A New Day

Well, last night was pretty horrible. I stayed up til 3am looking at videos on a video sharing site, pretty much all of which involved either buildings collapsing or people doing stupid stunts that nearly got them killed. It didn't help that I had a cup of coffee to drink at a dinner last night. I guess if I drink a cup of coffee at 7pm, I'll probably not go to sleep for another 6-7 hours. But now I'm awake and at work. Today's goal: finish revisions of paper I'm presenting next week at a conference. So this is just a post for some links

1. NYT reports on rising gonorrhea, syphilis and chlamydia. While a different article from the AP piece I linked to yesterday, it's basically the same story. One of the interesting trends is chlamydia. It'll be very hard to figure out if real chlamydia cases are rising, or if the rise is merely due to more vigilant testing by clinicians. Increased testing can increase reported STD cases without changing the underlying incidence - it just means that the mean and variance values of the measurement error on STD cases is falling.

2. More good news on housing. Foreclosures have almost doubled from last year. As someone trying to sell my house, I follow these stories closely, although it feels more like I'm just stopping to look at the gore and debris on a highway crash than anything else. How long does it take an economy of our size to work through these credit problems?

3. Kanye West's mom, who died over the weekend, from complications during cosmetic surgery, died at the hands of a doctor with a record of malpractice lawsuits and multiple DUI charges. Whatever the causes of her death, it's tragic. I've been thinking about the lyrics to his song, Hey Mama, a lot since learning about her death. He clearly adored her.

4. Two pieces in the news yesterday reported on some new studies by Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institute showing Black children born into the middle class in the 1960s were more likely than whites of the same income bracket to earn less than their parents. So, generally, you observe intergernational income mobility, except among Blacks, where you see a failure to move ahead. The papers apparently don't given any explanations, only note the trends. But, one thing Isaacs mentions is the fact that Black families have less wealth in the form of assets such as homes and other real assets. So if they have the same level of income, but less wealth, then they must have a higher marginal propensity to consume rate than Whites. Question, then, is why that would be the case. What prices, constraints and otherwise do Blacks face that would make it optimal for them to consume more out of income than Whites, such that they place themselves on a lower wealth trajectory, holding income the same for both groups? A similar piece was in the WSJ today, which is from a different data source (tax data analyzed by the US Treasury). Here the findings are more generally positive - income mobility for the poorest within ten years. But the article does not appear to discuss the heterogeneity by race, which presumably the authors had if they had individual-level tax data.

5. Paul Duggan, author of the 2001 Journal of Political Economy article "More Guns, More Crime", reports on DC's gun possession ban. For thirty years, DC has had a ban on gun possession, but since then, gun-related homicides have only risen. Now, far be it from me to say that the ban caused the increase just because rates were higher after the ban than before. Maybe the rates would have been even higher without the ban. Without some kind of counter-factual experiment, we can't say. But, it's interesting nonetheless that David Mustard and John Lott studied this and found laws that allowed citizens to carry handguns was followed by statistically significant and economically meaningful declines in gun-related violence. That literature has experienced a lot of study by skeptical scholars, including Duggan, and I'm not sure if you were to do some kind of selective meta-analysis of gun studies that came out after the original Lott and Mustard (1997) paper if you'd find findings that were on net positive or negative in favor of gun control laws efficacy. But, what it does appear from the DC situation, at the very least, is that whatever the efficacy of gun control, it's a fairly small solution to a major crime problem. The real underlying causes are structural. The problem is possibly mainly caused by the drug trade, in which drug traffickers use violence to enforce contracts and expand market share. The Wire had a bit on this in season 3 when the captain legalized drugs via the "Hamsterdam" neighborhood experiment. What you saw was that drug users, rather than dealing with (for instance) robberies and competition from rivals via violence, they went to police and reported the crimes. This ultimately freed up police resources, too, for instead of harrassing sellers, police could do police work (a common theme on The Wire - what is good police work during this age of America, in which the war on drugs and the politicization of arrest data creates perverse incentives to all policemen. My personal belief is that the war on drugs creates the necessity of violence since there are no legal avenues available to drug traffickers to have their informal contracts enforced. What this does is make it necessary to make credible threats via violence against buisiness partners. There's also the need to use violence to protect real estate, or in other words, to compete with rivals. It's all very screwed up.