Category: Law
Our drone future?
(In case you’re worried that drones lack allies in Congress, rest easy: there’s a Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus with 60 members. With global spending on drones expected to nearly double over the next decade, to $11.3 billion, industry groups like the AUVSI are rapidly ramping up their lobbying budgets.)
And:
Singer estimates that there are 76 other countries either developing drones or shopping for them; both Hizballah and Hamas have flown drones already. In November, a Massachusetts man was sentenced to 17 years for plotting to attack the Pentagon and the Capitol with remote-controlled planes.
The very interesting article is here, by Lev Grossman at Time, hat tip goes to The Browser.
*Shylock on Trial: The Appellate Briefs*
That is the new eBook by Richard Posner and Charles Fried, and I just bought my copy and expect I will be adding it to my Law and Literature syllabus. The book’s home page is here.
A longer book, edited by Bradin Cormack, Marthua Nussbaum, and Richard Strier will be coming out as well, Shakespeare and the Law, containing this piece among others.
Department of Uh-Oh
Labor unions enthusiastically backed the Obama administration’s health-care overhaul when it was up for debate. Now that the law is rolling out, some are turning sour.
Union leaders say many of the law’s requirements will drive up the costs for their health-care plans and make unionized workers less competitive. Among other things, the law eliminates the caps on medical benefits and prescription drugs used as cost-containment measures in many health-care plans. It also allows children to stay on their parents’ plans until they turn 26.
To offset that, the nation’s largest labor groups want their lower-paid members to be able to get federal insurance subsidies while remaining on their plans. In the law, these subsidies were designed only for low-income workers without employer coverage as a way to help them buy private insurance.
…Contacted for this article, Obama administration officials said the issue is subject to regulations still being written…
Top officers at the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the AFL-CIO and other large labor groups plan to keep pressing the Obama administration to expand the federal subsidies to these jointly run plans, warning that unionized employers may otherwise drop coverage. A handful of unions say they already have examined whether it makes sense to shift workers off their current plans and onto private coverage subsidized by the government. But dropping insurance altogether would undermine a central point of joining a union, labor leaders say.
…The Teamsters’ Mr. Hall said his union has no plans to eliminate workers’ insurance. Instead, he worries employers will have an incentive to drop coverage in collective bargaining if they can’t tap the subsidies.
All of a sudden, people are figuring this out. The article is here, and for the pointer I thank Craig Garthwaite.
What is the deadweight loss from museum art collections?
Steven Kopit, a loyal MR commentator, asks:
Tyler –
Let’s have more on the economics of museums. That’s actually an interesting topic.
Only a very small portion of the collections of the Louvre other major museums is on display at any given time. I think it would make a great deal of sense to provide additional venues for shows–including in China. In the end, holdings of art (like income, per SS) only matter is someone actually consumes them, ie, gets to see them.
I say the deadweight loss here is not so large. Most art exhibitions are not self-financing from the side of the viewers, which suggests that the demand to see the pictures is not higher than the costs of mounting the exhibit. Arguably you can throw in philanthropic support as another part of “market demand,” but I consider that a separate valuation issue. Maybe our current artistic institutions are under-providing marketing opportunities for businesses and foundations, but that still won’t get you a major pent-up demand to view the pictures, again not relative to cost. The very popular pictures, such as the good works by the Impressionists and post-Impressionists, are shown quite frequently, including in traveling exhibitions.
Context matters a great deal in this setting. Currently most of the Louvre is not being viewed at any point in time, as the crowds tend to cluster in a few very well-known areas. Many people would want to go see anything they are told they ought to go see. What is underfunded is some kind of “demand for participation in a public event,” not the viewing of art per se. If only they could create more hullaballoo around the more obscure Flemish painters.
Almost all museums have large stretches of empty walls. I would put up many more pictures there, as indeed I do in my own home. That museums do not do this I find striking and indicative. Nor do I see viewers and visitors demanding this, if anything the unspoken feeling might be to wish for a bit less on the walls, so that one may have the feeling of having seen everything without exhaustion.
The costs of storing art are high. Perhaps the Louvre should sell some of its lower-tier works to private collectors. But the general public just doesn’t want so much more art to see, not if they have to pay for it and maybe even if they don’t.
Medical Self Defense
Americans have historically put great weight on the right of self-defense which is one reason why many people support the 2nd Amendment, as the Supreme Court noted explicitly in District of Columbia v. Heller. But what about medical self-defense? John Robertson argues:
A person can buy a handgun for self-defense but cannot pay for an organ donation to save her life because of the National Organ Transplantation Act’s (NOTA) total ban on paying “valuable consideration” for an organ donation. This article analyzes whether the need for an organ transplant, and thus the paid organ donations that might make them possible, falls within the constitutional protection of the life and liberty clauses of the 5th and 14th amendments. If so, government would have to show more than a rational basis to uphold NOTA’s ban on paid donations.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has rejected medical self-defense arguments for physician assisted suicide and let stand an appeals court ruling that patients do not have a right to access drugs which have not yet been permitted for sale by the FDA (fyi, I was part of an Amici Curiae brief for this case). Robertson argues, however, that these cases can be distinguished. Physician assisted-suicide doesn’t fall within a long-American tradition necessary to receive due-process rights and organ transplants are not untested or experimental. It’s a good argument although it’s disappointing that the medical self-defense principle must be unjustly delimited.
Hat tip: Law, Economic and Cycling.
Predatory borrowing?
From Luigi Zingales:
In fact, the authors find that more than 6% of mortgage loans misreport the borrower’s occupancy status, while 7% do not disclose second liens.
…The authors provide some interesting evidence in this context. They show, for example, that the misrepresentation is correlated with higher defaults down the line: delinquent payments on misreported loans are more than 60% higher than on loans that are otherwise similar. Thus, the errors do not seem to be random, but purposeful.
What the authors do not find is also interesting. The degree of misrepresentation seems to be unrelated to the incentives provided to the top management and to the quality of risk-management practices inside these firms. In fact, all reputable intermediaries in their sample exhibit a significant degree of misrepresentation. Thus, the problem does not seem to be limited to a few bad apples, but is pervasive.
I cannot tell whether the borrowers defrauded the lenders or the lenders defrauded the investors who bought the loans. I always presume that it is the borrower instigating the fraud. However, Zingales says that the bankers should be prosecuted. He makes it sound as if the lenders would record a loan internally as backed by an investment property and report it to investors as an owner-occupied home. That would require a much more complex conspiratorial action on the part of the lender, and until I learn otherwise, I will doubt that it happened.
Sauce, goose, gander
A panel appointed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel to review taxpayer-subsidized health insurance for retired government workers suggested the city [Chicago] could drop coverage to help erase a financial shortfall…
Phasing out coverage for most retired city workers would leave the bulk of retirees dependent on the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
Here is more, and for the pointer I thank The Wisdom of Garett Jones.
The new music royalties
I’ve covered this before, but here is another update on a rapidly-evolving story in cultural economics:
Even for an under-the-radar artist like Ms. Keating, who describes her style as “avant cello,” the numbers painted a stark picture of what it is like to be a working musician these days. After her songs had been played more than 1.5 million times on Pandora over six months, she earned $1,652.74. On Spotify, 131,000 plays last year netted just $547.71, or an average of 0.42 cent a play.
Here is more, and you will recall that the streaming services don’t seem to be making money either.
The new bipartisan immigration bill
Here is the proposal. It is better than nothing, if only to show that something can be done. The “no path to citizenship until the border is secure” is simply kicking the can down the road, as that standard never will be met. In the meantime, lots of money will be spent and in due time drones will dominate the border; cult midnight showings of Blue Thunder will increase. U.S. universities will go crazy inflating the size of their graduate STEM programs, and it will become harder to flunk these people out. Economists will lobby for inclusion but fail. (Isn’t it better to simply increase the number of jobs-related visas?) The passage about the special importance of farm labor sounds like Orwellian satire. Dairy is mentioned too. Will this pave the way for a national ID card? More hi-tech workers will get in. Productivity will rise, and some individuals will have much better lives, but the country will feel less free. Republicans are trying to appeal to moderates here, not actual Latinos. We observe the ever-lingering influence of GWB.
This seems underreported
So I will link to it here:
Israel has admitted for the first time that it has been giving Ethiopian Jewish immigrants birth-control injections, often without their knowledge or consent.
The government had previously denied the practice but the Israeli Health Ministry’s director-general has now ordered gynaecologists to stop administering the drugs. According a report in Haaretz, suspicions were first raised by an investigative journalist, Gal Gabbay, who interviewed more than 30 women from Ethiopia in an attempt to discover why birth rates in the community had fallen dramatically.
I’ve read through a number of alternative accounts and this seems to be true. If you feel this is in error, however, please do give me another source to check out.
The culture that is Britain
Please don’t come to Britain – it rains and the jobs are scarce and low-paid. Ministers are considering launching a negative advertising campaign in Bulgaria and Romania to persuade potential immigrants to stay away from the UK.
The plan, which would focus on the downsides of British life, is one of a range of potential measures to stem immigration to Britain next year when curbs imposed on both country’s citizens living and working in the UK will expire.
Here is more, via Paolo Abarcar. What would you put in such an ad? As for precedents:
In 2007, Eurostar ran adverts in Belgium for its trains to London depicting a tattooed skinhead urinating into a china teacup.
On the other hand:
…the Home Office launched a guide to Britishness for foreigners who would be citizens which opens with the words: “Britain is a fantastic place to live: a modern thriving society”.
U.S. ownership of Mexican property
Morgan Warstler has a question:
On Mexican immigration, I’d like your thoughts on an open door policy conditioned on Mexico changing their Constitution to allow Americans to own beachfront property and companies outright.
The idea being we simply need to get Americans thinking about Mexico like a big Florida, thinking about their boomer parents buying condos and getting cheap medical care. Get entrepreneurs thinking about setting up manufacturing shops in Mexico and generally anything which makes more Americans feel annoyed by a closed border.
Why don’t free market economists that champion the import of human capital and free trade, spend more time pushing Free Market Manifest Destiny? Are we so sure Mexico wouldn’t agree to such horse trading? We push our ideas all over the globe, why not lean on Mexico where it is in our obvious strategic interest?
I believe Mexico would not agree to such horse trading, though it may happen in some lesser form, if the United States simply keeps quiet about the idea. In particular Mexico is likely to allow greater FDI in its fossil fuels production, if only to prevent a fiscal crash from this revenue source going away. They need expertise from U.S. companies in this area rather badly.
Beachfront property touches too closely on national pride and the efficiency gains to American ownership are in any case small. Rent if you must, and Mexico has more wealthy people all the time to buy up that stuff. I would favor the extension of Medicare coverage to American citizens living in Mexico, at least with some safeguards against fraud or maybe even without. The U.S. medical establishment would not like that but I think Mexico would find it more than acceptable.
The U.S. does best in Mexico when it allows Mexicans to move the key ideas forward in the public arena. Free trade in Medicare is the next big step we could take on our own.
More Police, Fewer Prisons, Less Crime
The New York times as a good piece on prisons, police and crime:
“The United States today is the only country I know of that spends more on prisons than police,” said Lawrence W. Sherman, an American criminologist on the faculties of the University of Maryland and Cambridge University in Britain. “In England and Wales, the spending on police is twice as high as on corrections. In Australia it’s more than three times higher. In Japan it’s seven times higher. Only in the United States is it lower, and only in our recent history.”
…Dr. Ludwig and Philip J. Cook, a Duke University economist, calculate that nationwide, money diverted from prison to policing would buy at least four times as much reduction in crime. They suggest shrinking the prison population by a quarter and using the savings to hire another 100,000 police officers.
My work on policing in Washington, DC (with Jon Klick) also strongly suggests that more police pass the cost benefit test; we suggest that doubling the police force would not be unreasonable.
Are free and charter cities making a comeback in Honduras?
By a large majority (110 votes to 128), the Honduran Congress approved the modification of three articles of the country’s constitution, giving powers to Congress to create areas subject to special arrangements, referred to as “Model Cities” that were declared unconstitutional last October for being considered “states within a state.”
Laprensa.hn reports that “The law consists of two approved articles. The first amending Articles 294, 303 and 329 of Decree 131 of January 11, 1982 containing the Constitution, which divided the country into departments. These ‘are divided into autonomous municipalities administered by corporations elected by the people, in accordance with the law’.
Without prejudice to the provisions of the preceding two paragraphs, Congress can create areas under special schemes in accordance with Article 329 of this Constitution ‘.
Here is more, and here is a related article of explanation. I am still told, however, that yet another piece of legislation needs to be passed. I don’t pretend to understand any of this (for one thing, how much do these developments represent genuine suspense?), but at least one insider seems to think it represents a breakthrough of sorts.
The big news from today
Via Felix Salmon, it appears Cyprus is going to default. However small a country it may be, does anyone at this point want to be on record setting any number of precedents, one way or the other?
Felix asks:
So even if Europe has made its first big decision — to force Cyprus to default — it still faces many more. Should it amend the ESM treaty to make any restructuring easier? Should it impose a haircut on Cyprus’s uninsured depositors? And how can it structure the process to minimize the chances of a messy bank run, default, and possibly even exit from the euro? It’s easy to dismiss Cyprus as too small to worry about. But it’s still an important sovereign state. And if the EU missteps on Cyprus, that would bode very ill for any similar problems in bigger eurozone countries in the future.
“Creative ambiguity” is getting harder to manage all the time. What would a depositor haircut here imply for Greek and Spanish banks?