I’M BACK FROM MY TRIP to the Chi. I highly don’t recommend Amtrak for your next 24-hour journey. One the way out to Chicago, the guy in the seat next to me had two rings going through his lip, stunk like smoke and spilled beer on the floor of the train. Nice guy, but still, not the type to spend a full day with. On the way back, there weren’t enough seats in my cabin, so I was put in the handicapped person seat in the way back of the train. It wasn’t fully attached to the ground and the recliner was broken, so at every bump, I’d do a little swivel and the chairback would swing up and nail me in the back. You might think that riding the train is a nice smooth ride through pretty countryside, Harry Potter style. No. For some reason, they built the train through the ugliest sections of this country, and the train shakes like a boat on the ocean. Next time I’m taking JetBlue, hehe.The rest of the trip was good, though. I got to see Andrea and Adam out at NU and UChi. Who knew U. Chicago was in the ghetto? I mean, damn. But for me it’s not thing - my Mom worked in Caprini-Green, a Chitown ghetto so bad they actually tore in down like 10 years ago. The joke about Chicago types having unattractive girls and tons of utilitarians is also true - check out this article from their school paper about The economics efficiency of dating. Hilarious stuff. Adam and I went to a Bulls game, I met Andrea’s ricockulously rich friends and went to a Boy Scout campout with my 11-year-old cousin all in one week. Good times.
Speaking about Adam, that kid claims he hits the weights for an hour a day, seven days a week. He’s gone from a bench of 70 lbs. in high school to 180 lbs. today. That’s crazy. He’s almost got me convinced to pull the hour a day in the gym thing. I can bench 175 now (though admittedly I’d never lifted weights until last week at Adam’s U) so maybe I could get up to 225 next year. That’d be tight.
From Travis: Singing Ponies. So very addictive.
So I said last time I’d talk about why “outsourced jobs” works the same way as trade in any other good and produces the same benefits. Essentially, outsourcing is trade is services (like programming) rather than trade in goods (like cars). First, some facts: The US has almost 7 million “insourced” jobs; that is, jobs in America in companies owned by foreigners. If we’re going to be upset at outsourcing a programming job to India, we can’t forget to mention the BMW lawyer who works in the US. Second, the unemployment rate is 5.6%, which really is quite mild. Third, of the three million or so job losses since 2000 (we’ve gained a bunch of jobs too, mostly in other sectors, so it’s not like there are three million less jobs now) only about 1% of those lost jobs are the result of outsourcing. Manufacturing has lost jobs *around the world*, even in places like China and Mexico, for the same reason that farming has lost jobs around the world - we are productive enough today to make tons of manufactured goods (and foodstuffs) without using many people. To blame China for the loss of US manufacturing jobs in simply not correct. And, of course, outsourcing was going on during the 90s at nearly the same level as today, but no one really minded much when the economy was rolling as well as it was back then.
Trade allows services to drop in price as they’re performed in the (comparatively) cheapest place. In the same way that TVs and clothing have become cheaper because of trade, services such as basic law consultation will also become cheaper. A lot of people think this means that the rich will get richer instead of the prices on goods coming down, but it’s simply not true. The value k, or the amount of income going to owners of capital, has stayed the same in the US for decades (it’s about 30 percent). Conversely, the value (1-k), or the amount of income going to workers like ourselves, has stayed the same at 70 percent. There’s a reason that the median, inflation-adjusted income in the US is almost 3 times higher today than it was in 1950. The average size of the American house, the amount of international vacations, life expectancy and number of cars per household has soared while infant mortality and percentage in poverty have plummeted.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t harms. People will lose their jobs in the short term if they work in an industry that is shedding workers. It is hard to adjust when one loses a lifelong job. Even with government unemployment benefits, you’re probably going to see “lost job insurance” that people will buy like they buy life insurance, just in case their industry happens to decline.
It sucks that people lose their jobs sometime. But everyone is better off both now, and in the future, if we make goods and services as productively as possible. Blaming outsourcing is xenophobia that is not backed up the facts.
Guess what is coming to Boston in April? Jeopardy tryouts! I signed up for the lottery in which they pick people to take the test and see if you’re good enough to be on the show. Please pick me, Mr. Trebek!
I haven’t mentioned it yet, so here’s hoping the cowardly bombers in Spain get every bit of punishment they deserve. A few of my friends were in Madrid during the bombings, though luckily all are OK. After the bombings, the Spaniards elected the opposition party, removing Aznar, a pro-US prime minister, from office. Many have said that the Spaniards, by responding to a terrorist bombing by voting in a politician who isn’t as hardline against terrorism as Aznar, have given victory to al-Qaeda. Others have said that Aznar was booted because he supported the Iraq war against the will of his people, who were 74% against the war in Iraq. I don’t really buy these arguments. It is true that Aznar’s party was winning (barely) in polls right before the bombing, and then lost the election (just barely). But they lost mainly because they essentially lied about who was responsible for the bombing, claiming that the ETA (Basque separatists) were responsible for the attack well after most others believed that Islamist groups were responsible. It is true that some may have changed their vote in order to “make Spain less of a target”? Sure. Is it true that this election may cause more bombings in the future, as Islamists mistakenly believe they influence elections with a well-timed bomb? Sure. But you can’t castigate the whole of the Spanish people for this. As for the “this is a repudiation of Bush policy” argument, Aznar’s party was ahead in the polls as of last week, despite supporting the war from Iraq, so I don’t see how that line of reasoning has much merit.
From Claremont McKenna: (White) professor fakes racist attack. This one loopy prof believed that CMC wasn’t focused on the “pervasive racism in the world today”, so she slashed the tires and broke the windows on her own car, and scrawled racist and homophobic messages on the side. CMC (and the other Claremont schools) cancelled classes for a day of sit-ins and whatnot. A few days later, a couple students come forward and admit that they saw the prof do this to her own car. The FBI notes that her stories during interviews didn’t match up. Look: I hate racism. It is a scourge. But a ridiculously high percentage of campus racism incidents in the last year or two have been staged. Perhaps these dimed-out, wishing-for-1968, white professors that always seem to be involved in such incidents need to put down their biography of Malcolm X and flip through “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”. Additionally, Claremont’s president should issue an apology for cancelling a full day of classes (the tuition at my school works out to 70$ for every class, so assuming a similar tuition at CMC, a student missing three classes had $210 stolen from them) for such bogus reasons. When racism is real, it’s a tragedy directed at mankind. When racism is faked and nonetheless followed up with no apologies, days of sit-ins and bogus calls for what “we as a community” need to do, it’s an insult to the intelligence of mankind. Enough.
Finally, subways of the world. Subways are rad. Now off to write 15 pages on prospects of democratic consolidation in East Timor. Peace.
Prime Cuts
“Are you Gonna Be My Girl” by Jet
Yeah, I’m a bit behind the times for not knowing this AC/DC-sounding rock track, but it’s rad. For wierder rock, of the variety that one would hear at 3 a.m. on a college radio station but nowhere else, check out “Leaf House” by Animal Collective. The part about the cats really threw me off.“H.U.S.T.L.E.” by Murs
Murs’s new CD is the best new rap this side of “The Grey Album”. Also peep “3:16″ by Murs. “And I never sold crack, I did aluminum cans / Used to get laughed at by you and your mans / But I never let it get me, stayed true to my plans / I used it all for the studio, now you understand / Cheap dirt hustles, no glourious tales / But it did keep my black ass from goin’ to jail.” “No Regrets” by Black Devil is a track from 1979 found in an old record store that was just released and sounds brand new in an Air kinda way. Pretty tight.
