Category: Law
The potential for the anti-Nazi music detector in contemporary German culture
Saxony State Police in Germany have developed a smartphone application that can identify neo-Nazi lyrics and racist words in rock songs. Der Spiegel reported Tuesday that German interior ministers will meet this week to discuss whether to implement this new method of policing.
The government said that neo-Nazi music helps radical organizations recruit youth, and it is used as a type of gateway drug to bring in new conscripts. The application, nicknamed “Nazi Shazam,” can identify names of songs just by playing a small sample of a song. The application would allow the police to react instantly if far-right songs are played on radio stations, at concerts, in club nights or at demonstrations.
There is much more here, hat tip goes to MT. This is of course another method of surveillance and measurement of our tastes, and some version of this idea will be picked up by marketers, whether or not this particular example is adopted.
The legacy of Michael Bloomberg
During his tenure, the zoning rules for 37 per cent of the city were changed to permit redevelopment by the private sector, and work on some of the biggest projects is just getting started as he prepares to leave office at the end of this month.
“He is going to define the city for the next 25 years,” said Mitchell L Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University, and a campaign adviser to Mr Bloomberg in 2001. “It doesn’t matter who the next mayors are. They are still going to be attending groundbreakings for projects he started,” he said.
Much of this development is along the waterfront, which Bloomberg calls “the sixth borough.” There is more here, and the pointer is from Paul Romer.
Ferguson and Steinetz on Israeli two-year budgets
…longer-term budgets have important advantages. They reduce uncertainty for the ministries, agencies and private companies that depend on government funds. Public investment in infrastructure is a good example; so are defense contracts. In each case, long-term engagements need to be made with contractors and the results take years to materialize. But the danger always exists of unexpected budget cuts that terminate unfinished projects at high cost to all concerned.
A more subtle advantage of longer-term budgets derives from the argument of the Nobel laureates Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott that rules are often preferable to discretion in the realm of economic policy.
…America’s fiscal problems will not be solved without some bipartisan agreement. Biennial budgets might just be the place to start. After all, this is an idea that was supported not just by Ronald Reagan and both Bushes, but also by Bill Clinton, Al Gore (leader in 1993 of the National Performance Review) and the current Treasury secretary, Jacob Lew.
Moreover, Israel’s experience has been a great advertisement. Not only did it enjoy an impressively rapid recovery from the financial crisis under the system of biennial budgets; more remarkably, when directors-general of Israel’s government ministries were polled in 2010, not one of them favored returning to what one called “the Dark Ages and the madness of the single-year budget.”
The NYT Op-Ed is here. If you would like to read a criticism of the two-year budget, try this:
“There is no other country that has a dual-year budget. Why? Because it requires long forecasts,” Ben-Bassat told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.
The predictions for economic growth and tax collection for the past year’s budget were made two-and-a-half years earlier, in the summer of 2010. Simply put, Ben-Bassat says, “they were wrong. Very wrong.”
Ben-Bassat noted that although Israel’s hearty growth started consistently declining in the second quarter of 2011, the old estimates were not revised because of the inflexible budget.
“It doesn’t make sense for policymakers to tie their own hands,” he said. “The finance minister said he wanted to give certainty to the private sector, but he provided just the opposite. It actually created uncertainty.”
You will find another criticism here. You will note that the American states have been moving away from biennial budgets, partly because their revenues have grown more volatile. Connecticut however uses a bifurcated system, where smaller agencies are on a two-year cycle. In Washington state, the government enacts annual revisions to a biennial cycle (pdf). In other words, the available space of options here is quite complex.
Overall I would not press a button to make this change happen. That said, we Americans have not exactly been pivoting on a dime, with optimal changes in fiscal policy, in response to new economic data.
The 25 most dangerous street corners in the United States
They are mostly in the Midwest, some South Carolina too.
For the pointer I thank Craig Richardson.
Portugal fact of the day
In 2008, 1.9 million Portuguese workers in the private sector were covered by collective bargaining agreements. Last year, the number was down to 300,000.
The article is by Eduardo Porter and is interesting throughout. Here is one additional bit:
The drop in unionization in Portugal “is going to blow the wage distribution apart,” David Card, a labor economist at the University of California, Berkeley, said.
Perhaps the most compelling evidence that Europe’s tentative new path will lead to deepening inequality comes from the country that adopted the strategy earliest and came out at the other end a paragon of success: Germany.
Average really is over, for Western Europe too.
The culture that is Iceland
Icelandic police have shot dead a man who was firing a shotgun in his apartment in the early hours of Monday.
It is the first time someone has been killed in an armed police operation in Iceland, officials say.
There is more here.
Protestors try a new tactic against the Ukrainian police
That is from @Reuterspictures and @pdacosta.
Raise revenue and penalize protest, all in one Spanish policy
Spain’s conservative government agreed on Friday to toughen penalties for unauthorized street protests up to a possible 600,000 euro ($816,000) fine, a crackdown that belies the peaceful record of the anti-austerity protests of recent years.
Leftists and civil rights activists have labeled the bill the “Kick in the teeth law” because it penalizes a battery of protest measures in what they say is a disregard for democracy in a country that only emerged from right-wing dictatorship in the late 1970s.
But Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, whose People’s Party (PP) has an absolute majority in parliament, has said the Citizens’ Security Law guarantees freedom and will have the support of a majority of Spaniards.
“Offensive” slogans against Spain will be eligible for fines up to 30,000 euros. There is more here, via Pol Antras.
Markets in everything
Reverse shoplifting edition, the link is from Japan by the way. As it is explained to me in an email:
Value_Added #240950
(Del Monte whole kernel corn no salt added)2012-Canned corn and receipts
Dimensions variableThe artist takes one canned good to multiple supermarkets and re-buys it. This single can of corn has been re-bought from 105 supermarkets for a total of $113.07. ( as of June1, 2013 )This procedure is possible because the stores have no way to identify individual items: the barcode printed on my can’s label, #240950, refers to its contents, and not to that particular can.
Net immigration into the UK, recent trends
This picture clarifies a few neglected points:
Since 2010 there has been a marked decline in non-EU net immigration. As a proportion of non-British immigration to the UK, it has dropped from 73% in June 2010 to 57% in June 2013. In the last year alone, it has fallen from 172,000 to 140,000.
Meanwhile, this year, net migration from the EU has gone up by 72,000 to 106,000.
But, as the chart above shows, the recent increase in net EU migration has come from the older, more established (and traditionally more wealthy) EU member states (the EU15), not the new member states from central and eastern Europe that joined in 2004 (the EU8).
That is from Open Europe Blog.
The other hand of the FDA
Via Chaim Katz, here is a Bloomberg headline from 2012: “Asian Seafood Raised on Pig Feces Approved for U.S. Consumers.” Whether or not you agree with this decision (how good is disclosure?), you get the point.
Our DNA, Our Selves
At the same time that the NSA is secretly and illegally obtaining information about Americans the FDA is making it illegal for Americans to obtain information about themselves.
In a warning letter the FDA has told Anne Wojcicki, The Most Daring CEO In America, that she “must immediately discontinue” selling 23andMe’s Personal Genome Service, more affectionately known as the spit kit.
As I wrote when this issue first surfaced in 2010:
The ability of genetic tests to predict diseases is currently limited; if the FDA were simply to require firms to acknowledge this point, say with a clear statement of probabilities, that would be one thing (although this task is better met by the FTC under advertising regulation). But the FDA is brazenly overreaching in trying to regulate genetic tests as medical devices. First, there is no question that these tests are safe–safer than brushing your teeth!–and also effective in identifying genetic markers. Thus,
there is no medical reason whatsoever for regulation.
Moreover, genetic tests provide information, personal information about our bodies and our selves. The FDA has no standing to interfere with the provision of such information.
Consider, I swab the inside of my cheek and send the sample to a firm. The idea that the FDA can rule on what the firm can and cannot tell me about my own genes is absurd–it’s no different than the FDA trying to regulate what my doctor can tell me after a physical examination or what my optometrist can tell me after an eye examination (Please read the first line. “G T A C C A…”).
The idea that the FDA can regulate and control what individuals may learn about their own bodies is deeply offensive and, in my view, plainly unconstitutional.
Let me be clear, I am not offended by all regulation of genetic tests. Indeed, genetic tests are already regulated. To be precise, the labs that perform genetic tests are regulated by the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) as overseen by the CMS (here is an excellent primer). The CLIA requires all labs, including the labs used by 23andMe, to be inspected for quality control, record keeping and the qualifications of their personnel. The goal is to ensure that the tests are accurate, reliable, timely, confidential and not risky to patients. I am not offended when the goal of regulation is to help consumers buy the product that they have contracted to buy.
What the FDA wants to do is categorically different. The FDA wants to regulate genetic tests as a high-risk medical device that cannot be sold until and unless the FDA permits it be sold.
Moreover, the FDA wants to judge not the analytic validity of the tests, whether the tests accurately read the genetic code as the firms promise (already regulated under the CLIA) but the clinical validity, whether particular identified alleles are causal for conditions or disease. The latter requirement is the death-knell for the products because of the expense and time it takes to prove specific genes are causal for diseases. Moreover, it means that firms like 23andMe will not be able to tell consumers about their own DNA but instead will only be allowed to offer a peek at the sections of code that the FDA has deemed it ok for consumers to see.
Alternatively, firms may be allowed to sequence a consumer’s genetic code and even report it to them but they will not be allowed to tell consumers what the letters mean. Here is why I think the FDA’s actions are unconstitutional. Reading an individual’s code is safe and effective. Interpreting the code and communicating opinions about it may or may not be safe–just like all communication–but it falls squarely under the First Amendment.
The FDA also has the relationship between testing and clinical validity ass-backward. The FDA wants to say no to testing until clinical validity is established but we are never going to discover clinical validity until we have mass testing. 23andMe is attempting to leverage individuals thirst for knowledge about themselves into a big data project that will discover entirely new connections between genotype and phenotype. But personalized medicine, just like personalized movie recommendations, only works with databases of millions. In the 20th century we took on many of our common diseases but it is now time to take on the uncommon diseases. There are some 7,000 known diseases and only about 500 have a treatment. Individual and disease heterogeneity is so large that even the diseases that we can treat are often not treated well. New approaches are necessary for progress. The collection of large amounts of DNA data is not the last step of personalized medicine but the first and by pushing back against the first steps the FDA is delaying the promise and progress of personalized medicine.
Full Disclosure: The FDA’s threat to regulate genetic tests in 2010 made me spitting mad so I put that spit to good use and became a 23andMe customer. Well worth it, if only to point out to my wife that contrary to all evidence I am in fact only 2.2% Neanderthal.
The mover’s advantage: The superior performance of migrant scientists
That is a new paper by Chiara Franzoni, Giuseppe Scellato and Paula Stephan, and the abstract is this:
Migrant scientists outperform domestic scientists. The result persists after instrumenting migration for reasons of work or study with migration in childhood to minimize the effect of selection. The results are consistent with theories of knowledge recombination and specialty matching.
The university-gated version is here. There are more new immigration papers here, via Kevin Lewis.
By the way, over sixty percent of the scientists and engineers of Silicon Valley were born outside of the United States. By the way, here is a new Swiss paper (pdf) on attitudes toward immigrant foreigners.
The new Franz Oppenheimer?
Here is the fascinating job market paper by Raul Sanchez de la Sierra of Columbia University, entitled “On the Origin of States: Stationary Bandits and Taxation in Eastern Congo.” The abstract is this:
The state is among the greatest developments in human history and a precursor of economic growth. Why do states arise, and when do they fail to arise? A dominant view across disciplines is that states arise when violent actors impose a “monopoly of violence” in order to extract taxes. One key fact underlies all existing studies: no census exists prior to the state. In this paper, I provide the first econometric evidence on the determinants of state formation. As a foundation for this study, I conducted fieldwork in stateless areas of Eastern Congo, managing a team that collected village-level panel data on current armed groups. I develop a model that introduces optimal taxation theory to the decision of armed groups to form states, and argue that the returns to such decision hinge on their ability to tax the local population. A sharp, exogenous rise in the price of a bulky commodity used in the video-game industry, coltan, leads armed groups to impose a “monopoly of violence” in coltan villages. A later increase in the price of gold, easier to conceal and hence more difficult to tax, does not. Results based on two alternative identification strategies are also consistent with the model. The findings support the hypothesis that the expected revenue from taxation, in particular tax base elasticity, is a determinant of state formation.
Hire him!
The culture that was Singapore (Haw Par Villa)
It has its gruesome side, as illustrated by this look at a traditional site for visits, Haw Par Villa:
Thousands used to throng the park, and it once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with attractions like Singapore Zoo and Jurong Bird Park. “Every Singaporean over the age of 35 probably has a picture of themselves at Haw Par,” said Desmond Sim, a local playwright. Those pictures would probably include the following statues, each made from plastered cement paste and wire mesh: a human head on the body of a crab, a frog in a baseball cap riding an ostrich, and a grandmother suckling at the breast of another woman.
But the highlight of this bizarre park are the Ten Courts. A tableau of severe disciplines are shown in painstaking detail, along with a placard stating the sin that warranted it. Tax dodgers are pounded by a stone mallet, spikes driven into a skeletal chest cavity like a bloodthirsty pestle in mortar. Spot the tiny tongue as it is pulled out of a screaming man, watch the demon flinging a young girl into a hill of knives. Ungratefulness results in a blunt metal rod cutting a very large, fleshly heart out of a woman. Perhaps the most gruesome depiction is an executioner pulling tiny intestines out from a man tied to a pole. The colons were visible and brown. The crime? Cheating during exams.
The park may be closing down, with few remaining attendees, though from the article it seems you still can go. Hurry up.
You can read TripAdvisor reviews of the park here. Here is Wikipedia on the park. Here are Flickr images. There are further sources here.
Are these the cultural preconditions of capitalism and good governance? I know which of my colleagues will be most happy to read about this.