Maybe it’s because I’m from a border state. I learned a lot about racism and the Civil War in school—I grew up within walking distance of Civil War battlefields. Maybe it’s because of my family. My family was anti-slavery—my great–great-grandfather Wagner fought in the Civil War from its start to its end. He had met Lincoln when Lincoln was campaigning for Congress in his home town. In my family racism was about the worst sin you could commit. We travelled in the pre-civil rights South. I found it horrifying. My mom spent a good deal of her career teaching poor black kids to read and when my dad died he was defending a young black man pro bono.

I have also lived and worked in Germany.

Michele L. Norris writes in the Washington Post:

In today’s Germany, children learn through their teachers and textbooks that the Nazi reign was a horrible and shameful chapter in the nation’s past. Cadets training to become police officers in Berlin take 2½ years of training that includes Holocaust history and a field trip to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Maybe that’s what she’s heard but I don’t believe it’s true. 2/3s of Germans don’t have formal education beyond the 10th grade other than vocational training and the sort of education she’s talking about is almost entirely in secondary and even tertiary education. She should watch Das schreckliche Mädchen (“The Nasty Girl”). That rings true to me. Many Germans think that the reports of what the Germans did during the war are lies.

German schoolchildren still routinely use anti-Semitic phrases in their schoolyard taunts much as American kids used to a couple of generations ago. “You look like a Jew”. “You walk like a Jew”. Do kids still talk like that here? I haven’t heard that sort of thing in decades other than black kids addressing each other with the “N” word. Racism and anti-Semitism are strong in Germany and France. Believe it.

The editors of the Washington Post endorse a steep tax on capital gains and then continue with this:

Shrinking the wealth gap calls for a two-pronged attack: offer more opportunity to those at the bottom and trim the undue advantages of those at the top. In this editorial, we address the latter issue by discussing how best to tax the rich. The smartest approach is the one endorsed in 2018 by economists at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD): significant, broad-based taxes on capital gains, coupled with similarly efficient levies on transfers of wealth through gifts and inheritance. As the OECD report concluded, this promises the greatest increase in equity with the fewest costly side effects.

The distinction between a wealth tax and a high tax on capital gains is that a wealth tax makes it tough to stay rich while the capital gains tax makes it harder to become rich.

I would venture a guess that after ten years of both a tax on capital gains and a wealth tax the “wealth gap” would be even greater than when you started. It’s a matter of simple mathematic, i.e. don’t raise the bridge lower the river. Reduce the number of people in the U. S. with entry level skills or a command of English insufficient to get a job beyond one that pays minimum wage or lower. Focusing on the rich may make for good sound bites but I doubt it will accomplish as much as its proponents think including raising revenue or reducing the “wealth gap”.

It also depends on which wealth gap you’re trying to shrink: that between the top 1% of income earners and the top .01% of income earners or the gap between the top 10% and the bottom 90%. Sounds like they’re focused on the former.

Thomas Edsall’s latest New York Times offering, “We Are Leaving ‘Lost Einsteins’ Behind”, was pretty much what I expected it to be but I thought he raised some interesting points nonetheless. Let’s start with the title: what does he mean by “Einsteins”? Colloquially, it generally means a person with a high IQ. Let’s consider that for a moment.

As far as we can tell Einstein never took an IQ test but it’s estimated to have been four standard deviations above normal or more. .37%, a little more than a third of one percent, of the U. S. population might have IQs that high assuming normal distribution. That’s not a particularly good assumption as it turns out but it will do as a first order approximation. That means that there are a few more than 1 million people with IQs that high in the U. S. So, yes, there could be hundreds of thousands of undiscovered high IQ individuals in the U. S.

Does it matter? I think the answer is not very much. It helps a lot to have higher than median intelligence. It opens a lot of gates—it’s very difficult to become a medical doctor, for example, unless your IQ is more than one standard deviation above normal. But not all geniuses are successful and there is a positive correlation between a number of mental disorders including depression and very high intelligence.

Additionally, IQ tests only test a narrow band of skills and there are other skills, e.g. social-emotional development, which have been found to be more important than a high score on an IQ test.

As it turns out that’s what Mr. Edsall is pointing out but he focuses on another very narrow measure:

“Current talent search procedures focus on the assessment of mathematical and verbal ability,” wrote David Lubinski of Vanderbilt and Harrison J. Kell, a senior researcher at the Educational Testing Service, in “Spatial Ability: A Neglected Talent in Educational and Occupational Settings.” Lubinski and Kell stress the failure of many of such searches to test for the cognitive skill known as spatial ability.

What’s “spatial ability”? It’s the capacity “for mentally generating, rotating, and transforming visual images”. I know of no evidence that Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates excelled in that particular area but there is considerable evidence that they do have high IQs as measured by IQ tests. Today seven of the ten largest STEM areas are computer-related. I have rarely observed notable spatial ability among people in information technology other than in the rather narrow area of computer graphics. Quite the opposite in fact.

I think Mr. Edsall is cherrypicking. However, let’s assume that he’s correct and that we’re allowing a substantial source of ability to go to waste (also cf. here). The areas of engineering in which spatial ability would be most useful, e.g. mechanical engineering and civil engineering, have seen sharp declines in the native-born population over the last couple of decades. Why? The explanations are pretty simple: wages in those areas peaked a long time ago, demand for mechanical and civil engineers has not been increasing, and we can import as many as we might want from India which will ensure that wages don’t increase. Additionally, the steep decline of U. S. manufacturing employment which followed China’s gaining most favored nation trading status greatly reduced the need for people with spatial ability.

All of which point to the solution to the problem: resume making more of what we consume here and stop importing engineers from abroad. I suspect that was not Mr. Edsall’s point but it’s the direction in which the incentives point.

Before someone mentions it first, median IQ in China is higher than median IQ here. There are more people in China with IQs one standard deviation above normal than there are people here.

This post at NPR’s Goats and Soda, on COVID-19 mortality in India, raises a point worth considering:

How many people have died of COVID-19 since the pandemic began?

The official global total as of this week: 4.1 million.

But everyone agrees the true toll is far greater. A study released on Tuesday looks at how much of a disparity there may be in India, one of the epicenters of the pandemic.

The analysis, from the Center for Global Development, a think tank in Washington, D.C., looks at the number of “excess deaths” that occurred in India between January 2020 and June 2021 – in other words, how many more people died during that period than during a similar period of time in 2019 or other recent years.

Drawing death data from civil registries and other sources, the report came up with three estimates for undercounts. The conclusion is that between 3.4 and 4.7 million more people died in that pandemic period than would have been predicted. That’s up to 10 times higher than the Indian government’s official death toll of 414,482.

Shorter: the mortality from COVID-19 in India alone may be greater than the presently reported global mortality. But that in turn raises a host of questions. While excess deaths represents a reasonable first order approximation it’s far from accurate. Do you include people who died as a consequence of bad policy or poorly implemented policy? Who counts? How do you count?

Right now there is no uniform generally-accepted method of tallying the number of deaths due to COVID-19 not just globally but in the United States itself. The method of counting varies from state to state.

And while I’m on the subject I’ll complain about something I’ve been whinging about for more than a year: there has been no systematic nationwide epidemiological testing for COVID-19. We don’t really know whether 5% of the population has contracted the disease of 50%. I honestly don’t know how you can formulate reasonable policy with at least making an attempt at getting better information.

I’m broadly in favor this policy, described at Politico by Sam Mintz:

The bill, H.R. 3684 (117), would erect new bureaucratic hurdles for states seeking to spend federal money on laying asphalt, while steering them to more climate-friendly options like transit. It also would give cities more power over selecting and funding transportation projects — boosting the leverage of Democratic-led enclaves in red states such as Texas, where Houston is engaged in a high-profile fight with the state’s DOT over a highway expansion local pols don’t want.

The bill is, for now, is separate from a compromise infrastructure bill backed by the Biden administration and key GOP senators, which would provide $579 billion in new spending, as well as a $3.5 trillion go-it-alone proposal that Democrats hope to approve by party-line votes. These chess pieces are separate for now, but portions of all three could end up blended together into whatever Congress ends up enacting.

The structure of the empowering legislation for the Interstate Highway System encourages building new roads. Constructing new roads is largely free to the states while the cost of maintaining them falls squarely on the states’ treasuries. Does anyone else see the roots of our present situation there?

I think that state and local officials are much better positioned to identify state and local needs than federal officials and my observation is that people are willing to pay for things that they genuinely want and need.

At this point every city in the U. S. of any substantial size is already served by an interstate. Under the circumstances does it actually make sense to build more? Said another way how much sense does it make to tax people in Racine to pay for commuter highways in Los Angeles?

I had gravely mixed reactions to this Washington Post editorial in which the editors recommend that President Biden adopt a more active posture with respect to Belarus:

To start, the Biden administration ought to match or exceed the European Union’s most recent round of sanctions on Mr. Lukashenko’s henchmen. Mr. Lukashenko’s rule is buttressed by a network of moneybags who regularly peel off profits from state enterprises and resources, redirecting cash to the dictator and his security services, allowing them to go on tormenting Belarus citizens. These regime oligarchs — such as Alexander Zaitsev, Alexei Oleksin, Nikolay Vorobey, Alexander Mashensky, Alexander Zingman and Mikhail Gutseriev — provide the fuel that keeps Mr. Lukashenko in power. The United States ought to follow Brussels in seeking to isolate them and empty the regime’s cash registers — no loopholes, no looking the other way.

The United States also can extend a hand to the beleaguered folks inside Belarus. Lately, Mr. Lukashenko’s thugs have been seizing activists to extract contacts from their phones, then arresting everyone on the list. The activists need Internet circumvention techniques, financial support through cryptocurrency, and replacement of the equipment the regime has confiscated.

Depending on your operative definition of “democracy”, I support more democracy everywhere including the United States. My operative definition includes not just voting but participation and defense of civil liberties.

On the other hand I think most Americans including most American politicians have little actual knowledge of Belarus. It’s not really a country; it’s an ethnicity. The territory of the present Belarus was part of Russia then the Soviet Union since the 18th century. Before that it was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Empire. It has no natural borders. Just squiggly lines on a map. I don’t know how to disaggregate support for Belarus from antagonism towards Russia.

Russia’s interests in Belarus will inevitably be greater than ours and particularly the interests of the present irredentist Russia. I don’t think that aggravating Russia for S&G is a particularly great idea.

I have no idea of just how popular the anti-Lukashenko movement in Belarus actually is and I doubt the editors do, either.

It takes Megan McArdle a while to get to her point about carbon tariffs in her most recent Washington Post column but she does eventually:

We will never solve climate change if our policy remains largely focused on persuading or forcing Americans to consume less stuff. Environmental asceticism clearly has very limited political appeal in this country, and it will have even less abroad for consumers eager to attain lifestyles Americans take for granted.

What’s necessary is a way to live just as lavishly as we do now while producing a tiny fraction of our current emissions. The only thing that will persuade developing countries to skip the coal plants and the gasoline engines and all the rest is green alternatives that are cheaper and better without the elaborate system of taxes, subsidies and mandates that rich-world governments are using to herd their population toward carbon reduction.

What she neglects to mention is that she has supported the entire neoliberal agenda, i.e. eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, eliminating tariffs, and so on for more than a decade—back when she was posting on Blogspot as “Jane Galt”. My own view is that imposing tariffs as a strategy for offsetting illegal export subsidies, lack of enforced safety and labor regulations, and so on should be one arrow in our quiver. Others include wind and solar power in some places and for some uses, carbon capture, and nuclear power.

Unlike her I think that government has a role to play as does the private sector.

As context for the remarks of the Wall Street Journal editors, consider the graph above. In March some, including the Biden Administration, were explaining the sharp increase in immigrants crossing our southern border as a timeshifting of May or June “encounters”, as they are called, into March. That explanation is no longer supportable. The editors remark on recent developments:

The Biden Administration’s immigration policy has been a debacle from the start, but two events Friday ought to spur a reboot. Democrats will need one if they want to avoid a political backlash in 2022 and beyond.

Customs and Border Protection reported that its agents had some 188,000 migrant encounters in June. CBP has made more than a million arrests at the U.S.-Mexico border so far this fiscal year, already more than any full-year total since at least 2005.

The number of families caught trying to cross reached 55,805 for the month, a 25% increase from May, and unaccompanied children encountered rose to 15,253. These numbers don’t count those who cross illegally and aren’t caught, and they mask the human exploitation of migrants by the cartels that control border crossings.

The migrants keep coming despite the vocal pleading of Biden officials because migrants perceive the benefits are worth the risk. The Biden Administration is expelling adults under a pandemic-era emergency policy. But news reports say it is considering an end to that policy, which means migrants would be able to seek asylum and remain in the U.S., often with permission to work, while they wait for their cases to be heard. That can take years given the backlog, and many will never show up in court.

No wonder so many pay the cartels and take their chances on the trek through Mexico rather than stay in Central American countries with little economic opportunity and no rule of law. Apparently America’s “systemic racism” isn’t as awful as the Biden Administration claims. But the surge of migrants is a growing political crisis for Democrats, whose failure to fix the broken incentives is costing them support, including among Hispanic-Americans in the border counties of Texas.

Meanwhile on Friday, federal Judge Andrew Hanen ruled that the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program is illegal. The George W. Bush appointee ruled that Congress never gave the executive branch the power to grant mass work permits to immigrants who are in the U.S. without authorization.

Apparently, when you encourage people to “surge across the border”, as Candidate Biden did during the campaign, they believe you and they may not change that behavior without some additional incentives. Or disincentives as the case may be.

I support the rule of law and think that the presidential oath of office means what it says. There is no “unless it’s politically unpopular among activists in your own party” clause. I also think that President Obama overreached in DACA. I support Congress’s enacting a law to replace the executive order and enforcing that law once it is enacted. I don’t believe that “poisoning the well” is the best strategy for gaining the support that such a law will require.

Rick Newman cites some evidence in his post at Yahoo/Finance that calls the notion that employers are having difficulty hiring due to overly generous jobless benefits into question:

Moody’s Analytics looked at four different sets of data, including weekly unemployment claims, Google mobility data, job search trends and small-business payrolls. There’s some evidence red states are recovering economically faster than blue states—but that has been the trend all year and hasn’t changed since red states began canceling jobless benefits. One reason may be that blue states tend to have more big cities that continue to struggle with residual Covid outbreaks, such as Los Angeles.

First-time claims for state-based unemployment insurance, for instance, fell 22% in blue states from May 2 through July 10, and 35% in red states during the same time period. That makes it seem as if employment has been recovering faster in red states as governors have been canceling federal jobless aid. But the gap between red and blue states was the same from February through May, before any Republican governors began killing benefits. So there’s been no change since the governors blocked those $300 weekly checks.

Job search firm Indeed found that search activity ticked upward after a few of the first Republican states announced they would be ending federal jobless aid. But that trend reversed, and last month Indeed reported that job-search activity in 12 GOP states that cut off jobless benefits was lower than it had been earlier in the year. “It is unclear why search activity is below the baseline in states where federal benefits have ended,” Indeed economist Jed Kolko wrote. “If overly generous federal UI benefits were holding back job seekers, then we would expect search activity to increase, relative to the national trend, in states where those benefits have ended.”

In 13 other states ending the benefits later, job-search activity was a bit above the national trend in late June. That may reverse, too, however.

Oxford Economics examined the income consequences for people losing jobless aid in red states, and found that about 1 million people will lose the $300 weekly benefit once cancellations have gone into effect in all red states. That represents about $1.2 billion in collective lost income per week. While not huge compared with the overall economy, it’s probably enough to offset anything gained from spurring people back to work. “Benefits discontinuation may end up doing more bad on the personal income ledger than good on the employment ledger of the economy,” chief US economist Gregory Daco wrote on July 14.

There are probably some people who are sitting out the job market because they make more in jobless aid than they would from working. But research has consistently found this to be a much smaller slice of the unemployed than Republicans typically acknowledge.

[…]

A June study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that only one worker out of seven is likely to turn down a job offer because of the current $300 per week federal benefit. That’s nearly the same portion as in the Morning Consult survey.

I don’t know quite how to interpret this. Maybe someone can elucidate it for me.

Does $300 a week just not mean that much to people? If that’s the case it calls the policy itself into question. Do people expect that something better will come along if they wait long enough? My offhand guess it that the results have multiple causes and vary from place to place in the country and from sector to sector. Thoughts?