This is a documentary by my wonderful friend (whom I had the honor of meeting in a mass media and law class which has developed into what will obviously be a life long friendship) Poh Si Teng.

Aaaargh!

Do the folks at the Bush administration believe a word they say about economics? Or are they consciously lying because they know that just saying “we want to help the rich and powerful, and fuck all to everything else” might not fly with the voters?

I’d like to believe that there’s such a thing as an honorable opposition, but they make it so hard.

From Ezra:

In one of the more insane stories you’ll read today, the Department of Agriculture has banned a small beef producer named Creekstone from testing its cows for Mad Cow Disease. Why? “Larger meat companies worry that if Creekstone is allowed to perform the test and advertise its meat as safe, they could be forced to do the expensive test, too.” And when they say “forced,” they mean that Creekstone will attain a competitive advantage by investing in diagnostics which will give consumers information they value, and then the market will strongly suggest that other producers follow suit. Other producers don’t want to follow suit and so they bent the ear of their good friends in the Bush administration. Dean Baker makes the right point here, saying “This is just a wonderful example showing that the Bush administration conservatives have no interest in the free market or ‘you are on your own’ economics. They are prepared to use the heavy hand of the government to ensure that small meat packers do not win out over bigger more politically powerful meat packers.”

This also has the effect of cutting US beef off from foreign markets, particularly Japan. But, really, I’m not crying any tears for the beef producers. It’s the hypocrisy that drives me mad.

David Leonhardt has written a long and substantive (although definitely pro-Obama) piece on Obama’s economic policies. It’s definitely worth reading if you want a one-stop summary of Obama’s economic views.

From a progressive point of view, assuming the article is accurate, Obama’s not as bad as a lot of centrist Democrats — or, more accurately, his positions reflect how the center of the Democratic party has moved a bit to the left since 8 years ago — but neither is he the answer to progressive dreams.

In practical terms, the new consensus means that the policies of an Obama administration would differ from those of the Clinton administration, but not primarily because of differences between the two men. “The economy has changed in the last 15 years, and our understanding of economic policy has changed as well,” Furman says. “And that means that what was appropriate in 1993 is no longer appropriate.” Obama’s agenda starts not with raising taxes to reduce the deficit, as Clinton’s ended up doing, but with changing the tax code so that families making more than $250,000 a year pay more taxes and nearly everyone else pays less. That would begin to address inequality. Then there would be Reich-like investments in alternative energy, physical infrastructure and such, meant both to create middle-class jobs and to address long-term problems like global warming.

All of this raises the question of what will happen to the deficit. Obama’s aides optimistically insist he will reduce it, thanks to his tax increases on the affluent and his plan to wind down the Iraq war. Relative to McCain, whose promised spending cuts are extremely vague, Obama does indeed look like a fiscal conservative. But the larger point is that the immediate deficit isn’t as big as it was in 1992. Then, it was equal to 4.7 percent of gross domestic product. Right now it’s about 2.5 percent.

I would have liked the article much better if Leonhardt had said the truth flat-out — by all appearances, Obama’s plan will increase the deficit (Obama aides optimism aside) or at best keep it the size it is, but McCain’s plan¹ would increase it more.² It’s odd that Leonhardt dodges around this question, since Obama openly admits that he doesn’t expect to balance the budget.

Leonhardt also emphasizes Obama’s interest in market-based solutions to problems. For instance, on cap-and-trade:

By last year, Democrats in Congress essentially agreed that to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, the government should place a nationwide cap on these emissions and then issue tradable permits giving companies the right to produce them (thus the term “cap and trade”). Most Congressional bills envisioned giving away many of the permits to power companies. Economists, by and large, considered this giveaway to be the worst part of the plan. It would require Congress to decide how many free permits each company should get and would set off a frenzy of corporate lobbying.

The alternative was to auction off the permits — to let the market set their value. “If you don’t auction 100 percent of the permits,” [Obama econ adviser] Goolsbee told me, “this could be one of the biggest pieces of corporate welfare ever.” With Congress making the decisions, the power companies with the best political connections might get the permits. With a full auction, the permits would end up with companies willing to make the highest bids. Presumably, these would be the most efficient companies, the ones able to produce the most energy (and profits) for a given amount of greenhouse-gas pollution.

Edited to add: Isn’t this exactly backwards? It seems to me that the least efficient, most polluting companies would be the ones forced to pay the most for these permits — while the most efficient companies would be less in need of the permits. Or am I misunderstanding something?

The auctions would have another big advantage too. They would raise billions of dollars for the government, money that could then be returned to taxpayers to offset the higher energy prices created by the emissions cap.

It seems likely that a President Obama would sign a cap-and-trade bill even if it did give away some permits. But candidate Obama has at least moved the debate toward a more pro-market solution.

The writer roots Obama’s market attitudes in his background at the University of Chicago. There’s some left-wing critique of Obama’s market bias in the comments at this post on Angry Bear.

A curious lack in the article is any discussion of trade policy. Nor is there any discussion of wage gaps (either gender or race).

Anyhow, I could go on more, but I’m going to go to the pool with my niece and nephew instead. Later, folks.

1. McCain has said he intends to balance the budget, but the actual economic plans he’s released don’t add up to a balanced budget. (back)
2. Quoting EconomistMom: “…if we use Tax Policy Center estimates for the cost of the McCain and Obama tax plans (I know the Obama campaign is using a much larger figure for McCain), then the Obama tax plan adds ‘just’ $2.8 trillion to the federal debt over ten years (not counting interest), while the McCain tax plan adds $4.2 trillion.” (back)

Over at Hit and Run, Nick Gillespie says “what, me worry?” to schools cutting programs and services in response to tightening budgets:

Jesus Christ, is this the worst of it? If so, please just stop. As someone who had kids in the Maryland’s Montgomery County schools for a couple of years, I can guarantee you that they could choose to cut something other than funds for “an award-winning” math team with ease. Indeed, the district seemed hellbent on calling three-day weekends whenever snow was forecast for a Friday morning. And where are the calls to make administrators ride their bikes or carpool to school?

Some of the cuts Nick do seem pretty trivial — switching from stop-at-every-home bus service to neighborhood bus stops, for instance. Others, however, are serious: Cutting school weeks from five days to four. Raising the costs of school lunches and charging parents for bus service (in one high school, they’ve cut out bus service altogether). Not being able to get up to date textbooks degrades the quality of education, and so — believe it or not — does cutting electives and math teams.

That Nick responds to these real problems with mockery — as if no reasonable person could possibly be concerned with cutting to a four-day school week, or updated textbooks — shows how irresponsible the idealogical anti-government tax-cutters are.

Meanwhile, Nick’s ideas on how to save money are ludicrous. Administrators typically use their own cars to get to work, so calls for biking or carpools for admins won’t save a cent. And snow days actually save money for school districts (as does any other method of cutting the number of school days).

Nick goes on:

Per-pupil spending is up over 300 percent in constant dollars since the early 1960s. You’d think somewhere in that increase, schools would figure out how to fund meaningful stuff and drop crap.

Of course, a lot of that increase has gone into special education, school breakfast and lunch programs, bilingual education, and computers. These expenses were all either low or nonexistent in the early 1960s — and yes, they are “meaningful stuff” and not “crap.”

The other thing to consider is that as long as we want students to have direct interaction with teachers, the costs of education will always go up, due to Baumol’s disease.

When Mozart composed his String Quintet in G Minor (K. 516), in 1787, you needed five people to perform it—two violinists, two violists, and a cellist. Today, you still need five people, and, unless they play really fast, they take about as long to perform it as musicians did two centuries ago. So much for progress.

An economist would say that the productivity of classical musicians has not improved over time, and in this regard the musicians aren’t alone. In a number of industries, workers produce about as much per hour as they did a decade or two ago. The average college professor can’t grade papers or give lectures any faster today than he did in the early nineties. It takes a waiter just as long to serve a meal, and a car-repair guy just as long to fix a radiator hose.

The rest of the American economy functions differently. In most businesses, workers are continually getting more productive and can produce a lot more per hour than they could ten or twenty years ago. [...] Generally, productivity growth is a boon, but it creates problems for non-productive enterprises like classical music, education, and car repair: to keep luring talent, they have to increase wages, or else people eventually migrate to businesses that pay better. Instead of becoming nurses or mechanics, they become telecom engineers or machinists. That’s why teachers are getting paid a lot more than they were twenty years ago. (The average salary for an associate college professor has risen almost seventy per cent since the early eighties, and that’s if you adjust for inflation.) To pay those wages, schools and hospitals have to raise prices. The result is that in industries where productivity is flat costs and prices keep going up.

I have no idea if school districts really spend more (as a percentage of the total) on “crap” now than they did in the 1960s. But I’m skeptical, because Nick presents zero evidence to support his implication.

What I do know is that the amount of “meaningful stuff” schools are providing, and the legitimate costs of the “meaningful stuff,” have gone up significantly since the early 1960s. Too many libertarians, like Nick, act as if they believe in a free lunch; we can make HUGE cuts in education budgets and not suffer any pain at all, because there’s lots of unnamed “crap” to be cut! But it’s nonsense. Just saying “costs have gone up 300%” as if that alone proves there’s a huge amount of waste is economic illiteracy.

My newest cartoon is online at Dollars and Sense.

Also on D&S, “Ask Dr. Dollar” argues that the insanely high CEO pay in the US isn’t about productivity, and not just about crony capitalism: It’s also about political power.

And from Chuck Collins:

While average wages for all workers rose 3% in 1996, the average CEO salary and bonus rose 39% to $2.3 million — and that is without stock options. Benefitting even more than average were the top managers of the 30 U.S. corporations that laid off the most people last year, according to a new study, “Executive Excess: CEOs Gain from Massive Downsizing,” by the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy. The axmen who laid off between 2,800 and 49,000 workers last year upped their own compensation by 67%.[...]

Most corporate leaders would say any government regulation of CEO pay is an outrageous interference in the free market. But the government is already involved in CEO pay — through the U.S. tax code. The tax code allows businesses to deduct “a reasonable allowance for salaries or other compensation.” The catch is that the code doesn’t define “reasonable.” So companies can — and do — routinely deduct the entirety of grotesque executive pay packages. Corporations pay less in taxes than they should, and regular taxpayers pick up the slack.

Read the whole thing.

Kent: Senator Dole, why should people vote for you instead of President Clinton?
Kang: It makes no difference which one of us you vote for. Either way, your planet is doomed. DOOMED!
Kent: Well, a refreshingly frank response there from senator Bob Dole.
–The Simpsons, “Treehouse of Horror VII”¹

Jesse at Pandagon links to an article asking us to gnash teeth and rend garments because under Obama’s proposals, Tiger Woods and Roger Clemens will pay more in taxes. O, the humanity! O, cruel, cruel Obama; hasn’t Tiger suffered enough?

The writer of the article — Hank Adler, a professor of accounting — goes on to say:

Only once since 1917 has there been a tax-rate increase equal to or greater than the two twin tax proposals being made by Obama. That tax increase, the Revenue Act of 1932, was proposed by Herbert Hoover. The result was an even greater budget deficit, plummeting tax revenue and a lengthier Great Depression.

Oh noooooos! We’re doomed! DOOOOOOOMED! The economy could never survive an Obama-sized tax increase!

Or could it?

Obama’s proposed tax increase² would be $9 billion in 2009, and increase to $28 billion by the end of his first term.

And as Professor Adler says, there hasn’t been a tax increase that big since 1932.

Oh, except for 1951’s $45 billion dollar tax increase.³

Oh, and the $38 billion in 1990. And the $39 billion in 1982 (signed by Ronald Reagan himself!).

Not to mention the $100 billion tax increase in 1968, and the $133 billion in 1942. To me, $133 billion sounds bigger than $28 billion, but what do I know?

Then there’s 1941, 1951, 1978, 1993…. In fact, our economy has routinely absorbed tax increases as large or larger than we’d expect under Obama, without causing worldwide depressions.⁴

I guess maybe the economy won’t blow up if Tiger Woods pays more in taxes. Whew!

1. Okay, this quote is barely relevant to anything, but it’s one of my favorite Simpsons quotes ever. (back)
2. Incidentally, the law to raise taxes was proposed by George Bush, not by Obama — all the tax increases would be the result of Bush’s tax cuts, which were designed by Bush’s people to expire in 2009. Strictly speaking, Obama’s proposals — which lower taxes compared to the status quo laws Bush signed — are tax cuts. Bush has since said he wants the tax cuts made perminant, but that doesn’t change the fact that the President who signed the 2009 tax increase into law was George Bush, not Barack Obama. (back)
3. This and all other figures in this post are given in 2008 dollars. (back)
4. Sources: The Tax Policy Center’s Analysis of Obama and McCain’s tax plans (pdf link), “Revenue Effects of Major Tax Bills” by Jerry Tempalski (pdf link), and the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ online inflation calculator. (back)

Click on the cartoon to see a larger version.

You can also read this cartoon on the Dollars and Sense website, where they have an accompanying short article by Jason Son about how inflation tends to wipe out the gains of the minimum wage, because it’s not indexed to inflation. They also have more good articles on the minimum wage here and here. Please do click through — I think they feel paying me for my cartoons is more worthwhile if they get some traffic. :-)

This Crooked Timber post about the minimum wage by Kathy (who usually blogs at “The G Spot,” which is an excellent blog) pretty much explains the state of research on the effects of the minimum wage:

In response, Krueger and Card did another study that looked at the impact of that same minimum wage increase on employment in fast food establishments in New Jersey. To counter the previous criticisms from economists like Kevin Murphy who said that their data was problematic and that they’d got the timing wrong, this time they used a more reliable data source (employer data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) and looked at the data over a longer time period. And guess what? This new analysis confirmed their original findings: the increase in the minimum wage did not lead to a decrease in employment.

There are a number of other reliable scholarly studies on the minimum wage that report similar results—such as this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one, for example. There are also quite a few very good studies that show the opposite—that an increase in the minimum wage does indeed bring about a decrease in employment. A fair characterization of the literature is that the minimum wage’s impact on employment is ambiguous. But the fact that the findings are mixed is fairly compelling evidence that there must be something wrong with the standard perfect competition model of employment. [...]

Krueger and Card have written a paper that provides strong evidence that “specification searching and publication bias” have led to an overrepresentation of studies that find that the minimum wage has a statistically significant disemployment effect. The ideological character of much of the economics profession in the United States suggests that there are rewards for producing scholarship that confirms the idea that the minimum wage causes unemployment, and punishment for scholarship that finds otherwise.

It’s worth mentioning that even those peer-reviewed studies that find negative effects of the minimum wage, usually find very small effects.

My new Dollars and Sense cartoon is up!

D&S editor Amy Gluckman writes:

Women who came of age 20 or 30 years ago in the United States may be forgiven our surprise that the whole work-home-motherhood thing continues to be so fraught. Surely by now, many thought, women would not be sweating it—at least no more than men do. Wrong! The media can take some of the credit, for, among other things, continuing to play up the alleged mommy wars between “working” and “stay-at-home” moms. At a more basic level, many people (well, men) still seem to think homemaking and raising kids is basically a “Ten-Year Nap”—the (tongue-in-cheek, we hope) title of a current bestselling novel on the subject.

There’s also some interesting stuff about what happened to Japanese divorces when the laws about pension allocations to ex-spouses changed, but you’ll have to click through to read that. :-)

From the Dollars and Sense blog:

Peter Wagner of the Prison Policy Initiative sent us this link to a recent article in Slate magazine. The article cites the curious phenomenon that professional baseball players are much more likely to be born in August than July. The author theorizes that August babies aren’t naturally better at baseball — they’re just older than their peers, because Aug. 1 is the normal cut-off date for youth baseball leagues.

The author concludes that this structural benefit for the August-born is a “small advantage can have an impact that lasts a lifetime.”

Which reminds me of this old cartoon of mine:

A few weeks ago I walked into my local supermarket to see that a 10 oz. bar of cheese was “on sale” for $5.39. I did a double take–maybe they meant two bars of cheese for $5.39. Generally, the sale on that brand of cheese is 2 for $4.00 or 2 for $5.00, but sure enough this was somehow supposed to be a sale. I’ve been complaining about this since last year–the cost of food is soaring. Last year, I could generally get out of the supermarket paying around $65-85.00 for two people, now I’m paying $90.00 or more. The higher prices seem to apply across the board–fresh produce, canned foods, flour/rice, and most dramatically dairy. Of course, I’m fortunate to be able to suck it up and pay the higher prices, but many lower income folks in this country and other wealthy countries are struggling, and in poorer countries, people are taking to the streets in protest because they are unable to feed their families.

A quick search of Google news indicates that we really are in a world wide food crisis. I’m not so sure that there is an actually shortage of food, but the crisis appears to be the cost. Some of the countries where people are struggling with soaring food prices, include–Afghanistan, Haiti, South Africa, Namibia, New Zealand, Ivory Coast, and numerous others. The situation is getting so serious that the United Nations (and the World Bank) weighed in last week :

The head of the UN World Food Programme has warned that the rise in basic food costs could continue until 2010.

Josette Sheeran blamed soaring energy and grain prices, the effects of climate change and demand for biofuels.

Ms Sheeran has already warned that the WFP is considering plans to ration food aid due to a shortage of funds.

Some food prices rose 40% last year, and the WFP fears the world’s poorest will buy less food, less nutritious food or be forced to rely on aid.

Speaking after briefing the European Parliament, Ms Sheeran said the agency needed an extra $375m (244m euros; £187m) for food projects this year and $125m (81m euros; £93m) to transport it.

She said she saw no quick solution to high food and fuel costs.

“The assessment is that we are facing high food prices at least for the next couple of years,” she said.

Ms Sheeran said global food reserves were at their lowest level in 30 years - with enough to cover the need for emergency deliveries for 53 days, compared with 169 days in 2007.

Several factors have been cited as causes for the food price crisis including: rising fuel cost, the shift towards biofuels (e.g. ethanol), population growth, the growth of capitalist economies, and weather patterns. The greatest criticism in the range of articles I read has been reserved for government subsidies for bio-fuels, specifically ethanol. Many feel that the shift to ethanol and bio-fuels is environmentally harmful, but now we can add soaring food prices and hunger to the list of arguments against bio-fuels1.

1. If you want more information of about the food crisis, these graphs from the BBC website have useful information about the food price crisis. The only additional point I would add is that (see the chart of trade balances) while some countries like the US will benefit in the area of trade, I don’t think that the average American is benefiting from this. A few corporate farmers may be getting rich, but the vast majority of people are hurting. We’re not hurting anywhere near as much as poor people in poor countries. (back)

From Tapped, Dana advises pregnant workers to give written notice… of pregnancy:

That’s one of the lessons in Sue Shellenbarger’s latest Wall Street Journal column, which reports that pregnancy bias complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rose 14 percent last year to 5,587, a 40 percent increase from a decade ago. One woman in the publishing industry was fired while she was pregnant, supposedly for poor performance, yet those issues had never come up prior to her pregnancy. She wanted legal redress, but couldn’t prove in writing that her bosses actually knew she was expecting. So consider sharing your big news over email.

Shallenbarger also writes that many American women, until they get pregnant, have no idea that they are entitled to no paid leave under current law. Indeed, a study from Harvard University last year found that of 168 nations worldwide, the United States is one of only four whose government doesn’t require employers to provide paid maternity leave. The others are Lesotho, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.

Dave Sim is one of the greatest living cartoonists, and his work has been very influential on my own approach to cartooning. Over the decades he’s also become an extreme, extreme anti-feminist. In a recent discussion on the Sequential Tart website, Dave wrote:

The last I heard roughly 80% of the women in our society work outside the home at outside the home jobs…forty years ago only 20% of women worked — most of them in a period between graduating from high school and getting married and then getting pregnant. Sixty years ago maybe 6% worked.

Since the run-up from 20% to 80% was largely unimpeded…

The point about percentages is really my best attempt at the collapsing of what I have to say to white dwarf size. We are definitely plowing forward to 100% of one and 0% of the other … Used to be 6% became 20% is now 80%…where do you THINK we’re going? … I don’t think it’s a good idea and I don’t think we’re well served in not examining it.

My response to Dave:¹

Dave, you’re basing your stated argument here on some factual errors. If your main concern is that we’ll be in trouble when we reach 100%, then I’ve got good news for you: It’ll never happen. In fact, we’ll never even reach 80%. Or 70%.

In the USA, about 59% of women are in the paid labor force, including both women actively looking for paid jobs, and those who currently have paid jobs.

Forty years ago, in 1968, about 40% of women were in the labor force, not 20% as you stated. Sixty years ago, in 1948, about 33% of women were in the labor force — not 6%.²

So, at least in the US, women didn’t used to do paid jobs as little as you’re claiming, and they don’t currently do paid jobs as often as you think. But can’t we say you’re correct about the overall direction of the trend, even though you’re mistaken about the specific numbers?

No, you’re mistaken about the trend too — because the percent of women in the paid labor force isn’t climbing anymore. It’s leveled out. Fifteen years ago, it was about 58%; in 2001, it peaked at 60%; and in 2005 (most recent year I’ve seen data for) it was at 59%. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics is predicting (based on demographic changes, economic changes, etc) that it’ll still be about the same in 2025. (That’s only a guess, of course, but it’s the most educated and well-founded guess anyone has at this point.)

So there’s no need to worry about what happens when 100% of women are in the paid laborforce. It will never happen. Nor is that news that disappoints feminists, as far as I can tell. In recent years, the approach among feminists is to work for not only equal access to all paid jobs, but also for more respect and economic security for people who do unpaid caring labor.

(By the way, did you know that men are working less than ever? In 1950, 86% of men had a paid job or were looking for one; today that’s gone down a bit, to 75%. The statisticians expect that number to keep dropping, to a predicted 69% in 2025. A bit of this change is due to a small, growing number of men having the freedom to stay home and take care of their kids, if that’s what they want).

* * *

You also wrote “Since the run-up from 20% to 80% was largely unimpeded…”

Women’s labor force participation was about 20% back in 1900. The run-up since then has not been unimpeded; indeed, the legal right for women to own their own paychecks had to be fought for. As recently as the 1970s, “help wanted” classified sections in many newspapers were still divided into “women” and “men” sections. Open discrimination against female workers was legal until new laws in the 70s and 80s, and a lot of less open discrimination still goes on today. (Just last year the Supreme Court of the US ruled that women who are systematically paid less than male co-workers for the same work can only sue within a few months of being hired or getting an unequal raise — after that, the employer’s discrimination is free and clear of legal repercussions.)

* * *

I don’t think that feminists want 100% of women (or men) in paid jobs. What is it feminists want?

Well, I’m a feminist. What I want is for people to have as much freedom as possible to choose a mix of home life and work life that suits them, without having to lose economic security, and regardless of if they’re female or male. I think very few people really want to be at the job 40-60 hours a week for 40 or 50 years (although there are some, but most of us don’t have interesting, creative jobs); and very few people really want a life that consists of nothing but their home and family. (For one thing, kids grow up, so that’s not really a whole-life plan.)

Over the last century, the lives of women and men have gotten a lot more similar; women have more access to paid jobs, including decently-paid jobs, than they used to (although it’s still not where it should be, especially for poor women and women of color). Men are spending less of their lifetimes at jobs, and they’re freer than they used to be to prioritize time with their families if that’s what they want (although there are still too many barriers). Wage discrimination against women, and safety discrimination against men (especially non-white and immigrant men), still exists — but it’s gone down.

I think those are all positive trends, and — speaking for this one feminist — I hope they continue.

1. I posted this response on Sequential Tart, then edited it a little before posting it here. (back)
2. Citations: You can find simple info about women’s labor force participation by clicking here. You can find a more complex essay discussing this stuff, including predictions for where labor trends are going, by reading this essay, but it’s a pdf file. (back)

Because I think I may have just read the winner.. Brownifemipower at La Chola riffs on the use and misuse of Audre Lorde’s famous comment that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I’m not certain I agree with everything BFP says,¹ but I agree with a hell of a lot if it.

BFP also gets at something I’ve been thinking about lately; the use of “we” on the left. Can Hugo and BFP — or BFP and I, for that matter — really be considered part of the same movement at all? I don’t think so; I’m too comfortable here in the house, drawing my comics. I might say supportive things about BFP’s movement, and hope she’s right and her movement wins in the end, but I won’t really join it.

Hat tip: The Silence Of Our Friends.

UPDATE: Just came across this post on Anxious Black Woman:

As the late poet Audre Lorde once wrote: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. It may allow us to temporarily defeat him at his own game, but it will never bring about real change.” And that’s the real issue, isn’t it? What exactly is our long term goal here? Is it simply to ensure that black women have a seat at the table of power? One of us is already there (always looking at you, Condi!) yet here we are, pretty much in agreement that black women collectively are in a sad state when it comes to our political power. So, what has such tokenism done for us? Should our goal be to include as many of us at that table (which is why I’m all about how we can increase our numbers to begin with and why I would even bother with meaningful dialogue to raise the consciousness of those whose consciousness needs raising)? Or do we need to set up a different kind of table?

1. I’m never sure what people mean when they refer to “the market,” for example — would a mixed-market economy like Sweden used to have be considered “the market,” for instance? (back)

“Congestion Pricing” is the practice of charging people more to drive in heavy-traffic areas during the most popular driving times; this results in less traffic congestion. Economist Johnathan Leape has an interesting report on how congestion pricing is going in London (very well, he says) and how it’s been made more progressive (using the taxes to subsidize public transportation).

The charging zone [...] is defined by a ring of roads that provide alternative routes for through traffic, at no charge. For those who cross the boundary, the cost was originally set at five pounds (about $10) a day, with zone residents entitled to a 90 percent discount. In 2005, the rate was raised to eight pounds (about $16). [...]

The border is enforced by video cameras, which were already common in London. Concerns about civil liberties have been diminished by the cameras’ effectiveness in reducing street crime. The cameras read vehicle license plates and a computer matches them against a list of those who have paid and those exempt (which, in London, includes emergency services vehicles, taxis, buses, low-emissions vehicles, and all two-wheelers).[...]

The impact of the scheme exceeded expectations. In the first year of the charge, traffic delays in London dropped by 30 percent, journey time reliability increased by 30 percent, and average speeds rose 17 percent, reflecting a sharp fall in traffic jams at intersections (the time spent traveling at speeds less than 6 mph decreased by one-third). The charge also changed who was using the roads: private car trips dropped by 34 percent, and trucks and vans by 5 to 7 percent, but bus, taxi, and bike trips all rose sharply. The overall impact was a noticeable improvement in traffic conditions. [...]

By committing to plough all the revenues raised by the congestion charge into public transportation improvements, London has ensured that congestion pricing didn’t just improve mobility for car drivers who can pay the charge (the “Lexus lanes” problem) but also increased access to the city centre for everyone. [...]

The higher cost of rush-hour car trips and increased bus travel speeds, due to reduced congestion, result in increasing passenger numbers and falling average costs — which, in turn, lead to improved service levels and lower fares that stimulate further shifts to public transport and additional reductions in congestion.

Via Common Tragedies.

This cartoon isn’t by me; it’s by my pal Kevin Moore. Click on the panel to read the whole thing.

From A Tiny Revolution, the Daily Show writers explain the premises of the writer’s strike with their usual flair and humor.

Megan McArdle writes:

I don’t know why Matt should find this remarkable:

Still, the main psychological point remains that there’s a remarkable tendency to equate advocating that others engage in risky acts of physical violence with the idea of possessing courage and strength as personal characteristics.

After all, we’ve already internalized the notion that advocating taxing other people in order to give their money to someone else is somehow morally akin to charity.

I find the “taxing other people” argument — which conservatives and libertarians use frequently — bewildering. “I think people, but not me, should go to Iraq and risk death,” just ain’t analogous to “I think all taxpayers, me included, should pay for a generous safety net.”

In a followup post, Megan implies that liberals only favor using wealthy people’s money to pay for social programs. Poppycock.¹ I’m hardly high-income, but I pay taxes. So do most liberals and leftists. And although liberals and leftists² favor raising taxes on the wealthy, not all rich people are republican.³

Note also that SCHIPP, which is paid for from cigarette taxes, has received enthusiastic support from lefties — even though smokers are not an especially wealthy group.

Yet the idiotic “liberals want to spend other people’s money” idea is commonplace among conservatives .

1. The word “poppycock” “is actually American in origin, first turning up there about 1865. The OED is silent on its origin, but most modern dictionaries know well where it comes from: the Dutch word pappekak for soft faeces.” (back)
2. ”L&L” — the newest sequel to Dungeons & Dragons! (back)
3. Incidentally, the overall tax structure in the US is flattish — the vast majority of Americans pay about 16% of their income in taxes, give or take a couple of percent. (back)

From Brad Plumer:

For the past 20 years, the World Bank and assorted Western governments have been telling Malawi how to conduct its affairs. Stop subsidizing crop prices. Curtail spending. Float your currency. And so on. More recently, in 2000, donors demanded that Malawi dismantle a fledgling program that subsidized fertilizer for poor farmers–who often can’t afford it on their own–on the grounds that the subsidies would make it impossible for a “solid agricultural market to develop.”

Well, it’s hard to flout the donors, and Malawi did as told. What happened next? Some 1,500 Malawians starved to death in 2002, and five million more needed emergency rations in 2005. So, last year, the government finally told its “advisors” to shove off and put the subsidies back in place. Two years of record surpluses followed, and Malawi is now shipping excess maize to Zimbabwe. As Toronto’s Globe and Mail tells it, the subsidies have worked wonders; they’re far cheaper than importing food aid; and even the EU has reversed its stance and pledge to underwrite the fertilizer coupons.

And from The New York Times:

Bank policies in the 1980s and 1990s that pushed African governments to cut or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, decontrol prices and privatize may have improved fiscal discipline but did not accomplish much for food production, the evaluation said.

It had been expected that higher prices for crops would give farmers an incentive to grow more, while competition among private traders reduced the costs of seeds and fertilizer. But those market forces often failed to work as hoped.

“The whole thing was based on the idea that if you take away the government for the poorest of the poor that somehow these markets will solve the problems,” Professor Sachs said. “But markets can’t step in and won’t step in when people have nothing. And if you take away help, you leave them to die.”

Professor Easterly said the bank’s managers had made elementary mistakes. “It was a simplistic, Economics 101 lesson, that if you raise prices, farmers produce more, which makes sense if farmers have roads, access to credit, good access to fertilizer markets,” he said. “But most of the time, farmers were lacking those.”

From Dani Rodrik:

The slave trade, whereby able-bodied Africans were shipped to other parts of the world and sold into slavery, was a despicable economic institution for sure. But did it also have long-run effects on the economic development of African countries? Yes, is the surprising answer of Nathan Nunn (pdf link):

I construct measures of the number of slaves exported from each country in Africa, in each century between 1400 and 1900. The estimates are constructed by combining data from ship records on the number of slaves shipped from each African port or region with data from a variety of historical documents that report the ethnic identities of slaves that were shipped from Africa. I find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from each country and subsequent economic performance. The African countries that are the poorest today are the ones from which the most slaves were taken.

Nunn is careful to try to rule out reverse causation: he finds that the regions from which slaves were taken were, if anything, the more developed parts of Africa at the time.

The most likely explanation for the result? “[The] procurement of slaves through internal warfare, raiding, and kidnapping resulted in subsequent state collapse and ethnic fractionalization.”

There’s some interesting discussion in the comments there, too.

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