Out of Control

Laws that bar drivers from talking on cell phones may not cover the fastest-growing diversion: texting.

Punching in short text messages on a cell phone keypad is far more distracting and increasingly common. It's also much harder for authorities to catch.

Texters, for example, can hold phones in their laps and text rather than put them to their ears.

"It's difficult for police officers to see that," said Brooklyn Patrolman Richard Hovan, whose city has a ban on talking on cell phones while driving.

Text messaging is largely used by the often-connected professionals, who pledge allegiance to BlackBerry handhelds, and the very young.
…
More than a third of teen drivers consider sending text messages the most distracting thing they do while driving, according to a recent study by Liberty Mutual Insurance and Students Against Destructive Decisions, which campaigns against drunken driving. That's ahead of having friends in the car and talking on the phone.

What this article ignores is whether bans against using cell phones are doing more harm than good.

Flashback: Don Boudreaux spots an unintended consequence of a DC driving-while-phoning ban:

[My student Carol Shin] reports that, since DC’s prohibition went into effect this past summer, she and her friends -- when driving in DC -- in fact spend less time chatting with each other by cell phone, but spend more time text-messaging each other.

Maybe it would be better to let Carol and Ashley just talk on the phone:

Ashley Mabry, a 16-year-old who attends Midpark High School, said she texts on her phone more than she talks on it. She once texted a whole conversation while driving, while other times she responds with a simple "yes," "no" or "maybe."

Reminds me of an AEI-Brookings study which noted other unintended consequences: If drivers cannot call ahead and say they will be late, they may speed. If drivers cannot call for directions, they may choose to read a map while driving. If they cannot save time by calling and driving, they may save time by eating and driving.

Possibly related: Smarter Car Technology Being Ignored

Does it decrease inequality?

Yes and yes, say authors of a new study:

The working paper titled “The Globalization of Household Production,” challenges many existing theories about the economic impacts of immigration. Co-authors Michael Kremer and Stanley Watt examine how immigrant household workers are affecting other labor trends, and how those trends are affecting the overall economy.

The authors document the rising numbers of women who are increasingly crossing international borders to work as private household workers. In Singapore and Hong Kong, for instance, foreign workers in private households comprise around 7% of the total labor force or more. The percentages are even higher in some “new rich” gulf countries.

Kremer and Watt argue that as more immigrant women serve in household positions, more high-skilled native women are therefore available to join the labor market, driving down relative wages among high-skilled workers and reducing the disparity in wages between low- and high-skilled workers. In addition, Kremer and Watt contend that as more native women return to the workforce, they contribute more tax dollars to the general coffers. This provides “a fiscal benefit for the population, even without considering the taxes paid by the migrants themselves,” they write. Assuming immigration levels of 7% of the total labor force, relative wages of native low-skilled workers are increased by 3.9%, and native welfare overall is increased by 1.2%, they claim.

Summary here; study here.

Many folks are amused at the evolution of the meaning of the famous “Don’t mess with Texas” slogan. It first emerged in 1986 as an anti-litter campaign, but today you’ll find those words on the back of many a Ford F150 and other similarly gigantic trucks.

So what's the deal? Is it a chest-thumping message, a sincere expression of eco-consciousness, or both?

Whatever it is, it's a very celebrated slogan:

Don't Mess with Texas" was honored today as America's favorite slogan with a parade down New York City's Madison Avenue and ending in Times Square.

The Texas Department of Transportation's "Don't Mess with Texas" litter prevention slogan won Advertising Week's 2006 Walk of Fame contest. "Don't Mess with Texas" beat out 25 other well-known slogans including “JUST DO IT.” by Nike, the California Milk Processors Board's "Got Milk?” and "Have it your way" by Burger King. TxDOT's slogan won in a landslide, with more than 400,000 votes.

I’m just glad it beat “Got Milk” and the zillions of copycats that campaign spawned. “Got this?” “Got that?” Enough already!

Article here.

Related: Some clear thinking on recycling

As cities spread into surrounding territories, roadways clog, pollution increases, social inequities expand, and the costs of municipal services like sewers and the police rise. Or do they? University of Toronto economist Matthew Turner and his colleagues decided to quantify one component of change: urban sprawl. They compared satellite images of the entire continental United States in 1976 and 1992, the most recent year complete data were available, and divided the country into 8.7 billion 98-foot squares to examine the question in unprecedented detail.

Predictably, the photo evidence revealed that America has grown: Nearly 2 percent of the country was paved by 1992, for example, a third more than in 1976. Not so predictably, the percentage of growth that is sprawl is not increasing. "Although there is more development, on average, that development isn't any more scattered," Turner says. In other words, modern American cities are really just bigger versions of older American cities.

Turner's observations of individual cities are also surprising. Miami, for example, is about a third more compact than either New York or San Francisco, while Pittsburgh sprawls more than even Atlanta or Washington.

Discover article here, including satellite images that show most new growth has been contiguous with old growth.

And how about reflecting on this bit from the article: Nearly 2 percent of the country was paved by 1992.

That’s even less than the 5 percent figure used by Ed Glaeser and Matthew Kahn in this study.

Related: LA Not Sprawl Poster Child, After All

Thanks to Brad Hutchings for passing this along:

Future passengers aboard Virgin Galactic spaceliners can look forward to cushioned reclining seats and lots of windows during suborbital flights aboard SpaceShipTwo, a concept interior of which was unveiled by British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson Thursday.

More here.

Related: An Investor’s Business Daily piece by me on space entrepreneurs

Just when you thought silly season had ended on Capitol Hill, Congress has taken up the case of the Hewlett-Packard board shenanigans. To satisfy the sense of self-importance, The House Energy and Commerce Committee felt compelled to equate this largely petty act of boardroom intrigue with Watergate and Enron, according to this afternoon’s coverage on MSNBC.com.

“We have before us witnesses from Hewlett-Packard to discuss a plumbers operation that would make Richard Nixon blush were he still alive,” Democratic Rep. John Dingell of Michigan said.

Other lawmakers said the scandal was reminiscent of the Enron Corp. debacle, in which top management claimed not to know of serious wrongdoing that ultimately brought the company down. The panel members said the comparison was especially disappointing for a company with the stature of HP, a 67-year-old computer and printer maker with a reputation for integrity.

“It’s a sad day for this proud company,” said Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado, the panel’s senior Democrat. “Something has really gone wrong at this institution.”

Of these, Rep. Degette’s comments are the most lucid. From every angle, it looks like HP Chairwoman Patricia Dunn, and some of those around her, crossed ethical and legal boundaries when they attempted to discover the board member who was repeatedly leaking information from confidential board meetings. There were far better ways of handling this than hiring a detective firm to impersonate board members and journalists in order to get a hold of their phone records.

But let’s apply some context here. While it’s likely laws were broken, the aggrieved parties can be counted on two hands at most. Watergate involved presidential wrongdoing, an ensuing cover-up and lies upon lies to the American people. Enron management engineered a massive stock fraud over several years specifically designed to hide mounting losses. HP, on the other hand, is a boardroom spat that got out of hand.

For all the bluster, the Congressional hearings are providing no new information. It’s merely a convenient forum for anti-business grandstanding. Fortunately, as of now, HP’s stock price has not been affected, but it would be a shame if, in the interest of appearing “tough on corporate crime,” Congress itself begins push down the value of HP shares. That only penalizes investors and employees, who until now, have been unaffected and unharmed by all this intrigue.

Of course, when government goes headhunting in the corporate suite, it’s the rank-and-file employees and 401(k) holders that end up on the chopping block. Recall when the government dragged out its very weak case against Martha Stewart: far more shareowner value, not mention jobs, were lost at Martha Stewart’s Omnimedia company than at Imclone, whose stock she was accused of, but never tried for, selling on an illegal inside tip.

Although tens of thousands lost their life savings in the Enron scandal, what justice was served by a government’s dissolution of Arthur Andersen as part of the case? Where a handful of Andersen employees should have gone to jail, the government chose instead put thousands of Andersen employees out of work.

If Dunn and her colleagues at HP broke the law, there is a process for adjudication. Parading HP broad members through Washington for a few minutes on the local news back in the home district doesn’t serve investors, employees or the economy.

Years ago, right-wing funnyman P.J. O’Rourke wrote a very clever book about American politics. The title said it all: Parliament of Whores.

Now a left-wing Aussie has published a book that examines politics down under. The title of Mark Latham's book is similarly straightforward: Conga Line of Suckholes.

Latham doesn’t focus solely on politics. He also worries about the dearth of Steve Irwins, the wussification of the Australian male:

"One of the saddest things I have seen in my lifetime has been the decline in Australian male culture - the loss of our larrikin language and values," he writes. "Australian mates and good blokes have been replaced by nervous wrecks, metrosexual knobs and tossbags."

It seems fitting that this former prime ministerial candidate would worry about such things. He did, after all, break a cabbie’s arm in a drunken fare dispute a few years back.

Kind of interesting that Latham’s coming from the left, blaming (at least partly) neoconservatism. Often lamentations about withering manliness come from the right and the targets are often “bed-wetting lefties” and the like.

For years his rallies and platitudes helped keep Wal-Mart outside Chicago, but now the biggest box has opened its first store inside city limits. And even though Rev. Pfleger has said that Wal-Mart jobs are “slave jobs” thousands of jobseekers showed up to be “oppressed.”

More than 15,000 people applied for the nearly 400 jobs at the store, said Ed Smith, the store's manager, adding that 98 percent of the employees live in the neighborhood. He said the lowest paid employees make $7.25 an hour, something only two workers earn.

(Another one for the “Don’t these people realize they’re being oppressed” file.)

A summary of the long saga that eventually led to opening day in Chicago:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. started looking at Chicago five years ago and proposed two stores. Zoning changes were approved for the West Side store in May 2004, but plans for a South Side store were abandoned when aldermen refused zoning changes there.

In January, Wal-Mart instead opened a store literally across the street from the city limits.

Then in July, the City Council approved an ordinance that would have required the biggest retailers to pay employees at least $10 hourly _ plus $3 in fringe benefits _ by mid-2010. Mayor Richard Daley vetoed ordinance, and aldermen were unable to override his veto.

Article here.

ESPN drew the second largest cable audience ever with its Monday night telecast of the football game between the Atlanta Falcons and New Orleans Saints, second only to the 1993 CNN debate on NAFTA between Al Gore and Ross Perot. What’s more, the cable network drew more viewers, 10.85 million households, than any other channel that night. That followed a record rating for ESPN the week before when it televised the contest between Pittsburgh and Jacksonville.

The migration of the popular Monday Night Football telecast to ESPN was expected to be a boon for the sports network as well as cable in general, but it caps an extraordinary trend over the past several years that has seen original programming on non-premium cable networks approach and at times exceed the quality and production values of programming on the broadcast networks.

“The Shield,” “Battlestar Galactica” and “The Daily Show,” are just three of the acclaimed shows that occupy bandwidth once relegated to fare such as endless reruns of “M*A*S*H,” vintage but overly familiar segments of “The Twilight Zone,” and old Chevy Chase movies.

Add something as visible as Monday Night Football to the mix and suddenly the terms “cable” and “quality” don’t seem so discordant. And with consumers investing in pricey HDTV, home theater systems and ad-zapping DVRs, they are coming to see cable TV service as much more than just 57 channels to surf at any given time. Bruce Springsteen’s observation aside, there’s actually something on.

The consequences are proving both good and bad. On the positive side, policymakers are questioning the entrenched belief that cable should be a local franchised monopoly. With telephone companies deploying TV via fiber to the home or through IP methods, the bar for quality, reliability and price is changing faster than it ever has. That's competitive market forces at work. Consumers want a choice of service providers. Legislators in states such as California, New Jersey, Texas and six other states have decisively voted to change 30-year-old rules in response to that demand.

On the downside, cable’s growth in viewership has led to calls that its programming be subject to the same constricting standards as broadcast TV. Because shows like “The Shield” features more graphic depictions of violence, adult language and adult themes, groups like the Parents Television Council, have begun an aggressive attack on cable content. Problem is, they come perilously close to arguing that the decision to enforce “decency” standards should be based on the number of people who are watching.

Adam Thierer at the Progress & Freedom Foundation has done some excellent writing on how PTC and its allies equate pervasive with popular.

Meanwhile, in one of the more reactionary essays on cable content I have seen, PTC’s Christopher Gildemeister demands that cable networks to go back to their humdrum fare of reruns. Check out how he waxes nostalgic about MTV’s formative days. Might be the first time PTC’s had anything good to say about the music network!

The X factor in all of this is the Web. In just the past year, both the studios and networks have begun to build stronger links between cable programming and the Web. This extends beyond offering downloads of episodes, as is the case with iTunes and NBC Univseral. SciFi.com is offering a series of original three-minute “webisodes” covering story elements that occur between the end of Season 2 of “Battlestar Galactica” and the beginning of Season 3 (Oct. 6). Cable and the Web will begin to drive content on each other’s medium. Ultimately, TV delivery models may change completely. In a world of on-demand content, where there’s unprecedented control over what, when and how you watch, there’s very little room for the “indecency-is-pervasive” argument.

TV habits and consumer demands are changing with the technology, perhaps faster than anyone thought. Let’s hope that regulators stay smart and let it happen without interference.

San Francisco taxpayers might end up being the biggest losers after all now that Bay Area muni-loonies have succeeding in getting the city to second-guess its planned deal with Google and Earthlink.

The Institute for Local Self Reliance (ILSR) and Media Alliance, which for months have been protesting the San Francisco plan to allow Google and EarthLink to provide free wireless access across the City by the Bay for the sole reason that the two companies might actually profit from it, instead want the city to fund and operate the network. Never mind that the formula that has proved fiscally and operationally disastrous in just about every market it’s been tried.

Here ILSR promises that a municipal network will cost San Francisco just $10 million, and revenues will be enough to pay back that investment in 4.2 years. For starters, $10 million is a dubious figure. Google itself estimates it’s a $12 million job. Back in 2005, when it was considering a municipally-financed network, Philadelphia, a smaller and far less challenging city from a radio engineering point-of-view, estimated the cost of a citywide system to be $10 to $15 million (see CNET story here). Overall, ISLR says, San Francisco’s municipal system would generate $6.1 million in revenue over the first five years. How ISLR derived these costs and projections is not really explained. But then again, the group is just following the old muni playbook, throw out numbers that look good, let the taxpayers deal with the consequences later. Remember Chaska, Minn., hailed as a muni wireless success, until TechDirt reported that the town went 50 percent over its $600,000 budget just to get the system to work right--and that was before they decided to upgrade to a new generation of equipment.

Followers of this blog will recognize ILSR as the group that tried to derail the Minneapolis private-public partnership with the same anti-business whining. Fortunately, its diatribes fell on deaf ears—and its wasn’t as if Minneapolis, with police, roads and schools to fund, had the extra millions sitting around to fund a service that would primarily be used by university students and middle-class professionals.

Nonetheless, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has agreed to revisit the idea of a municipal network, with a report due in December. Meanwhile, Google and EarthLink are growing impatient with the pace of negotiations as cities all around the Bay Area find success in choosing private enterprise over the public purse. Google itself has launched free wireless service in Mountain View. Then there’s the massive IBM-Cisco-Azulstar-SeaKay project that will feature 1 Mbps free service and span 1,500 square miles in Silicon Valley. Even as this occurs all around, Media Alliance and ILSR have somehow sold San Francisco’s government that there is market failure in public broadband and the only solution is government ownership.

The bill is coming due for years of generous benefits bestowed upon the nation's public employees, and it's a stunner: hundreds of billions of dollars over the next three decades, threatening some local governments with bankruptcy and all but guaranteeing cuts in services like education and public safety.

This opens an good AP story on what is destined to be the next classic story on the pathology of government's incentives to get things wrong. Some tidbits:

"A surprising number of public entities didn't even make informal estimates of long-term costs prior to the new accounting rules," Whitworth said.

. . .

"When the numbers are produced, they're going to be shocking," said Ronald Snell, director of state services for the National Conference of State Legislatures. "They'll be in the hundreds of billions, and it's definitely something that policy-makers are going to have to take notice of and act upon. ... There are consequences of decisions made in the past."

I'll say. It is always tempting for today's politicians to make decisions that create benefits now and push the costs off to the future. And we are learning just how many of them succumb to that temptation.

The Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan makes the case for cable franchise reform in a new paper by Diane S. Katz published Sept. 19.

Timed to coincide with hearings on Michigan House Bill 6456, which would create a statewide video franchising structure, “Assessing the Case for Franchise Reform” praises the creation of a uniform franchise requirement that would be administered by the Michigan PUC. This will speed entry of competition into local cable markets, as Katz shows through data from states like Texas and California that already have legislated statewide franchising. Still, Katz rightfully criticizes the bill for not permitting incumbent cable to convert to a statewide franchise agreement upon entry of a competitor.

While statewide franchising is a practical way of streamlining cable regulations—the regulations themselves will continue to adversely affect roll-out and may, in the end, wed franchise revenues to the cable model, which is being challenged by Internet video downloading services.

Katz writes:

“As a matter of policy, there is little rationale for main¬taining a franchise regime of any sort. The development of competitive video alternatives to cable undercuts the primary justification for municipal franchising. Moreover, state law would still empower communities to manage public rights-of-way in the absence of municipal franchising. Unfortunately, resistance to reform runs strong among those with a vested interest in the status quo — that is, municipalities and the cable industry. But enhancing consumer benefits and technological innova¬tion matters far more than preserving regulators’ powers or special-interest advantages.”

Those gay-video-selling hippies from Bentonville are at it again. They're always forcing big companies to accept smaller profit margins and then passing on the savings on to their Average Joe customers.

Now the issue is prescription drugs:

Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, plans to slash the prices of almost 300 generic prescription drugs, offering a big lure for bargain-seeking customers and presenting a challenge to competing pharmacy chains and makers of generic drugs.

The drugs will be sold for as little as $4 for a month's supply and include some of the most commonly prescribed medicines such as Metformin, a popular generic drug used to treat diabetes, and the high blood pressure medicine Lisinopril.
…
Analysts said consumers will save an average of 20 percent and up to 90 percent in some cases.

Article here.

Related: Progressive Wal-Mart--"Brokeback" Edition

Related: Progressive Wal-Mart

Anousheh Ansari is the first female Muslim in space, the first Iranian to reach Earth orbit, and perhaps the first civilian telecommuter in the ISS:

she has been trying to keep on top of her office work while she has been aboard, and has been receiving status reports from her staff at Prodea Systems, the telecommunications company she co-founded.

Article here.

Related: Directing a film from a hospital bed; attending college from home

Check out this fascinating article, with pictures. Folks realizing the feds are about to declare all swaths of local land as protected habitat move quickly to remove the habitat.

The chain saws started in February, when the federal Fish and Wildlife Service put Boiling Spring Lakes on notice that rapid development threatened to squeeze out the woodpecker.

The agency issued a map marking 15 active woodpecker “clusters,” and announced it was working on a new one that could potentially designate whole neighborhoods of this town in southeastern North Carolina as protected habitat, subject to more-stringent building restrictions.

Hoping to beat the mapmakers, landowners swarmed City Hall to apply for lot-clearing permits. Treeless land, after all, would not need to be set aside for woodpeckers. Since February, the city has issued 368 logging permits, a vast majority without accompanying building permits.

The federal spokesman seemed puzzled:

Landowners have overreacted, says Pete Benjamin, supervisor of the federal agency’s Raleigh office. Having a woodpecker tree on a piece of property does not necessarily mean a house cannot be built there, Mr. Benjamin said. A landowner can even get permission to cut down a cavity tree, as long as an alternative habitat can be found. “For the most part, we’ve found ways to work with most folks,” he said.

But people don't have kind of reaction out of the blue. If they had any reason to expect the feds to work cooperatively with them to allow reasonable use of land and protection of habitat, they wouldn't be running chainsaw happy. But most of us who live outside of cities have personally seen cases where the feds act on preserving habitat without any common sense or fairness. We are right to fear their arbitrary power. The shame is that it leads to this kind of destruction.

How much better for everyone, including the woodpeckers, if the feds, and the local residents, embraced a cooperative conservation approach.

From Yolo County, CA. The county has been working for 2 years to condemn the Conway Ranch, ostensibly to "preserve open space" even though the long -standing and public plans of the owners were agriculture and an environmental preserve. The real deal is the county wanted the water and mineral rights on the ranch. After a 2 year fight the county finally gave up, alas not in shame. Here is a rather partisan article on the wrap-up, but with the essentials.

Facing criticism that city building permit officials gave special treatment to politically connected applicants, the Los Angeles Building and Safety Department announced Tuesday that it is drafting new standards to ensure that all members of the public are treated the same.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa requested the action in response to a Times report that dozens of construction projects sought by political insiders had been assigned to a little-known "case management unit." The unit is designed to speed the permit process, saving applicants time, bureaucratic frustration and money.
…

The Times last month reported that the department had given special treatment to projects sought over the last year by dozens of insiders, including nine current and former city commissioners and donors to the mayor and City Council.

…

Building and Safety officials have repeatedly denied that department decisions are influenced by whether an applicant is a city commissioner or political donor. And at Tuesday's commission meeting, Adelman emphasized that he was acting only because of the mayor's request.

…

The Times report also raised concerns among City Hall watchdog groups.

Tracy Westen, chief executive of the Los Angeles-based Center for Governmental Studies, said it is not fair that the average resident has to navigate red tape to get a permit, while the politically connected are assigned a case manager who calls a meeting of representatives from all involved departments to expedite approval of projects.

Article here.

Anyone still convinced the government knows what it's doing on immigration law should read this article from today's New York Times. It's a classic example of how politics and reality diverge as well as the ineptitude of the administrative apparatus implementing policy.

Here's a snippet:

Now harvest time has passed and tons of pears have ripened to mush on their branches, while the ground of Mr. Ivicevich’s orchard reeks with rotting fruit. He and other growers in Lake County, about 90 miles north of San Francisco, could not find enough pickers.

and

For decades, Mr. Ivicevich said, migrant pickers would knock on his door asking for work climbing his picking ladders. Then about five years ago they stopped knocking, and he turned to a labor contractor to muster harvest crews. This year, elated, he called the contractor in early August. Pears must be picked green and quickly packed and chilled, or they go soft in shipping.

“Then I called and I called and I called,” Mr. Ivicevich said.

The picking crew, which he needed on Aug. 12, arrived two weeks late and 15 workers short. He lost about 1.8 million pounds of pears.

Reason magazine has an excellent series of articles on the immigration debate in its September/August 2006 issue.

Position: Window Washer

Job Description: This is specialized window washing work. Employees are responsible for performing window washing tasks that require the use of special height reaching equipment and attention to special safety precautions and guidelines.

Salary: $40,424

Interested jobseekers can apply via the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.

Flashback: WaPo’s June 2005 “Off the Rails” series

From the article “Metro Spending Often Veers From Core Transit Mission”:

Even as Metro officials complain that tight finances are crippling their ability to run the Washington area's subways and buses, they continue to pour millions into programs that have little to do with transporting passengers.

The agency spent close to $40 million for a massive training and maintenance facility that five years after the purchase is overbudget and underused. Millions more are needed to finish renovations.

When senior agency attorneys wanted two new window offices and a 1,440-square-foot law library, Metro spent $270,000 to accommodate them.

Metro paid more than $400,000 for a "culture change" project to teach managers to operate less like bureaucrats and more like business executives, an experiment officials now say was a bust. And the agency's inability to control overtime has led to $100,000-plus salaries for numerous mechanics, bus drivers and train operators.

Twice in the past two years, Metro Chief Executive Richard A. White has asked riders to pay higher fares, saying he had trimmed his budget to the core and his only choice was to charge more or cut service. In February, he told Congress that lack of funds had forced him to defer maintenance, spend less on customer service and cut back on cleaning the stations.

Thanks to Patrick from ADC for the job listing tip.

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw has a pretty tranquil life these days, at least compared to what he went through a couple of years ago.

As chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors he uttered the completely mainstream comment (mainstream among economists, that is) that international trade is a good thing that tends to benefit all nations involved. He said that offshore outsourcing is merely a new kind of trade in which exports come to our shores via the internet or our phones, instead of by ships and planes.

Many reporters simply yawned at what was then regarded as an uneventful press conference. Then the LA Times ran a story titled “Bush Supports Shift of Jobs Overseas.”

What followed was a (cliché alert) political firestorm. Our nation worried that the teachings of Adam Smith and David Ricardo no longer applied to our new economy. Speaker Hastert called for Mankiw’s head and Candidate Kerry had himself a great issue. He railed against “Benedict Arnold CEOs” and outrageous tax policies that supposedly encouraged this kind of traitorous activity. Politicians penned more than 200 anti-outsourcing bills, mostly at the state level (although few were passed).

Today the panic has largely subsided, at least for now.

In this paper Mankiw looks back at that loopy time. Pretty interesting stuff.

Related: A study Adrian Moore and I wrote on the topic

Related: My pre-election take on Kerry-Edwards’ rhetorical strategy

BTW, later on Kerry backed away somewhat from his infamous line:

Asked about outsourcing and his use of the "Benedict Arnold" epithet, Mr. Kerry replied: "The Benedict Arnold line applied, you know, I called a couple of times to overzealous speechwriters and said, 'Look, that's not what I'm saying.' Benedict Arnold does not refer to somebody who in the normal course of business is going to go overseas and take jobs overseas. That happens. I support that. I understand that. I was referring to the people who take advantage of non-economic transactions purely for tax purposes — sham transactions — and give up American citizenship. That's a Benedict Arnold. You give up your American citizenship but you want to continue to do business and deduct and do everything else. That's what I'm referring to."

Actually, it seems this explanation isn’t entirely accurate.

But more importantly--does Ben Affleck still think outsourcing is "criminal"?

Cecilia Kim and I explore this question in the latest issue of Econ Journal Watch.

Here’s the abstract:

In the United States, the public debate over urban rail projects is complicated by the lack of agreement on goals. Supporters offer a wide variety of justifications to build and expand rail transit. If one focuses on the judgments of economists, the list of justifications shrinks considerably, but we are still left with a bundle of goals. Compared to other justifications, economists appear to be somewhat optimistic about rail transit’s impact on local economic development, but less optimistic about rail’s ability to achieve environmental improvement and serve the transit-dependent poor. Economists seem quite pessimistic about rail’s ability to achieve key transportation goals like reducing congestion. Economists often attribute rail’s political success to rent-seeking and romantic political factors. Of those economists who offer a big-picture view, there appears to be wide, though not unanimous, agreement that rail’s costs exceed its benefits. And it seems that almost all economists who write about rail agree that various demographic features, such as suburbanization, the declining influence of central business districts, and increasing wealth will make it increasingly difficult to design successful rail systems.

Article here.

Whole issue here.

Complete table of contents below the fold.

…partially, on at least one topic. Reuters reports that Gore advocated a tax shift to replace all payroll taxes, including those for Social Security and unemployment compensation, with a tax on carbon dioxide emissions in a speech at New York University School of Law on Monday.

Of course, the idea of a revenue-neutral swap of taxes on labor for taxes on environmental “bads” isn’t Gore’s. Folks that are familiar with Arthur Pigou’s work on economics in the 1920s—and indeed, folks that are familiar with economics at all—were doubtless gratified to hear Gore characterize payroll taxes as “penalizing employment.”

The green tax shift has been underway in Europe for more than a decade now, but the claims of US green tax advocates that these reforms would create a “double dividend” or win-win by both reducing pollution (the first dividend) and increasing economic efficiency by replacing other more distortionary taxes (the second dividend) are regarded skeptically by most experts today (a sampling here and here and here and here). Even less appealing is the idea of lumping environmental taxes onto the distortionary tax structure we already have.

So, if Gore wants to make economists happy for the second time this week, he’ll announce support for eliminating payroll taxes first, as a good-will gesture.

(Side note—Gore’s new book is to be titled The Assault on Reason. We’ll be on the lookout for said assault this spring.)

Stockholm, Sweden went to the polls to determine whether the metropolis would continue with its congestion charging scheme. The program, by all accounts, seemed to be successful in achieving its goals: congestion fell by 50% and air pollution by 14%. But, it came at a political cost. After 12 years in office, the leftwing Social Democrats who imposed the charge were thrown out. Nevertheless, 53% of the metropolitan electorate voted to retain the program, so it will continue under the newly elected center-right coalition.

An informative article and interview by streetsblog.org on the election and its potential aftermath in Stokholm can be found here.

We don't often see the human toll subsidies take, but this article in the New York Times does a pretty good job. Suicide among farmers in India is at record highs, and a large portion of the despair comes from high debts incurred to keep farms going. One culprit is subisides to US agriculture that discourage importing lower cost products from nations such as India.

Though the crisis has been building for years, it presents an increasingly thorny political challenge for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. High suicide rates and rural despair helped topple the previous government two years ago and put Mr. Singh in power.

Changes brought on by 15 years of economic reforms have opened Indian farmers to global competition and given them access to expensive and promising biotechnology, but not necessarily opened the way to higher prices, bank loans, irrigation or insurance against pests and rain.

Mr. Singh’s government, which has otherwise emerged as a strong ally of America, has become one of the loudest critics in the developing world of Washington’s $18 billion a year in subsidies to its own farmers, which have helped drive down the price of cotton for farmers like Mr. Shende.

Texas is showing that it is still the nation's trailblazer when it comes to toll roads. From a press release from the Texas Department of Transportation:

In just a few weeks, motorists can enjoy an easier, faster, shorter commute in north Austin and Round Rock instead of their daily crawl through congestion. On Nov. 1, approximately 25 miles of the region’s first toll roads will open nearly a year ahead of schedule, the Texas Department of Transportation announced today.

Tollroads often allow new capacity to be built faster than under conventional, tax funded approaches. The revenues can be used to leverage private capital and make the projects attractive for private operators who are more nimble and flexible.

In Texas, they go a step further--all new road projects first have to be evaluated based on whether they can be funded through tolls before they can tap into tax revenue.

Rarely does an opponent provide so much clarity to the one’s own side of the issue.

In a column in last Thursday’s Madison (Wisc.) Capital Times, John Nichols put his finger on how network neutrality proponents, in their call for an Internet that treats all Web sites equally, muddle Web access and Web functionality, two different aspects of the Internet.

In his defense of network neutrality, Nichols writes, “On the Web that the telecommunications conglomerates want to colonize for their own convenience and profits, the average Internet user could get to Wal-Mart’s site in an instant but would have a hard time getting to Wal-Mart Watch’s site.”

Although I disagree with Nichols, I owe him a tip of the hat, because he took a minute to point out how the effect of network neutrality law would be judged: not by what the “telecom conglomerates” can and cannot do--but on how “average users” like you and me experience different Web sites. It won’t even matter that www.walmart.com is a retailing site while www.walmartwatch.com is an advocacy site or that the two exist to accomplish different things. The test, according to Nichols, is whether there is parity of presentation.

Via Bloomberg News--In the US we spend the most on education and get the worst results...

The U.S. spent about $12,000 per student, second only to Switzerland among the 30 OECD countries based on 2003 figures, the OECD said today in its annual report on education. The U.S. outperformed only five of the 30 countries on an OECD test given to 15-year-olds, ranked 12th in high school completion rates and averaged 23 students per class, higher than the average of 21.

No less an agency than the Department of Homeland Security, the poster child for government bureaucracy run amok, has concluded what few other Beltway insiders have—that the Internet works just fine without government-imposed mandates and requirements, even in such critical areas as security and survivability.

DHS reached its conclusions following a General Accountability Office assessment of cybersecurity issues, including the vulnerability of Internet infrastructure to terrorist attack, and whether the government should impose compliance mandates on the industry to reduce or eliminate these vulnerabilities.

Even as Congress debates network neutrality, which would prohibit service providers from creating quality of service tiers for Web-based content and applications, the GAO said market forces are doing a much better job managing the way the Internet functions and recommended that DHS not attempt to craft security mandates and directives

Larry Downes, a columnist for CIO Insight, sums up the GAO’s recommendations, which cut to the heart of why the Internet is different from the “public utilities” regulatory fans compare it to, and adds his own thoughts.

“The final report, and the subsequent lethargy of the DHS, reflect what is fundamentally a conservative view of government: Don't get involved until it’s clear the market has failed. To quote again from the final report, ‘Externally, a government role in cybersecurity is warranted in cases where high transaction costs or legal barriers lead to significant coordination problems; cases in which governments operate in the absence of private sector forces; resolution of incentive problems that lead to under provisioning of critical shared resources; and raising awareness.’

“Well, guess what? I agree. For one thing, the Internet is not like other national infrastructures. Unlike highways, the Internet is not built and operated by government entities. Unlike public utilities, such as the electric grid and the water supply, the Internet is not heavily supervised, inspected or controlled by regulators. At its core, the Internet is a private infrastructure, which owes its remarkable success, spread and constantly improving price/performance to the fact that it is in some sense a reflection of ‘market forces’ at their purest—an infrastructure of profoundly low, and always dropping, transaction costs.

“Our best defense against a catastrophic loss of Internet access is not a less supine DHS…but the Internet itself. Its decentralized design, full of the kind of checks and balances that make democracies work, is far more capable of withstanding natural disaster or terrorist attack than anything all the agencies and task forces and public/private partnerships in Washington could ever come up with. As the GAO report notes, since the creation of the DHS, the Internet has withstood a Baltimore tunnel fire in 2001 that burned key fiber-optic cables, the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina, and coordinated attacks from the Code Red and Slammer worms. In all these instances there were local disruptions, but most Internet users weren't even aware of the damage. And the DHS played no part in the recovery.”

With more than one million students enrolled in charter schools nationwide, some individual communities are seeing large numbers of students enrolled in charter schools. Via a new study on charter school market share from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools:

While charter schools enroll a modest percentage of students nationwide, some communities far exceed national and state averages to enroll high percentages of charter school students. In fact, 19 different communities educate over 13% of their public school students in charter schools (and ties account for 19 different communities being represented in our top "ten").

New Orleans leads the pack with 69% market share, due primarily to the post-Katrina reconstitution of the schools. Ohio has FIVE different communities in the top ten, with Dayton leading the pack at the #2 spot on our countdown with 28%. Alliance home base and our nation's capital, Washington D.C., comes in at #3 with 25%. And the largest community on the list is Detroit, with 18% of its nearly 160,000 students in public charters.

A new study by Minacom, a supplier of service level test automation systems for telephone companies, finds that the quality of voice over IP (VoIP) service markedly improved over the last twelve months, and is now regularly exceeding the quality of “basic dial tone” services, also know as public switched telephone network (PSTN) calling.

John Williamson, editor of U.K.-based telecom site Telecom Redux, provided a summary of Minacom’s findings.

“According to data collected over the last 12 months by Minacom's standards-based, single-ended service quality test system, VoIP service quality increased steadily, with an average Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of 4.2, compared to 3.9 for the PSTN (MOS is a scale commonly used to describe speech quality, ranging from 1 (worst) to 5 (best)).

“Based on a MOS threshold of 3.6, only 1 out of 50 calls in North America were considered to be unacceptable - 1 in 10 worldwide - while greater than 85% of VoIP calls exceeded average PSTN quality over the same period. Detailed results apparently show that VoIP service bettered PSTN quality worldwide, and improved in all regions over the course of the survey. In addition to superior sound quality, calls over VoIP connected quicker overall - 8.2 seconds on average, compared to 8.9 seconds for those placed over the PSTN. Regionally, the PSTN was faster to connect for calls placed to North America (4.3 seconds versus 5.7 for VoIP), while international calls connected faster with VoIP (8.7 versus 10.4 seconds for PSTN). Linear regression indicates that VoIP is closing the gap, connecting 2 seconds faster in July 2006 than a year earlier.”

As VoIP quality improves, regulators will be hard-pressed to justify continued subsidies and rate caps for PSTN service, which they still tend to regard as the “gold standard” of service whose affordability needs to be preserved.

They ignore market data shows that people of all ages and incomes are rejecting PSTN service, because in reality, when compared to wireless or VoIP, PSTN is the least attractive choice. It’s tethered to one location and offers none of the additional features (call forwarding, caller ID, voicemail, etc.) that come free with newer services. At the same time, for service providers, PSTN is the most expensive service to provision. Until now, regulators did have the quality card to play. That ace is turning out to be a deuce.

Nonetheless, recent legislation to remove price caps on “basic service” in California and North Carolina have come under fire from consumer advocates, even though their elimination would stimulate migration to cheaper, more robust calling services, not to mention more investment and competitive entry in a segment that the public—backed now by hard data—sees as clearly superior.

AT&T announced today that it will offer real-time feeds of 20 TV channels, including Fox News, Fox Sports, the Weather Channel and the History Channel, as part of a new video service that will be available to broadband users anywhere in the U.S., whether or not they are AT&T landline or DSL customers.

The service, called AT&T Broadband TV, represents the most organized attack thus far on the cable TV distribution model and opens the door to “regulatory escape” from local franchise fee structures.

AT&T Broadband TV is being launched in partnership with MobiTV, an Internet content aggregator that currently provides video feeds to wireless service providers. The AT&T tie-up, however, represents the first time such a wide array of cable programming that will be simulcast over the Internet. A trial version is available now at https://att.mobitv.com/do/welcome.

I doubt many people watching CBS-TV's Rock Star: Supernova are thinking about how it maps with the global economy, but it does in some striking ways as I discuss in an article for Michael Smith, executive recruiting. The show is tracking the auditions of musicians who want to be the next front man or woman for the newly formed rock band Supernova.

The auditions are turning out to be more than that. The performances, and the critiques by the rock band's members, exemplify the kinds of skills and attitudes necessary for producing a high quality service or product in a fiercly competitive global economy.

Although billed as a 13-week audition, in truth Rock Star’s a hard lesson on how to identify and evaluate the next rising star in any business. The lessons are even more prescient for a business fighting it out in a globally competitive services industry, where the skills, talent, and drive of your employees are more important than ever.

The auditioning muscians make textbook mistakes in a rigorous interview process. What may be even more surprising for those who tune in on Tusday nights is the very business-like approach to selecting the next bandmate taken by the current members of Supernova. The show is demonstrating that Rock 'n' Roll is more than music; it's an intensely competitive businesss. The band members understand the stakes of hiring the right person for the right job:

In the labor market, and particularly in today’s business world where services are the key to global competitiveness, relationships are critical to business and professional success. Finding the right talent, and making sure the talent can catapult an emerging company into the forefront of its industry, is ultimately what the hiring process is all about.

The complete article can be found here.

IBM and Cisco, with the participation of SeaKay, a non-profit organization, plan to provide free wireless broadband access to 1,500 square miles in Silicon Valley, which would make it the largest community broadband initiative thus far: 42 cities, 2.4 million residences, $270 million.

This comes as San Francisco, the city just to the north, continues to dither about whether government should fund broadband networks. There, municipal advocates argue that the private sector is incapable of getting broadband to those who need it.

The Silicon Valley project, and others like it, belie this. They show how much of an interest the private sector has in promoting broadband use. It also shows that government participation is not required in order to close the “digital divide.” Given the number of municipal failures, compared to commercial and non-profit successes in broadband, government only tends to make digital divide problems worse. They siphon off investment from the private sector, while falling short of their own goals.

Moreover, when non-profits like SeaKay participate, there is less of a chance that community broadband projects will fall prey to political interia or apathy—a concern voiced by Boston authorities who chose the non-profit approach specifically to ensure continuity of the project beyond the current administration.

Projects such as these also counter another familiar municipal platitude, that the industry is intent on holding back development. IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, not to mention the phone and cable companies all benefit when more people use broadband. It is not surprising to see the industry lining up behind non-profit, non-government initiatives.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, many people wondered if the World Trade Center would be rebuilt. We discussed this and other issues in a short policy paper discussng the future of cities.

The Twin Towers comprised 9.5 million square feet of office space. The entire WTC complex consisted of about 30 million square feet, and about 13 million (40 percent) were destroyed in the attacks. At the time, we noted Manhattan already had a surplus of office space, and that the market would unlikely replace it all unless there were significant subsidies.

Well, the newest proposal for rebuilding on the site proposes a complex of six office towers. Even with space dedicated to parks and a memorial, the new buildings will add 12.3 million square feet of new, class A office space. The new complex is expected (now) to cost about $6.6 billion. The complex will be funded using $4.6 billion from the insuance policy and $3.5 billion in "liberty bonds". The liberty bonds are tax exempt bonds issued by the city, and their allocation is controlled by the city of New York through its development agencies.

More information on the World Trade Center rebuilding project can be found here.

Many in the blogosphere are howling about this article from The Australian, which I linked to yesterday. At issue is what to make of a leak from an IPCC report.

From Real Climate:

The principle error in the latest 'exclusive' is that the writer confuses a tightening of the estimate of climate sensitivity to 2xCO2 (as discussed here) with projections of climate change in 2100. These projections obviously depend on the uncertainties in the scenarios of future technology, economic progress and population (etc.) plus uncertainties in feedbacks related to the carbon or methane cycles. Unfortunately these have not been reduced since the last assessment report (and in some cases have actually increased).

More here.

Global warming is a hot subject – so to speak, what with Schwarzenegger signing the bill to limit carbon dioxide emissions in California recently and Al Gore declaring in his movie -- for the nth time -- just how compelling the science of climate change really is. So what should we do?

That is the question that the recent Reason Roundtable addresses through essays by Don Boudreaux and Julian Morris. Here’s a sampling:

Boudreaux: Being neither an atmospheric scientist nor a former U.S. vice-president, I haven't the expertise to judge whether or not global warming is a reality or the extent to which humans cause it. Experts who I trust, however, persuade me that science does indeed show that global temperatures are rising and that industrial activity is at least part of the reason. I'm prepared to believe even the possibility that global warming will eventually kill millions of people.

But I nevertheless insist that science does not unambiguously endorse action against global warming. Put differently – and contrary to today's elite opinion – ignoring global warming is not necessarily a sign of scientific illiteracy or of ideologically induced stupidity.

First, human preferences might counsel against tackling global warming. If global warming's ill-effects won't occur for, say, another 150 years, nothing objective says that people today should sacrifice for that distant tomorrow. Such sacrifice might be demanded by ethics – or by human preferences themselves – but not by science. Click here for the article.

Morris: The best policy for reducing the vulnerability of people to potentially negative aspects of climate change is one that enables people to prosper and thereby avail themselves of all the adaptive measures that the wealthy can afford. But what will lead to this clean, green growth? The overwhelming body of evidence suggests that the key is to ensure that society is governed by appropriate "institutions." Institutions are the framework within which people act and interact – they are the rules, customs, norms, and laws that bind humans to each other and act as boundaries to human behavior……And the institutions that are most conducive to sustainable development are the institutions of the free society – property rights, contracts, and the rule of law. Click here for the article.

Last week I posted a comment on Culver City, Calif.’s decision to block access to peer-to-peer sites on its municipal wireless network, which offers free access to all users. P2P, moreover, was unceremoniously lumped into the category of kiddie porn.

P2P is an Internet-based application that allows users to exchange files directly from their PCs. It is one of the most democratic aspects of the Internet. It has not come without controversy. For example, because P2P can be used to copy and exchange copyrighted materials, such as music and movies, digital rights management enters into the picture. But although P2P can result in copyright violation, the application itself is not illegal, nor are P2P facilitators such as LimeWire, BitTorrent, Napster, Gnutella and KaZaA. P2P also is an inherent part of multiplayer gaming, a major revenue-driver for broadband adoption.

There’s a lot at work behind Culver City’s decision to block P2P sites, including the concern the movie studios, three of which are based in Culver City, have for P2P as a potential competitor. Indeed, the studio influence provides Culver City with a degree of cover as it lets muni proponents and network neutrality advocates off the hook with a “that’s politics” shrug.

The question remains as to whether the P2P censorship will extend to other municipal networks. There's every reason to believe it will.

With election season looming, brace yourself for more tales of woe. Like their somber predecessors the tellers of these new tales will probably miss the bigger point:

It's true that the middle class is shrinking -- but that's because more families are better off. The share of prime-age adults in households with real incomes above $100,000 rose by 13.1 percentage points from 1979 to 2004. The share of households making less than $75,000 dropped by 14 percent. Fully 41 percent of prime-age American adults are in households with incomes above $75,000.

Among married-couple households the picture is even brighter. In 2004, the median income for these households was $70,000, and $78,000 for couples with two earners.

Just as interesting as the message is the messenger--Stephen Rose writing in the lefty American Prospect. He highlights another reason why the old "middle class is getting hosed" saw doesn't cut it:

I focus on prime-age households (age 25-59), which are 68 percent of the population, because including the very young and the very old distorts the picture of what's really happening with the middle class. Many young workers get paid very little, but few will keep their low salaries as they move up in their careers. Older Americans distort the wage and income picture because they're no longer working. Their incomes may shrink, but their standard of living may not diminish. Indeed, Americans age 55-64 have greater net wealth than any other group.

Rose argues that progressives should cool it with all the hand-wringing:

Rather than documenting how the middle class is falling behind (it isn't), progressives might do better finding ways to help more middle-class families succeed. In its recent report, Politics of Opportunity, the group Third Way counsels progressives to adopt a message and policy agenda that looks to middle-class aspirations and seeks to create middle-class opportunity. One way to do this, for example, is to look at the characteristics of the top income quintile and use public policy to replicate that success.

Two things set the top quintile apart: people in the top quintile are much more likely to have finished college, and they are much more likely to be in married, two-earner families. We can move more people up the ladder by doing two things: one, by helping more students graduate from college, and two, by supporting two-earner families in balancing work and family. This means such things as broad-based tuition tax relief, paid family leave, and more tax breaks for child care costs.

Do read the whole article (via Greg Mankiw); it’s packed with lots more conventional wisdom-puncturing figures. For example, guess what the median credit card debt for all American households is. Hint: it's roughly equal to the likelihood of the Dems listening to Rose.

Actually, neither party wants to acknowledge that things gradually get better regardless of who is in office because it robs them of their favorite campaign hammer: “Things have gotten worse since the other guys have been in charge!”

Related: If things are so great, why do I feel so lousy, parts I and II

Related: What a great time to be poor

So says Paul Zimmet, chairman of the WHO’s International Congress on Obesity.

More here.

Flashback: US Surgeon General compares obesity to terror threat

And speaking of global warming:

A draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, obtained exclusively by The Weekend Australian, offers a more certain projection of climate change than the body's forecasts five years ago.

For the first time, scientists are confident enough to project a 3C rise on the average global daily temperature by the end of this century if no action is taken to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The Draft Fourth Assessment Report says the temperature increase could be contained to 2C by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions are held at current levels.

In 2001, the scientists predicted temperature rises of between 1.4C and 5.8C on current levels by 2100, but better science has led them to adjust this to a narrower band of between 2C and 4.5C.

The new projections put paid to some of the more alarmist scenarios raised by previous modelling, which have suggested that sea levels could rise by almost 1m over the same period.

The report projects a rise in sea levels by century's end of between 14cm and 43cm, with further rises expected in following centuries caused by melting polar ice.

The new projections forecast damage by global warming, such as stronger cyclones, modest sea-level rises and further shrinking of the arctic sea ice.

More here.

Bad news spreads quickly. It doesn’t even really matter if the news is true or not.

Last week I noted the NYT’s flurry of economic pessimism, and, in this TCS Daily piece (thanks to co-blogger Steve for the tip), David Henderson shows how the bad “news” has spread to the Washington Post in the form of this Harold Meyerson piece.

Henderson makes many interesting points about why the NYT’s coverage and its echoes are misleading. Note, for instance, the role higher taxes play in the story of wages:

as marginal tax rates have increased for most people except the highest-income people, due mainly to rising Medicare and Social Security tax rates over the last 40 years, employers have paid a higher and higher percent of compensation in the form of untaxed benefits.

Over at Café Hayek digs into that BLS study I mentioned and finds more surprising/interesting nuggets.

Maybe it’s too much grayness from the Gray Lady.

In news stories, columns, and editorials (like this one titled “Downward Mobility”) the NY Times harps on the same general point: things are getting worse—wages are stagnating or falling—and average workers are really getting hosed.

Generally speaking, there are a bunch of problems with such accounts. For example:

They ignore the fact that wages are only part of what determines living standards. The price of goods is very important too. And the price of just about everything that's exposed to competition has been falling (see Exhibit 6).

They highlight wages, but ignore other forms of compensation. (Since Dec. 2000 total compensation is up 40 percent.)Poverty stats often overlook the earned income tax credit and other forms of welfare.

They ignore the influence of immigration: millions of poor people pour into America each year and that pulls average wages down.

They examine a narrow time frame. Periodic downturns are inevitable, but take a wider view and things generally look much better. (Check out this recent BLS report: for example, in 1901 the average American family devoted 80 percent of its budget to the basics (food, clothing, housing), but by 2002-2003 that figure shrunk to 50 percent.)

Here’s a recent LA-focused attempt by me to prove that things are getting better and here the Investor’s Business Daily takes on a page one NYT story titled: "Real Wages Fail to Match A Rise In Productivity,"

it notes that the median hourly wage, adjusted for inflation, has slipped 2% since 2003, and that wages and salaries, as a share of GDP, are the lowest they've been since 1947.

There are all kinds of problems, however, with such a narrow analysis. Most of us aren't paid just in "wages" but in wages and benefits. And when the two are put together, total compensation is up 8.7% since 2003, for an average annual gain of 3.5%.

Why is this? Wages may not be soaring (up just 0.7% since 2000), but benefits are (13.1%). In other words, we're making more but getting it in the form of tax-free benefits.

If you’re still feeling lousy, see Café Hayek here, here, and here. And don’t forget your dose of Postrel.

Related: Even the NYT Occasionally Highlights Good News