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Open thread April 12, 2013

Dan Crawford | April 12, 2013 4:14 pm

Tags: open thread Comments (15) | Digg Facebook Twitter |
15 Comments
  • Jazzbumpa says:
    April 12, 2013 at 4:48 pm

    Staglationary Mark provided a graphic demonstration of the amazing recovery from the recent economic collapse.
    Here is his graph of real wage and salary disbursements per cap, via FRED.

    http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-u1msFmnK3jo/UWclR-vNZ9I/AAAAAAAALhA/q2vqGhAu77g/s1600/Real+Wage+and+Salary+Disbursements+per+Capita.jpg

    His post.

    http://illusionofprosperity.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-economic-recovery-in-one-chart.html

    JzB

  • Denis Drew says:
    April 13, 2013 at 12:57 am

    How does New York’s brazenly unconstitutional stop-and-frisk policy further degrade the performance of poorly performing schools?

    Put this …
    Political scientist Martin Sanchez-Jankowski spent nine years on the ground in five poverty stricken New York and Los Angeles neighborhoods (and ten years before that researching street gangs). He explains in his 2008 book Cracks in the Pavement that ghetto schools don’t work mostly because students (and teachers!) don’t expect jobs paying anything decent waiting for them in the labor market when they graduate and go to work — so think school accomplishments not worth a heavy effort.

    together with this …
    Noche Díaz — describing the degradation minority youth suffer from unjustified stop-and-frisk: “… why is it that I have to look at these 15-year-olds in the playgrounds in the Bronx who tell me that if you’re not a white person in this world you don’t matter and you don’t mean anything?”
    http://www.revcom.us/a/280/noche-diaz-facing-prison-for-standing-up-for-youth-en.html

  • save_the_rustbelt says:
    April 13, 2013 at 10:11 am

    Question:

    Is there an accepted definition for “sustainability?”

    I tend to think of it in an environmental context, but apparently it is used more broadly.

    Your thoughts?

  • coberly says:
    April 13, 2013 at 1:19 pm

    Denis Drew

    about what i thought. though i’m not sure it’s just about blacks. decent jobs for white people who don’t have the in-demand “talents” are pretty hard to come by, and schools are run by bureaucrats instead of people with any love of helping kids find out how to be happy human beings who can support themselves.

    kids in white schools do a little better because their parents care more and are “connected.” but are you sure you would want your kid to grow up to be larry summers?

  • Denis Drew says:
    April 13, 2013 at 3:10 pm

    coberly,
    >>>kids in white schools do a little better because their parents care more and are “connected.” but are you sure you would want your kid to grow up to be larry summers?<<< This is the stereotype that apparently everyone believes. When the San Francisco Chronicle did a story recently about young black students not expecting they would finish school (or something like that) almost every ast one of dozens of comments said something like that. Fact: out of 200,000 gang age males in Chicago, 100,000 are in drug dealing gangs. Since when are half of all parents in the world that neglectful? Animal parents are not that neglectful. Fact: if a biker gang won the lottery they would build a bigger club house — half of a ghetto gang would go to college. Fact: if the minimum wage were $15/hr there would be no gangs — the Crips and the Bloods could not whip a decent paying Ronald McDonald.

  • coberly says:
    April 13, 2013 at 4:12 pm

    Denis

    don’t take part of what i said for all of what i said, or read a meaning into i did not intend.

    i have taught in schools and maybe my experience was atypical, but the intensity of middle class parents pushing their kids to “succeed” is not evident among such black parents as i met.

    this is not a dis on them. if my kids had no chance i probably would not push them either.

    i could say a lot more, but i get tired of being misunderstood.

  • AnnaLee says:
    April 13, 2013 at 4:34 pm

    STR,
    “DoD acquisition and logistics professionals use the term “sustainment” to describe the support required to operate and maintain a system over its lifetime. Globally, the environmental-related term “sustainability” is used to mean a durable and self-sufficient balance between social, economic, and environmental factors. In the context of the DoD acquisition process, sustainability involves the wise use of resources and the minimization of corresponding impacts and costs during the life cycle.”

    http://www.denix.osd.mil/esohacq/upload/OSD-ATL-SLCA-Guidance_2.pdf

    So, not so much a single accepted definition but a series of similar definitions depending on emphasis.

  • AnnaLee says:
    April 13, 2013 at 4:42 pm

    What is the average added value to a nation due to the addition of one child. Is there a statistical optimal rate of population increase? What are the determining variables?

    (I’m not trying to be weird with these questions. Some of you are well read in the rise of civilization and I just wondered how someone who understands the issues better than I do thinks about population replacement as it relates to economics.)

  • Jack says:
    April 13, 2013 at 4:52 pm

    “i have taught in schools and maybe my experience was atypical, but the intensity of middle class parents pushing their kids to “succeed” is not evident among such black parents as i met.” Coberly
    Is “such” a pronoun for middle class? The implication is that middle class parents push their kids a bit harder. But harder than what other group? Poverty as it exists in the center of urban decay is stultifying to anyone’s growth and development. It is the operative factor. Give the black parent, the Latino family, or whom ever the financial stability of middle class income and they will produce producers. The stereotype trailer trash white person isn’t any more likely to succeed at school or life in general. Not because of the trailer, but because of the poverty.

    When all the wealth goes to a small segment of the population the rest will suffer the ravages of an impoverished childhood regardless of racial identity.

  • coberly says:
    April 13, 2013 at 6:07 pm

    Jack

    that was my point exactly.

    i realize i sound like a racist to people who aren’t used to saying it “like it is,” but trust me I am not a racist.

    I do observe the results of untreated poverty on the people who are trapped in it.

  • coberly says:
    April 13, 2013 at 6:10 pm

    I was actually agreeing with Denis, but as long as people have got their sensitivities out looking for stereotypes, any time i say something they didn’t expect, they decide i must be “one of them.”

    it does not bode well for any actual solutions.

  • Denis Drew says:
    April 13, 2013 at 6:49 pm

    coberly,
    Actual solution: pay people enough to work — double the federal minimum wage to $15/hr (for starts!) — a win-win proposition for employers and employees. You must have missed my, er, uh, “black hole theory of the minimum wage” (giving me a chance to post it again :-]):

    The “black hole theory” of the minimum wage:
    Physicists theorize that inside a black hole the laws of physics breakdown. When the minimum wage falls far enough below what the market would bear the laws of supply and demand breakdown. Doubling today’s federal minimum wage should lead to a disproportionate explosion of demand for the goods of minimum to median wage paying employers.

    If we cut today’s minimum to median wages in half that wouldn’t help McDonald’s or Wal-Mart, would it? This wage cut must already have taken place when we would need to triple today’s minimum wage to catch up with doubled productivity since 1968 (almost quadruple the early 2007 minimum wage — the median wage stagnated as productivity doubled too).
    Elizabeth Warren: Minimum Wage Would Be $22 An Hour If It Had Kept Up With Productivity

    Doubling today’s minimum wage to $15 an hour would add 50% to Wal-Mart’s wages but only 5% to Wal-Mart’s prices – 100% to McDonald’s wages but 33% to McDonald’s prices. $15 an hour being today’s median wage, half the workforce would get raises percentage multiples of pass through price increases.

    This win-win effect could not go on forever. At $30,000 a year consumers would buy a lot more fast food and retail items than they will at $15,000 a year – hugely pent-up demand. Going from a $30,000 year minimum wage to $40,000 would raise prices (3% at Wal-Mart; 11% at McDonald’s) but not add much to demand – though some people would have more money to spend — a wash? Somewhere in between is the edge of the black hole.

  • coberly says:
    April 14, 2013 at 7:26 pm

    Denis

    the reason it does not bode well is because i actually agree with you, but you keep thinking i don’t.

    How do you expect to enact this minimum wage, or sector wide labor agreements, if you can’t even even agree with the people who agree with you?

  • Denis Drew says:
    April 14, 2013 at 8:49 pm

    coberly,
    Let me think about that. ??? 🙂

  • Bruce Webb says:
    April 15, 2013 at 2:23 am

    STR well in Social Security lingo ‘sustainable’ is mostly used in a hyper-specialized way. So to the extent that SS policy has injected the word into discourse it might not be fully representative. I’ll think about it.

    Operationally ‘sustainable solvency’ for SS means not just being solvent (as defined) over the projection period (there 75 years) but having the metric of solvency (in this case Trust Fund ratio) trending up at the end of the period and so likely to be longer-term or permanent.

    Rhetorically it is an argument against ‘patching up’ a problem or as the Fix the Debt people put it in their messaging “Kicking the Can (Down the Road)”. If the need is permanent so too should be the structure that provides it, come what may there will be some need to provide transit of goods and people from San Francisco to Oakland as long as those cities exist. Showing that both BART and the new Bay Bridge will proper maintenance will suffice for 35 years is not good enough, long range planners need to think about year 36 and year 50. Now whether given all the uncertainties in the specific case of Social Security we should be worrying about years 76-100 (sustainable solvency) or all years to Heat Death of the Sun (unfunded liability over the Infinite Future Horizon), that is whether this is just reasonable prudence or pointless crisis-mongering to ‘sustain’ a ‘current’ ‘crisis’, is an open question. For example the current funding ‘crisis’ in the Post Office forcing shutdown in Saturday delivery is the result of a requirement to pre fund retiree health care for 75 years, or for the new hires of 2053. Similarly Congressional restrictions on Social Security Administration have forced field office consolidation and early closing even though those expenses are billed back against a Trust Fund with $2.6 trillion in legally available assets (which presumedly have to be paid back SOMEDAY, why starve SS today?)

    I am not really aware of ‘sustainable’ being deployed in that many other policy areas, then again I have a certain amount of tunnel vision on this topic. So to the degree that SS has actually been the source of injection of this term into political discourse it’s precise usage may not be illuminating to your overall question.

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