I got a first-hand look at the economy of Europe this past week with a trip to Ireland. The pessimism was rather unsurprising all around, but I got my first exposure to it before I’d even entered the country. I told the the customs officer that I was a professor and he replied “And what do you usually profess?” It took me a minute to realize what he was asking, but I replied “economics”. Without looking up at me, he handed me my passport and said, “Stay awhile. You’ll learn a lot.”
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Paying for Beauty Pays
Awhile back, I ordered Daniel Hamermesh’s new book, which is a basically a more readable compilation of some of his academic papers on beauty, called Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People are More Successful. I’ve yet to read it due to the piles of books all over my office and apartment right now, but I will say that I find the subject fascinating.
An article in today’s New York Times addresses one facet of the beauty premium by presenting research that shows that makeup affects our perception of women, particularly traits such as trustworthiness. The study is conducted by psychologists, but it’s no surprise that they asked Hamermesh to weigh in:
Daniel Hamermesh, an economics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said the conclusion that makeup makes women look more likable — or more socially cooperative — made sense to him because “we conflate looks and a willingness to take care of yourself with a willingness to take care of people.”
It’s a very economist-y response, which is likely why I find it appealing.
Diffuse Costs, Concentrated Benefits
In a principles of economics class, I have to spend a lot of time explaining why the government puts into place policies that create inefficiencies in markets, or policies that don’t seem to make much sense. In a situation where you’re already faced with disseminating large amounts of information, I tend to emphasize one factor above all, the principle of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. When we examine very simplistic market-changing tools like a price floor or a quota, we can clearly identify the winners–generally a really small group of people that benefits greatly–and the losers–generally a large group of people that loses out, but usually just a small amount. So even if the losses of the larger group outweigh the benefits to the smaller group, it’s hard to get the losers to rally around a cause to change things because what they’re losing is not quite worth the time to push for a change. Those who are winning have a strong incentive to make sure the policy stays in place to ensure their continued winning.
The press around the Occupy Wall Street protests is beginning to take form with a small twist on this outcome. Instead of just losing out a little bit, those who are losing out are losing out a lot. And though those who are winning still have a vested interest in maintaining the power structure, but even that is coming unraveled a bit. Warren Buffet’s offering to pay more taxes and in today’s Washington Post, Ezra Klein says there are a lot of people bitter at the fact that “You did everything you were told to do, and it didn’t work out.”
Maybe we’ve gotten far enough along the inequality path that the diffuse costs are big enough for individuals that they’re asking for change. That they don’t know what kind of change yet is definitely something that needs to be worked out, but perhaps not all that surprising. We had to know this wouldn’t last forever.
Democracy Day
Today, apparently, it is International Democracy Day. A colleague had a trip to DC planned with some students to commemorate the day with a convocation of parliamentary leaders from various newly formed democracies and a few US congresspeople. He invited me to tag along and as I was up for any trip at that point, I agreed. I have to say that I wasn’t entirely sure what I was getting myself into, and an hour into this, I’m still not sure. Speaker Boehner made an appearance first thing this morning and then likely sped off to a million other things he has to do today.
I am unsure whether it is indicative of American politics or an issue of language or the long fights many of these leaders have endured, but I am most stuck by the disparity in charisma. The Americans are brief, tanned, and speak loudly and to the audience. Most of the foreigners lack that ease and connection.
It’s a novel experience, at any rate.
How we measure violence
I’ve noticed lately that the way we talk about prevalence of gender-based violence has changed lately. While we used to talk mostly about incidence of violence, a measure riddled with problems of underreporting and non-response, more scholars, NGOs and thus media outlets are concentrating more on measures of acceptability of violence. The questions “is wife-beating ever justified?” and “when is wife-beating justified” are garnering more attention than ones that seek to pin down the number of times a wife was actually beaten. The extremely high affirmative response rate to these questions (a recent TrustLaw post cites a UN study claiming at least 25% of people think it’s justifiable for a man to beat his wife in 17 of 41 countries surveyed) reinforces the notion that we might be missing a lot with surveys that get at instance.
it of course, does nothing to mitigate problems of reporting in places where the practice is outwardly condemned. In the US, I’d imagine, the statistic isn’t very useful as you’re unlikely to find many people who would assert that domestic violence is justifiable.
Additionally, it seems that, just like with incidence reports, the answers are subject to social norms and prevailing custom. In that sense, though, the question about justifiability may more closely measure the social norms themselves than questions about incidence.
Not back to normal, yet
My plan was to post here twice a week and to be back in the swing of things by August. I started off well, but well, August is a slow news month and also a slow new working papers month and a busy, let’s move to Pennsylvania month. At least for me.
So, I defended my dissertation on Monday and though I have a few revisions, I’m, well, kind of done! It’s exciting. But I’m still not really up to blogging regularly, at least for now. Once I finish this paper, I think we’ll be good.
A slipperly slope argument for more taxes
I have to admit that this whole debt ceiling debate makes me want to tear my hair out. If I had my druthers, I’d sit down every member of Congress. pry their eyelids open and make them read a few economic history books. Because, you know, cutting spending in a deep recession worked so well the last time, *cough* *cough* (Great Depression!) *cough*. But the politics of it all, it’s just maddening is what it is. A bunch of idiots who don’t even know what their constituents want holding this country’s–and possibly the world’s–economy hostage. I honestly (and naively) expected to come back from my Green River rafting trip and the thing would be solved, over, done with. But no, it’s like no time passed at all.
Twitter brought me two great pieces over the last few days that sent my writing juices flowing again after a few days off. The first, which I believe came from @ezraklein (correct me if I’m wrong), said something to the effect of “The US is the only country in the world with the luxury to create an economic crisis where there is none.”
Just dwell on that one for a minute.
The second was a question retweeted by the official White House twitter account (@whitehouse for the #WHChat) asking why those who are already paying the most taxes should be asked to pay more, invoking the “it’s not fair” argument. The question of who pays more and how much is a sticky one, one that made heavy press a few months (weeks? I don’t know what’s happening to time right now) when it was announced that only 50% of Americans paid any taxes (really, federal income tax in one year with record-high unemployment; you’d be hard pressed to find someone who actually pays zero taxes). I don’t know what segment of the population the question-asker was referring to, but it got me thinking about who pays taxes and why.
From an practical standpoint, we have many different types of taxes; income taxes, use taxes, sales taxes, estate taxes, property taxes, etc. From an economic standpoint, we split taxes into bigger groups. One of those distinguishing factors of how we group comes down to who pays. From the simplest, principles of economics perspective, we have taxes that are based on use and those based on ability to pay. Use taxes are designed with the idea that the people using the service should be the ones taxed. Use taxes are often sales taxes, they’re associated with things that we use. Take a simplistic example like gasoline, which we tax, and much of the taxes go to repaving roads. If you buy gasoline, you pay tax on it based on how much you buy. If you don’t buy gasoline, you don’t pay tax on it, simple enough. Consequently, you also don’t contribute much to upkeep of roads. If you’re not buying gasoline, you’re probably not using the roads much (or your form of using them is much less destructive or limited than if you went by car), so, you don’t pay for roads.
The ability to pay principle says that those with the greatest ability to pay should pay more taxes. By this logic, a person who makes $200,000/year should pay more in gasoline taxes than a person who makes $20,000/year. Of course, creating a taxation system like that creates all sorts of incentives to lie and cheat and would be incredibly difficult to manage, but it is interesting to think about how use and ability to pay are actually interconnected, particularly at a federal level. Without any numbers to back me up, I’m certain that those with more money not only have a greater ability to pay, but also use more services. I’m going to distinguish here between services and transfers. There’s no doubt that people who make no money receive more transfers–e.g. food stamps, welfare payments, unemployment assistance–than wealthy people. But even though wealthy people may not be applying for food stamps or welfare, their money is being protected by banking laws, their consumer interests are greater because they buy more, they use the courts more for lawsuits (if not perhaps criminal defense), they’re greater users of health care (even more so if they have insurance). I of course have nothing to back this up, and realize fully that the argument could be made in precisely the opposite direction for public assistance. But then, the ability to pay part kicks in; if you’re requesting TANF funds, you have very low ability to pay.
The other reason I don’t like this argument, of course, is that it creates a slippery slope in terms of demanding to pay taxes only on the things we use. If a poor person keeps all their money stuffed in their mattress, they’re not ‘using’ the SEC or the FDIC or other federal banking institutions, and we might find dissenters trying to discount such expenditures from their taxes ala Maggie Gyllenhaal in Stranger Than Fiction. Talk about a nightmare. I think our tax code is complicated enough as it is.
With that rant being done, and regardless of whether paying taxes is fair or not, I’ll share another gem adapted from twitter. Just because you want to order a hamburger next time doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay for the filet mignon you already ate. It does appear that something is going to happen tonight, though, so we’ll see.
Quiet
I’m so excited that this blog is finding a voice and an audience. My apologies to all as I’ve been quiet and will likely continue to be for the next two weeks or so. I am racing to finish my dissertation, then will be on a rafting trip down the beautiful Green River for just under a week. I’m told I’m not allowed to bring work. Though I know it’s a physical impossibility to bring my computer on the river for five days, it will be much more difficult to emotionally distance myself from economics, gender, children, violence, etc, or at least the constant turning of my brain on such things. Back in August, I promise!
The Westerns
I’ve just returned from San Diego, where I took part in the annual conference of the Western Economic Association and spent a little time with some very good friends I don’t get to see nearly often enough.
I’m a bit embarrassed to say that I didn’t spend perhaps as much time at the conference as I have spent at others, but I did chair a session and present and even caught a few oher papers. My experience last year with the Westerns was that the quality of papers was exceptionally disheartening. The conference is traditionally grad student friendly, and due to its size, the call for papers ends just short of seven months before the conference. I’m not sure whether these things contribute to average quality, or the fact that it’s always in a fun, beautiful, outdoorsy place during the summer, but not many people seemed to put much thought into what they were presenting last year. I could have also just been extremely unfortunate in my choice of sessions.
In my session, I presented my job market paper, “Match Quality and Maternal Investments”, in which I tease out the association between subjective quality of a romantic relationship and investments in children’s cognitive skills. The session was well-attended and my paper well-received. I had fun presenting it (even though my heart was still beating a million miles a minute from having lost and magically found my flash drive only moments before). I’ve presented the paper so many times now that I can feel it calling at me to get out. Go forth and publish! Or at least go forth and submit (and wait, and submit, and wait, sorry, this wasn’t supposed to be commentary on publishing lags in economics).
I thought my session particularly interesting because we had four papers dealing with divorce and union dissolution in four very different ways. I discussed a paper by Risa Kumazawa of Duquense University on the effects of divorce on children’s educational attainment. A fellow CU grad student discussed her paper on spillover effects of divorce laws on marriage markets using LMAs and divorce law changes. And Claudia Smith of Grand Valley State discussed the effects of immigration policy on divorce and marriage. I was really impressed with all the papers and I’m excited to see them develop.
I also fully survived my first chair experience, keeping everyone within the time limit and being sufficiently organized. I’m sure someone is dying to make a joke about the diversity of my participants, but we had a great international group and I got to see a lot of papers about migration and labor market participation that I might have otherwise never seen. All in all, I was really pleased with the conference.
The Westerns are great because they give access to everyone. Their paper acceptance rate is high and while it increases the variability in quality, it definitely allows for a broad spectrum of ideas to come from lots of places, which is really fun. Next year, it’s in San Francisco and will hit my own hometown of Denver before going to Hawaii in 2016. I think I can get behind all of those stops.
Happy Fourth of July!
ERIN K. FLETCHER 