Sick Transit

Via Tyler Cowen, an interesting paper (co-authored by Sudhir Venkatesh, the analyst of the underground economy whom Steven Levitt made famous in Freakonomics) about what happened in New York when the Giuliani administration cracked down on street prostitution.

Unsurprisingly, a great deal of prostitution moved indoors, to clubs, brothels, private homes, etc. This was a good thing: indoor prostitutes are immensely less likely to be addicted to drugs or alcohol, and significantly less likely to be subject to theft or violence.

The upshot of these improved working conditions is that more prostitutes are willing to consider sex work as a career, rather than as a way of making ends meet in an emergency. Workers interviewed by the authors say that the autonomy, flexibility and pay are all far superior to their legal work options (usually in the service industry).

There are problems, however. Because of the illegality and stigma of their work, prostitutes are isolated from social networks and from the legal economy. It is difficult for them to switch to other employment if they want to. And they are still disproportionately subject to violence and other crime.

The authors do not address legalization, except in a brief footnote. While legalization would not be a panacea, it would clearly address all of those issues. (The authors note that legalization in Amsterdam increased the divide between legitimate indoor prostitutes and those working outdoors, who are often also substance-addicted. However, they also state that helping street workers is a much more achievable task for social service agencies.) Legalization would bring sex workers into the legitimate economy; allow them to openly create trade associations for mutual support; and provide them police and court protection.

Cowen provocatively titles his post, “should we keep prostitutes on the streets?” The obvious answer, however, is just the opposite. We should not heighten the perils of prostitution in a futile attempt to discourage it; rather, we need to mitigate its ills by working towards carefully regulated legalization.

A few days old, but hopefully apropos (at least in the long run) to acheiving today’s motto of “Peace on Earth”, Kevin Drum links to an interesting New Yorker article about the “war on terror.” It’s written by George Packer and is extremely Western-focused–one could even say imperialist–but has some interesting ideas:

Paraphrasing the American political scientist Roger D. Petersen, [Kilcullen] said, “People don’t get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks.”

Last year, in an influential article in the Journal of Strategic Studies, Kilcullen redefined the war on terror as a “global counterinsurgency.” The change in terminology has large implications. A terrorist is “a kook in a room,” Kilcullen told me, and beyond persuasion; an insurgent has a mass base whose support can be won or lost through politics.

Crumpton, Kilcullen’s boss, told me that American foreign policy traditionally operates on two levels, the global and the national; today, however, the battlefields are also regional and local, where the U.S. government has less knowledge and where it is not institutionally organized to act.

In his view, winning hearts and minds is not a matter of making local people like you—as some American initiates to counterinsurgency whom I met in Iraq seemed to believe—but of getting them to accept that supporting your side is in their interest, which requires an element of coercion.

An information strategy seems to be driving the agenda of every radical Islamist movement. Kilcullen noted that when insurgents ambush an American convoy in Iraq, “they’re not doing that because they want to reduce the number of Humvees we have in Iraq by one. They’re doing it because they want spectacular media footage of a burning Humvee.”

An Administration official pointed out that the President’s speeches on the war are like the last paragraph of every Churchill speech from the Second World War: a soaring peroration about freedom, civilization, and darkness. But in Churchill’s case, the official went on, nineteen pages of analysis, contextualization, and persuasion preceded that final paragraph. A Bush speech gives only the uplift—which suggests that there is no strategy beyond it.

Drawing on these studies, Kilcullen has plotted out a “ladder of extremism” that shows the progress of a jihadist. At the bottom is the vast population of mainstream Muslims, who are potential allies against radical Islamism as well as potential targets of subversion, and whose grievances can be addressed by political reform. The next tier up is a smaller number of “alienated Muslims,” who have given up on reform. Some of these join radical groups, like the young Muslims in North London who spend afternoons at the local community center watching jihadist videos. They require “ideological conversion”—that is, counter-subversion, which Kilcullen compares to helping young men leave gangs. … A smaller number of these individuals, already steeped in the atmosphere of radical mosques and extremist discussions, end up joining local and regional insurgent cells, usually as the result of a “biographical trigger—they will lose a friend in Iraq, or see something that shocks them on television.” With these insurgents, the full range of counterinsurgency tools has to be used, including violence and persuasion. The very small number of fighters who are recruited to the top tier of Al Qaeda and its affiliated terrorist groups are beyond persuasion or conversion. “They’re so committed you’ve got to destroy them,” Kilcullen said. “But you’ve got to do it in such a way that you don’t create new terrorists.”

And the idea that Kevin singles out, which I think is crucially important:

Kilcullen speaks of the need to “disaggregate” insurgencies: finding ways to address local grievances in Pakistan’s tribal areas or along the Thai-Malay border so that they aren’t mapped onto the ambitions of the global jihad.

By speaking of Saddam Hussein, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the Taliban, the Iranian government, Hezbollah, and Al Qaeda in terms of one big war, Administration officials and ideologues have made Osama bin Laden’s job much easier. “You don’t play to the enemy’s global information strategy of making it all one fight,” Kilcullen said. He pointedly avoided describing this as the Administration’s approach. “You say, ‘Actually, there are sixty different groups in sixty different countries who all have different objectives. Let’s not talk about bin Laden’s objectives—let’s talk about your objectives. How do we solve that problem?’ ”

Hawks seem to gleefully report any evidence of connection between local Islamic insurgencies and the global al-Qaeda network, trying to prove that we’re in a battle of civilizations and that we must confront every instance of Islamism head-on. It’s sad to see them play so readily into the enemy’s hands.

This is a bit out of the blue, since there are no current vacancies on the Supreme Court, but we should probably start thinking about the issue before it heats up again. At least, that’s my excuse for blogging about whatever happened to pop into my head this Christmas afternoon.

Why is only a majority of the Senate required to confirm Supreme Court judges? Why is there a consensus that holding the White House and a transient legislative majority is enough for a party to influence the direction of the nation for the next generation?

Unlike ordinary bills which can be overriden by a majority of the next Congress, the decisions of Supreme Court judges can only overriden by a supermajority sufficient to amend the constitution. It makes sense that only a supermajority should be allowed to bind the nation that heavily.

Adopting such a change would probably eliminate extremes on both sides of the aisle, and produce a more pragmatic and centrist judiciary. I think that would be an excellent result. Much as I would love to see the Supreme Court declare expansive reproductive rights, civil rights for gays, etc., such sharp changes to the nation’s direction should come from the political branches. (And of course, the Court’s current conservative majority is unlikely to produce such results anyway.) A more centrist Court would also eliminate the phenomenon of a single, pivotal Justice acquiring excessive power.

For those worried that accomplishments such as the race decisions of the Warren Court would be lost, it’s worth noting that Warren and Stewart were both Republicans, that Brown and Gideon were unanimous, and of course that the Warren Court was a historical aberration.

So what are the odds of this change actually happening? As an official rule, it seems quite unlikely; whichever party is currently in the majority would not want to restrict its own power. However, if the “nuclear option” arises again, this idea could be part of a potential compromise: allow the majority more freedom of appointment in the lower courts, in exchange for a supermajority requirement for the Supremes.

From Matt Yglesias:

The good news for politicians is that doing nothing is extremely easy. Over and above the general ease of not doing things, the American political system has been specially designed to facilitate not doing things.

A Republican Congressional aide looking to apply to grad school contacted a couple of hackers (in the good, old-fashioned meaning of the term) and offered to pay them to break into his alma mater’s computer and alter his grades. They decided to have a little fun with him.

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Low GPA was not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer. And somehow, it’s all that more amusing that this fine academic aspirant was a graduate of Texas Christian University.

(Via Alex Tabarrok.)

Via Religion Clause, California pot activist Craig Rubin has been arrested:

“Churches and Temples are no longer safe in America,” says Reverend Craig X Rubin of Temple 420, who was arrested November 8, 2006… An undercover officer joined Temple 420 on November 3, 2006, and immediately purchased 3.5 grams of sacrament, “PurpleErkle.” This was the basis of the arrest warrant for defendant Rubin; the seizure of all sacrament and money from the church; and, the freezing of all financial assets before conviction.

The “church” relies on Gonzales v O Centro, in which the Supreme Court held that the Federal Government had to prove a compelling interest in refusing to exempt religious practice from a ban on a hallucinogen. Unfortunately, that decision only applied to the Federal Government; since Rubin was arrested by the LAPD, he is presumably being charged under state law.

Still, it should be fun to watch the Reverend Mr. Rubin make his case.

Mark Kleiman has some interesting thoughts about Obama as a Presidential candidate, which I generally agree with, although I think he’s a bit inexperienced for a 2008 run. (I thought the same about John Edwards in 2004.)

What was more interesting to me, however, was one of the comments. Mark wrote:

For all Obama’s excellent policy-wonkery, that sort of language, and thinking, makes him far more strange to me than Wesley Clark is. But it makes him far more familiar and far more comfortable to tens of millions of people whose votes we need.

And this response is from ck up in this mofo (no comment permalinks available, but the timestamp is December 6, 2006 02:57 PM):

Gosh, Mark, you are a true technocrat. The people are a mere obstacle to your preferred policies. The people are there to be ruled, commanded. I get the sense that a wise King is what you’re looking for. That’s totally defensible but it’s crazy to see it put so starkly.

Perhaps I spend way too much time reading the technocratic blogosphere (the majority of my blogroll are academics, the rest are wonks), but I thought this was uncontroversial.

In all seriousness, democracy is clearly not the best system in the world because the majority of people make the smartest decisions. How many Americans could explain to you why the budget deficit matters, or even identify Iraq on a map?

Rather, democracy is necessary because it provides a check on the powerful. Academics and policy wonks, like everyone else, are corruptible by power. Accountability of leaders to the people is the only way to prevent excesses and keep corruption within tolerable levels.

Believing in democracy, however, does not mean believing in the policy wisdom of the masses. No one expects the majority of shareholders to actually make business decisions for a corporation; that is delegated to the board and the CEO.

So I do believe that we need to be led by wonks and experts who can determine what policies actually make sense. Even us amateurs who like to read the occasional journal article or policy paper don’t really know the right answer most of the time. Conversely, the wonks and experts–and their smooth-talking figureheads–also need to be accountable to the voters, to prevent them from growing too infatuated with their own power.

Of course, in the real world, it never works that smoothly. But I don’t see any real contradiction between democracy and technocracy.

Continuing from my previous response to Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation, I wanted to discuss Harris’ claims about the prevalence of fundamentalism in the U.S. He says in his opening note that “many of us may not care about the fate of civilization” because:

Fourty-four percent of the American population is convinced that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years. (xi, emph. orig.)

There’s no reference for this claim; the most relevant statistic I could find with a web search was from this Newsweek article from 2004:

Fifty-two percent of all those polled believe, as the Bible proclaims, that Jesus will return to earth someday; 21 percent do not believe it. Fifteen percent believe Jesus will return in their lifetime; 47 percent do not, the poll shows.

These numbers are obviously far higher than they should be in a rational society. Still, there’s no way to square “fifteen percent believe Jesus will return in their lifetime” with Harris’ claim.

The other fact that Harris seems to miss is that most religious people are very good at compartmentalizing their beliefs. Even among those who do notionally believe that Jesus will return in their lifetimes, how many do you find who actually don’t have a 401(k) or a pension plan?

Clearly, it’s disturbing that people hold irrational beliefs, and many of those beliefs do have real-world consequences; but there’s a definite difference between beliefs that people hold abstractly, and beliefs that actually influence their everyday behavior, and Harris doesn’t seem to recognize this.

Perhaps it’s wrong to ask for psychological subtlety from a book that explicitly chooses to “engage Christianity at its most divisive, injurious, and retrograde.” (ix) But if that’s the case, Harris should at least be honest about the extent of the problem, rather than using inflated numbers.

One of the many minor annoyances of Windows (or whoever you want to blame for it) is that when copying and pasting text from Word or a web browser, you often have to paste it through notepad (or use Paste Special) to avoid carrying along all kinds of screwy formatting garbage.

Which makes PureText a very simple and extremely handy tool. It binds to the (customizable) shortcut key Windows-V and automatically pastes the current clipboard contents as plain text.

A seemingly minor little thing, but really nice when you’re writing an e-mail or blog post and don’t want to interrupt your flow of composition.

Via Tyler Cowen, a very interesting new paper studying the effect of prison conditions on recidivism has found that “harsher prison conditions lead to significantly more post-release crime.” This doesn’t seem like a surprising conclusion, but in light of frequent claims that harsher prisons will deter criminals, it’s good to have the flip-side demostrated empirically.

The authors used an interesting approach to enable a controlled experiment. When an inmate enters Federal prison, they are assigned a risk score based on a standardized system (including severity of offense, length of sentence, history of violent behavior, etc). They are then assigned to a different security-level prison based on fixed score ranges. The study works by comparing inmates with ratings just above and below the cutoffs.

For example, if inmates Adam, Bob and Charles have scores of 5, 6, and 7, then Adam and Bob will both go to a minimum-security prison, while Charles will go to a low-security facility (one class up from minimum). So we can compare the difference in outcome between Adam and Bob–who are one point apart and went to the same prison–and Bob and Charles, who are also one point apart but went to different prisons.

Here are the results:

Given that approximately 600,000 inmates are released annually (accounting for about 200 of every 100,000 Americans), even if each released inmate were to commit at most one crime, and that all crimes result in arrests (both conservative assumptions), our estimates would imply an increase in the crime rate of approximately 56 per 100,000 released prisoners, for a net increase [after accounting for deterrent effects found in another study] of about 23 crimes per 100,000. (18)

There are plenty of caveats in the paper, of course; the biggest one is that it can’t be proven whether the increased recidivism is due to the change in conditions, or the change in peer group (i.e. being around more hardened criminals). Either way, however, it’s a very interesting result, and one that should give pause to the trend of tougher prisons.

Another instance of opponents of church-state separation getting a taste of their own medicine:

Last summer, conservative Christians convinced the Albemarle County, Virginia School Board to open its so-called “backpack mail” to religious nonprofits, as well as secular groups, so flyers advertising a Vacation Bible School could be sent home with elementary school students. But now some Christian clergy and others are upset because some local Pagans who attend a Unitarian Universalist church have used “backpack mail” to distribute a flyer advertising a program that will “explore the traditions of December and their origins, followed by a Pagan ritual to celebrate Yule.”

So are the original campaigners now accepting that religion is kept out of the public schools for a reason? Or perhaps they’re embracing tolerance, politely ignoring the advertisements of faiths they don’t accept? Nope:

Jeff Riddle, pastor of Jefferson Park Baptist Church in Charlottesville, wrote on his personal blog: ”… This kind of note adds weight to the argument that it is high time for Christians to leave public schools for reasonable alternatives (homeschooling and private Christian schools).”

(For a previous instance of similar schadenfreude, see this post.)

Bona fides of Universal Life Church ordinations called into question.

At a friend’s recommendation, I borrowed and read Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation. While Harris is a good writer, and he and I share the same fundamental metaphysical belief (atheistic materialism), I believe that much of his book is wrong-headed or naive.

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