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Facts Are Useless Things — Politically Speaking

by RaymundHuggins Posted on January 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Jared Bernstein thinks it makes more sense to push for an increase in the gasoline tax than to try to enact a full-blown carbon tax. But he admits the point is moot: Republicans aren’t going to give either one the slightest consideration:

Yet here again, the action is sub-national, and some states have moved on this. As with all those state minimum wages, this creates a useful natural experiment wherein we can collect data on the impact of these state gas tax increases on their economies, budgets, and residents’ incomes. That way, if facts should once again matter, we’ll have some evidence as to the actual impact versus the ideologically inspired cartoon impact.

Damn! Did I miss out on the period in American history when facts used to matter? I’m bummed. Those must have been interesting times.

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Facts Are Useless Things — Politically Speaking

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Lead and Crime: Some New Evidence From a Century Ago

by MelisaEPGY Posted on January 4, 2015

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And now from the future to the past: specifically, the period from 1921 to 1936. Let’s talk about homicide.

James Feigenbaum and Christopher Muller recently published an intriguing paper that looks at the correlation between the introduction of lead pipes in American cities at the turn of the 20th century and the increase in the murder rate 20 years later. Southern cities, it turns out, mostly opted out of lead piping (mainly because they lacked nearby lead smelters and refineries), so F&M present separate results for northern and Midwest cities where the vast bulk of lead pipe construction took place.

Their basic results are on the right. Cities with at least some lead piping had murder rates that were, on average, 8.6 percent higher than cities with galvanized iron or wrought iron pipes. Other causes of death were mostly unrelated. Only the murder rates changed1.

Now, there are several things to say about this. On the positive side, this study avoids some of the confounding factors of other studies. Lead paint and gasoline lead, for example, tend to be concentrated in poor neighborhoods, which means that correlations with crime might be due to hyper-local socio-geographic factors rather than lead itself. But F&M’s study avoids this problem: lead piping generally served entire cities, so it affects everyone equally, not just the poor. And since the likelihood of using lead pipes was mostly a factor of how close a city was to a lead refinery (thus making lead pipes cheaper), there’s no special reason to think that cities which used lead pipes were sociologically any different from those that used iron pipes.

On the negative side, it’s risky to look solely at homicide numbers. This is because the absolute number of murders is small, especially on a city-by-city basis, and that means there’s a lot of noise in the numbers. This is especially true when you’re limited to a period of time as short as 15 years. There’s also the fact that this was an era when lead paint was widely used, and that’s very hard to tease out from the use of lead in pipes. Finally, there’s the usual problem of any study like this: what do you control for? The use of lead pipes is plausibly unrelated to anything else related to crime, but it’s impossible to know for sure. The authors do control for black population, foreign-born population, occupations, home ownership, and gender breakdown, and that reduces their effect size from 11.4 percent to 8.6 percent. Might some other control reduce it even further?

Plus there’s the anomaly of Southern cities. Very few of them used lead pipes, but some did, and their murder rates were essentially no different from any other Southern cities. Why? It’s possible that this is because their use of lead pipes was small (F&M have data on lead pipe use by city, but not on how much lead piping was used in each city). But it’s still odd.

Finally, there’s a fascinating aspect to this study: when you study lead and crime, you need to concentrate on young children, since they’re the ones primarily harmed by lead exposure. So you want to correlate lead exposure to crime rates 20 years later. As near as I can tell, F&M do this, but only by accident: their lead pipe data comes from 1897 but the earliest reliable homicide data starts in 1921. So the proper time lag is there, but as near as I can tell, it’s not really deliberate. They do mention the time lag briefly in their discussion of a confirming bit of evidence toward the end of the paper, but nowhere in the main body.

In any case, this is yet another small but persuasive bit of evidence for the link between lead exposure in children and increased rates of violent crime when those children grow up. Despite the study’s few weaknesses, it really is plausible that lead piping is exogenous to any other factor related to crime rates, and this makes F&M’s discovery pretty credible as a causal factor for the difference in murder rates between lead-pipe and iron-pipe cities, not just a spurious correlation. Interesting stuff.

1Actually, not quite. They tested for cirrhosis, suicide, heart disease, pneumonia, tuberculosis, auto accidents, influenza, diabetes, childbirth, syphilis, whooping cough, measles, typhoid, scarlet fever, train accidents, and malaria. All were uncorrelated except for cirrhosis and train accidents. The latter two are unexplained, though lead exposure actually is related to cirrhosis, and it’s possible that reductions in impulse control might lead to more train accidents. Still, a bit odd.

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Lead and Crime: Some New Evidence From a Century Ago

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A Quick Note About the Future

by LannyCurtiss Posted on January 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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Jus a quick note before I move on to another subject this morning. A fair number of comments to my list of predictions yesterday suggested that it made for pretty depressing reading. But I suspect that might have been due to my tone more than the actual content of the predictions themselves. There’s a bit of fuzziness here, but here’s how I’d classify them:

Basically positive: 1, 2, 5, 9, 11, 13
Neutral-ish: 4, 8, 10, 14
Basically negative: 3, 6, 7, 12, 15, 16

Obviously there’s room for debate here. For example, I count the development of artificial intelligence (#1) as a positive development, but I do concede that it will either “transform or destroy” the world. (The case for destroying the world is here.) On the neutralish side, you might think that super social media (#8) sounds great, not neutral, and if you’re Russian or Chinese you won’t think much of #14. On the negative side, the stagnation of manned space travel (#12) might strike you as a yawn, and although any kind of biological attack is bad (#16), I pretty much think we’ll be able to contain this threat.

In any case, you can argue about my categories. Still, I think by any fair measure I ended up with a roughly an even mix of good and bad, and that’s just the way the world is. If you made a similar list for 1900-1950 but did it in hindsight, you’d get electrification, mass-produced cars, and penicillin, but you’d also get the Great Depression, two massive world wars, the start of the Cold War, and the invention of nuclear bombs. It was hardly all roses.

I suspect that for most of us alive today, our attitudes are skewed by growing up in the period from 1950-2000. But this is the anomaly: obviously there was some bad stuff during this era, but the good far outweighed it. On a broad scale, it was almost certainly the most progressive and innovative half-century in human history. After all, we might have been bristling with nuclear weapons, but we never ended up using them, did we? And we made massive material and social progress around the globe, but didn’t yet have any big worries about climate change or terrorism. In hindsight, most of our fears turned out to be modest, while our progress was unprecedented. It’s possible that the period from 2000-2050 will repeat that, but at the very least I think the dangers of the next few decades are both real and deserve consideration.

For what it’s worth, though, virtually everything hinges on two things: the development of benign artificial intelligence and the development of clean, abundant energy. If we manage those two things, the world will be bright indeed.

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A Quick Note About the Future

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Friday Cat Blogging – 2 January 2015

by KimCollette Posted on January 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Let’s start off 2015 right. Today Hilbert gets catblogging all to himself. Why? Because he’s just that magnificent, that’s why. This is sort of a reverse-selfie, the kind of picture Hilbert would take if he didn’t have a servant to take it for him. But he does. Life is good.

Of course, he doesn’t quite have catblogging all to himself. Hopper is back there waiting her turn. How did she manage to photobomb this picture? That’s easy. Around here, if you just point a camera randomly in any direction, you have at least even odds of a cat showing up. This is the sign of a properly run household.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 2 January 2015

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There’s More to the Oil Collapse Than Just Shale

by TomasDennis Posted on January 2, 2015

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Bloomberg provides us today with the following chart of oil prices over the years:

James Pethokoukis has a complaint:

There is one major factor affecting oil prices that somehow got left out. Really, nothing on fracking and the shale oil revolution? Granted, it’s not an event easy to exactly date (though somehow the accompanying article manages the trick), but neither is China’s economic takeoff, and that got a shout-out.

It’s a fair point—but only up to a point. Keep in mind that US shale oil production has been growing steadily for the past five years, and during most of that time oil prices have been going up. It’s only in the past six months that oil prices have collapsed. Obviously there’s more going on than just shale.

James Hamilton, who knows as much about the energy market as anyone, figures that about 40 percent of the recent oil crash is due to reduced demand—probably as a result of global economic weakness. Of the remainder, a good guess is that half is due to shale oil and half is due to the OPEC price war in Bloomberg’s chart.

In other words, although US shale oil production is likely to have a moderate long-term impact, it’s probably responsible for a little less than a third of the current slump in oil prices. The rest is up to OPEC and a weak economy. So give shale its due, but don’t overhype it. It’s still responsible for only about 5 percent of global production.

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There’s More to the Oil Collapse Than Just Shale

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Why Did the Enclosed Mall Die?

by KatlynSoutter Posted on January 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Alex Tabarrok links today to a BBC piece on the death of the American shopping mall. But it’s really about the death of the enclosed American shopping mall. So why did enclosed malls go the way of the dodo starting in the early 90s? Here’s the author’s crack at an explanation:

When the 35-year-old Cloverleaf Mall in Chesterfield, Virginia, closed in 2007, the Chesterfield Observer noted that while it had been a popular hangout for families in the 1970s and ’80s, “That all changed in the 1990s. Cloverleaf’s best customers, women, began staying away from the mall, fearful of the youth who were beginning to congregate there. People said a former Cloverleaf manager started seeing kids with huge baggy pants and chains hanging off their belts, and people were intimidated, and they would say there were gangs.”

OK. How about Amy Merrick in the New Yorker earlier this year? What does she think?

As any cubicle dweller knows, people like natural light and fresh air and, when deprived of them, feel oppressed. So are people alienated by those older malls, with their raw concrete, brutalist architecture and fretful, defensive air? Developers have a shorthand for this style: the “classic graybox.” In his talk, Rick Caruso flashed grim photos of their façades. He lingered on a picture of a deserted food court; you could practically smell the stale grease. “Does this look like the future to you?” he asked.

Here’s Neil Howe in USA Today:

There is a generational story behind what’s happening to shopping malls. And if you want to know how it will end, you have to pay attention to each generation’s role….What most impressed the G.I.s (and the Silent Generation who succeeded them) about malls was their enormous efficiency….Then came suburban Boomers, who grew up with these newly minted malls as kids. As they matured, many Boomers soured on what they regarded as the soulless and artificial consumerism of malls and began to champion what business author Joseph Pine calls the “experience economy” — turning stores and restaurants from mere retail outlets into places that mean something (think Rainforest Cafe or Build-a-Bear Workshop or L.L. Bean). That thinking not only inspired more stores to include a “tourism” component, but it also drove the surging popularity of lifestyle centers in the early 1990s.

….But Xers soon changed the mall scene. This strapped-for-cash generation helped popularize “category killers” and was the first to adopt online shopping. Millennial teens who arrived in the late 1990s began to show less interest in malls in part because their parents deemed malls too dangerous.

The lack of reasonable explanations suggests that nobody really knows the answer. It certainly remains a mystery to me. There’s no question that shopping spaces of all kinds have been hurt in recent years by the rise of online retail, and that mall development in particular was hurt by the Great Recession. But the switch away from enclosed malls began in the 90s, and it wasn’t because people were tired of shopping. Nor was it because suburbs started to die. It was because enclosed malls were replaced by outdoor “power centers” and “lifestyle centers.”

But why? I still don’t know. Is it due to the decline of traditional department stores, which served as anchors for enclosed malls? Are stores like Target and Best Buy simply unsuited to be anchors for enclosed malls? Is it cheaper to build outdoor malls? Was it really because people started to see malls as dangerous, as two of the stories above imply?

And how does this play out in less temperate climes than Southern California? No new enclosed mall has been built near me since (I think) 1987. That’s not too big a deal, since even in winter it’s no chore to shop at an outdoor shopping center. But what about in the suburbs of Chicago? Or Detroit? Or Kansas City? Do people really want to shop at outdoor lifestyle malls when it’s ten below zero? Do enclosed malls make a sudden comeback when the weather is bone-chillingly cold and then die again in the spring? Or what?

Perhaps this is just one of those mysteries: consumer tastes changed in the early 90s, and they changed because that’s what consumer tastes do. Radio Shack used to be pretty popular too.

Still, it’s an interesting mystery. I wish there were a good explanation, not just a few obvious guesses that amount to little more than a shrug of the shoulders. Why did enclosed malls die? Somebody needs to come up with a definitive answer.

POSTSCRIPT: One thing I should note is that although few (no?) new enclosed malls are being built, older malls that have been shut down don’t all turn into the infamous dead malls that have gotten so much attention lately. A fair number of them are renovated and reopened. I’m not sure what, if anything, that means. Just thought I’d mention it.

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Why Did the Enclosed Mall Die?

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Quote of the Day: Obama’s Clean Record Is Evidence of How Corrupt He Really Is

by RosalynNewdegat Posted on December 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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From Jonah Goldberg, explaining the “culture” that causes Hillary Clinton’s supporters to attack 2016 primary opponent Jim Webb even if she hasn’t asked them to:

She’s created an infrastructure. The incentives are in place. The culture exists. It’s a bit analogous to Lois Lerner at the IRS. She didn’t need to be told by the White House to target conservative groups. She simply knew what she had to do.

I guess this is where we are. Even Darrell Issa’s committee report—Darrell Issa’s!—was forced to concede that whatever the IRS did or didn’t do in its targeting of nonprofit political groups, there’s no evidence the White House was involved in any way. This creates a real pickle. What’s a good conservative to do?

Answer: simply declare that the White House was involved—in fact, so deeply involved that there was no need for actual marching orders. The very lack of evidence is the best evidence we have of massive, deep-seated corruption in Obama’s inner circle. Case closed!

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Quote of the Day: Obama’s Clean Record Is Evidence of How Corrupt He Really Is

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Vladimir Putin’s Russia: Criticize the Government and Your Family Will Be Locked Up in a Penal Colony

by DannielFrantz Posted on December 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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The show trial of one of Vladimir Putin’s chief political critics ended today. He was convicted and banned from political office for ten years, but the sentence was suspended and he immediately joined a protest march upon his release. So what happened next?

The police in Moscow briefly detained the anticorruption crusader and political opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny on Tuesday as he tried to join an unauthorized, antigovernment rally, just hours after a Moscow court had given him a suspended sentence on criminal fraud charges. Yet, in a sign of how unwilling the authorities are to make a martyr of Mr. Navalny, they said later that the police were merely escorting him back to his home, Interfax reported.

Well, that’s not so bad. Maybe Putin is lightening up a bit. Except for one little thing:

His brother Oleg was jailed for three and a half years for the same offence….Navalny’s supporters said the Kremlin was returning to the sinister Soviet-era practice of punishing the relatives of those it disliked. Upon hearing the verdict, mumbled quietly by the judge, Yelena Korobchenko, Alexei Navalny rolled his eyes and looked at his brother.

….Oleg Navalny is the father of two small children and a former executive of the state-owned postal service. Unlike his better known brother, he has never played a role in the Russian opposition movement. His imprisonment in a penal colony seems to echo the Soviet-era practice of arresting the relatives of “inconvenient” people.

So they let Aleksei go free in order to keep him from being a martyr, but tossed his brother into prison as a hostage to his good behavior. Charming. A spokesman admitted that Putin “had been aware of the Navalny case, but that Tuesday’s ruling ‘isn’t important enough to merit a special report’ to the president.” I actually believe this. For Putin, it’s just another day at the office.

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Vladimir Putin’s Russia: Criticize the Government and Your Family Will Be Locked Up in a Penal Colony

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Final Fundraising of 2014

by LatoshaGood Posted on December 30, 2014

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This is it: absolutely my last fundraising request of the year. After that, 2014 will be in the books. So if you’re in the mood to make a final, year-end contribution to Mother Jones, now’s the time. Small amounts are fine. Large amounts are even better! You can use PayPal or a credit card. Every little bit helps.

So thanks once again for another year of reading my rants and raves, and thanks in advance for whatever donation you can afford. Here are the details:

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Final Fundraising of 2014

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The Middle Class Needs More Income. Faith Will Follow.

by PedroVerdon Posted on December 29, 2014

Mother Jones

Atrios has decided to force me to read Robert Samuelson’s column this morning. Thanks, dude. Here’s the start:

What is curious about the present understandable preoccupation with the middle class is the assumption — both explicit and implicit — that the system is “rigged” (to use Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s favorite term) against this vast constituency of Americans. In reality, just the opposite is true. The system is rigged in favor of the middle class. That’s a natural result for a democracy in which politicians compete more for votes than for dollars.

If you look at how the federal government spends and raises its money, the bias for the middle class and poor becomes plain. In fiscal 2014, about two-thirds of the $3.5 trillion federal budget went for “payments to individuals.” This covers 59 million Social Security recipients, more than 54 million Medicare beneficiaries (overlapping with Social Security), 68 million Medicaid recipients, 46 million food-stamp recipients — and many more.

This really doesn’t make sense. When we speak of the “middle class,” we’re nearly always talking about the working-age middle class. Samuelson surely knows this. But the only programs he calls out by name are specifically directed at the elderly and the working poor. Barely a single dollar of those programs goes to middle-class workers.

What’s the point of this pretense? Beats me. I guess it allows Samuelson to ignore the stagnant middle-class wages and skyrocketing upper incomes of the past 15 years, which is what nearly everyone means when they say the system is rigged against the middle class. And it allows him to make the truly chin-scratching point that during the aughts, the result of this soaring inequality was basically a massive and fraudulent loan program from the rich to the middle class that eventually—and inevitably—broke down, producing a massive economic recession. This, in Samuelson’s view, was “an intellectual, political and social climate that legitimized lax lending policies in the name of promoting middle-class well-being.” If that’s the way we promote middle-class well-being, can I please be transferred to a different class?

I don’t agree with Samuelson much, but this column is a real head scratcher. It’s not as if any of this stuff is ancient history. For more than a decade, income gains have been going almost exclusively to the rich; the housing bust, by contrast, was a calamity mostly for the working and middle classes; and government aid programs have been aimed largely at rescuing the financial sector and (in a pinch) helping the poor. The middle-class folks thrown out of work have gotten a few grudging extensions of our meager unemployment insurance and a slight expansion of our meager disability system, but that’s about it. This is not a “crisis of faith,” as Samuelson puts it. It’s a crisis of not having very much money.

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The Middle Class Needs More Income. Faith Will Follow.

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