Car and air transportation by income

The Consumer Expenditure Survey (2007 data) shows (1, 2) that the higher a household’s income is, the more its members travel. Households whose income is above $150,000 a year spend on average about $4,000 a year on gasoline and motor oil, while household whose income is under $15,000 a year spend about $1,000.

The BLS groups air travel together with cruiseboat travel and mass transit under the heading “public transportation”. Most of the amount under this heading is spent on air travel, with the proportion increasing with income. The amount spent on “public transportation” is therefore a good indicator of the distance covered in travel by air, and inequalities in the expenditure in this category can serve as lower bounds for the inequalities in air travel. The expenditure within this category is overwhelmingly by the rich. The top 10% of households account for about half of the total expenditure on “public transportation” – a proportion similar to their share in the total income.

Expected age at death at various ages

The chart below shows the progression over time (1900-2005) of the expected age at death for Americans at various ages. Each line shows the expected age at death for a person at a specific age (10 year intervals, except for the dashed line, corresponding to age 1 year).

Data: National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 51, No. 3, The 2009 Statistical Abstract, Table 103.

Obama’s name recognition history

The case of Rudolph Guiliani suggests that mass media cannot dictate to the public who to vote for. However, since it is impossible to vote for a candidate one has never heard of, mass media cannot help but determine who the public will not vote for.

Senator Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president in January 2007, yet even by by February 2006 over 40% of the people heard enough about Obama to have an opinion about him.

For comparison, a different Democratic congressmember running for the nomination, Dennis Kucinich, never managed to have more than 35% name recognition, even during the height of the primary season.

(The points marked with ‘k’ show the proportion of people recognizing Kucinich.)

Data: pollingreport.com: Newsweek, NBC and Gallup series.

Income of richest households vs. tax on high incomes

During the last 90 years the U.S. has experienced large changes in the share of the total national income controlled by the richest households. The (pre-tax) share of the richest 0.01% of households, for example, was under 1% in the late 1970’s, but over 5% in the late 1920’s and in the years 2005 and 2006.

Over the same period, income tax rates on high incomes varied greatly. The top income rate fluctuated between over 90% (1950’s and early 1960’s) and under 40% (1920’s and 1987 to the present day).

As is evident in the chart below, those two phenomena are strongly negatively correlated over time. The correlation factor is about -74%. Of course, correlation does not imply causation, but even if high tax rates on high incomes do not directly translate to smaller (pre-tax) income for the rich, the correlation supports the notion that inequality in income is determined to a large extent by public policy rather than by an “impersonal phenomenon, the market price”.

Data: Income data are from Thomas Piketty and Emanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998″; updated version and updated data files available at Saez’s website. Tax rate data are from “Personal Exemptions and Individual Income Tax Rates, 1913-2002″, an IRS publication.

Implementation of democratic mass media

The aim of this post is to provide some particulars for the proposal for democratic media which I made:

Using public funds, “media sections” (TV and radio channels, newspapers, book publishers, etc.) are created and sustained. The media sections are controlled by citizen-editor boards, a role that would rotate within the entire population. Each citizen-editor board has a budget and complete control over a section – i.e., over a certain part of the public media – in the same way that present-day editors and media outlet owners have today.

Comment on Phillip Davis’s “The Market for Scholarly Articles”

As Phillip Davis writes (reprinted in the IMS Bulletin), scholarly authors are driven to publish in journals because that is the way to have their work noticed and readers read journals because these provide some measure of quality assurance. Davis is wrong, however, on multiple counts, when he concludes: “This system is not intended to be fair and democratic, but it saves the time of the reader and functions to help consensus building in science. For those who feel that this perpetuates hegemony, let them eat cake.”

The academic publishing system is intended to be fair; the current system (though better than nothing) performs poorly as a time saving tool for the reader; “consensus forming” (i.e., suppressing non-conventional thought) is not a legitimate function of a scientific communication channel; and, finally, there is no reason to dismiss people who are unhappy with the current system with “let them eat cake”: there is a better way to run the scholarly publishing system.

Palestinian and Israeli fatalities by month 2000-08

The following chart was generated using B’Tselem data. The data does not cover December 2008. The number of Israeli deaths was higher than the number of Palestinian death on the same month once during 99 months covered (June, 2001).

The totals for the years and for the entire period are:

Period	Israeli	Palestinian
2000 (Sept. – Dec.)	41	279
2001	191	469
2002	420	1032
2003	185	588
2004	108	828
2005	50	197
2006	23	662
2007	13	390
2008 (Jan. – Nov.)	31	452
Total	1062	4897

Household income distribution, 2007

The graph below shows a histogram of the household income distribution in the US in 2007. It was constructed using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), Table HINC-06. I smoothed the table by merging pairs of $2,500-wide intervals into $5,000-wide intervals, since the narrow intervals showed marked oscillation, as people apparently tend to report their income in multiples of $5,000.

The three vertical dashed lines indicate the 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles. The corresponding values are $25,100, $50,300 and $88,400, respectively.

The following table gives the deciles of the distribution:

Percentile	10	20	30	40	50	60	70	80	90
Income, $1000’s	12.3	20.8	29.8	39.4	50.3	62.7	78.6	100.8	141.9

All percentile points were calculated by interpolating linearly within the income bins.

The functions of mass media

When considering the form that democratic media could take, it is important to consider whether mass media – with its inherent potential for non-democratic effects – has any useful functions that are not anti-democratic. This question is akin to the question of whether government has any functions that are not oppressive. In an analogy to the anarchist position which claims that any governmental activity is necessarily oppressive, one could claim that the only functions of mass media are anti-democratic, i.e., those of allowing a privileged minority influence over the rest of the population. That position would claim that all mass media should be abolished (in the same way that the anarchists want to abolish government altogether) and people should rely exclusively on non-mass (or intimate) forms of media. In this view, the best that a democratic control structure over mass media could produce would be neutralizing those anti-democratic functions, leaving the entire organization useless.

Steven Levitt misrepresenting his source

Steven Levitt has risen to stardom by riding on the overblown rhetoric resting on the overblown claims of Freakonomics. It is, unfortunately, in the nature of popular books that they oversimplify and over-claim. Academic literature is supposed to be different: rigorous, cautious and, of course, peer-reviewed for accuracy.

Of course, if all those attributes really applied, a career like that of Levitt would have been impossible, since the econometric methodology he employs is far too weak to be able to produce with any credibility the kind of results Levitt is aiming at. It is clear, therefore, that within the community within which Levitt works, some standards of critical thought have been suspended. However, even when credulity is being stretched and poorly supported statements are taken as proven, one may still hope for the superficial ground rules to apply. Specifically, for example, one hopes that when previous research is cited and summarized the findings of the research are fairly represented.