I’ve heard of people loving their Macs but this is taking things a step too far:

(NEWSER) – A Florida judge has tossed out a bizarre motion from a man who claimed he wanted to marry his “porn filled Apple computer.”

It’s being claimed, probably correctly, that this is a bizarre anti-gay marriage publicity stunt.

It seems to me that the notion that race is a social construct, a view that largely took hold among social scientists after I had already left college, is fated (as Trotsky memorably said of the Mensheviks) to the dustbin of history. I don’t believe that it can survive the combination of the mapping of the human genome and genetic testing. That the subject to which Robert VerBruggen turns at RealClearScience, reviewing a book titled A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History:

It’s an important book. It should demolish the idea that race is nothing whatsoever but a “social construct” and jumpstart a conversation about human history. But unfortunately, A Troublesome Inheritance does not equip readers to deal with the broader ramifications of the claims it makes: Though such concerns are arguably outside the realm of science, these theories have the potential to inflame racial prejudices, and Wade’s attempts to address this fact leave much to be desired.

I certainly hope it doesn’t “jumpstart a conversation”. “Conversation” has become an auto-antonym, a word that means both one thing and its opposite like “inflammable”. The dictionary definition of “conversation” is an informal exchange of ideas using speech. It now also means a sermon issued by one person or group to another, very much the opposite of the dictionary definition.

What I hope it jumpstarts is reflection.

Investigations into racial differences have a bad pedigree. They’re frequently used as cudgels to beat some despised group or other with. For example, Mr. VerBruggen repeats one of them:

Wade also digs into Jewish history, relaying theories that the religion’s emphasis on literacy — a skill with little practical value in a farming society — may have driven the less intelligent to join Christianity instead, and that European Jews’ being highly concentrated in intellectually demanding professions like moneylending may have further contributed to increased IQ.

I’m skeptical of that. IMO a more productive investigation might be comparing urbanized Jews with rural Jews or middle class Jews with lower class Jews. My suspicion is that the cultural and social factors overwhelm the genetic ones.

I think that’s the case with cross-racial comparisons of intelligence, too: the variations within races are much more significant than those between races. A prudent society would promote its citizens making the best use of their gifts, regardless of gender (in the case, for example, of the Middle East) or race. That race and gender continue to matter suggests that we continue to have a long way to go.

In the wake of the debacle that’s unfolding in Ukraine, I’m seeing an odd sort of argument being made. It goes something like this.

Various miniscule countries have a right to exist because of self-determination. They don’t have the ability to protect themselves from their neighbors. Consequently, we (the United States) have an obligation to defend them.

Note that’s what is meant by NATO these days: the obligation of the United States to protect other countries while the remainder of our NATO allies stand around, ready to hold our coat while we work. Or not as they see fit.

I think that’s the most bizarre definition of self-determination I’ve ever heard. What the heck kind of right to exist does a country that can’t or won’t defend itself have?

I completely understand why these countries want us to defend them. What I can’t figure is what’s in it for us. I don’t see that it strengthens our security, enhances our prestige, or furthers any strategic interest.

I think I mentioned a month or so ago that my real income in 2013 was the lowest it had been in my adult life. My nominal income was lower than it’s been in decades.

A year ago I started putting out some feelers and I’ve added a few clients. It’s better than nothing but none of my new clients has much potential. Once I’ve started working with a client, I tend to retain the client, well, forever which is something.

At the beginning of the year I thought I’d secured a new client with substantial potential but for one reason or another that hasn’t materialized. It may eventually. We’ll see.

Over the last month I’ve put out more feelers and am beginning to get some nibbles. Last week I received roughly one inquiry or offer a day which is encouraging. It fully supports my belief that my skills remain saleable.

One of the problems I’ve encountered is that I’m not looking for a job. Based on what I’ve been seeing I could get a fulltime permanent job just about any time I wanted one but I don’t want one. I’m looking for work which is a slightly different proposition. My ideal solution would be for some combination of new clients who would give me ten hours of billable work a week over time. That really isn’t much and I would think it would be doable.

My least preferred alternative would be taking a fulltime job. That would leave me unable to serve my present clients towards whom I still feel responsibility.

Evan Soltas has a very interesting post that examines why the labor force participation rate is declining. After some math and pseudo-math, here’s what he finds:

The headline result is that 1.7 percentage points of the decline in the labor force participation rate are explained by changes in the demographic composition of the population, and that 1.1 percentage points are left unexplained. The 95-percent confidence intervals on those figures are that between 1.4 and 1.9 percentage points are explained and between 0.8 and 1.4 percentage points are unexplained.

Note that “demographic composition” has more than one component. It includes both Baby Boomers who he presumes are retiring and young workers who are seeking more education.

He mentions one shortcoming of the analysis in his concluding observations: he only examines a very small period. Commenters point out several technical issues with his analysis. I’ll point out some others. Although he recognizes the endogeneity of young workers seeking more education as a factor:

Another concern is the obvious endogeneity problem with education. That is, if the economy’s terrible, that affects your decision of whether to work now or to go back to school. But note that this problem is insoluble without a model of how the economy affects education decisions, something well beyond the scope of my work here. What my work suggests, though, is that this exercise is worthwhile. Since you get a year older every year, there’s not a lot of mystery to the aging-working link. But, since we know now that education decisions were actually important to driving down overall labor force participation, maybe we should go back and think about it carefully.

i.e. conditions other than age, e.g. the state of the economy, affect whether young workers seek more education or not. However, he fails to recognize that the same is true of older workers leaving the workforce: that, too, is not strictly exogenous.

Another issue is that although lives births and people who live to turn 65 are frequently thought of as smooth and continuous they aren’t. That wouldn’t be an issue if he were considering a longer timeframe but, since he’s only considering a couple of months, noise in the underlying data could be significant.

That aside note that the amount he attributes to older workers leaving the workforce is just about the same as the amount he considers unexplained. In other words Baby Boomers retiring doesn’t explain the decline in the LFPR. It probably explains less than half of it.

Here are probably his most important findings:

And what just straight up doesn’t matter? Changes in the share of people on welfare, disability aside. Changes in health, after accounting for disability and age. Changes in the sex and race composition of the labor force.

Overall it makes for interesting reading, especially if you’re math-oriented.

In the final analysis I believe that wondering too much about why the LFPR is declining is misdirection. Whatever the reason, it’s declining and that has implications. Among those implications are lowered tax revenues, reduced income for many people, and less economic activity in general.

Here’s a headline that caught my eye—”Man arrested in Santa Paula avocado theft”:

A man was arrested Saturday on suspicion of stealing avocados in Santa Paula, police said.

Officers responded about 3 p.m. to the area of East Telegraph Road and Texas Lane regarding two people stealing avocados, authorities said.

When police arrived, both people tried to flee, authorities said.

An officer caught one suspect, who was found to have 53 pounds of avocados, police said. The other person dropped 54 pounds of avocados before fleeing, officials said.

Apparently, avocados are a prime target for drug addicts. They can be sold pretty easily on the street for a buck a piece, don’t attract much attention in Southern California, and aren’t easy to trace.

They weigh about a half pound each so a hundred pounds of avocados is a lot of avocados.

Justice Louis Brandeis once characterized the states as “laboratories of democracy”. At Slate Jordan Weissmann writes about Seattle’s experiement in raising the local minimum wage to $15 an hour:

Economists everywhere may soon be thanking Seattle Mayor Ed Murray. Not because of his inspired policymaking, but because Murray seems ready to turn his city into a gigantic laboratory for one of the most ambitious, and quite possibly misbegotten, labor market experiments in recent memory.

The entire article is interesting and I commend it to your attention.

As I see things the real minimum wage peaked around 1970 and, well, conditions were very different then than they are now. The labor market was different. The global economy was different. It was a lot easier to get a job that paid more than minimum wage then that it s now. I think the primary effect of the high minimum wage was to incentivize the mass immigration we’ve seen since then, something only paralleled in our history by the immigration at the end of the 19th century.

It may be that a $15 minimum wage in Seattle will work out just fine. The experiment will soon be under way. Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn wants to raise Illinois’s minimum wage to $10 an hour, something I suspect will be disastrous. Illinois already has the third-highest unemployment rate in the country and a higher minimum wage than Wisconsin, Iowa, Indiana, or Missouri. I don’t think that Illinois is healthy enough to make a good experimental subject.

Rock star French economist Thomas Piketty has an op-ed in The Guardian you might want to take a look at. He proposes radical changes to European Union governance guided by what is to my eye and, presumably, the eyes of most Americans something pretty obvious: for a common currency to work there must also be a common fiscal policy. And a common fiscal policy requires a democratic European legislature:

It is time to recognise that Europe’s existing institutions are dysfunctional and need to be rebuilt. The central issue is simple: democracy and the public authorities must be enabled to regain control of and effectively regulate 21st century globalised financial capitalism. A single currency with 18 different public debts on which the markets can freely speculate, and 18 tax and benefit systems in unbridled rivalry with each other, is not working, and will never work. The eurozone countries have chosen to share their monetary sovereignty, and hence to give up the weapon of unilateral devaluation, but without developing new common economic, fiscal and budgetary instruments. This no man’s land is the worst of all worlds.

I think this brings something into relief that appears to be lost on the progressive Americans who lionize Dr. Piketty. His main interest is Europe and his assumptions and prescriptions are targeted at a European audience intent on fixing European problems.

Erstwhile Obama Administration “auto czar” Steve Rattner takes to the opinion page of the New York Times to argue that it’s time to end the corporate income tax. Reacting to the same news I commented on earlier he writes:

A more ambitious, and therefore more politically difficult idea, would be to scrap our unworkable corporate tax system altogether and instead tax shareholders, first by eliminating low tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

That would offset only a small portion of the loss of corporate tax revenue (a projected $350 billion in 2015), so we should raise the balance by eliminating loopholes enjoyed by wealthy Americans, increasing rates on their earned income and potentially introducing new concepts, such as taxing gains on investments as stock prices rise rather than when they are sold.

The wealthy need not fear; eliminating corporate taxes would lead to a jump in business earnings and, consequently, stock prices. That would encourage similar actions by other countries. Otherwise, their companies might move here to enjoy a zero corporate tax rate.

Higher stock prices would also help pension funds, foundations and other tax-exempt institutions focused on social betterment.

While eliminating corporate taxation would be branded a giveaway, properly engineered reforms would provide a huge uplift to ordinary Americans.

It’s heartening to see a Democratic Party apparatchik like Mr. Rattner getting behind eliminating the corporate income tax. As best as I can tell, it presently serves mostly to give large corporations that can afford armies of tax attorneys and accounts and are able to engineer exemptions for themselves a competitive advantage over small and medium companies that don’t have the resources to do the same thing.

Just as a reminder, the U. S. has the highest marginal effective tax rate on corporate investment of any OECD country.