Half Changed World

NASA Kids' Club

We had some very impressive thunderstorms this afternoon, and the picnic we were going to attend to was canceled.  N had a party to attend, so I let D spend extra time playing on my computer.

I had promised to look on NASA's web site for pictures from the new Mars lander, and we did find some fine images, but the hit of the day was the NASA Kids' Club.  Lots of games with a space theme, some more overtly educational than others, organized by difficulty level.  You can send your name to the Moon.  And, new today, Buzz Lightyear travels with the shuttle to visit the space station.

I also signed D up for his own Galaxy Zoo account, and he passed the qualifying test with ease, but didn't have patience to classify more than half a dozen or so objects.

Cross-national perspective

Ariane Hegewisch and Janet Gornick have a new report out on what countries other than the US are doing to mandate workplace flexibility.  It's all quite astonishing from the US perspective, but I'm honestly most surprised by the statistic that the US has the lowest labor force participation rate for college-educated prime-age women of any of the countries studied.  That's a pretty strong response to the claim that "no one will hire women" in Europe because of the social protections.    It also makes it hard to believe that US women's labor force participation has hit its "natural limits" and can't possibly go any higher.

Ariane said that she might be up for being "interviewed" on this blog -- what questions would you like to ask her?

How are you adjusting?

With energy and food prices both climbing, one of my regular readers suggested that I ask all of you all what adjustments you're making.  Are you reducing your driving?  Cutting coupons?  Reducing meals out?  Saving less?  And how much are these adjustments hurting?  Do you feel like it's a big sacrifice, or something you hardly notice?

In our household, I'd say we're making relatively minor adjustments:

• Trying to consolidate errands, do fewer grocery runs.
• Doing more shopping at the less expensive grocery stores, and buying less convenience foods
• Really paying attention to turning out lights, unplugging appliances when not in use.
• Taking the bus to NYC instead of driving (the parking costs in NYC were killing us)
• Generally asking "do we really need this" before buying stuff -- especially in the $20 to $50 range, which doesn't feel like big spending, but adds up fast.

I can't say we've really cut back on our day to day driving -- I was already driving to the metro, rather than downtown, and the bus is really more of a hassle than the additional savings justify.  (It's a bit slower than driving, but real problem is that the low frequency makes missing the bus a disaster, so you have to build in huge margins for error.)  I'm actually sort of dubious about these stories about how so many people are shifting from cars to buses.  I'm not disputing the fact that public transit systems are seeing big percentage increases in ridership -- but we're starting from such a low base that if only a few percent of drivers shift to buses, that can be a 30 or 40 percent increase in bus ridership.

I just put in a low-flow showerhead, but that was really an environmental choice rather than a frugal one.  Overall, we've done a lot to improve the efficiency of our house -- new windows, new boiler (we have baseboard heating), high efficiency washer and dryer, high
efficiency kitchen appliances.  Over the long run, these will save money, but for now, we've been writing a lot of big checks for them.

In the short run, things will be better for the next few months, as we won't have to pay for N's preschool, and have already paid for camp for the boys.  But then he's going 5 days a week instead of 3 next year, so that will cost about an extra $200 a month.   But then
after next year we'll be done with preschool and will feel rich.

Several years ago, I read an article on Money.com called the "60 percent solution" in which they argue that you should keep your fixed expenses down to 60 percent of your take-home income.  (I see I wrote about Warren and Tyagi's version of this plan two years ago).  If you were doing that before the recent run-up in prices, you're probably giving up some of your extras, but you don't have to do anything drastic.  If 80 or 90 percent of your paycheck was already allocated to fixed expenses, there's not a lot of room to adjust.

The reason I thought the 60 percent solution article was interesting was that it recognized that it's really hard to save significant amount of money by shaving your grocery bill.  Some of us never spent $5 a day on fancy coffees in the first place, and so can't find savings by giving them up. Instead of squeezing at the margin, it may be better to bite the bullet and look for big changes to make -- a smaller house or apartment, taking in a roommate, finding a second job.

Avatar

A few weeks ago, I got an email asking if I would be interested in receiving a copy of Avatar, Book 3, Volume 3.  I asked T if that was that show that he and the boys have been watching on netflix, and he said yes.  So I accepted the disk, and asked T to write the review.  As you'll see, he's effusive in his praise.  If you read this blog, you know that I'm not always that nice to folks who send me stuff to review, so this is the real deal.

The boys are now all caught up, so they're eagerly awaiting the last 6 episodes, airing on Nick later this summer.

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Avatar is that greatest of rarities, a show that educates children in such a distracting and entrancing way that they never even begin to suspect that they're being informed.

For those completely disconnected from the series, a brief summary: Avatar takes place in a setting assembled piece-meal from elements of chinese culture and legend, but assembled with quite western sentiments.  It features four nations, each associated with one of the classical four elements, and each gifted with people with the talent to "bend" that element to their will.  As the introduction that rolls before each show explains, all was in harmony until the fire nation attacked.  The Avatar, a figure reincarnated into each new era, can alone learn to control all four elements and bring balance back to the land.  But he disappeared a century ago, right when he was needed most.  The series follows the rediscovered young Avatar and both good comrades and dire enemies.

Simple, yes?  Fantasy at its most formulaic:  A messianic figure with wierd magic mojo, setting forth on a quest to win freedom for a world oppressed by a faceless evil empire.

Yes, all that is there ... but also in the best tradition of fantasy, that's not all there is.  Magic isn't just a gimmick or a tool, and bending isn't just a weapon by another name (though it is associated with various martial arts styles, and the action scenes that are liberally sprinkled through the series are -stellar-).  The elements and the cultures are intimately fused, and bending is both a result of and the cause of those cultures distinctive virtues.  To learn water-bending, you must master the ways of thinking that help make you a good member of the water tribes, and so on.  It's not about power, it's about personality.

The avatar starts the series already trained as an air bender, and his personality is yielding, slippery, free and flighty.  He's a kid ... a sweet, generous, fun-loving, irresponsible kid.  He is, without question, possessed of a type of wisdom.  The thing is, he starts the series possessed of only -one- kind of wisdom.  In order to reach his destiny, face the Fire-Lord and restore peace and justice and all that jazz, he needs to learn that there is more than one way of thinking, more than one set of virtues, more than one path of wisdom.  He needs to learn all four types of bending, which means learning four very different ways of thinking.  When he studies earth-bending, the intense, unyielding mirror of his own set of virtues, his teacher puts it very clearly:  "No, you're thinking like an air-bender!  There is no different angle, no trickety-trick that's going to move that rock.  If you want to move it you have to face it head on!"

The concept that a full person should be able to bring a whole catalog of different viewpoints to a problem is far too rare in children's television.  All too often it is exchanged for an easy "One lesson, hammered home," formula which at best makes characters shallow and unappealing, and at worst actually convinces children that a single moral touchstone will be enough for everything life is going to throw at them.  The messages may be good (in fact, they almost invariably are) but by blanking out the rest of the moral universe in order to fit into twenty-two minutes, such simple shows do children a disservice.

Quite simply, Avatar is the antidote to simple-minded kids action shows.  It uses the conceit of bending to bring a broad range of emotional and moral issues out of the shadows and examine them closely, in terms that kids find understandable and interesting.  The show's characters make mistakes.  They have flaws ... often grievous, world-wrenching flaws, and those flaws cause terrible things to happen.  Every last one of them earns a fair portion of guilt and shame, but also a heaping helping of confidence and strength.  Again, all of this tends to be a marked contrast from less nuanced children's television.

Which brings me to the character who really shines in Book Three, Volume Three ... a character who, to my mind, is consistently the most intriguing of the series:  Prince Zuko.

Prince Zuko is the much-abused son of that most abusive villain of the series, the Fire-Lord ... heir to the guy behind, well, pretty much everything evil going on in the world.  Zuko is there with us from the very first episode, banished by his father until such time as he returns with the captured Avatar.  He is, it seems very much, the bad guy: a remorseless, driven young man who will stop at *nothing* to regain his honor by hunting, hounding and attacking the heroes of the series.

And yet ....

The series portrays his qualities clearly:  His constant, explosive anger, his unyielding determination, his restless pride, his devilish cunning.  He's got all the tools a good villain needs.  And, bit by bit, we learn that these are virtues too.  He is passionate, driven, clever, brave.  He starts the series trying to be a good boy, to follow the course his father set, and as his life becomes worse and worse (the heroes always slipping from his grasp, his failures accumulating and poisoning his life further) he slowly grows into a desire to be a good man.

In this collection he sloughs off the destiny that his father would shape him into, and sets out on his own path.  It is the turning point that the series has been leading to for years, and it is -magnificent-.  It is only natural that this should lead him to ally with his former enemies ... and only natural that such an alliance should be hard on everyone involved.

The series has my young son asking some big questions:  What does it mean to have done bad things, and want to make it right?  How much can you look to other people for guidance, and how much do you need to do all alone?  Can you offer forgiveness and trust to one who has harmed you deeply, without denying your own hurt?  Can you withhold that chance at redemption, without destroying a piece of yourself?

The trope of bending has a lot to do with getting these questions across to children.  Does my son understand how very hard, how very important the confrontation between Zuko and his abusive father was?  I don't know, though I suspect not.  But he understands that the Fire-Lord levelled a fire-bending attack that would easily have -destroyed- the younger Zuko, and that because of his experiences the young prince was able not only to survive the attack but turn it back against its source.  My son literally screamed in surprise and satisfaction when it happened.  He grabbed me and shook me, saying "Did you see that?  Did you SEE?  He reflected it, just like his uncle showed him!" 

If my son doesn't see through the symbolism to the deeper human drama, I'm not really sure it matters.  That is the power of symbolism, after all ... the lesson that adversity and the support of those you love will strengthen you is the same whether you see that it can help you survive a harsh word, or survive a magic-woo-woo burst of lightning and flame.

And if, as in the case of Avatar, the two lessons are seamlessly paired ... well, maybe that's building a bridge to teach young children to resonate with the symbols in stories all around them.

Or maybe it's just keeping them entertained with spectacular drama, while it subtly acquaints them with some of the hardest questions in life.  I'm fine with that too.

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Blogroll

I spent some time updating my extremely out of date blogroll.  I think I got rid of all of the blogs that aren't being actively updated, but if you see one that I missed, please let me know.  If you're a regular reader here and have a blog that I haven't included, feel free to give a shout out in the comments.

Farm Bill

It appears that Congress overrode the President's veto on (most of) the Farm Bill today.  (Due to a clerical error, the bill that was sent to Bush omitted an entire title -- earlier today, it looked like they might have to pass the whole bill over again, but apparently they've decided that they can override the veto on what was sent to him today, and deal with the last title after the Memorial Day recess.)

The bad news is that the bill continues huge subsidies for agribusiness, at a time when commodity prices are at record highs.  The good news is that it contains some real improvements for the Food Stamp program (now to be called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) -- increasing the average benefit by increasing the amount of income that is assumed to be needed for purposes other than food, allowing more  child care expenses to be deducted, allowing the employment and training program to help people buy the equipment and uniforms they need to start a job, adjusting the asset limit for inflation over time.  There's also more money for WIC (which is *not* an entitlement, and can run out of money when lots of people apply.)

So, how do you weigh these issues?  People I generally trust don't all come down on the same side of this. Parke Wilde at the US Food Policy blog is pretty disappointed.  He's astonished to find himself agreeing with the President's criticisms of the bill.  The Food Research and Action Center is thrilled to finally pass the nutrition title improvements.

I'm more on the FRAC side of this argument.  While this is definitely a bill I need to hold my nose to support, I don't see any other way that we could have gotten the nutrition title improvements.  While the White House may not have actively opposed these improvements, they sure weren't going to put pressure on wavering Republicans to support them in a freestanding bill.

The Giant Pool of Money

It's clear that when I don't have the energy to post, I should put up something about housing costs, and then my commenters will take it from there. 

I've been listening to the This American Life's piece about the housing bubble and crash, and it's fascinating.  As suggested by the title of the episode, The Giant Pool of Money, it focuses on the supply side of the mortgage business, how it was in everyone's business to keep generating loans and not to ask questions about whether they were really good risks.  It's nearly an hour, and if you didn't grab the podcast already, you need to stream it, but it's worth listening to anyway.

TBR: Predictably Irrational

This week's book is Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely.  It's a quick read, but has far reaching ramifications.  It's about how people aren't as rational as economists think we are.  That's not particularly surprising, but Ariely goes on to argue that people are irrational in systematic-- predictable -- ways, and to explain the elegant experiments that psychologists and behavioral economists have developed to tease these out.  So, let's look at some of the examples:

• People are hugely biased for the idea of getting something for "free."  They'll take the crappy thing for free over the good thing for a modest cost.

• People don't know what things are really worth, and so anchor to arbitrary comparisons.  People often won't buy the most expensive thing on the menu, but they'll buy the next most expensive thing.  I was particularly impressed by the studies that showed that if the researchers asked people if a percentage was higher or lower than the last two digits of their social security number, and then had them guess at a concrete number, there was a strong correlation between the guess and those last two digits.  Based on this, I'd guess that including a high "buy it now" price pulls up the value of bids on ebay, even when no one uses the buy it now option.  (Although I don't know if it would pull them up to offset the increased fee.)

• When you ask people to choose among three things, two of which are similar (but one is clearly better than the other) and one is very different, they're more likely to choose the better of the two similar choices.  It's hard to tell if an apple is better than an orange, but a fresh apple is clearly better than a rotten apple -- and the presence of the rotten apple stand out against the orange.

All this isn't just entertaining, but has pretty significant policy implications.  Orthodox economists -- for all their pessimistic reputation -- actually tend towards a Panglossian view of the world -- that we're in the very best of all possible worlds, or at least that the world couldn't be made better for anyone without making it worse for someone else.  This is because economists take pretty seriously the idea of revealed preference: the idea that you can tell what agents in a free market prefer by what they chose, given the options that are available to them.

Ariely more or less blows up this idea, by showing studies where given choices A, B and C, no one chose option B, but taking away option B dramatically changes the distribution of choices between A and C.  The bad news is that this means that lots of people are making suboptimal choices all the time; the good news is that it means there's room for improvements without making anyone worse off.  The problem is that there's a lot of resistance -- for good reasons -- to having public institutions adopt the strategies of direct marketers...

Somewhat related books that I've read recently:

• Discover Your Inner Economist, by Tyler Cowan (of Marginal Revolution).  While Cowan is much more of a traditional economist than Ariely, I'm not sure you'd be able to tell that by this book.  Cowan's big take-away here is that economics is about scarcity, and so the key is always to figure out what's the resource that's scarce (and it's often attention or time, rather than money).
• Your Money and Your Brain, by Jason Zveig.  Specifically focusing in on why we behave irrationally when it comes to investing.  I thought the first chapter or two was fascinating, but then it got repetitive, and I didn't finish the book before it was due back to the library.  Maybe a good one to give to your brother who thinks that he's figured out a way to beat the markets.

Homeownership rates

When I posted about whether young people are "falling behind" their parents, almost all of the commenters agreed that a big part of the reason that even relatively affluent young adults *feel* poor is that homeownership seems so out of reach (even with the declining market).  This made a lot of intuitive sense to me.

But my dad then sent me a ton of Census data on homeownership rates by age, going back to 1982.* (Yes, I come by my geekery honestly.)  And his point is that households under age 35 were just about as likely to own homes in 2008 (41.7 percent) as in 1982 (41.2 percent).   Homeownership rates for this group hit a low of 37.3 percent in 1993-1994, and then rose to 43.1 percent in 2004, before falling off slightly.

So how is it possible that homeownership can feel so out of reach to almost everyone I know, even as the homeownership rate didn't decline at all?  Well, part of the answer is that I live in an expensive housing market, so the "everyone" I know is a biased sample.  (The readers of this blog are more diverse, but I think are still disproportionately living in large urban areas, compared to the country as a whole.)   Also, a whole lot of condos were built in the 1990s, so if by "homeownership" you mean "owning a single family detached home," the homeownership rate probably did decline somewhat.

But it's also true that a lot of people -- at all age groups -- bought homes only by extending themselves to their limits.  There was this credit bubble that you might have heard about... (Supposedly in 2005, half of all loans made in DC were interest-only.)  And there was this dreadful fear that if you didn't jump in right away, even if you couldn't really afford it, you'd be priced out forever.  So, the people who didn't buy houses felt like they were falling behind because they couldn't afford a home, and the people who did felt like they were falling behind because they couldn't afford anything else.

*The Census table is only online as a text file -- if you want my Dad's Excel spreadsheet, I'm happy to send it on.

Incomparable

All week, I've been blinking away tears as I read or hear the news.  This morning I turned the car radio from NPR to the classic rock station because I just couldn't cope with listening to the story about the middle school that collapsed in the earthquake in China.  The disaster in Burma is even bigger, but because the government isn't letting aid workers in (let alone reporters), there aren't the first-person stories that tug at the heart.

This NY Times story suggests that the grief of the Chinese parents is made worse by the fact that the one-child policy means that most of the dead children were their parents' only child.  I'm not sure I believe that -- I don't believe that the grief of a parent of two children is cut in half when only one child dies, or the grief of a parent of five is only one-fifth.

I -- and most (if not all) of my readers -- am lucky to live in a time and place where the death of a child is a rare tragedy.  At other times and places, it has been less rare, but no less tragic.  Reading 18th and 19th century diaries, it  is quite clear that the frequency with which children died of disease did not diminish the pain felt by those left behind.

But even here and now, we are never entirely safe.  Last week I learned that the son of one of the women on the birthmonth email list I joined when pregnant with D was killed, along with his grandfather, in a car accident.

11th Congressional District Primary

While the presidential primary grinds its way to a conclusion, things are heating up here in Virginia's 11th Congressional District Primary.  Tom Davis isn't running for re-election, and the district is widely believed to have high potential to swing Democratic.  Leslie Byrne and Gerry Connolly are slugging it out, with the primary coming up on June 10th.  We've gotten something in the mail pretty much every day this week, with people coming door to door as well.  (And this is a hilly neighborhood -- the canvassers looked like they hadn't quite realized what they were signing up for.)

The campaigns have released competing poll results, each claiming that they're way ahead of their opponent.  I don't know what the truth is, but I can say that in the campaign literature I've received, Byrne's name and face are clear on the outside, while you have to open up Connolly's to see who it's from.  That makes me think she's got the advantage. 

TVR: 51 Birch Street

This week I've got a video review instead of a book review.  This is actually one that a PR company sent me as a review copy, but then I didn't get around to watching it for over 6 months.  Oops.  51 Birch Street is an autobiographical documentary about the filmmaker's parents, and how after his mother's death and his father's swift remarriage, Doug Block discovered that their relationship was a lot more complicated than he had believed.

The inevitable comparison is to Capturing the Friedmans, because of the use of extensive home video footage.  But unlike the Friedmans, the Blocks don't have a deep dark secret.  The surprise for Doug Block is that, as he reads his mother's diaries, he discovers that she was deeply unhappy in her marriage, and that during the 70s she had an affair.  Not exactly earthshattering.  But what makes the movie compelling, although deeply sad, is that as Block shows more and more of the family footage, it becomes increasingly obvious that his mother wasn't exactly hiding her unhappiness.  And yet, although Block opens the movie by saying that he and his mother always had a special connection, he was clearly blind to it.

My take-away from the film is that when Block says that he was close to his mother, he means that he was able to talk with her about himself (as contrasted with his father, whom he had difficulty talking with).  It doesn't mean that he was able to listen to her, or to see her as a person separate from her role as a mother.  That's probably pretty common, but I found it sad.

Pantry chili

Via an article in the Washington Post, I recently found a food blog called The Perfect Pantry.  I particularly like the recurring feature called Other People's Pantries, and intend to submit mine soon. 

The process of unpacking our supplies into the new kitchen did make me aware of just how many spices, oils, etc I've accumulated.  Sometimes it's because I try a new recipe that requires a new ingredient, but as often it's because I see something interesting in the Asian grocery and decide to give it a try.  Unfortunately, given the constraints on my time, I'm afraid that buying new ingredients is as likely to be a substitute for cooking as an inspiration...

This recipe for Clean the Freezer Chili inspired me to make a batch of chili myself, with the rule that I could only use ingredients that I had on hand.  I don't stock tempe, so I used bulgar cooked in canned crushed tomato as the base.  I had an open jar of mole sauce, so that went in. What else?  Black beans, ancient sun-dried tomatoes, veggie stock, green peppers, fresh tomatoes, onions, celery.  Chili powder, cumin, paprika.  I thought the result was just ok -- a bit too salty for my taste, but T. liked it, and thought it was surprisingly "meaty" for veggie chili.

Happy Mothers Day

Happy Mothers Day to all, and a particular prayer for children who have lost their mothers and mothers who have lost their children.

My mom's been busily trying to give things away to reduce the "stuff" in her life, and so asked me to make a contribution rather than buy something for her.  In case you might be similarly inclined, here are two organizations that seem appropriate:

• UNFPA -- the United Nations Population Fund.  They support contraception, maternity care, fistula repair, and HIV/AIDS prevention.  The Bush Administration has refused to release congressionally appropriated funds to UNFPA since 2002.

• UNICEF -- the United Nations Children Fund.  They're collecting money for relief in Myanmar/Burma right now, but it's probably more useful to donate without restriction, and let them decide where it's most needed.

Paid parental leave for feds

Just wanted to give a heads up that HR 5781, which would provide federal employees with 4 weeks of paid parental leave, is headed to the House floor for a vote next week.   (If you read the bill text at that link, it will say it's 8 weeks of paid leave, but it was cut to 4 weeks in committee.)  Outside of the DC area, this probably hasn't gotten much attention, so it's worth dropping your Representative a line to encourage support.

I used to be a fed, and lots of people were shocked when I told them that I didn't get any paid maternity leave.  The feds generally provide good benefits, so everyone assumes that they provide parental leave.  They don't -- and they don't have any sort of short-term disability program, either -- although you can use any annual leave (vacation) or sick leave that you've accrued.  The problem is that while long-term federal employees often have months and months of sick leave accrued up, most of the people who have babies aren't long-term employees (since the federal government hires very few 12 year olds).  By hoarding my leave days carefully, and working up to the day I went into labor, I was able to take 12 weeks off with pay when I had D.  When I had N, less than 3 years later, there was no way I could have saved up enough leave -- and I was better off than most second-time parents, as T was staying home with D, so I didn't have to use up sick days when he was sick.

So, this bill both makes parenting significantly more manageable for federal employees, and also puts the federal government on record that parental leave is important.  And it even has a chance of being passed in both Houses.

WBR: Life Work

This week's book is Life Work, by Donald Hall.  When I agreed to review The Ten Year Nap, the blog tour organizers sent me links to some resources, including a review that said: "In fact, the novel, like poet Donald Hall's memoir "Life Work," is a passionate paean to the redeeming power of purposeful occupation."  This sent me off looking for Hall's book.

Life Work is a short book, really just an extended essay.  In unfussy but eloquent prose, Hall writes about his daily routine, and connects it to the lives of his ancestors, in particular his maternal grandfather, in whose house he lives.  For him, contentment is "work so engrossing that you do not know you are working," what others might call "flow."  He writes about waking up in the morning, wondering if it's close enough to 5 am that he can reasonably get up and start working on his poems.  He criticizes the idea that only what is paid should be considered valuable.

Hall writes with love about his ancestors, and their work, especially his grandparents who were farmers in a time and place where farmers could still do a bit of everything -- raise cows for dairy, chickens for pullets and eggs, maple syrup, enough vegetables to eat year round.  Except for buying store-bought cloth, their lives were closer to the prototype of the Ingalls family than to modern farmers.  And he contrasts them with his father, who spent his life doing the books for his family's dairy business, and hating every minute of it.

I still can't decide whether I believe that Hall's grandparents were as content with their lives of unremitting labor as he makes them out to be.  He writes that his grandmother had planned to be a medical missionary until her mother died, and then she set all those plans aside to keep house for her father and later her husband and children, without a word of complaint.  I think there's a difference between being not unhappy and being happy, and it's hard to know where they would have fallen.  And for all of Hall's romanticization of his grandparents' lives, he doesn't have any interest in taking up farming himself, unlike his friend Wendell Berry.

In any case, it's a lovely little book, filled with Hall's love for his work, his wife, and his family.

tomorrow

I've got a delightful little book that I want to blog about, but tonight's not the night.  I keep hitting refresh on CNN, but the percent counted doesn't seem to have gone up in the past hour...

Stupidest policies ever

In his quasi-blog* at The Atlantic, James Fallows asked whether anyone can name a more stupid policy that passed with bipartisan support during the last 50 years than the McCain-Clinton proposal for a gas-tax holiday.  His pick from the many submissions he received is the mandates and subsidies for corn-based ethanol.  The full list of popular submissions is worth reading -- Fallows notes that while some of them had worse effects than ethanol subsidies, in order to make the short list, a policy had to be obviously bad even without the benefits of hindsight.

The policy that I was surprised not to see on the list is the mortgage interest deduction, the one policy that everyone from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities to the American Enterprise Institute agrees is terrible policy.  It's expensive, regressive, and most people agree that it makes homeownership MORE expensive for the people likely to be on the margin between owning and renting.  I don't know if it misses the 50 year cut off, or if Fallows' readers are likely to be in the group that benefits from it, and so are blind to its faults.

What else would you put on the list?

*It's a quasi-blog because it doesn't allow comments.  This is clearly Fallows' choice rather than The Atlantic's because Yglesias has a real blog on their site.

BoltBus review

I took the BoltBus up to NYC and back this weekend, so thought I'd post a review.  This is unsolicited, and they didn't comp me anything.

Although you can't tell it from their website, BoltBus is actually run by Greyhound/Trailways.  It's their attempt to compete with the "Chinatown buses" which have been kicking their behinds over the past few years on the DC-NY and NY-Boston routes.  Like the Chinatown buses, it's very cheap -- I paid $35 round trip, but they're selling at least one seat on every trip for just $1 -- and doesn't require you to go to the bus terminal.  (The Port Authority isn't too bad in NYC, but the bus terminal in DC is several blocks from the metro, and not in the best of neighborhoods).

Unlikely the Chintown buses, on BoltBus, the seats are spread out enough to provide decent legroom, there are powerpoints for each pair of seats, and there's free wi-fi.  There are screens on the buses, but they didn't show movies on the trips I took, and it was blessedly quiet.  The buses are new and shiny -- in fact, the worst problem on my trip was one of the buses was so new that it stunk from the plastics outgassing.

I hate driving long distances, so even when gas was cheap, I'd almost never drive up to NYC by myself.  As a solo traveler, the question for me is whether the cost savings of a bus is worth the inconvenience compared to taking Amtrack.  Two years ago, the last time I took the bus to NYC, I took the bus one way, the train the other.  With these new buses, the "price" I pay in discomfort for taking the cheaper option has gotten a lot smaller.  (Note that I did go up Thursday and return Saturday -- I suspect the more crowded Friday and Sunday buses may be less comfortable.)

The bus is almost comfortable enough that I'd consider taking the boys on it, rather than driving as a family.  With the outlets, I could probably hypnotize them with the portable DVD player enough to keep them from being disruptive.  And between the cost of gas, tolls, and parking in NYC, busfare for three or four is somewhat cheaper than driving, even if we don't get the super-cheap fares.  But the boys are used to traveling by car, and being able to bring their own sleeping bags and suitcases, and I wouldn't want to deal with hauling all that on and off the bus.