4/19/15 Today's Inquiries

I fear these links are becoming fewer and farther between...


The Links:

Rather than start off with articles about how it's open season on black men everywhere, I thought I'd share a review of how the FBI is creating terrorists out of thin air and then patting themselves on the back when they catch said terrorists.

Critics, including many civil rights groups, say law-enforcement operatives or civilians working with them often egg on suspects to commit crimes they would not necessarily have otherwise. In its most egregious instances, it can result in the entrapment of otherwise harmless — or mentally ill — individuals...

Payen, whom Braverman described as one of the “most profoundly incapable” clients he has ever represented, is now serving a 25-year sentence — the mandated minimum for the use of a surface-to-air missile. But the plan to use the Stinger was proposed by an FBI informant. “It’s a perversion of justice” by law enforcement, he argued, because “they’ve come up with the crime.”...

94.2 percent of cases on a Department of Justice list of terrorism-related convictions from 2001 and 2010 involved elements of pre-emptive prosecution — which they define as “preventive, predatory, proactive, pretextual or manufactured prosecution” — to target those “whose beliefs, ideology or religious affiliations raise security concerns for the government.” 

There are legitimate questions as to whether the FBI was involved in radicalizing the Boston Marathon bombers. Given the behavior outlined above, it's not out of the question.

 Nonetheless, these 2011 interviews with Tsarnaev and his family would later raise questions about the nature of the FBI’s relationship with him before the bombing, even prompting Republican Senator Chuck Grassley to issue an open letter to FBI Director James Comey asking whether Tsarnaev had been the target of a sting operation, or if had been employed as an informant by the bureau.

Not only that, but it turns out that all the forensic evidence being presented by the FBI in court cases is bullshit too. So the FBI is having a bad couple of weeks...

Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’slargest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.

The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions.

Okay, now onto the riots in Baltimore and the absolutely bass ackward coverage of those rioting. Take this article as an example. Basically the media is portraying the situation on the ground as gangs attacking police while in reality the "gang members" are removing bystanders from tear gas and trying to get kids back to their parents.

Also infrequently mentioned is the high number of detainees being injured in BPD's transit vans. These so called "rough rides" are leading to millions of dollars in settlements by the police department but prosecutions have been very rare.

The most sensational case in Baltimore involved Johnson, a 43-year-old plumber who was arrested for public urination. He was handcuffed and placed in a transport van in good health. He emerged a quadriplegic...

And more here in a Baltimore Sun special report.

Over the past four years, more than 100 people have won court judgments or settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil rights violations. Victims include a 15-year-old boy riding a dirt bike, a 26-year-old pregnant accountant who had witnessed a beating, a 50-year-old woman selling church raffle tickets, a 65-year-old church deacon rolling a cigarette and an 87-year-old grandmother aiding her wounded grandson.

People like David Simon are speaking out, calling for peace.

And, surprisingly, the son of the Baltimore Orioles owner has a fairly nuanced take which I would not expect from the 1%.

Yet the best piece I've read comes from Ta Nehisi Coates. His point is that calls for nonviolence are tantamount to calls for compliance.

The people now calling for nonviolence are not prepared to answer these questions. Many of them are charged with enforcing the very policies that led to Gray's death, and yet they can offer no rational justification for Gray's death and so they appeal for calm. But there was no official appeal for calm when Gray was being arrested. There was no appeal for calm when Jerriel Lyles was assaulted. (“The blow was so heavy. My eyes swelled up. Blood was dripping down my nose and out my eye.”) There was no claim for nonviolence on behalf of Venus Green. (“Bitch, you ain’t no better than any of the other old black bitches I have locked up.”) There was no plea for peace on behalf of Starr Brown. (“They slammed me down on my face,” Brown added, her voice cracking. “The skin was gone on my face.")

When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself.

So, where does our criminal justice system go from here? It seems obvious that we've constructed a system which preys on minorities and the poos in the name of safer streets and the war on drugs. How do we fix this? Or, are overly aggressive and violative police actions the cost of our dramatic reduction in crime over the past 20 years?

Apparently this means Baltimore needs more charter schools.

Chicago is basically 2 cities in one. The wealthy white northern half and the mostly black police state in the south. Isn't that the case in most cities now? Baltimore, St. Louis, Atlanta, Detroit? They all look the same and the only significant change is the migration of the poor out to the suburbs. Downtowns, however, are all similarly bifurcated.

The civic funding crisis is spreading nationwide. This is what happens when you destroy the middle class.

All across America, cities and towns are struggling to maintain enough revenue to provide crucial services to residents. The collateral damage of this revenue crisis—over-criminalization, utility shut-offs, the withdrawal of public services, and slashed budgets for schools—is dire.

How elite students get elite jobs.

The economy stalled in the 1st quarter.

Surprisingly, there is nothing inherently bad about millennials and as soon as they get good jobs they move out of the basement.

Go here. Look at awesome graphs of America changing its mind about various social issues.

Tech and jobs should you worry?


Also:


Rating colleges by value added.

After Sweet Briar's closing, is there a future for all Women's colleges? Old article but new to me. Good discussion of actual revenues.

There's a new documentary about Women in Computer Science. I found most interesting that there's still a perception about women being innately inferior when it comes to science. How can that world view still exist in this day and age? Do read the whole article and see the movie if it comes to your area.

Speaking of coding, have you heard of Sharla P. Boehm? You probably haven't. It was her work in the 1960s which laid the computational foundations for ARPANET and therefore the Internet.

Radical conservatives took over the Hugo awards.

Here's why the FDA doesn't known what's in your food. Listeria. Listeria is in your food.

How much does font choice matter on a resume? Apparently using Times New Roman is like wearing sweat pants to a job interview. Yes, because the best indicator of my ability to perform well at a job is the font choice, not the words written in that font.

The biggest threat to your portfolio is you. Smart words about how to buy more money and keep it.

Bill Kristol is basically a parody of himself. Like most neocons, he is perpetually in a WWII mindset in which America is an unstoppable force for good in the world. Here are 61 times Kristol was reminted of Hitler, Churchill, and appeasement.

Insurance companies are creating bundled packages of disaster insurance investments. What could possibly go wrong?

The diversity that is craft beer.

The sleaziness that is Bud Light:

Should Bud Light come with a trigger warning?

4/23/15 Today's Inquiries

Short list today.


Today's Links:

Hillary: not exactly a liberal.

“Even at that early stage I was against all these people who come up with these big government programs that were more supportive of bureaucracies than actually helpful to people,” she told The Washington Post. “You know, I’ve been on this kick for 25 years.” In a 1993 interview with The New York Times, she praised an article by Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “Defining Deviancy Down,” in which the scholar-senator argued that liberals had become too tolerant of anti-social behavior among the poor. Hillary made Mark Penn, among the most centrist of her husband’s political consultants, the architect of her 2000 Senate run and 2008 presidential campaign.

Poverty in Scott Walker's Wisconsin. The republican dream.

Lobbying firms, Super PACs, and corruption? I'm shocked!

Wal-Mart is playing hard ball with workers seeking higher wages by closing stores "for repairs." Yeah, call in the :inkertons to bust some heads.

Interesting thoughts on the labor force participation rate. I'd say it's change is part recession after-effects and part baby boomer retirement surging.

It would appear that those who most want to repeal Obamacare are old people who already have their socialized medicine. Ah yes, the Fuck-you-I-got-Mine generation...

Only a third of the country supports full repeal, and, like the Republican coalition itself, it is a very old third—comprised of the only people in the country with almost no stake in the law’s core costs and benefits.

One-way streets are a plague on Louisville. Based on my experience playing Cities: Skylines, they need more roundabouts to make one-way streets work better.

Gilderbloom and Riggs have also done an analysis of the entire city of Louisville, comparing Census tracts with multi-lane one-way streets to those without them. The basic pattern holds city-wide: They found that the risk of a crash is twice as high for people riding through neighborhoods with these one-way streets. The property values in census tracts there were also about half the value of homes in the rest of the city.

California is failing at sustainability. I also found this to be an interesting swipe at Silicon utopianism. Brown's train is no different from Elon Musk's pipedream except that it's based on existing technology.

 Essentially the state could build enough desalinization facilities, and the energy plants to run them, for less money than Brown wants to spend on his high-speed choo-choo to nowhere.

The economics of E-sports.

The debate about the validity of eSports as sports misses the point. Like it or not, eSports have millions of passionate viewers and their momentum can no longer be ignored. Given its unique economics, a network looking to build a sports empire need look no further.

More on the Common Core-ing of medicine. Patient satisfaction, like standardized tests in education, is an easy measure to obtain but a poor measure of the effectiveness of medical care. If I don't get my painkillers I'll rate you low! I see situations like those described below frequently in the ER.

Patients have complained on the survey, which in previous incarnations included comments sections, about everything from “My roommate was dying all night and his breathing was very noisy” to “The hospital doesn’t have Splenda.” A nurse at the New Jersey hospital lacking Splenda said, “This somehow became the fault of the nurse and ended up being placed in her personnel file.” An Oregon critical-care nurse had to argue with a patient who believed he was being mistreated because he didn’t get enough pastrami on his sandwich (he had recently had quadruple-bypass surgery). “Many patients have unrealistic expectations for their care and their outcomes,” the nurse said. 

In fact, a national study revealed that patients who reported being most satisfied with their doctors actually had higher healthcare and prescription costs and were more likely to be hospitalized than patients who were not as satisfied. Worse, the most satisfied patients were significantly more likely to die in the next four years.

Arguments for broad gun rights would appear to imply we ought to give firearms to prisoners.

The case for gun rights rests primarily on two claims, one about facts, the other about moral principle.  The claim about fact is that members of society as a whole are safer when more of them have guns, since potential aggressors are likelier to be deterred the more reasonable it is for them to believe that their potential victim is armed.  The claim about principle is that each person has a right of self-defense and that this right entails a further right not to be deprived of, or prevented from having, the most effective means of self-defense.  These claims are independent.  Most of those who assert them think the second would be true even if the first were false...

If the logic behind the advocates’ empirical claim were correct, prisoners would be safer if they were allowed to have guns and thus did not have to rely on guards for protection.  Each would be deterred from attacking any other by the knowledge that the other was, or at least might be, armed.  This parallels the advocate’s claim that citizens are safer if they are armed and do not have to rely solely on the police for their protection.  Of course, if prisoners were armed, they might in many instances be able to defend themselves against guards, thereby decreasing the effectiveness of guards as protectors.  But advocates presumably advance their empirical claim in the awareness that police would similarly be more often deterred or forcibly prevented from fulfilling their protective functions if most or all citizens were armed at all times.

The biggest side-effect of a gluten free diet is scientific illiteracy.

4/20/15 Today's Inquiries

I apologize for the 6 day absence. The Hillbilly days festival meant work was busier than usual.


The Links:

Simon Johnson looks st Elizabeth Warren's proposed fixes for the financial sector. Now, she's mostly goeen headlines for arguing more bankers need to face criminal prosecution (skin in the game, eh?) but there are some other ideas she's floated which bear examination. She pushing these ideas now because she is trying to get Hillary to commit to a more progressive agenda.

Senator Warren puts forward two main sets of proposals. The first is to more strongly discourage the deception of customers. This is hard to argue against. Some parts of the financial sector are well-run, providing essential services at reasonable prices and with sound ethics throughout. Other parts of finance have drifted, frankly, into deceiving people – on fees, on risks, on terms and conditions – as a primary source of profits. We don’t allow this kind of cheating in the non-financial sector and we shouldn't allow it in finance either...

The second proposal is to end the greatest cheat of all – the implicit subsidies received by the largest financial institutions, structured so as to encourage excessive and irresponsible risk-taking. These consequences of these subsidies have already caused massive macroeconomic damage – this is why our crisis in 2008-09 was so severe and the recovery so slow. Yet we have made painfully little progress towards really ending the problems associated with some very large financial firms – and their debts – being viewed by markets and policymakers as being too big to fail.

The American public isn't supportive of redistribution. File under "our republican future."

Redistribution can mean less government not more. I find this line of reasoning clever and useful for online troll battles.

...the situation is less paradoxical when we consider the possibility that government policies are largely responsible for growing inequality. This is most obvious is with the bailout of the financial industry in 2008. Without the help of the TARP and the Fed, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and most of the other Wall Street behemoths would be out of business. This would have drastically reduced the wealth and income of many of the richest people in the country. 

The government has also redistributed income upward by supporting an over-valued dollar that has eliminated millions of manufacturing jobs and put downward pressure on the wages of non-college educated workers more generally. In addition, a Federal Reserve Board policy that raises interest rates to keep people from getting jobs any time the labor market gets tight enough to support wage growth has also had the effect of reducing the wages of most workers. 

Also our trade policy of selective protectionism, which exposes manufacturing workers to competition with the lowest paid workers in the world, while largely protecting doctors, lawyers, and other highly paid professionals (who comprise much of the one percent), has the effect of redistributing income upward. Similarly, our policy of patent protection redistributes hundreds of billions of dollars a year from ordinary workers to drug companies and other beneficiaries of these government-granted monopolies.

Locke's theory of just expropriation. So land rightfully belongs to those who would improve it? Okay, now let's apply that to California.

Cheap coal is a lie.

Tyler Cowen has 3 laws.

Should we tax University Endowments? Perhaps putting that money toward lower tuition? Link does to .pdf.

How does Scott Walker fix Wisconsin's job problems? He cuts university budgets which means the U of W is cutting 400 positions.

The War on Poverty turns 50. By and large, if we look at both absolute poverty numbers and at standards of living, it's been a mild success.

Poverty shrinks childrens' brains. I'm not surprised given, for example, the role of language in brain development at a very young age. Of course we have to be careful because size is not the only important determinant factor.

Neuroscientists who studied the brain scans of nearly
1,100 children and young adults nationwide from ages 3 to 20 found that the surface area of the cerebral cortex was linked to family income. They discovered that the brains of children in families that earned less than $25,000 a year had surface areas 6 percent smaller than those whose families earned $150,000 or more. The poor children also scored lower on average on a battery of cognitive tests.

The Missouri national guard call Ferguson protesters enemy forces. Well when all you have is a hammer...

Where do the GOP warmonger candidates fall on the invade Iran spectrum?
Greeted as liberators <-----> Shoes thrown at president. 

Malaria is going to kill us all.

Be careful saying "The Myth about Women in Science" is Solved. I do get the impression that arguments about women in science tend to ignore biological science and medicine where women have a much larger representation than in engineering and computer science.

Here's a linguistic analysis of the recommendation letters written for men and women in biology and chemistry.

Results revealed more similarities than differences in letters written for male and female candidates. However, recommenders used significantly more standout adjectives to describe male as compared to female candidates. Letters containing more standout words also included more ability words and fewer grindstone words. Research is needed to explore how differences in language use affect perceivers’ evaluations of female candidates.

What happens when you give drug dealers and criminals free psychotherapy and $200 cash?

Life imitates XKCD.

Some further analysis will follow, but for now here is the list in [part] (UPDATE: now in alpha-order):

(barely) not statistically significant (p=0.052)
a barely detectable statistically significant difference (p=0.073)
a borderline significant trend (p=0.09)
a certain trend toward significance (p=0.08)
a clear tendency to significance (p=0.052)
a clear trend (p<0 .09="" p="">

Here is the XKCD for reference:

4/14/15 Today's Inquiries

I wrote a long bit about Hillary Clinton. Read it if you're interested in my thoughts.


The Links:

If you provide material and financial support to the police, you can legally hunt black people in Tulsa OK. Well, that's not exactly the deal but it is nice to know that very qualified geriatrics can write a check and then wander around with the cops as if they're real police.

Mr. Bates, an insurance broker, had been a reserve deputy since 2008. He is among scores of civilian police enthusiasts, including wealthy donors to law enforcement, some of whom effectively act as an armed adjunct to the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Department... 

Mr. Bates was the chairman of Mr. Glanz’s 2012 re-election campaign and, with a $2,500 contribution, was its biggest donor. In recent years he also donated equipment to the sheriff’s office, including automobiles and technical equipment, according to a list provided by the county clerk to radio station KRMG.

That's okay, it's not like Tulsa has a bad history of racial violence and oppression.

The Tulsa race riot of 1921 was rarely mentioned in history books, classrooms or even in private. Blacks and whites alike grew into middle age unaware of what had taken place.

Ever since the story was unearthed by historians and revealed in uncompromising detail in a state government report a decade ago — it estimated that up to 300 people were killed and more than 8,000 left homeless — the black men and women who lived through the events have watched with renewed hope as others worked for some type of justice on their behalf.

I also noticed an interesting difference in the way our police kill about 2500 people a year but only 58 got charged while Blackwater killed 30 Iraqis and the perps are getting prison time. Not that American lives are worth more than Iraqi ones but it does seem an odd juxtaposition.

Society causes racial health disparities, not genetics.

Here's what happens when you build a town around a prison.

The world of threats to the US is an illusion. Yes, but it's an illusion that makes people rich!

Promoting the image of a world full of enemies creates a “security psychosis” that misshapes our view of the world. It tempts us to interpret defensive steps taken by other countries as threatening. In extreme cases, it pushes us into wars aimed at preempting threats that do not actually exist.

Year 4 of California's drought. So what happens if they run out of water? Seriously, that's a distinct possibility since none of the solutions are short term.

The "real middle-class" is even worse off than we thought. Thank goodness for Hillary!

A handy map and article about people who work but need public assistance anyway. Hillary will fix it!

Of course, that's the big lie about families on Welfare, that they don't work.

A chart Obama care's critics have a hard time explaining.

The disadvantages of an elite education. Well, the disadvantages to everyone else, the elites still do pretty well.

Financial lessons from Game of Thrones.

Let's Talk About Hillary

There will be other links of course but I'm mostly going to write about Hillary.

The Arrow Points to the Right for a Reason.

Hillary puts me in a tough position. I feel like the push to be seen as a progressive is more or less fake. She represents a right leaning side of the democratic party that emerged after the Reagan-era thumping the old left took. It is precisely those policies that led to the rise in income inequality and the great recession. I'm talking about repealing Glass-Stegall, cutting capital gains taxes, and encouraging "neo-liberal" trade which offshored much of our manufacturing. Oh, and a total hard-on for war.

Of course, that's how politics works. You tell one story to the funding apparatus of billionaires and corporations and another story to the voters. I linked this piece yesterday but it bears repeating: Both parties want more low pay work for poor Americans. That's the rub, look at any other issue and the story is the same. Hillary can stump about, say, more childcare at the workplace and easier leave policies. Those make her progressive and a champion for women. I agree with those policies, but let's not pretend that getting people to work more at bad jobs is a permanent or fully desirable solution. There needs to be a case made for upward mobility and I don't see that.

Indeed, when I look at Hillary's economic policies, I see more of the same. Wall St. loves Hillary because she's genuinely one of them. Her daughter married a hedge fund bro. The Clinton Global Initiative is essentially a private equity firm with politics as its purpose. Indeed, they see exactly what I see when I look at Hillary: someone who will say what's necessary to get elected and then make policy in exactly the way they want.

Down on Wall Street they don’t believe it for a minute. While the finance industry does genuinely hate Warren, the big bankers love Clinton, and by and large they badly want her to be president. Many of the rich and powerful in the financial industry—among them, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman, Tom Nides, a powerful vice chairman at Morgan Stanley, and the heads of JPMorganChase and Bank of America—consider Clinton a pragmatic problem-solver not prone to populist rhetoric. To them, she’s someone who gets the idea that we all benefit if Wall Street and American business thrive. What about her forays into fiery rhetoric? They dismiss it quickly as political maneuvers. None of them think she really means her populism.

It's not just policy toward the big banks, it's also policy toward the rich in general.  Will Hillary Clinton Follow Democrats on Capital Gains? No:

In a debate in April of that year, Mrs. Clinton said she would not raise the capital gains rate above 20 percent “if I raised it at all.” At the time, the top rate was 15 percent, as a result of the Bush tax cuts. Ms. Clinton’s position was in line with the economic policies of Bill Clinton’s administration, which called for much higher tax rates on wage income than capital income for high earners. In 1997, Mr. Clinton signed a law that cut the top capital gains tax rate from 28 percent to 20; in 1993, he had raised the top tax rate on ordinary income from 31 percent to 39.6 percent, and imposed a Medicare tax on high earners that effectively pushed their top tax rates above 40.

For all of the populism and "middle-class economics" of her campaign, we might just end up with a president that recreates the economic policies of the late 1990s. We live in an era where earned income is not a large part of the wealth and income of the very rich. Of course, that's a feature not a bug. A low capital gains tax and a higher income tax is designed to place the tax burden on the middle class but it is also a way for politicians to claim they're being progressive without actually being progressive. Moreover, the middle class is significantly smaller and significantly poorer than they were in 1997 relative to the growth that was happening in the 90s.

Clinton is also just about as hawkish as I could ever imagine a democrat being. Obviously she was in hot water in 2008 over voting for the Iraq war and it remains to be seen if that's going to come back and haunt her. ISIS pretty much exists because of the wreck we made of Iraq and she's not going to be keen on pointing out her role there. Indeed, her argument is that we should have been more interventionist in the Syrian conflict by arming the moderates from the get-go so they could stop ISIS and fight the regime. She's also open to lengthening our troop commitment in Afghanistan. On the bright side, she is at least in support of the nuclear deal with Iran.

Now, many of these positions were outlined a year or two ago. Hillary has been trying on a lot of hats in the meantime to get a feel for what would be most effective in a campaign. I don't take much comfort in that as it means she obviously pandering to the electorate. She's got a lot of time for outline exact policy proposals which might set my mind at ease a little bit more.I also think Hillary is going to represent me well on social issues: pro-gay marriage, pro-healthcare, pro-gender equity. There's definitely no republican candidate I'd consider voting for and there's not going to be a democratic primary challenger to Hillary. Her populist rhetoric (and it is just rhetoric) further insulates her against challengers from the left side of the party who won't be able to adequately differentiate themselves. I guess that makes her the least bad option available to someone like me. I hate that that's the world we live in but I don't see how anything will change.

So, there's 574 days of campaigning to go. It is going to be ugly and probably one of the most depressing campaigns in recent memory. Given the GOP's behavior under Obama, I'd imagine that obstructionism and personal attacks are going to be the name of the game for a Clinton presidency. Everybody knows that so the positive "I'm gonna change the world" message isn't going to be convincing. Instead, she's going to have to present herself as someone who will defend us against the GOP and forces which want to destroy the middle class. And that's what we're seeing. Hillary is an oligarch in populist's clothing. Her policies are superficially attractive but ultimately benefit her patrons on Wall St. more than the average American. On the foreign policy front, she's an interventionist plain and simple. Maybe not a warmonger like most of the GOP but she'll be putting boots on the ground and jets in the sky far more often than I'd like.

What's a person like me to do?

4/12/15 Today's Inquiries

Today's links are going to be very random and disorganized because I have a headache.

The Links:

So, I apologize for the long read at my first post. I've been thinking about education a lot recently because I'm looking ahead to next year when I move out of Pikeville and try again to find a job in education. I like this post about the shortcomings of the "growth mindset" in education and social policy but it's poorly written/edited. The short version is that there's a large group of people who make policy decisions based on a worldview which isn't backed up by science. The Growth Mindset means the most important factor in success is work ethic. If you're failing, work harder. If you're poor, work harder. You get the idea. The problem is, we're engaging in education in a way which reinforces privilege. Thinking back to my time in the classroom, the biggest challenge I saw students facing wasn't their failure to believe in their ability to learn. It was their lack of requisite skills to accomplish the tasks before them. Asking them to work harder or adopt a growth mindset isn't going to change their reading skills. What will? Actually teaching the kids how to read. The always smart Arnold Kling comments here.  Here's a quote from late in the essay:

We can argue all day about whether poor students do worse because they have bad health, because they have bad genes, because they have bad upbringings, or because society is fixed against them. We have argued about that all day before here, and it’s been pretty interesting.

But in this case it doesn’t matter. If the only thing that affects success is how much effort you put in, poor kids seem to be putting in a heck of a lot less effort in a surprisingly linear way. But the smart money’s not on that theory.

A rare point of agreement between hard biodeterminists and hard socialists is that telling kids that they’re failing because they just don’t have the right work ethic is a crappy thing to do. It’s usually false and it will make them feel terrible. Behavioral genetics studies show pretty clearly that at least 50% of success at academics and sports is genetic; various sociologists have put a lot of work into proving that your position in a biased society covers a pretty big portion of the remainder. If somebody who was born with the dice stacked against them works very hard, then they might find themselves at A2 above. To deny this in favor of a “everything is about how hard you work” is to offend the sensibilities of sensible people on the left and right alike...

Imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever, saying “YOUR PROBLEM IS THAT YOU’RE JUST NOT TRYING NOT TO BE STAMPED ON HARD ENOUGH”. 

No Pineapple Left Behind is a video game about our shitty education system.


Breaking news, police are more likely to shoot black people. Maybe they should have adopted a growth mindset.

Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder and California State University at Northridge in May reviewed a decade of empirical evidence about cops and implicit bias. They found police officers seem to possess implicit bias that might make them more likely to shoot black suspects than white ones. But this bias can be controlled through proper training, and police officers appear to perform better — meaning, they show less implicit bias — than participants from the general public.

A very long, very wonky, and very smart read about what causes recessions and why there's still disagreement about it. Here's part of the problem:

The only models that are legitimate and scientific are those that are based on representative agents to whom is imputed a fake psychology carefully crafted to drive the conclusion that the market equilibrium is Pareto-optimal.

Here's a really fun blog about what we can learn from anachronisms on television shows. I like this, instead of just complaining about inaccuracies we get to see how our perception of the past is colored by our views of the present.

Is this going to be the most important fiction book of 2015?

This post about the worst aspects of techno-libertarians fits nicely with my worldview. Horry for confirmation bias.

Hillary's announcing her run for the White House today. She's expected to raise about $2.5 billion. Is there any clearer indication who the party of the rich really is?

There's bipartisan support for job policies which will keep Americans poor.

Rand Paul and Hillary Clinton don't agree on much, but they both strongly believe more Americans should be working in low-wage, unpleasant jobs.

Paul devoted a large chunk of his announcement speech Tuesday to celebrating the "dignity of work," endorsing the notion that work is a force that gives us meaning, rather than a means by which to stay alive. "Self-esteem can't be given; it must be earned," he declared. "Work is not punishment; work is the reward."

Clinton is less blunt, but her campaign is expected to place a heavy emphasis on policies to get women into the workforce and encourage two-earner families, such as child care subsidies or paid parental leave.

The implication is clear: there are people, particularly women, who aren't working but should be, and the government should be doing all it can to push them to take jobs.

Also, Rand Paul wants to make college more affordable for the rich.

Americans are trapped in Yemen without a way home so they're suing the government to get rescued. Maybe the should email Hillary Clinton.

Yale's school of environment made this awesome granular data tool about Americans' beliefs about certain environmental issues.

The thing about the retirement crisis is that it's, you know, here. People don't have enough money to retire and maintain anything close to their existing standard of living. The 401(k) experiment failed, and even if 401(k) II Electric Boogaloo comes along and is totally awesome, that doesn't do anything for current and near retirees.
We want to structure our economy so that people who are beyond the age when they are able to work/able to find work will be able to have a dignified existence. We're currently failing at that.

Anti-vaxxer mom decides she's wrong after all 7 of her kids get whooping cough.

Everything about this movie looks amazing. It's like somebody wrote a blank check and said go nuts! Also, the 1980s are alive and well.

4/10/15 Today's Inquiries

Sometimes I try to eat healthy. Sometimes I just want bacon.


The Links:

Ferguson 3: The Blackening.Nothing to see here, just a cop killing another black guy who is only in trouble because it was caught on video.

Stunning differences in reporting before and after the video surfaced. More here.

Because three days elapsed between the shooting and the publication of the video of the shooting, the Scott incident became an illuminating case study in the routinized process through which police officers, departments and attorneys frame the use of deadly force by American cops in the most sympathetic possible terms, often claiming fear of the very people they killed. 

The NYPD is very bad at internet. After the Scott shooting, they went full racist on their police message board.

“The perpetrator was wanted for non support and stole the cops lazer and ran like a typical ni**aaa,” user DisGraziato wrote yesterday. “Aren’t police allowed to shoot a fleeing felon?? Eight shots in the back. A good shoot if you ask me..”

What are the shortcomings of establishing health metrics for judging physician performance? The more I hear about these kinds of attempts, the more I am reminded of standardized testing in our public schools. A single metric creates bad incentives and distortions. To be fair, the article is about looking for more well-rounded measures.

The way we usually answer these questions is to count the number of deaths: The more people killed, the more important the problem. Counting deaths is so familiar that few have thought to question it. But death toll alone says nothing about how long people live, and good health is much more than not being dead.

The Geography of Obamacare Nullification.

Once again, the lack of power of the health lobby to move the Red-State Republican political establishments is astonishing. The lack of any sense on the part of the Red-State Republican political establishment that they are there to work for or in any sense represent the working classes of their states is astonishing

Futures markets for babies.

Having caught your eye, I direct you to an article in the April 9, 2015 edition of the Grey Lady. It discusses attempts by various countries to boost domestic birthrates. The same issue had been considered earlier by Noah Smith. There are two questions lurking here. First, what is the optimal population size for a country? If the goal was to shrink the population then a declining birth rate is not a bad thing. Suppose the goal is keep the population fixed, because, say of pension obligations. Then, one wants a replacement birth rate of roughly 2 per couple.

This is the smartest statement I've read in a while:

The ageing societies of the rich world want rapid income growth and low inflation and a decent return on safe investments and limited redistribution and low levels of immigration. Well you can't have all of that. And what they have decided is that what they're prepared to sacrifice is the rapid income growth.

Barry Ritholtz uses facts and data to prove that raising the minimum wage isn't ruining business in cities like Seattle. Then he repeats himself because right wing news outlets are still telling lies.

I think this case from Wisconsin perfectly demonstrates where the GOP really is when it comes to science. It's not that they are anti-science. They're just pro making money. And when science is in conflict with making money, then they'll just shut down the science and appease their base by pretending to be anti science. Also, every decision in a republican governing environment is a political one. Every decision.

The agency’s Bureau of Science Services has recently drawn criticism from state Sen. Tom Tiffany, R-Hazelhurst. Tiffany criticized a bureau report on environmental concerns surrounding the now-defunct plan from Gogebic Taconite to build an open-pit iron mine in northwestern Wisconsin. He said the report was biased against the mine.

Tiffany also told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he was not supportive of the bureau doing research related to climate change because the science behind global warming is still “theoretical.”

Young people don't want to go into politics. Considering that generations X and Y are some of the most ethically inclined people in several generations, I'd imagine the politics is anathema.

Speaking of corruption:

A strategist involved with the committees, who asked not to be named because he's not authorized to speak publicly, corroborated those theories. Each of the super-PACs—Keep the Promise and three "sub-super-PACs" dubbed Keep the Promise I, Keep the Promise II and Keep the Promise III—will be controlled by a different donor family, and will likely develop different specialities, such as data mining, television advertising and polling, the strategist said.

Also, economics knowledge makes politicians more corrupt.

I show that those who hold a degree in economics are significantly more prone to corruption than ‘non-economists’. These findings hence support the widespread, but controversial hypothesis in the ‘economist vs. non-economist literature’ that economists lack what Frey and Meier (2004) call ‘social behavior’.

A deep dive into party affiliation. Do read this. It's a comprehensive look at race, gender, ethnicity, age and various other factors are related to political belief.

The Teach Better podcast. How the 1% should be taught.

Why the Confederacy lives. Umm, racism?

For many, the initial attraction to the history of the Confederate States comes from an interest in ancestry and history, yet for others the lure is to a narrative that, replete with recognizable symbols and characters, offers (some) Americans the opportunity to understand themselves as historically distinctive. Add to this the attractive traits of heroism and an underdog struggle against numerical odds, plus a mantra that the Confederacy in the 19th Century fought to preserve all that was good and right about the America of the Founding Fathers, and a potent imaginary political world emerges.

Also, yesterday was the anniversary of the Surrender at Appomattox.

General Lee was dressed in a full uniform which was entirely new, and was wearing a sword of considerable value, very likely the sword which had been presented by the State of Virginia; at all events, it was an entirely different sword from the one that would ordinarily be worn in the field. In my rough traveling suit, the uniform of a private with the straps of a lieutenant-general, I must have contrasted very strangely with a man so handsomely dressed, six feet high and of faultless form. But this was not a matter that I thought of until afterwards.

Gatwick airport is not known for being a wonderful place. Now it's going to be even worse because there's a tonne of oil underneath it.

4/6/15 Today's Inquiries

Lovely weather today. Also, I want muffins. I'll have to get right on that.


The Links:

In order to destroy your ability to spend free time productively, please read Elite: Dangerous is the best damn spaceship game I've ever played. Now available on Steam!

it doesn’t matter that the game still isn’t fully baked, because I am flying my own spaceship.

Your March employment report from the BLS. Not too good: 126,000 jobs, 5.5% unemployment.

A great report from The Economist about the ways we use, and tax, land. I liked this part:

The Santa Clara town of Mountain View, for instance, is home to some of the world’s leading technology firms. Yet nearly half of the city’s homes are single-family buildings; the population density is just over 2,300 per square kilometre, three times lower than in none-too-densely populated San Francisco... 

Or they could heed the advice of Henry George, an American follower of Ricardo who in the 1880s made the case for a land-value tax. It has many theoretical virtues. Most taxes dampen, distort or displace economic activity by changing incentives on the margins. But a land tax cannot reduce the supply of land, and it would stimulate economic activity by penalising those whose land is unproductive. And your tax base is always right there—a city lot cannot be whisked off to Luxembourg.

Should Germany keep running a trade surplus?

In a slow-growing world that is short aggregate demand, Germany’s trade surplus is a problem. Several other members of the euro zone are in deep recession, with high unemployment and with no “fiscal space” (meaning that their fiscal situations don’t allow them to raise spending or cut taxes as a way of stimulating domestic demand). Despite signs of recovery in the United States, growth is also generally slow outside the euro zone. The fact that Germany is selling so much more than it is buying redirects demand from its neighbors (as well as from other countries around the world), reducing output and employment outside Germany at a time at which monetary policy in many countries is reaching its limits.

There are several Tyler Cowen related bits to post today. I recommend reading them all.
First: Cowen argues that social mobility is more important than income inequality.
Second: Beat the Press thinks he's playing a bit of 3-card monty.
Third: Tyler interviews Peter Thiel. Video:


Anti-cheating software run amok. I really liked the part about using Big Data to determine which kids are likely to pass a course. So, obviously, the poor black kid who works hard is going to be under more scrutiny because his data says she should most likely fail. Racism and discrimination is a feature, not a bug.

And at Utah Valley University in Orem, the school developed its own early warning system, called Stoplight, which uses academic and demographic details about students to predict their likelihood of passing specific courses; as part of the program, professors receive class lists that color-code each student as green, yellow or red.

A rising insurrection against Obama. I think this is actually more important for a Hillary presidency than the last years of Obama's.

It’s a scary thought, but here it is: If some red states were to openly defy the authority of President Obama in the exercise of his constitutional duties, would today’s Republican Congress side with him? Or would they honor the insurrection?

And this:

4/3/15 Today's Inquiries

April showers.


The Links:

The Iran deal is astonishingly good. That won't stip the GOP and Israel from completely blowing it up and putting us back on the path to war. Diplomacy be damned, there's money to be made.

Ben Bernanke explains why rates are so low. Parts 1 and 2.

The state of the economy, not the Fed, is the ultimate determinant of the sustainable level of real returns. This helps explain why real interest rates are low throughout the industrialized world, not just in the United States.

What is holding back labor productivity growth?

Taken at face value, the chart suggests that a primary reason for the sluggish average labor productivity growth we have seen over the past three years is that capital spending growth has not kept up with growth in hours worked—a reduction in capital deepening. Declining capital deepening is highly unusual.

The Housing Bubble and the Financial Crisis.

We saw massive overbuilding in most areas of non-residential construction in this period. Even seven years later you can walk around the downtown of a relatively prosperous city like Washington and still see vacant retail and office space everywhere. This bubble was destined to burst, with or without a financial crisis.

As an aside, we send teachers to prison for cooking the books but why don't we jail any bankers?

I used to be in favor of raising the SS retirement and early retirement ages as an easy way to fix cost overruns. I've since changed my tune and working in the ER, seeing numerous geriatric patients with the Docs, has further reinforced my views. Old people need to get the hell out of the workforce and their families can't be on the hook for caring for their elderly relatives. Research, apparently, bears this out. I liked this bit:

In 2008, only 74.4 percent of 25 year olds who had less than a high school education survived to age 65, while 92.1 percent of their peers with a college degree or its equivalent years of education would do so. Higher levels of education are associated with higher income, access to better health care and nutrition, better odds of survival to age 65, and longer post-retirement life expectancies. However, the retirement age for Social Security is the same for everyone.

Interesting thoughts on gentrification. The quote is about low density housing in urban areas, for example, people who challenge scatter-site housing schemes but I think it applies equally to suburban homeowners. And the suburbs are where the poor increasingly live.

Homeowners in low-density neighborhoods will fight like tigers to preserve what they have. We’ve given them the legal tools to frequently win that fight — and if you try to take those tools away, they’ll fight that, too.

Chicago is in shockingly bad fiscal shape. They use all sorts of accounting shenanigans to hide that fact.

How much does job search matter for job switching? Is this an indicator of increasing inequality too? If employers are hiring people they already know and who aren't searching for jobs then it's personal connections that matter more than skills and training.

If workers aren’t searching for new employment, then it appears employers are the ones conducting a search. Recruitment and poaching are likely ways employers do this, the authors point out. But how can researchers measure employer recruitment efforts? The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics every month, measures job openings. But Carrillo-Tudella, Hobijn, Perkowski, and Visschers cite research that finds over 40 percent of hires at firms were for jobs that were never publically advertised.

I think this is the biggest barrier to the further automation of healthcare, or Big Data can't fix everything:

If you add the inaudible alerts, those that signal with flashing lights and text-based messages, there were 2,507,822 unique alarms in one month in our ICUs, the overwhelming majority of them false. Add in the bed alarms, the ventilators, and the computerized alerts . . . well, you get the idea.

The economics of The Economist.

More on the continuing saga of those poor saps (literally, they were mostly poo people) who were students at Corinthian colleges when they went under and sold out to a debt servicing firm.

With the election around the corner, here's a handy guide on how to research all the money in politics.

Being poor, meanwhile, is basically a crime.

Overconsumption and overpopulation in pictures.

And, more evidence that most recycling is bullshit. But highly profitable for the waste disposal business.

One problem with literary tattoos.

Why does whisky taste so good? Here comes the science:

Lastly, teachers aren't always the smartest crayon in the pencil bucket: