Redistribution to make society stronger

This is Joseph

I occasionally hear the argument that taxes are a form of theft.  When this is a form of looting to make the lives of the political class more opulent, then this is a cogent objection.  However, taxes can be used for two other things: redistribution and the provision of common goods. 

Paul Krugman takes on the moral argument against redistribution:

Don’t say that redistribution is inherently wrong. Even if high incomes perfectly reflected productivity, market outcomes aren’t the same as moral justification. And given the reality that wealth often reflects either luck or power, there’s a strong case to be made for collecting some of that wealth in taxes and using it to make society as a whole stronger, as long as it doesn’t destroy the incentive to keep creating more wealth.

And there’s no reason to believe that it would. Historically, America achieved its most rapid growth and technological progress ever during the 1950s and 1960s, despite much higher top tax rates and much lower inequality than it has today.

Of course, this requires government to act as a moral agent.  But I do not think that it is unreasonable to try and hold government to this expectation.  Just because government accountability is a hard problem doesn't mean that it isn't a worthwhile problem to solve.   

Private and public can both be effective

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So the Bertha tunneling project, led by a private contractor, was suspended after a sinkhole developed as a part of the tunnel project.  This would seem less serious if the project was not just suspended for two years due to a mechanical breakdown in the tunneling machine. 

In the same city (Seattle), a government agency doing a tunneling project under the same waterway is under budget (by about $150 million) and ahead of schedule (by six months).  Now, to be fair, the timeline for this project was rather stately, but it has still been much less plagued by problems.

Is this proof of anything.  In and of itself, not really.  What it does suggest is that specific challenges that arise on projects and, perhaps, project management can be more important than the actor who is doing the work.  After all, the slate of public works boondoggles is vast.

But it really shifts my focus to "are things well run" and "was there good planning" as being the most important metrics for whether a project is likely to go well.  So give me more success stories, for all types of projects, and I will be a happier person. 

Ayn Rand and Government?

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You thought that this would never happen -- that we'd link to Gin and Tacos.  But the latest piece on Ayn Rand and collective action problems is serious (instead of mocking) and I think highlights one of the major fault lines in thinking,  Consider:

Anyway, the real money scene is where the protagonist heads out into the forest and, in the space of a few hours before dinnertime, he makes a bow and arrows and shoots plenty of birds out of the sky to feed himself. He also gets a few by throwing rocks at them. This is a minor detail in the story but, in my view, is a great litmus test of a fundamental personality characteristic. The kind of person who thinks, "Yeah that seems plausible" believes that some people, namely themselves, are simply Great and therefore can solve any and every problem on their own through the force of their own Greatness. The other kind of person looks at a man running off into the woods with no supplies, food, clothing, or tools of any kind and thinks, "Well he's gonna be dead in about a week."

Now I am an introvert.  I am surprisingly more productive when nobody is capable of finding me.  But I realize that, innately, I am not good at everything and I will need help.  One option is to have some many resources (say social or financial) that one can call upon help at need.  But I know what the typical endpoint of somebody without tools and supplies in the wilderness really is.  

[I also have not read the book, but absent some actual textbooks it seems extremely implausible that somebody would discover electricity, in a usable form, given how long the historical process took]

But I think that this question gets at the crux of one of the great philosophical arguments of our time.  As a student of history, I presume that governed societies always out-compete un-governed ones, barring some very unusual circumstances.  Just ask your local hunter-gatherer tribes.  So the great question is how to make the best state.

But one could also presume that the state of nature is one in which everyone could prosper.  And then the question becomes should we have government at all.  But then how does one define property rights without it becoming a "war of all against all"?

Traffic Myths

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Via, the Mad Biologist, where are 10 tired traffic myths that didn't get a rest in 2015.  The most interesting was the discussion in Toronto about removing the Gardiner expressway.  It's pretty clear that the expressway really does make the waterfront a lot less useable and fun.  But it would be especially interesting to see what the new traffic patterns looked like.

My only concern was that there seems to be a contradiction between transit not reducing congestion but bike lanes doing so.  If you have induced demand when people take transit, don't the bikers also result in induced demand? 

I had a busy Monday

So let's all just kick back and enjoy a video.

When threads converge -- "How Mickey Mouse Destroyed the Public Domain"

For a while now we've been telling you to keep an eye on Adam Conover (and everybody else at CollegeHumor) and we've been bitching about the state of IP laws almost as long as we've been blogging.

For those reasons alone, we'd pretty much have to post this segment from Adam Ruins Everything even if it sucked, but we're safe on that score. This is one of Conover's best efforts, particularly for those in the audience nerdy enough to catch the steady stream of reference to classic animation.

How you sound to others

This is Joseph.

Dean Dad has a nice post on hearing yourself speak.  In my fiction writing days, I used to think of this as dialogue that you could try out on friends and see whether it sounded odd.  In some genres, like comic books, this is less critical.  But it is easy to destroy immersion in the story by having jarring dialogue.

Here, I think the speakers would have benefited with having an outsider to see whether or not an statement makes sense.  Mark and I are a bit different as bloggers, and I cannot count how many times we've had the other "sanity check" our statement.

In terms of the community college professor quoted, it might well have played better with context (which may be missing).  For the politician, I got nothing.

And, for the record, I hate listening to recordings of my lectures,

Food stamps, time of the month, and outcomes

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A recent set of studies had some interesting things to say regarding food stamps, and what happens in the last week of the month of benefits.  Emily Badger concludes:

None of these studies can say for certain that the food stamps shortfall causes hypoglycemia, or poorer test scores, or student behavioral problems. And the relationship is likely complex, a product of fewer calories, rising stress, financial tradeoffs, or lost sleep. But these studies suggest that families struggle in multiple ways when the food assistance runs out, and in ways that have to do with more than hunger.

These are good experiments, as the participants are serving as their own controls, greatly mitigating potential confounders of this association.  Instead, week of the month seems to be acting like an instrument (acting only through benefit and wage cycles), which is a very good property for an exposure to have.

I think that there are two pieces here.  One, it is pretty clear that we are probably spending more public money to keep food stamp benefits low -- as being admitted to a hospital is expensive.  So it is a odd kind of frugality that insists we need to pay more to reduce benefits to people with low levels of resources.

Two, the test scores piece makes it clear that these decisions also affect children, who are not really moral agents in regards to family financing.  Instead, it is more of a "luck of the draw" as to what income strata one is born into.

I will also note that this could have interesting effects on high stakes testing in areas with a lot of low income families.  Just the variance as to which week of the month a class takes their test could influence teacher evaluations -- a clear example of an exogenous factor we really don't want driving our results.  

Small changes in taxes

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Matt Yglesias has a really nice chart on how effective tax rates have gone up on the top 1% and top 0.1% of earners in the recent administration.  It's still not a crushing burden -- it looks like about 27%, for both groups, based on the chart (from a low of 19%/23%).  It definitely makes one wonder about things like this piece, where Chris Dillow wonders why rich people object to taxes. 

But it is worth remembering that we aren't talking about a crushing increase in tax burden here, even if there are other sources of taxes other than federal income taxes.  None of us like paying taxes (it is an expensive world) but these are not the scale of increases that I suspect lead to crushing burdens.

A Paul Krugman pun so bad even he apologizes

And you thought Asterisks: The Gall was bad.

From Doubling Down on W [emphasis added]:

The only real move away from W-era economic ideology has been on monetary policy, and it has been a move toward right-wing fantasyland. True, Ted Cruz is alone among the top contenders in calling explicitly for a return to the gold standard — you could say that he wants to Cruzify mankind upon a cross of gold. (Sorry.) But where the Bush administration once endorsed “aggressive monetary policy” to fight recessions, these days hostility toward the Fed’s efforts to help the economy is G.O.P. orthodoxy, even though the right’s warnings about imminent inflation have been wrong again and again.

One interesting historical note: back in the day, the leading evangelical candidate was violently opposed to the gold standard.

Even suburban cowgirls get the blues

Recently, I've gotten into the habit of checking the relevant Wikipedia pages after reading a news story. I particularly recommend checking the demographics of the towns that come up in the report.

For example, Charles Pierce points us to this quote from Dana Perino.

One of the greatest compliments I've been given is that people who met me when I first got to Washington, D.C., in 1995 say that I'm still the same person today, even though I've been blessed with opportunities to work in the White House, travel the world, and transition relatively smoothly into a new career in television on The Five. I realized I couldn't start the book with my recollections of my years working for President Bush—just showing up at age 35 as the White House Press secretary—so I had to tell the story of how I became who I am today. And with every fiber of my being I think of those years in the West as the most formidable, and I miss that way of life so much. And I have always known that if ever I needed to, I could go home. They'd take be back in an instant, though I'd have to shed some of my big-city conveniences and haul my own groceries to my kitchen.

For the moment, let's put aside the question of whether carrying your own groceries in from the SUV constitutes roughing it, and instead look at that other way of life in the formidable West.

According to my go-to source,  Dana Perino grew up in an affluent white-flight suburb of Denver.

As of the census of 2000, there were 23,558 people, 7,929 households, and 6,525 families residing in the town. The population density was 1,615.2 people per square mile (623.4/km²). There were 8,352 housing units at an average density of 572.6 per square mile (221.0/km²). The racial makeup of the town was 92.60% White, 1.71% Asian, 1.01% Black, 0.45% Native American, 0.03% Pacific Islander, 1.88% from other races, and 2.33% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 5.80% of the population.

...
The median income for a household in the town was $74,116, and the median income for a family was $77,384 (these figures had risen to $80,679 and $89,154, respectively, as of a 2007 estimate). Males had a median income of $52,070 versus $35,700 for females. The per capita income for the town was $27,479. About 1.7% of families and 2.3% of the population were below the poverty line, including 2.2% of those under age 18 and 2.1% of those age 65 or over.

I tried to go to the National Review article to see if the quote looked better in context. If anything it came off worse. Both Perino and her interviewer, Kathryn Jean Lopez, are careful to present things like part-time college jobs and visits to her grandparents' ranch so that they suggest a simple cowgirl of humble origins who would raise to great heights. As someone who grew up  in rural Western Arkansas, that does stick in my craw a bit.

Of course, there's another level of irony in the fact that her career peak was working for a cowboy president who was afraid of horses, but that's a story for another day.

Star Wars the Force Awakens (mild spoilers)

This is Joseph

It has become hip for critics to complain about the new Star Wars movie.  That said, it is hard to imagine objectively bad cinema sustaining such high box office numbers.  Buzz and nostalgia can result in a large opening day but don't provide a good explanation for the sustained numbers and the repeat viewings.  I admit that I was one of the repeat viewers -- I had low expectations and they were definitely overcome.

Now, it is true that the movie starts out derivative and kind of stays there.  But it is a skillfully done version of derivative.  There is fan service, some of which is distracting, but you could watch the movie without ever having seen Star Wars and enjoy it.

Instead of presuming that this is the last good movie before the series craters, I think that we need to wait and see.  The next movie will have a new director, with a reputation for being a free thinker. It is obviously possible that the next movie will take derivative too far, and result in a bad flick.  There is no guarantee that a studio can't find a way to mess up a popular franchise, but I must admit two things:

One, the movie was a lot better than I expected.

Two, I am now cautiously optimistic about Stars Wars VIII and I look forward to seeing if my optimism is warranted.  

That said, J. J. Abrams does need to figure out how to create a perception of time passing during space travel.  It's by far the most immersion breaking flaw in the film, and could be easily improved by looking at Star Wars IV or almost any episode of Star Trek.

A good new year's resolution

This is Joseph

Harold Pollack has a great article in Vox on improving personal finances.  In particular, the first suggestion, "Pay off (or chip away at) your credit card debt", is probably the easiest way to improve one's long term financial situation.

A thought for the new year: Eisenhower on planning

From the indispensable Robert Bateman:

"Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: The very definition of "emergency" is that it is unexpected. Therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning. So, the first thing you do is to take all the plans off the top shelf and throw them out the window and start once more. But if you haven't been planning, you can't start to work, intelligently at least."

Happy New Year from Windsor McCay and Little Nemo

Make it a good one. 

Originally posted at Mippyville.