Lone Candle – Page 701 – Champion of Truth

The Time the Federal Government Built a Flawed Housing Project and Tore It Down 20 Years Later

Posted on April 19, 2022 by Lone Candle

“Pruitt-Igoe represented complete racial and economic segregation. The building was dominated by single mother households that symbolized the collateral damage of public assistance. This was described by sociologist Lee Rainwater, in his book Behind Ghetto Walls: Life in a Federally-Subsidized Slum, “Only those Negroes who are desperate for housing are willing to live in Pruitt-Igoe.” When imploded, the buildings weren’t even two decades old.

The problems that toppled Pruitt-Igoe do not go nearly far enough to capture the deeply mistaken assumptions about government housing policy whose bad ideas continue today.

After clearing seedy areas, housing reformers who pushed for Pruitt-Igoe assumed that the neighborhoods they replaced were irredeemably bad and required what Architectural Forum magazine called, in 1957, “slum surgery.” In reality, the DeSoto-Carr neighborhood—like Chicago’s Bronzeville, Detroit’s Black Bottom, and New York’s East Harlem—contained small businesses, community institutions (such as a St. Louis hospital financed by African-American philanthropy) manufacturing, and, most notably, owner-occupied homes. Of the housing units cleared, according to the Census Bureau, 21 percent of the properties had “nonwhite owners.” What’s more, an additional 25 percent of those included rental units. It offered, in other words, a path to wealth accumulation through property ownership—a path wiped out by public housing.

Implicit in that heedless clearance was the idea that the private market inevitably fails to produce housing for those of modest means. In her landmark 1934 book Modern Housing, housing reformer, Catherine Bauer, wrote “The premises underlying the most successful forward-pointing housing developments are not the premises of capitalism [or] inviolate private property.” It was no coincidence that Bauer also included photographs of government-owned apartments in Soviet Moscow.

The design of Pruitt-Igoe’s modernist garden of towers would, instead, reflect the reformer’s hubris that planners, financed by government, could build a better neighborhood.”

Biden’s Plans To Fix the Pay Gap Won’t Actually Help Women

Posted on April 18, 2022 by Lone Candle

“evidence that this actually helps women is mixed. Meanwhile, such restrictions would have unintended consequences.

“For example, employers who can’t ask about prior salary might assume that a female candidate would accept less money than a man, because women make less on average,” as The New York Times has previously noted. In this scenario, a ban on salary history discussions could lead to women getting lowballed in job offers.

Salary history bans could also cost people—particularly women and younger workers—some job offers. It’s not hard to imagine an employer choosing to hire someone whose salary requirements seem slightly lower than an equally qualified candidate with higher requirements. In this case, prior salary disclosure could mean the difference between getting a job or not.

In other cases, where an employer has a strong preference for a particular candidate, the company may be prepared to offer a higher salary than the baseline in order to recruit them. Without knowing the candidate’s salary history, however, the employer may be lost as to what to offer. They might offer lower than the candidate currently makes, leading the candidate to reject the job that could have otherwise been a good fit.

Which is all to say that surely some women may actually benefit from past salary disclosure—especially now that young women are out-earning their male counterparts.

In general, letting employers and prospective employees exchange more information, not less, seems likely to lead to the best matches and the most satisfaction.”

…

“Today’s rhetoric about wider disparities in male and female incomes tends to 1) rely on research looking at incomes across professions and positions and 2) ignore explanations other than discrimination that might explain pay disparities—things like gender differences in types of work, work schedules, and years in the workforce. Politicians and media then use this distorted picture to spawn outrage and get kudos for addressing the issue, even if nothing they’re doing can actually “fix” the complicated causes behind disparities.

There may be a broader discussion to have about whether female-heavy industries are undervalued or how choosing to have children may harm women’s salary prospects more than men’s. But the issue is nowhere near the simplistic narrative that many modern progressives often make it out to be, in which sexist bosses and companies simply choose to pay women less than men for the same work and everything can be fixed with federal mandates.”

How I (and US policymakers) got inflation wrong

Posted on April 18, 2022 by Lone Candle

“At the time I wrote my July 2021 piece, “Don’t worry about inflation,” a prescient copy editor noted that this headline might look bad if I was wrong and inflation got increasingly worse. I responded that I stood by it, and if I was wrong, I would write a groveling follow-up piece.

So here we are.”

…

“I unfairly dismissed the most boring, Econ 101 explanation for why inflation happens: that there was too much money sloshing around for the amount of stuff the economy was able to produce — meaning the price of that stuff went up.”

…

“Past stimulus checks during non-pandemic episodes have been disproportionately spent on durable goods, rather than services, suggesting that the stimulus checks might have accelerated this phenomenon just as the virus did. And because prices of goods tend to be less “sticky” than prices of services (meaning they tend to rise and fall more easily), this especially contributed to inflation.

This surge in spending led to big, well-publicized shortages in certain areas, most famously cars, as demand for durable goods outstripped the economy’s ability to produce them (sick workers limiting production was a factor, too, if a smaller one). That provoked localized price spikes on a few goods. And because oil producers slowed production in expectation of a big post-Covid recession, they too struggled to keep up with demand, so gas prices rose — which Putin’s invasion of Ukraine only worsened.

For a while, many commentators thought you could wave off inflation fears by saying it was just limited in a few sectors. But at this point, an “inflation in a few places” theory doesn’t really fly.

Some goods, like oil and cars, have specific narratives like a chip shortage or low drilling that could explain inflation. But as Bloomberg’s John Authers has detailed, inflation is still rising even if you exclude those goods. The Dallas Fed’s “trimmed mean” inflation measure, which purposely removes “outliers” where prices are rising extremely fast or extremely slow from the data, started to shoot up recently, too.”

…

“Due to a combination of rapidly growing wages through all of 2021, plus trillions in government fiscal support, there has just been too much money around combined with insufficient goods and services to spend it on.

That’s led to not just inflation but accelerating inflation, as wage increases contribute to price increases and higher expectations of future inflation contribute to higher immediate inflation. That’s why you’ve started to see inflation in categories beyond just gas and cars. It’s a situation similar to what NAIRU would predict, except I would argue it’s not really about low unemployment.”

How China’s zero-Covid policy is failing Shanghai

Posted on April 18, 2022 by Lone Candle

“Shanghai, China’s bustling cosmopolis of 26 million has been under lockdown since late March under the nation’s strict “dynamic zero-Covid” protocols, a system so poorly managed that residents are frequently unable to access basic necessities like food, medications, and medical care, prompting fairly widespread, spontaneous protests both online and in real life.

The government has touted the zero-Covid strategy, the government’s system of containment using intensive testing and tracing, combined with partial or complete lockdowns when a case is detected, has kept case counts and deaths low over the past two years. But the reports coming out of Shanghai suggest that the local government was unprepared for an outbreak in the country’s economic center and cast doubt on the feasibility of zero Covid at this point in the pandemic. That’s translated into serious struggles for residents, including hours-long ambulance wait times, dwindling savings, and inadequate or rotten food supplies, among others. Although the central government is reportedly stepping up efforts to get supplies to the city, the overall policy is driving many residents to criticize the government’s policy — and Shanghai’s implementation of it — despite serious potential risks to their safety and freedom by doing so.”

…

“The Shanghai outbreak is thus far China’s most serious since the beginning of the pandemic; a staggering 200,000 cases have been reported since the outbreak started in March, though that’s likely under-reported, according to the New York Times. What started as a patchwork of temporary lockdowns to limit the spread of disease quickly turned into an interminable, city-wide shutdown with people only allowed out to take PCR tests, as a New York magazine piece explained earlier this week. Shanghai’s lockdown, two years into the pandemic, is rivaled only by those in Wuhan in 2020 and Xi’an at the end of last year in terms of strictness.

Shanghai residents’ outrage — which they’ve expressed by singing and chanting from their balconies and co-opting anti-American hashtags used by government officials to criticize the US — is borne from the fact that the government isn’t providing the stability it promises in exchange for personal freedoms, according to Rui Zhong, program associate at the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute on China and the United States. “I think what makes people angry in Shanghai, and what made people angry in Xi’an is, Covid has been a problem for years,” she told Vox. “I think they’ve been really stunned at the degree to which their local officials haven’t necessarily prepared, including non-supply-chain issues,” like hospital admissions.”

…

“Shanghai’s local government enjoys a degree of relative autonomy in the context of President Xi Jinping’s China; it’s technically directly under the control of the central government, as a province-level city, but enjoys special status as the country’s financial hub and a showpiece for the rest of the world. Until March, the local government had handled the pandemic well, with no major outbreaks. But the rapid onset of the omicron variant and the corresponding draconian government measures are pushing some citizens to the brink.

“I have no more money … What am I to do? I don’t care anymore,” one man shouts to his whole building in a viral video on Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter. “Just let the Communist Party take me.””

The debate dividing the January 6 committee

Posted on April 17, 2022 by Lone Candle

“The committee can’t actually file charges against anyone, but they can recommend that the Justice Department do so, with a criminal referral. The House has already approved four such referrals from the committee — of Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino, and Peter Navarro — for contempt of Congress. (All four aides refused to turn over some or all records to the committee.)

Panel leaders have been open that they’re assessing whether Trump violated the law, too, and they’ve argued he may have done so in court. Many anticipated that the committee would eventually put forward a referral for the former president.

But committee members like Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) downplayed the importance of such a move in these recent stories. “A referral doesn’t mean anything,” Lofgren told Politico.

In practical terms, Lofgren has a point. Once receiving a referral recommending charges against someone, the DOJ is under no obligation to follow through and charge them, and often the agency doesn’t.

Yet the question of whether Trump should be referred for prosecution does touch on broader questions of what exactly the committee is trying to achieve, and how Democrats (and Trump’s few Republican critics) are struggling to ensure the former president faces consequences for his attempted election theft.

Should the committee’s top priority be to make a maximal political splash, discrediting Trump in the eyes of the public? Or should they focus on trying to help a criminal indictment against Trump actually happen, and to make that case as strong as possible?

Is their audience the public, or is it Attorney General Merrick Garland?

And which strategy will best achieve those aims — if achieving them is even possible?”