US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8027

On July 07 2017 23:50 Mohdoo wrote:


Medicine, computation and energy are pretty hard to beat. I think the issue is creating 2 distinct sides as if it is as simple as humanities and STEM. Petroleum engineering, for example, is very technical but doesn't have the same nobility as pharmaceutical chemistry or physics. I would say a psychologist has a much higher net contribution to the world than a petroleum engineer.

Coefficients of economic inequality across households within states have been available from the Bureau of Economic Analysis on an annual basis only since 2000. Before that, sample sizes in the Current Population Survey made measuring inequality in small states problematic, since a state with population of (say) half a million might have as few as one hundred households represented in a national sample survey of 60,000 families. So data at the required level of detail were available only from the decennial census. This raised an issue of comparative measurement through time, especially since election years coincide with census years only once every two decades.

To deal with this issue, Travis Hale and I used the detailed annual measures of the Employment and Earnings database of the Bureau of Labor Statistics to construct annual measures of pay inequality that could be calibrated to the Census measures of income inequality, and we showed that these measures generate reliable annual estimates of state-level income inequality back to 1969. In recent weeks Jaehee Choi has extended Hale's measures by a decade to 2014, giving us an uninterrupted panel matrix of 2295 inequality measures for 51 states (including DC) over 45 years.

There are two ways to look at this data. One is to compare election outcomes to the current level of inequality in each state, and to ask: did the more egalitarian states have a tendency to choose one candidate over the other? The other approach, accessible only through a data set of the type just described, is to look at changes in inequality over time, and to ask, did states where inequality grew more have a tendency to choose one candidate over the other? Economists are especially drawn to the second approach, because it washes out (“controls for”) differences in the level of inequality across states that may be due to some timeless historical factors. For instance, a state with large cities and wealthy industries (such as international banking) is likely to have a baseline of inequality quite different from a wheat- or corn-growing state on the Great Plains.

In this case, both approaches generate a similar, striking result. A simple correlation between the level of inequality in each state and the vote share of one candidate in that state is 0.60. And the correlation between inequality changes and vote share is even higher: about 0.69 for the case of the changes from 1990 to 2014; depending on base year chosen the correlation fluctuates up to a maximum of about 0.71. This means that a large share of the election outcome across the states can be explained solely by the relative degree of rising inequality within each state over a quarter-century, give or take.

A somewhat surprising result

Using our measure of pay inequality, which avoids any distortion associated with making a conversion to income inequality measures, the fourteen states with the largest increases in inequality after 1990 without exception voted for Hillary Clinton.1 These fourteen included almost all of the large states that Clinton carried, including California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Virginia and Illinois. The largest Clinton state below the top fourteen is Washington, and after that, Minnesota (which she carried by whisker); the others include Vermont and Delaware, small states embedded in regions (New England, the Mid-Atlantic) where the increase of inequality was much larger than it was in the states themselves. Vermont is not immune from economic change in New York or Massachusetts, nor is Delaware unaffected by events in New Jersey or Maryland.

On July 07 2017 23:51 Buckyman wrote:
Pro Publica found the explanation for the Trump deportation mess:



(emphasis added)

(source)

In other words, Trump said "remove these categories of illegal immigrants" and the top career immigration official added "and all the rest of them too", apparently without consulting Trump or John Kelly.

On July 08 2017 00:07 Gorsameth wrote:

And you assuming they do so without consulting Trump (or his administration) because?

And please don't say "Trump only said criminals" because Trumps public word is worth jack shit.

On July 08 2017 00:22 Buckyman wrote:


I see no evidence that they did consult Trump/Kelly. Except for a Kelly memo that says not to do exactly what they're doing.

On July 08 2017 00:06 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
I would put psychologists in the same realm as a medical profession but if tomorrow all petroleum engineers disappeared, there is a good change that half the world would starve to death in a years time and electricity will have to be rationed. So, I understand what you are saying Mohdoo, but no.

On July 08 2017 00:24 zlefin wrote:
re: the man-child stuff with plansix on the last page.

Long as they can afford to pay other people to deal with it; we'll just have to roll our eyes and live with it.
At any rate, stuff like that is a failure of the lower education levels; imho a high school education should have covered the basics of taking care of yourself like that. sometimes parents don't teach that stuff to their kids, and in those cases the ed system should be able to cover it. I think we need a bit more life skills teaching in high school, and a bit less of the stuff most people forget anyways.

Russian spies are ramping up their intelligence-gathering efforts in the US, according to current and former US intelligence officials who say they have noticed an increase since the election.

The officials say they believe one of the biggest US adversaries feels emboldened by the lack of a significant retaliatory response from both the Trump and Obama administrations.

"Russians have maintained an aggressive collection posture in the US, and their success in election meddling has not deterred them," said a former senior intelligence official familiar with Trump administration efforts.

Russians could also be seeking more information on Trump's administration, which is new and still unpredictable to Moscow, according to Steve Hall, retired CIA chief of operations.

On July 08 2017 00:28 ZasZ. wrote:


100% correct. High-school, especially towards the end, should focus far less on requiring every academic subject be studied. Let juniors and seniors choose if they care about advanced mathematics, chemistry, etc., but force them to take basic taxation, accounting, financial, civics, and home economics classes. It's astonishing how many people my age (29, rather old for these forums) have no idea how credit cards work.

On July 08 2017 00:34 Mohdoo wrote:


I disagree. We should be holding high-schoolers to much higher standards because they are simply not equipped to make these decisions at their age. I only passed 2 science classes while I was in high school and just failed everything else. Barely made it out of basic algebra. I never thought I'd be remotely capable of being a scientist or engineer of any sort, so I just kind of chose not to. That hurt me a lot when I finally decided I was capable of it. I know not everyone is as much of a dipshit as I was in high school, but quite a few are. An 18 year old is NOT capable of planning their lives and quite frankly I think schooling should be required beyond 18. I think 18 is a very poorly defended age of adulthood or whatever. Does anyone here regard their 18 year old self as even slightly capable of long term planning? I am sure upbringing plays a big role, since mine was a complete joke, but I get the feeling my situation is not uncommon. I had friends who knew they were going to be a programmer. Came from rich families who coached them how to plan life etc. But I didn't have that and a lot of people don't.

On July 08 2017 00:43 zlefin wrote:


My 18 y/o self was highly capable of long term planning; of course I had a supportive upbringing, and a personality that favors it.
historically lots of 18 y/os were quite capable of long term planning; whether you can do things depends alot on training; giving them the training to look after themselves is more valuable than a lot of other stuff. a lot of stuff taught in school simply isn't that relevant and is forgotten afterwards.

your situation may be common; but that's all the more reason to have school step in to provide that kind of training for people who don't get it at home. and as long as high school is the highest level a fair number of people get to; then we should make sure it's done by then (or some of it even earlier in jr high and elementary)