Merging & purging

For years, I blamed it on those richly royal blue suede high heel pumps. The ones with the ridiculously tall, spiked heel and absurdly pointed toe. I was 22 when I bought them, 36 when I donated them to the Salvation Army.

Those shoes had a history, one that made me smile. I was a young sports reporter on assignment at USA Today in Washington, D.C. I had a terrific blue and black wool suit that Mama had made which matched them perfectly. The first time I wore that outfit, I was covering the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, Texas and wore it to a coaches’ press conference.

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Let MLK , Jr. Day be Equality Day

As we once again celebrate a great orator, leader and inspirational figure, we must also realize there’s a correct and equal way to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.

No other holiday is named for just one person. President’s Day is for all presidents, Memorial Day is for all those who died in wars, Mother’s Day is for all mothers and Veterans Day is for all veterans. All of these holidays are for those regardless of religion, sex or race. (Columbus Day should be renamed Founders Day or Discovery Day and Christmas is a religious holiday).

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New mayor, new council = pay raise?

On hold since ’10 with budget crunch, PTC mayor to go up from $9k to $18K, council members from $6K to $12k

With four of its five members freshly elected, the Peachtree City Council this Thursday will talk about giving themselves a pay raise — double their current pay.

On the agenda is the possibility of restoring pay increases for the mayor and council members that would double the mayor’s salary from $9,000 to $18,000 a year and council members pay from $6,000 to $12,000 a year.

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Minimum Wage: Economists Agree World is a Complicated Place

Forbes has an interesting article trying to sum up the

state of the economists’ empirical debate
over the minimum wage
and its effect on employment.

Some excerpts to get across the flavor of the conversation:

David Neumark and co-authors have utilized a panel approach and
found that minimum wages do lead to lower employment. Arin Dube and
co-athors use an alternative approach that takes cross-state border
counties as control groups and find there is no impact. They also
find that including additional controls in the panel approach, like
census region or state trends, makes Neumarks’ results
insignificant, allegedly due to pre-existing trends. Neumark
replies that the cross border county grouping doesn’t really lead
to optimal control groups. The Dube approach, he alleges, really
throws out too much identifying information, and the resulting
large standard errors don’t give you a precisely estimated zero
impact, but a very noisy estimate….

So this is where you are left off. Who has constructed the more
reliable counterfactual? Should you specify state time trends and
if so how? Does Dube throw out too much useful data? And if so, how
does Dube et al identify the impact on separations and
hires?…..

Then came Meer and
West
 (2013). This paper extended Dube’s focus on labor
market flows and looked at net job creation using the cross-state
border counties approach. Much has been discussed about their
findings, but I think an important missing contribution of their
paper is an explanation for why there would be so much disagreement
about the impact of minimum wages if there really was a negative
impact. What they show is that if the true effect of the minimum
wage was to reduce the growth rate of employment, then looking at
the impact in levels would give you two different estimates of the
effect: no effect if you included a growth trend, and a negative
effect if you didn’t include a control trend.

The article does what it sets out to do fairly well, but it is
curious that it never discusses economic theory or why
this question is so controversial, and why studies that seem to
show no employment effect of a minimum wage might seem curious and
worthy of being looked at very carefully.

Science tends to progress not merely by observing the
world in an empirical sense, but by trying to abstract out
regularities or laws that operate in it. This is, as the language
from Forbes above makes abundantly clear, because the
world is a crazily complicated multicausal place. Understanding the
whys of what you are observing is very difficult if all you do is
observe, or observe combined with lots of complicated mathematical
attempts to figure out how to account for all the other things that
might be going on. Because, as the ongoing debate described above
shows, you can never do that in a way that will satisfy all other
reasoning and observing minds.

Upon observing an airplane fly, one doesn’t assume that
apparently the law of gravity doesn’t apply to metal plane-shaped
things. Rather, you intelligently realize instead that other forces
must be in operation on the plane. Similarly, we should not assume
that just because one doesn’t always see an observable, countable
diminution in people employed related to the minimum wage in every
specialized situation an academic looks for it, that on the margins
the law of supply and demand don’t work on labor and that raising
the minimum wage is costless in terms of jobs.

If you believe that some people’s marginal product isn’t worth
more than that minimum wage, and if you believe employers would
tend (other things being equal) to not want to lose money on hiring
people, then you should understand that the minimum wage does cost
jobs. How many, and, whether you think the benefit to the seen
still employed should as a matter of policy outweigh the harm to
the unseen unemployed, is a different question.

People involved in the actual science mostly get these
distinctions. But that these sort of studies regarding the minimum
wage sink into that general background scientistic morass of what
the “educated, I read the Sunday New York Times with
some attention” believe and “know” about the world is unfortunate,
because it privileges some very picayune and minor attempts to look
at a portion of the world above the more valuable process of
actually understanding on a deep level how the world works.

In short, it allows minor-level smarty pants to confidently
“know” that we can raise the minimum wage without causing anyone to
lose or not get a job, to let this sort of “sophisticated,
empirical” stuff obscure a well-understood fact among economists:
you can raise a legal wage above the level which many people will
be employed. Anyone contemplating policy needs to know
that. 

Previous blogging by me on the minimum wage
here
and
here
.

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NSA Reform Bill Introduced, Men Arrested in Nigeria For Being Gay, Hollande Enjoying Increased Approval in Wake of Reports of Affair: P.M. Links

  • Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has introduced legislation that
    would reform the
    NSA’s metadata collection
    program.
  • The husband of a brain-dead,
    pregnant
    woman is suing the hospital in Texas keeping her
    alive, saying that it is acting against her wishes.  
  • Dozens of men have been arrested in
    northern Nigeria
    for being gay.
  • New research shows that
    drug testing
    in high schools does not dissuade students from
    trying illegal drugs.
  • French President
    Francois Hollande
    is enjoying an increased approval rating in
    the wake of reports that he has been engaging in an affair with an
    actress.
  • Washington, D.C. lawmakers are to vote on getting rid of
    criminal penalties for possession of
    small amounts of marijuana
    tomorrow. 

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Scott Shackford on the Limp Promises of Obama’s ‘Promise Zones’

As part of President Barack Obama’s pivot
to income equality for his final term, he announced five
communities to be designated as “Promise Zones,” areas with high
levels of poverty to receive special attention for federal grants.
But, as Scott Shackford notes, like Republican Kentucky Sen.
Rand Paul’s similar proposal for Detroit, the president’s program
shows no sign of addressing the root government regulatory problems
that suppress private economic growth in these communities. A
federal tax break is welcomed by just about everybody, but it does
little for the excessive and oppressive state and local
regulations, fees, and rules that make economic recovery
impossible.

View this article.

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Ms. Willis’ socialism column nonfactual

I find it difficult to get to the substance of Ms. Willis’ article when the premise seems to be that the socialist party started making promises to the Vietnamese people and then took over following the Vietnam War.

The North Vietnamese army, the military vestige of a communist totalitarian state, defeated the South Vietnamese in battle and seized control. I don’t think there were any promises made by socialists to achieve this.

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Climate ‘warming’ should be ‘change’

Global warming is over. It is a tired and trite phrase and presents a poor picture of reality.

It is time for a new paradigm: global climate change. The greenhouse effect, which traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere warming the land and the oceans, is only one aspect of global climate change.

Heat-powered high and low pressure systems such as the “arctic vortex” that pulled freezing air into Fayette County recently are another.

Rising ocean levels from thermal expansion and melting ice are another.

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Will Peachtree City be divided into 2 voting districts?

The title of a Bob Dylan song says it well, “The Times They Are A-Changin.’”

That is very true for the county and County Commission. For those not sure of what is going on and its meaning, it bears serious examination.

How have the commissioners been elected to date? The county was divided into three geographical areas know as districts. Each of those districts produced commission candidates for one post each, specifically Posts 1 through 3. To run for those posts you had to live within the district the post represented

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Labor’s defeat by Boeing portends bad news for working class, decline for U.S.

Late last week while having my morning coffee I listened to an interesting news item aired on NPR. It briefly reported that the Boeing Company and its machinists agreed that if Boeing manufactured its latest model aircraft in the Seattle area, the machinists would give the company significant wage and benefit concessions.

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