Eric Rasmusen's Weblog

Hebborn: An Example of Why Libel Laws Are Bad

2008-05-16T11:36:00.002+01:00

Eric Hebborn's career gives us an example of why strict libel laws are bad. Wikipedia says:

In 1978 a curator at the National Gallery of Artin Washington DC , Konrad Oberhuber, was examining a pair of drawings he had purchased for the museum from Colnaghi a seemingly reputable old-master dealer in London, one by Savelli Sperandio and the other by Francesco del Cossa. Oberhuber noticed that two drawings had been executed on the same kind of paper.
Oberhuber was taken aback by the similarities of the paper used in the two pieces and decided to alert his colleagues in the art world. Upon finding another fake "Cossa" at the Morgan Library, this one having passed through the hands of at least three experts, Oberhuber contacted Colnaghi, the source of all three fakes. Colnaghi, in turn, informed the worried curators that all three had been acquired from Hebborn.[1]
Colnaghi waited a full eighteen months before revealing the deception to the media, and, even then never mentioned Hebborn's name, for fear of a libel suit. Alice Beckett states that she was told '...no one talks about him...The trouble is he's too good'[4]. Thus Hebborn continued to create his forgeries, changing his style slightly to avoid any further unmasking, and manufactured at least 500 more drawings between 1978 and 1988.[2]

The Hindu Vicar

2008-05-15T14:54:00.002+01:00

Cranmer wrote in 2006: One priest, the Rev David Hart, a convert to Hinduism, has been allowed to continue to officiate as a cleric. His diocese renewed his licence even though he had moved to India, changed his name to Ananda (Sanskrit for ‘happiness'), and participates daily in pagan fire offerings to the snake god Nagar, and offers prayers to the elephant god Ganesh. He also offers namaaz at Muslim prayer halls. He sees no contradiction between these practices and his duties as an Anglican priest; he said he will officiate in a Christian church and a Hindu temple because ‘My philosophical position is that all religions are cultural constructs…" Wikipedia says His next book 'An Introduction to Hinduism' (London: Continuum 2009; Series Editor: Clinton Bennett) will examine the breadth of the Hindu faith as he discovers it living in India and will show how he regards his position as a Hindu believer as entirely compatible with being an Anglican priest in good standing with his diocesan bishop back in England.

The Volstead Act and Prohibition

2008-05-15T10:37:00.003+01:00

The Volstead Act (the National Prohibition Act, Oct. 28, 1919, ch. 85, 41 Stat. 305) was the federal statute implementing Prohibition (the constitutional amendment did not go into specifics; a law was needed for that). Surprisingly, it isn't available on the Web. Since Prohibition was repealed, the Volstead Act has been taken out of the US Code, so it can't be found there. There are various abridged versions on the Web, though. I quote from the best one below. Peter Hitchens said that Prohibition did not make possession of liquor illegal, and such seems to be the case, at least possession in one's home.

SEC. 33. After February 1, 1920, the possession of liquors by any person not legally permitted under this title to possess liquor shall be prima facie evidence that such liquor is kept for the purpose of being sold, bartered, exchanged, given away, furnished, or otherwise disposed of in violation of the Provisions of this title. . . . But it shall not be unlawful to possess liquors in one's private dwelling while the same is occupied and used by him as his dwelling only and such liquor need not be reported, provided such liquors are for use only for the personal consumption of the owner thereof and his family residing in such dwelling and of his bona fide guests when entertained by him therein; and the burden, of proof shall be upon the possessor in any action concerning the same to prove that such liquor was law fully acquired, possessed, and used.

This shows why it is important to have the full text of a law. Earlier in the Act it says that possession is illegal except in circumstances explained elsewhere in the Act.

Female Elders in Churches

2008-05-15T09:43:00.003+01:00

One question of ecclesiology is whether women should be elders. Walking in the rain today, I thought at first of an argument for that position, and then realized it cuts the other way.

The question is whether a passage such as the following implies that women in the America of 2008 should be ordained as pastors.Timothy 3 says

1 This is a true saying, If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work. 2 A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach; 3 Not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous; 4 One that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity; 5 (For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?)

My first thought was that this passage has no such implication, because in Paul's time and place women would not apply for public positions anyway. No normal woman would "desire the office of a bishop", so that case could be disregarded. Or, if one did, prudential reasons would so obviously argue against it that, again, there was no need to put in a special comment.

If the passage were about the qualifications to be a tax collector or a soldier the the argument of the previous paragraph would be valid. Its flaw is that in the Greco-Roman world there were priestesses. In fact, they come to mind more easily than priests do. Think of the Vestal Virgins in Rome and the oracle at Delphi. In that cultural context, a new religious cult such as Christianity could get away with having priestesses. The Jews, to be sure, did not, but Christians already had broken with Judaism on the questions of pork, circumcision, and Temple, and having priestesses would hardly increase the size of the break.

Putting aside other reasons, then, the cultural signifance of Timothy 3 might cut the opposite way of what we usually think: it was not an accommodation to the culture of the day, but a purposeful break with the culture. The pagans have priestesses; the Christians will not. That reasoning would apply equally well today. The episcopalians have priestesses; the Christians will not.

Sexist Bias

2008-05-15T09:31:00.003+01:00

Suppose we think that a person's political position is biased by his group category. We might think that a man will be biased in a pro-man direction on issues involving the role of women or wealth redistribution. Of course, a woman would be biased in the opposite direction according to this idea, so no person would have an objective opinion. That is probably the conclusion feminists would have reach, actually.

I think the conclusion is too hopeless because the idea starts off on the wrong foot. A man is a man, to be sure, but he also has personal biases in favor of his relatives, many of whom might be women. In fact, for many issues what would matter most, if personal interest is what counts, is not one's own sex, but one's children's. I have a wife, four daughters, and a son. That means my family's interest is pro-female by 5 to 2. Thus, I should be biased in the pro-female direction, and if I talk like a conservative patriarchalist, well, that's a sign the neutral, objective position is even more patriarchalist than me.

The people who are most biased are thus male and female homosexuals, who might have bias proportions of 2 or 3 or more to 0, and the divorced women with daughters. Unmarried people are next, who have biases of 1 to 0. Then come unbalanced families such as my own with ratios such as 5 to 2. Couples without children would be unbiased, with proportions of 1 to 1, and the most unbiased of all would be a large family with 5 sons and 4 daughters, which would be 6 to 6 (helping out with the problem of someone weighting his own self highest).

Obama's Church

2008-05-14T12:10:00.003+01:00

Obama's church is worse than even the negative publicity had led me to expect in its anti-Americanism and radical politics. See Stanley Kurtz's excerpts from the church magazine.

Democratic Primary Popular Votes: Obama and Clinton

2008-05-14T11:56:00.002+01:00

The Realclearpolitics website has a good table of Democratic delegates and popular votes according to various definitions. I see that right now Hillary is already ahead in the popular vote by one definition.

Apodictic versus Apodeitic

2008-05-13T11:49:00.002+01:00

Apodictic (αποδεικτικος, meaning "capable of demonstration"), is a logical term, applied to judgments which are necessarily true, as of mathematical conclusions. Apodicticity is the corresponding abstract noun, referring to logical certainty. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apodictic

Apodeitic: Good without reference to purpose. Rules of skill. Counsels of prudence. dsc.dixie.edu/owl/syllabi/Ph3510PPT/kant.ppt

Deriving Utilitarianism from First Principles

2008-05-13T11:40:00.003+01:00

(revised May 14, May 16 in light of the objection that the argument doesn't have several people's small gains justifying one person's big loss; that characteristics shouldn't matter)

I heard Professor Terence Irwin talk on 'Prudence, morality, and the importance of persons: a dilemma for Sidgwick' yesterday. He said that Sidgwick does a poor job of moving from his two axioms to utilitarianism, which is correct. Even the axioms aren't spelled out very clearly, it seems. Here's a fix-up I thought of.

Axiom 1. Pareto Improvements Are Good. If you can make one person better off without hurting anybody else, do it.

Axiom 2. Impartiality. Whether a change in welfare is good or bad shouldn't depend on the identity of the particular person affected or any personal characteristics. Whether an action that changes welfare by amount A affects person i instead of person j does not affect the action's moral goodness.

Result 3. By A1, if Jones can take an action that increases his welfare by 800 utils, he should do it.

Result 4. Suppose Jones can either do nothing or take the trio of actions T1:
Action X reduces Jones's welfare by 2000 utils.
Action Y1 increases Jones's welfare by 700 utils.
Action Z1 increases Jones's welfare by 500 utils.

By R3, Jones should take the trio of actions T1.

Result 5. Suppose Jones can either do nothing or take the trio of actions T2:
Action X reduces Jones's welfare by 2000 utils.
Action Y2 increases Smith's welfare by 700 utils.
Action Z2 increases Lee's welfare by 500 utils.

By A2 and R4, Jones should take this trio of actions T2.

Result 6. R5 would remain true for any trio of numbers (a,b,c) such that a is less than b+c. Thus, we have utilitarianism.

A possible flaw: Trio T1 has the same identity label for both actions, whereas Trio T2 has a different identity label for each action. Does A2 really require them to be treated in the same way?

Axiom 2 is different from saying that welfare pairs (2,3) and (3,2) are equivalent, and stronger. Even if (2,3) and (3,2) are equivalent, that does not imply that (3,3) and (2,4) are equivalent. Using Axiom 2, though, if start by saying (2,3) and (3,2) are equivalent, then the actions of "give 1 to person 1" and "give 1 to person 2" are equivalent, so we do get the implication that (3,3) and (2,4) are equivalent. Probably we can derive that (x,y) and (y,x) are equivalent too, from Axiom 2, though I don't see how immediately.

Now that I think about it, Axiom 2 is not so different from the contractarian axiom that if a person is willing to accept a gamble, then he should not complain if he is the loser. A contractarian introduces probability, though, and so needs expected utility perhaps-- or at least some comment on what happens to non-expected-utility maximizers.

Co-opting Your Opponent's Issues

2008-05-12T15:37:00.004+01:00

Steve Teles talked about a good idea in a conference here last weekend: the idea of going on one's opponent's issue ground in politics and beating him on his own terms. His paper was on Compassionate Conservatism. Here are perhaps other examples. The paradigm is:

"Liberals say X helps Y, but X actually hurts them."

1. X = Immigration, Y = Mexican-Americans

2. X= the minimum wage, Y = poor people

3. X= easy divorce laws, Y = women

4. X= low penalties for crime, Y = blacks

5. X= unions, Y = workers

We need a good name for this tactic. It is not the same as Co-Opting, really, or Issue Stealing

Seminar Presentation Ideas

2008-05-12T15:35:00.004+01:00

I thought of two ways to improve seminars today:

1. Put all my references on a slide, so people can tell me if I am missing anything. Do this AFTER the model is presented, so they know what is relevant.

2. Start the presentation on the blackboard and put the notation and main proposition there, and diagrams, for later reference. Then go to the projector. This is a substitute or supplement for a handout.

Shrinkwrap Contracts

2008-05-12T14:51:00.001+01:00

Mark Lemley has a 2006 Minnesota Law Review paper, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=917926 on shrinkwrap contracts that gives updates on what courts have been doing since Easterbrook's opinion.

Oregon Threatening People Who Post State Laws

2008-05-11T20:31:00.001+01:00

David Post at VC writes:
The State of Oregon, bless its heart, has begun sending out cease-and-desist letters to websites like Justia and Public.Resource.Org, demanding that the sites take down copies of the Oregon Revised Statutes posted there on the grounds that the posting infringes the State's copyright in the statutes.

Hard to believe, but apparently true. [See Cory Doctorow's posting on Boing Boing, and the story from TechDirt, along with accompanying documents.
The copyright claim is (like a lot of copyright claims these days) probably about 98% horse manure. They're not asserting copyright in the text of the laws themselves, but in the "arrangement and subject matter compilation," the numbering of statutory sections, and the various "tables, indices, and annotations" contained in the documents. Lots of that stuff is simply not copyrightable -- and even as to the stuff in which there might be copyright protection, what makes the State of Oregon so sure that it, and not the various individuals who authored particular sections, owns the copyright to those contributions?

Crime in England and the USA

2008-05-11T19:19:00.004+01:00

The International Crime Victims Survey's conclusion is that England and Wales (Scotland has separate data-- with higher crime, I think) has higher crime rates than the US even for violent crime. Murder (not covered by the survey) is the only exception. From Table 1, section 9.1, the 2004 and 2005 numbers for England and the US are, per person per year:
Car theft: 1.8, 1.1
Burglary (home):3.5, 2.5
Robbery (face to face): 1.4, 0.6
Theft of personal property: 6.3, 4.8
Assaults and threats (similar ratio for just assaults): 5.8, 4.3

Christianity Today-- Christian:?

2008-05-11T18:39:00.002+01:00

I've heard that the magazine Christianity Today has gone liberal. Some evidence of this is the article,

"Jeremiah Wright, Evangelicals' Brother in Christ:

Go ahead and disagree with Obama's pastor. But remember: He's family." But it doesn't offer any evidence that the anti-American pastor Wright actually is more than a nominal Christian-- indeed, the article seems to think Wright should get credit merely for that:

Jeremiah Wright goes to church looking for Jesus. And that's why evangelicals should pay attention to him. This is not to say they should agree with him. But Jeremiah Wright is a serious Christian. He didn't have to be — many gifted black intellectuals have gotten off the bus with the church for having been, as it inarguably has, a slave religion. (Wright has argued with Muslim friends that its track record is no better on slavery.) Even within the young tradition of Africentric theology, birthed by James Cone at Union Seminary in the late 1960s, former theologians have left Jesus behind in their effort to embrace the wider black diaspora worldwide. Cone himself worries that exclusive attention to Jesus yields something he calls "Christofascism," by which he seems to mean exclusivity. His brilliant student Dwight Hopkins, a leader at Trinity, also seems to think the Christian church too narrow an allegiance, and wants black folks generally to ally over race rather than religion. (Wright has repeatedly endorsed Cone and Hopkins, yet he doesn't use language like "Christofascism"--this is one of the things you should ask him about). In conversation with his teacher Cone, and the most distinguished theologian at his church in Dwight Hopkins, Wright is staking his claim solely on Jesus — respectfully, of course, in dialogue with Islam and black nationalist thought — but he's standing on the promises of this God.

41% of Americans don't pay federal income tax

2008-05-09T23:11:00.003+01:00

At a conference today Chric DeMuth of AEI mentioned that a large fraction of Americans pay zero federal income taxes. I googled, and found that a reasonable estimate is 41% of households (from http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/1410.html ). That's 43 million tax return (for 2006) out of 136 million total, with an estimated 15 million that don't file tax returns at all.

NASA's Temperature Data Adjustments

2008-05-08T14:16:00.003+01:00

Too little attention has been given to the news last August that NASA had made a year-2000 mistake in calculating US temperatures, a mistake that meant the temperatures after 2000 were all too high. Details are at Coyote Blog. The mistake was in the adjustment NASA makes for the fact that if a weather station's location become urban, the temperature rises because cities are always hotter. What is more important than the mistake itself are that (1) NASA very quietly fixed its data without any indication to users that it had been wrong earlier. (2) NASA's adjustment is by a secret method it refuses to disclose to outsiders. (3) NASA's adjustment appears (hard to say since it's kept secret) to both adjust "bad" stations (the ones in cities) down and "good" stations (the ones that read accurately) up, on the excuse of some kind of smoothing of off-trend stations. (4) The NASA people doing the adjustment are not statisticians. (5) It isn't clear what, if any, adjustment is made to weather station data from elsewhere in the world. The US has some of the best data, and there seems to be no warming trend in the US.

20 of 114 Church of England Bishops Homosexual

2008-05-03T19:25:00.000+01:00

I've come across a variety of items which point to the Church of England being heavily infiltrated by homosexual clergy. I became interested after reading a good book, Last Rites, by a homosexual ex-vicar who is perceptive in some ways and blind in others. It makes a good read, as he talks about the virtues of tolerance while also talking about how in the past evangelical clergy were quiet because they were afraid to talk and about how he called the police in to harass another pastor who wrote him criticizing his homosexual ways.

What surprises me most, though, is what a large fraction of the clergy and bishops are known homosexuals. Perhaps I shouldn't be; for Anglo-Catholics, it is a chance to dress up in fancy garb and pretend to be a priest. One can be an actor, organist, or singer and get paid for it.

Damian Thompson writes:

A leading Anglican source has told me how many Church of England bishops are easily identifiable as gay. The answer is 20, he says, out of 114 diocesan and suffragan bishops....
I wanted to find out because an extraordinary article has appeared in this week's Church of England Newspaper claiming - quite correctly - that the C of E is the most gay-friendly Church in the world, easily outstripping any other province of the Anglican Communion.
That is because its bishops routinely ignore their own official guidelines on homosexuality - and especially civil partnerships.
The article is by Christopher Morgan, a well-connected religious commentator who, many years ago, was best man at Rowan Williams's wedding. It's a good piece - he has done his homework - but it will shock some of the Church of England Newspaper's evangelical readers.
It is not available free online, so let me quote the relevant passage. The background is that, according to a House of Bishops' "pastoral statement", a bishop is supposed to inquire into the nature of a priest's gay relationship, to ensure that it is non-sexual, before giving a civil partnership his approval.
Morgan writes: "I do not think even one bishop has enquired into the bedroom arrangements of clergy in civil partnerships, ...
Morgan goes on to talk about gay bishops in the Church, and says that George Carey told him on tape that he had ordained at least two. In fact, Dr Carey actually named the two bishops. One of the names came as no surprise, since (if my memory serves me) the bishop had, as a priest, once served as a judge for Mr Gay UK.

From My time at homo-erotic college, The Spectator Dec 7, 1996 by Oddie, William:

Some theological colleges have been traditionally more noted for sodomy than others, though it is probably not too much to say that it is normal in all of them, with the possible exception of some evangelical establishments. The most famous of all used to be St Stephen's House, Oxford (known to its alumni as 'Staggers'), where 20 years ago I was in training for the Anglican priesthood, and where (despite a much publicised purge carried out by the then principal, Father David Hope, now Archbishop of York) I estimated that fully two thirds were openly homosexual, many without doubt actively so.
Nevertheless, the atmosphere at Staggers in my day was certainly more discreet than the overt queening about of the pre-Hope regime, which had been exacerbated by huge quantities of gin - the Reverend Kenneth Leech, a former St Stephen's House student (or `Staggers bag') of this period, described the ethos of AngloCatholicism as `gin, lace and backbiting'. A hardly exaggerated portrait of Staggers at this time is to be found in A.N. Wilson's novel Unguarded Hours (Mr Wilson is a former Staggers bag).
Father Hope had forbidden drinking (except for a pusillanimous glass of bad sherry after Sunday mass) and had thrown out the lace together with all the beautiful old Latin vestments. He had made a connection between elaborate liturgy and queening about, and there was now in force a regime of unrelieved liturgical austerity.
But the centrepiece of Father Hope's reforms had been the supposed purge of the rampant homosexuality of previous years, which had caused such a scandal that Staggers had nearly been closed down. Things had been just as bad at Cuddesdon, the prestigious theological college known for its `old-school mitre' -just outside Oxford, where Robert Runcie had once been principal. There was some resentment at Staggers that they and not Cuddesdon had attracted notoriety; it was rumoured that Cuddesdon had escaped public obloquy because its own scandals had been hushed up by the then Bishop of Oxford, the Rt Reverend Kenneth Woollcombe, who lived nearby.
At any rate, Father Hope's widely bruited blitz on the queens had the desired effect, and Staggers survived ( to become a hotbed of radical feminism following women's ordination)....
This all happened a long time ago. Things in the Church of England are much worse now and it would be almost impossible to threaten a theological college with closure on the grounds that it permitted sodomy. One college (not Anglo-Catholic) even encourages prospective students to bring their 'partner', male or female, to spend the weekend as part of the selection process.

The New Statesman says

...tabloid revelations in September 1994 that the then newly enthroned bishop of Durham, Michael Turnbull, who had condemned gay clergy in loving relationships, had a conviction for cottaging. An ex-monk called Sebastian Sandys outed three more bishops, including the then bishop of Edmonton, Brian Masters, at a debate at Durham University. Meanwhile, Peter Tatchell's OutRage! issued a list of ten gay bishops who had endorsed anti-gay discrimination within the Church. They included the high-profile bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood (who has since died).
The climax of the campaign came in March 1995 when the then bishop of London, David Hope, was named Archbishop of York - the number two post in the Church of England. Under pressure from Tatchell, Hope - who had endorsed the sacking of gay clergy and backed a Children's Society ban on gay foster parents - acknowledged that his own sexuality was a "grey area".

Hymns with Blame for the Crucifixion

2008-05-03T09:20:00.005+01:00

From The Cyber Hymnal here are some hymns that put blame for the Crucifixion on those who follow Jesus. I've given authors when I've heard of them. In each case I've given the first verse and the relevant verse.

----------------------------

John Newton

In evil long I took delight,
Unawed by shame or fear,
Till a new object struck my sight,
And stopped my wild career.

I saw One hanging on a tree,
In agony and blood,
Who fixed His languid eyes on me,
As near His cross I stood.

Sure, never to my latest breath,
Can I forget that look;
It seemed to charge me with His death,
Though not a word He spoke.

My conscience felt and owned the guilt,
And plunged me in despair,
I saw my sins His blood had spilt,
And helped to nail Him there.

A second look He gave, which said,
"I freely all forgive;
This blood is for thy ransom paid;
I die that thou mayst live."

Thus, while His death my sin displays
In all its blackest hue,
Such is the mystery of grace,
It seals my pardon too.

---------------------------------------------------

Charles Wesley

Come, Thou everlasting Spirit,
Bring to every thankful mind
All the Savior’s dying merit,
All His sufferings for mankind!
True Recorder of His passion,
Now the living faith impart;
Now reveal His great salvation;
Preach His Gospel to our heart.

Come, Thou Witness of His dying;
Come, Remembrancer divine!
Let us feel Thy power, applying
Christ to every soul, and mine!
Let us groan Thine inward groaning;
Look on Him we pierced, and grieve;
All receive the grace atoning,
All the sprinkled blood receive.

--------------------
My times are in Thy hand;
My God, I wish them there;
My life, my friends, my soul I leave
Entirely to Thy care.

...

My times are in Thy hand,
Jesus, the crucified!
Those hands my cruel sins had pierced
Are now my guard and guide.

------------------

Isaac Watts:

How condescending and how kind
Was God’s eternal Son!
Our misery reached His heav’nly mind,
And pity brought Him down.

...

Here let our hearts begin to melt,

While we His death record,
And with our joy for pardoned guilt,
Mourn that we pierced the Lord.

------------------------

My sins laid open to the rod,
The back which from the law was free;
And the eternal Son of God
Received the stripes once due to me.

...

I pierced those sacred hands and feet
That never touched or walked in sin;
I broke the heart that only beat
The souls of sinful men to win.

That sponge of vinegar and gall
Was placed by me upon His tongue;
And when derision mocked His call,
I stood that mocking crowd among.

The Good Samaritan Experiment

2008-05-01T15:26:00.002+01:00

The famous Darley-Batson experiment (Darley, J. M., and Batson, C.D., "From Jerusalem to Jericho": A study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior". JPSP, 1973, 27, 100-108.) Its conclusion is that if people are in a hurry, they help a lot less, but being on the way to preach on the parable did not, but it looks to me as if this second conclusion is wrong, given the data, so do not rely on it.

Copyright and Putting Up Old Books on the Net

2008-05-01T09:41:00.003+01:00

Here is a good 2006 post from the Baylyblog about copyright and the digitization of old books that are out of copyright, e.g. Shakespeare.

Italics and Asterisks

2008-05-01T09:31:00.002+01:00

For emphasis, I wonder if *asterisks* might be better than italics. They convey different impressions; that is certain. Asterisks are more masculine, more heavy-hitting, which is sometimes but not always desirable. For titles of books, however, asterisks are all wrong, since there emphasis is not desirable. Write not *Huckleberry Finn*, but Huckleberry Finn.

Illegal Immigrants Cause 6% of Crime , which Costs$24 Billion

2008-04-30T12:11:00.007+01:00

David Wilson pointed out flaws in my earlier post on crime and illegal immigrants. My numbers were way off, but even when cut they support my ultimate conclusion: the cost of crime by illegal aliens wipes out the economic gains from them. And this is true even if it were to be the case, as Mr. Wilson suggests, illegal aliens have a lower propensity to commit crime---adjusting for age, sex, ethnicity, etc. --- than citizens do. (That's because for the question of how much they harm the U.S. , one shouldn't adjust: what matters is how much crime they commit in total, not how much crime they would commit if they were old and female.)

Note that even corrected, my estimates are still just a weblog estimate, not up to the standards for first draft for an academic working paper, though that doesn't mean they aren't the best available (somebody *should* do a serious study of this). What would be really useful would be a survey of a random sample of those imprisoned in state and federal prisons and jails.

My numbers were indeed way off. The big problem was my use of the SCAAP numbers for the number of illegal aliens in jail during the year. I compared that to the number of people in jail measured on one particular day. Since jails are for terms of less than one year, there will be a lot more people in and out during the year than are in jail during any one day.

My latest estimate is that 6.1% of crime is by illegal aliens, and it imposes a cost of 24 billion dollars per year. The reasoning is below. (The percentage is exactly the same as David Wilson's but that is an odd coincidence; he includes jails and gets 6.1% as 131,000/ 2,135,335).

Here are some numbers on inmates of "prisons" (a term of art which means state and federal prisons, places where criminals serve sentences of one year or more, as opposed to jails, which are run by cities and counties for lesser offenders). K means "thousand".

From the Justice Dept. source on prison data: Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2006, http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/p06.htm, or http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/pjim06.pdf Appendix Table 6: In prisons: 33K federal, 57K state noncitizens on June 30, 2006. Total: 90K. Table 12: Prisoners in custody: 181K federal, 1290K state. Total: 1471K. Fraction noncitizen: 90/1471= 6.1%.

If there are 10.5 million illegal aliens, then their imprisonment rate is 90/10500 = 0.85%. There are 308 thousand Hispanics in prison p06t07.csv out of a population of 44.3 million (Stat Abs. Table 6), about 0.69%. Thus, illegal aliens aren't much different from hispanics in percentage imprisoned. That is surprising, since I would think the illegals would have fewer women and children to bring down the criminality rate. The overall US imprisonment rate is 1471/297000=.50%. The white (nonblack, nonHispanic) rate is .27% (= (478+49)/198000 ) and the black (nonhispanic) rate is 1.56% (=(534+28)/36000).

The prison data has some problems. It is not just for the 10 million or so illegal aliens, but for all noncitizens, which includes the 12 million or so legal aliens (people with green cards, tourists, etc.) (10.5 million illegal aliens from the Statistical Abstract: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/tables/08s0046.pdf The total population was 296,639,000, That's about 3.4% illegals.) (Legal aliens in 2005: 20.7-10.5 million. Table 44 SA http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/tables/08s0044.pdf) Also, (1) some states don't report, (2) some states report jails as well as prisons, and (3) some states report all foreign-born, not just illegal aliens.

Also, from GAO report number GAO-05-337R, ‘Information on Criminal Aliens Incarcerated in Federal and State Prisons and Local Jails’ which was released on May 9, 2005, criminal aliens incarcerated in federal prisons were 49K at year-end 2004, a lot more than the 33K above; and in fiscal year 2002-SCAAP reimbursed states for 77K criminal aliens. The 77K is compatible with the 57K above, since it's 4 years apart and not just year-end (some people even with sentences of over a year will have left by year-end).

Anyway, if illegal aliens are 6.1% of crime (making the further assumption that the percentage in prisons is equal to the percentage of crime generally,including less serious crime), then if crime costs $400 billion per year, crime by illegal aliens costs 24 billion dollars per year. That is about equal to the June 20, 2007 CEA report Immigration’s Economic Impact, which says immigration has a net benefit of $30 billion per year, which includes both legal and illegal immigrants.

May 3: A survey of illegal immigrants who applied for amnesty around 1989 found that of working-age adults, just 57% were male and 12% worked in agriculture. 37% had 9 or more years of schooling, which is below the American average, but above the Mexican average (p. 884 of Illegal Migration from Mexico to the United States Gordon H. Hanson, Journal of Economic Literature, Page 1. The Journal of Economic Literature Vol. 44, No. 4, December 2006)

ABA Threatens GMU with Loss of Accreditation

2008-04-30T09:34:00.004+01:00

Gail Heriot has a shocking WSJ op-ed telling how the American Bar Association forced George Mason Law School to admit unqualified applicants in order to retain its accreditation--- and thus its access to federal funds. Racial discrimination of this kind has been declared illegal by the Supreme Court, so the ABA is acting illegally. Is there a suit to bring?

If you have ever wondered why colleges and universities seem to march in lockstep on controversial issues like affirmative action, here is one reason: Overly politicized accrediting agencies often demand it.... In 2003, the ABA summoned the university's president and law school dean to appear before it personally, threatening to revoke the institution's accreditation. GMU responded by further lowering minority admissions standards. It also increased spending on outreach, appointed an assistant dean to serve as minority coordinator, and established an outside "Minority Recruitment Council." As a result, 17.3% of its entering students were minority members in 2003 and 19% in 2004. Not good enough. "Of the 99 minority students in 2003," the ABA complained, "only 23 were African American; of 111 minority students in 2004, the number of African Americans held at 23." It didn't seem to matter that 63 African Americans had been offered admission, or that many students admitted with lower academic credentials would end up incurring heavy debt but never graduate and pass the bar.

Biofuel Subsidies

2008-04-28T14:15:00.002+01:00

Mark Steyn on Biofuels:

The EU decreed that 5.75 percent of petrol and diesel must come from “biofuels” by 2010, rising to 10 percent by 2020. The U.S. added to its 51 cents-per-gallon ethanol subsidy by mandating a five-fold increase in “biofuels” production by 2022.
The result is that big government accomplished at a stroke what the free market could never have done: They turned the food supply into a subsidiary of the energy industry. When you divert 28 percent of U.S. grain into fuel production, and when you artificially make its value as fuel higher than its value as food, why be surprised that you’ve suddenly got less to eat? Or, to be more precise, it’s not “you” who’s got less to eat but those starving peasants in distant lands you claim to care so much about.
Heigh-ho. In the greater scheme of things, a few dead natives keeled over with distended bellies is a small price to pay for saving the planet, right? Except that turning food into fuel does nothing for the planet in the first place. That tree the U.S. Marines are raising on Iwo Jima was most likely cut down to make way for an ethanol-producing corn field: Researchers at Princeton calculate that to date the “carbon debt” created by the biofuels arboricide will take 167 years to reverse....
In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death. On April 15, the Independent, the impeccably progressive British newspaper, editorialized: “The production of biofuel is devastating huge swathes of the world’s environment. So why on earth is the Government forcing us to use more of it?”
You want the short answer? Because the government made the mistake of listening to fellows like you. Here’s the self-same Independent in November 2005:

At last, some refreshing signs of intelligent thinking on climate change are coming out of Whitehall. The Environment minister, Elliot Morley, reveals today in an interview with this newspaper that the Government is drawing up plans to impose a ‘biofuel obligation’ on oil companies... This has the potential to be the biggest green innovation in the British petrol market since the introduction of unleaded petrol…
Etc. It’s not the environmental movement’s chickenfeedhawks who’ll have to reap what they demand must be sown, ...