Cities Where African-Americans Are Doing The Best Economically 2018

Cities Where African-Americans Are Doing The Best Economically 2018

Notice they are mostly in the south. 

And this:

Why Charlotte and Raleigh Work for Black Residents

Democrats Seem to Run Local Government Badly

Democrats seem unfit to run local Government because they do not believe in commercial rights like the right to subdivide and build. Think NIMBYism in New York City and San Francisco, they are beginning to also mess up places like Austin TX and Colorado.

If we could keep The Democarts from NIMBYism and/or the GOP away for wars metaphorical or real we could make great gains.

PBS Documentary about Cabrini Green

I found this documentary I saw on PBS very interesting.

It confirmed my belief that people outside a community often have a very distorted view of that community (BTW I normally hate the use of the word "community" these day but in this case it's the correct word to use).

If we want Government to help people we should just give them money, make a good environment for jobs to form and maybe provide adequate police protection and public goods. Other ideas often seem better than giving cash, like we should make sure that they buy food so we give food stamps,  but we don't know enough about other lives nor do we want to spend the time to find out for those to be better.

We see a place like Cabrini Green on the news when things go wrong there but we do not see the day to day living. the relationships etc.We end up with a distorted view of life there and we can do more harm than good.

Are US Schools Better than Schools in Europe

Counter to what the article says, I really do not believe that USA schools are better than schools in any other developed country, or worse for that matter, nor do I belive that PISA is a good measure of school quality but the linked article gives a little evidence of what I DO believe, that is as far as what they try to teach they are all about equally effective. Also there are very, very few bad schools in developed countries (an insignificant number).

Now I had some teachers incapable of controlling a class and some lazy teacher who it seemed where out of the class about 1/2 or the time but they seem to have little effect. (I had some very good teachers too.)

What makes a school look bad is a bad student body now why is a big question, but her is the article:

Tino Sanandaji
The amazing truth about PISA scores: USA beats Western Europe, ties with Asia.







I do believe that schools could get better but it would require more changing what they teach than the teaching quality and it would probably make PISA scores worse not better.

Do the USA bottom 10% Live Better that the German bottom 10%?

Tim Worstall on that subject:
Astonishing Numbers: America's Poor Still Live Better Than Most Of The Rest Of Humanity

Tim Worstall

Cassidy Graham

The Cassidy-Graham healthcare bill would give some of the money that is spent on the PPACA to the states. 

The bill seems bad on the details (to be expected from congress even PPACA was bad on details) but since the big problem with healthcare in the USA is cost, driven BTW by growing bureaucracy part of which is due to state regulation, I think would be a good idea to give all the money that the Federal Government normally spends on healthcare to the states. how much money each state got would based on age adjusted population. The states would be required to at least cover the old (Medicare), the poor (Medicaid) and Federal Government employees.

Cost looks to me like a state problem because health care spending per capta in Utah is lower than in stingy Canada and only slight higher in Arizona which has an old population.  States like Utah and Arizona and maybe even Texas might be able to cover everyone with what they get from the Feds. High spending states woudl have an incentive to regulate with more attention toward costs.

Alternatively the Fed Gov. could take over all health care regulations from the states. As it is now the fed Gov subsidizes demand and the states restrict supply which is what you would expect considering he incentives.

Angus Deaton Deaths of Despair

New Hampshire was the highest earning state in 2016 and number 2 in opioid OD deaths.

Dear Angus Deaton with all due respect you might consider reassessing your deaths of despair theory. It never made much sense to me, there is in fact some evidence that people drink and drug more when they have more income and therefore access to booze and drugs, which is BTW a problem for my advocacy of legalization but I thin the positives would out weigh the negatives.

Related: Health Insurance Might not be Good for Everyone

Added 2018-01-08  see here

In the preferred estimates, changes in economic conditions account for less than one-tenth of the rise in drug and opioid-involved mortality rates. The contribution of economic factors is even less when accounting for plausible selection on unobservables, with even a small amount of remaining confounding factors being sufficient to entirely eliminate the relationship. 

Added 2022-10-19

Some people seem to miss that variance among people means that prosperity can lead some people to engage more in behaviors that people like Angus Deaton and me consider destructive. This is from Freakonomics post called Retirement Kills.

Josef ZWEIMULLER: I mean, actually, what we find in our study is that among blue-collar workers, we see that workers who retire earlier have higher mortality rates. And these effects are pretty large.

            ... 

Mo WANG: Working actually gives you a way to structure life and that’s very important. Usually, it’s interesting you see people travel right after they retire, but then after like one or two years, people just sit at home watching TV.

This relates to opioid deaths in that fentanyl has made opioids cheapar and more accessible, which is a wealth effect, and so we should expect more use among those who like opioids.

Also this tweet from Robin Hanson seems applicable:

I missed this when it out a year ago, but this article pointed me to this key result: Per capita US drug deaths have steadily doubled every decade 4 times in a row, R^2=0.99! Even as particular drug death rates far from steady. 

This graph from here https://takimag.com/article/white_privilege_vs_white_death_steve_sailer/ makes it seem like the trend started with cohorts born after 1945. Which suggest the trend has actually been going for ~55 years, which suggests it will continue for another ~3 decades, after which mortality will be ~8x higher!

The trend looks much more a result of growing prosperity than of Despair. Shout it form the house tops.