Middle school boys are famous for putting signs up on their bedroom doors. My son is no exception.
The classic messages are either "Keep out!" or "No girls allowed!"
The sign on his door is different. It says, "Come In."
It is nice to think that maybe I've done something a little bit right in the parenting department.
20 December 2012
18 December 2012
TSA Style Security Measures Counterproductive
A new book, "Against Security" by Harvey Molotch, reviewed here, cogently argues that the approach to securing public places exemplified by the Transportation Security Administration, is really "security theater" that may actually put us at greater risk.
A low key, liberal society has a lot of payoffs that even its advocates often don't fully appreaciate. A society where people are comfortable passing along tips to the right people are more effective than checkpoints, and reliance on every day heros may be more effective than efforts to creat giant bureaucracies of security specialists.
We would also be well served, generally, by learning to better teach our children the generalized skill of self-organization, something that Americans have tended to do less well in the last half century or so, for example, than their Japanese and British peers.
Sometimes we implement security measures against one threat, only to magnify another. . . . special “high-entry” subway turnstiles make it much harder for people to sneak in for a free ride but also make platform evacuations much slower in the case of an emergency. . . .
[E]ffective security comes less from the top down and more from the bottom up. . . . When we don’t know what sort of threats we want to defend against, it makes sense to give the people closest to whatever is happening the authority and the flexibility to do what is necessary. In many of Molotch’s anecdotes and examples, the authority figure—a subway train driver, a policeman—has to break existing rules to provide the security needed in a particular situation. Many security failures are exacerbated by a reflexive adherence to regulations. . . . this kind of individual initiative and resilience [is] . . . a critical source of true security.
We get much more bang for our security dollar by not trying to guess what terrorists are going to do next. Investigation, intelligence, and emergency response are where we should be spending our money. . . .we do better as a society when we trust and respect people more. Yes, the occasional bad thing will happen, but 1) it happens less often, and is less damaging, than you probably think, and 2) individuals naturally organize to defend each other. This is what happened during the evacuation of the Twin Towers and in the aftermath of Katrina before official security took over. Those in charge often do a worse job than the common people on the ground. . . . we should focus on nurturing the good in most people—by giving them the ability and freedom to self-organize in the event of a security disaster, for example—rather than focusing solely on the evil of the very few.
A low key, liberal society has a lot of payoffs that even its advocates often don't fully appreaciate. A society where people are comfortable passing along tips to the right people are more effective than checkpoints, and reliance on every day heros may be more effective than efforts to creat giant bureaucracies of security specialists.
We would also be well served, generally, by learning to better teach our children the generalized skill of self-organization, something that Americans have tended to do less well in the last half century or so, for example, than their Japanese and British peers.
A Rare, Justified Long Child Pornography Sentence
While there are many sentences for child pornography crimes that are clearly and grossly excessive, the 50-year federal sentence of imprisonment imposed on the 46-year old man convicted of producing child pornography a recent case is not one of them.
From a recent decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
Judge Posner, however, rightly notes in a concurring opinion, that the ends of justice could have been achieved, for example, with a 30 year term, at a far lower public cost.
The defendant pleaded guilty to four counts of producing child pornography. 18 U.S.C. § 2251(a). He produced them by photographing his repeated sexual assaults on a girl who was a friend of his daughters and sometimes slept over at his house.
He obtained additional pornographic images of her by threatening to kill her unless she photographed herself in sexually explicit poses and emailed him the images. The abuses began when she was 11 years old and continued until she was 14.
From a recent decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
Judge Posner, however, rightly notes in a concurring opinion, that the ends of justice could have been achieved, for example, with a 30 year term, at a far lower public cost.
17 December 2012
It's Not Just Witches
There are not many, but the states that forbid non-religiousness – typically as part of “anti-blasphemy” legislation – include seven nations where atheism is punishable by death. All seven establish Islam as the state religion. Though that list includes some dictatorships, the country that appears to most frequently condemn atheists to death for their beliefs is actually a democracy, if a frail one: Pakistan. Others include Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan, the West African state of Mauritania, and the Maldives, an island nation in the Indian Ocean.From the Washington Post.
Egypt, Eritrea and Indonesia merely throw atheists who out themselves in prison.
"Earlier this year, a 23-year-old Saudi man named Hamza Kashgari" who made secular comments, was charged under these statutes in Saudi Arabia. He fled for his life, but was apprehended in Malaysia and deported back to Saudi Arabia where he currently faces a potential death sentence.
Reversions To The Dominant Party Model?
In political science, one of the lesser known, but not that uncommon, bits of middle ground between a true multiparty political system and a one party state is a "dominant party system."
In a dominant party system, there is more than one legally recognized political party and it even wins minor individual political races now and then, but a "dominant party" always wins in a long standing pattern that persists for decades.
Three of the most common examples are the Democratic party in the American "Solid South" from the end of Reconstruction (after the U.S. Civil War) through the 1950s, and PRI in Mexico for a roughly eighty year period, and the LDP in Japan from the establishment of an representative democracy after World War II until quite recently.
Each of those examples of dominant party systems ended. Starting in the 1960s, the "Solid South" was supplanted by a competive Republican party (at least in federal elections), along with "Dixiecrats" and more liberal Democrats. The main opposition party to the PRI took control in Mexico. And, the LDP stumbled in the face of competition from an upstart party to the left of them in Japan (the "Liberal Democratic" party in Japan is actually its more conservative major political party).
But, political realignment seems to have almost run its course in the American South, threatening to make the Republican Party a reincarnated dominant party of the region with a new name. And, this fall, both the PRI in Mexico and the LDP in Japan have been resoundingly restored to power by voters.
Of course, any viable two party system assumes that there will be some alternation of political power at new elections. The conventional wisdom is that once a dominant party system lapses for a bit that the political system in question is no longer a dominant party system. But, what if we are instead seeing a "relapse" in to long term dominant party systems in three regions that have been long accustomed to operating that way with only recent and brief interruptions. Does that bode ill for the political future of the places that are experiencing it?
In a dominant party system, there is more than one legally recognized political party and it even wins minor individual political races now and then, but a "dominant party" always wins in a long standing pattern that persists for decades.
Three of the most common examples are the Democratic party in the American "Solid South" from the end of Reconstruction (after the U.S. Civil War) through the 1950s, and PRI in Mexico for a roughly eighty year period, and the LDP in Japan from the establishment of an representative democracy after World War II until quite recently.
Each of those examples of dominant party systems ended. Starting in the 1960s, the "Solid South" was supplanted by a competive Republican party (at least in federal elections), along with "Dixiecrats" and more liberal Democrats. The main opposition party to the PRI took control in Mexico. And, the LDP stumbled in the face of competition from an upstart party to the left of them in Japan (the "Liberal Democratic" party in Japan is actually its more conservative major political party).
But, political realignment seems to have almost run its course in the American South, threatening to make the Republican Party a reincarnated dominant party of the region with a new name. And, this fall, both the PRI in Mexico and the LDP in Japan have been resoundingly restored to power by voters.
Of course, any viable two party system assumes that there will be some alternation of political power at new elections. The conventional wisdom is that once a dominant party system lapses for a bit that the political system in question is no longer a dominant party system. But, what if we are instead seeing a "relapse" in to long term dominant party systems in three regions that have been long accustomed to operating that way with only recent and brief interruptions. Does that bode ill for the political future of the places that are experiencing it?
A Long Standing Tradition
As John Bainbridge wrote in The New Yorker in 1961,
From here.
Still true, and rightly so, half a century later.
It is currently fashionable among the more advanced spirits in this country to look upon Texas with an air of amused condescension.
From here.
Still true, and rightly so, half a century later.
Psychosis Not Preventable
Neither medication nor psychotherapy is effective in improving the prognosis for youngsters considered to be at high risk of developing psychosis, according to a major study just published.
The idea of identifying and treating young people at risk of becoming psychotic - because of a family history of schizophrenia, or because they're showing some mild symptoms - has become very fashionable lately. But can we really do anything to pre-empt the disorder?
In this trial, 115 "ultra-high risk" Australian subjects were randomized to three different treatment conditions, or if they didn't agree to treatment, they were just followed up to see what happened.
The treatments didn't work. . . .
The other lesson here is that even "ultra-high risk" folks usually don't get psychotic: only about 10-20% of them, in fact, became ill in the first two years of this study; the British results I mentioned are very similar.
So is this really "ultra high"? Relatively, yes it is; even a 10% risk is far higher than the chance that a random person on the street would have. But in absolute terms, perhaps not.
A concern here is that rounding these folks up, labelling and 'treating' them might make their lives worse, or even increase the risk of psychosis.From Neuroskeptic.
Genes, Enviroment and Developmental Biology
It has long been known that psychosis has a very strong genetic component, but since a large share of all genetic conditions lead to a phenotype (observable characteristic) via a gene x environment mechanism, it isn't unreasonable to think that genes that predispose someone for psychosis merely create vulnerability to whatever environmental triggers cause psychosis to manifest.
On the other hand, studies of the mechanisms of schizophrenia, which usually manifests in late adolescence, point to a process of neurological system reorganization that happens as part of the usual developmental process as being one of the key triggers for the onset of the condition in people who are genetically predisposed to it.
So, unless a treatment actually suppresses the biochemical process of adolescence (something that is done in the case of some transgender individuals, so that irreversible adolescent transformations of the body into a gender mold that undermine gender reassignment efforts can be suppressed until the individual is old enough to make his or her own decisions about sex reassignment treatments as a chronological adult), the treatment may be powerless to prevent the genes involved in schizophrenia from being triggered.
Non-Treatment Benefits Of Early Diagnosis
Similar issues come up in efforts to diagnosis autism early in the hope of treating it, despite the fact that it isn't clear yet that any of those treatments really work.
Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that early diagnosis is a bad idea.
Knowing that a serious mental health condition is likely to manifest at a particular point in someone's life helps families make sensible plans, even if those plans may be entirely non-medical in nature (e.g. arranging to have inheritances from a grandparent placed in protective trusts rather than distributed outright), or are purely of the harm reduction variety rather than constituting true "treatment" (e.g. keeping weapons out of the house where there is a risk that a psychotic condition may manifest).
How Do Treatment Myths Form?
But, these kinds of results do call into doubt approaches to dealing with these conditions (and the risk that they may develop in the case of individuals at high risk for them) that are practically articles of faith among members of communities of family members of affected individuals.
It is easy to see how these belief systems could form. Any form of "treatment" whatsoever is likely to be 80%-90% effective even among the highest risk individuals, and a run of good luck in a small study can easily get better results than that simply due to random chance. But, "success rates" at those levels don't actually mean anything.
How Much Risk Is Too Much?
The statistical issues involved are similar to those involved in cousin marriage or a decision of an older father to have more children.
Both marrying a cousin and having a child at an advanced age greatly increase the risk of cogenital genetic problems for the resulting child. But, a huge percentage of children in both cases are perfectly normal anyway, because the risks that are magnified by cousin marriage and advanced paternal age are so small in the absence of a risk factor. Is a risk that is increased ten-fold or more worth heeding, if there is a 90% or 95% or 98% chance that eveything will be fine despite the heightened risks? Those are decisions that scientistists and doctors can't make for people (or at least shouldn't make for people).
I personally have made medical decisions for myself to receive treatments with a chance of success in the 90% to 98% range, knowing that there is a real risk of serious side effects, when the benefit to be obtained if the treatment works well is great.
Snitching Pays
Snitching has become so commonplace that in the past five years at least 48,895 federal convicts — one of every eight — had their prison sentences reduced in exchange for helping government investigators. . . . The deals can chop a decade or more off of their sentences.From here.
The larger story recounts a scheme in Atlanta wherein criminal defendants paid people outside the prison to provide snitch information to reduce their sentences when they didn't actually have any information of their own to provide to prosecutors.
One of the particular concerns when it comes to sentencing relief based on snitching is that low level drug dealers often end up serving longer sentences than high level drug dealers, because the high level drug dealers have more information to provide prosecutors than low level drug dealers do.
One suspects that snitching is somewhat less important in the state and local criminal justice process because a far smaller share of state and local than federal criminal prosecutions involve crimes that involved organized group activity to any great extent. Also, most state and local sentencing systems do not rely on a system like the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines of the federal system that particularly flag leniency in exchange for cooperation with the government.
On the other hand, some estimates put the percentage of Colorado prison inmates who are gang members at close to 50%, so perhaps I am mistaken.
14 December 2012
Friday Rants
* Internet Security. There are too many usernames and passwords and account numbers to remember in life. My main list, which is incomplete, fills all of the space on a single sheet of paper, typed. If it was complete, it would take at least another half of a typed page or more. Moreover, so called security protocols make it impermissible to use passwords that you could actually remember. Humans do just fine in generating very large number of character passwords that would be hard to crack, but do very poorly at remembering irregular capitalization, punctuation codes and numbers. We want passwords that are human friendly and unfriendly to computerized systems that use automated means to hack passwords.
* Colorado's E-Filing System. While there are wonders associated with mandatory electronic filing of documents in the court system in Colorado, there are also many annoyances.
Multiple Systems. At the moment there are two parallel systems in federal court, and two parallel systems in state court, one of which recently changed ownership.
Legally Allowed Or Required Filings That Are Impossible To Do. Moreover, even though e-filing is mandatory, there are many things (e.g. intervening on behalf of a new party in an existing action, or giving notice by mail to a non-party in probate action) which are required but not possible to do in the system.
Probate Cases. The flaws in the e-filing system in probate cases are particularly problematic. The system doesn't acknowledge that a case exists, unless you are currently counsel of record for an existing party in a probate case, despite the fact that a great many people who are beneficiaries of an estate or creditors or contestants to a will or have interests in a guardianship are supposed to participate in probate proceedings which are a matter of public record. The mandatory e-filing system also has no means of accepting jury demands in probate cases despite the fact that there are certain types of probate cases where there is a right to a jury trial. A number of probate filings can't be e-filed (e.g. wills and trust registration statements), but the list of what can and cannot be filed is less than clear.
Other annoyances are minor, but irritating.
Filing Exhibits. For example, probably something like 50%-70% of all court filings include exhibits, and in many case there are several exhibits that support a single affidavit, motion, complaint or petition. Yet, rather than having a filing category for "Exhibits", they are classified as "Filing Other" as if it was something that no one in the Court system had ever heard of before.
Warnings About Failing To Serve Parties That Haven't Appeared. As another example, Rule 5 of the rules of civil procedure requires that court filings be served upon parties who have entered appearances in a case, but no a parties who have not made any filings in a case, subject to very rare exceptions. Yet, the e-filing system sends grave warning messages every time a filing is not served on a party that has not yet entered an appearance in an action, which a filer must click to override.
Bugs In Noting Which Attorneys Have Appeared. As a third, under the Rules of Civil Procedure, every attorney listed on any pleading filed in the case is an attorney of record in the case, but the e-filing system only includes attorneys who have actually personally filed something in the case and then when an attorney withdraws from representing people in a case often continues to send that attorney filings.
Failure To Indicate When Certain Court Actions Are Taken. More seriously, attorneys who are of record in cases are not automatically notified of entries made by the clerk of the court in a case, such as docketing notes, and sometimes even actual court orders, even though these are public records that are part of the record on appeal in a case.
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Research Fees. The fees in the file and serve system in the state courts for research court filings that are a matter of public record, which is a zero added cost service from the provider's perspective, are almost 100 times as expensive as they are in the federal court system's PACER system.
* Colorado's Outdated Pleading Format Rules. In a related rant, every single court pleading in Colorado must have several formalities that are outdated in the era of mandatory e-filing.
Court Address and Contact Information For The Filing Party. Each pleading must be accompanied by a full recitation of contact information for the filing party and the address of the court with which the case is filed. Yet, in the e-filing system, the full contact information of the filing party is retained in the system and a click away in general case information, and you aren't allowed to mail anything to the Court in any case.
Certificates of Service. Every Court filing must have a certificate of service establishing that copies have been provided to all parties appearing in the action. But, a transaction receipt retained by the third party e-fililng system in the cloud provides an authoritative, automatically generated, and almost always more accurate in the event of a dispute record of who was and was not served with a e-filing document.
Proposed Orders. Every motion that is filed in a Colorado court must be accompanied by a proposed order, no matter how straight forward the request (e.g. a request for an extension of time). Often, a single word order: "Granted" or "Denied" is appropriate. And, something like 90% of the time, judges use a feature of the e-filing system that allows a judge to enter his order directly on the computer from a template that is a modified version of the motion being ruled upon, rather than using the proposed orders that are submitted by the parties which would have to be printed out, manually signed and then scanned back into the system.
Dispensing with these requirements would reduce the length of almost every court filing by a page, significantly reduce the need for paralegal support in law offices, and eliminate several meaningless formalities that exist merely as as opportunities for people drafting court documents to make minor clerical errors that lead to confusion, for example, by inadvertently including an inaccuracy in a certificate of service.
* Currency. Nobody takes pennies! Also, coin and currency designs seem to be changed faster than teen fashions these days. It is hard to know if your money is even real any more. While I'm at it, I will go on record urging the abolition of the $2, $10 and $50 dollar bills that no one ever uses.
* Parking Meters. Parking meters in Denver no longer accept my old meter key that was preloaded with funds to pay parking meters. The amount of residual money that I have on mine is miniscule, but it is still a pain.
* Downtown Parking. I buy monthly parking in a local surface lot downtown that also allows for per day parking purchases at a kiosk on the lot. About 95% of the time this works perfectly, I don't have to worry about getting a ticket if I stay at work past 6:00 p.m. if I only bought parking until then like I did when I paid by the day, and I get the perk of free parking for events like the Parade of Lights downtown. But, about once or twice a month, without any warning whatsoever, everybody decides to show up for work downtown, nobody takes sick days or vacations, everybody schedules meeting with people downtown, and all of the travelling salesmen show up to the office. On those rare days, every spot in my lot, and for that matter every other lot in a three or four block radius and all street parking is completely full. This sucks.
As pleased as I am that the Denver Public Schools are selling their headquarters at 900 Grant Street and moving to a thirteen story building that is half a block from my office at 1860 Lincoln Street, and will also be home to a new (long overdue) downtown elementary school and a relocated vocational school (Emily Griffith), I fear that the parking situation will only get worse once they make their move.
* Notarizations. In New York State, at least in some towns, requests for death certificates must be notarized. For that matter, bloody everything you do in New York State must be notarized. WTF!
Utah, in contrast, allows the vast majority of matters that have to be notarized even in less draconian Colorado, to be signed outside the presence of a notary on a document that says that it is signed under penalties of perjury. Given the context that makes confirmation of the identity of the signing party less problematic in court cases than in real estate transactions, dispensing with most notarizations in Court filings would make all sorts of sense, particularly in an era where more communications are conducted electronically from places where notaries are difficult to locate, rather than in person in law offices where notaries are omnipresent.
* Loan Servicer Seterus. At loan serving company Seterus, you aren't allowed to speak on the telephone with anyone in the department that processes the handling of processing of deceased borrowers accounts, because "they aren't trained in customer service."
In one dealing I had with them, it took about two months and multiple attempts to get them to send mail to me as attorney for the estate of a decedent, and two and a half more months after that for them to acknowledge that the decedent was dead - which happened only after multiple communications including one that contained almost every single thesaurus equivalent to the word "dead".
Seterus has a practice of forcing the loans of deceased borrowers into foreclosure by refusing to accept payments from anyone else, even the new owner of the property. Yet another proof of the Dilbert principle: businesses aren't any more rational than government.
Seterus also has the annoying practice of sending you letters that say nothing exept that they received your letter and will reply to it later (which they don't always do), and of sending the same mail over and over again, apparently without realizing it. More paper does not mean better communication.
* The Denver Post. I still greatly dislike the fact that the Denver Post has banished national and world news to a dramatically slimmed down scope of coverage in a second part of the news section. The quality of the product just gets worse and worse and worse even though the price continues to increase. I haven't readed the point of dropping my subscription yet, but I'm getting close.
* Twinkies. I miss Twinkies and other Hostess deserts. I didn't have them often, but every once and I while, I do crave one. I understand that the formulas, trademarks and production plants have many bidders. With any luck, the new owner will adopt one of my pet ideas: Caffinated Twinkies. Wouldn't that be glorious?
* E-Book Page Numbering. Probably one in every three or four books that I read, I read in the form of downloaded e-books, either from the library or from a commercial source. E-books have page numbers, just like the hard copy originals. But, the page numbers aren't the same. For example, I recently read an e-book that had about 250 pages in E-Book form. But, exactly the same book in hard copy form had about 400 pages. Why?
It costs nothing to have consistent page numbering practice, which is what is done in the downloadable versions of reported court decisions, of academic papers in law and physics and anthropology, and in a variety of other contexts. The discrepency makes citations to e-books by page number inconsistent and differing numbers of pages offer no important added value to the e-book.
* Discover Magazine had a number of excellent blogs on science topics, including Gene Expression and Cosmic Variance each of which had vibrant communities of readers who commented on and discussed the posts made there. Recently, an overhaul of the formats of this group of blogs destroyed almost entirely the online community of readers and commenters and contributed to the departure of the lead author of the Cosmic Variance blog. Why did they have to mess with a good thing that was working well?
* The Fiscal Cliff Process. The fiscal cliff presents one of the most important decision points in recent U.S. history on federal taxing and spending policy. It is a discussion that is welcome and needs to be conducted. But, why is it that Congress, in its wisdom, decided that the best way to have that discussion was to play chicken a couple of days before the effective dates of the fiscal cliff tax and spending provisions in the Christmas and New Year's sessions of a lame duck Congress?
The expiration date of many of these tax provisions have been on the book for almost a decade. The people who will cast the votes have been in office for more than twenty-three months already. The deal that provides for automatic cuts in federal spending if no agreement is reached has been on the books for many, many months. This is not being done at the last minute because it was a surprise, or because the decision has been reserved for incoming members of Congress.
Is it so impossible for members of Congress to have the courtesy to set a deadline for themselves at some more convenient time, perhaps one or two business days before Thanksgiving, so that the underappreciated bureaucrats who have to write tax forms and prepare agency budgets based upon their decisions could have several weeks to digest whatever decision was made and impliment it, and so that everyone in the political process involved in making the decision could enjoy the holiday season instead of focusing on an entirely foreseeable chore?
Better yet, why not require all legislation to be completed before Halloween, and then swear in their successors by late November?
Also, couldn't we design a legislative process that doesn't routine rely on games of chicken between people who have absolute vetos over each other's decisions to make policy? What ever happened to unhurried deliberation and resolution of issues through votes cast by elected officials according to a consensus set of rules of parliamentary procedure. I want a government where it at least looks like decisions are being made by civilized grown ups. Is that really too much to ask?
* Construction. Road construction is a never ending process. It bogs up traffic. But, would it be so much to ask to at least be told, as we sit in gridlock for yet another day as cars merge into one or two fewer lane as we have for months on end in some particular spot, when we can reasonably hope to see the project completed?
* TV News "Expert" Discussions. Somebody who produces TV news discussion spots on policy issues and current affairs thinks that having grown men and women with all sorts of advanced credentials talk over each other and yell and interrupt each other makes good dramatic television. I hate it. I work hard not to have that kind of discussion climate in my home and workplace and really don't appreciate some television news show putting that kind of atmosphere back in my living room.
I don't like watching people with PhD's act like toddlers on television any more than I like it when politicians act like toddlers on television.
Call me old fashioned, but I honestly believe that it is possible to have an informative and persuasive conservation about an emotional policy issue in a civilized manner. The hormone fueled trashy conflict adds nothing to the discussion and makes me want to turn off the discussion even if the people involved really did have something worthwhile to say.
* Charity Junk Calls. The "no call list" has done an admirable job of shutting down telephone solicitations for goods and services that I don't want. But, it doesn't apply to charity calls, and those are relentless. Caller ID allows you to screen them, but I am still sick and tired of the never ending calls from the Fraternal Order of Police and three or four different organizations that my discarded clothes and household goods. Add cold call charitable solicitations to the "no call list" now.
* Voice Mail. It may be a necessary evil, but I absolutely hate voice mail. It takes a long time to retrieve and listen to, while you can quickly scan and assess texts and e-mails, and don't have to decipher sometimes difficult to hear accents when writing down numbers and names left on voice mails. A world without voice mail would be a better world.
Notably, one study by a telephone company concluded that people responded to texts about ten or twenty times as quickly as they do to voice mails. So, while others may not be as vocal as I am, many people, deep down, share the sentiment.
* Microsoft Word Outlining and Autonumbering Functions. Most of the time, I manage to disable the outlining and autonumbering functions of Microsoft Word, but when I don't, these features are among the most vexing things I encounter in a day. What you type should be what you get. But, it is quite tricky to disable the feature in a document that has it.
* Other Unwanted Microsoft Word Features. As a matter of personal and office style, there are only three or four fonts and only about six different font sizes that I use when I word process documents. There are also only three colors that I ever use (black, red and blue), and there are a whole host of formatting options that I never use. Yet, there is no easy way to suppress the formatting options that I never use to simplify the interface. It might be possible, but it is very time consuming and difficult and threatens to screw up compatability with other documents.
On the other hand, there are a number of legal and scientific words that don't appear in the spell checking dictionary that are correctly spelled but are flagged as misspelled that it is annoying to have flagged, but it is a pain to train the dictionary otherwise.
I use this computer program for many hours a day every work day and for many hours a week outside of work responsibilities. I would happily pay something like $100-$150 to get an "upgrade" to Microsoft Word that would suppress all of the features that I don't use and add the words that I do use to its dictionary. I have to think that there are millions of people who share my sentiment. Why hasn't the market responded to our needs? It would seem like a very simple think to do technologically and implement well and generate new revenue. What do all the thousands of geeks at Microsoft do instead? Create new inferior versions of Windows?
* Blogger HTML mode page breaks. In the blogger software, you can write posts either in "Compose Mode" which is more WYSIWYG, with lots of hidden and awkward complexities in the code, or in "HTML" mode where you put in all the formatting yourself. The one bad thing about HTML mode, however, is that the paragraph breaks that show on the display don't show up when you post it unless you add a code in the form <br /> to it (twice if you want a space between paragraphs). If this were automatically entered every time you pressed return in that part of the editor, it would be much better.
* Colorado's E-Filing System. While there are wonders associated with mandatory electronic filing of documents in the court system in Colorado, there are also many annoyances.
Multiple Systems. At the moment there are two parallel systems in federal court, and two parallel systems in state court, one of which recently changed ownership.
Legally Allowed Or Required Filings That Are Impossible To Do. Moreover, even though e-filing is mandatory, there are many things (e.g. intervening on behalf of a new party in an existing action, or giving notice by mail to a non-party in probate action) which are required but not possible to do in the system.
Probate Cases. The flaws in the e-filing system in probate cases are particularly problematic. The system doesn't acknowledge that a case exists, unless you are currently counsel of record for an existing party in a probate case, despite the fact that a great many people who are beneficiaries of an estate or creditors or contestants to a will or have interests in a guardianship are supposed to participate in probate proceedings which are a matter of public record. The mandatory e-filing system also has no means of accepting jury demands in probate cases despite the fact that there are certain types of probate cases where there is a right to a jury trial. A number of probate filings can't be e-filed (e.g. wills and trust registration statements), but the list of what can and cannot be filed is less than clear.
Other annoyances are minor, but irritating.
Filing Exhibits. For example, probably something like 50%-70% of all court filings include exhibits, and in many case there are several exhibits that support a single affidavit, motion, complaint or petition. Yet, rather than having a filing category for "Exhibits", they are classified as "Filing Other" as if it was something that no one in the Court system had ever heard of before.
Warnings About Failing To Serve Parties That Haven't Appeared. As another example, Rule 5 of the rules of civil procedure requires that court filings be served upon parties who have entered appearances in a case, but no a parties who have not made any filings in a case, subject to very rare exceptions. Yet, the e-filing system sends grave warning messages every time a filing is not served on a party that has not yet entered an appearance in an action, which a filer must click to override.
Bugs In Noting Which Attorneys Have Appeared. As a third, under the Rules of Civil Procedure, every attorney listed on any pleading filed in the case is an attorney of record in the case, but the e-filing system only includes attorneys who have actually personally filed something in the case and then when an attorney withdraws from representing people in a case often continues to send that attorney filings.
Failure To Indicate When Certain Court Actions Are Taken. More seriously, attorneys who are of record in cases are not automatically notified of entries made by the clerk of the court in a case, such as docketing notes, and sometimes even actual court orders, even though these are public records that are part of the record on appeal in a case.
'
Research Fees. The fees in the file and serve system in the state courts for research court filings that are a matter of public record, which is a zero added cost service from the provider's perspective, are almost 100 times as expensive as they are in the federal court system's PACER system.
* Colorado's Outdated Pleading Format Rules. In a related rant, every single court pleading in Colorado must have several formalities that are outdated in the era of mandatory e-filing.
Court Address and Contact Information For The Filing Party. Each pleading must be accompanied by a full recitation of contact information for the filing party and the address of the court with which the case is filed. Yet, in the e-filing system, the full contact information of the filing party is retained in the system and a click away in general case information, and you aren't allowed to mail anything to the Court in any case.
Certificates of Service. Every Court filing must have a certificate of service establishing that copies have been provided to all parties appearing in the action. But, a transaction receipt retained by the third party e-fililng system in the cloud provides an authoritative, automatically generated, and almost always more accurate in the event of a dispute record of who was and was not served with a e-filing document.
Proposed Orders. Every motion that is filed in a Colorado court must be accompanied by a proposed order, no matter how straight forward the request (e.g. a request for an extension of time). Often, a single word order: "Granted" or "Denied" is appropriate. And, something like 90% of the time, judges use a feature of the e-filing system that allows a judge to enter his order directly on the computer from a template that is a modified version of the motion being ruled upon, rather than using the proposed orders that are submitted by the parties which would have to be printed out, manually signed and then scanned back into the system.
Dispensing with these requirements would reduce the length of almost every court filing by a page, significantly reduce the need for paralegal support in law offices, and eliminate several meaningless formalities that exist merely as as opportunities for people drafting court documents to make minor clerical errors that lead to confusion, for example, by inadvertently including an inaccuracy in a certificate of service.
* Currency. Nobody takes pennies! Also, coin and currency designs seem to be changed faster than teen fashions these days. It is hard to know if your money is even real any more. While I'm at it, I will go on record urging the abolition of the $2, $10 and $50 dollar bills that no one ever uses.
* Parking Meters. Parking meters in Denver no longer accept my old meter key that was preloaded with funds to pay parking meters. The amount of residual money that I have on mine is miniscule, but it is still a pain.
* Downtown Parking. I buy monthly parking in a local surface lot downtown that also allows for per day parking purchases at a kiosk on the lot. About 95% of the time this works perfectly, I don't have to worry about getting a ticket if I stay at work past 6:00 p.m. if I only bought parking until then like I did when I paid by the day, and I get the perk of free parking for events like the Parade of Lights downtown. But, about once or twice a month, without any warning whatsoever, everybody decides to show up for work downtown, nobody takes sick days or vacations, everybody schedules meeting with people downtown, and all of the travelling salesmen show up to the office. On those rare days, every spot in my lot, and for that matter every other lot in a three or four block radius and all street parking is completely full. This sucks.
As pleased as I am that the Denver Public Schools are selling their headquarters at 900 Grant Street and moving to a thirteen story building that is half a block from my office at 1860 Lincoln Street, and will also be home to a new (long overdue) downtown elementary school and a relocated vocational school (Emily Griffith), I fear that the parking situation will only get worse once they make their move.
* Notarizations. In New York State, at least in some towns, requests for death certificates must be notarized. For that matter, bloody everything you do in New York State must be notarized. WTF!
Utah, in contrast, allows the vast majority of matters that have to be notarized even in less draconian Colorado, to be signed outside the presence of a notary on a document that says that it is signed under penalties of perjury. Given the context that makes confirmation of the identity of the signing party less problematic in court cases than in real estate transactions, dispensing with most notarizations in Court filings would make all sorts of sense, particularly in an era where more communications are conducted electronically from places where notaries are difficult to locate, rather than in person in law offices where notaries are omnipresent.
* Loan Servicer Seterus. At loan serving company Seterus, you aren't allowed to speak on the telephone with anyone in the department that processes the handling of processing of deceased borrowers accounts, because "they aren't trained in customer service."
In one dealing I had with them, it took about two months and multiple attempts to get them to send mail to me as attorney for the estate of a decedent, and two and a half more months after that for them to acknowledge that the decedent was dead - which happened only after multiple communications including one that contained almost every single thesaurus equivalent to the word "dead".
Seterus has a practice of forcing the loans of deceased borrowers into foreclosure by refusing to accept payments from anyone else, even the new owner of the property. Yet another proof of the Dilbert principle: businesses aren't any more rational than government.
Seterus also has the annoying practice of sending you letters that say nothing exept that they received your letter and will reply to it later (which they don't always do), and of sending the same mail over and over again, apparently without realizing it. More paper does not mean better communication.
* The Denver Post. I still greatly dislike the fact that the Denver Post has banished national and world news to a dramatically slimmed down scope of coverage in a second part of the news section. The quality of the product just gets worse and worse and worse even though the price continues to increase. I haven't readed the point of dropping my subscription yet, but I'm getting close.
* Twinkies. I miss Twinkies and other Hostess deserts. I didn't have them often, but every once and I while, I do crave one. I understand that the formulas, trademarks and production plants have many bidders. With any luck, the new owner will adopt one of my pet ideas: Caffinated Twinkies. Wouldn't that be glorious?
* E-Book Page Numbering. Probably one in every three or four books that I read, I read in the form of downloaded e-books, either from the library or from a commercial source. E-books have page numbers, just like the hard copy originals. But, the page numbers aren't the same. For example, I recently read an e-book that had about 250 pages in E-Book form. But, exactly the same book in hard copy form had about 400 pages. Why?
It costs nothing to have consistent page numbering practice, which is what is done in the downloadable versions of reported court decisions, of academic papers in law and physics and anthropology, and in a variety of other contexts. The discrepency makes citations to e-books by page number inconsistent and differing numbers of pages offer no important added value to the e-book.
* Discover Magazine had a number of excellent blogs on science topics, including Gene Expression and Cosmic Variance each of which had vibrant communities of readers who commented on and discussed the posts made there. Recently, an overhaul of the formats of this group of blogs destroyed almost entirely the online community of readers and commenters and contributed to the departure of the lead author of the Cosmic Variance blog. Why did they have to mess with a good thing that was working well?
* The Fiscal Cliff Process. The fiscal cliff presents one of the most important decision points in recent U.S. history on federal taxing and spending policy. It is a discussion that is welcome and needs to be conducted. But, why is it that Congress, in its wisdom, decided that the best way to have that discussion was to play chicken a couple of days before the effective dates of the fiscal cliff tax and spending provisions in the Christmas and New Year's sessions of a lame duck Congress?
The expiration date of many of these tax provisions have been on the book for almost a decade. The people who will cast the votes have been in office for more than twenty-three months already. The deal that provides for automatic cuts in federal spending if no agreement is reached has been on the books for many, many months. This is not being done at the last minute because it was a surprise, or because the decision has been reserved for incoming members of Congress.
Is it so impossible for members of Congress to have the courtesy to set a deadline for themselves at some more convenient time, perhaps one or two business days before Thanksgiving, so that the underappreciated bureaucrats who have to write tax forms and prepare agency budgets based upon their decisions could have several weeks to digest whatever decision was made and impliment it, and so that everyone in the political process involved in making the decision could enjoy the holiday season instead of focusing on an entirely foreseeable chore?
Better yet, why not require all legislation to be completed before Halloween, and then swear in their successors by late November?
Also, couldn't we design a legislative process that doesn't routine rely on games of chicken between people who have absolute vetos over each other's decisions to make policy? What ever happened to unhurried deliberation and resolution of issues through votes cast by elected officials according to a consensus set of rules of parliamentary procedure. I want a government where it at least looks like decisions are being made by civilized grown ups. Is that really too much to ask?
* Construction. Road construction is a never ending process. It bogs up traffic. But, would it be so much to ask to at least be told, as we sit in gridlock for yet another day as cars merge into one or two fewer lane as we have for months on end in some particular spot, when we can reasonably hope to see the project completed?
* TV News "Expert" Discussions. Somebody who produces TV news discussion spots on policy issues and current affairs thinks that having grown men and women with all sorts of advanced credentials talk over each other and yell and interrupt each other makes good dramatic television. I hate it. I work hard not to have that kind of discussion climate in my home and workplace and really don't appreciate some television news show putting that kind of atmosphere back in my living room.
I don't like watching people with PhD's act like toddlers on television any more than I like it when politicians act like toddlers on television.
Call me old fashioned, but I honestly believe that it is possible to have an informative and persuasive conservation about an emotional policy issue in a civilized manner. The hormone fueled trashy conflict adds nothing to the discussion and makes me want to turn off the discussion even if the people involved really did have something worthwhile to say.
* Charity Junk Calls. The "no call list" has done an admirable job of shutting down telephone solicitations for goods and services that I don't want. But, it doesn't apply to charity calls, and those are relentless. Caller ID allows you to screen them, but I am still sick and tired of the never ending calls from the Fraternal Order of Police and three or four different organizations that my discarded clothes and household goods. Add cold call charitable solicitations to the "no call list" now.
* Voice Mail. It may be a necessary evil, but I absolutely hate voice mail. It takes a long time to retrieve and listen to, while you can quickly scan and assess texts and e-mails, and don't have to decipher sometimes difficult to hear accents when writing down numbers and names left on voice mails. A world without voice mail would be a better world.
Notably, one study by a telephone company concluded that people responded to texts about ten or twenty times as quickly as they do to voice mails. So, while others may not be as vocal as I am, many people, deep down, share the sentiment.
* Microsoft Word Outlining and Autonumbering Functions. Most of the time, I manage to disable the outlining and autonumbering functions of Microsoft Word, but when I don't, these features are among the most vexing things I encounter in a day. What you type should be what you get. But, it is quite tricky to disable the feature in a document that has it.
* Other Unwanted Microsoft Word Features. As a matter of personal and office style, there are only three or four fonts and only about six different font sizes that I use when I word process documents. There are also only three colors that I ever use (black, red and blue), and there are a whole host of formatting options that I never use. Yet, there is no easy way to suppress the formatting options that I never use to simplify the interface. It might be possible, but it is very time consuming and difficult and threatens to screw up compatability with other documents.
On the other hand, there are a number of legal and scientific words that don't appear in the spell checking dictionary that are correctly spelled but are flagged as misspelled that it is annoying to have flagged, but it is a pain to train the dictionary otherwise.
I use this computer program for many hours a day every work day and for many hours a week outside of work responsibilities. I would happily pay something like $100-$150 to get an "upgrade" to Microsoft Word that would suppress all of the features that I don't use and add the words that I do use to its dictionary. I have to think that there are millions of people who share my sentiment. Why hasn't the market responded to our needs? It would seem like a very simple think to do technologically and implement well and generate new revenue. What do all the thousands of geeks at Microsoft do instead? Create new inferior versions of Windows?
* Blogger HTML mode page breaks. In the blogger software, you can write posts either in "Compose Mode" which is more WYSIWYG, with lots of hidden and awkward complexities in the code, or in "HTML" mode where you put in all the formatting yourself. The one bad thing about HTML mode, however, is that the paragraph breaks that show on the display don't show up when you post it unless you add a code in the form <br /> to it (twice if you want a space between paragraphs). If this were automatically entered every time you pressed return in that part of the editor, it would be much better.
13 December 2012
Too Many People Serve Excessive Prison Time
A Tragic Case Of Excessive Sentencing
The New York Times reminds us of an aspect of what is by far the most serious problem with the American criminal justice system.
Stephanie George and Judge Roger Vinson had quite different opinions about the lockbox seized by the police from her home in Pensacola. She insisted she had no idea that a former boyfriend had hidden it in her attic. Judge Vinson considered the lockbox, containing a half-kilogram of cocaine, to be evidence of her guilt.
But the defendant and the judge fully agreed about the fairness of the sentence he imposed in federal court.
“Even though you have been involved in drugs and drug dealing,” Judge Vinson told Ms. George, “your role has basically been as a girlfriend and bag holder and money holder but not actively involved in the drug dealing, so certainly in my judgment it does not warrant a life sentence.”
Yet the judge had no other option on that morning 15 years ago. As her stunned family watched, Ms. George, then 27, who had never been accused of violence, was led from the courtroom to serve a sentence of life without parole.
“I remember my mom crying out and asking the Lord why,” said Ms. George, now 42, in an interview at the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee. . . .
Ms. George was a young single mother when she first got in trouble with drugs and the law. One of her children was fathered by a crack dealer, Michael Dickey, who went to prison in the early 1990s for drug and firearm offenses.
“When he went away, I was at home with the kids struggling to pay bills,” Ms. George said. “The only way I knew to get money quick was selling crack. I was never a user, but from being around him I pretty much knew how to get it.”
After the police caught her making crack sales of $40 and $120 — which were counted as separate felonies — she was sentenced, at 23, to nine months in a work-release program. That meant working at her mother’s hair salon in Pensacola during the day and spending nights at the county jail, away from her three young children. . . .
When Mr. Dickey got out of prison in 1995, she said, she refused to resume their relationship, but she did allow him into her apartment sometimes to see their daughter. One evening, shortly after he had arrived, the police showed up with a search warrant and a ladder. . . .
Mr. Dickey said he had paid her to store the cocaine at her home. At the trial, other defendants said she was present during drug transactions conducted by Mr. Dickey and other dealers she dated, and sometimes delivered cash or crack for her boyfriends. Ms. George denied those accusations, which her lawyer argued were uncorroborated and self-serving. After the jury convicted her of being part of a conspiracy to distribute cocaine, she told the judge at her sentencing: “I just want to say I didn’t do it. I don’t want to be away from my kids.”
Criminal defendants like Ms. George aren't people who should be serving life in prison terms. Indeed, it is hard to justify prison terms of more than five or ten years for people in her circumstances period.Whatever the truth of the testimony against her, it certainly benefited the other defendants. Providing evidence to the prosecution is one of the few ways to avoid a mandatory sentence. Because the government formally credited the other defendants with “substantial assistance,” their sentences were all reduced to less than 15 years. Even though Mr. Dickey was the leader of the enterprise and had a much longer criminal record than Ms. George, he was freed five years ago.
Excessive Sentences Are The Most Important Problem With The Criminal Justice System
State and federal prisons are full of people serving incredibly long prison sentences for relatively minor offenses, while other relatively more serious felons are released after comparatively short prison terms.
The United States has the highest reported rate of incarceration of any country: about one in 100 adults, a total of nearly 2.3 million people in prison or jail. . . . Half a million people are now in prison or jail for drug offenses, about 10 times the number in 1980, and there have been especially sharp increases in incarceration rates for women and for people over 55, long past the peak age for violent crime. In all, about 1.3 million people, more than half of those behind bars, are in prison or jail for nonviolent offenses. . . .
Most other countries do not impose life sentences without parole, and those that do generally reserve it for a few heinous crimes. In England, where it is used only for homicides involving an aggravating factor like child abduction, torture or terrorism, a recent study reported that 41 prisoners were serving life terms without parole. In the United States, some 41,000 are.In terms of the human suffering and economic waste that problems with our criminal justice system create at a big picture level, the problem of grossly excessive sentences for middling mundane crimes is a far more serious problem than the death penalty, the juvenile life without parole sentencing problem, the degree to which it is hard for innocent defendants to set aside wrongful convictions, and a whole host of other problems with the American criminal justice system.
One doesn't have to be a hard core bleeding heart liberal to understand that a criminal justice system in which the sentences imposed on criminal defendants is roughly proportional to the seriousness of the crime committed is the correct one.
Excessive sentencing for minor crimes needlessly costs immenses sums of money for the public that must be paid for with taxes, wastes and destroys the lives and families of people who could otherwise have made positive contributions to society, and undermines respect for the criminal justice system and governmental authority generally. Likewise, insufficiently serious sentences for dangerous criminals who have a high risk of recidivism puts the public at risk of being harmed by future criminal acts.
Right now, excessive sentencing in a large number of specific situations that are important in the aggregate are the greater problem and are summarized below as "Hot Issues."
But, there are some criminal offenses, such as recidivist drunk driving, where the rigor of the sentences may be insufficient.
Also, American sentencing practices tend to be overly lenient in sentencing defendants with few prior convictions, often imposing no more than probation and a fine for less serious offenses until a breaking point is reached when a very harsh sentence is imposed for the current offense, often taking offenders by surprise, rather than imposing genuine but moderate punishments in a more consistent manner, which is the approach that has been shown to be most effective.
There Are No Meaningful Safety Valves To Address Excessive Sentences
In a series of U.S. Supreme Court cases over the past few decades that have basically gutted the protections of the 8th Amendment, any sentence up to life in prison without possibility of parole (although not the death penalty) by a prior felony offender has been held not to violate the 8th Amendment to the Constitution's protection against cruel and unusual punishment, for anything but the most trivial of petty misdmeanors.
Once upon a time, the power of Governors and the President to commute sentences in the prison systems managed by their respective executive branch subordinates provided a meaningful safety valve in cases where excessive sentences were imposed due to judicial abuses of discretion or a failure to legislatures to understand the practical implications of their criminal statutes as they are applied. But, use of the the power to commute sentences currently being served as withered to a tiny trickle in almost every state and at the federal level.
The last significant mass commuation and pardon grant for non-death penalty offenders was when the President of the United States pardoned Vietnam draft dodgers who had emmigrated to Canada or gone underground.
Even when legislatures reform criminal sentences that are excessive relative to the offense in some cases, they frequently do not make these revisions retroactive, something that would be unconstitutional in many countries.
There Is Room To Correct Past Mistakes At A Modest Administrative Or Societal Cost
A reluctance of reopen the process in the case of criminals sentenced to four or five years in prison, for example, may be appropriate. If the law is corrected going forward, the mistakes of the past will work their way through the system soon enough. The benefit to society that can be obtained by releasing someone who should have served only a few months in jail from prison when that person is already half way through a four or five year sentence is modest. But, when people are sentenced to ten, twenty or forty years in prison, or life in prison, and those individuals still have many years left to serve, there is an immense benefit to society that can be enjoyed by revisiting these sentences.
The outrageous point here is that the problem is excessive sentences is one that is capable of being mitigated if elected officials merely develop the necessary political will. We as a society don't have to keep women sentenced to life in prison without parole for low level drug offenses fifteen years ago in prison for another thirty more years if we choose not to.
The process of systemically identifying large classes of offenders who are likely to have received excessive sentences as a result of flawed sentencing laws, and then of reviewing those cases on a case by case basis, is far more tractable than opponents of this kind of leniency would have you believe. And, the benefits of doing so, from a public finance perspective, from the standpoint of the overall economic health of the country, and from the perspectives of fairness, justice, humanity and mercy, are great.
But, so far, too few elected officals have been brave enough to commit to addressing this serious social, economic and fiscal problem.
One piece of good news is that the overall problem of excessive incarceration is really the product of a lot of distinct smaller problems, each of which can be beneficially addressed piecemeal, as much as it is the product of one overarching problem.
There are solutions, like changes in 8th Amendment jurisprudence and commutation and pardon practices (such as institutions like innocnence commissions) could provide systemic overall solutions. But, overall solutions aren't necessary to solve a large share of the problem. Case by case instances of politicians developing constitutional fortitude could make a huge difference, particularly at the federal level.
There Are Few Opportunities To Correct Wrongful Convictions
It is also almost impossible to overturn a wrongful conviction that has been affirmed on direct appeal, via post-conviction judicial review, in cases that do not involve the death penalty or DNA evidence that definitively establishes that the wrong person was convicted. This is true even when new evidence makes the jury's decision, in hindsight, doubtful, when prosecutorial misconduct can be demonstrated, or when a criminal defendant's defense counsel may have seriously failed his or her client. While perhaps 90% of cases plea bargain, and empirical estimates have put the accuracy of jury verdicts at about 90%, something like one in a hundred criminal convictions are the result of inaccurate jury verdicts and only a modest share of these convictions for offenses other than capital murder or rape are ever set aside. A wrongful conviction rate of about 1% of criminal cases charged per year doesn't seem like much, until one considers just how many millions of criminal cases are commenced each year.
A large share of all cases where post-conviction mitigation of sentences or convictions are allowed involve death penalty cases, rape cases where there is a DNA based exoneration, mass relief when a corrupt judge is exposed, or mass relief when a large scale pattern of fraud by a small law enforcement unit is discovered.
The Innocence Penalty
A particularly troubling aspect of the extent to which it is hard to review wrongful convictions is that the sentences available to those who plea bargain are generally much shorter than the sentences available to criminal defendants who turn down a plea bargain and are convicted at trial. The disparity between the sentence available for a defendant who pleas guilty and one who is convicted at trial is generally greatest when the case that the defendant is guilty is weakest.
Yet, empirical studies have determined that defendants who believe themselves to be actually innocent are much more likely to go to trial and trust that they will be aquitted, even when the objective evidence and assessment of the case by people familiar with the workings of the particular court in question suggest otherwise.
Thus, people whose guilty (at least of the offense of conviction, even if they are guilty of something) is debatable who believe themselves to be innocent are systemically most likely to receive the longest sentences of incarceration.
Of course, in an ideal world, we would like to have institutions that produce the opposite result, with people who believe themselves to be innocent and are found guilty at trial to tend to receive the most lenient, rather than the longest sentences.
Hot Issues In Federal Sentencing
In the federal system, long sentences that are particularly notable fit a few main profiles.
Drug Sentencing
Drug offense sentencing in the federal system (and in state criminal codes modeled on the federal act) bear little connection to the culpability of the offender (focusing instead on the weight of the drugs seized), and have high mandatory minimum sentences in many cases that are far out of proportion to the economic scale of operations implied by a particular quantity of drugs. Excessive drug sentences are the single greatest factor bloating federal prisons.
Chid Pornography
Child pornography possession cases also low thresholds of culpability proof (possession and the barest minimum of knowledge is sufficient to convict), and often inappropriately involve separately charged offenses for each image that are to be served consecutively rather than concurrently. Thus, the sentence for possession of twenty child pornography images may be 100 years even though the sentence for possession of one child pornography image may be only 5 years, despite the fact that there is no reason to think that the number of child pornography images in someone's possession has much of anything to do with the seriousness of the offense.
As a result, otherwise harmless dirty old men who have done nothing more than download sexual pictures of children from the Internet on their private home computers (without even paying for it and hence economically encouraging the trade) often receive child pornography sentences longer than the serial child rapists who make child pornography and personally violently exploit the children depicted. It is entirely legitimate to conclude that these men should be prosecuted for their criminal offenses and perhaps that some of them should even be subject to sex offender reporting, at least for some period of time, once they are released. But, it is very hard to see a justification of hard prison time for child pornography offenders who are not involved in the production of child pornography and do not reap material economic gains for any involvement they have in distributing child pornography.
Firearms and White Collar Crime Sentences
Federal sentences for firearms violations involving felons, and large dollar white collar crimes are also very long, but there is more widespread sentiment that the nature of the offenses and the nature of the offenders in these cases more often justify these long sentences. In the case of firearms violations involving felons, the belief that strict enforcement may prevent future crime is understandable. In the case of large dollar white collar crimes, the offenders may not pose much of a threat to the public if allowed to be at large, but the harm caused is so immense that the punishment may fit the crime.
Excessive Leniency Towards Violent Crime In Indian Country
In contrast, sentences for violent offenders like rapists and murders who commit crimes on federal lands and in Indian Territory, often receive astonishingly lenient sentences relative to those sentences imposed for comparable crimes in state courts. The investigation and prosecution of these crimes is also often indifferent and ineffective.
Immigration Crimes
Federal criminal sentences for the lowest level federal immigration offenses aren't particularly long when the individual offense is weighed against the length of the sentence, at least compared to other outrageous federal sentencing issues. But, while historically almost everyone to be found to be present in the United States illegally was simply deported (which is a civil matter), the recent trend has been to incarcerate a large proportion of people who have previously been deported pursuant to a criminal conviction before deporting them. The sheer volume of relatively minor criminal immigration cases has caused these cases to have a major impact on incarceration costs and to heavily burden criminal justice system resources without providing much discernable impact on the likelihood that people will illegally immigrate to the U.S.
Hot Issues In State Sentencing
On average, the proportion of all state court imposed prison sentences in the United States that are excesssive isn't quite as great, but there are still a great many of them.
Three Strikes And Recidivist Sentencing
One of the most egregious group of inmates serving excessive sentences for relatively minor, non-violent offenses involves individuals sentenced under California's Three Strikes law which California voters repealed at the ballot box last month. Under that law, offenders with three prior non-violent felonies have been sentenced to life in prison without parole for offenses as minor as petty shoplifting and the courts have upheld those sentences in the face of 8th Amendment challenges.
Recidivist sentences also lead to excessive sentences compared to the offense, even allowing for the need for meaningfully longer sentences for recidivist offenders, in many other states.
Typical problems with recidivist sentencing statutes include counting very stale convictions of offenders who have spent many, many years living as law abiding citizens, allowing relatively minor felonies to be considered in three strikes kinds of statutes rather than limiting these serious habitual offender sentences to repeat serious felons, treating crimes that would otherwise be misdemeanors as felonies when committed by recidvists, allowing offenses for which the defendant was not convicted at the time a new offense was committed to count as "strikes" under recidivist statutes, and abandoning any effort to relate a recidivist sentence to the seriousness of current crime of conviction.
Colorado is, on the whole, a fairly reasonable state by all of these measures, and with one notable exception in the case of a particular suburban prosecutor who has been forced from her office by term limits, prosecutors in the state generally invoke their full power to secure recidivist sentences sparingly, despite the fact that the amount of additional proof required to secure these immense sentence enhancements is trivial.
Drug Offenses
Many states, like the federal government, have extreme sentences for drug offenses, for essentially the same reasons.
Child Pornography
Excessive child pornography sentences are almost as common in state courts as they are in the federal courts.
Felony-Murder
Most states have a crime known as "felony murder" that exposes criminal defendants to the same sentences as other forms of first degree murder (typically life in prison without parole or the death penalty), even if the individual convicted merely played a minor role within a group of people carrying out a burglary, or car theft, or robbery, and that individual did not participate in any way in killing someone (indeed, even if the individual urged the persons who did kill someone not to do so), did not organize or lead the group, and had not set out at the time that felony-murder liability attached to commit any crime that would result in someone's death. The minimum level of culpability for a felony-murder offense is simply intent to participate in some felony such as burglary or theft.
The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld even death sentences for even the least culpable adults on felony murder charges against 8th Amendment challenges, although the requirement that a sentencing jury make a death penalty v. life in prison without parole determination, and the exercise of discretion by prosecutors, means that minor participants in felony-murder cases overwhelmingly are sentenced to extremely long prison terms that far exceed that of other defendants with similar levels of culpability, rather than the death penalty.
Neo-Natal Homicides And Some Child Abuse Sentences
Many states sometimes impose very excessive sentences on women whose babies die while they are in the throes of child birth away from hospitals or other support. Colorado and some other states, more generally, impose sentences that are far out of proportion to the sentences that would be imposed if a similarly culpable crime was committed against a stranger, for child abuse offenses.
Stacking Sentences From Multiple Counts
Excessive sentences arising from concurrent sentences for many counts of guilt for relatively minor felonies is also a common fact pattern for excessive state sentences in a wide variety of circumstances.
Parole Violations
Disporportionate incaraceration consequences for relatively minor parole violations is also a widespread problem in state criminal justice systems, although several states have recently addressed this issue.
can’t believe myself it could happen in America.”
Happy Saint Lucy's Day
Today is the Saint's Day for Saint Lucy.
The Story of Saint Lucia
Saint Lucy (283–304), also known as Saint Lucia or Santa Lucia, was a wealthy young Christian martyr who is venerated as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church, Anglican, Lutheran, and Orthodox Christians. Her feast day in the West is 13 December; with a name derived from Lux, Lucis meaning "Light", as she is the patron saint of those who are blind. Saint Lucy is one of the few saints celebrated by members of the Lutheran Church among the Scandinavian peoples, who take part in Saint Lucy's Day celebrations that retain many elements of Germanic paganism.In some versions of the story, after she was denounced, Roman authorities threatened to drag her off to a brothel if she did not renounce her Christian beliefs, but are miraculously unable to do so, and so they gouge her eyes out instead. According to Christian tradition she dies at age twenty-one, in some versions of the story not expiring despite being beheaded until the sacrament is administered to her disembodied head one more time before her death.
Saint Lucy . . . consecrated her virginity to God through pious works refused to marry a pagan betrothed, and had her wedding dowry distributed to the poor. Her betrothed pagan groom denounced her as a Christian to the governor of Syracuse, Sicily. . . . Lucy's betrothed admired her eyes, so she tore them out and gave them to him, saying, "Now let me live to God". . . . In medieval accounts, Saint Lucy's eyes are gouged out prior to her execution. In art, her eyes sometimes appear on a tray that she is holding.
It is a bit stunning to think that medieval Europeans would see a woman who gouged her own eyes out in an effect to discourage suitors as a Christian role model, but sensibilities change.
Historical Context
The wave of persecution that Saint Lucy's story recalled, from 303 CE to 313 CE under Emperors Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius and Constantius was the last and most severe of the persecutions of Christians in the Roman Empire, carried out with guidance from the oracle of Apollo. "Although the persecution resulted in the deaths of—according to one modern estimate—3,000 to 3,500 Christians, and the torture, imprisonment, or dislocation of many more, most Christians avoided punishment." It also provoked a schism in the Christian church of the Romans into loyalist and anti-imperial factions.
The Edict of Milan, strongly echoed in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which ended the persecutions in 313 CE provided that:
We thought it fit to commend these things most fully to your care that you may know that we have given to those Christians free and unrestricted opportunity of religious worship. When you see that this has been granted to them by us, your Worship will know that we have also conceded to other religions the right of open and free observance of their worship for the sake of the peace of our times, that each one may have the free opportunity to worship as he pleases; this regulation is made that we may not seem to detract from any dignity or any religion.By 324, Emperor Constantine changed course on his policy towards Christianity, making it the state religion of the Roman Empire, and convened the convention of the church that produced the Nicene Creed which provided a formula to end centuries schism within the Christian church over religious doctrine.
The tolerance proclaimed by the Edict of Milan lasted only a few generations, however, after which the later Roman emperors embarked on a policy of persecuting pagans that ultimately caused the complete demise of that religion except in stories treated as fictional and covert pagan legacies sheathed in elements of the Christian tradition, such as Saint Lucy's Day.
Pagan Antecedents
The date of Saint Lucy's Day, like many Christian celebrations, has pagan roots. It coincides with a Scandinavian pagan celebration that was something of a mix between Halloween and the Santa Claus myth.
Lussinatta, the Lussi Night, was December 13. Then Lussi, a female being with evil traits, like a female demon or witch, was said to ride through the air with her followers, called Lussiferda. This itself might be an echo of the myth of the Wild Hunt, called Oskoreia in Scandinavia, found across Northern, Western and Central Europe.
Between Lussi Night and Yule, trolls and evil spirits, in some accounts also the spirits of the dead, were thought to be active outside. It was believed to be particularly dangerous to be out during Lussi Night. According to tradition, children who had done mischief had to take special care, since Lussi could come down through the chimney and take them away, and certain tasks of work in the preparation for Yule had to be finished, or else the Lussi would come to punish the household. The tradition of Lussevaka – to stay awake through the Lussinatt to guard oneself and the household against evil, has found a modern form through throwing parties until daybreak. Another company of spirits was said to come riding through the night around Yule itself, journeying through the air, over land and water. . . .
Possibly, the origins of the choice of date is to be found in the fact that it falls 12 days before Christmas (Winter solstice) as both her name and the method of celebration points towards solar worship. The custom of starting celebrations 12 days before Christmas (Advent) and ending them 12 days after Christmas ("The Twelve Days of Christmas") is known in various Northern-European countries, with the Icelandic Yule Lads appearing on December 13 and the end of Christmas being celebrated with bonfires and fireworks on January 6.Personal Reflections
My mother took the role of Santa Lucia as a young woman as a part of the Santa Lucia celebrations in the Scandinavian Lutheran church in which she grew up in rural Michigan, but I'd never actually heard the Saint's gory story until yesterday. Within the lived Scandinavian Lutheran tradition, Santa Lucia is more Disney princess or prom queen than she is a self-mutilating man hating philanthropist.
My mother's sister, who never married and went blind as a young woman as a result of M.S., would have been a better fit for the role (although no one could have known that at the age when one commonly takes on that role), but I don't know if she was ever Santa Lucia in her local celebration in Michigan.
Popular Culture
Tonya Hurley features the story of Saint Lucy along with that of two other young women who were Christian martyrs in her 2012 teen novel entitled "The Blessed" featuring modern teens who are reincarnations of the Saints after whom they are named in a mutual relationship that the characters themselves note has echos of a polygynous marriage, with a young man who is a reincarnated Saint who brings them together.
Hurley's novel has received very poor reviews, in part because of a choppy, affected, and emotionally vacant writing style, in part by due to its ham handed handling of Catholic religious aspects of the story, and in part, because of its excessive violence and torture.
While I am generally a fan of contemporary fantasy writing, the story of the young martyrs of the Great Persecution is so deeply context bound that it could be told much better as historical fiction that could bring this pivotal episode in the history of Western Civilization alive. The large scale bureaucracy and relatively urban context of the Roman empire in its prime make it a more understandable episode of ancient history than most. The inverted version of the story in the TV series Caprica, does a much better job with a similar subject matter.
12 December 2012
Small Tent Republicans
Reagan, himself a former union president, performed well electorally in part because he won over blue collar Democrats who were union members, the "Reagan Democrats" to his party. But, the legacy left by his decision to fire striking air traffic controllers more profoundly influenced his party.
Frontal attacks on union power in Wisconsin, Ohio and this week, Michigan, have been actions that emphatically say that unions and union members are not welcome in the Republican party.
Republicans have already made entirely clear that people who aren't Christians are welcome in their party. And, Republicans have done a pretty good job of telling people who aren't white, or aren't straight, that they aren't welcome in the Republican party either.
Unions may make up a declining share of the voting public. In Michigan, a union stronghold, only about one in six workers is in a union. Union members have also tended to favor Democrats since times immemorial. But, Republicans had been making bigger inroads with union members in recent elections than with almost any other traditionally Democratic constitutency.
Do Republicans really need to alienate the large number of working class white Christian union members who would otherwise have supported them, kicking one more large group of people out of their already small tent?
Romney's failure to win critical states like Ohio and Michigan, despite the fact that Michigan is the state where he was born, and that Republicans have managed to control state legislatures in both states, more than anything else, can be boiled down to one critical misstep during the financial crisis. Romney urged the federal government to let General Motors and Chrysler, icons of the old industrial, union dominated economy and a major source of regional jobs, die.
The 1950s that Republicans want the country to return to, at least in terms of social issues, was one build by big manufacturing companies with heavily unionized workforces.
But, Republicans have included unions in the handbasket they think that the nation is going to hell in, along with abortion, birth control, gays, fiat money, feminism, secularism, Muslims, immigrants, taxes, government regulations, welfare recipients, blacks, newspaper reporters, professors, science, drugs, terrorism, government involvement in health care, public employees, public lands, mass transit, the metric system, soccer, gun control, and art house movies. Republicans are convinced that global power is still about how many battleships you own, but they abhore foreign aid.
At the end of the day, Republicans seem to be working hard to confine themselves to a small tent. They have a coalition that can still consistently win majorities in Southern states and on the Great Plains. And, when voters turnout is low and their candidates aren't affilicted with foot in mouth disease, they can come close to attaining majorities nationally. But, in politics, the secret to getting elected is to have a lot of friends, and the Republican party seems intent on unfriending large parts of the American public as fast as it can.
Is Wisconsin proof that union busting doesn't hurt Republicans politically?
Suffice it to say that I expect Republicans could lose ground in Michigan in 2014, and probably in other places where unions have any power as well, as a result of their action. Or, not.
One of the undercovered stories of the 2012 election is that Republicans paid almost no political price for the union busting actions they took in 2011 which sparked huge protests and a series of recall elections.
In 2010, Democrats lost the Governorship, a U.S. Senate seat, the State Treasurer's office, and a net two seats in Congress, four state senate seats (costing Democrats their majority in the state senate), and thirteen state house seats (costing Democrats their majority in the state house). Democrats clawed back a narrow majority in the state senate in midterm recall elections. But, when the dust settled after the November 2012 election, Republicans were in almost the same dominant position that they were in after the 2010 election.
Republicans retained majorities in both houses of the state legislature. They had just one less state senate seat than they had after the 2010 election, and had one more state house seat (at the expense of the sole indpendent in the state house in 2010). Democrats held onto their other U.S. Senate seat and cast their electoral college votes for President Obama, but ultimately, Republican elected officials at the state level paid no price for their union busting in Wisconsin, despite the fact that the 2012 election had higher turnout since it is a Presidential election, than the 2010 election, a factor that should have favored Democrats.
Ohio Republican also gained control of the state's government in 2010.
Michigan Republicans were swept into control of state government in 2010, the same year that Republicans made inroad in Wisconsin.
Yet, Michigan Republicans tellingly waited until after they had an opportunity to see if Wisconsin Republicans paid a political price for their union busting before acting themselves. They concluded, probably rightly, that Wisconsin Republicans paid a short term political price for their move, but that less than two years later, voters seemed to no longer care. So, they decided to go ahead with an anti-union law of their own and passed it as quickly as possible so that any outrage over their actions would have a full twenty-three months to die down before voters rendered their verdict on them.
While unions are relatively strong in Wisconsin compared to most states, they are far more influential in Michigan. So, the electorate in Michigan may be less forgiving there. And, Republicans lost four state house seats in 2012.
Frontal attacks on union power in Wisconsin, Ohio and this week, Michigan, have been actions that emphatically say that unions and union members are not welcome in the Republican party.
Republicans have already made entirely clear that people who aren't Christians are welcome in their party. And, Republicans have done a pretty good job of telling people who aren't white, or aren't straight, that they aren't welcome in the Republican party either.
Unions may make up a declining share of the voting public. In Michigan, a union stronghold, only about one in six workers is in a union. Union members have also tended to favor Democrats since times immemorial. But, Republicans had been making bigger inroads with union members in recent elections than with almost any other traditionally Democratic constitutency.
Do Republicans really need to alienate the large number of working class white Christian union members who would otherwise have supported them, kicking one more large group of people out of their already small tent?
Romney's failure to win critical states like Ohio and Michigan, despite the fact that Michigan is the state where he was born, and that Republicans have managed to control state legislatures in both states, more than anything else, can be boiled down to one critical misstep during the financial crisis. Romney urged the federal government to let General Motors and Chrysler, icons of the old industrial, union dominated economy and a major source of regional jobs, die.
The 1950s that Republicans want the country to return to, at least in terms of social issues, was one build by big manufacturing companies with heavily unionized workforces.
But, Republicans have included unions in the handbasket they think that the nation is going to hell in, along with abortion, birth control, gays, fiat money, feminism, secularism, Muslims, immigrants, taxes, government regulations, welfare recipients, blacks, newspaper reporters, professors, science, drugs, terrorism, government involvement in health care, public employees, public lands, mass transit, the metric system, soccer, gun control, and art house movies. Republicans are convinced that global power is still about how many battleships you own, but they abhore foreign aid.
At the end of the day, Republicans seem to be working hard to confine themselves to a small tent. They have a coalition that can still consistently win majorities in Southern states and on the Great Plains. And, when voters turnout is low and their candidates aren't affilicted with foot in mouth disease, they can come close to attaining majorities nationally. But, in politics, the secret to getting elected is to have a lot of friends, and the Republican party seems intent on unfriending large parts of the American public as fast as it can.
Is Wisconsin proof that union busting doesn't hurt Republicans politically?
Suffice it to say that I expect Republicans could lose ground in Michigan in 2014, and probably in other places where unions have any power as well, as a result of their action. Or, not.
One of the undercovered stories of the 2012 election is that Republicans paid almost no political price for the union busting actions they took in 2011 which sparked huge protests and a series of recall elections.
In 2010, Democrats lost the Governorship, a U.S. Senate seat, the State Treasurer's office, and a net two seats in Congress, four state senate seats (costing Democrats their majority in the state senate), and thirteen state house seats (costing Democrats their majority in the state house). Democrats clawed back a narrow majority in the state senate in midterm recall elections. But, when the dust settled after the November 2012 election, Republicans were in almost the same dominant position that they were in after the 2010 election.
Republicans retained majorities in both houses of the state legislature. They had just one less state senate seat than they had after the 2010 election, and had one more state house seat (at the expense of the sole indpendent in the state house in 2010). Democrats held onto their other U.S. Senate seat and cast their electoral college votes for President Obama, but ultimately, Republican elected officials at the state level paid no price for their union busting in Wisconsin, despite the fact that the 2012 election had higher turnout since it is a Presidential election, than the 2010 election, a factor that should have favored Democrats.
Ohio Republican also gained control of the state's government in 2010.
Michigan Republicans were swept into control of state government in 2010, the same year that Republicans made inroad in Wisconsin.
Yet, Michigan Republicans tellingly waited until after they had an opportunity to see if Wisconsin Republicans paid a political price for their union busting before acting themselves. They concluded, probably rightly, that Wisconsin Republicans paid a short term political price for their move, but that less than two years later, voters seemed to no longer care. So, they decided to go ahead with an anti-union law of their own and passed it as quickly as possible so that any outrage over their actions would have a full twenty-three months to die down before voters rendered their verdict on them.
While unions are relatively strong in Wisconsin compared to most states, they are far more influential in Michigan. So, the electorate in Michigan may be less forgiving there. And, Republicans lost four state house seats in 2012.
10 December 2012
Tax Reform And Systemic Risk
There are several ways that changes to the tax laws are typically evaluated:
* How much revenue does the change produce or reduce?
* What are the distributional effects of the tax provision? Who are the winners and losers?
* What are the administrative and compliance costs associated with the tax provision relative to the revenues associated with the tax provision?
* Do the incentives created by the tax provision improve economic efficiency or do they lead to less efficient economic outcomes?
* Do the combined effects of the tax provision promote or do they discourage economic growth?
One perspective that is underappreciated in evaluating tax reforms is their impact on systemic risk in the economy, despite the fact that tax laws can have a powerful effect there.
Systemic risk matters. If there is any lesson that the past century or two of global economic history has taught us, it is that business cycles are inescapable. There will be booms and busts no matter how hard policy makers try to smooth them out. Most recently, in the United States, we were reminded of that fact when a long period of economic growth and shallow recessions was interrupted by the financial crisis, the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
It is the factor that allows whole industries and regional housing markets, for example, to collapse simultaneously when a tipping point in the economy is reached.
And, while we may not be able to prevent business cycles, it isn't unreasonable to think that the proper economic incentives, particularly in the tax code, can make our economy more robust, so that periods of falling GDP topple a smaller share of businesses, produce fewer layoffs and send fewer people into bankruptcy.
While the U.S. is finally starting to recover from the financial crisis, weak economies worldwide are facing intense public finance crisises and the creditworthiness of sovereign debts from a whole wave of these countries is plummeting.
The United States income tax system has a number of provisions that work together to magnify systemic risk in the U.S. economy. In particular, they encourage household to make "mixed bets" in the economy by simultaneously encouraging households to take on levels of debt higher than would make sense in the absence of tax incentives, and encouraging households to invest the assets that are freed up by continuing to have debt in financial market investments that are relatively volatile.
The single biggest tax code provision that favors debt is the mortgage interest deduction, including the deductions for home equity loans and second homes. A secondary tax code provision that favors debt is the student loan interest deduction. Both of these incentives are further amplified by interventions in the commercial lending market with loan guarantees and government chartered entities designed to make loans for these purposes more easily available than they would otherwise have been.
But, it is not just that there are tax incentives to leverage. There are also tax incentives to invest in the financial markets for households. A middle class household pays almost no income taxes on capital gains and qualified dividends from financial market investments. And, a middle class household can invest effectively all funds available out of income for savings in tax preferred retirement and education savings accounts.
When the economy is growing, these incentives are good policies for households to adopt. Growth in housing values, even merely at the rate of inflation, produce disproportionate gains in home equity for leveraged homeowners. Effectively income tax free financial investments for retirement or education in excess of the interest rates paid on tax deductable mortgages increase household wealth relative to paying off mortgage debt.
But, when the economic is in a bust phase, the mixed bets facilitated by incentives to leverage and invest in the financial markets with invested assets are bad policies for households to adopt. Leverage amplifies the declines in home equity that arise from falling housing prices. And, in the down phase of the business cycle, financial investments frequently lose value (often dramatically and in short periods of time) just when people need to tap their investments to meet their costs of living (hence causing them to buy high, and sell low) relative to paying off the debts that freed up the assets that were invested.
Economic historians will note that in the long term, indeed, for any time period of fifteen or twenty years or so or longer, the financial markets have been a good investment. Likewise, housing values have a strong tendency to mirror the rate of inflation over sufficiently long time periods. In short, for households that are able to weather economic downturns while still making their mortgage payments and not raiding their savings - in short - for households that manage to avoid more than very brief periods of unemployment even during economic downturns, a strategy of mixed bets seems like a sensible thing for the tax code to encourage in order to help households build wealth.
But, large numbers of households, particularly in a severe economic downturn, do experience periods of unemployment and even if they do remain employed, experience irregular incomes. This is particularly true in the small business sector. Small businesses may lead the economy in job creation during booms, but they also lead the economy in job destruction during busts. And, small business owners, who generally aren't even able to enjoy any counterpart to our nation's miserly unemployment insurance program when their incomes plummet due to downward business cycle trends, are particularly vulnerable if they heed the incentives of the tax code to make the kind of mixed bets that make sense only for households with extremely secure incomes such as government employees and core employees of big businesses.
During busts, people who have cyclical or insecure incomes lose their homes to foreclosure (again forcing them into buy high, sell low market timing strategies), pull money out of financial investments at times when asset prices are low and penalties designed to keep people in tax preferenced investments are incurred, lose their vehicles to repossession, forgoe health insurance possibly leading to permanent negative health effects from delaying treatment for medical conditions, and in the face of economic pressure see their marriages fall apart and may make decisions that compromise their children's future prospects.
If the tax code had neither deductions for interest expenses like mortgage interest and student loan interest, nor tax incentives to invest in the financial markets like tax preferrenced retirement savings accounts, tax preferrenced education savings accounts, and preferences for capital gains and qualified dividends, far more people would have far fewer savings in financial assets, but would also have much less debt.
A mass shift toward this kind of "unmixed bets" in households would reduce systemic risk in the U.S. economy during economic downturns. Fewer people would have mortgages at all, and those who did would have much smaller mortgages, so more people who suffered serious short to medium term income shocks would be able to weather downturns without being forced to lose their homes. Even in cases where households couldn't continue to make regular mortgage payments even with smaller mortgages, much lower loan to value ratios that could be refinanced more easily from hard money lenders (or paid off with non-distressed home sales) if necessary to avoid foreclosures, even in periods where housing prices were falling.
It is much harder to lose an investment made in paying off mortgage debt than it is to lose an investment in stocks and bonds.
A shift away from leveraged financing of homes would also make it harder for housing prices to stray far from ability to afford it, discouraging situations like the real estate bubble that precipitated the financial crisis.
Proof that policies to reduce systemic risk and leverage can help an economic sector become more robust in economic downturns, even when business cycles themselves cannot be tamed, is evidence from FDIC regulation of the commercial banking industry. Prior to FDIC regulation, half of commercial banks or more shuttered their doors during a serious economic bust. After FDIC regulation, the biggest component of which was to require commercial banks to limit the amount of leverage that they took on at the entity level, the percentage of commercial banks that failed, even in the financial crisis, dwindled to tiny single digit percentages and prevents the contigon of a failed entity from migrating throughout the economy.
Tax policies that similarly encouraged households to deleverage, rather than to make mixed bets on both leveraged housing purchases and volatile financial investments at the same time, would likewise not only increase the survivability of economic downturns for tens of millions of middle class households, particularly for working class families and small business owners who have less stable incomes, and would also help the economy overall weather recessions more robustly but preventing the economic distress of these households from propogating across other parts of the economy.
Thus, the path to an "ownership economy" is via economic policies that discourage household borrowing, and discourage financial market investments for households that have household debt.
Other policies that would encourage lenders to be more flexible during situations like a housing bubble collapse, such as allowing families in bankruptcy to "cram down" home mortgages to the value of the collateral and serve the bankrutcy modified loans, just as big businesses in Chapter 11 bankruptcies and wealthy individuals with second homes who are in bankrutpcy can under current law, would further advance the policy of having a more robust economy during economic downturns.
If we are to have preferences for investment in the tax code at all, perhaps those preferences should encourage households to develop what almost every financial planner puts first ahead over financial market investments in a financial plan, the establishment of a savings account in a risk free FDIC insurance commercial bank account worth three to six months or more of the household's income, to allow the household to weather brief job losses, income volatility for the self-employed, and medium sized unplanned expenses like the defense of a DUI prosecution, a major medical or dental bill, a miscalculated income tax bill at year end, or an unanticipated necessary repair to a home or a vehicle.
A tax code provision excluding all interest on, for example, up to $100,000 of FDIC (or equivalent) insured savings would do far more to support a robust economy during economic downturns than tax incentives for investments in stocks and bonds via special retirement accounts, education savings accounts and reduced rates of taxation on stocks and bonds. This quick and dirty exclusion from income would also help solve the dilemna whereby the after tax rate of return on a savings account is frequently less than the rate of inflation, causing taxes to be owed on an investment that is usually a break even or money losing investment in real dollar terms. And, it would provide a behavioral cue to encourage people to avoid the risks of uncompensable losses from theft and casualty associated with holding significant wealth in the form of currency rather than bank deposits (and simultaneously making funds that would otherwise have been held as currency available for others to invest in ways that promote economic growth).
If the exclusion was quite limited in dollar amount, didn't not have the involved account management features of retirement and education and medical savings accounts, and limited to risk free investments that the market insures will always have the lowest returns, the cost of this tax benefit could be very modest.
* How much revenue does the change produce or reduce?
* What are the distributional effects of the tax provision? Who are the winners and losers?
* What are the administrative and compliance costs associated with the tax provision relative to the revenues associated with the tax provision?
* Do the incentives created by the tax provision improve economic efficiency or do they lead to less efficient economic outcomes?
* Do the combined effects of the tax provision promote or do they discourage economic growth?
One perspective that is underappreciated in evaluating tax reforms is their impact on systemic risk in the economy, despite the fact that tax laws can have a powerful effect there.
Systemic risk matters. If there is any lesson that the past century or two of global economic history has taught us, it is that business cycles are inescapable. There will be booms and busts no matter how hard policy makers try to smooth them out. Most recently, in the United States, we were reminded of that fact when a long period of economic growth and shallow recessions was interrupted by the financial crisis, the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
It is the factor that allows whole industries and regional housing markets, for example, to collapse simultaneously when a tipping point in the economy is reached.
And, while we may not be able to prevent business cycles, it isn't unreasonable to think that the proper economic incentives, particularly in the tax code, can make our economy more robust, so that periods of falling GDP topple a smaller share of businesses, produce fewer layoffs and send fewer people into bankruptcy.
While the U.S. is finally starting to recover from the financial crisis, weak economies worldwide are facing intense public finance crisises and the creditworthiness of sovereign debts from a whole wave of these countries is plummeting.
The United States income tax system has a number of provisions that work together to magnify systemic risk in the U.S. economy. In particular, they encourage household to make "mixed bets" in the economy by simultaneously encouraging households to take on levels of debt higher than would make sense in the absence of tax incentives, and encouraging households to invest the assets that are freed up by continuing to have debt in financial market investments that are relatively volatile.
The single biggest tax code provision that favors debt is the mortgage interest deduction, including the deductions for home equity loans and second homes. A secondary tax code provision that favors debt is the student loan interest deduction. Both of these incentives are further amplified by interventions in the commercial lending market with loan guarantees and government chartered entities designed to make loans for these purposes more easily available than they would otherwise have been.
But, it is not just that there are tax incentives to leverage. There are also tax incentives to invest in the financial markets for households. A middle class household pays almost no income taxes on capital gains and qualified dividends from financial market investments. And, a middle class household can invest effectively all funds available out of income for savings in tax preferred retirement and education savings accounts.
When the economy is growing, these incentives are good policies for households to adopt. Growth in housing values, even merely at the rate of inflation, produce disproportionate gains in home equity for leveraged homeowners. Effectively income tax free financial investments for retirement or education in excess of the interest rates paid on tax deductable mortgages increase household wealth relative to paying off mortgage debt.
But, when the economic is in a bust phase, the mixed bets facilitated by incentives to leverage and invest in the financial markets with invested assets are bad policies for households to adopt. Leverage amplifies the declines in home equity that arise from falling housing prices. And, in the down phase of the business cycle, financial investments frequently lose value (often dramatically and in short periods of time) just when people need to tap their investments to meet their costs of living (hence causing them to buy high, and sell low) relative to paying off the debts that freed up the assets that were invested.
Economic historians will note that in the long term, indeed, for any time period of fifteen or twenty years or so or longer, the financial markets have been a good investment. Likewise, housing values have a strong tendency to mirror the rate of inflation over sufficiently long time periods. In short, for households that are able to weather economic downturns while still making their mortgage payments and not raiding their savings - in short - for households that manage to avoid more than very brief periods of unemployment even during economic downturns, a strategy of mixed bets seems like a sensible thing for the tax code to encourage in order to help households build wealth.
But, large numbers of households, particularly in a severe economic downturn, do experience periods of unemployment and even if they do remain employed, experience irregular incomes. This is particularly true in the small business sector. Small businesses may lead the economy in job creation during booms, but they also lead the economy in job destruction during busts. And, small business owners, who generally aren't even able to enjoy any counterpart to our nation's miserly unemployment insurance program when their incomes plummet due to downward business cycle trends, are particularly vulnerable if they heed the incentives of the tax code to make the kind of mixed bets that make sense only for households with extremely secure incomes such as government employees and core employees of big businesses.
During busts, people who have cyclical or insecure incomes lose their homes to foreclosure (again forcing them into buy high, sell low market timing strategies), pull money out of financial investments at times when asset prices are low and penalties designed to keep people in tax preferenced investments are incurred, lose their vehicles to repossession, forgoe health insurance possibly leading to permanent negative health effects from delaying treatment for medical conditions, and in the face of economic pressure see their marriages fall apart and may make decisions that compromise their children's future prospects.
If the tax code had neither deductions for interest expenses like mortgage interest and student loan interest, nor tax incentives to invest in the financial markets like tax preferrenced retirement savings accounts, tax preferrenced education savings accounts, and preferences for capital gains and qualified dividends, far more people would have far fewer savings in financial assets, but would also have much less debt.
A mass shift toward this kind of "unmixed bets" in households would reduce systemic risk in the U.S. economy during economic downturns. Fewer people would have mortgages at all, and those who did would have much smaller mortgages, so more people who suffered serious short to medium term income shocks would be able to weather downturns without being forced to lose their homes. Even in cases where households couldn't continue to make regular mortgage payments even with smaller mortgages, much lower loan to value ratios that could be refinanced more easily from hard money lenders (or paid off with non-distressed home sales) if necessary to avoid foreclosures, even in periods where housing prices were falling.
It is much harder to lose an investment made in paying off mortgage debt than it is to lose an investment in stocks and bonds.
A shift away from leveraged financing of homes would also make it harder for housing prices to stray far from ability to afford it, discouraging situations like the real estate bubble that precipitated the financial crisis.
Proof that policies to reduce systemic risk and leverage can help an economic sector become more robust in economic downturns, even when business cycles themselves cannot be tamed, is evidence from FDIC regulation of the commercial banking industry. Prior to FDIC regulation, half of commercial banks or more shuttered their doors during a serious economic bust. After FDIC regulation, the biggest component of which was to require commercial banks to limit the amount of leverage that they took on at the entity level, the percentage of commercial banks that failed, even in the financial crisis, dwindled to tiny single digit percentages and prevents the contigon of a failed entity from migrating throughout the economy.
Tax policies that similarly encouraged households to deleverage, rather than to make mixed bets on both leveraged housing purchases and volatile financial investments at the same time, would likewise not only increase the survivability of economic downturns for tens of millions of middle class households, particularly for working class families and small business owners who have less stable incomes, and would also help the economy overall weather recessions more robustly but preventing the economic distress of these households from propogating across other parts of the economy.
Thus, the path to an "ownership economy" is via economic policies that discourage household borrowing, and discourage financial market investments for households that have household debt.
Other policies that would encourage lenders to be more flexible during situations like a housing bubble collapse, such as allowing families in bankruptcy to "cram down" home mortgages to the value of the collateral and serve the bankrutcy modified loans, just as big businesses in Chapter 11 bankruptcies and wealthy individuals with second homes who are in bankrutpcy can under current law, would further advance the policy of having a more robust economy during economic downturns.
If we are to have preferences for investment in the tax code at all, perhaps those preferences should encourage households to develop what almost every financial planner puts first ahead over financial market investments in a financial plan, the establishment of a savings account in a risk free FDIC insurance commercial bank account worth three to six months or more of the household's income, to allow the household to weather brief job losses, income volatility for the self-employed, and medium sized unplanned expenses like the defense of a DUI prosecution, a major medical or dental bill, a miscalculated income tax bill at year end, or an unanticipated necessary repair to a home or a vehicle.
A tax code provision excluding all interest on, for example, up to $100,000 of FDIC (or equivalent) insured savings would do far more to support a robust economy during economic downturns than tax incentives for investments in stocks and bonds via special retirement accounts, education savings accounts and reduced rates of taxation on stocks and bonds. This quick and dirty exclusion from income would also help solve the dilemna whereby the after tax rate of return on a savings account is frequently less than the rate of inflation, causing taxes to be owed on an investment that is usually a break even or money losing investment in real dollar terms. And, it would provide a behavioral cue to encourage people to avoid the risks of uncompensable losses from theft and casualty associated with holding significant wealth in the form of currency rather than bank deposits (and simultaneously making funds that would otherwise have been held as currency available for others to invest in ways that promote economic growth).
If the exclusion was quite limited in dollar amount, didn't not have the involved account management features of retirement and education and medical savings accounts, and limited to risk free investments that the market insures will always have the lowest returns, the cost of this tax benefit could be very modest.
07 December 2012
HPV Vaccine Doesn't Increase Sexual Activity
The intimate contact involved in sexual activity allows a variety of diseases to be transmitted, including several that are transmitted only through sexual activity or other exchanges of bodily fluids, such as through the sharing intravenous drug administration needles.
Using condoms can prevent the transmission of most sexually transmitted diseases, but they aren't particularly effective at stopping the transmission of the virus called HPV which causes cervical cancer and genital warts in some subset of the people who are infected (often much later). Social conservatives like to make this point, because it provides a solid reason not to have premarital sex that birth control methods and condoms can't undermine.
Then, a safe and effective vaccine that stops the more common and virulent forms of the HPV virus was invented. Would the ability to be vaccinated against the only STD that a condom can't prevent the transmission of cause rational young people to engage in more sexual behavior?
The answer is no. HPV vaccination had no effect on sexual activity in a study that compared to a control group.
In fact, teen pregnancy rates in the United States are lower than they have been almost any time in recorded history, except during World War II, when many young men were abroad serving in the military.
Births to teenaged mothers are down 44% over twenty years for U.S. born teens and 43% over twenty years for foreign born teens over the last twenty years. "The 2010 rate was . . . 64 percent lower than the all-time high level of 96.3 recorded during the baby boom year of 1957," during the time period since 1920 over which accurate birth records have been maintained by the government. Of course, until not so long ago, for example, during the peak of the Baby Boom in 1957, a far larger proportion of teen mothers were newly married and trying to have children.
The decline has been similar across racial and ethnic lines: 54% for non-Hispanic white teens, 44% for non-Hispanic black teens, 53% for Hispanic teens, 46% for Native American teens, and 40% of Asian American teens.
If the teen birth rates observed in 1991 had not declined through 2010 as they did, there would have been an estimated 3.4 million additional births to teens during 1992–2010." This would have been a difference of about 1% of the entire population of the United States.
Teen birth rates are two and half times or more higher in many Southern States than they are in many New England States: "The birth rate for teenagers ranged from 15.7 in New Hampshire to 55.0 in Mississippi in 2010."
This year's trends continue those of a year ago reported at this blog.
Unmarried Mothers More Common
The proportion of women giving birth who aren't married has reached historically high levels (overall 41% of U.S. births compared to 28% twenty years ago), but their profiles are very different from the unmarried women giving birth of a few few decades ago.
Today, unmarried mothers tend to be in their twenties or thirties, rather than their teens. These women are often not poor. These women often have stable relationships with the fathers of their children, although not nearly as often as in Sweden, for example. Their pregnancies are frequently not "accidents." There is simply less of a sense in our culture that it is necessary or beneficial to get married before having children.
There are big differences in unmarried birth rates along racial and ethnic lines, however. Foreign born women are less likely to be unmarried than U.S. born women in every racial and ethnic category.
Marriage Is Becoming A Two Track Institution
Marriage rates show a strong class bias. College educated mothers are much more likely to be married and much less likely to get divorced, than mothers who have only graduated from high school or mothers who are high school dropouts. The women who are least likely to marry also tend to be the women who are most likely to divorce.
Marriage has all but disappeared as an institution in poor and working class black communities (in part because so many young men in those communities are incarcerated, unemployed or marginally employed), while it remains healthy among upper middle class whites and Asian Americans.
The shift is fairly recent. For example, in 1950, there was no black-white racial disparity in marriage rates. The trend extends to Europe as well, although not to Japan, where very few mothers are unmarried.
Falling Birth Rates Generally
Overall birth rates are lower than they have ever been in the entire history of the United States, among almost every demographic group. The exception has been among middle class women over the age of thirty-five, where assisted reproduction technologies have boosted birth rates and higher levels of education and career involvement have encouraged women to defer having children.
The report linked on this year's trends notes that: "The overall U.S. birth rate peaked most recently in the Baby Boom years, reaching 122.7 in 1957, nearly double today’s rate." The birth rate in 1920 was about the same as it was at the peak of the Baby Boom. It declined during the Great Depression and World War II, rose during the Baby Boom years after World War II, declined rapidly after that until the mid-1970s, and then has stablized and declined very gradually since then.
Complete and accurate birth rate records go back only to 1920, but birth rates were consistently so much higher than that no one seriously believes that there were any years prior to 1920 when the United States had lower birth rates than it does now.
In the wake of the financial crisis, birth rates have fallen particularly rapidly for women who were born in Mexico and immigrated (legally or illegally) to the United States. In the most recent year, their birth rate was down 23% in a single year.
Net migration from Mexico to the United States (legal and illegal combined) has been zero since the financial crisis, and this trend means that Mexican immigrants have, on average, lived in the United States for longer periods of time. Some analysts think that immigrants who have lived in the United States for longer periods of time are more likely to assimilate U.S. norms about how many children to have which has contributed to lower birth rates for immigrant women. Birth rates in Mexico has also declined significantly over the last couple of decades.
The low overall birth rate in the last few years is largely an artifact of hard economic times following the financial crisis. Everyone expects that it will rebound somewhat as the economy recovers.
But, the trend towards lower fertility rates for teenagers, black women, Hispanic women and poor women has been a consistent one over roughly the past twenty years, when violent crime and other negative social indicators were at a peak. Starting in the last decade or so, for the first time in a century or two, more affluent women are having more children than less affluent women.
In the last twenty years, birth rates overall have fallen 10%, but the drop was 22% for foreign born women, 29% for U.S. born black women, 21% for U.S. born Hispanic women, and 25% for U.S. born Asian American women. For U.S. born white women the drop was 5%. Births to both U.S. born and foreign born women aged 20-34 are down over the last twenty years, but births to U.S. born women aged 35 and older are up 18% and births to foreign born women aged 35 and older are up 14% over the last twenty years. Even among women aged 35 and older, births have fallen over the last twenty years for foreign born Hispanic women and U.S. born black women.
Resulting Population Trends
The birth rate in the U.S.is still higher than countries like Italy and Russia and Japan (in those countries birth rates are as much as a third below replacement levels), in part due to large numbers of immigrant women with higher fertility levels. But, like all countries in the developed world, the U.S. has low and falling birth rates.
The U.S. birth rate is currently at about 10% below replacement levels, and the U.S. population would be declining right now if it weren't for the high levels of immigration it has had for the past few decades and continues to enjoy. In 1960, 4% of children in the U.S. had mothers who were not born in the U.S., in 2010 the figure was 21%, rivaling levels last seen in 1910.
Abortion In The United States Is Increasingly Rare.
Abortion utilization is not driving these trends. Abortion rates have declined, more or less proportionately with falling birth rates (or perhaps a bit more) to the lowest levels since Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). Prior to 1973, abortion was illegal in many states.
The abortion rate in 2009, the most recent year for which official data are available, was at an all time, pro-Roe v. Wade low down 5% from 2008.
This wasn't only due to a falling number of pregnancies. The "number of pregnancies terminated for every 1,000 live births. . . dropped too, from 232 in 2008 down to 227 in 2009, a 2 percent decrease."
Using condoms can prevent the transmission of most sexually transmitted diseases, but they aren't particularly effective at stopping the transmission of the virus called HPV which causes cervical cancer and genital warts in some subset of the people who are infected (often much later). Social conservatives like to make this point, because it provides a solid reason not to have premarital sex that birth control methods and condoms can't undermine.
Then, a safe and effective vaccine that stops the more common and virulent forms of the HPV virus was invented. Would the ability to be vaccinated against the only STD that a condom can't prevent the transmission of cause rational young people to engage in more sexual behavior?
The answer is no. HPV vaccination had no effect on sexual activity in a study that compared to a control group.
Since the introduction of Gardasil, there have been concerns—raised both in peer-reviewed literature and the popular media—that use of the vaccine might lead to increased sexual activity, due in part to the mistaken belief that Gardasil protects against pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases other than HPV. . . . "We saw no increase in pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections or birth control counseling – all of which suggest the HPV vaccine does not have an impact on increased sexual activity.". . .
The study included 1,398 girls ages 11 who were members of the Kaiser Permanente health plan in Georgia in 2006 and 2007, during the first 18 months after the Gardasil vaccine became available. Of this group, 493 girls received at least one dose of the HPV vaccine during the study period. The comparison group included 905 girls who received other recommended vaccines but not the HPV vaccine. Researchers followed both groups of girls for up to three years to assess whether they had been tested for or diagnosed with a sexually transmitted infection (STI), had taken a pregnancy test, and had been counseled about contraceptives.
About 10 percent of the girls in the study, both those who received the vaccine and those who did not, had one or more of these outcomes. The average age of testing, diagnosis, or counseling was about 14.5. Only eight girls, or less than 1 percent, were diagnosed with an STI or had a positive pregnancy test. Girls who received the HPV vaccine did not have a statistically higher rate of testing, diagnosis, or counseling compared to those who did not receive the vaccine.Teen Births At Near Record Lows
In fact, teen pregnancy rates in the United States are lower than they have been almost any time in recorded history, except during World War II, when many young men were abroad serving in the military.
Births to teenaged mothers are down 44% over twenty years for U.S. born teens and 43% over twenty years for foreign born teens over the last twenty years. "The 2010 rate was . . . 64 percent lower than the all-time high level of 96.3 recorded during the baby boom year of 1957," during the time period since 1920 over which accurate birth records have been maintained by the government. Of course, until not so long ago, for example, during the peak of the Baby Boom in 1957, a far larger proportion of teen mothers were newly married and trying to have children.
The decline has been similar across racial and ethnic lines: 54% for non-Hispanic white teens, 44% for non-Hispanic black teens, 53% for Hispanic teens, 46% for Native American teens, and 40% of Asian American teens.
If the teen birth rates observed in 1991 had not declined through 2010 as they did, there would have been an estimated 3.4 million additional births to teens during 1992–2010." This would have been a difference of about 1% of the entire population of the United States.
Teen mothers account for a higher share of births to U.S.-born women (11% in 2010) than to foreign-born women (5%)[.]
Teen birth rates are two and half times or more higher in many Southern States than they are in many New England States: "The birth rate for teenagers ranged from 15.7 in New Hampshire to 55.0 in Mississippi in 2010."
This year's trends continue those of a year ago reported at this blog.
Unmarried Mothers More Common
The proportion of women giving birth who aren't married has reached historically high levels (overall 41% of U.S. births compared to 28% twenty years ago), but their profiles are very different from the unmarried women giving birth of a few few decades ago.
Today, unmarried mothers tend to be in their twenties or thirties, rather than their teens. These women are often not poor. These women often have stable relationships with the fathers of their children, although not nearly as often as in Sweden, for example. Their pregnancies are frequently not "accidents." There is simply less of a sense in our culture that it is necessary or beneficial to get married before having children.
There are big differences in unmarried birth rates along racial and ethnic lines, however. Foreign born women are less likely to be unmarried than U.S. born women in every racial and ethnic category.
Looking at births to foreign-born mothers by race and ethnicity, the highest share to unmarried mothers is among Hispanics (50%), followed by blacks (38%), whites (13%) and Asians (12%). Among births to U.S.-born women, the highest share to unmarried mothers is among blacks (78%), followed by Hispanics (58%), Asians (31%) and whites (30%).Eight out of ten U.S. born black mothers, and six out of ten U.S. born Hispanic mothers are not married, as are about half of foreign born Hispanic mothers, and about four in ten foreign born black mothers. About three in ten U.S. born Asian and white mothers, and about one in eight foreign born Asian and white mothers, are not married.
Marriage Is Becoming A Two Track Institution
Marriage rates show a strong class bias. College educated mothers are much more likely to be married and much less likely to get divorced, than mothers who have only graduated from high school or mothers who are high school dropouts. The women who are least likely to marry also tend to be the women who are most likely to divorce.
Only 4% of the children of mothers with college degrees are born out of wedlock. And the divorce rate among college-educated women has plummeted. Of those who first tied the knot between 1975 and 1979, 29% were divorced within ten years. Among those who first married between 1990 and 1994, only 16.5% were.
At the bottom of the education scale, the picture is reversed. Among high-school dropouts, the divorce rate rose from 38% for those who first married in 1975-79 to 46% for those who first married in 1990-94. Among those with a high school diploma but no college, it rose from 35% to 38%. And these figures are only part of the story. Many mothers avoid divorce by never marrying in the first place.
Marriage has all but disappeared as an institution in poor and working class black communities (in part because so many young men in those communities are incarcerated, unemployed or marginally employed), while it remains healthy among upper middle class whites and Asian Americans.
The shift is fairly recent. For example, in 1950, there was no black-white racial disparity in marriage rates. The trend extends to Europe as well, although not to Japan, where very few mothers are unmarried.
Falling Birth Rates Generally
Overall birth rates are lower than they have ever been in the entire history of the United States, among almost every demographic group. The exception has been among middle class women over the age of thirty-five, where assisted reproduction technologies have boosted birth rates and higher levels of education and career involvement have encouraged women to defer having children.
The report linked on this year's trends notes that: "The overall U.S. birth rate peaked most recently in the Baby Boom years, reaching 122.7 in 1957, nearly double today’s rate." The birth rate in 1920 was about the same as it was at the peak of the Baby Boom. It declined during the Great Depression and World War II, rose during the Baby Boom years after World War II, declined rapidly after that until the mid-1970s, and then has stablized and declined very gradually since then.
Complete and accurate birth rate records go back only to 1920, but birth rates were consistently so much higher than that no one seriously believes that there were any years prior to 1920 when the United States had lower birth rates than it does now.
In the wake of the financial crisis, birth rates have fallen particularly rapidly for women who were born in Mexico and immigrated (legally or illegally) to the United States. In the most recent year, their birth rate was down 23% in a single year.
Net migration from Mexico to the United States (legal and illegal combined) has been zero since the financial crisis, and this trend means that Mexican immigrants have, on average, lived in the United States for longer periods of time. Some analysts think that immigrants who have lived in the United States for longer periods of time are more likely to assimilate U.S. norms about how many children to have which has contributed to lower birth rates for immigrant women. Birth rates in Mexico has also declined significantly over the last couple of decades.
The low overall birth rate in the last few years is largely an artifact of hard economic times following the financial crisis. Everyone expects that it will rebound somewhat as the economy recovers.
But, the trend towards lower fertility rates for teenagers, black women, Hispanic women and poor women has been a consistent one over roughly the past twenty years, when violent crime and other negative social indicators were at a peak. Starting in the last decade or so, for the first time in a century or two, more affluent women are having more children than less affluent women.
In the last twenty years, birth rates overall have fallen 10%, but the drop was 22% for foreign born women, 29% for U.S. born black women, 21% for U.S. born Hispanic women, and 25% for U.S. born Asian American women. For U.S. born white women the drop was 5%. Births to both U.S. born and foreign born women aged 20-34 are down over the last twenty years, but births to U.S. born women aged 35 and older are up 18% and births to foreign born women aged 35 and older are up 14% over the last twenty years. Even among women aged 35 and older, births have fallen over the last twenty years for foreign born Hispanic women and U.S. born black women.
Resulting Population Trends
The birth rate in the U.S.is still higher than countries like Italy and Russia and Japan (in those countries birth rates are as much as a third below replacement levels), in part due to large numbers of immigrant women with higher fertility levels. But, like all countries in the developed world, the U.S. has low and falling birth rates.
The U.S. birth rate is currently at about 10% below replacement levels, and the U.S. population would be declining right now if it weren't for the high levels of immigration it has had for the past few decades and continues to enjoy. In 1960, 4% of children in the U.S. had mothers who were not born in the U.S., in 2010 the figure was 21%, rivaling levels last seen in 1910.
Abortion In The United States Is Increasingly Rare.
Abortion utilization is not driving these trends. Abortion rates have declined, more or less proportionately with falling birth rates (or perhaps a bit more) to the lowest levels since Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). Prior to 1973, abortion was illegal in many states.
The abortion rate in 2009, the most recent year for which official data are available, was at an all time, pro-Roe v. Wade low down 5% from 2008.
This wasn't only due to a falling number of pregnancies. The "number of pregnancies terminated for every 1,000 live births. . . dropped too, from 232 in 2008 down to 227 in 2009, a 2 percent decrease."
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