Month: December 2011

Economics 21 says that it changes constantly:

[M]ost of the churn in the top 1% over the course of 30 years is related to life cycle trends. Many households that were part of the top 1% in 2005, for example, have since retired and been replaced by households whose primary earners were in more junior positions in their company, attending graduate school, or yet to start their own businesses in 2005. A large number of taxpayers who benefitted from the Bush tax cuts are likely out of the labor force. Raising taxes on the top 1% is therefore not going to impact them.

Beyond life cycle, another issue that’s behind the churn in the top 1% of the income distribution comes from non-recurring sources of income, like asset sales. Every year, some portion of the top 1% sell family businesses, large stock portfolios, or real estate. The capital gains on these sales is non-recurring; the capital gains income from these sales comes in a single year. These sales may push up the average income of the top 1% for that year, but they have no impact on the average earnings of the group. 

Reihan adds two cents.

That was David Frum's phrase for what the GOP establishment would be feeling at a Newt Convention. I'd say it's clearly what they're thinking already, given the pro-Romney Super-Pac ad above (that was pulled at the last minute). The two grandees of conservative Washington punditry, George Will and Charles Krauthammer, have not minced words. Will:

"There is almost artistic vulgarity in Gingrich's unrepented role as a hired larynx for interests profiting from such government follies as ethanol and cheap mortgages." 

Krauthammer:

"[Gingrich is] possessed of an unbounded need for grand display that has already led him to unconservative places even he is at a loss to explain, and that as president would leave him in constant search of the out-of-box experience." 

Brooks:

[Newt] has every negative character trait that conservatives associate with ’60s excess: narcissism, self-righteousness, self-indulgence and intemperance. He just has those traits in Republican form.

Tom Coburn:

Gingrich had "one standard for the people that [he's] leading and a different standard" for himself.

Douthat:

The real issue for religious conservatives isn’t whether they can trust Gingrich. It’s whether they can afford to be associated with him.

Coulter FWIW:

Since Gingrich was forced out of the Speakership, he "occupied himself having an affair, divorcing his second wife and making money by being the consummate Washington insider — trading on access, taking $1.6 million from Freddie Mac and palling around with Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi and Al Sharpton."

Then there's Ron Paul's totally awesome ad. That pretty much covers the bases, doesn't it? You've got Mr Tory, Mr Neocon, Mr Hamiltonian, Mr Tightwad, Mr Theocon, and Miss Thing in rare agreement. But Fox News viewers and many many others in the base want none of it, at least so far. And so we have a fantastically interesting crisis in which the Republican establishment is trying to persuade the base to drop the candidate who now has commanding leads in four of the five first votes.

I'll have a large popcorn and a Coke Zero please.

Dave Barno, Andrew Exum, and Matt Irvine propose [pdf] a new mission:

It is time for a change of mission in Afghanistan. U.S. and coalition forces must shift away from directly conducting counterinsurgency operations and toward a new mission of “security force assistance:” advising and enabling Afghan forces to take the lead in the counterinsurgency fight. This shift is more than rhetorical. With a 2014 transition looming in Afghanistan, U.S. and allied military leaders must recognize that U.S. and coalition forces will not defeat the Taliban and its allies in the next three years. Instead, they must direct the military effort toward working by, with and through the Afghans. This effort will protect long-term U.S. security interests without a never-ending commitment of immense U.S. resources.

Gulliver, who mostly agrees with the report's conclusion, vents about some of its authors' past support for the current strategy:

COIN advocates insisted the 2009 escalation would be accompanied by a renewed commitment to generating and training capable Afghan security forces, but it didn't happen; the "surge" in combat and stability operations instead starved those efforts of the personnel, resources, and command emphasis they needed to succeed in parallel. The authors have diagnosed the problem properly, though they don't clearly state this conclusion.

(Photo: Silhouetted Afghan National Army [ANA] soldiers are seen during a ceremony to hand over security control in the city of Charikar in Parwan province on December 1, 2011. The second wave of Afghanistan's transition from foreign to local control officially started on December 1 as NATO forces handed over most of a peaceful province to Afghan authorities. All bar two districts of Parwan province, north of the capital Kabul, are being handed to Afghan control. By Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images.)

Jared Bernstein worries about growing income disparities. Chris Bickerton and Alex Gourevitch think the problem is deeper:

There is no single view on economic inequality at Occupy Wall Street or elsewhere, but it is clear that the concern is with a wider form of inequality than mere earning power.

The ability to meet basic needs is of course important, and is why pushing back against housing and student debt has been a recurring theme. But the relevant inequalities are of social and political power more widely. One sees demands for transforming work, for ending corporations, for real democracy and political equality, for socializing the means of production and for anarchist productive collectives. Some of these demands are contradictory, others downright undesirable. But they have in common the view that the inequality problem here is more fundamental than mere differences in income. Even income inequality itself tends to be seen as a consequence of differences in social and economic power.

Linda Holmes contemplates How I Met Your Mother:

In truth, the story didn't have to be called How I Met Your Mother. It could have been called How We Bought This House, or How I Bought That Couch, or How I Learned To Make Bread. What matters is that the show is structured around a philosophy that is fundamentally this: However your life goes, that's the story of how you ended up where you are, and therefore, every turn your story took, whether sad or happy at the time, is part of how you achieved whatever joy you have. It's not really How I Met Your Mother that Ted is explaining to his kids. It's How I Got Here, and How You Were Born, and How Everything Turned Out Okay.

A reader writes:

It has often occurred to me that the debate over pit bulls neatly parallels the debate over guns in American society.

Yes, they can be fun.  Yes, if you take the proper precautions, the danger is reduced, and given the number of them around, it's a fairly small risk.  Yes, people opposed to them may show a certain irrational fear about them.  But that's only because when something goes wrong, it goes catastrophically wrong, and people end up dead, severely injured, or disfigured.  And a good number of us don't want to be around them, because being exposed to an unquantifiable, but potentially life-threatening risk every time you go outdoors is an unfair and unreasonable burden for innocents to bear. And we have not yet devised a good method to deal with such stupidity ahead of time in a free society short of severe regulation.

Another writes:

Your discussion of pit bulls brings up a question: If they're so dangerous (which is debatable), why not ban them? Well, we tried that a few years ago in Ontario after a few well publicized pit bull attacks. First, it turns out it's really hard to do. A very good friend of my uncle's worked on the legislation and turning the broad government direction "Let's ban all pit bulls" into legislative language is extraordinary complicated. One of the primary reasons being that the problem dogs likely aren't registered pure breeds and banning them certainly doesn't increase the incentive to do so.

Finally, it also turns out that after six years such a ban has had very little effect in reducing dog bite incidents. The Toronto Humane Society is against the legislation and the countless dogs that have been destroyed because of it.

Esther Inglis-Arkell explores the history of the condition: 

The powerful multiple personality disorder has been humbled and dismantled into four "dissociative disorders," each comprising part of the original idea. Dissociative amnesia is memory loss, especially of a traumatic event from childhood. Dissociative fugue is what happens when someone walks away, semi-deliberately, from their life and lives under a new identity for a few hours or a few months. The end of the fugue can bring on anything from complete lack of memory to "feeling out of sorts."

Depersonalization disorder is the classic state of "watching life like it's a movie," and may come with a skewed perception of time and space. And finally there's dissociative identity disorder, which is characterized by switching between different personalities with different histories, mannerisms, and physicalities. Although this may be associated with dissociative amnesia, it's often more gentle than that. Often people feel a sense of multiple people living in their heads at once, and feel a sense of fragmentation between personalities, not complete divides.

That's if anyone believes it happens at all. Many psychiatrists think that this is a cultural behavior rather than a mental one. 

The Economist thinks the mass protests against Putin after the rigged elections signal a serious shift in Russian politics. Joshua Foust isn't jumping to conclusions:

[I]s Russia experiencing an Arab Spring, only in the Russian winter? It is way too early to tell. In Egypt and even Libya, revolutionary movements are being coopted by Islamists, and no one knows yet if those revolutions will wind up being net-gains for their respective countries. Protest movements in Russia are too nascent – are a few thousand Muscovite protesters that big a deal in a city of 10 million? – to draw grand conclusions at the present time.

Mark Adomanis is on a similar page. Jay Ulfelder is more optimistic:

Uprisings occur rarely, even in societies with deeply unpopular governments and weak police forces. With such a low baseline rate of success, we will almost always be right by saying, "It ain’t gonna happen." …

But improbable doesn’t mean impossible. The likelihood of unlikely occurrences can still change over time. What’s more interesting than reflexive skepticism, I think, is to adopt Beissinger’s "evenful" perspective and try to think about how the events of the past few days, and the government’s responses to them, might produce changes in the Russia’s political atmosphere that will become the causes of future actions.

Alexey Sidorenko tracks the spread of the protests around Russia. Seth Mandel worries about the nationalist leanings of putative opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Anna Borshchevskaya thinks through some scary international implications:

While more and more Russians now demand reform, this demand often carries aggressive nationalistic attitudes, hostile to the West, so there would be little incentive for United Russia to take a different path both domestically and internationally. Putin and United Russia will therefore likely continue to distance themselves from the United States and the West, and push the nationalist buttons to gain more public support—a public that has traditionally been all too eager for anti-American and anti-Western rhetoric. 

David Kramer wants the US to get on the side of the protestors by coming out strongly in favor of Russian democratic rights.

Fabio Rojas, pivoting off Bryan Caplan, thinks through a new paper on hiring in "investment banks, law firms, and management consulting firms." Among the conclusions:

• Elite firms have no time to sort through people.

• Nearly all applicants from low status schools (e.g., the "public Ivies" like Michigan or Berkeley or any other non-[Harvard-Yale-Princeton] school) are tossed in the trash without review.

• There’s a signalling of habitus – applicants need the right interactional skills, the right major, the right extra-curriculars, showing similarity to the recruiter

• There’s modest amount of evaluation based on performance (SAT or GPA), but not a lot.

McArdle is horrified. Manzi is more than a little skeptical:

It’s not the top four schools, but more like 40 or 50 highly competitive schools and 10 or 15 highly competitive MBA programs, that get you access to these firms. Further, while the odds of getting an offer are higher from the most highly ranked schools, a large fraction of each incoming class normally comes from schools not ranked 1–4. 

If you get into, for example, Michigan, UCLA, Emory, or the University of Texas, work hard to get good grades in a difficult major, and score very well on standardized tests, you will likely be able to get an interview with one of the leading strategy firms. 

(List of the top 5 colleges ranked by graduates' average starting and mid-career salary from PayScale)

There's new evidence for genetic control of sleep duration. Carrie Gunn summarizes: 

Scientists at Germany’s Ludwig Maximalians University of Munich have found that one gene, called ABCC9, influences sleep duration and could explain why certain people seem able to operate on limited amounts of shut-eye. The researchers studied responses to a sleep survey from more than 4,000 Europeans in seven different countries and also scanned their genomes. They found that people who had two copies of a particular variant of the ABCC9 gene generally reported sleeping for shorter periods than those who had two copies of a different version of the gene.

But Kathryn Doyle has doubts that sleeping less is a genetic advantage: 

[D]oes sleeping less really mean you will be more successful, even at the expense of your health? Do more successful people sleep less? To the contrary, the National Institutes of Health say we are designed to sleep more than eight hours per night. Further confusing matters, other sleep researchers have disputed the findings of that federal study. … There’s a lot of interesting research that actually suggests late risers are smarter than early risers. So maybe I’m not doing so bad, ahem.