Patrick Appel has a great item in the Atlantic’s “ideas” section about voting rights for convicted felons. He makes the critical point that the evidence indicates this is actually a counterproductive crime control measure:

According to a 2004 study, former prisoners who vote are half as likely to reoffend. If suffrage constitutes even a small nudge toward the straight and narrow, why shouldn’t we grant prisoners the right to vote? As things now stand, criminal-voting laws vary widely by state: in some, a first-time drug offender will be denied the right to vote for life; in others, murderers can vote while behind bars. But overall, America’s position on voting rights, particularly with regard to former criminals, is the most punitive of any developed nation. [...]

Crime costs this country an estimated $1.4 trillion annually. Unless disenfranchisement helps reduce that number — and the evidence suggests that it does the opposite — then denying prisoners the vote in order to minutely heighten the virtue of the voting pool is a bad trade.

Unfortunately, the crime control discussion in the United States tends to be heavily focused on people’s emotional sense of outrage, on nobody wanting to be seen as an advocate for criminals, and on a certain amount of denial that this is even an important issue. But it is an important issue—high crime rates are really damaging—and we have a strong interest in using punishments that work, and eschewing punishments that don’t.

As a bonus, here’s a map showing the variance in state-by-state policies:

Unfortunately, the reality is that there’s a lot of partisan politics in the way of changing this.

Paul Krugman, making a point about financial regulation, quotes Friedrich Schiller, “against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.” I know Krugman’s an Isaac Asimov fan so I wonder if he, like me, first met that line in Asimov’s novel The Gods Themselves. It’s a book I’ve been thinking about more lately.

To summarize the plot briefly, it’s the story of a man named Frederick Hallam who makes contact with “para-men” living in an alternate dimension. The laws of physics run differently in that dimension, and the ability to pass some matter trans-dimensionally thus opens up the possibility of a kind of physics arbitrage resulting in the invention of an “electron pump” which provides an unlimited source of cheap energy. Unfortunately, another scientist named Lamont reveals that the electron pump process is actually increasing the strong nuclear force inside the sun and thus dooming the planet to extinction by drastically increasing the rate at which the sun will go nova.

Needless to say, rather than being hailed as a hero Lamont is ignored and villified since people prefer to believe in the possibility of a free lunch. Eventually things reach a happy ending when a different scientist named Denison discovers a process that will allow for the creation of even cheaper energy without the environmental impact. Thus, people are ultimately willing to trade an apparently free lunch for an actually free lunch.

In an unrelated development, all the cutting edge public opinion research indicates that you can’t talk about global warming or environmental risks of any kind when talking about energy policy.

Condemns violations of human rights while (in my view wisely) refraining from commenting on underlying political disputes:

The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.

As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.

Martin Luther King once said – “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.

Well put, though of course the upshot of talk about bearing witness is that there’s very little practical assistance outsiders can provide.

One point Charles Kenny makes in The Success of Development that I’ve also seen argued convincingly in other contexts is that public policy choices seem to matter less than people would lead you to believe. This is a particularly striking fact:

Looking more broadly at the experience of the communist bloc under communism, over the period 1950-1988, no East European country grew as slowly as the UK, Mexico, Switzerland, Colombia, the US, Australia, India, New Zealand, Peru, Chile, Argentina or Venezuela.

People right sometimes about the poor policy choices that led to Argentina’s poor growth performance in the 20th century. But it’s hard to make the case that Argentina was following worse policies during this period than Poland. Also: “Between 1928 and 1937, at the same time as farms were brutally collectivized, famine killed as many as 10 million people in the Ukraine, and Stalin‘s great terror was unleashed, the Soviet Union was the fastest growing country in the world.”

NB: I am not advocating Stalin-style economic policies.

So asks Time’s Krista Mahr. I think both the article and the research paper on which it’s based seems to be really stretching to analogize this to human prostitution:

According to the paper, “Payment for Sex in a Macaque Mating Market,” published in the December issue of Animal Behavior, males in a group of about 50 long-tailed macaques in Kalimantan Tengah, Indonesia, traded grooming services for sex with females; researchers, who studied the monkeys for some 20 months, found that males offered their payment up-front, as a kind of pre-sex ritual. It worked. After the females were groomed by male partners, female sexual activity more than doubled, from an average of 1.5 times an hour to 3.5 times. The study also showed that the number of minutes that males spent grooming hinged on the number of females available at the time: The better a male’s odds of getting lucky, the less nit-picking time the females received.

If you think about human society, “paying for sex” denotes a pretty specific kind of social practice—prostitution—and isn’t a catchall phrase to cover every mutually beneficial relationship that involves sex. You could probably do a study of married human couples that would show that sex is more likely after a husband is nice to his wife than after he’s been a jerk; I don’t think you’d call that a study about “paying for sex” among married couples.