GOP: Groping Employees No Big Deal

A new USA Today/Gallup survey shows Cain tied with Mitt Romney at 21% among a nationwide sample of Republican and Republican-leaning voters, an increase of 3% for Cain over the previous month's survey. It's also the sixth major public poll in a month showing Cain leading or statistically tied with Romney atop the GOP field.

From here.

The latest polls include questions about the sexual harassment charges lodged against Cain from his days leading the National Restaurant Association.

It also says a lot about just how weak the Republican Presidential primary field is these days.

Cain is a guy who gropes his employees and tells them they might lose their jobs if they don't go along. His signature proposal, the 9-9-9 plan is the biggest tax increase for working and middle class Americans ever proposed in living political history, almost entirely for the benefit of the wealthiest Americans, from the political party that is supposed to be against tax increases. He has no experience in the political process except as a lobbyist. Nobody I know seriously believes that Herman Cain will be the GOP nominee, but I don't get out much and his polling is impressive.

Bachman is calling all of the other candidates in the GOP primary socialists. She's married to a guy who "deprograms" gay people for a living.

Romney can't command more than a fifth of the primary voters, or a decisively lead over anyone else, despite leading the insider nomination talley decisively and he shows up at events where keynote speakers have denounced him for not being a Christian. His signature legislative accomplishment was passing a health care reform program in his state almost identical to Obamacare, the legislation that Republicans love to hate, a few years before Congress did. He's flip flopped every which way on U.S. involvement in Libya.

Governor Rick Perry is in fourth place (with 11%) behind Newt Gingrich (12%), who resigned from his leadership post in Congress because of a sex scandal and was doing so poorly earlier this year in the primary race that his staff abandoned ship en masse. Perry can't debate to save his life, nearly flunked out of Texas A&M (and had to change his major from an agricultural one to manage it) and shares a background with GWB as a cheerleader in college.

Romney's absolutely horrendous campaign would have decisively ended any chance that he would be elected by now if it weren't for the utterly pathetic state of the bunch of idiots he's running against in the primary. The first primary votes are just two months away, so these polls aren't simply irrelevant either.

Nate Silver's silly model say the secret to Republican victory is to nominate Jon Huntsman, who is barely even in the running.

At the rate things are going, Obama's best strategy may be to quietly allow the Republicans to self destruct, although engineering an economic recovery without Congressional assistance would be an even better trick.

The math-science death march

[S]tudents brush up against the reality of what David E. Goldberg, an emeritus engineering professor, calls “the math-science death march.” Freshmen in college wade through a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students. And then many wash out.

Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students[.]

Via Marginal Revolution.

There is some nice discussion of what is wrong with STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education in colleges and universities in the comments at the linked post.

Another post at the same site notes that almost all of the growth in the number of college graduates the last twenty-five years has come in relatively low paying majors with modest wage premiums over high school like the visual and performing arts, communications and journalism, and psychology, while the number of STEM degrees awarded have stayed basically constant. It notes that "more than half of all humanities graduates end up in jobs that don’t require college degrees and these graduates don’t get a big college bonus."

Now What?

As Governor Hickenlooper explained on Colorado public radio today, the massive defeat of a statewide ballot measure to increase taxes for five years to help pay for education (Proposition 103) on Tuesday (which he neither endorsed nor opposed), leaves Colorado with a problem that isn't going away, a structural deficit in the state budget.

In Colorado's state budget, projected revenues with existing taxes are well below projected expenses that federal law, the state constitution, and practical realities (like the need to let prisoners in state prisons serve something like their existing sentences). We have a state budget that is break even in high revenue years and overconstrained in recessions.

Sooner or later, and increasingly, it is looking like sooner, we get a state constitutional crisis, where there are no lawful ways for the Governor and the Colorado General Assembly to balance the budget, as it is required by law to do every single year.

The fat in the state budget is long gone, the muscle is being chipped away at, and the bones themselves could break with something well within the range of possibility like a double dip recession. This year's gimmick appears to be a one time bump in the revenue stream from privatizing the worker's compensation provider of last resort for a few hundred million dollars. But, the bag of budget gimmicks is getting smaller and smaller.

Ultimately, there is no such thing as a free lunch, and that applies with a particular vengance at the state and local government level where the ability to borrow money is much more limited than at the federal government level, and where the government can't simply just print more money to meet its needs or reduce the nominal value of its obligations.

If Colorado taxpayers don't agree to a fix, sooner or later, we end up with West Virginia/Mississippi quality government and that makes Colorado a very unattractive place for desirable new businesses. In practice, the quality of the workforce and the amount of red tape involved in doing business in a state is a much more decisive factor in attracting new business than tax burdens. If we don't bridge the gap between projected state revenues and projected state expenses, we enter a vicious circle of economic malaise.

Moreover, there aren't that many ways that the gap can be resolved. K-12 education and higher education make up about half of the general fund budget in Colorado. Medicaid, mental health funds and the corrections budget make up much of the rest. The general fund cost of most of the business of government, like the state patrol, the courts, state parks, the Secretary of State, and so on, is chump change by comparison. Many of these functions are financed entirely with earmarked taxes and user's fees.

Transportation, which is also underfunded leaving us with crumbling bridges and roads (let alone improvements like high speed rail), doesn't get any state general fund money as it is, and if that state of affairs is to continue, then the only solution is to increase the earmarked excise taxes and user's fees that do fund it.

If current trends continue, we could be a few years away from not having any state funding of higher education in this state, as this is one of the few big line items not protected by any federal law or state constitutional mandate. A few libertarians might agree with this result, but most voters in Colorado would see that as madness.

While our health care system as a whole in the United States grossly overpays health care providers as a class, the current practice of reimbursing Medicaid providers at rates far less than Medicare providers and private health insurance providers is unsustainable.

Underfunding mental health programs and programs for the homeless ultimately just costs government overall more in other areas like health care and corrections and unemployment funds and welfare than we would have paid if we'd funded those programs.

We can reduce the amount of money we spend on corrections, but it takes smart policies, and political courage to achieve that result.

We can do a better job of targeting tuition breaks for people attending colleges in Colorado to people who actually have financial need, and to not spending state funds on higher education on people with extremely high probabilities of flunking out, rather than to every in prospective state college student who has graduated from high school without regard to need, but this probably comes at the cost of alienating groups of voters who have great political clout and the ability to control the stream of campaign contributions, making the program even more vulnerable politically to budget cuts than it is already.

There are no magic bullets to reduce spending on K-12 education without sacrificing the quality of the educational product that our children receive, and Colorado is already facing a lawsuit claiming that it is not meeting its constitutional obligation to spend a sufficient amount on K-12 education.

It is all good and well to oppose broad based tax increases when Colorado families have already seen their median incomes slump due to a recession. But, the money needed to provide public sector service has to come from somewhere, and the budget cuts that are within the realm of the plausible aren't enough to cover the revenue shortfalls for long. The revenue v. expenses mathematics that rule state and local government is entirely indifferent to its political unpopularity.

The instinctual opposition of Colorado voters, particularly Republicans, to taxes would be all good and well if we are a high tax state. But, we aren't. Colorado's combined state and local taxes, overall and in each subtype of taxes, are at the low end of the midrange of state and local taxes nationwide, and Colorado collects considerably more of its combined state and local taxes at the local level than most states do. Federal taxes are lower than they have been at almost any time in living history. State and local government spending in Colorado is not high, particular relative to the state's median income. We are very near the bottom of the nation in education spending relative to median income, for example.

Apparently, Colorado voters and politicans are simply not going to wake up and do something about the looming structural deficit crisis in the state until some dramatic showdown or budget cuts force them to pay attention. And, Tuesday's overwhelming defeat of a very modest tax increase to make one meaningful dent in the gap is going to make it all the more difficult to find a politically feasible solution. For whatever reason, we do not have the political will to pay for even minimal state and local government services. Until the average voter realizes that their tax dollars are paying for something worth having, and the is very good reason to believe that they do, this state is in a heap of trouble.

A Century of Chevy And A Brief History Of American Automobile Industry

The Chevrolet automobile brand is a century old today. The company was fonded by William Durant and Louis Chevrolet in 1911, and while Swiss born Chevrolet left the company two years later, the name stuck even after the company was acquired by General Motors (itself found in 1901) in 1918 and demoted from being an independent corporation to being merely a brand.

A Brief History Of The Big Three


Every American automobile company that remains in business today has business operations in direct succession to a company founded by 1904. But, as a public company, the current incarnation of General Motors is less than a year old, with its initial public offering held on November 18, 2010. Ford, which was founded in 1903, went public in 1956 (initially with 40% family ownership, which has now been diluted to about 5%).

Chrysler was founded as a brand in 1925, following a reorganization out of bankruptcy of a company founded in 1904 when it was called the Maxwell Automobile Company. Chrysler survived a close call with bankruptcy in 1980, when it received a government bailout. German-based Daimler-Benz AG made Chrysler its subsidiary in 1998, and sold it to a private equity firm in 2007 before it went bankrupt in 2009. Italian car maker Fiat is its 53.5% shareholder as of June 2011 (it owned 20% immediately after the bankruptcy) and remains closely held with the other 46.5% of the company owned by the United Auto Workers union trust fund for Chrysler pensioners). Hence Chrysler is scarcely even really a domestic automobile company, as opposed to a foreign company's brand with significant employee ownership.

Much of the automobile market in the United States belongs to companies the entered to American automobile industry much later: Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Hyundai, Kia, Volkswagen, Subaru, and Saab, for example. Fiats are just returning to the American market, through a partnership with Chrysler, after a long hiatus. But, no new American company has managed to enter the market and survive during the working lives of anyone participating in the industry today.

A Brief History of American Automobile Brands

Indeed, even new brands created within the industry have not fared well. There are ten American automobile brands in existence today. Four are General Motors brands: Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick, GMC. Two are Ford Motors brands: Ford and Lincoln. Four are Chrysler brands: Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep and Ram, and those are, of course, simply marquees of a majority foreign owned, closely held company.

Chevrolet, Ford and Dodge are the mass market brands of the respective big three automobile makers. Cadillac, Lincoln and Chrysler are the luxury brands of the respective big three automobile makers. Buick is the last of the American upper mid-market brands. GMC, Jeep and Ram are truck brands, a category that Ford manages to live without. But, GMC model trucks are now sold mostly at Buick dealers, rather than having a mostly independent distribution channel, are most GMC makes are also sold, in very similar models, under the Chevrolet brand. GMC is, in effect, a model in name only without much of a marketing side, or a manufacturing and design side, of its own.

Nine out of ten post-World War II American brands of automobiles have come and gone. Ram, which debuted as a Doge make in 1981 and is named after a Dodge trademark hood ornament that debuted in the 1930s, was promoted to brand status in 2009 is the only one of the ten that is left. Jeep, the youngest American automobile brand in the United States other than Ram, that is still on the market debuted in 1941. The runner up, Lincoln, debuted as a brand in 1917.

Six of the ten American automobile brands are legacies of acquired car companies, and three more are the names of the companies that produce the vehicles. Only the Ram brand has never been car companies of its own at some point.

The other three GM brands: Buick (1903), Cadillac (1902) and GMC (1901) have histories comparable to Chevy. GM foreign brands Vauxhall (1925), Opel (1929), and Holden (1948) came later. GM had already discontinued seventeen domestic brands and one foreign brand before World War II, it discontinued seven foreign brands and two domestic brands before its bankruptcy, and it discontinued three domestic and one foreign brand in connection with its bankruptcy. The three brands it created after 1930, Geo (1989), Saturn (1985) and Hummer (1992) are all no more.

The Lincoln brand at Ford was formed in 1917 as an independent company and acquired in 1922 and shared a division with the former Mercury brand from 1945 to 2010, when the Mercury brand was discontinued and in 2011 the Lincoln model lineup was expanded to make up for the demise of Mercury. Ford launched the Edsel brand in 1958, only to cancel it in 1960 as its name became synonymous with business failure. Ford's foreign Merkur brand created in 1985 was discontinued in 1990. Ford made the jeep in 1941, but Chrysler ultimately wound up owning the brand.

Chrysler bought the Dodge brand in 1928, which was founded as a parts company in 1900 and began selling cars of its own in 1915. Chrysler has discontinued eleven domestic brands (excluding Renault a foreign affiliate sold as a U.S. brand and later divested after a few years) and nine foreign brands including five brands it created and then discontinued after World War II: Rambler (reintroduced 1950-1969 after an initial 1910-1914 run), American (1954-1988), Imperial (1955-1983), Valiant (1960-1976) and Eagle (1988-1998). Chrysler did promote Ram, formerly a Dodge model, to brand status of its own in 2009, and acquired the Jeep brand (begun in 1941) in 1970.

All three of the American automobile companies have bought and divested themselves of investments in various foreign automobile companies, sometimes the same ones (e.g. Jaguar and Volvo) at different points in time. Daewoo, which is 70.1% owned by GM is the only foreign subsidiary of the big three American automobile makers today. Of course, Chrysler is a subsidiary itself and has Ferrari, Maserati, Alfa Romeo, Abarth, Lancia and Fiat as sister brands.

It is also worth recognizing that from the standpoint of economic reality, many "foreign" cars are built mostly or entirely in the United States, and many "domestic" car models of the Big Three American Automobile makers are built substantially or even mostly abroad.

An Investor's Perspective


Ford is the only American automobile company that hasn't gone bankrupt (it went public in 1956 after 53 years as a closely held company and continues to be about 5% family owned). Chrysler and General Motors both went bankrupt in 2009. Ford is the only company in which an automobile industry IPO purchaser of stock at any time before 2009 would still own shares of the company, and everyone who owned bonds in Chrysler or General Motors in 2009, some decades old, would have taken a haircut. No one has continuously owned shares of any American automobile maker for more than fifty-five years. Ford has come perilously close to failing more than once, both before and after going public, but managed to survive so far.  any other car companies came into being, were not lucky enough to be bought by one of the big three, and went out of business as the industry consolidated.

And, these are some of the oldest big businesses in existence. We think of corporations as having eternal lives, but die after lifetimes not much longer than the children of the people who create them and some pass much more quickly.

Of course, we are on the dawn of a new age when it comes to American automobile brands, as a number of new electric car companies attempt to launch themselves independently of any existing automobile manufacturer. But, none of them have yet become household names and some, if not all, will surely be acquired by existing automobile manufacturers if and when they prove themselves.

2011 Election Results In Denver and Colorado

Colorado Proposition 103 to raise taxes to pay for education was defeated in Denver and has no chance statewide if it doesn't win in Denver. Denver issue 300, which would have mandates sick leave, was also defeated.

Happy Haynes has won the Denver Public Schools at large race, and Anne Rowe has won the District 1 school board race in Denver.

The District 5 school board race, and issue 2A regarding the deputy auditor, are still too close to call.

The Japanese Extreme In Child Custody Considered

No country in the world has a lower divorce rate, or fewer children born out of wedlock, than Japan (despite remarkably low rates of non-barrier contraception use and very late average marriage ages).

When Japanese couples do divorce, litigated resolutions are rare, in part, because the outcomes are so rule driven - absent an agreement of the parties, custody determinations and post-decree payment obligations are very predictable, and the property division rules are at least as clear as they are in the United States (and are almost irrelevant to working class couples with few assets or liabilities).

But, if achieving those ends meant adopting Japanese style child custody laws, and other differences in the Japanese economic and legal millieu that lead to that result (while there is little sex discrimination against unmarried childless women in the Japanese labor market, societal expectations both at home and at work greatly limit the employment participation of married women with children), I'm not sure that many people would be willing to make that tradeoff.

Child Custody In Japan

[In Japan,] Mothers retain custody of the children after divorce in the vast majority of cases, while the non-custodial parent (usually the man) often has little or no contact with the children after the split as joint custody is generally regarded as undesirable in Japan. (One famous case of recent years was ex-prime minister Koizumi Junichiro, who has three sons. After he split with his wife in 1982, he had custody of the elder two sons, who were raised by his sister and have not since seen their mother. She retained custody of the youngest, who was born after the breakup and has never met his father.)

"It's the Japanese general understanding that if they divorce, the noncustodial parent won't be able to see the kid again," says Tokyo divorce lawyer Hiroshi Shibuya, who handles some of the rare cases that are contested. "It's as if the child loses a parent in an accident, as if that parent just dies."

Child support is not normally provided to the ex-wife, meaning she must take on the expense of raising the children herself. This lack of financial support, coupled with little job experience, forces many divorced mothers to move back in with their parents. The result has been an increasing number of divorced Japanese mothers living in poverty regardless of their ex-husband’s financial status.

From here, hat tip to the Red String Comic by Gina Biggs.

As an aside, this isn't a simple matter of "conservatism" regarding family relationships. As best I can tell from Japanese popular culture and non-fiction accounts of living in Japan, few Japanese are a fervently anti-homosexual as many conservative Americans are, although few are as fully accepting of the same sex relationships that deprive parents of grandchildren as the most liberal Americans are either. The Japanese are probably more accepting of adoption and de facto adoption relationships than the average American. Also, there is probably more of a tendency to treat stepsiblings and stepparents are "real parents" in Japan than there is in the United States.

Child Custody In The United States

The American norm in family law (not always honored) is that co-parents remain co-parents of children until they reach adulthood (and beyond, albeit without the same kind of legal supervision). When parents live in the same area, typically the children shuttle between two households spending a couple of nights a week, at least, with each parent. Typically, the arrangement is either an equal number of overnights, or more overnights with a mother who often has a lower income, and modest monthly child support payments until the youngest child reaches adulthood in addition to significant alimony payments in the case of formerly married parents for a year to a few years after a divorce. Often, joint decision making regarding major decisions in children's lives is required.

When never married or no longer married parents live far apart from each other, typically, a significant part of summer vaction and some other long holidays are spent with one parent (typically the father), and the school year is spent with the other (typically the mother), and the child support payment is typically a bit larger.

There are also residual vestiges, in fact, of a now de jure abandoned custody determination consideration called "the tender years doctrine" that preferred the mother of primary custodian of younger children and the father as primary custodian of older children, typically with a divide at about twelve years old. A similar consideration that is sometimes invoked today in American custody cases is the "primary caretaker presumption" that calls for the post-divorce parenting arrangements to mirror those prior to the split up of the parents to the extent practicable, without explicitly invoking the gender of the parent.

Japanese style arrangements are typical in the United States only when an unmarried mother specifically chooses not to identify the paternity of the child as part of a strategy of keeping a father that the mother views as useless or a negative influence out of a child's life, when one of the parents has parental rights terminated for abuse or neglect, or when there is a divorce arising from one spouse abandoning the other, often with whereabouts unknown. More often, it is the dad who is absent, but sometimes, often in cases where the mother has a substance abuse problem, or severe mental health issues, or is in prison, or simply disappears, the mother will be the absent party.

Even in more lopsided cases, typically for good cause described in a contested custody hearing, where one parent has sole decision making authority with respect to the children and the predominant share of parenting time, the other parent is typically granted at least a few days a year of parenting time, perhaps supervised, whether or not that parent wants it. Indeed, absent a termination of parental rights based upon a showing of abuse or neglect by a state attorney in a quasi-criminal proceeding, American judges generally lack the power to entirely deprive a parent of parenting time.

Thus, while it isn't unheard of in the United States for children to lose all contact with one parent, it is almost unheard of for that to happen following a more than momentary marriage of two middle class, respectable people. Likewise, while siblings fairly frequently lose contact with each other if they are left orphans because both of their parents have had their parental rights terminated and they are turned over to the foster care system, it is almost unheard of for siblings to lose contact with each other during childhood in a middle class divorce.

The only kinds of siblings who may infrequently but not too rarely end up without regular contact with their siblings are those where on of the siblings is in juvenile detention, is much older, grown and gone, the siblings are stepsiblings whose parents split up, or the siblings are half-siblings who have never shared a household together.

Analysis

Now, the American way of handling child custody absolutely has downsides to it. A very large share of joint custody arrangements decreed by U.S. courts result in some additional litigation before the children become adults and this system involves a large share of all minors in the United States at some point in their lives. There are few high school classrooms anywhere in the United States that don't include someone, probably several someones, whose parents haven't been engaged in post-decree litigation at some point. Parental incomes (relevant to child support payment amounts) change, and the fact that kids grow up and need different parenting time arrangements as a result is a near certainty.

A surprisingly large share of unmarried co-parents manage to do a better job of being co-parents than they did as spouses or long term lovers (from experience I'd peg the figure at about two-thirds of separated couples with children), and often (perhaps not quite half the time) have better relationships even with each other with more clearly defined and less personal stakes than they had when they were themselves in a relationship. But, this certainly isn't universal. It is hardly surprising that many divorce or never married couples "don't play well" with each other. A minority of truly high conflict couples fighting over their children perrenially can be a judicial management disaster that is extremely expensive and unpleasant for all involved.

It is also well established that the litigation process itself, and the mere fact of the divorce even when the litigation process isn't that traumatic, is harmful to the children involved outside the very worst, high conflict, domestic violence or criminality tinged marriages.

The parental rights and responsibilties decisions are generally made by a single judge with very limited statutory or case law guidance (the "best interests of the child" standard, interpreted in a fact intense manner on a case by case basis, trumps everything else in the ordinary case), whose has absolute judicial immunity in making that decision. which is not mediated by a jury, judicial panel, or meaningful appellate review. Removing a judge from office is often nearly impossible, even if the judge makes many questionable but not reversable decisions in child custody cases. Even getting a judge off the family court docket is often hard, because there are few volunteers for the post within the judiciary.

This process elicits widespread ire directed towards the system in general and the particular judge involved in making the decision, by a large share of all of the parties who feel dissatisfied with the decision that was made and a significant minority of the parties who are satisfied with the decision that was made by the judge. In that context, any disappointing outcome looks like judicial favoritism and bias.

Most Americans would prefer a regime with more predictability and less judicial discretion than the existing regime. But, not at the expensive of determinations that were as lopsided as those in Japan.

While full marriages end easily in the United States, co-parent relationships are very hard to end. We don't call it that, but the American serial monogamy system verges on an almost polygamy system when ex-spouses have shared children. All second spouses of both parties end of having some sort of relationship with the first spouses of both parents at the very practical level of being de facto co-parents of the same children. Children of unmarried and separated parents inevitably have de jure or de facto stepsiblings with whom they must develop relationships of some kind. All the parents and stepparents involved are one complicated extended family.

But, generally, we see the problems of managing these complicated separated and blended family arrangements as an inevitable consequence of the fact that parents can't always manage to keep their relationships together. Americans may argue for measures to discourage divorce in couples with children, or to reduce harm in the family law litigation process, but nobody is arguing that depriving children completely of contact with one of their two parents or their siblings, without a very good, fault based reason is conscionable.

Indeed, increasingly, we are a nation having doubts about even the concept of a closed adoption, where adopted children have no contact with their birth parents. In Britain, controversy is raging over the practical problem of avoiding incest when many children have genetic fathers who are the same undisclosed sperm donor. The modern trend is to see genetic relationships, while not controlling of what the relationship should be, as an undeniable basis of some relationship that gives rise to mutual obligations between all parents and all children.

After decades of frequent divorce (although it is less common now for middle class families than it used to be), there is still not a consensus on what kind of relationships the people involved should have with each other, how parenting should be arranged with similarily situated families, how inheritances should be handled when people consciously choose to write wills and trusts to distribute their wealthy in blended family situations, or an any other particular substantive or procedural reform of the system.

A minority want to return to the fault based regime that we once had for almost a century between the no divorce era and the divorce on demand era of "no fault", but where "covenant marriages" that include that option are available, they are rarely chosen.

The fact that the status quo is problematic is widespread, but there is little criticism of it that isn't so deeply embroiled in personal negative experiences that one can have much hope that it could be widely applied.

Also, while the Japanese extreme seems harsh and unconscionable even, it is hard to tell if it is really worse. In a society where divorce is so rare, the situation of divorced children in Japan may not be an apples to apples comparison with divorced children in the United States. There is no real consensus means of determining what psychological impact a divorce has on children and no obvious way to compare existing outcomes with counterfactual alternatives.

Geezers In Prison

People, often older people, serving life sentences, constitute a large portion of our nation's prison population. For example, 20% of prisoners in California's overcrowded prison system are serving life sentences.

From 1984 to 2008, the number of offenders serving life terms quadrupled, from 34,000 to roughly 140,000 . . . . One of the fastest-growing subgroups are inmates serving life without the possibility of parole. Those numbers have jumped from 12,453 in 1992 to 41,095 in 2008 and represent the most costly inmates to house as the aging inmates require increased medical care.

Yet, older inmates are much, much less likely to reoffend when released than younger inmates, and the crimes that they do commit when they reoffend show a strong tendency to be less serious than their original crimes.

A Stanford University study in September showed the recidivism rate was less than 1 percent among 860 murderers paroled in California since 1995. Five returned to prison for new felonies, none for similar life-term crimes. By contrast, nearly 49 percent of all released California inmates were recommitted for new crimes.

"Not only are most violent crimes committed by people under 30, but even the criminality that continues after that declines drastically after age 40 and even more so after age 50," the study found. . . .

New York now has more than 800 prisoners who are 65 or older, double the total a decade ago. It has no death penalty, though 34 states and the federal government do. Federal prisons held 3,254 inmates age 66 or older in August, up from 1,326 in 2000. From 1985 to 2006 in New York, 72 prisoners released when they were over 65 were returned for new crimes, less than 5 percent.

Of course, we also have insanities like increasing the sentence of a man set for release on parole after seventeen years in prison, for the technical prison system violation of calling family on a borrowed illicit prison cell phone to let family know that he had finally been released on parole. Normally, a technical violation is punishable by the loss of up to 90 days of good time, but in this case it was used to revoke a parole grant that had just been awarded to the inmate, and parole hearings are held only every five years for individuals serving the kind of sentences that this inmate was serving. The decision will cost California taxpayers about $250,000 and exacerbate California's compliance with a federal court order to reduce crowding in its prison system.

Pop More Likely To Produce Violent Crime Than Pot

A new study provides empirical evidence linking heavy soda consumption to violent crime. Similar evidence linking marijuana consumption to violent crime is absent.

Meanwhile, people are starting to ask why President Obama has stepped away from a policy of tolerance towards medical marijuana that is legal under state law.

7 Billion

There are about 7 billion people alive in the world today.  The current growth rate is the global population is about 1.1%, down from more than 2% in the 1960s.  At the current growth rate, the world's population would double by about the year 2075, but the declining population growth rate means that this doubling of populaton will probably never happen and, at least, will happen much later than then.  Current estimates for peak world population are in the vicinity of 10-12 billion people.

I am not a population alarmist.  Population growth is an issue that economic development seems to tame almost universally and automatically even without dramatic government intervention.  People who can know with great certainty that their children will live to adulthood and that they will be able to provide for themselves in their old age have far fewer children.

If you are worried about population growth, promote economic development.

Vote in Colorado and in particular in Denver.

You can still hand deliver your ballots in the 2011 general election in Colorado today and tomorrow at designated elections offices open until 6 p.m. today and from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m. tomorrow.

The locations in Denver, Colorado are:

Denver Elections Division, 200 W. 14th Ave.
Christ Community Church, 8085 E. Hampden Ave.
Harvey Park Recreation Center, 2120 S. Tennyson Way
Hiawatha Davis Jr. Recreation Center, 3334 N. Holly St.
Montbello Recreation Center, 15555 E. 53rd Ave.
Montclair Recreation Center, 729 N. Ulster Way
Scheitler Recreation Center, 5031 W. 46th Ave.
Washington Park Recreation Center, 701 S. Franklin St.

At the state level the only issue is Proposition 103 which would increase the state income tax rate from 4.63% to 5.0% and the state sales tax rate from 2.9% to 3.0% for a number of years, and in exchange increase funding for K-12 and higher education combined (the division of funds is up to the Colorado General Assembly) by about 15%.

Colorado has one of the least well funded higher education systems relative to median state income in the nation, and its funding of K-12 is lackluster.  Due to the mechanics of various federal law, state constitutional, and practical considerations that go into the Colorado state budget, in recessions, higher education almost always takes the lion's share of shortfalls in state revenues and this measure proposes a medium term fix to that problem.  I recommend that you vote for Proposition 103.

In Denver, voters will cast ballots in one five way at large school board race and two school board district races, each with two contenders.  I profiled the candidates here. At stake in the race is the ongoing division in the school board between members favorably inclined to charter schools and other reforms backed by well heeled area business people, and candidates strongly committed to neighborhood schools and concerned that new options undermine these schools backed by the teacher's union.

Denver voters also cast ballots on citizen initiated issue 300, which would mandate that workers in Denver at establishments with 10 or more employees would earn 1 hour of paid sick time/family sick time/domestic violence victim time off for each 30 hours worked up to 75 hours a year (40 hours a year for businesses in their first year).  The Mayor and City Council are against it, fearing an undue burden on businesses.  I'm not convinced and think that it is the right thing to do, and that the additional administrative burden would be modest given the many payroll obligations that businesses this size must already meet.  It works out to less than a 3% pay raise for hourly workers in the city, as not everyone would use the new benefit. Vote yes on issue 300.

Finally, Denver voters decide if the City Auditor should be permitted to appoint his deputy, a referred charter amendment that would slightly reduce the scope of the city's civil service system for one senior position in the auditor's office, rather than requiring the auditor to pick from three civil service board screened candidates for this post.  I think that this is a reasonable change and recommend that you vote in favor of it.

A Year Ago Today Pontiac Died

As we were driving around town this weekend, my son, who is currently fascinated by sporty cars (an affliction known to survive to adulthood in many men), noticed a number of interesting cars with the Pontiac logo and a Sunfire model, which set to me looking into the end of that brand as a result of the GM bankruptcy. It turns out that the last Pontiac was built at the end of 2010, and that the last of its dealers closed a year ago today.

Criminal Defendant Offers Up Creative Legal Theory

Every once in a while you encounter a legal defense from a pro se defendant that not even a $1,000 an hour criminal defense lawyer could have come up with, and this is such a case.

Man Caught Having Sex with Donkey Claimed It Was a Shapeshifting Hooker

In a testament to the fairness of the court system of Zimbabwe, while the man has been charged with bestiality, the Court allowed him to present his defense and he has not yet been convicted. He is undergoing psychiatric evaluation.

Grit Not Enough

Deliberate practice (DP) occurs when an individual intentionally repeats an activity in order to improve performance. The claim of the DP framework is that such behavior is necessary to achieve high levels of expert performance. The proponents of the framework reject evidence that suggests that other variables are also necessary to achieve high levels of expert performance, or they claim that the relationship between those variables and expert performance is mediated by DP. Therefore, the DP framework also implies that DP is sufficient to achieve high levels of expert performance. We test these claims by reviewing studies on chess expertise. We found strong evidence that abundant DP is necessary (but not sufficient) and estimated that the minimum requirement to achieve master level is 3,000 hours of DP. We also review evidence showing that other factors play a role in chess skill: general cognitive abilities, sensitive period, handedness, and season of birth.

From Guillermo Campitelli1 and Fernand Gobet "Deliberate Practice Necessary But Not Sufficient," 20 Current Directions in Psychological Science vol. no. 5 280-285 (October 2011) (Hat tip to Dienekes).

As the press release for the study notes:

In one survey of chess players in Argentina, Campitelli and Gobet found that, indeed, practice is important. All of the players that became masters had practice at least 3,000 hours. “That was not surprising,” he says. There is a theory in psychology that the more you practice, the better you’ll do in areas like sports, music, and chess. “But the thing is, of the people that achieved the master level, there are people that achieved it in 3,000 hours. Other people did, like, 30,000 hours and achieved the same level. And there are even people that practiced more than 30,000 hours and didn’t achieve this.”

Campitelli and Gobet concluded that practice is necessary to get to the master level—but it’s not enough. . . . [Also] about 90 percent of the general population is right-handed, only about 82 percent of adult chess players are right-handed.

Establishing a similar point, D. Z. Hambrick, E. J. Meinz show in "Limits on the Predictive Power of Domain-Specific Experience and Knowledge in Skilled Performance." Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2011; 20 (5): 275 DOI: 10.1177/0963721411422061, that general IQ can predict a large share of performance in tasks like piano sightreading, even controlling for hours of practice.

In one experiment Hambrick and Meinz tested 57 pianists with a wide range of deliberate practice under their belts, from 260 to more than 31,000 hours, to see how well they did on sight-reading -- playing a piece from a score they'd never seen before. Those who had practiced more did better. In fact, practice -- even specific sight-reading practice -- predicted nearly half of the differences in performance across the subjects. But working memory capacity still had a statistically significant impact on performance. In other words, regardless of amount of deliberate practice, working memory capacity still mattered for success in the task. . . . Challenging another "experts-are-made" contention -- that beyond a certain threshold, intelligence makes less and less of a difference in accomplishment -- the authors cite a study by Vanderbilt University researchers that looked at the math SAT scores of people with PhDs in science, technology, engineering, or math. Those who scored in the 99.9th percentile at age 13 were 18 times more likely to go on to earn a PhD than those who scored better than only 99.1 percent of their teenage peers. "Even at the highest end, the higher the intellectual ability -- and by extension, the higher the working memory capacity -- the better," says Hambrick.

The result is not surprising (to me), but is important.

Colorado Legislative Districts Update

The trial in the case to set Colorado's Congressional Districts ended on Friday in Denver District Court (a state court of general jurisdiction) with the judge now setting down to produce a map.

Meanwhile, Weld County has filed suit in the Colorado Supreme Court, on the last available date, to contest the state legislative boundaries designated by a state commission charged with drawing them.

Colorado's Inactive Voter Law Uniquely Restrictive

Jonathan Brater, a Law Clerk with the Brennan Center's Democracy Program, wrote me that Colorado is one of just a handful of states that don't mail ballots to all "inactive" voters, and Colorado rushes voters into the "inactive" category faster than any other state.

From here.

Former Western Slope DA Convicted Of Molesting DA Office Employees

The man who was the Republican District Attorney for the 7th Judicial District in Colorado (Delta, Gunnison, Hinsdale, Montrose, Ouray and San Miguel counties, basically the Western Slope to the south of Grand Junction and North of Silverton) when he was arrested in September 2010, Myrl Serra, has pleaded guilty to "criminal extortion and unlawful sexual contact involving three women," felonies punishable by up to twelve years in prison and requiring registration on the sex offender's registry. Sentencing is set for January 19, 2012.

The criminal extortion charges allege that he demanded "sexual favors from women in his office." The sexual contact charges were supported by preliminary hearing testimony in which "one of the women testified that Serra cornered her inside his office in April 2010, grabbed one of her breasts and forced her to touch his genitals."

The matter was handled surprisingly smoothly at the time of the arrest, with the office of Republican Attorney General John Suthers acting in coordination with Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper and stepping in to serve as a special prosecutor of the Republican elected official and an interim DA was appointed.

In Colorado, a District Attorney is elected on a partisan basis from the residents of each of the state's twenty-two judicial districts at the same time as other statewide elected official (in the even numbered years between President elections for four year terms) and reports only indirectly, via budget authorizations, to the county commissioners of the countries for whom he is the prosecutor.

This is not the first time in recent history that elected District Attorneys have attracted notice in recent memory in Colorado. Arapahoe's current Republican District Attorney Carol Chambers (who is also controversial for policy reasons related to her conduct in office and attracted national attention for linking Deputy DA compensation to conviction quotas), was found by the state supreme court to have committted an ethics violation. A recent Republican District Attorney John Newsome for Colorado Springs had a serious drinking problem and was found to have been embezzling petty amounts from his office. A District Attorney Colleen Truden in Aspen was recently recalled over scandals concerning her conduct in office.

This is not to say that appointing District Attorneys' statewide is necessarily a better approach.  Florida, for example, has state appointed rather than locally elected district attorneys and is not known for the good judgment of its prosecutors. 

Indeed, there is circumstantial evidence to suggest that the decentralized nature of the criminal justice bureaucracy in the United States is an important part of the unwritten constitution in the United States that reduces abuses by law enforcement relative to states where the process is more centralized, makes it harder for the entire criminal justice system to be corrupted by organized crime, and limits the need for the legal mandate to prosecute all known crimes that is found in many civil law countries. 

Perhaps the best compromise would be to make the District Attorney an appointed official who reports to local government elected officials, just as municipal law enforcement officers do in the United States.  The lack of accountability to anyone else is part of what makes the position of an elected District Attorney prone to abuse and makes abuses by someone in this position a monumental task to correct in most cases.  (Near total judicial immunity from civil liability for prosecutors further exacerbates this issue.)

CNN v. BBC v. NPR

Seth at Enik Rising (citing Chris Zorn) has a screen shot nails the distinction between the fluff engine that CNN has become compared to the relatively serious new outlet that is the BBC.

Of course, then there is National Public Radio (NPR). Its reporting is more serious in tone and content than even the BBC World Service, despite its effort to diversify with high end sports coverage and somewhat light hearted tech coverage in recent years.

FWIW, I like the depth that NPR offers, even if there are days that I can't bring myself to deal with it and listen to music instead. Now, if only NPR had a more global range of international coverage, rather than focusing squarely on international affairs intimately related to American foreign policy, and dropped the sports coverage, we'd really be getting someplace.

How Stable Is IQ?

IQ has a significant hereditary component and normally when someone has a major difference in IQ test results a few years apart, which themselves show a basically bell shaped distribution, not biased up or down, up to a bit more than one standard deviation in a sample of 33 people who were aged 14 when they started the study and were tested agains four years later, the change is assumed to be due to the inaccuracy of the test.

But, bolstered by MRI scans, a study announced today suggests that a significant share of the difference is due to real differences in teenaged brain development, rather than merely issues related to the testing instrument itself.

The implication, that education in the teen years really does matter and that nuture factors in one's teens can materially impact one's IQ, makes education seem far less futile than it does when one merely look at averages for larger numbers of people that obscure individual shifts in IQ in the teen years, even if they arise from real brain development.

Life Could Be Worse

You could be Asuquo Okon Inyang who had been fired by the British Embassy in Calabar, Nigeria in 1929 and said in this letter asking for his reinstatement:

On opening this epistle you will behold the work of dejobbed person, and a very bewifed and childrenized gentleman. Who was violently dejobbed in a twinkling by your goodself. For heavens sake Sir consider this catastrophe as falling on your own head, and remind yourself as walking home at the moon's end of five savage wives and sixteen voracious children with your pocket filled with nonexistent pounds shillings and pence; not a solidery sixpence; pity my horrible state . . . .

Government Commission Proposes Bad Solution To Non-Problem

A commission on continuity of government, i.e. keeping things running after a terrorist attack, disaster or some other calamity disrupts the functioning of the government, has proposed in a recent report has proposed "changes in federal law to allow the courts to keep working, including creating an emergency court that would function only until the Supreme Court had the minimum six justices it needs to hear and decide cases."

Of course, the U.S. Constitution already provides for this situation by allowing the President to make recess appointments to courts and civil service positions.

[T]he most provocative and potentially troubling issue highlighted in the report is the president's power to name several new justices, or even the entire court, without congressional approval for a period that could last a few months or as long as a year and a half.

The Constitution gives the president the power to make what are called recess appointments, temporary appointments to jobs that otherwise require Senate confirmation. Recess appointments only last until the end of the congressional session and can only be made when the Senate is not in session.

If the appointments are made in good faith and after informal consultation with congressional leaders, the temporary justices could allow the court resume its work quickly.

But the authors foresaw more difficulty if the president were expecting challenges to his legitimacy in office or actions he was planning. In that case, "he might fill a court with recess appointees who would be sympathetic to his point of view. He would appoint the court that might then be called upon to be an independent check on the president," the report said.

A temporary emergency court, set up before a crisis arises, but only coming to life following a catastrophe, would be well placed to deal with urgent court matters in the event the Supreme Court is unable to do its work, the report said.

Any surviving justices would sit on the court along with other judges chosen from a pool. Decisions of the temporary court could be appealed to the Supreme Court, after it was up and running again.

Overall, the report simply has the matter wrong. The status quo system is not seriously broken and doesn't need the kind of fix that it proposes.

First, there are very few matters which the lower courts are not qualified to handle. Every judge in the United States, federal, state and local, is empowered to rule on constitutional questions properly before that judge. The United States is not a country with a specialized "constitutional court." It takes many months and usually years for a case in the lower courts to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, so almost all of the cases on its docket from the time of the emergency until recess appointments expire would be pre-emergency cases. The U.S. Supreme Court has granted certiorari in fewer than a hundred cases a year in recent years, all of which have definitive resolutions that can simply be left standing in the lower courts, just as they are in the 99.8% of cases where certioari is denied by the U.S. Supreme Court now. En banc sittings of U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal can even provide discretionary review in the interim period of close issues. Some circuit splits on issues of federal law may fester a bit longer than they would have otherwise, but this is hardly a crisis.

Perhaps the weightest issues that are troublesome to postpone are death penalty stays of execution, but the President, in federal cases, or Governors of most states, in state cases, and in all cases the lower court before which the case was pending, would have the authority to stay an execution using the pardon power (or a stay of proceedings in the case of a lower court) to avoid an appearance of impropriety caused by the delay. Abuse of authority in death row cases by lower courts in cases that have already undergone multiple levels of judicial review before reaching the U.S. Supreme Court, is not truly a continuity of government crisis.

As it stands, individual judges of the U.S. Supreme Court can grant stays in cases for particular judicial circuits until the full court can review the decision. A rule allowing those assignments to be temporarily adjusted following the government continuity causing event pending the repopulation of the court is a far more modest way of addressing the issue.

If there is a place for a new law, Congress could pass a law automatically staying the execution of anyone whose case is pending before a court when there is a vacancy in every judicial position with authority to rule on a request for a stay in every court with authority to rule on a request for stay, until such a person is in place and has had a reasonable period of time after being appointed (perhaps a month) to rule on the request.

And, of course, recess appointments to lower courts pose even less of a concern about bias because they are subject to appellate review and don't make a long term impact on the makeup of the judiciary.

Second, in the same vein, the United States Constitution and the Judiciary Act does not allocate very much mission critical litigation exclusively, or even primarily to the federal courts. The vast majority of cases including the vast majority of cases that truly urgently need to be resolved by courts in a continuity of government emergency can and routinely are handled by state courts, and by federal trial courts when state courts lack jurisdiction. There are very few crimes or civil matters that are a priority to handle in a crisis that couldn't be handled in state court if necessary, and the few that are could be handled for a brief crisis period by federal trial courts.

Indeed, the reality of civil litigation in both state and federal trial courts, is that most kinds of litigation can proceed for many months with almost no judicial intervention prior to trial.

Third, the U.S. Supreme Court has an exceedingly small original jurisdiction, hearing perhaps a dozen or so such cases a year, and that jurisdiction is constitutional in nature so it can't be dealt with via a federal law.

If there is a change to be made for continuity purposes, and this indeed would be a minor one, it could be to allow for a majority of remaining judges of the U.S. Supreme Court to appoint a special master to hear cases in its original jurisdiction so as not to delay this perfunctory step that it always takes before the U.S. Supreme Court takes up such cases on the merits (by which time new justices were likely have been appointed).

Notably, the Constitution does not place actions under either the Presidential Succession Act or related to the powers of Congress in the original jurisdiction of the U.S. Supreme Court. Generally, these matters are within the jurisdiction of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and appealled to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (which can conduct an en banc review of a controversial decision of a three judge panel of that court).

Fourth, experience teaches us that a terrorist attack or major national disaster is precisely the sort of thing that causes the public, Congress and the courts to rally around the President rather than providing a really check on the President's actions in any case. So the concern that the balance of power in the U.S. Supreme Court would be thrown out of whack by recess appointees of a crisis period President, for a period of less than two years, leading not to a constitutional crisis, but a political one, are overblown.

Indeed, making a recess appointment is precisely the kind of political act by a President that can restore a sense of legitimacy, normalcy and control to the new administration, setting the nation back on track to the usual constitutional process.

Also, a recess appointment, by deferring a permanent decision until the crisis has passed or subsided somewhat, prevents a long term bias in the courts from arising from a short term crisis. Whatever mistakes the judges appointed on a recess basis making in a year and a half, their biases can be resolved when the recess appointments expire. Indeed, the fact that recess appointed judges will probably be first in line for permanent appointments and do not have lifetime appointments makes them especially sensitive to creating a partisan or biased appearance of impropriety during the crisis because it would sacrifice a shot at a lifetime appointment.

In any case, even if there is a temporary emergency court that is provided for, no federal statute can strip the President of recess appointment power and a judge who is going to stack the court with recess appointments is precisely the kind of President who will pre-empt the temporary emergency court's powers by making those recess appointments. Thus, a temporary emergency court curbs only the powers of Presidents whose power does not need to be curbed.

Fifth, this leads naturally to the fact that a temporary emergency court inevitably would raise all sorts of novel questions of law that would not come up if the system were simply allowed to work without modification. The validity of recess appointments has been litigated and tested over the two centuries of this Republic. The legal issues related to temporary emergency courts have not, so this measure would simply add to the legal uncertainty of an already confusing time. Any special purpose court or institution is inherently less legitimate than one that exists already when the continuity crisis arises.

One of the reasons that courts have power is that the people whose cooperation is needed to give effect to their decisions are used to obeying them and know how they work. For example, specialized human rights courts with thin dockets are often far less powerful in practice than courts such as the European Union's highest court which develops its legitimacy by routinely handling E.U. entity employment and regulatory cases.

In short, a temporary emergency court in lieu of the U.S. Supreme Court for emergencies is simply a very bad idea, in so many ways, and should be abandoned. The status quo isn't broken, although it could be slightly tweaked with adjustment that could mostly be enacted through the rule making process of the courts themselves.