April 2014 – Page 28

Payback For Skimming A Paycheck

Catherine Rampell wants to criminalize wage theft:

“Wage theft” is an old problem. It can take many forms, including paying less than the minimum hourly wage, working employees off the clock, not paying required overtime rates and shifting hours into the next pay period so that overtime isn’t incurred. Unfortunately, reliable data on the magnitude of the problem are scarce. Workers can be afraid to report the theft for fear of losing their jobs altogether, especially in today’s terrible economy, and many don’t know their rights. Often workers don’t even realize their pay is being skimmed. …

The consequences for wage theft are rare, small and not particularly deterring. Even when government investigators pursue these complaints, for example, criminal charges are rarely filed. Harsher penalties, including prison time, should be on the table more often when willful wrongdoing is proved. Thieves caught stealing thousands of dollars from someone’s home can go to jail; the same should be true for thieves caught stealing thousands of dollars from someone’s paycheck.

Kathleen Geier approves:

Though some people might argue that hard time for the wage thieves is a harsh penalty, I’m not one of them. We call this practice “theft” because that is what it is. Just as anti-choicers who refer to abortion as “murder” should either embrace the logic of their own argument and support prison time for women who undergo abortions, or abandon the use of the “murder” label altogether when applied to abortion, the opponents of wage theft should stand firmly in favor of prison sentences for those convicted of this sleazy, bottom-feeding crime.

The Soaring Suicide In South Korea

Following the suicide of Kang Min-gyu, the vice-principal of the South Korean school whose students died on a ferry last week, Adam Taylor explored the country’s epidemic:

South Korea has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, more than double that of the United States. According to one recent OECD report, Korea had bucked a trend of falling suicide rates among developed nations, with suicide rising to become the fourth most common cause of death. Unlike most other countries, South Koreans actually become more likely to commit suicide as they age.

High-profile suicides have become a regular feature in the media. Former South Korean president Roh Moo-Hyun jumped off a hill to his death in 2009. Park Yong-oh, a well-known businessman who once led the Doosan Group, the country’s oldest conglomerate, also committed suicide that year. In 2010, singer and actor Park Yong-ha committed suicide at the height of his career, just one of a string of suicides in the entertainment industry, and earlier this year, a well-known reality TV show was taken off the air after a contestant killed herself.

A reader fills us in on the ferry incident, which he calls “Korea’s 9/11”:

I’m not sure whether the lack of Dish coverage is reflective of your editorial filtering process or of the level of general media coverage, but this is the ONLY story in Korea right now and one the world needs to know.

Last week a Korean ferry sank while carrying a high school class full of kids en route to Jeju, a popular resort island. Some 250 are missing and by now most likely dead – but what makes the tragedy really horrific is that it was easily preventable. The captain instructed the kids to stay in their cabins instead of preparing to evacuate, which he then promptly did himself. When the ship started to list and sink, they were too crushed in the hallway to get out.

Unsurprisingly, families are howling at the captain’s irresponsibility and cowardice. But the problem runs deeper than the individual level. Officers were woefully undertrained – they hadn’t ever drilled in emergency preparations or even read the manual – so they were clueless about what to do except save their own skins.

This is unfortunately representative of Korean business culture at large, which is notoriously unprofessional and short-sighted. Projects are planned based on overly optimistic assumptions and executed as a series of frantic lurches from one deadline to the next. Deals are cemented informally over “hwae-sik” after-work dinners (usually with drinks) rather than in writing at the office. Employees are measured by face-time, not output. The litany goes on, and anyone – Korean or Westerner – who’s done business both in and out of Korea can expound at length.

This strategy of cutting corners and playing fast-and-loose with the rules pays dividends when everything goes well: back in the ’70s, Hyundai initially became a world-class competitor by undercutting foreign competition to win fat contracts in the Middle East. But when the strategy breaks down, it does so catastrophically: recall the Asiana SFO crash last December was attributable to human error.

In terms of scope of tragedy, this ferry incident is Korea’s 9/11. It has already triggered immense teeth-gnashing and soul-searching, but it remains to be seen whether those emotions translate into meaningful change. Please help bring much-needed awareness to this tragedy, both so that the world may share in these families’ grief and so that they can bring pressure to bear on Korean business practices so that these avoidable tragedies – Asiana, the ferry – do not recur.

The Pleasures And Sorrows Of Solo Reading

Laura Miller mulls them over:

Reading is a private activity, even as it allows us to commune with the mind and imagination of an author we will probably never meet. Yet because reading a great book can be so overwhelmingly gratifying and transformative, many of us yearn to share the experience with the people we care about. That’s why we join book groups and pester our friends to read our favorites. I once heard of two men, both obsessed with a popular novel series, who check into a hotel whenever a new title in the series is released so that together they can read the whole thing in one fell swoop and talk about it afterward – all without aggravating their wives. …

I suspect that, despite our pervasively socially networked culture, willful idiosyncrasy remains the very essence of reading. A book, and especially a novel, is a world you can enter at a time of your own choosing, and the world itself can be chosen from a seemingly infinite array of alternatives to suit whichever mood has taken you. That’s one of the things we love about reading. A reader’s imaginative freedom is absolute. My mother was not wrong in recognizing my childhood book binges as a retreat into a mental sanctuary whose doors were closed in her face. It turns out that even when we want to let other people in, there may not be enough room.

Perhaps the Dish Book Club can help reconcile those contradictions. Update from a reader:

Oh, so you fell for the old “Jim and I are checking into the Holiday Inn for a couple of days so we can read…” trick, did you?

Heh.

(Photo: “The Reading Club” by Nate Edwards)

Why Vonnegut Endures

Dan Wakefield, a friend to the late writer, contemplates why his work continues to attract young readers:

Few writers are able — or willing — to take on the most serious issues (e.g. the end of the world) and write about them with humor as well as insight. Puzzling over the “big issues” is part of a young person’s coming of age, and young people not only find in Vonnegut a humorous and satirical approach that they find congenial, they also discover a refusal to shirk from the dark side of human nature. Memorializing the death of children killed in war in Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut’s orator says “… we might best spend the day despising what killed them; which is to say, the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind.”

As young people come of age they are discovering that, as Vonnegut says, the truth is often shocking “because we hear it so seldom.” Vonnegut is a truth-teller, the one who points out the elephant in the room, the one who speaks the unspeakable, expressing the thought that we may be too timid to say ourselves. When Kurt and I and our publisher, Sam Lawrence, were invited to visit one of the first communes, back in the late sixties, the young man who founded it explained that he and his friends were learning to “live off the land” because “we want to be the last people on earth.” Vonnegut asked him, “Isn’t that kind of a stuck-up kind of thing to want to be?”

The Best Time To Fly

silver-flights-2

“Between 6 and 7 in the morning,” says Silver:

Flights scheduled to depart in that window arrived just 8.6 minutes late on average. Flights leaving before 6, or between 7 and 8, are nearly as good. But delay times build from there. Through the rest of the morning and the afternoon, for every hour later you depart you can expect an extra minute of delays. Delay times peak at 20.7 minutes — more than twice as long as for early-morning flights — in the block between 6 and 7 p.m. They remain at 20-plus minutes through the 9 p.m. hour. …

Late-arriving aircraft account for the bulk of the difference in the timing of delays. Ever have one of those days when you’re 10 minutes late to your first appointment and never make up the time? Airplanes are the same way. Early in the morning, almost all of them are in position from the previous evening. But there isn’t much slack. Once they’re late, their schedule may be off for the rest of the day.

Meanwhile, the slams on the dreadful Becker book continue to pile up. When Michelangelo Signorile is compelled to agree with me, you have some idea of how bad it is. He notes how the book grotesquely distorts the legal work of Robbie Kaplan, who argued the much-more-significant Windsor case, only to have Becker relegate it to a footnote of her exclusive-access p.r. clients, Olson and Boies:

In Becker’s zeal to make her book and its insiders seem more important, she shockingly steals the win on DOMA by Kaplan and gives it to Prop 8 attorneys Ted Olson and David Boies. She wrongly portrays Kaplan as having argued a very narrow case, one not based on the dignity and civil rights of gay people, when in fact that is how Kaplan has always portrayed the case against DOMA, in the media and before the courts, right up to the high court. …

But Becker’s breathtakingly shameless conclusion, for which she quotes no legal scholar and clearly got directly from Olson and Boies, is that Olson’s arguments on Prop 8 won the DOMA case for Kaplan. She even quotes Kaplan seeming to back this up, a quotation that I find very strange, having read everything Kaplan has said about the case since DOMA was struck down. (Kaplan has not publicly commented on this book.) The omissions in the book are certainly egregious. But throwing Roberta Kaplan and Edie Windsor under the bus while comparing Chad Griffin to a woman who refused to sit at the back of the bus is truly horrendous.

My sources tell me that Kaplan rebutted this argument to Becker directly, only to have Becker ignore her points – which tells you something about the ethics and fairness of this shoddy p.r. exercise. Signorile, however, has to insist that my notion of the gay left’s resistance to marriage equality in the 1990s is unfounded. Well, since Evan Wolfson is an upstanding member of the gay left, and always has been, he is partly right. But the idea that the gay left was supportive of marriage equality as a priority or even at all in the early days is not true. Don’t ask me (although I can recite you chapter and verse), see this new piece by Richard Kim of The Nation on the epic struggle within the movement that preceded and accompanied the struggle for marriage rights. Money quote:

In the early 1990s, the writers Andrew Sullivan and Tony Kushner, in the pages of The New Republic and The Nation respectively, laid out two catalytic visions of gay politics. In his essay “The Politics of Homosexuality,” Sullivan made the conservative case for a gay agenda that focused solely on eliminating state discrimination against lesbians and gay men, chiefly the bans on same-sex marriage and military service … Kushner’s rejoinder, “A Socialism of the Skin,” published in these pages in 1994, was a galvanizing interpretation of gay liberation’s utopian and solidaristic spirit … I am, of course, Team Tony. But twenty years later, it is undeniable that Sullivan’s brand of politics defines the gay movement and that the achievement of its limited goals is on the near horizon.

Does Signorile think Richard Kim just made all that up?

On Becker, two questions: why, after all this fuss, does she refuse to engage her critics? And where is the NYT’s Public Editor on this mess?

The most popular post today was “Was Jesus God?” followed by my response to Ann Wroe’s thoughts on sin. I also went another round responding to critics of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. From the in-tray, small business owners shared their Obamacare stories (follow the whole thread here).

See you in the morning.

(Photo: A man with ‘We’re Back!’ written on his chest limps by after finishing the Boston Marathon on April 21, 2014 in Boston, Massachusetts. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images.)

Biting The Stardust

In a loving tribute to her father, Sasha Sagan remembers how she came to learn about death. She describes an exchange in which she asked Carl if he would ever see his deceased parents again. He responded that “there was nothing he would like more in the world than to see his mother and father again, but that he had no reason — and no evidence — to support the idea of an afterlife, so he couldn’t give in to the temptation”:

Then he told me, very tenderly, that it can be dangerous to believe things just because you want them to be true. You can get tricked if you don’t question yourself and others, especially people in a position of authority. He told me that anything that’s truly real can stand up to scrutiny. As far as I can remember, this is the first time I began to understand the permanence of death. As I veered into a kind of mini existential crisis, my parents comforted me without deviating from their scientific worldview.

“You are alive right this second. That is an amazing thing,” they told me. When you consider the nearly infinite number of forks in the road that lead to any single person being born, they said, you must be grateful that you’re you at this very second.

Think of the enormous number of potential alternate universes where, for example, your great-great-grandparents never meet and you never come to be. Moreover, you have the pleasure of living on a planet where you have evolved to breathe the air, drink the water, and love the warmth of the closest star. You’re connected to the generations through DNA — and, even farther back, to the universe, because every cell in your body was cooked in the hearts of stars. We are star stuff, my dad famously said, and he made me feel that way.

Meanwhile, Jason Koebler explains the latest Hubble photo, pictured above:

What you’re seeing is a cross-section of the universe, showcasing objects that are one billion times fainter than those that you can see with your naked eye. Most of the things that look close are actually billions of light years apart, and most of them are billions of light years away from us. Check out the ultra high-res version here.

(Image by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope)

In Search Of A Well-Credentialed Egg, Ctd

A reader shares her experience:

Your reader noted that models and actresses get a premium on their donated eggs, and that reminded me that there’s also a Jewish premium.

I seriously considered donating my eggs as a way to pay off some grad school debt. I knew from the frequent ads in my undergrad newspaper (a prominent liberal arts school) that there is a high premium not just for the characteristics of being tall, slim, and with high SAT scores, but also for being Jewish – especially on the mother’s side since the ethnicity is traditionally matrilineal. Based on what I saw at the time, I could get about 40% above average (an extra $3K+) just for being ethnically Jewish.

It was interesting to think about my genes as high-priced commodities in this way – both flattering and uncomfortable. But it certainly makes sense in economic terms that low supply leads to high demand. And in this case, it’s not just a matter of wanting a baby that looks like you (as with the ad you posted specifying a Caucasian donor), but of wanting a baby that is part of your culture in a very deep and irreplaceable way.

Ultimately I decided against donating because the process sounds so unpleasant. I also have reservations about going to such lengths to bring new children into the world when there are so many already born who need a loving home.

Update from a reader:

“I seriously considered donating my eggs ….I could get about 40% above average (an extra $3K+) just for being ethnically Jewish.”

That’s not donating; that’s selling.

The reader responds:

It absolutely is selling. So is most sperm donation. Though actually one could look at the money for egg donation as being compensation for the months of physical discomfort, as opposed to the egg itself.

Dogs Have People Smarts

Cognitive researcher Brian Hare suggests that the secret to canine intelligence “may be nothing more than a good attitude”:

Hare had his epiphany while studying silver foxes in Siberia – animals researchers have bred for decades, selecting for tamer and tamer animals every generation until today they are docile as golden retrievers. When Hare first noticed that dogs could follow human pointing and chimps couldn’t, he initially thought that they must have simply picked the ability up from hanging around people. The idea made sense. Wolves don’t pass the pointing test, and because they’re nearly identical to dogs, the difference must lie in cohabitation. But when Hare visited the Russian fox farm in 2002, he found that the domesticated foxes were just as good as dogs at understanding human pointing, even though they’d spent almost no time with people.

“The control foxes,” says Hare – the ones not bred to be docile – “were too freaked out to participate in the study. When you’d walk by a row of cages, they’d all run to the back. It was like parting the sea. And when they did calm down, they weren’t interested in interacting with you.” The domesticated foxes were a different story. “Their stress response to people was completely gone. And because of that, they could solve all sorts of problems the other foxes couldn’t.”

The Case For Soaking The Rich

Yglesias makes it:

Very high taxation of labor income would mean fewer huge compensation packages, not more revenue. Precisely as Laffer pointed out decades ago, imposing a 90 percent tax rate on something is not really a way to tax it at all — it’s a way to make sure it doesn’t happen. If you believe systematically lower CEO compensation packages would mean a mass withdrawal of talent from the business world and a collapse of American industry, then those smaller pay packages could be an economic disaster. But the more plausible theory is that systematically lower CEO compensation packages would mean systematically higher compensation spending elsewhere in the corporate structure. Either more frontline workers or better-paid ones. The new tax code would redistribute value inside the corporate structure without anyone actually paying the new sky-high taxes.

But Zachary Karabell doubts that taxing the bejesus out of CEOs will solve our problems:

The top 100 CEOs in the [NYT’s] survey took home a total of $1.5 billion. That’s rather nice for them, but redistributing, say, $1 billion of that would do almost nothing to help the 100 million people at the bottom of the economic pyramid in the U.S.

Even if you included upper management and got to, let’s say, $100 billion, the extra income distributed across American society would barely improve living standards. Boards could mandate that, say, Larry Ellison of Oracle should be less wealthy so that Oracle employees could be more wealthy, but Oracle employees are already on the winning side of the global economic equation. They are not the ones who need help. …

No matter what redistributive measures we took, we’d still be faced with an economic system in dramatic flux based on the erosion of traditional wage industries in the developed world over the past decades. It is not inequality that has caused the middle class to lag and suffer. Inequality rather is a symptom of a system that reached the limit of what it could provide wage earners performing jobs tied to 20th-century manufacturing.

Danny Vinik counters Karabell:

[I]f he thinks $100 billion in additional redistribution “would barely improve living standards,” he does not understand the federal budget. President Obama’s plan to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) would cost $60 billion over 10 years and lift half a million people out of poverty while helping another 10.1 million Americans in deep poverty. You could fund that and still have $940 billion to spend on antipoverty programs over the next decade. The federal government spent $61 billion in total on the EITC last year. On the Child Tax Credit, it was $57 billion. In January, Republicans and Democrats bitterly fought over food stamp cuts that ended up totaling $9 billion over a decade. An additional $100 billion in annual federal spending would have an immense effect on the living standards of low-income Americans.

In another post, Yglesias flags a study suggesting that higher taxes on the rich could boost the economy by redirecting talent out of the financial sector:

The career choices talented people make matter not just for themselves, but for the rest of society. Jobs differ in the extent to which success helps others. Major scientific breakthroughs help a scientist advance her career but are also broadly beneficial to society. A great teacher may impact a smaller circle of people, but is still helping many people beside herself.

By contrast, lawyers and traders seem to largely compete with each other in zero-sum games. If high taxes push talented people into careers where their work helps others that could raise the growth rate and increase human welfare completely apart from revenues. The authors show that under a variety of plausible assumptions the socially optimal top marginal income tax rate is very high — in the 70 to 90 percent range — largely because high tax rates would deter talent entry into finance and encourage talent entry into research/academia and teaching.

Month: April 2014