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On the first anniversary
of his death, a
marvel for the eyes.

My Brother's Book by Maurice Sendak. Harper, 2013, 32 pages.

As of this morning, I'm now an agent with Wernick & Pratt Agency LLC. Marcia and Linda were my colleagues, bosses, and mentors at my very first job, and I'm delighted to come full circle and work with them again. Visit me, and the agency, at www.wernickpratt.com.

It's nice to be home.

Good advice worth

Where I live, it seems winter is refusing to loosen its grip, holding back a long-awaited spring. With two feet of snow still on the ground and frigid, breezy days, it’s nice to sit inside (by the fire) and lose myself in the delights of the Reader. Forget Calgon. Reader….take me away! Here’s just a few Freshly Pressed posts that gave us pause this week.

Roger Ebert, RIP

Yesterday, the world lost more than a prolific film critic when Roger Ebert died of cancer at age 70. In Roger Ebert, RIP, science fiction author John Scalzi hails Ebert as one of his most important writing teachers, a fair, incisive film critic, and above all, a man who refused to allow a devastating disease to take away his humanity:

In these later years and after everything that he’d been through with cancer and with losing the ability to physically speak, I read and was contemplative about the essays and pieces he put up on his Web site. Much of that had nothing to do with film criticism, but was a matter of him writing… well, whatever. Which meant it was something I could identify with to a significant degree, since that is what I do here. It would be foolish to say that Ebert losing his physical voice freed him to find his voice elsewhere. What I think may be more accurate was that losing his physical voice reminded Ebert that he still had things he wanted to say before he ran out of time to say them.

Lean Together

Sheryl Sandberg’s recent book, Lean In, challenges ambitious women to seek leadership positions to help shake off the ever-competitive socio-political status quo and reshape the world of work for the better. At The Purpose of Work, Mike Gammage suggests Lean In‘s fatal flaw is that Sandberg should be addressing society’s “all-pervasive competition” to always be “on” and working in Lean Together:

Almost wherever we look, the workplace is becoming relentlessly competitive. It’s an assumed ‘passion’ that jeopardises family life. And as work becomes more hyper-competitive, women’s opportunities shrink. Pregnancy and maternity leave especially become huge issues. Sandberg acknowledges her own fears that – even at her level and with her talents – her job and prospects at Google would be diminished if she took ‘too much’ time off [that is more than a week or two] after her first child was born.

What if we try instead to slow down and step off this devilish hamster wheel that we’ve created?

First off, I think, we would want to reflect on the culture of contest that is embedded into our societies and so into our working lives. We have to recognise the myth of the inevitability of all–pervasive competition.

Cursi

At Vocabat, author Katie gives us a reflective Spanish lesson on the word cursi, which in English means “cheesy.” Katie transcends simple translation, meditating on the cultural nuances between Latino and American culture, finally embracing cursi as an unfettered expression of love:

In sum: What is love if not cursi? Love is supremely sentimental and gushy and ridiculous. And love means leaving your self-consciousness at the door, as well as your ego. I feel like you’re not really in love if you’re not regularly making a fool of yourself! But why hide our cheesiness within the safe confines of relationships? I admire people who can unblushingly own their feelings, hopes, and even disappointments without pussyfooting or pretending to not care all that much anyway. Although cursi people could use some work in the originality department, at least they care in the first place. There’s a lamentable epidemic of nonchalance and numbness and self-absorption these days, and cheesiness is a much better alternative to these terrible modes of subpar living.

Did you read something in the Reader that you think is Freshly Pressed material? Feel free to leave us a link, or tweet us @freshly_pressed.

For more inspiration, check out our writing challenges, photo challenges, and other blogging tips at The Daily Post; visit our Recommended Blogs; and browse the most popular topics in the Reader. For editorial guidelines for Freshly Pressed, read: So You Want To Be Freshly Pressed.

Hooray for The Master List! There is nothing like getting all your thoughts on paper…. and yes, I said paper!  Sitting right in front of me where I can doodle on it, cross it off, highlight it etc. I have tried the electronic list making but nothing quite satisfies this artist.

All my ideas are added to my The Master List.  For a creative person, this list is quite freeing!  I can stop trying to shuffle all of this around in my head.  Yes, these items and more have been yelling at me from my head!  ha!  Everything was fighting for recognition… saying things like,  “Me first!”,  “NO! Me first!”

Now I can decide who is first!  Does this sound a little scary to you?  Leslie is hearing things?  I assure you, this is the world of many of us who are visual thinkers!  The world speaks to us! Being the cartoonist that I am, I can actually imagine people as cartoons.  Many of my Facebook friends can attest to that fact.  It’s quite fun!

Okay,  Now to the next step.  Working at crossing off all these things on the list!  I will keep you posted.

So what do you have on your list?

Have you ever started a new chapter in your life?  Have you ever dared to do something you never did before?  Did you feel launched into it and found yourself in free fall? You are not alone. It happens all the time! Anyone who wants to do something worthwhile in life has to take risks and sometimes those risks lead to even more risks!

When my art career began, I was imagining all the possibilities. I dreamed of success. I created many fun little cartoons and talked about what I wanted to do with them.  Then one day, I ran into a friend who was DOING what I wanted to do.  She shook me!  She said, “Les, you have to go to the N.Y. Stationary Show and you have to go NOW!

I had heard of this show. I had many of my friends online talking about going.  This was back in the late 90′s.  There was something in her voice.  It was more like a command from heaven than a gentle nudging from a friend.  I made up my mind to go!

This was huge for me.  I had only been on an airplane once for a 45 minute flight. I practically sat on the lap of the man sitting next to me… asking him what this bump was and what THAT  bump was!    I decided I better pray about this trip.  I told the Lord that if HE wanted me to do this then he would have to make the way for me.   A few days later someone had put an envelope in my mailbox. It was  $300.00.  Enough for my flight!  It was not long until I was flying across America to New York City.  I met up with my girlfriend and stayed with her uncle and aunt. We took buses, rode trains and cabs.  Once at the show we had to pedal our portfolios. I am NOT a sales person. … but there I was asking people where their art director was and if I might have a minute with them.  Over and over.  Hmmm…. it became a little easier each time.

One last company sat down with me.  They looked through my whole portfolio and asked if I had anything more?  I pulled out one last picture of a little baby.  That was it!  That was the one the art director liked.  She asked me if I had any more and I told her I would email them to her when I got home. You better believe I was sketching babies on the airplane!

This was one of my first “be brave” moments. Over and over the good Lord has taken my by the hand and shown me what to do next.  Some would say, “you are weak if you need help for everything.”  But I say,  I am smart for asking.

I have a few more adventures I am yearning for.  There will come that day, when the dreaming is over, and the bags all packed and ready to GO!

What are you waiting for?  Be Brave!!!!!

Come February, without fail, I  begin to feel the effects of Spring Fever. My tulips are peeking out, our trees are budding, and my heart begins pining away for warm weather.  THEN it SNOWS 8 inches! haha!

There is no complaining on my part.  Colorado needs the moisture!  Like Peepsqueak, (above) I put on my coat and scarf and set off in our winter wonderland.  Spring will arrive as it alway does, but there are sidewalks to shovel and a wood stove to load and lots of indoor activities to keep me busy until snow gives way to rain and flowers.

By John Knowles

If you become wealthier tomorrow, say through winning the lottery, would you spend more or less working than you do now? Standard economic models predict you would work less. In fact a substantial segment of American society has indeed become wealthier over the last 40 years — married men. The reason is that wives’ earnings now make a much larger contribution to household income than in the past.  However married men do not work less now on average than they did in the 1970s.  This is intriguing because it suggests there is something important missing in economic explanations of  the rise in labor supply of married women over the same period.

One possibility is that what we are seeing here are the aggregate effects of bargaining between spouses. This is plausible because there was a substantial narrowing of the male-female wage gap over the period. The ratio of women’s to men’s average wages; starting from about 0.57 in the 1964-1974 period, rose rapidly to 0.78 in the early 1990s.  Even if we smooth out the fluctuations, the graph shows an average ratio of 0.75 in the 1990s, compared to 0.57 in the early 1970s.

The closing of the male-female wage gap suggests a relative improvement in the economic status of non-married women compared to non-married men. According to bargaining models of the household, we should expect to see a better deal for wives—control over a larger share of household resources – because they don’t need marriage as much as they used to. We should see that the share of household wealth spent on the wife increases relative to that spent on the husband.

Bargaining models of household behavior are rare in macroeconomics. Instead, the standard assumption is that households behave as if they were maximizing a fixed utility function. Known as the “unitary” model of the household, a basic implication is that when a good A becomes more expensive relative to another good B, the ratio of A to B that the household consumes should decline.  When women’s wages rose relative to men’s, that increased the cost of wives’ leisure relative to that of husbands. The ratio of husbands’ leisure time to that of wives should therefore have increased.

In the bargaining model there is an additional potential effect on leisure: as the share of wealth the household spends on the wife increases, it should spend more on the wife’s leisure. Therefore the ratio of husband’s to wife’s leisure could increase or decrease, depending on the responsiveness of the bargaining solution to changes in the relative status of the spouses as singles.

To measure the change in relative leisure requires data on unpaid work, such as time spent on grocery shopping and chores around the house.  The American Time-Use Survey is an important source for 2003 and later, and there also exist precursor surveys that can be used  for some earlier years. The main limitation of these surveys is that they sample individuals, not couples, so one cannot measure the leisure ratio of individual households.  Instead measurement consists of the average leisure of wives compared to that of husbands. The paper also shows the results of controlling for age and education. Overall, the message is clear; the relative leisure of married couples was essentially the same in 2003 as in 1975, about 1.05.

One can explain the stability of the leisure ratio through bargaining; the wife gets a higher share of the marriage’s resources when her wage increases, and this offsets the rise in the price of her leisure.  This raises a set of essentially  quantitative questions: Suppose that marital bargaining really did determine labor supply how big are the mistakes one would make in predicting labor supply by using a model without bargaining?  To provide answers, I design a mathematical  model of marriage and bargaining to resemble as closely as possible the ‘representative agent’ of canonical macro models.  I use the model to measure the impact on labor supply of  the closing of the gender wage gap, as well as other shocks, such as improvements to home -production technology.

People in the model use their share of household’s resources to buy themselves leisure and private consumption.  They also allocate time to unpaid labor at home to produce a public consumption good that both spouses can enjoy together.  We can therefore calibrate the  model to exactly match the average time-allocation patterns observed in American time-use data. The calibrated model can then be used to compare the effects of the economic shocks in the bargaining and unitary models.

The results show that the rising of women’s wages can generate simultaneously the observed increase in married women’s paid work and the relative stability of that of the husbands. Bargaining is critical however; the unitary model, if calibrated to match the 1970s generates far too much of an increase in the wife’s paid labor, and far too large a decline in that of the men; in both cases, the prediction error is on the order of 2-3 weekly hours, about 10% of per-capita labor supply. In terms of aggregate labor, the error is much smaller because these sex-specific errors largely offset each other.

The bottom line therefore is that if, as is often the case, the research question does not require us to distinguish between the labor of different household or spouse types, then it may be reasonable to ignore bargaining between spouses.  However if we need to understand the allocation of time across men and women, then models with bargaining have a lot to contribute.

John Knowles is a professor of economics at the University of Southampton. He was born in the UK and schooled in Canada, Spain and the Bahamas. After completing his PhD at the University of Rochester (NY, USA) in 1998, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania, and returned to the UK in 2008. His current research focuses on using mathematical models to analyze trends in marriage and unmarried birth rates in the US and Europe. He is the author of the paper ‘Why are Married Men Working So Much? An Aggregate Analysis of Intra-Household Bargaining and Labour Supply’, published in The Review of Economics Studies.

The Review of Economic Studies aims to encourage research in theoretical and applied economics, especially by young economists. It is widely recognised as one of the core top-five economics journals, with a reputation for publishing path-breaking papers, and is essential reading for economists.

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Image credit: Illustration by Mike Irtl. Do not reproduce without permission.

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Hey it almost Christmas, it means so many things to do, how exciting!
I'm done designing these Christmas envelope, phewww.. it's a lot but I'm quite satisfied with the result, I'll let you know later after I receive the print out version..

“According to the Edmonton Journal, “editorial cartoons by the Journal’s Malcolm Mayes attract more page views than any other piece of content on the website.” So why don’t publishers put their cartoonists’ work front and centre online? Although editors vary in temperament, editorial cartooning seems to be endured rather than encouraged by management. Perhaps one problem is that the political sentiments of the average Canadian caricaturist lie somewhere between Stéphane Dion and Jane Fonda, while the editorial position of many Canadian newspapers ranges somewhere between Barbara Amiel and Genghis Khan.”

- 3 of 3 – Drawing the line, via Common Ground

“Given today’s political and economic climate, what should be the purpose of the contemporary editorial cartoon? “Foremost – a means of dissent,” Dan Murphy replied by email. “States, corporations, institutional political parties have big budgets for promotions, can erect big PR statues to try to legitimize their vision. A political cartoon is graffiti around the base of those statues. The wittier, the funnier – the more memorable, the more powerful.””

- 2 of 3 – Drawing the line, via Common Ground

“As of late July, [political cartoonist] Dave Rosen has spent almost a month looking for work in his field, while maintaining his blog (www.takeoutallthewords.blogspot.ca). “In that time, I have confirmed for myself the sad truth that no one wants to pay for editorial cartoons anymore,” he tells CG. “The websites I’ve approached simply won’t pay. They want free content, unfortunately because of precedents set by freelance writers who use the sites primarily for self-promotion.”

- 1 of 3 – Drawing the line, via Common Ground

After months of prep work, Surtex 2012 is history.  It was a great time of meetings, and visiting with other artists.  It almost feels like a dream now that it is over.  I am filled with ideas and hope for the future!

Here is a picture of Margaret Anastas, my editor at Harper Collins, me, and Annie Stone, Margaret’s assistant.  It was so fun sitting at Harper C. and visiting with everyone who worked so hard on Peepsqueak and his promotion.  I do love my HC family.  They had a nice breakfast for me and we all met in the Harper Collins library. I wish I had a picture of Jeanne Hogle.  She was my graphic designer.  She escaped the room before I could snap her picture.

After our meeting, I packed up 30 books and headed to the Javitz Center in a doozy of a rainstorm!  I LOVED that cab driver for picking me up!!

Messing around with my friends Jane Shasky and Megan Halsey during my Peepsqueak book signing at Surtex. Everyone was in such a good mood!

Here is my teeny tiny room at the Best Western.  I was surprised at how small it was, but in the end, it was cozy and I was so glad I stayed there. It was a good retreat after a busy day.

Can’t forget my sweet agent Alicia Dauber. She had everything running smoothly!

Outside my window all the horse drawn carriages were lining up.  New York is so full of LIFE!

As amazing as the big city is, it is always nice to come HOME!   I had to get my zinnias planted!!  Now it is back to work for the next show!

2 Comments on New York Fun – Surtex 2012, last added: 5/30/2012