Rigged college admissions

In an article at San Francisco Chronicle, Shikha Dalmia makes the case that elite universities' increasing promises of aid are meaningless if they keep the number of legacy admissions that they currently have. In another article for Reason, she makes the same case and cites a chancellor at Berkeley as saying that "at one Ivy League school only 40 percent of the seats are open to candidates competing on pure educational merit." This is a problem, she explains, since:

Admissions are a zero-sum game in which students vie for a finite number of seats. So every seat that a less-talented legacy gets is one less spot at Stanford available to a talented poor kid. The crucial determinant of economic diversity on campus is not how much largesse legacies expend on poor kids - but how many seats they take away from them.

It's all fine and good, until she gets to the end, where she says that she doesn't believe that private schools should have to do this, since "Stanford is a private school and should be free to set whatever admission standards it deems fit." But, is this really true? Given the tax breaks given to schools and grants for research and other things and the cross-subsidization by colleges of the different kinds of education, can you really say that "private" schools really retain the distinction as not dependent or beholden to the state? Private universities like the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Caltech, Stanford and MIT have all received over a half billion dollars each in federal contracts in recent years, to say nothing of state and local contracts and grants, tax breaks of all kinds, bond issues, and political clout.

If the public is going to subsidize all of this research, it ought to have the option of mandating that the entities be separate from and not cross-subsidizing rigged undergrad programs.

Sydney, Athens, Beijing, London, Baku?

I wonder what the cumulative cost of long-shot Olympic bids like this one in Baku, Azerbaijan are?

Murtha's myrrh*

The WaPo has an article about Rep. John Murtha's endorsement of Hilary Clinton, and doesn't skimp on the filth that is this man. All from the man with institutionalized bribe sessions and a penchant for directing federal anti-terror/anti-drug money to his rusting town on the Pennsylvania side of the PA/WV border. And yet, somehow, despite the Democrats' rhetoric about Bush's fiscal irresponsibility, an endorsement from the House's largest recipient of pork seems to be the best thing that Clinton has going for her in Pennsylvania. Thankfully, the last two paragraphs of the article do Murtha's sliminess justice:

In 1980, Murtha testified as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Abscam trial of two House members after an FBI sting in which agents offered several lawmakers $50,000 to help a fictitious sheik with immigration problems. In a conversation that agents videotaped, Murtha responded characteristically: He refused to take the money, but he indicated that he might be able to help later if the man invested in local businesses and helped unemployed miners get new jobs.

"He understands the system, and he knows how to work it better than anybody," Rooney said. "I'm not sure there's anybody from around here who wields more influence."

* From Wikipedia: "Myrrh was burned in ancient Roman funerals to mask the smell emanating from charring corpses."

Blackboard patents invalidated

From Michael Feldstein, a follow-up to the Blackboard patent case I wrote about a few weeks ago: all of Blackboard's patents have been rejected in a ruling. Though there is still room for appeal, apparently the bar will be set very high and it's likely that this ruling will stand. It's good to see that patent system working correctly in this instance, but it would be nice it a company wouldn't need to go through such expensive and uncertain litigation to do something they should clearly have the right to do.

Private supercomputers

Despite the libertarian atmosphere of technology and the internet, it's undeniable that modern computers and indeed all science has been strongly influenced by the whims of governments. For centuries scientists have made killing machines for governments, and while they've discovered some incredible things, one can't help but wonder if they couldn't be working more efficiently – say, not on killing machines.

Supercomputers are still largely the provenance of government agencies, but recently a privately-owned supercomputer in India has become the fourth most powerful in the world. The company who owns it is CRL, a Tata outfit in Pune, India. Good to see that despite the funding lavished on governmental/quasi-governmental institutions like universities (public and "private") and research labs like Lawrence Livermore, private demand for this kind of computer power is strong enough to break through. It's also good to see India's reputation in technology coming to fruition, with high end projects like this that dwarf anything the private sector in America or Europe has to offer.

Whither, Somalia?

In continuing with my favorite topic, Somalia, I noticed a story on the nytimes.com about Somalia. Normally stories about Somalia are about some failed initiative or outbreak of violence between government/non-government troops, but they don't really do justice to the smallness of the the power of the "government." This story does – it says that the government lives on $19 million per annum (the rest siphoned away from corruption). And it alludes to the fact that the Transitional Federal Government doesn't control much land, but doesn't do justice to the situation by stating that "in many ways, Somalia is not a state at all, but more a lawless space between its neighbors and the sea." That's a gross simplification – much of the land (especially the produce urban areas) are under the control of governments, just not the federal government. Nomadic Somalis follow the xeer, the same code they've followed since before the Europeans. Northern Somalia is divided among the governments of Somaliland and Puntland, with weak albeit present reach. They are much less violent than the south, and for the most part have been since the start of anarchy around 1990. And anyway, the conflict is not among the traditional nomads of Somalia, but rather between invading forces and their reactions, the Islamists.

Correctly, the Times points out the failed policies of American intervention, UN intervention, and American-backed Ethiopian intervention (the current demon). However, it's reflecting only its own ignorance when it declares that "[t]he looming failure is making many people here and abroad question the strategy of installing the transitional government by force." The implication is that there was some doubt in Somalis' minds as to what any form of government, imposed by locals or foreigners, would be like for them. Somali businessmen don't have ideological commitments and consistently side with whoever will protect their business, and would be impossible to capture in the form of a permanent tax base. Somalis haven't supported the colonial powers, diaspora-backed political democracy, American-backed dictatorship, Soviet-backed dictatorship, UN-backed political democracy, or American/Ethiopian-backed political democracy. At the moment the Islamists have sway, but that seems to be a reaction to the Ethiopian invasion. Given the history and the relative mildness of Somali Islam, the Somalis would likely chafe under the Islamists if the Ethiopians withdrew.

Finally, the Times makes the eternal Somali gaffe, when it implies that anarchy in Somalia has been brutally worse than under Siad Barre and scientific socialism in the decades before: "Sometimes it seems that if anything binds this country together, it is scar tissue." This is nonsense – the Somalis have an incredibly rich culture and civilization, with a functioning and unique justice system and generally growing wealth. According to a paper called "Better off Stateless" by Peter Leeson published in 2006, key indicators of welfare in Somali have largely risen in the period since the collapse of Siad Barre's state. Infant mortality is down, underweight births per capita declined 80%, extreme poverty is down more than 15 percentage points, and access to sanitation and healthcare is up significantly. Somalia has cheap, accessible, and competitive internet and mobile phone markets as well as competitive private low-cost air carriers. Education is relatively well-provisioned by the private market, and Somalia now has a higher university enrollment than under the Barre regime.

The Times and the media in general must emerge from their paradigmatic shell of always looking to governments for indicators of society. While this might work okay in Western countries where much of the civil and social discourse is in some way filtered through government, the model breaks down for countries like Somalia where foreign and non-governmental entities and institutions are much more important to ordinary Somalis than the supposed central government.

Joints, OK; spliffs, not so much

According to the NIS, when Amsterdam's smoking ban goes into effect in July, only tobacco will be targeted. Spliff-smokers – much more common in Europe than in the US, as it's only way to smoke hashish without a pipe – must light up outside, whereas smokers of pure marijuana joints can puff away in peace. Though allowing marijuana but not tobacco might seem bizarre, it's actually more consistent with the relative harm of marijuana and tobacco. Then again, I don't see the Dutch legalizing acid, mushrooms, or ecstasy, despite the fact that they also rank lower on the harm scale.

For more on the Netherlands' schizophrenic drug laws (fun fact: selling marijuana is illegal in the Netherlands!), here's the very comprehensive Wikipedia article.

Terrorism, rent-seeking, and Academe

In an article from Wired called "Civil Libertarians See a Hopeful Dawn in 2009 ... the Fools," comes this ominous paragraph:

"There is so much money in the terrorism trough," says Steven Aftergood, who runs the Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy Project. "There are constituencies within agencies who are going to be advocating for retention of those practices. It will take a lot of work to roll back practices that have been entrenched for the last seven years."

I personally got creaped out about this when I moved to Washington to go to Georgetown, and noticed a) ads by Raytheon and colleges advertising "Homeland Security" certificates in the Metro, and b) the obsession with students and academics in Georgetown's foreign studies departments with terrorism. The rent-seeking associated with anti-terrorist things is obvious – there are many companies who do a lot of business with governments. And then there's the academic side of it – academic rockstars like Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama inspire future generations of grad students and aspiring academics, who in turn coax undergraduates into classes on terrorism and Arabic. This pattern isn't new: socialism and statist brewed in universities across the US and Europe in the early twentieth century, and then the ideologies bled over into the real world. But at least statism was romantic and progressive-feeling – this shit is just fear-mongering.

Amazon's DRM-free store is #2 online music seller

Only six months after opening, Amazon's MP3 service has become the second-largest online music retailer. To differentiate themselves from iTunes Music Store, they only sell DRM-free music which comes in MP3 form that you can easily share with anyone you'd like. While Apple is moving in that direction, as of yet only about a third of their catalog is DRM-free, and Amazon has more than twice the amount of DRM-free songs available.

Licensing as cartels

From Radley Balko at Fox News (yeah, I know), the most succinct article I've ever seen on the anti-competitive practice of professional licensing. The artificial scarcity of taxi cabs in large cities is pretty well known, but Balko shows that this practice is creeping into other professions: interior designers in many states, florists in Louisiana, basic equine dentistry in Texas, and hair dressers and beauty salons in many states. And on top of all that, the article points out that the exams necessary for earning a license are evaluated by already-licensed professionals, who obviously have an incentive to lessen their competition. This paper from the Reason Foundation gives a detailed look at licensing laws across the US, along with some absurd anecdotes about the hoops that people have to jump through to do what they already know how to do.

Licensing becomes particularly Kafka-esque when it comes to African hair braiding: a very time-consuming and expensive way of styling hair. Drive down any commercially-zoned street (and some that aren't) in any city with a large black population and you'll see that these salons are integrals parts of these economies. And yet, according to the Institute for Justice, the process for becoming licensed can be very time-consuming and difficult:

In all but a handful of states, performing African hairbraiding professionally without a government-issued license is against the law. And earning the license requires braiders to take more than 1,000 hours of coursework that cover techniques completely unrelated and even antithetical to the type of natural hair care braiders provide.

The State of Washington’s regulations are typical of many states, requiring even skilled braiders to take up to 1,600 hours of completely unrelated classes to get a cosmetology or barbering license to braid legally. In Mississippi, braiders can get a cosmetology license with a 1,500-hour class, or a “wigology” license with 300 hours of classes in wig care, but only two of the state’s more than 40 cosmetology schools offer wigology. That leaves most aspiring braiders in the state with only three options: attend an expensive, 1,500-hour cosmetology program that doesn’t teach braiding, abandon their profession or operate outside the law.

Recognizing this problem, Melony Armstrong, who earned her wigology license, decided to open a wigology school to teach her craft to others. But the State doesn’t allow wigology-only schools. Instead, Melony must open a cosmetology school—even if she only wants to teach braiding and wigology—which means spending more than 3,000 hours (about three academic years) in cosmetology and cosmetology instructor programs. Of course, those programs don’t teach braiding.

Consider that in the 3,200 classroom hours it would take for Armstrong to get a license to teach hairbraiding, she could instead become licensed in all of the following professions: emergency medical technician (122 hours plus five emergency runs), paramedic (1,700 hours), ambulance driver (8 hours), law enforcement officer (ten weeks), firefighter (six weeks), real estate appraiser (75 hours) and hunting education instructor (20 hours). And all of that would take more than 600 hours less than getting her license to teach braiding.