James P. Freeman: Applying data analysis to Supreme Court nominees

U.S. Supreme Court Building.

Last autumn, techrepublic.com concluded, with its feature “How big data won the 2017 World Series,” that America’s pastime was more the cold science of analytics than the graceful art of, say, a George Springer swing. This fall, progressives hope that big data will win the day to thwart Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s ascension to the Supreme Court.

When the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game was published in 2003, it acted as a catalyst for Major League baseball teams to “start taking data-based decision making more seriously.” The employment of metrics was also rooted in cost-effective ways to win. The prize was the Fall Classic.

Baseball, already known for its rich sediment of data, hired experts to “make data-driven decisions based on predictive analytics.” Perhaps the biggest manifestation of data predicting outcomes is the use of “the shift” — a technique where a coach will move his defensive players to one side of the field knowing, in advance, that a hitter will put a ball into play there a statistically significant number of times. (Shifts increased from 2,350 in 2011 to 28,130 in 2016). TechRepublic notes that teams with a “prowess with data” — the once moribund Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs and Houston Astros — are recent World Series champions.

Some now believe that these methodologies can be applied to Supreme Court nominees.

Data for Progress is, in its own words, “the think tank for the future of progressivism.” Claiming that “a new generation of progressives is rising,” it wants to be the Elias Baseball Analyst for left-leaning causes. Using scientific techniques to support progressive activists and issues, it also aims to “challenge conventional wisdoms about the American public that lack empirical support.”

Areas of its research include: “Multilevel Regression and Poststratification analysis,” to provide “reliable sub-national opinion estimates on progressive issues;” “deep learning textual analysis of media;” and “data mining and analyzing social media data for politicians and pundits to find interesting trends and patterns.”

Pitchers and catchers beware!

In another sign of the miniaturization and mobilization of complex matters on social media, Data for Progress prefers to distribute its research over the internet because “data can only help interpret the world.” (Many credit its co-founder, Sean McElwee, with inspiring the “Abolish ICE” movement based upon a tweet he posted in early 2017.)

Today, however, McElwee is focusing on the Supreme Court. And his opposition to Judge Kavanaugh.

Data for Progress believes that a Kavanaugh seat on the high court would set back progressive causes in areas such as voting rights, Medicaid, corporate pollution, unions, gerrymandering, and, most urgently, abortion rights.

A key component of its approach is that ideological implications can be measured. Data for Progress uses a political science methodology called Judicial Common Space, which seeks to answer, among other things, why courts make the decisions they do. Judicial politics, like a Chris Sale slider, can be measurable and explainable. Or can it?

Justices are “scored” or measured in similar ways that members of Congress are measured for their roll call votes. So, Justice Sonia Sotomayor appears on the left of the spectrum and Justice Clarence Thomas appears on the right. But, like all computer modeling, how Kavanaugh fits into the equation — hence, how he would affect the ideological balance of the court — is entirely hypothetical.

Data for Progress suggests that judicial reasoning is necessarily a linear process; past judicial decisions are a measurable and definitive predictor of future decisions. This in turn determines where judges stand on an ideological plane.

For Data for Progress — even if its quantitative analysis stands close scrutiny — prospective liberal justices are acceptable and conservative justices are not. Big data is now political fodder for modern progressives.

But history may prove McElwee and Data for Progress wrong.

In a recent piece for The Nation, McElwee argues that “Democrats Must Stop Pretending the Supreme Court is Apolitical.” He worries about the looming “threat” of a Supreme Court that could “reverse progressive legislative accomplishments.” When did Democrats stop believing the court was apolitical?

In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, attempted a ''court-packing” plan. His motivations were entirely political. He intended to shape the ideological balance of the court so that it would cease striking down his New Deal legislation. And in 1987, Democrats launched a full partisan attack on the nomination of Robert Bork to the high court. The conservative jurist was soundly defeated over what conservatives believe were purely political motivations. There is a long history of partisan battles in picking Supreme Court justices.

And Data for Progress’ fears of the court — and, by extension, the nation — being held hostage by conservative justices for years to come may be mistaken. In fact, big data may prove Data for Progress to be just another political lever of the progressive organ. And render their rantings moot.

Fivethirtyeight.com concluded three years ago that “Supreme Court Justices Get More Liberal As They Get Older.” The “ideological drift” of justices is cited in a 2007 academic paper. The authors of the study, using scores based on data from the Supreme Court Database, write that: “Drift to the right or, more often, the left is the rule, not the exception.”

A 2005 New York Times expose, “Presidents, Picking Justices, Can Have Backfires,” should be a reminder to Data for Progress that, despite a wealth of data, Supreme Court justices’ ideology is malleable and subject to change. As President Eisenhower learned of  Chief Justice Earl Warren and President George H.W. Bush learned of Justice David Souter.

Whatever their political persuasions, Americans are now keeping score in two spectator sports because of big data.

James P. Freeman is a former banker and now a New England-based essayist. This piece first appeared in Inside Sources.

David Warsh: 'Radical Markets' in Somerville?

David Square in Somerville, Mass.

I live in Somerville, a city near Boston that is rapidly gentrifying.  It seems like a pretty good place to think about the implications of  Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax, or COST system, that Eric Posner and Glen Weyl sketch out in Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society (Princeton, 2018) The example they give is Rio de Janeiro, but their notion of “perpetual auctioning” easier to imagine think in a place close to home.

Here’s the “thought experiment” the authors propose.

“Suppose the entire city of Rio is perpetually up for auction. Imagine that every building, business, factory and patch of hillside has a going price, and anyone who bids a price higher than a going price for an entity would take possession of it… [Assume] that the auctions are conducted via smartphone apps that automatically bid based on default settings, eliminating most of the need for people to constantly calculate how much to offer.  Laws ensure that obvious sorts of disruptions don’t occur (for example coming home to find your apartment is no longer yours). Incentives are in place to care for and develop assets, and ensure that privacy and other values are also preserved.

“All the revenue generated by this auction would be returned to citizens equally, as a ‘social dividend,’  or used to fund public projects, which is how revenues from oil sales in Alaska and Norway are used.’’

What would happen? The slums on Rio’s picturesque hillsides would soon disappear.  Whoever bought them wouldn’t be planning to build rickety slums (though what the acquirers might have in mind isn’t described). Where would the slum-dwellers go?  Transformed by those “social dividends” into a vast middle class,” they would rent apartments in the skyscrapers that would replace the ritzy shops and condos that now dominate in the center of the city.  The rich, meaning “people who own a lot of businesses and land,” would disappear, because “if everything was up for auction, no person would own such assets.” Instead “their benefits would flow equally to all.” And with the radical diminution of inequality that would ensue from steeply progressive taxation, crime would drop, gated communities would disappear, street life would be restored, and trust in public life would flourish.

Not, I think, in Somerville.

In the pure, thought-experiment form of the COST scheme, everything would be owned in common and the right to rent it would be forever on the auction block – a little like the old Soviet Union, but with individuals rather than planners making and timing decisions.  In practice, the authors say, some combination would probably be required, as in the United States, where government owns vast tracts that it rents out as parcels for drilling, timbering, grazing, and so on, while private property law governs all of the rest.

This isn’t the world of John Lanchester’s biting 2012 novel of contemporary London, Capital, with its increasingly sinister declarations slipped under neighborhood homeowners’ doors: “We want what you’ve got.”  It’s much worse than that.  In a city like Somerville, individuals and businesses would be required to list their homes and factories on a city Web site and, for each, enter a price for which they would be willing to leave – or accept a default based on the history of the house. This is a reservation price in the lingo of auctions; it is the “self-assessed” value of the property, in Posner’s and Weyl’s scheme. It also sets the owner’s annual tax bill – the portion that the city would keep from the sale, at whatever the tax rate happened to be. Residents could adjust their reservation price up or down at any time during the year.

Meanwhile, would-be buyers would search online for houses they might like to acquire, much as they do now with Web sites like Zillow, with one critical difference: Every house would be for sale at the listed price.  You could buy it out from under the owner with a few clicks and move in after a “reasonable period of time.” A footnote explains that the authors have in mind mainly a system of business taxation. They describe their example of Rio as “fanciful,” and say that they conjure markets for personal possessions like homes and automobiles mainly to make their account “vivid.”

Weyl works for Microsoft and teaches at Yale University.  Posner, son of former U.S. Appeals Court Judge Richard Posner, is a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.  Their book contains several other novel proposals, each of which probably merits a column. If I understand it correctly, the essence of their property scheme, is a highly generalized second-price auction, coupled with the steep progressive taxation.

They dedicate their book to economist William Vickrey (1914-1996), who identified the mechanism and described its virtues in a celebrated paper, “Counter-speculation, Auctions, and Competitive Sealed Tenders,” published in 1961.  In a second-price auction, the winner pays only the second-highest price bid.  The idea is to elicit honest offers, to prevent participants from shading their bids. He suggested using the method to auction off government bonds.  But houses out from under their owners? “Most novel concepts initially seem far-fetched,” the authors write. “[B]ear in mind [Vickrey’s]  idea is already used to assign the advertising slots of Web and Facebook pages all of us visit every day. Every few seconds these slots are reallocated to the highest bidder…”

In 1996, three days after he was recognized, with James Mirrlees, with a Nobel prize in economics for his work on moral hazard in public finance, Vickrey died, preventing him, the authors say, from articulating a grand vision such as their own. (See the splendid biographical memoir by Jacques Drèze.) Instead, they cite a similar scheme propounded by University of Chicago economist Arnold Harberger in a speech in Chile in 1962.  He had in mind a way of circumventing widespread bribery of tax assessors by homeowners eager to understate the value of their property:

“If taxes are to be levied… on the value of… properties… it is important that assessment procedures be adopted which estimate the true economic value.   The economist’s answer … is simple and essentially fool-proof: allow each… owner… to declare the value of his own property, make the declared values… public, and require that the owner sell his property to any bidder … willing to pay… the declared value.  This system is simple, self-enforcing, allows no scope for corruption, and creates incentives, in addition to those already present in the market, for each property to be put to that use in which it has the highest economic productivity.’’

As Tim Harford slyly observed in the Financial Times, “This system [of Radical Markets] has enormous potential — simple, fair, progressive taxes and a more dynamic economy.   It would be much easier to develop new infrastructure, build new homes, buy your neighbor’s garden, and pour concrete all over twee villages to build monorails or airport runways.”

Posner and Weyl locate resistance to their idea of using perpetual auctions to erode private property “barriers to trade” in, among other impediments, the “endowment affect.”

Richard Thaler, of the Booth Business School of the University of Chicago, won a Nobel Prize for describing the emotional attachment to what you already possess. The authors say the endowment effect seems characteristic of those who lack time and ability to make swift trading decisions. That sent me to the library, where I spent part of a pleasant afternoon leafing through Measuring America: How an Untamed Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy (Walker, 2002), by Andro Linklater. Nearby was Utopian Ideas and Movements of the Great Depression: Dreamers, Believers and Madmen (Lexington, 2013), by Donald Whisenhunt.

The way it works now is that Somerville gentrifies at its own rate.  People wait to sell their homes until, for one reason or another, they are willing to let go. Rents are rising rapidly, driven by home sales.  A record 871 new units are under construction.  Property rights in the city are not absolute, of course.  There are zoning and building-code restrictions.  A 1 percent sales tax has been submitted to the state legislature for approval,  given that homeowners reap windfall gains thanks to local improvements (better schools, new rail lines) and changes in tastes (more people moving in from the suburbs). That’s about as far as it goes. Meanwhile, Posner and Weyl want most of the rest of our property rights.  Shoot the moon!

David Warsh, a long-time columnist on economics and politics and an economic historian, is proprietor of ecnomicprincipals.com, where this essay first appeared.

The Somerville Theatre is an independent movie theater and concert venue in the Davis Square neighborhood. It was started off as a vaudeville house and movie theater. The theater now operates as a live-music venue and first-run movie theater.

Tapley Jewelry has a new way of looking at silver

Tapley Jewelry has a new way of looking at silver.

 https://www.t-a-p-l-e-y.com/

Info@t-a-p-l-e-y.com

Negin Owliaei: How a Pa. county kept out a for-profit prison giant

A Geo Group vehicle used for transporting prisoners.

Via OtherWords.org

What’s the best way to push profit-seeking corporations out of the public sphere? Don’t let them take over in the first place.

Residents of Lancaster County, Pa., were thrilled to learn this lesson with their recent victory against Geo Group, a giant of the private prison industry.

Geo turned into a household name for profiting off the youth and family detention centers that have become hallmarks of President Trump’s inhumane immigration policies. But the company’s shady practices go way back. Geo Group has misspent millions in federal funds, only to manage facilities that one federal judge called “a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions.” (In New England, Vermont and Connecticut have privately run prisons.)

Despite its abhorrent track record, Geo has raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in federal government contracts in the last year, with a staggering $9.7 million lining the pockets of CEO George Zoley in 2017.

In Lancaster County, Geo was bidding to take over the reentry services the county provided to formerly incarcerated people as they left the prison system.

But Lancaster County already had an established reentry program. A coalition of nonprofits known as the Reentry Management Organization had been providing community-led reintegration services with proven success.

Those nonprofits were left in the dust when the county decided to change the funding process to a bidding-style competition. A whirlwind of changing standards and opaque processes left the nonprofits confused. Meanwhile, Geo Group capitalized, putting forward the only bid to provide parolee services.

Lancaster residents were surprised and angry to learn that local nonprofits might be replaced by prison profiteers. They leapt into action, planning town halls and packing prison board meetings. Religious leaders, nonprofit leaders, and formerly incarcerated citizens turned the normally empty gatherings into standing-room-only events.

“I don’t think [county officials] expected such a community response — or, as they called it, a distraction,” Michelle Hines, an organizer with Lancaster Stands Up, told me.

“It’s a bad company,” Hines added of Geo Group, citing her concerns over for-profit prisons in general, and Geo’s contract to build controversial immigrant family detention centers in particular. “I know I’ve lived in Lancaster my whole life and I don’t want them in my county.”

Neither did many people in Lancaster. Ultimately, the county was swayed, rejecting the company’s bid. Hines and other members of the community are now pushing the county to let the local nonprofits maintain control over the reentry program.

“These big corporations over and over again come into our communities, buy people off, and then are able to perpetrate harm against everybody here,” Hines said. “For a really long time I’d been watching this happen and it just felt like an impossible thing to fight back against, and I feel so empowered to be in a position to have enough people power in our community to be able to fight back.”

Lancaster Stands Up has been organizing in southern Pennsylvania for two years now. The collective came together in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, and has since put pressure on elected officials across the political spectrum in an effort to recast established politics into something that works for people in their community.

“To do work to try to make sure that the people — the regular, everyday working people — have a voice, and to see that actually come to fruition in such a concrete way,” Hines said, “is really incredible.”

Hines hopes  that the victory against Geo will help other communities railing against what often feel like insurmountable odds. “I hope we can provide some inspiration to other groups that are fighting and feel like they’re up against an impossible system and incredible power, to know to keep at it.”

Negin Owliaei co-edits Inequality.org, where a longer version of this piece appeared, for the Institute for Policy Studies.  

Beautiful dogs in action in Boston

"Under the Surface,'' by Seth Casteel, in the exhibition "Best in Show II,'' at the Lanoue Gallery, Boston, through Sept. 2. The show is a fundraiser for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals-Angell Animal Medical Center.

The marijuana-marketing mania is too persuasive

Legal status of recreational marijuana retail shops in Massachusetts by town as of June 21, 2018. Towns in red have implemented permanent bans, towns in yellow have implemented temporary moratoriums, and towns in green have not implemented a permanent ban or a temporary moratorium.

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com

As business people, states and localities  rush to get into the marijuana  bonanza, everyone would do well to look at a nationally representative online survey of 16,280 U.S. adults that found that “many ascribe health benefits to marijuana that haven’t been proven,  report researchers in Annals of Internal Medicine.’’

“The American public has a much more favorable point of view than is warranted by the evidence,” the study’s lead author, Dr. Salomeh Keyhani, of the University of California at San Francisco, told the news service. “Perhaps most concerning is that they think that it prevents health problems.”

Reuters reported: “While studies have shown that cannabis can help quiet seizures in children with hard to treat epilepsy, quell the nausea and vomiting that can accompany chemotherapy and soothe nerve pain, there’s no evidence that it can help with the vast majority of other medical conditions, Keyhani said. And yet, people think of it as a cure all, she added.’’

Recalling Big Tobacco in the ‘50s and ’60s, the marijuana industry is relentlessly marketing its products, with what I think will end up being very nasty public-health results. But meanwhile, we  may see pot stores pop up in most strip malls.

To read the Annals of Medicine report, please hit this link.

'Nothing is cost-effective here'

"The week in August you come home,

adult, professional, aloof,

we roast and carve the fatted calf

-- in our case home-grown pig, the chine

garlicked and crisped, the applesauce

hand-pressed. Hand-pressed the greengage wind.

Nothing is cost-effective here.

The peas, the beets, the lettuces

hand-sown are raised to stand apart.''

-- From "Family Reunion,'' by Maxine Kumin (1925-2014)

From 1976 until her death  she and her husband lived on a farm in Warner, N.H., where they bred Arabian and quarter horses. She was the U.S. poet laureate in 1981-82.

Main Street in Warner, N.H. about 1908.

What we got

In the New Hampshire mill village of Harrisville.

"New Englanders gave us codfish and quahogs and atomic submarines. They gave us the America's Cup races and Waltham watches, town meetings and mill towns, village greens and fall colors.''

-- From New England, by Ted Smart and David Gibson

And with Indian pudding, too?

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com

Sabin Lomac and Jim Tselikis are two cousins from Maine who have created a national company with restaurants and food trucks under the name Cousins Maine Lobster whose main fare is, of course, Maine lobster. I wonder if someone from Rhode Island and/or southeastern Massachusetts could do the same thing with quahogs and oysters?

To read about the cousins’ success, please hit this link:

James T. Brett/Michael K. Thomas: A strategy for building a New England pipeline for talent

From the New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com)

BOSTON

The New England Board of Higher Education Commission on Higher Education & Employability recently released an 18-point strategy to increase the career readiness of graduates of New England colleges and universities and improve their transitions to work.

Chaired by Rhode Island Gov. Gina M. Raimondo, the 50-member commission invested 11 months in public meetings and working-group sessions exploring New England employers’ concerns about a lack of qualified, skilled workers, particularly in rapidly changing, technology-intensive and growth-oriented industries.

In its report, “Learning for Life and Work,” the commission offers a strategic action agenda with key recommendations to align institutions, policymakers and employers.

The commission believes that all postsecondary students must have access to and demonstrate completion of critical employability-related experiences during their postsecondary education, including:

• Foundational skills in literacy, numeracy and communication.

• An individual career plan prepared early in their postsecondary experience.

• At least one paid and/or credit-bearing, work-integrated learning experience.

• Achievement of digital competencies related to their course of study, career goals and the fast-changing economy.

• Attainment of an affordable credential that is employer-informed and aligned to a career pathway.

The commission also recommends that the New England states should collaborate to launch multistate, industry-specific, talent-pipeline partnerships focused on top growth-oriented sectors in the states and region (including health care, life and biosciences, information technology, advanced manufacturing and financial services), and driven by key stakeholders from higher education, industry and government.

As a regional business association, The New England Council brings together employers across a range of industries with colleges and universities to foster partnership that will help develop a talent pipeline in our region. The council has promoted internships, apprenticeships and other partnerships where employers ensure that students are being educated in up-to-date industry practices that will prepare them to contribute to the regional workforce. The council has also advocated for public policy that will support and enhance experiential-learning opportunities for students at various levels of education.

Talent is already one of the biggest reasons that companies choose New England. Building upon the world-class strength of our institutions and human capital will confirm that this reputation is long-lasting and indisputable.

Working together, we can ensure that New England will have a future as a hub for cutting-edge technology, innovative entrepreneurship and career-ready graduates prepared to tackle the economic and civic challenges that lay ahead for us all.

James T. Brett is president and CEO of The New England Council and a member of the NEBHE Commission on Higher Education & Employability. Michael K. Thomas is the president and CEO of NEBHE and executive director of the commission.

Todd McLeish: Invasive crab is stressing New England lobster populations

Asian shore crab.

Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)

Speculation about the cause of the decline of lobster populations in Narragansett Bay has focused on an increasing number of predatory fish eating young lobsters, warming waters stressing juveniles, and a disease on their shells that is exacerbated by increasing temperatures.

A new study by a scientist at the University of North Carolina points to another contributing factor: Asian shore crabs, which originated on the shores of the Pacific.

The crabs were first observed on the coast of New Jersey in 1988, where they probably arrived in the ballast of cargo ships. They quickly expanded up and down the East Coast — arriving in Rhode Island in 1996 — and they are now found at densities of up to 200 per square meter in the intertidal zones of southern New England.

“If you flip over a rock, it’s like going into an old basement and turning on a light and watching the cockroaches scatter,” said Christopher Baillie, who conducted the study as a doctoral student at Northeastern University. “They’re really abundant.”

The dramatic increase in the density of Asian shore crabs in the region was followed by a massive decline in the density of green crabs. Green crabs are also not native to the region, having been introduced more than 100 years ago, “but it’s an indication of what the Asian shore crab could be doing to native species,” Baillie said.

Adult lobsters live in much deeper water than the shallow intertidal zone inhabited by Asian shore crabs, so the two species seldom interact. But some larval lobsters settle in the intertidal and subtidal zones, which they use as nursery habitat. Prior to the arrival of Asian shore crabs, it was an area that had fewer predators and an abundance of food. But now the young lobsters are finding themselves in competition with the crabs for food and shelter.

When Baillie surveyed the shoreline in Nahant and Swampscott, Mass., over a five-year period, he found a dramatic increase in the density of Asian shore crabs concurrent with a decrease in the density of juvenile lobsters. He then conducted several laboratory experiments that found that smaller juvenile lobsters lost out to the crabs when competing for food and shelter, especially as the crab numbers increased.

“We saw that the presence of Asian shore crabs significantly reduced the amount of time the lobsters were able to spend in the shelter,” Baillie said. “The more crabs we introduced, the more times the lobster was displaced. When the crabs were at higher densities, the lobsters spent the entire time fleeing from predation attempts by the crabs.”

In similar tests, lobsters that were slightly larger than the crabs were able to obtain food and shelter, but the lobsters fed more frequently and ate faster in the presence of the crabs.

“It appeared that they perceived the crabs as a competitor, and sometimes the lobsters even attacked the crab,” Baillie said. “So while that sized lobster was the dominant competitor, there is a potential energetic cost to battling the crab as well as a potential for injury in those battles.”

According to Niels-Viggo Hobbs, a lecturer and researcher at the University of Rhode Island who studies Asian shore crabs, Baillie’s research confirms what many scientists have suspected: the crab has a substantial negative impact on young lobsters.

“There are still a lot of unanswered questions,” he said. “There may also be a positive impact for lobsters. The crabs may provide a food source for adult lobsters. Lobsters love to eat smaller crustaceans. The take-home message for me is that even when we talk about invasive species, we can’t always say they’re 100 percent bad.”

Although the crabs arrived in Rhode Island waters at about the same time that lobster numbers began declining in Narragansett Bay, Hobbs said it’s unclear if the crabs were a major factor in lobster decline.

“The problem is that on top of Asian shore crabs showing up, we also had lobster shell disease, increasing water temperatures, and other factors working to make life for lobsters more difficult,” Hobbs said. “The Asian shore crab certainly didn’t help. It’s difficult to say how bad an impact it had, but it was certainly poor timing if not worse.”

The long-term implications of Baillie’s study are unclear, since most lobster nursery grounds are in deeper waters than where Asian shore crabs are found.

“But as the crabs continue to expand their range into the northern Gulf of Maine, there is potential for further interactions with juvenile lobsters,” Baillie said. “And while there’s a number of things going on with lobster populations, we’ve shown that the Asian shore crabs may be reducing the value of this nursery habitat for lobsters.”

Unfortunately, there is little that can be done about the invasive crabs. They are occasionally used as bait by tautog fishermen, but not enough to affect population numbers. They are too small to be a valuable commercial fishery. A parasite in the crab’s native range in East Asia is believed to castrate the crabs, rendering them unable to reproduce, but releasing the parasite in local waters would likely cause more harm than good.

“It would be incredibly dangerous to go down that rabbit hole,” Baillie said.

“The crabs are established and here to stay,” Hobbs noted. “So the best we can do is keep an eye on how they impact our native species, and then hope that maybe there’s some good that comes out of it.”

Baillie hopes his study will at least draw attention to the effects the crabs have and prompt government leaders to prioritize what he calls “fairly simple changes in policies” — like requiring the discharge of ballast water in the open ocean — that could be implemented to prevent future introductions of invasive species to the local marine environment.

Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.

'Obstruction is in vain'

The poetry collection published in 1923 where this poem first appeared.

The tree the tempest with a crash of wood
Throws down in front of us is not bar
Our passage to our journey's end for good,
But just to ask us who we think we are

Insisting always on our own way so.
She likes to halt us in our runner tracks,
And make us get down in a foot of snow
Debating what to do without an ax.

And yet she knows obstruction is in vain:
We will not be put off the final goal
We have it hidden in us to attain,
Not though we have to seize earth by the pole

And, tired of aimless circling in one place,
Steer straight off after something into space.

"On a Tree Fallen Across the Road  (To hear us talk),'' by Robert Frost

Jennifer Ware: When bad stuff comes from technology

Via The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

It’s an unpleasant reality, but also an inevitable one: Technology will cause harm.

And when it does, whom should we hold responsible? The person operating it at the time? The person who wrote the program or assembled the machine? The manager, board or CEO that decided to manufacture the machine? The marketer who presented the technology as safe and reliable? The politician who helped pass legislation making the technology available to consumers?

These questions reveal something important about what we do when bad things happen; we look for an individual—a particular person—to blame. It’s easier to make sense of how one person’s recklessness or conniving could result in disaster, than to ascribe blame to an array of unseen forces and individuals. At the same time, identifying a “bad guy” preserves the idea that bad things happen because of rogue or reckless agents.

Sometimes—as when hackers create programs to steal data or drone operators send their unmanned aircraft into disaster zones and make conditions unsafe for emergency aircraft—it is clear who is responsible for the adverse outcome.

But other times, bad things are the result of decisions made by groups of people or circumstances that come about incrementally over time. Political scientist Dennis Thompson has called this "the problem of many hands." When systems or groups are at fault for causing harm, looking for a single person to blame may obfuscate serious issues and unfairly scapegoat the individual who is singled out.

Advanced technology is complex and collaborative in nature. That is why, in many cases, the right way to think about the harms caused by technology may be to appeal to collective responsibility. Collective responsibility is the idea that groups, as distinct from their individual members, are responsible for collective actions. For example, legislation is a collective action; only Congress as a whole can pass laws, while no individual member of Congress can exercise that power.

When we assign collective responsibility and recognize that a group or system is morally flawed, we can either try to alter it to make it better, or to disband it if we believe it is beyond redemption.

But critics of collective responsibility worry that directing our blame at groups will cause individuals to feel that their personal choices do not matter all that much. Individuals involved in the development and proliferation of technology, for instance, might feel disconnected from the negative consequences of those contributions, seeing themselves as mere cogs in a much larger machine. Or they may adopt a fatalistic perspective, and come to see the trajectory of technological development as inevitable, regardless of the harm it may cause, and think to themselves, “Why not? If I don’t, someone else will."

Philosopher Bernard Williams argued against this sort of thinking in his “Critique of Utilitarianism” (1973). Williams presents a thought experiment in which “Jim” is told that if he doesn't kill someone, then 20 people will be killed—but if he chooses to take one life, the other 19 will be saved. Williams argues that, morally speaking, it is beside the point whether someone else will kill or not kill people because of Jim's choice. To maintain personal integrity, Jim must not do something that is wrong—killing one person—despite the threat.

In the case of an individual who might help develop “bad” technology, Williams’ argument would suggest that it does not matter whether someone else would do the job in her place; to maintain her personal integrity, she must not contribute to something that is wrong.

Furthermore, at least some of the time our sense of what is inevitable may be overly pessimistic. Far from being excused for our participation in the production of harmful technologies that seem unavoidable, we may have a further obligation to fight their coming to be.

For many involved in the creation and proliferation of new technologies, there is a strong sense of personal and shared responsibility. For example, employees at powerful companies such as Microsoft and Google have made efforts to prevent their employers from developing technology for militarized agencies, such as the Department of Defense and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Innovators who have expressed some remorse for the harmful applications of their inventions include Albert Einstein (who encouraged research that led to the atomic bomb), Kamran Loghman (the inventor of weapons-grade pepper spray), and Ethan Zuckerman (inventor of the pop-up ad), all of whom later engaged in activities intended to offset the damage caused by their innovations.

Others try to make a clear distinction between how they intended their innovations to be used, and how those technologies have actually come to be used down the line—asserting that they are not be responsible for those unintended downstream applications. Marc Raibert, the CEO of Boston Dynamics, tried to make that distinction after a video of the company’s agile robots went viral and inspired dystopian fears in many viewers. He stated in an interview: "Every technology you can imagine has multiple ways of using it. If there's a scary part, it's just that people are scary. I don't think the robots by themselves are scary."

Raibert’s purist approach suggests that the creation of technology, in and of itself, is morally neutral and only applications can be deemed good or bad. But when dangerous or unethical applications are so easy to foresee, this position seems naive or willfully ignorant.

Ultimately, our evaluations of responsibility must take into consideration a wide range of factors, including: collective action; the relative power and knowledge of individuals; and whether any efforts were made to alter or stop the wrongs that were caused.

The core ethical puzzles here are not new; these questions emerge in virtually all arenas of human action and interaction. But the expanding frontiers of innovation can make it harder to see how we should apply our existing moral frameworks in a new and complicated world.

Jennifer Ware is an editor at Waltham, Mass.-based MindEdge Learning who teaches philosophy at the City University of New York. 

'Suburbia is dead'

Tiny homes redux. South Portland, Maine, City Councilor Sue Henderson, pushing for zoning changes to allow “tiny homes’’ – generally described as smaller than 400 square feet --  said that “Suburbia {with its big expensive houses and sprawl) is dead,’’ The Portland Press Herald reported. They’re as cheap as $45,000 and environmentally friendly. With an aging population, with young adults having fewer children and with wages of most people flat or declining on an inflation-adjusted basis, they’re going to look increasingly attractive.

And they’re great guest houses.

To read more, please hit this link

d

But fleeting

"In Love" (acrylic on canvas), by Anika Savage, in the "Summer Invitational'' show at Bromfield Gallery, Boston, Aug. 1-19.

Katie Parker: Amazon shuts out local businesses

Via OtherWords.org

The billions in tax breaks cities, including Boston, are offering Amazon to host its “HQ2,” Amazon’s bare-knuckled push to squash a business tax in Seattle, and recent strikes for better working conditions in Amazon facilities have all fueled a growing conversation about the retail behemoth’s toll on communities.

But one element of Amazon’s business strategy has fallen under the radar, and this one could really bite where you live: its bid to dominate local government purchasing.

In January 2017, Amazon won a contract with U.S. Communities, a purchasing cooperative made up of government agencies, school districts and other public or nonprofit agencies. The cooperative wields the heft of its more than 55,000 members to negotiate better prices. With this contract, they can now opt to buy their goods through Amazon Business, which advertises greater product selection, free shipping, and pricing discounts.

While the contract is a big boon for Amazon — a potential for $5.5 billion in sales over 11 years — recent analysis from the Institute for Local Self Reliance (ILSR) seriously questions how good a deal the public is getting out of this.

For one thing, the Amazon contract lacks the pricing protections that are usually standard in public procurement. Rather than relying on a catalog of fixed prices, governments are at the whim of Amazon’s dynamic pricing model, much like the “surge pricing” of ride-sharing services.

The Amazon contract also makes it harder for agencies to buy from local vendors. ILSR notes that while local businesses can join Amazon’s Marketplace to compete for U.S. Communities contracting opportunities, Amazon takes a 15 percent cut. That’s enough, given the already thin margins of public procurement, to push many local businesses out of the running.

For the 1,500 members that have signed onto this contract so far, that means a significant missed opportunity to help their local economies thrive. The good news is that a growing number of governments and nonprofits are realizing that getting the lowest bid isn’t the same as getting the best deal.

Local governments spend money every day. They can use that spending to build up local businesses, create jobs for residents, and grow their tax base, something impossible to do with Amazon’s virtual footprint. This purchasing strategy is more efficient, too: Dollars spent at independent local businesses recirculate at a greater rate than money spent at national chains, creating a multiplier effect.

By shifting their everyday spending, city governments from Phoenix to New Orleans are joining hospitals, universities, and other anchor institutions to spark inclusive economic growth.

Cleveland is a great example. There, local anchor institutions like the Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals helped launch Evergreen Cooperatives, a network of worker-owned businesses established to provide some of the goods and services these institutions routinely need, such as laundry services and food.

The businesses have an explicit goal of hiring local residents facing barriers to employment, and the cooperative structure gives these workers opportunities to participate in decision-making and build wealth through profit-sharing. Evergreen Cooperatives employs more 220 residents and is growing.

Local governments weighing whether to sign on to Amazon’s marketplace should consider this growing movement around inclusive, local procurement. Instead of being lured by Amazon’s come-on of lowest-price promises, stewards of local tax dollars should ask what would bring the best value for their communities.

Instead of going into Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s deepening pockets, the money they spend on goods and services should help everyday residents build wealth.

Katie Parker is a research associate at the Democracy Collaborative with a specialty in how health care institutions can support inclusive economic development. 

James P. Freeman: McConnell the central figure in reshaping the Supreme Court

Perched high above the fray, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R.Ky.) has comported himself in going about the people’s business like that of the reserved Barred Owl: observing keenly, roosting quietly, and acting decisively. Such attributes have allowed McConnell — a tactical and strategic master of parliamentary maneuvers — to calmly consolidate power, particularly with regard to shaping Supreme Court appointments.

President  Trump may have nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, but Kavanaugh’s likely confirmation to the court this year will be because of something McConnell understood almost five years ago.

In November  2013, at the urging of then-Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.), Democrats — voting along party lines — changed the rules of the Senate. This became known as “the nuclear option.” As The Atlantic then noted, under the new rules, “presidential nominees for all executive-branch position — including the Cabinet — and judicial vacancies below the Supreme Court could advance with a simple majority of 51 votes.”

(The rules for legislation were untouched, but the nuclear fallout was that the 60-vote threshold for overcoming a filibuster on nearly all nominations was dead; the net effect is that the minority party is nearly powerless to stop these nominations.)

Furious, then-Minority Leader McConnell issued a stern and prescient warning to Democrats on the Senate floor: “You’ll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think.”

McConnell could not have imagined that members of his party — and, by extension, conservatives — would soon be the beneficiaries of his prophetic words.

After the 2014 mid-term elections, Republicans regained control of the Senate. The significance of this became apparent upon the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in February 2016. An intellectual heavyweight, he was, by all accounts, the staunchest conservative on the court. And Republicans rightly feared that President  Obama would not replace Scalia with another conservative. They were correct.

Obama nominated Appeals Court Judge Merrick B. Garland, a centrist, to the Supreme Court in March 2016. He was indeed no Scalia. The Washington Post wrote that Obama figured that “the highly regarded jurist might blunt some of the expected political attacks and ultimately embarrass Senate Republicans into dropping their fierce opposition to the nomination.” Obama badly miscalculated Republican judicial motivations.

In a stroke of bold politics, McConnell imposed a blockade of the Garland nomination, letting it languish — without a hearing or a vote — until after the 2016 presidential elections. The action, or inaction, denied Obama the chance to replace Scalia. If anything, it proved a successful delaying tactic.

McConnell could hardly have foreseen a Trump (Republican) presidency but he knew that even if Republicans fell back into minority status in the Senate and Democrats retained the presidency after the elections, he could engineer a filibuster of Garland or another Supreme Court nominee. (Recall that the nuclear option did not apply to nominees of the high court.)

But Trump won, and Republicans still controlled the Senate.

Fulfilling a promise to nominate conservative justices, the new president nominated Court of Appeals Judge Neil Gorsuch in early 2017. Expressing their displeasure, Democrats in the Senate threatened to filibuster the conservative jurist, an option still available to them.

While Reid went nuclear in 2013, McConnell went thermonuclear in 2017.

Republicans in the Senate changed the rules whereby the nuclear option would also apply to Supreme Court nominees, not just lower-court nominees. (Democrats had threatened a similar change before they unexpectedly lost the 2016 election). Last month, The New York Times reminded its readers that “simple majority approval for considering and confirming Supreme Court nominations is the standing policy of the Senate now.”

While both parties have tinkered with procedural changes in the Senate in the short run, Republicans are using it to their advantage for the long run.

The Boston Globe recently reported that Trump (guided by Republicans) has already appointed 44 judges since taking office — “including more appellate judges than any president in American history at this point in his tenure.” He has another 88 nominees currently pending before the Senate. “If,” The Globe asserts, “Trump is able to fill just the current vacancies alone, he will be responsible for installing more than one-fifth of the sitting judges in the United States.”

Barring a political catastrophe for them this November, McConnell and the Republicans will likely retain power in the Senate. Consequently, they will continue controlling Supreme Court nominations and other federal court nominations. At least for two more years.

The retirement of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy means that there are no longer any justices serving on the Supreme Court who were nominated by President  Reagan. However, should just one more justice leave the high court before the 2020 presidential elections, Trump’s changes to the composition of the court would rival those made in the Reagan era.

History will show that McConnell also played a critical role in reshaping the court for generations to come.

James P. Freeman, a former banker, is a New England-based essayist. This piece first ran in Inside Sources.

Briefly very happy communards

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com

'This being summer in Vermont, my thoughts turn to the Hippies’ attempts at communal life in Vermont in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, during part of which time I was a college student in Hanover, N.H., just across the Connecticut River from the Green Mountain State.

 I just read Peter Simon’s amusing if  sometimes melancholic  article in The Boston Globe’s  July 22 magazine headlined “The beginning (and bittersweet end) of two hippie communes in Vermont’’. Because of its beauty, (then) cheap real estate and (exaggerated) reputation for tolerance for counter-culture types, the Green Mountain State was a magnet for hippies – real or just playing at it. For a few years, from about 1967 to about 1974, there were communes all over the state. Most of these young people were college students, dropouts or recent graduates.

In the end, these communes were doomed by their chaotic social and work systems, internal feuds and  at some, lack of indoor plumbing. They were often a mess. Such quasi-communism doesn’t work well, perhaps especially so for the middle-class and well-off kids experimenting with group living. They’re used to lots of personal space and creature comforts.

Mr. Simon writes:

“Within 2½ years, the dream was over. The hard realities of life on the farm, the menial labor, and our dwindling levels of tolerance for one another proved to be too much for this naive group of city dwellers.’’

Still, the experience seems central in their lives. 75 now mostly elderly people showed up at a 50th reunion of the residents of one of the communes – “Total Loss Farm,’’ in Guilford. The other commune was  the nearby “Tree Frog Farm,’’ where life was more comfortable than at Total Loss because the rich Mr. Simon (his father was a New York book-publishing executive) and a partner paid the bills.  In any case, tight bonds of friendship were forged in those long-ago days at the two communes.

On my visits to a couple of such Vermont farm communes in the summers I found that residents were generally sweet-natured (some simply because they were stoned), if grimy. I’d be invited to stay for the night but an air-conditioned motel room was more alluring.  Still, the vegetables produced in the short growing seasons were delicious.

I look back fondly at the ridiculous exuberance of that time, and the lush greenery.

Weaponizing art

"Sticks and Stones B9'' (monoprint), by Joan Hausrath, in "The Fifth National Monoprint Juried Exhibition,'' at the Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, Mass., through Sept. 2.

Joan Hausrath, Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Sticks and Stones B9, 2016, Monoprint

A club that's no more a club

Cellar hole in Dana, Mass.

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com

'Ruminate on an article in The Stamford Advocate  about how nature is fast reclaiming the Twin Lakes Swim & Tennis Club, in Stamford, foreclosed and abandoned in 2008, with its “14 acres delivered back to the whims of nature.’’

The newspaper’s Francis  Carr Jr. reported:

“In the parking lot, dragonflies flit among clumps of wildflowers growing through cracks in the asphalt. Farther on, where the swimming pool used to be, broken piles of rebar-laced concrete and stacks of wooden debris rise from thickets of thigh-high grass. Here and there, an overturned deck chair or a rusty old grill evoke the site’s leisurely past. Someone has spray-painted ‘RIP Twin Lakes’ across the roof of a vine-covered outbuilding.’’

The description reminded me of the crumbling dairy-farm buildings in the town I grew up in the ‘50s --  buildings that had been abandoned only about 20 years before as these small farms became uneconomic. The roofs were sagging and vines were extending themselves through broken windows.

That in turn reminded me of the late and eerie Robert Frost poem called “Directive,’’ parts of which I’ve quoted before.  It starts:

“Back out of all this now too much for us,

Back in a time made simple by the loss

Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off

Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,

There is a house that is no more a house

Upon a farm that is no more a farm

And in a town that is no more a town.’’

To read  the whole poem, please hit this link.

Our structures will erode, decay and disappear sooner than we might think.

To read Mr. Carr’s piece, please hit this link: