Since we posted our annual Best Books of the Year review yesterday morning, I thought this recent post over at Harvard Business Review was appropriate. Literary technologist Hugh McGuire describes the constant barrage of digital information day in and day out:
I was distracted when at work, distracted when with family and friends, constantly tired, irritable, and always swimming against a wash of ambient stress induced by my constant itch for digital information. My stress had an electronic feel to it, as if it was made up of the very bits and bytes on my screens. And I was exhausted.
To his horror, he realized that his constant immersion in this easy, instantaneous web of mental overstimulation caused him to
read just four books in all of 2014. That’s one book a quarter. A third of a book per month. I love reading books. Books are my passion and my livelihood. I work in the world of book publishing. I’m the founder of LibriVox, the largest library of free public domain audiobooks in the world; and I spend most of my time running Pressbooks, an online book production software company. I might have an unpublished novel in a drawer somewhere. I love books. And yet, I wasn’t reading them. In fact, I couldn’t read them. I tried, but every time, by sentence three or four, I was either checking email or asleep.
Drawing on new neuroscience research, McGuire points out that the constant novelty triggers the release of dopamine, conditioning us to continually seek out potential pleasure in new things (e.g. new emails, Facebook updates, etc.). This constant bouncing around between topics also depletes our brain’s energy. McGuire suggests three rules by which we can diminish the stress of information overload and learn to read again:
When you get home from work, put away the laptop and iPhone.
After dinner, don’t turn on Netflix, the TV, or the Internet.
No glowing screens in the bedroom (Kindle is ok).
While I don’t do these exactly, I have made a rule of “no iPhone or Internet one hour before bed.” I finally have a set bedtime every night before work. Granted, I’ve only been doing this for about a week or so, but I can already feel a difference. If you saw anything in our Best Books post that you would like to read, but just can’t seem to find the time, give the rules above a try.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I offer you Exhibit B…”
In July of last year, I wrote about a study that found subsidized loans to be the culprit behind rising tuition. Now, a newer study comes to similar conclusions:
With all factors present, net tuition increases from $6,100 to $12,559. As column 4 demonstrates, the demand shocks— which consist mostly of changes in financial aid—account for the lion’s share of the higher tuition. Specifically, with demand shocks alone, equilibrium tuition rises by 102%, almost fully matching the 106% from the benchmark. By contrast, with all factors present except the demand shocks (column 7), net tuition only rises by 16%.
These results accord strongly with the Bennett hypothesis, which asserts that colleges respond to expansions of financial aid by increasing tuition (pg. 36).
“Remarkably,” writes economist Alex Tabarrok, “so much of the subsidy is translated into higher tuition that enrollment doesn’t increase! What does happen is that students take on more debt, which many of them can’t pay.” This just provides further evidence that “the Econ 101 insight that subsidies increase prices (even net for those who are not fully subsidized) holds true.”
I’ve written about assortative mating and income inequality before, pointing out that the more educated tend to marry each other and therefore increase their economic earnings. Ronald Bailey at Reason weighs in on the discussion, adding to the mix evidence that shows assortative mating isn’t just about education, but intelligence. Quoting a 2015 study, he writes,
For example, if spouses mated randomly in relation to intelligence, highly intelligent women would be just as likely to mate with men of low as high intelligence. Offspring of the matings of women of high intelligence and men of low intelligence would generally be of average intelligence. However, because there is strong positive assortative mating, children with highly intelligent mothers are also likely to have highly intelligent fathers, and the offspring themselves are likely to be more intelligent than average. The same thing happens for less intelligent parents. In this way, assortative mating increases additive genetic variance in that the offspring differ more from the average than they would if mating were random. The increase in additive genetic variance can be substantial because its effects accumulate generation after generation until an equilibrium is reached.
University of Washington professor Tony Gill once shared a thought experiment he employs in his classes during a Facebook discussion:
Most students are for higher marginal taxation on the rich (defined as the dollar amount of people who have a wee bit more than them).
I propose centrally planned sorting by either IQ or socio-economic status (noting some studies that show how IQ might have a hereditary component and how IQ might be related to long-term income potential). I also note that we tend to marry people who are educationally and socially close to us (e.g., people meet at Harvard or in the same upscale neighborhood bars). Some of us use mail order catalogues, but we usually get a box on education to check.
Students freak out. First, they say that this has never been done. Then I note how arranged marriages are not an uncommon fixture in history. Then they say it isn’t possible because of data concerns, and I remind them about all those tests they took in 3rd, 7th and 11th grade and their “permanent record,” not to mention all the income data the IRS has on their parents.
Then they squeal that this isn’t right because it limits their freedom to do what they want. And then I say, “Oh, so now you’re worried about centrally-planned limits on freedom, eh?”
So, next time you get the social justice itch to redistribute wealth, ask yourself the following:
Are the adjectives smart or intelligent used to describe your spouse? Are they some of the reasons given as to why you love them?
Did you meet your spouse at college?
Would it have a negative influence on your choice to date an individual if they were a waiter/waitress, barista, fast food employee, Walmart cashier? (And not one who is working there part-time while they go to school.)
Would you date someone you thought was uneducated?
If you answered “yes” to the first three and “no” to the last, congrats: you’ve officially contributed to income inequality.
The Atlantic cuts through much of the pessimism found in the media with data that should make us smile:
From Paris to Syria through San Bernardino to Afghanistan, the world witnessed obscene and unsufferable tragedy in 2015. That was on top of the ongoing misery of hundreds of millions who are literally stunted by poverty, living lives shortened by preventable disease and malnutrition. But for all of that, 2015 also saw continued progress toward better quality of life for the considerable majority of the planet, alongside technological breakthroughs and political agreements that suggest the good news might continue next year and beyond.
And their evidence?:
A 35% decline in violent crime rates in the U.S. since the 1995, with a 6% drop in homicide rates worldwide between 2000 and 2012.[ref]Based on countries for which data was available.[/ref]
While terrorism and war is up slightly in the last couple years, “across the globe, the numbers of ongoing wars and battle deaths are still far below their levels of the 1970s and 1980s. Furthermore, terrorism, war, and murder together remain a minor cause of death worldwide.”
“Famine deaths are increasingly rare and increasingly limited to the few areas of the world suffering complete state collapse. Related to that, the proportion of the world’s population that is undernourished has slipped from 19 percent to 11 percent between 1990 and today.”
Vaccines have nearly exterminated diseases like polio and measles, while new ones (such as the recent one to combat Ebola) may prevent future outbreaks. “Meanwhile, the UN reported this year that global child mortality from all causes has more than halved since 1990. That means 6.7 million fewer kids under the age of five are dying each year compared to 1990.”
“[T]he number of electoral democracies worldwide remains at a historic high…”
Greater LGBT rights worldwide.
Increased wealth worldwide.
Increased globalization.
Increased commitment to battling climate change.
Chris Smith over at Approaching Justice has his own list of “good news” stories from 2015, including:
Advances in treatments for cancer and Alzheimer’s.
Plummeting U.S. school dropout rates.
Women in Saudi Arabia voting and running for office for the first time.
And much more. Check out these links and remember that despite the bad news, the world continues to get better.
30% of Republicans and 19% of Democrats support bombing Agrabah. You know, Aladdin’s hometown.
44% of Democrats were in favor of allowing refugees from Jasmine’s kingdom to settle in the U.S., while 27% were opposed and 28% were indifferent.
According to a 2007 survey, 35% of Democrats and 12% of Republicans support the “truther” theory of 9/11 (i.e. 9/11 was an inside job).
Only 29% of Republicans believe President Obama was born in the U.S. (the rest said either he wasn’t or they “aren’t sure”).
32% of Democrats and 18 % of Republicans believe “the Jews” deserve substantial blame for the 2008 financial crisis.[ref]For a fascinating read on a lot of the anti-Semitism underlying anti-capitalist sentiments, see Jerry Z. Muller, Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).[/ref]
GMU law professor Ilya Somin recent Washington Post article uses these numbers to explore how ignorance abounds among political partisans on both sides. Check it out.
“We have this large body of evidence covering many, many years that consistently shows if you happen to live in an area with only one hospital you are going to pay a lot more,” [Carnegie Mellon economist Martin] Gaynor said.
That helps explain why a C-Section in one Oregon market costs more than $15,000 and can run for as little as $3,000 in St. Louis, where there’s lots of competition. For years, hospital executives have defended these prices saying it’s about quality, or that they see sicker patients, or lots of folks on Medicare. “That’s just not true,” said co-author Yale economist Zack Cooper.
I mention Pethokoukis’ blog specifically because it provides a number of informative links on the subject, including one from The New York Times appropriately titled “The Experts Were Wrong About the Best Places for Better and Cheaper Health Care.” This is what makes central planning so dangerous: experts are often wrong when it comes to making sweeping societal changes via laws and policies. When the market is allowed to work, as in the case of hospitals, prices drop and quality improves.[ref]For example, recent research suggests that competition between hospitals improves managerial quality and thus hospital performance (e.g. increase in survival rates of emergency heart attacks).[/ref]
My friend Chris Smith recently authored a piece over at Approaching Justiceon how minimum wage opponents get it wrong on economics. As I commented elsewhere, providing nuance to the discussion by pointing out some studies that find no effect on employment or by discussing trade-offs is important. But I think it is quite a stretch to say that minimum wage opponents believe in an “oversimplified economic theory that is not borne out by empirical research.” It’s not just that “many studies” show an increase in unemployment among the least skilled and least educated. That’s what most studies over the last couple decades have shown (as Neumark’s MIT-published book from a few years ago demonstrates as well as his literature reviews) along with plenty of recent research. There is also a difference between low-wage workers and low-income families. Many low-wage workers are not the primary breadwinners and are simply bringing in extra money for middle-class families.
Other studies show that an increased minimum wage causes firms to incrementally move toward automation. Now, this too could be seen as a trade-off: automation and technological progress tend to make processes more efficient and therefore increase productivity (and eventually wages), raising living standards for consumers (which include the poor). Nonetheless, the point is that while unemployment in the short-term may be insignificant, the long-term effects could be much bigger. For example, one study finds that minimum wage hikes lead to lower rates of job growth: about 0.05 percentage points a year. That’s not much in a single year, but it accumulates over time and largely impacts the young and uneducated.
Princeton’s Thomas Leonard has looked at Progressive Era policies and found that the minimum wage was wielded by progressive economists as a form of economic eugenics; a way of ridding the labor force of those considered “unemployable” or “unfit” such as women, immigrants, and blacks. It was a matter of social control rather than social justice, but now it is heralded as the latter.
I was reminded of all this when I read David Neumark’s (mentioned above) new Wall Street Journal article on this very subject. He explains, “Economists have written scores of papers on the topic dating back 100 years, and the vast majority of these studies point to job losses for the least-skilled. They are based on fundamental economic reasoning—that when you raise the price of something, in this case labor, less of it will be demanded, or in this case hired.” He cites some of the same research I mention above. He addresses some of the recent research showing no effect on low-skill employment:
But as Ian Salas of Johns Hopkins, William Wascher and I pointed out in a 2014 paper, there are serious problems with the research designs and control groups of the Dube et al. study. When we let the data determine the appropriate control states, rather than just assuming—as Dube et al. do—that the bordering states are the best controls, it leads to lower teen employment. A new study by David Powell of Rand, taking the same approach but with more elegant solutions to some of the statistical challenges, yields similar results.
Another recent study by Shanshan Liu and Thomas Hyclak of Lehigh University, and Krishna Regmi of Georgia College & State University most directly mimics the Dube et al. approach. But crucially it only uses as control areas parts of states that are classified by the Bureau of Economic Analysis as subject to the same economic shocks as the areas where minimum wages have increased. The resulting estimates point to job loss for the least-skilled workers studied, as do a number of other recent studies that address the Dube et al. criticisms.
Overall, I think all of this is good evidence for a healthy skepticism toward the minimum wage. Future evidence may convince me otherwise (I’ve been known to change my mind), but as of now, I think my position is as empirically grounded as any.
Girls’ rifle team at Central High, Washington, DC. November 1922. (Wikimedia Commons)
I haven’t posted anything about gun control in the middle of this most recent medley of outrage. This is primarily because I haven’t seen anything that looks remotely like a rational debate in which I could participate. It’s also because I’ve written on this topic at great length already[ref]Especially here and here.[/ref], and there is not a whole lot new to add.
It’s not that I’m opposed to considering new policies to solve the problems of widespread gun ownership.[ref]Note that I’m not denying that such problems exist, either.[/ref] Nope, the problem is that I find most of the folks who are calling for greater gun control are suggesting the wrong solutions to the wrong problems.
The degree of irresponsibility this time around has been particularly shocking. The most prominent example of this is the way that the media has adopted a completely baseless definition of “mass shooting” to sensationalize the issue. You’ve probably heard that there have been “more mass shootings than days this year” or something similar. All those articles are using data assembled by the Mass Shooting Tracker website. Their definition is, shall we say, non-standard: it includes any shooting in which at least four people are injured. The FBI definition is more stringent: a shooting in which there are at least 4 fatalities. The database maintained by Mark Follman and Mother Jones[ref]Not exactly a mouthpiece of the NRA.[/ref] is even more narrow: it excludes attacks related to gang violence or domestic violence. Follman explains this logic in a piece for the New York Times[ref]Again: not exactly an NRA-friendly outlet.[/ref]:
While all the victims are important, conflating those many other crimes with indiscriminate slaughter in public venues obscures our understanding of this complicated and growing problem. Everyone is desperate to know why these attacks happen and how we might stop them—and we can’t know, unless we collect and focus on useful data that filter out the noise.
German Lopez of Vox (which uses the Mass Shooting Tracker data) thinks Follman is being silly for caring so much about specific definitions: “this entire debate is ridiculous. A shooting is a shooting.” But of course, if that were true, Lopez would have to deal with the fact that gun deaths in America are in a steep decline. According to the Pew Research Center[ref]Yet another source that has never been accused of being in the NRA’s pocket.[/ref], “Compared with 1993, the peak of U.S. gun homicides, the firearm homicide rate was 49% lower in 2010, and there were fewer deaths, even though the nation’s population grew.” I’m not saying the current level is acceptable, I’m just saying that there is no possible way for a person to simultaneously believe “a shooting is a shooting” and also believe that we’re in some kind of unprecedented crisis. Follman has a point: mass shootings (narrowly defined) are on the rise. Lopez—and anyone else jumping on the Mass Shooting Tracker bandwagon—has nothing but hand-waving and posturing.
So, if gun violence is actually at historical lows and on the decline, why are gun control advocates convinced that we’re facing some kind of massive epidemic? After all, the New York Times ran a front-page editorial for the first time in almost 100 years to support gun-control. What explains such an extreme reaction?
Missing white woman syndrome is a phrase used by social scientists and media commentators to describe the extensive media coverage, especially in television, of missing person cases involving young, white, upper-middle-class women or girls. The phenomenon is defined as the media’s undue focus on upper-middle-class white women who disappear, with the disproportionate degree of coverage they receive being compared to cases of missing women of other ethnicities and social classes, or with missing males of all social classes and ethnicities.
Although missing white woman syndrome is primarily about kidnapping cases, “it is sometimes used to describe the disparity in news coverage of other violent crimes.”
So, to be perfectly plain about it, mass shootings are sensational because the victims are often white, often middle or upper-class, suburban and–relative to homicide rates in general–female.[ref]According to stats collected at Wikipedia, 91% of drug homicide victims are male, 95% of gang homicide victims are male, and 77% of all homicide victims are male. If mass shootings are random, then only about 50% of victims will be male, which means that females make up a much larger proportion of mass shooting victims than they do of overall homicide victims.[/ref] Crime might be down overall, but who cares? If college students and suburban white kids can be killed, then we have a crisis.
It’s not just the perception of the problem that is skewed by race and class, but also the proposed solutions. You see, there are policies that have been tried and found to be effective in combating urban violence. But no one seems to know or care about such initiatives, leading The New Republic to run an article to explain “why no one in Washington—not even President Obama—will embrace a program that could actually reduce gun violence.” Lois Beckett points out that “America’s high rate of gun murders isn’t caused by events like Sandy Hook or the shootings this fall at a community college in Oregon. It’s fueled by a relentless drumbeat of deaths of black men.” He then went on to talk about a program called Ceasefire. It isn’t new and it isn’t sexy, but “in Boston, the city that developed Ceasefire, the average monthly number of youth homicides dropped by 63 percent in the two years after it was launched.” The US Department of Justice has officially labeled it “effective.”
If “a shooting is a shooting”, and if the highest rates of crime are in inner cities, and if the disproportionate rate of murder victims are black Americans, and if we have a proven program to reduce those crimes… why isn’t anyone talking about them?
Timothy Heaphy, a former U.S. attorney quoted in Beckett’s article, has a pretty simple hypothesis:
I think that people in those communities are perceived as not sufficiently important because they don’t vote, they don’t have economic power. I think there’s some racism involved. I don’t think we care about African-American lives as much as we care about white lives.
So the problem is misdiagnosed, and the most promising solutions are ignored. But it gets worse than that. The reality is that the proposed “common sense” gun regulations will have basically no impact on mass shootings whatsoever. For example, Marco Rubio recently stated that “None of the major shootings that have occurred in this country over the last few months or years that have outraged us, would gun laws have prevented them.” The Washington Post fact-checked his claim[ref]Yet again: not an NRA shill.[/ref] and ended up giving out “a rare Geppetto Checkmark.”[ref]Did you even know they gave those out?[/ref]
The idea of “common sense” gun regulation coming to the rescue is a politically convenient fiction. It is designed to appeal to moderate voters, but it’s just an empty slogan. The only kinds of gun laws that would have any kind of impact would have to involve a massive reduction in the number of firearms currently in circulation with a forced buyback and stric enforcement. But those laws are guaranteed to be enforced in unequal ways, a point that Ross Douthat made on Sunday:
I suspect liberals imagine, at some level, that a Prohibition-style campaign against guns would mostly involve busting up gun shows and disarming Robert Dear-like trailer-park loners. But in practice it would probably look more like Michael Bloomberg’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy, with a counterterrorism component that ended up heavily targeting Muslim Americans. In areas where gun ownership is high but crime rates low, like Bernie Sanders’ Vermont, authorities would mostly turn a blind eye to illegal guns, while poor and minority communities bore the brunt of raids and fines and jail terms.
If that sounds at all farfetched you simply need to ask yourself this question: has the War on Drugs had a disproportionate impact on poor and minority communities? Then what makes you think a War on Guns would be any different?
Nor is this hypothetical. The history of gun control is a primarily racist history in which gun control was used as a pretext to disarm African Americans to make them easier targets. The Atlantic covered this thoroughly in an article called The Secret History of Guns, noting that “no group has more fiercely advocated the right to bear loaded weapons in public than the Black Panthers—the true pioneers of the modern pro-gun movement.”
And let me just end with a note about how spectacularly bad some of the proposed new “common sense” regulations are. In his address to the nation, President Obama doubled down on the idea of using the terrorist watch list to screen gun purchases. This sounds entirely reasonable for about a second or two. After that, however, you might remember that—before it was brought up in this context—the terrorist watch list showed up in the news only in story after story of how horrifically mismanaged and unfair it was. This is the same terrorist watchlist that contained 72 Department of Homeland Security employees, a finding that led the DHS director to resign. Even ThinkProgress[ref]Need I point out how much they are not on the NRA’s Christmas list?[/ref] thinks it’s a terrible idea. Aviva Shen quoted Marco Rubio in The Problem With Banning Guns From People On The Terrorist Watch List:
The majority of the people on the no-fly list are oftentimes people that just basically have the same name as somebody else, who doesn’t belong on the no-fly list. Former Senator Ted Kennedy once said he was on a no-fly list. There are journalists on the no-fly list.
It’s not just a matter of plain bureaucratic incompetence, however. Ken White pointed out the philosophical problems with the idea for Popehat:
Do I even need to point out that this list is also guaranteed to skew along ethnic and religious lines? The exact same folks who are horrified by Donald Trump’s bigotry[ref]And they should be horrified. Everyone should be horrified and revolted.[/ref] don’t seem to realize that a proposal like adding the terrorist watchlist to the background check is basically a backdoor method of accomplishing the same kind of religiously-based stripping of civil liberties from American citizens.
This is what passes for “common sense” regulation? Clearly some people are using the phrase “common sense” in novel and fascinating ways.
To recap: gun violence is ignored when it effects primarily young black men, but when it happens in suburban schools or movie theaters it is a crisis that demands swift and thorough response. Anti-violence programs with a proven record of lowering gun crime where it is worst—in inner cities—and thereby saving the lives of young black men are also ignored. Instead, we hear about “common sense” gun regulations that sound reassuring but would help no one and end up (you guessed it) further compounding the systematic inequalities in our society that target the poor and minorities.
The left is very, very good at sniffing out the faintest whiff of white privilege from the right, but—when it comes to handling the gun issue—it’s time to say: physician, heal thyself.
The nature of partisan politics has shifted over the last few decades, transforming political parties into tribal identities and opposing partisans into what philosopher Jason Brennan calls “civic enemies.” This is likely unsurprising to most readers, but now there is intriguing evidence supporting the inkling. Recently, Vox reported on the research of political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood, which found that America’s two dominating parties have become even more polarized:
The experiment was simple. Working with Dartmouth College political scientist Sean Westwood, Iyengar asked about 1,000 people to decide between the résumés of two high school seniors who were competing for a scholarship.
The resumes could differ in three ways: First, the senior could have either a 3.5 or 4.0 GPA; second, the senior could have been the president of the Young Democrats or Young Republicans club; third, the senior could have a stereotypically African-American name and have been president of the African-American Student Association or could have a stereotypically European-American name.
The point of the project was to see how political and cues affected a nonpolitical task — and to compare the effect with race. The results were startling.
When the résumé included a political identity cue, about 80 percent of Democrats and Republicans awarded the scholarship to their co-partisan. This held true whether or not the co-partisan had the highest GPA — when the Republican student was more qualified, Democrats only chose him 30 percent of the time, and when the Democrat was more qualified, Republicans only chose him 15 percent of the time.
Think about that for a moment: When awarding a college scholarship— a task that should be completely nonpolitical — Republicans and Democrats cared more about the political party of the student than the student’s GPA. As Iyengar and Westwood wrote, “Partisanship simply trumped academic excellence.” It also trumped race.
The whole piece is both fascinating and deeply troubling and provides more reason for me to disengage from politics altogether. As Georgetown professor Peter Jaworski commented on Facebook in light of these findings, “Partisan politics corrupts your character. Instead of trying to get votes for your favoured tribe, try to make money instead. Engaging in markets makes mean people nicer, makes you more trustworthy, more charitable, and more beneficent.”
A recent piece in The Washington Post illuminates an often overlooked obstacle to economic mobility:
In recent years, and especially over the last few months, economists and other public policy experts across the political spectrum have come to realize that zoning rules are a major obstacle to affordable housing and economic opportunity for the poor and lower middle class. By artificially restricting new construction, zoning and other similar land-use restrictions greatly increase the price of housing, and prevents the market from adjusting to increasing demand. This emerging consensus is a good sign, though it may be difficult to translate it into effective policy initiatives.
We’ve highlighted zoning herebefore, especially from more market-oriented economists. Yet, there seems to be a growing bipartisan consensus. Good thing too:
