The first car I ever bought -- with the assistance of my folks -- was also the only new car I have ever bought. The three successive vehicles to bear the label "Friarmobile" -- all Toyotas -- were purchased used. Which means I've not had to care for a long time about the fact that there's a whole lot that goes on in selling and buying a new car that's just flat-out icky.
Among those things is the fallacy behind the idea of "manufacturer's suggested retail price" or MSRP. Nearly every car commercial you will ever see offers new wheels at some significant number below MSRP. It helps create a sense of urgency for the buyer. The way the number gets used, one would believe that it's something the carmaker came up with that represents the cost of building the car, plus some profit margin. Therefore, sales that throw out such figures have to be very limited time offers, because otherwise no one would make any money and the dealer and manufacturer would go out of business.
Of course, most folks pay zero attention to car commercials except when they're buying, or more of us would notice that the cars seem to almost constantly be offered at some steep discount off MSRP. Which would again be economically impossible. If, that is, MSRP represented what its name suggests. But it doesn't.
For one, as Jack Baruth notes in this article at Hagerty, no one really knows how much it costs to make a car. Maybe some costs can be calculated, such as how much the manufacturer paid for the pieces it will assemble into a car, but many others can't. Trying to results in a mare's nest of interlocking expenses and such that has no real resolution. Just read the first few paragraphs of Baruth's article and you will see enough variables to make accountants close the spreadsheet and reach for the vodka.
I have family that buy new and like to buy whenever the warranty on their current vehicle runs out, since that puts them into the "Major repair costs" zone. To each his or her own, and it's not like I'm a canny wheeler-dealer that's made any salesman go home unhappy. But at least while I'm tooling around in my used-vehicle market, I'd like to think I'm being taken for less of a ride.
(H/T Dustbury)
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 2, 2019
Tuesday, March 19, 2019
Wisdom
Economist Don Boudreaux uses a metaphor about balls and strikes to describe the operation of the free market, suggesting that in a truly free market the consumer makes certain pitches "hits" by swinging at them and others "balls" by not swinging at them. The seller, or pitcher, can claim something should have been a strike, but from the point of view of the batter, if it had been a strike then he would have swung on it.
The point is a pretty good one and I'm rarely averse to a succinct explanation of the way the free market works, but my favorite piece of the post is the quote that Boudreaux lifts from a 2007 George Will column about a young pitcher facing St. Louis Cardinals great Rogers Hornsby:
The point is a pretty good one and I'm rarely averse to a succinct explanation of the way the free market works, but my favorite piece of the post is the quote that Boudreaux lifts from a 2007 George Will column about a young pitcher facing St. Louis Cardinals great Rogers Hornsby:
"Rogers Hornsby, who averaged .400 over five years, was facing a rookie pitcher who threw three pitches that he thought were strikes but that the umpire called balls. The rookie shouted a complaint to the umpire, who replied: 'Young man, when you throw a strike, Mr. Hornsby will let you know.'''
Monday, January 21, 2019
Cooperation
Today our nation honors the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the major forces in the civil rights movement during some of its toughest -- and in many ways most effective -- years.
Something that sometimes gets overlooked in reflecting on the struggle for civil rights was how segregation and racism disrupted so many basic human relationships. Extra drinking fountains so whites and blacks wouldn't mix. Separate areas for seating. Extra bathrooms in buildings. Refusal to serve a large chunk of the population and thus cutting off a significant source of revenue. I'd have never succeeded as a segregationist -- aside from recognizing it as evil, I'm way too lazy to go through all of that mess.
When you read about the civil rights movement, you see a variety of opinions. Some leaders wanted to focus solely on the political arena, and ensure African-Americans could exercise their right to vote and hold office. They thought that things like bus seats and lunch counters could come later. But the thing about doing business with people is that it doesn't take too long before whatever barriers custom and history put up get knocked down by plain ol' commerce.
And from there, it's barely a generation before community ties erode even the memory of the divided place of business: The diner founder refuses to serve black people. His son starts that way but new laws require him to serve everyone. And his son, if he thinks about segregation at all, shakes his head at how much money gramps let slip away by limiting himself to only part of the population.
P.J. O'Rourke, in an essay about the meaning of trade in American Consequences, references a 1958 pamphlet by an economist named Leonard Read, called I, Pencil - My Family Tree. It highlights how one of the simplest and most ubiquitous items on the planet is beyond the grasp of any one person to make from its most basic ingredients. Only through trade -- a formalized kind of cooperation involving money -- can pencils arrive in the hands of those who want them. Leaders like King saw that the more ties were forged across the barrier of skin tone, the more each race would understand it gained as a result. And commerce offered an abundance of opportunities for such cooperation.
Today voices on both sides of the melanin line talk more about separation and disunity than they do about a shared destiny and common ground. King's kind of voice is heard amid a lot of others, many much less irenic and unifying. It's cause for concern that we might lose some of the ground we gained as a nation through the efforts of civil rights leaders in the 1950s and 1960s. And we should keep an eye out for that kind of slippage.
In the end we might find ourselves saved by commerce and good ol' Adam Smith's invisible hand of self-interest. Because if bigotry resurfaces and someone somewhere decides they don't want to sell to someone of a particular race, they'll have a competitor who will be more than happy to do so -- whether from altruism or ugly naked greed. But sell they will. And they'll be the ones left in business.
Something that sometimes gets overlooked in reflecting on the struggle for civil rights was how segregation and racism disrupted so many basic human relationships. Extra drinking fountains so whites and blacks wouldn't mix. Separate areas for seating. Extra bathrooms in buildings. Refusal to serve a large chunk of the population and thus cutting off a significant source of revenue. I'd have never succeeded as a segregationist -- aside from recognizing it as evil, I'm way too lazy to go through all of that mess.
When you read about the civil rights movement, you see a variety of opinions. Some leaders wanted to focus solely on the political arena, and ensure African-Americans could exercise their right to vote and hold office. They thought that things like bus seats and lunch counters could come later. But the thing about doing business with people is that it doesn't take too long before whatever barriers custom and history put up get knocked down by plain ol' commerce.
And from there, it's barely a generation before community ties erode even the memory of the divided place of business: The diner founder refuses to serve black people. His son starts that way but new laws require him to serve everyone. And his son, if he thinks about segregation at all, shakes his head at how much money gramps let slip away by limiting himself to only part of the population.
P.J. O'Rourke, in an essay about the meaning of trade in American Consequences, references a 1958 pamphlet by an economist named Leonard Read, called I, Pencil - My Family Tree. It highlights how one of the simplest and most ubiquitous items on the planet is beyond the grasp of any one person to make from its most basic ingredients. Only through trade -- a formalized kind of cooperation involving money -- can pencils arrive in the hands of those who want them. Leaders like King saw that the more ties were forged across the barrier of skin tone, the more each race would understand it gained as a result. And commerce offered an abundance of opportunities for such cooperation.
Today voices on both sides of the melanin line talk more about separation and disunity than they do about a shared destiny and common ground. King's kind of voice is heard amid a lot of others, many much less irenic and unifying. It's cause for concern that we might lose some of the ground we gained as a nation through the efforts of civil rights leaders in the 1950s and 1960s. And we should keep an eye out for that kind of slippage.
In the end we might find ourselves saved by commerce and good ol' Adam Smith's invisible hand of self-interest. Because if bigotry resurfaces and someone somewhere decides they don't want to sell to someone of a particular race, they'll have a competitor who will be more than happy to do so -- whether from altruism or ugly naked greed. But sell they will. And they'll be the ones left in business.
Tuesday, January 8, 2019
Worst of Times, Best of Times?
Quite a few people bid adieu to 2018 with relish, rejecting it as a really bad year because of all of the bad news it produced. But, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof points out, there were a lot of reasons to think of 2018 as the best year in human history.
Kristof notes that rates of extreme poverty and things like child death were the lowest they have ever been -- and not just in developed countries: Around the whole world! As recently as the early 1980s, more than 40 percent of the people of the world lived in extreme poverty, making less than $2 per person per day. Adjusted for inflation, the figure in 2018: Ten percent.
This post at Threedonia shows some other statistics in the illustration and also references the Kristof article. The author notes that several of the things that combined to make 2018 a great year are parts of trends rather than one-off events, meaning that 2019 has a good shot at being even better. We might figure we've got reasons to gripe, considering that the majority of our elected leadership labors mightily to prove that brains, decent character and common sense are not job requirements. But when we think of the children who live to be 5 today who wouldn't have as few as 20 years ago, we might offer at least a grudging admission that for some folks, being born now is not the worst thing in the world.
Kristof notes that rates of extreme poverty and things like child death were the lowest they have ever been -- and not just in developed countries: Around the whole world! As recently as the early 1980s, more than 40 percent of the people of the world lived in extreme poverty, making less than $2 per person per day. Adjusted for inflation, the figure in 2018: Ten percent.
This post at Threedonia shows some other statistics in the illustration and also references the Kristof article. The author notes that several of the things that combined to make 2018 a great year are parts of trends rather than one-off events, meaning that 2019 has a good shot at being even better. We might figure we've got reasons to gripe, considering that the majority of our elected leadership labors mightily to prove that brains, decent character and common sense are not job requirements. But when we think of the children who live to be 5 today who wouldn't have as few as 20 years ago, we might offer at least a grudging admission that for some folks, being born now is not the worst thing in the world.
Monday, December 31, 2018
Unlearning
Scott Sumner, an economist at George Mason University, offers a case about why economics education shouldn't push behavioral economics so hard at an early stage of economics education.
"Behavioral economics" is apparently a blending of some basic economic theory with social science concepts that, at least as Sumner sees it, tends to dilute some of the essential economic information a basic econ course needs to teach. Instead, he said, the basic course should show students how data demonstrates that a lot of things that seem like they should make sense and work actually don't, and how economics can give someone a better idea of what really goes on.
I don't have nearly enough knowledge of the field to know whether or not all of the fallacies Sumner lists in his article are indeed fallacious, although I suspect he could offer some good data that show they are. What does resonate a little is that a big part of educating people is helping them unlearn things they know that aren't true. A person in my field spends a significant amount if his or her time doing exactly that -- probably more than once, and probably upon himself or herself as much as anyone else.
As in so many other fields, it's not that we don't know things. It's just that we know so many things that aren't so.
"Behavioral economics" is apparently a blending of some basic economic theory with social science concepts that, at least as Sumner sees it, tends to dilute some of the essential economic information a basic econ course needs to teach. Instead, he said, the basic course should show students how data demonstrates that a lot of things that seem like they should make sense and work actually don't, and how economics can give someone a better idea of what really goes on.
I don't have nearly enough knowledge of the field to know whether or not all of the fallacies Sumner lists in his article are indeed fallacious, although I suspect he could offer some good data that show they are. What does resonate a little is that a big part of educating people is helping them unlearn things they know that aren't true. A person in my field spends a significant amount if his or her time doing exactly that -- probably more than once, and probably upon himself or herself as much as anyone else.
As in so many other fields, it's not that we don't know things. It's just that we know so many things that aren't so.
Wednesday, December 5, 2018
Tariff Riff
I'd thought about using my fairly limited knowledge of economics -- ably assisted by Thomas Sowell -- to explain why President Trump's labeling himself a "Tariff Man" shows he don't get the trade thing very well.
But then Samford University professor Art Carden dreamed up some new words set to the tune of Billy Joel's "Piano Man," and I realized I didn't have to. Which was good, because that Sowell book is kind of heavy.
But then Samford University professor Art Carden dreamed up some new words set to the tune of Billy Joel's "Piano Man," and I realized I didn't have to. Which was good, because that Sowell book is kind of heavy.
Thursday, November 22, 2018
Monday, October 29, 2018
New and Improved
Well, the amount of rancor in public discourse and the general ugly tenor that seems to accompany cultural differences may make you believe we live in some pretty rotten times. Perhaps we do, and perhaps things some 30 years ago or so were nicer, and maybe even better.
Unless you're a kid looking for a store-bought Halloween costume. Then yesterday stinks and today rules, all the way.
(H/T JenX67)
Unless you're a kid looking for a store-bought Halloween costume. Then yesterday stinks and today rules, all the way.
(H/T JenX67)
Tuesday, October 2, 2018
Turn the Page
At long last, something returns from the dead that isn't a part of the most boring subgenre imaginable of entertainment, the zombie movie.
It's the independent bookstore, presumed dead or dying in the 1990s as Borders and Barnes & Noble stomped their massive inventories and extensive ordering potential into the market, overwhelming the small nooks and such that occupied downtown corners and repurposed houses.
But then Amazon killed Borders and has Barnes & Noble stuck in a corner of its own. And folks who want the experience of searching out a book that they might not have known they wanted to read find themselves committing the shocking act of leaving their homes and entering an actual building in order to browse or hunt down a potential purchase. The story at the link focuses on the openings of some new stores in Baltimore, but it's happening in other towns as well, and even the Bezos Brigade has dipped a toe into meat-space with a couple of brick and mortar stores with books printed on paper and everything.
There's not much hope for the United States Senate, but we may yet justify our country's continued existence by saving the bookstore.
It's the independent bookstore, presumed dead or dying in the 1990s as Borders and Barnes & Noble stomped their massive inventories and extensive ordering potential into the market, overwhelming the small nooks and such that occupied downtown corners and repurposed houses.
But then Amazon killed Borders and has Barnes & Noble stuck in a corner of its own. And folks who want the experience of searching out a book that they might not have known they wanted to read find themselves committing the shocking act of leaving their homes and entering an actual building in order to browse or hunt down a potential purchase. The story at the link focuses on the openings of some new stores in Baltimore, but it's happening in other towns as well, and even the Bezos Brigade has dipped a toe into meat-space with a couple of brick and mortar stores with books printed on paper and everything.
There's not much hope for the United States Senate, but we may yet justify our country's continued existence by saving the bookstore.
Thursday, December 21, 2017
Keep on Searching
Writing at The Sports Economist, Kurt Rotthoff outlines how the current playoff structure for bigtime college footbal's championship an easily be expanded to a 24-team field, adding only one more week of play.
Rotthoff suggests that current schedules would work just fine if conferences got rid of their own championship games and left an open week for the extra layer of playoff games.
Left unaddressed are all of the official and unofficial opinions brought up to tell us how a playoff is the only way we can determine an actual national champion. Rather than trying to figure out which two teams should play for the title, we'll have four teams to make sure the qualified teams get the chance to play.
But if Rotthoff is right, then not only is a four-team playoff inadequate, so would an eight-team playoff be. No, we need to have a 24-team playoff series in order to learn who the real national champion is.
Oh well. At least the players will all have useful degrees with good employment prospects.
Rotthoff suggests that current schedules would work just fine if conferences got rid of their own championship games and left an open week for the extra layer of playoff games.
Left unaddressed are all of the official and unofficial opinions brought up to tell us how a playoff is the only way we can determine an actual national champion. Rather than trying to figure out which two teams should play for the title, we'll have four teams to make sure the qualified teams get the chance to play.
But if Rotthoff is right, then not only is a four-team playoff inadequate, so would an eight-team playoff be. No, we need to have a 24-team playoff series in order to learn who the real national champion is.
Oh well. At least the players will all have useful degrees with good employment prospects.
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Unbelievable Precision
I'm not buying this Los Angeles Times article about how many jobs in the United States are at "high risk" of automation in the next 15 years or so.
It's not because I think it's some kind of "liberal media" cliché that's trying to talk about bleak economic news in order to get people thinking negatively about the current president. It's not because I think that jobs won't get phased out by innovation and advances in automation. It's not because I think that the story ran because the figures were less for Europe and all newspaper reporters have a goal of making America look bad. That's ridiculous.
No, I'm not buying it because the analysis firm that conducted the research and survey came up with a figure of 38 percent. Not a rounding number like 35 or 40. Nope. A precise oddball figure of 38. Which is also ridiculous. There's no way anyone could come up with that kind of number, whether the time frame is the next week or the next decade. If the analysts had said "a third," or "around a quarter" or even "more than two-fifths" that would sound like a reasonable guess or even aa reasonable result for speculative analysis.
But 38? Nah. Go back to the drawing board and come up with a vaguer answer. It's easy. Just look at the way politicians talk about budgets: The closer they get to exact dollar amounts the more nervous they are. Only when the talk turns to values like "several billion" or "almost a trillion" do they seem relaxed.
It's not because I think it's some kind of "liberal media" cliché that's trying to talk about bleak economic news in order to get people thinking negatively about the current president. It's not because I think that jobs won't get phased out by innovation and advances in automation. It's not because I think that the story ran because the figures were less for Europe and all newspaper reporters have a goal of making America look bad. That's ridiculous.
No, I'm not buying it because the analysis firm that conducted the research and survey came up with a figure of 38 percent. Not a rounding number like 35 or 40. Nope. A precise oddball figure of 38. Which is also ridiculous. There's no way anyone could come up with that kind of number, whether the time frame is the next week or the next decade. If the analysts had said "a third," or "around a quarter" or even "more than two-fifths" that would sound like a reasonable guess or even aa reasonable result for speculative analysis.
But 38? Nah. Go back to the drawing board and come up with a vaguer answer. It's easy. Just look at the way politicians talk about budgets: The closer they get to exact dollar amounts the more nervous they are. Only when the talk turns to values like "several billion" or "almost a trillion" do they seem relaxed.
Monday, February 27, 2017
Six Rings to Bankrupt Them All
Of all the lousy things that have happened to Venezuela over the last couple of decades, like Hugo Chavez and frequent visits from Sean Penn, it seems they have dodged at least one bullet: Their neighbor Brazil hosted the 2016 Olympics instead of them. And writing in USA Today, Nancy Armour sketches just how quickly the glory of the XXXI Olympiad has become a dingy Scooby-Doo set.
Armour lines up the International Olympic Committee as one of the culprits, as a culture of corruption and entitlement fuel explosive expansion of estimated Olympic venue costs. The Cato Institute's David Boaz details some of the significant cost overruns of recent games, with the most fiscally responsible edition being (of all places) the 2004 Athens games that only cost 60 percent more than the original estimates. When Greece sets the standard for your economic spending over the last 20 years, then your model has some flaws.
The system is so screwed up that even a losing bid costs money for years afterwards. Chicago was one of the candidates for the 2016 games, with then-President Barack Obama flying to Denmark in 2009 for the final IOC vote as a show of support. The IOC showed itself a little smarter than the national Democratic Party and recognized that while Mr. Obama was pretty fabulous at getting people to support himself, he was not so great a help for someone else. Chicago went out in the first round of voting, much to the surprise of CNN, which had a nice fancy countdown graphic set up and preparation for a whole morning of voting coverage.
In order to fund that bid, Chicago did things like rent its parking meters to a group of private companies. For seventy-five years. In order to lose in the first round of Olympic voting, the city gave up its share of parking revenues until the 100th anniversary of the Games of the XXIII Olympiad in 2084. The city used public funds to buy a hospital complex as a site for the Olympic Village -- land which is now valued at about 15% of the cost Chicago taxpayers laid out for it. But at least that'll be paid off 60 years before the city gets its parking meters back.
Boaz notes Anne Applebaum's suggestion that if this trend continues, then the only kinds of places that will compete to host Olympics are those where voters get to make choices like which tank will run them over during human rights demonstrations. Notably, the two remaining candidates for the 2022 Winter Olympics are China and Kazakhstan. So the choice before the IOC is to have yet another Olympics in a brutally repressive authoritarian country (the same one it did in 2008) or have it in a slightly less repressive authoritarian country but run the risk of Sacha Baron Cohen showing up every time they turn around.
My money's on Beijing. I think that, for all its thick-headed corruption, the IOC is aware that everyone already thinks it's a joke and they don't want to give them any help laughing.
Armour lines up the International Olympic Committee as one of the culprits, as a culture of corruption and entitlement fuel explosive expansion of estimated Olympic venue costs. The Cato Institute's David Boaz details some of the significant cost overruns of recent games, with the most fiscally responsible edition being (of all places) the 2004 Athens games that only cost 60 percent more than the original estimates. When Greece sets the standard for your economic spending over the last 20 years, then your model has some flaws.
The system is so screwed up that even a losing bid costs money for years afterwards. Chicago was one of the candidates for the 2016 games, with then-President Barack Obama flying to Denmark in 2009 for the final IOC vote as a show of support. The IOC showed itself a little smarter than the national Democratic Party and recognized that while Mr. Obama was pretty fabulous at getting people to support himself, he was not so great a help for someone else. Chicago went out in the first round of voting, much to the surprise of CNN, which had a nice fancy countdown graphic set up and preparation for a whole morning of voting coverage.
In order to fund that bid, Chicago did things like rent its parking meters to a group of private companies. For seventy-five years. In order to lose in the first round of Olympic voting, the city gave up its share of parking revenues until the 100th anniversary of the Games of the XXIII Olympiad in 2084. The city used public funds to buy a hospital complex as a site for the Olympic Village -- land which is now valued at about 15% of the cost Chicago taxpayers laid out for it. But at least that'll be paid off 60 years before the city gets its parking meters back.
Boaz notes Anne Applebaum's suggestion that if this trend continues, then the only kinds of places that will compete to host Olympics are those where voters get to make choices like which tank will run them over during human rights demonstrations. Notably, the two remaining candidates for the 2022 Winter Olympics are China and Kazakhstan. So the choice before the IOC is to have yet another Olympics in a brutally repressive authoritarian country (the same one it did in 2008) or have it in a slightly less repressive authoritarian country but run the risk of Sacha Baron Cohen showing up every time they turn around.
My money's on Beijing. I think that, for all its thick-headed corruption, the IOC is aware that everyone already thinks it's a joke and they don't want to give them any help laughing.
Wednesday, July 6, 2016
Earnings
Last October, Andy Kiersz of The Business Insider crunched some numbers and showed which profession in each state earned the most outsized annual salary compared to the national average for that profession.
For example, your annual salary if you are a welder in Alaska is 80 percent higher than the national average for welders. This doesn't mean that welders in the other 49 states all earn that much less than Alaskan welders. Some of them may earn almost as much. But when you do the math of averaging -- adding up all 50 and then dividing by 50, you get the lower figure, and the Alaska figure is 80 percent higher than that.
Some of the greatly higher figures make sense. People in the category "lifeguards, ski patrol and other recreational protective service workers" who work in Hawaii are probably a little more in demand than people in that same category in Nebraska, for example. So they can command higher salaries. The demand for logging operators in Idaho probably exceeds the demand for the same specialty in, say, Arizona, and so the salaries for such in Idaho are 39% higher than the national average.
Some of the figures explain a lot of things. Judges and magistrates in California make 62% above the national average for their profession, offering a pretty good hint as to why California is so screwed up. Tax examiners and collectors do better in Michigan and we now have some hints as to what's helped Detroit collapse. Some are predictive -- Colorado legislators earn 50% more than the national average for legislators, so Colorado is likely to be screwed up pretty soon.
Actually, as noted in this space before, comparing state legislative salaries across the country involves some apples and oranges that make the average a less informative figure than it might be. Some states pay their legislators a per diem and others only compensate for expenses with no base salary at all. And for the benefit of the campaign-by-meme crowd repeating that statistic, the profession in Oklahoma which pays the most above its national average is not legislator, but optometrist.
Rhode Island is the state where teachers do better vs. the national average than any other profession in the state, bringing home 77% more than that national average. For 2015, Rhode Island's students scored 25 points below the national average on the SAT. There's no way to know what if any correlation exists between those two facts, but it could at least hint that other factors than educator salaries affect student performance. And some of those factors might not be at all amenable to correction by legislation.
Some of the figures are head-scratchers. Why do gaming dealers in Kansas make close to 30% more than gaming dealers across the country? And why do "athletes and sports competitors" in Pennsylvania make 66% more than their profession's national average, given the performances of most Pennsylvania sports teams? Why do printing press operators in the District of Columbia make more than double their profession's national average -- perhaps printing all of those government regulations takes such a toll on a normal person's sense of logic and proportion that only extremely high pay can lure them in? And why do "insulation workers" rank as the most above-average salary for Illinois, when Chicago voters earn more per ballot than anyone else in the country?
Some questions, it seems, await more exploration.
For example, your annual salary if you are a welder in Alaska is 80 percent higher than the national average for welders. This doesn't mean that welders in the other 49 states all earn that much less than Alaskan welders. Some of them may earn almost as much. But when you do the math of averaging -- adding up all 50 and then dividing by 50, you get the lower figure, and the Alaska figure is 80 percent higher than that.
Some of the greatly higher figures make sense. People in the category "lifeguards, ski patrol and other recreational protective service workers" who work in Hawaii are probably a little more in demand than people in that same category in Nebraska, for example. So they can command higher salaries. The demand for logging operators in Idaho probably exceeds the demand for the same specialty in, say, Arizona, and so the salaries for such in Idaho are 39% higher than the national average.
Some of the figures explain a lot of things. Judges and magistrates in California make 62% above the national average for their profession, offering a pretty good hint as to why California is so screwed up. Tax examiners and collectors do better in Michigan and we now have some hints as to what's helped Detroit collapse. Some are predictive -- Colorado legislators earn 50% more than the national average for legislators, so Colorado is likely to be screwed up pretty soon.
Actually, as noted in this space before, comparing state legislative salaries across the country involves some apples and oranges that make the average a less informative figure than it might be. Some states pay their legislators a per diem and others only compensate for expenses with no base salary at all. And for the benefit of the campaign-by-meme crowd repeating that statistic, the profession in Oklahoma which pays the most above its national average is not legislator, but optometrist.
Rhode Island is the state where teachers do better vs. the national average than any other profession in the state, bringing home 77% more than that national average. For 2015, Rhode Island's students scored 25 points below the national average on the SAT. There's no way to know what if any correlation exists between those two facts, but it could at least hint that other factors than educator salaries affect student performance. And some of those factors might not be at all amenable to correction by legislation.
Some of the figures are head-scratchers. Why do gaming dealers in Kansas make close to 30% more than gaming dealers across the country? And why do "athletes and sports competitors" in Pennsylvania make 66% more than their profession's national average, given the performances of most Pennsylvania sports teams? Why do printing press operators in the District of Columbia make more than double their profession's national average -- perhaps printing all of those government regulations takes such a toll on a normal person's sense of logic and proportion that only extremely high pay can lure them in? And why do "insulation workers" rank as the most above-average salary for Illinois, when Chicago voters earn more per ballot than anyone else in the country?
Some questions, it seems, await more exploration.
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