Category: reason

While President Joe Biden’s administration doesn’t seem to need an excuse to spend money, two recurring arguments for his gigantic $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal are that our roads and bridges are “crumbling,” and that modernization would generate economic growth and jobs—hence its name, the American Jobs Plan. But none of this clever marketing makes any of these claims true.

Let me start by pointing out that, to the extent that people think about roads and bridges when they hear the word “infrastructure,” they should know that only $621 billion of the $2.3 trillion is for transportation—and of that sum, only $115 billion is for repairing roads and bridges. The rest of the bill is mostly a handout to private companies that already invest heavily in infrastructure. These subsidies will come with federal red tape and regulation, and hinder job creation, not bolster it.

Also, while our infrastructure could certainly be modernized and could use some maintenance, it’s not crumbling. According to the World Economic Forum, U.S. infrastructure is ranked No. 13 in the world—which, out of 141 countries, isn’t too shabby, especially when considering the enormous size of our country and the challenges that presents.

Yet as Washington Post columnist Charles Lane notes, it would be more accurate to bundle European nations together, since they share a significant amount of infrastructure, which would move the United States into fifth place.

Moreover, while the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2021 report card gave the United States a C-, this is its best grade in two decades—meaning that the quality of roads, bridges, inland waterways, or ports has been improving each year, without a congressional rescue plan. This fact doesn’t quite fit the crumbling infrastructure narrative that politicians and the media like to tout.

Academics also refute the idea that infrastructure is crumbling. Reviewing a large body of research in a National Bureau of Economic Research paper, Wharton University economist Gilles Duranton and his co-authors state: “Perhaps our main conclusion is that, on average, U.S. transportation infrastructure does not seem to be in the dire state that politicians and pundits describe. We find that the quality of interstate highways has improved, the quality of bridges is stable, and the age of buses and subway cars is also about constant.”

This is an important reminder that the private sector doesn’t seem to have any problem maintaining its infrastructure assets, as we see in the difference with railroads. Passenger rail is in mostly bad shape when owned publicly, whereas privately owned freight rail is mostly strong in quality. The best way to improve infrastructure isn’t to throw taxpayers’ money at it, but to privatize things such as passenger rail, airports, and air traffic controllers, as many other countries have done already.

Also, while the idea that building infrastructure will bring about more economic growth makes for a good talking point, it doesn’t work in practice. It’s proven that when there’s already economic growth occurring in a specific area, infrastructure spending targeted to support the boom will promote even more growth. But simply building infrastructure in the hope that it will create growth isn’t supported by evidence. For instance, in their review of the literature, Duranton and his colleagues find “little compelling evidence about transportation infrastructure creating economic growth.” One reason is that a supply of more infrastructure is likely to be a total waste of money if there’s no actual demand for it.

What’s more, looking at spending on highway construction in the Great Recession stimulus bill, economist Valerie A. Ramey concluded that “there is scant empirical evidence that infrastructure investment, or public investment in general, has a short-run stimulus effect. There are more papers that find negative effects on employment than positive effects on employment.” What that spending does do, however, is displace private investments. This is unfortunate, since the Congressional Budget Office found that private spending produces twice the return as does public spending.

Finally, in theory, government spending could lead to higher growth in the longer term. Unfortunately, legislators’ well-documented tendency to make decisions based on politics often leads them to favor projects that are outdated, expensive, and never profitable at the expense of private and profitable alternatives. Rail and transit projects come to mind.

The bottom line is this: Politicians make a lot of promises, but we shouldn’t always believe them.

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You can see the Complaint (filed in New Jersey federal court) and the press release—but not their brief explaining why they think they are entitled to a pretrial preliminary injunction, because that brief was filed under seal, though plaintiffs’ counsel tells me that a very lightly redacted version will be available soon.

I obviously can’t speak with any confidence about whether the allegations in the Anesthesiology article are true, or were said with the requisite mental state. But here are three legal observations:

1. New Jersey law (and the First Amendment) seems to allow permanent injunctions requiring the takedown of material after it is found to be libelous at trial.
2. In principle, libel lawsuits over academic research papers are potentially viable, especially if the court concludes that the papers included knowingly or recklessly false statements of fact, rather than just critical opinions or honest mistakes. (I oversimplify here slightly.) So are “trade libel” lawsuits, which are like libel lawsuits but allege damage to the reputation of a product rather than of a person or company.
3. But pretrial injunctions are generally not allowed, and are indeed seen as quintessential “prior restraints,” because they are entered prior to a conclusive decision that the material is indeed libelous.

I expect the District Court will be especially likely to reject a request for a takedown injunction (and the accompanying request for a retraction) in a case such as this, which is against a reputable establishment publisher. I don’t think the defendant’s identity should matter, but as a practical matter the First Amendment rules tend to be especially effectively policed when the defendant looks serious, plus I imagine these defendants will be well-represented.

This having been said, plaintiff is also well-represented, by megafirm Latham & Watkins (the fifth largest in the U.S.), so I do look forward to seeing their brief.

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Do you remember the “power pose” craze from about a decade ago? In the second-most popular TED talk ever, psychologist Amy Cuddy has told over 60 million viewers that they can change their lives by simply changing their body language.

If you grew up in the 1990s, you probably experienced classes devoted to boosting your self-esteem, independent of your actual achievements on tests or assignments.

Have you taken the Implicit Association Test or IAT, which claims to test your unconscious bias against minorities and other groups? It is routinely used in all sorts of diversity training programs and educational settings, from K-12 through college.

These are all examples of what science writer and podcaster Jesse Singal calls “quick fixes” that attempt to address pressing social issues based on fundamentally flawed research. In The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills, Singal looks at these and other attempts to change social policy based on bad or faulty science.

One of Cuddy’s fellow researchers has said that their research doesn’t prove anything in the real world. The K-12 curriculum that started the self-esteem boom was based on a misreading of Nathaniel Branden’s work by a single powerful California politician. And the IAT is not only unreliable—the same individual will generate very different scores when they retake the test—it’s not clear that “unconscious bias” is a major influence on how we act toward one another.

Singal, co-host of the popular podcast Blocked & Reported, tells Nick Gillespie his goal is to explain why we keep falling for ideas that psychologists say will fix society. He hopes that we’ll waste less time focusing on things that don’t really help anyone.

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A federal judge confirmed yesterday that a Texas family will have their land immediately seized by eminent domain for a U.S.-Mexico border wall—the very type of confiscation that President Joe Biden expressly promised he would put a stop to.

“We are utterly devastated,” said Baudilia Cavazos, whose family owns land in Hidalgo County, Texas. “We thought President Joe Biden would protect us. Now we’ve lost our land. We don’t even know what comes next.”

The Cavazos clan has fended off similar attempts at confiscation for years. When former President Donald Trump took office, his administration sought to claim about 7 acres and divide their land—which they rent to various tenants—in two. A huge chunk of their property would thus be nearly inaccessible to prospective customers, paralyzing their business.

“I retired five years ago—I taught for 40 years,” Eloisa Cavazos told Reason in 2018. “This is my income that I use for my retirement.”

She may have to find a new source of revenue. “The Court already addressed many of Defendant’s arguments—including the United States’ compliance with statutory requirements, whether the taking was arbitrary and capricious, and whether the United States satisfied the negotiation requirements,” wrote District Judge Micaela Alvarez of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas. “For the same reasons outlined above, the Court rejects Defendant’s argument that immediate possession should be delayed on these bases.”

The Biden administration could well have come between yesterday’s decision, handed down by Alvarez in McAllen, Texas. On Biden’s first day in office, the administration issued a proclamation pausing border wall construction for 60 days to determine if any land needed to be confiscated. That 60 days came and went without a decision.

Yet he was insistent the decision was already made on the campaign trail. “There will not be another foot of wall constructed in my administration,” he told NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro in August of last year. And the land seizures? “End, end, end, stop, done, over. Not gonna do it. Withdraw the lawsuits. We’re out.”

He did not, in fact, withdraw the lawsuits. “Yesterday, we witnessed a betrayal of the Biden Administration’s commitment to end construction of the border wall,” said Ricky Garza, an attorney for the Texas Civil Rights Project, in a statement. “In federal court, the President’s pause on border wall construction is meaningless without immediate action from the DOJ to dismiss these cases.”

The news marks yet another promise broken by Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, both of whom cast themselves as foils to Trump’s merciless immigration program. Their administration is defending Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after the agency set up a fake college, charged immigrant students thousands of dollars, and then deported them without refunds. Not unlike Biden did with land seizures, Harris in 2019 called out the ruse and declared that “officials must be held accountable.” Biden has also continued the practice of separating some families at the border, and in various ways has restricted asylum claims even more than his predecessor.

The Cavazoses, including Eloisa’s brother Fred Cavazos and Rey Anzaldua, their first cousin, have watched their land steadily dwindle over the years. Descendants of 1700s-era Spanish settlers, the family began with 18,000 acres.

“Now we probably have no more than 150 acres,” Anzaldua told Reason‘s Mark McDaniel three years back. “That’s a lot of land to lose.”

They’re about to hemorrhage more. “We’re liable to lose about 10 acres, three barns, and two houses,” said Anzaldua, “so when they asked if I could help with this, I said, ‘Yes, I’ve got ties to this land just like you do. This is our grandmother’s land.'”

Despite all of Biden’s promises to the contrary, it is now the government’s land.

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