Category: Law
Microsoft, Security and the NSA
New from The Guardian:
Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users’ communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company’s own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.
…The NSA has devoted substantial efforts in the last two years to work with Microsoft to ensure increased access to Skype, which has an estimated 663 million global users.
One document boasts that Prism monitoring of Skype video production has roughly tripled since a new capability was added on 14 July 2012. “The audio portions of these sessions have been processed correctly all along, but without the accompanying video. Now, analysts will have the complete ‘picture’,” it says.
Japan fact of the day
It’s not just diapers:
Boredom and isolation don’t just belong to teenagers anymore as a report from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police shows that there are now more elderly shoplifters than teenaged ones in Tokyo. This is the first time that this has happened since the police began keeping records about this particular crime.
Statistics show that 3,321 people aged 65 or older were arrested on suspicion of shoplifting in 2012, which accounted for almost a quarter or 24.5% of the total number of arrests. Those aged 19 or below accounted for 23.6% of figures, with 3,195 arrests made. Even though the total number of arrests have declined based on the statistics from 2011, the ratio of elderly people shoplifting is on the rise. While the statistics did not include reasons for shoplifting, the growing isolation of the elderly from society has been cited as a growing problem among that age group.
Here is more, via the excellent Mark Thorson.
Where should Edward Snowden go?
Assuming he can get there, of course. Currently it’s down to Venezuela, Bolivia, or Nicaragua. Dylan Matthews argues for Venezuela, on the grounds that the other two countries are much poorer and have lower life expectancies. He says Snowden should put up with the much higher crime rate (by the way “0.2 percent of Caracas residents [are] killed each year.”)
But Snowden is not playing a Rawlsian game here, he is going to these countries as Edward Snowden. I say seek out Santa Cruz, Bolivia, which is much richer than Bolivia as a whole and safer than Venezuela at least. Sloths hang from the trees. Also keep in mind that much of Snowden’s income may be coming from abroad, whether it be from Wikileaks or book royalties or civil libertarian well-wishers or sources unknown. That militates in favor of the cheaper, lower wage country and Bolivia fits the bill. Nicaragua is quite nice, and attracts some notable expats (pdf), but if you can’t travel abroad choose a larger country.
Finally, Venezuela has had some pro-American tendencies in its history and those could return. Bolivia seems to have a more or less stable indigenous (semi) democratic majority, plus the hijacking of Morales’s plane may give the Snowden issue a resonance in Bolivia for some time to come.
If he loves the beach, however, Leon, Nicaragua is a charming town.
Very good sentences
It is perhaps no accident that the ardour for liberty is no longer expressed through political channels. Its main outlets are morally ambiguous figures such as Mr Snowden and Bradley Manning, the US soldier who gave classified documents to WikiLeaks. Technology will pose new challenges for all states. We are not in a world of John le Carré’s spies but one resembling CIA TV series Person of Interest, where states claim power over us ostensibly to prevent us coming to harm. But we cannot navigate this terrain by reinstating a form of moral hegemony where the rights of Americans count more; and the rest of the world be damned.
That is from Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the FT, the whole thing is excellent but the first two sentences cited above are the most striking of them all.
The prisoners’ dilemma with actual prisoners
This is from a new research paper by Menusch Khadjavi and Andreas Lange:
We compare female inmates and students in a simultaneous and a sequential Prisoner’s Dilemma. In the simultaneous Prisoner’s Dilemma, the cooperation rate among inmates exceeds the rate of cooperating students. Relative to the simultaneous dilemma, cooperation among first-movers in the sequential Prisoner’s Dilemma increases for students, but not for inmates. Students and inmates behave identically as second movers. Hence, we find a similar and significant fraction of inmates and students to hold social preferences….
The blog post and link to research is here, hat tip goes to @Noahpinion.
The market speaks
Will Middle Eastern governments be Islamacized?
Tarek Osman offers four reasons why maybe not:
But this Islamization will not succeed. First, despite the piousness of the vast majority of Muslim Arabs, themselves the commanding majorities of the region, the Islamization efforts inherently challenge the national identities of each country. Despite clever rhetoric, Islamization means the domination of one component of Egyptianism, Tunisianity, Syrianism, etc, over other components that had shaped these entrenched identities. This is especially true in the old countries of the Arab world, the ones whose borders, social compositions, and crucially identities had been carved over long, rich centuries. And the more the Islamist movements continue to thrust their worldviews and social values, the more they will disturb these national identities, and the more agitated—and antagonized—the middle classes of these societies will become.
Second, these efforts at Islamization take place when almost all of these societies are undergoing difficult—and for many social classes, painful—economic transitions. And there is no way out. The ruling Islamist executives are compelled to confront the severe structural challenges inherent in the economies they inherited. Some are able to buy time and postpone crucial reforms through foreign grants (which come at a political price). But sooner or later, they will have to make the tough socio-economic decisions that these structural reforms require. Islamists in office will be blamed for the pains that will ensue. Rapidly, some of the constituencies that had voted them into power will seek other alternatives.
Third, demographics will work against these efforts at Islamization. Close to 200 million of the Arab world’s 340 million people are under 30-years old. As a result of the many failures it has inherited, this generation faces a myriad of socio-economic challenges on a daily basis. A culture of protest and rejection has already been established amongst its ranks, and young people will not accept indoctrination—even if it was presented in the name of religion. Almost by default, the swelling numbers of young Arabs, especially in the culturally vibrant centers of the Arab world (Cairo, Tunis, Beirut, Damascus, Casablanca, Kuwait, Manama), will create plurality—in social views, political positions, economic approaches, and in social identities and frames of reference.
Finally, this Islamization project, in its various parts, will suffer at the hand of its strategists and managers. The leaderships of the largest Islamist groups in the Arab world have immense experiences in developing and managing services and charity infrastructures, operating underground political networks, fund-raising, and electoral campaigning, especially in rural and interior regions. But they suffer an acute lack of experience in tackling serious political-economy challenges or administering grand socio-political narratives. Lack of experience will result in incompetence.
That is via @GideonRachman.
Somerville, MA rebels against minimum parking requirements
In a city where people can spend hours searching for parking, Boston officials are pursuing a strategy that seems as galling as it is counterintuitive: They are deliberately discouraging construction of new spaces.
The policy shift — which comes even as thousands of new residents flock into its neighborhoods — is being implemented across the city, with officials relaxing once inflexible requirements that parking be built with every new residence. The goal is to encourage the use of public transportation, and to devote more land and money to affordable housing, open spaces, and other amenities. Officials also say the city’s youthful population is becoming more accustomed to life without a car.
“We don’t need a parking space for every bedroom in every new building,” Peter Meade, head of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, said in a recent interview. He cited US census data showing that one in three Boston residents is between 20 and 35, and most bike, walk, or use public transportation to get to work.
Residents are complaining the new policy will make matters worse in the short run, even if there is a longer-run substitution away from cars. By the way, this is not causally connected but there is evidence Boston has reached “peak car”:
The number of registered vehicles in the city has dropped by nearly 14 percent in the last five years, from 362,288 in 2008 to 311,943 today, according to the Registry of Motor Vehicles.
The full story is here, and my earlier column on minimum parking requirements is here.
Sentences to ponder
A random sample of new books for sale on Amazon.com shows three times more books initially published in the 1850’s are for sale than new books from the 1950’s.
Here is much more, from Paul J. Heald.
Should Oregon fund college through equity?
Here is the latest proposal, which seems to stand a chance of actually happening:
This week, the Oregon Legislature approved a plan that could allow students to attend state colleges without paying tuition or taking out traditional loans. Instead, they would commit a small percentage of their future incomes to repaying the state; those who earn very little would pay very little.
I’m all for this as an experiment, but I’m not sure how effective it will be. Here is one more detail:
The plan’s supporters have estimated that for it to work, the state would have to take about 3 percent of a former student’s earnings for 20 years, in the case of someone who earned a bachelor’s degree.
Twenty years is a long time and I fear the implied selection mechanism embedded in that time horizon. At the margin I would expect this to attract people who don’t have a vivid mental image of the distant future. Furthermore the terms of the program discriminate against those who expect high earnings or for that matter those who expect to finish. In other words, the drop out rate of the marginal students here may be relatively high. And what are the payback terms for dropouts? Do they get off scot free? Pay proportionately for what they finished? Pay much much less to reflect their lower expected wages? The six-year graduation rate at Oregon State is only about 61%. This is not a small question.
Funding education through debt or through family-based crowd-sourcing may serve up a better mix of students. By the way, this source says the repayment period is over 24 years, not 20. Again, keep in mind that “the rate of return for the marginal student” is not the same as the “rate of return for the marginal student who would be attracted by these terms.”
And is this a better or worse deal for the median student at say Oregon State? If most students take this offer, I fear that the university’s incentive to improve the quality of education will not stay intact at the margin. I do understand there is a version of this plan where the tuition revenue simply comes from a state program rather than from the student, but more likely than not Oregon would end up with a “complex formula” which weakens the incentives of the institutions at the relevant margin. (On the state side of the equation, there is an incentive to conserve on cash and make the marginal tuition “free,” rather than pay the same amount of cash to the school the student would have paid.) Alternatively, if most students do not take this offer, one has to wonder what is wrong with it and adjust one’s estimate of the adverse selection problem accordingly.
Let’s assume, for the purposes of argument, that the 3% future “tax” won’t hurt labor supply at all. How is this program so different from moving to the European model, where higher education is free or near-free and general taxes on the population are higher? Yet the European systems of higher education are generally worse than those in America, so why should we be trying to copy them or move toward them? If anything, they are trying to move closer to American models.
At the end of the day, I am willing to let Oregon make a likely mistake to find out how this works. Go ahead guys, do it, we are all watching.
I thank several loyal MR readers for the pointer.
How bad were the Navigation Acts really?
Adam Smith supported them and he was no mercantilist. Here is another take:
…that remains the consensus view among a broad sample of modern scholars: a recent study concluded that nearly 90 percent of the economists and historians surveyed agreed with proposition that “[t]he costs imposed on the colonists by the trade restrictions of the Navigation Acts were small.”
if the burden of the Navigation Acts was so slight — no more than one percent of GDP, according to Thomas’ calculation — why did the Americans make such a fuss over it? The short answer is that although the burden to the American colonies as a whole was low, it did not fall evenly across the entire economy: some sectors and regions suffered disproportionately, while others were barely affected. The regions and sectors that suffered the most from the Navigation Acts tended to be the strongest supporters of the American Revolution.
That is from the forthcoming useful book by Richard S. Grossman Wrong: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them. For the two relevant Robert Paul Thomas pieces (jstor) see here and here.
To further brighten your day, here is a non-gated piece by Robert Whaples, “Where is There Consensus Among American Economic Historians? The Results of a Survey on Forty Propositions” (pdf).
*Napoleon’s Egypt*
The author of this interesting work is Juan Cole and the subtitle is Invading the Middle East. Here is one excerpt:
Many of the French took seriously Bonaparte’s proclamations that he intended to bring liberty to the Egyptians through institutions such as the clerically dominated divan. The French not only interpreted Egypt in terms familiar to their eighteenth-century world, they were also capable of reinterpreting their own history in light of what they saw in Egypt. Just as rationalist officers coded popular Islam as reactionary Catholicism, so the Republican French mapped the defeated beys as analogous to the French Old Regime and saw their overthrow and institution of municipal elections as the advent of liberty.
This book is one good place to start. Here is the Wikipedia page on the French invasion of Egypt and Syria.
How might democracy disappear?
From my latest request for requests, anonymous asked:
It’s 2050. Democracy has ended in most countries, with a few exceptions. What happened?
Another reader, Dirk, asked:
If democracy ended in the USA, how do you think it would most likely play out?
Maybe you are thinking in terms of war or pandemic, but external conditions would have to be truly extreme to end democracy in the United States. The poor military fortunes of the Confederacy in the South, during the Civil War, did not lead to non-democracy (for Whites, slanted source here). Nor did siege by the Nazis make Great Britain less democratic, if anything the contrary.
If the Anglo democracies are to disappear, it will be because they will have voted themselves out of the idea, democratically of course.
As for many other parts of the world, my view is if you haven’t had democracy for one hundred years or more, it probably isn’t as stable as it may at first appear.
Repeal the employer mandate altogether
I agree with Ezra Klein, who writes:
Delaying Obamacare’s employer mandate is the right thing to do. Frankly, eliminating it — or at least utterly overhauling it — is probably the right thing to do. But the administration executing a regulatory end-run around Congress is not the right way to do it.
Ezra notes:
– By imposing a tax on employers for hiring people from low- and moderate-income families who would qualify for subsidies in the new health insurance exchanges, it would discourage firms from hiring such individuals and would favor the hiring — for the same jobs — of people who don’t qualify for subsidies (primarily people from families at higher income levels).
– It would provide an incentive for employers to convert full-time workers (i.e., workers employed at least 30 hours per week) to part-time workers.
– It would place significant new administrative burdens and costs on employers.
By tying the penalties to how many full-time workers an employer has, and how many of them qualify for subsidies, the mandate gives employers a reason to have fewer full-time workers, and fewer low-income workers.
We can only hope that repeal of this one part of the law is what the Obama Administration actually has in mind, though as Ezra notes Congress is not currently in a cooperative frame of mind. Still, this way it has a chance of serious reexamination after the 2014 elections.
Evan Soltas offers relevant comment on how this will change implementation in the short-run, namely that it puts more burden on the exchanges. Sarah Kliff comments on the politics, a very good post. Here is one good quotation from a source: “Politically, it won’t get easier a year from now, it will get harder,” he said. “You’ve given the employer community a sense of confidence that maybe they can kill this. If I were an employer, I would smell blood in the water.”
My view is you don’t serve up a delay and PR disaster like this, on such a sensitive political issue, unless you really wish to derail the entire provision.
Do positive wealth shocks stick?
There is a new paper by Hoyt Bleakley and Joseph P. Ferrie, titled “Up from Poverty? The 1832 Cherokee Land Lottery and the Long-run Distribution of Wealth.” This paper uses a very clever experimental design, relying on random, lottery-based allocations of land. The question is how much winning this land lottery helped people in the longer run. Here is the abstract:
The state of Georgia allocated most of its land to the public through a system of lotteries. These episodes provide unusual opportunities to assess the long-term impact of large shocks to wealth, as winning was uncorrelated with individual characteristics and participation was nearly universal among the eligible population of adult white male Georgians. We use this episode to examine the idea that the lower tail of the wealth distribution reflects in part a wealth-based poverty trap because of limited access to capital. Using wealth measured in the 1850 Census manuscripts, we follow up on a sample of men eligible to win in the 1832 Cherokee Land Lottery. We assess the impact of lottery winning on the distribution of wealth 18 years after the fact. Winners are on average richer (by an amount close to the median of 1850 wealth), but mainly due to a (net) shifting of mass from the middle to the upper tail of the wealth distribution. The lower tail is largely unaffected.
The bottom line is that the grants increased inequality, many people were helped a great deal, and a large chunk of people weren’t helped at all. An ungated version of the paper is here.