Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

“Hungary Pulls Out of U.N. Global Migration Agreement” (nytimes):

Hungary pulled out of a United Nations global agreement on migration on Wednesday, citing security concerns, just days after the accord was reached.

Hungary joined the United States as one of two United Nations members that are not committing to the agreement, the first of its kind to lay out international standards for countries to address migration.

As with “Germans shutting down immigration because they are tired of getting wealthier and enjoying lower crime rates?”, Hungary apparently doesn’t want to get richer and safer via immigration.

As a proud Econ 101 veteran (plus some graduate courses too!), I like market-based solutions to perceived problems. “If countries won’t take refugees for moral reasons, let’s give them financial incentives” is by a couple of law school professors, but it has an economics angle and sort of proposes a market.

What if we depended less on potential host nations’ humanitarian impulses, and instead created a system that appealed to their economic self-interest? What if nations’ perceived self-interest could be better aligned with the humanitarian needs of refugees?

We begin with three basic propositions: Countries that create refugees can and should pay a price for it, countries that take them in can and should be paid for it, and refugees can and should have a say in where they go. Those three principles suggest a possible solution: We would allow refugees to assert a financial claim against the governments that have persecuted them, and also—if they wish—to trade that claim (a kind of “refugee debt”) to a host nation, thereby lessening the economic resistance and giving them some control over their own fates.

Oddly, these guys assume that the price for a refugee should be negative rather than positive. Politicians tell us that even the lowest-skilled immigrants make existing citizens of a country way better off. Yet here these guys say that “countries that take them in can and should be paid for it”. Why should countries get paid to do something that is guaranteed to enrich them?

Readers: What do you know about this grand new U.N. solution and why Hungary and the U.S. are staying out?

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Internet was supposed to enable individual authors to reach an audience and get paid. For example, see this distributed system conceived by Robert Kahn, of TCP/IP fame, in a patent filed in 1993 (6,135,646).

The technology that was supposed to decentralize commerce and media instead led to a much tighter concentration. Most ad revenue goes through Google or Facebook. The local newspaper has died while the New York Times captures a larger (and ever-more-outraged?) national audience. Nasim Aghdam had no practical way of getting paid for her media productions other than going through YouTube. When the righteous folks at YouTube decided that they didn’t like her content and “demonetized” her, the Iranian refugee went on a shooting spree at the YouTube HQ.

In a world where robots, perhaps overseen by a few low-wage humans in countries where their understanding of English and American culture is limited, can demonetize, doesn’t the long-term trend favor the biggest publishers? A traditional big media newspaper or TV station won’t be demonetized because there is too much at stake for a Google, Facebook, YouTube, et al. They can write something inflammatory or edgy and even if a robot misinterprets it the ads still display. But there is no real financial consequence to Google from demonetizing an individual author (see Ann Althouse’s personal tale, for example).

Except maybe for people whose production is limited to cat videos, does this mean that in the long run we will only be able to see material that has been filtered through the biggest (and primarily the traditional) media outlets?

Related:

• How was the refugee immigration of Nasim Najafi Aghdam supposed to work out?

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I am awesome at predicting the future of the stock market. I can tell you that there will be a crash at some point within the next few years. I just can’t give you the exact date…

But seriously, the S&P 500 is carrying a fairly high P/E ratio, isn’t it? Even if we allow for a “Trump bump” due to the lower corporate income tax rate?

Index funds are susceptible to corruption by companies about which investors are wildly enthusiastic, e.g., Tesla, Apple, Facebook, et al. I’m wondering why it isn’t easier to buy a profit-weighted index fund. See this article from 2003 on the subject, which claims a 59 percent outperformance compared to the S&P using hypothetical back-testing. But now there are some actual ETFs that try this approach, notably from WisdomTree (EXT, EPS, EZM, EES), started in 2007. Their EPS fund, since inception, has tracked the S&P 500 (SPTR) pretty closely, actually with slight underperformance (maybe due to the higher expense ratio of 0.28% versus around 0.1% for an S&P index?).

Readers: What do you know and/or think about this approach to index-based investing? Why isn’t the performance more different from dumb-as-bricks indexing? It can’t be that markets are efficient, can it?

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One of the papers that we studied during our Harvard Medical School “big data” course in February was “National Expenditure For False-Positive Mammograms And Breast Cancer Overdiagnoses Estimated At $4 Billion A Year” (Health Affairs 34:4, 2015). The researchers used a data set of 4 billion insurance claims to see what was going on in the U.S. population. We learned that screening mammograms are not helpful compared to waiting for a lump to show up. There are a lot of things that look bad on a mammogram that aren’t, in fact, bad.

Americans fell in love with mammograms:

• Obama talks about Mammograms on Jay Leno (are either of these guys experts on breasts or radiology?)
• Hillary Clinton expressed faith in mammograms back in 2008
• the central planners behind Obamacare continue to force insurance companies to pay for 100 percent of the cost of mammograms every 1-2 years (see healthcare.gov)

Why do we love them so much? It turns out that the five-year survival rates for breast cancer were improved after women en masse got put through the mammography industry. Why would anyone want to stop doing something that improved five-year survival rates?

It turned out that the statistical cure for breast cancer because of mammography was due to the fact that women who did not have cancer were being treated for cancer. They hadn’t been killed by cancer five years later because… they never had cancer to begin with.

So we wrapped ourselves around the axle with data that we weren’t smart enough to comprehend.

(Separately, we learned during this medical school class that it takes approximately 17 years for an identified “best practice” to be adopted by physicians nationwide. Thus we can expect Americans to back off on their love for mammography perhaps in 2032.)

Related:

• “Heart Stents Are Useless for Most Stable Patients. They’re Still Widely Used.” (nytimes)

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School is almost out, so it is time to think about retreating to the peace and quiet of our National Parks, right?

Check out these photos from my October 2017 trip to Zion National Park. The parking lot at the park entrance is generally full so you park a few miles away and wait for a shuttle bus, packed to standing-room-only. Then you wait 30-45 minutes to get on a second shuttle bus, within the park, and that too will be standing-room-only. The visitor center features a 20-minute line for “information” next to a sign talking about “wilderness” and how it “has outstanding opportunities for solitude”.

Zion National Park was established in 1919 and I don’t think that any new trails have been built since then. Consequently, once you do get off the shuttle bus, unless you’re planning to do a 15-mile hike, you’ll likely be on a trail that is more crowded than the average Manhattan sidewalk (not more crowded than Times Square, of course, but far more crowded than the sidewalks away from Midtown). See my photos for the typical crowds on a trail in a shoulder season. The monopoly vendors of crummy food enjoyed long lines of customers, the flip side of which was that it was much more time-consuming to purchase food than it would be in Manhattan, even during the Midtown lunch rush.

Currently access to the park is rationed by ability to stand in lines, ability to stand on a packed bus, and tolerance for walking on a jammed trail. (We went to a convention in Las Vegas afterward, attended by nearly 30,000 people, and it seemed far less crowded than the National Park.)

Americans don’t seem to be willing to ration access to this scarce resource by price. See, for example, “National Park Service Reconsiders Steep Fee Increase After Backlash” (nytimes):

A Trump administration proposal to steeply increase entrance fees to the most popular national parks landed with a thud when it was presented in November, and park officials say they are now reconsidering it.

The proposal, which would apply during the peak visitor season to 17 parks including the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone and Yosemite, called for a $70 fee for noncommercial vehicles, up from $30.

The fee increase seems to be sold as a way of increasing the funds available for maintenance, not as a way to reduce crowds.

Since we aren’t going to reduce the crowds by imposing a higher price and we’re going to continue to grow U.S. population through immigration and incentives to Americans to have more kids, our National Parks are going to end up being more like tourist attractions in Japan or China. Once we accept that we’re going to have Shanghai-style densities, why not reconfigure the parks to be more like Shanghai? Build a denser network of trails where possible. Run robot-driven buses every minute (like the Moscow subway!). Put in high-rise hotels and McDonald’s restaurants that are capable of handling a high volume of customers efficiently. Since we have accepted that our National Parks should be urban environments, why not run them as competent urban environments instead of as pretend wilderness with hour-long waits for the standing-room-only bus and 30-minute waits for a frozen burger?

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“The Children of Flint Were Not ‘Poisoned’” is interesting because it comes from the same nytimes that maintains a “Flint Water Crisis” section.

What are the boring statistics?

Right now in Michigan, 8.8 percent of children in Detroit, 8.1 percent of children in Grand Rapids and an astounding 14 percent of children in Highland Park surpass the C.D.C. reference level. Flint is at 2.4 percent. A comprehensive analysis of blood lead levels across the United States reveals at least eight states with blood lead levels higher than Flint’s were during the water switch.

Flint did hit 3.7 percent at the height of the “crisis,” but never reached anywhere near the level of Detroit, which is not in a “crisis”. But perhaps the measured increase did not correspond to an underlying change?

Moving from evaluating percentages to examining actual blood lead levels in children, we found that levels did increase after the water switched over in 2014, but only by a modest 0.11 micrograms per deciliter. A similar increase of 0.12 micrograms per deciliter occurred randomly in 2010-11. It is not possible, statistically speaking, to distinguish the increase that occurred at the height of the contamination crisis from other random variations over the previous decade.

Obviously any amount of lead is bad, but given that other cities have worse issues with lead and these data are readily obtainable, why the focus on Flint?

Related:

• see this mini-site about our suburban neighbors’ plan to spend $100 million on a new school because they think there is lead in the drinking water in the old school; people cannot be convinced by negative lab tests nor can they be convinced to buy $75 filters that take out 99 percent of any lead (so these environmentalists have been trucking in jugs of water every week for the last 10+ years, but that isn’t Green enough so it is time to push the 1994-built/renovated school into a landfill)

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Americans expect the Department of Homeland Security to do a complex task reliably, i.e., figure out if someone who appears at a U.S. border crossing and asks for asylum (or who crosses illegally and is arrested and then claims to be a victim of persecution back home) is telling the truth and is therefore entitled to the usual U.S. welfare package (i.e., a lifetime of free housing, free health care, free food, and free smartphone).

It is impossible for citizens to know if this task is being done competently. Generally we don’t speak the language of the migrants. We don’t have any way to verify if their stories are true (see this story about a mother of four young children who says that she is being persecuted by the Honduran government; how would we ever determine the truth or falsehood of this statement?).

But most of us know what a competently-run web site looks like. About 13 years ago the U.S. government decided to impose on private aircraft operators the requirement to pre-submit passport-type details for everyone departing or arriving in the U.S. This is the “eAPIS” system at eapis.cbp.dhs.gov. We know that it has a database back-end because it can remember pilot details and information from recently filed manifests, but it is impossible for a family to enter all of the non-pilots persistently. This has led to various subscription services ($250/year for a popular example at fltplan.com) where someone else will keep a database and send over a completed manifest to CBP via XML. You might think that in 13 years the programmers at or working for CBP would have added the most-requested features, such as the ability for each user to save details for a few friends or family members, but this has not happened. At a minimum, this would likely reduce transcription errors (if a passport number is entered once it is more likely to be correct and consistent than if it must be entered 25 times).

The argument, I guess, is “well, this CBP agency is terrible at running a web service, but they’re great at everything else they do.” But usually when an enterprise is good at one thing they are pretty good at everything and when they’re bad at one thing it is usually because management has low standards for pretty much everything that the enterprise does.

Can we infer from their inability to run a decent 1995-style web service that CBP is never going to be able to screen refugees and asylum-seekers?

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“Maria Butina, Suspected Secret Agent, Used Sex in Covert Plan, Prosecutors Say” (nytimes) describes how a 29-year-old student pilot in a Piper Warrior (see the video on the page at 2:11) managed to subvert the $4.4 trillion/year Federal government:

Apparently hoping for a work visa that would grant her a longer stay, she offered one American sex in exchange for a job. She moved in with a Republican political operative nearly twice her age, describing him as her boyfriend. But she privately expressed “disdain” for him and had him do her homework, prosecutors said.

In other words, a young person was having sex with an older person who had something to offer in terms of career advancement.

When this happens between two Americans, the young person is described as a helpless victim, suffering from what might be a year of forced sexual encounters, utterly trapped and with no thought of what was being obtained in exchange. When the young person is Russian, however, the same newspaper describes the young person as a cunning aggressor, in control of the situation.

Also in anti-Russian hysteria:

• “NRA ADMITS ACCEPTING MONEY FROM 23 RUSSIA-LINKED DONORS” (Newsweek), in which we learn that it is front-page news for Americans that, over the past 3 years, $2,500 was received, mostly in subscription or membership fees, from 23 people ($100 each!) who “may include U.S. citizens living in Russia.”

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Harvard makes the Daily Mail: “‘Are you in one of the affordable units?’ Director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative is accused of being a racist ‘Sidewalk Susie’ after slamming a mom and her biracial daughter, 3, for playing outside”

Cambridge has taken to calling its “steal from the (rich) developers and give to the poor” program “inclusionary housing”:

The Inclusionary Housing Ordinance applies to new residential developments or buildings converted to residential use which create 10 or more new housing units or over 10,000 square feet of residential space. The Ordinance requires that 20% of the residential floor area in a building be devoted to affordable units.

There are apparently roughly 1,100 units currently (source). This is in addition to the Cambridge Housing Authority, which provides 5,500 free and/or subsidized housing units. In a city of 110,000, however, in which most people with middle-class jobs have been forced to exile themselves to boring suburbs and unendurable commutes, there is near-infinite demand for free housing. The waiting lists therefore can stretch to infinity unless an applicant has some sort of hook into the system. Thus 99.99 percent of Americans are excluded, as a practical matter, from these “inclusionary” houses.

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“California Supreme Court Squashes Bid To Split State Into Three” (NPR):

California will be staying in one piece, at least for now, after the state’s supreme court ruled that a proposal to divide California into three cannot be placed on the ballot in November.

… the Planning and Conservation League (PCL), a nonprofit environmental group in California, filed a lawsuit to block the measure from getting to a vote.

The PCL says the proposal amounts to a change in the state constitution, which must be decided by the Legislature before it goes to voters, The Sacramento Bee reports.

“We opposed the measure because splitting the state up doesn’t solve any of our existing challenges, it just makes them worse,” Howard Penn, the executive director of PCL, told NPR via email. “We have worked hard for the past 50 plus years on statewide policies that help make California a healthy place to live. If the state gets split up into three parts, it would be like hitting the reset button and starting over.”

I’m not sure why the judges wouldn’t let this on the ballot. The other 49 states would have had to approve the measure, right? And that would never have happened? So why does anyone care?

What about an internal split, though, that would be less dramatic in name but have more impact in reality?

Right now someone in San Diego who thinks that schools should be funded more lavishly or run differently has to travel up to Sacremento and argue with imperial overlords. With a population of 40 million, far larger than most European countries, there is no reason for anyone in the capital to listen to a citizen unless that citizen is crazy rich or famous.

A Pattern Language (written by a UC Berkeley professor and friends!) suggests a country sized like Denmark, about 5 million, if individuals are to have any practical chance of influencing laws and decisions. The claim is that people will be happier in a country where they have a political voice.

Why couldn’t Californians vote to take apart their unaccountable state-wide bureaucracy one piece at a time? For example, they could vote to disband the California Department of Education (“We oversee the state’s diverse public school system, which is responsible for the education of more than six million children and young adults in more than 10,000 schools with 295,000 teachers. We are in charge of enforcing education law and regulations and continuing to reform and improve public school programs.”). Adjusted for demographics, California runs the worst-performing schools in the United States (nytimes). With nothing to lose, therefore, just say that whatever the statewide department was doing would now be done by counties (smaller ones could band together and cooperate if necessary) and that funding would be similarly devolved onto the counties (they would still have the Federal education bureaucrats to report to, of course, just like now!).

If decentralizing control of schools worked out well, voters could move on to the next government function. San Francisco could continue to run a winner-take-all family court system (the current law; see also how it could have worked for Ellen Pao) while San Diego adopted shared parenting and capped child support profits (see this chapter of Real World Divorce for the three basic types of custody dispute resolution systems in the U.S.) There could be marijuana in supermarkets up in Eureka and restrictions on the sale of this critically important medication down in San Diego. The speed limit on highways could be set by county. Maybe out in the desert it be over the current statewide 70 mph limit. Back in Silicon Valley the limit could be set to 25 mph to reflect (a) the reality of actual travel speeds during most of the day, and (b) the experimental nature of the self-driving cars that are sharing the road. (That’s another good thing to regulate locally: self-driving cars! They make a lot more sense in some places than others and how does a bureaucrat in Sacramento know?)

Eventually the only things left at the state level would be the National Guard and the soon-to-be-$1 trillion high-speed rail project. There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution, I think, that requires individual states to have central bureaucracies and uniform statewide laws for any given government function.

California readers: Would this make you and your neighbors happier? You’d still be in the same state as people who live 500 miles away, but you wouldn’t have to get their approval anymore.

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