The Carlylean Atheist’s God

Monday, January 17th, 2011

Recently I mentioned Bruce Charlton’s four tough questions for the secular right. What I didn’t realize — until Kalim Kassam mentioned it — is that Mencius Moldbug swooped in and answered them, by saying that he wants a sovereign corporation rather than a democracy, because coherent authority is not fissiparous:

Radicalism, etc, are tempting because these ideologies collectively empower their believers. In a state that does not leak power, they lose their attraction and disappear naturally.

Intellectuals are not inherently liberal. They are liberal if and only if liberalism is empowering. Intellectuals in Nazi Germany were attracted to Nazism, not democracy. Intellectuals in golden-age Spain were attracted to Catholicism, not democracy. Intellectuals (almost all) in Elizabethan England were attracted to the Virgin Queen, not democracy.

Divided authority is entropic and autocatalytic — like rust, cancer, etc. It can be cured, but it has to be cured all the way. The more of it you have, the harder it is to kill.

Present regimes have no trouble suppressing right-wing dissent, violent or nonviolent. They simply need to apply these mechanisms to the left.

Charlton has become disenchanted with — and alienated within — the modern bureaucratic world, which has led him [via neo-Paganism] to Christianity. Moldbug doesn’t disagree with this view of modernity, but he hasn’t exactly found Jesus:

Oh, I don’t at all disagree. My own strongest influence is Carlyle, and Carlyle as you know was a very Christian man — although one could say he had a Christianity of his own. He certainly went through a great crisis of faith in his youth. And he was no hedonist!

My ideal state (a) is run like a business, and (b) does the will of God. It seems to me that these criteria do not conflict, but reinforce each other from opposite perspectives — if you’ll pardon the cliche, a wave-particle duality. I think God wants his kingdoms on Earth to be run like businesses, and I think that if you run a kingdom like a business you’ll find yourself doing the will of God — whether or not you ascribe any sort of reality to Him.

“God” for the Carlylean atheist is a fictional character, like Hamlet. Dear atheist, do you believe in the material reality of Hamlet? Does this prevent you from (a) reading Shakespeare, (b) imagining the person of Hamlet, (c) describing certain actions as characteristic or uncharacteristic of Hamlet?

“God,” for instance, solves or at least greatly ameliorates the is-ought problem. What is good? What is justice? What is right? In each case, it is the will of God — for it’s clear that if we define an ungood, unjust, unrighteous deity as “God,” we are just abusing the English language. We certainly can’t define good as the will of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Does this solve anything? No, the secularist might say, because we cannot see or speak to God, at least not in any reproducible way. Wrong! We cannot see God, but we can imagine God — our post-ape brains are very good at (a) personifying imaginary characters, (b) submitting to higher authorities, (c) obeying moral codes.

Thus a fruitless debate of “ought” becomes a fruitful debate of the nature of God. One ought to eat babies, I say. You disagree. Can we continue conversing? We cannot, Hume tells us. Hume is right.

But if I say, God wants us to eat babies, I have to construct the character of a baby-munching God. You in turn can criticize my baroque construction — just as if I’d written a “Hamlet II” in which Hamlet ate babies. Thus the debate is fruitful, in that (a) we have stuff to talk about, (b) spectators can tell which of us is an ass.

In short, I simply don’t see any real conflict between atheist and Christian visions of reaction. For all sorts of reasons (child-rearing among them), I would much rather be a Christian, or even a Muslim — but I’m not, and I can’t change that.

There’s a story that Oriana Fallaci spoke to John Paul II and asked His Holiness how, as an atheist, she should live her life. “You don’t believe in God?” the Pope said. “No problem — just act as if you did.” I suspect there are precious few atheists who are physically incapable of understanding or following these instructions — and even fewer who could act as if they believed in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

(Foseti found the same passage interesting.)

Posted in Bruce Charlton, Policy | 19 Comments »

On Early Warning Signs

Monday, January 17th, 2011

Theoretical biologist George Sugihara draws some parallels between complex biological systems and man-made systems:

A key phenomenon known for decades is so-called “critical slowing” as a threshold approaches. That is, a system’s dynamic response to external perturbations becomes more sluggish near tipping points. Mathematically, this property gives rise to increased inertia in the ups and downs of things like temperature or population numbers — we call this inertia “autocorrelation” — which in turn can result in larger swings, or more volatility. In some cases, it can even produce “flickering,” or rapid alternation from one stable state to another (picture a lake ricocheting back and forth between being clear and oxygenated versus algae-ridden and oxygen-starved). Another related early signaling behavior is an increase in “spatial resonance”: Pulses occurring in neighboring parts of the web become synchronized. Nearby brain cells fire in unison minutes to hours prior to an epileptic seizure, for example, and global financial markets pulse together. The autocorrelation that comes from critical slowing has been shown to be a particularly good indicator of certain geologic climate-change events, such as the greenhouse-icehouse transition that occurred 34 million years ago; the inertial effect of climate-system slowing built up gradually over millions of years, suddenly ending in a rapid shift that turned a fully lush, green planet into one with polar regions blanketed in ice.

The global financial meltdown illustrates the phenomenon of critical slowing and spatial resonance. Leading up to the crash, there was a marked increase in homogeneity among institutions, both in their revenue-generating strategies as well as in their risk-management strategies, thus increasing correlation among funds and across countries — an early warning. Indeed, with regard to risk management through diversification, it is ironic that diversification became so extreme that diversification was lost: Everyone owning part of everything creates complete homogeneity. Reducing risk by increasing portfolio diversity makes sense for each individual institution, but if everyone does it, it creates huge group or system-wide risk. Mathematically, such homogeneity leads to increased connectivity in the financial system, and the number and strength of these linkages grow as homogeneity increases. Thus, the consequence of increasing connectivity is to destabilize a generic complex system: Each institution becomes more affected by the balance sheets of neighboring institutions than by its own. The role of systemic risk monitoring, then, could simply be rapid detection and dissemination of potential imbalances, much as we allow frequent underbrush fires to burn in order to forestall catastrophic wildfires. Provided that these kinds of imbalances can be rapidly identified, maybe we will need no regulation beyond swift diffusion of information. Having frequent, small disruptions could even be the sign of a healthy, innovative financial system.

Further tactical lessons could be drawn from similarities in the structure of bank payment networks and cooperative, or “mutualistic,” networks in biology. These structures are thought to promote network growth and support more species. Consider the case of plants and their insect pollinators: Each group benefits the other, but there is competition within groups. If pollinators interact with promiscuous plants (generalists that benefit from many different insect species), the overall competition among insects and plants decreases and the system can grow very large.

Relationships of this kind are seen in financial systems too, where small specialist banks interact with large generalist banks. Interestingly, the same hierarchical structure that promotes biodiversity in plant-animal cooperative networks may increase the risk of large-scale systemic failures: Mutualism facilitates greater biodiversity, but it also creates the potential for many contingent species to go extinct, particularly if large, well-connected generalists — certain large banks, for instance — disappear. It becomes an argument for the “too big to fail” policy, in which the size of the company’s Facebook network matters more than the size of its balance sheet.

Posted in Economics, Science | 3 Comments »

The Childhood Pattern of Genius

Monday, January 17th, 2011

Marvin Minsky suggests providing children with ideas they could use to invent their own theories about themselves — whatever that means — by engaging them in various kinds of constructive, computer-related projects.

As an aside, he cites Harold G. McCurdy’s “The Childhood Pattern of Genius,” published in Horizon Magazine, May 1960:

Biographical information on a sample of twenty men of genius suggests that the typical developmental pattern includes as important aspects: (1) a high degree of attention focused upon the child by parents and other adults, expressed in intensive educational measures and, usually, abundant love; (2) isolation from other children, especially outside the family; and (3) a rich efflorescence of fantasy as a reaction to the preceding conditions.” … [If so, then] the mass education of our public school system is, in its way, a vast experiment on the effect of reducing all three factors to a minimum: accordingly, it should tend to suppress the occurrence of genius.

Charly Mann, whose father was good friends with McCurdy, calls McCurdy the Polymath of Chapel Hill (where the University of North Carolina is located) and expands on his research on geniuses:

A subject that McCurdy was keenly interested in was what factors most contributed to someone becoming a genius. After considerable study of the lives of twenty geniuses McCurdy wrote The Childhood Pattern of Genius.

His first conclusion was that genius was most common among children who spend the majority of their time with adults and little time with children near their ages unless they were siblings. His research actually showed that preteen children who are sent to school and must do their socializing with their peers are significantly impeded in their intellectual and character development. Boys he found are particularly impaired if they begin interacting with people their age before 14.

His second discovery was that highly intelligent and socially mature children are usually immersed in the interests of adults around them, and are allowed the time and loving support to naturally master these subjects. Children who grow up in this kind of environment develop a high degree of intellectual and artistic creativity.

Finally he found that most geniuses were given a high degree of family responsibility from a young age that builds self-respect and confidence. This often meant making things that could be useful or even sold, and at a minimum taking a major role in maintaing their home. What this all means is that home schooling is far better than public schools for primary education. Children, McCurdy found, are just not socially or academically mature enough for institutional education until they are teenagers. Children in fact are negatively socialized by having to spend their early youth interacting with other children, and become less creative and much more likely to have mental and emotional problems throughout the rest of their lives.

Posted in Education | 3 Comments »

Why Our Best Officers Are Leaving

Sunday, January 16th, 2011

Tom Kane explains why our best officers are leaving the military:

It’s convenient to believe that top officers simply have more-lucrative opportunities in the private sector, and that their departures are inevitable. But the reason overwhelmingly cited by veterans and active-duty officers alike is that the military personnel system — every aspect of it — is nearly blind to merit. Performance evaluations emphasize a zero-defect mentality, meaning that risk-avoidance trickles down the chain of command. Promotions can be anticipated almost to the day — regardless of an officer’s competence — so that there is essentially no difference in rank among officers the same age, even after 15 years of service. Job assignments are managed by a faceless, centralized bureaucracy that keeps everyone guessing where they might be shipped next.

The Pentagon’s response to such complaints has traditionally been to throw money at the problem, in the form of millions of dollars in talent-blind retention bonuses. More often than not, such bonuses go to any officer in the “critical” career fields of the moment, regardless of performance evaluations. This only ensures that the services retain the most risk-averse, and leads to long-term mediocrity.

When I asked veterans for the reasons they left the military, the top response was “frustration with military bureaucracy” — cited by 82 percent of respondents (with 50 percent agreeing strongly). In contrast, the conventional explanation for talent bleed—the high frequency of deployments — was cited by only 63 percent of respondents, and was the fifth-most-common reason. According to 9 out of 10 respondents, many of the best officers would stay if the military was more of a meritocracy.

The US military has a long history of innovative thinking — and a long history of punishing it:

General Mitchell was court-martialed for insubordination in 1925; and who can forget the hostile treatment afforded General Eric Shinseki in 2003 after he testified that “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” would probably be required to stabilize post-invasion Iraq?

In a 2007 essay in the Armed Forces Journal, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling offered a compelling explanation for this risk-averse tendency. A veteran of three tours in Iraq, Yingling articulated a common frustration among the troops: that a failure of generalship was losing the war. His critique focused not on failures of strategy but on the failures of the general-officer corps making the strategy, and of the anti-entrepreneurial career ladder that produced them: “It is unreasonable to expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to institutional expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late forties.”

Posted in Business, War | 3 Comments »

You don’t mess with Gaston Glock

Saturday, January 15th, 2011

When you hear that a trusted business associate tried to kill Gaston Glock a few years ago, you might expect to hear a story involving guns:

Lured into a dimly lit garage in Luxembourg by his colleague Charles Ewert, the Austrian Glock stopped to look at a sports car at Ewert’s suggestion. Suddenly, a massive masked man leaped from behind and smashed a rubber mallet into Glock’s skull. Ewert fled to the stairwell. “I am a coward,” he later told . With Glock off balance, the attacker landed another crushing blow. “I was fighting for my life,” recalls Glock, 73, during a rare interview with the press.

Springing up on legs toned by miles of daily swimming, Glock thrust his enormous fist into his assailant’s eye socket. As the would-be assassin staggered, Glock pounded again, knocking out a few of the man’s teeth. The bloodied attacker staggered, then collapsed on top of Glock “with his arms outstretched like Jesus,” according to John Paul Frising, Luxembourg’s deputy attorney general, who brought attempted murder charges against the attacker, the French-born Jacques (Spartacus) Pêcheur, 67. This was how the police found the two men at 9:30 a.m. on July 27, 1999.

Glock says he lost a liter of blood from cuts and abrasions and that he suffered seven head wounds. Yet as soon as he reached the hospital he summoned his personal bankers at UBS and Banque Ferrier Lullin. The banks held $70 million in cash, and Ewert had access to it all. By 12:30 p.m. Glock managed to move $40 million to a Swiss account. But by then Ewert had blocked the other $30 million with a court order. As he nursed his injuries, Glock wondered how he could have trusted the wrong man.

Gaston Glock’s gun business has come a long way in a short time:

The U.S. police business was once dominated by Smith & Wesson and Beretta. Then in 1985 along came Glock with a gun made from a nylon resin that was tough enough to be made into most parts of a pistol (except the carbon steel barrel). The Glock was also revolutionary for its simple design — 34 parts, compared with 60 or so for the Smith & Wesson .45 caliber semiautomatic — and its 24-ounce weight, to 25.4 ounces for the Smith & Wesson. A Glock shooter experiences a softer recoil because the gun’s polymer frame flexes slightly when it’s fired. Glock fans include the New York City police, U.S. Special Forces, the FBI and many international antiterrorist units.

These days Glock GmbH has an estimated $100 million in sales, two-thirds of it from the trigger-happy United States. A gun that retails for $500 can be manufactured for $75, and the company has a pretax margin nearing 60%, estimates John Farnam of Defense Training International, a LaPorte, Colorado, small arms instructor.

Posted in Business, Crime, Weapons | No Comments »

Death Wears a Snuggie

Saturday, January 15th, 2011

That a capacity for great violence sustains great peace is one of the genuine paradoxes of our time, John Noonan notes. Oh, and Death wears a snuggie:

Though tedious, missile duty is not without perks. The uniform regulations are relaxed, though not by design. Once the blast door thuds shut and a crew is free from the prying eyes of the public or enlisted personnel topside, out come the pajamas and hooded sweatshirts.

In a favorite missileer uniform patch, the Grim Reaper sits at an ICBM console, dressed in bunny slippers. In the real world, death wears a campus T-shirt, JCrew bottoms and the ubiquitous Snuggie. The silly blanket-robe hybrid is suited to the missile force, keeping an officer toasty while allowing him to interact with the weapons console unobstructed.

Missileers learn that on alert, comfort is as important as humor. One enterprising fellow liked to string a hammock between the two command chairs and stretch out for his long shifts at the console. Videogame systems are forbidden, a rule that was mocked until it got out that wireless Nintendo Wii controllers could cause the system to detect a false electromagnetic pulse attack and shut down.

I used to imagine that I’d have some sort of stiff-upper-lip moment should I receive “the order,” where I’d shed the Snuggie and slippers, zip up my flight suit, and make imperial references about “going out proper.”

Posted in War | No Comments »

Making the bureaucracy accountable

Friday, January 14th, 2011

Congress delegates far too much power to regulators, a Wall Street Journal editorial laments, passing ambiguous laws that convert the agencies into quasi-legislative bodies that aren’t politically accountable. So, what we need, it asserts, is a bill that would require Congress to approve major regulations.

Foseti argues that we need to make the bureaucracy accountable some other way:

To make something accountable it must be accountable to a responsible body that exercises authority. Congress is not such a body. Making something responsible to a body without any willingness to exercise power is a contradiction in terms.

In addition, the bureaucracy already controls Congress. The reason that the statutes are so vague now is because the bureaucracy writes them (your humble blogger has written many pages of at least one of the bills mentioned in the article). We already make Congress dance, it would barely slow us down if we had to make them dance an extra step.

The purpose of any such reforms should be to make the bureaucracy accountable. Making it possible to fire some of us would be a good start. If Congress tied our funding to the success of our regulations, I think you’d see an immediate spike in the quality of regulations. Making the agencies legally liable for crappy regulations would also be quite interesting.

Of course, none of this will happen. An unaccountable bureaucracy is a pillar of the progressive society — perhaps it’s the pillar. The courts would, therefore, find any change to the status quo to be unconstitutional.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

Restoring the Social Order

Friday, January 14th, 2011

Conservative ideas are responsible for restoring the social order, Heather Mac Donald says:

Liberal urban policy was based on several core assumptions. Number One: multigenerational poverty was the result of structural forces — above all, of rapacious capitalism and racism. It could never be the result of bad decision-making or a deficit of personal responsibility. Number Two: though men were still, alas, required for conceiving a child, they were purely optional for raising one. (Corollary: the role of illegitimacy in creating and perpetuating poverty could never be acknowledged.) Number Three: low-wage work was demeaning and pointless. It was better to receive a monthly welfare check than to labor at an entry-level job. Number Four: crime was an understandable and inevitable reaction to economic injustice and discrimination. (Corollary: the police could not lower crime; only government social programs and wealth-redistribution schemes could.) Together, these four conceits composed the most dangerous idea of all: that the bourgeois values of order, self-discipline, and respect for the law were decorative afterthoughts to prosperity, rather than its very precondition.

From the 1960s onward, liberal policymakers put these notions into practice, just as radical disorder was breaking out in American cities. In the name of economic justice, the welfare-rights movement, the brainchild of two New York academics, sought to eliminate all remaining stigma associated with the dole and to sign up as many people for welfare as possible. Within three years, welfare rolls in big cities had doubled. The urban riots of the 1960s heralded a decades-long outbreak of crime. A presidential commission responded to the growing anarchy in 1967 by recommending that prison sentences be shortened or eliminated and that the police focus on coordinating social services to offenders rather than on making arrests. The states complied, and the national incarceration rate dropped through the 1970s, while judges diverted offenders into social programs. Crime kept rising.

By the early 1990s, the fruits of this liberal monopoly over urban policy were in clear view. New York City homicides topped 2,000 in 1990. Drug dealers controlled the streets in the city’s poorest neighborhoods; children slept in bathtubs to avoid stray bullets from the dealers’ gun battles. Small businesses fled the city, unable to withstand the assaults on their employees and the constant break-ins. Manhattanites posted pathetic little NO RADIO signs in their cars, hoping for mercy from the circumambient thieves. The national welfare caseload was up fivefold, as was the nation’s illegitimacy rate. In New York City, one in seven residents was on welfare. I remember interviewing an able-bodied New York man who had been mooching off his girlfriend’s welfare check but was applying for his own food stamps. “I’m going for every dime I can get out of them,” he told me, righteously adding one caveat: “If they make you work, I’m not doing it.”
[...]
President Bill Clinton, to his credit, ignored these doomsayers and in 1996 ended the lifetime welfare entitlement. The same women who, the advocates had said, were incapable of working or were unwanted by the economy entered the workforce in droves. The welfare rolls dropped 66 percent, and black child poverty experienced its greatest drop in history. In New York City, where Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had started asking people to go to work a year before federal welfare reform passed, the welfare rolls have dropped 70 percent. New York now has the lowest child poverty rate of the eight largest U.S. cities. If any poverty professional has said, “Oops! I was wrong,” I haven’t heard it.

Posted in Crime, Economics, Policy, Urbanism | No Comments »

More TV viewers may be cutting the cord this year

Friday, January 14th, 2011

The Los Angeles Times reports the unsurprising news that more TV viewers may be cutting the cord this year, as a torrent — get it? — of television-ready gadgets hit store shelves this year:

For entertainment industry executives, Internet video’s migration from the PC to the TV presents opportunities as well as fresh headaches. It opens the market to a new crop of distributors willing to pay top dollar for licensing rights to TV shows and movies. But it also causes friction with cable, satellite and telecommunications carriers, which pay $30 billion annually to deliver video into the home.
[...]
Nonetheless, Internet TVs began gathering retail momentum this year, as 1 in 4 high-definition televisions sold in the U.S. provided Internet capability, according to researcher Parks Associates. Fewer than half of the consumers who purchased such high-end devices, or 40%, took advantage of this feature, Parks found.

A scant 5% of people whose televisions are connected to the Internet have used their TVs to access online video services such as Netflix, Amazon Video on Demand, Vudu or Hulu Plus. Although this is seemingly insignificant compared with the 60 million people who subscribe to pay TV, analysts say this nonetheless represents a meaningful shift away from these Internet-based on-demand services as computer-centric experiences.

This seems like a good moment to reiterate that you’re not currently paying for channels you never watch. Really.

Posted in Business, Economics, Media | No Comments »

The Bounty Hunter’s Pursuit of Justice

Thursday, January 13th, 2011

Alex Tabarrok describes the bounty hunter’s pursuit of justice:

Most people don’t realize how many fugitives from the law there are. About one-quarter of all felony defendants fail to show up on the day of their trial. Some of these absences are due to forgetfulness, hospitalization, or even imprisonment on another charge. But like Luster, many felony defendants skip court with willful intent. The police are charged with recapturing these fugitives, but some of them are chased by an even more tireless pursuer, the bounty hunter.

Bounty hunters and bail bondsmen play an important but unsung role in a legal system whose court dockets are too crowded to provide swift justice. When a suspect is arrested, a judge must make a decision: set the suspect free on his own recognizance until the court is ready to proceed, hold the suspect in jail, or release the accused on the condition that he post a bail bond. A bond is a promise backed by incentive. If the suspect shows up on the trial date, he gets his money back; but if he fails to show, the money is forfeited. We don’t want to deprive the innocent of their liberty, but we also don’t want to give the guilty too much of a head start on their escape. Bail bonds don’t solve this problem completely, but they do give judges an additional tool to help them navigate the dilemma.

Bail might be a rich man’s privilege were it not for the bail bondsman. (Many bondsmen are women, but “bondsperson” doesn’t have quite the same ring, so I’ll use the standard terminology.) In return for a non-refundable fee, usually around 10 percent of the bond, a bondsman will put up his own money with the court. A typical bond might run $6,000. If the defendant shows up, the bondsman earns $600. But if the defendant flees, the bondsman potentially can forfeit $6,000. Potentially, because when a fugitive fails to appear, the court gives the bondsman a notice that essentially says, “Bring your charge to justice soon or your money is mine.” A bondsman typically has 90 to 180 days to bring a fugitive back to justice, so when a defendant jumps bail, the bondsman lets the dogs loose.

Actually, that last image suggesting a massive manhunt is misleading. Bail bond firms are often small, family-run businesses — the wife writes the bonds and the husband, the “bounty hunter,” searches for clients who fail to show up in court. Although a bondsman never knows when a desperate client might turn violent, his job is usually routine, as I found out when Dennis Sew volunteered to show me the ropes.

Dennis Sew was looking for a female heroin addict, and he checked at her aunt’s pleasant suburban home:

What it takes to be a successful bounty hunter is mostly persistence and politeness. On most days your leads don’t pay off, so you need to visit and revisit the fugitive’s home, work, and favorite hangouts. Waiting is a big part of the game. Why politeness? Well, where do the leads come from? From people like Chrissy’s aunt — relatives and friends who might not talk to the police but who will respond to a kind word. Bounty hunters are polite even to the fugitives who, after all, are also their customers, and sadly, bounty hunters rely a lot on repeat business. One customer of a firm owned by the same family that runs the one Dennis works for told him proudly, “My family and I have been coming to Frank’s Bail Bonds for three generations.”

Most fugitives don’t fight, and Dennis is eager to avoid confrontation. Cowboys don’t last long in this business. Most bounty hunters have a working relationship with police officers and will sometimes call on them to make the arrest once a fugitive has been located.

A bounty hunter also benefits from being prepared. A typical application for a bond, for example, requires information about the defendant’s residence, employer, former employer, spouse, children (along with their names and schools), spouse’s employer, mother, father, automobile (including description, tags, and financing), union membership, previous arrests, and so forth. In addition, bond dealers need access to all kinds of public and private databases. Noted bounty hunter Bob Burton says that a list of friends who work at the telephone, gas, or electric utility, the post office, welfare agencies, and in law enforcement is a major asset. Today, familiarity with the Internet and computer databases is a must.

Good bond dealers master the tricks of their trade. The first three digits of a Social Security number, for example, indicate the state where the number was issued. This information can suggest that an applicant might be lying if he claims to have been born elsewhere, and it may provide a clue about where a skipped defendant has family or friends.

If at all possible, bail bondsmen get a friend or family member to cosign the bond. The reason is simple. A defendant whose bond is cosigned is less likely to flee. As Dennis told me, “In my line of work, I deal with some mean people, people who aren’t afraid of me or the police. But even the mean ones are afraid of their mom, so if I can get Mom to list her house as collateral, I know the defendant is much more likely to show up when he is supposed to.” A defendant whose bond is cosigned is also more likely to be caught if he does flee, because the bondsman will remind the cosigner that if the fugitive can’t be found, it’s not just the bondsman who will be left holding the bag.

The history of bail is fascinating:

Bail began in medieval England as a progressive measure to help defendants get out of jail while they waited, sometimes for many months, for a roving judge to show up to conduct a trial. If the local sheriff knew the accused, he might release him on the defendant’s promise to return for the hearing. More often, however, the sheriff would release the accused to the custody of a surety, usually a brother or friend, who guaranteed that the defendant would present himself when the time came. So, in the common law, custody of the accused was never relinquished but instead was transferred to the surety — the brother became the keeper — which explains the origin of the strong rights bail bondsmen have to pursue and capture escaped defendants. Initially, the surety’s guarantee to the sheriff was simple: If the accused failed to show, the surety would take his place and be judged as if he were the offender.

The English system provided lots of incentives for sureties to make certain that the accused showed up for trial, but not a lot of incentive to be a surety. The risk to sureties was lessened when courts began to accept pledges of cash rather than of one’s person, but the system was not perfected until personal surety was slowly replaced by a commercial surety system in the United States. That system put incentives on both sides of the equation. Bondsmen had an incentive both to bail defendants out of jail and to chase them down should they flee. By the end of the 19th century, commercial sureties were the norm in the United States. (The Philippines is the only other country with a similar system.)

In places without “commercial” bail, defendants tend not to show up for their court appearances:

In Philadelphia, where commercial bail has been regulated out of existence, The Philadelphia Inquirer recently found that “fugitives jump bail… with virtual impunity.” At the end of 2009, the City of Brotherly Love had more than 47,000 unserved arrest warrants. About the only time the city’s bail jumpers are recaptured is when they are arrested for some other crime. One would expect that a criminal on the lam would be careful not to get caught speeding, but foresight is rarely a prominent characteristic of bail jumpers. Routine stops ensnare more than a few of them. When the jails are crowded, however, even serial bail jumpers are often released.

The backlog of unserved warrants has become so bad that Philadelphia and many other cities with similar systems, including Washington, D.C., Indianapolis, and Phoenix, have held “safe surrender” days when fugitives are promised leniency if they turn themselves in at a local church or other neutral location. (Some safe surrender programs even advertise on-site child care.) That’s good for the fugitives, but for victims of crime, both past and future, justice delayed is justice denied.

Bail bondsmen and bounty hunters work at no cost to the taxpayers:

The public reaps a double benefit, because when a bounty hunter fails to find his man, the bond is forfeit to the government. Because billions of dollars of bail are written every year and not every fugitive is caught, bond forfeits are a small but welcome source of revenue. At the federal level, forfeits help fund the Crime Victim Fund, which does what its name suggests, and in states such as Virginia and North Carolina they yield millions of dollars for public schools. Indeed, budget shortfalls around the nation are leading to a reconsideration of commercial bail. Oregon, which banned commercial bail in 1974, is considering a controversial bill to reinstate it, and even Illinois, nearly 50 years after establishing its alternative system, may once again allow bail bondsmen.

Posted in Crime, Economics, Policy | 2 Comments »

A Theory of Growth

Thursday, January 13th, 2011

Eric Falkenstein reiterates his theory of growth, which does not focus on preventing recessions:

That decentralized, self-interested, people can collectively make such large errors seems irrational or corrupt to many, but they should remember that growing economies require people to be making things better, which means, new ways of doing things. New ideas are often wrong. Economics has gone onto intellectual cul-de-sacs many times (socialism, Keynesian macro models, input-output models, Hilbert spaces in finance, Arbitrage Pricing Theory, Kalman-filter macroeconomic models, etc.). Other scientific disciplines have their own mistakes, and political mistakes — stupid wars — are also common. These are rarely conspiracies, but rather, smart people making mistakes because the ideas that are true, important, and new, are really hard to discern, and tempting ones are alluring when lots of other seemingly successful people are doing them.

My Batesian Mimicry Theory posits that recessions happen because certain activities become full of mimics, entrepreneurs without any real alpha who got money from investors looking in their rear-view window of what worked and focusing on correlated but insufficient statistics. For example, people assumed a nationally diversified housing prices would not fall significantly in nominal terms, because they had not for generations; people assumed anything related to the internet would make them rich in the internet bubble, conglomerates would be robust to recession in 1970, that the ‘nifty fifty’ top US companies had Galbraithian power to withstand recessions in 1973, that cotton prices would not fall in 1837, etc.

As in ecological niches, there is no stable equilibrium when mimics arise to gain the advantages of those with a real, unique and costly, comparative advantage. Every so often there are too many mimic Viceroy butterflies, not enough real poisonous Monarch ones, and a massive cataclysm occurs as predators ignore the unpleasant after-effects and start chomping on all of them. The Viceroy population grows until this devastating event occurs, a species recession. Next time, it won’t happen in butterflies, but rather, among frogs or snakes. They key is, some ecological niche is always heading towards its own Mayan collapse (distinct from the 2012 Mayan apocolypse).

The key to wealth creation is doing more with less — destroying jobs at the micro level and creating jobs at the macro level by reallocating capital and labor to more valuable pursuits. The computer got rid of things from typesetters, secretaries, to engineers working with slide-rules, but these people didn’t stay unemployed, they did something else, making the economic pie bigger. This is antithetical to government and unions who think creating a permanent ‘job’ creates productivity — stability at the micro level and stagnation at the macro level. Wealth is created by having decentralized decision-makers focused on simple goal of making money, which means, they oversee transactions where revenues collected are greater than expenses paid. If externalities are properly priced (I know, most liberal think this never happens), this implies value is created. The continual improvements in method (ie, productivity, wealth creation) merely maintain profits in a competitive environment; to do nothing would see their profits eaten away by competitors would could easily copy what they did and just undercut their prices.

This passage reminds me of our recent discussion on authority and education:

The key to this is having managers who keep their workers focused. A good example is a story I heard second-hand about a football player for Minnesota Vikings in the 1970s. Coach Bud Grant called this marginal player into a meeting, and said, ‘Here’s what I need you to do…’. The player, an articulate fellow quite confident in himself, interrupted with an explanation of why he wasn’t doing better and suggestions about how to correct it, mainly focused what others were doing wrong. Grant cut him off: ‘You don’t understand. This isn’t a negotiation. Do what I’m telling you, and you have a role here. Otherwise, you don’t.’ Hierarchies only work well when people have clearly defined goals, and managers who manage their direct reports singlemindedly.

Private firms can do this much more quickly and often than government, and are rewarded with investment and retained earnings to the degree they do it well. When the government wants to do something, like build a light-rail system, it instead satisfies all its stakeholders who have no financial downside, only veto power, and so the cost/benefit calculus is almost irrelevant. The probability that benefits will outweigh costs when not prioritized is negligible, as highlighted by the fact that companies have to work very hard to make this positive when all those other considerations are ignored.

Posted in Business, Economics, Eric Falkenstein, Policy | No Comments »

Saturday’s Event

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011

The Arizona Star doesn’t share the outlook of the larger coastal papers. It discusses Saturday’s event from the perspective of one gun-toting bystander:

Zamudio, 24, said the clerk at Walgreens was waiting for his debit card to clear when he heard the gunshots.

He ran outside.

“It was crazy. A photographer with a telephone lens was outside and he yells ‘Shooter! Shooter! Get down! And I didn’t,” Zamudio said.

Instead, Zamudio said he ran toward a man and a woman who were grappling with a man on the ground. When he saw another man holding a gun, Zamudio grabbed his arm and shoved him into a wall.

“He told me ‘It’s not me. It’s not me,’ and I just told him to put it on the ground to make all of us feel safer,” Zamudio said.

Reassured by the others involved that the man wasn’t the shooting suspect, Zamudio helped hold the suspect down.

“He was just laying there until the guy who had the gun put more weight on and he said ‘Oh, my arm! You’re breaking my arm,’” Zamudio said.

When deputies arrived, Loughner resumed his silence and refused to roll over for them, Zamudio said.

Zamudio, who was armed, said he didn’t draw his weapon because it wasn’t needed and he didn’t want to be confused as a second gunman.

Zamudio doesn’t think of himself as a hero; the elderly man who tackled Loughner despite a head wound deserves much of the credit, he said.

“Somebody had to do something,” Zamudio said. “I just joined in. They’d already started it.”
[...]
Ironically, Hamilton said family members have been teasing Zamudio for years about carrying a gun, saying he’d never be in a situation where he might have to use it.

Had Loughner not been tackled, Zamudio said he would have shot him.

I would like to hear the story of the innocent armed fellow who was grappled and subdued by bystanders. Or was he simply holding the disarmed shooter’s gun?

Posted in Crime, Policy, Weapons | No Comments »

Diplomatosis

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011

It’s nice to know that the world is drawing closer together, Theodore Dalrymple says:

When I saw pictures of the young rioters in Tunisia and Algeria, I thought I was looking at pictures of young rioters in England or France. The Tunisian and Algerian rioters made the same gestures as their Western European counterparts — perhaps there are not all that many ways to riot — and dressed in precisely the same fashion, that is to say, in international slum-youth costume. It’s nice to know that the world is drawing closer together.

Different as the societies of the Maghreb and Western Europe might at first appear to be, they share at least some important features — for example, high rates of youth unemployment — and for the same reasons. In fact, when one considers that about half of the population of Tunisia and Algeria is under 25, it is possible that they do better than European countries such as Spain, France, and Britain in absorbing young people into the labor market.

Societies on both sides of the Mediterranean suffer from what one might call diplomatosis. This dangerous disease is caused by the assumption that, since a modern economy requires educated people, the more educated people it can call upon — as measured by the average number of years in school — the more productive that economy will be. On this view, education is in itself the motor of growth, and the demand for educated labor will automatically keep up with, if not outstrip, the supply.

The story of the young Tunisian Mohammed Bouazizi, whose suicidal self-immolation was the spark that set Tunisia aflame, is instructive. He was 26 and had a degree in computer science. Like 200,000 other university graduates in Tunisia (in a population of 10 million), he could not find a job. He then tried selling fruits and vegetables from a stall. However, he did not have bureaucratic permission to do this — such permission being bestowed by other university graduates, lucky or well-connected enough to have found jobs in the public-sector bureaucracy. The police constantly harassed him because he didn’t have the requisite licenses. It is said that he set fire to himself when a policeman spat in his face.

No policy could be more dangerous, more certain ultimately to produce a social explosion, than to educate young people for many years and deny them first the opportunity to earn a living that they believe is commensurate with their education, and then the opportunity to earn a living at all. But this is the policy that many countries persist in following on both sides of the Mediterranean.

This is also one of Peter Turchin’s points, that having too many elites leads to instability.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy, Theodore Dalrymple | No Comments »

The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011

The incredible true story of the Collar Bomb Heist is indeed incredible:

At 2:28 pm on August 28, 2003, a middle-aged pizza deliveryman named Brian Wells walked into a PNC Bank in Erie, Pennsylvania. He had a short cane in his right hand and a strange bulge under the collar of his T-shirt. Wells, 46 and balding, passed the teller a note. “Gather employees with access codes to vault and work fast to fill bag with $250,000,” it said. “You have only 15 minutes.” Then he lifted his shirt to reveal a heavy, boxlike device dangling from his neck. According to the note, it was a bomb. The teller, who told Wells there was no way to get into the vault at that time, filled a bag with cash — $8,702 — and handed it over. Wells walked out, sucking on a Dum Dum lollipop he grabbed from the counter, hopped into his car, and drove off. He didn’t get far. Some 15 minutes later, state troopers spotted Wells standing outside his Geo Metro in a nearby parking lot, surrounded him, and tossed him to the pavement, cuffing his hands behind his back.

Wells told the troopers that while out on a delivery he had been accosted by a group of black men who chained the bomb around his neck at gunpoint and forced him to rob the bank. “It’s gonna go off!” he told them in desperation. “I’m not lying.” The officers called the bomb squad and took positions behind their cars, guns drawn. TV camera crews arrived and began filming. For 25 minutes Wells remained seated on the pavement, his legs curled beneath him.

“Did you call my boss?” Wells asked a trooper at one point, apparently concerned that his employer would think he was shirking his duties. Suddenly, the device started to emit an accelerating beeping noise. Wells fidgeted. It looked like he was trying to scoot backward, to somehow escape the bomb strapped to his neck. Beep… Beep… Beep. Boom! The device detonated, blasting him violently onto his back and ripping a 5-inch gash in his chest. The pizza deliveryman took a few last gasps and died on the pavement. It was 3:18 pm. The bomb squad arrived three minutes later.

The police began sorting through a trove of physical evidence. In Wells’ car, they discovered the 2-foot-long cane, which turned out to be an ingeniously crafted homemade gun. The bomb itself was likewise a marvel of DIY design and construction. The device consisted of two parts: a triple-banded metal collar with four keyholes and a three-digit combination lock, and an iron box containing two 6-inch pipe bombs loaded with double-base smokeless powder. The hinged collar locked around Wells’ neck like a giant handcuff. Investigators could tell that it had been built using professional tools. The device also contained two Sunbeam kitchen timers and one electronic countdown timer. It had wires running through it that connected to nothing — decoys to throw off would-be disablers — and stickers bearing deceptive warnings. The contraption was a puzzle in and of itself.

The most perplexing and intriguing pieces of evidence, though, were the handwritten notes that investigators found inside Wells’ car. Addressed to the “Bomb Hostage,” the notes instructed Wells to rob the bank of $250,000, then follow a set of complex instructions to find various keys and combination codes hidden throughout Erie. It contained drawings, threats, and detailed maps. If Wells did as he was told, the instructions promised, he’d wind up with the keys and the combination required to free him from the bomb. Failure or disobedience would result in certain death. “There is only one way you can survive and that is to cooperate completely,” the notes read in meticulous lettering that would later stymie handwriting analysis. “This powerful, booby-trapped bomb can be removed only by following our instructions… ACT NOW, THINK LATER OR YOU WILL DIE!” It seemed that whoever planned the robbery had also constructed a nightmarish scavenger hunt for Wells, in which the prize was his life.

Posted in Crime | No Comments »

A Haunted City

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

When Richard Fernandez was growing up, Manila was a haunted city:

The scars of the Second World War were still everywhere in evidence. There were shrapnel marks on public benches. Every now and again new construction would unearth a set of skeletons, which was only to be expected in a city that suffered more civilian casualties than either Hiroshima or Nagsaki. The bodies were everywhere. They would never find them all. Not far from where I lived, a group of men from the provinces, believers in some strange occult faith, charged police demanding land reform. They were wearing amulets that they thought conferred immunity to bullets. They were wrong. Thirty three men belonging to the Lapiang Malaya died just down the street. Not that it bothered me.

Anyone who grows up in the Third World is exposed early to the sight of death. I remember finding a man dead early one morning on the street as I was heading off to my fourth grade class. The man had electrocuted himself while trying to steal electric wire. I knocked on the nearest door and asked the householder to call the cops and went straight to school, ate my lunch and went right back home to watch Gunsmoke or something. School itself had a chapel where a plaque marked the spot where 70 people, including 16 German and Italian religious, were bayoneted by the Japanese. It didn’t bother anyone because in our childlike faith, we assumed they were all in heaven, together with the heroes of Bataan and Corregidor. Nobody gave anyone “counseling” back then in the matter of death and dying, and nobody seemed to need it.

As I grew older I decided to find out a little more about the backstory of these Manila mysteries. That eventually led me to visit the remnants of the cults based in Calamba, Laguna and to descend into the “holy” caverns of the mysterious sects which are burrowed into the side of Mt. Banahaw, an extinct volcano, which I did at 3 pm on a Good Friday, naturally. The caverns were lit at intervals by stumps of candles, by whose fitful light you could read as you grasped the guide ropes in tunnels no wider than a couple of feet, the mysterious inscriptions in pig-Latin, decorated with occult symbols. What the inscriptions meant, God only knew. I never divined the tenets of that faith, though I spoke to many a survivor. They spoke in riddles. Maybe they did not know themselves. But whatever their doctrines were it had been it enough to send the Lapiang Malaya charging against the M2 carbines of the police.

Even the Japanese battlegrounds attracted my attention. I would wander in the hills around the area of the Battle of the Dams. While tramping the trails, I met an old farmer who showed me where some unit of Japanese Naval Infantry had been overtaken and killed. I realized that the Japanese unit had been trying to walk 300 miles north over the Sierra Madre range to join with Yamashita, who himself was doomed. Anyone who has tried walking 30 miles in that terrain knows how singularly hopeless effort that must have been. The fact they even tried it filled me with awe and not a little sadness. It left me with renewed respect for the Japanese soldier and the Army dogfaces and Filipino guerillas who ran them to their deaths.

Read the whole thing — and his follow-up comments.

Posted in War | No Comments »

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