Labor Day Musings

* The state of labor in one chart:

The failure of businesses to share productivity increases with their workers starting in the early 1970s is the root cause of a lot of the current political reality in the United States. In my view, the decline of private sector union membership is more a product of declining worker economic power than a cause of this shift, but that's an open question in economics.

* The number of immigrants in the U.S. labor force has fallen by 1.2 million since Trump started his second term. According to the Wall Street Journal: "With zero net immigration, Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok estimates, the U.S. economy would be able to sustainably add only about 24,000 nonfarm jobs a month, compared with an average 155,000 from 2015 through 2024."

Agriculture (overwhelmingly in "red America") in the U.S. is particularly suffering both due to tariffs and due to the immigration crackdown that is cutting into the agricultural labor workforce. Nebraska and Iowa saw their state GDPs fall at an annualized rate of 6.1% in the first quarter of 2025.  Those tariffs were found to be mostly illegal by the U.S. Court of International Trade in a ruling affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in a 7-4 ruling. The effect of the ruling is on hold until mid-October pending a petition for certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court which has consistently ruled in favor of Trump despite his weak legal arguments.

The anti-immigrant fervor is driven by two main factors: (1) the economic stagnation of working age men without any college education who native born white men attribute to immigrants, international trade, and civil rights for women and minorities, and (2) the fear of white protestants in places with few immigrants that their culture will cease to be dominant.

* Courts in India are very slow.

[I]n one recent example a Delhi court concluded a property dispute after 66 years. Both the original litigants were dead. Still, the lawyer for one of the warring parties cautioned that the conclusion was in fact not the end, as the ruling would be appealed.

Three years ago, after pondering a dispute for 16 years, the supreme court sent back a 60-year-old land case for fresh adjudication to a lower court, which had already taken over 30 years to give its judgment in 2006.

A 2021 study of Mumbai real estate found that more than a quarter of the projects under planning or construction and 43 per cent of all “built-up spaces” in the city were under some litigation. My apartment block was one of them.

…One of the reasons for this accumulation is human resources. India has around 16 judges per million people, compared to over 150 for the US. In 2016, the issue brought the country’s chief justice, TS Thakur, to tears during a speech as he requested that the government hire more judges to wade through the “avalanche” of backlog.

For what it is worth, there are far fewer judges per capita in the U.S. than in Europe, even though the total number of legally trained professionals in the U.S. and in Europe per capita are similar.

The lack of state capacity in the area of courts means that property and contract rights and other forms of private law are weaker, which is bad for the economy.

* Adults in the U.S. are having sex less often (the decline is at least as great among high school students). It is basically a coincidence, but my children were conceived right around "peak sex" in the recent history of the United states.

* Wildfires are at record high in Europe due to climate change.

* The U.S. housing market is starting to favor smaller single family homes again after a peak in roughly 2014. Single family houses in the U.S. are still, on average, much larger than they were 30 years ago.

* A mere 6.0 magnitude earthquake in Afghanistan, shortly before midnight on August 31, 2025, was enough to cause at least 800 deaths and 2500 injuries.

* "Flukewarm": That feeling when you're reluctant to make a recipe, because the last time you made it, it came out perfectly. But it was a fluke, you're not sure what you did right, and you're worried you won't be able to repeat your past success.

* Last Saturday, I went to a store to buy a blind spot warning system for my car. They weren't available in 2015 when I bought it. But, I couldn't. Tariffs have delays shipments of cars parts like that one by more than a month and have greatly increased the price of those parts.

* As our country devolves into a civil war, ICE agents in unmarked cars wearing masks and not displaying their badges are unlawful combatants, and are thus they are not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions. Instead, they are terrorists who are not entitled to the protections of legitimate combatants under the laws of war. They also aren't entitled to the peacetime protections and privileges of law enforcement officers.

* Rhode Island has the lowest state murder rate in the United States. Louisiana has the highest (or very nearly so) and has about ten times as many murders per capita.

* The lion's share of the counties in the U.S. with life expectancies lower than North Korea are (1) in the South and majority black or nearly so, (2) include Indian Reservations (or the Alaskan equivalent), or (3) are in Appalachia. The outliers are still in the South.

* Non-U.S. central banks are substituting gold for U.S. Treasury Bonds.

* The U.K. electrical wall plug design is safer than the U.S. design.

* People are dying on overloaded boats trying to emigrate from Gambia (in West Africa) to Europe. "More Than 130 People Are Feared Dead in West Africa Boat Tragedy: Around 150 people boarded a boat in Gambia that was thought to have been headed for Europe. The boat capsized after traveling about 380 miles."

* A judge ordered Alligator Alcatraz in Florida closed on the petition of an Indian tribe with an interest in the land, because an environmental impact statement wasn't done. The debacle cost $250 million. All detainees at the location which was inhuman and defective have been moved to other detention centers in Florida.

* Finland (which is the source of about half of my genetic ancestry) is a genetic outlier in Europe (for reasons that are well understood and closely related to the fact that it is also a linguistic outlier). 23andme was able to correctly pinpoint the place of origin of my Finnish ancestors to a region about the size of a U.S. county. The other half of my ancestry (which I know to some detail due to genealogy) is basically a European mutt that can't be localized from genetics much at all.

Other places with significant Uralic populations, Basque country, historically Celtic areas (despite the putative cultural origin of the Celts in the vicinity of Czechia which is being used as a baseline in the chart above), and places with significant Islamic migration since the 700s CE, also stand out in  this map. Sardinia is the closest modern match to the genetics of Europe prior to the arrival of the Indo-Europeans.

* It doesn't take a history genius to understand why South America, in general, and Argentina, in particular, has so much Italian ancestry (to a significant extent, because a lot of Italian Nazis fled there after World War II).

* The Holocaust has an immense effect:

* New Mexico is, by a variety of measures like education and poverty, much more like red states than blue states. But it has stayed blue because the GOP has historically made its Hispanic and Native American residents feel unwelcome and tried to persecute them. 

Utah is, by a variety of measures like education and poverty, much more like blue states than red states. But, its predominantly Mormon religion's conservative tenets have kept it out of the Democratic party fold.

* The cost of living is about 30% greater in the highest cost of living states in the U.S. than in the lowest cost of living state (Arkansas). Most of the difference is due to real estate prices.

* A plausible observation:

* Louisiana still hasn't recovered from Hurricane Katrina twenty years ago. It permanently reduced the population of the state, and of New Orleans, in particular (predominantly due to migration away from it, not due to the fatalities themselves).

* Almost every country in Western Europe has supplied Ukraine with military equipment. So have quite a few other countries (mostly in what could be called the Western European diaspora).

* Most of North America was once home to Buffalo, although the size of the herds may have been exceptionally large because the Native American populations that hunted them were decimated by European diseases not long before European migrants first documented them.

* Almost all of the land on Earth was connected about 200 million years ago.

* Republicans in Congress have grown less likely to have attended elite universities (while Democrats have grown more likely to have done so), mirroring the shift in college educated people towards the Democratic party.

* Data centers v. office building construction.

* Soil quality in Europe.

* Firefighting employment in Europe.

The U.S. figure is 0.2% (there are about 1.019 million firefighters out of 163.3 million employees, but two-thirds of them, who are not included in the 0.2%, are volunteers). This is similar to the European average.

* The twenty years from 1807 to 1827 did a lot to shape the political map of the Americas.

* Squirrels v. people.

* Women didn't start wearing underwear (i.e. panties and bras) in Europe until the 19th century, for the most part.

* Modern musical notation was invented by a Benedictine monk, Guido of Arezzo in 1025 CE and he also invented the Do-Re-Me system. Recognizable modern musical notation is older than Middle English.

* Billionaires have lower effective tax rates than the upper middle class and even less than for the average person.

We estimate income and taxes for the wealthiest group of US households by matching Forbes 400 data to the individual, business, estate, and gift tax returns of the corresponding group in 2010–2020. In our benchmark estimate, the total effective tax rate—all taxes paid relative to economic income—of the top 0.0002% (approximately the “top 400”) averaged 24% in 2018–2020 compared with 30% for the full population and 45% for top labor income earners. 

This lower total effective tax rate on the wealthiest is substantially driven by low taxable individual income relative to economic income. First, the C-corporations owned by the wealthiest distributed relatively little in dividends, limiting their individual income tax unless they sell their stocks. Second, top-owned passthrough businesses reported negative taxable income on average in spite of positive book income, further limiting their individual income tax. The top-400 effective tax rate fell from 30% in 2010–2017 to 24% in 2018–2020, explained both by a smaller share of business income being taxed and by that income being subject to lower tax rates. 

Estate and gift taxes contributed relatively little to their effective tax rate. Top-400 decedents paid 0.8% of their wealth in estate tax when married and 7% when single. Annual charitable contributions equalled 0.6% of wealth and 11% of economic income in 2018–20.

* Japan has the lowest housing prices in its major metropolitan areas of any comparable cities in the world. It isn't clear to me how much of this is due to lax land use laws arising from handling that function at a regional level rather than locally, and how much of this is due to its low birthrates and modest immigration rates.