If You Don’t Want Murderers to Control you, Don’t Let Them Control You: Ross Douthat’s Insecure Liberalism.

“But when offenses are policed by murder, that’s when we need more of them, not less, because the murderers cannot be allowed for a single moment to think that their strategy can succeed.”

I believe the liberal order is a good enough idea that it can function without its advocates taking to the ramparts every time some other idea threatens it, or even seriously threatens it. Yes radical Islam is real, and big, and deadly. In the last 13 years, despite all the West’s efforts to shout and force it down, it is realer, bigger, and deadlier than ever. Douthat seems to be calling for a doubling down on the overt, forceful anti-radical Islam strategy. If we really stand up and pound our chests, unfurling banners bearing the prophet’s image, they’ll know we won’t back down from our principles. Naturally, they’ll back down from theirs, right?

9/11 was purported to be retribution for American military adventurism. The Great Satan had defiled Muslim holy lands and spilled blood there. The response to 9/11? More defiling, more blood. The result? Radical Islam is more popular, powerful, and far-reaching than ever before. The Great Satan lived up to its reputation and behaved as advertised. Douthat gives examples of reasonable religious people taking offense at others’ exercise of free speech. Certainly, swathes of peaceful Muslims the world over aren’t happy to see or hear about cartoons mocking their prophet. The radicals who planned and carried out these attacks have undoubtedly touted the Western notion of free speech as one that cannot avoid insulting Islam. Douthat seems to be encouraging us to live up to that billing as well. If we take his advice, I expect to see a repeated strategy meet with repeated results.

Am I an advocate of appeasement then? Am I calling for censorship? Absolutely not, I’m calling for ignorance. The men who committed these murders in Paris should be seen as murderers and little else. The way we prevent murders from controlling society is to prosecute them as murderers rather than fanning the flames of their motivation. To do the latter would be to allow them their second (probably first) avenue of victory. When people commit ideological crimes, they have at least two definitions of success. One is to intimidate their opponents into conforming with their desires. The other is to become martyrs and highlight the vileness of their opposition. Douthat wants to make these men martyrs and he wants us to be the great enemies of Islam those men believe us to be.

I for one am utterly indifferent toward Islam in any and all of its strains. What I am not indifferent toward is murder. I want murderers to be subject to fair trials and, if convicted, punished in accordance with their actions alone with no consideration given to the political context in which those actions occurred.

To give that consideration would be a blow against freedom. It would be to punish an act of speech merely because it coincided with an act of violence. It would be to punish all those who peacefully protest images insulting Islam by dictating that they must lose because their position coincided with that of a violent minority.

If liberal society is the great thing we believe it to be, we must also believe that it can function without agitation and distortion on its behalf against those who wish to see it destroyed. Liberalism’s strength is in its ability to tolerate myriad points of view while at the same time maintaining peace and order. To demand, for the sake of liberalism, that an idea be utterly rebuffed because some of its proponents chose not to conduct themselves peacefully is to admit that liberalism shares with radical Islam an inability to withstand criticism.

2015
01/08
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Yes, Wages are Sticky; No, I’m not a Keynesian

Bryan Caplan believes that sticky wages are partially the product of government intervention, but much more significantly a product of behavioral psychology. He has recently gotten excited about it and challenged anti-keynesians to register their responses to Truman Bewley’s magnum opus on sticky wages with the presumption being that significant and persistent unemployment caused by non-legislatively induced wage stickiness suggests expansionary monetary/fiscal policy as the only reasonable solution. If you’re a GDP fetishist, you’re an interventionist plain and simple, if you oppose involuntary unemployment (lost gains from trade), these facts would seem to recommend intervention as well. I see this as a watershed in the liberty vs. efficiency debate, where the advocates of efficiency break toward Keynes and the advocates of liberty must bear some lost gains from trade to respect the rights of savers, ill-positioned (vis a vis stimulus) businesses, and, most interestingly, the unemployed and those businesses who refuse to hire them at lower wages.

First off, you might be wondering how I think the liberty vs. efficiency debate even applies here. I take liberty to imply both complete freedom to use those resources to which you are entitled and complete responsibility for what comes of those decisions. One thing people are entitled to under any reasonable version of entitlement theory is their psychological disposition, so long as they bear the full cost to themselves and others. The disposition at issue is the common unwillingness to be a reasonably productive worker when you (wrongly) feel you’re being undercompensated. The cost of that disposition to you is “involuntary” unemployment. If I could wish that cost or disposition away so you could rejoin the workforce and add to society’s bounty, I absolutely would. Unfortunately, the Keynesian remedy comes at a greater cost than a passing thought and pair of crossed fingers; it requires a reallocation of resources away from the distribution currently geared toward those who’ve managed to justify their wages and it punishes those people who appreciate the difference between nominal and real wages enough to bid their numbers down without sacrificing productivity (and those who’ve cultivated the willingness/ability to recognize this from a hiring perspective).

The end result? You’ve tricked a relatively undesirable portion of the workforce into thinking they’re worth more than they are by diminishing the real compensation of the relatively productive. And you’ve done all this without the consent of those who’ve borne the cost. There are two inclusive arguments against my point here 1) If the employed had all the relevant information, they’d consent to it because 2) re-employing unutilized resources meaningfully grows the economy and compensates for a very large part of any transfers that took place. Liberty and efficiency!

The first point doesn’t quite measure up: the proposal is a risk and a difficult-to-gauge one at that; surely there’d be plenty of risk-averse wage earners not willing to bear the costs of misallocation and/or inflation. On the second, the size of this compensation is not at all clear, and there are plenty of reasons to doubt it would recoup the social cost. Among these is the fact that, in most cases, businesses have discretion with regard to who gets laid off, and the body of the long-term unemployed population will largely be comprised of low skill/wage ratio individuals. That means higher nominal wage targets will need to be met with more aggressive (inflationary/distorting) stimulus to add some of the most relatively low-productivity workers to (hopefully) relevant/valuable sectors of the new economy. The act itself subsidizes their problematic dispositions, and the results are not obvious boons either.  You’ve just about tricked a handful of people into not being zero-marginal-product workers; not only does this violate liberty, it likely comes well short of clearing the – thoughtfully construed – efficiency bar as well.

2013
10/14
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Follow the Goods, not the Money: The ‘I Am Rich’ App and its Discontents

A bit late to the party, I recently stumbled upon this story and, more importantly, this response to it. It naturally got me thinking about wealth transfers since the moral and economic consequences of purchasing the ‘I am Rich’ app lend themselves more toward that description than one of proper consumption.* Treating and scorning these purchases as bona fide consumption I think is an instance of a common economic fallacy: following the money.

All exchange is fundamentally the same phenomenon at the micro level: someone values a physical good, service or any psychological consequence that comes of transferring their resources to someone else, so they do it and, if the exchange was voluntary, there is an ex ante increase in utility for both parties. At the macro level, however, it becomes useful to delineate consumption and transfer; the implications for society matter. Pure transfers have no effect on the allocation of resources unless some very specific behavior induced the transfer and would do so predictably in the future. If transfers like this were profitable enough for many prospective recipients, it would soon develop into a market for services, much like I speculate the market for street beggars to be. However, to the extent transfers are not behavior induced or are sufficiently isolated/unpredictable, their effect on the structure of production is precisely a transfer from the marginal consumption pattern of the transferer to the marginal consumption pattern of the transferee with a magnitude of the sum transferred. To call money wasted or opportunities foregone in this instance is inappropriate; it depends on what the recipient will do with his windfall.

In the case of the app, its developer did adjust his behavior to meet some perceived market demand and his minor success may have signaled others to do likewise and, to that extent, it was a humanitarianly wasteful venture. I, however, measure this extent to be quite small in comparison to the money he received given his presumably moderate opportunity costs and very low resource commitment to the project. This was mostly a one-off transfer in my view and its effects on the actual distribution of resources in the world are negligible given the sums involved; their impact was (circa 2008) still yet to be determined. Armin Heinrich can still make the world a better place, and the world has lost very little for his app.

2013
10/11
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Critical Analogies and Dis-Analogies Between the Trolley Car and Emergency Organ Harvest Experiments

I, like almost everyone else in the world, am not a utilitarian. More surprisingly, I reject utilitarianism for almost the same reasons as everyone else, almost. Is pleasure preferable to pain? Of course. Should maximizing net pleasure be the sole concern of our moral inquiries? probably not.  Utilitarianism, like almost all absolutist moral philosophies, is subject to damning counter examples, one of which I’ll focus on here.

Judith Jarvis Thomson:

A brilliant transplant surgeon has five patients, each in need of a different organ, each of whom will die without that organ. Unfortunately, there are no organs available to perform any of these five transplant operations. A healthy young traveler, just passing through the city the doctor works in, comes in for a routine checkup. In the course of doing the checkup, the doctor discovers that his organs are compatible with all five of his dying patients. Suppose further that if the young man were to disappear, no one would suspect the doctor.

On its face, it’s identical to a trolley car experiment: kill one to save five. The difference is, here, no one regards the decision to be as easy as flipping the switch on the trolley car. I think I can safely put the variance in responses up to people simply not understanding thought experiments, but some elaboration is in order.

In the trolley car experiment, the probability of the five being killed in lieu of a track switch is 1, the probability of the one being killed and five being saved with a switch is 1. The experiment’s beauty is in its simplicity; people understand that there really are only two possible outcomes here. When hearing the emergency transplant scenario, however, people implicitly reject these probabilities even though they assent to them, their real-world knowledge weighs too heavily on them: the patients are old and sick, their donor is young and healthy, no surgeon is perfect.

The other side of the coin is viscerality: The traveler is completely innocent and you’re going to strap him to a table and carve him open with your own hands. The man tied to the rails must have found himself there somehow and he’s probably expecting a trolley to come barreling down any minute; it will never look like anyone intentionally killed him. All moot, the parameters of the experiment are such that both these men were completely safe and free from any danger until an agent’s utilitarian calculation worked against them. Each life in the experiments will be equally long and happy after they’re conducted, all there is to do is for your intuition to dictate whether five go on or one does.

The interesting thing is, when fully appreciated, these experiments tell us precisely nothing. When utility is the only value at stake, of course you maximize it. However, loosening the constraints of either experiment and actually allowing other values a stake in the decision does illustrate why people who do and don’t fully understand the experiments ultimately reject utilitarianism.

Naturally, the more easily adaptable experiment is the emergency transplant. Adding a combination of uncertainty and a reasonable person standard with regard to choices immediately engenders huge and justified sympathies for the traveler. Yes, his life still likely represents a new lease on five others (or, make it seven so we can say the expected value stays the same), but our general experience of the world tells us that a person making his sequence of choices to end up in the hospital should expect no harm to come to him and indeed deserves no harm to come to him. Of course, the same could be said of the patients, none of whom may have any behaviorally caused ailments.

It seems as though a bullet must be bitten either way. My very narrow contention is that, while the patients may not have merited their conditions, the forces of history have nevertheless placed them here at deaths door. Now, the surgeon does have the option of taking history into his own hands and establishing a principle that allows moral agents to make their mark on the procession of existence to a degree rivaling fate, The question is: need we favor the will of many to exercise their liberty over fate over one whose liberty was granted by fate?

I worry about the consequences.

2013
09/21
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Executive Compensation Part II: Spoiling the Good Child

Aside from the objectively huge effect that executive decisions can have on a firm’s bottom line, there is at least one more compelling reason to pay top executives more than their own marginal product (in a sense). A professor once suggested to me that a CEO’s full marginal product includes not only the value of his policy, branding, and motivational actions, but also his motivational inactions. Basically, by over-compensating a CEO in terms of what he actually does, a firm presents a big carrot to anyone within shouting distance of the position. Of course, this practice shouldn’t begin or end with a company’s top man; indeed there are gains to be had from over-compensating employees at every level, even the ground level (consider a firms desire to attract the best entry-level applicants).

Obviously, this practice will always scale with the classical value of the positions in question; how big is the spread between the median dishwasher and one who performs in the 95th percentile? It will also compound towards the top, each supervisor is paid to increase the output of those beneath her, both explicitly and implicitly; the more supervisors and the more tiers beneath you, the great the ripple effect of your desirable salary.

I don’t think this theory is far-fetched in the least. As I’m not so well versed on the subject, it may even be common knowledge in relevant circles. What I do find very interesting are this strategy’s applications outside of the hierarchical firm.

All of this came very keenly to mind when talking to my 24 year-old friend who still lives quite amicably off the trough of her parents. The interesting thing is, her 21- year old brother is being cut off. My friend’s justification for her disproportionate compensation? She stays out of trouble, got through college in a reasonable amount of time, and does errands upon request. Her brother is hardly a degenerate; he does poorly in school, but still attends regularly, he stays away from hard drugs, doesn’t run in criminal or otherwise dangerous circles and is usually home at a decent hour. He is more impulsive, serially lazy, and temperamental, but you can squeeze a favor out of him now and then.

Basically, children are always better compensated, often into their twenties than the services they provide to their parents would ever warrant. But why the disparity in the case of my friend? She does provide more than her brother, but not nearly to the degree (and length of time) that she’s been better taken care of. My leading hypothesis is that my friend is enjoying the spoils of implicit motivational compensation. Just by being a relatively good child next to a less well behaved sibling, she enjoys the fruits of being a vegetable (carrot), that she likely wouldn’t if her wayward brother wasn’t around to, perhaps, learn his lesson.

2013
08/17
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There’s a Silverware Lining to the Restaurant Recovery

This. So Much This.

This is Ashok.

I’ve seen many posts today about our sluggish jobs recovery. Most people are pointing to data that show most of the job creation is in ultra low-wage, crappy sectors like fast food. (Here are James Pethokoukis, Tyler Cowen, and Mark Thoma on the matter.)

I think there’s a silver lining to this. Without considering part time jobs (which are not relevant to this post) there are three types of households: dual income, single income, and no income. The latter two indicate that one or both earners, respectively, cannot hold their job consistently, have high turnover, and are living off insurance.

Dual-income families have higher median incomes not only because there are two earners, but each individual earns more on average. Educated people from healthier backgrounds are more likely to get married – and stay married.

Let’s say I’m a genie. I can create jobs as I want. The…

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2013
08/17
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Executive Compensation Part I: Resolving Market Failures

When it comes to executive compensation, most people like to make it a distributive issue; the asymmetry of the typical large firm is just very off-putting for many. And the feeling comes from the tendency in most arguers to identify with the mass of workers near the bottom of the hierarchical firm, regardless of where their place may actually be. Some others go as far as saying that excessive compensation of CEOs is actually bad for the firm insofar as it increases turnover and decreases the quality of work at the bottom and over all demand for product (this last claim is common, but ridiculous). Overall, I’m not here to make a comment on what I believe optimal executive-worker compensation ratios are, or how distant those are from what we observe. I’m here to point out some interesting ways in which top executives, who seem so detached from a business’s direct sources of revenue, justify their enormous salaries. My general theory is that their skills and attributes as employees serve only to get them into top positions, but it’s the positions themselves, which are so valuable to good corporate governance, that demand high valuation.

Top executives are trusted to make sweeping policy decisions that can easily move markets and earnings in huge ways and, often enough, make or break entire companies. It’s my belief that the fact that most CEOs tend not to make horrible gaffs speaks less to the ease of the decisions (made with great advisory teams on hand) and more to the ability of boards to select great decision-makers.  One thing I’d like to consider is the kind of policy an executive hands down to alter employee behavior in such a way as to neutralize intrafirm market failures: instances in which rational behavior for individual employees collectively destroys earnings.

Take a simple example. At one point, “employees must wash hands” wasn’t even posted in the toilets at fast food restaurants and this was of course long before the days of disposable food prep gloves. No employee would go through the trouble of bringing in their own sanitary gloves when it wasn’t expected and some portion might not have even bothered washing their hands. One bold, though retrospectively easy, decision from a top executive immediately reduced instances of food poisoning and the associated legal/reputational liability and instilled a sense of cleanliness and security that dramatically increased brand value. After years and years as the law of the land, you can imagine the millions that such a marginal decision could tally up. All of that increased income is down to a single employee who, in making across the board cost-saving and revenue increasing decisions for his front-line workers, has increased their productivity in ways they would have never bothered to with very rare exception.

2013
08/17
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Regress of Authority: My Theory on The Foundation of Noetic Structures

While beginning to draft a post offering my theory on why I write what I write, think what I think, and do what I do, I found it essential to explain my theory of the origin of noetic structures. Another thing I found is that a cursory search will not turn up a satisfactory explanation of what a noetic structure even is; allow me. A noetic structure is a web of all an individual’s beliefs, the vast majority of which depend on other beliefs. A noetic structure, if drawn out, would show all the ways in which beliefs depend on each other for validation in the mind. In order to believe that you’re sitting in front of a screen, you need to believe that your senses give accurate representations of the external world, the existence of which you must also hold true. If you’ve ever entertained a child who asked you a simple question and followed it up with an endless string of “whys,” you’ve taken that child on a tour of your noetic structure.

Any non-self-referential (circular) noetic structure would have to contain some foundational, or ‘basic,’ beliefs that are not justified with reference to other beliefs. Strictly speaking, the only beliefs of this nature that stand up to philosophical scrutiny cannot be used as justification for others, but as a matter of convention, we accept the existence of the external world and other minds along with all that they imply. Beyond those two, most seem to take as given the reliability of ‘experts.’ You believe protons exist, but you’ve never seen the evidence for yourself; you take it on faith that the chain of claimants from the community of people directly observing subatomic particles to the person who told you they exist have been reasonably prudent in their assessments of the claim. From whence comes this faith on which modern humans’ world views rely? My claim is that it comes from Mom.

My theory assumes that infants regard their most immediate care-givers as essentially gods, capable of manipulating the whole of reality (as the infant sees it) on a whim; They can remove, fear, discomfort, and hunger with ease and right when its needed. Some anecdotal evidence for the continuance of this view into early childhood can be seen when toddlers run to mom to save them from a monster, something they seem not to know mom is woefully ill-equipped to handle. As they grow up, children only assent to the claims of others with mom’s blessing. “Listen to what Ms. Vicky has to say, she’s very good and has a lot to teach you,” “My mom says Billy only says Santa isn’t real because he got coal in his stocking this year.” Consistent reinforcement of the epistemic authority of teachers, books, and other knowledgeable adults is what weens children off of absolute deference toward their parents and ultimately empowers these other sources of knowledge with the ability to imbue new claimants with epistemic import.

I find the anomalous cases in which parents refuse to relinquish some measure of epistemic control the most compelling evidence for their place at the base of almost everyone’s noetic structures. Family-centric cults are probably the most glaring example of children discrediting sources for lack of their parents approval, but everyday religion provides ample evidence of otherwise intelligent people who’ve been through no special religious education foregoing their normal criteria for belief in favor of deferring to their parents’ beliefs. Of course the mechanism doesn’t remain the same as a child with any sort of freedom grows and thence comes the market for pseudo-academics and social niches for any crazy belief you can imagine. Once parents let children engage with society and its customary populist mode of argument, they need to defer to sources beyond themselves to repel the counter-current provided by outsiders.

My claim is ultimately that parents have the requisite tools to control which sources their children will take as credible, although control over content will scale with either the parents ability to exercise direct and absolute control over their child or the relative popularity of the desired content in society. Once you’ve ceded ground to schoolteachers or neighbors, it’s very easy to have sewn the seeds of your own incredulity. In principle though, the absence of any parental concession seems to guarantee a very shallow noetic structure, while liberal concession leads to many layers of differently weighted authorities whose claims are more susceptible to an informed sense of judgement.

2013
08/08
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Dissonance: Fun for Everyone

I suppose I’ve been beating up on the political left a bit lately, but I want to take this chance to remind my readers that I’m an equal opportunity hater. This won’t be a make-up post simply shaming the right for something, but it will begin a long regress toward my libertarian mean. Republicans and Democrats often find some neat rhetorical symmetries in their constant battle to differentiate themselves whilst remaining indistinguishable from a policy point of view and some of these symmetries often reveal glaring inconsistencies in their underlying ideologies. A pair that I’ve recently hit upon both revolve around the already ridiculous issue of immigration.

A common retort offered by conservatives against those criticizing their position on wealth redistribution is that marginal investment spending is more socially beneficial than marginal consumption spending, populist translation: we’re taxing “job creators.” The assertion is often coupled with a diatribe about how “it’s not a fixed pie,” i.e. investment can grow the economy and subsequently raise living standards across the board or allow for more beneficial redistribution at some later date. “A rising tide lifts all boats,” “the wealth will trickle down,” etc.

When it comes to immigration, however, the pie gets very fixed, very quickly. While economic theory and all the empirical evidence from the last 40 years has shown immigrants to add to the division of labor and indeed “grow the pie,” they only come to “steal” jobs from Americans by “accepting freely offered employment from American businesses.”

On the other side you have Democrats, the steadfast defenders of laborers everywhere and the unions that bring them dignity. What people tend to miss is that unions, while often increasing compensation for their own members, do so at the expense of scabs and aspiring professionals everywhere. There are many people willing to accept unions jobs for lower pay, and I think it’s fair to say that this willingness is indicative of their being in greater “need.” They are denied jobs because the labor market is either too selective or restricted in quantity, both on account of higher union compensation. Then there are people who see union compensation as an entry signal, grad students being a perfect example. They pour resources into getting credentials in hopes of getting the return of a comfortable and protected position, but often find themselves in debt and out of luck, or in the very unenviable position of adjuncts.

The dissonance? Those on the left tend to be more sympathetic to the plight of immigrants, whose situation is almost perfectly comparable to those of scabs and aspiring professionals. The American Union insists on keeping out wage and job competition, so would be immigrants are forced to live in squalor to protect the well-being of people no more deserving than they are.

All in all, the left have a better excuse in that it’s much more likely they are just ignorant of the disemployment and rent-seeking effects of unions. But of course, ignorance of the law is mitigating at best, not a full-fledged excuse. Happily, I think this leaves this post’s conservative bashing credentials slightly stronger on balance…

2013
08/02
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People Who Complain About Growing American Income Inequality Are Sorry Excuses For Cosmopolitan Thinkers

Here is the kind of chart they like and here is another.

Here is a powerful theoretical explanation for stagnant or stalling average wages in a country and a world where many many more people are far far better off then they were in the 70s.*

Conjecture on why the theoretical explanation almost certainly applies:

The Second World War left the (only recently) industrialized world in ruins. While Europe and Japan rebuilt, American capital and infrastructure were wholly intact. When you consider the huge relative advantage of working in an industrialized economy to begin with, it becomes very hard to understate the significance of the United States’ position at the time. Moreover, Women had not broken into the peacetime workforce and bid down the wages of men. Median/Average income was at an all time high, shocking.

When would we say all of these socio-economic/historical factors began to shift against the lone male American household income earner? Hard to venture a better guess than the 1970’s. The European and Japanese recoveries/miracles were hitting full swing, we opened trade with China, women started entering the workforce in droves and the US economy hit a rough patch. By the time the domestic economy turned around, foreign competition in the labor market was well established and Reagan’s more liberal immigration policy coupled with the recovery to increase the number of low-income earners entering the American economy from abroad.

These trends have largely continued through today and they have been a boon to everyone. It would be very difficult to show that the median American family, or indeed the median Chinese or Indian family is not much better off than they were 40 years ago when we had so much more domestic equality. Technology and efficiency gains have been huge and they’ve been distributed all over the American economy; you’re reading this online article over free wi-fi on your smartphone, you’re no one-percenter and your parents would be awed by your lifestyle at this age.

So America’s middle class of old is in far better shape, the new middle class is lightyears ahead of what was likely third-world poverty a generation ago, but our focus needs to be the fact that we all live like shit because the greed and privilege of 3 million Americans making more than $250,000/yr is robbing us of the life we deserve. The truth seems to be that the middle class were the privileged ones, getting to press buttons and pull levers for fat suburban incomes while the rest of the world lived in real poverty. Now that those people who were once desperate have joined the global economy and proven themselves no less skillful than their American counterparts, the latter have lost their privilege that came at a great price to many millions of people and now sulk despite still living in the lap of luxury.

On the other side are the 1%: A tiny minority of people with highly specialized skills that few have learned despite many having the chance because they are that difficult to master and that dismal to learn even though they are the skills that let you make extremely important decisions about the structure of production that effect the income and consumption of millions. Given the boon to living standards we’ve seen due to globalization and the successful adoption of new technologies on an industrial scale, I’d say the people organizing it deserve quite a premium over the people stamping jars and balancing cash registers.

The moral of the story is that the people narrowly focusing on the slightest possibility that wealthy middle class Americans have been given a raw deal are they same people who call themselves champions of the poor and proponents of progress. My understanding is that humanism was progress in the 17th century and 19th/20th century nationalism was the conservative backlash; yet many on the left prioritize a return to a world of abject poverty for billions so a select few among their countrymen needn’t feel inferior to an even more select few, though this connection very likely does not occur to them. They are, at the very least, myopic, if not outright selfish and malicious in their drive to cultivate an elite that coheres to their aesthetic.

 

 

*The second graph was the best I could find in a lengthy search, nothing on global median income, but an endless trove of the headlining charts. This heavily underscores my point.

2013
07/24
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