Category: Law
Can a Google autocomplete function be libelous?
…for Bettina Wulff it’s a nightmare. The wife of former German President Christian Wulff wants the search engine to cease suggesting terms that she finds defamatory. This has nothing to do with the search results, but rather with the recommendations made by Google’s “Autocomplete” function, a service that is also offered by competitors like Bing and Yahoo. All one has to do is type her first name and the first letter of her last name to get search suggestions such as “Bettina Wulff prostitute,” “Bettina Wulff escort” and “Bettina Wulff red-light district.”
Don’t forget the problem of cascades here:
The Autocomplete function, the usefulness of which Google so guilelessly praises as a means of giving one’s fingers a rest, undeniably helps spread rumors. Assuming that someone unsuspectingly begins to look for information on “Bettina Wulff” and is offered “prostitute,” “Hanover” and “dress” as additional search terms — where, independent of their actual interests, will users most likely click?
Sir John Strachey’s *India: its Administration & Progress*
This is a fascinating and indeed highly readable book. The third edition dates from 1903 but it is based on some 1884 lectures. Here is one excerpt:
If the richer classes in China were deprived of Indian opium they would suffer as the richer classes in Europe would suffer if they were deprived of the choice vintages of Bordeaux and Burgundy, or as tobacco-smokers would suffer if not more cigars were to come from Cuba. In such a case, in our own country, the frequenters of public-houses would be conscious of no hardship, and the vast majority of the opium-smokers of China would be equally unconscious if they received no more opium from India [TC: China itself produced a lot of opium]. If, in deference to ignorant prejudice, India should be deprived of the revenue which she now obtains from opium, an act of folly and injustice would be perpetrated as gross as any that has ever been inflicted by a foreign Government on a subject country. India now possesses the rare fortune of obtaining from one of her most useful products a large revenue without the imposition of taxes on her own people…
Recommended, especially if you like to discover what people were really thinking at the time.
Patent Policy on the Back of a Napkin
How do the new Honduran “charter cities” differ from those of Romer?
Here is a very useful article and interview, excerpt:
Segundo, nuestro modelo donde los residentes siguen el acceso a las mejores leyes sin ser gobernados por extranjeros es mucho más respetuoso de la autonomía local y soberanía del país.
Tercero, aunque al final será el gobernador, que será hondureño, quien decidirá qué sistemas legales estarán disponibles en la RED, proponemos que los hondureños sean permitidos a decidir usar ley hondureña en sus contratos si la prefieren a los otros sistemas que proveeremos.
De esta forma, nuestra visión es simplemente expandir otros mecanismos legales aplicados a los contratos y no restringir el derecho a las leyes de Honduras y no estamos de acuerdo con imponer un sistema legal extranjero sin que la persona pueda personalmente adherirse a él.
La diferencia final entre nuestro modelo y el de Romer es que el de MGK no depende de una concesión de tierra por parte del Gobierno de Honduras.
Fewer concessions to foreigners and foreign laws, for a start. More corporatist. For the pointer I thank M.
Small business under Proposition 37 (GMO labeling in California)
I advise anyone who favors Proposition 37 to read the text of the law. It is full of bad ideas and questionable distinctions, many of which are not apparent from the more superficial descriptions of the proposal. Here is one of them:
Retailers (such as grocery stores) would be primarily responsible for complying with the measure by ensuring that their food products are correctly labeled. Products that are labeled as GE would be in compliance. For each product that is not labeled as GE, a retailer generally must be able to document why that product is exempt from labeling. There are two main ways in which a retailer could document that a product is exempt: (1) by obtaining a sworn statement from the provider of the product (such as a wholesaler) indicating that the product has not been intentionally or knowingly genetically engineered or (2) by receiving independent certification that the product does not contain GE ingredients. Other entities throughout the food supply chain (such as farmers and food manufacturers) may also be responsible for maintaining these records.
I call this the “how to kill off small farmers and retailers” provision. And what would it do to local farmers’ markets to have the burden of proof so shifted? Who is best situated to handle possible lawsuits or shakedown lawsuits? The larger corporations.
It is interesting to see what receives an exception from the labeling provisions: alcohol, restaurant food, and animal meats raised from genetically engineered crops. (Lobby much?) For varying reasons, those are some of the outputs most likely to be harmful to you or to the environment.
Prop. 37 also exempts milk, cheese, and meat and it exempts “small” amounts of transgenic material in foodstuffs. According to critics of the bill it exempts 2/3 or so of the food products which Californians consume.
I do not think it is very well thought through.
Should there be required labeling of GMOs?
Here is one on-the-mark take (of many):
…there have been more than 300 independent medical studies on the health and safety of genetically modified foods. The World Health Organization, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association and many others have reached the same determination that foods made using GM ingredients are safe, and in fact are substantially equivalent to conventional alternatives. As a result, the FDA does not require labels on foods with genetically modified ingredients because it acknowledges they may mislead consumers into thinking there could be adverse health effects, which has no basis in scientific evidence.
Or try the National Academy of Sciences from 2010:
Many U.S. farmers who grow genetically engineered (GE) crops are realizing substantial economic and environmental benefits — such as lower production costs, fewer pest problems, reduced use of pesticides, and better yields — compared with conventional crops, says a new report from the National Research Council.
Here is a good NYT summary Op-Ed on that report. There is not the scientific evidence for Mark Bittman’s recent evaluation that:
G.M.O.’s, to date, have neither become a panacea — far from it — nor created Frankenfoods, though by most estimates the evidence is far more damning than it is supportive.
It’s the tag there that is problematic. He doesn’t offer a citation, nor has he in past columns offered convincing material to back this evaluation (you can read here for a somewhat more detailed account from Bittman; it simply minimizes benefits and does not support “by most estimates the evidence is far more damning than it is supportive”). This earlier critique of Bittman is on the mark on virtually every point.
The standards of evidence being applied here are extremely weak. In that last Bittman link he wrote that:
…The surge in suicides among Indian farmers has been attributed by some, at least in part, to G.E. crops…
The link is to a sensationalistic Daily Mail (tabloid) story, yet that gets translated into “has been attributed by some.” In that story, the suicides were caused by indebtedness and supposedly the debts were in part caused by a desire by farmers to buy GMO crops. In comparable terms one could write that anything one spends money on could cause suicide through the medium of indebtedness.
By the way, the Wikipedia treatment gives some more detailed citations suggesting that GMO crops are not a significant cause of farmer suicides in India. The most careful study of the matter reports this:
We first show that there is no evidence in available data of a “resurgence” of farmer suicides in India in the last five years. Second, we find that Bt cotton technology has been very effective overall in India. However, the context in which Bt cotton was introduced has generated disappointing results in some particular districts and seasons. Third, our analysis clearly shows that Bt cotton is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the occurrence of farmer suicides. In contrast, many other factors have likely played a prominent role.
I would in fact be more supportive of the GMO labeling idea if renowned food writers such as Bittman, and many others including left-wing economists, would come out and boldly proclaim the science about GMOs to their readers. Too often the tendency is to use a “I’ll try not to say anything literally incorrect, while insinuating there are big problems” method of scoring points against big agriculture. (Another common trope is to switch the discussion to “distribution” and to suggest, either explicitly or implicitly, that a net benefit technology such as GMOs is somehow unnecessary or undesirable; dare I utter the words “mood affiliation“?) GMO labeling is the one issue which has gained legal traction, so critics of “Big Ag” just can’t bring themselves to give it up.
Bittman’s whole column is about GMOs, but he gets at the important point only in his final sentence:
[With better information] We’d be able to make saner choices, and those choices would greatly affect Big Food’s ability to freely use genetically manipulated materials, an almost unlimited assortment of drugs and inhumane and environmentally destructive animal-production methods.
Overuse of antibiotics and animal treatment (both cruelty and environmental issues) — now those are two very real problems, backed by overwhelming scientific evidence. The fact that the California referendum is instead about GMOs — which have overwhelming scientific evidence for net benefit and minimal risks — is the real scandal.
It’s time that our most renowned food writers woke up to that difference. In the meantime, they are doing both us and themselves a deep disservice.
World hunger: the problem left behind
Here is my new New York Times column, about the tall task involved in doubling world food output by 2050:
The green revolution has slowed since the early 1990s, and it has become harder to bolster crop yields, as I have discussed in my book, “An Economist Gets Lunch.” And recent research by Dani Rodrik, a professor of international political economy at Harvard, indicates that agricultural productivity improvements are among the hardest to transmit from one nation to another.
And:
In a recent address, Michael Lipton, an economist and research professor at Sussex University in Britain, offered a sobering look at Africa’s agricultural productivity. He suggests that Rwanda and Ghana are gaining, but that most of the continent is not. Production and calorie intake per capita don’t seem to be higher today than they were in the early 1960s. It remains an issue how Africa’s growing population will be fed.
And:
There is no shortage of writing — often from a locavore point of view — in support of more organic methods of farming, for both developed and developing countries. These opinions recognize that current farming methods bring serious environmental problems involving water supplies, fertilizer runoff and energy use. Yet organic farming typically involves smaller yields — 5 to 34 percent lower, as estimated in a recent study in the journal Nature, depending on the crop and the context. For all the virtues of organic approaches, it’s hard to see how global food problems can be solved by starting with a cut in yields. Claims in this area are often based on wishful thinking rather than a hard-nosed sense of what’s practical.
I can’t stress that last sentence enough, and I find it amazing what passes for a good pro-organic argument in this area.
There is also an excellent recent essay by Jeremy Grantham on agriculture (pdf), too pessimistic in my view but still more right than wrong. For an interesting look at why future gains from GMOs may be limited, at least in the short run, read R. Ford Denison’s Darwinian Agriculture. Nature already has done a lot of the optimization.
The bottom line is this: right now agriculture is a laggard sector — in part due to state interventions — and this is not totally unrelated to recent headlines about unrest in the Middle East.
Ice cream shadow banking markets in everything
State banking officials want to put the freeze on the owner of an ice-cream parlor who opened a community-bank alternative that pays interest in the form of gift cards for ice cream, waffles and coffee.
Ethan Clay, 31 years old, opened Whalebone Café Bank seven months ago in his shop, Oh Yeah!, a year and a half after he was hit with $1,600 in overdraft fees from a local bank where his account was overdrawn by a series of checks.
Mr. Clay says he wants to offer an alternative banking experience, and has accepted small deposits and made small loans. He claims he isn’t subject to banking rules because his operation is a gift-card savings account.
“It’s a strange case, we don’t have the authority to go close an ice-cream store,” said Ed Novak, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of Banking. “But we are going to do something. You can’t mess with people’s money.”
The article is here, here is Philip Wallach’s new paper (pdf) on whether we need a new Glass-Steagall.
China fact of the day
The gap between the nominal and official number of urban residents is large enough to fit the entire population of Brazil.
That is from Nicholas Borst, the blog post is interesting throughout on Chinese urbanization.
Charter cities and extraterritoriality
In part I am writing this post because Google yields so little on that combination of words.
It would be a mistake to equate charter cities with extraterritoriality. For one thing, a charter city has its own laws and governance, possibly enforced by overseas courts, rather than imposing foreign courts upon domestic governance, a’la Shanghai through the early 20th century. Still, the history of extraterritoriality gives us some sense of what it looks like to have foreign courts operating outside their usual domestic environment.
The problem with extraterritoriality, as I read the literature, is not the Chinese courts had a superior system of commercial or criminal law which was tragically pushed out by inferior Western ideas. The problem was that the foreign courts were not supported by comparably strong domestic interest groups and there was a clash between the foreign courts, national symbols, fairness perceptions, domestic rents and the like, all in a manner which led to eventual talk of foreign devils and violent overreaction against the influence of outsiders.
The history of extraterritoriality focuses one’s attention on the question of who has an incentive to support the external system of law, when such a system is transplanted abroad. This question does seem relevant to charter cities and related concepts.
Hong Kong worked because the UK and USA were able to exert enough control at a distance, at least for a long while, and because China was weak.
One vision is that a charter city works because a dominant hegemon — perhaps at a distance — supports the external system of law.
A second vision is that a charter city works because the external system of law serves up some new and especially tasty rents to domestic interest groups. In the meantime, avoid Tongans.
A related question is what it means for the external legal system to be “invited” in, and how much such an invitation constitutes prima facie evidence of real domestic support.
I would like to see these topics receive more discussion.
Two interesting books are:
1. Wesley R. Fishel, The End of Extraterritoriality in China, and
2. Par Kristoffer Cassel, Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan.
Addendum: Here is an update about Romer’s group and Honduras. There is lots going on, and probably even more than is captured in this story. Here is the account from Romer’s group.
The culture that is Canadian thievery
Someone (possibly wearing super villain gear, although that’s pure speculation on my part until they’re apprehended) broke through security at the Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve in Quebec and made off with $30 million worth of Canada’s sweetest export.
…Canada is the global leader in production of this seasonal treat, churning out somewhere in the neighborhood of three quarters of the world’s supply. According to the documentation I was able to dig up, the Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve was created in order to establish stockpiles of syrup that would be used to stabilize supply and prevent price fluctuations during poor harvests…
Here is more, and I thank Saliency and several other MR readers for the pointer.
Reading John Goodman’s *Priceless*
John Goodman and I have a deal. Beginning in a week or two, I’m going to start reading his book Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, and I will write my reaction(s) to it on TIE as I do. He, of course, is free to react to my reactions by contributing to the TIE comments, posting on his blog, hollering out the window, or however he likes.
The crux of the deal is that our writings and window hollering about each other’s thoughts will be respectful, free of snark, or any implied or overt insults. No feigned shock that the other claims to be a health economist. No histrionics over those mixed up liberals or conservatives or libertarians (as applicable). No statements like, “What [Austin/John] fails to understand” or “Do you realize that …” In short, we’re just going to stick to the evidence and the ideas, not attack each other.
I look forward to the exchanges.
Yesterday was an interesting day for development economics
The government of Honduras has signed a deal with private investors for the construction of three privately run cities with their own legal and tax systems.The memorandum of agreement signed Tuesday is part of a controversial experiment meant to bring badly needed economic growth to this small Central American country.
Here is a bit more, and for the pointer I thank M.
The forward march of progress
The California state legislature just moved that dream a little closer to reality by approving a bill paving the way for driverless cars to be allowed on Golden State freeways.
The bill, authored by State Senator Alex Padilla (D-Van Nuys), was passed by the state Assembly on Wednesday and then given the overwhelming thumbs up by the state Senate the following day.
If signed by Governor Jerry Brown, Padilla’s bill would legally allow autonomous vehicles on the road and charge the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles with determining the standards for self-driving cars, rules which current do not exist under the present vehicle code.
Here is more, and for the pointer I thank Mark Thorson. By the way,
Hawaii, Florida, Arizona and Oklahoma are all also considering similar legislation.
Welsh markets in everything
There was a time when the best you could hope for from prison food might be cold porridge.
But all that is set to change when a bizarre new restaurant opens next month – inside a Welsh prison.
The Clink Cymru, at Cardiff Prison, is the brainchild of award-winning chef Alberto Crisci, who has worked at Marco Pierre White’s Mirabelle Restaurant in Mayfair, London.
All the dishes will be cooked and served by criminals but Crisci insists it is “no gimmick”.
The story is here, hat tip goes to Yana.