Far from having the 21st-century equivalent of an Edwardian class system, the United States is characterized by a great deal of variation in income: More than half of all adult Americans will be at or near the poverty line at some point over the course of their lives; 73 percent will also find themselves in the top 20 percent, and 39 percent will make it into the top 5 percent for at least one year. Perhaps most remarkable, 12 percent of Americans will be in the top 1 percent for at least one year of their working lives.Darn 73-percenters.
"Different from you and me"?
Kevin Williamson looks at the fuzzy boundaries of the category we call "the rich":
Progress?
I was reading what seemed like an ordinary article about coming attractions in the biotech revolution when I came across the casual statement:
Yes. It hardly seems a sporting thing to do to an animal that likes to hunt at night.
I know I said I like innovation in resource use, but I don't believe cats are merely a resource for us to use as we please.
Cats that glow like jellyfish, now in labs, are just the beginning.Wait. What?
Yes. It hardly seems a sporting thing to do to an animal that likes to hunt at night.
I know I said I like innovation in resource use, but I don't believe cats are merely a resource for us to use as we please.
Overdrawn at the planetary bank
Are we? Matt Ridley says "Nonsense." Did Stone Age civilization collapse because people ran out of stone? Contrasting "ecology" with "economy," Ridley finds that one little letter makes all the difference. Despite our benevolent host's apparent conviction that the study of economics amounts to inquiries into the ways in which people can be induced to accept monetary bribes to tarnish their honor, the field really consists of examining the ways a society decides how to wield scarce resources for which there are multiple possible uses. A market economy typically makes this decision by letting prices rise and fall according to the scarcity of the resource, together with the demand for it, as expressed by a large number of individuals exercising freedom of choice. But supply and demand aren't static, even at a particular price point. As a resource in high demand becomes scarce and costly, the pressure is on to find a substitute. And human beings under pressure are remarkably gifted at innovating substitutes.
Our natural short-term perspective regards a price spike as a catastrophe--what if someone in need can't pay the price?--but a longer view suggests that a price spike often is just the impetus needed to discover a cheaper alternative. As Ridley points out,
Our natural short-term perspective regards a price spike as a catastrophe--what if someone in need can't pay the price?--but a longer view suggests that a price spike often is just the impetus needed to discover a cheaper alternative. As Ridley points out,
The best-selling book "Limits to Growth," published in 1972 by the Club of Rome (an influential global think tank), argued that we would have bumped our heads against all sorts of ceilings by now, running short of various metals, fuels, minerals and space. Why did it not happen? In a word, technology: better mining techniques, more frugal use of materials, and if scarcity causes price increases, substitution by cheaper material. We use 100 times thinner gold plating on computer connectors than we did 40 years ago. The steel content of cars and buildings keeps on falling....
In many respects, greater affluence and new technology have led to less human impact on the planet, not more. Richer people with new technologies tend not to collect firewood and bushmeat from natural forests; instead, they use electricity and farmed chicken—both of which need much less land. In 2006, [Jesse Ausubel at Rockefeller University] calculated that no country with a GDP per head greater than $4,600 has a falling stock of forest (in density as well as in acreage).Would any of those things have happened if the Global Department of Resource Justice had had the authority and the funding to prevent anyone from feeling the consequences of scarcity? Human beings who care about the suffering of others experience a strong temptation to respond to price spikes by imposing price freezes. (How dare those hoarders of valuable resources withhold them from the needy?) While there may be good arguments in favor of the brief application of charitable relief to ameliorate an unusually abrupt transition from one resource to its substitute, we're not doing anyone any favors by subsidizing an economic choice about any resource that has begun to get scarce enough to be unaffordable. If that approach made sense, we'd be subsidizing the use of whale oil so that poor people could light as many lamps as the rich. Or subsidizing stone tools so that no one had to figure out how to make them out of metal.
Only Rarely Does Political News Make Me Feel Like Screaming
"Let's hope #Kremlin & @mfa_russia will live by the promise of hashtag"
These people represent you. They represent me. These are my representatives.
These people represent you. They represent me. These are my representatives.
Or Maybe Not
President Barack Obama has declared any secession vote in Crimea illegitimate, and warned: “We are well beyond the days when borders can be redrawn over the heads of democratic leaders.”
Political will
President Obama scolded mid-east leaders: "What we haven't seen is frankly the kind of political will to actually make tough decisions."
Any comment I could make would only be bouncing the rubble.
For Our Gracious Host
As well as for anyone else, who like Grim, split your own wood.
http://www.geek.com/news/physics-exploiting-axe-splits-wood-in-record-time-1591725/
I think this is amazing. And probably the first real advancement in what is an ancient tool in a very long time.
http://www.geek.com/news/physics-exploiting-axe-splits-wood-in-record-time-1591725/
I think this is amazing. And probably the first real advancement in what is an ancient tool in a very long time.
Warning Order: Bannockburn
It is now exactly two months until the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn.
Prepare yourselves with due care.
Prepare yourselves with due care.
Admirable brevity
Economist and Nobel laureate Thomas Sargent:
H/t Maggie's Farm.
I remember how happy I felt when I graduated from Berkeley many years ago. But I thought the graduation speeches were long. I will economize on words. Economics is organized common sense. Here is a short list of valuable lessons that our beautiful subject teaches.
1. Many things that are desirable are not feasible.
2. Individuals and communities face trade-offs.
3. Other people have more information about their abilities, their efforts, and their preferences than you do.
4. Everyone responds to incentives, including people you want to help. That is why social safety nets don’t always end up working as intended.
5. There are tradeoffs between equality and efficiency.
6. In an equilibrium of a game or an economy, people are satisfied with their choices. That is why it is difficult for well-meaning outsiders to change things for better or worse.
7. In the future, you too will respond to incentives. That is why there are some promises that you’d like to make but can’t. No one will believe those promises because they know that later it will not be in your interest to deliver. The lesson here is this: before you make a promise, think about whether you will want to keep it if and when your circumstances change. This is how you earn a reputation.
8. Governments and voters respond to incentives too. That is why governments sometimes default on loans and other promises that they have made.
9. It is feasible for one generation to shift costs to subsequent ones. That is what national government debts and the U.S. social security system do (but not the social security system of Singapore).
10. When a government spends, its citizens eventually pay, either today or tomorrow, either through explicit taxes or implicit ones like inflation.
11. Most people want other people to pay for public goods and government transfers (especially transfers to themselves).
12. Because market prices aggregate traders’ information, it is difficult to forecast stock prices and interest rates and exchange rates.
H/t Maggie's Farm.
At ease
A sense of entitlement from having served in the military? Really?
Tom Cotton cheerfully swats away Sen. Pryor's absurd criticism:
Tom Cotton cheerfully swats away Sen. Pryor's absurd criticism:
BLM II: Messing with Texas
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott slammed the federal Bureau of Land Management’s claims that private property within the state now belongs to the federal government.
The BLM says the federal government owns a 90,000 acre piece of land along Texas’s Red River, despite it being maintained and cultivated by private landowners for generations and no law has been passed by Congress giving BLM ownership of the land.
...
“I am deeply concerned about the notion that the Bureau of Land Management believes the federal government has the authority to swoop in and take land that has been owned and cultivated by Texas landowners for generations,” Abbott wrote in a letter to BLM Director Neil Kornz.
"If A President Signs a Bill into Law, Must He Obey It?"
The answer turns out, of course, to be "no." It is impossible to make the President obey the law.
The Feast of St. George
April 23rd is the feast day of the patron saint of the mounted warrior, the Order of the Garter ("Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense") and many other orders of knighthood. Here is an article on the life and myth of St. George, patron saint of the cavalry. New Advent has another piece.
Any Stick Will Do To Beat You
At some point, you might as well do it your own way. You're going to take the hit one way or the other.
State of Adventure
After 2,055 miles -- not counting side trips for gas or food -- the long ride has brought me home. I'll be around a bit more often for a while.
Liz Warren
Elizabeth Warren (whom you may recall I dislike far less than most of you guys) insists she's not running for President, but there's no doubt she's just put out a political biography timed to compete directly with the upcoming Hillary!TM production. Warren's views aren't all quite what you'd expect. The New Yorker reviewer is horrified to find, for instance, that she supports the immediate imposition of unlimited public school vouchers: “An all-voucher system would be a shock to the educational system, but the shakeout might be just what the system needs.” "Yes," the reviewer sniffs, "that would be a shock. It would also be reckless"--and of course doesn't bother to defend this assertion.
Warren previously wrote a book arguing that the two-income family is an economic trap that leads families to take on dangerous levels of debt. Her own father died suddenly when she was a child; the family survived only because they were accustomed to living on his single salary, so that her homemaking, child-rearing mother was able to go out and get work to replace his paycheck. This is not an argument that will endear her to many feminists, no matter how querulously the victim angle is spun. She also has views on the subject of appropriating "other people's money" that are calculated initially to endear her to me, at least (which is to say, not to her target demographic), though unfortunately the only "OPM" context she seems prepared to analyze is that of greedy bankers who collect and re-invest the deposits of virtuous common people. Evidently if benevolent congressmen do it it's all good.
The reviewer made the surprising admission that it's a bit ticklish for a wealthy U.S. Senator to write an autobiography about how tough the powers-that-be have made her life: "An argument that the system is rigged tends to be somewhat undermined, for instance, by the success of the person pointing that out."
It's a shame that Warren's shabby politics interfere with her considerable analytical skills. I will never understand how people persuade themselves that other people force them to take on more debt than they can service. Warren is unusual in her skepticism about debt as an engine of growth for the economy, a stance shared (in my experience) by many people who've made bankruptcy law their specialty, but she seems to think that more regulations on bankers will cure the problem. Or possibly she believes people would borrow less if they were given more generous handouts, though how that can be squared with the experience of any culture in history is a deep mystery to your humble correspondent.
Warren previously wrote a book arguing that the two-income family is an economic trap that leads families to take on dangerous levels of debt. Her own father died suddenly when she was a child; the family survived only because they were accustomed to living on his single salary, so that her homemaking, child-rearing mother was able to go out and get work to replace his paycheck. This is not an argument that will endear her to many feminists, no matter how querulously the victim angle is spun. She also has views on the subject of appropriating "other people's money" that are calculated initially to endear her to me, at least (which is to say, not to her target demographic), though unfortunately the only "OPM" context she seems prepared to analyze is that of greedy bankers who collect and re-invest the deposits of virtuous common people. Evidently if benevolent congressmen do it it's all good.
The reviewer made the surprising admission that it's a bit ticklish for a wealthy U.S. Senator to write an autobiography about how tough the powers-that-be have made her life: "An argument that the system is rigged tends to be somewhat undermined, for instance, by the success of the person pointing that out."
It's a shame that Warren's shabby politics interfere with her considerable analytical skills. I will never understand how people persuade themselves that other people force them to take on more debt than they can service. Warren is unusual in her skepticism about debt as an engine of growth for the economy, a stance shared (in my experience) by many people who've made bankruptcy law their specialty, but she seems to think that more regulations on bankers will cure the problem. Or possibly she believes people would borrow less if they were given more generous handouts, though how that can be squared with the experience of any culture in history is a deep mystery to your humble correspondent.
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