Maybe I just have Bush Derangement Syndrome. But I find myself agreeing with James Wimberly and Mark Kleiman: there exist more than sufficient grounds for impeaching George W. Bush. In his recent statements about CIA detainees, he essentially confessed to violations of U.S. law. The laws in question provide for criminal punishments – of 20 years or more – for acts of torture and violations of the Geneva Convention.
Keep in mind that just eight years ago, Bill Clinton was impeached for committing perjury. Some of Clinton’s defenders insisted that he was really impeached for fellatio. But the Republicans argued that the law is the law. Clinton was subpoenaed to testify in court – under a sexual harassment law that Clinton himself had signed into law – and he lied under oath. That was the crime that left Clinton vulnerable to impeachment, on the theory that perjury counts among the high crimes and misdemeanors for which the Constitution authorizes impeachment. In all honesty, I bought that argument at the time. And now I have to wonder: are the Republicans willing to apply the same strict standard to their own man at the top? (That was a rhetorical question, of course. But I’d love to hear some Bush supporters try to answer it.)
Monday, September 11, 2006
Impeachment Sauce for the Republican Gander
Sunday, September 10, 2006
The Calculus of Commitment
Eugene criticizes the overuse of the term ‘commit-phobic,’ since the suffix ‘-phobic’ implies an irrational fear, whereas for many men (the term is almost always applied to men) the fear of long-term romantic commitment is perfectly justified. Lots of interesting posts follow in the comments section; the award for best comment goes to Dan Simon.
Naturally, I tend to think about the subject in economic terms. The mating-and-dating process is an application of search theory. Just like someone searching for a job or a product, a person searching for a mate faces both (a) costs of searching and (b) a distribution of possible outcomes, some of which will be more satisfying than others. The optimal search strategy in such a context, it turns out, is to calculate a “reservation level” of satisfaction: a generous enough compensation package, a low enough product price, or in this case, a pleasing enough mate. Once you’ve calculated your reservation level, you keep searching until you find a mate who meets or exceeds it.
There are two ways you can botch the optimization. One is setting your reservation level too high. As a result, you’ll reject mates who should have been good enough, and you’ll likely spend too long on the market (thereby incurring unnecessarily large search costs). A person whose reservation level is definitely too high might justifiably be called a ‘commitment-phobe.’ But the commitment-phobe is easily confused with the perfectly rational searcher who simply has low costs of search or unusually high returns from finding a more compatible mate. Hence Eugene’s objection to the overuse of the term.
The other optimization error is setting your reservation level too low. As a result, you run the risk of accepting mates you should have rejected. Your search costs will be low because you exit the market quickly, but you’ll also suffer from a lower stream of returns from your low-quality match – not to mention the risk of getting divorced and having to re-enter the market again (with a “pre-owned” sticker attached). A person whose reservation level is definitely too low might be called a ‘commitment-phile,’ but for some reason this term hasn’t caught on. But given the divorce rate, it’s not hard to believe such people exist.
What causes optimization failures? The most obvious answer is mistaken beliefs about the parameters – e.g., underestimation of search costs, inflated notions of one’s own quality, and so on. But I suspect there’s also a more subtle source of error: poor understanding of probability theory. Suppose that, given one’s reservation level, the probability of finding a mate during one period of searching is p. It follows mathematically that your expected length of search is 1/p. Thus, if you stand a 2% chance of meeting an acceptable mate during each month of searching, on average it should take you 50 months, or just over 4 years, to find an acceptable mate. But there’s a wide distribution around the average. You might get lucky and find an acceptable mate in your first 6 months! And then you might think, “Wow, that was easy. Maybe my chances are better than I thought!” So you adjust your reservation level up; we might call this the “better shop around” effect. At the other extreme, you might get unlucky and find yourself still searching after 8 years. You might think to yourself, “This is harder than I thought; perhaps it’s time to lower the standards a bit.” So you adjust your reservation level down; this would be called the “settling” effect.
Here’s the rub: some adjustment to one’s reservation level is justified, to respond to learning and changed circumstances. But it’s difficult to sort out the signals. If you found an acceptable mate quickly, did you just get lucky, or had you defined acceptability too low relative to your prospects? If you’re taking too long to find a mate, have you been unlucky, or are you just being too damn picky? Given the incredibly small sample size – you’re the only you – it’s no simple matter to distinguish the good strategic adjustments from the bad.
Related posts here, here, and here.
Saturday, September 09, 2006
Slaved by Zero
What do the immigration debate and the inequality debate have in common? Both seem to turn on zero-sum versus positive-sum framing of the issues.
Much opposition to immigration derives from the belief – correct or not – that immigrants create a burden on the welfare state. Since the dollars spent on welfare (including public health, education, and so forth) can’t simultaneously be spent on other projects (or left in the taxpayers’ pockets), the zero-sum framing is justified: the immigrants’ gain is our loss. But even if the immigrants-on-welfare argument is put to rest, either by laws restricting immigrants’ reliance on welfare or evidence demonstrating the problem is small, some people will still oppose immigration because of the perception that immigrants take American jobs. Here, the zero-sum framing is mistaken, relying on the bogus belief that the number of jobs is fixed, meaning the immigrants' job gain is our job loss. But given that belief, opposition to immigration follows naturally enough.
The debate over inequality follows a similar pattern. Why should we be concerned at all about inequality? The presumption is that gains to the rich necessarily imply losses to the poor – another example of zero-sum framing. The presumption is wrong, because it fails to consider the possibility that everyone might gain in absolute terms. It’s true, for instance, that the share of income received by every income quintile except the top one has decreased over time. But it’s also true that the average real income of every quintile has increased at the very same time. It’s just not true that the rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer; instead, the rich have gotten a lot richer and the poor have gotten a little richer. It’s a positive-sum game. Once this fact is understood, some opposition to inequality should dissolve. But the debate isn’t over, because the opponents of inequality fall back on a different argument: that the relative success of the rich makes the rich feel smug and the poor feel envious. Even if the absolute material well-being of the poor has improved, their relative well-being has declined. By means of this argument, the inequality debate is framed once again as a zero-sum game: if we care intensely about relative status, gains to the rich are ipso facto losses to the poor.
It should go without saying that I’m simplifying greatly. Probably the most important factor I’ve glossed over is that positive-sum is not synonymous with beneficial to everyone involved. Immigration may (I believe does) create gains that exceed the losses to all parties, making it a positive-sum activity; and in the long run, I think almost everyone shares in the gains (through, among other things, lower-priced goods and services). But almost doesn’t mean universal, and some people assuredly lose. They would have reason to oppose immigration even without a zero-sum perspective. Similar, the kind of economic system that generates high inequality along with widespread growth in real incomes doesn’t help absolutely everyone. There are certainly many short-run losers and some long-run losers as well. They, too, might have reason to oppose the system even without thinking in zero-sum terms. Still, I think it’s interesting how far the zero-versus-positive-sum distinction goes in explaining policy debates.
Verdura Blocks Rock!
Is it wrong to love a landscaping block? Don't prejudge the answer until you've cast your eyes upon the Verdura plantable dry stack modular retaining wall system. You, too, may fall prey to its charms. So strong! So flexible! So easy to use! Stack them high or stack them low. Lay them in graceful curves and cover them with flowers! And, yes my friends, love the Verdura block as an elegant and economical market solution to our landscaping needs.
Friday, September 08, 2006
Blood Money
The FDA has slapped the Red Cross with a $4.2 million fine for violations of blood-safety regulations.
The Red Cross will not use donated money to pay the fine, but instead will rely on operating funds, including revenue from the sales of blood products, [Red Cross spokesman Ryland] Dodge said.I can't see how it matters whether the fine is taken from operating or non-operating (i.e., donated) revenues. Money is fungible. Any expenses that would have been covered by operating revenues diverted to fine payment will have to be covered by non-operating revenues instead. One way or another, the Red Cross is out $4.2 million. Sounds to me like the Red Cross is being disingenuous to make its donors feel like their money is being spent on good deeds instead of fines. It's like a kid saying he paid his library fine with his allowance money instead of his birthday gift check from Grandma.
(I confess I've had almost zero training in accounting, so maybe the distinction between operating and non-operating revenues affects the Red Cross's management decisions in some way -- though I don't see why it should in this case, given that the fine is presumably a one-time fixed cost, and thus should affect no marginal decisions. Maybe someone with an accounting background will enlighten me.)
Class Bias in Higher Education
Thanks to an email from its author, Prof. Jeffrey L. Harrison of the University of Florida College of Law, I recently discovered the Class Bias in Higher Education blog. What a fascinating read! Prof. Harrison goes straight for the jugular in his critique of how self-serving academics enjoy lives of leisure at the public expense.
He lambastes, for instance, a Sloan Foundation survey as "embarrassingly slanted to signal the 'right' answers to privileged professors who want even more," and calls it "a study of people with salaries high enough to hire childcare, who are in the classroom 5 to 10 hours a week, who can cancel and reschedule classes at any time, and who can do most of their research at home." Ouch. That zinger comes close enough to singe.
Prof. Harrison very plausibly asserts that
people with working-class backgrounds are not found in our profession in anything close to the same proportion as they are in society. Further, current efforts to improve diversity are far too exclusionary to be responsive to what I believe to be a pervasive class bias. Surely a truly diverse and representative faculty would include far more than a smattering of men and women who have grown up in a working-class culture.
As I've elsewhere observed, the American Association of Law Schools imposes perplexingly discriminatory limits on how hiring committees search for would-be faculty members. Perhaps it's just as well, then, that the AALS does not collect data about the class background of each candidate.
Prof. Harrison pegs some of the blame for the privileges of academia on the difficulty of measuring just what the heck we academics do. Discussing the problem of assessing law school performance, Prof. Harrison says, "The subjectivity involved in evaluation leaves huge gaps for interpretation by faculty committees and self-promotion by individual faculty." He might well add to that list of subjective measures the reputation scores that play so prominent a role in U.S. News and World Report's law school rankings.
[Crossposted to MoneyLaw.]
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Opportunistic Definitional Change
On the Freakonomics blog, Steven Levitt discusses a recent report that shows a correlation between autism and older fathers, and he wonders whether economics has much to say about the rise in autism cases. In the comments, “Sarah” nails it:
I have a friend whose son was clearly “not right”. After lots of agonizing, and lots of testing, he was diagnosed with Asperger’s-type autism.At least one other commenter took umbrage at the implication (by commenters less careful than Sarah) that autism and Asperger’s syndrome are just made-up. But you don’t have to deny the reality of the condition to recognize the economic incentives at work.
Now, it’s well-known that diagnosis of anything can often bring tremendous relief to someone who has been suffering with a nameless problem, but in this case, the relief was something different: it was relief that he QUALIFIED for state-funded programs to help autistic kids. That meant physiotherapy, speech therapy, a special preschool, swimming lessons, and more.
I don’t deny that this boy will really benefit from these programs, and I’m glad he’s getting them. And, obviously, his parents don’t want him to be autistic. But… there must be many cases (autism, and other syndromes or diseases), where an upswing in prevalence reflects the pushing of borderline cases into diagnosis, in order to qualify people for benefits. If that’s not economics, I don’t know what is!
As experts in the field recognize, autism and Asperger’s are spectrum disorders, which means there’s no sharp dividing line between those who have them and those who don’t, just as there’s no specific height that qualifies a man as tall, and no specific number of grains of sand that defines a heap. Yet there really are tall people, there really are heaps, and there really are people with autism or Asperger’s. (As my co-blogger Tom likes to say, the existence of dawn does not abolish the difference between night and day!)
In our paper on slippery slopes, Mario Rizzo and I argue that slippery slope effects are especially likely in the presence of gradients like these. When law or policy grants privileges to, or imposes duties on, people who fall into a vaguely defined class, new cases will continually arise that push the class-defining boundary one way or the other. For instance, if retarded people are exempt from the death penalty, the dividing line between retarded and not retarded becomes very important – and some criminal defendants will have a rather strong interest in being classified as retarded.
In the context of spectrum properties, the arbitrariness of any strict definition will always produce hard-to-justify distinctions – such as executing someone with a 70 IQ while sparing someone with a 69 IQ, or granting funds to a middle-class family with a child who is borderline-autistic by current standards while refusing funds to a poorer family with a just barely more functional child. The natural tendency will be to shift the boundary to produce consistency of treatment.
In principle, the class-defining boundary can slide in either direction, becoming more or less inclusive. But when public policy rewards membership in a class, the incentives naturally point toward more inclusive definitions, as seems to be the case here. The direction of definitional change is most predictable when the benefits of expansion are concentrated on a small group (such as parents of children who are borderline autistic by present standards and the professionals who treat them), while the costs are spread thinly over a large group (such as taxpayers).
I won’t be surprised if future econometric studies reveal that the rate of autism and Asperger’s diagnoses has grown fastest in those states that provide public funding for children so diagnosed, and possibly grew earliest in those states that adopted the funding earliest. Levitt is the acknowledged expert at this kind of analysis.
The potential for a slippery slope does not necessarily argue against having programs to fund treatment of autistic/Asperger’s children, of course. But it should at least make us wary of their growth. We should not expect any definition to produce a clean separation between the cases-that-should-be-funded and cases-that-should not, and that vagueness creates a built-in mechanism to encourage growth of the program.
The Constitution as Contract
Forget it's the U.S. Constitution we expound. Think of it, instead, as a contract. The Constitutional contract primarily binds agents of the U.S. federal government and its constituent states. That, it does expressly. It binds other parties more weakly, via implied or hypothetical consent. But anyone over whom the U.S. claims jurisdiction thereby wins standing to enforce the Constitution as an intended beneficiary. Thus may citizens sue the government.
Viewing the Constitution as a contract proves quite an interesting exercise. It suggests a number of interpretive rules--rules tested over hundreds of years and thousands of cases--that could help us discern the objective meaning of the constitution and the proper scope of its enforcement. Constitutional contractualism suggests, for instance, that we interpret the U.S. Constitution as a form contract written, judged, and offered by a government services provider. That adhesion contract binds citizens to the extent that they objectively manifest consent to the federal government's proposed bargain. The Constitution thus binds most of us only rather weakly.
How should we read the constitution-qua-contract? Pretty much the way we read other contracts. Thus, for instance, we should start with the plainest meaning of the text, taken as a whole, that a reasonable person would have adopted when accepting the contract; we should interpret vague or ambiguous language against the agreement's drafter; and we should favor efficient and equitable remedies for breach. At the time of its founding, on that view, the Constitution meant what those who ratified it did or should have thought it meant. Now, though, the Constitution means what it does or should mean to those of us it binds or benefits.
A contractual constitution can claim justifiability only relative to certain parties, such as one who signs a promise to obey the Constitution. A hierarchy of justifications applies to the constitutional contract, running from the ideal of a negotiated and express agreement between equals, through a form contract imposed from on high, down to consent implied by conduct, bottoming out at hypothetical consent. Greater justifications trump lesser ones. An express disavowal of allegiance, for instance, typically negates an argument for implied consent. Constitutional contractualism thus suggests that the U.S. Constitution binds government agents very tightly, while binding the government's subjects only loosely, at most.
Contractual constitutionalism suggests reforms that might make the U.S. federal government, as well as governments generally, more justified. It suggests, for instance, that suits against the government should not be tried by agents of the same. Rather, they should go to private, third-party, mutually-chosen arbitrators. Judicial independence and the jury system gesture in that direction, but leave ample room for improvement. Contractual constitutionalism also suggests interesting observations about the legal status of immigrants, the validity of "The Pledge of Allegiance," and the proper response to secession.
Because it advocates the initiation of coercive force, statism cries out for justification. Constitutional contractualism answers that call with a ruggedly practical methodology, one built on time-tested principles of common law. Yet constitutional contractualism also offers a transcendental appeal, one springing from the observation that a putative justification must seek with good intent to win the consent of its audience. Thus do principles of contract law measure the justification of the Constitution; thus does consent counterbalance coercion on the scales of justice.
I plan to work up these ideas in an academic paper, tentatively called "The Constitution as Contract." I'm come late to the Con Law party, admittedly. I stand at the entry, shuffling my feet awkwardly, staring at my shoes. Please introduce me to arguments you think I should know, whether friendly or challenging. I've of course read Randy Barnett's inspiring work and I've followed the long-running blogospheric debate over originalism at Larry Solum's, Legal Theory Blog, Brian Leiter's Law School Reports, Mike Rappaport at The Right Coast, Jack M. Balkin at Balkinzation, and elsewhere. It looks like a fun discussion, and one that I hope to enliven.
Happy Just to Have Participated
Marginal Revolution : USA Today
:: Agoraphilia : The Honolulu Advertiser
Maybe our ranking would improve if I resumed posting more than twice a week...
Saturday, September 02, 2006
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Hey Baby, What's Your Fruit Sign?
For some reason, I'm mildly amused by Dasani's MySpace marketing gimmick, the "What's Your Fruit Sign" page. Input your birth year, and the page will identify your fruit sign: strawberry, grape, lemon, or raspberry (turns out I'm a raspberry). And then you can find out your turn-ons and turn-offs, get your weekly horoscope, connect with others who share your fruit sign, etc.
It's utterly pointless and stupid, of course. I'll never visit the website again, and I'll never get back the two minutes I spent there. But I appreciate the sly lampooning of more traditional signs like those of the Zodiac and Chinese horoscope, which make about as much sense.
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Prediction Markets Whup on Copyrights and Patents
I've just posted to SSRN my forthcoming paper, "Prediction Markets for Promoting the Progress of Sciences and the Useful Arts." It will appear in vol. 14 of the George Mason Law Review. You can download a pretty-to-close-to-final draft at here. The abstract:
Copyrights and patents promote only superficial progress in the sciences and useful arts. Copyright law primarily encourages entertaining works, whereas patent law mainly inspires marginal improvements in mature technologies. Neither form of intellectual property does much to encourage basic research and development. Essential progress suffers.
Prediction markets offer another way to promote the sciences and useful arts. In general, prediction markets support transactions in claims about unresolved questions of fact. A prediction market specifically designed to promote progress in the sciences and useful arts - call it a scientific prediction exchange or SPEx - would support transactions in a variety of prediction certificates, each one of which promises to pay its bearer in the event that an associated claim about science, technology, or public policy comes true. Like other, similar markets in information, a scientific prediction exchange would aggregate, measure, and share the opinions of people paid to find the truth.
Because it would reward accurate answers to factual questions, a SPEx would encourage essential discoveries about the sciences and useful arts. Researchers and developers in those fields could count on the exchange to turn their insights into profit. In contrast to copyrights or patents, therefore, a SPEx would target fundamental progress. Furthermore, and in contrast to copyrights and patents, the exchange would not impose deadweight social costs by legally restricting access to public goods. To the contrary, a scientific prediction exchange would generate a significant positive externality: Claim prices that quantify the current consensus about vital controversies.
This article measures copyright and patent law against the Constitution's call for promotion of the Progress of science and useful Arts, to find those traditional forms of intellectual property lacking. As a cure for that policy failure, it suggests scientific prediction exchanges. Given that such exchanges offer the promise of large net public and private benefits, why don't they already thrive in the United States? Because the laws written for commodity futures, securities, and gambling markets cast a pall of legal uncertainty over scientific prediction exchanges. To ease that unwarranted burden, the article explores a variety of strategies designed to guarantee the legality of scientific prediction exchanges. The article concludes with an all-too-apt illustration of how legal risks can discourage prediction markets from promoting the progress of science and the useful arts.
Research That Sucks
My essay on "The Political Economy of Non-Coercive Vampire Lifestyles" appears in the newly-released volume The Undead and Philosophy. For a preview of the argument, check out my two previous blog posts that reference the essay.
I eagerly await this book's appearance in our faculty publication display case.
Mechanical Beauty
I've long had an interest in continuously variable transmissions (CVTs), going so far as to invent the Biaxial Idler for Continuously Variable Transmission, U.S. Utility Patent, No. 5,538,484 (July 23, 1996). I came up with that design while spending long hours bicycling, pondering the limitations of the customary derailleur. Typically for academic, though, I came up with something that works better in theory than in practice. Finally, though, some real engineers appear to have come up with a workable CVT for bicycles.
A fellow fan of human-powered technology recently tipped me off to Fallbrook Tech's NuVinci continuously variable planetary drive. As the first commercially-available application of their design, Fallbrook plans to market an in-hub bicycle transmission. You can see a very cool animation here. Tastes vary, I know, but I'd call the NuVinci design gorgeously elegant.
The NuVinci transmission holds the promise of improving not just bikes, but electric cars, windmills, and other useful things. I salute that sort of practical improvement, of course. Nonetheless, I also admit to having a soft spot for somewhat impractical tinkering. Hence my membership in the Human Powered Vehicle Assocation and my Semi-Prone Bicycle, U.S. Provisional Application for Utility Patent, No. 06/015856 (May 28, 1996). I doubt that, say, the pedal and propeller powered hydrofoil will save any lives. But it surely does no more harm than any other artistic work, and to some of us mechanical hackers it holds just as much beauty.
Monday, August 28, 2006
The Size of Your Graph: It's Not Just the Length, It's the Girth
And now back to my regularly scheduled bashing of bad statistics reporting. As Tyler says, this map of the worldwide presence of Starbucks and McDonald’s is very pretty. It’s also highly misleading. Here’s a graph I extracted from the lower right-hand corner:
The graph is intended to show the dominance of McDonald’s over other franchises. But it commits the classic error (seen also in this previous post) of showing differences using a single dimension of two-dimensional pictograms.
Look at the difference between the sales of McDonald’s and Burger King. McD’s makes $41.3 billion, BK only $11.3 billion. So McD’s sales are 3.6 times as large as BK’s. But the eye naturally focuses on the total area of the pictogram, which rises with the square of the proportional increase in height. As a result, the golden arches are nearly thirteen times (3.6 squared) the size of the BK logo. Unless your brain subtracts out the negative space inside the arches, in which case the deception is not quite so bad.
For a clearer example, unaffected by negative space, compare BK and Starbucks. BK’s sales are almost three times those of Starbucks. But if you calculate the areas of the circular logos, you’ll find that BK’s logo is between seven and eight times as large.
Is it possible to be even more misleading? Sadly, yes. Here’s a graph taken from the lower left-hand corner of the map:
This graph is supposed to show the growth in the number of Starbucks stores over time. But here, the numbers are depicted with three-dimensional pictograms. The apparent volume of the pictograms rises with the cube of the proportional increase in height. Looking at the tops of the cylinders, we can see there were about 2000 stores in 1999, as compared to 6200 in 2003. So the number of stores has approximately tripled. But the volume of the 2003 cylinder is approximately twenty-seven times the volume of the 1999 cylinder.
I won’t speculate on whether these deceptions were intentional.
Doing the Math on Prison Sex
I spend a lot of time on this blog debunking bad statistics reporting, but this time I actually want to commend some good statistics reporting. A recent study on reported sexual improprieties in the prison system included some interesting stats about the involvement of prison staff in such cases:
Roughly half of all sexual impropriety reported in U.S. prisons and jails last year was perpetrated by correctional staff, not inmates.Based on these results, the fun-because-counterintuitive conclusion to draw would be that female guards are more dangerous or unethical than the male ones. (As Fark reports, presumably in jest, “Females [are] 66% hornier than males.”) Fortunately, reporter Frank Green does not reach that conclusion. Instead, he quotes an academic who explains why the results aren’t that strange after all:
Female staff were the offenders in two-thirds of the prison cases, and two-thirds of the victims of prison staff were male inmates, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.
[Brenda V.] Smith [a professor at American University’s Washington School of Law and a member of the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission] said it is not surprising that a larger number of female staff in prisons are involved in sex offenses. Male inmates outnumber female inmates more than 10-to-1. The federal report did not break down the data for homosexual versus heterosexual misconduct, but assuming most staff and most inmates are heterosexual, you would expect to find more female staff reported as perpetrators and more male inmates as victims, she said.So congratulations to Mr. Green for including a sensible interpretation of an odd-sounding statistic.
Still, the article left me wondering. Given the large number of male inmates, we should expect that most sexual relations between staff and inmates would involve female staff. But how many, exactly? What fraction would be large enough for us justifiably to conclude that female staff commit a disproportionate share of offenses? What’s the benchmark statistic?
The question is more difficult than it sounds, because it turns on both the male-to-female ratio of inmates and the male-to-female ratio of staff. It also depends on the frequency of homosexuality among both males and females. And it depends on how many of the interactions are actually consensual, since a non-consensual homosexual interaction need involve only one homosexual. Or even less than one, if the act arose out of sheer desperation or a desire to terrorize the victim. (Even consensual sex acts between staff and inmates are considered violations of prison policy.) The article didn’t include all that information, but I took a shot at deriving a rough benchmark anyway. [Warning: Remainder of post probably interesting only to math dorks.]
According to the article, inmates are 91% men and 9% women, while staff are 67% men and 33% women. I assumed (a) that 5% of both male and female guards are homosexual, (b) that only the sexual orientation of staff is relevant in determining whether a sexual encounter takes place, (c) that only sexual encounters consistent with the staff member’s orientation occur, and (d) that staff-prisoner interactions are independent events; that is, there is no sorting designed to reduce the frequency of interactions between male prisoners and female staff or vice versa.
Here are the expected frequencies for different types of interactions:
Male prisoner, male homosexual staff: 0.030485
Male prisoner, male heterosexual staff: 0.579215
Male prisoner, female homosexual staff: 0.015015
Male prisoner, female heterosexual staff: 0.285285
Female prisoner, male homosexual staff: 0.003015
Female prisoner, male heterosexual staff: 0.057285
Female prisoner, female homosexual staff: 0.001485
Female prisoner, female heterosexual staff: 0.0282125
Assumptions (b) and (c), above, imply that only the italicized interactions above could result in sexual encounters; I refer to these as “matched” interactions. So the question is, what fraction of all “matched” interactions involve female staff? The answer, it turns out, is 0.7656, or about 77%. Since the observed percentage is only about 67%, this seems like a “dog bites man” story: it appears that female staff are disproportionately less likely to be involved.
I hasten to add, given the many assumptions made, that my calculations should be taken with a hefty grain of salt.
Saturday, August 26, 2006
On Employer Health Costs and Crowding Out
Don Boudreaux has a nice post at Café Hayek, responding to Malcolm Gladwell’s claim that the cost of providing healthcare to workers puts American companies at a competitive disadvantage relative to their foreign competitors (in countries with government-run healthcare systems). I don’t want to repeat Don’s arguments, but I have an addendum.
As Don implies in passing, the U.S. healthcare system is very far from a free market. The phenomenon of employer-provided health insurance is largely attributable to a distortion in the tax code, and the results are undesirable in a variety of ways. But are higher employer costs among those bad results? Yes, employers make substantial expenditures on healthcare. But the question is whether costs are higher on net. There is a good deal of evidence that health insurance benefits crowd out other forms of compensation, particularly wages. Here’s an illustrative graph, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data:
(Note: since the time I downloaded the data, the BLS has changed it to reflect a different base year.) The blue line shows how employer costs in the form of wages have changed over time. The pink line shows the same for employer costs in the form of benefits – mostly health insurance. Note how the pink line has risen faster than the blue line; moreover, notice how the blue line tends to stay flat or fall when the pink line is rising most steeply.
Now, this is probably a bad thing for workers, because the rising cost of healthcare is eating into their compensation. But is it really a bad thing for employers? What they care about most is the total expenditure on labor. This rises with worker productivity (which explains the growth in overall compensation, shown by the yellow line), but it does not necessarily rise with the cost of healthcare. In the short run, rising health costs will hurt employers who cannot quickly adjust wages. But in the long run, they can change the composition of the compensation package by, among other things, resisting wage increases they would otherwise have granted.
I don’t wish to imply that rising health costs have no ill effects on employers. Among other things, they have to deal with workers disgruntled by the paucity of wage increases. But it’s certainly an error to say the employers’ burden is equal to their entire expenditure on health insurance, because that conclusion fails to account for any amount of crowding out.
Thursday, August 24, 2006
The Definition of Hyperbole
For CNN's report on the Murkowski story yesterday, the anchor's pre-commercial teaser was, "Another politician loses in the primary. Are incumbents an endangered species?"
Hah! And again I say, hah! If I squash a couple of cockroaches today, will CNN ask if cockroaches are an endangered species?
Lawyers Online
Will blogging revolutionize the practice of law? Nah. To explain that curmugeonly view, I recently wrote a very short paper, "The Impact of Blogging on the Practice of Law: Hit the Snooze Button," 11 Nexus 75 (2006). I invite you to download a PDF of it. Here's the abstract:
To forecast how blogging will impact the practice of law, we need to consider how some similar, equally revolutionary technology has impacted attorneys. I nominate the clock radio. Given that example, you might suppose that I don't think blogging will radically change the practice of law. Correct. Blogging has many virtues. It offers a largely harmless outlet for extroverted cranks and cheap entertainment for procrastinating office workers. Blogging even stands to do some very real good. I have nothing against blogging; I blog, myself. I simply don't think it will change the practice of law very much. Why not? First, because blogs seldom offer the sort of detailed and applied legal analysis that a careful attorney must perform. Second, because an attorney would find it next to impossible to practice law via a blog without violating several rules of professional responsibility. I thus conclude that neither reading nor writing blogs will have a significant influence on the practice the law.
Sunday, August 20, 2006
"Victim Disarmament" Instead of "Gun Control"
I recently encountered an alternative to "gun control" that I immediately embraced as a better term: "victim disarmament." Most political attempts to restrict access to firearms do not "control" criminals very well, leaving the rest of us at the mercy of armed aggressors. "Victim disarmament" thus describes such policies more accurately than "gun control" does. And, not incidentally, "victim disarmament" focuses attention on the policy failure that should worry us most: Harming innocent citizens who want only to uphold the law and exercise their rights to self-defense.
I thank Professor Michael Huemer, of the University of Colorado's Philosophy Department, for introducing me to "victim disarmament." The term has been around a while, apparently. I don't think, however, that it has won the wide use that it deserves. Please help me change that!
(Long-time readers will recognize this post as yet another example of my interest in honest and effective rhetoric. In earlier posts, I argued for such terms as "lawmakers," "leftist," "drug war," and "statism." In those and other cases, I've tried to follow a policy choosing words that persuade because they reveal important truths.)
Saturday, August 19, 2006
Getting Stoned
In the postal store this afternoon, I saw some inspirational river stones much like these:
And I wondered, as I have in the past, why products like these always showcase words like “faith,” “hope,” “love,” and “imagine,” but never words like “reason,” “logic,” “think,” and “justify.”
The obvious answer, I suppose, is that people don’t generally associate logos-based virtues with objects of beauty. But sometimes they try, as evidenced by the success of Successories. Yes, they’re highly annoying, but not because they’re ugly.
Anyway, if you’d really like river stones engraved with words like those I suggested above, you can have them custom-made here. And since they’ll engrave any word you like, you don’t even have to stick to the upbeat and inspirational. You could vent your spleen with “hate,” “envy,” “backstab,” and “deceive.” You could get inscrutable with “sponge,” “the,” “ahem,” and “phlebotomy.” Or you could get surreal with “This is how you” (with nothing engraved on the back) or simply “This is not a stone.”
Friday, August 18, 2006
Pug Bowling
Okay, if you're not reading Radley Balko's The Agitator, you should be. But if you're not, you missed his link to this. Just watch it. I laughed so hard I cried.
Thursday, August 17, 2006
On Noble Lies and Intentional Self-Deception
I’ve been meaning to link this post by Julian for a couple of weeks now, because it marks the first comprehensible explanation I’ve found of Maggie Gallagher’s argument against gay marriage. I kept thinking I’d find some profound way to paraphrase it, but I give up. Julian gets it exactly right:
I think Gallagher's view is something like this: If you're too explicit about marriage (as a civil, legal institution, anyway) being just about regulating procreation, it loses the mystique that pulls people into it. So you can't just reserve the institution for people who have or are having children. Marriage, on this account, is a little like the "here comes the plane, flying into the hangar" game you play with an infant when you want him to eat his strained spinach. If you're too overt about the function of the game, it won't serve that function.As Julian notes earlier in the post, the argument has the form of a Noble Lie: people have to believe one thing in order for them to achieve something else.
On the other hand, if you allow too explicitly that marriage can also be centrally about love between two adults, it becomes obvious that this may not be best served by marrying the first person you have a child with. What Gallagher and company want to preserve, in other words, is an ideal that links personal romantic fulfillment and childrearing. If we start analyzing too closely, of course, it become apparent that these things won't necessarily go together. The function of marriage, then, is to create the illusion of a necessary unity between two logically distinct elements: one functional or utilitarian, the other romantic or spiritual. And the reason gay marriage opponents so seldom put it in quite this clear a fashion is that to speak openly about the importance of preserving an illusion is precisely to concede that it is an illusion, which is what you were trying to avoid. [boldface emphasis added]
I’m less hostile than Julian to the concept of a Noble Lie (though in the case of marriage I don’t think one is really necessary). I think, for instance, that utilitarian goals are best achieved if people don’t approach social issues from a utilitarian perspective as a matter of course, but instead generally start from some notion of rights or personal autonomy. But with any Noble Lie, there is always the danger of the truth getting out. And once the genie is out of the bottle, the first-best outcome – the one whose achievement depended on the perpetuation of the Lie – may no longer be an option.
The Noble Lie in the realm of social choice has an analog in the realm of personal choice: self-deception to achieve goals that cannot be sought directly. Probably the best example is the desire to be surprised. If you try to be surprised, you probably never will. Or you might be surprised sometimes, but no more (and probably less) often than if you didn’t try. So if you want to be surprised, your best strategy is to distract yourself with other activities and do your best to forget about your desire for surprise. But there is a danger, at least for the mentally active, of infinite regress: if you choose not to try to be surprised so that you’ll be surprised, then you actually are trying to be surprised... It’s like trying not to think. If you’re thinking about the fact that you’re not thinking, then you’re still thinking.
Trying to be surprised is not the only example. Suppose you’re interested in meeting members of the opposite sex. If you try to do this deliberately, you’re likely to send off a strong creepy vibe that will stymie your efforts. So you’re better off doing something else – you know, just hanging out with friends, having fun, in a place where there might happen to be people worth meeting. But hold on: if you know that’s the real reason you’re hanging out, then that old creepy vibe can creep right back in. You’ll be most successful at meeting members of the opposite sex if that really isn’t your purpose. If that’s not a genuine paradox, it’s close.
What’s my point? Well, somehow we manage, imperfectly, to overcome these personal choice paradoxes. People who like surprises do get surprised, and people who want to meet members of the opposite sex quite often do. How? I’m not sure, but I think the mechanism is a kind of mental compartmentalization. We develop rules of behavior and habits of mind that put us in the sort of situations where (we hope) we’ll get the things we want – and then we forget about it and just fly on autopilot. The internalized rules and habits take on a life of their own, and that’s often a good thing. Perhaps the same kind of process, on a social level, can help preserve Noble Lies that are actually worth preserving.
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Searching in Vain
Is Carly Simon in the news today? StatCounter tells me at least five people have reached Agoraphilia via Google or MSN searches for "apricot scarf lyric," "wore an apricot scarf," "the apricot scarf some say it was about mick," or some other variant on the theme. They all landed on this post from last year, in which I analyzed the lyrics of "You're So Vain." I'm pretty sure the searchers were different people, because the searches originated in diverse locations (Virginia, California, Idaho, Oklahoma, Massachusetts) as well as diverse ISPs (Adelphia, Verizon, and RoadRunner, at least). Anyone know what's up?
While it's on my mind, I might as well respond to Will's criticism from last year. Will insists the song is not actually about a man but about Simon's own emotional frustration. Why do I resist this explanation? It's fundamentally right, but it also dodges the question. Yes, she's emotionally frustrated, that's obvious; but who got her that way? I stand by my final hypothesis from the earlier post: that the song is actually about a composite of different men, possibly including some leading contenders like Warren Beatty and Mick Jagger. Each one of these self-absorbed men had the same kind of emotional impact on her. Not only does this explanation make logical sense (my original point), but Simon has strongly hinted at this explanation on more than one occasion. Look here, and be sure to read the "FAME" and Charlie Rose entries.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
The Shortest Distance Between Two Complaints
Here’s the first sentence from a Yahoo/AFP news report:
The world now has more overweight people than hungry ones...Hey, that’s fantastic! A cause for celebration! We’re on our way to conquering world hunger and starvation! Oh, wait:
...and governments should design economic strategies to influence national diets, a conference of international experts have heard.Wow, that was fast. It took less than one sentence to get from victory to hand-wringing to paternalism.
Seriously, you’d think we could take just one moment to savor the fact that capitalism and technology are gradually eliminating famine and malnutrition. But the tone of the entire article is negative and, of course, paternalistic. Among the experts’ suggestions quoted in the article:
Food prices could be used to manipulate people's diets and tilt them towards healthier options, [Prof. Barry Popkin] suggested.Nothing in the article challenges the significance of the obesity problem, asks whether manipulating people’s dietary choices is a proper role for government, or questions the efficacy of the proposed policies. Surprisingly, there is one proposal for deregulation:
"For instance, if we charge money for every calorie of soft drink and fruit drink that was consumed, people would consume less of it.
"If we subsidise fruit and vegetable production, people would consume more of it and we would have a healthier diet."
While a direct tax on food in the US to reduce obesity would not be politically acceptable, agricultural subsidies which resulted in cheap food could be reduced.Boy, wouldn’t that be nice. The problem is that most agricultural subsidies aren’t outright payments per unit of output – which would indeed lower prices for consumers – but instead programs to raise prices, such as price supports coupled with government purchases of the resulting surplus, or tariff barriers designed to keep out cheap foreign foodstuffs. I suppose Popkin would like to keep those agricultural policies in place, and fortunately for him – but unfortunately for the rest of us – doing so is politically feasible, thanks to the powerful agricultural lobby.
Feeders Help Writers Reach Readers
I've signed up for Bloglines at the suggestion of my host and fellow blogger, Glen, who described it as a "brilliant" way to keep track of my favorite blogs. Our conversation on the topic got started when I asked him to add Jurisdynamics under the "BLOGS WE ACTUALLY READ" list in Agoraphilia's left margin. I noted, as an aside, that some of the blogs listed there appear to have fallen into desuetude. Glen replied, in effect, that his Bloglines subscription has largely mooted such concerns, since he relies on it to tell him when new posts appear on his favorite blogs.
(It occurs to me, in retrospect, that I might have interpreted "WE ACTUALLY READ" too narrowly. I took it to list blogs that "WE DO READ." Glen might mean the list to include blogs that "WE HAVE READ." It that event, even fossil blogs would qualify. But I digress.)
Signing up for Bloglines lead me to reflect on how it and other news feed services extend the equalizing power of blogs. Blogging has already empowered nobody writers to reach the world. In a world without news feed services, however, blogs that don't frequently offer new content risk losing their readers. No matter how much you like a blog, it's a pain to pull it up time and again only to find the same old stuff. News feeders solve that problem by making it nearly cost-free to keep tabs on your favorite, but relatively quiescent, blogs.
Blogging let us all go head-to-head with the mainstream media. Bloggers capable of generating a fairly constant stream of content tended to fare best in that contest, however. Now, thanks to Blogline and other news feeds, writers who sacrifice quantity for quality can go head-to-head with such blogging giants as Instapundit or the Daily Kos.
Monday, August 14, 2006
More on the Lawnmower Study
The full version of the lawnmower study that I blogged about last week is available online here. The full study includes much greater detail than the media reports – but also the same problems that I noted last week. Specifically:
1. The study says, “During the 15-year period, the annual number of lawn mower–related injuries to children remained relatively consistent.” No statistical test for this claim is mentioned, but the following graph is provided:
This actually looks like a mild decline to me. Moreover, the raw numbers don’t take rising population into account. Using population figures from WISQARS, plus my eyeballed estimates from the graph above (the study doesn’t provide the precise numbers), I generated lawnmower injuries per 100,000 in the 0-20 age group. (The rates did not exactly match the study’s for the two years in which they were given; I’m guessing they used different population estimates.)
Here, the decline looks even more pronounced. And indeed, every statistical test I performed indicated a statistically significant decrease in the rate of lawnmower injuries over the period in question, always with a confidence level of 95% or better.
2. Like the media reports, the study itself concludes, “The relative consistency of the number of lawn mower–related injuries to children during the 15-year study period is evidence that current prevention strategies are inadequate.” As I said before, this is a complete non sequitur. Even if the number or rate of injuries were constant over time (which does not seem to be the case), that wouldn’t mean it was unacceptably high. The rate could be consistently high, or consistently low, or consistently moderate. To know which, we would need some reasonable (i.e., non-zero) standard for comparison.
The study also says, “Injuries that are related to lawn mowers are an important cause of pediatric morbidity,” but it offers no comparisons with other sources of injury to support this claim. Again using data from the WISQARS site, I found that lawnmower injuries constituted less than one-tenth of one percent of all non-fatal injuries for the designated age group, for every year from 2000 to 2004 (the only years for which I had complete data). Is one-tenth of one percent worth making a big deal about?
Friday, August 11, 2006
Multitasking vs. Division of Labor
This article about Inboxes (via Tyler) reminded me that it was time to clean out my own. Where do I fit in the Inbox-overloader vs. Inbox-emptier dichotomy? Somewhere in the middle; my Inbox collects emails until it reaches about 150, at which point I can’t stand it anymore and do a major housecleaning. On that day, everyone who’s been awaiting a reply from me gets one (or else never will).
I appreciated the following statement, which applies to so much more than Inbox strategies:
"Multitasking is a misnomer," says Mr. Bock. "What you're really doing is switching rapidly between tasks. And every time you switch, you have to start up again. Over the course of a day, you lose a chunk of efficiency."That passage reminded me of this one from Adam Smith:
Secondly, the advantage which is gained by saving the time commonly lost in passing from one sort of work to another, is much greater than we should at first view be apt to imagine it. It is impossible to pass very quickly from one kind of work to another; that is carried on in a different place, and with quite different tools. ... When the two trades can be carried on in the same workhouse, the loss of time is no doubt much less. It is even in this case, however, very considerable. A man commonly saunters a little in turning his hand from one sort of employment to another. When he first begins the new work he is seldom very keen and hearty; his mind, as they say, does not go to it, and for some time he rather trifles than applies to good purpose. The habit of sauntering and of indolent careless application, which is naturally, or rather necessarily acquired by every country workman who is obliged to change his work and his tools every half hour, and to apply his hand in twenty different ways almost every day of his life; renders him almost always slothful and lazy, and incapable of any vigorous application even on the most pressing occasions. Independent, therefore, of his deficiency in point of dexterity, this cause alone must always reduce considerably the quantity of work which he is capable of performing.And that’s why I prefer to concentrate my teaching duties on as few days a week as possible.
The Expected Value of Governmental Quality
Tyler (or is it Tyrone?) links to my post on war as a case of a government failure, citing it as an example of the libertarian vice of “fixing the quality of government” before comparing it to the market.
Now, that may well be a libertarian vice (although see the response from Tyler’s co-blogger Alex). And I’ve probably been guilty of it from time to time. But I just don’t see how the accusation sticks here.
In that post, I readily admitted that the war in Iraq might have gone better – or not happened at all – had someone other than GWB held office. I agreed that some government officials have done especially poorly and deserve criticism; by implication, it’s possible for other government officials to beat the curve. In short, government can vary in quality. That seems a pretty obvious point, which few would deny. But the more important issue is that the incentives of government are systematically biased in an undesirable direction, especially in the absence of competition. This is the key point that Alex made in his original post and that I was affirming, and which non-libertarians repeatedly deny or ignore. Hence the willingness of neocons to believe we can achieve any foreign policy goal if we just have sufficient will, and the willingness of liberals to lay the blame for foreign policy failure entirely at the feet of the Bush administration.
But let me address Tyler’s post more analytically. The quality of both government and market outcomes display variance around the mean. But the systematically poor incentives of government strongly indicate that the mean will be lower for government than for the market. (I use the word “market” loosely here, to mean “whatever is the alternative to government.”) So we can regard the two spheres of action as having overlapping distributions, something like this:
This is, of course, an incredibly simplistic model whose only purpose is to address Tyler’s claim about libertarians “fixing the quality of government.” That phrase implies that libertarians regard all government as having uniformly low quality – a single point instead of a distribution. As the diagram shows, if both government and market outcomes vary in quality, then it’s possible for government to outperform the market! Fine. But is that what you should expect from expanding the general power of government, or from extending government regulation into a new area, or from inserting the U.S. military in another foreign war? From an ex ante perspective, what matters most is the mean.
If the libertarian vice is to assume that government quality will always be equal to its mean, the non-libertarian vice is to assume that we can simply choose whatever point we want on the curve. If we just put the right people in power, they apparently think, we’ll jump into that right tail where the government outperforms the market! This strikes me as a much more serious vice than making decisions based on expected value.
[BTW, if anyone knows how I can create a standard bell curve in PowerPoint, please let me know. I had to draw the two above using the curve tool.]
Jurisdynamicimania
Jim Chen, law prof and associate dean at the University of Minnesota law school, recently launched a blog named, "Jurisdynamics." In the blog's introductory post, Jim explains that
Jurisdynamic tools include:
- Mathematics, statistics, and empirical analysis, including bibliometrics
- Language, linguistics, and interpretation
- Complexity theory
- Evolutionary biology and behavioral psychology
Naturally jurisdynamic subjects include:
- Innovation policy and intellectual property
- Economic regulation, antitrust, and competition policy
- Environmental protection, natural resources, and agriculture
- Natural disasters and other emergencies
- Trade, development, and public finance
- Constitutional law and democratic governance
I've been enjoying reading Jurisdynamics, not least because it used the perfect word to describe my professional approach to summer: estivation. Don't recall what that means? Check out Sunny Side d's account of our recent road trip through the state of Jefferson.
More substantively, the many language mavens who read this blog will probably share my appreciation of Jim's recent post about the (inevitable) evolution of Global English. To catch him in an elegaic mood, check out his post on the small copper. And if you find that Jurisdynamics does not exhaust your appetite for all things Chen, you should check out Unloving, 80 Iowa L. Rev. 145 (1994). D calls it her "favorite law review article, ever."
(You'd think she'd be my biggest fan, eh? But I suppose she could toss my writings a mere "not bad" and still qualify for that title. As Sunstein taught d, me, and countless other U of C law students to ask, "What's your baseline?")
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
Reforming the USN&WR Law School Rankings
Earlier this summer, I began a series of posts about the U.S. News & World Report's law school rankings. (Please see below for links to each post in the series.) My research uncovered many interesting and troubling things about the rankings. I discovered errors in the data that USN&WR used for the most recent rankings and, consequently, errors in the way that it ranked several law schools. More distressingly, I discovered that almost no safeguards exist to correct or prevent such errors. I think it fair to say that, but for my peculiar obsession with the USN&WR rankings, nobody would have noticed the errors I've documented. That won't do. We cannot rely on one nutty professor to keep the rankings honest. I thus here wrap up my series about the most recent USN&WR law school rankings by describing several reforms designed to make law school rankings more accurate and open. Although I suggest all of them, implementing any one of these reforms would make errors in the rankings less likely, and surviving errors more likely to get corrected.
1. USN&WR's Questionnaire Should Mirror the ABA's
Both the ABA and USN&WR send law schools questionnaires each fall. The latter apparently wants schools to repeat their answers to the former. Judging from how it asked schools to report their median LSAT and GPA data last fall, however, USN&WR could do a better job of clarifying exactly what data it wants. To avoid honest confusion or lawerly logic-chopping, USN&WR's questionnaire should simply ask schools to repeat exactly the same answers that they put on the ABA's questionnaire.
2. USN&WR Should Commit to Publishing Corrections and Explanations
Law schools have a strong incentive to answer the ABA's fall questionnaire accurately, as that organization controls their accreditation. USN&WR, in contrast, wields no similar threat. Furthermore, law schools have a much more powerful incentive to dissemble on the USN&WR questionnaire, as their responses directly affect their rankings. What can USN&WR do to encourage law schools to give it accurate data?
USN&WR should commit now to publishing corrections to any inaccuracies it discovers in the data it uses to rank law schools. It should do so at all events, given that students use the rankings to make very important decisions. It can do so easily, too; it need only update its website. Yet USN&WR has thus far failed to correct the erroneous data it used to (mis)rank the University of Florida College of Law and Baylor University School of Law. For shame!
Perhaps USN&WR does not want to publicly acknowledge that its law school rankings sometimes contain errors, fearing that to do so would decrease the credibility of its rankings and, ultimately, its profits. Consumers will eventually discover the errors, though. Better that USN&WR should correct the rankings when necessary and thereby reassure its customers that it sells the best data available.
In addition to promising to correct errors in its rankings, USN&WR should also promise to document the cause of any errors it discovers. That double commitment would strongly discourage law schools from misreporting data on the USN&WR questionnaire. No school wants to earn a reputation for opportunistic lying. (Nor, of course, should any school suffer the wrongful imputation that it lied if, in fact, USN&WR causes errors in the rankings.)
3. USN&WR Should Publish All the Data it Uses in Ranking Law Schools
At present, USN&WR publishes only some of the data that it uses to rank law schools. Why? It is not at all clear. Even supposing that it would constitute an unwieldy amount of information in a print format, USN&WR could easily offer all the relevant data online. Specifically, USN&WR should publish the following additional categories of data for each law school it ranks:
- median LSAT;
- median GPA;
- overhead expenditures/student for the last two years, which includes
- instruction and administration expenditures;
- a cost-of-living index applied to the preceding sum;
- library operations expenditures;
- law school miscellaneous expenditures; and
- full-time enrollments;
- instruction and administration expenditures;
- financial aid expenditures/student for the last two years, which includes
- direct expenditures on students; and
- indirect expenditures on students;
- (as well as the same full-time enrollments figures used in calculating overhead expenditures/student, above); and
- direct expenditures on students; and
- library resources.
Publishing all that data would allow others to double-check it, thereby helping to keep law schools honest and the law school rankings accurate.
4. The ABA Should Publish the Data it Collects and that USN&WR Uses to Rank Law Schools
At present, a law school must pay the ABA $1430/year to receive "take-offs" summarizing the data that the ABA has required all member schools to report. The ABA marks that data as "confidential" and forbids its unauthorized publication. As I discussed earlier, the ABA apparently treats law school data that way not to protect law schools or the ABA from public scrutiny, but rather to increase ABA revenue.
Given that revenue model, the ABA has a strong disincentive to publicly disclose all the data it collects from member schools. Fortunately, however, it need not do so in order to improve the USN&WR rankings. Rather, the ABA need only publicly disclose those few categories of data that it collects and that USN&WR uses to rank law schools. Together with the Law School Admission Council, the ABA already publishes much of that data in the Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools. It remains only for the ABA to publish data in the following categories:
- overhead expenditures/student, including
- instruction and administration expenditures;
- library operations expenditures; and
- law school miscellaneous expenditures;
- instruction and administration expenditures;
- financial aid expenditures/student including
- direct expenditures on students; and
- indirect expenditures on students.
- direct expenditures on students; and
It would greatly help, too, if the ABA would publish in a conveniently downloadable form that and the other data that USN&WR uses in its rankings. The Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools currently comes only in paper or PDF formats, making it necessary to scan or re-key the data needed double-check the USN&WR rankings. That grindingly tiresome process invites the introduction of errors, throwing a needless hurdle before those of us interested in improving the law school ranking process.
As I said, adopting any one of the reforms I suggest would improve how law schools get ranked. Adopting all four would prove better, yet. Please note, though, that I do not promote these reforms for the sake of USN&WR. It seems quite capable of milking the rankings cash cow without my help. Rather, these reforms stand to benefit all of the rest of us—students, professors, and administrators—who live in the shadow of USN&WR's law school rankings.
By opening up public access to the data used to rank law schools, moreover, the reforms I've proposed make it more likely that alternatives to the USN&WR rankings will grow in popularity. Rankings require data, after all. In a better world, the ABA would make lots and lots of data about the law schools it accredits freely available in an convenient-to-use format. Those of us who doubt that USN&WR has discovered the one sole Truth about how to measure law schools might then easily offer the world our own, new and improved, rankings.
So ends my series of posts about the most recent USN&WR law school rankings. I thank my gracious host and co-blogger, Glen Whitman, for putting up with my often-dreary march through the necessarily statistical and administrative arcana. Readers—if any!—who share my interest in these matters may want to note that I plan to write an academic paper relating and expanding on the observations I've made here. Please feel free to drop me a line if you have any suggestions about how I might make such a paper useful to you.
[NB: Cross-posted at Moneylaw.]
Earlier posts about the 2007 USN&WR law school rankings:
- Change to U.S. News Law School Rankings Methodology
- "Financial Aid" Revised in U.S. News Methodology
- How USN&WR Counts Faculty for Rankings
- Whence Come the LSATs and GPAs Used in the Rankings?
- Gains and Losses Due to USN&WR's Use of Reported Median LSATs and GPAs
- How to Model USN&WR's Law School Rankings
- Why to Model USN&WR's Law School Rankings
- The ABA and USN&WR's Law School Rankings
- Accuracy of the Model of USN&WR's Law School Rankings
- Z-Scores in Model of USN&WR's Law School Rankings
- Further Tinkering with Model of USN&WR Law School Rankings
- Baylor's Score in the USN&WR Law School Rankings
- What USN&WR Asks About Law Schools' LSATs and GPAs
- USN&WR and Baylor on that School's Data
- The University of Florida's Score in the USN&WR Rankings
- Baylor Explains the Data it Reported for the USN&WR Rankings
- More Edits to Model of USN&WR's Law School Rankings
- Insider Higher Ed Reports on USN&WR's Ranking of Baylor
- Florida Explains the Data it Reported for the USN&WR Rankings
- Scores of All Law Schools in USN&WR Rankings
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Non Sequitur Alert, Lawnmower Injuries Edition
A study from the Center for Injury Research and Policy at the Columbus Children's Research Institute shows that about 9400 children and teens are injured in lawnmower accidents each year (UPI report; CCRI website).
According to one of the study’s authors, “We found that the annual number of lawn mower-related injuries remained relatively consistent during the 15-year period studied, which demonstrates that current injury prevention strategies are inadequate.” There follows a list of recommended changes to produce safety standards.
Two problems. First, if the annual number of lawnmower injuries has remained constant for 15 years, then the annual rate must have fallen (because the population has risen). So arguably, we’ve seen an improvement in lawnmower injury prevention – either from better safety technology or from fewer children mowing the lawn. Or maybe the author simply misspoke, and it was actually the rate that remained constant.
Second, even if the rate were constant, how would that figure show injury prevention strategies are inadequate? Complete non sequitur. We cannot simply compare the number to zero; one-hundred percent safety is simply not an option, in life or in lawn-mowing. To judge the claim, we’d need to know much more than the raw number (9400 injuries per year!). We’d need to know the actual rate of injury, how it compares to other sources of injury, the costliness of better safety measures, and so on.
Neither the UPI article nor the CCRI website provides any perspective, so I will. The current U.S. population aged 0-19 is about 81 million. So 9400 injuries comes to a rate of about 11.6 per 100,000. For comparison, the rate of drowning or near-drowning for the same age range is 6.7 per 100,000; non-fatal inhalation or suffocation, 25.26 per 100,000; non-fatal dog bites, 193 per 100,000; non-fatal poisoning, 221 per 100,000. (All data from the immensely useful WISQARS website.)
Taken in context, then, a rate of 11.6 per 100,000 doesn’t seem especially large. Does the frequency of dog bites indicate that our dog-containment policies are inadequate? Or does it say more about the frequency with which kids interact with dogs? Still, it’s possible that lawnmower injuries are especially responsive to relatively low-cost alterations in behavior or technology, so the authors might be right to recommend change. The public summary of the research just doesn’t provide any reason to think so. I hope the complete study does a better job.
Sunday, August 06, 2006
War: The Paradigm Case of Government Failure
Alex Tabarrok makes an excellent and, to my mind, obviously correct point about the Iraq War:
In Fiasco, Thomas Ricks says the war on Iraq and subsequent occupation was ill-conceived, incompetently planned and poorly executed. I have no quarrel with that. What dismays me is that anyone expected any different. All wars are full of incompetence, mendacity, fear, and lies. War is big government, authoritarianism, central planning, command and control, and bureaucracy in its most naked form and on the largest scale. The Pentagon is the Post Office with nuclear weapons.When I read that, it didn’t even occur to me that liberal anti-war types would object. But it should have. Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber takes Alex to task:
But to say that the incompetence with which the Iraq war was conducted was simply business as usual is not only to get Rumsfeld et al. off the hook for the quite specifically personal incompetence that they displayed and are still displaying. It’s to make a general claim that can’t be supported using the evidence that you claim is supporting it. An incompetently conducted war does not a general case against government make.What follows in the comments section is an astonishing parade of libertarian-bashing and state-praising. (Including some who even defend the Post Office! Okay, fine, if you really think Snailmail is good government, substitute the DMV instead.) Alex responds in the comments and also in a second post at Marginal Revolution.
So what’s going on? Why are (some) liberals so anxious to dismantle Alex’s anti-war position? Their reaction becomes explicable once you realize that the left-wing explanation of government failure relies crucially on the Bad-Men-at-the-Top theory. To admit that the incentives of political actors – politicians, bureaucrats, and voters – are systematically flawed is to admit their own favorite big-government schemes could fail even if their guys were in charge. To avoid such an admission, the blame for failures in governance must be cast on specific personalities like the hated George W. Bush.
And to be sure, GWB has been a phenomenally bad leader. If someone else had been in charge, maybe things in Iraq might have turned out a little better. Or maybe we wouldn’t have invaded in the first place. So if Farrell’s point is merely that the current administration deserves to get served a big helping of spleen, sure, he’s right. But Alex said nothing to imply that Bush & Co. should get off the hook. He was making a broader point: that wars, whether Republican wars or Democratic ones (of which there have been plenty), go badly for a reason. That reason is one that leftists like Farrell are loath to admit, because it reflects poorly on big government in general.
UPDATE: Hello, MR readers! My response to Tyler's criticism is posted here.
Friday, August 04, 2006
How I Know I Won't Like a Moovie
Observing negative movie reviews is insufficient, because critics' likes and dislikes don't always match my own. So instead, I scan the reviews to see if the criticisms sound like the sort of complaints I would make. If so, I probably won't like the movie. Here's a perfect example:
I understand that realism is not the main goal in an animated movie about anthropomorphized farm animals, but, seriously, what's with the male cows in "Barnyard"? Did the bovine gender confusion at the heart of the story give no one pause at Paramount or Nickelodeon? Did the drawbacks of featuring a female lead so outweigh the benefits of cow protagonism that a mass species sex-change was required in order for the project to go forward? Are hornless, uddered boy-cows the next big thing in aggressively marketed, reality-displacing fallacies, like Snackwells and intelligent design?Had I gone to see this movie, my annoyance at the unmentioned sexual identity confusion would assuredly have prevented me from appreciating anything else (if there were anything else to appreciate). Don't think I'll be seeing this one.
I don't pretend to know all the answers; all I can say for sure is that in writer-director Steve Oedekerk's bizarre computer-animated universe, "female cows" are required to wear hair accessories in order to differentiate themselves from "male cows," with whom they unaccountably share secondary sex characteristics.
Thursday, August 03, 2006
Book Returns
I’ve reread two books this summer, and I’m in the process of rereading a third. In the past, I’ve been unjustifiably resistant to rereading. I figured it was wasteful to spend precious time reading books I’d already read when there were so many out there that I hadn’t. But now I’ve reconsidered. I here offer a list of reasons to reread:
1. Differing rates of diminishing marginal utility. Sure, the marginal utility of a given book may decline with each reading, but it doesn’t always drop to zero after the first. Truly excellent books’ marginal utility starts high and declines slowly. Thus, the marginal utility of rereading an old book can exceed the marginal utility of reading a new one for the first time.
2. Potential for increasing marginal utility. Some books make more sense the second time around. Themes fully developed in the later chapters now jump out more readily in the early chapters. Foreshadowing you blew past the first time, because you didn’t know what was to come, now becomes apparent.
3. Complementarity with subsequent reading and education. Your understanding and appreciation of a book depends, in large part, on what you bring to the table. Lacking the optimal background and stock of knowledge, you might fail to appreciate the best material. Go back when you’ve learned a bit more, and you’ll find insights that resonate more than they did the first time around.
4. Known quantities versus expected values. You know what quality to expect from a book you’ve read before. By contrast, any new book is a gamble. It could be great, or it could be lousy. This lowers the expected value of new reading relative to rereading.
5. Forgetfulness. An obvious point, but still true. Wait long enough, and rereading a book is almost like reading it for the first time again. (However, forgetfulness can also diminish the "known quantities" point above. The first of this summer's rereads was not nearly as good as I'd remembered, for example. That is one of the dangers of rereading, but it's no greater than the danger of a new read. The other two have been at least as good as I remembered.)
A solicitation for comments: What books have you reread most often? And what characteristics are common to the most rereadable books?
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
This Is How Cynical I've Become
In conversation a couple of days ago, a friend mentioned that her younger sister planned to get an MFA in creative writing.
“No offense to your sister, but what’s the point of that?” I wondered aloud. “No one thinks someone is a good writer because they have a Masters degree in writing.”
“Yeah, I don’t really get it, either,” my friend said. “It’s much better to just read an actual writing sample.”
Then another friend pointed out that a creative writing program might actually – get this – help you learn to write better. It gives the participant an ongoing incentive to write, along with regular feedback from peers and teachers.
And that’s when I realized how fully I had bought into the signaling model of education, which says that education doesn’t actually increase productivity, but merely identifies people who had high productivity to begin with. Somehow it didn’t even occur to me that someone might seek a Masters degree for any purpose other than sending a message to future employers.
The reality, of course, is that education involves both signaling and skill-building, as well as pure consumption for people who just like school (or fear the workplace), with the precise mix differing from discipline to discipline. Intellectually, I know this to be true. But my first instinct was to assume near-100% signaling – which is odd, given the substantial amount I learned during my own graduate education. I’m not sure what this says about me.
Sunday, July 23, 2006
Adverse Selection in the College Cafeteria
This week I’m serving as a faculty member at the Institute for Humane Studies’ Liberty & Current Issues Seminar, hosted by the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. As usual, both faculty and students are housed in the dorms and treated to college cafeteria food. These conditions are made tolerable by the great company and intellectual stimulation. (Seriously. I do at least one of these events every summer, and it’s always one of the highlights of my year.)
I bring up the cafeteria food not to complain, but because I realized today at lunch (while discussing the food with two student participants) that it could be a nice example of adverse selection.
Have you ever wondered why college meal plans are so expensive relative to the quality of fare? Most college meal plans are all-you-can-eat propositions. With extra servings free at the point of service, students tend to consume more food until the marginal benefit is zero (contributing to the well-known phenomenon of the freshman fifteen). The excess consumption explains part of the price; it’s crappy food, but you’re paying for quantity, not quality.
But there’s more to the story. Some students naturally eat more than others. Yet most college cafeterias set a uniform price for all students, and that price must cover at least the average cost per student in order for the cafeteria to break even. Then each student (and their parents) must decide whether to enroll in the meal plan at that price, and this is where the adverse selection sets in: Those who eat more than average are getting a good deal, so naturally they enroll. Those who eat less, however, are more inclined to drop the plan and get their food elsewhere. As a result, the meal plan disproportionately attracts the heavy eaters, so the average cost per enrolled student must rise… and the cafeteria has to hike its price accordingly. The higher price leads yet more of light-eaters to drop the plan, and so on.
There are ways of controlling the problem. One way is to offer different meal plans that limit the number of meals per week. These plans deal adequately with the difference between students who eat many meals and those who eat few, but not the difference between those who eat a lot per meal and those who eat a little. Another possible solution is to offer meal plans with different restrictions on the food quantities and types; this approach is akin to health insurance companies’ practice of offering a menu of differing insurance policies to their customers, so that consumers’ choices effectively sort them into differing groups. Yet another solution, adopted by some colleges, is simply to require enrollment in the meal plan by all students or, as is more typically the case, all freshmen. This approach holds down prices by preventing the defection of light eaters, but it also effects a cross-subsidy from the light eaters to the heavy eaters. In addition, this grants greater monopoly power to the cafeteria, which can push prices back up (unless the prices are regulated by the provider’s contract with the university) or quality down.
