- Courtland Milloy of WaPo makes the case for concealed carry after a fatal stabbing. The comments are similar to the ones I’ve made. It makes most sense if the assailant always carries a knife but the potential victim always carries a gun.
- The way out of the mess in Greece might have been some Brady bonds type approach of a debt swap. Little did I know that a large chunk of the debt was held by Greeks. I see no way out.
I suppose this might be a reason why gun control advocates think that more guns equals more crime:
In the aftermath of a deadly shooting outside a party at a Southeast Washington apartment building, investigators searched for evidence that would positively identify one of their top suspects. But they never found it, and nobody came forward to name him.
As a result, authorities say, police couldn’t obtain the arrest warrant they needed to get the suspect, Orlando Carter, off the street. Days later, according to prosecutors, Carter drove a rented minivan while three of his friends opened fire on another group.
But Orlando Carter had been recognized at the party. Instead of telling authorities, Andre Morgan testified last week, he planned to avenge his dead friend — and is now charged with plotting to kill Orlando Carter.
...
Morgan, 21, testified that he was outside the apartment after the party with his friend Jordan Howe, 20, on March 22, when he saw Orlando Carter arrive in a car and hand a gun to his brother Sanquan Carter, 21.
Angry after Sanquan’s gold-colored bracelet disappeared, authorities say, the brothers and another man began shooting at the crowd. Howe was killed, and two others were hurt.
Morgan never planned to tell police, he testified. Instead, he told the jury, his first thought as he held Howe after the shooting was: “Kill Sanquan and Orlando.”
People familiar with the case say Morgan and several friends then planned an attack on Orlando Carter the next day — an attack Orlando Carter survived.
Authorities said Orlando Carter then orchestrated further retribution: a March 30 drive-by shooting in the 4000 block of South Capitol Street SE that targeted mourners who had attended Howe’s funeral. The drive-by, and the killing of a 17-year-old during a robbery minutes earlier, left another four dead and six injured.
The FDA has often been blamed for slowing the process of drug development. (An overview here.) There are plenty of problems with the FDA in its current form but this was a different take on the the problems confronting drug discovery:
“All of the 20,000 or so drug products that have ever been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration interact with just two percent of the proteins found in human cells,” he [Brent Stockwell] writes in The Quest for the Cure. “This means the vast majority of proteins in our cells — many of which, in theory, can modulate disease processes — have never been targeted before with a drug.”
Many scientists, he says, have taken this as evidence that these harmful proteins yet to be penetrated by drugs cannot be stopped. Pharmaceutical companies have also succumbed to this viewpoint, he says, shifting their priorities away from the discovery of new drugs in favor of finding new applications for existing ones.
“Pharmaceutical companies face tough economic questions,” Stockwell says. “Should they spend their money going after proteins considered to be the most elusive? Or should they focus, perhaps, on fine-tuning their existing drugs in order to discover new clinical applications for them or to improve them just enough so that they can be marketed as new products?”
This is impressive:
This morning, if you opened your browser and went to NYTimes.com, an amazing thing happened in the milliseconds between your click and when the news about North Korea and James Murdoch appeared on your screen. Data from this single visit was sent to 10 different companies, including Microsoft and Google subsidiaries, a gaggle of traffic-logging sites, and other, smaller ad firms. Nearly instantaneously, these companies can log your visit, place ads tailored for your eyes specifically, and add to the ever-growing online file about you.
…
Adnetik is a standard targeting company that uses real-time bidding. They can offer targeted ads based on how users act (behavioral), who they are (demographic), where they live (geographic), and who they seem like online (lookalike), as well as something they call "social proximity." They also give advertisers the ability to choose the types of sites on which their ads will run based on "parameters like publisher brand equity, contextual relevance to the advertiser, brand safety, level of ad clutter and content quality."
Adnetik also offers a service called "retargeting" that another … company, AdRoll, specializes in. Here's how it works. Let's say you're an online shoe merchant. Someone comes to your store but doesn't purchase anything. While they're there, you drop a cookie on them. Thereafter you can target ads to them, knowing that they're at least mildly interested. Even better, you can drop cookies on everyone who comes to look at shoes and then watch to see who comes back to buy. Those people become your training data, and soon you're only "retargeting" those people with a data profile that indicates that they're likely to purchase something from you eventually. It's slick, especially if people don't notice that the pairs of shoes they found the willpower not to purchase just happen to be showing up on their favorite gardening sites.
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AdExpose, now a comScore company, watches where and how ads are run to determine if their purchasers got their money's worth. "Up to 80% of interactive ads are sold and resold through third parties," they put it on their website. "This daisychaining brings down the value of online ads and advertisers don't always know where their ads have run." To solve that problem, AdExpose claims to provide independent verification of an ad's placement.
All three companies want to know as much about me and what's on my screen as they possibly can, although they have different reasons for their interest. None of them seem like evil companies, nor are they singular companies. Like much of this industry, they seem to believe in what they're doing. They deliver more relevant advertising to consumers and that makes more money for companies. They are simply tools to improve the grip strength of the invisible hand.
But not as impressive as this:
Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ”
…
… the marketers said they wanted to send specially designed ads to women in their second trimester, which is when most expectant mothers begin buying all sorts of new things, like prenatal vitamins and maternity clothing. “Can you give us a list?” the marketers asked.
…
The only problem is that identifying pregnant customers is harder than it sounds. Target has a baby-shower registry, and Pole started there, observing how shopping habits changed as a woman approached her due date, which women on the registry had willingly disclosed. He ran test after test, analyzing the data, and before long some useful patterns emerged. Lotions, for example. Lots of people buy lotion, but one of Pole’s colleagues noticed that women on the baby registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close to their delivery date.
As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.
I’m agnostic about some of these privacy concerns but I believe that consumers need to be aware of them. I also use four different browsers for different purposes (Opera, Chrome, Firefox and IE). All are set to delete cookies on exit - except for Chrome which I use solely on Google sites.
My response to cookies is that I find them more annoying than a breach of privacy. The Internet is so cool that all they can come up with is serving ads? Zuckerberg’s response when Eduardo Saverin wanted to have ad companies link up with Facebook was an emphatic no because Facebook was so cool. Look where Facebook is now - they may not be serving ads but they’re definitely trying to sell something.
If users were really upset about this one thing they might be able to do is to render their databases invalid. Deleting cookies is one way. Randomly clicking away at ads is another. Sometimes I amuse myself by responding to pop up surveys and giving responses that are way out of whack.
Gary Gorton’s Panic of 2007 was a fairly interesting read only because it confirms most of my biases about the subprime crisis so yes, this post is confirmation bias at its worst.
- The lack of a way to short the crisis did not allow asset prices to adjust.
- The introduction of the ABX index allowed shorts to finally reveal their expectations and beliefs.
- The size of the the trade on short side of the ABX revealed to the market the expectations which set the market into a downward spiral.
- The ABX index made it easier to mark MBS to market which fed back into the downward spiral.
Most surprising passage (in other words investors bought stuff they had no idea how to value):
With the increase in crime in our neighborhood my thoughts turned to whether it might be worthwhile to procure a gun. As part of my research on the costs and benefits of gun ownership I deferred to John Lott’s “More Guns, Less Crime”. (link is Wikipedia version - I read the 2nd edition)
I found the book and its research pretty comprehensive. Included were many sensitivity analysis which I appreciated. The effects were large and require some explanation. Lott’s explanation is that more guns means less crime. Unfortunately I was not quite convinced and like Gary Kleck of University of Florida whom Lott cites in the book, I feel like something is missing in the regression specification but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Perhaps the first problem with the results was the lack of published R-squares. If his model explained more than 80 percent of the variation in crime I may be more persuaded.
The second “problem” is that this is not really a study of guns and crime but the passage of concealed carry laws in states. Lott’s analysis is at the state and county level using longitudinal data. I have serious issues with instrumental variables but most economists are in love with it so I’m in the minority. In my book, the year the concealed carry law is passed is an instrumental variable. When we use different instruments we would naturally get different size effects. The implication here is that the passage of concealed carry laws led to higher gun ownership although this chart seems to indicate that it might not be the case. (I may take this with a grain of salt since its in Mother Jones - and I would have to convince myself by actually doing my own tabulation.) Anyway it would be whole lot different if the regressions were run on actual gun ownership so that the results would be more easily interpretable as in the following manner: “Increasing one gun in the county reduces 3.2 robberies” or something to that effect. There is no indication that the year concealed carry is passed is a correlated with gun ownership nor as far as I can see the use of an alternative instrument.
Lott rejects the use of trend terms in his model because including a quadratic term might capture most of the effects in his model. In his charts, after the passage of a concealed carry law, the number of robberies, for instance would decline and continue falling. He objects to using the trend term because then it would capture the intended effects of the year concealed carry is passed. His models use year as dummies so he claims that this effect is partially captured and including a trend would obviously invalidate the results. If I read it correctly, some other economists who have tried to replicate his results have included a trend term and have found that the effects are not statistically significant. I am undecided at this point whether including turning points as part of the regression is a mispecification or an omitted variable.
The other larger substantive issue is that even though Lott claims that more guns would lead to less crime he does not say how much more (although he does say that it is more than what it is now). Introspection will indicate that 100% gun ownership will not drive crime down to 0. If everyone owns a gun there is no uncertainty when a criminal intends to rob someone. Since he knows for certainty the the other person is armed he will shoot first and then rob the victim while the victim is incapacitated.
Likewise 0% gun ownership is not a stable equilibrium either unless we can stuff the knowledge of gun making and guns into a vacuum. There will always be an incentive to own a gun because then - well - I would outgun you and can rob you easily.
More speculatively, I would also suggest that anything above 50% gun ownership would have the same effect as 100% ownership. The story that Lott tells is that a criminal is uncertain of whether the potential victim has a gun and therefore this uncertainty drives the criminal away toward other ‘safer’ crimes such as burglary.
I have my doubts as to how substitutable different types of crimes actually are for instance one doesn’t think that rape and robbery are substitutes and it isn’t clear to me that robberies and burglaries are highly substitutable either. In the latter case someone who commits robberies is likely to be impatient and hence just sticks some up rather than have the patience to case a place to determine whether he should break in or not.
In sum I thought that the research on guns and crime is important but I also think that attention needs to shift toward finding other instruments or measuring actual gun ownership directly such as gun registrations, etc. (Yes, this will be biased since there are stolen, unregistered guns which is why I say different instruments so that gun ownership while biased would presumably still be a valid instrument.)
P.S. I also flipped through The Bias Against Guns but it didn’t really hold my attention. Most of the book was about whether guns increased other types of crimes such as mass shootings and such.
And why we would be too if we were in the 1 percent: Housing and education for children
The lack of affordable housing in the city which is close to jobs and good public education in the neighborhood.
“We could all move to Montana, but what would we do there?”“Yes, the kids can go to public school - but isn’t private school better?”
Or perhaps housing, good jobs and good education is all relative and that we need these things is just an illusion.
