Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
The Chicago Tea Party is sponsoring a TeaCon 2011 on September 30 – October 1, 2011. Check it out.
Before that, the next Chicago Tea Party meeting is on August 3, 2011. The speaker will be Otis McDonald, plaintiff in the critically important case of McDonald v. City of Chicago — which is worth reading, even if you are not a lawyer.
I plan to be at both of these events, hopefully wearing my new shirt:
… President Obama makes a public statement linking the Norway massacres and the Tea Party?
Does he go first? Or does he let others take the lead?
It is taking them a few days to figure out how to use the massacre politically.
But it is going to be a major theme for them going forward.
Count on it.
UPDATE: This is now circulating: “Koch-Funded Tea Party Heavyweight Tim Phillips Spoke at Norweigan Killer’s Political Party Event.” Classic.
I am repairing a gap in my education by reading Thomas Sowell’s classic, Vision of the Anointed, which was written in 1992 but is still, unfortunately, as valid a critique of leftist thought as it was then. As an example of his methods, he constructs an experiment in statistics. This concerns poverty and inequality and, in particular, the poverty of leftist thinking.
He imagines an artificial population that has absolute equality in income. Each individual begins his (or her) working career at age 20 with an income of $10,000 per year. For simplicity’s sake, we must imagine that each of these workers remains equal in income and at age 30, receives a $10,000 raise. They remain exactly equal through the subsequent decades until age 70 with each receiving a $10,000 raise each decade. He (or she) then retires at age 70 with income returning to zero.
All these individuals have identical savings patterns. They each spend $5,000 per year on subsistence needs and save 10% of earnings above subsistence. The rest they use to improve their current standard of living. What statistical measures of income and wealth would emerge from such a perfectly equal pattern of income, savings and wealth?
| Age | Annual Income | Subsistence | Annual Savings | Lifetime Savings |
| 20 | $10,000 | $5,000 | $500 | $0 |
| 30 | $20,000 | $5,000 | $1,500 | $5,000 |
| 40 | $30,000 | $5,000 | $2,500 | $20,000 |
| 50 | $40,000 | $5,000 | $3,500 | $45,000 |
| 60 | $50,000 | $5,000 | $4,500 | $80,000 |
| 70 | $0 | $5,000 | $0 | $125,000 |
Unfortunately, even with an Excel spreadsheet, I cannot get these numbers to line up properly.
[Jonathan adds: Many thanks to Andrew Garland for providing html code to display these numbers clearly.]
Now, let us look at the inequities created by this perfectly equal income distribution. The top 17% of income earners has five times the income of the bottom 17% and the top 17% of savers has 25 times the savings of the bottom 17%. That is ignoring those with zero in each category. If the data were aggregated and considered in “class” terms, we find that 17% of the people have 45% of the all the accumulated savings for the whole society. Taxes are, of course, ignored.
What about a real world example ? Stanford California, in the 1990 census, had one of the highest poverty rates in the Bay Area, the largely wealthy region surrounding San Francisco Bay. Stanford, as a community, has a higher poverty rate than East Palo Alto, a low income minority community nearby. Why ? While undergraduate students living in dormitories are not counted as residents in census data, graduate students living in campus housing are counted. During the time I was a medical student, and even during part of my internship and residency training, my family was eligible for food stamps. The census data describing the Stanford area does not include all the amenities provided for students and their families, making the comparison even less accurate. This quintile of low income students will move to a high quintile, if not the highest within a few years of completion of graduate school, A few, like the Google founders, will acquire great wealth rather quickly. None of this is evident in the statistics.
Statistics on poverty and income equality are fraught with anomalies like those described by Professor Sowell. That does not prevent their use in furthering the ambitions of the “anointed.”
On June 11, 2011 I went to the Democratic Party of Oak Park Grassroots Planning Session at the Oak Park Public Library. It was run by OFA, Mr. Obama’s campaign organization. It was open to the public, so I walked in, to check it out. It was an interesting gathering. Many people from local government were there. There were also many people who were experienced activists who travelled recently to Wisconsin, and who were working for Mr. Obama in other states during the 2012 campaign. Oak Park’s activist community is to the Midwestern Democrat Party what India was to the Victorian Empire, a bottomless source of manpower that pays for itself and can be used for campaigns around the region. It was expressly stated at the meeting that Illinois is a source of manpower for other battleground states in the region. This is one more cost to Republicans of having declined so far in Illinois.
The speakers seemed to have trouble describing themselves. They never used the L word, so I guess they are not liberals anymore. Oddly, the word Progressive was not used as a regular thing, either. I thought Progressive was the new orthodox label. There were several awkward locutions, such as “people who want to bring about change” and “people committed to change.” I suppose the idea is to keep the idea of “change” in the forefront.
For these folks, the 2012 campaign is now on, full blast. It was impressive for an outsider to see the size and energy of the group gathered on a Saturday 17 months before the election.
One of my favorite novelists is Nevil Shute. He was an engineer, as was I, plus he writes about people with an ability to show their humanity and their deeper motivations without a lot of explanation. He is the engineer’s novelist, the businessman’s novelist and should be on every list of conservative novelists. I have read all his post-war novels, most of his wartime novels and a selection of his pre-war novels. He died in 1960 and all his books are still in print.
I was a college student when “On the Beach
Shute had written another prophetic novel in the late 1930s, called “Ordeal
I very nearly dropped out of school after that book and spent a year or two getting over the idea that I would soon be fried in a nuclear war. My reaction was based as much on my regard for his novels as for the topic, itself. A quite good movie was made from “No Highway” with James Stewart, Glynnis Johns, and Marlena Dietrich.