a tale of two cities...,

zerohedge | New York City has a well-deserved reputation as the country’s financial and cultural center — and that’s great.

What is not so great is that, for a growing number of its residents, simply surviving in New York has become an increasingly difficult proposition.

As shown by a report issued last year by the city controller, the so-called “Capital of the World” is also the capital of income distribution inequality in the nation.

...

Even though the research precedes superstorm Sandy, this year’s NYC Hunger Experience report (below) reveals a tale of two cities, wherein the struggles of low-income and unemployed New Yorkers to keep food on the table have intensified even as the circumstances continue to improve for those who are better off.

“Now, we have the additional hardships brought about by Sandy,” Stampas said.

Many of the report’s findings are truly worrisome. For instance, between 2011 and 2012, the percentage of households with annual income below $25,000 that had trouble affording food increased a whopping 30%, though the total number of city residents who reported difficulty affording food in the same time period actually decreased by 9%.

No less serious is that, according to the Food Bank, “low income families are making the difficult decision to reduce the nutritional quality of their meals by purchasing less expensive and unhealthy foods in order to afford the mandatory expenses that would keep a roof over their heads.”

Not surprisingly, low-income residents — especially Latinos and African-Americans, women and the unemployed — are more likely to experience difficulty affording the basics than other groups.

The picture painted by the report is nothing short of alarming:

• The percentage of unemployed New Yorkers reporting difficulty soared from 41% in 2011 to 54% in 2012. To make matters worse, the city’s unemployment rate continues to trump the national average.
• As of last November, the city’s unemployment rate was 8.8% (approximately 351,000 people), compared to 7.8% (approximately 12.2 million people) in the country as a whole.
• In fact, the report adds, three years after economists declared the end of the Great Recession in 2009, unemployment rates in the city have yet to recede to pre-recession levels. Participation in government food assistance programs continues to rise, and demand for emergency food programs continues to intensify.

Again, not a pretty picture.

what the labor pool collapse means

businessinsider | “If today, the country had the same proportion of persons of working age employed as it did in 2000, the U.S. would have almost 14 million more people contributing to the economy. Even assuming that these additional workers would be 25% less productive on average than the existing labor force, U.S. gross domestic product would still be more than 5% higher ($800 billion, or about $2,600 more per person) than it actually is.”

Makes sense.

The larger question concerns how and why this happened. I have my own theories about this, but let’s first look at the evidence that Vedder himself comes up with to show that most of this can be explained by transfer programs like food stamps, disability insurance, student subsidies, and unemployment payments.

Let’s look at each.

Food stamps were a slightly goofy subsidy to the big agriculture lobby back in the 1960s, fobbed off on the public as somehow essential to ending hunger. Today, food is cheaper and more plentiful than ever, and American waistbands reveal this fact. People talk about the plight of the hungry, but it is mostly a myth. We are the most stuffed society in the history of the world.

Yet even now, 47.5 million people are receiving food stamps, with an average benefit of $125 per month. That’s 15% of the population. That’s some pretty serious grocery purchases there. Big Ag is very happy about this. Must be nice to a have a pool of guaranteed customers who live off others.

Vedder makes the point that a major reason people work is to eat. If the eating part is guaranteed, why bother working?

With disability benefits — the government program most famous for massive fraud and abuse — it’s the same story. Back in 1990, only 3 million people took checks. Today, that number is through the roof, so much that almost 8.6 million people get checks that provide the equivalent of a full-time income. And this has happened at a time when medical technology is better than ever at dealing with real disability.

Next comes the whole student racket. Back in 2000, not even 3.9 million young people received Pell Grant awards to go to college. Today, the number is approaching 10 million. Going to school is a great way to avoid having to work. Hey, but maybe all these desk sitters are absorbing fabulous information that they will soon spring on society in the form of dazzling innovations and productivity, and we will look back and say, wow, that was worth it after all.

OK, stop laughing.

Next comes unemployment. In the past, it was never possible to stay unemployed for a full year and still receive benefits. Now it is normal. Congress just keeps extending benefits, probably out of fear that if these people are pushed into the labor market, unemployment will go up and wages will fall and there will be a revolution. It’s literally the case that government is paying millions of people to shut up and stay at home.

What are we to make of Vedder’s picture of the workforce? One gains the image of many millions of people sitting at home drawing checks, pretending to be students, stuffing their faces with tax-funded potato chips, and otherwise just living it up. If that’s really true, that’s not really suffering, is it? The data reported above indicate no real disaster, except for those of us footing the bill.

I actually don’t think this is entirely the right way to look at it. The reality is that the labor market is broken today because it is not really a market in any normal sense. Many people are shut out due to more substantial problems. People are saddled with debt, terrified to lower their wage expectations, and completely shut out of a system that doesn’t seem to accommodate the old expectations.

how much can kids learn by themselves?

technologyreview | Have you watched a two-year-old use an iPad?

The meteoric rise of modern instructionism, including the misguided belief that there is a perfect way to teach something, is alarming because of the unlimited support it is getting from Bill Gates, Google, and my own institution, MIT. While Khan Academy is charming and brilliantly nonprofit, Salman Khan cannot seriously believe that he and a small number of colleagues can produce all the material, even if we did limit our learning to being instructed.

One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a nonprofit association that I founded, launched the so-called XO Laptop in 2005 with built-in programming languages. There are 2.5 million XOs in the hand of kids today in 40 countries, with 25 languages in use. In Uruguay, where all 400,000 kids have an XO laptop, knowing how to program is required in schools. The same is now true in Estonia. In Ethiopia, 5,000 kids are writing computer programs in the language Squeak.

OLPC represents about $1 billion in sales and deployment worldwide since 2005—it’s bigger than most people think. What have we learned? We learned that kids learn a great deal by themselves. The question is, how much?

To answer that question, we have now turned our attention to the 100 million kids worldwide who do not go to first grade. Most of them do not go because there is no school, there are no literate adults in their village, and there is little promise of that changing soon. My colleagues and I have started an experiment in two such villages, asking a simple question: can children learn how to read on their own?

To answer this question, we have delivered fully loaded tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, one per child, with no instruction or instructional material whatsoever. The tablets come with a solar panel, because there is no electricity in these villages. They contain modestly curated games, books, cartoons, movies—just to see what the kids will play with and whether they can figure out how to use them. We then monitor each tablet remotely, in this case by swapping SIM cards weekly (through a process affectionately known as sneakernet).

Within minutes of arrival, the tablets were unboxed and turned on by the kids themselves. After the first week, on average, 47 apps were used per day. After week two, the kids were playing games to race each other in saying the ABCs.

Will this lead to deep reading? The votes are still out. But if a child can learn to read, he or she can read to learn. If these kids are reading at, say, a third-grade level in 18 months, that would be transformational.

Whether this can happen has yet to be proved. But not only will the results tell us how to reach the rest of the 100 million kids much faster than we can by building schools and training teachers, they should also tell us a great deal about learning in the developed world. If kids in Ethiopia learn to read without school, what does that say about kids in New York City who do not learn even with school?

Barriers to Better K-12 Math Education: Poverty and the Inadequate Undergraduate Education of Prospective K-12 Teachers

aera-l | ". . . . .why do we as mathematics educators - I'm talking about the research community and us higher education types - focus so much our attention on the secondary years? If I was building a fourteen story high rise and skimped on the first six floors, things would be problematic indeed. Is it because we think secondary teachers can fix students who struggle through those six years? Is it because we don't really care and it is survival of the 'fittest'? Is it because we have, in a sense, dumbed down the elementary school mathematics education curriculum to the extent that elementary school teachers, in their collegiate years, come away unsure and ill prepared and we, in effectively a vicious cycle, write them off?"

Ed Wall's complaint about the "dumbed down the elementary school mathematics education curriculum" is on target, but not IMHO because "the research community and us higher education types - focus so much our attention on the secondary years." Instead it's primarily because of poverty in the U.S. - see e.g. "The Overriding Influence of Poverty on Children's Educational Achievement" [Hake (2011a)]; and secondarily because U.S. Mathematics Education Researchers (MER's) have not devoted enough attention to the postsecondary years

Do We Learn All the Math We Need For Ordinary Life Before 5th Grade?

aera-l | "Although about 70% of students entering the non-calculus-based Indiana University (IU) courses . . . . have completed a university calculus course, almost NONE SEEMS TO HAVE THE FOGGIEST NOTION OF THE GRAPHICAL MEANING OF A DERIVATIVE OR INTEGRAL. Similar calculus illiteracy is commonly found among students in calculus-based introductory physics courses at IU. In my judgment, these calculus interpretations are essential to the crucial OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS of instantaneous position, velocity, and acceleration: the term 'substantive non-calculus-based mechanics course' is an oxymoron."

Regarding Guy Brandenberg's recommendation of Berlinski's (1997) "Tour of the Calculus," The publisher of that book states: "Were it not for the calculus, mathematicians would have no way to describe the acceleration of a motorcycle or the effect of gravity on thrown balls and distant planets, or to prove that a man could cross a room and eventually touch the opposite wall. Just how calculus makes these things possible and in doing so finds a correspondence between real numbers and the real world is the subject of this dazzling book by a writer of extraordinary clarity and stylistic brio. Even as he initiates us into the mysteries of real numbers, functions, and limits, Berlinski explores the furthest implications of his subject, revealing how the calculus reconciles the precision of numbers with the fluidity of the changing universe."

Compare the above with to Susan Ohanian's "I never seemed to gain any insight from this exercise. . . . [[of solving calculus problems in Courant's text]]. . . , which struck me then as plodding and now I don't have any idea what any of it means."

two thousand first signer for a space odyssey

Fist tap John Kurman

This issue available to read for free online

facebook's scary engine of unintended self-disclosures...,

Facebook's scary engine of unintended self-disclosure.
Fist tap Dale.

is the indispensable cognitive object not so indispensable after all?

abcnews | A book-less library.

It sounds like an oxymoron, but come the fall of 2013, San Antonio's Bexar County is going to be home to the BiblioTech, the country's first book-less public library. Of course, there will be books -- just e-books, not physical books.

The 4,989 square-foot space will look like a modern library, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, who was inspired to pursue the project after reading Walter Issacson's Steve Jobs biography, told ABC News. (A glance at the photo shows that its inspired by Apple in more ways than one.) Instead of aisles and aisles of books there will be aisles and aisles of computers and gadgets. At the start, it will have 100 e-readers available for circulation and to take out, and then 50 e-readers for children, 50 computer stations, 25 laptops and 25 tablets on site.

"We all know the world is changing. I am an avid book reader. I read hardcover books, I have a collection of 1,000 first editions. Books are important to me," Wolff told ABC News. "But the world is changing and this is the best, most effective way to bring services to our community."

collective security club membership certification?

Excerpted from "The World Until Yesterday"

salon | Virtually all religions hold some supernatural beliefs specific to that religion. That is, a religion’s adherents firmly hold beliefs that conflict with and cannot be confirmed by our experience of the natural world, and that appear implausible to people other than the adherents of that particular religion. For example, Hindus believe there is a monkey god who travels thousands of kilometers at a single somersault. Catholics believe a woman who had not yet been fertilized by a man became pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy, whose body eventually after his death was carried up to a place called heaven, often represented as being located in the sky. The Jewish faith believes that a supernatural being gave a chunk of desert in the Middle East to the being’s favorite people, as their home forever.

No other feature of religion creates a bigger divide between religious believers and modern secular people, to whom it staggers the imagination that anyone could entertain such beliefs. No other feature creates a bigger divide between believers in two different religions, each of whom firmly believes its own beliefs but considers it absurd that the other religion’s believers believe those other beliefs. Why, nevertheless, are supernatural beliefs such universal features of religions?

One suggested answer is that supernatural religious beliefs are just ignorant superstitions similar to supernatural non-religious beliefs, illustrating only that the human brain is capable of deceiving itself into believing anything. We can all think of supernatural non-religious beliefs whose implausibility should be obvious. Many Europeans believe that the sight of a black cat heralds misfortune, but black cats are actually rather common. By repeatedly tallying whether or not a one-hour period following or not following your observation of a black cat in an area with high cat density did or did not bring you some specified level of misfortune, and by applying the statistician’s chi-square test, you can quickly convince yourself that the black-cat hypothesis has a probability of less than 1 out of 1,000 of being true. Some groups of New Guinea lowlanders believe that hearing the beautiful whistled song of the little bird known as the Lowland Mouse-Babbler warns us that someone has recently died, but this bird is among the most common species and most frequent singers in New Guinea lowland forests. If the belief about it were true, the local human population would be dead within a few days, yet my New Guinea friends are as convinced of the babbler’s ill omens as Europeans are afraid of black cats.

A more striking non-religious superstition, because people today still invest money in their mistaken belief, is water-witching, also variously known as dowsing, divining, or rhabdomancy. Already established in Europe over 400 years ago and possibly also reported before the time of Christ, this belief maintains that rotation of a forked twig carried by a practitioner called a dowser, walking over terrain whose owner wants to know where to dig a well, indicates the location and sometimes the depth of an invisible underground water supply. Control tests show that dowsers’ success at locating underground water is no better than random, but many land-owners in areas where geologists also have difficulty at predicting the location of underground water nevertheless pay dowsers for their search, then spend even more money to dig a well unlikely to yield water. The psychology behind such beliefs is that we remember the hits and forget the misses, so that whatever superstitious beliefs we hold become confirmed by even the flimsiest of evidence through the remembered hits. Such anecdotal thinking comes naturally; controlled experiments and scientific methods to distinguish between random and non-random phenomena are counterintuitive and unnatural, and thus not found in traditional societies.

Perhaps, then, religious superstitions are just further evidence of human fallibility, like belief in black cats and other non-religious superstitions. But it’s suspicious that costly commitments to belief in implausible-to-others religious superstitions are such a consistent feature of religions. The investments that many religious adherents make to their beliefs are far more burdensome, time-consuming, and heavy in consequences to them than are the actions of black-cat-phobics in occasionally avoiding black cats. This suggests that religious superstitions aren’t just an accidental by-product of human reasoning powers but possess some deeper meaning. What might that be?

beijing hardens subways for nuclear attack

freebeacon | China recently upgraded its subway system in Beijing and revealed that its mass transit was hardened to withstand nuclear blasts or chemical gas attacks in a future war, state-run media reported last month.

The disclosure of the military aspects of the underground rail system followed completion and opening of a new subway line in the Chinese capital Dec. 30, along with the extension of several other lines. The subway upgrade is part of an effort to ease gridlocked traffic in the city of 20 million people.

According to Chinese civil defense officials quoted Dec. 5 in the Global Times, a newspaper published by the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, the subway can “withstand a nuclear or poison gas attack.”

A U.S. official said the disclosure of the subway’s capabilities to withstand attack is unusual since it highlights Beijing’s strategic nuclear modernization program, something normally kept secret from state-controlled media. The strategic nuclear buildup includes the expansion of offensive nuclear forces, missile defenses, and anti-satellite arms.

China is building new long-range mobile missiles, including the DF-41, and plans to deploy up to eight new ballistic missile submarines. Reports from Asia indicate the Chinese military is also planning to build new long-range strategic nuclear bombers.

Russia too is expanding its nuclear forces with new submarines and missiles. Moscow announced last year that it is also constructing some 5,000 underground bomb shelters in Russia’s capital in anticipation of a possible future nuclear conflict.

By contrast, the U.S. government has done little to bolster civil defense measures, preferring the largely outdated concept of mutual assured destruction that leaves populations vulnerable to attack and building only limited missile defenses that the Obama administration has said are not designed to counter Chinese or Russian nuclear strikes.

The Obama administration instead is seeking deep cuts in U.S. nuclear forces as part of President Barack Obama’s policy of seeking the elimination of all nuclear arms.

why is china stockpiling rice and other commodities?

joemiller | Yesterday, it was reported that China – not currently suffering from any food shortages – is amassing rice stockpiles. This past year, the country mysteriously imported four times the rice over 2011 purchases:

United Nations agricultural experts are reporting confusion, after figures show that China imported 2.6 million tons of rice in 2012, substantially more than a four-fold increase over the 575,000 tons imported in 2011. The confusion stems from the fact that there is no obvious reason for vastly increased imports, since there has been no rice shortage in China. The speculation is that Chinese importers are taking advantage of low international prices, but all that means is that China’s own vast supplies of domestically grown rice are being stockpiled. Why would China suddenly be stockpiling millions of tons of rice for no apparent reason? Perhaps it’s related to China’s aggressive military buildup and war preparations in the Pacific and in central Asia.

Yesterday’s revelation follows reports over the past several years of the Chinese amassing commodities in warehouses through out the nation. For example, Reuters reported last year that

At Qingdao Port, home to one of China’s largest iron ore terminals, hundreds of mounds of iron ore, each as tall as a three-storey building, spill over into an area signposted “grains storage” and almost to the street.
Further south, some bonded warehouses in Shanghai are using carparks to store swollen copper stockpiles – another unusual phenomenon that bodes ill for global metal prices and raises questions about China’s ability to sustain its economic growth as the rest of the world falters.

Several months ago, at least one analyst speculated that a commodities buying spree involving 300,000 tons of metals in another Chinese province was motivated by an attempt to keep local smelters running, thereby ensuring continued tax revenues to government. But that doesn’t explain the rice-buying.

What we do know is that the world may be headed – led by the United States – toward a period of significant inflation if sovereign debt crises lead to additional “quantitative easing” and other expansions of the monetary supply.

In other words, China may be hedging its bets. Better to buy commodities than U.S. Treasuries that may ultimately be worth pennies on the dollar.

the world until yesterday

Guardian | Anthropology was born of an evolutionary model by which 19th-century men such as Lewis Henry Morgan and Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest", envisioned societies as stages in a linear progression of advancement, leading, as they conceived it, from savagery to barbarism to civilisation.

Each of these phases of human development was correlated, in their calculations, with specific technological innovations. Fire, ceramics and the bow and arrow marked the savage. With the domestication of animals, the rise of agriculture and the invention of metalworking, we entered the level of the barbarian. Literacy implied civilisation. Every society, it was assumed, progressed through the same stages, in the same sequence. The cultures of the world came to be seen as a living museum in which individual societies represented evolutionary moments captured and mired in time, each one a stage in the imagined ascent to civilisation. It followed with the certainty of Victorian rectitude that advanced societies had an obligation to assist the backward, to civilise the savage, a moral duty that played well into the needs of empire.

Oddly, it took a physicist to challenge and in time shatter this orthodoxy. Frans Boas, trained in Germany a generation before Einstein, was interested in the optical properties of water, and throughout his doctoral studies his research was plagued by problems of perception, which came to fascinate him. In the eclectic way of the best of 19th-century scholarship, inquiry in one academic field led to another. What was the nature of knowing? Who decided what was to be known? Boas became interested in how seemingly random beliefs and convictions converged into this thing called "culture", a term that he was the first to promote as an organising principle, a useful point of intellectual departure.

Far ahead of his time, Boas believed that every distinct social community, every cluster of people distinguished by language or adaptive inclination, was a unique facet of the human legacy and its promise. He became the first scholar to explore in a truly open and neutral manner how human social perceptions are formed, and how members of distinct societies become conditioned to see and interpret the world. Boas insisted that his students conduct research in the language of place, and participate fully in the daily lives of the people they studied. Every effort should be made to understand the perspective of the other, to learn the way they perceive the world, the very nature of their thoughts. Such an approach demanded, by definition, a willingness to step back from the constraints of one's own prejudices and preconceptions.

This ethnographic orientation, distilled in the concept of cultural relativism, was a radical departure, as unique in its way as was Einstein's theory of relativity in the field of physics. It became the central revelation of modern anthropology. Cultures do not exist in some absolute sense; each is but a model of reality, the consequence of one particular set of intellectual and spiritual choices made, however successfully, many generations before. The goal of the anthropologist is not just to decipher the exotic other, but also to embrace the wonder of distinct and novel cultural possibilities, that we might enrich our understanding of human nature and just possibly liberate ourselves from cultural myopia, the parochial tyranny that has haunted humanity since the birth of memory.

Boas lived to see his ideas inform much of social anthropology, but it wasn't until more than half a century after his death that modern genetics proved his intuitions to be true. Studies of the human genome leave no doubt that the genetic endowment of humanity is a single continuum. Race is a fiction. We are all cut from the same genetic cloth, all descendants of a relatively small number of individuals who walked out of Africa some 60,000 years ago and then, on a journey that lasted 40,000 years, some 2,500 generations carried the human spirit to every corner of the habitable world.

It follows, as Boas believed, that all cultures share essentially the same mental acuity, the same raw genius. Whether this intellectual capacity and potential is exercised in stunning works of technological innovation, as has been the great historical achievement of the West, or through the untangling of the complex threads of memory inherent in a myth – a primary concern, for example, of the Aborigines of Australia – is simply a matter of choice and orientation, adaptive insights and cultural priorities. There is no hierarchy of progress in the history of culture, no Social Darwinian ladder to success. The Victorian notion of the savage and the civilised, with European industrial society sitting proudly at the apex of a pyramid of advancement that widens at the base to the so-called primitives of the world, has been thoroughly discredited – indeed, scientifically ridiculed for the racial and colonial notion that it was, as relevant to our lives today as the belief of 19th-century clergymen that the Earth was but 6,000 years old.

the ghost in the machine?

Guardian | The origin of life is one of the great outstanding mysteries of science. How did a non-living mixture of molecules transform themselves into a living organism? What sort of mechanism might be responsible?

A century and a half ago, Charles Darwin produced a convincing explanation for how life on Earth evolved from simple microbes to the complexity of the biosphere today, but he pointedly left out how life got started in the first place. "One might as well speculate about the origin of matter," he quipped. But that did not stop generations of scientists from investigating the puzzle.

The problem is, whatever took place happened billions of years ago, and all traces long ago vanished – indeed, we may never have a blow-by-blow account of the process. Nevertheless we may still be able to answer the simpler question of whether life's origin was a freak series of events that happened only once, or an almost inevitable outcome of intrinsically life-friendly laws. On that answer hinges the question of whether we are alone in the universe, or whether our galaxy and others are teeming with life.

Most research into life's murky origin has been carried out by chemists. They've tried a variety of approaches in their attempts to recreate the first steps on the road to life, but little progress has been made. Perhaps that is no surprise, given life's stupendous complexity. Even the simplest bacterium is incomparably more complicated than any chemical brew ever studied.

But a more fundamental obstacle stands in the way of attempts to cook up life in the chemistry lab. The language of chemistry simply does not mesh with that of biology. Chemistry is about substances and how they react, whereas biology appeals to concepts such as information and organisation. Informational narratives permeate biology. DNA is described as a genetic "database", containing "instructions" on how to build an organism. The genetic "code" has to be "transcribed" and "translated" before it can act. And so on. If we cast the problem of life's origin in computer jargon, attempts at chemical synthesis focus exclusively on the hardware – the chemical substrate of life – but ignore the software – the informational aspect. To explain how life began we need to understand how its unique management of information came about.

the secret history of the gun control agenda in america

theatlantic | The Ku Klux Klan, Ronald Reagan, and, for most of its history, the NRA all worked to control guns. The Founding Fathers? They required gun ownership—and regulated it. And no group has more fiercely advocated the right to bear loaded weapons in public than the Black Panthers—the true pioneers of the modern pro-gun movement. In the battle over gun rights in America, both sides have distorted history and the law, and there’s no resolution in sight.

The eighth-grade students gathering on the west lawn of the state capitol in Sacramento were planning to lunch on fried chicken with California’s new governor, Ronald Reagan, and then tour the granite building constructed a century earlier to resemble the nation’s Capitol. But the festivities were interrupted by the arrival of 30 young black men and women carrying .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns, and .45-caliber pistols.

The 24 men and six women climbed the capitol steps, and one man, Bobby Seale, began to read from a prepared statement. “The American people in general and the black people in particular,” he announced, must

take careful note of the racist California legislature aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against black people The time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.

Seale then turned to the others. “All right, brothers, come on. We’re going inside.” He opened the door, and the radicals walked straight into the state’s most important government building, loaded guns in hand. No metal detectors stood in their way.

two different worlds we live in: lawfulness and perceived police misconduct

ssrn | What should we make of this? At least three points are important:

First, people’s ordinary intuitions about rightful police behavior do not comport with the law. That is, people do not seem to care very much at all about police adherence to constitutional rules when assessing whether the police should be punished. They care instead primarily about the procedural justice and fairness of the way the police act when dealing with people in the community. This could result from at least two conditions. The first condition is one in which people are aware both of legality and fairness factors, but consciously choose to credit fairness over legality. A second condition is one in which people choose fairness over legality because they are unaware of -- or perhaps more precisely -- untutored in legality. If this condition holds, then we would expect people’s assessments of legality and fairness to be coextensive.

To put this point another way, people rely on fairness to evaluate police conduct because they do not know the law. On this account procedural justice is a kind of “everyday lawyering.”62 As best we can tell, the second condition is a better descriptor of our data.63 People do not know the law and apparently judge police behavior with reference to their procedural justice judgments.

Second, that people “know” fairness and not the law means, we think, that it is extremely important to separate lawfulness from unlawfulness on the one hand, and fairness and unfairness on the other while specifying a relationship among them as we do in the model presented above. Perhaps the most important reason to do this is that police are creatures of law and are trained in it. Police are not everyday lawyers. They strive to conform their behavior to set of norms and scripts heavily influenced by formal law.

The bifurcation we see on the spectrum of evaluations that ordinary people make regarding police behavior represents a social psychological disjuncture in police-citizen engagement that is damaging to citizens, counterproductive for policing agencies and ultimately inconsistent with the police accountability project that is critical to so many cities today. Of course, one way to respond

to the fact that citizens are unaware of the law is to educate them about constitutional law in the hope that they may comport their internal assessment processes in ways that are much more consistent with articulated law. To be blunt, this is likely a fool’s errand. The resources involved would be enormous, and the project bumps up against the natural inclination that people have to choose evaluative methods that are consistent with and affirm their social identity.

Constitutional law, as it is currently composed, does not emphasize the importance of quality of police treatment, but rather places a premium on the police officer’s intention when she decides to exercise her discretion to engage someone. The values that the law protects are not those that ordinary folks, at least in this area, regularly look to when constructing individual or group identity as decades of social psychology make clear. Nothing about constitutional law prohibits a police officer from being rude, and very little of constitutional criminal procedure promotes the kinds of dignity concerns that people tend to care about.

Indeed, as our review of the constitutional imperative of suspicion which highlights much of the law is even at odds with concerns about human dignity.64 When the police deal with people in the community their legal framing encourages them to look at people as potentially engaged in “suspicious” activity. It is identifying signs of such activity that justifies police officer intervention into people’s life. Hence, when people deal with the police their experiences are tinged with mistrust and a demeaning tone. The police already suspect those they deal with are “up to no good” and they adopt the tone on inquisitors to gather data in support of these suspicions.

One possible reform strategy is to advocate change in the legal rules that shape police conduct – perhaps along the lines that Bill Stuntz has suggested.65 We worry that this approach is an exercise in futility. Thus, we may be better served by educating police officers about procedural justice. Police officers need to comport their behavior with constitutional rules, yes, but they also need to be encouraged to treat people with dignity and respect regardless of whether the rules require it.

Third, that the approach we have outlined likely leads to safer streets is only one of its benefits. As British legal scholar, Neil Walker, notes “the police are both minders and reminders of community – a producer of significant messages about the kind of place that community is or aspires to be.” Taking Walker seriously promotes an understanding of the policing enterprise that is different from is different from the usual conception that emphasizes solution of collective action problems, which in turn emphasizes police primarily as crime control agents. We do not doubt the positive benefits of policing agencies casting themselves as necessary utilities for the production of safe, functioning communities akin to well-lit streets, clean water, and cheap, widely available electricity. One must be careful in making the public utility analogy,

however. A consequential conception of a public good, which the utility analogy clearly is, conceives of production of the good as one that can be enjoyed by individuals and aggregated up, so to speak. Thus its benefits – and costs – can always be assessed in terms of efficiencies at the individual level, and it is possible to imagine the good’s production by some entity other than the state.

We think our account of the way in which people assess the rightfulness of policing behavior is more consistent with Waldron’s account of a public good which acknowledges that "no account of [its] worth to anyone can be given except by concentrating on what [it is] worth to everyone together." Truly good policing then, is enjoyed by all people in common whether or not they experience positive outcomes as individuals. Generation of it is “wholly, directly and reciprocally dependent upon its simultaneous generation for and enjoyment by certain others.”66

We can go further and say that our argument not only implies a demand for policing that is assertedly social as Waldron suggests, but constitutive, too, in the way that Ian Loader and Neil Walker claim. It is not enough for policing to simply solve collective action problems associated with the project of crime reduction. Policing also can and should play a role in the production of positive feelings of self-identity that helps to “construct and sustain our ‘wefeeling’—our very felt sense of common publicness.”67 Legitimacy, then, can be a key driver of a healthy and properly functioning democratic government. We need to do more work to fully justify this last potentially normative claim. No doubt many are made uncomfortable by the notion that police should be involved in this work. What we know, however, is that they are involved in it. The empirical distinctions we demonstrate between lawfulness assessments of police conduct on the one hand and fairness assessments on the other, powerfully suggest that people understand police treatment of citizens in the constitutive manner that Loader and Walker describe.

The focus that people place upon the procedural justice of police actions points first to the potentially negative consequences of an exclusive focus on lawfulness. If the police are not cognizant of and responsive to public concerns they are blind to the source of public feelings that police actions are inappropriate and should be sanctioned. Further, the police miss the opportunity to be involved in the broader effort to build people’s ties to their communities that build healthy and vibrant communities that are both more open to cooperation with the police and better able to generate the types of social and other forms of capital that can help communities to “build their way out of crime”.68

what if? - REALLY, "WHAT IF?"

NYTimes | WE typically blame Washington for not doing more to help the economy grow. But what if we have it backward: What if it is the weak economy that is driving the failures in Washington?

That is what Benjamin Friedman, a Harvard economist who has studied the way slow growth frays societies and strains politics, thinks. “We could be stuck in a trap,” he told me last week. “We could be stuck in a perverse equilibrium in which our absence of growth is delivering political paralysis, and the political paralysis preserves the absence of growth.”

Consider how different our politics might be today if the economy had not collapsed in 2008 and not been mired in sluggish growth ever since. A ballpark estimate suggests that if the economy were to grow one percentage point more than expected in each year over the next 10, the deficit would shrink by more than $3 trillion. That would be more than enough to set the ratio of our debt to our annual economic output on a comforting downward trajectory. Moreover, it would happen without making cuts to a single program, like Medicare or food stamps, or without raising a single dollar of additional tax revenue. Even a much smaller boost to growth — say one-tenth of a percentage point per year, or even half that — would make Congress and the White House’s burden hundreds of billions of dollars lighter.

And consider how much better deficit reduction might feel to families in a growing economy, compared with a limping one. The recovery in the past year has delivered only sluggish wage growth, with much erased by inflation as more of a worker’s paycheck goes to paying for more expensive groceries, tuition bills and gas. The end of a payroll tax holiday was only one small portion of the fiscal deal the White House and Republican leaders brokered at the turn of the year. Yet it was enough to wipe out a full year’s worth of wage gains entirely.

Indeed, even before the economic crisis, middle-class incomes had stagnated, with the economy’s gains primarily going to a thin sliver of wealthy families. Then, of course, the crisis hit, forcing millions into unemployment and millions more into poverty. Given that reality, Democrats have fought for making the George W. Bush-era tax cuts permanent for 98 percent of households. Republicans have argued that nobody should have to shoulder the burden of tax increases at all.

“Everything is easier to do if the economy is growing,” says William G. Gale of the Brookings Institution. “If you want to cut spending, it is easier to do in an environment where people think they are going to have robust income growth and aren’t as dependent on government. In terms of taxes, growth gets you not just more income to tax, but taxpayers moving into higher rates.”

extreme weather grows in frequency and intensity around the world

snow blankets Jerusalem

NYTimes | Britons may remember 2012 as the year the weather spun off its rails in a chaotic concoction of drought, deluge and flooding, but the unpredictability of it all turns out to have been all too predictable: Around the world, extreme has become the new commonplace.

Especially lately. China is enduring its coldest winter in nearly 30 years. Brazil is in the grip of a dreadful heat spell. Eastern Russia is so freezing — minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and counting — that the traffic lights recently stopped working in the city of Yakutsk. 

Bush fires are raging across Australia, fueled by a record-shattering heat wave. Pakistan was inundated by unexpected flooding in September. A vicious storm bringing rain, snow and floods just struck the Middle East. And in the United States, scientists confirmed this week what people could have figured out simply by going outside: last year was the hottest since records began. 

“Each year we have extreme weather, but it’s unusual to have so many extreme events around the world at once,” said Omar Baddour, chief of the data management applications division at the World Meteorological Organization, in Geneva. “The heat wave in Australia; the flooding in the U.K., and most recently the flooding and extensive snowstorm in the Middle East — it’s already a big year in terms of extreme weather calamity.” 

Such events are increasing in intensity as well as frequency, Mr. Baddour said, a sign that climate change is not just about rising temperatures, but also about intense, unpleasant, anomalous weather of all kinds.

sanity is the ability to live within the laws of nature

denverpost | In November, I watched the two parts of Ken Burns’ new documentary film, “The Dust Bowl.” The film presents a lesson for us today.

When farmers first arrived in the large area surrounding the Oklahoma Panhandle, the ground was covered with hardy buffalo grass that firmly protected the soil from erosion by the wind. Then each farmer acted freely and independently to do what was economically best for him. He plowed up the buffalo grass and planted wheat. The more land he plowed and planted, the greater was his income. Almost a decade of very low rainfall dried up the land, but the farmers hung on, plowing up even more land and hoping that there would be rain next year. Most important, there were no government agencies interfering with the freedom and independence of the farmers by trying to promote conservation or to limit the acreage of buffalo grass that was being plowed. The collective action of all of the individual farmers, each acting in his own best interest, resulted in the buffalo grass being stripped from enormous areas of the Great Plains. When the wind started blowing over the exposed soil, the dust began its assault on all living things in the area and beyond. The suffering was so severe as to be difficult to imagine.

A few doomsday voices pointed out the destructive consequences of the elimination of the buffalo grass over such a large area but these voices were ignored by the farmers who resented any suggestion that their agricultural practices were responsible for the disaster. The relief and public works programs initiated by President Franklin Roosevelt provided some immediate help to the suffering people, allowing them to hang on a bit longer.

The lesson I got from this is that when you have large numbers of individuals practicing free enterprise in an unregulated society, with each individual (or today it could also be each company) acting in his or her (or its) best interest, the result can be disastrous to all. The great recession that started around 2008 is only the most recent example of this. These are examples of the “Tragedy of the Commons” in real life just as Garrett Hardin portrayed it.

The long-term solution of the Dust Bowl problem came only after the Federal Government purchased large areas of farmed grassland and replanted these areas in grass to create national grasslands. What the free and independent farmers had destroyed, the “socialistic” Federal Government restored.

ocean currents and sea ice

mit | Each winter, wide swaths of the Arctic Ocean freeze to form sheets of sea ice that spread over millions of square miles. This ice acts as a massive sun visor for the Earth, reflecting solar radiation and shielding the planet from excessive warming.

The Arctic ice cover reaches its peak each year in mid-March, before shrinking with warmer spring temperatures. But over the last three decades, this winter ice cap has shrunk: Its annual maximum reached record lows, according to satellite observations, in 2007 and again in 2011.

Understanding the processes that drive sea-ice formation and advancement can help scientists predict the future extent of Arctic ice coverage — an essential factor in detecting climate fluctuations and change. But existing models vary in their predictions for how sea ice will evolve.

Now researchers at MIT have developed a new method for optimally combining models and observations to accurately simulate the seasonal extent of Arctic sea ice and the ocean circulation beneath. The team applied its synthesis method to produce a simulation of the Labrador Sea, off the southern coast of Greenland, that matched actual satellite and ship-based observations in the area.

on the deep-state politics of legalization...,