Month: May 2013

A Simple, Not Flat, Tax

James Pethokoukis at NRO agrees with me on the need to simplify the tax code without necessarily flattening it:

It’s an elegant, compelling model that might work splendidly if you were creating a tax code ex nihilo. Flat-tax fever swept across Eastern and Central Europe after the end of the Cold War, when finally independent nations were rebuilding their own economies, and the model has been quite successful, for the most part.

America, however, is in a much different place. Millions of individuals and businesses have made long-term plans based on expectations that the tax code will remain more or less the same. Half the nation, thanks to all those deductions and credits, pays no income tax. And, perhaps most important, an aging population means that the cost of health-care entitlements will grow rapidly, even if health-care inflation slows.

Adding that flat taxes are consistently unpopular with voters, Pethokoukis thinks through some other options:

One solution is to take the essentially flat consumption tax devised by economists Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka and give it a progressive rate structure. Or we could combine a consumption tax with a flat income tax on wealthier Americans, as suggested by Yale’s Michael Graetz. Both ideas are also flexible enough give needed tax relief to parents. (Call it a “human-capital gains” tax cut.)

The flat tax embodies pro-growth, supply-side principles that are great starting points for tax reform, but it shouldn’t be the destination.

The Right Brain For The Job, Ctd

Michael Schrage applauds software company SAP’s recently announced commitment to hiring more diagnosed autistics:

The firm told the BBC that by 2020 perhaps 1% of its global workforce of 65,000 would be people with autism. Though a medically recognized DSM-5 disorder, many diagnosed autistics apparently bring special cognitive flair to digital details and computational concentration. “We share a common belief that innovation comes from the edges,” said Luisa Delgado, an SAP HR director, who noted the company valued the ability of many autistic people to “think differently and spark innovation.” SAP’s Bangalore office saw its productivity increase after deploying autistic hires.

He wonders, however, “What happens as medicines and therapies for autistics improve?”

If drugs and/or medical intervention effectively treat the awkwardness and dysfunction associated with autism, might they also undermine the cognitive skills and abilities that originally got those autistics hired by SAP and other IT firms? Would autistics feel compelled to cling to their disabilities for fear of losing their jobs?

Previous Dish on autism in the workforce here.

The Female Breadwinner, Ctd

A new report from the Pew Research Center finds yet more evidence that women are becoming the primary earners in their households. Bryce Covert parses the numbers:

Four in ten mothers are either the sole or primary source of income for their families, a new record, according to a Pew Research Center report released on Wednesday. That figure nearly tripled since 1960.

Yet the trend is not necessarily due to women making more than their husbands. Nearly two-thirds of this group of women workers are single mothers, and just 37 percent are married and have a higher income than their spouses. While the median total family income in houses where mothers earn more than their husbands was nearly $80,000 in 2011, much higher than the national median of $57,100 for families with children, it’s just $23,000 for single mothers’ families – just over a quarter of what families with married breadwinner mothers earn.

Joan C. Williams, meanwhile, looks at the differences in the number of hours men and women work per week:

How many employed American mothers work more than 50 hours a week? Go on, guess. I’ve been asking lots of people that question lately. Most guess around 50 percent. The truth is 9 percent. Nine percent of working moms clock more than 50 hours a week during the key years of career advancement: ages 25 to 44. If we limit the sample to mothers with at least a college degree, the number rises only slightly, to 13.9 percent. …

This “long hours problem,” analyzed so insightfully by Robin Ely and Irene Padavic, is a key reason why the percentage of women in top jobs has stalled at about 14 percent, a number that has barely budged in the past decade. We can’t expect progress when the fast track that leads to top jobs requires a time commitment that excludes most mothers — and by extension, most women.

Previous Dish on female breadwinners here.

Following Our Programming

Alex Mayyasi flags some fascinating research on how we interact with computers:

[Professors Clifford Nass and Youngme Moon of Stanford and Harvard] found that people were too polite to give honest feedback in the form of an on screen evaluation to a mediocrely helpful computer. But when they evaluated the computer’s helpfulness on another computer, people proved as forthcoming as students privately complaining about their terrible teacher. And just as we will generally go to greater lengths to help people that have helped us, Nass and Moon found that participants asked to “help” a computer match a color palette with human perception spent much more time doing so with computers that had provided helpful search responses than computers that returned bad search results.

We don’t treat computers exactly like humans. We don’t cry when they die (usually) and we don’t excuse ourselves when we suddenly leave our computers to grab a coffee. But to a surprising extent, we do apply rules and expectations from the social world to interactions with computers.

The Legacy Of The Marquis

Hussein Ibish revisits the Marquis de Sade’s writings and considers the more nuanced points of the amoral aristocrat:

Sade’s deeply idiosyncratic views on the morality of personal violence are probably Exhibit A for why he cannot pass muster as any kind of guide for left-liberal cultural resistance. If we take his work at face value, he was not opposed to individual murders. He frequently had his characters argue that murder should not be punished by the state at all. Yet there probably has never been a more passionate opponent of capital punishment—the only form of premeditated homicide that normative “rational” thought typically considers potentially justifiable. This is Sade’s challenge to his readers in a nutshell: he specializes in justifying the conventionally unjustifiable while absolutely and passionately condemning what many would regard as, at least plausibly, defensible and rational.

There is, however, a much surer gauge of what might be called a vulgar Sadean legacy: the mainstreaming of American porn.

Pornography is now so ubiquitous in contemporary American culture—so impossible to get away from—that the two things one may be assured of being offered in even the cheapest motel are pay-per-view porn on the television and a Gideon Bible in the bedside table, should you find yourself in sudden need of one form or the other of shameless mystification. I’m sure I’m not the only frequent traveler who has never availed himself of either of these kindly offerings, but they’re always there. One can’t help but imagine both Sade and [John] Calvin bitterly grousing, in whatever mutually disappointing afterlife to which they’ve been jointly consigned, about how their intellectual legacies have been downgraded into all-but-interchangeable items of consumer convenience.

Recent Dish on pornography and its Sadean tones here.

Shutting Down The Shares

Last week the city of New York fined an Airbnb host $2,400 for violating a law against “illegal hotels.” Emily Badger suspects that more cases like this will trigger a reassessment of city codes:

It’s reasonable for cities to create some standards for how residents might operate what the [Sustainable Economies Law Center] calls “host homes” or “no-host homes.” Perhaps regulation could require the host to register the property for a small fee, while limiting the number of nights in a year that guests can stay there (this could be a concession to neighbors who don’t want their block or building to become a revolving door for tourists). The SELC also floats a cap on the income that a host can make in a year, tied for example to the cost of actual rent or the market value of a property (for example: your Airbnb income can’t exceed 75 percent of your actual yearly rent and utilities).

This last idea would certainly codify the notion that the “sharing economy” is fundamentally a different kind of economy, one where the ultimate goal for individual participants isn’t to make as much profit as possible.

Marcus Wohlsen insists government will have to make way for the share economy sooner rather than later:

New York is a city built on bureaucracy, and bureaucracies are inherently resistant to change, especially when a new technology comes along to undermine the assumptions on which those bureaucracies were built. And in a way that’s by design. The mechanization of the economy and the mechanization of government have occurred in parallel, often in the form of agencies meant to check industries’ more flagrant violations of the social contract. In a sense, those bureaucracies’ express mission is to hinder progress.

Still, renting out your room when you’re not home or your car when you’re not driving it hardly feels flagrant. If people and the politicians they elect feel the same way, these bureaucratic roadblocks to the sharing economy’s rise will also turn out to be very temporary. Whether or not Airbnb, RelayRides or Uber turn out to be the companies that define the future of sharing, the idea of using technology to leverage any resource’s excess idle capacity seems too sensible—and popular—to fail.

Walter Mead nods:

In the case of Airbnb, New York City’s zoning and administrative codes were so numerous and confusing that the client hit with the fine had no idea that he was breaking the law simply by renting out his room. A legal system in which the average citizen can’t make sense of when or how he or she is doing something illegal is not only unfair but a serious detriment to quality of life. America is not going to create the service jobs it needs to stay vital in the post-industrial age by making it hard for small-time entrepreneurs to succeed.

Previous Dish on Airbnb and the share economy here, here and here.

The Best Of The Dish Today

If you have five posts to read today, I recommend my critique of Ross Douthat, the homophilic ironies of scouting, the face that lit up Fenway Park, the vast complexities surrounding “race” and IQ, and an evocatively banal view from West Virginia.

The two most popular posts were those on Ross Douthat and an enduring post from the weekend: “Where The Atheists Are.”

See you in the morning.

Why Is Americaness Next To Cleanliness?

Katherine Ashenburg, author of The Dirt on Clean, explains why Americans are clean-freaks:

Oddly enough it was the Civil War that got Americans interested in being clean. The army’s initially derided Sanitary Commission, headed by the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, had proved that simple soap and water could significantly reduce military mortality, and by the end of the war cleanliness was seen as patriotic, progressive and distinctively American. Good hygiene had other virtues: it was a way to mark status and civility in a country without an aristocracy, and it could “Americanize” the hundreds of thousands of Europeans who began arriving in the 1880s.

Those ideas drew 19th-century Americans to cleanliness, but it was advertising that kept them interested. Body soap first became widely available in the late 19th-century, around the birth of modern advertising. Since there was little to distinguish one soap from another, advertising and soap grew up together.

The Recession’s Silver Lining

Fewer deaths:

With more accidents at work and on the road during expansions, expansions have more deaths by such accidents, and recessions have fewer. It turns out that the business cycle for suicides is more than offset by the business cycle for other deaths.  Mortality and the unemployment rate are negatively correlated.  Christopher J. Ruhm, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Virginia, has looked at all causes of death and found that most of them – suicide was the exception – occur less frequently at the depths of the business cycle.

Peter Orszag adds:

Taken together, the evidence suggests that a combination of forces contribute to the increase in life expectancy during times of higher unemployment: Motor vehicle deaths decline, people tend to avoid unhealthy behavior, air pollution is diminished, and nursing home staffing improves.

None of which should make us wish for economic trouble. Higher unemployment means loss of productivity, lower income and mental anguish, and those are more than sufficient reasons to combat joblessness. There may be some small consolation, though, in learning that it probably doesn’t harm human health the way that we all imagined.