Cab Thoughts 8/20/16

"We are the friends of liberty everywhere but custodians only of our own."--John Adams

For progressives, a legal minimum wage had the useful property of sorting the unfit, who would lose their jobs, from the deserving workers, who would retain their jobs.  Royal Meeker, a Princeton economist who served as Woodrow Wilson’s U.S. Commissioner of Labor, opposed a proposal to subsidize the wages of poor workers for this reason.  Meeker preferred a wage floor because it would dis-employ unfit workers and thereby enable their culling from the work force.--Thomas Leonard, on the early history of the minimum wage

A recent study shows students from for-profit schools on average were worse off after attending for-profit schools. Undergraduates were less likely to be employed, and earned smaller paychecks–about $600 to $700 per year less–after leaving school compared to their lives before. Those who enrolled in certificate programs made roughly $920 less per year in the six years after school compared to before they enrolled. The key factor is that most of these students never earned a degree–they dropped out early. Excluding them, the minority of students who earned degrees saw an earnings bump after graduating. This does not include debt which 90% of students take on. The analysis includes one big caveat: The group of students they studied left school either just before or during the 2007-2009 recession. Unemployment was skyrocketing, and incomes were falling broadly. “Therefore, our findings are likely to be partially explained by overall weakness in the labor market,” they say.

Think Trump University.

What is....the Great Attractor?

Sowell has an article on the problems of socialism and includes this observation on the effects of the minimum wage as he complains about the fact that no one ever looks at cause and effect in socialism: In 1948, when inflation had rendered meaningless the minimum wage established a decade earlier, the unemployment rate among 16- to 17-year-old black males was under 10%. But after the minimum wage was raised repeatedly to keep up with inflation, the unemployment rate for black males that age was never under 30% for more than 20 consecutive years, from 1971 through 1994. In many of those years, the unemployment rate for black youngsters that age exceeded 40% and, for a couple of years, it exceeded 50%.

Heuristic: adj: 1. encouraging a person to learn, discover, understand, or solve problems on his or her own, as by experimenting, evaluating possible answers or solutions, or by trial and error: a heuristic teaching method. 2. serving to indicate or point out; stimulating interest as a means of furthering investigation. usage: Not least, the rigidity of the dictation has also been the subject of long arguments over its heuristic value as a learning method.-- Lilia Blaise, "In Paris Suburbs, Adopting a Dreaded School Test as a Tool of Integration," New York Times, May 11, 2016 Heuristic is a New Latin construction, equivalent to the Greek heurískein, "to find out, discover." It entered English in the early 1800s.

From a paper from Princeton on the GDP growth in Democrat vs. Rube-publican Presidencies. One writer was Blinder: "During the 64 years that make up the core 16 terms, real GDP growth averaged 3.33% at an annual rate. But the average growth rates under Democratic and Republican presidents were starkly different: 4.33% and 2.54% respectively. This 1.79 percentage point gap (henceforth, the “D-R gap”) is astoundingly large relative to the sample mean. It implies that over a typical four year presidency the U.S. economy grew by 18.5% when the president was a Democrat, but only by 10.6% when he was a Republican. And since the standard deviations of quarterly growth rates are roughly equal (3.8% for Democrats, 3.9% for Republicans, annualized), Democratic presidents have presided over growth that was faster but not more volatile." (“it appears that the Democratic edge stems mainly from more benign oil shocks, superior [productivity], and perhaps greater defense spending and faster growth abroad.”)

There will be a lot of talk this campaign about free trade. It is not complex: It is unregulated exchange. People make decisions as to what they will give up for what they will gain. As an aside, the losses to certain segments of America, while large in an absolute sense, are utterly trivial compared to the gains in living standards seen in places like Asia.

Judge Andrew S. Hanen of Federal District Court in Brownsville accused the Justice Department lawyers of lying to him during arguments in the immigration case, and he barred them from appearing in his courtroom. (From an article in the NYT on May, 16, 2016 titled "Federal Judges in Texas Demands Justice Dept. Lawyers Take Ethics Class.") Now, isn't that a big deal and has anybody heard much about this?

What about this: From the Washington Examiner: “The CIA's inspector general is claiming it inadvertently destroyed its only copy of a classified, three-volume Senate report on torture, prompting a leading senator to ask for reassurance that it was in fact ‘an accident.’” The IRS seems to have destroyed hard drives containing potentially incriminating evidence regarding the IRS Tea Party targeting case. Clinton's emails kept on a private unsecured server — presumably to avoid Freedom of Information Act disclosures — were deleted. Now emails from Hillary’s IT guy, who is believed to have set up the server, have disappeared. Gonzalo Lira wrote: “A terrible sentence, when a law-abiding citizen speaks it: Everybody else is doing it — so why don’t we? ... What’s really important is that law-abiding middle-class citizens are deciding that playing by the rules is nothing but a sucker’s game.” (from Reynolds in USA Today)

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/07/reward-limits.html

Our galaxy and other nearby galaxies are being pulled toward a specific region of space. It’s about 150 million light years away and no one is sure what it is. But it is named. It is called the Great Attractor. Part of the reason the Great Attractor is so mysterious is that it happens to lie in a direction of the sky known as the “Zone of Avoidance”. This is in the general direction of the center of our galaxy, where there is so much gas and dust that we can’t see very far in the visible spectrum. We can see how our galaxy and other nearby galaxies are moving toward the great attractor, so something must be causing things to go in that direction. That means either there must be something massive over there, or it’s due to something even more strange and fantastic.
When evidence of the Great Attractor was first discovered in the 1970s, we had no way to see through the Zone of Avoidance. But while that region blocks much of the visible light from beyond, the gas and dust doesn’t block as much infrared and x-ray light. As x-ray astronomy became more powerful, we could start to see objects within that region. What we found was a large supercluster of galaxies in the area of the Great Attractor, known as the Norma Cluster. It has a mass of about 1,000 trillion Suns. That’s thousands of galaxies. 1,000 TRILLION SUNS! THOUSANDS OF GALAXIES!

Often one will see the argument that both minimum wage and restricted trade help some and hurt others. Sort of a wash. But there is a big difference. Minimum-wage legislation is a restriction on people’s freedom to find mutually agreeable terms of exchange while free trade is a policy of refusing to so restrict people’s freedom. This freedom thing is really very difficult for some people.

If there is any place in the Guinness Book of World Records for words repeated the most often and revered, over the most years, without one speck of evidence, “diversity” should be a prime candidate.
Is diversity our strength? Or anybody’s strength, anywhere in the world? Does Japan’s homogeneous population cause the Japanese to suffer? Have the Balkans been blessed by their heterogeneity — or does the very word “Balkanization” remind us of centuries of strife, bloodshed and unspeakable atrocities, extending into our own times?

Birdbrain. There is a paper out on bird neuronal density. Here is a summary of its significance and an abstract:

Significance

Birds are remarkably intelligent, although their brains are small. Corvids and some parrots are capable of cognitive feats comparable to those of great apes. How do birds achieve impressive cognitive prowess with walnut-sized brains? We investigated the cellular composition of the brains of 28 avian species, uncovering a straightforward solution to the puzzle: brains of songbirds and parrots contain very large numbers of neurons, at neuronal densities considerably exceeding those found in mammals. Because these “extra” neurons are predominantly located in the forebrain, large parrots and corvids have the same or greater forebrain neuron counts as monkeys with much larger brains. Avian brains thus have the potential to provide much higher “cognitive power” per unit mass than do mammalian brains.

Abstract

Some birds achieve primate-like levels of cognition, even though their brains tend to be much smaller in absolute size. This poses a fundamental problem in comparative and computational neuroscience, because small brains are expected to have a lower information-processing capacity. Using the isotropic fractionator to determine numbers of neurons in specific brain regions, here we show that the brains of parrots and songbirds contain on average twice as many neurons as primate brains of the same mass, indicating that avian brains have higher neuron packing densities than mammalian brains. Additionally, corvids and parrots have much higher proportions of brain neurons located in the pallial telencephalon compared with primates or other mammals and birds. Thus, large-brained parrots and corvids have forebrain neuron counts equal to or greater than primates with much larger brains. We suggest that the large numbers of neurons concentrated in high densities in the telencephalon substantially contribute to the neural basis of avian intelligence.

Americans added $71 billion in credit card debt in 2015 and repaid just $26.8 billion during the first quarter of 2016—the smallest first-quarter paydown since 2008. Surprisingly, the group with the highest credit card debt are middle-aged Americans. The average 45- to 54-year-old American owes $9,000 on credit cards, 50% more than the average Millennial. But credit cards are just one part of the American debt binge. Total outstanding consumer credit, a measure of non-mortgage debt, increased by $13.4 billion to $3.6 trillion in April. The biggest chunk is student loans, which make up 37% of outstanding consumer credit. Student-loan lending by the government climbed to $989.6 billion in April and now stands at $1.26 trillion.
The average interest rate on credit cards today is a whopping 15.19%.

Jeremy Bentham regarded natural rights as intellectually incoherent. 
Natural-rights theory was the revolutionary doctrine of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, being used to justify resistance to unjust laws and revolution against tyrannical governments. This was the main reason why Edmund Burke attacked natural rights—or “abstract rights,” as he called them—so vehemently in his famous polemic against the French Revolution.

Natural rights, according to Bentham, are “simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, — nonsense upon stilts” So-called moral and natural rights are mischievous fictions and anarchical fallacies that encourage civil unrest, disobedience and resistance to laws, and revolution against established governments. Only political rights, those positive rights established and enforced by government, have “any determinate and intelligible meaning.” Rights are “the fruits of the law, and of the law alone. There are no rights without law—no rights contrary to the law—no rights anterior to the law.”

So no rights precede law; law creates rights. This in opposition to the American Revolution--inspired by Locke and others--that declared certain qualities in human life basic and inalienable where the job of government was to protect them.

The Magna Carta was agreed upon by King John after a rebellion of his barons. It established a legal relationship between the King and his subjects with actual limits. Of greatest interest to later generations was clause 39, which stated that “no free man shall be arrested or imprisoned or disseised [dispossessed] or outlawed or exiled or in any way victimised…except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” This clause has been celebrated as an early guarantee of trial by jury and of habeas corpus and inspired England’s Petition of Right (1628) and the Habeas Corpus Act (1679).

According to a New York Post article (May 22, 2016), in just two years, Hillary Clinton — former first lady, senator from New York and secretary of state — collected over $21 million in speaking fees. These fees were paid by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Fidelity Investments, UBS, Bank of America and several hedge fund companies.In 2015, lobbyists spent $3.22 billion lobbying Congress. In 2013 and 2014, just 10 chemical companies and allied organizations spent more than $154 million lobbying the federal government. The Center for Responsive Politics in 2013 reported that the Dow Chemical Co. “posted record lobbying expenditures” in 2012, “spending nearly $12 million,” and was “on pace to eclipse” that amount. Fourteen labor unions were among the top 25 political campaign contributors between 1989 and 2014.
Why do you suppose people give good money away to politicians?

Shady internet lenders in China are reportedly coercing female college students to provide nude pictures of themselves as collateral – a loan-for-porn scheme that has prompted anger on the country’s internet.Under the arrangement reported by state media this week, some college students have agreed to send photos of themselves naked, holding their identification cards, to potential lenders. In exchange, they became eligible for higher loan amounts – two to five times the normal sum, the state-run Beijing Youth Daily reported.
Lenders tell the students they will publish the photos online if the loans are not repaid on time, often at usurious interest rates.

AAAAAAaaaannnnnndddddddd.......a graph using old and probably outdated and overly optimistic data on the effect of early saving: