Half Changed World

I had heard earlier in the day that McCain was having some sort of telephone town hall today, but I was still somewhat taken aback when the phone rang after dinner and I was connected to it.   I’d love to know how I got on their list of "independents and moderates" — Virginia doesn’t have party registration.  Is it because I voted in the Republican presidential primary in 2000?  If so, their data systems did a good job of matching me to my voting history at my old address.

When I was connected to the call, it was already under way — I assume they had some fixed number of
lines available, and when someone hung up on them, they went down their
list of numbers until they reached someone else.  When I came on, he was in the middle of a response to question about farm subsidies and sugar tarifs — I thought he gave the right answer (that they’re undefensible).  He did a poor job on one about how to respond to people who say that he’d just be Bush 2.0 — going into his differences with Obama, before seeming to remember what the question was. I only listened for about 10 minutes because the boys were needing my attention.

I’ve never lived in a state that was really in play during a Presidential election.  It should be interesting.  According to Real Clear Politics’ poll averaging, McCain has a slight lead in Virginia so far. Given that Virginia hasn’t gone for a Democratic presidential candidate since Kennedy, Obama’s doing well even to keep it in play.  Four years ago, I let myself be caught up in the election-day frenzy enough to believe that Kerry had a chance.  I think Obama’s got more than a chance, but we’ve got four long months to go.

Last month, I asked for questions to pose to Ariane Hegewisch about her report on cross-national perspectives on workplace flexibility.  Here, at last, are some answers.  The delay is entirely my fault — she was extremely prompt in responding when I sent them to her.

bj had wondered, "I thought the low proportions of women in private sector employment in
countries like Germany was well documented. Perhaps that’s not college
educated women? Not in the private sector?"

Ariane responds:

Germany does
not have a huge public sector, and women are not predominantly working in
the public sector. Incidentally, this is partly because Germany does not have
well developed state services for children and eldercare, and does not have a
big state healthcare system. Germany is is probably almost as different from
Sweden as it is from the USA. Sweden on the other hand does have a big public
sector (which provides many of the services done in the private sector in the
US- such as childcare, aftercare and eldercare), and women are much more likely
to work in the public sector than in the private sector. Sweden also has high
birth rates, whereas Germany has very low ones.

Christine asked about discrimination: "Did they expect discrimination would follow regarding the hiring of
women of child-bearing years? What are governments with mandated
workplace flexibility doing to combat hiring discrimination? Have there
been studies done to compare discrimination against fathers that are
mandated to follow family leave policies vs. mothers?"

Ariane answers:

First, there is a bit of a confusion between ‘flexible working
rights’ and leave / work-family policies more generally. A 3 year job protected
parental leave period [as is available in Germany] is different from the right to work that leave on a
part-time basis (one is likely to reduce your employability, while the other one
is designed to maintain it).

Three
years job protected parental leave is a considerable disincentive for
employers; Germany continues to have a very conservative climate for motherhood-
a lot of pressure coming from mothers and fathers, about what they think a ‘good
mother’ should look like. Germans have reacted to this with having one of the
lowest birth rates in the EU- there is a very stark choice between careers and
parenthood, and many women opt out altogether. This was not created by the
law- but the parental leave rights and social expectations mutually
re-enforce each other.

Now- looking at German flexibility rights in this
context- they are in fact designed to reduce that long gap, by making it easier
for parents to come back to work on a part-time bases earlier, instead of
staying out of the labor market altogether for three years, and by making it possible to
work in better part-time jobs (Germany has very high proportion of very low
quality part-time jobs). And they are deliberately open to all employees and all
circumstances (even though parents are the most likely to avail themselves of
these rights) to reduce the ‘mommy track’ association.

Now, on the other hand if you take
Denmark: here, working hours have come down for men and women (so that full-time
work is more combinable with care responsibilities); parents are able to have a
period of part-time work as part of their parental leave, which gets them back
to work faster. Part-time work overall has been falling, as people are more
likely to treat it as a short transitional period (for care or education).
And the pay gap is very low. (Although as always, this is because Denmark
overall has low pay differentiation, not just between men and
women).

The discriminatory effect of a flexible working right
will depend on how far it is possible to spread the right in practice beyond
women as primary caregivers. This is a key policy design issue (not just law,
but also in terms of other supportive measures). Hence it has to be linked to
rights for male carers (as is the FMLA, and that ‘gender neutral’ design is
common to almost all laws), but also should be broadened away from
flexible working specifically for family care (as is done in the Netherlands,
Germany, France etc: where you can apply for change if you want to volunteer in
the community on the same basis as if you want to look after your toddler).

Flexible working rights at least in some countries were introduced because it
was clear that women were already much more likely to ‘work flexibly’ but had to
accept really bad working conditions for it. So flexible working rights were
introduce to lessen the discriminatory effects of the need to work flexibly.

She also notes:

There is discrimination now in the USA : pregnancy
discrimination has spiked; women systematically have different working patterns
from men; women are twice as likely as men to work part-time; women’s lifetime
earnings are markedly lower than men’s for these reasons. However, this facet of
gender discrimination is much less well recognised in the US than elsewhere. As
Joan Williams always says: the USA is a great place for women who work
like the ideal man (always, all-the-time); but it is a lousy place for women(and
men) who for any reason are unable or unwilling to do so.  Many women
would like to spend some time with their children when they are young; however
full-time working requirements are such that this can be very
hard.  And, if you have more than one child, childcare costs are such,
that economic incentives to look after your kids yourself are enornous. So:
flexible working is only one spike in the work life wheel, but one that is being
neglected in the USA. (It is a fair question whether flexible working rights on
their own will be able to achieve anything much without well established
part-time equity rights; better childcare; paid leave; and a better enforcement
environment generally for labor rights).

When I wrote about Farthing, I wondered why so many alternate histories take World War II as their point of departure from our world.  In The Explosionist, Jenny Davidson takes a different tack.  This story is set in the 1930s on the possible eve of a second world war, but the two sides are an apparently fascist united Europe (unified by a Napoleon who won at Waterloo) and a "Hanseatic League" of Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, and Russia.  Oh, and Sophie, the heroine, is a somewhat skeptical medium who really can talk to the spirits of the dead.

I ordered this book because I read Davidson’s terrific blog, Light Reading, and her broad reading and lively interest in the world shows through.  The plot of the book drew me in, and kept me turning the pages, but it’s the subtle jokes and suggestions about the world that I expect will keep with me — touches like the Wittgenstein Uncertainty Principle, and the phone having been invented by Alexsandr Bell.  (A main topic of the book is terrorist attacks — which certainly existed well before the 1930s, although I’m not sure when they started being called "terrorist" attacks — the English word itself apparently dates to the French revolution and the reign of terror.)

Until I clicked through from Davidson’s blog to Amazon, I didn’t realize that The Explosionist was being sold as a young adult novel.  It almost stopped me from buying the book, but I’m glad it didn’t.  Davidson says that she didn’t particularly think of it as YA, but they were the editors most interested in it.  She says that Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy was one of her mental models, but it actually reminds me far more of the Sally Lockhart books.

My one complaint is that the girl on the cover has long hair, and the first page of the book says that Sophie has "straight black hair bobbed short with a fringe to keep it tidy."

Back from the camping trip with my college friend.
We had a great time, even though it rained on and off almost the whole time, I got
stung by wasps, and I fell several times, earning this enormous bruise:

For scale, that’s my thigh, so the bruise is probably 5 inches across.  And I can’t blame it on particularly tricky terrain — there was just a big rock in the path that I totally didn’t see.

Given the rain, we decided that climbing Old Rag would probably be a stupid idea, so we explored some of the other trails in the area, and had a great time playing around in this swimming hole:

I suspect that the rhododendrons would have been unreal a month or two earlier, but at this point, the most interesting wildlife was the various and colorful fungi:

For anyone considering a trip to Shenandoah National Park, I highly recommend the trip planning database on the NPS website.  You enter the experience level of your group and how many nights you want to camp, and it spits back a list of suggested trips.

In the final week, we wound up doing three grocery trips, to Costco, Trader Joe’s, and Giant, for a total of $173.75 for the week, and $460.78 for the month.  Some of the high spending this week is because we stocked up on stuff that will last until the next month, but we also bought more packaged goods — a big thing of nutrigrain bars for D to take as snacks at camp, string cheese, ice cream — and D even convinced T to buy "orange chicken" at Costco.  So, it’s easy to see that it would be easy to blow past the $501 thrifty food plan budget if you weren’t really watching.  The bars are a lot cheaper at Costco than at the regular grocery store, but they’re still far more expensive than baking.

As it happens, this week we’re going to get our first delivery from South Mountain Creamery.  Since I read The Way We Eat, I’ve been wanting to move away from industrially produced meat and dairy, and this looks like a way to do so without adding yet another set of shopping trips to our lives.  It’s not cheap, but it’s a better price than the comparable foods from Whole Paycheck.  I’m interested in seeing whether we can taste the difference.

I’ve spent much of the last couple of hours digging into our storage closet and the boxes stuffed in the garage trying to locate all my camping gear.  My closest friend from college is visiting over the 4th of July weekend, and we’re going to go backpacking for a couple of days.  I’m hoping that she’ll be able to help me figure out my big frame backpack, which I’ve never used.

I bought that pack sometime in the fall of 1999, around the time I ran my last marathon.  T and I were going to hike the Grand Canyon in the early summer, and I had even written away for the backcountry permits.  But by the time spring came around, I was pregnant with D. and doing a strenuous hike in 100 degree weather didn’t sound like such a bright idea.

BitchPhD blogged last week about visiting with an old friend, looking for reassurance that they’re still the same people, even if they spend their days saying "eye-rolling mommy things."  K is single, she doesn’t have kids, and she has her summers off from work, so she gets to spend lots of time hiking and biking.  Our lives are pretty different.  And she lives on the west coast, so we don’t see much of each other.  I’m a little worried that we’ll find out that we’ve drifted too far apart to bridge the gap.

This week’s book is a novel, Tom Perrotta’s latest, The Abstinence Teacher.  Like Little Children, the pleasure of this book is mostly how Perrotta captures the realities of daily suburban life.  In this one, the characters are a little older, on their second marriages, wondering whether it’s possible to connect with their teenage children.  Perrotta occasionally loses his lightness of touch and relies on crude stereotypes (the stay at home mother who used to be a biomedical researcher working on autoimmune disorders but now is "playing a lot of tennis") but mostly his characters are both believable and likable.

The plot of the book on first glance is ripped from the headlines — a sex ed teacher forced to teach an "abstinence" curriculum that she doesn’t believe in, a soccer coach who causes waves by praying with his players.  But Perrotta doesn’t really do much with the plot — it’s just an excuse to spend some time exploring the two main characters and what makes them tick.

In some ways it’s a slight book,  but I was sufficiently engrossed in it that I missed my stop on the train coming home this evening. 

We’ve been in this house for a bit more than a year now, so now we’re able to do same month year-to-year comparisons of our energy use.  We’ve been steadily working on making the house more energy efficient, so I’ve been curious to see what the impacts are.  We’ve replaced the windows, one of the toilets, clothes washer, dryer, boiler, fridge, dishwasher, and stove.  Basically, the only things left to do are the hot water heater and the air conditioner…

So, the envelope please…

• Electricity — Dominion Virginia Power has a handy-dandy button on its site that generates various comparisons for you once you’ve logged in.  It shows how much you paid in a given month compared to the previous month and the same month the year before, and divides the change out among different temperatures, different number of days in the billing cycle, change in prices, and "customer-controlled use."  So, we paid $71.20 in May 2008, down from $95.02 a year previously.  And the rates went up in that period, so they claim that customer-controlled use saved us $27.28.  So, a decent percentage savings, but not that impressive in absolute dollar amounts.  Even with the forthcoming 18% rate hike, it’s going to take us a long time before the improvements pay for themselves.  (Obviously, the energy savings were not the primary reasons we made these changes, so we’re not upset by this.)

• Gas — Washington Gas doesn’t offer this kind of comparison, so I have to sort of eyeball things.  We used 13.2 therms last month, versus 63 therms a year ago.  That’s because it took us a while last year to figure out how much energy our old boiler was using keeping water hot even when it wasn’t sending any into the baseboard heaters.  Once we figured out that we needed to shut the boiler off in the summer, it dropped down to 32 therms. (The remainder is for the clothes dryer and water heater, both of which are gas-powered.  Our new stove is also gas powered, but you’d have to work really hard to spend more than a few dollars that way…)  The more impressive comparison is February to March, when our use dropped from 258 therms to 151 when we installed the new boiler.  That improvement clearly is cost-effective, since our February bill was close to $400.*

• Water — We get billed quarterly for water, and haven’t paid more than $100 per quarter.  While the washer and dishwasher use less water than the old ones, I don’t expect it to make a noticeable difference on our bills.  We put in a low-flow showerhead but I’m guessing that it impacts the gas bill more than the water bill.

Dominion is making a big deal out of their new conservation plan, but I’m pretty skeptical.  Based on my results, my guess is that just showing people how much their energy use costs won’t significantly affect usage unless they also adopt variable rate pricing, where electricity costs a lot more during peak usage times. (Dominion does not appear to be doing that, since their demo says you’d be entering the rates from your bill.)  I think this is mostly an attempt to convince politicians to give them approval for the transmission lines and coal-burning plant they want to build.

* When I see stories like this one about people with $400 monthly electric bills, I have to assume that they have electric heat, and very poor insulation.  I’m not sure I could run up a $400 electric bill in this house even if I ran the air conditioning with the windows open.

Cross-posted to my home blog.  Also, note the new "Environment" category — I’ll go back when I get a chance and add the tag to some of my older posts. 

This week we did only one shopping trip, spending $58.56, to bring us to a total for the month so far of $286.95.  Then we went out of town for three days, taking the bus to New York.  I don’t know how to account for that in this experiment.  On the one hand, my brother and parents fed us several meals, which helped out the budget.  On the other hand, we spent about $60 on restaurant meals… 

So why are we finding it relatively easy to stay within the Thrifty Food Plan, when by all accounts, people on Food Stamps are struggling badly to cope with rising food prices?  My guess is that there are several things going on:

• First, most people on Food Stamps are working, and thus receive less than the maximum monthly benefit.  In theory, Food Stamps aren’t supposed to pay for all their food — they’re supposed to use some of their cash income for food as well.  But low-income families have many other demands on their income (if I remember correctly, about half are spending 50 percent or more of their income just on housing).  Food is the easiest part of the budget to squeeze, particularly if you’re willing to invest the time in going to food pantries.
• Second, we have a car, and so can travel to low-cost supermarkets and warehouse stores.  And we can have enough cash to buy large quantities when they’re on sale.
• Third, we’re eating very little meat, and relatively little processed food.  We often make a big batch of pancakes or waffles on the weekend, and reheat them for breakfast all week, which is a lot cheaper than breakfast cereal.

Someone posted on my neighborhood listserve this morning, wondering "where are the cries for help for
the poor people of Iowa? Are they less deserving than the people of Louisiana?"  The question wasn’t from someone I know, and maybe I’m misjudging him, but my interpretation of the subtext was "all you people who were so dramatic about Katrina weren’t really worried about the people, but looking for a reason to beat up on Bush."

My impression is that the floods in the midwest have caused massive displacement, and overwhelming property loss, but that there’s been relatively little loss of life.  Kari Lyderson writes at Rooflines about the contrast between the disasters and suggests a few causes:

1. The local governments are far more functional.
2. Most people displaced in Iowa are staying with friends and family; in New Orleans, many of the affected had no social networks outside of the city.
3. Those from outside helping (FEMA, National Guard, volunteers)  have positive impressions of the people they are helping: "To put it bluntly, law enforcement and volunteers in Iowa were not
   afraid of or harboring deep-seated hatred toward the people they were
   trying to help."  I mentioned this idea to someone at work, and she commented that if Iowans break store windows, they’ll be seen as "getting needed supplies" not "looting."

That said, I do think it took a ridiculously long time for the East Coast media to figure out that this was a major story.  One of my colleagues is from Iowa, and she was stressing last week when the flooding started.  I hadn’t heard the news, so went online to look, and discovered that there wasn’t a single mention of the flooding on the Washington Post’s website at the time. 

Via Crunchy Granola, I found Boomerific’s postings about the flooding.

Some ways to help:

• Red Cross  — their disaster relief fund is empty and they’re borrowing to keep going.
• Union for Reform Judaism disaster relief.