How 'real' are real (vs nominal) prices/wages?

Whichever economist decided to call inflation-adjusted price and wage figures 'real' values had a real bad idea. It's a bit like calling an era 'modern' - what do you call your next degree of refinement?

I recently listened to a debate on the American economy where much was made of whether the average 'real' wage had increased since the seventies, and also watched a video by one of the participants (Horwitz) where he discusses cost of living; allowing for inflation (or change in average industrial wage); and the difficulty that the underlying products being priced change radically over time. Horwitz focuses on how the car you buy today is wildly different than a car from 80 years ago, so for only a few more hours of labour you can buy a much more useful car.

The next day I read this book review which quotes Christopher B. Leinberger's calculation that the need to buy a car adds about $135,000 to the effective cost of the average suburban house (in 2005 America). How do you factor that into your inflation calculation? You get more benefit, but you are also more dependent. I believe this is meant to be accounted for by the scope of the basket of goods used to calculate inflation, but the number of estimates and approximations starts to make the mind reel.

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ps. If you're wondering what the 'nominal' prices/wages mentioned in my title are, they are just the actual dollar values spent/earned at the time of spending/earning; the original numbers before any adjustment.

Also, hat tip to Chris Blattman for putting me onto the blog where I found Horwitz, which I hope will give me some 'Austrian' economist perspectives that I have lacked exposure to thus far.

Cool patterns!

During the recent cold snap I noticed something strange about my shampoo:

The white patches are where the shampoo's frozen! They're not quite solid, but they're definitely significantly firmer than usual. I think the pattern they make looks really cool :-) However, a few days later when the whole bottle had turned white, I realised I needed to keep my shampoo somewhere warmer for the duration. Solid shampoo is a lot harder to get out of a squeezy bottle than the liquid kind!

Microwave hotspots

Inspired by this post my brother spotted, the other day I found out where the hotspots are in our microwave.

I started with four poppadoms:

After about 15 seconds there was ring of cooked poppadom a bit shy of the outer edge of the rotating plate:

At 30 seconds the poppadoms were mostly cooked, but there were three curious dolphin-shaped uncooked patches, one of which included the centre of the rotating plate:

How did that happen??  It must be something to do with the intersection of the rotating speed of the plate and the peaks of the microwave waves as they bounce around the inside of the oven, but who knows what.

After a full minute all four poppadoms were beautifully cripsy, with only a few tiny spots retaining their uncooked plastickyness:

On the whole, it looks like our microwave cooks a whole lot more evenly than any of the four in the original post, but I'm interested to know that the strongest heat is to be found just shy of the edge of the rotating plate.  I'll bear that in mind next time I want to melt something small (e.g. a few spoonfuls of butter for baking): putting it near the edge should make it melt noticeably quicker!

Plus, it was fun to act like a scientist again :-)

Allowing God the centre

In recent months, something has begun to change in how I see God's role in my life.  Doing what God wants has always been very important to me and has already influenced a number of aspects of how I live day to day.  However, I've recently come to think that what God really wants is to be the centre of my life.  Absolutely everything I do ought to be shaped by and flow from that centre.
What does that mean?

I'm not all that sure yet.  For some people it means living a quite unusual life, such as the life of a hermit or of a wandering preacher.  But without a specific call to do so, it seems to me wrong to let go of the income, house etc. that you rely on to stay alive, or even to let go of the things that make you happy.  On the pragmatic side, I've recently had it brought home to me that I find it extremely hard to put aside my grumpiness and serve other people when I haven't done anything fun recently.  On the theological side, the Western Church has long believed that the chief end of man (and woman!) is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

It does, however, mean that it shouldn't be possible for 'the things God wants me to do' to get squeezed out of my life, as I shouldn't be doing anything at all that is not part of his call on me.

I find this an exciting way of understanding how I should live, and I look forward to seeing what comes of it.  It's already given me a new angle on Jesus' instruction to love one's neighbour as one's self.  Sometimes I've heard people say that that command includes an implicit one to love one's self, but that's never really felt right to me.  It doesn't really seem to fit with what Jesus was saying, plus I'm suspicious of such a comfortable reading of one of Jesus' parables!  Just recently, though, I've come to think that I'm probably not capable of loving my neighbour like that if I don't look after my own needs as well.  I think that that gives me a yardstick that I expect I'll find helpful, even though it's a very subjective one.

Making requests to God

As mentioned earlier, for years I've felt that it makes no sense to ask God for things.  He already knows everything, and can work out much better than me what needs to be done.

But just recently I've realised I've had it all wrong.  God wants to relate to me.  That's at least one of the reasons why Jesus died: so that God could talk to me¹.  So of course I should tell him about what's important to me and how I'd like the world to be.  He went to some pretty extreme lengths so he could be in communication with me!

¹ If that sounds to you like it's bordering on the blasphemous, it does to me, too!  But I think it's true, too.  Before sin entered the world, God hung out with Adam and Eve.  Then sin cut them off from him, and hence he from them.  Jesus came and died in order to remove that barrier that kept people cut off from God and God from them.

Cheers for the BBC

Last week I had chance to catch two BBC programmes about brutal prisons: an interview with Marina Nemat, an Iranian woman jailed shortly after the revolution 20 years ago which kept me sitting an extra 20 minutes in the car, and another with Kim Hye Sook who spent 27 years in a North Korean gulag because her grandfather defected.

Terrible stories, and in some ways I don't want to hear them. Heather definitely has to turn them off, as CFS makes her emotionally labile and these stories are literally bad for her health. On the other hand, it is important to know what is out there. Outlook in particular makes consistently good programmes, revealing so vividly the details of life for a wide range of people. Many thanks to the UK government.

Hyacinths!

The first of the year, just starting to open!  When the spikes* are fully grown and the flowers are all open I'll bring them inside where they'll scent my bedroom and make me smile :-)  They're descendants of bulbs given to me nearly 6 years ago by Martin's Aunty Elspeth and every year it's a real treat when they come out.

*you can sort-of see another flower spike beginning to grow on the right of the photo.