Jack

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The Universal Basic Income is only a tangential interest of mine.  Yet when I’ve debated it, I’ve been consistently impressed by how little the eager advocates try to teach me.*  Case in point: I learned more from reading three paragraphs in Kevin Lang’s Poverty and Discrimination than in my typical conversation with a UBI enthusiast:

Because the stakes involved in instituting a negative income tax were so high, policy analysts convinced the federal government to conduct experiments in which some people were randomly assigned to be eligible for the negative income tax while others were randomly assigned to remain subject to traditional welfare. In the experimental group, there was also variation in the generosity of the program. Four experiments were conducted in the United States and a fifth in Canada. The largest of these is known as SIME/DIME (the Seattle Income Maintenance Experiment / Denver Income Maintenance Experiment).

Many policy analysts found the results of the experiments disappointing. Although the labor supply response was modest, it added substantially to the cost of the program. Depending on the generosity of the program evaluated in SIME/DIME, the labor supply response could account for over half of the costs. The least generous program would save $4 billion but would make 95 percent of recipients worse off. A program that would guarantee support at the poverty level and tax-back benefits at a rate of only 50 percent would still make one-fourth of recipients worse off and would exceed the cost of the welfare program then current by $30 billion, an enormous increase.

There were also some “unintended consequences,” the social science equivalent of medical side effects. In particular, the divorce rate rose among recipients randomly assigned to the negative income tax. The combination of the costs of the labor supply effects and the effect on marriage led Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an early supporter of the negative income tax, to withdraw his support.

If I were an enthusiastic UBI advocate, I would know this experimental evidence forwards and backwards.  Almost all of the advocates I’ve encountered, in contrast, have little interest in numbers or past experience.  What excites them is the “One Ring to Rule Them All” logic of the idea: “We get rid of everything else, and replace it with an elegant, gift-wrapped UBI.”  For a policy salesman, this evasive approach makes sense: Slogans sell; numbers and history don’t.  For a policy analyst, however, this evasive approach is negligence itself.  If you scrutinize your policy ideas less cautiously than you read Amazon reviews for your next television, something is very wrong.

*Exception: Ed Dolan

Since 9/11, I’ve had the view that America’s security measures were wildly excessive and counterproductive. They very likely ended up costing lives by making flying so unpleasant. In the past, I’ve assumed that this reflected irrational fears among the public. Our bureaucrats are schooled in cost/benefit analysis and know that these measures are unwise. But politicians worry about being blamed by voters if there is another terrorist attack when the government had not “done everything it could” to prevent the attack.

After visiting China, I’m not so sure about this. China has security checks at all subway stations. It’s very difficult to enter an office building without permission.  Many roads are blocked.  I was especially surprised by the train stations, where security is far more intensive than in either Europe or Japan—basically three layers of controls before you can go to the tracks—including passport control for a high-speed train ride lasting 15 minutes. While the Chinese government does care about public opinion to some extent, it’s hard to believe that they are under as much pressure as elected governments in Europe and Japan. Then why the intensive security?

I suspect that part of this is the bureaucratic instinct for control. Thus if you visit a museum in China you first pass through security (which is something that also occurs in some places in the West.) But then you must also show a passport in order to get a ticket, even when the museum is free. So this isn’t just about security; it’s also about information.

China’s Social Credit system has gotten a lot of attention, but in my view the WeChat payment system is the bigger story. It’s increasingly difficult to buy things in China without having the WeChat app on your smartphone. For instance, many vending machines don’t take coins or bills, only WeChat. Ditto for some restaurants.  A few days ago, we tried to buy a ride on a Ferris wheel in Tianjin, but you could only buy the tickets online. At the rate things are going, it wouldn’t surprise me if China became a completely cashless society at some point in the 21st century. (Good luck to tourists–you can’t even download WeChat without a Chinese bank account.)

In fairness, apps like WeChat offer enormous convenience for Chinese consumers.  And even in the West, most people don’t seem to care about the loss of privacy from modern technology.

I doubt whether the Chinese government pays much attention to the WeChat purchases of individual Chinese citizens. And I’ve read that the Social Credit system is not very effective—so far. But I suspect that the trends I see in China will eventually spread elsewhere, and at some point all governments will become “potentially totalitarian” in the sense of having the technological capability of exercising total control over the population. They’ll be able to know everywhere you move, everything you read, and everything you buy.  Whether they will actually exercise that control is another question, which I can’t answer.

I don’t like where the world is headed.  But perhaps younger people are comfortable with all this technology.

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Last week I wrote an article in which I suggested planting trees as potentially a much cheaper way to slow or even reverse global warming, cheaper, that is, than a carbon tax. I wrote:

The third low-cost way to rein in global warming is by planting trees. Trees absorb and store CO₂ emissions. You could call the tree-planting strategy geo-engineering, but it would count as such in a very low-tech form. According to a July 4, 2019 article in The Guardian, planting one trillion trees would be much cheaper than a carbon tax and much more effective. At an estimated cost of 30 cents per additional tree, the overall cost would be $300 billion. That’s large, but it’s a one-time cost. Moreover, writes The Guardian’s environment editor Damian Carrington, such a tree-planting program “could remove two-thirds of all the emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by human activities, a figure the scientists describe as ‘mind-blowing’.” A carbon tax, by contrast, would simply slow the rate of emissions into the atmosphere.

Yesterday I came across this CNN news story from July 30.

Ethiopia planted more than 353 million trees in 12 hours on Monday, which officials believe is a world record.

The burst of tree planting was part of a wider reforestation campaign named “Green Legacy,” spearheaded by the country’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. Millions of Ethiopians across the country were invited to take part in the challenge and within the first six hours, Ahmed tweeted that around 150 million trees had been planted.

“We’re halfway to our goal,” he said and encouraged Ethiopians to “build on the momentum in the remaining hours.” After the 12-hour period ended, the Prime Minister took to Twitter again to announce that Ethiopia not only met its “collective #GreenLegacy goal,” but exceeded it.

Hmm. Let’s round 353 million trees down to 333 million. That’s one third of a billion. My article said that we need about 1 trillion. So during that one 12-hour period, volunteers in one country achieved 1/3000 of what was needed. Imagine that 50 times as many volunteers in other countries were as efficient as the Ethiopians. In a 12-hour period, they could plant 50 times 1/3000 or 1/60 of what is needed. So all we would need is 60 such 12-hour periods per person. Stretch that out over 3 years, and it means volunteering to take one long day to plant trees 20 times a year for 3 years.

Of course, that’s not the least-cost way. Far cheaper would be for millions of rich people like me and a number of our readers in rich countries to put up, say, $500 each, and hire low-income people in poor countries to do it. I won’t bother working out the math, but you can see this is not a very expensive proposition. And if you think it is expensive, compare that to the amount of high-value time spent arguing and lobbying for (and against) a carbon tax.

If you thought things were bad in the US, consider the UK. Here’s the FT:

If Mr Johnson’s prorogation ploy succeeds, Britain will forfeit any right to lecture other countries on their democratic shortcomings. The UK’s constitutional arrangements have long relied on conventions. The danger existed that an unscrupulous leader could trample on such conventions. That has not happened, in the modern era, until now.

Parliamentarians must seize their opportunity next week to assert the will of the Commons against that of the prime minister. . . .

Mr Johnson might seek to ignore such a vote and try to hang on until after Brexit. This would be an even greater constitutional affront than his actions this week. It would confirm that Britain has a despot in Downing Street.

Two days ago, I said this about the US:

We like to believe that American presidents are not dictators, which may be true.  But that’s not because they lack dictatorial powers, rather it’s because they were too embarrassed to fully exercise those powers.  Over time, that reluctance has been gradually breaking down.  

The euro is used throughout most of Europe. Thus you’d naturally expect Europe’s financial center to be located in a country that uses the euro. But that’s not the case; the “Wall Street” of Europe is in “the City”, the term for London’s financial district. That’s as weird as if North America’s major financial center were located in Toronto. It seems like having a universally accepted language to do business deals (English) is more important than having a common currency.

I wonder is something similar is true for capital flows. David Beckworth expresses a popular view in a recent National Review article:

The world needs dollars to buy safe assets from the United States. This, combined with the reserve-currency role held by the dollar, raises demand for the dollar, making it more expensive. As long as the U.S. remains the main supplier of safe assets to the world, the dollar will continue to be relatively pricey, and the U.S. will probably continue to run trade deficits.

That seems reasonable, and I believe there is some truth in that claim. Nonetheless, I suspect that the English language is an even more powerful factor. Here is the US current account balance as a share of GDP:

Since 1983, the deficit seems to have averaged about 3% of GDP.  And here’s Australia:

A slightly larger deficit than in the US, on average, although this year their deficit is expected to shrink to only 0.4% of GDP.

From various sources, I found that Canada’s current account deficit is expected to be 2.6% of GDP in 2019, vs. 2.4% in the US.  New Zealand is expected to have a 3.6% deficit, while the UK expects a 4.1% deficit, “despite” the very weak pound sterling.  (I use scare quotes for the term ‘despite’, as a reminder that we should not be reasoning from a price change.  The US has a completely “normal” CA balance for English-speaking countries, indeed surprisingly small if one accounts for our huge budget deficit.

You might wonder if these deficits reflect the fact that English-speaking countries are rich, and can’t compete with low wage places like China and Mexico and Vietnam.  Nope, the world’s biggest current account surpluses are mostly in other rich places like the Netherlands (9.7% of GDP), Switzerland (9.6% of GDP), Singapore (15.8% of GDP), Denmark (6.8% of GDP), Norway (7.1% of GDP) and Germany (6.5% of GDP.)  High wages do not cause CA deficits.

So why do the English-speaking countries have persistent CA deficits?  I suspect it has something to do with the fact that English-speaking places are an attractive location for immigration and investment.  Immigrants to Australia who take out a mortgage and buy a house are contributing to their current account deficit.  Chinese buyers who invest in homes in LA or Vancouver tend to create deficits for the US and Canada.

That’s not to say the dollar’s role as a reserve currency plays no role in our deficit.  As an analogy, most economists believe that budget deficits contribute to our current account deficit.  I accept this claim, and have made that point in numerous blog posts.  And yet, America had a relatively large current account deficit during 1999-2001, despite several consecutive years of budget surpluses.  So just as the US dollar’s role as the world’s dominant reserve currency is not the whole story, neither are budget deficits the entire story.

In other words, it’s complicated.

PS.  If you believe the US current account deficit is somehow hurting our economy, ask yourself whether the Australian CA deficit has been hurting their economy during the past 28 recession-free years.

When Senator Kamala Harris is criticized for actions she took as San Francisco’s district attorney or as California’s attorney general, the Democratic presidential hopeful responds in two ways. She cites the most progressive aspects of her record, arguing that she’ll advocate in the White House for more reforms to the criminal-justice system. And she asserts that it is laudable to work for change from within broken institutions, “at the table where the decisions are made.”

She says very little, and nothing convincing, about some of the most serious charges against her, like that she fought hard to keep innocents in prison and failed to fight hard against corrupt cops.

If elected president, Harris seems as likely as any of her Democratic rivals, and far more likely than Donald Trump, to pursue a criminal-justice-reform agenda that overlaps with policies I favor as a civil libertarian. And I do not hold it against Harris that as a municipal and state official she enforced many laws that I regard as unjust. All the candidates now running for president will, if elected, preside over the enforcement of some laws that they and I regard as unjust.

But like her rivals, the reforms that Harris would sign into law as president would depend mostly on what Democrats in Congress could get to her desk. Far more important is how she would preside over a federal legal system and bureaucracy that is prone to frequent abuses. And her record casts significant doubts about whether she can be trusted to oversee federal law enforcement, the military, intelligence agencies, the detention of foreign prisoners, and more.

The Innocent-Man Test

On June 6, 1998, police were summoned to a bar in the San Fernando Valley where a fight had broken out. The Los Angeles Police Department officers Michael Rex and Thomas Townsend rolled into the parking lot and turned on their floodlights. They later testified that they saw Daniel Larsen, then 30, pull a long, thin object from his waistband and throw it under a vehicle; that they ordered everyone in the parking lot to get down on their knees; that they retrieved a double-edged knife with a weighted handle from beneath a car; and that they arrested Larsen, who was convicted of felony possession of a deadly weapon during a jury trial, despite protesting his innocence. Larsen had two prior felonies and was sentenced to 28 years to life.

Larsen continued to proclaim his innocence, but got nowhere for years, until he became one of the few inmates chosen by the Innocence Project to benefit from its limited resources.

The petition assembled on his behalf was formidable. At trial, Larsen’s defense attorney called no witnesses, having failed to do the leg work of identifying any who would help his case. But as it turned out, a man named James McNutt, a retired Army sergeant first class and former police chief, had been in the parking lot that night with his wife, Elinore, and both agreed to give sworn statements asserting that they saw a different man throw the object under the car, and that they specifically saw Larsen just standing there doing nothing.

The man that the couple saw is named William Hewitt. And he swore that’s what happened, too. So did Hewitt’s girlfriend, who said Hewitt sold his motorcycle shortly after the incident to bail Larsen out of prison, because Hewitt felt guilty that another man was being punished for his actions. Not only did Larsen’s defense attorney fail to identify or call these witnesses; he also failed to request that the knife be examined for fingerprints and did not present a theory of third-party culpability. He was later disbarred for failing other clients.

There was, however, a procedural weakness in Larsen’s petition: He filed it in 2008, long after the one-year deadline for appeals. After missing that deadline, getting federal habeas relief is difficult and rare. One must show evidence of actual innocence.

In 2009, Magistrate Judge Suzanne H. Segal finally heard testimony from the multiple witnesses who proclaimed that the knife belonged to another man. She ruled that in light of the new evidence, Larsen’s case seemed to be among those “extraordinary cases where the petitioner asserts his innocence and establishes that the court cannot have confidence in the contrary finding of guilt.” She declared that “no reasonable juror would have found Petitioner guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” and that he “clearly received ineffective assistance of counsel,” but stopped short of declaring him to be innocent outright.

On June 14, 2010, Larsen was still in prison, but the state was ordered to either retry him within 90 days or to release him. Harris, who was elected attorney general that year, could have chosen to free the man who had already served more than a decade in prison for possessing a knife that almost certainly wasn’t his.

Under her leadership, the attorney general’s office instead filed an appeal attempting to block his release because he hadn’t filed his claim for relief in a timely manner. It sought to keep a man in prison on procedural grounds, despite strong evidence of innocence. As a result, Larsen needlessly spent two more years in prison, until the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that he had cleared the threshold for producing proof of innocence and should be released. Even then, Harris’s office continued to litigate the matter, arguing before a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit that “one reasonable juror could still vote to convict.” The argument failed. And Harris’s office finally conceded defeat.

Still, it did not quite relent.

According to the journalist Nick Martin, the freed inmate applied to get money from the California board that compensates the wrongly imprisoned. The going rate is $140 for every day of wrongful incarceration. “To be declared eligible for compensation, a person has to prove to the court that they deserve the money. And in order to secure that proof, one of the main requirements of the board is a recommendation from the attorney general’s office,” Martin wrote. “When Harris’ office filed their suggestion on Sept. 4, 2014 that the board should decline Larsen’s claim, despite him already proving his innocence in court, that essentially sealed his financial fate.” Martin reported last month that Larsen now lives in a small garage and relies on welfare payments.

Harris’s office didn’t merely fight to keep a man in prison after he’d demonstrated his innocence to the satisfaction of the Innocence Project, a judge, and an appeals court. After losing, it fought to keep the newly released man from being compensated for the decade that he spent wrongfully imprisoned.

Harris failed the innocent-man test.

The Disclosing-Misconduct Test

In 2010, the crime lab run by the San Francisco Police Department was rocked by a scandal when one of its three technicians was caught taking evidence––cocaine––home from work, raising the prospect of unreliable analysis and testimony in many hundreds of drug cases. It was later discovered that, even prior to the scandal, an assistant district attorney had emailed Harris’ deputy at the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office complaining that the technician was “increasingly UNDEPENDABLE for testimony.”

But even after the technician was caught taking home cocaine, neither Harris nor anyone in her office notified defense attorneys in cases in which she had examined evidence.

“A review of the case, based on court records and interviews with key players, presents a portrait of Harris scrambling to manage a crisis that her staff saw coming but for which she was unprepared,” The Washington Post reported in March. “It also shows how Harris, after six years as district attorney, had failed to put in place written guidelines for ensuring that defendants were informed about potentially tainted evidence and testimony that could lead to unfair convictions.”

In fact, her office initially blamed the San Francisco police for failing to tell defense attorneys about the matter. A judge was incredulous, telling one of the assistant district attorneys, “But it is the district attorney's office affirmative obligation. It's not the police department who has the affirmative obligation. It's the district attorney. That's who the courts look to. That's who the community looks to, to make sure all of that information constitutionally required is provided to the defense.”

Harris claimed that her staffers didn’t tell her about the matter for several months.

The Wall Street Journal reported in June that years earlier, her aides had sent her a memo urging her to adopt a policy of disclosing police misconduct to defense attorneys to safeguard the right to a fair trial. Police unions, however, were opposed to the policy, and Harris failed to act on it until after the 2010 scandal.

Had she chosen otherwise, she would not have woken up to this San Francisco Chronicle story: “Kamala Harris’ office violated defendants’ rights by hiding damaging information about a police drug lab technician and was indifferent to demands that it account for its failings, a judge declared Thursday … In a scathing ruling, the judge concluded that prosecutors had failed to fulfill their constitutional duty to tell defense attorneys about problems surrounding Deborah Madden, the now-retired technician at the heart of the cocaine-skimming scandal that led police to shut down the drug analysis section of their crime lab.”

Meanwhile, Jeff Adachi, then head of the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, declared at the time, “Anytime I've asked the district attorney for a meeting, I've been told the district attorney is out of town or not available. We need a district attorney who will give this the attention it deserves.”

Harris failed the disclosure-of-misconduct test.

The Corrupt-Prosecutors Test

For years, R. Scott Moxley, an indefatigable alt-weekly reporter, has covered police and prosecutorial misconduct for OC Weekly, a beat that never left him short for material, and that absolutely exploded in 2014, when Harris was attorney general. As he summarized it, “Sheriff’s deputies had spent years running unconstitutional jailhouse scams against pretrial inmates to secretly secure prosecutorial victories at trials. In return, prosecutors under then–District Attorney Tony Rackauckas looked the other way when deputies hid, doctored or destroyed exculpatory evidence from defendants; repeatedly committed perjury; and disobeyed lawfully issued court orders. Tens of thousands of pages of records inside the Orange County Superior Court, as well as at the California Court of Appeal, prove beyond a reasonable doubt each element of what became known nationally as the jailhouse-informant scandal.”

For months, Moxley watched as details of the scandal emerged in a Santa Ana courtroom, and then as the judge declared that multiple deputies had perjured themselves on the stand. Earlier this year, he gave a scathing assessment of Harris’s response, which amounted to almost nothing by the time she was elected to the Senate in 2016.

According to Moxley:

After more bombshell evidence emerged that expanded the scope and intensity of the deputies’ cheating, [Judge] Goethals—a former homicide prosecutor—wrote another ruling expressing exasperation over the corruption.

Harris finally acted.

She announced the opening of an investigation into the Orange County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD). As months, then years passed, it became increasingly clear the probe was nothing more than a sham. Though efforts were made to conceal that fact from the public, illuminating details emerged. For example, Harris’ investigators incredibly obeyed Orange County Sheriff’s Department commands not to audio record certain statements from accused deputies.

More telling, however, is the fact that the alleged investigation long ago landed in bureaucratic oblivion. Though Goethals and the California Court of Appeal officially announced disgust with OCSD perjury years ago, the AG’s office—first under Harris and now with Xavier Becerra—hasn’t held anyone accountable after a probe that so far has lasted more than 1,411 days.

The probe later ended without any charges filed.

Moxley went on to quote Scott Sanders, the assistant public defender who first unearthed the corrupt behavior in question. Sanders declared, “The former attorney general’s efforts in Orange County were far from a profile in courage. Her unwillingness to stand up to dishonest law enforcement will be her lasting legacy here, and the criminal-justice system will continue to pay the price for years.”

In a separate case, Kern County prosecutor Robert Murray appended to a confession two fabricated lines that would significantly increase the potential sentence a defendant faced, then gave a falsified transcript to the defendant’s attorney. When the attorney found out what happened, he filed a motion to dismiss the indictment for prosecutorial misconduct.

Sidney Powell reported this in The Observer:

California Judge H.A. Staley got it right. He found that Mr. Murray’s fabrication of “evidence”—falsifying the transcript of a confession during discovery and plea negotiations—was “egregious, outrageous, and . . . shocked the conscience.”

The trial judge saw no laughing matter—and neither should the rest of us. He dismissed the indictment completely, and in a scathing opinion, also quoted by the appellate court, wrote that the prosecutor’s actions “diluted the protections accompanying the right to counsel and ran the risk of fraudulently inducing defendant to enter a plea and forfeit his right to a jury trial.” The court refused to “tolerate such outrageous conduct that results in the depravation of basic fundamental constitutional rights that are designed to provide basic fairness.”

As for Harris:

Undaunted by the criminal conduct of a state prosecutor, or the district court’s opinion, Ms. Harris appealed the decision dismissing the indictment. According to the California attorney general, only abject physical brutality would warrant a finding of prosecutorial misconduct and the dismissal of an indictment. Fortunately for all of us—and the Constitution—she lost again.

She failed the corrupt-prosecutors test.

Progressives are divided about Kamala Harris’s candidacy, with some criminal-justice reformers who started off skeptical warming to her. For example, Shaun King told BuzzFeed News, “I was a little slow to trust her as a reformer on criminal justice, but I think she’s proven herself to me. I think she’s become one of the better spokespersons for really serious criminal-justice reform in the Democratic Party.”

I don’t doubt that Harris will continue to champion prudent criminal-justice reforms, whether she continues in the Senate or becomes president. But speaking and even voting for sound criminal-justice policies and being a trustworthy overseer of a sprawling criminal-justice bureaucracy are very different things.

I can forgive a politician a vote on a crime bill that looks ill-conceived two decades later, or a too-slow evolution toward marijuana legalization, or even a principled belief in the death penalty, something I adamantly oppose. I find it far harder to forgive fighting to keep a man in jail in the face of strong evidence of innocence, running a team of prosecutors that withholds potentially exculpatory evidence from defense attorneys, and utterly failing as the state’s top prosecutor to rein in glaringly corrupt district attorneys and law enforcement.

At best, Harris displayed a pattern of striking ignorance about scandalous misconduct in hierarchies that she oversaw. And she is now asking the public to place her atop a bigger, more complicated, more powerful hierarchy, where abuses and unaccountable officials would do even more to subvert liberty and justice for all.

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The NYT has a piece discussing the Fed’s gradual reduction in bank capital requirements:

Some of the changes, seemingly incremental and technical on their own, could add up to a weakening of capital requirements installed in the wake of the crisis to prevent the largest banks from suffering the kind of destabilizing losses that imperiled the United States economy. Another imminent change will soften a rule intended to prevent banks from making risky bets with customer deposits.

Translation:

“Another imminent change will soften a rule intended to prevent banks from making risky bets with taxpayer insured funds.”

After the banking crisis, Congress passed the massive Dodd-Frank bill, which somehow “forgot” to address most of the actual causes of the crisis.  One concrete step in Dodd-Frank that its supporters often point to was the higher capital requirements.  But now that’s also being chipped away.

In a perfect world, there would be no capital requirements at all, but also no FDIC, no t00-big-to-fail, no Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, no FHA, etc.  Given all the moral hazard in the system, there needs to be some way of discouraging excessive risk-taking.

Deregulation doesn’t always reduce the footprint of the government, in this case it makes the government even more involved in the financial system.

Meanwhile, the WSJ reports that “unconventional mortgages” (no longer called subprime) are on the rise again:

I don’t have strong views on the appropriate regulation of subprime mortgages.  What I object to is procyclical banking regulation.  We loosen regulations during booms and tighten them during recessions.  Thus our banking regulators make the same error as our monetary policymakers—a procyclical policy regime that makes the economy less stable.

There’s a lot of talk about “macroprudential regulation”, but our policymakers do the exact opposite.

Are coastal real estate markets far too expensive for new home buyers?  One pessimistic theory is that the very few Americans can afford to buy houses in the expensive coastal markets. In this view, we need to produce housing at much lower price points in order to make it “affordable”.

Another question is whether building more housing will reduce prices.  One pessimistic theory suggests that just building lots more housing in expensive coastal markets won’t solve the problem of high prices. For example, this is from an excellent article discussing NIMBYism and YIMBYism:

One big problem with SB 50, Nall believes, is that its beneficiaries aren’t clear, other than the real estate developers who back it, and, perhaps, the young white-collar renters who might easily afford to move to Austin instead. Housing isn’t a pure supply-and-demand problem; location is a huge factor. Some say that the amount of demand to live in the Bay is literally insatiable, and that costs will never come down naturally. And the jury is out on whether “trickle-down housing”—also known as filtering—brings down rents. You could fill a basketball court with the economists and policy wonks who are arguing about this right now.

Each of the two pessimistic theories that I described are entirely plausible.  Students of EC101 will recognize that both are essentially “elasticity” questions.  However, these two pessimistic theories cannot both be true.  One assumes demand is relatively elastic and the other assumes demand is relatively inelastic.  Either building lots of new housing brings prices down sharply, or lots of Americans can afford to buy really expensive homes in coastal regions.

In fact, both pessimistic theories are addressing relatively uninteresting issues.  The interesting issue is this:

If we build lots more housing in the Bay Area, will lots more people be able to afford to live in the Bay Area?

Unlike with the two pessimistic theories above, the answer to this question is unambiguous:  Yes!

And this statement is true regardless of the elasticity of demand for housing.

PS.  I wrote this post a few weeks ago, and was prompted to post it now because I came across these interesting tweets, on a related point:

[You may wish to skip this post.]

I am currently making my eighth trip to Beijing, 25 years after my first trip. In my previous seven trips I visited as a middle-aged man, and now I’m an old man. If you are an old guy considering your first trip to Asia, I’d suggest Japan.

While China is not an easy country for a foreigner to travel in, it is full of interest. And for the locals it’s definitely getting better. I expected the old people I spoke with to grouse about how much better things used to be (as old people do), but instead they were as enthused as Silicon Valley millennials gushing about their newest toy. “We Chat is so easy to use.” “You can get things delivered right to your door.” “There are many more trees in Beijing and you are again seeing animal life, especially birds.” “There are so many subway lines now.”

It’s been 7 years since I was last in Beijing, and the city has changed about as much as I would have expected. I am staying with in-laws in an apartment in the university district (Haidian). From the front door I see this in one direction:

These are kind of depressing looking apartment buildings, as you’d see in middle income countries. But don’t be fooled; the units are extremely expensive. (Roughly $10,000 per sq. meter, I believe.) It’s in an area with good schools, which is gold.

Turning in a different direction from the exact same spot, you see a typical high income country apartment complex (much more expensive), where my mother-in-law lives. The price/monthly rent ratios are insanely high (maybe 1000X?) as the Chinese prefer to own property.

This summarizes modern Beijing. Today, it’s basically a 1st world city, with lots of legacy buildings from earlier decades that look more like what you see in a developing country. But the proportion of modern buildings is significantly higher than in 2012.

Update: That’s not to say there aren’t still plenty of “middle-income country” neighborhoods, especially in outlying suburbs.

I find it hard to compare Beijing with cities in developed countries, as it’s always “apples and oranges”. Beijing is often very messy looking, and with your eyes closed it smells like a developing country. They seem to want to build lots of things quickly, without much thought to the detailed amenities that the Japanese are so good at. But it’s also pretty high tech, with the “We Chat” payments system being more advanced than American payments.

There’s also a huge distinction between indoors and outdoors. Where I live in Orange County, both indoors and outdoors are equally “nice.” In Beijing, the outdoors is dirty and messy, while the indoors are often the other extreme, especially in newer places. If you went from an American department store to one in Beijing, you’d feel like your vision suddenly jumped from 20-30 to 20-20. The white marble floors are polished, the goods are artfully arrayed and so well-illuminated as to appear almost hyperreal. In the inside, Beijing seems almost an order of magnitude more economically advanced than the street scenes.

Like many Asian cities, Beijing is a nightmare for pedestrians. But they are now developing European-style neighborhoods like Dashilan, which goes under the acronym “FUN”. This area has the most impressive Starbucks I’ve ever seen (including lots of alcohol drinks, although I tried a citrus iced coffee with ice cream for $10), and a really neat bookstore. Sebastian Edwards will be pleased to note that his book on the gold clause Supreme Court case was prominently displayed, but alas, no “Midas Paradox.” Overall, it had a nice mix of restored old buildings, fake old buildings, and ultra-modern buildings.

Ironically, “globalization” is making China turn from soulless western corporate monstrosities to quaint, 19th century-style, walkable Chinese neighborhoods. The Chinese travel to Europe, and then want to create the same thing at home. (Recall the T.S. Eliot line about seeing home again for the first time.)

Overall, it remains a mostly unattractive city on the outside, but with many places of high interest. The historical places have been nicely restored. (Fortunately, Asians care less about “authenticity”.) Unfortunately, right now those famous places are overrun with tourists. The Chinese tourists now completely dominate western tourists, perhaps by 100 to 1. I gather that tourist overcrowding is becoming a big issue all over the world.

Don’t be misled by the $10 coffee I cited. Two days ago, I bought an egg McMuffin and a cup of coffee for a total of 8 yuan at McDonalds. That’s about $1.12. Beijing is still very cheap; 42 cents for subway trips up to 6km and $2 taxi rides. In PPP terms this is relatively high income place. BTW, I only do stupid things like visiting McDonalds when out alone; with my family we go to spectacular Yunnan restaurants. China still has great food at very good prices. Later I’ll get my hair cut at the place I always go to, which I use to estimate PPP. It was $1.20 in 1994 and $4 in 2012. I predict $6.

Soon after I got off the plane I sensed that the western articles about the “social credit” system were probably misleading. China’s too vast and messy for the government to pay much attention to ordinary people. Yes, they can monitor you via your We Chat purchases if they choose, but so can our NSA. China’s government is a big problem if you are an activist on controversial issues (or a Muslim in Xinjiang), but otherwise I suspect it’s not really a 1984-type society for most people.

So far, the air has been unusually clear (see picture above), but of course there are still plenty of bad days (especially in winter). September and October are the best time to visit. I see lots of “e-bikes” and “e-scooters”, indeed most of them now seem to be electronic, not gas powered. So there’s a real effort in Beijing to reduce pollution (including noise pollution; these scooters are really quiet.) I believe the air will be much clearer in 20 years.

Later, we plan to visit relatively poor Guizhou, which will be an interesting contrast. But even Guizhou has spectacular infrastructure:

Infrastructure investment in Guizhou has grown 20 per cent annually over the past five years with the state adding high-speed railways, nearly half of the world’s 100 tallest bridges and a motorway network to rival France’s.

PS. The Chinese property market is complex. Many “owners” in the building where I am staying do not have the legal right to sell their unit, but can rent it out and can also bequeath it to their children. The public spaces (halls and elevators) in buildings with $1 and $2 million condos aren’t much better than what you’d see in a public housing project in Chicago. But the condo fee is only about $50/month.

PPS. China is now quite unequal, but in death there is still a lot of egalitarianism. In a large cemetery that we visited almost all the tombstones were the same size and shape.

PPPS. Lots of Chinese people ask to have their picture taken with my daughter. No one asks for a picture with me.

Last week, The Oregonian newspaper exposed what ought to be a headline-grabbing scandal in the course of reporting on an otherwise obscure criminal trial.

The dicey behavior began when Portland cops investigating a series of bank robberies felt they knew the perpetrator’s identity: Tyrone Lamont Allen, a 50-year-old whose face is covered by several prominent tattoos.

But there was a problem. None of the bank tellers had noted seeing any face tattoos on the robber. And no tattoos were visible in recovered surveillance footage.

Rather than looking for other suspects, or even proceeding with a photo lineup knowing that the tellers were unlikely to positively identify Allen, the police officers turned to a piece of software to solve their problem.

“They covered up every one of his tattoos using Photoshop,” The Oregonian’s Maxine Bernstein wrote. “Police then presented the altered image of Allen with photos of five similar-looking men to the tellers for identification. They didn’t tell anyone that they’d changed Allen’s photo. Some of the tellers picked out Allen.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: The most powerful member of the ruling class]

There’s more. The cops in question did not know that they were doing anything wrong. Neither did the local U.S. attorney. Indeed, they still stand by their actions. The Oregonian quoted a police forensic criminalist, Mark Weber, as testifying, “I basically painted over the tattoos. Almost like applying electronic makeup.’’

Then the paper quoted the federal prosecutor in the case endorsing the approach:

Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Maloney defended police actions. “The whole idea was to make Mr. Allen blend in—so his photo wouldn’t stand out,’’ he said. “These procedures were prudent. They were appropriate.’’ Maloney said the altering of Allen’s photo was done to “look like the disguises that were on the robber,’’ who wore a baseball-style hat and glasses, with no tattoos visible.

Maloney affirmed that the intent was to alter the photo for the lineup so that the suspect looked more like the robber—and finds that both prudent and appropriate!

After that, nothing should have surprised me, but my jaw still dropped a bit when I got to a quote from the man who ordered the Photoshop manipulation, Detective Brett Hawkinson, “a nearly 18-year Police Bureau veteran assigned to the FBI’s task force on bank robberies and the lead investigator on the case.”

Hawkinson said in cross-examination that altering photographs was “standard practice among investigators,” and that he learned about it through “on the job training” and from his supervisors.

Note that after employing the tactic, neither the Portland police nor the FBI nor the U.S. Attorney’s Office disclosed it. A defense lawyer noticed on his own.

The Oregonian reported that Weber, who did the Photoshop job, “testified that he didn’t write a report because it wasn’t part of the Police Bureau’s standard operating procedures” and that “he had changed suspect photos for other lineups before but wasn’t aware of any bureau protocol that expressly allowed that.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: He killed an unarmed man, then claimed disability]

The criminal-defense attorney Scott Greenfield put it well. “Contrary to the common assumption that eyewitness identification is strong evidence, it’s long been known, and overwhelmingly empirically proven, that eyewitness identifications make for very strong testimony but very unreliable evidence,” he explained on his website. “This is particularly true for cross-racial identifications. When photo arrays … are done properly, they still present grave problems of mis-identification. When done with altered pics, they’re just goofy.”

What remains unclear is how many innocents have been identified in Portland and beyond in goofy lineups where their photos were altered to look more like the perpetrator.

Society has already entered an era when technology permits the easy manipulation of images, video, and audio. One would expect law-enforcement professionals to discern the perils of participating in such manipulation. That they do not underscores the need for more oversight by civilians and stricter requirements about what must be disclosed to defense attorneys.

Finally, it is thanks to a court reporter working a beat at an old-fashioned broadsheet that the public learned about this matter at all. Support your local newspaper.

Ryan White and I would be the same age if he were alive today. He's not. He died in 1990 at the age of 18, right before he was going to graduate from high school, of an AIDS-related respiratory tract infection.

For the final few years of White's life he became famous—a household name—fighting for the right to attend school in Indiana at a time when Americans were still not entirely certain about how the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was spread. He was a hemophiliac who became infected from a blood transfusion, but at the time, most of American culture thought of HIV and AIDS as something that only afflicted gay men and those who injected street drugs.

White's court fight with the local school board became a cultural rallying point to drive an important point home: HIV and AIDS were going to kill off a whole lot of people unless Americans got serious about addressing the risks.

If you were a closeted gay teen, like I was, White also represented a fearful look at a dangerous future. I reached sexual maturity as a member of a high-risk class. My early adult life was shaped by the full awareness that I could very easily share White's fate.

White was one of more than 18,000 people in the United States to die of AIDS-related illnesses by 1990. But life today for people who have HIV and for those who are at risk of infection is remarkably, wonderfully different than it was in his time. While HIV has not yet been cured, medical research across nearly 35 years has brought us to a place where the virus can be fully suppressed. Not only are HIV-positive people able to enjoy normal life spans, they're also able to be sexually active with HIV-negative partners without the risk of passing on the virus.

In 1995, AIDS was the top killer of Americans between the ages of 25 and 44, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data. By 2016, HIV-related illnesses no longer cracked the top 10 causes. More people now die of kidney disease.

'You Can Live a Happy Life'

The decline in the spread of HIV and the dramatic drop in AIDS-related deaths are among the biggest health-related good news stories of the first part of the 21st century.

"It's an uplifting story with a lot of twists and turns," explains Myron S. Cohen, a professor of medicine, microbiology, immunology, and epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He would know: He's partly responsible for one of the story's more significant chapters. In 2005, Cohen organized a massive international study of more than 1,700 primarily heterosexual couples where one partner was HIV-positive and the other was HIV-negative. As the quality of drug therapy had been improving, a theory needed to be explored: Do these treatments suppress HIV levels to the point that the virus could not be transmitted to partners?

"Can that drug, when you treat somebody, also render them less contagious?" Cohen asks. "We've spent forever working on that question."

His team got part of the answer in 2011, when an oversight board stopped Cohen's study prematurely after an important discovery. As part of the testing, HIV-positive members of one group were given immediate access to drug treatment, while the other group was scheduled to delay drug treatment until later. A review determined that only one participant in the group given drug treatment had infected his or her partner during the trial, compared to 35 partners in the other study group. They restarted the study and offered the drug therapy to all HIV-positive participants, not just one group.

When the effort concluded, researchers found just eight cases in which an HIV-positive person on drug treatment infected his or her partner. In four of those cases, the transmission likely happened before the medication kicked in.

Science magazine named this discovery its "Breakthrough of the Year" for 2011. Since that time, more and more research has arrived at the same conclusion. The study Cohen led focused on heterosexual transmission, but similar results are bearing out among gay men. A study released this May in The Lancet tracked more than 700 male couples in Europe where one man was HIV-positive and on suppression drug therapy and the other was HIV-negative. During the eight years the couples were monitored, not a single study participant transmitted the virus to his partner.

This research has all led to a significant shift in how HIV prevention and treatment are approached as public health issues. In the virus's early days, when HIV infection was likely to lead to AIDS-related illnesses and death, most public service messages offered dire warnings against unprotected sex and encouraged regular HIV testing among those at risk. As medical advances made HIV more manageable, the warnings continued—but for those who had become infected, new messages stressed the positive outlook. HIV was no longer a death sentence, and people who were infected could live healthy lives with treatment.

Advances in research also led to the discovery that people who are HIV-negative could take the same medications used to treat people with HIV and thereby resist becoming infected themselves. A drug called Truvada, manufactured by Gilead, was approved for use to treat people who were infected with HIV in 2004. Subsequent tests found it was also effective in preventing the virus's spread when taken by those who were not infected but were sexually active with those who were. In 2012, Truvada was approved as a form of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP)—a preventive medication for those in high-risk categories.

We're now seeing a new public health approach, one designed to push HIV-positive people to seek treatment by helping them understand that this will actually stop them from infecting others. The campaign's message is "undetectable=untransmittable," or "U=U" for short. It simply means that if an HIV-positive person's viral load has been suppressed enough through treatment that it doesn't show up in blood tests, then that person is unable to infect others. The treatment for HIV is also the mechanism to prevent the spread of HIV.

The campaign was launched in 2016 (with Cohen as an endorser of its message statement) via the Prevention Access Campaign, a group that partners with organizations across the world to spread the "U=U" message. According to Bruce Richmond, the founding executive director of the campaign, the goal is to reach even further into at-risk communities and reduce the HIV stigma that keeps people from getting tested or treated.

"We're moving away from fear-based campaigns," Richmond says. "We're realizing terror and fear about people with HIV doesn't work. We're using the carrot, not the stick. The focus is really on medicine and staying on care. You can live a happy life and won't pass on HIV.…That's a revolutionary message."

'Study After Study Has Shown It Does Work'

There's a challenge, though, in actually getting the word out. The "U=U" campaign boasts hundreds of partnerships with organizations in 97 countries. Richmond explains that he's working with Vietnam's Ministry of Health on a national rollout in Hanoi, for example, translated to "K=K." But he says he's actually struggling to get the word out here in the United States, even though the campaign has significant support from HIV researchers, the National Institutes of Health, and the CDC.

According to data collected and examined by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, the U.S. lags behind Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Sweden, and many other developed countries in its HIV viral suppression rates. And these aren't small differences: Just 54 percent of Americans with HIV are receiving enough medical treatment for the virus to be considered "suppressed." In the United Kingdom and Switzerland, that number is 84 percent. New incidences of HIV infection had been falling for years in the United States, but that statistic has hit a plateau. About 38,500 Americans are still becoming infected annually. An estimated 15 percent of Americans who are infected do not know it.

Polling from Kaiser shows that there are significant gaps in the average American's awareness of advances in this space. People realize that fewer are dying of HIV-related illnesses and that treatment has improved, but many don't realize how much better it has gotten. In a poll from March, only 52 percent of respondents understood that drug therapy was effective in stopping people with HIV from infecting their partners. Only 42 percent knew that PrEP drugs even existed. But that's still an improvement, since just 14 percent knew about PrEP in 2014.

President Donald Trump announced in his State of the Union address in February that he wants to eliminate HIV in the United States within 10 years. State of the Union promises are often aspirational expressions of goals that may not exactly be realistic. This goal didn't come out of the blue, though. It was pushed up to the president by experts in public health. Is it actually achievable?

"Given the HIV treatments that we have as well as the prevention options that we have, theoretically, yes," responds Jennifer Kates, vice president and director of global health and HIV policy for the Kaiser Family Foundation. "Realistically, it's challenging. It's hard. The details are in proven public health interventions. It's building on years of knowledge and know-how. It's something we couldn't have said 10 or 15 years ago."

The true goal isn't complete elimination of HIV in the next decade, she says. Rather, it's to reduce new infections by 75 percent in five years and by 90 percent in 10 years. Trump's 2020 budget proposes $291 million for this effort, targeting areas where new infections are most notable.

Accomplishing that feat can't just involve targeting people whose sexual activity puts them at risk. Consider needle exchange programs, where intravenous drug users are able to replace the dirty tools they use to get high without worrying about getting arrested. Such programs were developed in the 1990s, despite the ramping up of the drug war at the time, because they served the important goal of reducing the spread of HIV. Yet needle exchange programs are still often attacked by those who believe they're encouraging drug use, which they don't like seeing in their neighborhoods.

The day after Trump's State of the Union address, the administration's commitment to reducing HIV was challenged from within when the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania filed a lawsuit to stop the city of Philadelphia from allowing a safe injection facility to be built. These sites are places where drug users can safely shoot up under the watchful eye of professionals who can quickly respond to overdoses and help those who are addicted seek treatment. Like needle exchange programs, they are harm reduction efforts that lower the risk of HIV transmission without trying to punish the underlying drug use. The United States doesn't have any of these facilities yet, and the Department of Justice is threatening legal action against any locality that tries to build one.

If the Trump administration is serious about advancing HIV prevention, it should rethink how it's using the opioid overdose crisis to breathe new life into the war on drugs. "Syringe access is an issue that's been politicized for many years," Kates says. "But study after study has shown it does work."

'This Depended on a Lot of Altruism'

While an increase in federal attention and spending is undeniably a part of the picture, the dramatic three-decade shift in the fate of those infected with HIV wasn't a top-down effort. Kates notes that community-level education and advocacy were at the tip of the spear. The fight against HIV also brought into focus the concept of the patient as an advocate for his or her own care, not just a passive recipient of outside treatment. People with HIV and AIDS became experts on their conditions and played a significant role in helping to push policy.

The medical advancements didn't just happen "out of the clear blue sky" or by government fiat, Cohen says. It took a lot of work, and a good chunk of it was philanthropy-driven. About a fifth of the funding for all disease treatment research and development comes from philanthropic sources, accounting for more than $650 million annually, according to data from the global health think tank Policy Cures Research. In 2017, about $144 million of that money was devoted to HIV research. That's nearly equal to the $149 million that the pharmaceutical industry itself spent researching HIV drugs in 2017.

"This depended on a lot of altruism from a lot of people, both infected and uninfected," Cohen says. "It's a great story, but it was decades in the making."

And the story is not over. Researchers are now working on an injected version of PrEP that would require only one shot every few weeks instead of a daily pill. Results of those tests are expected in 2021.

For somebody like me, whose entire early adulthood was framed by a fear that I might contract HIV and die, the looming end of this crisis is a triumph.

The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The tweets claimed a police officer “murdered” Michael Brown. But that’s not what investigators, including those from the Obama administration, concluded.

Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris marked the five-year anniversary of the Ferguson, Missouri, police shooting of Michael Brown last week with tweets claiming that the cop who shot Brown “murdered” the 18-year-old black man.

But the evidence, including a report released by President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice, says otherwise.

The protests in Ferguson drew national attention to the real problem of police violence and racial bias nationwide — the bigger movement Harris and Warren acknowledged with their tweets. Justice Department investigations after the shooting, though, found that the officer who shot Brown was legally justified, even if the police department that he worked in had serious problems with racial bias and violence.

The Brown shooting became a national story almost immediately on August 9, 2014, triggering protests and riots in Ferguson over accusations of racist and racially biased policing against the city’s police department. The protesters claimed, based on some eyewitness testimony, that Brown raised his hands up before Wilson shot him anyway — which gave way to the mantra of “hands up, don’t shoot.”

Warren and Harris reiterated the protesters’ narrative in two separate tweets on the five-year anniversary of the shooting, using the moment to call for action against systemic racism and police violence.

But the Justice Department’s 2015 report contradicted many of the protesters’ claims, finding that Wilson likely did have reason to fear for his life and didn’t violate the law in shooting Brown. The Warren and Harris campaigns did not return requests for comment.

The tweets expose the fine line that Warren, Harris, and others calling attention to police brutality have to walk. Individual police shootings and killings can and do help draw attention to genuine, broader issues surrounding police violence and systemic racism. But because the original narrative around the shootings can simply turn out to be wrong as we get more evidence, there’s a risk that attaching calls for reform too much to individual shootings and killings can backfire.

The response to the Warren and Harris tweets, from conservative and more progressive commentators, demonstrates that risk: Because Warren and Harris got the details of the Brown shooting wrong, their bigger message about policing and racism has gotten lost on social media in a sea of criticism over the facts of the shooting.

The Justice Department report exonerated the cop who shot Michael Brown

After Wilson stopped Brown for walking in the middle of the street, the officer reportedly realized Brown was a robbery suspect who stole cigarillos from a nearby convenience store. Wilson attempted to stop Brown, and both men had a physical altercation at the officer’s SUV. Wilson then opened fire from his vehicle. Brown ran, turned around, and Wilson fired more shots, supposedly out of fear that Brown was charging at him.

Brown died about 150 feet from Wilson’s vehicle. He was shot six times. No gunshot was confirmed to hit Brown from behind.

The physical evidence suggested that Brown reached into Wilson’s car during their physical altercation and, very likely, attempted to grab the officer’s gun. The most credible witnesses agreed that Brown moved toward Wilson before the officer fired his final shots — and there simply wasn’t enough evidence, especially given the struggle at the car, that Wilson wasn’t justified in fearing for his life when he fired the shots that killed Brown.

Although some credible witnesses suggested Brown raised his hands up before he died, witnesses who disputed major parts of Wilson’s side of the story were discredited by the physical evidence and when they changed their accounts.

The report said all this was “corroborated by bruising on Wilson’s jaw and scratches on his neck, the presence of Brown’s DNA on Wilson’s collar, shirt, and pants, and Wilson’s DNA on Brown’s palm.”

The report concluded:

Given that Wilson’s account is corroborated by physical evidence and that his perception of a threat posed by Brown is corroborated by other eyewitnesses, to include aspects of the testimony of Witness 101 [Brown’s friend], there is no credible evidence that Wilson willfully shot Brown as he was attempting to surrender or was otherwise not posing a threat. Even if Wilson was mistaken in his interpretation of Brown’s conduct, the fact that others interpreted that conduct the same way as Wilson precludes a determination that he acted with a bad purpose to disobey the law. The same is true even if Wilson could be said to have acted with poor judgment in the manner in which he first interacted with Brown, or in pursuing Brown after the incident at the SUV. These are matters of policy and procedure that do not rise to the level of a Constitutional violation and thus cannot support a criminal prosecution.

In other words, this wasn’t a murder or a federal civil rights violation, based on the evidence we have.

That’s not to say that the Justice Department exonerated the whole Ferguson Police Department. Another report released at the same time uncovered a pattern of racial bias in the Ferguson Police Department, and it argued that the disparities could only be explained, at least in part, by unlawful bias and stereotypes against African Americans. In particular, the police department largely seemed to be used by the local government as a revenue-generating operation that disproportionately stopped, ticketed, and fined black residents.

It’s these kinds of racist operations that likely fueled local resentment toward the police department, making Ferguson a tinderbox for protests and riots — one that ignited when news of the Brown shooting spread. Even if Wilson wasn’t as guilty as many believed him to be, his employers certainly were.

The dual reports have led many commentators, from the progressive Ta-Nehisi Coates to the conservative David French, to write that Wilson was innocent, but the Ferguson Police Department was not. As Coates wrote at the time:

Darren Wilson is not the first gang member to be publicly accused of a crime he did not commit. But Darren Wilson was given the kind of due process that those of us who are often presumed to be gang members rarely enjoy. I do not favor lowering the standard of justice offered Officer Wilson. I favor raising the standard of justice offered to the rest of us.

Five years after the shooting, though, major presidential campaigns are still getting the details wrong.

Yesterday marked the tenth anniversary of Justice Sonia Sotomayor's ascension to the Supreme Court. USA Today Supreme Court reporter Richard Wolf has an interesting article summarizing her time on the Court so far:

Sotomayor was President Barack Obama's choice to fill the first Supreme Court seat that became vacant on his watch, and she has not disappointed. Since winning Senate confirmation, 68-31, and being sworn in Aug. 8, 2009, to succeed former associate justice David Souter, she has been a reliable member of the court's liberal wing.

These days, she may be the court's most liberal member. She and Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the grande dame of the court's left flank, agreed in 93% of the court's cases last term. Over the past two terms, as the court moved further to the right, Sotomayor has penned more dissents than any other justice.

She is best known for her opinions on civil rights, privacy rights and criminal justice, including prisoners on death row…

Like many Supreme Court justices, Sotomayor has not made much effort to outline and defend a comprehensive judicial philosophy. So her record must be judged primarily based on her opinions on specific issue areas.

In the process of writing the article, Wolf interviewed some of those who testified at Sotomayor's confirmation hearing in 2009, including myself. My testimony was highly critical of her record on constitutional property rights issues (see also here, for answers to follow-up questions by some members of the Senate Judiciary Committee), though I did also note that she had written a praiseworthy decision in an asset forfeiture case.

I told Wolf that I believe my concerns about Sotomayor's property rights jurisprudence have been amply justified by her record on the Court. Since joining the Court, Sotomayor has voted for the government in every non-unanimous takings decision heard by the justices. That includes some where she has diverged from the views of other liberal justices, most notably the 2015 Horne raisin takings case, where she was the sole justice to conclude that the seizure of large quantities of raisins by the federal government (for purposes of propping up a government-sponsored cartel) is not a taking.

That record is not a surprise, given that her decision in the 2006 Didden case (the main focus of my testimony) was the most extreme modern eminent domain "public use" decision I had seen in many years of studying this subject. She ruled that the use of eminent domain to back what was almost literally extortion for the benefit of a private developer, qualifies as a "public use" permissible under the Fifth Amendment. For reasons I explained in my testimony, thisoutcome was not required by the Supreme Court's earlier decision in Kelo v. City of New London (2005), which—although egregious in other respects—still noted  that the "pretextual" use of eminent domain for the purpose of benefiting a private party is unconstitutional. It's hard to find a more blatantly pretextual taking than the one in Didden.

Wolf quotes a number of commentators who praise Sotomayor as a justice sensitive to the ways in which the Court's decisions negatively affect ordinary people, when they allow abuses of government power to go unchecked. There is some justification for that praise, based on other aspects of her record. But Sotomayor seems unaware or indifferent to the ways in which judicial abdication on takings issues inflicts great harm on the poor, the disadvantaged, and the politically weak.

I also have reservations about Sotomayor's jurisprudence in a number of other areas, such as federalism (where she is often overly deferential to federal government power, including in some cases where other liberal justices have not been), deference to administrative agencies (ditto), and racial preferences. A notable example of the latter was her dissent in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action (2014), where Sotomayor was one of only two justices to conclude that a Michigan referendum barring the use of racial preferences in state university admissions is unconstitutional. The point is not just that Sotomayor concluded that such racial preferences are constitutional (a very defensible, though still problematic, position), but that she took the far more extreme position that it is unconstitutional to use the referendum process to repeal them.

This dissent is also flawed in crudely treating affirmative action as a simple lash of interest between the white majority and racial minorities, despite the fact that in reality it disadvantages some minority groups (most notably Asian-Americans), while potentially benefiting others (particularly African-Americans and Hispanics). Ironically, Sotomayor's mistake here was partly a failure to consider the full extent of America's diversity. In fairness, other justices were guilty of less severe forms of the same error. As I pointed out at the time, Asian-Americans were not mentioned even once in any of the five opinions in the case (totaling over 100 pages), despite the fact that their situation was highly relevant to the questions considered by the Court.

But, in my discussion with Wolf, I also emphasized that Sotomayor deserves great credit for her excellent work on a number of other issues. I specifically praised her outstanding dissent in the travel ban case, where I said "she nailed it exactly right." It isn't just the best of the four opinions in that tragically misguided ruling, it is—in my view -one of the best opinions by any justice over the last decade. Sotomayor brilliantly explains why the majority was wrong to minimize the significance of Trump's bigoted motivations for issuing the travel ban, and why the Court was repeating some of the most egregious errors Korematsu v. United States, even as it belatedly repudiated that awful precedent. In 2009, I did not expect either that a case like the  travel was likely to come up in the foreseeable future, or that Sotomayor would write the best opinion on the issue.

As Wolf describes in some detail, Sotomayor has also compiled an excellent record on many civil liberties and criminal justice issues, where she has formed something of a cross-ideological alliance with Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch. This alliance is often described as "unlikely." But it is not so surprising in light these two jurists' records on the lower courts, and the fact that criminal justice issues often now divide judges in ways that cut across left-right ideological divisions rather than align with them. In 2009, many commentators (myself included) did not give enough weight to this aspect of Sotomayor's jurisprudence.

Wolf  mentions Sotomayor's many speeches and public statements, which are more extensive than those of any other current justice. On balance, I think this is a good thing, in so far as it gives the legal community and others a  better understanding of her views. At the same time, I am not a fan of some of the positions she has taken in these speeches, most notably her advocacy of "forced labor" (Sotomayor's term, not mine), as a tool for increasing the availability of legal services. I share her concerns about the need to reduce the cost of legal services for the poor, but believe that there are vastly better and more just ways to achieve that end.

One key lesson of Sotomayor's tenure on the Court, so far, is that we should try to assess nominee's qualifications based on a wide range of issues, not just a few that happen to be prominent at the time. In an age when Supreme Court justices serve for decades, it is highly likely that some of the most important cases they consider will be ones different from the "hot button" issues at the time they were appointed. Few in 2009 foresaw that overreaching immigration policies would be an important part of the Court's docket during Sotomayor's tenure on it. Similarly, few in 1987 expected that cases involving the rights of gays and lesbians would turn out to be a major part of the legacy of Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Barring unforeseen health problems, Justice Sotomayor is likely to be on the Court for many more years. Her most important legacy could turn out be a case—or a series of cases—that hasn't happened yet, perhaps on an issue whose future significance few now foresee.

Ottawa city treasurer Marian Simulik wired nearly $130,000 ($98,000 in U.S. dollars) to a fraudster after getting an email she thought was from the city manager. She later got another email asking for $200,000 ($150,000 U.S.), but this time the city manager happened to be sitting nearby. That's when they discovered Simulik had sent money to a scammer.

Science fiction writers have wondered for years what an all-encompassing surveillance state might look like. China decided to build it.

Over the last year, The New York Times has revealed the lengths to which Beijing has gone to identify and control Uighurs, a Muslim minority that has lived for centuries on the country's western frontier. While Chinese state secrecy means we don't know the full extent of the regime's malevolent policies, what has been uncovered should chill every civil libertarian to the bone.

Within Kashgar, a majority Uighur city, residents must line up to be scrutinized before they can move from place to place. They are legally required to travel with ID cards and to swipe them at each checkpoint. They are also required to expose their faces to cameras that feed their pictures to facial recognition software. At the behest of the national government and regional police forces, Chinese software makers are training their algorithms to distinguish Uighurs from Han, China's ruling ethnic majority. Police officers stationed throughout Kashgar need neither probable cause nor a warrant to detain Uighurs and check their phones for the surveillance software that they're legally required to install.

And if a Uighur resident raises a red flag during one of these encounters? He or she will likely be sent to a "re-education" camp where, Human Rights Watch reported last year, Chinese Muslims are "held indefinitely without charge or trial, and can be subject to abuse." The camps may contain tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of Muslims. The lack of government transparency makes it impossible to know even this basic information.

To the extent that China has justified its systematic targeting of a religious and ethnic minority, the government says it wants only to combat Islamic terrorism as part of its "stability maintenance" program. Yet the country's surveillance apparatus has no obvious form of due process, no regard for civil liberties or privacy, and no avenues for appeal.

Perhaps we should not be surprised that China, the most oppressive global superpower since the Soviet Union, is a leader in this race to the bottom. More alarming is that the disease is spreading. Foreign Policy reported in August 2018 that Ecuador is using a "national emergency response and video surveillance system built entirely by Chinese companies and financed by Chinese state loans." The Times reported in April that the country may soon add China's facial recognition software as well.

As this technology improves and gets cheaper, it will likely become affordable to every two-bit dictator on Earth. What happens then is a chilling mystery.

The post The clothing of the future appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

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Disney is aggressively crafting the service to be an end-all, be-all for streaming subscribers.

The Walt Disney Company is serious about streaming. And during its quarterly earnings call this week, CEO Bob Iger emphasized as much by announcing that the company will be bundling all three of its streaming services, including the upcoming Disney+, for the same monthly price as the most popular Netflix subscription.

Subscribing to Disney+, ESPN+, and Hulu together will cost $12.99 a month, which includes the following:

• Access to Disney+, a.k.a. the soon-to-be home of Disney’s entire film and TV catalogue, which contains content from Disney itself (read: classic animated movies like The Lion King and Aladdin, and original TV shows like Even Stevens and Lizzie McGuire), in addition to the entire Marvel Studios library, every Star Wars film, the 20th Century Fox archives, and every single episode of The Simpsons. Disney+ will also offer original movies and TV series based on many of these established properties, some produced exclusively for the platform. (Disney+, which launches November 12, will cost $7.99 a month as a standalone service.)
• Access to ESPN+, where viewers can watch tennis, golf, UFC matches, and myriad college sports, as well less “mainstream” sports like cricket and rugby. (ESPN+ costs $4.99 monthly as a standalone service, although additional games and teams are available at a premium.)
• Access to the ad-supported tier of Hulu. While inferior to the blessedly commercial-free (and more expensive) tier of Hulu, Hulu-with-ads carries all the same content — a range of past and current network TV shows, original content produced by Hulu (including the critically acclaimed The Handmaid’s Tale), and a wide selection of big-budget and genre films alike. (Hulu with ads is $5.99 a month.)

Subscribing to all three services separately would run you about $19 a month, meaning this newly announced bundle will translate to a $6 discount. But Disney’s real goal here seems pretty clear: to intimidate Netflix, its biggest competitor in the streaming space and a stalwart that charges its subscribers $12.99 a month for the ability to stream its content on a number of devices. (Netflix’s most basic tier only offers content in standard definition, and at $8.99 it’s still more expensive than all three of Disney’s standalone offerings.)

Disney is well positioned to take on Netflix, even beyond the bundle. Disney+ capitalizes on the monstrous popularity of the company’s conglomerate-fueled catalogue right now; Avengers: Endgame recently became the highest-grossing movie of all time, for example, and the only place to stream it will be Disney’s own streaming service. (The film directly behind it on the list of box-office record-holders? Avatar, which was produced by Fox when it came out in 2009 but is now owned by Disney, thanks to the company’s $71.3-billion merger earlier this year.) And Disney’s killer year at the box office and extensive archives go far beyond Endgame; Pixar’s Toy Story 4 made bank in June, and it and the rest of Pixar’s films will also be exclusive to Disney+.

Combined with Hulu’s hefty library and the timelessness of sports, Disney’s bundle foray into the crowded streaming arena stands to deliver benefits that other players just can’t promise. Sure, the forthcoming HBO Max (from WarnerMedia) will be the only place to watch Friends once the service launches in spring 2020, and NBCUniversal’s eventual streaming service will be free, as well as the exclusive home of The Office starting in 2021. But Warner and NBC aren’t true challengers to Disney — they’re much more of an issue for Netflix, which has long counted Friends and The Office as two of its most marquee offerings.

Disney has so many name-brand shows and movies under its belt that it hardly needs one special, expensive get to woo subscribers. And with additional announcements from the company’s earnings call revealing that it is planning to produce “re-imaginings” of fan-favorite movies like Home Alone, Night at the Museum, Cheaper by the Dozen, and The Diary of a Wimpy Kid for Disney+, it’s hard to deny that Disney is prepped for an easy takeover of the family-friendly streaming market in particular — and that it’s savvy enough, and rich enough, to grab as many other recognizable names as it can.

The creeping costs of TV content spread out across several different subscription services are a legitimate fear for many viewers as we inch toward a streaming landscape that looks a lot like cable TV, despite once being dominated by just a handful of providers. And the Disney+ bundle comes with a somewhat comforting price relative to its content, which should at least make the expense of subscribing to an increasing number of services a little easier to swallow. But if people are looking to cut costs, it might soon be easier to decide which service to drop first, and that service just might be Netflix.

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Supplied

• In February 2018, Princess Latifa of Dubai, one of the emir's 23 children, fled with her martial arts teacher, and man who says he used to be a French spy.
• Their escape was cut short by Emirati commandos off the coast of India, who intercepted the group as they sailed away in a yacht.
• Latifa was forcibly returned to Dubai, and hasn't been heard from in public since. 
• Tiina Jauhiainen was Latifa's confidant and martial arts teacher who accompanied her during the escape. She spoke to INSIDER about the mission.
• A spotlight has focused on Sheikh Mohammed's household since news broke in July 2019 that his sixth wife, Princess Haya, had fled, and is suing him for custody of their two children.
• Visit INSIDER's homepage for more stories. 

In July 2019, Princess Haya, the sixth wife of Dubai emir Sheikh Mohammed, sued for custody of their two children in a UK court.

The legal battle has cast a new spotlight on the inner working's of Dubai's royal household — and, according to reports, was inspired by a previous scandal.See the rest of the story at Business Insider

NOW WATCH: Nxivm leader Keith Raniere has been convicted. Here's what happened inside his sex-slave ring that recruited actresses and two billionaire heiresses.

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