Public Policy « The Ramblings of An Eternal Student of Life

Saturday, July 18, 2015

Public Policy ... Science ... Society ...

The New York Times recently published an article about genetic crop modification (“GMO“, as popularly known) by financial experts Mark Spitznagel and Nassim Taleb. Spitznagel and Taleb (yes, the “black swan” Taleb) think that tinkering with agricultural products by intentionally altering their genes through now-common scientific techniques is a formula for trouble. They feel that “complex chains of unpredictable changes in the ecosystem” could lead to catastrophe (shortages, high prices, economic depressions, starvation) if important crops get unexpectedly wiped out or are no longer able to grow in a changing environment.

To give their argument some weight, Taleb and Spitznagel compare the current GMO situation with the growth in the late 90’s and early 2000’s of hybrid financial arrangements for sub-prime investments (e.g. credit default swaps, tranched mortgage backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, etc). These investments were designed based on detailed economic studies, statistical analyses and complex mathematical and computer techniques, and became very popular in the big-money world of high-finance. Unfortunately, they had some unforeseen flaws in them, such that changing conditions in the US housing market triggered a cascade of events that ultimately led to a financial crisis and a “Great Recession”.

Their logic was criticized in an article in Forbes by Henry I. Miller, a biomedical scientist and former FDA drug regulator. Miller first points out that Spitznagel and Taleb are » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 12:40 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Sunday, July 12, 2015

◊ Obamacare rising? And Meditation deflating . . .

Public Policy ... Spirituality ...

Back in November, 2014, I was discussion Obamacare, and I cited a then-recent poll indicating that public support for Obamacare was improving, closing the excess of disapprovals over approvals down to 6%. Shortly thereafter, new polls came in showing that this poll was a fluke, and the overall disapproval margin was hovering around 10%. Well, don’t look now, but it appears that some better results are finally coming in for the Affordable Care Act of 2010. A recent Gallup Poll showed the disapproval margin down to 1 measly percentage point, and a CBS / NY Times poll actually showed a 3 point favorability margin — the first positive poll since early 2013. This is a very recent trend — two polls in May showed disapproval margins of 12 and 15 percentage points.

If the recent trend continues, however, then perhaps Obamacare is here with us to stay, no matter how the big 2016 election goes. I personally wish that the GOP would just stop being so pigheaded in its opposition to the ACA, and get down to proposing ways to implement more market-driven mechanisms and fewer government-managed aspects of a national health insurance system. That probably won’t happen, however, unless they win the White House in 2016. They will then propose to replace Obamacare, but in the end, when the dust settles, it will be Obamacare with a few more market-based features and a few less government control mechanisms and oversight boards. That is, if the public popularity trend continues. Stay tuned.

Oh, while I’m here — one more odd topic, having nothing to do with health care. I was reading an article on the Atlantic website about one of those recent neuroscience studies regarding the brains of Buddhist meditators, and all the wondrous things that lots of mediation » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:01 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

◊ Ferguson and ‘Broken Windows’ Policing

Current Affairs ... Public Policy ... Society ...

Looks like Fegruson, MO might be back in the news shortly. A Grand Jury is soon expected to release its decision as to whether criminal charges should be filed against Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson for the August 9, 2014 shooting and killing of 18 year old Michael Brown by Darren. The Washington Post reports that the testimony of six local residents to the Saint Louis County Grand Jury who eyewitnessed the shooting, along with physical evidence collected at the scene, tend to confirm Wilson’s version of the story (i.e., that a physical struggle between Wilson and Brown ensued while Wilson was in his police vehicle, during a stop by Wilson to warn Brown and his companion not to walk in the middle of a busy street; Brown tried to take Wilson’s gun from him during the struggle; Wilson’s gun was discharged during the struggle, but did not hit anyone; Brown and his companion then ran from the vehicle while Wilson recovered his weapon and then got out and ordered them to stop; Brown stopped, but then starting moving towards Wilson without any sign of surrender — i.e., no “hands up”; and Wilson then raised his gun and discharged a volley of shots at the approaching Brown, hitting him at least 6 times including in the forehead, thus killing him).

If the Post report is true, then the likeihood of a “no-bill” (whereby the Grand Jury lets Wilson off) must be taken seriously. Local officials thus fear that there could be significant protests and possible disturbances once again in Ferguson as a result. There is no doubt that many in the African American community, including a majority of its leaders, will be upset if Wilson walks away without any sort of punishment. To repeat the obvious, many African Americans have had upsetting and arguably disrespectful interactions with police in their lives, and thus well remember the many incidents reported in the press over the past decade where unarmed black community members were killed by law enforcement (e.g., Trayvon Martin, Amadou Diallo, Oscar Grant, Sean Bell, Wendell Allen, etc., with very many others not making the national news). The Ferguson situation is just another lightening rod for their angst and frustrations.

However, there does appear to be a valid argument that Officer Wilson was mostly doing what he should have been doing (other than perhaps the final barrage of close-range shots » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:51 am Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

◊ Stop For Pedestrian Laws: How Twee

Public Policy ... Society ...

I’d like to discuss a small but somewhat interesting situation involving the side-effects laws and customs that attempt to make things better for some portion of the human community. A few years ago, my home state of New Jersey passed a law requiring motorists to jam on their brakes and stop anytime a pedestrian enters a roadway intending to cross it. You can get a ticket with points and fines if you don’t immediately stop, even if the speed limit is 40 and you’d have to make a panic stop and risk getting rear-ended because some pedestrian starts into the road just ahead of you.

Well, actually this rule applies at marked crosswalks and at street intersections, marked or not; it may not hold when people take their chances with “jaywalking” on an open road stretch. The obvious intent of this law is to prevent auto-pedestrian collisions and the terrible injury they cause. The unfortunate side effect, which is becoming very apparent in my current home town of Montclair, is that pedestrians are getting careless and stepping out into the road without any regard for whatever vehicles may be approaching. This is especially apparent with the younger generation; a lot of kids don’t even look for approaching traffic anymore, they just step zombie-like onto the crosswalk. However, older folk also seem to be getting sloppy and assuming that every motorist is going to grind to a stop on a main thoroughfare as soon as they arrive at the curb.

In some towns, the chances that you are going to get ticketed for a technical violation of this law, i.e. for not stopping when there is clearly no danger to the pedestrian because the road is wide and they are still 15 or 20 feet away from where your car will pass, are relatively low (although you never know when a cranky cop will go after you just for fun). This is especially true in the low-income urban » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:19 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

◊ Nick Kristof and the Cycle of Poverty

Public Policy ... Society ...

Since it’s a weeknight and I’m still working full time for a living, I’m gonna try to make this quick. I’m just going to cite an interesting article that I read over the weekend, and add a quick though or two, not a complete essay.

If you are interesting in poverty and social justice in America, Nicholas Kristof has a very thought provoking (and hopefully an ACTION provoking) article in the NY Times, entitled “The Way to Beat Poverty“. That’s quite an ambitious title, given that America has been trying to beat poverty since the days of Lyndon Johnson. To put it optimistically, our national efforts have had “mixed success” over the past half century. Kristof and co-author Cheryl WuDunn contend that the ongoing generational poverty experienced by many low-income communities is caused, to a great extent, by poor pre-natal and early life care for infants.

We’ve always known that sub-standard conditions in early life were an effect of poverty, but Kristof is saying that it is in fact a CAUSE. He doesn’t use the politically incorrect expressions “cycle of poverty” and “poverty culture” (this is the New York Times, » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:48 am Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Thursday, August 21, 2014

◊ Ferguson: Tactics, Technology, Bias Against Poverty

Current Affairs ... Public Policy ... Technology ...

I’m going to weigh in with some comments on the Ferguson, MO situation and the difficult national issues that it touches upon. Before I offer my own thoughts, I would like to summarize a few articles by a few pundits who I feel offered some very cogent observations about the tragic events that have transpired over the past 2 weeks.

Charles Blow in the NY Times states that

discussion about issues in the black community too often revolves around a false choice: systemic racial bias or poor personal choices. In fact, these factors are interwoven like the fingers of clasped hands. People make choices within the context of their circumstances and those circumstances are affected — sometimes severely — by bias . . . These biases do material damage as well as help breed a sense of disenfranchisement and despair, which in turn can have a depressive effect on aspiration and motivation. This all feeds back on itself . . . If we want to truly address the root of the unrest in Ferguson, we have to ask ourselves how we can break this cycle.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar says that the ultimate problem is more a matter of bias and class presumptions against those living in poverty.

This fist-shaking of everyone’s racial agenda distracts America from the larger issue that the targets of police overreaction are based less on skin color and more on an even worse Ebola-level affliction: being poor. Of course, to many in America, being a person of color » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 6:49 am Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Monday, July 28, 2014

◊ On The Border . . . Crisis

Current Affairs ... Foreign Relations/World Affairs ... Public Policy ...

Unless you are a doctrinaire liberal or conservative, the unaccompanied child crisis at the Mexican border is a real quandary. On the one hand, you want to sympathize with a humanitarian crisis involving perhaps a hundred-thousand unaccompanied teens and pre-teens showing up each year at the US border seeking a better life. They are coming primarily from nations with high rates of drug trade and gang activity, and thus high rates of violence (primarily Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador).

On the other hand, perhaps the conservatives do have a point when they attribute the crisis to President Obama’s non-enforcement amnesty policies towards illegal aliens, especially illegal children. These policies were publicly announced in 2012 (certainly with political motivation – i.e., to minimize Republican inroads into the Hispanic voting block by figures such as Suzanna Martinez, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, and thus preserve the large Hispanic electoral margins which Democrats increasingly depend upon). Therefore, most Hispanic populations north of Cape Horn have become aware of them. It certainly seems plausible (but not yet fully proven) that many Central Americans believe that if someone can get across the border, they will likely be allowed to stay, especially a child from one of the nations south of Mexico (who are subject to legal judicial process before being sent back, unlike Mexican children, who can be deported immediately; and interestingly, the number of unaccompanied Mexican children crossing the border has actually decreased in recent years).

An alleged USDHS report indicates that about half of the new wave of children at the border are males 13 to 17, with the balance a mix of teen females (many pregnant) and toddlers of both sexes down to 2 or less. The liberal / progressive press keeps emphasizing the terrible, violent conditions in the places where this new wave » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 11:29 am Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Saturday, May 3, 2014

◊ Slavery & Fossil Fuels, What Goes Around . . .

Current Affairs ... Public Policy ... Society ...

I was driving to work the other day, and morning person that I am, I had the radio tuned to the Bloomberg financial station. By 7 AM, I’m ready for some insightful and stimulating comment on the state of business, the markets and the world economy. (Bloomberg is after all about money, but Bloomberg media does do a pretty good job of covering politics and social trends in addition to its primary focus on the business of making money).

As I rolled down Ridgewood Avenue in Glen Ridge, it was time for Bloomberg View, and this day it was Megan McArdle‘s turn. Ah yes, good old Megan (she’s actually rather young), the rising star of economics-oriented punditry. I remember back when she cut her teeth writing an occasional “rational economic thinking” piece for The Atlantic. I find that Ms. McArdle’s thoughts have generally been worth a read or listen, and I take my hat off for her being one of the few female pundits embracing market theory and financial trends.

During my ride to work, Ms. McArdle was taking on Chris Hayes of MSNBC, specifically a recent article he published in the uber-liberal Nation magazine which compared and in some ways equated global warming with slavery. Mr. Hayes’ bottom line was that slavery was such a crime against humankind that society had to eviscerate billions of dollars worth of economic value (i.e., the investment of the plantation owners in their armies of slaves, and the huge profits that they earned by using them) . . . despite the fact that this radical seizure of economic value would have a tremendously disruptive effect on the regional economies of the South (and secondarily on the industrialized North, too). In the same fashion, society would now have to destroy a tremendous amount of economic value by prematurely ending the use of fossil fuels, because of the great crimes that global warming will soon have (and possibly is already having) on the human race (to say nothing of the many other living species and the overall living ecology of planet earth).

Ms. McArdle found this logic to be a bit “inapposite” – i.e., Mr. Haynes did not hit the nail on the head, after all. Slavery was a horribly » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 11:27 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Thursday, April 3, 2014

◊ Global Warming or Global Freezing?

Current Affairs ... Public Policy ... Science ...

Does it make any sense to talk about an ice age at a time when global warming makes all the headlines? According to the patterns of cold and warm eras over the past million years or so of earth history, we may be due for an new ice age. The general pattern for the past few million years of earth history has been 100,000 years of ice age followed by 12,000 years of temperate climate (an “interglacial” period).

We have been in an “interglacial” now for about that number of years, and thus could be due for the start of a new ice age. There are patterns called “Milankovich cycles” that are thought by some to trigger the warm and cold spells; these cycles involve the overall tilt of the earth relative to the sun (which varies over a 41,000 year period), the shape of the earth’s orbit (which changes over a period of 100,000 years) and the Earth’s ‘spin wobble’ (which varies the direction of the earth’s axis over a period of 26,000 years). Arguably our planet is re-entering a tilt / orbit / wobble combo where cold, dry conditions become the norm; the warm inter-glacial periods that we are used to have been more of an exception to the general rule of an ice-ball planet.

Recall that in the 1970s, the climate change articles were talking about the prospect of global cooling, along with the threats to human existence that it would pose. There were global cooling articles in both Time and Newsweek in the mid-70s. (However, that trend may have been driven by media bias for » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:23 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Thursday, March 13, 2014

◊ Obamacare In a Tailspin?

Current Affairs ... Politics ... Public Policy ...

Megan McArdle, an economic policy writer for Bloomberg, has published a series of articles over the past few months expressing doubt about the long-term viability of Obamacare. Ms. McArdle acknowledges that the Affordable Care Act of 2009 has had some positive effects. However, she has her doubts as to whether the government-private hybrid system that the ACA maps out can attain its lofty goal of providing affordable health care to the vast majority of American households, given the many complex problems that it has encountered and the many compromises that have been made by the Administration in the roll-out. Oh, and also the hostile political environment that the GOP and the general public have created for the ACA. It ain’t easy to radically re-design and re-arrange 16% of the American economy (and a terribly complex segment of that economy, one involving life-and-death issues affecting nearly everyone) within 5 years, especially when about 55% of the adult population is against it.

Up to now, I haven’t taken Ms. McArdle all that seriously. A lot of other writers, such as the redoubtably liberal Paul Krugman, are arguing that teething pains are to be expected and that a lot of major government initiatives (including the 2006 Romney health care reforms in Massachusetts) seemed very messy at first but eventually kicked-in and accomplished their major goals. But Ms. McArdle’s review of a recent poll released by the McKinsey consulting company is causing me to have my own doubts. In a nutshell, only 10% of uninsured adults using the new insurance exchanges (mostly thru the troubled federal web site and the various individual state care sites) have bought it by end of Feb, 2014. Most of the purchases that have been made through the exchanges are by those who already had insurance. The biggest issue appears to be high costs, even net of the subsidy that the ACA provides to lower-income households.

Another recent survey by Gallup gives a more optimistic view. An NPR article notes that this survey shows that the uninsured rate has fallen significantly in the » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 2:48 pm Read Comments (4) / Leave a Comment

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