The Life of Julia (Real World Edition)

(UPDATE: Here's a nice video rebuttal to the Life of Julia.

(The original Life of Julia is an Obama fantasy about how a hypothetical baby girl born this year might live out her life under Obama's policies. Here's what I think would actually happen...)

3 Years Old: Julia is enrolled in a Head Start program to help get her ready for school. Approximately $14,000 is spent providing her with a "leg up", but any apparent gains have evaporated by the time Julia enters second grade.

18 Years Old: As she prepares for her first semester of college, Julia and her family qualify for President Obama's American Opportunity Tax Credit—worth up to $10,000 over four years. Julia is also one of millions of students who receive a Pell Grant to help put a college education within reach. But because such grants and handouts have continued to push the cost of college education ever higher, college is actually even less affordable when Julia starts that when she was born. She is forced to take out a student loan to cover the difference.

22 Years Old: During college, Julia undergoes surgery. It is thankfully covered by her insurance due to a provision in health care reform that lets her stay on her parents' coverage until she turns 26. Otherwise, she would have had to use the low-cost insurance most colleges offer to their students.

23 Years Old: Because of steps like the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, Julia is one of millions of women across the country who knows she'll always be able to stand up for her right to equal pay. She starts her career as a web designer. She was lucky to get a job at all, though; millions of her peers are unable to because of continued high unemployment.

25 Years Old: After graduation, Julia's federal student loans are more manageable since President Obama capped income-based federal student loan payments and kept interest rates low. These low rates, coupled with skyrocketing college costs, have led to an explosion in student loans. Julia has a job and is responsible about paying back her loans, but millions of her peers don't or can't, and the system loses billions of taxpayer dollars.

27 Years Old: For the past four years, Julia has worked full-time as a web designer. Thanks to Obamacare, her health insurance is required to cover birth control and preventive care. Of course, her employer no longer provides health insurance, because requirements like that have made it cheaper just to pay the Obamacare penalty. Julia has health care, but little choice over her care.

31 Years Old: Julia decides to have a child. Throughout her pregnancy, she benefits from maternal checkups, prenatal care, and free screenings under health care reform. Prior to reform, she would have been required to pay a $25 co-pay for the entire pregnancy. Julia tries to be grateful that changing America's system of health insurance saved her $25.

37 Years Old: Julia's son Zachary starts kindergarten. The public schools in their neighborhood have better facilities and great teachers because of President Obama's investments in education and programs like Race to the Top. Of course, Julia and her husband had to take out a massive mortgage to afford a house in that neighborhood.

42 Years Old: Julia decides to start her own web business. She qualifies for a Small Business Administration loan, giving her the money she needs to invest in her business. But she quickly realizes that bureaucratic red tape involved with starting a business is so costly and time-consuming that it's more worthwhile to just stay with her existing job.

65 Years Old: Julia would have enrolled in Medicare. But the system, drowning in debt, was drastically cut decades before Julia was eligible. It now covers such a minimal amount of care that Julia is forced to dig into savings to afford private health insurance.

67 Years Old: Julia retires. After years of contributing to Social Security, that system, too, has been drastically cut for budgetary reasons. Julia gets back much less than she paid in.

I hope Julia contributed to her 401(k).

The Universe is Weird

And now for a change from our usual politics- and economics-heavy talk to something weirder: physics.

Quantum mechanics is weird. Richard Feynman, one of its most important discoverers, said, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." Well, it just got weirder.

This article says that effects can occur before their causes. Don't ask me how that can possibly work; I have no idea. But the experiment seems to show that it's possible.

As always with entanglement, it's important to note that no information is passing between Alice, Bob, and Victor: the settings on the detectors and the BiSA are set independently, and there's no way to communicate faster than the speed of light. Nevertheless, this experiment provides a realization of one of the fundamental paradoxes of quantum mechanics: that measurements taken at different points in space and time appear to affect each other, even though there is no mechanism that allows information to travel between them.

I wonder if it's possible to change the experimental setup a bit: can Alice and Bob take their measurements and then tell Victor what to do? If Alice and Bob measure that Victor didn't entangle, but tell him to entangle and he does, something has to give. It's a little unsatisfying to say they must not have been able to communicate because of speed-of-light issues. Let them communicate and see if we can violate causality on the macro level.

The Bully Pulpit

In America's system of separated powers, the executive power is more limited that in most systems. The President cannot, for example, propose a budget. (In the parliamentary model, the government generally proposes budgets which are then debated and usually passed by the legislature. It's usually a smooth process because the government is usually the party of the majority. Not so in America, where we often find the executive and legislative branches controlled by different parties.)

However, one great advantage of the Presidency is the so-called "bully pulpit", a term coined by Teddy Roosevelt, who meant "bully" in the sense of "great" or "terrific". My generation might called it an "awesome platform", a great place from which to advocate for an agenda or position.

President Obama seems to have taken "bully" to mean something else: to harass or coerce. His preemptive attack on the Supreme Court over Florida v. HHS cannot possibly have any populist effect: the legislative work, after all, is done. The only effect it can possibly have is to try to cow the Supreme Court justices to decide in favor of the government. That is the other form of bullying.

Whether he'll get away with it is another matter. I would hope not. Everyone expects the case to be decided 5-4, with Justice Kennedy, as usual, the swing vote.

The Single Life

This is heartbreakingly difficult to read.

And tried to remind myself that when we first met I thought he was an arrogant, presumptuous little man. I tried to think about my conversation with Steven. I tried to remember that I was actively seeking to practice some Zenlike form of nonattachment. I tried to remember that no one is my property and neither am I theirs, and so I should just enjoy the time we spend together, because in the end it's our collected experiences that add up to a rich and fulfilling life. I tried to tell myself that I’m young, that this is the time to be casual, careless, lighthearted and fun; don’t ruin it.

Drilling and the Price of Oil

Should United States policy tilt toward more drilling? It's a complicated question that touches on many of today's issues: jobs, foreign relations, environmental protection, and gas prices, to name a few.

A recent Associated Press report claimed that at least one claim made by the "drill, baby, drill" crowd - that increased oil production would lead to cheaper gas - is incorrect. Here are the statistics and analysis that resulted in the report. As reported, the statistical conclusion is unmistakable: there is no correlation between domestic oil production and gas prices.

Some objections, though. First, there's a pretty major flaw in the reasoning behind the report. Oil is a fungible good, which means that its price tends to converge to a stable number worldwide. (This is unlike, for example, natural gas, which has transportation issues that make it more valuable closer to its point of production.) Since gas prices are rooted in the price of oil (plus the cost of refining oil into gasoline, plus taxes, plus profits), they vary with the worldwide price of oil. Domestic production affects a small (and over the period covered, decreasing) percentage of worldwide production, so we wouldn't necessarily expect the effect on prices to be very large.

Second, the law of supply and demand is a bit more complex than a simplistic analysis like this can capture. If the price of a good rises, absent non-market factors such as taxes or regulations (more on this in a moment), this could be because demand has increased, supply has decreased, or both have increased or decreased but in such a way that the clearing price goes up rather than down. All we really know for sure when prices are rising is what did not happen: decreasing demand combined with increasing supply. Since the regression did not look at demand at all, it ignores half of the input to price.

Finally, those non-market factors are important. They do not greatly affect the worldwide price of oil, but local regulations and taxes can affect pump prices greatly. Furthermore, those regulations have changed over the period of time under study. Failing to remove those effects is a problem, and not an easily-solvable one either. (To see why it's not a simple matter, imagine there is a $0.25/gal tax on gasoline. Does this raise the pump price by $0.25? No, because the increased price decreases demand, which lowers the price, which may result in reduced supply, which raises the price, and so on. It would take a detailed and deep analysis to estimate how much effect the tax actually had on prices, and this effect would not be stable from month to month.)

But the important thing about domestic drilling, to me at least, is not the direct result on pump prices. Expanding production of oil certainly won't increase gas prices, so at least we know no harm would be done there. Where we know it would help would be in our balance of trade: since we currently import (net) about 8-9 million barrels of oil per day at a price of over $100/barrel, that's a daily trade deficit of close to $1 billion. Much has been made of the fact that we have become net exporters of gasoline, but that's only because we have excellent refineries. We still import lots of crude and export some of the refining products, for a huge net trade deficit. If we expanded domestic drilling to, say, halve our imports, we could potentially eliminate the deficit, to the economic advantage of the country as a whole.

Predictable Beats Perfect

Friedrich Hayek observed decades ago that predictability of laws and regulations was more important than their perfection. The way this is often interpreted (by conservatives and libertarians) is that part of the evaluation process of any new law or regulation should be to test how much it improves predictability versus how much absolute improvement it is expected to make. (Since a new law by definition introduces at least some element of unpredictability, it starts out in the hole at least on this metric.) While this is a fair interpretation, there are others.

In some cases, laws themselves balance predictability and perfection, and then, too, the former exceeds the latter in importance. A recent article from the Hoover Institute is illustrative. Lueck and Libecap examine different ways of defining property: the old but common way by "metes and bounds" (in which natural landmarks and neighboring property lines are used to define boundaries) and the new one promulgated by the U.S. Congress when setting up rules for development in the West (in which boundaries were defined by strict square grids aligned with lines of latitude and longitude).

A natural experiment turns out to be possible by looking at bordering lands, one area using the rectangular system and the other using metes and bounds, and the results are startling:

We found that, controlling for land and owner characteristics, land values were around 25 percent higher under the rectangular system than under metes and bounds in 1850 and 1860. Further, extending the analysis for 100 years revealed that these land value differences persisted!

To learn why that might be so, we turned first to data on land disputes from Ohio court records. Over the entire nineteenth century, we found that parcels in the VMD had 18 times more land boundary disputes than the rest of Ohio combined. Indeed, the history of the VMD is one of ongoing land conflicts. We then turned to land market activity. Land transactions in the middle of the nineteenth century were about 75 percent greater in the counties adjacent to the VMD than within it.

Something to think about when someone proposes a new rule to take care of some tiny edge case in the law. Before deciding whether it's worth it, we might consider the harm to predictability being done.

Poor Strategy

I'm generally sympathetic to the notion that Christian tradition is under attack in America. There are many places where this is evident, not least the spread of "holiday parties" (held a week or two before Christmas), "spring picnics" (held on Easter weekend) and the like. I suspect I will find much to dislike in this vein in the public school system.

But there are good ways to fight this, and not so good ways. One of the latter is "engag[ing]... co-workers in conversations about intelligent design and hand[ing] out DVDs on the idea while at work." (Source. An irrelevant tidbit from the article is that the guy who did this was a team lead at NASA. So what? Engineers can be religious. Many are.)

The gentleman who was proselytizing his co-workers was laid off, and now he's suing.

"It's part of a pattern. There is basically a war on anyone who dissents from Darwin and we've seen that for several years," said John West, associate director of Center for Science and Culture at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute. "This is free speech, freedom of conscience 101."

No, it isn't, and we shouldn't adopt the tactics and speech modes of the Left, even when we're fighting the Left. Free speech is the freedom to publish, to make your speech available, to avoid public censorship. It is not the freedom to say whatever you want at your place of employment. Employers can fire you for annoying other employees, and that's what happened here. (Heck, employers can fire you for nothing at all in most cases. Just as you can quit any time.)

I'm sure there are many other NASA employees who believe in intelligent design. If they are fired merely for believing it, that's a mistake by NASA (and closer to a violation of "freedom of conscience" ideals). But being fired for badgering your co-workers violates no right, and in the wider culture wars this is not a hill worth defending.