Month: August 2023

Earlier today, while I was browsing through the MINT8 retirement report, I noticed something I had missed on earlier reads: estimates of the number of workers with pensions.

As we all know, the era of the traditional "defined benefit" pension is pretty much over except for government workers. These are pensions that had a defined payout when you retired, and they've mostly been replaced by "defined contribution" plans like 401(k) accounts. The value of these plans depends on how your investments do, so the payout isn't guaranteed.

MINT8 has projections for pension plan participation, and this is what it looks like for the upper middle class:

As you can see, DB plans are down and projected to keep going down, while DC plans have gone up. However, between the two of them pension plan participation is extremely stable: 87% a few years ago and 85% half a century from now.

However, the news is not so rosy for the working class:

Among workers with modest incomes, DB plans are down but DC plans haven't made up for them. A few years ago 55% of these workers had pensions of some sort, while half a century from now that's projected to fall to 44%.

A couple of days ago I was thinking, as one does, about the equivalence of gravitational mass and inertial mass. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, all mass has two properties:

• It is attracted to other mass (gravity).
• It resists having its motion changed (inertia). This is true even out in the deepest expanses of empty space where it's free of both gravity and friction.
• Quite remarkably, these two properties are exactly equal.

This is why a 10-pound bowling ball and a five-ounce baseball fall at the same speed if you drop them from the leaning tower of Pisa. The bowling ball has 32x more mass, so gravity attracts it 32x more strongly. However, it also has 32x more inertia, so it resists gravity 32x more than the baseball. Result: both balls fall to the earth at the same speed.

But then I got to thinking more. The source of gravitational attraction is the curvature of spacetime. But what's the source of inertial resistance? I fiddled with that a bit, trying to either remember or figure out the answer. Some quantum mechanical property? Just an uninteresting alternate way of saying objects travel on geodesics? Something to do with conservation of momentum and therefore the translational symmetry of space? Finally I gave up and googled it. And the answer is: no one knows.

Isn't that something? Inertia is everywhere and it's a concept so simple everyone understands it. But where does it come from? The precise equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass is one of those well-known mysteries because it's part of the familiar story of Albert Einstein's derivation of General Relativity. It even has a name. Until today, however, I had never realized that the very existence of inertia remained a deep and unsolved mystery of physics.

Donald Trump looks to be a busy man next year:

Busy calendar (per @cnn): pic.twitter.com/sqhxijdP2S

— Paul Farhi (@farhip) August 28, 2023

This is an impressive graphic, and I don't blame CNN for running it. At the same time, complex federal trials never begin on time—and they're really not going to begin on time in these cases. Trump's lawyers are going to flood the courts with motions for this and that, and many of them will be granted. I'll be surprised if any of these trials begin before summer.

A lone rider makes her way up the escalator from the Madeleine metro station in Paris.

In the Wall Street Journal today, Andy Biggs takes issue with a recent GAO report that says retirement savings are in trouble, especially for low-income workers:

Among all households of workers 51 to 64 earning more than $20,000 in 2019, 80% either have a retirement account or are entitled to traditional pension benefits. Even among households with total earnings between $20,000 and $40,000, 49% have a formal retirement plan. Simply adopting reasonable parameters multiplies the report’s headline finding fivefold.

Does 49% seem low? It shouldn't. Most people with low to moderate incomes will have nearly their entire incomes replaced by Social Security alone. They don't necessarily need retirement accounts.

On the more general question of how we're all doing on retirement, the answer is: it depends. I was curious, so I took a look at the latest assessment from MINT, the Social Security Administration's tool for projecting retirement income into the future. Here's the latest from MINT8:

MINT8 projects that the average retiree income today is about 100% of the average wage. Fifty years from now it will be only 75%.

However, SSA projects that average wages will increase even accounting for inflation. This means that the average retiree today earns $63,000 while the average retiree in 2071 will earn the equivalent of $84,000.

So is this good news or bad news? You can cherry pick either of these to make whatever point you want. But they're both true.

Why are there so many more earthquakes than there used to be? My friend the geophysicist answers:

Before 1960 there was only a minimal global network of seismometers, and it was difficult to share data among researchers. After the 1963 Test-Ban Treaty in which the USA and the USSR agreed to cease detonating nuclear devices above ground, the US developed a unified technology for analog seismic stations and installed a global network to monitor underground nuclear explosions at the Soviet test sites and the possible underground nuclear detonations by other nations.

This network, the WWSSN, The World Wide Standardized Seismic Network, could be accessed by any academic researcher to study global seismic activity. It is not surprising that the number of "major earthquakes" detected globally went up significantly soon after the network began operation.

The second boost to event detection began with the advent of global digital seismic networks from which digital data could be fed directly from a sensor network into a computer to search for unnoticed events. The stated goal was to detect a 1-kiloton underground explosion anywhere on Earth, roughly Richter magnitude 4. The 1960s WWSSN had focused on Eurasia, so it missed many "major" earthquakes in other parts of the world. Many major quakes occur in remote regions, such as the Tonga Islands or Vanuatu Islands. Before 1960, only the largest quakes in these remote regions were detected and cataloged, and M=5 quakes were routinely missed by the WWSSN.

Because the post-1960 increase was in "major" earthquakes, I figured it was unlikely to be merely a measurement issue. I guess I was wrong.

Since its peak in the mid-90s, violent crime is down 40%. Anti-Black hate crime is down 50%:

Anti-Black hate crime has trended downward over the past 25 years but began to turn back upward after Ferguson. It spiked during the George Floyd protests before dropping the following year, and is currently up by a third since 2014.

I got pointed to a paper earlier today that summarized the trend in natural disasters in recent years. It wasn't super interesting, but it did have one thing that intrigued me:

What's up with this? These are major earthquakes, so it's not likely to be a measurement issue. But for some reason the number of earthquakes suddenly took off from 1960-2000 before leveling off. We now have nearly five times as many earthquakes each year as we did in 1960 and seven times as many as 1900.

Anyway, as long as I was doing this, I checked out hurricanes too:

North Atlantic hurricanes are up about two times since 1970. Here's everything else climate related:

Everything climate related is up a lot since 1970. No surprise there.

But what's the deal with earthquakes?

Here is the minimum wage for California compared to the federal minimum wage:

The federal minimum wage lost value in practically every year since 1980, while the California minimum generally continued to rise with inflation. In 2016, as the federal minimum fell further and further behind inflation, California went in the other direction, raising it more than inflation.

Just judging by inflation, the minimum wage today should be about $12. It's $3.50 above that in California and $4.75 below that federally. So it's no wonder that the federal minimum wage is little more than an historical artifact. Practically nobody is paid the federal minimum wage anymore:

(The people paid less than the minimum wage are typically teenagers and tipped workers in states where this is legal.)

In our Twitter spat a couple of days ago Chris Geidner mentioned a new law that prevented trans kids from getting gender affirming care up through age 18. I corrected that to 17, thinking of the Tennessee law that was recently upheld in federal court. But no. It turns out Alabama has a law that really does go up through age 18, and it too has been recently upheld in court.

But why? The Alabama law talks repeatedly about protecting "minors," who are generally defined as age 0-17. What's the excuse for adding on an extra year?

The answer is that Alabama is one of the few states that defines minors as age 0-18. So at age 18 you still aren't an adult.

But medical care is a big exception. In Alabama, you can get treatment for drugs and alcohol at any age. You can get STD testing at age 12. You can get yourself vaccinated at age 14 (except for COVID). You can get contraceptives at age 14. Or anything else, for that matter:

Any minor who is 14 years of age or older, or has graduated from high school, or is married, or having been married is divorced or is pregnant may give effective consent to any legally authorized medical, dental, health or mental health services for himself or herself, and the consent of no other person shall be necessary.

Now, it isn't unheard of to make exceptions to general age restrictions like this one. Abortion is completely illegal in Alabama, for example, no matter your age. The drinking age is 21, as is the vaping age and the smoking age. You can buy life insurance at age 15 and take out an educational loan at 17. You can't run for governor until you turn 30. The age of consent is 16.

Still and all, the general age of adulthood for medical procedures is 14, and that's without parental consent. Trans care is now basically the only exception even with parental consent, a hysterical submission to the current crusade against trans people from red state Republicans.

Moral panics like this one generally produce nothing but misery and oppression, and the campaign against gender-affirming care is headed down the same road. It's one thing to display some caution toward procedures that haven't been heavily studied and still have unknown consequences—this is happening in some European countries—but it's quite another to ban them altogether out of bigotry and ignorance. That's what the militant zealots in Alabama are doing, along with their militant zealots in two dozen other states.

In the absence of strong evidence in either direction, decisions like these should generally be left up to the patient, their doctor, and their parents. They're the ones best able to make case-by-case judgments. At most, given the current state of our knowledge, states might be justified in mandating a few guardrails (counseling, time restrictions, etc.). But that's it. Banning gender affirming care entirely for minors—the only age at which certain procedures can be done—is nothing more than jumping on the bandwagon of never-ending ugliness that has broken out in the Republican Party in the age of Trump. It's cretinous and disgraceful.