US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8090

On July 14 2017 08:27 Leporello wrote:


Our country is run by insecure sociopaths.
This is the best lawyer Trump could find.
This is a professional.

The fucking guy can't even structure a proper fucking sentence, in his threat-laden responses to random e-mails.

On July 14 2017 08:48 Tachion wrote:

I might be shocked if I wasn't so busy laughing at him instead. Thus dude is writing emails like this at 65 years of age. This is hilarious.

On July 14 2017 09:00 Nyxisto wrote:
I await the xDaunt response how "watch your back bitch" is perfectly reasonable legalese in the Trump era. This is simply modern day lawyering.

On July 14 2017 08:45 mozoku wrote:

I found a copy. I only took a skim through (I'll try to read it in more detail later), but I don't see how a weakly predictive/significant grandfather effect in a huge sample in a model that explains 20% of the response variable (years of education) is evidence that anything I've said is false, or is strong evidence that social mobility isn't alive.

There's a big difference between practical significance and statistical significance. That said, I'll look over it in more detail later to make sure I fully understand their model and give better conclusions later.

On July 14 2017 08:37 Leporello wrote:


I mean, of course. If there's mobility upwards -- then there's mobility downwards. Not everyone can have top-paying jobs.

So, I agree, the term "mobility" is kind of a misnomer. Although, I think the article misses some points. Primarily on education. Actually -- it doesn't even mention education. That's kind of a crazy-large blind-spot to have on the issue.

Because it is easier for a low-income Dane to receive top-quality education, compared to a low-income American. And that does mean more opportunity for all.


And, of course, we shouldn't ignore that social-welfare simply does improve people's lives, and that, at its surface, is a perfectly good thing.

On July 14 2017 09:33 IgnE wrote:


Ok so what you mean when you say, "reasonably fair" and "can reliably rise" is that a person with the (considerable) fortitude and determination to succeed could rise from the 4th quintile to the 1st through hard work, at least most of the time, if we ran the simulation 100 times, assuming everyone else made "normal" decisions and had "normal" ambition, resilience, and fortitude.

When you say social mobility is "alive" you mean it's possible, not that it actually happens frequently.

Now let's think at a systems level please and start to consider why most people don't "reliably rise," how human beings make decisions, why kids don't "spend as much time" on their homework and "productive extracurriculars" as you think they should, whether competition can reach a system-level equilibrium, etc.

On July 14 2017 09:57 mozoku wrote:

Nice timing, I just finished a more in-depth read of the article.

My opinion on the article hasn't changed from before. The grandfather effect is barely measurable--even the authors themselves caution it may only be due to measurement error. They do find an effect (I dislike a lot of how they perform their statistical analysis, but what they do is fairly common practice and is reasonable given their limitations), but I never claimed that coming from a higher socioeconomic class isn't an advantage. I've maintained that it's a sizable advantage since the beginning.

My claim, which is entirely supported by the article given how little variance grandparent education explains, is that it's entirely possible for most individuals to reliably raise his socioeconomic status by making good life decisions and working hard.

I don't see an system-wide issue with that at all. If one works hard, one will likely get ahead. If one does not work hard, one will likely fall behind. Yes, some people are born with advantages, but there's a very valid argument that if a parent wants to work hard and get ahead, he/she should be able to give an advantage to their children.

In theory, if everyone works equally as hard as they possibly could, nobody advances.... but a) that doesn't match what we see in real life at all, and b) if everyone actually worked that hard, the economy would grow so fast that I doubt anybody would be worried about class mobility anyway.

EDIT: I realize class mobility almost certainly breaks down at the tails of the income/wealth distribution, and I've advocated for trying to deal with that throughout this entire discussion. My post is primarily aimed at the 20th-90th percentile of wealth/income, which is where most people come from. And also where most people complaining about the system come from.

EDIT2: Below: I totally agree with your sentiment. The class mobility discussion came up when GH tied it to our previous long discussion on privilege and race relations, so I was trying to avoid diverging from the discussion at hand.

It’s not an exaggeration: It really is getting harder to move up in America. Those who make very little money in their first jobs will probably still be making very little decades later, and those who start off making middle-class wages have similarly limited paths. Only those who start out at the top are likely to continue making good money throughout their working lives.

That’s the conclusion of a new paper by Michael D. Carr and Emily E. Wiemers, two economists at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. In the paper, Carr and Wiemers used earnings data to measure how fluidly people move up and down the income ladder over the course of their careers. “It is increasingly the case that no matter what your educational background is, where you start has become increasingly important for where you end,” Carr told me. “The general amount of movement around the distribution has decreased by a statistically significant amount.”

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Environmental and public health groups asked a U.S. Appeals Court in a lawsuit filed on Wednesday to force the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reverse its decision to delay issuing a set of smog cleanup rules.

The groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and Earthjustice, argued the agency's June 6 announcement that it would wait to identify areas of the country where smog pollution is especially heavy until it gathered more information and reviewed existing pollution standards was illegal.

At issue in the lawsuit is a provision in the Clean Air Act that requires the EPA to decide what levels of smog pollution are acceptable, then identify parts of the country where pollution exceeds those levels and enforce their cleanup. The agency released standards and designations in 2008 and 2015, and was due to update them this year.

"Simply put, delay of designations delays the stronger pollution controls Congress mandated to protect people in communities with unhealthy air," said the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Liz Bowman, a spokeswoman for the EPA said the agency had asked lawyers representing the groups in a phone call on Tuesday to delay filing their suit for two weeks. She said the EPA was still working on the designations and its lawyers believed the suit would be unnecessary once the groups saw the results of the agency's work.

Bowman said the groups were reading too much into the delay. "The agency was not going to meet the original deadline for all 50 states," she said. "This administrator doesn't like being outside the bounds of statutory deadlines so he said extend it. We're continuing our work."

The topic has been a recent source of dispute. Environmental groups and representatives of industries that contribute to smog, like power plants, sparred in court over whether the previous designations were too lax or too strict.

Mustafa Ali, a former assistant associate administrator for environmental justice at the EPA, criticized the delay and said the suit, in which he was not involved, was warranted. If the EPA needed more time to deal with certain states over their designations, the agency could do so without the overall delay, he said.

"You can always work with states that are not moving quickly, you can build some accommodation into the process," he said.

"How long do these communities need to wait? What we're really doing is playing with their lives."

On July 14 2017 11:25 IgnE wrote:


Ok, so I disagree with your downplaying of a measurable, significant grandparent effect, at least insofar as you characterize it as "fair" for a measurable, significant predictor of your success to be attributable to your grandparents. But you also ignore the much more massive impact that parents have on a child's success, writing it off as defensible under some theory of ethics in which parents' hard work should be rewarded through their childrens' "unfair" advantages. The fact that doubing-back to justify asymmetrical starting points vitiates your "fairness" and "reliability" argument from the get-go seems to be lost.

But here are some more articles about how social mobility seems to be decreasing quickly with inequality:

www.theatlantic.com
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/social-mobility-america/491240/



It might make sense then to see a "small" grandparent effect, when most grandparents are from the baby-boomer generation, an historically anomalous generation where mobility might have been higher than others preceding it and those following it.

Here's another one from a conservative, orthodox economic website:

https://www.ft.com/content/7de9165e-c3d2-11e6-9bca-2b93a6856354?mhq5j=e2



Here is where I think you go wrong, if I may be so bold. You are looking at "your experience," which includes your homogeneous high school peer group. Looking out at that experience, it seems like meritocracy is in working order: the smart, hard-working ones seem to be doing better on average than those who "didn't spend as much time on their homework as they should have" (or at least that's how you remember it). Those who chose to work hard tend to get rewarded.

Now let's compare your school to some notorious inner-city schools where the outcomes for all the kids are much worse. Those schools have a large sample size, wherein the only linking attribute seems to be place of birth, which, I hope you will agree, should not affect natural or in-born traits like intelligence, persistence, resilience, etc. And yet the outcomes for all these kids turns out to be much worse? Is it because they all happened to freely make bad choices? I am not trying to put words in your mouth, of course, but that seems to be the logical result of your meritocratic theory: that heterogeneous groups across the system just all happen to make bad choices.

Now maybe you mean something else when you say "merit" or "hard work." Maybe you aren't referring to the reasonable or probable range of behaviors that might be expected from a population set loose in the wild of their environment. Maybe you are referring to an objectively attainable standard based on knowledge and instilled discipline. But then what are we talking about when you say it's "fair" and "reliable" for a person who chooses to work hard to rise within the system? I mean if your only point is that if someone has the good fortune to be born into a family that instills in them from a young age the habits and behaviors they will need, the discipline they need, the knowledge they need (perhaps foremost the knowledge about how to find the knowledge they will need; the intellectual milieu in which they live), will oftentimes outperform a rich kid without those advantages, then yes, meritocracy is "alive and well." But when I said we need to think about "systems" and how human beings work, how they make choices, I meant that you haven't explained anything, and haven't actually defended any meaningful thesis about meritocracy at all.

On July 14 2017 08:37 Leporello wrote:


I mean, of course. If there's mobility upwards -- then there's mobility downwards. Not everyone can have top-paying jobs.

So, I agree, the term "mobility" is kind of a misnomer. Although, I think the article misses some points. Primarily on education. Actually -- it doesn't even mention education. That's kind of a crazy-large blind-spot to have on the issue.

Because it is easier for a low-income Dane to receive top-quality education, compared to a low-income American. And that does mean more opportunity for all.


And, of course, we shouldn't ignore that social-welfare simply does improve people's lives, and that, at its surface, is a perfectly good thing.

On July 14 2017 13:44 mozoku wrote:

It's late, so this is going to be short.

I looked at the Atlantic article. It doesn't deal with intergenerational mobility at all, to start with. It deals with the rise in people incomes during their career (i.e. after school). This isn't really what we've been discussing, but whatever. Anyway, it's another case of practical significance vs statistical significance. The rank-rank correlation in the 15-year difference in people's incomes went from 0.59 to 0.64 overall. Hardly something to worth even bothering to write about. To make matters worse, they reference a mention a separate publication which finds results that contradicts theirs. So we have a tiny "significant" difference from another giant sample, and conflicting results between papers. The media loves to publish this stuff because it draws views and looks "sophisticated," but statisticians such as Andrew Gelman, Uri Simohnson, etc. have been critical of this sort of nonsense for years.

As far as the second article, it's talking about absolute mobility as opposed to relative mobility. We've been discussing the latter this whole time; the former is a different issue, and it's closely related with rising income inequality (which has its own set of drivers that are largely due to changes in how the economy functions in the past several decades).

The data in the appendix of the first paper confirms what I've been saying as well. If you had an income in the 3rd decile in 1993, you have a 15% chance of reaching the 7th decile or above in 2008. That roughly jives what I was saying earlier--significant class mobility is possible for individuals if they work hard. However, the way was the data is systematically underestimating class mobility anyway: it only looks at individuals who had an income at the start of the period. The most common way that class mobility is achieved intergenerationally (largely due to education reasons). So again, the numbers are largely painting a picture fairly close to what I had described earlier (i.e., someone in the ~20th percentile can reliably rise to 70-80th percentile through good life decisions and hard work). Obviously, the most crucial years to achieving class mobility are going to be high school through college/grad school.

On July 14 2017 11:25 IgnE wrote:


Ok, so I disagree with your downplaying of a measurable, significant grandparent effect, at least insofar as you characterize it as "fair" for a measurable, significant predictor of your success to be attributable to your grandparents. But you also ignore the much more massive impact that parents have on a child's success, writing it off as defensible under some theory of ethics in which parents' hard work should be rewarded through their childrens' "unfair" advantages. The fact that doubing-back to justify asymmetrical starting points vitiates your "fairness" and "reliability" argument from the get-go seems to be lost.

But here are some more articles about how social mobility seems to be decreasing quickly with inequality:

www.theatlantic.com
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/social-mobility-america/491240/



It might make sense then to see a "small" grandparent effect, when most grandparents are from the baby-boomer generation, an historically anomalous generation where mobility might have been higher than others preceding it and those following it.

Here's another one from a conservative, orthodox economic website:

https://www.ft.com/content/7de9165e-c3d2-11e6-9bca-2b93a6856354?mhq5j=e2



Here is where I think you go wrong, if I may be so bold. You are looking at "your experience," which includes your homogeneous high school peer group. Looking out at that experience, it seems like meritocracy is in working order: the smart, hard-working ones seem to be doing better on average than those who "didn't spend as much time on their homework as they should have" (or at least that's how you remember it). Those who chose to work hard tend to get rewarded.

Now let's compare your school to some notorious inner-city schools where the outcomes for all the kids are much worse. Those schools have a large sample size, wherein the only linking attribute seems to be place of birth, which, I hope you will agree, should not affect natural or in-born traits like intelligence, persistence, resilience, etc. And yet the outcomes for all these kids turns out to be much worse? Is it because they all happened to freely make bad choices? I am not trying to put words in your mouth, of course, but that seems to be the logical result of your meritocratic theory: that heterogeneous groups across the system just all happen to make bad choices.

Now maybe you mean something else when you say "merit" or "hard work." Maybe you aren't referring to the reasonable or probable range of behaviors that might be expected from a population set loose in the wild of their environment. Maybe you are referring to an objectively attainable standard based on knowledge and instilled discipline. But then what are we talking about when you say it's "fair" and "reliable" for a person who chooses to work hard to rise within the system? I mean if your only point is that if someone has the good fortune to be born into a family that instills in them from a young age the habits and behaviors they will need, the discipline they need, the knowledge they need (perhaps foremost the knowledge about how to find the knowledge they will need; the intellectual milieu in which they live), will oftentimes outperform a rich kid without those advantages, then yes, meritocracy is "alive and well." But when I said we need to think about "systems" and how human beings work, how they make choices, I meant that you haven't explained anything, and haven't actually defended any meaningful thesis about meritocracy at all.

A scramble by White House aides to respond to the brewing controversy over Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Russian lawyer may have exposed those aides to special counsel scrutiny.

They can now be called on by investigators led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller to explain what they may have learned about the meeting that the President's eldest son, Trump Jr., his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had with the Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign.

White House aides and Kushner's legal team began strategizing in late June over how to manage the disclosure of newly discovered emails setting up that meeting, according to sources close to Kushner's legal team.

Their public relations efforts culminated in a series of stumbles over the weekend in response to inquiries from The New York Times, which was working to publish a story about the meeting. Initial statements by Trump Jr., who organized the meeting, were undermined by more reporting from the paper.

Some of the President's closest aides, who were traveling with him back from Europe, then helped strategize about a response for Trump Jr., according to people briefed on the matter. The Times first reported on the crafting of the statement.

A sensitive legal matter such as this would normally have been handled by the attorneys, given that it was about the Russia investigation.

But the President's lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, who is designated to handle personal legal issues, was not traveling with the President and was largely uninvolved, according to the people familiar with the matter. The Times reported Wednesday that the President himself approved the statement, raising the possibility the President may have opened himself up to new legal issues not covered by attorney-client privilege. Jay Sekulow, the President's attorney, denied that Trump was involved.

"I wasn't involved in the statement drafting at all, nor was the President. I'm assuming that was between Mr. Donald Trump Jr., between Don Jr. and his lawyer. I'm sure his lawyer was involved, that's how you do it," said Sekulow in an interview on CNN's New Day.

Kasowitz's hiring was specifically intended to help shield White House aides from having to become witnesses in the ongoing investigation. As government employees, they aren't supposed to be involved in the President's personal matters.

The White House and lawyers for Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. did not comment for this story.

Multiple changing explanations for the meeting attributed to Donald Trump Jr. made a complex set of events spiral.

"It was a public relations disaster," one person close to Kushner's team told CNN.

Now, White House aides are pointing fingers at one another. Some of the discord is over a public relations strategy that seemed aimed in part at protecting Kushner, the only person in the June 2016 meeting who works in the White House and who already was under scrutiny for failing to disclose contacts with Russians. Donald Trump Jr., a private citizen, does not have an obligation to disclose the Russian meeting.

"Who do you have to protect? You have to protect the guy who filled out the form saying I never took this meeting," one of the sources said, referring to Kushner's SF-86 application for security clearance where meetings with foreigners need to be listed.

People close to the matter said that strategy went awry because Trump Jr. released misleading press statements.

On July 14 2017 13:44 mozoku wrote:

It's late, so this is going to be short.

I looked at the Atlantic article. It doesn't deal with intergenerational mobility at all, to start with. It deals with the rise in people incomes during their career (i.e. after school). This isn't really what we've been discussing, but whatever. Anyway, it's another case of practical significance vs statistical significance. The rank-rank correlation in the 15-year difference in people's incomes went from 0.59 to 0.64 overall. Hardly something to worth even bothering to write about. To make matters worse, they reference a mention a separate publication which finds results that contradicts theirs. So we have a tiny "significant" difference from another giant sample, and conflicting results between papers. The media loves to publish this stuff because it draws views and looks "sophisticated," but statisticians such as Andrew Gelman, Uri Simohnson, etc. have been critical of this sort of nonsense for years.

As far as the second article, it's talking about absolute mobility as opposed to relative mobility. We've been discussing the latter this whole time; the former is a different issue, and it's closely related with rising income inequality (which has its own set of drivers that are largely due to changes in how the economy functions in the past several decades).

The data in the appendix of the first paper confirms what I've been saying as well. If you had an income in the 3rd decile in 1993, you have a 15% chance of reaching the 7th decile or above in 2008. That roughly jives what I was saying earlier--significant class mobility is possible for individuals if they work hard. However, the way was the data is systematically underestimating class mobility anyway: it only looks at individuals who had an income at the start of the period. The most common way that class mobility is achieved intergenerationally (largely due to education reasons). So again, the numbers are largely painting a picture fairly close to what I had described earlier (i.e., someone in the ~20th percentile can reliably rise to 70-80th percentile through good life decisions and hard work). Obviously, the most crucial years to achieving class mobility are going to be high school through college/grad school.