U.S. BecomIng A Third-World Country Part 63

The U.S. legal and political system used to be a model that the rest of the world looked up to, but this isn't the case any longer. Mostly, Republicans are to blame for the decline.

Overall, the U.S. score in the Rule of Law Index declined by 2.9 percent, more than any other country in the Western Europe and North America region, and more than any other high-income country. Its global ranking fell by two, putting it at 27th out of 139 countries, just behind Portugal, Uruguay, and Latvia.

The U.S. scores fell in every factor except regulatory enforcement, with the most significant deterioration in the measures of constraints on government powers, absence of corruption, open government, fundamental rights, and criminal justice. The data . . . reflect the deepening of multi-year negative trends as well as certain longstanding systemic weaknesses, all of which will require a concerted effort to reverse.

The Index score measuring constraints on government powers, for example, captures issues such as checks on executive authority by the legislature, judiciary, independent auditing bodies, non-governmental actors, and the like. The last time the United States saw improvement in this score was between 2015 and 2016. Since 2016, in the period corresponding to the Trump administration, the U.S. score on constraints on government powers fell 16 percent, with double-digit declines in each of the indicators that make up that score, including legislative checks on government powers (-16%), judicial checks on government powers (-17%), checks from independent auditing and review (-21%), non-governmental checks (-16%), and sanctions of government officials for misconduct (-14%). Over the same period, the U.S. score on respect for fundamental rights fell 11 percent, giving it a ranking of 42nd out of 139 countries on that factor in the 2021 study.

Beyond these contemporary rule of law challenges, the United States suffers from historic weaknesses with respect to equal treatment in the justice system. This year the United States ranks 122nd out of 139 countries in the indicator measuring discrimination in the civil justice system and 111th out of 139 for impartiality of its criminal justice system.

From here.

Payday Loans v. Plasma Donation

Economically insecure people need small boosts of funds now and then someway or another. 

Young people, in particular, often haven't had time to build up emergency fund savings to deal with these situations and haven't developed the credit to have credit cards to solve this problem for them.

Payday loans and other exploitive short term small loan finance at high interest rates are one way that this happens. Plasma donation is another. We should look for another way to meet this need. 

We find that access to a plasma donation center reduces demand (inquiries) for payday and installment loans by 6.5% and 8.1%, respectively, with larger effects (13.1% and 15.7%, respectively) on younger borrowers. Moreover, foot traffic increases by 7-10% at essential and non-essential goods establishments when a new plasma center opens nearby. Our findings suggest that plasma donation helps households smooth consumption without appealing to high-cost debt.

Link here.

Socioeconomic Status v. Intelligence and Parental Ability

At the level of an entire school or school district at the K-12 level, the best predictor of academic achievement is the socioeconomic background of its students.  And, the gaps get bigger as kids get older (something called the Matthew Effect).

Some of this is because people with higher IQ and other socioeconomically valuable psychological traits, which are real things with a strong hereditary component, tend to have more socioeconomic success (which is the main reason why we care about IQ). These people tend to marry each other in this age of assortive marriage, and in turn they have kids who share these traits. And, while IQ doesn't predict everything well, it is an excellent predictor of academic success in school.

Is this purely hereditary model enough? No. Serious socioeconomic, nutritional, and educational deprivation (especially for preschool age and young elementary school aged children) can also undermine academic achievement, even if someone has a high IQ potential. 

But, once you hit a socioeconomic situation which we'd call "middle class" in the U.S. (in its very elastic definition of that term), for someone going to public schools in all but the worst neighborhoods (in terms of academic achievement in schools and personal safety and lead exposure), these deprivation effects become minimal.

A new study concludes, however, that almost all effects on academic ability and achievement attributed to socioeconomic background and the Matthew Effect can be successfully modeled as a combination of the child's inborn ability as demonstrated at a young age, and the nurture derived or not yet realized genetic gains involved in their primary caregiver's abilities modeled here as "mother's ability". 

This is true even though socio-economic gaps in measured academic achievement tend to accumulate and grow over time when not controlling for a child and a mother's academic abilities.

This result tends to support the idea that early, quality, full day preschool is more valuable in the long run for poor children whose primary caregivers have less academic ability (or aren't able to spend time with their children to transmit their ability because they work so much), than for middle class and more affluent children whose have a high ability parent that is a primary caregiver for them in those years. What full day preschool is providing to poor children is higher ability primary caretakers for much of each day than they would otherwise have been exposed to without it. 

This study is at odds with a massive volume of conventional heredity tests that show little or no nurture effects. 

It may be that these nurture effects are masked by homogeneous and correlated nurture effects in most samples. Alternatively, the mother's ability tested in this study may be a proxy for late blooming hereditary ability in the mothers' children. But the "Head Start" studies showing strong benefits from these programs, and non-replication of these results to nearly the same extent in more broadly available full day quality preschool programs, tends to support a primary caregiver nurture, rather than a not yet blossomed inborn ability hypothesis.

Studies that investigate the effects of socioeconomic background (SES) on student achievement tend to find stronger SES effects with age, although there is much inconsistency between studies. There is also a large academic literature on cumulative advantage arguing that SES inequalities increase as children age, a type of Matthew Effect. 

This study analysing data from the children of NLSY79 mothers (N ≈ 9000, Obs ≈ 27,000) investigates the relationship of SES by children's age for two cognitive domains (Peabody Picture Vocabulary test and digit span memory) and three achievement domains (reading comprehension, reading recognition and math). 

There are small increases in the SES-test score correlations for several domains, but there are more substantial increases in the test score correlations with mother's ability and prior ability. Regression analyses found linear increases in SES effects for all domains except digit memory. However, when considering mother's ability, the substantially reduced SES effects did not increase with children's age. Much of the effects of SES on children's domain scores are accounted for by mother's ability. The effects of prior ability also increase with age and SES effects are small. Therefore, there is no evidence for cumulative socioeconomic advantage for these domains. Generally, increases in SES effects on children's cognitive development and student achievement are likely to be spurious because of the importance of parents' abilities and their transmission from parents to children.

Gary N. Marks, Michael O'Connell, "No evidence for cumulating socioeconomic advantage. Ability explains increasing SES effects with age on children's domain test scores" 88 Intelligence 101582 (September-October 2021) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2021.101582. 

Who Pays Sin Taxes?

Sin taxes are excise taxes that are conceived primarily public health tools, not primarily ways to raise general revenue for governmental operations. 

To lesser extent, excise taxes, more generally, can also serve as self-insurance charges/user fees, for example, in using gasoline taxes to pay for roads, in vaccine taxes to pay for vaccine side effect treatment, or in gambling taxes to pay for gambling addiction treatment.

The dollar amount of tax dollars raised by these taxes is fairly modest compared to general taxes in income, sales, and property ownership. But the idea behind sin taxes is that higher taxes on things that are bad for you, but not appropriate to ban entirely, will discourage their consumption.

The impact of about 2% of total income isn't crushing even for the most heavily impacted clusters of households, although since many of these households pay no federal or state income tax, it is still often their greatest federal tax burden.

In the U.S., high taxes on tobacco products have been quite successful in that regard. Only 8% of Americans purchase and smoke tobacco on a regular basis. These taxes have played an important role in greatly reducing smoking rates compared to our international peers, and producing associated health benefits, in concert with other regulatory developments like limiting where it is legal to smoke, increasing the minimum age to purchase tobacco products, and a cultural shift driving by public interest advertising campaigns and growing public health research that has become widely known. But, these taxes are strongly regressive.

In contrast, alcohol taxes have not had nearly the same consumption reducing effects. While 10% of households buy 80% of alcohol, roughly 50% of American households purchase significant amounts of alcohol on  a regular basis (which is far more dry households than I would have expected). Instead, it has operated as a sales tax on a good for which demand in inelastic, and has not had as clearly demonstrable public health benefits. On the other hand, as the study below reveals, the impact of these taxes was mildly progressive in distributional by income group.

Marijuana and gambling taxes, likewise, seem to be functioning more as a way to bribe median voters into supporting legalization to overcome their weak preferences against legalization, rather than reducing consumption or serving sound tax policy. It probably makes sense to reduce them or phase out these taxes once support for legalizing these activities becomes widespread because legalization didn't lead to the parade of horribles that opponents of legalizing marijuana and gambling claimed that it would.

The body text of the new paper notes that:

In New York City, a 1.75L bottle of vodka might sell for as little as $11.99 of which $7.97 is tax; and a $13.00 pack of cigarettes includes $6.86 in taxes. 

To forward these goals, taxes on sin goods have grown in recent years. In 2009 the federal excise tax on a pack of cigarettes increased from $0.39 to $1.01. . . . All but nine states have substantially raised their tobacco taxes in the last two decades, with the median tax on cigarettes more than quadrupling between 2000 and 2021 from $0.34 to $1.78. Meanwhile, tax revenues from alcoholic beverages have grown, due to both rising consumption and state tax rate increases.

In all, combined federal and state taxes on alcohol and tobacco raise nearly $40 billion annually – an amount comparable to the total federal income tax paid by the bottom half of the income distribution.2

2 For state sin tax revenues, please see https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/state-and-local-tobacco-tax-revenue and https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/state-and-local-alcohol-tax-revenue. For federal sin tax revenues, see https://www. taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/types-federal-excise-taxes. For income tax statistics, please consult https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/17in02etr.xls 

The linked sources indicate that for the year 2015, federal excise tax collections were: $10.37 billion on alcohol and $14.45 billion on tobacco. State and local excise tax collections in the year 2015 were: $7.04 billion on alcohol and $18.17 on tobacco. 

The combined total excise taxes in the U.S. for the year 2015 were $17.41 billion on alcohol, and $32.620 billion on tobacco, for a combined $50.03 billion in total alcohol and tobacco excise taxes at the federal, state and local level. 

The body text of the paper continues, stating:

Just 10% of households account for more than 80% of alcoholic beverage purchases by volume, while the bottom half of the distribution nearly abstains from beer, wine and spirits purchases. For cigarettes, 8% of households are responsible for virtually all purchases. . . 

The top 20% of households [ranked by sin taxes paid] pay roughly 90% of all sin taxes, while more than half of households pay virtually no sin taxes. Following the purchase patterns, taxes on cigarettes are more concentrated than those on alcohol beverages. . . . 

[For analysis purposes each person in the large survey sample was assigned to the best fitting of the eight statistical purchase pattern clusters.] These clusters explain 80% of the overall variation in sin tax burden, while demographics alone explain less than 3%. We identify a tiny group of households (2.5% of the population), whom we label Everything and who consume extremely large amounts of nearly all sin goods. . . . They also tend to be disproportionately from the lowest levels of income and education, white, and older. These households bear a striking similarity to those Case and Deaton (2020) describe as most susceptible to “deaths of despair.” A group of non-drinking Smokers are demographically similar and make up an additional 5.5% of the population. These groups pay 68% of existing sin taxes, which average approximately 2% of income[.] . . . 

[A]lcohol taxes appear progressive at most quantiles of purchasers, and around half of households purchase little to no alcohol. High-income households in the top decile spend around $52 per year on [alcohol excise] taxes, while low-income households in the top decile spend only around $32. Households in the top 5% spend more than twice these amounts.

This comes from two sources. First, high-income households purchase more ethanol (around 35% more) than low-income households at nearly all quantiles of the distribution. However, drinks per adult are roughly constant across quantiles, so extra purchases are mostly explained by larger household size. Second, distilled spirits comprise a higher share of drinks for higher-income households, and are taxed at a higher rate per unit of ethanol (or standard drink) than beer.

Cigarette taxes, on the other hand, appear regressive . . . , though the overall correlation between cigarette taxes and income is still quite weak, ≈ −0.06. Regressivity is driven largely by the extensive margin. At lower levels of income, more than 10% of households smoke, while this is not the case at higher income levels. The lowest income households in the top 5% of the cigarette tax distribution spend more than $300 per year on these taxes, while the top 1% of households spend more than $1000 per year. This is consistent with the fact . . . that the top 1.5% of households account for 60% of all cigarette taxes. These heaviest smokers drive both the average burden and the overall regressivity of the tax.

As the table above indicates, about 60% of households are in clusters that consume very little alcohol or tobacco. 

About 32% of households are in clusters that consume moderate or large amounts of alcohol, but not tobacco (about 93% of people who consume moderate or large amounts of alcohol are non-smokers, similar to the share of the population as a whole). 

About 5.5% of households  are in a cluster that consumes little alcohol but consumes tobacco (a 69%  share of tobacco users, which is surprisingly large). 

About 2.5% of households are in a cluster that consumes significant amounts of both alcohol and tobacco.

Put another way, alcohol consumption and tobacco consumption are almost completely statistically independent of each other.

The demographic profiles of the different clusters is interesting as well.

It also is worth noting that more than two-thirds of sin taxes are paid by people who look a lot like Trump supporters who smoke among whites. The body text's characterization of this group as predominantly "white" while technically true, is somewhat misleading and largely just reflects the fact that "white" is the most common racial category in the U.S. 

This group includes mostly proportionate numbers of whites, of blacks and of Hispanics who both smoke and drink. It includes disproportionately smaller numbers of Asians, Hispanics who smoke but don't drink, people under age 35, people with college degrees, high income people, and parents of minors who smoke and drink. 

These excerpts omit speculation in the article on potential future legislation and in particular the potential impact of a sugary beverages tax. A sugary beverages tax, if enacted, however, would also disproportionately impact the group that pays the highest alcohol and tobacco excises taxes as well, although not as starkly.

The paper and its abstract are as follows:

We find that sin good purchases are highly concentrated with 10% of households paying more than 80% of taxes on alcohol and cigarettes. 

Total sin tax burdens are poorly explained by demographics (including income), but are well explained by eight household clusters defined by purchasing patterns. The two most taxed clusters comprise 8% of households, pay 68% of sin taxes, are older, less educated, and lower income. 

Taxes on sugary beverages broaden the tax base but add to the burdens of heavily taxed households. Efforts to increase sin taxes should consider the heavy burdens borne by few households.

Christopher Conlon, Nirupama L. Rao & Yinan Wang, "Who Pays Sin Taxes? Understanding the Overlapping Burdens of Corrective Taxes" NBER Working Paper 29393 (October 2021) DOI 10.3386/w29393.

A Breakthrough in Converting Heat To Electricity More Efficiently

Scientists have made a breakthrough in converting heat to electricity much more efficiently with a class of materials called thermoelectric oxides.  One of the main reasons that this is important is that in developed countries nearly two-thirds of total energy production (mostly from fossil fuel power sources, and from nuclear fission power plants) is typically discarded as "waste heat".

This would make it possible, for example, to convert waste heat from electricity generation to electricity, which has been a major problem involved in making nuclear fusion power generation economically viable. It is a break through that is also relevant to some, but not all, renewable energy sources. It would enhance solar thermal plants, biofuel plants, and geothermal plants, but wouldn't have much of an impact on hydropower, tidal power, wind power, or photovoltaic solar cells. (Geothermal plants, by the way, are usually sited where magma is unusually close to the surface of the Earth in places like Iceland, but can, in principle, be used anywhere if you dig deep wells.)

More mundanely, this development might facilitate clothing with thermoelectric converters that would power your smart phone, flashlight, or laptop. Or it might be used in hybrid cars to extend their range by using waste heat from the internal combustion engine to recharge the car's batteries in much the same way the regenerative braking does in existing hybrid and electric cars. It could also reduce the drain that using air conditioning places on electric car batteries, by using the waste heat the air conditioner generates to recharge the car's batteries.

Other materials called chalcogenides are currently still more efficient at converting heat to electricity than even these new enhanced thermal oxides, but chalcogenides have other drawbacks that have prevented them from being used on a large scale. Chalcogenides are unstable in air, require cold temperatures to work well, and are toxic. So, their large scale use has been a problem.

The methods used in the breakthrough, using a Lithium-Titanium oxide, in contrast, lacks those drawbacks. The benefits of the new method arise mostly from the manufacturing process used to create the two layer, film over substrate, material, rather than the specific thermoelectric oxide material used in this proof of concept test. So this method can probably be generalized to other thermoelectric oxides that work even better.

These materials would allow power plants to attain a total energy production efficiency similar to that of co-generation plants that divert waste heat from electricity generation to generate useful heat such as heating greenhouses or buildings. So, power plants would produce much more useable energy with the same amount of fuel. The reduced fuel consumption would also makes the electricity generated at fossil fuel and nuclear fission power plants greener in every respect.

Waste heat itself is an environmental problem called thermal pollution, that contribute to global warming and disrupt ecologies in the water and other habitats near power plants: "Elevated water temperatures decrease oxygen levels, which can kill fish and alter food chain composition, reduce species biodiversity, and foster invasion by new thermophilic species." This breakthrough could greatly reduce thermal pollution.

One of the possible ways to recover this waste heat as electricity is via "thermoelectric conversion" -- a process that uses temperature difference in semiconductors to convert waste heat into electric power. The thermopower (S) is a measure of the magnitude of an induced thermoelectric voltage in response to a temperature difference across the material. The electric power is evaluated by power factor (PF), which is the product of thermopower (S)-squared and electronic conductivity (s). Therefore, the high electric power (PF) is capable of combining large S with high s in thermoelectric materials.

However, the PF is constrained by a trade-off between S and s. The S and s depend on carrier concentration, and thus the PF is usually maximized by tuning the carrier concentration with the addition of impurity elements -- the s increases with increasing impurity concentration but the S decreases. This trade-off limits the PF.

In a recent study published in Advanced Science, a team of scientists led by Associate Professor Takayoshi Katase of the Tokyo Tech have discovered a way to break this trade-off. The scientists grew thin films of the Mott insulator oxide LaTiO3 on different substrates and found a way to introduce epitaxial strain, a strain that is born from a mismatch in the lattice structures of the substrate and the deposited (epitaxial) film. The artificial compressive strain was able to change LaTiO3 from the Mott insulator to metal. In the metallic state, increase in both S and s resulted in a hundred-fold increase in PF. . . .

This discovery promises to advance the field of thermoelectric materials. 

Our experiments suggest that epitaxial strain will be a novel tool to harvest large power factors from thermoelectric oxides that are inconspicuous in their bulk by breaking the trade-off problem. Metal chalcogenides such as Bi2Te3 have been known as high performance thermoelectric materials, but the chalcogenides have problems with toxic elements, and low thermal and chemical stability, which restrict the large-scale use of thermoelectricity. Contrarily, since oxides are stable in air and even at high temperatures, they are ideal for maintenance-free thermoelectric conversion applications. The thermoelectric conversion efficiency is much lower than that of metal chalcogenides at this stage. But, by greatly improving the thermoelectric performance of oxides beyond the trade-off relationship, thermoelectric conversion is expected to become widespread as a general energy source. 

concludes Dr. Katase.

From Science Daily discussing a paper in:

Takayoshi Katase, et al., "Breaking of Thermopower–Conductivity Trade‐Off in LaTiO 3 Film around Mott Insulator to Metal Transition." Advanced Science 2102097  (2021). DOI: 10.1002/advs.202102097

Denver Ballot Issues 2021 And Colorado State Ballot Issues In 2021

Ballots are just starting to arrive at people's homes in Denver, Colorado this week for the 2021 general election, for which ballots must be returned by November 2, 2021. 

Your ballot can be mailed back if you complete it soon enough and pay for postage, or it can be dropped at any of numerous, conveniently located Denver ballot drop boxes around the City for free at any time before the end of the day on Tuesday, November 2, 2021.

The ballot in Denver will have three statewide ballot issues and thirteen City and County ballot issues.

The ballot in Denver will also have four Denver Public Schools school board elections which make up about half of the DPS school board: an "at large" director election with five candidates seeking one seat, and DPS School Board district director elections in three Districts (Districts 2, 3 and 4 with two, two and four candidates running in each respectively). I personally only vote in the "at large" race because my district had a vote for school board director for a four year term two years ago when the other half of the current DPS school board was elected. My analysis of the Denver Public Schools school board races will be saved for another possible future post.

Any given voter in Denver will thus have either seventeen or eighteen decisions to make on their ballot. Long ballots like these, even in off years, are a systemic problem with Colorado's political system that should be reformed. But that is a matter for another day in another post.

This is based largely on official voter information pamphlets for the measures and casual awareness of local news coverage of the issues. If you want a second opinion you have review a Denver Post voter's guide on the same issues.

Executive Summary

If you are in a rush, and you trust me, here are my recommendations on the sixteen ballot issues voters have to consider in the City and County of Denver, Colorado this year.

Vote No on all three state ballot issues (Amendment 78, Proposition 119 and Proposition 120).

Vote No on the following six local Denver ballot issues: 

2E, 2F, 300, 302, 303 and 304.

Vote Yes on the following seven local Denver ballot issues: 

2A, 2B, 2C, 2D, 2G, 2H, and 301.

State Ballot Issues

Amendment 78

Amendment 78 would require the approval of the state legislature, following a public hearing, to spend state money that comes from sources other than legislative appropriations, like lawsuit settlement proceeds and certain federal grants. It is a response to conservative dissatisfaction with the fact the Governor Polis, a Democrat, was able to decide how to spend emergency COVID grants from the federal government.

You should vote No on Amendment 78, a change to the state constitution. 

The reality is that these kinds of funds may not be available at all unless the executive branch can actively negotiate where they will be going (e.g. class action lawsuit settlements earmarked for particular purposes), or need to be spent quickly (e.g. disaster and pandemic relief funds) to have the desired effect. Colorado's legislature is in session for only four months each year, so in order to get quick action, the wait to spend emergency funds could easily be as much as nine to ten months, unless an expensive special session of the legislature is called for what is usually, relative to the size of the state budget, a fairly small amount of money.

The reason for voter input in TABOR ballot issues is to give the public a say on spending that they are paying for, this justification isn't present, however, for Amendment 78 funds.

Proposition 119

This initiative would increase retail marijuana sales taxes from 15% to 20% (phased in over three years) raising an estimated $137.6 million to fund grants for tutoring and other after school education programs in a way independently of existing school boards and higher educational programs. The priority for the programs would be for lower income families.

You should vote No on Proposition 119.

Like most complex ballot issues, it isn't very well drafted or thought out, relative to comparable initiative of the state legislature.

This is a major new regressive tax the strengthens the incentive to move marijuana to the black market. It creates a new bureaucracy independent of the State Board of Education and Colorado Department of Education to run this program rather than working with existing educators. It doesn't have a clear focus or buy-in from educations whom it is supposed to support. While supporting kids learning is a worthy cause, this leaves open lots of room for dubious programs when other public needs are more worthy of taxpayer financed spending.

Proposition 120

The state legislature temporary reduced for 2022 and 2023, real property tax rates by 9% on all forms of real estate covered by Proposition 120 except multifamily apartment buildings and hotels.

Proposition 120 would make those reductions permanent and would also lower property taxes by 9% on multifamily apartment buildings and hotels.

Proposition 120 would significantly and permanently reduce funding for public schools and would also significantly reduce revenue for public schools, only some of which wouldn't be restored by state funding. It would also reduce the availability of homestead property tax exemptions for senior citizens and disabled veterans. The reduction would be about $46 million statewide in 2022, about $50 million in 2023, and more in subsequent years.

The ballot language doesn't reflect the impact of significantly changed state laws since it was proposed.

Denver Ballot Issues

Issues 2A, 2B, 2C, 2D and 2E

Denver ballot issues 2A, 2B, 2C, 2D and 2E are requests from the City and County of Denver government seek voter permission to issue new municipal bonds, financed with existing taxes, to replace prior municipal bonds that have been paid off, for particular major capital expenditures broken into five subcategories (A-E). Some of these expenditures are for repairs and renovations of existing infrastructure. Some are for new projects.

In substance, the City is asking voters if they favor the major spending commitment that each of the five measures calls for on the merits as a good or a bad way to spend money. 

Issue 2A would devote $104 million to capital expenditures on various cultural facilities in the City.

Issue 2B would devote $39 million to capital expenditures on homeless shelters.

Issue 2C would devote $63 million to capital expenditures for pedestrian and bicycle transportation infrastructure and to improving a Morrison Corridor Art District in West Denver.

Issue 2D would devote $54 million to capital expenditures for park and recreation facilities.

Issue 2E would devote $190 million to a major expansion and overhaul of the National Western Stock Show Complex in North Denver (basically the "county fair grounds" for the City and County of Denver).

Vote Yes on Denver ballot issues 2A, 2B, 2C and 2D because the amount of spending on these capital improvements are things that the City needs. 

Vote No on Denver ballot issue 2E because the very large amount of money that the City proposed to devote to a major expansion and overhaul of the National Western Stock Show complex isn't consistent with the City's needs.

Issue 2F

Issue 2F is a proposal to repeal the Group Living Ordinance recently adopted Denver's City Council. 

This would substantially reduce the number of unrelated people who can live in various kinds of housing (disallowing homes where roommates rent rooms in a larger home in many cases) and would also greatly restrict the geographic areas where nursing homes, group homes for foster children, women's shelters, and other kinds of temporary housing can be located.

Vote No on Denver ballot issue 2F which would make housing less affordable and increase homelessness in Denver. The fears stoked by its opponents that higher population density in neighborhoods destroys those neighborhoods are absurdly exaggerated. 

Issue 2G

The City has an Independent Monitor's Office to review misconduct allegations directed at Denver's law enforcement agencies, but it doesn't have enough authority to be effective. For example, it doesn't have the authority to hire lawyers to analyze claims of police misconduct. Issue 2G would give the Independent Monitor's Office the authority it needs, such as the authority to hire lawyers and experts, to more effectively carry out its mission of monitoring Denver's law enforcement agencies.

Vote Yes on Denver ballot issue 2G.

Issue 2H

Denver's City Charter contains timelines for municipal elections which violate state and federal laws related to military and overseas voting. Issue 2H would bring the Denver City Charter in compliance with state and federal law by moving its municipal election date a month earlier from May to April. If Issue 2H isn't passed, a court would probably order Denver to change its election date anyway.

This is basically an uncontroversial "housekeeping" amendment to the City Charter, although it also has the side effect of making it much easier to college students to vote in municipal elections.

Vote Yes on Denver ballot issue 2H.

Issue 300

Issue 300 would impose a 1.5% sales tax on retail marijuana sales, in addition to existing marijuana retail sales taxes which are 10.3% now in Denver. It would use the money raised (about $7 million per year) to fund non-medicinal COVID countermeasures research (e.g. research on the effectiveness of masks and social distancing) which is already being done by other public and private agencies with public health responsibilities.

This ballot issue is ill-conceived. It supports funding for programs that Denver is ill-suited to conduct and isn't supported by the proposed grant recipients. Others are already doing the same research this issue authorizes funding with better protocols associated with being in the public health research business, so the results will be obsolete if the research is conducted. It is also a regressive tax and proposes spending on purposes that aren't as great a priority for tax funding as other more urgent needs.

Issues 301 and 302

These issues are related to the future use of the former Park Hill Golf Course. The City of Denver was recently given a conservation easement when the golf course (owned by a private non-profit) was closed that was intended to preserve the use of the course for open space and parks. But the conservation easement had an unintended loophole that allows the City to authorize real estate development on the former Park Hill Golf Course instead (with a significant share of affordable housing) and the City is poised to allow that now.

Issue 301 would require a citywide ballot issue to approve discontinuing the Park Hill Golf Course conservation easement, and also requiring a vote of the people to discontinue any other conservation easements or develop municipal parks in the future.

Issue 302 would allow the former Park Hill Golf Course to be redeveloped, would allow other property with flawed conservation easements in favor of the City to be redeveloped in the future, and would require a vote of the people to discontinue well drafted conservation easements or develop municipal parks in the future. 

Issue 302 was proposed by the real estate developers seeking to redevelop Park Hill Golf Course as a "dirty trick" to confuse voters into thinking that they were protecting parks and open space when they are really authorizing real estate development on the Park Hill Golf Course despite the intent of the conservation easement that was granted to the City to disallow that use.

While I recognize the City's urgent need for new affordable housing developments, the City's conduct in brazenly abrogating what was intended to be a conservation easement that prohibited that which it recently was given in good faith, and the dirty tricks used by the developers in proposing Issue 302 make the right choice more clear.

Vote Yes on Issue 301. Vote No on Issue 302.

Issue  303.

Issue 303 directs the City to vigorously enforce the City's controversial anti-homeless person camping ban, deputizes private individuals to do so if the City doesn't act in just a couple of days or so, and prohibits the City from establishing more than four authorized camping locations in the City for homeless people which must meet fairly high standards for public facilities on site if it does so.

Basically, Issue 303 seeks to punish people harshly for being homeless and occupying public property as a result, even if the City wants to do so, or wants to establish interim solutions like designating City owner property that isn't fully developed as a long term RV park type facility.

It was proposed by the chair of the Denver County GOP.

Vote No on Issue 303.

Issue 304.

Issue 304 permanently reduces Denver's sales tax rate from 4.81% to 4.5% for ordinary retail sales. The ballot issue is ambiguously worded so it isn't clear if it would also reduce the City's short term car rental sales tax rate of 7.25%, the City's 10.31% sale tax on retail marijuana sales, or if it would increase the City's 4.0% sales tax rate on non-grocery store food and beverages.

It would reduce the City's tax revenues by an estimated $48 million to $55 million per year, without providing an alternative revenue source, which would force dramatic cuts in essential municipal services and functions.

Modestly reducing Denver sales tax rates and creating a legal nightmare to figure out what the poorly worded ballot issue really means, in order to cripple the function of the City and County of Denver's government is not good policy.

It was proposed by the chair of the Denver County GOP.

Vote No on Issue 304.

Quote Of The Day

Speaking of six siblings. I had to have a serious conversation with Claire that the “Buckinghams” are a fictional family. Not a prophecy. Doctor said she’s 98% certain it’s a girl, due in April. That makes five daughter and Jackson can be ‘the weird one.’

From the author of Shotgun Shuffle, a long running comic (since October 9, 2009) about seven sisters. FWIW, they are a blended family with both having some children from previous relationships, which means the kids are also closer in age to each other than would otherwise have been possible.

Purging

In Denver these days they take away your regular garbage bin every week, your recycling bin every two weeks, and large items and extra garbage several times a year. All three come early in the morning (i.e. about 7 a.m.) tomorrow morning.

This time around, the pent up large item and extra garbage collection demand was high in our household. 

An old wooden plank cover that predated our move into our home more than twenty years ago for our gas meter was destroyed and had to be removed when a duplex neighbor whose main gas line comes from a meter in front of our half had a gas leak (we were otherwise spared).

A while ago we discovered that bugs had eaten away two decent sized area rugs. The bugs are gone, but the rugs had to go too.

Also we returned to empty nest status as kids moved out in June and in late August. The kids took some items from their rooms and the kitchen with them. And they left behind to be disposed of, some too destroyed to donate bed pads, an old file cabinet that was falling apart, and some boxes for items that had been too large to break down and put in our recycling, which all had to go.

Add to that a campaign led by my wife to round up items that could be donated to Goodwill (a mix of clothes, left over items from promotions that ended long ago, a few books from college she no longer wanted, a puzzles we'd grown bored of after using them as much as we would during the pandemic, and a few miscellaneous items), as well as a never assembled bookcase that we found a new home for with someone else.

Collectively, the result was a very substantial purge of stuff in a condensed three day period. This comes on top of a sustained effort for the past few weeks to use up excessive inventories of grocery store items that made sense in a household with four adults, but not so much in a household with two.

The end result has been that our small home has quite a bit less stuff in it. For what it is worth, we've also made modest progress in clearing out excess things in my storage unit over the last year or so in several rounds of purging.

Working in probate, I've seen plenty of homes where this never happened, and where home owners basically left their home exactly as it was when they bought it as young adults about to have children, except that they continually added more stuff. 

We've fixed things as they break, updated the place enough to keep it reasonably modern. This year, for example, our huge fussy 1925 coal fired steam heat boiler converted to natural gas on an ad hoc basis sometime later by a previous homeowner, finally had to be replaced with a new purpose built gas fired steam heat boiler that takes less manual attention, doesn't require spare parts with asbestos, and takes up about 1/6th of the space of the old one.

We gotten rid of many things we no longer need as well (although I mount an evergreen campaign to explain why books and files need to be kept, even when you don't use them every year, unlike most other things). 

We certainly aren't a paragon of excellence in these respects, but our home won't be the nightmare that so many homes are when we pass, or when we have to downsize for health or other reasons, either.

Today's Motto

 

Nuclear Fusion Research Performance Oversold

Technical Power Generation Is Overstated

Recent headlines have touted nuclear fusion research at ITER that will get ten times as much energy out as it puts into the process when completed. The problem is that this is the estimate for only the core of the process, not for energy generation of the power plant a whole.

ITER's new work is a great improvement. It is the highest efficiency nuclear fusion power generator ever built. The process as a whole, if it performs as expected when completed, would produce about 57% of the energy going into it (if we use the heat to generate electricity rather than raw heat), compared to 1-10% from the best previous contenders set back in 1997 or earlier. 

ITER would do just better than break even in generating raw heat, if it works as expected, but usually that isn't what you want a nuclear fusion power plant to do.

They need to get the 10:1 ratio they are talking about if it performs as promised, to about 18:1, to start generating net electrical power for the process as a whole.

Sabine Hossenfelder's blog, Backreaction, has more of the technical details.

It Also Has To Make Economic Sense

Also, in order for generating nuclear fusion power to make economic sense relative to alternatives like solar, wind, tidal power, and nuclear fusion, it needs to do much better than barely generating more power than breaking even. The net power produced has to be great enough to justify the immense cost of the facility and the research and development going into making it possible.

You need to get the cost of the power plant annualized by amortizing of the construction costs over its useful life, plus operating costs, including operating staff salaries and some minimal fuel expenditures, down low enough that the cost of generating electricity is less than about 12 cents per kilowatt hour, for nuclear fusion to make economic sense. This is $120 per megawatt hour.

People have penciled out the costs estimated for much a larger scale operation with a construction cost of about $3 billion. They estimate that operating costs would be  $25.20 per megawatt hours (about 21 percent of the going price of electricity). 

Assuming for sake of argument that this is correct, the depreciation and interest must be not more than $94.80 per megawatt hour, about $41.71 per megawatt hour on interest, and $53.09 per megawatt hour for construction costs.

Over 40 years, a power plant generates up to 350,400 megawatt hours per megawatt of power generation at any one time. So, the construction costs need to be less than $18.6 million per megawatt hour of electricity generation capacity. This would have to be $18.6 billion for a power plant that can generate 1000 megawatts of net electricity output.

We are getting close to getting to the point where this is technologically feasible, but what ITER is doing now won't get us there, even if it works.

Height Gains In Korea

According to a 2014 survey, Korean men have grown about 15 cm (5.9 in) and Korean women have grown about 20 cm (7.8 in) over the past 100 years. . . . In fact, it is said that Koreans have grown the most in the world over the past 100 years.

From here. 

All other things being equal, height is primarily genetic. But all other things are not equal.

Quote Of The Day

I'm done trying hard and being good! 

I'm gonna be a demon!

- A six year old girl, to her single dad, in Sweetness and Lightning (Volume 5, Chapter 25).

I remember being that kid.

German Election Results

Germany and Japan both have new prime ministers. The German election results by geography are below (see here and here).

Black is Christian Democratic Union. Red is Social Democrat. Blue is the far right AfD (Alternative for Germany), and Green is, of course, the Green party. I'm not sure what yellow stands for on this map, but it is probably for the Free Liberals, a pro-business libertarian leaning party.

The blue area corresponds, fairly well, with the historical Kingdom of Saxony and some of the neighboring former Thuringian States.

The Social Democrat-Christian Democrat divide largely reflects the Protestant-Catholic divide in Germany (as well as secular East Germany). Green Party supporters are found in the urban centers. 

The maps below break down Germany by religion as Catholic (red), Protestant (blue), and Atheist/Other (Green):

German elections have left the shape of the next ruling coalition government unclear. As a commentator at the Washington Post explains:

The Social Democrats (SPD) just edged ahead with 25.7 percent of the vote, marginally ahead of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union, which fell to 24 percent, a historic low for the party.... With Merkel’s departure, it will fall to one of the two main parties to provide a successor. This will either be Armin Laschet, who leads Merkel’s party, or the SPD’s Olaf Scholz, who has served as Merkel’s finance minister and vice chancellor as his party has run the country together with Merkel’s since 2013. Neither of the two candidates is a revolutionary on a ticket of rapid change, but both understand that absolute continuity from Merkel’s middle-of-the-road politics is no longer tenable. Germans want change, but they also want the change to be handled well and securely.... The Greens reached 14.8 percent and the Free Liberals (FDP) 11.5 percent, and both are likely to act as kingmakers and form the body of a coalition led by other big parties. Yet, they are fundamentally opposed on many baseline issues. The libertarian principles of the FDP are structurally at odds with the deep, state-driven changes the Greens want to make to decarbonize the German economy at a fast pace. There is no lowest common denominator and stagnation threatens unless one or the other makes significant concessions.

Parties that get less than 5% of the vote don't get representatives in the parliament. A New York Times report notes that:

The progressive, environmentalist Greens appeared to make significant gains since the 2017 election but seemed to fall short of having a viable shot at the chancellery. That positions the Greens, as well as the business-friendly Free Democrats, to join the next government. They will play a key role in deciding what the next German government could look like, depending on which of the larger parties they would like to govern with. 

On the outer edge of the political spectrum, support for the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, appeared roughly unchanged, while the Left party appeared to be hovering on the 5 percent threshold needed to win seats in Parliament.

Quote Of The Day

上等人，本事大，脾气小。中等人，本事大，脾气大。下等人，本事小，脾气大。

The upper-class people, the ability is big, the temper is small. The middle-class people, the ability is big, the temper is big. The inferior people, the ability is small, the temper is big.

-Du Yuesheng, a famous Shanghai mafia boss in 30s.

Covert Regime Change Operations Usually Fail And Often Backfire When They Succeed

Covert regime change operations work less than 40% of the time, and not infrequently backfire when they do work. 

But, they are popular with American Presidents, who ordered them an average of about six times per term prior to the end of the Cold War, because they are deniable for diplomatic purposes. They also cost a lot less money than a conventional military operation.

During the Cold War, the United States undertook an extraordinary number of attempts to overthrow foreign governments. These interventions were mostly conducted in secret, and the majority failed to achieve their aims. One recent tally identified sixty-four covert operations and six overt ones between 1947 and 1989, with less than 40 percent of the covert operations installing a new regime in power. 

Some of these failures are quite well known. The Bay of Pigs intervention in Cuba, for example, not only failed to remove Fidel Castro from power, but also brought Cuba closer to the Soviet Union and helped precipitate the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even those operations that appeared successful at the time often had negative repercussions in the longer term. This was the case in Iran, where the United States helped oust Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh from power in 1953—but in doing so, also fueled anti-American sentiment and contributed to the 1979 revolution.

Why would the United States continue to pursue a strategy with such a poor track record? The central contention of Michael Poznansky’s fascinating and well-researched new book, In the Shadow of International Law: Secrecy and Regime Change in the Postwar World, is that the explanation lies in international law. In 1945, the principle of nonintervention, which holds that states should not violate the sovereignty of others, came to enjoy the status of international law through incorporation into the charter of the United Nations and subsequent adoption in the charters of the Organization of American States and other regional organizations. Once it did so, overt efforts to oust foreign rulers from power became costlier. States that abrogate their formal commitments undermine their credibility and open themselves up to accusations of hypocrisy.

From here.

What Do You Do With A Decommissioned Coal Fired Power Plant?

The concept is that a decommissioned coal fire power plant has everything that a power plant or energy storage facility for a power grid needs except a source of power. So, if you can find a substitute for the coal fired power plant, the transition can be quite efficient.

The idea of using molten salt energy storage to fill part of the gap in employment and taxes left by the planned closure of the Routt County town’s coal-fired power plant is being planned by the unit’s operator, Xcel Energy, as it seeks to cut its greenhouse gas emissions.

The technology was developed for use at concentrating solar power plants, where hundreds of mirrors trained the sun’s rays on a tower to heat the salt, which would later be used to power an electric turbine.

“New players are looking at using the grid rather than the sun to heat the salt,” said Mark Mehos, a National Renewable Energy Laboratory researcher. “Then using the hot salt to make steam to turn a turbine.”

While it may sound exotic, company executives, local officials and labor leaders say the initiatives being taken at Hayden could be a template for helping transition other coal plant-reliant communities.

Coal-fired power plants are closing around Colorado and the United States – where coal-fired generation capacity has dropped by almost a third since 2008 to 223 gigawatts. In Colorado, by 2030 only one coal-fired facility, Xcel’s Comanche 3 unit in Pueblo, is slated to be in operation, as more than 30 units will have closed over 20 years.

The state has created an Office of Just Transition to help power plant and mining communities faced with the end of the age of coal, appropriated $15 million to the effort, and developed a Just Transition Action Plan.

From the Colorado Sun. 

COVID Data

New data on hospitalization rates and long haul COVID rates are now available.

From Paredes et al., "Associations between SARS-CoV-2 variants and risk of COVID-19 hospitalization among confirmed cases in Washington State: a retrospective cohort study" medRxiv, (September 29, 2021).

Also, long haul COVID-19 rates by age group (U.K. data): 

How Much Do I Drive?

I love my 2015 Juke. But as someone who has a short, intracity commute, even though there is only one driver in the household, I don't use it all that much.

Since I bought it, I've driven almost exactly 18 miles per day (6,570 miles a year). A 10,000 mile per year pace is 27.4 miles per day. A 12,000 mile per year pace, also often used in for warranty limits, is 32.9 miles a day.

A my average gas milage of 26 miles per gallon, and at current gasoline prices, that translates into $885 of gas a year plus two oil changes a year.

What Expertise Matters When Making Good Predictions?

 Smart generalists rock!

This is just one chapter in a larger story. 

At many points in the war, the coalition had access to the insights of people who had graduated from the world’s best universities and brought highly specialized knowledge to issues (state building, counterterrorism) that the United States was facing in Afghanistan. The last president of the American-backed government, Ashraf Ghani, has a Ph.D. from Columbia and was even a co-author of a book titled “Fixing Failed States.” But for all their credentials, they were not able to stop a swift Taliban takeover of the country.

What Afghanistan shows is that we need a new definition of expertise, one that relies more on track records and healthy cognitive habits and less on credentials and the narrow forms of knowledge that are too often rewarded. In an era of populism and declining trust in institutions, such a project is necessary to put expertise on a stronger footing. 

It’s true that many experts also opposed the Afghanistan war and thought that the United States was seeking unrealistic goals. But individuals with the most subject-matter expertise often tended to get things the most wrong. This included generals with experience in counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as many think tank analysts with the most focus and interest in those conflicts.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Philip Tetlock, a psychologist, has famously shown that subject-matter experts are no better at accurately forecasting geopolitical events relevant to their field than those with training in different areas. Similarly, in a different study, the intelligence community, with access to classified information, proved less accurate than an algorithm weighted toward the views of amateurs with no security clearances but a history of making accurate forecasts.

So “just trust the experts” is the wrong path to take. But simply deciding to ignore them can lead us down rabbit holes of conspiracy theories and misinformation. The subject-matter experts in Mr. Tetlock’s research couldn’t beat informed amateurs, but they did defeat random guessing, or the epistemological equivalent of monkeys throwing darts.

This is in part because the divisions we create between fields are, in a sense, artificial. As radical as it sounds, just because someone has a Ph.D. in political science or speaks Pashto does not make that person more likely to be able to predict what is going to happen in Afghanistan than an equally intelligent person with knowledge that appears less directly relevant. Anthropology, economics and other fields may offer insight, and it is often difficult to know ahead of time which communities of experts have the most relevant training and tools to deal with a particular problem.

Academia is in some ways nearly ideally suited to produce the wrong kinds of expertise. Scholarly recognition is based on high degrees of specialization, obtaining the right pedigree and the approval of colleagues through peer review rather than through an external standard.

From the New York Times. 

"Nobody Really Knows How The Economy Works."

Mainstream economics is replete with ideas that “everyone knows” to be true, but that are actually arrant nonsense.

From Jeremy B. Rudd, "Why Do We Think That Inflation Expectations Matter for Inflation? (And Should We?)", Federal Reserve Board (September 23, 2021).

Macroeconomics is not a science, despite the fact that is uses a lot of math and data to look like one.

I explored going to graduate school in economics after law school. Life got in the way. But misgivings about the soundness of macroeconomics as a discipline (which would have been part of my studies even if I focused primarily on something else) also limited my enthusiasm.

This isn't to say that we don't need economists. Lots of very important economic decisions have to be made every day. It is better, on balance, to make those decisions with the best available information than based upon amateur whim. But any macroeconomic prediction needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt.

Nobody Really Knows How the Economy Works. A Fed Paper Is the Latest Sign. Many experts are rethinking longstanding core ideas, including the importance of inflation expectations. . . .

It reflects a broader rethinking of core ideas about how the economy works and how policymakers, especially at central banks, try to manage things. This shift has also included debates about the relationship between unemployment and inflation, how deficit spending affects the economy, and much more. . . .

It is vivid evidence that macroeconomics, despite the thousands of highly intelligent people over centuries who have tried to figure it out, remains, to an uncomfortable degree, a black box. The ways that millions of people bounce off one another — buying and selling, lending and borrowing, intersecting with governments and central banks and businesses and everything else around us — amount to a system so complex that no human fully comprehends it.

"Macroeconomics behaves like we’re doing physics after the quantum revolution, that we really understand at a fundamental level the forces around us,” said Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, in an interview. “We’re really at the level of Galileo and Copernicus,” just figuring out the basics of how the universe works." . . . 

Mr. Posen, a former Bank of England policymaker, says there remains a simple and hard-to-dispute idea about inflation expectations supported by lots of history: that if people distrust a country’s monetary system, inflation shocks can spiral upward. Economic policy credibility matters. But that isn’t the same as assuming that some survey or bond market measure of what will happen to inflation in the distant future is particularly meaningful for forecasting the near future.

“It has been a noble lie that has become a critical part of the catechism of global monetary policy, that long-term inflation expectations are not just interesting but are a decisive determinant of real-time inflation,” said Paul McCulley, a former Pimco chief economist, commenting on Mr. Rudd’s paper.

This isn’t the only way in which basic precepts underlying economic policy are shifting beneath economists’ feet.

Particularly prominently, for years central bankers believed there was a tight relationship between the unemployment rate and inflation, known as the Phillips Curve. Over the course of the 2000s, though, that relationship appeared to weaken and become a less reliable guideline for how to set policy.

From the New York Times.