Month: July 2009

Biloxi’s Godmother

Rita2

by Patrick Appel

Christina Davidson profiles Rita Baldwin, the  executive director at Loaves and Fishes, a soup kitchen in Biloxi, Mississippi:

Rita works at least full-time hours at a job that earns her a take home pay of about $850 a month, with no benefits. Like nearly 50 million other Americans, she lacks the luxury of insurance, which means recent health crises have left her about $60,000 in debt to doctors and hospitals.

 With a BS in Social Work, a Master's in Adult Education, and extensive work experience, Rita could qualify for a cushier job, but leaving Loaves and Fishes would make her feel like she was abandoning those who need her most during an era of the most widespread desperation she has witnessed in her 58 years. Post-Katrina was a crisis of extraordinary magnitude, but with outside assistance pouring in, the forward outlook did not feel as bleak as it does now. "They're my family," she says of the people Loaves and Fishes feeds, explaining why she could never leave them. "It's like I've become godmother to the homeless of Biloxi."

Did Obama Promise Too Much?

Afghanistan

by Patrick Appel

Hitchens lauds this essay by Rory Stewart on Afghanistan. Stewart:

It is impossible for Britain and its allies to build an Afghan state. They have no clear picture of this promised ‘state’, and such a thing could come only from an Afghan national movement, not as a gift from foreigners. Is a centralised state, in any case, an appropriate model for a mountainous country, with strong traditions of local self-government and autonomy, significant ethnic differences, but strong shared moral values? And even were stronger central institutions to emerge, would they assist Western national security objectives? Afghanistan is starting from a very low base: 30 years of investment might allow its army, police, civil service and economy to approach the levels of Pakistan. But Osama bin Laden is still in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. He chooses to be there precisely because Pakistan can be more assertive in its state sovereignty than Afghanistan and restricts US operations. From a narrow (and harsh) US national security perspective, a poor failed state could be easier to handle than a more developed one: Yemen is less threatening than Iran, Somalia than Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan than Pakistan.

For another view of Afghanistan and Pakistan, David Kilcullen is always worth reading.

(Photo: US Marine in Afghanistan/Joe Raedle/Getty)

America’s Growing Waistline, Ctd

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

Don't put too much credence in the body-mass index (BMI), it does not take into account body composition.  It's basically weight divided by height.  You can be 6'2" and weight 225 pounds with three percent body fat or with twenty percent body fat and score the same.  One of the reasons we, as Americans, have put on more weight in recent years is because our exercise habits have changed.  We lift weights more (look at the difference in college and pro athletes today vs thirty years ago), which builds more muscle which weighs more than fat (by about a 2:1 ratio).  My guess is Americans simply work out more today than they did in the past, and one of the byproducts is that they end up weighing more because they have more muscle mass than previous generations.

The BMI is a crude tool that is taken way too seriously.  There is a trainer at my gym, a former professional body builder, who today probably has less than 6% body fat that was recently told by an insurer that he was obese and uncoverable because his BMI was too high.  I don't know anyone in better shape than this guy but he was considered obese because of muscle mass.  The focus needs to be on body composition, percentage of body fat, muscle mass, and the like.  I'm 6'1" and weigh 255 pounds, which under the BMI would make me obese.  But most of that weight is muscle, in fact, most people are shocked when I tell them how much I weigh.  I've been weight lifting since I was 15, and I'm now 31.  There is no way I could possibly get down to the 204 pounds necessary to be considered "normal" weight (which coincidently was my weight when I graduated from high school) without losing a signifiant amount of muscle mass (which, for a variety of reasons, may be unhealthy).

This is not to say there are those among us to are overweight in the sense that most people think about it.  But there is a very real disconnect between the "statistics" and perception.  I'm guessing most people wouldn't consider me out of shape, but according to the BMI, I'm a fat slob.

BMI can be misleading, but I believe it's relatively uncontested that America, as a whole, has gotten chubbier over the past several decades. If you want a contrast to the New Yorker article, Radley Balko has defended the fattening of America in the past.

Celebrating Cronkite

by Patrick Appel

Greenwald uses Cronkite's death to bash the talking heads:

Tellingly, his most celebrated and significant moment — Greg Mitchell says "this broadcast would help save many thousands of lives, U.S. and Vietnamese, perhaps even a million" — was when he stood up and announced that Americans shouldn't trust the statements being made about the war by the U.S. Government and military, and that the specific claims they were making were almost certainly false.  In other words, Cronkite's best moment was when he did exactly that which the modern journalist today insists they must not ever do — directly contradict claims from government and military officials and suggest that such claims should not be believed.  These days, our leading media outlets won't even use words that are disapproved of by the Government.

The Era Of Peace?

by Patrick Appel

Steven Pinker argues that violence is declining:

In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, that statement might seem hallucinatory or even obscene. But if we consider the evidence, we find that the decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon: We can see the decline over millennia, centuries, decades, and years. When the archeologist Lawrence Keeley examined casualty rates among contemporary hunter-gatherers—which is the best picture we have of how people might have lived 10,000 years ago—he discovered that the likelihood that a man would die at the hands of another man ranged from a high of 60 percent in one tribe to 15 percent at the most peaceable end. In contrast, the chance that a European or American man would be killed by another man was less than one percent during the 20th century, a period of time that includes both world wars. If the death rate of tribal warfare had prevailed in the 20th century, there would have been two billion deaths rather than 100 million, horrible as that is.

Read the whole thing.

Outing Iran: Gaz

Gaz

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I'm not Iranian; my husband is. This is not my recipe, but I made Persian Pistachio Nougat (Gaz, but without the traditional gaz angebin, or sap from the Tamarisk plant) for the first time last night. The candy originates in my husband’s hometown of Esfahan. A friend sent me your link and thought you might be interested.

There is no substitute for the real thing, of course – but Gaz made without the sap is not half bad, either. If anything, it’s a little sweeter and a lot stickier.

The Ugly Shoe Bubble

by Patrick Appel

The WaPo reported yesterday that the company which makes Crocs is in trouble. Rob Horning has no sympathy:

I think that it is safe to assume that Crocs might have found itself in some trouble regardless of the recession. It always amazes me that companies like this get hyped in the financial press; it seems a bit irresponsible and cynical. The unspoken subtext seems to be this: Everyone knows that eventually the trends that such companies are built on will pass, but everyone also believes that the other investors are more naive than they are and have bought into the trend unthinkingly. Everyone then wants to exploit the other’s presumed ignorance, assuming some other fool will be left holding the shares when the day of reckoning comes. And the press is there to cheer this game along, pointing to how much growth the company has seen during its peak trendiness, encouraging the extrapolation of such unsustainable figures into the future. I wonder if all the analysts who recommended Crocs a few years ago (or the ones, probably the same ones, who recommended Krispy Kreme in the late 1990s) feel any embarrassment at all.

Ezra Klein piles on.

A Sea Of People, Ctd

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

My nephew arrived in Tehran last Monday, and he was out in the crowds yesterday (much to my sister's distress, I'm sure). Here's what he wrote about the size of the gathering:

After the sermon ended, people started filing towards Valiasr square, and I was pulled along on the current. I can’t say at all how many people there were—I didn’t even close to make it all the way around the circumference of campus and even if I had it would have been impossible to estimate—all I can say is that there were a lot. A lot. It took at least 20 minutes to make it, packed body to body, maybe a hundred meters down the road to where there was at least breathing room. Good Samaritans splashed water from bottles onto the crowd or wet keffiyahs and scarves and then swung them around overheard for a sprinkler effect.

Cutting Both Ways, Ctd

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

I strongly disagree with Mr. Kain's assessment of your charts on the effective tax rate of top earners. As someone who has worked in international economics, I have produced a lifetime's worth of charts, and I would hardly label your charts deceiving. Mr. Kain's charts, on the other hand, excel at being uninformative.

Mr. Kain's point seems to be that your chart exaggerates the downward movement of effective tax rates since 1993, and so he produced a chart demonstrating that relative to 0%, effective tax rates haven't budged all that much. How one should adjust the scale in charts like these is dependent on the context of what is being analyzed, and in the case of tax rates, allowing the reader to visualize a 0% effective income tax rate isn't necessary because levels that low are nowhere to be in found in the range of the data. If we were looking at a graph of rainfall, then it would be entirely reasonable to base the scale at 0, because the reality of receiving no or very little rainfall is not unrealistic. Additionally, seeing as how these tax rates move each year by a handful of percentage points at most, it makes absolutely sense to restrict the scale given the short time frame.

In the end, the point I believe you're trying to make is that tax rates have come down quite a bit since 1993. From your chart, this point is easy to see. From Mr. Kain's chart, the truth is murky. Eyeballing the numbers from the charts, tax rates dropped from a high of 36.1% to roughly 31.3%, a decrease of roughly 13%, a number not to be brushed away.