I’m not sure I’ve ever talked to anyone who would disagree, but all the structural incentives push in the direction of continuing expansion. No one gets re-elected for getting rid of bad laws.

Not only have our laws grown rapidly in recent years; so have the punishments they carry. You might think that federal criminal laws are reserved for the worst of the worst—individuals who have committed acts so egregious that they merit the attention not just of state authorities but of federal authorities, and not just civil fines but potential prison time. But if that’s your intuition, ask yourself this question: How many federal crimes do you think we have these days?

It turns out no one knows. Yes, every few years some enterprising academic or government official sets out to count them. They devote considerable resources and time (often years) to the task. But in the end, they come up short.

In 1982, the Department of Justice undertook what stands as maybe the most comprehensive count to date. A lawyer spent more than two years reading the U.S. Code—at that time, some 23,000 pages. The best the lawyer could say was that there were about 3,000 federal crimes.

Today, the U.S. Code is roughly twice the length it was in 1982, and contemporary guesses put the number of federal crimes north of 5,000. As the American Bar Association has said, “Whatever the exact number of crimes that comprise today’s ‘federal criminal law,’ it is clear that the amount of individual citizen behavior now potentially subject to federal criminal control has increased in astonishing proportions in the last few decades.”

Part of the reason no one can easily count the number of federal crimes is that our federal criminal code was “not planned; it just grew,” as Ronald Gainer, a retired Justice Department official, puts it. We do not have any single place to which people can turn to discern what our criminal laws prohibit. Sure, there’s Title 18 of the U.S. Code, “Crimes and Criminal Procedure.” But in truth, criminal laws are scattered here and there throughout various federal statutory titles and sections, the product of different pieces of legislation and different Congresses. Really, our federal criminal law is, Gainer writes, “a loose assemblage of … components that were built hastily to respond to perceptions of need and to perceptions of the popular will.”

That’s not the only confounding factor, though. Many federal criminal statutes overlap entirely, are duplicative in part, or, when juxtaposed, raise perplexing questions about what they mean. Take fraud. We have a federal mail-fraud law. We have a federal wire-fraud law. We have federal bribery and illegal-gratuities laws. We also have a federal law forbidding the deprivation of “honest services,” though no one is exactly sure what it does (or does not) add to all those other laws about fraud. On top of all this, more new laws criminalizing fraud are proposed during just about every session of Congress.

Once more, Congress’s output represents just the tip of the iceberg. Our administrative agencies don’t just turn out rules with civil penalties attached to them; every year, they generate more and more rules carrying criminal sanctions as well. How many? Here again, no one seems sure. But estimates suggest that at least 300,000 federal-agency regulations carry criminal sanctions today.

If you were to sit down and read through all of our criminal laws and regulations—or at least flip through them—you would find plenty of surprises. You would learn, for example, that it’s a federal crime to damage a government-owned lamp in Washington, D.C.; consult with a known pirate; or advertise wine by suggesting its intoxicating qualities.

The truth is, we now have so many federal criminal laws covering so many things that the legal scholar John Baker suggests that “there is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/08/america-has-too-many-laws-neil-gorsuch/679237/

Adverse Selection is the phenomenon in which information asymmetries in non-cooperative environments make trading dangerous. It has traditionally been understood to describe financial markets in which buyers and sellers systematically differ, such as a market for used cars in which sellers have the information advantage, where resulting feedback loops can lead to market collapses.

In this post, I make the case that adverse selection effects appear in many everyday contexts beyond specialized markets or strictly financial exchanges. I argue that modeling many of our decisions as taking place in competitive environments analogous to financial markets will help us notice instances of adverse selection that we otherwise wouldn’t.

Toward a Broader Conception of Adverse Selection

It’s been a long time since I read the original “Bullshit Jobs” essay or the book it was extended into; I’m tempted to go back with this critique in mind and see what I think.

[Graeber] presents an economic theory for how this happens, connecting it to the medieval practice of creating face-saving make-work jobs for talentless aristocrats, like a master of the horse or a lady of the bedchamber. In Graeber’s telling, a monarch who mostly gets paid taxes in kind has a calorie surplus, and needs to spend it by feeding assorted lackeys and hangers-on. And the modern rich are much richer than medieval rulers, while human vanity is a constant. So of course they hire a lot more such lackeys, right?

No! Of course not, because economic growth makes stuff cheap and time precious. And unstable political institutions also make safety precious. If there’s a cheap way to keep lots of allies handy, in case they’re necessary, and to keep enemies close, in case they want to try something, why not? That doesn’t apply today; Shantanu Narayen doesn’t have to worry that the illegitimate son of an Adobe cofounder is going to sail to San Jose, mercenaries in tow, and depose him.

“Bullshit Jobs” is a Terrible, Curiosity-Killing Concept

Very interesting points here, which among other things suggest that regardless of how badly last week’s debate hurt Biden’s chances, Democrats don’t really have the institutional capability to pick someone else.

If you decide after delving into the data that you need to warn “Democrats” about something and you give them a call, it turns out there’s nobody picking up the phone. Of course, the DNC and RNC do exist and they have staffers in the building who will literally pick up the phone. But the party committees don’t amount to anything. Neither do the quadrennial national conventions. Neither do the state parties. We have a lot of partisanship, but that’s largely negative partisanship, not affective affiliation with the party you usually vote for. The parties barely exist as institutions, but beyond that, even to the extent that they exist as a loose constellation of related entities, those entities lack social legitimacy and can’t steer events.

That presents itself most obviously in the spectacle of willfully nominated unpopular presidential contenders. But it arguably has more dire implications in terms of the difficulties it creates for setting priorities and making political decisions — if the public’s desires and interests can’t be constructively channeled through political parties, then we’re more likely to ping pong between stasis and demagoguery.

Democracy needs political parties, and the United States of America doesn’t really have them.

Why the parties can’t decide – by Matthew Yglesias

Sometimes, groups are genuinely found to differ a bit, on average. For instance, it may be found that men are a bit more dishonest than women or that kids from East Asian countries outperform American kids at math, on average. Situations like this often involve people jumping to inaccurate conclusions and spreading misinformation. In this article, we’ll explore why, as well as how to think more clearly about these kinds of situations.

http://clearerthinking.org/post/how-to-think-about-group-differences

459 citations, so is presumably considered solid.

In this paper, we use five decades of time-use surveys to document trends in the allocation of time within the United States. We find that a dramatic increase in leisure time lies behind the relatively stable number of market hours worked between 1965 and 2003. Specifically, using a variety of definitions for leisure, we show that leisure for men increased by roughly six to nine hours per week (driven by a decline in market work hours) and for women by roughly four to eight hours per week (driven by a decline in home production work hours). Lastly, we document a growing inequality in leisure that is the mirror image of the growing inequality of wages and expenditures, making welfare calculation based solely on the latter series incomplete.

Source: Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time Over Five Decades* | The Quarterly Journal of Economics | Oxford Academic

This is absolutely horrifying.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.

The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.

Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to incite fear of China vaccines

Another thing I don’t like, not only about Kabul but broadly about life after the fatha, are the new restrictions. In the group, we had a great degree of freedom about where to go, where to stay, and whether to participate in the war.

However, these days, you have to go to the office before 8 AM and stay there till 4 PM. If you don’t go, you’re considered absent, and [the wage for] that day is cut from your salary. We’re now used to that, but it was especially difficult in the first two or three months.

https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/en/reports/context-culture/new-lives-in-the-city-how-taleban-have-experienced-life-in-kabul/

The videos are really fun.

Dani Clode, a collaborator within Professor Makin’s lab, has developed the Third Thumb, an extra robotic thumb aimed at increasing the wearer’s range of movement, enhancing their grasping capability and expanding the carrying capacity of the hand. This allows the user to perform tasks that might be otherwise challenging or impossible to complete with one hand or to perform complex multi-handed tasks without having to coordinate with other people.

The Third Thumb is worn on the opposite side of the palm to the biological thumb and controlled by a pressure sensor placed under each big toe or foot. Pressure from the right toe pulls the Thumb across the hand, while the pressure exerted with the left toe pulls the Thumb up toward the fingers. The extent of the Thumb’s movement is proportional to the pressure applied, and releasing pressure moves it back to its original position.

https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/third-thumb

We’re staying in one of these charming early-19th century townhouses…

…in the admittedly less charming basement:

Condiments are clearly labeled as such.

Whereas orange juice is worryingly unspecific.

Lawns are cut somewhat less short. 

Some housing appears to still be segregated.