more on the hollowing out of the middle class

This article from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco talks about how the “wage premium” (how much educated workers make compared to less educated ones) seems to have stopped growing recently, although it is still large.

Recent Flattening in the Higher Education Wage Premium: Polarization, Skill Downgrading, or Both?

Wage gaps between workers with a college or graduate degree and those with only a high school degree rose rapidly in the United States during the 1980s. Since then, the rate of growth in these wage gaps has progressively slowed, and though the gaps remain large, they were essentially unchanged between 2010 and 2015. I assess this flattening over time in higher education wage premiums with reference to two related explanations for changing U.S. employment patterns: (i) a shift away from middle-skilled occupations driven largely by technological change (“polarization”); and (ii) a general weakening in the demand for advanced cognitive skills (“skill downgrading”). Analyses of wage and employment data from the U.S. Current Population Survey suggest that both factors have contributed to the flattening of higher education wage premiums.

Bradford Delong on…I’m not sure what

I have a sense that this long blog post by Bradford Delong contains some key insights or kernels of wisdom, but I just don’t quite have the language skills to translate from econospeak to English. I’ll give it a shot:

  • The human economy consists of two layers – the supply-and-demand market system governed by prices as envisioned in economics 101 textbooks, built on top of something more biological, our “propensity to be gift-exchange animals”.
  • Gift-exchange animals want to form relationships. We want wealth, but we want to feel like we have earned that wealth. We want to give, but we don’t want to feel like we are being taken advantage of.
  • What we are paid actually has a lot to do with what country, city and family we were born into, and all the knowledge and groundwork that was laid by the people who came before us in that location, and in the world/economy more generally.
  • Based on the above, he claims to be for some system of fair income or wealth allocation – “we need to do this via clever redistribution rather than via explicit wage supplements or basic incomes or social insurance that robs people of the illusion that what they receive is what they have earned and what they are worth through their work.”
  • He never quite explains what this would look like. He quotes another blogger, who suggests infrastructure, education, entrepreneurship, and something about removal of urban land use regulation that doesn’t quite make sense.

So I don’t quite know what my personal take-away from all this is but I feel like there is something there and if I ruminate on it for awhile it might come to me.

Venn Diagram your work-life balance

This is a very simple idea but I like it.

The second good idea is to use a Venn Diagram to improve your practice and/or your life. Basically, the circle on the left is your ideal practice/life. The circle on the right is your current practice/life…

The amount of overlap determines how happy you are. Drummond says if the overlap is 60% or more, you are likely very happy and unlikely to burn out. If it is 20% or less, watch out! You are very likely to burn out very soon.

The first good idea, by the way, is to create a “transition ritual” between your work and personal lives. I like that idea to, and have actually been doing it for many years without having such a good name for what I was doing.

the real Santa was black

or Olive skinned, at least, because St. Nicholas was a 3rd century Greek. Here’s some other Santa and Christmas-related miscellany:

The Romans were still around at that point and were still persecuting Christians. Poor families had to pay a dowry to marry off their daughters, or else sell them into sex slavery. Women would wash their stockings and hang them over the fireplace to dry. Nicholas supposedly put dowry money in the stockings of a few girls, which is supposedly the initial origin of the Santa story.

“The other story is not so well known now but was enormously well known in the Middle Ages,” Bowler said. Nicholas entered an inn whose keeper had just murdered three boys and pickled their dismembered bodies in basement barrels. The bishop not only sensed the crime, but resurrected the victims as well. “That’s one of the things that made him the patron saint of children.”

Sounds like it was a scary time to be a kid back then. Even after pickling, enslaving and raping children were no longer as common, children were routinely terrorized by a variety of boogeyman stories. The Germans had a variety of monsters that were mutated combinations of St. Nicholas and older creatures from German and Norse mythology.

Some of these scary Germanic figures again were based on Nicholas, no longer as a saint but as a threatening sidekick like Ru-klaus (Rough Nicholas), Aschenklas (Ashy Nicholas), and Pelznickel (Furry Nicholas). These figures expected good behavior or forced children to suffer consequences like whippings or kidnappings. Dissimilar as they seem to the jolly man in red, these colorful characters would later figure in the development of Santa himself.

Then there is Krampus, who is a Santa-like horned devil who beats bad children and carries them off to hell.

So is there a war on Christmas? Maybe not now, but both the Nazis and Soviets tried to suppress it and introduce alternatives.

In Russia, Santa Claus fell afoul of Josef Stalin. Before the Russian Revolution, Grandfather Frost (Ded Moroz) was a favored figure of Christmas who had adopted characteristics of proto-Santas like the Dutch Sinterklaas. “When the Soviet Union was formed, the communists abolished the celebration of Christmas and gift bringers,” Bowler said.

“Then in the 1930s, when Stalin needed to build support, he allowed the reemergence of Grandfather Frost not as a Christmas gift bringer but as a New Year’s gift bringer,” Bowler added. Attempts to displace Christmas in Russia were ultimately unsuccessful, as were Soviet attempts to spread a secular version of Grandfather Frost, complete with blue coat to avoid Santa confusion, across Europe.

“Everywhere they went after World War II, the Soviets tried to replace the native gift bringers in places like Poland or Bulgaria,” Bowler explained. “But local people just sort of held their noses until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989 and returned to their own traditions.”

 

100 is about it

This Nature article makes an argument that pushing human life span much beyond 100 years is not likely to happen. However, there has been criticism of the statistical methods used in this study.

Evidence for a limit to human lifespan

Driven by technological progress, human life expectancy has increased greatly since the nineteenth century. Demographic evidence has revealed an ongoing reduction in old-age mortality and a rise of the maximum age at death, which may gradually extend human longevity1, 2. Together with observations that lifespan in various animal species is flexible and can be increased by genetic or pharmaceutical intervention, these results have led to suggestions that longevity may not be subject to strict, species-specific genetic constraints. Here, by analysing global demographic data, we show that improvements in survival with age tend to decline after age 100, and that the age at death of the world’s oldest person has not increased since the 1990s. Our results strongly suggest that the maximum lifespan of humans is fixed and subject to natural constraints.

do the rich deserve more health care?

This New York Times opinion article is an economist making the somewhat offensive argument that maybe poor people should not be offered the same access to newer more expensive health care technology as rich people. I say offensive because that is the gut reaction. But part of the article’s point is that newer, higher-tech and more expensive don’t automatically mean a big benefit in terms of outcome and effectiveness. If they do improve outcomes, it is often just by a little bit compared to the lower-tech alternative, and at a much higher price. So it is an argument that a small increase in health is not worth a high price, or at least people should be helped to understand that tradeoff and then decide for themselves. It’s the economist’s basic argument that we live in a universe with finite resources available and we have to decide how to allocate them, and a large number of people making small decisions in a relatively free market will do that efficiently, if not necessarily fairly. Fairness is not really an economic argument, after all.

Consider, for example, treating prostate cancer with proton-beam therapy. It’s more expensive than alternatives like intensity-modulated radiation therapy, but isn’t proven to be any better. If given the choice, many people — especially those with lower incomes — might rather buy health insurance plans that exclude high-cost, low-value treatments.

The trouble is that insurers rarely sell those sorts of plans. Even insurers that try to exclude a particularly expensive and unproven technology from coverage are often rebuffed by legislatures and the courts.

This one-size-fits-all approach to insurance coverage disproportionately hurts low-income people, many of whom might reasonably prefer to devote their scarce dollars to housing or their children’s education. To some extent, subsidies and other monetary adjustments can mitigate this problem. Medicare and Medicaid, for example, are financed in large part out of federal income taxes. And within the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, lower-income people receive subsidies that cover some of their costs.

One way to handle this, which is not suggested in this article, is for the government to provide a minimum level of cost-effective treatment to all citizens, plus catastrophic coverage for the really big stuff like heart attacks and car accidents. The private health insurance market could still exist to cover everything in between, which you could argue is the stuff people want but don’t necessarily need. Which is the proper domain of economics. Distinguishing between high value treatments that prolong and improve the quality of life, and shiny new technologies that we might want but don’t necessarily all need, may become more and more important as technology continues to accelerate.

drought in the U.S. SOUTHeast

We are hearing a lot about drought in the U.S. Southwest. It is severe and a big deal. The climate situation may not be as severe in the Southeast, and yet the consequences may be severe because the population is unprepared and the development and forest management practices are putting people in harm’s way.

Although wildfires may draw more attention in the western U.S., the Southeast is no stranger to them. The U.S. Geological Survey and the Federal Emergency Management Agency mapped wildfire frequency from 1994 to 2013 and showed that while most hot spots are across large swaths of the West, there are a few key hazardous areas in the Southern Appalachians and parts of Alabama and Georgia. To researchers such as Costanza, another devastating wildfire in the Southeast was a long time coming. “But seeing pictures of Gatlinburg — that is scary, and anything like that is surprising,” she said…

Wildfires present such danger in the region partly because a significant amount of the population — more than in any other region — lives in wildland-urban interfaces, where development meets natural areas. Asheville, North Carolina, and Atlanta are among the cities near forests, national and state parks and other public lands and have been under high alert during this season’s fires. Officials are monitoring how close the fires come to city limits. About 80 million people live in the Southeast, according to 2015 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. And urban sprawl is expected to increase dramatically in the region, potentially putting people even closer to forested areas…

If more droughts and a population that continues to come into contact with wild areas are in the region’s future, funding for prevention steps such as creating healthier ecosystems, promoting community preparedness and fire education, and managing prescribed burns is crucial, experts said. Although scientists and climatologists don’t yet know whether this season of fires represents the start of a long-term pattern, conditions suggest that the Southeast might start seeing more intense fires like the one in Gatlinburg — and if so, the region will have to adapt.

flow maps

Here is an interesting paper proposing design principles for flow maps, which “visualize movement using a static image and demonstrate not only which places have been affected by movement but also the direction and volume of movement.”

Design principles for origin-destination flow maps

Origin-destination flow maps are often difficult to read due to overlapping flows. Cartographers have developed design principles in manual cartography for origin-destination flow maps to reduce overlaps and increase readability. These design principles are identified and documented using a quantitative content analysis of 97 geographic origin-destination flow maps without branching or merging flows. The effectiveness of selected design principles is verified in a user study with 215 participants. Findings show that (a) curved flows are more effective than straight
flows, (b) arrows indicate direction more effectively than tapered line widths, and (c) flows between nodes are more effective than flows between areas. These findings, combined with results from user studies in graph drawing, conclude that effective and efficient origin-destination flow maps should be designed according to the following design principles: overlaps between flows are minimized; symmetric flows are preferred to asymmetric flows; longer flows are curved
more than shorter or peripheral flows; acute angles between crossing flows are avoided; sharp bends in flow lines are avoided; flows do not pass under unconnected nodes; flows are radially distributed around nodes; flow direction is indicated with arrowheads; and flow width is scaled with represented quantity.

What a Fish Knows

What a Fish Knows is what it sounds like – a book about what fish are thinking. From the publisher:

Do fishes think? Do they really have three-second memories? And can they recognize the humans who peer back at them from above the surface of the water? In What a Fish Knows, the myth-busting ethologist Jonathan Balcombe addresses these questions and more, taking us under the sea, through streams and estuaries, and to the other side of the aquarium glass to reveal the surprising capabilities of fishes. Although there are more than thirty thousand species of fish—more than all mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians combined—we rarely consider how individual fishes think, feel, and behave. Balcombe upends our assumptions about fishes, portraying them not as unfeeling, dead-eyed feeding machines but as sentient, aware, social, and even Machiavellian—in other words, much like us.

What a Fish Knows draws on the latest science to present a fresh look at these remarkable creatures in all their breathtaking diversity and beauty. Fishes conduct elaborate courtship rituals and develop lifelong bonds with shoalmates. They also plan, hunt cooperatively, use tools, curry favor, deceive one another, and punish wrongdoers. We may imagine that fishes lead simple, fleeting lives—a mode of existence that boils down to a place on the food chain, rote spawning, and lots of aimless swimming. But, as Balcombe demonstrates, the truth is far richer and more complex, worthy of the grandest social novel.

Highlighting breakthrough discoveries from fish enthusiasts and scientists around the world and pondering his own encounters with fishes, Balcombe examines the fascinating means by which fishes gain knowledge of the places they inhabit, from shallow tide pools to the deepest reaches of the ocean.

Teeming with insights and exciting discoveries, What a Fish Knows offers a thoughtful appraisal of our relationships with fishes and inspires us to take a more enlightened view of the planet’s increasingly imperiled marine life. What a Fish Knows will forever change how we see our aquatic cousins—the pet goldfish included.

Tobler’s first law of geography

Since I seem to be on a kick of writing about key theories I didn’t learn in school (and perhaps I am a bit burned out thinking about politics and climate change, and I don’t have any amazing new technologies to share today), here is the first law of geography:

The first law of geography was developed by Waldo Tobler in 1970 and it makes the observation that ‘everything is usually related to all else but those which are near to each other are more related when compared to those that are further away’.  This observation which Tobler made is closely related to the ‘Law of Universal Gravitation’ and the ‘Law of Demand’ as well. The concept was first applied by Tobler to urban growth systems and was not popularly received when it was first published.  It wasn’t until the 1990s when this formulation of the concept of spatial autocorrelation became an important underlying concept in the field of GIS.