Taxes and Freedom

October 3, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Denmark is adding a tax on fatty foods to the already hefty tax burden on their citizens. 

In the US, nobody in public life can get away with saying a good word about taxes.  Maybe Warren Buffet, but he’s not running for office.  The Republican mantra “It’s your money, it’s not the government’s money” has great appeal, and the Republicans and Tea Partistas have clearly stated their preference that government shut down rather than raise taxes to pay for what the government does.  

After all, less government equals more freedom.  Or does it?

Bruce Bartlett at the Times Economix blog,checked out some of those low-tax countries, nations that are well below the 27% tax-to-GDP ratio of the US.  Then he went to the Heritage Foundation site to see how these nations ranked on the Heritage Index of Economic Freedom.  Here are the results.  (On the Freedom Index, a high score is good.  A score above 80 (only six countries) is “free”; a score below 50 is “repressed.”) 

(The tax-to-GDP ratio is very slightly different from what you find here, and obviously the score on Libya is from before the fall of Gaddafi.) 

Where to go if I couldn’t stay in the US – Chad or Denmark?  The freedom of low taxes or the high-tax nanny state?  It’s a tough choice, but I think I’d go with Denmark even though language might be a problem.  The only Danish I know is prune.

Moneyball

September 30, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Stanford is a three-touchdown favorite over UCLA tomorrow night.  Which is the more desirable team?

If you said Stanford, you’re probably one of those people who thinks that the Big Ten consists of ten schools.  You probably also thought that football was all about points on the board – six for a touchdown, three for a field goal, and so on.  Silly you. 

As the recent (and perhaps continuing) realignment of conferences makes clear, college football is about points, but they are Nielsen points.  And on the Nielsen scoreboard, UCLA crushes Stanford. 

 

The graphic is from a Nate Silver article at The New York Times (here).  It’s the companion piece to Taylor Branch’s recent article  in the Atlantic.  Branch gives the sordid details. Nate Silver provides the systematic numbers – fan base and TV market share. What both make clear is that college football is not about good match-ups.  It’s about good profits.

The S.E.C.’s interest in Texas A&M becomes easier to understand once you recognize that the Aggies have among the largest fan bases in the country. The fact that Notre Dame’s fans are dispersed throughout the country explains why they’ve been loathe to join a conference. And that the West Coast is less enthusiastic about football than other parts of the country, making the Pacific-12 a harder sale to the television networks, explains why the conference is going to great lengths to expand into football-crazy states like Texas.

Not to go all Marxist here, but by design, the money flows entirely to the networks, to the universities, and to the coaches.  The workers who put their bodies on the line get nothing.  Actually some of them do get some trinkets and favors, but in the ideal world of the NCAA, they are supposed to get zero dollars.  After all, they are not workers.  They are scholar-athletes, and they do get scholarships, which are worth something, though it’s questionable whether they get much of an education.  But even though they produce substantial amounts of revenue for other people, they are not workers. Running back Kent Waldrep was paralyzed during a game in 1974. When his university stopped paying for his medical bills, he sued for workers’ compensation. 

The appeals court finally rejected Waldrep’s claim in June of 2000, ruling that he was not an employee because he had not paid taxes on financial aid that he could have kept even if he quit football.

The university – ironists take note – was Texas Christian.


HT: My colleague George Martin for calling Silver's article to my attention. 

UPDATE, Oct. 2:  By game time, UCLA was a 23-point underdogs.  Stanford won  45 - 19.  No information yet on how many viewers watched the game on TV.

Education Divested

September 28, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Here in New Jersey, as in Wisconsin and elsewhere, the governor has been attacking educators and cutting education budgets, and educators have been doing their best to fight back. 

In France too, professors are trying to win public support against the “depouillement” of education.  The word literally means stripping or skinning, leaving something bare, and it carries the same connotations as the English “fleecing.”  So the profs have posed, depouillé, for a calendar. 

The writing on the blackboard carries a message appropriate both to the academic area and to the protest.  The double meaning gets lost in a literal translation.  “Let’s do economics, not budget-cutting.”

The decreasing function in math is more obvious.

As you might expect, the conservative reaction laments that by doing something that might win public opinion to their side, the profs “dévalorisaient la profession.”  Of course, if you really want to “devalue” something, you  reduce the money you allocate to it, which is what the government is doing. 


View and download all twelve months here, all safe for work.  The calendar begins with Septembre 2011, so you’d better hurry.

HT:  Maîtresse

Chic Cliques (or is it Chick Clicks?)

September 27, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sara Wakefield mentioned on Facebook that Kindergarten Moms’ night was “remarkably like high school where I did okay with all groups but fit in with none.”  (I took note because at the time,  I was just about to leave for my own high school reunion.)

The social structure of high school, it seems, is all about cliques – freaks and geeks,* jocks and emos, preps, goths, cool kids, et. al.  But there’s a paradox here.  Whenever I ask students about cliques in high school, they all say pretty much what Sara said.  (I mean, that's what they say once they figure out that when I say “clique” – rhymes with “antique” or “unique” – I really mean “click.”)  I ask them to jot down a list of the cliques at their school.  Some make longer lists, some shorter, but nobody sits there with a blank sheet of paper. Then, when I ask them which they were in, it turns out that nobody was a member of any clique.  Instead, like Sara, they affiliated loosely with many of the groups, or they had friends in several different cliques.

But wait a minute. You can’t have a group without members.  So if nobody is a member of any clique, then cliques don’t exist.  How can everyone see all these cliques when nobody in the school belongs to a clique?

The paradox stems from two different definitions or ways of thinking about cliques – as an actual group, and as a label.  When we think about other people, we think of the clique as both – group and label.  But when we think about ourselves, we think of the clique primarily as a label.  And while we are very willing to apply a label to other people, we resist labeling ourselves. 

Attribution theory has a similar take on “personality.”  If we are given a list of personality traits – from Affable to Zany –  and asked to say whether they apply to some person we know, we have no trouble going through the list and checking Yes or No for each trait. But when asked if those traits apply to us, we balk and go for the column marked “depends on the situation.”  As one of the attribution pioneers (Walter Mischel?) put it, apparently a personality is something that other people have. 

The same self/other difference shapes our ideas about cliques – that they are something that other people belong to – and for the same reason: the clique label, like the personality trait, is too limiting.  To say that I am “introverted” implies that this is how I am.  Always.  But “always” doesn’t feel right.  For one thing, I know that sometimes I can act in a very outgoing way. And for another, if I assign myself that label, then I can never act effusively and still be true to who I “really” am.

Similarly, to label myself as “one of the cool kids,” flattering though that may seem, limits me to that characteristic – coolness – when in fact I know there are times when I feel very uncool.  And besides, I sometimes hang around with kids who are not in the cool group.  (I’m using “I” in the hypothetical, generic sense. In reality, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the cool kids.)

The distinction probably even applies to official groups like the football team.  If you’re not a member, you might think of them as “the jocks” with all the connotations that the word carries. But I suspect that your local linebacker is more reluctant to apply that label to himself. There’s no doubt that he’s on the team. But he probably doesn’t think of himself as a jock.   

So while cliques have a certain reality embodied in real people, they are also cognitive categories that we construct and use to simplify and make sense of the social life of school.  Perhaps it’s equally useful to think of cliques not so much as actual groups of people but as ways of being that real people slide into and out of. And if any of what I’m saying here is accurate, how might it apply outside the high school microcosm – for example, to the concept of social class?

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* At about this same time when Sara and I were thinking about high school, Mrs. Castelli’s  students – actual high school students –  were thinking and blogging about “Freaks and Geeks.”