How many North Koreans who have been permitted to attend the World Cup will attempt to defect? Alternatively, how difficult is it for the North Korean government to maintain tangible leverage on those attending?
For some historical parallels, consider defectors from the Soviet Union, many of whom were athletes or competitors in international competitions of some kind.
Here is one estimate of the number of North Koreans in attendance (~40).
Romer’s prescription is not merely neo-medieval, in other words. It is also neo-colonial.
That’s from a great article in the Atlantic about Paul Romer and charter cities. H/T Greg Young.
Brennan David reports about the Columbia police department’s new customer surveys in today’s Columbia Tribune:
“I think the chief recognizes that most of the department supplies excellent customer service,” said police spokeswoman Officer Jessie Haden. “If someone has a bad experience, they are vocal about that. The people that are happy with service can be the silent majority. This is another way to get feedback.”
The charitable interpretation here is that the police department is delusional about precisely how to measure customer satisfaction and fail to recognize that citizen interactions with police often happen in the context of overwhelming displays of force. It is not disputed over the last several years there have been numerous incidents of police brutality and misconduct in Columbia that have only been publicized through a serious of fortuitous accidents and the emergence of modern video recording technology that can be deployed through cellphones. Often members of poor and politically weak groups, particularly black people, are the victims of police brutality and misconduct, and find their complaints stymied by police bureaucracy and the tendency of law enforcement to protect its own.
When citizens are the victims of substantial and forceful rights violations they are left with the belief that the system does not exist to protect them and that they are best served by dropping out and not participating. It is hard to convince people that after their doors have been kicked in by SWAT teams dressed in paramilitary gear for non-violent misdemeanor offenses that their complaints of rights violations will be met by a receptive officer at the desk or even by the Internal Affairs department. Moreover there is evidence that rights violations are systemic and underreported by the Columbia Police department. Check out this particularly egregious case where the Columbia police department is on video outright lying to an attorney waiting in their lobby to speak to his client; officers told his client, who was in the holding cell, that her attorney had gone home, and told the attorney that his client had not asked to see him yet.
So no. Officer Haden is wrong in saying that there is a “silent majority” that is happy with their “customer service”. People are silent because they have been silenced and fear reprisal, not because they are happy with their law enforcement.
Welcome to Soviet America.
Addendum: here is the link to the CPD’s customer survey, which can be presumably filled anonymously.
Martha King at the Show Me Daily notes that Missouri’s cigarette taxes are the lowest in the nation and tries to make a rather interesting argument about liberty:
Although the majority of Americans don’t smoke, a new poll suggests that most voters would favor increases in tobacco taxes as an alternative to state budget cuts. This kind of discrepancy demonstrates one of the main problems with cigarette taxes — those least directly affected by the tax feel justified in imposing a tax on those most affected.
This analysis falls rather short. Here are some problems with it.
The health costs of cigarettes are high and undisputed. This is particularly true when you include the victims of second or third-hand smoke. At some point government healthcare programs foot a substantial amount of the costs and generally everyone is worse off:
The data in this book are based on present value of loss for men and women who are smokers at the age of 24. One factor that is distinct in this study is the calculation of “quasi-external cost,” which the authors define as the cost of freedom of choice to the family members of smokers, including children who are nonsmokers. In their longitudinal analysis of lifetime smoking, the authors estimate that the social cost of smoking, which is a sum of purely private, quasi-external, and external costs (the latter determined by excise tax) for a 24-year-old person turns out to be $39.66 per pack of cigarettes. The cost to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security is substantial. The quasi-external cost of smoking to the spouse of a 24-year-old who smokes comes to a staggering $28 billion. After considering these numbers and the amount of people who turn 24 each year and smoke, the authors of this book have predicted that the national external and quasi-external lifetime cost per year is $13.8 billion for females and $32.8 billion for males. Thus, with each new cohort of 24-year-old smokers in the United States there is an additional $204 billion of lifetime costs. These staggering expenses in light of the high number of smokers in the country make a convincing argument for rethinking the issue of public health policy making. Federal and state cigarette excise taxes have increased dramatically over the years. The calculations made by Sloan and his coauthors provide an analytical reason for such increases.
This study is not a complete evaluation of the costs of smoking. There are many other studies that attempt to quantify the hidden economic costs of smoking and there is of course much debate on what methodology is best, etc. I would note that one cost that I’ve never seen computed is the harm done to the earth and our groundwater as toxic chemicals seep out of the millions of butts smokers casually toss wherever they can (4.5 trillion a year globally, according to one estimate).
My intuition is that cigarettes, particularly in Missouri, are underpriced. Raising Missouri’s taxes would be an excellent way to make smokers pay for the harms of using cigarettes; my only comment is that is it is probably true that we don’t have the political will to raise them high enough. As a matter of functional policy I would at least align Missouri’s cigarette taxes with neighboring states, as drastically lower prices in Missouri provide an attractive opportunity to cigarette smugglers, who buy cigarettes in Missouri on the cheap and market them in black or grey markets particularly in Chicago, where taxes are way higher.
Economists like Arthur Ceceil Pigou have approached this problem before and favor policy mechanisms that “internalize the externalities”. In real life this is often done simply by taxing the good or service that is implicated in the negative externality. Generally this is a concept addressed in introductory economics classes.
So if we’re going to make a John Stuart Mill argument about liberty and whatnot, I would say that yes, liberty is important, and it is also important to understand precisely where all the costs of cigarettes manifest themselves and be prepared to make an appropriate cost-benefit analysis.
The view from Schmitt,Warner, and Gupta (2010):
The United States currently incarcerates a higher share of its population than any other country in the world. We calculate that a reduction in incarceration rates just to the level we had in 1993 (which was already high by historical standards) would lower correctional expenditures by $16.9 billion per year, with the large majority of these savings accruing to financially squeezed state and local governments. As a group, state governments could save $7.6 billion, while local governments could save $7.2 billion.
These cost savings could be realized through a reduction by one-half in the incarceration rate of exclusively non-violent offenders, who now make up over 60 percent of the prison and jail population.
Missouri Supreme Court Chief Justice William Price puts this into perspective for Missouri in a Feb. 3rd, 2010 speech:
Perhaps the biggest waste of resources in all of state government is the over-incarceration of nonviolent offenders and our mishandling of drug and alcohol offenders. It is costing us billions of dollars and it is not making a dent in crime.
Listen to these numbers. In 1994, shortly after I came to the Court, the number of nonviolent offenders in Missouri prisons was 7,461. Today it’s 14,204. That’s almost double. In 1994, the number of new commitments for nonviolent offenses was 4,857. Last year, it was 7,220 — again, almost double. At a rate of $16,432 per offender, we currently are spending $233.4 million a year to incarcerate nonviolent offenders … not counting the investment in the 10 prisons it takes to hold these individuals at $100 million per prison. In 1994, appropriations to the Department of Corrections totaled $216,753,472. Today, it’s $670,079,452. The amount has tripled. And the recidivism rate for these individuals, who are returned to prison within just two years, is 41.6 percent.
Here is a graph, again from CEPR:
Increases in wages are associated with greater consumption of cigarettes.
That’s from this paper by Xin Xu and Robert Kaestler.
This fellow is auctioning his ability to suggest Facebook pages to his 3,000 friends for $10. He has other packages too; 500 friends for $3, and 1500 for $5.
Thomas Duda at the Show-Me Daily writes:
While reading the Springfield Business Journal, I ran across a mention of the governor’s recently formed Executive Advisory Board, which will produce “a five-year plan for economic growth.” The governor’s press release states:
The final outcome of the planning process will be six to 10 strategic objectives to transform Missouri’s economy for the 21st century. The objectives will pinpoint existing and future industries that will drive growth. Along with each strategic objective, the plan will include specific tactical steps necessary to accomplish the goal. The strategic objectives and tactics will focus on the next five years.
Although I find the Executive Advisory Board’s mandate ludicrous — that state government should chart and shape the course of something as complex as our collective future economic development, I do find it encouraging that a committee member quoted in the Springfield Business Journal stated:
“We spend lots of money on economic development every year. The question is, ‘Are we strategically aligned to do it in the most effective way?’”
Obviously, the panel will not consider the possibility that the state of Missouri leave the business of economic development entirely, but I am somewhat hopeful that Executive Advisory Board just might conclude that the termination of some market-distorting policies would set Missouri on a course toward a freer and more prosperous future.
Say there are several companies in cutting edge industry X that are trying to make location decisions. The key criteria for a potential location is whether or not the legal architecture for that business to operate exists or not. Do you think it is appropriate for a governmental commission to try to predict what kind of legal architecture is necessary to sustain economic growth? Consider the much debated but unarguably important scholarship of Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny (LLSV 1998) whose data-driven approach to analyzing the relationship between legal development and economic growth has been influential in persuading governments to support markets, not replace them (LLS 2008).
Consider, too, that this is not just a commission that can be characterized in a strict government/free market dichotomy. The press release notes that the commission will be directed by top business leaders; this is more appropriately characterized as a place where the public and private spheres interact to increase the efficiency of both. I point you to Vincent Ostrom, who notes in an interview with Vernon Smith:
Instead, we should expect to find some combination of market and non-market structures in every society, and we should recognize the complex configuration of institutions behind labels such as “capitalism”. We might usefully think about combinations of private and public economies existing side by side. However, it’s important to stress that not all forms of public enterprise are, or need to be, state-owned and operated. Markets are diverse and complex entities. Markets for different types of goods and services may take on quite different characteristics. Some may work well under the most impersonal conditions. Others may depend upon personal considerations involving high levels of trust among trading partners. In other words, the options are much greater than we imagine, and we can see this is true if we don’t allow our minds to be trapped within narrowly constrained intellectual horizons.
I hazard a guess that Duda does not account for these parameters. Consider Maryland, for instance. The economic development commission there (if there is one) there could make the determination that laws barring video recording of law enforcement provides a poor legal architecture for the existence of citizen journalism or documentary filmmakers, among others. Relaxing these laws would stimulate economic activities by people and firms who previously were priced out of the market by liability costs.
Or alternatively, an economic development commission could find that biotech companies would be happy to relocate to Missouri if they could rely on a legal architecture that protects them from unfair claims of tort. Without that architecture, biotech companies wouldn’t be willing to relocate to Missouri, and we’d lose what might otherwise be an very productive industry to another place.
I don’t want to extend this argument to subsidizing businesses to relocate through tax incentives and other kinds of public financing. But I do think that the notion that Governor Nixon is interested in promoting sensible economic development through the work and advice of private-sector leaders commendable, and I think that there are good arguments as to why.
I spoke to the Columbia City Council last night, delving into specifics on how forfeiture money is retained by local and federal law enforcement in circumvention of of the Missouri constitution (Article IX, Section 7) and Missouri statutory law (RsMO 166-131, RsMO 166-300). Here is a link to the video; I speak at 2:27:30.
Here is the white paper I sent to the Columbia City Council last month in Microsoft Word format (*.doc). The topic is forfeiture money and how allowing law enforcement to retain the proceeds of forfeiture skews their incentive structures and disconnects law enforcement policy from voter and legislative preferences.
Addendum: here is the link to the 1990 Missouri Supreme Court opinion I cite (Reorganized School Dist. No 7 v. Douthit).
I spoke to Missouri state representative Mary Still (D-MO 25) on her attempts to regulate payday lending. Also present was Abhi Sivasailam, a scholar at the Show-Me Institute, who is writing a policy study on the issue of payday loan reforms. Previously I wrote about Still’s efforts to regulate the industry here; my basic conclusion is first that a lot of the relevant data that might help us quantify the harms of payday lending does not exist or is unclear and second that I think that the real regulatory challenge is to tranche the market in a way that minimizes the harms that payday loans are implicated in.
There are easy ways to break this down into a free-market vs. anti-market debate. I don’t like them because I think that the hard ideological line is, well, wrong. It would be easy to accuse Still of being anti-market, but after speaking with her, I think she makes a much more nuanced claim. Part of it is simply that regardless of who is right about the normative question of “should we regulate payday loan providers out of business or not?”, there are reasonable arguments to be made that companies in this industry in Missouri have behaved extremely poorly.
The best piece of evidence that exists for this claim is that the payday loan industries were able to move enough money around to Missouri House Republicans that the speaker, Ron Richards, kept the Still’s payday lending bill out of committee for several months, and when the bill was assigned to committee, the hearing was chaired by Don Wells from Cabool, a Republican who himself owns payday lending stores. The hearing on the bill was deceptively presented as an information presentation on lending practices, which Still herself, the author of the bill in question, was not invited to or allowed to speak at. Testimony was exclusively presented by people in the payday loan industry, without any rejoinder.
There also seem to be substantial harms in the status quo that payday loans are implicated in. There is a lack of data to quantify these harms, and researchers are often forced to use proxies, like the number of bounced checks or bankruptcy filings in a region. While these are useful, there are some meaningful questions about possible omitted variables and trends that may color the data partially. No one has done simple, ground level research to improve the quality of the data available; while the Better Business Bureau collects data on received complaints, the people who are most harmed by a payday lender are often the least likely to file a complaint. The internal arguments there are that the people who are most likely to get locked into repeat loans and extremely high fees/interest rates are also the people who tend to be poorly educated, financially ignorant, and politically weak. Poor people face extremely high barriers in simply accessing the information needed to know that legal mechanisms to arbitrate claims of tort exist and face high barriers accessing them (poor people have limited access to transportation and face much greater tradeoffs in terms of taking the time away from work or family to engage in that process).
Abhi notes studies in the literature (sorry, I’m lacking in the citation of the specific arguments but I will correct that later) lead him to the conclusion that payday lenders are good for the average borrower but bad for the marginal borrower. The studies he points to note that there is a clear discontinuity in the bankruptcy data for people taking out payday loans that can be isolated when you look at the credit scores of applicants. That is, there is a clearly definable threshold where people who are below a specific credit score tend to have a much higher rate of bankruptcy after they start taking out payday loans. The other study notes that there is an increase in bankruptcies and bounced checks in two states (Georgia and North Carolina) after payday lending is banned or regulated out of the market. The conclusion that can be drawn from these studies is that perhaps we should look at regulations that restrict access to payday loans by credit score or through some other similar mechanism. This has the benefit of allowing the market to function for those people who are able to benefit from the liquidity options that payday loans present without harm while restricting the market to exclude the people who are most likely to go bankrupt after using payday loans. Still agreed with the thrust of that analysis, which I don’t know has been a part of the legislative or popular debate to date.
The other issues that I think are at play here is the access to basic banking and financial mechanisms that aren’t often offered to low-income or minority communities by the market. Payday lending and the associated harms are more symptoms of this problem than they are problems themselves; I think it is true that in a world where it easy for poor people to access mainstream financial products they have fewer liquidity needs that lead them to payday lenders. Still agrees with that fundamental argument and is working with Missouri state treasurer Clint Zweifel towards that end. Still also indicates that she is receptive to tax-increment financing (TIF) to induce mainstream banking institutions to penetrate low-income communities, though she also hinted that in the long term the market is trending in that direction.
Addendum: Abhi’s previous work on payday lending is here and here, published through the Show-Me Daily.
Addendum the second: Abhi discusses our conversation with Still, here.
From Charles Dickens in his tome “On Travel“, p51-2:
When Don Diego de–I forget his name–the inventor of the last new flying machines, price so many francs for ladies, so many more for gentlemen–when Don Diego, by permission of Deputy Chaff Wax and his noble band, shal have taken out a patent for the Queen’s dominions, and shall have opened a commodious warehouse in an airy situation; and when all persons of any gentility will keep at least a pair of wings, and be seen skimming about in every direction; I shall take a flight to Paris (as I soar round the world) in a cheap and independent manner. At present, my reliance is on the South Eastern Railway Company, in whose xpress train here I sit, at eight of the clock on a very hot morning, under the very hot roof of the terminus at London Bridge, in danger of being ‘forced’ like a cucumber or a melon, or a pineapple–and talking of pineapples, I suppose there were never so many pineapples in a train as there appear to be in this train.
Whew! The hothouse air is faint with pineapples. Every French citizen or citizeness is carrying pineapples home. The compact little enchantress in the corner of my carriage (French actress, to whom I yielded up my heart under the auspices of that brave child ‘Meat-chell’, at the St. James’s Theatre of the night befor last) has a pineapple in her lap. Compact Enchantress’s friend, confidante, mother, mystery, Heaven knows what, has two pineapples in her lap, and a bundle of them under the seat. Tobacco-smoky Frenchmen in Algerine wrapper, with peaked hood forward, who might be Abd-el-Kader dyed rifle-green, and who seems to be dressed entirely in dirt and braid, carries pineapples in a covered basket. Tall, grave, melancholy Frenchman, with black Vandyke beard, and hair close-cropped with expansive chest to waistcoat, and compressive waist to coat, saturnine as to his pantaloons, calm as to his feminine boots, precious as to his jewellery, smooth and white as to his linen, dark-eyed, high-foreheaded, hawk-nosed–got up, one thinks, like Lucifer or Mephistopheles, of Zamiel, transformed into a highly genteel Parisian, has the green end of a pineapple sticking out of his neat valise.
Pineapples, by the way, are originally from south Brazil/Paraguay, and were first brought back to Europe by Christopher Columbus.
Note the final words (“come as you are”). It is strange to think that many Americans, particularly those who define themselves through their attachment to a Christian ideology, are not so open and accepting of difference as McDonald’s is willing to be.
H/T: Justin Scott.
From Nat Hentoff’s (really) excellent At the Jazz Band Ball: Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene. This selection is from chapter 47, “The Thoreau of Jazz”:
Art Davis, who died of aheart attack at seventy-three on July 29, 3007, was, for me, the Henry David Thoreau of jazz. I’ve known many people in the jazz family with admirable integrity, but Art Davis’s was fiercely unbreakable, whatever the cost.
…
Art Davis was a complete musician, as authoritative in a symphonic orchestra, a Broadway pit band, network studio assignment or accompanying, as he did, Judy Garland or country music comedienne Minne Pearl.
He also became a pariah in parts of the music business for years because he insisted on breaking the color line in symphony orchestras. As I had reported in the The Reporter magazine in the late 1950s, it was not only that Jim Crow managed much of that hiring. Also, as positions opened in an orchestra, the first-chair players (all of them white) would get management to hire their best students (also white) for those chairs.
For years, Art, having been turned down by leading symphony orchestras, challenged the conductors to pit him against any classical bassist they chose in an open competition. There were no takers. In the 1970s, he sued the New York State Philharmonic for racial discrimination, and as the years went on, until the case was dismissed, Art lost a lot of the previously highly diversified work for which he had been sought. Obviously, the man was a “troublemaker”.
But because of the lawsuit, the attendant publicity and Art’s continuing challenge to put any symphonic bass part–however deeply traditional or unprecedently avant-garde–before him in competition for a gig in any world-famous orchestra, he became the major force that created “blind auditions”. It became the practice, when there was an opening for any instrument, to audition the player behind a screen so that those judging his or her abilities–Art also protested gender discrimination–could hear the music but not see the musician. He lost the lawsuit, but won the battle.
Here is William Osborne with more on blind auditions and gender.
…Between 1978 and 2007, more than one million Chinese students would go abroad to study, only 30 percent of whom ever returned.
That’s from Bruce Gilley’s chapter “Deng Xiaoping and His Successors (1976 to the Present)” in Politics in China: an Introduction, edited by William A. Joseph (2010).
Ducks and Economics 