Just sayin’ . . .
The PotUS and Minimum Wage [UPDATED!]
On April 2, 2014 the President of the United States came to the University of Michigan to speak about minimum wage. I covered The Event for the Ann Arbor Chronicle, but didn’t at all speak to the nominal topic of these remarks (i.e., minimum wage), because I don’t feel that events like these are really at all about substantive discussions of policy. They are about handshakebabykissSMIIIIIIIIILEgoBlue!!!–and the PotUS perforned admirable in this regard.
But for those who read the column and really *do* want to think more about minimum wage, here are some articles that have influenced my thinking (with commentary). I also touched base via email with Adam Stevenson (an econ lecturer at U-M mostly known for his work on the labor and tax ramifications of same-sex unions). The sense I got from Stevenson–who describes his position as “pretty orthodox,” basically running along the lines of what you’ll find in any halfway decent Econ 101 textbook–is that increasing minimum wage is in no way the clear win-win the PotUS was pitching to his 1,400 gathered listeners on April 2:
1) Increasing the minimum wage obviously HELPS folks who already have minimum wage jobs (i.e., employers don’t start eliminating job when the minimum wage increases). These workers will have more money, and will spend it on stuff. Economic growth!
2) Increasing the minimum wage HURTS people who are unemployed and basically only qualified for a minimum wage job (i.e., when the wage floor goes up employers avoid staffing vacant minimum wage jobs and creating news ones). These non-workers will continue to have basically no money, and won’t buy stuff. Misery!
2a) The bulk of minimum wage workers are “teenagers and the elderly” [UPDATE: It turns out that this is a pretty contentious statement; details below] Stevenson mentioned this because minimum wage issues can at least in part explain the very high (~25 percent) unemployment among these potential workers, and tends to indicate that raising the minimum will make things even worse for those folks. I’m mentioning it because in his speech the PotUS said that “the average age of folks getting paid the minimum wage is 35.” I believe this is likely true–because the *average* of 17, 17, and 70 *is* 35–but it doesn’t mean that many 35-year-olds necessarily earn the minimum wage. Using a mean average to get folks thinking about a median or mode average is a classic How to Lie with Statistics tactic, and the PotUS deserves to be called out on it.
3) No one can really say what the net effect of #1 and #2 are, despite hundreds of academic papers trying to get at just that. The most famous (cited 1500 times, according to Stevenson, and mentioned in the NPR pieces I included among my resources) is a 1994 paper by Card and Krueger, which found no meaningful job destruction when the minimum wage was raised. “This paper launched a thousand responses, many of them quite critical of the methodology. Most subsequent papers do indeed find a negative employment effect, which reinforces the idea that it’s hard to say what the net effect of the min wage is.” Stevenson goes on to recommend this “readable (if slightly technical) paper by Dave Neumark, one of the country’s major experts in the area. Neumark tends to be critical of the Card and Krueger paper I mention above, but I think he gives all sides a reasonably fair shake.”
4) Increasing the minimum wage is a crummy way to “help the poor.” Noting Stevenson’s point in #2a–that the bulk of minimum wage workers are teens and older workers–relatively few minimum wage workers are “supporting” families in the way we tend to picture when someone says “helping working families.” What *does* “help the poor” and “support working families”? Quoth Stevenson: “The EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit) is a much bigger, better, and direct way to achieve the same goals. Things like subsidized health care, child care, etc. would also be of much larger practical impact.”
In other words, since we have every reason to believe that futzing with the minimum wage is a crummy way to actually help working families and “think of the children” (see #4), then the real question is whether the individual joys and trickle-down-ish benefits of a higher minimum wage (#1) are large enough to cancel the individual misery and deadweight losses (#2)? Stevenson’s conclusion:
The likelihood that the benefits of increasing the minimum wage outweigh deadweight loss “is not clear empirically, and the simple theory (let me stress the many connotations of the word SIMPLE) suggests that there must be a net loss.”
The Public Library: America’s Most Beloved–and Transparent–Taxing Entity
I continue to write a monthly-ish column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. This most recent installment is a 2600-word love letter to local libraries. It begins:
Say a precocious child – like Glenn Beck, for example – asks you how much the library costs. The library is, after all, readily confused with a bookstore (because it is full of books) or NetFlix (because they let you have stuff for a while, but expect it returned in good condition).
What’s your answer?
Probably the first thing that comes out of your mouth is that it’s free – which makes sense to the child (and, evidently, Glenn Beck). After all, the kid never sees you pay anyone there, and (assuming your household finances are like mine) it is also likely often a place you go to have fun and get stuff after you’ve explained that you can’t buy this or pay to visit that on account “We don’t have the money for it.”
But we’re all grow-ups here – even Glenn Beck – and we certainly know that the library costs something [1], we just don’t know how much (or, evidently, who foots the bill). If pressed, we’d wave our hands and say that the library is probably funded (note that passive voice!) by some sub-portion of a portion of our property taxes, plus a little Lotto money and tobacco settlement, multiplied by the inverse of some arcane coefficient known only to God and the taxman, or something – yet another inscrutable exercise in opaque bureaucracy.
But it’s not that way at all.
. . .
What’s your answer?
Probably the first thing that comes out of your mouth is that it’s free – which makes sense to the child (and, evidently, Glenn Beck). After all, the kid never sees you pay anyone there, and (assuming your household finances are like mine) it is also likely often a place you go to have fun and get stuff after you’ve explained that you can’t buy this or pay to visit that on account “We don’t have the money for it.”
But we’re all grow-ups here – even Glenn Beck – and we certainly know that the library costs something [1], we just don’t know how much (or, evidently, who foots the bill). If pressed, we’d wave our hands and say that the library is probably funded (note that passive voice!) by some sub-portion of a portion of our property taxes, plus a little Lotto money and tobacco settlement, multiplied by the inverse of some arcane coefficient known only to God and the taxman, or something – yet another inscrutable exercise in opaque bureaucracy.
But it’s not that way at all.
. . .
And goes on from there, with footnotes and charts, a picture of my tax bill, links to videos of Glenn Beck and Jon Stewart–we’ve got it all! Make sure to check the comments for my 1000-word (!!!) drunken clarification/addendum. Enjoy!
The Ann Arbor Chronicle | In it for the Money: Your Public Library
TWERKTASTROPHE!
Or maybe the “Twerkpocalypse”? We can only hope that this is the harbinger of a golden age of twerksploitation films.
In any event, I *love* this goddamn song.
Video: This Video Is Madness: DJ Snake & Lil Jon – Turn Down For What
(via William Gibson’s twitter feed, a font of all that is good and right in this sordid little Internet)
Paint Your Nails, Change Your Habits
Here’s the thing about habits and rituals: They are enormously evolutionarily advantageous. We are cognitive misers; making decisions and remembering things take energy (which is finite), and forgetting things can be very costly–even deadly. So, we’re primed to form habits, because they offload this effort. The productivity books and blogs are full of anecdotes about Famous Admirable People establishing rituals to free up their headspace (e.g., Einstein had a closet full of clothes that all matched and never wore socks; he could just dress at random without putting effort into choosing garments).
Any task that you can initiate in under two seconds[1] is not perceived as requiring effort; it easily slips into habit and automation: Putting on a seat belt, switching off a light, grabbing some M&Ms from a bowl on someone’s desk, glancing at a cellphone.[2]
As this little list makes obvious, there are up and downsides to this mechanism, as an unhealthy or downright dangerous habit can form and ossify just as easily as a good one.
So, I love that this guy’s nail-polish hack–by creating a consistent distraction–effectively increases the cognitive effort of the habit up beyond the threshold, so the automation falls. Maintain this consistent cognitive load, and the habit softens up and becomes far more susceptible to modification.
“Any one of us would hate to be thought of as the worst thing we ever did.” @kohenari
I continue to write a monthly column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. My February column (which came in so late it actually ran in March) is a sorta interview I did with Ari Kohen (Schlesinger Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Forsythe Family Program on Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs at the University of Nebraska, author of books, human rights activist, researcher generally known for his work on heroism/moral decision making, basically solid dude, and chum of mine from auld lang syne).
Although Woody Allen’s alleged 1992 rape of his seven-year-old adopted daughter is the inciting incident for that conversation, the column itself is *not* about Woody Allen, Dylan Farrow, rape, fame, patriarchy, or the law.
It *is* about how we should think about our interactions with those who transgression, and the pitifalls of the psychological standards we use to decide when (or if) we’ll accept a transgressor back into our midsts. Quoth Kohen:
I consistently tell people, when I talk about the death penalty and people on death row, is that it’s troubling to judge someone by the worst thing he ever did, and say “This is the measure of the man.” This is a point I got long ago from Sister Helen Prejean, she says it all the time, that any one of us would hate to be thought of as the worst thing we ever did. I think there’s some merit to that. I think most people want to draw a line and say “Well, not when it comes to murder; murderers are murderers and that is the most relevant fact about them,” and they’d make the same case about child rapists, or pedophiles, whatever; that’s what you are.
But I try – and it’s stressful – but I try not to think of people that way, not to think of people as monstrous, and not to think about people as being that worst thing, but as having made terrible decisions and having made atrocious mistakes, or having acted on terrible impulses. It’s difficult, and it’s one of the hardest things to talk to people about when you talk about criminals and people in prison. [. . . ] Because, generally, free people think of themselves as being very, very different from [criminals and] incarcerated people, that there’s a fundamental break between someone who is in prison and someone who is not in prison. [. . .] The idea that they could, or that someone they love could be, in prison is a shocking idea, because they are categorically different. . . .
But I try – and it’s stressful – but I try not to think of people that way, not to think of people as monstrous, and not to think about people as being that worst thing, but as having made terrible decisions and having made atrocious mistakes, or having acted on terrible impulses. It’s difficult, and it’s one of the hardest things to talk to people about when you talk about criminals and people in prison. [. . . ] Because, generally, free people think of themselves as being very, very different from [criminals and] incarcerated people, that there’s a fundamental break between someone who is in prison and someone who is not in prison. [. . .] The idea that they could, or that someone they love could be, in prison is a shocking idea, because they are categorically different. . . .
Much more here: The Ann Arbor Chronicle | In it for the Money: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Check out “Haphead”—a noir-ish near-future SF web series #scifi
This Buffyesque web-series is the latest project from the folks who brought you the mockumentary Ghosts with Shit Jobs. If you dig the trailer, please take a second to “Like” it on YouTube, Facebook, G+, etc., or sign up for their newsletter; the more public support they can show for this project, the more likely the Canadian government will bankroll the series. Go Canada!
Anti-Smoking Ad Campaigns: Vitamins vs. Painkillers #biz #marketing #rhetoric
Conventional wisdom in advertising is that it’s much easier to sell painkillers than it is to sell vitamins–i.e., it’s easier to motivate a suffering prospect with the offer of relief than it is to motivate a basically content prospect with an offer of future betterment. This is especially the case with men, who basically *never* believe anything bad will happen to them–or if they do, simply brush it of with cavalier bluster (“Why stop smoking? Sure, it shortens your life, but it only takes the worst years, amiright?”–which I’ve heard countless times, evidently from men you *haven’t* watched their spouses’ beloved grandfathers slowly suffocate in hospice, smothered by lungs gone brittle with a lifetime of Luckies.)
So, for example, insurance was a really hard product to sell in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s–until it dawned on folks not to focus on the prospect, but instead on his family. Tell a man about how his *family* will suffer when he’s gone, and you give him pain in the here and now that will be soothed by purchasing an insurance policy[*]–i.e., you convert vitamins into painkillers.
The genius of this ad is that shifts the vague notion of future pain caused by smoking cigarettes into an immediate discomfort and moral panic. Well played Thai Health Promotion Foundation (those with an interest in marketing–and MAD MEN fans–will note that the ad was produced by Ogilvy & Mather).
Continue reading “Anti-Smoking Ad Campaigns: Vitamins vs. Painkillers #biz #marketing #rhetoric”
Be the Ant on the Rubber Rope #writing #biz #everythingelse
Consider for a moment the plight of the ant on a rubber rope:
An ant starts to crawl along a taut rubber rope 1 km long at a speed of 1 cm per second (relative to the rubber it is crawling on). At the same time, the rope starts to stretch by 1 km per second (both in front of and behind the ant, so that after 1 second it is 2 km long, after 2 seconds it is 3 km long, etc). Will the ant ever reach the end of the rope?
The answer–which may seem counterintuitive–is yes, although “in the form stated above the time taken is colossal.”
If I were to write an essay on this, it would be one on incremental progress: No matter how distant your goal, no matter how small your steps, no matter how vexing the hinderance—even to the point of your destination actively moving away from you—you will get there provided you don’t flag and don’t quit.
But I don’t need to write an essay, because the situation is self-instructive, once you see it for what it is. Instead, I offer this very brief benediction:
Yes, the road is long, my children, and the universe is fucking with you. But you, my best belovéds, are each a dogged little ant: Just keep trucking, and you will walk that mutherfucker down. Amen.
Astronaut Ronald McNair: Libraries, Cops, Star Trek, and Social Justice
What I’ve long admired about Ronald McNair was how polite and persistent he was in telling the haters (both abstract and concrete, external and internal) to fuck off. Just an affable, erudite guy going about his business, taking a moment to say: “Hey, America; couldn’t help but notice the arc of your history was a little crooked. I’m just gonna bend it back towards justice a smidge, if you don’t mind.”