Steve Reads

Author: stevereads

Not to cavil with Krugman, but … — March 7, 2014

Not to cavil with Krugman, but …

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Today he says that “private-sector wages…continue to run well below pre-crisis levels”, and uses this graph to support that claim:

Average hourly earnings of all employees

He’s not being quite accurate. As you can see from the y-axis, that’s year-over-year *growth* in hourly wages. Since the y-axis is everywhere above zero, we conclude that wages have always been growing. They’ve just been growing less than they were before the crisis.

…Which is Krugman’s point, I think. The main argument for increasing interest rates is to keep inflation in check. Inflation might be running amok if labor costs are skyrocketing. Labor costs are not skyrocketing; they’re under control. If interest rates need to rise now because labor costs are out of control, then they needed to rise back in 2007-2009 as well.

My buddy FRED will show you average earnings, as opposed to year-over-year change in earnings.

Honestly, this was probably just a typo on Krugman’s part. In context it’s obvious what he meant. But I would be shocked if the typo didn’t start propagating.

Initial thoughts on reading Hofstadter’s “Paranoid Style” — March 6, 2014

Initial thoughts on reading Hofstadter’s “Paranoid Style”

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Richard Hofstadter wrote a very famous essay entitled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, which mapped the contours of a certain habit in American political life — a tendency to turn mere political debates into contests between good and evil. It’s not just that your side is right and their side is wrong; it’s that their side is practically the embodiment of the Devil himself, and their side’s victory would mean the end of the United States as we know it. Hofstadter goes into a lot of rich and lovely detail about the conspiratorial style that accompanies this, including its often scholarly pretensions; an abundance of footnotes will, one supposes, bulletproof the arguments.

All of this feels like a very accurate description of American political life; anyone who lived through the “death panels” era will see some truth in it. And indeed, Hofstadter’s habit of getting to the core of American phenomena has often come into my life like a breath of fresh air, relieving some of the strain of the Bush administration. We were fucked, sure, but then we’d always been fucked; as Hofstadter put it elsewhere,

>

When one considers American history as a whole, it is hard to think of any very long period in which it could be said that the country has been consistently well governed. And yet its political system is, on the whole, a resilient and well-seasoned one, and on the strength of its history one must assume that it can summon enough talent and good will to cope with its afflictions. To cope with them but not, I think, to master them in any thoroughly decisive or admirable fashion. The nation seems to slouch onward into its uncertain future like some huge inarticulate beast, too much attainted by wounds and ailments to be robust, but too strong and resourceful to succumb.

So the man says true and important and in some perverse sense relaxing things about America. Yet two aspects of “The Paranoid Style” make me wonder how useful it is.

The first problem is deciding how to identify paranoid strains in everyday life. Suppose a rational, intelligent friend tells you that ObamaCare is the coming of sharia socialism. Suppose that, using one criterion or another, you identify this argument as a species of paranoia. Does that mean it’s *wrong*? One wants a criterion that will reliably distinguish cranks from the sane. Just because you’re paranoid, goes the line, doesn’t mean they’re not after you. Hofstadter gives us no way to determine whether *this* paranoid fellow over here is crazy, whereas this one over here is telling the truth.

It’s probably too much to expect that Hofstadter will give us a fully fleshed out theory of psychoceramics. Maybe it’s useful just to know that the U.S. has created an indigenous form of paranoid political culture. Hofstadter is at pains to note, though, that paranoid political culture is in no way indigenous to the United States. (In fact I would have liked him to have chased down its religious roots. It hardly seems coincidental that a country founded by hardcore Christian zealots would channel the book of Revelation into its politics.)

So “The Paranoid Style” seems like little more than what it says on the tin: a style guide. Here are some fun observations about some durable aspects of our culture. Should I be happy with that? Or should I expect more from Hofstadter?

Crooked Timber: “Principled bigotry is still, you know, bigotry” — March 5, 2014

Crooked Timber: “Principled bigotry is still, you know, bigotry”

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The Conor Friedersdorf article that Henry Farrell links to is as odd as Henry makes it out to be. I guess the logic is that if you believe in some principle that leads you to reject photographing a gay couple’s wedding, but you have no personal animosity toward gay people as such (e.g., “some of my best friends are gay”), then you’re not homophobic?

I mean, I guess there’s some question of definition here. But “I support gay people, except for the bit wherein they have the same rights as the rest of us” is … at least the sort of thing that should give one pause.

I’m reminded of John Holbo’s very excellent Crooked Timber piece from nearly a year ago, pointing out that people have an odd soft spot for religiously based beliefs:

Suppose your neighbor leans over the fence and says, Dear neighbor, I notice you tend to sleep in until noon on Saturdays. I wish you would get up by 8 AM. I have a moral view according to which people should get up by 8 AM on Saturday morning. Your neighbor is free to say this. But he isnt entitled to you taking him seriously.

Religious beliefs are fine. But they don’t entitle your perspective to any more weight than beliefs which are, say, based on a devotion to the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I wonder whether the religious basis of homophobia is what makes Friedersdorf leap to the defense of the photographers. Are their principles somehow more noble for being religious?

P.S.: Rereading the oh-so-excellent Holbo piece, I realize it’s actually even more relevant to this Farrell piece than I initially recalled. Holbo responds to a very confused premise, of the form “Genuine violations of people’s civil rights can’t be the sort of thing that we debate about; no one can reasonably stand to see anyone’s civil rights violated. Therefore, if we’re earnestly debating the rights of gay people — if there’s morally serious opposition to gay equality — then we must not be talking about a civil-rights issue. Therefore gay rights shouldn’t be framed in those terms.” Holbo replies:

The problem with this is that, if it were a good argument, it would prove that the civil rights struggle wasnt actually a civil rights struggle either. After all, not everyone who opposed civil rights for African-Americans did it with dogs and firehoses. Most whites certainly many whites who opposed civil rights did so in a more mild-mannered, lets-debate-it-in-an-op-ed kind of way.

Likewise with Farrell’s piece today: Friedersdorf seems to be making the same sort of “these people aren’t bigots; they just have a calm, centrist, reasoned opposition to equal rights for gay people.” Most whites in the 50s and 60s were probably not explicitly bigoted, just as most folks who oppose gay marriage today aren’t explicitly homophobic. But does it matter?

Anyone know how to get current dollars out of FRED? —

Anyone know how to get current dollars out of FRED?

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The Disposable Personal Income(DPI) graph counts total DPI across the whole U.S. in nominal dollars. I can transform it to per-capita nominal DPI easily enough. And there’s a CPI graph, so that’s cool. But now I want to combine the two to get DPI in current dollars. I could divide the nominal DPI by (CPI/100). The CPI equals 100 in some base year (1982-84, as it happens), so CPI/100 there would tell us how much dollars have deflated from the base year to now; if CPI = 200 today, dollars are worth half what they were in 1982-84. So then dividing DPI by CPI/100 would give us everything in 1982-1984 dollars.

I’d like to get everything in 2014 dollars. I can’t think of any obvious way to get that out of FRED. Am I just not thinking straight? If the CPI index in year x was 150, and it’s 200 now, then I want to multiply disposable income from year x by 200/150 to get everything in 2014 dollars.

I’d really like median DPI, but that doesn’t seem to be available. In fact I’d also like post-tax, post-transfer income (which should be basically DPI with Social Security, food stamps, etc. added in), but I don’t think that’s in FRED; I’ve not looked around much, but at least the CBO measures this stuff; I could probably mine their sources for the raw data.

The Census Bureau has real DPI in 2005 dollars, measured from 1980 to 2000, apparently derived “U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Survey of Current Business, April 2011, earlier reports and unpublished data”. So I’ll look there, too. And if worse comes to worst, I’ll find various people at the Census Bureau and the BEA.

This concludes your daily data-mongering.

__P.S.__: I mean, I could just grab the most recent CPI number from the CPI raw-data series, and divide by that rather than by 100. But I’d like whatever graph I form here to auto-update as new current-day CPI numbers come in.

__P.P.S.__: Ah. Disposable Personal Income: Per capita: Current dollars (A229RC0). That was easy.

Notes on traveling to Argentina and Brazil (spring vacation 2014) — March 2, 2014

Notes on traveling to Argentina and Brazil (spring vacation 2014)

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The first thing I would like to say about this trip is that it was awesome. Buenos Aires resembles Paris in a lot of really amazing ways (including an abundance of dogs, though BA does a much worse job cleaning up after them), and Iguazu Falls is really awe-inspiring; the several hundred (sic) waterfalls make Niagara look like a piker.

The second thing to note is that the currency situation is completely bizarre. I include this second because it unfortunately consumed a large part of our trip and our mental energy. The basic gist is that Argentina is experiencing hyperinflation, which would lead to a plummeting exchange rate with the US dollar if the market were allowed to do its thing. But the market is not allowed to do its thing; Argentina is under currency controls. The most important upshot of this for tourists is that there is a massive disconnect between the official exchange rate and the unofficial rate, the latter of which is called the “blue dollar”. The blue dollar even has a Twitter feed to track its current exchange rate; the blue rate is currently 11.3 pesos to the dollar. Contrast this with the official exchange rate, currently 7.89 to 1. If you withdraw cash from an ATM or use a credit card, you’ll get the official rate, which means you’ll be paying (11.3/7.89)-1 = 43% more for any given item than you should be.

I expected that it would be fairly easy to get the blue rate. It probably would have been if I had planned things more deliberately ahead of time. My understanding is that most hotels will hook you up with someone who can get you the proper rate. Once we had a waiter in a restaurant change $20 for us at 10 pesos to the dollar. Another time I asked a cashier at a café to change money at the blue rate, and he reacted as though I had just asked him, “Hey, do you have any drugs?” while he’s standing next to a cop. “No blue dollar,” he said; “just the official rate.”

We ultimately got 10 pesos to the dollar from Mobile Wechselstube, which delivered money to us by bicycle while we sipped cold drinks at a café. So if we were to do it again, I think we’d

1. Change a small amount of money at the airport, just to get a cab to our AirBNB.
2. Pre-arrange with Mobile Wechselstube to deliver to us at a café, or arrange with a friend to get 11-to-1.

It has to be mapped out ahead of time, though. That, I think, is the final lesson in all of this. In general, I hope I’ll be a lot more deliberate in my foreign-travel preparations from now on.

The exchange-rate situation is part of a larger story that I really need to understand in detail, given that it overlaps with a number of my interests and seems to intersect with larger parts of Argentine history. In capsule form (which is most of what I know at the moment): the current president, Cristina Kirchner, is the widow of the former president, Néstor Kirchner, who in 2007 fired the head of the agency for official statistics (Indec) when it dared to publish an estimate of inflation that was markedly higher than what the government said it was. The government has continued to insist on its inaccurate inflation numbers since 2007, apparently having gutted Indec’s autonomy in the meantime. The IMF took the strong step within the past few months of censuring the Argentine government over its statistical practices. Official statistics are in many ways central to the functioning of a modern industrial democracy; it’s a testament to the United States that our official statistics (the Census Bureau and the BLS specifically) are almost universally respected, with the exception of some cranks. I’d love to understand the institutional structures that keep our statistics collection independent. I’d also like to understand how the IMF can confirm that a nation is playing a game of funny buggers with its inflation statistics.

Back to our more-local story: if you get the blue exchange rate in Argentina, everything is really cheap. For instance, we had the best meal of our lives at Casa Felix for 400 pesos per person, including wine pairings. At 11.3 pesos to the dollar, that’s $35.39 per person for what — I repeat — was the best meal of our lives, including wine.

Indeed, flying around was the most expensive part of the trip, by far. Looking through my receipts, it looks like the whole trip cost $6500, of which about 70% was the airfare. Housing through AirBNB was only about 8% of the total cost.

We took the free walking tour around Buenos Aires, which I would highly recommend. It’s funded entirely through tips for the tour guides. We gave ours $20, and it seemed like most others on the tour did as well. Our tour guide was named Magdalena; she was charming as hell. I was concerned going into the tour that it would be propagandistic, or rather that it would whitewash the parts of Argentine history that don’t fit a pleasant narrative. Maybe I’ve been mis-trained by Boston tours, whose theme is basically “Boston was central to the American Revolution … and then a few hundred years passed.” No Joseph Rakes attacking Ted Landsmark with a flag pole there. So I was pleasantly surprised that Magdalena didn’t shy away from discussing the Dirty War.

You have to see tango while you’re there. I can’t pretend that I know The Best And Most Authentic Tango Spot In All Of Buenos Aires, but I would like to direct your favorable attention to Buenos Ayres [sic] Club. The night we went, dancing was in full effect, and El Afronte was blowing everyone’s minds. I must own their music now.

We saw something that is seemingly quite a lot less authentic the next night, having had our whistles wetted by El Afronte. This was Bar Sur. It’s run down, a little sad, and entirely surreal; I guess it’s a Porteño’s vision of what a tourist in Buenos Aires thinks tango is. I’m glad we saw El Afronte first; it was achingly intimate and lovely. (Bar Sur was 200 pesos per person after the doorman bargained himself down. I think his initial offer of 400 pesos, or whatever it was, was entirely for effect. The place was almost empty that night.)

Overall our itinerary was: first night in Palermo Hollywood, fly up to Iguazu, spend a few nights there, then fly back and spend a few nights in Palermo (near the Bulnes Subte station). Palermo is a really nice neighborhood to spend your time in; I would highly recommend it. Recoleta is also nice, but Palermo is more transit-accessible. The city has 40-some barrios, and we only saw maybe five of them, so I can’t say that we’ve landed on the one objectively correct place to stay. But we did well. We really enjoyed ourselves. If we were to do it all over again, I think I’d spend one day less — or maybe ideally half a day less — in Iguazu. And I’d probably explore San Telmo more during the day; our only encounter with it was the milonga at night, and a restaurant just before the milonga that was completely empty other than the two of us.

Speaking of which, a word on the Buenos Aires schedule: I don’t understand it at all. We’d heard from nearly everyone, guide books included, that Argentines start eating dinner around 10, and routinely go to bed around 2. You’d think, then, that their schedules would be shifted four hours or so ahead of the standard American one: Porteños would wake up at 10 or 11, get into work at noon, and leave around 8 or 9 pm. Then they’d come home, eat late, party, and start the cycle all over again. Yet in our week there, I don’t think we managed to understand exactly how the schedule worked. We definitely seemed to hop on the Subte at rush hour circa 9 or 10 am, and again at 6pm or so. And restaurants were deserted when everyone had suggested that they’d be packed. Were we picking the wrong restaurants? Or m’lady’s hypothesis: everyone who visits Buenos Aires, including guide book authors, is pulling a massive joke on the rest of us. Argentines want their restaurants to be free of tourists when it’s time for the natives to dine, so they tell everyone else to show up at 11pm. Here in Boston, a similar strategy would be to tell tourists that positively *everyone* drinks at Cheers and eats at Legal Seafoods, thereby leaving lots of free space at the bars we *actually* frequent.

If you’re lucky enough to spend more time in Buenos Aires than we did, maybe you can come back and explain to me how it works. Or maybe you’re in on the conspiracy too.

A tiny thought — February 20, 2014
Paul Wells, The Longer I’m Prime Minister: Stephen Harper and Canada, 2006- —

Paul Wells, The Longer I’m Prime Minister: Stephen Harper and Canada, 2006-

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A man's silhouette, set in front of a draped Canadian flag

This is an interesting read for an American who mostly knows nothing about how parliamentary democracy works, who knows nothing about Stephen Harper other than that I’m supposed to hate him, and who has a starry-eyed vision of Canada. (Vancouver and Montreal are amazing. The fact that Americans aren’t moving there en masse is proof that we’ve been brainwashed.)

What outsiders — this one, anyway — want to know is whether the Canadian welfare state is basically resilient against those who want to destroy it, and whether indeed Harper wants to destroy it. (Sort of like with the UK: in a conservative’s most hopeful moments, can he even dream of killing the NHS?) I look up to the Canadian welfare state; is it all going to disappear under Harper?

I think the short answer from Wells’s book is “too soon to tell; check back later.” First, Harper has learned on a few occasions that the Canadian populace just will not tolerate sudden changes; so whatever he does, he’s going to do gradually. But the more important story is right there in Wells’s title: Harper has been in office now for eight years, and soon enough he’ll be the sixth-longest-serving prime minister in Canadian history. With luck (from Harper’s perspective), he’ll not only stay in office for a long time, but cement his legacy through successors who will carry his program forward. Gradualism, carried on over time, can achieve a lot. If we’re wondering whether Harper will upturn the welfare state, I think Wells would tell us that we’ll have to do a lot of waiting and seeing.

What Harper’s done in the meantime seems to be a variant of the Grover Norquist “starve the beast” approach: he’s slashed tax revenues and flirted with deficits, because apparently the going theory is that Canadian PMs just can’t leave a surplus alone; they feel compelled to spend it on social programs.

Then there are Harper’s moves that just seem outright slimy, like getting rid of the long-form census and generally gutting Statistics Canada. Again, this seems to be part of a pattern: if you remove the fundamental tools underlying the welfare state, including its financing and its means of measuring the populace, then there are questions you just never think of asking. If you stop measuring the same people over time, for instance, it’s harder to say that income mobility has gone down.

Gutting the collection of official statistics is right out of the U.S. GOP’s playbook. Wells touches on this a little bit, but perhaps not as much as I’d like. Is Canadian conservatism very similar to its American cousin? Wells is more focused on Harper the man, and on the details of Ottawa politics, so The Longer I’m Prime Minister has more to say about the politics than about these broader questions.

Wells also presupposes that I know more about Canada than I do. (It’s probably fair to assume that most Americans will not read a book about Canadian politics, so he rightly assumes that his reader will have all the necessary background.) For instance, the fight between western and eastern Canada is a large part of the book’s undercurrent. Is Canada basically a resource-extraction economy, based in Alberta, with a financial economy strapped on top? What happens when the oil runs out? In any case, Wells paints Harper’s time in office as the story of a man empowering western Canada while bringing along as many Québecois as necessary to get repeatedly reëlected.

Québec is an interesting part of the story, for me anyway. I never really knew that the Bloc Québecois was important to people outside Québec, but it repeatedly shows up in Wells’s story as the bogeyman — basically, “Don’t vote for this guy; he’s allied with those separatist terrorists over there.” There are parallels with the treatment of American socialism. The Bloc Québecois is treated (fairly or unfairly; I’m not fit to judge) as the group that wants to tear Canada apart. So various elections were cast as a battle between separatism and federalism. (The elections also lasted five weeks, I hasten to add. This too can be ours, America!)

Again, Wells knows how scared (or not) I ought to be; I do not. When m’lady and I went up to Montréal 18 months ago or so, we stayed with a charming French-Canadian man at an AirBNB, who told us that we, of course, must have heard in the United States about the recent student protests. We blushingly admitted that no, we had not, because American news says basically nothing about Canada. (If it covered Canada honestly, I swear we’d all move there.) According to our host, the government had talked about raising university fees, which had sparked the first round of protests. Apparently the protests turned up to 11 when the National Assembly of Québec passed an emergency law limiting how students could protest. Read the linked Wikipedia entries. I’ll just note one bit from there: the bill would have raised tuition “from $2,168 to $3,793 between 2012 and 2018.” I … I don’t need to explain to American readers why this news would have landed and died on page A16 or so in the <span class="newspaper"New York Times.

So is that essentially what the Harper era comes down to? A weakening of the welfare state such that university educations become slightly less affordable? (Median Canadian family income income is on the order of US$63,000, so four years’ tuition even by 2018 would be c. 25% of the median Canadian family’s annual income.) Don’t mistake me: I am deeply envious of the Canadian social-welfare state, and I’m humbled that Canadians are out on the streets fighting to keep education cheap. This was just the sort of story that Wells assumed we all knew: sure, Harper is shaking things up somewhat, empowering the west a bit at the expense of the east, but Canada will still be Canada when all is said and done.

On a personal note: m’lady and I visited some friends in Vancouver over Patriot’s Day of 2013. I was absolutely in love (with Vancouver, as well as with m’lady). Our friends were American expats who did what everyone said they’d do in 2004, namely move to Canada if Bush was reëlected. He was, and they did. They seem 100% happy with that decision. It’s right there, America! It’s a quick and astonishingly beautiful train ride north from Seattle. I don’t know why I haven’t moved there yet.

Also, I haven’t investigated this too closely, but when we got back from Montréal I looked into the Québec points system. Immigration into Canada, if I’m reading things right, is … rational? Is that even a word? Can I dream? You speak English, you get some points; you speak French, you get some points; you’re of baby-making age, you get some points; you’ve got a college education, you get some points; you have a job offer, you get some points; you can live without the support of the welfare state, you get some points. Add up the points; if the sum is high enough, you’re likely to be able to immigrate into Canada. It almost seems too good to be true.

I’m kind of in love with my ancestral home (everyone in my family named Laniel who was born up to 1946 spoke French as a first language, and for all I know I have some connection to a French postwar prime minister). I read Wells, in no small part, to decide whether I should be: my buddy Chris, I think, wanted to gently remove a little bloom from the rose. I’m not sure he succeeded. Maybe I should read a book on Rob Ford next.

Doctors are part of the capitalist economy as well — February 19, 2014

Doctors are part of the capitalist economy as well

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That would be my takeaway from any number of Atul Gawande’s works, maybe taking canonical form in [book: The Checklist Manifesto]. If you’re looking for a short intro to the idea, how about Gawande’s piece on the Apgar score? According to Gawande, there’s a more or less straight line between the Apgar score and the rise of C-sections. C-sections may be industrial and clinical, but they seem to lead to higher Apgar scores. You optimize for what you can measure.

Boy, did that Apgar-score essay ever irritate an ex-girlfriend of mine, who had had experience with the hospital system and absolutely hated the idea of birth being mechanized, and mothers being routinely subjected to surgery for something that should be natural and beautiful. I’ll even set aside for the moment the whole question of whether the C-section is better for mothers and babies; a lot of people just hate the idea of medical care being turned into this cold, mechanical, capitalist process.

Doctors seemingly hate the idea of being treated as mere cogs in the capitalist machine, churning out the same medical procedure over and over again. They’d probably hate to be penalized for deviations from accepted practice. That would explain the resistance that Gawande encountered among doctors to their merely washing their hands more often. They might like to believe that each patient is a separate entity with his or her own feelings and needs, and that the main thing the doctor brings to the relationship is empathy — deeply personalized empathy.

I want to believe that too. I also want to believe that the data would bear it out: the more empathetic the doctor, the better the care and the better the health outcomes. And maybe that’s true. But it’s just as easy for me to believe that we want to be measuring rates of central-line infection and hand-washing, and that the way to measure these things is to get doctors to spend a lot more time feeding data into the system that confirm they’re running procedures exactly the same way every time. Hospitals become Taylorist factories. Sorry.

That’d be my response to Bill Gardner’s thought-provoking latest piece at The Incidental Economist. Maybe measuring everything is at odds with understanding the patient as a human being. But given that conflict, which do you think will win? Capitalism always wins. The bet isn’t remotely fair.

Corey Robin knocks another one out of the park — February 18, 2014

Corey Robin knocks another one out of the park

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…with this achingly beautiful piece, a followup to his earlier column which said that socialism converts hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness. It starts like so:

> Socialism wont eliminate the sorrows of the human condition. Loss, death, betrayal, disappointment, hurt: none of these would disappear or even be mitigated in a socialist society. As the Pirkei Avot puts it, against your will you enter this world, against your will you leave it. (Or something like that.) Thats not going to change under socialism.
>
> …
>
> But what socialism can do is to arrange things so that you can deal with and confront these unhappinesses of the human condition. Not flee from or avoid them because youre so consumed by the material constraints and hassles of everyday life.

It gets better from there. Please go read.

Single-payer versus individual mandate, shoveling-your-sidewalk department — February 16, 2014

Single-payer versus individual mandate, shoveling-your-sidewalk department

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Brief note: when the city you live in requires you to shovel the sidewalk around your home, and leaves open the possibility of fining you for not shoveling, that’s an individual mandate for shoveling. When the city does it for you in exchange for your tax money, that’s single-payer shoveling.

Both have failure modes similar to the health-insurance case. In the individual-mandate case, the city might set the fine too low, such that people have an incentive to shirk their duty. But there’s a social aspect to the shoveling mandate that might be missing in the insurance case: everyone can see that you haven’t shoveled. As for single-payer shoveling: maybe the city would do a poor job of it.

In Cambridge, anyway, the results of the mandate are quite poor. “America’s Walking City” is a really poor place to walk during the winter. Me, I’d love some single-payer shoveling here.

Then, of course, there’s my longstanding gripe about how we choose to account for expenses like these. Charge all Americans taxes to fund the Department of Defense: that’s on the Federal budget, hence contributes to the deficit. Instead require all Americans to purchase a “self-defense package” from a private Defense Provider of their choice, while requiring that the self-defense package provide certain minimum safeguards, such as fighter jets: that’s not on the budget (you’re buying it on the private market, after all), so it doesn’t contribute to the deficit. You can see our way out of all debt concerns: don’t charge Americans taxes; just require them to buy things.

Likewise, Cambridge isn’t charging us taxes, with which it will hire men to shovel our sidewalks. Instead it’s shifting that burden onto us. So when you wake up at 5am to shovel your sidewalk, because you need to get it done before you take your kids to school, that doesn’t show up on the books, even though it deducts from your time, and even though your time is worth some money.

Finally: if the city did this for me, it could benefit from economies of scale. Rather than 45,000 or so households each buying a shovel, the city could buy a much smaller number of industrial-strength snowblowers.

Here’s a compromise: the city continues to require us to do it ourselves, but it sets up libraries for capital goods. The library that’s a few hundred feet from my apartment would open its doors early in the morning on the day of a snowstorm and allow one person from each building to rent a snowblower for a few hours. Seems silly to take this approach: it requires the city to spend money on more capital goods for its citizens than if the city just took care of the job itself. But there’s clearly something motivating the city, at present, to require that we all remove our own snow, and this plan allows them to continue that.