Sexual Freedom v. Freedom From Exploitation

Anyone who reads this blog with any regularity knows that I have strong opinions on a great many issues. But, now and then, a case comes along that is so hard to evaluate, that it is very hard to see a right answer. The case of the 41 year old British man with an IQ of 48 who was in a same sex relationship and banned from having sex is one such case. It presents hard issues that are worth grappling with in a situation that is unfamiliar to most of us.

The Facts

The facts, insofar as we know them are as follows:

The 41 year-old [man] had been in a relationship with a man with whom he lived and told officials "it would make me feel happy" for it to continue.

But his local council, which provides his accommodation, decided his "vigorous sex drive" was inappropriate and that with an IQ of 48 and a "moderate" learning disability, he did not understand what he was doing. . . . the man known as Alan was described as being physically able but "seriously challenged in all aspects of his mental functionality". He lived in a home provided by the council, where he developed a sexual relationship with a man called Kieron by the court. Alan was also accused of making lewd gestures at children in a dentists' surgery and on a bus, although no police action was taken.

An IQ of 48 is a level of intellectual functioning lower than 99.8% of the general population, and is commonly described as "moderate mental retardation" per the DSM-IV. It is roughly equivalent to having the mental abilities of an eight year old child.

The Law

The law in Britain gives the state broad powers in such a case: "Under the Mental Capacity Act 2005, [judges on Britain's Court of Protection] have the power to make life-or-death decisions for people deemed to lack the intelligence to make them for themselves - such as ordering that they undergo surgery, have forced abortions, have life-support switched off or be forced to use contraception."

In Colorado, and most U.S. states, an individual in this situation would probably have a legal guardian appointed for him under the supervision of a general jurisdiction or probate court or some other court with comparable equity jurisdiction (a type of jurisdiction named after the British courts that once, but no longer, have jurisdiction over these kinds of cases). In Colorado, a guardian's authority can vary from case to case as set forth in a judge's order, although at common law a guardian of an adult had rights comparable to the rights of a natural parent's rights when that parent's child is in the parent's custody.

In other words, while the issue would present itself somewhat differently, a U.S. court could probably grant a guardian of an adult with an IQ of 48 the right to decisions similar to the ones made by the Court in this British case.

Procedural History

The town hall began court proceedings in 2009 to restrict contact with Kieron on the grounds that he lacked mental capacity, and an interim order was made. . . . A psychiatrist involved in the case tried to prevent the man being given sex education, on the grounds that it would leave him "confused".

Mr Justice Mostyn said the case was "legally, intellectually and morally" complex as sex is "one of the most basic human functions" and the court must "tread especially carefully" when the state tries to curtail it.

But he agreed that the man, known only as Alan, should not be allowed to have intercourse with anyone on the grounds that he did not have the mental capacity to understand the health risks associated with his actions.

Under the judge's order, the man is now subject to "close supervision" by the local authority to ensure he does not break the highly unusual order. The judge concluded: "Alan does not have the capacity to consent to and engage in sexual relations.

"In such circumstances it is agreed that the present regime for Alan's supervision and for the prevention of future sexual activity is in his best interests."

"Since then Alan has been subjected to close supervision to prevent any further sexual activity on his part," said the judge.

Analysis

There are good reasons to be skeptical of this kind of court order. The eugenics movement sponsored movement in the 20th century to sterilize the mentally retarded is generally seen as a class historical instance of government exploitation of vulnerable individuals. There is also a history of government abusing its authority to punish gays in the name of mental hygiene. Some high profile cases in Britain involving prominent intellectuals are particularly notorious.

On the other hand, the exploitation, sexual and otherwise, of people who don't have the capacity to consent intelligently to what people ask of them is also a long standing problem. A central theme of Steig Larsson's Millennium Series (which starts with "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo") is that vulnerable people, such as wards with guardians appointed for them and illegal immigrant women are subject to a horrible injustice when they are sexually exploited. Sexual exploitation is sufficiently common in this situations that in the popular imagination, at least, at is seen as almost the unpleasant norm in prisons, foster care situations, and households where an impoverished single mother lives with a boyfriend unrelated to her children.

We have statutory rape laws that declare that children under a certain age are incapable of consenting to sex and that someone who does so has committed the crime of rape. While those laws can be controversial when applied to high schoolers who are past puberty and routine have sex with each other, there is a wide consensus that they are appropriate when applied to pre-pubescent children. Likewise, while there is intense controversy over the harsh sentences imposed for people who merely view child pornography, and over the near criminalization of innocent child nudity, there is widespread consensus that it is a serious crime to use pre-pubescent children to create pornography or to pimp out pre-pubescent child prostitutes, and that there is a genuine government interest in destroying the economic market that drives its creation.

Certainly, there would be a very wide consensus that is would be a serious crime for an adult to have sex with an eight year old, regardless of the sex of the parties involved.

But, there are many important ways that a 41 year old is different from an 8 year old, even if they have similar mental capacities. Adults routinely have sex for pleasure. Many adults men are gay or bisexual. Eight year olds have genuine opinions and feelings and are capable of engaging in surprisingly sophisticated relationship, of understanding differences between right and wrong to a considerable extent, and consenting to a variety of agreements. Most parents allow their eight year olds to make many choices about their clothes and room decor and food to eat when eating out, to largely choose their own friends at school, and to spend small amounts of money as they see fit. Eight year olds can play baseball and board games, can hug each other and family members in genuine expressions of love, and make many other decisions for themselves.

Even though statutory rape is often theorized as an incapacity to consent, there is really more to it. Pre-pubescent children aren't just intellectually incapable of consent, they are hormonally and physically not yet at a stage of development where their bodies are ready for sex.

Statutory rape laws for adolescents, which were almost universally adopted initially with the understanding that they would pertain to adolescent or adult men seeking to have sex with teenage girls, were also rooted in the concern that teenage girls due to their youth and adolescent impulsivity are especially vulnerable to making impulsive bad decisions that have the potential to carry with them the serious long term consequences of pregnancy, parenthood and quite possibly either a shotgun marriage for life or a lifetime in which one is unmarriagable and destitute as a result.

A different way to view statutory rape laws, that is gaining increasing credence, is to view statutory rape not as an incapacity to consent in the same class as a stranger drugging you and then having sex with you, but as a distinct subset of cases where someone in a position of trust (by virtue of being an adult in states where there is a Romeo and Juliet exception) abuses that position of trust. In this view, statutory rape is less like a date rape drug case and more like a sexual harassment of a subordinate employee case. The gravamen of the wrong is abuse of power within a relationship by someone whom we presume under the law should know better than to do so.

There is also a widespread view that sexual relationships carried on by someone who isn't ready for them or capable of "truly understanding" what sex involves (do any of us ever really reach that blissful state) will inflict intense psychological trauma that will destroy a person's entire well being, also making it far more serious than other kinds of things to which one might consent.

If a 41 year old man who is physically ready for sex, and perfectly well could be homosexual or bisexual, is voluntarily (to the extent that his eight year old intellectual capacity permits) having sex with another man and enjoying the experience, who is to say that it really is wrong?

This man doesn't appear to be suffering from psychological trauma. He doesn't have to worry about having children or being rendered unmarriagable or forced into a marriage that can't be legally terminated. His body, and no doubt his hormones, are ready for sex and have been for decades. Finding someone who is ready and willing to satisfy his sexual drive probably isn't very easy for a 41 year old with an IQ of 48 who lives on welfare in public housing. It is certainly plausible that Alan is gay or bisexual (indeed, by some definitions his acts and words are sufficient to say that this is true as a matter of definition), that the relationship between Alan and Kieron is as sincere, voluntary, loving and non-exploitative as the sexual relationship between any two single adults, and that the town's intervention is simply a case of an inability to genuinely come to terms with the idea that two men can have legitimate, loving sexual relationships. There are certainly strong hints in this case that this is what is happening in this situation.

On the other hand, it certainly wouldn't be implausible that Kieron is an evil hearted, exploitative manipulator who has managed to get Alan to say things that hide Alan's inner feelings of pain and being used and compelled into something that makes him uncomfortable that Alan isn't capable of articulating to legal system officials in that kind of atmosphere and that Alan has no sexual attraction to Kieron, but has trouble distinguishing between sexual attraction and the kind of platonic physical contact that is normal between eight year old boys.

While Kieron's motives aren't the center of the court's inquiry, which is really about what is best of Alan, it is certainly possible to see Alan as being in a position a bit like someone who is acting happy because he has been tricked into thinking that he has formed a relationship that was really just a scheme to make him the butt of a cruel joke and doesn't know it yet, but is sure to be furiously angry and miserably sad when he realizes it.

By analogy, contrary to common belief, a large share of bona fide childhood sexual abuse victims have trouble remembering the incidents because they weren't as aware of the special meaning that our culture attaches to sexual contacts at the time, and feel the bulk of the psychological trauma that they experience not when the sexual abuse actually takes place, but when they get old enough to gain an understanding of that special meaning and finally realize that an adult whom they trusted exploited them all those years ago. A reasonable person could fear that Alan is at grave risk of experiencing a similar kind of traumatic realization and suffering dearly at a psychological level when and if that happens.

If one thinks that absence of capacity to consent is really all that matters in a case like this one, Kieron's motives are irrelevant and people with the intellectual capacity of eight year olds are morally equivalent to actual eight year olds and shouldn't be subjected to sexual activity. But, if the important question is really abuse of a position of trust that Kieron holds as the intellectually normal close friend of mentally retarded Alan, then Kieron's motives and what is going on in the interactions between Kieron and Alan matter a great deal to the merits of whether a court should or should not prevent Alan from having sex with Kieron.

On balance, I'm skeptical of the British judge and town government's decisions in this case. It bears the stink of a lot of unreasonable prejudices. But, I also recognize that this decision is a highly fact specific inquiry for which ordinary social intuition provides few exact precedents, and that decision makers further removed from the facts are at a decided disadvantage. It is hard to say with any great degree of certainty from the little that we know that the judge's decision was clearly wrong in this unfamiliar territory.

Ancient Rome v Pre-Industrial London

In "The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization," Bryan Ward-Perkins reports that the pollutants which are the byproducts of industrial activity did not reach Roman levels in Britain until the 18th century! I am not naive enough to be such a partisan of the “ancients” as to suggest that Europe did not reach Roman levels of civilization in the generality until the 1700s. But, up until the Industrial Revolution occurred in Britain there were aspects of European civilization which had not yet climbed back up to the Roman scale of grandeur or virtuosity. For example, it seems that it was only in 1800 that London attained the size of the city of ancient Classical Rome (which had fallen in its nadir in the 7th century to a population of 50,000).

- Per Razib (links omitted, punctuation added in lieu of link emphasis).

Questioning Patriotism For Fun and Profit

Liberals already control many aspects of American life, and they have undue influence on the Internet. . . . people who use e-mail or other services from companies such as Google, AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple are unwittingly helping the liberals. These companies are, and will continue to be, huge supporters of those who are damaging our country.

The influence of these companies also extends internationally, where the liberal grip on the Internet has been demonstrated anew in the turmoil in Egypt. There, according to media reports, it is playing a key role in stirring up the mass protests that are clogging the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities such as Alexandria and fueling demands for the immediate ouster of President Hosni Mubarak . . . the movement is being manipulated by those who favor a hard-line, Iranian-style, Islamic theocracy. . . . Google executive Wael Ghonim, just released from 12 days of Egyptian detention, confirmed that he was responsible for the Facebook page that ignited "the revolution of the youth of the Internet."

This is the same Google where CEO Eric Schmidt is a personal friend of President Barack Obama. . .

Is that where you want your money to go? I didn't think so, so I started the very first conservative e-mail service provider. . . . Your purchase will help me promote true Reagan values to win back our country in 2012.

Liberals have gone too far to influence the Internet and the political process.

- Michael Reagan, son of President Ronald Reagan, professional pundit, and newspaper columnist (Source: Aurora Sentinel, February 9, 2011, page 9.)

Who knew that it was unpatriotic to financially support Internet companies by having a free gmail, hotmail, or yahoo e-mail account?

Who knew that there was a Democratic and a Republican way to provide e-mail accounts?

Who knew that preventing traffic jams was more important then ending dictatorships?

Who knew that it was unpatriotic for a private American corporation to support democracy in a totalitarian state?

Who knew that you could get paid for writing a newspaper column that is an infomerical for your own business?

Who knew that liberals control American life and the Internet too?

What Did Reagan Say?

What are "true Reagan values" anyway? What did Ronald Reagan had to say on the subject of religious people taking the streets to secure democracy with the help of shared information from Internet that his son is so wary of?

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.

Without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure.

Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.

Democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.

A people free to choose will always choose peace.

Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.

Then again, some of Reagan's messages on the issue can be interpreted in more than one way:

The greatest security for Israel is to create new Egypts.

Drones, Robots and the Next War

Drones (i.e. unmanned vehicles that are remotely operated) and robots (i.e. computer controlled machines) are just on the verge of radically transforming the way that the United States conducts wars.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles



MQ-1 Predator

The Pakistani side of the War on Terrorism is being carried out mostly by the CIA via armed drones similar to the MQ-1 Predator above which uses Hellfire missiles similar to those mounted on the U.S. Army's AH-64 Apache helicopter gunships (which are large enough to destroy a tank), and has purported led to the death of thousands of Taliban and terrorist group leaders and operatives, but also to significant numbers of deaths of innocent civilians, particularly family members of targets. A less powerful and lighter version of the guided missile, designed to allow more missiles to be fired with less collateral damage, called the Viper Strike, is also in use.

Drones in advanced stages of development promise to take on far more roles than the relatively primitive drones like the Predator (and several similar drones such as the MQ-5 Hunter) do today.



RQ-170

Some of the new drones, such as the flying wing reconnaisance drone called the RQ-170 shown above, utilize the same stealth technology that makes the planes invisible to radar that is found in the recently retired F-117 Stealth Fighter, the B-2 bomber, the F-22 fighter and the F-35 joint strike fighters which are currently being tested prior to entering military service.

Modifying the Air Force RQ-170 to drop "smart bombs," perhaps in places where there are anti-aircraft weapons that would make the mission unsafe for a manned fighter aircraft and radar systems that would make a non-stealth aircraft vulnerable, would be only a minor upgrade for which proof in principle already exists from the MQ-1 Predator. Indeed, in a simple mission to drop a bomb on a target, it wouldn't even have to be remotely controlled and could fly autonomously to its launch area, drop its bomb and return, without being vulnerable to having its telecommunications link to its human operator severed at a key point in the mission.



X-47

An experimental prototype of an unmanned stealth fighter plane intended for use on aircraft carriers and about the same size as existing carrier based F-18s, shown avove, has made its first test flights without a hitch.

All of these drones offer a variety of military advantage over manned warplanes. Weight doesn't have to be devoted to an ejection seat and life support systems for the pilot, and can often be smaller than a similar sized manned aircraft. A drone isn't limited by a pilot's need for food, water, bathroom breaks or the need to get up and stretch. The extra weight can translate into more payload or longer range. They can handle g forces in aerobatic manuevers that would cause a human pilot to pass out or at least be too distracted to be optimally alert. Drones can take a risk and get closer to a target to identify it better or increase its accuracy if needed. If it gets shot down, no American Airman dies, and operators as a result can accumulate their skills despite being sometimes shot down, a classic problem with fighter pilots who rarely have more than a handful of actual battles in their careers. Drone operators don't have to be located anywhere near harm's way, and can work in shifts (many current drone operators for drones in Pakistan do their work from Utah). It is easy to train operators with simulators without causing wear and tear to the real expensive thing. You can wrap a drone in plastic wrap in a warehouse until you need it without having to incur maintenance costs associated with training time until it is needed. The quality control difference between a 1% failure rate and a o.1% failure rate matters far less in a drone than in a manned aircraft and the last little bit of realiability is by far the most expensive part. Drones are cheaper than manned aircraft of comparable capabilities. There is every reason to believe that air refueling will be possible -- this function is already automated to some extent. Automated takeoff from a known airfield shouldn't be a problem either, although landings may require remote control by a drone operator.

In addition to the fact that the aircraft itself would be cheaper, it is much cheaper to train an drone (aka UAV) operator than it is to train a pilot of a manned fighter aircraft.

Today, a manned aircraft pilot completes undergraduate and graduate pilot training programs. The service spends more than $2.6 million to train a fighter pilot. Training for an airlift pilot, relatively speaking, is far less — about $600,000. . . . [The UAV training program starts with the manned pilot training program] “eliminating 20 unnecessary weeks of the current undergraduate pilot training program, deleting unnecessary graduate training on other aircraft,” and adding an eight-week UAV undergraduate course and 12 weeks of UAV graduate training. The cost . . . a little more than $135,000 per [UAV] pilot. . . .

Predator and Reaper flight hours have jumped in the past three years. Predator flights nearly doubled last year, according to the Air Force. UAV orbits over Iraq and Afghanistan — or around-the-clock combat air patrols — have gone from 11 in 2007 to 33 in 2009. Plans call for 50 CAPs by 2011.

Air Force leaders had to temporarily assign manned aircraft pilots to handle the higher number of flights. In 2008, 161 fighter, bomber, tanker and cargo pilots flew Predators and Reapers, the two UAV models. . . . “Developing a UAS-specific career path and eliminating unnecessary training will reduce costs by more than $1.5 billion with aviation fuel savings alone accounting for about $180 million."

There are missions for which remote control, rather than autopilot use of drones will be required (although even then, the planes can travel on autopilot to the immediate vincinity where they will carry out a combat mission). Pursuing moving targets on the ground, missions where it is necessary to look at the target before firing to confirm that it is the intended target, and air to air combat (i.e. dog fights), all involve this kind of situation.

While there are many possible missions of aircraft, reconnaissance and bomb dropping (sometimes in "strike" missions where there is not control of the airspace, and sometimes not) that drones are well suited to carry out have been the dominant missions for U.S. fighter and bomber aircraft. You can list every instance of air to air combat involve U.S. forces since Vietnam in a short blog post, and every instance of air to air combat in the world since then in a long one. With opponents who lack the ability to jam GPS signals and remote control telemetry, there is no reason that drones can't be effective in anti-tank and anti-vehicle warfare -- the missiles mounted on Predator drones were invented for that very purpose.

It may be necessary to have some manned fighter planes and bombers as a hedge against opponents who can jam GPS singles and remote control telemetry, or out of concerns that drone software could be hacked, or to deliver VIP passengers. But, drones seem to be well on track to make it unnecessary to have a manned successor to the F-22 or the F-35. Indeed, an operational version of the X-47 shown in this post may be possible within a few years of the time that the carrier based F-35C variant of the joint strike fighter enters naval service (and the F-35B variant has been put at the back of the line and may enter service around the same time as an operation version of the X-47). There is essentially nothing that a pilot does in a fighter aircraft in the kind of military environment that the United States military has ever encountered in the history of the fighter and bomber aircraft that couldn't be done by a remote operator of a military drone aircraft.

A notable corollary of this development is that it would allow for much lower impact foreign airbases. A drone base could have a skeleton crew to serve as security guards, maintain the fitness of the runway, the hangar/warehouse, the tools, the ammunition and supply stores, and a vacant dorm. The operators would at all times stay safe in the United States. The drones would sit silent in their hangar until actually needed for operations, avoiding the noise and activity that makes military air bases bad neighbors. In the event that tensions were rising in the region of the foreign base, and it looked like it might be necessary to deploy drones from a foreign airbase, drone maintenance technicians could be assembled at a U.S. base and flow in on a day or two's notice to maintain the drones while they were operating. Operates could train on simulators, and from time to time with actual drones, from the safety of U.S. bases.

If a few lukewarm U.S. allies were agreeable to having these kinds of lower impact drone bases on their territory, the distance of any plausible target in the world from the nearest U.S. base would be greatly reduced, making fast response times to threats possible without hypersonic aircraft speeds and the attendant sonic booms.

The drone concept isn't limited to replacing fighters and bombers.

Reconaissance

Reconaissance missions are the main purposes of drones today, and allow U.S. forces to have a bird's eye view of the battlefield that is on the verge of becoming much more comprehensive (follow up link here). Current drones can look at one small spot at a time directly below it; camera systems in development that would be transported by existing drones could look at thirty points at a time in a five kilometer radius circle.

Already, the U.S. has a variety of means to put explosives of almost any desired capacity at any point in the world with extreme accuracy and drone aircraft will only improve this capability - call this omnipotence. The U.S. already basically has the capacity to see any particular point in the world that it wants and this capability is being greatly expanded with drones - call this omnipresence. The next step is to be able to process the incoming flood of data well enough to make sense of what is coming in so that what is seen everywhere can be dealt with as if the U.S. forces were actually present everywhere it can observe something - call this omniscience. But, since the data collection part of this process is something that already exists in the hear and now or is ready to enter operational service in the very near future, the real bottleneck at this point is the data analysis.

However, increased data analysis capacity, either through the brute force of assigning more people to watch the feeds coming in, or through computer image processing, or through a combination of the two, is essentially invisible in war zones. The data analysis can happen can be done by people comfortable offices in the United States and its autonomous image processing capacity can be enhanced with invisible to the user computer software and hardware in some anonymous military server farm.

Airdrops

A Berlin airlift type operation is just a bomb run with a different payload.

Cargo Transports

While military leaders might appropriate be concerned about using drones to transport people, at least apart from high pilot risk situations like medical evacuations in the middle of a fire fight, there is no reason why a UAV wouldn't be appropriate as a cargo plane. Indeed, it would be relatively easy, once the flight software is developed for a drone fighter aircraft, to retrofit existing cargo planes so that they could be operated remotely.

Staffing Impact

It takes about twenty active duty military personnel to keep an aircraft operating in the existing Air Force. And, most of those personnel, the maintenance crews, for example, would still be needed. But, the number of manned aircraft that need pilots could be reduced dramatically in a matter of two or three decades, and maintenace crews would be needed only where drones are being used for actual operations - not for the most part, for training duties.

Unmanned Ground Vehicles



The Black Knight (vehicle)

The drone trend isn't restricted to aircraft. For example, the U.S. Army is testing and evaluating the Black Knight, a prototype light tank that is remotely controlled, not so differently from the remote controlled vehicles you can buy for your kids at Target. It can go as fast as the Army's existing tanks over similar terrain, it has a 30mm cannon and a machine gun, and it can be carried in a C-130 cargo aircraft, unlike existing heavy military hardware like the M1A tank and the M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle.

A smaller ground drone called the Gladiator, that has been in military service for three years, has a light machine gun and tracks and weighs three-quarters of a ton (think armed, remote controlled riding lawn mowner on steroids). Obviously, this isn't very useful for chatting up locals to determine who is siding with insurgents. But, it provides the kind of firepower that would otherwise require a soldier without the need to hide from income fire or be unduly concerned about IEDs.

Remote controlled ground drones are more prone to getting stuck than drone aircraft and have to contend with the messiness of surface terrain, but are near future possibilities with off the shelf technology for just about any military mission that doesn't involve interacting with human beings. More humble remotely operated vehicles could deliver supplies or have forklifts to move loads around warehouses.

Army efforts to develop unmanned artillery batteries, the Non-Line of Sight missile system component of the "Future Combat System" that has been cancelled after it failed to meet performance test, went over budget and was behind schedule are sidelined for now. But, since the problems were almost entirely a matter of electronic guidance systems and software, rather than the rest of the missile system, it is only a matter of time before the technology can catch up to the mission and be reintroduced into the Army's military arsenal.

The superfast reflexes of robots and computers have already been harnessed in a modified version of the Navy's "Phalanx Close In Weapons System" for Army use that uses bullets shoot incoming rockets and artillery shells identified by its sensors before an operator even knows what is happening. Systems that use lasers rather than bullets to shoot incoming ordiance have been developed and tested, but are so far inferior to the current system which shoots big bullets with little bullets.

An interesting modification of Phalanx that recently entered service with the US Army is the Counter-Rocket Artillery Mortar system (C-RAM), which is designed to combat the small mortar and rocket threat. This system grew out of a 2004 request from Army Chief of Staff General Peter Schoomaker, who wanted a better means of defending US troops based in Iraq.

The complete C-RAM system networks a ground-based version of Phalanx together with the Army's Lightweight Counter Mortar Radar (LCMR) and Q-36 Target Acquisition Radar (AN/TPQ-36 Firefinder Radar), which detects incoming rounds and determines their point of origin. When C-RAM detects an incoming round, it turns on a set of strobe lights to alert local personnel to take cover, authorizes the modified Phalanx to open fire with explosive bullets to destroy the projectile and dispatches a Hunter UAV equipped with Viper Strike laser-designated munitions to kill whoever fired it. Raytheon is currently (2007) offering a trailer-mounted version of Phalanx as part of C-RAM under the product name of Centurion™. Unlike the naval version, the C-RAM version of Phalanx does not fire solid tungsten penetrators. Instead, in order to reduce the risk of civilian and friendly casualties, this system uses self-destructing explosive bullets.

The first two C-RAM systems arrived in Iraq in May, 2005 and have been reported as having successfully knocked down incoming mortar rounds.

The Centurion unloaded from a cargo aircraft

As in the case of air drones, ground drones aren't very useful as a tool to dispatch people in a war zone. But, for combat and transport roles, particular in asymmetric conflicts (or even "near peer" conflicts) where electronic means of interfering with these military systems aren't available to opposing forces, they have the potentially to replace a large share of the systems current military systems.

The need to have an operator present with a military vehicle or weapon when it is being used in high threat environments could be greatly diminished in the time frame before my grandchildren are of military service age.

Analysis

Suffice it to say that similar unmanned system concepts apply to surface and submarine forces.

A New Era In Conventional Warfare

The net effect of all of this is to make possible a world in which conventional warfare with large military systems of the kind that has dominated every full scale war from World War I to the early days of the Iraq War can be carried out on behalf of technologically advanced countries like the United States mostly by drones and robots that are extremely accurate and capable of managing in conditions unsuitable for soldiers with endurance and patience.

In conflicts with countries that don't have this kind of technology, or advanced electronics that can counter their control systems, heavy weapons systems from tanks to armored personnel carriers to military aircraft to artillery batteries to warships may become all but useless.

Tank squadrons and non-stealth manned fighter wings and surface navy fleets may become as obsolete in conflicts with technologically advanced militaries as the "light brigade" of horse riding cavalry was in the face of machine guns.

The main limitation on the use of military force will be not the capacity to deliver explosive force precisely when and where the military wants to do so, overcoming all static armor systems, but the ability to distinguish rapidly enough between friends, foes and neutrals.

While military planners have portrayed conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, where heavy conventional military opposition was utterly destroyed in days or weeks, followed by long mopping up counterinsurgency campaigns conducted mostly by infantry with low levels of heavier military equipment providing support, this may become the norm in future wars, at least those conducted against advanced military powers by nations that do not have comparable military technology.

Spy v. Spy: The Red Queen Effect

Of course, the other problem is that proliferation of this kind of technology is much harder to control than proliferation of ballistic missiles, nuclear weapons, or navy fleets, for example. The computing power and electronic components necessary to make servicable versions of these kinds of weapons systems are available on a commercial, off the shelf basis. This is the kind of stuff that a bright high school student or undergraduate engineering student can devise with a six figure budget. The copies may not be quite as capable as the original, and may come on line a few years later, but they aren't that far behind.

A terrorist cell may not be able to field a stealth bomber drone, but they may very well be able to put together an ugly hybrid of a radio controlled airplane, a cell phone with a videocamera, and a handgun that can be used as a remote controlled assassination weapon, and a full fledged terrorist organization might even be able to mass produce something like that in some lonely industrial park in Yemen or Afghanistan or Pakistan or Compton, a smuggle crates of them (perhaps with a legal radio controlled aircraft component and an illegal weaponizing upgrade kit distributed separately) all over the world. I can even imagine some U.S. court finding that such a device can be lawfully mass produced and distributed in the United States as a Second Amendment protected right, given that it is made up of components that are protected by the Second Amendment or are lawful, and given free speech rights to discuss technology, even military technology, that is not esoteric.

Similarly, a low budget "cruise missile" with a rocket propelled grenade's explosive as a warhead could transform a somewhat heavier than average small arm into a medium range guided artillery weapon.

A single dud Excaliber artillery round or smart bomb recovered from a battlefield, as the Chinese are believed to have recovered parts from an F-117 stealth fighter shot down in Balkans, could allow a decent engineer to reverse engineer most of the core concepts in the weapon's guidance system while attracting far less notice than an attempt to smuggle nuclear materials to a rogue nation might.

A country like North Korea which has managed with get noticed with very small numbers of very advanced military systems like nuclear bombs, medium range missiles and submarines probably doesn't have the industrial base to do more than the equivalent of throwing a one time punch that gives some other nation a bloody nose. Maybe it could destroy one or two medium sized cities in China or Japan or even the United States or Canada. But, it would then be hopelessly outmatched and obliterated. If its next leader is as crazy as its current one, it might even try to make that happen.

But, a somewhat less isolated and backward country with resticted access to the international arms markets, like Iran or [North] Sudan, could devote the resources necessary to develop a pretty credible military-industrial complex to develop drone and robot weapons systems. The examples of South Africa and Israel illustrates the fact that a nation doesn't have to be very large or have that huge of a GDP to have a quite credible defense contracting industry, making not quite state of the art weapons systems and military vehicles. Indeed, perhaps the best justification for allowing the arms sales of Russia and the United States to foreign nations of questionable character to continue is that this discourages those countries from developing the kind of industrial base necessary to make them domestically.

Exports from these unfriendly arms makers, in turn, could spread worldwide to all manner of regimes that might be quite interested in launching attacks on the United States or its interests or allies remotely. China, even if it backs down from hostile direct action against its neighbors, could prove to be more of an arms proliferation threat to the United State than it is a direct military threat.

Our progress in figuring out how to defend our nation from drone and robotic weapons systems is far less advanced than our capacity to make them. But, simply refraining from developing our own drones and robotic weapons systems won't be enough to prevent other nations from doing so with the technological foundations that are available to all.

Ultimately, the technologies inherent in drone and guided weapons may make the need to invade other nations that don't control access to that kind of military technology the norm, rather than exception that the Afghan war seemed to involve.

Education and Unemployment

Is Cyclical Unemployment Mostly A Function Of An Underskilled Work Force?

It is widely known and irrefutable that unemployment is higher among those who have less education. Does it follow that an insufficiently educated rank and file labor force is an important cause of unemployment rates overall? I'm not sure that this follows.

The vexing point is education is to a great extent a way for employers in the economy to sort the workforce. Often, an employer will prefer an employee with more education, on the grounds that it is an indicator of greater general purpose workplace fitness, even when nothing learned during the course of that education is relevant to the job.

To the extent that education is used by employers, on average, as a sorting tool, we expect education to reduce unemployment simply because employers in an employer's market will prefer to hire more educated workers and the lay off less educated workers.

If formal education was the secret to employment, one would expect low education immigrant populations to have the highest unemployment rates, but that isn't the case. The highest unemployment rates are found in native born people with poor educations, not immigrant populations where the relationship between the kind of people sorted into reasonable levels of education in the U.S. and the education levels obtained in their home countries are quite different.

Also, the way that unemployment is defined masks a related problem in more educated workers, which is underemployment. For example, large law firms laid off about 12,000 lawyers in 2009, all of whom had graduate educations and many of whom had spent years on the job developing sophisticated specialty practices. When the market no longer needed lawyers, many of these laid off lawyers would still be able to carry out white collar jobs - perhaps as video store assistant managers, or self-employed divorce lawyers with small case loads, or substitute teachers, and others might decide that this is the time for them to leave the workforce and get more education or have children. But, a measure that looks only at unemployment would greatly understate the economic impact of the lawyer layoffs on lawyers and conclude based upon the low unemployment rates for lawyers that a legal education was somethign that the economy greatly valued in 2009.

While there are some "unemployable" people in the economy, this isn't what is going on when the nation experiences high levels of unemployment in the ordinary course of the business cycle. The vast majority of the people who are unemployed on the day that I write this post (when the unemployment rate nationally is about 9%), have been gainfully employed in a functional way within the last three years, or have been functional participants in educational institutions within the last three years. They don't have jobs not because they are incapable of doing jobs, but because their efforts at their old jobs, while competent, were being directed towards doing things that the economy didn't need, like building more houses in Florida and California and Nevada and providing for the economic needs of people who were doing so. The people who are unemployed during a period of business cycle driven high unemployment are more functional and more skilled unemployed people than those in any other part of the business cycle.

Job Creation As A Function Of Elite Skill Sets

While at the individual level, education of the rank and file workforce is an asset, at the macroeconomic level, it may be that the group whose education matters most is not the education of the ordinary worker, but the education of the economy's elites.

The idea is motivated mostly by two things.

First, my view that unemployment is fundamentally a failure of entrapreneurship. It happens when there is a shortage of executed ideas to find worthwhile things for idle workers to do. The vast majority of the labor force isn't in the business of creating jobs, it is in the business of doing jobs. But, an entrapreneurial elite does create jobs and unemployment is a product of their failure to meet the challenges they face at a certain moment in the economy. Unemployment is about a failure to mobilize ideal resources. There is not a fixed number of jobs in the economy, and there are very few people whose talents can't be put to productive use.

The problem is not that they were doing a poor job at their old jobs, or that they are unqualified to do whatever new job might be created in the near future, but that an entrapreneurial elite has failed to figure out profitable things for them to do.

Car companies don't lose market share and have to lay off the employees whose jobs are lost because of declining market share (as opposed to offshoring) because the employees have collectively done a bad job of building cars. They lose market share because the design engineers, quality control engineers, marketing campaign managers, and senior executives in the company have failed to do their jobs as well as their counterparts in competing firms. When American automobile companies lay off workers and shutter factories at the same time that foreign automobile companies are hiring workers and opening factories in the United States, it is poor leadership by elites in the American automobile companies that is killing the jobs, not an uneducated workforce or excessive regulation or anything else of the kind.

Unemployment happens because the lassiez faire economy has become disorganized.

Second, it is motivated mostly by anecdotal evidence. Good management, leadership even, and a clear vision of how some job creating or economy enhancing institution is works, can have immense effects. Some of the examples that come to mind follow.

* Consider, Tumaini University. It is a private college in Tanzania sponsored by the Lutheran Church (the first private college in Tanzania), which some of my relatives played a significant part in establishing. The lay missionaries that helped build this institution that educates thousands of Tanzanians and employs many people received some outside funding, but the real asset that the church brought to the project was leadership, organization and expertise. Students made their own bricks and helped build college buildings with their own hands (something not so different from the early days of my alma mater, Oberlin College, when it earned its "Learning and Labor" motto starting in the 1830s). Vibrant local congregations provided a great deal of the resources of money and labor to make it work. But, those resources couldn't be put to work until someone who knew how a private university was supposed to work and knew what was involved in managing a long, complex project through all the steps necessary to get from here to there, knew when outside guidance was needed and where to get it, and knew how to establish an organizational culture that was free of corruption in the university's administration came along to guide and crystalize those resources into a large and worthwhile undertaking. A very small number of individuals with those talents and a very modest amount of funding and materials, made possible a big project that will educated large numbers of people for decades or centuries and create countless jobs, both directly, and indirectly through jobs created by graduates who will learn both skills in the classroom, and will absorb through osmosis the way a large bureacratic private entity that runs smoothly works.

* Consider the Port of Haiti when it was run for a brief period by outside American contractors (probably Halliburton, but I could be mistaken). All the rank and file employees were the same. But, a very small managerial group who knew how to do that job and were free of the institutional culture of corruption that had reigned before they arrived dramatically increased the productivity and efficiency of the Port.

* I've seen the exceptional talents that entrapreneurs whom I've represented who take an idea from start up businesses to medium sized ventures that employ a dozen or more people exhibit. While something on the order of sixteen million people, about one in six members of the labor force, are self-employed, the percentage of those people who every managed to establish or run medium to large sized businesses that employ lots of people is very small. The vast majority of self-employed people employ only themselves and perhaps a few other people.

* Consider job creation in immigrant communities, where someone in a first wave of early immigrants develop a business model, perhaps Chinese restaurants or laundries, perhaps Mexican subcontracting firms, perhaps Korean wig shops, that works and then later waves of immigrants follow that model and create large numbers of jobs from the clear vision of how to make it work created by the founder. This isn't restricted to immigrant communities of course. For example, the California style burrito vendor and the expresso shop have both been widely imitated by others who created many jobs in the process.

* Consider the economic collapse that followed fast track land reform in Zimbabwe, because the newly installed farmers didn't know enough about how to carry on the agribusinesses that had previously been run by mostly white plantation style farmers:

Before 2000 land-owning farmers, mostly white, had large tracts of land and utilized economies of scale to raise capital, borrow money when necessary, and purchase modern mechanized farm equipment to increase productivity on their land. As the primary beneficiaries of the land reform were members of the Government and their families, despite the fact that most had no experience in running a farm, the drop in total farm output has been tremendous and has even produced starvation and famine, according to aid agencies. Mostly crops for export have suffered severely, e.g. Zimbabwe was the world's 6th largest producers of Tobacco in 2001. It produces nowadays less than 1/3 of the amount produced in 2000, the lowest amount in 50 years. Zimbabwe was once so rich in agricultural produce that it was dubbed the "bread basket" of Southern Africa, while it is now struggling to feed its own population. About 45 percent of the population is considered malnourished.

The problem is not that black Zimbabweans can't run productive farms. I would have done no better than any of the beneficiaries of land reform. The problem is that the people who were given land to farm didn't have the skill set at the time to do it. A small managerial elite did have those talents and that knowledge was one component necessary to create a productive agricultural system in Zimbabwe, and removing the elite before a new one had been trained, had led to the collapse of the entire system.

* Consider franchises and branch stores of successful retail and service businesses. Once on person establishes a working business model, many others follow on to implement that proven business model and they in turn hire may people for their local operations.

* One of the persistant tropes of fairy tales and fantasy, because it has a certain residual nugget of truth to it, is of a erstwhile prince or princess down on his or her luck turning a dismal home into a place worth living, or organizing a lot of local people into a mass movement that gets something done. Call it the "community organizing" of President Obama's youth, or pull this concept out of a handbook on how to run a counterinsurgency campaign, the idea is the same. Even "The Lord of the Flies" extols the immense impact of a cohesive group of people who can organize themselves. World War II POW Camp narratives relate the way that the British more swiftly self-organized and became a functioning whole relative to American POWs who had trouble reaching consensus around leadership and authority within their POW community.

* My strong suspicion is that one of the main reasons that the Islamic Empire swept most of the known world around 700 CE so quickly is that the new system it created organized communities that had previously been disorganized, and by doing so, made them more functional. Christianity in Africa, mostly off the radar screen of American journalists, is doing something very similar today.

* One of the classic ways to end employment is to start a war. This works for two reasons. First, it creates a vision with all sorts of worthwhile things that need to be done. Second, it creates an end that is declared by fiat to be worthwhile.

* The habit of fitting workers to worthwhile tasks that the military develops can carry over into peacetime. This habit probably plays a large part in the pivotal role played by militaries in undeveloped economies from Egypt to China in the non-military economy.

* As noted in a biography of Dan Quayle, who made job training legislation his signature issue in Congress before he was tapped to be Vice President, no job training program ever implimented by Congress has worked very well. This makes a great deal of sense if entrapreneurial job creation failures by that elite, rather than a lack of job skills in the labor force, is the main culprit in unemployment.

* This fits the heuristics about idea exchange that are used to explain why economic productivity is exponentially related to urban population scale, and why some communities that are open to new ideas (like Boulder and San Francisco) over perform other communities given their scale. Richard Florida's work on localized economic development leads to similar conclusions. Idea exchange among elites in large, perhaps shallow networks is critical to economic growth. Economic growth happens better in communities where relationship networks look more like Facebook networks and less like tight knit, high social capital villages of the kind identified by Putnam.

* Consider that most of the most obvious things that separate Third World living from life in the developed world are carried out in the United States by non-partisan local government officials according to best practices that are mostly so uncontroversial that they never become a subject of political debate in the United States: good water and sewer services, regular trash collection, paved local roads, traffic laws that are routinely followed, widespread K-12 education, building codes enforced by non-corrupt building inspectors, property and sales taxes that are collected by non-corrupt local officials, police forces that are mostly not engaged in any political conspiracy more grand than to arrest criminals and maintain order. Indeed, real estate developers routinely put together new communities in "virgin territory" on these same principles every day and there are tens of thousand of professional city managers in the country (as well as many amateur local elected officials) who make them run smoothly. Many of the residents of these communities aren't exceptional in any way, and indeed, many of the elected officals charged with running these communities wouldn't know how to run them, but do know that one hires a city manager and that it gets done. The clear vision of the people establishing these municipal services held by a very small elite reproduces a modern functioning version of American society in first world style.

* Governor Hickenlooper, like most Governors interested in economic development, has rightly focused his short term job creation efforts on tapping the skills of highly talented retired or semi-retired corporate managers in Colorado who have created jobs before and know how to do it and are interested in contributing to the economy of their new home state. His intuition is right, because the highly networked, highly skilled people who make connections that other people failed to, in ideas and in people, are the ones who create most jobs. Jobs need boosters and entrapreneurs to be created.

Job creation is the process of finding something worthwhile that people in the labor force can do and then repeating it rapidly until it stops working. The people up come up with those business models create vast numbers of jobs, many of which they will never receive credit for creating. A few good ideas can create thousand or even hundreds of thosuands of jobs.

The skill set involved in creating these jobs is only partially academic. Even business school, either at the undergraduate level or the MBA level, doesn't fully capture what is necessary to be a prolific job creator. It also takes large personal networks, strong people skills, and the mix of skill and good fortune needed to identify ways to monetize worthwhile things that can be done with available labor (I say monetize rather than finance, because borrowing money or raising capital is a distinct issue from development a business model that turns meaningful work into business revenue.) And, more than any of these things, it takes a clear vision of what needs to be done that is true. A clear, valid vision of a way to make an enterprise work is more important than anything else in creating jobs.

Implications

One key implication of a theory of unemployment that focuses on the skill sets of entrapreneurs rather than the skill sets of rank and file workers, is that it dramatically shifts the natural conclusions about what kind of educational efforts are necessary to reduce unemployment. If a failure to perform on the part of elite is the problem, then doing a better job of providing them with what they need to make the economy thrive and create jobs matters more than training for rank and file members of the labor force, particularly those rank and file members of the labor force who were perfectly functional employees before an economic downturn hit.

There may indeed be individual skill gaps, but this is probably a fairly small part of the problem -- functional employees in one job setting can usually work at a job of comparable responsibility in another job setting in a different industry with only modest on the job training. There may be some technical skills that are in short supply, but my sense is that this is rarely the big bottleneck. Often, when there is a shortage of properly licensed and certified workers, the problem is more one of loosening barriers to entry so that people who can actually do the work are allowed to do so than a lack of actual ability. Similarly, in the tech boom the computer industry routinely hired people with the right computer skills before they graduated from college, because the demand was so great, even though jobs of that level of sophistication are usually reserved for college graduates in sectors of the economy that aren't growing so fast.

Another implication is that the biggest part of a government response to unemployment may be to inject organization into the economy by finding worthwhile things for unemployed people to do until the private sector can come up with something better. No government worth its salt can't find something it wouldn't like to do, and since it has to pay the unemployed something whether they work or not (not only unemployment benefits but a wide variety of other benefits), why shouldn't it use those resources to directly hire people to do things that are worth doing? As long as the pay is not so high in "make work" jobs that it drives up labor prices to high for when the private sector can find work to do, this shouldn't harm a recovery and prevents waste caused by a massively idle labor force.

A third implication of this analysis is that is greatly recasts the role of immigration in employment. A lot of immigration rather than filling some fixed quanity of jobs in the economy, creates jobs by bringing in entrapreneurial individuals who know how to creat jobs. In times of cyclical downturns in employment it makes particular sense to engage in an active policy of brain drain calculated to bring elite potential job creators to the U.S., rather than closing the doors on the grounds that the U.S. needs to reserve jobs for its own workers. Jobs are created by exceptional individuals, and people who are willing to cast aside the culture and world they grew up in, in order to make a better economic life for themselves disproportionately have the drive and visions that it takes to create jobs, and will tend to return home discouraged if they don't.

Unanswered Questions

This view of unemployment comes with unanswered questions. Why do entrapreneurs fail to come up with worthwhile things to do that they can monetize when the economy goes into recession? What are they missing? How can you measure that failure? What distinguishes someone who is capable of prolifically creating jobs from someone who is capable of filling a job competently but not likely to create one? What kind of stimulus fosters more connection making and creates a better climate for implementing entrapreneurial visions? How do you get people to change gears? Can economic indicators better tailored to capture this critical job creating component of the economy help us better understand unemployment?

Still, you can't get the right answers until you ask the right questions, and I am convinced that most people thinking about the issue of unemployment in politics and mainstream economics and the media are not asking the right questions.

Goldman's Regulating Reputational Information

Internet law blogger extraordinaire Eric Goldman's book chapter on regulating reputational information is now available at SSRN. Per the abstract:

This essay considers the role of reputational information in our marketplace. It explains how well-functioning marketplaces depend on the vibrant flow of accurate reputational information, and how misdirected regulation of reputational information could harm marketplace mechanisms. It then explores some challenges created by the existing regulation of reputational information and identifies some regulatory options for the future.

I particularly like his operational definition of "reputational information," as:

[I]nformation about an actor’s past performance that helps
predict the actor’s future ability to perform or to satisfy the
decision-maker’s preferences.

and his notion of “reputation systems” that aggregate and disseminate reputational information to consumers of that information, as a discrete concept.

He notes that immunity from liability and the reputation of reputation systems themselves may be more effective than government regulation of reputational information, but identifies emerging concerns such as "ex ante consumer gag orders" in contracts with vendors and service providers, which may deserve scrutiny under void as against public policy doctrines or may require statutory regulation.

Patterns of Divorce

Most marriages that end up in divorce were horrible from day one, but some are good for a while before going bad according to a new study.

About one in three newlywed couples gets divorced within 10 years, but their paths to breaking up differ. . . . A majority of new husbands and wives who display negative personality traits, communicate poorly with each other and experience unrelenting stress in their lives split up in the next 10 years[.] Among couples whose marriages do well for several years . . . divorce occurs for nearly 20 percent, apparently because poor communication skills eventually undermine the union.

The study by Justin Lavner and Thomas Bradbury at UCLA interviewed and tracked 172 newlyweds for ten years.

The hopeful side of this news is that it suggests that most divorces may be preventable through better attention to the compatability of couples in the first place.

Should Liberals Care About NFL Unions?

NFL owners are seriously considering a lockout to push NFL players, who are unionized, to agree to an eighteen game season and other pro-football player contract reforms. Atrios says (via Steam Powered Opinions):

[L]iberals should care and side with labor, even if some of the players do make a lot of money. This is about how the pie gets split, and that matters even if it is a really big pie.

Analysis

I can't say that I share that sentiment very emphatically. Honestly, I don't have strong feelings about union-management relations in pro-sports generally.

The fact that pro-sports, and most of the performing arts, are organized into unions at the industry level is notable. This shows the potential for union power in industries with employers that are either small, or ephemeral (e.g. a movie production company or Broadway show run), which are ill suited to an employer based organizing approach.

Labor actions in these high profile fields are among the only labor actions that receive public attention in a modern union-management relations climate in which work stoppages have never been more rare.

But, these labor actions have not cast those unions in a very favorable light. The most recent writer's strike in Hollywood appears to have led to a permanent shift in favor of reality TV formats that have undermined union members. Appearing to deprive average Americans who have no strong economic stake with the owners or the talent of entertainment isn't a good way to make them your friends. The general American public has also been habituated to a distaste for public conflict over compensation in tough, battling ultimatum driven negotiations, something that they rarely experience in their own lives.

Indeed, in sports even more than in the other performing arts fields, the public media coverage of the money issues seems to take away from the enjoyability of the game itself. It tarnishes the images of all involved and the institution itself.

This isn't to say that I have lots of warm and fuzzy feelings for pro-sports team owners and management either. But, players and owners alike have a strong shared economic interest in extracting as much money from fans as possible. Why shouldn't liberals care as much about the size of this particular pie as they do about how it is split?

To be perfectly honest, despite Atrios' appeal to our liberalism, since I am not a die hard sports fan who stays abreast of the business of sports as well as the conduct of sports, I have very little sense of what share of the pie players, referees, and owners and managers of our professional sports leagues receive now, let alone whether there is any sensible reason for this mix. I do have a fairly fine tuned understanding of why different players get paid different amounts relative to each other and relative to other people in the labor market, from general economics discussions, but I know more about the relative split of profits in small enterprise, in movie productions, in investment banks, in utilities, in government and in industrial companies, than I do about industry specific divisions of loot in professional sports. (In fairness, he cites a Daily Kos diary that makes the case that players do get the shaft relative to franchise owners.)

Any responsible person, before taking sides in a dispute where someone seeks to change the status quo, ought to understand the status quo better than I do, rather than simply jumping on a bandwagon without regard to the merits. Surely, there is some fundamental sense in which the status quo is more or less fair, and favors one side or the other. Is the player's share fat or lean? Are management's demands sensible or oppressive? I certainly don't know the answer to those questions personally and would hesitate to have an opinion on how their negotiations should come out until I knew. While a presumption of unequal bargaining power between labor and management is reasonable in some contexts, it isn't at all obvious that such a presumption is appropriate in the case of NFL football players.

And, suppose that the split of the pie between NFL players and owners in the current status quo is unfair. My instinct is to wonder how that came to be, given that the status quo itself was a product of union-management negotiation. Perhaps, something else in the system of union-management negotiations is broken. And, if it isn't broken, why should anyone involved care what I or anyone else in the blogosphere thinks? If union-management negotiations generally produce good results, why should we fear that it won't do so this time around?

Do Unions Benefit Athletes?

Any effect that these unions have had in reducing compensation inequality among union members is less than obvious from pro-sports and the performing arts which have increasingly gravitated towards a winner takes all model, that owners have appeared (for the selfish reason of wanting a larger share of the pie) to advocated more than the talent. Is the second string outfielder or linebacker, or the chorus member in a Broadway show, or the infrequently recurring soap opera actress really better off because of the union? Perhaps, but these gains are often invisible to the general public, and are hard to quantify even for expert economists.

It is also far from obvious that pro-athlete unions do an adequate job of helping people who mostly have very high flying but short careers convert their brief moments of bounty into long term financial well being. I've known financial planners who specialize in that, but the extent to which they are used and the extent to which they are successful in achieving those ends, is decidedly mixed. Lots of athletes get feted and then thrown out and find that they have squandered their brief moments of plenty. Perhaps it is presumptuous to think that this is a job for athlete's unions, but being a liberal, I do think that.

The case that unions provide a negotiating edge is also atypical in pro-sports, because many or most pro-sports union members, unlike most ordinary union members, have professional agents on retainer who are charged with negotiating their contract terms to their advantage. While a typical union provides its members with both savvy in negotiations and power, the pro-sports player's union is purely a means by which to maximize employee power.

Liberal Instincts On The Organization Of Sports

My "liberal" instincts are instead to question whether it really makes sense for pro-sports teams to be organized as "for profit" entities at all, particularly in light of the ample public subsidies in the form of stadium construction and less tangible assistance in the form of public goodwill and loyalty, that members of the public provide to these teams.

Watching George W. Bush and his cronies in a box at the Superbowl brings to mind the underlying story about all that is bad about corporate sports. It also brings alive a question. Why, if the publicly held corporation is the secret to all great economic blessings, are pro-sports teams organized as closely held for profit businesses, rather than publicly held ones? These are capital intensive enterprises, so why don't they raise funds for stadiums with stock offerings and bond issuances?

A lot of the attraction of professional supports comes from tribal rivalry rather than the absolute quality of what actually takes place on the field. The fact that our professional soccer players aren't nearly as elite as our professional baseball players and get paid far less has only a modest impact on our feelings about rooting for the home team. If there was a national salary cap on compensation for pro-athletes of $100,000 per player, per year, we would still love pro-sports just as much. Appropriating that civic pride for private gain feels a little dirty to me.

In my ideal world, pro-sports teams might be owned by non-profits, perhaps affiliated with local governments and perhaps not, or organized as player owned organizations, although I can see that the very unequal and different in kind contributions of talent to these organizations might make a player owned form of organization problematic, because groups of co-owners tend to do a poor job of negotiating compensation arrangements with any degree of complexity among themselves.

On the other hand, I can't say that the college sports model, in which the immense enterprise that is centered around college athletes at large universities deprives those athletes of any compensation beyond scholarships, popularity and prospects of a pro-sports career, in the name of amateurism, is any better. In that circumstances, recognition of their legitimate contributions to the enterprise, which involve a great amount of work and commitment and produce economic benefit, are treated as a form of corruption.

Indeed, I am ambivalent about the linkage between education and organized sports at all. There is much to be said for the European model of having sports clubs independent of particular schools or colleges at all levels of competition. There is no deep reason that we should expect aspiring professional football, hockey and basketball players to attend college, while allowing aspiring professional baseball players to chase their dreams in the minor leagues instead.

Who trades stock?

Since 2009 high-frequency trading firms, which represent approximately 2% of the nearly 20,000 trading firms operating in the U.S. markets, have accounted for over 73% of all U.S. equity trading volume.

From here.

Also note that this excludes lots of other very short term traders in the market like individual day traders operating out of brokerage houses, coffee shops, office suites and living rooms around the nation, and institutional investors who are making some significant trades every day for time horizons measured in days and weeks. Many of these traders are doing essentially the same thing as the high-frequency traders in a less sophisticated way.

The fact that so few firms engage in high-frequency trading, and that so many day traders are economically marginal, suggests that the profits to be made from this kind of activity are pretty marginal. This is classic arbitrage of rounding errors and kindred "substance blind" investment decision making, in some ways the opposite of another "substance blind" investment approach called "index trading" which tries to replicated overall market return rather than trying to beat it.

Once you filter out the high-frequency technical trading and blind index fund activity from the equity markets, you are left with a pretty modest volume of smart money trading on the economic merits of publicly held companies for the relatively long term.

Vassar economist Rajiv Sethi has written a lot on algorithmic trading and kindred issues of market strategy. One of his bottom line conclusions, as I understand it, is that markets have a self-correcting tendency to shift from substance blind follow the leader kinds of trading to investment merit based trading, in what he calls "endogenous regime switching" (hand it to academics to give great insights boring names), as the proportion of algorithmic traders in the market overleverages the outside information driven signals in the market place.

When most of the trades in the market are driven by traders running on autopilot, the market itself becomes unstable, because technical bets can be confused with genuine new information about the outside world and leverage noise into major market movements.

Friday Links of Interest

* Colorado's incarceration rate for women (93 per 100,000 population) is the third highest in the United States after Oklahoma (134 per 100,000), and Texas (98 per 100,000). The national average is 69 per 100,000. "In 2004, [Oklahoma] imprisoned more than 10 times as many women per capita as Massachusetts or Rhode Island."

* Microsoft's customer support website chronicles the ire of people who have had Bing hijack their systems.

* "[H]ow many offenders sentenced under the old 100-1 crack guidelines (and the amended version applicable from 2007 to 2010) would benefit from retroactive application of the new 18-1 crack guidelines that the passage of the Fair Sentencing Act produced"?

12,835 offenders sentenced between October 1, 1991, and September 30, 2009 (fiscal years 1992 through 2009), would be eligible to receive a reduced sentence if [the new sentencing guideline] were made retroactive. If these offenders were to receive reduced sentences . . . the dates on which they would be released would span more than thirty years....

Based on [additional] assumptions, the average sentence reduction for all impacted offenders with sufficient information to perform this analysis would be 22.7 percent (or 37 months, from 163 months to 126 months). Table 6 shows that 7,612 offenders (76.9%) would receive a sentence reduction of 48 months or less. Conversely, 286 offenders (2.9%) would receive a sentence reduction of more than 10 years.

A more modest adjustment to the crack sentencing guidelines in 2007 was applied retroactively. "The 2007 reduction benefited over 15,000 crack prisoners, though the amount of sentence reduction was only around 2 years of imprisonment."

The federal corrections budget would be reduced by about $1 billion if the sentencing guideline change mandated by the Fair Sentencing Act was made retroactive.

* Mohamad Hammoud was the first man convicted of charges including material support for terrorism after 9/11 (he was the first man charged under a 1996 law that makes it illegal to give money to designated terror groups and was found guilty and sentenced shortly after 9/11). He was sentenced to 155-years in prison "for smuggling cigarettes and sending $3,500 of the profits to Hezbollah." This was reduced this past January by Judge Graham Mullen on the grounds that this was "grossly disproportionate." But, the new sentence for the man who has served about ten years in prison so far is 30 years in prison after the original sentence was reversed on appeal. Thus, "the 37-year-old from Lebanon will spend an additional two decades in prison, then likely be deported." Hammoud plans to appeal the new sentence as well.

His attorneys wanted Hammoud to walk out of the courtroom with a sentence of the more than 10 years he already served. . . They contend he sent the money to a wing of Hezbollah that helps provide Middle Eastern communities with clean water and good housing, not the military wing labeled terrorists by the United States government for numerous attacks on Israel. . . . defense attorneys brought up more than a dozen cases in which people got sentences much shorter than Hammoud, including sentences of only a few decades for defendants that provided actual weapons and hundreds of thousands of dollars to terrorist organizations. "This is a case where people get seven years, eight years," Hammoud's attorney Stanley Cohen said.

From here.

* Twin studies, surprisingly, show a strong hereditary component to adolescent crime victimization:

[G]enetic factors explained a surprisingly significant 40 to 45 percent of the variance in adolescent victimization among the twins, while non-shared environments (those environments that are not the same between siblings) explained the remaining variance. But among adolescents who were victimized repeatedly, the effect of genetic factors accounted for a whopping 64 percent of the variance.

The study's author surmises that "genetically influenced traits such as low self control affect delinquent behavior, and delinquents, particularly violent ones, tend to associate with antisocial peers."

* Low prices of consumer electronics in the U.K. have caused criminals to shift from committing burglaries to muggings where small, high value items like iPods and laptop computers are stolen.

* High IQ people of modest means are considerably less likely to get higher education in Minnesota than in Sweden, while low IQ people from affluent families were more likely to get higher education in Minnesota than in Sweden. Higher education is free in Sweden to students with good grades and test scores, but money is still a barrier to these students in the United States.

Notably, Harvard and several other Ivy League schools have instituted sliding scale tuition arrangements so that they can continue to admit the most qualified applicants regardless of means. For example, Harvard limits tuition to 10% of the first $180,000 of family income and has ceased including student loans in undergraduate financial aid packages.

* Tree ring data from Mexico released last year showed that a "large ancient drought previously confirmed for the Southwest of the United States is shown to have extended into central Mexico (1149-1167 AD)."

[It] also provides the first independent confirmation of the so-called Terminal Classic drought, a megadrought some anthropologists relate to the collapse of the Mayan civilization. This decades-long dry period had been previously determined by analysis of lake and basin sediments in other areas of Mexico and the Caribbean. . . [The data] narrowed the event's timing to 897-922 AD and confirmed that it had a wider geographical impact than previously thought, extending into the highlands of Central Mexico, where other classic period cultures were located.

This parallels recent 2500 years of paleoclimate data from Europe that also shows a strong link between the major upheaval in European civilization in the last couple of thousand years and climate trends.

At times of social stability and prosperity, like the rise of the Roman Empire between 300 B.C.E. and 200 C.E., Europe experienced warm, wet summers ideal for agriculture. Similar conditions accompanied the peak years of medieval Europe between 1000 C.E. and 1200 C.E. . . .

In the 3rd century C.E. . . . extended droughts matched the timing of barbarian invasions and political turmoil. Around 1300 C.E., on the other hand, a cold snap combined with wetter summers coincides with widespread famines and plague that wiped out nearly half of Europe's population by 1347. . . . In eras of prosperity, more trees were cut down for building and fuel, yielding more samples in the archaeological record. At other times, like the years after the Black Death and the so-called Migration Period between 300 C.E. and 600 C.E. when the Roman Empire was overwhelmed by tribes pushing in from the east, the number of wood samples dwindles to nearly nothing.

Krugman and Brad DeLong, meanwhile, have recently noted an interesting article from 1970 on the connection between the institutions of slavery and serfdom in Europe and the Black Death. Climate data may elucidate some of the unanswered questions from that analysis.

Cutting the Deficit

House Republicans in Congress are learning that it is hard for them to keep their promises of budget cuts.

The hardest hit agencies would include the Food and Drug Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and the departments of Commerce, Housing and Urban Development and Agriculture. . . . Foreign aid on an annualized basis would take a 6 percent cut. . . .

— The Department of Homeland Security would face a budget freeze instead of the 3 percent increase proposed by Obama. . . .

— Republicans would scale back Obama's proposed 4 percent, $23 billion increase for the Pentagon. Instead, the military budget would grow by just $10 billion.

— Popular programs such as health research and federal aid to school districts appear likely to take a hit when lawmakers write the spending bill for the departments of Education, Labor and Health and Human Services. Republicans promise not to cut the minimum $5,550 Pell Grant for low-income college students.

I proposed a combination of tax reforms, cuts to the defense budget, and cuts to domestic spending last November after the election, as a response to the bad proposals considered by the deficit reduction commission and the Republican proposal made during the campaign. To the domestic spending proposal, I made then, I would also suggest deep cuts to federal higher education funds for for profit higher education, on the order of about $2 billion, in a way that would provide greater confidence of results.

Meanwhile the Colorado General Assembly is considering state budget issues as well. Last summer, I addressed some of the issues it is facing (although mostly longer term fiscal viability issues) in the form of a proposed overhaul of the state and local public finances in Colorado.

Are Low Debt Levels Good?

Weld County, home of Greeley, Colorado, is the only county in Colorado, and one of the only local governments period, that has no long term debt. It has also managed to do this while keeping tax levels low.

Clearly, Weld County must be the most economically vibrant county in Colorado as a result? Right? After all, no other county in the state comes anywhere close in the fiscal responsibility department.

Well, no. Notwithstanding its fiscal responsibility (to a great extent a product of oil drilling related revenues in the county), Weld County is not a picture of prosperity that is drawing in businesses and driving economic growth in Colorado.

Instead, Weld County's growth has been concentrated in bedroom communities in the I-25 corridor where people return home from their jobs in Denver, Boulder, Longmont and Fort Collins. The county seat, Greeley, has a downtown that looks like it hasn't changed much since 1955 accompanied by lots of empty storefronts and empty sidewalks. Its slaughter houses are still in business, but they've been there for a long time rather than having been attracted there recently by the county's fiscally sound practices.

The brightest spot in the local economy is the University of Northern Colorado, which owes its existence to state government funding from tax dollars.

An idiot school board member has brought notoriety to its school district, but Greeley's school district is underperforming in any case. The school district is also a major employer in the county and it too derives much of that money from state government funding from tax dollars.

If Weld County is what debt free local government produces, do we really want it? Or, is the rather dismal economic base that we see in Weld County exhibit A in the case that you need to invest in your communities if you want good results in terms of job producing economic development?

Evidence That Value Added Evaluation May Be Unfair

Colorado's legislature has recognized that evaluating teachers and principals based on absolute levels of CSAP performance is unfair, because at the classroom and school level, CSAP performance is largely a function of student affluence and entire educational career school performance, rather than current teacher and current school performance.

As a result, the state has moved to a system where "value added" is measured for each teacher. This approach looks at CSAP improvement of children in a class during the course of a class. Are students improving more than average, less than average or typically?

Clearly, this is seems more fair. At the very least, it disentangles a lot of what happened before a child arrived in a teacher's class. But, does it really measure teaching quality?

A new twin study of U.K. twins finds that academic improvement measures like the system used in Colorado also have significant genetic components.

"These findings do not mean that educational quality is unimportant, in fact environmental factors were just as important as genetic factors. However, these results do suggest that children bring characteristics to the classroom that influence how well they will take advantage of the quality."

Surprisingly, according to the open access study, value added may actually be worse at assessing teacher performance than raw achievement scores:

Raw achievement shows moderate heritability (about 50%) and modest shared environmental influences (25%). Unexpectedly, we show that for indices of the added value of school, genetic influences remain moderate (around 50%), and the shared (school) environment is less important (about 12%). . . . At first glance, this high degree of genetic overlap between different cognitive and academic measures suggests that correcting achievement measures for general cognitive ability would remove the genetic influence on achievement. However, this genetic overlap is not 100%, so there could be residual genetic influences on achievement that are independent of those on general cognitive ability, or even previous measures of achievement. . . . The results were striking, indicating that even when previous achievement and a child's general cognitive ability are both removed, the residual achievement measure is still significantly influenced by genetic factors (heritabilities of 48% and 37% respectively for teacher-ratings and test data). The main point, to which we shall return, is that corrected-achievement scores are influenced by genetic factors that are independent of those influencing g or previous achievement.

Of course, great individual differences in educational improvement ability don't necessarily detract from a value added measure of teacher evaluation based on test scores if the mix in any given class of thirty kids in a classroom, or hundreds of kids in a school, tends to average out.

We know that raw achievement scores have a strong socio-economic component that varies greatly from school to school. We don't know, and the study doesn't tell us, if this achievement controlled improvement factor varies in a systemic way that is likely not to average out from school to school. For example, the study doesn't tell us, and U.K. data would probably not be very helpful in any case in measuring, if there were strong ethnic components to that variation.

If value added components are strongly heritable, but the genetic component of a value added effect controlled for raw achievement is randomly distributed from one classroom to the next, a value added measure is still valid.

But, if there is a clear pattern in which some category of students routinely improves a lot even after controlling for past achievement, while another category of students routinely improves little, then the new measure may simply create a more subtle version of the problem that causes Colorado to go from absolute performance to value added based evaluations of teachers and schools in the first place.

Eyeballing the latest round of Colorado value added evaluations data, the only distinct trend that I noted was that schools with a lot of English language learners seemed to have an edge in value added measures, presumably because poor English language skills of smart students suppressed their prior year achievement, but this effect presumably rapidly eased as the students gained English language mastery.

Colorado's system also addresses concerns that learning disabilities might have an effect independent of raw achievement levels, by limiting the way that the system can be used in classes with many special education students.

The Phoenix Requiem To Be Published

Sarah Ellerton's excellent webcomic The Phoenix Requiem will be published this year by 4th Dimension Entertainment. The niche publisher appears to be focusing on publishing webcomics, which makes them available to a wider audience.

The lavishly drawn Victorian era epic ghost story will run about 800 color pages when complete and currently has about 775 pages available on the web, with groups of pages published twice a week. The full webcomic will be complete in a month or two.