Slashdot Mirror

Hilarious.

http://ago.mo.gov/VehicleStops...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.or...

http://www.nber.org/digest/sep...

There's more, there's so much more! There's so much more it kind of drives me insane! I could list hundreds of links! Educational opportunities, health outcomes, workplace advancement, legal mistreatment, housing discrimination, homeland security - name an institution where you think black women are outclassing white men, name one, and I will throw it back in your face so freaking fast.

If you think that allowing an entity control an idea just simply because they "though of it first" is practical solution simply imagine a world where this is the case for everything. The wheel, fire screws, language ... we would go crazy trying to attribute value to people. In fact since every idea is based on others, giving the person who thought of it first indefinite control means you will stifle new ideas. Ok patents have a limited life, but as the pace of technology increases, the length of a patients should decrease, as soon as everybody in the world can improve on an idea, not just the inventor the better. I think 20 years is far too long. I don't think there is evidence that patients increase innovation.(http://www.google.co.nz/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=11&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CFIQtwIwCg&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dq1Pi4w8ddA8&ei=ilOGVKnhDsLs8AWtr4K4Ag&usg=AFQjCNHKvJQ8POQ4jnw6Jlda2o31NmIIYw) or http://www.nber.org/papers/w99...

Knowledge is not like physical things its replication comes without cost and the more people that can use that knowledge the better off everyone will be. That is why we teach our children isn't it? So that they can learn the ideas of the past, in order that they can build on them in the future.

The internet's, power lies in people sharing ideas (not porn, cat movies, or what I had for breakfast) it seems ironic that we have invented a mechanism which drastically increases our ability to share knowledge and people are jumping up and downs saying don't share its evil, its just like stealing.

Don't get me wrong we should compensate the entity that came up with an idea fairly, but I don't think the entity getting the money is the right person to come up with what is fair, they will always want as much as possible. (Neither is the person spending the money)

Good point, They thought of that. Their answer is no.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w98...

In Section 5, we discuss possible interpretations of our results, focusing especially on two issues. First, we examine whether the race-specic names we have chosen might also proxy for social class above and beyond the race of the applicant. Using birth certicates data on mother’s education for the dierent names used in our sample, we nd little relationship between social background and the name specic callback rates.

Also see Table 11.

Here's one:

Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination (NBER Working Paper No. 9873).

Studies like that have been done repeatedly for decades. I expect that if you read the NBER study, they'd have a bibliography of older research.

Each one repeatedly demonstrates actual discrimination against blacks in hiring. I don't know how anyone could avoid that conclusion. Employers are more likely to hire a person with a white name than a person with a black name with the identical resume. It's not just socioeconomic disadvantage, inability to do the job, lack of qualifications or laziness.

I don't know if anyone has done a similar study in tech fields specifically, but it would be a good thing to do. If you're taking a black studies course, you could get a good paper out of it. Send out 100 resumes to Monster.com from Greg and 100 resumes from Jamal.

If you want to know generally why there are so few minorities in science, Science magazine has had many articles.

http://www.chicagobooth.edu/ca...

http://www.nber.org/digest/sep...

Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination (NBER Working Paper No. 9873).

Employers' Replies to Racial Names

"Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback."

Now a "field experiment" by NBER Faculty Research Fellows Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan measures this discrimination in a novel way. In response to help-wanted ads in Chicago and Boston newspapers, they sent resumes with either African-American- or white-sounding names and then measured the number of callbacks each resume received for interviews. Thus, they experimentally manipulated perception of race via the name on the resume. Half of the applicants were assigned African-American names that are "remarkably common" in the black population, the other half white sounding names, such as Emily Walsh or Greg Baker.

To see how the credentials of job applicants affect discrimination, the authors varied the quality of the resumes they used in response to a given ad. Higher quality applicants were given a little more labor market experience on average and fewer holes in their employment history. They were also portrayed as more likely to have an email address, to have completed some certification degree, to possess foreign language skills, or to have been awarded some honors.

In total, the authors responded to more than 1,300 employment ads in the sales, administrative support, clerical, and customer services job categories, sending out nearly 5,000 resumes. The ads covered a large spectrum of job quality, from cashier work at retail establishments and clerical work in a mailroom to office and sales management positions.

Here's more:

http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/200...

Study: Black man and white felon – same chances for hire

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12...

In Job Hunt, College Degree Can’t Close Racial Gap

"A more recent study, published this year in The Journal of Labor Economics found white, Asian and Hispanic managers tended to hire more whites and fewer blacks than black managers did."

"There is also the matter of how many jobs, especially higher-level ones, are never even posted and depend on word-of-mouth and informal networks, in many cases leaving blacks at a disadvantage. A recent study published in the academic journal Social Problems found that white males receive substantially more job leads for high-level supervisory positions than women and members of minorities."

Companies like Nike have been steadily moving their labor to the next cheapest place whenever people start asking for fair wages and working conditions.

Actually the evidence indicates that multinational firms routinely provide higher wages and better working conditions in poor countries than their local counterparts, and they are typically not attracted preferentially to countries with weak labor standards.

On the other hand, if manufacturers are forced to stay in high labor cost countries, they will simply use more automation and employ fewer people. US real manufacturing output is near an all-time high, yet US manufacturing jobs are down 35% from the peak in 1979. This is not just a US trend, but typical of all advanced economies.

a) If you honestly think that unequal representation of people that aren't mostly white or asian men in any given technical field is primarily because white and asian men are simply less sensitive to not being given preferential treatment, and work harder, then you either have a really overinflated sense of your own awesomeness, or have a severely limited understanding of the social and financial challenges that other people face. For example, Marianne Bertrand, Sendhil Mullainathan conducted a study, showing that in responding to 1300 job ads, sending out 5000 distinct resumes, with carefully crafted fake people with equal amounts of experience and education, some with more commonly white names (e.g. Emily, Greg) and some with more commonly black names, (e.g. Jamal, Lakisha.) The white names received 50% more callbacks. Saying that you're a better person because you're in a traditionally more socioeconomically empowered group is like saying you're a better gamer than someone you consistently do better than, even though you're playing on a lower difficulty level. Might you be? Possibly. Can you use career success as a useful metric to calculate that? Absolutely not.

b) The expression you're looking for is 'kid' gloves. The leather from kids– young goats– is extremely soft and thin, making it ideal to handle extremely delicate objects... that is unless there are some sort of gloves made from a kit fox, or perhaps some sort of glove making kit, that have suddenly become preferential.

http://www.nber.org/digest/sep...

The National Bureau of Economic Research sent out 5,000 resumes to 1,300 jobs randomly assigning black or white sounding names to the resumes. The black sounding names received 50% less callbacks than the white sounding names.

So is "Jesse" a black sounding or white sounding name? What about "Malcolm" or "Martin"? (Just borrowing the names of three of the most famous black civil rights activists as examples.) Or in order to be "black sounding" does a name have to also indicate a socio-economic status (which will also inevitably conveniently conflate your results)?

http://www.nber.org/digest/sep...

The National Bureau of Economic Research sent out 5,000 resumes to 1,300 jobs randomly assigning black or white sounding names to the resumes. The black sounding names received 50% less callbacks than the white sounding names.

These folks simply do not understand that the underlying goal is to drive U.S. wages to third world levels by introducing large labor surpluses.

It is unlikely that any surplus of labor would lead employers to pay significantly less than the productivity of a worker, especially in sectors such as computer programming where barriers to entry are low and new firms can rapidly form.

It is possible that labor surpluses could actually lower the prices of goods and services in general, which can benefit consumers.

for those who talk about expanding the economy to accommodate millions of new workers; how's that working for you?

Research suggests that "U.S. natives (especially high-skill natives) appear to have benefited from greater availability and reduced prices of nongraded goods and services that are intensive in low-skill labor"

Complimentary labor from low-skilled immigrants makes things better for high-skilled natives, although it may have a small negative effect on the earnings of low-skilled natives (especially those that drop out of high school).

BTW, I know several women in tech fields who only have the opportunity to work because of the low cost of services from immigrant nannies for their young children, immigrant house cleaners, etc.

Minor correction guy, here. That's a proportionally higher chance, not a high chance. Since the best estimates for being gay put it at less than 10% of the population,

Well, You are only off by 100%, that's not bad. In a Microsoft or Congress kind of way, that is. 50% is a failing grade.

buh buh, if the team (and every other team in the entire NBA) is comprised almost entirely of black players, then the we need some kind of investigation on diversity, and how the NBA can make itself a more tolerant, and diverse organization.

You think you are being clever, but you are absolutely right. The fact that the NBA is nearly 100% black (while the owners are nearly 100% white) is proof of racism. Just not in the way you think. The reason black people dominate the sport is because for the majority of black kids there are only two options to improve their lot in life - deal drugs or play the pro-sports lottery.

No other profession has that level of competition, it is just crazy intense. If you had ANY other legit options with less competition, you'd be a fool not to take them. Losing the lottery sucks, much better to take a path where you have a higher chance of success, even if it won't make you a multi-millionare. A good job is better than no job.

So that's why blacks dominate pro-sports, most of them don't have any other choice. Take a look at their backgrounds - practically all of them come from poor backgrounds. Even Richard Sherman, the NFL cornerback who got called a "thug" but actually attended Stanford came from Compton.

Sure there are poor whites, asians and hispanics too and their lives aren't easy. But they don't have the same levels of racism to overcome in order to a get a normal job.

Maybe, most undergrad educations are the same, but a degree from Harvard says you got accepted to Harvard.

There was a follow-up study (Dale-Kruger) to a interesting study a while back that more-or-less concluded it's more important that you apply to Ivy school, but even if you don't get in, still go to a decent school. Krueger and Dale found that for students bright enough to win admission to a top school, later income "varied little, no matter which type of college they attended." In other words, the student, not the school, was responsible for the success.

In fact the data actually suggested that it didn't even mater that much if you even were admitted into that elite school, only that you had the ego/self-confidence to apply to an elite school.

Yes.

We find that alcohol consumption fell sharply at the beginning of Prohibition, to approximately 30 percent of its pre-Prohibition level. During the next several years, however, alcohol consumption increased sharply, to about 60-70 percent of its pre-prohibition level. The level of consumption was virtually the same immediately after Prohibition as during the latter part of Prohibition, although consumption increased to approximately its pre-Prohibition level during the subsequent decade.

That record stands even when people aren't asked at all about their alcohol use. Rather, cirrhosis rates can be measured, and show a similar trend.

All that tells me is that the initial smash-up of bars and liquor distributors was temporarily successful at eliminating the immediate supply, but completely ineffective at lowering the actual consumption rate after supply chains were re-established.

Also, it tells me nothing about geekoid's claim that Prohibition "substantially reduce[d] domestic violence."

Yes.

We find that alcohol consumption fell sharply at the beginning of Prohibition, to approximately 30 percent of its pre-Prohibition level. During the next several years, however, alcohol consumption increased sharply, to about 60-70 percent of its pre-prohibition level. The level of consumption was virtually the same immediately after Prohibition as during the latter part of Prohibition, although consumption increased to approximately its pre-Prohibition level during the subsequent decade.

That record stands even when people aren't asked at all about their alcohol use. Rather, cirrhosis rates can be measured, and show a similar trend.

Ooooooo humble pie is served! I hate that icanhasdiy fucker... you got him good!

Yes.

We find that alcohol consumption fell sharply at the beginning of Prohibition, to approximately 30 percent of its pre-Prohibition level. During the next several years, however, alcohol consumption increased sharply, to about 60-70 percent of its pre-prohibition level. The level of consumption was virtually the same immediately after Prohibition as during the latter part of Prohibition, although consumption increased to approximately its pre-Prohibition level during the subsequent decade.

That record stands even when people aren't asked at all about their alcohol use. Rather, cirrhosis rates can be measured, and show a similar trend.

"Why is CEO pay so entirely disconnected from the value of said CEOs to society as a whole?"

This study notes that "that CEO wealth has been strongly tied to firm performance since the 1930s, and that relationship strengthened considerably after the mid-1980s."

It is possible that paying a CEO a lot of money to make them wealthy is part of making them be effective CEOs. Rich people command respect and attention from most people. Rich people like other rich people. Being rich may allow for CEOs to make the business connections with other rich CEOs. Being rich may allow for rich CEOs to command respect from those they manage.

Anthropologically, it is similar to the concept of the Big Man. You see this not only with CEOs, but also with gang leaders who end up reaping significant pay as a key element to maintain their status as a leader.

1) "The ratio of large-company CEO pay to firm market value is roughly similar to its level in the late-1970s and lower than its pre-1960s levels"

2) "Realized compensation was highly related to firm stock performance. In every size group, firms with CEOs in the top quintile of realized pay were in the top performing quintile; firms with CEOs in the bottom quintile of realized pay were in the worst performing quintile."

3) "CEO turnover levels have increased since the late 1990s, so CEOs can expect to be CEOs for less time than in the past. CEO turnover also has become increasingly related to poor firm stock performance"

4) "Consistent with that, top executive pay policies at over 98% of S&P 500 and Russell 3000 companies received majority shareholder support in the Dodd-Frank mandated Say-On-Pay votes in 2011."

Executive Compensation and Corporate Governance in the U.S.: Perceptions, Facts and Challenges

This isn't true at all, it's actually quite the opposite. The older line of thinking of organizations was to have a pyramid of managers, which gave line workers less autonomy. Today line workers are more empowered and organizations tend to be flattened in comparison.

Proof: http://www.nber.org/papers/w96...

In the early 1900's the highly bureaucratized management structures were largely a result of Max Weber's business principles, which started to fall out of favor in the 70's, and newer businesses try to avoid that system as much as they can. Some workers need to be micromanaged (yes, believe it or not most minimum wage workers can't tell their ass from a hole in the ground, which is why they make minimum wage) but firms where you're paid a higher salary want to avoid that as best as they can so that their employees can maximize their potential.

And before you go "aha you sound like a manager" no, I'm not in management, not interested in it either. I'm not morally opposed to being a manager either, like some who post on slashdot are, rather I just don't think it's a very fun thing to do. I'm actually the type who prefers to simply be handed a problem and asked to solve it within the defined parameters. You do that with management (especially project management,) but a lot of times you're bogged down with accounting, and I hate accounting (and things like it, such as logistics.)

Do you realize that doubling the minimum wage will also result in a net loss of jobs?

For someone who complained about lack of citations and statistics the sentence before, you sure make bold claims with nothing to back them up.

Loss of jobs has been the #1 agenda item for those against... uh, actually pretty much anything that might help the low-income people, be it minimum wage, unions, employee protection laws or really anything else.

Rarely is there any evidence for it. Two recent papers show that there is no significant impact:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w4509
http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/workingpapers/157-07.pdf

Now pony up your evidence or accept you've fallen for cheap rhetorics.

Luckily for this discussion, the data actually exists. Indiana recently went from not changing time to chaning time. Turns out energy costs are 1-3% more under daylight saving time than with out it.

Here's the citation:

NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES
DOES DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME SAVE ENERGY? EVIDENCE FROM A NATURAL EXPERIMENT IN INDIANA
Matthew J. Kotchen Laura E. Grant
Working Paper 14429 http://www.nber.org/papers/w14429

-Chris

Nonsense. That's like saying you can tell a particular baseball team is cheating by monitoring how often they win.

Poker does involve some skill (mostly in reading the table & other players). There is always the chance that one person at the table is reasonably good, and the others are just terrible. There is know way you could detect a cheat over the sample size of a couple of nights using statistics alone.

Monitoring the cards is a far simpler method, and provides much better data than statistics in this case.

The National Bureau of Economic Research defines a recession as:

a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.

And according to the NBER, the last recession in the US lasted from 4Q2007 to 2Q2009. We are not currently in a recession.

> It was interesting to see the guy's theory about patents, without checking his numbers.

I don't know what should be interesting about someone's theories. Anyone can have theories. What is interesting is the numbers, the evidence. The same as the Geocentric theory. It's a nice theory but it is totally wrong. That is why I'm so negative about him. If he would have some numbers to back up his theory I would praise him.

That is also why I'm so negative about almost all economists. Hard evidence in a complex world economy is very hard to get but it don't stop economists from postulating theories. It wouldn't be so bad if not for the politicians that then pick one theory that serves their agenda and then with the help of the economists push that agenda.

There was a recent example with Reinhart and Rogoff.
Here is their paper: Growth in a Time of Debt
From the National Bureau of Economic Growth.

When external debt reaches 60 percent of GDP, annual growth declines by about two percent; for higher levels, growth rates are roughly cut in half.

Nice claims no? Problem is, the data is completely bonkus. See Reinhart And Rogoff's Pro-Austerity Research Now Even More Thoroughly Debunked By Studies

Any real scientists would lose any creditability, but not so economists. I guess Reinhart and Rogoff are still call them self economists and they are still used by politicians to push policy.

It's not a question of that, it's a question of wholesale exportation of jobs overseas to get 1) cheaper labor 2) avoid government regulation 3) dodge taxes. There's lots of reasons why things cost more to produce in some countries vs. others. Because kids are small, they can get into small areas so why not use them in the manufacturing process for say ships? I can see Korean kids getting into all of those nooks and small areas. That's a niche market isn't it?

It's not like it hasn't all been done before.

I'm not arguing against globalization, far from it. US Consumers have also wrought most of this on themselves because that $19.99 thing from China is a must have item or a new Walmart opened up down the street so everybody has to shop there. Competition is healthy when everybody is playing by the same rules, not when one country dumps products and blocks its markets from US product . Or when it happens in other economic areas.. surprise!.

So, greed is everywhere from the consumer to the companies that export jobs to nations with policies to undermine entire industries. It's time people woke up and started smelling the cat shit otherwise it'll be cat food that you'll be eating when you get too old and can't retire comfortably.

The issue is what collateral damage prohibition causes, compared with the damage caused by the drug itself.

Agree. Illegality has been incredibly destructive and expensive. Which is why I'm arguing for regulation.

The question isn't really whether or not prohibition increased or decreased the amount of alcohol consumed. From what I can gather from reading the literature, it's extremely hard to tell. Accurate statistics of how much alcohol was consumed during prohibition are very hard to come by, and studies look at other secondary indicators for their data. It seems that the effect on consumption wasn't enormous, and didn't last long anyway. I'd love to see where your data backing up your claim of a correlation between usage and restrictions comes from.

I agree it is messy. Well there are 3 groups of statistics:

a) comparing wet to dry counties prior to national prohibition. These numbers are striking. The problem is that people went from dry counties to wet counties to drink. Sort of like people today going to Las Vegas or Atlantic City to gamble.

b) Once national prohibition went into effect you have solid secondary effects: cirrhosis death rates for men were 29.5 per 100,000 in 1911 and 10.7 in 1929. Admissions to state mental hospitals for alcoholic psychosis declined from 10.1 per 100,000 in 1919 to 4.7 in 1928. Now those might have decreased anyway. There was an anti-drinking movement and those numbers were dropping.

c) The amount of production in the USA before and after prohibition. My argument is that prohibition semi-permanently shifted USA consumption patterns down. Alcohol was heavily taxed both before and after prohibition so we have very good data on usage. Once alcohol became legal people bought less than half what they had before.

A good source for a lot of data is: http://www.nber.org/papers/w3675.pdf?new_window=1

I've never seen any study that didn't show a large drop. Which ones are you looking at that say there were no effects?

No, the claim that intelligence agencies can read overwritten data is not true. See
http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-gutmann.html

Here is a better article than the small blog post cited. Read the whole thing. The clincher for me was that when lead was removed from gasoline in different states at different times the reduction in violence in those areas tracked perfectly two decades later. Not only that, but the shape of the violence reduction data tracked well with the shape of the lead reduction data. (i.e. a fast phase out of lead resulted in a fast reduction of crime twenty years later.)

Corporate profits as a share of the economy are at all time lows, and we need to constrain rapacious labor to improve the economy. Sadly, the numbers do not bear this out. Stop giving out indentured servitude, let people stay here on work visas which allow them to change employers, and charge the same price with the same rights as USC/GC. And by the way, the evidence indicates that people are leaving because the American economy is growing sluggishly, and many countries are more attractive to return to because the are democratizing. http://www.nber.org/papers/w18780 But why listen to data when making policy if it gets in the way of lowering wages, throwing people out of jobs, and creating a non-voting class of workers, who cannot protect their rights with political power, against Citizen United empowered super-people?

Some interesting stuff from Nordhaus. I found this interesting: http://www.nber.org/papers/w12741.pdf But I don't understand the fixation on reducing greenhouse gases? Why are the alternatives not considered? Why do anything at all? Why does the fear of change make people do very risky experiments, such as deliberately shutting down valuable parts of the economy?

Environmental chicken littles don't have an unblemished track record, from preventing logging and forest fires, to opposition to GMO's, to the misery inflicted on poor countries by the blanket ban on DDT. Don't get me wrong, the green movement has some proud moments, but I fear it is turning into a new religion. A religion being when you believe what everyone else believes, with no supporting evidence.

Long story short, all this social and economic engineering is a Fatal Conceit, as Hayek would say. There, I have given myself away!

The fact that he tried to physically destroy things means he isn't nearly as smart as they want us to believe. They'll get quite a bit of it back. And more than likely will be able to get a pretty good profile of him by sequestering logs from various services, be it ISP, Xbox Live, etc.

Ah, no, they will get nothing back.

There is a huge myth around data recovery from physically damaged hard disk drives that all stems from an article written by Peter Gutmann as a research paper.
In the real world (Even the NSA's real world) this can not be done.

They have a much better chance of getting something back from the nvram in a cell phone uses as a clay pigeon.

Heck we have a lot of things that would be excessively expensive back in the day.

A simple everyday example is food.

Most food has been reduced to near the cost of the transportation necessary to deliver it to your area. Evidence for this is the large fluctuations in food prices in lock step with fuel price fluctuations. Further evidence of this is that all food conglomerates are now also shipping conglomerates, and this is so because thats where the value creation actually happens with regards to food. The food is worth very little where it is grown and where it is processed because of the extreme efficiencies that we have achieved. It only attains value through shipping. Shipping is where the value creation happens with regards to most foods.

Yes there are "brand names" that carry a premium, but much like Apple they are essentially niche irrelevant.

More on topic, this is the historic price of light in terms of median US labor:

year - hours of work needed to purchase 1000 lumen hours of light
1800 - 5.387
1850 - 2.998
1900 - 0.2204
1950 - 0.00188
1992 - 0.00012

here is the citation for those numbers

That was my FATHER's generation, not mine!

NO IT WASN'T. Median job tenure in the 1950's was LOWER than it is today. "Lifetime employment" never applied to more than a small minority. Yet even today, most people spend a median of 21.4 years as their longest job tenure. In 1969 the figure was 21.9 years, nearly the same. This "lifetime employment" myth is an example of the "golden age meme" but things really weren't any better back in the "good old days".

Actually, there is a disproportional amount of evidence (IMF, World Back, academia, etc.) that show that lower tax rates increases private investment.
Investments grow the pie, so the economy is larger, so that is good – everybody has gotten richer. The problem, at least in American over the past 40 years, is that most of the benefits have flowed to the top .1%.
Short term tax breaks to the lower and middle class does cause a short term stimulus effect. Downside, you have to pay it back, which slows future growth. There is a fierce debate on what the overall effect is. Here are 2 good ones.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w18423.pdf
http://www.nber.org/papers/w16311.pdf

And the type of taxes are important. The mortgage interest deduction stimulates consumption by encouraging people to build bigger houses – however most of the benefits of the mortgage interest deduction flow to people who have big loans on their houses – the rich. Cutting capital gains tends to stimulate long term investment. An example - I wish I could something better - but you get the point.

http://www.economist.com/node/21564609

The rich invest abroad. O.k. So what? Trying to draw artificial lines in the sand has had a host of negative unintended consequences. Better to reform the tax code from a residential to a territorial format. Besides, we are greying. You can only throw so much capital at a ever shrinking base. Ask the Japanese.

Actually, there is a disproportional amount of evidence (IMF, World Back, academia, etc.) that show that lower tax rates increases private investment.
Investments grow the pie, so the economy is larger, so that is good – everybody has gotten richer. The problem, at least in American over the past 40 years, is that most of the benefits have flowed to the top .1%.
Short term tax breaks to the lower and middle class does cause a short term stimulus effect. Downside, you have to pay it back, which slows future growth. There is a fierce debate on what the overall effect is. Here are 2 good ones.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w18423.pdf
http://www.nber.org/papers/w16311.pdf

And the type of taxes are important. The mortgage interest deduction stimulates consumption by encouraging people to build bigger houses – however most of the benefits of the mortgage interest deduction flow to people who have big loans on their houses – the rich. Cutting capital gains tends to stimulate long term investment. An example - I wish I could something better - but you get the point.

http://www.economist.com/node/21564609

The rich invest abroad. O.k. So what? Trying to draw artificial lines in the sand has had a host of negative unintended consequences. Better to reform the tax code from a residential to a territorial format. Besides, we are greying. You can only throw so much capital at a ever shrinking base. Ask the Japanese.

So someone should be watching the hen house, and we should have regulations to make sure it is no the fox.

These programs have made a huge difference to many people and to our nation.

http://www.nber.org/bah/2009no3/w15371.html

The authors acknowledge funding from the Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth at the Northwestern University School of Law.

The source of the problem has proclaimed that it is not a problem at all.

In a nation where lawyers advertise on television to increase the cost of such lawsuits while they regularly recoup hugely significant double digit percentages from such malpractice cases, as well as donate heavily to fund the politicians that refuse to pass, or even consider tort reform, I find it a bit unconvincing when they choose to fund anti-tort reform research.

The evidence is that the amount of money that can be saved by various tort reform laws is approximately 2%:
http://www.nber.org/bah/2009no3/w15371.html

Even that article doesn't quantify the costs caused by what it calls "defensive medicine". These are tests and procedures done a doctor covering his ass rather than trying to diagnose and treat evident conditions.

The evidence is that the amount of money that can be saved by various tort reform laws is approximately 2%:
http://www.nber.org/bah/2009no3/w15371.html

Now, that's not nothing, but it's not even close to explaining why US health care costs 3.5 times that of the UK. Some things that are more likely to make a difference:
1. Most health care in the US is fee-for-service, so doctors get paid more if they do more procedures, no matter how useful those procedures are. Solution: put doctors on salary.
2. The US spends a lot of money keeping people alive as basically a vegetable in a hospital during the last year of their life. Solution: end-of-life counseling and legalizing euthanasia.
3. A significant portion of health care costs are insurance companies, hospitals, individuals, and government each haggling to try to make the other parties pay for the cost of care. Solution: Single payer and single provider, so there's nobody else to haggle with.
4. Another significant problem is that people without insurance and money to pay for care tend to seek care at emergency rooms, which both makes it harder for ERs to handle real emergencies and means we spend easily 5 times what we would have spent to treat the same condition in a doctor's office. Solution: Cover everybody.

In other words, you get pretty close to what every other country in the world is doing, and it gets a lot cheaper to provide health care.

“There is no chance of recovery with overwritten clusters. The bit density on hard disk drives is so great now that when the magnetics are rewritten, the data is gone,” he said. Barry is Ontrack's Remote Data Recovery Manager and has 10 years of experience recovering files for private business as well as government agencies.

http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-guttman.html

Claims that intelligence agencies can read overwritten data on disk drives have been commonplace for many years now. The most commonly cited source of evidence for this supposed fact is a paper (Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory) by Peter Gutmann presented at a 1996 Usenix conference. I found this an extraordinary claim, and therefore deserving of extraordinary proof.

Education is never a scam, you should always continue learning.

Sadly, that's a common fallacy. Although you should always continue learning, sometimes so-called "education" opportunities are scams. Witness the plethora of diploma mills out there that cater to mid-career angst... Also, there are quite a few that border on scams as in many fields continuing degrees don't seem to help much, yet they are offered anyhow...

It depends on where you're living / working. In Chicago, experience was all that mattered. When I moved to the Bay Area, I've had interviews stop when they found out I didn't have a degree.

I've seen many hiring managers that were school snobs and/or degree snobs (both in the bay area and outside). Although on principle I'd like to condemn the school/degree snobbery practice, unfortunatly, I've also seen areas where letters after your name were useful to the company (independent of the actual job performed by the employee). If your company is dealing with lots of foreign companies (especially asian companies, although some european companies as well) and your job is customer facing, or if you are a small company dealing with certain Venture Capital fundraising activities, having employees with petigree sometimes is the trump card.

Of course this slim slice of jobs doesn't justify the school/degree snobbery that exists (which is pretty rampant and unrelated), it's probably mostly a function of people wanting to hire people that are like themselves. This has been the way that job discrimination has been justified in the past (e.g., against women, minorities, etc ), and probably will, unfortunatly, continue to be tolerated in the future...

On the other hand, there was a study that seemed to correlate the schools where a student applied (rather than actually ended up attending) was a strong indicator of future success. Sometimes you just have to get that union card and join the club or at least have the motivation to try. Then again, I've also worked with a few people that never attended college, yet were all pretty good programmers and/or technology folks. Although most you wouldn't know it, there was one guy who had lots of experience, but always seemed to have a chip on his shoulder (probably just overcompensating). He was definitely not very pleasant to work with (IMHO, not very different than other folks that I've worked with that had phds and never let you forget it). YMMV...

Citation please. Show me this alleged subsidy (and how big it is) that goes only to oil companies. I'm aware that there are supposed to be minor subsidies that oil companies can get, but my understanding is that most such things are not particular to a fossil fuel business.

Here you go.

Expensing Intangible Drilling Costs amounts to a subsidy of $3.2 billion over five years. (See section 4.2 starting on page 15.) Percentage depletion expensing accounts for another $3.2 billion. Both of these apply to fossil fuel companies (so not only oil, but natural gas drillers and coal miners), but the percentage depletion rate was 15% in 2007 for oil and gas producers, but only 10% for coal (this being the percent of revenue they can deduct from gross revenue to account for the lost value of the products they sold, which can be more than the actual cost they paid for the land from which they extracted the resources).

Any one of two dozen drive over-write utilities (free or paid) will make sure your drive is unreadable.

No need for multiple passes either, simply write binary zeros everywhere and you are done. The old FUD about the CIA recovering your info with electron microscopes is pure bull, and nobody has ever once successfully demonstrated that in public even when they had access to state of the art university electron microscopes.

Platter level forensics are a hoax.

I fully agree about revolutions and smashing existing structures. The Occupiers doesn't realize that what we've got in the mature capitalist democracies is an improvement over anything that has been seen throughout human history. We actually have an open access social order whose foundation is free entry to competition for positions in economy and politics. This is new and rare. The norm has been that the social order is created by rent-seeking elites limiting access to positions. There is a fairly new academic framework on this: http://www.nber.org/papers/w12795

It's very heartening that the book reviewed here is not only anti-capitalist, but also peak oil-environmentalist. The mixing, hopefully, makes it less likely that the dangerously ignorant anti-capitalist ideas get traction. Even if Occupiers are not close to understanding this, their typical ideas would make any open-access order country regress into limited-access order. Democracy and capitalism needs each other.

...and why are women suddenly doing better than men?

It's not sudden. In fact, I'm not aware of any evidence that there has been any change over time at all in the male-female gap in college success. Women simply do better in school than men in general. Probably always have and always will.

Women enter college with about the same critical thinking and writing skills as men (Arum and Roksa, Academically Adrift, p. 40). They don't choose easier majors than men ( http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/womcolge.htm ). But: "Girls spend more time doing homework than boys. These behavioral factors, after adjusting for family background, test scores, and high school achievement, can explain virtually the entire female advantage in getting into college[...]" ( http://www.nber.org/digest/jan07/w12139.html ) "[...] in two national studies, college men reported that they studied less and socialized more than their female classmates." ( http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/education/09college.html?pagewanted=all )

So it absolutely makes sense that women do better than men in most departments at my school, and, yes, it would be a sign that something was wrong if they did worse in one particular department. Women simply do better because they work harder.

Rather, it is a "central bank" and every country has one. Ours was established by the Federal Reserve Act of nearly a century ago and periodically their mandate has changed with the passage of new laws. Also, its leaders are nominated by the President and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. While hardly perfect, it has helped reduce instability in the economy. Check out http://www.nber.org/cycles/cyclesmain.html and you'll see that compared to the period before the establishment of the Fed, the last century has been much more stable. While they can indeed make a profit, it goes to the U.S. Treasury.

On the Fed's relative independence being a good or bad thing, the weight of the professional research literature suggests that countries with independent central banks have lower inflation. The reason is pretty obvious -- increases in the money supply is a pretty tempting thing for politicians to do.

It isn't widely recognized how severe the crisis was in the Fall of 2008 -- at one point U.S. banks had lost half their capital and interbank lending, a lifeblood to the system, was drying up. The U.S. financial system all but collapsed and if not for the intervention of the Fed it would have certainly dragged the economy down with it. Many claim that we should have let banks fail -- I understand the sentiment, but we tried that once -- it's widely known as the Great Depression. Back then 1/3 of U.S. banks shut their doors and this was in the days before deposit insurance.

Yes, the rescue was ugly and there is a lot to the point about socializing risk. But, back in 2008 that wasn't at the front of the Fed's mind. I'd be in favor of reducing the size of institutions so that we no longer have "systematically important institutions," but that doesn't carry much weight these days given Wall Street's influence in Washington.

Not that appeals to authority carry much weight, but among professional economists (I'm one) appeals to eliminate the Fed are seen as nutty. Also, much of this is covered in various college economics courses.

One pass with zeroes or random data over the whole drive is sufficient, unless you expect that a large government agency is going to open up the hard drives and spend millions of dollars to attempt to recover the data (and even they might be unable to get at the overwritten data. See http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-guttman.html).

With dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb you can wipe all the hard drives in a weekend.

Before I weigh in on what you said, I'd like to begin with a simple screener question.

How many Nobels in Economics do you have?

OK, good. And Krugman?

Hmm, maybe that's a bit of an unfair comparison. How about we'll start instead with this... How many publications?

Women left: citation http://www.nber.org/papers/w15853.pdf

US currency lost half its theoretical purchasing power in one day in (I believe) 1938 when the US government re-assigned the dollar-to-gold exchange ratio to be nearly half what it was before... which was of course was sort of a thumbed noise at the populace at that point anyway as they had outlawed private gold ownership 6 months beforehand

The background is that from 1928-1933, the Federal Reserve allowed the value of the dollar to rise steadily (aka deflation). At first it was to "pop the stock asset bubble" and to avoid loss of gold reserves to France, but then even after the stock market crash, there was a conscious decision not to devalue the dollar because of the large number of "gold clauses" in private contracts that required payment in dollars equivalent to an amount of gold.

The feeling of President Hoover was that too many people had mortgages with gold clauses and they would become much more deeply indebted as they would be paid in devalued dollars at work but have to pay back in gold equivalents. Thus he opposed devaluation.

But FDR decided that the federal government had the power to change all US contracts to ban "gold clauses", and pushed the gold clause ban through the Congress in 1933. Then he devalued the dollar, and also prohibited private gold ownership to lock down the gold flows and to avoid an underground gold economy that would sink the devalued dollar economy.

Countries that went off the gold standard earlier (such as Britain and Scandinavian countries in 1931, or Spain that never went back to the gold standard after leaving it during WWI) ended up with far less economic devastation during the Great Depression than the US.

I personally think FDR did a lot of stupid things during the Great Depression, but I have to admit that finding an acceptable way to devalue the dollar was the right thing to do. A mild recovery started in 1933, and probably the economy would have recovered fully during the late 1930's if FDR did not push through his other New Deal policies.

"They believe that erosion of purchasing power will be offset by the returns on GDP growth but i don't see any convincing proof anywhere, quite the contrary."

Hey, what about the USA? Or post-USSR Russia? Or Chile? Or Brasil?

"Fake boom based on on nothing more but monetary policy invariably ends"

In the long run we're all dead.

"with a bust and deflation is there to liquidate excess inventories built upon rosy projections of a bubble."

Unless government steps in and replaces reduced demand with government-funded demand to refuel the bubble.

"If you cry a river because of all the poor becoming even poorer in heartless capitalist economies - guess what, they are slowly wiped by the very inflation you propose that eats their rarely updated wages and modest savings. "

Nope. Investments in bonds and stock market tend to grow faster than the economy. And as I've said, if you have a deflation then you won't really have much savings in the first place. Look at Japan, it had a near-zero inflation with several dips into deflation for a decade. Total savings have actually decreased in that period: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_vhPkPUN2aT8/S1dxroArbYI/AAAAAAAABZk/EkSyucPxnQk/s1600-h/savings+rate+households.JPG , see here for the paper: http://www.nber.org/papers/w15601 - it's not actually that bad, dis-savings are compensated by the shifted structure of savings, but it's still not good - there's no significant growth.

"You seriously think that politicians can control the economy? Everything would be better if they couldn't. Name one successful man-made intervention in natural ecosystem that didn't bite in the ass with tons of unpleasant unintended consequences."

You're changing topics. I can name A LOT of successful interventions into economy which resulted in good well-being for at least a generation. That's because economy is not a natural phenomenon, it certainly can be influenced (which you do admit by citing bad consequences - they are results of actions).