Today I bid a not particularly fond farewell to 2013. It has been the worst year of my working life since I got out of grad school.

Not only was my real income lower than it has been since then but, worse from my point of view, I was bored. I just didn’t have enough to do.

To some degree it has been circumstances. However, to some degree it’s my own darned fault. I miscalculated.

I recognized that my workload would slow down at some point but I’d been counting on that happening in about five years. At that point I might have been more willing simply to allow my client base to diminish little by little every year. I’m not ready for that now.

Instead of wallowing in self-pity, I’m going to look at the bright side and count my many blessings. Chiefest among those is my dear wife who love and support are unfailing and a constant source of joy.

Another of my blessings is my siblings, their spouses, and my nephews and nieces. All of my nephews and nieces are now launched into life. Some are prospering, some are surviving. When some kids who are in the top ten percent of the population in brains, looks, and probably in the top 1% of the population in hard work aren’t prospering, there’s a real social pathology at work. Being smart, working hard, and having a college degree are clearly no longer enough. What in the world are the ordinary kids or, worse, those who dropped out of high school going to do?

My dogs, too, are a last source of joy. I don’t know if I can describe for you what it’s like to have your own, personal therapy dogs. This is a house full of love.

This year I’ll begin rebuilding. Sadly, I’m not alone. There are millions of other people who are in much more serious straits than I am. That’s a blessing of which I’m always aware.

In 2013 the population of the United States grew by .71%, just about the replacement rate:

An aging Baby Boomer population and slower immigration combined for nearly stagnant U.S. population growth in 2013 as the total number of residents inched up even more slowly than the previous year.

Figures released Monday by the U.S. Census Bureau show that growth for the 12 months ending July 1 was 0.71%, or just under 2.3 million people. That’s the slowest since 1937, according to Brookings Institution demographer William Frey, who called this year’s growth “underwhelming.”

Now it might be that if the economy were growing faster so would the population. Or if sectors other than the healthcare sector were growing. My own view is that we’ve just accelerated our transition to reduced immigration a bit. The demographics of Latin America and the Caribbean just can’t support the level of immigration to the U. S. from there we’ve experienced over the last several decades.

However, if this trend continues a number of companies will have a difficult period of adjustment. Their industries will suddenly have become mature and the only way to grow will be to take business away from competitors or diversify (and take business away from companies they aren’t accustomed to competing with).

Don’t know much about history
Don’t know much biology
Don’t know much about science book
Don’t know much about the French I took

This morning I stumbled across a lament that members of Congress didn’t have a better understanding of economics. I’d say the complaint was about accounting rather than economics but I don’t think that most Congressmen understand either particularly well. Now Robert VerBruggen is complaining that “financial experts” should have a better understanding of statistics. The article caught my eye because the subject is crime statistics in Chicago, something rather clearly understated by the official reckoning.

Now to be honest I’d be happy if elected officials, journalists, and pundits (professional or amateur) had the quantitative skills of infants. Sixty years ago Piaget thought that children didn’t develop quantitative skills (like the ability to identify whether one quantity was larger than another) until late preschool years. Thirty years ago Starkey and Cooper demonstrated that infants as young as four to six months had that particular quantitative skill known as numerosity.

This is apparently a skill that eludes many.

Robert Tracinski gloats:

There’s no drum roll for the unveiling of the #1 top story of 2013: the spectacular collapse of ObamaCare. It’s a story so big there’s no suspense about anything else coming close.

We had to wait three and a half years from the time it was passed for ObamaCare to fully go into effect, and now we know the purpose of that delay, don’t we? It wasn’t because they needed four years to implement it, because they put off many key decisions about ObamaCare until after last year’s election. No, they needed the delay so that we wouldn’t “find out what’s in it” until after the election. Because if any of this had happened before November 2012, do you think Barack Obama would be sitting in the Oval Office right now?

Finding out what’s in it, to use Nancy Pelosi’s infamous phrase, has been the big theme of this year.

Never was a disaster more predictable, or more widely predicted. Possibly my own greatest moment of vindication as a writer is the fact that I warned, in late 2009, that under ObamaCare “You Will Lose Your Private Health Insurance.” Lo and behold, four years later, we’re losing it. And we’re not happy about it. That’s the big story to look for in 2014, by the way. I’m already hearing stories about Democratic operative being approached in public and told off by angry strangers who are livid at losing their insurance.

and declares the PPACA a dead letter. According to Mr. Tracinski the PPACA:

is a failure so total, so comprehensive, and so multifaceted that it will be studied by schoolchildren 50 years from now when their teachers explain to them why the giant welfare and regulatory state built up in the second half of the 20th century collapsed in the first half of the 21st.

Just as I’ve been saying that proponents of the PPACA have been and continue to be declaring victory prematurely, I think that opponents of the law are declaring it dead prematurely. Indeed, despite my resolve not to make predictions here for the coming year, I’m pretty confident that on December 31, 2014 the PPACA will still be on the books. There’s a good reason for this. As Mr. Tracinski observes:

ObamaCare is not really a law. It is an open-ended grant of power and a set of vague guidelines and aspirations, with all of the details to be filled in by the executive branch.

but he’s saying that as though it were a bad thing. From the point of view of supporters of the PPACA it’s a good thing. The PPACA has no benchmarks, no clear goals, and no way to determine whether it’s failing or succeeding. Its supporters will continue to declare victory while its opponents declare it dead for the foreseeable future.

However, my best advice, like the title of this post, is from The Princess Bride: get used to disappointment.

This is the time of the year for retrospectives and, in the unlikely event that you’re looking for one, I’d recommend Dave Barry’s. Here’s a sample. In October

… the federal government, in an unthinkable development that we cannot even think about, partially shuts down. The result is a catastrophe of near-sequester proportions. Within hours wolves are roaming the streets of major U.S. cities, and bacteria the size of mature salmon are openly cavorting in the nation’s water supply. In the Midwest, thousands of cows, no longer supervised by the Department of Agriculture, spontaneously explode. Yellowstone National Park — ALL of it — is stolen. In some areas gravity stops working altogether, forcing people to tie themselves to trees so they won’t float away. With the nation virtually defenseless, the Bermudan army invades the East Coast, within hours capturing Delaware and most of New Jersey.

By day 17, the situation has become so dire that Congress, resorting to desperate measures, decides to actually do something. It passes, and the president signs, a law raising the debt ceiling, thereby ensuring that the federal government can continue spending spectacular quantities of money that it does not have until the next major totally unforeseeable government financial crisis, scheduled for February 2014.

This was definitely a year in which the best alternatives were to laugh or to cry. If you’d prefer to laugh, read Dave Barry’s recap of the year. More hits than misses.

If you’d rather cry, there’s always the state of Illinois’s financial report.

As you can see, Will is taking good care of Tally. Tally is wearing a pair of boxer shorts, protecting a pressure sore that’s now healing nicely. Our vet removed the scab that had formed over it to reveal nice, healthy new skin. She seems happier and is moving more comfortably.

There’s a good article at The Atlantic on Vermont’s statewide experiment in healthcare reform that you might want to take a look at. Vermont is in the process of implementing a single payer system. Here are its broad outlines:

The program was designed by Harvard economist William Hsiao, who detailed the plain in a 2011 Health Affairs article. Hsiao projected the state would save 25.3 percent annually in total healthcare spending, lower household and employer healthcare spending, job growth, and higher economic output for the state. The savings would come from lower administrative expenses, reduced fraud and abuse, eliminating middlemen, malpractice reform, and governance improvements. These savings, about $4.6 billion over the first five years, would be plowed back into paying to cover the uninsured and expanding benefits and services leaving $2.3 billion in residual savings. The law also created the Green Mountain Care Board, an independent group charged with overseeing the law and ensuring quality. What the plan didn’t do is lay out how the state government would pay for its increased spending.

Under the new system nearly all of Vermont’s residents would be enrolled in Green Mountain Care. It would, in effect, become the sole healthcare insurer in the state and employers and other purchasers of insurance would substitute taxes paid to the state for premiums paid to insurance companies.

Vermont is a very nearly perfect Petrie dish for such an experiment. It is small (both geographically and in terms of population), extremely homogeneous, and economically diverse. It has a higher household income than the country does nationally, a lower unemployment rate, and a higher average level of academic attainment than the country does nationally.

The state’s largest private employer is IBM which has a manufacturing facility in the state. Vermont doesn’t have a large presence of big companies, an advantage in implementing a plan of this sort since most such companies self-insure and companies that self-insure are likely to resist any plan like Vermont’s.

Importantly, Vermonters are more favorably disposed towards government services (and taxes) than is the case in many states.

The entire approach is still in its infancy, more an idea than an actual plan. If a single payer plan can work anywhere in the United States, it’s Vermont and success in Vermont would impel other states to imitate the Green Mountain State. Conversely, if Vermont’s experiment with single payer were to fail and, especially, if it were unable to restrain the growth of healthcare costs, it would probably discourage other states from following that path.

Some children see Him lily white,
the baby Jesus born this night.
Some children see Him lily white,
with tresses soft and fair.
Some children see Him bronzed and brown,
The Lord of heav’n to earth come down.
Some children see Him bronzed and brown,
with dark and heavy hair.

The children in each different place
will see the baby Jesus’ face
like theirs, but bright with heavenly grace,
and filled with holy light.
O lay aside each earthly thing
and with thy heart as offering,
come worship now the infant King.
‘Tis love that’s born tonight!

That song has music by Alfred S. Burt and words by Wihla Hutson. It was written in 1951. Obviously, we’ve come a long way since then but not, apparently, in a good way.

I’d thought I was going to steer clear of this topic but this article encouraged me to comment.

There’s been something of a flap about a newsreader’s comment to the effect that, of course, Jesus and Santa Claus were white. Does it really make a difference? I have no problem with German medieval Jesuses, Nigerian Jesuses, or Thai Jesuses. Or Santa Clauses, for that matter.

However, for those of you who are absolutely convinced that Jesus of Nazareth was obviously brown, I have a question: how do you know? We have no contemporaneous photos of him. In the earliest paintings he is sometimes portrayed as white, sometimes as brown, sometimes as black, sometimes even as blue. It seems that what paint the painter had on hand or what satisfied his aesthetic taste was more important than any kind of verisimilitude. If you’re arguing for historical accuracy, again, how do you know?

I’ll give two examples of why we should have no confidence in any kind of pseudo-historical speculations based on backwards extrapolations from present-day experience. First, we should be cautious about drawing any conclusions from geography. Two thousand years ago the people who lived in, say, Idaho might have been the ancestors of the people who lived there two hundred years ago. Or they might not. The more we learn about prehistory the more complicated the genetic picture seems to get. Similarly, what did Jews of two thousand years ago look like? The best answer is that we have no idea.

Most of the present-day residents of the Middle East other than Israeli Jews self-identify as Arabs or Persians. That certainly wasn’t the case two thousand years ago. The Middle East of the early Christian Era was a hodgepodge of Romans (some of whom were blondes), Greeks (some of whom were blondes), Persians, Bedouins, and people whose origins we can only speculate about. They might have been white or brown or black or any color in between. We simply don’t know.

We don’t know what the Jews of 2,000 years ago looked like. The Y-haplogroups of modern Jews appear to be pretty Levantine while their mitochondrial DNA is all over the map. I could produce hundreds or even thousands of photos of Lebanese people who are all shades including white and brown. But what about the Jews of 2,000 year ago? We simply don’t know.

Secondly, DNA testing of remains from two millennia ago won’t tell us what Jesus looked like unless they’re Jesus’s remains (and those would tell us a great deal more). As a rule you can’t infer much about individual genetics based on population genetics. Especially in a crossroads like the Middle East.

All in all I prefer the view expressed in Some Children See Him. Jesus—and Santa Claus—are whatever race and hue works best for you.

This year we had a very quiet, modest Christmas. We had no guests. It was just my wife, the dogs, and me.

I looked at it sort of as we do our usual Sunday with a late morning brunch and earlyish supper, not lavish but nice. Except with Christmas decorations and present opening.

I received three DVDs: Nina Foch’s course for actors and filmmakers; We’re Not Dressing, a musical version of Barry’s The Admirable Creighton, Bing Crosby’s first movie also featuring Burns & Allen; and Damsel in Distress, a Fred Astaire picture that has the last movie score composed by George Gershwin to be released before his death, also featuring Burns & Allen. I also received a music CD and a voucher good for one class of my choice, presumably a cooking, cheesemaking, or brewing class.

For brunch I made good use of the Southern Care package we receive annually from dear old friends: I made eggs, biscuits, and country ham with redeye gravy.

In the evening we had a simple dinner of roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and peas. Birthday cake was later.