Half Sigma

Rewarding students who do well

There’s another article in the NY Times today about the plan to give material rewards to students who get good grades in school (in this case, cell phones, which is something that children, apparently, highly desire).

What I don’t get are the negative comments, like this one:

[H]ow do you expect our students to be intrinsically motivated when they are receiving rewards for doing well? This is not the way to motivate our future!

It just seems so obvious to me that children from lower class families don’t see good grades in schools as something that’s very valued, and this will lead to changing that.

Every employer understands this. That’s why they motivate employees with paychecks, and bonuses and raises if they perform well. And that’s the kids’ future (hopefully). They will get a job after school where they get rewarded with money.

The person who wrote the comment above must be a liberal. Only liberals don’t understand the concept that people respond to incentives. That's why I always vote against liberals.

White liberals only drink bottled water

Has Christian Lander been reading my blog? Today he writes that white people like bottles of water. This is a topic I’ve previously covered.

Christian, however, does have a funny way of writing about it:

Water seems like a fairly simple concept. You turn on the tap, put glass underneath, and drink. Sadly, it is not this simple for white people.

On the whole, they are unable to put a glass under a tap and just drink. In fact, this is such a strange concept that the city of New York had to launch a rather large PR campaign to show white people that it was possible to actually drink the water that comes out of the tap!

People are irrational on a daily basis

There’s an interesting John Tierney article in today’s NY Times about the new book Predictably Irrational. It looks like something I’m going to have to read. The author of the book, Dan Ariely, also has a new blog.

The Tierney article focuses on human’s irrationality in keeping options open. Open options often incur maintenance costs. We would have more resources available for our good options if we allowed our bad options to close.

The placebo effect and anti-depressant drugs

According to a new study, anti-depressant drugs work little better than placebos. From Time Magazine

Researchers from the U.K., U.S. and Canada analyzed results for fluoxetine (better known by the brand name Prozac), venlafaxine (Effexor), nefazodone (Serzone) and paroxetine (Paxil or Seroxat) — all members of a class of drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). The researchers' paper, published this week in the journal PLoS Medicine, claims that only patients who are diagnosed "at the upper end of the very severely depressed category" get any meaningful benefit from the widely prescribed drugs. For the others, the paper says, antidepressants are barely more effective than a placebo (although patients suffering from depression, like those suffering from chronic pain, generally do see a substantial placebo benefit).

A lot of money could be saved if doctors just prescribed cheap placebos.

Do you have to pay tax on scholarships that include room and board?

It was asked, in the comments, whether a student receiving free room and board from Brown University has to pay taxes on it. The answer is yes, but with a possible loophole.

§ 117(a) of the Internal Revenue Code excludes from gross income “qualified scholarships,” and § 117(d)(1) excludes “qualified tuition reductions.” Only amounts used for “qualified tuition and related expenses” can be excluded. § 117(b)(2) defines the term “qualified tuition and related expenses”:

(A) tuition and fees required for the enrollment or attendance of a student at an educational organization described in section 170(b)(1)(A)(ii), and

(B) fees, books, supplies, and equipment required for courses of instruction at such an educational organization.

You don’t have to pay tax on free tuition, or anything else that’s “required” for courses of instruction, but you do have to pay tax on financial aid that covers other expenses.

Note the importance of the word “required.” If a university requires all students to own a notebook computer, then a free notebook computer would be excluded from income. But if the computer is merely suggested, and the university gives you a free computer, you would have to pay tax on the value of the computer. See Proposed Regulation § 1.117-6(c)(6) Example (1). This explains why many universities have instituted policies requiring every student to have a computer.

If the text of the statute doesn’t make it clear enough that room and board is not an allowable “related expense,” Proposed Regulation § 1.117-6(c)(2) states:

In order to be treated as related expenses under this section, the fees, books, supplies, and equipment must be required of all students in the particular course of instruction. Incidental expenses are not considered related expenses. Incidental expenses include expenses incurred for room and board, travel, research, clerical help, and equipment and other expenses that are not required for either enrollment or attendance at an educational organization, or in a course of instruction at such educational organization.

But, what happens if a college “requires” that all students live in campus housing and be on the campus meal plan, thus making the “fees” for these items “required for enrollment”? Is this a way around the tax problem?

I believe that if Brown University requires all students to live in campus housing and be on the meal plan in order to attend, then grants for such expenses magically become excluded from taxable income under § 117(a).

Ivy League schools offering free ride for prole students

Poor means parents who earn less than $60,000, and if you fit into that category and attend Brown, you will get a free ride. Brown joins Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth and Stanford.

I am usually very suspicious of charity, especially from the Ivy League, but this seems like a good thing for college students with the misfortune of being born to prole parents.

I also wonder how it might be possible for parents to game the system.

According to Brown, 60% of students who attend Brown have their entire tuition, room, and board, (approximately $200,000 for four years) completely paid for by their parents.

Married, despite video game habit

There’s an article in today’s NY Times about a Japanese woman who married a Thai man despite the fact that he spends a lot of time playing video games (including World of Warcraft).

(1) A white girl would probably be far less forgiving of this habit than a Japanese girl. (Wait a minute. Is "Walsh" a Japanese name?)

(2) There’s a suggestion in the article on their vows that he might be somewhat financially well off. He “has held top management posts in several start-up businesses he has invested in.”

The following comment is how the typical American woman feels about this:

I refuse to date boys who play WoW or any other kind of video game. Period. When an ex bragged to me that it was what he was "good at," as opposed to any sort of sport, musical instrument, or other far more interesting hobby, I realized that it would never work out. Perhaps it sounds shallow, but the risk of forgoing a beautiful day in order to sit inside and play a video game is simply unacceptable to me. My current boyfriend agrees.

The above comment demonstrates (among other things) the truth of entry #9 at the Stuff White People Like blog: making you feel bad about not going outside.

Jamie Johnson in the Wall Street Journal

There's an article about Jamie Johnson in the Wall Street Journal (which I think is available for free to non-subscribers). I recently wrote about his documentary Born Rich.

His new documentary is showing on Cinemax (but alas, is not available on Netflix). But he had trouble finding rich people willing to talk to him. Even supposedly liberal billionaires, like Warren Buffett and George Soros refused to talk to him.

There's also a NY Times article.

Michelle Obama failed the bar exam

Steve Sailer reports that Michelle Obama failed the July 1988 Illinois bar exam.

The bar exam is extremely easy. I just passed the New York bar exam again this summer, despite having not studied any law for more than a decade. So I’ve taken three bar exams, and passed all three of them.

This information indicates that Michelle Obama was either (1) woefully underqualified to be admitted to Harvard Law School (no doubt being black helped); or (2) exceptionally lazy; or (3) both. It should be pointed out that she had a job lined up at Sidley Austin (BIGLAW), and those jobs don’t start until after the summer bar exam, so she had the opportunity to study full-time for the bar exam and thus she has no excuse for failing it.

This type of stuff really pisses me off because I was clearly more qualified than Michelle Obama to work at a firm like Sidley Austin, but she got the prestigious high-paying job and not me because of her blackness.

Liberal feminists discover Stuff White People Like

“Days of Broken Arrows” left me a link to a post at a feminist blog about Stuff White People Like.

You want to read this post for the comments, which demonstrate the cluelessness of white liberals. Hardly any of them understand the fact that the overwhelming majority of white people don’t behave the way they do. On commenter writes:

I’m a vegan, I recycle, compost, read books from the library, drink organic tea, ride a bike, etc, etc, and I am not upper class and it has nothing to do with my being white. There’s this thing called individuality.

How can someone think they are expressing their “individuality” by acting exactly like everyone else in their peer group?

Among teenagers, poor girls most likely to blog

A NY Times article about girls and the internet has some interesting statistics along with some clueless analysis. But I may as well quote from the original Pew Report:

Overall, girls continue to dominate the teen blogosphere; 35% of all online teen girls blog, compared with just 20% of online teen boys. As was the case in 2004, there is relatively little variation by age in blogging activity when looking at all teens. The gender gap for blogging, however, has actually grown larger over time. Virtually all of the growth in teen blogging between 2004 and 2006 is due to the increased activity of girls. Older teen girls are still far more likely to blog when compared with older boys (38% vs. 18%), but younger girl bloggers have grown at such a fast clip that they are now outpacing even the older boys (32% of younger girls blog vs. 18% of older boys).

Now, for some cluelessness from the NY Times:

But even though girls surpass boys as Web content creators, the imbalance among adults in the computer industry remains. Women hold about 27 percent of jobs in computer and mathematical occupations, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In American high schools, girls comprised fewer than 15 percent of students who took the AP computer science exam in 2006, and there was a 70 percent decline in the number of incoming undergraduate women choosing to major in computer science from 2000 to 2005, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology.

The Pew article is about “Teens and Social Media.” Everyone knows that girls are more social than boys. This is sort of like asking the question, “girls use cell phones a lot more than boys, so why are engineers who design cell phones so overwhelmingly male?”

Girls like to write stuff about their lives, no doubt about it, but they don’t like doing practical stuff such as programming computers. The computer is just a tool like a cell phone. Girls are happy to use the tools, but have no interest in designing them.

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Now, a more interesting finding from Pew is that poor children are more likely to blog than rich children:

Teens living in households earning less than $50,000 per year are considerably more likely to blog than those living in higher-income households; fully 35% of online teens whose parents fall in the lower income brackets have created an online journal or blog, while just 24% of those in the higher income brackets have done so.

An even more pronounced contrast is evident when looking at teens who live with single parents vs. those who live with married parents. Online teens living in single-parent homes are far more likely to have shared their writing through a blog; 42% of these teens keep a blog compared with 25% of teens living with married parents.

Poor children are more likely to have a single parent than rich children, so these two indicators are indicating the same thing. This means that blogging is low class--at least with respect to the type of confessional blogging done by teenagers. The higher classes value their privacy more than the lower classes; Paul Fussell wrote about this in his book Class.

[Peter and Trumwill say, in the comments below, that poor children have more time to blog than rich children, and I agree with them that this is a contributing factor. And also, children with only one parent are less supervised--parents who supervise their children may not allow them to blog for fear of stalkers and other unknown evils lurking on the internet.]

While authoring blogs is low class, reading blogs is high class. According to the Pew report, of those teenagers who say they read other people’s blogs, 63% lived in households earning $50,000 or more.

Slutty bridal gowns

NY Times article on slutty bridal gowns.

Obama continues to surge

As I previously predicted, Obama won the primary in Wisconsin and the caucus in Hawaii, by huge margins. I didn’t realize back then that the Washington primary was nonbinding, but Obama had a 3% point lead there too.

Hillary is relying on a Texas strategy. The theory is that Hispanics in Texas will vote for Hillary, and Texas is a winner-take-all state. But even before last night, a Texas poll showed that Obama had tied Hillary. With more momentum from Wisconsin, I predict Obama to pull ahead and win Texas.

Semicolon sighting

The NY Times reports (in an article currently at the top of the most-emailed list) that a semicolon was spotted on the NY subways.

But my former high school English teacher laments that it’s not having its desired effect:

In terms of punctuation, semicolons signal something New Yorkers rarely do. Frank McCourt, the writer and former English teacher at Stuyvesant High School, describes the semicolon as the yellow traffic light of a “New York sentence.” In response, most New Yorkers accelerate; they don’t pause to contemplate.

Paul Krugman has his cause and effect wrong

A reader emailed me a link to the latest Paul Krugman op-ed. To summarize the editorial in one sentence, Krugman says that research shows that poverty causes children to become stupid, so in order to prevent children from becoming stupid, we must spend massive billions of government dollars on anti-poverty programs.

Didn't Lyndon B. Johnson try that?

Obviously Krugman and the clueless researchers have the cause and effect wrong. Stupidity causes poverty, and then it's passed down genetically to the children.

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I should make clear that, even though stupidity causes poverty, the opposite is not true, genius does not cause wealth, at least not with the high reliability with which stupidity causes poverty.

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RESPONSE TO A COMMENT BELOW

"Speed" wrote:

uneducated mothers smoke, drink, eat crap and have increased stress (either stereotypical fights with their husbands, or lack of husbands, or cheated and got knocked up, financial problems, etc, etc) All these influence the baby before it is even born.

I agree with the above if you replace "uneducated mothers" with "low intelligence mothers."

This is a vicious circle effect the government has little control over. It's considered the greatest of moral crimes to encourage people of low intelligence to have fewer children. We also can't fix this problem by randomly switching babies in the hospitals.

I am in favor of using the schools to teach middle-class values, but the liberals are opposed to that too because it's "arrogant" to assume our values are better than their values. And it hurts the "self-esteem" of the kids to learn that their parents who drink while pregnant out-of-wedlock and who sell drugs have bad values.

The great thing about my idea to teach middle-class values is that it doesn't cost any extra money. We already have public schools, we just need to better utilize the teachers.

Who believes in evolution? Part II

Finally, my followup from Part I.

In Part II, I compare belief in evolution to score on the 10 question Wordsum vocabulary test. (I decided to ignore the few people who score below 4, because they tend to be too stupid to understand a lot of the GSS questions. As usual, I exclude people born outside the U.S. under the theory that an English vocabulary test is unfair to the foriegn born.)

This is the text of the question:

Now, I would like to ask you a few short questions like those you might see on a television game show. For each statement that I read, please tell me if it is true or false. If you don't know or aren't sure, just tell me so, and we will skip to the next question. Remember true, false, or don't know. i. Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals. (Is that true or false?)

Below are the results:

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -Weighted N		EVOLVED
		1 True	2 False	ROW TOTAL
WORDSUM	4	28.7 17	71.3 43	100.0 60
	5	44.3 53	55.7 67	100.0 121
	6	43.4 63	56.6 83	100.0 146
	7	49.9 73	50.1 73	100.0 146
	8	64.1 69	35.9 39	100.0 108
	9	73.3 43	26.7 16	100.0 59
	10	84.6 18	15.4 3	100.0 21
	COL TOTAL	51.0 337	49.0 323	100.0 660

Of course it's not surprising that smarter people are more likely to believe in evolution, but the difference is pretty extraordinary. Only 15% of people with Wordsum 10 disbelieve in evolution (although it's a pretty small sample size), while a whopping 57% of people with Wordum 6 (which is the average score) disbelieve in evolution.

While Wordsum does a great job of predicting belief in evolution, from the following chart you see that it does a very poor job of predicting wealth:

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -Weighted N		WEALTH
		less than $150,000	greater than $150,000	ROW TOTAL
WORDSUM	4	58.8 29	41.2 20	100.0 49
	5	59.6 60	40.4 41	100.0 101
	6	53.5 68	46.5 59	100.0 127
	7	54.2 70	45.8 59	100.0 130
	8	35.8 30	64.2 54	100.0 84
	9	42.0 24	58.0 33	100.0 57
	10	44.7 8	55.3 10	100.0 18
	COL TOTAL	51.1 290	48.9 277	100.0 566

The proportion of respondents with above-average wealth peaks at Wordsum 8 and then declines. Although the sample size is small, based on my previous analyses of the GSS, I believe that the dropoff in wealth for the smartest respondents is a real phenomenon and not merely an artifict of a small sample size.

Stay tuned for Part III.

Digital photography update

My digital photography blog has been updated with a post about the Canon G9 digital camera.

Is the author of Stuff White People Like an Asian male?

A commenter named "Tom Sawyer" left a very long comment on the Stuff White People Like blog explaining why he thinks the author of the blog is an Asian male. It's such a good comment it deserves to be read in it's entirety by more people, so I reproduce it below the fold.

Stuff White People Like

There’s an hilarious new blog called Stuff White People Like, but by “white people” he means limousine/latté liberals under the age of forty. Each post is titled with the name of something that “white people” like. Each post generally includes a stock photo, which means that the mysterious blog author is putting a lot of effort into his project.

For Example:

#5 Farmers Markets

White people like Farmers Markets for a number of reasons. The first is their undying need to support local economies (see future post), and the idea of buying direct from the farmer helps them assuage the fears instilled in them from reading Fast Food Nation (and yes, every white person has read this book).

White people also like Farmer’s Markets because it is outdoors (they love being outdoors), they can bring their dogs and children in expensive strollers, and they get to see other white people. If they are single, this is a good place to meet other single white people who share their passion for sustainability.

The idea of calling these limousine/latté liberals just “white people” is brilliant because, not only is it true that they are nearly all white, but it will make them feel extra guilty about being white, and perhaps make them aware of how stupid some of their beliefs are.

I believe that the whole limousine/latté liberal lifestyle is a substitute for religion, which explains the strange liberal dietary restrictions. Liberalism-as religion explains why the liberal feels as smug about being vegetarian as the evangelical Christian feels about his belief in Christ.

Born Rich

Born Rich is a 2003 documentary movie directed by Jamie Johnson, of the family that founded the company Johnson & Johnson. The documentary consists of a series of interviews of college-aged children of the rich, along with some of Jamie’s narration. Jamie was about 23-years old when this movie was filmed, and yes the movie does have the look of an NYU film student’s final project, but therein lies some of its charm.

What other people have to say about this movie is, in some ways, more interesting the movie itself. Not surprisingly to me, the college-age children of the super-rich aren’t that much different than the college-age children of regular multi-millionaires, and there were lots of children of regular multi-millionaires attending the University of Pennsylvania. Children of regular multi-millionaires are more likely to attend private day-schools, while children of billionaires are more likely to attend private boarding schools, but there’s a lot of overlap. The point is that they grow up going to the same schools, so naturally they aren’t that much different.

Like the regular upper-middle class, the true upper class shares the ethos that one should go to college, and then “do” something. The days when the children of the American upper class would do nothing at all with their lives except go to parties (like the main character of the Edith Wharton book The House of Mirth) are now past us. It’s for this reason that the only really interesting person in the movie was Cody Franchetti. Cody is a “baron” who grew up in Europe, so he has a very un-American view of wealth. Cody is the only character in the movie who lives like the masses imagine a stereotypical rich person to live. He doesn’t pretend to “do” anything except collect antiques, and he goes to the tailor once a week to have expensive clothes made. He says that he doesn’t understand why rich Americans feel guilty about being rich. The typical reviewer of this movie hates Cody

Most reviewers like Ivanka Trump the best of all the interviewees. I think she’s awfully cute, but besides that I wasn’t too impressed. What impressed others is that Ivanka is very good at talking in a mature manner; she’s the most guarded of all the interviewees, only saying politically correct stuff. The exception is in one segment where she expresses her genuine outrage at a comment that a regular person in Australia made to her, something about how great it must be for her not to have any problems. It sounded like an innocent faux pas to me, but Ivanka is livid that someone thinks that, because she’s rich, it means she doesn’t have any problems. That fact that she’s so angry about it just demonstrates, to me, that behind her politically correct façade she has a hugely inflated opinion of herself combined with complete lack of desire to understand regular people.

A female interviewee I found more interesting than Ivanka was Stephanie Erklentz (yes, she’s no longer single), who isn’t quite model perfect like Ivanka, but she’s still cute, and she also seems very familiar. No, I don’t know her, but I’ve run across girls who act like her, who are smart enough to do well in elite colleges but are also obsessed with shopping for handbags. I thought her most interesting comment was how she worked for one day at an investment bank (at least in the interview she made it seem as if it were only one day), and then she quit when she realized how many hours she was expected to work. After all, why should she work hard when her family is rich and she gets to marry a 29-year-old hedge fund manager?

Luke Weil is probably tied with Cody for most disliked interviewee. While I disagree about Cody, I agree that there is little to like about Luke the person, who epitomizes that stereotype of the spoiled brat rich kid. On the other hand, he’s a much more interesting interviewee than Ivanka because he reveals his true self to the camera. A little Googling revealed that Luke has recently spent some time in jail. That’s a real waste of an Ivy League education.

One thing I learned from this movie that I didn’t know before is that Brown is the school most associated with the children of the very rich. Perhaps this is because Brown has a pure liberal arts undergraduate program with no practical majors such as accounting or engineering. And it tends to be the lowest ranked Ivy, so it’s the easiest one to get into. Luke Weil talked about getting extremely poor grades at Brown, yet he wasn’t kicked out of the school because his parents were too rich. Luke reminds me a lot of some guy who lived on the same floor of “High Rise East” as me when I was a sophomore at Penn.

The most humorous parts of the movie are the scenes featuring Jamie’s father, who is a nerdy Fred Rogers-like character. Jamie’s father doesn’t work and seems to spend most of his time oil painting. Jamie asks his dad what he should “do,” and his dad suggests a career as an antique map dealer. So Jamie visits an antique map dealer, who reveals his middle class background when he expresses his surprise that someone who was as wealthy as Jamie would want his job.

Jamie’s narration is kind of stiff, but he does a much better job on the two commentary tracks, where he loosens up, and has an extra year or so of wisdom behind him. You may think it’s strange having a commentary track to a documentary, because a documentary is just people talking, and here we have not one but two commentary tracks featuring people talking about other people talking, but nevertheless, you need to watch this movie again and listen to both commentary tracks. One commentary track features just Jamie, and the other has a three-way conversation with Jamie, his maternal uncle who collaborated with him on the film, and Cody Franchetti. In addition to expounding on his philosophy of not feeling guilty about being rich, Cody expresses his lack of understanding of why Americans make a big deal about where they go to college. Cody says that intelligence is innate, and that he knows of dumb people with elite college degrees. My answer to Cody is that he’s right about intelligence being innate, but in America it’s not politically correct to say so. It’s more politically correct to believe that the right education is what makes you intelligent. Cody’s attitudes are clearly influenced by some European aristocratic belief that nobles are born better than everyone else.

An interesting conversation on the commentary track occurred when Jamie was talking about some of the negative reviews by various “freelance journalists.” Jamie says that most of them are living off of trust funds themselves, and they all got very defensive about that fact when he brought it up with them. This gets to a key point I make all the time on this blog, that the “cool” professions, such as journalism, are heavily populated by children of the rich, but they don’t wear t-shirts that say “my parents are decamillionaires,” so unfortunately many middle-class children try to get into these professions without realizing how the odds are so stacked against them.

Born Rich is a must-see movie, but there should come with some sort of warning that only advanced students of social class in America will be able to appreciate its subtleties.

Getting your kid into kindergarten

A reader emailed me a link to a must-read article about the difficulty of getting your kid into a decent kindergarten.

"Everybody wants to go the same 15 schools, but they don't have 500 kindergarten places. They have 30 to 60," said Amanda Uhry, who charges $15,000 to help families through the admissions process. "It's like a parental feeding frenzy. You can't buy your way in. If you've got $5 billion, there's probably somebody who is applying who has $10 billion."

. . .

"Families are in the middle of the, 'Where-am-I-going-to- get-in' panic, it's Crazy Friday," Cynthia Bing of the nonprofit Parents League of New York said in a phone interview. Her group doesn't charge to help families apply.

The "panicked response" has been building in recent years, Ashe said. "We don't know if applications are going up because there's more people out there, or if there's just more panic out there."

I don't blame parents for panicking. If your kid doesn't get into private kindergarten, it means he or she will get beaten up by the black kids at the free public kindergarten. The only thing to do would be to move to Westchester.

I have to ask again, why do people have children? It doesn't really seem like it's worth all of the effort.

$235 for a color laser printer!

My new HP 2605dn color laser printer arrived yesterday. It was only $200 plus $35 shipping.

I can't believe you can buy a color laser printer for so little money. I remember when a color laser printer cost at least $1000. Now, it doesn't pay to buy a black and white laser printer because the color laser printer costs the same price.

Not only does it print in color, it also prints on both sides of the paper!

It costs more money to visit my Manhattan dentist for a regular checkup than it costs to own your own color laser printer.

For the price of one year of tuition at NYU I could buy two hundred color laser printers.

Yesterday was Valentine's Day, and I couldn't imagine a better Valentine's Day present than a color laser printer. It would have cost more money to take a girlfriend out to Valentine's Day dinner at a romantic Manhattan restaurant than it cost to buy myself a color laser printer.

* * *

The only caveat about the price is that it would cost $300 to replace all of the toner cartridges. I guess, when it runs out of color toner, it's more cost effective to throw it out and buy a new printer than it is to buy new toner cartridges.

Good furniture and children don’t mix

From today’s NY Times, an article about children and expensive furniture:

During two renovations, each costing more than $100,000, they built a two-sided fireplace to separate the living and dining rooms, put in a wine cellar and installed a sleek maple and granite kitchen. They bought molded-wood chairs in the Arne Jacobsen style, Murano glass pendant lamps and a custom walnut entertainment unit. Ms. Brown, who had become obsessed with interior design in law school, poured heart and soul into the projects.

But just as Ms. Brown and Mr. Friedman were establishing their first truly grown-up residence — she was 38, he 37 — Ms. Brown gave birth to their first child, Harrison, a boy who turned out as bouncing as most.

Suddenly they were confronted with a question that had never before occurred to them: given the way baby gear and toys take over households, the uncivilized habits of toddlers and the dangers posed by sharp-edged contemporary furniture, could Ms. Brown and Mr. Friedman continue to live their high-design dream?

First of all, this makes you wonder what good children are for in the first place, if they ruin your expensive furniture.

But that thought aside, kids ruining the furniture was not as big an issue back when people had children in their early twenties when Mother Nature wanted them to. By the time they were old enough to afford expensive furniture, the children were old enough not to destroy it.

Environmentalist liars

The NY Times Dot Earth Blog reports that a private experiment to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by fertilizing the ocean was scrapped because of protests from environmentalists.

This is so disgusting. The same people who whine "earth is warming earth is warming earth is warming" fight tooth and nail to shut down an experiment to see if the earth can be cooled.

This demonstrates how the global warming people aren't being honest with us. They don't really care about carbon dioxide, what they really want is to use the fear of global warming to effect a radical change in our lifestyle. Every technology that could reduce carbon dioxide, such as nuclear power or ocean fertilization, they oppose.

Woman dumps boyfriend because he eats meat

A NY Times article features a woman who dumped her boyfriend because he likes to grill meat:

Lisa Romano, 31, a vegan and school psychologist in Belleville, N.Y., said she recently ended a relationship with a man who enjoyed backyard grilling. He had no problem searing her vegan burgers alongside his beef patties, but she found the practice unenlightened and disturbing.

Her disapproval “would have become an issue later even if it wasn’t in the beginning,” Ms. Romano said. “I need someone who is ethically on the same page.”

I guess that explains why she's 31 and still unmarried.

Potomac primaries

9:31 PM: Boy, Hillary sure got CRUSHED tonight. Why doesn't she just drop out? Hillary's Texas strategy is looking a lot like Giuliani's Florida strategy.

* * *

In her pep rally in Texas (where there isn't much pep), she talked about how she wants to make energy cheaper. What a dumb place to say that, Texas is booming right now because of the high oil and gas prices.

* * *

Meanwhile, the talking heads note that McCain, although he won Virginia, he only won it by a slim margin, unlike the massively huge margin by which Obama beat Hillary. Obama is looking like a much stronger frontrunner than McCain.

* * *

9:45 PM: Obama is getting better at giving speeches. I actually laughed at his quip about Republicans for Obama: Obamicans. And he never says a single policy thing, so he never has to turn anyone off with actual policies they might disagree with.

9:58 PM: The "hope-monger" comment was funny also. This is a long speech.

Goodbye Hillary

Polls show that Obama will sweep today’s primaries in Virginia, Maryland, and DC. Maryland, especially, is a state where I would have expected Hillary to do well if she were actually going to win the nomination. Hillary is supposed to be strong in the northeast.

Next week looks very grim for Hillary, there is a primary in Wisconsin, a region of the country in which Obama is very strong and where he won in the neighboring states of Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota. Then there’s a primary in Hawaii where Obama used to live. And finally there is Washington. Washington is like California, but with fewer Hispanics. Without the Hispanic vote supporting Hillary in California, Obama would have won there. Washington also has very few blacks, and Obama does well in states with very few blacks. It's hard to see how Hillary could win in Washington.

After winning so many consecutive primaries, Obama will be considered the frontrunner, and he will get all the votes from people who only vote for the frontrunner.

Goodbye Hillary. I can’t say I’m sad to see you lose.

Another Susan/Bob state-of-mind capital example

I obviously used a bad example in the previous post, so let me try it again.

Susan and Bob both graduated from the same college with the same GPA, and scored the same on the LSAT. Susan intends to go to Harvard Law School. Bob intends to go to a second-tier state law school because of the free tuition, and he doesn’t realize how lousy the job opportunities are for graduates of second-tier law schools.

Susan will probably be making $190,000/year when she graduates, but Bob will probably only be making $45,000/year.

Thus Susan has more state-of-mind capital than Bob. The state-of-mind capital will turn into track-record capital in three years when they both get their degrees.

Contrarian health news

Artificial sweeteners cause weight gain:

Casting doubt on the benefit of low-calorie sweeteners, research released Sunday reported that rats on diets containing saccharin gained more weight than rats given sugary food.

Statins cause memory loss:

"This drug makes women stupid," Orli Etingin, vice chairman of medicine at New York Presbyterian Hospital, declared at a recent luncheon discussion sponsored by Project A.L.S. to raise awareness of gender issues and the brain. Dr. Etingin, who is also founder and director of the Iris Cantor Women's Health Center in New York, told of a typical patient in her 40s, unable to concentrate or recall words. Tests found nothing amiss, but when the woman stopped taking Lipitor, the symptoms vanished. When she resumed taking Lipitor, they returned.

State-of-mind capital

Here’s an interesting economics question involving “human capital.”

Bob and Susan both just graduated from high school. They both took the same classes in high school and scored the same on the SAT, so they would seem to both possess the same amount of human capital.

Both intend to attend college. However, Bob intends to major in computer engineering, a field where he will probably earn $100,000 per year. Susan intends to major in studio art, a field in which she probably won’t find any sort of decent paying work.

The expected present value of Bob’s future earnings is a lot higher than Susan’s. How can this be, unless Bob possesses more human capital than Susan? Yet above, I wrote that they “seem” to possess the same amount of human capital!

Bob most possess some sort of human capital that Susan doesn’t in order to explain this expected income disparity. I’m going to call it state-of-mind capital.

Maybe state-of-mind capital is a fifth type of human capital that should be added to my previous list of four types of human capital?

UPDATE

When economists like Gary Becker write about "human capital", they are mostly talking about how much money people are able to make. The theory (which is false in my opinion) is that how much money you earn is exactly equal to your contribution to the economy. So Bob, in the example above, is expected to contribute more to the economy than Susan, therefore he has more "human capital" than Susan.