Jack

The post The merit of Mount Rushmore appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The post The NBA’s reopening is a warning sign appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The post Singapore facts of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

[EDIT 8/4: This post is now six weeks old. The current situation is unclear, but it’s less urgent to take any of the actions described below.]

So, I kind of deleted the blog. Sorry. Here’s my explanation.

Last week I talked to a New York Times technology reporter who was planning to write a story on Slate Star Codex. He told me it would be a mostly positive piece about how we were an interesting gathering place for people in tech, and how we were ahead of the curve on some aspects of the coronavirus situation. It probably would have been a very nice article.

Unfortunately, he told me he had discovered my real name and would reveal it in the article, ie doxx me. “Scott Alexander” is my real first and middle name, but I’ve tried to keep my last name secret. I haven’t always done great at this, but I’ve done better than “have it get printed in the New York Times“.

I have a lot of reasons for staying pseudonymous. First, I’m a psychiatrist, and psychiatrists are kind of obsessive about preventing their patients from knowing anything about who they are outside of work. You can read more about this in this Scientific American article – and remember that the last psychiatrist blogger to get doxxed abandoned his blog too. I am not one of the big sticklers on this, but I’m more of a stickler than “let the New York Times tell my patients where they can find my personal blog”. I think it’s plausible that if I became a national news figure under my real name, my patients – who run the gamut from far-left to far-right – wouldn’t be able to engage with me in a normal therapeutic way. I also worry that my clinic would decide I am more of a liability than an asset and let me go, which would leave hundreds of patients in a dangerous situation as we tried to transition their care.

The second reason is more prosaic: some people want to kill me or ruin my life, and I would prefer not to make it too easy. I’ve received various death threats. I had someone on an anti-psychiatry subreddit put out a bounty for any information that could take me down (the mods deleted the post quickly, which I am grateful for). I’ve had dissatisfied blog readers call my work pretending to be dissatisfied patients in order to get me fired. And I recently learned that someone on SSC got SWATted in a way that they link to using their real name on the blog. I live with ten housemates including a three-year-old and an infant, and I would prefer this not happen to me or to them. Although I realize I accept some risk of this just by writing a blog with imperfect anonymity, getting doxxed on national news would take it to another level.

When I expressed these fears to the reporter, he said that it was New York Times policy to include real names, and he couldn’t change that.

After considering my options, I decided on the one you see now. If there’s no blog, there’s no story. Or at least the story will have to include some discussion of NYT’s strategy of doxxing random bloggers for clicks.

I want to make it clear that I’m not saying I believe I’m above news coverage, or that people shouldn’t be allowed to express their opinion of my blog. If someone wants to write a hit piece about me, whatever, that’s life. If someone thinks I am so egregious that I don’t deserve the mask of anonymity, then I guess they have to name me, the same way they name criminals and terrorists. This wasn’t that. By all indications, this was just going to be a nice piece saying I got some things about coronavirus right early on. Getting punished for my crimes would at least be predictable, but I am not willing to be punished for my virtues.

I’m not sure what happens next. In my ideal world, the New York Times realizes they screwed up, promises not to use my real name in the article, and promises to rethink their strategy of doxxing random bloggers for clicks. Then I put the blog back up (of course I backed it up! I’m not a monster!) and we forget this ever happened.

Otherwise, I’m going to lie low for a while and see what happens. Maybe all my fears are totally overblown and nothing happens and I feel dumb. Maybe I get fired and keeping my job stops mattering. I’m not sure. I’d feel stupid if I caused the amount of ruckus this will probably cause and then caved and reopened immediately. But I would also be surprised if I never came back. We’ll see.

I’ve gotten an amazing amount of support the past few days as this situation played out. You don’t need to send me more – message very much received. I love all of you so much. I realize I am making your lives harder by taking the blog down. At some point I’ll figure out a way to make it up to you.

In the meantime, you can still use the r/slatestarcodex subreddit for sober non-political discussion, the not-officially-affiliated-with-us r/themotte subreddit for crazy heated political debate, and the SSC Discord server for whatever it is people do on Discord. Also, my biggest regret is I won’t get to blog about Gwern’s work with GPT-3, so go over and check it out.

There’s a SUBSCRIBE BY EMAIL button on the right – put your name there if you want to know if the blog restarts or something else interesting happens. I’ll make sure all relevant updates make it onto the subreddit, so watch that space.

There is no comments section for this post. The appropriate comments section is the feedback page of the New York Times. You may also want to email the New York Times technology editor Pui-Wing Tam at pui-wing.tam@nytimes.com, contact her on Twitter at @puiwingtam, or phone the New York Times at 844-NYTNEWS.

(please be polite – I don’t know if Ms. Tam was personally involved in this decision, and whoever is stuck answering feedback forms definitely wasn’t. Remember that you are representing me and the SSC community, and I will be very sad if you are a jerk to anybody. Please just explain the situation and ask them to stop doxxing random bloggers for clicks. If you are some sort of important tech person who the New York Times technology section might want to maintain good relations with, mention that.)

If you are a journalist who is willing to respect my desire for pseudonymity, I’m interested in talking to you about this situation (though I prefer communicating through text, not phone). My email is scott@slatestarcodex.com.

[EDIT: I am now over capacity for interview requests. Feel free to send more if you want, but I may not answer, sorry.]

[EDIT2: There’s now a petition you can sign.]

The post The course of Covid-19 in the United States appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The other day, my 14-year-old daughter, who was born in Ethiopia, asked me why some people object to the slogan "Black Lives Matter." I said many well-intentioned Americans, including people who recognize police abuse as a serious problem, view the phrase as divisive. Some of them prefer to say "All Lives Matter," meaning that we should aspire to fair treatment of all citizens, regardless of their complexions or ethnicity. Yet that formulation glosses over stark, persistent, and widely documented racial disparities in law enforcement, which contradict the principle of equal treatment under the law and cannot be explained by racial differences in the propensity to commit crimes.

Many conservatives and Republicans are reluctant to acknowledge that reality, fearing that doing so would endorse the proposition that American society is irredeemably racist. But that does not necessarily follow, since many of these disparities are caused by race-neutral policies that impose disproportionate burdens on black people or give too much power and discretion to police officers, some of whom may be influenced, consciously or not, by racial prejudice. By the same token, racial disparities can be reduced by race-neutral reforms that would benefit everyone. Here are some examples.

1. Eliminate Unconstitutional Pedestrian Stops

In principle, stop-and-frisk programs, whether or not they are actually effective at reducing crime, can be constitutional. But according to the Supreme Court's decision in the 1968 case Terry v. Ohio, that means every stop has to be based on reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, and every frisk has to be based on reasonable suspicion that the subject is armed. Stop-and-frisk data from New York City suggest that police officers commonly flouted those requirements, which is one reason a federal judge deemed the program unconstitutional.

Enforcing the constitutional requirements for pedestrian stops would not eliminate racial disparities, which are unavoidable when police focus their resources on high-crime, low-income neighborhoods—a decision that makes sense for reasons that have nothing to do with race. But requiring police to respect the Fourth Amendment as it applies to pedestrian stops would address the understandable grievances of innocent black people who are hassled by cops for no good reason and who recognize that white people are much less likely to go through that degrading experience.

2. Curtail Pretextual Traffic Stops

In the 1996 case Whren v. United States, the Supreme Court said the Fourth Amendment allows police to stop a driver whenever they have probable cause to believe he has violated the law, no matter how trivial the offense, even when that violation is merely a pretext for investigating other matters. If an officer stops a car for a traffic violation in the hope of finding illegal drugs or seizable cash, according to the Court, that is perfectly constitutional, even without any evidence of criminal conduct.

State vehicle codes include hundreds of rules governing the maintenance and operation of automobiles, many of which are picayune or open to interpretation. It is difficult, if not impossible, to drive for any length of time without violating one of them. Whren therefore gives police vast discretion to stop drivers they deem suspicious, which opens the door to decisions affected by racial bias.

One study after another has found that black drivers are much more likely than white drivers to be searched during routine traffic stops, and that those searches are less likely to discover contraband. A study by Charles Epp and two other researchers at the University of Kansas is particularly revealing.

After surveying drivers in the Kansas City area in 2003 and 2004, Epp and his colleagues classified police encounters based on the legal justification (or lack thereof) and the amount of discretion involved. They found that black drivers were no more likely than white drivers to report clear-cut "traffic safety stops" (e.g., for running a red light or stop sign, driving at night with headlights off, or exceeding the speed limit by seven or more miles an hour) but were nearly three times as likely to report seemingly pretextual "investigatory stops" (e.g., for an unilluminated license plate, driving too slowly, or no reason mentioned by the officer).

During investigatory stops, Epp and his colleagues reported, black drivers were five times as likely as white drivers to be searched. They were also more likely to be handcuffed and threatened with arrest, and more likely to describe the officer's demeanor as rude, hostile, or insulting. Blacks perceived investigatory stops as less legitimate than traffic safety stops, while whites made no such distinction. The more stops black drivers had experienced, the less they trusted the police, an effect that was not apparent among white drivers.

Even if the Supreme Court never reconsiders Whren, that does not have to be the end of the matter. State courts can curtail pretextual stops by applying the search-and-seizure limits imposed by state constitutions, which in many cases have been interpreted as providing broader protection than the Fourth Amendment.

Last year, for instance, the Oregon Supreme Court said that state's constitution bars police from routinely fishing for evidence of a crime when they stop drivers for minor traffic offenses. "All investigative activities, including investigative inquiries, conducted during a traffic stop are part of an ongoing seizure and are subject to both subject-matter and durational limitations," it said. "Accordingly, an officer is limited to investigatory inquiries that are reasonably related to the purpose of the traffic stop or that have an independent constitutional justification."

Legislators also have a role to play. The Fourth Amendment, as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court, creates a floor that can be raised by legislation. Regardless of what state courts say, legislators could impose a rule similar to the one that now applies in Oregon.

3. Abolish Civil Asset Forfeiture

Civil asset forfeiture allows police to seize cash they come across during routine traffic stops based on a bare allegation that it is somehow connected to criminal activity, typically drug trafficking. Once the cash is seized, the owner bears the burden of challenging the forfeiture, a process that often costs more money than the cops took. This financial motive is a major driver of pretextual traffic stops, as illustrated by the 2013 case in which Iowa state troopers stole $100,000 in poker winnings from two men they had pulled over for failing to properly signal a lane change.

While the victims in that case were white, there are many examples of outrageous seizures involving black or Hispanic travelers whose only crime was carrying an amount of cash that police deemed suspicious. A 1992 investigation by The Orlando Sentinel found that nine out 10 drivers whose cash was seized in Volusia County, Florida, were black or Hispanic; three-quarters of them were never charged with a crime. Under Philadelphia's asset forfeiture program, according to a 2015 report from the American Civil Liberties Union, African Americans, who represent 44 percent of the city's population, accounted for 71 percent of cash seizures that did not involve a criminal conviction. Abolishing civil asset forfeiture, as several states have effectively done, would address disparities like these while simultaneously protecting everyone's due process and property rights.

4. Narrow the Authority to Arrest People

In the 2001 case Atwater v. City of Lago Vista, the Supreme Court approved arrests for minor traffic violations like failing to buckle your seat belt, meaning you can go to jail for offenses that are not punishable by jail. States such as Texas and Georgia authorize arrests for a wide range of traffic offenses.

The reform group Just Liberty estimates that more than 45,000 Texas drivers were arrested during traffic stops in 2016 for Class C misdemeanors—traffic and city ordinance violations that are typically handled with citations. That happens less than 1 percent of the time, which raises the question of how police decide that an arrest is warranted. Broad arrest authority gives police dangerous discretion that can be used to punish drivers they consider insufficiently respectful or do not like for arbitrary reasons.

As last week's shooting of Rayshard Brooks during an arrest for driving under the influence in Atlanta illustrates, taking a driver into custody not only involves additional anxiety, humiliation, and inconvenience; it creates the potential for violence that otherwise could be avoided. A breath test put Brooks' blood alcohol concentration at 0.1 percent, slightly above the current legal limit of 0.08 percent and right on the line under the standard that most states used before the 1990s. The offense he was charged with is a low-level misdemeanor that is theoretically punishable by up to 10 days in jail but is typically handled by sanctions such as probation, fines, community service, and license restrictions.

Instead of routinely arresting drivers in such cases, police could issue citations, accompanied by precautions, such as taking away the car keys or towing or booting the car, aimed at preventing them from getting back behind the wheel while they are intoxicated. But that approach is forbidden by the Atlanta Police Department's current policy, which requires arrests of drivers with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08 percent or more.

5. Stop Trusting Police Dogs

The Supreme Court has approved the use of drug-sniffing dogs during routine traffic stops, provided it does not "unreasonably" prolong the driver's detention. And the Court has said an alert by a properly trained dog is enough to provide probable cause for a search, notwithstanding substantial evidence that such alerts are often erroneous, imagined, invented, or triggered by the handler's subconscious cues. In practice, these rulings mean that when a driver declines to allow a search, an officer can still get permission from a dog.

Even if police properly use a well-trained dog, false positives can far outnumber true positives when the animal is used during routine traffic stops, because a small percentage of cars are actually carrying illegal drugs. In a 2006 George Mason Law Review article, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill law professor Richard E. Myers calculated that a dog who performs well in controlled conditions could still erroneously alert to cars 84 percent of the time in the real world. Is a 16 percent chance of finding drugs enough for probable cause? It's not exactly clear based on the case law, but Myers persuasively argues that the probability should be substantially higher.

Dog-authorized searches mean that many innocent drivers will be detained for far longer than was necessary to address the original reason for the stop as the cops go through their personal possessions. Even if police do not find evidence to support a drug arrest or cash they have a license to steal, that experience is embarrassing and time-consuming. Americans should not have to live in fear of canine narcs simply because judges have an unjustified faith in dogs' ability to reliably identify drug offenders. And given the racial disparities in car searches, African Americans have special grounds for concern on that score.

6. End the War on Drugs

As long as the government insists on trying to forcibly prevent people from consuming arbitrarily proscribed intoxicants, Americans will continue to encounter police for no good reason, and those encounters will be invasive, humiliating, destructive, injurious, and sometimes deadly. As the shooting of Breonna Taylor during a drug raid in Louisville, Kentucky, last March shows, people can end up dead even when they are not drug dealers, simply because they exercise their basic rights by defending their homes against armed invaders.

"No-knock warrants have proven to be lethal to citizens and police officers, for an obvious reason," Rep. Tom McClintock (R–Calif.) observed last week. "The invasion of a person's home is one of the most terrifying powers government possesses. Every person in a free society has the right to take arms against an intruder in their homes, and the authority of the police to make such an intrusion has to be announced before it takes place. To do otherwise places every one of us in mortal peril."

Although restricting no-knock raids is a good idea, it is not an adequate response to this danger. Even when police knock and announce themselves while serving a search warrant, that notification can easily be missed by slumbering residents during middle-of-the-night raids, especially when the cops breach the door immediately after knocking, which is common. The basic problem is not the techniques that police use when they break down our doors but the lack of a moral justification for such assaults. Drug prohibition is based on the premise that violence is an appropriate response to peaceful conduct that violates no one's rights. It isn't.

The drug war's origins were explicitly racist, and it continues to have a disproportionate impact on racial minorities, no matter the intent of the people who wage it. Three-quarters of drug offenders in federal prison and two-fifths of drug offenders in state prison are black or Hispanic. Black people are nearly four times as likely as white people to be arrested for marijuana possession, even though they are only slightly more likely to be cannabis consumers. When African Americans are caught with cocaine, they are apt to receive especially severe penalties under federal law, even now that the sentencing gap between the smoked and snorted forms of the drug has been narrowed.

Those disparities should trouble anyone who cares about equality under the law, and they help explain the anger expressed in recent protests against police brutality. But drug prohibition would be unjust, ineffective, costly, counterproductive, and morally bankrupt even if it victimized everyone equally. It is the main driver of pretextual traffic stops, car and home searches, asset forfeiture, no-knock raids, and the court-blessed erosion of our Fourth Amendment rights. It fuels violence, corruption, and theft; makes drug use more dangerous by creating a black market in which quality and potency are unpredictable; and diverts police resources from predatory crimes. Ending the war on drugs would be a victory for all Americans, whatever their skin color or pharmacological tastes.

7. Abolish Qualified Immunity

Despite hopes that the Supreme Court would reconsider this doctrine, which protects police officers from liability when they violate rights that were not "clearly established" at the time, the justices seem to be passing up that opportunity for now. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress seem to consider legislative efforts to abolish the doctrine beyond the pale. That attitude is puzzling, since critics across the political spectrum have been pointing out for years that qualified immunity amounts to a license for outrageous police conduct whenever the victims cannot identify a sufficiently specific precedent.

Derek Chauvin, the now-former Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes, has been charged with murder. But would he be liable under 42 USC 1983, the federal law that allows people to sue government officials for violating their constitutional rights? Although decisions by various federal appeals courts suggest he would be, the issue is surprisingly unclear in the 8th Circuit, which includes Minnesota.

In a 2015 case with similar facts—a handcuffed arrestee named Nicholas Gilbert who suffocated while restrained by St. Louis police officers in a prone position for 15 minutes—the 8th Circuit granted qualified immunity to the cops. "We find that the Officers' actions did not amount to constitutionally excessive force," the appeals court said. "The undisputed facts…show that the Officers held Gilbert in the prone position only until he stopped actively fighting against his restraints."

In Floyd's case, he was not resisting, except by repeatedly complaining that he could not breathe. Presumably those facts would make a difference in the court's analysis. But I am not completely sure about that, and the fact that I felt a need to look it up speaks volumes about the extent to which qualified immunity prevents victims of police abuse from holding cops accountable for it.

If stealing cash and property worth more than $225,000 while executing a search warrant, siccing a police dog on a suspect who had already surrendered, shooting a 10-year-old while trying to kill his dog after chasing a suspect into their yard, and wrecking a woman's home by bombarding it with tear gas grenades after she agreed to let cops enter to arrest her ex-boyfriend do not qualify as violations of "clearly established" rights, maybe Chauvin's appalling behavior doesn't either. Something has gone terribly wrong when we have to ask that question.

[UPDATE at end]

Today brings word that President Trump, having summarily disposed of a number of pesky Inspectors General who had the temerity to do their jobs, has now had enough of his own appointment to the position of US Attorney for the SDNY, Geoffrey Berman. Berman, AG William Barr tells us, is "stepping down" (having done "an excellent job"), to be replaced by Jay Clayton of the SEC.

No reasons have been given for the removal; apparently, Berman himself got no word of it until Barr's press release appeared. Surely Trump and Barr are not motivated by a desire to suppress Berman's on-going investigation of Rudy Giuliani, nor is the removal connected in any way with the charge, newly-revealed in John Bolton's forthcoming book, that Trump offered to get SDNY prosecutors to drop their investigation of a Turkish bank (Halkbank) at the request of Turkish president Erdogan.

Putting aside questions about the president's motives for the firing, and the the possibility that it's more than his usual mafioso stuff and might actually constitute obstruction of justice, one might think, at least as far as Geoffrey Berman is concerned, that that's that.  The president hires, the president fires.

But not so fast. Berman says that he's not going anywhere.

Here's his position. He was named to the US Attorney position by then-AG Sessions in January 2018, to succeed Preet Bahrara (whom Trump had just fired). For some reason, though, Berman's name was never formally put forward for required Senate confirmation.

So in April 2018 the federal district court judges voted unanimously to appoint him to the job.

My first reaction, when I read about this, was:  What?!?!  Federal judges appointing Officers of the United States?  Can they really do that? I felt a little bit like I had just found out that Mike Pompeo, say, hadn't ever actually been confirmed by the Senate, but had been appointed by the Supreme Court to be Secretary of State.

It turns out that they can really do that—or at least, they have been given the express authorization by statute to do that.  28 USC 546 reads:

Vacancies. 

(a) Except as provided in subsection (b), the Attorney General may appoint a United States attorney for the district in which the office of United States attorney is vacant.

(b) The Attorney General shall not appoint as United States attorney a person to whose appointment by the President to that office the Senate refused to give advice and consent.

(c) A person appointed as United States attorney under this section may serve until the earlier of—  

   (1) the qualification of a United States attorney for such district appointed by the President under section 541 of this title; or

   (2) the expiration of 120 days after appointment by the Attorney General under this section.

(d) If an appointment expires under subsection (c)(2), the district court for such district may appoint a United States attorney to serve until the vacancy is filled. The order of appointment by the court shall be filed with the clerk of the court.

Berman was appointed under 546(d); his original appointment was coming to the end of its 120-day lifespan (under sec. (c)(2)), so the court exercised its authority to appoint him to the position "to serve until the vacancy is filled."

So Berman now says: I don't serve at the president's pleasure, like the ordinary US Attorney, because the president didn't appoint me—the judges did.  The appointment lasts until "the vacancy is filled." That can't happen until a presidential nominee to the position has been confirmed by the Senate.

It's not enough for the AG to appoint a temporary successor (Barr has purported to name Jay Clayton of the SEC to the position) and to say: "There—your appointment has ended because 'the vacancy is filled'.  Clean out your desk and begone." That won't work because the statute gives the AG the authority to appoint a temporary US Attorney only where "the office of United States attorney is vacant."  But the office of US Attorney for the SDNY is currently not vacant—Berman is in it, duly appointed by the court.

Whether Trump and Barr want to submit Clayton's name for Senate confirmation is an open question.  But until they do so, Berman's the US Attorney for the SDNY.

Chaos and dysfunction are likely to prevail in the office unless Trump/Barr back off. My guess is that if both Berman and Clayton show up on Monday morning, the staff of the office will continue to take their orders from Berman. Perhaps we'll find out.  In any event, it's another small milestone in the war on the federal prosecutors and the federal judiciary.

[UPDATE 6-20-20 4:15 PM EDT:  Several readers have called my attention to the 10th Circuit case of US v. Hilario, where the court upheld the constitutionality of sec 546(d) against a separation-of-powers challenge.  The court in Hilario supported its judgment by noting that:

[W]e do not believe that section 546(d), by giving courts the option of naming an interim United States Attorney to avoid a vacancy, undermines public confidence in the disinterestedness of the Judicial Branch. The judiciary's integrity is not affected, and the method of appointment does not violate the doctrine of separated powers….

Here, the power to appoint is tempered in ways that ensure the appointee's independence. In this regard, we deem it especially significant that section 546(d) neither grants the judges of the district court authority to supervise or remove an interim United States Attorney whom they have appointed nor gives them power to determine (or even influence) how the appointee will enforce the laws. Cf. Morrison, 487 U.S. at 681, 108 S.Ct. 2597 (emphasizing appointing judges' lack of supervisory authority). Under those circumstances, it is unreasonable to think that merely making an interim appointment impermissibly entangles judges in the functioning of the Executive Branch.

This is particularly so because, insofar as interim United States Attorneys are concerned, the Executive Branch holds all the trump cards. For one thing, the President may override the judges' decision and remove an interim United States Attorney. See 28 U.S.C. § 541(c). For another thing, the President retains the right to nominate a United States Attorney whose confirmation by the Senate automatically will oust the interim appointee. See id. § 546(d). Even short of presidential involvement, the Attorney General can shunt the interim appointee to one side on any given investigation or case. See id. § 518. These features make it crystal clear that the district court's appointment of an interim United States Attorney is not an unconstitutional encroachment on executive authority.

Putting aside that the constitutional question, to my eyes, remains problematic—a holding that the appointment of a prosecutor who will be responsible for arguing cases before the district court by the judges before whom he/she will be appearing does not "undermine public confidence in the disinterestedness of the Judicial Branch" strikes me as questionable—the case does highlight a weakness in Berman's argument that I had not adequately considered in the O.P.  If sec. 541(c)'s removal power in fact trumps sec. 546(d)'s command that a judge-appointed US Attorney serves "until the vacancy is filled," President Trump (who has not, to my knowledge, himself taken any action in the matter) can remove Berman from his position, which creates a new vacancy, which can then be filled on a temporary basis by the Attorney General.

If, however, sec. 546(d) trumps sec. 541(c), and the president's removal power is qualified by the requirement that a judge-appointed US Attorney must serve until the president fills the vacancy (via the appointment/confirmation process), Berman's argument (that he is entitled to continue in office until that occurs) is correspondingly stronger.

 

The post Coronavirus travel markets in everything appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The post Our regulatory state is failing us appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The post I’m so American, I can’t even tell if this British speech is parody appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

People on the left often favor government support for public news outlets such as NPR and PBS. They argue that the reporters are independent of the government and do a good job. That may be true, but as long as the government is involved there’s always the danger that the public media outlets get turned into a propaganda tool for the administration.

And now that seems to be happening for another part of the US government’s vast media empire:

Earlier this month, a Steve Bannon ally and conservative filmmaker appointed by President Donald Trump took over running the vast global network of news agencies funded and operated by the US government.

Within hours of introducing himself to employees, he’d purged four top officials — and critics are calling it a blatant effort to turn America’s state-run news organizations into Trump-friendly propaganda outlets.

But Steve Bannon, who was deeply involved with getting Trump to nominate his ally Michael Pack, sees the ousters as a reckoning for an agency that he believes has been too soft on covering China.

“We are going hard on the charge,” Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and executive chairman of Breitbart, told me. “Pack’s over there to clean house.”

Michael Pack was confirmed this month as the new CEO of the US Agency for Global Media, a government department that oversees five media organizations — Voice of America, Middle East Broadcasting, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Open Technology Fund — and is collectively one of the largest media networks in the world.

The Trump administration is unhappy about coverage of China:

“Journalists should report the facts, but VOA has instead amplified Beijing’s propaganda,” read an April White House article titled “Amid a Pandemic, Voice of America Spends Your Money to Promote Foreign Propaganda.”

“This week, VOA called China’s Wuhan lockdown a successful ‘model’ copied by much of the world — and then tweeted out video of the Communist government’s celebratory light show marking the quarantine’s alleged end,” it continued.

This is a bit odd; given that Trump praised the Chinese leadership no fewer than 15 times for their success in handling the Covid-19 crisis.  Is Trump a part of the Chinese propaganda?

Under Pack, Bannon said taxpayer-funded news outlets will now forcefully highlight many of the regime’s human rights abuses, namely its detention of over a million Uighur Muslims in concentration camps.

I wonder if Steve Bannon wants these news outlets to report that Trump at least tacitly encouraged Xi Jinping to continue putting the Uighurs into concentration camps:

Mr Bolton said Mr Trump also told Mr Xi to go ahead with its internment of Uighurs — Chinese ethnic Muslims who have been rounded up and placed in facilities that human rights groups compare to concentration camps.

At the same time, there is evidence that the VOA put out stories ridiculing Trump during the 2016 campaign.  So the VOA is not blameless.

For libertarians, there are no winners in a war between the right and the left over regulating the media, the internet, or any other form of information dissemination.  The only solution is to keep the government out of the media to the greatest extent possible.  If government media outlets did not exist, they’d be a less tempting target for those who wish to use them as a propaganda tool.

(3 COMMENTS)

The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The post Bloody Well Pay Them appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Photo by GEORGE FREY/AFP via Getty Images

The Food and Drug Administration is withdrawing emergency authorization for chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as treatments for COVID-19, the agency announced today. Recent clinical trials showed that the drugs were not effective against the disease.

The medications are still FDA-approved for diseases like malaria and lupus, so they remain on the market. Because they are approved for other diseases, doctors could technically still prescribe them for COVID-19 patients under off-label use. Clinical trials focusing on the drugs can also continue. This decision, though, indicates that the FDA is no longer confident that the drug would benefit COVID-19 patients.

“We now believe that the suggested dosing regimens for [chloroquine] and...

Continue reading…

There has recently been a great deal of discussion as to how to reduce police brutality. I don’t necessarily oppose attempts to reform police forces, but I doubt whether that sort of approach would be effective. In my view, the problem must be addressed indirectly. The primary problem is not too many police; it’s too many laws.

There are two obvious objections to my argument:

1. I’ve long advocated a reduction in laws, so my motives are suspect. Perhaps I’m just using recent events as an excuse to promote a libertarian agenda.

2. A reduction in the number of laws would not have helped in the case of George Floyd, who was detained (and then killed) over a counterfeiting charge.

Those are both good arguments. But it’s equally true that suspect motives don’t necessarily mean my argument is incorrect. And the fact that it would not have helped George Floyd doesn’t mean that it would not help in many, many other cases.

As a general rule, police have two types of interactions with the public. Traditionally, police were called in by victims of crimes. In these cases, the victims were happy to see the police show up and assist them.

During the 20th century, however, the police increasingly became a semi-military force that launched a war on significant segments of the population, including drug users/merchants, prostitutes, gamblers, possessors of illegal ammunition, tax evaders, and others.  Whole communities are almost under siege, with paramilitary SWAT teams breaking into houses.

In 2014, Eric Garner died after telling the police “I can’t breath”.  He was being arrested for selling individual cigarettes from low tax states.  This crime would never have occurred if New York had not decided to adopt a highly regressive cigarette tax, aimed at behavior modification.

Prostitutes are often harassed by law enforcement, with police sometimes asking for special “favors”.

Police often barge into homes (without knocking) in search of drugs, illegal ammunition, and other contraband.  This often leads to confusion, and innocent people are occasionally shot and killed.

If we were to dramatically reduce the number of laws, then the police would have less leverage to harass the public.  Power corrupts, and the police will have an enormous amount of power in a country where thousands of consensual acts are illegal.  Even minor infractions such as loitering and jaywalking are used as excuses to harass people, often members of minority groups.

Roughly 400,000 people are currently imprisoned for drug crimes, often activities that would not even be illegal in other states.  We’d be much better off if the police were to focus on protecting us from violent criminals, not trying to tell us how to live our lives.

(22 COMMENTS)

The post Revisiting Camden appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The post *The Address Book* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

A few months back, I did a post discussing the stock market’s failure to correctly anticipate the impact of Covid-19. More recently, there has been widespread puzzlement as to what’s causing the recent rally in stock prices.

Today we have an answer to all of these questions. Real shocks simply are not as important as everyone has assumed. While I’ve generally argued that real shocks are overrated, even I am somewhat guilty in this case, as I had assumed that unemployment was likely to rise to 20% in May. Instead, it fell to 13.3% and NASDAQ hit an all-time record. I was wrong.

Now we know what the stock market has been sensing for weeks; this depression is not what we thought. Also, kudos to Lars Christensen. We still don’t know if his “less than 6% unemployment by election day” will be correct (I’m still skeptical), but it’s looking much more plausible than yesterday.

Tyler Cowen links to a story showing that this may be the first dental office led economic recovery in world history. Heck, why even use the term “may be”? This is the first dental office led recovery in world history. And why not? Half the collapse in the first quarter was in health care, the one sector you’d think would do well in a pandemic. Personal income soared 13% in April, as unemployment rose 1000 basis points. Our economy is like Crazy Town in that old Betty Boop cartoon.

The entire recession lasted for two months. And no, the recovery was not entirely due to the end of lockdowns, as the data was mostly collected in the second week of May, when many big states were still closed down. (We’ll know more when we get the state-by-state data. It’s gradually getting safer out there, and businesses are finding creative ways to shield customers from the virus.

Again, never overestimate the impact of real shocks on the business cycle and never underestimate the amazing prescience of the stock market.

PS. Some pundits gripe and moan that the stock market no longer reflects the situation of average Americans. They are right, it doesn’t. Personal income is up dramatically since February, whereas the S&P500 is still down somewhat from February.

PPS. This also removes the last shred of doubt as to whether the slow recovery from 2008-09 was caused by tight money or real factors. It was tight money. Case closed.

Now available to the whole world.

For weeks before the egregious police killing of George Floyd sparked protests, public-health experts and much of the press were singularly focused on COVID-19. News coverage of the pandemic frequently cast protests against stay-at-home orders and the closures of businesses and churches as risky, if not irresponsible. “Public-health officials say the coronavirus can easily be spread by people packed together, like, say, at a protest,” NPR’s David Folkenflik told listeners in April. “Fox hosts like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and others have cheered the protests—usually from the safety of their own home studios—yet have done so without explicitly noting the risks involved.”

Skeptical coverage of anti-shutdown protests and scolding of those who failed to socially distance abounded. Later, when a video of a social gathering at an outdoor pool in the Ozarks went viral, news articles quoted elected leaders and health officials describing the event as reckless.

Then mass protests against police killings began. Many protesters wore masks and kept a distance between themselves and other participants—but others left their faces uncovered, traveled in large groups, crowded together, and shouted for hours. Police arrested many, transporting them in crowded vehicles to enclosed spaces. Some news outlets published articles specifically noting these facts, but most stories about the protests did not mention potential risk at all. Commentators who did raise concerns about disease transmission sometimes sounded apologetic. “It seems almost weird to say this,” the MSNBC host Chris Hayes tweeted, “but the coronavirus hasn’t changed, and hasn’t gone anywhere. Very hopeful outdoor activity + warmer weather + mask wearing can avoid huge clusters, but real worried.”

[Read: The protests will spread the coronavirus]

Why did it seem “almost weird” to highlight the ongoing danger of a virus that has killed more than 100,000 Americans and is likely to kill many thousands more in the coming months? Not because gathering en masse to protest police killings is any less dangerous than gathering to party in the Ozarks or protest church closures, but because it strikes a lot of journalists and health experts (quite reasonably) as more urgent and justified. For some people who are sympathetic to the protesters’ cause, giving any fodder to those intent on criticizing them feels like a failure of solidarity.

But those who genuinely care about public health should not conflate the factual question of how dangerous mass protest may be during this pandemic with value judgments about whether the risk is worth it. Nevertheless, such an approach is ascendant. This week, hundreds of people in the public-health community signed an open letter, first drafted by infectious-disease experts at the University of Washington, that explicitly counsels an ideological double standard on protests.

The letter noted that when “heavily armed and predominantly white protesters” entered the Michigan State Capitol late last month, “infectious disease physicians and public health officials publicly condemned these actions and privately mourned the widening rift between leaders in science and a subset of the communities that they serve.” But the letter drew a distinction between those protests and more recent ones responding to the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other African Americans by police. “A public health response to these demonstrations is also warranted, but this message must be wholly different from the response to white protesters resisting stay-home orders,” the signatories declared. “Infectious disease and public health narratives adjacent to demonstrations against racism must be consciously anti-racist, and infectious disease experts must be clear and consistent in prioritizing an anti-racist message.”

Forget public-health information––these experts are conveying a public-health narrative. The letter’s most telling passage:

Staying at home, social distancing, and public masking are effective at minimizing the spread of COVID-19. To the extent possible, we support the application of these public health best practices during demonstrations that call attention to the pervasive lethal force of white supremacy. However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States.

Notice the weaselly construction. The signatories “do not condemn these gatherings as risky” not because the potential risk for disease transmission is lower than at the Michigan protests, but because they are unwilling to criticize an anti-racist gathering, no matter how risky it might be. The implication is that protests could succeed, leading to less racism and improving public health.

[American protest: Images from the past 24 hours]

NPR represented this line of thinking to the masses by tweeting, “Dozens of public health and disease experts have signed an open letter in support of the nationwide anti-racism protests.” A casual Twitter user could be forgiven for inferring that joining a crowd of protesters carries little risk of catching or spreading disease. But great uncertainty remains—which is why public-health experts spent weeks warning about what might happen if society reopens too quickly.

NPR’s article on concern that protests could spread the coronavirus and the public-health experts’ letter contain a remarkable juxtaposition. The NPR writer Bill Chappell quotes an elected official, Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser, as saying, “I’m so concerned about [the risk] that I’m urging everybody to consider their exposure if they need to isolate from their family members when they go home and if they need to be tested, because we have worked very hard to blunt the curve.”

Immediately afterward, the article declares, “But the risks of congregating during a global pandemic shouldn’t keep people from protesting racism, according to dozens of public health and disease experts who signed an open letter in support of the protests.” In other words, the politician is emphasizing the epidemiological risk, while disease experts stress the potential political gains.

I have long regarded police abuses as among the most urgent issues facing the United States and believed that, if more Americans objected to unjust police killings, vital reforms could ensue. Peaceful protesting for this righteous cause is a brave and defensible decision—especially given the participants who diligently wear masks and doubts about how easily COVID-19 spreads in outdoor spaces. Also defensible, though, is the view that mass protests carry risks at least for the medically vulnerable and could burden already-exhausted doctors and nurses. Many Americans who objected to Floyd’s death may still feel understandably torn about what to do.

[Read: The double standard of the American riot]

To help would-be protesters reach an informed judgment, public-health experts and journalists alike should strive to provide a neutral accounting of the risks involved. The blunt truth is that those risks include at least some chance of death and disease on a terrifying scale. Protesters objecting to police killings deserve warnings as blunt as what protesters objecting to shutdowns got, not politeness that leaves them less prepared to stay safe. To frame today’s protests not only as a defensible choice but as a choice validated by experts––as if their expertise somehow encompassed all the trade-offs implicit in the judgment—is to pass politics off as public health.

On matters of life and death, the reinforcement of progressive social-justice narratives should not get in the way of simple truth-telling. And when it does, it will only undermine the influence of those charged with informing Americans about the pandemic. The fallout: More Americans will decline to heed any public-health advice or journalism, seeing it as ideological and hypocritical.

The post My excellent Conversation with Ashley Mears appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

How much should responsible news organizations report on stupid things?

If they don’t report at all, the stupid things go unchallenged. But if they report too much, then they signal-boost the stupid thing and give it free publicity (eg Donald Trump). Also, people who mistrust the media might reflexively support the stupid thing just because the media hates it (eg Donald Trump). Also, the more time you waste covering stupid things, the less time you have for real news (eg Donald Trump).

I recently read Causes And Consequences Of Mainstream Media Dissemination Of Fake News: Literature Review And Synthesis, which argues that the news might be covering too many stupid things right now. The authors note that “only 2.6% of visits to current affairs articles were to fake news websites” (though other sources suggest more) and that the mainstream press bears some responsibility for spreading inaccuracies beyond this small demographic. But they also understandably worry that maybe if the mainstream press wasn’t so aggressive in covering and debunking fake news, then fake news would go uncorrected.

When I think about this problem, I remember creationism.

In the early 2000s, creationism was Public Enemy Number…maybe not One, but somewhere in the top ten. If you’re old enough to remember the decade at all, you probably recall the key flashpoints. The Discovery Institute. Michael Behe. “Teach the controversy”. The Creation Museum. Of Pandas And People. That one anti-Richard-Dawkins rap song which somehow despite everything managed to be really good.

And you probably remember the efforts by “the reality based community” to spread awareness of the dangers of creationism – the xkcd comics, the petitions by 1400 scientists named Steve, the New York Times articles:

Frequency of the word ‘creationism’ in the New York Times as a percent of all words, source here but currently down

…yeah, the 2000s were a weird time. I’ve talked about this particular conflict already in my post New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed. Today I want to focus on another aspect.

All those creationists are still there. A 2019 Gallup poll found that 40% of Americans believed “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so”, little different from 44% who believed it when they first asked in 1983 or the 46% who believed it in 2006.

And the Discovery Institute! They’re still there! You can read their very modern-looking website at discovery.org. Their blog has three new posts on creationism just from the past two days (eg A Hot Seller From Discovery Institute Press: New Book Offers Intelligent Design In A Nutshell).

Same with the Creation Museum! Last year they completed a $5.5 million upgrade, including a planetarium, “4D theater”, and a snazzy “Biblical authority exhibit”. And they still have their full-scale replica of Noah’s Ark (looking more and more prescient these days).

Same with Michael Behe! He’s still publishing! Last year he released his newest book, Darwin Devolves, which “gives a sweeping tour of how modern theories of evolution fall short and how the devolving nature of Darwin’s mechanism limits them even further”. Also, in case you wanted to read Behe’s opinions about the coronavirus, that is a thing you can do.

As far as I can tell, the creationists are putting in just as much effort today as they did in 2006. But the mainstream went from fiercely challenging them, to totally ignoring them. And the change didn’t help them at all. They haven’t won any major victories, or convinced any more people. If anything, they’re doing worse – nobody hears about them. Although the decline in media coverage hasn’t prevented people from being creationist, it hasn’t helped creationism spread or build clout either.

I see people using rivers of ink to fight the modern equivalents of creationists. Pizzagaters, flat-earthers, moon-hoaxers, QAnon, deep-staters, people who say the coronavirus is a bioweapon, Alex Jones. Are they sure it’s not equally useless? Equally counterproductive?

Even beyond that, I see people willing to legitimize any tactic if it gives them a leg up on this group – censorship, social shaming, no-platforming, changing social media from a free public square to a carefully-monitored walled garden. Spreading the cowpox of doubt, teaching people to optimize for solving easy problems in ways that make it harder for them to think about the hard ones. The justification is always the same – if we don’t tighten control, then facts and science will lose out to bullshit and denialism, and fringe ideologies will burst into the mainstream and overwhelm it.

If that were the only way to save civilization from anti-science barbarism, maybe it would be a worthwhile trade. But the experience of unchallenged creationism suggests maybe we can relax.

The post The plans for Greece’s reopening to tourists appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

I recently pointed to a Matt Yglesias tweet that called on the US government to punish China by allowing Hong Kong residents to migrate to the US. Alas, the US government seems to be moving in the opposite direction, restricting the migration of highly talented Chinese students.

Fortunately, the UK government has better judgment:

The UK has set itself on a collision course with China after broadening its offer on extended visa rights from 350,000 to almost 3m Hong Kong residents.

After Beijing announced plans this week to proceed with the imposition of a national security law on Hong Kong, UK foreign secretary Dominic Raab retaliated with an “unprecedented” pledge to expand visa rights for British National (Overseas) passport holders in Hong Kong from six to 12 months and “provide a pathway to future citizenship”.

Hong Kong has many highly talented entrepreneurs that would provide a boost to any country to which they emigrated.

PS. Does anyone know where the 3 million figure comes from? Is that the number of Hong Kong residents who were living there back in 1997, when Hong Kong was still a British colony?

Maybe the US could offer visas to the other 4 million HK residents.

(18 COMMENTS)

When assessing the United States government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, most observers focus on the performances of President Donald Trump, his most prominent advisers, and the governors of large states.

The George Mason economist Tyler Cowen, who has helped raise more than $1 million in prizes for promising efforts to combat the coronavirus, has an additional concern. “Our regulatory state is failing us,” he has repeatedly warned on his blog, Marginal Revolution. In fact, Cowen sees those failures as among the most significant obstacles to successfully combatting the virus. He fleshed out his concerns and desired reforms in an interview conducted over email. This is a lightly edited version of our exchange.

---

Conor Friedersdorf: What is the “regulatory state”? And what does it have to do with America’s pandemic response?

Tyler Cowen: I define “the regulatory state,” in this context, as the set of laws, rules, and institutions set up to govern, oversee, and indeed define our response to the pandemic. Of course, the regulatory state reports to both the executive and the legislatures, so this is all of a piece, but in the short run, agencies and bureaucracies typically have a great deal of independent influence.

[George Packer: We are living in a failed state]

Friedersdorf: What are the most significant failures of America’s regulatory state as it relates to the pandemic?

Cowen: Let me give you a few examples:

1. New York state regulations, until very recently, forced nursing homes to accept COVID-19-positive patients being discharged from hospitals. Nursing homes, especially in the northeast, have been an epicenter for COVID-19 casualties. By law, they were forced to accept more than 4,500 COVID-19-positive patients, often without proper PPE for their staff.
2. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed its own test procedures early on, but those proved to be faulty and based on contaminated materials. At the same time, the CDC legally prevented Americans from pursuing other testing options. That is a major reason America fell behind in the testing race, and with its late start, America was not able to buy up enough testing materials before those items became very scarce.
3. One particular method of COVID-19 testing has been up and running in Washington State, supported by the governor, local officials, and the Gates Foundation. This testing has been saving lives, and it does not endanger anyone. The FDA recently shut down such testing on the basis of a sheer technicality, and scientists find this decision baffling.
4. The World Health Organization, our own CDC, and Dr. [Anthony] Fauci all told Americans that masks were ineffective and not important. It turns out masks can help a great deal in limiting virus transmission, and later the WHO reversed its stance. The American government is still sending mixed signals.
5. One Texas entrepreneur offered to gear up his factory, early on, to make masks in great quantities. The Department of Health and Human Services let his offer lie fallow, as the agency was too slow, uncertain, and tied up in bureaucracy.

Those are just a few examples of many. And they are not small matters; they are major reasons America has confronted this crisis so poorly. Former President Barack Obama recently stated: “More than anything, this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing.”

Friedersdorf: Some observers see public and private hospitals with insufficient stockpiles of personal protective equipment, or workers in crowded meatpacking plants falling ill, and conclude that America’s pandemic response is characterized by insufficient regulation. What do you say to them?

[Read: Why we’re running out of masks]

Cowen: They are partly, but by no means fully, right. I would favor better regulations for meatpacking plants, at least once we can figure out how to do them properly (temporary paid sick leave could serve as an interim measure). But as for PPE, regulations have done more to discourage supply than to boost it, and here I would cite required permits for mask factories, procurement failures, trade restrictions, and anti-price-gouging laws, which limit supply. Give hospitals more money and let them bid for masks.

Friedersdorf: Almost every prosperous country has a permanent bureaucracy characterized by lots of rules and regulations. Is there some reason that America’s regulatory state is impeding pandemic response more than the regulatory states of, say, Germany or South Korea?

Cowen: First, it is not yet clear whether America or Germany will, in the final analysis, have done the better job. Germany has been much better on testing and having a disciplined lockdown and risk communication, but when it comes to having a free, competitive biomedical establishment to search for cures, I would put my money on the United States.

As for the South Korean government, once the coronavirus arrived in their country, the government sat down with the private sector, figured out what needed to be done, and started doing it right away, including very aggressive procurement of PPE and testing. I think there are at least three differences that partly account for this difference in response. First, the South Korean state has very recent experience building lots of quality infrastructure. Second, SARS was a very real risk in South Korea, which boosted their readiness and also response capabilities. Third, South Koreans are used to the idea of existential risk, given their history and neighbors, and they do not regard themselves as invulnerable.

Friedersdorf: Which country’s regulatory state comes closest to ideal? Based on which characteristics?

Cowen: Taiwan and South Korea have done excellent work in this area, based on speed of response and taking the problem seriously. Taiwan, like South Korea, is also used to the idea of existential risk and risk coming from China. Singapore mostly did a very good job, but with one big lapse, namely failing to secure the dormitories of migrant workers. New Zealand did a very good job too. Three of those four cases are from non-complacent countries that take existential risk seriously. New Zealand has had ongoing regulatory reform, and mechanisms to improve governance, since its broader reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. They all had a strong civil service and leaders who took the problem seriously. They are also smaller nations, islands, or territories having strong island-like properties (South Korea).

Friedersdorf: Until we improve the U.S. regulatory state, should its shortcomings inform the pandemic strategies we pursue?

Cowen: We should invest as much as possible in biomedical research to try to beat this thing back. That applies to corporate R&D, nonprofits and universities, and also our government. By the way, that is yet another instance of regulatory failure—ever try to repurpose National Institutes of Health funding on the fly? Even during a pandemic, that is very hard to do. Our various apparatuses for funding research have responded far too slowly to this crisis, and I would include the private sector and the foundation sector in that criticism as well.

Friedersdorf: What’s more important in a political leader: someone who’ll push to formally get rid of flawed rules and regulations, or someone who is adept at navigating the regulatory state as it exists when they are elected?

Cowen: I don’t see a general rule; this one is going to depend on context. I certainly would not assume that the former is more effective. For a pandemic, it can be hard to know in advance exactly which rules and regulations to repeal; rather, a speedy and flexible response is at a premium. You do want a leader who understands the detailed workings of government, and the countries with better response performance usually have had that.

[Francis Fukuyama: The thing that determines a country’s resistance to the coronavirus]

Friedersdorf: On the right, at institutions such as the Claremont Institute, there’s a critique of the administrative state that says it is extra-constitutional, unaccountable to the people, and ought to be reined in by elected leaders asserting legitimate authority over unelected bureaucrats who have grown too powerful. On the left, there is widespread concern that Trump is capriciously firing public-health experts and inspectors general, and that allowing him to do so is making the federal bureaucracy more dysfunctional, not less so. Where are your allegiances in that conflict, given your view that the U.S. bears significant downside costs when its regulatory state is not functioning well?

Cowen: It is important not to make this a partisan conflict. I do not view the administrative state as extra-constitutional. That said, it has become far too inflexible, and not sufficiently focused on outcomes. It is time we woke up and realized that we have a system that simply is not working. As for the views you cite on the left, I largely agree with their critique of Trump’s performance in this crisis, though I prefer the less partisan versions of that critique. The performance of the New York state governor and mayor—both Democrats—has been dismal as well … New York State arguably has been the worst performer by far, and Hawaii arguably the best or among the best. Both are strongly Democratic. Some red states, such as Georgia, Florida, and Texas, are proceeding with relatively speedy and liberal reopenings. As I am writing this, it remains to be seen how well that will work out, but I would say a high risk is being run.

Friedersdorf: If you could change one thing about the culture of America’s bureaucracy, what would it be?

Cowen: Regulation should be more goal-oriented, and less prescriptive in terms of the details. It should be easier to exercise judgment to meet particular worthy ends, rather than being hamstrung by restrictions and details. Regulation should recognize that emergency situations will come along when very fast action will be needed. Our current regulatory state is not built around those ideas, and its culture is accordingly complacent, and compliance- and process-oriented rather than success-oriented. These days, the American public sector just isn’t very good at getting things done.

Friedersdorf: To reform the regulatory state, should we be thinking in terms of big versus small? Powerful versus weak? Smart versus dumb? Competent versus incompetent? Flexible versus inflexible? Some other paradigm? What particular steps should be taken to improve the performance of the regulatory state?

Cowen: So much needs to be done. First, we need far more data on the scope of regulation, what it does and doesn’t do, and its costs. Second, the possibility of excess regulation needs to become a political issue once again, as it was right before the time of airline deregulation. Third, America needs to be far more open to learning lessons from other countries. “Smart versus dumb” is the best framing of the ones you list. And we should not be reluctant to admit and indeed emphasize that some areas, such as carbon emissions, require much more regulation. That said, when it comes to green energy, some doses of deregulation could help as well—right now it is very difficult in many communities to build a wind farm, even though that is a very green form of energy.

Friedersdorf: Are you aware of any particular government agency that outperforms most others? If so, what lessons can we take from it?

Cowen: The response of our Federal Reserve System has been excellent. They prevented a global financial crisis by prompt action in mid-March, and in general, Fed monetary policy has helped stabilize the economy. The Fed has an excellent staff, reasonable governance, and first-rate leadership at the top. You will note that the Fed is largely autonomous; outside of normal civil-service regulations, they pay staff more than does the federal government. Perhaps our public-health bureaucracy should move in a similar direction, as my colleague Garett Jones [a GMU economics professor] has been suggesting.

Friedersdorf: If political leaders and bureaucrats took your critique to heart and started making changes, what would we look for as markers of success, and what would signal that they were going too far and overcorrecting?

Cowen: An obsession with data and with learning from other countries do not themselves constitute success. Still, they are very good starting points to look for. Another simple sign is when American institutions dealing with COVID-19 testing and PPE supply report that the government is a greater aid than hindrance. We are not there yet. As for a sign that we have gone too far, one would be if we distribute a doubtful vaccine for reasons of political expediency without sufficient testing and study.

Friedersdorf: As you look ahead to pandemic challenges we’re likely to face in the future, what prospective regulatory-state failures worry you most? What preemptive correctives can be taken to avoid them?

Cowen: Eventually, we will indeed get PPE and COVID-19 testing problems worked out, even though many lives will have been lost in the meantime, and many jobs destroyed. Over the medium term, looking forward, I am more worried that biomedical research doesn’t get funded quickly enough, risk communication from our executive branch is abysmal, and our plans for reopening are not very coherent or well understood, by either citizens or even policy makers themselves. As for recommendations, I would repeat the various points suggested above.

[Read: There’s one big reason the U.S. economy can’t reopen]

Friedersdorf: How could the press improve its coverage of the regulatory state?

Cowen: Statnews.com is a very good source for covering the regulatory state during COVID-19. They are an offshoot of The Boston Globe, and my belief in what they are doing does not stem from any particular ideological affinity. They simply have very well-informed expert journalists, and they focus on reaching a sophisticated audience (disclaimer: My nonprofit program, Emergent Ventures, has made a grant to them).

The New York Times and The Washington Post and, yes, also The Atlantic have published some excellent articles outlining failures of the regulatory state during COVID-19. I do not see, however, that the opinion pages of the first two institutions have done a sufficient job in putting the pieces together and helping their readers see the bigger picture. The media have already done some great work to date, and I am not in general a media-basher. But can you imagine the major, mostly left-leaning NYT columnists and op-ed writers making regulatory reform a major crusade? I can’t quite see it, but let’s hope.

Friedersdorf: Libertarians and small-government conservatives are highly skeptical of the regulatory state. What do they get wrong?

Cowen: Very often, the alternative to regulation is ex post facto reliance on the courts and juries to redress wrongs. Of course, the judiciary and its components are further instruments of governments, and they have their own flaws. There is no particular reason, from, say, a libertarian point of view, to expect such miracles from the courts. Very often, I would rather take my chances with the regulators.

Also, let’s not forget the cases where the regulators are flat-out right. Take herbal medicines, penis enlargers, or vaccines. In those cases, the regulators are essentially correct, and there is a substantial segment of the population that is flat-out wrong on those issues, and sometimes they are wrong in dangerous ways.

Friedersdorf: Are there critiques of the FDA in particular or the pandemic-era regulatory state more generally that deserve wider attention?

Cowen: There are legitimate questions as to whether the FDA is too risk-averse in normal times, raising the costs of drug approval and pursuing safety at the expense of innovation. I don’t think we should be trying to settle those debates right now. Conditions have changed, and we do in fact need faster responses during COVID-19 times. That means greater attention to clearing and approving testing procedures, securing and enabling the supply of masks (by no means the province of the FDA only, to be clear), and yes, accelerated scrutiny for candidate treatments and vaccines. The FDA has been failing on testing and masks; we don’t yet know how they are doing in terms of accelerated treatment, but their overall record in very recent times has not been positive.

Friedersdorf: Is there any figure in the regulatory state to whom you’d like to pose a question here?

Cowen: To the heads and senior staff of the FDA, CDC, OIRA (Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs), and other agencies: What changes do you need from Congress, the president, and the courts to treat matters such as pandemics more urgently? To heads of the NSF (National Science Foundation) and NIH: Why can’t you spend more money more quickly on COVID-19-relevant research? What changes do you need made? And in which ways are you yourselves obstacles to a speedy reallocation of funds and priorities?

"AI has ushered in a new golden age of semiconductor innovation," reports Forbes: For most of the history of computing, the prevailing chip architecture has been the CPU, or central processing unit... But while CPUs' key advantage is versatility, today's leading AI techniques demand a very specific — and intensive — set of computations. Deep learning entails the iterative execution of millions or billions of relatively simple multiplication and addition steps... CPUs process computations sequentially, not in parallel. Their computational core and memory are generally located on separate modules and connected via a communication system (a bus) with limited bandwidth. This creates a choke point in data movement known as the "von Neumann bottleneck". The upshot: it is prohibitively inefficient to train a neural network on a CPU... In the early 2010s, the AI community began to realize that Nvidia's gaming chips were in fact well suited to handle the types of workloads that machine learning algorithms demanded. Through sheer good fortune, the GPU had found a massive new market. Nvidia capitalized on the opportunity, positioning itself as the market-leading provider of AI hardware. The company has reaped incredible gains as a result: Nvidia's market capitalization jumped twenty-fold from 2013 to 2018. Yet as Gartner analyst Mark Hung put it, "Everyone agrees that GPUs are not optimized for an AI workload." The GPU has been adopted by the AI community, but it was not born for AI. In recent years, a new crop of entrepreneurs and technologists has set out to reimagine the computer chip, optimizing it from the ground up in order to unlock the limitless potential of AI. In the memorable words of Alan Kay: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware...." The race is on to develop the hardware that will power the upcoming era of AI. More innovation is happening in the semiconductor industry today than at any time since Silicon Valley's earliest days. Untold billions of dollars are in play. Some highlights from the article: Google, Amazon, Tesla, Facebook and Alibaba, among other technology giants, all have in-house AI chip programs. Groq has announced a chip performing one quadrillion operations per second. "If true, this would make it the fastest single-die chip in history." Cerebras' chip "is about 60 times larger than a typical microprocessor. It is the first chip in history to house over one trillion transistors (1.2 trillion, to be exact). It has 18 GB memory on-chip — again, the most ever." Lightmatter believes using light instead of electricity "will enable its chip to outperform existing solutions by a factor of ten."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The post The Miracle of the Internet appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.