SpaceX Versus the Department of Justice
The DOJ is suing SpaceX for focusing its hiring on US citizens and permanent residents. Yes, you read that right.
Semafor: The DOJ alleges that SpaceX discouraged refugees and asylum seekers from applying to open positions and refused to hire those that did, according to the complaint.
According to the complaint, SpaceX job postings wrongly stated that only U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents could apply for openings, and that “SpaceX’s hiring practices were routine, widespread, and longstanding, and harmed asylees and refugees.”
Under U.S. law, both asylum seekers and refugees are protected from hiring discrimination regardless of citizen status.
The lawsuit is bizarre. I am sure Elon would be happy to hire some refugees from the Russian space program. So why does SpaceX advertise that only US citizens and lawful permanent residents can apply for some jobs? Because that’s what they understand the law requires:
People “don’t understand the chilling effect of the federal export control laws” that SpaceX allegedly cited in its job listings as a reason for excluding refugees and asylees as candidates, writes Abhi Tripathi, the director of mission operations at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. The International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) only allows U.S. citizens and green card holders to access information in companies that make spacecraft and rockets for national security reasons. “Employees are PERSONALLY liable with huge fines and imprisonment if the wrong info gets out,” Tripathi says. It’s unclear which positions SpaceX allegedly refused refugee and asylum applicants for.
Now SpaceX may be wrong about the technicalities of the law, the distinction, as I understand it, rests on the difference between US Persons and US Citizens, but they are 100% correct that the DoD frowns on non-citizens working for military related ventures. As a result, jobs restricted to US citizens are common in industries that interact with the military or that involve technologies which are potentially dual-use, such as jobs at SpaceX. Jobs that require security clearances are, of course, typically restricted to US citizens but so are many jobs not requiring clearances. Here, for example, is an ad for an engineer at Northrup Grumman in aerospace structures that does not require security clearance but advertises US Citizen only. The U.S. military, of course, mandates citizenship or a green card for enlistment, a policy that is shared by another federal employer—can you guess? Surprise. The Department of Justice.
Below, for example, is an ad for a recreational specialist to work for the DOJ’s Bureau of Prisons–this is not a job involving national security!–but the ad states clearly that U.S. Citizenship is Required. Most federal government jobs, in fact, are restricted to US citizens. The Federal Reserve even requires US citizenship to get an internship.
In short, it seems that SpaceX is being singled out for punishment for a practice that is widespread in the industry and often encouraged by, sometimes required by, and usually practiced by the Federal government.
The Real UFO Story
Erik Hoel writes that the “the UFO craze was created by government nepotism and incompetent journalism” which makes a lot more sense to me than the other explanation. Here’s a key bit:
To sum up the story as far as I understand its convoluted depths: diehard paranormal believers scored 22 million in Defense spending via what looks like nepotism from Harry Reid by submitting a grant to do bland general “aerospace research” and being the “sole bidder” for the contract. They then reportedly used that grant, according to Lacatski himself, the head of the program, to study a myriad of paranormal phenomenon at Skinwalker Ranch including—you may have guessed it by now—dino-beavers. Viola! That’s how there was a “government-funded program to study UFOs.”
Our current journalistic class, unwilling or unable to do the research I can do in my boxers in about five hours, instead did a big media oopsie in The New York Times, running the story and lending credibility to the idea the Pentagon did create a real serious task force to investigate UFO claims. The fervor in response to these “revelations” memed into existence a real agency at the DoD that now does actually study UFOs, simply because everyone “demanded answers”—which is totally understandable, given the journalistic coverage. However, the current UFO task force is staffed by, well, the people willing to be on a UFO task force. According to the Post:
And who was in charge, during the Trump administration, when the Pentagon created a UFO Task Force to investigate incursions of unknown objects over America?
Stratton—who believes the ghosts and creatures of Skinwalker Ranch are real—officially headed up these Pentagon investigations for years.
The “chief scientist” of this Pentagon task force was Travis Taylor, who is and was a co-star of “Ancient Aliens” on the History Channel. He currently stars on “The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch” on the same network.
This official embedding makes it difficult to break the veneer of legitimacy unless you know the whole story, simply because there’s likely a lot of coordination by professional UFO enthusiasts behind the scenes, which is why you’ll occasionally read stuff about how anonymous sources from other insiders confirm the accounts.
See also my previous post on Uri Geller and the government’s Stargate Project.
The Mother Church of the Common Law
The Temple Church is a small church in London built in 1185 by the Knights Templar. It’s now hidden behind Fleet Street amid the Middle and Inner Temple, two of the four “Inns of Court”, the educational institutions and professional associations for common law barristers and judges. The Temple Church is known as the Mother Church of the Common Law both for its role in the creation of the Magna Carta and because of its location amid the Temple area.
King John used the Temple Church as his headquarters in 1214-1215 and it’s from here that he was forced to issue the first of the Magna Cartas. The real hero of the Magna Carta, however, was the knight William Marshal who negotiated the original agreement, reissued it again under his authority as regent to the boy King, Henry III, and then reissued it again–after, at the age of 70 personally leading troops into battle and defeating a French invasion–thereby cementing the Magna Carta and the rights it guarantees into British life.
William Marshall’s tomb can be found in the Temple Church.
Middle and Inner Temple were the heart of the common law for hundreds of years and the presence of the Temple Church meant that the idea of a bill of rights was always nearby. So much so that the Temple played a role in the American Revolution and not just as inspiration. Six members of the Inner or Middle Temple were signatories to the Declaration of Independence and seven were signatories to the US Constitution.
The Mother Church of the Common Law is well worth a visit if you are in London.
Twenty Years of Marginal Revolution!
Who would have guessed that after twenty years Tyler and I would still be writing Marginal Revolution! Thanks especially to Tyler, we have had multiple new posts every single day for twenty years! Incredible.
We had some idea when starting Marginal Revolution that it would provide the foundation for our eventual textbook, Modern Principles of Economics, but we didn’t imagine that it would also become the foundation for our online platform for economics education, Marginal Revolution University and Conversations with Tyler, Emergent Ventures and various other projects of Tyler and myself.
We never imagined that Marginal Revolution would one day be archived by the Library of Congress or become one of the world’s nexus points for debating and understanding events like the Financial Crisis and the Covid Pandemic. It was a shock when the first undergrad told us that they had been reading MR since the age of 12. Today, there are multiple PhD economists who grew up reading Marginal Revolution.
In this conversation, with David Perell, we reflect on 20 years and talk about our process of writing and working together. Tyler is very funny. Tyrone makes an appearance or two, albeit never announced. (Apple podcast, Spotify).
We also thank our many readers and the commentators. You all make MR better (ok, most of you make MR better).
We are still excited to write about economics every day and we don’t think we have peaked! Let’s see what happens over the next 20 years. Thank you all.
The Jones Act Enforcer
The Offshore Marine Service Association has a ship, the Jones Act Enforcer, whose only job is to spy on and harass European vessels that are installing wind farms off the coast of New England.
BostonGlobe: To get Vineyard Wind done, developers are turning to vehicles such as the Sea Installer, which arrived in Salem in early August. Owned by the Danish firm DEME Group, the vessel is one of the few on the planet capable of installing GE Haliade-X wind turbines that are the size of a skyscraper into the ocean floor.
Measuring more than 430 feet in length and 150 feet wide, Sea Installer is a “jack up” vessel that lifts itself out of the water on legs more than 300 feet long. Once elevated, the vessel becomes a platform where an immense crane, capable of lifting more than 1,600 tons, can install the tower sections, nacelle, and blades for each turbine.
The Jones Act Enforcer does not board the suspected ships. Instead, as it did this day with the Sea Installer, the crew photographs the vessels from about half a nautical mile away and, if they suspect violations, files complaints with US Customs and Border Protection and the Coast Guard. The outcomes of the complaints are confidential, Smith said.
…The law prohibits foreign ships from transporting goods between two points within the US. But the actions that ships can and can’t take on American waters gets very technical.
For example, the Jones Act Enforcer observed Go Liberty, an American ship, perched beneath the Sea Installer. Smith said the American vessel was most likely transporting materials to the site so the Sea Installer could place a monopile — the bright yellow steel piles that support the turbines — into the ocean.
However, if the Sea Installer received material from the Go Liberty and then physically moved to another monopile in a different location, that act could violate the Jones Act.
The Jones Act Enforcer also observed the Italian ship Giulio Verne, which was working to connect underseas cables to an electric substation that would power the wind turbines. In this case, Smith claimed the Italian ship was violating the law because it was moving the cables from one point (the sea bed) to another point (the substation).
The stupidity, it burns. But Biden supports the Jones Act.
Return to the Econ
Joshua Gans revisits life among the econ, 50 years after the classic investigation by Axel Leijonhufvud.
In Leijonhufvud’s time, economics was dominated by two super-castes which worshipped different totems.
Today, however, the super-castes are hardly to be seen and the old totems have been replaced by a singular new totem:
The technology powering the Econ runs on one precious resource, d’ta, and the work of obtaining that d’ta rests with the grads. Upon arrival in the dept, they are immediately sent into the D’ta Mines and tasked with collecting seemingly impossible quantities of the resource. They toil in dirty and unsanitary conditions. Ironically, their next task is to painstakingly clean and polish the d’ta they have extracted one at a time — sometimes millions of individual items — so they can then be sorted and made available for processing. With luck, the grads may be assigned processing tasks that take place in windowless rooms twenty-four hours a day operating a single machine. The hope is that they can then produce the new high achievement of the Econ, a tabl. It is hard to describe what a tabl is to outsiders, but it represents the outcome of finely processed d’ta. The more the tabl contains bright, bejewelling in the form of star-like symbols (*), the more valuable it is. Failure to create a sufficiently dazzled tabl means being sent back to the mines.
Listen to Lech
WashPost: Of the giants who brought down the Iron Curtain — among them Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, John Paul II, Vaclav Havel — only Walesa is still with us. At 79, he still looks as vigorous as the young electrician who led a workers’ uprising against the “dictatorship of the proletariat”; forced Poland’s Marxist regime to recognize the first independent trade union in the communist world; was imprisoned under martial law only to later force his former jailers at the negotiating table to allow free elections; and who, as the first president of the newly free Poland, anchored his former Warsaw Pact country in the institutions of the West.
Sitting in his office at the European Solidarity Center, the museum built on the grounds of the old Lenin Shipyard where Solidarity was born, I asked about polls showing that half of young Americans have a positive view of socialism. What is his message for young people who have no living memory of communism? “Many young people are actually fooled to accept communism as an idea,” he said, speaking through an interpreter. “There are beautiful sentences talking about equality, about justice. … But as soon as you start putting that system into practice, all sorts of serious disasters come about. But young people quite often don’t know it. We have experience [with socialism], so we really know something about it. So, I strongly recommend rejecting it.”
Compensating Kidney Donors
LA Times: Never in the field of public legislation has so much been lost by so many to one law, as Churchill might’ve put it. The National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 created the framework for the organ transplant system in the United States, and nearly 40 years later, the law is responsible for millions of needless deaths and trillions of wasted dollars. The Transplant Act requires modification, immediately.
We’ve got skin in this game. We both donated our kidneys to strangers. Ned donated to someone who turned out to be a young mother of two children in 2015, which started a chain that helped an additional two recipients. And Matt donated at Walter Reed in 2021, after which his kidney went to a Seattleite, kicking off a chain that helped seven more recipients, the last of whom was back at Walter Reed.
…The National Organ Transplant Act prohibits compensating kidney donors, which is strange in that in American society, it’s common to pay for plasma, bone marrow, hair, sperm, eggs and even surrogate pregnancies. We already pay to create and sustain life.
…Compensation models have been proposed in the past. A National Institutes of Health study listed some of the possibilities, including direct payment, indirect payment, “in kind” payment (free health insurance, for example) or expanded reimbursements. After much review, we come down strongly in support of indirect payment, specifically, a $100,000 refundable federal tax credit. The tax credit would be uniformly applied over a period of 10 years, in the amount of $10,000 a year for those who qualify and then become donors.
This kind of compensation is certainly not a quick-cash scheme that would incentivize an act of desperation. Nor does it commoditize human body parts. Going forward, kidney donation might become partly opportunistic rather than mostly altruistic, as it is now. But would it be exploitative? Not at all.
Long-time readers will know that I have argued for the greater use of incentives in organ donation both for live donors and cadaveric donors. Pecuniary compensation is one possibility but so are no-give, no-take laws that give those who previously signed their organ donor cards priority should they one day need an organ.
Speeding up Science
Writing in the Washington Post, Heidi Williams has good suggestions for making the NIH and NSF move faster. Namely:
- Give the NIH the option to bypass peer review, as can the NSF.
- Give the NSF the option to “desk-reject”, as can the NIH.
- Give the NIH and the NSF more authority to fund scientists and not just projects.
Straightforward, actionable reforms that have a good chance of being implemented.
Read the whole thing for justification, details and background.
Don’t Doubt: Saint Thomas in India
Christianity in India has roots at least as old as in Italy. Millions of Christians in Kerala today believe that their tradition traces back directly to Thomas, one of the 12 apostles of Jesus, who traveled to India in the first century AD. According to the Acts of Thomas, the apostles divided the world and drew lots to decide their respective regions for spreading the gospel. Thomas, drew India but, ever the doubter, he demurred. “It’s too hot and the food isn’t kosher”, he said, more or less. Jesus appeared to Thomas, however, and bade him “go to India!” Amazingly, he still demurred–what a doubter!–but by a minor miracle just as this was happening an Indian merchant arrived in Jerusalem calling for a master architect and builder to return with him to India. Finally, with this sign, Thomas’s doubts were allayed and his India adventures began.
For a long time, The Acts of Thomas were considered to be more of an unreliable fantasy novel than a historical account and of course the Acts does contain fantastical stories. Nevertheless, the Acts of Thomas have gained credence over time as certain names and places mentioned in the Acts and once thought to be purely imaginary, turned out to be accurate historical references. As William Dalrymple writes in an excellent piece:
…a series of remarkable discoveries have gone a long way to prove that the story contained in the Acts seems to be built on surprisingly solid historical foundations. First, British archaeologists working in late 19th-century India began to find hoards of coins belonging to a previously unknown Indian king: the Rajah Gondophares, who ruled from AD19 to AD45. If St Thomas had ever been summoned to India, it would have been Rajah Gondophares who would have done it, just as the Acts had always maintained.
The fact that the Acts had accurately preserved the name of an obscure Indian rajah, whose name and lineage had disappeared, implied that it must contain at least a nucleus of genuine historical information. Archaeological discoveries have since confirmed many other details of the story, revealing that maritime contacts between the Roman world and India were much more extensive than anyone had realised.
Aside from the Acts, a considerable amount of oral history and circumstantial evidence suggests that by AD 50-52, Thomas arrived on the Malabar coast of what is today Kerala and he began converting an older Jewish population as well as Hindus to Christianity. Indeed, the evidence is strong that the followers of Thomas in India have preserved one of the oldest versions of Christianity. Dalrymple again:
If St Thomas had carried Christianity to India, it is likely that he would have taken a distinctly more Jewish form than the Gentile-friendly version developed for the Greeks of Antioch by St Paul and later exported to Europe. Hence the importance of the fact that some of the St Thomas Christian churches to this day retain Judeo-Christian practices long dropped in the west – such as the celebration of the solemn Passover feast.
Hence also the significance of the St Thomas Christians still using the two earliest Christian liturgies in existence: the Mass of Addai and Mari, and the Liturgy of St James, once used by the early Church of Jerusalem. More remarkable still, these ancient services are still partly sung in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus and St Thomas.
The more you investigate the evidence, the more irresistible is the conclusion that whether or not St Thomas himself came to India, he certainly could have. And if he didn’t make the journey, it seems certain that some other very early Christian missionary did, for there is certainly evidence for a substantial Christian population in India by at least the third century.
Not only is there is a substantial presence of Christians in India from at least the third century, many early Western and Eastern Christian sources attest that it was Thomas who was sent to India. Kurikilamkatt writes:
From the third century onwards it had become an undeniable and incontrovertible tradition and belief in the Christian world that Thomas preached in India. And these Fathers and early writers had no doubt that the Thomas they speak about was the apostle who declared for the first time in history that his master was the Lord and God.
Historians tend not to trust oral history but to me it’s the oral histories, the genealogies of Indians who trace their lineage back to someone who was personally converted by Saint Thomas, and the songs that are most convincing. Indians have orally preserved the vedas for some four thousand years so I trust them on Saint Thomas. In the 4th or early 5th century, Saint Jerome wrote that “Christ lives everywhere. With Thomas in India and Peter in Rome.” And of the two, I’d put more money on Thomas.
After founding seven churches in Kerala, Thomas journeyed to the eastern region of the Indian peninsula, near present-day Chennai. Here Thomas’s mission was ended when he refused to bow down to Kali and was killed. Even so he was held in such reverence that his place of death was marked and his body kept and entombed. Fifteen hundred years later the Portuguese built a cathedral over his tomb, both of which you can still visit today as I did recently. Even for those not of Christian faith or any religious affiliation, connecting with 2,000 years of history and considering the distances Thomas traveled is quite moving, especially when it happens in a place which stills seems far from the Christian world.
The WV Canary in the Coal Mine
West Virginia University has announced a preliminary plan to cut 7% of its faculty and 9% of its majors:
Among the programs recommended for discontinuance, World Languages including all 32 faculty positions. WVU is also recommending the elimination of several programs in the College of Creative Arts, graduate programs in higher education administration and special education.
On twitter there is a lot of bemoaning about the importance of languages but the students are voting with their feet. Indeed, most of these programs are only sustained by foreign language requirements which are increasingly otiose in a world with ubiquitous instant translation. The students are correct, the value of learning a second language has fallen.
Where the ax should fall may be debatable but the ax must fall somewhere because of demographics. College enrollment peaked in 2010 and has since fallen by 15%. What’s going on in WV is thus a reflection of national trends, magnified by West Virginia’s own decline in population. Full paying foreign students from China are also way down. Now add to declining college demographics, budgets hit by the great recession and then the pandemic. Now add in the rise of online learning which means that universities can outsource low-demand classes to other universities and save money and quite likely increase quality. (Indeed, the local teacher might have been teaching online anyway so why not substitute with a world expert and great teacher who has the backing of an entire team of delivery experts?) Finally, add in the fact that a substantial part of the electorate would like to see a decline in programs they see as politicized.
Put it all together and the only surprise is how long it has taken for the ax to fall. You can be sure, however, that there is more chopping to be done.
The Root of the Problem
It’s almost like the government’s imposing its will on its residents,” Trayon White, the D.C. council member for Ward 8, said at the council’s June 6 legislative meeting. He wasn’t talking about a proposed highway, a subway station, a power plant, or—perish the thought—an apartment building…White said he was concerned about the potential risk to property values and what he sees as a “reasonable fear”…[of] a public-safety concern.” He asked his colleagues to support an emergency resolution to remove them before this happened.
An incredible story by Jerusalem Demas about local politics that starts with small absurdities but raises larger questions. Can you guess the subject of concern?
AOC Gets on the Anti-FDA Bandwagon
At least when it comes to suncreen. As long-time readers will know, I have been complaining about FDA over-regulation of sunscreen for a decade! Maybe now that AOC is on the case things will change.
AOC’s sunscreen video is pretty good. One point she doesn’t stress is that requiring Americans to use more oily, less natural-feeling sunscreen can cause less use and thus more skin cancer. Even more important is the general issue of reciprocity or polycentric authority:
My rule is very simple. I don’t think the FDA is better than the EMA so if any drug or device is approved in Europe it ought to be available for purchase in the United States with a label saying “Approved by the EMA. Not approved by the FDA.” (By the way, we do have reciprocity type agreements with Canada and New Zealand for food so this would not be unprecedented.)
US sunscreens are far behind the rest of the world and our regulations aren’t necessarily making our sunscreens better or safer — but it doesn’t have to be this way! pic.twitter.com/vaZXpZ2a7S
— Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@RepAOC) August 11, 2023
The Gender Death Gap
Hat tip: i/o.
Unintended Geoengineering
In my post SuperFreakonomics on Geoengineering, Revisited I noted that regulations requiring ships to reduce sulfur have increased global warming. Science has a new piece on the phenomena and the implications for intended geoengineering:
Regulations imposed in 2020 by the United Nations’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) have cut ships’ sulfur pollution by more than 80% and improved air quality worldwide. The reduction has also lessened the effect of sulfate particles in seeding and brightening the distinctive low-lying, reflective clouds that follow in the wake of ships and help cool the planet. The 2020 IMO rule “is a big natural experiment,” says Duncan Watson-Parris, an atmospheric physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “We’re changing the clouds.”
By dramatically reducing the number of ship tracks, the planet has warmed up faster, several new studies have found. That trend is magnified in the Atlantic, where maritime traffic is particularly dense. In the shipping corridors, the increased light represents a 50% boost to the warming effect of human carbon emissions. It’s as if the world suddenly lost the cooling effect from a fairly large volcanic eruption each year, says Michael Diamond, an atmospheric scientist at Florida State University.
The natural experiment created by the IMO rules is providing a rare opportunity for climate scientists to study a geoengineering scheme in action—although it is one that is working in the wrong direction. Indeed, one such strategy to slow global warming, called marine cloud brightening, would see ships inject salt particles back into the air, to make clouds more reflective. In Diamond’s view, the dramatic decline in ship tracks is clear evidence that humanity could cool off the planet significantly by brightening the clouds. “It suggests pretty strongly that if you wanted to do it on purpose, you could,” he says.