Thursday, September 9, 2021

How we got here -- a 2016 flashback



 


One of the few good things about the past few years was the way the various crimes and crises forced clarity on a lot of members of the political and media establishment. Recently, though, I've noticed certain journalists and publications falling back into old habits at what may be the worst possible time. 

 Perhaps it would be useful to revisit the conversation of five years ago.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2016

The cognitive dissonance phase

Let's have the essential Josh Marshall set the scene.
We've had a number of looks recently at how The New York Times appears to be revisiting its 'whitewater' glory days with its increasingly parodic coverage of the "Clinton Foundation" - I'm adding scare quotes to match the dramatic effect, even though of course the Clinton Foundation is a named legal entity. Beyond the 'clouds' and 'shadows' TPM Reader AR flagged to our attention, as Paul Glastris explains here, the latest installment from the Times explains how Bill Clinton's request for diplomatic passports for aides accompanying him on a mission to secure the release of two US journalists held captive in North Korea constitutes the latest damning revelations about the corrupt ties between the Foundation and the Clinton State Department.

The Times uniquely, though only as a leading example for the rest of the national press, has a decades' long history of being lead around by rightwing opposition researchers into dead ends which amount to journalistic comedy - especially when it comes to the Clintons. But here, while all this is happening we have a real live specimen example of direct political and prosecutorial corruption, misuse of a 501c3 nonprofit and various efforts to conceal this corruption and the underlying corruption of Trump's 'Trump University' real estate seminar scam. It's all there - lightly reported here and there - but largely ignored.

The core information here isn't new and it's definitely not based on my reporting. Much of it stems form the on-going and seemingly indefatigable work of Washington Post reporter David A. Fahrenthold who's been chronicling Trump's long list of non-existent or promised but non-existent charitable contributions. In this case, it goes to a $25,000 contribution Trump made to the reelection campaign of Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi in 2013. The neglected story has only popped up again now because Trump was penalized by the IRS for a relatively technical part of the corrupt act.

...

But all of these pale in comparison to the essence of the transaction itself. Trump made this substantial contribution to Bondi at just the moment when her office was evaluating whether to bring legal action against Trump's 'Trump University' real estate seminar scam. Indeed, Bondi admits she reached out to Trump to solicit the contribution just as the decision was on her desk. She eventually declined to take legal action against Trump, overruling the recommendations of career investigators.
A mounting legal case was also underway in Texas, by career investigators under then-Attorney General and now Governor Greg Abbott. Abbott overruled the investigators recommendation for legal action. Shortly thereafter Abbott got $35,000 from Trump. In this case Trump at least mad the contribution without the commingling of nonprofit funds that go them in trouble in Florida.

...

At the risk of stating the obvious, these facts are textbook examples of the sort of political and prosecutorial corruption journalists are supposed to uncover. Trump used money to buy protection from the consequences of his bad acts from friendly politicians. He then tried to cover up his payment of protection money. And on top of all that he made the either bizarre or incompetent mistake of paying the protection money out of his Foundation - the money from which mostly comes from other people beside Trump.

So here you have straight-up bad acts, political corruption to enable prosecutorial corruption to escape the consequences of fraud perpetrated on vulnerable consumers. And yet the page space gets dedicated to Clinton Foundation stories which raise 'questions' that could 'create appearances' and all other journalistic workarounds reporters use when they haven't found what they were looking for. The North Korea rescue mission Glastris pinpoints in the Times latest salvo just gets the whole enterprise to the point of self-parody.

Now why this disjuncture?

I think there are basically three reasons, some more understandable than others but none of them good. The first is that the Times had a decades long institutional issue with the Clintons. There's no other way to put. It goes beyond single reporters and even individual executives editors. Why this is the case I'll leave to biographers and psychologists. But that it is the case is obvious from reading a quarter century of their reporting on the topic.


We've reached the point where much, if not most, of the campaign coverage produced by the New York Times can only be explained by cognitive dissonance. What we are seeing is the journalistic equivalent of the day after doomsday in " When Prophecy Fails."

How we got here is a long and convoluted story dating back at least a quarter-century involving self-interest, declining journalistic standards, class and regional prejudices, the kind of social psych forces normally associated with isolated tribes and high school lunch rooms, and (inevitably) Maureen Dowd, but the result is a set of beliefs so deeply held that they define the paper and so inextricably interconnected that challenging just one can bring down a world view.

As these beliefs have become less and less defensible, those holding them have clung more and more tightly. Particularly over the past year and a half, organizations like the New York Times and the Associated Press have tended to let they expected and/or wanted to see blind them to what was obviously happening. We've seen this in a string of absurdly off-base predictions, a number of stories that had to be retracted because the sources were obviously unreliable, a reliance on ominous and insinuating language that has become the stuff of punchlines ("these clouds cast a shadow over the Clinton campaign"), and most recently, an account of Trump's widely anticipated immigration speech that actually managed to report the exact opposite of its contents.

Self-criticism is always a painful process, but when it requires up ending a number of fully internalized and tightly networked erroneous beliefs, it can be absolutely traumatic .This is especially true for the NYT, where faith in the paper's superiority is fundamental to the institution's sense of identity. Ironically, this very article of faith has become the biggest impediment to the paper reversing its decline. In order to once again be the best, it has to acknowledge that it hasn't been the best for a long time.
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Wednesday, September 8, 2021

Tuesday Tweets on Wednesday

[That's what happens in a four day week.]

Opening with some cyber-silliness



Feral disinformation respects no borders.


And another case study of insane humans...

And sane vampires.

Speaking of vampires, Vance is, of course, a protégé of Peter Thiel. 


And another for our cult of personality file.

The conservative movement's targeting of strategically valuable elections and offices is also relevant to another recent conversation.
Not to mention related tactics.


I've been too busy putting off other things, but I've been meaning to dig into the relationship between marketing psych and behavioral economics.


And finally the thread you never knew you always wanted (not to brag, but I guessed where they were going with the underwear).
I'd dedicate this to the memory of James Burke, but he's not dead yet. 
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Tuesday, September 7, 2021

Another quick hit

This is Joseph.

Josh Marshall is a really sharp operator and his comments on the political (as opposed to legal) implications of the latest ruling in Whole Woman's Health, et al., Applicants v. Austin Reeve Jackson, Judge, et al.

But now they’ve essentially managed not only to overrule Roe but do so with a law that lets that guy you knew in High School who’s always sharing right wing memes on Facebook sue your sister who drove you to the clinic for a $10,000 cash prize. In a way the antis and the Court have done abortion rights advocates a favor by creating a reality in Texas that exposes the hideousness of the Roe opponents’ aspirations: both shackling and predatory.

The problem is so severe that even the center right can see where this is going. Look at Outside the Beltway:

I can’t stress enough that what is going on here is a ban that would normally be implemented via the criminal code is being enforced by civil actions. And, one should note, this is being done to undercut a procedure that is legal under federal court rulings. The pretzel here twists expansive standing with the ability of plaintiffs to receive financial awards as a way to stop providers from engaging in an otherwise legal activity. No doubt abortion opponents find this clever (and, it is–it is certainly creative), but a dispassionate assessment should lead one to see the way in which it is subverting the legal system to get around Supreme Court rulings on a process the Court has deemed as constitutionally protected. If the threat of harassing lawsuits can empower a state to block rights and privileges that are otherwise deemed constitutional, then we have a true subversion of the legal order at play here. 

These are not wild-eyed liberals.  In his previous post, Steven Taylor even focused on John Roberts as having the best dissent (his dissent is the only one he explicitly agrees with) based on it being entirely focused on the issue of procedure and and not focused at all on the substance. There is a serious chance that Roe vs Wade seems likely to be overruled this year in a different case, with better facts than this case, not that better facts would be hard to achieve. Why let the case with bad legal structure proceed and not be disciplined and wait for the best shot?  

There have been some attempts to argue that this should be fought via a series of civil challenges. But the legal fee rules make this complicated:

Still, even getting a lawsuit dismissed can be burdensome and, at times, require expensive lawyers. The abortion law specifically bans plaintiffs from being ordered to pay defendants’ legal fees; opponents fear that the risk of filing a baseless lawsuit is low for plaintiffs and that defending from many lawsuits — even if they are dismissed — could still be financially damaging to a clinic or doctor.

as do the venue rules: 

Adriana Piñon, a senior staff attorney and policy counsel for the ACLU of Texas, said the new law “stacks the deck” against defendants and encourages plaintiffs to sue by including various mechanisms in the law, such as barring a change in venue unless all parties agree, limiting the legal defenses that the defense can present and awarding the plaintiff $10,000 at minimum if they are successful in the suit

This upends standard rules on standing and personal jurisdiction that seem to have very broad implications. Regardless of what you think about the merits, the structure itself seems poised to create a wave of lawsuits that are procedurally 

There is a lot more to say, about the rights that are actually harmed and about the evils of the "Shadow Docket" (where major decisions are made without discussions of merits), but I suspect the procedural stuff is enough to make it clear that this is a bad law. We all focus on the Supreme Court decision not to intervene, but notice that the appeals court has been preventing a hearing on the merits by just deciding to neither stay the law or have a hearing. It's just a mess.

Whatever one thinks of where we ended up, is this really the type of process we want? 

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Monday, September 6, 2021

Quick Hit

This is Joseph.

There has been a lot of discussion about leaving Afghanistan and the consequences thereof. For the record, I am generally supportive of the decision to leave, given that the opportunity for long term nation building (i.e., the Japan model) was botched long ago. While we can discuss some obvious places that we could improve policy (easy Green Cards for Afghani residents who helped the US seems like a bit of a no-brainer), the truth is that the war was not achieving any important goals and people were dying. We might not like some of the policies that the Taliban is bringing, but they appears to have much broader support than in 2001 (which is a huge critique of the operation) and war is not really a great way to improve human rights (collateral damage from modern military operations tends to undermine moral credibility). 

But smart people can disagree.

What I find somewhat amazing is people who left the conflict in 2015 (aka the British) are suddenly upset that the US is leaving. The easy way to ensure that an operation continues is to be a part of it. There were only 8000 US troops in Afghanistan -- at it's peak the UK had more and could have decided to send these troops back. 

The narrative that the leaving process was botched is only credible insofar as we think that the complete collapse of the Afghan state was a sign of previous failure. But how do you fix such a problem, 20 years into the conflict? Honestly, I think Trump and Biden made the best of a bad situation. 

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It's Labor Day, so we're taking time off and running a repost



 
Look for the Union Label


The ILGWU sponsored a contest among its members in the 1970s for an advertising jingle to advocate buying ILGWU-made garments. The winner was Look for the union label.[9][10] The Union's "Look for the Union Label" song went as follows:

    Look for the union label
    When you are buying a coat, dress, or blouse,
    Remember somewhere our union's sewing,
    Our wages going to feed the kids and run the house,
    We work hard, but who's complaining?
    Thanks to the ILG, we're paying our way,
    So always look for the union label,
    It says we're able to make it in the USA!

The commercial featuring the famous song was parodied on a late-1970s episode of Saturday Night Live in a fake commercial for The Dope Growers Union and on the March 19, 1977, episode (#10.22) of The Carol Burnett Show. It was also parodied in the South Park episode "Freak Strike" (2002).















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Friday, September 3, 2021

Where we ended, where we started

A policy of undermining trust in scientific institutions (like medical authorities) may have unintended consequences. 


SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2012

Strauss and the war on data

The most important aspect of Randianism as currently practiced is the lies its adherents tell themselves. "When you're successful, it's because other people are inferior to you." "When you fail, it's because inferior people persecute you (call it going Roark)." "One of these days you're going to run away and everyone who's been mean to you will be sorry."

The most important aspect of Straussianism as currently practiced is the lies its adherents tell others. Having started from the assumption that traditional democracy can't work because most people aren't smart enough to handle the role of voter, the Straussians conclude that superior minds must, for the good of society, lie to and manipulate the masses.

Joseph and I have an ongoing argument about which school is worse, a question greatly complicated by the compatibility of the two systems and the overlap of believers and their tactics and objectives. Joseph generally argues that Rand is worse (without, of course, defending Strauss) while I generally take the opposite position.

This week brought news that I think bolsters my case (though I suspect Joseph could easily turn it around to support his): one of the logical consequences of assuming typical voters can't evaluate information on their own is that data sources that are recognized as reliable are a threat to society. They can't be spun and they encourage people to make their own decisions.

To coin a phrase, if the masses can't handle the truth and need instead to be fed a version crafted by the elite to keep the people happy and doing what's best for them, the public's access to accurate, objective information has to be tightly controlled. With that in mind, consider the following from Jared Bernstein:
[D]ue to pressure from Republicans, the Congressional Research Service is withdrawing a report that showed the lack of correlation between high end tax cuts and economic growth.

The study, by economist Tom Hungerford, is of high quality, and is one I’ve cited here at OTE. Its findings are fairly common in the economics literature and the concerns raised by that noted econometrician Mitch McConnell are trumped up and bogus. He and his colleagues don’t like the findings because they strike at the supply-side arguments that they hold so dear.
And with Sandy still on everyone's mind, here's something from Menzie Chinn:
NOAA's programs are in function 300, Natural Resources and Environment, along with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and a range of conservation and natural resources programs. In the near term, function 300 would be 14.6 percent lower in 2014 in the Ryan budget according to the Washington Post. It quotes David Kendall of The Third Way as warning about the potential impact on weather forecasting: "'Our weather forecasts would be only half as accurate for four to eight years until another polar satellite is launched,' estimates Kendall. 'For many people planning a weekend outdoors, they may have to wait until Thursday for a forecast as accurate as one they now get on Monday. … Perhaps most affected would be hurricane response. Governors and mayors would have to order evacuations for areas twice as large or wait twice as long for an accurate forecast.'"
There are also attempts from prominent conservatives to delegitimize objective data:
Apparently, Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric, is accusing the Bureau of Labor Statistics of manipulating the jobs report to help President Obama. Others seem to be adding their voices to this slanderous lie. It is simply outrageous to make such a claim and echoes the worrying general distrust of facts that seems to have swept segments of our nation. The BLS employment report draws on two surveys, one (the establishment survey) of 141,000 businesses and government agencies and the other (the household survey) of 60,000 households. The household survey is done by the Census Bureau on behalf of BLS. It’s important to note that large single-month divergences between the employment numbers in these two surveys (like the divergence in September) are just not that rare. EPI’s Elise Gould has a great paper on the differences between these two surveys.

BLS is a highly professional agency with dozens of people involved in the tabulation and analysis of these data. The idea that the data are manipulated is just completely implausible. Moreover, the data trends reported are clearly in line with previous monthly reports and other economic indicators (such as GDP). The key result was the 114,000 increase in payroll employment from the establishment survey, which was right in line with what forecasters were expecting. This was a positive growth in jobs but roughly the amount to absorb a growing labor force and maintain a stable, not falling, unemployment rate. If someone wanted to help the president, they should have doubled the job growth the report showed. The household survey was much more positive, showing unemployment falling from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent. These numbers are more volatile month to month and it wouldn’t be surprising to see unemployment rise a bit next month. Nevertheless, there’s nothing implausible about the reported data. The household survey has shown greater job growth in the recovery than the establishment survey throughout the recovery. The labor force participation rate (the share of adults who are working or unemployed) increased to 63.6 percent, which is an improvement from the prior month but still below the 63.7 percent reported for July. All in all, there was nothing particularly strange about this month’s jobs reports—and certainly nothing to spur accusations of outright fraud.
We can also put many of the attacks against Nate Silver in this category.

Going back a few months, we had this from Businessweek:
The House Committee on Appropriations recently proposed cutting the Census budget to $878 million, $10 million below its current budget and $91 million less than the bureau’s request for the next fiscal year. Included in the committee number is a $20 million cut in funding for this year’s Economic Census, considered the foundation of U.S. economic statistics.
And Bruce Bartlett had a whole set of examples involving Newt Gingrich:
On Nov. 21, Newt Gingrich, who is leading the race for the Republican presidential nomination in some polls, attacked the Congressional Budget Office. In a speech in New Hampshire, Mr. Gingrich said the C.B.O. "is a reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic growth, does not believe in innovation and does not believe in data that it has not internally generated."

Mr. Gingrich's charge is complete nonsense. The former C.B.O. director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, now a Republican policy adviser, labeled the description "ludicrous." Most policy analysts from both sides of the aisle would say the C.B.O. is one of the very few analytical institutions left in government that one can trust implicitly.

It's precisely its deep reservoir of respect that makes Mr. Gingrich hate the C.B.O., because it has long stood in the way of allowing Republicans to make up numbers to justify whatever they feel like doing.

...

Mr. Gingrich has long had special ire for the C.B.O. because it has consistently thrown cold water on his pet health schemes, from which he enriched himself after being forced out as speaker of the House in 1998. In 2005, he wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Times berating the C.B.O., then under the direction of Mr. Holtz-Eakin, saying it had improperly scored some Gingrich-backed proposals. At a debate on Nov. 5, Mr. Gingrich said, "If you are serious about real health reform, you must abolish the Congressional Budget Office because it lies."
...                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Because Mr. Gingrich does know more than most politicians, the main obstacles to his grandiose schemes have always been Congress's professional staff members, many among the leading authorities anywhere in their areas of expertise.                                                                                                                                                                                                

To remove this obstacle, Mr. Gingrich did everything in his power to dismantle Congressional institutions that employed people with the knowledge, training and experience to know a harebrained idea when they saw it. When he became speaker in 1995, Mr. Gingrich moved quickly to slash the budgets and staff of the House committees, which employed thousands of professionals with long and deep institutional memories.

Of course, when party control in Congress changes, many of those employed by the previous majority party expect to lose their jobs. But the Democratic committee staff members that Mr. Gingrich fired in 1995 weren't replaced by Republicans. In essence, the positions were simply abolished, permanently crippling the committee system and depriving members of Congress of competent and informed advice on issues that they are responsible for overseeing.

Mr. Gingrich sold his committee-neutering as a money-saving measure. How could Congress cut the budgets of federal agencies if it wasn't willing to cut its own budget, he asked. In the heady days of the first Republican House since 1954, Mr. Gingrich pretty much got whatever he asked for.

In addition to decimating committee budgets, he also abolished two really useful Congressional agencies, the Office of Technology Assessment and the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. The former brought high-level scientific expertise to bear on legislative issues and the latter gave state and local governments an important voice in Congressional deliberations.

The amount of money involved was trivial even in terms of Congress's budget. Mr. Gingrich's real purpose was to centralize power in the speaker's office, which was staffed with young right-wing zealots who followed his orders without question. Lacking the staff resources to challenge Mr. Gingrich, the committees could offer no resistance and his agenda was simply rubber-stamped.

Unfortunately, Gingrichism lives on. Republican Congressional leaders continually criticize every Congressional agency that stands in their way. In addition to the C.B.O., one often hears attacks on the Congressional Research Service, the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Government Accountability Office.

Lately, the G.A.O. has been the prime target. Appropriators are cutting its budget by $42 million, forcing furloughs and cutbacks in investigations that identify billions of dollars in savings yearly. So misguided is this effort that Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma and one of the most conservative members of Congress, came to the agency's defense.

In a report issued by his office on Nov. 16, Senator Coburn pointed out that the G.A.O.'s budget has been cut by 13 percent in real terms since 1992 and its work force reduced by 40 percent -- more than 2,000 people. By contrast, Congress's budget has risen at twice the rate of inflation and nearly doubled to $2.3 billion from $1.2 billion over the last decade.

Mr. Coburn's report is replete with examples of budget savings recommended by G.A.O. He estimated that cutting its budget would add $3.3 billion a year to government waste, fraud, abuse and inefficiency that will go unidentified.

For good measure, Mr. Coburn included a chapter in his report on how Congressional committees have fallen down in their responsibility to exercise oversight. The number of hearings has fallen sharply in both the House and Senate. Since the beginning of the Gingrich era, they have fallen almost in half, with the biggest decline coming in the 104th Congress (1995-96), his first as speaker.

In short, Mr. Gingrich's unprovoked attack on the C.B.O. is part of a pattern. He disdains the expertise of anyone other than himself and is willing to undercut any institution that stands in his way. Unfortunately, we are still living with the consequences of his foolish actions as speaker.

We could really use the Office of Technology Assessment at a time when Congress desperately needs scientific expertise on a variety of issues in involving health, energy, climate change, homeland security and many others. And given the enormous stress suffered by state and local governments as they are forced by Washington to do more with less, an organization like the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations would be invaluable.


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Thursday, September 2, 2021

Thursday Tweets

I've been meaning to do a post on the really terrible job the press (particularly in NYC) with rising sea levels and bigger storm surges. While you're waiting, try this exercise at home. Look up cities on the West, East and Gulf Coasts. Make a list of cities under 25' elevation. Add 15' to that if the region has been hit by a hurricane in the past twenty years. I'm betting you see a pattern.











"Interesting" but not unusual. You often hear successful conservatives who have gone through periods of financial hardship often cite their time on the dole as evidence of their status as self-made men.




Up till now with a handful of exceptions, the business model of the digital on-demand subscription services (Netflix, Spotify, and even SubStack) has been to cash in on fame and followings built in older, more open, and generally free media. If open media dies, will exclusive media have to change its model?









Ohio's legislature has the best writers.








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Wednesday, September 1, 2021

A bit of historical context


Kulldorf's tweet is a little less surprising if you know a bit about his recent activities and affiliations. We could make this a discussion about the heavily subsidized anti-vax adjacent libertarian faction but it's been a long day and the thought of diving into this topic makes me feel even more tired. 

For now, here's another reminder that, despite all the talk about the opposition to mandates and passports reflecting traditional American emphasis on freedom and individuality, previous generations were a hell of a lot less concerned with personal liberty than we are when it came to infectious diseases. 


First quarantine (1907–1910)

Soper notified the New York City Health Department, whose investigators realized that Mallon was a typhoid carrier. Under sections 1169 and 1170 of the Greater New York Charter, Mallon was arrested as a public health threat. She was forced into an ambulance by five policemen and Dr. Josephine Baker, who at some point had to sit on Mallon to restrain her. Mallon was transported to the Willard Parker Hospital, where she was restrained and forced to give samples. For four days, she was not allowed to get up and use the bathroom on her own. The massive numbers of typhoid bacteria that were discovered in her stool samples indicated that the infection center was in her gallbladder. Under questioning, Mallon admitted that she almost never washed her hands. This was not unusual at the time; the germ theory of disease still was not fully accepted.

On March 19, 1907, Mallon was sentenced to quarantine on North Brother Island. While quarantined, she gave stool and urine samples three times per week. Authorities suggested removing her gallbladder, but she refused because she did not believe she carried the disease. At the time, gallbladder removal was dangerous, and people had died from the procedure. Mallon was also unwilling to stop working as a cook, a job that earned her more money than any other. Having no home of her own, she was always on the verge of poverty.

After the publication of Soper's article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Mallon attracted extensive media attention and received the nickname "Typhoid Mary". Later, in a textbook that defined typhoid fever, she again was called "Typhoid Mary".

Soper visited Mallon in quarantine, telling her he would write a book and give her part of the royalties. She angrily rejected his proposal and locked herself in the bathroom until he left. She hated the nickname and wrote in a letter to her lawyer:

I wonder how the said Dr. William H. Park would like to be insulted and put in the Journal and call him or his wife Typhoid William Park.

Not all medical experts supported the decision to forcibly quarantine Mallon. For example, Milton J. Rosenau and Charles V. Chapin both argued that she just had to be taught to carefully treat her condition and ensure that she would not transmit the typhoid to others. Both considered isolation to be an unnecessary, overly strict punishment. Mallon suffered from a nervous breakdown after her arrest and forcible transportation to the hospital. In 1909, she tried to sue the New York Health Department, but her complaint was denied and the case closed by the New York Supreme Court. In a letter to her lawyer, she complained that she was treated like a "guinea pig". She was obliged to give samples for analysis three times a week, but for six months was not allowed to visit an eye doctor, even though her eyelid was paralyzed and she had to bandage it at night. Her medical treatment was hectic: she was given urotropin in three-month courses for a year, threatening to destroy her kidneys. That was changed to brewers yeast and hexamethylenamin in increasing doses. She was first told that she had typhoid in her intestinal tract, then in her bowel muscles, then in her gallbladder.

Mallon herself never believed that she was a carrier. With the help of a friend, she sent several samples to an independent New York laboratory. All came back negative for typhoid. On North Brother Island, almost a quarter of her analyses from March 1907 through June 1909 were also negative. After 2 years and 11 months of Mallon's quarantine, Eugene H. Porter, the New York State Commissioner of Health, decided that disease carriers should no longer be kept in isolation and that Mallon could be freed if she agreed to stop working as a cook and take reasonable steps to avoid transmitting typhoid to others. On February 19, 1910, Mallon said she was "prepared to change her occupation (that of a cook), and would give assurance by affidavit that she would upon her release take such hygienic precautions as would protect those with whom she came in contact, from infection." She was released from quarantine and returned to the mainland.

Release and second quarantine (1915–1938)

Upon her release, Mallon was given a job as a laundress, which paid less than cooking—$20 per month instead of $50. At some point, she wounded her arm and the wound became infected, meaning that she could not work at all for six months. After several unsuccessful years, she started cooking again. She used fake surnames like Breshof or Brown, and took jobs as a cook against the explicit instructions of health authorities. No agencies that hired servants for upscale families would offer her employment, so for the next five years, she moved to the mass sector. She worked in a number of kitchens in restaurants, hotels, and spa centers. Almost everywhere she worked, there were outbreaks of typhoid. However, she changed jobs frequently, and Soper was unable to find her.

In 1915, Mallon started working at Sloane Hospital for Women in New York City. Soon 25 people were infected, and two died. The head obstetrician, Dr. Edward B. Cragin, called Soper and asked him to help in the investigation. Soper identified Mallon from the servants' verbal descriptions and also by her handwriting.

Mallon again fled, but the police were able to find and arrest her when she took food to a friend on Long Island. Mallon was returned to quarantine on North Brother Island on March 27, 1915.

Little is known about her life during the second quarantine. She remained on North Brother for more than 23 years, and the authorities gave her a private one-story cottage. As of 1918, she was allowed to take day trips to the mainland. In 1925, Dr. Alexandra Plavska came to the island for an internship. She organized a laboratory on the second floor of the chapel and offered Mallon a job as a technician. Mallon washed bottles, did recordings, and prepared glasses for pathologists.

Death

Mallon spent the rest of her life in quarantine at Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island. Mallon was quite active until suffering a stroke in 1932; afterwards, she was confined to the hospital. She never completely recovered, and half of her body remained paralyzed. On November 11, 1938, she died of pneumonia at age 69. Mallon's body was cremated, and her ashes were buried at Saint Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx. Nine people attended the funeral

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Tuesday, August 31, 2021

More Baumol

 Another aspect of this story I should have mentioned, while spending on digital effects has exploded, it's still difficult for the effects houses to turn a profit.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2015

Obscure comic book heroes battle (the idea of) cost disease

Before we get started, one big caveat: the piece I'm linking to seems to be based on rumors and speculation. Back in the Nineteenth Century, newspaper stories often started with the disclaimer "Important if true." For stories like this, we probably start with "interesting if true."

Fans of the DC Television Universe might have some reason to worry. While the creation of the first season of Legends of Tomorrow is underway, it has come out that the CW may have overextended themselves in regards to budget. It seems that the first season of the Legends of Tomorrow is more expensive than the network originally anticipated. Intel from Bleeding Cool is now claiming that the CW may be nixing the idea of a second season, knowing that show will likely continue to become more expensive as it grows. Yikes.

...

What is it about Legends of Tomorrow that makes it so much more expensive than its predecessor? I can only imagine the multitude of visual and special effects are what is taking such a toll on its budget. After all, in a show that revolves around time travel, and where each protagonist has a unique set of superpowers, the effects team must have their hands full. Maybe having one superpowered lead in both Arrow and The Flash allowed for a more budget-friendly production, rather than having to stretch funds across a baker's dozen worth of heroes.
Assuming both the rumor and the speculation are sound (and there's lots of other evidence that Hollywood has a growing problem with budget spirals), this raises some perplexing questions.

These days, the explanation de jour for cost spirals is...
Baumol's cost disease (also known as the Baumol Effect) is a phenomenon described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s. It involves a rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no increase of labor productivity in response to rising salaries in other jobs which did experience such labor productivity growth. This seemingly goes against the theory in classical economics that wages are closely tied to labor productivity changes.
If there's an economist in house, I'd greatly appreciate a knowledgeable take on this, but it would seem we should a disproportionate amount of money going to the people who have had the smallest gains in productivity.

As mentioned before, technology has improved productivity in film and video by orders of magnitude. These changes have affected every part of the industry but the biggest jump has been in what used to be called special effects. Ray Harryhausen's standard answer to the question "can you do ______" was that he could do anything if given the time and the money, and that was largely true. What has changed is mainly speed and cost.

Here's the weird part, though. The budgets are usually spiraling out of control not because studios are spending that much more on people like writers (whose productivity hasn't grown that much), but because they are pouring money into those areas where productivity has exploded.
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Monday, August 30, 2021

And then back to unsupported hypothesis?

We've frequently been told that what appears to the lay person to be a speculative economic theory is actually an established and uncontested scientific fact, as solid as the laws of thermodynamics. We'll have to see if Konczal gets any traction with this, but he has at the very least shown that the matter is still up for debate.




WEDNESDAY, APRIL 17, 2013

From unsupported hypothesis to conventional wisdom

I don't want to pick on Andrew Delblanco, who turned in an unusually well-balanced piece on MOOCs in a recent issue of the New Republic, but this passage bothered me quite a bit:
But the most persuasive account of the relentless rise in cost was made nearly 50 years ago by the economist William Baumol and his student William Bowen, who later became president of Princeton. A few months ago, Bowen delivered two lectures in which he revisited his theory of the “cost disease.” “In labor-intensive industries,” he explained, “such as the performing arts and education, there is less opportunity than in other sectors to increase productivity by, for example, substituting capital for labor.” Technological advances have allowed the auto industry, for instance, to produce more cars while using fewer workers. Professors, meanwhile, still do things more or less as they have for centuries: talking to, questioning, and evaluating students (ideally in relatively small groups). As the Ohio University economist Richard Vedder likes to joke, “With the possible exception of prostitution . . . teaching is the only profession that has had no productivity advance in the 2,400 years since Socrates.”
(for more along similar lines)

I'm not an economist, I haven't gone through Baumol and Bowen's research, and my college teaching experience is more than a decade out of date, so I'm certainly missing some salient points here, but if the hypothesis is true, I'd expect to see the following:

1. There should be a shortage of teachers

2. The percentage increase in wages for teaching should be greater than the percentage increase in overall tuition.

3. The share of tuition going to instructional costs should increase substantially relative to costs such as administration.

Rather than seeing all of these, it's not immediately obvious that we're seeing any. College teaching jobs are not easy to get, non-instructional costs seem to be more than holding their own and if you look at people who are paid solely to teach, their wages are increasing more slowly than tuition.

We have to be careful about treating informal observations as data, but with that caveat in mind, there are lots of reasons to question and not much evidence to support the hypothesis that a lack of technology-driven productivity gains by instructors are causing the sharp growth in tuition. Nonetheless, the idea has gone from interesting but unlikely theory to generally accepted fact.

Here's where I blame it all on Steven Levitt.

OK, not really, but this is an example of a journalistic fad that owes a lot to Freakonomics: propping up an argument with a semi-relevant economic allusion. This isn't the same as analyzing a problem using economic concepts (for example, trying to explain health care inflation as a principal agent problem). Instead, what we have here is the idea that explaining a concept is the same as arguing that it applies.

It is, of course, possible that cost disease really is driving the growth of tuition. This is an enormously complicated problem and complicated problems often look very different when examined in detail. Viewed from a distance, though, the idea that a lack of instructional productivity gains are driving the growth simply doesn't jibe with what we're seeing.
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Friday, August 27, 2021

Isaacson knows how to nail a job interview

From Walter Isaacson's recent NYT review of two recent books on Elon Musk:

In his famous “Think Different” ad for Apple in 1997, Steve Jobs saluted people like himself: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels… Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” Musk is in some ways the current incarnation of Jobs. As these two books show in vivid detail, Musk can drive people hard. He can drive them to distraction. But he can also drive them to do things they never dreamed were possible. “Please prepare yourself for a level of intensity that is greater than anything most of you have experienced before,” he wrote in one staff memo. “Revolutionizing industries is not for the faint of heart.”

Like Jobs, Musk has a reality distortion field. “In meetings, Musk might ask his engineers to do something that, on the face of it, seemed absurd,” Berger writes. But unlike Jobs, Musk has an understanding of physics and thermodynamics that has helped him know what boundaries could be successfully pushed. “When they protested that it was impossible, Musk would respond with a question designed to open their minds to the problem, and potential solutions. He would ask, ‘What would it take?’”

By drilling down to fundamental principles and the underlying science, he has built the globally dominant private rocket company whose Starship vehicle might lead the way in bringing humans to Mars, and Tesla has become the world’s most valuable auto company, one that will help wean humanity from fossil-fuel cars.

Regular readers will know I disagree with quite a bit of this. While the talented engineers at SpaceX and Tesla have accomplished some remarkable things and Musk certainly has proposed things that most engineers consider impossible or at least ridiculously impractical, those two sets do not overlap. The first consists of accomplishments that were seen as ambitious but feasible at the time such as using controlled landings to recover rocket boosters. The second consists of really bad ideas (like using air-bearings in a high speed vactrain) that have all been allowed to die quietly when Musk unveiled the next big thing. (When firms started raising money on the vactrain buzz and realized they'd have to come up prototypes, every last one of them discarded Musk's concept but kept the name.) 

The idea Musk's success comes from his grasp of science is laughable. The man is a terrible engineer and whenever he goes off script, things go badly. He does have a tremendous talent for fundraising, generating PR, and creative accounting, but Isaacson lost me when he painted Musk as the next Steve Jobs, only smarter.

Of course, I'm not the target audience. 


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Thursday, August 26, 2021

Self-driving cars and reverse centaurs -- are we approach autonomy backwards?

 



Jalopnik's Jason Torchinsky uses the embarrassing Tesla Bot debut as a stepping off point for a clever discussion of technology and autonomy.

Tesla’s big AI Day event just happened, and I’ve already told you about the humanoid robot Elon Musk says Tesla will be developing. You’d think that would have been the most eye-roll-inducing thing to come out of the event, but, surprisingly, that’s not the case. The part of the presentation that actually made me the most baffled was near the beginning, a straightforward demonstration of Tesla “Full Self-Driving.” I’ll explain.

...

What’s being solved, here? The demonstration of FSD shown in the video is doing absolutely nothing the human driver couldn’t do, and doesn’t free the human to do anything else. Nothing’s being gained!

It would be like if Tesla designed a humanoid dishwashing robot that worked fundamentally differently than the dishwashing robots many of us have tucked under our kitchen counters.

The Tesla Dishwasher would stand over the sink, like a human, washing dishes with human-like hands, but for safety reasons you would have to stand behind it, your hands lightly holding the robot’s hands, like a pair of young lovers in their first apartment.

Normally, the robot does the job just fine, but there’s a chance it could get confused and fling a dish at a wall or person, so for safety you need to be watching it, and have your hands on the robot’s at all times.

If you don’t, it beeps a warning, and then stops, mid-wash.

Would you want a dishwasher like that? You’re not really washing the dishes yourself, sure, but you’re also not not washing them, either. That’s what FSD is.

...

Now, if you want to argue that Tesla and other L2 systems offer a safety advantage (I’m not convinced they necessarily do, but whatever) then I think there’s a way to leverage all of this impressive R&D and keep the safety benefits of these L2 systems. How? By doing it the opposite way we do it now.

What I mean is that there should be a role-reversal: if safety is the goal, then the human should be the one driving, with the AI watching, always alert, and ready to take over in an emergency.

In this inverse-L2 model, the car is still doing all the complex AI things it would be doing in a system like FSD, but it will only take over in situations where it sees that the human driver is not responding to a potential problem.

This guardian angel-type approach provides all of the safety advantages of what a good L2 system could provide, and, because it’s a computer, will always be attentive and ready to take over if needed.

Driver monitoring systems won’t be necessary, because the car won’t drive unless the human is actually driving. And, if they get distracted or don’t see a person or car, then the AI steps in to help.

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Wednesday, August 25, 2021

Repost: "A propaganda-fed base has no capacity to self correct, rather it continues follow unsustainable paths that only gain momentum"

 While the details have been unexpected, the general trends have been evident for a while.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2017

Russians, Straussians, soft landings, and hamburger emojis

Since February, we've been discussing the curiously stable dynamic that keeps the GOP aligned with Trump even as his poll numbers slip. We've also argued that, at this point in time, this alliance holds the danger of an extraordinarily hard landing for the party. At the risk of overextending the metaphor, the Republicans are desperately hoping for a soft landing but are, at the same time, doing everything they can to maintain altitude.
As many have observed, the GOP of the 70s was able to minimize the long-term damage of Watergate by distancing themselves from Nixon and very publicly refusing to impede the investigation. The response of the party now has been just the opposite. It is as if the Republicans had responded to Watergate by doubling down their defense of Nixon, insisting there was nothing to the accusations, and calling for hearings into the crimes of McGovern, Humphrey, and LBJ.

Obviously, the decision to go all in on Trump is partially motivated by a desire to achieve as many policy goals as possible while still firmly in control of all three branches of government, but there's another factor which might be as large and which is possibly doing even more to eliminate the possibility of a soft landing.




.

If some poli-sci PhD candidate out there is looking for a thesis topic, you could do worse than the breakdown of Straussian communication matrices, or as I've put it, "drinking from the wrong pipe." The conservative movement was essentially a three-legged stool built on money, prioritizing strategic offices and elections, and misinformation. This last one was arguably the most important; it is also the one that has proven the least stable.

The initial purpose of this "noble lie" approach was to use the propaganda to keep the base sending money and showing up for the polls through of a combination of rage and fear. As with all Straussian systems, it was assumed that those in power would be in on the joke while the people who believed the lies would simply serve as electoral cannon fodder.

At some point though (I suspect inevitably), a couple of things happen. First, the believers become leaders. This is become blindingly obvious with Trump, but the children of Fox News have been in control of the party since at least 2010 and the roots go back further. Remember how Dick Cheney insisted while traveling that all hotel televisions be tuned to Fox News?

The second, and possibly more dangerous problem is that a propaganda-fed base has no capacity to self correct, rather it continues follow unsustainable paths that only gain momentum, often exacerbated by ratcheting mechanisms. Soon you reach a point where, even if the leaders accurately perceive the situation and realize the best solution, they can no longer reconcile that reasonable course of action with what the vast majority of their supporters have been told to believe for decades.

One of the essential steps for achieving a soft landing is getting your core supporters to face just how dire the situation is. Fox News et al., however, has simply lost the capacity to do this.
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Tuesday, August 24, 2021

Housing shortages

This is Joseph.

One place where Mark and I disagree is whether the YIMBY (yes in my backyard) movement can make arguments dumb enough to make the NIMBY (not in my back yard) group seem less dumb. So I thought I would lay out the essential piece of my argument.

Let us imagine that the government decided to tightly regulate farming. This isn't a ridiculous argument as these disasters have been attempted before. The result of bad policy could easily be a food shortage, which would cause prices to rise, and since the options are eat or die it isn't crazy to imagine food prices would rise quickly. Now imagine you needed permission in order to increase food production, from the people earning the excess profits. They would resist this at all costs, because everybody likes being rich.

Now consider housing, also a necessity (especially in climates where living outdoors is hazardous). In Canada we see a shortage of new construction to match population growth:
Now every pro-growth policy reduces housing prices (one might say that this is the point). Lack of affordable housing is a big deal. Similarly, there are many non-carbon emitting fuel technologies that have to be built somewhere. Ranging from nuclear plants (consider the zoning on this one) to windmills (where senior politicians have claimed health effects like cancer, even if these seem unfounded).

YIMBY can go wrong with too much unplanned, unrestricted growth with too little care for the consequences on the inhabitants. It is not the goal to replicate the squalor of London during the Victorian age. But the idea of stopping all development in the service of neighborhood character is also a clearly bad goal. In 1200 AD houses were very different -- do we really want to preserve the character of the medieval city? 

Finally, this really is a collective action problem. Allowing small blocks of residents to protect property values by blocking all development means that if any one block cracks then they take all of the consequences while preserving other people's wealth. The real question is the scale at which these right operate -- at the individual or city level it is probably ok, at the small neighborhood level you can see some real issues. 

Anyway, just a quick thought. 

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Monday, August 23, 2021

It's not just we're going to have more fires; it's that we need more fires.

There is a tendency to treat global warming and Western megafires as one thing when they are two related but distinct crises requiring,  in a sense, opposite approaches. With the climate crisis, we need to do what it takes to reverse the trends toward higher temperatures and ocean acidification. In the West, we actually need more but better fires.  

As Elizabeth Weil explains in her Pulitzer-worthy Propublica piece (which we discussed earlier here). [emphasis added]

Yes, there’s been talk across the U.S. Forest Service and California state agencies about doing more prescribed burns and managed burns. The point of that “good fire” would be to create a black-and-green checkerboard across the state. The black burned parcels would then provide a series of dampers and dead ends to keep the fire intensity lower when flames spark in hot, dry conditions, as they did this past week. But we’ve had far too little “good fire,” as the Cassandras call it. Too little purposeful, healthy fire. Too few acres intentionally burned or corralled by certified “burn bosses” (yes, that’s the official term in the California Resources Code) to keep communities safe in weeks like this.

Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change. We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.

...

[Deputy fire chief of Yosemite National Park Mike] Beasley earned what he called his “red card,” or wildland firefighter qualification, in 1984. To him, California, today, resembles a rookie pyro Armageddon, its scorched battlefields studded with soldiers wielding fancy tools, executing foolhardy strategy. “Put the wet stuff on the red stuff,” Beasley summed up his assessment of the plan of attack by Cal Fire, the state’s behemoth “emergency response and resource protection” agency. Instead, Beasley believes, fire professionals should be considering ecology and picking their fights: letting fires that pose little risk burn through the stockpiles of fuels. Yet that’s not the mission. “They put fires out, full stop, end of story,” Beasley said of Cal Fire. “They like to keep it clean that way.”


Why is it so difficult to do the smart thing? People get in the way. From Marketplace.

Molly Wood: You spoke with all these experts who have been advocating for good fire for prescribed burns for decades. And nobody disagrees, right? You found that there is no scientific disagreement that this is the way to prevent megafires. So how come it never happens?

Elizabeth Weil: You know, that’s a really good question. I talked to a lot of scientists who have been talking about this, as you said, literally, for decades, and it’s been really painful to watch the West burn. It hasn’t been happening because people don’t like smoke. It hasn’t been happening, because of very well-intended environmental regulations like the Clean Air Act that make it harder to put particulate matter in the air from man-made causes. It hasn’t happened because of where we live. You don’t want to burn down people’s houses, obviously.

From this follows some equally obvious conclusions. If wildfires are both unavoidable and a natural part of the life-cycle of forests, if trying to suppress them only delays and compounds the problem and if people in the paths of these fires is one of, perhaps the, major obstacle to the solution, then we need to have a serious debate about where we encourage (or even allow) new housing and development.

I don't want to get sidetracked by discussions about fire-adapted communities and wildland–urban interfaces. These are important topics but not the conversation stoppers people seem to think they are. The first is roughly equivalent to social distancing, smart preventative steps but hardly absolute protection. The second brings up images of of isolated mountain villages suggesting developed areas don't need to worry about this sort of thing. The reality of WUIs is more U than you might expect. 

"The US Forest Service defines the wildland-urban interface qualitatively as a place where 'humans and their development meet or intermix with wildland fuel.' Communities that are within 0.5 miles (0.80 km) of the zone are included."

Here's a shot of L.A.

Lots of yellow here, particularly in areas noted for heated NIMBY/YIMBY debates, such as a big chunk of Santa Monica...


And pretty much all of La Cañada Flintridge.



 Western megafires are an incredibly complex topic, but there are a couple of simple but important points we can make here.

1. We need more good fire, either through controlled burns or by simply choosing not to fight certain wildfires.

2. The more people who live in an area, the more difficult it is to pull the trigger on those good fires.

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