Links - 21st July 2019 (3)

The Danger of Economics 101 in Public Discourse - "Many economic propositions are more an expression of the speaker’s ideology or dogma rather than empirical fact. Consider, for a moment, some often heard claims about the economy:
• Free trade makes everyone in society better off.
• Minimum wages reduce employment.
A professional economist would react to these statements with much less certitude. He/she would say that these propositions hold up only under certain (strict) assumptions.But in public discourse, many of these economic propositions are often taken as fact. In debating the value of the recently concluded Singapore-European Union Free Trade Agreement, for example, it is not unusual to hear statements along the lines of “any Economics 101 class will tell you that free trade benefits everyone in society.”But that is exactly the problem: it is precisely because it is Economics 101 that these claims are made without qualification and without any reference to empirical reality... The students of Economics 101 often forget the simplifying assumptions, and only remember its conclusions. They also extrapolate those conclusions to contexts where the (forgotten) assumptions do not hold... The work by the legendary economic professor Paul Samuelson suggests for instance that tariffs could benefit a large economy such as the United States. In other instances, tariffs may play a distributional role in compensating the “losers” of globalisation... [For minimum wage] In the “standard model”, firms are assumed to be working in a one-sector, perfectly competitive market. As Gary Fields, Professor of Labour Economics and Economics at Cornell University argued, the effects of decreased labour in the theoretical one-sector market “do not carry over” when the analysis is complicated to include multiple sectors.The assumption of a perfectly competitive labour markets is also problematic. When there is a “monopsony” power (i.e. employers having more market power than workers), a minimum wage can increase both wages and employment"

How women are taking on the world of Dungeons and Dragons - "“For example, (we’re) making sure their armour is practical,” she says. “So, we’ve been trying to eradicate ‘boob armour’ — a metal plate that moulds around a women’s breast, because that would be deadly — and ‘chainmail bikinis.’ Why would you only have chainmail on a bikini?”
If they want to be realistic, will they give female characters reduced strength and a debuff for 3 days a month? Or is realism only good when it advances liberal causes?

Vampire: The Masquerade’s latest edition is trying to deal with sex and power in 2018 - "I was giving William all of the skills he needed to be a competent sexual predator. You see, in V5 — just as in previous editions of Vampire — feeding is a pleasurable act for vampires somewhat akin to sexual intercourse. For humans it’s described as an even higher form of ecstasy.Gaining someone’s consent to feed from them, and then stealing that memory away, would prove to be one of the most uncomfortable moments I’ve ever had in gaming.
SJW logic: pretend murder is okay, but pretend one sided sexual assault isn't

Canadian university sued after student had child fetishes - "A Canadian University has found itself in the middle of a human rights complaint after a male student came to school with disturbing child fetishes including wearing diapers and having the stories of Beatrix Potter read to him by an English professor.Katrin Roth, Vancouver Island University's former director of human rights and workplace safety ended up filing the complaint alleging the Nanaimo university failed to adequately support and protect professors, staff and students.In 105-page complaint to the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, several women became so disturbed by the man, they had to change their daily routines to avoid him... the student harassed several women, complimenting them on their clothing while leering at their chests, repeatedly asking staff members to go on dates, and following female staff members... the man submitted a photo of himself partially nude alongside a dirty diaper as part of an English essay... On two occasions the man is alleged to have asked the university's nurse to change his dirty diapers, although she refused the second time... Even in emails, he communicated in childish, baby talk opening a message 'Hewoh'.He wrote about how he had enjoyed the day's stories, 'especially the pee pee part!' and then went onto reveal how he 'sometimes call people poo poo heads."

The rebirth of racial stereotypes - "In reality, rather than providing a safe space for elbow-patched professors desperately clinging on to patriarchal, whites-only reading lists, universities were already busy internationalising and diversifying the curriculum. Academics unable or unwilling to defend a disciplinary canon were quite happy to point to inclusivity as the determiner of course content. Far from threatening the foundations of the university, protesting students pushed at an open door and inside found a seat at the departmental table... Too often, the decolonise movement draws upon patronising and racist stereotypes about black students. Kingston University changed its geography course on rural Britain following concern that it ‘normalised white experiences’. It was assumed that black and ethnic-minority students were less likely to visit the countryside and could therefore struggle ‘to grasp concepts such as the “rural idyll”’. So the course has been redesigned to encompass ‘rural areas globally, with an emphasis on Africa and Asia’. But why should black students struggle with the concept of a ‘rural idyll’ any more than other students? And why should a black kid born and bred in a British city be expected to feel more affinity for rural Africa than the English countryside? New life is being breathed into jaded old stereotypes. The push to get black-Caribbean authors on to reading lists suggests that the most significant factor about an author is not their contribution to the discipline being studied, but their skin colour. The life and works of Toussaint L’Ouverture and CLR James are well worth studying — but I’m convinced neither man would welcome inclusion in the curriculum simply to fill a quota for black-Caribbeans. For years women and black writers fought against being labelled according to their gender and skin colour and to have their ideas recognised in their own right. The decolonise movement assumes a key cause of underperformance by black students at university is a result of them not seeing themselves reflected in the curriculum... This assumes that the whole point of education is a narcissistic focus on the self. But education should take us beyond ourselves, it should open up new horizons and help us learn about the world and other people in it. If we only learn about people who look like us then we risk learning very little"

ERIK FIN on Twitter - "San Francisco in one photo.
Fully Robotic Coffeeshop next to the Starving Jobless Homeless"

Thread by @RVAwonk: "So ... it appears that Facebook helped the reporter who wrote this story identify the person behind the doctored video of Nancy Pelosi — i.e […]" - "So ... it appears that Facebook helped the reporter who wrote this story identify the person behind the doctored video of Nancy Pelosi — i.e., Facebook used its own internal data to help publicly identify a private citizen.
That’s extremely troubling... Facebook is handing over information to reporters regarding what people are doing on their personal Facebook accounts?... it’s beyond disturbing that Facebook revealed supposedly private data to a reporter to help him publicly ID a private citizen...
If Facebook thinks it’s ok to reveal private user data to a reporter to identify someone who — according to Facebook — didn’t even violate the company’s policies, what’s stopping them from handing over your personal data to a reporter?
(Hint: Nothing is stopping them.)"

A devastating analysis of the tax cut shows it’s done virtually no economic good - Los Angeles Times - "You may remember all the glowing predictions made for the December 2017 tax cuts by congressional Republicans and the Trump administration: Wages would soar for the rank-and-file, corporate investments would surge, and the cuts would pay for themselves.The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has just published a deep dive into the economic impact of the cuts in their first year, and emerges from the water with a different picture. The CRS finds that the cuts have had virtually no effect on wages, haven’t contributed to a surge in investment, and haven’t come close to paying for themselves. Nor have they delivered a cut to the average taxpayer.

From painkiller to empathy killer: acetaminophen (paracetamol) reduces empathy for pain - "Because empathy regulates prosocial and antisocial behavior, these drug-induced reductions in empathy raise concerns about the broader social side effects of acetaminophen, which is taken by almost a quarter of adults in the United States each week."

Do police numbers really affect knife crime? - "The impact of police cuts and police increases could be “asymmetric”, the review says, and smaller, incremental changes may not have an effect. Cautiously, though, it suggests that there probably is a causal link. Yet there are two things worth noting. First, the link isn’t huge – an “elasticity” of about -0.3, which is to say you get a 3% reduction in crime for every 10% increase in policing. That’s not insignificant, but police numbers in England and Wales have only gone down by about 15% since 2010, so it’s no use if you want to explain a 33% rise in knife crime since 2011.Second, the review of the literature found that increasing your police force had different effects on different crimes. Property crime went down most – which makes sense, as some of those crimes are presumably carried out by people who are weighing the potential risks and benefits, and that calculation will be affected by seeing more police around.But, the review said, violent crime was much less affected – which again makes sense. “Much violent crime … is conducted in the heat of the moment in pubs or on the street, or behind closed doors in the home”, it notes, so one would not “expect consideration or even awareness of potential police attention to come into play”.So police numbers probably are important, but May still has a point if she’s saying that it’s not the dominant factor in the increase in knife crime. You could even argue that reducing police numbers was the right thing to do, given that crime was falling. Let’s look at what the dominant factors could be. Some of them are out of the government’s hands: for instance, socioeconomic shocks often lead to crime, and although we didn’t see that in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, Jennings thinks it could be having a delayed effect.But others are firmly in the government’s hands. Both Kirchmaier and Jennings said that a decade of cuts to social services and youth centres have probably contributed (although, again, it’s hard to tease out). Welfare cuts have led to a growth in youth homelessness, which makes young people more at risk of joining gangs.And the Government’s continued cowardice over drugs leaves a huge industry in the hands of violent criminals – with gangs now recruiting “across county lines”, away from urban centres, and seeking new markets. A former Metropolitan Police chief has partly blamed school exclusions, driven by Government educational policy, for the rise in knife crime."

David Cumin and Paul Moon: Law against hate speech helped Hitler's rise - "Some commentators have made an argument for banning speech that claims racial superiority or inferiority (the definition of racism) by claiming that if only there were such laws in 1920s Germany, six million Jews and others might not have been systematically murdered.As compelling as that argument sounds, it is not based in reality. There were hate speech laws in the Weimar Republic, including against "insulting religious communities". Hundreds of Nazi affiliates were prosecuted under these laws.Police also cited possible disruption to order as a reason to shut down meetings where Hitler was to speak. The National Socialist German Workers' (Nazi) Party was banned from speaking in all German states before it rose to power. Hate speech laws did not work. In fact, some have made a case that they actually helped the Nazis. Presenting as political martyrs arguably helped rally more public support, in much the same way that the current use of "health and safety" to ban speakers in New Zealand has propelled their publicity.The gag of Hitler was accompanied with posters of him and the caption "One alone of 2000 million people of the world is forbidden to speak in Germany".There is another, less practical and more fundamental, reason for opposing legislation against hate speech. Even if we could define what is and what is not hateful and even if there were real harms caused and even if the laws were effective, giving power to the state to effectively govern speech is a dangerous precedent. Just as the Nazis were persecuted by hate speech laws in the Weimar Republic, they went on to implement their own suppression on expression.The Third Reich organised a massive propaganda campaign and excluded opposing views in media, forced boycotts on Jewish businesses, and burnt books they disapproved of. In the words of Holocaust survivor, Aryeh Neier, "Those who call for censorship in the name of the oppressed ought to recognise it is never the oppressed who determine the bounds of censorship"."