From Jason Samenow of the Washington Post comes this video of fascinating satellite images (a compilation of shots taken every minute) of the storm that swept through Virginia and North Carolina yesterday. It's like looking at a tidal wave or tsunami sweeping over parts of these two states.
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Researchers had participants sit in chairs at tables. Some sat in chairs that wobbled and tables that also wobbled, while some sat in sturdy chairs at sturdy tables.
Once in their chairs, participants were asked to judge the stability of the relationships of four celebrity couples: Barack and Michelle Obama, David and Victoria Beckham, Jay-Z and Beyoncé, and Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis. They did this by rating how likely they thought it was, on a scale of one to seven, that a couple would break up in the next five years. A score of one meant “extremely unlikely to dissolve”. A score of seven meant “extremely likely to dissolve”.
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The results reveal that just as cold drinks lead to perceptions of social conditions being cold, tinkering with feelings of physical stability leads to perceptions of social instability. Participants who sat in wobbly chairs at wobbly tables gave the celebrity couples an average stability score of 3.2 while those whose furniture did not wobble gave them 2.5.
Story here.
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America’s scorn for skills is extraordinary. The share of permanent visas granted for economic reasons (as opposed to kinship) fell from 18% to 13% between 1991 and 2011. In Canada it rose from 18% to 67%. The Partnership for a New American Economy, a pro-immigration group, warns that America is “falling behind in the global race for talent.” China, meanwhile, offers some highly skilled returners not only free homes but also cash to buy furniture.
We permit some of the best and brightest people from around the world to come to this country to earn college degrees, but then turn them away or put obstacles in their way when they request to stay here to work or start businesses. That's hardly a winning strategy for economic progress and growth. This is an important issue that should be at the top of this presidential campaign.
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Nor is IQ the primary predictor of success.
Research carried out by the Carnegie Institute of Technology shows that 85 percent of your financial success is due to skills in “human engineering,” your personality and ability to communicate, negotiate, and lead. Shockingly, only 15 percent is due to technical knowledge. Additionally, Nobel Prize winning Israeli-American psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, found that people would rather do business with a person they like and trust rather than someone they don’t, even if the likeable person is offering a lower quality product or service at a higher price.
As Woody Allen noted, "Eighty percent of success is just showing up." And as Harry Banks once said, "For success, attitude is as important as ability."
For this and last year's graduates, it is very important that you convey not only your abilities and how you'll create value for the firms to which you are applying, but also signal your personal worth and how you'll be a good emotional fit within the company.
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The world's population symbolically reached 7 billion today. (Not really, but the UN decided to use a birth today to commemorate what will come in the near future.)
"Seven billion is a number we should think about deeply," he said.
"We should really focus on the question of whether there will be food, clean water, shelter, education and a decent life for every child," he said. "If the answer is 'no,' it would be better for people to look at easing this population explosion."
I remember when we hit six billion; there was this same sentiment, the sentiment expressed by Paul Ehrlich in 1970. In response to this sentiment, I remember one commentator in 1999 making the important point that "It's not that we're multiplying like rabbits, it's that we're no longer dying off like flies."
So for those lamenting the growth in the world's population, whom do you propose killing off to reduce it? Between which two countries should we instigate a war to reign in the number of people on the planet?
But things have been slowing down.
But Poston said a combination of factors led to what may be the most significant demographic shift ever.
In the industrialized West, improved methods of birth control and greater opportunities for women in the workplace and in society meant the end of 5,000 years of women generally being considered society's baby-makers.
In China, there has been aggressive enforcement of a "one-child" policy, drastically reducing population growth rates.
Worldwide, urbanization has reduced the need for large families beneficial in rural agricultural areas.
Reasons for significant growth rate declines in places like Iran, where the rate has fallen from 7.0 in 1974 to 1.9, remain more of a mystery, but Poston said they probably could be traced to cultural changes that can be very difficult to reverse.
And from what did those changes derive? What about vast changes in economic growth around the world? The adoption of market capitalism in the West since the nineteenth century? In parts of the developing world like Brazil, India, and China over the past four decades? If the argument is that we should reduce the size of families, well the best solution for that is increased economic growth. And for that, we need what the West initiated two to three centuries ago. And where is that going now?
According to the United Nations Population Fund, the seven-billionth child is most likely to be a boy born in India or China, but the trend of fertility in the longer term is in a different direction, Dudley Poston, a professor of sociology and demographics at Texas A&M University, told Reuters.
For the first time ever, the human reproduction rate is slowing, in many places slowing significantly, and the slowing growth is not only happening in Europe and Japan, he said.
"Once your fertility rates drops below two, it is very very hard to get it to go back up again," Poston told Reuters.
"We now have 75 countries in the world where the fertility rate is below two," meaning the average woman is having fewer than two children.
It seems as if some of the world's leading economies are moving in the opposite direction. Let's hope the developing world adopts market capitalist policies more rapidly than the West rejects them.
Oh yeah, here's Robert Higgs explaining the cause of that decline. (HT: Don Boudreaux)
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In explaining his bias against certainty, Scott Adams explains,
I have a personal bias that only idiots have certainty about complicated issues. (The exception would be skeptics who don't believe in magic, religious or otherwise. I give them a pass for being 100% certain.) So when Krugman, who is brilliant, displays certainty on the economy - with his Nobel Prize and all - my brain automatically conflates him with idiots, and it weakens his argument.
Good point. But then again, I'm not certain about that; it may be a bad point. Or even just a mediocre point.
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Pete Boettke asks:
So objectively, are we experiencing more severe weather in 2011 than we did in say 1951? Or, do we just see and hear more about the storms because of the ease of communication across the country?
Prior to 1950, records on tornadic activity were not well kept, but we can look at the change over that time period. The following graph shows the number of recorded tonadoes by year in the U.S. (Actual data taken from here.)
The number of tornadoes touching down each year is one thing, how many people died from a given tornado is another. This chart shows that far more deaths from any given tornado occurred in earlier years (beginning in 1950), but that's likely due to better forecasting and warning systems available today relative to earlier time periods.
More to the point, this chart reports deaths from any given weather-related source over the past 70 years. Deaths from tornadic activity decreased in more recent years relative to earlier years, but again, that's due mostly to better forecasting and warning systems in place today relative to years prior to 1980. Since 1980, deaths from tornadic activity have remained relatively stable.
Deaths from all other weather-related activity also appear relatively stable, notwithstanding the ten-year average for hurricanes nearly doubling the 30-year average. That data is skewed by one outlier: the 1,016 deaths from Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Below are the total number of hurricanes per year beginning in 1851. As noted on the site:
This shows quite pronounced year-to-year variations with as many as 7 hurricane strikes in 1886 and 6 in both 2004 and 2005 and as few as none occurring many years, the most recent being 2009. No significant long term up or down trend is apparent in this record.
So hurricane activity in the U.S. has not increased, and the number of hurricane deaths, minus Katrina, has remained stable.
UPDATE: Patrick Michaels explains the increase in tornados to better detection (i.e., Doppler radar) and reporting systems in place since 1950s.
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An interesting analysis of the cost of the various means of energy sources, including externalities and subsidies, by Michael Rizzo of Unbroken Window.
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David Henderson points to the following posts by David Friedman. In these posts, David speaks out against the sustainability movement, arguing that it is a) based on predicting the needs of future populations, of which we have no idea today what they will be (think of what the world would be today if in 1900 the sustainability movement protected horse production etc.); and b) sustainability proponents today call for reduced rates of population, but that runs counter to our actual needs.
Read the posts.
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1. In 1900, about 47% of the U.S. labor force was employed in agriculture; today that figure is just about 1%, and we have more food produced each year today relative to then. This change occurred due to technological innovations (i.e., fertilizers and new farming techniques) and machinery that could do what labor once did. In fact, if you travel to a poor developing country today you'll see a greater percentage of its workforce engaged in agriculture relative to the percentage of the workforce in rich developed countries. This same trend is now happening with manufacturing. Why at this event are we discussing ways to preserve manufacturing labor in this country? Isn't the subtitle of this event, "Jobs for the Next Generation"?
2. The sole purpose of trade - whether it be with my wife, my neighbor, some stranger in Detroit, or some stranger in Tokyo - is to increase my consumption possibilities, not my production possibilities. If I really wanted to preserve potential jobs we should ban trade with anyone and instead produce our own cars, homes, food, clothes, books, etc. Obviously self-sufficiency leads to poverty. If we can agree that increasing consumption is our objective, why are we concerned at this meeting with preserving jobs in this country? There are an infinite number of things to be done and if machines or workers in foreign countries can do some of them for us, why is that considered detrimental to our economic well being?
3. There was concern expressed during the panel discussions that the economic output of the U.S. is losing ground to the combined economic output of China, Brazil and India, three-fourths of the BRIC countries. Why is this surprising? These three countries make up nearly 1/2 of the world's population while the U.S. makes up about 1/20th. Additionally, these three countries are becoming more productive and economically efficient because they have adopted more free market reforms over the past thirty years. Why are we concerned about that? Shouldn't we be relishing in the fact that as workers in these countries become more productive and efficient their opportunity costs increase for producing goods and services in which we have comparative advantages? This means we can potentially obtain more goods and services at lower cost to us. Why should we ever worry ourselves about people in other countries (or even in Florida, for that matter) becoming more productive?
4. Damon Silvers from the AFL-CIO perpetuates numerous myths about middle class incomes having declined in the U.S. over the past four decades, this despite increasing worker productivity. (Ron Brownstein also argues that median household income has declined in the US since 2000.) What evidence does he (or Mr. Brownstein) have for this claim?
Below is a graph showing employee compensation received as a percentage of GDP. (Source: U.S. Federal Reserve Bank's FRED database.) In 1959 employee compensation was about 55% of GDP, it hits a peak around 59% in 1969, drops slightly in 1983, and then returns to around 55% by 2009.
Yes, there appears to be some slight decline. But what has happened to employer expenditures on employee health care over this period? We are receive a greater percentage of our total compensation today in the form of benefits relative to thirty and forty years ago, especially as health care costs have risen over the past thirty years. Michael Cox of the Dallas Federal Reserve explains well the trend in middle class incomes.
Additionally, payroll taxes increased significantly beginning in the late 1970s, more so in 1980 as the threshold income on which FICA and Medicare taxes was based increased, and then increased significantly again beginning in 1983 when the government began indexing this threshold to the increase in the average wage rate. Remember, the employer portion of FICA and Medicare taxes is paid by the employee in the form of reduced compensation.
Lastly, beginning in 2001 there was a long and protracted decline in the number of jobs created, mostly due to the recession, but also, I believe, due to structural changes in our economy. A surplus of labor in, say, the manufacturing sector leads to lower employee compensation as labor supply in certain sectors increases, and remains so until either these workers are retrained for jobs of the new economy (where wages tend to be higher), or until retirement thins the oversupply and the next generation of workers are equipped for jobs in the new economy.
To respond to Brownstein (who, by the way, is an outstanding gentleman and I appreciated greatly the time he took to speak to my wife and me), household income is a poor proxy for determining changes in income characteristics through time because households change. One of the biggest factors has been the change in the number of foreign born workers in the US workforce today relative to thirty and forty years ago. In 1970, 5.2% of the U.S. labor force age 25 and older was foreign born; in 2009 it was 15.5%, nearly three times as many. 50.1% of foreign-born workers in the U.S. today are of Hispanic or Latino descent; they have lower levels of education, which means they have fewer skills today relative to the workforce of forty years ago. The majority of foreign-born workers of Hispanic or Latino descent never earned a high school diploma. This means that there is an increasing number of lower skilled workers in the workforce, many of them possessing even fewer skills than the average worker in the bottom quintile of household income forty years ago. Whenever the marginal is less than the average, the average must fall.
5. Throughout this program, the panelists and speakers discussed "public-private-education" partnerships as a means of increasing our competitiveness around the world. There has been no greater public-private partnership in this country in every conceivable measure than with education, both at the secondary and post-secondary levels. In fact, we've doubled real per pupil expenditures on secondary education over the past forty years and the only change has been a slight decrease in science scores. As Joel Klein recently pointed out, the problem is a lack of competition in our government schools.
Why do the panelists think that taking from successful, more competitive firms and industries to subsidize less competitive firms and industries will promote our competitiveness around the world? Would the panelists agree that there are extreme information and incentive problems with government deciding on winners and losers in the global marketplace? If we want our industries looking more like government schools, then this is a winning strategy. If instead we want more competitive industries and jobs for the next generation, let them compete and win or fail based on successful innovation and discovery, not their political connections that tend to preserve the status quo and firms that cannot stand on their own.
(BTW - Japan's MITI was notorious for subsidizing industries as a means of increasing Japan's global economic dominance. Their success record is abysmal, with about 12 failed "investments" for every successful one. People who look favorably at the automobile and electronics sectors of the Japanese economy of the 1960s - 1990s ignore the opportunity costs of the money that was spent subsidizing the 12 sectors per each one of these successful sectors that failed to materialize and produce value to the Japanese economy. Anyone ever heard of Bastiat's Broken Window Fallacy?)
Overall, it was worth attending the "Road to Prosperity" discussion. Unfortunately, I spend my life trying to dispel the myths I heard perpetuated at this forum.
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