Bribe-Switching
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) prohibits US firms from paying bribes to foreign public officials. We show that FCPA enforcement has no positive effect on the GDP per capita of the countries of these officials but, rather, increases their countries shadow economy. When public officials take bribes both from legal and illegal markets, corruption enforcement in legal markets induces them to make up for lost rents by taking more bribes from illegal markets. In equilibrium, they enforce less against illegal producers, thereby increasing the size of illegal markets. We find that one case of FCPA enforcement alone increases the shadow economy by as much as 0.25 percentage points (pp), homicide rates by 0.02 pp, and trade misinvoicing by 0.5 pp.
That is a new paper by Jamie Bologna Pavlik and Desiree Desierto. I am very pleased to now have Desiree as my colleague at George Mason University.
What I’ve been reading
1. Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle. She covered 3000 miles in the 1960s, and as she notes in the introduction: “Epictetus put it in a nutshell when he said, “For it is not death or hardship that is a fearful thing, but the fear of death and hardship.” Self-recommending. But don’t be fooled by the title — hardly any of the narrative takes place in India.
2. David E. Bernstein, Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America . A scathing and unfortunately spot-on indictment of America’s schemes of racial classification. So often those schemes turn out to be racist themselves. The Hmong cannot count as an “underrepresented group” because they are Asian!? Come on, people. There is no good way to do this work, and I am pleased to see David pointing this out so effectively.
3. Nelly Sachs, Flight and Metamorphosis, Poems. A lovely bilingual edition, covering her less-known post-Holocaust poetry. The quality is still very high and the page display is excellent.
Serhi Plokhy, Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters is exactly what the subtitle promises.
Fernanda Melchor, Paradais is a new Mexican novel that has received a lot of attention. I thought English was “not good enough for it,” though the slang and format would challenge my Spanish. If you can read this properly in Spanish, I suspect it is excellent.
Daisy Hay, Dinner with Joseph Johnson is a good book about the Enlightenment publisher who interacted with Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Benjamin Franklin, Priestly, Fuseli, and Mary Wollstonecraft, among others.
Halik Kochanski, Resistance: The Underground War Against Hitler, 1939-1945. So far I have had time only to browse it, but it appears to be both excellent and definitive.
Saturday assorted links
1. Predictions for Britain in 2050.
2. A skeptical case on fusion.
3. Swiss woman fined for feeding her neighbor’s cat.
4. “Although most individuals with IQs ≤ 90 did not have a college degree, the rate at which they completed college had increased approximately 6-fold in men and 10-fold in women relative to rates in the previous generation.” And it seems to be good for them.
The magnitude of depolicing
Using a time regression discontinuity design, we estimate a 72.7 percent decrease in lower-level “quality of life” arrests, and a 69 percent decrease in non-index crime arrests in Minneapolis following George Floyd’s death. Our results also show that the decrease in arrests is driven by a 69 percent decrease in police-initiated calls for service. Using the same approach, we find a much smaller decrease of 2.7 percent in arrests and a 1.5 percent decrease in police calls following police-involved shootings. Our results, thus, suggest that the Ferguson Effect exists, and it is much larger following highly publicized events of police violence such as George Floyd’s death.
That is from the new AER, by Maya Mikdash and Reem Zaiour, “Does (All) Police Violence Cause De-policing? Evidence from George Floyd and Police Shootings in Minneapolis.” The title I find slightly Straussian, I hope not outright naive.
The paradox of auction happiness
If you win something at auction, even if you end up paying your full bid, you are typically quite happy, rather than just a smidgen happy.
Then why didn’t you bid more in the first place?
Is your mistake being too happy, or is your mistake having bid too low?
Do you become happy only by winning discrete, decent-sized lumps of happiness, rather than smidgens of happiness? Does that even make sense?
Or is it just the value of winning per se, in which case there might be some other artificial way of manufacturing the same feeling?
Note this all runs a bit counter to winner’s curse arguments, which suggest you should be a smidgen unhappy when you win, not when you lose.
How should we best model this?
Friday assorted links
The Unfairness Doctrine
The great George Will hits another one out of the ballpark with some useful reminders:
Government pratfalls such as the Disinformation Governance Board are doubly useful, as reminders of government’s embrace of even preposterous ideas if they will expand its power, and as occasions for progressives to demonstrate that there is no government expansion they will not embrace.
…Using radio spectrum scarcity as an excuse, even before the Fairness Doctrine was created, Republicans running Washington in the late 1920s pressured a New York station owned by the Socialist Party to show “due regard” for other opinions. What regard was “due”? The government knew. So, it prevented the Chicago Federation of Labor from buying a station, saying all stations should serve “the general public.”
In 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration conditioned one station’s license renewal on ending anti-FDR editorials. (Tulane Law School professor Amy Gajda’s new book, “Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy,” reports that earlier, FDR had “unsuccessfully pushed for a code of conduct for newspapers as part of the Depression-era National Recovery Act and had envisioned bestowing on compliant newspapers an image of a blue eagle as a sort of presidential seal of approval.”)
John F. Kennedy’s Federal Communications Commission harassed conservative radio, and when a conservative broadcaster said Lyndon B. Johnson used the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 as an excuse for Vietnam escalation, the Fairness Doctrine was wielded to force the broadcaster to air a response.
Hat tip: Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek.
“NAIMBY” goes beyond just belling the cat
In April, Akureyri—the largest municipality in the country’s north, with a population of 19,000 people and some 2,000 to 3,000 cats—decided to ban their feline residents from night roaming outside. Neighboring Húsavík banned cats several years ago from going outdoors day and night. Other Icelandic towns are considering bans as the issue of free-roaming cats increasingly makes its way from online forums to local politics, with the arguments generally falling into two categories. Some people—the “no animals in my backyard” or NAIMBY-ists—proclaim free-roaming cats are nuisances that should be confined like any other pet. Others think beyond the anthropocentric: cats kill birds and disrupt ecosystems.
And:
Surveys suggest Icelanders’ support for cat curfews is highest in regions with private homes and private gardens. Their reasoning is predominantly idiosyncratic, likening roaming cats to visits from rowdy town drunks. To paraphrase some online comments about cat visitations: “cat urine sprayed the patio,” “challenged another cat to a 3:00 a.m. duel and killed the yellow daffodils,” “last week he came into the house, and the pharmacy is out of pet-allergy drugs.” Cat supporters reply along the lines of, “Get a life and try to tolerate the outside world; cats are a delight and have roamed Iceland as long as we have.”
Here is the full Icelandic story, from the always excellent The Browser. Is there a corresponding YAIMBY movement?
The fall of Sri Lanka
After the end of a devastating 26-year civil war in 2009, the island of 22mn had the makings of an Asian economic success story. Under governments run by the powerful Rajapaksa family, annual economic growth peaked at 9 per cent. By 2019, the World Bank had classified the island as an upper-middle income country. Sri Lankans enjoyed a per capita income double that of neighbours such as India, along with longer lifespans thanks to strong social services such as healthcare and education. The country tapped international debt lenders to rebuild, becoming a key private Asian bond issuer and participant in China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
And yet now everything is in tatters (that passage is from a very good FT piece). Here is one bit:
Sri Lanka’s reserves have fallen from $7.5bn in November 2019 to the point where finding $1mn is “a challenge”, Wickremesinghe, the new prime minister, said in an address last week. This has meant shortages of not only fuel but food and medicine, with hospitals forced to postpone surgeries. The country has the worst inflation in Asia at about 30 per cent in April and the currency has almost halved in value since it was floated in March. The UN Development Programme says that nearly half the population is in danger of falling below the poverty line, and warns of a looming humanitarian crisis as the urban poor and former middle class begin to cut back on meals.
And:
“Most people are down to one meal a day”, says her neighbour, Mohammad Akram, “but are embarrassed to admit it.”
I believe we have not yet internalized how rapidly a middle income country can fall from grace and into utter chaos.
Qubit teleportation between non-neighbouring nodes in a quantum network
Future quantum internet applications will derive their power from the ability to share quantum information across the network. Quantum teleportation allows for the reliable transfer of quantum information between distant nodes, even in the presence of highly lossy network connections. Although many experimental demonstrations have been performed on different quantum network platforms, moving beyond directly connected nodes has, so far, been hindered by the demanding requirements on the pre-shared remote entanglement, joint qubit readout and coherence times. Here we realize quantum teleportation between remote, non-neighbouring nodes in a quantum network. The network uses three optically connected nodes based on solid-state spin qubits. The teleporter is prepared by establishing remote entanglement on the two links, followed by entanglement swapping on the middle node and storage in a memory qubit. We demonstrate that, once successful preparation of the teleporter is heralded, arbitrary qubit states can be teleported with fidelity above the classical bound, even with unit efficiency. These results are enabled by key innovations in the qubit readout procedure, active memory qubit protection during entanglement generation and tailored heralding that reduces remote entanglement infidelities. Our work demonstrates a prime building block for future quantum networks and opens the door to exploring teleportation-based multi-node protocols and applications.
Here is the Nature paper, by S.L.N. Hermans, et.al., via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Thursday assorted links
“A political football” takes on new meaning (MIE)
The concept and governance of name, image, and likeness has always been highly politicized. But the deals themselves have largely stayed out of politics — until now.
Dresser Winn, a quarterback at the University of Tennessee at Martin, has signed a partnership to support the candidacy of Colin Johnson, who is running for District Attorney General for Tennessee’s 27th Judicial District.
The deal is considered to be the first to support a political candidate. It’s also an example of how athletes who may not have major followings or a Power 5 platform can ink partnerships in their community, as one of Winn’s agents, Dale Hutcherson, pointed out on Twitter.
The deal was born when both of Winn’s agents, Dale and Sam Hutcherson, came up with the idea and presented it to him, he told Front Office Sports.
“I’ve been lifelong friends with Colin. He’s always supported me,” he said. From there, it was an easy decision to sign with the candidate.
As part of the partnership, Winn said he wore a campaign shirt during a football camp that he ran last weekend. On Monday, his announcement on Twitter included photos of himself and Johnson — both of whom were wearing campaign apparel — spending time on a football field. The tweet encouraged voters to ensure they were registered for the August election.
As for future promotions, Winn said they’re going to “see how things go from here.”
Winn declined to disclose financial terms of the deal.
America! Here is the full story, via Daniel Lippman.
The best arguments for and against the alien visitation hypothesis
Those are the subject of my latest Bloomberg column, about 2x longer than usual, WaPo link here. Excerpt, from the segment on arguments against:
The case against visits by aliens:
1. Alien sightings remain relatively rare.
Let’s say alien drone probes can make it here. That would imply the existence of a very advanced civilization that can span great distances and command energy with remarkable efficiency. If that’s the case, why isn’t the sky full of aliens? Why aren’t there sightings from more than just military craft?
So the question is not so much, “Why don’t we see aliens?” as, “Why don’t we see more of them?” It is a perfectly valid (and embarrassing) question. On one hand, the aliens are impressive enough to send craft here. On the other, they seem constrained by scarcity.
Are we humans like those bears filmed in the Richard Attenborough nature programs, worthy of periodic visits from drone cameras but otherwise of little interest? The reality is that bears, and indeed most other animals, see humans quite often…
3. The alien-origin hypothesis relies too much on the “argument from elimination.”
The argument from elimination is a common rhetorical tactic, but it can lead you astray. You start by listing what you think are all the possibilities and rule them out one by one: Not the Russians, not sensor error, and so on — until the only conclusion left is that they are alien visitors. As Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes once said: “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
The argument from elimination works fine when there is a fixed set of possibilities, such as the murder suspects on a train. The argument is more dangerous when the menu of options is unclear in the first place. Proponents of the alien origin view spend too much time knocking down other hypotheses and not enough time making the case for the presence of aliens.
And this:
There is an argument that is often used against the alien-origin hypothesis, but in fact can be turned either way: If they are alien visitors, why don’t we have better and more definitive forms of evidence? Why is the available video evidence so hard to interpret? Why isn’t there a proverbial “smoking gun” of proof for an alien spacecraft?
This particular counter isn’t entirely convincing. First, the best evidence may be contained in the still-classified materials. Second, the same question can be used against non-alien hypotheses. If the sensor readings were just storms or some other mundane phenomena, surely that would become increasingly obvious over time with better satellite imaging.
The continued, ongoing and indeed intensifying mystery of the sightings seems to militate in favor of a truly unusual explanation. It will favor both the alien-visitation and the religious-miracle hypotheses. If it really were a flock of errant birds, combined with some sensor errors, we would know by now.
Recommended.
Wednesday assorted links
That is now, this was then, Taiwan edition
Words matter, in diplomacy and in law.
Last week President Bush was asked if the United States had an obligation to defend Taiwan if it was attacked by China. He replied, “Yes, we do, and the Chinese must understand that. Yes, I would.”
The interviewer asked, “With the full force of the American military?”
President Bush replied, “Whatever it took” to help Taiwan defend itself.
A few hours later, the president appeared to back off this startling new commitment, stressing that he would continue to abide by the “one China” policy followed by each of the past five administrations.
Where once the United States had a policy of “strategic ambiguity” — under which we reserved the right to use force to defend Taiwan but kept mum about the circumstances in which we might, or might not, intervene in a war across the Taiwan Strait — we now appear to have a policy of ambiguous strategic ambiguity. It is not an improvement.
Here is the full 2001 Wapo Op-Ed — can you guess who the author was? Hint: a prominent Senator at the time. Via tekl.