Kayakers are going over really big waterfalls – 3 world records this year, topping out at 198 feet.
Check out this piece from The Wall Street Journal (with video) entitled “Kayaking Goes Over the Edge”.
Nineteen years ago a guy tried to kayak over Niagara Falls – which is about that height, but a bit … um … bigger than the typical kayak water. They still haven’t found his body. Photos here.
Posted for Sage.
Why watch the video on your phone when you can project it on a wall?
Let me guess: in a few years this will lead to another incarnation of videophones – as you project your friend in their pjs on the wall – and once again no one will bother.
The oldest woman to ever give birth – at 66, and to twins no less – has died at 69.
Last I checked having kids isn’t about you. You’re supposed to be about them.
Reader B.S. from back east has asked for some thoughts about the living wage.
Yikes. Is there any policy idea out there that’s as wrong-headed in as many ways as this one?
OK, let’s start with motivations vs. consequences. Which should be a basis for policy? I fall on the side of valuing consequences more heavily. I don’t need to think I’m good, or have other people feel that I’m good – for my part I want to be good. That’s a consequentialist viewpoint; and most of the points I’ll raise about the living wage are consequentialist. I have faith that most people are pretty good at thinking about consequences; the problem is that using motivations to make decisions is much quicker and leaves more time for watching Dancing with the Stars.
I’m also an economist, which means I bring two more views to the table. One is a sensitivity to unintended and secondary consequences. The second is the realization that many people want to avoid thinking about those issues: for them, partial equilibrium arguments trump general equilibrium. When I put those together, I don’t think you can reasonably support living wage proposals unless you are putting zero value on some important facets of the debate.
I’m also realistic enough to know that names, labels and marketing are a key part in pushing people to avoid consequentialist and general equilbrium viewpoints. The name “living wage” is part of the issue, as much as the concept is.
FTNItK: a living wage is a proposal for a policy that uses the legal system to push the economic system towards a goal in which poorer people get more income for the work that they do.
What could be possibly be wrong with that?
Quite a lot, but if you value motivations more than consequences, this is probably right up your alley. Also, if you’re not disposed towards thinking about broader implications, this probably sounds pretty good.
One thing that a living wage policy is not is a “living income” policy. If the problem was insufficient income for the poor, we could clearly have an alternative policy proposal which required the poor to work longer hours to raise their incomes. I don’t think that’s particularly realistic, but the absence of this sort of proposal should clarify for you that this really isn’t about income at all.
Another thing that the living wage is not is a policy to increase wages. It’s convoluted, but we could manage this by mandating a minimum income instead of a minimum wage, and then reducing the maximum number of hours that can be legally worked. Again, I’m not advocating this, but neither is anyone else, so this probably isn’t about wages either. This is doubly interesting though, because we have pursued policies like this in the past – think shorter work week - without any mention that a living wage was the goal.
A third thing that a living wage is not is a program to improve productivity. I don’t think there’s a manager out in the real world who wouldn’t increase the wages they pay by 50% if they could get 50% more productivity out of their workers. Again, we have policies that are targeted at improving wages through productivity – educational and vocational assistance, tax breaks, and so on – but we don’t talk about those as living wage policies.
These points should clarify that living wage policies are really about paying individual people more for the same aggregated amount of production done in the same amount of time. But, this is going to be done without increasing the revenue stream (since production won’t change), so it is really about using the legal system to bring about a shift in how that revenue is allocated. Note that since managers and owners already control that decision and choose not to pay a living wage, it is really about taking those decisions out of their hands.
And … who will make all these decisions? The best and the brightest of course! Even at face value though, this isn’t a good outcome, because we measure who is best and brightest not by the ins and outs of a specific firm, but on a more general and abstract basis. Excuse the hyperbole, but this is like asking the coach of the state high school basketball champions to enlighten us about our own gardens: no amount of tools and training is likely to make that work.
So, at the core, this is really about inexpertly diverting some of the revenue stream of the firm away from other groups and towards workers covered by the living wage. Who are those other groups? Broadly, there are three: vendors, owners, and other workers not covered by the living wage. One of those groups has to get shorted.
I think we can eliminate the vendors from that list. The vendors that supply other businesses are going to be covered by the living wage policy too – so that cash flow will be dearer to them than ever.
Owners next! Of course, we have a name for policies that use the legal system to shift cash flow from owners to workers: it’s called socialism. Fair enough. We now get into the argument about whether economies lying towards the socialist end of the spectrum perform better than those towards the capitalist end. I’ll concede the point that perhaps we can’t tell which has done better, but it’s ridiculous to assert that socialism has won: that hasn’t been a respectable position outside the academy for a generation now.
But, here’s where federalism would prove useful if we could just get the zealots to measure first and decide later: I wouldn’t have any objection at all to a living wage being passed at the state level. As a matter of fact, I’d like to see that happen in a bunch of states. After 20 years or so, I’d like to measure net immigration to those states. If people vote with their feet to go there, I’d be more than willing to concede that I’ve been wrong. Unfortunately for the real world out there, I don’t think this is going to happen because the people interested in the living wage know that it’s a loser without a national command-and-control legal system standing behind it.
One other point worth pondering here: this proposal amounts to reducing the fraction of national income that goes to owners. Macroeconomists have a lot of data on this, and across a variety of countries pursuing almost all the known policy options, no one has ever been able to make that fraction budge much. Macroeconomists usually call a measure of this something like an aggregate Cobb-Douglas alpha; we all know it’s around 30%, and that it changes so little that it can be justifiably regarded as constant. Just saying …
OK – back to the third group. No living wage proposal ever targets raising everyone’s wage; instead some fraction of workers will get a boost, and without owners or vendors to hit up, this will come from the non-covered workers. Again, I’m willing to concede that perhaps some of those people are overpaid … although this may lead down the road to a bizarro-world like the U.S. auto industry – where retired union members were provided private health insurance for free while the retired executives had to buy their own or go on Medicare.
Even so, there are two things to think about. One is personal investment and backloading of compensation. The second is the circular flow of income.
A great many occupations fall under the former: executives, sales people, professors, skilled workers who served as apprentices, doctors who did residencies, pilots who earned their wings in the military, and so on. If these people made an investment in the past to get higher backloaded compensation later, and a living wage policy takes from them now to give to the currently poor, will they be compensated for the past periods when they weren’t getting a living wage? I’ve never heard of such a compensation proposal, but I certainly think it’s worth thinking about. I’m all ears, since I’m one of those people who gave up part of my life to get into a highly compensated job by my late 20s.
The latter is a bit more subtle. All those “overpaid” workers don’t eat their compensation – they spend it. It’s fair to say that a good chunk of that spending is made in places where some workers would be covered by a living wage policy. For example, the executive plays less golf, so there is less revenue at the club when it actually needs more revenue to cover the outflows going to living wage recipients. Exactly how are we going to finesse that one? In a word, badly. We’ve actually had punishing the rich backfire before: twenty years ago Congress enacted an excise tax on (among other things) luxury boats. This raised the price of boats made in America, and shifted demand so the rich bought them overseas. The law was eventually repealed, largely under pressure from skilled and unskilled workers involved in yacht building. Do we really think it will be any different when we shift demand indirectly through a living wage policy?
One decision the best and the brightest are likely to leave to the employers on the ground though, is who to keep and who to let go. It’s delusional to think that this isn’t going to take place, or to believe that there aren’t going to be workers who were up to snuff at the market wage but can’t cut the work to justify the higher living wage. Heck – that was me until I was about 20.
In the end, I think a living wage policy is a devil’s bargain offered to workers. It really puts them in a put up or shut up position: work hard enough to justify the higher wage, or lose your job. So, maybe it should be called the work-harder-or-get-fired-wage. My guess is that this label won’t go over well. Even so, it’s more informative to voters than “living wage”.
And for society, I don’t think there’s even a devil’s bargain - just a losing one. One goal of a living wage policy is to reduce the inequality between the haves and the have-nots. But it does this by splitting the have-nots into the employed-at-the-living-wage and the unemployed-because-of-the-living wage. Since these are big groups, it’s hard to see how a living wage could do anything other than increase the perception, and perhaps the reality, of inequality. I know quite a lot of people who are against reducing inequality below what the market produces on its own, but I don’t know of any zealots of any stripe who actually want to increase inequality. I take that back: there might be a social worker out there who sees a living wage policy as a form of job security, but my guess is that they are in the few.
Let me finish up with a bit of trivia. I think just about every advocate for a living wage policy would cite inequality as an important justification. Yet, among the 50 states, it’s fairly well-known that the most equal distribution of income is in Utah. It’s done this without a living wage policy, and with a whole bunch of cultural and social norms that are anathema to living wage proponents. Apparently those proponents are wedded to their own hare-brained scheme to equalize income, and would rather cast aspersions at the hare-brained beliefs common in the most theocratic state in the country; one that also just happens to be leading the race towards living wage proponents’ goal. But, of course, this brings us full circle: the consequences produced by a Mormon-dominated society are sullied by questionable motivations, while the pure motivations of policy utopians are unsullied by straightforwardly identifiable consequences.
Here’s a graphic from the National Association of College Stores explaining why college textbooks cost what they do.
vX reported about memristors about 18 months ago – they’re a recently discovered “missing link” in electronics.
New evidence shows that memristors built in labs appear to conform to how synapses work in the brain, and of all things, how huge single-celled things called slime molds appear to “remember”.
Cool.
Use the Greasemonkey script Bloglines HAI – Hide Archived Items to give Bloglines a cleaner look.
What this script does is take all those archived posts and move them out of the main window – now they appear with a link at the top.
I use Aplia in a variety of classes, and I swear by it.
FTNItK: Aplia is an online for-profit service that provides slicker homeworks than most professors can put together on their own.
Now, Steven Pearlstein has written it up in The Washington Post.
… What's really exciting about Aplia is that it finally holds out the possibility of bringing to higher education the same productivity revolution that has lowered costs and improved quality in almost every other industry over the past two decades.
Read the whole thing.
FWIW: I was not an early convert to Aplia, nor was I initially attracted to its technology. For me, the best sales pitch came from a long, lost cousin who did PR for Paul Romer, and sold me on his personal devotion to getting students to understand economics better.
From Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw’s The Commanding Heights:
What I tried to leave my students with is the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the hidden hand [of government]. Things will happen in well-organized efforts without direction, controls, plans.
Via David Henderson at Econlog.
Give a 3 year old a hammer and they think everything is a nail.
The same thing happens to Excel users. They get to a certain skill level, pick up the IF statement, and realize that this can solve so many problems they’ve had in the past by nesting IFs.
The problem is that this method gets cumbersome, and troubleshooting it can be difficult.
Office for Mere Mortals has offered some alternatives including Lookup Tables and VBA, readers responded with tips for using MATCH, AND, OR, and especially CHOOSE.
