The income inequality story, followup

I received some angry feedback from a reader, who took great issue with this line in my last post:

One of the amazing things about all this is, that almost everybody is pretty much equal.  Look at how flat the line is up to about 95% (~ $200,000): for the vast majority of people, your neighbors, friends, family and community is making pretty much the same amount of money that you are. 

This, the reader said, was patently untrue and made me sound like some out-of-touch egghead.  Because for almost everybody, that line doesn't look flat at all, and $200,000 is an incredibly unattainable sum.

In my last post, I was focusing on the relationship between the super-rich and the rest of us.  And when you compare the super-rich and the rest of us, the first thing to catch the eye is that they are making exponentially more money than everyone else.  That was my point last time.

Now lets look at another graph of the same data:

This is the same graph as last time, just zoomed in on a more reasonable range (income = $0 to $200,000).  This lets you see more readily what percentile you are, if you are the vast majority of people.  And when you plot the numbers this way, my previous statement about equality rings fairly hollow.  

The trap I fell into was simple: when you are considering big numbers, it is easy to lose track of little numbers. As a scientist, I tend to care most about big effects, and so what caught my eye was the insanely rapid increase in order of magnitude of income in the top 10%.  But when you're having trouble making ends meet, an extra $1000 can mean a LOT.

What I began to do at the end of my last post (and what is more ethically informative) was to compare the actual income of people to the income they need to live a healthy life with the possibility of improvement.  How many times the living wage do people make?  Well, that varies from place to place; but I can select a few representative ones*.  Take a look:

I'm plotting the income curve from above, but divided by the living wage in a variety of places (see the legend for details).  This is much more informative ethically speaking.  Dollars mean different things in different places; the living wage is supposed to tell you just how valuable your income is.

The story this graph tells us is that between 20 and 30 percent of Americans earn less than a living wage.  That should mean that roughly 20-30% of Americans are struggling to make ends meet, cutting corners on food, housing, education and healthcare, and getting stuck in cycles of predatory debt.  Moreover, the graph reveals that income inequality is definitely alive in the bottom 90%, even if it's totally blown out of proportion in the top 10%.

It also tells us that eliminating poverty is a problem we can solve.  Look at how much money is in the system, compared to the living wage!  Speaking simplistically, to eliminate poverty all we have to do is fill in that hole on the left of the graph.  Obviously how to do that is a detailed policy and economics question - but the capability to do it is not what is holding us back.

Thanks for reminding me not to get hung up on the little picture (the top 1%), when it's the big picture that matters.



*Living wage numbers taken, once again, from http://www.livingwage.geog.psu.edu/ at the Pennsylvania State University.

The income inequality story

Numbers are fascinating and tantalizing things.  They're kind of like the words of power in some functional magic system* - with the exception that their powers are purely descriptive**, and not constructive.***

My goal is to have a footnote for every sentence in this post.****

Anyway, numbers:  they're liberating, in a sense, and can give a little guidance amidst confusion and doubt.  They can be used to figure out a story about the complex world we're living in, and there's nothing people need so much as a story about their life.

So here's a numerical question: what's going on with the Occupy movement?  When they claim "We are the 99%", what do they mean?  Well, they mean this:

(from nytimes.com, data from taxpolicycenter.org.)  Here we show total cash income in 2010 of all taxpayers in the United States, versus 'percentile' i.e. the percent of people compared to whom you make more money.  So reading this graph, if I make $25,000 a year, I'd be in about the 30th percentile - I'd make more money than 30% of people in the US.  (it's kind of hard to see on the graph, so I downloaded the data.)

Are you, then, in the oft-mentioned 99%?  From this data, the 99% are everyone who makes less than $515,000 a year.  So now you know.

This graph only goes up to the 99.9 percentile.  I read somewhere that the congressional budget office has not released data on the top 0.01% or the top 0.001% since 2005, and you can read what you like into that fact. But roughly speaking, the top 1% of earners make a comparable amount of money to the bottom 99%.

One of the amazing things about all this is, that almost everybody is pretty much equal.  Look at how flat the line is up to about 95% (~ $200,000): for the vast majority of people, your neighbors, friends, family and community is making pretty much the same amount of money that you are.  EXCEPT FOR the super rich!  Their colleagues are making stupendously more or less than them.  This kind of makes sense, since the most financially competitive people are probably also those who rise to the top.  It also probably provokes them to greater competition, as they see bigger swings of perceived prosperity than the rest of us.

Now we know all that, we need to ask: is income inequality a moral problem?  Not in and of itself.  If everyone in the society were taken care of, or able to take care of themselves, if there were a serious shared commitment to working for the good of all our citizens, than there would be no moral dilemma and perhaps the financial gaming of the wealthiest few shouldn't be a concern.

But there's another number that changes the story.  The living wage - an income necessary to pay for housing, food, and other necessities - is greater than the income of a large part of the population.  For Cambridge, MA, living wage for a family of 4 is ~ $66,000, and for a single adult living wage is ~$25,000.  That's (respectively) 45th percentile and 30th percentile nationally.*****  And that's the moral problem.

For the poor end of the spectrum, for whom service jobs are increasingly unsustainable, and for the lower middle class which is losing factory jobs overseas and increasingly to robots, these numbers reveal a rich environment for the growth of discontent.  For the richest of the rich, who subscribe to the Gospel of Pure Capitalism and make the claim that regulation will only ever harm them and (through them) the country,... well I imagine that they don't think too much about it.

I don't know about you, but having pieced together this story, I feel the need to compare it to another narrative, which has such sway over our national consciousness: the American Dream.  The idea that with effort anyone can improve their situation and pass on a better, healthier life with greater potential to their children is a stark contrast to the reality of life for so many millions in our country.  Our society is neglecting them, and leaving them behind, apparently for the sake of protecting the wealthy few.

As a country, is this who we want to be?

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Not steering by the venal chart
That tricked the mass for private gain,
We rise to play a greater part.
Reshaping narrow law and art
Whose symbols are the millions slain,
From bitter searching of the heart
We rise to play a greater part. 
     - from Leonard Cohen, "A Villanelle for Our Time," 2004

*Beware links to tvtropes.org: there be time-wasting dragons here
**Actually, there's an ongoing and unresolved philosophy of science debate regarding why math has been so effective at describing the workings of the universe.  We have observed reality ('the universe') and we have conceptual structures that seem to have predictive power about the universe ('physics', or 'applied mathematics').  We also have something else: the observer ('conscious beings' or 'minds') that construct and note this relationship.  But what is the relationship between these three?  Does math somehow literally form the underpinnings of reality, i.e. the laws of physics are actual laws written on a metaphysical stone tablet?  Is describability an artifact of human intelligence only?  Can we apply the anthropic principle, and say that the universe MUST be intelligible for intelligent life to arise within it?  I need to figure out what the name for this question is - and when I do, I'll write more about it!  In the meantime, I strongly recommend this article from the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton: On Math, Matter and Mind.
***I have a neat idea for a functional magic system kicking around the back of my head based on this question.  It's an incredibly arcane and unwieldy type of magic where you have to self-consistently rewrite the local laws of physics to get what you want done.  Lots of unintended consequences.
****JK! no srsly LOL.
*****You can calculate the living wage in your area here: http://www.livingwage.geog.psu.edu/

In the style of John Cage

So I was going to do something else today, but instead I got this great idea for a novel:

In a post-apocalyptic one-way spaceflight, a wisecracking mercenary stumbles across an encrypted data-feed, which spurs him into conflict with his own insecurity vis-a-vis girls, with the help of a leather clad female in shades and her wacky pet, culminating in a philosophical argument punctuated by violence.  The title is: "The Chronobots."

I have had a couple story ideas before but I haven't really taken them anywhere yet.  Deep down, I feel that this one has real possibility.

Virtuosity, or, how I came to understand both jazz and tap dancing in a particularly productive and enjoyable evening

I barely managed to squeak into NYC in time to go see two dance companies perform in a double-bill* at the Joyce Theater last friday.  Very few people in my acquaintance actually believe in the existence of Luck as a fundamental substrate in the universe; perhaps I just have a way with transportation methods, that makes them nice to me.

The first company was choreographed by and bore the name of Jason Samuels Smith, a ferocious tap-dancer with a surprisingly small number of feet**.  This was the first professional tap concert I've ever seen live; my past encounters have been limited to student groups of varying caliber and enthusiasm (uncorrelated), and a handful of Hollywood musicals.

From seat #B3, two rows from the stage and all the way to the left, I was closer to the dancers feet than the dancers themselves - and those feet were performing activities I could barely follow.  The first piece, "A.C.G.I.: Anybody Can Get It" (2009) provided a smorgasbord of dynamism and staccato athleticism as the five** dancers slid from perfect and insanely complex rhythmic unison in and out of teetering solos, to the accompaniment of an on-stage 3-piece jazz band.

Choreographically, though, there's not much to it.  The tap dancers tapdance.  If they're in unison, they're in formation; if they're soloing, the other four are in a line behind them, keeping time.  Occasionally the formations pulsate, rotate, or invert.  In fact other than their feet, they seem to pretty much do whatever they want to do (or, occasionally, need to do to stay upright).  To one of my companions, this freeformness was downright irritating; their arms were flying all over the place, lacking both rhyme AND reason!  No modern dance choreographer (let alone Ballet) would leave the visual aspect of a dance looking so unfinished.  Alas for optimistic titles.

I think it was actually the next piece really helped me to G.I..  This was "Chasing the Bird" (2009, Excerpts) and ode to Jazz great Charlie Parker, in which three women each took on the role of an instrument in Charlie's songs and learned to play its part with her tap shoes - rhythm, pitch, inflection, as much as could possibly be translated into an entirely separate medium.  The first part introduced this idea by dancing through one complete song: riffs, solos, harmonies, musical conversations.  In the second, the music carried through about halfway and then, slowly, faded away.  And my sensation of listening to music transferred, smoothly, to the sensations of watching the Tap.  The whole skeleton of the music was still there, the bones of rhythm and tendons of conversation, and attached to it like a halo was the physical dynamism and personality of the dancers themselves.

Tap dance has the same relationship to other kinds of dance as jazz has with the rest of music: half its soul is in the pursuit of the mercurial, fractal, and baroque virtuosity that the other half of its soul, the pure personality of the performer, shines through.  The goal isn't to put on a character or transport the audience to another world.  The world of tap and jazz is right here, right now, and these amazing talented people can do incredible things before your eyes, pouring their being into a instantaneous and fleeting bit of magic.  That's really exciting!  If you know enough to understand what's going on.

I wouldn't say I really understand either form, and each separately washes over me like a foreign language.  But I do speak a little dance, and a little music - and the slow, steady reveal of their holographic connection in Jason Samuels Smith's work gave me a taste of that world.

^_^^^__^^_^_^^__^^^___^^_^_^^_^^^^___^^_^_^

"I would imagine that if you could understand Morse code, a tap dancer would drive you crazy."
-Mitch Hedberg


* The second company is Trey McIntyre Project, and they're also worth talking about: but they're kind of off-topic for this post.  Next time I'll do something that's more standard dance-criticism.
** He had two feet.  It sounded like a lot more to me.
*** ethnically- and gender-diverse

The Problems with Solar

Happy 2012, everybody!  I hope you're already planning your End-Of-The-Conversations-About-the-Mayan-Civilization party (I sure am) and making wild and exuberant statements about your actions in the New Year.  I, for one, pledge to think one unprecedented thought every day.  Today's thought: feet could maintain mirror symmetry both across the body and across the foot if the big toe were in the middle.  Shoe production could cost half as much!*

Having painted an optimistic portrait of the Solar Revolution, lets take off the rose-colored sunglasses for a closer examination of the difficulties with solar power.

And the beginning of a new year is a good time to do this!  For the sun has just turned around its decreasing presence of the fall, and is beginning to rise moments earlier and stay up seconds longer.  Last year, on the shortest day our sun was in the sky for only 9 hours, 4 minutes and 33 seconds** in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Of course, the Sun plans to make up for it in the summer, with the longest day in 2012 planned for 15 hours, 17 minutes and 6 seconds on June 20th.

This annual variability seasonally aggravates the primary difficulty with solar power: NIGHT.

Yes, unlike Kalgash the Earth has but a single star and a high (365:1) rotation to revolution ratio, implying that for about half the time we receive (almost) no light from our primary star.  From a solar power perspective, this is a real pain.  The electrical grid was designed around fossil fuels, and requires 24-hour-a-day electricity generation as a necessary component: whenever someone somewhere plugs in a toaster, an electric company has a power station online burning the midnight oil.  And while on average there's enough luminous energy from the sun to power everyone's ovens and iPhones, all of it is concentrated in just one-half of the day (and less in the winter).  Plus people tend to use the most energy in the mornings and evenings, not during the middle of the day.

The solution to the day/night quandary will necessitate as big a change to the grid as installing the solar panels themselves.  We'll need to store the energy when the sun's up, so we can use it when the sun is down.  The proponents of renewable energy know this, and everything from batteries with liquid-metal or nanotech to flywheels to giant capacitor banks are being researched.  While small-scale electricity storage has undergone a couple revolutions recently (any of you reading this on a phone may be aware), large-scale electricity storage is actually kind of difficult.  I'll come back to that point sometime and discuss it in a bit more detail.

What about the seasons, though?  Remember there's a six-hour swing in the length of the day during a Boston year, and that'll get bigger the further north you go.  And unfortunately, those shorter days are also when energy use goes up, as people break out the space heaters and take long hot showers.  Storing electricity from day into night is eminently doable, but it's unclear how electricity could be effectively stocked up in the summer months for use in the winter.  Maybe some chemical storage process would work best if such storage duration became necessary (like making hydrogen fuel from water using electrolysis).

Alternatively the more regularly-cooked southern states could become major electricity exporters in the wintertime.  There's plenty of space in (say) Texas to manage giant solar farms.

The other big problem of course is weather.  We also enjoy rotisserie chicken on rainy days; to say nothing of snowy ones!  Shoveling the driveway is enough of a pain without having to shovel the solar panels as well.  To this, I suppose there are two solutions.  Solution the first: build giant solar facilities in deserts.  The Mojave desert (as I stated before) could theoretically provide enough solar electricity to power the entire US, and they have the nice dry air that lets the sunlight through.

Solution the second is that solution to so many of life's problems: zeppelins.  Or space lasers.

It's unfair, really.  The sun is trying so hard to keep us warm and happy and able to use power tools, and the Earth just won't cooperate, all spinny and tilted and weatherish.  Well, the spinny part is probably a good thing.  And the weather, come to think about it.  Maybe we could do something about the tilt***.  In the meantime, it's just as important to work on electricity storage as on solar generation.

Happy New Year!

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"Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations." - Alan Watts


* Don't worry, I won't subject you to the rest of these.
** December 22nd, the Winter Solstice.  See this rather impressive site to calculate the length of day in your city, for arbitrary dates going back and forward 20 years!
*** incidentally, this too is most likely a really bad idea.

Eggnog ruminations

So... all our oil and coal originates from plant and animal matter, right?  Living stuff was buried over millennia, compressed and reduced and cooked until all that remains is a sludge of hydrocarbons: long branches of carbon bursting with hydrogen atoms like ripe fruit ready for the fiery picking.

And our industrialized, world-changing society was built on finding these puddles of free energy, just lying there*.

So what if we, or a race like us, rose up in the Cretaceous?  The first abundant complex life on earth rose up at the end of the Proterozoic Eon, around 600 million years ago; but the Cretaceous period, where there's massive complex animal life in the form of dinosaurs and other beasties was around 100 million years ago already.  Would there be oil to find, to fuel their own industrial explosion?

I had this sudden image of velociraptors learning to herd smaller, dumber dinosaurs; setting up colonies and competing nations; languages, philosophies, dances about the hunt.  Their brains grow, they make fences and weapons, they discover surface metals and learn to shape them.  A rich and flowering culture emerges, celebrating their prime and central place at the top of the foodchain.

And it all just sticks around until it goes kablooie with the asteroid impact, because there's no oil to fuel a truly industrial velociraptor society.  Their theropoda alphabet fades, unfossilized, the writings of Velocishakespeare and his violent (but hilarious!) comedies vanish.  The universe murders their society in cold blood, and you can't do anything about it unless you have a space program**.

Of course, this probably didn't happen.  We would see fossilized pipes and predator bling at least; and the oil was probably there already anyway, with 500 million years to develop.

But that just begs another question: why are we the first species on Earth to tap into all this stored energy and have a chance of spreading away from our home planet?  That's hard to say.  Maybe pure predators just have an intelligence cap, or a population cap, and intelligent species are much more likely to develop from animals with general ability (i.e. fingered omnivores).  Maybe the exact evolutionary pressures that lead to intelligence are rare, so it's a one in a billion chance.  Maybe other lingual species have existed, but didn't develop tools (or leave tools in the fossil record) and were wiped out before they spread.   Maybe intelligence is SO rare that its impossible except for uplift***.

Maybe we are inevitable.  And maybe, we are special.

Have a Merry Christmas!

><<><<><>><<><><<><<><><>><><>><><>><><><<><><>><><<><><<><>>
"Man becomes man only by his intelligence, but he is man only by his heart."
-Henri Frederic Amiel

* not necessarily true: most of the structure for our world-changing civilization was already in place well before industrialization and the primacy of oil.  Metal-based civilizations arose with just wood for smelting, and there was plenty of wood in the Cretaceous.  But stick with me for a moment.
** Take a look at some groups that are actually working on this problem, as well as many other potentially earth-shattering or catastrophic possibilities for life as we know it, at The Lifeboat Foundation.
*** also comes in futuristic space opera flavor!

update re: Tidal energy

Part of why physics is fun is that it lets you put numbers to off-the-wall concepts.

For instance, I mentioned a couple of posts ago that if you use the tides to make electricity, you are actually taking energy out of the Earth's rotation, making the day longer.  But by how much?

You can start by calculating the energy stored in the rotation of the Earth.  As a freshman in college (if you take physics) you learn that there's a quantity called Rotational Inertia (I) for solid bodies that behaves like normal inertia (mass).  So, where energy for linear motion is E = (1/2)*(mass)*(velocity)^2,  energy for rotational motion is E = (1/2)*(I)*(rotational speed)^2.  And you can calculate I for any geometry of solid.

For a rigid, uniform sphere, I = (2/5)*(mass)*(radius)^2.  Earth is neither rigid nor uniform, but we'll assume this is close for now.

Then with the magic of Google Calculator, you can just plug all these in for the earth and get it's rotational energy.  Seriously, copy-paste this into Google:

" (1/2)*(2/5)*mass of earth * radius of earth^2 * (2*pi / day)^2 in gigawatt*hours".

It will tell you that the Earth stores about 7*10^16 gigawatt-hours of energy.  Google calculator is so magic.

Well, the US uses 30,000 gigawatt-hours of energy a year.  So the annual energy usage of the US is about 0.4 billionths of the energy stored in the rotation of the Earth.  If you take that amount out of the Earth's rotational energy, you can use the energy formula in reverse to figure out how much the Earth slowed down.  The answer: 18 microseconds (that's 18 millionths of a second).

So there you go.  If you run the entire US on tidal energy, you slow the Earth's rotation down by 18 microseconds each year.  Amazingly, this is almost exactly the amount of slowing that is measured to occur naturally due to torque from the Moon (17 +/- 0.5 microseconds/year).

Obviously the aliens living inside the hollow sphere of the Earth are powering their invasion bases with tidal power.  It's the only explanation.  Don your tinfoil hats!

~*~~~~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~~*~~*~~*~~~~~~~*~~***~~~~~~*~*~*~~~*~
"Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin