Month: April 2022

It's a well-known fact that in the United States rich people have much longer life expectancies than poor people. Much of this is attributed to our private health care system, which does a lousy job of treating the uninusured and underinsured.

That got me curious: do other countries with national health care systems do better? In a nutshell, not really:

The rich live about ten years longer than the poor in the US. In France it's about 12 years. The UK and Belgium are a little over 9 years. Only Sweden, at around 4 years, does significantly better.

The numbers in the chart above are taken from various sources, not all of which agree with each other, and in some cases are roughly extrapolated from education levels, which are a decent but imperfect proxy for income differences. Don't take any of them as gospel.

That said, they're in the right ballpark. The problem of low lifespans for the poor is universal and has little to do with the details of health care systems. It's much more foundational than that, and it's one reason why increasing retirement ages is a bad idea. It might help put pension systems like Social Security on a sounder footing, but it does so on the backs of the poor. Raising the retirement age to 68 takes a much bigger toll on someone who will live to age 76 than it does to someone who will live to age 88.

From Doug Johnson, writing about the need for indigenous voices in the search for extraterrestrial life:

Other trappings of colonialism have ended up in modern space exploration. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wore a cowboy hat before his spaceflight, for example. In all, if anyone out there is looking, said Shorter, humanity isn’t necessarily putting its best foot forward.

Roger that.

Oh ffs:

It's bad enough that half of all Republicans think Democratic leaders run child sex-trafficking rings, but 21% of Democrats think so too. So why are they still Democrats, anyway?

In any case, thanks conservative media! It's good to see that you're on the job as always.

Midnight on the subway.

Third Way posted an analysis of murder rates by state a few weeks ago and concluded that red states had more murders than blue states. They used murder rates compiled individually by each state "because we found it’s more comprehensive than FBI data."

That's true, and it's a perfectly defensible choice. However, the FBI data is generally pretty reliable and has the advantage of using the same methodology for every state. So I replicated the analysis using the FBI data to see what it looked like:

The FBI data differs from the Third Way data in some states, but overall it presents pretty much the same picture. The seven most murderous states are all Republican, and of the states above the national average 15 are Republican and only 8 are Democratic

Likewise, among the states below the national average 17 are Democratic and only 10 are Republican.

You may decide for yourself how meaningful this is. Contrary to Fox News, however, it's clear that residents of red states are pretty familiar with homicide and have nothing to fear if they want to visit big blue states like California or New York.

This post has a twist at the end, so bear with me. We start with a piece in the Atlantic by Derek Thompson about the end of the 9-to-5 workday. It's based on a Microsoft study of keyboard strokes on work computers:

Findings from Microsoft and its researchers suggest that the 9-to-5 workday is fading in an age of remote and hybrid work and more flexible hours. That pattern was first spotted early in the pandemic, when Microsoft Teams chats outside the typical workday increased more than in any other time segment, particularly between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m....Microsoft researchers have begun referring to this phenomenon as a “triple peak day.”

What Microsoft found was a peak before lunch, a peak after lunch, and a brand new peak from 9-10 pm. Here's the obligatory chart:

Are you with me so far? Let's assume everything is kosher here and that keystrokes on work computers are a good proxy for doing work at home. Do you notice anything odd?

Of course you do. The chart is labeled "Subjects with a third peak." In other words, this chart only counts workers with a third peak and then concludes that a third peak is now widespread.

I have two problems with this. The first is the obvious one: what if we just take a look at everyone in the study? To their credit, Microsoft includes this in their paper:

If you look at the full study data, there's nothing there. Keystrokes decline rapidly around 5 pm and fade out gradually after that. The researchers say that 30% of workers had a third peak, but the full chart doesn't show even a hint of one.

This is an obvious problem with the study, but I said I had two problems with it. What's the second? Can you guess?

Here it is: I have been hearing for decades that email and remote connections in general have destroyed the 9-to-5 workday. We are on call constantly. Our bosses expect us to respond 24/7. We work more hours than ever.

But here we have Microsoft claiming that the "third peak" is a brand new thing that took off only during the pandemic. And it's a small effect even though the data was collected from precisely the kind of workers who are most likely to demonstrate workaholic behavior. If we take this seriously, it means that email and Slack and Zoom haven't turned knowledge workers into 24/7 work zombies at all—at least, no more than before.

What's more, there's data that supports this. Among men,¹ Larry Mishel estimates that average hours worked over the past few decades have gone up more among the poor than the rich:

Using a different metric, the number of high-income men working very long hours (more than 50 per week) went up during the '80s but has gone up only modestly since then. And since 2004, the average number of hours worked by high-income men has actually gone down:

There have always been some men who work long hours: teachers who grade papers at home; coders who are obsessed with their work; executives who read reports in bed; and so forth. But over the last few decades this kind of of workaholism has gone up only a little bit and the average workweek has increased by only about two hours—most of which has been given back in recent years. The bottom line is that contrary to conventional wisdom, the number of high-income men who are workaholics is fairly modest and hasn't gotten a lot bigger over the past decade or two. This fits the Microsoft findings, which show a smallish amount of after-hours work and a smallish hump even among those who do make a habit of working late.

And of course, if you take income out of it and just look at all men, average hours worked hasn't budged a bit since the BLS started its time use survey:

American men do work longer hours than men in most other rich countries, largely because other countries mandate many more vacation hours. But this hasn't changed a lot since computers made it easier to work at home.

I don't doubt that our always-connected lifestyle has made work more stressful in some ways. On the other hand, it's also made it less stressful: A white-collar worker who needs to get another hour of work done no longer has to choose between finishing it and getting home for dinner with the family. The work can simply be done a little later when the kids are in bed and everything has calmed down. I imagine this is a choice that lots of men make. They work the same hours, but are able to choose the least stressful time to do it. That's a nice tradeoff.

¹There are substantial gender differences in hours worked, and for women the numbers depend a lot on the entrance of more women into the workforce. For these reasons, it's best to restrict the analysis to men in order to get a fairly clean look at things.

Remember the Great Resignation? Fed economist Bart Hobijn says there's nothing to it:

The labor market recovery since the depth of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 has been the fastest in postwar history....At the same time, the share of workers quitting their jobs—either to take new jobs or to exit the labor force—has also hit its highest level since 2000, when the data began being collected.

This recent spike in quits has been referred to as the “Great Resignation.” Some have interpreted it as a wave of resignations, driven by people reconsidering their career prospects and work-life balance, that is drastically altering the labor supply. In this Economic Letter, I provide two pieces of evidence that cast doubt on this narrative and, instead, suggest that the high rate of quits is simply a reflection of the rapid pace of overall labor market recovery.

Go ahead and read Hobijn's piece for the details, but I continue to wonder where this narrative ever came from in the first place. For starters, here's the rate of both hires and quits during the Great Recovery of the past decade:

The quit rate dropped precipitously at the start of the pandemic for obvious reasons: workers were being laid off by the millions and no one in their right mind wanted to enter a job market like that.

But that turned around shortly and the quit rate went back up. Critically, though, the quit rate merely rebounded to its old Great Recovery trendline. It may be that 3% is a "record" quit rate, but it's only very slightly above trend. Plus there's this:

This chart shows the difference between the hire rate and the quit rate. As you can see, it's very, very stable. The quit rate during the Great Recovery has been consistently about two percentage points below the hire rate.

Bottom line: There was never really anything to the Great Resignation theory. Quits and hires spiked and rebounded during the pandemic year of 2020 but were back to normal by the start of 2021. I'm not sure why you need anything more than this to understand what was going on.

Last year I posted a snippet of the Colosseum in Rome that was taken about an hour before dawn. The combination of yellow lighting and dark blue sky was both gorgeous and dramatic.

This picture was taken at the same time, but it's a straightforward shot of the entire structure. It looks surprisingly small! I don't really recommend getting up at 5 am just to see the Colosseum like this, but if you're up anyway it's worth a visit.

The Wall Street Journal has good news for America's CEOs!

Pay increases for U.S. chief executives have gained steam, putting compensation on pace to set a record amid a tight labor market that is also driving pay higher for many of their workers. Median pay rose to $14.2 million last year for the leaders of S&P 500 companies, up from a record $13.4 million for the same companies a year earlier.

....Pay for rank-and-file employees rose, too, last year but more slowly, as measured by the compensation figures the companies report for their median employee. Half the companies said pay for their median worker increased by 3.1% or less in 2021...

As I never tire of pointing out, you have to adjust wages for inflation whether you're talking about pipefitters or CEOs. At first it might seem like our nation's CEOs got a solid 6% increase last year, but in real terms they received a raise of only 1.3%. That's not so great.

But it's better than nothing, which is roughly what rank-and-file employees got. Average wages increased about 4-5% last year, which is to say 0% when adjusted for inflation. Here's a longer look at things:

According to the Journal, hardly a socialist rag, median CEO pay has increased 33% since 2010. Meanwhile, the median working schmoe has seen an increase of only 15%. More recently, CEO pay increased 4% during the past couple of years—no doubt a tribute to their stalwart leadership during the pandemic—while ordinary worker pay went down 3%—presumably a well-deserved rebuke to their lazy-ass shirking whenever some family member got "sick."

So there you have it. CEOs already made a gazillion percent more than ordinary workers before the Great Recession, and since then they've increased it to 1.3 gazillion percent. Then they increased it even more during the pandemic. God bless America.

From Brian Stelter:

In a forthcoming book, a pair of New York Times reporters and CNN political analysts report that President Joe Biden "assessed" Fox News "as one of the most destructive forces in the United States."

The reporters, Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, say that Biden was even more critical of Fox Corp patriarch Rupert Murdoch. According to the book, Biden told an unnamed associate in mid-2021 that Murdoch was "the most dangerous man in the world."

I sure hope Biden really said this. I only wish more people were willing to say it in public and to treat Murdoch as the amoral civic toxin that he is.