Quotulatiousness

October 12, 2011

The “Ontario education system [is] a remarkably clean and ongoing experiment in the effects of school choice”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Education, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:22

Stephen Gordon explains why Ontario’s two parallel school systems are helping to prove the efficacy of school choice:

Public funding for the Ontario separate school system is sometimes a controversial topic for reasons I won’t get into here. But by offering one set of parents with the choice of which school they can send their children, the Ontario education system has set up a remarkably clean and ongoing experiment in the effects of school choice. Catholics have the choice of sending their elementary-school aged children either to separate or to public schools, and non-Catholics do not have this choice.

Elementary school administrators in the two systems face very different constraints:

  • Public schools have a monopoly on non-Catholics who can’t afford private school.
  • Separate schools face a clientele that always has the option of switching to the public school system.

Of the two, separate school administrators have the greater incentive to provide higher-quality education: if the separate system were widely known to be dysfunctional, it would likely disappear.

Basic economics would predict that the competitive pressures on separate school administrators would provide stronger incentives to provide better education outcomes. And that seems to be just what is happening. A recent study (pdf) by McMaster University economists Martin Dooley and Abigail Payne in collaboration with UC-Berkeley’s David Card that examine these effects finds “a statistically significant but modest-sized impact of potential competition on the growth rate of student achievement.” In a related study using similar data, a CD Howe study done by Wilfrid Laurier’s David Johnson finds that of the 13 ‘above-average’ school boards, 11 are in the separate school system, while none of the 10 ‘below-average’ school boards are.

Changing opinions about pornography

Filed under: Health, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:44

Anna Arrowsmith points out that what we “know” about porn ain’t necessarily so:

Since Andrea Dworkin wrote about pornography as being anti-women in the early 1980s, we have become acclimatised to the idea that porn is bad for us, and must only be tolerated due to reasons of democracy and liberalism. In the past 30 years this idea has largely gone unchallenged outside academia and, in the process, feminism has been conflated with the anti-porn position. We have effectively been neuro-linguistically programmed to equate porn with harm.

Not only is there no good evidence to support this view, but there is a fair amount of evidence to support the opposite. This is the problem with the opt-in proposal: only the reportedly negative results from porn have been considered. But porn is good for society.

Women’s rights are far stronger in societies with liberal attitudes to sex — think of conservative countries such as Afghanistan, Yemen or China, and the place of women there. And yet, anti-porn campaigners neglect such issues entirely. A recent study by the US department of justice compared the four states that had highest broadband access and found there was a 27% decrease in rape and attempted rape, and the four with the lowest had a 53% increase over the same period. With broadband being key to watching porn online, these figures are food for thought for those who believe access to porn is bad news.

October 11, 2011

What the “Occupy #LOCATION” folks should really be protesting

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

Caroline Baum puts her finger on the real looming crisis that the folks out in all the various Occupy Wall Street/Bay Street/Seattle/Edmonton gatherings should really be agitating about:

Oh, sure, some protesters have posted lists of pie-in-the-sky demands. (The occupywallst.org website insists there is no official list of demands.) One of these includes a $20 minimum wage regardless of employment, tariffs on all imports, trillions of dollars in new spending on alternative energy and infrastructure, and debt forgiveness — all debt “on the entire planet.”

In other words, lots of benefits and no consideration of the cost. You’d think one of these kids — and that’s how they come across — would have taken an economics course along the way. Where do they think the government gets the money for its largesse? Imposing usurious taxes on the top 1 percent of earners won’t yield enough money to provide for the other 99 percent. (One of the protesters’ slogans is, “We are the 99 percent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.”)

It’s not as if young adults couldn’t find good targets for their anger. If these protesters are looking for something to get exercised about, they might want to wander into Chris McHugh’s Monetary Economics class at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and learn about “generational economics,” the idea that government is going to stick the younger generation with the bill for supporting the retiring baby boomers. McHugh asked his students to identify grass-roots youth groups that are agitating about this, but all they found were a couple of minor groups that tended to be Tea Party and Ron Paul spinoffs.

Talk about haves and have-nots. The debt burden that the younger generation is staring at almost guarantees it will have a reduced standard of living. After all, if more dollars are directed at keeping Granny alive until age 102, that means fewer dollars for productivity-enhancing investments.

This idea clearly hasn’t resonated with today’s youth.

Maybe that’s because the numbers — tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded Social Security liabilities, for example — are hard to fathom. It’s much easier to vent their anger at bank bailouts and preferential treatment for corporate interests, much of which is justified. They seem to be ignoring Capitol Hill, where the rules are made by our bought-and-paid-for government.

“Fat taxes” are doomed to failure

Filed under: Economics, Food, Government, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:06

Patrick Basham and John Luik handily dismiss the potential of government-imposed “fat taxes” on certain foods as tools to reduce obesity or to change peoples’ food choices:

The obesity crusaders’ argument is that a fat tax will reduce junk-food consumption, and thereby improve diets and overall public health. There are many reasons, however, to suspect that a fat tax would be at best unsuccessful, and at worst economically and socially harmful.

For example, scientifically rigorous evidence suggests that higher prices do not reduce soft-drink consumption. There are no studies demonstrating a difference either in aggregate soft-drink consumption or in child and adolescent body mass index (BMI) between jurisdictions with soft-drink taxes and those without such taxes.

[. . .]

These results are confirmed in a study by Christiane Schroeter in the Journal of Health Economics which examined the link between food prices and obesity. The study concluded that while increasing the price of high-calorie food might lead to decreased demand for these foods, ‘it is not clear that such an outcome will actually reduce weight’.

Why do fat taxes fail? The economic answer is that demand for food tends to be largely insensitive to price. Considerable research on food prices has demonstrated this inelasticity. A 10 per cent increase in price, for instance, reduces consumption by less than one per cent.

[. . .]

Furthermore, fat taxes have perverse, unintended consequences. According to the US government’s Economic Research Service, another unintended consequence of a fat tax on consumer behaviour is that taxes on snack foods could lead some consumers to replace the taxed food with equally unhealthy foods. Adam Drewnowksi similarly found that poorer consumers react to higher food prices not by changing their diets, but by consuming even fewer ‘healthy’ foods, such as fruits and vegetables, and eating more processed foods.

A Danish study confirmed this problematic outcome, finding that sin taxes on junk foods would fail to reduce consumption by the population (that is, the poor) who consume these foods most frequently. Additionally, it found that taxes levied on sugar content — the basis for the soft-drinks tax — would increase saturated fat consumption.

October 7, 2011

“The entire Occupy Wall Street movement needs a ‘[citation needed]’ footnote”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:32

Robert David Graham does some independent reporting of the “Occupy Wall Street” protests and finds the mainstream media is being remarkably superficial:

It’s the quality of the coverage, not the amount that’s the problem. It’s been on the nightly news every night for the past week, but there has been little “serious” reporting.

By “serious” reporting, I mean such things as contacting the park’s owners asking for an official statement. The protesters are occupying Zuccotti Park, owned by the same company (Brookfield Office Properties NYSE:BPO) that owns the adjacent skyscraper. An obvious step would be to contact them asking for a statemen, but I could find no journalists that had yet done so. Well, if “journalists” aren’t going to do this, I can do this myself. I sent an email to their VP of Communications. I got a response, which I posted to my blog. When I posted it, I also Googled the sentences from the official statement, and found no results. I was indeed the first one “reporting” on this. Since then, others have mentioned the official statement, probably by picking it up from the #OccupyWallStreet Twitter hashtag that links to my blog.

[. . .]

In many ways, the press treats this protest the way they treated the Tea Party, completely distorting the story. Journalists ignored the mainstream of the Tea Party and instead focused on the fringe. Instead of showing the hundreds of signs calling for smaller government, reporters instead focused on the one sign showing Obama as Hitler. In the end, this reporting became self-fulfilling. The Republican fringe disaffected with the establishment were convinced by this reporting, believing that they, too, should join the Tea Party, thus derailing it.

[. . .]

In that way, it’s like the Internet. When the Internet appeared on the scene 20 years ago, it wasn’t like anything that predated it. Yes, you could define it in terms of the old, as a digital library, as an electronic form of mail, or as a communications network, but none of these descriptions captures the essence of what the Internet really is.

In particular, there is the problem with the “filter bubble”. While the Internet can expand a person’s universe, it gives people the power to shrink it. People create a “filter bubble” around themselves, using tools of the Internet to pass only those things they agree with. For example, Google watches what people search for, profiling them, and sorts the results for that individual. They see their own small universe reflected back, rather than the big universe.

[. . .]

I get the impression that the entire Occupy Wall Street movement needs a “[citation needed]” footnote. Wikipedia uses this technique to allow anybody to challenge an unsupported assertion. Anybody can insert this footnote, expressing to the reader that (as yet) the assertion isn’t supported. Anybody else can find supporting evidence, and replace the [citation needed] to a footnote pointing to a reliable source. If no citation can be found, the assertion is eventually deleted.

October 6, 2011

Steve Jobs was not a world-leading philanthropist, thank goodness

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:53

Kevin D. Williams explains why the late Steve Jobs did more good by avoiding big-ticket philanthropy and concentrating on his business:

Mr. Jobs’s contribution to the world is Apple and its products, along with Pixar and his other enterprises, his 338 patented inventions — his work — not some Steve Jobs Memorial Foundation for Giving Stuff to Poor People in Exotic Lands and Making Me Feel Good About Myself. Because he already did that: He gave them better computers, better telephones, better music players, etc. In a lot of cases, he gave them better jobs, too. Did he do it because he was a nice guy, or because he was greedy, or because he was a maniacally single-minded competitor who got up every morning possessed by an unspeakable rage to strangle his rivals? The beauty of capitalism — the beauty of the iPhone world as opposed to the world of politics — is that that question does not matter one little bit. Whatever drove Jobs, it drove him to create superior products, better stuff at better prices. Profits are not deductions from the sum of the public good, but the real measure of the social value a firm creates. Those who talk about the horror of putting profits over people make no sense at all. The phrase is without intellectual content. Perhaps you do not think that Apple, or Goldman Sachs, or a professional sports enterprise, or an internet pornographer actually creates much social value; but markets are very democratic — everybody gets to decide for himself what he values. That is not the final answer to every question, because economic answers can only satisfy economic questions. But the range of questions requiring economic answers is very broad.

I was down at the Occupy Wall Street protest today, and never has the divide between the iPhone world and the politics world been so clear: I saw a bunch of people very well-served by their computers and telephones (very often Apple products) but undeniably shortchanged by our government-run cartel education system. And the tragedy for them — and for us — is that they will spend their energy trying to expand the sphere of the ineffective, hidebound, rent-seeking, unproductive political world, giving the Barney Franks and Tom DeLays an even stronger whip hand over the Steve Jobses and Henry Fords. And they — and we — will be poorer for it.

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, for the link.

Update: An obituary from The Economist seems pretty accurate to me:

NOBODY else in the computer industry, or any other industry for that matter, could put on a show like Steve Jobs. His product launches, at which he would stand alone on a black stage and conjure up a “magical” or “incredible” new electronic gadget in front of an awed crowd, were the performances of a master showman. All computers do is fetch and shuffle numbers, he once explained, but do it fast enough and “the results appear to be magic”. He spent his life packaging that magic into elegantly designed, easy to use products.

[. . .]

His on-stage persona as a Zen-like mystic notwithstanding, Mr Jobs was an autocratic manager with a fierce temper. But his egomania was largely justified. He eschewed market researchers and focus groups, preferring to trust his own instincts when evaluating potential new products. “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” he said. His judgment proved uncannily accurate: by the end of his career the hits far outweighed the misses. Mr Jobs was said by an engineer in the early years of Apple to emit a “reality distortion field”, such were his powers of persuasion. But in the end he changed reality, channelling the magic of computing into products that reshaped music, telecoms and media. The man who said in his youth that he wanted to “put a ding in the universe” did just that.

Update, the second: “Death is very likely the single best invention of life.” Steve Jobs, 2005.

October 5, 2011

The police are not subject to the rules they enforce on gun owners

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:52

Lorne Gunter itemizes some of the many, many ways that legal gun owners in Canada can be tripped up by vagaries and inconsistencies in the law:

Since Bill C-68 became the law of the land more than 15 years ago, one of the most common charges police have laid against gun owners has been for unsafe storage. The reason for this is that the federal firearms law is very unclear about what constitutes safe and unsafe storage.

Is it enough to have one’s firearms locked away in a gun safe or must they also have trigger locks installed? How secure must the safe’s lock be: strong enough to keep a thief out for two minutes? Five? Fifteen?

Is it OK to store ammunition in the same safes as guns or must bullets and shells be in separate safes from one’s firearms? Must the two safes be in separate rooms?

There are no hard-and-fast rules, so in some provinces, unsafe storage provisions have become catchalls. In Ontario, for instance, most frontline officers have been trained to lay unsafe storage charges against any gun owner whose firearm lacks a trigger lock, even if the owner had just removed the lock so he could use his firearms to defend his home or family against intruders.

These unwritten rules make self-defence next to impossible. You are permitted by law to use a gun to defend yourself and your home against an armed intruder, but you cannot remove the locks on your guns to defend your loved ones, yourself or your property unless you’re willing to be charged with unsafe storage.

Perhaps the unsafe storage rules are should be called a Catch-22 rather than a catchall.

Oddly enough, the police don’t hold themselves to the same standard that they so unevenly enforce on the citizens. According to a recent FOIA result, police forces in Canada have lost more than 400 firearms over the last three years, but no police officers have faced criminal charges or loss of their jobs over these losses. Yet another way that the police have different rules than ordinary citizens.

October 4, 2011

New York wants to rework the First Amendment “not as a right, but as a privilege”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:53

Some New York senators think you’ve got too much freedom of speech, and they think the world would be a much nicer place if you didn’t have as much:

. . . some state Senators in NY are trying a new line of attack: going directly after the First Amendment and suggesting that current interpretations are way too broad, and it’s not really meant to protect any sort of free speech right. In fact, it sounds as though they’re trying to redefine the right to free speech into a privilege that can be taken away. Seriously:

     Proponents of a more refined First Amendment argue that this freedom should be treated not as a right but as a privilege — a special entitlement granted by the state on a conditional basis that can be revoked if it is ever abused or maltreated.

Yes, that totally flips the First Amendment on its head. It is not a “more refined First Amendment.” It’s the anti-First Amendment. It suggests, by its very nature, that the government possesses the right to grant the “privilege” of free speech to citizens… and thus the right to revoke it. That’s an astonishingly dangerous path, and one that should not be taken seriously. Of course, given their right to speak freely, state senators Jeff Klein, Diane Savino, David Carlucci and David Valesky have every right to put forth that argument — but similarly, it allows others to point out their rather scary beliefs.

October 3, 2011

ReasonTV: Ken Burns on his new documentary, Prohibition

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:20

Ban violent video games? Expect more crime as a result

Filed under: Gaming, Law, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:11

Caleb Cox explains why:

While there’s no end of detractors claiming that violent videogames cause aggressive, often criminal behaviour, some refreshing research has now insisted that the opposite is true.

The report, entitled Understanding the Effects of Violent Video Games on Violent Crime, says while “there is evidence that violent videogames cause aggression in a laboratory setting, there is no evidence that [they] cause violence or crime [in society]”.

Written by Benjamin Engelstätter from the Centre for European Economic Research, Scott Cunningham from Baylor University in Texas, and Michael Ward from the University of Texas, the paper essentially asserts that because gamers are too busy gaming, they’re unable to cause much trouble in the real world. No shizzle, Sherlocks.

October 1, 2011

More on Assange’s “unauthorized” autobiography

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:26

Patrick Hayes reviews the autobiography (draft) recently published against the wishes of the author:

The folks at publishing house Canongate must have thought they’d hit the jackpot when they secured the rights to the memoirs of the person whom the Guardian had compared to Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa. The so-called ‘spectral’ Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, apparently living the life of Jason Bourne, was to give an unprecedented glimpse into his formative years as a freedom fighter and the events that led him to found Wikileaks, the whistleblowers’ website. Hollywood wanted in, as did dozens of leading publishers around the world. Even better, Assange’s book was to be ‘part memoir, part manifesto’ — something like A Long Walk to Freedom and the Communist Manifesto rolled into one. What could go wrong?

Pretty much everything, that’s what. In a matter of months, the liberal commentariat fell out of love with the silver-haired whistleblower extraordinaire. The oft-dubbed Silver Fox had proved to be a skunk and the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel, which had all secured deals to publish Wikileaks material, couldn’t distance themselves fast enough from him. Fevered speculation about who would play Assange in an upcoming movie — Neil Patrick Harris? Paul Bettany? Bill Hader? Tilda Swinton? — abruptly stopped. Not only that, but Assange, who seemed to have only reluctantly agreed to pen the book in order to cover legal fees, bolted midway through the project, declaring ‘All memoir is prostitution’.

However, Assange no longer had his advance, so he couldn’t break the contract and, to recoup costs, Canongate went ahead and published a draft anyway, billing it as an ‘Unauthorised Autobiography’. On publication day last week, Assange revealed that the title itself was a half-truth, announcing that he had not written a word of the book himself. Instead, it had been ghost-written by novelist Andrew O’Hagan, who was reportedly given £100,000 to write up 50 hours of interviews that he’d conducted with Assange. Many biographers spend a lot more time interviewing their subjects.

ESR on sexual repression

Filed under: Economics, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:07

ESR looks at a recent New York Post article on the price of sex, and comes to a few depressing conclusions:

The New York Post has an interesting article up on the price of sex. Summary; more women are giving it up sooner. Between a shortage of men who are marry-up material, competition from other women, and porn, withholding sex to get commitment is no longer a workable strategy Tellingly the article says “those who don’t discount sex say they can’t seem to get anyone to ‘pay’ their higher price. Consequently, younger women are doing an awful lot of first-date or even no-date fucking, and the marriage rate is steadily dropping.

[. . .]

The first difficult thing to accept, after the sexual revolution, is this: sexual repression and the double standard weren’t arbitrary forms of cruelty that societies ended up with by accident. They were functional adaptations. By raising the clearing price that women charged for sex, they actually increased female bargaining power and raised the marriage rate.

Most people can process that one without wincing. But this next one is a hot potato: the ideology of sexual equality made the problem a lot worse in two different ways. The obvious one was that it encouraged women to believe they could and should be able to act like men without negative consequences — including rising to male levels of promiscuity. The less obvious, but perhaps in the long run more damaging consequence, was that it collided with hypergamy.

Women are hypergamous. They want to marry men who are bigger, stronger, higher-status, a bit older, and a bit brighter than they are. This is massively confirmed by statistics on actual marriages; only the “a bit brighter” part is even controversial, and most of that controversy is ideological posturing.

OK, so what happens when women get educated, achieve economic equality, etcetera? Their pool of eligible hypergamic targets shrinks; the princess marrying the swineherd is a fairytale precisely because it’s so rare. More women seeking hypergamy from a higher baseline means the competition for eligible males is more intense, and womens’ ability to withold sex vanishes even supposing they want to. Thus, college campuses today, and plunging marriages rate tomorrow.

September 29, 2011

ReasonTV: Prohibition Vogue

Filed under: Government, History, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:25

September 28, 2011

“‘Sensitivity to hurt feelings’ is not, in fact, a First Amendment value or a justification for censorship”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:42

Follow-up to Monday’s link to Popehat on bureaucratic censorship at the University of Wisconsin, Ken has a few words to say about the administration’s “justification”:

2. The problem with demanding a campus free of “implied threats” is illustrated by this case. Campus police first censored a poster of an imaginary space cowboy with a fan-pleasing quote. Next, just to say FUCK YOU IRONY they used threats of official retaliation against a poster condemning threats of official retaliation. No rational person could construe either poster as a threat, actual or implied, to commit violence against any person (although I suppose the second could be construed as a warning — a correct one — that thugs will act thuggishly when questioned.) If a rational person wouldn’t take it as an actual threat of violence, then it’s not a true threat that can be censored, however much the hysterical, irrational, nanny-stating, coddling, or professionally emo think about it, and however much university chancellors would like to believe otherwise.

3. Similarly, this case illustrates the problem with an approach to freedom of expression premised on “sensitivity” and making people feel “welcome, safe and secure.” “Sensitivity to hurt feelings” is not, in fact, a First Amendment value or a justification for censorship. In fact, stopping people from speaking because the speech hurts people’s feelings is the essence of censorship. A system in which what we can say is premised upon the likely reactions of the mentally ill and the undernourished pussywillows of the world is a system that encourages suppression of all unpopular, forceful, interesting, or challenging speech. The irrational and the morally and mentally weak are not entitled to have their feelings protected through the force of law, however prevalent they are on campus.

Economics on one foot

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:03

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