Why Do LIberal Reforms Hurt the Poor?

 Is this true?

Liberals propose and enact more laws, regulations, and programs than conservatives?  

The poorer the citizen the more difficulty they have in knowing, understanding, complying, and taking advantage of the laws, regulations, and programs.

The richer the citizen the more able they are to manipulate laws and regulations to their advantage and to exploit programs in ways not intended by the authors.

Tattoos

NY Times says 1/3 of Americans have a tattoo. That's a big change in the culture from my youth, when tattoos were limited to a few sailors and other veterans. A tattoo signified (not a word much used in the 1950's) the man (never a woman, except maybe a stripper) was a rebel and/or on the fringes of society.

College Side Entrances and Carl Van Doren

Somehow the current scandal on the "side entrances" for college admission through fake athletic credentials or fake SAT tests reminds me of Charles Van Doren.

Why?  Because some of the reactions to both see (saw) the episodes as undermining the prestige and validity of the elites of society.  Van Doren, for those who weren't born in the 50's, was a contestant on a televised quiz show which was a big hit.  This was back in the day where, if you were lucky, you could choose among three TV networks, but more likely were limited to one or two.  Van Doren was part of the educational elite, a young professor who was the son and nephew of prominent academics. Finding out that someone with such a background who seemed a model had stooped to cheating was a shock.

Van Doren and Sputnik are linked in my mind as creating and epitomizing discontent with US society of the late 50's, a discontent which both JFK and Nixon tried to ride.

Did the Elite Used To Believe in Service?

The current assessments of George H.W. Bush's life often include a statement to the effect that in the past the elite, as exemplified by Bush,, used to believe in service to the nation, in noblesse oblige.  Such statements seem to be accepted unthinkingly, without question.

I'm not so sure there's that much difference between now and the past.  When you look at the business elite, the big shots with the big bucks, there seems to be a mixture of plutocracy and service. For every Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie Foundation created decades ago you can match similar efforts by Gates and Buffett.

Charlie Wilson famously said what's good for the U.S. is good for General Motors, and vice versa.  Our current elite knows better to say that, but I suspect they think it.  Wilson headed DOD under Ike.  Trump has had his own set of rich men, members of the elite albeit rather second level, serving in his administration.

My bottom line is that there's always been a mixture of motivations for public service: some people want new fields to explore (think Sen. Corker), some people want a career in politics moving in and out of government depending on which party is in control, some just fall into it.

[Update:  Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns, & Money visits the grave of Joseph Choate, touching on some of the good and bad aspects of the old-time elite beliefs.  Choate's brother founded the Choate private school, now Choate-Rosemary Hall, attended by many elite, including JFK. ]

"Hollow Dolls" and Essentialism and My Cousin's Book

Just finished "The Lies That Bind Us" by Appiah.  I recommend it. The lies are: creed, culture, color, class, and country.  One of the keys to the binding is the lie of "essentialism"--the idea that everyone who shares in the lie is essentially the same: all Americans are alike, all Muslims are alike, all blacks are alike, etc.

It's stretching a bit, I know, but I was reminded of essentialism when I read an article in the Times entitled "The robots aren't as human as they seem."  A biped robot is assumed to be humanlike, a quadraped is likely a dog, or maybe a cheetah.  That very human impulse seen with robots also leads us astray when considering flesh and blood humans and their beliefs about patriotism, religion, etc.

And since I've referred to "Dueling Dragons" in my post yesterday, I'll bring it up again today: I see its theme as the impact of tribalism based on all of Appiah's lies on Ulster.

[Updated--I don't think my post of yesterday does what I wanted--so some additions: if we humans can look at a biped and think it's human, it's easy for me to see that humans can look at other humans and project into the person what they believe.  And the projections will be consistent, because they're not based on facts, on reality, on data perceived in real time but based on ideas in the mind, wherever the ideas come from, past experience or the broader culture.

The reader can see that in in Dueling Dragons, as George Henderson, the newspaper editor, and John Martin exchange their mistaken (my take, definitely not the author's) views of the state and future of Ireland.]

The LUCkies

Paul Campos suggests the "lower upper class" is a better term than "upper middle class". I agree. I don't see anyone admitting to being upper class, but it's ridiculous that all the lawyers, doctors, CEO's, and entertainers in the top 5 percent are still considered middle class. I've created the acronym, based on my view that a lot is luck.

From his post, these are the percentiles and household income for my LUCkies, household income:


95th 215,000
99th 400,000
99.9th 1,117,000

Brooks: The Pictures We Have in Our Head

In some of the commentary on David Brooks column, or rather one paragraph in his column, I think I see some different answers to the question: who was Brooks' friend with a high school diploma?

I suspect most or all of those who commented saw her as a white woman, perhaps young, perhaps a contemporary.  If true, that shows our blinders.  IMHO it's quite as likely that she's a minority, perhaps given his social milieu an immigrant. I'm further dealing in stereotypes when I suggest that a well-to-do media person is more likely to come into contact with an immigrant in his/her daily life than with a white person with only a high school diploma.  It would be interesting to know more, but for me the bottom line is his example doesn't do the job he wants it to in his column.  On the other hand, the fact that all of us commenters focused on that one paragraph rather than his more general point suggests to me that we're guilty about our privilege and about pulling up the ladder behind us.

Miller and Smith--And the Course of History

The Times had a piece on changes in the most common last names, the hook being the fact that Latino last names are moving up.

What caught my eye, though, were two of the other most common names: "Smith" and "Miller".  (Jones and Williams and Johnson were also big).  Why?  They're occupational names. Back in the day when surnames first were assigned, the predominant occupation was farming, but we don't see "Farmer" as a big surname.  Miller and smith would be higher income occupations back in the 16th century.  It appears that higher income people had more surviving offspring then, and in the future.

On a related issue Megan McArdle has a piece on the inheritance of status, giving a brief summary of some work tending to show that socioeconomic status is very inheritable. 

Astyk and Black Men

Been a couple years since I linked to Sharon Astyk's blog, which it seems she only updates a couple times a year now.  Anyhow, here she muses on current events (the adoption of her foster kids went through BTW).

Astyk's an example of how a person can be wrong on one issue and right on others.

$14,000 Per Poor Person?

David Brooks says Robert Samuelson reports that the federal government spends $14,000 per poor person in today's column.

I don't believe it.  A top of the head estimate is we have about 45 million poor people (15 percent times 300,000,000 total population).  So Brooks and Samuelson are saying we spend $600 billion on poor people?  No way.

To be continued.

In Defense of Inequality?

On some days I have a populist streak  On some days I have a contrarian streak.

Today I was reading "The Great Escape" by Angus Deaton.  In a chapter on the improvements in life expectancy over the centuries in different countries he observed that inoculation for smallpox used to be very costly: a family like John Adams' would go off for a week or so to be in isolation as they waited for the mild case of smallpox to emerge and run its course until they were no longer infectious.  That required money.  Of course over the years, over the centuries the cost came done, but in this case the richer people were by necessity the early adopters.

Christenson's Innovator's Dilemma argues that innovations develop from a product which may be more expensive and less capable for most purposes, but which better fits the needs of the niche market than the mainstream product.  By capitalizing on the niche, and using the revenue to finance improvements, the innovators can improve and expand, eventually reducing the mainstream product to niche status.

There's another announcement, from Tesla, which builds ridiculously pricey electric cars, but now they're using their battery expertise to expand into power supplies for backup and filling the gaps from solar power.

So, at least today, maybe I'm living in the best of all possible worlds, where the rich finance innovations.  Maybe.

The Great Sharon Astyk on Reading to Kids

Several years ago I found Ms Astyk's Casaubon's Book blog, which then was devoted to the food movement, locavores, peak oil, etc.  I mostly disagreed with her views, but she wrote very well so it was worth following her RSS feed.  She and her husband live on a small farm in upstate New York where he's a professor and she's a writer/lecturer and, for some years now, a foster mother.  She has several sons of her own and an amazing procession of foster kids, all of which has made her blogging very very sporadic, and perhaps eliminated her writing and speaking.

Her occasional posts on the foster parenting experience are good, and particularly interesting as she meditates on the effects of class and culture. Her last post is  a long essay on reading to kids.  I strongly recommend it.

How the Point Zero Zero Zero Ones Live

My wife and I visited the Rockefellers Friday, more specifically took the tour of Kykuit.  Over the years we've visited the homes of the  Vanderbilts, the Ogden Mills, the Roosevelts,and other formerly rich and famous people who lived a few weeks in the year in the Hudson River valley.

Rockefeller and Vanderbilt rank 1, 2 on this list of the wealthiest Americans.  While both places are large and nice, I was more at home in Sunnyside, the relatively modest home of Washington Irving.  Perhaps it was the crumbled paper on the floor of his office/writing room, perhaps it was the way he got hot water, by running pipes through the coal stove and into a tank, much the same way my family got its hot water some 100 years later. 

All these houses seem stuck in time; they were very modern in their day but as time passed and their owners aged, and sometimes lost their money, they weren't updated.  I wonder whether Bill Gates will leave his house to the nation upon his death, and whether it will still have the flat screens on the walls displaying the pictures/photographs he bought (I'm going on memory here) and whether people will experience a mix of emotions as they tour, both respect for the money and disdain for the backwardness of the taste.

Surprising Unsurprising Fact

Or is it "unsurprising surprising fact"?  Maybe the latter, given the evidence for widening inequality in income/wealth in the nation.  Anyhow, Peter Orszag writes:

In 1990, 20-year-old white women who had at least a college degree were expected to live to age 81, while those with less than a high-school degree were expected to reach 79, a recent study in Health Affairs found. By 2008, however, that two-year gap had widened to more than 10 years. For 20-year-old white men, the difference grew from five years in 1990 to 13 years in 2008.

It's part of a discussion on how the gap affects discussion of entitlement reform:arguing for greater progressivity in any reform of Social Security and Medicare/medicaid reform to offset the gap.  He's not particularly focused on causes, mentioning smoking and the effects of education.

Surprising Stat of the Day

Via Marginal Revolution, from this site:

An African-American child raised in a lower-class family is 37% less likely to become a professional basketball player than is an African-American child raised in a middle- or upper-class family, according to Joshua Kjerulf Dubrow of the Polish Academy of Sciences and jimi adams of Arizona State.

Something I'm Ready to Believe

From Jack Shafer at Slate, in an article on the NPR fund-raising thing:

If you've ever hung out with rich people, you know they have a lot of crazy ideas and aren't afraid of expressing them.

Of course, on mature second thought, I'll just believe it without going to the trouble of hanging out with rich people.  Charlie Sheen is evidence enough.

On Class, and the Lack Thereof

I recommend Tony Judt's The Memory Chalet, a book of essays written as he became immobilized in body by Lou Gehrig's disease. It's getting 5 stars on Amazon. The writing is graceful.  Judt, now dead, was a Londoner, of Jewish heritage, a historian who taught on both sides of the Atlantic but ended up in New York City.

I want to quote from the essay "Bedder".

"I grew up without servants.  This is hardly surprising: in the first place, we were a small, lower-middle-class family who lived in small, lower-middle-class housing.  Before the war [WWII], such families could typically afford a maid and perhaps a cook as well.  The real middle class, of course, did much better: upstairs and downstairs staff were well within the reach of a professional man and his family." [His parents could afford a day-nanny for him. At Cambridge he had "bedders": women who looked after undergraduate rooms. Oxford has "scouts".]

Judt's class-consciousness is British, as are his gradations.  I think he means his family was middle-class because they weren't "working class/lower class"; they had white-collar jobs, not manual labor.  The "lower" part probably implies no college education, not a professional lawyer, teacher, manager. I think it's generally true a higher proportion of Brits had servants (say from 1850-1950) than Americans. Americans had "help", neighbor girls who might come in after childbirth or during sickness.  But anyone who could afford regular employees probably was considered upper-middle-class. 

Having noted this bit in Judt, I was struck when I saw on a newscast a talking head describing a growing "underclass" resulting from people losing their jobs in the Great Recession and being unable to find new employment. To me "underclass" is a bit pejorative, although perhaps not as much as "lower class" would seem.

Back When Being a Millionaire Meant Something

From the 1930 blog:

"A record 511 people reported income over $1M in 1928; 26 reported income over $5M, with 11 of those in NY State."

Compare that to this, from Business Week (Bloomberg):

"The 400 highest-earning U.S. households reported an average of $345 million in income in 2007, up 31 percent from a year earlier, IRS statistics show."

So the incomes of the rich have multiplied many times since 1930.  (I won't give a multiple because the figures are apples and oranges.)

Downward Mobility [Updated]

The Post reports on a Pew study which says black middle class children more often grow up in poorer neighborhoods than do white middle class children and there's a high correlation between one's neighborhood and one's eventual status. That is, black middle class children more often end up as lower class adults than do white middle class children.

It makes sense to me. It may be my preconceptions talking, but I think people who do well are often envied by their relatives and neighbors and expected to share the wealth. I think that's particularly true of blacks, perhaps because the black community has stronger ties although it might simply be the by-product of the distribution of wealth. (Is there such a thing as the "white community"?)

I remember a book by an anthropologist studying a small Caribbean island, entitled "Crab Antics", the thesis of which was the less successful tried to pull down the more successful.

[Added: Watched the first two episodes of The Corner last night. It's the HBO dramatization of a nonfiction book written by David Simon about Baltimore; it led eventually to The Wire. The major characters are the McCulloughs, a black couple who had it made then lost it to crack, and their son, DeAndre who is vacillating between the drug culture and school. We don't see Gary's (the father) fall, just the aftermath but the writer makes it sound as if he was dragged down by his obliging his old friends. I recommend both the book and the TV series.]

The Decline of Hierarchy

For some reason the other day I got to thinking about cars. (Maybe it was prompted by the bankruptcy of GM.)

In the American Revolution, one of the strands was the rise of democracy and the decline of aristocracy. Where once people tipped their hats in respect to their "betters" (and elders), that sort of deference declined. John Adams was mocked for his enthusiasm for aristocratic and monarchical seeming titles. Then the great Scots-Irishman Andrew Jackson became President and the people were really rising.

But all the historical emphasis on the rise of democracy obscured the ways in which hierarchy still ruled. In my youth it was cars. GM and the others had a deliberate hierarchy--start with a Chevy then move up the ladder until the apex of the mountain was the Caddy. You could drive down the street and place people by the make and age of their cars. A new Cadillac was king of the road, a crapped-out old Chevy had to cower in the side streets.

No more. The Big Three are gone, their vehicular hierarchies are dissolved, the distinctions among cars are blurred. Now when you walk by the community swimming pool the lifeguards may be driving small foreign cars or bigger SUV's. Who knows.

I'm sure there are other hierarchies remaining or evolving, but I notice most the changes from my youth.