January 2005

Ygelesias, among others, is skeptical of the various pro-reform social security calculators. My colleague Tim Lee responds. Here’s a bit:
More to the point, even if you grant all of Matt’s objections, personal accounts still end up doing better. I whipped up a little calculator of my own, which does the math in a [...]

Please cite by email or comments the best “bigthink” magazine and journal articles about social security reform. I’m especially interested in pieces that explore that claim that PRA’s, by creating a class of “worker capitalists,” will have a transformative effect on the economy, politics, society, and so forth. This is in my opinions the most [...]

Here are my results from Heritage’s Social Security Calculator:
You can expect to pay $350,881 in Social Security taxes over your working life for retirement and survivors benefits. For those taxes, you can expect to receive $2,467 a month in Social Security retirement benefits. Your rate of return under today’s Social Security is -3.56%.
However, if you [...]

Lynne Kiesling dismantles Christina Rosen’s Republic.com qualms about “egocasting.” Check it out.
The issue of informational fragmentation and social coherence is an issue I’m putting on the “to do” list. Hmm, I guess I really should have a bigthink “to do” list. No doubt it is too much, and too hard, for me to do. So [...]

As you probably know, I’m a critic of development aid. Why? Well, for one thing (and there are many other things), it’s a massive waste of money. For a taste, let me quote myself quoting William Easterly in an article I wrote a while back on globalization and capitalism (or just skip down to the [...]

I’ve become frustrated with what I’ll call the “forecasting” debate over social security. And my frustration has turned around into an additional argument against the PAYGO system.
It is now clear to me that the forecasting debate works by choosing your favored assumptions about growth, aging, immigration, etc., extrapolating into the future, and then arguing [...]

I have only begun to plumb the depths of Cato’s resources on Social Security. In the process, I ran across this excellent paper, “The Moral Case for Social Security Privatization,” by Daniel Shapiro. It turns out that Danny made most of the arguments I’ve been trying to formulate back in 1998. It’s time for this [...]

I really liked this Jonathan Rauch piece in National Journal. His conclusion:
The 2004 exit polls suggested, to many conservatives, that “moral values” won the election for Bush. It may seem odd, then, that his boldest post-election priority is not abortion or gay marriage or schools, but Social Security. The key to the paradox is that [...]

Will and Amber and playing a fun game, this is what I got:
Stormy Weather, Jimmy Luxury & the Tommy Rome Orchestra
Options, Pedro the Lion
Highly Evolved, The Vines
Tears Are in Your Eyes, Yo La Tengo
If We Can Land a Man On The Moon Then Surely I Can Win Your Heart, Beulah
Gotta Get Away, The Offspring
Joe #1, [...]

I’ve just returned from the President’s well-staged event kicking off the administration’s push for social security personal accounts. I’ve got a lot to do, so no analysis now. I’ll just say that I think Bush is hitting the right notes.

Mike Munger, chair of the political science department at Duke, has a nice article over at the Library of Economics and Liberty about what democracy is and is not.

Ain’t ideology grand? Laura Kipnis:
Heterosexuality always was the Achilles heel of feminism because the asymmetries involved usually took the form of adequacy for one sex, inadequacy for the other. And so things seem to remain: You may hear a lot of tough talk about empowerment and independence in women’s culture today, except you hear it [...]