Half Changed World

• I thought this article on the growth in Fairfax school enrollment was interesting  It says enrollment is up by 2,500, in part due to a shift of 1,000 students from Prince William county.  Some hypothesize it’s due to Prince William’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants; others suggest it’s due to the high price of gas.  It’s likely that both contribute, and may even affect the same families. I wonder what the typical shifts between the two counties are.

• Via Yglesias, I ran into this study arguing that redshirting of kindergarteners leads to reduced high school completion, since it means that kids have completed fewer years of school when they reach the age where they’re no longer required to attend school.  This doesn’t make sense to me, as it’s overwhelmingly upper-middle-class families who hold their kids back a year, but lower-income kids who drop out as soon as they’re legally able to.  Anyone want to take a crack at it?

• I love Alan Blinder’s idea of stimulating the economy by buying back polluting clunkers for more than book value.  One of my pet bugaboos is that when people talk about "green jobs" they always focus on the sexy futuristic stuff like solar and wind power, when you could get a lot more bang for the buck subsidizing new boilers and more insulation in low-cost rental housing.  (As long as renters pay for the utility bills, it almost never makes economic sense for landlords to make those investments on their own.)

Parke at US Food Policy poses the bold question: "Are high food prices unambiguously bad?"

The obvious problem with high food prices is that they mean that people on the edge eat less, and often poorer quality food.  Food is one of the most flexible part of the budget for most people — in the short term, you can’t reduce your rent, but you can skip a few meals, or see if the local food pantry can help you out.  There’s a study that shows that poor families eat less in cold winters, when utility bills are especially high.

So what’s good about high food prices?  Let’s start by thinking about the parallel question for gas.  I don’t think that high gas prices are unambiguously bad.  While I worry about the effect on low-income folks, especially in rural areas, I think high gas prices generally send the right economic signals: buy more fuel-efficient cars, use more carpools and mass transit, think about the costs of commuting when you decide where to live.  I’d like to see more of the cost of gas going into funding things like better mass transit, and less going to enrich oil companies and OPEC, but that’s a different issue.

So, is there something parallel for food?  Well, a big part of why food in the US is so cheap is that energy has been cheap.  When Michael Pollen says that the US food economy runs on corn, he could just as easily say it runs on oil — in the form of fuel for tractors and combines, in the form of fertilizer (which is largely made from petroleum), in the form of the fuel for the trucks that move the corn from farm to processing plant to grocery store.  So, it’s hard to imagine how food prices could stay as low as they’ve been in a world of higher energy prices.

It’s also likely that the relative costs of different kinds of food will change.  Bananas may be more expensive compared to apples, free range chicken may only cost twice as much as factory farmed chicken, rather than five times as much.  Some things that have been unsustainably cheap will be more expensive, and that might be a good thing.

But, none of this makes the basic problem of low-income people not being able to afford food go away.  The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has been doing a lot of thinking about how to make sure that low-income households are protected in the context of climate change legislation that will increase energy costs — basically, the idea is that if the government auctions off all carbon permits, rather than assuming that companies are entitled to permits at the left that they currently pollute, it generates enough money to provide generous refunds to low and moderate income households.  I’m not sure what the food equivalent of that is.

Last weekend, I took the boys to the big Air and Space Museum annex, out by Dulles.  Like all the Smithsonian museums, admission is free, but they charge $12 for parking.  After some agonizing, I signed up for an annual parking permit.  I’m something of a sucker for unlimited admission passes — we also got season passes for Six Flags.  I’m not sure they always make economic sense, but I’m a more relaxed and happier parent when I know that we can leave as soon as the boys start to fade, without having to endure the "death march of fun" in order to wring out the most value from our admission.  Economic logic says that once you’ve paid the admission it’s a sunk cost, and thus the price of admission shouldn’t affect how long you choose to stay, but I don’t know anyone who actually behaves that way.  (I’m also pretty sure that we’re still not mentally accounting for the price of gas when when we decide to go to the museum because it’s "free.")

The Six Flags passes are an interesting case, because they cost barely more than a single admission.  As far as I can tell, they’re a loss leader to get you to buy food and rent lockers at the park.

When I worked at HHS, I occasionally found myself in the odd position of defending this administration to my friends.  Some of it (as my husband pointed out) was cognitive dissonance — if I had believed that they were as evil as some of my friends said, I couldn’t have survived working there as long as I did.  But it’s also true that, after listening to the political appointees, I often found myself in a position where I disagreed with them, but was convinced that they genuinely believed that their policies (stricter work requirements, marriage promotion activities) were the best ways to help poor children and families.

This spring, OMB issued a directive that said that agencies wouldn’t be allowed to rush through regs at the last minute.  I said at the time that I assumed this only applied to regulations they didn’t want to issue, not to ones they did.  Sure enough, the Post reported today that DOL is trying to sneak through a regulation that would make it harder to regulate workplace toxins.  So I thought I was maybe getting cynical enough.

Nope.  Apparently the Bush Administration doesn’t really believe that companies are supposed to pay their employees for the work they do.

• We’ve been swimming a lot.  D’s now comfortable going under water (with goggles on) and N can paddle around with a swim noodle.

• Zot! is finally out.

• We’ve been having a great time playing Boom Blox.  I really like the cooperative play mode, which is a good level of difficulty for D and me — hard enough that we have to work at it, but easy enough that we can in fact solve the puzzles.  We’re clearly not the only ones who like it — it was sold out at all the stores near us, so we ordered it online.

• I loved this librarian’s letter to someone who asked that a book be pulled.

• The nice folks who make Avatar asked if I wanted a review copy of the next disk.  Boy did I, especially since we managed to miss an episode on the tivo.  The boys are just thrilled.

There’s a good discussion about H1B visas
going on in the comments of my last post, with some interesting
perspective provided by Jen, who actually hires programmers.  But I
wanted to pick up on a different aspect of the discussion.

GoriGirl commented that I was
missing the point by focusing on inequality within the US — she
suggested that by employing workers from poorer countries, it would
reduce worldwide inequality.  I’m not convinced that’s
necessarily true about the H1B visa program as currently implemented,
but I’m willing to concede the claim that I’m more concerned about the
displaced American workers than I am about the upwardly mobile workers
from other countries.  And I’m not sure how there’s a moral basis for
that.  I certainly can’t come up with one based on either utilitarianism or Rawls’ "Veil of Ignorance." 

We’ve recently been having some mice in the kitchen, so I bought some
traps.  The kind that bash their little mousie brains out.  And within
the first 24 hours, we caught two mice.  And I feel badly about it, and
sorry for the little pathetic things.  On the other hand, I don’t feel
the least bit guilty or sorry about squashing mosquitoes.  And, while I
could try to find an ethical basis for the distinction (the mosquitoes
I kill are generally in the act of biting me, while the mice are just
taking food), the truth is that I think I feel badly about killing the
mice because they’re cute and furry. Aesthetics, not ethics.

Last night I was reading a collection of short stories by Orson Scott
Card, and a few of them are set in Mormon communities, and so he
explains in a background essay a bit about the system of "wards" that
are an organizing structure of Mormon communal life.   It made me think
about whether it’s an inherent part of human nature to value your
fellow citizens over citizens of another country.  I think it’s natural
to value your family members, and your neighbors, but I’m not sure
about anything much larger than that.  I do think that it’s part of American ideology to say that people have a claim on us because of fellow citizenship, rather than ethnic origin, or race, or religious.

I nearly choked this morning on my way to work when I heard on Marketplace radio Cato’s Will Wilkenson arguing that we should allow more visas for skilled workers in order to reduce wage inequality. His claim is that wage inequality is largely driven by the increased demand for skilled workers relative to unskilled workers, and so by increasing the supply of skilled workers, we’d reduce inequality.  Let me count the things that are wrong with this:

1. Since when does Cato care about inequality?
2. I believe that relative wealth and relative poverty matter, but even I’m not brutal enough to suggest that the appropriate solution is to push the wages of middle-class workers down.  I’d be happy to impose higher marginal tax rates at the top, but that’s not what this proposal would do.
3. The biggest driver of the growth of inequality in recent years is not the gap between the average college graduate and the average high school graduate — it’s the gap between the highest paid college grads and the average college graduates.  Only the top 10 percent of the income distribution has experienced gains that have kept up with productivity. 
4. Even if increasing the number of H1B [corrected — I wrote HB2 before] visas reduced wage inequality, it would probably increase overall inequality in the US, by shifting money from skilled labor to capital.

This week’s book is (Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Middle Class, by Nan Mooney.  In many ways, it covers the same ground as The Trap, Strapped, and  The Two-Income Trap— how families today are squeezed by the high costs of housing, child care, health care, and college loans. 

The only problem is that — as we’ve gone over here before — there’s not actually a lot of evidence that this generation is overall worse off than their parents were, and if their parents weren’t college graduates, they’re probably earning a lot more.  Mooney deals with this by narrowing her subjects down to what she calls "the professional middle class" — those with college degrees, but excluding doctors, lawyers, businesspeople, and anyone else who is actually making decent money.  She focuses on teachers, social workers, journalists, artists, workers for non-profit organizations, etc.   

I wanted to like this book, but I found myself muttering that the subjects seemed to believe in Marjorie Williams‘ "no fault fairy."  I’m not sure who they think promised them that there would be no tradeoffs between interesting work, living in expensive vibrant urban areas, and living a middle class life with homeownership and a secure retirement.  Easy credit may make it possible to postpone these tradeoffs (and may even make things worse by thus increasing the supply of people who are willing to take interesting jobs at non-sustainable wages), but the existence of these tradeoffs isn’t something new. 

"Achoo!"
"Bless you."
"Achoo!"
"Gezundheit!"
"Achoo!"
"Damn it, you better not be getting sick."

Tomorrow evening, I’m attending a fundraiser in support of the Ohio Healthy Families Act, which would guarantee full-time workers 7 paid sick days a year (with part-timers eligible on a pro-rata basis).   The ability to take a paid sick day is something that professionals take for granted, but only about half of American workers have any paid sick days, and many of those that do, can only use them if they’re personally sick, not to care for a sick family member.

Paid sick days are good for workers, good for families, and good for public health.  Trust me, you don’t want restaurant workers coming to work sick, and you don’t want other families sending their kids to school sick because they can’t afford to keep them home.

I support federal legislation for paid sick days, but I also think it’s great that folks in Ohio are using the ballot initiative process to try to move the idea.  For one thing, it might well get passed before anything happens at the federal level.  For another, it helps mobilize low-income workers to vote in November.

I don’t think I ever posted about the "science share" at D’s school in the spring.  He really wanted to participate, so we looked in our kid science books for something easy, and decided to bring in a big bowl of oobleck, which is just cornstarch suspended in water.  It’s got some really weird properties — if you apply pressure to it, it acts like a solid, but if you just hold it in your hand, it acts like a liquid.

As it turns out, it was a huge hit.  Pretty much every kid who walked by wanted to feel it, and half the adults were asking us "what is that stuff?"  It was pretty chaotic, because between trying to watch N, stop kids getting oobleck all over the place, and racing to the bathrooms for more paper towels, we clearly needed at least one more adult than we had.  But it was also a ton of fun.

Today, gizmodo had a link to a video of what happens when you mix oobleck, a metal pan, and a loud subwoofer.  We have got to try this.