It's Kucinich Time!

From a recent Esquire profile of Dennis Kucinich:

But the deepest truth of all is also the most simple and most plain: The mark of the boy's poverty etched into the man's face. It isn't any sort of metaphor. It isn't shame and it isn't anger and it isn't hunger and it isn't need. It's all of those -- and more: the fire to make things right for those who truly suffer -- and it isn't going away.

No pity -- it's a matter of respect and gratitude. Whatever helped to make that boy grow up into this man, making fun of it means only that you never knew a kid as poor as this guy was -- and that you're too bereft of soul yourself to count your own blessings.

Awesome. Truly awesome.

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Cumulative Distribution of Income-to-Poverty Ratios in the U.S.

In August of this year, the U.S. Census Bureau published a report titled "Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2006." Sadly, the report revealed that the number of Americans living below the poverty line and living without health insurance increased from 2005. According to the report, 12% of Americans (36.5 million people) live in poverty. Shockingly, 17.4% of children under 18 (that's 12.8 million children) under 18 currently live in poverty.

Of course, reporting the number of people below the poverty line doesn't tell the whole , tragic story. It's perhaps more revealing to look at the depth of poverty throughout the population. The depth of poverty can be measured by the "income-to-poverty ratio." If someone has an income equal to the poverty threshold, their income-to-poverty ratio is 1. If they make twice what the poverty threshold is, then they have an income-to-poverty ratio of 2. The text of the Census Bureau report mentions the number and percentage of people within three ranges of income-to-poverty ratios (those below 50% of poverty, those below 100% and those below 125%) but I was curious about what percentage of people are below other levels, like 150% or 200%. There is a figure that shows the approximate distribution of income-to-poverty ratios:



but it's hard to tell how many people might fall below a particular ratio. For that, it would be much better to have the cumulative distribution. So, I decided to generate the cumulative distribution myself and put it up here in case anyone else would like to see it:



Now we can look at this new figure and determine what percentage of people are below any arbitrary income-to-poverty ratio. Ordinarily, cumulative distributions go from 0 to 1, but in this case it doesn't start at 0 since there are some people with no income and it doesn't go all the way up to 1 because about 15% of Americans have an income-to-poverty ratio greater than 6. Interestingly, the curve passes through the 50% point at an income-to-poverty ratio of about 3. This means that half of Americans make less than 3 times the poverty threshold. Unfortunately, the Census Bureau has defined 48 different poverty thresholds, depending on how many total people and how many children live in the household, so it's hard to put a dollar value to this statistic. To get a ballpark number, let's use the weighted average poverty threshold for one person living by himself (~$10,500) to estimate income per person in the household. This will actually be an overestimate, since the more people who live in the household, the higher the poverty threshold gets, but the income per person that constitutes the poverty threshold actually decreases.

Anyway, using this estimate, we can say that half of Americans make less than about $31,500 per person in their household. If you live in a city like LA, San Francisco, Boston or New York City, then this is still barely a living wage.

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If you're curious, here's how I made the cumulative distribution plot:

Mathematically, it's simple to convert between a probability distribution function and a cumulative probability distribution function -- just integrate. However, here we don't have a function describing the distribution. Instead, I had to extract the coordinates of the pixels on the curve from the figure (using NIH's ImageJ). I also extracted the pixels of the extreme values on the axes, which I imported into Excel so that I could do a quick linear fit to get equations for converting the pixel coordinates of the curve to values of "income-to-poverty ratio" and "density". Finally, I imported the converted values into MATLAB and used a function called "cumsum" to get a numerical approximation to the integral of the density values.

You can download the data for the distribution and cumulative distribution in a MATLAB MAT-file here.

(The other) Michael Jackson resigns

The Homeland Security Department's second-in-command resigned today, citing personal "financial reasons I can no longer ignore." (i.e. his $100k+/year public service job, which gives him 5x the national median income, is not as financially ridiculously unfair as the $1M+/year private sector job he's about to get as a lobbyist or a corporate chair)

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On Extinction and Evolution

I recently read an article warning that sea turtles could soon become extinct due to human influences (hunting and pollution among the primary causes). Reading this, especially after the announcement a few months ago that the Yangtze River dolphin is officially thought to be extinct, made me both profoundly sad and pissed off at the same time. It's just unbelievable to me that in this day and age we as a species can continue to engage in activities that result in the complete eradication of another species from the planet. Permanently. It's the same sadness and anger that I felt when I heard about priceless treasures being destroyed in Iraq's museums shortly after the Hussein regime collapsed.

Some people think that extinctions are good, or at least they cannot be bad since they are simply a product of "natural selection" and a natural part of evolution that results in the "survival of the fittest" (and who wouldn't want only the fittest to survive??). I strongly disagree with this point of view.

It's true that in the classical sense evolution through natural selection results in the survival of the fittest. I think that "evolution" through human intervention is far from natural selection. With natural selection, there are many forces acting upon the populations of species which balance each other out normally. With human intervention, all of those forces are made insignificant and the pressure on a threatened population due to hunting, habitat destruction and/or pollution become far too much to bear very quickly. Humans' technologies in particular give them the power to overcome any potential roadblocks to the complete and total annihilation of any species. If we so desired, we could harness our great technological powers to eradicate every reptile, amphibian, bird and mammal species from the face of the planet in just a few decades. (It would be too difficult to eradicate all the little creepy crawlies like beetles and spiders and whatnot, since there's just so damned many of them and they reproduce -- and mutate -- too quickly!)

If we were crazy enough to embark upon such a blood quest, then I think that it would be more fitting (no pun intended!) to call the results the "survival of the most homicidal." At that point, we may be able to survive with our own agricultural plant strains and domesticated livestock, but it's really hard to say. Out in the wild, the populations of plants and insects would be reeling as certain species gained great benefits from the sudden absence of larger predators, while others would have died off due to the loss of animals that played an important role in the normal life-cycle. (For instance, many plants rely on birds and mammals to help them spread their seeds and to keep populations of parasitic insects down). It's quite probable that the entire ecosystem of the planet would basically implode upon itself and only a few species in each region would survive the great struggle for survival. After this, there may be very profound implications for the atmospheric balances of carbon dioxide and oxygen, depending upon which plant species survive. Large parts of the earth may start to turn into desert as plants die off. And of course, it's hard to say what new viruses or bacteria might not crop up in response to the strange and extreme changes occurring in the ecosystem.

All in all, I think the chances for human survival following such a scenario would be very meager and so in the end the "survival of the most homicidal" would be short-lived and would give way to "survival of those lucky enough to have the appropriate attributes for surviving in the drastically changed ecological and environmental landscape". Of course, that's just another way of saying "survival of the fittest", and so we would see a return to natural selection as the primary driving force of evolution.

Evolution is what it is. It happens, without plan, inevitably. I think the likelihood of our completely halting evolution altogether by killing off every living thing on the planet is zero, but I think we could come pretty damn close by at least killing off everything except the bacteria and viruses, which I have a feeling will always be around.

Of course, my scenario is very extreme. But I think it's important to realize that virtually any species out there is vulnerable to being eradicated by human activity. If we continue with business as usual and simply view it as a process of natural selection, weeding out those "unfit" for survival, then eventually our own number will be up and we'll be the ones deemed "unfit" for survival in the world we've created.

Finally, I think it's important to clarify that the word evolution only applies to life. Once a species becomes extinct it has ceased to evolve. To be sure, life on the planet as a whole continues to evolve, but that particular path of evolution has reached a dead end (another unintended pun, I'm sorry!).

Oil Prices & AP Headlines

So, I'm looking at my Google Desktop newsfeed and I see a headline from Forbes: "Oil Inches Up Ahead of U.S. Supply Data." Okay, fine. Oil prices just rose. It says so right there in that article.

But then I do a double take as my Google Desktop newsfeed adds another headline a minute later that says, "Oil Prices Fall Below $74 a Barrel." Okay, now I'm officially confused. Did oil prices go up, or did they go down?

Upon closer inspection of the two articles, I noted the following:

1) Both articles are from the Associated Press. Normally, I would expect that articles coming from the same news agency would agree with each other. Apparently that's a foolish assumption.

2) Both articles are virtually identical. That's right. Aside from the time at which they were released, and the polar opposite events that their headlines seem to report, the articles are pretty much identical.

How is this possible? How can the same article get two wildly different headlines??? Well, I'm still trying to wrap my head around this, but as far as I can tell, the headlines are addressing two different time points within the same trading day. In the first article (the one that was released at 6:49 AM ET), the second paragraph reads:

"Light, sweet crude for August delivery fell 4 cents to $73.98 a barrel in Asian electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, late afternoon in Singapore. The contract ended 13 cents lower at $74.02 a barrel Tuesday." [Emphasis mine]

In the second article (released at 12:41 AM ET), the same paragraph reads:

"Light, sweet crude for August delivery rose 11 cents to $74.13 a barrel in Asian electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, midmorning in Singapore. The contract ended 13 cents lower at $74.02 a barrel Tuesday." [Again, emphasis mine]

You'll notice that both articles report exactly the same closing price!

So, apparently you can say anything you want about price changes in the markets, as long as you're sure to cherry-pick the appropriate slice of time! And, if you're really ballsy, you can even print two different articles on the same trading day reporting two entirely different results for the day.

What did actually happen to the price of oil in Singapore today? Well, it's impossible to tell from these articles alone, since neither one provides the opening price and both of them use the same phrase, "the contract ended 13 cents lower at $74.02 a barrel," without telling us the significance of the price that they are comparing it to. Can we assume it's the opening price that was 13 cents higher than $74.02? I'm not sure. From the structure of the paragraph, the price that was being compared should have been the one quoted in the first sentence (i.e. $73.98 in the first article and $74.13 in the second article). Of course, the ending price of $74.02 is not "13 cents lower" than either of those.

What conclusions can we draw from this little exercise? First, that the Associated Press doesn't proofread. Second, that the Associated Press releases absolute garbage. And third, that organizations like Forbes.com will print anything that the AP releases without checking the accuracy of it.

Former UN Ambassador John Bolton gets a history lesson from Jon Stewart on the Daily Show

This could be my favorite segment of the Daily Show of all time:


If you want to see the whole interview with Bolton, in which he basically states that the President should have unlimited power, it's right here:



For those who don't know, prior to his appointment as the United States' Ambassadors to the United Nations, John Bolton was best known for his rants against the United Nations. Another interesting tidbit related to Bolton: he was appointed without the consent of Congress.

Search Kindly -- raise money for charity through the power of search

The whole point of Search Kindly is to take something that you'd be doing anyway, like surfing the Internet, and turn it into a really meaningful action. We know that most people, like us, would love to be able to give limitless amounts of money to those in need, but who has a limitless amount of money? Well, together we all do.



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Agrarian Justice

Recently, I drove up the California coast along Highway 1 for my honeymoon. Along the way, my wife Averil and I stopped at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur. While I was there, I bought three books. One of them was Miller's Tropic of Capricorn, because I read a blurb on a plaque placed beside one of the many pieces of art strewn about the front yard of the Library that it was "one of the most important books of the 20^th century."

The other two books I purchased as much because of how they looked as for their content, for they are members of the "Great Ideas" series by Penguin Books, which feature some of the most striking covers I have ever seen on paperbacks. Anyway, I bought Why I Write by George Orwell and Common Sense by Thomas Paine.

The second of these not only contained Paine's famous call-to-arms, but also another of his pamphlets which is just as great, called Agrarian Justice. I was delighted to find this unexpected little gem in an already small book! In beautifully concise and precise language, Paine constructs an argument in favor of using a portion of all land values within a society in order to create a fund for the purpose of supporting the old and infirm for the duration of their lives, as well as to provide a small kickstart for everyone upon reaching 21 years of age. His justification for creating the fund based upon land values stems from his belief that prior to the arrival of civilization all people "owned" all of the land with equal shares, and that it was only with the advent of agriculture that land became "property" due to the development of inherently stationary agricultural improvements.

I was quite impressed to read Paine's insights concerning the fundamental shift in the human condition that came with agriculture (i.e. "the civilized state"):

It is always possible to go from the natural to the civilized state, but it is never possible to go from the civilized to the natural state. The reason is that man in a natural state, subsisting by hunting, requires ten times the quantity of land to range over to procure himself sustenance, than would support him in a civilized state, where the earth is cultivated.

I was reminded of one of the major themes of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel -- that agriculture became the foundation upon which the great civilizations of the world were built. For it was agriculture that allowed human populations to multiply, and it was agriculture which motivated humans to domesticate any suitable wild animals that might be available for exploitation.

But, Paine points out, civilization has been a double-edged sword. While the "natural state is without advantages which flow from agriculture, arts, science, and manufactures," it is also true that "there is not, in that state, any of those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes in all the towns and streets of Europe."

Modern America can hardly escape this same criticism, when we consider that the latest U.S. Census Bureau statistics list 37 million Americans as living "under the poverty line" (which for a single person household is roughly $10,000/year). Estimates of the numbers of children who go to sleep each night feeling hungry also reach the millions.

This state of affairs should outrage us as much as it did Paine over 200 years ago. In his words:

...the first principle of civilization ought ... to be that the condition of every person born into the world, after a state of civilization commences, ought not to be worse than if he had been born before that period.

While we can certainly point to many wonderful advantages that have been extended to many of our citizens due to the great technological advances of the ensuing years, I still do not think that we can boast that everybody who lives within our current economic-political system is better off now than if they had been born on this continent 1,000 years ago. That is something we should not be complacent about!!

Paine was a man far ahead of his time for recognizing the wisdom of providing a safety net for the elderly (anticipating the eventual creation of Social Security by almost 150 years!), and I think he was spot-on in advocating that the funds should come from a tax on land, as opposed to any other possible taxation schemes (e.g. the current method of taxing income that the U.S. uses).

I won't get into the specifics for why I'm convinced that a full land tax is a fantastic idea, but if you're interested you should read this site and this article, both by Steven Cord.