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WHY I'M NOT BLOGGING MUCH
What he said. I'm in L.A., researching glamour, and enjoying the weather, which is great even by L.A. standards (i.e., no smog). I'm getting tons of work done, but it doesn't involve much blogging. And, no, I haven't gone to the beach. But I did go to Hollywood, which isn't gross and scary any more.
Written by Virginia - Monday, January 12, 2004 - Link/Printer-friendly
FAT DEMS, THIN DEMS
Pundits on Meet the Press analyze the dimensions of Democrats:
MR. BRODER: I saw the same kind of contrast when I was out there earlier this week. Gephardt gave a pep talk to about 175 union business agents and staff people who';d come in from around the country. I'd say it was about 98 percent male and the median size of these guys, about 6'3", 250 pounds. Then I went over to...

MR. RUSSERT: My kind of guy.

MR. BRODER: Then I went over to the Dean headquarters, they're young, they're female, they're gay, and they're small. And I thought to myself, I hope those Gephardt guys don't run into the Dean people. You know it would be a bad scene.

MR. TODD: You know, it'll be interesting at the caucuses, on caucus night, if there is some physical intimidation, or not, I mean...

MR. RUSSERT: Punch everybody out.

Mr. TODD: Yeah.

MR. BROWNSTEIN: I wanted to add a shirt size cross tab to our poll after experiencing the same thing. I think we'd find a pretty clear division.

MR. RUSSERT: Double XL.

Written by Virginia - Monday, January 12, 2004 - Link/Printer-friendly
THE INFINITE CASH REGISTER
This Steve Lopez LAT column perfectly exemplifies the attitude that is pushing people and businesses and people who create businesses out of California. If you can afford to buy a home in a real estate market made impossibly expensive by growth controls, you can afford to hand over more of your income to the state government. If you can't afford to buy a home and aren't eligible for state transfers, you're already packing for Nevada.
Written by Virginia - Monday, January 12, 2004 - Link/Printer-friendly
IMMMIGRATION DETAILS
This LAT article follows the well-established script of finding fault with the Bush administration's plan for reforming immigration. But it's refreshing in its attention to nitty-gritty details rather than the "what does this mean for the 2004 election" political spin that greeted the policy announcement.

This DMN article on employers' response was also a refreshing change from the horse-race treatment. Unlike most cities, Dallas takes restaurants and construction seriously as major local industries. Combine that business angle with the long-standing connnection between Texas and Mexico and you get a more nuanced picture of immigration policy than cable's 24/7 "news" shows offer. (Unlike Californian conservatives, Texans don't appear to long for the good old days of life without Mexican immigrants, perhaps because they realize those days didn't exist in Texas.)

Written by Virginia - Sunday, January 11, 2004 - Link/Printer-friendly
CONFIDENCE FIRST
This fairly routine issues-vs.-image analysis from the CSM's Linda Feldmann concludes with a smart observation from the smart Karlyn Bowman:
Karlyn Bowman, an expert on polling at the American Enterprise Institute, sees a two-step process in voter decisionmaking. First, she says, people want a "threshold level of confidence in the individual, a feeling you could sit down in a living room and relate that person, feel comfortable with that person in their stewardship of policy." Then, she says, "the issues follow from that."

That's why seemingly qualified candidates run into trouble if they seem weird--watch out, Wesley Clark. It's also why the star candidates--Reagan, Clinton, Arnold--combine familiarity with charisma. We don't really know them, and if we did they'd lose some of their magic, but we like to think we know them. (That combination was, I think, much of Colin Powell's appeal as a fantasy candidate for Republicans.)

Written by Virginia - Sunday, January 11, 2004 - Link/Printer-friendly
FRIEDRICH THE GREAT
Prompted by the publication of Bruce Caldwell's excellent intellectual biography, Hayek's Challenge, the Boston Globe asked me to do an article on Friedrich Hayek for their Ideas section. The article leads today's section. There's also a sidebar on the "What Would Friedrich Do?" debate on gay marriage.
Written by Virginia - Sunday, January 11, 2004 - Link/Printer-friendly
ANOTHER SPAM KING
My friend Rick Henderson, sends a link to this Las Vegas Review Journal feature on yet another unashamed king of email harassment. Rick, who writes editorials for the LVRJ, remarks, "You really want to hit this guy with a shovel."
Written by Virginia - Sunday, January 4, 2004 - Link/Printer-friendly
PROGRESS PARADOX
When I agreed to review Gregg Easterbrook's new book, The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse, I expected to mostly like the book. I was wrong. It's a mess. Here's the review. Since I had only 750 words to work with, the review couldn't cover everything I would have liked to address, including the questionable use of data discussed below.

Many, though by no means all, of the book's problems stem from its lack of concern with "how life gets better," as opposed to the mere fact that life gets better. There are lots of statistics, but very little connection to specific human enterprise, experiments, or experience. The few anecdotes are memorable, because they're so rare. The Progress Paradox represents an old strain of progressive optimism, which imagines social and economic systems as far simpler than they are. It's reminiscent of the technocratic works that dominated "progressive" thinking through the 1960s. Easterbrook's approach to, say, universal health insurance amounts to the "if we can put a man on the moon" argument, with no acknowledgement whatsoever of all the feedback effects that people who think seriously about health policy--regardless of their prescriptions--routinely address. He essentially takes a Nike attitude: Just do it! The result is a glib work, but not a very good one.

Written by Virginia - Sunday, January 4, 2004 - Link/Printer-friendly
YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK
Lyndon LaRouche will get $839,000 in federal campaign funds, about $100,000 more than Dennis Kucinich. Here's the report.
Written by Virginia - Thursday, January 1, 2004 - Link/Printer-friendly
LOOKING FORWARD, LOOKING BACK
What did the past really look like? My latest NYT column mines the new Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History for details both trivial and profound.
Written by Virginia - Thursday, January 1, 2004 - Link/Printer-friendly
DODGING SPAM
In response to my post below about my new email address, quite a few readers have suggested that the hot link on the right is a spam magnet. But it isn't. If you'll look at the source code, which I got from a tech-savvy reader the last time I was battling spam, you'll see that there is no @ for spambots to spot. My spam problems don't come from this site, at least as it stands today. They come from old email adddress lists and other online publications.

Speaking of spam, are there any protesters outside this guy's house? (More info here.) Maybe Dave Barry could publish his phone numbers, as he did the telemarketing association's.

Written by Virginia - Wednesday, December 31, 2003 - Link/Printer-friendly
FACT CHECKING EASTERBROOK
In his latest "Being Andrew Sullivan" post on his own blog, Dan Drezner expresses some concerns about an item he posted yesterday on AndrewSullivan.com:
On this post, I also link to the Easterbrook book, but I'll admit to wavering. I've been a big fan of Easterbrook's policy analysis in the past, particularly this TNR essay that's a key component of the new book. Last week, however, I made the mistake of linking to an Easterbrook post about the environment when it turned out he'd screwed up an important fact (he has yet to correct it). In this case, however, he appears to be standing on the shoulders of other researchers, so I go with it.

Prompted by Dan's skepticism (and my own disappointment with Easterbrook's book, about which more later), I checked the two sources Easterbrook cites on the relevant page of his book: this study by Steven Camarota, director of research at the anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies, and this study by Federal reserve economists Ana M. Aizcorbe, Arthur B. Kennickell, and Kevin B. Moore.

Based on a superficial reading, I have no quarrel with either study's factual conclusions. I also find Easterbrook's claim that "Factor out immigration, and the rise in American inequality disappears" both politically appealing and factually plausible. But the studies he cites don't say this. They don't contradict that conclusion, but neither do they back it. They don't even talk about equality.

The CIS study is about poverty rates (and, in fact, Easterbrook cites it only on that subject). The Fed study, which appears from the footnotes to be Easterbrook's source, looks at household income and wealth figures and does not break out separate data for immigrants. The positive trends for African Americans come from the Fed study, but those trends measure absolute levels, not inequality. In short, it would take more data and more careful econometrics to demonstrate Easterbrook's bold conclusion.

Perhaps Easterbrook has done a lot of calculations he doesn't include in the book, though I have no reason to think he has the necessary technical skills. (Neither do I.) Perhaps he is jumping to a logical, but unsupported, conclusion.

Or perhaps he good-heartedly does not understand the difference between "equality" and "income levels." Poor people can get a lot richer while inequality increases if the affluent get richer even faster. (Indeed, tables in the Fed study show the mean income of people in the top 10 percent of households pulling away from the median from 1995 to 2001, which suggests that the very, very richest people are getting much richer; in other income categories, the medians and means roughly track each other.) When everyone gets richer but the top 1% get rich fastest, everyone enjoys a higher standard of living. But Paul Krugman can still write articles about the horrible increase in inequality.

Written by Virginia - Wednesday, December 31, 2003 - Link/Printer-friendly
FACT-CHECKING YOUR ASS
Instapundit approvingly quotes a reader who writes, "One of the great things about blogs is bloggers work through the holidays, as opposed to newspapers and magazines, which recycle the year's news during the last week of the year to put together the inevitably boring "Year in Review" issue."

This is a crock. I just met a deadline for one newspaper and have another one tomorrow for a second. In both cases, editors were there to receive phone calls and copy. Plus, without newspapers, most bloggers have nothing to write about. Andrew Sullivan is vacationing, but Dan Drezner's excellent guest blogging is full of comments on fresh newspaper articles.

Written by Virginia - Wednesday, December 31, 2003 - Link/Printer-friendly
"REPATS" AND SHOE SALES
This article by the WSJ's always-interesting Joel Millman and Ann Zimmerman is the most fascinating piece of business reporting I've read recently. The link should work for the next few days, but here is an excerpt:

As unintended consequences go, the spectacular rise of Payless in Latin America must be counted among the least foreseen: As inner-city U.S. barrios swelled with Latin American refugees throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a no-frills retailer based in Topeka, Kan., quickly blossomed into a household brand for these new Americans. When they started going back, they took Payless shoes with them.

In 2000, Payless opened five stores in Costa Rica, its Central American staging area; then in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Just three years later, Payless has almost 200 stores in the tropics, adding Honduras, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago, Ecuador, Chile and Peru to its roster.

Cannibalizing sales doesn't appear to be a problem: Ms. Orellana's Sonsonate store is one of 24 Payless outlets in El Salvador, where a new store opens almost every month. Company officials say that in the countries where they operate, there is room for at least 300 more outlets -- and many more, should Payless enter Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Venezuela.

Nor is Payless unique. U.S. chains, from rival footwear vendor Stride Rite Corp. to Home Depot Inc. to hoteliers like Marriott Corp. and Hilton Corp., are discovering that Latinos, as well as being great customers in the U.S., are among the leading disseminators of brand loyalty to countrymen back home.

Home Depot has grown quickly in Mexico, deploying Spanish-speaking veterans of its U.S. stores to recruit and train a local staff. Stride Rite entered eight countries ringing the Caribbean basin -- including the hemisphere's poorest, Haiti -- by leveraging its strong brand recognition with status-conscious expatriates in U.S. cities.

...

Brand acceptance is certainly apparent at Ms. Orellana's store, where traffic is steady from the moment she opens until she closes at 8 p.m. And why not? Prior to Payless's arrival, Salvadorans bought shoes mainly in street markets, where cheap synthetics dangle from hooks strung over piles of used clothing or baskets of fresh produce. Nowadays, an air-conditioned Payless store offers heretofore unheard-of luxury. "They have all the sizes in order," marvels Zulema Aragon, 29, as she scans displays of pumps, work boots and dress sandals, priced from about $5 to $40. An older woman, Luisa Hernandez, chimes in, "They have styles no one else has."

Shiny gadgets with metal slides that let customers measure shoe sizes, and benches with mirrored panels to inspect shoed feet, also are new here. For returned émigrés, Payless is a reminder of their time north of the border. For those who only dreamed of emigrating, Payless is a taste of the glamorous life relatives are forever bragging about. "A lot of [expatriate] Salvadorans send Payless shoes home as Christmas gifts," Ms. Orellana says. "People here see the brand as special."

Millman, like me, is fascinated with the complex and unexpected interactions of immigration, trade, and business. But, unlike me (or me most of the time), he does the hard work of tracking down the details. If you liked the story about Cambodian doughnut shops in TFAIE, you can thank his reporting, which I cited in the footnotes.

Written by Virginia - Monday, December 29, 2003 - Link/Printer-friendly
EARTHQUAKE RELIEF
Here's how to help. As expected, Jeff Jarvis has done a great job tracking links to coverage on Iranian blogs.

Christian though he is, Lileks suggests that earthquakes don't reflect too well on God. I always think of the Yom Kippur prayer "that their houses not become their graves," originally said for a Middle Eastern region but quite resonant in California. You say it not because you think God will change the laws of nature and stop earthquakes but because you have particular sympathy with people who live with that danger.

Written by Virginia - Monday, December 29, 2003 - Link/Printer-friendly

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