The elephant bell

I’ve been reading blogs for almost as long as there have been blogs and my reading as you might expect has been, er, eclectic. I’ve been reading blogs since late in 2001 or early 2002, was a frequent commenter on several now defunct and much-lamented blogs (notably Winds of Change) and at one point was a front page contributor at WoC, Dean Esmay’s blog, and OTB as well as writing posts here at The Glittering Eye.

A comment about the mists of the distant past in a comment thread at OTB caught my eye:

Completely ignored here is the fact that the rise of the progressive bloggers was almost entirely a reaction to the way the right wing was able to disseminate its bullshit through its paid media and then into mainstream sources all the way through the Clinton administration.

That’s not the way I remember it. The way I remember events is that Jerome Armstrong’s MyDD was the first major Left Blogosphere blog, it inspired several other major Left Blogosphere blogs, notably The Daily Kos, and it was primarily a way of complaining about the George W. Bush Administration, predating 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan, etc.

Could anybody help me out with this?

There’s an article over at New Scientist on how crops farmed may have affected cultural and maybe even genetically mediated cognitive development:

It is a cliché to say that East Asians think in terms of the group, while Westerners think in terms of the individual. But there is some truth to it, and part of the explanation may lie in what our ancestors ate. Rice farming seems to have fostered collective thinking while wheat farming favoured individualism.

The popular image of Americans and Europeans as individualist and innovative, versus Asians as collectivist and conforming, is partly true. People from the West and Far East can and do think in both ways, but these peoples’ cognitive styles divide broadly along those lines.

Researchers have proposed many possible explanations for these cultural habits, including differences in prosperity and rates of infectious disease.

Thomas Talhelm of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville wondered if a region’s long-term way of life is what matters: specifically, whether its people grow rice or wheat. “The rice-growing regions of East Asia are less individualistic than the Western world or northern China, even with their wealth and modernisation,” says Talhelm.

I think that’s right but it’s a bit more complicated than that. Different crops have differing nutritional payoffs. You can support more people per hectare growing rice and soy beans than you can growing wheat, oats, rye, and barley but in turn it takes more people working more intensively to accomplish it. Paddy rice culture both encourages and requires more people.

However, you can support even more people growing maize and beans with a lot less work. Why didn’t Central America develop the huge populations that China and Europe did? I think the answer is that corn is very hard on the soil and Central America doesn’t have enormous amounts of arable land. That discouraged the long-term stable occupation of the land required to develop those populations. The people of Central America, consequently, developed a different strategy than those of Europe and Asia did.

As usual Africa drew the short straw. The problem in sub-Saharan Africa has always been protein.

In a nutshell that’s the way I see that human civilization developed. The crops you cultivated, the requirements for their cultivation, and the land you lived in all contributed to genetic and cultural development.

Let’s start off with a little basic statistics. A “normal distribution” is illustrated in the curve on the left. In a normal distribution whatever is being measured occurs with the characteristic that the mean (average) equals the median (the middle of the distribution of values) equals the mode (the most commonly occurring value in the distribution). Incomes do not occur within a normal distribution. Consequently, average is an extremely poor way to understand incomes.

In a post at the blog of the New York Times Teresa Tritch attempts to explain why even in the face of stagnant incomes for college grads it still makes sense to get a college education:

Graduating from college still means better job prospects. And there are ways to try to buck the wage-stagnation trend, like choosing an in-demand major, though — let’s face it — most people are not cut out to be electrical engineers. College is also valuable for non-economic reasons, including developing one’s intellect and establishing personal, community, institutional and professional ties. It correlates to better health and greater civic engagement throughout one’s life.

I’m much more skeptical than Ms. Tritch. Quite to the contrary, I think that if you exclude the wages of a relative handful of very highly compensated individuals the comparative wage picture of those without college educations and those with college educations looks a lot different. That is what “income inequality” means. Some people get paid a lot more than others.

Here are my predictions for what excluding those wages would do to the income distribution chart. I think it would move the mean income, the median income, and the mode income left. That means that average incomes for college grads would be a lot closer to the average wage of non-grads.

I also think that it makes sense not simply to talk about income but about net income. College grads incur expenses that non-grads don’t. They frequently borrow to pay for their educations and pay interest on those debts—education loans are the fastest-growing form of indebtedness today. Loan repayment reduces net income. Additionally, income over a working life should be taken into account rather than just income. College grads forego years of income and if for most of them the pay they can expect isn’t a great deal more than it would be had they not foregone those years of income, how much economic sense does it actually make?

You won’t find that in Ms. Tritch’s blog post.

The real reason people are pursuing higher education isn’t to increase their average wages. It’s to give them a competitive advantage over people who don’t have a college education. The more people get college educations, the less effective that will be.

And then, of course, there’s the reality that 40% of recent college grads can’t find jobs.

Today seems to be the day for specious claims and vapid prescriptions. Maybe they’re assuming that no one notices over the weekend. Under the category of vapid prescriptions we have this op-ed from Edward Alden and Rebecca Strauss at the New York Times on the sad strategy of producing growth in your own state by luring businesses away from other states:

Such competition among states is all too common. Each year, state and local governments in the United States spend more than $80 billion, or roughly 7 percent of their total budgets, on tax breaks and subsidies to attract investments from auto companies, movie producers, aircraft makers and other industries. Last year, Washington State granted a subsidy package to Boeing worth $8.7 billion — the largest to a single company in American history — to keep Boeing from moving production to South Carolina.

From a national perspective, this is about as dumb as it gets. Taxpayer money is wasted to pay off companies that would most likely have invested somewhere else in the United States. State governments would be better off if they collectively ended the handouts and competed for business in other ways, such as making investments in infrastructure or education or offering lower overall tax rates. But no state wants to stop first and risk losing jobs if other states don’t follow suit.

That’s a genuine problem but as is the case with so many op-eds the proposed solutions are genuinely vapid. The prescriptions are to explain to the voters the cost of the inducements and for states, for reasons they don’t explain, to enter into bilateral agreements.

Let’s take the example of companies that re-locate from California to Texas. Do Mr. Alden and Ms. Strauss genuinely believe that explaining the costs to Texas voters (in many cases, none) and California entering into a non-compete contract with Texas will solve the problem? Companies move from California to Texas for the more business-friendly climate offered without further inducements by the Lone Star State. You can salute the benefits of California’s more extensive regulations or explain how dearly California needs the tax revenue to support its commitments but I doubt those will be particular inducements either to Texas voters or companies.

Further, governors who court out-of-state businesses are fulfilling their fiduciary responsibilities to the voters that elected them. The governor of Texas has a responsibility to the voters of Texas, not the voters of California. That Texas voters will re-elect or reject him based on what he does for them is an additional inducement.

The brutal reality is that states going out of their way to lure businesses from other states will be an attractive strategy as long as economic growth is as low as it has been since the late recession. As long as re-allocating economic growth among states is an easier chore than producing growth within states, we should expect states to encourage the behaviors that the authors decry.

Windows 8.x is a flop:

In July 2008 (when StatCounter started recording OS share) XP dominated the market with 75.07 percent. Today it sits on 15.84 percent — a drop of 59.23 percent. But while XP was tumbling, Windows 7 was rising at a meteoric rate. It’s a clear upgrading picture — one OS ceding to another, newer one. That picture is totally absent when you look at the impact that Windows 8.x has had.

From launch on October 26 2012, Windows 8.x took 18 months (with a little rounding up) to get to where it is now — 13.73 percent. 18 months after it launched on October 22 2009, Windows 7 was at 33.22 percent. At the rate it’s going (an average of 0.76 percent a month), Windows 8.x will take another two years to reach that mark, assuming users of other operating systems (Windows 7 and XP) decide they want to make the switch. Of course, the keyboard and mouse friendly improvements added in Windows 8.1 Update could see the tiled OS pack on market share at a faster rate, but it’s too early to know.

I think that’s been obvious long since. Windows 8 is the only version of Microsoft’s operating system to date whose release drove up its predecessor’s sales.

Windows operating systems still have 88% of the desktop market, the balance being OS X, Android, and Linux.

It might be claimed that market share of desktop operating systems is irrelevant because the PC is dead but that reflects a misunderstanding of the U. S. market. The U. S. computer market is completely mature; just about every prospective customer already has what they need. That’s not just true in the desktop sector and mainframe sectors but in the smartphone and tablet sectors as well. More new businesses could spur additional desktop sales or some “killer app” could boost tablet sales but barring those eventualities the market in just about every sector of the computer market from handheld to mainframe is mature.

Mature markets operate drastically differently than new ones do and American computers companies haven’t adjusted to that reality yet.

Here’s something I found last night that I hope that regular readers and commenters here enjoy. It’s a profile that a regular commenter (whose name I will not mention to avoid search engines) has written of his wife.

I’d like to meet that courageous woman.

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden has come out in favor of reform in the corporate tax, too:

In pursuit of lower tax rates, American multinationals are merging with smaller foreign companies and moving their headquarters overseas. About 50 U.S. companies have leveraged this “inversion” tactic in the past 30 years—and more than 20 have done so in the past two years. And just recently we have seen Pfizer make a bid for AstraZeneca that would move its tax domicile to the United Kingdom.

While they may not be breaking U.S. laws, many of these companies are navigating a loophole in America’s broken and dysfunctional tax code. And while their shareholders may secure a temporary win, workers, taxpayers and this country all lose. America’s tax base erodes at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, increasing the burden on other companies and individuals. America also loses good jobs, talent, investment, and the ability to compete on a global stage.

Legal or not, this loophole must be plugged. Current law requires that U.S. companies reincorporating overseas must ensure that at least 20% of their stock is owned by their new, foreign partner. As chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, I am committed to raising this floor to at least 50% for all inversions taking place from May 8, 2014, on. I don’t approach retroactivity in legislation lightly, but corporations must understand that they won’t profit from abandoning the U.S.

It would be easy to point a finger at these runaway corporations alone and simply question their morality or patriotism, but that would be ignoring our own failure to bring the tax code into the 21st century. An uncompetitive tax code strains our economy, and we should not be surprised when corporations fight to get out from under antiquated tax rules.

Congress has a responsibility to reverse the tide—now.

Sen. Wyden is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

Our corporate tax rate is the highest among OECD countries (our effective rate is the highest as well). Since it’s the highest, if we reduce our tax rate from 35% to 24%, the average rate among OECD countries, the average would fall, too. To be competitive we’d need to reduce our rate considerably below 24%.

As I’ve mentioned before tax reform is something that’s long overdue, at least a decade overdue. While Sen. Wyden’s support for reform is welcome, the idea won’t make any progress without support from the Senate leadership and the White House.

The Chicago Teachers Union has voted to oppose the Common Core standards:

The Chicago Teachers Union has voted to oppose the Common Core Standards, a rigorous set of educational benchmarks implemented by Illinois law and in many other states.

The union announced its House of Delegates voted Wednesday to urge the city’s teachers to join the “growing national opposition to the Common Core State Standards, saying the assessments disrupt student learning and consume tremendous amounts of time and resources for test preparation and administration,” according to a new release.

If you haven’t been following the controversy, the “Common Core standards” are a set of K-12 educational standards for what kids should know about English and math at the end of each grade level. It has attracted both support and opposition. It’s been a bête noire of conservative talk show hosts for some time but more recently it has attracted opposition across a much broader spectrum of opinion. Most states have officially accepted the Common Core. Texas and Virginia, notably, have not and Indiana has formally withdrawn from them.

To my untutored eye it would appear that governors, textbook publishers, and E-school professors are the natural constituencies for the Common Core while school boards and teachers are their natural enemies since they intentionally remove discretion and consequent power from both groups.

Several reasons have been proposed for the influential CTU’s move. Not the least is that the CTU has suffered a number of setbacks over the last year and its members may simply be angry and oppositional.