God's interests

I just ordered a couple of ebooks online: John Updike's Golf Dreams and Frederick Kempe's Berlin 1961. After my order was complete the store told me people who had bought these two books also bought Karen Armstrong's The Case for God.

It seems that if you lived through the Cold War or if you golf, you are interested in God. Seems reasonable.

Anti-social media

Bullhorns.
Graffiti.
Spam.
Junk mail.
Outdoor Muzak.
Indoor Muzak.

Tiger, Tiger, Fading Out

When 21-year-old Tiger Woods won the Masters in 1997 by 12 strokes I broke a personal rule and headed my weekly column “Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright” even though that hed had already been widely used. I wrote Fridays at the time, five days after that ridiculous win. My rationale was that it was better to be good than original. Kipling got the essence of the moment. 

Now the burn seems to be fading. Watching Tiger not be competitive in big golf tournaments is like watching the tide not come in. Forces of nature may not need rooters. Some people take pleasure in rooting against them. It’s a question of taste. I’m a Yankees fan in baseball and a Habs fan in hockey and though I’m a longtime Giants fan in football it was upsetting when the universe did not unfold as it should have and the Giants beat the Patriots on a great but fluky catch by a receiver who never made another catch--great, fluky or whatever. 

Tiger no longer seems a force of nature. At 35 he would be a waning force of nature in any case. The Yankees, Canadiens, Patriots and Giants have all had their fallow periods. I hope he can come back. Tiger at his peak is something to behold. If the knee can be fixed, if he can build a workaround stroke, there’s still time to catch Nicklaus in majors. (Can the knee be repaired? In Tiger Woods: How I Play Golf the 25-year old Tiger explained: “For more yards, I ‘snap’ my left leg...I’ve found that by snapping my left leg straight, my hips clear faster and speed up the movement of my shoulders, arms and legs.” It doesn’t sound like something you can do years on end.)

But I’ve been reading Dan Jenkins‘ Fairways and Greens and am beginning to think that even if Tiger does get 21 majors (we’re counting US amateur titles here), he still may not equal Nicklaus. Jenkins has a table showing firsts and seconds in major tournaments. Nicklaus won 20 but was second in another 19. At the time that book came out, his total of 39 was 20 more than--almost double--the next best, Bobby Jones. Arnold Palmer was third at 18, Ben Hogan fourth with 16. 

Tiger has passed Jones for second place, with 14 wins and six second place finishes (including ties). That leaves him 19 behind Nicklaus. Maybe second place shouldn’t count. Maybe the competition wasn’t as deep in earlier decades as it is now. Still, 39 golds and silvers. Talent contests are like approach shots, close does count.      

Who's got the Better Life: Canada or the US?

Significant differences? Canada vs the US in the OECD’s Better Life Index
	Canada	US	OECD
Average household net-adjusted disposable income (US$)	27,015	37,690	22,284
Household financial wealth (US$)	59,479	98,440	36,808
Per cent of people 18-64 with a paid job	72	67	65
Per cent of work force unemployed for a year or longer	0.97	2.85	2.7
Per cent of occupied dwellings inhabited by their owners	65	67	67
Number of rooms per person in average home	2.5	2.3	1.6
Per cent of dwellings lacking private access to indoor flushing toilets	0.9	0	2.8
Average hours worked per year	1699	1768	1739
Per cent of mothers employed after their children begin school	71	73	66
Per cent of people 25-64 with equivalent of high-school diploma	87	89	60
Per cent of people 25-34 with equivalent of high-school diploma	92	88	80
Average PISA reading score out of 600	524	500	493
Life expectancy at birth	80.7	77.9	79
Per cent of people reporting their health as good	88	88	69
Health spending as per cent of GDP	10.4	16	9
Atmospheric PM10 (micrograms per cubic meter)	15	19	22
Per cent of people who know someone they could rely on in a time of need	95	92	91
Voter turnout (per cent)	60	90	72
Per cent of people who say they trust their political institutions	67	58	56
Per cent of people reporting they had been assaulted over the previous 12 months	1	2	4
Homicides per 100,000 people	1.7	5.2	2.2
Per cent of people who report feeling unsafe on the street after dark	17	19	26
Per cent of people who say they are satisfied with their life	78	70	59
Source:http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/canada/ and http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-states/

These are from the OECD's new "Better Life Index." I've indicated "winning" scores in red (very bright red, sorry!). It's hard to know how smart an idea that is. For instance, is it good that more Canadians than Americans say they trust their political institutions? Maybe we're naive and they're wisely wary. (And does anybody believe voter participation in the US is really 90 per cent?) Same with life satisfaction: Are we Canadians simply less willing to share our dissatisfactions with pollsters, are we too easily satisfied or does our objectively better situation legitimately justify greater satisfaction (especially after the emigration of those of us who are dissatisfied)?

Health spending as a per cent of GDP poses similar problems. It's better to spend less for the same service but are we getting the same service as in the US?

Is home ownership necessarily preferred to renting? Here, in any case, the differences between the two countries aren't great. (It's surprising that we have more rooms per person, on average. How big do you suppose those rooms are on average?)

Finally, though Canada comes out on top in a number of measures, there's a big difference in income and financial wealth: more than $10,000 a year per person in the former and almost $40,000 in total in the latter. Money isn't everything. But it's got to count for something.

Gas taxes and climate change

Two questions about gas taxes and climate change: 1. In the diagram (from the Canadian Tax Federation), how much tax is embedded in "Refining," "Crude," and "Marketing"? And 2.: How far does this level of taxation leave us from efficient carbon taxation? What is the all-in marginal external cost of a litre of gas?

Bi-polar tax rates

Average and marginal tax rates, Canada, single-parent families making 67 per cent of average labour income, 2010
Income tax plus employee and employer contributions less cash benefits (as % of labour costs)	-8.3
Increase in net income after 1% increase in gross wage earnings	0.37
Source: OECD, Taxing Wages 2009-10, Tables I.1 and I.8.

Quebec METR

 

Source: Finn Poschmann and Alexandre Laurin, "What has happened to Quebecers' marginal effective tax rates?", C. D. Howe Institute e-brief, May 18, 2011.

Dividing line for the species

We may divide the whole struggle of the human race into two chapters. First, the fight to get leisure; and then the second fight of civilization--what shall we do with our leisure when we get it?

James Garfield, quoted by Judith Flanders in the TLS, "Song and dance," April 22, 2011.

Major in economics

Nicholas Kristof says in today's NYT that if he had it to do over again, he'd major in economics, not political science: "It possesses a rigor that other fields in the social sciences don’t—and often greater relevance as well. That’s why economists are shaping national debates about everything from health care to poverty, while political scientists often seem increasingly theoretical and irrelevant."


Kristof, "Getting smart on aid," NYT, May 18, 2011

La différence

The media in France are not allowed to show pictures of DSK in handcuffs but are reporting the name of his accuser. The US media have shown the perp walk endlessly but have not mentioned the accuser's name. Are any countries doing both? Neither?

Whatever happened to "an old tax is a good tax"?

James Cloyne of University College London has an interesting new paper on the effects of taxes on growth: "What are the effects of tax changes in the United Kingdom? New evidence from a narrative evaluation." The narrative evaluation in question, provided in an exhaustive companion paper, summarizes British budgets going all the way back to 1945. The purpose of the narrative, in part, is to try to judge whether the tax changes reacted to macroeconomic circumstances, so that the statistical relation between taxes and GDP would be contaminated by feedback effects. Cloyne finds a number of cases where tax cuts were introduced more or less independently of macro conditions, including four periods of "supply-side reform" (1957-8, 1970-3, 1983-4 and 1995-6, all under Conservative governments). Cloyne judges that subsequent changes in GDP were pure tax effects. He finds that these effects are large: "Output increases by around 0.6 per cent on impact, rising to 2.5 per cent over 3 years. This implies that tax cuts stimulate above trend growth for over three years" (p. 27).

What's also intriguing is that Cloyne identifies 2500 discretionary tax changes between 1945 and 2009, an average of 39 per year. Whatever happened to the idea that an old tax is a good tax?