Confessions of a Black Mr. Mom" by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Kannu

This is an interesting article but before that some other points. 

As an economic and psychological aspect, children raised in a family turn out to be better citizens, more educated, more economically active and happier. 

That said, divorce is quite high in western societies so quite a lot of families are not a twin parent family. 

Also the welfare state ensures that if you have a child out of wedlock then you have benefits and child support. Plus many other issues and factors mean that for some groups, some countries, the number of children being brought up in families without a father is extraordinarily high. And that has high individual, family, social, economic and societal costs like imprisonment, low income, drug abuse etc etc. 

difficult to fix this issue but some try to do so. Here's an article by a black father who is trying to be a father! Personally and emotionally speaking, I find this totally bewildering as to why a father wouldn't be 100% involved with his children. But as an economist I understand that this behaviour of black and other men abandoning their children is a natural outcome of the economic and social incentives. 

Society and the family structure   is changing dramatically, and will need careful observation for lessons learnt. 

Love

Baba

"Confessions of a Black Mr. Mom" by Ta-Nehisi Coates
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0203.coates.html

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Respond to this Article March 2002

One man’s crusade to redefine African-American fatherhood.

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

In one of his more interesting comic sketches, Chris Rock compares one group of African Americans, “niggas,” to another more wholesome group, “black people.” “You know what really bugs me about niggas is the way they always take credit for stuff a normal man would just do,” says Rock. “Like, ŒI raised my kids.’”

By Rock’s definition, I know exactly where I belong among African Americans today. For I am sure that even for this meager deed of fatherhood I am performing, I deserve a lot more than credit. My mission sounds simple enough: carting my young son through West Manhattan to visit another friend, working in Chelsea. I have logged enough baby hours to earn the title “stay-at-home dad,” so I’m not exactly new to this. But our trek into the city elicits terror because of three converging factors: 1.) I am a hefty 6’4” black male—-anything can happen. 2.) It’s Manhattan—-everything might happen. 3.) My son is 7 months old—-something always happens.

King João II of Portugal “O Príncipe Perfeito” and the Jews (1481-1495)

A paper that i was sent was quite interesting. King Joao II of Portugal is quite an interesting chap. I was interested in him not just because of what he did in Portugal but of his funding of expeditions to India (people who think that the Portuguese were fun chaps should really read up on what these guys did in the Indian Ocean, they were true barbarians, unbelievable savages).

Second was the fact that this chap was responsible (during the time of Columbus), to divide up the world between Spain and Portugal.

Third was that this king was supposed to be the personification of Machiavelli’s work..Very interesting indeed.

But I digress, as is usual with Europe for a very long time, the Jews got it in the neck. This paper, Sefarad (Sef)
Vol. 69:1, enero-junio 2009, págs. 75-99, ISSN 0037-0894 by Francois Soyer of the University of Southampton tells all about how this fellow was an absolute infamous horrible man with the Jews. I quote:

 

A central element of this reputation has been João II’s treatment of the thousands of Jews who were expelled from the neighbouring kingdoms of Castile and Aragón in 1492 and who came to Portugal. King João has become particularly notorious because of his enslavement of a
number of these Castilian Jews as well as his decision to deport Jewish children seized from their parents to the inhospitable island of São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the Portuguese sovereign gained the reputation –both in contemporary Jewish accounts and in the work of modern historians– of a callous tyrant who pitilessly persecuted the Jews;
resorting to cruel methods in order to extort funds from the Castilian Jews and coercing many of them to convert to Christianity. By way of illustration, Isaac Abravanel (1437-1508), one of the foremost Jews at the Portuguese Court until his exile in 1483, used the epithets “tyrannical,” “deceitful” and “iniquitous” to describe João II in his work.
Likewise, the Cretan Rabbi Elijah
Capsali (c. 1490-1549), who interviewed many Iberian Jews, presents João II
in his famous chronicle as an inveterate enemy of the Jews and describes the
monarch as a “repulsive” and “wicked” king. In his work, Capsali went to the
extreme of including an extraordinary paragraph in which God punished João
II for his cruelty towards the Jews by sending an avenging angel to slay him
and thus avenge his Jewish victims.

The paper is just amazing to read. Here’s one more quote:

the episode recorded by Solomon Ibn Verga, who himself
came to Portugal in 1492 with his family, is particularly moving:

There was a [Jewish] woman from whom they had taken six children.
When the unfortunate woman heard that the King was leaving the church
[where he had just attended mass], this woman [started to] implore his mercy and threw herself at the feet of his horse, pleading with him to return her
youngest child to her but the King would not listen to her.
The King ordered his servants: “take her out of my sight!”
[The woman] continued to plead her case with yet louder screams and
[the servants] abused her.
The King then exclaimed: “Let her be, she is like a bitch whose pups
have been taken away from her!”

Europe, your history is full of ill-treatment towards minorities. Why just blame the Nazi’s? there is good form for anti-Semitic attacks in pretty much every country.

Are human rights and economic well-being substitutes? The evidence from migration patterns across the Indian states

This was a very interesting paper. But the highlights and abstract first

Highlights

• Intra-national migration as a tool to measure revealed preferences for human rights protection and economic well-being

• Economic well-being can serve as a substitute for bad protection of human rights

• Results are not driven by discrimination against particular ethnic or religious groups or type of human rights violations considered

• Human rights complaints are interpreted in the opposite way by migrants to states with high and low trust into the government

• The effect is driven by states with high TV penetration

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Abstract

The objective of this paper is to study the relationship between the demand for human rights and the demand for economic prosperity from the “exit” perspective, looking at migration patterns. We investigate intra-national migration in India, which is a federation of various states that feature significant economic and political differences. The paper finds that the quality of human rights protection and the economic well-being in the target state are substitutes with respect to determining patterns of migration. These results depend on framing effects; human rights complaints appear to be interpreted differently by migrants, depending on the trust in the government in the target state.

First. Here’s the regression model

for all i ≠ j

where Migr_ij denotes the number of migrants from state i to state j; Inc_i and Inc_j represent the income per capita in states i and j, respectively; HR_i and HR_j indicate the number of human rights violations complaints in states i and j, respectively; Dist_ij is the highway distance between the capitals of these two states;CommonLang_ij is a dummy that is equal to 1 if both states belong to the same linguistic zone; and Controls_iand Controls_j represent the set of control variables for states i and j, respectively. Thus, the estimated equation is essentially a gravity model in which we regress the number of migrants from one state to another state on the income per capita in the target state and the origin state, the human rights violations complaints in these two states, and interaction terms between human rights violations complaints and income.

I really really like this formulation. Fascinating, very well done indeed. Simple but very intuitive.

But with the elections coming up, people need to think through how states approach their twin goals of security (as per human rights maintenance and enhancement versus economic growth. The news isn't as clear cut. When you are poor as a state, people will take off from your state if you are bad at human rights. But people can go to a state with higher economic growth but with potentially lower levels of human rights.

Fascinating.

Show me the money

Another very interesting paper trying to explain the drop of the US savings rate. The savings rate dropped from 8.6% in 1980-90 to 5.5% 1990-2000. The reasons are multiple, such as technology improvements, labour productivity, medical care cost increases, asset appreciation, improved credit access, etc. etc.

The abstract

This paper investigates the effect of mortgage equity withdrawal on saving in the US over the period 1993–2011. A multivariate time series analysis based on a vector error correction model (VECM) is carried out. The saving rate, mortgage equity withdrawal, net wealth, interest rates and inflation are included in the empirical model. The results show that the equity withdrawal mechanism plays a relevant role in explaining the saving rate pattern.

People tend to think that the bankers are to blame for the crisis, yes, sir, but as I have already pointed out so many times, don't be a bloody economic illiterate and then blame the Jews for everything. That ship has sailed a long time back and all it does is to expose you as one of the Daily Mail readers. Just like we did pogroms way back and blamed the Jews for everything, blaming the bankers for everything just tells me that you are a doofus :P

Our economic conditions and civilisation is undergoing some serious changes but at the end of the day, one has to recall that basic economic laws are fairly constant. Don't spend more than you have, if you are going to take on debt, then you will have higher fixed costs, the business cycle cannot be wished away, etc. etc. So having more savings is good, very well. So like the paper shows, people shouldn't goose the mortgage market so much. Rental is a perfectly good alternative, see the situation in Germany for one example of a housing market which is not driven by home ownership lemming like behaviour.

How the government helped the banking crisis

not this one, the one before. I quote the abstract:

This essay examines how the Banking Acts of the 1933 and 1935 and related New Deal legislation influenced risk taking in the financial sector of the U.S. economy. The analysis focuses on contingent liability of bank owners for losses incurred by their firms and how the elimination of this liability influenced leverage and lending by commercial banks. Using a new panel data set, we find contingent liability reduced risk taking. In states with contingent liability, banks used less leverage and converted each dollar of capital into fewer loans, and thus could survive larger loan losses (as a fraction of their portfolio) than banks in limited liability states. In states with limited liability, banks took on more leverage and risk, particularly in states that required banks with limited liability to join the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. In the long run, the New Deal replaced a regime of contingent liability with deposit insurance, stricter balance sheet regulation, and increased capital requirements, shifting the onus of risk management from bankers to state and federal regulators.

Remember the partnership structures of the investment and other banks were unwound quite a lot. Once you have removed this contingent liability and make it public, well, you see what happens. Here’s an idea for the banking industry, bring back the partnership model (I know, I know, I am kidding)

Birds of a feather flock together

This paper was a bit of a d’oh bit.

We examine the effects of subnational variations in corruption and democratization on the location decisions of foreign investors in Russian regions using firm-level panel data for the period 1996-2007. We link these effects to the level of corruption and type of political regime in the country of origin of a foreign investor. We find a relationship between attributes of foreign investors’ home countries and attributes of the regions in which investment takes place: foreign investors from less corrupt and democratic countries tend to invest in less corrupt and more democratic Russian regions, whereas those from more corrupt and non-democratic countries tend to invest in more corrupt and less democratic regions. An inference is that, in Russian regions with high corruption and with autocratic government, foreign direct investment appears driven by the personal interests of controlling regional political elites who collaborate for mutual gain with foreign investors from corrupt and autocratic countries. Our results suggest a general conclusion that origin and location of foreign investment are linked by common political culture.

well of course! Birds of a feather flock together..

To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize – Voltaire

Not much to say beyond saying that this is a great quote, cuts straight to the core of human behaviour and society. As a libertarian and freedom of speech absolutist, this is clearly very important.

Two US bloggers were banned from entering UK. This is clearly a failure of the Sharansky test. The book is very good, and the test is simple:

If a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm, then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society. We cannot rest until every person living in a "fear society" has finally won their freedom.

I saw so many people wittering on along two lines, “i support freedom of speech but…” that but means you are not a freedom of speech supporter.

Second was, what kind of a society are we producing if we allow people like these guys in? Well, as the Sharansky test says, we are living in a fear society. USA is happy to have freedom of speech, but here in the UK?

ESPHOKS on the Home Office Minister, bah

The Centroid

Kannu

We like the idea of centres. Centres of gravity. Centres of concentration in yoga. Our human architectures look for centres. When we look at humans we seek the centre and people whose faces are symmetrical around the centre are considered better looking. Our home has its centre in the kitchen or living room. London's centre is measured from charing cross. Financial markets are mean reverting - an example of coming to the centre. People tend to congregate in crowds and centres. Recognise this tendency and therefore you can take advantage of it. Learn how to create your comfort spot. Learn how others come to the mean or centre. Learn why people are so attracted by the concept of centres. 

Fascinating to see the calculations so if you are interested in cartography or geography or economics or history or demographics or anthropology this article will be good to read. 

Love

Baba

The  Centroid | Orion Magazine
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7377

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On the road with the population of a restless nation

By Jeremy Miller

Published in the March/April 2013 issue of Orion magazine

ON A WARM DAY in March 2011, I find myself in the back seat of a white, government-issue Chevy Suburban, rolling over spongy pasturelands in the sparsely populated foothills of the Ozark Mountains of southern Missouri. The vehicle is being piloted by Brian Ward, a geodetic advisor for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Dave Doyle, the chief surveyor with NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey division, sits in the passenger seat, looking intently at a dashboard-mounted GPS screen. “Almost there. Just a little farther on,” Doyle mutters as Ward slaloms through an agitated herd of beef cattle.

We are aimed at the mean population center—or centroid—of the United States, a hypothetical and highly mathematical point calculated every ten years as part of the decennial census. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population center is “the place where an imaginary, flat, weightless and rigid map of the United States would balance perfectly if all 308,745,538 residents counted in the 2010 Census were of identical weight.” Picture that if you can.

“Looks like we continue on and then veer left,” says Doyle, a gregarious man with a mane of salt-and-pepper hair, glasses resting precariously at the tip of his nose. The edge of the pasture gives way to a stand of leafless hickories and dogwoods covered in white blooms. Due to the unusually warm weather, the small, four-petaled flowers have emerged a few weeks earlier than usual.

After God: What can atheists learn from believers?

Kannu

I have what can be called in Facebook speak as a complicated relationship with God throughout my life. I believed in him then became an atheist and then a firm believer when you two were born and have now settled into a situation which can politely be described as a secular spiritual humanist. 

Don't believe in religion. Hinduism is a good philosophy. It's great for historians and for people who want to exercise their mental muscles. All religions are powerful in terms of the hold they have on their worshippers. So whatever you decide to believe in, be careful of religions son. They are on the retreat and that's when they are the worst. 

Love

Baba

After God: What can atheists learn from believers?
http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/religion/2013/03/god-dead-long-live-our-souls

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From the art series “A Place Beyond Belief, 2012” by Nathan Coley. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Jonathan Derbyshire writes: Jeremy Bentham, his disciple John Stuart Mill once wrote, would always ask of a proposition or belief, “Is it true?” By contrast, Bentham’s contemporary Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mill observed, thought “What is the meaning of it?” was a much more interesting question.

Today’s New Atheists –Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and the late Christopher Hitchens principal among them – are the heirs of Bentham, rather than Coleridge. For them, religion – or the great monotheistic faiths, at any rate – are bundles of beliefs (about the existence of a supernatural being, the origins of the universe and so on) whose claims to truth don’t stand up to rational scrutiny. And once the falsity of those beliefs has been established, they imply, there is nothing much left to say.

The New Atheists remind one of Edward Gibbon, who said of a visit to the cathedral at Chartres: “I paused only to dart a look at the stately pile of superstition and passed on.” They glance at the stately pile of story and myth bequeathed to humanity by religion and quickly move on, pausing only to ask of the benighted millions who continue to profess one faith or another that they keep their beliefs to themselves and don’t demand that they be heard in the public square.

How to Be a Stuffed Animal

Kannu

Your didu's father was a big game hunter. Like teddy Roosevelt. In our house in Allahabad we had variety of animals mounted and framed. Tigers leopards cheetah crocodile antelope bears. for a young child, entering the drawing room in the dark was scary with the glass eyes glinting at you. 

We got some back in Bhopal, bear skins, cheetah head deer skins etc. can't complain son. It was a different time and world. Your Didu went hunting and she was a crack shot as well. I've done my share of hunting as well but it's no longer considered 'good'. So I do my hunting with a camera. 

So why do people do it? Pretty much the same reason why people go on a roller coaster. For the thrill of it. 

So it goes. 

Love

Baba

How to Be a Stuffed Animal - Lapham’s Quarterly
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/how-to-be-a-stuffed-animal.php?page=all

 

The fire that destroyed P. T. Barnum’s American Museum was the spectacle to end all spectacles. It started in a basement shortly after noon on July 13, 1865, and spread with an energy befitting the museum’s restive owner. By midafternoon it had attracted an audience of thirty thousand to the corner of Broadway and Ann Street in Lower Manhattan. As the Prince of Humbugs’ palace of wonders hissed and cracked and roared under the pressure of its own combustion, so the crowd responded to the conflagration with cheers and shrieks and “uncontrollable laughter,” reported the New York Times.

Gone were the flea circus, the loom run by a dog, the trunk of a tree under which the disciples of Jesus had sat, the hat worn by Ulysses S. Grant, the waxworks, the Feejee mermaid, the taxidermy displays of “monkeys in all imaginable attitudes, stuffed and waxed and furnished with curiously wrought glass eyes, sacred white cows filled with hay, monstrous turtles varnished and stuffed, camels with humps, zebras with the traditional 365 stripes, lions with shaggy manes, and tigers with beautiful skins.” These, and tens of thousands of other curiosities and collectibles, the entire contents of Barnum’s Wunderkammer, were all incinerated.