Eberstadt

Men Without Work

 

 

These are some notes from Nicholas Eberstadt’s new book, Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis. He sees a serious, long term problem here that has been going on for a long time, not just recently.  There are some identifying factors: Immigrants work with more regularity than native born Americans, a felony conviction weighs powerfully upon a man's not working, and participation in the community with wives and families are factors that correlate with work.

Between 1948 and 2015, the work rate for U.S. men twenty and older fell from 85.8 percent to 68.2 percent. Thus the proportion of American men twenty and older without paid work more than doubled, from 14 percent to almost 32 percent. Granted, the work rate for adult men in 2015 was over a percentage point higher than 2010 (its all-time low). But purportedly “near full employment” conditions notwithstanding, the work rate for the twenty-plus male was more than a fifth lower in 2015 than in 1948.

Before World War II, the exclusive economic activity for the overwhelming majority of U.S. women was unpaid labor at home. Today the overwhelming majority of women – including women with young children – engage in at least some remunerated employment outside the family. Needless to say, this shift has opened up new prospects for prosperity, as well as new horizons of economic independence and autonomy. The tremendous expansion of economic opportunities for U.S. women created a massive new supply of workers in the postwar economy. The share of women with paid work skyrocketed in every age group and doubled for women between twenty-five and sixty-four. For women twenty-five-to-fifty-four, the work rate was 34 percent in 1948; in 2015, it topped 70 percent. In arithmetic terms, this enormous influx of new workers completely offset the decline in work rates for prime-age men.

In sum, an American man ages twenty-five-to-fifty-four was more likely to be an un-worker in 2015 if he (1) had no more than a high school diploma; (2) was not married and had no children or children who lived elsewhere; (3) was not an immigrant; or (4) was African American….No matter their race or educational status, married men raising a family work more, and never-married men without children or children in their home work less. No matter their ethnicity or race, prime-age men who come to this country work more than those here by birth.

 

Having a criminal record is a key missing piece in explaining why work rates have collapsed much more dramatically in America than other affluent Western societies over the past two generations. This single variable also helps explain why the collapse has been so much greater for American men than women and why it has been so much more dramatic for African American men and men with low educational attainment than for other prime-age men in the United States.

Employed Canadians and Britons now work at least one hundred hours per year (over two full workweeks) less than working Americans. The gap between the United States and France, according to the OECD, is now nearly three hundred hours (over eight full workweeks). More than four hundred annual hours (over ten full workweeks) separate workers in America and Germany.
20 million men in the U.S. have been convicted of a felony but only a tiny fraction of all Americans ever convicted of a felony are actually incarcerated at this moment. Maybe 90 percent of all sentenced felons today are out of confinement and living more or less among us.

But they are not working.

Mueller

When the Witch-hunt Turns Up Witches

Apparently there is an indictment coming today from the Special Counsel.

But the "Russian influence" in the election with Trump's possible "collusion" has morphed into a very different beast. And, so, perhaps, must the Special Counsel.
​

“Strip out the middlemen,” the Wall Street Journal’s editors argue, “and it appears that Democrats paid for Russians to compile wild allegations about a US presidential candidate.” The editorial demands a “full investigation” into the FBI’s activities during the previous presidential cycle, saying that collusion may have taken place — only in a completely different direction than previously thought. And that puts the special counsel in an impossible position, the editorial concludes:

​
"The more troubling question is whether the FBI played a role, even if inadvertently, in assisting a Russian disinformation campaign. We know the agency possessed the dossier in 2016, and according to media reports it debated paying Mr. Steele to continue his work in the runup to the election. This occurred while former FBI Director James Comey was ramping up his probe into supposed ties between the Trump campaign and Russians.
Two pertinent questions: Did the dossier trigger the FBI probe of the Trump campaign, and did Mr. Comey or his agents use it as evidence to seek wiretapping approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Trump campaign aides?
Congressional investigators need to focus on the FBI’s role, and House Speaker Paul Ryan was correct Wednesday to insist that the bureau comply with Congress’s document demands “immediately.” Mr. Sessions has recused himself from the Justice Department’s Russia probe, but he and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein can still insist on transparency. Mr. Ryan should also reinstall Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes as lead on the Russia investigation, since it appears the Democratic accusations against him were aimed in part at throwing him off the Fusion trail."
​
Also, WSJ editors note, this impacts on the supposed independence of special counsel Robert Mueller.  The Uranium One issue  took place while Mueller ran the FBI. The dossier case will directly reflect on James Comey, Mueller's friend and protege. And the initial probe has changed. Originally the FBI was presumed to be merely a collector of evidence; it now appears that the agency he led will have to get scrutinized as well.
The Journal continues, "Mr. Mueller is a former FBI director, and for years he worked closely with Mr. Comey. It is no slur against Mr. Mueller’s integrity to say that he lacks the critical distance to conduct a credible probe of the bureau he ran for a dozen years. He could best serve the country by resigning to prevent further political turmoil over that conflict of interest."


The country continues to bumble along with no one to bell its numerous cats.
What a mess.

Sunday/2 Commandments

Today's gospel is the Two Great Commandments gospel. The Jews had 613 commandments they collected over the years based upon Old Testament readings. These two commandments Christ takes from Deuteronomy and Leviticus.

This is the quote from Deuteronomy, in the King James:
4 Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD:
5 And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
6 And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart:
7 And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.
8 And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes.
9 And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.

Current thinking is that Moses was talking figuratively, suspicious of the whimsy of the word. But Jews at the time did indeed write these words on their doorways--and orthodox Jews do that now--as well as wear "phylacteries," little boxes that contain the words written. This appeared like amulets and Christ often focused upon making the word physical as a bad substitute for internalizing them.

Reverie

But in the end what Obama did that is unforgivable is increasing centralization in a complex system.--Taleb

No one has a good answer to the Las Vegas shooting. A police state is safer but for whom? The Egyptian war on the Muslim Brotherhood has been seriously successful but there has been a lot of collateral damage. The individual madman is an outlier in the society but he is also representative of it. Why is he not representative of the society's potential leaders as well?

This is the  Danger of the Bell Curve.

Homophone: n: each of two or more words having the same pronunciation but different meanings, origins, or spelling, e.g., new and knew. A Homograph is a word of the same written form as another but of different meaning and usually origin, whether pronounced the same way or not, as bear “to carry; support” and bear “animal” or lead “to conduct” and lead “metal.”

 

Some changes are at work with traditional TV. The length of commercials is down.  Between 34% and 49% of viewers constantly use another screen when commercials are on TV and 79% of millennials are distracted by other devices during commercial breaks either "most of the time" or "all of the time." One wonders what the long term implications of services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are.

Who is....Auberon Waugh?

Norberg has a book out called Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, 2016. .

Drawing heavily on The Better Angels of our Nature by Pinker, Norberg shows that one-on-one violence and violence by governments against people in other countries has declined considerably over the centuries. One striking statistic is the annual European homicide rate, which fell from a whopping 19 per 100,000 people in the 16th century to 3.2 in the 18th century to about one today. 

Norberg leads the chapter on violence with an 1875 quote from the famous legal scholar Sir Henry Maine: "War appears to be as old as humanity, but peace is a modern invention."

The value of a taxi cab medallion in New York just a few years ago was $2.1 million. Today, it’s $100,000 dollars, because of Uber and Lyft. Can the customer can be separated from the NFL just as easily?

There is a new sociological book on poverty out called Doing the Best I Can and a reviewer said this:

Like Promises I Can Keep, the new book leaves little doubt that poverty is a state of mind - and that state of mind is low conscientiousness.

A TV promo for a sports event said it was of interest especially because a new manager had "taken the reigns." "Reigns," of course, is a homophone of "reins" and "rains." Homophones do not get caught by spellcheck.

Reuters (10/2, Rapaport) reports a new study suggests that “less than one in three U.S. hospitals can find, send, and receive electronic medical records for patients who receive care somewhere else.” While the study found a modest improvement over the previous year, lead study author Jay Holmgren of Harvard Business School said “there is potentially a significant amount of waste and inefficiency in hospitals.” 

Golden oldie: http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/07/20-feet-from-stardom-review.html

20 Feet From Stardom: A Review steeleydock.blogspot.com "20 Feet From Stardom" is a history/documentary of famous backup singers from the 1970's and '80's, a mixture of live interviews and arc...

If it is reasonable to discourage importation of foreign goods into the country, what about foreign art and science?

Sen. Bill Nelson worried that ticket prices for flights out of San Juan and other Caribbean cities would surge. The higher costs would prevent some people from fleeing the storm, the Florida Democrat figured. Using his influence as head of the Senate committee that oversees airlines, he urged major U.S. airlines to cap fares for flights leaving cities in Maria’s path. But Imposing artificially low prices will  create shortages, albeit egalitarianly dispersed.

A follow-up of Auberon Waugh: As a result of his injuries, he lost his spleen, one lung, several ribs, and a finger, and suffered from pain and recurring infections for the rest of his life. But he survived his wounds and the war. Most of his life was spent writing, first fiction--he wrote 5 novels--then editorial journalism. He became a curmudgeon as a young man, followed his mother (and his converted father) in Catholicism (for a while) and had surprising, intense views. His obituary said Waugh "had a truly Sicilian taste for vendetta." He hated the Labour Party, loved Thatcher until he didn't, opposed Vatican 2 but was in favor of the merging of Europe mainly because it would deemphasize the Americans. He was a militant smoker and was equally opposed to the hamburger. He hated former Labour leader Jeremy Thorpe and helped expose a seamy event in his life (and ran against him as the country's only representative of the Dog Lover's Party. He lost.) 

He married Lady Teresa Onslow, daughter of the 6th Earl of Onslow and a writer. They had four children, all talented, several writers and translators and one Oxfordian.

His obit in The Guardian is really worth reading. The Mandy Rice-Davies episode alone is worth it: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/jan/18/guardianobituaries.booksnews 

Regarding his death, they refer to his genetics but it is likely smoking was a factor, too.

The new poster boy for sanctimonious hypocrisy might well be the esteemed Tim Murphy. Rep. Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania, an opponent of abortion, announced first he will not be seeking reelection at the end of his current term, ending speculation about his future a day after a news report claimed the married Republican had asked a woman with whom he had an extramarital affair to get an abortion. Now, why do we have to wait to get rid of this guy? Once you are elected, does that guarantee your position regardless of revelatory disasters? (He eventually did step down.)

Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize.

There are still almost 4 million Neflix subscribers who receive their DVDs by mail. That's down 17 percent from a year ago, and is much smaller than Netflix's nearly 52 million (!) domestic streaming subscribers, but it's still sizable. 

The debate over the Las Vegas shooting will continue to examine closely the wrong question. The question is not the weapon, it is the growing impact of the individual in the cultural fabric. We used to be a people where the outlier was indeed an outsider. He is now among us. We are now vulnerable to him. From guns to explosives to bioweapons to nuclear devices, the culture must see itself in thrall to the whims and obsessions of twisted men. Where we once were moved as a culture by great minds in the university who offered insight and possibilities, we now tremble before the vision and possibility of the mind of the deranged. Not that the university did not do damage--Lord knows how much evil Nietzsche, Marx and Freud unleashed--but it only proves the point. The culture  now suffers the torments of the unmoored individual.

The Revenge of the Bell Curve.

Amazon is now the top recruiter at the business schools of Carnegie Mellon University, Duke University and University of California, Berkeley. It is the biggest internship destination for first-year M.B.A.s at the University of Michigan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dartmouth College and Duke. Amazon took in more interns from the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business than either Bain & Co. or McKinsey & Co., which were until recently among the school's top destinations of interns, according to Madhav Rajan, Booth's dean. All told, Amazon has hired some 1,000 M.B.A.s in the past year, according to Miriam Park, Amazon's director of university programs. 

AAAannnnndddddd......a map showing how the country's economy can be shown geographically:
 

Funding/Benefits

Funding Benefits

If a guy like Tim Murphy designed the Social Security system or Medicare, would you trust it to work well? Dennis Hastert? How about William Jefferson? Mark Foley?

An old statute requires the Treasury to issue an annual financial statement, similar to a corporation’s annual report. The 2016 edition is 274 pages.
It contains a table on page 63 that reveals the net present value of the US government’s 75-year future liability for Social Security and Medicare. That amount exceeds the net present value of the tax revenue designated to pay those benefits by $46.7 trillion. Yes, trillions.

Note that this chart expresses the various items as percentages of GDP, not dollars. So the relatively flat spending categories simply mean they are forecasted to grow in line with the economy, or just a little faster. But the space representing net interest grows much faster than GDP does – fast enough to make total federal spending add up to one-third of GDP by 2090.

This must, at some point, must be reconciled. How?
First, the benefits must be reduced. Initially it will be done righteously: "You earn too much to get benefits too." Then more generally. The essence will be a decline in living standards as those promises--and taxes that were committed to them--are slowly denied.
Second, taxes will go up. This will make less money available to people to spend and invest. That will create ....as above..."a decline in living standards as those promises--and taxes that were committed to them--are slowly denied."

Dalio

Two Economies

 

Ray Dalio is the founder of Bridgewater, the world's largest hedge fund with about $160 billion in management. He posted a note on LinkedIn on Monday about some elements of the economy. Here are some selections (the underlined areas are his):

Real incomes have been flat to down slightly for the average household in the bottom 60% since 1980 (while they have been up for the top 40%). 

Those in the top 40% now have on average 10 times as much wealth as those in the bottom 60%. That is up from six times as much in 1980.

Only about a third of the bottom 60% saves any of its income (in cash or financial assets).

Only about a third of families in the bottom 60% have retirement savings accounts—e.g., pensions, 401(k)s—which average less than $20,000. 

For those in the bottom 60%, premature deaths are up by about 20% since 2000. The biggest contributors to that change are an increase in deaths by drugs/poisoning (up two times since 2000) and an increase in suicides (up over 50% since 2000).

The top 40% spend four times more on education than the bottom 60%. 

The average household income for main income earners without a college degree is half that of the average college graduate.

Since 1980, divorce rates have more than doubled among middle-aged whites without college degrees, from 11% to 23%.

The number of prime-age white men without college degrees not in the labor force has increased from 7% to 15% since 1980.

We used to have a situation called "The Underclass" of low employed, heavy abusing and abused people. Dalio now sees this disparity as expanding into what is essentially "two economies" and warns the "stress between the two economies" will "intensify over the next 5 to 1o years" because of demographic and technological change.

​

Reverie

We haven't yet learned how to stay human when assembled in masses. -Lewis Thomas, physician and author


From a review of Norberg's new book, Progress: The amount of oil spilled in the ocean between 2000 and 2014 was 257,000 tons. This sounds big—it is big—but that was the amount spilled annually in the 1970s. Air pollution is much lower than it used to be in richer countries. Norberg tells of the horrible smog in London in December 1952 that killed as many as 12,000 people. With less burning of coal for heating, that just doesn’t happen in London anymore. The improvement, moreover, is worldwide. Out of 178 countries whose environmental progress is measured in the Environmental Performance Index, 172 improved between 2004 and 2014. A big part of the reason is that environmental quality is what economists call a “normal good.” As real income per person rises, people want a better environment. And they achieve it partly with laws and regulations and partly with their own voluntary changes in behavior.


Renate Langer, a 61-year-old former German actress, has reported to the Swiss police that the film director Roman Polanski raped her at a house in Gstaad in February 1972, when she was 15.
Ms. Langer is the fourth woman to publicly accuse Mr. Polanski of sexual assaulting her when she was a teenager.
But he is an artist.

A recent curious Gospel where Christ talks to the priests and says a surprising thing: "Amen, I say to you, tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you.
When John came to you in the way of righteousness, you did not believe him; but tax collectors and prostitutes did. Yet even when you saw that, you did not later change your minds and believe him."

The wisdom of the common man? So the common man is a leader here, more than the educated men? Is this a Galton confidence in the masses? Is this why there are no priests at the Nativity?

The World Economic Forum looked at six developed countries (the US, UK, Netherlands, Japan, Australia, and Canada) and two emerging markets (China and India) and found that by 2050 these countries will face a total savings shortfall of $400 trillion. The WEF study shows that the United Kingdom currently has a $4 trillion retirement savings shortfall, which is projected to rise 4% a year and reach $33 trillion by 2050. This in a country whose total GDP is $3 trillion.

 

The Blood Libel  was the medieval lie leveled at Jews in some European countries that accused the Jews of killing Christian children to use their blood to make Passover matzo.

 

Technology decouples economies. AirBNB owns no rooms, but provides accommodations; Uber owns (essentially) no vehicles, but provides transport; Stripe is not a bank, but provides bank accounts; a vast panoply of corporate services run on Amazon-owned servers. Decoupling improves efficiency, aids focus, and spurs innovation.
But technology also decouples authority from responsibility. A company is just a matchmaker. Any problem you might have is with of the independent contractor providing the service; the company is only a middleman.
So there is only an abstract responsibility. Fits well with the culture.

What are....Ghost Guns?


IBM employs 130,000 people in India-- about one-third of its total work force, and more than in any other country. Their work spans the entire gamut of IBM's businesses, from managing the computing needs of global giants like AT&T and Shell to performing cutting-edge research in fields like visual search, artificial intelligence and computer vision for self-driving cars. One team is even working with the producers of Sesame Street to teach vocabulary to kindergartners in Atlanta.

In 1938, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, French Premier Edouard Daladier, and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Pact, which sealed the fate of Czechoslovakia, virtually handing it over to Germany in the name of peace. Upon return to Britain, Chamberlain would declare that the meeting had achieved “peace in our time.”
Although the agreement was to give into Hitler’s hands only the Sudentenland, that part of Czechoslovakia where 3 million ethnic Germans lived, it also handed over to the Nazi war machine 66 percent of Czechoslovakia’s coal, 70 percent of its iron and steel, and 70 percent of its electrical power. It also left the Czech nation open to complete domination by Germany. In short, the Munich Pact sacrificed the autonomy of Czechoslovakia on the altar of short-term peace-very short term. The terrorized Czech government was eventually forced to surrender the western provinces of Bohemia and Moravia (which became a protectorate of Germany) and finally Slovakia and the Carpathian Ukraine. In each of these partitioned regions, Germany set up puppet, pro-Nazi regimes that served the military and political ends of Adolf Hitler. By the time of the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the nation called “Czechoslovakia” no longer existed. (History)

A columnist wrote: Vast numbers of nonwhites are being raised to believe that America hates them. This should be considered a form of child abuse.

 ....by 1900 27 percent of black farmers in the entire South had become owners.  Surely that rise constituted a spectacular achievement on their part.  The figures become still more striking for those who adopt the hypothesis that the heritage of slavery inevitably destroyed the freedmen’s competence, or the hypothesis that the Ku Klux Klan represented a unified view of the white South.

Black ownership was the outcome of wide-ranging experience in private markets.--Liebergott


 “Progressives” who appropriately emphasize the society-wide impact of a carbon tax too often mysteriously ignore the society-wide impact of income taxes--Bordeaux. So they abide by the laws of economics only when it suits them?

"Football is one of the most powerful institutions in American society. It is so powerful that it claimed an entire day of the week. It said, 'This day is ours. We own it.' Not only did football take a day of the week, but the previous owner was God."--quoted from somewhere by Charen

The tax cut debate will emerge now with the continuing disingenuous of most involved. The real question about taxes is its implication to the economy: Money in private hands is spent more wisely and to better effect in the system than taxed money is. So earned money, untaxed, multiplies in its effect in the economy whereas taxed money is expressed as only a fraction of the original amount. This is generally agreed by everyone. So the problem arises when you cut taxes, you have to decrease the amount paid by those who pay taxes; those that pay taxes are where the impact must be. One cannot cut the taxes of those who don't pay them. And the impact of tax cutting will be greater the more you cut. How this impact those who receive tax money in this peculiar moral laundering scheme is a completely different question.


Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-ruby-parable.html

The Ruby, A Fable steeleydock.blogspot.com A young woman I knew years ago was suddenly orphaned by an auto accident that killed both her parents. Terrified and stricken by the loss a...

What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.  It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves.--Hayek


The Supreme Court hearing the "Gerrymander" case is filled with bad omens. One of them is the concept of "proportional representation," an imperfect reflection of federal democracy. The plaintiffs are attempting to restructure the national voting on the same basis as the Democratic Party's quota system.

"Ghost Guns:" Back in 2013, a guy named Cody Wilson got international attention when his company, Defense Distributed,  published the world’s first fully 3D-printed gun called the Liberator. Almost immediately, the State Department under the Obama administration demanded Mr. Wilson take down the 3D-printable gun files for possible export control violations. In the first two days, downloads for the 3D-printable gun exceeded 100,000.
In 2014, Mr. Wilson received the title as ‘Ghost Gunner’ and was described as a gun manufacture by some for creating AR-15 frames without serial numbers. Defense Distributed offered the internet a package including a CNC milling machine that can turn an aluminum block into an AR-15 lower receiver, the components regulated  by state and federal authorities. The machine called ‘Ghost Gunner 2’ (3D-printer) and 80% AR-15 lower receivers are still being sold on Defense Distributed’s website.
On Sunday, Wilson’s group announced a new software for his computer-controlled milling machine to carve out the aluminum frame of an M1911 handgun. According to WIRED, “the latest model of the milling machine can finish a handgun’s frame in about an hour, with minimal human interaction”.
The end is nigh.

Thomas  More, was canonized in 1935 and was made patron saint of politicians(!) in 2000.

Morse and Satel have an interesting article in the WSJ about an upcoming court appeal on addiction. The case involves a Ms. Eldred who was convicted of theft to support her addiction. She argues that brain changes in the addict make addiction more severe and consequently her actions were not her responsibility. The authors write that people do escape addiction and thus addiction--and its subsequent acts--is behavioral (unlike, they argue, Alzheimer's.)


Gender bias is stalking this great land of ours. Of the 78,744 doctoral degrees awarded in 2016,  women earned 40,407 of those degrees and 52.1% of the total, compared to 37,145 degrees awarded to men who earned 47.9% of the total. Women earning doctoral degrees in 2016 outnumbered men in 7 of the 11 graduate fields tracked by the Council of Graduate Schools.  Women earned 57.4% of all master’s degrees in 2016.
I eagerly await the social movement to make this disparity right.


From a review of A Word of Three Zeroes by Muhammad Yunus: Mr. Yunus prefers to criticize the market system—and mainstream economics—for its celebration of selfish greed as the basis of everything. This is a common misunderstanding of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, which privileges individual choice, not individual selfishness. If consumers choose to buy products with social benefits, or refuse to buy those that inflict social harms, nothing about the capitalist system prevents them from doing so. If investors want to accept lower returns in exchange for investing in socially conscious businesses, they are free to do that too.


Catalonia is much bigger than Greece – it’s 20% of the Spanish economy and Spain’s strongest region. What is going on in Europe? And how crazy was the aggressive Spanish response?


The NFL is getting some pushback over its municipal bonds' subsidizing stadiums--because of the national anthem controversy. But there are some serious practical questions too. When the Rams moved to California, St. Louis taxpayers were left with $100 million in debt from the construction of the Rams’ former home, the Edward Jones Dome — and now that debt must be repaid without the revenue generated by the team it was built for in the first place. 

The Left sees cutting taxes as only a break for the rich. (Although it is tough to cut taxes on those that don't pay taxes.) But they want to tax carbon because they think it will discourage production. Sooooo......

AAAAaaaannnnnddddd......a list of U.S. metropolitan areas and their comparable countries:

Lemeiux

While nuclear weapons have refined names for refined homicide, "tactical"  and "strategic" come to mind, a characteristic of these weapons is that they are designed to be used against civilian populations. The economist  Pierre Lemieux has an article on nuclear weaponry where he compares the writings of Jouvenel, writing from the safety of Switzerland in WW11, with some opinion polls from then and now.

While aristocratic governments generally kept ordinary people out of their conflicts, Jouvenel claimed, "totalitarian democracy" has regimented ordinary citizens into the states' wars; they have become implicit combatants. Jouvenel wrote:

In the time of Louis XIV ... conscription was unknown, and the private person lived outside the battle ... For the first time in [American] history, a President of the United States [Franklin D. Roosevelt] looked on the mass of his fellow-citizens as 'human potential,' to be used as might best serve the prosecution of the war! ... Whereas the feudal monarchs could nourish hostilities only with the resources of their own domains, their successors have at their disposal the entire national income.

​
Sagan and Valentino vindicate Jouvenel by arguing that American public opinion favors the use of nuclear weapons. According to a Gallup poll of August 4, 1945, 85% of Americans approved of the bombs just dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today, in retrospect, less than 50% think it was a good idea. But Sagan and Valentino's 2015 opinion survey indicates that, in a similar scenario with Iran instead of Japan, 59% of Americans would support a US government decision to nuke 2 million civilians in order to prevent the deaths of 20,000 American soldiers in an alternative ground invasion. (The scenario presented to respondents was that of a war started by the Iranian government.) And most of these hawkish respondents would not change their minds even if a diplomatic solution were possible.
Of the American respondents who favored either a nuclear or conventional strike on civilians to save American soldiers, 68% agreed with the statement: "Because the Iranian civilians described in the story did not rise up and overthrow the government of Iran, they must bear some responsibility for the civilian fatalities caused by the U.S. strike." Sagan and Valentino express surprise at the number of respondents who "suggested that Iranian civilians were somehow culpable or were less than human."


Grim stuff, but I am not sure any of this is true. The wars of the Mongols were total wars and leverage against non-combatants routine, the impact of invading armies upon crops and transportation had wide ranging indirect impact upon non-combatants. Many wars, like the wars of Rome against the Frankish Celts and the Iberian Celts were wars of extinction, genocidal wars to extirpate a people. Are these people arguing that royal wars were somehow kinder? That the viciousness of modern war is a technological quirk? Is the endpoint argument that wars will be a lot more benign with good management?
​

Wages/Prices

Tight Labor market/No Inflation


There seems to be a mystery in the higher realms of economics--especially the Fed. The labor market is tight, so why there is no inflation?

Some policymakers cite the increased ease with which shoppers can compare prices on the internet and the impact these changes have on brand loyalty and pricing power. Amazon is entering grocery retail via Whole Foods, while the hotel sector is being overturned by Airbnb. But if inflation were held down by rising aggregate supply, then you'd expect rapid GDP growth. Instead we have the opposite.

This is Caroline Baum from MarketWatch:

Almost every discussion on this subject begins with a statement of fact that the tight labor market, as evidenced by the 4.4% unemployment rate, should be lifting wages and prices.
Note the order: wages and prices. A tight labor market leads to higher wages, which lead to higher prices. This is one of those myths that never dies: cost-push inflation. Milton Friedman was adamant that both prices and costs rise in response to an increase in aggregate demand, which is a function of the Fed's money creation. Wage and price increases are a reflection of inflation, not a cause of it.
As to the relationship between prices and wages, they generally move together. But prices lead wages, not the other way around. You can read about the relationship in academic literature, or you can think about how businesses operate.
Let's start with a small-business owner whose company produces widgets. He begins to see a pickup in sales. Pretty soon, his products are flying off the shelf, and he can't accommodate the increased demand.
What does he do? A rational businessman raises his prices to allocate the limited supply. If he still can't satisfy the demand for widgets, he may try to increase output using his existing staff, paying overtime if necessary. If he still can't meet his customers' demand for widgets at the higher price, he will most likely look to add staff.
In the mythical cost-push-inflation world, a businessman responds to increased demand by paying a higher wage to attract additional workers -- and then tries to raise prices to preserve his profit margins.
Which of those examples describes how businesses operate? Good. Let's move on.

Sunday/Masaccio

The Gospel today is the "Give to Caesar..." gospel. This is a remarkably interesting gospel as it seems to imply the government has certain rights, certain authority that might be seen as "divine right." It certainly is not an anarchistic view.

There is another specific tax reference in the gospel, significantly only in Mathew the tax collector. It also is fascinating, almost comic. Peter is asked if Christ pays the "tribute tax." (This is a 1/2 shekel tax on all adult Jewish males to maintain the Temple, dating back to Moses. It is the reason there are money changers in the Temple.) Peter says Christ does.
Christ then grabs the teaching moment:
"What thinkest thou, Simon? of whom do the kings of the earth take custom or tribute? of their own children, or of strangers?
26. Peter saith unto him, Of strangers. Jesus saith unto him, Then are the children free.
27. Notwithstanding, lest we should offend them, go thou to the sea, and cast an hook, and take up the fish that first cometh up; and when thou hast opened his mouth, thou shalt find a piece of money: that take, and give unto them for me and thee."
They tax strangers, not their children, "then are the children free,"  "less we should offend them"--hardly a ringing endorsement. And then He gets the money from the mouth of a fish!

The Tribute Money
Artist Masaccio Year 1425 Type Fresco  Dimensions 247 cm × 597 cm (97.2 in × 235 in) Location Brancacci Chapel, Florence (from Wiki)

Christ with disciples in the painting

Reverie

Life never knows the return of spring. --John Gay in Beggar's Opera

My graphs don't fit.


Beginning in the 1660s, many British productions allowed Romeo and Juliet to live on, or had Juliet wake up for a simultaneous death-duet with Romeo; until about 1730, some companies played to all tastes, offering the 'tragic death' and the 'happily-ever-after' versions on alternating nights.

The average cost to make “Game of Thrones” per episode is $6 to $8 million.

It will cost $60 to $80 million to make a whole season of Game of Thrones.

Interesting origin but I can't fix the font either:

Cocksure: PRONUNCIATION: (KOK-shoor, kok-SHOOR)  MEANING: adjective: Arrogantly or presumptuously overconfident. ETYMOLOGY: From cock (a euphemism for god) + sure, from Old French seur, from Latin securus (secure). Earliest documented use: 1520.

Cowen on the incoherent anthem silliness: "Nor do we play the anthem before movies, as is mandatory in India. Furthermore, “The Star-Spangled Banner” wasn’t sanctioned by Congress as our national anthem until 1931. Earlier in the history of baseball, the anthem was played during the seventh-inning stretch. It was only during World War II that the anthem was played regularly at the beginning of each game, rather than for special games alone, such as the World Series."

Starting in 2018, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board—the source of generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) for state and local governments—will force officials to record healthcare liabilities on their balance sheets. These are the liabilities that governments are committed to, retirees and the like. Pew Charitable Trusts estimates the national shortfall will add up to $645 billion.

That’s on top of the estimated $1.1 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities they already had. 

Another shortfall is in retirement savings. As people are living longer, they will require more money, longer. A report this summer from the International Longevity Centre suggested that younger workers in the UK need to save 18% of their annual earnings in order to have an “adequate” retirement income – which it defines as less than today’s retirees enjoy. But these realities are tough, even for the clear eyed Swiss.

Earlier this month, Swiss voters rejected a pension reform plan that would have strengthened the system by raising women’s retirement age from 64 to 65 and raising taxes and required worker contributions. From what I can see, these were fairly minor changes, but the plan still went down in flames as 52.7% of voters said no. A study shows that the United Kingdom has a $4 trillion retirement savings shortfall, which is projected to rise 4% a year and reach $33 trillion by 2050. This in a country whose total GDP is $3 trillion. That means the shortfall is already bigger than the entire economy.

In the Country of Ire, 80% of the Irish who have pensions don’t think they will have sufficient income in retirement, and 47% don’t even have pensions.

France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, and Spain are all pay-as-you-go countries (PAYG). That means they have nothing saved in the public coffers for future pension obligations, and the money has to come out of the general budget each year.

Europe’s population of pensioners, already the largest in the world, continues to grow. Looking at Europeans 65 or older who aren’t working, there are 42 for every 100 workers, and this will rise to 65 per 100 by 2060, the European Union’s data agency says. By comparison, the U.S. has 24 nonworking people 65 or over per 100 workers, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which doesn’t have a projection for 2060. (WSJ)

As Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine calculates, current global average income per capita is about $10,000. If the world grows at 3 percent per year over the next 80 years or so, global average income per capita will rise to $97,000. According to Nordhaus and Moffatt’s estimations, therefore, an increase in global temperature by 3°C would reduce global average income per capita by $2,000 to $95,000. A 6°C increase in global temperature would reduce global average income per capita by $8,000 to $89,000.

“We have a predicament,” Bailey concludes. “How much are we willing to spend in order to make those living in 2100, who will likely be at least nine times richer than us today, $2,000 better off?”

One of my basic beliefs in the world has been changed. I always thought that Darwin really chose the non-Lamarkian path and denied the inheritance of acquired characteristics. But he did not. There were many elements in evolution he could not understand--actually that he thought natural selection was too limited to explain. He used the development of habits--rather than the Lamarkian inheritance--that he felt became instinctive before allowing anatomic change. Abstract reasoning and intelligence were his two stumbling blocks.

Interestingly, he felt women were not able to reason as well as men but inherited the tendency from their fathers and through use and habit this became more native to them.

Such politically incorrect thinking probably invalidates all of his work so don't tell anyone.

In 1941, the Boston Red Sox’s Ted Williams played a double-header against the Philadelphia Athletics on the last day of the regular season. He went 6 for 8 to boost his batting average to .406 and become the first player since Bill Terry in 1930 to hit .400. It has never been done since.

We are a long way off from putting beliefs of the mind to the judgment of the sword, but that is the logical destination of the path we are on, because we have lost faith in the utility of upholding the right to be wrong.--Goldberg

Poor families in 2005 were more likely to own things like a clothes dryer, dishwasher, refrigerator, or air conditioner than the average household was in 1971. 

In 1970 the Hispanic population in the U.S. was 5%. Now it is 17%.

Lawrence, Kansas has a witch-themed store opening to serve its growing pagan population.

North Korean-connected businesses in China must shut down to comply with new United Nations sanctions meant to stymie Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear-weapons programs, China’s government said. (wsj)

The University of Washington released a study on the impact of Seattle's raising the minimum wage to $15/hour. The study, published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, concluded that the costs to low-wage Seattle workers have been three times larger than the benefits. Using a richer trove of data and more sophisticated statistical methods than have been available for other studies of minimum wages, the report concluded that Seattle's still-advancing increase has cost more than 5,000 jobs, and that workers whose wages were increased to comply with the new minimum lost an average of $125 a month as employers reduced their hours. Although total employment in the restaurant industry, which hires a substantial portion of minimum wage workers, did not decline, employers replaced less skilled, low productivity workers with others able to produce higher-value work products. As one of the study's authors said, "Basically, what we're doing is we're removing the bottom rung of the ladder."

The Los Angeles Times (9/26, Karlamangla) reports that “for the second year in a row,” US diagnoses of “chlamydia, gonorrhea or syphilis reached a record high.” The article says “more than 2 million cases” of the three sexually transmitted diseases were reported in 2016, according to data released by the CDC on Tuesday. The Times adds that the rise in women with syphilis has caused a corresponding increase in congenital syphilis among newborns, which has nearly doubled to 632 cases since 2012.

Alabama Republicans voted decisively to nominate Roy Moore, a former state Supreme Court judge, for a U.S. Senate seat, delivering a rebuke to President Trump and the GOP establishment that supported his rival.

This from the WSJ. This may be less of a rebuke of Trump than an indication that the anti-politician movement may be out of control, indeed may be incompatible with leadership.

Dark matter has no charge, no weak and strong forces, and no nuclear forces--but it has gravitational force. 27% of the universe is dark matter. So, does a huge mass without influence other than gravity cause the structure of the universe?

In 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to divide control of occupied Poland roughly along the Bug River–the Germans taking everything west, the Soviets taking everything east.
It was a follow-up to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. 
Governments of power seeking their natural level.

Fifty-three percent of Americans support single payer health care, according to a June 2017 poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation. But,  BUT....according to the same Kaiser poll, 62% would oppose single-payer if it gave the government too much power over health care. Sixty percent would reject it if it increased taxes.
So, how do the people in favor of single payer expect this would work?

Sanders estimated that the single-payer plan he proposed during his presidential campaign would cost $1.4 trillion a year. To cover that cost, the plan included a 2.2% income tax and a 6.2% tax on employers, i.e. products.

The liberal Urban Institute's analysis of Sanders' campaign plan found that federal expenditures would surge $32 trillion over its first 10 years. Total U.S. health spending from all payers, public and private, was $3.2 trillion in 2015, the most recent year for which there are data. So Sander's single-payer plan would double what our entire nation spends on health care each year to the federal budget.

AAAAaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnddddddd......a picture/metaphor of the American debt crisis:

Photo: DWS via Flickr