Tag: news

The Legal Academy, Episode 3: Sarah Lawsky

There’s a lot going on in the country right now.  But for law professors and others interested in legal academia who want a distraction, here’s the third episode of my new show The Legal Academy.  The guest is Sarah Lawsky of Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.  Topics include Sarah’s invaluable entry-level hiring report; the world of tax scholarship and how it’s different from other fields (and how to evaluate tax scholars if you aren’t one); lateral hiring and visits; and being an associate dean.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3eEhQU3
via IFTTT

The Legal Academy, Episode 3: Sarah Lawsky

There’s a lot going on in the country right now.  But for law professors and others interested in legal academia who want a distraction, here’s the third episode of my new show The Legal Academy.  The guest is Sarah Lawsky of Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.  Topics include Sarah’s invaluable entry-level hiring report; the world of tax scholarship and how it’s different from other fields (and how to evaluate tax scholars if you aren’t one); lateral hiring and visits; and being an associate dean.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3eEhQU3
via IFTTT

COVID-19 and the Collapse of Complex Societies

With the world experiencing the worst pandemic since 1918, people may be wondering whether our way of life is secure. Looking at how civilizational breakdown has happened before can help us understand what causes it, the forms it may take, and whether it’s in our future.

Civilizational crisis and collapse were given a formal scholarly definition in Joseph A. Tainter’s 1988 book, The Collapse of Complex Societies. The model works this way: Since at least the advent of agriculture, people have responded to challenges and sought to improve their condition. One form this takes is through social cooperation, an approach that leads to more complex forms of economy, society, and politics.

In the abstract, complexity means higher levels of heterogeneity, as opposed to uniformity. In concrete economic terms, it means more elaborate division of labor, a larger number of distinct occupations, and greater specialization both geographically and among people. Socially, it means a greater number of roles and ways of living, more variety in the stages of life, increased differentiation, and more varied and changeable interpersonal relations. Politically, it means more structured political units, more elaborate administration, and higher levels of urbanization. Complexity in all of these forms brings a positive payoff in terms of more production, higher living standards, more inventiveness, and more varied and commodious lifestyles. In other words, it pays to move toward more complex ways of doing things.

But there are limits to this approach. Complexity has diminishing marginal returns: The gains from complexity decrease as complexity increases, while the costs (such as information problems and difficulty changing course) become greater. Eventually, increased complexity has negative returns. Moreover, as social, economic, and political orders become more complex, they also become more fragile and brittle, less resilient and adaptable. They have a harder time coping with unexpected shocks (or even shocks that are anticipated). As the system becomes more interdependent—in ways that the people who are part of it do not fully understand—it becomes susceptible to a general breakdown caused by “cascade effects,” which happen when a failure in one part of the system leads to unforeseeable failures in other parts. These failures may have no obvious connection to the original problem, and they in turn lead to further breakdowns elsewhere.

Underlying all of this is the fundamental reality of limited resources, which imposes constraints on the level of complexity that a given type of economic and social organization can support. The limits usually lurk in the background, but as levels of population, human activity, and complexity reach such constraints, they start to pinch in many ways. It is that pressure that brings the collapse of a complex order.

For Tainter and his successors, the process of civilizational breakdown is actually one of decomposition of complex forms of organization into simpler and less diverse ones. This has many aspects, including a decline in population and urbanization; a move from large polities to smaller, more local ones; and a decay of elaborate trade systems and divisions of labor. Sometimes the process is arrested or even reversed, and sometimes it continues until a new, simpler equilibrium is reached.

Importantly, collapse does not usually mean cataclysm: The process takes place over two or three human lifetimes rather than as a single, dramatic event. A number of indicators suggest that a society is entering such an episode: overproduction of elites; intensified social conflict; diminishing returns on investment across the whole range of assets; increasingly severe shortages of key resources and materials; conflicts over access to resources between groups and states; large-scale migration; and increasingly severe environmental degradation. One common feature is widespread epidemics. Another is famines, caused as much by interruptions to the food supply and distribution system as by natural events. All these things are both causes and components of the process of collapse.

Much of human history consequently has a cyclical quality. A society will start off relatively simple (“undeveloped,” we might say) and gradually become more complex, sophisticated, and wealthy. Eventually it reaches the limits of that process and a crisis ensues. It may adapt or surmount it, but more often it does not; the society returns to a simpler, less complex form. There are several well-known examples of this, such as the collapse of the classical Mayan civilization in the eighth and ninth centuries, the breakdown of the ancient civilizations of the Middle East and the lands around the Mediterranean in the sixth century, and the disintegration of the civilizations of the late Bronze Age in the 12th century B.C. It has happened several times in Chinese history.

Yet the process is not straightforwardly cyclical. Sometimes civilizations rebound, as the Roman Empire did after the great crisis of the third century. Between 235 and 284 A.D. there were over 50 recognized emperors or claimants to that title; the empire was riven by civil wars, barbarian invasions, massive epidemics, currency debasement, and peasant rebellions. Toward the end, it had effectively split into three states. But a series of soldier-emperors restored and stabilized Roman civilization, and it went on to flourish for another two centuries. The simplification process can also be arrested at a level of complexity above that of original simplicity.

There is a force that works against the dynamic identified by Tainter: the process of innovation, derived from a combination of human ingenuity and the liberty that gives it expression and encourages it. The innovative process, spurred by the challenges that arise when society reaches a natural limit, may open up ways of pushing that limit further out and so checking or reversing the breakdown.

Since 1300, the world has experienced two major episodes of civilizational crisis on a global scale. In the 14th century, the Black Death killed around 40 percent of the population of Eurasia, urban life went into decline in many places, there was a dramatic slump in long-distance trade, and the level of political unrest and war rose dramatically all over the Old World. In the 17th century, the Little Ice Age helped produce popular rebellions from the Atlantic to the Pacific, culminating in violent revolutions in 1648–49 in almost every part of Europe—and sometimes beyond. Again, there was a severe economic slowdown and a global decline of long-distance trade. But on both occasions, although the damage was considerable, human civilization survived in all parts of the world.

Since the middle of the 18th century, the world has pushed up against natural limits several times. It happened in the period from the 1770s through the first decade of the 1800s, it happened in the period from the later 1840s through the 1860s, and it happened at the turn of the 20th century. These were all times when an existing level of technology began to reach the limit of complexity it could sustain, leading to economic and political breakdowns. On each of these occasions there was a major crisis, marked by the classic signs of systemic stress and collapse, but the outcome was not a collapse. In the modern world, unlike most pre-modern eras, each crisis has led to a breakthrough to a higher level of complexity, as the resource limit is pushed back.

It seems very likely that we are experiencing another instance of this phenomenon. We certainly see many signs of a crisis of complexity. This probably explains the current popular fascination with novels, movies, TV shows, comic books, and video games centering on the breakdown of civilization, with the precipitating disasters ranging from plagues to asteroid impacts to nuclear war to zombies. Alongside all this fiction is a flourishing prepper industry and subculture. This sort of apocalyptic thinking tends to lull and surge, and lately we’ve been experiencing the latter. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

A major pandemic is one of the classic markers of a civilizational crisis. All of our systems are being put through a stress test. We will discover which are resilient and robust, which are fragile and brittle, and which are actually antifragile—thriving on the breakdown of structures. Fortunately, by looking at the signs of systemic stress, we can observe that human ingenuity is producing technologies and ways of doing things that will very likely enable us to overcome this time of troubles. We may be facing challenges, perhaps lasting many years. But we should be confident that global civilization will overcome this, as it has before.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2ZYMQde
via IFTTT

The Social Contract Between Government And People Is Unraveling

The Social Contract Between Government And People Is Unraveling

Tyler Durden

Tue, 06/02/2020 – 06:00

Authored by Mark Glennon via Wirepoints.org,

Numbers, budgets, charts and graphs about government finances. That’s what we do here. We try to understand where public money should be spent and what it accomplishes.

Through that lens, it’s difficult to know where to begin on what has befallen the Chicago area and most of the country.

For now, this simple observation seems paramount:

The most fundamental element of the social contract between government and the people is cracking.

That’s the obligation of government to keep its citizens safe. For that, we surrender a portion of of our freedom and wealth to government for the collective good.

That arrangement has been recognized as a foundational philosophy of civil society since Thomas Hobbes articulated it over 300 years ago.

Thomas Hobbes

Citizens expect government to protect their lives and adhere to to a civil process even when being arrested, just as they expect to be protected from riots and looting. Both expectations are now broken.

“The sight of looters and arsonists pillaging stores at will has shaken the confidence of many that law enforcement is capable of maintaining the peace. It has also tainted the very real grief felt over the tragic loss of life.”

That’s not from a source that’s unsympathetic to George Floyd or protesters. It’s from an editorial in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

What will be the consequences breaking the social contract? Speculate if you want, but know that it may extend far beyond George Floyd’s murder and the resulting violence.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2MrD2jP Tyler Durden

COVID-19 and the Collapse of Complex Societies

With the world experiencing the worst pandemic since 1918, people may be wondering whether our way of life is secure. Looking at how civilizational breakdown has happened before can help us understand what causes it, the forms it may take, and whether it’s in our future.

Civilizational crisis and collapse were given a formal scholarly definition in Joseph A. Tainter’s 1988 book, The Collapse of Complex Societies. The model works this way: Since at least the advent of agriculture, people have responded to challenges and sought to improve their condition. One form this takes is through social cooperation, an approach that leads to more complex forms of economy, society, and politics.

In the abstract, complexity means higher levels of heterogeneity, as opposed to uniformity. In concrete economic terms, it means more elaborate division of labor, a larger number of distinct occupations, and greater specialization both geographically and among people. Socially, it means a greater number of roles and ways of living, more variety in the stages of life, increased differentiation, and more varied and changeable interpersonal relations. Politically, it means more structured political units, more elaborate administration, and higher levels of urbanization. Complexity in all of these forms brings a positive payoff in terms of more production, higher living standards, more inventiveness, and more varied and commodious lifestyles. In other words, it pays to move toward more complex ways of doing things.

But there are limits to this approach. Complexity has diminishing marginal returns: The gains from complexity decrease as complexity increases, while the costs (such as information problems and difficulty changing course) become greater. Eventually, increased complexity has negative returns. Moreover, as social, economic, and political orders become more complex, they also become more fragile and brittle, less resilient and adaptable. They have a harder time coping with unexpected shocks (or even shocks that are anticipated). As the system becomes more interdependent—in ways that the people who are part of it do not fully understand—it becomes susceptible to a general breakdown caused by “cascade effects,” which happen when a failure in one part of the system leads to unforeseeable failures in other parts. These failures may have no obvious connection to the original problem, and they in turn lead to further breakdowns elsewhere.

Underlying all of this is the fundamental reality of limited resources, which imposes constraints on the level of complexity that a given type of economic and social organization can support. The limits usually lurk in the background, but as levels of population, human activity, and complexity reach such constraints, they start to pinch in many ways. It is that pressure that brings the collapse of a complex order.

For Tainter and his successors, the process of civilizational breakdown is actually one of decomposition of complex forms of organization into simpler and less diverse ones. This has many aspects, including a decline in population and urbanization; a move from large polities to smaller, more local ones; and a decay of elaborate trade systems and divisions of labor. Sometimes the process is arrested or even reversed, and sometimes it continues until a new, simpler equilibrium is reached.

Importantly, collapse does not usually mean cataclysm: The process takes place over two or three human lifetimes rather than as a single, dramatic event. A number of indicators suggest that a society is entering such an episode: overproduction of elites; intensified social conflict; diminishing returns on investment across the whole range of assets; increasingly severe shortages of key resources and materials; conflicts over access to resources between groups and states; large-scale migration; and increasingly severe environmental degradation. One common feature is widespread epidemics. Another is famines, caused as much by interruptions to the food supply and distribution system as by natural events. All these things are both causes and components of the process of collapse.

Much of human history consequently has a cyclical quality. A society will start off relatively simple (“undeveloped,” we might say) and gradually become more complex, sophisticated, and wealthy. Eventually it reaches the limits of that process and a crisis ensues. It may adapt or surmount it, but more often it does not; the society returns to a simpler, less complex form. There are several well-known examples of this, such as the collapse of the classical Mayan civilization in the eighth and ninth centuries, the breakdown of the ancient civilizations of the Middle East and the lands around the Mediterranean in the sixth century, and the disintegration of the civilizations of the late Bronze Age in the 12th century B.C. It has happened several times in Chinese history.

Yet the process is not straightforwardly cyclical. Sometimes civilizations rebound, as the Roman Empire did after the great crisis of the third century. Between 235 and 284 A.D. there were over 50 recognized emperors or claimants to that title; the empire was riven by civil wars, barbarian invasions, massive epidemics, currency debasement, and peasant rebellions. Toward the end, it had effectively split into three states. But a series of soldier-emperors restored and stabilized Roman civilization, and it went on to flourish for another two centuries. The simplification process can also be arrested at a level of complexity above that of original simplicity.

There is a force that works against the dynamic identified by Tainter: the process of innovation, derived from a combination of human ingenuity and the liberty that gives it expression and encourages it. The innovative process, spurred by the challenges that arise when society reaches a natural limit, may open up ways of pushing that limit further out and so checking or reversing the breakdown.

Since 1300, the world has experienced two major episodes of civilizational crisis on a global scale. In the 14th century, the Black Death killed around 40 percent of the population of Eurasia, urban life went into decline in many places, there was a dramatic slump in long-distance trade, and the level of political unrest and war rose dramatically all over the Old World. In the 17th century, the Little Ice Age helped produce popular rebellions from the Atlantic to the Pacific, culminating in violent revolutions in 1648–49 in almost every part of Europe—and sometimes beyond. Again, there was a severe economic slowdown and a global decline of long-distance trade. But on both occasions, although the damage was considerable, human civilization survived in all parts of the world.

Since the middle of the 18th century, the world has pushed up against natural limits several times. It happened in the period from the 1770s through the first decade of the 1800s, it happened in the period from the later 1840s through the 1860s, and it happened at the turn of the 20th century. These were all times when an existing level of technology began to reach the limit of complexity it could sustain, leading to economic and political breakdowns. On each of these occasions there was a major crisis, marked by the classic signs of systemic stress and collapse, but the outcome was not a collapse. In the modern world, unlike most pre-modern eras, each crisis has led to a breakthrough to a higher level of complexity, as the resource limit is pushed back.

It seems very likely that we are experiencing another instance of this phenomenon. We certainly see many signs of a crisis of complexity. This probably explains the current popular fascination with novels, movies, TV shows, comic books, and video games centering on the breakdown of civilization, with the precipitating disasters ranging from plagues to asteroid impacts to nuclear war to zombies. Alongside all this fiction is a flourishing prepper industry and subculture. This sort of apocalyptic thinking tends to lull and surge, and lately we’ve been experiencing the latter. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

A major pandemic is one of the classic markers of a civilizational crisis. All of our systems are being put through a stress test. We will discover which are resilient and robust, which are fragile and brittle, and which are actually antifragile—thriving on the breakdown of structures. Fortunately, by looking at the signs of systemic stress, we can observe that human ingenuity is producing technologies and ways of doing things that will very likely enable us to overcome this time of troubles. We may be facing challenges, perhaps lasting many years. But we should be confident that global civilization will overcome this, as it has before.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2ZYMQde
via IFTTT

Virus “No Longer Exists” In Italy, Top Italian Doctor Sees COVID Potency Plunge

Virus “No Longer Exists” In Italy, Top Italian Doctor Sees COVID Potency Plunge

Tyler Durden

Tue, 06/02/2020 – 05:30

The global case tally for COVID-19 continues to inch higher, now at 6.19 million on Monday, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University. As the virus rages in South America and India, infections in the US and Europe continue to wane. 

On Monday morning, there were 232,997 confirmed cases and 33,415 virus-related deaths in Italy, according to official government data. There is good news; the pandemic curve is mostly flattening in the European country after months of strict social distancing and lockdowns. Though, the trade-off was a collapse in the country’s economy. 

Recently, the EU Commission published new guidelines on how to “reboot” the continent’s tourism industry in 2020 and beyond. The new guidelines state: “principle of non-discrimination,” member states should “allow travel from all areas, regions or countries in the EU with similar epidemiological conditions.” While we noted some member states had a conflict with reopening and allowing cross-border activity, it appears Italy is now prepared to reopen its travel and tourism industry. 

Ahead of Italian officials reopening the country’s resort towns and beaches, a top Italian doctor was quoted Sunday by Reuters as saying the deadly virus is “losing its potency” and has become much less lethal.  

“In reality, the virus clinically no longer exists in Italy,” said Alberto Zangrillo, head of the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, which was one of the hardest-hit areas during Italy’s COVID-19 outbreak. 

“The swabs that were performed over the last ten days showed a viral load in quantitative terms that was infinitesimal compared to the ones carried out a month or two months ago,” Zangrillo said.

Zangrillo’s comments come as new infections and fatalities declined in May, and the country is easing restrictions ahead of the summer season, a move that could potentially restart the crashed economy.

He said many experts were “alarmist” about the prospect of a second coronavirus wave, and government officials need to take into account the new reality of a less potent virus. 

“We’ve got to get back to being a normal country,” he said.

Zangrillo triggered disbelief among health officials who said it was too early to say the virus has been completely eradicated. 

“Pending scientific evidence to support the thesis that the virus has disappeared, I would invite those who say they are sure of it not to confuse Italians,” Sandra Zampa, an undersecretary at the health ministry, said in a statement.

Franco Locatelli, president of the Superior Health Council, said he was absolutely “baffled” by Zangrillo’s comments:

“It’s enough to look at the number of new positive cases confirmed every day to see the persistent circulation in Italy of the new coronavirus,” Locatelli said.

In a bid to thwart a second wave, Italy launched a contact-tracing app on Monday in 20% of the country, with more of the country to come online in the coming weeks. 

It wasn’t just Zangrillo who said the virus has weakened; a second doctor told ANSA news agency: 

“The strength the virus had two months ago is not the same strength it has today,” said Matteo Bassetti, head of the infectious diseases clinic at the San Martino hospital in the city of Genoa.

“It is clear that today the COVID-19 disease is different.”

And for those returning to Italian beaches, you might want to read our recent piece titled “Italian Beachtowns Plan “Plexiglass Cages” To Enforce Safe-Sunbathing This Summer” to get a view of what beaches could look like in a post-corona world. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZZ9ja7 Tyler Durden

New UK Laws Could Criminalise Journalism

New UK Laws Could Criminalise Journalism

Tyler Durden

Tue, 06/02/2020 – 05:00

Authored by Richard Norton-Taylor via Declassified Uk blog,

British journalists and their sources are facing an unprecedented assault on freedom of speech, including the prospect of criminal prosecution. Threats aimed at whistleblowers and journalists were evident before the coronavirus crisis struck, but went largely unnoticed.

The government’s Queen’s Speech in December included plans for new “espionage legislation”. It stressed the need to combat “hostile state activity” and make the UK “a harder environment for adversaries to operate in” – an indirect reference to the poisoning in Salisbury of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal.

But it also insisted that the Official Secrets Act, drawn up in 1989, must be “updated” and confirmed that the Law Commission, the body that reviews the law in England and Wales, has been commissioned by the government to do this.

Yet proposals drawn up by the Law Commission to review the Official Secrets Act pose major dangers. Whistleblowers and journalists could be convicted for revealing information about defence, international relations or law enforcement, even if it was unlikely to cause harm. They would make it easier to secure convictions by weakening the existing tests for proving an offence.

Neither would someone revealing danger to the public, abuse of power or serious misconduct be able to argue that they acted in the public interest. In addition, maximum prison sentences on conviction, currently two years under the Official Secrets Act, would be increased.

Moreover, it would not be a defence to show that the information had already lawfully been made public – unless the information had also been “widely disseminated”. How would that be determined?

Maurice Frankel, director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information, has warned that the Law Commission’s proposals could criminalise the release of a vast amount of additional information.

Keira Knightley plays GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun who was charged with breaking the Official Secrets Act. The case against her was withdrawn when it reached the Old Bailey (Photo: Official Secrets)

Instead of applying, as now, to unauthorised disclosures “likely” to damage defence, international relations or law enforcement, he points out that it would be an offence to reveal information that the discloser should have realised was simply “capable” of causing such damage.

“A whistleblower revealing information, or a journalist or blogger publishing it, would commit an offence even if there was only the remotest possibility of harm”, says Frankel.

Douglas Hurd, the home secretary responsible for the 1989 Official Secrets Act, assured the public that the measure would not apply to “information of a general nature that might conceivably be useful in committing an offence, where the chain of circumstance is too long and too uncertain”.

The Law Commission’s proposals would scrap this crucial limitation, Frankel warns. Importantly, officials who released information knowing that there was no realistic chance of harm would still risk prosecution, without any public interest defence.

Furthermore, under the proposals, leaking information that anyone could obtain by making a Freedom of Information (FOI) request could be an offence.

More secrecy

The Queen’s Speech included two other little-noticed measures that would bolster official secrecy. The government’s Environment Bill would prevent the proposed Office for Environmental Protection from disclosing information, including about suspected failures by public bodies and organisations to comply with the law.

Under the Health Service Safety Investigations Bill, a new body would investigate patient safety accidents or incidents in the National Health Service. But the disclosure of information held by the new Health Service Safety Investigations Body (HSSIB) would be severely limited.

The measure would remove existing rights of access to information under the FOI Act and the right of individuals to see their own personal data under data protection legislation.

“The scope of this prohibition is remarkable”, says the Freedom of Information Campaign.

“It applies to any information held ‘in connection with’ the HSSIB’s function that is not already published, whether or not it relates to an identifiable individual, whether or not it relates to an identifiable investigation and whether or not it is capable of deterring participants from speaking frankly to investigators, inhibiting investigators in reaching their conclusions or causing any other adverse effect at all.”

The current crisis has exposed the government’s instincts to run for cover behind a wall of official secrecy. It has revealed what Frankel calls “an epidemic of secrecy”, insisting that “it is following scientific advice while withholding the advice”.

It has only been leaks which have allowed the public to know the membership of the important SAGE group of scientific advisers addressing coronavirus and the report of a simulated influenza pandemic exercise in the National Health Service in 2016. At the time of writing, just 28 of more than 100 expert papers on the crisis have been published.

NHS staff revealing shortages in protective equipment have been threatened with disciplinary action by their managers, who are themselves more likely to be responsible for those shortages.

Instead of regretting, explaining, or justifying its decision to impose a quarantine on people returning to Britain after holidays or business trips, the home secretary, Priti Patel, and the head of the UK Border Force, Paul Lincoln, appeared at a recent joint press conference to revel in the prospect of being given new powers.

But “Take Back control” – the cry of the Brexiteers led by Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s chief adviser – takes on a whole new meaning as the government relishes the prospect of imposing more and more restrictions on the disclosure of information.

The official appeal to “Stay Alert” to protect people from the coronavirus should now be adopted in the fight against increasingly oppressive official secrecy.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3eKcNBE Tyler Durden

Brickbat: Bowing to Their Masters

The University of Queensland, a public university in Australia, has suspended student Drew Pavlou for two years, after he and his attorney walked out of a closed disciplinary hearing, calling it a “kangaroo court.” The university accuses Pavlou of 11 counts of misconduct. The 186-report detailing those allegations is confidential. But Pavlou, who was six months away from graduation, says they all have to do with his activism in support of Hong Kong and his criticism of the Chinese government and the school’s ties to that government. With the university under fire for the decision to suspend Pavlou from Australian elected officials, Chancellor Peter Varghese says he will convene the school Senate to review the matter.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/36TQ4QU
via IFTTT