Author: Andrew Sullivan

Avent dusts off the history books:

From a historical perspective the entire retirement concept it is relatively new. For most of civilisation the average person worked until they became too sick or feeble, or died. According to Dora Costa’s book on the history of retirement, in 1880's America more than three-quarters of men over 64 and half of 85-year olds still worked. When people did retire they had little wealth and often were dependent on relatives. The growth of retirement was driven by changes in the labour force (a move away from family farms and toward production and services), new social norms (which made retirement the expectation and created a critical mass of retirees), and financial incentives (income from state pensions and private pensions from employers). The introduction of state pensions was significant because it provided retirement income for everyone (including those too poor to save). This allowed elderly people to cease work and not be dependent on their families. To this day, many people rely on state benefits as their primary source of retirement income.

McArdle finds no easy solution. She is in favor of rising the retirement age. But:

I notice that it is a proposal espoused and endorsed by sedentary people who have interesting jobs as policy wonks.  Moving people off the social security rolls and onto the disability system is not a huge help. 

Moreover, this proposal will not do much good unless you also raise the early retirement age; seven out of ten retirees collect their benefits before age 65 (or now 66).  Keeping people in the workforce means more years of taxes to prop up the system.  Otherwise it's just a benefit cut by another name–and if you cut them far enough, you end up with the elderly on other forms of public assistance to make up the shortfall.

A few weeks ago MSNBC reported on a study that found the "percentage of food shoppers who are obese is almost 10 times higher at low-cost grocery stores compared with upscale markets." Pivoting off a post by Jamelle Bouie, Mike Konczal parses:

[W]hen you hear arguments that income inequality isn't so bad because consumption inequality is less than you'd think, it's important to be skeptical about what in fact is being consumed. Sometimes it is exactly what you think it is: less quality and worse long-term health outcomes. And the long-term consequences for the health and well-being of the working poor are exactly the type of information econometric stats obscure.

I had a dream last night that I was lost in Sarah Palin's garden. It was springtime, and there were bluebells everywhere. I suddenly realized where I was and tried to get out to the street. But there was just more garden …

More Intelligent Life posts the above video of YouTube user Peter Oakley and muses:

YouTube is sometimes hounded for being the natural product of all of our most craven instincts. Instead of watching quality programming on television, say, we are all narcissistically posting videos of our dancing babies and puking cats in the hopes of becoming famous. Though Joel Budd at The Economist makes a convincing case for television's sustained hegemony, it's clear that something more interesting is going on here. The promise of an audience is enough to motivate most anyone to take out a camera and capture something (Anne Trubek made a similar argument for blogging and writing). People are creating work and engaging with each other. The result is that everyone becomes a producer, not just a consumer—something that Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink consider in this insightful conversation in the latest issue of Wired.

John Dickerson delves into the difficulty of finding creative solutions to stop the BP leak:

Federal officials who have been in big crises all talk about a moment when someone figured that the answer was not to apply more of the same remedy (or even "historic" amounts of it) but to look for an entirely new approach altogether. This sounds great in theory, but is very hard to do in the moment because the immediate needs take up 25 hours of the day. There's no time to think, and even if you have a great idea, there may be no organizational capacity to carry it out. There's also the problem that every hour someone spends on your creative idea is an hour they're not spending producing outputs that can be measured by the media and your political opponents. Also, creative ideas open you to ridicule. Why are you wasting your time on that and not ordering more boom?

Jonah Lehrer advises the engineers to stop thinking about the problem:

I imagine the poor engineers trying to fix this catastrophe back at HQ are working around the clock, swilling coffee by the gallon and trying to stay focused amid all the pressure. Their bosses are probably driving them crazy, demanding instant solutions to a seemingly impossible puzzle. And so the engineers drink more coffee. They pull yet another all-nighter. After all, a problem this difficult requires every ounce of their conscious attention.

This post is about why those poor BP engineers should take a break. They should step away from the dry-erase board and go for a walk. They should take a long shower. They should think about anything but the thousands of barrels of toxic black sludge oozing from the pipe.

The reason for this counterintuitive advice is that there appears to be a tradeoff between certain kinds of creativity and the frantic sort of focus that comes when people are put in high stakes situations.

Which countries are the most content?:

(Hat tip: Compass)

A reader writes:

The career counselor nails it. I've been looking for a job for about two months now and have come to the conclusion that Human Resources is, without question, the most useless, bureaucratic, least efficient department in ANY organization. HR has, ironically, perfected the extrication of any sort of human contact imaginable when applying for a job – no names, no contact info, no phone numbers, no nothing. I even went to one job fair where an HR rep for a company refused to accept a resume I was trying to hand her. "We only take resumes online for jobs posted," she said.

Another writes:

Your reader attempts to offer some good advice for getting a job in today's market, but I feel like the his/her outlook is beyond cynical and really gets to the heart of the matter of the jobs crisis in this country: no longer is it sufficient to be driven, motivated, competent, and skilled at one's job; one must also be a professional marketer and kiss-ass.

I have a great distaste with the idea of having to "brand" or "market" myself in order to even land an interview. I have made available my work record, my marks in school, professional and personal references, a cover letter tailored to each individual position for which I am applying … since when do my qualifications not speak for themselves? It makes me think that the only people who are going to get jobs are those who, while perhaps not as qualified or competent as me, have connections and know how to bullshit their ways into positions. I have an ethical problem with that (not to mention that I'm a terrible bullshitter).

Another:

I very much agree with the general thrust of what this former career counselor has to say. Tomorrow I will be starting a new job – a temporary position managing a small project for 3-4 months with a decent chance of becoming permanent by autumn. I didn't get the job through Monster, CareerBuilder, the Washington Post's job section, or any other online or print resource, but through two friends and former co-workers working on my behalf – one who works at the company that laid me off last year, the other at the company which hired me last week.

Ever since getting laid off 15 months ago, I have strongly suspected that the only chance of finding a new job would come through people I know. I used every contact I could think of, "cold-e-mailed" every company who seemed to have projects up and running or in the pipeline, talked directly to the people running some of the largest construction projects in the metro area where I live, had friends circulate my resume – everything. I applied for maybe 200 jobs over the past year, and landed a grand total of zero interviews.

In short, I have come to believe that unless you are a superstar who can choose your job offer and name your salary, then personal contacts are not just the most important factor when it comes to finding a new job, they are pretty much the ONLY factor.

Today on the Dish we learned that BP has been criminally culpable for years and that Palin has more chutzpah than we thought. With the help of Noah Millman, Andrew took a long look at the Israel dilemma. Readers dissented en masse. We also heard from a friend of the young American who lost her eye protesting the flotilla, we learned how harmless its cargo was, and we watched some right-wingers rub it in. Larison laid into Israel for blockading Gaza, Jim Henley clarified his point about Israel "winning," Thomas P.M. Barnett turned the klieg light on Turkey, and Pareene parodied Palin.

In other coverage, Phillip Smith saw some good signs for legalization in California, an NRO contributor gave props to Obama for his drone policy, and we rounded up some racial commentary on Artur Davis' loss in Alabama. Maureen Dowd demanded that Obama be more like daddy, Reihan rolled his eyes at the call for an oil spill czar, Leonhardt looked at worst case scenarios, Bernstein balked at majority rule, and Andrew agreed that we should prune benefits for senior citizens.  David Runciman examined the UK's unraveling and ITN reported on a rampaging gunman.

Paul Bloom discussed our attachment to fictional characters, P.J. O'Rourke recommeded live obituaries, and Michelangelo sketched brains on God. Steve Jobs dissed blogging, Steve Coll had some parting words on the medium, Nick Carr criticized links, and Dave Coverly drew an accurate conclusion. Ken Layne spotted manbearpig. Beard sighting here. Cracks and cleavage here. Recession view here and cool ad here. MHB here, VFYW here, and FOTD here. Holy shit! moment here.

— C.B.

Leonhardt shrewdly observes:

I have an essay in this weekend’s Times Magazine about one of the lessons of the BP oil spill: the difficulty that people have estimating the odds of low-probability, high-cost events.

The BP spill is a good example of when people tend to underestimate such odds. When an event is difficult to imagine, we tend to underestimate its likelihood. The manager of the oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico probably never had a rig explode on them before, which led them to assume it would not happen. They tried to save money by skipping safety procedures, and we’re all now paying the price.

But there are also times when people overestimate the chances of a low-probability event: when that event easily comes to mind, as is the case with plane crashes. One example I didn’t have room to mention in the magazine is what economists refer to as the “favorite-longshot bias.” It holds that gamblers tend to over-bet underdogs and under-bet favorites.

(Image from xkcd)

A Chinese girl screams when she takes part in a 'Who has the loudest voice' competition, in Hangzhou, east China's Zhejiang province, as locals celebrate Children's Day on June 1, 2010. A dramatic rise in prosperity has created previously unheard-off possibilities for upward mobility and in turn stoked pressures on children to do well at school. STR/AFP/Getty Images.