Paul M. Jones

Gilens compiles a massive data set of public opinion surveys and subsequent policy outcomes, and reaches a shocking conclusion: Democracy has a strong tendency to simply supply the policies favored by the rich.  When the poor, the middle class, and the rich disagree, American democracy largely ignores the poor and the middle class. 

To avoid misinterpretation, this does not mean that American democracy has a strong tendency to supply the policies that most materially benefit the rich.  It doesn't.  Gilens, like all well-informed political scientists, knows that self-interest has little effect on public opinion.  Neither does this mean that Americans strongly object to the policy status quo.  They don't, because poor, middle class, and rich tend to agree.  Gilens' key conclusion is simply that when rich and poor happen to disagree, the rich generally get their way.

...

Both left and right are likely to misread Gilens.  The left will probably imagine that he's saying that American democracy is a vast conspiracy to promote the material interests of the rich.  To repeat, Gilens explicitly disavows this conclusion: His claim is not that American democracy primarily **benefits** the rich, but that it primarily **listens** to the rich. 

The right, on the other hand, will angrily reject Gilens' findings as rehashed Marxism in statistical garb.  (To quote The Communist Manifesto, "The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.")  If you read the whole book, though, you'll be amazed by how many leftist oxen he gores.  Most shockingly: Gilens concludes that the president most responsive to all Americans regardless of income was... George W. Bush!

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I find Gilens' results not only intellectually satisfying, but hopeful.  If his results hold up, we know another important reason why policy is less statist than expected: Democracies listen to the relatively libertarian rich far more than they listen to the absolutely statist non-rich.  And since I think that statist policy preferences rest on a long list of empirical and normative mistakes, my sincere reaction is to say, "Thank goodness."  Democracy as we know it is bad enough.  Democracy that really listened to all the people would be an authoritarian nightmare.

Emphasis mine. Read the whole thing. Via Why Is Democracy Tolerable? Evidence from Affluence and Influence, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

The authors are arguing that, yes, the evidence suggests that having a limited amount of patent protection makes countries slightly more innovative, presumably by encouraging inventors to cash in on their great ideas without fear of being ripped off. But patent protections never stay small and tidy. Instead, entrenched players like intellectual property lawyers who make their living filing lawsuits and old, established corporations that want to keep new players out of their markets lobby to expand the breadth of patent rights. And as patent rights get stronger, they take a serious toll on the economy, including our ability to innovate. 

via The Case for Abolishing Patents (Yes, All of Them) - Business - The Atlantic.

[T]he whole teaching structure of a university is based upon the medieval expense of books. No individual student could possibly hope to afford even one book directly, let alone the small library required to read all around a subject. Thus the form of tuition of the lecture, where the Master reads to the assembled from the text.

This lives on in our current universities in the lecture: almost wholly a waste of time as far as I can see.  Reading the set text is faster for each of the individual 500 students entrapped and the Master (now the Professor) probably wrote the text and she really doesn’t need to read it out loud again. Even a video of a decent lecturer would work better than insisting that everyone turn up at the same time in the same place.

Further, with books now at $2.99 each, heck, almost all of the canon of literature is available in e-book format for nothing, we really have got past that scarcity problem that led to this form of instruction in the first place. Given that we are not so technologically limited then perhaps we really shouldn’t be using this technology any more.

I can see two places left for universities. The first is for graduate degrees. This is when you actually do get the individual attention of your professors and when it’s actually important to do so. Plus of course those professors who do research will need to have somewhere to research from plus a paycheck to do so on. But colleges as factories for teaching what anyone can now get out of a book seem archaic enough that we should probably stop using them to do such.

The second is that some subjects require a much more hands on approach. No one’s going to learn much chemistry without a lab, astronomy requires a rather better telescope than WalMart sells and so on. So there’s still a point to collective endeavour on one site for some subjects.

via Should We Abolish Liberal Arts Degrees? Quite Possibly, Yes - Forbes.

We often hear a lot, especially from those who want to tear them down, about the top 1 percent. We don't hear nearly as much about the bottom 1 percent. Who are they? Where are they? Why are they in the bottom 1 percent? And what should we do about them?

It turns out that about two thirds of the people in the bottom 1 percent are in U.S. prisons. And of these people, a few hundred thousand are there for victimless crimes. Letting them out would help them and save us taxpayer money. That’s a win-win.

via The Bottom One Percent, David Henderson | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

[M]y interpretation of Rand’s core principle has always been “Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you” (Hitchens 2001: 140).  I know neither if Randians agree with my interpretation of her nor if Hitchens, were he still among us, would appreciate me interpreting his words as expressing a foundational principle endorsed both in the Bible and in Rand’s philosophy.

And note that even if many adults are eager – even when taking a long-run perspective – to enter with other adults into a pact of mutual slavery (“I’ll live to sacrifice myself for you if you live to sacrifice yourself for me”), this fact does not morally require those of us who don’t wish to live to sacrifice ourselves for others to follow in the footsteps of these mutual enslavers.  Hitchens’s – and the Bible’s – wise moral advice is followed by those of us who do not wish to sacrifice ourselves for others if we simply and consistently do not expect or force others to sacrifice themselves for us - and by our resisting, in every prudent way possible, attempts by the mutual enslavers to draft us into their pact of mutual sacrifice, as well as resist their efforts to portray us as immoral because we refuse to be enchanted by their collectivist creed.

via Quotation of the Day….

I am not a purist. There is no such thing as a perfect political party, or a president who governs in accordance with one's every ethical judgment. But some actions are so ruinous to human rights, so destructive of the Constitution, and so contrary to basic morals that they are disqualifying. Most of you will go that far with me. If two candidates favored a return to slavery, or wanted to stone adulterers, you wouldn't cast your ballot for the one with the better position on health care. I am not equating President Obama with a slavery apologist or an Islamic fundamentalist. On one issue, torture, he issued an executive order against an immoral policy undertaken by his predecessor, and while torture opponents hoped for more, that is no small thing.    

What I am saying is that Obama has done things that, while not comparable to a historic evil like chattel slavery, go far beyond my moral comfort zone. Everyone must define their own deal-breakers. Doing so is no easy task in this broken world. But this year isn't a close call for me.

He says if he votes at all, it will be for Gary Johnson. Please read the whole thing. Via Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama - Conor Friedersdorf - The Atlantic.

If a Republican physically attacked a Democrat, or a Democrat a Republican, after one said something with which the other strongly disagreed, would it be any defense for the attacker to say, “He knew perfectly well that I detested his views”? Freedom of expression requires not so much the exercise of self-control in what is said as its exercise in reaction to what is said. I can hardly look at a book these days without taking offense at something that it contains, but if I smash a window in annoyance, the blame is only mine--even if the author knows perfectly well that what he wrote will offend many such as I.

via Freedom of Expression, Without the Expression by Theodore Dalrymple - City Journal.

if we let it, the government will define the War on Terror however it wants.

The United States government, under two opposed increasingly indistinguishable political parties, asserts the right to kill anyone on the face of the earth in the name of the War on Terror. It asserts the right to detain anyone on the face of the earth in the name of the War on Terror, and to do so based on undisclosed facts applied to undisclosed standards in undisclosed locations under undisclosed conditions for however long it wants, all without judicial review. It asserts the right to be free of lawsuits or other judicial proceedings that might reveal its secrets in the War on Terror. It asserts that the people it kills in drone strikes are either probably enemy combatants in the War on Terror or acceptable collateral damage. It asserts that increasing surveillance of Americans, increasing interception of Americans' communications, and increasingly intrusive security measures are all required by the War on Terror.

But the War on Terror, unlike other wars, will last as long as the government says it will.

via How I Convicted A Man For Helping Terrorists Who Now Aren't Terrorists | Popehat.

A few minutes later, I heard a Dutch audience member make a similar, if stronger, point.  The average American, he said, is much worse off than the average Swede.  Why can't America be more like Sweden?  

I actually don't think that the latter point is true; if you plucked an average American (mean, median, or modal) out of Kansas City or Aurora, and plopped them down in the middle of Gothenburg, the average American would be very unhappy.  Yes, they'd have generous social benefits and lots of vacation, but they'd also be crammed into a small apartment in a very small country.  They wouldn't be able to afford services that average Americans take for granted, like lots of restaurant foods and extremely high levels of customer service, which means they'd spend a lot more time doing basic housework, childcare, and so forth.  They would find it very expensive to fuel their car, and the insular, almost formal culture would make them crazy.  

This is also true the other way, by the way; the average Swede would not be happy living in America.  Sure, they'd have a huge house, filled with cheap consumer goods, and they could drive their car everywhere, particularly to their incredible array of dining options.  But they'd miss their vacation and find America's looser safety net both terrifying and inconvenient.  They would hate the inefficiency of our government services, and miss their cozy circle of friends and family.  Part of the reason that we have different systems from the Swedes and the Germans is that we place different emphasis on various possible sets of amenities, and of course, the availability of various amenities changes what we think of as the basic package for a decent life.  In most of America it includes a house, preferably detached, and a car.  In Sweden it includes a year of mandated maternity leave and a well-run streetcar system.  Losing any of those amenities is usually more painful for people than getting whatever the other folks have--which is why most expats are some combination of young, unhappy in their home country, or wealthy enough to buy the stuff they miss.  

via America Really Is Exceptional - The Daily Beast.

Angered by the recent murders of four young people,  the mayor announced today that police are going to impose drastic new measurers to keep teens off the streets.

“There is something going on in the community at this point that we’ve got to safeguard them and keep them off the streets,” Mayor Alvin Parks said. “There are people shooting at each other for no reason whatsoever.”

Among the new rules:

**Minors are to be off the streets at ten o’clock on both weeknights and weekend nights.

**Minors on the street during school hours will be arrested on sight.

**Police will also perform I.D. checks on street corners and conduct gun searches, and Parks says he won’t hesitate to call in the National Guard if the spike in violence continues.

East St. Louis Mayor Alvin Parks announcing crackdown on youth violence

“The loiterers will be arrested, not warned, but arrested. Those who are hanging out at 11th and Bond, 15th and Lynch, 38th and Waverly, wherever you happen to be, if you are loitering, you will be arrested.”

"Articulable suspicion" is now "walking around after 10pm" and gets you searched on a whim. Papers, please! Via Virtual House Arrest Ordered for Minors in East St. Louis « CBS St. Louis.