Category: reason

Brickbat: Drivers Ed

sofaroad_1161x653

The Florida Highway Patrol has recommended that prosecutors rescind a $166 ticket issued to a driver who crashed trying to avoid a sofa in the road. The driver, who wasn’t named by the media, was traveling on I-95 in February when the sofa fell off a truck in front of her vehicle and began tumbling towards it. The driver swerved to avoid the sofa, and her vehicle hit the median and overturned. A Highway Patrol trooper ticketed the driver for failure to drive within a single lane. A Highway Patrol spokesman initially defended the ticket. But after several media outlets picked up the story, supervisors met and agreed to ask prosecutors to drop the ticket.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3vsAWWk
via IFTTT

The former lingerie salesman who has Putin’s knickers in a twist

This week we interview Eliot Higgins, founder and executive director of the online investigative collective Bellingcat and author of We Are Bellingcat.

Bellingcat has produced remarkable investigative scoops on everything from Saddam’s use of chemical weapons to exposing the Russian FSB operatives who killed Sergei Skripal with Novichok, and, most impressive, calling a member of the FSB team that tried to kill Navalny and getting him to confess. Eliot talks about the origins of the effort (as a part-time break from his job at a lingerie company), the techniques that make Bellingcat so effective, and the hazards, physical and moral, that surround crowdsourced investigations.

In the news, Dave Aitel gives us the latest on the Chinese Exchange server attacks, and the reckless hack-everyone spree that was apparently triggered by Microsoft’s patch of the vulnerability.

Jamil Jaffer introduces us to the vulnerability of the week – dependency confusion, and the startling speed with which it is being exploited.

I ask Nate Jones and the rest of the panel what all this means for government policy.  No one thinks that the Biden administration’s published cyberstrategy tells us anything useful. More interesting are two deep dives on cyber strategy from people with a long history in the field. We see Jim Lewis’s talk on the topic as a sign of his evolution in the direction of much harsher responses to Russian and Chinese intrusions. Dmitri Alperovich’s approach also has a hard edge, although he points out that the utter irresponsibility of the Chinese pwn-em-all tactic  deserves an especially harsh response.  I ask why Cyber Command didn’t respond by releasing a worm that would install poorly secured shells on every Exchange server in China.

In other news, I blame poor (or rushed) DOD lawyering for the district court ruling that DOD couldn’t list Xiaomi as an entity aligned with the Chinese military. Jamil is more charitable both to DOD and the Judge who made the ruling, but he expects (or maybe just hopes) that the court of appeal will show DOD more deference.

Twitter, on the other hand, is praying that the Northern District of California suffers from full-blown Red State Derangement, as it asks the court there to enjoin the Texas Attorney General’s investigation into possible anticompetitive coordination in the Great Deplatforming of January 2021. Nate gives us the basics on the lawsuit. I observe that, to bring such a Hail Mary of a case, Twitter must deeply fear what its own employees were saying about the deplatforming at the time. Neither Nate nor I give Twitter a high probability of success. And even if this case does succeed, red states are lining up a host of new laws and regulatory initiatives for Silicon Valley, most notably Gov. DeSantis’s controversial effort to navigate section 230 and the first amendment.

Nate also provides a remarkably clear explanation of the sordid tale of European intelligence and law enforcement agencies trying to cut a special deal for themselves in the face of surveillance-hostile rulings from the EU’s Court of Justice. The agencies are right to want to avoid those foolish decisions, but leaving the US on the hook will only inflame trans-Atlantic relations.

In quick hits, Jamil and Dave talk about Israel’s Unit 8200, which offers a better cybersecurity VC alumni network than Stanford. Playing to type, I close with This Week in Sex Toy Security and immediately display my naivete: Wearables, who knew?  But the security lapses in what Dave calls the internet of junk at least offer us a new, more explicit interpretation of a man-in-the-middle attack.

And more!

Download the 353rd Episode (mp3) 

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

 

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3qLZqXb
via IFTTT

The former lingerie salesman who has Putin’s knickers in a twist

This week we interview Eliot Higgins, founder and executive director of the online investigative collective Bellingcat and author of We Are Bellingcat.

Bellingcat has produced remarkable investigative scoops on everything from Saddam’s use of chemical weapons to exposing the Russian FSB operatives who killed Sergei Skripal with Novichok, and, most impressive, calling a member of the FSB team that tried to kill Navalny and getting him to confess. Eliot talks about the origins of the effort (as a part-time break from his job at a lingerie company), the techniques that make Bellingcat so effective, and the hazards, physical and moral, that surround crowdsourced investigations.

In the news, Dave Aitel gives us the latest on the Chinese Exchange server attacks, and the reckless hack-everyone spree that was apparently triggered by Microsoft’s patch of the vulnerability.

Jamil Jaffer introduces us to the vulnerability of the week – dependency confusion, and the startling speed with which it is being exploited.

I ask Nate Jones and the rest of the panel what all this means for government policy.  No one thinks that the Biden administration’s published cyberstrategy tells us anything useful. More interesting are two deep dives on cyber strategy from people with a long history in the field. We see Jim Lewis’s talk on the topic as a sign of his evolution in the direction of much harsher responses to Russian and Chinese intrusions. Dmitri Alperovich’s approach also has a hard edge, although he points out that the utter irresponsibility of the Chinese pwn-em-all tactic  deserves an especially harsh response.  I ask why Cyber Command didn’t respond by releasing a worm that would install poorly secured shells on every Exchange server in China.

In other news, I blame poor (or rushed) DOD lawyering for the district court ruling that DOD couldn’t list Xiaomi as an entity aligned with the Chinese military. Jamil is more charitable both to DOD and the Judge who made the ruling, but he expects (or maybe just hopes) that the court of appeal will show DOD more deference.

Twitter, on the other hand, is praying that the Northern District of California suffers from full-blown Red State Derangement, as it asks the court there to enjoin the Texas Attorney General’s investigation into possible anticompetitive coordination in the Great Deplatforming of January 2021. Nate gives us the basics on the lawsuit. I observe that, to bring such a Hail Mary of a case, Twitter must deeply fear what its own employees were saying about the deplatforming at the time. Neither Nate nor I give Twitter a high probability of success. And even if this case does succeed, red states are lining up a host of new laws and regulatory initiatives for Silicon Valley, most notably Gov. DeSantis’s controversial effort to navigate section 230 and the first amendment.

Nate also provides a remarkably clear explanation of the sordid tale of European intelligence and law enforcement agencies trying to cut a special deal for themselves in the face of surveillance-hostile rulings from the EU’s Court of Justice. The agencies are right to want to avoid those foolish decisions, but leaving the US on the hook will only inflame trans-Atlantic relations.

In quick hits, Jamil and Dave talk about Israel’s Unit 8200, which offers a better cybersecurity VC alumni network than Stanford. Playing to type, I close with This Week in Sex Toy Security and immediately display my naivete: Wearables, who knew?  But the security lapses in what Dave calls the internet of junk at least offer us a new, more explicit interpretation of a man-in-the-middle attack.

And more!

Download the 353rd Episode (mp3) 

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

 

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3qLZqXb
via IFTTT

Let’s Talk About Our Relationship with the State

sfphotosfour895445-2

The Reason Roundtable mixes up the regular crew as Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie are joined by Reason Reporter Eric Boehm, filling in for Peter Suderman.

Discussed in the show:

0:29: A debrief of Biden’s coronavirus anniversary speech on March 12
4:01: Eric Boehm’s expertise on the COVID bill’s shortcomings
23:10: Katherine woo-hoos about vaccines
30:24: Cuomo has not resigned yet. Maybe that’s a good thing?
41:33: Weekly Listener Question: I love the aesthetic of the magazine, especially in the early days. I don’t know much about art and design, but I’d like to take that sort of vibe into my home decor. Is there a name of it? Are there a few artists you could tell me the name of that might give me some inspiration?
46:19: Media recommendations for the week

This week’s links:

Send your questions either by email to roundtable@reason.com or by voicemail to 213-973-3017. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.

Today’s sponsor:

  • Donor-advised funds are the simple, tax-friendly, secure way to give. Why not work with the fund that matches your values? For Roundtable listeners, that’s DonorsTrust. Get your free Donor Prospectus to see how DonorsTrust can be your principled charitable partner at DonorsTrust.org/Reason.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Assistant production by Regan Taylor.
Music: “Angeline,” by The Brothers Steve.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3qRMY82
via IFTTT

Can Law Review Submissions Be Improved?

Oona Hathaway has a very interesting thread on this year’s law review submission process. Like Will, I think the current student-run law review system is pretty good. If we’re in the market for reforms, though, we should look for changes that (1) reduce the burden on student editors, while (2) preserving the information added by journal placements, and (3) if possible, preserving the information otherwise added by expedite requests.

One possible answer: accepting journals should impose stricter limits on the number of expedites, and somewhat looser limits on the time for considering expedites.

—

Contra some of the Twitter commentary, it’s good that there’s a hierarchy of journals. Life is short, and one can only read so much. A better journal placement is on average a useful signal of article quality, compared to the other indicators one might use to make the cut (author names, titles, catchy abstracts unreflective of the piece as a whole, …).

And it’s good that there are expedites. Especially as one moves up the rankings, interest from other journals is a useful signal too. Yes, there’s a danger of cross-institution groupthink, but there’s also a benefit from pulling well-liked articles out of a very large pile. The more overworked the student editors are, the less compelling “just read all the pieces more carefully” becomes.

But the current system, of multiple submission and fast-moving expedites, overwhelms student editors too. So can we get the benefits without the costs?

—

Imagine that journals were to broadly adopt a no-expedite rule, displaying it prominently (and securing explicit consent) during the submission process. By submitting an article, you’d legally commit to accepting the first law-review offer you’re given, and to withdrawing your article from every other such journal within a set time.

(This could be enforced through various kinds of partially exclusive IP licensing. It might entail posting the author contract publicly, but that itself might be a benefit! And it could also be enforced technologically: once a journal told Scholastica about the acceptance, the piece could be auto-withdrawn everywhere else.)

In that world, authors would slow down their pace of submissions, hesitating to submit too far down their list for fear of an immediate acceptance. Blast-submissions might still happen, but every time a blast-submitted article were accepted somewhere, the auto-withdrawals would shrink the pile everywhere else.

Each journal would get more time to read each submission, allowing for better consideration without really delaying the publication calendar (which is mercifully quick in law, at least as compared to other disciplines). Information from placements would still be preserved, as reflected in authors’ judgments of where to submit. Those market signals would be more muted, though, as they’d rely on the authors’ decisions of when to submit and where, and authors might have inaccurate expectations (or be unsure how best to work the system, etc).

—

If that’s too far a stretch, suppose that everyone limited the number of expedites to some small but nonzero number—say, three. Suppose that, on receiving an offer, an author committed to accepting that offer OR to naming, within a set time, a maximum of three journals for expedite requests. (This, too, could be enforced by licensing and/or by the submission system.)

The three journal names could be provided quickly, but the consideration by the three journals could be slower. Accepting journals could afford to wait a little longer than they currently do, as three named expedites are less likely to lose them the piece than the unlimited expedites under the current system.

Again, because the authors get to choose where to submit (and where to expedite), information from placements is preserved. And having a small number of expedites might allow for more accurate market signals than a no-expedite rule, without overwhelming everyone else up the chain.

There wouldn’t be quite as much market information as in the unlimited-expedite system, and and authors (including me) would surely stress more about which three journals to name as expedites. And journals’ failure to tell authors when their pieces have been silently rejected would be a real problem for choosing expedite venues.

But under the current system, the student editors’ workload might be so high as to trade off with the quality of consideration, and also to distract them from sending rejection notices. If so, the reform’s potential downsides might be worth it.

—

Note that this system, once it catches on, might also have some staying power. The top-end journals once tried to guarantee long expedite windows, something that’s harder to do for the mid-ranked journals that compete against them. Each journal has a strong incentive to give narrower windows, so it’s hard for a long-window norm to catch on.

But requiring immediate acceptance generally acts in an individual journal’s favor. Not many people will turn down YLJ, and even fewer would refuse to submit there so as to preserve their right to turn them down. So if a few journals at the top start restricting expedites, each next tier down might find it easier to jump on board, and they likely wouldn’t lose many submissions as a result.

I imagine this would eventually shake out with a few journals at the top allowing some expedites (in name more than in reality), the next rung of journals (the kind with 2-hour expedite windows) requiring immediate acceptance, and then the rungs after that permitting whatever becomes the standard number of expedites.

And I don’t think this system, once in place, would easily unzip. Maybe student editors at lower-ranking journals would offer more expedites as a marketing move (“Submit here! We’ll let you try again elsewhere!”), but it seems unlikely.

So a move to limit expedites could be reasonably durable, and it might be a good way to reform the system overall.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3qJU1zO
via IFTTT

Bipartisan Support of Child Tax Credits Is Too Hasty

dreamstime_xxl_13647542

The ink had barely dried on the American Rescue Plan Act signed into law by President Joe Biden before calls began to make permanent the expanded child tax credit that the law provides as a one-year emergency measure for 2021.

“Democratic leaders are banking on some of the aid provisions being so popular that letting them expire would be a political nightmare, painful enough for Americans that even Republicans couldn’t stand in the way. At the top of the list is making permanent the expanded child tax credit,” Politico reported.

It cited a press release from Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D–Conn.) who even before the COVID-19 stimulus passed was insisting, “Children and families must be able to count on this benefit long after the end of this pandemic.”

Michael Gerson, who was a White House aide to President George W. Bush, wrote a Washington Post column headlined, “The child tax credit is a conservative dream fulfilled. Let’s help make it permanent.”

Gerson reasons that the refundable tax credit of $3,600 or $3,000 “will be the functional equivalent of a school voucher—money they can use at any private or religious school. This is the fulfillment by liberals of a conservative policy dream.”

The politics of this are indeed perilous for potential opponents. Allowing the expanded refundable tax credit to expire as scheduled after a year will be described as “plunging 4.1 million children into poverty” or “cutting $1 trillion in funding for poor children.”

But the politics of a $1 trillion (over 10 years) increase in no-strings-attached welfare spending aren’t exactly so easy for advocates, either.

Two comparison cases can provide some useful context. Jonathan Tepperman’s 2016 book The Fix describes the “Bolsa Família,” or family grant, that was a signature initiative of Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. When the program launched in 2003, Tepperman writes, “most experts and international organizations still considered the idea of simply handing money straight to the poor to be dangerously wrongheaded. It just felt wrong, on an intuitive level.” Tepperman writes that people assumed the poor would “just blow the money on booze, cigarettes” or jewelry.

Lula told Tepperman that a key to winning political support for the program was requiring beneficiaries to commit to positive behaviors. “The idea was to show that we are not giving away money for free,” Lula said.

Participants had to get regular medical checkups for themselves and their families, and make sure their children between ages 6 and 15 attended school at least 85 percent of the time. Pregnant women had to get prenatal care. And the rules were enforced; in 2006, by Tepperman’s account, the Brazilian ministry of social development cut off payments to half a million recipients who had failed to hold up their ends of the bargain.

In New York City, a randomized controlled trial tested the effect of paying 600 families cash rewards for behavior such as getting medical checkups, attending school, getting good grades in school, or working full time. A study of the “Family Rewards 2.0” program found it “met its short-term goals of increasing income and reducing poverty, for all families and across a range of family types. The program also increased dental visits and adults’ self-reported health status, particularly for those in poorer health at study entry. However, the program led to reductions in work and earnings for some participants. Moreover, the model did not affect students’ progress in school.” In addition, the program was costly to administer—for every dollar in rewards to families, a dollar and seven cents were spent on consultants, staff salaries, and partner organizations.

Whether poverty can be cured by government handouts or whether it is a problem of bad habits is a long-running controversy. Will the recipients of the $3,600 “Joe Dole,” as welfare reform advocate Mickey Kaus dubs it after Biden, spend it on Catholic school tuition, or on cigarettes and lottery tickets?

A test of a no-strings-attached $500 a month payment to 125 adults in Stockton, California during 12 months in 2019 and 2020 found “less than 1 percent of the tracked purchases were for tobacco and alcohol.” Education spending also tracked at about that same level—a monthly average of 0.83 percent.

The record of the old Aid to Families With Dependent Children program is contested but eventually was clear enough to the voting public that a Democrat, Bill Clinton, got elected president in a significant measure on the basis of a promise to end welfare as we know it.

The prudent move now would be to test the refundable expanded child tax credit in a state or a city, or empirically evaluate the nationwide results after one year, before making a trillion-dollar 10-year or “permanent” commitment. Maybe one place could try it no-strings, and another place could try it with conditions attached, and the results can be compared. No one wants to be excessively paternalistic. If “free money” makes the poor children better off, great. But if it just subsidizes bad parental habits and doesn’t improve outcomes for children, skip it. These aren’t deep philosophical questions. They are empirical ones.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3bNCpi4
via IFTTT

Let’s Talk About Our Relationship with the State

sfphotosfour895445-2

The Reason Roundtable mixes up the regular crew as Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie are joined by Reason Reporter Eric Boehm, filling in for Peter Suderman.

Discussed in the show:

0:29: A debrief of Biden’s coronavirus anniversary speech on March 12
4:01: Eric Boehm’s expertise on the COVID bill’s shortcomings
23:10: Katherine woo-hoos about vaccines
30:24: Cuomo has not resigned yet. Maybe that’s a good thing?
41:33: Weekly Listener Question: I love the aesthetic of the magazine, especially in the early days. I don’t know much about art and design, but I’d like to take that sort of vibe into my home decor. Is there a name of it? Are there a few artists you could tell me the name of that might give me some inspiration?
46:19: Media recommendations for the week

This week’s links:

Send your questions either by email to roundtable@reason.com or by voicemail to 213-973-3017. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.

Today’s sponsor:

  • Donor-advised funds are the simple, tax-friendly, secure way to give. Why not work with the fund that matches your values? For Roundtable listeners, that’s DonorsTrust. Get your free Donor Prospectus to see how DonorsTrust can be your principled charitable partner at DonorsTrust.org/Reason.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Assistant production by Regan Taylor.
Music: “Angeline,” by The Brothers Steve.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3qRMY82
via IFTTT

Can Law Review Submissions Be Improved?

Oona Hathaway has a very interesting thread on this year’s law review submission process. Like Will, I think the current student-run law review system is pretty good. If we’re in the market for reforms, though, we should look for changes that (1) reduce the burden on student editors, while (2) preserving the information added by journal placements, and (3) if possible, preserving the information otherwise added by expedite requests.

One possible answer: accepting journals should impose stricter limits on the number of expedites, and somewhat looser limits on the time for considering expedites.

—

Contra some of the Twitter commentary, it’s good that there’s a hierarchy of journals. Life is short, and one can only read so much. A better journal placement is on average a useful signal of article quality, compared to the other indicators one might use to make the cut (author names, titles, catchy abstracts unreflective of the piece as a whole, …).

And it’s good that there are expedites. Especially as one moves up the rankings, interest from other journals is a useful signal too. Yes, there’s a danger of cross-institution groupthink, but there’s also a benefit from pulling well-liked articles out of a very large pile. The more overworked the student editors are, the less compelling “just read all the pieces more carefully” becomes.

But the current system, of multiple submission and fast-moving expedites, overwhelms student editors too. So can we get the benefits without the costs?

—

Imagine that journals were to broadly adopt a no-expedite rule, displaying it prominently (and securing explicit consent) during the submission process. By submitting an article, you’d legally commit to accepting the first law-review offer you’re given, and to withdrawing your article from every other such journal within a set time.

(This could be enforced through various kinds of partially exclusive IP licensing. It might entail posting the author contract publicly, but that itself might be a benefit! And it could also be enforced technologically: once a journal told Scholastica about the acceptance, the piece could be auto-withdrawn everywhere else.)

In that world, authors would slow down their pace of submissions, hesitating to submit too far down their list for fear of an immediate acceptance. Blast-submissions might still happen, but every time a blast-submitted article were accepted somewhere, the auto-withdrawals would shrink the pile everywhere else.

Each journal would get more time to read each submission, allowing for better consideration without really delaying the publication calendar (which is mercifully quick in law, at least as compared to other disciplines). Information from placements would still be preserved, as reflected in authors’ judgments of where to submit. Those market signals would be more muted, though, as they’d rely on the authors’ decisions of when to submit and where, and authors might have inaccurate expectations (or be unsure how best to work the system, etc).

—

If that’s too far a stretch, suppose that everyone limited the number of expedites to some small but nonzero number—say, three. Suppose that, on receiving an offer, an author committed to accepting that offer OR to naming, within a set time, a maximum of three journals for expedite requests. (This, too, could be enforced by licensing and/or by the submission system.)

The three journal names could be provided quickly, but the consideration by the three journals could be slower. Accepting journals could afford to wait a little longer than they currently do, as three named expedites are less likely to lose them the piece than the unlimited expedites under the current system.

Again, because the authors get to choose where to submit (and where to expedite), information from placements is preserved. And having a small number of expedites might allow for more accurate market signals than a no-expedite rule, without overwhelming everyone else up the chain.

There wouldn’t be quite as much market information as in the unlimited-expedite system, and and authors (including me) would surely stress more about which three journals to name as expedites. And journals’ failure to tell authors when their pieces have been silently rejected would be a real problem for choosing expedite venues.

But under the current system, the student editors’ workload might be so high as to trade off with the quality of consideration, and also to distract them from sending rejection notices. If so, the reform’s potential downsides might be worth it.

—

Note that this system, once it catches on, might also have some staying power. The top-end journals once tried to guarantee long expedite windows, something that’s harder to do for the mid-ranked journals that compete against them. Each journal has a strong incentive to give narrower windows, so it’s hard for a long-window norm to catch on.

But requiring immediate acceptance generally acts in an individual journal’s favor. Not many people will turn down YLJ, and even fewer would refuse to submit there so as to preserve their right to turn them down. So if a few journals at the top start restricting expedites, each next tier down might find it easier to jump on board, and they likely wouldn’t lose many submissions as a result.

I imagine this would eventually shake out with a few journals at the top allowing some expedites (in name more than in reality), the next rung of journals (the kind with 2-hour expedite windows) requiring immediate acceptance, and then the rungs after that permitting whatever becomes the standard number of expedites.

And I don’t think this system, once in place, would easily unzip. Maybe student editors at lower-ranking journals would offer more expedites as a marketing move (“Submit here! We’ll let you try again elsewhere!”), but it seems unlikely.

So a move to limit expedites could be reasonably durable, and it might be a good way to reform the system overall.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3qJU1zO
via IFTTT

Bipartisan Support of Child Tax Credits Is Too Hasty

dreamstime_xxl_13647542

The ink had barely dried on the American Rescue Plan Act signed into law by President Joe Biden before calls began to make permanent the expanded child tax credit that the law provides as a one-year emergency measure for 2021.

“Democratic leaders are banking on some of the aid provisions being so popular that letting them expire would be a political nightmare, painful enough for Americans that even Republicans couldn’t stand in the way. At the top of the list is making permanent the expanded child tax credit,” Politico reported.

It cited a press release from Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D–Conn.) who even before the COVID-19 stimulus passed was insisting, “Children and families must be able to count on this benefit long after the end of this pandemic.”

Michael Gerson, who was a White House aide to President George W. Bush, wrote a Washington Post column headlined, “The child tax credit is a conservative dream fulfilled. Let’s help make it permanent.”

Gerson reasons that the refundable tax credit of $3,600 or $3,000 “will be the functional equivalent of a school voucher—money they can use at any private or religious school. This is the fulfillment by liberals of a conservative policy dream.”

The politics of this are indeed perilous for potential opponents. Allowing the expanded refundable tax credit to expire as scheduled after a year will be described as “plunging 4.1 million children into poverty” or “cutting $1 trillion in funding for poor children.”

But the politics of a $1 trillion (over 10 years) increase in no-strings-attached welfare spending aren’t exactly so easy for advocates, either.

Two comparison cases can provide some useful context. Jonathan Tepperman’s 2016 book The Fix describes the “Bolsa Família,” or family grant, that was a signature initiative of Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. When the program launched in 2003, Tepperman writes, “most experts and international organizations still considered the idea of simply handing money straight to the poor to be dangerously wrongheaded. It just felt wrong, on an intuitive level.” Tepperman writes that people assumed the poor would “just blow the money on booze, cigarettes” or jewelry.

Lula told Tepperman that a key to winning political support for the program was requiring beneficiaries to commit to positive behaviors. “The idea was to show that we are not giving away money for free,” Lula said.

Participants had to get regular medical checkups for themselves and their families, and make sure their children between ages 6 and 15 attended school at least 85 percent of the time. Pregnant women had to get prenatal care. And the rules were enforced; in 2006, by Tepperman’s account, the Brazilian ministry of social development cut off payments to half a million recipients who had failed to hold up their ends of the bargain.

In New York City, a randomized controlled trial tested the effect of paying 600 families cash rewards for behavior such as getting medical checkups, attending school, getting good grades in school, or working full time. A study of the “Family Rewards 2.0” program found it “met its short-term goals of increasing income and reducing poverty, for all families and across a range of family types. The program also increased dental visits and adults’ self-reported health status, particularly for those in poorer health at study entry. However, the program led to reductions in work and earnings for some participants. Moreover, the model did not affect students’ progress in school.” In addition, the program was costly to administer—for every dollar in rewards to families, a dollar and seven cents were spent on consultants, staff salaries, and partner organizations.

Whether poverty can be cured by government handouts or whether it is a problem of bad habits is a long-running controversy. Will the recipients of the $3,600 “Joe Dole,” as welfare reform advocate Mickey Kaus dubs it after Biden, spend it on Catholic school tuition, or on cigarettes and lottery tickets?

A test of a no-strings-attached $500 a month payment to 125 adults in Stockton, California during 12 months in 2019 and 2020 found “less than 1 percent of the tracked purchases were for tobacco and alcohol.” Education spending also tracked at about that same level—a monthly average of 0.83 percent.

The record of the old Aid to Families With Dependent Children program is contested but eventually was clear enough to the voting public that a Democrat, Bill Clinton, got elected president in a significant measure on the basis of a promise to end welfare as we know it.

The prudent move now would be to test the refundable expanded child tax credit in a state or a city, or empirically evaluate the nationwide results after one year, before making a trillion-dollar 10-year or “permanent” commitment. Maybe one place could try it no-strings, and another place could try it with conditions attached, and the results can be compared. No one wants to be excessively paternalistic. If “free money” makes the poor children better off, great. But if it just subsidizes bad parental habits and doesn’t improve outcomes for children, skip it. These aren’t deep philosophical questions. They are empirical ones.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3bNCpi4
via IFTTT

Can Law Review Submissions Be Improved?

Oona Hathaway has a very interesting thread on this year’s law review submission process. Like Will, I think the current student-run law review system is pretty good. If we’re in the market for reforms, though, we should look for changes that (1) reduce the burden on student editors, while (2) preserving the information added by journal placements, and (3) if possible, preserving the information otherwise added by expedite requests.

One possible answer: accepting journals should impose stricter limits on the number of expedites, and somewhat looser limits on the time for considering expedites.

—

Contra some of the Twitter commentary, it’s good that there’s a hierarchy of journals. Life is short, and one can only read so much. A better journal placement is on average a useful signal of article quality, compared to the other indicators one might use to make the cut (author names, titles, catchy abstracts unreflective of the piece as a whole, …).

And it’s good that there are expedites. Especially as one moves up the rankings, interest from other journals is a useful signal too. Yes, there’s a danger of cross-institution groupthink, but there’s also a benefit from pulling well-liked articles out of a very large pile. The more overworked the student editors are, the less compelling “just read all the pieces more carefully” becomes.

But the current system, of multiple submission and fast-moving expedites, overwhelms student editors too. So can we get the benefits without the costs?

—

Imagine that journals were to broadly adopt a no-expedite rule, displaying it prominently (and securing explicit consent) during the submission process. By submitting an article, you’d legally commit to accepting the first law-review offer you’re given, and to withdrawing your article from every other such journal within a set time.

(This could be enforced through various kinds of partially exclusive IP licensing. It might entail posting the author contract publicly, but that itself might be a benefit! And it could also be enforced technologically: once a journal told Scholastica about the acceptance, the piece could be auto-withdrawn everywhere else.)

In that world, authors would slow down their pace of submissions, hesitating to submit too far down their list for fear of an immediate acceptance. Blast-submissions might still happen, but every time a blast-submitted article were accepted somewhere, the auto-withdrawals would shrink the pile everywhere else.

Each journal would get more time to read each submission, allowing for better consideration without really delaying the publication calendar (which is mercifully quick in law, at least as compared to other disciplines). Information from placements would still be preserved, as reflected in authors’ judgments of where to submit. Those market signals would be more muted, though, as they’d rely on the authors’ decisions of when to submit and where, and authors might have inaccurate expectations (or be unsure how best to work the system, etc).

—

If that’s too far a stretch, suppose that everyone limited the number of expedites to some small but nonzero number—say, three. Suppose that, on receiving an offer, an author committed to accepting that offer OR to naming, within a set time, a maximum of three journals for expedite requests. (This, too, could be enforced by licensing and/or by the submission system.)

The three journal names could be provided quickly, but the consideration by the three journals could be slower. Accepting journals could afford to wait a little longer than they currently do, as three named expedites are less likely to lose them the piece than the unlimited expedites under the current system.

Again, because the authors get to choose where to submit (and where to expedite), information from placements is preserved. And having a small number of expedites might allow for more accurate market signals than a no-expedite rule, without overwhelming everyone else up the chain.

There wouldn’t be quite as much market information as in the unlimited-expedite system, and and authors (including me) would surely stress more about which three journals to name as expedites. And journals’ failure to tell authors when their pieces have been silently rejected would be a real problem for choosing expedite venues.

But under the current system, the student editors’ workload might be so high as to trade off with the quality of consideration, and also to distract them from sending rejection notices. If so, the reform’s potential downsides might be worth it.

—

Note that this system, once it catches on, might also have some staying power. The top-end journals once tried to guarantee long expedite windows, something that’s harder to do for the mid-ranked journals that compete against them. Each journal has a strong incentive to give narrower windows, so it’s hard for a long-window norm to catch on.

But requiring immediate acceptance generally acts in an individual journal’s favor. Not many people will turn down YLJ, and even fewer would refuse to submit there so as to preserve their right to turn them down. So if a few journals at the top start restricting expedites, each next tier down might find it easier to jump on board, and they likely wouldn’t lose many submissions as a result.

I imagine this would eventually shake out with a few journals at the top allowing some expedites (in name more than in reality), the next rung of journals (the kind with 2-hour expedite windows) requiring immediate acceptance, and then the rungs after that permitting whatever becomes the standard number of expedites.

And I don’t think this system, once in place, would easily unzip. Maybe student editors at lower-ranking journals would offer more expedites as a marketing move (“Submit here! We’ll let you try again elsewhere!”), but it seems unlikely.

So a move to limit expedites could be reasonably durable, and it might be a good way to reform the system overall.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3qJU1zO
via IFTTT