Category: Current Affairs

Average wage in Northern Mariana: About half the U.S. federal minimum wage

Current plans of the Democratic Congress: Raise the U.S. minimum wage to $7.25, and apply that raise to Northern Mariana, although maybe not to American Samoa.

Imagine a modern metropolis with no outdoor advertising: no billboards,
no flashing neon signs, no electronic panels with messages crawling
along the bottom. Come the new year, this city of 11 million,
overwhelmed by what the authorities call visual pollution, plans to
press the “delete all” button and offer its residents an unimpeded view
of their surroundings…

The outsized billboards and screens that dominate the skyline,
promoting everything from autos, jeans and cellphones to banks and sex
shops, will have to come down, as will all other forms of publicity in
public space, like distribution of fliers.

The law also
regulates the dimensions of store signs and outlaws any advertising on
the sides of the city’s thousands of buses and taxis.

Here is the full story.  As far as I can tell (my last visit was eight years ago, however), most of it is not down yet.  In any case I suspect the city is more attractive with the commercial angle.  The underlying buildings are mostly ugly, so a fanciful clutter will do better than an attempt at sleek postmodernism.

By the way, it was already the case that most of Sao Paulo’s 13,000 or so outdoor billboards were installed illegally.  The goal is to clear the space entirely, so that any single offender sticks out very obviously and can be prosecuted.  But of course the tipping point matters.  Whatever change ends up in place, I expect a slow creep back towards the status quo ex ante.

Male workers who vow to stay away from prostitutes after year-end celebrations in South Korea are to be rewarded.

The Ministry for Gender Equality is offering cash to
companies whose male employees pledge not to pay for sex after office
parties.

Men are being urged to register on the ministry’s website.  The companies with most pledges will receive a reward.

Note that the vow is awarded, not the abstinence.  The pointer is from Claudio Shikida, Brazilian economist and blogger.

The law of below averages also applies to students trying to hire hackers to change their GPA.

Hat tip to MetaFilter.

The Economist blog reports:

We have also heard that Doug Holtz-Eakin, another former Bush administration official who went on to head the Congressional Budget Office, will be John McCain’s top economic advisor. Mr Holtz-Eakin is giving up his current job–running the Centre for Geoeconomic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations–to work full-time for the McCain team.

Thanks to Martin Scriblerus for the pointer.

Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s less-than-stealth positioning to join the
2008 presidential race took another baby step forward today, when two noted
economists – former chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisors Glenn Hubbard
and Greg Mankiw – signed on to lead his PAC’s Economic Advisory Council. Another
former Bush official, Cesar
Conda, also signed on.

Thanks to Carrie Conko for the pointer.

Matt Yglesias proposes an exchange:

There’s an obvious deal to be cut here — NATO membership for the Baltics is a done deal, but we can return Russia’s "near abroad" to Russia in exchange for Russian cooperation on Iran and North Korea, or else we can have a series of standoffs across a wide Eurasian arc.  Some would call this appeasement and, frankly, the shoe fits decently.  It strikes me, however, as preferable to either going to war with Iran or to having Iran build a nuclear bomb.

I might add that Natasha still thinks I promised to take out the trash every evening.

Here is the NYT story, still gated.  Here are more articles. 

I believe Capitalism and Freedom was the second or third book I ever read on economics and it definitely shaped my life.  I knew Milton only a bit but he was always gracious and of course razor sharp and a lover of liberty and prosperity.  He was one of the most important minds of the second half of the twentieth century and his influence remains felt all around the world.  In purely academic terms, he easily could have won two or three Nobel Prizes from the quality and quantity of his work.

Here is Levitt’s brief tribute.  Here is WSJ.com, via Brad DeLong.

At about 8:30 a.m., Tradesports.com is giving the Republicans a 13 to 15 percent chance of Senate control.  The Webb-Allen race, described by newspapers as "too close to call," is being called for Webb; Allen’s chance is about five percent.

Addendum: Chris Masse reports: if Virginia and Montana go Democratic, as of morning yesterday, the prediction markets called every race correctly.

John Kerry this week has been abjectly apologizing for his statements on Iraq and education.  According to Kerry he intended to critique President Bush:

Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart,
if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in
Iraq.

But what he said was:

You know education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do
your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If
you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.

The irony is that the joke he intended to make is a lie but what he actually said may be the truth.  The disaster in Iraq was created by a bunch of highly educated intellectuals but the soldiers fighting in Iraq do have less education than the young men and women who have stayed home.  According to historian David Kennedy, quoted in the October issue of the Atlantic, 50 percent of 18-24 year olds in the general population have some college education compared to only 6.5 percent of the same age group in the U.S. military.  (Kennedy’s figures are contested by others.)

American political correctness extends to more than women and minorities and as in those areas it prevents discussion of important but uncomfortable truths.

The Washington Post has another story today on Wal-Mart’s plan to offer lower pharmaceutical prices.  Today’s piece is far superior to the one I criticized earlier but the following sentence did catch my eye:

But the additions have not quelled skepticism of the program. In a
statement early this month, the National Community Pharmacists
Association, a trade group representing independent pharmacists, called
the rollout an "attempt to gain maximum public relations value while
providing minimum value to patients."

Ok, you don’t need a PhD in Public Choice to see the issue.  Nevertheless the "skepticism" expressed would have been better put into context had the sentence been written:

In a
statement early this month, the National Community Pharmacists
Association, a trade group representing many pharmacists in competition with Wal-Mart, called
the rollout an "attempt to gain maximum public relations value while
providing minimum value to patients."

Via Daniel Drezner:

A few months after stepping down as president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers has joined a $25 billion hedge fund management firm, D.E. Shaw & Co., as a part-time managing director.

Summers will remain on the Harvard faculty while he works for D.E. Shaw on strategic initiatives and high-level portfolio management, according to the company.