Justice Department takes a stand on recording police in public
The Justice Department, in my opinion, has not been doing a good and aggressive job of protecting the rights of citizens and prosecuting wrong-doers (particularly wealthy wrong-doers), so it’s good see (in this editorial in the NY Times) that DoJ has noticed a bad trend:
The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department took an important stand last week, declaring that citizens have a First Amendment right to videotape the actions of police officers in public places and that seizure or destruction of such recordings violates constitutional rights.
The Justice Department made the statement in a federal lawsuit brought against the Baltimore Police Department by Christopher Sharp, who used his cellphone to take video of the police arresting and beating a friend at Pimlico on the day of the 2010 Preakness. The officers took Mr. Sharp’s cellphone while he was recording and wiped the phone clean of all videos before returning it to him.
The Courts of Appeals for the First and Seventh Circuits have wisely found that the Constitution protects the right to videotape police officers while they perform official duties. The video taken by another witness of the beating at Pimlico shows that the right to record is crucial to holding police accountable for their actions.
Mr. Sharp sued for damages to his personal property and for injunctive relief in the form of a clear policy on videotaping consistent with the Constitution and also training for the police. The judge hearing the case arranged a settlement conference for May 30, though the case is far from being settled.
Last November, the Police Department issued an order paying lip service to the right of citizens to make “video recording of police activity.” But the day after that order became public, as The Baltimore Sun reported, police officers were caught on video threatening to arrest for loitering a man who was recording them as they surrounded and held someone on the ground.
It is essential that the Justice Department and federal courts make clear that police departments will be held liable for violating this constitutionally protected right.
Power posture
Weird, but I can sort of see it: taking up more room shows confidence, making yourself small shows fear. Danielle Venton writes in Wired Science:
Sit up straight and listen: Amy Cuddy has a plan to help you change your life. And it’s easy. The Harvard psychologist recently completed a study demonstrating that positioning our bodies a certain way doesn’t just tell people we’re powerful, it actually makes us more powerful. And she has the data to prove it: Standing tall directly influences our biochemistry, increasing testosterone, decreasing cortisol, and generally making us feel dominant. So pull back those shoulders and stretch out. Stand like Superman and you’ll become the Man of Steel.
What got you thinking about posture?
There is a gender grade gap in the MBA classroom; men slightly outperform women. It’s competitive; you really have to get in there. I noticed in class that women tended to make themselves small, holding their wrist, wrapping their arms around themselves. Guys tended to make themselves bigger. They’re leaning back, stretching out, draping their arms around chairs. We know from studies of facial feedback that if you smile, you fake yourself into feeling happier. We wondered whether just asking people to spread out would help them feel more powerful, and it did.Aren’t traits like this fixed? . . .
Continue reading. Very interesting advice for the job-seeker.
Ezekiel Emmanuel Doesn’t Like Social Security and Medicare
Dean Baker takes aim at a zombie myth continually exhumed by conservatives:
That is what he told us in his New York Times column that was ostensibly about out of control Social Security and Medicare spending. Emmanuel begins by telling readers:
“If nothing is done about entitlement spending, and if our current tax breaks continue, then by 2025, tax revenue will be able to pay for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest on the debt and nothing else.”
There are two big problems with this story. First there is the old trick of conflating Social Security with Medicare and Medicaid. This is a great trick for those who want to deceive people into believing the budget problem is primarily a demographic story. However, it is highly misleading. The retirement of baby boomers is projected to increase Social Security spending by 0.9 percentage points of GDP or roughly 20 percent between now and 2025.
By comparison, military spending increased by more than 1 percentage point of GDP between 2000 and 2005. In other words, the projected increase in Social Security spending over the next 13 years is relatively modest and easily affordable. It also is fully covered by projected Social Security revenue and assets in the trust fund.
The projected increase in health care spending is considerably larger, however this depends on using the Congressional Budget Office’s “alternative fiscal scenario” rather than the baseline projection. The difference is that the baseline projection assumes substantial cost controls that were in the Affordable Care Act. These cost controls, if left in place, would substantially reduce the rate of growth of Medicare costs.
This point is important for two reasons. First . . .
Needle-bending and competition in the sciences
“Needle-bending” is my name for the practice of falsifying information to make things look better—as bending a needle that’s in the red zone of the dial so that it is once again pointing the green: the underlying situation is unchanged, but the read-outs look great. This practice is extremely common, especially in business—not necessarily in their financial statements, though revenue recognition is a dark art, but rather in progress reports from teams (development, sales, production, whatever): progress reports are very subject to needle-bending.
Needle-bending is particularly apt to occur in competitive situations. “Competition” inevitably is associated with “winning” (and “losing”), and if you win, you win, whether you bent the needle or otherwise cheated. Trying to meet quotas often leads to needle-bending, and if a prize is offered for the best performance, you can expect to find workers sabotaging each other’s efforts, because the idea is to win—which many interpret as meaning “to make sure that others lose.” For example, a group of sales people who are trying to win some fabulous prize will often find that messages are not passed along, that completed forms disappear, and so on. Getting the highest sales figure, however it’s done (needle-bending or not), gets the big prize. In some people’s eyes, the big prize is a bribe to encourage cheating.
In the sciences and in academia, one measure of competitive success is the number of papers published. Since it is view competitively by many if not most, you get things like this:
Research misconduct and the fallout from such behavior is increasingly common, according to a new report compiled by a company that makes software to detect plagiarism in submitted scientific manuscripts. The makers of iThenticate—software that combs a database, called CrossCheck, with more than 25 million published articles—published the report, which collates previously published research on misconduct and plagiarism, and sprinkles in a few iThenticate customer testimonials.
A couple of years ago, iThenticate helped determine that plagiarism was a far more common occurrence in the scientific literature than anyone expected, and the new report confirms that finding with some standout figures: retractions have increased tenfold over the past decade, 1 in 3 scientists admits to questionable research practices, and $110 million was spent on misconduct investigations in the United States in 2010.
But beyond the regurgitated factoids, iThenticate’s own data is a striking illustration of how common plagiarism may be in the scientific community. The report claims that iThenticate identified more than 10 million content “matches” to already-published work in manuscripts submitted in 2011 and 2012. The folks at iThenticate worked up a little infographic containing most of the information:
Like this:
Wonderful Patrick O’Brian reference site
Just stumbled into this site as I pick up once more Master and Commander. I’m reading with the computer in my lap, and this time Googling every reference I don’t understand (e.g., “Earl Godwin’s piece of bread”). By doing that, I stumbled onto the wonderful site.
For those who have not read Patrick O’Brian’s series of novels of the British Navy during the Napoleonic era, I highly recommend you try them. They are surely in your library. I suggest that you read the first three, which constitute a trilogy of sorts:
Master and Commander
Post Captain
HMS Surprise
Read in that order, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll find much to enjoy.
Klar Seifen = Good Stuff
I really like Klar Seifen, particularly the Klassik aftershave: recommended. The Thäter brush—a terrific brush—worked up a fine lather. The tin is somewhat messy to lather: I hold it over the sink since lather abounds as I load the brush.
Then three very smooth and comfortable passes from the IKon OSS holding a Gillette 7 O’Clock SharpEdge blade. Flawless shave, and a great splash of Klar Seifen.
What a great way to begin the week!
Mann and Ornstein critique solutions to Congressional dysfunction—some that don’t work, some that would
Very good article. Their critiques of some of the solutions that have been tried are spot-on. From the Washington Post:
Political dysfunction. Partisanship at record levels. Attack politics run amok. And public approval of Congress scraping the single digits (Sen. John McCain is fond of saying it’s down to blood relatives and paid staff).
We’ve all heard the laments — we’ve made some of them ourselves — that Washington is broken, that our political system can’t grapple with the nation’s big, long-term problems. So what can be done about it? Unfortunately, the cures that get tossed around are often misguided, sometimes even worse than the disease. Here are five much-praised solutions we should avoid, followed by four that have a chance to make a meaningful difference.
1. A third party to the rescue
Ah, if only we had a third force, an independent movement that could speak plain truths to the public and ignite the silent, centrist majority around common-sense solutions.
Sound familiar? In recent decades, Ross Perot, John Anderson and George Wallace have pursued a serious third-party route, although only Wallace managed to win any electoral votes. But that hasn’t stopped high-profile columnists such as Tom Friedman of the New York Times and Matt Miller of The Washington Post from singing this siren song, along with former elected officials such as Republican Christine Todd Whitman, Democrat David Boren and many others. The much-hypedAmericans Elect group — which was to harness the democratic spirit of the Internet to find a centrist third-party presidential candidate for the 2012 race — is a prime example of this approach.
One problem: Despite Americans’ disgust with our politics, about 90 percent of us identify with — or at least lean toward — one of the two major parties. Among Americans who call themselves independent, two-thirds lean to one of the parties, and behave at the polls just like the partisans. So the core audience for a third party is perhaps 10 percent of the electorate. So-called independents are classic referendum voters; when times are bad, they want to throw the bums out rather than carefully attribute responsibility or parse alternatives.
The third-party fantasy is of a courageous political leader who could persuade Americans to support enlightened policies to tax carbon; reform entitlements; make critical investments in education, energy and infrastructure; and eliminate tax loopholes to raise needed revenue. But there is simply no evidence that voters would flock to a straight-talking, independent, centrist third-party candidate espousing the ideas favored by most third-party enthusiasts. Consensus is not easily built around such issues, and differences in values and interests would not simply disappear in a nonpartisan, centrist haze.
Just ask Americans Elect, which was unable to coalesce around a single candidate, despite spending $35 million.
2. Term limits will save us
This is the quintessential bromide for curing American democracy. The case seems self-evident: Career politicians in safe seats lose touch with their constituents, become beholden to the Washington establishment and stop acting in the public interest. Term limits, we’re told, would replace them with citizen-lawmakers who cared less about reelection and more about acting on behalf of their fellow citizens — thus restoring Congress to its intended role as the citadel of deliberative democracy.
Does it work? Term limits of some sort have been implemented in 21 states since 1990 (in six of them, the limits were ultimately overturned), and the experience has given scholars time and opportunity to evaluate them. But instead of channeling ambition in the right, public-interest direction, term limits have the opposite effect: New lawmakers immediately begin planning for ways to reach the next level, or to find lucrative lobbying jobs when they are term-limited out. They have no incentive to do things for the long-term and no regard for maintaining their own institutions. With the loss of expertise among senior lawmakers, power devolves to permanent staff members and to lobbyists.
If anything, voters should look to candidates with a stake in the regular order, an understanding of the need to compromise, a willingness to build expertise in important policy areas, and an incentive to listen to constituents — all features that are more likely among politicians with longer horizons.
3. A balanced-budget amendment can fix the economy
Another hardy perennial is the notion that a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget would end Washington’s rapacious habits and force politicians to make tough fiscal decisions. After all, 49 states have such an amendment in their constitutions, so why not Washington?
In fact, the states’ balanced budgets are the best reason to avoid one at the federal level. When a downturn occurs, basic economic theory tells us that we need “counter-cyclical” policies to inject adrenaline into a fatigued economy — meaning more government spending and/or lower taxes. States do the opposite: A downturn means less revenue and more demands from unemployed residents, so they cut spending and raise taxes to preserve their balanced budgets. The fiscal drag from states in the recent Great Recession amounted to $800 billion, which the Obama administration’s stimulus plan barely offset. A federal balanced-budget amendment would only have aggravated the downturn — the economic equivalent of bleeding an anemic patient.
The latest House Republican proposals for a balanced-budget amendment would limit spending to 19.9 percent of gross domestic product and make any tax increases contingent on a two-thirds majority vote in both chambers of Congress. Because federal revenue is now at barely more than 15 percent of GDP and spending is at 24 percent, balancing the budget under these conditions would essentially eliminate all of the government other than the big entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare — or would require cutting those programs severely.
Maintaining fiscal flexibility is critical in the American political system, particularly in a globalized economy where less and less of our destiny is under our control. And the experience of the 1990s demonstrates that the White House and Congress together can take the steps needed to balance the budget under existing rules.
4. Public financing of elections will restrain special interests . . .
Continue reading. The 4th one is one of mine, so I was interested to read their (convincing) rebuttal. You definitely should continue reading. From later in the article, this grim remark:
No doubt, acrimony and gridlock are built-in features of our political system, and it is true that we have had several eras of intense stress and polarization, including the period right before the Civil War and around the turn of the 20th century.
Yet, it is not exactly comforting to compare what’s going on now to the years leading up to the Civil War. And an examination of the Obama presidency suggests that we are experiencing neither politics as usual nor an odd blip. We are witnessing unprecedented and unbalanced polarization of the parties, with Republicans acting like a parliamentary minority party opposing almost everything put forward by the Democrats; the near-disappearance of the regular order in Congress; the misuse of the filibuster as a weapon not of dissent but of obstruction; and the relentless delegitimization of the president and policies enacted into law.
Given the defeat of problem-solvers such as Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) and the emergence of take-no-prisoners partisans such as Richard Mourdock, there is no reason to think the system will correct itself anytime soon.
Making schools work
We know how to make schools work, but as a nation we’re too racist to accept the solution. David Kirp writes in the NY Times:
AMID the ceaseless and cacophonous debates about how to close the achievement gap, we’ve turned away from one tool that has been shown to work: school desegregation. That strategy, ushered in by the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, has been unceremoniously ushered out, an artifact in the museum of failed social experiments. The Supreme Court’s ruling that racially segregated schools were “inherently unequal” shook up the nation like no other decision of the 20th century. Civil rights advocates, who for years had been patiently laying the constitutional groundwork, cheered to the rafters, while segregationists mourned “Black Monday” and vowed “massive resistance.” But as the anniversary was observed this past week on May 17, it was hard not to notice that desegregation is effectively dead. In fact, we have been giving up on desegregation for a long time. In 1974, the Supreme Court rejected a metropolitan integration plan, leaving the increasingly black cities to fend for themselves.
A generation later, public schools that had been ordered to integrate in the 1960s and 1970s became segregated once again, this time with the blessing of a new generation of justices. And five years ago, a splintered court delivered the coup de grâce when it decreed that a school district couldn’t voluntarily opt for the most modest kind of integration — giving parents a choice of which school their children would attend and treating race as a tiebreaker in deciding which children would go to the most popular schools. In the perverse logic of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., this amounted to “discriminating among individual students based on race.” That’s bad history, which, as Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote in an impassioned dissent, “threaten[s] the promise of Brown.”
To the current reformers, integration is at best an irrelevance and at worst an excuse to shift attention away from shoddy teaching. But a spate of research says otherwise. The experience of an integrated education made all the difference in the lives of black children — and in the lives of their children as well. These economists’ studies consistently conclude that African-American students who attended integrated schools fared better academically than those left behind in segregated schools. They were more likely to graduate from high school and attend and graduate from college; and, the longer they spent attending integrated schools, the better they did. What’s more, the fear that white children would suffer, voiced by opponents of integration, proved groundless. Between 1970 and 1990, the black-white gap in educational attainment shrank — not because white youngsters did worse but because black youngsters did better.
Not only were they more successful in school, they were more successful in life as well. A 2011 study by the Berkeley public policy professor Rucker C. Johnson concludes that black youths who spent five years in desegregated schools have earned 25 percent more than those who never had that opportunity. Now in their 30s and 40s, they’re also healthier — the equivalent of being seven years younger.
Why? For these youngsters, the advent of integration transformed the experience of going to school. By itself, racial mixing didn’t do the trick, but it did mean that the fate of black and white students became intertwined. School systems that had spent a pittance on all-black schools were now obliged to invest considerably more on African-American students’ education after the schools became integrated. Their classes were smaller and better equipped. They included children from better-off families, a factor that the landmark 1966 Equality of Educational Opportunity study had shown to make a significant difference in academic success. What’s more, their teachers and parents held them to higher expectations. That’s what shifted the arc of their lives.
Professor Johnson takes this story one big step further by showing that the impact of integration reaches to the next generation. These youngsters — the grandchildren of Brown — are faring better in school than those whose parents attended racially isolated schools. . .
When boneheaded stupidity takes over the government
Now we see the ultimate example of bending the needle: throwing the needle away so that you still have the dial that shows the range of values, but no needle to tell the current value: in the green? the yellow? the red? about to blow? who knows?
Catherine Rampell writes in the NY Times of a political party that doesn’t seem to grasp the most fundamental aspects of government, but is sure that it doesn’t like it:
THE American Community Survey may be the most important government function you’ve never heard of, and it’s in trouble.
This survey of American households has been around in some form since 1850, either as a longer version of or a richer supplement to thebasic decennial census. It tells Americans how poor we are, how rich we are, who is suffering, who is thriving, where people work, what kind of training people need to get jobs, what languages people speak, who uses food stamps, who has access to health care, and so on.
It is, more or less, the country’s primary check for determining how well the government is doing — and in fact what the government will be doing. The survey’s findings help determine how over $400 billion in government funds is distributed each year.
But last week, the Republican-led House voted to eliminate the survey altogether, on the grounds that the government should not be butting its nose into Americans’ homes.
“This is a program that intrudes on people’s lives, just like the Environmental Protection Agency or the bank regulators,” said Daniel Webster, a first-term Republican congressman from Florida who sponsored the relevant legislation.
“We’re spending $70 per person to fill this out. That’s just not cost effective,” he continued, “especially since in the end this is not a scientific survey. It’s a random survey.”
In fact, the randomness of the survey is precisely what makes the survey scientific, statistical experts say.
Each year the Census Bureau polls a representative, randomized sample of about three million American households about demographics, habits, languages spoken, occupation, housing and various other categories. The resulting numbers are released without identifying individuals, and offer current demographic portraits of even the country’s tiniest communities.
It is the largest (and only) data set of its kind and is used across the federal government in formulas that determine how much funding states and communities get for things like education and public health.
For example, a question on flush toilets — one that some politicians like to cite as being especially invasive — is used to help assess groundwater contamination for rural parts of the country that do not have modern waste disposal systems, according to the Census Bureau.
Law enforcement agencies have likewise used the data to predict criminal activities like methamphetamine production.
Their recent vote aside, members of Congress do seem to realize how useful these numbers are. After all, they use the data themselves. . .
Continue reading. Maybe it’s ignorance rather than stupidity. But it’s extremely destructive in any event. (And to be that ignorant as an adult does suggest some incapacity.)
Building a Jewish and Democratic State: A Conversation with Peter Beinart
Michael Lerner interviews Peter Beinart about Beinart’s recent book, The Crisis of Zionism:
Peter Beinart, formerly an editor of The New Republic, famous during most of the past thirty years for its support of many of the most right-wing policies of the State of Israel toward Palestinians and for its hostility toward American Jews supporting the Israeli peace movement, has caught the attention of U.S. media for his switch to a pro-peace perspective in the past few years. His book The Crisis of Zionism has stirred considerable controversy within the American Jewish community, to its credit.
Michael Lerner: You describe yourself as a Zionist in your new book The Crisis of Zionism, but today many people are not sure exactly what that means and assume that it means that Zionists are those who support the policies of the government of the State of Israel. What does Zionism mean?
Peter Beinart: I’m a political Zionist. I believe that the Jewish people need a democratic Jewish state in some portion of the ancient Land of Israel. The history of Jewish persecution in the Diaspora made it important to have a Jewish state of refuge for Jews around the world, a state which is a cultural center for Jews, a center whose language is Hebrew which has historically provided a bond among Jewish communities around the world and which today is central to a renaissance of Jewish thinking and creativity, and whose founding principles (as embodied in Israel’s declaration of independence) proclaim complete equality for all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, nationality, or sex. I believe that a state set up on those principles within the pre-1967 borders of Israel has the capacity to embody those goals.
Lerner: How do you respond to some on the Left who acknowledge the need of the Jewish people for safety but doubt that such a state should be in Palestine where there was already a culture and a people with a long history of their own and who got supplanted by the Jews moving there? Why not create such a state from the territory of those who previously oppressed Jews?
Beinart: I wouldn’t support a state whose founding principles only gave full citizenship to Jews. The denial of equal rights does take place across the Green Line but inside the Green Line (pre-1967 borders), Arabs have full voting rights, participate in the Knesset and on the Supreme Court, and that is a basis upon which to build. Why build a Jewish homeland in pre-state Palestine rather than Easter Europe? Because you cannot deny the Jewish historical connection to that part of the world. To deny it is to deny Judaism itself. But that historical connection should not exclude a Palestinian state on some of that same territory nor should it exclude individual human rights.
Lerner: But there was another people living there!
Beinart: That’s why we need to share the land with them. They need to have national rights within their own state, a Palestinian national flag and national anthem, and the right of return to a Palestinian state. Plus they need to have full individual rights within the State of Israel. When those two things happen, they will constitute a “completion” of the Zionist project, because they will assure that the people who share the land with the Jewish people have the same national and individual rights that the Jews have.
Lerner: Would it be acceptable in your mind to have a democratic Israel if through demographic changes a majority of Israelis were Palestinians? Or would you say that to preserve its Jewish character it would be permissible to infringe on its democratic character? . . .
Continue reading. The comments to the interview are interesting as well.
“Grub” category created
I wanted to point someone to the “grub” posts, and I found the WordPress search function erratic. So I’ve added a category “grub” and marked the posts that fall into that category, including the initial definitional post, “Food as Grub.” So now you can readily browse past grub-oriented posts.
No more maple syrup
We’re rapidly killing off ocean life—many of the fish now harvested from the sea were considered “trash fish” a generation ago: we’re slowly working our way down the food chain as we kill off species. And now we’re wiping out the maple trees. My grandson’s grandchildren may never know the taste of maple syrup. James West has the story in Mother Jones:
A few years ago, Martha Carlson, a veteran maple farmer, began noticing subtle changes in her 60-acre “sugar bush” in Sandwich, New Hampshire: Maple sap was unusually dark, and leaves were falling too early, never having reached postcard New England color. Her sugar maples, some of them nearly 300 years old, were sick.
At 65, Martha now leads the crusade to save the New Hampshire sugar maples—and the multimillion dollar local syrup and tourism industries they provide—from disastrous climate change. And in the process she’s mobilizing a crack team of researchers: a group of elementary school kids.
Take a peak at the Climate Desk’s slideshow of production stills from New Hampshire on Facebook (and make sure to like our page). We’re also on Google Plus.
Like this:
The Son’s shave station
Above is The Son’s shave set-up: Otoko Organics shave soap, Truefitt & Hill Ultimate Comfort shaving cream, English Gillette Aristocrat #22 open-comb rhodium plated, Merkur Futur, Hoffritz Slant rhodium plated, Omega 643167 artificial badger, and a silvertip I don’t recognize. Very elegant and uncluttered, especially compared to my own piles of product…
Like this:
Newspapers and truth
Interesting anonymous quote:
A government lies, and newspapers lie, but in a democracy they are different lies.
Another attempt to explain basic economics
Weird how people can’t seem to grasp it. Robert Shiller in the NY Times writes:
WHY is there such strong political support for fiscal austerity, for government cuts and layoffs, at a time of widespread unemployment?
Maybe it’s because we have the wrong metaphor stuck in our minds, and it’s framing policy choices in a misleading way.
Clearly, metaphors and other symbols carry real weight in our thinking, as has been shown by George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, and Mark Johnson, a philosopher at the University of Oregon. In their 1980 book, “Metaphors We Live By,” they argue, “Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”
Our metaphors are like the icons on our computer screen, little pictures by which we condense complexities into manageable packets to refer to in our decision-making. Our brains may be hard-wired for them.
Consider our current thinking about taxes and government spending. We seem caught up in a “family belt-tightening” metaphor, in which the nation is a family that has outspent its income and is trying to get back in control. The family must cut profligate spending, save and pay down debts. It’s a powerful thought, of course, because we know that mismanagement of household finances can lead to a family’s ruin.
But perhaps the most important lesson conveyed by the great economist John Maynard Keynes is that this metaphor, when applied to the national economy, is fundamentally misleading: what is smart for the family is not smart for society as a whole. This idea, sometimes known as the paradox of thrift, is that when we all tighten our belts at once, the economy is so weakened that we end up failing to save more, and instead are all worse off. When that happens, some collective action — government stimulus — is needed. . .
All-Clad Stainless
I just got my new All-Clad Stainless 6-qt “stockpot” (I still don’t like that term)—a large pot with the stated capacity. I started collecting All-Clad in the mid-80′s—Cook’s Illustrated rated cookware, and in every category I checked, All-Clad Stainless consistently topped the ratings—so most of mine is fairly old. (I accumulated it slowly, buying a piece every now and then, and taking full advantage of introductory offers.) All-Clad Stainless uses three layers: a layer of aluminum (good heat conduction) sandwiched between two layers of stainless (more inert than aluminum and easier to clean).
I’d noticed “New” labels on All-Clad Stainless and I couldn’t figure out what was new, but now that the pot’s arrived, it does have some new things. One, less important to me, is that the outer stainless layer is induction stainless—i.e., will work with induction ranges. That’s not an issue with me, but I feel pretty sure that my old pots has the same 18/10 stainless for the outer layer as it does as its inner layer.
The other difference is the edge: this pot has a rolled edge, but my older pots just has a straight edge: pot rises and stops, with a horizontal cut. This is cheaper to manufacture than a rolled edge but it doesn’t pour very well. I’m assuming that even the smaller All-Clad Stainless pots now sport the rolled rim. UPDATE: The Son tells me that the first 6-qt pot I had also had the rolled edge, so that’s not new. Just the induction capability, I guess. And it looks as though the current saucepans also don’t have a rolled edge: guess that’s just for the bigger pots.
Great stuff.
Like this:
What makes countries rich or poor?
Very interesting book review and exegesis by Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel:
The fence that divides the city of Nogales is part of a natural experiment in organizing human societies. North of the fence lies the American city of Nogales, Arizona; south of it lies the Mexican city of Nogales, Sonora. On the American side, average income and life expectancy are higher, crime and corruption are lower, health and roads are better, and elections are more democratic. Yet the geographic environment is identical on both sides of the fence, and the ethnic makeup of the human population is similar. The reasons for those differences between the two Nogaleses are the differences between the current political and economic institutions of the US and Mexico.
This example, which introduces Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, illustrates on a small scale the book’s subject.* Power, prosperity, and poverty vary greatly around the world. Norway, the world’s richest country, is 496 times richer than Burundi, the world’s poorest country (average per capita incomes $84,290 and $170 respectively, according to the World Bank). Why? That’s a central question of economics.
Different economists have different views about the relative importance of the conditions and factors that make countries richer or poorer. The factors they most discuss are so-called “good institutions,” which may be defined as laws and practices that motivate people to work hard, become economically productive, and thereby enrich both themselves and their countries. They are the basis of the Nogales anecdote, and the focus of Why Nations Fail. In the authors’ words:
The reason that Nogales, Arizona, is much richer than Nogales, Sonora, is simple: it is because of the very different institutions on the two sides of the border, which create very different incentives for the inhabitants of Nogales, Arizona, versus Nogales, Sonora.
Among the good economic institutions that motivate people to become productive are the protection of their private property rights, predictable enforcement of their contracts, opportunities to invest and retain control of their money, control of inflation, and open exchange of currency. For instance, people are motivated to work hard if they have opportunities to invest their earnings profitably, but not if they have few such opportunities or if their earnings or profits are likely to be confiscated.
The strongest evidence supporting this view comes from natural experiments involving borders: i.e., division of a uniform environment and initially uniform human population by a political border that eventually comes to separate different economic and political institutions, which create differences in wealth. Besides Nogales, examples include the contrasts between North and South Korea and between the former East and West Germany. Many or most economists, including Acemoglu and Robinson, generalize from these examples of bordering countries and deduce that good institutions also explain the differences in wealth between nations that aren’t neighbors and that differ greatly in their geographic environments and human populations.
There is no doubt that good institutions are important in determining a country’s wealth. But why have some countries ended up with good institutions, while others haven’t? The most important factor behind their emergence is the historical duration of centralized government. Until the rise of the world’s first states, beginning around 3400 BC, all human societies were bands or tribes or chiefdoms, without any of the complex economic institutions of governments. A long history of government doesn’t guarantee good institutions but at least permits them; a short history makes them very unlikely. One can’t just suddenly introduce government institutions and expect people to adopt them and to unlearn their long history of tribal organization.
That cruel reality underlies the tragedy of modern nations, such as Papua New Guinea, whose societies were until recently tribal. Oil and mining companies there pay royalties intended for local landowners through village leaders, but the leaders often keep the royalties for themselves. That’s because they have internalized their society’s practice by which clan leaders pursue their personal interests and their own clan’s interests, rather than representing everyone’s interests.
The various durations of government around the world are linked to the various durations and productivities of farming that was the prerequisite for the rise of governments. . .
Does moral theory create extremism?
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., famously remarked that “the life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.” This post sort of unpacks that statement in the sense of providing reasons for it.
Interesting benefit of bilingualism
Jonah Lehrer has an intriguing article in Wired:
Samuel Beckett, born in a suburb of Dublin in 1906, was a native English speaker. However, in 1946 Beckett decided that he would begin writing exclusively in French. After composing the first draft in his second language, he would then translate these words back into English. This difficult constraint – forcing himself to consciously unpack his own sentences – led to a burst of genius, as many of Beckett’s most famous works (Malloy, Malone Dies, Waiting for Godot, etc.) were written during this period. When asked why he wrote first in French, Beckett said it made it easier for him to “write without style.”
Beckett would later expand on these comments, noting that his use of French prevented him from slipping into his usual writerly habits, those crutches of style that snuck into his English prose. Instead of relying on the first word that leapt into consciousness – that most automatic of associations – he was forced by his second language to reflect on what he actually wanted to express. His diction became more intentional.
There’s now some neat experimental proof of this Beckettian strategy. In a recent paper published in Psychological Science, a team of psychologists led by Boaz Keysar at the University of Chicago found that forcing people to rely on a second language systematically reduced human biases, allowing the subjects to escape from the usual blind spots of cognition. In a sense, they were better able to think without style.
The paper is a tour de force of cross-cultural comparison, as the scientists conducted six experiments on three continents (n > 600) in five different languages: English, Korean, French, Spanish and Japanese. Although all subjects were proficient in their second language, they were not “balanced bilingual.”
The experiments themselves relied on classic paradigms borrowed from . . .
