"Noone taught me to be happy. Why didn’t anyone teach this to me? This is THE skill of skills."
http://thehappyphilosopher.com/single-player-game/
Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.
We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself a blushing hermit in the sun
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and I turn to you and am bright and young.
My love, the wind falls in like stones
from a white mountain and where we touch
we are twice marked and twice alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.
And what would the dead say? What defiles
their calm eyes and their loose brows?
Not this. For through their tiny smiles
they mutter: live now, live now.
I always knew the Conference Board published a consumer confidence index monthly, but I just realized that they also publish sub-indices by income bucket.
Surprise! Surprise! Confidence for the highest income bucket (>$50k) is soaring and it tracks the inflation-adjusted performance of the stock market pretty well (which direction is the causation? not sure). Confidence for the lowest two buckets for people making less than $25k/yr (at least 30% of the population) is still below pre-recession lows.
The difference in confidence for these two groups (green line) is at all time highs. Its sad? funny? ironic? that the TARP bailout of the banksters marked the low in the inequality of confidence and termination of benefits for the long term unemployed this year pushed the measure to all time highs. This seems like bizzaro-world policy. Maybe it will mean-revert a little later this year as the loss of benefits forces those lazy slob unemployed people to get off the couch and go to work at one of the millions of high-paying jobs this economy offers.
At what point does our political class stop ignoring this? I am not even suggesting welfare handouts, just an honest discussion of proposals for addressing this. Job training, infrastructure investment, something. Sadly, with Citizen's United and the 2009-2011 redistricting we are probably past the point of no return on this. Road to Serfdom, indeed.
Fantastic take-down of a massively over-sited and misleading macroeconomic ratio.
http://philosophicaleconomics.wordpress.com/2014/03/30/foreignpm/
This is so interesting. Age-old preference of women for men who are savvy, educated or possess "know-how" is now likely the leading driver of US income inequality. Why? Because our modern era for the first time, permits women to work in hi-comp occupations. If their age-old preference biases them to hi-comp men, you get hi-hi couples for the first time, when in the past you almost always had a lot of hi-lo couples with the woman (unfairly) relegated to lo or no comp stations.
Think about it. Assume 10% of the jobs in your work force are hi-comp (making X times more than lo comp) and 90% are lo comp. With random mating, you end up with 20% hi-lo couples and 80% lo-lo couples. Hi-lo's would make (X + 1) / (1 +1) = (X + 1) / 2 times as much as lo-los. So about half the inequality among couples than among individuals.
Now with completely assortative mating, the half the hi-comp individuals are women and they select the other half of the hi-comp individuals who are men. Now your couple population is 10% hi-hi's and 90% lo-lo's. Hi-hi's make (X + X) / (1 + 1) = X times as much as lo-los and there are half as many of them than without assortative mating, exacerbating inequality further. Thus, income inequality among the couples in this population should increase by a factor of X / (0.5X + 0.5) / 0.5 = 4X/(X+1) ~= 4 times larger than without assortative mating .
This really turns the political discussion on its head. Democrats are supposed to be the party supporting women and opposing inequality. Sure rent-seeking fat cats are lobbying their way to tax breaks and a good citizenry should push back on that but this is bigger than the tax code and its not going away. I would be interested in examining this effect in other developed countries.
I think that because this effect is persistent and growing means it is all the more important we invest in training and educational opportunities that improve what "lo-comp" means while investing in strong public health and transportation infrastructure to buttress the living conditions of the many couples in a lo-lo type of pairing.
HT Michael Gibson
This is really well done and quite interesting to me. Quick google shows that this is coming from the Libertarian right. What I find compelling is that with the exception of the "Parts & Labor" character, most of this satire should be very appealing to the left, especially the parts about bankers and military suppliers. I think that "krapitalism" has gotten so bad that there is a revolt from the left and now the Tea-party right to reset DC. Most of the left unfortunately, has not realized that a libertarian policy mix could do a lot to reign in the 0.1% which has ravaged much of their voter base by owning both sides of the aisle.
I took a stab at this policy mix below. I would love to get feedback on where this is economically wrong or too re-distributive to the massively wealthy.
1. Eliminate corporate tax which hurts small businesses lacking large legal/tax teams the most, that corporations barely pays anyway, that keeps American capital offshore, only raises $300B. It takes the system more risky as well because interest from debt is tax deductible and it makes it possible for congressmen to offer loopholes for campaign donations.
2. Lower tax brackets but tax capital gains, interest and dividends as ordinary income. This is obvious. I think we could manage to have a 30% top tax bracket if we only taxed all forms of income, as income.
3. Eliminate mortgage interest deductions and 401ks and Roth IRAs. These only really help the wealthy and they distort markets.
4. Eliminate payroll tax, it is regressive anyway.
5. Eliminate the minimum wage, it keeps companies from employing people and forces a bunch of jobs into the black/grey market where they aren't taxed.
6. Expand the earned income tax credit (i.e. if you take a job, we will make sure you make enough to get by)
7. Eliminate subsidies for student loans while massively expanding grants to states for trade schools, community colleges and apprenticeship programs. Make parents and kids think hard about what specific skills they want to learn to become productive members of society instead of spending 4 years and a lot of borrowed money on a generic diploma in beer chugging.
Basically everything needs to be way way simpler. Complexity just creates loopholes that the people with the greatest resources exploit to the greatest extent. Complex systems also exacerbate difference in natural abilities, massively benefiting high IQ humans while creating a byzantine obstacle course for everyone else.
.EW
We just got back from our vacation / honeymoon in Thailand and Malaysia. Damian Kim's wedding in Kuala Lumpur was impetus for the faraway destination. I am going to post the pictures here in sets. This set is from our two days in Bangkok. After 20 hours of flying, we got to the hotel, took a tour of the city on a longtail boat, we visited the buddhist temples of Wat Pho and the Jim Thompson House, saw the protests, ate our first of many delicious Thai meals and just tried to relax and acclimate to the timezone. I also stubbed my toe ridiculously bad on the second day.
"Complex societies are problem-solving organizations, in which more parts, different kinds of parts, more social differentiation, more inequality, and more kinds of centralization and control emerge as circumstances require. Growth of complexity has involved a change from small, internally homogeneous, minimally differentiated groups characterized by equal access to resources, shifting, ephemeral leadership,and unstable political formations, to large, heterogeneous, internally differentiated, class structured, controlled societies in which the resources that sustain life are not equally available to all. This latter kind of society, with which we today are most familiar, is an anomaly of history, and where present requires constant legitimization and reinforcement."
Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies
After some cold summer days here in San Francisco, I got an itch to be in the mountains and to go skiing. With the season is still 3 whole months away, all I can do is reminisce over pictures from last season.
Here are the pics from skiing Taos, New Mexico with my brother and sister last February. We had a great time in New Mexico though I was nearly banned from Taos for a bit of aggressive skiing. I had to wear a disguise to get back in to climb Kachina Peak with Alex the last day.
...And here are the pics from skiing Beaver Creak, Vail and Copper Mountain in Colorado with Jessica last January. The snow was pretty poor and a trashed my bases pretty hard on the rocks (and gravel and tree stumps) but we had a fun weekend together.
Next season we want to return to Whistler and Utah or Jackson Hole using our new Mountain Collective multi-resort passes. Let me know if you are interested in joining us for any of those trips.
Last weekend, Jessica and I traveled with our friends Ben, Michael and Sarah to Cape Cod for Brock & Ali's fabulous wedding. The whole thing was gorgeous, right on the water in a part of the country I had never visited before. The couple couldn't have asked for better weather. The food was great, the band killed it, the speeches were wonderful and uplifting. We had a great time all around except flying to Boston and back from San Francisco in 36 hours was exhausting. I wish we could have spent a week out there exploring the Cape....
