Category: Current Affairs

Double dutching might be back! I wonder if I can talk any of my friends into it …

The New York Times > National > In San Francisco, a New Twist on a Schoolyard Pastime

Everything you do today requires an expert. From drafting a will to selling a home, you spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars to people that have an advanced degree and know the rules. My reaction to this is I’d better learn the rules! However, is the world really this complicated or do these experts just make it seem that way? Hundreds of people sell their own home each year. Many people draft their own will. Do the experts provide value add or merely the comfort of knowing you got it right?

I’d argue that we need more of a tiered approach. Most of us are probably relatively satisfied with a standard format will. Most of us just need a realtor to show the house. Paying a full fee, whether it’s $250/hr to an attorney or 7% commission to a realtor is rather steep.

This topic came up when I was reading Realty Bites – Why do you still need an agent to buy a home? By Douglas Gantenbein. The author strongly believes that everyone should sell their own house in order to avoid giving large amounts of the profits to a realtor.

If you’re really interested in the details of the recent tax law changes, the Congressional Budget Office has put together a publication called “Effective Federal Tax Rates Under Current Law, 2001 to 2014” that provides tables that show how the laws affect different categories of tax payers over time.

Making prisoners pay for their prison stay is an appealing idea. I can definitely see why it would be popular with voters. However, you can also see the other side. How saddling people with debt, in addition to a criminal record, can make it even harder for them to fit into society and make ends meet when they get out of jail.

Decisions and policies like this hinge on whether or not our goal for prisoners is punishment or reform. Making prisoners pay for their stay add, perhaps justly, to their punishment. But it makes it much easier for them to reform when they get out, and we already don’t offer them many resources for reform.

Posted on July 23, 2004

Torturing Terrorists

Setting goals and then missing them may make people more likely to cheat than if they hadn’t had any goals, especially if they missed them by just a little. This Wharton article, Goal setting and Cheating: Why They Often Go Together in the Workplace – Knowledge@Wharton, talks about several studies that relate goal setting to cheating and gives very tangeable, believable examples. It does end on a positive note with some suggestions for how to minimize cheating. For example, they suggest that the rewards should be graduated, so if selling one more car will win you a trip to Hawaii, there had better be a pretty good second prize or you’re likely to cheat on that last car.

Sociology is not the only area where the Bush administration stretches the facts. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has issued a new report expressing its concern about the way the Bush administration uses scientific data. The UCS report is signed by 4,000 scientists, including “48 Nobel laureates, 62 National Medal of Science recipients and 127 members of the National Academy of Sciences.”

Scientists horrified by Bush’s Bad Science | The Register

A while back, Bush announced plans to encourage and help poor people to marry. His reason? Married people are less likely to be poor. I think Bush should have taken Sociology 101 in college, which is where I learned the difference between cause, effect, correlating statistics and other interesting tidbits that might help set public policy. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a column in the New York Times about this.

Posted on June 19, 2004

Minimum Wage Poll: What do you think?