Political Calculations

Not in the US it wasn't? Costs for higher education have tripled in the past couple decades, to say NOTHING of costs in the 80s or 90s. Note that I already knew this, having a free ride thanks to the U.S. Pell Grants, however I DID to a basic google search. Among many other sources, this one is eye opening. Curious as to what your thoughts are: https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-ongoing-inflati… In case you think I'm shilling a link (I'm not, first i've seen of this), here is another: https://res.cloudinary.com/value-penguin/image/upload/c_limit,dpr_1.0,… and one more: https://feelthebern.org/bernie-sanders-on-education/ Even being at the edge of a boomer and a millennial, I particularly love that last link.

Political Calculations : https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/ Capital Spectator : https://www.capitalspectator.com/

This study is misleading, because it uses 'household' wealth, instead of individual wealth, and may be incorrectly interpreted as showing a decline in the middle class, when it is really showing the results of changes in family structure over the past 50 years. This graph shows how this choice affects the results: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-g3WZGpDibPM/Up3ZAPRtScI/AAAAAAAAJqE/5hWGdOBo… The following blog-posts go in to more detail: http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-major-trends-in-u… http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-widows-peak.html#… http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-men-who-werent-th…

> The period of perhaps greatest economic growth in the West, the 1950s and 60s, was the period of greatest government regulation and direct involvement in economies. What calculation leads you to conclude there was more regulation in the 1950s and 1960s than today? My impression is that "deregulation" in practice largely amounted to at best a decline in the rate of increase in federal regulations, not an overall decrease in total regulation. Today there are vastly more federal rules and regulations and also substantially more government employees as a percentage of total employment than there was in the 1970s. Um, here's a plot of one proxy for new regulations - the size of the federal register in pages: http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-regulation-of-am… There were several high-profile cases of actual deregulation (eg, regulations related to trucking and airline fares), but it amounted to pushing back the tide - the nature of government programs is to grow and most have continued to do so, occasional changes in fashionable rhetoric notwithstanding.

"SF Developers are by most definitions filthy rich." So you're implying that it's unfair for a highly skilled SF developer making 2-3x the median wage across all professions (having dedicated years to decades of their life to attain that level of skill) to make that money in the first place? Besides the $100-150K such a developer makes is less than half what the bottom of the 1% makes in 2014: $390K, source: http://money.cnn.com/2014/04/04/pf/taxes/top-1-taxes/. You're talking something closer to the top 3-5% here, source: http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2014/09/what-is-your-income-… And even then, most of the people I know who make that kind of money worked their butts off and sacrificed a lot to get to that income level. To be fair, I know some idle trustafarians too, but they are a tiny minority of the group it seems like you're demonizing for their hard work. My unsolicited advice to people who can't afford to live in SF is DON'T LIVE IN SF! For what it's worth, I don't and for exactly that reason. That and my definition of filthy rich is a lot stricter: the top 0.1% and their $1M+ a year income.

My mistake, I linked the wrong thing. Here is the right one https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-price-of-campbe… .

Tell-tales are all over the place. From explosion in asset prices world wide and cross-industry to micro-signals, such as goods coming in smaller packaging (for the same price) or slightly increasing grocery prices[0]. In my bubble, its mostly tinfoil-hat-wearing crypto-enthusiasts pointing at examples of how toiletpaper comes in smaller packages-for-the-same-price, so my view is skewed. But its safe to consider all these as datapoints that indicate possible worldwide inflation is building up. [0]: https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-price-history-o…

We've confirmed the code is working on several other browsers, both desktop and mobile versions, so the issue right now looks specific to Safari and potentially mobile Safari. The last time we confirmed the tool works in Safari was 2018, so that would narrow the potential issue down to changes in Safari since then. I suspect the code's vintage may be an issue. It was originally developed in 2006 to very specifically be backward compatible with older versions of JavaScript, where I can see Apple perhaps phasing out supporting some of the coding aspects that have become obsolete. We do have another tool that uses the same data and many of the same formulas, but with a more modern implementation of code (http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2009/06/investing-through-ti… If you run into the same issue, that would suggest other changes in Safari are at work.

They have updated it for 2021: https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-price-of-campbe…

Re/ medicare for all ... Canada has universal health care yet a very similar suicide rate to the USA.[1] Canada doesn't have a livable minimum wage either. Each province sets its own. There is talk of UBI experiments. [1] https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2011/02/us-vs-canada-suicid…

The US is hitting new record highs in median income: https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2018/08/july-2018-median-ho…

Canada is much less (racially) diverse than the U.S.: 89% white and the largest minority group as asian with 6.7% versus the U.S. 66% white and 14.7% hispanic as the largest minority group. source: data compiled from census reports https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.mx/2011/03/us-vs-canada-compari…

Short version. A member of the San Jose teacher's association thinks one of two academic studies is wrong, because... we already have a consensus. The one point raised in the article about multi-site employers is acknowledged by the article's favored Berkeley study: "some multi-site businesses report payroll and head counts separately for each of their locations, while others consolidate their data and provide information as if their business operated only at a single location." Oh and by the way: "This report was prepared at the request of the Office of the Mayor of Seattle." http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-most-surprising-…

Yes and no. With regard to spreading, just prior observation that adjustments tend to spread. With regard to housing, the observation that the median home price : median income ratio is now above 5.2x, while at the last peak it was only at ~5x. The rate of growth is lower this time, but I don't think it matters because the ratio is still really bad. http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-current-trend-fo…

A blogger created a calculator that allows you to determine (over a 5-year time frame) whether it is cheaper to buy an expensive robot and do automation or to just use manual labor and to save the excess in Treasury bonds. He found that when the minimum wage is at $7.25, it would be slightly cheaper to hire humans, and if the minimum wage is raised to $10.10, then it would be slightly cheaper to hire robots. The blogger assumes that it would cost $150,000 to build the robot, including R&D and maintenance. This comes out to $30,000 per year (while your assumptions claim that the bots only cost $20,000 per year to replace one human). http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2014/01/business-math-robots… I don't know which assumption is correct, though I would guess that eventually bots will be cheaper as we get better making them.

"Upper class is people other than us." Go ahead, enter your household income here, find out where you really fall. http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2013/09/what-is-your-us-inco… Hint- if you're a techie in SF, you're reaaaaallll near the top.

Nice to meet someone with my exact policy views! :-) There's another huge problem that it solves besides just administrative costs. Currently marginal tax rates near the poverty line are very high due to loss of access to need-based programs like foodstamps (exactly how high depends a lot on individual circumstances). It's a horrible burden on the working poor that nobody seems to understand. More discussion here: http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-flat-tax-us-effe…

The amount of information doesn't remain constant - technology enables bureaucrats to invent yet more bizarre and arcane legislation. For example,the U.S. tax code was 504 pages long in 1939, 8,200 pages in 1945, 67,000 in 2008 and 75.000 pages today. http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2010/03/growing-complexity-o… I work for an insurance company, and we spend far more time writing code to comply with regulations than we do writing code for our agents and customers.

You're not an underachiever. Class is all relative. "Middle class" in America translates to "extremely wealthy" for the average human being. My wife and I were just in Newport Beach, CA over the weekend, and we felt very poor. But back here in Nevada, we feel very blessed. Here are some links to make your wife feel better: http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2010/12/whats-your-us-income… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States

It seems to show a rather low tax burden for everyone by historical standards. I wonder if part of the issue is that income taxes have fallen but various state and local taxes, and fees for government services, have gone up instead. I think people might be willing to tolerate a somewhat higher 'headline' rate if taxation were simpler and didn't involve so many different transactions and associated administration. an oldie but goodie - the growth (in pages) of the US tax code: http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2005/12/measuring-growth-of-…

Numerous studies show that education majors is the US have among the lowest composite ACT and LSAT scores of any major. http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2006/02/ranking-school-smart… There have been various explanation for this phenomenon which started in the 1970s and grew since then. Among the most interesting hypotheses is that traditionally smart women went into teaching as one of the few careers available to women who did not want to become young mothers and housewives. But this century, with more opportunities available to women, smart women become doctors, psychologists, screen writers, etc. Yet teaching is still a career dominated by women, leaving the less qualified students to take the available positions.

I'm not the one arguing about definitions. You chose to take us down that path, adding a bunch of ad hominem while simultaneously misusing the terminology you were trying to be patronizing with. I 100% agree that it's completely inconsequential so long as we both understand what the other is saying, but I'm also trying to, within reason, respond to each thing you're stating. One major thing I'd emphasize here is that you're acting like the consequences of non-inflationary systems are speculative. The entire point of this discussion is we have a wealth of data to draw from, from both systems. With a non-inflationary system we have a system that was, more or less, stable over nearly 200 years through numerous catastrophic events. With the modern inflationary system we have something that already not only seems unsustainable, but is causing major societal issues after just 50 years of relative super-utopia. I say super-utopia because not only have we avoided anything on the scale of e.g. WW2, but it kicked off alongside the once-in-a-civilization super-economic boom of mass digitization that is now plateauing. So on the data issue - the way you determine an inflection point on a noisy graph is just to look at the midpoints of the noise and graph them. Look at the slope of the midpoints from start to mid 70s, and then from the mid 70s to present. The brief spike at the dotcom bubble is just noise that gets smoothed out. For a comparable graph, with less noise, here [1] is a…

Not true. In 2014, the 99th percentile of personal income was was $240k, and the 99th percentile of household income was $330k. http://i.imgur.com/cCmRisG.png source http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2014/09/what-is-your-income-… $250k is a realistic number for the upper tier of software engineers to make in Silicon Valley. If you work for one of the big companies, your stock options will get you pretty close to that. If you're a manager, bonuses and incentive pay will also bridge the gap. If you're an independent consultant and you're not making at least this much, you're really missing the boat. Are you a senior software engineer, or middle management or higher? Is you partner also? Then it's _highly_ likely that your household is a 1% household More importantly, the IRS considers any group of people who live together to be a household. I know of many people here in SF who have two, three, four roommates, each making six figures in tech. Essentially all of those households are 1% households. As an aside, I've pointed this out to several people I know. Without fail, they always have reasons why they don't count. "Oh cost of living is too high". "Oh, I have to pay back student loans, my disposable income isn't this". "Oh, sure I make this much but look at my taxes". In reality, describing "the 1%" is not a useful description. For one, many of the 1% are people living middle class lives in high cost-of-living areas. On the one hand, it is…

This study is misleading, because it uses 'household' wealth, instead of individual wealth (...) Perhaps, but there is no hard data at the individual level because, as it happens, basically every comprehensive dataset on income or wealth relies on tax or census data, which are aggregated at the household level by design. So any empirical claim about individual-level data should be taken ex ante with a big grain of salt and evaluated carefully; especially in a heavily politicized field like economics where data is scarce and motivated reasoning reigns. Take, for instance, the graph you cite [1], which cites Kitov and Kitov (2013) [2] along with the US census bureau as a source. The problem is, what that paper provides is not an empirical dataset but a microfounded model for predicting individual income --with all the problematic epistemological/overfitting caveats that they come with. Presenting that graph as an empirical fact and not as a debatable modeling exercise is quite misleading. Besides, as others have pointed out, all the links you provide discuss income, not wealth (and no, their arguments/reasoning about income do not readily/trivially translate to wealth, as you commented below). If you are interested, check out the work of Cheryl Doss [3], who has conducted actual empirical work about the differences between household and individual equality in Ecuador, Ghana and India. (PD: Oh wow even their claims about changing family structure in that blog [4] is…