Your Privilege Is Showing

It often surprises me how out of touch most people are with the plight of the poor.  One “journalist” who stopped surprising me long ago is Megan McArdle.  She is ostensibly a business and economics reporter, but she quite often has issues with basic economic theory and even basic math sometimes.  She is at her best (read worst) when she shows just how clueless she is about the people she is covering, though.

In a recent article about the recent Black Friday Wal-Mart strike, Megan says the following:

Recessions are also a time when employers don’t necessarily have a lot of profits to give up.  Walmart’s $446 billion of revenue last year was eye-popping, but its profit margins are far from fat–between 3% to 3.5%.  If they cut that down by a percentage point–about what retailers like Costco and Macy’s have been bringing in–that would give each Walmart employee about $2850 a year, which is substantial but far from life-changing.  Further wage improvements would have to come out of the pockets of Walmart’s extremely price conscious shoppers.  Which might be difficult, given how many product categories Amazon is pushing into.

Yeah, Megan, you’re right, for you, an extra $2,850 a year is far from life-changing.  You waste more than that in a year.  For a person making $20,000 a year, though, it is huge!  You would suddenly have 14% more money than you did previously.  Who wouldn’t be thrilled with a 14% raise?  Megan McArdle, apparently.  You would have $200 extra each month.  You can pay for groceries with that.  You can not get kicked out of your apartment with that.  You can maybe start planning for a future with that instead of having to constantly worry about the present.

But, no, Megan, you continue to live in your fantasy world.  Continue believing that $2,850 wouldn’t be life altering for almost 15% of the U.S. population.  Your persistent writing with blinders on gives us bloggers plenty of fodder.  I mean, it’s not like we can all just pick on David Brooks.

Legal Question of the Day

Say that I am standing on the Illinois side of the border.  There is another man standing a little way away from me, but on the Wisconsin side of the border.  I shoot that man dead.  Who has jurisdiction?

A murder definitely occurred, but on which side of the border did the actual physical crime occur?  Is the act of firing the gun with the crime or is the result of the act the crime?  Can you separate the two?    Or is this one of those jurisdictional nightmare situations where you have two district attorneys fighting for the prestige of getting a conviction for an unusual crime and all the press that goes with it?  I certainly couldn’t be tried for murder in both states because that would violate double jeopardy.

Never a lawyer when you need one.

Being poor

My friend Eric commented in my “The poor think differently than you” post about an old post by John Scalzi titled “Being Poor“.  It’s worth reading in its entirety.  It’s hard to wrap your head around, but choice is a privilege.

Idiom of the day

Today’s idiom of the day is “scared shitless”.  Did you know that it’s totally a thing?  On some level, of course, I did.  But like many other idioms, I use it more for effect than for actual meaning.  Because, let’s be honest, almost everyone that is reading this can probably count on one hand the number of people who have crapped their pants in terror.  Unless you’re military and have seen action, I guess…

But it actually happens.  In times of extreme terror, the body of many animals (including humans) involuntarily voids its bowels.  And there’s science behind it!  It came as a surprise to me that something that we normally consider a completely voluntary reflex can suddenly become involuntary.  I couldn’t find any reference to chemicals that get released that cause it to become involuntary, but I assume it has something to do with the blast of adrenalin the body releases in times of stress.

On top of that, though, there is a very good reason for the body to do so.  Think about it.  If something is that scary, your fight or flight reflex is probably in full flight mode.  Your body signals that it’s all hands on deck for full speed ahead.  (Wow, is that sentence nautically historically challenged.)  Hey, what are you red blood cells doing helping with the digestion of food?  Drop what you’re doing and get up here, we need to move!  And so the body quite literally drops what it’s doing.

Hopefully, that extra boost will be just what you need to get away from the big, ugly, dangerous predator that is bearing down quickly on you.  Probably not, though, since you’re a human who finds it inconvenient that you have to walk all the way over to the refrigerator to get food.

And since we’re already getting all scatological, did you know that pissing yourself in fear is worse?  It means that you have lost complete control of your body and your ability to think and you will probably just curl up in a fetal position and suck your thumb waiting for death.

This is important information to know the next time you and your friends find yourself facing a grizzly bear.  It’s not the one who runs slowest who loses, it’s the one who pisses himself.  Or, if you’re part of a fire team that just got ambushed by a group of armed insurgents, the guy who pissed himself is the one you have to protect until he can function again.  Because that’s what you do.

Movie Review: Life of Pi

Ratings for reviews will appear above the fold, while the review itself will appear below the fold to avoid spoilers for anyone that wants to go into it with a blank slate.

Jean-Paul’s rating: 5/5 stars

Continue reading →

Signs that you’re getting old

During the week, my alarm wakes me up at 6:30 in the morning to start my daily get ready for work routine.  Every day off for a few months now, I have been waking up at exactly 7:00.  It doesn’t matter when I go to bed or how much I had to drink the night before.  7:00 and *ping!* eyes open.  This can only be the inevitable shifting of time that occurs as one ages.  I see 5:00 PM dinners in my near future.

How (not) to buy a foreclosed home – Part 2

Part one discussed the backwards economic forces of the foreclosure market and how cash is king.  In part two, we’ll discuss one of universalities of buying a home.

Some things are universal when buying a home.  When a real estate agent talks about “location, location, location”, it’s really just a lazy way of saying that research is everything.  Yes, in a normal housing market, you’re going to pay more for a good location and that’s all you need to concern yourself with, but we’re not in a normal housing market.  Location still matters, but the idea of location is kind of turned on its head.  So what you really want to do is research, research, research.

This is the only part of buying a foreclosure that’s actually fun.  If you love the city you’re in, this gives you a good chance to explore your city.  If you’re doing your research right, you get to learn a lot about the history of the neighborhoods that you are looking at.  For instance, the neighborhood that I was looking at was once almost entirely Polish, but in the last few decades the Polish population has moved further northwest and been replaced with a mostly Hispanic immigrant population.  They, in turn, have slowly been migrating west and getting replaced by hipsters as prices rose.  All that came to a screeching halt, though, when the housing bubble burst.

Now, the neighborhood has lots of distressed housing.  Commercial properties are empty, lots are vacant, houses are abandoned and in disrepair.  This makes the neighborhood sound really bad, but it actually isn’t.  It’s still a good family neighborhood and it’s close to both public transportation and a major highway.  It has just hit a rough spot.

So if you have a population trend interrupted by an economic disaster and a good neighborhood hit particularly hard by said disaster, you have lots of opportunity.  Yes, it’s still a gamble.  Yes, trends may not continue.  Yes, the economy must improve to make this worth while.  I like to think, though, that it’s all about odds.  Odds are the trend will continue.  Odds are the economy will improve.  And just like you can usually fee pretty comfortable when you’re playing blackjack and you have a 20 and the dealer’s showing a 9, I like my odds.

The poor think differently than you

My post about socioeconomic blindness triggered a memory of a study from a few years ago that shows that poor kids really do think differently from rich kids.  This is both fascinating and completely understandable.

There is an immediacy to being poor.  It’s very hard to plan a future when so many resources are spent providing for now.  This immediacy causes all sorts of problems, as shown by the kids in the study.  Throwing poor kids into a classroom and expecting them to learn because it’ll be good for them in 20 years is like giving a bear a honeycomb and telling it that it can either have that or the giant barrel of honey just in the next room.  The sad thing is that so many people then blame the kids for failing.

The good news is that there are tools that we already know will work that can help these kids.  The bad news is that society has decided that teachers are greedy and lazy and evil and we spend way too much on education already so getting them those tools will be nigh impossible.  And this is an area where rich people think like poor people.  They are too blind to see that spending some extra money now could mean huge savings in the future, with respect to necessary social services that many people would also like to see cut.

Socioeconomic blindness

A thought from the Ta-Nehisi Coates/Chris Hayes video that I posted yesterday.  They talk about how the socioeconomic ladder is so stratified and there are huge gaps of understanding between the layers.  Meaning that a person who makes $30,000 cannot begin to comprehend what a person on welfare’s life is like and a person who makes $100,000 can’t even begin to comprehend what life is like for the person who makes $30,000 and the person who makes $100,000,000 a year can’t even begin to comprehend what life is like for the person who makes $1,000,000 a year.

This, I believe, is where the whole “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality comes from.  People who say that don’t have the slightest idea what the other person is even going through.  This is also why the Romneys can say they were struggling so much in college that they had to sell some of their stock in order to survive and believe that they’re sharing an experience with the common man.  On the surface, it’s absurd, but seen through the lens of socioeconomic blindness, it makes complete sense.  You may laugh at the Romneys’ complete lack of self-awareness, but chances are you’re just as guilty of committing those fouls as they are.

This socioeconomic blindness is not an easy problem to solve.  The best thing to do is to interact on a meaningful level with people not in your economic comfort zone.  And that’s almost impossible to do.  Volunteering at a soup kitchen doesn’t really give you meaningful interactions nor does volunteering in general (though you should volunteer for something, anything).  But you can ask yourself questions while volunteering.  What would I do if I had no money, no job, no house, and was hungry?  (Hint: If you’re thinking at all about solving the first three, you’re doing it wrong.)

In the end, though, the most important thing to do is recognize that socioeconomic blindness exists.  Maybe then, you’ll recognize that you shouldn’t be passing judgements on someone who is so far removed from your situation you can’t even see what she’s going through.