Quote Of The Day

Change is not a rope, a single line that you pull on. Change is a net.

- Kate Elliott, "Cold Steel."

The quotation is in the context of bringing about political change by pressing on multiple fronts with different kinds of tactics simultaneously (in this case, court action, spreading propaganda, trying to change existing institutions from within from the top down, and elsewhere, a war).

Poem Of The Day

My battle cry when I was in English class in high school. I eventually transferred to another class. 

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;

Or surely you’ll grow double:

Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;

Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun above the mountain’s head,

A freshening lustre mellow

Through all the long green fields has spread,

His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife:

Come, hear the woodland linnet,

How sweet his music! on my life,

There’s more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!

He, too, is no mean preacher:

Come forth into the light of things,

Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,

Our minds and hearts to bless—

Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,

Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,

Of moral evil and of good,

Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—

We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;

Close up those barren leaves;

Come forth, and bring with you a heart

That watches and receives.

Got that? “…bring with you a heart

That watches and receives."

- William Wordsworth, "The Tables Turned"

Selected Gun Control Cases Through 2010

SCOTUS held in Barron v. Baltimore (1833), that the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government, not to the states.

In the Slaughter-House Cases (1873), SCOTUS held that the Privileges or Immunities Clause did not protect individuals from state governments.

SCOTUS held in United States v. Cruikshank (1876) that the 1st and 2nd Amendments didn't apply to the states.

In Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252 (1886), SCOTUS held that the 2d Amendment does not apply to the states.

In Twining v. New Jersey (1908), SCOTUS held that the Due Process Clause might incorporate some of the Bill of Rights, but not the Privileges or Immunities Clause.

In United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939), SCOTUS held that the federal National Firearms Act was a constitutional reasonable regulation of firearms. 

In Barrett v. United States, 423 U.S. 212 (1976), SCOTUS held that a federal law banning felons from owning firearms was constitutional. 

In United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549 (1995), SCOTUS held that the gun free school act exceeded the commerce clause power of Congress, but did not consider a 2nd Amendment dimension to the case.

Wikipedia says that until 2001, all the courts had ruled that the 2nd amendment protected states' right to arm their citizens (a "collective right to bear arms") from encroachment by the federal government. The "well regulated militia" portion was considered to be an intrinsic part of the text, so that it was read to guarantee the right to bear arms only to such a militia. Prior to 2001, every circuit court decision that interpreted the Second Amendment endorsed the "collective right" model. However, beginning with the Fifth Circuit's opinion United States v. Emerson in 2001, some circuit courts recognized that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. 

The 2nd Amendment was basically a dead letter until SCOTUS decided District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), which held that the 2nd Amendment established an individual constitutional right to bear arms for self-defense and defense of one's home vis-a-vis the federal government but subject to reasonable regulation. 

The 2nd Amendment was first held to apply to state and local governments via the 14th Amendment in McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010) which, like Heller allows for reasonable regulation of the right to bear arms for self-defense. 

The Paper Belt

Today is the first time I saw this term and it deserves a mention because it makes novel conceptual connections.

The Paper Belt is an informal analogic term referring to the four metropolitan areas where several important industries and political infrastructures converged during the post-war era: Boston (education), New York (publishing, finance), Los Angeles (media, Hollywood) and Washington DC (politics, law).

Some alternative definitions focus on the northeastern coast of the United States by excluding Los Angeles and including Delaware, where a large number of corporations are legally headquartered due to its more generous tax laws for corporations.

It came into attention after Balaji Srinivasan's 2013 talk titled Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit. In the context of the talk, the term was used as a contrast with the emerging influence-structure of Silicon Valley.

From here. Hat tip to Wired.

The breathless and excited original speech the spawned the term says in some key excerpts:

So what I’m going to talk about today is something I’m calling Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit. So as motivation here, it’s a bit topical: is the USA the Microsoft of nations? We can take this sort of thing and we can expand it: codebase is 230 years old, written in an obfuscated language; system was shut down for two weeks straight; systematic FUD on security issues; fairly ruthless treatment of key suppliers; generally favors its rich enterprise customers but we still have to buy it.

And if we think about Microsoft itself, there’s a great quote from Bill Gates in 1998: what displaced Microsoft, what did he fear, it wasn’t Oracle or anybody like that, what he feared were some guys in a garage, who happened to be ultimately Larry and Sergey back in 1998.

And the thing about what Larry and Sergey did is: there’s no way they could have reformed Microsoft from the inside. At that time, Microsoft already had 26,000 employees; joining its numbers as 26,000 and 26,001 and trying to push for 20% time or free lunches… they probably wouldn’t have gone too far. So what they had to do was start their own company: they had to exit. And with success in that alternative, then Microsoft would imitate them. And this is actually related to a fundamental concept in political science: the concept of voice versus exit. A company or a country is in decline, you can try voice, or you can try exit. Voice is basically changing the system from within, whereas exit is leaving to create a new system, a new startup, or to join a competitor sometimes. Loyalty can modulate this; sometimes that’s patriotism, which is voluntary, and sometimes it’s lock-in, which are involuntary barriers to exit.

And we can think about this in the context of various examples and start to get a feel for this. So voice in the context of open source would be a patch; exit would be a fork. Voice in the context of a customer would be a complaint form, whereas exit would be taking your business elsewhere. Voice in the context of a company, that’s a turnaround plan; exit is leaving to found a startup. And voice in the context of a country is voting, while exit is emigration. So if there are those two images on the left is the Norman Rockwell painting on voice; on the right is actually my dad in the center, and that’s a grass hut on the right-hand side, so he grew up on a dirt floor in India, and left, because India was an economic basket case and there’s no way that he could have voted to change things within his lifetime, so he left.

And it turns out that, while we talk a lot about voice in the context of the US and talk about democracy… that’s very important, but you know, we’re not just a nation of immigrants, we’re a nation of emigrants: we’re shaped by both voice and exit, starting with the Puritans, you know, they fled religious persecution; the American Revolutionaries which left England’s orbit, then we started moving west, leaving the East Coast bureaucracy to go to the Western nations; later, late 1800s, Ellis Island, people leaving pogroms, and in the 20th century fleeing Nazism and Communism. And sometimes people didn’t just come here for a better life; they came here to save their life. That’s, you know, the airlifting at the end of Saigon.

And it’s not just the US that’s shaped by exit; Silicon Valley itself is also shaped by exit. You can date it back to the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor with the Traitorous Eight, the founding of Fairchild… the fact that non-competes are not enforceable in California, and the fact that DC funds disruption, not just turnaround. The concept of forking in open source, if you think about the back button, that is, in some ways, the cheapest way to exit something. And of course the concept of the startup itself. That right there, if you guys haven’t seen, is one of Y Combinator’s first ads. Larry and Sergey won’t respect you in the morning.

So the concept here is that exit is actually an extremely important force in complement to voice, and it’s something that gives voice its strength. In particular, it protects minority rights. In the upper left corner, for example, you imagine two countries, and country 1 is following policy A, and country 2 is following policy B. Some minority is potentially interested in following policy B, but policy A is very stridently promulgated by the majority. However, there’s some other country, maybe a smaller country, maybe another country, that’s actually quite into B, and so that person leaves. And they’re not necessarily super into B, but they think it might be interesting, thus B question mark. And what happens is that all the other guys in A see that people are actually leaving. They really care about this particular policy so much that they actually left. It could be a feature where people are leaving for a competitor; it could be a bug that you haven’t fixed so people fork the project and take it somewhere else—what happens is that exit amplifies voice. So it’s a crucial additional feature for democracy is to reduce the barrier to exit, to make democratic voice more powerful, more successful. And so a voice gains much more attention when people are leaving in droves. And I would bet that exit is a reason why half of this audience is alive. Many of us have our ancestors who came from China, Vietnam, Korea, Iran, places where there’s war or famine, economic basket cases. Exit is something that I believe we need to preserve, and exit is what this talk is about.

So exit is really a meta-concept: it’s about alternatives. It’s a meta-concept that subsumes competition, forking, founding, and physical emigration. It means giving people tools to reduce influence of bad policies on their lives without getting involved in politics: the tools to peacefully opt out. And if you combine those three things: this concept of the US is the Microsoft of nations, the quote from Gates, and Hirschman’s treatise [ed. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States] you get this concept of Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit. Basically, I believe that the ability to reduce the importance of decisions made in DC in particular without lobbying or sloganeering is going to be extremely important over the next ten years. And you might ask, “Why? What does this have to do with anything?” So the reason why is that today it’s Silicon Valley versus what I call the Paper Belt. So there’s four cities that used to run the United States in the postwar era: Boston with higher ed; New York City with Madison Avenue, books, Wall Street, and newspapers; Los Angeles with movies, music, Hollywood; and, of course, DC with laws and regulations, formally running it. And so I call them the Paper Belt, after the Rust Belt of yore. And in the last twenty years, a new competitor to the Paper Belt arose out of nowhere: Silicon Valley. And by accident, we’re putting a horse head in all of their beds. We are becoming stronger than all of them combined.

And to get a sense of this: Silicon Valley is reinventing all of the industries in these cities. That X up there is supposed to be a screenplay, the paper of LA, and LA is going to iTunes, BitTorrent, Netflix, Spotify, Youtube… that was really the first on the hit list, starting in ’99 with Napster. New York right alongside: AdWords, Twitter, Blogger, Facebook, Kindle, Aereo. We’re going after newspapers; we’re going after Madison Avenue; we’re going after book publishing; we’re going after television. Aereo figured out how to put a solid-state antenna in a server farm so you don’t have to pay any TV fees for all of their recording. Recently Boston was next in the gunsights: Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity. And most interestingly, DC, and by DC I’m using it as a metonym for government regulation in general, because it’s not just DC: it includes local and state governments. Uber, Airbnb, Stripe, Square, and the big one, Bitcoin… all things that threaten DC’s power. It is not necessarily clear that the US government can ban something that it wants to ban anymore.

The cause of this is something I call the Paper Jam. The backlash is beginning. More jobs predicted for machines, not people; job automation is a future unemployment crisis looming. Imprisoned by innovation as tech wealth explodes, Silicon Valley, poverty spikes… they are basically going to try to blame the economy on Silicon Valley, and say that it is iPhone and Google that done did it, not the bailouts and the bankruptcies and the bombings, and this is something which we need to identify as false and we need to actively repudiate it. So we must respond via voice: the obvious counterargument is that Valley reduces prices. The top is a little small, but that’s a famous graph: consumption spreads faster today. That shows the absolute exponential rise of technologies over the last century. Anything that is initially just the province of the one percent, whether it be computers or cell phones, quickly becomes the province of the five percent and the ten percent, that ??? that barely works that someone is willing to pay thousands and thousands of dollars for allows you to fix the bugs, to get economies of scale, to bring it to the ten percent and the twenty percent and the fifty percent and the middle class and the 99 percent. That’s how we got cell phones from a toy for Wall Street to something that’s helping the poorest of the poor all over the world. Technology is about reducing prices. The bottom curve there is Moore’s Law. And by contrast, the Paper Belt raises them. There’s the tuition bubble and the mortgage bubble and the medical care bubble and too many bubbles to name. The argument that the Valley is a problem is incoherent, but it’s not going to be sufficient to respond via voice. We can make this argument, but the ultimate counterargument is actually exit. Not necessarily physical exit, but exit in a variety of different forms. What they’re basically saying is: rule by DC means people are going back to work and the emerging meme is that rule by us is rule by Terminators. We’re going to take all the jobs. Whereas we can say, and we can argue, DC’s rule is more like an overrun building in Detroit, and down right there is a Google data center. And so we can go back and forth verbally, but ultimately this is about counterfactuals: they have aircraft carriers; we don’t. We don’t actually want to fight them. It wouldn’t be smart.

So we want to show what a society run by Silicon Valley would look like without actually affecting anyone who still believes the Paper Belt is actually good. That’s where exit comes in. So what do I mean by this? What do I mean by Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit? It basically means: build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the US, run by technology. And this is actually where the Valley is going. This is where we’re going over the next ten years.

Quote Of The Day

[P]eople exposed to market institutions are honest while traditional people cheat. Cheating is only ameliorated in the traditional group when cheating comes at the expense of an in-group (fellow-villager) but not when it comes at the expense of an out-group member.

From here. 

More generally, involvement in market economies increases trust and pro-social behavior towards both in groups and out groups.

Electric Cars Increasingly Don't Run On Coal

The message of this meme used to be much more true than it is today.

The U.S. electrical grid is gradually growing less dependent upon coal, particularly in many states that have higher rates of electric car usage. 

Ten states and the District of Columbia have an above the national average share of battery electric vehicles market share (the same rankings hold true if you look at the market share of battery electric vehicles and plug in hybrid electric vehicles combined). 

Six of those states have electrical girds derived less than 10% from coal, including three of those states with no coal powering their electrical grids at all. California, Massachusetts and Vermont use no coal. Washington, Oregon and Nevada used less than 10% coal. 

The District of Columbia, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, and Maryland have power grids that are less than 90% coal-free.

Market share data from here.

The average share of electricity generated from coal in the US has dropped from 52.8% in 1997 to below 22% since 2020. Firm plans are in place to reduce that share going forward. 

In 2018, 16 of the 50 Federal States of the US had either no coal power in their power production for the public power supply (California, Idaho, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont), less than 5% coal in power production (Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Delaware) or between 5 and 10% (Alaska, Nevada, Mississippi, Oregon and Washington State).

Including Alaska is somewhat unfair, however, since it generates much of its electricity with oil unlike every other state except Hawaii. 

(Source)

Hawaii is also notable for having the lowest electricity consumption per capita (despite having a significant average number of non-resident tourists not included in the denominator of that calculation), which mitigates the dirty character of its electrical grid.

Which Regions Have The Most Crime? Are Crime Levels High Right Now?

This isn't new, but is worth recalling. California, for example, is in the middle of the pack.

Which states have the lowest and highest crime rates?

The Northeast is the region with the lowest crime rates. The property crime rate in the Northeast was 34% lower than in the rest of the country, and the violent crime rate was 26% lower than in other states.

Four of the bottom five states by property crime rate in 2020 were in the Northeast, as well as all five of the lowest states by violent crime rate. New Hampshire and New Jersey were in the bottom five states for both property and violent crime.

States in the South and West had the highest crime rates in 2020. Washington, DC, which is in the South, and New Mexico, which is in the West, were in the top five states for both property and violent crimes.

The Census Bureau defines more specific areas within each region, called districts. The West South Central District – part of the South region and composed of Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas – had the highest crime rates of any district. Both property crime and violent crime were 22% higher in these states than the national average.

Washington, DC had the highest property crime rate in 2020, at 3,493 crimes per 100,000 residents. This was 21% higher than Louisiana, the state with the next-highest property crime rate. Massachusetts had the lowest property crime rate, at 1,053 crimes per 100,000 residents. 

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation.

From USA Facts. 

State crime rates are heavily driven by property crime and by the lowest level violent crimes that are considered in the index, since these crimes occur much more often than more serious violent crimes like rape and murder, and there isn't an accepted way of weighting different kinds of crimes.

D.C. Is An Outlier That Isn't Strictly Comparable 

The District of Columbia is an outlier, in part, because it only includes the central city of a larger metropolitan area that also includes a large part of the population of Virginia and Maryland, but has a disproportionate share of the low income neighborhoods of the metropolitan area. 

The District of Columbia also has a much higher daytime and nightlife population than its residential population that serves as the denominator in the crime rate formula. No U.S. state has the number of people in it surge as much with non-residents on a weekly basis. 

How do current crime levels compare to the past?

The same source also demonstrates that while crime has seen a modest uptick (mostly limited to murder) in the last few years, that this is coming from a near record low crime rate:

Crime in 2020 was 60% lower than in 1980. The crime rate began consistently declining in the early 1990s and fell every year between 2001 and 2020.

Both property and violent crimes reflect this long-term trend of decreasing crime. Property crime is down 63% since 1980, and violent crime is down 33%.

Property crime includes burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson, with larceny making up about 80% of property crimes. Violent crime includes homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assaults, with aggravated assaults making up 66% of violent crimes.

In 2020, the lower overall crime rate was driven by fewer property crimes, which were down 8.1% from 2019. Violent crime, on the other hand, was 4.7% higher over the same time period. This increase was primarily due to more aggravated assaults, but the homicide rate also increased by about 25%.

Things That Make English Hard To Speak For Korean Speakers

Korean has a smaller palette of sounds than English and learning new sounds as an adult is difficult. So, it is particularly hard for someone whose first language is Korean to learn to speak English without an accent. There are also some closely related issues:

• Prosody (stress and pitch): Korean is a syllable-timed language.
  • Each syllable in the Korean language is distinctly produced, with equal stress. By contrast, English is a stress-timed language.
  • . . . Korean has less variation in pitch and stress than English.
  • English spoken by Korean native speakers can sometimes be perceived by native English speakers as monotone and monoloud.
• Vowels:
  • There are at least 7 vowels in English that do not exist in Korean: /I/ (as in “bit”), /ae/ (as in “apple”), the “u” sound as in “put”, the “or” sound (as in “for”, “author” and “gnaw”), the /aI/ diphthong (as in “like”), the “or-I” diphthong (as in “boy” or “oil”), and the “au” diphthong (as in “cow” or “allow”).
  • Particular common issues include understanding and producing the differences between:
    • the long “ee” sound (/i/) as in “beet” and the short “i” sound (/I/) as in “bit”;
    • the short “e” sound (as in “egg”) and the short “a” sound (as in apple); and
    • “u” (as in “put”), “or” and “er” sounds.
• Consonants:
  • There are at least 12 English consonants that do not exist in Korean and Korean has fewer consonants that English. Sounds such as /f/, /v/, “th” (voiceless, as in “bath”), “th” (voiced, as in “bathe”), /z/, “sh”, “ch”, “zh” (as in “measure” or “vision”), “j” and “r” don’t exist in Korean. /b, d/ and /g/ are often unvoiced.
  • The Korean consonant /s/* has only a slight air escape, which makes it different from the English /s/.
• Consonant clusters:
  • In Korean, there are no consonant clusters at the start or end of syllables (e.g. like /st/).
  • Many Korean speakers insert a vowel when they pronounce English words including consonant clusters. For example “strike” is sometimes pronounced something like “sitilaiki”.

From here. 

A Ukraine War Update

Ukrainian estimates of Russian casualties may be high, although they are certainly closer to reality than Russian claims. But, there is no doubt that the war in Ukraine is going badly for Russia at the moment and was a colossal mistake on Putin's part. 

Likewise, whatever the exact toll, Russian's conventional military capabilities in Europe have been profoundly depleted with no reasonable prospects of being replenished in the short to medium run time frame.

On the 224 of the war, the Ukrainian forces continue to advance in the east and the south while the Russian military seems to be in full retreat. 

After weeks of successful Ukrainian counteroffensives, a pattern is emerging. The Ukrainian military has been launching a two-prong attack from the north and south, aiming at an enemy-occupied city. Once it is threatening to envelop or has enveloped the city, the Russian forces retreat, often under heavy artillery fire, and the Ukrainian military captures the city and then repeats the process. . . .

The Ukrainian military now has the proper manpower and weapon systems, especially long-range precision capabilities in the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) and M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS), to fix the Russian forces on a particular position but also generate preponderant power at weak spots on the Russian defenses and achieve tactical depth penetration. . . .

Making things worse for the Russian military is the fact that with every mile that the Ukrainians advance, they are able to bring their deadly long-range weapon systems, most notably the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) and its heavier cousin, the M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS), closer to the frontlines and thus threaten additional Russian units and lines of communication and supply that were out of range previously.

Overall, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense claimed that as of Wednesday, Ukrainian forces have killed approximately 61,000 Russian troops (and wounded approximately thrice that number), destroyed 266 fighter, attack, and transport jets, 232 attack and transport helicopters, 2,435 tanks, 1,414 artillery pieces, 5,038 armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles, 341 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS), 15 boats and cutters, 3,841 vehicles and fuel tanks, 177 anti-aircraft batteries, 1,032 tactical unmanned aerial systems, 132 special equipment platforms, such as bridging vehicles, and four mobile Iskander ballistic missile systems, and 246 cruise missiles shot down by the Ukrainian air defenses.

From here. 

Wikipedia sums up the data on casualties in the war here. 

It appears that the report quoted above is misinterpreting the Ukraine data which is really suggesting 61,000 Russian troops have been killed, wounded, captured, or deserted, with closer to 20,000 deaths (as the U.S. estimates) and 41,000 to 60,000 Russian forces wounded, captured, or deserted. 

The Russian losses have not been confined to rank and file soldiers either (per Wikipedia's link above):

According to BBC News Russian and the Mediazona news website, out of 6,756 Russian soldiers whose deaths they had documented by 23 September 2022, 16.9 percent (1,142) were officers, while 20.3 percent (1,370) were Motorized Rifle Troops and 16.6 percent (1,124) were members of the Russian Airborne Forces (VDV).

Still, the Russian death toll is still around 13% of its initial total force size, and 40% or more of its initial force size of troops have been "lost" from availability to fight. These are losses of a scale that has been reputed to break the will of a military unit to fight, destroying its morale. 

About 7,000 Russian side forces (mostly Ukrainian separatists) were killed prior to the current war in the 2014 Russian invasion and its follow up.

About 10,000 Ukrainian forces have been killed, 30,000 wounded, 7,200 missing, and 5,600 captures. About 7,000-29,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed in the current conflict. 

About 4,500 Ukrainian forces and about 3,400 Ukrainian civilians were killed prior to the current war in the 2014 Russian invasion and its follow up.

What Drives Racial And Gender Pay Inequities?

A lot of the racial wage gap is apparently driven by differences in educational success that are well in place by the time people are in high school.

In 2010, using nationally representative data on thousands of individuals in their 40s, I estimated that Black men earn 39.4% less than white men and Black women earn 13.1% less than white women. 

Yet, accounting for one variable–educational achievement in their teenage years––reduced that difference to 10.9% (a 72% reduction) for men and revealed that Black women earn 12.7 percent more than white women, on average. 

Derek Neal, an economist at the University of Chicago, and William Johnson were among the first to make this point in 1996: 

While our results do provide some evidence for current labor market discrimination, skills gaps play such a large role that we believe future research should focus on the obstacles Black children face in acquiring productive skill.

From here.

Immigration Reform

(Source for the images above)

Some quick and dirty ideas for reforming U.S. immigration laws, although not an exhaustive list, that retains much of the existing structure.

Family Based Immigration

* Eliminate categories F1, F2B, F3 and F4.

* End numerical limits on category F2A and transfer this category to the immediate family category.

* Allow individuals who are immediate family of U.S. citizens and in category F2A to have lawful permanent resident status as a matter of law automatically without having to apply for it, even if they would otherwise be inadmissible. A marriage certificate or birth certificate would establish this status without further proof.

* Waive the English language and citizenship examination requirements for everyone in the immediate family category.

Employment And Education Based Immigration

* Automatically grant U.S. citizenship to any non-citizen who enlists as an active duty soldier or sailor in the U.S. military.

* Allow unlimited applications for lawful permanent resident status for graduates of four year colleges (or graduate programs or two year degrees in a STEM field) where the language of instruction was English. Waive the English language and citizenship examination requirement for these applicants when they seek to become U.S. citizens. These applicants would not count against the quotas in other categories.

* There would be unlimited applications for anyone who has graduated from a U.S. high school after at least four years of attendance at U.S. K-12 schools where the language of instruction is English and did not have a criminal record in the U.S. Waive the English language and citizenship examination requirement for these applicants. These applicants would not count against the quotas in other categories. 

* Eliminate the "Special Immigrant" status for religious workers.

* Double the number of visas in the first three employment preference categories.

* Immediately clear the backlog in the employment categories.

Other Reforms

* Repeal criminal penalties for unlawful entry into the United States.

* Anyone who has lived in the United States for ten years with or without legal visa status, who does not have a criminal record in the U.S., would be non-deportable.

* Reduce the waiting period to become U.S. citizens for all categories where it is five years to three years.

* Increase the maximum number of visas from a single country in a category with a quota from 7% to 21% to prevent the kind of backlogs for applicants from Mexico and the Philippines arising again.

DNA Registration In Denmark Seems To Greatly Reduce Revidivism

I'm skeptical that this result would replicate to the very different society and criminal justice system found in the U.S. from the results in Denmark. But even a much smaller effect size from the same strategy of creating  a DNA database of felons would still be worth it.

This paper studies the effects of adding criminal offenders to a DNA database. Using a large expansion of Denmark’s DNA database, we find that DNA registration reduces recidivism within the following year by up to 42%. It also increases the probability that offenders are identified if they recidivate, which we use to estimate the elasticity of crime with respect to the detection probability and find that a 1% higher detection probability reduces crime by more than 2%. We also find that DNA registration increases the likelihood that offenders find employment, enroll in education, and live in a more stable family environment.

Anne Sofie Tegner Anker, Jennifer L. Doleac, and Rasmus Landersø, "The effects of DNA databases on the deterrence and detection of offenders" (April 2020).

Hat tip to Yglesias via Fully Myelinated.

From the body text of the paper:

[W]e measure the effects of a 2005 Danish reform that increased offenders’ probability of being added to the DNA database from 4% to almost 40%. The change allowed police to add anyone charged with what is roughly equivalent to a felony in the U.S. (which is the relevant policy margin for most U.S. states considering database expansions), increasing offenders’ average probability of being included in the DNA database dramatically. Using the database expansion as an exogenous shock to the likelihood of DNA registration, we estimate that being added to the DNA database reduces recidivism by 6.5 percentage points (42%) in the first year (p < 0.01) – a deterrence effect persisting for at least three years. 

Using the rich Danish register data, we are further able to explore heterogeneity in effects of DNA registration by previous criminal history, age, and family structure. We find statistically significant deterrence effects for all groups except older offenders. The effects of DNA registration are larger for first time offenders, offenders with children, and offenders initially charged with violent crime, while DNA databases prevent subsequent property, weapon, and violent crime, which supports the hypothesis that offenders frequently commit multiple types of crime instead of specializing in one specific type. 

In addition, we find that DNA registration has beneficial effects on subsequent employment, education, and family life. Young offenders are more likely to enroll in education while older offenders are more likely to be employed if they are in the DNA database. Also, first-time offenders are more likely to be married after they are added to the DNA database, and recidivists are more likely to be with the same partner and to live with their children, at least in the short run. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that keeping people out of trouble (and out of prison) can put their lives on a more positive track. 

Table 1 compares the characteristics of felons before and after the 2005 reforms in Denmark (which are generally speaking similar before and after the reforms).

Table 6 sets forth the core conclusions of the paper.

 

Table A-2 shows that the more serious the crime, the more inclusion in the DNA registry discouraged felons from reoffending by committing it.

Recidivism was extremely low, however, for federal prisoners who received early release due to COVID-19. As the Washington Post reports:

To protect those most vulnerable to covid-19 during the pandemic, the Cares Act allowed the Justice Department to order the release of people in federal prisons and place them on home confinement. More than 11,000 people were eventually released. Of those, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) reported that only 17 of them committed new crimes.

That’s not a typo. Seventeen. That’s a 0.15 percent recidivism rate in a country where it’s normal for 30 to 65 percent of people coming home from prison to reoffend within three years of release.

Of those 17 people, most new offenses were for possessing or selling drugs or other minor offenses. Of the 17 new crimes, only one was violent (an aggravated assault), and none were sex offenses.

This extremely low recidivism rate shows there are many, many people in prison we can safely release to the community. These 11,000 releases were not random. People in low- and minimum-security prisons or at high risk of complications from covid were prioritized for consideration for release.

Better distinguishing between offenders with high and low risks of recidivism and adjusting sentences accordingly could greatly reduce mass incarceration in the United States. The most important factor was that the early released prisoners were mostly old or sick.

Sexual Harassment As Theft From The Corporate Employer

This is a fascinating concept that superficially seems attractive, at least as an internal philosophy of the business regarding how to treat these cases. 

But this approach as a basis for rules of law does seem to undermine the theoretical basis for relief for victims of sexual harassment from the offender's employer, on the theory that the harasser is an agent of the company for which it is responsible. Normally, a principal does not have liability for an agent's conduct that is ultra vires. 

A model where the employer and offender are both responsible, and the offender then has a duty to indemnify the employer for the damages it suffered, would seem to better address that issue, even though it aligns the employer and offender against the victim in the first instance, even if the employer's defense of the offender's conduct is temporary. In the context of the article, it isn't clear that the third objection to this theory has really been overcome and accurately describes the likely corporate response.

This article suggests how sexual harassment should be treated by companies as a civil misappropriation, embezzlement, conversion, or theft - as well as a civil rights violation. Additionally, some payments associated with sex-based harassment should be considered corporate waste. 

The misappropriation approach considers not only how sex-based harassment constitutes a civil misappropriation, embezzlement, conversion, or theft, but it also responds to three anticipated objections to sexual harassment as a civil misappropriation: (1) sexual harassment is a minor corporate expense; (2) identification of sexual harassment as civil misappropriation of corporate human assets commodifies targets; and (3) this new concept will change neither corporate responses nor corporate cultures. First in response, sexual harassment is not a minor expense but one that costs companies billions of dollars annually. It is, therefore, in a company’s financial interest to treat the problem as a theft of valuable assets. Second, only corporate failure to recognize the market value of female professional talent dehumanizes people. Almost all human beings engage in work and, men in particular, are valued for their work. Thus, the misappropriation solution puts targets on the same plane as privileged men, valued for their market productivity (as opposed to sexual or reproductive utility). Third, the identification of sexual harassment as a theft, conversion, embezzlement, or misappropriation, as well as a civil rights violation, encourages companies to modify and improve their remedial responses, corporate culture, profitability, and transparency. 

By making corporations and harassment targets potential allies, instead of adversaries, the reconception of sex-based harassment as a misappropriation of corporate human assets incentivizes new collaborations for social and economic justice.

Jennifer Ann Drobac, "The Misappropriation, Embezzlement, Theft, and Waste of Corporate Human and Financial Assets: Sexual Harassment Reconceived" —ABA J. LAB. & EMP. L.— (anticipated 2022).

Religion In The Cayman Islands

As of 2021, 66.9% of people in the Cayman Islands identify as Christian down from over 80% in 2010. About one in six people in the Cayman Islands have stopped identifying as Christian in a decade. A far greater percentage of people in this British Overseas Territory identify as Christian, however, than in Britain.

Being A Republican Is Bad For Your Health

Old news with improved precision. Anti-vaccine ideologies have killed a lot of Republicans in Ohio and Florida (and pretty much everywhere else, because the trends are national).

Political affiliation has emerged as a potential risk factor for COVID-19, amid evidence that Republican-leaning counties have had higher COVID-19 death rates than Democrat-leaning counties and evidence of a link between political party affiliation and vaccination views. 

This study constructs an individual-level dataset with political affiliation and excess death rates during the COVID-19 pandemic via a linkage of 2017 voter registration in Ohio and Florida to mortality data from 2018 to 2021. 

We estimate substantially higher excess death rates for registered Republicans when compared to registered Democrats, with almost all of the difference concentrated in the period after vaccines were widely available in our study states. 

Overall, the excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 percentage points (pp), or 76%, higher than the excess death rate for Democrats. Post- vaccines, the excess death rate gap between Republicans and Democrats widened from 1.6 pp (22% of the Democrat excess death rate) to 10.4 pp (153% of the Democrat excess death rate). 

The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after vaccines became widely available.

Jacob Wallace, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham & Jason L. Schwartz, “Excess Death Rates for Republicans and Democrats During the COVID-19 Pandemic” NBER Working Paper 30512 (September 2022).

Immigration and Political Identity In Europe

The conclusion that second generation European immigration are more liberal than native born Europeans is unsurprising, but it is always better to rely of established data than default assumptions.

We analyze whether second-generation immigrants have different political preferences relative to observationally identical children of citizens in the host countries. Using data on individual voting behavior in 22 European countries between 2001 and 2017, we characterize each vote on a left-right scale based on the ideological and policy positions of the party receiving the vote. 

In the first part of the paper, we characterize the size of the “left-wing bias” in the vote of second-generation immigrants after controlling for a large set of individual characteristics and origin and destination country fixed effects. We find a significant left-wing bias of second-generation immigrants, comparable in magnitude to the left-wing bias associated with living in urban (rather than rural) areas. 

We then show that this left-wing bias is associated with stronger preferences for inequality-reducing government intervention, internationalism and multiculturalism. We do not find that second-generation immigrants are biased towards or away from populist political agendas.

Simone Moriconi, Giovanni Peri, and Riccardo Turati, "Are Immigrants more Left leaning than Natives?" NBRE Working Paper 30523 (September 2022).

The Law Of Personal Jurisdiction

On the whole, the personal jurisdiction jurisprudence of the U.S. Supreme Court since 2011 has been substantively bad and ideologically ill-motivated and unreasonably dismissive of precedent (something also true of its landmark decisions on pleading standards in civil actions).

The Supreme Court did not decide a personal jurisdiction case between 1990 and 2011. It launched its new era of personal jurisdiction in 2011 with a specific jurisdiction case, J. McIntyre, and a general jurisdiction case, Goodyear. The former did nothing new, but the latter began a significant restriction of general jurisdiction. That restriction would have a profound impact on specific jurisdiction in many cases, by forcing a change of focus – from whether the defendant had forged a purposeful contact with the forum to whether the plaintiff’s claim is sufficiently related to that contact.

This new focus in specific jurisdiction requires consideration of the claim itself (usually the domain of subject matter jurisdiction) and of the plaintiff's contacts with the forum (ordinarily not relevant to the personal jurisdiction inquiry). Twice in the new era – with Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) in 2017 and in the Ford Motor Company (Ford) in 2021 -- the Court has addressed the connection required between the defendant's contact with the forum and harm suffered by the plaintiff. It took different approaches to whether the claim "arises out of or relates to" the contact in the two cases. Ford is far more nuanced than BMS and opens the door to a more plaintiff-friendly approach, particularly in product-liability cases against large firms, than we have seen in the new era. Ford may signal that the Court now feels it went too far in restricting general jurisdiction in the new era. Most interestingly, perhaps, separate opinions in Ford indicate several Justices' willingness to rethink the personal jurisdiction canon -- particularly Pennoyer and International Shoe.

Richard D. Freer, "From Contacts to Relatedness: Invigorating the Promise of "Fair Play and Substantial Justice" in Personal Jurisdiction Doctrine"73 Alabama L. Rev. 583 (2022).

International Comparisons Of Hiring Discrimination

There have now been lots of resume-audit studies in which identical resumes but for the “minority-distinct” name are sent out to employers and callback rates are measured. A meta-study of 97 field experiments (N = 200,000 job applicants) in 9 countries in Europe and North America finds there is some discrimination in every county but, if anything, the USA has one of the lower rates of discrimination while France and perhaps also Sweden have very high levels.

From Marginal Revolution. 

France clearly has more discrimination in hiring (consistent with what I have heard informally), Sweden is close to having more discrimination than the U.S. at a statistically significant level. 

The other countries in the study (Belgium, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Norway) do not have a statistically significant difference in hiring discrimination from that of the United States or each other.

High School Exit Exams Don't Matter

Conditioning the award of a high school diploma on passing a high school exit exam is designed to provide a signaling benefit to those who pass it relative to those who don't, given the fact of having earned a diploma more value in the economic and educational marketplace. 

But that doesn't seem to be what actually happens.

This suggests that IQ matters more than the signal of earning a diploma for these students who often receive a "certificate of completion" that the market treats as a high school diploma, even though it is not a true diploma.

Part of why high school dropouts perform so much worse that high school graduates who just barely graduate in the job market is that usually dropping out of high school reflects delinquency and a failure to conform to social norms, rather than serving as a measure of IQ. The diploma signals something, but not academic ability.

For the same reason, even though earning a GED requires more IQ than the average high school graduate, a GED is a less desirable credential than a high school diploma since it is so often earned by someone who is incarcerated, a negative mark that outweighs proving that one has a minimum level of intellectual capacity.

Also, perhaps this is because attempting college and not getting a diploma has been widely adopted as a signal to distinguish high school graduates who are more or less academically capable. Students who just barely pass a high school exit exam aren't likely to attempt to go to college.

Clark and Marotell (2014) . . . compare the career earnings of students who barely passed and those who barely failed high school exit exams - those who failed did not get a diploma, but those who passed did (these were at the end of their education, so a big effect here would give credence to the signalling thesis). They find little evidence of there being a signal effect, and you can see the visualisations . . . below.

From Sam Atis, "Quasi-experiments and Education" Samstack (September 29, 2022) (comparing linear regression to "Regression Discontinuity Design" [where] "an arbitrary cut-off can give you the equivalent of the treatment group and a control group that you get in a randomised control trial.").

If there were a signaling effect from passing a high school exit exam, you would expect that there would be a discontinuity in the trend at the zero line that divides students who passed the exit exam from those who failed it in the charts above. But, there isn't one. 

Two other RDD students on the benefits of education are also interesting:

• Banks and Mazzona (2012) exploit a 1947 change to the minimum school leaving age in the United Kingdom, and find a large and significant effect of one year of education on male memory and executive functioning in old age.

  
  

  Ozier (2018) exploits the fact that the probability of admission to a government secondary school sharply increases if a child gets a score close to the national mean, finding that completing secondary school increases scores on a cognitive ability test by 0.6 standard deviations. Education also seems to increase employment rates and decrease the chance of teen pregnancy among women - although this would be consistent with the signalling thesis.

  These studies also point out another issue. One way to conceptualize a content free IQ test administered to a child is, at least in part, as a potential to benefit from education that still requires education to be fully realized.

It Is Very Bad To Be A High School Dropout In The U.S.

Middle-age mortality increases among non-Hispanic Whites from 1992 to 2018 are driven almost entirely by the bottom 10 percent of the education distribution.

From a newly published paper, by Paul Novosad, Charlie Rafkin and Sam Asher (AEA gate). Open access link to PNAS paper from November 2, 2015 is here.

The significance and abstract portions state:

Significance 

Midlife increases in suicides and drug poisonings have been previously noted. However, that these upward trends were persistent and large enough to drive up all-cause midlife mortality has, to our knowledge, been overlooked. If the white mortality rate for ages 45−54 had held at their 1998 value, 96,000 deaths would have been avoided from 1999–2013, 7,000 in 2013 alone. If it had continued to decline at its previous (1979‒1998) rate, half a million deaths would have been avoided in the period 1999‒2013, comparable to lives lost in the US AIDS epidemic through mid-2015. Concurrent declines in self-reported health, mental health, and ability to work, increased reports of pain, and deteriorating measures of liver function all point to increasing midlife distress. 

Abstract 

This paper documents a marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013. This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround. The midlife mortality reversal was confined to white non-Hispanics; black non-Hispanics and Hispanics at midlife, and those aged 65 and above in every racial and ethnic group, continued to see mortality rates fall. This increase for whites was largely accounted for by increasing death rates from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis. Although all education groups saw increases in mortality from suicide and poisonings, and an overall increase in external cause mortality, those with less education saw the most marked increases. Rising midlife mortality rates of white non-Hispanics were paralleled by increases in midlife morbidity. Self-reported declines in health, mental health, and ability to conduct activities of daily living, and increases in chronic pain and inability to work, as well as clinically measured deteriorations in liver function, all point to growing distress in this population. We comment on potential economic causes and consequences of this deterioration.

It reminds me of deaths in Russia following the Soviet Union's collapse during the harsh economic stumble it took at that time.