Hedonics fails because it wants to factor unfungible (non-transferable) added value into inflation indexing. Are retired people living on Social Security supposed to eat fewer potatoes as TV performance improves for the same price? Let them eat high definition?
If the Timex I wear today cost half what it would because it is made overseas, that frees up money for potatoes. That it keeps immeasurably better time (almost immeasurable error) cannot be traded off for more of anything else.
Add value that cannot transfer should be counted as unfungible added income. Lucky American consumers; we get to keep up with some part of average income increase -- that the market could not squeeze out of us.
Only God could figure the right inflation number for by a more powerful computer at the same price (and I am sure He would have a very interesting explanation). Meantime, for we human beings, it is enough to know that the price of the computer went up or down so much and the power went up or down so much. Any attempt to melt the two together would leave us with something akin to Heisenberg's uncertainty: unable to delineate cost and value (as in, position and momentum) -- in other words, a not very helpful measurement.
Ironically (hypocritically?), Hedonics believers advocated an inflation measure (C-CPI-U) that would have skipped over changes in value if they pushed inflation numbers in the wrong direction. If the price of pork went up -- forcing consumers to eat more rice (because cheaper; not because they are going macrobiotic) -- C-CPI-U would have allotted less weight to pork in the basket of goods used to track inflation and allotted more weight to rice -- as if the substitutes were voluntary instead of led by price changes. Republican logic.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Had a billion American Indians inhabited the million square miles of America's Midwest...
Had a billion American Indians inhabited the million square miles of America's Midwest, our settlers would faced the same population density -- one thousand per square mile -- encountered in the West Bank by Israeli settlers -- that is, before Israeli first worlders battered West Bank third worlders back into half the space (affluent moderns needing more room to breath -- and swim).
To fill out the billion Indian comparison: 150 million American settlers would have to have carved out -- extra -- room for themselves. What today's 300 million Americans face are the least rational responses of the Palestinian people's billion-plus co-religionists for what they deem our role in the "dozerkrieging" of Islamic land.
The accidents of history make it easier for America to take the rap for Israel's mis-doings: Israelis speak the same language, live the same lifestyle, the other half of their ethnic group lives by and large in the United States, their people even gave rise to our Christian-Judaic culture.
*****************
An Israeli defense analyst recently worried that, for all Israel's local conventional and nuclear preponderance, her continued existence could be called into question by a single nuclear strike on Tel Aviv. Enough Israelis might, then, take flight for safer climes to insure others followed and so on.
Country emptying could be just as likely to play out with nuclear material-free bomb works* (no plutonium core) -- snuck into Tel Aviv and left to be discovered -- with no one to blame and no reason to fully retaliate: the perfect nuclear blackmail?
Could the shadow of nuclear blackmail drive Israel to the ultimate mad option?: go Stanley Kubrick and deploy a doom's-day device -- that does its dirty work without the possibility of human intervention? (Witness Israel's recent nation blasting over a couple of POWs.)
In real life Israel hasn't the thermonuclear technology to build a full-fledged, civilization ending weapon (see Herman Kahn). Possibly Israel could improvise a poor man's version -- arraying half (100?) her Hiroshima type bombs widely and deeply enough underground to blow millions of tons of matter into the upper atmosphere, triggering nuclear winter.
-- or -- alternately --
Israel could adopt the ultimate sane option (practiced by successful first-worlders everywhere): no more "dozerkrieging" next-door neighbors, no-choice returning misappropriated land and homes and no fair waiting until resistance ends before doing both (it works the other way around). A growing Arab consensus can assure Israel that withdrawing the unbearable occupation would do more for her genuine security than embarking on mutually assured destruction.
In the twentieth century, a smart Jew gave the world E = MC squared.
Twenty centuries earlier, a Smarter Jew (by me) gave the world: "Love thy neighbor as thyself, already" [A certain amount of "lingo" was culled from the New Testament for wider distribution -- always going to be more Gentiles, right?]
*****************
It does not take a Solomon to calculate that a nation of 5 million who occupies a neighbor of 4 million -- to park a few hundred thousand of her own on half their ancestral land -- will be condemned to exist always half-concentration camp and half-free. Oy!
Denis Drew
Chicago
ddrew2u@sbcglobal.net
www.onsamepage.blogspot.com
[*Anyone could sneak nuclear-free bomb works into any city in the world in the hope someone else catches the blame. Anyone includes Mossad. Red Star Rogue recounts a credible tale of old Soviet hard-liners attempting to provoke a war between the US and China -- leaving the USSR the winner -- by staging what was to look like a Chinese sub nuking Honolulu, only to have the sub blow a hole in itself upon the attempt (and be later recovered by the Glomar Explorer). Any such event should be investigated as painstakingly as any airline crash in the expectation that the explanation may take the same kind of time to work its way out.]
To fill out the billion Indian comparison: 150 million American settlers would have to have carved out -- extra -- room for themselves. What today's 300 million Americans face are the least rational responses of the Palestinian people's billion-plus co-religionists for what they deem our role in the "dozerkrieging" of Islamic land.
The accidents of history make it easier for America to take the rap for Israel's mis-doings: Israelis speak the same language, live the same lifestyle, the other half of their ethnic group lives by and large in the United States, their people even gave rise to our Christian-Judaic culture.
*****************
An Israeli defense analyst recently worried that, for all Israel's local conventional and nuclear preponderance, her continued existence could be called into question by a single nuclear strike on Tel Aviv. Enough Israelis might, then, take flight for safer climes to insure others followed and so on.
Country emptying could be just as likely to play out with nuclear material-free bomb works* (no plutonium core) -- snuck into Tel Aviv and left to be discovered -- with no one to blame and no reason to fully retaliate: the perfect nuclear blackmail?
Could the shadow of nuclear blackmail drive Israel to the ultimate mad option?: go Stanley Kubrick and deploy a doom's-day device -- that does its dirty work without the possibility of human intervention? (Witness Israel's recent nation blasting over a couple of POWs.)
In real life Israel hasn't the thermonuclear technology to build a full-fledged, civilization ending weapon (see Herman Kahn). Possibly Israel could improvise a poor man's version -- arraying half (100?) her Hiroshima type bombs widely and deeply enough underground to blow millions of tons of matter into the upper atmosphere, triggering nuclear winter.
-- or -- alternately --
Israel could adopt the ultimate sane option (practiced by successful first-worlders everywhere): no more "dozerkrieging" next-door neighbors, no-choice returning misappropriated land and homes and no fair waiting until resistance ends before doing both (it works the other way around). A growing Arab consensus can assure Israel that withdrawing the unbearable occupation would do more for her genuine security than embarking on mutually assured destruction.
In the twentieth century, a smart Jew gave the world E = MC squared.
Twenty centuries earlier, a Smarter Jew (by me) gave the world: "Love thy neighbor as thyself, already" [A certain amount of "lingo" was culled from the New Testament for wider distribution -- always going to be more Gentiles, right?]
*****************
It does not take a Solomon to calculate that a nation of 5 million who occupies a neighbor of 4 million -- to park a few hundred thousand of her own on half their ancestral land -- will be condemned to exist always half-concentration camp and half-free. Oy!
Denis Drew
Chicago
ddrew2u@sbcglobal.net
www.onsamepage.blogspot.com
[*Anyone could sneak nuclear-free bomb works into any city in the world in the hope someone else catches the blame. Anyone includes Mossad. Red Star Rogue recounts a credible tale of old Soviet hard-liners attempting to provoke a war between the US and China -- leaving the USSR the winner -- by staging what was to look like a Chinese sub nuking Honolulu, only to have the sub blow a hole in itself upon the attempt (and be later recovered by the Glomar Explorer). Any such event should be investigated as painstakingly as any airline crash in the expectation that the explanation may take the same kind of time to work its way out.]
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Settlements that work -- 1949 Israel -- high settler to native ratio:
Settlements that work -- high settler to native ratio -- 1949 Israel:
Jews made up 86% (see chart V) of the population.
Settlements that fail -- low settler to native ratio -- long list:
South Africa: blacks outnumbered white settlers five to one (settlers allowed to remain -- after yielding power -- because they had something to offer);
Algeria: North Africans outnumbered French settlers ten to one (all gone);
Today's West Bank: Palestinians make up 86% (see chart VII) of the population.
Settlements that can work -- 1 native per square mile -- 1850 American plains:
A farming nation of 23 million people (growing 35% a decade) expanded into a million square miles roamed by a million plains Indians -- territory previously dwelt in by 20 million hunter gatherers before Spanish diseases took their overwhelming toll, a century earlier.
Settlements that cannot work -- 1000+ natives per square mile -- the West Bank:
400,000 Israelis bulldoze aside two and a half million subsistence farming Palestinians (with world's highest birth rate) who were already over-packed into 2,000 square miles.
Settlements not overly dangerous -- no natural allies:
American plains Indians had no one to back them up.
Settlements very, very dangerous -- unnaturally militant allies:
Just beyond the subjugated Palestinian homeland begins a civilization of a billion plus (!) co-religionists whose shared faith contains a template for terror -- which template has lately (1983) added a fearsome new instrument, suicide bombing -- which has been tragically experienced not only by David but by David's big brother Goliath.
Almost forty years ago, a disturbed loner whose family had been ethnically cleansed from Palestine assassinated a possible next president of the United States, Robert Kennedy for supporting Israel. Sixty years might have healed the scars of Israel's initial intrusion on world Islam. But, recent decades of piling on doubly-undoable settlements has created enough facts on the ground to motivate multiple attacks on America's greatest downtown -- what else could have?
[Check out the correlation between increasing settlements and increasing suicide bombings in former US Air Force instructor Robert Pape's book "Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism" -- just received here; haven't read yet.]
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Israel may have as many as 200 Hiroshima type nuclear weapons -- actually enough, if Israel had the deliver systems, to flatten most of Europe's and America's downtowns (would need to rent and rig cargo planes for the day to hit continental USA) -- just to emphasize that Israel's strategic bulwark is no fragile eggshell.
Saddam was an Armageddon kind of guy: he set fire to the Kuwaiti desert (600 oil wells), flooding the adjoining gulf with oil and was prepared to dump all his WMDs on Israel in 1992 -- to avenge the destruction of half his armed forces. If he could have bought or built nukes he might have been happy to die using them.
Israel has now serially attacked the core infrastructure of one defenseless neighbor while making Lebanon's adjoining land mass as unlivable as 1,000,000 unexploded bomblets can -- and bombed what amounted to the only infrastructure (power station) of an even more toothless next door neighbor and screwed down Gaza's financial lid so tight that many residents have been reduced to one meal a day -- in both cases to force the release of a single military abductee.
Can Israel be trusted with weapons of mass destruction? Doesn't matter; nobody can take them away from her. Israel has twice as many tank formations on short notice as today's US army -- and it takes three to one to invade. China or Russia could field three or four to one respectively but they suffer inferior equipment and training. All of NATO might be able to put together one to one.
Israel may field the world's fourth strongest army and its sixth most powerful nuclear deterrent -- she is held protectively to the breast of the world's only super power. Yet Israel refuses to negotiate peace with the Palestinians unless they, first, formally agree to Israel's right to exist -- while daily chipping away at the Palestinians' own homeland, which is guaranteed to leave them in no mood to.
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Settler overload can give rise to peculiar institutions, the chief example being the West Bank's "wormhole" road network which connects settlements to Israel and to each other and which is reserved for the use of Israelis only (Palestinians lately banned from riding on them in Israelis' cars without a permit) -- making it possible to travel the length and breadth of West Bank "Israeli World" without making contact with the Palestinian dimension.
The West Bank's "wormholes" are all too reminiscent of Thomas Jefferson's odd Monticello mansion setup, where racially divided floor levels and physical gimmickry (e.g., dumbwaiters) contrived to allow free whites to live without the conscience pricking sight of enslaved blacks.
Extremist Israeli settlers are certain God granted Palestine to their people in perpetuity, but that doesn't mean God would not "allow" Palestinians the "use" of the remaining 22% of Palestine -- if vacating would cause prior residents unbearable hardship and if the fight they put up against vacating in accord with their own beliefs is likely never to end. The constraints of humanity and prudence here should outweigh the right to property. Ask your Rabbi.
[http://www.israelipalestinianprocon.org/populationpalestine.html#graph1 See charts V & VII.]
Education of workers has not kept up with demand?:
Education of workers has not kept up with demand?: why then is it that when technology slows and productivity LAGS that most workers in America fall far behind average income growth -- but when technology races ahead and productivity soars most or our workers keep much better pace with average income growth?
Too simple answer: how human nature responds to boom and busts when there are no checks and balances in the labor market. During the boom, bargaining pressure is down, everyone is allowed to make money -- during the dip the pressure is on and those with small bargaining power will lose the share they had previously gained.
This works in CEO favor at all times: today's firms are flush with money either because of boom times or because unionless workers are being squeezed to keep profits up during the down cycle, leaving little pressure to keep CEOs from looting.
None of this exists in Europe -- not because of heavy market regulation there but because of fair labor market balance of power there: sufficient unionization.
Everybody seems to understand the need for a free market for efficiency and innovation. Nobody, even progressives -- at high academic levels -- seem to catch on to the unconditional need for checks and balances in the labor market to achieve fairness.
Around about 1968 in New York State: A police officer may not draw his gun....
As it was in 1968 in New York State: A police officer may not draw his gun....
....even upon entering the scene of a reported armed robbery, even if the suspect has drawn his gun -- unless -- the suspect points his gun at the officer. Which newly revised deadly force rule quickly got an officer killed in Queens, New York; leading a quick legislative reversal. The equally cruel rule it succeeded had authorized police officers to fire a shot in the air to warn -- any -- fleeing suspect, and then shoot to kill (you may observe this rule portrayed in action on "oldies" TV stations featuring the early 60s series "Naked City").
A similarly crackpot deadly force rule change seems to have fallen de facto upon law enforcement across the land in the form of the conviction and draconian sentencing of two U.S. border patrol guards in El Paso federal court for shooting a fleeing drug smuggler whom officers believed -- but were not sure -- had a gun in his hand.
The El Paso, Texas U.S. Attorney's Office's took the combination of federal civil rights law and a U.S. Supreme Court finding that "it is a violation of someone's Fourth Amendment rights to shoot [someone] in the back while fleeing if you don't know who they are and/or if you don't know they have a weapon" as a federal civil rights formula for prosecuting the (honest enough to admit they were not sure about the gun) border patrol officers.
The officers believed they acted in fear for their lives as they were chasing a suspect who had just left one of them floored and bloody in the act of breaking free (not your typical illegal job seeker) and kept looking over his shoulder while running with an object in hand, at one point turning towards them and pointing the "shiny object" they took for a gun...
....according to the convicted officers at least. The prosecution-immunized drug smuggler -- 800 pounds of marijuana were subsequently found in his van -- told a different tale under oath. He escaped at the time, making it impossible to absolutely prove or disprove possession of a gun.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously declared that "we cannot expect calm deliberation in the face of an upraised knife." To which we may add the modern day knowledge that adrenalin can diminish you judgment every bit as much as alcohol.
Back in the late 70s when I was driving for a car service in the Bronx I had more than one almost accident with police cars -- not chasing a suspect -- but rather whose drivers had ALREADY made an arrest and were so pumped that they blew red lights forgetting lights and sirens.
Back in the late 70s when I was driving for a car service in the Bronx I had more than one almost accident with police cars -- not chasing a suspect -- but rather whose drivers had ALREADY made an arrest and were so pumped that they blew red lights forgetting lights and sirens.
If the El Paso decision holds up there should theoretically be no defense for police officers who fire when they think a suspect is even reaching for a gun -- if they were not sure. If the El Paso case holds the FBI should theoretically be prepared to investigate every police shooting in every state that fits the newly coined mis-understanding about the need for certainty about the suspect possessing a gun. Back turned doesn't mean a thing: the quick and the accurate are out there.
Last -- and perhaps most importantly: Justice White's dictum -- on which the prosecution theory lies -- did not comprehensively rule on the aspects of "imminent danger" as far as I can see. Justice White defended his opinion at the time that by explaining "It is better for all suspects to escape than for all suspects to be killed." That sounds to me like a rule that finds society's need to apprehend the suspect of less weight than the suspect's Fourth Amendment rights -- not a rule that says finds imminent danger to the officer's life automatically outweighed by the suspects rights.
Last -- and perhaps most importantly: Justice White's dictum -- on which the prosecution theory lies -- did not comprehensively rule on the aspects of "imminent danger" as far as I can see. Justice White defended his opinion at the time that by explaining "It is better for all suspects to escape than for all suspects to be killed." That sounds to me like a rule that finds society's need to apprehend the suspect of less weight than the suspect's Fourth Amendment rights -- not a rule that says finds imminent danger to the officer's life automatically outweighed by the suspects rights.
End poverty in 30 years: said John Edwards a few months back. Better to return 40 years back, to when....
End poverty in 30 years: said John Edwards a few months back. Better to return 40 years back, to when....
....L.B.J's, 1968, federal minimum wage of $9.50/hr (adjusted);
....and income was distributed fairly enough to end poverty overnight were the same pattern applied to 2006's doubled average income.
Happy paydays played through 1973, following which 12%* of overall income shifted from below 90 percentile to above 5 percentile earners -- pumping top-5 share from 20% to 32% -- depleting bottom-90 share from 69% to 57%.
Practical repercussions: a quarter of today's jobs pay below L.B.J.'s (and Europe's) minimum wage -- middle and upper middle family income grew half as fast as average income from 1973 to 2001 (30% compared to 60%) -- today's real poverty line may be as high 25% (imagine if the media would report that; the official federal line having been adjusted for the price of food only for the last 50 years**).
For happy paydays to be here again, top 5 percentile incomes will need to give back a third of their swollen 32% share -- but the next to last 4 percentile would only have to yield a sixth of their 15% share (by slower growth alone?).
The next to last 9/10 of 1% must learn to live without two-fifths of their bloated 10% share -- the last 1/10 of 1% need to return to earth without three-quarters of their bulging 7.5% share [percentages rounded].
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The first step to a fair and balanced labor market could be a minimum wage adjustment that, as much as practicable, catches up with 38 years of lost time on both inflation and growth. Adjusting the 1968 minimum for inflation and GROWTH would yield $19.00/hr ($9.50/hr X 200% average income growth).
Eighth-grade arithmetic can demonstrate that a less cosmic $12.50/hr minimum wage should add less than 4% to the cost to GDP output. ***
My guess: a $9/hr minimum wage (today's 25 percentile wage) would cost incomes somewhere above 50 percentile more than they gained -- with about 2% inflation and wages above the new minimum pushed up.
My guess, again: a $12.50/hr minimum wage (today's 40 percentile wage) would cost incomes somewhere above 60 percentile more than they gained -- with 4% direct inflation.
Today's federal minimum wage earner has to work one hour to pay for a $5.00 fast food meal -- if he could afford it. A $9.00/hr minimum wage earner would need to work only 40 minutes for a more expensive, $6.25 meal (fast food has one-third labor costs) -- thus did McDonalds expand coast to coast while paying almost double today's minimum wage in 1968; at half today's average income, yet.
60-90 percentile income earners can only reset their earnings by resetting their bargaining power via coast-to-coast unionization -- which can be spurred via an eighth-grade math educational effort (above) -- which should hurry the necessary legal changes (see below).
Hopefully American labor can be sold on something called sector-wide labor agreements (most extensively used in Germany; also known as de-facto minimum wages): where all workers performing the same tasks in the same geographic area work under a single collective bargaining contract -- even for different employers. This would mark the end of the race to the bottom and to (contractless) scabs.
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It is possibly arguable that today's federal unionizing setup violates First Amendment protected freedom of assembly -- the legally mandated unionizing process being needlessly prejudicial to organizing labor (commercial assembling?): logical, but not necessarily promising.
What organized labor probably needs is a constitutional amendment to clarify the -- inalienable -- right to organize, in the image of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment supposedly clarified the full equality of the slaves freed by the Thirteenth Amendment (only to have the Supreme Court putrefy that into separate but equal) and enabled Congress to write laws in defense of civil rights.
A "Right to Organize Amendment" would prohibit unjustified legislative obstacles being placed in the path of union organizing. An enabling clause could empower Congress give Congress unquestioned authority to write laws to maximize the usefulness of collective bargaining; for example, mandating (German style) sector-wide labor agreements.
....it would wake up working folks to the notion they always should have been perfectly free to organize all along -- that today's run the management gauntlet deal was not handed down from the mountaintop;
....which reminder should supercharge heavy pressure for federal card check legislation (w/o management's OK)....
....which could quickly add the 50% of the American workforce who state they would prefer to be unionized to the 10% who happily are unionized -- overnight.
[ * http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=23754016&postID=115117779314646236 -- info and source of 12% income shift measure NEAR BOTTOM of blogger comments]
[ ** The federal poverty level was set in 1965 (using a 1955 formula) at three times the cost of an emergency diet (which diet doesn't even permit canned beans, only dried), before taxes yet -- meaning the poverty line has been adjusted for the price of food only for 50 years. Today's real poverty line could be more like 25% (officially reported at 12.4%). Republicans could argue that things like food stamps -- they opposed -- would bring it down to 20%; still 5% more than in L.B.J.'s era. IMAGINE THE CHANGE IN POLITICAL CLIMATE IF THE MEDIA WOULD JUST REPORT THIS ONE STAT!!! For a current bare needs income breakdown, see Raise the Floor, p. 44-47, tables 2-3,2-4,2-5,2-6.]
[ *** $12.50/hr = $7.50/hr more than today's federal minimum wage = $7,500 AVERAGE adjustment (1000 hours). Currently 54 million workers earn below $12.50/hr + 6 million at federal minimum wage ("who get two average raises") = 60 million average adjustments = $450 billion divided by $12 trillion GDP = 3.75% added cost of GDP output. ]
PS. Another federal stat quirk is the Census family income survey practice "top-coding", of not reporting family income above $1 million -- which, pre-1973, had a rationale -- but today hides most of the income share that has shifted from bottom 90 percentile to top 1 percentile.
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Every year we run a test of the wage-hike/job-loss theory on a sample 20 times larger (!) than the 6 million who would be directly affected by the current minimum wage hike proposal: the 120 million American workers who get raises every year -- and do not lose their jobs over it.
It works like this: everybody gets a raise every year to make up for everybody else getting a raise every year -- everybody that is except minimum wage workers who have had two, two-step raises since Jimmy Carter was president.
If they finally get a raise, we may confidently assume that everybody else will just get a teensy higher annual raise to match the teensy higher cost of living.