Sommaire pour May 2018 de Reason

DARON ACEMOGLU IS no ally of robotkind. The MIT economist is one of the most prominent advocates of the theory that automation depresses employment and wages, at least for low-skilled workers. In a 2017 paper, Acemoglu and his Boston University colleague Pascual Restrepo produced a series of maps of “robot exposure” and its economic effects in the United States. The results look awfully similar to maps of the districts that tilted Republican in the last election, with a thick red band stretching through the Rust Belt and the Deep South. As Acemoglu later told The New York Times, “The swing to Republicans between 2008 and 2016 is quite a bit stronger in commuting zones most affected by industrial robots. You don’t see much of the impact of robots in prior…

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP and some Republican lawmakers in Congress insist that the president and his aides were inappropriately snooped on by politically motivated federal intelligence officials during the 2016 election. Yet when given the opportunity to scale back the FBI’s power to secretly engage in domestic surveillance of American citizens, the president and the GOP did not take advantage of it. In fact, they did the opposite. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments was scheduled to sunset at the end of 2017 unless Congress renewed it. That provision authorizes the federal government to poke into communications of foreign targets, overseen by a secret court. While these powers are supposed to be used only to collect foreign intelligence and fight terrorism overseas, domestic communications also get quietly vacuumed…

THE GREAT MATHEMATICIAN Stanislaw Ulam challenged the great economist Paul Samuelson to name a principle in the social sciences that was both true and nonobvious. Samuelson thought for a bit, then replied, “Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage.“ “That this idea is logically true,” he said, “need not be argued before a mathematician; that it is not trivial is attested by the thousands of important and intelligent men who have never been able to grasp the doctrine for themselves or to believe it after it was explained to them.” You can make the argument for comparative advantage seem highly nontrivial and devilishly hard to believe after it is explained to you by following the great English economist David Ricardo into arithmetic and clotted prose. Ricardo wrote in 1817 that “England exported…

YOU MIGHT NOT recognize the name Gary Gygax. But even if you’ve never rolled a critical fail on a d20, you have almost certainly consumed some movie, TV show, book, comic, computer game, or music influenced by Gygax’s most famous creation: Dungeons & Dragons, the world’s first and most popular roleplaying game. The FBI certainly knew who he was. Between 1980 and 1995, agents compiled a dossier on the gaming company TSR Inc. and Gygax, its founder. In 1980, a note on TSR stationary about an assassination plot drew the FBI’s attention, leading to a search of the company’s offices in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. The note turned out to be materials for an upcoming espionage game. In 1983, an FBI field report about an investigation into a cocaine trafficking ring…

IS THE PRESIDENT of the United States mentally ill, or is he just an asshole? That is the puzzle posed by The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. The question would have amused Thomas Szasz, the late psychiatric iconoclast whose legacy is considered in a new essay collection edited by Jeffrey Schaler, Henry Zvi Lothane, and Richard Vatz. Szasz, who died in 2012 at the age of 92, spent his career calling attention to the ways in which “the myth of mental illness” (the title of his best-known book) muddles our thinking about troublesome people and problematic conduct. The sweeping, creeping medicalization of thought and behavior that Szasz decried is epitomized by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental…

WHEN ATTORNEY GENERAL Jeff Sessions rescinded Obama-era guidelines discouraging federal prosecutors from targeting state-licensed marijuana businesses, he called it “a return to the rule of law.” But the memo Sessions issued on January 4 left the legal situation for the cannabis industry essentially unchanged, and the crackdown he seemed to be inviting would violate a basic principle of constitutional law: The federal government may not exercise powers it was never granted. U.S. attorneys prosecute a minuscule percentage of marijuana violations, and they have very broad discretion to decide which ones are worth their time. Sessions withdrew a series of memos that said a violator’s compliance with state law was one factor prosecutors should consider. The reasoning, as explained in a 2013 memo from then–Deputy Attorney General James Cole, was that…

TAKING CARE OF a child, wrote Meredith Walsh, a Washington, D.C., resident and mother to a 1-year-old daughter, takes patience and a sense of humor. “It does not require a college degree.” Working in D.C. day care, though, will require at least an associate’s degree in early childhood education by 2020, if the city’s Office of the State Superintendent for Education (OSSE) has its way. The mandate was approved by the entity in mid-2016 with little fanfare, but its decision to reconsider the timeline for implementation generated hundreds of pages of public comments from workers and parents like Walsh. That feedback was nearly unanimous in its opposition. Jill Homan, whose 1-year-old daughter attends a day care program in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, is confused by the requirement. If workers lacking…

HALF A CENTURY ago, nuclear power was on track to out-compete fossil fuels around the globe, which would have reduced the price of electricity, the amount of harmful air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions associated with climate change. Then came a dramatic slowing of new construction and research into safer and more efficient nuclear reactors. According to Australian National University researcher Peter Lang, the ’60s and ’70s saw a transition “from rapidly falling costs and accelerating deployment to rapidly rising costs and stalled deployment.” Had the initial trajectory continued, he writes in the journal Energies, nucleargenerated electricity would now be around 10 percent of its current cost. In a counterfactual scenario featuring increasing uptake of nuclear power from 1976, Lang calculates that by 2015 it would have replaced all coal-burning…

AMERICANS ARE PRONE to assuming the government redistributes wealth downward, to the poor and vulnerable. In The Captured Economy, libertarian Brink Lindsey and modern liberal Steven Teles emphasize the ways governments persistently redistribute wealth upward, from ordinary people to elites. Their accessibly written book highlights several sectors of the economy that have been dramatically misshaped by state-secured privilege—in economic jargon, by “rent-seeking.” This, they show, has both reduced productivity and increased inequality. Lindsey, a vice president at the Niskanen Center, and Teles, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, don’t try to identify every industry that has been seriously distorted in this way. But they explore important examples that reflect a much larger problem. They consider a range of subsidies and implicit guarantees offered to firms in the financial sector, for…

TV TRAFFIC COPS ALEC WARD BBC’s popular reality show Traffic Cops is not so far from what a stereotype-inclined American might imagine if told, “It’s like Cops, but British.” Traffic Cops may not be a montage of helmeted and mustachioed bobbies puffing after pickpocketing orphans on cobblestoned streets. But to American eyes, the constables of Traffic Cops do seem terribly proper and polite. Compared to the show’s ever-controversial American cousin, there’s very little shouting, wrestling, cracking of skulls, or brandishing of firearms. In fact, to viewers used to such shenanigans in our cop shows, Traffic Cops (and its spinoff, Motorway Cops) can seem downright boring. Sure, you get the occasional familiar chase-run-tackle sequence. But thanks to strict national restrictions on engaging in high-speed chases, pursuits often end with cops taking…

BOTH THE BOYS admit they did it. Horsing around, two New Jersey 14-year-olds pulled down their pants and sat on the faces of two 12-year-old boys. As one of them later explained, “I thought it was funny and I was trying to get my friends to laugh.” For that act, he and his buddy are on the sex offender registry for life. This was, after all, “sexual contact done for sexual gratification or to degrade or humiliate the victim.” The boys lost an appeal in 2011, with a three-judge panel writing that “although we are not unsympathetic to the arguments criticizing the application of the lifelong registration requirements… we are bound to uphold such application because that outcome is mandated by the Legislature.” This is what our sex offender laws…

EMINENT DOMAIN ABUSE has reared its head in East Harlem. New York City officials plan to seize a family-owned dry cleaning business, raze the buildings, and hand the forcibly vacated land to a private developer. City officials insist that the property is “blighted,” the condition of severe disrepair required to trigger a taking under state eminent domain law. But as Damon Bae, whose parents opened Fancy Cleaners after immigrating from Korea in 1981, told the New York Daily News, “the only ‘blight’ was in the [city-owned] vacant lots the city allowed to sit empty” nearby. In other words, the local government created the very conditions it is now using as a pretext for seizing the property. Unfortunately for the Baes and others like them, the U.S. Supreme Court rubberstamped a…

IT’S MID-DECEMBER, AND Scott Gottlieb is at the Harvard Club. The Manhattan Institute has invited a few dozen people for an intimate discussion about what’s happening at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). As they eat finger foods and sip cocktails, a relaxed Gottlieb meanders around the room sans entourage and snags the occasional pretzel stick from a platter. As a former think tanker himself—he was an American Enterprise Institute resident fellow for roughly a decade—these are his people. Everyone takes their seats. Gottlieb’s old friend Peter Huber, an attorney and senior fellow at the host institute, is sitting right up front. Just a few years earlier, the two had partnered to argue the affirmative in a debate over whether “the FDA’s caution is hazardous to our health.” But now…

SCIENCE WRITER GARY Taubes has a knack for subverting conventional wisdom. Sixteen years ago, he published a groundbreaking feature article in The New York Times Magazine arguing that decades’ worth of government-approved nutritional advice was flat-out wrong, ideologically motivated, and contributing to rising rates of obesity and diabetes. Traditional dieting guidance attacking fatty foods and praising carbohydrates, he wrote, was based on “a big fat lie.” Back then, Taubes was excoriated. (Reason published pieces both attacking and defending him.) But today his thesis is gaining ground among health and nutrition researchers. His work has been highlighted everywhere from The New York Times to Time magazine. Protein-rich regimens have taken off after millions of Americans found that stocking their pantries with supposedly “heart-healthy” snacks such as granola bars and fruit juice…

A COUPLE OF YEARS ago, I went to dinner at the Seattle Space Needle. To my surprise—I was over 30—the waiter asked to see ID when I ordered wine. I hadn’t brought my purse from the hotel, so I had nothing with which to prove my age. In retrospect, this probably saved me from a $100 bar tab at their prices, but at the time I was annoyed. Although we aren’t officially required by law to carry identification, in practice it is necessary to get through many interactions. This has become increasingly true over time. As a teenager I bought booze without problems. I can also recall being able to fly domestically without showing ID. I still often go out with nothing but some cash in my pocket. Nonetheless, like…

20 YEARS AGO May 1998 “So now we find out: The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 empowers federal judges to rewrite the rules of golf, after deciding that the right to play in the elite PGA Tour is a ‘public accommodation’ like the chance to patronize a lunch counter or motel. It’s hard to see a reason in principle why enfeebled base runners now shouldn’t ask for motorized buggies to help in their attempts to steal third, or why slow pawn pushers shouldn’t get double time on the tournament chess clock if they bring in a note saying they’re learning disabled. College applicants already get double time on the SATs that way, after all. Every Olympics a Special Olympics!” WALTER OLSON “Still Crazy!” 30 YEARS AGO May 1988 “The…