Category: Science and Other News

There are Very Few “Deserving Poor” ― Other Than Immigrants, That Is

Most reviewers have panned the Heritage Foundation’s new immigration study. (See Keith Hennessey, for example.) Yet, Bryan Caplan notes that Robert Rector (co-author of the study) has done some excellent work demonstrating that there are not very many poor people who are deserving of our charity. For example:

The vast majority of America’s “poor” are rich by world and historic standards. 82% of poor American adults say they were never hungry during the last year because they couldn’t afford food; 96% of poor American parents say their children never went hungry because they couldn’t afford food. Half of poor Americans live in a single-family home, and 41% own their own home. Poor Americans have 60% more living space than the average European. 82% of poor Americans have air conditioning. 64% have cable or satellite T.V. 40% own a dishwasher. 34% have a T.V. that would have made billionaires drool in 1990. Materially speaking, poor Americans are doing just fine.

Furthermore, they could easily be not poor: “Most poor American adults could have avoided their situation with prudent behavior ― especially by delaying childbearing until they marry.”

[O]ver 60 percent of fathers who have children outside of marriage earned enough at the time of their child’s birth to support their potential family with an income above the poverty level even if the mother did not work at all. If the unmarried father and mother married and the mother worked part-time, the typical family would have an income above 150 percent of poverty, or roughly $35,000 per year.

But then Caplan cites Rector for lack of moral consistency. Most poor immigrants are “deserving.” Their poverty is no fault of their own.

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Where Did We Come From?

Alexei Sharov of the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore and Richard Gordon of the Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Panacea, Florida…concluded that genome complexity doubles every 376 million years in a sort of geological version of Moore’s Law of progress in computers.

When the researchers extrapolate the chart backward, they find the origin of life must have happened almost 10 billion years ago, long before Earth existed. Therefore life may have spent its first five billion years on a different planet and got here as bacterial spores deep inside rocks that drifted through the vacuum after some cosmic explosion.

Matt Ridley from the WSJ.

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Myths about Austerity

Three points from Arnold Kling:

• There is no austerity budget: As a percent of GDP, federal government spending is above the past 40 year average.
• The only significant decrease in spending is “net interest.”
• There has been no decrease in domestic discretionary spending.

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Before There Was Medicare There Was…

Uwe Reinhardt observes,

Sometime around 1780-70 B.C., the Babylonian King Hammurabi promulgated the now famous Code of Hammurabi, covering both civil and criminal law…Remarkably, it has echoes also in modern health policy in the United States. [Hint: it's the forerunner of Medicare.]

Among the 282 laws in Hammurabi’s Code, nine (215 to 223) pertain to medical practice:

215. If a physician makes a large incision with an operating knife and cures it, or if he opens a tumor (over the eye) with an operating knife, and saves the eye, he shall receive 10 shekels in money.

216. If the patient is a freed man, he receives five shekels.

217. If he is the slave of someone, his owner shall give the physician two shekels.

218. If a physician makes a large incision with the operating knife, and kills him, or opens a tumor with the operating knife, and cuts out the eye, his hands shall be cut off.

219. If a physician makes a large incision in the slave of a freed man, and kills him, he shall replace the slave with another slave.

220. If he had opened a tumor with the operating knife, and put out his eye, he shall pay half his value.

221. If a physician heals the broken bone or diseased soft part of a man, the patient shall pay the physician five shekels in money.

222. If he were a freed man he shall pay three shekels.

223. If he were a slave his owner shall pay the physician two shekels.

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The Education Achievement Gap

The gap between rich and poor children is growing:

In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race.

This is from the NYT.

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