Obsidian Wings

Decoupling of Increased Labor Productivity from Wage Growth

by Ugh

One of the selling points of the "tax reform" legislation, now commonly known as the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act, or TCJA (or the Corporate Tax Lawyer Full Employment Act), is that it would in time increase wages by a certain amount.  The economists' view of how this would happen is by decreasing the marginal cost of new investments - by both introducing full expensing and lowering the business tax rate (corporate and pass-through).  This would cause more capital investment by business, which would increase labor productivity, which would then result in increased wages.*

This is the typical view of economists for, like, forever (technical term).  But an interesting thing seems to have happened in the past 25+ (or more) years, which is that increases in labor productivity have not been matched by increases in wages.  See, e.g., this paper.  See also this article which attributes the decoupling to wage inequality, the average wage rising faster than the median wage.  Here is a third paper talking about both.

This has substantial implications for public policy. In the past, increased capital formation could be relied upon to (eventually) increase median wages.  If that is no longer the case, then a different approach is needed and it is not clear to me that policy makers, or even economists generally, recognize this.  Moreover, this, combined with the anticipated large increase in workplace automation, may mean that median wage increases are a thing of the past, resulting in attendant large negative consequences, a potential crisis.

So, what to do?  One idea is a universal basic income.  Others include increasing the minimum wage, getting the fed to stop clamping down on inflation worries any time the labor market gets tight, among others (see the third paper).  Whatever the solution, it is clearly not on offer from the current U.S. government, and I wonder even if the government changes these things can be done.  ISTM that this, along with climate change, are the gigantic, worldwide public policy problems of the coming decades.  Whee, as they say.

*Notably there was little, if any, selling of the TCJA before passage by even the GOP on the basis of "big corporations will hand out bonuses!!!"  As noted, this is not the economists' view of how it was supposed to work and is also, ISTM, rather disgusting of these businesses to announce their (one-time, and meager relative to the tax cuts) bonuses and tie them to TCJA's passage - a rather cynical and transparent attempt to suck up to Trump.  Notably, bonuses deductible in 2017 will reduce taxes at a 35% clip, whereas any bonuses deductible in 2018 only result in tax savings at 21%....

**Related to this is this report from the BLS, which notes "workers in the U.S. business sector worked virtually the same number of hours in 2013 as they had in 1998—approximately 194 billion labor hours.¹ What this means is that there was ultimately no growth at all in the number of hours worked over this 15-year period, despite the fact that the U.S population gained over 40 million people during that time, and despite the fact that there were thousands of new businesses established during that time."  That seems remarkable to me.

Again

Bailey Holt and Preston Cope

The 11th school shooting since 1 Jan, and the 50th this academic year.

Bright the hawk's flight

by Doctor Science

Ursula K. LeGuin has died. The SFF community knew she was fading, but we hoped, illogically, that there would be a reprieve, time for more encores.

For so many of us, she was our mother, our teacher, our grandmother. An icon of what we might do, and even more of what we might strive to be. She was always aware that SFF is the most political of genres and also the most religious, because we think about building and re-building the world. I've never really respected the Nobel Literature Prize Committee because AFAIK they never seriously considered awarding her the Prize, even though she was the greatest English-language writer "in an ideal direction", as Nobel desired.

Her writing was thoughtful, beautiful, heartfelt, and she was always exploring. The Earthsea Trilogy was powerful and influential, and she came back to it years later and wrote her own fix-it fics, expanding her world to include the voices of women she hadn't let herself hear the first time.

A recurring theme in her work was the denial of immortality. She was an atheist, but in contrast to the so-called Four Horsemen of Atheism, Le Guin's her firm but compassionate attitude is so much more complex and humane.

For many years I called my political beliefs that of a Le Guinian anarchist:

An anarchist is one who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.

I'm behind on reading all her work, so I'm going to pick up her latest book, a collection of her online writing, to savor. I don't know if I'll be called to say something more detailed about her life and writing, but here's a start.

Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying, life.
Bright the hawk's flight
on the empty sky.

The image is of a kestrel or Sparrowhawk, in honor of the hero of the Earthsea Trilogy. Photo by Lee Jaffe

The Fire Next Time -- Open Thread

by wj

We're way overdue for a new open thread. So here it is.

To kick-start things, I noticed something interesting this morning. A bunch of items in the Washington Post on the general theme of how things played out over the weekend regarding the shutdown.

For example, this one entitled White House Strategy: Keep Trump Contained

Is that accurate? I don't know. But we do know how Trump reacts to suggestions, especially in the media, that he is not in charge and that others are controlling him. Which I suspect means that when we go through the next CR exercise in a couple weeks**, he will insist on being much more actively, and visibly, involved in negotiations. Given his "contributions" to discussions last week, what does that suggest will happen?

''''''

Or, yes, you can take up other pressing issues like this one: Is Tom Brady or Joe Montana the greatest quarterback of all time? (Not that the answer isn't obvious. Even to dedicated 49er fans....)

** Of course, the Congress could just get its act together and pass actual budget and appropriations bills. Stranger things have happened -- although I'm not sure I can think of one right off.

Bread – Part One of X

by JanieM

I’ve just started making and eating bread again after about twenty years of (mostly; it’s hard) avoiding wheat. I was going to write a post about these adventures, but the more I thought about it the bigger the topic got, until it was far too long for a single post. So I’m going to break it up into several smaller offerings, spaced out over time.

Bread on the Table

Long ago when I was young, we sat down at the supper table one night – my parents, my three siblings, and I – at five o’clock, as usual. This was nothing out of the ordinary; we did it every night of my childhood. But this time, instead of starting to eat, my dad just sat there. We didn’t have any big rules about waiting for him to start, but it was odd that he didn’t, so we looked at him in bemusement and waited for an explanation.

None came; he continued to just sit there.

Finally one of us asked him what was wrong.

“There’s no bread on the table,” he said.

Whichever one of us three sisters had set the table that night got up, fetched some bread out of the bread box, put some slices neatly on a little plate, and brought it to the table.

The meal could begin.

My dad was the son of Italian immigrants. His mother, my grandma, was a fantastic cook. She could make a great meal out of very little, which was lucky, because for a lot of his growing up years they had very little. (Well, they had a bountiful garden and a grape arbor, so they were probably better off in the fresh food department than a lot of people, then and now. But that’s one of many tangents off the main topic.) (My grandpa and my uncles used the grapes to make what they called “Dago Red.” But that’s yet another tangent. Several, in fact.)

Now that I think about it, and rather surprisingly, I never knew my grandma to make bread. She might have when she was younger, but there’s no one left to ask. I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t, though, because there was wonderful bread to be had from local bakeries. The one I remember most vividly was the Balkan Bakery, where we stopped after Mass on many a Sunday to get bread still hot from the brick oven (maybe a quarter a loaf), and sometimes dough (ditto, for a pound).

The bread was a crusty white loaf, still in my mind the archetypal standard for bread, as robins are the archetypal bird and maples the archetypal tree. The dough we took home and fried, not deep fried with sugar as at fairs (yech), but in a frying pan, with salt or garlic salt (yum).

I’ve often thought that if I were ever to write a memoir/essay starring my dad, I would call it “Bread on the Table.” (This may be as close as I ever get.) My dad wasn’t a sophisticated guy. He didn’t read a lot (except National Geographic and the local paper). He never traveled much, except with the Navy during the war. He worked what amounted to two jobs, saving his pennies so his kids could go to college. His central focus, metaphorically speaking, was to make sure there was bread on the table for his family. Sometimes that was his literal focus too.

Tsunami Warning

by wj

Yesterday, in Wisconsin, there was a special election. Governor Walker had nominated a prominent state senator to be his agriculture secretary, so this was to fill his (safe) seat. It wasn't a big deal . . . except it was.

The previous (Republican, obviously) state senator was a popular guy. And the Republican assemblyman running to succeed him was also popular. Nothing resembling a Roy Moore, seriously flawed, candidate here. And Republicans (including, but not limited to, the Koch brothers' PAC) out-spent the Democrats by a fair margin.

This was a district that Trump won last year by 17 points. Tuesday, the Democratic candidate, Patty Schachtner, won by 9 points!

And she did it without running against Trump. She talked about the opioid crisis. She talked about health care in general (she's the chief medical examiner for St. Croix County). She talked about jobs. And, for all the liberal purists out there, her biography talks, among other things, about her membership in the Wisconsin Bear Hunters’ Association. But not about Trump.

Not surprisingly, Wisconsin Republicans are freaking out. Governor Walker, in a spate of tweets, called it "A WAKEUP CALL". It certainly appears to be. And not just for Wisconsin Republicans.

MLK

by russell

One of his last speeches, an address to the Conference on New Politics, entitled The Three Evils of Society.  King's three evils were war, racism, and poverty.  It's pretty long, about 45 minutes, but worth a listen IMO.

This speech represents some of King's later thinking, when he had broadened the scope of his analysis from racism and race-related civil rights issues, to a broader consideration of American society and its ills.

There's a Boston area jazz radio host who has, for many years, dedicated one night of his programming on or around King's birthday to playing selections from King's speeches along with related music.  As the years have gone on, I've found it more and more difficult to listen to the show, because it makes me consider how far we have come since King's day, and that consideration brings me no joy.

There are a lot of ways to think about King.  Personally, due to my own background and personal history, I see him in broader terms than merely political.  To me he occupies a prophetic position in our history, and his public career as a gift and a wake-up call.  

Have we woken up?

If you take King and his words seriously, he remains a challenging figure, fifty years later.

Let us continue to wake up.

Your ObWi Hospital report

by liberal japonicus
It is another example of ObWi synchronicity that Sebastian writes about fears just before I went under the knife (that's a phrase) If you really want to crank those fears up to 11, aim for a long convalescence in a hospital. I suppose you can become accustomed to it, but getting old isn't the problem, it's getting helpless. I'm on the mend, and I should be back to ADL in a week or so. Interestingly, according to that wikipedia page, another acronym for ADL was DEATH (dressing/bathing, eating, ambulating (walking), toileting, hygiene) Wonder why that didn't catch on. But Sebastian's post plus a close up encounter of when ADL is not a given really make things jump out at you.

I'm at a university hospital for this prostectomy, using the Da Vinci machine. Since everyone is talking about their age, I'd suggest that dealing with prostate enlargement earlier is probably better than what I did, which was ignore it until it got really bad and then found I had cancer that I may not have needed to treat, but the prostate was twice the size it is normally, so I opted to have it removed. If I had dealt with it 5 years earlier, I might not have had to have the surgery.

Obviously, at a uni hospital, with students around following the doctor, student nurses on rotation and such, it's nice. The ones who want to be doctors seem to be on a short leash, I've got a student nurse who seems to have a lot of time and is just shadowing people to see what to do. Seems like a good system. They need a 4 year degree (don't know if a 2 year degree is a possibility) but they have to pass extensive tests to become nurses, so they don't have a problem that they have in a lot of Japanese education where the entrance exam is the main hurdle.

There is a concept in Japanese called omotenashi, which is poorly translated as hospitality. Japanese like to break it out to explain why they are so nice, but it's a double edged sword, and it can be controlling, telling you how to eat your dish and keeping track of all the minute rules involved with just about every social interaction. . There are, it seems to me, a lot of foreigners who make Japan their home. I've got no way to quantify that number, but in talks I give to folks beginning their Japan soujourn and deciding if they want to stay, I tell them not to assume that everyone stays because Japan is such a wonderful place. That is not to say it is not wonderful, but it seems that a lot of people stay because of an impression of sunk costs. I realized this when I was in Vietnam with a group of students and teachers and we went out for pho, the heavenly Vietnamese noodle dish. With the bowl of noodles, you get a bunch of leaves, lime slices and other stuff. I started asking my dining partners how I was supposed to eat it, do I put the leaves in first, how many lime slices to squeeze, yada yada yada. Finally, one of them said 'just eat it the way you like'. While I'm sure part of my epiphany was due to the noodles, another part was realizing how much one gets in a groove in Japan thinking how certain things had to be done in a particular way. The idea of going to another country and relearning all that, or even going back to your home and trying to figure out what has changed, become daunting.

As I'm not having any complications (so far), I only have the occasional visit from the doctor so most of my observations are about nursing. I've got no idea how realistic medical shows are about how hospitals work, but even taken with a grain of salt, nursing seems better paid and 'easier' here. That "easier" requires some qualifications. It seems to me that nursing, at least as it works in Japan, looks a lot like blue collar labor. Before I go any further, I don't want anyone to assume I'm looking down on blue collar labor. In fact, I think one of the big problems of our modern world is that we don't give blue collar work its due. So when I say that nursing in Japan seems to be blue collar work, I'm not dismissing what they do.

And when they do it (with the technology backing them up and the previously mentioned omotenashi), it is quite nice. Each nurse has an ipod set up with face recognition. Everytime they administer a drug, they either ask me my name or scan the bar code on my wrist band. The face recognition records their face, and they also take a picture of whatever they are administering, down to the lowliest saline solution. They have a cart with a networked Thinkpad where they record my blood pressure, temp and oxidation level so the doctor has a full timeline of the patient's condition if it goes south.

The demographics of nursing is pretty interesting. Almost entirely women, this is a university hospital that is quite busy, so the nurses tend to be in their 20s. The general pattern is to work and then leave the job to marry, or to move to a smaller hospital that is not as busy in the late 20's/early 30's. I asked if people come back to work after getting married and having children and was told no, not really, which is not surprising, because the Japanese mother's workload in education is quite extensive.

I've heard that there are shortages in nurses in the UK and US, and there are also shortages here, though not to the level that I have read for the UK. However, the nurse shortages here are exacerbated by the difficulty that foreign nurses have in working here in that they have to pass not only all the nursing tests, they have to reach a very high level of Japanese fluency not only to pass those tests but also to pass other language tests. I, despite living in Japan for 30 years, would have difficulty passing them as well. In jobs that don't require that level of medical knowledge, that of care workers who "just" have to assist in ADL, there are still huge hurdles. This reinforces a belief I've had, that if we were able to invert the wages, so that people who handled children and taking care of the elderly had the highest compensation and people who got to do easy stuff like teaching university students were towards the bottom, we might have a more just society.

My last observation is that there is really no way in a civilized society that a health system should be for profit. Because if it is, there are going to be so many opportunities for someone to cut corners or boost revenues by cutting back on something that you get to a point like Lord of the Flies. My hospital stay after my prostatectomy is ten days to 2 weeks. In the US, it's 24 hours after the surgery. So yeah, maybe I'm a stupid liberal ignoring the wellspring of our entreprenurial energy, but if that energy is generated by making it more and more expensive to spend time in a hospital, maybe we've got the balance wrong. But if the goal is to profit, then you are going to have things like this: Not criminal, but making it so everyone else has to pay a cost.

Stay well.

Ur American Sh1thole Values NFL Open Thread

by Ugh

More Trump because why not? Eh. I've seen responses to the latest sharted eruption from POTUS saying that it "does not represent American values," to which my response of late is "Are you sure?" Almost 63 million people voted for this waste. There is a long history of American racism in immigration (and obviously other) matters that continues to this day, apparently. So, who are we kidding? 

Meanwhile, the GOP is in all in on doing everything they can to deny African Americans the ability to vote. Full stop, not even pretending anymore. "Party of Lincoln" GFY.

Anyway, all is full game here. Rooting for a Pats-Vikings Superbowl here in suddenly balmy DC. I recommend Belize for a visit. The Southern Reach Trilogy was interesting and different, but not sure I'd recommend it.

Fire away.

Personal Fears Semi-Open Post

--Sebastian

In this time of Trump, it seems almost indulgent to worry about personal fears of unverifiable things, but we can't let Trump be our only source of misery now can we? 

My paternal grandmother had a particularly nasty descent into Alzheimer's disease about 10 years before her death.  The signs started earlier, but she had a long bitter spiral downward.  One of her only great joys was birdwatching, and about eight years before her death she couldn't remember the name of any but the most common birds.  In the last five she couldn't recognize any of us, except me.  And even then she wasn't recognizing me, I just looked exactly like my father did at 20. 

My maternal grandfather had a more gentle descent into Alzheimer's disease.  He had a kinder life than my grandmother, so I think reverting to it wasn't as painful.  He would still tell vivid stories about his youth, but then suddenly look shocked to realize that my mother was older than 15.  He was one of those men who knew all the connections between everyone in town.  When we moved him to a care facility near my parents he knew everyone in the community within a week.  But by two years later he couldn't remember by mom's name. 

The currently known genetic markers for Alzheimer's only predict a fraction of the cases, and don't appear in my family. 

The longitudinal Nun study has two fairly strong findings.  First, that idea density in the nuns' writing was highly correlated with Alzheimer's--the more idea-dense your writings were the less likely you were to show up with Alzheimer's late in life.  Heaven knows I'm idea dense (quality not vouched for) so hooray!

But it also suggests that for those who eventually showed up with Alzheimer's, the signs of declining ability showed up MUCH earlier than previously thought.  Their writing got simpler as early as their 40s and 50s.  So Alzheimer's appears to be a longer descent then originally thought.  It turns out that a lot of what we think of as age related forgetfulness really isn't normal.  It is the large minority of people who have Alzheimer's slowly drifting into it. 

As recently as ten years ago, I can look back at my writing as see that I could fairly easily hold up three or four ideas simultaneously.  I could compare and contrast them in my head and then reduce it to paper.  I could quickly knock out a piece as long as ten or twelve pages because I could easily maintain mental control of the two or three concepts I wanted to play with.  Similarly, I could fairly easily read 30-40 comments on an interesting piece and then respond to 3 or 4 different strains of thought--usually keeping them separated (with occasional slip ups).

Now, only in my early 40s, I have SERIOUS trouble holding onto more than one thought at a time, and sometimes trouble even finishing a thought if it has more than one or two moving parts.  I regularly have to reread what I write to remember where I was going with it.  I often forget names of people or things that I have known a very long time.  I have trouble following a thread and end up rereading it time and time again to respond to people (this sentence is an interesting example, I knew I had another parallel but I had to reread the draft post to remember that the parallel was about responding to a comments thread--it would have been trivial to bang out the parallels from memory as recently as 5 years ago). 

I'm a very mind oriented person--nearly all the joy I have comes from reading or discussing ideas or crap I seriously had a third example... oh that's right, solving puzzles.  And because of the way being gay as played out in my life I don't have as close a family as I might want to lean on for that.  So Alzheimer's is serious personal fear.  I hope I'm wrong. 

 

This is a personal fears thread.  Though they don't have to be your most serious ones.  ;)