Mixed-race kids manage to be as bad as whites on the white behaviors and as bad as blacks on the black behaviors. Mixed-race kids act out in almost every way measured in the data set. – Steven Levitt
… the United States and the European Union resisted calls to reduce the enormous subsidies that they hand out to agricultural producers. This is one of the main barriers to developing countries having a chance to trade their way out of poverty, for it funds cheaper agricultural produce against which farmers in poorer countries cannot compete.
When the Chinese government instituted the policy in 1979, it touched off a wave of sex-selective abortions as pregnant couples decided that if they could have only one child they would benefit most from having a boy. That helped leave modern China with the largest gender imbalance in the world. Today, there are 37 million more men than women in China. As the first generation of one-child boys have reached adolescence, the youth crime rate in China has more than doubled.
Writing in the much poorer world of 1899, Veblen argued that people spent lavishly on visible goods to prove that they were prosperous. To test this idea, the economists compared the spending patterns of people of the same race in different states—say, blacks in Alabama versus blacks in Massachusetts, or whites in South Carolina versus whites in California. Sure enough, all else being equal (including one’s own income), an individual spent more of his income on visible goods as his racial group’s income went down.
The Religion News Service reports new evidence that tithing is on the decrease, which is affecting churches of all types.
Misdirected government policy plays a part here, too. In 2005, the United States Congress began to require widespread use of ethanol in motor fuels. This law combined with a subsidy for this use has created a flourishing corn market in the United States, but has also diverted agricultural resources from food to fuel. This makes it even harder for the hungry stomachs to compete.
In their study, which appears in the May 2008 edition of The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Gruber and Hungerman show what happens when religious services must compete with shopping, hobbies and other activities.
Today we work under an operating principle that assumes that I will only pay for the cost of my care, and I want that cost as low as possible. Know it or not, we are all caught up in that game: insurer, employer and consumer. None of us want to pay more than what is supposed to cost to care for me and me alone.
The other day, I did the funeral of a woman I’ll call Polly. She lived alone, worked as a cashier in a gas-station/variety store 50 to 60 hours per week saving $5 here and $20 there to “pay off” the bills she carried after a being hospitalized for a seizure. As far as we can tell, her care was very good. Care was not the problem. The problem was that she was never going to pay her bills in anything like a normal lifetime.
Join others across the nation and give 100%, 10% or even 0.7% of next month’s so-called “economic stimulus” check to an organization of your choice working to acheive the Millennium Development Goals.