I Give the Public What It Wants: More Graphs!

So I have been pondering what to write about next for about a week now, and I have to admit that at the present time the cupboard is kind of bare. I'll chalk it up to the fact that my mind has been pre-occupied with the seemingly endless amount of schoolwork I have this quarter. You'd think that somewhere within the 4-5 hours of reading and writing I do every week that I'd eventually hit upon something worth writing or discussing, but I must sadly report that none of it is in the least bit interesting.

Actually, there is one thing (which, by the way came out anecdotaly during class and had nothing to do with the topic of the night) that I did find pretty interesting, and it concerns the country of Singapore. They have a pretty interesting idea of population control. I don't know all of the specifics, but the gist of it is that they try to encourage highly educated people to have more children and discourage those with lower educations from having kids. It works basically like this. Everybody is permitted to have 2 kids. After two kids, if the mother has been college educated she receives a tax credit for having additional children in addition to the normal tax deduction you are entitled to for having an additional dependent. Not to get too technical on the accounting side, but for those who don't know the difference between a credit and a deduction is that a deduction lowers your taxable income, while a credit directly offsets the amount of tax you owe (or directly increases your refund). If that doesn't make sense, just know that credits are much better than deductions. Anyway, if the mother has not been college educated not only is she not entitled to the credit, but she also does not even get to claim a deduction for the child as a dependent.

I have had to think a lot about how I feel about this. On the one hand, this is certainly better than China where they explicitly limit the number of children you can have. And wanting to populate your country with children born from people with college degrees (and thus presumably higher incomes) seems like it would be beneficial to your country in the long term. And I have caught myself looking at a large family walking around a state fair who look like they might not even be able to afford a trailer to live in and wanted to ask them "do you really think having 6 kids was a good decision?" Of course, on the other hand I don't like the idea that the government is in effect further stratifying the population; making it easier for the affluent to become more so while further burdening the lower class from ever being able to rise above their class level. In the end, I think that for a small island-country like Singapore that has essentially no natural resources, this kind of policy makes a certain amount of sense, and I can't really say I am against it. That being said, I also would not want to see this policy spread to this or any other developed Western country. Does that make me a hypocrite? Well, wouldn't be the first time.

OK, since I have no other original thoughts I will recycle one I previously had. A little over a month ago there was an e-mail circulating on a Friday afternoon discussing getting together for a Happy Hour. Someone suggested getting together at 5:00 and one of the responses was "we're too old to start drinking at 5:00". This led to a discussion about what time was acceptable to begin drinking. This was my contribution to the discussion:

I too have wondered about what time it is acceptable to drink and if it changes with age. I have conducted an exhaustive and highly scientific study on the matter and I refer you to the attached graph for my results.



As you can see, the acceptable drinking time begins to drop significantly from age 15 till 21. There are no data points for 21 and 22 because it is both acceptable and encouraged to be drunk and drinking for the duration of those 2 years. After that there is a distinct rise for the next 10 years until it levels off at 7:00 PM. It is always acceptable to drink from 7:00 PM onward. The curious thing is that after 50 it starts to come down again. This is mainly because you no longer give a shit what other people think is acceptable and they realize this and don't bother you anymore. Finally, once you crack 65 you figure you're lucky to have lived that long anyway and might as well spend the rest of your life shitcanned.

But more to the point, the last time it is still acceptable to be drinking at 5:00 is when you are 29. That is why turning 30 sucks. However, we are still safely within the margins. In fact, as it is now 3:51 I can safely begin drinking in 9 minutes, which is about how long it will take me to get to the bar. . .

Have a good weekend everyone and if you find yourself within the acceptable time range of drinking, go grab yourself a cold one!