Saturday, April 05, 2008

Rich Men Behaving Badly

I almost missed this... Daniel Gross, writing in Slate notes some striking resemblances between the underclass and the newly emergent super rich overclass:

In the underclass, unmarried, young fathers don’t take responsibility for their children. In the overclass, twice-married, middle-aged Wall Street daddies don’t own up to the consequences of their insane financial miscues. Wall Street titans are almost incapable of seeing the problem with taking nine-figure payouts in years in which their stocks plummet. “There’s just a total disconnect between the compensation and the responsibility for their actions,” says William Cohan, a former Lazard banker turned author.

In his book The Age of Abundance, libertarian author Brink Lindsey boils down the difference between the desperately poor and the blissfully rich to an ability to focus on the long term. “Members of the underclass operate within such narrow time horizons and circles of trust that their lives are plagued by chronic chaos and dysfunction,” he says. By contrast, elites are well-organized long-term thinkers. Riiiiight. “Modern Wall Street is a system,” says Charles Morris—a former Chase banker and author of The Trillion Dollar Meltdown-"that rewards crazy risk-taking in the short term without regard for the long-term consequences.”

Critics point to a pervasive sense of victimhood in the underclass. But listen to what Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz told the troops after his firm succumbed to wounds that were almost entirely self-inflicted. “We here are a collective victim of violence,” he said. Yep, just another case of the Man keeping the Man down.

Conservative critics constantly carp that the culture of poverty has encouraged a sense of dependency on Washington. Of course, in recent months, the bureaucracy-the Federal Reserve, the Federal Housing Authority, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac-has generally ignored the struggles of poor homeowners. Yet it vaulted into action to save the bankers from their own disastrous bets. When Bear Stearns, the nation’s fifth-largest investment bank, approached insolvency, the Feds orchestrated JPMorgan’s acquisition of it.

Ah, but there are important differences:

The overclass is better connected, and it can cause more damage. “Poor inner-city kids selling drugs to suburban kids can harm people,” [dean of the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy Studies Susan] Mayer says. “But financial markets can bring thousands and thousands of people to ruin.”

Friday, April 04, 2008

Dan Ariely says, “Test the stimulus package”

The author of Predictably Irrational on Marketplace last night:

The field of behavioral economics has rather convincingly shown that money given in different forms can have different effects. For example, paying for dinner in cash feels very different than paying the same bill with a credit card. And an increase in monthly salary has a different effect on a person’s spending than the same amount in an equivalent yearly bonus. [...]

We force drug companies to test the efficacy of their drugs before rolling them into the market. So shouldn’t we ask the government to first test its ideas before it invests billions of dollars of our tax money into some stimulus package?

Experiments like these aren’t easy to do. But in order to learn what is truly most effective, we must select a few possibilities. We should try them out in different markets or market sectors and compare their effectiveness over time.

For instance, I suspect that giving people a prepaid debit card will do more to rejuvenate the economy than mailing out checks, but direct deposits wouldn’t be nearly as effective. I also suspect that if we added a line on the debit card that reads “spend the government’s money” this would work even better.

SEE ALSO: Dan Ariely’s “Self-Control” credit card.

Thursday, April 03, 2008

On the difference between feeling secure and being secure

Cryptographer and computer security expert Bruce Schneier writing in Wired examines the significant difference between feeling safe and having security:

If we make security trade-offs based on the feeling of security rather than the reality, we choose security that makes us feel more secure over security that actually makes us more secure. And that’s what governments, companies, family members and everyone else provide. Of course, there are two ways to make people feel more secure. The first is to make people actually more secure and hope they notice. The second is to make people feel more secure without making them actually more secure, and hope they don’t notice.

The key here is whether we notice. The feeling and reality of security tend to converge when we take notice, and diverge when we don’t. People notice when 1) there are enough positive and negative examples to draw a conclusion, and 2) there isn’t too much emotion clouding the issue.

Both elements are important. If someone tries to convince us to spend money on a new type of home burglar alarm, we as society will know pretty quickly if he’s got a clever security device or if he’s a charlatan; we can monitor crime rates. But if that same person advocates a new national antiterrorism system, and there weren’t any terrorist attacks before it was implemented, and there weren’t any after it was implemented, how do we know if his system was effective?

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Dan Ariely’s “Self-Control” credit card

Among the books I’m reading these days is Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. Dan’s in the news a lot lately, as well he should be. The book is a joy to read, and reduces very complicated concepts to easily understood highly readable chapters.

The other day I noted that college students are crying out for limits to be placed on credit card marketing. This is absolutely consistent with much of Ariely’s work. His 2002 study, Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment, is referenced in his book and available at SSRN.

But the brilliant joy of his book is the way he hypothesizes applications for his research. Here, for example, from page 123, the idea of a “self-control” credit card:

A FEW YEARS ago I was so convinced that a “self-control” credit card was a good idea that I asked for a meeting with one of the major banks. To my delight, this venerable bank responded, and suggested that I come to its corporate headquarters in New York.

I arrived in New York a few weeks later, and after a brief delay at the reception desk, was led into a modern conference room. Peering through the plate glass from on high, I could look down on Manhattan’s financial district and a stream of yellow cabs pushing through the rain. Within a few minutes the room had filled with half a dozen high-powered banking executives, including the head of the bank’s credit card division.

I began by describing how procrastination causes everyone problems. In the realm of personal finance, I said, it causes us to neglect our savings-while the temptation of easy credit fills our closets with goods that we really don’t need. It didn’t take long before I saw that I was striking a very personal chord with each of them.

Then I began to describe how Americans have fallen into a terrible dependence on credit cards, how the debt is eating them alive, and how they are struggling to find their way out of this predicament. America’s seniors are one of the hardest-hit groups. In fact, from 1992 to 2004 the rate of debt of Americans age 55 and over rose faster than that of any other group. Some of them were even using credit cards to fill the gaps in their Medicare. Others were at risk of losing their homes.

I began to feel like George Bailey begging for loan forgiveness in It’s a Wonderful Life. The executives began to speak up. Most of them had stories of relatives, spouses, and friends (not themselves, of course) who had had problems with credit debt. We talked it over.

Now the ground was ready and I started describing the self-control credit card idea as a way to help consumers spend less and save more. At first I think the bankers were a bit stunned. I was suggesting that they help consumers control of their spending. Did I realize that the bankers and credit card companies made $17 billion a year in interest from these cards? Hello? They should give that up?

Well, I wasn’t that naive. I explained to the bankers that there was a great business proposition behind the idea of a self-control card. “Look,” I said, “the credit card business is cutthroat. You send out six billion direct-mail pieces a year, and all the card offers are about the same.” Reluctantly, they agreed. “But suppose one credit card company stepped out of the pack,” I continued, “and identified itself as a good guy--as an advocate for the credit-crunched consumer? Suppose one company had the guts to offer a card that would actually help consumers control their credit, and better still, divert some of their money into long-term savings?” I glanced around the room. “My bet is that thousands of consumers would cut up their other credit cards-and sign up with you!”

A wave of excitement crossed the room. The bankers nodded their heads and chatted to one another. It was revolutionary! Soon thereafter we all departed. They shook my hand warmly and assured me that we would be talking again, soon.

Well, they never called me back. (It might have been that they were worried about losing the $17 billion in interest charges, or maybe it was just good old procrastination.) But the idea is still there-a self-control credit card-and maybe one day someone will take the next step.

We have groups like Working Assets setting up credit cards for social ends. I expect one day soon some progressive organization like MoveOn.org will set up the self-control credit card on its own.

RELATED: Ariely is hardly the only hero of behavioral economics. I’ve long been a fan of the libertarian paternalism work of Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler.

Friends say they’d better do something about that name. I’d say that the title of their new book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, is a promising move in the right direction.

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Women in military more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire

Jane Harman has an OpEd in the LATimes today:

Women serving in the U.S. military are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq.

The scope of the problem was brought into acute focus for me during a visit to the West Los Angeles VA Healthcare Center, where I met with female veterans and their doctors. My jaw dropped when the doctors told me that 41% of female veterans seen at the clinic say they were victims of sexual assault while in the military, and 29% report being raped during their military service. They spoke of their continued terror, feelings of helplessness and the downward spirals many of their lives have since taken.

Numbers reported by the Department of Defense show a sickening pattern. In 2006, 2,947 sexual assaults were reported—73% more than in 2004. [...]

At the heart of this crisis is an apparent inability or unwillingness to prosecute rapists in the ranks. According to DOD statistics, only 181 out of 2,212 subjects investigated for sexual assault in 2007, including 1,259 reports of rape, were referred to courts-martial, the equivalent of a criminal prosecution in the military. Another 218 were handled via nonpunitive administrative action or discharge, and 201 subjects were disciplined through “nonjudicial punishment,” which means they may have been confined to quarters, assigned extra duty or received a similar slap on the wrist. In nearly half of the cases investigated, the chain of command took no action; more than a third of the time, that was because of “insufficient evidence.”

Via Think Progress.

Jessica at Feministing points to more information and resources on sexual assault in the military —the Veterans for America and their list of rape crisis centers near military bases; the National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence also has a long list of resources for military women; and the National Sexual Violence Resource Center has statistics.  For those who are looking for more theory-based info, check out just about anything by Cynthia Enloe.

Monday, March 31, 2008

Keep predatory lenders off college campuses!

I made my nephew sit through this story from ABC News about a student who used a Visa card with a $500 limit to charge her $350 tuition. Unfortunately, the card had an additional $100 origination fee and a $10.95 monthly maintenance fee so instead of enrolling in school the student wound up with a job to pay off her credit card bills.

In the story a former bank employee says the boss called cardholders “the scum of earth,” “lowlifes” and “deadbeats.” I paused the video after an industry spokesperson, President of American Financial Services Association Chris Stinebert, justified such fees by saying, “We firmly believe that everyone should be well-informed” and “it seems fair to me...”

My nephew pleaded, “Uncle Joey I haven’t had my coffee yet.”

And therein lies the problem. He doesn’t want to watch that story. He wants me to take care of it for him. And, really, isn’t that only fair and just?

On Friday the Chronicle reported on a study that found students want limits placed on credit card marketing:

Although many college students have plastic in their wallets, most support at least some limits on credit-card marketing, according to a new survey by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. [...]

Among the survey’s other findings:

• Students reported receiving an average of nearly five credit-card solicitations per month.
• Sixty-six percent of students said they had at least one credit card, while 34 percent said they carried a balance from month-to-month.
• Fifty-five percent of students with credit cards said they had used them to pay for day-to-day expenses, and 24 percent said they had used credit cards to pay for tuition.

Information about the survey is available on the group’s Web site.

To those of you who say that my nephew should grow up, my answer is that the research shows all of us would benefit from learning what the marketers already know: when we make decisions we think we’re in control, making rational choices. But in reality we’re much more predictably irrational than we ever realized.

Those college students are on to something smart. More on that in a future post.

Friday, March 28, 2008

Challenging the candidates on the death penalty

Lawyers in the Troy Anthony Davis case filed a motion with the Georgia State Supreme Court yeserday to reconsider its refusal to grant their client a new trial. The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer headline suggests public opinion is not on their side, Convicted cop killer wants court to reconsider its denial of new trial:

Their motion asks the high court to order a lower court to hold a hearing on evidence they say proves Troy Davis’ innocence.

A decision on the motion to reconsider could come by mid-April, the state Supreme Court said in a statement.

Earlier this month, the court, in a 4-3 decision, denied a new trial for Davis, even though several witnesses against him recanted their testimony.

Meanwhile Ben Jones, a first-year political-science graduate student and a member of the Amnesty International club at Yale writing in the Yale Daily News, notices the presidential candidates aren’t much interested in speaking to the death penalty issue:

Such lack of concern is troubling given the persistent problems plaguing the death penalty in this country. Firstly, time and again studies show that race influences the likelihood that an individual convicted of murder will receive a death sentence. There is also evidence suggesting that the number of wrongfully convicted individuals on death row is alarmingly high. Since 1973, 125 death row inmates have been released on account of evidence overturning their convictions. [...]

Legislation in recent decades has had the effect of only exacerbating the injustices of the death penalty. Particularly troubling has been the impact of the Anti-Terrorist and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), a law deemed by some as a more egregious assault on civil liberties than the Patriot Act. This legislation, signed into law by President Clinton, had, as one of its principal goals, shortening the time between conviction and execution for those sentenced to death. In order to accomplished this goal, the habeas corpus rights of death row inmates was severely limited.

To be sure, the law has expedited the executions of a number of rapists and murderers. But it has also had the effect of cutting short the appeals process for possibly innocent individuals - individuals such as Troy Anthony Davis. [...]

To say that the situation faced by Davis is common would be an exaggeration. But with the AEDPA in place, it occurs more often than one may think. The Davis case should have sparked - and perhaps still can - a national debate about the unwanted consequences of federal and state death penalty laws.

Unfortunately, the candidates have failed thus far to lead the debate. McCain has never wavered in his support of the AEDPA, and Clinton has made no indication that she disagrees with her husband’s support for the law. Obama, though more ready to admit problems in the administration of capital punishment, has offered little in the way of substantive measures for remedying these problems on a national scale.

A case currently before the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of lethal injection holds the possibility of bringing the death penalty back into the public consciousness. It would be naive to believe, however, that the candidates, on their own initiative, will draw attention to a potentially explosive issue like the death penalty. Presently, there is no electoral incentive to do so.

It is therefore important that during this campaign season we force the candidates to refocus on the dismal reality of the death penalty. To challenge the view that, as Obama puts it, a community needs to be able to express “the full measure of its outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment.” Is not the true audacity of hope rather believing in - and fighting for - a community that does not have to validate itself through revenge?

Beautifully put Ben!

Monday, March 17, 2008

Silda Spitzer & the perils of postfeminism

Ariel Levy, still* writing in New York Magazine:

Last Wednesday, Silda Wall Spitzer was caught in a trap she’d inadvertently set for herself. Like half of the best-educated and most-privileged women in this country who have babies, she relinquished her high-powered career to devote herself to supporting her spouse and caring for their three daughters. However traditional this idea of wifely duty, it was an open-eyed decision, mulled over endlessly and made on modern, postfeminist terms. Later, in 2005, she even sought Clinton’s advice on becoming the First Lady of New York: “I figured, here’s a woman who also met her husband at law school, who had been a lawyer with a firm, whose husband was a state attorney general,” Silda Spitzer said in 2006. “There really aren’t that many role models for this.” But Hillary Clinton never stopped pursuing her own professional agenda. The Clinton relationship has always mixed romance and ambition, and while the calculated nature of this bargain has at times made Hillary seem less than human, it’s also enabled her, at age 60, to be in the prime of her professional life. That’s a stage many more men reach than women.

During his 2006 campaign, Eliot Spitzer said of his wife, “The fact that she believed in me enough to put her very promising legal career on hold was a great source of inspiration.” While this move may well have helped him achieve his goals, it put Silda Spitzer in the nationally televised bind we witnessed last week. This is a Harvard-educated woman who was once a corporate lawyer who made more money than her husband and was proud of it. But since 1994, the year Silda opted out of the workforce to witness her husband’s first run for attorney general, all her formidable drive has had to be channeled into his career. Fourteen years later, retreat wasn’t possible. As the rest of the state called for his head, Silda told her husband to fight for power. It was a moment Hillary Clinton, no doubt, could have advised her about. But for Silda Spitzer, even more was at stake. And she will not have the consolation of her own career as she comes to terms with the man she gave it up for. In a way, it’s the saddest part of the story, and it exposes the risks women take when they make certain kinds of choices-things that, after Silda, they might not think are safe.

In other postfeminism news, we’ve got the spectacle of a former aide to disgraced NJ governor James E. McGreevey saying yesterday that he had three-way sexual trysts with the gov and his wife that kicked off at T.G.I. Fridays—“but it didn’t seem like he was gay”—denied by Dina and confirmed today by McGreevey.

I’m sorry, but spare me the postfeminism and give me some of that good old-fashioned feminism please!

* A couple weeks ago we learned that Levy’s moving to The New Yorker effective April 1.

The markets-know-best model is a fairy tale

Predictably Irrational was reviewed in the NYTimes’ Book Review this weekend:

For years, the ideology of free markets bestrode the world, bending politics as well as economics to its core assumption: market forces produce the best solution to any problem. But these days, even Bill Gates says capitalism’s work is “unsatisfactory” for one-third of humanity, and not even Hillary Clinton supports Bill Clinton’s 1990s trade pacts.

Another sign that times are changing is “Predictably Irrational,” a book that both exemplifies and explains this shift in the cultural winds. Here, Dan Ariely, an economist at M.I.T., tells us that “life with fewer market norms and more social norms would be more satisfying, creative, fulfilling and fun.” By the way, the conference where he had this insight wasn’t sponsored by the Federal Reserve, where he is a researcher. It came to him at Burning Man, the annual anarchist conclave where clothes are optional and money is banned. Ariely calls it “the most accepting, social and caring place I had ever been.”

Obviously, this sly and lucid book is not about your grandfather’s dismal science. Ariely’s trade is behavioral economics, which is the study, by experiments, of what people actually do when they buy, sell, change jobs, marry and make other real-life decisions.

To see how arousal alters sexual attitudes, for example, Ariely and his colleagues asked young men to answer a questionnaire - then asked them to answer it again, only this time while indulging in Internet pornography on a laptop wrapped in Saran Wrap. (In that state, their answers to questions about sexual tastes,, violence and condom use were far less respectable.) To study the power of suggestion, Ariely’s team zapped volunteers with a little painful electricity, then offered fake pain pills costing either 10 cents or $2.50 (all reduced the pain, but the more expensive ones had a far greater effect). To see how social situations affect honesty, they created tests that made it easy to cheat, then looked at what happened if they reminded people right before the test of a moral rule. (It turned out that being reminded of any moral code - the Ten Commandments, the non-existent “M.I.T. honor system” - caused cheating to plummet.)

These sorts of rigorous but goofy-sounding experiments lend themselves to a genial, gee-whiz style, with which Ariely moves comfortably from the lab to broad social questions to his own life (why did he buy that Audi instead of a sensible minivan?). He is good-tempered company - if he mentions you in this book, you are going to be called “brilliant,” “fantastic” or “delightful” - and crystal clear about all he describes. But “Predictably Irrational” is a far more revolutionary book than its unthreatening manner lets on. It’s a concise summary of why today’s social science increasingly treats the markets-know-best model as a fairy tale. [READ ON]

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Banks stop people from speaking their truth

So I just finished telling the tale of cops going bonkers over the possibility that ordinary citizens would have the opportunity to rate their performance on the job.

Which reminds me of a similar story about congress caving to the banking industry at a hearing of the Financial Services Subcommittee on Financial Institutions last Thursday. Elizabeth Warren was a panelist:

The first panel was four regular people who wanted to give first-hand information about their experiences with their credit cards. While the reps from Cap One, Chase and Bank of America went on for hours about their customer friendly policies and how much value they provided free to consumers, the people who had different stories were never allowed to utter a single word. 

The people who had been invited to testify had flown in from around the country with their credit card bills in hand, only to learn that they couldn’t talk unless they would sign a waiver that would permit the credit card companies to make public anything they wanted to tell about their financial records, their credit histories, their purchases, and so on. The Republicans and Democrats had worked out a deal “to be fair to the credit card lenders.” These people couldn’t say anything unless they were willing to let the credit card companies strip them naked in public.

Via Kevin Drum, who observes:

Hmmm. That’s pretty much how we used to treat rape victims in court, isn’t it? Why the Democratic majority felt like it had to agree to this “compromise” is a little hard to fathom.

In any case, Warren has a good question: does this policy apply to credit card companies too? “I asked if the credit card companies were going to testify to such factual statements, would they be required to produce the data to back up the claims so that we could all see it and evaluate it....I never quite understood the Congressman’s reply.” Actually, I have a feeling she understood it perfectly. It’s only got two letters, after all.

Later on Friday Steve Autrey, one of the people who had been invited to testify before the House subcommittee, made his testimony available as a post on Credit Slips. I’ve excerpted some choice phrases here:

My relationship with Capital One goes back to 1999, when I was solicited with an offer for a Visa card with a “fixed” 9.9% rate card.  [In July, 2007] Capital One advised me in a billing insert that my “fixed” rate of 9.9% was being raised to 16.9%.  No reason or explanation was given – I was not late on payment, and had not utilized the entire credit limit.  This was a unilateral change to the terms of our agreement. 

In August, of 2007, I wrote a letter to Mr. Richard D. Fairbank, Chairman, President, and CEO of Capital One, at their McLean, Virginia home office.  My written statement will contain a copy of Capital One’s response which includes the line, “Unfortunately, changes in the interest-rate environment or other business circumstances may require us to increase rates, even for fixed-rate accounts in good standing.”

Other issues should be of concern to this committee as well.  My wife holds a Capital One-issued MasterCard credit card.  Last October, she experienced a medical emergency and had to leave work to spend hours at a medical facility to receive tests and treatment.  Arriving home later that evening, she immediately logged on to the CapitalOne.com website to pay her bill online.  It was approx. 9:00pm on the due date.  Although she made the payment on the due date, it was 6 hours past the 3:00pm cutoff time. 

For being six hours late on her payment, she was hit with a $39.00 punitive fine labeled as a “late fee.” That late fee, when added to her account, pushed her balance over the limit by $16.00.  It was at this point that Capital One added a second $39.00 fine in the form of an “Over the limit fee” to her account.

Last March Professor Warren discussed the abusive lending practices of credit card companies with Terry Gross on Fresh Air. It’s worthwhile listening. I excerpt some of it here.

Saturday, March 15, 2008

More on Stossel’s Age of Consent

A background report asking what should the age of consent be? gives plenty of space for Family Research Council spokesman Peter Sprigg to make his case that the laws should be stricter.

I have no problem with that. Like the parent who wants to beat up the kid for having sex with his daughter, then have the cop come and arrest him, they can’t deal. The argument has no legitimacy. Sprigg makes the same oft and easily refuted std/depression/pregnancy arguments before summing up:

“...young people today need more time before marriage, but they don’t need sex before marriage.”

The article concludes:

There’s no proof that age of consent laws are a deterrent to sex before marriage. Many kids don’t even know what the age of consent is.

Whatever the age of consent is, or should be, something is very wrong when some young people, doing what hundreds of thousands of other kids do, are severely punished, branded for life on sex registries next to rapists and real pedophiles. There’s no justice in that.

I point back to some of the more reputable understanding of the topic that I’m happy to see ABC air:

Family counselor Marty Klein calls this criminalization of sex, “America’s War on Sex.”

“The idea that we have to criminalize 14-year-olds having oral sex or sexual intercourse with 16-year-olds, that’s a horrible solution to a subtle and complex issue,” he said.

Klein points out that throughout history even younger teens have had sex.

“Back in the 1850s, the age of puberty and the age of first marriage were very, very close together.  People got married pretty much as soon as their bodies matured,” Klein said. “Their bodies matured around 14 and 15, and they got married around 14 or 15.”

Today, however, Klein said “we live in a time when kids are going through puberty when they’re 10, and they’re getting married for the first time when they’re 25 or 26. ... Telling a kid just say no, and expecting them to not have sex, that’s like telling somebody who’s depressed, ‘have a nice day,’ and expecting that to lift their depression.” [...]

“We trust 15-year-olds to make decisions all the time,” Klein said, pointing out that we give them access to credit cards, let them play dangerous sports, let 16- and 17-year-olds drive cars.

“The idea that somebody who’s behind the wheel of a car can’t make good sexual decisions, I think, is more about our anxiety about sex than it is about any clear thinking about 17-year-olds,” he said.

I agree. Our problem with kids having sex is about our problem with kids having sex! We don’t want to deal with it; we don’t want to talk to them about it. It’s too difficult for us, not them!

Yes, it is complex and difficult and challenging and we may make mistakes and not know the right answers. But it is also an opportunity for us to grow closer and help and provide support and understand and know and accept our kids in ways we otherwise can’t.

I’m a gay man so what do I know from parenting anyway? Well I do now have my nephew living with me so I do now have some small inkling. I’m also aware that it is only an inkling. Still, my experience is at least suggestive.

Parents use police to lock-up daughters’ boyfriends

It has consistently been my contention that adults—and most especially parents—must STOP sexualizing kids and START talking to kids about sex.

We are using kids to market our clothes and cars and dreams and youthful longings at the expense of those kids bright and happy future. And we’re skipping out on our adult responsibilities to parent them, teach them, and face the difficult challenges that come with all of that!

The tornado that touched down in Atlanta preempted the 20/20 follow-up broadcast to last week’s Age of Consent program. So I was able only to read this story:

Parents may not want to hear it, but it’s just a fact: Lots of teenagers are having sex.

About a quarter of 15-year-old girls and boys, almost 40 percent of 16-year-olds and about half of 17-year-olds say they’ve had sex.  But what if parents of the girl find out? And they’re furious?  In many cases, they can use the law to punish the boy.

The story tells the tale of parents having teenage boys arrested for having sex with their daughters. Some parents have regrets; some don’t. All of the boys are branded as sex offenders for life:

Kids are clueless about the legal consequences of teenage sex, says Arizona public defender Chris Phillis.

“We tell them you could get pregnant, you could get a disease.  But we don’t tell them they could be locked up for the rest of their life,” she said. “Even if everyone says it’s OK, that you know, they’re consenting to the touching, the kissing, you could still go to jail.”

Part of the crime in all of this—beyond the immorality of locking up these boys for the simple human failings that should and could be handled in more appropriate ways—is that our limited resources are wasted on cases like these when it is needed for those much more serious cases of the very real and dangerous and violent sexual predators that are out there threatening our children.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Spitzer once told Kristoff to write about his prostitution work

So today he did:

Studies suggest that up to two-thirds of prostitutes have been sexually abused as girls, a majority have drug dependencies or mental illnesses, one-third have been threatened with death by pimps, and almost half have attempted suicide.

Melissa Farley, a psychologist who has written extensively about the subject, says that girls typically become prostitutes at age 13 or 14. She conducted a study finding that 89 percent of prostitutes urgently wanted to escape the work, and that two-thirds have post-traumatic stress disorder - not a problem for even the most frustrated burger-flipper.

The mortality data for prostitutes is staggering. The American Journal of Epidemiology published a meticulous study finding that the “workplace homicide rate for prostitutes” is 51 times that of the next most dangerous occupation for women, working in a liquor store. The average age of death of the prostitutes in the study was 34.

Would legalization help?

The Netherlands formally adopted the legalization model in 2000, and there were modest public health benefits for the licensed prostitutes. But legalization nurtured a large sex industry and criminal gangs that trafficked underage girls, and so trafficking, violence and child prostitution flourished rather than dying out.

As a result, the Netherlands is now backtracking on its legalization model by closing some brothels, and other countries, like Bulgaria, are backing away from that approach.

In contrast, Sweden experimented in 1999 with a radically different approach that many now regard as much more successful: it decriminalized the sale of sex but made it a crime to buy sex. In effect, the policy was to arrest customers, but not the prostitutes.

Some Swedish prostitutes have complained that the policy reduced demand and thus lowered prices, while forcing sex work underground. But the evidence is strong that the new approach reduced trafficking in Sweden, and opinion polls show that Swedes regard the experiment as a considerable success. And the bottom line is that if you want to rape a 13-year-old girl imported from Eastern Europe, you’ll have a much easier time in Amsterdam than in Stockholm.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

1 in 4 teenage girls has STD: Study

Chicago Sun-Times:

One in 4 teenage girls in the United States has at least one sexually transmitted disease, according to a first-of-its-kind study released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The trend is even worse among African-American girls: Nearly half have one or more STDs, compared with 20 percent of whites.

Human papillomavirus was the most common of the four diseases included in the study, affecting 18 percent of the girls studied. Chlamydia was a distant second at 4 percent, followed by trichomoniasis and genital herpes.

The data is based on a nationally representative sample of 838 young women who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey in 2003 and 2004.

Teen health experts say the study, billed as the first to look at common STD rates among young girls, highlights the need for comprehensive sex education that goes beyond the abstinence-only message pushed by the federal government.

Emphasis mine.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Foes of Sex Trade Stung by Spitzer’s Crash

One advocate said of Spitzer, “he was our hero.” NYTimes:

As New York’s attorney general, Eliot Spitzer had broken up prostitution rings before, but this 2004 case took on a special urgency for him. Prosecuting an international sex tourism business based in Queens, he listened to the entreaties of women’s advocates long frustrated by state laws that fell short of dealing with a sex trade expanding rapidly across borders.

And with his typical zeal, he embraced their push for new legislation, including a novel idea at its heart: Go after the men who seek out prostitutes.

It was a question of supply and demand, they all agreed. And one effective way to suppress the demand was to raise the penalties for patronizing a prostitute. In his first months as governor last year, Mr. Spitzer signed the bill into law.

Speaking of crashes, Spitzer traffic crashed the Times website beginning at 2 p.m. yesterday:

We asked the NYT if the website trouble was the result of the Spitzer scoop, and spokesperson Diane McNulty confirmed that it was, saying that traffic had spiked shortly after the Spitzer article was posted. McNulty said that the hourly Web site traffic between 2-4 pm was a whopping 60% higher that during the same time frame last Monday; meanwhile, NYT mobile almost doubled its traffic for the same time period. Wow — those are pretty big numbers, especially given that eveything is spiking lately due to the election (recall that last Monday was the day before the Ohio-Texas primaries, and there was tons of interest across the board). [...]

These stories are huge traffic drivers across the board, and here’s another example: The Drudge Report linked to the NY Observer story on its top at around 3 p.m. this afternoon, and the traffic spike temporarily disabled the link and, presumably, has been responsible for site slowness since then (since the piece is still linked in the headlines on Drudge).

Update II: McNulty kindly answered our follow-up question asking if this had ever happened before. Her response: Yes, twice: Once on September 11, 2001 ("we were overwhelmed by the amount of traffic and some people had trouble getting through") and then again on Nov. 12, 2001 when American Airlines Flight 587 crashed in Queens (McNulty said they had “load issues” but it wasn’t as bad as 9/11). Said McNulty: “It’s hard to tell how either one compares to today’s event given that we have almost 10 times the bandwidth now.”

RELATED: Talk Left has Jeff Toobin thinking he’s holding out for a misdemeanor with a resignation possible tomorrow.

Sunday, March 09, 2008

Get enough sleep. If not, nap!

Doug’s napping now. I slept in and made up for the lost hour. When I got up I watched a report on sleep on CBS Sunday Morning.

Adults need 7–9 hours of sleep. In 1960 we got 8-and-a-half hours of sleep a night; today we get six hours and forty minutes.

We always hear that naps are a good idea. I’m not a big napper, but I am very glad to get this key piece of information on the science of how long to nap:

Researchers have found, though, that there’s a science to naps.

20 to 40 minutes is enough to revitalize you. But after forty minutes, you fall into a deeper sleep. Waking up during that period could actually leave you feeling MORE groggy.

A two-hour nap will allow you to doze through a complete sleep cycle - so that you feel REALLY refreshed.

My take-away is nap 20 to 40 minutes or the full two hours but nothing in between. Maybe the reason I’ve failed at napping is I’ve tried an hour!

And for you parents and teachers, there’s this, “it turns out that teenagers’ body clocks naturally turn them into night-owls, making it difficult for them to get out of bed early.”

So that sleepy-headed kid is doing as God intended. And maybe we ought to do like the Kentucky school in the report and stop blaming the kids and instead start rethinking the school day clock!

Age of consent: young love as sex crime

ABC 20/20:

Frank and Nikki Rodriguez are married with four children. He is on the Texas State Sex Offender registry because the couple had sex when he was 19 and she was 15, below the age of consent in the state. [...]

Twelve years ago, Frank Rodriguez pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a child.

Faced with two to 20 years in prison on the charge, he signed a plea bargain that gave him seven years probation. He was told he must never be near children. That meant he couldn’t be any place where children gather, like playgrounds or parks, which made it tough to find work.

It’s a story we’ve heard all too many times before. What’s the crime here? Still, he’s a registered sex offender for life. And still, the lawmaker defends the law saying, “it’s the law.” As if that’s some kind of rational justification when we know the laws don’t work, residency restrictions don’t work, judges need leeway in teen sex cases, and parents need to start talking to their kids about sex.

What’s particularly striking about the Texas case highlighted in the 20/20 piece is that the girl’s mom knew about the boy, took the girl to the birth control clinic, then brought in the police. She regrets that now:

“If I would have known that the seriousness of what I was doing I would not have filed charges,” she said. “I love Frank and he is good to my grandbabies and he is good to my daughter, and it just breaks my heart that for the rest of his life he’s gonna be labeled a sex offender.”

I am struck that people think the police are there to be the enforcers of their private disputes. I have my nephew living with me now. His parents divorced when he was very young and throughout his life both his mother and his father would call the police on one another to try to enforce this or that provision of their animosity on the other. My nephew now wants to act that out in my home. I fight against it.

The law is a blunt force instrument of last resort; a fuse that once lit can’t be stopped. All of us are too quick to use it. These are difficult problems that we don’t know how to handle so it’s easier to hand them off to someone else. Unfortunately, it seems elected officials are all too happy to go there (cops, on the other had, are put in the uncomfortable situation of having to walk into the middle of it and deal).

If the legal solutions are bad—and to date, they have been—those we have seen from the media are even worse (Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator” is just one egregious example). So into that now 20/20 weighs in with a viewer poll asking how old we think the age of consent should be. They promise a follow up next week.

Much as I might hope they’d shed some light, I’m not optimistic. The question, as phrased, is too simplistic for the age we live in as I learned from William Saletan who writes for Slate in this piece on rethinking the age of consent.

He begins by walking us through some history—“The original age of consent, codified in English common law and later adopted by the American colonies, ranged from 10 to 12”—and then points out that as the age of consent has gone up, the age of puberty has gone down:

Having sex at 12 is a bad idea. But if you’re pubescent, it might be, in part, your bad idea. Conversely, having sex with a 12-year-old, when you’re 20, is scummy. But it doesn’t necessarily make you the kind of predator who has to be locked up. A guy who goes after 5-year-old girls is deeply pathological. A guy who goes after a womanly body that happens to be 13 years old is failing to regulate a natural attraction. That doesn’t excuse him. But it does justify treating him differently.

He looks at research that finds differences in the age of physical, cognitive and emotional readiness and in that finds the beginnings of a logical scheme for regulating teen sex:

First comes the age at which your brain wants sex and your body signals to others that you’re ready for it. Then comes the age of cognitive competence. Then comes the age of emotional competence. Each of these thresholds should affect our expectations, and the expectations should apply to the older party in a relationship as well as to the younger one. The older you get, the higher the standard to which you should be held responsible.

The lowest standard is whether the partner you’re targeting is sexually developed as an object. If her body is childlike, you’re seriously twisted. But if it’s womanly, and you’re too young to think straight, maybe we’ll cut you some slack.

The next standard is whether your target is intellectually developed as a subject. We’re not talking about her body anymore; we’re talking about her mind. When you were younger, we cut you slack for thinking only about boobs. But now we expect you to think about whether she’s old enough to judge the physical and emotional risks of messing around. The same standards apply, in reverse, if you’re a woman.

It’s possible that you’ll think about these things but fail to restrain yourself. If you’re emotionally immature, we’ll take that into consideration. But once you cross the third line, the age of self-regulatory competence, we’ll throw the book at you.

I sent the piece to the 20/20 producers. Let’s see what they come up with next week.

Saturday, March 08, 2008

Yes Pecan or Barackadamia Nut?

Obama won Wyoming

Meanwhile, after the Vermont primary, Slate’s Trail Head asked readers to help name a Ben & Jerry’s Obama ice cream flavor.

“Yes Pecan” quickly became the odds on favorite:

Ben & Jerry’s is famous for such flavors as Cherry Garcia (named for the Deadhead), Phish Food (named for the Dead successors), and Americone Dream (named for the not-dead Stephen Colbert), and if Ben & Jerry’s delivered a victory for Obama, then it should also honor him with a taste of his own.

Plenty of you responded with riffs on Obama’s name. Peanut Butter Barackle, Obamana Split, and Barackadamia Nut all raised a chuckle. But it was Aaron Nathan of Amherst, Mass., who really impressed. Eschewing Obama’s name, he reached another level of ingenuity when he sent in his entry: “Yes, Pecan!”

[… scandalous brouhaha omitted ...]

Trailhead reader Gerrit H. mocked up the brilliant pint of ice cream you see above. Tremendous job all around, especially on the blue, red, and white scheme.

Also, several readers have e-mailed telling us that our East Coast bias is on display by thinking “Yes, Pecan!” rhymes with “Yes, We Can!” Down South, pecans are not pronounced pe-CAN, but puh-CAHN, according to Trailhead devotees (Trailheaders? Trailheadians? Trailheads?). Considering Obama adamantly believes in one America, we think he might be distressed by this development. As a result, we’re looking for an alternate flavor for Ben & Jerry’s stores below the Mason-Dixon. The front-runners are currently “Barackadamia Nut” and “Neopolitician.” Got anything better? Let us know.

Via Slate’s Political Gabfest. (BTW, I’m with you, Plotz, on the big Moo!)

Dream on…

Had a dream about a candidate? Send it to…

Via Blogs for Democracy, “What would Freud say?”

Friday, March 07, 2008

The upside of expensive

Same behavioral economist. Different study.

ABC News:

The more expensive your pain medications are, the better the relief you get from taking them  even if they’re fake.

That’s according to a study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which suggests that sugar pills labeled as expensive drugs relieve pain better than sugar pills labeled as discounted drugs.

Researchers often compare real drugs to sugar pills in medical studies to account for the placebo effect, in which the illusion of taking medicine alone can cause symptoms to disappear.

But Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University in Durham, N.C., and a team of collaborators from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology compared the placebo effect of the marketing that people are asked to swallow along with their medicine.

In the study, 82 volunteers were subjected to a series of electric shocks  a standard research protocol for measuring pain thresholds. They were then given a placebo pill alongside a fake drug company brochure for the fictitious drug “Veladone-Rx,”  ostensibly a new fast-acting painkiller made in China.

The only catch was that half of the test subjects received brochures showing that the drug had been marked down from the original price of $2.50 a pill to 10 cents a pill. These modified brochures also included circled fine print which suggested that the pills were manufactured in China.

After participants went through the shocks again, 85 percent in the full-price group reported pain relief from their sugar pill, while only 61 percent in the discount group reported pain relief.

The downside of free

For all my yacking about the economy of free, Im very aware that there is a downside.

I am watching the work of Dan Ariely. He is a behavioral economist on the faculty at MIT on leave and teaching at Duke. In his book, Predictably Irrational, he asks the question, do we get what we pay for?

Ariely was recently interviewed by Robert Siegel on All Things Considered. There he described an experiment with kids and chocolate in which he gave them all some chocolate, then made them two great offers, only one of which offered the inducement of free:

Prof. ARIELY: But in this case, the kids went largely for the free one. Basically giving up a better deal, a fantastic deal, just because of the allure of free. And, by the way, this is not just with kids. We replicated experiments with Amazon gift certificates and products and chocolates with MIT students and adults. And everybody has the same issue. That free is such a hot button. That many times it tempts us so much that we end up paying a high price to give up something better just for the allure of free. [...]

SIEGEL: Well, there’s just one last question before I let you go which is, if indeed we are as irrational as you would have us, does behavioral economics pretty well make a mess of regular economics and say, that can’t be describing human behavior since it’s not the way we behave?

Prof. ARIELY: That’s right. So behavioral economics flies in the face of standard economics in two ways. One is we say, you’re model of human being is wrong. And the second and more important thing is saying, as a consequence of this, you’re prescription for policy is also wrong. And that’s actually the most important part of this. If you understand the places where people are irrational and make mistakes, you need to think differently about the policies for health care, for saving, for driving, for smoking, for anything you want that is different from the one that standard economics prescribes.

Emphasis mine. I think if there’s any one thing we have to learn in this century, it’s that!

Thursday, March 06, 2008

People Power: the good, the bad & the ugly over a puppy

Duncan points to the Monroe family ‘nightmare’ as Marine puppy throwing video spreads:

A Monroe Marine’s sister said her family is “living in a nightmare” as news spreads around the world linking the man to a video of what appears to be a U.S. Marine throwing a puppy off a desert cliff.

Death threats and graphic descriptions of physical violence continue to be directed at the Marine and his extended family as their personal information is being spread on the Internet. [...]

“They are getting angry about this puppy and the loss of this puppy, if this is real,” the sister said in an interview with KIRO (710-AM) radio talk-show host Dori Monson. “On the same hand, they are also threatening human beings’ lives. They are putting this puppy’s life above human beings.” [...]

“What it says for them is when they are so passionate about a single dog’s life, yet they are willing to—they say they are—willing to kill the entire family over something like this,” the sister of the Marine from Monroe told KIRO. Her brother has served his country in Afghanistan and Iraq and “none of them take that into account,” she said. “They just want to jump on him and immediately call him a mental maniac.”

To the best of my knowledge (and the story reports that) it has yet to be determined whether or not the video footage is real.

RELATED: On The Media talked with Clay Shirky about his new book, Here Comes Everybody, which depicts the activist audience in this new online world, driven by networks that grow and act in never-before-seen ways.

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Come together

From Across the Universe

While on a tear about our broken, distorted, market-driven media system, I want to ask why so few of us have seen this movie? It never came to my town. It never came to any city in Georgia outside of Atlanta (maybe Savannah for a moment, but I was watching and didn’t ever see it listed there).

That was a decision by some suit in New York or Hollywood. A decision that me and my students here would not, could not, see the movie on a big screen. That was a bad decision. If Hollywood profits are tanking—and they are—we, here, in flyover America have no sympathy for it.

Monday, March 03, 2008

Nine Inch Nails net distribution

Nine Inch Nails founder Trent Reznor has become the latest recording artist to bypass the traditional music distribution machine by releasing a 36-track album over the internet.

The album, titled Ghosts I-IV, is available on the band’s official website for prices that range from free to $300 depending on the package. Reznor is giving away the first nine cuts, as 320 kbps MP3 files, along with a 40-page PDF book that covers the entire album. For $5, fans can get the remaining 27 songs and have the option of getting the files in lossless formats including FLAC.

Less than 24 hours after the album became available, the band’s website had slowed to a crawl. At time of writing, attempts to download the free package were greeted with an error message indicating the URL was not available. A download of the $5 offering initiated, but at a speed of just 10 kbps, we weren’t optimistic we’d be hearing the new tunes anytime soon. (Administrators are racing to add more servers “to accommodate the unexpected demand,” according to a note on the site.)

Even still, you’ve got to admire Reznor for trying to figure out a viable way to stick it to the man. Unlike the much-ballyhooed online release a few months ago of the most recent Radiohead ablum, the Nine Inch Nails experiment is a lot easier to take seriously. That’s because Reznor has made album available in both lossless and high-bit rate formats. Radiohead’s In Rainbows, by contrast, came as only a 160 kbps MP3, which hardly seemed worth the time it took to download it.

Oh, and the album in no longer available as an online download. Radiohead singer Thom Yorke later dismissed a net-only album paradigm, saying people want to buy a tangible object rather than a download. Makes you wonder why Britain’s favorite navel gazers bothered in the first place.

Additional packages of the new Nine Inch Nails album that include audio CDs, CDs and DVDs an autographed “ultra-delux” limited edition set that also comes with vinyl LPs are are priced at $10, $75 and $300 respectively. And just in case this net distribution thing doesn’t take off, Ghosts I-IV is also available as a regular CD in retail stores.

Gosh, I’m not sure if The Register’s got the best or least biased sources. I’m more of a lecture listener myself, but back in the day…

If you’d like to give it a go, Read/Write Web (which has a decidedly more positive take on the story) notes that NIN uploaded the free package to BitTorrent sites:

“Now that we’re no longer constrained by a record label, we’ve decided to personally upload Ghosts I, the first of the four volumes, to various torrent sites, because we believe BitTorrent is a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them,” wrote the band in a text file distributed with the BitTorrent release.

RWW suggests you grab it here. You’ll avoid those pesky error messages.

Sunday, March 02, 2008

Billionaire gives it all away

As I say, its hands-down the best Sunday morning show on television. Still, I tend to watch it last, too. This from CBS Sunday Morning last week. I only watched it just now…