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.