Results for “child abuse”
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Legalization of prostitution

Nicholas Kristof writes:

I changed my mind [on legalization] after looking at the experiences of other countries. The Netherlands formally adopted the legalization model in 2000, and there were modest public health benefits for the licensed prostitutes. But legalization nurtured a large sex industry and criminal gangs that trafficked underage girls, and so trafficking, violence and child prostitution flourished rather than dying out.

As a result, the Netherlands is now backtracking on its legalization model by closing some brothels, and other countries, like Bulgaria, are backing away from that approach.

A few points in response: first, "backtracking" could and should have been written as "still maintained as mostly legal throughout the country."  Second, Germany offers perhaps the best model for legalized prostitution; by the way, here is one odd description of the German practice in Cologne.  It’s not so offputting to make me favor a ban.  Third, we should institute drastically higher penalties and enforcement for traffickers in children and their customers.  Don’t blame adult transactions for that problem or think that is the best resource investment to stop it.  Fourth, legalized prostitution may not be "popular" because it doesn’t appeal to the median voter, least of all to the median female voter.  So the mere popularity of Swedish policy doesn’t make it a success; there is less consensual sex going on! 

We all debate the topic without bringing up the delicate question of the benefits (or lack thereof?) to the customers.  No one wants to say "I think guys should be able to [fill in the blank] more often and more easily," but that’s what at least half the story boils down to.  (The other half is the possibility of female empowerment, etc.)  Such a framing maybe sounds bad to you, but that’s a feeling we need to come to terms with and indeed question. 

I see the costs and benefits of legalization as murky.  Should government attempt to steer women away from the psychological tendencies implanted in them by child abuse?  Indeed, should such steering stop at their choices to become prostitutes?  When doing our cost-benefit analysis, should we count the preferences of the man sitting quietly at home or the preferences of the man as he approaches the end of the act?  How should we count the preferences — if at all — of the bluenoses who don’t like the whole idea of legalization?  After all, there are lots of them and they just don’t want legal prostitution.  These are difficult questions.

When push comes to shove it is fundamentally a moral question and that for me means legalization or at least decriminalization.  Ultimately you are threatening to jail or even shoot someone (should he or she try to leave the jail) because of a particular interpretation you have placed on their consensual sexual acts.  I have to say "no way" to that one.  Is barter a problem too?  Andrew Sullivan pointed out that it is legal to pay two people to have sex and film them and sell the film; it just isn’t legal to pay two people to have sex and simply watch them.  That’s what I call absurd.

Spanking and Sex

Here are some more oddities about the study.  According to this report:

"the study found that 29 percent of the
male and 21 percent of the female students had verbally coerced sex
from another person….The percentages of those who physically forced sex were much lower: 1.7 percent   of the men and 1.2 percent of the women…."

Don’t these percentages seem very high? Especially for the women?

And get this,

"Straus found that 15 percent of the men and 13 percent of the women
had insisted on sex without a condom at least once in the past year.

Using the four-step corporal punishment scale, Straus found that of
the group with the lowest score on the corporal punishment scale, 12.5
percent had insisted on unprotected sex. In contrast, 25 percent of
students in the highest corporal punishment group engaged in this type
of risky sex."

13 percent of the women insisted that the man not use a condom?

More importantly, I believe that there is a causal connection between child abuse (rather than spanking) and later problems of violence but to me a connection between the kid being spanked and later engaging in risky sex is especially suggestive that the connection is a risk-loving person.  Children who take a lot of risks, like running out on to the street a lot, are going to get spanked more.  Later these same children also engage in risky activities.  Not having seen the data I would be willing to bet that spanking is also correlated with skydiving, not wearing your seatbelt, gambling, and many other risky behaviors which are plausible not caused by spanking.

Finally, how about this for a non sequitur of the day:

"because over 90 percent of U.S. parents spank toddlers, the potential
benefits for prevention of sexual and relationship violence is large,”
Straus says."

What I’ve been reading

1. Hannah Ritchie, Not the End of the World: How We Can be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet.  An excellent book with sound conclusions, think of it as moderate Julian Simon-like optimism on environmental issues, but with left-coded rhetoric.

2. Colin Elliott, Pox Romana: The Plague that Shook the Roman World.  Think of this as a sequel to Kyle Harper’s tract on Roman plagues and their political import, this look at the Antonine plague and its impact has both good history and good economics.  It is also highly readable.

3. Carrie Sheffield, Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness.  A highly effective and harrowing tale of a lifetime journey from abuse to Christianity: “Carrie attended 17 public schools and homeschool, all while performing classical music on the streets and passing out fire-and-insurance religious pamphlets — at times while child custody workers loomed.”  The author is well known in finance, ex-LDS circles, public policy, and right-leaning media, and she has a Master’s from Harvard.  This story isn’t over.

4. Charles Freeman, The Children of Athena: Greek Intellectuals in the Age of Rome: 150 BC0-400 AD.  Avery good guide to the intellectual life surround the period of the Pompeii library scrolls that will be deciphered by AI.  If you want background on the import of what is to come, this book is a good place to start.  And it is a good and useful work more generally.

5. Erin Accampo Hern, Explaining Successes in Africa: Things Don’t Always Fall Apart.  I found this book highly readable and instructive, but I find it more convincing if you reverse the central conclusion.  There is too much talk of the Seychelles and Mauritius, and is Gabon the big success story on the Continent?  Population is 2.3 million, the country ranks 112th in the Human Development Index, and almost half the government budget is oil revenue.  Still, this book “tells you how things actually are,” and that is more important than any objections one might lodge.

Recent and noteworthy is Peter Jackson, From Genghis Khan to Tamerlane: The Reawakening of Mongol Asia.  You may recall that the Mongol empire at its peak was much larger than the Roman empire at its peak, but how many young men think about it every day?

Then there is Jian Chen’s Zhou Enlai: A Life, which seems like a major achievement.  I’ve only had time to read small amounts of it…is it “too soon to tell”?  I say no!

The Burial

I loved The Burial on Amazon Prime. Not because it’s a great movie but because it serves as a cinematic representation of my academic paper with Eric Helland, Race, Poverty, and American Tort Awards. Be warned—this isn’t a spoiler-free discussion, but the plot points are largely predictable.

The Burial is a legal drama based on real events starring Jamie Foxx as Willie Gary, a flashy personal injury lawyer who takes the case of Jeremiah O’Keefe, a staid funeral home operator played by Tommy Lee Jones. O’Keefe is suing a Canadian conglomerate over a contract dispute and he hires Gary because he’s suing in a majority black district where Gary has been extremely successful at bringing cases (always black clients against big corporations).

As a drama, I’d rate the film a B-. The major failing is the implausible friendship between the young, black, flamboyant Willie Gary and the older, white subdued Jeremiah O’Keefe. Frankly, the pair lack chemistry and the viewer is left puzzled about the foundation of their friendship. The standout performance belongs to Jurnee Smollett, who excels as the whip-smart opposing counsel.

What makes The Burial interesting, however, is that it tells two stories about Willie Gary and the lawsuits. The veneer is that Gary is a crusading lawyer who uncovers abuse to bring justice. Most reviews review the veneer. Hence we are told this is a David versus Goliath story, a Rousing True Story and a story about the “dogged pursuit of justice.” The veneer is there to appease the simple minded, an interpretation solidified by The Telegraph which writes, without hint of irony:

The audience at the showing was basically adult and they applauded at the end which you often see in children’s movies but rarely in adult films.

The real story is that Gary is a huckster who wins cases in poor, black districts using a combination of racial resentment and homespun black-church preaching to persuade juries to redistribute the wealth from out-of-state big corporations to local knuckleheads. I use the latter term without approbation. Indeed, Gary says as much in his opening trial where he persuades the jury to give his “drunk”, “tanked” “wasted”, “no-good”, “depressed,” “suicidal” client, $75 million dollars for being hit by a truck! Why award damages against the corporation? Because, “they got the bank.” (He adds that his client had a green light–this is obviously a lie. Use  your common sense.)

My paper with Helland, Race, Poverty, and American Tort Awards, finds that tort awards during this period were indeed much higher in counties with lots of poverty, especially black poverty. We find, for example, that the average tort award in a county with 0-5% poverty was $398 thousand but rose to a whopping $2.6 million in counties with poverty rates of 35% or greater! The Burial is very open about all of this. The movie goes out of its way to explain, for example, that 2/3rds of the population of Hinds county, the county in which the trial will take place, is black and that is why Willie Gary is hired.

The case on which the movie turns is as absurd as the opening teaser about the drunk, suicidal no-good who collects $75 million. Indeed, the two trials parallel one another. The funeral home conglomerate, the Loewen group, offered to buy three of O’Keefe’s funeral homes but after shaking on a deal they didn’t sign the contract. That’s it. That’s the dispute. The whole premise is bizarre as Loewen could have walked away at any time. Moreover, O’Keefe claims huge damages–$100 million!–when it’s obvious that O’Keefe’s entire failing business isn’t worth anywhere near as much. So why the large claim of damages? Have you not being paying attention? Because the Loewen group, “they got the bank.”

Furthermore, and in parallel with the earlier case, it’s O’Keefe who is the no-gooder. O’Keefe’s business is failing because he has taken money from burial insurance premiums–money that didn’t belong to him and that should have been invested conservatively to pay out awards–and lost it all in a high-risk venture run by a scam artist. Negligence at best and potential fraud at worst. Moreover, in a strange scene motivated by what actually happened, O’Keefe agrees to sell to Loewen only if he gets to keep a monopoly on the burial insurance market. Thus, it’s O’Keefe who is the one scheming to maintain high prices.

Indeed, the whole point of both of Gary’s cases is that he is such a great lawyer that he can win huge awards even for no-good clients. As if this wasn’t obvious enough, there is an extended discussion of Willie Gary’s hero….the great Johnnie Cochran, most famous for getting a murderer set free.

Loewen should have won the case easily on summary judgment but, of course, [spoiler alert!] the charismatic Gary wows the judge and the jury with entirely irrelevant tales of racial resentment and envy. The jury eats it up and reward O’Keefe with $100 million in compensatory damages and $400 million in punitive damages! The awards are entirely without reason or merit. The awards drive the noble Canadians of the Loewen group out of business.

The Burial is a courtroom drama surfaced with only the thinnest of veneers to let the credulous walk away feeling that justice was done. But for anyone with willing eyes, the interplay of racism, poverty, and resentment is truthfully presented and the resulting miscarriage of justice is plain to see. I enjoyed it. 

Addendum: My legal commentary pertains only to the case as presented in the movie although in that respect the movie hews reasonably close to the facts.

Why are Gender Pay Gaps so Large in Japan and South Korea?

From Alice Evans:

Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan are closing gender gaps in payseniority and parliamentary representation. Japan and South Korea, meanwhile, have the largest gender pay gaps in the OECD. Management remains 85% male. Female graduates are treated like secretaries, expected to pour the tea and run errands.

In Japan, a female graduate earns the same as a man who has only completed school. For Korean women aged 25-39, gender gaps in wages are indistinguishable between those with children and those without. In Europe, by contrast, there is a major penalty for motherhood.

Japanese businesses have lobbied again legislative change, even refusing sexual harassment training. Courts routinely deny systematic discrimination. Employers cannot even be sued for sexual harassment. Employees can only ask the Ministry of Labour for mediation. Accusations of abuse are mostly ignored.

At least part of the explanation stems from the lifetime full employment norms of Japan and South Korea, not present in Taiwan or Singapore, where those wage gaps are lower.

To summarise, Japan and South Korea have enshrined a system of lifetime employment and seniority pay for both blue collar and white collar workers. Firms are extremely sexist: men are treated as future managers, women are their subordinates. These inequalities are largest amongst low status regular workers. Fed up and frustrated, wives quit regular work to spend more time with their children and undertake non-regular, low paid work.

That is only part of the argument, here is the entire piece.

Larry Temkin takes half a red pill

His new book is Being Good in a World of Need, and most of all I am delighted to see someone take Effective Altruism seriously enough to evaluate it at a very high intellectual level.  Larry is mostly pro-EA, though he stresses that he believes in pluralist, non-additive theories of value, rather than expected utility theory, and furthermore that can make a big difference (for instance I don’t think Larry would play 51-49 “double or nothing” with the world’s population, as SBF seems to want to).

So where does the red pill come in?  Well, after decades of his (self-described) intellectual complacency, Larry now wonders whether foreign aid is as good as it has been cracked up to be:

In this chapter, I have presented some new disanalogies between Singer’s original Pond Example, and real-world instances of people in need.  I have noted that in some cases people in need may not be “innocent” or they may be responsible for their plight.  I have also noted that often people in need are the victims of social injustice or human atrocities.  Most importantly, I have shown that often efforts to aid the needy can, via various different paths, increase the wealth, status, and power of the very people who may be responsible for human suffering that the aid is intended to alleviate.  This can incentivize such people to continue their heinous practices against their original victims, or against other people in the region.  this can also incentivize other malevolent people in positions of power to perpetrate similar social injustices or atrocities.

The book also presents some remarkable examples of how some leading philosophers, including Derek Parfit, simply refused to believe that such arguments might possibly be true, even when Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton endorsed one version of them (not exactly Larry’s claims, to be clear).

Another striking feature of this book is how readily Larry accepts the rising (but still dissident) view that the sexual abuse of children has been a grossly underrated social problem.

What is still missing is a much greater focus on innovation and economic growth.

I am very glad I bought this book, and I look forward to seeing which pill or half-pill Larry swallows next.  Here is my post on Larry’s previous book Rethinking the Good.  Everyone involved in EA should be thinking about Larry and his work, and not just this latest book either.

“What is wrong with physicians?” (from the comments)

My top candidates:

1. Loss of locus of control. People go into medicine to save lives. They believe that they will use their demonstrated intelligence and skills to make a difference. Unfortunately, modern medicine is ever more about turning physicians into box checkers. CPT codes, checklists, facility mandates, perpetual boards … a physician quickly loses control of their working day unless they are weird freaks who do extensively more work to retain control. And beyond that the average physician becomes enculturated to this much earlier. Which medical school you get into is largely a function of where you grew up, went to undergrad, and exactly how well you did on a test that everyone aces with a side of barely legal implicit racial quotas. Your residency is determined by where you went to medical school, where you went to medical school, where/what the top candidates want, and how well you did on a test that everyone aces with a side of barely legal implicit racial quotas. You spend a decade where your locus of control in life is minimal. Then you hit the real world and rather than being set free, you get hit by unending paperwork and yet a thousandth petty demand on your time. If you do research it is not uncommon to spend multiplicatively more time on compliance paperwork. If you head out to make money, you will find that your charge capture is more relevant than the quality of care you provide by an order of magnitude. All of this is a textbook case of loss of locus of control that we know is highly correlated with drug use and depression.

2. There is a wild disconnect between “being a physician” as understood by the public and what you actually live. The public thinks this is still the 1980s when you could pay for medical school working a summer job, residency was three years, and salaries were higher in real terms than they are today. Instead, physicians spend much closer to fifteen years going through training as the needed resume padding has grown at every step along the way. This means that they live longer at resident salaries which are close to US median, but typically are located in high population areas with expensive housing costs. And being a resident physician is not cheap. You have high commuting costs because the regs allow your boss to work you 24 out of 28 days. You can, and will, have weeks with over 100 hours of actual patient care. And again, remember that something like half of residencies are in violation of these rules. And all of this is while nursing a second mortage in undischargable medical school debt. Everyone will think you are rich and that you take fine vacations to Europe and the you will drive a flashy care. And maybe you will, but it will not be until after you are 40 and often 45 that the full physician lifestyle of the movies really comes into play.

3. And then we have the stakes. At every step in a physicians formative adult years you face massive ultra-high stakes events that we know are bad for mental health. College admissions (where you will hit a ceiling for medical schools if you get in too low), MCAT and medical school admissions (which will drastically lower your access to certain specialties if you end up having to go DO), Step and the Match (where you will spend five figures to beg for interviews, the folks on the other side will be unable to differentiate you from the thousands of other applicants, and when you get the interview the only thing of meaning that will come forth is if they like you and if you grew up nearby). Then you have boards and your first job. All of these are massively high stakes and they all require performing quite well relative to your peers. This sort of setup is known in experimental animals and people to lead to depression, anxiety disorders, and drug use.

3. Then we have the punctuated nature of the physician’s life. Going back to medical school, you routinely have long weeks with minimal time to enjoy because studying is rampant. Your entire career can theoretically hang on if you memorized which ultra-rare cancer is caused by which mutation in which gene – even if you want to be a psychiatrist. When you have time “off” this may be the only time you get and there is a very strong tendency toward binges and bacchanals. This will continue to residency where you might have one free weekend in a month (the others being taken up with working and studying), which again lends itself toward binging. And it may continue from there with horrid call schedules and long weeks punctuated by long vacations.

4. The stakes never get lower. You go through with your career riding on high stakes tests and your studying time never being accounted for in your official duties. Boards are now never ending and you face ever more theoretically threatening liability for your decisions.

5. And then there is the obvious stuff. Day in, day out you meet people at their worst. And all your coworkers are doing the same. People cry, threaten, swear, and otherwise abuse you. And nobody wants to get mad at somebody who was just paralyzed from the waist down. Likewise, you can only become so inured to death and dying, we are a social species with extremely large portions of our brains dedicated to feeling empathy for others, physicians see the 5% of humanity who is most obviously suffering as their modal patient.

6. Lastly, whatever you think about physician renumeration, it becomes painfully evident that the golden days were decades ago and there is a small army looking for ways to reduce your renumeration. It will fall disproportionately on you even when the major growth in medical expenses has been nursing, administration, and other warm bodies. Whatever you got paid for a highly taxing job last year, there will be a thousand signs that people think you should do it again for less. People who believe wholeheartedly in the stickiness of wages for reasons of morale and who hold that pay cuts are sufficiently difficult that we need to order international finance around inflation and obviating the need for explicit wage reductions will turn around and concoct wild schemes that explicitly reduce your income in real and nominal terms and question your character should your professional organization (to which you don’t belong) object. All, of course, while the administrators who are generally incompetent at understanding medical practice rake in an ever larger share of the money.

Some of this is US specific, but we have set up medicine to be highly backloaded with its rewards for physicians. We have risen the profession to a vocation and made it a truly arduous task to get through. And at every step along the way physicians have not had access to healthy coping mechanisms and repeated psychic injuries of the sort known to cause or exacerbate these conditions. Major life protective events (e.g. marriage, children, home ownership) are routinely delayed and disrupted by the demands of the training. Why again are we surprised that physicians come out bruised, batter, and willing to take the short term fix for some relief?

That is all from Sure.

The performance of the NIH during the pandemic in 2020

“A new research study by one of us and his Johns Hopkins colleagues found that of the $42 billion the National Institutes of Health spent on research last year, less than 2% went to Covid clinical research…

Here is the WSJ source.  Here is the full report from Johns Hopkins, and here is the executive summary:

● Of the $42 Billion 2020 NIH annual budget, 5.7% was spent on
COVID-19 research
● Public health research was underfunded at 0.4% of the 2020 NIH
budget
● Only 1.8% of the 2020 NIH budget was spent on COVID-19 clinical
research
● Average COVID-19 NIH funding cycle was 5 months
● Aging was funded 2.2 times more than COVID-19 research
● By May 1, 2020, 3 months into the pandemic, the NIH spent 0.05%
annual budget on COVID-19 research
● Of the 1419 grants funded by the NIH:
• NO grants on kids and masks specifically
• 58 studies on social determinants of health
• 57 grants on substance abuse
• 107 grants on developing COVID-19 medications
• 43 of the 107 medication grants repurposed existing drugs

Ouch.  Here is a not entirely random sentence from the report:

The COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated the NIH institutional challenges and inability to reallocate funds quickly to
critical research.

Here is another damning sentence, though it damns someone other than the NIH:

…to date, no research has investigated NIH COVID-19 funding patterns to the best of our knowledge.

Double ouch.  Might the NIH have too much influence over the allocation of funds to be investigated properly?  Rooftops, people…

“How Britney Spears was trapped in a web of injustice”

That from the FT is the kind of headline we should be seeing.  From Henry Mance:

…for 13 years, courts in California have rewarded Spears’s father Jamie, a failed businessman who struggled with alcoholism, once filed for bankruptcy and who, according to the documentary Framing Britney Spears, was often absent from his daughter’s childhood. They have enabled arguably the most egregious villain of them all. In 2008, when his daughter suffered an apparent mental health crisis, Jamie asked a court to make him her conservator — that is, legal guardian. He has mostly kept the power since. He has decided which friends she sees, what medical treatment she receives and what happens to her fortune, estimated at $60m.

…They had made her work seven days a week, taken her credit cards and given her no privacy when undressing. “In California the only similar thing to this is called sex-trafficking,” she said. They would not let her have an intrauterine device removed, because they didn’t want her to have more kids. But they did allow a doctor to prescribe her lithium “out of nowhere”.

I get that you might have doubts about this case, or be able to cite many other cases where some form of guardianship might be useful.  But if something like this is possible at all, it is time to realize the whole system is broken and we need to work much harder to root out its abuses.

Time to wake up!  Be woke!  Really woke.

#FreeBritney

What I’ve been reading

1. Allen Lowe, “Turn Me Loose White Man”, two volumes and 30 accompanying compact discs.  “Personally I accept the assumption that a great deal, if not all, of American music is rooted in forms that derive in some way from Minstrelsy.”  Would you like to see that documented over the course of 30 CDs and almost 800 pp.?  Would you like to know how early blues, country, gospel, jazz, bluegrass (and more) all fit together?  Then this is the package for you.  It is in fact of one of the greatest achievements of all time in cataloguing and presenting American culture.  Here is a WSJ review.

2. Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life.  This book is the best introduction to this key Girardian concept.

3. Blake Bailey, Philip Roth: The Biography.  I only read slivers and won’t finish it, because I just don’t need 800 pp. on Philip Roth.  But…it’s really good.  I like Picasso too, and Caravaggio (a murderer).  I’ve heard, by the way, that this book will be picked up by Simon and Schuster and put back into print.

4. Martha C. Nussbaum, Citadels of Pride: Sexual Assault, Accountability, and Reconciliation.  There are so many recent books on these topics, you might feel a bit weary of them all, but this is one of the best.  It is rationally and reasonably argued, from first principles, and focuses on the better arguments for its conclusions.  It nicely situates the legal within the philosophical, it is wise on power vs. sex, rooted in the idea of objectification, and it has at least one page on alcohol.

5. Kenneth Whyte, The Sack of Detroit: General Motors and the End of American Enterprise.  How the consumer and auto safety movement helped to bring down GM.

6. Fabrice Midal, Trungpa and Vision, a biography of Chögyam Trungpa, the Tibetan Buddhist leader.  I enjoyed this passage: “He never hesitated to tell the truth, even if this meant provoking the audience.  At a talk in San Francisco in the fall of 1970, he began by saying: “It’s a pity you came here.  You’re so aggressive.””

And this passage: “Chögyam Trungpa might have appeared, at first, sight, to be very modern and up-to-date in his approach to the teachings.  He had abandoned the external signs of the Tibetan monastic tradition.  He drank whiskey, smoked cigarettes, and wore Western clothes.  He had a frank often provocative way with words and ignored the normal conventions of a guru.”  In fact he died from complications resulting from heavy alcohol abuse.

What should I ask Zachary Carter?

Zachary is first and foremost the author of the New York Times bestselling The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes.  Here is part of a broader bio:

Zach Carter is a senior reporter at HuffPost, where he covers economic policy and American politics. He is a frequent guest on television and radio whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Nation, and The American Prospect, among other outlets. Zach began his career at SNL Financial (now a division of S&P Global), where he was a banking reporter during the financial crisis of 2008. He wrote features about macroeconomic policy, regional economic instability, and the bank bailouts, but his passion was for the complex, arcane world of financial regulatory policy. He covered the accounting standards that both fed the crisis and shielded bank executives from its blowback, detailed the consumer protection abuses that consumed the mortgage business and exposed oversight failures at the Federal Reserve and other government agencies that allowed reckless debts to pile up around the world. ​Since joining HuffPost in 2010, Zach has covered the implementation of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, political standoffs over trade policy and the federal budget, and the fight over the future of the Democratic Party. His feature story, “Swiped: Banks, Merchants and Why Washington Doesn’t Work for You” was included in the Columbia Journalism Review’s compilation Best Business Writing. ​

So what should I ask him?

My Conversation with Ross Douthat

We do another CWT, here is the audio and transcript (link corrected), a very good installment in the series.  Here is part of the summary:

Ross joined Tyler to discuss why he sees Kanye as a force for anti-decadence, the innovative antiquarianism of the late Sir Roger Scruton, the mediocrity of modern architecture, why it’s no coincidence that Michel Houellebecq comes from France, his predictions for the future trajectory of American decadence — and what could throw us off of it, the question of men’s role in modernity, why he feels Christianity must embrace a kind of futurist optimism, what he sees as the influence of the “Thielian ethos” on conservatism, the plausibility of ghosts and alien UFOs, and more.

A welcome relief from Covid-19 talk, though we did cover Lyme disease.  Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Does the Vatican have too few employees? There’s a Slate article — it claimed in 2012, the Roman Curia has fewer than 3,000 employees. Walmart headquarters at the time had 12,000. If the Church is a quite significant global operation, can it be argued, in fact, that it’s not bureaucratic enough? They don’t actually have state capacity in the sense that state capacity libertarianism might approve of.

DOUTHAT: Right. State capacity libertarianism would disapprove of the Vatican model. And it reflects the reality that media coverage of the Catholic Church doesn’t always reflect, which is that in Catholic ecclesiology and the theory of the institution, bishops are really supposed to be pretty autonomous in governance. And the purpose of Rome is the promotion of missionary work and the protection of doctrine, and it’s not supposed to be micromanaging the governance of the world Church.

Now, I think what we’ve seen over the last 30 years — and it’s been thrown into sharp relief by the sex abuse crisis — is that the modern world may not allow that model to exist; that if you have this global institution that has a celebrity figure at the center of it, who is the focus of endless media attention, you can’t, in effect, get away with saying, “Well, the pope is the pope, but sex abuse is an American problem.”

And to that extent, there is a case that the Church needs more employees and a more efficient and centralized bureaucracy. But then that also coexists with the problem that the model of Catholicism is still a model that was modern in the 16th century. It’s still much more of a court model than a bureaucratic model, and pope after pope has theoretically tried to change this and has not succeeded.

Part of the reality is, as you well know, as a world traveler, the Italians are very good at running courts that exclude outsiders and prevent them from changing the way things are done. Time and again, some Anglo-Saxon or German blunderer gets put in charge of some Vatican dicastery and discovers that, in fact, the reforms he intends are just not quite possible. And you know, in certain ways, that’s a side of decadence that you can bemoan, but in certain ways, you have to respect, too.

Definitely recommended, a very fun CWT with lots of content.  And again, here is Ross’s (recommended) book The Decadent Society: How We Became a Victim of Our Own Success.

Imperfect optimization

Paul Ohm, a former prosecutor in the Justice Department’s computer crime and intellectual property section, said the laws governing child sexual abuse imagery were among the “fiercest criminal laws” on the books.

“Just the simple act of shipping the images from one A.I. researcher to another is going to implicate you in all kinds of federal crimes,” he said.

Here is more from Dance and Keller at the NYT.

Michael Kremer, Nobel laureate

To Alex’s excellent treatment I will add a short discussion of Kremer’s work on deworming (with co-authors, most of all Edward Miguel), here is one summary treatment:

Intestinal helminths—including hookworm, roundworm, whipworm, and schistosomiasis—infect more than one-quarter of the world’s population. Studies in which medical treatment is randomized at the individual level potentially doubly underestimate the benefits of treatment, missing externality benefits to the comparison group from reduced disease transmission, and therefore also underestimating benefits for the treatment group. We evaluate a Kenyan project in which school-based mass treatment with deworming drugs was randomly phased into schools, rather than to individuals, allowing estimation of overall program effects. The program reduced school absenteeism in treatment schools by one-quarter, and was far cheaper than alternative ways of boosting school participation. Deworming substantially improved health and school participation among untreated children in both treatment schools and neighboring schools, and these externalities are large enough to justify fully subsidizing treatment. Yet we do not find evidence that deworming improved academic test scores.

If you do not today have a worm, there is some chance you have Michael Kremer to thank!

With Blanchard, Kremer also has an excellent and these days somewhat neglected piece on central planning and complexity:

Under central planning, many firms relied on a single supplier for critical inputs. Transition has led to decentralized bargaining between suppliers and buyers. Under incomplete contracts or asymmetric information, bargaining may inefficiently break down, and if chains of production link many specialized producers, output will decline sharply. Mechanisms that mitigate these problems in the West, such as reputation, can only play a limited role in transition. The empirical evidence suggests that output has fallen farthest for the goods with the most complex production process, and that disorganization has been more important in the former Soviet Union than in Central Europe.

Kremer with co-authors also did excellent work on the benefits of school vouchers in Colombia.  And here is Kremer’s work on teacher incentives — incentives matter!  His early piece on wage inequality with Maskin, from 1996, was way ahead of its time.  And don’t forget his piece on peer effects and alcohol use: many college students think the others are drinking more than in fact they are, and publicizing the lower actual level of drinking can diminish alcohol abuse problems.  The Hajj has an impact on the views of its participants, and “… these results suggest that students become more empathetic with the social groups to which their roommates belong,.” link here.

And don’t forget his famous paper titled “Elephants.”  Under some assumptions, the government should buy up a large stock of ivory tusks, and dump them on the market strategically, to ruin the returns of elephant speculators at just the right time.  No one has ever worked through the issue before of how to stop speculation in such forbidden and undesirable commodities.

Michael Kremer has produced a truly amazing set of papers.

The modern world has not yet abolished slavery and forced deprivation

The health service has said that it will stop locking up, isolating and physically restraining autistic children after an inquiry stated that it was damaging to their health.

NHS England has committed to make radical changes within 18 months, including a pledge not to place children with autism and learning difficulties in psychiatric wards unless they have a mental illness.

Matt Hancock, the health secretary, commissioned an inquiry led by Teresa Fenech, director of nursing at NHS England, after a series of scandals that involved the abuse of vulnerable patients, enforced medication and the use of seclusion cells.

In one case a girl with autism, Bethany, then aged 17, was held in isolation for 21 months at a private psychiatric hospital in Northampton.

Here is more from The Times of London, via Michelle Dawson.