Month: July 2013

Pareene calls the new PBS documentary “Two American Families” one of “the best, most heartbreaking, documentaries I’ve seen this year”:

It wasn’t “hard to watch” because it was about a singularly awful moment in human history or one unspeakable monstrous act — a hurricane or war or even a specific crime committed by specific people — but because it just happened to document the lives of some struggling working-class families beginning at shortly after the point when the ground fell out from beneath the American lower middle class and ending now, when there’s clearly no hope for a return to economic security.

To use the regrettable cliché, both families “played by the rules.” They are in fact superhumanly devoted to the rules. They both attend church — Claude is actually a minister — and they hate the idea of going on the dole and they take any available work and the kids are Boy Scouts and their parents are dedicated to their educations. The families are so virtuous, so imbued with the great American work ethic, that it is practically unfair to other struggling Americans; families that fuck up deserve our sympathy, and the support of a social safety net, as well. But as George Packer wrote earlier this month, the film serves as a rebuke to right-wing social critics like the execrable Charles Murray, “who believe that the decline of America’s working class comes from a collapse of moral values, social capital, personal responsibility, and traditional authority…” These people are overflowing with personal responsibility.

Previous Dish on the documentary here.

Oregon college students may soon be able to pay for college by pledging a percentage of future earnings rather than paying tuition upfront. Dylan Matthews provides details:

The actual bill text is very spare and doesn’t specify a set percentage or payment period, though the bill’s supporters tell the New York Times that something like 3 percent over 20 years would cover costs. And [John Burbank of the Economic Opportunity Institute] is quick to note that there would be some substantial upfront transition costs, which, for universal adoption in Oregon, are estimated at $9 billion. “25 years from now, it will be self-financing,” he says. “The question is, ‘How do we get there?’”

It’s a big question. Oregon’s commission will have to figure out not only what rate to charge and how long to charge it, but whether one can take a “buyout” by paying off tuition costs early, as is possible with student loans, and how to enforce the plan for students who move out of state. If you can’t take a buyout, then students who earn high incomes later on could find themselves paying far, far more than their education actually cost. And if enforcement is tougher in Oregon than out of state, that could provide a perverse incentive for state university graduates to skip town.

Michelle Asha Cooper lodges other criticisms:

[P]utting aside the complexity and feasibility of implementing such a system, this supposedly “debt-free” plan only covers tuition and fees, which is less than half of the costs most students incur while in college. Furthermore, the plan could have a negative impact on efforts to ensure equal opportunity in higher education because it may encourage recruiting practices that identify students on the likelihood of future employability, limiting access to our nation’s most underserved students.

Tony Lima doubts the Oregon experiment will work:

[A]ssume there are two types of students.

One type (S) majors in art, English composition, history, and ethnic studies.  The other (H) majors in mathematics, hard science, engineering, or even economics.  While type S individuals may not know it, their major will, on average, result in lower lifetime income than those in group H.  Type S individuals will happily accept Oregon’s offer since three percent of their income over 20 years is a good deal.  Type H individuals, however, are likely to think that three percent of their income is a high price to pay.  They will seek alternative methods of financing their education, paying the standard tuition and fees.  (This proposal could, in fact, revive the private student loan market — but without government intervention.)

Result: Oregon will collect far less than they are predicting.  The percentage of income will rise and the duration of the loan will also increase — to 25 years, then 30 years.

Richard Vedder wants to tweak the proposal:

A more successful approach would vary the percent and length of the payback on the investment with the student prospects for financial success, as measured by probability of, say, successfully completing a degree (as predicted by high school grades and ACT/SAT test scores) and the earnings experience of the student’s major. While less politically popular, this would make the program more financially viable.

Still, long term, this novel approach ducks the real problem: the cost of college is rising faster than earnings of graduates. No financial scheme — no matter how innovative — can overcome the ultimate reality that this is not an economically sustainable long-term trend.

Andrew Norton notes that Australia already has a similar plan in place.

Filmmaker Greg Gilderman composed six evocative profiles of individuals intimately connected to the AIDS crisis in Russia. From his intro:

Russia is dying. Much has been written about the country’s demographic crisis—the declining population, the low birth rate, the life expectancy that puts the country on par with the world’s poorest—but bleak as those figures are, they don’t yet include masses of people dying as a result of the country’s HIV/AIDS epidemic. The World Bank estimates that in 2020, Russia will lose 20,000 people per month to AIDS. Russia has experienced the fastest-spreading HIV/AIDS epidemics in any one country in history, but there remains a lack of effective preventative measures to slow it down—in large measure because the people most affected are also the country’s most reviled.

From the profile of a former heroin addict, featured in the above video:

Irina Zolotova has AIDS; her infant son is HIV-positive.

He shares her bed in a tiny room on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. HIV in Russia is spreading most quickly among the sexual partners of people who became infected in the 1990s, when it seemed every young person was experimenting with injection heroin use. Irina was one of those early heroin users. She is a part of the massive cohort of Russians in their late 30s and early 40s that has transitioned from being HIV-positive to having AIDS.

The irony isn’t lost in Irina that her generation, the most hopeful in Russian history, the one that experienced political and personal freedom in its youth, is becoming housebound and frail in middle age. “It’s difficult to say,” Irina says, “but it really feels like everything has left you, and nothing is left.” …

The Russian government’s most aggressive move in the country’s HIV/AIDS epidemic—arguably its only effective move—has been to provide antiretroviral drugs to pregnant women who are living with AIDS. The goal is to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV. But the consumption of those drugs is no guarantee that no child of an HIV-positive mother will become infected.

Five more video profiles and a photo gallery here.

Yglesias asks:

Cars are very useful, and if you want to own one, you need someplace to put it. A parking space is valuable, and so reasonable real-estate developers will typically want to feature parking spaces as part of a new development. But parking spaces are a building amenity like any other—granite countertops or spacious bathtubs or a fitness center or a roof deck—and so they’re something the real-estate market is capable of generating in the quantity that people demand. The current rules, mandating that all new construction come with more parking spaces than the market supports, create costly distortions throughout the city.

Michael Manville of UCLA studied a liberalization of parking regulations in one section of Los Angeles and found that deregulation leads to the construction of more housing units and fewer parking spaces. Conversely, tighter regulation leads to a lack of affordable housing and a surplus of parking spaces. That might make sense if parking spaces were a public good, like clean air. But they’re closer to being a public bad. When Chicago mandates the creation of ahigh number of parking spaces per square foot of downtown office building, it reduces the price of parking, but it has a number of negative consequences. Cheaper parking means more traffic congestion on the streets. It also means lower ridership for Chicago mass transit. Perversely, cheaper parking offers a subsidy to commuters from outside the city limits at the expense of Chicago residents living within walking or biking distance of the central business district. And, of course, it leads to dirtier air, not cleaner.

A reader writes:

Obesity may not compare to sexual orientation, but that doesn’t mean it’s equivalent to short stature, ugly noses, acne, etc.  Our society doesn’t blame people for being short, having an ugly nose or acne.  In contrast, conventional wisdom is that obesity can be remedied and that tolerating it in oneself is a character defect.

Scientists are investigating the interaction between genetics and the environment (e.g., whether endocrine disrupters or something else in the chemical soup we live in causes obesity in genetically susceptible individuals).  If this research pans out, it may explain why obesity has dramatically increased in recent decades in some countries and not others. Those who believe the issue is primarily calories taken in versus calories burned should check out these articles from the NYTimes here and here.  The origins of obesity are complex, and it may be impossible for even the most motivated, conscientious people to maintain a normal weight.

Another reader:

There is a lot of overlap between the queer/feminist community and the fat acceptance community, and I think there are good reasons for that. I think that embracing being fat as a woman can be empowering in how it can be an act of willfully denying societal expectations of attractiveness and therefore gaining a profound sense of ownership over one’s body.  I have a pet theory that lesbians and fat women are offensive to some people for the same reasons – neither group is showing much care for the sexual impulses of straight men.

As an on-and-off-again fat chick with diabetic, obese parents, I am sympathetic to the FA message that basically equates with “Our Bodies, Ourselves”- though for myself I don’t think that I can be “healthy at any size”. But I have some real issues with how this all gets mixed up with sexuality.  A male friend who’s “out” once talked wistfully about how he wished his straight-sized girlfriend had a bigger ass, and I frankly don’t see how that’s any different than the more typical straight dude who probably wishes his girlfriend were skinnier; it’s still a man imprinting his sexual desires onto a woman’s body.  A couple things that make me particularly skeptical about this FAG-BLT suggestion:

1) The FA movement as a sexual orientation seems to be mostly centered on straight men liking fat women.  Even that first post from Anna Mollow specifically calls out the fat lovers as male.  Sure, there must be women who prefer fat – certainly of women who love fat woman – but who’s really out there saying that fat men are sexy, too?  This really seems to be an aspect of male sexuality, and like most things straight, the personification of sex is the naked woman.  The one-sidedness of the movement makes it suspect, in my eyes.

2) Someone can ask or prefer their lover to lose weight (we like what we like, right?).  This is unremarkable, because society tells us that slender bodies are more attractive.  FA guys might ask or prefer their lover to gain weight (and feederism seems active in this community).  What is the functional difference between preferring one over the other?  It’s really hard for some people to lose weight; it’s really hard for others to gain it; but let’s ignore for a moment what it’s possible for the individual to achieve – no one could ever ask someone to change their gender!

Another:

While I agree that fatness is a result of both genetics and ongoing lifestyle choices, whether you become fat and stay fatcan depend in part on socioeconomic status as well (a point which Anna Mollow’s piece addresses briefly but was not emphasized in your posts). Not everyone has access to the same kinds of lifestyle choices as middle- to upper-class fatpeople do. Personally, I find that reader advice that fat people just need to “work harder” and “do what you have to do” might be very applicable to someone like me–i.e., a slightly overweight upper-middle-class woman with time and money to go running in the park, pay for a personal trainer, cook healthy dinners and buy quinoa or kale salads for lunch, if I want to–but a shade too glib when you consider the circumstances of the overweight in lower-income communities. Not everyone is lucky enough to work only one job, and not everyone has the time to run 20 miles a week.

The limited sphere of choices for the lower-income overweight looks even worse when you consider that a good number of urban, low-income areas are stacked with fast-food restaurants. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the New York-run hospitals with McDonald’s on the premises are all located in high-immigrant, high-minority areas.) When I graduated from college in Manhattan six years ago, I moved in an almost perfectly horizontal line across the island, from the Upper West Side to East Harlem. In the span of ten avenues, my food choices changed dramatically–I went from having access to vegetarian restaurants, organic grocery stores, salad bars and weekly farmer’s markets to being surrounded by McDonald’s, KFC, Burger King and Dunkin’ Donuts as my nearest options. I got a gym membership to offset the effects of “2 Big Macs for $3” Tuesdays and “Buy One Get One Free” deals at Baskin Robbins, but my location definitely affected my eating habits and opened my eyes to the correlation between weight and class. The fast food was just so (1) cheap, (2) high in caloric content, which gives you a good amount of energy for the low price you’re paying, and (3) conveniently located all over the neighborhood.

Of course, I don’t agree with Mollow’s stance that we should celebrate fat people of all colors instead of trying to reduce obesity in lower-income minority communities. Again, it’s all about finding the happy medium between that extreme and the equally simplistic view that fat people who stay fat just don’t want it enough. Your readers aren’t wrong to point out that there are things you can do to not be as fat, but we also need to acknowledge that it’s harder for some populations to make the meaningful and long-lasting lifestyle choices they advocate. Maybe we should have a little more empathy in addition to providing support, encouragement and education for the overweight.

Previous parts of this discussion thread here, here, and here.

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/354458394750488577

Two days ago, Richard Deitsch wondered aloud how many of his Twitter followers have photos of their happiest moment ever. Megan Garber observes that the outpouring of responses is a testament “not only to Twitter’s power as a platform for sharing, but also to cameras’ increasing ubiquity in our lives”:

We may plan to take pictures at weddings, or during proposals, or after the births of babies; many of life’s happiest moments, however, are unexpected and random and weird. The fact that more of us are regularly carrying cameras around with us means that we are newly able to capture those moments–to make the ephemeral newly permanent. And, then, shareable with Sports Illustrated writers.

Many more excellent pictures sent to Deitsch are below:

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/354456303965446146