Half Changed World

Based on a few posts that looked interesting from the TPM Cafe bookclub, I requested Daniel Brook’s The Trap.  I got it last week, and spent about an hour skimming it today, but couldn’t really get into it.  The online discussion is far more interesting.

Brook’s overall thesis is that the high cost of living in desirable urban areas, the cost of college and health care, and the very high salaries paid to workers in certain professions (big law, investment banking, management consulting), makes it harder for idealistic college grads to follow their dreams.  I think that’s probably true, but am not sure it’s the major crisis he portrays. 

Two quick points:

1)  As several of the commenters at TPM Cafe pointed out, Brook is wildly overstating the case when he suggests that the only alternatives are selling out and being a "saint" destined for poverty.  And by overstating the case, he actually makes it easier for people to sell out.  In reality, I know plenty of people who have darn good lives on public and nonprofit sector salaries.  By and large, they don’t have second homes and they don’t expect that their kids will make it through college without taking out student loans, but they’re not living on ramen noodles either.

2)  When I wrote about the cost of living last of week, the comments were running pretty strongly against the "just move" idea.  And I agree that you shouldn’t have to move time zones in order to make ends meet.  But I don’t have a lot of sympathy for recent college grads who feel like they’re entitled to live in hip urban neighborhoods and don’t want roommates.

On a related note, my team at work is hiring a Research Assistant.  I’m not sure exactly what they’re offering for salary — probably not enough to live in Dupont Circle, even with a roommate — but the benefits are excellent, they take work-life balance seriously, and it’s a terrific group of people. 

I was a little concerned that the boys would be disappointed in their Halloween haul, as the houses are far more spread out in our new neighborhood than our old one.  They did hit fewer houses, but lots of people were giving out full-size candy bars, so I don’t think they feel deprived.

T gets all the credit for the costumes.Bonus points if you know who D is dressed as — he was quite annoyed that very few of the adults knew the answer.

Yesterday, I saw an article somewhere about Brijit, a new website that abstracts newspaper and magazine articles down to 100 words or less, and rates them.  The idea is that it’s news for people who don’t have time to read, or something.  Anyone can sign up to write abstracts for them, and they pay $5 a pop if they use them.

It’s certainly true that my to-read pile grows far faster than I can keep up with.  But I’m not convinced that this is a solution.  For one thing, it covers mostly sources that I actually do keep up with — I don’t read the NY Times cover to cover, but I usually look at the front page, and scan the list of  "most emailed" articles, and I think I get as much out of that as I would out of the Brijit summaries.

My favorite source for telling me what I would like to read if I had another 5 hours a day is Jenny Davidson at Light Reading.  She almost never suggests things that I’ve already read, and often includes a few paragraphs that capture the heart of the article.

On a related note, she recently linked to an interview with Pierre Bayard, the author of the wonderfully named book "How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read."

(No book review today — I’m in the middle of 3 different books, and not far enough along to talk about any of them.  I did watch the movie of Maurice last week; I think it was a mistake to watch it right after reading Birdsong, because all I could think about was that they were all doomed.)

Last week, someone advertised a bunch of used toys that her kids had outgrown on the neighborhood email list.   A couple of them looked interesting, so, for $25, we got some k’nex, a snap-in circuits kit, and a bunch of tubes that connect together to make forts and stuff.  The tubes came with a manual, but some of the things that they showed required more pieces than we got, so I went online to see if I could find some more pieces.

It turns out that they’re Playskool Pipeworks, and are almost as old as I am.  The good news is that if my kids decide that they’re not interested in the forts any more, we can sell the pieces for a lot more than we paid.  The bad news is that I’m not buying more pieces, not at those prices.

And then today, via Daddy Types, I found out that my sister’s old dollhouse furniture is also apparently collectible.

Who’d have thunk?  Not me.

The past week just kicked my *ss.  Busy at work, terrible traffic due to the rain, lost power 5 minutes after I got home one evening, had to put the cat to sleep.  And it really doesn’t help me when it’s totally dark out when I’m getting up.

I like the idea of trick-or-treating before it’s totally dark out, but otherwise, I think this extended daylight savings hours idea stinks.  My boys keep asking me, with quizzical expressions, whether it’s really morning as I shake them awake.  The streetlights are still on as the high school bus rolls down the street.

And does anyone really think that it saves power? 

When I wrote about my criteria for keeping or discarding books, I said that one of the reasons that I keep books is to be able to lend them out.  This week’s book is one that I don’t think I’d ever have picked up if my father hadn’t said it was wonderful and then put it in my hands.  The book is Birdsong, by Sebastian Faulkes.  And I wouldn’t have picked it up because it is, as the subtitle says "A Novel of Love and War," and I’m not a huge fan of either romance novels or war stories.

I’m still not sure the book hangs together as a whole — the primary story from World War I is cut together with scenes from the life of the main character’s granddaughter, 60 years later, which exist mostly to let Faulkes make a point about how quickly forgotten the horrors of WWI were.  But the descriptions of trench warfare are both engrossing and horrific.   Faulkes shows soldiers seeing their friends killed, and having to keep doing the exact same things that led to their deaths, and doing it again and again and again for weeks or month on end (often with the rotting bodies still in view).

And, as Faulkes points out, the idea that the world managed to do it all over again just 20 years later is hard to believe.  Reading this book, I had some sympathy for Neville Chamberlain‘s position for the first time.

Last summer, I wrote about two social lending sites, one for money and one for stuff.  Borrowme seems to have gone under, without ever building up any steam.  But Prosper seems to still be functioning well, and hasn’t been totally swamped by the mortgage meltdown.

When I wrote about it, I hadn’t put any of my money into Prosper, but I did so in the fall.  I’ve now made 36 loans over the course of the past year, all of them for $50.  Two of them have already been repaid (ahead of schedule) and two of them are 3+ months late, and barring a miracle, likely to go into default.  Netting out the defaults, I’ve made a little more interest than I’d have gotten from the bank, but the difference is probably under $40.  So, not a particularly good return on the time spent reading through loan requests.  Although there’s a certain fascination with reading people’s stories…  I still think the real potential is for loans among people with 2nd and 3rd degree real life connections, but I see little evidence that’s what’s happening.

I’m slowly moving almost all of my real banking into the online world.  My main checking account is now at Ebank, which I love because I can take out money from any ATM without a fee.  I’m trying to figure out whether I think it’s unethical to keep our savings at Countrywide, which is offering awesome savings rates, presumably because they’re desperate for deposits to keep from sinking under all their bad loans.  (Yes, it’s FDIC insured.)  But they’ve got a reputation for being particularly unhelpful to borrowers in trouble.

D has been saying that he wants to save his money for a Nintendo DS.  I’m not thrilled at the idea of a handheld game system, but if he has the willpower to save that kind of money on a $1 a week allowance, we’re going to allow it.  I’m trying to convince him to open an account at a nearby bank that offers generous rates on kids’ accounts, but he likes having the piles of coins to play with and count.   We need to figure out if they offer safe deposit boxes — if so, we’re going to say goodbye and good riddance to SunTrust.

I was at a conference last week on accounts, assets and access.  It was a real eye-opener for me.  Call me naive, but I hadn’t realized how much money banks were making off of poor people on overdraft and late fees.  Now that  it’s been pointed out, it seems obvious — the dollar amounts that low-income people borrow are typically so low that even high interest rates don’t amount to much in dollar terms.  The killers are the fees.

Here’s an example of a card advertised as available to people with bad credit.  Not bad interest — only 9.9% APR.  But check out the fees — $29 set up fee, $95 one-time fee, $48 annual fee, $7 monthly fee.  And if you’re in this situation, you probably don’t have this cash on hand, so all of these fees are charged to the card when you get it.  So if you get the minimum possible credit limit of $250, your card will come to you with a balance of $179 and available credit of $71.  Oh, and they charge $11 for each autodraft (which actually costs them less to process than a check) and $25 each time they raise your credit limit.

Compared to that, a payday loan with a 100% interest rate doesn’t sound like such a bad deal.

Laura at 11d and Megan McArdle are going back and forth about child care subsidies today.  The comment that struck me was this one from "buffpilot" at Megan’s blog:

"We don’t need to give a subsidy to anyone, but making a means-tested
welfare, would be fine with mean. But base it on the income needed in
Mississippi – since you can move! If you want to live in NYC make the
money, don’t have kids, or move. Its YOUR choice. But don’t ask me to
give you money so you can live your lifestyle without making any
sacrifices. That’s what you want."

Similarly, when Bitch PhD posted last month about how unaffordable housing is, even given that her family has a good income, she got lots of "that’s what you get for living in California" type comments.

I really don’t have a good answer for the public policy question of how to handle cost of living disparities.  As has been pointed out repeatedly during the SCHIP discussion, a family in NYC living on $60,000 is in a fundamentally different situation than a family in Iowa with the same income.  But at least some of that difference is a matter of choice.  Are you willing to tax an Iowa family with a potentially lower income level to help that New York family?  Or do you tax the New York family more?  In spite of the federal tax deduction for state income and property tax payments, richer states — with higher costs of living — tend to pay more in federal taxes than they get back.  This is justified in the name of progressivity. But if you you take the cost of living argument seriously, progressivity might cut in the other direction.

As I’ve said here before, I’m not quite ready to get on the Hillary bandwagon.  But I have to give her kudos for the set of work-family proposals that she laid out at her YWCA speech yesterday.  No one else in either party is talking about these issues at all, and she’s got all the key points there — child care, paid sick days, expanding the FMLA.  She’s even included a "right to request" flexible work conditions, modeled on the UK law.

If you had told me in 1992 that one day Hillary Clinton was going to be a candidate for president, this is the kind of thing that I would have expected from her.

Hopefully it will make the other candidates, at least on the Democratic side, feel that they have to address these issues as well.  I know that one of Obama’s senior aides used to work on these issues, so I’m sure she’s got a list of suggestions.

After some hesitation, I’ve accepted the blogad that you’ll see on the side of this post, from something called the Smart Television Alliance.  According to their website, it’s a coalition of nonprofits "united by a shared commitment to improving what our nation’s children see on television." That sounds like a decent goal.  So why the hesitation?

Well, the site does have some useful information, although I think they’re out of their minds in suggesting that Harry Potter might be appropriate for the 3-6 year old crowd.  But my main concern is that the site is also an ad in disguise, for TiVo, which is sponsoring the alliance.  I generally dislike ads that are pretending to be something else.  But, that said, I do believe that TiVo is a terrific tool for parents who want to control what their kids watch, and have so said so repeatedly on this site in the past.  It lets us zap out commercials, it lets us show kid-friendly fare at times of our choice, and it lets us save the kid-inappropriate stuff for when they’re safe in bed.

Coming from our little ad-free world, it was a real shock to be visiting my parents Columbus Day weekend and to encounter all the commercials in the baseball games.  (Although merseydotes says it’s better than the football games.)  Since D doesn’t see commercials all the time, he was fascinated by them.  I kept on reminding him that they were ads by asking him what they were selling.  (Best answer, in response to a Marine recruiting ad, "uh… war?")

In related news, I just got a copy of Lisa Guernsey’s new book on tv and kids, Into the Minds of Babes.  Review coming when I get a chance.