Two preliminary takeaways from the link:
1. For example, if we move towards relatively open standards of hardware for telecommuting, so that it works from any standard computer or smartphone, there's both less opportunity to require people to rent expensive, specialized goods, and more opportunity for "work centers" where such equipment is available by the hour.
This will of course demand that physical and virtual security keeps up. Technically this is easy, although in practice it will give national security people such as police and spies a conniption fit, but it will also create a class of semi-LD jobs checking out that protocols are being followed and that physical assets are secured.
2. The vision set out in the article sounds like paradise regained to me, as a gazetted introvert, who has suffered career setbacks (as I have been told by the people responsible) for not being loud and assertive enough. But will those people, even in Gen. A, be willing to let go.
This is one of those things were I'm reluctant to say things because there's a small danger I might have an informed opinion.
Doesn't this dynamic have a breaking point? They still need janitors, etc in NY and SF, right?
I prefer one of Ygelesias's links, on the regional effects of deregulation:
In 1966, the Supreme Court blocked a merger of two supermarket chains in Los Angeles that, had they been allowed to combine, would have controlled just 7.5 percent of the local market. (Today, by contrast there are nearly forty metro areas in the U.S where Walmart controls half or more of all grocery sales.)Very worth reading.
[...]
In 1952, the Interstate Commerce Commission ordered a 10 percent reduction in railroad freight rates for southern shippers, a political decision that played a substantial role in enabling the South's economic ascent after the war. The ICC and state governments also ordered railroads to run money-losing long-distance and commuter passenger trains to ensure that far-flung towns and villages remained connected to the national economy.
[...]
Electricity prices similarly vary widely from region to region, depending on whether local utilities are held captive by a local railroad monopoly, as is now typically the case.
[...]
One result of this, and of the continuing failure to adequately fund mass transit and high-speed rail, has been mounting traffic congestion that reduces geographic mobility, including the ability of people to move to or remain in the areas offering the highest-paying jobs.
Minor personal tangent: In 1952, the Interstate Commerce Commission ordered a 10 percent reduction in railroad freight rates for southern shippers
That was while my great-grandfather was chairman of the ICC. I'd never really looked into what he did while he was there - we just admired the huge certificate of his appointment from 1934 hanging in the attic.
"work centers" where such equipment is available by the hour
Surely such places would never turn into dingy, sad daycare prisons for adults and, in the more violent jurisdictions, prime locations for mass shootings.
So long as the firearms use standard, interchangeable parts.
Surely such places would never turn into dingy, sad daycare prisons for adults and, in the more violent jurisdictions, prime locations for mass shootings.
Turn into?
To get concealed carry permit in this state, you need to give two references. I'm not sure I can think of two people who I would both want to know that I have such a permit and who I would want to talk to a nice deputy about my character.
At the mass-shooting stage I think the concealed carry is kind of redundant.
Electricity prices similarly vary widely from region to region, depending on whether local utilities are held captive by a local railroad monopoly, as is now typically the case.
Wait, what?
Shipping fuel? I don't know, but it makes sense?
I think that makes sense. The coal usually comes from Wyoming these days, even in the east. Gas is used more and more, but pipelines aren't where they need to be for all of it.
And pipelines are no less monopolizable.
Speaking of shipping fuel, in Trump/coal miner slash-fiction news, today the local mine owners are complaining that Trump refused to use his emergency powers to forbid coal plants from closing. I'm hopeful that the "won't somebody think of the white people in the rust belt" and the "don't interfere in the free market" wings of the Republican Party will go to war with each other soonish.
For some reason I can't recall, for a while the Texas Railroad Commission basically set the price of oil.
I mean, part of the reason was because Texas was where the oil was. But there's probably more to it.
Likely because they also regulated pipelines at the time. BTW Standard Oil built its monopoly very largely by buying and extorting preferential rail freight rates. And when they were done with that they built a pipeline monopoly to fuck over the surviving independents.
I guess that does make sense. I was thinking railroad as monopsony and it made no sense, as most US railroads aren't electrified and anyway they don't use all that much electricity when they are. I don't think fuel transport costs are all that material a part of the wholesale electricity price in the UK, judging as best I can from data like this, but that's probably because we're much less reliant on coal.
He was from Cleveland. Just not becoming a serial killer was a plus.
HE was from upstate New York actually. He was attracted to Cleveland by the burning rivers.
That is, John Rockefeller. HE liked a different kind of burning.
I'm not sure the rivers burned before he was there.
But you're right. He was attracted by the dry goods business, which if anything says even less for his character.
Anyway, in general I think that wage stagnation is the biggest impediment to labor mobility. It's one thing to pull you family across the country for the difference between $7/hour and $15/hour, but it's another to do it for the difference between $7/hour and $9/hour. The numbers for that kind of thing only work out if you ignore risk and uncertainty.
I've been offered, twice now, jobs in different cities at my same salary adjusted for the cost of housing differences. Once was when I had no idea if my current job would continue or not. I turned them both down because it's not worth upending your life without significant gain.
Were there any prospects of setting rivers on fire?
I don't think fuel transport costs are all that material a part of the wholesale electricity price in the UK, judging as best I can from data like this, but that's probably because we're much less reliant on coal.
I don't know for real, just thinking about maps, but it's plausibly a factor that everyplace in the UK is near water transport?
And far fewer electricity producers. Just two companies with thermal plants if I read wiki correctly.
The result is that less skilled workers now tend to eschew the highest-wage, highest-cost locations -- creating a powerful counterpressure to other forces that would otherwise drive regional income convergence.
The impact here isn't limited to the lack of regional income convergence. It's also responsible for the rise of big shithead. Nick notes the link to politics, but would like to add that in a certain sense the issue is who remains in these rural areas. In the recent past, a small farming town of a few thousand people (let's say it's a county seat and 60 miles from a larger city) would have had maybe 15% (guessing) of the populations with some kind of status that would be recognized in a larger arena (lawyer, doctor, farmer with land in excess of a certain amount, owners of your more prosperous businesses, spouses of all the preceding, etc.). But farms have been consolidating, stores closing (Amazon and Walmart), professionals moving to the bigger cities, and so on. With these types of people greatly reduced, the area becomes not just poorer, but the likelihood of somebody having a friend who doesn't get all their news from listening to Rush drops by a very large amount.
stores closing (Amazon and Walmart)
The link in 4 talks a lot about this. And it's self-reinforcing: when local retail disappears, demand for local lawyers falls, etc. Also in relation to mergers: Fewer, larger, companies, fewer head offices in fewer places.
I don't know the rural coal communities as well, but I suspect the problems are worse. Pittsburgh is full of chirpy, smiling young people from nearby crap holes. On the one hand, they're clogging up the buses and making me wait longer for lunch. But I don't see how the towns they are from and going to function well when most of the young people of ambition and talent leave.
Pittsburgh is full of chirpy, smiling young people
The American Prospect recently said complimentary things about Pittsburgh.
For some reason I can't recall, for a while the Texas Railroad Commission basically set the price of oil.
It's a deliberately misleading title for the guy in charge of oil and gas in Texas. Historical title, but there's periodically a fight to give the job a more transparent title and they never do, for nefarious reasons.
36: We get a fair bit of that. The way to solve the housing issue, which is becoming a real probably, is to have bought your house before 2005. I can't stress enough how much easier that makes things.
Can't they gentrify smokestacks and things?
The housing crash hit just as Pittsburgh needed more housing, so we were behind. I'm not sure if we caught up or not, but even if we have, it hasn't yet gotten to the point where it helps the poor. The problem is the new housing is more expensive because of relative scarcity of anything new and because it's built in the most convenient locations. Much more expensive, with one bedroom condos or apartments costing significantly more than my house (which is in a nice neighborhood that never got gentrified because the gentry never left).
Because I have false consciousness, I really want some hipsters to be convincing themselves they really enjoy living in a smokestack.
The part I left out is how basically nothing new was built between 1980 (or so) and 2003 (or so).
Although the gentrification problem--while very real and hugely affecting the communities that live there--is a small part of our metropolis. Three or four large neighborhoods at most. In general we still have a lot of old and cheap housing stock, although not as cheap as it was a decade ago. But a lot of it is in places that aren't great for transit (or in the actual suburbs).
Yes, it is a small part. It's just that I forget about the other parts because who even goes to those places if they don't live there.
Great big belts of high rise apartments are being built along new metro lines all over Roc North. These are filled, not by upwardly mobile migrants, or even upwardly mobile locals, but by no one, because the rents are too high. I think it's mostly mainland money getting parked in any real estate it can find. And hope so, because if not there's going to be a painful bubble-bursting here.
I'm pretty sure all the new housing in Pittsburgh since 1980 would be fewer units than one of those buildings.
42: We did keep some of our smokestacks as ornamentation. These beauts are where the Homestead Strike took place and now adorn the parking lot of a movie theater.
45: I also myopically ignore all places not in the East End or Downtown.
46: I just saw this on Twitter (apologies if someone already linked it), so it's a problem stateside, too. Seems like it'd be easy to solve by having an extra tax on vacant properties that increases with length of time vacant. If there were political capital to do that, anyway.
48.3 might be clever on a phone, but it's very broken on this here desktop.
I really want some hipsters to be convincing themselves they really enjoy living in a smokestack.
Somebody did something very nice with a former weapons factory.
Today, I have to drive to some place called "Wexford". It's like you have to drive to Erie, except you stop just a big early.
49: Huh, it looks fine for me using Chrome on OS X. Anyway, it mentioned the very large number of vacant luxury properties in expensive parts of Manhattan and other places:
The richest neighborhoods in many cities are also some of the most vacant. If you walk around Midtown Manhattan or Downtown Brooklyn on a weekday evening and look up at all the residential luxury skyscrapers that have cropped up in the last decade, you might notice they're relatively dark. In the stretch of Manhattan between Park and Fifth Avenues and 56th and 59th Streets, 57 percent of apartments were vacant at least ten months a year, according to a New York Times analysis based on data from 2012. Buildings from 60th Street to 63rd Street were also only around 50 percent occupied. Across the country, even in smaller cities, downtowns are being filled with tall, expensive, and often empty apartment buildings. The apartments in the flashiest of these buildings, like the towers rising along 57th Street in New York (now sometimes called Billionaire's Row) are often bought by the LLCs of the uber-rich, and they're used more as investment opportunities than as places to live.
Anyway, zoning and transit doesn't do shit without income equality. Moby has been very acute on this thread, even by his standards.
51: Good luck. Don't forget to pack your snowshoes and a rifle, in case you have to eat your dogs.
Anybody relying on my directions to Wexford would be really put out.
Anyway, zoning and transit doesn't do shit without income equality. Moby has been very acute on this thread, even by his standards.
I agree. I think sustained regional inequality is bad -- as both a symptom if and contributing factor to stagnating wages and broader social inequality.
52 does precisely describe the new building here, though it's not so concentrated in prestige areas.
There was a missile silo advertised for sale for home conversion a year or two ago.
If you used the fuel sparingly you might never have to pay for heating.
If you used the fuel lavishly, you might never have to pay for anything ever again.
56: Yes. I'm leaning more to the 'symptom' side though. I was reminded of The Imperialism of Free Trade. The British went around inflicting free trade areas, not because they would produce more wealth overall* but because most of that wealth would accrue to Britain (and indeed London). The US is a great big free trade area, but FTAs left to their own devices don't just create wealth, they concentrate it. The link in 4** describes how the US used to have a a whole thicket of regulations essentially restricting trade across the country.
*Though they do, at least in theory.
**Sorry if threadjacking, Nick.
I love the article in 48.3. When I was in high school, there was a hub-bub about Japanese investment in Los Angeles real estate. My Dad's reaction was "hell, let them. If things don't work, what are they going to do, take their buildings back?". I'm all for giving the property of the rich to the poor.
I'm excited because they're building several hundred new apartment units within four blocks of my house. I'm also a little taken aback. The reason three of those blocks were vacant is that they are adjacent to the freight railroad line. Maybe those buildings are on dampers or something (although I didn't see them, and Steadfast and I watched the construction when we could), but if not, oh boy. I mean, clearly any buyers would know they're moving to the nuisance, but I still think the trains will be a real presence for anyone who lives there. Anyway, it'll mean a couple thousand more people in my immediate neighborhood and I am very excited for all the new twee stores they'll support. Although we'll probably move in a year or two, while the new twee stores are just getting started.
I wonder if starting new universities could help. I don't totally understand why new universities don't happen anymore, but they're one of the few things that's still able to anchor a higher earning town in an otherwise low-income area.
I wish we could, but there isn't enough state funding for the universities we have now. Probably not enough graduating high school students, either.
Our smokestack has been repurposed as a cell-phone tower.
Like what if we said that if you want to keep your non-profit status and your endowment is over $5 billion, then you have start another campus in an educationally underserved state.
People have started discussing moving some government departments out of DC and into other cities. This seems like a pretty good idea to me.
The reason three of those blocks were vacant is that they are adjacent to the freight railroad line. Maybe those buildings are on dampers or something (although I didn't see them, and Steadfast and I watched the construction when we could), but if not, oh boy. I mean, clearly any buyers would know they're moving to the nuisance, but I still think the trains will be a real presence for anyone who lives there.
We're two houses down from a mostly-freight railroad line. For the first decade I lived here, they honked their horn every time they crossed. My brain completely deleted the noise after a month or so, and I'd only remember when I'd see someone else react to the honking. Last year, we became an Official Quiet Neighborhood with crossing arms that come down, so they stopped honking.
Perhaps we could convert our unused smokestacks to universities.
I too am super on board with the link in 48.3.
63, 67: A few years back I came up with the idea of establishing Civil Service Academies in cities around the country, one for each major federal department, that would have free tuition in exchange for the requirement of working for the department for a certain number of years. Basically taking the model of the military service academies and extending it to the civilian parts of the government. I still think it's a good idea.
63: Of the forgotten and shrinking towns in this area that Moby mentioned above, the only ones that I can think of that have long-term hope are those with state universities (the towns of Slippery Rock, California, and Indiana). A few more have tourism (Ohiopyle, Bedford), service the highways and delivery infrastructure (New Stanton), or might be extractive centers if fracking has a resurgence (Kittanning) but that's about it. I don't know what can be done for the rest.
71: I like this idea.
I'm breaking my silence because things like the article in 4 are increasingly common in my viewing and are driving me insane and I need to vent. Note: I say this as someone who IN THIS VERY SPACE has defended public utility rate-setting as a model for all sorts of different economic problems and even attacked airline deregulation, by far the easiest form of deregulation to defend. But I am now in the weird position of watching my basic view "econ 101 as taught to policymakers has extremely severe limits and its worth learning from regulatory structures of the 1910s-1970s," the line I've been pushing to my tiny audience of near-zero since at least 2001, become transmuted into some kind of MAGA-for-the-left Frankenstein's monster.
You see so many stories now where the logic is (a) the 1950s-1960s were awesome (b) hey guys I notice that this kind of government regulation was in place in the 1950s-1960s (c) so hey lets just do that thing we did in the 1950s-1960s easy peasy! This logic is usually accompanied by (d) I'm a journalist in my early 30s and also (e) neoliberals suck. I've seen a bunch on this theme recently in antitrust (Amazon is TOO BIG and SOMETHING SHOULD BE DONE), housing (housing sucks now! let's rebuild Cabrini Green without stopping to think why it was a problem in the first place), motherfucking railroad regulation according to that shit article linked in 4. But while the basic intuition deregulation bad/regulation good has a lot of validity the unthinking return to old regulation without thinking about the reasons why there was a broad consensus against that kind of regulation is just historically uninformed nostalgia for the left and needs to motherfucking stop right now. It's even more annoying because it's often presented as if there are easy solutions to really fucking complicated problems. Among other things:
1) Any desire to go back to the antitrust policy of the 1960s has to look at what the antitrust policy of the 1960s actually was, namely the government intervening (and always winning) more or less randomly for a bunch of local competitors picked more or less at random, with no definable or manageable set of standards whatsoever for figuring out what was or wasn't a violation. The result wasn't yay awesome social equality unless you think that benefiting incumbent classes of randomly-selected middle managers in randomly-selected areas at the expense of higher prices for consumers and jobs and internationally competitive companies was a big win. There was a really big and really good reason why "competition not competitors" is and should be the focus of antitrust law and why the DOJ and the FTC and the courts decided that they needed some enforcement standard other than vague handwaving about local argle bargle. I say this while ALSO saying are lots of reasons why there should be more antitrust enforcement and some pretty good people, many in the Obama administration, who have come up with good and workable guidelines for clamping down on antitrust misbehavior, and that are based on actual competitive harm to markets rather than totally subjective decisions about whether some particular kind of power is "too much."
2) It is extremely unlikely that antitrust or railroad regulation or any goddamn other regulatory thing has had an effect on inequality between regions as much as the far more simple explanation that wages are growing too slowly and that finance capital became a bigger share of the US economy, basically explaining NY and regions where there have been financial bubbles. The way out of this problem is dampening down on finance and financial bubbles as a way of managing the economy (which is a big part of what Dodd-Frank was trying to do).
3) Motherfucking railroads are still run by a regulatory agency that was put into place to provide them with guaranteed rates and protection from antitrust law because in the 1970s they were under pressure from trucks to the point where they couldn't exist otherwise. Today there are shipper/railroad fights because the railroads have gotten profitable again but that wasn't true at all until maybe like 2005, and the solution there is just to clamp down on rates (or subject the railroads to normal antitrust law).
4) The idea that railroad costs (for shipping coal?) are the primary difference maker in electricity prices is fucking insane -- electric utilities are also regulated industries, they buy electricity from each other on grids regulated by FERC (so that if a RR was gouging costs for a particular coal-fired plant, they could get the power cheaply from another generator who had access to cheaper coal. In fact the primary driver of the difference is different regulatory regimes and local costs -- because electric utlilities GET GUARANTEED RETURNS based on their operating costs and can set prices accordingly.
5) Ironically for me, the only part of the article that I'd say is pretty much right on is about patents. The pendulum on patent protection swung way crazy from the creation of the Federal Circuit until about 5 years ago. It's getting a little better now but there's still work to do. No this does not mean we should abolish patents entirely and destroy intellectual property.
TL;DR, provide Keynsian full employment and more public spending and everything else takes care of itself. Good luck getting there, but if you want a lesson from the past take that fucking one.
OK, back to silence. Hi everyone! Not gonna participate further because everything on the internet drives me crazy.
The thread has moved on a bit, but on the issue of coal and railroads: The thing about coal is that while it's very energy-dense and relatively cheap, it's very heavy, so the cost increases dramatically if you have to move it any significant distance. Rail is the most efficient way to move bulk (solid) commodities over land, so almost all coal shipping is by rail, but even so the cost gets very high very fast. (There are parts of the US where gas was cheaper than coal even before the fracking boom for this reason.)
The best solution for this from a power-production perspective is to locate power plants right next to coal mines, and this is how it commonly works in the western states where most of the big coal mines are these days, but that doesn't help the eastern utilities with plants located near older mines that are now either played out or too expensive to operate compared to the big western strip mines, so they have to buy coal from distant mines and just pay whatever the railroads charge to ship it. And with so few freight railroads left in the country, a lot of regions really just have one and it can basically charge whatever it wants. This is one of the factors leading utilities to switch from coal to gas.
Wexford is scary. The parking lots are big enough to swallow a neighborhood.
73.4 is definitely correct, and the outcomes of electric utility regulation vary a lot by state. The result of the dynamics I described in 74 is generally going to be not higher electric rates but utilities (and railroads) switching away from coal.
A few years back I came up with the idea of establishing Civil Service Academies in cities around the country, one for each major federal department, that would have free tuition in exchange for the requirement of working for the department for a certain number of years. Basically taking the model of the military service academies and extending it to the civilian parts of the government. I still think it's a good idea.
I like this idea, too!
**Sorry if threadjacking, Nick.
Quite alright
I'm leaning more to the 'symptom' side though.
I was thinking about this over lunch. I do think it's a symptom of (some version of) "the winner-take-all economy" but I think it's a cause of problems in it's own right in this way:
Think about the idea of resentment. Personally I accept that there are other people in the world who are more successful (or smarter, nicer, better-looking, etc . . .) and sometimes I'm resentful but mostly I can shrug my shoulders and figure that's just part of life. I quickly become more cranky if society starts leaning on me with the message, "if you want to be more successful you have to try to be more like that person." I have a strong stubborn streak that would rather try to live on my own terms, and accept some limitations from that, than try to copy what's successful.
I think disparity between regions can feel like that (and I say this as somebody that's living in a region that's doing well). Moving is not only difficult for many reasons, but it demands some willingness to try to fit in to the new place. So if I feel like the only way for me to succeed is to move to [fill-in-the-blank] that feels an awful lot like saying that the only way I can succeed to become more like a [fill-in-the-blank]ian.
I think we should train all the unemployed rural people in phlebotomy. That way, if they don't find a job and turn to elephant tranquilizers, they'll be safer at injecting them.
Georgist land tax FTW! Seattle may be close to following Vancouver's lead on a vacancy tax, which would be great. But a properly constructed land tax would work equally well. Even conservative economists agree!
People have started discussing moving some government departments out of DC and into other cities. This seems like a pretty good idea to me.
Counterpoint: Relocating Silicon Valley to Battle Mountain would represent an even greater leap forward.
I endorse the last two paragraphs of 73. The rest is probably true too.
73: What struck me is that there are many different ways to redistribute wealth, with different costs and benefits. The article in 4 describes policies enabling mostly a bunch of local rent-seeking, and those rents were mostly regressive (like higher consumer prices you mention). But that regression had qualitative effects that are worth thinking about, like the local elites in Moby's 33, or the civic elites mentioned in 4. And regressive policy in some areas can be offset by progressive policy elsewhere: given full employment and real wage growth consumers could afford higher prices, for instance.
In the end, the final results of those local elites was me being an asshole on the internet.
I guess I have siblings too. And nieces. And a nephew, if you count Chihuahua.
The civic bit:
This has led to the effective colonization of many once-great American cities, as the financial institutions and industrial companies that once were headquartered there have come under the control of distant corporations. Empirical studies have shown that when a city loses a major corporate headquarters in a merger, the replacement of locally based managers by "absentee" managers usually leads to lower levels of local corporate giving, civic engagement, employment, and investment, often setting in motion further regional decline. A Harvard Business School study that analyzed the community involvement of 180 companies in Boston, Cleveland, and Miami found that "[l]ocally headquartered companies do most for the community on every measure," including having "the most active involvement by their leaders in prominent local civic and cultural organizations."I'm guessing those business leaders used to be a disproportionate fraction of both political parties, and their shrinkage has had significant effects; at the least, that it made it easier for Koch & C to take over the Republicans.
Yes. Of course, that's towns of a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than what I'm talking about.
I want to ask for clarification on the Chihuahua thing, but I'm afraid the answer will be disappointing.
Ok. Preserve your mysteries.
71, 82. Good idea, but depends on there being a civil service in a few years' time, which seems increasingly uncertain. I have advocated here for moving all the major departments and arms of government except the White House and State* out to depressed areas. If people want cross-departmental meetings, they can skype or something. There is, in 2017, no determining reason why the government has to all be in one place any more.
* No reason to penalise all the other countries who have bought property in DC. SCOTUS, on the other hand, can go to somewhere in rural Mississippi.
(I once worked out the equivalent plan for Britain in some detail, but I seem to have lost it. Home Office to Hull (high rate of warehoused poor immigrants); Defence to Gloucester (GCHQ is in the next town); DEFRA to some shithole in the south west, where they can get a taste of what agriculture is really like; Education to Sheffield, because they're already doing that; etc.)
Defence to Gloucester, or at least somewhere in the West Country, makes sense; it's close to most of the Army (Andover, Salisbury Plain) and most of the Navy (Portsmouth, Devonport, Plymouth) and as for the RAF, fuck 'em.
Cute idea moving federal government offices. You've just made civil service jobs less attractive to talented people. When families had a single income, that might have worked to follow thejobs and enjoy the low cost of living, but now, let's say I am a lawyer for DHS and my theoretical spouse is an engineer in the private sector. We can't really consider living in a place where he or she can't find work, even if the cost of living is low, because both of us place a high value onprofessional fulfillment. Two body problems are bad enough in academia. Also, remember that federal jobs have adjusted cost of living compensation and pay slightly less than private sector. How good does being a government lawyer look when you're taking a $50,000 pay cut compared to your colleagues?
103: The future's here, it's just that it's been evenly distributed all over the place by that fan it hit.
105: You don't have to scatter all of them, but I think it would be a really good idea to scatter some. Moving a few thousand jobs up to Pennsylvania might have thrown the state to Clinton.
105 seems to assume that all "talented people" and all private-sector jobs for engineers are located exclusively within the Washington DC area. I don't think this is true.
It doesn't. But it does assume that large centers of varied professional employment make it easier to keep and attract talent. I think that is a very good assumption, but I also don't care about anything but winning in 2020.
105 also seems to assume that because it has never been tried in the US, it must never have been tried anywhere in the world. Again, not true. It's been happening in Britain, to an extent, for some time now. 20,000 civil service jobs were moved out of London since the Lyons review in 2004.
large centers of varied professional employment make it easier to keep and attract talent.
Fine. Move the departments out of Washington DC into other cities. I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting relocating them to the North Slope or the Jornada del Muerto.
That is, about how to win without making an horrible compromise with evil. A few thousand complaining or job shifting professionals is something I'm not going to sweat. I remember Murtha used to shove (mostly pointless) federal jobs in Johnstown, PA, plus strong arm defense contractors into opening offices there. In terms of economic efficiency, it was pure dead weight. But Murtha held that seat for 36 years, caucusing with the Democrats. At the time I wasn't thrilled, but after the past few years, I'd happily pay my share of the few hundred millions it cost to keep those jobs there if it put the seat in reach.
111: If you have to, but also shitty small cities.
Because the Democrats already control nearly all of the House seats from them.
114: Because Moby wants some fucking pork.
I think of myself as in a large city. But YMMV.
I should get pork dumplings for lunch.
I recommend a greenfield site, actually.
Pork is made out of green fields, so it's all the same really.
I used to build pig barns for a summer job. They smell better before you put the pigs in them.
Twenty years ago, I was wondering why big law firms were paying New York City office rent (and salaries) for junior associates. You could easily have the scut work done in Philadelphia -- Princeton, if you want to be even closer -- for way less.
There is quite a lot of back-office type legal work done in Pittsburgh.
Only a few less than 20 years ago, I was the only member of an ABA task force arguing against abolition of Scanwell jurisdiction. I got outvoted, and now we have Trump.
According to Wikipedia, that doesn't even exist.
You're on the wrong side of the straits, asshole.
105 also seems to assume that because it has never been tried in the US, it must never have been tried anywhere in the world.
Not quite never. There was that time when lots of government jobs were moved to Richmond.
And those other times they did New York and Philadelphia and a whorehouse in Valley Forge.
Possibly I'm not remembering all the details quite right.
There's a casino at Valley Forge. I didn't check on the prostitution.
The last time I was there was before they had the casino. It was just a convention center/historical whatnot.
As for moving jobs out of DC, I'd like to see analysis that takes into account how many government jobs already aren't in the DC area, and what effect it would have on the performance of the agencies. Only something like 20 percent of federal workers are in the capital region right now. I'm sure teo and others around here would know more about this than me. As for the federal workers who are still in the DC area, a lot of them work on the legal or policy side of things, and there are practical reasons to have them in the same geographical area as other agencies and the politicians they report to. Skype and email have their uses but are really no substitute for in-person interaction. The link in OP.3 posited an adoption phase that wouldn't be done for another 13 years, and I think even that is optimistic for some of this stuff.
As for policy on affordable housing and wealth redistribution by geography (AHWRG) like in the OP and the Evict the Rich link in 48.3, this is part of why I'm so fatalistic about politics. Picture Medicare for all (or, if rather than single-payer you would prefer one of the other models of universal health care, no problem). Now picture what actually got passed when Democrats had the presidency, the House, and a veto-proof majority in the Senate, which we call the ACA, and think about how short it falls. I assume the best AHWRG policy we could hope for would perform similarly. (No, I don't assume an effective AHWRG policy would do better just because it helps red states. They've been voting against their interests for decades and would vote against this for the same reasons.)
Now remember that even something as good as the ACA required complete Democratic dominance of two branches of government and think about how unlikely that is any time soon. Dooooomed.
The thing is that elected officials have been voting against the interests of wedge states for quite some time, but the local people are pretty blatant about wanting pork and not giving a shit about theories of the market. I'm looking for a wedge to slam in between the national party and the local yokel party.
Personally, I think it's a good thing that coal mining is fading away, but I'm perfectly willing (even eager) to encourage the people from the mining areas to attack Trump for not having spent the billions that would be required form them to have gotten coal mining jobs back. Wedges. Hitting them with hammers. Don't care much if the wedge is true. Only that is it effective and doesn't involve attacking any allies or likely allies.
One of the long-term effects of moving all the bits of government that actually do anything out of DC would be to even further detach the legislature & upper levels of the executive from knowing (or caring) at all about what the government actually does, since neither they nor their aides would ever encounter these people socially.
If the problem with Appalachia is that people are unwilling to move away, then a solution where you force a bunch of government employees to move away from their homes to Appalachia strikes me as... unfair.
136
the local people are pretty blatant about wanting pork and not giving a shit about theories of the market.
Counterexample: red states turned down the Medicare expansion subsidies from the ACA. Not exactly the same as pork in the form of jobs, but pretty similar.
and a veto-proof majority in the Senate,
We really didn't quite. What you're calling a veto-proof majority included Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson. The problems with the ACA don't reflect what the median Democratic senator would vote for, it was what the godawful marginal senator would vote for.
It's very nice scenery, except where they took the tops of mountains for coal.
140: Yes, but that doesn't help the relatively well-off or elderly white people who were the core of the Republican party before Trump invited the worst of the white people.
141: I think Ben Nelson was as far to the left as he could have been and gotten into office. If you look at who is there now, they're either objectively horrible or "Never Trump Unless Maybe Briefly Trump To Get What I Want."
Trump wasn't the first to invite the worst of the white people, or course. I should have phrase it "invited the worst of the white people to run the agenda."
Oh, sure. I mean, the Democrats have to somehow actually manage to win seats with candidates who agree with them on the important issues, and god knows how we do that.
I was just quibbling with the implication that you can tell what the Democratic Party really wants to do by looking at what they did when they had the power to pass anything they wanted. The party generally never had that power: they had the power to pass anything Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman would vote for.
I see a lot of people willing to condemn my kids to grow up in Lincoln, but no support for Silicon Battle Mountain? That's a recipe for the kind of resentment Republican voters are made of.
OPM's Fedscope has all (well, lots of) info about federal employment. (The data definitions page is important.)
DC employment is 171,789. And...
Employees of these agencies that work in the Washington, DC-MD-VA-WV Metropolitan Statistical Area (see Metropolitan Statistical Area), which includes parts of Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia, are all reported as working in the District of Columbia (under the United States category). Other employees are reported as "Suppressed" (a separate value under the United States category). As a result, FedScope overstates employment for the District of Columbia and understates employment for all states, territories, and foreign countries.
111: If you have to, but also shitty small cities.
Yglesias suggested Cleveland (also mentioned: Milwaukee, & Detroit).
The poorest places in the United States have been poor for a very long time and lack the basic infrastructure of prosperity. But that's not true in the Midwest, where cities were thriving two generations ago and where an enormous amount of infrastructure is in place. Midwestern states have acclaimed public university systems, airports that are large enough to serve as major hubs, and cities whose cultural legacies include major league pro sports teams, acclaimed museums, symphonies, theaters, and other amenities of big-city living.
When I visited the National Institute of Standards and Technology a few months ago, someone mentioned that they had been located in DC, but moved to get away from the vibrational noise and also "so it wouldn't be destroyed in case of a nuclear strike on Washington." I recall thinking "And you think being 20 miles away would do you much good?". I suspect that if the Soviets had nuked the capital they would probably have used more than 1 missile to do it.
Other employees are reported as "Suppressed"
This made my day.
149: Fun fact: I found it was easier to get good vegetarian food in restaurants in Cleveland than in Baltimore. But that may be a function of neighborhood. And anyway I still like Baltimore better.
147: Where is Battle Mountain? I have no idea at all.
153: Only people smart enough to parse the disambiguation page will be granted residence.
141, 144, 146, etc.: I had a lot of caveats in there explaining that I didn't blame the Democratic Party as an institution for how the ACA was such a half-measure, nor the people leading it at the time, but cut it for brevity. Maybe I should have left it anyways. But either way, I'd say it's beside the point. That was as good as we could get under those circumstances, and I'm not seeing any path to even getting back to those circumstances, let alone better ones.
Yeah, I don't know what to do about the Senate at all.
Oh, maybe I do. Kill the filibuster. We have a hope of getting past 50%, but we're never getting back to 60.
I may have gotten "abolish the Senate" into a local club's platform. We'll see.
156. Well, over here we got round the problem of an unrepresentative upper house by removing its power to kill legislation or amend it unreasonably. You could try that.
It's kind of the key bit to the whole Constitution.
The compromise between the big states and the small ones, that is.
If only you had had a big war in which progressive urban interests had won a decisive victory over regressive agrarians.
Just because it was a critical component of the deal in 1789 doesn't make it still the case now.
And yeah, I could totally imagine it being neutered instead of abolished; but I want to start with "abolish!" and negotiate down from there.
(I could imagine the Parliament Act 1911 being a good practical workaround in our case too: it the purpose of the Senate is to ensure debate and deliberate decisionmaking, then let them at most delay passage by 2 years, allowing an intervening House election. Bonus, that doesn't deny any state "equal representation" in the Senate, just reduces the power that representation allows, so might not run afoul of the last clause of Article V. But really that "no state shall without its consent" bit is an illegitimate constraint at this point.)
162: But, not really. The North had plenty of smaller population agrarian states (basically all of New England that wasn't MA to start).
I'm focusing on the part where rough-hewn Southern masculinity met the products of browbeaten millworkers and had the shit shot out of it.
Hang more Nazis, is what I'm saying.
Yes, but most of the northern soldiers were farmers, I think. The industrial economy was there, but I don't think it eclipsed the agricultural one even in the most industrialized parts of the country until after the Civil War.
167: Yes, but there was more industry in the Union. Hence more bullets and more burning southern houses.
Right. But I'm just thinking that Vermont people would have had no more interest in weakening the Senate then than any small state does now.
Ok. You're right. Do you have time to hang some Nazis now?
Not until 5. And maybe I'm supposed to cook dinner tonight. I guess I could just grab Wendy's.
Re: the Senate, maybe we can start admitting individual college towns as states? Like 30 or 40 of them?
I mean, you'd have to put up with the occasional Senator from the LOL Party Down Delts Party, but small sacrifices must be made for the greater good.
The rhetorical distinction between The Ohio State senators and the Ohio state senators would be a great test for copy editors and amateur pedants alike.
141, 144, 146: You could look at what Dems do in states where they do control the gov't. It has been a very nice run of balancing the budget including raising taxes, expanding abortion access, restricting guns, creating a climate change cap and trade system, etc.
Incidentally, there are enough small blue states that Trump would still have won the EC if states got EVs equal to their representation in the House, without the bonus 2.
(My biggest problem with National Popular Vote, while it's an improvement, is that it allows a winner by plurality, so potentially more and more people bleed off into third parties, until victory margins are more like 40-39 than 46-45, with no further runoff or other sorting mechanism.)
The other main problem with national popular vote is that you'd need the agreement of at least some members of party that keeps winning the presidency without winning national popular vote.
You could look at what Dems do in states where they do control the gov't.
I hate our (nominally Democratic) governor so much.
It's too bad the US can't follow the examples of other countries, if they exist, that use popular voting in national elections, if they have them. I would guess, based on popular sports, they send pluralities to penalty kicks.
Doomsaying aside, I thought the article in the OP about telecommuting was interesting.
My first take on it was a very pessimistic one - it sounds a hell of a lot like a cyberpunk dystopia where there's almost no middle class because every job that used to be a middle-class job has been automated. (I guess I failed to put doomsaying aside and just switch from political doomsaying to another kind, sorry. Pessimism is a theme for me for some reason.)
There was also a little bit in it about what telecommuting might look like after 20 more years of technological and cultural advancement, which I thought was interesting.
if we move towards relatively open standards of hardware for telecommuting, so that it works from any standard computer or smartphone, there's both less opportunity to require people to rent expensive, specialized goods, and more opportunity for "work centers" where such equipment is available by the hour. Such centers are actually an advantage for everyone, not just people with low incomes: they're the extension of modern co-working spaces, and are quite good for people who would like to telecommute, but not necessarily work from home.
On the one hand, this sounds like a nice compromise between the pre-telecommuting status quo of offices and Snow Crash. On the other hand, I actually enjoy intermittent telecommuting. It's nice to break up the routine and have some time during the day for errands or household chores that are hard to do on a normal workday. (In theory anyone could negotiate it as a perk at any job but at my current job it's actually encouraged for space reasons.) If "telecommuting" came to mean working during specific hours at a specific place outside my home that just happens to be not the same place as most of my co-workers, it would suck.
I learned recently that France uses the top-two system* for its entire lower house, not just the presidency, which is kind of weird - I had assumed it was PR or mixed-member. Helps explain how Macron's new party REM got a majority in the legislative election immediately following his election.
*Occasionally the runoff can have three candidates - you advance to the runoff if your votes are 12.5%+ of registered voters, so you need some close clustering of top candidates, and low turnout makes it harder. In 2017 there were three candidates in one district, compared to 46 in 2012.
||
I cut off contact with my mother five years ago, and she recently left me a voicemail asking to get back in touch. I just sent a letter saying that wasn't going to happen. I feel really, really sad.
|>
I'm really sorry, J. There must be a lot of grief for what might have been if your mother were fundamentally different.
Thanks, heebie. I think I'm finally starting to really grieve this loss, which I hope means that I might eventually start feeling better. No need to disrupt the thread--just needed to put it out there somewhere.
That does sound sad -- particularly knowing that you've had so much else going on in your life that's been emotionally exhausting,
108/110: Late to respond, but there aren't a lot of folks I know who would be thrilled with moving their federal job to, eg, Kansas. Lots would need to turn it down, beacuse they had maybe five major cities where they and their spouse could both find work. Cities like Detroit might be easier, but still tricky. Are depressed areas hiring engineers? Do they have a bunch of jobs for professionals? Probably not if they are economically depressed. Of course engineers can work in a number of places, but having just dragged a pseudo-spouse to the middle of nowhere where he HAD an existing professional network due to family connections and there were four or five possible (mostly small) employers and it still took six months for him to find a job, I can assure you it is not very attractive to complemplate doing again.
Also, yes, there are a number of government employees who have no special skills. Those jobs are relatively easy to fill. And yes, we could move some. But talent acquisition is important for government jobs, and I think it's really stupid to propose moving everything to low cost of living areas and ignore a real cost in talent pool. Also, the cost of living does trap folks who decide to leave. Current salary often determines future salary and not all places use cost of living adjustments that are really reflective when it would on paper appear to be a large pay raise.
183: I'm so sorry. In my experience, it's really hard to give up the idea of a relationship, how it could have been if only. I eventually reached the point of feeling sorry for my mother about what she missed. She wasn't bad or abusive, but she wasn't a great parent in a number of ways. At this point, I wish she could have had a happier life. I think she struggled with depression, although never diagnosed or even discussed. When she got sick, I had a long goodbye, where I got to make my peace bit by bit. It's been about ten years now since she first got sick, and I've had better and worse times, but overall, I have achieved sort of balance between stuff she was good at and I remember fondly and stuff she was bad at.
It took me a year to find work when I moved here as a dragged spouse. I managed and I suck at patience and not blaming others.
Lyndon is thinking about quitting his job without having another one lined up. He's super burnt out and would like to take 3-6 months to do some soul-searching, or as Lyndon puts it, "Organize every last part of this house and clean it top to bottom, etc."
I am very supportive of his need/desire to do so, and a bit worried about finances.
Tell him six weeks. That's as long as it's possible to avoid resentment.
191: Hoo. It sounds like step one may be for him to spend a few evenings working up the current finances, so you both have concrete numbers to plan with.
As everyone laments, it's much easier to find a job when you have a job. If he doesn't pick a vastly different field, does he know if a 6 month gap will be insurmountable? Is he thinking of changing fields?
Anyway, soul searching is important, but it'll be very limited if it's accompanied by worry about finances and on the dispiriting side of a job hunt.
But, as I'm pretty pessimistic about job hunts--probably excessively so, as I've stuck around bad jobs too long to avoid them. Take the above with a whole shaker of salt.
Use GoDuckGo for soul searching. You don't want Google to index your deepest self and sent you ads based on it.
193: yeah...exactly. He's not a programmer, but he's programmer-adjacent. We're in a smallish town, with a commute to the big city, which is part of what he's burnt out on (but not just that).
He is very open to changing fields, especially if he could find something in town...it's just not clear what's available. I'm a little worried about him being burned by an employment gap.
It would be great if he can get an (unpaid) leave of absence from work, which would at least help with the resume gap.
Depending on how the work goes, they might be more willing to have him as a part-time consultant for a few months.
Last time I was in Battle Mountain, I was offered a cocktail of vodka mixed with heroin. At something like 3:30 a.m. (I feel like I've probably told that story before.)
That was a long time ago. I'm sure they're better fixed to take over the computer business now . . .
141, 144, 146: You could look at what Dems do in states where they do control the gov't. It has been a very nice run of balancing the budget including raising taxes, expanding abortion access, restricting guns, creating a climate change cap and trade system, etc.
Sometimes it turns out like Illinois.
If you were up that late, maybe they figured you needed a sleeping aide.
197: Jesus, can't we put some federal jobs in Boise or something? That Battle Mountain stretch of I-80 is god forsaken.
199 Nighttime hitchhiking trip across Nevada, stopping to wake up people my hosts knew in every town. The Battle Mountain people were just being friendly. The Carlin people were positively scary.
200: I'm sure the people of rural Nevada will be just thrilled for the federal government to take on a bigger role in their lives.
|| Does Trump know that the South lost the Civil War? Does he know which side Lincoln was on? |>
191: I kind of endorse this plan. I spent about three months after graduating unemployed/recovering, and it was amazing for being pretty burnt out. I puttered and made fancy food and walked around our new neighborhood and slept a ton (I was so run down I had lost about ten pounds and spent weeks sick with every cold that came around.) AJ did not really need a break and didn't enjoy his stint of unemployment like I thought he might. Ungrateful!
Does Trump know that
Ap-bap-bap-bap.
156. Well, over here we got round the problem of an unrepresentative upper house by removing its power to kill legislation or amend it unreasonably. You could try that.
I feel like the UK's kind of got the worst of both worlds now. The upper house is still unrepresentative, albeit not quite as egregiously so as pre-reform, and any attempt to give it more legitimacy and therefore authority to challenge the government of the time is attacked as threatening the primacy of the Commons.
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2017/08/accept-obvious-rip-dick-gregory-by.html
In contrast to 191, over here Abigail deeply hates her job and it is causing all sorts of misery and stress, and would similarly like to have some time to do some organizing in the house, but she is unwilling to leave it without lining up something else first, out of fears that leaving and spending time unemployed will cause her to be unemployable ever after. The finances wouldn't even be a problem (guilt over which is also a contributing factor to her not willing to be unemployed). So instead she's continually miserable, which isn't really working out well.
If I made a little more money, Lyndon would happily be a stay at home Dad forever. As is we probably couldn't do it, at least not in our current house, which is not extravagant but is not an apartment.
We could live on my salary, and did for several years. But after our youngest got to into double-digit in age, I grew to deeply resent the economizing this required and I forced the issue with increasing threats.
208: I have no idea what she does, but can she pull some kind of deal where she finds an organization that needs volunteers in her field, and work out a half-time unpaid job with a respectable job title? It keeps her employed with a job that looks reasonable to future employers, gets her out of her current toxic workplace, and gives her time to recuperate and mess with the house.
Or drop back to half time at her current job? It's the kind of thing that's available at a lot of workplaces, although it'll often tank your future prospects. But if she hates the place, that doesn't matter so much.
Actually, same question for Ladybird/Lyndon. Anyway he could go to half-time? That'd give him a break but he'd still be employed while he was looking for the next thing.
I have no patience for free market fetishists proposing elaborate policy bankshots. The last time one of these building deregulation as panacea papers was making the rounds it didn't take too much reading to debunk, so I suppose I could—
the University of Chicago
Possibly. I'll run it by him. Although I think he wants to cut ties with his current boss altogether.
A few years ago, she transferred him to a one-year job which was awful for us as a family (lots of travelling) and she intimated that he was saving someone's job by taking the temporary transfer. He felt obligated to do so, but if he'd been certain it was his own job being saved, would have preferred a severance package. Now we know for sure that it was his own job, and she does seem to be arranging things so that he could be fired, but that might not materialize.
Current plan is that he's waiting to hear back if he can work from home 3 days a week, and also looking for internal transfers at work. But I would not be surprised if one day he just grabs two beers and jumps down the inflatable slide.
Lyndon reports that he's not too worried about a gap on his resume. He may be reading the tea leaves correctly on that one - I can't really tell.
Reading tea leaves is bullshit. Get a sheep shoulder blade and a hot iron.
|| I hope our Texas contingent stays safe in the upcoming rains. |>
They are predicting 24-48" of rain this weekend!
Very glad my parents'/childhood home is 50+ feet above water level.
Great balls of shit! Even when hurricane remnants pass through here, we don't get but half the low end of that.
A tiny part of me wants to test out our new high rise 2nd story walk-up house, but I am well aware of how devastating that would be for the rest of the town. It's depressing - either we're chicken little raising our house for no good reason, or there is severe devastation everywhere.
I have similar thoughts about blocking the destruction of Obamacare.
Anyway, I bet if you are a young man with a giant hipster beard, you can say "I'm taking a few months off to do some soul searching" and people will believe you. If I said it, they'd all wait until I was out of earshot and say "Binge drinking".
The nice thing about drinking is you can both find your soul and lose it, all in a single evening.
Abagail has attempted to switch to part-time at her current job and been soundly rebuffed: she's in a union job at a state agency and the job category she's in doesn't have explicitly spelled out part-time positions, so it is bureaucratically impossible even before figuring out if her superiors would be okay with it (This kind of bureaucratic impossibility is creating a lot of the misery in the first place).
Unpaid part-time volunteering for the job title is an interesting idea. I'm not sure if there's really much of that in her field. I suspect she would assume it wouldn't work, would be transparently "not a job" and still count against her, though. I have zero sense of either how reasonable her fear of the employment gap is or how easy it would be to cover it up.
Heebie. Dude. You didn't raise your house a moment too soon.
Anyway, I bet if you are a young man with a giant hipster beard, you can say "I'm taking a few months off to do some soul searching" and people will believe you. If I said it, they'd all wait until I was out of earshot and say "Binge drinking".
Hipster beard, age 40. So an authentic hipster from the aughts.
227: My equal-and-opposite fear is that we didn't raise it high enough!
I think that at the 500 year flood plain, which is what we're now at, the entire city opens up and the marginal inch of flood height requires orders of magnitude more volume of water than a lower height. Basically we said, "When does the water breach our neighborhood? We want to be at that height," and we had to do quite a bit of holding our ground to contractors and engineers not to talk us down a foot or so.
But I would not be surprised if one day he just grabs two beers and jumps down the inflatable slide.
I really like my job and am very jealous of anybody considering taking 3-6 months off. He should do it. One of the things that helps me stay sane is that I assume that whenever my current job comes to an end I'll take a couple months before even starting to look for the next one. I don't know if that's a good idea, of if it's what I'll actually do when the situation rolls around, but boy does that sound nice.
228: My stupid beard doesn't ever get long enough for people to buy me as somebody who thinks about stuff.
That's also why I don't have a Ph.D.
My wife and I both hate our jobs, but in our financial situation we can't even consider anything that might jeopardize them. This makes things so much simpler!
I'm so close to paying off my loans I'm starting to dream of either buying better stuff to replace stuff that's wearing down, or saving up as if I'm in debt to the future when maybe I could take a few months to find another job. And I like my job and where I live, more or less, but am also bored and feel like I could do more, whatever that means.
You want to fell more genuine? More sincere? Less...fake?
The accent is fake but the angst is real.
I just filled out the paperwork for a retirement planning session offered by my employer next week. I hope they can quit laughing long enough to tell me useful things. It would be nice to do some exercise that would put an upper limit on the money I could possibly need (and/or want). It always feels like, every month, we ceremonially burn our paychecks and cook a nice pizza over the flames.
Like: even in theory, is there an amount of money where I could securely invest it and live off the interest indefinitely? The number can't be that high, but I don't know what it is.
Assumes most drinking will be Straub and Ezra Brooks. Limited vacations.
"You'll earn an estimated $125,288 income per year from a 2,505,764.24 investment yielding 5.00%." Yeah, that might be okay. Definitely okay if I could pull a house purchase out of the principal and reduce returns accordingly.
238. Your returns with absolute security are much lower than if you're willing to take on some risk. Muni bonds pay 3-4%, long term average for US stocks is 7% annual return. $1M suitably invested will pay US median household income most years.
That's not with absolute security, and for many people, especially those now living in the expensive places where there is good work there is the large question of housing-- the financial crisis messed up retirement planning for many people.
|| I hope our Texas contingent stays safe in the upcoming rains. |>
They just cancelled classes here tomorrow. That seems a little overly precautious - it's not supposed to start raining hard until tomorrow night. It's not like you want the Houston students to start driving towards Houston a day early.
Well, great. Now I just need to save approximately $2,516,364.24 to cover debts, and I'll be set.
(this is 99% in jest, I promise)
If you want the best security, find a calculator for an inflation-adjusted annuity. Because there have been whole decades where real returns on the stock market are below zero. Paying somebody else to take that risk is expensive.
My personal calculations are now based on how much a nursing home good enough for my son not to feel guilty about putting me in costs.
I always think about how little I could live off of, and then how much I'd need to get that in interest. I call it a goal of being "independently poor." If I could get land and go full hippie, 10K a year should cover it, given that I'd be spending my free time foraging for my subsistence. I would be most worried about medical care, and I'd have to figure out utilities (I would want electricity and heat). Children's education is a big expense, but I could home school and then I'm sure the "my parents were hippies and forced us to live off the land" college essay could get them in somewhere where they could get a full ride.
The problem isn't just "Could you live at $10k/year?" The problem is "Could 70 year-old you live on $10k/year?"
By 'you', I mean the kind of person who wants to see how frugally they could live. I think of $10k/year as a housing budget, not a life.
I call it a goal of being "independently poor."
Norman Blake has a recent song on that subject.
You'll be paying property taxes as well.
251
Right, 10k probably isn't enough including that.
The problem is also that if you quit working, you need something to occupy your time. Nearly all of the usual activities (travel, drinking, secret family, crafting) take quite a bit more money than bare subsistence.
Just as a note: in 2015 the bottom 20% of household had a mean income of $12.5. I'm curious if I can find that number grouped by age to exclude students or people living on savings/fixed-income.
247: From what I keep hearing, 10K/year is like one kid's orthodontia. Even with Medicaid, health problems can add up quickly and you're not going to not get a heated mattress cover so your kid's joints relax in the night while they sleep or whatever. I am a believer in that idea that children eat all available money, but I'd be hesitant foraging for them and also trying to cut things too close to the bone. But I'm fundamentally both cheap and risk-averse and you may be only the former. (I also, for instance, don't buy used clothes, which I would for biological children. So there are added complications.) I'm inclined to be smug to Moby about my housing budget but yeah, 10k/year is mortgage and utilities and doesn't include things like new appliances or getting the siding painted or whatever probably. And now I'm stressed out thinking about THAT.
I'm just taunting the coastal elites.
From what I keep hearing, 10K/year is like one kid's orthodontia.
I assume that in the life that Buttercup is talking about the kids just wouldn't get orthodontia (and would have teeth that would make them as poor).
I was thinking again about my 254 and it makes me realize that $10K is really low. If only (say) 10% of households are making that and most of those will have supplementing their income with some combination of (government support, going into debt, drawing down savings, or being supported by their parents). That would definitely be scraping by.
On the other hand . . . 2 people, each of whom had a stable $10K/yr might be okay (assuming good health and so on).
It's not quite that bad, we just did first kid and it was $3250, and that was also pretax because we had some FSA hacking we could do involving leave of absence. Of course pretax doesn't matter for low income families, another reason
It's not quite that bad, we just did first kid and it was $3250, and that was also pretax because we had some FSA hacking we could do involving leave of absence. Of course pretax doesn't matter for low income families, another reason
all these stupid purpose-specific accounts are dumb.
I was definitely exaggerating on orthodontia but not by tons. I am the sad prophet of unexpected medical expenses at the moment, so I'll just go moan miserably over here and life can continue fine. But scary stuff really does happen and you can't plan for it but not being able to respond to it at all with the resources you have would terrify me at least.
I hear someone once tried to estimate what the bare minimum salary one could reasonably survive on. I wonder where I'd find that info?
Specific accounts are dumb if you think they're about the specified purpose. But if you realize they're about having more options for upper-middle and upper class people to stash money away tax-free, they work perfectly (that applies more to HSA than FSA though).
One of the benefits of an English and stay-at-home co-parent is that he does all the kid dental appointment stuff and is rock-solid proof against any and all orthodontia-selling. If you can masticate sufficiently for nutritional purposes, no orthodontia.
What about being able to geld a reindeer?
There are a lot more castration videos on YouTube than I had expected.
Our fall back plan for the kid involves accordion and tap dancing, not reindeer gelding.
I don't see why that has to be an either/or.
TBH any post-HBO entertainer who isn't prepared to geld is just being unrealistic.
I am the sad prophet of unexpected medical expenses at the moment, so I'll just go moan miserably over here and life can continue fine.
I'm being balance billed $183,000 for my 1st, of four, emergency hospitalizations this summer. (Yes, I have health insurance.) I am already curled up in a ball of procrastinating anxiety. (Plus, the not having worked in two and a half years thing.)
261: That all sounds so stressful. I'm currently struggling with anxiety, depression, self loathing, and the start to a new semester, and I have no idea how I'm going to make it work., even leaving beside the continual medical treatments.*
* Namely, vaginal atrophy due to premature surgical menopause. I am...not excited, as a sexual abuse survivor, to start the process of addressing sexual health needs, get insurance to provide coverage, or doing the darn work itself.
Oh jeez, J. That sounds awful. I am as ever part of your cheering section but I don't know, happy to talk if that would ever be helpful. Or if there are parts you can outsource, I'm around and getting paid for not working for another three months.
Despite my complaining I've been very lucky in so many ways with this, and was thinking of md 20/400 in particular when giving the warning above. I have had mostly medical problems I knew about plus one surprise that worked out fine* and while the girls' problems have been surprises and have gotten us into the wonderful world of seeing specialists about the negative interactions between drugs other specialists have provided, we aren't dealing with anything drastically awful there too. But it's really tiring and frustrating to keep up with it all, especially while in considerable pain.
* Not counting things like how my most recent IV site had a pool of blood get infected that required treatment and stupid stuff like that where it's annoying and makes me feel cursed but still resolves quickly. Still, no more antibiotics for the rest of the year world be great. I've been on maybe a dozen so far? Something completely ridiculous and exhausting.
And one meaningful rural/urban divide is how close you are to a really good children's hospital. We have certain appointments that happen in the northern suburbs and the drive that takes out of an hour each way transforms that into a completely different experience from zipping across the bridge and up the hill to the main location. Treatment has been wonderful at all locations and they provide special resources for families who live more than I think 60 miles away, but I would hate to be in that boat both for ER/urgent care options and because getting routine treatment becomes a huge chore.
10K might be too low for a family, but I'm basing off of some documentary I watched as a teenager, where a family of 4-5 semi-lived off the land for something like 5K a year, in the mid 90s. The 10K was made up inflation from that. It could be inflation in medical expenses makes my new random number untenable.
Since the 10K a year would have to be interest income (so at least 100-200K in investments), there would be money available for catastrophic expenses. It would be spending the principle, but it could be done if necessary. Neither my husband and I had any orthodontia as a kid, so I hope my kids would inherit our teeth. I do have braces now (they're not 10K, but closer to 10K than to 3K), but knowing other children of hippies, my kids would probably rebel by being investment bankers or something, so they should be able to afford their own braces in their early 30s. Obviously medical expenses would be a big gamble. Doing this in
I'm hoping that I'd have a chunk of ruralish land away from city temptations to spend money, and then I could spend all my free time doing intensive gardening, weaving my own cloth, making furniture, toys, canning food, etc. I'd want internet for entertainment, I could also get a projector and then I could show movies via my computer. Travel would be a major problem, since it's my largest expense. I already spend over 10% of my income on travel, and with kids it only gets exponentially more expensive. 1K on flights is pushing it with an income of 10K, but with a family that becomes 4K, which clearly isn't possible. I personally could rely on knowing my children's paternal grandmother would pay for us to visit them, but that feels like cheating in claiming the ability to sustainably fund my lifestyle.
I'm actually also cheap and risk averse, so I doubt I'll ever actually live out this fantasy. I can also see how the urge to give children nice things would be different if your kids have already experienced a lot and have their own struggles they deal with daily. Right now I'm ok with children who grow up never owning something new or not handmade.
My biggest obstacle besides not being risk averse is I have a husband who thinks subsistence farming sounds like a horrible nightmare.
274
I honestly don't see how that can't be criminal. Does your insurance not have an out of pocket maximum? That is so beyond stressful. I know it's really hard to deal with this especially after health issues, but I would fight tooth and nail. Hospitals will often cut deals with you, because if it goes to collections they're going to get pennies on the dollar, if they get anything. Also, appealing the bills can get them tied up in bureaucratic limbo for months if you feel you need more time and breathing space. Another option is if you're an American to contact your congressperson. You are the poster child for how incredibly screwed up our medical system is, and simply counting the numbers of "insured" isn't enough, because frankly what's the point if you can still be easily bankrupted. This is a case where the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and where being a bit belligerent helps. I would tell the hospital how much you feel like you can realistically afford to pay and offer to pay that and then see where it goes from there.
275
Ugh, I'm sorry you're dealing with this now after everything before it. I had to have pelvic floor PT years back, and it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. Maybe you can find a PT who specializes in sexual abuse survivors?
That was me.
Also, I'm in a European country right now, and I had a health problem which required several trips to the hospital and some regular testing. Since it's out of country I have to pay the full price out of pocket and then get reimbursed by my insurance company later. The total cost, for multiple doctor's consultations, ultrasounds, and blood tests, as well as the registration fee is under $350. Since I haven't met my $500 deductible and my insurance rolls over Sept 1, I'm not even going to bother submitting the forms, I think. It's yet again making me so angry at how amazingly screwed up our health care system is, and how much people's lives would be improved if we had a government run healthcare system.
274: Sounds both awful and like something that requires professional help.
274/281
Yeah, consulting a lawyer might be a good idea. Law schools often have clinics where they offer free help to low income people, if there's a law school near you it might be good to look into what options they might provide.
Subsistence farming sounds like the worst possible outcome. Being a homeless panhandler sounds preferable.
Do not borrow to pay them and hang up if they suggest it.
Subsidence farming is worse, because you have to wait for a sink hole.
I don't see why that has to be an either/or.
Presumably because reindeer gelding is a job for an organ grinder.
283: there is definitely a difference between being a part-time farmer with another job (a crofter, we'd call it), which can be great fun, and being a subsistence farmer. Being a subsistence farmer is pretty abysmal.
When I was a kid my dream in life was to be a subsistence farmer and totally off-grid/self-sufficient. Eight-year old me learned an early lesson in why the industrial revolution happened and the limits of the skills of enthusiastic children. I did try to make my own paper, weave my own cloth (aka potholders), build my own doll furniture, grow my own food (limited success, let the lettuce go to seed) and at one point I tried to make my own shoes. I made sandals with cardboard, elastic, and staples. I think they lasted about 20 feet before falling apart. A part of me still has the dream though, except I know I would need income to buy things I can't make or grow, and I'm bourgie enough to really want electricity, indoor plumbing, and heat and internet. The plan would be to have enough income such that my homesteading efforts would be more of an extended hobby, not a matter of life or death. I know I can make simple furniture, sew simple clothes, and knit. Gardening is a bigger unknown, since I'm not doing well at growing indoor herbs. I'd have to do research and not have to rely on my home grown food to live, at least until I knew I was good at crops.
284
Yes, whatever you do don't put any bills on credit cards. Medical debt is basically interest free, plus I read once that outstanding medical debt dings your credit score way less than outstanding credit card debt.
288.1: Have you considered a cob house?
289
You jest, but I am from the cob public sculpture mecca of North America. (I haven't checked this fact, but there can't be that many places.) Our family friends built a cobb house out on some land where they're thinking of retiring.
Not jesting. I have the books with how to do it.
Cob houses are definitely the one thing Moby would never joke about.
287
Yeah, the idea would be something like that, except the other job would be interest income. Having to actually subsistence farm I agree would be a nightmare (I just watched The Witch, which is an excellent movie, and one of the main points of the film is just exactly how screwed you are with subsistence farming if you're a bad farmer).
291
I would actually be interested in building a cob house.
If you are considering a situation in Ohio, watch out for serial killers.
288 Buttercup is a woman after my own kid heart here but all I did practically was read the Whole Earth Catalog to pieces and daydream a lot
I was thinking that maybe you could get a piece of land cheap if there was no road access good enough to get either traditional construction equipment or a trailer on it. With cob, you could maybe build with all materials you could haul in without a proper road, say an ATV or something. I think you'd need to get some sort of mechanical mixing device in, so you'd need some access.
I haven't clicked on it but I really hope that 294 is just a link to the Wikipedia page for "Mud".
I'm being balance billed $183,000 for my 1st, of four, emergency hospitalizations this summer. (Yes, I have health insurance.) I am already curled up in a ball of procrastinating anxiety. (Plus, the not having worked in two and a half years thing.)
Omg. I'd be hyperventilating. Feel better soon!
This is what I get for not visiting more.
Yggles and all the rest of them are full of shit, because this study promotes their preexisting, libertarian-infected POV. But it doesn't actually tell a coherent cause-effect story.
Which thing changed in 1980? Zoning regs sprung up in NYC and SF, or antitrust policies changed, leading to massive concentration of economic power in a handful of cities?
Boy, that was hard to suss out.
Dumbasses.
Industries naturally concentrate in certain cities. The whole computer industry would be in the Bay Area, and the whole finance industry would be in NYC, even if anti-trust constrained the size of individual companies. Given that, zoning will meaningfully constrain economic growth.
the whole finance industry would be in NYC
This is completely, demonstrably wrong. We know this, because we had a finance industry before 1980, and it wasn't all in NYC. In fact, the nation's largest banks were spread throughout the country. Mellon Bank, for instance, was HQ'd in Pittsburgh. It is now, of course, BNY Mellon, and HQ'd in NYC.
As to tech, you're ignoring how big tech companies have acted: snapping up established companies and startups that are based all around the country. MA-based DEC created Alta Vista, got bought by TX-based Compaq, which sold Alta Vista to Yahoo, and then was bought by HP. All of that was approved by antitrust regulators who didn't believe in the mission of antitrust. The fact that tech hubs exist in those places even after their founding companies (so to speak) were vacuumed up by Silicon Valley shows just how much more diverse the tech geography would have been if not for unchecked consolidation.
More importantly, you're missing the broader picture: the economy isn't only tech and finance. It's every industry, and they've all been ruthlessly consolidated, and virtually all of them are now HQ'd in a half dozen winner-take-all cities. So, sure, it's always been the case that NY was the #1 place to go for finance, but it wasn't also the #1 place to go for every other industry. You could move from rural MO to St. Louis to work for any of a dozen Fortune 500 companies HQ'd there; now there's a scant handful, and if you want a piece of the pie, you need to go all the way to a coast. Instead more people stay put. Believe it or not, rent is not the only constraint on people deciding whether to leave their hometowns.
I don't get why market fundamentalism is roundly mocked by liberals in all cases but this one. The zoning story is just as simple, straightforward, and wrong as every other libertarian just-so story (did you know that markets make everything more efficient? It's Econ 101!).
304: Because it's the only such story that would leave America looking more like Europe?
In effect, if not cause. Most of Europe presumably is zoned up the wazoo.
It's every industry, and they've all been ruthlessly consolidated, and virtually all of them are now HQ'd in a half dozen winner-take-all cities.
Walk me through this a little more slowly. Why exactly is that happening (and are we counting Houston as one of those winner-take-all cities)?
I take your argument is that (a) changes in anti-trust enforcement lead to industry consolidation and (b) big industry leaders want to be in big cities. (a) makes sense, though the timing makes me think that the LBO craze of the 80s is worth mentioning as an important cause instead of/in addition to anti-trust. (b) is something I'm less familiar with. Why would Fortune 500 companies be less likely to have a St. Louis branch now than they were 30 years ago? There may be an obvious answer, I just don't know.
the LBO craze of the 80s is worth mentioning as an important cause
Let me re-state that in stronger terms. I believe that one of the most important changes in the US economy since the 80s has been the "financialization" of the economy -- the increase in both corporate debt, and in the importance of stock price (to some extent as opposed to profit) as a metric of corporate performance.
I'm not an expert on that story, but I would still wager that has as much to do with how corporate consolidation plays out as anti-trust enforcement does.
No expert either, but the stories aren't contradictory. Financialization can mean basically the big get bigger (because they can get better terms). At the city level that could mean not so much winner-take-all as winners take more. So NY was #1 in finance, but it became #1 by an ever-growing margin, as its bigger, better-financed banks bought out smaller ones. It looks like the same phenomenon as increasing returns to the individual 1%, 0.1%, 0.001%, etc.
Fuck it, I dived in once.
1. JRoth is totally right that the zoning-killed-regional-equality story is simplistic and can't be right.
2. That said, ridiculous over zoning in NY, DC, California and some other places has driven housing costs through the roof and has created huge social and environmental problems. So as myths go, "kill off zoning and things will be better" is a pretty decent one, especially given entrenched interests on the other side, and especially if you live in California. But it should be considered a simplistic lodestar, not like actual policy.
3. The "antitrust-is-everything and reason we lost our glorious past" story is super dumb and evidence free and needs to stop now since it's becoming a go-to source of hot takes from bozos (lefty division). First, on the specific issue here, antitrust when it was more heavily enforced was focused on market share in specific cities, not dispersing corporate headquarters throughout the US. It didn't break up Hollywood, or Detroit, or Pittsburgh, ot Akron Ohio, it just meant that in most cities you'd have more competing industries, even if they were parts of national operations. The companies in Brown Shoes, the highwater-mark for antitrust of that era, were national companies. There were limits on vertical integration but that didn't much stop the nationalization of the economy from the 1940s-1980s. Antitrust enforcement is a good thing! But let's restrain our claims about it please thx bye.
4. The Mellon Bank story isn't about antitrust, it's about banking regulations that used to require state-specific retail and commercial banks (of the boring, do nothing but lend out at interest kind). High finance has always been basically in New York. Then, NEOLIBERALS said banks could merge across state lines. But, guess what. Mellon Bank still has huge retail and commercial banking operations in Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. That Mellon Bank has a different name doesn't change that dynamic, the functions aren't all that different. High finance is way bigger now than it used to be, though.
5. The bigger change is exactly what NickS points to in 308, it's that finance grew exponentially and the balance sheets of individual banks, debt, and financialization grew to insane levels. The effect of this on regional economic equality is maybe opaque but it's basically led to those on the good end of financial slush piles earning a ton of money, which has increased inequality for everyone. I strongly suspect that the regional inequality story is basically that+declining overall growth means that there's just not enough oomph in the economy to start paying people enough to leave their small town lives.
OK, I'm out of here before this fucking habit takes over again. Be well all.
Halford, I was just thinking I needed to ask you a question today- is there any way to legally get permission to include a copyrighted song in a slide show sound track for noncommercial play in a YouTube video? My family had a tribute video they wanted to post for someone who died but it's automatically blocked due to the songs.
I've noticed a parallel concentration in academia, and I've been trying to puzzle out its origin for a while now.
1. Previously strong schools in rural areas or small towns (read: big midwestern state schools) are failing to keep and attract talent at the rate they used to, while that same talent is flowing to previously weaker schools in urban areas.
2. Previous generations of well-educated upper-middle class people used to be content with building a nice house in an out of the way location and raising a family. New generations prefer big cities.
3. One thing that has changed is the rise of the two professional couple. well-educated upper-middle class men and women now self-sort and marry each other and expect that both of them will have professional careers. This rules out many rural areas/small towns.
4. Well-educated upper-middle class people like having fun things to do with their excess money, and both positional luxury goods as well as fun and engaging leisure activities for educated people are more likely to exist in bigger cities.
I don't know if that's the whole story (for instance, it doesn't explain the decline of mid-size cities), but it's my best story so far, and I wonder if a similar phenomenon isn't happening with business too.
312 - You can just try clearing the song from the label -- see e.g. here for WMG. The other major labels have similar sites. It doesn't cost very much at all, though it will cost something and be a little bit of a hassle maybe (emailing back and forth to arrange) and then you're home free. I've never done it myself since I've never posted to YouTube. Now gone for real! Sorry that it's a pain for the tribute video but. Let me know (by smoke signal, since I obviously never lurk here) if it works.
Back in the day, if we wanted to set our wedding march video to "I Like Big Butts", we just stole it.
313 We're up 75% in population since 1990, which was already nearly 30% over 1980. There's a ton of construction going on right now -- we might add a couple percentage in housing units just this year. Our percentage college educated is about half-again the national average. People are coming from somewhere else because the two income couple with kids, commuting into a big city model is a failure for enough people that leaping into the void looks viable.
One hears the term 'death spiral' to describe our local university in general conversation all the time. This may be local factors though: the 'udder' university 3 hours east seems to be doing very well.
Just spent 20 minutes reading about 316.2. Really seems like people don't know quite what's going on, but wow those are some dramatic drops in enrollment! I was surprised to read that MSU enrollment in their college of letters and sciences is increasing, which makes the liberal arts vs engineering take a little muddled. But the recession really has taken a huge bite out of traditional areas of study, as everyone is really focused on first jobs. A little scary to me since we have a pretty similar division of subjects between the two state schools in our state, but we aren't seeing enrollment declines in the school as a whole, just changes in what people major in.
UM alums I know are resistant to my solution to their problem: change the school colors to blue and gold, change the name to MSU-Missoula, put it under Pres. Cruzado as a satellite campus.
Seriously, though, it is pretty scary over there. Our city is growing well notwithstanding the enrollment drop, so all but the most student dependent businesses are going to be ok. What toughest to untangle is the impact of the Krakauer book (and the stories in it, all pretty well known). And what can be done about that now, other than what's been in train for several years now.
When I chose MSU over UM, nearly 40 years ago, air quality played a role. That's all resolved now, except today is a real throwback: can't open the windows without getting a stinging in the eyes.
I hear will get a north wind in a couple of days . . .
Ha! That's some outside the box thinking...
The two state flagship system is a bit strange, and I'm not totally sure how it developed or why. The number of state flagships seems to have little correlation to the size of the state (ignoring CA).
I had a vague sense the two university model was usually due to one being an ag school and the other a liberal arts school and having them just converge over time. Especially since many are land grant universities which the Morrill Act specifically encouraged for ag, science and engingeering.
Yes. Like Texas and Texas-not-really.