Links to Consider, 4/7
The Zvi on banning TikTok; Joseph M. Bessette on Mangual on Crime; Brett Andersen on brain hemispheres; Tanner Greer on school boards and democracy
TikTok is Chinese spyware. Letting it be installed on most phones, given the data it is collecting, is not something we can or should abide.
Then someone actually proposed a bill, S 686 or the Restrict Act. I was reminded why it is almost never a good idea to ban things. Rather than a narrow bill to allow the banning of TikTok, we got a bill that vastly expands government powers, a Patriot Act for the Internet.
I have come to believe that this is standard operating procedure for government. Do not legislate or regulate in order to solve a problem. Legislate or regulate in order to expand authority in general ways that do not involve solving the problem.
Markets do not reliably work well. But they tend to evolve to work better than before. I wish that I could say the same for government.
Joseph M. Bessette, reviewing a recent book by Rafael E. Mangual, writes (gated),
One of Mangual’s recurring themes is how “hyper-concentrated” serious violent crime is in the United States—“both geographically (in small slices of metro areas) and demographically (among young, disproportionately Black and Latino males).” Although this is not news, the data are startling. In 2019, for example, the city of Chicago had a murder rate of 18.2 per 100,000 residents, more than three times the national rate of 5.0. But within Chicago, where the author moved for law school in 2012, the ten most violent communities, in which about a sixth of the city’s residents lived, had a murder rate of 61.7, over twelve times the national average. In one of these, the murder rate was a staggering 131.9. (This community, with 17,433 residents, had 23 murders—only two fewer that year than in the entire country of Norway with its population of 5.3 million.) Yet in this same city, 17 neighborhoods saw not a single murder … about a quarter of Chicagoans, living in a city infamous for its violent crime problem, reside in communities that, at least by the homicide measure, are much safer than the nation as a whole
Some people believe that criminals made bad by society, so that incarceration is evil. The rest of us believe that it is some small units of society that are made bad by criminals, so that incarceration is necessary. One more excerpt:
Mangual cites a 2021 paper in the American Economic Review that found that “parental incarceration has beneficial effects on children, reducing their likelihood of incarceration by 4.9 percentage points and improving their adult socioeconomic status.”
The left hemisphere wants to make plans and execute them. The right hemisphere builds a unitary model based on past experience so that it can react to stimuli in the present. This means that the left hemisphere tends to be “proactive” while the right hemisphere tends to be “reactive”.
…the left hemisphere applies well-established responses to routine situations while the right hemisphere estimates and reacts to novelty.
Being predictive and proactive (i.e., future-facing) is more useful when dealing with predictable, routine situations. Thus, the left hemisphere is expected to deal more with routine situations according to the Janus model. Being reactive, on the other hand, is more useful in novel and unpredictable situations. You cannot plan ahead if you have no idea what’s going to happen next. In radically novel situations you therefore need a more generalizable model of the world (which is created through incorporating general principles from past experiences) that can be applied to almost anything. That is the job of the right hemisphere according to the Janus model.
Hard to summarize the post.
In this post, I mentioned the way that school district consolidation has made parent participation more difficult. It turns out that several years ago, Tanner Greer wrote,
To see democracy at work, I suggest, they should attend a meeting of an American school board. Nowhere are the duties and virtues of participatory democracy more powerfully expressed than in these small assemblies. What Americans know of self governance, they learned here. The school boards are the measure of our republic.
He charts the drop in the number of school districts in the United States, from nearly 120,000 in 1940 to fewer than 20,000 in 1970.
Substacks referenced above:
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I've read the things you have written previously on consolidated county school boards with regard to Maryland, even before I had children, and sit here in Florida asking myself why I have a consolidated county school district that I am relatively satisfied with. The answers I have come up with: in Florida it is against the law for public employees to go on strike. My property taxes are capped by state law to a max increase of 3 percent per year. Despite not having state income taxes there is universal Pre-Kindergarten at the state level and many churches with schools and daycares participate in this. Both my elementary school children have never been in a class with more than 23 to 25 students and have seen teachers hired and classes split when they get to this higher number. Florida Virtual school has been advertised regularly and was an option even before covid. There is open enrollment for any school in the district if there is room, so if I don't like the local school zoned for I can send my child to any school in the district and all that is required is 30 dollars and a single form filled out. There are many "exit" options within the given system. There has also been republican domination of the state legislature that is antagonistic to the already weak union.
Re: "parental incarceration has beneficial effects on children" -- 2021 article in AER.
My intuitions:
(a) The statistical finding very probably masks a mix of positive and negative effects.
(b) A substantial subset of children very probably experience more harm than benefit, if the father is incarcerated.
I don't say this in order to argue against incarceration (incapacitation) of criminals.
My point is that condign punishment of a criminal, who has children (or spouse, or others who count on him or need him), intrinsically involves risk of major harm to intimate *innocent* third parties. This is a tragic aspect of a substantial fraction of real-existing punishment. Perhaps this is an implicit message in the old saw, "A good man is hard to find."
An aside:
Perhaps this is one of many reasons why Dante's masterpiece, *Inferno,* captures the imagination. In Dante's vision of Hell, the damned experience incarceration/incapacitation in a variety of characteristic punishments. Their fates are metaphors of the specific wrongdoings, and so communicate: "This is *how* what you did is wrong." More to the point, the metaphorical punishments -- unlike worldly incarceration -- don't impose negative externalities on the wrongdoer's innocent intimates, because the punishment occur in the afterlife. Presumably, infernal punishments have a positive externality -- general deterrence -- insofar as the vividness of Dante's poetry inspires deeper comprehension of wrongdoing, and greater fear of a purportedly ineluctable punishment in the afterlife.