Getting down to what really upsets us about the census income numbers..

NYT's Janny Scott cleans up the embarrassing mess Peter Kilborn and Lynette Clemetson made of the 2000 census results two weeks ago by delivering a  fair and sophisticated second-take analysis. ... She nevertheless persists in approving the term "barbell economy." Three points:  a) If you look at the income curve in the economies she's talking about, it's still a "bell curve," with a hump in the middle. It's not a barbell, with bulges at both ends. It's just a slightly flatter bell curve where the most rapid job growth is occuring on either side of the hump.  b) Better an economy with growth at the top and bottom than one with growth just at the top, as economist Jared Bernstein notes in Scott's closing grafs;.c) The middle still did reasonably well --- even in the "barbell" city of San Francisco, the NYT's hired number-cruncher says that during the 90's the "income of people in the middle rose by $16,961, to $70,470."...

What really troubles people about income numbers these days, I strongly suspect, is not the relative rise and fall of the middle or the bottom or even of  the top -- the crude distributional results analyzed by Scott. It's the increasing correlation of success with education, which gives the whole distribution a more invidious, meritocratic caste. But that could (and would) be happening whether the median was going up or down.  Kilborn's latest gloom-finding piece,  about the disappearance of low-skill, high-wage jobs in a strip-mining community is the relevant story, even if it's a decades-old one (and even if there are industries whose passing we lament more than strip mining). ... 2:00 A.M.

Scott Shuger, a good friend, a great guy, a no-b.s. writer and a Web pioneer (he gave "Today's Papers" a powerful voice) died in a scuba diving accident on Saturday. I miss him already. Kinsley has an appreciation here. 2:00 A.M.

As suspected, the Boston Business Journal report that had The American Prospect claiming a circulation of 500,000 contained a misplaced decimal point, the apparent result of a typo. (TAP claims circulation of 50,000). ... The story as  posted on the BBJ site has now been corrected. ... Meanwhile, TAP's Walsh-like investigation into its almost-as-suspicious Web traffic claims  grinds on. The magazine seems to be laying the groundwork for a "blame-the-stats-program" defense. ... 10:30 A.M.

Saturday, June 15, 2002

Reader-nominated names to replace "Homeland Security" (to date):  Department of Domestic Security, Department of Domestic Defense ("3-D"), Continental Security, Mainland Defense, Mainland Security, Home Defense, Federal Security, Federal Security & Intelligence, Heartland Defense, Department of American Protection, Homefront Security, Interior Security, Civil Security, Civil Defense, Civilian Security or plain old Department of Security. ... (Remember the headline writers' motto: "Good ideas come from bad ideas!") ... Current kf faves in red. ... 6:30 P.M.

More: Joshua Micah Marshall  also thinks "homeland" is "un-American ... creepy ... big-brotherish."  ...  "Man Without Qualities" agrees. ... As the NYT would say, it's an emerging national consensus!. ... On "Weekend Edition," National Public Radio's Alex Chadwick says  of "homeland":

This is a word you'd read in George Orwell and you'd rather not see it in big block letters across the facade of a Washington office building. ..We do live in a world where real enemies mean us real harm. We do have to fight them. We have to defeat them. But in every battle we've fought and won our most powerful weapons have always been words. We ought to use the best ones we can find now, which means the ones that sound most like us.

4:30 P.M.