“Get Out of Jail Free” Cards
In the movies I’ve seen people who try to get out of a traffic ticket by telling the police officer they made a donation to the policeman’s ball, but those were comedies. I had no idea that not only does this exist there are official cards. In fact, the police in New York are livid that the number of cards is being limited:
The city’s police-officers union is cracking down on the number of “get out of jail free” courtesy cards distributed to cops to give to family and friends.
Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association boss Pat
Lynch slashed the maximum number of cards that could be issued to current cops from 30 to 20, and to retirees from 20 to 10, sources told The Post.
The cards are often used to wiggle out of minor trouble such as speeding tickets, the theory being that presenting one suggests you know someone in the NYPD.
The rank and file is livid.
“They are treating active members like s–t, and retired members even worse than s–t,” griped an NYPD cop who retired on disability. “All the cops I spoke to were . . . very disappointed they couldn’t hand them out as Christmas gifts.”
A Christmas gift of institutionalized corruption.
Here’s another article on these cards which just gets all the more stunning.
First, there are tiers of cards. Silver cards are the highest honor given to citizens. It’s almost universally honored by officers, and can also help save money on insurance. Gold PBA cards are only given to police officers and their families. You’d be hard-pressed finding a cop who won’t honor a gold card.
Gold and silver cards! It gets better. You can buy these cards on eBay. Here’s a gold New Jersey card on sale for $114. A silver “family member” shield goes for $299. Some of these are probably fake. The gold and silver are rare but remember, cops get 20 to 30 regular cards so you can see why they might be upset at losing them.
The regular cards have become more common as NYC hires more police. The union may in fact be trying to bump up its monopoly profit by restricting supply.
The cards don’t just go to family members. The rot is deep:
Union officials say the cards are also public relations tools and tokens of appreciation handed out to politicians, judges, lawyers, businessmen, civil service workers and members of the news media.
A retired police officer on Quora explains how the privilege is enforced:
The officer who is presented with one of these cards will normally tell the violator to be more careful, give the card back, and send them on their way.
…The other option is potentially more perilous. The enforcement officer can issue the ticket or make the arrest in spite of the courtesy card. This is called “writing over the card.” There is a chance that the officer who issued the card will understand why the enforcement officer did what he did, and nothing will come of it. However, it is equally possible that the enforcement officer’s zeal will not be appreciated, and the enforcement officer will come to work one day to find his locker has been moved to the parking lot and filled with dog excrement.
He’s not kidding. Here is what seems like a real police officer on a cop chat room (from Mimesis law)
It’s important for me to get in touch with shield [omitted] and ask him why he felt it necessary to say “I’m not even going to look at that” to my PBA card and proceed [sic] to write a speeding ticket on the Bronx River Parkway yesterday afternoon to my fukking WIFE!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’ll show him the courtesy he so sorely lacks by not posting his name on a public forum.
Any help would be appreciated. Please inbox me.
I will find you.
I find these cards especially odious as more and more police are funding themselves through fines and forfeitures. Discriminatory taxation increases the tax rate. It’s one rule for the ruler and another for the ruled.
The cards are not a secret but I agree with my colleague Mark Koyama who remarked:
Sometimes you find out something about the country you live in that makes it appear little better than a corrupt, tinpot, banana republic.
The China Shock was Matched by a China Boom
We have always known that trade and technology shocks destroy some jobs and create others with the change in equilibrium typically being zero net job losses and a net positive effect on wages. Increases in imports, for example, should be matched sooner or later by increases in exports as foreigners aren’t sending us goods for nothing. The China Shock paper of Autor, Dorn and Hanson seemed to suggest that the job losses were not matched by job gains. The paper’s clever identification strategy, however, was much stronger on identifying the losses than the offsetting gains (see e.g. Scott Sumner.)
New research by Feenstra, Ma and Xu and Feenstra and Sasahara (summarized here) shows, that as theory predicts, there were offsetting gains. Feenstra, Ma and Xu use similar techniques to ADH and find big offsetting increases in exports:
Our empirical results show important job gains due to US export expansion. We find that although imports from China reduce jobs, the global export expansion of US products creates a considerable number of jobs. Based on the industry-level estimation, our results show that on balance over the entire 1991-2007 or 1991-2011 periods, job gains due to changes in US global exports largely offset job losses due to China’s imports, resulting in about 300,000 to 400,000 job losses in net. Estimation at the commuting zone level generate even bigger job creation effects: in net, global export expansion substantially offsets the job losses due to imports from China, resulting in about 200,000 net job losses over the period 1991-2007, and a roughly balanced net effect if we extend the analysis to 1991-2011.
(Note that the net job loss figures are rounding error in an economy where there are millions of hires and separations every month).
Using a second, quite different, approach based on input-output calculations they find similar results in manufacturing but an even bigger effect on services:
We find that the growth in US exports created demand for 2 million manufacturing jobs, 500,000 resource-sector jobs, and a remarkable 4.1 million jobs in services, totalling 6.6 million. The positive job creation effect of exports in the manufacturing sector, 2 million, is quantitatively similar to the result in Feenstra et al. (2017), in which 1.9 million jobs were created by US exports from the instrumental-variable regression approach. On the import side, our analysis shows that manufacturing imports from China reduced demand for US jobs by 1.8-2.0 million, which is similar to the result in Autor et al. (2016), who finds a decline of 2.0 million jobs due to imports from China.
The authors conclude:
Our results fit the textbook story that job opportunities in exports make up for jobs lost in import-competing industries, or nearly so. Once we consider the export side, the negative employment effect of trade is much smaller than is implied in the previous literature. Although our analysis finds net job losses in the manufacturing sector for the US, there are remarkable job gains in services, suggesting that international trade has an impact on the labour market according to comparative advantage. The US has comparative advantages in services, so that overall trade led to higher employment through the increased demand for service jobs.
What is optimal group size for solving hard problems?
Galesic, M., Barkoczi, D., & Katsikopoulos, K. (2018). Smaller crowds outperform larger crowds and individuals in realistic task conditions. Decision, 5(1), 1-15.
Decisions about political, economic, legal, and health issues are often made by simple majority voting in groups that rarely exceed 30–40 members and are typically much smaller. Given that wisdom is usually attributed to large crowds, shouldn’t committees be larger? In many real-life situations, expert groups encounter a number of different tasks. Most are easy, with average individual accuracy being above chance, but some are surprisingly difficult, with most group members being wrong. Examples are elections with surprising outcomes, sudden turns in financial trends, or tricky knowledge questions. Most of the time, groups cannot predict in advance whether the next task will be easy or difficult. We show that under these circumstances moderately sized groups, whose members are selected randomly from a larger crowd, can achieve higher average accuracy across all tasks than either larger groups or individuals. This happens because an increase in group size can lead to a decrease in group accuracy for difficult tasks that is larger than the corresponding increase in accuracy for easy tasks. We derive this non-monotonic relationship between group size and accuracy from the Condorcet jury theorem and use simulations and further analyses to show that it holds under a variety of assumptions. We further show that situations favoring moderately sized groups occur in a variety of real-life situations including political, medical, and financial decisions and general knowledge tests. These results have implications for the design of decision-making bodies at all levels of policy.
I have heard a number of CEOs and directors claim that organizations change fundamentally once they start exceeding fifty employees, a number only slightly above the cited optimum here. But if only for reasons of sales and marketing and branding, it does in fact make sense, on net, for many institutions to exceed that number of employees.
Here is the paper, and for the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Jordan Peterson’s 12 rules for life
Peterson’s 12 rules
Rule 1 Stand up straight with your shoulders back
Rule 2 Treat yourself like you would someone you are responsible for helping
Rule 3 Make friends with people who want the best for you
Rule 4 Compare yourself with who you were yesterday, not with who someone else is today
Rule 5 Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
Rule 6 Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world
Rule 7 Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)
Rule 8 Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie
Rule 9 Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t
Rule 10 Be precise in your speech
Rule 11 Do not bother children when they are skate-boarding
Rule 12 Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street
They are from this article, via Michelle Dawson.
New Hampshire fact of the day
The government estimates that 10 percent of New Hampshire residents — about 130,000 people — are addicted to drugs or alcohol.
Here is much more from the NYT.
Samuelson-Stolper arbitrage against musical nationalism
A notable event in the
@SanDiegoSymph‘s It’s About Time festival, now under way: a performance of John Luther Adams’s Inuksuit next Saturday will involve percussionists on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border.
That is a tweet from Alex Ross, here is the accompanying event link.
Sunday assorted links
1. Allison Schraeger on the economics of the art market.
2. How the University of Texas system spends its oil fund endowment.
3. The Economist on how Argentina’s reforms are going.
4. Carolyn Johnson at Wonkblog on why the price of insulin keeps rising.
5. NFL players do indeed perform for pay.
6. Ross Douthat on The Show So Far (NYT).
*Off the Charts*
As I’ve already mentioned, the author is Ann Hulbert and the subtitle is The Hidden Lives and Lessons of America’s Child Prodigies. This is an excellent book, and so far I am overwhelmed by the high quality and quantity of books coming out this January (in comparison to last year’s near drought). You don”t have to care about prodigies per se, I would recommend this to anyone in Silicon Valley or finance who thinks about how to find and recruit talent, or anyone interested in the history of art, science, or technology.
I had not known that musician Henry Cowell was the protege of Thorstein Vebeln’s ex-wife, Ellen Veblen. Here is just one bit about Henry:
He was in his element. As Clarissa noted, Henry was highly receptive without being unduly impressionable. “Always he has worked mostly alone,” she observed, “browsing for information, when he felt in need of it, whenever a door opened.”
As a child, he quickly outgrew his town’s public library, and was suspected of skimming the books he claimed to have read. He could give a clear and detailed summary of each. He was born in rural Menlo Park, formal schooling never really worked for him, and Irish music remained a touchstone of his composing, albeit supplemented with tone clusters, extreme dissonance, and a variety of rhythmic innovations. To many people at the time, his music sounded like noise.
Here is a short YouTube clip of Cowell playing the piano.
It’s not a “this puts all the pieces together for you book,” but still I am finding it engrossing. I take the overall message to be a) mentorship is very important for prodigies, and b) most mentors have no idea what they are doing.
*Elinor Ostrom: An Intellectual Biography*
Once they moved to Indiana University and started the workshop, they were able to return to the initial idea. Initially, Elinor Ostrom was hired for teaching “Introduction to American Government” on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays at 7:30 a.m. “How could I say no?” she joked later.
That is from Vlad Tarko’s new and very useful biography of Ostrom. Of course in 2009 she was both the first political scientist and the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics.
Saturday assorted links
1. Rod Dreher on Cowen-Douthat.
2. “Interestingly, some prodigies may actually do better when their eccentricities are seen by loving adults as disabilities first — and talents second.” Here is a good NYT review of Ann Hulbert’s Off the Charts: The Hidden Lives and Lessons of America’s Child Prodigies.
3. Do lower class people have more wisdom for resolving conflicts? (speculative)
4. “More than 20 per cent of Japan, an area the size of Denmark, has no readily contactable owner. By 2040 the projected area is bigger than the Republic of Ireland — a spreading nightmare for government, construction and the property industry, because if nobody knows who owns the land then nobody, except for flytippers, can use it. Forestry roads go unmaintained, solar farms are left unbuilt and taxes uncollected. According to a private sector working group on unowned land, by 2040 the annual economic cost will rise from ¥180bn ($1.6bn) to ¥310bn.” That is Robin Harding from the FT.
5. MoMA announces an upcoming exhibition on Yugoslav concrete architecture.
What I’ve been reading
I do not have time to read it now, but this appears to be an amazing and very high quality volume: David Biale, et.al., Hasidism: A New History, over 800 pp. but it does all appear to be well-written and also interesting, often gripping.
Shaun Walker, The Long Hangover: Putin’s New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past. Most of all useful for the Russia-Ukraine recent history.
John C. Hulsman, To Dare More Boldly: The Audacious Story of Political Risk. A consistently interesting history of political risk analysis, I most liked this sentence: “The chapters themselves are baroque in structure, a fond homage to the genius of the pioneering musician and peerless producer Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, particularly his work on his masterpiece Pet Sounds.”
Peter J. Dougherty, Confessions of a Scholarly Publisher (not yet on Amazon). Peter was the director of Princeton University Press for many years, and these are his thoughts on the (much underrated) importance of university presses. I would stress that Michael Aronson (of Harvard University Press) and Peter were two of the most important figures in my entire career.
Tim Rogan, The Moral Economists: R.H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E.P. Thompson, and the Critique of Capitalism. The subtitle says it all. People talk less about Tawney these days, but his book is well worth reading if you don’t already know it.
I perused them only briefly, but these seemed attractive:
Joshua B. Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World.
Timothy Tackett, The Coming of Terror in the French Revolution.
Arrived in my pile and not yet scrutinized is:
Anne Fleming, City of Debtors: A Century of Fringe Finance.
Which are the most skill-selected immigrant groups?
Into the United States that is:
Overall, the relationship is strong and positive (r = .56, p < 0.001): immigrant groups that are more skill-selected tend to have higher average incomes. The five most skill-selected groups are: Taiwanese, Nigerians, Swedes, Indians and Swiss. The five least skill-selected groups are: Mexicans, Salvadorans, Hondurans, Portuguese and Cape Verdeans. For example, 82% of Nigerians are high-skilled, while only 4% are low-skilled. By contrast, only 14% of Mexicans are high-skilled, while 57% are low-skilled.
Methodological caveats: I was unable to match a number of the ancestry groups (e.g., ‘Hmong’, ‘Jewish’, ‘Cajun’); the income data are not adjusted for household size or reporting bias.
That is from Noah Carl, here are his other essays. For the pointer I thank Dan Klein.
Friday assorted links
1. New and interesting Jordan Peterson article: “He speaks in rapid-fire, um-less sentences. He doesn’t smile much.” In my view Peterson is one of the five most influential public intellectuals today.
2. Paul McCartney talks about the bass.
3. Gender bias in economic texts. And more from The Economist.
4. The gravity of every state’s most important trading partner.
The culture that is San Francisco solve for the equilibrium
A man threw his body onto a self-driving car — a GM Cruise AV — causing a car vs. pedestrian collision at the 16th and Valencia intersection earlier this month, the DMV reported Wednesday.
Operating in “autonomous mode,” the Cruise AV was stopped at a green light, facing northbound on Valencia, waiting to make a right turn onto 16th Street as pedestrians crossed.
Suddenly, a man ran across Valencia Street against the “do not walk” sign, shouting, and struck the left side of the car’s rear bumper and hatch with his entire body. This is all according to a report the self-driving car manufacturer must file with the DMV in the event of a collision.
The man sustained no injuries, but the car did. It suffered “some damage to its right rear light,” according to the report.
Here is the full story.
The miracle of Israeli water policy
“Israel should have been a water basket case,” says Siegel, listing its problems: 60% of the land is desert and the rest is arid. Rainfall has fallen to half its 1948 average, apparently thanks to climate change, and as global warming progresses, Israel and the whole Levant are expected to become even drier – and from 1948, Israel’s population has grown 10-fold.
During that time, the country’s economy grew 70-fold. But instead of starting to waste water, as happens when a society becomes wealthier, it used its new affluence to implement what Siegel calls “the Israel model” of water management.
That model includes drip irrigation, the world’s highest rate of water reclamation and recycling, high prices when necessary, massive desalination, fixing leaks early and frequently, discouraging gardening, and mandating water-efficient toilets.
Are you listening California? Here is the article from Ruth Schuster at Haaretz. Here is Wikipedia on water policy in Israel. Here is the miracle of Israeli dairy; Israeli cows are far more productive than most other cows, mostly because of technology.