Results for “black lives matter”
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The Black Lives Matter Plaza, WDC

Just north of the White House, I visited Sunday for the first time.  I am very much a fan of the “Black Lives Matter” block print letters as an artwork, and I wished to take in the broader social scene.  On the plaza I saw fully boarded up buildings for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, the AFL-CIO, and the Motion Picture Association of America, suitable victims it would seem.

On the Reagan building the sign reads “Fire Command Center.”

Downtown Washington D.C. will not be returning to its prior nature for some time to come.

What to protest Black Lives Matter continued

Following up on yesterday’s discussion, I received this in my email:

I think you protest society (and whatever you think the cause is) on the unconditional probabilities but only protest cops on the conditional probabilities.

That is from a very high quality correspondent.  Since I think BLM is in large part trying to raise consciousness about society at large, and not just complaining about the cops, it is fine for them to protest the large number of bad outcomes for many black people without getting too caught up in the “conditional upon x, y, and z, is a cop more likely to shoot a black or a white person?” sort of question.  Body cameras, reforming/ending the War on Drugs, stronger civil liberties, and other changes make sense for macro reasons, no matter what your view on the conditional probabilities.  So a big chunk of your 300+ comments are simply off the mark.

My response to the correspondent included the following good advice:

Every movement…has a smart version and a stupid version, I try to (almost) always consider the smart version.  The stupid version is always wrong for just about anything.

If you focus on the stupid version, you too will end up as the stupid version of your own movement.

Black Lives Matter

Several loyal MR readers requested I cover this topic.  My views are pretty simple, namely that I am a fan of the movement.  Police in this country kill, beat, arrest, fine, and confiscate the property of black people at unfair and disproportionate rates.  The movement directs people’s attention to this fact, and the now-common use of cell phone video and recordings have driven the point home.

I don’t doubt that many policemen perceive they are at higher risk when dealing with young black males, and that is part of why they may act more brutally or be quicker to shoot or otherwise misbehave.  I would respond that statistical discrimination, even if it is rational, does not excuse what are often crimes against innocent people.  For instance, a man is far more likely to kill you than is a woman, but that fact does not excuse the shooting of an innocent man.

I also don’t see that citing “Black Lives Matter” has to denigrate the value of the life of anyone else.  Rather, the use of the slogan reflects the fact that many white people have been unaware of the extra burdens that many innocent black people must carry due to their treatment at the hands of the police.  The slogan is a way of informing others of this reality.

“Black Lives Matter” is a large movement, if that is the proper word for it, and you can find many objectionable statements, alliances, and political views within it.  I don’t mean to endorse those, but at its essence I see this as a libertarian idea to be admired and promoted.

Robert Frank responds on Black Friday

Here is the email I received from Bob:

I enjoyed your observations about my Black Friday op-ed in Thursday’s NYT.  If you’d permit me to respond, I’d propose to post something like this:

Like Tyler, I think we needn’t worry much about consumers who elect to wait in line for hours in the hope of getting bargains.  That’s indeed wasteful, as one of the commenters pointed out.  But it’s fairly easy to drop out of that game, and some, as Tyler speculates, may actually enjoy the process.

But the arms race that’s led to longer store hours poses a more serious problem for employees, many of whom had little choice but to truncate their holiday time with family and friends.

I had a recent conversation about this issue with a friend in Ithaca who owns a wine store. Traditionally, New York State wine merchants were not allowed to do business on Sundays.  But last year that restriction was repealed, and I asked my friend how the change had affected him.

His overall sales were about the same, he told me.  The change had thus been a clear negative from his perspective, since it meant that he and his wife were no longer able to spend Sundays together with their children.  The upside was that customers who lacked the foresight to shop in advance for their Sunday wine needs could now be accommodated.  If we’re willing to discount the cost of an inconvenience suffered by those who could easily have avoided it, the costs in this case seem clearly to outweigh the benefits.

Even so, an econometrician might find it difficult to convince a skeptic that the former Sunday closing mandate was justified.  Fortunately, a definitive answer to that question isn’t required for an assessment of my tax proposal, which isn’t nearly as costly as a flat prohibition.

Arms races arise because, as Charles Darwin saw clearly, important aspects of life are graded on the curve.  It’s not how strong or fast you are that matters, but rather whether you’re faster or stronger than your direct rivals.  And for merchants, it’s not how early you open that matters, but rather how your start time compares with rivals’.  If the stakes are sufficiently high in such cases, arms races are inevitable.

If staying open longer hours is misleadingly attractive to individual merchants, the best solution is not to prohibit longer hours but rather to make them less attractive by taxing them.  My 6-6-6 tax proposal doesn’t prohibit earlier store hours on Thanksgiving.  It simply makes them less attractive to individual merchants.

Many on the Right are quick to denounce such taxes as “social engineering”–which they usually define as using the tax code “to control our behavior, steer our choices, and change the way we live our lives.”  But that’s what virtually all laws do.  Stop signs are social engineering, as are prohibitions against theft and homicide.  Laws restrict behavior because individuals often choose to behave in ways that cause harm to others.  For someone who cares about personal liberty, discouraging harmful behavior by taxing it should be far less objectionable than prohibiting it outright.

Yet many on the Right suddenly lose their ability to think clearly when confronted by proposals to tax harmful behavior.  The first message I received in response to my Black Friday op-ed, for example, came from a chaired professor of philosophy who had this to say:  “Another sad elitist call for government to butt in so as to promote your special interest.  Maybe there are those who judge the black Friday ride just right for them.  But do you care?  You just know it should be shut down and so you will empower the government to do just that.  Well, over my dead body.”

Oh, please. Perhaps this professor is among those who denounce all taxation as theft.  But mature adults realize that we have to tax SOMETHING.  Right now, we tax many useful activities.  The payroll tax, for example, discourages hiring.  The income tax discourages savings.  Every dollar we can raise by taxing activities that cause harm to others is a dollar less we must raise by taxing beneficial activities.

In my recent book, The Darwin Economy, I defend the claim that taxes on activities that cause undue harm to others could generate more than enough revenue to balance the federal budget and restore our crumbling infrastructure.  We should tax congestion, noise, and pollution.  We should tax passenger vehicles by weight.  We should replace the income tax with a more steeply progressive tax on consumption. But until we’ve done all that, no champion of liberty has any cogent reason to oppose replacing taxes on useful activities with taxes on harmful ones.

More ‘Little Black Lies’

Black life expectancy is lower than white life expectancy.  On this basis, President Bush argues that social security is a worse deal for blacks than whites.  Paul Krugman says this is a lie but his primary counter-argument is shockingly weak:

Mr. Bush’s remarks on African-Americans perpetuate a crude misunderstanding about what life expectancy means. It’s true that the
current life expectancy for black males at birth is only 68.8 years –
but that doesn’t mean that a black man who has worked all his life can
expect to die after collecting only a few years’ worth of Social
Security benefits. Blacks’ low life expectancy is largely due to high
death rates in childhood and young adulthood. African-American men who
make it to age 65 can expect to live, and collect benefits, for an
additional 14.6 years – not that far short of the 16.6-year figure for
white men.

True, life expectancy at birth isn’t the right statistic but neither is life-expectancy at 65.  Consider the following simple example: suppose that 95 percent of blacks die before the age of 65 but that the 5% who survive to 65 have the same life expectancy as whites.  Krugman would then claim that social security isn’t discriminatory, but that would be absurd – 95 percent of blacks would be paying payroll taxes for all of their working lives and in return they would receive nothing.

As HedgeFundGuy points out a more relevant measure of life expectancy for social security is life expectancy at 20, when working-life begins, and at this age black life-expectancy is still a significant 6 years less than that of whites.

Life expectancy isn’t the only thing that affects social security redistribution, however, marriage rates, number of dependents, disability, income and even the time pattern of income matter also.  It may be that when all of these considerations are taken into account that on average social security is no worse a deal for blacks than for whites but this will be true only because social security is a hash of redistributionist tendencies few of which are well understood let alone well justified.

Addendum: See also Heritage’s rebuttal which makes a number of other good points especially the fact that lumping in the disability program with social security is not appropriate.  Although the programs are connected historically they can, are, and should be treated as independent for purposes of reform and analysis.

Market Response to Racial Uprisings

Defund the police was never really in the cards:

Do investors anticipate that demands for racial equity will impact companies? We explore this question in the context of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement—the largest racially motivated protest movement in U.S. history—and its effect on the U.S. policing industry using a novel dataset on publicly traded firms contracting with the police. It is unclear whether the BLM uprisings were likely to increase or decrease market valuations of firms contracting heavily with police because of the increased interest in reforming the police, fears over rising crime, and pushes to “defund the police”. We find, in contrast to the predictions of economics experts we surveyed, that in the three weeks following incidents triggering BLM uprisings, policing firms experienced a stock price increase of seven percentage points relative to the stock prices of nonpolicing firms in similar industries. In particular, firms producing surveillance technology and police accountability tools experienced higher returns following BLM activism–related events. Furthermore, policing firms’ fundamentals, such as sales, improved after the murder of George Floyd, suggesting that policing firms’ future performances bore out investors’ positive expectations following incidents triggering BLM uprisings. Our research shows how—despite BLM’s calls to reduce investment in policing and explore alternative public safety approaches—the financial market has translated high-profile violence against Black civilians and calls for systemic change into shareholder gains and additional revenues for police suppliers.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Bocar A. Ba, Roman Rivera, and Alexander Whitefield.

Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell

Then all nine remaining students entered, each carrying a piece of paper. One by one they read a paragraph….I had used racist language. I had misgendered Brittney Griner. I had repeatedly confused the names of two black students. My body language harmed them. I hadn’t corrected facts that were harmful to hear when the (now-purged) students introduced them in class. I invited them to think about the reasoning of both sides of an argument, when only one side was correct….

One might be tempted to dismiss this as another old, white male complaining about the kids but the speaker is Vincent Lloyd, highly-regarded director of Africana Studies at Villanova and the author of Black Dignity, “a radical work by one of the leading young scholars of Black thought…an effort to describe the philosophy underlying the Black Lives Matter movement.”

I have no doubt that I would disagree with much of what he has to say but Lloyd has a calling, he believes in his students, in the virtue of teaching and in the power of the humanities to make us better:

…a seminar requires patience. Day by day, one intervention builds on another, as one student notices what another student overlooked, and as the professor guides the discussion toward the most important questions. All of this is grounded in a text: Specific words, phrases, arguments, and images from a text offer essential friction for conversation, holding seminar participants accountable to something concrete. The instructor gently—ideally, almost invisibly—guides discussion toward what matters.

The seminar assumes that each student has innate intelligence, even as we come from different backgrounds, have different amounts and sorts of knowledge, and different skills. We can each be formed best if we take advantage of our differing insights to push each other, over time, again and again. When this practice is occasioned by carefully curated texts—not exclusively “great books,” but texts that challenge each other and us as they probe issues of essential importance—a seminar succeeds.

A seminar takes time. The first day, you will be frustrated. The second and the third day, you will be frustrated. Even on the last day, you will be frustrated, though ideally now in a different way. Each intervention in a seminar is incomplete, and gets things wrong. Each subsequent intervention is also incomplete, and also gets things wrong. But there are plenty of insights and surprises, for each participant looks at a text with different eyes.

It is tempting to add: Such is life. Such is democratic life. We each have different, partial knowledge. We each get things wrong, over and over. At our best, we enter the fray by listening to each other and complementing and challenging the insights of our fellows. In the process, over years, decades, we are oriented toward justice and truth.

You can feel Lloyd’s pain when his students reject this gift.

Read the whole thing.

Some reasons why the U.S. dollar is strong

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column.  After talking through some traditional economic reasons, here are some cultural reasons:

In addition, American soft power is far more robust than many criticisms would indicate. English is increasingly entrenched as the global language. The world’s major internet companies are still largely American, with the exception of some Chinese ones. If the internet continues to become more important in our lives, that is another plus for the US — and the dollar.

America also sets a good deal of the global intellectual agenda, for better or worse. The #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter and wokeism, among other topics, are debated around the world. A US presidential election is akin to a global presidential election, in terms of interest and maybe impact. No other country can say the same.

Perhaps, in view of the larger moral picture, this is all a mixed blessing. But in terms of keeping the dollar as a focal reserve currency, it is a major plus.

There is a reason why the global intellectual chattering classes find it hard to be bullish on America, and so to them a strong dollar is counterintuitive. When one country is so much the center of global attention, it is hard for that country to look good. As my colleague Martin Gurri argues, anything studied and discussed long enough on the internet tends to lead to disillusionment. People focus on the vices more than the virtues, and lose trust.

And so it is with the US. Both abroad and domestically, on both the left and right, there seems to be less faith in the American dream than there was three or four decades ago. In some quarters the US is seen as on the verge of collapse, or at the very least moral and intellectual ruin.

…Most people around the world can recite the defects of America far more easily than they can those of, say, Paraguay.

As a related side note, with both nominal incomes and the dollar up, now is a remarkably inexpensive time for Americans to travel abroad.

Monday assorted links

1. Surgeon quality really matters.

2. Further observations on the Russian Army.

3. The Trump tariffs hurt Hollywood in China.

4. Heckman and Zhou vs. test scores.

5. Who went to BLM protests?  Some of you will enjoy this point: “Finally, we provide novel evidence of overlap: attending a Black Lives Matter protest increases the likelihood of attending a protest calling for fewer public health restrictions.”

6. “Finally, the inflation expectations of managers deviate systematically from the predictions of “anchored” expectations.

Are body cameras effective for constraining police after all?

Controversial police use of force incidents have spurred protests across the nation and calls for reform. Body-worn cameras (BWCs) have received extensive attention as a potential key solution. I conduct the first nationwide study of the effects of BWCs in more than 1,000 agencies. I identify the causal effects by using idiosyncratic variation in adoption timing attributable to administrative hurdles and the lengthy process to the eventual adoption at different agencies. This empirical strategy addresses limitations of previous studies that evaluated BWCs within a single agency; in a single-agency setting, the control group officers are also indirectly affected by BWCs because they interact with the treatment group officers (spillover), and agencies that give researchers access may fundamentally differ from other agencies (site-selection bias). Overcoming these limitations, my multi-agency study finds that BWCs have led to a substantial drop in the use of force, both among whites and minorities. Nationwide, they reduce police-involved homicides by 43%. Surprisingly, I do not find evidence that BWCs are associated with de-policing. Examining social media usage data from Twitter as well as data on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, I find that after BWC adoption, public opinion toward the police improves. These findings imply that BWCs can be an important tool for improving police accountability without sacrificing policing capabilities.

That is from a new paper by Taeho Kim, on the job market from the University of Chicago, a Steve Levitt student.  The piece has a revise and resubmit from ReStat.

My Conversation with Edwidge Danticat

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the CWT summary:

She joined Tyler to discuss the reasons Haitian identity and culture will likely persist in America, the vibrant Haitian art scenes, why Haiti has the best food in the Caribbean, how radio is remaining central to Haitian politics, why teaching in Creole would improve Haitian schools, what’s special about the painted tap-taps, how tourism influenced Haitian art, working with Jonathan Demme, how the CDC destroyed the Haitian tourism industry, her perspective on the Black Lives Matter movement, why she writes better at night, the hard lessons of Haiti’s political history, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

Recommended.  And I thank Carl-Henri Prophète for assistance with the transcription.

Tuesday assorted links

1. ” We estimate that inventors’ human capital is 5–10 times more important than firm capabilities for explaining the variance in inventor output.

2. Markets in everything: breathable bacon mask edition.

3. Some Chinese discuss Black Lives Matter, and related issues.

4. New Yorker Eugene Scalia profile, just turn the negatives into positives.  If you find that stricture appalling, ask yourself a simple question: what is your plan to increase the quantity of capital invested per worker?  Is it better than his plan?

5. Male students are dropping college at much higher rates.

6. State-level data show the Phillips Curve to be flat.  And the new relevant data set for state-level inflation rates, important stuff many more papers will be written from this.

7. WaPo covers Fast Grants, and other changes in the speed of scientific advance.

Why cancel culture will not take over everything

I was reading this blog post by Arnold Kling, and I thought I should put my own views into a Bloomberg column.  Here is one bit:

So what to make of the apparent growing strength of cancel culture and affiliated movements? Here is the fundamental point: With the rise of social media and low-cost communications, virtually everything that can be said, will be said.

It might be said on Twitter rather than on the evening news, or on 4Chan rather than on Facebook. But the sentiments will be out there, and many of them will be disturbing. The world has arrived at a place where just about every politically incorrect statement — and a response to it, not to mention every politically correct statement and a response to that — is published or recorded somewhere.

So the policing of speech may be vastly more common than it was, say, 15 years ago. But the discourse itself is vastly greater in scope. Political correctness has in fact run amok, but so then has everything else.

As a general principle, people notice what disturbs them more than what doesn’t. Therefore opponents of political correctness — and I include myself in this group — have a never-ending supply of anecdotes to be concerned about. I am not suggesting that this cycle will end well, but it does put the matter in perspective.

The issue is how social norms will adjust to cope with a world where everything is being said all the time. That path will not be smooth — but anxiety about it is different from fear of political correctness simply swallowing up everything and canceling everybody.

I’m no optimist. In fact, I suspect it will be harder to rein in the chaos and bewilderment from the say-whatever-you-want culture — have you checked out the pandemic discourse lately? — than to curb the intemperance of the you-can’t-say-that culture.

Consider also the evolution of internet communication. For all of its diversity, there are significant trends toward centralization. The English language is more focal than before, national politics command more attention than local politics, and the U.S. itself has more soft power in some crucial directions, thanks to its central role in the internet’s intellectual infrastructure. It is striking, for example, how much the entire world responded to the Black Lives Matter movement.

That means Americans will be subject to more cancellations and to more political correctness than people in the rest of the world. For better or worse, Americans are the central nexus that so many others are talking about, not always favorably. To quote Joseph Heller: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you — and Americans have good reason to be paranoid these days. If you published your politically incorrect column in your local Croatian newspaper, the rest of the internet just wouldn’t care all that much.

Yet note the underlying assumption here — namely, that American soft power is indeed growing. And if you are an American intellectual, your relative influence around the world is likely to be growing as well. With that greater influence comes greater scrutiny, and greater risk that you will be treated unfairly by the PC brigades. Is that really such a bad trade-off?

At first I was afraid that “all the wrong people” would like this piece, but so far so good.

Using Social Media to Bring Down the Power Grid

Social media are a coordination device and coordinated behavior has many advantages. Social media was used to motivate, organize and coordinate movements like the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter. Of course, coordination can also lead to conspiracy theories like QAnon, twitter mobs that police political correctness and riots that lead to death and destruction. For better or worse, coordinated behavior is likely to increase, creating more and more quickly moving mobs. The use and abuse of such mobs is only just beginning. One insidiously clever prospect is the use of seemingly benign coordination to bring down a power grid. What if everyone turns on their air conditioner and lights at the same time? In How weaponizing disinformation can bring down a city’s power grid, Raman et al. discuss how such a scenario could be generate by something seemingly as simple as sending fake coupons!

Social media has made it possible to manipulate the masses via disinformation and fake news at an unprecedented scale. This is particularly alarming from a security perspective, as humans have proven to be one of the weakest links when protecting critical infrastructure in general, and the power grid in particular. Here, we consider an attack in which an adversary attempts to manipulate the behavior of energy consumers by sending fake discount notifications encouraging them to shift their consumption into the peak-demand period. Using Greater London as a case study, we show that such disinformation can indeed lead to unwitting consumers synchronizing their energy-usage patterns, and result in blackouts on a city-scale if the grid is heavily loaded. We then conduct surveys to assess the propensity of people to follow-through on such notifications and forward them to their friends. This allows us to model how the disinformation may propagate through social networks, potentially amplifying the attack impact. These findings demonstrate that in an era when disinformation can be weaponized, system vulnerabilities arise not only from the hardware and software of critical infrastructure, but also from the behavior of the consumers.

Hat tip: Kevin Lewis.

Addendum: California is once again issuing rolling blackouts. Welcome to the future.

Just how weird are things now?

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is the opener:

If I have learned one thing over the last few weeks, it is that the psychology of the American public is weirder — and perhaps more flexible — than I ever would have thought.

Consider, as just one example among many, the issue of nursing homes. According to some estimates, about 40% of the deaths associated with Covid-19 have occurred in nursing homes, with more almost certain to come.

You might think that those 40,000-plus deaths would be a major national scandal. But so far the response has been subdued. Yes, there has been ample news coverage, but there are no riots in response, no social movement to “clean up the nursing homes,” no Ralph Nader-like crusader who has made this his or her political cause.

Nor has there been much resulting vilification. There are plenty of condemnations of technology billionaires, but very few of nursing-home CEOs. Many of the state and local politicians who oversee public-sector nursing homes have been rewarded with higher approval ratings.

As if all this weren’t bad enough, of those 40,000 deaths, surely a considerable number are African-American (data by race is hard to come by). This could be an issue for Black Lives Matter, but somehow it isn’t.

There is indeed much more at the link.