Results for “bounty hunter” 40 found
Rogue Economist!
A famous economist is trying to capture terrorists by combing through data on banking records. Wimpy. Wimpy. Wimpy. A real rogue economist would go after them with his bare hands. Grrrrr! 🙂
Today, I am in Baltimore, one of the roughest cities in the United States. Not content to study bounty hunters from the safe confines of my desk I am going hunting with the real thing. Is this my dangerous summer? Nah, that is next summer!
I am really going to Baltimore to learn. Tyler writes on development and globalization and spends a lot of time traveling and living in poor countries. It’s a good model to emulate. Blackboard economics can only get you so far. I am working on a book about bounty hunting but also about bounties and prizes more generally. I figure one less equation and one more story about Doc Rock and the Fugitive will double my sales.
Grumpy makes me Happy (and probably a little Dopey too)
As I walked into the hotel I couldn’t help but notice a strikingly attractive woman who was also checking in. I was just outside of Nashville to talk about my work on bounty hunters to the Tennessee Association of Professional Bail Agents. Imagine my surprise (and delight!) when the next day at the lecture there she was front and center! Leah Hulan a former Miss Tennessee and first lieutenant in the United States Army Military Intelligence is the owner and president of Grumpy’s Bail Bonds.
If you commit a crime in TN, now you know who to call.
Let the Dog(s) Out
Operation Falcon, a dragnet put together by the U.S. Marshals and local police agencies, netted 10,000 fugitives last week. Cool. But note that that there are millions of unserved arrest warrants. The Washington Post was one of the few newspapers to get the story right:
Criminal-justice experts said that by apprehending
thousands of fugitives in a matter of days, the operation underscored
the low priority that law enforcement agencies often give to locating
people who have jumped bail, violated parole or otherwise evaded state
and federal courts.
"The dirty little secret is that there usually is not
enough effort and manpower put into apprehension of fugitives," said
David A. Harris, a law professor at the University of Toledo who
studies criminal-justice issues. "Most fugitives are aware of this, and
it makes the system a joke. . . . It’s never been a top priority."
I would add only that the commercial bail system, backed by bounty hunters, does a much better job than the public system in ensuring court appearances and capturing fugitives. The long arm of the law belongs to the bounty hunter.
Is blackmail coercive?
On some level, I do believe blackmail is a kind of coercion, but I fear my structuralist explanations for this view would be deeply upsetting to the average libertarian Joe, so I will keep my dirty little Foucault-inspired secrets to myself.
Here is more from Alina Stefanescu.
And how about the economics of blackmail? If blackmail victims are bad guys, why not allow a horde of potential bounty hunters to profit from uncovering their wrongdoing? We can keep "false blackmail" illegal, while allowing blackmail based on truth, no? We likely underinvest in the gathering of such information, and the profit incentives of blackmail would help correct (and overshoot?) this institutional failure.
Yet I remain convinced there is, somewhere, a sound economic and utilitarian case against blackmail. But what is that case?
My favorite exotic explanation (it is not quite sound) is that legal blackmail would lead to inefficient blackmail. Perhaps the ones who should blackmail you are your family and close friends. That is when transaction costs are low and both parties strike a good deal, often based on an implicit rather than explicit blackmail. ("If you run off with that floozy…") The wrongdoer pays a penalty, and the would-be wrongdoer remains deterred. Nothing gets too messy. But if you open up this business to outsiders, well…trust breaks down. Blackmailers fabricate stories, they send weird threatening letters, and they cause extreme anxiety. Outsiders don’t even know when they should believe the word of a blackmailer, which limits blackmail possibilities from those in the know. Under this hypothesis, we keep blackmail illegal to keep blackmailers we can trust.
Addendum: I have turned on the comments function, in case you have good ideas on this topic.
Virus writers beware
Microsoft put a bounty on the head of the author of Sasser Internet worm and tips led to his arrest on Friday. With $250,000 at stake, virus writers need to understand that their chances of getting away with it are now slim. The long arm of the bounty hunter will find you.
The Poincare conjecture
Has the Poincare Conjecture been solved? Possibly. Read this recent news report about a new proof by an obscure Russian loner, Grisha Perelman. The Conjecture is one of the famous Millennium Problems in mathematics.
“This is arguably the most famous unsolved problem in math and has been for some time,” said Bruce Kleiner, a University of Michigan math professor reviewing Perelman’s work.
Here is the clearest statement I can find of what the whole thing means:
To solve it, one would have to prove something that no one seriously doubts: that, just as there is only one way to bend a two-dimensional plane into a shape without holes — the sphere — there is likewise only one way to bend three-dimensional space into a shape that has no holes. Though abstract, the conjecture has powerful practical implications: Solve it and you may be able to describe the shape of the universe.
Or try this:
[the] work has huge implications for our understanding of partial differential equations. PDEs (as they are known in the trade) are the mainstay of physics and engineering. Mazur notes that physicists and engineers use PDEs to model everything from the flow of water to the buildup of heat in aircraft engines. “I would expect this work to have enormous applications in many fields of science,” he says.
There may also be applications for scientists studying DNA…Some kinds of DNA wrap themselves into knot formations that can be insanely difficult to decipher. But Mazur says Thurston’s classification [referring to related work] may provide a way to calculate the exact nature of any knot – so in theory it could be used to work out the structure of knotty DNA molecules.
The upper reaches of mathematics can often seem absurdly detached from life down here on planet earth, but Mazur points out that you can never know where things might lead. He cites the case of James Clerk Maxwell. In the late 19th century Maxwell worked out the equations of electromagnetism. “At the time it would have been easy to write off Maxwell’s ideas about invisible forces as a mystical abstraction,” Mazur says. But Maxwell’s work laid the foundations for the development of radio, and hence the communications revolution. Every time we turn on the TV or pick up a cellphone or log onto a WiFi system we are reaping the rewards of Maxwell’s equations.
Another bottom line: Perelman will receive a million dollars if his result stands up. Alex says this is another win for bounty hunters!
Happy Birthday
Did you know that AOL/Time Warner owns the rights to the Happy Birthday song? First published in 1893 the song still earns revenues of some $2 million a year. You don’t have to pay AOL for singing the song, however, unless you do it for profit – movies that feature a birthday scene can pay up to $50,000 for the rights. Interestingly, the Happy Birthday song is usually not dubbed which may account for the fact that it is sung in English in many countries around the world even by non-English speakers. Saddam Hussein was once caught on videotape singing it to his daughter.
A report on the bounty hunter conference tomorrow!
The fate of co-blogger Alex
You haven’t heard from Alex for a few days, he is out at Lake Tahoe addressing, get this, a conference of bounty hunters. In fact he is the keynote speaker, having done some excellent work on the topic. I mean work as a researcher, not work as a bounty hunter. I hope he will tell us more about this when he returns. And if he doesn’t come back, we will have some inkling of the reason.
The Return of Privateering?
TexasSignal: Rep. Lance Gooden, a Republican who represents Texas’ 5th District, has introduced legislation that would allow U.S. citizens to seize the yachts, jets, and other property belonging to Russian oligarchs who have been sanctioned in response to the invasion of Ukraine. In other words, privateering.
…In the age of sail, it was common for nations to issue letters of marque licensing private citizens to raid the shipping of enemy nations. The practice died down in the 19th Century with the Paris Declaration of 1856 outlawing privateers. However, the United States never signed the Paris Declaration, and Article I of the Constitution gives Congress the power to issue letters of marque.
Gooden’s bill would require President Biden to issue letters of marque to seize yachts and other assets belonging to sanctioned Russian citizens. Gooden’s office even says that letters of marque could be issued to hackers to go after Russia in cyberspace.
There are three questions. First, should some Russian citizens be sanctioned? Second, should assets belonging to sanctioned Russian citizens be seized? Third, should privateers be able to do the seizing under a legal regime? There is a lot of room for debate on the first two questions but oddly these questions aren’t debated. Sanctions of this kind are common and broadly regarded as legitimate although likely overused in my view. The latter question arouses the most debate but is to me the easiest to answer. Sure, why not? Privateering worked well in the wars of the 19th century and we could likely have saved trillions by using bounties in the war in Afghanistan.
Here’s my paper on privateering and my story about the time I went bounty hunting in Baltimore.
Efficient Taxation
As regular readers will know, I have waxed philosophic and econometric about the virtues of bounty hunting. I have always maintained, however, that tax collecting is one thing I wouldn’t want done efficiently. Alas.