I think the intention of the graph is to illustrate that the unemployment rate for men has increased at about twice the rate as the unemployment rate for women. And it's successful.
255 karma · joined June 26, 2009
And even in absolute numbers, there are far, far more than 20% more men than women who are unemployed. It's the unemployment _rate_ for which the figure for men is about 20-ish% more than the rate for women.
Even anti-redistributionists acknowledge that taking 10% of the income of someone making $5e5 will reduce that person's lifestyle less than taking 10% of someone making $35k. I think the issue is more that this isn't the case -- the 500,001st dollar is taxed at a much higher rate than the 35,001st dollar.
And even though no more dinosaur juice is being made (nobody seems to think the abiogenic theory is worth anything) we certainly could have the use of more oil: if the right Fischer Tropsch catalyst is found and/or if we figure out how to drill deeper and/or get more out of the existing fields.
The solutions for peak oil, global warming, etc are extremely costly. For example, the Waxman-Markey bill would impose significant indirect regulatory costs in addition to making electricity substantially more expensive (http://rollcall.com/news/36393-1.html?type=printer_friendly). For example, buying smaller, fuel-efficient cars will lead to more fatalities (http://iihs.org/externaldata/srdata/docs/sr4404.pdf).
The cost of being wrong leading to misallocation of resources is being poorer, less competitive globally, and deader. It may indeed be worthwhile to pursue these mandated-change initiatives anyway since being right means being relatively rich, competitive, and alive, but the downside costs are certainly real. Just because the author grows some of his own food and enjoys bicycling and thus his behavior when wrong looks very much like his behavior when right doesn't mean that he and everyone else wouldn't be bearing the diffuse costs of being expensively wrong.
"This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years." (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/28/international/americas/28c...)
We don't just punt money into Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc -- we exchange it for oil which we then use productively. By definition, if we didn't want the oil more than the money (or anything else we could get for that money) we wouldn't make the deal. How does it increase the total efficiency to coerce people into spending money on X instead of Y if when they have their druthers they clearly prefer Y?
You can make the argument that we are in a sort of local maximum and that in the long run, tolerating this inefficiency is worthwhile because it would lead to the changing of the surface such that we can find an even better maximum. Could be. All I'm saying is that it's complex and monolithic technocratic solutions are doomed.
See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01... for the story about how the pilots union hated the retirement age limit until a bunch of younger pilots started joining the union. All of a sudden the upstarts had the majority vote and lo and behold, the age limits are imposed.
Certification of pilots is not imposed out of a desire to assure safety; it's because the lawmakers are lobbied by the pilots themselves.
Journalists would also love to be licensed, that way that upstart rapscallion Drudge and those dastardly blogs would stop eating into their business.
Ask Richard Jewell if misguided/malicious journalists matter.
This is why Bjorn Lomborg is reviled: not because he doubts that anthropogenic global warming is for real, but because he has the temerity to suggest that the cure (spending a kajillion dollars to achieve relatively small changes in climate) may be worse than the disease. See http://www.ted.com/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global_prioritie....
And dancing about, declaring that the science is settled, and claiming to know the One True Solution to something as inherently complex as climate is indicative of failure to understand the science, which leads to politically motivated footballs like this: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/25/source-inside-epa-conf...
See sections 27C.2 and 27C.3.