Month: August 2014

by Dish Staff

Jason Abbruzzese examines how journalists in conflict zones have become common targets for abduction:

The kidnapping of journalists is a relatively new issue. Reporters in conflict zones well understood the risks, but occupied a relatively sheltered position. “Pre-internet and pre-social media, pretty much all parities to wars and conflicts understood that they needed journalists to communicate their message, their view, to get the word out,” [Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma director Bruce] Shapiro says. Another part of the problem: major media organizations have closed foreign bureaus and become reliant on freelancers as cheap alternatives. Without the backing of major media organizations, these freelancers tend to be at even more risk — especially if they and their families happen to live in the country where the conflict is taking place.

Jack Shafer stands back:

The killing of an innocent reporter violates what many of us would call an unwritten social contract stipulating that journalists deserve protection because they’re witnesses to history, not state actors. …

The old framework, in which reporters are generally tolerated, may be coming to an end, especially on the Syria, Iraq, and Libya battlegrounds. As the New Yorker‘s Jon Lee Anderson writes today, “Yesterday’s guerrillas have given way to terrorists, and now terrorists have given way to this new band [from the Islamic State], who are something like serial killers.” Serial killers tend to reject social contracts.

As we mourn Foley’s death, we need also acknowledge how routine the killing of reporters has become world-wide, and not just on the war-front. According to statistics compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 706 reporters have been murdered since 1992, and only 25 percent of them while covering a war. The remainder was assigned to other beats — crime, corruption, politics, human rights, and the like. Of the total dead, 94 percent weren’t foreign correspondents, they were local reporters.

David Rohde, who was kidnapped by the Taliban in 2008, compares American and European approaches to negotiating with terrorists:

There are no easy answers in kidnapping cases. The United States cannot allow terrorist groups to control its foreign policy. One clear lesson that has emerged in recent years, however, is that security threats are more effectively countered by united American and European action. The divergent U.S. and European approach to abductions fails to deter captors or consistently safeguard victims.

Last month, a New York Times investigation found that al-Qaeda and its direct affiliates had received at least $125 million in revenue from kidnappings since 2008—primarily from European governments. In the last year alone, they received $66 million. “Kidnapping hostages is an easy spoil,” Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, wrote in a 2012 letter to the leader of an al-Qaeda affiliate in North Africa, “which I may describe as a profitable trade and a precious treasure.”

And James Traub probes the moral dilemma inherent in choosing whether or not to do so:

Should states pay ransom to kidnappers? If you are a friend or loved one of the victim, the answer is obviously yes. But even a more remote observer could cite the moral argument that the obligation to treat people as ends rather than means — what Kant calls the “categorical imperative” — forbids one to place the life of the abductee in a balance with abstract goods, like “sending a message” that kidnapping doesn’t pay. In any case, the consequences of capitulation are remote and hypothetical; the life is terribly real. …

The consequences of capitulating to terrorist kidnappers are ruinous. As a recent New York Times investigation revealed, “Kidnapping Europeans for ransom has become a global business for Al Qaeda, bankrolling its operations across the globe.” That’s why no European government will admit to making payments. The thought of Steven Sotloff jammed into a pit, awaiting death, when he might have been freed for nothing more than money, is unbearable. But the thought of rewarding the Islamic State for its savagery is also unbearable. A humane response to a monstrous act engenders more monstrousness.

by Dish Staff

According (pdf) to the CDC:

Jason Millman unpacks the news:

Though the United States lags behind other countries, the CDC says the progress made since 1991 has amounted to 4 million fewer teen births. Citing research from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, the CDC says this also saved taxpayers an estimated $12 billion alone in 2010 from costs associated with government-funded health care, child welfare and higher incarceration rates of teen moms. And having fewer babies born to teen mothers, the CDC points out, is good for other reasons. Teen motherhood comes with a higher health risk for the baby, educational limits for the mother and limited resources, since about 90 percent of teen births are to unmarried mothers. And babies born to teen mothers are more likely to eventually become teen mothers themselves.

Tara Culp-Ressler has more details:

The steepest declines in the teen birth rate appear to be occurring in the areas where it’s historically been the highest. Southern states — where the teen pregnancy rate has beensignificantly higher for years — have seen the largest drops, although there’s still a noticeable disparity between states in the South and states in the Northeast. Similarly, while teen births have declined across all racial groups, they’ve recently fallen the fastest among Hispanic women, who currently have the highest rate.

But what caused the decline? Jordan Weissmann addresses the question:

For its part, the CDC cites one telling paper from the American Journal of Public Health. Using government survey data on adolescent sexual behavior, it concluded that 86 percent of the decline in teen pregnancy between 1995 and 2002 could be chalked up to increased contraception use; the other 14 percent was due to abstinence. “The decline in U.S. adolescent pregnancy rates appears to be following the patterns observed in other developed countries, where improved contraceptive use has been the primary determinant of declining rates,” the researchers wrote.

Kliff concludes that maybe we’ve “just gotten lucky”:

It’s not an especially scientific answer, but it’s one that seems to describe how teen pregnancy researchers view the dramatic slowdown in the birth rate: a collision of lots of trends that all serendipitously happened in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

The recession, the uptick in IUD use, a hit MTV show that deglamorized teen pregnancy — each of these factors could have have caused a small decline on their own. Taken together, it’s possible they caused a much bigger change.

And if that is the case, that doesn’t portend especially well for the fast decline continuing.

by Dish Staff

Harry Enten thinks it has been greatly exaggerated:

Since the beginning of the year, there have been eight live-interview national polls that detail results among young voters (ages 18 to 29 or 18 to 34), and matched Paul against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Together, these polls give us the views of more than 1,000 young voters. The same polls matched Clinton against Christie. The surveys show that young voters don’t see any difference between Paul and other Republican politicians. …

The median of the eight surveys shows that among young voters, Paul trails by 17 percentage points more than he trails among all voters. That would represent a slight improvement over Romney, who lost young voters by 20 points more than he did voters overall. Still, Paul’s and Romney’s relative performances with young voters are within the margin of error of each other.

Ponnuru points out that Paul’s performance with young voters was underwhelming when he won his Senate seat:

Maybe Paul would do better with young voters as the Republican nominee in 2016 than any of the other possibilities. He makes a plausible case that his brand of politics — skeptical of military intervention, the drug war and domestic surveillance — ought to find favor with them.

In its one electoral test so far, though, Paul’s brand of Republican politics has done roughly the same as the generic version.

Chait adds:

Paul and his allies have won quite a propaganda coup by implanting the notion that he offers a unique appeal to the youngest voters. (Buoyed by the Times Magazine endorsement, and undaunted by the gaping holes in its data, Reason is plunging ahead with its predictions of the libertarian future.) It could happen. There is no reason to think it will.

by Freddie deBoer

For awhile now, I’ve been arguing against the notion of a STEM shortage, the idea that our labor problems stem in part from a failure to produce enough graduates in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math fields to meet demand. This idea is, well, just wrong, plainly wrong. I aggregated a lot of the data here, and here’s a great piece from The Atlantic by Michael Teitelbaum making the case. I have been committed to debunking this idea for two major reasons. First, because facts matter, and one of the most dangerous things to us as a society are those ideas that sound good from a narrative point of view but lack factual backing. The idea of the STEM shortage plays into a bunch of our petty prejudices, most powerfully our idea of the future. But the data simply doesn’t back up that notion.

The second reason is because the notion of a STEM shortage plays into a misguided and destructive vision of our economy– a moralizing notion of our labor market where your outcomes are all a matter of choices that you have made. This is the chumps narrative, where people who have suffered in our labor market have done so because they have pursued foolish, “impractical” careers or education. Virginia Postrel has written cogently about this phenomenon in the past, pointing out, among other things, that it isn’t the case that people with supposedly impractical majors systematically underperform the average, and also that they are such a small slice of the labor force that they can’t possibly account for our problems. I’ve pointed out many times before that going to law school went overnight from being the mercenary path for those bent on riches to a pie-in-the-sky, impractical move for dreamers, as soon as the law job market collapsed. The narrative changes to preserve the idea that individuals are responsible for their own joblessness, and in so doing keeps us from pondering systemic change.

Look at the app economy, which was meant to be the hot new ticket into the land of abundance. (See this 2012 piece from The Atlantic for an indicative example of app economy woowoo.) What could better play into our notions of how to get ahead in America in this new age than the app economy? It’s dynamic! It’s innovative! It’s disruptive! Gone are the days of putting on a suit to go work in some stodgy firm. These days, it’s all about being your own boss, building an app with some buddies in your dorm room, and reaping the whirlwind. It’s a Tom Friedman wet dream, an Aspen Ideas Festival panel sprung to life, the validation of every buzzwordy Wired article and Business Insider post you’ve ever read.

Whoops!

As the indispensable Valleywag tells us this morning, people within the app economy are catching on to the fact that it’s not, actually, an industry in which they can achieve long-term economic security, let alone riches. The bottom 47% of developers make less than $100 a month. Studies have shown that the vast majority of revenues goes to a tiny fraction of developers. The numbers are even more stark when it comes to in-app revenue. Less than .01% of all apps will be considered a financial success, according to some estimates. It turns out that, as in so many other things in the American economy, the app industry is a winner-take-all field, a lottery ticket economy where a tiny number make out like bandits and most people can’t get ahead. And as usual, it’s only the biggest firms– Apple, Google, Microsoft– which are getting ahead.

So all the kids who heard the clarion call and rushed out to get CS degrees, or to drop out under the advice of Peter Thiel, and start coding in their basements– are they all chumps? Do they deserve scorn? Do they deserve to be unable to scratch out a living? Of course not. Like so many others, most of them did what their society told them to do to pursue the good life: work hard, go to school, and try to provide value for people so that you can earn a living. They were sold on a social contract that is failing them. No one can be reasonably expected to predict what skills the economy will value five, ten, twenty years in advance. The urge to call out others for what you perceive as their bad choices is destructive in a labor economy where, despite gains in overall unemployment rate, workers still have remarkably little bargaining power, thanks to underemployment, lack of benefits, low pay, and poor hours. Rather than succumbing to our petty insecurities by blaming others for their economic conditions, we need to look at the macroeconomic factors that are hurting our labor markets. We need to recognize that automation and artificial intelligence are pushing us towards a new era of work– one with tremendous potential productivity gains, but also tremendous uncertainty for labor, even educated labor. It’s time to stop calling people chumps and start building the kind of social system that can guarantee basic material security for all of our people, so that we can all share in the staggering gains of efficiency and productivity that technology is bringing about.

(Photo by Jason Howie)

by Dish Staff

It’s absurdly expensive:

It costs approximately $249,930 on average for a two-parent, middle-income family to raise an American child from birth until age 18, according to a Department of Agriculture report released on Monday. The data were adjusted for inflation for 2013, and they ultimately show that child-rearing prices have skyrocketed more than many people imagined over the course of the last half-century. The report considers the costs of housing and utilities, food, transportation, clothing and diapers, healthcare expenses, childcare and education, as well as “miscellaneous costs” such as entertainment and personal care products. As Think Progress notes, the report conspicuously fails to include birth-related costs or the costs of lost time, earnings and opportunity that many people give up (overtly or not) by deciding to have kids. Additionally, the report fails to consider the cost of college, which costs parents approximately $30,000 to $40,000 per year.

Josh Zumbrun throws some cold water:

[A] closer look at the methodology casts some of the numbers in a new light.

The report calculates the cost of housing by looking at the expense of buying a home with an additional bedroom. If you’d otherwise planned to live in a one-bedroom condo your entire life, this is an extra cost. But if you planned on buying a 3 or 4 bedroom house anyway, this is not really an additional expense of parenthood. That extra bedroom assumption alone accounts for $4,000 a year in expenses, or about $73,000 of the cost of raising a child until age 18.

The cost of some transportation and other miscellaneous items are calculated on a per-capita basis, in the estimate. So if there’s two parents and a child, spending $3,000 on some item, then $1,000 of that is assumed to go to the child. That assumption may or may not be applicable for your family.

Regardless, McArdle remarks that the “last 50 years have seen a massive shift away from the basic expenses of keeping your kid alive and toward competitive expenses”:

If your kids go to school with other kids who aren’t wearing thrift-school clothing, they’ll be made fun of. They’ll learn to long for all the new toys the other kids have. They’ll want to join expensive activities, and you’ll want to get them tutoring and enrichment programs to increase their shot at getting into a good school. You certainly won’t want to cram them into a three-bedroom house. In other words, raising kids cheaply is only possible if you think there’s something even more important than socializing and getting a good education – or if you’re so poor that you simply lack the cash to help your kids compete in our society’s various status competitions.

Kyle Chayka focuses on the inequality angle:

Structural inequality is growing in the U.S., a fact acknowledged across the political spectrum. But few statistics illustrate that fact as starkly as a graph of how much the highest-income families can spend on their children versus the lowest-income families in a single year. A household earning above $106,540 was able to spend more than double the amount spent by those earning less than $61,530, particularly for young children. When the kids become teenagers, the spending of high-income families also grows faster than the other groups, reaching $25,000, as compared to $15,000 in the middle range and around $10,000 at the bottom.

Yet even that increased spending is less of a burden on wealthier families, who spend the lowest percentage of their income on their children (as measured before taxes). The lowest-income group spent 25 percent of their income on a child, while the middle-income group spent 16 percent and the top bracket just 12.