Links 2019/10/29

Kansas City spans two states, both of which have constantly competed for businesses to relocate to their side of the city with tax incentives. Obviously this was a negative-sum game, and the governors of both states have worked out a deal to end it (link). Everyone appears to correctly recognize this as a good thing to stop, but isn't this what's happening across all cities and states offering tax incentives to specific businesses!? Should we not pass a federal law to end this at a higher level?

The PATRIOT Act created special warrants that were supposed to give federal agents more power to stop terrorism. It turns out, this new power has been used a lot, but almost entirely on the war on drugs instead of terrorism. Link.

And yet... per capita US drug deaths have doubled every decade for the last 4 decades! That's a far bigger increase than I realized. Link.

A long-term look at California's Paid Family Leave Act suggests that it "tended to reduce the number of children born". That seems very surprising to me, and I don't know whether to consider this a case where evidence should overturn common sense or it's safer to brush this aside as noise in the data? Link.

ICE accidentally deported an American citizen with mental disabilities to Mexico with only $3. It took 125 days of living on the streets of foreign countries before he was able to get back. Yet another reminder that you can lose all your rights as soon as you are suspected of being an illegal immigrant. Link.

A guy who was born in Greece, then moved to America as a kid, was deported by ICE to Iraq because he was ethnically Iraqi. He had never lived there, did not speak Arabic, had diabetes, and of course... died, apparently from a from lack of insulin. Link.

"65% of American adults describe themselves as Christians ... down 12 percentage points over the past decade. Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated ... now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009." Link. There has also been an especially rapid drop in religiosity the last few years in parts of the Arab world, without almost half of young adults in Tunisia now identifying as not religious (link). I expect these trends to continue, but... if religiosity remains somewhat heritable and correlated with larger family size, then in the long-run, maybe those less naturally inclined to be religious will fade from the gene pool and religion will make a major comeback?

People often mention Trump's deregulation efforts without ever getting into any details. The Brookings Institution keeps a running list here. As noted here, the deregulations are largely environmental, such as less restrictions on pollution and removing the rule requiring humane treatment of animals in order to be officially "certified organic". On the other hand, regulations of the labor market have increased in many ways, e.g. "employers have been asked to document every possible project a prospective immigrant employee might work on over the next three years".

Per "average fine particulate matter" measurements, American air pollution decreased by 24.2% from 2009 to 2016, then reversed course and increased by 5.5% between 2016 and 2018. "The increase was associated with 9,700 additional premature deaths in 2018." Link.

Links 2019/07/03

"What you think about landfill and recycling is probably totally wrong": "Almost all of the litter that escapes into nature, especially the sea, comes from fishing ships or poorer riverine countries with bad rubbish collection practices... Rich countries like the UK or US have rubbish collection rates approaching 100%". Throwing stuff away is probably fine most of the time. We're just taking stuff out of the ground, making use of it, then putting it back in the ground.

"An investor-led building boom has almost doubled the size of the Sydney apartment rental market in two years, forcing landlords to drop rents more than $100 a week in some areas to secure tenants" (link). It almost makes you wonder if restrictions on increasing housing supply, happening in cities all over, are bad and increasing our cost of living!

"I’m begging you: Stop donating canned goods to food banks". Canned food drives are maybe the best example of ineffective altruism. Among other things: "that $1 you spent on tuna could have purchased $4 worth of tuna if put in the hands of non-profit employee".

A government policy passed today will affect younger people more, because they will live longer. So wouldn't it be more fair to make votes count more the younger you are? The case for age-weighted voting.

Tax preparers are capturing 13-22% of the value of the EITC (link). So if the government did pre-filled tax returns, people would get much more out of the EITC without us having to spend an extra penny on it (link).

Comparing states that accepted the ACA Medicaid expansions to those that did not finds a "reduction in disease-related deaths" which "grows over time" in states that did the Medicaid expansion (link).

Replacement of manned toll booths with electronic ones greatly reduce vehicle emissions in the area. And a study of one example of making that transition in a populated area found that it "reduced prematurity and low birth weight among mothers within 2 kilometers of a toll plaza by 10.8 percent and 11.8 percent, respectively, relative to mothers 2-10 km from a toll plaza" (link).

Related: schools downwind of a highway have "decreases in test scores, more behavioral incidents, and more absences" than ones upwind. To help control for other variables, this is comparing students who move campuses from one side of the highway to the other (link).

Related again: when Volkswagen cheated on emission tests, they were selling cars "which secretly polluted up to 150 times as much as gasoline cars". That's a lot! So a study tracked where these vehicles were used as a natural experiment on the effects of sudden and randomly dispersed increases in air pollution from cars. And it found "a 10 percent cheating-induced increase in car exhaust increases rates of low birth weight and acute asthma attacks among children by 1.9 and 8.0 percent" (link).

A Dallas-born teenage citizen was mistakenly arrested under suspicion of being an illegal immigrant and kept in one of our special detention centers for asylum-seekers. He was not given basic rights like a phone call, because those rights do not apply to people who are not believed to be citizens. In the 23 days it took before the error was recognized and he was released, he apparently lost 26 pounds (link). In contrast, read this excerpt on how well we treated Nazi prisoners. Were we wrong to not treat them worse? Or is being a brown person seeking asylum a worse crime than Nazism?

Trump is now telling non-white women in Congress, who were born in America, to go back to the countries they came from (link). In a follow-on rally, his supporters chanted "send her back" about a Somali-born American citizen (link). I wonder what David Duke saw in him.

Links 2019/05/29

The state agency that regulates and licenses plumbing in Texas is being abolished. According to one state representative, "our plumbing shortage is solved because we can all become plumbers." Link. Yee-haw!

Sweden has a tradition called "Lordagsgodis" (Saturday candy), where you shouldn't eat candy on any other day of the week, but on Saturday you eat as much as you want. "When participating in the 'Lordagsgodis' tradition, the average Swedish family of four eats about 1.2 kilos (2.65 lbs.) of candy!" Link.

Does College Turn People Into Liberals? In a study following 7,000+ students across 120+ colleges through their first couple of years, "48 percent viewed liberals more favorably in their second year of college than when they arrived on campus. However, among the same students, 50 percent also viewed conservatives more favorably. In other words, college attendance is associated, on average, with gains in appreciating political viewpoints across the spectrum, not just favoring liberals."

One Step For Animals is an animal welfare organization that, instead of advocating vegetarianism, is focused just on getting people to stop eating chicken. "If we can convince someone to stop eating birds, they would go from being responsible for the factory farming and slaughtering of more than two dozen land animals per year to fewer than one." "It takes more than 200 chickens to provide the same number of meals as one cow."

Everyone learns about the Stanford Prison Experiment, but the whole thing was basically bad science and a sham. People know this and still teach it because, in the words of one professor, it teaches a lesson "bigger than the science". THIS REALLY GETS ON MY NERVES! Link.

"Paying American students cash incentives causes them to do better on the PISA, an international standardized test of math skills. But similar incentives had no effect on Chinese students, implying that Americans are slacking while Chinese students are trying hard." Link. IMO, it's often the case that what people are "good" or "bad" at is more matter of how motivated they feel to do it.

In a study trying to determine why people deny science: "Subjects were asked to justify their rejection of the scientific consensus. In 33% of cases... subjects simply restated their position, essentially giving no justification." Link. ...

Links 2019/05/22

The Day The Dinosaurs Died: The asteroid's impact "formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon". Hollywood has really dropped the ball on cool/scary asteroid explosions.

"Our belief in the benefits of low salt consumption are largely based on mis-information and myth-information." Link.

"Saudi crown prince defends China's right to put Uighur Muslims in concentration camps." ??? This has been up to 1 million people. Link.

"August birthday (read: enter school younger) associated with 30% increase in ADHD diagnoses relative to September birthday. But only in states with September school cutoff." Hmmm... Link.

California used to allow medical and non-medical exemptions for school-mandated vaccines. Then, to try to increase vaccination, they repealed non-medical exemptions. But this only led to a 1% decline in total exemptions, seemingly because many of the people who were getting non-medical exemptions switched to medical ones instead. What a coincidence! It makes you doubt how effectively we can change people's behavior in general... Link.

"A Women's March planned in Eureka has been postponed by the organizers over fears that participants were not diverse enough." Link.

You Have No Right to Your Culture: "Do you have more cultural ground in common with your grandparents - or with foreigners of your own generation?"

After reading the full Mueller report, Justin Amash, a GOP congressman, now says that "Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller's report", "Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct" (obstruction of justice), and "few members of Congress have read the report". Link. I have no doubt that nothing will come of this.

Common sense regulations to save children's lives

In the U.S., according to the CDC, gun accidents are the #1 cause of injury deaths for children ages 1-4, mostly caused by guns kept in the home. For ages 1-14, it is the #2 cause of unintentional injury-death, behind only car accidents (link and link). Yet many people insist on keeping guns in their homes. And many oppose simple regulations that could reduce these deaths, such as child locks. Do they just not care about the deaths of so many children?

Sorry, I read that wrong. That was the data for drowning and pools, not guns.

I'm guessing that, of the people who strongly support gun control laws and have fond memories of swimming at their or friends' homes growing up, most dislike the idea of "pool control" laws. If so, why do you feel that way? Do you think, maybe, people who have enjoyed gun ownership have the same negative reaction to gun control, for the exact same reasons?

Should there be more regulations on swimming pools?

Does anyone really care about abortion?

Pro-lifers claim that abortion is murder. But I don't think they, for the most part, truly believe that.

To be clear, I'm questioning people's subconscious motivations, not accusing people of consciously lying. Politics, on all sides of all issues, is surely full of people who don't have a clear understanding of why they believe what the believe. So even though this particular post is about pro-lifers, I'm not claiming this basic type of problem is unique to them. I personally struggle with what to believe about the ethics of abortion, and there are good arguments for being pro-life.

6 pro-life mysteries

Mystery 1

Consider this thought experiment from Patrick Tomlinson. You're escaping a fire in a fertility clinic. In one room, you see a 5 year old child crying for help. In another room, you see a frozen container labeled "1000 Viable Human Embryos". You only have time to save either the child or the embryos. Which should you save?

I suspect most pro-lifers believe you should save the child. But that would mean they do not truly feel that an embryo's life is nearly as valuable as other human lives. What is the amount of embryos that would be worth saving instead of a child? What if the frozen container said 5555 instead of 1000? According to the CDC, 1 in 5,555 pregnancies kill the mother in the U.S.. If you value 1 born human's life greater than 5555 embryos, then the expected value on life of an average abortion in the U.S. is positive, because the risk of killing the mother outweighs the moral worth of the embryo.

Mystery 2

Consider what the president of the March for Life said: "No pro-lifer would ever want to punish a woman who has chosen abortion". If you believe abortion is murder and therefore should be illegal, why would you feel that a murderer should face no punishment? And what does it even mean that something should be illegal, if there should be no punishment for doing it? Do you think this is because most pro-lifers don't want murder to be punished, or do you think it's because they don't really believe abortion is murder?

Mystery 3

In polls, 68% of pro-lifers say that abortion should be legal when the mother's health is endangered (arguably, pregnancy and giving birth just is a danger to your health). And 59% of pro-lifers say that abortion should be legal when the pregnancy is caused by rape or incest. Why would you believe those things if you believe it is murdering a baby? Does anyone think it's ok to kill a baby after birth if the above scenarios are true?

Mystery 4

Part of U.S. foreign aid goes to family-planning NGOs. The MCP is a rule that prohibits a family-planning NGO from receiving U.S. money if they so much as provide information about abortion to those who receive their services. Whenever a Democrat is President, that rule is removed. And whenever a Republican gets elected, it is put back into place, and pro-lifers cheer. However, when the rule is removed, abortions decrease, and when it is re-instated, abortions increase (link). Why? Because it effectively reduces funding for family-planning in general, which leads to less access to other family-planning services like contraception, which then increases unwanted pregnancies, which obviously increases the number of pregnancies that the parents want to abort. So why do pro-lifers support the MCP rule? Do you think, when considering this evidence, most would change their mind, and become upset with Republican presidents for it? Or, perhaps, is reducing abortion not really the motivating goal?

Mystery 5

The ACA mandated that health insurance cover contraception. As mentioned above, increasing access to contraception is an effective way to reduce unwanted pregnancies, and therefore reduce abortion. If you cared deeply about reducing abortion, this would be one of your favorite government policies. However, this was overturned by the Supreme Court in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. Is that case reviled by pro-lifers, second only to Roe v. Wade? If someone truly believed abortion was murder, they should. But AFAIK, the average pro-lifer cheered this abortion-increasing Supreme Court decision. And the people who brought this to the Supreme Court in the first place were pro-lifers!

Mystery 6

The most pro-life group in the U.S. is evangelicals, who officially only accept the Bible as the sole authority on God. But as far as I can tell, the Bible is not pro-life. Here are the 2 parts of the Bible which come the closest to directly addressing the morality and legality of abortion:

1. Exodus 21:22-25 declares that the punishment for killing someone else's fetus in a fight is only to pay a fine. You may object that the punishment is so light because it's probably only referring to accidental killing of the fetus. But notice that it doesn't suggest going light on punishments for any other accidental harms that are caused by the same fight. And other passages, like Exodus 21:28-32, are quite willing to prescribe the death penalty for negligent homicide. This pretty strongly indicates that fetus' lives were not considered nearly as valuable as other human lives.
2. Numbers 5:11-22 says that when a woman cheats on her husband and gets pregnant, a priest should give her poisoned water to abort the baby.

If evangelicals are not getting their pro-life beliefs from the Bible, where are they getting it from? Abortion was legal in the U.S. in the earlier (more religious!) years. Criminalizing abortion didn't really start until the 1800s, and the leading pro-life advocates were doctors (link). Even up until the time of Roe v. Wade, abortion wasn't a big issue among evangelicals; it was considered a Catholic issue. As time has passed, this has flipped, where now evangelicals are the ones that are predominately pro-life (link). Why?

Possible explanations

The above mysteries lead me to believe that something else, other than a belief that abortion is murder, is what motivates most pro-lifers to be pro-life.

Some pro-choicers like to say that the pro-life movement is really just about misogyny. But I don't know how that can be reconciled with the fact that there's basically no gender gap on this.

The following 2 alternatives seem like a better fit.

Ring-bearers vs. freewheelers

I heard about this on the Rationally Speaking episode with Jason Weeden.

Basically, suppose you broadly categorized people into two groups with regard to attitudes about sexuality: ring-bearers and freewheelers. Freewheelers are people who have more sexual partners throughout their life, have fewer kids, wait longer to have kids, etc. Ring-bearers are the opposite. This is highly predictive of one's view of abortion, perhaps even more so than political affiliation (link). It also predicts a person's opinion on the ethics of similar topics like birth control.

Weeden proposes that people mostly vote out of self-interest, and abortion is no exception. Freewheelers want a society that enables of their preferred lifestyle, such as having the option of an abortion in the case of an accidental pregnancy. But ring-bearers want a society with less freewheelers, and so they want laws that are less conducive to that lifestyle.

This would explain some of the pro-life mysteries, especially the question of why pro-lifers tend to oppose increasing access to contraception. If their motivation is to decrease abortions, that doesn't make sense. If their motivation is to have a society less conducive to freewheelers, then it does make sense. It also would explain why the average pro-lifer thinks abortion is OK if the mother is at risk or if it was the result of a rape. In those situations, the abortion is no longer about freewheelers.

So, this solves a big piece of the puzzle, but gaps still remain. For example, I can't imagine that this motivation would lead to abortion being as major of an issue as it is for some people. Why would so many pro-lifers be single-issue voters just because they want freewheeling to be less convenient?

A rallying flag for political tribalism

Suppose you are a politically tribal Republican. You are loyal to your tribe, and you hate the other tribe. You don't care for a careful assessment of issues and facts on a case-by-case basis; you'd really prefer to not even listen to the arguments from the other side. It'd be nice to have an issue where the other side is clearly extremely evil, so that you can feel justified in supporting your team no matter what. For example, imagine a hypothetical scenario where your party's presidential nominee is a corrupt ignorant celebrity conspiracy theorist. You may feel uncomfortable throwing your full support to your team. But you can simply say "the other side supports murdering babies" and feel good with your tribe again! You don't need to think through the implications of that; the point is actually not to have to worry about thinking too much. You just want to feel good rooting for your home team and booing the away team.

This is similar to what Scott Alexander calls a rallying flag in tribalism. What's different compared to how he talked about it is that this rallying flag is formed after the tribe is formed, rather than before.

The advantage of this theory of what motivates pro-lifers, over the ring-bearer theory, is that it explains why many people seem to care so much about being pro-life, even though the pro-life mysteries suggest they don't actually care much about abortion itself. It also explains why evangelicals in particular are so pro-life, compared to other religious groups, and despite the Bible not giving much to support being pro-life: it's just because evangelicals happen to be more Republican.

So...

Do I think these two things are the only motivations for pro-lifers? No. I just think they are both significant subconscious motivations to varying degrees for many pro-lifers.

Links 2019/02/06

Is Sunscreen the New Margarine?

Evidence is growing that the cause of Alzheimer's is: gum disease.

When black and white televisions were common, people mostly reported that their dreams were in black and white. But before and after that, most people say their dreams are in color. Perhaps "dreams are neither colored nor black and white"? Link.

The happiest countries tend to also have the highest rates of mental illness among young people. ??? Link.

"Female employees earn lower wages if their supervisor is also a woman". ??? Link.

"Fatal police shootings of unarmed people... have dropped substantially compared to 2015." Link.

"Crime Along the Mexican Border Is Lower Than in the Rest of the Country... If the entire United States had crime rates as low as those along the border in 2017, then the number of homicides would have been 33.8 percent lower, property crimes would have been 2.1 percent lower, and violent crimes would have dropped 8 percent." Link.

In a poll, 52% of Republicans said they would support postponing the 2020 election if Trump proposed it. Link. ... ...

Robin Hanson said this in response to a paper about how being attractive leads to better publishing outcomes for economists, and now I can't not think about discrimination in this way: "I predict that learning about this kind of discrimination will induce almost zero outrage... we don't directly care much about unfair discrimination. We instead sometimes use issue to ally ourselves with particular groups who have suffered discrimination. Probably when that helps us ally against other groups we dislike. It's all coalition politics." Link.

Links 2019/01/06

When people say income inequality is increasing, that is only within nations. Globally, income inequality is decreasing. Link.

"Trump's environmental policy is mainly about owning the libs, and that's better news for the environment than you might think". Link.

A book I haven't been able to stop thinking about is "Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals" by Tyler Cowen. It makes a pretty convincing case that, politically, the goal of maximizing long-run economic growth is more important than anything else. A quick review is here. Even though this seems correct when looking at the past up until now, I wonder if it's not correct going forward, because of something like Yudkowsky's Law of Mad Science: "Every 18 months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point."

"black students randomly assigned to a black teacher in grades K-3 are ...(7%) more likely to graduate from high school and ...(13%) more likely to enroll in college than their peers in the same school who are not assigned a black teacher" Link.

We are already doing a bailout for U.S. farmers, who are facing rising bankruptcies due to loss of global customers from our fearless leader's good-and-easy-to-win trade war. The problems faced by American farmers due to anti-trade policies are about to get worse. The TPP, a trade agreement among many countries that Trump pulled the U.S. out of, is about to go into effect. When it does, farmers from the countries in that deal will have lower tariffs when selling to other countries in the agreement, compared to American farmers. Link.

When Trump issued "Executive Order 13780: Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States", the Justice Department wrote a supporting document detailing how much crime is committed in America by foreigners. Their data appeared to be... not right. And after being challenged on it, they now finally admit it, but refuse to retract or correct it because "the [law] does not obligate" it! Link.

H.R. 392, a bill introduced by a Republican, would "(1) eliminate the per-country numerical limitation for employment-based immigrants, and (2) increase the per-country numerical limitation for family-based immigrants from 7% to 15% of the total number of family-sponsored visas," using a merit-based system instead. This would be a very good thing! It was even referred to as "the most popular bill in congress", claiming "we're on the precipice of having a veto-proof majority in support" (link). But that was 2017, and the bill hasn't gone anywhere (yet?). I don't know what the current status is.

"Americans would be up in arms if the government were allowed to seize their property any time it pleased. Or at least, that’s what one might believe. In reality, Americans have suffered the outrageous practice of civil-asset forfeiture with relative complacency... under civil-asset forfeiture, government employees can take innocent people’s property and keep it for themselves... Opposition to civil forfeiture has come from groups as politically diverse as the conservative Heritage Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union... (Attorney General Jeff) Sessions promptly reversed the previous administration’s restrictions on civil forfeiture, declaring 'I love that program. We had so much fun doing that.'" Link.

Links 2019/01/01

"Mothers who juggle jobs outside the home spend just as much time tending their children as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s." Link.

An old essay from Bush 1 on why he decided not to invade Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. History has proven him right. Link.

"Twelve leading economists on the research that shaped our world in 2018" Link.

Was 2018 "the year of the YIMBY"? "Could this be the blueprint for a housing wave — a strategy that unites social justice warriors, type-A transit maximalists, and Howard Roark–ian libertarians?". Link.

Trump recently signed a bipartisan criminal justice bill that everyone should be happy with. Here is a case for further criminal justice reform: Link.

Illegal immigrants commit less crime than native-born citizens. Link.

People frequently claim that school shootings have become more/very common, but "there are about 55 million schoolchildren in the United States, and about 10 of them are killed annually by gunfire at school, a rate that hasn’t increased since the 1990s. That number includes all shooting incidents, not just mass shootings at schools, which average about one a year, in a country with about 130,000 K-12 schools." Link.

The Niskanen Center's policy vision paper advocates a "free-market welfare state... economic freedom and robust social spending are complements rather than antagonists. Consider the economic freedom rankings produced by the 'pro-market' Heritage Foundation and Fraser Institute... larger social transfers tend to correlate positively with other measures of free markets and good governance. The freest economies generally feature big welfare states." Link.