On the Battlefield of Inequality

We are only beginning to understand on how subtle a communication system the functioning of an advanced industrial society is based — a communications system which we call the market and which turns out to be a more efficient mechanism for digesting dispersed information than any that man has deliberately designed.--Hayek

Vietnamese coffee yesterday in Lawrenceville.
GoT is over. It's gong to be like stopping smoking. Apparently  it was averaging 43 million viewers per episode.

St. Raphael's is having a fundraiser  at the Bulldog Bar in Morningside tonight. The Bulldog Bar. Surely some revelation is at hand.

The state with the highest poverty rate in the country is California, where nearly one out of five residents is poor. That’s according to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, which factors in the cost of housing, food, utilities and clothing, and which includes non-cash government assistance as a form of income. With 12% of the American population, California is home today to about one in three of the nation’s welfare recipients.

New data show millennials are in worse financial shape than every preceding living generation, and may never recover. Their woes have delayed traditional adult milestones in ways expected to alter the nation’s demographic and economic contours.(wsj)

 In 2014, in 17 Ex-Im Bank transactions the primary borrower was the Export-Import Bank of China. Says Toomey, “You cannot make this stuff up”: Ex-Im is subsidizing the Chinese bank; that is cited as the reason we need Ex-Im.

The U.S. Has a Fleet of 300 Electric Buses. China Has 421,000.

The threat of a Labour government wiped more than £500m off SSE and National Grid on Wednesday as party plans to seize UK energy networks emerged.

Sector shares slipped as The Telegraph revealed Jeremy Corbyn wants to renationalise the £62bn network, compensating shareholders with government bonds below market rate.

“Our research provides quantitative evidence for what we all can see in the media landscape,” said Jennifer Kavanagh, a RAND senior political scientist and lead author of the report, the second in a series on the phenomenon of “Truth Decay,” the declining role of facts and analysis in civil discourse and its effect on American life. “Journalism in the U.S. has become more subjective and consists less of the detailed event- or context-based reporting that used to characterize news coverage.” Truth decay!

On this day in 1498, Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama became the first European to reach India via the Atlantic Ocean when he arrived at Calicut on the Malabar Coast.


                         On the Battlefield of Inequality

Colleges are no longer content with taking our kids hostage for four years and creating a sham product of education, they now want to drive everyone nuts. The College Board assigns a so-called "adversity" score to every student who takes the SAT to try to capture their social and economic background. Apparently people are easy to summarize.

This 'disadvantage' score - seemingly designed to adjust for the facts that black Americans (see chart below) score on average 946 and Asian Americans score on average 1223 in the SAT - goes from 1 to 100. 1 is very disadvantaged and 100 is very advantaged. 50 is average.

The Adversity Score is calculated using 15 factors including the crime rate and poverty levels from the student’s high school and neighborhood.

Students won't be told the scores, but colleges will see the numbers when reviewing their applications.

WSJ reports that fifty colleges used the score last year as part of a beta test.

The College Board plans to expand it to 150 institutions this fall, and then use it broadly the following year.

Yale University is one of the schools that has tried using applicants’ adversity scores.

Soon we will be able to eliminate those factors that predispose to success, whatever they are, in favor of those failure factors. This is a serious decision, like turning down a one way street the wrong way.

Certainly somebody has been in power for too long.