Results for “more police” 437 found
Why I love the suburbs
1. We live 30 minutes from Washington but we also have a fox in the backyard. Deer are a frequent sight as well.
2. Chinese restaurants are usually better in the suburbs these days.
3. Driving is fun and a good way to experience music. MR readers know I favor a (revenue-neutral) gas tax. My worry is that car culture makes people more individualistic and thus I have some reluctance to tax this trend. Try Chuck Berry’s "No Particular Place To Go."
4. A few weeks ago, the first Fairfax County police officer died in the line of duty. That’s the first ever. In New Jersey, where I grew up, you might speak of the first local cop to die today.
5. Many of my friends who live in Manhattan lose interest in global travel or never acquire it. Sadly they feel they already have everything they need from the world right at home.
Natasha and I talk of retiring in New York City. But are we up for it? I’ve started subscribing to New York magazine. Sometimes it is interesting; more to the point I can pretend I might someday live there.
I’ll cover Jane Jacobs soon.
South Korea fact of the day
Players in South Korea have been prosecuted for stealing virtual
property. More than half of the 40,000 computer crimes investigated by
South Korea’s National Police Agency in 2003 involved online games.
Can you defame someone’s avatar? Does antitrust law apply? Here is the link.
At the Sorbonne
French riot police stormed the Sorbonne on the weekend, ousting students who had barricaded themselves in the first occupation since the events of 1968. I am in Paris (did you guess?) and the police presence at the Sorbonne is impressive, but student protests continue in the streets.
The students are protesting a new labor law which would make it easier to fire workers under the age of 26. Of course, this would also make it easier to hire young workers who currently have an unemployment rate of 23 percent. You cannot have it both ways; raise the cost of firing and you raise the cost of hiring. In my opinion, the Sorbonne students need a little less Foucault and a little more Bastiat.
Or perhaps the students know more economics than I credit them with. Under the current law it is costly to fire anyone but the effect on hiring is not symmetric. The workers least likely to be hired are those who are perceived, rightly or wrongly, as a risk. The fear of hiring effect falls not on the privileged students at the Sorbonne (trust me today’s protesters were tres chic), but on young French North Africans whose unemployment rate exceeds 30 percent.
Thus, paradoxical as it may seem, today’s protests by the Sorbonne elite are a cause of the riots of late last year.
Prudie blows it again
The question: I have a friend who is a functional alcoholic. Every day after work he stops by a bar, and within two hours consumes two pitchers of beer. Needless to say he drives home. He’s not sloppy drunk, nor does he exhibit signs of being drunk, but I’m sure his reaction time is impaired. Two years ago he was arrested for drunk driving. After hiring a lawyer who used to work as a police officer, he got the charges dropped to reckless driving. The lawyer advised him that next time he is pulled over not to submit to any tests, but to request a lawyer. He was pulled over again last week and did as he’d been advised. He spent the night in jail, allowing the alcohol level in his blood to drop, making it pointless to test him. I don’t want to see him get away with this anymore. I don’t know what to do. I fear that confronting him will do nothing. I feel if I make an ultimatum in regard to our friendship, he will choose alcohol, which won’t stop his drinking and driving. Part of me wonders if I should anonymously inform the police of information that would help prove their case against my friend, but I feel this would be a huge betrayal. I just want to stop this behavior and help him avoid harming an innocent bystander.
—Afraid for a Friend
Read Prudie’s answer here, but basically she says lie in wait for him at a bar and then call in the police to track him and arrest him. I suggest a different approach…
1. He shouldn’t be your friend in the first place.
2. Turning him in to the police will make him your ex-friend. That is in some ways a good start, but I suggest you have only weak duties to help your "soon to be ex-friends."
3. If you wish to help innocent bystanders, forget about your friend and stand outside a popular bar with a cell phone. Or work overtime and invest the money in third world micro-finance. There is no good consequentialist reason to target your friend’s drinking and driving. (Did I just call him your "friend"?) It is unlikely that is the area of your greatest effectiveness, especially since the guy doesn’t care much about you.
4. What is she trying to get out of her system? Has he neglected her in favor of the alcohol? Often you can infer the real motivations by taking the opposite of the "pen name," in this case "Afraid for a Friend."
Let us do one more:
Question: I have a fiance who has an anxiety problem for which he takes medication. He wants to bring his guitar with him on our honeymoon because he said since he can’t bring his piano (he’s a classically trained pianist), he needs some instrument to play. He said that he needs the guitar or else he will feel anxious, because he would not have any instrument to practice. It irks me to no end that if he doesn’t have an instrument and he’s sharing company with me, that’s what he’s focusing on even though we’re watching TV or at dinner, etc. When we have gone away for a weekend and he has not brought his guitar, he drinks instead. He does not get drunk, but he does drink enough over time that the alcohol keeps him from "performing." Is it selfish to want to have my honeymoon with just my husband and not have him leaving to go to another room to practice for a couple hours? I want undivided attention! Yet, I don’t want to have him drinking and not able to perform, nor yearning to play an instrument while he is with me. Shouldn’t I be enough, at least for our honeymoon?
—Feeling Not Important Enough
Prudie says you are a pain in the neck and you should split with a man you obviously do not love or even like. I’ve been known to offer this advice myself, but let’s give it another spin. There is a reason why "Feeling Not Important Enough" made a bad choice in the first place. If she splits with him, she will be "drawing from the urn without replacement," as they say. And what a very special urn it is. Should she think that simply making another choice will yield something much better? At least this first pick a) plays at least two musical instruments, and b) is taking medication, which is more than you can say for the median impotent, nervous, obsessive-compulsive, alcoholic musician.
Caught my eye
A U.S. firm is implanting silicon chips in some employees, to prevent them from entering secure areas.
Spotsylvania police have been consummating their dealings with prostitutes before arresting them. Furthermore this sounds like official policy. One officer left a $350 tip [TC: still looking for humorous comment to make here], and only unmarried detectives are assigned to such cases.
There is a long waiting list to adopt children with Down syndrome.
Blogofdeath.com focuses on obituaries of the famous and not-so-famous. When I go away on trips, this is the one piece of news it is hard to catch up on.
Buy Bruce Bartlett’s new book, available here, and thank academic freedom on the way out the door.
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is the first transcendentally great movie of the year. Imagine a rural Mexican sensibility applied to Weekend at Bernie’s, and you have some idea where this one is coming from.
Dan Drezner has a sense of humor about Dick Cheney. Revere at EffectMeasure has a different take.
This web site is basically Digg.com for videos.
Must I Retire Now? Must You?
I will leave the philosophical assumptions unquestioned. What about the economic assumptions?
1) What happens if everyone follows the philosopher’s advice and
retires so long as they are below the median of the unemployed? Is
there a stable equilibrium? Yes, in equilibrium every worker with a
job must be better than the average worker without a job. This
certainly seems possible although it is hard to see how it is optimal –
can no change in wages or job assignments make it beneficial to hire
more workers? The fixity of jobs assumption is very strong.
2) More generally, if workers are
paid their marginal product and are appropriately assigned (e.g. better doctors work on harder cases) then no worker need retire. With appropriate assignment, when a below-median doctor does retire he would not be replaced by an above-median doctor. Instead, the new better doctor would be slotted in for
more difficult work, everyone else would move down slightly and the
retiring doctor would be replaced by one only marginally better.
3) What happens in general equilibrium? With flexible markets everyone gets a job so the worker who retires because he is below median is replaced by a worker from another industry. It’s no longer obvious that this is optimal.
Most generallly, comparative advantage tells us that markets find a place for even the lowest-quality workers. For the argument to apply we need a relatively fixed number of jobs, relatively fixed wages and a large reserve army to draw from. Supreme Court justices come to mind.
A Bush plan for avian flu
President Bush said today that he was working to prepare the United States for a possibly deadly outbreak of avian flu. He said he had weighed whether to quarantine parts of the country and also whether to employ the military for the difficult task of enforcing such a quarantine.
"It’s one thing to shut down your airplanes, it’s another thing to prevent people from coming in to get exposed to the avian flu," he said. Doing so, Mr. Bush said, might even involve using "a military that’s able to plan and move."
The president had already raised, in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the delicate question of giving the military a larger role in responding to domestic disasters. His comment today appeared to presage a concerted push to change laws that limit military activities in domestic affairs.
Mr. Bush said he knew that some governors, all of them commanders of their states’ National Guards, resented being told by Washington how to use their Guard forces.
"But Congress needs to take a look at circumstances that may need to vest the capacity of the president to move beyond that debate," Mr. Bush said. One such circumstance, he suggested, would be an avian flu outbreak. He said a president needed every available tool "to be able to deal with something this significant."
Here is the full story. Here is the text of his remarks, with commentary from Glenn Reynolds.
I am hoping to write a longer piece on what we should do, but frankly Bush’s idea had not crossed my mind. For a start, quarantines don’t usually work, especially in a large, diverse, and mobile country. The Army would if anything spread the flu. A list of better ideas would include well-functioning public health care systems at the micro-level, early warning protocols, and good decentralized, robust plans for communication and possibly vaccine or drug distribution. Might the postal service be more important than the Army here? How about the police department, and the training of people in the local emergency room?
Stockpiling Tamiflu is worthwhile in expected value terms, but many strains of avian flu are developing resistance; we should not put all our eggs in this basket. We also should stockpile high-quality masks and antibiotics for secondary infections (often more dangerous than the flu itself), and more importantly have a good plan for distribution and dealing with extraordinary excess demand and possibly panic. Let’s not ignore obvious questions like: "if the emergency room is jammed with contagious flu patients, where will other (non-flu) emergencies go?"
A good plan should also make us less vulnerable to terrorist attacks, storms, and other large-scale disasters. Robustness and some degree of redundancy are key. You can’t centrally plan every facet of disaster response in advance; you need good institutions which are capable of improvising on the fly. In the meantime, let’s have betting markets in whether a pandemic is headed our way; that would provide useful information.
Addendum: It is Bird Flu Awareness Week in the blogosphere, Silviu has the appropriate links.
Paying people to stay in the path of the storm.
By now you have seen pictures of the long lines of cars leaving Texas. Some reports suggest average speeds of one mile per hour. It is unlikely that such a result is optimal.
Randall Parker suggested closing or limiting some of the on-ramps to freeways to limit clogging. Or perhaps we should have given priority to cars with more passengers, in part to encourage "car pooling." I’ve also heard rumors that the police closed off too many secondary roads. We went from paying too little attention to evacuation (Katrina) to pushing evacuation very hard (Rita), but unaware of its full difficulties (not to mention the exploding bus full of old people).
The economist recoils at the idea of quantity restrictions on cars. Might there be a way to use the price system? Having police collect tolls at the major highways is one option, but the very process would slow down traffic. And it doesn’t sound exactly fair to the poor. So how about a more devious, Swiftian idea? Pay people who stay behind. By the day, of course. And only if they own cars.
Rotting in FEMA City
The Bush administration and FEMA are planning to house Hurricane Katrina evacuees in some 300,000 trailers and "mobile" homes. What an awful idea. Mobile home cities are nothing but public housing built on the cheap – why must we revisit that disaster?
In Florida some 1,500 people left homeless by Hurricane Charley are still living in "FEMA City," a desolate subdivision of trailers and mobile homes built on 64 acres between a county jail and Interstate 75. Located far from jobs, real schools and ordinary amenities like restaurants and grocery stores, FEMA City has become another public housing failure.
There are no trees, no shrubs, and only two small playgrounds for several hundred children.
Teenagers have been especially hard-hit – drug use, vandalism,
break-ins and fights are widespread. Young people regularly call FEMA
City a prison.The troubles got so bad in the spring that the entire camp was
fenced in, a county police substation was set up, and armed security
guards were stationed at the one point where residents were allowed to
enter and exit. Even with that, the number of calls to the county
sheriff’s office was at an all-time high last month – 257 calls that
resulted in 78 police reports, many of them involving domestic
violence, fights, juvenile delinquency and vandalism. In January, there
were just 154 calls and 40 official actions.
FEMA City has only 1,500 residents. Can you imagine how bad things will get if "vast towns of 25,000 or more mobile homes" are built, as is being planned?
Why are we interring people in government camps? Housing vouchers are a much better policy. Let evacuees use their vouchers in any city in the United States. Let them begin to rebuild their lives with decent housing in places where they can find jobs, schools and community.
Microeconomics exam question
1. Derive the conditions under which post-disaster looting is efficient.
Hints: Start with a queuing problem, and then ask when rents will not be exhausted; that is, the resources spent obtaining the goods should not equal the value of the goods themselves. The quest for looted goods therefore should be monopolized or somehow restricted, rather than competitive. The goods should be perishable, available for subsequent resale, and the negative incentive effect on future production should be small. The discount rate and the transactions costs of immediate sale by the (previous) owner should both be high.
Extra credit: Does efficiency more likely rise or fall when we consider looting by the police?
In Defense of Mercenaries
The Gurkhas have been active in the British military since 1817 but they are not British citizens they are Nepalese hired by the British. In recent years the Gurkha brigades have served in the Falklands, Kosovo, Afghanistan and now Iraq. The Indian army and Singaporean police force also hire many Gurkhas.
The Gurkhas are unusual but not unique. The United Arab Emirates, where Tyler is now, relies almost exclusively on mercenaries. The French Foreign Legion continues to attract a small number of mercenaries from around the world. During the Vietnam war the United States paid the South Korean, Philippine and Thai governments for the use of troops – these were mercenaries paid by proxy.
Should we hire more mercenaries today? Our military already has hired more than thirty thousand non-citizens. Why not bypass residency entirely and go straight to Mexico, India and elsewhere to hire soldiers? If outsourcing is good for US firms then surely it is good for the US government.
Outsourcing the military has a number of advantages. The supply of labor is nearly limitless and the price is low. Some people will object that quality is low too but if Indians can be trained to do US tax returns they can be trained to fight US wars.
One reason the Gurkhas are among the most highly regarded troops in the world is that the entrance exam is extremely difficult – only 1 in 30 applicants makes the cut. The British can pick and choose because wages are high relative to the next best alternative (the Indian army picks up many of the British rejects). Meanwhile, we are so desperate for troops in the United States that we are forcing old men and women, people who haven’t seen active duty in forty years, back into service. At US wage rates we could easily hire many thousands of Mexicans. Many Mexican noncitizens are already
serving honorably in the US military so there is no reason for quality to decline.
Mercenarism may seem unusual today but in the 18th century a typical European army contained 20-30 percent
foreign troops – mercenarism was the norm. It’s hard to see how the United States has a comparative advantage in military labor so the future may resemble the past more than it does the present.
Comments are open.
Bounty Hunting, the sad part
The sky was dark as I drove to Baltimore to try my hand at bounty hunting; it was 5:15 am. Fugitives from the law tend not be early-rising types so bounty hunters search homes in the morning and the streets at night.
Dennis, who has been in the business 21 years and has volunteered to show me the ropes, hands me a photo. Our first fugitive is a surprise. Taken a few years ago in better times, the photo is of an attractive young woman perhaps at her prom. She has long, blond hair and bright eyes. She is smiling.
We drive to the house where a tip places her recently. It’s a middle class home in a nice suburb. Children’s toys are strewn about the garden. I’m accompanied by Dennis and two of his co-workers, a former police officer and a former sherrif’s deputy. One of them takes the back while Dennis knocks. A women still in her nightclothes answers. She does not seem surprised to have four men knocking at her door in the early morning. She volunteers that we can search the house. We enter and get the whole story.
"Chrissy" is her niece. She was at the house two days ago and may return. Chrissy has had her life ruined by drugs. Or, perhaps she has ruined her life with drugs – sometimes it’s hard to tell. She is now a heroin addict whose boyfriend regularly beats her. The aunt is momentarily shocked when we show her the photo. No, she doesn’t look like that anymore – her hair is brown, her face is covered with scabs and usually bruised, she weighs maybe 85 pounds. "Be gentle with her," the Aunt says even though "she will probably fight."
The Aunt gives us another location – Chrissy is living out of her car with her mother. We are about to leave when the Aunt thanks us for being quiet, there’s a child in the house who was scared when the police last came. The child is Chrissy’s son.
Is Grade Inflation All Bad?
Grade inflation has not been constant through time. Mark Thoma at Economist’s View offers some hypotheses.
There are two episodes that account for most grade inflation. The first
is from the 1960s through the early 1970s. This is usually explained by
the draft rules for the Vietnam War. The second episode begins around
1990 and is harder to explain….My
study finds an interesting correlation in the data. During the time
grades were increasing, budgets were also tightening inducing a
substitution towards younger and less permanent faculty. I broke down
grade inflation by instructor rank and found it is much higher among
assistant professors, adjuncts, TAs, instructors, etc. than for
associate or full professors. These are instructors who are usually
hired year-to-year or need to demonstrate teaching effectiveness for
the job market, so they have an incentive to inflate evaluations as
much as possible, and high grades are one means of manipulating student
course evaluations.
But what are the consequences of grade inflation? A new study takes advantage of a tres bon experiment. In May of 1968 French students rioted, were suppressed by the police, but then joined by 10 million striking workers leading to a near revolutionary situation. To quiet things down many students that year were accepted to universities which in former and later years they would not have qualified for. What happened to those students?
Eric Maurin and Sandra McNally write:
We show that the lowering of thresholds at an early (and highly selective stage) of the higher education system enabled a significant proportion of students born between 1947 and 1950 (particularly in 1948 and 1949) to pursue more years of higher education that would otherwise have been possible. This was followed by a significant increase in their subsequent wages and occupational attainment, which was particularly evident for persons coming from a middle-class family background. Finally, returns were transmitted to the next generation on account of the relationship between parental education and that of their children.
The results are surprising but consistent with Bowen and Bok who argue that affirmative action did not harm minority students who were accepted at universities at which they would not have qualified based on grades alone.
I’m puzzled but not yet ready to retire my reputation as a tough grader – my best students deserve no less.
Comments are open.
Arrow, Becker, and Levitt on Grokster
How is that for heavyweights? You can add William Landes, Kevin Murphy, and Steve Shavell — among others — to the list.
Here is their Amicus brief on the Grokster case coming before the Supreme Court. (Here is a more general list of amicus briefs on the case.) Their bottom line, however, is general rather than concrete:
They argue that indirect liability often makes economic sense. If a file-sharing service can distinguish and police illegal files at low cost, that service should not be able to hide behind the 1984 Sony Betamax decision (i.e., the mere existence of non-infringing uses for a technology implies no liability). Furthermore we should consider whether P2P services offer real benefits above and beyond fully legal alternatives, such as iTunes. They stress that previous courts have failed to ask these key questions.
I’ve argued similar points myself, but my doubts grow. I worry we cannot find a standard of indirect liability with clear lines. Just how easy must it be to monitor illegal behavior and how hard must Grokster try? Most likely all the variables lie along a relatively smooth continuum.
And who else can be indirectly liable? File-sharing through iPods, email, blogs, and instant messaging is larger than you think. 36 million Americans admit to having shared files in this manner.
"All these internet technologies share this common mass-copying capability: e-mail, web servers, web browsers, basic hard drives," said Jason Schultz, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represents StreamCast Networks. "There’s no principal distinction between (P2P) and other internet technologies in the way it’s designed.
Read more here.
Is the question which level of technology can police illegal file sharing and copying most easily? This might not be Grokster at all, since they have only an indirect link to the downloaded files. Such a "least cost" approach might result in a monitoring chip put into all hard drives. Yikes.
Does Grokster supply any economically useful product that the legitimate services don’t? Well, how about free files for those who wouldn’t otherwise pay for them? If we approach the problem in a utilitarian manner, we can’t flinch from this conclusion.
My current best guess is that an economic approach — however correct in general terms — won’t come up with any new solutions we can live with. We may be stuck with the Sony case after all.
Blog dare
I dared Bryan Caplan, our resident non-bleeding heart libertarian, to blog today’s lunch conversation. The result is called Let Them Get Roommates. His best fact is:
[the] poorest 25% of Americans have more living space than the average European.
His bottom line is:
Before anyone starts collecting welfare, it is more than fair to ask them – for starters – to try to solve their own problem by taking on some roommates. Is it beneath their dignity to live like college students? I think not.
Addendum: Several of you have asked what is my point of view. I worry about the idea of a welfare bureaucracy "residency police." And the general cost of welfare — as opposed to broad-based entitelments such as Medicare — is relatively small. So I would not push the button on this one. I also would fear the symbolic connection to workhouses and the like.