Conditions of income mobility

Two studies reported in The Economist (pay content) show that income mobility--the ability for children to be more economically successful than their parents--is much greater in Scandanavian countries and the UK than it is in the United States:

The authors rank countries on a scale from one to zero, with one meaning no mobility at all (ie, a child's income is identical to its parents') and zero meaning perfect mobility (ie, a child's income bears no relation to its parents'). The Nordic countries score around 0.2 for sons, Britain scores 0.36, and America 0.54 (meaning that a son's earnings are more closely related to his father's in America). These figures are roughly in line with the conclusions of other studies, though they have the advantage of using standardised data, thereby minimising problems of definition that usually bedevil cross-country comparisons.

The biggest finding of the studies is not, however, about overall social mobility, but about mobility at the bottom. This is the most distinctive feature of Nordic societies, and it is also perhaps the most significant difference with America. Around three-quarters of sons born into the poorest fifth of the population in Nordic countries in the late 1950s had moved out of that category by the time they were in their early 40s. In contrast, only just over half of American men born at the bottom later moved up. This is another respect in which Britain is more like the Nordics than like America: some 70% of its poorest sons escaped from poverty within a generation.

The Nordic countries are distinctive in one further way: the sons born at the bottom (into the poorest fifth) earn roughly the same as those born a rung above them (the second-poorest fifth). In other words, Nordic countries have almost completely snapped the link between the earnings of parents and children at and near the bottom. That is not at all true of America.

The effect is attributed to two things--welfare programs and education. If the consequences of U.S. policies include not only growing income inequality but declining income mobility, the latter undermines a standard argument for the former, and provides a motivation for changing policies.

(The studies are “Non-linearities in Inter-generational Earnings Mobility” (Royal Economics Society, London) and “American Exceptionalism in a New Light” (Institute for the Study of Labour, Bonn). Both are by Bernt Bratsberg, Knut Roed, Oddbjorn Raaum, Robin Naylor, Markus Jantti, Tor Eriksson, Eva Osterbacka and Anders Bjorklund. The Economist also criticized the U.S. for declining income mobility in 2005, in an article that is available in full without a subscription.)

Valerie Pachulski and Gabi Plumlee's 2004 GOP contributions

How is it that a 1999 high school graduate, "GOP Babe Val," who recently worked as an administrative assistant for Arizona Right-to-Life had over $10,000 to donate [SEE CORRECTION BELOW] to the Nevada Republican Party between July and November 2004 (also see here) while working as a volunteer for Bush-Cheney '04 Inc. of Las Vegas?

In a May 31 Arizona Republic website feature of restaurant reviews from readers, Pachulski is the contributor and mentions that she has "moved to D.C."

Another Arizona donor of over $9000 to the Nevada Republican Party in 2004 [SEE CORRECTION BELOW], Gabi Plumlee, works for the Republican National Committee in D.C.

UPDATE July 8, 2006: As pointed out in the comments by "Kellen Rose", the Center for Public Integrity website I linked to for "over $10,000 to donate" has things exactly backwards--this isn't a record of donations (though CPI has extensive databases of donations to politicians and political campaigns), but a record of expenditures by the Nevada GOP to out-of-state entities. That is, Pachulski and Plumlee were on the GOP payroll, not making contributions. I failed to see what was staring me in the face on that website.

Accordingly, I apologize to Ms. Pachulski and Ms. Plumlee for my inaccurate statements and the suggestion that there was something unusual going on here. I'll leave this post as a historical record of my error and the correction. It was a stupid mistake.

UPDATE (September 24, 2007): Valerie Pachulski points out that she was not an administrative assistant at Arizona Right to Life, but the Director of Events.

Skeptics Society conference

I've returned from the Skeptics Society conference on "The Environmental Wars," and there wasn't much warring between speakers, though there were some debates among audience members between sessions. The most controversial speaker was John Stossel, who was the only person to proclaim himself a global warming skeptic (and did so without having witnessed any of the day's presentations, which made it abundantly clear that (a) there is global warming and (b) it is caused by human activity). Michael Crichton managed to avoid the global warming subject in his talk, though in the Q&A he agreed that (a) there is no debate that the globe is warming (contrary to the position in State of Fear that it's an artifact of city "heat islands"), (b) there is no debate that CO2 has increased as a result of human activity, and (c) there's no debate about the greenhouse effect.

I'll comment more later on at least some of the talks, but for now I'll refer you to conference presenter Jonathan Adler's live-blogged descriptions of the talks and Chris Mooney's summary of his initial debate presentation.

UPDATE June 7, 2006: Also check out desmogblog's coverage of the conference.

UPDATE (July 18, 2009): Looks like my only further comment was on Jonathan Adler's talk on federal environmental regulation, though I did post this on the JREF Forums on June 30, 2008:

I very much enjoyed the Skeptics Society "Environmental Wars" conference. I thought it was a good mix of long-term history on climate change (Prothero), current scientific evidence on climate change (Schneider), what to do about it from an economic perspective (Arnold), what doesn't work from a regulatory perspective (Adler), what wild and crazy mitigation techniques might be available and what they'll cost (Benford), and a little debate on politicization of science (Mooney vs. Bailey), and a couple of climate change skeptics who didn't really address any of the science presented during the conference (Crichton and Stossel). It was also a chance to see one of Paul MacCready's last public appearances before he died.

Michael Crichton and John Stossel were no Mike Reiss (Simpsons writer who gave a hilarious talk in 2005), but I still thought they provided entertainment.

Part II of Botnets Interview

Part II of my interview on Michael Santarcangelo's Security Catalyst podcast is now available.

(Part I is here.)

Kevin Drum gets it wrong on net neutrality and common carriage

Kevin Drum writes:

The 1996 Telecommunications Act defined two different types of service, information services (IS) and telecommunications services (TS), and cable companies were originally classified as IS and telephone companies as TS.

Right so far, except that Internet service is classified as an information service, not a telecommunications service. Keep that in mind as you read his next two sentences:

Although both cable companies and telcos provide local internet access, the backbone of the internet is carried exclusively by telcos, which were regulated as common carriers under the tighter TS rules. The common carrier rules effectively enforced the principles of net neutrality on the internet backbone.

This is just wrong. Common carriage rules require telcos to allow third parties to connect to their telephony networks or to use their networks for private line connections between two points. Common carriage does not require interconnection to anybody's Internet network. There is not and there has never been a legal requirement that any Internet service provider or backbone allow all comers to connect to their Internet services--and thank goodness, because that means ISPs and NSPs can deny services to spammers or other entities that don't agree to their terms of service/acceptable use policies. ISPs qua ISPs and NSPs qua NSPs are not common carriers!

While there are Internet backbone links that use telco networks, these were typically the networks of long-distance telcos (AT&T, Sprint, MCI) or next-generation fiber telcos (Qwest, Global Crossing, Level 3) rather than the last-mile telcos (such as the Regional Bell Operating Companies). Now AT&T, MCI, and Qwest have been acquired by or acquired last-mile telcos (SBC, Verizon, and U.S. West, respectively), but the last-mile telcos subject to common carriage didn't build the backbones.

Why do net neutrality advocates continue to get this wrong, even after being corrected repeatedly?

UPDATE: BTW, I should note that Harold Feld (who has commented here) has specifically agreed that he'd like to impose common carriage requirements on broadband providers (meaning that last-mile telcos and cable companies would have to allow others to provide services over their access networks, so you could buy Earthlink, AOL, Yahoo, or Panix Internet service from your local cable company or telco--the situation would be like it used to be with DSL providers and local telcos). I'm not sure what other elements he would advocate--whether he'd apply similar requirements to wireless providers (requiring them to let anybody be a mobile virtual network operator), ban QoS, ban anything less than full Internet service over any medium, count non-residential services as broadband, etc. (And Harold, if you read this, I'm still waiting to hear responses from you here (on your own blog) and here (on mine, about HR 5417).)

By contrast, Timothy Karr at Save the Internet has explicitly denied that he's equating net neutrality and common carriage, but hasn't said what he does mean. (And Tim, you haven't responded to my final comment here on your own blog, either.)

UPDATE June 11, 2006: Tim Lee rightly questions Drum on this point as well, asking whether Internet backbones have really been under such regulations, which leads to some further information about peering agreements. I've pointed him to this post from last November about peering (see in particular the linked Geoff Huston paper).

"The Environmental Wars" Skeptics Society conference

Einzige and I will both be at the Skeptics Society conference in Pasadena tomorrow and Saturday and would welcome greetings from any blog readers, assuming the intersection of our readership and the conference attendees is non-null. At least I'll be able to say hello to Chris Mooney, whose blog I read regularly...

Worst net neutrality analogy ever?

From Susan Crawford:

Think of the pipes and wires that you use to go online as a sidewalk. The question is whether the sidewalk should get a cut of the value of the conversations that you have as you walk along. The traditional telephone model has been that the telephone company doesn't get paid more if you have a particularly meaningful call -- they're just providing a neutral pipe.

If you're going to use a sidewalk as an analogy for a communications pipeline, then the users of the sidewalk need to stand for the communications traffic. Then the question becomes, should users of different types have to pay different rates for the use of the sidewalk to those who build and maintain it (not to the sidewalk itself!). Further, the sidewalk has to keep being made bigger to support all the traffic being carried, and some of the users are in a bigger hurry and are likely to collide with those who aren't, and some of the latter are holding big gatherings between their residences, like a block party in the neighborhoods. Should those guys get to do that for free, or at the same cost as their neighbors who aren't interested in a block party?

UPDATE: I had issued a trackback ping to Susan Crawford's blog post which was accepted, but apparently she decided to delete it. That's rather ironic--she supports net neutrality, but blocks critical trackbacks to her blog. I guess her support of net neutrality isn't based on any principle of fairness or free speech.

UPDATE (June 8, 2006): Susan Crawford responded to a query about this, and attributed the deletion to automatic anti-spam defenses, and invited me to re-issue a trackback, which I will shortly do. I retract the last two sentences of the above update, and apologize to her for my erroneous inference.

UPDATE (March 13, 2008): Actually, I never regained the ability to issue trackbacks or even to reference this blog's URL in comments posted on Susan Crawford's Blogware blog, so all of my comments there refer to my discord.org website instead. She moved her blog in late 2007, but I've not commented or issued any trackbacks to the new one.

Fuck jurisprudence

No, that's not an imperative, it's a description of a new area of law explored in a recent law journal article.

(Hat tip to John Lynch at stranger fruit.)

The Abstract Factory on net neutrality

"Cog" at The Abstract Factory has a good, thoughtful post on net neutrality--and gets hit by astroturfing shills in the comments who almost seem to be trying to change his mind. (He comments further on the shills, a few of which have appeared in the comments at this blog, here.)

Scientologists pay another web visit

As I noted in my "Scientology Sampler" post on March 4, my web sites still get periodic visits from Church of Scientology IP addresses, at that time most recently on January 1. They just came by again on May 22, attempting to look at my online copy of Russell Miller's biography of L. Ron Hubbard, Bare-Faced Messiah, as well as the article I co-authored with Jeff Jacobsen, "Scientology v. the Internet," and my skeptical links pages on Scientology. Here's an example web log entry:

[Mon May 22 11:42:00 2006] [error] [client 205.227.165.11] client denied by server configuration: path deleted/03.3.jl-jj-scientology.html, referer: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLD%2CGGLD%3A2005-09%2CGGLD%3Aen&q=Jim+Lippard+Scientology

Then, yesterday afternoon, this blog got a visit and a comment (from a brand-new Blogger account) on my post on Arizona legislators accepting trips from the Church of Scientology in return for sponsoring bills for Scientology's front group the Citizens Commission on Human Rights. This poster, asking why I don't support Scientology's mental health efforts, came across the entry by Googling for "CCHR":

Time of Visit           May 29 2006 4:49:43 pm
Last Page View          May 29 2006 4:59:42 pm
Visit Length            9 minutes 59 seconds
Page Views              4
Referring URL           http://search.blogger.com/?ui=blg&q=cchr
Search Engine           search.blogger.com
Search Words            cchr
Visit Entry Page                http://lippard.blogs...ponsoring-bills.html
Visit Exit Page         http://lippard.blogs...ponsoring-bills.html
Out Click               a number of Arizona legislators have been sponsoring bills
http://www.azcentral...cientologists11.html
Time Zone               UTC-6:00

This individual's source IP, however, is an Ameritech/SBC IP out of Springfield, Illinois (not a big Scientology stronghold like Los Angeles or Clearwater, FL). Illinois is, however, the location where Scientology won a battle to get an exhibit that compares psychiatry to Nazis put back on public property in the Thompson Center--so it looks like the CCHR Chicago has a bit of pull.

Anyway, this is a good opportunity to recommend reading Janet Reitman's "Inside Scientology" from Rolling Stone magazine from February, an excellent overview and introduction to Scientology's beliefs and history.