Results for “Ed Lopez” 67 found
Condom Law: NSFW
The AIDS Healthcare Foundation is lobbying California to require the use of condoms in porn movies. Their argument is that this is an employee safety issue–like requiring workers to wear hard hats–and so should fall under the Cal/OSHA laws.
But in an op-ed at Forbes.com Alex Padilla points out that to fall under the law will require classifying porn stars as employees rather than as performers and that has surprising consequences.
…the adult film industry would have to make every performer an employee to satisfy the California's Division of Occupational Safety and Health, better known as Cal/OSHA, laws. This would be detrimental: California's anti-discrimination laws prohibit requiring an HIV test as a condition of employment; therefore the adult film industry's current testing process, in which every performer is tested for HIV monthly, would be illegal. Nor would adult film producers be allowed to "discriminate" by refusing employment to HIV-positive performers. As a result, untested and HIV-positive performers would be able to work in the industry, raising the risks of HIV outbreaks–particularly since condom breakage or slippage can occur.
My suspicion is that the AIDS lobbyists are not really so concerned with the performers but they do want to increase condom use by the general public and they think seeing more condoms in porn movies will help with that goal. A legitimate goal perhaps, but more likely the industry will move to Nevada or will further go online amateur.
Hat tip to Ed Lopez at Division of Labor.
What does campaign finance do?
Here is Ed Lopez’s survey article, here is the survey from Thomas Stratmann. Overall the academics who work on this issue tend to see the practical ramifications of campaign finance restrictions as very often constituting less than meets the eye. It’s also well understood that most campaign finance reform benefits incumbents, who already have name recognition.
The pointer is from Ed Lopez, who notes:
Consider two ratios.
1. In 2000 the federal government spent about 1.8 trillion (~18% of
GDP), and total campaign expenditures on all federal elective offices
was about $1.85 billion (about $1b on congressional races, $0.35b on
presidential, and $0.5b in soft money). So federal public sector
advertising was 1/1000th of federal public spending. Ratio 1 = 0.001.2. In 2000 the private sector share of GDP was about $7.5 trillion
(after federal, state and local spending net of intergovernmental
transfers), and total private sector advertising, according to
Advertising Age, was $240 billion (Statistical Abstract Table 1251). So private advertising was 3.2% of private spending. Ratio 2 = .032.By this comparison, private sector advertising is more than thirty times greater
than the amount we spend on federal elections trying to make sure we
get the right person for the job. Given how much we expect from our
federal government, isn’t it surprising that campaign spending isn’t
twice, or even ten times, more than it is right now?
Ed thinks that campaigns need more money flowing through them, not less; I don’t have a personal view on this issue. Reihan Salam offers interesting comment on recent controversies surrounding Barack Obama.
CSI on Trial
…to judge by the most
comprehensive study on the reliability of forensic evidence to date,
the error rate is more than 10% in five categories of analysis,
including fiber, paint and body fluids. …DNA
and fingerprints are more reliable but still not foolproof….a 2005 study in the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology
suggests a fingerprint false-positive rate a bit below 1%, a widely
read 2006 experiment shows an alarming 4% false-positive rate.How can we preserve the
usefulness of forensic evidence while protecting the public when it
breaks down? The core problem with the forensic system is monopoly.
Once evidence goes to one lab, it is rarely examined by any other. That
needs to change. Each jurisdiction should
include several competing labs. …This procedure may seem like a waste. But such checks would save
taxpayer money. Extra tests are inexpensive compared to the cost of
error, including the cost of incarcerating the wrongfully convicted….Other reforms should include
making labs independent of law enforcement and a requirement for blind
testing. When crime labs are part of the police department, some
forensic experts make mistakes out of an unconscious desire to help
their "clients," the police and prosecution. Independence and blind
testing prevent that.
That’s forensics expert Roger Koppl writing in Forbes. If anything I think Koppl is being kind to CSI. Take bullet lead analysis a procedure used by the FBI for decades that turns out to have no scientific validity whatsoever.
Full Disclosure: Koppl’s op-ed is based on a paper in a book called Law Without Romance edited by Ed Lopez to be published by Independent Institute where I am director of research.
Didn’t Bob Tollison write a paper on this once?
What words of wisdom. Via email, Ed Lopez fills me in:
Laband and Tollison’s 2000 JPE paper speaks to your MR post yesterday on co-authorship [TC: I’ve added the links]:
"In this paper, we compare the incidence and extent of formal coauthorship observed in economics against that observed in biology and discuss the causes and consequences of formal coauthorship in both disciplines. We then investigate the economic value (to authors) of informal comments offered by colleagues. This investigation leads us naturally into a discussion of the degree to which formal collaboration through coauthorship serves as a substitute for informal collaboration through collegial commentary. Data on manuscript submissions to the Journal of PolzticalEconomy permit us to shed additional empirical light on this subject. Finally, we demonstrate that while the incidence and extent of formal intellectual collaboration through coauthorship are greater in biology than in economics, the incidence and extent of informal intellectual collaboration are greater in economics than in biology. This leads us to search for evidence (which we find) of quids pro quo offered by authors to suppliers of informal commentary on manuscripts and to speculate that the greater importance of intellectual collaboration in economics (relative to biology) might imply greater pay compression in economics than
in biology (Lazear 1989). We find compelling evidence of such pay
compression in terms of the distribution of formal intellectual property rights to scientific contributions."
They
find the more quantitative work increases likelihood of co-authorship.
It’s also been increasing over time with decreasing information costs.
They also cleverly get citation and salary effects from the number and
stature of scholars listed in the acknowledgments.
The Big Donor Show
A 37-year-old woman suffering from an inoperable brain tumor wants to
donate a kidney before she dies and will choose the recipient from
among three contestants on Dutch national television, a TV network said
Tuesday, claiming it wants to highlight a crisis in organ donations.
From CNN. Hat tip to Ed Lopez at Division of Labor.
Guns, Germs, and Steel on TV tonight
An adaptation of Jared Diamond’s renowned Guns, Germs, and Steel will be shown on PBS tonight, I believe at 10 p.m. but check it may depend upon your area. Thanks to Ed Lopez for the pointer. I must now run to give a talk (yes, it is intimidating to have both Jane Galt and Daniel Drezner in the audience), but I’ve opened comments for those of you who know more about this, and perhaps know about future showings as well.
Crime, cocaine, and marijuana
Serious and violent crimes dropped more than forty percent during the 1990s, more than can be explained by demographic shifts. One reason for the crime drop has been the shrinking trade in crack cocaine, here is one account and a more detailed treatment. For whatever reasons, crack has turned out to be a one-generation drug. As crack fell in popularity, crime rates have fallen in turn.
Richard Rosenfeld, writing in the February Scientific American, raises but does not answer the question why crack markets have bred so much violence compared, say, to marijuana markets. I have thought of several possible and related hypotheses:
1. Cocaine supply, which requires processing in Colombia labs, is more centralized in nature. Centralization leads to monopoly profits and thus a greater incentive for violence to protect territory. There will be mobs and mafias at the top of the supply chain. They will feel threatened if anyone invades their turf, and the tendencies for violence work their way down to the retail level.
2. Marijuana is closer to a constant cost supply drug. You can always grow some in your backyard. The power of mobs is limited correspondingly and the incentive to invest in marketing and addicting your customers is weaker.
3. Marijuana is more of a depressant than is crack. Users are less likely to turn violent when deprived of the drug. Marijuana is less addictive in the sense of inducing total desperation.
4. Crack, which was essentially a new drug, required greater marketing than did marijuana. Marketing led to fights over turf and to violence.
5. Marijuana is used by many members of the middle and upper middle classes. Crack has been more popular in ghettos and with lower income groups, in part because it is potent and cheap. The reasons for the violence differential are found in the nature of the respective clienteles, rather than in the nature of the drugs per se. For instance, when drug carriers walk through a ghetto to supply their customers, they are at greater risk, more likely to carry a gun, more likely to meet with a gang, and so on.
Further ideas from readers are welcome.
The bottom line: When it comes to crime, it matters a great deal which drugs people are taking. Furthermore, if we are able to legalize some but not all drugs, we should consider legalizing the most objectionable drugs, not the tamest ones. Legalizing marijuana, whatever its merits and demerits, would not make a huge dent in the crime rate.
Addendum: Ed Lopez adds the following:
1. Crack is split up a lot more than marijuana so it has (had) far higher markup once it hit the street.
2. The early profiteers were the street distributors who discovered how to multiply the number of doses from the uncut cocaine. That gave suppliers higher up the chain something to grab at.
I think a lot of the violence question boils down to risk-takers competing for rents that weren’t protected by contract.
3. Crack is more ephemeral than pot and used with greater frequency, so users are more prone to commit crimes to acquire additioanl doses.
How Mexico built a state (that was then, this is now)
Mexico in the nineteenth century presents a dramatic example of this problem. Mexico suffered extreme political instability and strife in the nineteenth century. There were 800 revolts between 1821 and 1875. Between independence in 1821 and 1900, Mexico had 72 different chief executives, meaning that the average term was only a little more than one year long. Likewise, the country had 112 finance ministers between 1830 and 1863. In addition there were several invasions and secessionist movements.
The country also experimented with several different forms of government, including two empires (one headed by a French-backed, Austrian-born member of the Habsburg dynasty), one disputed period where there were presidents from both main parties, four republics, one provisional republic, and a long dictatorship. President Guadalupe Victoria was the first constitutionally elected president of the country, and the only one who would complete a full term in the first 30 years of independence.
Some other examples: There were four Mexican presidents in the years 1829, 1839, 1846, 1847, and 1853, while there were five in 1844 and 1855 and eight in 1833. Antonio López de Santa Anna, who was President of Mexico on ten separate occasions, was president four different times in a single year.
Mexico faced constant challenges to its sovereignty in the first 50 years of independence, from the secessions of Texas and Central America, to the secession attempts of the Yucatán, as well as numerous smaller rebellions.
Here is more from the excellent Robin Grier, from Works in Progress. There are further points of interest in the piece.
Gender, competition, and performance: Evidence from chess players
This paper studies gender differences in performance in a male‐dominated competitive environment chess tournaments. We find that the gender composition of chess games affects the behaviors of both men and women in ways that worsen the outcomes for women. Using a unique measure of within‐game quality of play, we show that women make more mistakes when playing against men. Men, however, play equally well against male and female opponents. We also find that men persist longer before losing to women. Our results shed some light on the behavioral changes that lead to differential outcomes when the gender composition of competitions varies.
Here is the full paper by Peter Backus, Maria Cubel, Matej Guid, Santiago Sánchez‐Pagés, and Enrique López Mañas. Via someone who is thanked in any case!
A temporary equilibrium only?
“The Tax Policy Center estimates that last year nearly 107 million households, or about 61 percent, owed no income tax or even received tax credits from the government,” Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, noted last week. “The spike is likely to be temporary, however. The share of non-payers will decline to about 102 million or 57 percent this year.”
n recent pre-pandemic years, the percentage of tax returns with no income tax liability has been closer to 44 percent in Tax Policy Center’s figures, though it has trended upward over time.
“The percentage of filers with no income liability has generally increased from where it was nearly 40 years ago,” the National Taxpayers Union Foundation reported in 2018. “This trend is indicative of a progressive income tax code under which higher-income earners pay a larger share of taxes while low-income earners are generally shielded from significant income tax liabilities.”
Here is more from Reason, via Ray Lopez. In so many other areas, the pandemic has accelerated trends that already were present…
USA fact of the day
The average U.S. customer loses power for 214 minutes per year. That compares to 70 in the United Kingdom, 53 in France, 29 in the Netherlands, 6 in Japan, and 2 minutes per year in Singapore. These outage durations tell only part of the story. In Japan, the average customer loses power once every 20 years. In the United States, it is once every 9 months, excluding hurricanes and other strong storms.
Here is the full article, via Ray Lopez.
America fact of the day
…according to recent polls from Quinnipiac and Monmouth, 38 percent of registered Hispanic voters in 10 battleground states may be ambivalent about even voting…
Progressives commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well. Certainly, we both once took that perspective for granted. Yet in our survey, only one in four Hispanics saw the group as people of color.
Here is more from Ian Haney López and
Who and what will rise and fall in status?
A reader asks:
will we see a post from you with predictions of ‘risers & fallers’ in our new coronowartime world?…What are your predictions for (semi-) permanent changes in status of various insititutions & ideologies in the new times?!
Here goes:
Risers
Health care workers — duh, and much deserved.
The internet and the tech community more broadly — Their institutions have performed the best, and even Anand G. has more or less recanted.
Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea
Peter Thiel, who numerous times cautioned us about the fragility of globalization and global supply chains.
State capacity libertarianism
The NBA and Adam Silver — They led the charge to shut things down.
Surveillance — It worked in parts of East Asia, and Europe’s unwillingness to use it will cost many lives.
Telemedicine
Science and scientists
Balaji Srinivasan, who saw it all coming on Twitter.
Individuals who can create structure for themselves — the true winners of lockdown.
The Federal Reserve System and Jay Powell — hail QE Infinity!
Losers
The FDA, CDC, and WHO — ouch.
Social justice warriors — who cares about your microaggression these days?
Rudy Gobert — will never be in the running for “Defensive Player of the Year” ever again. That said, his being Covid-positive led to the closing of the NBA and may have benefited America more than any other NBA player “action” has done, ever. He has since given a good deal of money to charity and ought to go up in status.
Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York.
Bolsonaro, López Obrador, and populism more generally.
Academics in the humanities — have they added much to our understanding of the situation, or to our response?
The media. No matter what you think they might deserve, they just seem to keep on going down in status. Bet on the trend!
Mixed
Various “right wing types,” of varying degrees of fringe, were early on this issue. But I suspect they will rise in status only within their “in groups.” Same with Matt Stoller.
Triage — we had to do it, and we did it unflinchingly. But in the “social record,” will this go down as OK, or as horrifying and “we can’t ever let this happen again”? Or maybe we’ll just forget about it, and pretend those silly philosophers doing trolley problems are wasting our time.
Donald Trump and also China. I’ll delete any comments that discuss these, because as topics they do not encourage subtlety of response. No matter what you may think is a just outcome here, in predictive terms the paths of these reputations are still difficult to call.
I thank C. for some assistance with this post.
Is the trade war with China a carbon tax?
I know that in my Twitter feed I am told a “carbon tax is GOOD” and the “Trumpian trade war with China is BAD.” But isn’t Trump’s trade war, at least indirectly, a tax on carbon emissions?
Most Chinese exports are manufactured goods, and they are produced in a fairly carbon-intensive manner. Furthermore, it doesn’t seem that Vietnam is able to pick up the slack, so it is not just a case of substituting from one dirty carbon emitter to another. It seems the trade war is genuinely restricting trade, and over time it will restrict the consumption and production of carbon-intensive goods. China is by far the exporter with the most to lose.
Of course the targeting of these new taxes is far from ideal from an environmental point of view, nor are they contingent on emissions in the proper manner (still, China is hardly on the verge of being able to switch into clean manufacturing, and in that sense contingent may not matter so much). And it is hardly the case that Trump has “green motives.”
Still, put aside all the imperfections — don’t we finally have a carbon tax — and a framework for improving it — that so many commentators have been wanting all along? Won’t this give Elizabeth Warren the chance to really fine-tune the apparatus?
On these points I am indebted to some remarks from Ray Lopez. And here is my earlier 2016 post “Tyrone on why Democrats should vote for Donald Trump.“
What I’ve been reading
1. Robert W. Poole, Jr. Rethinking America’s Highways: A 21st Vision for Better Infrastructure. Highways can and will get much better, largely through greater private sector involvement. He is probably right, and there is much substance in this book.
2. Aysha Akhtar, Our Symphony with Animals: On Health, Empathy, and Our Shared Destinies. An unusual mix of memoir, animal compassion, and childhood horrors, I found this very moving.
3. Ethan Mordden, On Streisand: An Opinionated Guide. Should there not be a fanboy book like this about every person of some renown? Insightful and witty throughout, for instance: “…we comprehend Streisand from what she does — yet a few personal bits have jumped out at us through her wall of privacy. One is the “Streisand Effect”…which we can restate as “When famous people complain about something, they tend to make it famous, too.”
4. Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness, Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education. Hard-hitting and courageous, and I can attest that much of it is absolutely on the mark. Still, I did wish for a bit more of a comparative perspective. Are universities more hypocritical than other institutions? Might the non-signaling, learning rate of return on higher education still be positive and indeed considerable? I am not nearly as negative as the authors are, while nonetheless feeling much of their disillusion on the micro level. Furthermore, American higher education does pass a massive market test at the global level — foreign students really do wish to come and study here. What are we to make of that? Which virtues of the current system are we all failing to understand properly?
5. Kirk Goldsberry, Sprawlball: A Visual Tour of the New Era of the NBA. A highly analytical but also entertaining look at the rise of the three point shot, the history of Steph Curry, how LeBron James turned into such a good player, and much more, with wonderful visuals and graphics.
6. Paul Rabinow, Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology. PCR is the polymerase chain reaction, and this is a genuinely good anthropological study of how scientific progress comes about, noting there is plenty of lunacy in this story, including love, LSD, and much more. There should be more books like this, this one dates from the 1990s but I am still hoping more people copy it. Via Ray Lopez.
Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century, covers Boas, Mead, Benedict, and others. Not enough of the material was new to me, though I expect for many readers this is quite a useful book.
I enjoyed Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution.
Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite. Remember how I used to say “The only thing worse than the Very Serious People are the Not Very Serious People?” Well, you should have listened. I have the same fear with the current critiques of meritocracy. That said, this is the book that does the most to pile on, against meritocracy, noting that much less space is devoted to possible solutions. There are arguments in their own right for wage subsidies and more low-income college admissions, but will those changes reverse the fundamental underlying dynamic of knowing just about everybody’s marginal product?
John Quiggin, Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly. The third lesson, however, is government failure, and you won’t find much about that here. Still, I found this to be a well-done book rather than a polemic. Here is the introduction on-line.