Some Notes on Women in Sports.

Last weekend was an eventful one in La Casa de Gringo as Daughter #1 competed in the state gymnastics meet.

You might believe, as I used to, that gymnastics was the sport of skinny, rich white girls. Au contraire. You will not find many Priuses with Obama/Biden bumper stickers in the parking lot outside of gymnastics meet here in AZ (although you will find some.) And inside you will find a diversity of races, ethnicities, and "body shapes" competing.

What I haven't quite figured out is why parents pay 100's of dollars per month for their daughters to practice and compete in a sport with such an opaque scoring system. There does seem to be some system behind since since the scores tend to be, to use some jargon from the field of measurement, Reliable. Scores for a gymnast tend to be consistent from match to match and from even to event. However, there always seem to be one or two judgments that cause a range of reactions from puzzled shrugs and muttering to speculation and rumor about certain judges having a bias against a gymnast or team.

Often I have advised Daughter #1 to take up a sport like soccer. Not only is it cheaper, but the scoring is more self-evident. Then something like this happens.

Nearly two weeks later, the University of New Mexico soccer player Elizabeth Lambert said she still could not fully explain what led her to yank an opponent from Brigham Young down by her ponytail in what has become a highly publicized incident of violent behavior.

I will attempt to establish some progressive, sensitive bona fides on my part by stating that Ms. Lambert is getting a bum rap because she is a woman. I doubt that Thierry Henry is issuing abject apologies or seeing a clinical psychologist due to his act of gamesmanship (ie cheating) in a game with much, much higher stakes.

(Click on the link. I wonder what Mark Steyn would have to say about the picture of the five players from the French team at the top of the article, and this paragraph that ends it:

In France, which ruled Algeria until it became independent in 1962, Algeria’s victory was greeted with celebrations in Marseille and Paris, which have large Algerian populations. People were hanging from cars, honking horns and waving the Algerian flag along the Champs-Élysées.

Actually, I don't wonder that much.)

At the restaurant where we had the victory pizza on Saturday (La Famiglia in Chandler, very good) a Pop Warner football team was also having their post-game lunch. Accompanying them were several girls (sisters I suppose) dressed as cheerleaders.

It reminded me of something James Michener wrote criticising how many parents would prefer their daughters to act as accessories to a men's sport as cheerleaders, instead of participating in a sport themselves.

Before you yell at James Michener or me, know two things.

First I am well aware that cheerleading has become more than just a sideshow to mens sports. I have watched an entire episode of "King of the Hill" devoted to this phenomenon.

Second, when I told Daughter #1 that I preferred that she not be a cheerleader she assured me that she didn't want to be since cheerleaders are mean and stuck up--as demonstrated by nearly every show on the Disney channel and ABC family. In tween literature and movies, vampires get more sympathetic treatment than cheerleaders.

Far from being mean or stuck up, these girls were clearly indicated that they wanted to make my daughter's acquaintance, first by staring at her, then approaching her they way Al Gore walked up to George W back in that debate in 2000. While adults will check each other out with furtive glances, children, especially girls, are not shy about showing interest in someone or some thing. Both Gringo daughters will stare like a pointer dog if they see a child or toy that catches their interest.

Uncle Tom's Cabin--by Harriet Beecher Stowe. (In my continued effort to make up for the liberal arts education that I missed.)


Modern depictions of slavery in America see it through a lens ground in the Holocaust, so there is heavy emphasis the racism and brutality. To be sure there is racism and brutality in Stowe's book, but it's emphasis is on its impact on families, especially mothers. Slavery is living death. If you were a slave, at any time--coming back from the field or waking up in the morning--you could find your child or spouse gone forever, her whereabouts unknown.


This approach gives the book a deeper, more universal impact than mere graphic descriptions of whips, dogs, and chains. Not everyone is a member of a persecuted minority, or has been hounded by a genocidal regime. Most of us, however, are members of families, have children, and might have even lost a loved one. Imagine living in a system where you could lose a wife or a child at someone else's whim without even having the chance to say goodbye.


(Is praising this book politically incorrect? It's up front religion probably has diminished how frequently it's assigned these days.)


There are still three good reasons to read this book.


1. It contains cultural references that still have not yet disappeared (Eliza's escape over the ice floes.)


2. It provides insight on the passions behind that great national calamity that took place nearly 150 years ago. It will give Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, or anything you read or see about the Civil War, greater context, meaning, and impact.


3. You don't have to be elected President and travel the world making grovelling apologies to acknowledge that as a nation of human beings, the U.S. has not always been perfect, nor always in the right. Reading the book you will be chagrined to realize that for some part of our history, Canada was actually the land of the free. (If you want even more unfavorable comparisons to the Great White North, rent The 49th Parallel.)

Misperceptions About the Magnitude and Timing of Changes inAmerican Income Inequality by Robert J. Gordon

The rise in American inequality has been exaggerated both in magnitude and timing. Commentators lament the large gap between the growth rates of real median household income and of private sector productivity. This paper shows that a conceptually consistent measure of this growth gap over 1979 to 2007 is only one-tenth of the conventional measure.

By some measures inequality stopped growing after 2000 and by others inequality has not grown since 1993. This cessation of inequality's secular rise in 2000 is evident from the growth of Census mean vs. median income, and in the income share of the top one percent of the income distribution. The income share of the 91st to 95th percentile has not increased since 1983, and the income ratio of the 90th to 10th percentile has barely increased since 1986. Further, despite a transient decline in labor's income share in 2000-06, by mid-2009 labor's share had returned virtually to the same value as in 1983, 1991, and 2001.

Recent contributions in the inequality literature have raised questions about previous research on skill-biased technical changeand the managerial power of CEOs. Directly supporting our theme of prior exaggeration of the rise of inequality is new research showing that price indexes for the poor rise more slowly than for the rich, causing most empirical measures of inequality to overstate the growth of real income of the rich vs. the poor. Further, as much as two-thirds of the post-1980 increase in the college wage premium disappears when allowance is made for the faster rise in the cost of living in cities where the college educated congregate and for the lower quality of housing in those cities. A continuing tendency for life expectancy to increase faster among the rich than among the poor reflects the joint impact of education on both economic and health outcomes, some of which are driven by the behavioral choices of the less educated.

In other words, all that money earned by the creative class is blown on rents for teeny apartments, $5.00 lattes, and trips to Home Depot. To live well, learn a trade and move to El Mirage.

Better persons than I.

Olberman, Krugman, Pelosi, and their fellow travelers may have undisguised hatred and contempt for tea-partiers, 9/12er's, and conservatives and Republicans in general, but you can say this for them: they are willing to pay more taxes to provide the objects of their fear and loathing health insurance.

Muzak. Shopping at Fry's around noon for tripe and oxtails with Mrs. Gringo and what's playing from the store speakers? "I Wanna Be Sedated" by the Ramones. Man, I must be getting old.

But not as old as most of the people shopping at Fry's at noon on a weekday. They probably listened to Sinatra, Elvis, and maybe the Beatles when they were as old as I was when I bought "Rocket to Russia."

Check out my new blog at Mvcho Books.

Save Taxpayers Money, Get Off Your Fat A** and Start Smoking!

Understanding the Economic Consequences of Shifting Trends inPopulation Health by Pierre-Carl Michaud, Dana Goldman, Darius Lakdawalla, Yuhui Zheng, Adam Gailey - Together, the reduction in smoking and the rise in obesity have increased net public-sector liabilities by $430bn, or approximately 4% of the current debt burden. Larger effects are observed for specific public programs: annual spending is 10% higher in the Medicaid program, and 7% higher for Medicare.

By the same authors!

International Differences in Longevity and Health and theirEconomic Consequences

In 1975, 50 year-old Americans could expect to live slightly longerthan their European counterparts. By 2005, American life expectancy at that age has diverged substantially compared to Europe. We find that this growing longevity gap is primarily the symptom of real declines in the health of near-elderly Americans, relative to theirEuropean peers. In particular, we use a microsimulation approach to project what US longevity would look like, if US health trends approximated those in Europe. We find that differences in health can explain most of the growing gap in remaining life expectancy. In addition, we quantify the public finance consequences of this deterioration in health. The model predicts that gradually moving American cohorts to the health status enjoyed by Europeans could saveup to $1.1 trillion in discounted total health expenditures from 2004to 2050.

What is the probability your vote will make a difference?

by Andrew Gelman, Nate Silver, Aaron Edlin

The states where a single vote was most likely to matter are New Mexico,Virginia, New Hampshire, and Colorado, where your vote had an approximate 1 in 10 million chance of determining the nationalelection outcome. On average, a voter in America had a 1 in 60 million chance of being decisive in the presidential election.

Big Business: Big Government's Co-Dependent Enabler.

Why Can Modern Governments Tax So Much? An Agency Model of Firms as Fiscal Intermediaries by Henrik Jacobsen Kleven, Claus Thustrup Kreiner, Emmanuel Saez

This paper presents a simple agency model to explain why third-party income reporting by employers dramatically improves income tax enforcement. We embed the agency model into a simple macroeconomic growth model wherethe size of firms grows with exogenous technological progress. In early stages of development, firms are small, tax rates are severely constrained by enforcement, and the size of government is too small. As firm size increases, the enforcement constraint is slackened, and government size is growing. In late stages of development, firm size is sufficiently large to make third-party tax enforcement completely effective and government size is socially optimal.

How smart is Snoopy?

Not very...

Not as bad as they say...

Low Life Expectancy in the United States: Is the Health CareSystem at Fault?

by Samuel H. Preston, Jessica Y. Ho -

Life expectancy in the United States fares poorly in nternationalcomparisons, primarily because of high mortality rates above age 50. Its low ranking is often blamed on a poor performance by the healthcare system rather than on behavioral or social factors. This paperpresents evidence on the relative performance of the US health caresystem using death avoidance as the sole criterion. We find that, bystandards of OECD countries, the US does well in terms of screeningfor cancer, survival rates from cancer, survival rates after heartattacks and strokes, and medication of individuals with high levelsof blood pressure or cholesterol. We consider in greater depthmortality from prostate cancer and breast cancer, diseases for whicheffective methods of identification and treatment have been developedand
where behavioral factors do not play a dominant role. We show that the US has had significantly faster declines in mortality from these two diseases than comparison countries. We conclude that thelow longevity ranking of the United States is not likely to be aresult of a poorly functioning health care system.

The Obamatroids made the mistake of scaring the public by contemplating meddling with people's health care once they got inside the doctor's office. Most Americans have no problem with what happens once they get in the door. It's getting in the door that worries them.