Nicholas Eberstadt's portrait of Russia's steep demographic decline makes for sobering reading. Though Russia's post-Soviet population decline has halted, Eberstadt maintains that it will start anew in a few years time, due to unusually high death rates from cardiovascular disease and injuries and the after-effects of the post-Soviet baby bust, which will sharply reduce the number of Russian women in their 20s for the next decade or so. Moreover, Eberstadt observes that though Russia produces a relatively large number of university graduates relative to its population (the share of Russian 25-to-64-year-olds with a college degree in the same ballpark as Read More ...
The $10,000 bachelor’s degree remains elusive. But Southern New Hampshire University’s College for America has unveiled self-paced, competency-based degrees that students should be able to complete for that price, or less.
The private university’s regional accreditor, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, last week gave a green light to online bachelor’s degrees in health care management and communications from College for America, which is a nonprofit subsidiary of the university.
The college first began enrolling students last year. Until this week its sole option was an associate degree in general studies.
Tuition and fees at College for America are $1,250 per six-month term. The college uses a subscription-style model in which students can complete assessments at their own speed. The associate degree is designed for students to complete in an average of two years — at a cost of $5,000.
And:
…students can go from start to finish in four years, spending a total of $10,000…
Tuition subsidies will bring the price down further for many students. The college is heavily focused on employer partnerships, and has brokered arrangements with 50 companies and nonprofit employers, including McDonald’s, Sodexo and Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield. Employers steer potential students to the college. Most also cover some of the tuition.
In those not-so-old days when Jeffrey was born, as a preemie, many doctors mistakenly believed that babies’ nervous systems were too immature to process pain and that, therefore, babies didn’t feel pain at all. Or, doctors rationalized, if babies did somehow feel pain, it was no big deal because they probably wouldn’t remember it. Besides, since nobody knew for sure how dangerous anesthesia drugs might be in tiny babies, doctors figured that if surgery was necessary to save a child’s life, they’d better operate anyway — and comfort themselves with the hope that the child wouldn’t feel pain. As one scientific paper from those days intoned, “Pediatric patients seldom need medication for relief of pain. They tolerate discomfort well,”
That’s preposterous, obviously. But doctors had to have these self-protective beliefs for their own emotional survival, says Neil Schechter, a pediatric pain physician at Children’s Hospital in Boston. “Doctors were not sure how to do anesthesia in babies. In response, they had to believe that the babies couldn’t feel pain. They were too scared of the anesthetics.”
Here is part of the Amazon summary:
Out of 238 million American adults, 100 million live in chronic pain. And yet the press has paid more attention to the abuses of pain medications than the astoundingly widespread condition they are intended to treat. Ethically, the failure to manage pain better is tantamount to torture. When chronic pain is inadequately treated, it undermines the body and mind. Indeed, the risk of suicide for people in chronic pain is twice that of other people. Far more than just a symptom, writes author Judy Foreman, chronic pain can be a disease in its own right — the biggest health problem facing America today.
Stagnationists often complain about the "hollowing out" of the economy: Well-paid middle-income jobs are disappearing. Normally, they only look at the United States and other developed countries. As a cosmopolitan, however, I'd rather discover what's been happening to incomes at the global level. Branko Milanovic's "Global Income Inequality by the Numbers: in History and Now" (Global Policy, 2013)has fascinating answers.
The key graph:
Discussion:
What parts of the global income distribution registered the largest gains between 1988 and 2008? As the figure shows, it is indeed among the very top of the global income distribution and among the 'emerging global middle class', which includes more than a third of the world's population, that we find most significant increases in per-capita income. The top 1 per cent has seen its real income rise by more than 60 per cent over those two decades. However, the largest increases were registered around the median: 80 per cent real increase at the median itself and some 70 per cent around it. It is between the 50th and 60th percentiles of global income distribution that we find some 200 million Chinese, 90 million Indians and about 30 million people each from Indonesia, Brazil and Egypt. These two groups - the global top 1 per cent and the middle classes of the emerging market economies - are indeed the main winners of globalization.
The surprise is that those in the bottom third of global income distribution have also made significant gains, with real incomes rising between over 40 per cent and almost 70 per cent. The only exception is the poorest 5 per cent of the population, whose real incomes have remained the same. This income increase at the bottom of the global pyramid has allowed the proportion of what the World Bank calls the absolute poor (people whose per-capita income is less than 1.25 PPP dollars per day) to go down from 44 per cent to 23 per cent over approximately the same 20 years.
But the biggest losers (other than the very poorest 5 per cent), or at least the 'nonwinners', of globalization were those between the 75th and 90th percentiles of global income distribution, whose real income gains were essentially nil. These people, who may be called a global upper middle class, include many from former communist countries and Latin America, as well as those citizens of rich countries whose incomes stagnated.
So has the global economy "hollowed out"? A pessimist would say so. Yet a more balanced view is that 80% of the global population has done great over the last two decades - and the remaining 20% are not so much "losers" as "nonwinners" or "marginal winners".
Milanovic then insightfully breaks down the distribution by country:
Who are the people in the global top 1 per cent? Despite its name, it is a less 'exclusive' club than the US top 1 per cent: the global top 1 per cent consists of more than 60 million people, the US top 1 per cent only 3 million. Thus, among the global top 1 per cent, we find the richest 12 per cent of Americans (more than 30 million people) and between 3 and 6 per cent of the richest Britons, Japanese, Germans and French. It is a 'club' that is still overwhelmingly composed of the 'old rich' world of Western Europe, Northern America and Japan. The richest 1 per cent of the embattled euro countries of Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece are all part of the global top 1 percentile. The richest 1 per cent of Brazilians, Russians and South Africans belong there too.
To which countries and income groups do the winners and losers belong? Consider the people in the median of their national income distributions in 1988 and 2008. In 1988, a person with a median income in China was richer than only 10 per cent of the world's population. Twenty years later, a person at that same position within Chinese income distribution was richer than more than half of the world's population. Thus, he or she leapfrogged over more than 40 per cent of people in the world.
For India the improvement was more modest, but still remarkable. A person with a median income went from being at the 10th percentile globally to the 27th. A person at the same income position in Indonesia went from the 25th to 39th global percentile. A person with the median income in Brazil gained as well. He or she went from being around the 40th percentile of the global income distribution to about the 66th percentile. Meanwhile, the position of large European countries and the US remained about the same, with median income recipients there in the 80s and 90s of global percentiles...
Who lost between 1988 and 2008? Mostly people in Africa, some in Latin America and post-communist countries. The average Kenyan went down from the 22nd to the 12th percentile globally, the average Nigerian from the 16th to 13th percentile.
Fascinating stuff. My main thought: Milanovic's results are a Rorschach test for sheer misanthropy. If you like human beings - as I do now - you'll look at Figure 4 and say, "Wow, living standards are swiftly growing for most of mankind - especially the poor." If you dislike human beings - as I did in high school - you'll look at Figure 4 and say, "Horrors, living standards are stagnant for the 80th percentile, but the <scorn>super-rich</scorn> are making out like bandits."
20/20 hindsight: No one should be like I was in high school.
A. The US admits 1 million immigrants per year between now and 2050.
B. The US admits 3 million immigrants per year between now and 2050.
Suppose we only cared about the welfare of Americans. Would Americans be better off in 2050 under policy regime A or policy regime B?
Surprisingly, the answer may well be "yes." That is, whichever policy option is adopted will make Americans better off (as compared to the alternative policy.) Given how inept our policymakers are, thank God for that!
At first glance my claim might seem like a logical contradiction. The trick (or gimmick) is that the term 'Americans' means something very different in policy A as compared to policy B. More specifically, policy B will result in lots of people counting as "Americans" in 2050 who (by assumption) would not count if policy A were adopted.
This is from a post on immigration by Reihan Salam:
The Scandinavians, in contrast, spend a heck of a lot of money to see to it that migrants can be full participants in society. They don't always do a great job, but they certainly try. And they try because they reject the idea of a two-tiered society, in which privileged natives live cheek-by-jowl with migrants who have no hope of living alongside them as equals. Perhaps the Scandinavians are just naive. If these migrants weren't living alongside them, they'd still be living somewhere, and they'd almost certainly be a lot worse off. Other views, however, are that migration can never be as good a solution for fighting global poverty as improving governance in poor countries and that all countries, including rich countries, have the right to pursue their vision of the good society--including one in which you accept a small number of migrants and treat them extremely well.
I find it interesting to see a conservative make this argument, because I believe it underlies much of modern progressive thought. As an example, it's pretty obvious from the intense reaction to Thomas Piketty's new book that the progressive movement is currently more focused on the "cheek-by-jowl" inequality that blights New York, Miami and LA, than the (diminishing) inequality between the incomes of Iowa farmers and Punjabi farmers.
Keynes spoke of poverty as being "ugly," and I think that's right, but primarily a certain type of poverty. Poverty juxtaposed with wealth. That grates on our sense of fairness, especially where the poor are obviously trying very hard (say California farm workers.) If you are a nationalistic conservative, you might not be bothered by income inequality, but might find cultural diversity to be distasteful.
I don't intend to preach a message on immigration here, but rather I'd like to warn against cognitive biases. When thinking about what's best for America in 2050 we need to think very hard about whether we are interested in the well-being of people living in America in 2050, or the well-being of those people currently living in America (and their children) who are still alive in 2050. That slight change of focus can lead to radically different policy implications.
Utilitarians like me and non-utilitarians like Bryan Caplan are very interested in the welfare of anyone who might be living in America under various possible policy regimes. Many progressives put a lot of weight on the welfare of illegal immigrants who live in America today, but much less weight on the poor in other countries who do not live "cheek-by-jowl" with affluent native-born Americans. Some conservatives put much less weight on the welfare of illegal immigrants than they do on the welfare of those who are in America lawfully. Or perhaps they put more weight on rules than outcomes.
Conservatives should not forget that we can also play this game by running the clock backwards. From the perspective of Native Americans, most European Americans are "illegal immigrants." And European immigration probably made Native Americans worse off. Before Columbus, the natives of North America often had relatively good health, based on average height. Today many live in failed communities full of crime, poverty and alcoholism. A large portion died of diseases like smallpox soon after the Europeans settled America. [Yes, their descendants now have cell phones, but surely there is more to life than technology.]
From a global (utilitarian) perspective, the discovery of America was clearly a good thing. It increased global population and wealth dramatically. If America had not been discovered, hundreds of millions (maybe billions) of people would not be alive today. Nonetheless, the result was surely not anyone's "vision of the good society" for Native Americans, to use Salam's terminology. And the Native Americans of 1491 were the only Americans whose welfare should have "counted," according to one popular view of national self-interest.
To conclude, when thinking about immigration it depends very much on how you frame the issues. Who counts and who doesn't count? Do we add up the welfare of 7 billion individuals, or construct an aesthetically pleasing "good society" in our small corner of the planet?
I'm a bit more agnostic on these issues than Bryan, but you can probably tell which way I lean, at least at the margin.
Cable news has always made a rich target for comics, but after a recent report on the devastating effects of manmade climate change, John Oliver's Last Week Tonightattacked the networks' skeptical response head-on. In the segment, he plans out a "statistically accurate" climate debate that pits four skeptics against 96 scientists who accept the consensus. The result isn't terribly coherent as a debate, but it's some of the best political theater you'll see all week.
How often have you found yourself scratching your head in bewilderment over the ridiculous autocomplete suggestions that Google makes for you? They can often be as hilarious as they are absurd, which is what inspired sisters Phoebe Stephens and Nikki Flowerday to turn those search engine predictions into a board game called Query.
If you've ever chastised a friend for their gnarly smoking habit, you know that scolding does absolutely nothing. Making people feel bad about smoking just makes them want to smoke in secret. Well, here's an idea: What if it was your lighter making you feel bad about smoking. You can't run away from your lighter right?
You know those rectangles that appear when you open a new tab in the Firefox internet browser? They show your most frequently visited websites -- convenient! -- but soon they'll also show a mélange of Firefox sites "and other useful sites on the...
I guess all the states that didn't create their own exchanges made the right call.
The Massachusetts Health Connector is getting its plug pulled.
Nevada, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Oregon are members of a club that no one wants to join—all of these states have largely failed at getting their electronic health insurance exchange sites to work properly (or, in some cases, at all). Given the legislatively mandated deadline, the delays in delivery of requirements by the federal government, and the scale of the task that faced states developing their own healthcare exchange sites under the Affordable Care Act, people familiar with government information technology projects might tell you that it’s surprising that any of the websites worked at all.
But if any state had a greater shot at success, it was Massachusetts—the state that served as the model upon which the Affordable Care Act was based. Now, Massachusetts' health exchange has decided to shutter its own site at least temporarily, switching to the federal exchange to buy time for a better fix.
States running their own exchanges need to be ready by November 15 for the next round of open enrollment for health plans. That has put a number of states with floundering exchange sites in a pinch. Oregon was the first state with its own exchange to completely abandon its own website after spending more than $300 million in federal grants on the project.
It's no secret anymore that Nintendo is in some dire business straits. After decades of profitability it has just recorded its third straight fiscal year loss, dragged down by dismal sales for the Wii U and mobile-dampened enthusiasm for the 3DS.
Luckily, a few select members of Ars Technica's editorial team have magically been named to Nintendo's board of directors and have been given free rein to do whatever we please to turn the company around. Our sure-fire, can't-miss ideas for staving off financial ruin are laid out below, and they will be put into effect just as soon as the necessary arrangements can be made.
OK, that last paragraph is obviously false. But we still think our ideas for turning Nintendo around are pretty good. See for yourselves!
Campaigns such as Miiquality rose up seeking a response (or action) on Nintendo's part, saying that the game's focus on personalization would be disrupted when gay players are not given the option to have gay characters. Nintendo's response to those campaigns, titled "We are committed to fun and entertainment for everyone," was direct: the company wishes it could fix it, but it can't.
"We apologize for disappointing many people by failing to include same-sex relationships in Tomodachi Life," Nintendo wrote. "Unfortunately, it is not possible for us to change this game’s design, and such a significant development change can’t be accomplished with a post-ship patch."
On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the sale and marketing of a prosthetic arm called the DEKA Arm System, which uses electronic signals from the wearer's muscles to induce up to 10 different movements in the prosthetic.
Electrodes attached to the arm above the prosthesis detect muscle contractions and send those signals to a processor, which translates the contractions into movements that the arm should execute. The prosthetic weighs the same as an adult arm, and its design is modular so that it can be fitted to accommodate many different needs. Specifically, the FDA notes that the prosthetic can be used for “limb loss occurring at the shoulder joint, mid-upper arm, or mid-lower arm. It cannot be configured for limb loss at the elbow or wrist joint.”
A Breakthrough in Upper-Limb Prosthetics.
The movements that the arm can execute use a “combination of mechanisms including switches, movement sensors, and force sensors that cause the prosthesis to move,” the FDA wrote. Bloomberg further reports that six grip patterns “allow wearers to drink a cup of water, hold a cordless drill, or pick up a credit card or a grape.” The FDA says that in clinical studies, “90 percent of study participants were able to perform activities with the DEKA Arm System that they were not able to perform with their current prosthesis, such as using keys and locks, preparing food, feeding oneself, using zippers, and brushing and combing hair.”
By Felix Clay Published: May 10th, 2014
We in Western society tend to have a preoccupation with sex, to a greater or lesser degree. And that's every side of the sexy coin: whether you're preoccupied with getting it and looking at it, or with making sure no one sees it or knows it exists. V
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen went on a mini-rant on Twitter on May 7, outlining a theory of the current bubble in bubble-spotting, arguing that the quantity of analyses indicating that asset prices are in a bubble is actually a sign that there is no bubble:
I don't know that it has to be a bottom or a top, but I do think the proliferation of of people worrying about a bubble seems like a good sign that we're not in a bubble.
An aggressive asset valuation, at this point, is basically just a prediction that the next five or ten years will be better than the previous five or ten years — and the previous five and ten years have been awful. A lot of people see bubbles around because even that return to normal scenario looks too optimistic to many people. That's essentially the opposite of a cultural moment of irrational exuberance.
Palcohol is powdered alcohol. It comes in a pouch. You pour a few ounces of water into the pouch and it becomes a margarita, or a shot of rum. Palcohol is not available for sale. It may never be. It's a brilliant concept, with the potential to save Americans untold amounts of money each year. The problem is, no one — not even its creator — seems to understand how to use it properly.
Palcohol founder Mark Phillips released a 16-minute-long video this week called "The Truth About Palcohol." In it, he claims the product's main purpose is to allow people to drink when they're out camping: "When I hike, kayak, backpack, whatever, I like to have a drink when I reach my destination. Carrying liquid alcohol and mixtures and bottles to make a margarita, for instance, is totally impractical. So I created Palcohol."
This video was mean to silence critics of the product. One of those critics is Chuck Schumer, Senior Senator from New York State. He thinks that Palcohol's main purpose is to allow teenagers to sneak alcohol into school dances. As such, he's urged the government to "stop this product in its tracks."
Phillips and Schumer are both wrong. Palcohol is not for outdoorsmen. Palcohol is not for teens. Palcohol is for adults who are tired of getting ripped off by airlines and stadium owners.
Palcohol is for adults who are tired of getting ripped off by airlines and stadium owners
The first rule for frugal travelers is to pack your own dinner. If you show up at the airport hungry and without food, you're forced to either a) buy gross, overpriced food at the airport food court or b) buy even grosser, even more overpriced food on the airplane itself. So bring a sandwich, or leftover lasagna, and you'll eat well and not get ripped off. This rule also applies to frugal sports fans, assuming your favorite team allows outside food into the stadium.
Currently, this rule does not apply to alcohol, which is scandalous. Homeland Security doesn't let you get more than three ounces worth of liquid past security, so forget about stashing a can of beer (12 ounces) or a bottle of wine (about 25 ounces) in your carry-on. And even sports venues that let fans bring in outside food generally don't let people bring in booze. If you want to sip on a glass of wine while flying to Los Angeles or watching the Nationals, you'll have to pay the marked-up price.
This restriction is made in the name of safety and security, but really it's just an excuse on the part of airlines and sports franchises to charge a captive audience way too much for drinks. Jet Blue charges $9 for a glass of sparkling wine and an astounding $6 for a Bud Light. At Nationals Park you can buy one DC Brau for $9 — which is about what an entire six pack costs.
Palcohol would fix this problem. Before heading to the airport or the stadium (or the concert venue, or any other place with ridiculous alcohol mark-ups), you'd just throw a pouch or two into your bag. Sail through security. On the plane, you'd ask the flight attendant for a cup of water. Stir it into the pouch. Sit back, relax, and sip on the sweet knowledge that you are saving money. This is my dream.
"Sunlight," Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis famously argued, "is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman." It's a powerful metaphor: if the people know what people in government and industry are doing, they'll be spurred to action. But when it's been used to fight influence-peddling, sunlight has been losing for years. Congress has mandated campaign disclosures since 1910, when it passed the Federal Corrupt Practices Act in...
A month ago, we tracked a handful of names from fantasy and sci-fi series (Khaleesi and Arya from Game of Thrones, Hermione, Sirius, and Draco from Harry Potter, and Katniss from The Hunger Games); unsurprisingly, the names' popularity tracked that of the series they come from pretty well.
Today, the Social Security Administration released name data from last year, and Khaleesi and Arya are doing as well as ever. There were 241 Khaleesis born in 2013, up from 146 in 2012 (a 65 percent jump). That puts the name above the likes of Stacy, Pamela, Janet, and Joan:
Arya also grew impressively, going from 756 (girls only) in 2012 to 1,135 in 2013, a 50 percent jump. That may not be entirely attributable to Game of Thrones, especially as the Eragon series featured a main character named Arya, but given how much more popular Game of Thrones was last year it seems fair to credit the show (and to some extent the books). Arya tied with Madeleine and bested Amanda, Phoebe, Helen, and Karen:
There was somewhat less action on the Hunger Games and Harry Potter fronts. There were 17 Katnisses in 2013, compared to 12 in 2012; that' s a big jump in percentage terms, but it's from a very low base. There were 47 Hermiones, barely different from the 52 in 2012, while Draco fell from 51 to 27 and Sirius rose from 15 to 22. Still, all of those are well above the numbers before the first Harry Potter book. Draco and Sirius don't show up in the database until the late '90s, while Hermione saw some use in the 1910s and 1920s before mostly disappearing until 2001.
If you want to play with the data yourself, I put together a CSV file of all of the Social Security Administration's national name counts from 1880 to 2013; check out the SSA site for state-level data. Keep in mind that names used less than 5 times in a given year will be omitted for privacy reasons.
Apple is reportedly close inking to a deal to acquire the luxury headphone maker Beats Electronics for a staggering $3.2 billion, which would be the company's largest acquisition ever.
Actually, one tech and music observer did predict this acquisition, arguing that what Apple is really after is the recently launched Beats streaming music service. But it might have also been an April Fool's Day joke, so who knows what anyone is thinking here.
Sen. Rand Paul is now a disciple of the anti-voter ID movement, after the black pastors he met with on Friday showed him the way and the truth about measures that tend to decrease minority voter turnout. After meeting with the pastors, Paul shared the good news with Jeremy W. Peters of The New York Times: the GOP needs to "lay off" the whole voter ID laws thing, according to Peters. "It's offending people," Paul said.
This isn't the first time Paul has met with black pastors — it's just one element of his ongoing attempt to be the face of (successful) GOP outreach to black and Hispanic voters. And this also isn't the first time he's come out against the restrictive voter fraud laws in red states that disproportionately affect black voters (who are more likely to vote for Democrats). Last month, during a conversation with David Axelrod, a former advisor of President Obama, Paul said he was against the restrictions on early voting passed in Ohio and Wisconsin, according to The Huffington Post. Paul has also come out in favor of restoring voting rights to ex-felons.
During last month's conversation, however, he didn't come out against ID laws. "Dead people do still vote in some elections. There is still some fraud. And so we should stop that, and one way of doing it is (driver's licenses)," he said at the time. The problem is, when a political party that has a reputation for pushing policies that work against minorities, people will get offended. Thank God someone finally told Paul.
Since the 1980s, economists and psychologists have been aware of a "parental happiness gap." Basically, the running theory has been that parents are a less happy bunch than their non-parenting peers. This makes some sense: After all, parents have a lot on their plates—changing diapers, getting their kids into the right schools, keeping their vaccinations up to date—and rarely have time to just relax and enjoy themselves.
But Chris Herbst of Arizona State University and John Ifcher of Santa Clara University noticed some weaknesses in earlier studies on the phenomenon. Why did the studies always treat the happiness gap as a constant? Also, why was the word parents always defined as people whose egg and sperm had met and created a child? This excluded a segment of society who chose to have children: adoptive parents, step-parents, relatives who take in children—non-biological parents who willingly (and many times, happily) take in children to raise because they want to and, perhaps, find joy in having kids around.
So Herbst and Ifcher turned to two surveys (the General Social Survey and the DDB Worldwide Communications Life Style Survey) to re-examine parental happiness by looking at both happiness trends and expanding the definition of “parents” to include any adult who has a non-adult living under the same roof.
Their results, appearing in a study titled "The Increasing Happiness of Parents," challenge previous research on parental happiness: While parents appear to remain just as happy as they did back in the 1980s, the happiness of non-parents has fallen. This means that, today, parents are happier relative to non-parents—a shift from previous evidence.
Ifcher explained the results this way: “What we believe is going on is that there is a general negative trend in happiness among adults—[but] that negative trend is not happening for parents.” Adults seem to be getting grumpier as a whole, but parents are bucking that general trend.
The findings stay “sturdy” even in the face of common tough childrearing times, such as the terrible twos and adolescent angst, surprising Herbst and Ifcher.
“Parents with young kids of any age are becoming happier than non-parents,” Herbst told me. “It doesn’t matter how old the child is in the household: Parents with kids in any of these age groups are becoming happier.”
Herbst and Ifcher also tested their findings against the idea that having fewer kids would lead to happiness: Is there a peak number of children that a parent could have to experience for maximum happiness before there was a diminishing marginal utility in happiness? Not so, it seems. Additionally, their findings held even for the least happy subgroup of parents: single working mothers. Their discovery? Moms and working moms are becoming happier relative to their childless counterparts.
“It speaks potentially to the role of technology,” Herbst said, noting that the prevalence of washing machines, kitchen appliances, and other aides to household chores have allowed for working mothers to focus more on their children and enjoy it.
In short, “it’s remarkable” how just the presence of children seems to protect against declining happiness, Ifcher said.
Herbst and Ifcher offer three theories why parents are becoming happier—and what that means for American society.
First, there’s the phenomenon that Robert Putnam identified in his 2000 book Bowling Alone—that Americans were becoming increasingly isolated from community and family. Herbst and Ifcher argue that families are the “last vestige of community life in American society.”
“Parents are more likely to spend time with friends, get the news, be interested in politics, think people are honest, have faith in the economy, be trusting,” Herbst said. “We think that parents remain better attached to society, and we think the lynchpin of that attachment is kids.”
Moreover, contrary to the notion that kids hinder the social lives of mom and dad, children help parents stay social. Think PTA meetings, playdates with fellow parents in tow, and taking part in the sociopolitical fabric of the neighborhood.
Second, the financial hardship brought on by children has lessened over time. The U.S. now has a more generous earned income tax credit and childcare tax credits, which means parents have more of a financial cushion than they used to.
“The social safety net has begun to favor parents more over time than non-parents,” Herbst said. In short: “Parents may have more money in their pocket, and more money translates to more happiness.”
Finally, who is having a kid these days is different than who had children in previous decades—and their reasons for doing so have changed. Median marriage ages are increasing, and having a birth out of wedlock isn’t as socially frowned upon as it used to be.
In other words, parents are probably becoming parents because they want to be parents, and less because of societal pressure. These adults are more likely to be a self-selected group, desire their children, and therefore derive more happiness from having the children they wanted.
“The composition of parents and non-parents looks different,” Herbst said, calling the comparison of who was a parent in the 1970s to who is a parent today an apples and oranges comparison. “Who is choosing to become a parent and who is choosing to remain childless have changed,” he said. “Parents look a lot different today."
And as far as these researchers are concerned, they're looking a lot happier.
I've long proposed a simple rule: police officers who shoot unarmed innocents should have their guns taken away. They can work desk jobs or monitor meters. But if nothing else, they shouldn't ever be in a position to put lives in danger again.
Applying that rule in Miami would have dramatic consequences.
The local CBS affiliate has investigated a police shooting that happened there last December. The results are jaw-dropping. A man who committed armed robbery and shot a police officer hours earlier was spotted in his automobile, along with a passenger who played no role in his crime. Police officers gave chase.
CBS reports what happened next:
The suspect's blue Volvo crashed into the backyard of a townhouse.
It was later determined that neither the suspect nor the passenger was armed. Police officers nevertheless fired two barrages of bullets into the vehicle. Witnesses say that after the first volley of approximately 50 bullets, the two men were still alive.
Anthony Vandiver, who lives in a building adjacent to the lot, saw the incident. “They were saying put your hands up, and the guys were still moving after they shot maybe 50, 60 times,” he said. “And the guy tried to put his hands up. And as soon as he put his hands up, it erupted again. And that was it for them. That guy tried his best to give up. I swear to God on everything I love, my kids, my momma, everything, I seen it all.”
Roughly two minutes passed between volleys.
After the second volley both men were dead. Said another witness: "The policemen that had on the black and white vests were out there laughing like it was so funny."
The behavior already noted is inexcusable.
Additional details from CBS underscore how extraordinarily reckless was the behavior of these police officers:
"Bullets were sprayed everywhere. They hit the Volvo, other cars in the lot, fence posts and neighboring businesses. They blasted holes in a townhouse where a 12-year-old dove to the ground for cover and a four month old slept in his crib."
"Two Miami Dade police officers were hit as well—caught in the crossfire. One officer was shot in the arm and the second was hit in the arm and grazed in the head. If the bullet had struck just a half an inch to the side the officer would have been killed."
"Senior commanders admit they are very lucky more officers weren’t seriously hurt or killed. Even more haunting is the danger the residents in the area faced. At the time of the shooting, parents were getting their kids ready for school and across the street men and women stood exposed on a Metrorail platform."
Today’s hypothetical: Police officers come to your home at 2 a.m., insist (as a result of their own clerical error) that the car you’re driving is stolen property, order you to lie on your belly, slam your mother against a garage door, and then shoot you three times from 15 feet away when you protest. Is there some chance—some very slight chance—that their conduct violates a “clearly established” constitutional right?
The Supreme Court on Monday said “yes.” All nine justices agreed that a lower court that blew off the claim needs to go back and take a fresh look at the issue.
Tolan v. Cottonbegan early in the morning of December 31, 2008, when John C. Edwards, a police officer in Bellaire, Texas (a close-in suburb of Houston), saw a black SUV make an “abrupt turn” into a cul de sac. This struck him as suspicious. He watched as two African American men parked in front of a house and got out.
The police computer reported that the car had been stolen. In fact, it hadn't; it belonged to Bob Tolan, the owner of the house. Bob Tolan is a local celebrity with a 14-year career in Major League Baseball, including a spot in the outfield for the 1967 World Champion St. Louis Cardinals. The driver was his son, Robbie, then a 23-year-old minor-leaguer with big-league hopes of his own. Robbie lived at the house, too. He was unarmed. He and a friend had been to a Jack in the Box.
Edwards had triggered the stolen-car report by typing the wrong license plate number into the computer.
Edwards drew his pistol and ordered Robbie and his friend down on their bellies. Bob Tolan and his wife, Marian, came onto the porch in their pajamas. Robbie’s father told Edwards the car was his; the officer ignored him. He also urged their son and his friend to remain compliant; Robbie’s mother, Marian, however, began to complain about the police entering their property and threatening her son.
Unfortunately, at this point “help” arrived in the person of Bellaire Police Sergeant Jeffrey Wayne Cotton. Without hesitation, he slammed Mrs. Tolan against her garage door (bruises persisted for days). When Robbie, 15 to 20 feet away, rose to his knees and said, “Get your fucking hands off my mom!” Sergeant Cotton shot him three times.
He had been on the scene 32 seconds.
Robbie lived, but he reports persistent pain, and his professional baseball career is almost certainly over.
Local district attorneys must work with police, and they are reluctant to move against them except in extreme cases. But even by Texas standards, Cotton’s behavior was so egregious that the local state prosecutor brought criminal charges against him. Cotton was acquitted, but the indictment itself spoke volumes.
Two federal courts, however—the U.S. District Courts for the Southern District of Texas and the Fifth Circuit—decided the case wasn’t even worth listening to. There would be no trial, no jury, no real finding of fact.
The federal courts’ decision was based on special rules of civil-rights litigation. When a government official violates a citizens’ rights, federal statutes allow the citizens to bring a federal lawsuit. The most important, 42 U.S.C. § 1983, is the basis of the Tolan case. It provides a civil action against any person who deprives another of any legal or constitutional right “under color of” law.
But individuals—prisoners, defendants, “sovereign citizens,” and just people who have had a bad encounter with a cop—like to sue law enforcement, especially since, if they win, the government will pay their legal fees. To prevent baseless suits, the Supreme Court evolved a doctrine called “qualified immunity.” Government officials are presumed to be immune from suit for their official acts. Unless the plaintiffs can allege facts that, if true, would violate “clearly established” rights, official defendants are entitled to immediate dismissal.
So, for example, if a cop arrests me, grabs the key to my house, drives there, and uses the key to search without a warrant, I can sue for damages, because any reasonable officer would know the Fourth Amendment forbids that. If, on the other hand, a cop arrests me, grabs my cellphone, and searches my call log, I probably can’t sue, because that issue hasn’t been resolved.
So the issue for the Fifth Circuit was, could a reasonable police officer believe he was legally justified in shooting Robbie Tolan? To decide that, the courts are required by the federal rules to believe all the factual allegations made by the plaintiffs against Sergeant Cotton. A ruling of “qualified immunity” means “even if you can prove everything you say, the shooting was still reasonable.” Only if the court finds against “qualified immunity” will there be a trial, and real findings of fact.
The Fifth Circuit claimed to be applying that standard. It still dismissed the case because it believed, as the Supreme Court summarized it:
the front porch had been “dimly-lit”; Tolan’s mother had “refus[ed] orders to remain quiet and calm”; and Tolan’s words had amounted to a “verba[l] threa[t].” Most critically, the court also relied on the purported fact that Tolan was “moving to intervene in” Cotton’s handling of his mother, and that Cotton therefore could reasonably have feared for his life.
Reading the record in Tolan, I’d find it hard to reach that conclusion. The Tolans’ testimony—true or not—directly contradicted a lot of the Fifth Circuit’s version. No one disputes Robbie was unarmed. By his account, he rose only to his knees; a man he had never seen before had just barged onto his property and thrown his mother against a garage door. That man then shot him without warning.
The Supreme Court, in a 9-0 opinion, said that the appeals court had put a thumb on the scales. “By failing to credit evidence that contradicted some of its key factual conclusions, the court improperly ‘weigh[ed] the evidence’ and resolved disputed issues in favor of” Sergeant Cotton—which the rules forbid.” (Justice Samuel Alito, by far the most pro-prosecution Justice on the Court, wrote separately to emphasize that the Court shouldn’t overturn decisions like this often, but even he agreed that in this case, “there are genuine issues of material fact and that this is a case in which summary judgment should not have been granted.”)
The Court’s decision was narrower than some had hoped. Eric Del Pozo of Jenner & Block, the author of an amicus brief on behalf of the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund, Inc., told me there’s a perception that the Fifth Circuit, and some other courts around the country, have begun to alter the test for “qualified immunity.” Instead of asking, as the cases hold, whether a reasonable officer should have known he was violating the plaintiffs’ rights, some judges, in some cases, have begun to view cases from the particular view of the specific officer involved. As they imagine what that officer was thinking or feeling, they have begun to “play with the facts,” Del Pozo said, deciding “whether they think the officer’s perspective was reasonable even if a jury could find for the plaintiffs.”
The Court did not directly address the “qualified immunity” issue. But the decision may send a signal to the lower courts to apply the immunity test as written. “It rights the ship a little bit,” Del Pozo said—and in a case that has been closely watched by civil-rights lawyers nationwide. He speculates that the court didn’t want “to foster a perception that the courthouse doors are closed to persons with meritorious claims.”
My own perception is that many federal judges seem to have little capacity for outrage—no real gut feeling that, when police storm onto private property, brutalize a woman, and shoot her unarmed son, there really might be something very badly wrong. The kind of “review” this case got in the courts below is hardly worthy of being called “law.”
The Court sent a quiet signal that this kind of thing won’t do; it was, as Will Baude notes, the first time in a decade it has held against law enforcement in a “qualified immunity” case. Let’s hope that signal is received.
I find this fascinating to read about but I know I won't ever play it.
Last year
EVE Online, the massive multi-player online game set in
the fictional universe of New Eden, welcomed its 500,000th
subscriber. (For comparison, Iceland, the country where EVE
Online developer CCP Games is based, has a population of about
320,000.) A video game with a nation-sized economy throws off an
awful lot of data, but can economists draw real-world lessons from
the buying, selling, stealing, and destroying of virtual space
gear?
As in-house economist at CCP, Eyjólfur Guðmundsson oversees
all of New Eden's trucking and bartering. As Guðmundsson told
the blog Massively in 2009, New Eden's economy behaves
very well according to economic theories seen in the non-virtual
world. "I have not found any example of an economic theory that
does not apply to a virtual economy like EVE," he said.
"And in all honesty, it looks to me that it even applies better
than to the real world because there is less distortion in the
EVE universe than there is in real life." Still, it would
be unwise to think that New Eden's economy provides easy lessons
for real-world policy makers.
For starters, EVE Online players are not
demographically representative of a nation. The culture of New Eden
appeals to a fairly specific sort of player, observes Dmitri
Williams of the University of Southern California's Annenberg
School for Communication and Journalism. "Where its players like
the lawlessness," Williams says, "it's also famously hard to learn
and is not for the faint of heart. Its players are anything but
typical and representative of other games. Your Candy
Crush-playing masses are not going to be happy (or welcome) in
EVE."
Those brave
enough to venture into New Eden can expect to reap some of the
rewards of a game designed by people who understand the attraction
of economic freedom and the value of community. EVE Online
is a "sandbox" game where players create content, making it
different from many other video games. Observing the emergence of
trade there offers interesting insights on how market institutions
might take shape against a relatively anarchic legal
background.
But the history of New Eden is full of stories of loss as well
as gain. For some players it is the more nefarious activities
allowed in EVE Online, such as piracy and scamming, that
are the most interesting. Games here are less a mirror of real life
than a projection of how comparatively anonymous people will behave
given the freedom to act out on fantasies that have little if any
real-world impact.
"If you play games online you run into a lot of people—maybe a
12-year-old who doesn't get out much and doesn't have much outlet
for his aggression—that will just be horribly awful to anyone he
perceives as different or inferior, or even people he's insecure
about comparing himself to," says Kyle Orland, who covers games for
Ars Technica. "There's no lack of cruelty in online games.
Just like in the real world, there's people who are going to be
jerks like that, only it's exacerbated because people in these
games are anonymous. There's really no repercussion for social
malefaction."
Still, for many players, in-game economic behavior all too
closely mirrors real life. In fact, one of the most notable battles
in EVE's history began because of a forgotten bill.
When one alliance forgot to pay rent on a space station in the
B-R5RB system earlier this year, the region exploded in a massive
battle that involved more than 7,000 characters. During the 21-hour
melee, now sometimes known as the Bloodbath of B-R5RB, dozens of
ships, each worth thousands of real-world U.S. dollars, were
destroyed.
Not every lesson learned in EVE Online can be applied
to the bricks-and-mortar world. But the Bloodbath of B-R5RB
provides at least one that can: Pay your rent on time.
Big surprise! Hedge fund managers make a lot of money. But there are some lessons there.
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Arya also grew impressively, going from 756 (girls only) in 2012 to 1,135 in 2013, a 50 percent jump. That may not be entirely attributable to Game of Thrones, especially as the Eragon series featured a main character named Arya, but given how much more popular Game of Thrones was last year it seems fair to credit the show (and to some extent the books). Arya tied with Madeleine and bested Amanda, Phoebe, Helen, and Karen:
There was somewhat less action on the Hunger Games and Harry Potter fronts. There were 17 Katnisses in 2013, compared to 12 in 2012; that' s a big jump in percentage terms, but it's from a very low base. There were 47 Hermiones, barely different from the 52 in 2012, while Draco fell from 51 to 27 and Sirius rose from 15 to 22. Still, all of those are well above the numbers before the first Harry Potter book. Draco and Sirius don't show up in the database until the late '90s, while Hermione saw some use in the 1910s and 1920s before mostly disappearing until 2001.
PRNewsFoto/ColorWare 
Associated Press 
Those brave
enough to venture into New Eden can expect to reap some of the
rewards of a game designed by people who understand the attraction
of economic freedom and the value of community. EVE Online
is a "sandbox" game where players create content, making it
different from many other video games. Observing the emergence of
trade there offers interesting insights on how market institutions
might take shape against a relatively anarchic legal
background.