So . . . I was walking back from the home of Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman and instead of doing the normal thing and taking Q Street west to 5th and then walking south, I wanted to take a shortcut by walking south on North Capitol to then cut southwest on New York. But then lo and behold right by Catania Bakery a couple of dudes ran up from behind, punched me in the head, then kicked me a couple of times before running off. Once, years ago, in Amsterdam a guy threatened me with a knife and took my money. These guys took nothing, and just inflicted a bit of pain. All things considered the threaten/rob model of crime seems a lot more beneficial to both parties than the punch-and-run model. But I guess it takes all kinds.

To offer a policy observation, higher density helps reduce street crime in an urban environment in two ways. One is that in a higher density city, any given street is less likely to be empty of passersby at any given time. The other is that if a given patch of land has more citizens, that means it can also support a larger base of police officers. And for policing efficacy both the ratio of cops to citzens and of cops to land matters. Therefore, all else being equal a denser city will be a better policed city.

That said, as a matter of personal ethics you really shouldn’t run around punching random dudes in the back of the head irrespective of the prevailing level of population density or policing.

Ta-Nehisi Coates heard the dog whistle loud in clear in Newt Gingrich’s proclamation last night that Barack Obama is “the most successful food stamp president in modern American history.” But the speech also featured a straightforward call for the revival of the kind of techniques that were used to prevent African-Americans (and many poor whites as well) from voting in the Jim Crow South:

“You know, folks often talk about immigration. I always say that to become an American citizen, immigrants ought to have to learn American history. [applause] But maybe we should also have a voting standard that says to vote, as a native born American, you should have to learn American history. [applause] You realize how many of our high school graduates because of the decay of the educational system, couldn’t pass a citizenship test.”

For one thing, Gingrich really shouldn’t be running for president on a platform of adding an American history component to the citizenship test without trying some sample questions first. He might realize that history questions already feature prominently on the test. Meanwhile, if Gingrich himself wants to avoid flunking history he might take note of the fact that making US citizens take a poll test would be illegal under the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That’s for the very good reason that the historical purpose of such proposals has been to prevent black people form voting. This is certainly more subtle than Ron Paul’s direct criticism of the Civil Rights Act but either way the spirit is hard to miss.

Even a model libertarian state requires the existence of the ultimate “big government” program—a bunch of dudes with guns authorized to threaten to shoot people who don’t agree to be handcuffed and imprisoned. And this program needs to work well. Which is difficult to do if you have a force of poorly paid and poorly trained cops dependent on corruption to make a living. As Mark Kleiman explains, you can easily get stuck in a bad equilibrium:

Also not news, but something I hadn’t reflected on: the “neoliberal”/IMF/Washington Consensus emphasis on reducing taxes and public spending made the problem – already bad enough – worse, and almost impossible to fix. One reason the Colombian security/rule of law situation has gotten better (which is not to say good) is a special tax levy on high incomes dedicated for the use of the security services. The back story on that tax, according to Zedillo, is that Bill Clinton went to Bogota in 1999, met with a bunch of rich folks, and told them that if they wanted security they’d have to pay for it. Apparently they agreed, and basically volunteered the tax increase.

But when Zedillo at about the same time (when he was President of Mexico) talked to Mexican “civil society” groups that were complaining about lawlessness, and told them “The taxes you don’t pay are the security you don’t have,” he got nowhere. “Right away, I lost eye contact,” he said. Prosperous Mexicans would rather hire private “security firms” to protect their children from kidnapping, without too much concern about that fact that some of those firms maintain demand for the service by kidnapping the children of non-clients.

This is in part a “policy problem.” But I think it’s also pretty clearly to an extent a problem of public ethics and public morals. In societies with a decent level of public spiritedness, social solidarity, and moral responsibility, elites concerned about public safety respond by trying to improve pubic safety. For the past 15 years or so, Colombian elites have, among other things, sincerely wanted their country to work better and it’s paid off.

Something I’ve been interested to see lately (also flagged by Kevin Carey is that “education reform” skeptics have gotten very interested in citing the success of Finnish public education. I heard a good deal about this from AFT President Randi Weingarten when I spoke to her last week. On one level it makes a great deal of sense since Finland tends not to have the kind of labor market model oriented around quantitative assessment of teacher performance that reformers have been pushing in the United States.

On a deeper level, though, what reformers are saying is that the United States of America needs better teachers and is promoting these changes in compensation/retention models in order to try and generate this outcome. And that does seem to me to be the upshot of what you see looking at Finland. They don’t do extensive test-based assessment of teacher performance, but the human capital inputs into the profession are very high quality. It’s not just that their teachers are extensively trained, but admission to the training programs is highly selective—only about 15 percent of applicants are admitted. More broadly, as an important McKinsey report released last year showed, just 23 percent of American teachers are drawn from the “top third” of college graduates. By contrast, in Finland (and Singapore and South Korea) 100 percent of teachers are from the “top third.” And while American schools in general seem to be undersupplied with excellent teachers, the problem is especially severe in high-poverty schools where only 14 percent are coming from the top third.

I think reasonable people can disagree about what approaches exactly would move the United States away from 23 percent up to something closer to 100 percent. But whatever approach you favor, if you’re talking about Finland (or South Korea or Singapore) you’re necessarily having a conversation about how to get different people into the profession than the ones who are currently there.

I watched Ron Paul on Hardball yesterday afternoon talking about his opposition to the Civil Rights Act and while this of course reminds you of his troubling racist associations, I think that’s actually the least significant part of the story. The real issue here is Paul’s perfectly sincere non-prejudiced, non-biased reasoning here. The Civil Rights Act is, after all, a genuinely large infringement of people’s private property rights. It says that just because you own a hotel doesn’t mean you can decide to bar black people from staying at it. It says that just because you own a bus, you can’t decide to make black passengers ride in the back. It says you can’t buy—at any price—a seat at a whites-only lunch counter. It’s a massive instance of big government medaling in people’s private business.

It was also in the 1960s and 1970s an absolutely vital tool in resolving a social and political crisis of gargantuan proportion. And though it has less practical significance today (it’s not like people are chomping at the bit to open segregated hotels), the Civil Rights Act remains an important tool against racism and an important token of America’s strong commitments to non-discriminatory norms.

But Ron Paul, like Rand Paul before him, opposes this measure not—or not only—out of some bias against black people but out of a deeply-held belief that the state should never solve any social problem no matter how severe the problem or how effective the solution.