The convention of lumping all of the issues that fit under the rubric of health care is necessarily somewhat arbitrary. As we look to improve ways to control costs and find better ways to finance care, which is a never ending process despite the passage of the Affordable Health Care Act, which makes major reforms, it is worth examining ways to break the overall field of health care into parts, and to see if there are things that we commonly don't define as health care that are appropriate to address with the same tools.
Group health insurance plans and Medicare define health care quite broadly, but exclude certain procedures and treatments commonly deemed to be cosmetic or recreational or fitness related; long term care in nursing homes or with home health care services; and sometimes abortion. Medicaid often includes a broader definition that includes, for example, nursing home care.
Individual health insurance plans, out of concerns about moral hazard in the purchase of health insurance, have narrower definitions of covered health care. Routine services are often covered by a deductible on the theory that the tax advantage that applies to group health care plans creating an incentive to include as much as possible in the plan coverage scope for tax reasons does not apply in individual plans of employees who are not self-employed where risk management and price negotiation with providers, but not tax minimization is the goal.
Individual health insurance plans also usually exclude, or include only at prohibitively expensive rider rates (far more than this kind of care contributes to the whole in group health insurance plans) types of health care for which moral hazards exist because patients can know that they will need coverage in advance and buy it only if they need it. These conditions include pregnancy related care, mental health coverage, and coverage for pre-existing conditions (mitigated by a variety of devices to allow pre-existing condition coverage where moral hazard risks are not as serious, such as quasi-group COBRA continuation coverage).
Pregnancy is very expensive to insure against in individual health insurance plans because it is highly controllable by the insured, even though the lifetime costs of pregnancy related care frequently don't vary much from one woman to the next.
Mental health coverage has been further divided into categories that look more or less medical (biologically based conditions). There is dispute over whether some treatment regimes such as non-allopathic medical approaches (such as chiropractic, aromatherapy, herbal remedies, psychological therapy, acupuncture, personal training, and massage therapy remedies) are really health care in the sense intended, and over whether treatments such as fertility treatments are genuinely necessary as opposed to recreational.
Long term care coverage is an example of a very expensive, high probability event, with moderate risks regarding duration and costs, that is further complicated by the fact that long term care typically covers not only medical-like expenses but also non-medical-like expenses such as rent and food costs for the resident. Similarly, loss of income due to disability, or the disabilities presumptively inferred from old age called retirement, are typically handled separately from medical care.
We make distinctions between "emergency care" which everyone who comes to an emergency room is entitled to regardless of ability to pay, at least until stabilized, and other kinds of medical care.
We have different financing regimes for dental care, vision care, work related injuries (worker's compensation or the equivalent), non-work related accidental injuries (tort remedies and casualty insurance), health care for foster children, health care for Medicaid v. non-Medicaid patients, health care for the uninsured who can and cannot pay in cash, health care for certain veterans, out-of-pocket and insurance paid care, over the counter and prescription treatments, and so on.
Within the area of Medicaid covered health care, there are two groups of beneficiaries whose care is very expensive: older people who need nursing home care, and people with disabilities, and another, poor people who are not disabled or old served by the minority of providers willing to accept new Medicaid patients for below market rate reimbursements, for whom it is very inexpensive to provide health care.
A large share of all people covered by health insurance or governmental health care programs are entitled to that coverage not in their own right, but by virtue of their status of dependents of someone else. Medicare is one of the few programs that does not cover the entire family (although individual policies and CHIP enrollment in Medicaid for children only in a family are another).
The Affordable Care Act has made several strategic choices, which made political sense at the moment, but may not be the best long term solutions. One is to focus on a scope of care similar to bare bones group health insurance plans. Group plans are encouraged. Individual plans are made more like group plans through prohibitions on pre-existing condition denials, through mandatory coverage, and through expanded scope of coverage, in order to address moral hazard issues. The scope of Medicaid is expanded to include the near poor. And, tax credits and incentives ease the ability to pay problem for both group and individual plans.
There are other ways that the task could have been divided.
We could have chosen to deliver some or all health care services to children (and even college students) through educational institutions. Most school districts have school nurses and psychologists already, administer a few routine screening tests, provide health education (mostly, but not entirely sex education and illegal drug use propaganda), and refer children who seemed to be in need of medical attention but are denied it to social services authority. But, it wouldn't have been hard to establish a system of comprehensive, single payer health care for children through the school system. This would prevent the current system from suffering strain from the fact that large families do not fully bear the cost of their own care in many cases (particularly with more generous employers), and would in some ways reinforce the notion of connecting health care to one's place of employment - extending the idea to school aged children.
Colorado until recently, and some other states, have experimented with no fault automobile accident medical coverage, in which care for automobile accident injuries are financed through the injured person's car insurance, with particularly severe cases to be settled via subrogation actions by the insurer who pays for the care. There have been proposals to make such no fault coverage universal and finance it with a gas tax or other excise tax that functions as a "pay at the pump" user's fee. Worker's compensation, in theory, at least, covers work related injuries and diseases without regard to fault.
With a universal health care system, it would be possible to remove health care payments from the domain of automobile insurance, casualty insurance, tort judgments and worker's compensation entirely, by making health insurance the primarily responsible party for all health care, with legal responsibility for medical expenses related to fault in accidents or on the job injuries or diseases limited to subrogation actions. This would take a great many personal injury cases outside the tort law system entirely, and narrow dramatically the scope of the issues presented in these cases. Even more dramatically, we could decide that compensation for lost income due to disabilities that arise from injuries or diseases (or perhaps otherwise) ought to be entirely the province of insurance or social safety net programs, rather than the courts, perhaps via a more robust version of Social Security, or mandatory comprehensive disability insurance, in lieu of separate regimes for work related injuries, general tort cases, sick leave policies, and cases covered partially by private disability insurance policies and social security. Subrogation cases could allocate fault in cases where it was necessary to provide the proper incentives not to engage in negligent conduct (although in a society where everyone is adequately insured, this is harder to justify, particularly for small cases where the burden of the risk faced by different insurance companies can be expected to average out over time). In a regime like this one, only "pain and suffering" and dignitary injuries would be left to litigate.
Less radically, health insurance companies would process all health care claims, regardless of the nature of the injury, and then would be reimbursed by casualty insurance companies, with their actual costs entitled to presumptive validity. Tort lawsuits might establish liability for medical costs, but simply order the insurer for the tortfeasor to pay those costs as they come due, avoiding litigation involving expert witnesses over the validity of medical costs incurred and the estimated future medical costs involved in a personal injury case. Casualty insurers and health insurers could resolve medical expense disputes in individual cases through intercorporate arbitration.
We could have had a single payer system for some conditions, perhaps mental health care, or pregnancy care, or congenitally disabled people whose high cost of care is a certainty at the outset, that are hard to deal with through individual insurance due to moral hazard issues, while utilizing the Affordable Health Care Act insurance regime approach only for more ordinary cases. Mental health care or pregnancy care could be quite affordable to provide via a single payer system since they are a small part of the total national health care expense. Failure to provide adequate mental health and/or pregnancy care has immense externalities for the rest of society as well, so perhaps these need to be redefined as public health issues.
We could have medical care in all trauma cases handled by one program or insurance regime, and handle non-trauma causes in another regime. The public interest in universal trauma care is greater than the public interest in many kinds of universal non-trauma care.
Pregnancy care could be insured not through employers, but on a basis similar to universal life insurance or long term care policies, with premiums made over a lifetime or many years, to cover a lifetime of coverage. Rather than expiring for want of premium payments, these policies could create non-dischargable debts, a bit like student loans, which insurers could collect with bad debt figured into their pricing. Alternately, we could have a system of guaranteed pregnancy care loans that is directly analogous to the student loan regime, allowing births to be paid for over the course of a decade or two, rather than all at once, and could focus on transparency in pricing as a way to control costs in this area.
Guaranteed medical care loans also make sense as a back stop to a regime with catastrophic coverage in which not all patients have funds in a health savings account or otherwise sufficient to pay their current out of pocket costs.
We could distinguish between catastrophic care, which might be handled by a government program or secondary tier of insurers (a bit like umbrella insurance), and ordinary health care which would de-emphasize risk sharing and emphasized price negotiating and cash flow management. The greater ability of patients to pay for non-catastrophic care would make more ordinary market-like arrangements such as those seen in the area of dental health, seem more workable.
If coupled with a system of guaranteed medical loans, non-catastrophic care could be optional, and only catastrophic care would have to be universal either because it is mandatory in some form, or is a tax financed government program. The downside of making this a mandatory form of insurance, is that compliance can be difficult to secure for a program that actually makes insurance payments to the people who pay the bills only very infrequently, while accounting for something on the order of half of the cost of health insurance. But, catastrophic care on an umbrella insurance model would have very low administrative costs relative to premiums, and relatively few of the really controversial insurance coverage issues involve catastrophic care cases. This could give a government program a fairly large economic role in health care without having much of a day to day administrative role in it that people would fear would interfere with doctor-patient relationships.
Medicare and Medicaid are currently mostly programs that pay providers directly on a fee for service basis, but could be organized to pay for a menu of health insurance options, or to pay providers on capitation or similar basis. The Ryan plan that would provide mere flat dollar vouchers to buy health insurance would be problematic standing alone, but if there was a core set of coverages that could be purchased with the voucher without additional expenses from a vendor of last resort who was required to provide it, this would not be worrisome.
It would be possible to structure health care claim processing a bit like the way we structure credit card progressing today, where cooperatives like Mastercard and Visa process claims and adjudicate billing disputes, but the loans are extended by member banks that set interest rates, set credit limits, and establish their own reward programs. The vast majority of health insurers could be united in a small number of cooperatives, which would receive claims from providers and process them in a standardized process, set provider compensation rates for member providers, and leave the actual health insurers with only a few key terms like copay amounts or deductibles being set by the actual health insurer which would bear the financial cost of claims processed for its insureds, but would not actually administer those claims. This could produce many market efficiencies even if the claim processing cooperative had no formal monopoly.
Of course, to some extent, this is the easy part of the equation. Once you have universal health insurance coverage, it is a relatively bloodless affair to reshuffle the expense from one pocket to another in the interests of more efficient administration and more sensible cost distribution that is consistent with ability to pay. The really hard part of the issue is figuring out which scenario is not going to be to reduce just administrative and marketing costs to a minimum, giving health care consumers the best value for their money. This is the low hanging fruit, which shouldn't be that hard to realize.
The truly hard part of the health care reform question, which still remains largely unanswered, is who is both willing and able to effectively negotiate lower compensation rates for providers that will translate into lower compensation for doctors, nurses, pharmacists, drug companies, medical equipment makers, hospital administrators, and so on. The deepest problem with the American health care system is that the people who are currently making these decisions, with other people's money, are leaving American providers much better compensated than those anywhere else in the world by a large margin, for the same or less or inferior work. And, very few people in the policy world are entirely clear on what precise flaws in the provider rate system is most to blame. Notably, the truly iconic seats of medical excellence in the United States, like Mayo and Bethesda, are not the ones with the most highly paid providers.
Even in a perfect world with high levels of transparency, the sick and the injured are simply not in a good position to bargain for lower provider costs at the time of treatment as one would with many goods and services. They need intermediaries to handle this for them. But, how do we get the intermediaries (who might be civil servants or insurance company bureaucrats that we have never met) the clout that they need visa-a-vis medical providers who we know and love and the incentive to do their job well?
06 April 2011
Beyond Heritable IQ in Socioeconomic Success
IQ is one of the stronger predictors of socio-economic success in life, and success on a wide variety of other measures, and a lot of a person's IQ is heritable.
Personality, IQ and Success
In a result, largely contrary to the claims of Malcolm Gladwell in his book, "Outliers" in which he claimed that the famous Terman study which looked at life outcomes for a large cohort of California students with an IQ of 135 or higher on the Stanford-Binet in 1921-1922, over their entire lifetimes, a recent analysis of that data has shown that IQ is a significant predictor socio-economic success at all levels within this elite subgroup. Male teman study members with IQs in the bottom of the range for inclusion, IQ 135 (roughly the 99th percentile), had lifetime earnings (in 2008 dollars from ages 18 to 75) of about $2,350,000. Those in the top 10% of the study group (roughly the 99.9th percentile), had lifetime earnings of about $2,700,000, a statistically significant 15% difference of $350,000 that was stronger at the end of their careers than at the beginning. Averaged over 40 years, the average annual income of those at the bottom of the IQ range was $58,750 (in 2008 dollars) and the average annual income of those at the top of the IQ range was $67,500.
Thus, there were lifetime economic benefits to being a genius, rather than merely "gifted" but the benefits weren't huge either.
More interestingly, the study also had data on the "Big Five" personality traits (conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, openness and neuroticism) of the the study participants, the most widely uses psychological description of general temperament. Wikipedia notes regarding the Big Five that:
The personality impacts of Big Five personality traits in the general population were largely confirmed in high IQ populations. Moreover, Big Five personality traits are independent of IQ in high IQ populations:
Evolutionary pressures appear to quite consistently favor higher IQ in the long run, but some models suggest that evolutionary pressures on personality traits favor an ecological mix of personality types rather than a single personality, so no one personality trait has translated into "fitness" in the long run (of course, if it had, we wouldn't notice it, since it would mathematically fold into IQ by virtue of the way that IQ is constructed by psychologists).
Big Five traits are heritable, but not as strongly as IQ, although some of the weaker association may be a product of a less refined measurement instrument, as the Big Five personality traits have been consensus personality measurements only since the early 1980s, while the concepts of "g" and IQ are among the oldest in psychology, which has allowed more time to refine the measurement of the concept.
Thus, a significant cause of conscientious personality and ADHD is congenital, but not hereditary. Digit ratio and IQ over 130 are also associated.
Conscientiousness and neuroticism are both strongly correlated with ADHD inattentive type, in that order, and agreeableness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness are strongly correlated with ADHD hyperactive type in that order). ADHD, with the strength of the relationship being strongest between conscientiousness and ADD inattentive type diagnosis (r=-0.59), is the strongest of the Big Five/ADHD correlations.
The Big Five personality traits aren't perfectly independent of each other, but they are sufficiently independent of each other than a four factor model captures significantly less of the variation in personality from person to person, and the Big Five measure was created with the express purpose of identifying maximally independent factors.
Four of the Big Five personality traits had a measurable impact on lifetime earning of men with IQs of 135 of more. Neuroticism, surprisingly, was completely unrelated to lifetime income. In 2008 dollar terms, comparing the lowest decile to the highest decile in each of the other four traits, the lifetime impact of being high in each of the traits was approximately as follows (reading from a line chart):
Conscientiousness: $800,000.
Extraversion: $650,000
Agreeableness: -$350,000
Openness: -150,000
Each of these traits showed a more or less linear relationship between decile in a personality trait and its economic impact.
Thus, an extremely conscientious, extroverted, disagreeable, and close minded individual with an IQ of 135 of more would earn an average of $1,950,000 more than an extremely non-conscientious, introverted, agreeable and open minded individual. The combined effects of these four personality traits was about five and a half times as great as differences in IQ between the 99th and 99.9th percentile.
Even the difference between being in the sixth and tenth decile for conscientiousness has as much of an economic impact as the difference between being in the 99th and 99.9th percentile for IQ.
These four out of five personality factors and IQ influenced both the amount of education that a person received and the amount that a person earned independent of education:
Grit and Success
Another recent study looked at "grit" as a factor in spelling bee success. The famous rule of thumb, also discussed by Gladwell, is that it take "10,000 hours of intense training (plus or minus a few thousand hours)" to reach the pinnacle of expertise in a pursuit. But, Gladwell glosses over the question of what traits are necessary to be able to stick to an intense training regime for that quantity of time.
The spelling bee study first found that the key to performance in spelling bees was the amount of deliberate practice that a kid put into it, which "involved studying and memorizing words while alone, often on note cards" as opposed to alternatives like being quizzed by others or leisure reading:
A refined version of the test that Duckworth and Quinn used in the spelling bee study from 2009, with four fewer items and a different means of using answers to produce a scaled score strengthened "the positive relationships between Grit and educational attainment, GPA, retention in college, and success in a national spelling bee competition."
As Jonah Leher notes in a blog post as Wired, one take away lesson from these studies is that there are personality traits that are largely unrelated to IQ which are important to socio-economic sucess other than IQ, which Steve Hsu sums as as the "W" factor, and which we are increasingly starting to be able to describe with psychological testing; like IQ, a meaningful part of these traits are genetic, congenital, or arise early in life, although there isn't good research on the relatively recently well defined trait "grit."
The other is a bit more subtle and I'll reproduce his observation in his words:
Mostly, we measure traits like "grit" or "W" indirectly, by looking at how well people perform academically or otherwise, after controlling for traits like IQ.
Poverty and IQ
So, we know that IQ is important to socio-economic success, and that there are independent contributions from at least a handful of personality traits that are independent of IQ.
We also know that IQ is related to poverty in a manner more complex than a Bell Curve model with highly hereditary IQ in which the stupid tend to be both poor and prone to have low IQ children, while the smart tend t obe both rich and prone to have high IQ children is involved. This is because the measured heritability of IQ is lower, while the importance of environmental impacts is higher, in the poor than in the well to do.
Also, a large subset of mental retardation cases are not genetic and instead depended on enviromental factors like fetal alcohol syndrome, lead exposure and inadequate pre-natal nutrition, and labor and delivery medical care. While high IQ appears to be rooted in a large number of small, cumulative factors, low IQ frequently has a single dominant cause that is different in kind from the causes of IQ levels within the normal range. Alleviation of these mental retardation drivers is an important factor in the Flynn Effect (secular long term trends towards higher IQ in the same population from generation to generation over time).
Put another way, you are born with a maximum potential IQ, but seriously adverse environmental conditions, mostly associated with poverty, can prevent you from reaching that potential. These environmental effects appear to be particularly strong during pregnancy and in the first few years of life.
With that key observation in mind, the relationship between American performance on international tests of academic ability and poverty can be put in context in the nature v. nuture debate:
You don't have to go far afield to see this effect, even within different schools that are mostly poor in the same district. A child identified as "gifted" who attends North High School in the Denver Public Schools is far more likely to go to college and not require remedial work than a child identified as "gifted" who attends West High School, with an even more impoverished student body, a mile or two away.
In a nutshell
IQ, which has a strong hereditary component in the absence of adverse environmental factors, has an impact on socio-economic success at all levels, but among the smartest, personality factors, which can mostly be summed up in a quite small number of measures like extraversion, conscientiousness, grit, agreeableness, and openness, are even more important with the high IQ population. These personality traits also have some hereditary component, although probably significantly less than for IQ. Envirommental conditions strongly assocaited with poverty, particularly during pregnancy and early childhood, prevents children from reaching their genetic IQ potential and also has a measurable impact (generally negative) on personality traits associated with socio-economic success.
Implications
This has several implications of importance:
1. If we want to measure likelihood of success most accurately in a wide range of academic and occupational fields, a multi-dimension measure that captures both IQ and "W" factors is necessary.
2. While many "g" intensive activities that are proxies of IQ have been identified, less systematic work has been done to identify "W" intensive activites, like spelling bees, that are proxies for factors like "grit" and can be used to identify children who excel in these non-IQ dependent traits.
3. We should also devote research to ascertaining which occupational and academic pursuits are more or less "W" heavy, and whether there are pursuits like math and physics in the IQ demain within academics, where there appear to be theshold effects, i.e. where a minimum level of certain "W" factors are a minimum for real success, rather than making a linear contribution to outcomes. Does one need a minimum level of "W" factors, for example, to make it as a special forces soldier or a medical doctor or an accomplished musician? Similarly, are there occupational or academic pursuits to which individuals who are high in IQ but low in W factors, or high in W factors but low in IQ, are likely to be best suited?
4. Much but not all socio-economic benefits of both IQ and W factors are mediated through practice and educational opportunities that must be available for people to take full advantage of what these traits offer. Identifying IQ and W rich individuals is a beginning, not an end point in developing human potential.
5. Research into the existent to which "W" factors are malleable and the environmental impacts that influence these factors is worthwhile because research on this for IQ has been exhaustive, but research for other factors has not been, because W factors as important to societal success as IQ, and because W factors appear to be less strong hereditary than IQ. Indentification of enviromental factors that enhance "W" factors should be a priority for researchers. What parenting and educational approaches best foster the non-environmental components of "W" factors and to a lesser extent IQ.
6. Long term success in activities from probation and parole to high school retention to college retention to adherence of mental health medications may be strongly related to W factors that vary from person to person. This makes these factors attractive as components of validated statistical prediction tools to determine what management approach should be supervising people in these situations. Individuals who have low conscientiousness or little grit may require more intensive supervision than those who lack it.
7. The single most promising way to improve aggregate IQ and socio-economic performance in American society is to identify and address ways that poverty inhibits them. Particularly attention should be devoted to reducing hardship and improving medical care for pregnant women and young children. Another area where there is an already identified problem that can be addressed is to improve the quality of pre-college educational opportunities, college counseling and collegiate financial aid for children with established strong academic ability from less affluent families.
8. To the extent that we can psychometric for selected "W" factors that are at least as good as those for IQ, there should be an active and open ended inquiry into what kind of patterns are seen in the residuals of performance in these combined measures. This inquiry is useful even if the residual factors turn out to be matters such as pure luck or cohort timing that demonstrate that psychological factors related to socio-economic success have been exhausted.
Personality, IQ and Success
In a result, largely contrary to the claims of Malcolm Gladwell in his book, "Outliers" in which he claimed that the famous Terman study which looked at life outcomes for a large cohort of California students with an IQ of 135 or higher on the Stanford-Binet in 1921-1922, over their entire lifetimes, a recent analysis of that data has shown that IQ is a significant predictor socio-economic success at all levels within this elite subgroup. Male teman study members with IQs in the bottom of the range for inclusion, IQ 135 (roughly the 99th percentile), had lifetime earnings (in 2008 dollars from ages 18 to 75) of about $2,350,000. Those in the top 10% of the study group (roughly the 99.9th percentile), had lifetime earnings of about $2,700,000, a statistically significant 15% difference of $350,000 that was stronger at the end of their careers than at the beginning. Averaged over 40 years, the average annual income of those at the bottom of the IQ range was $58,750 (in 2008 dollars) and the average annual income of those at the top of the IQ range was $67,500.
Thus, there were lifetime economic benefits to being a genius, rather than merely "gifted" but the benefits weren't huge either.
More interestingly, the study also had data on the "Big Five" personality traits (conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, openness and neuroticism) of the the study participants, the most widely uses psychological description of general temperament. Wikipedia notes regarding the Big Five that:
A number of meta-analyses have confirmed the predictive value of the Big Five across a wide range of behaviors. Saulsman and Page examined the relationships between the Big Five personality dimensions and each of the 10 personality disorder categories in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). Across 15 independent samples, the researchers found that each disorder displayed a unique and predictable five-factor profile. The most prominent and consistent personality predictors underlying the disorders were positive associations with Neuroticism and negative associations with Agreeableness.
In the area of job performance, Barrick and Mount reviewed 117 studies utilizing 162 samples with 23,994 participants. They found that conscientiousness showed consistent relations with all performance criteria for all occupational groups. Extraversion was a valid predictor for occupations involving social interaction (e.g. management and sales). Furthermore, extraversion and openness to experience were valid predictors of training proficiency criteria.
The personality impacts of Big Five personality traits in the general population were largely confirmed in high IQ populations. Moreover, Big Five personality traits are independent of IQ in high IQ populations:
[E]ven though the Terman sample has a restricted range of IQ, there is substantial variation in personality. In fact, the Terman men do not differ from the general population in terms of personality.
Evolutionary pressures appear to quite consistently favor higher IQ in the long run, but some models suggest that evolutionary pressures on personality traits favor an ecological mix of personality types rather than a single personality, so no one personality trait has translated into "fitness" in the long run (of course, if it had, we wouldn't notice it, since it would mathematically fold into IQ by virtue of the way that IQ is constructed by psychologists).
Big Five traits are heritable, but not as strongly as IQ, although some of the weaker association may be a product of a less refined measurement instrument, as the Big Five personality traits have been consensus personality measurements only since the early 1980s, while the concepts of "g" and IQ are among the oldest in psychology, which has allowed more time to refine the measurement of the concept.
Of four recent twin studies, the mean estimated broad heritabilities on self-report measures for the Big Five traits were as follows:Conscientiousness overlaps with ADD inattentive symptoms, and both of these traits are also correlated with digit ratio which is an easy to measure physical trait associated with natal testosterone level exposures. Specifically: "More masculinized finger-length ratios show associations with ADHD symptoms, possibly acting through the trait mechanism of conscientiousness." This is in line with the cross-cultural gender discrepencies observed in onscientiousness.
Openness: 57%
Conscientiousness: 49%
Extraversion: 54%
Agreeableness: 42%
Neuroticism: 48% . . .
Many studies of longitudinal data, which correlate people's test scores over time, and cross-sectional data, which compare personality levels across different age groups, show a high degree of stability in personality traits during adulthood. More recent research and meta-analyses of previous studies, however, indicate that change occurs in all five traits at various points in the lifespan. The new research shows evidence for a maturation effect. On average, levels of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness typically increase with time, whereas Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Openness tend to decrease. . . .
Cross-cultural research from 26 nations (N = 23,031 subjects) and again in 55 nations (N = 17,637 subjects) has shown a universal pattern of sex differences on responses to the Big Five Inventory. Women consistently report higher Neuroticism and Agreeableness, and men often report higher Extraversion and Conscientiousness. Sex differences in personality traits are largest in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities that are equal to those of men. Both men and women tend to grow more extraverted and conscientious and less neurotic and agreeable as cultures grow more prosperous and egalitarian, but the effect is stronger for men.
The second digit to fourth digit finger ration has been shown to be a reliable indicator of testosterone exposure in utero. If your fourth finger (your ring finger) is longer than your second finger (the one next to your thumb) you had a high exposure to testosterone when your mother was pregnant with you. This ratio has also been associated with genital size, aggression, ADHD and now conscientiousness.
Thus, a significant cause of conscientious personality and ADHD is congenital, but not hereditary. Digit ratio and IQ over 130 are also associated.
Conscientiousness and neuroticism are both strongly correlated with ADHD inattentive type, in that order, and agreeableness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness are strongly correlated with ADHD hyperactive type in that order). ADHD, with the strength of the relationship being strongest between conscientiousness and ADD inattentive type diagnosis (r=-0.59), is the strongest of the Big Five/ADHD correlations.
The Big Five personality traits aren't perfectly independent of each other, but they are sufficiently independent of each other than a four factor model captures significantly less of the variation in personality from person to person, and the Big Five measure was created with the express purpose of identifying maximally independent factors.
Four of the Big Five personality traits had a measurable impact on lifetime earning of men with IQs of 135 of more. Neuroticism, surprisingly, was completely unrelated to lifetime income. In 2008 dollar terms, comparing the lowest decile to the highest decile in each of the other four traits, the lifetime impact of being high in each of the traits was approximately as follows (reading from a line chart):
Conscientiousness: $800,000.
Extraversion: $650,000
Agreeableness: -$350,000
Openness: -150,000
Each of these traits showed a more or less linear relationship between decile in a personality trait and its economic impact.
Thus, an extremely conscientious, extroverted, disagreeable, and close minded individual with an IQ of 135 of more would earn an average of $1,950,000 more than an extremely non-conscientious, introverted, agreeable and open minded individual. The combined effects of these four personality traits was about five and a half times as great as differences in IQ between the 99th and 99.9th percentile.
Even the difference between being in the sixth and tenth decile for conscientiousness has as much of an economic impact as the difference between being in the 99th and 99.9th percentile for IQ.
These four out of five personality factors and IQ influenced both the amount of education that a person received and the amount that a person earned independent of education:
Our results highlight the importance of personality and intelligence on our outcome variables. We find that personality traits similar to the Big Five personality traits are significant factors that help determine educational attainment and lifetime earnings. Even holding the level of education constant, measures of personality traits have significant effects on earnings. Similarly, IQ is rewarded in the labor market, independently of education. Most of the effect of personality and IQ on life-time earnings arise late in life, during the prime working years.This adds to a growing literature on traits other than IQ that are important to lifetime successes.
Grit and Success
Another recent study looked at "grit" as a factor in spelling bee success. The famous rule of thumb, also discussed by Gladwell, is that it take "10,000 hours of intense training (plus or minus a few thousand hours)" to reach the pinnacle of expertise in a pursuit. But, Gladwell glosses over the question of what traits are necessary to be able to stick to an intense training regime for that quantity of time.
The spelling bee study first found that the key to performance in spelling bees was the amount of deliberate practice that a kid put into it, which "involved studying and memorizing words while alone, often on note cards" as opposed to alternatives like being quizzed by others or leisure reading:
With each year of additional preparation, spellers devoted an increasing proportion of their preparation time to deliberate practice, despite rating the experience of such activities as more effortful and less enjoyable than the alternative preparation activities.But:
Why were some kids better at drilling themselves with note cards? What explained this variation in hours devoted to deliberate practice? After analyzing the data, Duckworth discovered the importance of a psychological trait known as grit. In previous papers, Duckworth has demonstrated that grit can be reliably measured with a short survey that measures consistency of passions (e.g., ‘‘I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest’’) and consistency of effort (e.g., ‘‘Setbacks don’t discourage me’’) over time using a 5-point scale. Not surprisingly, those with grit are more single-minded about their goals – they tend to get obsessed with certain activities – and also more likely to persist in the face of struggle and failure. . . . Here are the scientists: "Grittier spellers engaged in deliberate practice more so than their less gritty counterparts, and hours of deliberate practice fully mediated the prospective association between grit and spelling performance."In other words, practice is what produces results, but "grit" (a.k.a. "tenaciousness" a.k.a. “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.”) is the key psychological trait that determines how much someone practices. And, like the Big Five personality traits, grit is largely unrelated to intelligence: "Grit was found to be either orthogonal to or slightly inversely correlated with intelligence." It is not independent of the Big Five personality traits, however, although it doesn't completely overlap:
Grit was strongly correlated with conscientiousness (r = .77, p <.001 and r = .73, p <.001) (2009). While Grit is related to conscientiousness measures, it also differs from conscientiousness in important ways. For example, while both Grit and conscientiousness are often associated with short term accomplishments, Grit is also associated with longer term and multi-year goals. This long-term persistence and dependability are important aspects that make Grit unique from conscientiousness.Grit has been validated in settings other than spelling bees.
Grit provided incremental predictive validity . . . above and beyond the Big 5 personality traits; . . . higher levels of Grit were more highly associated with cumulative grade point average (GPA) in an Ivy league sample when compared to those with lower Grit levels (r = .25, p<.01); [and] that Grit predicted retention after their first summer in two classes of cadets at the United States Military Academy[.] . . . Grit predicts beyond the typical and unrelated cognitive construct of IQ and can account for variance over and above what is observed in the Big 5 personality construct of conscientiousness.Grit also predicts the performance of Teach For America teachers in "under resourced public schools.", as does life satisfaction prior to entering the program.
A refined version of the test that Duckworth and Quinn used in the spelling bee study from 2009, with four fewer items and a different means of using answers to produce a scaled score strengthened "the positive relationships between Grit and educational attainment, GPA, retention in college, and success in a national spelling bee competition."
As Jonah Leher notes in a blog post as Wired, one take away lesson from these studies is that there are personality traits that are largely unrelated to IQ which are important to socio-economic sucess other than IQ, which Steve Hsu sums as as the "W" factor, and which we are increasingly starting to be able to describe with psychological testing; like IQ, a meaningful part of these traits are genetic, congenital, or arise early in life, although there isn't good research on the relatively recently well defined trait "grit."
The other is a bit more subtle and I'll reproduce his observation in his words:
[T]here’s a major contradiction between how we measure talent and the causes of talent. In general, we measure talent using tests of maximal performance.
Think, for instance, of the NFL Combine: Players perform in short bursts (40 yard dash, short IQ test, catching drills, etc.) under conditions of high motivation. The purpose of the event is to see what players are capable of, to determine the scope of their potential. The problem with these tests, however, is that the real world doesn’t resemble the NFL Combine.
Instead, success in the real world depends on sustained performance, on being able to work hard at practice, and spend the weekend studying the playbook, and reviewing hours of game tape. Those are all versions of deliberate practice, and our ability to engage in such useful exercises largely depends on levels of grit.
The problem, of course, is that grit can’t be measured in a single afternoon on a single field. (By definition, it’s a metric of personality that involves long periods of time.)
The end result is that our flawed beliefs about talent have led to flawed tests of talent. Perhaps that explains why there is no “consistent statistical relationship between combine tests and professional football performance.” We need . . . a test that measures how likely people are to show up, not just how they perform once there.
Mostly, we measure traits like "grit" or "W" indirectly, by looking at how well people perform academically or otherwise, after controlling for traits like IQ.
Poverty and IQ
So, we know that IQ is important to socio-economic success, and that there are independent contributions from at least a handful of personality traits that are independent of IQ.
We also know that IQ is related to poverty in a manner more complex than a Bell Curve model with highly hereditary IQ in which the stupid tend to be both poor and prone to have low IQ children, while the smart tend t obe both rich and prone to have high IQ children is involved. This is because the measured heritability of IQ is lower, while the importance of environmental impacts is higher, in the poor than in the well to do.
Also, a large subset of mental retardation cases are not genetic and instead depended on enviromental factors like fetal alcohol syndrome, lead exposure and inadequate pre-natal nutrition, and labor and delivery medical care. While high IQ appears to be rooted in a large number of small, cumulative factors, low IQ frequently has a single dominant cause that is different in kind from the causes of IQ levels within the normal range. Alleviation of these mental retardation drivers is an important factor in the Flynn Effect (secular long term trends towards higher IQ in the same population from generation to generation over time).
Put another way, you are born with a maximum potential IQ, but seriously adverse environmental conditions, mostly associated with poverty, can prevent you from reaching that potential. These environmental effects appear to be particularly strong during pregnancy and in the first few years of life.
With that key observation in mind, the relationship between American performance on international tests of academic ability and poverty can be put in context in the nature v. nuture debate:
[T]he brutal reality is that U.S. schools that contain more than 25% poor children do abysmally--they are literally pulling the scores down:
If we subdivide the U.S. data in a very obvious way, we observe something, well, rather obvious:
But data available now tells us that poverty, as usual, had a huge impact on PISA reading test scores for American students. American students in schools with less than 10% of students on free and reduced lunch averaged 551, higher than the overall average of any OECD country. Those in schools with 10 to 25% of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch averaged 527, which was behind only Korea and Finland.
In contrast, American students in schools with 75% of more of children in poverty averaged 446, second to last among the 34 OECD countries.
We might not be living in a nation where one-third of a nation is ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. It's only one in five, give or take. . . . Until we get serious about reducing poverty, as well as breaking up large geographic concentrations of poverty, our average test scores will be poor.This poverty effect is not simply a product of poor students having lower maximum potential IQ at birth because their parents are below average in IQ and poor as a result. The conditions of poverty prevent thse children from achieving their potential.
You don't have to go far afield to see this effect, even within different schools that are mostly poor in the same district. A child identified as "gifted" who attends North High School in the Denver Public Schools is far more likely to go to college and not require remedial work than a child identified as "gifted" who attends West High School, with an even more impoverished student body, a mile or two away.
In a nutshell
IQ, which has a strong hereditary component in the absence of adverse environmental factors, has an impact on socio-economic success at all levels, but among the smartest, personality factors, which can mostly be summed up in a quite small number of measures like extraversion, conscientiousness, grit, agreeableness, and openness, are even more important with the high IQ population. These personality traits also have some hereditary component, although probably significantly less than for IQ. Envirommental conditions strongly assocaited with poverty, particularly during pregnancy and early childhood, prevents children from reaching their genetic IQ potential and also has a measurable impact (generally negative) on personality traits associated with socio-economic success.
Implications
This has several implications of importance:
1. If we want to measure likelihood of success most accurately in a wide range of academic and occupational fields, a multi-dimension measure that captures both IQ and "W" factors is necessary.
2. While many "g" intensive activities that are proxies of IQ have been identified, less systematic work has been done to identify "W" intensive activites, like spelling bees, that are proxies for factors like "grit" and can be used to identify children who excel in these non-IQ dependent traits.
3. We should also devote research to ascertaining which occupational and academic pursuits are more or less "W" heavy, and whether there are pursuits like math and physics in the IQ demain within academics, where there appear to be theshold effects, i.e. where a minimum level of certain "W" factors are a minimum for real success, rather than making a linear contribution to outcomes. Does one need a minimum level of "W" factors, for example, to make it as a special forces soldier or a medical doctor or an accomplished musician? Similarly, are there occupational or academic pursuits to which individuals who are high in IQ but low in W factors, or high in W factors but low in IQ, are likely to be best suited?
4. Much but not all socio-economic benefits of both IQ and W factors are mediated through practice and educational opportunities that must be available for people to take full advantage of what these traits offer. Identifying IQ and W rich individuals is a beginning, not an end point in developing human potential.
5. Research into the existent to which "W" factors are malleable and the environmental impacts that influence these factors is worthwhile because research on this for IQ has been exhaustive, but research for other factors has not been, because W factors as important to societal success as IQ, and because W factors appear to be less strong hereditary than IQ. Indentification of enviromental factors that enhance "W" factors should be a priority for researchers. What parenting and educational approaches best foster the non-environmental components of "W" factors and to a lesser extent IQ.
6. Long term success in activities from probation and parole to high school retention to college retention to adherence of mental health medications may be strongly related to W factors that vary from person to person. This makes these factors attractive as components of validated statistical prediction tools to determine what management approach should be supervising people in these situations. Individuals who have low conscientiousness or little grit may require more intensive supervision than those who lack it.
7. The single most promising way to improve aggregate IQ and socio-economic performance in American society is to identify and address ways that poverty inhibits them. Particularly attention should be devoted to reducing hardship and improving medical care for pregnant women and young children. Another area where there is an already identified problem that can be addressed is to improve the quality of pre-college educational opportunities, college counseling and collegiate financial aid for children with established strong academic ability from less affluent families.
8. To the extent that we can psychometric for selected "W" factors that are at least as good as those for IQ, there should be an active and open ended inquiry into what kind of patterns are seen in the residuals of performance in these combined measures. This inquiry is useful even if the residual factors turn out to be matters such as pure luck or cohort timing that demonstrate that psychological factors related to socio-economic success have been exhausted.
05 April 2011
Crisanta Duran Disappoints
A gutless, self-defeating and bitterly disappointing vote by Democratic State Representative Crisanta Duran, in the proud tradition of Colorado Governor Ritter's most self-defeating moments, permitted the weak legal arguments of Colorado's Republican Attorney General Suthers, that she as a lawyer should have known better than to take seriously, to derail justice for 48 juveniles serving life without possibility of parole sentences in Colorado (authorized by statute only from 1991 to 2006), once again.
Duran's unwillingness to take responsibility for the consequences of her own actions and to claim that she "hasn't given up on" them is particularly disgusting.
From the Pueblo Chieftan, via Thinking Outside the Cage.
Updated on 4-6-2011 to correct the spelling of Duran's first name.
Duran's unwillingness to take responsibility for the consequences of her own actions and to claim that she "hasn't given up on" them is particularly disgusting.
Under HB1287, the juveniles convicted during that time would be eligible for parole after serving 40 calendar years.
The judiciary committee killed HB1287 on a 6-5 vote, despite its bipartisan sponsorship by two members of the committee, Reps. Claire Levy, D-Boulder, and B.J. Nikkel, R-Loveland.
The bill’s sponsorship all but guaranteed its passage out of the committee if the vote had broken down along party lines. But Rep. Crisanta Duran, D-Denver, voted with Republicans to spike it.
She cited questions about its constitutionality raised by the attorney general’s office.
“I’m not going to give up on those 48 offenders,” said Duran, a lawyer. “The reason why I voted against the bill is because I think there needs to be work done to reach out to all of the stakeholders and have a less divisive process.”
She also would like to see a ruling from the Supreme Court on whether the Legislature has the authority to change sentences retroactively, or whether that would represent overstepping the General Assembly’s authority and encroaching on the governor’s right to commute sentences.
From the Pueblo Chieftan, via Thinking Outside the Cage.
Updated on 4-6-2011 to correct the spelling of Duran's first name.
It Still Sucks To Be Poor
Low levels of household income are associated with several lifetime mental disorders and suicide attempts, and a decrease in income is associated with a higher risk for anxiety, substance use, and mood disorders[.]
From here.
Colorado Secures State Budget Deal
Colorado lawmakers – in both houses – appear to have reached a tentative agreement on the state budget[.]
Via Tim Hoover's blog at the Denver Post.
GOP Wins:
Restores "tax exemptions for certain agricultural products and for downloaded software." The bull semen and other ag products exemption costs Colorado $3.7 million The downloaded software exemption could have been worth $24 million (a disputed amount).
Democratic Win:
No local control over PERA contributions.
Hick Win:
The deal will maintain "a general fund reserve of 4 percent, keep at least $100 million in the State Education Fund[.]"
Compromises:
There will be a K-12 cut of $250 million not $332 million. This is about $377 per kid instead of $500 per kid. This works out to about $150K from the local elementary school that my son attends, and about $300K from my daughter's middle school. Thus, each school will probably have to make some painful staffing cuts. Don't ask me how the K-12 cut is constitutional, I don't understand myself although I have some hunches that aren't worth stating given my lack of confidence in them.
The deal will "transfer about $71 million in severance tax funds to help balance the general fund budget."
"The deal would allow retailers to keep 2.2 percent of the taxes collected instead of the [scheduled] full 3.3 percent [which was suspended during the recession], allowing the state to keep $20 million that otherwise would have gone to businesses."
Caveat:
This summary omits that ugly cuts that everyone agreed upon as necessary before negotiations began, and there are many.
No ballot issues to raise more revenues will be requested by the legislature in 2011, and many of the citizen initiatives to do so have been canned based upon poor opinion polling. It isn't clear what happens if revenues turn out to be better than expected, as a recent state forecast suggested, or if the budget reflects the revised revenue estimates.
Who Supports School Vouchers?
Education vouchers are generally disliked by poor whites and are liked by rich whites (if they happen to be Catholic or evangelical Protestant), poor Hispanics, and poor blacks in the Northeast.
From
The Monkey Cage, reacting to inaccurate op-ed statements in the Wall Street Journal with actual facts.
As someone who believes that good data analysis is the only hope we have of saving the world, I also add this from the Monkey Cage post:
P.S. Why does this irritate me so much? I analyze survey data for a living. If I were to go around making up numbers about the atomic weight of potassium or international trade, people would rightly ask what I know about chemistry or economics. But when people start spreading false statements about public opinion, they're believed without question--even by a science writer who prides himself on defying conventional wisdom--and used as part of a pseudo-populist argument about that despicable group, "rich whites," It all just makes me want to barf. If you want to attack rich whites, fine. But use a more plausible argument, please!
Fuzzy Descriptions Of What Should Be
Sometimes ideas about how to solve the problems in our society are fuzzy. You have an intuitive notion about what they should look like before you have a rigorous argument for why they should be that way or how we will get there. The intuition may be accurate, may be nostalgia for a past that may never have even been, or may be inaccurate products of cognitive biases. But, it doesn't hurt to articulate and examine them in incomplete form. This is what I'm doing today.
* We need to develop more middle ground in our economy and social class system between winner-take-all successes and those who are just getting by; to invigorate the middle class.
For example, lawyer income is bimodal. The high end is a cluster of lawyers making very high earnings working at big firms (or sometimes botiques) for big businesses and their senior managers; it also has a modest number of plaintiff's lawyers who have been very successful at taking them on in big dollar case. The low end has lawyers in small and medium sized firms and government agencies dealing with the issues presented by small businesses and individuals. There is very little middle ground.
The absence of middle ground is surprising, because there is an obvious niche to fill. In theory, it makes sense to have lawyers making in between incomes, with credentials that are good but not top ten law school honors and law review and Supreme Court clerkship class, working less insane hours than large firms, doing what they call in the trade "commodity work" (i.e. recurring, predictable, moderate stakes matters, as opposed to "bet the company" disputes and deals that big firms want) , doing competent work in an assembly line fashion, and charging less for it. There are some specific areas where this happens: foreclosure practice, a few tax dispute resolution shops and insurance defense law firms. But, there are lots of kinds of practice where one would expect it, but you don't see it: employment cases and a lot of business planning work.
We also have a lot of valueable legal work that isn't done, or is done by overworked and underpaid idealists, because it is hard to make pay. This includes a lot of family law in low asset/low income households, a lot of termination of parental rights litigation, a lot of criminal defense work for moderate to low income individuals, representation of consumer defendants in debt collection and eviction and foreclosure cases, a fair amount of probate litigation in low asset estates, and immigration law work in areas other than employer visas. Lawyers with seven years of post-high school education are very expensive ways to meet the public need to counsel and advocacy in these areas, but many individuals who are involved in these kinds of disputes aren't qualified to represent themselves competently. If independent specialized paraprofessionals who could just hand child custody cases, or just handle criminal defense work, or just handle immigration work could do these kind of cases with an associates or undergraduate pre-professional degree, rather than a law degree, unmet legal needs could be filled in an affordable way that is more competent than the status quo without really impacting the market for existing lawyers much, and a lot of middle class jobs would be created in the process. In some cases, the most sensible way to handle these cases would be the way we handle most criminal cases - with their services provided by a government agency with professional employees on payroll, but this wouldn't have to be the case.
This has happened somewhat in the area of tax law, where certified financial planners and certified public accountants, tax preparers, and enrolled agents before the IRS fill the gap between what people need and what they can afford that lawyers cannot bridge. In the area of bankruptcy, in theory, independent paraprofessionals are mere scrivners, but in practice, they subtly provide more guidance to bankruptcy petitioners than their formal duties suggest. There is also a very small niche conceirge/personal assistant niche of people who help people with personal consumer disputes sometimes formalized as a "health care advocate" when it involves medical bills.
Another example is in the mental health field. We have psychiatrists, whose investment in becoming an M.D. makes them very expensive and gives them an immense amount of training that is irrelevant to what they actually do, who can prescribe mental health medications but are too expensive to take a more wholistic view, and a lot of psychologists, counselors, and the like who have some relevant education and credentials, but can't prescribe the medications that would be necessary to best address some of the cases that they encounter. Some states are experimenting with empowering lower paid mental health professionals to write some prescriptions. Colorado has a provision that allows some non-medical doctors to do this, but the rules are very restrictive.
It would also be good if mental health could move to a less transaction/fee for service/medical model, to something closer to a pastoral care kind of model where anyone in the appropriate group, however defined, would receive care as needed, despite the tendency (often desirable) toward commodification in other parts of professional practice. Some mental health issues are episodic and succeptible to being "cured" but many are life long conditions that are fundamentally a part of who someone is and always will be. An injury/disease model of care is a poor way to address those cases.
We are seeing the development of middle ground to some extent with the establishment of urgent care centers as middle ground between family practice and the ER, and the establishment of retail location based clinics staffed mostly by RNs at places like Walgreens, Wal-Mart and King Soopers that handle not-so-urgent primary care needs like vaccinations and well child checkups and minor infectious diseases and pregancy testing. We are also seeing the resurgence of the midwife who is not an M.D. as a middle ground health care provider. Indeed, to some extent, the evolving health care industry model of having many different professions dealing with specialized parts of the total problem, after receiving intermediate levels of training and receiving intermediate levels of pay, is a model that would make sense in other.
* We need a more healthy environment for medium sized businesses.
Another area where a gap has emerged, not unrelated to the gap in legal services, is the gap between the truly small business and the large publicly held business. There aren't mid-range lawyers because there aren't mid-range enterprises for them to represent in the numbers that there used to be.
The United States is particularly deficient in the ranks of its medium sized businesses - small restaurant and retail chains, manufacturing ventures that employ a few hundred people, and so on. We have some really impressive very national and multinational firms that account for an increasing share of our economy, and we have a large sector of not very economically important proprietorships or very small businesses, but surprising few that involve dozens to hundreds of employees, that involve single or double digit millions of dollars of revenues, that involve dozens to hundreds of equity investors. Venture capitalist and angel investors can funnel small businesses to the big time, and consolidators come along and turn industries dominanted by small firms into industries dominated by big business now and then, but somehow, medium sized businesses seem to lack staying power.
Some of the areas where small and medium sized businesses thrive are dying out or on borrowed time. Liquor stores in Colorado fiercely defend their perogatives, because they know that if grocery stores can sell their goods that they will die. Wal-Marts have shuttered thousands of small town independent businesses because they are more competitive on price. Better quality control and marketing have led franchises to squeeze a large share of the independent fast food businesses out of the market. Blockbuster pretty much wiped out the independent videostore industry through consolidation and competition before it collapsed itself. Small evangelical churches are losing ground to megachurches.
There are exceptions. Craft brewing of beer and spirits and small vinyards seem to be holding their own. Medium sized venture charter schools seem to be springing up left and right. Urgent care centers and ambulatory surgery centers are cutting into the near monpology that large hospitals used to have on those kinds of medical services. There are a host of new medium sized medical marijuana ventures. Farming seems to be shifting from proprietorships to medium sized operations.
But, we need to better understand what leads medium sized ventures to be optimal from an economy of scale perspective, and look at the possibility that modest policy changes that don't do undue damage to consumer prices can make the economy more attractive to medium sized businesses in parts of the economy.
We also need to get a better philsophical grasp on what medium sized ventures can offer the economy that big businesses and small businesses do not so that we can promote medium sized ventures in parts of the economy where they add value that the current economic system may not be adequately capturing. For example, one of the lessons of the financial crisis has been that there are systemic risks involved in having "too big to fail" enterprises in the economy. It is also becoming increasingly clear that the existing model of management dominated publicly held corporations that are highly insultated from shareholders is an ineffective way of keeping senior management performing well, making prudent judgments for the long term, and keeping senior management from self-dealing in its own compensation.
Some of the gap is less monetary. We need to have more institutions where it is easier to reach someone in the organization with real authority. We need to have more firms that have humanity and individuality. We need to break up centers of wealth and power so that our society is not dominated by plutocrats. We need the "warm glow" that comes from dealing with something other than a massive impersonal bureaucracy. We need institutions that recognize that consumers would prefer not to deal entirely with robots and powerless bureacrats on the other side of the phone in who knows where when you have a problem.
Put another way, what benefits to big businesses have over medium sized businesses and why? Is the problem that our securities laws and tax laws don't facilitate the financing of these businesses well? Is the problem that big businesses have better economies of scale in regulatory compliance? Is it a matter of marketing? Is it a shortage of executive leadership?
In the legal industry, this is central to the discussion about the "death of big law". Big law firms seem to be offering increasingly little value added simply by being big. There seem to be few common assets and synergies. Whole departments routinely jump ship to form their own firms or join other firms.
The approach to regulating unnecessarily large firm size in all industries, through anti-trust laws has largely been a bust. So, we need to throw out that model and look for different ways to create the right incentives for these businesses to thrive when it is appropriate.
* We need to find better options for members of the less educated working class.
One of President Clinton's iconic stances was his plea that working people who played by the rules should get a fair deal in life. If you graduate from high school, marry before having children, stay married even when times are tough, make your best efforts to find work when you are not disabled, don't commit crimes, and do your job reasonably competently, you ought to be able to expect a decent, if modest life for your family like a decent place to live in a safe neighborhood, access to the health care you need, an ability to send your kids to college if they are academically up to it, a safety net when you can't find work for no fault of your own, a chance to retire when you are old. Few developed countries in the world do a worse job of fulfilling that promise.
In truth, we need an even broader promise. We need to have an economy that makes playing by the rules going forward a good option, even if you aren't married to the other parent of your children, even if you somehow or other failed to get a high school diploma in your late teens, even if you have committed a crime in the past, even if you really screwed up on your job in the past and were fired for good cause, or if you incurred more debts than you could pay destroying your credit, or what have you.
We need to have a system in which somebody feels responsible for finding the most productive and meaningful thing that we can put each person who is able and ready to work to do, to insure that people who take that path get what they need to have a decent life, and to subsidize the difference between the value that they create and what it costs to provide a decent life if necessary.
We should find something for people to do that adds value to society first and figure out how to turn that value into money second. Better to have someone doing work that has a market value of $5 an hour and to subsdize the rest of the cost of having them live a decent life, than having that person sit idle and trying to deal with the costs that are created when that person's family can't get by.
There are some people whose lives are screwed up because they are simply dysfunctional people. But, most of the people in the United States whose lives are screwed up are willing to work, would place a lot fewer burdens on the public if they had the resources to meet their basic needs, but can't manage to earn enough to meet their basic needs.
For example, there are some hard core homeless people who are just incapable of functioning in normal society, often due to severe untreated mental health issues or disabilities or disagreeable personalities. But, there are far more for whom the problem is simply not having enough money to afford a modest apartment.
A lot of child abuse and neglect, a lot of families that have trouble staying together, a lot of crime, a lot of failure in the education system, is driven by poverty pure and simple, and would go away with a steady job that pays enough to support a family.
Sometimes a little skill training or further education will allow the person to find employment and provide for their family without further assistance, but often it won't. Some people will need help finding decent work only in periods of high unemployment, others will be persistently hard to employ. In a minority of cases, it may be easier simply to let someone have a pension and not trying to find anything for them to do, as we do in the case of people who are classified as having total disabilities or are retired.
* We probably devote too many resources to selling things.
Economics suggests that the amount of a particular good or service that is sold and the number of people involved in selling it, are only dimly related. Supply, demand and price are the key factors in sales volume. If labor was more scarce, we could sell just as many cars and refrigerators and annuities and nails and houses with fewer people. Commission sales have Malthusian tendencies. The sales force expands until everyone involved in selling is barely making it, instead of staying at a size just large enough to sell what the market wants with a minimum of staff making maximal compensation. Big box stores have made their fortune, in part, by recognizing this fact and having smaller sales staffs per dollar of revenue so they can offer lower prices.
In part, this is a good thing. Selling stuff is often a mid-level job that lots of people can do that seems to create demonstrable value, so it has picked up a lot of the slack as farming, fishing, forestry, mining, manufacturing, utilities, and so on have become more efficient and no longer require such a large share of the labor force. But, the ratio of people who actually make the stuff we need in the economy, to the people who are selling and administering and financing the distribution of that stuff once it has been made seems like it has gotten out of hand. It takes nine administrators to send out bills for the work of two and a half doctors. Marketing costs have become a substantial share of the costs of all sorts of goods and services compared to the cost of the goods itself.
It isn't that marketing and administration aren't important. We don't want to end up like the Soviet's with factories churning out goods that nobody wants to buy because marketing isn't given the importance that it deserves. But, is our economy really better off with an Aurora Mall that has a third or more of its retail space devoted to selling cell phones and associated accessories, with large number of locations at the same mall often all competing to sell goods made at the same factory and services provided by the same operations company?
* Our society is goods rich and service poor.
People who would often really benefit from services don't receive them because they can't afford them from their own earnings. Our nursing homes and hospitals are frequently understaffed. Our probationers and parolees are frequently undersupervised. Our classrooms could benefit from having more teacher's aides in them. Our kids could use more mentoring and tutoring. Our neighorhoods would be nicer is our sidewalks were professionally clearned every time it snowed and our sidestreets were professionally cleared by people with the right equipment, rather than waiting for snow to melt off roads and for individual households to clear these sidewalks. Our jobless could use more career guidance and training. Our ailing bridges and road could use more repairs. Our addicts could use more counselers. Our criminal defendants could use more public defenders and investigators to manage the crushing case loads. Our old houses could use more maintenance and rennovations. Our call centers could use shorter waits and better quality service. We would benefit from a society with more art and more performing artists. Lawn care professionals would probably do a better job that the do it yourselfer homeowners usually do.
Efficiency is a good thing. But, when it comes to providing services it is harder to sever the amount of labor provided and the amount of benfit confered by the services. The quality of a refrigerator is an objective thing, and is no worse if it can be achieved with fewer man hours. Fifteen minutes of therapy can rarely be as helpful as two hours of therapy, even with an extremely qualified therapist.
We need some better way to turn idle labor into beneficial services, and to turn beneficial services into money for the people who provide those services, so that we can increase the size of the pie and as a result, make our society more affluent. But, for some reason, the market economy is failing to do that, in part, because the people who need services often have trouble affording them when they need those services.
We seem close to the point where we are producing all the goods that our society needs. But, we need to find a way to redirect effort that goes towards selling goods and services and administrating their provision and potential work that goes idle because no one has found an economic way to utilize it, into efforts to create additional services that have value.
The mismatch between ability to pay, and need for goods and services is reducing our society's productivity.
* We need more authoritative attention to complicated problems.
No court system in the world has as few judges per lawyer, or per case, as the United States. As a result, our court procedures tend to focus on reducing judicial effort even when more judicial effort would create value. There are some classes of cases where this is not a problem, because they are largely pro forma, or where this merely shifts work from the public sector judiciary to the litigants who really care about the outcome. But, there are lots of cases where taking the time to understand and deal meaningfully with the merits of a dispute early on would make a huge difference in the maount of private sector time devoted to resolving it.
The tendency isn't limited to the courts. Public policies that are clearly failing, like the crack-powder cocaine differential in the criminal justice system, persisted for a couple of decades before legislators did something about the problem. Judicial calls for legislative reform of an issue that comes up in a case producing a bad result frequently go unheeded. Prison administrators who know that abuses are taking place under their watch don't have the inclination or the authority to solve those problems. Failing schools fester for decades, for want to guidance and leadership from someone with authority on what to do about them.
One of the bigger problems in a democracy is that the need for an electoral or legislative mandate denies people on the ground the authority to deal with problems that they understand better than anyone else and solve them, even if they know of a solution that would work.
* We work too much.
Americans work more hours per year than any other country in the world. We take few vacations. We have very little maternity leave. We rely heavily on day care. We retire late. We have few holidays and little personal time. Part-time jobs are often not viable alternatives even for those who would prefer to work fewer hours for less money. We need to find a way to negotiate more balanced alternatives.
* We need to develop more middle ground in our economy and social class system between winner-take-all successes and those who are just getting by; to invigorate the middle class.
For example, lawyer income is bimodal. The high end is a cluster of lawyers making very high earnings working at big firms (or sometimes botiques) for big businesses and their senior managers; it also has a modest number of plaintiff's lawyers who have been very successful at taking them on in big dollar case. The low end has lawyers in small and medium sized firms and government agencies dealing with the issues presented by small businesses and individuals. There is very little middle ground.
The absence of middle ground is surprising, because there is an obvious niche to fill. In theory, it makes sense to have lawyers making in between incomes, with credentials that are good but not top ten law school honors and law review and Supreme Court clerkship class, working less insane hours than large firms, doing what they call in the trade "commodity work" (i.e. recurring, predictable, moderate stakes matters, as opposed to "bet the company" disputes and deals that big firms want) , doing competent work in an assembly line fashion, and charging less for it. There are some specific areas where this happens: foreclosure practice, a few tax dispute resolution shops and insurance defense law firms. But, there are lots of kinds of practice where one would expect it, but you don't see it: employment cases and a lot of business planning work.
We also have a lot of valueable legal work that isn't done, or is done by overworked and underpaid idealists, because it is hard to make pay. This includes a lot of family law in low asset/low income households, a lot of termination of parental rights litigation, a lot of criminal defense work for moderate to low income individuals, representation of consumer defendants in debt collection and eviction and foreclosure cases, a fair amount of probate litigation in low asset estates, and immigration law work in areas other than employer visas. Lawyers with seven years of post-high school education are very expensive ways to meet the public need to counsel and advocacy in these areas, but many individuals who are involved in these kinds of disputes aren't qualified to represent themselves competently. If independent specialized paraprofessionals who could just hand child custody cases, or just handle criminal defense work, or just handle immigration work could do these kind of cases with an associates or undergraduate pre-professional degree, rather than a law degree, unmet legal needs could be filled in an affordable way that is more competent than the status quo without really impacting the market for existing lawyers much, and a lot of middle class jobs would be created in the process. In some cases, the most sensible way to handle these cases would be the way we handle most criminal cases - with their services provided by a government agency with professional employees on payroll, but this wouldn't have to be the case.
This has happened somewhat in the area of tax law, where certified financial planners and certified public accountants, tax preparers, and enrolled agents before the IRS fill the gap between what people need and what they can afford that lawyers cannot bridge. In the area of bankruptcy, in theory, independent paraprofessionals are mere scrivners, but in practice, they subtly provide more guidance to bankruptcy petitioners than their formal duties suggest. There is also a very small niche conceirge/personal assistant niche of people who help people with personal consumer disputes sometimes formalized as a "health care advocate" when it involves medical bills.
Another example is in the mental health field. We have psychiatrists, whose investment in becoming an M.D. makes them very expensive and gives them an immense amount of training that is irrelevant to what they actually do, who can prescribe mental health medications but are too expensive to take a more wholistic view, and a lot of psychologists, counselors, and the like who have some relevant education and credentials, but can't prescribe the medications that would be necessary to best address some of the cases that they encounter. Some states are experimenting with empowering lower paid mental health professionals to write some prescriptions. Colorado has a provision that allows some non-medical doctors to do this, but the rules are very restrictive.
It would also be good if mental health could move to a less transaction/fee for service/medical model, to something closer to a pastoral care kind of model where anyone in the appropriate group, however defined, would receive care as needed, despite the tendency (often desirable) toward commodification in other parts of professional practice. Some mental health issues are episodic and succeptible to being "cured" but many are life long conditions that are fundamentally a part of who someone is and always will be. An injury/disease model of care is a poor way to address those cases.
We are seeing the development of middle ground to some extent with the establishment of urgent care centers as middle ground between family practice and the ER, and the establishment of retail location based clinics staffed mostly by RNs at places like Walgreens, Wal-Mart and King Soopers that handle not-so-urgent primary care needs like vaccinations and well child checkups and minor infectious diseases and pregancy testing. We are also seeing the resurgence of the midwife who is not an M.D. as a middle ground health care provider. Indeed, to some extent, the evolving health care industry model of having many different professions dealing with specialized parts of the total problem, after receiving intermediate levels of training and receiving intermediate levels of pay, is a model that would make sense in other.
* We need a more healthy environment for medium sized businesses.
Another area where a gap has emerged, not unrelated to the gap in legal services, is the gap between the truly small business and the large publicly held business. There aren't mid-range lawyers because there aren't mid-range enterprises for them to represent in the numbers that there used to be.
The United States is particularly deficient in the ranks of its medium sized businesses - small restaurant and retail chains, manufacturing ventures that employ a few hundred people, and so on. We have some really impressive very national and multinational firms that account for an increasing share of our economy, and we have a large sector of not very economically important proprietorships or very small businesses, but surprising few that involve dozens to hundreds of employees, that involve single or double digit millions of dollars of revenues, that involve dozens to hundreds of equity investors. Venture capitalist and angel investors can funnel small businesses to the big time, and consolidators come along and turn industries dominanted by small firms into industries dominated by big business now and then, but somehow, medium sized businesses seem to lack staying power.
Some of the areas where small and medium sized businesses thrive are dying out or on borrowed time. Liquor stores in Colorado fiercely defend their perogatives, because they know that if grocery stores can sell their goods that they will die. Wal-Marts have shuttered thousands of small town independent businesses because they are more competitive on price. Better quality control and marketing have led franchises to squeeze a large share of the independent fast food businesses out of the market. Blockbuster pretty much wiped out the independent videostore industry through consolidation and competition before it collapsed itself. Small evangelical churches are losing ground to megachurches.
There are exceptions. Craft brewing of beer and spirits and small vinyards seem to be holding their own. Medium sized venture charter schools seem to be springing up left and right. Urgent care centers and ambulatory surgery centers are cutting into the near monpology that large hospitals used to have on those kinds of medical services. There are a host of new medium sized medical marijuana ventures. Farming seems to be shifting from proprietorships to medium sized operations.
But, we need to better understand what leads medium sized ventures to be optimal from an economy of scale perspective, and look at the possibility that modest policy changes that don't do undue damage to consumer prices can make the economy more attractive to medium sized businesses in parts of the economy.
We also need to get a better philsophical grasp on what medium sized ventures can offer the economy that big businesses and small businesses do not so that we can promote medium sized ventures in parts of the economy where they add value that the current economic system may not be adequately capturing. For example, one of the lessons of the financial crisis has been that there are systemic risks involved in having "too big to fail" enterprises in the economy. It is also becoming increasingly clear that the existing model of management dominated publicly held corporations that are highly insultated from shareholders is an ineffective way of keeping senior management performing well, making prudent judgments for the long term, and keeping senior management from self-dealing in its own compensation.
Some of the gap is less monetary. We need to have more institutions where it is easier to reach someone in the organization with real authority. We need to have more firms that have humanity and individuality. We need to break up centers of wealth and power so that our society is not dominated by plutocrats. We need the "warm glow" that comes from dealing with something other than a massive impersonal bureaucracy. We need institutions that recognize that consumers would prefer not to deal entirely with robots and powerless bureacrats on the other side of the phone in who knows where when you have a problem.
Put another way, what benefits to big businesses have over medium sized businesses and why? Is the problem that our securities laws and tax laws don't facilitate the financing of these businesses well? Is the problem that big businesses have better economies of scale in regulatory compliance? Is it a matter of marketing? Is it a shortage of executive leadership?
In the legal industry, this is central to the discussion about the "death of big law". Big law firms seem to be offering increasingly little value added simply by being big. There seem to be few common assets and synergies. Whole departments routinely jump ship to form their own firms or join other firms.
The approach to regulating unnecessarily large firm size in all industries, through anti-trust laws has largely been a bust. So, we need to throw out that model and look for different ways to create the right incentives for these businesses to thrive when it is appropriate.
* We need to find better options for members of the less educated working class.
One of President Clinton's iconic stances was his plea that working people who played by the rules should get a fair deal in life. If you graduate from high school, marry before having children, stay married even when times are tough, make your best efforts to find work when you are not disabled, don't commit crimes, and do your job reasonably competently, you ought to be able to expect a decent, if modest life for your family like a decent place to live in a safe neighborhood, access to the health care you need, an ability to send your kids to college if they are academically up to it, a safety net when you can't find work for no fault of your own, a chance to retire when you are old. Few developed countries in the world do a worse job of fulfilling that promise.
In truth, we need an even broader promise. We need to have an economy that makes playing by the rules going forward a good option, even if you aren't married to the other parent of your children, even if you somehow or other failed to get a high school diploma in your late teens, even if you have committed a crime in the past, even if you really screwed up on your job in the past and were fired for good cause, or if you incurred more debts than you could pay destroying your credit, or what have you.
We need to have a system in which somebody feels responsible for finding the most productive and meaningful thing that we can put each person who is able and ready to work to do, to insure that people who take that path get what they need to have a decent life, and to subsidize the difference between the value that they create and what it costs to provide a decent life if necessary.
We should find something for people to do that adds value to society first and figure out how to turn that value into money second. Better to have someone doing work that has a market value of $5 an hour and to subsdize the rest of the cost of having them live a decent life, than having that person sit idle and trying to deal with the costs that are created when that person's family can't get by.
There are some people whose lives are screwed up because they are simply dysfunctional people. But, most of the people in the United States whose lives are screwed up are willing to work, would place a lot fewer burdens on the public if they had the resources to meet their basic needs, but can't manage to earn enough to meet their basic needs.
For example, there are some hard core homeless people who are just incapable of functioning in normal society, often due to severe untreated mental health issues or disabilities or disagreeable personalities. But, there are far more for whom the problem is simply not having enough money to afford a modest apartment.
A lot of child abuse and neglect, a lot of families that have trouble staying together, a lot of crime, a lot of failure in the education system, is driven by poverty pure and simple, and would go away with a steady job that pays enough to support a family.
Sometimes a little skill training or further education will allow the person to find employment and provide for their family without further assistance, but often it won't. Some people will need help finding decent work only in periods of high unemployment, others will be persistently hard to employ. In a minority of cases, it may be easier simply to let someone have a pension and not trying to find anything for them to do, as we do in the case of people who are classified as having total disabilities or are retired.
* We probably devote too many resources to selling things.
Economics suggests that the amount of a particular good or service that is sold and the number of people involved in selling it, are only dimly related. Supply, demand and price are the key factors in sales volume. If labor was more scarce, we could sell just as many cars and refrigerators and annuities and nails and houses with fewer people. Commission sales have Malthusian tendencies. The sales force expands until everyone involved in selling is barely making it, instead of staying at a size just large enough to sell what the market wants with a minimum of staff making maximal compensation. Big box stores have made their fortune, in part, by recognizing this fact and having smaller sales staffs per dollar of revenue so they can offer lower prices.
In part, this is a good thing. Selling stuff is often a mid-level job that lots of people can do that seems to create demonstrable value, so it has picked up a lot of the slack as farming, fishing, forestry, mining, manufacturing, utilities, and so on have become more efficient and no longer require such a large share of the labor force. But, the ratio of people who actually make the stuff we need in the economy, to the people who are selling and administering and financing the distribution of that stuff once it has been made seems like it has gotten out of hand. It takes nine administrators to send out bills for the work of two and a half doctors. Marketing costs have become a substantial share of the costs of all sorts of goods and services compared to the cost of the goods itself.
It isn't that marketing and administration aren't important. We don't want to end up like the Soviet's with factories churning out goods that nobody wants to buy because marketing isn't given the importance that it deserves. But, is our economy really better off with an Aurora Mall that has a third or more of its retail space devoted to selling cell phones and associated accessories, with large number of locations at the same mall often all competing to sell goods made at the same factory and services provided by the same operations company?
* Our society is goods rich and service poor.
People who would often really benefit from services don't receive them because they can't afford them from their own earnings. Our nursing homes and hospitals are frequently understaffed. Our probationers and parolees are frequently undersupervised. Our classrooms could benefit from having more teacher's aides in them. Our kids could use more mentoring and tutoring. Our neighorhoods would be nicer is our sidewalks were professionally clearned every time it snowed and our sidestreets were professionally cleared by people with the right equipment, rather than waiting for snow to melt off roads and for individual households to clear these sidewalks. Our jobless could use more career guidance and training. Our ailing bridges and road could use more repairs. Our addicts could use more counselers. Our criminal defendants could use more public defenders and investigators to manage the crushing case loads. Our old houses could use more maintenance and rennovations. Our call centers could use shorter waits and better quality service. We would benefit from a society with more art and more performing artists. Lawn care professionals would probably do a better job that the do it yourselfer homeowners usually do.
Efficiency is a good thing. But, when it comes to providing services it is harder to sever the amount of labor provided and the amount of benfit confered by the services. The quality of a refrigerator is an objective thing, and is no worse if it can be achieved with fewer man hours. Fifteen minutes of therapy can rarely be as helpful as two hours of therapy, even with an extremely qualified therapist.
We need some better way to turn idle labor into beneficial services, and to turn beneficial services into money for the people who provide those services, so that we can increase the size of the pie and as a result, make our society more affluent. But, for some reason, the market economy is failing to do that, in part, because the people who need services often have trouble affording them when they need those services.
We seem close to the point where we are producing all the goods that our society needs. But, we need to find a way to redirect effort that goes towards selling goods and services and administrating their provision and potential work that goes idle because no one has found an economic way to utilize it, into efforts to create additional services that have value.
The mismatch between ability to pay, and need for goods and services is reducing our society's productivity.
* We need more authoritative attention to complicated problems.
No court system in the world has as few judges per lawyer, or per case, as the United States. As a result, our court procedures tend to focus on reducing judicial effort even when more judicial effort would create value. There are some classes of cases where this is not a problem, because they are largely pro forma, or where this merely shifts work from the public sector judiciary to the litigants who really care about the outcome. But, there are lots of cases where taking the time to understand and deal meaningfully with the merits of a dispute early on would make a huge difference in the maount of private sector time devoted to resolving it.
The tendency isn't limited to the courts. Public policies that are clearly failing, like the crack-powder cocaine differential in the criminal justice system, persisted for a couple of decades before legislators did something about the problem. Judicial calls for legislative reform of an issue that comes up in a case producing a bad result frequently go unheeded. Prison administrators who know that abuses are taking place under their watch don't have the inclination or the authority to solve those problems. Failing schools fester for decades, for want to guidance and leadership from someone with authority on what to do about them.
One of the bigger problems in a democracy is that the need for an electoral or legislative mandate denies people on the ground the authority to deal with problems that they understand better than anyone else and solve them, even if they know of a solution that would work.
* We work too much.
Americans work more hours per year than any other country in the world. We take few vacations. We have very little maternity leave. We rely heavily on day care. We retire late. We have few holidays and little personal time. Part-time jobs are often not viable alternatives even for those who would prefer to work fewer hours for less money. We need to find a way to negotiate more balanced alternatives.
04 April 2011
Selected Bad Precedents and Rules of Law
What rules of law (other than those in the U.S. Constitution) and court precedents, that remain good law, are on my list of the worst precedents and rules of law? I supply the bad holdings only below, rather than presenting a more scholarly version that cites the case making that law in this post.
Criminal Justice
1. Acquitted conduct may be considered when calculating a sentence under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, or in general, as a basis for a sentence by a judge following a jury verdict.
2. It is constitutional to try guilt or innocence for a death penalty crime before a "death qualified" jury.
3. The death penalty is permitted in felony-murder cases where the convicted defendant was not a trigger man and did not solicit a murder or conspire with the intent of causing a murder.
4. No imprisonment sentence for a recidivist felony offender, no matter how trivial the current offense, violates the 8th Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
5. There is no constitutional requirement that criminal sentences for clearly lesser crimes be no more severe than clearly greater crimes (e.g. child rape is often punishable by a shorter sentence than non-commercial possession of child pornography).
6. Photographs of lawful conduct can be criminal to produce and distribute (e.g. in child pornography cases involving adolescents above the age of consent engaged in consensual, non-commercial sex).
7. Neo-natal homicide by women in the throes of childbirth constitutes first degree murder (true in Colorado and in some other states).
8. Criminal defendants who have been convicted are not generally permitted to benefit from subsequent reductions in the sentence for the crime of conviction.
9. A decision of a criminal defendant to testify in his or her own defense opens the door to introduction of evidence of prior criminal convictions that would otherwise be inadmissible. (Note that there is not a single alternative to this rule, but the rule as currently posed is problematic.)
10. Plea bargain offers are not relevant in any legally binding way to the validity of a later sentence upon conviction.
11. Acquittal of an offense in a state court does not trigger double jeopardy protections in a criminal prosecution by another state or the federal government (and likewise acquittal of a offense in a federal court does not trigger double jeopardy protections in state court).
12. Federal habeas corpus review is limited the violations of constitutional rights that took place through the conviction, even if after acquired evidence can establish innocence or cast substantial doubt on the accuracy of the verdict.
13. Forfeitures of rights in a criminal case as a result of the failure of court appointed counsel to act is not, per se, unconstitutional ineffective assistance of counsel.
14. The exclusionary rule applies to physical evidence obtained in violation of the 4th Amendment. (In such cases, damage awards would be more appropriate.)
15. Defects in grand jury indictment process, or preliminary hearing process can constitute a basis for the reversal of a conviction in a criminal case.
16. Multiple offenses, not interrupted by a period of incarceration or a criminal proceeding, often lead to consecutive rather than concurrent sentences of imprisonment.
17. State court criminal juries need not be unanimous as a matter of constitutional law.
Governmental Liability
1. Liability for civil rights violations is not vicarious. Employers of civil rights violators are only liable if affirmative misconduct is shown.
2. The 11th Amendment establishes a substantive principle of state sovereign immunity, rather than merely limiting venue in select types of lawsuits.
3. Qualified immunity for civil rights violations of constitutional rights that are not well established extends to all liability, rather than merely to liability for punitive damages.
4. Imprisonment as a result of a wrongful conviction does not give rise to liability under the takings clause of the due process clause of the 5th and 14th Amendments.
5. Judicial enforcement of a legal right does not constitute state action for civil rights action purposes.
Civil Procedure and Choice of Law
1. A federal court complaint fails to state a claim in cases where an alleged civil liability arises from acts that only the alleged offender is in a position to know absent espionage or whistle-blowing for failure to establish that it is "plausible" that such secret action took place.
2. A federal law counterclaim does not give rise to federal court jurisdiction in a civil action.
3. Corporations not treated a residents of every state where they have a regular place of business for diversity jurisdiction purposes.
4. Appeals from courts of inferior jurisdiction (at least in Colorado, New York, and some federal court contexts) are to the court of general jurisdiction rather than to the intermediate court of appeals.
5. Default civil judgments cannot be set aside for mistake, inadvertence, surprise, execusible neglect, fraud, misrepresentation or other misconduct of an adverse party more than six months after the judgment is entered, even if no action is taken to enforce the judgment in that time period. (Many defendants don't recognize that a default judgment has been entered or is a problem and have an incentive to do something about it, until it is enforced.)
6. Judges are not permitted to resolve disputed issues of fact prior to trial in actions where the right to a jury trial has been waived.
7. The right to a jury trial depends upon the classification of an action as arising in law or in equity, rather than expressly on facts such as the availability of money damages v. injunctive or declaratory relief, the availability of damages for non-economic damages, or allegations of fraud.
8. Personal jurisdiction is available in defamation actions in forums other than the forum in which the allegedly defaming party resides, or was present when the defamatory statement was allegedly made by the defaming party.
9. Personal jurisdiction is available in contract actions in forums other than the forum in which the allegedly breaching party resides, where the allegedly breaching party was present when executing the contract, where the contract provides that jurisdiction shall be available, or where the contract duties other than payment are to be performed (e.g. where the non-breaching party resides, or where contract negotiations took place).
10. The U.S. Supreme Court and federal courts have jurisdiction to review disputes concerning the outcome of federal elections (i.e. U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Senate, electoral college votes) made by state courts and by state and local governments, as opposed to confining these decisions exclusive to state courts and Congress.
Constitutional Law Other Than Individual Rights
1. Treaties may be unilaterally repealed by an ordinary law enacted by Congress and are not generallly viewed as self-executing.
2. The filibuster has the practical effect of imposing a sixty vote supermajority requirement on all legislation in the U.S. Senate for which a higher supermajority requirement is not imposed.
Tort and Environmental Law
1. The CERCLA (superfund) liability exception for innocent property owners is not sufficiently narrow to protect innocent property owners from all liability in excess of forfeiture of the property and forfeiture any profit received from the property.
2. There is no vicarious liability for medical malpractice.
3. Warnings that it is foreseeable that an ordinary user of a product will not read are relevant to product liability.
4. Ordinances requiring property owners to clear their sidewalks of snow do not give rise to negligence per se civil liability in Colorado.
Intellectual Property Law
1. Intellectual property protection is available for images of publicly available buildings.
2. Intellectual property protection is not per se unavailable for materials delivered voluntarily to an intended receipient on a non-commercial basis.
3. Statutory damages are permitted in intellectual property actions in cases where the existence of a market for identical or closely comparable intellectual property and a calculation of attorneys' fees permits accurate determination of the damages actually suffered by a defendant.
4. Stautory damages are determined per infringing work rather than per defendant.
5. Injunctive relief is available for patent law violations even when the holder of the patent has known about the infringement and has failed to assert any rights until the economic impact of an injunction far exceeds the economic impact had the infringement been alleged when the infringement was first discovered, or when the patent holder is not engaged in the production of a competing product. (In such cases, a court imposed accounting for profits on the basis of the licensing agreement that would have been made if the parties had negotiated a license should be imposed instead).
6. Intellectual property protection is available for public performance without modification of intellectual property made available for free, for example, via broadcast television or radio.
7. Copyrighted works take an extremely long time to enter the public domain, even if the owner has taken no action whatsoever, even a copyright registration, to assert copyright protection.
Bankruptcy
1. There is no general priority for trade creditors.
2. It is not generally possible to cramdown a personal residence mortgage in bankruptcy.
3. Replacement value, rather than the value of a debtor's assets to a creditor if obtained via a writ of execution, is used to value tangible personal property in bankruptcy.
4. Default interest in excess of pre-default interest rates, late payment fees, and punitive damages have the same priority as general creditor claims as pre-default interest rates and principal claims.
5. Exemptions from creditors in bankruptcy vary from state to state.
Trusts and Estates
1. Beneficiary designations supercede later executed probates wills.
Criminal Justice
1. Acquitted conduct may be considered when calculating a sentence under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, or in general, as a basis for a sentence by a judge following a jury verdict.
2. It is constitutional to try guilt or innocence for a death penalty crime before a "death qualified" jury.
3. The death penalty is permitted in felony-murder cases where the convicted defendant was not a trigger man and did not solicit a murder or conspire with the intent of causing a murder.
4. No imprisonment sentence for a recidivist felony offender, no matter how trivial the current offense, violates the 8th Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
5. There is no constitutional requirement that criminal sentences for clearly lesser crimes be no more severe than clearly greater crimes (e.g. child rape is often punishable by a shorter sentence than non-commercial possession of child pornography).
6. Photographs of lawful conduct can be criminal to produce and distribute (e.g. in child pornography cases involving adolescents above the age of consent engaged in consensual, non-commercial sex).
7. Neo-natal homicide by women in the throes of childbirth constitutes first degree murder (true in Colorado and in some other states).
8. Criminal defendants who have been convicted are not generally permitted to benefit from subsequent reductions in the sentence for the crime of conviction.
9. A decision of a criminal defendant to testify in his or her own defense opens the door to introduction of evidence of prior criminal convictions that would otherwise be inadmissible. (Note that there is not a single alternative to this rule, but the rule as currently posed is problematic.)
10. Plea bargain offers are not relevant in any legally binding way to the validity of a later sentence upon conviction.
11. Acquittal of an offense in a state court does not trigger double jeopardy protections in a criminal prosecution by another state or the federal government (and likewise acquittal of a offense in a federal court does not trigger double jeopardy protections in state court).
12. Federal habeas corpus review is limited the violations of constitutional rights that took place through the conviction, even if after acquired evidence can establish innocence or cast substantial doubt on the accuracy of the verdict.
13. Forfeitures of rights in a criminal case as a result of the failure of court appointed counsel to act is not, per se, unconstitutional ineffective assistance of counsel.
14. The exclusionary rule applies to physical evidence obtained in violation of the 4th Amendment. (In such cases, damage awards would be more appropriate.)
15. Defects in grand jury indictment process, or preliminary hearing process can constitute a basis for the reversal of a conviction in a criminal case.
16. Multiple offenses, not interrupted by a period of incarceration or a criminal proceeding, often lead to consecutive rather than concurrent sentences of imprisonment.
17. State court criminal juries need not be unanimous as a matter of constitutional law.
Governmental Liability
1. Liability for civil rights violations is not vicarious. Employers of civil rights violators are only liable if affirmative misconduct is shown.
2. The 11th Amendment establishes a substantive principle of state sovereign immunity, rather than merely limiting venue in select types of lawsuits.
3. Qualified immunity for civil rights violations of constitutional rights that are not well established extends to all liability, rather than merely to liability for punitive damages.
4. Imprisonment as a result of a wrongful conviction does not give rise to liability under the takings clause of the due process clause of the 5th and 14th Amendments.
5. Judicial enforcement of a legal right does not constitute state action for civil rights action purposes.
Civil Procedure and Choice of Law
1. A federal court complaint fails to state a claim in cases where an alleged civil liability arises from acts that only the alleged offender is in a position to know absent espionage or whistle-blowing for failure to establish that it is "plausible" that such secret action took place.
2. A federal law counterclaim does not give rise to federal court jurisdiction in a civil action.
3. Corporations not treated a residents of every state where they have a regular place of business for diversity jurisdiction purposes.
4. Appeals from courts of inferior jurisdiction (at least in Colorado, New York, and some federal court contexts) are to the court of general jurisdiction rather than to the intermediate court of appeals.
5. Default civil judgments cannot be set aside for mistake, inadvertence, surprise, execusible neglect, fraud, misrepresentation or other misconduct of an adverse party more than six months after the judgment is entered, even if no action is taken to enforce the judgment in that time period. (Many defendants don't recognize that a default judgment has been entered or is a problem and have an incentive to do something about it, until it is enforced.)
6. Judges are not permitted to resolve disputed issues of fact prior to trial in actions where the right to a jury trial has been waived.
7. The right to a jury trial depends upon the classification of an action as arising in law or in equity, rather than expressly on facts such as the availability of money damages v. injunctive or declaratory relief, the availability of damages for non-economic damages, or allegations of fraud.
8. Personal jurisdiction is available in defamation actions in forums other than the forum in which the allegedly defaming party resides, or was present when the defamatory statement was allegedly made by the defaming party.
9. Personal jurisdiction is available in contract actions in forums other than the forum in which the allegedly breaching party resides, where the allegedly breaching party was present when executing the contract, where the contract provides that jurisdiction shall be available, or where the contract duties other than payment are to be performed (e.g. where the non-breaching party resides, or where contract negotiations took place).
10. The U.S. Supreme Court and federal courts have jurisdiction to review disputes concerning the outcome of federal elections (i.e. U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Senate, electoral college votes) made by state courts and by state and local governments, as opposed to confining these decisions exclusive to state courts and Congress.
Constitutional Law Other Than Individual Rights
1. Treaties may be unilaterally repealed by an ordinary law enacted by Congress and are not generallly viewed as self-executing.
2. The filibuster has the practical effect of imposing a sixty vote supermajority requirement on all legislation in the U.S. Senate for which a higher supermajority requirement is not imposed.
Tort and Environmental Law
1. The CERCLA (superfund) liability exception for innocent property owners is not sufficiently narrow to protect innocent property owners from all liability in excess of forfeiture of the property and forfeiture any profit received from the property.
2. There is no vicarious liability for medical malpractice.
3. Warnings that it is foreseeable that an ordinary user of a product will not read are relevant to product liability.
4. Ordinances requiring property owners to clear their sidewalks of snow do not give rise to negligence per se civil liability in Colorado.
Intellectual Property Law
1. Intellectual property protection is available for images of publicly available buildings.
2. Intellectual property protection is not per se unavailable for materials delivered voluntarily to an intended receipient on a non-commercial basis.
3. Statutory damages are permitted in intellectual property actions in cases where the existence of a market for identical or closely comparable intellectual property and a calculation of attorneys' fees permits accurate determination of the damages actually suffered by a defendant.
4. Stautory damages are determined per infringing work rather than per defendant.
5. Injunctive relief is available for patent law violations even when the holder of the patent has known about the infringement and has failed to assert any rights until the economic impact of an injunction far exceeds the economic impact had the infringement been alleged when the infringement was first discovered, or when the patent holder is not engaged in the production of a competing product. (In such cases, a court imposed accounting for profits on the basis of the licensing agreement that would have been made if the parties had negotiated a license should be imposed instead).
6. Intellectual property protection is available for public performance without modification of intellectual property made available for free, for example, via broadcast television or radio.
7. Copyrighted works take an extremely long time to enter the public domain, even if the owner has taken no action whatsoever, even a copyright registration, to assert copyright protection.
Bankruptcy
1. There is no general priority for trade creditors.
2. It is not generally possible to cramdown a personal residence mortgage in bankruptcy.
3. Replacement value, rather than the value of a debtor's assets to a creditor if obtained via a writ of execution, is used to value tangible personal property in bankruptcy.
4. Default interest in excess of pre-default interest rates, late payment fees, and punitive damages have the same priority as general creditor claims as pre-default interest rates and principal claims.
5. Exemptions from creditors in bankruptcy vary from state to state.
Trusts and Estates
1. Beneficiary designations supercede later executed probates wills.
01 April 2011
Internet Impact Accurately Predicted In 1971
Boing Boing presents yesterday, some highly accurate predictions about technologies like Netflix downloading of movies over the Internet, that were made forty years ago, in 1971.
Altitude Sickness Vulnerability Overwhelmingly Genetic
Robert Roach, who directs the Altitude Research Center at the University of Colorado, performed a similar test last year, taking 28 research subjects to a simulated altitude of 16,000 feet by putting them in a special chamber that mimics the effect of a low-oxygen environment. A blood test, screening for those six genetic elements, was able to predict with 96% accuracy which of the 28 would fall ill.
From here.
The military wants to know so that it can predict which soldiers will be most impaired when deployed rapidly to a high altitude situation, so it is funding the research, replicating the study described above with 140 subjects, and if it is successful, having a mass production "Acute Mountain Sickness Prediction Kit" for the military in place by 2014.
Military models indicate at least 25% of unacclimatized troops parachuting into a battlefield at 10,000 feet—and more than 80% of troops fighting at 13,200 feet—will get altitude sickness. One military study of a prolonged operation in the high mountains of Afghanistan found 14% of troops evacuated for medical treatment didn't have combat injuries—they had altitude sickness. Uncounted others, not sick enough to merit rescue by helicopter, were huddled in base camps while their units went out fighting, said Dr. Muza, the Army research physiologist. In most cases, acute mountain sickness dissipates within three days as the body adjusts to the elevation, though in severe cases, it can linger or lead to fatal complications. . . .
Projections for proportion of unacclimatized troops who will get sick at high altitudes.
10,000 feet – 25-35%
11,500 feet – 50-60%
13,200 feet – 80-90%
14,800 feet – 90-100%
Source: Stephen Muza, U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine. . . .
While the military is funding the new research, a predictive blood test could also be marketed to the public, Dr. Roach said. That could benefit Colorado's ski industry, which says up to 40% of its visitors come down with mountain sickness. The Institute for Altitude Medicine in Telluride, Colo., estimates the illness damps spending at mountain resorts by $200 million a year, as afflicted tourists don't much feel like shopping, skiing or dining out.
The fact that this trait is so overwhelmingly predicted by genetics is itself surprising.
Regional Differences In Neanderthal Admixture
The amount of Neanderthal admixture shown in Eurasian DNA analysis is similar (1%-4%) for all Eurasians, but there is a definite patttern in which the Neanderthal genes found in Europeans and those found in the Chinese are different. Indeed, it looks like the Neanderthal genes found in South Asians may be different from either of the others.
There are basically two ways this could happen.
One is that we are seeing founder effects from small groups that broke away from a common Eurasian source population that had a certain amount of Neanderthal admixture which was common to the entire Eurasian source population. This would have had to have happened quite early, as the East Asian branch of modern Eurasians breaks away from the West Eurasian branch no earlier than about 45,000 years ago, and possibly as early as 75,000 to 100,000 years ago.
The other is that there was population structure in the proto-European, proto-South Asian and proto-East Asian source populations, each of which had separate admixture events with Neanderthals that were similar in magnitude because the admixture process was similar in each case. This population structure, however, would need to have been present somewhere in the range where Neanderthals were present to admix with these separate founder populations. The admixture of Neanderthals with East Asian founder populations would have to have taken place somewhere in the vicinity of Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Southwest Asia, and again no earlier than about 45,000 years ago, and possibly as early as 75,000 to 100,000 years ago.
Any admixture, of course, would have had to have taken place by about 30,000 years ago, give or take a few thousand years, when the Neanderthals went extinct.
There are basically two ways this could happen.
One is that we are seeing founder effects from small groups that broke away from a common Eurasian source population that had a certain amount of Neanderthal admixture which was common to the entire Eurasian source population. This would have had to have happened quite early, as the East Asian branch of modern Eurasians breaks away from the West Eurasian branch no earlier than about 45,000 years ago, and possibly as early as 75,000 to 100,000 years ago.
The other is that there was population structure in the proto-European, proto-South Asian and proto-East Asian source populations, each of which had separate admixture events with Neanderthals that were similar in magnitude because the admixture process was similar in each case. This population structure, however, would need to have been present somewhere in the range where Neanderthals were present to admix with these separate founder populations. The admixture of Neanderthals with East Asian founder populations would have to have taken place somewhere in the vicinity of Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Southwest Asia, and again no earlier than about 45,000 years ago, and possibly as early as 75,000 to 100,000 years ago.
Any admixture, of course, would have had to have taken place by about 30,000 years ago, give or take a few thousand years, when the Neanderthals went extinct.
Good News on Friday
Social Issues:
* Despite the failure of a civil unions bill in the Republican controlled Colorado House of Representatives (the bill probably would have passed a vote in the chamber as a whole), gay marriage is now supported by majorities of men, women, Democrats and independents in opinion polls and support has increased dramatically in every demographic in the last six years.
* Civil unions or gay marriage are available in many states.
* Restoration of gay marriage in California seems imminent.
* The federal government has decided to stop defending the constitutionality of part of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in court.
* Sodomy prosecutions remain unconstitutional.
* Teen pregnancy rates and teen birth rates are at near record lows.
* Abortion rates are at near record lows, but constitutional protections for a pro-choice position on abortion remain secure precedents.
* Interracial marriage has become much more common as the stigmas against it have fallen.
* Divorce rates have fallen for a number of years. The current generation is less likely to get divorced than there parent's generation.
* New York recently became the last state to permit "no fault" divorce in favor of its previous, deeply flawed, fault based divorce regime.
* The percentage of the population that identifies as having "no religion" is the fastest growing religious identification in the United States and the stigma associated with that religious identification is waning.
Public Health and Safety:
* Traffic accident deaths are at the lowest level since 1949, down 3% from 2009 to 2010 despite an increased number of passenger-miles traveled, and down 25% since 2005. It has never been safer to drive a car per passenger-mile in the history of the world.
* Almost every kind of accidental death rate, other than deaths from overdoses of a select group of prescription drugs (mostly painkillers), are at near record lows.
* Public education campaigns have greatly reduced sudden infant death syndrome and traffic deaths of young children. Those campaigns are also making a dent in shaken baby syndrome injuries.
* Smoking is down greatly and this is one public health area where the U.S. leads comparabhle nations in the Europe and Asia. This has finally produced, this year, declining lung cancer death rates in women as well as men.
* Anti-scientific criticisms of vaccination of children have been definitively discredited.
* People with HIV/AIDS can now live much longer with effective treatments than they did a couple of decades ago and the infection rate for the epidemic has stablized or declined in a great many demographics.
* A vaccine against HPV, one of the only sexually transmitted diseases not easily treatable with drugs and not effectively prevented with barrier contraception methods, has entered wide public use.
* Life expectencies are rising and infant mortality rates continue to fall. Great gains have been made in treating cardiovascular diseases and cancer.
Education:
* Colorado has significantly increased its high school graduation rate with a new mandatory attendance law.
* The United States has one of the highest rates of college graduation and high school graduation in the world.
* The scores of armed forces recruits on entrance exams has improved.
Crime and Punishment:
* Crime rates, including murder, are at near record lows.
* Incarceration rates are no longer surging up as state budgets have tightened and forced a more balance look at the necessity of mass incarceration.
* Medical marijuana has wide support and is legal in at least seventeen states, and the federal government has agreed to tolerate it despite the lack of a formal federal legislative exception permitting it. Support for legalization of marijuana is high, and support for the punitive war on drugs approach is weak.
* Excessive and racially discriminatory in practice federal punishments for possession of small amounts of crack cocaine based on bad scientific assumptions have been greatly reduced.
* Many states, including Colorado, have shifted sentencing laws for drug crimes to favor a treatment approach over incarceration for drug users (as opposed to drug dealers).
* Serious white collar crimes receive serious criminal sentences rather than "slap on the wrist" sentences that fail to reflect their seriousness, and prosecuters have been willing to prosecute serious white collar crime defendants.
* DNA evidence has produced exonerations of many wrongfully convicted or wrongfully charged criminal defendants (mostly in rape cases), and has produced convictions of many rapists who would never have been charged otherwise.
* Wider use of videotape technology has resulted in many more cases of successful sanctioning of improper police conduct and has reduced the amount of lying about alleged confessions by criminal defendants.
* Illinois ended the death penalty and commuted the sentences of everyone on death row to long or life prison sentences.
* The U.S. Supreme Court has prohibited the use of the death penalty for crimes committed by the mentally retarded and for crimes committed by offenders under the age of eighteen.
* The U.S. Supreme Court has prohibited the use of the death penalty for almost all crimes other than murder (a few crimes such as treason and espionage where murder is an inferred likely possibility but not certain to have occurred are also constitutionally subject to the death penalty).
* The U.S. Supreme Court has prohibited the imposition of life without possibility of parole for crimes other than murder committed by people while under the age of eighteen.
* Many states have ended the use of life without possibility of parole sentences for juveniles entirely.
Economics:
* Housing market fundamentals such as long term inflation adjusted prices and price/rent ratios suggest that the housing price bubble has come close to working its way out of the economy. Since mortgage rates remain fairly low, housing is at its most affordable for more than a decade in many markets.
* Inflation is low, but we are not in deflation.
* We are experiencing some positive GDP growth on a consistent basis.
* Unlike Iceland, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, we are not in or near a sovereign debt crisis. The Irish have incurred government bailouts of its banks of $25,000 per person, which would be equivalent to $7.5 trillion if it has a population comparable to the United States. The combined bailout cost in the United States is on track to be about 2% of that amount per capita and did not require foreign assistance or major austerity plans.
* The unemployment rate in the United States, at 8.8% for March, while not low, is the lowest it has been for two years.
* Subprime mortgage lending, which was exploitive to borrowers and unsound as a business model, has virtually vanished.
* Payday lending has been curtailed in many states including Colorado.
* Consumer debt levels have fallen, and increased credit card minimum payments systemically reduce the extent to which families can become overextended for the foreseeable future.
Military, Security and Foreign Affairs
* We are down to 50,000 troops in Iraq, none in front line combat positions, and there is some reasonable prospect that many of them will come home.
* Tunisia and Egypt have cast off dictatorships and on are a clear path towards democratic government.
* Significant democratic reforms or replacements of dictators are likely in Syria, Jordan, Yemen and Libya.
* A dictator in Pakistan was not so long ago forced out in favor of a democratically elected leader.
* An uprising in the Ivory Coast appears on track to depose a pretender to that country's Presidency whose election depended on election fraud in favor of the actual election winner.
* World powers organized to use economic sanctions and military force to prevent mass civilian killings and a restoration of totalitarrian rule in Libya.
* The Cold War is still over, more than a decade later, and Soviet style Communism lost. Some former Soviet countries have joined the E.U., the Eurozone and NATO.
* Kosovo remains securely independent from Serbia and is widely recognized as a sovereign state.
* Nine and a half years later, 9/11 has not been repeated. Foreign terrorism has not become a regular event in the U.S. A new skyscraper and memorial are going up where the Twin Towers once stood.
* The U.S. military budget is being cut.
* China has started to move towards allowing the Yuan's value in foreign currency markets to float to market levels, reducing the importance a factor that has disfavored U.S. exports to China and favored China imports to the U.S.
* While China still accounts for about half of the world's executions, it has significantly curtailed its use of the death penalty and instituted new due process protections in that process.
* Despite the failure of a civil unions bill in the Republican controlled Colorado House of Representatives (the bill probably would have passed a vote in the chamber as a whole), gay marriage is now supported by majorities of men, women, Democrats and independents in opinion polls and support has increased dramatically in every demographic in the last six years.
* Civil unions or gay marriage are available in many states.
* Restoration of gay marriage in California seems imminent.
* The federal government has decided to stop defending the constitutionality of part of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in court.
* Sodomy prosecutions remain unconstitutional.
* Teen pregnancy rates and teen birth rates are at near record lows.
* Abortion rates are at near record lows, but constitutional protections for a pro-choice position on abortion remain secure precedents.
* Interracial marriage has become much more common as the stigmas against it have fallen.
* Divorce rates have fallen for a number of years. The current generation is less likely to get divorced than there parent's generation.
* New York recently became the last state to permit "no fault" divorce in favor of its previous, deeply flawed, fault based divorce regime.
* The percentage of the population that identifies as having "no religion" is the fastest growing religious identification in the United States and the stigma associated with that religious identification is waning.
Public Health and Safety:
* Traffic accident deaths are at the lowest level since 1949, down 3% from 2009 to 2010 despite an increased number of passenger-miles traveled, and down 25% since 2005. It has never been safer to drive a car per passenger-mile in the history of the world.
* Almost every kind of accidental death rate, other than deaths from overdoses of a select group of prescription drugs (mostly painkillers), are at near record lows.
* Public education campaigns have greatly reduced sudden infant death syndrome and traffic deaths of young children. Those campaigns are also making a dent in shaken baby syndrome injuries.
* Smoking is down greatly and this is one public health area where the U.S. leads comparabhle nations in the Europe and Asia. This has finally produced, this year, declining lung cancer death rates in women as well as men.
* Anti-scientific criticisms of vaccination of children have been definitively discredited.
* People with HIV/AIDS can now live much longer with effective treatments than they did a couple of decades ago and the infection rate for the epidemic has stablized or declined in a great many demographics.
* A vaccine against HPV, one of the only sexually transmitted diseases not easily treatable with drugs and not effectively prevented with barrier contraception methods, has entered wide public use.
* Life expectencies are rising and infant mortality rates continue to fall. Great gains have been made in treating cardiovascular diseases and cancer.
Education:
* Colorado has significantly increased its high school graduation rate with a new mandatory attendance law.
* The United States has one of the highest rates of college graduation and high school graduation in the world.
* The scores of armed forces recruits on entrance exams has improved.
Crime and Punishment:
* Crime rates, including murder, are at near record lows.
* Incarceration rates are no longer surging up as state budgets have tightened and forced a more balance look at the necessity of mass incarceration.
* Medical marijuana has wide support and is legal in at least seventeen states, and the federal government has agreed to tolerate it despite the lack of a formal federal legislative exception permitting it. Support for legalization of marijuana is high, and support for the punitive war on drugs approach is weak.
* Excessive and racially discriminatory in practice federal punishments for possession of small amounts of crack cocaine based on bad scientific assumptions have been greatly reduced.
* Many states, including Colorado, have shifted sentencing laws for drug crimes to favor a treatment approach over incarceration for drug users (as opposed to drug dealers).
* Serious white collar crimes receive serious criminal sentences rather than "slap on the wrist" sentences that fail to reflect their seriousness, and prosecuters have been willing to prosecute serious white collar crime defendants.
* DNA evidence has produced exonerations of many wrongfully convicted or wrongfully charged criminal defendants (mostly in rape cases), and has produced convictions of many rapists who would never have been charged otherwise.
* Wider use of videotape technology has resulted in many more cases of successful sanctioning of improper police conduct and has reduced the amount of lying about alleged confessions by criminal defendants.
* Illinois ended the death penalty and commuted the sentences of everyone on death row to long or life prison sentences.
* The U.S. Supreme Court has prohibited the use of the death penalty for crimes committed by the mentally retarded and for crimes committed by offenders under the age of eighteen.
* The U.S. Supreme Court has prohibited the use of the death penalty for almost all crimes other than murder (a few crimes such as treason and espionage where murder is an inferred likely possibility but not certain to have occurred are also constitutionally subject to the death penalty).
* The U.S. Supreme Court has prohibited the imposition of life without possibility of parole for crimes other than murder committed by people while under the age of eighteen.
* Many states have ended the use of life without possibility of parole sentences for juveniles entirely.
Economics:
* Housing market fundamentals such as long term inflation adjusted prices and price/rent ratios suggest that the housing price bubble has come close to working its way out of the economy. Since mortgage rates remain fairly low, housing is at its most affordable for more than a decade in many markets.
* Inflation is low, but we are not in deflation.
* We are experiencing some positive GDP growth on a consistent basis.
* Unlike Iceland, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, we are not in or near a sovereign debt crisis. The Irish have incurred government bailouts of its banks of $25,000 per person, which would be equivalent to $7.5 trillion if it has a population comparable to the United States. The combined bailout cost in the United States is on track to be about 2% of that amount per capita and did not require foreign assistance or major austerity plans.
* The unemployment rate in the United States, at 8.8% for March, while not low, is the lowest it has been for two years.
* Subprime mortgage lending, which was exploitive to borrowers and unsound as a business model, has virtually vanished.
* Payday lending has been curtailed in many states including Colorado.
* Consumer debt levels have fallen, and increased credit card minimum payments systemically reduce the extent to which families can become overextended for the foreseeable future.
Military, Security and Foreign Affairs
* We are down to 50,000 troops in Iraq, none in front line combat positions, and there is some reasonable prospect that many of them will come home.
* Tunisia and Egypt have cast off dictatorships and on are a clear path towards democratic government.
* Significant democratic reforms or replacements of dictators are likely in Syria, Jordan, Yemen and Libya.
* A dictator in Pakistan was not so long ago forced out in favor of a democratically elected leader.
* An uprising in the Ivory Coast appears on track to depose a pretender to that country's Presidency whose election depended on election fraud in favor of the actual election winner.
* World powers organized to use economic sanctions and military force to prevent mass civilian killings and a restoration of totalitarrian rule in Libya.
* The Cold War is still over, more than a decade later, and Soviet style Communism lost. Some former Soviet countries have joined the E.U., the Eurozone and NATO.
* Kosovo remains securely independent from Serbia and is widely recognized as a sovereign state.
* Nine and a half years later, 9/11 has not been repeated. Foreign terrorism has not become a regular event in the U.S. A new skyscraper and memorial are going up where the Twin Towers once stood.
* The U.S. military budget is being cut.
* China has started to move towards allowing the Yuan's value in foreign currency markets to float to market levels, reducing the importance a factor that has disfavored U.S. exports to China and favored China imports to the U.S.
* While China still accounts for about half of the world's executions, it has significantly curtailed its use of the death penalty and instituted new due process protections in that process.
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