The People Who Dare To Speak Truth To Power

"Explanations for this somewhat counterintuitive trend include the tendency of women to enter STEM fields in Arab and Muslim countries, where a high proportion of young men are shopkeepers or study in religious seminaries, as well as the ability of women in more open societies to pursue what they desire. As Murray puts it, in Scandinavia and other highly equal countries, “both sexes become freer to do what comes naturally.”"
https://www.realclearbooks.com/articles/2020/04/15/charles_murrays_real_talk_on_biological_differences_489205.html

What Does "inequality" Mean and How Should it Be Measured?

I should memorize this article.

There is a simple theory of inequality in which rich people have nearly all the wealth and income, and do nearly all the spending, while poor people struggle along with the minimum of those things necessary for survival. It’s understandable that some people think this way. In many places in the world today, and for most complex societies in human history, the picture is accurate. Moreover, the rich elite usually hoards most of the economic opportunity, civil freedoms, political power, legal status and other good things for itself and its children.
https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2019/12/03/inequality_is_decidedly_not_the_problem_in_the_us__103991.html

Kanye, Meet Scott

Scott Peck describes the process of spiritual growth as going from:
-I am the most important thing, to
-There is a being greater than I am, and will do exactly as directed by that being; some folks term this fundamentalism. The person in this phase feels saved, because they are liberated from the tyranny of their own self importance. Then comes
-I can regulate myself and have a more liberal interpretation of the greater being's intent - may not go to church each religion day, may not interpret the holy text literally, will begin to see the application of the greater being's intent as less compliance and more cooperation for a bigger purpose
-Mysticism, which I don't understand fully enough to describe

And here's Kanye:

West has led church services that have attracted thousands of black youths, some of whom said they had never entered a church before. More than 14,000 thousand people jammed Joel Osteen’s megachurch when West confessed to his previous lifestyle of arrogance and self-aggrandizement and acknowledged his bouts with mental illness. Departing from conventional forms of worship, Kanye’s large chorus surrounded him and, hands raised, stepped to the beat of his new album, “Jesus is King,” which he rapped as an enthralled crowd swayed with the beat. 

https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/472091-kanye-west-a-welcomed-disruptive-voice

Dr. Sowell at his best:

"For 12 consecutive years -- from 2001 through 2012 -- each home run leader in the American League had a Hispanic surname. When two American boys whose ancestors came from India tied for first place in the U.S. National Spelling Bee in 2014, it was the 7th consecutive year in which the U.S. National Spelling Bee was won by an Asian Indian.

"We all know about the large over-representation of blacks among professional basketball players, and especially among the star players. The best-selling brands of beer in America were created by people of German ancestry, who also created China's famed Tsingtao beer. Of the 100 top-ranked Marathon runners in the world in 2012, 68 were Kenyans. The list could go on and on. Although blacks are over-represented among professional football players, even the most avid National Football League fan is unlikely to be able to recall seeing even one black player who kicked a punt or a point after touchdown.

"Should there be an article titled: "What's Holding Black Kickers Back in the NFL?" Could it be that blacks are more interested in playing positions where there is more action and -- not incidentally -- more money?

"Should there be an article titled: "What's Holding Back Whites in the National Basketball Association?" Or an article titled: "What's Holding Back Non-Asian Indian Kids from Winning the Spelling Bee?" Lawsuits claiming discrimination have been won on the basis of statistical disparities far smaller than these."

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/10/06/charlatans_and_sheep_128321.html

The Null Hypothesis for Income and Wealth | askblog

http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/the-null-hypothesis-for-income-and-wealth/

The Null Hypothesis for Income and Wealth

The abstract of a working paper by David Cesarini and others says,

We use administrative data on Swedish lottery players to estimate the causal impact of wealth on players' own health and their children's health and developmental outcomes. Our estimation sample is large, virtually free of attrition, and allows us to control for the factors ‒ such as the number of lottery tickets ‒ conditional on which the prizes were randomly assigned. In adults, we find no evidence that wealth impacts mortality or health care utilization, with the possible exception of a small reduction in the consumption of mental health drugs.

Our estimates allow us to rule out effects on 10-year mortality one sixth as large the cross-sectional gradient. In our intergenerational analyses, we find that wealth increases children's health care utilization in the years following the lottery and may also reduce obesity risk. The effects on most other child outcomes, which include drug consumption, scholastic performance, and skills, can usually be bounded to a tight interval around zero. Overall, our findings suggest that correlations observed in affluent, developed countries between (i) wealth and health or (ii) parental income and children's outcomes do not reflect a causal effect of wealth.

Pointer from James Pethokoukis.

Somebody should replicate this study in the United States. I would not be surprised if the effects on child outcomes were closely bounded to a tight interval around zero here, also.

This is the sort of evidence that I wish Robert Putnam would confront.

Inequality and Unicorns, Darlings of the Progressives

Virtually all of the data cited by the left to decry the supposed explosion of income inequality, as Lee Ohanian and Kip Hagopian point out in their seminal paper, "The Mismeasure of Inequality" (Policy Review, 2011), use a Census Bureau definition of "money income" that excludes taxes, transfer payments like Medicaid, Medicare, nutrition assistance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and even costly employee benefits such as health insurance.

Thus the data that is conventionally used to calculate the so-called Gini coefficient—the most commonly used measure of income inequality—ignore America's highly progressive income tax system and the panoply of benefits and transfer payments. According to Messrs. Ohanian and Hagopian, once the effect of taxes and transfer payments is taken into account, "inequality actually declined 1.8% during the 16-year period between 1993 and 2009, when the Gini coefficient dropped from .395 to .388."

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303773704579269990020773098

"Seek and you shall find."  Unless what you seek is a reason why inequality of income or wealth matters.  I have yet to find even a bare bones explanation that goes beyond voodoo and chicken bones for rationale.  

Equality and Unicorns

"It's misplaced because it glosses over strong evidence that the ability to rise above your starting place-the American Dream, by most accounts-is better than it was 40 years ago.  "There is no doubt that the spread between top earners and those below them has grown over time. The share of income earned by the top 1 percent in the United States has doubled since the early 1970s. The top 20 percent's share has risen, too, though the increase is much smaller and has leveled off since the 1990s."

 http://reason.com/archives/2012/12/30/examine-inequalitys-causes-before- prescr 

Excellent points to consider from this article: If Bill Gates has 200 million or billion or whatever, does that hurt you, and if so, how? You were not forced to buy his product, so your money only went to him if you decided his product was worth what you had to pay. And if someone else's money went to him, how did that hurt you? Answer, it did not unless you were a business competitor.

Furthermore, all of the productivity Microsoft's products enabled materially contributed to you by allowing businesses to develop and sell their products with greater efficiency (better product, available to market more rapidly, at a lower cost). 

How could we "compress" incomes, even if "we" decided we could? "The same trend toward greater inequality is happening in most advanced economies, across different tax and regulatory systems. Despite spending $1 trillion a year on the poor, federal and state governments report increases in poverty and need." 

Government leveling attempts tend to work opposite of the way they were intended. Great example - government workers, who are paid from your taxes, whereas private employees are paid only from money voluntarily exchanged. Washington, DC is now the wealthiest - do you think that comes from the value DC adds to your life? 

"The wealthy" could mean "the old", since the old on average have 22 times the wealth of those under age 35. 12.5% (SS) and 2.9% (Medicare) of the income of "workers" is extracted and given to the "wealthy old." 

And yet - the author cites a study that indicates that 84% of Americans have higher family incomes than their parents did - presumably, even though their parents were more likely to have been or remained married.  

Conclusion: equality is more likely to result from removing the government sucker punches that prevent the less wealthy from upward mobility, than it is from looking for more ways to "slice money off of the top" so that it could be recycled through government programs that are proven not to be cost effective.  

Europe's Legendary Nirvanna .... Not

"He who has ears to hear, let him hear."  Mark 4:1-34  http://tcpiii.tripod.com/mark4a.htm

A interesting review of the state of the social democracies, going from bad to worse.  Have you ears?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903480904576510200756243420.html

Did You Want Sunshine Out Of Cucumbers, Too?

But consider the mischief contained in that “or more.” It makes the full-time category embrace everyone from a clerk who arrives at her desk at 9 am and leaves promptly at 4 pm to a trial lawyer who eats dinner four nights a week—and lunch on weekends—at his desk. I assume, in this case, that the clerk is a woman and the lawyer a man for the simple reason that—and here is an average that proofers rarely mention—full-time men work more hours than full-time women do. In 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 27 percent of male full-time workers had workweeks of 41 or more hours, compared with 15 percent of female full-time workers; meanwhile, just 4 percent of full-time men worked 35 to 39 hours a week, while 12 percent of women did. Since FTYR men work more than FTYR women do, it shouldn’t be surprising that the men, on average, earn more.

http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_3_gender-gap.html

There's a reason women earn less than men - women are smart enough to avoid spending their lives chasing more money.  Thus they work less.  Perhaps they also have divided responsibilities, since, perversely, men cannot have children without women, and therefore, women spend more time taking care of children and less time working.  Either way, as the author rightly concludes, for those who demand government interventino to right this wrong, "no government anywhere has ever fulfilled—and that no government ever will".