Politics

The US Military Made Your Cell Phone Possible

by

Business Insider has an arresting chart showing which of the major technologies that make cell phones possible are directly attributable to the United States military.

2014-11-04 DARPA Cell Phone Tech

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a big believer that government is an evil that is necessary. But there are a few things that it does well. The canonical examples are national defense and civil/criminal justice. I’m starting to think that research might be another exception to the rule, however. I’d love to see even more investment in R&D. Want to see more STEM graduates? Well, start up a few more government labs and there you go. While you’re at it, consider giving preferential access to resulting tech to companies that locate their workforces in the United States. Seems like a great way for an advanced nation to compete for private investment dollars.

New Manhattan Institute Report on Inequality

by
Inequality expert Scott Winship
Inequality expert Scott Winship

Scott Winship at the Manhattan Institute has a new study[ref]A summary can be found here.[/ref] out on inequality and prosperity. His key findings are:

1. Across the developed world, countries with more inequality tend to have, if anything, higher living standards. The exception is that countries with higher income concentration tend to have poorer low-income populations.

2.  However, when changes in income concentration and living standards are considered across countries—a more rigorous approach to assessing causality—larger increases in inequality correspond with sharper rises in living standards for the middle class and the poor alike.

3.  In developed nations, greater inequality tends to accompany stronger economic growth. This stronger growth may explain how it is that when the top gets a bigger share of the economic pie, the amount of pie received by  the middle class and the poor is nevertheless greater than it otherwise would have been. Greater inequality can increase the size of the pie.

4. Below the top 1 percent of households—and prior to government redistribution—developed nations display levels of inequality squarely in the middle ranks of nations globally. American income inequality below the top 1 percent is of the same magnitude as that of our rich-country peers in continental Europe and the Anglosphere.

5. In the English-speaking world, income concentration at the top is higher than in most of continental Europe; in the U.S., income concentration is higher than in the rest of the Anglosphere.

6. Yet—with the exception of small countries that are oil-rich, international financial centers, or vacation destinations for the affluent—America’s middle class enjoys living standards as high as, or higher than, any other nation.

7.  America’s poor have higher living standards than their counterparts across much of Europe and the Anglosphere, while faring worse than poor residents of Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Low Countries, and Canada.

 

Check it out.

Are We the New Serfs?

by

2014-10-30 Overlords

Kevin D. Williamson has an interesting piece up at the National Review Online with a really though-provoking title: Meet the New Serfs: You. In the article, Williamson recaps some of the more egregious examples of government malfeasance towards private citizens over the past couple of years, emphasizing the callous followup to bungled SWAT raids on innocent Americans. For example:

Bobby Griffin Jr. was wanted on murder charges. His next-door neighbor on Peck Street, Joseph Adams, wasn’t. But that didn’t stop the SWAT team from knocking down his door, setting his home on fire, roughing him up, keeping him tied up in his underwear for nearly three hours, and treating the New Haven man, who is gay, to a nance show as officers taunted him with flamboyantly effeminate mannerisms. If the events detailed in Mr. Adams’s recently filed lawsuit are even remotely accurate, the episode was a moral violation and, arguably, a crime.

And when Mr. Adams showed up at the New Haven police department the next day to fill out paperwork requesting that the authorities reimburse him for the wanton destruction of his property — never mind the gross violation of his rights — the story turned Kafkaesque, as interactions with American government agencies at all levels tend to do. The police — who that same night had managed to take in the murder suspect next door without the use of flash grenades or other theatrics after his mother suggested that they were probably there for her son — denied having any record of the incident at Mr. Adams’s home ever having happened.

So far so good: the extraordinary lack of accountability for anyone operating under government auspices is truly breathtaking. From police brutality to missing hard drives at the IRS, the degree of insulation from any reasonable consequences for corruption or incompetence have gone beyond the bounds of hilarity. We literally have cops blowing the faces off of little children with flash-bang grenades and then the government refusing to even help pay with medical expenses. This does seem a lot like serfs being bullied by the thugs of privileged nobles.

But who are the privileged nobles? This is where Williamson’s analogy breaks down. The cops who brutalized Joseph Adams weren’t targeting Joseph Adams. That’s the whole point: they were too indifferent and incompetent to care who they were harassing. Another problem is Williamson’s insistence that it’s law-abiding citizens who suffer worst under this regime: “the brunt of government abuse falls on the law-abiding.” That claim seems utterly detached from reality, as any discussion of the way local governments have entrapped poor citizens in a never-ending nightmare of threats, fees, and penalties will tell you.[ref]These kinds of articles have been plentiful in the wake of Ferguson as explorations of the roots of the anger in black communities.[/ref]

The reality is twofold. First, we must admit that those most vulnerable to government oppression are not middle or upper-class Americans. The more you interact with, depend on, or (Heaven help you) cross the government or its innumerable agents, the more vulnerable you are. That doesn’t describe your stereotypical National Review audience member at all. Second, we have to concede that if we were serfs who belonged to some cruel lord, that would be less frightening than the reality. A cruel master would at least have a chance of being restricted in their cruelty by self-interest or even simple exhaustion. The lord of the manor doesn’t want to kill everyone who raises his crops, and he has to sleep sometime. But bureaucracy never sleeps and doesn’t care at all if you live or if you die. The real horrifying possibility is not that we are serfs and that local cops or bureaucrats are the new aristocracy. (Have you seen how much cops get paid?) Nope, what ought to keep you up at night is that we’re creating a society with serfs, but no lords at all, where it is institutions themselves that–driven from within by some monstrous emergent property of self-preservation–have become our overlords.

Shaky Global Warming Models

by

2014-10-29 Global Warming

Earlier this month the Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece by Dr. Judith Curry, former chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the President of the Climate Forecast Applications Network. The gist of the article is simple: global warming predictions based on current models are predicting unrealistically high levels of climate change. The real levels–based on observational models–are much lower.

Continuing to rely on climate-model warming projections based on high, model-derived values of climate sensitivity skews the cost-benefit analyses and estimates of the social cost of carbon. This can bias policy decisions. The implications of the lower values of climate sensitivity in our paper, as well as similar other recent studies, is that human-caused warming near the end of the 21st century should be less than the 2-degrees-Celsius “danger” level for all but the IPCC’s most extreme emission scenario.

This slower rate of warming—relative to climate model projections—means there is less urgency to phase out greenhouse gas emissions now, and more time to find ways to decarbonize the economy affordably. It also allows us the flexibility to revise our policies as further information becomes available.

To me, this represents a moderate and mature approach to climate change. Curry’s work neither denies global warming nor the human factor in causing global warming. It simply suggests that climate models are biased upwards, and that we might have more time. Time that could be used to develop more sophisticated solutions to a post-carbon economy. This is really important given news like (just as an example) the announcement from Lockheed Martin that they are just 5 years away from a prototype nuclear fusion reactor.

I just finished reading Tim Flannery’s Here on Earth, which was the most eloquent and serious defense of the Gaia Hypothesis I’ve ever read, so I really  like the idea of greater human responsibility for our environment. I just think we’ll do a better job of living up to that responsibility if we have (1) a little less partisanship and (2) a deeper understanding of the relevant science. A little more time can help.

Drug War’s Impact on Black America

by

As the arrest data above shows (provided by Jonathan Rothwell at the Brookings Institution), arrests of blacks for violent and property crimes have dropped since 1980. However, arrests for drug related crimes have spiked dramatically. Yet,

whites are actually more likely than blacks to sell drugs and about as likely to consume them.

Whites were about 45 percent more likely than blacks to sell drugs in 1980, according to an analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth by economist Robert Fairlie. This was consistent with a 1989 survey of youth in Boston. My own analysis of data from the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that 6.6 percent of white adolescents and young adults (aged 12 to 25) sold drugs, compared to just 5.0 percent of blacks (a 32 percent difference).

As for drug use, just 10 percent of blacks report using illegal drugs within the last month, which is not statistically different than the rate for whites. Among college students, 25 percent of whites reported illegal drug use within the last month but just 20 percent of black students.

Incarcerations wreak havoc on family stability, employment prospects, and future income. While there are other important factors that negatively impact black social mobility, an unnecessary War on Drugs is one we can easily address.

Economic Freedom of the World Report 2014

by

The Economic Freedom of the World: 2014 Annual Report has been published by the Fraser Institute. I blogged about the 2013 report last September and Nathaniel and I made use of its data in our SquareTwo article earlier this year. The following can be considered an update of what I deem to be some of the most important graphs in the whole report (descriptions are at the bottom of the graphs):

 

Economic Growth

 

 Per Capita Income

Income of Poorest 10%

Life Expectancy at Birth

 

Another Pro-Choice Spin Job

by

2014-10-16 Keep Abortion Legal

I often comment on the lamentable pro-choice bias in American journalism, but one of the strange things you will only learn if you dig deep into this issue is that the bias really gets serious when international stories come into play. I have no idea why this is, I’ve just seen it happen enough to know that the amount of skepticism required when you read a mainstream report of an abortion-related news story (already pretty high) gets even higher when the events take place in a foreign country. Just to give the story I’m about to relate some context, the most recent major example of this was the case of Dr. Savita Halappanavar, who died along with her 17-week unborn child as a result of complications from a miscarriage. The story had literally nothing to do with abortion–and this was known from day 1–but it quickly became a media sensation when reporters claimed that she died because she was denied an abortion. If that sounds extreme, it’s actually barely scratching the surface. Read the rest here.

Unfortunately, of course, the fact that the lies are lies never really seems to matter. “A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots,” as Mark Twain is reported to have said. And, by the time truth gets its boots on, nobody really cares anymore. There’s already a new crisis to pay attention to.

And that’s what’s happening again, but this time with a story out of El Salvador:

American media giant National Public Radio (NPR) published a report last week claiming to expose the underbelly of El Salvador’s pro-life legal system by profiling a woman whom they say was sentenced to 30 years for abortion after a stillbirth. On-the-ground evidence reveals, however, that the woman was in fact convicted for murdering her son after he was born alive.

It’s not hard to see why El Salvador is a target. First: it’s small, the smallest country in Central America. Second: it’s pro-life. It banned abortion–with no exceptions–in 1998 and then recognized personhood from the moment of conception in 1999. Just as powerful American evangelical lobbies meddle in African countries to get anti-gay laws that they can’t pass in the US, pro-choice lobbies in the United States (often working through the UN or powerful non-profits) throw their weight around in African, Central, and South American countries to get their political way.

And, as usual, it’s easy to see how this makes sense from their perspective. If you’re coming from a strong pro-choice background, then El Salvador has to strike you as an absolutely terrifying human rights tragedy in the making. It’s only a matter of time before some poor woman dies because she can’t get a life-saving abortion. Why wait for it to really happen? Much more compassionate to invent a story instead and make an issue out of that way. Much better than waiting for someone to actually die.

Two additional points to keep in mind. The first is evidence from Chile that criminalizing abortion doesn’t, in fact, lead to women dying. We covered that story back in February. The second is a very technical but very important clarification of what it means to have a “no exceptions” law against abortion. The problem is that Catholics (who are obviously rather dominant in S. and Central America) have a peculiar definition of “abortion” that amounts to “deliberate killing of the unborn human being to end a pregnancy,” whereas the technical definition of abortion simply means “early termination of a pregnancy.” In practice, this means that no-exception laws often do have exceptions. To see an example of this, consider the case of “Beatriz”[ref]Not her real name.[/ref] She would not survive her pregnancy and requested an abortion (in El Salvador). Her request was denied, but permission was granted for an early Cesarean section instead, even though the fetus was non-viable. Did she get an abortion? If you use the Catholic definition, she did not, because the unborn child was removed without harm and even incubated and given fluids rather than being killed or abandoned. But if you use the more general term, she did, because the pregnancy was terminated early even though it would result in the death of the fetus.

This confusion leads to a lot of unhelpful acrimony in the abortion debate. The reality is that no one, as far as I know, has ever actually maintained a true no-exceptions stance on abortion when the general definition is used. For further reading, check out the principle of double effect, which is the ethical principle that allows abortion to save a mother’s life with the caveat that the abortion not be a deliberate act of killing but rather a removal of the fetus to preserve the woman’s life that results in the foreseen but unintended death of the fetus.

Paglia Weighs In On Campus Sex Crimes

by

sb10065836e-001

I like Camille Paglia a lot in no small part because the world clearly has no idea what to do with her. I mean, just look at the intro she gets to this piece for Time: Paglia is the author of Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars. I mean, that’s true, she did write that book, but it has nothing to do with who she is, what she thinks, or why so many people find her fascinating (or infuriating). Anyway, here’s her take on sex crimes on collage campuses: “Young women today do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.”

She calls the warning cries about levels of sexual violence on college campuses “wildly overblown” and–in direct contradiction of conventional wisdom from all the experts–declares that it really is forcible rape by strangers that should be every woman’s concern. She writes:

Despite hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides.

I’d be inclined to write her off as being a bit over-confident in her own anecdotal experiences over hard facts if it were for the fact that I also recently read an NRO piece on the same topic: The Rape Epidemic Is a Fiction:

Much of the scholarly literature estimates that the actual rate is more like a tenth of that one-in-five rate, 2.16 percent, or 21.6 per 1,000 to use the conventional formulation. But that number is problematic, too, as are most of the numbers related to sexual assault, as the National Institute of Justice, the DoJ’s research arm, documents. For example, two surveys conducted practically in tandem produced victimization rates of 0.16 percent and 1.7 percent, respectively – i.e., the latter estimate was eleven times the former. The NIJ blames defective wording on survey questions.

So the numbers are really in dispute after all, and Paglia may have some legitimate backup. Setting that contention aside for a moment, however, I think there’s no real arguing with these paragraphs from her piece:

Colleges should stick to academics and stop their infantilizing supervision of students’ dating lives, an authoritarian intrusion that borders on violation of civil liberties. Real crimes should be reported to the police, not to haphazard and ill-trained campus grievance committees.

Too many young middleclass women, raised far from the urban streets, seem to expect adult life to be an extension of their comfortable, overprotected homes. But the world remains a wilderness. The price of women’s modern freedoms is personal responsibility for vigilance and self-defense.

And that dark vision of human nature and the reality we inhabit really explains Paglia’s appeal to conservatives despite her radical left-wing politics. I can’t resist quoting just a bit more:

Current educational codes, tracking liberal-Left, are perpetuating illusions about sex and gender. The basic Leftist premise, descending from Marxism, is that all problems in human life stem from an unjust society and that corrections and fine-tunings of that social mechanism will eventually bring utopia. Progressives have unquestioned faith in the perfectibility of mankind.

The horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of primary and secondary education except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism — toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and remade. But the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and light.

You should just read the whole post. It is, like so much of what she writes, well worth the time.

TED: Economist on the Global Impact of Remittances

by

Economist Dilip Ratha gave a fascinating TED talk this month on the global impact of money sent by migrants to their native countries. It is hard to imagine how this subject gets overlooked when Ratha points out that the amount of money sent home by migrants in 2013 was three times that of development aid. Or that remittances make up 42% of Tajikistan’s GDP. Or that monthly remittances to Somalia exceed the average per capita income of $250 per year. What especially struck me was the following line by Ratha in his discussion of Somalia:

“Remittances are the lifeblood of Somalia. And yet, this is an example of the right hand giving a lot of aid, while the left hand is cutting the lifeblood to that economy, through regulations.”

Sometimes the most conventional method of helping the poor isn’t the most effective.

Abortion, Race, and Cluelessness

by

2014-10-10 Abortion and Race

In September, The Atlantic ran a post called Abortion’s Racial Gap that was breathtaking in its cluelessness.

The rate of abortion among American women is currently at its lowest point since Roe v. Wade, according to a recent report by the Guttmacher Institute. About 1.1 million abortions were performed in 2011, at a rate of 16.9 abortions for every 1,000 women of childbearing age, down from a peak of 29.3 per 1,000 in 1981. Since the report’s release in February, the reason why has been the subject of much debate. Its authors and abortion-rights supporters point to the increase in contraceptive use and sexual education, while anti-abortion activists counter that the decrease is a result of abstinence-only teachings and state restrictions.

Largely missing from the debate, though, is discussion of abortion’s racial disparity: Although rates among Hispanic and African-American women have decreased along with the rest of the country, they remain significantly higher than the national average.

To the extent that abortion’s racial disparity is “largely missing from the debate,” it is absolutely not because pro-lifers are either ignorant of it or silent on the topic. The problem, by contrast, is that the overwhelmingly pro-choice media squelches any discussion of, for example, the insidious beliefs that prompted pro-choice hero Margaret Sanger to advocate for legalized abortion. I’ll go ahead and give away the secret: she was an ardent eugenecist who hoped that abortion and birth control could be used to exterminated blacks from the country. Ask any pro-lifer about this, and they’ll happily tell you about it and find one of her more infamous quotes and point out that, tragically, her legacy seems to be alive and well. Meanwhile Planned Parenthood, the organization she founded, still gives an annual award in her name. Oh there’s a racial disparity alright, but it’s only on one side of this issue.

To their credit, I think that pro-choicers (who are usually liberal) aren’t intentionally trying to conceal the concern that pro-lifer’s have on this issue. I think they just genuinely can’t imagine that conservatives (who are supposed to be racist) might actually sincerely care about the racial impact of abortion policy in the United States.

By chance, I happened upon another article that demonstrates exactly how this plays out in real time. Over at Townhall, Ryan Bomberger described the reaction to some comments from Jessa Duggar after visiting the Holocaust Museum. She wrote:

I walked through the Holocaust Museum again today… very sobering. Millions of innocents denied the most basic and fundamental of all rights–their right to life. One human destroying the life of another deemed “less than human.” Racism, stemming from the evolutionary idea that man came from something less than human; that some people groups are “more evolved” and others “less evolved.” A denying that our Creator–GOD–made us human from the beginning, all of ONE BLOOD and ONE RACE, descendants of Adam. The belief that some human beings are “not fit to live.” So they’re murdered. Slaughtered. Kids with Down syndrome or other disabilities. The sickly. The elderly. The sanctity of human life varies not in sickness or health, poverty or wealth, elderly or pre-born, little or lots of melanin [making you darker or lighter skinned], or any other factor… May we never sit idly by and allow such an atrocity to happen again. Not this generation. We must be a voice for those who cannot speak up for themselves. Because EVERY LIFE IS PRECIOUS. #ProLife

No matter what you think about this message, one thing is clears: she understands the connection between discrimination and being ProLife. The backlash was as vicious as it was predictable:

Cosmo went into full anti-woman mode. Filipovic attacked Jessa Duggar for daring to put history into perspective: “Jessa had just walked out of the Holocaust museum, and instead of absorbing the scale of that atrocity, decided to make a point about abortion rights. That’s not just tone-deaf; it’s deranged.”

So, just to be clear, pro-lifers are acutely aware of the connection between race and abortion. Folks–especially those in the media–just tend to have an allergic reaction every time we bring it up. Then, when they discover the connection themselves, they act as though it’s the most starting, unexpected thing in the world.

Maybe they should have been listening.