Politics, Economics and other Stuff

Heightism in Action

The NYT reports.  BTW, my mother accuses me of heightism...

"Married (Happily) With Issues"

Elizabeth Weil writes about marriage in the NYT.  Sounds pretty accurate. 

Pater Galbraith News

The NYT reports:

Peter W. Galbraith, an influential former American ambassador, is a powerful voice on Iraq who helped shape the views of policy makers like Joseph R. Biden Jr. and John Kerry. In the summer of 2005, he was also an adviser to the Kurdish regional government as Iraq wrote its Constitution — tough and sensitive talks not least because of issues like how Iraq would divide its vast oil wealth.

Now Mr. Galbraith, 58, son of the renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith, stands to earn perhaps a hundred million or more dollars as a result of his closeness to the Kurds, his relations with a Norwegian oil company and constitutional provisions he helped the Kurds extract.

In the constitutional negotiations, he helped the Kurds ram through provisions that gave their region — rather than the central Baghdad government — sole authority over many of their internal affairs, including clauses that he maintains will give the Kurds virtually complete control over all new oil finds on their territory.

Mr. Galbraith, widely viewed in Washington as a smart and bold foreign policy expert, has always described himself as an unpaid adviser to the Kurds, although he has spoken in general terms about having business interests in Kurdistan, as the north of Iraq is known.

So it came as a shock to many last month when a group of Norwegian investigative journalists at the newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv began publishing documents linking Mr. Galbraith to a specific Norwegian oil company with major contracts in Iraq.

Interviews by The New York Times with more than a dozen current and former government and business officials in Norway, France, Iraq, the United States and elsewhere, along with legal records and other documents, reveal in considerable detail that he received rights to an enormous stake in at least one of Kurdistan’s oil fields in the spring of 2004.

As it turns out, Mr. Galbraith received the rights after he helped negotiate a potentially lucrative contract that allowed the Norwegian oil company DNO to drill for oil in the promising Dohuk region of Kurdistan, the interviews and documents show.

He says his actions were proper because he was at the time a private citizen deeply involved in Kurdish causes, both in business and policy.

When drillers struck oil in a rich new field called Tawke in December 2005, no one but a handful of government and business officials and members of Mr. Galbraith’s inner circle knew that the constitutional provisions he had pushed through only months earlier could enrich him so handsomely.

As the scope of Mr. Galbraith’s financial interests in Kurdistan become clear, they have the potential to inflame some of Iraqis’ deepest fears, including conspiracy theories that the true reason for the American invasion of their country was to take its oil. It may not help that outside Kurdistan, Mr. Galbraith’s influential view that Iraq should be broken up along ethnic lines is considered offensive to many Iraqis’ nationalism. Mr. Biden and Mr. Kerry, who have been influenced by Mr. Galbraith’s thinking but do not advocate such a partitioning of the country, were not aware of Mr. Galbraith’s oil dealings in Iraq, aides to both politicians say.

Some officials say that his financial ties could raise serious questions about the integrity of the constitutional negotiations themselves. “The idea that an oil company was participating in the drafting of the Iraqi Constitution leaves me speechless,” said Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi, a principal drafter of the law that governed Iraq after the United States ceded control to an Iraqi government on June 28, 2004.

In effect, he said, the company “has a representative in the room, drafting.”

DNO’s chief executive, Helge Eide, confirmed that Mr. Galbraith helped negotiate the Tawke deal and advised the company during 2005. But Mr. Eide said that Mr. Galbraith acted solely as a political adviser and that the company never discussed the Constitution negotiations with him. “We certainly never did give any input, language or suggestions on the Constitution,” Mr. Eide said.

When the findings based on interviews by The Times and other research were presented to Mr. Galbraith last weekend, he responded in writing to The Times, confirming that he did work as a mediator between DNO and the Kurdish government until the oil contract was signed in the spring of 2004, and saying that he maintained an “ongoing business relationship” with the company throughout the constitutional negotiations in 2005 and later.

Mr. Galbraith says he held no official position in the United States or Iraq during this entire period and acted purely as a private citizen. He maintains that his largely undeclared dual role was entirely proper. He says that he was simply advocating positions that the Kurds had documented before his relationship with DNO even began.

“What is true is that I undertook business activities that were entirely consistent with my long-held policy views,” Mr. Galbraith said in his response. “I believe my work with DNO (and other companies) helped create the Kurdistan oil industry which helps provide Kurdistan an economic base for the autonomy its people almost unanimously desire.”

“So, while I may have had interests, I see no conflict,” Mr. Galbraith said.

Kurdish officials said that they were informed of Mr. Galbraith’s work for DNO and that they still considered him a friend and advocate. Mr. Galbraith said that during his work on the Constitution negotiations, the Kurds “did not pay me and they knew I was being paid by DNO.”

Mr. Istrabadi, who was also the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations from 2004 to 2007, said the case was especially troubling given the influence of Mr. Galbraith’s policy views. In his writings — some of them on the Op-Ed page of The Times and in the New York Review of Books — he is generally identified as a former ambassador or with some other generic description that gives no insight into his business interests in the area.

Mr. Galbraith, for many years on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has a long relationship with the Kurds. In 1988, he documented Saddam Hussein’s systematic campaign against the Kurds, including the use of gas. He served as United States ambassador to Croatia between 1993 and 1998. In September, he was fired as the No. 2 official with the United Nations mission in Afghanistan after he accused the head of the mission of concealing allegations of electoral fraud.

Views of Mr. Galbraith’s business ties are harsh within the central Baghdad government, which has long maintained, in stark opposition to Mr. Galbraith’s interpretation of the Constitution, that all the oil contracts signed by the Kurdish government were illegal.

Referring to the Constitution negotiations, Abdul-Hadi al-Hassani, vice chairman of the oil and gas committee in the Iraqi Parliament, said that Mr. Galbraith’s “interference was not justified, illegal and not right, particularly because he is involved in a company where his financial interests have been merged with the political interest.”

Citing what he said were confidentiality agreements, Mr. Galbraith refused to give details of his financial arrangement with the company, and the precise nature of his compensation remains unknown. But several officials, including Mr. Galbraith’s business partner in the deal, the Norwegian businessman Endre Rosjo, said that in addition to whatever consulting fees the company paid, he and Mr. Galbraith were together granted rights to 10 percent of the large Tawke field and possibly others.

An internal DNO document dated Dec. 3, 2006, which was first obtained by Dagens Naeringsliv, indicates that a company called Porcupine, registered in Delaware under Mr. Galbraith’s name, still held the rights to the 5 percent stake at that time, while a company associated with Mr. Rosjo held the other 5 percent.

Mr. Eide, the DNO executive, said that as far as the company knew, Mr. Galbraith’s work was proper.

“To our knowledge, Mr. Galbraith in 2004 was working as a businessman with no political assignments,” Mr. Eide said. “Given our network model and limited experience and knowledge from the region at that time, our evaluation concluded that we should use Mr. Galbraith to advise DNO in the first stage of the project.”

As revelations began appearing in recent weeks, Mr. Galbraith at first issued qualified denials stating that he had never been party to any arrangement in Iraq technically referred to in the oil industry as a production-sharing contract. But industry insiders say that the rights could have been couched in different terms — not an ownership stake, but a conditional right or option to become part of such an agreement at a future date.

Estimating the value of any stake in the Kurdish fields is difficult given the political uncertainties. But Are Martin Berntzen, an oil analyst at Oslo’s First Securities brokerage, said the Tawke field alone has proven reserves of about 230 million barrels, a figure likely to increase as new wells are drilled.

“Given no political risk, a 5 percent stake should be worth at least $115 million,” he said, though he emphasized that he knew nothing about Mr. Galbraith’s arrangement.

A possible indication of Mr. Galbraith’s estimate of the deal’s worth may be discerned in a London arbitration case in which Porcupine and a Yemeni investor who now apparently holds Mr. Rosjo’s former share are seeking more than $525 million from DNO, according to a filing reported on the legal news Web site Law.com. Oil analysts in Norway played down the likelihood of a reward as large as the claim.

According to DNO, the claim represents up to 10 percent of the value of the regional production contract, which the Norwegian oil firm now shares with a Turkish energy company after Kurdish authorities reviewed the previous deal and barred “certain third-party interests” from participating further. At a shareholders meeting on Wednesday, Mr. Eide refused to name Mr. Galbraith as a claimant in the case. He acknowledged, however, that DNO lost a procedural ruling in the case last May, and he said a final decision on damages was expected in early 2010.

In his response, Mr. Galbraith would say only that “my contractual relationship was with DNO and is the subject of pending arbitration.”

Detroit

via Clusterstock, Urbanophile posts

1949:



2003:

Oregon in the NYT

Camps of homeless runaway kids this time.  Despite the headline 'With More Troubled Families, More Runaways' it's not surprising that there is no actual data:

Federal studies and experts in the field have estimated that at least 1.6 million juveniles run away or are thrown out of their homes annually. But most of those return home within a week, and the government does not conduct a comprehensive or current count.

The best measure of the problem may be the number of contacts with runaways that federally-financed outreach programs make, which rose to 761,000 in 2008 from 550,000 in 2002, when current methods of counting began. (The number fell in 2007, but rose sharply again last year, and the number of federal outreach programs has been fairly steady throughout the period.)

'Inquiry fails to find single trafficker who forced anybody into prostitution'

It seems the UK has been running a large scale police operation to attack trafficking in women this year, and The Guardian writes up the results very forcefully -- quite astounding press coverage from a top tier newspaper.  Not sure what to make of this, but I it would be good to know more.  Part of the context is a new criminal bill before Parliament.  Two articles: 

The UK's biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers in a six-month campaign by government departments, specialist agencies and every police force in the country.

The failure has been disclosed by a Guardian investigation which also suggests that the scale of and nature of sex trafficking into the UK has been exaggerated by politicians and media.

Current and former ministers have claimed that thousands of women have been imported into the UK and forced to work as sex slaves, but most of these statements were either based on distortions of quoted sources or fabrications without any source at all.

While some prosecutions have been made, the Guardian investigation suggests the number of people who have been brought into the UK and forced against their will into prostitution is much smaller than claimed; and that the problem of trafficking is one of a cluster of factors which expose sex workers to coercion and exploitation. ...

When police in July last year announced the results of Operation Pentameter Two, Jacqui Smith, then home secretary, hailed it as "a great success". Its operational head, Tim Brain, said it had seriously disrupted organised crime networks responsible for human trafficking. "The figures show how successful we have been in achieving our goals," he said.

Those figures credited Pentameter with "arresting 528 criminals associated with one of the worst crimes threatening our society".  But an internal police analysis of Pentameter, obtained by the Guardian after a lengthy legal struggle, paints a very different picture.

The analysis, produced by the police Human Trafficking Centre in Sheffield and marked "restricted", suggests there was a striking shortage of sex traffickers to be found in spite of six months of effort by all 55 police forces in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland together with the UK Border Agency, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, the Foreign Office, the Northern Ireland Office, the Scottish government, the Crown Prosecution Service and various NGOs in what was trumpeted as "the largest ever police crackdown on human trafficking".

The analysis reveals that 10 of the 55 police forces never found anyone to arrest. And 122 of the 528 arrests announced by police never happened: they were wrongly recorded either through honest bureaucratic error or apparent deceit by forces trying to chalk up arrests which they had not made. Among the 406 real arrests, more than half of those arrested (230) were women, and most were never implicated in trafficking at all.

Of the 406 real arrests, 153 had been released weeks before the police announced the success of the operation: 106 of them without any charge at all and 47 after being cautioned for minor offences. Most of the remaining 253 were not accused of trafficking: 73 were charged with immigration breaches; 76 were eventually convicted of non-trafficking offences involving drugs, driving or management of a brothel; others died, absconded or disappeared off police records.

Although police described the operation as "the culmination of months of planning and intelligence-gathering from all those stakeholders involved", the reality was that, during six months of national effort, they found only 96 people to arrest for trafficking, of whom 67 were charged.

Forty-seven of those never made it to court.

Only 22 people were finally prosecuted for trafficking, including two women who had originally been "rescued" as supposed victims. Seven of them were acquitted. The end result was that, after raiding 822 brothels, flats and massage parlours all over the UK, Pentameter finally convicted of trafficking a grand total of only 15 men and women.

Police claimed that Pentameter used the international definition of sex trafficking contained in the UN's Palermo protocol, which involves the use of coercion or deceit to transport an unwilling man or woman into prostitution. But, in reality, Pentameter used a very different definition, from the UK's 2003 Sexual Offences Act, which makes it an offence to transport a man or woman into prostitution even if this involves assisting a willing sex worker.

 Internal police documents reveal that 10 of Pentameter's 15 convictions were of men and women who were jailed on the basis that there was no evidence of their coercing the prostitutes they had worked with. There were just five men who were convicted of importing women and forcing them to work as prostitutes. These genuinely were traffickers, but none of them was detected by Pentameter, although its investigations are still continuing.

 Two of them — Zhen Xu and Fei Zhang — had been in custody since March 2007, a clear seven months before Pentameter started work in October 2007.

The other three,  Ali Arslan, Edward Facuna and Roman Pacan,  were arrested and charged as a result of an operation which began when a female victim went to police in April 2006, well over a year before Pentameter Two began, although the arrests were made while Pentameter was running.

It appears that in the UK criminal cases actually go to court.  In the US most accused plea bargain, since going to court is too risky, which means that the US court system doesn't reign in enforcement panics like this one in the UK.  This also appears to mean that lesser charges in the UK actually mean the main charge couldn't be proven, not that a plea was entered to a lesser charge in exchange for the main charge being dropped.  But that's me speculating...

Not the sort of press coverage I'd like to wake up to if I were involved. 

Discrimination

The taz reports on religions discrimination in employment in Germany:

Naime B. (26) hat an der Gießener Fachhochschule studiert, als Diplom-Ingenieur-Architektin abgeschlossen, ihre Praktika absolviert, im Beruf gearbeitet und sich online bei einem Architekturbüro im hessischen Friedberg beworben. Ihr Bewerbungsfoto zeigt sie fröhlich lächelnd. Sie trägt ein schwarzweißes Kopftuch mit Wellenlinien.

Die Absage kam prompt. Man suche "einen Mitarbeiter/in für die Bauleitung, nicht für die Planung" hieß es knapp. Und dann ausführlicher: "Außerdem kommt eine Mitarbeiterin mit islamistischer Grundeinstellung mit dem Symbol des Kopftuches als Unterdrückung der Frauen nicht in Frage. Das Kopftuch ist ein Symbol politisch gewollter Unterdrückung und kein Ausdruck persönlichen Glaubens (wie fälschlicherweise oft behauptet wird). Dies können wir in unserem Büro leider nicht akzeptieren."

Naime B. fühlte sich "schockiert, beleidigt und ungerechtfertigt angegriffen" und "in ihrer Würde zutiefst verletzt". Allein aus dem Kopftuch könne eben nicht auf ihre und die Grundhaltung anderer Kopftuchträgerinnen geschlossen werden. Sie holte sich Hilfe bei dem "Clearingprojekt: Zusammenleben mit Muslimen" beim Interkulturellen Rat in Darmstadt, erstattete Strafanzeige und klagte beim Arbeitsgericht auf Schadensersatz wegen Verstoßes gegen das Allgemeine Gleichstellungsgesetz (AGG) und Artikel 3 des Grundgesetzes. Sie forderte drei Monatsgehälter, insgesamt 9.000 Euro. Selbst möchte sie nicht öffentlich Stellung beziehen. Zu viel "Medienrummel" habe es in der Vergangenheit um Frauen gegeben, die das Tragen des Kopftuches verteidigen.

Torsten Jäger vom Interkulturellen Rat wird deutlicher. Immer wieder kämen Beschwerden ähnlicher Art. "Die Absage ist ein exemplarisches Zeichen dafür, dass wir ein Klima in Deutschland haben, in dem es als avantgardistisch gilt, das zu sagen, was andere heimlich denken." Dies sei, meint Jäger, vor allem der Debatte um das Kopftuchverbot in Schulen geschuldet. Dadurch seien Vorurteile befördert worden, dass das Kopftuch "per se ein Zeichen für Unfreiheit" und jede Trägerin "auch Islamistin" sei.

Die Absage sei "nur die Spitze des Eisberges". Junge Frauen mit Kopftuch, die die zur Integration immer wieder geforderte Bildung erworben hätten und nach Abitur und Studium ins Berufsleben wollten, hätten es sehr viel schwerer als andere. Immer häufiger seien derzeit auch Fälle von Diskriminierung bei der Wohnungssuche. Selbst Tischreservierungen in Restaurants seien "bei Augenschein" schon storniert worden.

Im Sommer scheiterte ein Gütetermin zwischen dem Friedberger Architekturbüro und Naime B. Die Firma entschuldigte sich und erklärte, sie habe keinesfalls diskriminieren wollen, sondern auch schon in der Vergangenheit "Mitarbeiter mit islamischem Glauben beschäftigt" und somit "ein normales Verhältnis zu anders Gläubigen". Die Bewerberin sei lediglich abgelehnt worden, weil sie nicht genug Berufserfahrung habe. Man könne sich aber auf einen Schadensersatz von 3.500 Euro einigen. Naime B. lehnte ab.

Ein neuer Termin soll Ende Oktober vor dem Arbeitsgericht Gießen stattfinden. Torsten Jäger ist optimistisch, dass zugunsten von Naime B. entschieden werde: "Es ist wichtig, dass jemand, der etwas sagt, was er hinterher am liebsten nicht gesagt hätte, merkt, dass das auch Geld kostet."

One scary part are the reader comments, especially for a left wing paper, running 10:1 against the woman, with lots of claims about the need to stand up for freedom of association and the right of firms to exclude people for wearing head scarfs.  Some people, in my estimation quite a few in Germany currently, though it is hard to judge not having lived there for quite some time, don't seem to understand that this level of exclusion and harassment creates exactly the ghettoization of immigrants these people claim they oppose. 

It would be nice to know more, but my sense is that the fraction of the population that is engaged in this active harassment of Muslims is creating serious problems that would otherwise be avoidable. 

Smiles Predict Life Outcomes

via 3QD, Scientific American reports.  One of the higher correlations for an external beauty attribute I've seen.  I'd need to read the paper to see if this is credible.   

Pictures of grinning kids may reveal more than childhood happiness: a study from DePauw University shows that how intensely people smile in childhood photographs, as indicated by crow’s feet around the eyes, predicts their adult marriage success.

According to the research, people whose smiles were weakest in snapshots from childhood through young adulthood were most likely to report being divorced in middle and old age. Among the weakest smilers in college photographs, one in four ended up divorcing, compared with one in 20 of the widest smilers. The same pattern held among even those pictured at an average age of 10.

The paper builds on a 2001 study by psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, that tracked the well-being and marital satisfaction of women from college through their early 50s. That work found that coeds whose smiles were brightest in their senior yearbook photographs were most likely to be married by their late 20s, least likely to remain single into middle age, and happiest in their marriage; they also scored highest on measures of overall well-being (including psychological and physical difficulties, relationships with others and general self-satisfaction).

The scientists speculate that one’s tendency to grin—an example of what psychologists call “thin slices” of behavior that can belie personal traits—reflects his or her underlying emotional disposition. Positive emotionality influences how others respond to a person, perhaps making that individual more open and likely to seek out situations conducive to a lasting, happy marriage.

But there could be a more cynical explanation, according to Matthew Hertenstein, a psychologist at DePauw who led the new study. “Maybe people who look happier in photos show a social face to others,” he says. “Those may be the same people who are likely to put up with partners because they don’t want to appear unhappy.”

Paper is here.  Matthew J. Hertenstein, Carrie A. Hansel , Alissa M. Butts  Sarah N. Hile,Smile intensity in photographs predicts divorce later in life. 
M

Universal Health Insurance as objectively detrimental to American Religious Fundamentalism

via 3QD, a summary of a paper in Evolutionary Psychology:

Gregory Paul argues that high religiosity is not universal to human populations, and it is actually inversely related to a wide range of socio-economic indicators representing the health of modern democracies. Paul holds that once a nation's population becomes prosperous and secure, for example through economic security and universal health care, much of the population looses interest in seeking the aid and protection of supernatural entities. This effect appears to be so consistent that it may prevent nations from being highly religious while enjoying good internal socioeconomic conditions.

National level statistics suggest that strong mass religiosity is invariably associated with high levels of stress and anxiety, which are created by impoverishment, inequality, or economic security, related to high levels of societal dysfunction. These relationships are largely consistent when the United States, an outlier amongst advanced democracies in the high level of both religious belief and social decay, is removed from the comparison.

Diversity

Newsweek reports:

The unfortunate twist of diverse schools is that they don't necessarily lead to more cross-race relationships. Often it's the opposite. Duke University's James Moody—an expert on how adolescents form and maintain social networks—analyzed data on more than 90,000 teenagers at 112 different schools from every region of the country. The students had been asked to name their five best male friends and their five best female friends. Moody matched the ethnicity of the student with the race of each named friend, then compared the number of each student's cross-racial friendships with the school's overall diversity.

Moody found that the more diverse the school, the more the kids self-segregate by race and ethnicity within the school, and thus the likelihood that any two kids of different races have a friendship goes down.

Moody included statistical controls for activities, sports, academic tracking, and other school-structural conditions that tend to desegregate (or segregate) students within the school. The rule still holds true: more diversity translates into more division among students. Those increased opportunities to interact are also, effectively, increased opportunities to reject each other. And that is what's happening.

As a result, junior-high and high-school children in diverse schools experience two completely contrasting social cues on a daily basis. The first cue is inspiring—that many students have a friend of another race. The second cue is tragic—that far more kids just like to hang with their own. It's this second dynamic that becomes more and more visible as overall school diversity goes up. As a child circulates through school, she sees more groups that her race disqualifies her from, more lunchroom tables she can't sit at, and more implicit lines that are taboo to cross. This is unmissable even if she, personally, has friends of other races. "Even in multiracial schools, once young people leave the classroom, very little interracial discussion takes place because a desire to associate with one's own ethnic group often discourages interaction between groups," wrote Brendesha Tynes of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

All told, the odds of a white high-schooler in America having a best friend of another race is only 8 percent. Those odds barely improve for the second-best friend, or the third-best, or the fifth. For blacks, the odds aren't much better: 85 percent of black kids' best friends are also black. Cross-race friends also tend to share a single activity, rather than multiple activities; as a result, these friendships are more likely to be lost over time, as children transition from middle school to high school.

I should look up the literature referred to here.  The above is consistent with my casual observation and priors. One issue is how different racial boundaries work here, with black-non-black probably somewhat different than other boundaries. 

A Book

via Cowen, from a review of Vollman's Imperial (which is about California's Imperial County):

Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange.

The Cost of Meetings

via Tom Ricks, the cost of meetings. 

1/3 of Massachusetts Drivers don't wear Seat Belts

One third of Massachusetts drivers don't wear seat  belts, making Massachusetts the Mississippi of seat belt use.  No explanation in the article for the origin of this anomalous rank of Massachusetts in this issue area, though from personal experience it seems to me that the problem seems to go quite far back with a lack of helpful state legislative action.  But why Massachusetts and not, for instance, Alabama or South Carolina?  What am I missing here? 

I need to find the data, maybe none of the state data are significantly apart or much more than measurement error. 

Ah, here is the state data, but without error bars.  California is the best performing state, with seat belt use well into the 90+% range for many years, with Washington state catching up to this level recently.  Even Texas is now above 90%.  Massachusetts is a longstanding outlier on the low side, the only other entity that does this badly is American Samoa.  Admittedly, Wyoming is only slightly better than Massachusetts, with seat belt use in the high 60%.   These are clearly significant differences, not just noise. 

The weird thing is that the West has the highest seat belt use and the Northeast the lowest, despite seat belt use being much higher in urban areas than rural areas, and much higher in cars that trucks.  So Wyoming being the second worst state for seat belt use makes sense.  But Massachusetts?  (data) Seat belt use by blacks and hispanics also appears to be lower than for non-hispanic whites, which again doesn't explain Massachusetts relative to the deep South or Texas and California. 

I know, there is the notion that this is a sort of passive aggressive displacement of the lack of gun rights in Massachusetts onto 'if you don't let me carry hand guns at least I have the right to kill myself in a car accident', but that only explains the lack of the lack of a seat belt law in MA, not the low seat belt use.  Though people may be mistakenly learning from their right not the wear seat belts that it is not in their interest to wear seat belt.   And by now certain parts of the Massachusetts culture have dug in on this issue and made it part of their identity.  The interesting thing is that this occurs at the state level, not a regional or more local level.  All very disconcerting for standard economic modeling approaches. 

Hiring the employed vs. the unemployed

The WSJ reports on firms that only hire the employed away from other firms and shun unemployed job seekers.  Lots of interesting sociology and economic in this topic and it would be nice to know more, for instance how this preference changes over time. 

With unemployment at 9.4% and rising, it’s a buyer’s market for employers that are hiring. But many employers are bypassing the jobless to target those still working, reasoning that these survivors are the top performers.

“If they’re employed in today’s economy, they have to be first string,” says Ryan Ross, a partner with Kaye/Bassman International Corp., an executive recruiting firm in Dallas. Mr. Ross says more clients recently have indicated that they would prefer to fill positions with “passive candidates” who are working elsewhere and not actively seeking a job.

The bias extends from front-line workers to senior managers. Charlie Wilgus, managing partner of executive search for Lucas Group, based in Atlanta, says a manufacturing client looking for a division president recently refused to consider a former divisional president at Newell Rubbermaid Inc. whose department had been eliminated. The client doesn’t want candidates who have been laid off, Mr. Wilgus says.  ....

Even when employers are successful, recruiting the employed can cost money. Tim Donohue, senior account manager of Infinity Consulting Solutions, an executive-search firm specializing in finance-related industries, based in New York, says candidates who are wooed away from other jobs typically demand a higher salary than the unemployed, who tend to be more open to negotiation.

Nonetheless, many employers consider the employed more valuable and worth the extra effort. Health-care management-consulting firm Beacon Partners Inc., Weymouth, Mass., has openings for 10 technology-consulting and senior project-management positions. Chief Executive Ralph Fargnoli is looking first for people who are still working. “If they’re still employed that means they have some significant value,” Mr. Fargnoli says. ...

When employers post jobs, they often are flooded with applicants, many of whom aren’t good matches for the position. Kristi Robinson, vice president of talent acquisition at Express Scripts Inc., says applications at the St. Louis pharmacy-benefit manager are up 80% from last year, but many candidates are either over- or underqualified. By targeting people who are currently employed in comparable positions, the firm can bypass candidates who aren’t perfect matches.

What drives moral concerns

This from Cheap Talk seems about right:

I enjoyed this article in the Boston Globe which surveys a variety of theories for the (mostly anectodal) tendency for the most vocal moralizers to be the most prone to vice.  When you read an article like this you have to start with simple null hypothesis that, other things equal, making a person more concerned about moral behavior will make them inclined to act morally.  Many of the stories in this article are tempting, mostly because we want to hate hypocrites, but ultimately don’t put up a good counterargument to this benchmark view.  However the following excerpt is more subtle and in my opinion the most robust story offered.

When asked about the phenomenon of the hypocritical moralizer, psychologists will often point to “projection,” an idea inherited from Freud. What it means – and there is a large literature to back it up – is that if someone is fixated on a particular worry or goal, they assume that everyone else is driven by that same worry or goal. Someone who covets his neighbor’s wife, in other words, would tend, rightly or wrongly, to see wife-coveting as a widespread phenomenon, and if that person were a politician or preacher, he might spend a lot of his time spreading the word about the dangers of adultery.

Not that this is the only thing going on. 

False Familiarity with the US and its effects?

I've wondered about this as well.  Chris Dillow writes:

How can the dollar be regarded as a “safe haven currency” when the US has net overseas debt equivalent to almost a fifth of GDP, when the OECD said today that the country is likely to have big current account deficits despite the recession, and when there are still good reasons to fear that the dollar could fall a lot?
Here’s a partial answer - Pamela Anderson.
To see what I mean, we must distinguish between risk and uncertainty; risk is quantifiable, whereas uncertainty, or ambiguity, is not.
The dollar might not be a low-risk asset. But it is a low ambiguity one.  And when investors get nervous they flock towards things they “know” - the Ellsberg paradox shows us that people hate uncertainty even more than they hate quantifiable risk. Low-ambiguity assets therefore do well in jittery times, but fall back as “safe haven“ demand falls.
But how did the dollar acquire its low ambiguity status? Many reasons. Here’s one. Foreigners think they are familiar with American society in a way that they are not with, say, Japanese or German society. And a form of halo effect causes them to unconsciously think that because they “know” American society, they know its economy too - and by extension its assets.
This familiarity arises in part from the spread of the English language. But it‘s also the result of the US’s cultural hegemony.  The universal popularity of American film, TV and music has helped make the US seem well known to foreigners.

Gay Rights in Public Opinion

Gelman reports:

Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips used the method of multilevel regression and poststratification (“Mister P”; see here and here) to estimate attitudes toward gay rights in the states. ...

The popularity of gay marriage has increased fastest in the states where gay rights were already relatively popular in the 1990s.

In 1995, support for gay marriage exceeded 30% in only six states: New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, and Vermont. In these states, support for gay marriage has increased by an average of almost 20 percentage points. In contrast, support has increased by less than 10 percentage points in the six states that in 1995 were most anti-gay-marriage—Utah, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Idaho.

Here’s the picture showing all 50 states:

Gelman also speculates about what's going on. 

Disgust

via Jonathan Haidt's YourMorals.org:

The scale you completed was the The Disgust Scale, developed by Jonathan Haidt, Clark McCauley, and Paul Rozin.

The scale is a measure of your proclivity to feel disgust. People vary quite a bit in how strongly and how often they feel disgust, and in the kinds of things they find disgusting. Earlier research using the disgust scale showed that there are three sub-types of disgust:

1) Core disgust: the "core" of the emotion, which is about defending the mouth from contamination by dirty or inappropriate things like body excretions, certain animals like rats and cockroaches, and certain foods, like ice cream with ketchup.

2) Animal-reminder disgust: things involving death, corpses, and violations of the external boundaries of the body, such as amputations. These things remind us that we, like animals, are mortal.

3) Contamination disgust: this kind of disgust is a defense of the whole body, not just the mouth, from contact with dirty or sleazy people

The idea behind the scale is that disgust is an important and understudied moral emotion, as well as being an emotion about physically dirty and gross things. Disgust is involved in many moral codes, for example it appears to be part of the psychological foundation of widespread ideas of purity and pollution. Many religions (e.g., Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism) have extensive rules for regulating human bodily processes and keeping them separated from sacred objects and practices. Disgust appears to provide part of the structure of these rules and practices. Disgust also has clinical ramifications, for it seems to be involved in obsessive-compulsive disorder and in a variety of phobias.

In the graph below, your scores are shown in green, compared to the average of all other people (in purple) who have taken the scale on our website. Scores run from 0 (least sensitive to disgust) to 4 (extremely sensitive to disgust). The first green bar shows your overall disgust sensitivity score. The next 3 green bars show your scores on the three subscales described above.





To learn more, you can visit the Disgust Scale Home Page.

Legacy Admission Preferences at Public High Schools

via Steve Sailer, the LA Times reports that two LA area public high schools are adopting legacy admission systems.  In part a sign of California's pathological public finance system, but still something that might be worth understanding more. 

Emulating a controversial practice at many colleges, two high-achieving public school districts in California are giving preference to the children of alumni.

The Beverly Hills Unified School District and the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District have adopted legacy admissions policies for children of former students who live outside their enrollment boundaries. The policies appear to be the first in the nation at public schools, education experts said.

The programs vary slightly, but leaders of both districts say they hope to raise money by forging closer ties with alumni who may be priced out of their hometowns as well as with grandparents who still live there. In each district, nonresident legacy students will make up a tiny percentage of the student population, officials said.

"I'm taking a page out of the university or college playbook," said Steve Fenton, a Beverly Hills Unified trustee. "Alumni are the lifeline for any academic institution."

Critics argue that such policies are antithetical to American public education.

"It's antidemocratic," said Mark Rosenbaum, legal director of the ACLU of Southern California. Public schools, he said, were created as places where "merit was to be rewarded and birth and economic advantage was to have no place."

Many universities and colleges have long offered preferences to the children, grandchildren and siblings of alumni, accepting them at greater rates than applicants overall, sometimes with lower grades and SAT scores.

Disassociative Mating

This is cool (via Paul Kedrosky):

Scott Rick, Deborah A. Small, Eli Finkel, Fatal (Fiscal) Attraction: Spendthrifts and Tightwads in Marriage

Although much research finds that "birds of a feather flock together," surveys of married adults suggest that opposites attract when it comes to emotional reactions toward spending. That is, "tightwads," who generally spend less than they would ideally like to spend, and "spendthrifts," who generally spend more than they would ideally like to spend, tend to marry each other, consistent with the notion that people are attracted to mates who possess characteristics dissimilar to those they deplore in themselves (Klohnen and Mendelsohn 1998). In spite of this complementary attraction, spendthrift/tightwad differences within a marriage predict conflict over finances, which in turn predict diminished marital well-being. These findings underscore the importance of studying the relationships between money, consumption, and happiness at an interpersonal level.

I'm not sure they have the matching process right here.  An alternative view would be there is an ideal level of frugalness for everybody and deviations from that level in one partner need to be paid for by deviations in the level of frugalness in the other partner, irrespective of sign.  Good people match up with good people, less good people with less good people. Does this go beyond this?  Do excessively frugal people matched up with excessively frugal people do better? 

I couldn't actually say where I and my wife line up here.  We think of ourselves as similar in frugalness, but who knows. 

Biblical Inerrancy as Legal Positivism?

Biblical inerrancy sure looks like a version of legal positivism applied to Christianity.  A bit of an ironic situation given the strident critiques and denunciations of legal positivism in some religious circles.

Update #1:  Riever T., who I don't know, comments:

Given the argument, wouldn't it also be appropriate to posit, for example, that orthodox judaism and much of islam also constitute applications of legal positivism? If not, then why not? Are the various branches of xianity that embrace inerrancy unique in some significant way?

One issue is that I didn't lay out an argument above but just stated my current impression of one possible interpretation of biblical inerrancy given my recent reading.  And that reading has been on Christian self-understandings, not Islamic or Jewish self-understandings.  I suspect the analogy between biblical inerrancy as understood for Christianity works better than for the analagous claims in Islam or in Judaism, but I'd need to explain that further.  And it might work for Islam and Judaism as well, but it depends what 'works' means, which I would need to spell out.  

Finally, the irony in 'biblical inerrancy as legal positivism' comes in part from the energy the Catholic Church spends denouncing legal positivism and positing itself as the necessary cure for this ill, which the other two faiths probably have broader targets for their self-justification in contemporary society.

Mostly just throwing a thought out here. 

A Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician

Mark Kleiman has a nice rant:

The spectacular success that resulted from the application of mathematics to natural philosophy in the era of Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz made the theologians look silly by showing that (1) sacred texts weren't very reliable guides to the physical world (2) it was possible to actually make genuine, palpable intellectual progress rather than trading arguments insults, and anathemas and (3) the heavens themselves yielded their secrets to mechanical, rather than spiritual, analysis.

Naturally, the theologians struck back. Unable to produce any actual knowledge in their own domain, their answer was to prove that scientific analysis was just as full of holes as their own beloved dogmas. Berkeley's The Analyst: A Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician is the masterpiece of this genre: what Orwell, two centuries later, was to call the "silly-clever" style of argumentation.

Berkeley pointed out, correctly, that the conceptual basis of the differential calculus was unsound; it waited for Dedekind and his colleagues in the late 19th century to finally build a secure intellectual foundation under the tremendous edifice that had been erected in the meantime. Berkeley's scorn is eloquent and magisterial:

"And what are these Fluxions? The Velocities of evanescent Increments? And what are these same evanescent Increments? They are neither finite Quantities nor Quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing. May we not call them the Ghosts of departed Quantities?"

And yet, at the end of the day, the natural philosophers continued to be able to predict and explain more and more phenomena with increasing precision, and the theologians continued to trade arguments, insults, and anathemas, just as before. The natural philosophers were able to work signs and wonders at least as impressive as those attributed by the sacred texts to the Deity and His prophets and saints, with the added virtue of being current and actual rather than historical and mythical. Even Raising the Dead is now, under the less euphonious label of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation, a routine bit of techne that can be learned by anyone who cares to learn it, without even a bit of esotericism to give it flavor.

Of course the theologians respond that their discipline isn't about all that foolish wonder-working, but considers the Ineffable Big Questions. But that's simply not consistent with Scripture: back when people actually believed, they naturally claimed for their faith the power to heal, and to move mountains. That was before penicillin and bulldozers.

But while the scientists and engineers continue to make progress, the theologians and their fellow obscurantists continue to mock. True to their sacred principle of never making intellectual progress, they continue to say what Berkeley said: "Your science is just as mysterious as our religion. So there!"

Like a joke that was funny the first time, the reiterations of this point suffer from rapidly diminishing marginal returns. So I have no idea why Stanley Fish considers Terry Eagleton's latest essay along these lines, Reason, Faith, and Revolution worth commenting on, or why Eagleton thought it worth writing in the first place. The NYT on-line summary ably captures the essence of the argument: "believing in technology and progress might be more superstitious than believing in religion."

More on Kleiman's blog. 

And I need to get around to putting up a blog post in (semi-) defense of certain types of religion. 

Taking a look at The Analyst: A Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician might also be interesting.  A quick google suggests that Berkeley did get off a good attack on the lack of rigorous foundations of calculus, something not remedied until much more recent history, for instance Judith V. Grabiner: “Berkeley’s criticisms of the rigor of the calculus were witty, unkind, and—with respect to the mathematical practices he was criticizing—essentially correct.”  Which suggests a less foundational and more pragmatic view both of physics and religion might give better answers.  

Update #1: Grabiner also writes in passing in another paper:

What then were the reasons for the deepened interest in rigor? One set of reasons
was philosophical. In 1734, the British philosopher Bishop Berkeley had attacked
the calculus on the ground that it was not rigorous. In The Analyst, or a Discourse
Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician, he said that mathematicians had no business
attacking the unreasonableness of religion, given the way they themselves reasoned.
He ridiculed fluxions— “velocities of evanescent increments’’—calling the evanescent
increments “ghosts of departed quantities’’ [11]. Even more to the point, he correctly
criticized a number of specific arguments from the writings of his mathematical
contemporaries.  ...
Since an adequate response to Berkeley’s objections would have involved recognizing
that an equation involving limits is a shorthand expression for a sequence of
inequalities—a subtle and difficult idea—no eighteenth-century analyst gave a fully
adequate answer to Berkeley. However, many tried. Maclaurin, d’Alembert, Lagrange,
Lazare Carnot, and possibly Euler, all knew about Berkeley’s work, and all wrote
something about foundations. So Berkeley did call attention to the question. However,
except for Maclaurin, no leading mathematician spent much time on the question
because of Berkeley’s work, and even Maclaurin’s influence lay in other fields.

Update #2: Jody comments about something I was a bit concerned with when I read Kleiman as well (and which ought to get into the semi-defense of religion -- or at least a demand for a realistic critique --  I'm promising):

I thought Fish was somewhat incomprehensible, but Eagleton's own point is apropos to something I'm pretty sure is wrong with Kleiman. To wit, I'm not sure I agree with Kleiman's assertation that "back when people actually believed, they naturally claimed for their faith the power to heal, and to move mountains. That was before penicillin and bulldozers." Medieval Europeans from Norway to Budapest knew that God didn't cure the plague at least 600 years before penicillin. They knew the Cathedrals didn't build themselves. This is in no way a defense of religious belief, per se, but it does go right to Eagleton, and his assertion that the "religious belief" stereotyped by the current atheists does a violent disservice to t he actual content and practice of most religious people for most of human history.

But what did "Medieval Europeans from Norway to Budapest" believe about God's power to heal?  What sources is Jody referring to here? 
Update #3: Jody follows up:

Well, in fairness, the plague provoked astonishing levels of anti-Semitic violence and a resurgence in the idea that God was punishing people for their sins, so I must concede that people responded to the Black Death in ways that ascribed a great deal of power to God.  But if you look at the actual texts produced by bishops and laypeople at the time, you'll see a variety of religious responses that is far less fundamentalist than Kleiman implies.  My citations are entirely out-of-date (I hate to be reminded how long ago I was at Oxford) but The Black Death By Rosemary Horrox has a typical undergraduate-level collection of primary-source excerpts.

For a 20th-century, pre-penicillin account of how the Black Death affected a newly Christianized Norway, you could do worse than Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy.  It's not history per se, but it reflects one strain of Catholic thought at the beginning of the last century, and how Roman Catholicism had been interpreting the Black Death for centuries.

In general, what I'm trying to criticize is the idea that all religion before the twentieth century was fundamentalist religion, and that people throughout Christian history in particular have always received the miracle stories of the Bible as predictive of how God will act in their own lives.  There's very little evidence to suggest that, either with regards to the Bible or to non-Biblical miracle stories.  (Many of the original collections of  Saints' lives were written and received as allegorical and instructional, not historical.)  Of course it's impossible to generalize about European Christian thought, either geographically or across classes, and there was undoubtedly plenty of magical thinking about God all over the place.  The cult of saints and relics was a major focus of popular piety during the middle ages.  But I would argue that, if you look at Chaucer's account of pilgrimage at least, the range of popular expectations about saints' relics and their healing powers was broader than Kleiman implies.  And that's before you talk about the difference between the theologians and the people.

Luther was probably the most saint-friendly of the reformers and I wouldn't be surprised if he'd written that keeping saints' reliquaries could remind people of how to lead Godly lives, but of course he thought that all saving power came only from God.  Most of the modern "healing shrines" of the Catholic church date from the middle of the nineteenth century and onward: they seem to me to be a fundamentalist reaction to modernity, not something that modernity overthrew.

There seems to be a strain of atheist philosophy popular right now that makes three claims about religious belief -- well, really, about Christianity: (1) Before scientific materialism, the Christian worldview in Europe was entirely fundamentalist and literalist; beginning with Galileo, this worldview began to crumble; (2) As the Christian worldview crumbled, a wishy-washy liberal/moderate Christianity arose and made new claims about the nature of God which had no precedent or power in the fundamentalist Christian past.  (3) Both of these forms of Christianity are bogus: the first because science has overthrown it, the second because it's a lame attempt to salvage Christian belief by abandoning the Real, Authentic Christianity that science destroyed.

As one of those lame, wishy-washy Christians, I've been vaguely amused for a while now that both the evangelicals and the atheists are convinced I'm wrong.  It's curious to me that both groups are sure that the only religion is a fundamentalist one.

FWIW, I don't think it's Eagleton who has the best book refuting (3) out at the moment -- although I think Eagleton's argument that there's always been an intellectually rigorous Christian theology, one not anchored in Creationist museums or a literal belief that God will re-grow legs and bulldoze the hills of Rome at a whim, is better than Fish's blog post by far.  Of course, I'm a Lutheran who was educated in Christian theology by Jesuits and the people they hired: I would believe that Augustine and Aquinas deserve my respect.

Still, I think (3) is best demolished by Bart Ehrman, in all his books, including the latest, "Jesus, Interrupted."  Ehrman shows that the Christian understanding of Biblical texts and of God's power was interpretive and theological right from the get-go, and that the earliest Christians understood their texts to be symbolic and non-literal in ways that evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity only began to reject at the end of the nineteenth century.  Fundamentalism isn't the thing science defeated; it's the response to science's challenge to religious belief.  Of course, Ehrman is an atheist now himself, but for reasons that have nothing to do with the criticisms lobbed by Kleiman.

It's not Kleiman's atheism I'm arguing against here--it's only his portrayal of what The Authentic Christian Church was and is that I reject. Let me emphasize that: I do not think that what I'm writing is in any way an argument against atheism.  It's only an argument against the idea that the only real Christianity for all of time has been a literalist, anti-scientific Christianity.

Update #4: David comments:

I agree with Jody that Kleiman is overstating the fundamentalism of pre-modern Christianity and I'm sure that people like Aquinas were not simple believers in magic and miracles but also had complex philosophical arguments to butress their religious beliefs.
But here's how I'd put Klieman's argument:
Christianity has 2 main selling points:
1- Magical stuff can happen. Miracles occur. The dead can be resurrected. The world will end in some kind of amazing way. Prayer works. Etc. etc.
2- We have a lot of important ethical insights too.
#1 and #2 have never been completely separated. Some theologians emphasize #1 more, some kind of minimize #1 and talk a lot about #2, but they never completely deny #1. Show me one major Christian theologian who totally denies the power of God to transcend the laws of science at certain times, maybe very rarely and only on very special occasions in the past, but not never. So it's wrong to portray Christianity (either modern or ancient) as totally wrapped up in #1 and against science, but it's also wrong to say that Christianity ever really takes point #1 off of their marketing materials and embraces scientific explainations for all natural phenomena. If it did so, it wouldn't be much of a religion anymore. It would be a collection of ethical principles, which is something else.
Put another way, it's fine to say that most Christians didn't believe in magical explanations for the Plague. It's something very different to say that Christians don't believe that faith healing ever occurs, that Christians don't believe that prayers are answered, that Divine intervention occurs, etc.. I'll grant Jody's point that many ancient Christians were highly intelligent and occasionally skeptical. But they still had a role for supernatural phenomena. They were just more selective in their use of the supernatural..
The point that Kleiman makes is that Christianity's point #1 is getting smaller and weaker all the time. As recently as a few hundred years ago, at least some of the assertions of magic seemed pretty robust. Without Neuroscience, the existence of the soul seems plausible, for example. But, as science moves forward and more and more unexplainable stuff gets explained, it seems harder and harder to believe that the laws of science can be or have ever been suspended where convenient and also that science can't explain what previously seemed mysterious and therefore possibly magical. Without some hocus-pocus Religion is pretty whimpy. You can take away the more vulgar hocus-pocus but if you're religious it seems that you can't get rid of all of it.
I'd add that all Religions have different versions of this magical part. Some more explicit and theatrical than others. The question that I'd ask any religious person is how do you know which magic to believe? Presumably, you think that the magic of the other religions is just silly tricks, just denying reality and "making stuff up" about the Tree Spirits, or Zeus, or the Fire God; but how do you know? What makes you so sure that your supernatural phenomena are real and that the other folks are just daft? How can you assert magic and then turn around and act like a skeptic?

The Culture of Shaping Precedent

Daniel Larison writes:

[I]ronically, some of the defenders of the torture regime are making the best argument for the prosecution of past administration officials by their own invocations of past government illegalities. They are unwittingly reminding us that crimes unpunished today can easily become tomorrow’s conventionally accepted “correct” decisions. Every usurpation or instance of lawbreaking that is not challenged and reversed creates a precedent for the next round of usurpation and lawbreaking, and the fact that there is a non-trivial number of people in America who think that the illegal acts of Lincoln, FDR, Truman or others should have some mitigating effect on how we treat illegal acts under a more recent administration is one of the best reasons why crimes committed during the last administration must be investigated and lawbreakers must be prosecuted. Had many past administrations been scrutinized and their crimes investigated and punished, it is less likely that we would have to cope with an executive branch that acts as if it is above the law and which seems to be able to to break the law with impunity.

I have also wondered if one can get the same dynamic from the other side: pointing to past atrocities as moral failures and unsuccessfully trying to prosecute them as crimes can also create culturally important precedents that normalize these types of actions (which is a large part of my reaction to this historical literature: doing these things is part, potentially a necessary part, of the spectrum of standard behavior and not so damaging that we cannot arrive at a world like ours).  Which in part just points to the problems of a highly precedent based culture like the US without other cultural methods for dealing with standards of behavior. 

The Atheist Overcount in Britain

via MR, the BBC reports:

About 390,000 people listed their religion as Jedi in the 2001 Census for England and Wales. In Scotland the figure was a reported 14,000.

The Office for National Statistics did not recognise it as a separate category, and incorporated followers of Jedi with atheists.

Survey Errors

This is a pretty impressive survey error, especially given the relatively non-sensitive nature of the question.  Monkey Cage writes:

In a study reported in the current issue of Public Opinion Quarterly, Markus Prior says ... self-reports of exposure to the evening news shows are grossly off.

That conclusion is based on Prior’s comparison between self-report data from the 2000 National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES), on the one hand, and ratings of news audiences based on Nielsen’s “people meters,” on the other. (In each of 5,000 Nielsen households, each TV set was attached to a meter that household members used to indicate the beginning and end of their viewing.)

Prior’s basic finding:

The survey estimates vastly overstate the size of the network news audience. According to Nielsen, between 30 and 35 million people watched the nightly news on an average weekday. Based on NAES self-reports, that number is between 85 and 110 million for most of the year. In other words, the ANES -based estimate is somewhere around two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half times higher than the Nielsen-based estimate.

Oof.

But it gets worse. The overreport factor varies from one part of the public to another. For example. For viewers aged 55 or more, it’s about two-to-one; but for those in the 18-34 age range, it’s somewhere around six-to-one or even eight-to-one.

Why did interstate geographical mobility fall in 2005-2006?

The census has its latest geographical mobility figures out (via CR). 

The weird thing here is that interstate mobility falls already in April 2005 to March 2006 period (the data is from the March CPS survey). In particular, the data is 

April-March          interstate movers
2007-2008             1.6%
2006-2007             1.7%
2005-2006             2.0%
2004-2005             2.6%
2003-2004             2.6%
2002-2003             2.7%

This is a large fall from 2004-2005 to 2005-2006, with the 2005-2006 level of 2% lower than the previous post-WWII record low of 2.2%.  Note that this is before any big problems developed in the housing market.  Why is this???  Move rates look countercyclical, but with a good amount of lag.  Understanding the mechanism here would be interesting and what that mechanism means for the interpretation of the current move rate. 

Fernando Ferreira, Joseph Gyourko, and Joseph Tracy Housing Busts and Household Mobility argue that

Using two decades of American Housing Survey data from 1985-2005, we estimate the impact on household mobility of owners having negative equity in their homes and of rising mortgage interest rates. We find that both lead to lower, not higher, mobility rates over time. The impacts are economically large, with mobility being almost 50 percent lower for owners with negative equity in their homes. This does not imply that current worries about defaults and owners having to move from their homes are entirely misplaced. It does indicate that, in the past, the lock-in effects of these two factors were dominant over time. Our results cannot simply be extrapolated to the future, but policy makers should begin to consider the consequences of lock-in and reduced household mobility because they are quite different from those associated with default and higher mobility.

But this doesn't explain why 2005-2006 interstate mobility is so low, since negative housing equity is still relatively low and interest rates aren't high (though higher than in the previous years -- is this it?  For such a large drop in mobility?  It would be interesting to see the demographic breakdown of who moves and how it changes over time.

Grand Social Theory

I'm not all at sure about these claims, but I did notice them. 

Matt Steinglass:

Excellent feature by Richard Oppel Jr. in the NYT on corruption in the Afghan police force. There’s a crucial telltale moment here:

“The corruption here is a bigger threat to a stable government than the Taliban,” said First Sgt. John Strain, the senior noncommissioned officer on the American unit training the Ghazni police.

“If we stay here another year, or another 50 years, I think it’ll probably only take two to three years after we are gone until it reverts to the way it was right before we got here,” he added.

Strain takes it for granted that the American presence is what’s preventing police corruption. That’s not true. The police are corrupt because they have no need to establish popular legitimacy, because the government they serve is propped up by foreign forces and sustained on foreign aid. It’s the same dynamic as South Vietnam. The Taliban, like the Viet Cong, are not corrupt because they need to build popular legitimacy to survive. The more US troops prop up the government, and the more American aid pours in, the more feckless and corrupt the government will become. The American presence isn’t reducing corruption in Afghanistan. It’s causing it.

Andrew Sullivan:

The assertion of total power through unchecked violence - outside the Constitution, beyond the reach of the law (apart from legal memos from hired hacks instructed to retroactively redefine torture into 'legality') - will be seen in retrospect as the key defining theory of Bush conservatism. It ended with torture. Why? Because reality may differ from ideology; and when it does, it is vital to create reality to support ideology. And so torture creates reality by coercing "facts" from broken bodies and minds.

This is how torture is always a fantastic temptation for those in power, even if they first use it out of what they think is necessity or good intentions: it provides a way for them to coerce reality into the shape they desire. This is also why it is so uniquely dangerous. Because it creates a closed circle of untruth, which is then used to justify more torture, which generates more "truth." This is the Imaginationland some of us have been so concerned about.

The Western anathema on torture began as a way to ensure the survival of truth.

I recall a really good article on the history of the right against self-incrimination, specifically in relationship to heresy investigations in Britain, but I cannot find it [is it The Substantive Origins of Criminal Procedure,William J. Stuntz; Yale Law Journal, Vol. 105, 1995?  I cannot find an online version.]. One point the article made was that creating a right against self-incrimination in Britain was a way of defanging heresy laws without actually revoking them, since (coerced) confessions were necessary for heresy convictions.  Which gets one back into the torture and truth context for religion and the relationship of criminal justice to religion/ideology. 

Atheist/Jewish Materialism vs. the Catholic Spiritual-Ethical View

I've been obsessing a bit about the current Catholic Church's attack on atheists.  My current state of mind is:

1. The Catholic Church ought to extend its ecumenical process to cover atheists as well, if it hasn't already done so.  The Church's current stance seems driven by caricature and distortion to an extent that isn't generally acceptable in ecumenical relations.  The Church ought to review how it is handling this matter to come up with a more truthful stance that lives up the the Church's aspirations.

2.  It strikes me that the Church's stance on atheism and atheists is reproducing some of the features of Catholic and also Protestant antisemitism in the 19th and first half of the 20th century.  While before 1945 German Christians could get worked up about Jewish Bolshevism as opposed to just Bolshevism, and then use this association to go after all Jews (or at least the annoying ones) in Germany, we now have the Catholic Church talking about atheist Communism and atheist Nationalsocialism, to use this against all atheists (or at least the vocal ones) in Germany.  As for the strengths of the association the Church is constructing here, the association between Communism and Jews is at least as strong as the association between atheists and Nazis (i.e. very partial: some Jews became Communists and Communism was much stronger in their lives than Jewish religious heritage, and most Communists were not Jews, similarly most Nazis were not atheists and those that were atheists were most shaped by Nazism and not atheism). The motives for the Churches and social elites for adopting this constructions of Jews appears in part to be the creation of polarization against a perceived enemy, to better create internal cohesion in the face of a changing environment and internal dissidents ('nationale Sammlungspolitik' before 1945), presenting reaction as the only possible response to social change, not one of many options (i.e. taking socialism and liberalism, both seemingly  compatible with non-reactionary versions of Christianity,  off the table). 

The contrasts drawn between Jews and Christians or Atheists and Christians are very similar, to the extent that I can tell from my limited exposure.  On the one side Jewish materialism or atheist materialism, on the other side the Christian spiritual-ethical world of love, creation and salvation by the one true god.  On the one side Jewish rule-bound clannish materialism or atheist scientistic materialism vs. Christian spiritual universal love.  We also have the contrast between the cosmopolitan Jew or atheist vs. the deeply rooted man with his local organic and necessarily Christian culture.  It would be nice to look into the exact parallels and differences in how these constructions work and where they come from, but it would take some actual reading to do so.  Paul Lagarde seems to be one of the leading lights for these constructions that were picked up widely in the second half of the 19th century.  

3. 19th and 20th century Antisemitism was explicitly conceived as a protest against social change perceived as imposed from the outside on communities and the Jews who took advantage this change to give themselves upward social and economic mobility and access to the public sphere (journalism, science and academia).   Current Catholic anti-atheism seems similarly conceived, as a protest against unjust and externally imposed capitalist and unethical change and the people who defend and promote it, as well as use these changes for upward social and economic mobility and access to the public sphere (journalism, science and academia). 

4. I'm not claiming that the Catholic Church has a history and doctrinal base that necessarily requires it to construct these distorted demonizations of Jews and atheists, but it is a possible construction the Church seems open to.  The Church could go elsewhere as well, I hope.  It might be worth giving it a try, though it might take more work to tread new ground that to rehash the past under a new heading. 

This post clearly needs more work, in particular trying to figure out more what is true beside just being plausible, but I thought I'd put it up.  One final issue: the fact that Christian and German antisemitism ended in a ethical and political disaster for Germany isn't an argument the the Church got its antisemitism fundamentally wrong, it could instead be that only elements malfunctioned in unforeseen circumstances, but that the strategy is actually superior to others available to the Church.  Nor does the analogy I construct above between the structure of antisemitism and anti-atheism, in itself, prove anything about the Church's anti-atheism.  Instead, this is all just a pointer to where to look further. 

What to Make of This?

Last week Matthew Yglesias, who I generally like, posted

I was saying that whatever one thought should be done with large financial institutions as a policy matter, surely we could agree that the executives at these institutions are primarily bad people. It turns out we couldn’t agree on that. But my argument is pretty simple. These are people primarily motivated in life by greed.

Then this week

as a society we’ve become accustomed to the idea that when empirical evidence seems to contradict basic economic theory—as when the United States experienced rapid economic growth under conditions of widespread unionization and a high minimum wage—that we ought to accept the theory as true. This, again, is usually a claim you hear being made by economists, but its social prestige ultimately is a kind of idea in epistemology or the philosophy of science. And all this, of course, is to say nothing of the specific influence of particular empirical claims in economics which hold that high levels of taxation and government spending are everywhere and always economically destructive.

Atheism in Europe

When the Catholic Church goes after atheism as evil (see Mixa below or Mueller, what appears to be a widespread talking point in the Catholic Church right now), it is no longer going after a small minority.  For instance, from a 2005 Eurobarometer poll, showing believers in god are now a minority in Germany, with 25% not believing in god, with the rest believing in non-Christian god-like forces or refusing the take a stance.  Again, it would be nice to break out West and East Germany.  There are strong age, sex and education gradients in Europe overall, with more young, male and educated atheists, so atheists may now even outnumber theists among the young and educated in Germany (but it would be nice to see the crosstabs for Germany).  So it looks like the Catholic Church may face a losing struggle to in maintaining that Germany is a Christian country with entrenched privileges for the large Christian churches and what most people understand as a fundamentally Christian culture (as opposed to say a post-Christian culture). 

For context, here is Bischof Dr. Gerhard L. Müller trying to claim Germany is a necessarily Christian nation (which suggests why Muslims building mosques is seen as so scary by some):

Unsere Kultur ist eine christliche Kultur. Sie ist aus den Tiefen der Geschichte, aus den christlichen Grundüberzeugungen heraus gewachsen und lebendig in unserer Gegenwart. Unsere Kultur ist nicht eine Zivilisation, die von Technokraten am Reißbrett entworfen worden ist, sondern wir verdanken uns einer geschichtlichen Herkunft und sind durch unsere Vorfahren, ihr Tun, ihre Verkündigung und ihr gelebtes Zeugnis mit unseren Wurzeln verbunden.

Das Christentum in unserem Kulturraum besteht – das ist historisch nachgewiesen – seit dem 3. und 4. Jahrhundert. Die römische Festung Castra Regina, Regensburg, hat über Kaufleute und Soldaten das Christentum aus dem Mittelmeerraum empfangen. Nach dem Zusammenbruch des römischen Reiches ist der christliche Glaube in unserer Heimat aber nicht erloschen. Vielmehr ist er durch große Missionsbischöfe aus der schottischen und angelsächsischen Mission ganz neu in unserer Gegend aufgeblüht – bis hin zur kanonischen Gründung unseres Bistums im Jahre 739 durch den heiligen Bonifatius. So ist unser christlicher Glaube gewachsen und hat die gesamte Kultur geprägt und geformt.

„Kultur“ leitet sich vom lateinischen Verb „colere“ ab, das soviel bedeutet wie „bebauen“. Wir erinnern uns an die symbolisch zu verstehenden, aber als wahr auszulegenden Worte der Hl. Schrift, wo Gott den Menschen am Morgen der Schöpfung in einen Garten hineinsetzt und ihn beauftragt, diesen Garten zu bebauen, zu hegen und zu pflegen (vgl. Gen 2). „Bebauen“ – dieses Wort bezieht sich zuerst auf den Ackerbau. Es beinhaltet meist mühsame Arbeit, damit dem oft so kargen Boden – wie er gerade auch bei uns ist – etwas abgerungen werden kann. „Bauen“ ist aber auch noch tiefer zu verstehen: Gemeint ist das Bauen von schönen Häusern, die Pflege der Landschaft und ähnliches. Wenn man heute morgen von Regensburg hierher nach Tirschenreuth fährt, dann sieht man wie herrlich diese Landschaft ist! Wie die Wälder und Felder wachsen, wie sie blühen, wie das Grün und die leuchtenden Farben der Blumen unser Herz erfreuen. Überall in den Ortschaften steht in der Mitte eine wunderschöne Kirche! Man hört die Kirchenglocken grüßen, wenn man aus dem Auto aussteigt und einen kurzen Weg in den Wald hineingeht. Von überall her klingt es, ist es prächtig und schön. Das alles ist der Ausdruck unserer christlichen Kultur. Die Menschen, die hier ihre Heimat fanden und Wurzeln geschlagen haben, sind sich bewusst, dass sie diese Synthese aus Natur, Kultur und Glauben letztlich dem Wirken Gottes verdanken.

Update #1: Malta, the country with the most religious population in the Europe, still has this in its constitution, Article 2:

(1) The religion of Malta is the Roman Catholic Apostolic

Religion.

(2) The authorities of the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church

have the duty and the right to teach which principles are right and

which are wrong.

(3) Religious teaching of the Roman Catholic Apostolic Faith

shall be provided in all State schools as part of compulsory

education.

Targeting Child Support by Parent Quality

The FAZ has an article that raises an issue I've thought about quite a bit, but haven't written about here yet: the targeting of child support measures by parent quality, especially in the tax structure.  Having a decent theoretical and empirical framework that can accommodate the multiplicity of interests at stake here would be welcome, and lots of the public discussion doesn't have either. 

Religion Update

Less Wrong writes:

Religion is what you get when you push totally for non-evidential memetic success. All ties to reality are essentially cut. As a result, all the other dials can be pushed up to 11. God is not just wise, nice, and powerful - he is all knowing, omnibenificent, and omnipotent. Heaven and Hell are not just pleasant and unpleasant places you can spend a long time in - they are the very best possible and the very worst possible experiences, and for all eternity. Religion doesn't just make people better; it is the sole source of morality. And so on; because all of these things happen "offstage", there's no contradictory evidence when you turn the dials up, so of course they'll end up on the highest settings.

This freedom is theism's defining characteristic. Even the most stupid pseudoscience is to some extent about "evidence": people wouldn't believe in it if they didn't think they had evidence for it, though we now understand the cognitive biases and other effects that lead them to think so. That's why there are no homeopathic cures for amputation.

I'm not sure if this is totally true -- religions seems to face lots of constraints on what they can claim, including evidential ones.  Evidence just doesn't work quite the same the way as in other fields, but the differences are a lot subtler than described here -- what is the best way to describe how it does work? 

Why can't you eat horse meat in the US even under the Bush Administration?

Al Roth posts:

The first sentence of Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets asks "Why can't you eat horse meat" in California? The answer is that it's against the law. But while similar bills to outlaw the sale of horse meat for human consumption have passed by big majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives, they have never managed to pass into law. Nationally such bills are opposed (as they were in California) by many horse breeders, cattle ranchers, and veterinarians. Nevertheless, the department of Agriculture removed funds for inspection of slaughterhouses.

Now the NY Times reports: Surge in Abandoned Horses Renews Debate Over Slaughterhouses .

"Emaciated horses eating bark off trees. Abandoned horses tied to telephone poles. Horses subsisting on feces, walking among carcasses.
As the economy continues to falter, law enforcement officers in Kentucky and throughout the country are seeing major increases in the number of unwanted and neglected horses, some abandoned on public land, others left to starve by their owners.
The situation has renewed the debate over whether reopening slaughterhouses in the United States — the last ones closed in 2007 — would help address the problem. Some states, Missouri, Montana and North and South Dakota, for example, are looking at ways to bring slaughterhouses back. "

Arguing Successfully in Public: The Plausible vs. The True

Since I'm on a climate change bender, here a comment from Julian Sanchez  about how the climate change debate works with anthropogenic climate change skeptics who come up with counterarguments:

Obviously, when it comes to an argument between trained scientific specialists, they ought to ignore the consensus and deal directly with the argument on its merits. But most of us are not actually in any position to deal with the arguments on the merits.  ...

Sometimes, of course, the arguments are such that the specialists can develop and summarize them to the point that an intelligent layman can evaluate them. But often...that’s just not the case. Give me a topic I know fairly intimately, and I can often make a convincing case for absolute horseshit. Convincing, at any rate, to an ordinary educated person with only passing acquaintance with the topic. A specialist would surely see through it, but in an argument between us, the lay observer wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell which of us really had the better case on the basis of the arguments alone—at least not without putting in the time to become something of a specialist himself.  Actually, I have a plausible advantage here as a peddler of horseshit: I need only worry about what sounds plausible. If my opponent is trying to explain what’s true, he may be constrained to introduce concepts that take a while to explain and are hard to follow, trying the patience (and perhaps wounding the ego) of the audience.

Come to think of it, there’s a certain class of rhetoric I’m going to call the “one way hash” argument. Most modern cryptographic systems in wide use are based on a certain mathematical asymmetry: You can multiply a couple of large prime numbers much (much, much, much, much) more quickly than you can factor the product back into primes. Certain bad arguments work the same way—skim online debates between biologists and earnest ID afficionados armed with talking points if you want a few examples: The talking point on one side is just complex enough that  it’s both intelligible—even somewhat intuitive—to the layman and sounds as though it might qualify as some kind of insight. (If it seems too obvious, perhaps paradoxically, we’ll tend to assume everyone on the other side thought of it themselves and had some good reason to reject it.) The rebuttal, by contrast, may require explaining a whole series of preliminary concepts before it’s really possible to explain why the talking point is wrong. So the setup is “snappy, intuitively appealing argument without obvious problems” vs. “rebuttal I probably don’t have time to read, let alone analyze closely.”

If we don’t sometimes defer to the expert consensus, we’ll systematically tend to go wrong in the face of one-way-hash arguments, at least our own necessarily limited domains of knowledge.  Indeed, in such cases, trying to evaluate the arguments on their merits will tend to lead to an erroneous conclusion more often than simply trying to gauge the credibility of the various disputants. The problem, of course, is gauging your own competence level well enough to know when to assess arguments and when to assess arguers. Thanks to the perverse phenomenon psychologists have dubbed the Dunning-Kruger effect,  those who are least competent tend to have the most wildly inflated estimates of their own knowledge and competence. They don’t know enough to know that they don’t know, as it were. 

You get the same sort of problem with economics debates once they hit a wider audience.   And there is also a feedback where skeptics tear into popularized presentations of academic experts designed to appeal to a lay audience on grounds of plausibility and find, surprise, lots of omissions, sloppy arguments, misstatements or worse, and the skeptics conclude from this the experts are either clueless or deceptive, in either case not to be trusted as authorities.

On the other hand, there are academic fields, mostly in the humanities but not limited to the humanities, that do occasionally go off on dead ends where 'truth' is defined in a somewhat self-referential manner that does occasionally need to be overthrown.  Still, real subject matter outsiders aren't able to do so, while some institutional outside status does at times help.  More later...

Update #1: David comments

I really liked this post. It's important and very hard to explain why intelligent discourse is so hard, even impossible. The heuristics that we need to get through life also can make it impossible to correctly understand what's going on.
I have these sort of arguments with global-warming "skeptics" all the time. I admit that I'm not an expert either, of course. I just have better heuristics, I think.
There's only a couple of things that I might qualify myself as an expert. Even then, I sometimes can't convince people.
Come to think of it, these sort of problems are present in medical debates too.
What I'm missing is how to improve the situation. Any ideas?

I thought you might like the post and see the analogy to medical debates.  I don't know how to improve the situation -- I don't want to suggest developing better skills to exploit this problem, though that is what public relations and marketing is about, and to some extent career advancement in organizations.  Decisions get made all the time by people who miss out on very important context that they are simply unaware of and which cannot be communicated to them efficiently by experts.   Views that are not pre-marketed then don't fall on fertile ground and get filtered out by time-constrained decision makers looking for solutions that, well, look like neat solutions that fit preexisting understandings and organizational contexts, not further complications that are going to result in the need to reorganize things that currently don't look like they need reorganization. 

How to deal with climate skeptics?  I don't run into any in my world.  I do run into climate model skeptics -- I am one in some ways --, but they also understand that model uncertainty combined with greater climate forcing via CO2 should make one more cautious about putting more forcing into the climate system.  So I have no experience with climate skeptics.  But I would suggest you push exactly this view: we are increasing very persistent climate forcing quite a bit in a system with lots of positive and at times slow feedbacks that we don't understand all that well, which should make us cautious about doing more of it.  The more you're a skeptic about how good the modeling is, the more cautious you should be about CO2 emissions.  My world if full of people who build and use models, and model skepticism is our daily bread.  It isn't model nihilism.  If we know we're kicking a system hard and don't have a good reason to believe it will take the kicking well we don't rely on 'well, nothing bad happened recently before we kicked it hard so nothing bad will happen because that would suck' thinking. [1]

The only out here for the climate skeptic is that the climate forcing effect of CO2 is much lower than the standard calculation or 'there is no CO2 greenhouse effect'.  I don't know if you've run into this and it is hard to counter without recounting lots of hard big science radiative transfer physics done in the 1940-70 period, stuff I now want to read up on.  The physics is hard enough that good physicists got it wrong for quite some time. (see this recent post) 

[1] Though we -- or rather our employers --  may take the fees we get for kicking the system, but that's because it is money, not because we are sure about the modeling.  That's a topic for another post.  

Update #2: Doug comments:

I'm something of a climate model skeptic, too (though not of anthropogenic explanations for climate changes). I am particularly skeptical of claims of economic harm that are grafted onto somewhat dubious climate models. Anyone who is claiming to have an "estimated" dollar figure for the welfare impacts from climate change a century from now should probably have his/her license to practice economics revoked.

At the same time, we make social choices all the time that involve spending real resources today to avert potential but uncertain -- and even unlikely -- harm in the future. For example, a lot of the same politicians who oppose spending money on climate remediation have vocally advocated spending money on missile defense. In both cases, we are talking about allocating real resources to avert low probability (but very bad) outcomes at some uncertain future date. And in both cases, the science is a bit sketchy.

To offer a couple of other examples, we devote a lot of social resources to medical research and military research in areas where the success probabilities may be low but the potential payoffs are large.

In my mind, a high degree of skepticism about climate change models and impacts is not inconsistent with believing that we need to take strong action fairly soon. What I don't understand is why so many of the climate change skeptics have trouble understanding this. You could have a constructive argument over how much to spend on remediation today, or about what the decision tree should look like. But even if you don't believe that the case is proven that people cause climate change and that climate change is harmful, you should probably believe that there is some possibility that both claims are true. And if so, you should be willing to act on that possibility.

How the US Military-Industrial Complex discovered Global Warming

Just musing about a title for a possible blog post.  The US military did fund good geo- and atmospheric physics research, especially for understanding atmospheric physics. Though it may be more the military research side of the complex than the private industrial side.  Which reminds me that the Office of Naval Research is still the lead auditor for Harvard's federal grants:

Harvard University receives approximately $500 million annually in Federal research funds and is required to maintain a Federally approved purchasing system. An approved purchasing system complies with Federal procurement regulations and internal purchasing policies and procedures. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) conducts a Contractor Procurement Systems Review (CPSR) at Harvard every three years to evaluate compliance.

When did this start at Harvard?

In any case, for global warming research the Office of Naval Research's support of Roger Revelle at Scripps one of the big contributions of the military supported research in overcoming the view that

the oceans would absorb any excess gases that came into the atmosphere. Fifty times more carbon is dissolved in sea water than in the wispy atmosphere. Thus the oceans would determine the equilibrium concentration of CO2, and it would not easily stray from the present numbers.

First step here: blow up some nuclear weapons in the Pacific. 

Structural Informational Advantage and Political Manipulation/Institution Building

MY writes on the American disadvantage in dealing with foreign political elites who know much more about US politics than American policy makers know about the politics of most foreign countries, in this particular case Pakistan. 

[D]uring the FDR and Truman years, American elites were generally more familiar with Europe than European elites were with the United States. I think that’s an important element in understanding why the institution-building of that era largely worked.

Anything to this notion? 

One Degree of Separation

I found out today that I have one degree of separation to one Madoff investor.  She is moving to the suburbs as a consequence of Madoff's Ponzi scheme since she can no longer afford her downtown apartment.  The connection she had to Madoff is via an ex-boyfriend. 

Local Crime

We've had quite a bit of local crime...one bank robbery this week, the classic walk in the bank and give the teller a note method, several minor burglaries from garages and sheds, and now, my wife tells me from talking to a town employee, quite a bit of street sign stealing for scarp metal. 

Women in the CT State Police

I heard a story about this on NPR this morning.  Surprising numbers for 2009 for a state employer.  Here is NH's Channel 8's report, the only coverage I could find online:

The State Police force is about 1,200 strong. In 2003 there were 79 women. And, in 2009 there are 81. That's not enough progress for some. ...

"Approximately 13 percent of law enforcement nationwide is female; in the State Police only makes up 6 percent," said Lt. Marianne Daly of the CT State Police. "And, this number has been stagnant for far too long."

"State Police Departments throughout New England, to my understanding, have female presence in the range of 6.5 to about 8 percent," said Commissioner John Danaher of the CT Department of Public Safety.

If you look at occupational statistics, 13% of police officers are women across all jurisdictions...also surprisingly low and not just a legacy statistics from a slow transition.  Still, it would be good to know the statistic for police at a job tenure of 5 or 10 years, and hiring and attrition rates by sex and tenure. 

On the other hand, the construction industry is 2.5% female. 

Quality of the Catholic Priesthood

Sullivan writes without supporting evidence

The quality of the Catholic priesthood has also drifted downward: the next generation of priests is more orthodox, but also more insular and less engaged with the wider world.

Do we have any evidence on this issue?  Who does enter the priesthood and how did they do in school?