Plan B Litigation Continues

The FDA currently permits women aged seventeen and older to obtain the "morning after pill" (a.k.a. Plan B contraception) without a prescription.  After losing in court on the age limit (which was contrary to the scientific panel recommendation of the FDA), which it is appealling, it announced it would reduce the age to fifteen.  While this is an improvement, it leaves young women aged 12 to 14 needing a prescription for this time sensitive method of preventing pregnancy, precisely the people for whom the desirability of preventing pregnancy is greatest and the ease of obtaining parental consent or a doctor's visit may be greatest.

It has been clear for a long time that women old enough to get pregnant need to be in control of their own reproductive health decisions without requireing parental permission or notice.  They are reproductive adults which is far more meaningful than the arbitrary age eighteen age of majority for most purposes.  But, getting there isn't an easy task.

NIMH Doubts Utility of DSM-5

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is distancing itself from the the American Psychiatric Association and its upcoming Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).
 

From here.

The process up updating the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DMS) from the fourth edition (DSM-IV) to the fifth edition (DSM-5), has been controversial.  But, in losing the unreserved support of a key constituent like NIMH, the process of finalizing the draft which has been lurching forwards despite many expressions of concern is facing a critical barrier to the wide to the point of universal acceptance that previous drafts of the DSM have attained.

The key issue is that it gives names to syndromes and clusters them on that basis, without providing any real insight into the underlying nature of the conditions:  "DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever."

Denny's Murder Update

Two brothers aged 25 and 18, who got in a fight with Chris Haney at a Denny's at Sante Fe and Alameda in Denver and were arrested an hour later, appear to have intentionally shot and killed him, according to filings by the District Attorney.  The younger brother brandished the gun first, but the killing shot was fired by the older brother.  Previous coverage of this story at this blog is found here.  The cause of the fight was not disclosed in the newspaper report.

The Porn Singularity

One could say that I had the misfortune of my adolescence overlapping almost perfectly with the last few years prior to the ‘pornographic singularity.’ I speak here of the internet, circa 1995 and later. Prior to this era of the ‘pornographic explosion’ one often had to rely upon a lax or absentee father of a friend, from whom the porn was ‘borrowed,’ and then returned with the owner none the wiser. . . . I recall realizing that something radical had occurred when visiting my family and observing my brother, who was 8 at the time, deleting porn spam from his Hotmail account. Porn as nuisance rather than treasure would have amazed my adolescent self.

From Razib Khan.

For anyone out there is doesn't know, there is now and has been for a long time, an essentially unlimited amount of hard core, video, non-child pornography of every type available on the Internet for free to anyone capable of putting key words into a Google search whose computer isn't filtered and few people have effective filters on their home computers (although many business, school and library computers are effectively filtered).  Apparently, some people still pay to purchase pornography in non-streaming formats and over the Internet, but an ability to pay certainly isn't necessary for anyone with unfiltered Internet access.

This is notable not just because pornography is more available, but because the character of the pornography that was available is different.  Much of pre-1995 porn sales involved erotic nude photography and implied but not directly depicted sex acts and lacked sound and video.  Much of pre-1995 porn sales of materials that were more explicit in depicting sex acts was less "hardcore". The explosion in access to explicit video depicting many individual orgies, bestiality, S&M, fetish porn, and the like has been far more dramatic than the increase in access to images of naked twenty-something girl's next door posed suggestively.

I was a law school graduate and newlywed around the time that the "pornographic singularity" hit and as a result didn't notice it until quite a few years later.

Pornography and Rape

The number of rapes per 1,000 people has declined steadily since about 1990 by about 32% in all from the peak to the present (to roughly 1975 levels), more or less in line with the decline a broad spectrum of serious crimes of all kinds in that time period. The same period also saw great declines in high school dropout rates and teen pregnancy rates, especially for minorities, declines in non-geriatric deaths from almost causes other than prescription drug overdoses, and immense increases in incarceration rates.

Theses overall trends at attributed to a variety of causes: the aging of the baby boomers, the crime impact of greater availability of abortion and declining levels of lead poisoning, greater institutionalization levels as prisons willed while impatient mental health care facilities emptied, sustained economic prosperity subject to only relatively minor speed bumps, increasing education levels, public awareness campaigns, a collapse of the drug trade, new policing strategies, and stronger anti-crime technologies that made crime less profitable and more risky (from anti-theft devices in cars to DNA testing to widespread use of surveillance video).

Current rates of reported rape are not terribly low by historical standard, unlike many other serious crimes (such as homicide), however.  Rape incidence is still about three times as high as they were in 1960, and increased steadily from 1960 to 1990 by more than a factor of four. 

Some of the increase in rape incidence relative to 1960 may be due to greater reporting of rapes and broader acceptance of a broader definition of what constitutes reportable rape in the living law of every day culture (there have been shifts in formal legal definitions of rape as well, but they have been more subtle) driven largely by the feminist movement.

But, quite a bit of increased incidence, to the extent that exceeds increases in other kinds of serious crimes, is also probably due to the fact that men and women have opportunities to interact with each other in relatively unsupervised situations that are far more expansive than they were in 1960 (also as a result of the feminist movement) and create more opportunities for crimes to take place. 

In an era when female college students and young adults were essentially locked in their dorms and homes at night for the most part until they were swiftly married and expected to stay at home away from non-family men and have children, there were fewer occasions in which a woman was in a place where a man (other than her husband) could rape her. 

No one seriously suggests that we should return to that regime (and even at the 1990 peak 2499 out of 2500 women did not report a rape to authorities in any given year v. 9,999 out of 10,000 in 1960), because it so greatly benefits women who are not raped.  But surely, these changes in the daily lives of women did have some measurable impact.

It also isn't unfair to observe that one reason for the declining precautions against rape was that the downside consequences of rape for a victim were mitigated by wider use of birth control pills and abortion and declining social sanctions suffered by women who weren't virgins, and did not reflect the still limited awareness of the risks associated with serious and incurable sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS.  The consequences of rape were and continue to be serious, but they weren't as catastrophic for the average victim in 1990 as they were in 1960.

Some explanations of declining rape incidence point to decreased "demand" on the part of rapists, as sex has become easier for men who aren't married to obtain.  But, the timing is wrong.  The sexual revolution started to happen just as rape incidence was rising, and was rolling into a "counter-revolution" as it began to fall.  The proportion of men who are single has increased dramatically (and single men have sex much less often than married men, even in the post-sexual revolution world).

It isn't at all obvious that the motives of rapists are comparable to the motives of ordinary single men who can't find someone to sleep with them - i.e. it seems likely that men who commit the rapes that end up in crime statistics have a quite different profile from the vast majority of men.  Incarcerated rapists aren't that different in demographics or traits like mental health, education, unemployment and intelligence from other violent criminals.  Incarcerated rapists have more in common with murderers, carjackers, home invasion burglars, robbers and men who commit aggravated assaults than they do with the growing ranks of ordinary, single, young adult men.

As Razib explains:

I’m not claiming that the correlation is causal. Rather, I’m pointing out that the explosion in porn use does not seem to have led to a concomitant explosion in sex crimes, which would have been the prediction by social conservatives and radical feminists if they could have known of the extent of penetration of pornography into culture and private lives over the next 20 years in 1990.

I agree with his conclusion that while the decline in rape incidence was not materially caused by the explosion of access to pornography, that the decline, viewed in the context of declines in rates of other serious crimes, does support the conclusion that an explosion in access to pornography did not lead to any material increase in the number of rapes committed relative to what we would have seen without this factor.

The assumptions of freedom of speech doctrines that distinguish strongly between acts and words have turned out to be empirically well supported.

Footnote:  Razib also make a quite insightful observation: "Kissing a woman is preferable for a heterosexual man not just because a woman has smooth skin, and attractive facial features, but because the target of their affections is a woman."

Five Things We Should Be Able To Expect In Medical Billing

There are certain aspects of medical billing in the United States that are absurdly out of step with reasonable expectations in a modern marketplace.  Here are a few things we should be able to expect:

1.  The real price of services should be disclosed before they are rendered in non-emergency situations, and should appear on the bill.  It should also disclose how much of the bill the patient will owe under the health insurance provided by the patient. 

Providers who fail to do so should be limited to a bottom tier Medicaid scale payment only, rather than having the freedom to set their own rates or having an entitlement to a "customary rate."  If you want more, you should have to bargain for more.

Patients who can find providers who charge less than the health insurance allowed amount should receive some or all of the benefit from doing so in their financial responsibilities under the health insurance contract (e.g. a waiver or reduction in co-pays).  The notion that the person who chooses the provider has zero incentive to price should and zero ability to price shop is a critical reason that health care providers are currently overpaid in the United States.  This is a critical market failure whose creeping impact of medical provider pricing now costs Americans hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

2. Bills should accurately reflect health insurance contracts and not claim a right to claim something different than what a contract with a health insurance company allows.  Doing otherwise amounts to an anticipatory breach of the contract that the provider has with the health insurance provider from which the provider intends to benefit.

3. The provider should know what patients are charged for the provider's services and the services of others that the provider orders.  Providing medical services without any awareness of what they cost somebody is irresponsible and verges on unethical.

4.  A single hospital stay or doctor's visit should produce a single bill, not multiple bills from everyone involved in the process (many of whom have never even identified themselves to the patient by name).  How can patients trust a group of professionals who can't cooperate enough to produce a single consolidated bill to a patient to provide sufficiently coordinated medical services?

5.  A provider who sends a bill should do so in the same name that the provider does business under, and provide contact information for someone with the authority to resolve disputes regarding a bill.  Providers should not bill patients in the name of some anonymous affiliated administrative unit or collections service without authority to resolve disputes.  A responsible business person should be afraid to bill in their own name.

None of these expectations say anything about how much should be charged that doesn't apply under the current regime.  It simply involves the manner in which bills are presented and handled.  Each of these steps would be a fairly radical change from how business is done today, but it is not too much to ask.

Word of the Day: Limerence

Limerence is an involuntary state of mind which results from a romantic attraction to another person combined with an overwhelming, obsessive need to have one's feelings reciprocated. The psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the term "limerence" in her 1979 book Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love[.]

In other words, stalker love at first sight. 

Proud of Colorado

Driving to work today was like driving through a cloud.  Snow is coming down heavy on May Day.  Snow late in the spring isn't unprecedented in Denver.  There was snow during U2's famous concert at Red Rocks on June 5 in the early 1980s, for example.  But, it is notable.  Free of the distractions that one sees out the window, one is free to contemplate the many things that Colorado is doing right.

A United Front On Civil Unions.

Honestly, on the morning after Colorado has formed hundreds of new civil unions, with strong public support from our federal Congressional delegation, the Governor, the leaders of both houses of the Colorado General Assembly, City and County of Denver officials, and many local clergy who helped officiate, I feel pretty damn proud to be a Coloradan.

This triumph is part of a larger positive civic culture in Colorado and comes on the heels of years of more incremental but important reforms expanding discrimination law protections and creating tools that same sex couples can use to plan their lives.

We Are Tolerant

I'm proud to live in a state whose housing has become much less segregated by race and ethnicity since I move here.  I'm proud to live in a state tolerant enough to elect many openly gay and lesbian elected officials at the state level and an openly gay member of Congress.  I'm proud to live in a state that has more woman in public office than all but a handful of other states.  I'm proud to live in a state where a man who murders his sexual companion after discovering that this companion has male genitals is prosecuted vigorously instead of apologized for by authorities.  I'm proud to live in a state where gay rights groups can sponsor public radio without a fuss, and atheist groups can find someone who will let them put up bill boards. 

I'm proud to be in a state that last year repealed obsolete criminal libel laws and this year is repealing the last remnants of laws prohibiting unmarried cohabitation and sex between consenting adults.  I am proud to be in a state which has finally repealed all of its blue laws except the ban on selling cars on Sundays (maybe next year).  I'm proud that we have a legislature enacting pro-immigrant rather than anti-immigrant measures.  I'm proud to be in a state that is disavowing marijuana prohibition and on multiple other fronts, the war on drugs.  

We Are Investing In Ourselves

I'm proud to be in a state that is opening new light rail laws, building more and is going to ask voters for more money to fund public K-12 education and is reforming the formula for doing so to be more fair to poor students.  I'm proud to live in a state with generally clean air, clean water, and one of the highest shares of renewable source electricity in the nation.  I'm proud to be in a state that is embracing Obamacare and its promise of near universal health care, and finding its own ways to make it work well in Colorado, rather than fighting it.  I'm proud to live in a state where business leaders recognize that they need to take responsibility to address climate change, environmental contamination, and quality public education options.

We Are Making Government Work Better.

I'm proud to be in a state where many policy reforms proceed on a bipartisan basis, without the undemocratic filibusters, holds, logjams holding up routine appointments, and decision making mostly by secret conference committee deliberations seen in Congress, in a process that perhaps not coincidentally, is less corrupt.  I'm proud to live in a state where good ideas can triumph over vested political interests in the legislative and policymaking arena.

I'm proud to be in a state that is adopting election day voter registration and increasing the availability of mail in ballots that will improve voter turnout and effectively expand the franchise. 

I am proud to be in a state whose governments have some of the best Internet presences in the nation.  I'm proud to be in a state that has reformed obsolete civil service rules, that is increasing governmental liability generally and creating for the first time a no fault compensation regime for people who are incarcerated and then exonerated.  I'm proud to be in a state the promptly investigates, and where appropriate sanctions, removes from office, or prosecutes public officials who engage in misconduct personal or professional.  I'm proud to be in a state that appoints judges on a merit basis, rather than through elections or purely political appointments.

We Are Pro-Actively Improving Private Law Rules And Regulation

I'm proud to be in a state that is pro-actively identifying problems in the way civil litigation, probate laws, foreclosure litigation, tort litigation and family law litigation work and is coming up with original solutions to those problems without having to wait for federal lawmakers or uniform law commissions or other states to act first.

I'm proud to live in a state where most business and commercial arrangements that must be recorded can be set up online through an easy to use database at a modest cost.  I'm proud to live in a state that with only a few important exceptions, had common sense, plain English statutes with sensible rules for a wide variety of private law matters.  I'm proud to live in a state that has had the good sense to retain common law marriage.

While I don't always agree with the substance of the reforms (e.g. tighter aesthetic regulation of construction and a camping ban), I applaud Denver for its many efforts to modernize its urban planning with fresh eyes, most recently, with the first comprehensive overhaul of zoning code in half a century.  I'm also proud of the steps Denver is taking like building new parks, building new recreation centers and libraries, freeing up large swaths of the city for infill development, improving the viability of using bicycles for transportation, and easing regulation of food trucks to open up new opportunities.  I'm glad that a decision restricting new entrants to the taxi market by state regulators has been overturned by our courts.

Conclusion

In sum, while Colorado may not be utopia, we are actively working in the right direction to transform ourselves and our government in a way that most people can agree makes Colorado a better place.  So much of America between its two vibrant coasts is content with stagnation and mediocrity.  Colorado, in contrast, remains focused on its future.  It may not last forever, but at the moment, we are in the groove.

Very Few Jews Remain In Europe (For Obvious Reasons)

From here for 2010.

The total is 13,428,300 which is subject to considerable adjustments based on the definition of "Jew" used to make the count.  This is about 0.2% of the world's population and this percentage is shrinking because the absolute number of Jews is growing at a rate of about half the rate of world population growth.  Notably, the Jewish population is growing in Israel (at a healthy 1.7% annual rate) while declining or flat everywhere else in the world (overall at a 0.2% annual rate).

The study looks at a "core" Jewish population consisting of people born Jewish, less people who cease to identify as Jewish as a conscious choice, plus people who are "Jews by choice" (such as spouses who convert). "Two countries, Israel and the United States, account for about 82 percent of the total, another 16 countries, each with more than 20,000 Jews, accounted for another 16 percent of the total, and another more than 75 countries each with Jewish populations below 20,000 accounted for the remaining 2 percent."  The U.S. and then Canada have the highest numbers of Jews per capita after Israel, followed by Australia, Hungary, the United Kingdom and Argentina.  About 10.8% of all Jews live in Europe.  Just only in seven Jews in the world lives in a country where English or Hebrew is not the national language.

It also bears noting that the distribution of Jews within the United States is not remotely homogeneous. 

For example, while only 1.7% of Americans are Jewish, in the New York metropolitan, the percentage is closer to 10-11%.  Only twenty metro areas in the world have more Jews than Denver (with about 83,900 Jews which is about 3.4% of the metropolitan area population), four of which are in Israel and five more of which are in other countries.  There are more Jews in metropolitan Denver than in the entire African continent, or in all of Asia (apart from Israel and Oceania). 

Jews are 0.5% or less of the state's population in twenty U.S. states by a definition that finds the total percentage in the U.S. to be 2.1% rather than the 1.7% estimated in the source for the chart above.  Mostly these states are rural states in the South (with the exception of Virginia, Maryland, Florida, Georgia and Texas), and the Moutain West (except Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico) and the Great Plains and Midwest(including North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Oklahama).  Maine and Hawaii also have small Jewish populations.

More colloquially, a very large share of all Jews in the United States live within 30 miles of a profitable Amtrak line or intracity rail service.

Quote of the Day

Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.  

Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Waiting Means Happier Brides But More Spinsters

This study tested whether the timing of first sexual intercourse in adolescence predicts romantic outcomes in adulthood, including union formation, number of romantic partners, and relationship dissatisfaction. Participants were 1,659 same-sex sibling pairs from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, who were followed from adolescence (mean age = 16 years) to young adulthood (mean age = 29 years). The timing of participants’ first sexual intercourse was classified as early (at age 14 or earlier), on time (between the ages of 15 and 19), or late (at age 19 or older).

Compared with early and on-time age at first sex, late age at first sex was associated with decreased odds of marriage or nonmarital cohabitation and fewer romantic partners in adulthood. Among individuals who had married or cohabited with a partner, late timing of first sex was associated with significantly reduced levels of relationship dissatisfaction, even after controlling for genetic and environmental differences between families (using a sibling-comparison model), demographic outcomes in adulthood, and involvement in dating during adolescence.

K. Paige Harden, "True Love Waits? A Sibling-Comparison Study of Age at First Sexual Intercourse and Romantic Relationships in Young Adulthood", 23 Psychological Science 1324-1336 (November 2012).

Islamic Fundamentalism Kills

The 2011 Somali famine killed an estimated 260,000 people, half of them age 5 and under . . . The aid community believes that tens of thousands of people died needlessly because the international community was slow to respond to early signs of approaching hunger in East Africa in late 2010 and early 2011. The toll also was exacerbated by extremist militants from al-Shabab who banned food aid deliveries to the areas of south-central Somalia that they controlled.
 

From here.

Somolia is a country with about 10.1 million people.  Roughly one in ten of its pre-school aged children starved to death in 2011. The only disaster or disease outbreak in U.S. history with a comparable impact was the Spanish flu of 1918.

In al-Shabab controlled territory, the number of pre-schoolers who starved to death was probably closer to one in five.  This group is Somolia's version of the Taliban, imposing strict Islamic fundamentalism on the people it rules with its roughly 14,000 soldiers.



Map showing territorial gains made by al-Shabaab from January 31, 2009 to December 2010; the period when a civil war against the Transitional Federal Government commenced (from the link in the paragraph above).

While the East African drought of 2011 was unavoidable, the deadly consequences of that drought in Somolia in 2011 were mostly a result of its ongoing civil war.

Marriage, Murder, Videophone and Television

* Early Wednesday morning, Colorado will have its first civil unions.  Polling showed that this measure providing for marriage in all but name under state law, had 70% public support.  May 1st will likely be one of the biggest days for weddings in state history.  It is a step that makes the entire gay rights movement more secure because any effort to repeal the law will have to confront the vested interests of those already married. 

Those planning outdoor weddings should plan on relocating to indoor venues.  There is wet snow in the forecast.

* Rhode Island has adopted a gay marriage bill, becoming the last of the New England states to permit gay marriage.  Pennsylvania is the last holdouts in the Northeast without either gay marriage or civil unions.  Alaska is the last Pacific State holdout.  Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois are states in the nation's interior with gay marriage or civil unions and President Obama has largely tipped the balance at the federal level in favor of gay rights, although there are some loose ends to resolve there.

I have little doubt that Colorado will amend its state constitution to allow for same sex marriage sometime in the next few years, probably via a citizen initiative as too many Republicans in the Colorado General Assembly oppose it for the change to be introduced via the legislature at this point.

No state that was formerly a part of the Confederacy has civil unions or gay marriage.



Laws regarding same-sex partnerships in the United States

Same-sex marriage¹

Unions granting rights similar to marriage^1,2

Legislation granting limited/enumerated rights¹

Same-sex marriages performed elsewhere recognized¹

No specific prohibition or recognition of same-sex marriages or unions

State statute bans same-sex marriage

State constitution bans same-sex marriage²

State constitution bans same-sex marriage and some or all other kinds of same-sex unions

¹May include recent laws or court decisions which have created legal recognition of same-sex relationships, but which have yet to enter effect.
²See the article on same-sex marriage in California for the status in California. [A lower court invalidated a measure overturning California's stance permitting gay marrriage.  It was appealed and the U.S. Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in the relevant case and have not decided it on the merits at this point.  The outcome is quite uncertain.]

From here.

* Chris Haney, 26, a bartender at the Gothic Theater was shot and killed at about 3 a.m. on Saturday at the Denny's at Sante Fe Boulevard and Alameda in Denver.  Two suspects, Robert Bernal, a twenty-five year old man and a juvenile, have been arrested.  It isn't clear if the man was a bystander caught in the cross-fire or the intended victim.  (I was unable to find the story, which appeared prominently on the first page of the Denver and West Section of today's Denver Post on the newspaper's website even using its search function.)

He is survived by a wife and a five year old daughter.  He lived nearby.  Until recently, so did I.  The story strikes me as notable because I go to that Denny's now and then.  In particular, in the two or three rare occasions that I needed to get out of the house to blow off steam and keep myself from saying something rash after an argument with my wife, that was where I would go.

* I had a second successful Skype-Facetime communication from my home with the assistance of my children.  Even though this technology has been anticipated as a logical outgrowth of prior technologies for eighty years or so, actually having home videophone technology is still pretty cool.  It works well enough that I suspect that it is only a matter of time before it replaces in person depositions and hearings for many purposes in the court system, and in meetings with rural or homebound clients.

* Echoing a previous post about how far forgotten broadcast TV is, a company that sells digital antennas has run a full page age proclaiming how amazing it is that "federal law" allows you to get "Free TV channels with no cable, satellite or internet connection and no monthly bills" simply by buying their $49 antenna.  The silly ad lists every ZIP code in Denver as a place you can get it if you "immediately call" their 1-888 number.  Broadcast television has definitely jumped the shark.

Living Alone Sucks

Few things are more wretched than being single and unattached, or married and separated, at least on those evenings when you are home alone without children.  I do not subscribe to Satre's maxim that "Hell is other people" on this score.

Coming Attractions: Doing The Work Of "Second-Rate Minds" (i.e. "The Book")

It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done. Statesmen despise publicists, painters despise art-critics, and physiologists, physicists, or mathematicians have usually similar feelings: there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.
 

G.H.Hardy, A Mathematicians' Apology (1940), available here (via Quantum Diaries Survivor).

I am in the early stages of writing (with a collaborator who will be a co-author) a short, trade non-fiction book meant for an audience of educated non-specialists.  So, I anticipate that I will be devoting significant efforts to it over the next twelve months or so.

"The book" will be less technical and academic than academic journal articles or a magnus opus like "Albion's Seed" or Gibbon's "Rise and Fall."  But, won't be a textbook or comprehensive primer either.  Instead, it will be more along the lines of popularizations of the current state of knowledge about the topics it discusses with significant original analysis and introspection exemplified, for example, in books by people like Malcomb Gladwell and Jared Diamond (or less famously, bloggers like Peter Woit, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga  and Tyler Cohen).  I am also drawing to some extent on the trend towards recognizing a class of unaffiliated academic investigators and public intellectuals that the Internet has made possible.  Relative to journalist efforts, this will be the stuff of feature articles and op-ed page essays, rather than straight news reporting.

The mission statement of the book is basically to find a more prominent place in the never ending "national discussion" for some important but under appreciated facts, developing trends, and analytical perspectives that too often are ignored in favor of conventional wisdom.  We think we provide a perspective that isn't reflected in any of the "conventional wisdom" accounts of the topics we will discuss.  This matters.  Perhaps the greatest threat to modern industrialized societies today are those that arise from "group think."  It is important to enough end participants in the discussion, but it is even more important to maximize the number of alternative perspectives expressed in those discussions which the collective audience to this national discussion can weigh and when complimentary, synthesize into an overall approach.

Of course, as a side benefit, we are also buying a ticket for us in the fame and fortune lottery of trade non-fiction writing, and if it is successful there could be successor books along the same lines.

"The book" will not primarily consisting of original research, which I leave for people who have salaried professorships, research assistants, and university resources.

Instead, "the book" will seek primarily to explain the works of others, popularizing concepts and facts that are now familiar only to those at the cutting edge of professional expertise and academic research. Of course, we will go far further in terms of synthesis, connecting of the dots, and analysis than what would be appropriate in some other forums in which I publish or write like Wikipedia article contributions, continuing education courses, bar journal articles for practicing attorneys, and legal briefs. It will be more like the occassional academic conference papers that I write every few years, but with a broader scope and intended for a more general audience.

I come to this from the perspective of someone active in politics all of his life, who actively practices law, and who has intermittently been a journalist (in addition, of course, to being a blogger before the terms was even well established).  My collaborator is a novelist and free lance writer with a solid practical experience and academic background in addressing public policy issues.

Our motives are at least as rooted in the political tactics of movement politics and "saving the world" as they are in raw economics.  While books are "old school," they are still a very effective platform for influencing the national discussion and sowing the seeds of ideas in the heads of bright people who will find their own ways to apply.  At any rate, they are effective relative to posts at a couple of blogs that are currently well into the long tail, or the discipline or industry specific academic or trade publications that similarly have only a small audience, even if that audience is an elite and influential one. 

From my perspective, good ideas mean nothing unless enough of the right people are aware of them, consider them in their professional and political lives, and apply them.  The book will help bridge the gap between what somebody knows and what lots of people know about these topics.

For example, many of the currently influential mathematics of fractal dimensions and chaotic dynamics that emerged in the late 1800s was virtually overlooked by all but a few specialist graduate students in obscure academic journals (some available only in Russian) that failed to illustrate how these ideas could be applied or incorporated into other works, until Benoît Mandelbrot took the lonely road of reinvigorating the field starting in the 1960s that only really took off when his ideas started to be popularized in the trade press in the 1980s and early 1990s.  Once people knew that these concepts were out there, however, professionals and academics in disciplines from physics to engineering to economics to mathematics to information technology and beyond started to incorporate these ideas into the crowded math and statistics canon of concepts taught to undergraduates and first year graduate students in math and science disciplines (most of which was well established before the United States adopted the Bill of Rights).

At this point, "the book" has a working title and overall theme, a lot of research and very rough draft writing for many of the chapters (although without a final determination on which chapters will stay and which will go, or on how they will be organized), an overall sense of where the book will fit on a range from very journalist to very academic, a sense of what some of the core subtopics will be, a general sense of what steps will be taken in the writing and marketing process, an agreement in principle on how tasks will be allocated between the co-authors, and an understanding about how the economics and division of credit will be addressed.  But, the devil is in the details and a great deal of the work still needs to be done.

In the interest of building up dramatic tension and allowing the ideas to gel and to be modified in the course of the writing process, I won't be providing much detail on the specific substance of what will be in the book until much, much later.  But, I will note that posts at this blog and its companion blog, Dispatches from Turtle Island, are and will continue to be one important source for the initial core of supporting facts, academic research, government reports, and analytical constructs that will be systematized, expanded upon and updated in the book.

At any rate, if you notice a reduced volume of posting over the next many months, part of this may be because my available creative capacity is being diverted to "the book." 

Stay tuned.

Too Clever By Half

$1 = 100¢ = (10¢) ^ 2 = ($0.10) ^ 2 = $0.01 = 1¢.

From here.

Obviously, this is wrong.  But why? 

A correct answer that exposes the subtle error can be found in the comments at the linked post.

A Question Of Regulatory Priorities When It Comes To Terrorism

The question of what sort of laws and policies are necessary to prevent terrorism, or at least to make it harder to carry out terrorist acts can be a difficult one that requires careful balancing of the public interest in security against personal civil liberties. 

For example, questions regarding whether there should be some legal authority for preventative detention of suspected terrorists without the probable cause necessary for a criminal arrest, and involving the targeting of U.S. citizens and their companions who may be innocent to be killed with armed drones, can be hard ones.

But, as the examples below illustrate, many aspects of the existing set of laws and policies on these subjects defy common sense.  Seemingly very serious threats are regulated quite lightly, while other aspects of American life that pose far lesser threats to public health and safety are sometimes regulated much more strictly.

Mortars Are Easier To Buy Than Sudafed, Oral Contraceptives Or A Gun

In the United States, you can buy a mortar and mortar rounds over the counter (although not the full strength version, although it contains some gunpowder and easily modified to replace firework colors with more gunpowder), over the counter, for $100 with nothing more than a merchant's voluntary decision to take a copy of your ID.  No license, no permit, no background check, no entry in a centalized database is required.

One of the suspected Boston Marathon bombers purchased two large reloadable mortar kits from a fireworks store in New Hampshire, an executive with the pyrotechnics company said Tuesday.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev paid $199 cash for two “lock and load” kits, each of which contained four tubes and 24 shells, said William Weimer, vice president of Phantom Fireworks. Such kits cannot be legally sold in some states, including Massachusetts and California.

It takes a background check to buy a gun from a retail vendor and certain groups of people are not legally allowed to buy them.  You are required by law to show ID and be entered in a centralized database to buy Sudafed (an allegery medication that can be used as an ingredient to make methamphetamines).  You need an actual doctor's prescription to buy oral contraceptives that have fewer health risks than asprin.  But, none of that is required to buy your own artillery set, or the gunpowder needed to charge these rounds to full military strength.

Of course, there are some people in the United States who have been banned from possessing and using small mortars for a while as recently as a month ago.  Those would be U.S. Marines.

People On Terrorism Watch Lists Can Legally Buy Guns And Routinely Do

The United States also has a national terrorism watch list that is routinely used to prevent people from getting onto commercial airplanes even after their possessions are carefully searched by TSA officials.  But, people on the national terrorism watch list are still free to buy firearms even when the background check done for someone purchasing a gun from a retail vendor shows that they are on it.  On average, five people on the national terrorism watch list buy a gun each week.

Under current laws, if a background check reveals that your name is on the national terrorism watch list, you're still free to walk out of a gun dealership with a firearm in your hands — as long as you don't have a criminal or mental health record.

Data from the Government Accountability Office show that between 2004 and 2010, people on terrorism watch lists tried to buy guns and explosives more than 1,400 times. They succeeded in more than 90 percent of those cases, or 1,321 times.

I recognize that the national terrorism watch list has flaws.  The grounds for putting someone on it are very flimsy, and the process for finding out that you are on it or getting yourself removed from it are flawed.  This tool needs to be fixed.  But, the notion that it should be easier to buy a gun than to get onto a airline after TSA inspection of your baggage is pretty problematic. 

While Michael James Barton, a former counterterrorism official during the Bush Administration quoted in the linked story argues that the constitution protects gun purchases but not travel, there actually is a well recognized express protection of the right to engaged in interstate travel without undue interference.

While one justification for allowing people on a national terrorism watch list to buy guns is that this avoids tipping them off while allowing the federal government could follow up on gun purchases by people on a national terrorism watch list, there is no indications that it actually does so, or even that it has sufficient resources to do so.

It is also widely acknowledge that there a huge holes in the background check requirement to purchase guns in many states making it easy in practice for felons and people with restraining orders against them to actually buy guns in practice, that many people barred from buying guns are not routinely stripped of the guns already in their possession when a background check trigger kicks in, and that the background check database is woefully incomplete, particularly with regard to keeping track of people who have been committed for mental health issues - something that pending legislation in Congress with widespread support, even from gun rights groups, may change.

Knives On Planes Almost O.K.'d, Shampoo And Toothpaste, Not So Much

Then again, until yesterday, the TSA was planning to permit passengers to carry knives on commercial flights (of the same size as the box cutters used in the 9-11 attacks) (as well as "ski poles, lacrosse sticks, billiard cues and up to two golf clubs").  

It still has no plans, however, to discontinue its ban on carrying regular sized shampoo and toothpaste tubes or bottled water in carry on luggage, or its requirement that all abled bodied adults have their shoes X-rayed before flying unless they have a pre-approved safety clearance.

Ordinary People In The U.S. Are Allowed To Own Tanks With Operational Weapons

There are several hundred to 1000 private tank owners in the United States according to the Wall Street Journal.  The tank can even have live weapons if the owner obtains the functional equivalent of a concealed weapon permit (although obviously, tanks are not themselves concealled weapons).

A tank in the U.S. can have operational guns, if the owner has a federal Destructive Device permit, and state laws don't prohibit it. The permit costs $200, and the applicant must swear he hasn't been a "fugitive from justice," "adjudicated mentally defective" or convicted of "a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence." A local law-enforcement official, usually a sheriff or police chief, has to sign off on the application.

Tanks generally aren't street-legal, so owners usually drive them off-road or on other private property. Some say local authorities sometimes make exceptions for parades, a quick test drive or a trip to the gas station.

There Are 488,065 Privately Owned Legal Machine Guns In The United States

Incidentally, while private ownership of fully automatic weapons (i.e. machine guns) is highly regulated, it is possible for a private citizen in the United States to get a permit to own and possess one, and there are quite a few such permits are outstanding (488,065 as of 2012 up from about 240,000 in 1995).

There were 30,220 registered machine guns in Virginia as of March, according to figures compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

That's more than any other state in the nation.

Florida and California, with far larger populations than Virginia, ranked second and third in the number of registered machine guns, with 29,128 and 28,774, respectively.

Nationally, there are nearly 500,000 registered machine guns, according to an annual report compiled by the ATF. . .

Private citizens who want to legally own a machine gun face a lengthy approval process. Meeting the standard requirements for gun ownership — including no felony record, no psychiatric commitments and no domestic assault convictions — is just the beginning.

After passing a background check, applicants must submit their photograph and fingerprints to be used in a registry maintained by the ATF. Also required is a signed statement from the chief law enforcement officer in the locality where the applicant lives, stating there is no indication the machine gun would be used illegally.

Like tank ownership, the requirements that must be met to legally own a machine gun are similar to those for a concealled weapon permit in many states (although in Colorado and a many other states, a concealled weapons permit is easily available after a brief training course to almost anyone who can legally buy one).

There is no indication that the officials who have to sign off on permits to own tanks with operational firearms or machine guns have access to information regarding whether or not the applicant is on the national terrorism watch list which they can then use as a cue to investigate for themselves.

Also, keep in mind that once a permit is issued in one local jurisdiction where a local sheriff may be lenient in granting permits to obtain a firearm, nothing prevents the machine gun owner (at least for all practical purposes) from taking the machine guns to a new jurisdiction and using them there.  This is a list common denominator system of regulation.

It is worth noting, however, that many privately owned machine gun owners have multiple machine guns, so the number of privately owned machine gun owners is significantly smaller than the number of private owners of machine guns.  But, with that many machine guns in circulation, the risk that one could fall into the wrong hands, for example, via burglary or a relative who gains access to a legal owner's gun safe, is real.

The Second Amendment Is Unique In The World And Only Recently Enforceable In The U.S.

The United States is the only country in the world with constitutional protections for the right to bear arms.  Several Latin American countries that once copied the U.S. and had similar protections have repealed those protections in the last half-century.  It has been more than a century since a new constitutional protection for the right to bear arms was adopted by a country. 

Moreover, while the Second Amendment was adopted in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights, the first time that a court determined that it created an enforceable individual right against the federal government (at least in the case of ownership of handguns for self-defense) did not come until 2008 in the case District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008).  The question of whether that right was enforceable against state and local governments, as well as the federal government, was not resolved until the case of McDonald v. Chicago (2010).  Before 2008, the not fully resolved but majority view was that the Second Amendment was a collective right that prohibited the federal government from banning state militias, rather than an individual right to bear arms for personal self-defense.  McDonald v. Chicago made clear that the Second Amendment was not primarily just a federalism protection.

Even those cases and precedents decided since 2008 have upheld many gun control laws, including all current nationally applicable gun control laws, as reasonable regulations of the right to bear arms.  The laws struck down have overwhelmingly been nearly complete bans on handgun ownership enacted by big city municipal governments like the one struck down in the original Heller case in Washington D.C.

I Am A Zero TV Household

A recent Huffington Post article on Zero TV households captures me and my motives for not having one (or a landline telephone) to a T.  We are the future.

Some people have had it with TV. They've had enough of the 100-plus channel universe. They don't like timing their lives around network show schedules. They're tired of $100-plus monthly bills.

A growing number of them have stopped paying for cable and satellite TV service, and don't even use an antenna to get free signals over the air. These people are watching shows and movies on the Internet, sometimes via cellphone connections. Last month, the Nielsen Co. started labeling people in this group "Zero TV" households, because they fall outside the traditional definition of a TV home. There are 5 million of these residences in the U.S., up from 2 million in 2007. . .

Last year, the cable, satellite and telecoms providers added just 46,000 video customers collectively, according to research firm SNL Kagan. That is tiny when compared to the 974,000 new households created last year. While it's still 100.4 million homes, or 84.7 percent of all households, it's down from the peak of 87.3 percent in early 2010.

Nielsen's study suggests that this new group may have left traditional TV for good. While three-quarters actually have a physical TV set, only 18 percent are interested in hooking it up through a traditional pay TV subscription. . . .

More people are raised with the power of the Internet in their pocket, and don't know or care that you can pull TV signals from the air for free. 

"They're more aware of Netflix than they're aware over-the-air is even available[.]" 

As one Zero TV household member explains, TVs have also grown to be ridiculously complicated (something that I can attest to from similar experiences):

"I'm pretty tech savvy, but the TV industry with the cable and the television and the boxes, you don't know how to use their equipment," he says. "I try to go over to my grandma's place and teach her how to do it. I can't even figure it out myself."

Why pay for a hundred stations full of crap (often redundant crap) that you can't watch when it is convenient for you to watch, if you can even manage to figure out how to work the damn thing and censor out the crappiest of crap stations like shopping channels and channels that you don't actually subscribe to anyway.

Price absolutely is a consideration, however.  And, Netflix runs a very tight ship.  According to my dead tree newspaper this morning, it made a profit of just $2.7 million on revenues of a bit more than $1 billion, a profit margin of 0.27% or so (and this comes on the heels of a loss twice as large). Amazon has similarly skinny margins despite massive market share.  Those companies provide what they do at very close to cost.

Comcast, Direct TV and Dish, I am certain, make considerably fatter profits relative to their revenues.

What is the useful life of an investment in intellectual property?

The Bureau of Economic Analysis is trying to determine the time period over which to amortize investments in cultural intellectual property investments, for example, in books, movies, and music recordings for purposes of GDP accounting.  To do so,  they are measuring the time periods over which these asset classes from a given year of production generate returns in real life, and fitting this to a model in which the return on the asset class declines by a specific percentage each year (it isn't clear if the BEA is using straight line depreciation or iterating a percentage decline each year from the previous year's value).  The results:

Music recordings: 26.7% per year
Television shows: 16.8%
Books: 12.1%
Movies 3.8%
Miscellaneous: 10.9% (e.g. "theatrical play scripts, stock photography, greeting-card designs, etc.).

On a straight line depreciation basis, this would give a movie a useful life of 26 years, miscellaneous cultural properties about 9 nine years, books about 8 years, television shows about 6 years, and music recording about 4 years.  A percentage reduction each year would never get quite to zero and would also reach say 1% or less, considerably more slowly.  The post at Slate by by Matthew Yglesias doesn't source his figures, so its hard to tell.

These numbers seem quite low to me (i.e. my intuitive estimate of the rate at which cultural investments depreciate would be higher), but all of these numbers make two points very clear. 

First: Existing copyright law protection time periods grossly exceed the typical time period in which the vast majority of the economic value of an intellectual property asset is realized, even if you look at entire asset classes which weight the time period of economic returns heavily towards the rare mega-successful works with longer shelf lives.

Second: Different kinds of cultural properties protected by copyrights actually have very different useful economic lives.

As an aside, it is interesting to note that website IIMDb.com is so credible that it is used to help calculate our nation's GDP.

UPDATE: The source for the article appears to be here:

Capitalization of entertainment, literary, and other artistic originals Some entertainment, literary, and other artistic originals are designed to generate mass reproductions for sale to the general public and to have a useful lifespan of more than one year. For 1929 forward, BEA will capitalize these items, which include theatrical movies, long-lived television programs, books, music, and “other” miscellaneous entertainment.[21] This change will expand BEA’s measures of intangible assets in the NIPAs and help better align the NIPAs with recommendations of the SNA.[22]  

Current treatment The costs associated with the production of entertainment originals are currently classified as expenses that are consumed as part of the production of other goods and services. Therefore, expenditures for the production of entertainment originals do not enter into the calculation of GDP.  

New treatment Under the new treatment, BEA will record the private expenditures associated with producing or purchasing entertainment originals as private fixed investment in the measure of GDP.[23] The production of entertainment originals may span several years. Theoretically, these costs should be recorded as investment when accrued; however, due to practical constraints, BEA will record the value of the investment in the year the asset is released to the public. Entertainment originals are rarely sold in an open market, so it is difficult to observe market prices for these original works. This is a common problem with measuring the value of intangible assets, and in such cases, other valuation methods must be utilized, such as the sum of the production costs (which is used for own-account software and R&D) or the estimated net present value (NPV).[24] Because adequate information on production costs is not available for most entertainment originals, BEA will estimate the value of these assets based on the NPV of expected future royalties or other revenue obtained from these assets, net of any associated sales costs. For investment in theatrical movies prior to 2007, the estimates will be derived using a production costs approach based on movie budget data. For each type of entertainment originals asset, the expected net cash flow of the producing industry will be estimated using revenue and cost data from the Census Bureau’s economic censuses and surveys, numerous trade sources, and databases such as IMDb.com.[25] BEA will assume a 7 percent real discount rate for all asset types and will apply an NPV adjustment factor, a ratio that represents the average NPV-to-current period revenues from new works, to current-year revenues in order to derive an estimate of investment in entertainment originals for that year.  

Estimation methodology. First, total current-period revenue from licensing fees, merchandise sales, ticket sales, and other revenue generating activities for the industries producing the assets will be estimated. Second, the value of sales costs—such as advertising, manufacturing of reproductions, and other marketing type costs—will be subtracted from the total current period revenues to derive net revenue values that capture only the revenues earned on the intangible assets held by the business. Third, these net revenue values will be adjusted further to only include the revenue from the release of new works (that is, the “originals”), using BEA-derived investment ratios.26 Finally, the NPV adjustment factor will be applied to the net revenue value that has been adjusted by the investment ratio in order to derive the current-period investment value of the future revenue stream of these new works.  

Depreciation of newly recognized assets. The depreciation of entertainment originals assets, like the depreciation of R&D assets, will be included in the NIPA measure of CFC. BEA will estimate service lives and depreciation rates for each type of entertainment originals asset based on its net present value over time as described above. The depreciation rates will follow a geometric pattern in which a constant percentage of the existing asset stock depreciates each year. The typical movie, for example, is released in theaters, followed by DVDs, premium television, regular cable networks, foreign television, and U.S. broadcast networks. Based on an analysis of the profits obtained from these successive releases, BEA estimates an annual depreciation rate of 3.8 percent. For television programs, which earn a substantial proportion of their long-term revenue in their first airing, the depreciation rate is 16.8 percent. For music, an even larger portion of profits is obtained in the first year of release, and so the estimated depreciation rate is 26.7 percent. The estimated depreciation rate is 12.1 percent for books and 10.9 percent for theatrical play scripts, greeting card designs, and stock photography. [26] Long-lived television programs include situation comedies and drama programs. Other types of television programs, including news programs, sporting events, game shows, soap operas, and reality programming have much shorter service lives and will not be capitalized. “Other” miscellaneous entertainment includes miscellaneous artwork including theatrical play scripts, greeting card designs, and commercial stock photography.  . . .

The recognition of entertainment originals as investment will boost the level of gross private domestic investment, which will in turn boost the level of GDP. Based on preliminary research, private investment in entertainment originals for 2007 is estimated at about $70 billion. About one-third of the new investment is in theatrical movies, one-third in television programs, and the remaining one-third in the other entertainment original assets." 

22. This change was introduced in a SURVEY article by Rachel H. Soloveichik, “Artistic Originals as Capital Assets,” SURVEY 91 (June 2011): 43–51. See also SNA 2008, 207, paragraph 10.115 and “Entertainment, Literary, and Artistic Originals,” in the Handbook on Deriving Capital Measures of Intellectual Property Products (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD): Paris, October 2010): 150–166. 

23. BEA will not identify any investment in entertainment originals by governments.  

24. The SNA discusses the use of NPV for estimating the value of assets (SNA 2008, 22, paragraph 2.60, 52, paragraph 3.137–138); see also the OECD Handbook on Deriving Capital Measures of Intellectual Property Product, 18, 158–159.  

25. BEA will benchmark its investment estimates to revenue data from the 2007 economic census.  

26. Based on research using trade sources, studies, and survey and economic census data from the Census Bureau, BEA estimates the following investment ratios for the five categories of entertainment originals assets: 51 percent of industry revenue for theatrical movies, 50 percent of industry revenue for music, 37 percent of industry revenue for books, 30 percent of industry revenue for television, and 15 percent of industry revenue for miscellaneous artwork. The remaining revenue is spent on nonartwork costs such as advertising, stamping DVDs, or printing books. The NIPAs record these nonartwork costs as current production costs.

The key June 2011 paper that developed these estimates is here. It notes that:

Before 2005, IMDB.com data—which gives filming dates and production budgets for individual movies from 1900 to 2011[9]—were used to estimate annual investment expenditures. . . .

Theatrical movies and television programs have the longest lifespans.[19] Ten years after the first release, theatrical movies retain 48 percent of their initial value, and television programs retain 35 percent of their initial value. In contrast, books and music earn most of their money in the first 5 years; after 10 years, music retains 19 percent of its initial value, and books retain 14 percent of their initial value.

The main reason for the different lifespans among the categories is consumer storage.[20] Theatrical movies and television shows get most of their money from television licensing. Accordingly, the studios get paid each time a classic movie or television episode is replayed. In contrast, books and music get most of their money from the initial sale. Once consumers have bought a book, they can reread it without paying more money to the publisher. In this paper, only the capital stock of original artwork was measured. Therefore, the reprint rights owned by publishing houses are counted but not the physical books owned by libraries and consumers. The depreciation schedules in chart 4 are based on revenue net of sales costs. Studios, musicians, and authors typically spend a great deal of money advertising their new releases. BEA’s general practice is to treat advertising as a current expense. Because advertising is a current expense, all advertising costs are deducted from revenue for a particular year. As a result, first year profits are much lower than first year revenue. In fact, theatrical movies actually have losses in the first quarter and therefore appear to gain value early in their lifespan. Some might consider advertising a long-lived investment in brand awareness. That treatment of advertising suggests higher depreciation rates for artwork in the first year after release.[21]

9. IMDB reports data for most major movies, with better coverage of recent movies and more expensive productions. The missing data were imputed.

19. The depreciation rate for television programs is still preliminary and may change significantly in the final version.

20. Consumers can tape a movie or television program when it is first aired and then watch it whenever they chose. In practice, very few people use their DVR for long-term storage. Instead, they watch whatever is on.

21. However, the capital value of artwork plus capitalized advertising would be identical to my capital values for artwork alone.

Degree Inflation

Fifteen per cent of taxi drivers in the US have a degree, up from 1 per cent in 1970. Likewise, 25 per cent of sales clerks are graduates, against 5 per cent in 1970. An astonishing 5 per cent of janitors now have a bachelor’s degree.
 

Via Marginal Revolution.

UPDATE: The more that I think about it, the more convinced I am that this statistic is more than trivial.  Instead, it has the potential to has consequences of epic proportions.

Societies and organizations in which talented people have their expectations defeated and are confined to positions of little authority, rather than being co-opted are deeply unstable.

The history of the American labor movement can be seen as a story of talenting management grade talent being shut out of management due to a lack of social class and education and finding other means to exert their influence until more meritocratic and need blind admissions processes were developed in higher education.

A great deal of radical Islamic activity can be fairly attributed to the huge class of educated (often in theology) but unemployed young people in Islamic petro-monarchies feeling a deep need to do something that makes a difference with their lives.

This also recalls that bad old days during World War I when aristoratic officers continued to send huge numbers of rank and file soldiers to their deaths irrationally climbing out of trenches to storm machine gun nests that was an acid bath to class relations in Europe for decades to come.

Of course, it also has to be bad for society to so profoundly underutilize the intellectual resources we as a society have available to us.  A mind is a terrible thing to waste.  And, if you waste it after that mind has gotten a degree, it is also a profoundly expensive form of waste for everyone who participated in paying for that degree. 

Rhyme Of The Day

April showers bring snow ploughers.

- repeated by my children from an unknown source, and aptly summing up today's repeat snowy weather in Denver.