Getting Better Understanding Of Minimum Wage Changes

I stumbled upon this AEI chart on Mark J. Perry's Twitter feed (@Mark_J_Perry):

It took some digging, but the full story is available as a blog post at their Carpe Diem site. One of the big issues I see with a lot of research in this area is how it tends to push an agenda one way or another by purposefully changing the goalposts. One example is this tendentious piece from Occupy Democrats, heralding minimum wage job losses as a nothingburger, or Erik Sherman's piece claiming the then-current $11 minimum wage resulted in restaurant employment "soaring". Perry's post goes a fair distance to improving the heat vs. light ratio minimum wage discussions tend to elicit. It's not perfect, but it is a better guide than most. A few observations:

1. As Perry asks, "soaring compared to what?" Restaurant employment in the Seattle metropolitan area is outpacing Seattle proper, whose first derivative appears to approach zero, i.e. growth has stopped.
2. This is the kind of thing we really need, i.e. looking more closely at broad effects on employment among people likely to be in minimum wage jobs rather than among the entire labor pool.
3. Restaurant employment is a good but not wholly satisfying proxy for minimum wage employment, because it also encompasses fine dining restaurants that do pay some employees substantially more (if only on tips).

Price Controls, The Next Phase Of Health Care "Reform"

Daily Kos has discovered that Medicare isn't a good gauge of medical spending (this is my shocked face), because Medicare reacts to an entirely different set of stimuli and constraints than private actors:

The research looked not only at Medicare but also at a huge, new database drawn from private-insurance plans—the sorts used by most Americans for health care. And it shows that places that spend less on Medicare do not necessarily spend less on health care over all. Grand Junction, as it happens, is one of the most expensive health care markets in the country for the privately insured—despite its unusually low spending on Medicare.

So the answer (you won't be surprised) is cost controls!

All of this boils down to an idea that isn't at all new: in order to really rein in healthcare costs, providers have to be reined in. Existing anti-trust laws need to be enforced when it comes to hospitals and provider groups with near monopolies, and price regulations could be called for where there are already monopolies.

This is not really surprising, and as with all price controls, will end up having the opposite effect than those its architects envision, i.e. shortages and lines. These lines will appear mainly for expensive procedures, i.e. it will predominantly affect older people needing joint replacement surgery, cancer patients, and so on; young, healthy people, whose needs are occasional and generally inexpensive, won't encounter problems, and thus will claim that these things "work", for some value of that word. The comments are a maze of wishful thinking greasing the slippery slope, as though the obvious, much-heralded government meddling in the medical arena hasn't tainted further actions. (Hint: both houses of Congress are now in the hands of the opposition.) (Hat tip: @phillyrich1.)

Revisiting Tinder: The Even Worse News For Unmarried Young Women

David M. Buss in Edge has a thought-provoking essay about the dating crisis among educated young women, something I've treated elsewhere recently. Largely manufactured by women's dating preferences (and a reduction in the number of young men coming out of universities as a fraction of the whole graduate population), he has a take on it that I didn't really appreciate: the nature of male sexuality means such young women face competition from below their own socioeconomic level as well:

Additional elements of the mating mind exacerbate it. A key cause stems from the qualities women seek in committed mateships. Most women are unwilling to settle for men who are less educated, less intelligent, and less professionally successful than they are. The flip side is that men are less exacting on precisely these dimensions, choosing to prioritize, for better or worse, other evolved criteria such as youth and appearance. So the initial sex ratio imbalance among educated groups gets worse for high achieving women. They end up being forced to compete for the limited pool of educated men not just with their more numerous educated rivals, but also with less educated women whom men find desirable on other dimensions.

But wait: Susan Patton's much-smirked-at advice to apply effort to find a husband while one is in college has some sensibility behind it, too? Because,

The depletion of educated men worsens when we add the impacts of age and divorce to the mating matrix. As men age, they desire women who are increasingly younger than they are. Intelligent, educated women may go for a less accomplished partner for a casual fling, but for a committed partner they typically want mates their own age or a few years older, and at least as educated and career-driven. Since education takes time, the sex ratio imbalance gets especially skewed among the highly educated—those who seek advanced degrees to become doctors, lawyers, or professors, or who climb the corporate ladder post-MBA. And because men are more likely than women to remarry following divorce and to marry women increasingly younger than they are—three years at first marriage, five at second, eight at third—the gender-biased mating ratio skews more sharply with increasing age.

Yikes. That's pretty fearsome odds, but on the other hand, one wonders just how much women past a certain point in their lives might want to quit the game altogether, or bat for the other side (i.e. take up lesbianism).

Star Wars, The Mornings After

A handful of mostly unrelated thoughts on the latest Star Wars installment after reading a number of essays online:

• The Discontents Of Star Wars-Land: Christopher Orr in The Atlantic takes on critical reversal on Star Wars: The Force Awakens (which includes Peter Suderman's meh review, something I touched on briefly here), and earns his paycheck with this one sentence:
  

  Even George Lucas has gotten in on the act, complaining that the movie is all recycled ideas, and that his experience of selling the franchise to Disney was akin to selling his children to “white slavers.” (Which mostly raises the question: Who’s worse? White slavers, or the person who sells his children to them?)

  Ouch. Thanks, George. You're now allowed to buy a small tropical paradise and disappear from our cultural landscape. (I guess he must have gotten a call from someone at Disney.)
  
• Mary Rey? In the context of such a play-it-safe approach, it seemed likely Rey would be held up as a feminist icon, Abrams having already addressed "will the fans embrace this episode?" questions. The issue of whether she is a sort of Mary Sue has come up in multiple corners, with Charlie Jane Anders at io9 wrestling with definitional problems:
  

  “Mary Sue” is one of those terms that had a useful meaning in fan culture at one point, long ago, and has now become both vague and toxic. Originally, a “Mary Sue” was an author surrogate, inserted into fan-fiction. The “fan fiction” thing is important, because part of the fantasy of the “Mary Sue” was the fan-fic author getting to live at Hogwarts or travel on board the U.S.S. Enterprise. And this thinly veiled copy of the story’s author is incredibly good at everything, to the point where all the established characters marvel at her (usually it’s “her”) wonderfulness.
  
  The “Mary Sue” is a very specific wish-fulfillment fantasy, in other words. It’s about getting to hang out with Harry, Ron and Hermione, and having them admire you. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of fantasy—we’ve all had it, when we get especially invested in a particular universe—but the term acquired a pejorative meaning because people felt it made for bad stories. Fair enough.
  
  Over time, the term “Mary Sue” has broadened until it means “any female character who is unrealistically talented or skilled.” Which is insane for a couple of reasons: It makes this “trope” so vague as to be meaningless, and this is also purely a way at tearing down female characters who are good at stuff.

  Rey isn't perfect — she manages to get captured (conveniently!) by Han Solo and Chewbacca — but she's plucky and resilient. Rey is indeed many things female fans have longed for since the opening trilogy — a heroine in her own right in a heroic story. Nevertheless, the familiarity of the arc leads us to wonder just how much of her story isn't Luke Skywalker in drag.
• Whose Feminism? The Atlantic's Megan Garber takes on the broader subject of feminism as it appears in The Force Awakens. There's a great deal that's positive to be said about Rey's handling of herself; as Garber writes,

  Rey’s feminism does not protest too much. It is not insistent; it is not obvious. It is, instead, that most powerful of things: simply there. Rey, tellingly, is not an archetype, but rather a fully realized character, subtle and nuanced and human. She, as a character, luxuriates in her own subjectivity.

  I'm not entirely sure what Garber's trying to get at with "luxuriates in her own subjectivity", but it sounds like writerly fan service. Yet Rey as a new feminist model can only come too soon. As with Miss Piggy, whose martial arts exploits go underappreciated, it would represent a step up from many of the modern acolytes operating under that label.
• Slave (Leia) To Fashion: I guess it was inevitable that Carrie Fisher would catch a bunch of sniggering about her 30-years-older visage, since the last time we saw her in the series, she was wearing a metal bikini. Consequently, awful people are on Twitter (and elsewhere) saying awful things about her appearance:

  Please stop debating about whetherOR not👁aged well.unfortunately it hurts all3 of my feelings.My BODY hasnt aged as well as I have.Blow us👌🏼

  — Carrie Fisher (@carrieffisher) December 29, 2015

  Fisher apparently had a fairly ambivalent relationship with her role as a sex symbol in the series, on the one hand warning Daisy Ridley, "Don’t be a slave like I was… You keep fighting against that slave outfit." Simultaneously, she recently mocked people objecting to the bikini as failing to see the whole picture (which is that she was about to kill the "giant testicle" that had imprisoned her). Live by the sword, I guess.
• Laurie Penny Is Still A Horrible Person: Witness what limitless self-pity and identity politics yield:
  

  This isn’t just about "role models". Readers who are female, queer or of colour have been allowed role models before. What we haven’t been allowed is to see our experience reflected, to see our lives mirrored and magnified and made magical by culture. We haven’t been allowed to see ourselves as anything other than the exception. If we made it into the story, we were standing alone, and we were constantly reminded how miraculous it was that we had saved the day even though we were just a woman. Or just a black kid. Or just - or just,whatever it was that made us less than those boys who were just born to be heroes.
  
  The people who get angry that Hermione is black, that Rey is a woman, that Furiosa is more of a hero than Mad Max, I understand their anger. Anyone who has ever felt shut out of a story by virtue of their sex or skin colour has felt that anger. Imagine that anger multiplied a hundredfold, imagine feeling it every time you read or watched or heard or played through a story. Imagine how over time that rage would harden into bewilderment, and finally mute acceptance that people like you were never going to get to be the hero, not really.

  The sense of entitlement involved in telling others how they need to tell the stories you want in the manner you want and with the characters you approve of — STFU. Really, what this is about is whether you get to operate the machines of culture while forcibly annoying others.
  
  Update 1/1/2016: It occurred to me that Penny here embodies a great deal of what's wrong with modern feminism: it's not enough to simply enjoy a movie with a strong female hero. A good bit of Penny's enjoyment comes from sticking it to men. There's no small irony in that, given who Rey is and what Penny is not. In Penny's telling, patriarchy is a suffocating conspiracy to suppress women like Rey. Rey is about doing; Penny is about kvetching, a permanent, dull narcissism that rejects even the idea of empathy between the sexes.

Tamir Rice's Preordained "No True Bill"

With the Christmas season upon us, I missed a few things, but it was no surprise when I learned yesterday that Tamir Rice's killer in a blue uniform had a "no true bill" delivered (i.e. insufficient evidence to prosecute on murder charges) against Timothy Loehmann. Scott Greenfield had already predicted this outcome back on December 16, when the presentment was sent to the grand jury:

McGinty doesn’t want an indictment. McGinty is too much of a coward to take the responsibility of his office to say so, and instead is engaging in a grand jury charade to soothe the public’s anger about the murder of Tamir Rice while assuring the desired outcome.  And as this description of what happened in the grand jury shows, the prosecution is making damn sure that there will be no indictment.

This shouldn’t happen. Prosecutors do not attack, ridicule, smirk at and mock their own witnesses, except when they are doing everything possible to guarantee the result of no true bill.  And they are doing this solely to pretend, after the grand jury refuses to indict, that they’ve been fabulously fair. It’s a lie.  The difference this time is that we know of the lie before the outcome.  We’ve got the details in hand.

Which is to say, it was exactly the same sort of dog-and-pony show the district attorneys in the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases trotted out as a legal Potemkin village substituting for real adversarial proceedings. There were signs Timothy Loehmann was incompetent to begin with: he had effectively been fired (he quit, in fact, but circumstances suggest he was pushed out) from the Independence, Ohio police force:

After five months on the job, Loehmann quit the police force of the Cleveland suburb of Independence, Ohio, in December 2012, days after a deputy police chief recommended his dismissal. The deputy police chief based his recommendation on a firearms instructor’s report, obtained by NBC News, that Loehmann was experiencing an “emotional meltdown” that made his facility with a handgun “dismal.”

“They put a police officer in this situation who had a history of mental health problems,” said Michael Benza, a criminal law professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “It may not have been ‘reasonable’ for him to shoot given his mental issues.”

Or it may not have been reasonable that the Cleveland PD should have ever hired him.  Claims of menace backed up his preordained exoneration, eagerly accepted by juries grand and petit, not to mention police:

In one experiment, a group of 60 police officers from a large urban police force were asked to assess the age of white, black and Latino children based on photographs. The officers were randomly assigned to be told that the children in the photographs were accused of either a misdemeanor or felony charge. The officers overestimate the age of black felony-suspected children by close to five years, but they actually underestimated the age of white felony-suspected children by nearly a year.

California lately has signed into law a bill forbidding the use of grand juries in police shooting cases, SB 227.  It could be a step in the right direction, depending on how it's implemented; state attorneys at least wouldn't have a grand jury to hide behind, anyway.

The Surprising Polling Results On Stricter Abortion Controls In The UK

Why do so many more UK women than men favor further restriction on abortion on demand? It's frequently taken as axiomatic by a number of social media memes and bumper stickers implying that, because legislators tend to be male that this reflects who, generally, wants to control abortion. (The idea's origin appears to come from an expression coined by Florynce Kennedy, "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.") The reality is the opposite, at least for certain questions and in certain places; broadly, in the U.S., Gallup reports a more conventional view, with men self-labeling as "pro-life" 51%-44% and women skewing the opposite way, 50%-41%. But it's not a huge gap, and given the UK polling covered much more specific proposals, one wonders how that would go if you started asking detailed questions.

Instant Review: Star Wars Episode VII [Spoiler]

The first three are two and a half good movies; to that, we can add this one, which expels George Lucas from the management of his brainchild to the franchise's apparent betterment. J.J. Abrams has, somewhat unexpectedly, managed to produce the third best Star Wars film. It's unsatisfying in ways already outlined by Reason's Peter Suderman (incoherently, at Vox):

... as much as I enjoyed the acknowledgement, I also found the movie’s near-total reliance on elements recycled from the original somewhat disappointing. At times it felt like I was watching the cinematic equivalent of a very polished Star Wars cover band — playing all the old favorites, but without adding anything beyond a few clever riffs.

Tascha Robinson in Vox argued that Rey's arrival means we've already reached Peak Strong Female Character, which, having seen her, wasn't the annoying, Didactic character I figured she might be, given the itch To Teach All Of Us About Strong Female Characters. Other remarks:

• Somewhat surprised to see Carrie Fisher in this one; she looked terrible, like a bad combination of botox and obvious plastic surgery. I would have preferred she keep herself honest.
• Harrison Ford pulled the escape chute to get out of future episodes, with Han Solo dying in this film, and just as well.
• So it's interesting that the two actors with, shall we say, shallow resumes since Star Wars concluded have both the possibility of future roles within the franchise. Good business move.