While I was going over my geneaological research, I began to muse about the languages my ancestors spoke and realized that nobody born in my family since about 1890 has been a native speaker of any language other than English. I think that it’s pretty likely that my great-grandfather Schuler was bilingual in German and English. My grandfather Schuler, referred to by my generation as “Fred X”, may have spoken a little German but probably no more than my grandfather Blanchard who was definitely a native speaker of English and only English. I also think it’s pretty likely that my great-great-grandmother Celestine Didier was bilingual in French and English. I think that my great-great-grandfather Flanagan spoke a few words of Gaelic as did my great-grandmother McCoy but to the best of my knowledge neither spoken any language well other than English. But could they put on a brogue! Practically everybody on my mom’s side could put on a brogue and I think my mom spoke with a very, very faint brogue herself. Perhaps something in her prosody. Or maybe she was putting that on, too. I’ll never know. But she could definitely put on a brogue when she had a mind to as can I.

But that’s it. Everybody else has been a native speaker of English. My dad was fluent as a native in German but that was book l’arnin’. He was a native speaker of English. My dad used to say of my mom that she only spoke English but she understood all languages which is a pretty fair description. She was a great reader of body language, tone, and expression, and a good guesser. However, she only spoke English.

I speak several languages pretty fairly (and read more) but I’m a native speaker of English.

Have you noticed that neither President Obama’s supporters nor his detractors can bring themselves to take what he says at face value? They either believe he’s kidding (his supporters) or he’s lying (his detractors or maybe even his supporters for all I know). I have never thought the president was kidding. I thought it was possible he could be persuaded, for example on Afghanistan, but I’m beginning to doubt that as well.

Just for a moment assume that you can take what the president says at face value. What does that mean for

• the war in Afghanistan
• the economy
• the budget
• the prospects for war with Iran

As I’ve mentioned before one of my several hobbies is geneaological research. I’ve posted quite a number of posts on various branches of my family tree but I don’t recall whether I’ve posted an overview of my family history and I know that I haven’t posted on what I plan to do next or the areas in which I’ve hit a brick wall.

I can trace all branches of my family back to about 1880. You can click on the tree above for a larger image. Indeed, from then to now is so much a part of my identity I practically feel as though it’s all living memory although actual living memory only goes back about 80 years to my dad’s cousin, Joan, the last of her generation of my family still alive.

As you can see my dad’s family is a sort of German combination plate: Swiss, Rheinland-Pfalz, Rheinland-Westphalia, and (if my dad’s claims are to be believed) Swabia. I can trace my Schuler ancestry back at least six hundred years. I can trace the Wagners and Vogts back to around 1800 in Germany. My dad couldn’t trace them much farther back than that even using German records. The records just don’t exist any more. War.

I could flesh out some of the Schulers’, Wagners’, and Vogts’ information with a little travel, going back into the old tax rolls. They were landowners so they’re bound to show up. I doubt that there’s really that much more to be learned there. Where I’m stuck is with the Fischers and the Baders. My great-grandmother (father’s paternal grandmother) Mary Fischer may or may not have been born here. I really don’t know. I do know that her family lived in rural Missouri. I’ve got some pictures taken in the 1920s of a visit to his Fischer cousins by my dad’s Uncle Tony. A more surly-looking bunch of hillbillies you’ve never seen. I’ve been to the area in which they lived. I think it’s complete dead end. The records don’t seem to exist any more.

I know very little of the antecedents of my great-grandmother Emma Bader. I think she may have emigrated to this country as a very young woman (fifteen or sixteen years of age) all by herself. There’s some family folklore that her family was a prominent one—there have been claims that her father was the mayor of the town she was from. I really don’t know. I haven’t been able to locate much in the way of records of her prior to 1891. I’ve hit a brick wall here. Since my grandmother was born in March of 1891 the my great-grandparents must have gotten married no later than 1890 (these aren’t my Blanchard ancestors—the Wagners were very proper). Haven’t located a record.

I’ve traced my Blanchard ancestors back to the 1820s in Clinton County, New York but no farther. The relevant church records no longer exist—they were destroyed in a fire long ago. I’ve spoken with Clinton County county historian and the parish priest of the relevant parish. I’m at a dead end here. I think the Blanchards came from Canada which would imply that they were French but I don’t really know.

I’d like to know more about the Didiers. They were apparently well-to-do (property owners) and intermarried with one of the most prominent St. Louis families (making that connection is one of my contributions to documenting my family’s history). Maybe tax rolls but I doubt they’ll tell me much. I have no idea how my great-great-grandmother Celestine Didier ended up marrying my great-great-grandfather William Schneider. I know almost nothing about him other than that he died young. I suspect that his family was Alsatian but I have little more than suspicions.

I’d also like to know more about the McCoys. Based on the name they were Scots-Irish. I can almost trace them back to Ireland sometime between 1849 and 1856. They were clearly Famine Irish. I have no idea how or why they got from the environs of Pittsburgh to St. Louis, Missouri or how my great-grandmother Sarah McCoy ended up marrying my great-grandfather George Blanchard in Chicago (I’ve located the marriage record).

The Dunns, Rogans (or Grogans), Reillys, Rebstocks, and Freiczechs are a complete black box.

So that’s where my research stands. I might be able to trace the Schulers, Wagners, Vogts, and Baders by going to Switzerland and Germany. I’d need to know more about the Fischers to research them farther in Europe. I could go to Ireland and research the Flanagans (I know they were from Westmeath). Before I do that I’d like to know more about the McCoys.

Some of my previous geneaology posts:

My Family History
The Schulers
The Wagners
The McCoys
The Didiers
The Flanagans

Update

After writing this post I found my great-great-great-great-grandfather Francois Didier’s will online (Missouri has excellent digital legal records). It confirmed a number of things that I had inferred based on other information, e.g. that he was a person of some means, that my great-great-grandmother Celestine Didier was his granddaughter and that her father had died prior to 1876 (I haven’t been able to find a death record for him), and so on.

Around here I’ve frequently wondered about economics as a predictive science. I’m not alone. John Maynard Keynes, for example, once described the purpose of economic forecasting as to make astrology look good. That’s why I found this article, reproduced at naked capitalism, on the shortcomings of economic statistics very thought-provoking:

The Economist recently had a leader “Don’t Lie to Me Argentina” in which it accused Argentina of some kind of unforgivable treachery for politicising its economic statistics. As if economic statistics aren’t political in their very nature (a heavy bias towards capital and against labour, for instance).

So in contrast to H&H [a fellow MacroBusiness blogger], who enthuses that without economic data we are “naked, bereft of meaning” I wish to present a very different perspective. I wish to briefly examine what it would mean not to have economic statistics.

Here are some of the author’s suggestions about what that would mean:

1. We would have to stop being lazy in the way we construct meaning and do the work of creating meaning ourselves.
2. We would embrace a broader sense of meaning, one that did not involve just what can be measured.

There are three more bullet points and expansions on them. Read the whole thing.

I think those first two points should be thought of in an old MBA rule-of-thumb: if it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed. But it does make me wonder if, as was originally said about archaeology, economics is not a science, it’s a vendetta.

Tyler Cowen states a simple, provocative true or false question without elaboration:

As commodities prices fall, the rights of women rise.

The ensuing comments are as much a Rorschach test as anything else and I guess this post will be the same. It’s mostly an illustration of how I approach problems. Generally speaking, I don’t identify the applicable theory and try to apply it to the specific case which to my eye is what most of Tyler’s commenters have done (those that didn’t answer “How dare you!”, that is).

I found Tyler’s question too vague to be susceptible to straightforward investigation. What commodities? Where? How do you define “women’s rights”? Or determine that they’re rising? So I’ll answer a different, related question that I find a bit more rigorous: in the United States what is the historic relationship between industrial commodity prices and expansions of women’s legal rights? That may not be Tyler’s question but it’s one I can begin to answer.

Possible relationships would include a positive correlation, a negative correlation, no clear correlation, and a lagging or leading effect in either direction.

The graph above illustrates industrial commodity prices in the United States from 1862 to 1999. That should handle one side of the question.

I would characterize the periods of great expansions in women’s rights in the United States as two, the first from 1919 to 1935, the second from 1965 to 1982.

The first period saw women granted the right to vote, prohibition (at the time seen as a women’s rights issue), and concludes with the enactment of the Social Security Act of 1935 which provided subsidies to widows, married women, working women, and, importantly, AFDC.

The second period began with the enactment of the Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, included the period of Women’s Lib and the women’s rights movement, Roe v. Wade, women entering the workplace in unprecedented numbers, and ended with the failure of ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.

I can think of some other periods of expansion of women’s legal rights in the U. S. but those two should serve for discussion.

The first period of expansion of women’s legal rights accompanied what was, perhaps, the greatest decline in industrial commodity prices in U. S. history. The second period of expansion of women’s legal rights accompanied an even greater increase in industrial commodity prices. To my eye that suggests there’s no clear relationship.

This post from Dean Baker on why China will not have a dependency ratio problem confuses me. Why does he only cite percentages? Viz.:

If we look at the IMF’s data, we see that per capita GDP has rise by 740 percent over the last 25 years while Mexico’s per capita GDP has risen by just over 26 percent [warning: more arithmetic ahead]. Now let’s assume that China’s per capita income doesn’t rise at all over the next decade (absolutely no one expects this), while Mexico’s continues to grow at the same pace as it has over the last quarter century. This means that in 2020, per capita GDP in China will still be 740 percent higher than it was in 1985, while in Mexico per capita GDP will be 38.6 percent higher.

I have repeatedly pointed out that I do not want the U. S. to bomb or invade Iran. I think it would be illegal, immoral, and futile. It would be worse than a crime; it would be a mistake.

For more on this see here and here.

However, if I wanted to attack Iran I wouldn’t attack its hardened nuclear development facilities or its population centers or even its military. I would attack its oil fields, its oil refineries, and its fuel depots. I would do it with drones and I would keep it up until the present Iranian regime collapsed.

In his column in The Fiscal Times Bruce Bartlett points to “The Two Issues That Can Bring Down the Economy”. The two issues he highlights are both time-sensitive: the raising of the debt ceiling and the expiration of various tax cuts including the “Bush tax cuts” at the end of the year.

With the economy picking up, the Treasury may get enough extra tax revenue this year to put the debt limit problem off until after the election. I suspect that the expiring tax cuts will simply be extended for another year or two after the election unless Obama loses. In that case, he may veto any extension. Senate Democrats may also filibuster any Republican effort to extend them in 2013, leaving the economy to cope with a large tax increase at a time when it may still be fragile.

Clearly, the optimum solution would be a deal this year to replace the automatic budget cuts now in law with a better mix of spending reductions, as well as some kind of tax reform package to replace the expiring tax provisions and get the tax system on a permanent track. But given time constraints and political gridlock, it is hard to see that happening.

Those are just two of the factors that are within our control that could pose serious problems for the still fragile (and likely to stay that way) economy. There are plenty of other factors that aren’t within our control that could do as much or more harm:

• Economic slowdown in Europe.
• Financial crisis in China. China’s own property bubble appears to be collapsing right now.
• Rising gas prices. There’s a world market for oil and oil consumption by the long list of countries that actually subsidize the price of oil directly (China, India, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Venezuela, just to name a few) is doing what you’d expect: increasing sharply.
• War with Iran. Things may already have proceeded from the deliberative to the implementational and be beyond anybody’s control.
• The unknown unknowns.

One, more, or all of those may bite over the coming year. Have a nice day.

The Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics or your own lyin’ eyes?

Forget the modest 3.1 percent rise in the Consumer Price Index, the government’s widely used measure of inflation. Everyday prices are up some 8 percent over the past year, according to the American Institute for Economic Research.

The not-for-profit research group measures inflation without looking at the big, one-time purchases that can skew the numbers. That means they don’t look at the price of houses, furniture, appliances, cars, or computers. Instead, AIER focuses on Americans’ typical daily purchases, such as food, gasoline, child care, prescription drugs, phone and television service, and other household products.

And from an experiential standpoint for most people prices (which is what most ordinary, average Joes think of as “inflation”) are up sharply. The big offender? Transportation costs (AKA gasoline) up 21% year-on-year. Sounds like a campaign issue to me. Not a fair campaign issue but an issue that resonates with people nonetheless.