Community Effects: Measles Versus Eastern High

The outbreaks of measles have focused attention on community effects.  When a high percentage of the community has been vaccinated, there's herd immunity--the virus can't maintain itself.  So the choices made by individual families affect the whole community.

By chance the Post Sunday had a good article on the choice faced by a white family on Capitol Hill  Their teenage daughter was in an integrated DC intermediate school,but now is facing the decision of which high school to attend.  Does she go to Eastern, the local high school, almost entirely black (like the intermediate school) with known problems and the possibility it's on the upswing, or travel across town to a selective public high school.

On the one hand the daughter gets greater certainty of a good and challenging education with less risk of a bad experience; on the other hand she might be missing a unique experience and, more importantly, she contributes a bit to the community effect.

Recent research on upward mobility has shown the importance of community effects: the better the community by our customary standards (two-parent families, etc.) the better everyone does, particularly the poor. 

I'm not an anti-vaxer, but I think it's true a measles vaccination carries a risk, a very small risk, to the individual. But the risk to the individual is outweighed by the benefits to the community if everyone gets vaccinated, or at least in the neighborhood of 95+ percent.  So I've no problem in saying the individual should be vaccinated, and mandatory vaccination laws are good.  But why would I, and the liberal parents of the daughter in the Post article, hesitate to require her to attend her neighborhood school?  I think the answer is the probable cost to the individual is much higher and the probable benefit to the community, in the absence of many others in the same situation is minimal, meaning the tradeoff is unfair.

While that calculus seems to be convincing, it leaves the $64,000 question of how do we get positive community effects: how do you get a herd, a crowd, all moving in the same positive direction?

On Recognizing Faces

Saw a piece in the Post about people remembering when schools in Arlington integrated. Several interesting points, but I liked this one:

"He chuckled as he recalled his reaction to so many new faces. “The only white kids I knew were the families on TV, like ‘Leave It to Beaver,’ ” he said. “They talk about all black people look alike? It took me months to distinguish one white face from another.”

IMHO facial recognition is a combination of experience and capability--that's my story..  I regard myself as having problems with both, so it's reassuring when I find others have similar problems, confirming my narrative.

Samuelson and Education

He concludes education programs have failed, because they haven't changed the gaps between ethnic  groups.

Logically it's possible that they've been successful, in that in their absence the gap would have widened.  It's possible over 60 years the amount of knowledge to be imparted has increased a bit.  A simile: education is like rowing a boat up a river.  Over the years we may have improved the oars, gotten the rowers more fit, etc., but meanwhile the flow of water down the river has increased, so the boat stays in roughly the same place.

Corporate Transparency: Canadians Are Ahead of Us

This article shows that at least one Canadian province is going where the US ought to be (and FSA is getting to):  recording the real people behind paper entities.

Do Toads Climb?--One of Life's Mysteries Solved

Was cleaning oak leaves out of one of our window boxes when doing so revealed a stone, rather slivery in appearance.  Strange, I thought, I've only put potting soil in the box in the past so how did a stone get there?

Looked closer and found it wasn't a stone, but a toad, immobile.  That's even stranger, I thought--how the hell did a toad get there as the window box is 8 feet or so off the ground.  Dropped by a bird, maybe, and finding refuge under the leaves?

Anyway, I cleaned out the leaves, realizing the toad would then have no hiding place from hawks or whatever and no cover from the sun, which is getting stronger.  So I got an empty plastic seedling pot and put it on its side in the window box.

An hour later the toad had retreated to the pot, so I could put my hand over the top and carry toad and pot outside and release it.

It turns out toads of various kinds can climb, some are tree toads and some just plain garden toads.

Virginia even has a society devoted to amphibians.

I'm going to say my  "toad" is this guy:

Good for IRS

In the midst of a not very good week, I was pleased by an IRS website.

It turns out that you can get your old tax returns from IRS, or at least the data from them, in case your house burns down or computer file systems crap out on you.  To do so you go to an IRS website which gives you options: online, phone, or mail.  I of course chose on-line and was impressed by the process.  They obviously require data to confirm you're who you say you are, but the process of getting it is easy and well-thought out.  (The only glitch was they weren't able to recognize a smartphone using Google FI--I assume there's a semi-valid reason for that.)  You end up creating an on-line account, which judging by the username which was available isn't all that well patronized.

If I had any ambition left after this week I'd suggest to Sec. Mnuchin that he have Treasury Direct scrap their log-in system, which hasn't changed for years, and have them use the IRS system.

I might write my Congressional delegation telling them I deeply oppose the legislation which would ban the IRS from creating a free online tax system, as reported by ProPublica.  I'm almost tempted to support Sen. Warren for president, since she proposes to beef up IRS. 

Combining Organizations

I tend to think of the outcome of two organizations combining as based on physics, sort of like two objects in space.  An asteroid colliding with the earth doesn't affect the earth's path through space much at all.  Why shouldn't the same be true of two companies, like Perdue and Niman Ranch, which combined a few years ago.

Turns out humans aren't solid brainless objects, at least not always.  John Johnson has an interesting piece on the results of the combination of a big poultry producer and a smaller organic venture.

Have I Lived Too Long

I confess these are two developments I never expected to see:

• a vegan burger from a fast-food chain (as it turns out, more than one such chain). BurgerKing
• a country which buys more electric vehicles than conventional.(Norway, which will in a few years, and they have cold weather, too.)

But I hope to live long enough to see even more surprising things. 

Laws Aren't Self-Executing

My title is, I think, obviously true.  But just to recap:

• some laws are enforced by a bureaucracy, the police or an executive agency which can invoke legal sanctions, fines or imprisonment after due process.
• some laws are enforced by opposing parties which can file civil suits accusing their opposition of violating a legal provision.
• some "laws" are applied by one part of a bureaucracy against the bureaucrats within it

Most laws rely on voluntary compliance; people incorporate their understanding of law and justice into their consciences and abide by it, until it becomes too inconvenient or their understanding of the situation or of law changes.  That means that the bureaucracies and the civil lawsuits mostly serve as backups, at least in most "advanced" countries.

But that leaves a hole--it's difficult to enforce laws on heads of bureaucracies, the top level who set policy and who therefore supervise those who are charged with enforcing the laws.  

We deal with that hole in two ways in the US: 

1. each agency (i.e. cabinet department) has an inspector general who's independent of the heads of the subordinate units  
2. each agency has Congressional committees and the GAO (which works for Congress) with oversight responsibility.  

That still leaves the big hole at the top of the government: enforcing the President's compliance with laws.  This Just Security article discusses a big one--the Presidentiall Records Act.  The Act is part of the overall structure of rules on government records, none of which get much respect.  NARA can try to enforce the rules on the agencies, but as the article discusses there's no way, outside of politics, to ensure the President follows the rules. 

Women, Cows, and Hens

Just skimmed this summary of research on economic history.  A couple paragraphs:

Given the obviously crucial role of endogeneity issues in this debate, we carefully consider the causal nature of the relationship. More specifically, we exploit relatively exogenous variation of (migration adjusted) lactose tolerance and pasture suitability as instrumental variables for female autonomy.
The idea is that a high lactose tolerance increased the demand for dairy farming, whereas similarly, a high share of land suitable for pasture farming allowed more supply. In dairy farming, women traditionally had a strong role; this allowed them to participate substantially in income generation during the late medieval and early modern period (Voigtländer and Voth, 2013).

My translation: women do better with dairy cows than plowing ground for grain, and if women do better, the overall economy does better.

A similar logic could apply to chickens.  You don't need a lot of strength to manage a flock of hens.  The one advantage dairy has over chickens is it's easier to store dairy products--cheese specifically, than it is eggs.

I suspect this may be over-simplified. I vaguely remember that the development of plows which could handle the soils of northwest Europe, soils which were heavier than the soils of southern Europe, was a big deal, at least in history as it was taught 60 years ago.