Month: June 2014

You don’t have time to watch this right now:

… because you’re working too much:

The 40-hour workweek is mostly a thing of the past. Ninety-four percent of professional workers put in 50 or more hours, and nearly half work 65 or above. All workers have managed to cut down on our time on the job by 112 hours over the last 40 years, but we’re far behind other countries: The French cut down by 491 hours, the Dutch by 425, and Canadians by 215 in the same time period. Workers in Ireland and the Netherlands are also working less. We’re also increasing our productivity, getting more done in the time we spend at work. It went up by nearly 25 percent between 2000 and 2012. …

Taking some time off actually improves a worker’s productivity at work. A study from Ernst & Young found that every ten hours of vacation time taken by an employee boosted her year-end performance rating by 8 percent and lowered turnover. Former NASA scientists found that people who take vacations experience an 82 percent increase in job performance upon their return, with longer vacations making more of an impact than short ones.

Relatedly, Cohn wants the US to have better work-family policies. Here he addresses the main pushback:

Conservatives in particular complain that requiring paid leave would hurt businesses, because employers must scramble to fill vacant posts—and do so temporarily. But if you talk to actual business leaders, you hear a different, much more nuanced story.

The trend among Fortune 500 companies has been towards offering longer leaves, with more compensation. Google, for instance, recently announced that it was extending paid leave for its employees by several weeks. One study found that the market even rewards such behavior; when companies announce they are extending parental leave, share prices rise.

The reason is that offering workers more leave tends to improve retention. Although the evidence is far from definitive, many studies have shown that, overall, new parents (and, in particular, new mothers) are more likely to return to work if they have the opportunity to take an extended leave for newborns. If companies don’t offer such long breaks—if they insist employees come back too soon—the new parents are more likely to abandon the job altogether and never come back. When workers who would rather work leave their jobs anyway, to take care of children, the companies aren’t the only ones who suffer. The economy does, too.

Zachary Goldfarb asks:

Why hasn’t the president been more aggressive on family leave? He’s enacted other major family-related benefits, such as the expansion of health care insurance under the Affordable Care Act, and proposed other child-focused policies, including a plan to offer pre-K to 4-year-olds from low- and moderate-income families. The idea of paid leave, however, hasn’t seriously come up in White House policy discussions, according to a person who has been deeply involved in those talks.

The reason has to do with the substantial cost of such a program, and the difficulty of funding it without raising taxes on the middle class — which would violate a major 2008 campaign promise. Recall that during his first presidential campaign, one of Obama’s big promises was that he would not raise taxes on any household earning less than $250,000 a year. He has tried to hold firm to that pledge, rejecting pressure from liberals who argue that it creates an unnecessary limit on what he can accomplish.

Suarez next season #suarez #biting pic.twitter.com/YF6CwOe8OC

— Martyn Jones (@JonesMartyn) June 24, 2014

On the subject of Luis Suárez, a reader writes, “The one thing you might want to mention is that human bites are very, very nasty”:

I’m a clinical pharmacist working in a big-city emergency department, and by far, the worst bite wounds and consequences we get in the emergency room are human bite wounds. The potential for infection with seriously awful bacteria is quite high. Eikenella Corrodens is the worst, and it causes infections almost exclusively from human bite wounds. When it gets into a joint (you see this in “clenched-fist injuries,” virtually always the result of someone hitting someone else in the mouth and lacerating their knuckles), it can especially cause lots of issues, including moving to the heart valves and causing endocarditis.  The infections from those bites are really tough to treat.

If it were me, I’d much rather be bitten by a dog or cat or any type of (non-rabid) animal than a human.

Physician Matt McCarthy elaborates on the many disgusting organisms living in your maw:

The pathogens that live in the mouth include common Staph and Streptococcus species, as well more obscure, yet potentially lethal bacteria like Eikenella, Fusobacterium, Peptostreptococcus, and Prevotella. You might not have heard of Eikenella, but at our hospital we see it quite frequently, typically as the causative agent of endocarditis, a potentially life-threatening infection of the heart. The bacteria can live harmlessly in the mouth, but if enough of it gets into the bloodstream, it can wreak havoc. There’s a good chance Luis Suárez has Eikenella living in his mouth—most of us do.

But wait, there’s more: Syphilis can also be transmitted via biting. The one case I know of occurred when a prostitute bit a 47-year-old man in the right nipple during sex. The nipple bled profusely, eventually became ulcerated, and failed to respond to several rounds of antibiotics. It was more than a month before doctors figured out it was syphilis. Not that anyone involved is known to be carrying around an STI—but would you want to explain how you caught syphilis from Luis Suárez?

Kathryn Joyce registers a decline in domestic adoption rates:

[F]fewer women are willing to relinquish children for adoption if they find themselves pregnant at a young age, or while unmarried. A 2010 report from the Center for American Progress noted that annual domestic infant adoption rates have fallen so significantly that they are hard to track accurately. There is the simple fact that teenage pregnancies are down across the country. And for young women who do experience unplanned pregnancies, there are more choices available today. Although adoption is often presented as the pro-life alternative to abortion, the Center for American Progress report found that the greater acceptance of single parenthood is a stronger factor in fewer women choosing adoption than the availability of abortion, since both adoption and abortion rates have fallen, while rates of unmarried parenthood have dramatically increased.

Paradoxically, Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza notes that hundreds of American-born children are being raised by Canadian and European adoptive parents:

Over the past 10 years, Canadian parents have adopted more than 1,000 American-born children; another 300 are growing up in the Netherlands; and at least another 100 will be raised in the United Kingdom. … The best estimate, from Joan Heifetz Hollinger, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law, is that as many as 500 infants, most of whom are black, leave this country through outgoing adoption every year. When it comes to the adoption of black infants, the European market is all demand and America all supply. Social acceptance of single parenthood, the accessibility of contraception, and the legalization of abortion have drastically reduced the number of children available for adoption domestically in much of Western Europe, and U.S. agencies have emerged to meet the demand.

Buckwalter-Poza adds, “the perseverance of race-based preferences is troubling for a number of reasons, not least of which is that black children are less likely to be adopted than white”:

Any policy – official or not – that slows the adoption of non-white children is a worrying one. More than 100,000 thousand children become eligible for adoption in the US in a given year; on average, about 50,000 of these children will be adopted annually. Rough math finds a troubling truth: Approximately 46 percent of black children awaiting adoption were placed in 2012, compared to 58 percent of eligible white children over the same time period.

It can be argued that outgoing adoption is an indirect consequence of the commoditization of adoptees in the American market: White children are, in these terms, more “valuable,” and there is, as now-judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Richard Posner once put it, “a glut of black babies.” Foreign prospective parents, it seems, appear less concerned with a child’s race than American parents; in some countries, international, transracial adoption has become “the norm.” One legal scholar explicitly champions outgoing adoption as a “win-win” for black adoptees, arguing that they benefit when we allow less racist countries to adopt children of color.

Leonhardt believes the problem is overblown:

In fact, the share of income that young adults are devoting to loan repayment has remained fairly steady over the last two decades, according to data the Brookings Institutions is releasing on Tuesday. Only 7 percent of young-adult households with education debt have $50,000 or more of it. By contrast, 58 percent of such households have less than $10,000 in debt, and an additional 18 percent have between $10,000 and $20,000. “We are certainly not arguing that the state of the American economy and the higher education system is just great,” Matthew Chingos, a Brookings fellow and one of the authors of the new analysis, told me. “But we do think that the data undermine the prevailing sky-is-falling-type narrative around student debt.”

Choire Sicha tears into Leonhardt:

All this data comes from the Survey of Consumer Finances, which is conducted by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the Department of Treasury. … Of all the households in that study, only about 1711 have “household heads” that are younger than 40. That’s what they’re extrapolating from. (And, intriguingly, a small number of those have a head of household younger than 18.) This is not a big sample!

What, obviously, does this data completely omit? Well, one obvious thing is…

households who are headed by someone who is not under 40. One thing we know is that, in 2012, 36 percent of Americans aged 18 to 31 were not their head of household, because they were living with their families. This survey also clearly combines family and non-family households. (Also, there’s some unknown amount of statistical imbalance from same-sex households; 31 percent of same-sex households are likely to have two college-degreed people, compared to 24 percent of opposite-sex married households and just 12 percent of opposite-sex cohabiting households.)

But Freddie questions Choire’s statistical know-how:

This is something I’ve written about before – people dramatically overestimate the sample size needed to make responsible statistical conclusions. A sample size of almost 2,000 isn’t just big, it’s enormous. The standard error of a sample of this size will be very low. Absent systematic sampling bias (as opposed to error), the odds of the underlying population being significantly different from a sample of this size is tiny. Saying that it’s not a big sample just displays ignorance about the standards applied in statistical research.

His take on the topic:

[T]he student loan crisis is indeed a crisis, a moral and practical problem of considerable size. But it’s not the size that most people think it is. And more, it doesn’t change this fact: that despite the endless concern trolling of almost our entire media, the constant tendency for the (college educated) professional writers in our culture to say that “college isn’t worth it,” a college education remains a very good investment for the large majority of graduates. American college graduates are, by essentially any international standards and in comparison to Americans with only a high school degree, in a very economically secure class.

At the same time, Derek Thompson makes the case that college isn’t actually getting that much more expensive:

One of the confusing things about college is that it’s hard to keep straight its price, cost, and value. The sticker price of college – that is, the published tuition – isn’t paid by most middle-class students, who receive grants, tuition breaks, and tax benefits. The average net price of a bachelor’s degree is still 55 percent lower than the sticker price today. For many students, tax benefits eliminate the full cost of an associate’s degree. College is much cheaper than advertised.

Meanwhile, Matt Phillips argues that “if you managed to rack up giant student debt loads, that’s likely because you’ve undertaken – and finished – the kind of extensive education that enables you to earn a good salary over time.” He adds:

The real student debt problem comes in the relatively modest amounts of borrowing done by low-income, first-generation college goers, who are four times more likely to leave school after the first year than students without those risk factors. Incidentally, this is also why increased funding of state schools is probably the answer. And, of course, most elites didn’t go to state schools. (Go SUNY Binghamton!)

Jordan Weissman concurs:

If you talk to people who study education policy for a living, they’ll tell you that the real victims of student debt aren’t English grads who took out a bit too much money to attend the University of Michigan or Oberlin. Those kinds of borrowers usually end up just fine.

However, there is a huge contingent of working-class and minority students – some of whom are among the first of their families to attend college – who are getting chewed up by student debt. These are young people, and increasingly older adults, who might not have gone to college 20 or 30 years ago, but do now because the economy is brutal for job-seekers without a degree. They borrow for school, often to pay the inflated tuition at an unscrupulous for-profit institution or little-known vocational school, then frequently drop out. Suddenly, they find themselves in debt, with no degree and no guidance on how to manage their loans.

Christopher Ingraham adds, sensibly:

The big story in student debt over the past 20 years is not – and never should have been – the few people taking on huge debt burdens, but rather that the share of all students graduating with any student debt has risen sharply:

In 1989, 22 percent of households headed by twenty-to-forty-somethings with a degree were saddled with student loan debt. That figure more than doubled by 2010, standing at 50 percent. It’s likely climbed even more since then. That number is probably an underestimate, too. … Another important consideration is that the data above only go back to 1989. If we could extend it further, to the 1960s and 1970s, when Boomers were graduating, we’d likely see even lower rates of student debt back then. This is the reason why it feels like student debt is everywhere these days –compared to the ’60s and ’70s, it is everywhere.

Lastly, Mike Konczal notes that today’s student debtors spend 13.4 years paying off their loans, in contrast to the class of 1992’s 7.4 years.