Pasadena Star-News – Private prisons have public benefits

Wednesday, October 27th, 2004

From Private prisons have public benefits by Alexander Tabarrok:

Texas houses about the same number of prisoners as does California, but the California taxpayer pays almost twice as much per inmate: around $30,000 per year, more than the cost of a decent college education.

If California prisons were unusually effective, the high cost might be acceptable. But with 300,000 prisoners packed into a system designed for only 170,000, it’s a challenge simply to warehouse the prisoners, let alone provide effective programs for rehabilitation.

It’s no surprise that private prisons cost less than public prisons. Private prisons also drive public prisons to keep their costs down:

Cost savings of 15 to 25 percent on construction and 10 to 15 percent on management are common. These are modest but significant cost savings in a $5.7 billion state system that continues to grow more expensive every year. [...] Perhaps moretellingly, from 1999 through 2001, states without any private prisons saw per-prisoner costs increase by 18.9 percent, but in states where the public prisons competed with private prisons, cost increases were much lower, only 8.1 percent.

Tabarrok makes the point that while, “The bad rap on private prisons has always been that cost-savings would come at the expense of quality,” that’s not the case:

Careful studies by the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice and others indicate that if anything, private prisons are of higher quality than public prisons.

In fact, although prison privatization in the United States has been driven by cost savings, in Britain the driving motivation was higher quality, more humane prisons.

After studying the issue, the director general of Her Majesty’s Prison Services concluded that the private prisons “are the most progressive in the country at controlling bullying, health care, and suicide prevention.’

2blowhards.com: Romeo, Juliet and Renaissance Urban Demographics

Wednesday, October 27th, 2004

Romeo, Juliet and Renaissance Urban Demographics explains why gangs of young men rampaged through Renaissance Italian cities:

Based on very detailed information available from the Catasto, a combination tax assessment and census conducted in 1427, Professor Herlihy points out that the sex ratio between Florentine men and women aged 18 to 32 was 132:100. This is the kind of oversupply of men and undersupply of women that is normally found only in frontier towns. In the case of Renaisance Florence, this sex imbalance was the result of two causes. The first was a continuing immigration of ambitious young men from the countryside. The second was the tendency of Italian urban families to ship any unmarried daughters off to convents by the age of 15 or so, where they wouldn’t need expensive dowries and were apparently beyond the reach of the census takers.

Added to the sex-ratio imbalance was the fact that urban males couldn?t get married until they could support a family. (This was the opposite of the situation in the Italian countryside, where you couldn?t start an independent life as a farmer without a hard-working wife.) And it took a long time to get established enough for a city-guy to contemplate marriage, if he ever made it to the altar at all. In Florence in 1427, only a quarter of men between the ages of 18 and 32 were either married or widowed. Married men didn’t make up the majority of the masculine population until they reached their middle 30s. The average Florentine child was born to a 40-year-old father.

The Worst Jobs in Science: The Sequel

Monday, October 25th, 2004

When you think of awful jobs, you tend to think of cleaning toilets or asking, “Would you like fries with that?” You think of the kinds of jobs you don’t have to do once you have an education — but sometimes an advanced degree leads to a more disgusting job than anything in fast food or facilities maintenance. From The Worst Jobs in Science: The Sequel:

  • Anal-Wart Researcher
  • Worm Parasitologist
  • Lab-Animal Veterinarian
  • Tampon Squeezer
  • Landfill Monitor
  • K-25 Demolition Worker
  • Ecologist at St. John?s Harbor
  • Iraqi Archaeologist
  • Tick Dragger
  • Nurse
  • Computer Help-Desk Tech
  • Congressional Science Fellow
  • Public-School Science Teacher
  • Nosologist
  • Root Sorter
  • Crank
  • Television Meteorologist

(Hat tip to Mercola’s Health Blog.)

News Flash: Nobel Laureate Criticizes Bush Tax Cuts!

Friday, October 22nd, 2004

News Flash: Nobel Laureate Criticizes Bush Tax Cuts! explains how income and payroll taxes form a “tax wedge” that distorts labor markets.

This is how I was taught labor economics:

The traditional view looks at the elasticity of labor supply in terms of the choice between labor vs. leisure. That is, you either work longer, or you lie around watching TV and eating Bon-Bons. In that framework, if you get a higher wage, that makes working more profitable, but it also gives you more income, making leisure more attractive. These two effects more or less cancel one another out, it was thought, so that you do not increase labor supply very much in response to a higher wage.

This is how Nobel prize-winning economist Edward Prescott sees the labor market:

Prescott re-casts the trade-off as between “market time” and “non-market time.” In addition to TV and Bon-Bons, you spend some of your non-market time producing goods and services, such as home-improvement projects, meals cooked at home, housework, and child care. Thinking of the choice in those terms, an increase in your wage rate could have a significant effect on your labor supply. The higher your wage rate, the more it makes sense for you to “outsource” household chores. If I can earn enough in six hours of work to pay for someone else to do eight hours of household chores, then I can get more hours for TV and Bon-Bons by increasing my “market time.” Working six more hours but spending eight fewer hours on household chores gives me a net saving of two hours.

This use of market time to increase leisure time is an application of one of the most basic concepts in economics — comparative advantage. An accountant could put together the bookshelves that she just bought from Ikea, but her comparative advantage is using spreadsheets, not screwdrivers. She and the economy are better off if she does more work as an accountant and pays a professional to assemble her bookshelves.

Taxes, Deficits and War: the History Lessons

Friday, October 22nd, 2004

Taxes, Deficits and War: the History Lessons explains that our current regime is far from the first to pay for a war through borrowing (rather than an immediate tax hike):

America finances wars through borrowing. So does virtually every other modern nation. In fact, our modern financial markets were born in the various open-air auctions at which the debt instruments of warring nations were traded. Nations that were expected to lose wars had their bonds discounted by the marketplace and vice versa. Powerful banking interests such as the Rothschilds became very adept at quickly ascertaining real-time war news and using it to receive an edge in the marketplace. Debt in times of war is not an unusual aberration; it is universal.

Some financial insight:

As during the era of the Rothschilds, the danger signal is not that borrowing occurs, but that the marketplace begins to worry whether economic weakness or military defeat will harm the borrower’s ability to repay. This can occur either in the form of outright default for the vanquished party or in the form of repayment in a debauched currency for the overstretched. What is the international marketplace saying about our borrowing? High degrees of confidence have caused them to lend to us at roughly 4%, the lowest rates in four decades.

Should we worry about passing along debt to our children? Not really:

Ronald Reagan ended a multi-generational threat through his military build-up in the 1980s. Soviet missiles are not pointed at us any longer. The collapse of the Soviets freed up enormous resources (remember the peace dividend?) which helped lay the foundation for the growth of the ’90s. The generation following WWII reaped enormous benefits from the defeat of the Nazis. The generation following the demise of the Cold War reaped similar benefits from the demise of the Soviets.

Atavistic Socialism

Friday, October 22nd, 2004

Atavistic Socialism looks at Hayek’s evolutionary take on culture and why he held that socialism was a primitive step back to our hunter intincts, not a scientific leap forward:

Hayek himself had little time for inevitability. He looked at human development with a more empirical mind, and observed that the human societies which prospered and survived were those which enabled certain institutions and practices to take firm root and be passed on to succeeding generations. Prominent among the cultural traditions which enabled this were things like respect for property rights, and a strong value placed upon family ties and loyalty. He included traditions such as those which encourage people to forgo present gratification in favour of greater future benefit.

Nobody thought this out, said Hayek. It was simply that the societies which respected and practised such things survived, while the other did not. New religions came and went through the ages, he observed. Those which incorporated values such as these might last, but the others would not. Hayek expressed the view that the ‘false’ religions which did not respect these values would be counted out, on average, after a few score years. The first generation adopted the new ways in the flush of enthusiasm; their children’s loyalty to the ideas was weaker; and they would finally be abandoned during the third generation.

To the consternation of Socialists, Hayek treated Communism as if it were just another ‘false’ religion, albeit a seductive and deadly one. He conjectured that it would suffer the same fate as those other value systems which had run counter to the traditional values. His prescience was remarkable, for it was just over 70 years between the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the final collapse of its edifice just 15 years ago. Fortunately Hayek himself lived long enough to see his ideas vindicated, and saw Socialism, his lifelong enemy, predecease him.

The three sources of human values, according to Hayek:

In that lecture Hayek explained that from the first source came ideas which were genetically determined and innate. The second source was the product of rational thought, the ideas we think up. These two were relatively minor. The third, and by far the most important, came by cultural transmission, the ideas passed on by society.

Part of his thesis was that human beings had developed their inherited moral instincts as hunters. As they later developed an extended society, interacting and trading, they had to learn culturally to subjugate the inherited instincts to the wiser and more rewarding morality of what he called The Great Society.

Hayek told his rapt audience that the old values of the hunting band still had their allure, including the urge to share everything when value could not be stored. Even with all that modern society makes possible, we still feel the inherited urge that we have learned to subjugate to the transmitted rules which make more worthwhile goals possible. The groups which learned to do that were the ones which survived and prospered.

Members of the audience actually gasped when Hayek referred to Socialism as ‘atavistic’ — the reversion to an older, more primitive form. Many of the students were among those who thought that Socialism was modern and scientific, and could perhaps bring rational order to a chaotic and unjust world. Now here was Hayek equating it with a primitive instinct, inferior to the learned rules which had enabled human society to develop.

Indian Mounds Mystify Excavators

Friday, October 22nd, 2004

From Indian Mounds Mystify Excavators:

A thousand years ago along the banks of the Mississippi River, in what is currently southeast Illinois, there was a city that now mystifies both archeologists and anthropologists.

At its zenith, around A.D. 1050, the city that is now called Cahokia was among the largest metropolitan centers in the world. About 15,000 people lived in the city, with another 15,000 to 20,000 residing in its surrounding ‘suburbs’ and outlying farmlands. It was the region’s capital city, a place of art, grand religious rituals and science.

But by 1300, the city had become a ghost town, its carefully built structures abandoned and its population dispersed.
[...]
Cahokia is not the historical name of this city; the current name comes from the native people who were living in the area when French explorers arrived in the early 1600s. The city’s authentic name — the name given to it by its creators — is lost to time, as its residents did not appear to have a written language.

But what really puzzles archeologists and anthropologists is that there are no legends, no records, no mention whatsoever of the once-grand city in the lore of any of the tribes — Osage, Omaha, Ponca and Quapaw — that are believed to be the direct descendents of the city’s builders.

This odd silence on the matter of Cahokia has led some experts to theorize that something particularly nasty happened there.

For Its Own Reasons, Singapore Is Getting Rather Gay-Friendly

Friday, October 22nd, 2004

One of my favorite quirky statistics is the high correlation between high-tech industry and gay population. I’d forgotten where I’d read about, but a quick web search on “technology correlation cities” brought up Technology and Tolerance: Diversity and High Tech Growth:

Perhaps our most striking finding is that a leading indicator of a metropolitan area’s high-technology success is a large gay population. Frequently cited as a harbinger of redevelopment and gentrification in distressed urban neighborhoods, the presence of gays in a metro area signals a diverse and progressive environment and provides a barometer for a broad spectrum of amenities attractive to adults, especially those without children. To some extent, the gay and lesbian population represents what might be called the “last frontier” of diversity in our society. [...] In our statistical analyses, the gay index does better than other individual measures of social and cultural diversity as a predictor of high-tech location. The correlations are exceedingly high and consistently positive and significant. The results of a variety of multivariate regression analyses support this finding. The gay index is positively and significantly associated with the ability of a region both to attract talent and to generate high-tech industry.

It sounds like the social engineers in Singapore have read the research. From For Its Own Reasons, Singapore Is Getting Rather Gay-Friendly:

‘Singapore’s become much more tolerant and open,’ says Sean Ho, surveying the raucous scene at the dance party. Mr. Ho, a 33-year-old information-technology consultant, was decked out in a T-shirt proclaiming ‘Choose Sin’ in large, red letters and ‘gapore’ in smaller print. ‘They are giving us a lot more space,’ he says.

The driving force behind this change appears to be economic. One consideration: reaping so-called pink dollars from gay tourists. The August dance party and related events, including plays and art exhibitions with gay themes, pulled in about 2,500 foreign visitors and about $6 million, according to event organizers.

Singapore’s more relaxed attitude toward homosexuality is also part of a broader government strategy to transform the small former British colony into a creative, idea-driven economy. That, Singapore’s leaders realize, will require some loosening up, as well as a serious effort to change the world’s perception of Singapore as a rigid, authoritarian place.

Re-Inventing the Flu Vaccine

Friday, October 22nd, 2004

You may not realize how vaccines are made. From Re-Inventing the Flu Vaccine:

If ya wanna make a flu vaccine, ya gotta break a few eggs. Actually, over a million. The current ‘hen oviduct bioreactor technology’ (a.k.a., using eggs) takes up to nine months in its entirety. That means if health authorities goof in choosing the viral strains they think will be prevalent in the winter, or we have a flu-shot shortage like this year, it’s too late to start a new batch. People get sick; people die.

When War Games Meet Video Games

Thursday, October 21st, 2004

I don’t know how useful this is, but it sounds like a fun project. From When War Games Meet Video Games:

You’d hardly expect to find dozens of defense strategists setting aside two weeks at a time to play a video game. But then, Urban Resolve is no ordinary video game.

Developed by the U.S. Joint Forces Command, or JFCom, a division of the Department of Defense, the $195,000 program is a combat simulation on a massive scale. It pits two opposing teams of soldiers against one another in a fight for control over a city under siege, and it’s capable of modeling the behavior of the nearly 1 million entities — the soldiers, civilians, cars, tanks and so on — that might exist in such a conflict.

In other words, it’s one part Risk, one part The Sims and one part raw supercomputing power.

Dreams of Empire

Thursday, October 21st, 2004

In Dreams of Empire, Tony Judt explores how “the world has changed in ways that make imperial power uniquely difficult to sustain”:

In the first place, it is hard to be an imperial democracy. Given the choice, voters are reluctant to pay the full cost of sustaining an empire. In a democratic setting the sentiment that money might be better spent at home can be more easily exploited by political opponents, especially when expensive postwar “stabilization and reconstruction” (i.e., nation-building) is at stake. That is why US administrations have sought to underwrite overseas adventures (first in Vietnam and now in Iraq) by borrowing money rather than taxing the American citizenry, and have tried, so far as possible, to outsource — i.e., privatize — the unglamorous nation-building part.

Moreover, the US is handicapped when it comes to exporting the image of its own democratic virtues: because it has rather too many undemocratic allies (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan come to mind) and because America does not always regard democracy as an unalloyed virtue if it produces the wrong results. Open elections in Iraq or Palestine right now would produce outcomes wholly unwelcome in Washington, as they have done or threatened to do in other places at other times. The British and the French, not to mention the Russians, did not have this problem: whatever “values” they were exporting, universal suffrage was not one of them.

Secondly, it is almost impossible to practice empire in a world of instantaneous mass media transmission. Imperial control is violent. Colonization, as the Marquis de Gervaisis observed apropos of France’s seizure of Algeria back in the 1830s, unavoidably entails “the expulsion and extermination of the natives.” But most people at home in the imperial metropole never saw that. Not so today.

To watch crimes being enacted is very different from reading about them after the fact. That is why Bill Clinton was forced into the Balkans in 1995, once the images from Bosnia had become daily fare on American television. There is a good reason why Washington now “embeds” reporters and looks with disfavor upon the independent Qatar-based al-Jazeera television network (whose equipment we damaged in both Kabul and Baghdad and which the sovereign authorities in Iraq have now temporarily banned) — the same reason the Bush administration severely restricts visual coverage of American casualties in Iraq.

The crimes of Abu Ghraib were as nothing set against what King Leopold of Belgium did to his Congolese slave laborers or the British massacre of 379 civilians at Amritsar in the Punjab in 1919. The difference is that everyone has seen what happened at Abu Ghraib. We don’t know how ordinary Belgians would have responded to seeing what their government was doing in central Africa; but in any case our own sensibilities are heightened. When the inevitable dirty work of exercising power over reluctant foreigners — expropriation, violence, corpses — is available in real time for all to see, the case for empire becomes a lot harder to sell.

Thirdly, the US cannot be an effective empire precisely because it comes in the wake of all the other empires before it and must pay the price for their missteps as well as its own. The French had been to Vietnam before the US got there. The Russians (and before them the British) have been to Afghanistan. And everyone has been to the Middle East. When Donald Rumsfeld assured his troops in Baghdad that

unlike many armies in the world, you came not to conquer, not to occupy, but to liberate, and the Iraqi people know this [emphasis added]

he was decidedly unoriginal. That’s what the British General Stanley Maude said in Baghdad ninety-seven years earlier (“Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators”) — not to mention Napoleon Bonaparte’s proclamation upon occupying Alexandria in 1798:

Oh Egyptians… I have not come to you except for the purpose of restoring your rights from the hands of the oppressors.

The Ketchup Conundrum

Thursday, October 21st, 2004

For some time now, I’ve been wondering, Why is there no Grey Poupon of ketchup? Malcolm Gladwell’s The Ketchup Conundrum answers exactly that question:

Many years ago, one mustard dominated the supermarket shelves: French?s. It came in a plastic bottle. People used it on hot dogs and bologna. It was a yellow mustard, made from ground white mustard seed with turmeric and vinegar, which gave it a mild, slightly metallic taste. If you looked hard in the grocery store, you might find something in the specialty-foods section called Grey Poupon, which was Dijon mustard, made from the more pungent brown mustard seed. In the early seventies, Grey Poupon was no more than a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year business. Few people knew what it was or how it tasted, or had any particular desire for an alternative to French?s or the runner-up, Gulden?s. Then one day the Heublein Company, which owned Grey Poupon, discovered something remarkable: if you gave people a mustard taste test, a significant number had only to try Grey Poupon once to switch from yellow mustard. In the food world that almost never happens; even among the most successful food brands, only about one in a hundred have that kind of conversion rate. Grey Poupon was magic.

So Heublein put Grey Poupon in a bigger glass jar, with an enamelled label and enough of a whiff of Frenchness to make it seem as if it were still being made in Europe (it was made in Hartford, Connecticut, from Canadian mustard seed and white wine). The company ran tasteful print ads in upscale food magazines. They put the mustard in little foil packets and distributed them with airplane meals–which was a brand-new idea at the time. Then they hired the Manhattan ad agency Lowe Marschalk to do something, on a modest budget, for television. The agency came back with an idea: A Rolls-Royce is driving down a country road. There?s a man in the back seat in a suit with a plate of beef on a silver tray. He nods to the chauffeur, who opens the glove compartment. Then comes what is known in the business as the “reveal.” The chauffeur hands back a jar of Grey Poupon. Another Rolls-Royce pulls up alongside. A man leans his head out the window. “Pardon me. Would you have any Grey Poupon?”

In the cities where the ads ran, sales of Grey Poupon leaped forty to fifty per cent, and whenever Heublein bought airtime in new cities sales jumped by forty to fifty per cent again. Grocery stores put Grey Poupon next to French?s and Gulden?s. By the end of the nineteen-eighties Grey Poupon was the most powerful brand in mustard. “The tagline in the commercial was that this was one of life?s finer pleasures,” Larry Elegant, who wrote the original Grey Poupon spot, says, “and that, along with the Rolls-Royce, seemed to impart to people?s minds that this was something truly different and superior.”

The rise of Grey Poupon proved that the American supermarket shopper was willing to pay more–in this case, $3.99 instead of $1.49 for eight ounces–as long as what they were buying carried with it an air of sophistication and complex aromatics. Its success showed, furthermore, that the boundaries of taste and custom were not fixed: that just because mustard had always been yellow didn?t mean that consumers would use only yellow mustard. It is because of Grey Poupon that the standard American supermarket today has an entire mustard section. And it is because of Grey Poupon that a man named Jim Wigon decided, four years ago, to enter the ketchup business. Isn?t the ketchup business today exactly where mustard was thirty years ago? There is Heinz and, far behind, Hunt?s and Del Monte and a handful of private-label brands. Jim Wigon wanted to create the Grey Poupon of ketchup.

Seriously, read the whole article.

The Language Police

Thursday, October 21st, 2004

I’ve been meaning to read Diane Ravitch’s The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, but it might just make me angry. From the Times Literary Supplement:

Ravitch’s discovery of textbook censorship began when she was appointed by the Clinton administration to the National Assessment Governing Board, a non-partisan federal agency charged to develop a voluntary national proficiency test. The Board began gathering material from literature and history for a fourth-grade national test. But no sooner had they compiled this material than it was handed over for review to a “sensitivity committee”, a group with backgrounds in counselling, diversity training, guidance, bilingual education, and so forth. The committee flagged many seemingly innocuous passages gathered by the Board as potentially offensive or biased: an essay on peanuts because some children are allergic to peanuts; a biography of the designer of the Mount Rushmore monument because the site is considered sacred by some Native Americans; a legend about dolphins because it reflects a regional bias against children who don’t live near the sea; an inspirational story about a blind mountain climber because it suggests that a blind person might find it harder to climb a mountain than a sighted one. The examples go on. Even Aesop’s fable, “The Fox and the Crow”, was flagged as sexist because a male fox flatters a female crow; to gain approval, the gender of the animals had to be changed. The review committee also gave the Board a list of topics to be avoided. These included abortion, evolution, expensive consumer goods, magic, personal appearance, politics, religion, unemployment, unsafe situations, weapons and violence — among others.

This sounds good though:

Perhaps the best alternative to bad textbooks is no textbooks. The Language Police has an appendix containing a list of primary readings for grades three to ten.

Better Playing Through Chemistry

Thursday, October 21st, 2004

Beta blockers are drugs that block the effects of adrenaline — increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, etc. — and, for that reason, they’re often prescribed after heart attacks.

But they’re also, oddly enough, performance-enhancing drugs — for certain kinds of sport:

Speaking from the Athens Olympics in August, Steven Ungerleider, a sports psychologist and the author of ‘Faust’s Gold,’ said that beta-blocking medications are prohibited for some events, like riflery, in which competitors use the drug to slow the pulse so that they can fire between heartbeats to avoid a jolt.

I first heard about beta-blockers as performance-enhancing drugs for the biathlon, that peculiar mix of cross-country skiing (a cardio-intensive aerobic event) and rifle shooting (which requires calm, steady aim).

Now it turns out that musicians are relying on beta-blockers to tame their stage fright — and more. From Better Playing Through Chemistry:

Indeed, the effect of the drugs does seem magical. Beta blockers don’t merely calm musicians; they actually seem to improve their performances on a technical level. In the late 1970′s, Charles Brantigan, a vascular surgeon in Denver, began researching classical musicians’ use of Inderal. By replicating performance conditions in studies at the Juilliard School and the Eastman School in Rochester, he showed that the drug not only lowered heart rates and blood pressure but also led to performances that musical judges deemed superior to those fueled with a placebo. In 1980, Dr. Brantigan, who plays tuba with the Denver Brass, sent his findings to Kenneth Mirkin, a frustrated Juilliard student who had written to him for help.

“I was the kid who had always sat last-chair viola,” said Mr. Mirkin, whose bow bounced from audition nerves. Two years later, he won a spot in the New York Philharmonic, where he has played for 22 years. “I never would have had a career in music without Inderal,” said Mr. Mirkin, who, an hour before his tryout, took 10 milligrams.

Digital Cameras Appropriated for Automobile Safety – Help Deter Distracted Drivers

Thursday, October 21st, 2004

While using a “cell phone while driving can increase chances of an accident by 400 percent,” new digital-camera technology may reduce the risk of such distractions. From Digital Cameras Appropriated for Automobile Safety – Help Deter Distracted Drivers:

Digital cameras are now being used in cars to keep drivers awake and less distracted. The cameras are used as part of the automotive vision system; some cameras scan drivers? eye movements to detect where the driver is looking, while others watch the road for animals or pedestrians. If a pedestrian crosses the street in front of a car with the automotive vision system, the digital cameras will see the person and scan the driver?s eyes to check for alertness. If the driver is not paying attention, an alarm will alert the driver. According to a study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, about 25 percent of all automobile accidents and 68 percent of rear-end crashes are caused by distracted drivers.