EconTech

Robin Hanson writes, To What Expose Kids?:

State courts recently rebuked Texas Child Protective Services and told them to return 440 kids to their polygamous Mormon parents. The main complaint I’ve heard is that these teen girls can not really consent to polygamous marriage because they were not exposed enough to the rest of the [...]

Global war deaths have been substantially underestimated

Research paper: 50 years of violent war deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia
Globally, war has killed three times more people than previously estimated, and there is no evidence to support claims of a recent decline in war deaths, concludes a study published on BMJ.com.
Current survey-based techniques used to estimate violent [...]

. . . Al Jazeera reports. My question is, has there ever been a situation where a country that was outside the international mainstream made a change in policy due to sanctions. There are the obvious major counter-examples (Cuba, North Korea, Iraq). I cannot think of any evidence that supports the notion that sanctions are [...]

There SEEMS to have been a lot of recent crane collapses, more than in any other time that I can think of. However, not being an automated data collector, I am not particularly confident in such memories. The reason I ask is that I am told that there is a global shortage of cranes. After [...]

Lazy Lineup Study
Thursday’s Nature suggests standard police line-ups may not be so bad:
The traditional US procedure is familiar to any fan of television cop shows. Witnesses are presented with a line-up that includes both the suspect and a number of innocent people, or foils’, and are asked to identify the perpetrator. In the early 1990s [...]

Appeals Court Rules U.S. Bills Discriminate Against Blind
By DAVID STOUT
WASHINGTON — In a decision that could drastically change the appearance of American money, a federal appeals court panel ruled on Tuesday that the United States discriminates against the blind because the country’s paper currency is the same size regardless of a bill’s value.
The 2-to-1 [...]

That’s what it means to say something fails the Turing test: they are not identifiable as human, though usually in the context of computers and artificial intelligence:
What Does John Yoo Believe?
A correspondent sends me to a 2000 article by Yoo, “The Imperial President Abroad”, an article that opens:
Aside from getting himself impeached, President Clinton’s most [...]

Marty Lederman Defends John Yoo

Wow. Just wow. This is supposed to be a defense:
Balkinization: There has been a great deal of discussion in the blogosphere and the legal academy about the question of whether the OLC torture memoranda were not merely wrong, horrifying and indefensible, but actually criminal. My own view, roughly speaking, is… that [...]

Beating a not-so-dead horse on food prices
A “loyal reader” writes
Martin Wolf of the FT has written a whole article arguing that: ‘… higher food prices have powerful distributional effects: they hurt the poorest the most’ without even a mention of the basic economics in your September post on food prices: ‘The real answer of course [...]

Swedes start to question refugee policy
Nader will not give his real name but he does not hide why he chose Sweden as a refuge after Islamic gunmen threatened to murder him unless he fled Mosul in northern Iraq.
“Sweden is the only country that accepts immigrants and gives them permission to bring their families,” says [...]

Eminent Domain and Civil Rights

“[t]he burden of eminent domain has and will continue to fall disproportionately upon racial and ethnic minorities, the elderly, and economically disadvantaged.” Unfettered eminent domain authority, the NAACP concluded, is a “license for government to coerce individuals on behalf of society’s strongest interests.”
That is the NAACP quoted in [...]

I’ve long thought that licensed ‘purchased’ materials is an asinine business plan that some day some hero will come through and shatter. Much of our cultural history has been created through sharing and reshaping. Now that the technology has come along to do it, companies and governments are attempting to create technological and legal barriers [...]

I got some complaints (why do people email, isn’t it easier to comment?) that my algebra leaved something to be desired in my previous post on this. I thought the details were rather obvious, and I left H and L as being the real expenditure for a single unit of a high and low quality [...]

Trade and inequality, revisited — Rooftops edition

Another way of investigating the relationship between inequality and trade with poor countries implies that China may actually help the poor, suggests new work from University of Chicago economists Christian Broda and John Romalis.
Instead of focusing purely on what’s produced outside of the country, Broda and Romalis turn their [...]

From VoxEU by Jane Humphries:

Child labour: lessons from the Industrial Revolution
Societies have long sought to eliminate child labour. Yet two hundred years after the first Factories Act and despite a level of prosperity that our forefathers would have deemed unimaginable, there are an estimated 186 million child labourers worldwide –5.7 million in forced labour, 1.8 [...]