Classy...

The NY Times online offers a fascinating dissection of socioeconomic class in America. It offers you an opportunity to determine how you fit in, percentile-wise, to our society based on income, education, occupation, and accumulated wealth. There are also graphical breakdowns of class by quintile, income mobility, and what people think.

Aside from the intrigue of quantifying exactly how you should feel about yourself (what a wonderful time to be alive!), I found the most interesting section to be the series of slides on income mobility - make sure you click "next" to cycle through them all. The "income elasticity" portion shows exactly how great a handicap being poor in America is: a child born to parents in the bottom fifth is only expected to make about 60% of the national average income, and children three generations removed from poor parents still are barely expected to make 90% of average. Country-wise, American families are roughly as economically mobile as British, but much less mobile than France, Canada, or Denmark.

It's safe to assume that class mobility is desirable in modern society. The more highly mobile society is, the more people will be rewarded for their own merits, abilities, and accomplishments rather than those of their parents (or parents' parents). In this light, lagging behind most "progressive" industrialized countries, the conservative push to repeal the estate tax seems especially ludicrous. After all, the estate tax is essentially a tool to level out society and prevent development of a permanent economic aristocracy. Without it, none of Bill Gates' descendants, to take an extreme example, would need to work for at least 50 generations (1200 years!) of decadence.

Anecdotally, the findings of this study seem pretty intuitive. For a math dork like me, though, it's interesting to see it in numbers.

Links for this morning

Some links while pondering the difference between Islamic and Western society...
Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic compares the "enhanced interrogation" techniques used in the war on terror to those used by the Gestapo. Most fascinating are the political justifications for the use of torture and the judgements handed down during the 1948 War Crimes trials.

Slate says that evangelical teens do it sooner and do it more often. Anybody surprised?

Dubya wants the U.S. to stay in Iraq for 50 years. Isn't that setting a timeline? I think the terrorists will be emboldened in the months leading up to May 2057...

Is it possible for the front half of a bus to take a left while the back half takes a right?
So Kobe demanded a trade from the Lakers... or did he? SG examines some of the possible trade scenarios, from least likely to most.

A group of investors that includes Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is planning to start the United Football League, a fall competitor to the NFL that will play on Friday nights. My view? More football = better, although I can't see the UFL succeeding unless the owners all are willing to take multimillion dollar losses for about the first 10 years. The NFL's TV deals make it too rich to be overtaken directly.

Also... the front page center headline of The Somerville News, a local free newspaper: "Parade Attracks Thousands". We wonder why other countries don't respect us...

So this is it...

I've finally started a blog. For me, this represents the final step of a distinct evolution in the way I view blogs.

-When I first heard of the idea, several years ago, I thought: "Why would anybody want to put their diary on the internet... isn't this just amateur voyeurism?"
-I gradually began to think it was a good idea, allowing the dissemination of ideas outside the mainstream media, but remained slightly confused as to how to discover blogs that were relevant to my interests. After all, there's no real internet directory.
-Within the last year or two, I began to add a few blogs (such as deadspin.com and democraticunderground.com) to my daily reading schedule.
-I began sending out emails every day to friends and family to tell them about funny, thought-provoking, or just plain weird stuff I ran across on the internets.
-Last fall, I experimented with carrying around a small notebook to write down the random things I think about. It worked for a little while, but didn't last, because stuff written on paper is so much less accessible than the searchable, sortable world of comuters.
-Eventually, I realized that it would be easier just to do a blog myself.

So that's that. Now I have a blog. Mostly, I think, it will just provide a place for me to put random, interesting links and collect my thoughts. Maybe it can provide a glimpse inside my madness ("Doin' fine"). We'll see how it works out.