In the end, the lettuce won. Six days ago, Liz Truss’s leadership was in such trouble that a British tabloid began a livestream to test a simple proposition: Could the shelf life of a supermarket vegetable outlast her time as prime minister?

Today, the lettuce looked a little bruised, but it could still be incorporated into a healthy salad. Sadly, Liz Truss serves no such useful purpose. At 1:30 p.m. London time, she announced that she was leaving office. Her replacement will be elected next week.

The saga of Liz and the lettuce tells us many things about British political culture, one of which is its taste for lousy jokes. How was the Brexiteer Liz Truss brought down? A Romaine plot. Why did she make so many mistakes? Just cos. Was her decision to give a tax cut to the rich her fatal error? No, it was just the tip of the iceberg. Be thankful there aren’t more varieties of lettuce.

[Brian Klaas: What happened to Liz Truss can’t happen here]

The other lesson is that the prime-ministerial system allows political parties to ditch a leader who has become a liability. None of this sitting around until November hoping the president doesn’t advocate injecting yourself with Clorox again—no, Liz Truss managed 44 days as prime minister before her own party made it clear that her services were no longer required. (To convert that into American measurements, that’s about four Scaramuccis.) She is now the shortest-serving prime minister in British history, racking up less than half the tenure of a guy who died of tuberculosis.

What went wrong? As I wrote earlier this week, everything. Her economic plans made the markets shudder. Her staffing decisions alienated her colleagues. Her poll numbers suggested that the Conservatives were heading for an electoral wipeout. Britain’s economic situation is extremely precarious: Inflation is higher than 10 percent, food banks are warning about elevated demand, and there is a small possibility of electricity blackouts over the winter. Yet despite the widespread fear these things engender, in the end, so much went wrong for Truss that people kept telling me they felt sorry for her. She was absolutely hopeless. Watching her stagger on began to seem cruel.

Since I opened the casket for a sniff on Monday, the Truss administration has continued to decay with impressive speed. Yesterday morning, the prime minister was forced to suspend one of her closest advisers for allegedly calling a former cabinet colleague “shit” in a press briefing. That afternoon, Home Secretary Suella Braverman resigned after accidentally forwarding a confidential briefing from her personal email account. “Pretending we haven’t made mistakes, carrying on as if everyone can’t see that we have made them, and hoping that things will magically come right is not serious politics,” Braverman wrote in her resignation letter. “I have made a mistake; I accept responsibility; I resign.” The subtext was clear: You should too. Given that Truss had already sacked her chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, on Friday, this meant that her government had lost two of its most senior ministers in less than a week.

Sounds bad, huh? Oh, we’re just getting started. Yesterday evening, the opposition Labour Party forced a vote to ban fracking—a disruptive gas-drilling technology that local communities typically hate and that even a fracking-company founder says is unlikely to be feasible in Britain. In 2019, every Conservative politician in the House of Commons was elected on a manifesto promising not to allow fracking, yet Truss decided to force her party to vote against the proposed ban. (She loves fracking but hates solar panels, apparently because she has replaced her brain with a right-wing newspaper column.) What’s more, her team told everyone that the fracking vote was effectively a confidence motion in her leadership.

[Helen Lewis: The prime minister who did everything wrong]

Invited to show their continuing support for Truss, more than three dozen of her colleagues declined. The mood in the House of Commons was like closing time at a biker bar. A scrum broke out in the parliamentary corridor where the voting took place, and the Conservatives’ deputy chief whip—the second in command on matters of party discipline—was heard shouting an expletive-laden phrase at the unruly parliamentarians. (Please enjoy either an unexpurgated German news report or a British one with the relevant words daintily replaced with “effing.”) The whip resigned, along with his boss, only for Truss’s team to announce via a text to journalists at 1:30 a.m. today that the pair “remained in place.”

I’ve long nursed a theory that we underestimate how difficult some jobs are—talk-show host, bomb-disposal expert—because only talented people are usually allowed to have a go at them. This week has revealed something similar about running a government. Wow, we all thought this summer, Boris Johnson is presiding over a chaotic, undisciplined mess. This is the pits. And then Liz Truss said, Hold my beer.

Truss’s swift downfall is her own doing, but it is also part of a bigger story of British political instability. From 1997 to 2016, Britain had just three prime ministers. By the time Truss’s replacement takes charge, the country will have had five since 2016. Based on current trends, David Beckham will have been called to serve by 2050, along with James Corden, the cast of Downton Abbey, and every contestant on The Great British Baking Show. Even worse, during a time of terrifying financial instability, Britain has had four chancellors in four months. Jeremy Hunt, the current incumbent—at time of writing, at least—is due to deliver a multiyear economic plan on October 31. It will be signed off on by a prime minister who will have been in place for 72 hours.

Far be it from me to disagree with a colleague, but unlike The Atlantic’s Tom McTague, I do blame Brexit for this turbulence—at least in part. The referendum on leaving the European Union was supposed to resolve a split in the Conservative Party. It did no such thing. After the Leave vote doomed Prime Minister David Cameron, a Remain supporter, the argument moved on to how “hard” the break with the EU would be. That particular debate then ended the prime-ministerial career of Theresa May, who was unable to reconcile her moderate instincts with the loudest, most obstinate wing of her party. Her successor, Boris Johnson, then floundered in the job precisely because of the instinct that made him a Brexiteer: his belief that hard decisions could simply be avoided. (His lockdown parties were only one reason his party turned against him; the other was his slowness to accept that two misbehaving colleagues had to be disciplined.)

[Read: The Liz Truss travesty becomes Britain’s humiliation]

In Truss, the Brexit instinct reached its natural conclusion. No compromises would be made with reality. Ideology was everything. The other (and perhaps more genuine) reason for Braverman’s departure is that the new chancellor wanted more immigration to boost the British economy, and she didn’t. The dominant strain of Brexitism, to which Braverman belongs, is opposed to more immigration—without being willing to say out loud that the trade-off is making Britain poorer. A similar tendency is evident among the most extreme Brexiteers and their sympathetic media outlets. In this telling, Truss didn’t fail as prime minister because her policies were unpopular and profligate—instead, a “globalist coup” must be to blame. Conspiracism—from the side that won the referendum, no less—is now a permanent feature of British political conversation.

This is the danger of “cakeism”—a style of politics where moderation, trade-off, and compromise are dirty words. Over the summer, Truss told Conservative Party members and supportive newspapers what they wanted to hear: She could deliver a low-tax libertarian paradise—a radical overhaul of British economic policy—despite also needing to spend billions of pounds on energy subsidies because of high wholesale gas prices. She was wrong to make the promise, and they were fools to believe it.

The upcoming leadership contest will be fast, furious, and divisive: The Conservatives currently look as unified as a sack full of raccoons and cocaine. The odds-on favorite is Rishi Sunak, the runner-up to Truss this summer, although several other candidates are canvassing support. And there is another possibility. Because the 2019 election is the last time the Conservatives consulted the rest of the country on their policies, some on the right claim that there is only one man who has a mandate from the British people: Boris Johnson.

Frankly, I would rather take my chances with the lettuce.

2022 Election

Nevada Could Be Senate Republicans’ Ace In The Hole

By Nate Silver

Oct. 7, 2022, at 1:13 PM

On the surface, Nevada seems to validate the otherwise somewhat unsuccessful hypothesis of the 2002 book “The Emerging Democratic Majority.” Authors John Judis and Ruy Teixeira predicted that Nevada would become a light-blue state as Democrats held onto their unionized, working-class base and demographic change brought new Democratic voters into the fold.

Although Democratic nominee John Kerry narrowly lost to George W. Bush in Nevada in the following presidential election, Barack Obama carried the state by a whopping 12.5 percentage points in 2008, and Democrats have won the state in every presidential election since. Nevada’s senators, Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen, are both Democrats, as is its governor, Steve Sisolak, and three of its four U.S. representatives.

So, Nevada is usually a pretty reliable state for Democrats, right? Well, not so fast. Cortez Masto, up for reelection this year, is narrowly trailing in the polling average against her Republican opponent, Adam Laxalt, the state’s former attorney general.⁹ Our forecast has this race at about as close to 50/50 odds as it gets. 

And just to be clear about the stakes here, Nevada couldn’t be much more important in determining which party controls the Senate. It is Republicans’ most likely pickup opportunity, according to FiveThirtyEight’s forecast¹⁰ — and the GOP’s second-best target, Georgia, took a big hit this week after new allegations surfaced that Republican nominee Herschel Walker paid for his then-girlfriend to get an abortion in 2009.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/voting-rights-north-carolina-hinge-supreme-court-election-91401195

The math is fairly simple. If Democrats pick up a seat in Pennsylvania, where Lt. Gov. John Fetterman is favored to win, Republicans will need two pickups to gain control of the Senate, and Nevada and Georgia are the easiest targets. If Fetterman loses, they’ll need one of the two. According to our interactive,¹¹ Republicans’ chances of flipping the Senate shoot up to 56 percent if they win Nevada but are just 11 percent if they don’t. So let’s take a deeper look.

Nevada isn’t that blue

Consider Nevada’s presidential, congressional and gubernatorial elections since 2000, as the following table shows.

Several things stand out. First, although Democrats have a four-election winning streak in presidential races, their record in congressional and gubernatorial elections is checkered. Sisolak was the first Democrat elected governor there since 1994. And even though Cortez Masto’s Class III Senate seat was in Democratic hands for some time thanks to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Rosen’s Class I seat was held by Republicans between 2001 and 2019. House races in Nevada have been swingy, meanwhile. As recently as 2014, Republicans won the state’s combined popular vote for the U.S. House by 17.4 points.

And with the exceptions of Obama and Reid — and we’ll come back to what they had in common in a moment — Democratic wins in Nevada have been narrow. Hillary Clinton’s 2.4-point win in 2016 was similar to her national margin of victory in the popular vote — and Joe Biden’s 2.4-point win in 2020 was less than his 4.5-point national popular-vote win. Sisolak and Rosen, meanwhile, won their gubernatorial and Senate races by 4 and 5 points, respectively, in 2018, but both of them underperformed the national political environment that year, which favored Democrats by almost 9 points. Whether you call Nevada blue, red or purple is something of a semantic question. But it certainly hasn’t been a reliable state for Democrats.

Nevada isn’t a great fit for the new Democratic coalition

Paired together as tipping-point states this year, Nevada and Georgia are moving in opposite directions.

Georgia has a sizable share of Black voters and a multiethnic coalition of increasingly college-educated voters in Atlanta and its suburbs. The Black vote there has held up relatively well for Democrats, and they’ve been gaining ground with college-educated professionals in almost every election. If you tried to create a state in a lab where Democratic fortunes improved even as they had problems elsewhere, Georgia would be about as good a formula as you could get.

Nevada, on the other hand, ranks 44th in the share of adults with a college degree, right between Oklahoma and Alabama. Its Black population is below the national average but increasing. It does have a considerable share of Hispanic and Asian American voters, but they are often working-class — subgroups that Democrats have increasingly struggled with in recent years.

Of course, Nevada is sui generis, with several economic and demographic attributes that aren’t that common in other states. On the one hand, it has a massive workforce in the gaming (gambling), leisure and hospitality industries. To give you some sense of the scale, just one hospitality and entertainment company, MGM Resorts International, employs 77,000 people in Nevada, roughly as large a share of its workforce as Ford Motor Company employs in Michigan. These are mostly working-class and middle-class jobs, often unionized, often held by employees of color. But Nevada doesn’t have as many jobs in culturally progressive industries like media and technology.

On the other hand, Nevada is a major destination for out-migrants from other states who are attracted to its warm weather,¹² lack of state income tax and laissez-faire lifestyle. Only 26 percent of Nevada residents were born in Nevada, easily the lowest of any U.S. state. Nevada has traditionally had a big third-party vote — it was one of Ross Perot’s better states, for instance.

This latter group of voters can also be relatively apolitical. If people migrate to Colorado for its crunchy, progressive politics, and to Florida for its YOLO conservatism, the prevailing attitude in Nevada is live-and-let-live, which sometimes borders on political apathy. Political participation is relatively low. Its turnout rate in 2020 was 65.4 percent, lower than the 66.8 percent in the U.S. overall — which is unusual because swing states usually have high turnout. By comparison, for instance, turnout was 71.7 percent in Florida in 2020 and 76.4 percent in Colorado.

Turnout could be Democrats’ saving grace

Let’s return to that question I teased earlier. What did Obama and Reid, the two big Democratic overperformers in Nevada, have in common? For that matter, what about Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who never got to compete in a general election in Nevada but performed extremely well in the state’s Democratic caucuses in 2020?

Well, Reid, Obama and Sanders relied heavily on organization, turnout and the state’s union-backed Democratic machine. It’s hard to know whether Cortez Masto — and Sisolak, who is also in a very tight reelection race — will be able to pull off the same. But if you have two large voting blocs in Nevada, and the more conservative of the two is somewhat politically apathetic, turnout at least potentially works to Democrats’ advantage.

Indeed, this may be a race where Democrats need the turnout edge because the other dynamics of the campaign don’t work in their favor. Though he’s an election denier who served as one of then-President Donald Trump’s Nevada campaign chairs in 2020, Laxalt has a relatively traditional resume as the state’s former attorney general — an exception among Republicans in competitive Senate races this year — and in recent polling, he has decent personal favorability ratings.

Although abortion is a strong issue for Cortez Masto in a relatively irreligious state like Nevada, voters in the Silver State rank the economy as their top issue. It’s understandable in a state that was hit hard by the housing bubble and that relies on highly cyclical industries like the casino business, which suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic.

On the turnout front, a CNN/SSRS poll yesterday had both good and bad news for Cortez Masto, depending on how you squint at it. In the survey, she led by 3 points among registered voters but trailed by 2 points among likely voters. Polls among likely voters are usually more reliable, and so the +2 number for Laxalt is the one in our polling average and forecast. But it does suggest a gap that could be closed by a strong turnout operation.

Reid, for instance, won comfortably in 2010 despite trailing in the polling average. Cortez Masto may need a little bit of Reid magic to hold onto her seat.

Last week, President Joe Biden announced that he would pardon all Americans federally convicted of simple possession of marijuana. The announcement was a welcome, though limited, shift in the U.S. government's seemingly unending war on drugs. Biden additionally called on governors to follow suit in their respective states and grant clemency to the vast majority of offenders convicted under state laws. He also encouraged Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Xavier Becerra to review marijuana's classification under federal law.

But that shift may be easier said than done thanks to the age-old problem of federal bureaucracy.

Currently, marijuana is classified as a Schedule I substance, indicating "a high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States, and a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision." In his announcement last week, the president noted that this puts it in the same category as heroin and a more restrictive category than fentanyl.

In 2015, the last time the government assessed marijuana's classification, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and HHS recommended keeping it at Schedule I. The assessment included, among other factors, "the scientific literature on whether marijuana has a currently accepted medical use"—a tall order since Schedule I status makes it much more difficult to study in the first place.

The Washington Post reported today that "such an evaluation—the first initiated by a U.S. president—is made all the more difficult due to tight restrictions on research into marijuana." Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a research institute within the National Institutes of Health, told the paper, "It's something that we constantly communicate: We really need to figure out a way of doing research with these substances."

In other words, as Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute tweeted, the government "can't research whether marijuana should remain a 'Schedule I' substance bc of govt restrictions on… researching Schedule I substances."

So the govt can't research whether marijuana should remain a "Schedule I" substance bc of govt restrictions on… researching Schedule I substances. Makes sense. https://t.co/d9nl4sqVNf pic.twitter.com/ySdciQOhn5

— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) October 10, 2022

Even just changing the classification of weed to Schedule II, the same as fentanyl, would at least open it up to medical research, a change advocated by such groups as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Physicians. Further, under Schedule II, it could even be prescribed by doctors similar to the way painkillers are now.

In an unfortunate catch-22, marijuana's current classification status will likely prolong the process of reclassifying it.

The post Federal Bureaucrats Say We Can't Reschedule Marijuana Because of How It's Scheduled appeared first on Reason.com.

After Hurricane Ian pulverized parts of Florida earlier this month, roofer Terence Duque sprung into action.

Duque has run a successful Texas-based commercial and residential roofing business since 2008. He's got an A-plus rating from the Better Business Bureau and has been named a "preferred contractor" by national roofing supply company Owens Corning. And in the wake of Ian, there's an obvious need for roofers and other contractors in Florida, as cleaning up and repairing the storm's damage will take months, if not years. Duque thought he could help by offering his services to homeowners with damaged roofs in Charlotte County, near where the brunt of the storm hit.

The county's response: "Get him."

Duque was arrested for "conducting business in Charlotte County without a Florida license," the Charlotte County Sheriff's Office announced on Friday. If charged as a felony, that's an offense that could carry up to five years in prison under Florida law—although it's possible that Duque could be charged with only a misdemeanor offense that carries a mere one year of jail time.

Either way, it's an obviously outrageous response.

According to the Charlotte County Sheriff's Office, Duque got busted for his good deed after the Charlotte County Economic Crimes Unit—which is apparently a real thing—received a call from an investigator with the state Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR).

When a detective with the sheriff's office tracked down Duque, the roofer reportedly said he believed he was allowed to work in Florida due to Gov. Ron DeSantis' emergency order that loosened licensing rules in the aftermath of the storm. "The investigator informed Terence that this was not the case, and that Terence would be placed under arrest, as he had already done work in violation of the statute," according to the Charlotte County Sheriff's Office.

No good deed goes unpunished, it seems.

"DBPR does not appear to realize that it is the bad guy here," says Justin Pearson, managing attorney for the Florida office of the Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm. "When safe, successful businesses come to Florida in the aftermath of a hurricane to provide much-needed assistance, the last thing DBPR should want is for the workers to be arrested and charged with a felony. DBPR is punishing people for doing the right thing."

Pearson notes that 18 states have universal licensing recognition laws—meaning that a license issued in another state is accepted as valid—but Florida is not one of them.

That's convenient protectionism for roofers and other contractors in Florida, but it's terrible news for anyone who needs a new roof right now.

As FloridaPolitics.com noted, Florida's contracting licensing requirements are notoriously strict and costly. It takes four years to get licensed for a variety of residential and commercial construction work in Florida, according to data collected by the Institute for Justice.

Defenders of those licensing schemes argue they are meant to protect consumers from unscrupulous contractors and scammers, but this situation illustrates how consumers are hurt by those same rules. Allowing licensed roofers from other states to work in Florida would help make post-hurricane repairs move more quickly, and would give consumers more choices (and possibly lower prices) even in nonemergency situations.

"These people have been through enough, and I will not allow unlicensed contractors to further victimize them," Charlotte County Sheriff Bill Prummell said in a statement.

Heckuva job, Bill.

The post Texas Roofer Arrested in Florida for Helping Hurricane Victims appeared first on Reason.com.

Nearly 40 million people worldwide work in jobs related to clean energy, according to a Sept. 8 report from the International Energy Agency. That number represents 56% of total energy sector employment, meaning that, for the first time ever, clean energy jobs outnumber those involved in producing, transporting, and…

Read more...

Antiracism has become fashionable in certain circles.

This leads to an odd kind of discourse, because while there are many circumstances in which racially-based discrimination occurs (for one example, check out this study on traffic stops), arguments grounded in antiracism are often deployed even in situations where correlations are driven by factors other than race.

For example, if you were making the case to college-educated liberals against closing schools as a Covid precaution, you’d probably emphasize the fact that Black children suffer most from remote school learning loss. But if you wanted to make the case for closing schools as a Covid precaution, you’d likely focus on the fact that Black people were at higher risk of dying from Covid. And while that’s not wrong, in this instance those correlations are mostly driven by educational attainment and occupation.

But the focus on race reflects how contemporary liberals like to talk about things. There’s a lot of emphasis on viewing situations through an equity lens, which really means primarily a racial lens, even when the driving factors are economic or the participants in the debate don’t particularly care about racial justice and are just trying to gain a rhetorical advantage.

I was thinking about this dynamic as I read Liam Kofi Bright’s recent paper “White Psychodrama” in which he characterizes the culture war over race as largely a distraction. I’m broadly sympathetic to his account, but I think Bright’s call for a kind of Non-Aligned Movement in the woke wars underrates the extent to which this kind of psychodrama can be actively harmful.

For example, I think the bulk of the evidence supports the view that all the talk of Covid-19 and racial disparities reduced political support for taking action to halt the spread of the virus.

Wesley @WesleyLowery

the media comprehensively covered the racial disparities in the COVID pandemic. @AdamSerwer and others noted then and this data suggests that such coverage made readers less concerned /less supportive of protective measures sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

March 30th 2022

549 Retweets1,273 Likes

I know there’s a view that if Marc Novicoff or I make this argument,1 it’s a way for secretly-racist white people to smuggle our hostility to racial justice into the discourse. But I really do implore everyone to look seriously at the evidence, because if you take seriously the idea that racial animosity is a big deal, that counsels for caution. Debating a fundamentally non-racial topic like school closures through a racialized lens may be fun or even profitable for the relatively elite participants in the debate, but it can do real harm to vulnerable people (both Black and white), and that calls for a response beyond abstention.

Repressers and Repenters

Until the relatively recent past, the United States of America had a de jure racial caste system, and there remain, decades after officially ending that system, significant and obvious racial gaps in material resources and other outcomes. This, Bright argues, creates an inevitable tension: there’s a big gap between the country’s official status as a non-racist society and what everyone can see in practice.

He says this creates a battle between two dueling factions of white people, the Repenters and the Repressers.

• The Repenters feel very guilty and want to do things to expiate that guilt, “and their form of repentance involves trying to change their interpersonal habits and consumer choices so as to minimize their contribution to the broader social issue, and help the particular black people they interact with. In this way, by doing that sort of self-work, they hope to be able to live in a world that is admittedly unjust while making it that little bit better, and through such efforts be able to honestly maintain a positive self image.”

• On the other side are the Repressers, who just want to be told that racism ended when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act or Barack Obama was elected president. They acknowledge the country’s history of racism as well as our huge racial disparities in outcomes, but they maintain that this is just an odd coincidence. These are the folks who lost their shit when Obama said “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon” because it betrayed the idea that Obama’s mere presence in the White House ended the need to ever discuss such matters.

Of course not everyone is white, and Bright has this rather funny take on how non-white people get sucked into and exploit the white psychodrama:

Of course, the rest of us do not simply sit by and watch the whites duke it out amongst themselves. If nothing else they still have ownership of the stuff and a democratic majority, so most of us are dependent on them for making a living. How then have the PoC intelligensia — people of colour sufficiently engaged in politics to be tapped into the white culture war and the historical narrative underpinning it — responded to the opportunities and challenges presented thereby?

With a dextrous entrepreneurial spirit! Which is to say, by cashing in. In institutions like academia more dominated by the Repenter type there has been the opportunity for mediocre of sharp eyed young PoC intelligentsia to present themselves as bearers of black thinkers’ insight (e.g. Bright 2018). It is considerably harder to pull this off from within academia as an advocate for Represser views. But where there is demand there will be supply. And there is a large audience keen for a black thinker to give voice to an intelligent version of the Represser narrative. Sufficiently talented black thinkers have been happy to oblige (e.g. Loury 2009). Various media organisations and political groups likey provide opportunity for similar pseudo-spokespeople PoC intelligentsia catering to both Repressers and Repenters.

The most-correct move, however, according to Bright, is not to hop on either of these bandwagons but instead to be a Non-Aligned person who focuses on directly addressing the underlying material inequalities:

Hence as long as the material inequalities exist they will keep making racial hierarchy salient whatever the Repressers want, and keep generating reasons for guilt whatever the Repenters want. All of the institutions designed to respond to this culture war — which is essentially all of the epistemic institutions controlled by the white bourgeois, which is to say all of them — are thus fundamentally addressing the wrong questions from the point of view of the Non Aligned person. They are concerned with managing the results of a tension they can never resolve, which the nature of the Repenter and Repressor conflict will not allow them to resolve. They are not arranged to produce information, or set an agenda, that will aid in resolving material in- equality, and in fact will forever be supplied with more culture war flashpoints on which to focus and with which to distract.

This is basically what I think, which is why I’m always trying to remind people that Martin Luther King Jr. was very focused on kitchen-table economic issues and, perhaps even more importantly, that he saw the path forward as forging a political alliance with self-interested low-income white people, not cultivating a class of guilt-ridden high-status Repenters.

But I want to emphasize the practical aspects of this and the dilemmas it entails.

Increasing the salience of race is bad

In a new paper from Jesper Akesson, Robert Hahn, Robert Metcalfe, and Itzhak Rasooly, the authors share the results of their randomized experiments on race and welfare:

First, 86% of respondents greatly overestimate the share of welfare recipients who are Black, with the average respondent overestimating this by almost a factor of two.

Second, White support for welfare is inversely related to the proportion of welfare recipients who are Black — a causal claim that we establish using treatment assignment as an instrument for beliefs about the racial composition of welfare recipients.

Third, just making White participants think about the racial composition of welfare recipients reduces their support for welfare.

Fourth, providing White respondents with accurate information about the racial composition of welfare recipients (relative to not receiving any information) does not significantly influence their support for welfare

This is new research in the sense that the experiment is novel, but the broad conclusions are recognizable across multiple economic literatures. Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote find, using international comparative data, that “racial animosity in the US makes redistribution to the poor, who are disproportionately black, unappealing to many voters.” And in their excellent book “Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion,” Donald Kinder and Cindy Kam find that among white people, possession of ethnocentric views correlates with hostility to means-tested public assistance programs.

A deep body of scholarship across history, political science, and economics all broadly point toward the conclusion that increasing the salience of race can have harmful results.

One particularly frustrating example I came across years ago at Vox is that Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt found in experimental settings that telling people about racial disparities in the criminal justice system made people less supportive of reform.

And you could react to that by thinking “wow, that sucks, people shouldn’t be so terrible,” but I think most people believe there are tradeoffs between harshness in the criminal justice system and public safety. And while more progressive-minded people would say that’s overstated, there are clearly some margins on which it’s true. So if you tell people a penalty will be applied in a racist way, for many of them, that’s appealing — the system can crack down on dealers and addicts while they personally can rest assured that if their kid happens to be caught doing drugs, he’ll be okay. By the same token, a friend who’s running for office told me that many of the people she speaks to who are most agitated about crime also hate traffic cameras. My guess is that’s precisely because traffic cameras don’t engage in racial discrimination, and nice middle-class white people don’t like the idea of an enforcement system that doesn’t exempt them.

In the specific case of the cameras, I think we should have more of them and that the aim of our criminal justice system more broadly should be to catch a larger share of offenders in a non-discriminatory way and then punish them less harshly. Ideally, everyone who speeds would get caught and fined and the fines wouldn’t necessarily be very high, but people would stop doing speeding because the odds of detection are overwhelming.

And in the general case, I think it’s clear that the goal should be to reduce the salience of race in public debate and focus on the direct objects of reducing poverty, making policing more accountable, improving schools, reducing air pollution, expanding health insurance coverage, and otherwise solving the big problems of American society. All of this would, mechanically, close racial gaps. But highlighting that is genuinely counterproductive.

The ethic of responsibility

I’m not sure if this is contradictory to Bright’s view or complementary, but I think the pursuit of justice requires a bit more than Non-Alignment with regard to culture war chum.

People in positions of power and influence — that includes funders and media figures and professors and nonprofit leaders and elected officials — need to deploy an ethic of responsibility with regard to these matters. There are situations in which explicit consideration of race is essential because you have genuine, specific evidence of discrimination. I don’t know whether Nathan Connolly’s claims of discrimination in home appraisal will ultimately stand up to scrutiny, but the evidence he’s presented is persuasive, and importantly for our purposes, he’s trying to demonstrate specific race-based discrimination, not a situation that disproportionately impacts Black Americans because they are on average poorer.

But we should be cognizant that it is potentially counterproductive to deliberately increase the salience of race when it’s not necessary. I think that most of the people who do this are responding to an objective incentive structure, and I think that structure was set up mostly with good intentions, but it’s actually deleterious to the interests of the people it’s supposed to be helping.

It’s fun and easy to mock the most egregious hypocrites within Bright’s Repenter circle — the people who read DiAngelo and post a Black Lives Matter yard sign while bragging about how diverse their kids’ private school is — but real damage is done by people who are less cringy than this. When the way to get a grant application funded or get donations to your political campaign or get your article on the front page is to engage in some shallow disparity-spotting, that’s actually making it harder to reduce disparities. And you would possibly need to incur some personal cost to push back against that way of doing business. But relative to the hardships people have endured in the past for the sake of progress, that’s pretty minor.

In my last post about President Biden's plan to cancel hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan debt, I criticized the administration's claims that the policy is authorized by an emergency power provision of the 2003 HEROES Act. But there is an alternative potential legal justification for the policy: Section 432(a) of the Higher Education Act of 1965, (now codified as 20 U.S.C. Section 1082(a)(6), which authorizes the Secretary of Education to "enforce, pay, compromise, waive, or release any right, title, claim, lien, or demand, however acquired, including any equity or any right of redemption" related to loans authorized by the Federal Direct Loan Program.

Fordham law Professor Jed Shugerman, who is highly critical of the administration's HEROES Act theory, argues that the Higher Education Act (HEA) provides a much stronger rationale for Biden's plan. Earlier, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others argued that Section 432(a) could even justify a much larger debt cancellation program. Last year, the administration viewed this theory with skepticism. But should Biden's plan be challenged in court, they could potentially still resort to it.

In some ways, the HEA argument is indeed superior to the HEROES Act theory. Taken in in isolation from the rest of the Act, Section 432(a) does appear to grant the executive the power to cancel as much student loan debt as it wants. That can be extrapolated from the power to "waive…or release any right, title, claim, lien, or demand" (emphasis added). Moreover, unlike the HEROES Act theory, the HEA justification isn't confined to emergency situations or to borrowers who can plausibly claim that an emergency or disaster has made it more difficult for them to pay their debts. If the argument is correct, the administration can cancel any amount of federal student loan debt, at any time, for virtually any reason.

But a closer look suggests that the HEA theory is flawed for may of the same reasons as the HEROES Act rationale. Indeed, its breath-taking scope contributes to its undoing.

The HEA rationale was examined in some detail in a January 2021 memorandum written by then-Education Department Deputy General Counsel Reed Rubinstein, for outgoing Trump Administration Education Secretary Betsy DeVos (Secretary DeVos actually resigned in protest of Trump's role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, a few days before the memo was officially submitted to her; but I don't think this changes its status). I don't agree with everything Rubinstein says. But he does make several strong points against the idea that Section 432(c) gives the Secretary of Education a blank check to cancel student loan debt.

As Rubinstein points out, "reading 20 U.S.C. § 1082(a)(6) to permit the Secretary [of Education], on a blanket or mass basis, to cancel, compromise, discharge, or forgive student loan principal balances" would render superfluous various other provisions of the HEA and later statutes, which give the Secretary the power to cancel or limit debt in more limited circumstances. And, as he rightly explains, there is a longstanding presumption against interpreting statutes in a way that renders parts of them superfluous. The Supreme Court has repeatedly reaffirmed this principle.

To avoid this and other problems, Rubinstein suggests that it makes more sense to construe Section 432(c) as only giving the Secretary the authority to waive or release student loan debt  "on a case-by-case basis and then only under those circumstances specified by Congress." In such situations, the provision serves to eliminate any ambiguity about the Education Department's ability to forego any rights in question and to do so in whatever way the Department sees fit.

Like the HEROES Act theory, the HEA rationale for Biden's plan is vulnerable to attack under the "major questions" and nondelegation doctrines. The former requires Congress to "speak clearly when authorizing an [executive branch] agency to exercise powers of vast economic and political significance." If a statute is ambiguous, courts must presume that Congress has not given the agency the power in question.

Jed Shugerman rightly argues that the HEROES Act argument runs afoul of the Supreme Court's recent major questions rulings.  The authority to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan debt under an expansive definition of what qualifies as an "emergency" surely qualifies as a power of "vast economic and political significance." But that's even more true of the HEA theory, which would give the executive the power to cancel any amount of student loan debt at any time, for any reason.

Under the HEA approach, there would essentially be no limit to the executive's power to cancel student loan debt. If the major questions doctrine applies anywhere, it surely does here. And Rubinstein's analysis suggests there is at least some significant ambiguity about whether Section 432(c) - read in conjunction with the rest of the Higher Education Act - actually gives the administration such vast power. If so, the major questions doctrine requires federal courts to rule against the executive.

What is true of the major questions doctrine is also true of nondelegation. In my earlier post, I explained why, if there are meaningful constitutional limits to Congress' power to delegate its authority to the executive, the HEROES Act theory likely runs afoul of them. That reasoning applies with even greater force to the HEA rationale, which would give the executive still greater discretionary authority. The Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to allocate federal funds. Giving the president unfettered authority to deprive the treasury of hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan debt is a truly enormous delegation.

At the very least, as the Rubinstein Memorandum  points out, courts must apply the Supreme Court's longstanding canon against interpreting federal statutes in ways that raise constitutional problems. In his controlling opinion in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), Chief Justice John Roberts famously emphasized that this rule requires courts to reject "the most natural" reading of a statute if there is any "fairly possible" interpretation that would avoid the risk of rendering it unconstitutional. Rubinstein's interpretation of Section 432(c) is at least a "fairly possible" one, and it would enable courts to avoid confronting a massive constitutional nondelegation problem.

I'm no great fan of the constitutional avoidance canon, especially Roberts' very broad view of it. But the Supreme Court doesn't seem likely to curb it anytime soon, and lower courts are required to follow it.

In sum, the HEA rationale for Biden loan cancellation plan has some advantages over the HEROES Act theory advanced by the administration. But the enormous scope of the power the theory gives the executive should lead courts to reject it.

UPDATE: I plan to write one more post in this series, addressing the question of whether anyone has standing to sue to challenge the loan debt cancellation policy.

The post Assessing an Alternative Legal Justification for Biden's Student Loan Debt Cancellation Policy appeared first on Reason.com.

1. What is up in Eritrea?

2. Noah interviews Vitalik.

3. Economist John Friedman on education and mobility (NYT).

4. Arcadia, a new group house in Berkeley.

5. Why is China so obsessed with food security?

6. The wisdom of John Arnold, on student loans: “Interestingly, the government student loan program originally guaranteed only 80% of principal. In 1976 it was increased to 100% plus interest, thereby eliminating any shared risk and creating the moral hazard that exists today.”

The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Avarice, or the desire of gain, is an universal passion, which operates at all times, in all places, and upon all persons: But curiosity, or the love of knowledge, has a very limited influence, and requires youth, leisure, education, genius, and example, to make it govern any person. You will never want booksellers, while there are buyers of books: But there may frequently be readers where there are no authors.

David Hume explaining why it’s more difficult to explain the progress of the arts and sciences than economic progress, even if the latter may depend on the former. And here is Hume on geography and the growth of the arts and sciences:

But the divisions into small states are favourable to learning, by stopping the progress of authority as well as that of power. Reputation is often as great a fascination upon men as sovereignty, and is equally destructive to the freedom of thought and examination. But where a number of neighbouring states have a great intercourse of arts and commerce, their mutual jealousy keeps them from receiving too lightly the law from each other, in matters of taste and of reasoning, and makes them examine every work of art with the greatest care and accuracy. The contagion of popular opinion spreads not so easily from one place to another. It readily receives a check in some state or other, where it concurs not with the prevailing prejudices. And nothing but nature and reason, or, at least, what bears them a strong resemblance, can force its way through all obstacles, and unite the most rival nations into an esteem and admiration of it.

…In China, there seems to be a pretty considerable stock of politeness and science, which, in the course of so many centuries, might naturally be expected to ripen into some thing more perfect and finished, than what has yet arisen from them. But China is one vast empire, speaking one language, governed by one law, and sympathizing in the same manners. The authority of any teacher, such as Confucius, was propagated easily from one corner of the empire to the other. None had courage to resist the torrent of popular opinion. And posterity was not bold enough to dispute what had been universally received by their ancestors. This seems to be one natural reason, why the sciences have made so slow a progress in that mighty empire.

If we consider the face of the globe, Europe, of all the four parts of the world, is the most broken by seas, rivers, and mountains; and Greece of all countries of Europe. Hence these regions were naturally divided into several distinct governments. And hence the sciences arose in Greece; and Europe has been hitherto the most constant habitation of them.

See Tyler’s In Praise of Commericial Culture for more Humean themes.

The post Hume on the Rise And Progress of the Arts And Sciences appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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YouTube’s recommendation algorithm pushed more videos about election fraud to people who were already skeptical about the 2020 election’s legitimacy, according to a new study. There were a relatively low number of videos about election fraud, but the most skeptical YouTube users saw three times as many of them as the least skeptical users.

“The more susceptible you are to these types of narratives about the election…the more you would be recommended content about that narrative,” says study author James Bisbee, who’s now a political scientist at Vanderbilt University.

In the wake of his 2020 election loss, former President Donald Trump has promoted the false claim that the election was stolen, calling for a repeat election as recently...

Continue reading…

A game designer has sparked controversy after submitting an image created by an AI text-to-image generator to a state art competition and taking home first prize.

Jason Allen entered the artwork titled “Theatre d’Opera Spatial” in the “Digital Arts / Digitally-Manipulated Photography” category of the Colorado State Fair fine arts competition but created the piece using a popular text-to-image AI generator named Midjourney.

A Twitter post describing Allen’s win went viral earlier this week (and was first covered by Vice). The post elicited a strong response, with many users claiming that Allen had been deceptive in submitting the piece, particularly as most of the public is unaware of how text-to-image AI generators work. Allen, though,...

Continue reading…

Between 1901 and 1904, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a series of cases, collectively known as the Insular Cases, which asked whether the Constitution should fully apply to the residents of Puerto Rico and other territories recently acquired by the U.S. after its victory in the Spanish-American War. The Court held that the Constitution did not fully apply in those U.S.-held territories.

The Insular Cases have been severely criticized—then and now—for being the product of racist and imperialist thinking. The legal scholar Walter F. Pratt Jr., author of The Insular Cases: The Role of the Judiciary in American Expansionism, described the legal arguments involved as "largely racially motivated," since the Court effectively held that "the people of the new territories were unfit to become citizens."

A similar criticism of the Insular Cases was recently voiced by Justice Neil Gorsuch, who argued that "the Insular Cases have no foundation in the Constitution and rest instead on racial stereotypes. They deserve no place in our law."

Gorsuch's characterization is apt. Take the case Dorr v. United States (1904), which asked whether the constitutional right to trial by jury should exist in the Philippines. The Court said no, observing that "the uncivilized parts of the archipelago were wholly unfitted to exercise the right of trial by jury."

In other words, it was racism and imperialism in the guise of a Supreme Court opinion.

Gorsuch also added his voice to those calling for the Insular Cases to be wiped off the books. "The time has come to recognize that the Insular Cases rest on a rotten foundation," Gorsuch wrote. "And I hope the day comes soon when the Court squarely overrules them."

Alas, the Department of Justice under President Joe Biden apparently sees things differently. As The Washington Post's Robert Barnes recently reported, "the Biden administration told the Supreme Court Monday that it should not take up a case [Fitisemanu v. United States] about citizenship rights for American Samoa even though advocates say it would give justices a chance to upend a series of century-old precedents that have been roundly denounced as racist."

Unsurprisingly, the Biden administration's stance has come under fire. "Advocates were disappointed that [Solicitor General Elizabeth] Prelogar asked the high court not to take the case," the Post notes. "'It is shocking that the Biden-Harris Administration and the Solicitor General continue to breathe life into the Insular Cases, which were grounded in a vision of white supremacy that has no place in our society, much less briefs filed by the U.S. Justice Department,' said Neil Weare, president and founder of Equally American, which advocates for equal rights in U.S. territories."

To say the least, Gorsuch has probably not been described as "woke" very often. But he sure seems more ready to act against systemic government racism in this case than the liberal Biden administration does.

The post Why Won't the Biden Administration Join Gorsuch in Seeking To Overrule These Racist SCOTUS Precedents? appeared first on Reason.com.

So NBC New York reports, discussing how stores are beginning to comply with this law, enacted last Fall:

1. "[W]hipped cream charger" shall mean a steel cylinder or cartridge filled with nitrous oxide (N2O) that is used as a whipping agent in a whipped cream dispenser.

2. No … business … shall sell or offer for sale a whipped cream charger to any person under the age of twenty-one.

3. Any … business within the state selling, offering for sale, or distributing whipped cream chargers shall require proof of legal age prior to allowing an individual to purchase or receive a shipment of whipped cream chargers. Such identification need not be required of any individual who reasonably appears to be at least twenty-five years of age, provided, however, that such appearance shall not constitute a defense in any proceeding alleging the sale or distribution of whipped cream chargers to an individual under twenty-one years of age.

4. Any … business … that violates the provisions of this section shall be subject to a civil penalty of not more than two hundred fifty dollars for an initial offense and not more than five hundred dollars for the second and each subsequent offense.

The rationale, from the Senate sponsor, Joseph P. Addabbo:

This new law is an important step in combatting a significant problem for many neighborhoods throughout my district. The need to limit the access and sale of whippits first became apparent after receiving constituent complaints about empty canisters on neighborhood streets. Used whippits piling up in our communities are not only an eye sore, but also indicative of a significant nitrous oxide abuse problem. This law will help to protect our youth from the dangers of this lethal chemical, while helping to clean up our neighborhoods….

Whipped cream chargers are filled with nitrous oxide which is often referred to as "laughing gas" and popularly used as an over-the-counter inhalant because of its euphoric effects. Dental professionals use the chemical during oral surgery to relieve pain but it is highly addictive and has detrimental effects if used improperly.

Studies have shown that younger people are most at risk when it comes to inhalants because they are inexpensive, easy to obtain, and may provide one of the easiest ways to get high. The gas-filled canisters are to be legally sold for cooking, baking and other proper home uses.

And from the Assembly sponsor, Stacey Pheffer Amato:

Our bill will greatly improve the quality of life throughout our state by removing the unused whipped cream canisters from our streets, and prevent their dangerous misuse—especially among our youth.

UPDATE (8/29/2022, 9:52 pm Pacific): The NBC New York story, from which the headline is borrowed, pointed to stores that interpreted the statute as barring sale of whipped cream to under-21-year-olds; and Sen. Addabbo's Oct. 29 press release quotes (as I noted above) his cosponsor saying the bill does apply to "whipped cream canisters." But Sen. Addabbo Tweeted today that  his "bill is not intended to prevent people under the age of 21 from buying whipped cream dispensers, but the small, individual charger or cartridge inside the whipped cream canisters that is the target of this law." (Thanks to reader Jordan Brown for the pointer.)

Clarification for the misinterpretation of the state law regarding the sale of whipped cream canisters, which should be allowed. pic.twitter.com/XpCwrIQyF9

— SenatorJoeAddabbo (@SenJoeAddabbo) August 29, 2022

Perhaps this was the intent, and perhaps that's the best reading of the law—though one could certainly imagine a creative prosecutor arguing that selling a whipped cream canister containing a whipped cream charger constitutes selling the whipped cream charger. ("In theory, a youngster could buy a can of Reddi-wip, break it open and remove the cartridge of nitrous oxide," Addabbo reportedly said, though he also said "that's not his target.")

The stores' reactions described in the NBC story might thus reflect the famous "chilling effect," where a law leads cautious people to avoid even conduct that they worry might violate the law, even if it turns out that the conduct doesn't violate the law. At the same time, such a chilling effect is pretty foreseeable, especially when your own press release quotes your cosponsor saying that the law would remove "whipped cream canisters from our streets."

The post "It's Illegal for People Under 21 to Buy Canisters of Whipped Cream in NY" appeared first on Reason.com.

• Bali and Costa Rica launched their highly anticipated "digital nomad visas" this summer. 
• They join dozens of countries hoping to attract virtual workers to boost the local economy.
• Three digital nomads from Ghana, the UK, and Canada gave Insider an inside look at the application process. 

Bali and Costa Rica recently joined the growing list of countries that offer residence visas specifically for remote workers, also known as "digital nomad visas." 

Prior to the pandemic, the term digital nomad was fundamentally at odds with the corporate 9-to-5 crowd. Now, tourism-dependent countries are hoping the new wave of remote workers with consistent paychecks will create a more reliable source of economic activity.

That's the case for Sean McNulty, the CEO and founder of asset management firm XIB International. The 38-year-old Canadian has been living and working remotely from Bermuda with his wife Jana through the island's digital nomad program since November 2020. He told Insider they plan to live on the island for at least three more years and are considering raising a family there. 

After applying through the program website, the couple was approved "within a week," McNulty said, adding that working in finance likely aided his application as Bermuda looks to diversify the economic activity on the island. 

Applicants must pay a $263 fee, provide proof of employment outside of the island, and demonstrate they can afford the local cost of living. 

"The lifestyle and the work life balance here, I don't think you could beat that anywhere in the world," McNulty told Insider. "If you just be a good human and have fun then it's hard not to be happy here."

Benjamin Rogers, a 23-year-old marketing specialist from the United Kingdom, told Insider he's in the process of applying to Mexico's temporary residence visa. He said he plans on working abroad without the permission of his current employer, but hopes to keep his position at the company. Applicants must make around $2,600 a month in order to apply. 

Once in Mexico, Rogers said he plans to stay in Airbnbs in different areas of the country and create content for his travel blog, The Lonesome Wanderer. 

"It feels like we're on the edge of the swingin' sixties, but with less acid and more Microsoft Teams," he told Insider, adding that he views the digital nomad community as a "movement" that values creativity. 

For 35-year-old music blogger Osei Kojo Enoch, working remotely from abroad was more an economic necessity than a lifestyle option. 

"You really don't have a choice because unemployment in Ghana is a very serious thing," he said. "The reason I started [a virtual business] was a result of not finding a job after graduating from school."

After launching his website from Ghana, Enoch said he wanted to work from a country with better electricity, internet access, and potable water. However, his travel options were severely limited by his West African passport, he told Insider.

"Unlike people from the West who can just take their passports and travel to any part of the world, people coming from places like in Asia and Africa, most everywhere you go, you will need a visa," Enoch said.

Last year, Enoch applied for Dubai's remote worker visa, a program that launched in 2020. He said he chose Dubai due to the city's infrastructure, safety, weather, and lack of a personal income tax. 

In order to qualify, applicants need to submit proof of employment for the one-year duration of the visa with a minimum monthly salary of $5,000. The entire application process took a total of six weeks, according to Enoch.

"I needed better opportunities in life so that is what brought me to Dubai, and I also love to travel," he said. "It's like killing two birds with one stone."

Even with a Dubai work visa, Enoch said he was still unable to travel outside of the UAE due to his Ghanaian passport, which he said led to a UK tourism visa being denied.

The experience prompted him to apply to Malta's digital nomad visa, which allows for travel within the Schengen area — a region containing 26 European Union member countries where travelers can move freely without dealing with border control. For this, he enlisted the help of Citizen Remote, a start-up that offers digital nomad visa consultations and assistance.

Enoch said he paid a total of €2,800 fees throughout the application process, which he described as much stricter in terms of vetting compared to Dubai. However, Malta's digital nomad program only requires a monthly income of €2,700 — approximately €2,300 less than Dubai's monthly income requirement. 

Despite the growing overlap between digital nomads and influencer territory, Enoch warned that the lifestyle isn't always as great as it seems on social media. 

"It gets very lonely," he told Insider. "The one year that I've been working at a co-working space, I really haven't been able to make many friends ... a lot of people come and they don't tend to live in that place for a long time."

• The insurance agency Insurify compiled a list of the 10 best US cities for recent grads.
• The ratings are based on unemployment rate, cost of living, and overall appeal, among other factors.
• A city's affordability and public transportation are key determiners of its appeal, the report says.

Young graduates searching for the best place to start their careers have several factors to consider when choosing a city.

In recent years, major US cities like New York and San Francisco that have long been magnets for recent grads are starting to lose their luster, thanks in part to skyrocketing rent and shifts in the way Americans work during the pandemic. 

As more companies offering hybrid and remote work models, many graduates are trying to determine if they want to stay where they are or venture into new territory to find opportunities.

With so many emerging hubs for young professionals around the country, the process can feel daunting. To assist with the search, the insurance agency Insurify published a list of the best cities for new graduates in each state based on the cost of living index, unemployment rate, overall appeal, and more.

For young professionals starting out on an entry-level salary, a city's affordability, public transportation, and entertainment are important factors, Insurify says. 

Here are the top 10 cities in the US for recent college graduates, according to Insurify.

10. Tampa, FL

Overall appeal score: 73.0 (48% greater than state average)

Cost of living index: 101.4 (vs. national average of 100)

Unemployment rate: 2.9%

9. Denver, CO

Overall appeal score: 73.3 (76% greater than state average)

Cost of living index: 112.1 (vs. national average of 100)

Unemployment rate: 3.2%

8. Fort Wayne, IN

Overall appeal score: 73.7 (23% greater than state average)

Cost of living index: 86.8 (vs. national average of 100)

Unemployment rate: 3.0%

7. Fargo, ND

Overall appeal score: 75.8 (13% greater than state average)

Cost of living index: 91.4 (vs. national average of 100)

Unemployment rate: 2.1%

6. Portland, OR

Overall appeal score: 78.9 (54% greater than state average)

Cost of living index: 116.5 (vs. national average of 100)

Unemployment rate: 3.6%

5. Lincoln, NE

Overall appeal score: 84.9 (12% greater than state average)

Cost of living index: 94.7 (vs. national average of 100)

Unemployment rate: 2.4%

4. Pittsburgh, PA

Overall appeal score: 85.5 (58% greater than state average)

Cost of living index: 93.1 (vs. national average of 100)

Unemployment rate: 4.6%

3. Rapid City, SD

Overall appeal score: 88.8 (23% greater than state average)

Cost of living index: 94.2 (vs. national average of 100)

Unemployment rate: 2.5%

2. Minneapolis, MN

Overall appeal score: 98.3 (30% greater than state average)

Cost of living index: 105.4 (vs. national average of 100)

Unemployment rate: 2.2%

1. St. Louis, MO

Overall appeal score: 100.0 (25% greater than state average)

Cost of living index: 89.6 (vs. national average of 100)

Unemployment rate: 2.8%

Most people in modern democratic societies want a government that is simultaneously democratic, accountable, and large (in the sense that it carries out a wide range of functions). In an insightful recent blog post on "The Good Government Trilemma," Canadian legal scholar Leonid Sirota explains why we probably can't have all of these things at once. At most, we can only hope to get two out of three:

What is the respective role of democratic and other means of holding a government to account in a well-ordered polity? In one way or another, this question is the subject of live―and lively―debates in many (perhaps all?) democratic societies….

At the risk of generalizing, my impression is that these debates tend to present themselves as clashes between the values of, for lack of better terms, democratic government and accountable government. One side thinks that the important thing is that elected officials get to run the show as they think best, subject to eventually being booted out by the voters. The other thinks that what matters is that the government be kept in check and made to answer for its actions on an ongoing basis, through some mix of elections, judicial supervision, and other accountability mechanisms, either internal to the government (such as ombudsmen and auditors) or external (NGOs and media)….

However, I think that the debate framed in this way is incomplete. It ignores a third factor that needs to be taken into account: the size of the government in question….

I would suggest that the apparent need to trade off between democracy and accountability is in fact only special case of what I will, again for lack of a better term, call the good governance trilemma. Of democracy, accountability, and big government, you can have two ― if you do things well; many polities won't get two, or indeed even one ― but you cannot have all three. It is possible to satisfy the trilemma by choosing fractions ― a dose of democracy, a measure of accountability, a government not quite as big as one might dream of ― but the total cannot go above two, and it will certainly never go anywhere near three. You can't have it all.

How does the trilemma work? Let's start, as most people do, with big government a given. A government so big it takes scores of ― or, in the UK's case, close to a hundred ― ministers of various sorts (or, in the US, agency heads) to run itself, to say nothing of the tens or hundreds of thousands of civil servants. This, of course, is ….  our present reality. A citizen who wanted to keep track of what the government is getting up to at a rate of, say, half an hour per minister per week would have a full-time job on his or her hands. And for at least some departments…., half an hour per week hardly seems like it would be anywhere near enough to know what's going on. Never mind ordinary citizens: even members of Parliament would struggle mightily to keep the tabs on the administration by virtue of its sheer size….

The post The "Good Government Trilemma": Why We Can't Have Democracy, Accountability, and Big Government all at Once appeared first on Reason.com.

Covid, it’s now an established fact, is airborne.

Read more...

The pilots at Mesa Airlines are about to be the best-paid in the regional airline industry.

The Phoenix-based regional airline, which operates the Canadair Regional Jet 900 for American Airlines and the Embraer 175 for United Airlines, will pay its first officers a starting rate of $100 per flight hour and its captains a starting rate of $150 per hour, the union representing its pilots, the Air Line Pilots Association, announced on Friday.

It’s the first regional airline to break the $100 per hour starting pay mark for first officers. In June, American Airlines sent shockwaves through the industry when agreements were reached with unions at its three wholly-owned regional airlines to start first officer pay at $90 per flight hour.

Want more airline-specific news? Sign up for TPG’s free biweekly Aviation newsletter.

During the airline’s third-quarter earnings call earlier this month, Mesa’s longtime CEO, Jonathan Ornstein, said that his airline was losing pilots to American’s regional airlines.

Prior to this agreement, Mesa’s pilots were among the lowest paid in the regional industry. It’s a 118% pay hike for first-year first officers and a 172% hike for captains.

“With strong competition in the regional industry, today’s LOA offers the compensation Mesa needs to remain competitive and attract and retain experienced, qualified pilots,”  Capt. Chris Gill, the chair of Mesa’s pilot union, said in a statement, referring to the letter of agreement signed between the union and the airline’s management.  “We’re happy to see management and our partners recognize the value of Mesa pilots.”

The new rates take effect on Sept. 15. The deal is for two years, and the union is currently negotiating other aspects of its contract with Mesa.

More: Pilots at American Airlines’ regional airlines will see a massive pay increase

The move by Mesa comes as a pilot shortage is acutely impacting the regional airline industry and driving airlines to increase pay in order to compete for a smaller pool of pilots. Things have gotten particularly bleak for regional airlines during the COVID-19 pandemic, as pilots at larger mainline carriers took buyouts and early retirement packages, leaving a large void of pilots for the airlines to fill. Regional airlines haven’t been able to compete with the majors as easily in recruiting talent.

“There’s no fundamental flaw to this business beyond this pilot shortage,” Ornstein said on the call.

Earlier this week, pilots at another United Express carrier, CommutAir, received a pay bump as well, though it now falls far below the new rates at Mesa.

TPG reached out to Mesa for comment and will update this story when we hear back.

Featured photo by Alex Tai/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images.

…I was shocked to discover that many social policy interventions, including some of the most touted, don’t help boys and men.  The one that first caught my eye was a free college program in Kalamazoo, Michigan.  According to its evaluation team, “women experienced large gains,” in terms of college completion (increasing by 50%), “while men seem to experience zero benefit.”  This is an astonishing finding.  Making college free had no impact on men…So not only are many boys and men struggling, they are less likely to be helped by policy interventions.

And:

In the U.S. for example, the 2020 decline in college enrollment was seven times greater for male than for female students.

And:

The bottom line is that Finland’s internationally acclaimed educational performance is entirely explained by the stunning performance of Finnish girls.

That is from the forthcoming Richard V. Reeves book, one of the most important of this year, perhaps the most important.

The post *Of Boys and Men* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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A new paper, The Injustice of Under-Policing, makes a point that I have been emphasizing for many years, namely, relative to other developed countries the United States is under-policed and over-imprisoned.

…the American criminal legal system is characterized by an exceptional kind of under-policing, and a heavy reliance on long prison sentences, compared to other developed nations. In this country, roughly three people are incarcerated per police officer employed. The rest of the developed world strikes a diametrically opposite balance between these twin arms of the penal state, employing roughly three and a half times more police officers than the number of people they incarcerate. We argue that the United States has it backward. Justice and efficiency demand that we strike a balance between policing and incarceration more like that of the rest of the developed world. We call this the “First World Balance.”

First, as is well known, the US  has a very high rate of imprisonment compared to other countries but less well  known is that the US has a relatively low rate of police per capita.

If we focus on rates relative to crime then we get a slightly different but similar perspective. Namely, relative to the number of homicides we have a normal rate of imprisonment but are still surprisingly under-policed.

As a result, as I argued in What Was Gary Becker’s Biggest Mistake?, we have a low certainty of punishment (measured as arrests per homicide) and then try to make up for that with high punishment levels (prisoners per arrest). The low certainty, high punishment level is especially notably for black Americans.

Shifting to more police and less imprisonment could reduce crime and improve policing. More police and less imprisonment also has the advantage of being a feasible policy. Large majorities of blacks, hispanics and whites support hiring more police. “Tough on crime” can be interpreted as greater certainty of punishment and with greater certainty of punishment we can safely reduce punishment levels.

Hat tip: A thread from Justin Nix.

The post Still under-policed and over-imprisoned appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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It was a pleasant November day in Tucson, Arizona, and Sarra needed to procure a Thanksgiving turkey. The COVID-19 pandemic was still raging—this was fall 2020, before vaccines had been made available—and the supermarket's policy was to discourage excess people from entering the premises.

Sarra thus opted to let her 7-year-old son and his 5-year-old friend play at the park while she ran the errand. She instructed the kids to wait for her by the jungle gym; taking note of an adult acquaintance teaching a tai chi class in the park, Sarra told her kids to consult the friend in the event of an emergency. She then left to buy her turkey.

"It seemed like a nice, calm day," says Sarra. (In order to protect her privacy, her full name is not being used.)

Leaving the kids behind was an easy decision, one any parent might have made. The park was safe and the errand was quick.

And yet the state of Arizona has decided that the incident demonstrates Sarra's unfitness to care for children. Leaving two kids to fend for themselves even briefly—in a perfectly safe public park, with an acquaintance nearby—was an act of negligence, in the state's view, and one that warrants Sarra's placement on a list called the Central Registry.

People who are on the Central Registry are prohibited from working with children, even in a volunteer capacity. The Central Registry violates basic tenets of due process in numerous ways: It is run by an administrative agency, the Department of Child Safety (DCS), and the standard for placement on the Central Registry is probable cause—mere suspicion of wrongdoing, in other words.

"That's the standard the government uses to get a search warrant," says Timothy Sandefur, an attorney and vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute. "That's really outrageous."

The Goldwater Institute, a conservative and libertarian think tank, and the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), a libertarian public interest law firm, have filed a motion on Sarra's behalf to prevent the Central Registry from adding her name to its list—or to remove her name if it's already there. (The list is so shrouded in secrecy that it's hard to tell.) If unsuccessful, Sarra's name will enter the registry for the next 25 years. "It's really shocking," she says.

She was in the middle of shopping when a friend found her in the store and informed her that the police were with the kids. She raced back to the park, where the police arrested her on suspicion of endangering a minor. This was surprising, given that the children were never in any danger whatsoever—and no one had claimed they were.

Though there's not an explicit law against letting kids play by themselves in a public park, Arizona's minor delinquency laws are especially vague. And even in states where the laws are clearer, parents are customarily prosecuted for leaving kids at home, letting them walk to school by themselves, or dropping them off at the playground for a few minutes of unmonitored play. Thus Sarra joined the ranks of the Meitiv parents, Melissa Henderson, Megan McMurry, and so many others across the country who were wrongly punished by law enforcement for entrusting kids with reasonable levels of autonomy.

Sarra ultimately worked out a plea deal, in which the prosecutor would drop the charges if she took a parenting class.

"I was told you just take this one class and they'll drop everything, it will all go away," she says. "But it doesn't really go away."

That's because the police are one matter, and DCS is another. The department operates all on its own and can take action against a parent whether or not the cops file charges.

Moreover, the procedures in DCS trials bear little resemblance to actual courts of law, which have rules of evidence and require a presumption of innocence. Sarra's case went before a DCS administrative law judge with the sole power to decide her fitness as a parent—a "hired bureaucrat," according to Sandefur, who described the treatment of parents like Sarra as fundamentally unfair.

"It violates a large number of constitutional protections that are supposed to ensure that innocent people are not railroaded for allowing their children to play outside for half an hour," he says.

Particularly concerning, notes Sandefur, is the unbelievably low threshold for finding a parent unfit: probable cause. The situation reminds him of civil asset forfeiture abuses, in which police seize property from people merely suspected of crimes. Victims of civil asset forfeiture often have great difficulty recouping their losses, even though in many cases they are never actually convicted of underlying crimes. Police took $8,040, for instance, from a Rochester, New York, woman after raiding her apartment. The cops were investigating her former boyfriend, and never charged her with a crime; they did keep the money, though.

Similarly, parents who were never convicted of child endangerment—nor even reasonably accused of ever putting a child in harm's way—can nevertheless be prohibited from taking care of children in the state of Arizona.

"You have a system that allows the government to blacklist people based on irrational assertions of harming children," says Sandefur.

DCS procedures are especially illiberal in that the department's director can overrule an administrative judge and place a person on the Central Registry even if the judge ruled in the person's favor.

After a "kangaroo" hearing that Sarra describes as a mere formality—it was a foregone conclusion DCS would determine the probable cause threshold had been reached, she says—her name was slated for registration. She appealed that decision, and now with Goldwater and PLF's help, she expects her case to reach the Superior Court in the coming months. If they lose there, they will appeal all the way up to the state Supreme Court, says Sandefur.

In the meantime, Sarra's pending designation as a menace to children hasn't fazed the Sunday school where she teaches.

"They said, 'Don't worry about it, we're not going to listen to DCS,'" she recalls. The Central Registry is evidently so vast that organizations working with children can't even rely on it. Sarra said she saw an estimate that one in every 100 Arizonans is on the list for one reason or another.

"It's so crazy," she says. "Either we're all criminals, or the law is not quite right."

The post A Mom Let Her 7-Year-Old Play in the Park. Arizona Arrested Her and Banned Her From Working With Kids. appeared first on Reason.com.

[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked. This contains spoilers for the Dune series. - SA]

—

The memory of sand’s gold sheen
The worm, the man, the Arakeen
The beast, the wise undying king
His long and gentle wrath
His voice trapped under golden swells
Like screams wrung from uncounted bells
divided god within a hell
His pain a golden path

- From The Collected Songs of The Scattering, author unknown.

The Setting

As God Emperor of Dune begins, our attention is immediately drawn to people. Here, 3500 years after the chronological setting of the first novel, is immediate proof that humanity has survived in the form of a small group of people fleeing through a forest, wolves nipping at their heels.

The wolves belong to Leto Atreides II, the grandson of Duke Leto Atreides and son of Paul Muad’ib Atreides, the Kwisatz Haderach and protagonist of Dune I: The One You’ve Probably Read. At the end of the third book, Leto fused his body with Arakeen sandtrout, the larval form of the Sandworms on which the plot of the series mostly hangs. This symbiosis gave Leto super-human physical powers to match the clairvoyance already enjoyed by his family and allowed him to seize control of the galactic empire.

Centuries of time have seen him evolve into a hybrid of a human man and a full-grown sandworm, and the resultant power and pseudo-immortality have allowed him to extend his father’s dominance of the known universe from a period of decades to an era spanning the better part of four millennia.

The wolves are his not only by right of ownership but also apparently by right of design and creation; near-immortality leaves one with much time to tinker, and he has developed the wolves to a level of sophistication sufficient that they understand the boundaries of their hunting grounds to stop at the Idaho river. It is towards this river and the safety attained through its crossing that the group is fleeing.

The members of the retreating troupe also belong to Leto, although they may not acknowledge or even suspect it. The nature of his ownership of them is in many ways similar to his sovereignty over the wolves that guard the forbidden forest around his citadel; they too are to some extent beings of his creation and design.

If this description has made you expect an action-filled novel, dispel those hopes. This is a book about the nature of leadership as practiced over periods of time that defy normal concepts of mortality. As a story, it doesn’t amount to much. As a picture of a fully-imagined empire at a particular point in time and a description of an unusual method of rulership, it’s something more. This is the least readable of the Dune books, but also the most meaningful.

It’s a book that meditates on the loneliness of true superiority, of the ennui of true invulnerability. It is a book that ponders humanity as brought to heel at the side of a benevolent and less-than-human mind with greater-than-human capabilities.

Hydraulic Despotism

As was the case in the nearly two-Christianities-ago day of Leto’s father, control of the spice resources of the planet Arakis amounts to de facto control of the universe; it’s the unobtainium does-everything-you-need resource the dune universe runs off. The book likens this to Hydraulic Despotism, where control of an all-important resource (generally water) allows for control of everything downstream of and reliant on that resource.

Leto’s grasp of the resource that grants this near-universal control is unshakably strong compared to his father’s. He has driven the sandworm to extinction; he is all that remains of the species. What spice remains in the universe exists only in stockpiles he created over the course of his rule.

From those stockpiles he ekes out poisoned riches; a dose of spice essence to create a Bene Gesserit reverend mother here and a supply just great enough to enable the spacing guild to allow such travel as Leto approves there only serve to reinforce the universe’s reliance on Leto’s largess.

Leto’s prescience, his nigh invulnerability, and his unrivaled levels of experience both personal and inherited [1] allow him to use this control to its utmost while never being much in danger of losing it; any assassination attempt would have to be of a magnitude sufficient to threaten Shai-Hulud, and Leto (for the most part) stays a safe distance from large bodies of water.

The book is thus a 400-page contemplation on the nature of power as exerted by a mind created by humans which has nonetheless surpassed them. It’s the story of an entity that seizes control and pursues paths and goals that seem right to it, but that are not necessarily in concert with the will of humanity as a whole.

Though likely unintended by Herbert — whose fear of mechanical thought took on a different flavor — it is impossible to fully ignore the echoes of AI risk throughout the novel. In reviewing the book for a 2020’s audience it’s necessary to return to that well again and again, to share dreams of humanity in chains, destroyed or kept in comfort by an entity with powers that exceed our own.

The characters

Leto, the god-king

Leto II functions as both a person and a sort of societal force in the book, and this description only concerns his person. While connected, his function as a mind that emerged from humanity and controls it is distinct from Herbert’s personification of him as a man.

In the sense that he can be understood as human, Leto is a man on the brink of a mental collapse that never quite comes; the isolation brought on by being both in a position of untouchable power and a not-quite-human shell wear away at even the strongest of wills, it seems. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, and Leto has worn it for 3500 years.

This loneliness synergizes with Leto’s immense boredom, an ennui enhanced by experience and near-omniscience. Very little is new to him and virtually no one in the universe can serve as a companion to him. This makes him vulnerable not only to the psychological instability his loneliness encourages but also to anything that could possibly satisfy that lack; he would (and does) tolerate large amounts of risk to try and fill these gaps.

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of Leto is his firm, unshakeable belief that he is doing the right thing. In Herbert’s universe, the rightness of his actions is not just opinion but instead verifiable fact, at least in the sense that Leto himself can verify them to his satisfaction.

This means that there is nothing Leto will not do if he perceives it as necessary; there is no cruelty he would not enact to push forward his golden path. But he is a mind that emerged from humanity and sees things humanity cannot itself see. His good deeds are not understood, and he works quasi-endlessly for what he considers to be the ultimate good while bearing the burden of the knowledge that he is viewed as nothing more or less than a dictator, a personification of the restriction under which humanity itself chafes.

The Duncan Idaho

In the second and third books of the series, Duncan Idaho returned to life (and death) in the service of the Atreides. In the Duniverse, both your mind and your cells have memory, each Duncan clone carries the memories of the original. Through the same mechanism of ancestral/cellular memory, Leto has seen Duncan’s sacrifices through two generations of eyes in addition to his own.

Faced with this loyalty, a sense of personal debt and the ability to order unlimited clones, Leto shrugged his shoulders and decided to always have a Duncan around to shoot the shit with.

From what we gather, the Duncans themselves always have very mixed feelings about this and tend to go slightly crazy with doubts related to how each of their predecessors met their end.

Duncan himself (or, at least, this iteration of himself) has misgivings about the totality of Leto’s control that clash with his absolute loyalty to the surname he serves:

”You’ve taken something away from us,” he said. “I can feel it. Those women… Moneo…”

Us against you, Leto thought. The Duncans always choose the human side.

Duncan is also faced with the reality any legendary swordsman faces 3500 years into a focused human-improvement breeding program faces: he’s slightly obsolete. People (read: women) generally like him and a giant worm-man loves him, but he seems to feel he lacks a clear purpose. He is a man who has always been useful wallowing in sudden, shocking impotence.

This combined with other frustrations lends his character a tone of someone casting about for something significant to do; he is almost from the first waiting on a match that can light his fuse and force him into meaningful action of any kind.

Siona

Remember those people running from the wolves at the onset of the novel? They were led by Siona in a successful effort to steal some intel from Leto’s own backyard. Siona is a rebel; she detests Leto and Leto’s rule. She will do anything to make even small progress towards hurting him, including sacrificing the lives of her friends, which was the eventual outcome of everyone who followed along on her lupine 5k theft-run.

She is unpleasant to most people, most of the time. Here is the nicest thing she says in the book, spoken directly after she kind-of-sort-of kidnaps Duncan Idaho to try to hurt his feelings:

“It would not offend me to be your friend,” she said.

It might sound as if she’s a bad character, but like most of the other major players she is more representative of a facet of humanity than she is a fully fleshed human being. She is humanity, developed, advanced and unconquered. She is as refined as her father, with none of his domestication.

Hwi Noree

You might occasionally hear someone talk about Ernest Hemingway not being able to write women - that they exist purely for the male characters in his book. They have not met Hwi Noree, a character who is literally designed to like a particular housebound rationalist utilitarian and who has no other characteristics whatsoever.

I’d like to write a whole bunch of insightful things about the character, but there isn’t anything to delve into. She’s from IX, a planet that builds technology that can mostly block Leto’s psychic powers, and was designed in a joint effort involving both the techy Ixians and the genetic meddling of the Tleilaxu.

And designed she was, for one purpose and one purpose only: Being attractive to Leto. The book describes her as “the epitome of good”, but “good” in this sense seems to be being from the start completely and unjustifiably committed to Leto; from her first day on the job as the Ixian ambassador to the god-emperor, she ruthlessly sells out her bosses and tells Leto everything he wants to know in just the subservient way he likes to hear it.

Lest you think I’m exaggerating, consider Herbert’s description of Hwi after Leto contemplates the difficulties of worm/human romantic relationships, becomes frustrated, and sends her away:

She left quietly, but Leto could see that Hwi, too, was tortured. There was no mistaking the deep sadness in her for the humanity that Leto had sacrificed. She knew they would have been friends, lovers, companions in an ultimate sharing between the sexes.

At this point, she has known Leto for approximately five minutes.

Besides being very nice to people who haven’t earned it from her (this is almost entirely aimed at Leto, but comes up in one other way later) she has essentially no personality traits. As a plot device, she exists only to be tempting to Leto, to be something he wants enough to compromise his primary objectives.

Herbert dug deep and tried to figure out what the most appealing woman possible would be, and came up with a personification of subservience and unearned affection so blatant it makes love interests from harem anime look like Susan B. Anthony in comparison. Lacking any kind of a personality or desires of her own, Hwi Noree exists almost entirely as a desirable object - a particularly shiny apple would have done just as well in her place.

Moneo

If Duncan Idaho represents the “mongrel strength” of the wild, primitive human as Leto claims, Moneo is a fully domesticated purebred. He is a direct line descendent of the Atreides, and thus a result of 35 centuries of Leto’s behavioral and genetic design. In a way also similar to the purebred, he is high-strung. He spends the greater part of the book being really, really nervous any time he’s around Leto, for whom he serves as a right-hand man.

As Leto’s most senior employee, he knows as much about Leto as anyone can. He has read his history, sees his present and works to make his wishes reality. But for all that close association, he doesn’t appear to understand Leto very well; where Leto seems to respect strength and a level of rebellion and pushback, Moneo is consistently passive and cowardly. Where he serves Leto’s goals, the impression given to the reader is that he has been browbeaten into accepting them as correct.

As a possible result of this, Leto doesn’t appear to actually like Moneo; despite his usefulness, Leto spends most of his time talking to him in a way that resembles a bully verbally abusing someone he’s incredibly tired of. If he’s wrong in his actions, Leto is at least not wrong in his target; Moneo really does suck.

To the extent he cares about anything or shows even a scrap of bravery, it is in his desire to protect Siona.

If Duncan represents all that’s worth saving in humanity’s past, Siona represents humanity’s potential to transcend, and Nayla represents the balance of humanity’s nobility against its flaws, Moneo represents a sort of voluntary spiritual death in the face of large systems. His decisions are cool and mathematical, intended to maximize his performance within a system he dislikes but doesn’t dare to change.

The Golden Path

To talk in detail about Leto’s goals, it’s necessary to talk generally about his fears. Those fears are for the most part robotic in nature. What alien life exists in the Herbert universe is broadly man-made, and the greatest historic risk humanity has faced was the crisis that drove the prohibitions of the Butlerian Jihad.

The Jihad is barely explained in the books, but seems to have involved a crisis of artificial intelligence; man rose up against the machine and won out, but the victory was either so costly or uncertain as to drive a universal ban on machines that imitate the complexity of human thought.

Leto’s ability to peer into the future does not tell him the specifics of the next danger that might threaten humanity, but he does know that it’s threatened, nonetheless:

“Nothing is ever separated from its source,” he said. “Seeing futures is a vision of a continuum in which all things take shape like bubbles forming beneath a waterfall. You see them and then they vanish into the stream. If the stream ends, it is as though the bubbles never were. That stream is my Golden Path and I saw it end."

Imagine Leto as a very big Big Yud (Eliezer Yudkowsky, rationalism’s original AI doom-sayer); he’s convinced that unless serious, committed action is taken the only future humanity can look forward to is paper-clip-based.

“The Ixians do not recognize that machine-makers always run the risk of becoming totally machine. This is ultimate sterility. Machines always fail… given time. And when these machines failed there would be nothing left, no life at all.”

Understanding Leto-as-Yud is necessary to understand the threat Leto is responding to, but is a sub-par way of understanding Leto himself. The better way is to look at Leto’s function as an all-powerful force both holding the hazards of malicious AI at bay while at the same working to mitigate those same hazards.

To put it another way, Leto might be organic and have a different distribution of strengths, but he functions as a sort of anti-AI AI, working a centuries-long gameplan to hedge against humanity’s impending doom. In the short term, his methods for doing this are pretty simple; he simply doesn’t allow people to build computers. His long-term plans on the other hand don’t involve shielding us so much as they involve teaching us to protect ourselves and making us capable of the same.

The Breeding and Culling of the Incalculable

The first aspect of Leto’s work is to build a human that can threaten an AI in the same way we are threatened by AI today. Leto’s plans first involve developing something that mitigates his biggest advantage - that is, a strain of human that bypasses his clairvoyance. He finds this in Siona, who “fades from his sight”; if he can’t see her, then neither can other forms of oracle.

Though Leto spends the better part of 3500 years doing this, time is not the most vital aspect of his plan. The Bene Gesserit spent over 10,000 years on their breeding program, but focused on power alone; they succeeded in the form of Paul, but quickly lost control of their creation. Nor does the difference lie in creativity. The Teilaxu are short-term genetic engineers who exert a great deal of control in their alterations. In doing so they create wonders, but also bend humanity in unnatural and inhuman directions. They are universally hated, a sort of society-sized uncanny valley reviled by all. The Ixians put their faith in technology, speeding towards instead of away from humanity’s demise.

All three of these forces seek their own narrow goals while ignoring the broader needs of humanity. The Bene Gesserit got a messiah who immediately turned against them. The Teilaxu are mules who only vaguely resemble humans, and the Ixians are only kept from creating an immediate AI disaster through external controls exerted upon them.

Leto succeeds in helping humanity where others fail, not because of the time he spends and not even because of his resources; in the Dune universe, both could be duplicated by any sufficiently dedicated group of people. Leto creates no super-soldiers besides those that might have occurred naturally, given time. He creates no traits, instead only encouraging and curating traits that push humanity towards long-term viability. He keeps his power separate from his goals and thus keeps his goals pure.

The man-who-walks-as-a-worm thus protects humanity while actively encouraging it to grow. In doing so he creates something that will one day not need him, and that is also capable of destroying him. The book does not say so directly, but the fact that both of those are really one single goal is key.

An AI that was created accidentally may one day be destroyed accidentally, either by another AI or developing into an insane version of itself. Only by cultivating humanity itself into AI-destroying viability can it create safety.

Stored Mechanical Energy and the Scattering

Travel is restricted in Leto’s empire. While ornithopters and spacecraft still exist, he limits their uses entirely to official travel of the sort necessary to make the empire run. The vast majority of people are planet-bound and mostly restricted to such travel as they can accomplish on foot. They are trapped in place in a society he engineered to be banal and boring.

The goal (which is possible in Leto’s world, if not ours) is to encourage a kind of genetic yearning, a desire to travel and settle that is ingrained in humanity at a cellular level. Leto pushes for the accumulated voices of thousands of ancestors to scream “go west, my son” in unison, too loud to ignore. In the Dune universe, ancestral memories are a factual truth; this is how genetics work there. To build the desire, all you need is time - but the desire to do something and the wherewithal are two very different things.

Early in the novel, Leto makes an off-hand mention that some forces in the universe are terrified he will die away from water. When a sandworm dies, it breaks apart into sandtrout, which encapsulate environmental water until they’re surrounded by desert. Only when the environment is absolutely arid do they combine to create their adult sandworm forms.

The lifecycle of a sandworm is long, and TGEoD’s supply of spice is entirely contained within Leto’s horde; he carefully rations that supply to keep his empire functional. Leto expects that the remaining spice will be quickly exhausted after his death and for a period perhaps measured in centuries humanity will be trapped, unable to travel, starving, and creating harsh survival-of-the-fittest environments on all inhabited planets.

This great culling is intended to take the genetic advantage Leto has given and hone it to a razor’s edge. After a time, the re-emergence of the sandworm should reintroduce the spice to a population of untrackable super-warriors. Only by doing this does Leto believe he can scatter an ultra-tough humanity far enough through the universe that the machines will never catch them all, and that they will have a fighting chance even if they do.

The Plot (Such as it is)

“Yes, yes,” you are likely saying. “But what of the plot?”. And in asking you’ve stumbled onto the major problem with the novel: it doesn’t have one, really. Or at least not much of one.

Herbert’s books all have a theme. Dune is about teaching the reader about the untapped power of the desert, while Dune Messiah seeks to show them that power in action. Children of Dune is a warning that success can make you soft - since the harshness of the desert is what brings you power in this universe, bringing it under your control domesticates it and cuts into the very power base you rely on. When Paul Atreides blinks in the face of an overwhelming fate and is usurped by a younger, more vital generation, it’s no surprise.

TGEoD is only a slight departure from these themes, instead asking what would happen if the harshness and strength of the desert were concentrated in a single mind. Genetic development has always been a tale written by hardship, a story about how life rises to greatness only when facing and overcoming great problems.

(For the record, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse Dune are about sexing uppity women into submission and discovering a literal secret clan of space Jews, respectively. They are not necessarily required Dune reading, but if you are specifically looking for late-career-author-weirdness, they are excellent.)

Because TGEoD is mostly about describing the end-point of a millennia-long exploitation of desert power, it is better understood as a book of sci-fi political philosophy than a story. But, to the extent there is a story at all, it is as follows:

While Siona is busy running from wolves, Leto is killing one of his Duncan Idahos; the replacement Idaho is arguably the main character of both TGEoD and the rest of the series. The Idaho is brought in and shown the wonders of the future by Leto, and is momentarily convinced to be a faithful and committed servant of the God-Emperor. Despite Idaho having misgivings about some of Leto’s tactics, everything is momentarily fine.

This order is upset by Hwi Noree, who is immediately loved by Leto and who (again, weirdly) loves him back. After two short meetings, they decide to get married. But as you might expect, the kind of person who will get married after two coffee dates is not always the most reliable; after noticing that Duncan Idaho is sort of needy, she has one-time pity sex with him.

This does not result in a love triangle; Duncan now loves Hwi, but she explains to Leto that she acknowledges that he has Mua’Dibs on her and leaves Idaho in the lurch.

Meanwhile, Leto is busy kidnapping Siona, taking her to the desert and forcing her into a situation where she has to drink the spice essence he secretes to survive. Leto does this to force out her latent Atreides psychic powers, which shows her the golden path. In the past, this tactic has resulted in various people realizing the necessity of Leto’s actions and joining his team. Siona, however, is not convinced.

Duncan’s recently bruised ego makes him easy to recruit to her cause, and between her prescience and his rock-climbing skills (read the book, it’s weird) they manage to do the impossible, assassinating the god-emperor and shattering his 3500-year-rule. He passes over control of his spice-hoard to them, and they proceed to have a thousand children to seed the universe with a strain of human immune to prescient search.

Hwi Noree dies and, as a reader, you will find it nearly impossible to care.

This Review is Kind of About AI

So, why write a review on a 40-year-old sci-fi novel that nobody likes? If there is an orthodox strategy to winning an ACX book review contest, it’s probably something like “Review a non-fiction book about the connection between Tanzanite mining and the re-emergence of Georgist Monarchalism” and not so much “Scattered musings on the least popular Frank Herbert novel”. Why bother?

First, I think it’s an interesting example of prescience on Herbert’s part. Thirty years before you had heard of Bayes, Herbert had tapped into an assumption that seemed so clear to him he didn’t realize he should spend more time explaining it to you: that any development of AI or AI-like programs would logically (if not actually) eventually result in an AI that held views so profoundly counter to the needs of humanity that it would wipe us out in pursuit of them.

Today, those thoughts are old hat, but this book came out in 1981.

Second, there is always some value in anything that makes us think about the unpopular part of a problem. As is the case in any movement that addresses a potential hazard, eventually the prominent voices in the field are incentivized to focus on the sexy, sexy risk and not the boring, boring solutions. And thus you see much more “eventually nanomachines will fly through space at just under the speed of light, converting everything they see to AI”. They talk about the singularity, but less about potential solutions.

Let’s assume that both Herbert and Yud are correct and that an all-powerful AI is a given, that it’s coming like a freight train with little we can do to stop at least some form of it from becoming reality. If that’s the case, it’s arguably that the only possible solution that presents a potential “good ending” for humanity is not finding ways to avoid an all-powerful AI but instead moving as quickly as possible towards the correct version of the same.

TGEoD does not map perfectly onto reality. But to the extent it maps at all, it argues that the AI we build must be both protective and powerful; we have to allow it to accrue sufficient strength to prevent malicious AIs from gaining a foothold. We might be able to do that, or we might not. But if AI is inevitable then the dominance of a specific AI is likely; our best bet comes in promoting the correct one, not in the futility of trying to avoid the wrong program for the rest of eternity.

If we can attain a perfect protective AI, we can be happy while still acknowledging that we are at best its pets; the very concepts we are talking about demand that we acknowledge the AI in this hypothetical is superior to us. Therein lies the secondary risk of AI; by creating an AI that coddles us, we run the risk of never advancing as a race again. As Dune points out, soft environments tend to weaken rather than reinforce.

How much better would it then be if we could create an AI that restricts all other AI’s, but only as a secondary goal necessary to reach its primary objective of identifying what it is that makes humans human and amplifying those traits in a positive direction until we (as a still identifiably human race) can stand against AI’s on equal footing.

I am not an AI expert. I’m not sure if any of this is possible even without the theoretical framework of AI risk. But I do know people, at least a bit, and I know that the reflex to run from danger is often stronger than the impulse to run towards safety. If all-powerful AI is inevitable, then running away from the wrong AI is merely delaying our eventual fatal mistake. Running towards the correct AI is necessary. As Leto says:

Run Faster. History is a constant race between invention and catastrophe. Education helps, but it’s never enough. You must also run.  

Endnotes

1: Leto’s family, the Atreides(es?) are basically magic; the Bene Gesserit were essentially witches who could draw on the ancestral memories of women in their ancestral line, and they bred this ability into Paul, Leto’s father. As a bonus, they can also draw on male ancestor’s memories, as well as having a pretty good ability to predict the future and know what’s going on in the present.

If this seems like cheating, it is; Leto is not only 3500 years old, but also has the combined leadership/political experience of every member of his family line at least as far back as the ancient Greeks. Did I mention he’s also mentat and can do computer-level mental calculations? He can also do mind control with his voice, and roll into you to kill you like Sonic the Hedgehog. It’s like Frank Herbert was worried you’d mistake him for the Reasonably Tough Emperor of Dune and over-corrected in the other direction.

Enlarge (credit: Cavan Images | Getty)

There’s nothing like fresh eggs from your own hens, the more than 400,000 Australians who keep backyard chooks will tell you. Unfortunately, it’s often not just freshness and flavor that set their eggs apart from those in the shops.

Our newly published research found backyard hens’ eggs contain, on average, more than 40 times the lead levels of commercially produced eggs. Almost one in two hens in our Sydney study had significant lead levels in their blood. Similarly, about half the eggs analyzed contained lead at levels that may pose a health concern for consumers.

Even low levels of lead exposure are considered harmful to human health, including among other effects cardiovascular disease and decreased IQ and kidney function. Indeed, the World Health Organization has stated there is no safe level of lead exposure.

Read 23 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Breeze’s pilots have voted to join a union.

By a 29-21 vote conducted by the National Mediation Board, pilots at the ultra-low-cost startup have voted to join the Air Line Pilots Association, the union said.

Want more airline-specific news? Sign up for TPG’s free new biweekly Aviation newsletter

“With 85% of eligible pilots participating in a representation election that concluded today, Breeze Airways pilots voted in favor of union representation and chose to join ALPA,” the union said in a statement. “The National Mediation Board is expected to certify ALPA as the official bargaining representative for the airline’s pilots in the next few days.”

The NMB is the federal government body that handles labor relations in the airline and railroad industries.

In a statement, Breeze said it plans to take legal action against the vote.

More news about Breeze Airways: 

• Breeze adds Phoenix, but cuts some new transcons planned for NYC-area airport
• Breeze encounters strong headwinds as it cancels new routes ahead of launch
• Inside Breeze Airways’ swanky Airbus A220 with a whopping 36 first-class recliners
• Breeze plans to launch international flights after its first A220 routes are up and running
• A faux inaugural: What it’s like on board Breeze’s new Airbus A220

“Breeze was disappointed to learn of the National Mediation Board’s (“NMB”) decision that the Air Line Pilots Association, International (“ALPA”) had won an election as union representative for Breeze pilots,” an airline spokesperson said. “Breeze plans to file a legal challenge to the election since the NMB used a flawed election process that unlawfully denied a majority of Breeze’s pilots the right to vote in the election.”

The basis of Breeze’s argument is that the number of eligible pilots for the vote is based on those who were actively flying in commercial service at Breeze as of March 31, when the airline was smaller and had yet to begin Airbus A220 service, the spokesperson told TPG. Breeze believes that many more pilots should have been eligible for the vote.

Regardless of the timing, some Breeze pilots have raised issues about the pay and working conditions at the startup, a source familiar with the unionization effort told TPG.

Breeze first officers currently start at $75 an hour on both its Embraer and Airbus A220 fleets. By comparison, the first-year first officers at the three regional airlines owned by American Airlines make $90 per hour — an industry outlier but a figure that shows just how in demand pilots currently are, amidst an industrywide pilot shortage.

Should Breeze pilots prevail once management challenges the result of the union, they would begin collectively bargaining for a contract with the airline.

Featured photo by Zach Griff/The Points Guy.

There’s a popular saying among religious apologists:

Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything.

Big talk, although I notice that this is practically always attributed to one of GK Chesterton or CS Lewis, neither of whom actually said it. If you’re making strong claims about how everybody except you is gullible, you should at least bother to double-check the source of your quote.

Still, it’s worth examining as a hypothesis. Are the irreligious really more likely to fall prey to woo and conspiracy theories?

Amjad Masad ⠕ @amasad

Increasingly obvious that religion is an anti-virus for the human mind. Once you uninstall it, a bunch of mind viruses start spreading like crazy, mutating and becoming more extreme with time.

April 17th 2022

959 Retweets9,125 Likes

This Economist article examined the question and concluded the opposite. See especially this graph:

“White evangelicals” are more likely to believe most measured conspiracy theories, and churchgoers were more likely to believe in QAnon in particular.

There’s an obvious confounder here: the authors are doing the usual trick where they cherry-pick right-wing examples of something bad, show that more right-wingers are in favor of them, then conclude that Science Has Proven Right-Wingers Are Bad. QAnon, illegal votes, and COVID microchips are inherently right wing conspiracy theories; vaccines/autism has probably become right-coded post-COVID. Only the moon landing seems politically neutral, and it’s hard to tell if there’s a real difference on that one. So this just tells us that white evangelical church-goers are further right than other people, which we already know.

These data still deflate some more extreme claims about religion being absolutely protective against conspiracy theories. But I was interested in seeing how people of different faiths related to politically neutral conspiracies.

Here’s Pew on who believes in UFOs:

The two most skeptical groups are . . . evangelicals and atheists. Quite the Baptists and Bootleggers alliance.

Here’s belief in Bigfoot by religion and worship attendance

I would ignore the Absolutely category, which is too small to have a good sample size, and look at who says “Absolutely Not” vs. weaker versions (in theory some groups could be open-minded and less likely to take strong positions on either side, but it doesn’t look like that happens here).

People of “none” religion are less likely than any religion except Jews to believe in Bigfoot. Somehow at the same time, the less often you go to church, the more likely to believe in Bigfoot you are.

And here’s astrology:

We find a similar pattern. Agnostics and people with “no particular religion” are more likely than Protestants to believe in astrology, but outright atheists are much less likely.

I would have liked to look into JFK and 9/11 conspiracies, but I couldn’t find great data. There is a Zogby poll which says 47% of evangelicals believed Bush knew about 9/11, but different sources give the base rate as either 41% or 49%, which makes it hard to tell if evangelicals are higher or lower.

Overall I think these results support the fake Chesterton/Lewis quote, but in a weird and unexpected way.

Strongly religious people and outright atheists were usually less likely to believe in conspiracy theories. The conspiracy believers were usually somewhere in the middle: either weakly religious people who never went to church, or vague agnostics.

One possible explanation is that people with any coherent worldview are smarter or at least more intellectual than people who don’t care. I don’t think this can fully explain these results: although following the logical implications of Christian belief would make you go to church a lot, I don’t think this is why most frequent churchgoers do it. Most churchgoers do it because they come from families and areas where going to church is expected.

Another possible explanation is that people with coherent worldviews already have strong opinions on what’s true, making them closed-minded against conspiracy theories. For example, if God created humans in the Garden of Eden, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for aliens and UFOs. Or, since atheists believe everything works through purely physical scientifically-measurable forces, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for astrology.

But this one doesn’t quite work either: neither scientific materialism nor Biblical literalism precludes Bigfoot. God and/or Evolution created all sorts of weird ape species; why shouldn’t there be one more?

Maybe there’s not a single explanation. Maybe the religious people don’t believe it because it sounds too much like consorting with demons, and the atheists don’t believe it because they’re already pre-selected for skepticism and not believing in things? I don’t know.

Still, if someone tells you that people who don’t believe in God will believe in anything, please politely correct them that this is only true until the point where they 100% accept scientific materialist atheism, at which point they go back to mostly not being that gullible again.

Big shout out to whoever it was that turned in 62 3D printed guns for $150 each at a Houston gun buy-back pic.twitter.com/QYUNxG0Jg6

— Xaniken (@Xaniken) July 31, 2022

Via Petr.

The post Supply is elastic appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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So I hear there’s an underpopulation crisis now.

Elon Musk @elonmusk

Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.

July 7th 2022

26,217 Retweets274,248 Likes

Mike Solana @micsolana

growing up, we were taught the world was overpopulated, and overpopulation would lead to catastrophe. turns out the opposite is true: we appear to be vanishing. @rmcentush guests for pirate wires with a primer on the population crash: Vanishing People: the Population Crisisfor us to solve the challenges ahead, there needs to be an “us”piratewires.com

May 13th 2022

304 Retweets2,233 Likes

Pranay Pathole @PPathole

Population decline is one of the most serious problems for the existence of human civilization. We need to reverse this trend.

June 16th 2022

16 Retweets82 Likes

I think the strong version of this claim - that underpopulation could cause human extinction - is 100% false.

The weaker version - that it could make life unpleasant in some countries - is true. But I don’t think it’s at the top of any list of things to worry about.

1: Declining Birth Rates Won’t Drive Humans Extinct, Come On

Not only are we not going to go extinct because of underpopulation, population is going to continue to rise for the next 80 years.

Although growth rate may hit zero a little after 2100, it will be centuries before the human population gets any lower than it is today - if it ever does.

This is mostly because of sub-Saharan Africa (especially Nigeria) where birth rates remain very high. Although these are going down, in some cases faster than expected, current best projections say they will stay high enough to keep population growing for the rest of the century.

2: Immigrant-Friendly Countries Will Keep Growing

Here are Our World In Data’s projections for US and UK populations:

The US will grow from about 330 million people today to about 430 million in 2100; the UK from about 60 million to 80 million. Most of this growth will be immigration. Some of these immigrants will come from sub-Saharan Africa, others from countries whose populations are themselves declining (sorry, other countries).

3: Countries With Low Immigration Will Shrink, But Mostly Slowly

Brazil will go from 210 million today to 190 million in 2100.

Germany will go from 80 million to 70 million.

Japan will go from 125 million to 70 million.

India will go from 1.3 billion today, to a peak of 1.8 billion in 2060, before declining back to 1.6 billion in 2100.

China will go from 1.4 billion today to 800 million in 2100.

Aside from Japan and China, these are relatively gentle drops even over the course of a century.

4: Big Relative Drops Still Imply High Absolute Populations

But Japan and China will drop a lot. By 2100, there will only be 800 million Chinese and 70 million Japanese.

Still: in the early 1900s, America and Europe were gripped by fear of “the Yellow Peril”: what if innumerable hordes of Orientals overran the West using their limitless numbers? Chinese and Japanese people were likened to swarms of insects, or flocks of birds: so numerous that it was incomprehensible and almost obscene.

At the time, there were about 500 million Chinese and 50 million Japanese.

East Asia will probably be hit worst by underpopulation, with low birth rates and little immigration. But by 2100, there will still be 50% more East Asians than there were in 1920, when everyone was terrified of how many East Asians there were. Honestly, 800 million Chinese people still seems like a lot.

The same is true in the West. The number of native-born white Americans is predicted to fall from 200 million to 140 million by 2100, a 30% decrease. But 140 million native-born white Americans is about as many as there were in 1965, when native-born white American Paul Ehrlich wrote Population Bomb, claiming that current populations were unsustainable and the world would collapse soon. On the way up, people were able to look at same these numbers and see them as terrifyingly high. Is there some objective standard by which we should look at them and instead find them worryingly low?

5: Concerns About “Underpopulation” Make More Sense As Being About Demographic Shift

In high-immigration countries, declining birth rates will cause changing ethnic demographics, as native populations shrink and immigrant populations increase.

I understand why people don’t want to talk about the issue this way, because if you say demographic shift is a problem, people will call you a racist conspiracy theorist. I don’t think it’s racist to care about ethnic demographic shift - I think Japan as it currently exists is not completely interchangeable with a Japan made of 1/3 ethnic Japanese people and 2/3 ethnic Kenyans. But that’s probably not a discussion people can have openly given today’s climate. So I appreciate the reasons why people would want to say things about “underpopulation” and “human extinction” instead. But technically these things are false.

In low-immigration countries, ethnic demographics won’t shift, but age demographics will: since each generation is smaller than the last, there will be more old people than young people. See Section 6 below for more.

6. Age Pyramid Concerns Are Real, But Not Compatible With Technological Unemployment Concerns

As birth rates rise, you have many hard-working young people supporting a small number of retirees. As they fall, you have fewer young people and more older people who need support. This either burdens the young, or requires cuts in support for the elderly.

And yeah, to some degree this will happen. I think it will look less like an apocalypse and more like increasing effective retirement ages, but that will suck.

On the other hand, this is basically a complaint about a shortage of labor. And I notice it’s weird to be worried both that the future will be racked by labor shortages, and that we’ll suffer from technological unemployment and need to worry about universal basic income. You really have to choose one or the other. I’m pretty worried about technological unemployment myself.

Another way of saying “labor shortage” is “the value of labor relative to capital goes up”. Workers will be able to expect high salaries and good working conditions. Labor shortages are also periods of intense innovation for labor-saving devices (some historians blame the Industrial Revolution on unusually high wages in the England of the time).

7: Dysgenics Is Real But Pretty Slow

Another potential demographic shift in both types of country is shift among social classes / levels of educational attainment:

In general, educated people reproduce less than uneducated people (although this picks up slightly at the doctorate level).

The claim isn’t that fewer people will have PhDs in the future: colleges will certainly solve that by increasing access to education and/or dumbing down requirements. It’s a dysgenic argument where we assume at any given time the people with higher degrees have on average higher genetic intelligence levels. If they’re reproducing less, the genetic intelligence level of the population will decrease.

There is some debate in the scientific community about whether this is happening, but as far as I can tell the people who claim it isn’t have no good refutation for the common sense argument that it has to be. The people who claim that it is make more sense, and have measured the effect in Iceland, an isolated population that it’s easy to measure genetic effects in. It seems to be a decline of about 0.3 IQ points per decade. If the American rate is close to the Icelandic one, this implies that the average US IQ in 2100 will be 97.5 by current standards, unless we get more mileage out of the Flynn Effect, in which case it might be higher (although the environmental Flynn Effect and genetic dysgenic effects seem to hit slightly different skills). I think societies are probably hyper-sensitive to small changes in average IQ, so I’m not excited about this, but I don’t expect it to directly be apocalyptic.

8. Innovation Concerns Are Real But Probably Overwhelmed By Other Factors

The more people are innovating and researching things, the faster technology advances, and the more the economy grows (I wrote a bit about this here). As population growth slows, we should expect technological and economic growth to slow too.

But this can’t be the whole story. After all, consider the century 1820 - 1920. It gave us the steamship, the railroad, the automobile, the factory, mass production, electricity, refrigeration, radio, the airplane, etc, etc, etc, with a population only about 10 - 20% as high as today. The effective innovating population - the number of educated people living in countries on the technological frontier - was probably an even smaller proportion. About half of these innovations came from Britain, a country with about 0.3% the current world population. So the solution is clear - just give everyone the same scientific productivity as 19th century British people, and we can cut the population by a factor of 300 without consequence!

I’m joking, of course. What it actually means is that science is slowing down. I write about this phenomenon - amply described and categorized by various economists and other thinkers - here - in the context of a paper finding that the number of researchers has increased by about 10x since the early 1900s, but science seems to be moving only at the same rate, or maybe even a little slower.

(there might be an exception for fields of science that couldn’t have existed in the 19th and early 20th century - see here for more)

My current model is that there are two trends - a trend for low-hanging fruit to get picked and science to become harder over time, and a counterbalancing trend for population increases and number of researchers per X people to increase. The studies cited there suggest that you need about a 10x researcher population increase per century to compensate for the low-hanging fruit effect - or, alternately, that absent any population increases, science will go about 10x slower each century. I’m sure this number itself isn’t the full story and it’s probably way off anyway, but I think we should expect something like this to be true.

This makes me think that declining population in educated countries on the order of 30% or so isn’t that interesting in terms of innovation rate. Other factors are going to overwhelm this effect.

I guess it’s still true that if innovation is destined to be only 10% of its current level in 2100, then a 30% population decline could lower that to 7%. I find it hard to worry about such a small difference, but maybe that’s a flaw in me and not in the territory.

9. In The Short-To-Medium Run, We’re All Dead

Maybe all these arguments sound half-hearted? Like I’m conceding too much ground? Like I should still be worrying about underpopulation more than I do? Or that even if I’m right that things won’t degenerate too far by 2100, we should be thinking forward to 2200 or 2300?

Fine. My real argument is that 2100 is not a real year. You make a mistake by thinking about it at all.

The term “technological singularity” gets overused, but the original definition is “a point where things change so profoundly that it’s not worth speculating about what happens afterwards”.

If we don’t die of something else first, there will probably be a technological singularity before 2100. The way things are looking now, it will probably involve AI somehow. If by some miracle that doesn’t happen, we’ll get one involving human genetic engineering for intelligence. I think there’s maybe a 5-10% chance we somehow manage to miss both of those entirely, but I’m not spending too many of my brain cycles worrying about this weird sliver of probability space.

This is why I even though I love predictions, I couldn’t bring myself to participate in the “predict what the world will be like in 2050!” contest that was going around this part of the blogosphere recently. Even 2050 is starting not to seem like a very real year. Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s even odds it happens, I would just feel silly predicting something like “US politics will center around this set of issues” and then 2050 comes along and things are more like “the cloud of microscopic death robots that used to be our solar system has expanded as far as Sirius B”.

Even if these trends don’t reach singularity level, they probably reach “big enough that it’s not worth speculating about underpopulation” level. Like, a 2.5 point decline in IQ could be pretty bad. But if we can’t genetic engineer superbabies with arbitrary IQs by 2100, we have failed so overwhelmingly as a civilization that we deserve whatever kind of terrible discourse our idiot grandchildren inflict on us.

And are we seriously expecting First World countries to be worrying about labor shortages by 2100?

So to steal a turn of phrase from Andrew Ng, in this kind of situation, worrying about underpopulation in 2100 is like worrying about underpopulation on Mars. It’s too far in the future to be worth thinking about.

Appendix: The Amish Inversion

Suppose that there is a 2100 - and even a 2200, 2300, etc. What happens if we extend current trends?

Answer: the Amish take over the world.

The Amish have about seven children per family. Their population doubles every twenty years. This has been very consistent; the Amish never change. Relatively few Amish “defect” to regular modern society. As regular American birth rates get lower, the percent of the American population who are Amish rises.

The Daily Caller has an article on how the Amish [Are] Projected To Overtake Current US Population In 215 Years If Growth Rates Continue. It predicts Amish-non-Amish parity around 2250:

But in fact, the Amish will not quite be a majority of Americans in 2250, because Orthodox Jews have only-slightly-slower growth rates.

Assume that regular US population stabilizes at 430 million in 2100. By 2250, the population is 430 million regulars, 450 million Amish, and 100 million Orthodox Jews, for a total of about a billion people.

Even this isn’t quite right, because a lot of Orthodox Jews do leave Orthodoxy, so along with those 100 million devout Orthodox there will probably be a few dozen million extra Reform Jews with a confused relationship to religion and lots of emotional baggage. It’ll be a great time for the rationalist community.

• Klondike announced earlier this week that it'll stop making the Choco Taco.
• People weren't happy to hear about the discontinuation of the nostalgic ice cream treat.
• Klondike cryptically says it's "discussing next steps" after being surprised to see how much fans said they'd miss the Choco Taco.

It's been a tough week for Choco Taco fans, but there may be good news yet.

Klondike announced Monday it's discontinuing the iconic ice cream taco after nearly 40 years.

"We've experienced an unprecedented spike in demand across our portfolio and have had to make very tough decisions to ensure availability of our full portfolio nationwide," the company said at the time.

But fans were upset, and the news had such a trending moment that Google added a banner to searches for "Choco Taco," featuring emojis of ice cream, tacos, and a tombstone marking the treat's existence from 1983 until now.

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian even tweeted that he wants to buy the rights to the product to keep it alive.

Now, however, things are looking up: The Choco Taco may live on, at least for a little while longer.

On Twitter Thursday, Klondike said it was shocked by the reactions to the news, posting an image of a Choco Taco holding a press conference, saying: "I want to address the rumors: I'm really being discontinued, it's not a PR stunt. I knew you loved me, but not THIS much. While I reflect on this outpouring of support, we are discussing next steps, including what to do with the last 912 (we counted) tacos at HQ. Stay tuned…"

The cryptic message has fans wondering what the "next steps" will be, despite Klondike's message that it really is discontinuing the dessert taco.

Only time will tell — let's hope Klondike reveals its plans before the last of the Choco Tacos melt away. (Too soon?)

Developers in west London face a potential ban on new housing projects until 2035 because the electricity grid has run out of capacity to support new homes, jeopardising housebuilding targets in the capital.

The Greater London Authority wrote to developers this week warning them that it might take more than a decade to bulk up grid capacity and get developments under way again in three west London boroughs — Hillingdon, Ealing and Hounslow.

Here is more from the FT.  Via Patrick Collison, #punycivilization.

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