Author Archives: WinfredBSB

Here Is What Blogging Has Done To Me

by WinfredBSB Posted on January 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Yesterday I wrote a post that listed a bunch of things people have said about Ted Cruz, along with a bunch of things I made up. But which were real and which were invented? Here was the answer:

All statements whose ordinal number takes the integer form 2n+1 or 2n-1 have been invented. The rest are real.

I got some pushback about this, mostly asking what the hell kind of crap was this, anyway? So here goes. Here’s where it came from:

  1. At first I was just going to toss in a few fake statements and put the answer key below the fold. But then I realized that anyone who got here via a direct link would see the answers right away.
  2. So then I figured I’d add eight fakes in all the odd slots. But if your eye drifted down to the answer, you’d see “odd” right away.
  3. So I put it in small type. But even that was readable.
  4. So then I figured that instead of “odd,” I’d say that all the fakes were of the form 2n+1. My geeky readers would appreciate it.
  5. Then I looked for a link that defined “odd,” so that my non-geeky readers had a fighting chance of figuring things out. The only simple one I found defined odd as 2n+1 or 2n-1. So I changed the text to match.

This was pretty obviously a pointless waste of time. Welcome to my world. This is what blogging has done to me.

Anyway, in case you didn’t figure it out, all the odd numbered statement are fakes. The rest are real. The scary thing is that I didn’t have any trouble coming up with eight plausible fakes.

This article:  

Here Is What Blogging Has Done To Me

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Remember That Shot Fired a Few Months Ago in the Great Immigration vs. Wages War? Turns Out It Was a Dud.

by WinfredBSB Posted on December 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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Does immigration depress wages? One of the seminal studies of this was done by David Card in 1990. He studied the Mariel boatlift of 1980, which swamped Miami with new immigrants, and concluded that there was little effect on wages. A few months ago, George Borjas took a fresh look at the data, and concluded there was an effect, but it was restricted to those without a high school diploma. Among high school dropouts, wages dropped 10-30 percent for about six years.

The key chart is on the right. Click here for more detail, but the nickel version is that the blue line shows the wages of Miami’s dropout population compared to other cities. I wrote about this at the time, and noted an oddity: “Before 1980 and after 1990, the wages of high school dropouts in Miami are above zero, which means dropouts earned more than high school grads. That seems very peculiar, and none of the control cities show the same effect. Does this suggest there’s something wrong with the Miami data?”

Yes it does! A pair of researchers at UC Davis tried to recreate Borjas’s conclusions, but they couldn’t do it. “Significant noise exists in many samples,” they say, “but we never find significant negative effects especially right after the Boatlift, when they should have been the strongest.”

So what’s up? Where did Borjas get his huge effect? Well, it turns out that his Miami data was indeed suspect:

We find that the main reason is the use of a small sub-sample within the group of the high school dropouts, obtained by eliminating from the sample women, non-Cuban Hispanics and selecting a short age range (25-59). All three of these restrictions are problematic and, in particular, the last two as they eliminate groups on which the effect of Mariel should have been particularly strong (Hispanic and young workers). We can replicate Borjas’ results when using this small sub-sample and the smaller March CPS, rather than the larger May-ORG CPS used by all other studies of the Boatlift. The drastic sample restrictions described above leave Borjas with only 17 to 25 observations per year to calculate average wage of high school dropouts in Miami.

So Borjas used a small March census sample, and then left out several groups that should have shown a strong response to the wave of immigration. As a result, his sample size is so small as to be useless. Tweaking his data even slightly removes the wage effect entirely.

Borjas does mention sample-size problems in his paper, but never really addresses it or makes it clear just how tiny his sample is. I’ll be curious to hear Borjas’s reaction to this, but given the questions I already had about his paper, this reappraisal of his data puts it pretty firmly in the category of unlikely to be true. For now, it appears that even a massive influx of new immigrants over a period of just a few weeks has almost no effect on wages at all.

Does this mean that immigration in general also has no effect on wages? Nope. But it certainly suggests that the effect is probably pretty small if it exists at all. In any case, the Borjas paper doesn’t seem to prove anything one way or the other.

Original source:

Remember That Shot Fired a Few Months Ago in the Great Immigration vs. Wages War? Turns Out It Was a Dud.

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How Much It Costs to Raise a Kid, in 4 Charts

by WinfredBSB Posted on August 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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A middle-income family with a child born in 2013 can expect to spend about a quarter of a million dollars in child-rearing expenses over the next 18 years, according to a new report from the USDA.

Costs such as housing, food, transportation, clothing, health care, child care, and education will amount to an expected $304,340 ($245,340 in 2013 dollars) for middle-income families, a 1.8 percent increase from last year’s report. For each income bracket, costs will increase as the child ages:

Although households with incomes in the lowest third will spend less than half as much on child-related costs as higher income families, their spending will amount to a far greater percent of total income.

Housing is the highest child-rearing expenditure, amounting to 30 percent of expenses for middle-income, husband-wife families with two children. Raising a child is costliest in the urban Northeast and least expensive in rural areas.

USDA

The report notes that child-rearing costs have grown 24 percent since 1960, when a middle-income family could have expected to spend $25,230 ($198,560 in 2013 dollars). The USDA has also released an interactive calculator to help families estimate child-rearing costs based on type of household, number of children, location, and income.

See more here:  

How Much It Costs to Raise a Kid, in 4 Charts

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