Civil protest, Chinese style

Sun [Zhongjie] became a hero of sorts here in Shanghai for his protest against police entrapment.

He was driving his company's minivan on an errand last month when a man flagged him down and begged for a lift. A few minutes later, policemen surrounded Sun's vehicle and accused him of operating an illegal taxi. The van was confiscated, Sun was fined 10,000 yuan, or about $1,400, and his company fired him.

Drivers in Shanghai had been complaining for years about such sting operations. In most cases, drivers angrily pay the fines, which they consider a form of extortion.

But Sun decided to fight back. He chopped off the pinky finger on his left hand as a public way to declare his innocence. Soon, his story was picked up in several national newspapers. The story then spread online, with unregulated Internet bulletin boards, chat rooms and the popular instant messaging site QQ inundated with complaints of police harassment and support for Sun. ...

The Internet furor was so intense that the local government announced a new investigation. Sun won his case and did not have to pay the fine.
--Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post, on the cost of effective protest in China

Department of obvious

You as the [grant] recipient, your employees, subrecipients under this award, and subrecipients' employees may not--

i. Engage in severe forms of trafficking in persons during the period of time that the award is in effect;
ii. Procure a commercial sex act during the period of time that the award is in effect; or
iii. Use forced labor in the performance of the award or subawards under the award.
--Onerous restrictions in my Social Security Administration grant terms and conditions

Mark-to-market accounting fail

Ambac Financial Group reported a $2.19 billion quarterly profit Wednesday as the company got a big accounting boost from deterioration in the perceived creditworthiness of its main bond insurance unit.

Most the gain came as credit spreads widened on Ambac Assurance Corporation, the company’s main bond insurance subsidiary. When credit spreads widen, that implies investors are more concerned about a company not being able to meet its obligations. However, when this happens, it reduces some of the insurer’s liabilities. ... That results in a derivatives gain.
--Alistair Barr, MarketWatch, on winning by losing. HT: Donald Marron

MBTA fail

[Massachusetts governor Deval] Patrick made the comments this morning during a radio interview as he discussed a new independent report he commissioned that details a decade of neglect at the MBTA. The author of the report, David F. D’Alessandro, went so far this morning as to say he would not ride the Red Line between Harvard Square and Alewife because a water leak has created the potential for a train derailment. ...

The report pointed out that an $80 million project has been delayed to fix the water leak, which has corroded fasteners and allowed the tracks to move out of alignment, presenting "the possibility of train derailment."
--Noah Bierman and Andrew Ryan, Boston.com, on the death-defying subway ride north of Harvard Square

Get yer free golf carts here

Thanks to the federal tax credit to buy high-mileage cars that was part of President Obama's stimulus plan, Uncle Sam is now paying Americans to buy that great necessity of modern life, the golf cart. ...

The golf-cart boom has followed an IRS ruling that golf carts qualify for the electric-car credit as long as they are also road worthy. ...

In South Carolina, sales of these carts have been soaring as dealerships alert customers to Uncle Sam's giveaway. "The Golf Cart Man" in the Villages of Lady Lake, Florida is running a banner online ad that declares: "GET A FREE GOLF CART. Or make $2,000 doing absolutely nothing!"

Golf Cart Man is referring to his offer in which you can buy the cart for $8,000, get a $5,300 tax credit off your 2009 income tax, lease it back for $100 a month for 27 months, at which point Golf Cart Man will buy back the cart for $2,000. "This means you own a free Golf Cart or made $2,000 cash doing absolutely nothing!!!" ...

The IRS has also ruled that there's no limit to how many electric cars an individual can buy, so some enterprising profiteers are stocking up on multiple carts while the federal credit lasts, in order to resell them at a profit later.
--Wall Street Journal on the difficulty of targeting government spending

Just play the game already!

Here's what I don't get in baseball. You have a Korean pitcher, a Dominican catcher, a first baseman from French Canada and a third baseman from Mississippi, and they can't understand each other already. Then they cover their mouths with their gloves. Then the catcher puts down one finger for fastball. What was that all about?
--Bull Durham actor Robert Wuhl on player conferences at the mound

Wisdom from Run Lola Run

It was Franka Potente, [Matt Damon’s] love interest in the first two Bourne films and the star of “Run Lola Run,” who taught him that “most people look ridiculous when they’re running,” he said. She told him to study videos of himself in motion.
--Dennis Lim, NYT, on a lesson gleaned from a woman with lots of experience. I remember thinking this when I was on the track team in high school.

Health care reform and marginal tax rates

President Obama has said he wants to raise marginal tax rates on high-income taxpayers. Yet under his policies, the largest increases in marginal tax rates may well apply not to the rich but to millions of middle-class families. These increases would not show up explicitly in the tax code but, rather, implicitly as part of health care reform. ...

A family of four with an income, say, of $54,000 would pay $9,900 for health care. That covers only about half the actual cost. Uncle Sam would pick up the rest.

Now suppose that the same family earns an additional $12,000 by, for example, having the primary earner work overtime or sending a secondary worker into the labor force. In that case, the federal subsidy shrinks, so the family’s cost of health care rises to $12,700.

In other words, $2,800 of the $12,000 of extra income, or 23 percent, would be effectively taxed away by the government’s new health care system.

That implicit marginal tax rate of 23 percent is a significant disincentive. And it comes on top of the explicit marginal tax rate the family already faces from income and payroll taxes. Altogether, many families would face marginal rates at or above the 50 percent level that animated the Reagan supply-side revolution. ...

None of this necessarily means that health reform is not worth doing. ... But we should not forget the cost of translating that noble aspiration into practical policy. ... Future generations of Americans may find health insurance more affordable, but they will also find hard work less financially rewarding.
--Greg Mankiw, NYT, on how subsidies that phase out with income are implicit marginal tax rate hikes

Laboring in obscurity

Perhaps not surprisingly, I knew all the answers. HT: Greg Mankiw

Your professor's next girlfriend

Jessica Simpson is tired of dating jocks and musicians - she's ready for an academic. ...

And Simpson has revealed why she is still single - she gets bored easily and craves intellectual stimulation.

She tells Extra, "I don't want to get bored. I can bore out pretty easily, so I love intellectual men - people that will always keep me intrigued."
--SFGate.com on the appeal of the professoriate

Public option yikes

After Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992 some Floridians were having difficulty purchasing homeowners’ insurance. (The reason: rates are regulated, and at the regulated rates some properties are too great a risk.) So, the state government formed Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, which is owned and operated by the State of Florida. ...

Today about 30% of homeowners’ policies are written by Citizens, which is the largest property insurer in the state. It’s about to get bigger too. The largest private insurer, State Farm, had a rate request rejected last year, and now is pulling out of the state altogether (for property insurance; they’ll still insure your car). ...

Everybody in Florida knows Citizens is a fiscal time bomb. Already, every Florida insurance policy (on homes, boats, cars, etc.) pays a surcharge that goes to Citizens, but Citizens still doesn’t have sufficient reserves to weather a major hurricane. When one comes, Florida taxpayers will be on the hook for the bill. ...

In Florida, the public option has meant a substantial socialization of insurance, subsidization of the public option by those who take a private option, and the creation of a fiscally-unsound public insurance company despite the subsidy. Now, we have an opportunity to do the same thing at the national level with health insurance. The results have not been good in Florida, and everyone in Florida knows it. Why would it be any different at the national level?
--Randall Holcombe, The Beacon, on public insurance in Florida. HT: Marginal Revolution

An economist gets it right

Thirty years ago, the [University of Michigan] began going through the convulsions other public universities are now experiencing. Today, it is largely protected from Michigan’s plummeting economy. Only 7 percent of its budget is provided by the state.

The transformation of the University of Michigan’s finances began with Harold T. Shapiro. In the mid-1970s, Mr. Shapiro, then a professor of economics and public policy at the university, studied Michigan’s economy and predicted that the state would lose tax income compared with the rest of the country in coming decades. He was right.

While the state trimmed a third of its support for the university in the 1980s, Mr. Shapiro, as the university’s president, worked to build a more secure budget base. Michigan increased private fund-raising and developed a tuition structure that took advantage of a growing number of out-of-state students, who now pay $36,163 a year in tuition and fees — about the same as Princeton.
--Paul Fain, NYT, on one economist's prescience

Legal systems

Whereas in England all is permitted that is not expressly prohibited, it has been said that in Germany all is prohibited unless expressly permitted and in France all is permitted that is expressly prohibited.
--English judge Robert Megarry on the scope of law

Why cubicles?

Robert Oppenheimer agonized over building the A-bomb. Alfred Nobel got queasy about creating dynamite. Robert Propst invented nothing so destructive. Yet before he died in 2000, he lamented his unwitting contribution to what he called "monolithic insanity."

Propst is the father of the cubicle. ...

Another critical factor in the cubicle's rapid ascent was Uncle Sam. During the 1960s, to stimulate business spending, the Treasury created new rules for depreciating assets. The changes specified clearer ranges for depreciation and established a shorter life for furniture and equipment, vs. longer ranges assigned to buildings or leasehold improvements. (Today companies can depreciate office furniture in seven years, whereas permanent structures--that is, offices with walls--are assigned a 39.5-year rate.)

The upshot: A company could recover its costs quicker if it purchased cubes. When clients told Herman Miller of that unexpected benefit, it became a new selling point for the Action Office. After only two years on the market, sales soared. Competitors took notice.

That's when Propst's original vision began to fade. "They kept shrinking the Action Office until it became a cubicle," says [Joe] Schwartz, now 80. As Steelcase, Knoll, and Haworth brought their versions to market, they figured out that what businesses wanted wasn't to give employees a holistic experience. The customers wanted a cheap way to pack workers in.

Propst's workstations were designed to be flexible, but in practice they were seldom altered or moved at all. Lined up in identical rows, they became the dystopian world that three academics described as "bright satanic offices" in a 1998 book, Workplaces of the Future.
--Julie Schlosser, Fortune, on how tax laws abetted the rise of the cubicle. HT: Freakonomics

Born to run

Most mammals can sprint faster than humans — having four legs gives them the advantage. But when it comes to long distances, humans can outrun almost any animal. Because we cool by sweating rather than panting, we can stay cool at speeds and distances that would overheat other animals. On a hot day, the two scientists wrote, a human could even outrun a horse in a 26.2-mile marathon. ...

Other research suggests that before the development of slingshots or bows, early hunters engaged in persistence hunting, chasing an animal for hours until it overheated, making it easy to kill at close range. A 2006 report in the journal Current Anthropology documents persistence hunting among modern hunter-gatherers, including the Bushmen in Africa.
--Tara Parker-Pope, NYT, on heating up your food

More on the migrant mother

Perhaps because she felt rushed that mizzly afternoon in Nipomo, [Dorothea] Lange was uncharacteristically remiss in ascertaining information about her subject. The little she did record was largely misleading and factually incorrect, including the date of the photos, which her notes alternately report as both February and March of 1936.

Through her negligence, in effect, Lange perpetrated a case of historic deception on the American public.

The person most angry and, indeed, most bitter about Lange’s portrayal was the "migrant mother" herself, Florence Owens Thompson. The Lange photo stamped a permanent Grapes of Wrath stereotype on Thompson’s life–a life that was far more complex and complicated than Lange, or the American public for that matter, might have ever imagined. ...

In the field notes that she filed with her Nipomo photographs, Lange included the following description: "Seven hungry children. Father is native Californian. Destitute in pea pickers’ camp … because of failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tires to buy food."

[Troy] Owens scoffed at the description. "There’s no way we sold our tires, because we didn’t have any to sell," he told this writer. "The only ones we had were on the Hudson and we drove off in them. I don’t believe Dorothea Lange was lying, I just think she had one story mixed up with another. Or she was borrowing to fill in what she didn’t have."

"Mother always said that Lange never asked her name or any questions, so what she [Lange] wrote she must have got from the older kids or other people in the camp," speculates daughter Katherine McIntosh, who appears in the Migrant Mother photo with her head turned away behind her mother’s right shoulder. "She also told mother the negatives would never be published–that she was only going to use the photos to help out the people in the camp."
--Geoffrey Dunn, New Times, on the truth getting in the way of a great photograph

Evolutionary girly-men

Since the Industrial Revolution, modern humans have grown taller and stronger, so it's easy to assume that evolution is making humans fitter. But according to anthropologist Peter McAllister, author of Manthropology: the Science of Inadequate Modern Man, the contemporary male has evolved, at least physically, into "the sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet." Thanks to genetic differences, an average Neanderthal woman, McAllister notes, could have whupped Arnold Schwarzenegger at his muscular peak in an arm-wrestling match. And prehistoric Australian Aborigines, who typically built up great strength in their joints and muscles through childhood and adolescence, could have easily beat Usain Bolt in a 100-m dash.
--Eben Harrell, Time, on the physical degeneration of humanity

The story behind the migrant mother

In the Nipomo camp, [Dorothea] Lange met Florence Thompson, 32, the mother of 11 children, five born out of wedlock. The family was in desperate straits, living off stolen vegetables from the fields. Lange took a half-dozen photos, putting Thompson and her children in different poses. She took the photos from just outside their tent, even moving a pile of soiled laundry aside, so as not to embarrass the subjects by noting their squalid living conditions. (Though Gordon doesn’t mention it, Lange may have decided to use only three of the children to avoid the public perception of “Okies” as irresponsible “white trash.”) For the key photo, she “made the unusual decision to ask the two youngsters leaning on their mother to turn their faces away from the camera,” Gordon writes.
--David Oshinsky, NYT, on the artifice of the documentary photograph

Einstein didn't watch videos

Parent alert: the Walt Disney Company is now offering refunds for all those ”Baby Einstein” videos that did not make children into geniuses.

They may have been a great electronic baby sitter, but the unusual refunds appear to be a tacit admission that they did not increase infant intellect. ...

According to a 2003 study, a third of all American babies from 6 months to 2 years old had at least one “Baby Einstein” video.

Despite their ubiquity, and the fact that many babies are transfixed by the videos, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time at all for children under 2.
--Tamar Lewin, NYT, on why your kid isn't a theoretical physicist

The low marathon bar

Purists believe that running a marathon should be just that — running the entire course at a relatively fast clip. They point out that a six-hour marathoner is simply participating in the event, not racing in it. Slow runners have disrespected the distance, they say, and have ruined the marathon’s mystique. ...

In 1980, the median finishing time for male runners in United States marathons was 3 hours 32 minutes 17 seconds, a pace of about eight minutes per mile. In 2008, the median finishing time was 4:16, a pace of 9:46. For women, that time in 1980 was 4:03:39. Last year, it was 4:43:32. ...

Last year, 44 percent of the field for [the Honolulu Marathon] finished in more than six hours — with some marathoners stopping for lunch along the course.
--Juliet Macur, NYT, on "running" the marathon