If there were no War on Drugs, I sincerely believe that within a single generation, there would be no perceptible “crisis in black America,” and this book shows much of why that’s true. The War on Drugs turns whole neighborhoods against the cops—with no discernible benefit after more than 30 years. Brown’s book is very The Wire–except the people he writes about are real.
For 35 years, you’ve…marginalized a certain percentage of your population, most of them minority, and placed them in a situation where the only viable economic engine in their hypersegregated neighborhoods is the drug trade. Then you’ve alienated them further by fighting this draconian war in their neighborhoods, and not being able to distinguish between friend or foe and between that which is truly dangerous or that which is just illegal.
I like this quote from David Simon better:
The Wire will have an effect on the way a certain number of thoughtful people look at the drug war. It will not have the slightest effect on the way the nation as a whole does business.
Some people like to say that the way you change policy isn’t to study policy analysis, but to make a movie instead.
But we often observe only one side of the experimental condition: those cases where a specific media message changed policy. What about all those movies on the War on Drugs? Not a lot of policy change so far.
The Park National shutdown occurred after several Illinois congressmen, including Reps. Bobby Rush and Danny Davis and Sen. Roland Burris, called the FDIC asking it to delay closing the bank for at least a week, said Marilyn Katz, a bank spokeswoman.
and
Rep. Tom Price (R., Ga.) told [FDIC Chairwoman] Ms. Bair he wasn’t “convinced that the FDIC isn’t contributing to the awful problems that we’re having” in his state, where 20 banks have failed in 2009. The banks “dot every ‘i’ and they cross every ‘t’ and then the knock comes on the door on Friday afternoon,” he told her.
During his immersion in his new job, Gil Kerlikowske attended a focus group of 7-year-old girls and was mystified by their talk about “farm parties.” Then he realized they meant “pharm parties” – sampling pharmaceuticals from their parents’ medicine cabinets. What he learned – besides that young humans have less native sense than young dachshunds have – is that his job has wrinkles unanticipated when he became director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Washington University professor Andrew Martin and his collaborators have recently released their US Supreme Court Database website. It updates, enhances, and streamlines Spaeth’s original data set. This project looks to be a significant development in the field and a very useful and reliable resource for law and courts scholars interested in studying SCOTUS. The website can be found here, and Andrew’s formal announcement is available below the fold.
The proposed Coburn amendment to eliminate the political science division of the National Science Foundation and funding for political science research has once again raised the question of whether academic research is relevant to real-world problems.
The controversy over electing judges provides interesting insight into this question, particularly when examining the reactions of the advocacy community to scientific studies of judicial elections published in the nation’s leading academic journals, law reviews, and commercial presses. While there certainly are valid criticisms of empirical studies of judicial selection, it simply is the case that empirical findings that contradict political strategies and goals will not be acknowledged and incorporated into the public dialogue no matter how relevant or compelling.
It has not mattered, for example, that empirical evidence has shown for decades that there are no measurable differences between judges chosen in partisan elections and judges chosen by other “less political” methods. Nor have many in the “reform” community demonstrated concern with the fact that nonpartisan elections effectively disenfranchise large segments of the electorate, raise the costs of seeking office, and open supreme court races to idiosyncratic forces. Similarly, recent evidence showing that confidence in courts is not lower in states using partisan elections has not been incorporated into the public dialogue, or the fact that elections are perhaps the most powerful legitimacy-conferring institutions in the world.
The bottom line is that contradictory evidence is irrelevant to actors pursuing their own agendas, an irony in the case of judicial selection since many of the most aggressive advocates against judicial elections are judges and attorneys. The same evidence also may seem, without effort to understand it, incomprehensible.
In fact, many advocates in the judicial selection controversy engage in forms of fact-finding quite removed from the standards and practices of scientific journals in political science, including the use of anecdotes to claim general tendencies or to discredit them, public opinion polls with biased question wording and flawed sampling strategies, incorrect and selective interpretation of poll results, and reliance on the opinions of “experts” as concrete evidence of problems that cannot yet be seen but nonetheless purportedly are looming. These are attempts to seek the truth but often produce evidence that does not withstand more rigorous scientific scrutiny.
There is another kind of problem, however, quite apart from sincere though flawed attempts to seek the truth. Best explained by Princeton University Professor Emeritus Harry Frankfurt in his illuminating essay On Bullshit, there is a distinct form of expression – “bullshit” – the defining characteristic of which is offering statements to suit one’s own purpose without much regard for whether the statements actually are true or false. Given the instrumental nature of political action (no matter how altruistically the goals of many advocacy organizations are stated) and the willingness to argue positions that may lack empirical support, academic work is ignored or dismissed, usually with flimsy arguments not befitting a badly educated high school debate team (more on this in my next post). As part of this, econometrics become easy to caricature among non-academics as being divorced from reality or as having some fatal flaw. Thus, “bullshit” is a powerful countervailing force to science.
In short, science and politics often are not compatible, and no amount of careful study, scientific rigor, or attempts to contribute constructively to the political process will change that. Even so, truth intrinsically is important, and the difficulties political scientists may encounter when engaging political actors does not render the enterprise any less worthwhile.
Dear Voir Dire readers, please join me in welcoming professor Melinda Gann Hall to our blog. While she needs no introduction, I’ll provide a little bio information for anyone who is doesn’t follow law and courts or state politics work and is therefore unfamiliar with her scholarship. Melinda earned her Ph.D. at the University of New Orleans in 1983 and is now Professor and Distinguished Faculty at Michigan State University, department of political science.
Her publications, awards, and professional leadership positions are too numerous to list here, but you can find her vitae here. She (along with Chris Bonneau) has recently penned a book, In Defense of Judicial Elections and she is also a co-creator (with Paul Brace) of the well-known State Supreme Court Data Project, funded by NSF. We look forward to her posts and I am sure that you will enjoy her insights.
The New York Times reports on the Hawaii healthcare system and how it compares against the rest of the nation. Since 1974 the state has required all employers to provide healthcare benefits to any employee working twenty hours a week or more. As the chart at the left indicates this situation has not led to an explosion in health care costs.
“But perhaps the most intriguing lesson from Hawaii has to do with costs. This is a state where regular milk sells for $8 a gallon, gasoline costs $3.60 a gallon and the median price of a home in 2008 was $624,000 — the second-highest in the nation. Despite this, Hawaii’s health insurance premiums are nearly tied with North Dakota for the lowest in the country, and Medicare costs per beneficiary are the nation’s lowest.
Hawaii residents live longer than people in the rest of the country, recent surveys have shown, and the state’s health care system may be one reason. In one example, Hawaii has the nation’s highest incidence of breast cancer but the lowest death rate from the disease.”
But the system is certainly not perfect:
“There are clear problems with Hawaii’s system. Hospitals on the outer islands are small and losing money. With unemployment rising, so, too, are the ranks of the uninsured — which is now 10.7 percent of nonelderly adults. Only Massachusetts has a lower share of uninsured adults, and the national share is 20.4 percent. And there is growing evidence that as the economy has slowed and premiums have risen, employers have hired more part-time workers who are ineligible for benefits.”
It might be interesting to hear what Hawaiian policy makers think of the proposals currently circulating in DC. Given the state’s success, it is rather surprising that other states haven’t done more experimenting with such a system.
The Law School Innovation Blog details a movement to establish a “nationalized” or “uniform” bar exam. Apparently, at least 10 states are on board with this idea and the switch should come next year. I am surprised that this hasn’t been bigger news in the media or the blogosphere, if in fact it is not a hoax. I’m not too surprised to read that the larger market states (e.g. California, New York, Florida, etc.) are not participating. If this does come to pass, then it should be a great benefit for law students in those states adopting the change as they will enjoy a greatly enhanced set of potential job opportunities. It’s nearly impossible to sell yourself as a new graduate to a firm in which you don’t have the bar exam under your belt – although perhaps not so much with mega firms. The usual concerns over the bar exam aside, this should do good things for at least certain segments of the legal economy.
The WSJ Blog has two interesting recent posts on the law associate scene – the first is on lockstep pay increases (and decreases) versus merit pay for law firm associates and the second is on (ew!) networking (it’s actually a very helpful and informative post).
I suggest to students heading for their first job to write on an index card four institutions where you would be happy to have a tenured position in six years. Select these on the basis of the type of department and university that best fi ts your personality and interests: large versus small, relative time and weight given to teaching, public versus private, heterogenous or more homogenous in the type of work and approaches, etc. For the fi rst four years look at that card at the end of each year and honestly assess whether you have made progress towards that goal. As the tenure decision gets closer look at that card more frequently to keep in mind what was your goal, how you de ned success, and whether you are succeeding. If the answer to the last part is yes, then you have succeeded regardless of the current tenure decision.
And in what may well be a unique feature in corporate America, Enron’s top management today uses its human capital flows to guide its allocations of financial capital.
Gotta love hindsight. Kaminski was a main quant at Enron. Some say he tried, but ultimately failed, to avert Enron’s collapse.
A good ‘public service announcement’ from the folks at “Funny or Die” with a lot of TV faces you might recognize. Somehow it’s kind of funny to see ad executive Don Draper taking a poke at insurance executives – still works though – but doesn’t everything John Hamm seem just a little better? [hat tip Rorie Spill Solberg on FB]
On the other hand, two states saw income losses of 10 percent or more – Vermont (-10.3 percent) and New Jersey (-10.1 percent); and incomes declined by more than five percent in two others – Georgia (-6.4 percent) and Tennessee (- 5.1 percent).
Ouch. Florida and California took big hits, too, but the hits were small relative to the base. Imagine if those states took sizeable income hits – and then the impending Option ARM crisis happened? Yikes, we’d be looking at >40% foreclosures in that market segment, and 40% is bad enough.
Since April 2008, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District has told 35,000 customers in their monthly bills how their energy use compares with neighbors’, and with the district’s most-efficient customers. Customers who received the additional information cut their energy use by 2%, compared with a similar group of users who didn’t get comparison data.
Last month, the district expanded the test to cover 50,000 households. Ali Crawford, a district project manager, says officials want to see if the comparison approach reduces energy use more than direct appeals to consumers’ wallets, such as offering rebates on the purchase of energy-efficient appliances.
In the midst of furloughs and massive cut backs at many state schools, the University of Alabama’s announcement of Nick Saban’s 42.35 million dollar coaching contract is almost humorous … almost. The Faculty Lounge details the announcement here. But college sports pay for everything else at the university, right? As you may recall we already dealt with this question.
Dear Voir Dire readers, please join me in welcoming professor 
The New York Times 
