Month: September 2010

Ta-Nehisi rebuffs the latest attempt “to encourage black women … to not have kids until they’re married”:

I am, at my core, a prude, who wanted to raise a child in a two-parent home, who believes in thinking about who you sleep with, thinking harder about who you have kids with, and even harder about how this person fits into this one-shot life. 

I have never known marriage to be definitive evidence of such thinking, any more than a Bally’s membership is evidence of prodigious health. An institution must be more than totemic, must be more than its name. These are the humble thoughts I have assembled after some 12 years of living in sin, ten of them spent rearing a wayward son in a heathen den of iniquity. 

It’s been a gay old time.

Not any longer, TNC. The gays are increasingly as married as anyone else.

Chris Good interviews Aaron Perlut, the chairman of the American Mustache Institute:

Q: What are the biggest geopolitical factors affecting mustaches right now?

A: There is still the perception that leaders cannot have mustaches, at least in the U.S. there are less than 30 members of Congress that wear mustaches, and unfortunately some of the people that have been deemed by Americans to be tyrants or evil, such as Saddam Hussein, have been heavily mustached. So I think that there is a perception still that Mustached Americans are incapable of leading, are incapable of being role models, are incapable of living a just life by certain sectors of our culture.

McArdle niggles:

[S]houldn't people be doing this for more than just gay kids?  A lot of kids are horribly bullied–weird kids, smart kids, new kids, whatever–and some of them, too, kill themselves.  And even the many more who don't might need to hear that it doesn't just get better for gay people, but that Aspergers nerds and fat kids and everyone else who gets singled out by abuse really can go on to have a happy, meaningful life that they're very glad they aren't missing out on.

Robin Hanson asks why certain jobs are associated with low or high divorce rates:

Before you browse their divorce rate vs. job table [xls] to see what it says about your job, ask yourself: what do you infer about people who do a job associated with a low divorce rate?  Are you impressed and attracted by their reliability, or do you snicker that they are losers no one wants to tempt away from their marriage? How do you think most folks react?

After giving a talk on "the higher education bubble," Glenn Reynolds writes:

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

There is much truth to this, though the GI Bill is an obvious counterexample – most beneficiaries proved their self-discipline and ability to defer gratification far more than your average entering freshmen from the upper class, and many of these former soldiers were helped into the middle class by the government help. Megan says the problem is subsidy in the form of loans:

In the past, college degrees conferred higher incomes on those who earned them.  But almost all of that surplus went to the student rather than the college, because aside from a small number of extremely affluent families, the students were young and did not have that much cash.  If colleges wanted to expand their market, college tuition was constrained to what an average student, or their family, could pay.

Introducing subsidized loans into the picture allowed students to monetize that future income now.  It's hardly surprising that colleges began to claim more and more of the surplus created by their college degree.  Think about it this way:  if colleges create an extra million in lifetime salary, you're theoretically better off if you pay them the discounted present value of $999,999 in order to earn that extra million.

 

Easterbrook makes some very important points:

Stated in today’s dollars, median household income was $45,000 in 1985, peaked at $52,500 in 2000 and is $50,000 now. (Absurd precision such as the “$46,269” median for 1991 doesn’t appeal to me.) Nearly all the decline from $52,500 to $50,000 has occurred since 2007 — that is, during a recession. Most likely that loss will bounce back.

But the key point is that the numbers in the Census Bureau report, and in nearly all alarmism about the middle class, are pre-tax income. Federal income tax rates for the middle class were cut in 2001 and again in 2003. … The result is that slightly lower middle-class incomes are being taxed less — and all that matters to the individual is buying power.

His bottom line:

After-tax and adjusting for consumer prices, middle class household income is about the same today as a decade ago. That’s not fabulous — but it’s also not the emergency being claimed.

Tom Jensen notices that”Obama voters who are planning to show up [for the midterm elections] generally have more negative feelings toward him than Obama voters at large”:

Our national poll last week- which is conducted with registered, rather than likely, voters- found that 88% of people who voted for Obama still approve of the job he’s doing. It’s a different story with likely voters in the 16 states we’ve polled since switching over to LVs for our horse race polling in mid-August …

What these numbers suggest to me is that Democrats staying home aren’t necessarily disappointed with how things have gone so far. The Democrats not voting are more pleased with how Obama’s done than the Democrats who are voting. And when you’re happy you simply don’t have the sense of urgency about going out and voting to make something change. That complacency, more than the Republicans, is Democrats’ strongest foe this year.

How do you combat that complacency? My view is seize the issue of the debt and show how the Republicans will sky-rocket it under their current plans. Outflank the Republicans on fiscal conservatism. Hype the debt commission. Let Obama campaign on his determination to balance the budget long-term and make the tough decisions now.

Matthew Kahn, author of a new book on "how our cities will thrive in the hotter climate," remains upbeat:

[I]magine a diverse world in which for every 100 citizens; there are 97 Homer Simpsons and 3 Spocks. The self interested second group can and will smell an economic opportunity. The sheer desperation and suffering that the Homers will suffer from as climate change unfolds means that a huge market is available for those entrepreneurs who seize the day. The irony here is that while the Homers smugly believe in technological optimism, their collective willingness to pay for a “bailout” actually helps to make this happen. Part of my optimism about our future in the face of climate change is my belief in induced innovation as self interested entrepreneurs seek out the potential opportunities caused by climate change. 

Well, that's the only hope we've got left. I share it, by the way. I just don't see why the government can't also nudge us a little with a carbon tax, which would also help reduce the debt and defund our enemies. But, hey, this is America. And its slogan of the moment is: "No We Can't".

Air and Space profiles Jeb Corliss:

…what if you could jump from the sky and fly through the air and land, just like a bird? Corliss sees that as the purest form of human flight. He wants to be the first person to jump out of an airplane and land safely without a parachute, and make it repeatable. The plan has a lot of ifs, and the biggest is money. He needs about $3 million to erect, in the middle of the Las Vegas strip, a ramp hundreds of feet tall. It would look like a ski jump, but act as a landing slope. Since Corliss would bellyflop on it head forward, arms back, he’s found it difficult to persuade people with deep pockets to finance what, after all, could become a televised suicide.