Here's a look at effective tax rates, a measure that includes federal income taxes, payroll taxes, and excise taxes [by income level].
Here are two more graphs to take you home: the first shows share of income by quintile and the second shows share of federal income taxes by quintile. What you'll see is that income inequality is behind tax burden inequality.
For more, see One of These Graphs Will Make You Angry About the Rich and Taxes by , October 6, 2011 at The Atlantic.
For more, see Our Health-Care System, in One Report Card by , October 18, 2011 at Ezra Klein.
For more, see Where the Top 1% Work by , October 11, 2011 at Mother Jones.
Before Kahneman and Tversky, people who thought about social problems and human behavior tended to assume that we are mostly rational agents. They assumed that people have control over the most important parts of their own thinking. They assumed that people are basically sensible utility-maximizers and that when they depart from reason it's because some passion like fear or love has distorted their judgment.Kahneman and Tversky conducted experiments. They proved that actual human behavior often deviates from the old models and that the flaws are not just in the passions but in the machinery of cognition. They demonstrated that people rely on unconscious biases and rules of thumb to navigate the world, for good and ill. Many of these biases have become famous: priming, framing, loss-aversion.
Kahneman reports on some delightful recent illustrations from other researchers. Pro golfers putt more accurately from all distances when putting for par than when putting for birdie because they fear the bogie more than they desire the birdie. Israeli parole boards grant parole to about 35% of the prisoners they see, except when they hear a case in the hour just after mealtime. In those cases, they grant parole 65% of the time. Shoppers will buy many more cans of soup if you put a sign atop the display that reads
Limit 12 per customer.
We are players in a game we don't understand. Most of our own thinking is below awareness. Fifty years ago, people may have assumed we are captains of our own ships, but, in fact, our behavior is often aroused by context in ways we can't see. Our biases frequently cause us to want the wrong things. Our perceptions and memories are slippery, especially about our own mental states. Our free will is bounded. We have much less control over ourselves than we thought.This research yielded a different vision of human nature and a different set of debates. The work of Kahneman and Tversky was a crucial pivot point in the way we see ourselves.
They also figured out ways to navigate around our shortcomings. Kahneman champions the idea of
adversarial collaboration— when studying something, work with people you disagree with. Tversky had a wise maxim:Let us take what the terrain gives.Don't overreach. Understand what your circumstances are offering.
For more, see Who You Are by , October 20, 2011 at NYTimes.com.
For more, see Who Really Robbed the Middle Class? Maybe It Was Health Care by , October 13, 2011 at The Atlantic.
Researchers studying vitamin E supplements as a way to reduce men's risk of prostate cancer found they actually had the opposite effect, increasing the risk slightly, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health.
The findings, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, are based on long-term follow-up of participants in a large cancer-prevention trial known as Select. That trial, meant to study whether supplements of vitamin E, selenium or a combination of the two nutrients could prevent prostate cancer, was stopped three years ago because a review of the data showed no benefit, compared with a dummy pill.
For more, see Vitamin E Is Linked to Prostate Cancer by , October 12, 2011 at WSJ.com.
For more, see Bankers' Salaries vs. Everyone Else's by , October 11, 2011 at Economix.
After Charles Whitman shot 45 people from the top of the University of Texas Tower, ...
[his] body was taken to the morgue, his skull was put under the bone saw, and the medical examiner lifted the brain from its vault. He discovered that Whitman's brain harbored a tumor the diameter of a nickel. This tumor, called a glioblastoma, had blossomed from beneath a structure called the thalamus, impinged on the hypothalamus, and compressed a third region called the amygdala. The amygdala is involved in emotional regulation, especially of fear and aggression. By the late 1800s, researchers had discovered that damage to the amygdala caused emotional and social disturbances. In the 1930s, the researchers Heinrich Klüver and Paul Bucy demonstrated that damage to the amygdala in monkeys led to a constellation of symptoms, including lack of fear, blunting of emotion, and overreaction. Female monkeys with amygdala damage often neglected or physically abused their infants. In humans, activity in the amygdala increases when people are shown threatening faces, are put into frightening situations, or experience social phobias. Whitman's intuition about himself—that something in his brain was changing his behavior—was spot-on.
When your biology changes, so can your decision-making and your desires. The drives you take for granted (I'm a heterosexual/homosexual,I'm attracted to children/adults,I'm aggressive/not aggressive,and so on) depend on the intricate details of your neural machinery. Although acting on such drives is popularly thought to be a free choice, the most cursory examination of the evidence demonstrates the limits of that assumption.
Many of us like to believe that all adults possess the same capacity to make sound choices. It's a charitable idea, but demonstrably wrong. People's brains are vastly different.Who you even have the possibility to be starts at conception. If you think genes don't affect how people behave, consider this fact: if you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, the probability that you will commit a violent crime is four times as high as it would be if you lacked those genes. You're three times as likely to commit robbery, five times as likely to commit aggravated assault, eight times as likely to be arrested for murder, and 13 times as likely to be arrested for a sexual offense. The overwhelming majority of prisoners carry these genes; 98.1% of death-row inmates do. These statistics alone indicate that we cannot presume that everyone is coming to the table equally equipped in terms of drives and behaviors.
Free will may exist (it may simply be beyond our current science), but one thing seems clear: if free will does exist, it has little room in which to operate. It can at best be a small factor riding on top of vast neural networks shaped by genes and environment. In fact, free will may end up being so small that we eventually think about bad decision-making in the same way we think about any physical process, such as diabetes or lung disease.
For much more about how the law should be changed due to this, see The Brain on Trial by , July, 2011 at The Atlantic.
The FDA has completed its analysis of the first genetically modified animal likely to hit supermarket shelves: the AquAdvantage salmon, made by Massachusetts-based AquaBounty Technologies, Inc. Thanks to some added genes, the salmon grows 2-6 times the size of a normal Atlantic salmon in half the time, promising some respite for the planet's heavily taxed natural fish stocks, a third of which are near extinction or exhaustion.
For more, see FDA Completes Review of First Genetically Modified Animal for Consumption by , October 11, 2011 at 80beats.
According to a new report commissioned by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts in the U.K. (because the Brits would like to figure out how to do this, too), the Obama administration is institutingthe most sweeping and potentially groundbreaking emphasis on rigorous program evaluation ever conducted by the federal government.It has been trying to identify social programs that work, scientifically evaluate how they work and apply those models in awarding grant money.The hope is that Uncle Sam — with the help of rigorous social science — will stop supporting teen pregnancy prevention programs that don't actually prevent teen pregnancies, or childhood literacy programs that don't teach all that many children how to read.
The authors cited six initiatives begun under Obama in which they conclude the role of evidence has beenunprecedented.The Department of Health and Human Services has commissioned literature reviews on programs targeting teen pregnancies and parental home visitation. Expert panels have reviewed applicants for the Social Innovation and Investing in Innovation funds. Program guidelines for the Community College Challenge Fund and the Workforce Innovation Fund through the departments of Labor and Education have stressed the importance of evidence-based strategies and evaluation.
For more, see U.S. Evaluating Government Programs More than Ever by , September 14, 2011 at Miller-McCune.
Travel and discovery will be on display during October at Gallery Los Olivos when featured artist Martha Inman Lorch exhibits a collection of watercolors and jewelry in an aptly titled show called “Artist with a Passport.”The exhibition runs Oct. 1 through 31
For more, see Gallery Los Olivos to Display Martha Inman Lorch Artwork, September 29, 2011 at Santa Ynez Valley News.
Developer Datawind is selling the tablets to the government for about $45 each, and subsidies will reduce that to $35 for students and teachers.
... the Aakash has a color screen and provides word processing, Web browsing and video conferencing. The Android 2.2-based device has two USB ports and 256 megabytes of RAM.
For more, see India Announces $35 Tablet Computer to Help Lift Villagers Out of Poverty, October 5, 2011 at The Washington Post.
The chart, based on new data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, shows the distribution of the top 50 universities for a range of disciplines. Rankings are based on citations of work coming from each university's department.The darker blue bars at the bottom of the chart refer to American universities. And as you can see, at least at the post-secondary level, we still have some top-notch schools.
For more, see U.S. Still Dominates in Research Universities by , September 30, 2011 at Economix.
"I would rather back human ingenuity," says Dylan Grice, a London-based global strategist for Société Generale and a self-proclaimed skeptic about investing in commodities. "If there's no copper, we will find something else."
Natural gas as an energy source is now roughly the equivalent of $24-per-barrel oil, says Philip Verleger, an energy economist and publisher of Petroleum Economics Monthly. Ethanol, mostly made from corn or sugar cane, is also on the rise."We expect the oil industry's monopoly on transportation to be broken," Mr. Verleger wrote in July. In an interview, he adds, "There will be oil. I'm just not sure there will be anybody to consume it." He thinks that projections of crude-oil demand in 2025 are typically 20% to 30% too high, and that crude-oil prices are likely to drop sharply as those forecasts go awry.
Spot prices for raw materials have been basically flat, after adjusting for inflation, since 1871, vastly underperforming stocks and bonds, [Mr. Grice] wrote in a December research note titled, "Commodities for the long run? Not on your Nellie—I'd rather eat coal!"
For more, see The Case Against Commodities by , October 5, 2011 at WSJ.com.
Wow.
In a study published last week, researchers showed they could reconstruct video clips by watching viewers' brain activity. The video of the study's results, below, is pretty amazing, showing the original clips and their reconstructions side by side.
For more, see How Did Researchers Manage to Read Movie Clips from the Brain? by , September 28, 2011 at 80beats.
Many people getting unemployment start work only when it's running out.
The chart displays the fraction of persons (in Pittsburgh) receiving unemployment benefits who began working again, as a function of the number of weeks until their unemployment benefits were scheduled to be exhausted. For example, ahazardvalue of0.04for week-14means that, among unemployed persons with 14 weeks remaining until their benefit exhaustion date, 4% of them either began working a new job or returned to their previous job.
Very few people started working during the two to three weeks prior to the exhaustion of their unemployment benefits (weeks-3and-2in the chart). But almost 30% started work just a week later (19% started a new job, 10% returned to a previous job).
Demandmay have been lacking in Pittsburgh in the early 1980s, but that did not stop unemployed people from responding to the work incentives presented to them by the unemployment insurance program (economists also looked for this pattern during a Swedish recession, and found it there too).
For more, see Do Jobless Benefits Discourage People from Finding Jobs? by , March 17, 2010 at Economix.
In one experiment in the 1970s, researchers planted a dime in a phone booth. 87% of the people who found the dime offered to help a person who dropped some papers nearby, compared with only 4% who didn't find a dime. Empathy doesn't produce anything like this kind of effect [a temporary burst of positive emotion].
For more, see The Limits of Empathy by , September 29, 2011 at NYTimes.com.
The starting point for many claims that antibusiness policies are hurting the economy is the assertion that the sluggishness of the economy's recovery from recession is unprecedented. But, as a new paper by Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute documents at length, this is just not true. Extended periods ofjobless recoveryafter recessions have been the rule for the past two decades. Indeed, private-sector job growth since the 2007-2009 recession has been better than it was after the 2001 recession.We might add that major financial crises are almost always followed by a period of slow growth, and U.S. experience is more or less what you should have expected given the severity of the 2008 shock.
But aren't business people complaining about the burden of taxes and regulations? Yes, but no more than usual. Mr. Mishel points out that the National Federation of Independent Business has been surveying small businesses for almost 40 years, asking them to name their most important problem. Taxes and regulations always rank high on the list, but what stands out now is a surge in the number of businesses citing poor sales — which strongly suggests that lack of demand, not fear of government, is holding business back.
For more, see Phony Fear Factor by , September 29, 2011 at NYTimes.com.
In Turkey and Tunisia, culturally conservative parties founded on Islamic principles are rejecting the nameIslamistto stake out what they see as a more democratic and tolerant vision.In Egypt, a similar impulse has begun to fracture the Muslim Brotherhood as a growing number of politicians and parties argue for a model inspired by Turkey, where a party with roots in political Islam has thrived in a once-adamantly secular system. Some contend that the absolute monarchy of puritanical Saudi Arabia in fact violates Islamic law.
The debates are deep enough that many in the region believe that the most important struggles may no longer occur between Islamists and secularists, but rather among the Islamists themselves, pitting the more puritanical against the more liberal.
The notion of an Arab post-Islamism is not confined to Tunisia. In Libya, Ali Sallabi, the most important Islamist political leader, cites Mr. Ghannouchi as a major influence. Abdel Moneim Abou el-Fotouh, a former Muslim Brotherhood leader who is running for president in Egypt, has joined several new breakaway political parties in arguing that the state should avoid interpreting or enforcing Islamic law, regulating religious taxes or barring a person from running for president based on gender or religion.
For more, see Activists in Arab World VIE to Define Islamic State by , September 29, 2011 at NYTimes.com.
Germany is #3?
For more, see Taxing Times, September 29, 2011 at The Economist.
