Lots of kids are not going to school for less than benign reasons. Parents need the money they can earn, they’re trafficked, and so on. Look at history before compulsory schooling. Compare the US and its schooling to places like Mexico without it (and I love Mexico, but the comparison is true) and the progress of an enlightened populace. Sad to say, schools aren’t always great, but letting parents let/keep kids out of attending school is not a good idea.
The excerpts from the book are fairly banal ideas and highlight the point that execution of these policies is really what matters. These are carefully worded policy positions on tactics that hardly ever get implemented effectively. Strikes me as typical focus-group tested pablum.
Given her public policy incoherence, and her statements on issues that barely exceed the level of "See Spot run. Run, run, run", claiming she actually has the capacity for anything other than clever campaigns is a stretch IMO. She certainly isn't one of the Edith Wilsons that are the authors of the Biden administration.
I don't have a super strong opinion about Harris, but I've noticed that her supporters are disproportionately in the "DEI manager in the Yemeni wedding liquidation division at Lockheed Martin" quadrant of the coalition. The guys who want to decolonize the claim denial department at the health insurance company they work for. As in, more concerned about the most basic optics (and talking about them constantly) than, you know, what's really going on out there.
Today ended up being a fun Throwback Thursday: after Matt took us on this trip down memory lane, I reread Elizabeth Nolan Brown's critical piece on Harris [https://reason.com/2019/06/03/kamala-harris-is-a-cop-who-wants-to-be-president/], to which I remember Matt tweeting in reply at the time something like "Kamala is a cop but cops are popular.".
Just some meta-commentary... I'm kinda surprised that there isn't more KH hate going on here. Don't get me wrong, I'm totally a detractor of hers, but I'm not actually a hater. I just figured most SBers *were* haters.
There’s a good amount of hate being expressed. But Matt usually encourages that with negative commentary about her. This time he was more positive about her.
KH's views on the appropriate use of incarceration would be more attractive if our jails and prisons were more constructive and less dangerous places. Here in NYC, sending someone to Rikers could literally be a death sentence, and certainly not rehabilitative.
No good explanation, nope. And...things are definitely getting worse, because of inadequate staffing. We read this in the NYT, but also my son's Zen Buddhist group, which used to provide Buddhist chaplains to Rikers (and elsewhere) on a volunteer basis, has finally been invited back in after Covid, but is seriously worrying about whether conditions are too dangerous, based on what they have been told by the official chaplain, about staffing inadequacy. "We'd really love to have you back, but we can't promise to keep you safe."
Basic point that Matt leaves completely unaddressed: Cops should also be arrested and prosecuted for non-murder crimes, such as making false statements on official documents (like arrest reports). Any attempt to improve the quality of our law enforcement has to take this seriously.
I mean, the issue is there's a distinct disagreement on what crimes should be prioritized and gone after for the overall good of society, as opposed to the more obvious crimes in front of you.
Most of my more left-leaning friends for example, think the executives who have been in charge of oil and gas companies for the past 50 years who spend tens of millions to basically create the climate change denial industry are on the hook for far more death and criminal actions than any group of normal criminals. Like, if the CEO of Exxon whose funding of various think tanks led to untold number of deaths, cancer diagnoses, and a lower quality of life walks free with more money than God, why care that some guy is getting free bail who held up a 7-11?
You're never going to convince somebody believes that it's far more important to go after the guy who stole something from Walgreen's. Like, much of the generation that saw bank execs get off scot-free from the Great Recession is just going to laugh at your first sentence.
Now, those people aren't going to be the majority of voters, but they might, especially in the next decade or so, be the majority of primary voters in many prominent American cities, so "popularists" are going to have to figure out an argument to win them over.
I think it would be hard to draw a rock-solid causal line that would hold up in court, between the actions of fossil fuel executives decades ago and deaths/cancer rates now. Climate science can be complex and contentious on attribution-related issues. And how much of a rise in global temperature did each of those think tank dollars lead to?
Plus they would try all sorts of arguments to rebut it, that might even have some truth to them, like climate change reduced extreme cold deaths which are much greater in quantity than extreme heat deaths, or fossil fuels saved more lives than climate change took, etc.
Plus it's really hard to prove that, that fossil fuel or or bank execs knew what the outcome of their actions would be to the same degree a street criminal would. Our justice system weights intent very heavily, and rarely comes down hard when there is poor evidence for it.
I am curious about the fact that many countries have much lower crime rates than ours even though we have comparatively huge incarceration rates. I know it is complicated, and there is probably a Slow Boring about it somewhere, but this is the sticking point I come back to when thinking about this issue.
I think that at a core level, we as a society tolerate violence and more importantly believe in an efficacy of violence much more than do our peer societies.
The reasons for this are myriad, but it leaves us with more people, who are more prone to violence, and then we the state believe in and respond with a higher level of violence in the both police force and longer incarceration.
I don't think our incarceration rates will ever level down to our peers. that's not to say we shouldn't be trying to get them lower than they are.
I just browsed a study on recidivism from the US Sentencing Commission, the group that writes the federal sentencing guidelines. The basic takeaway is that increasing sentences from 38 to 79 months reduced recidivism by 18%. That doesn’t mean you subtract 0.18, it means you multiply by 0.82.
They used matching to control for age at release and offense type, very plausible methodology, and they have enough data for robust conclusions.
Anyway, that seems like a good estimate of the effect of incarceration. Double sentences, reduce recidivism by 18%. This is a good investment if you are deterring serious, violent crimes and a bad investment if you are deterring almost anything else.
Seems like there’s a slip from reduction of recidivism to deterrence at the end. It seems to me that those are very different things. And the importance of an 18% drop in recidivism might be more meaningful if it is a drop from 44% chance to 36% chance than if it’s a drop from 11% chance to 9% chance.
I remembering reading once that age is a significant factor the probability that some one commits a crime, and I wonder to what extent longer sentences reduce recidivism because people are older when they get out of prison.
the u.s. sentencing commission adjusted for that through matching, but yes, age is a huge predictor of criminality and violent crimes by men over 50 are pretty rare
I think that might be more true of violent crime, but much less than you would expect for crime in general. Recidivism among older people is still remarkably high.
One thing I would like to know is who exactly are these key Harris staffers? What are their names? And why do they appear from afar to be so much worse than the average Democratic staffer? Are they a bunch of a Tiktok-addicted zoomers? What's going on? I see from five seconds of googling that her chief of staff is someone named Lorraine Voles, but she was only hired in 2022 and has a long resume working for lots of normal Democratic politicians, so I assume she isn't the worst of them.
Thanks for not answering any of my questions, and for so effectively countering an argument that I plainly didn't make. I get that you really dislike Harris and everyone else to your left - I'm not a huge fan of hers either - but at least try to stay on topic instead of preaching at people.
I'm late getting to this post and catching up on all the comments. One thing I get (other than how focused people are on pulling kids from school) is that people dislike Harris because they, well, dislike Harris. Mumble mumble failed 2020 campaign mumble mumble. Something about unnamed staff personnel? Her fans being progressives? (I didn't know she had any fans.) All very vague and confusing.
VPs are never popular. VPs are never never more popular than POTUS (current approval rating 40% compared to 39% for Harris). They always look weak and ineffectual. It's in the job description.
The dislike of Harris seems to be so much about "vibes" and not much else that part of me is starting to think maybe it has something to do with her gender? I don't know. "Just asking questions."
What on earth? I don't particularly dislike Harris, nor is she on my left on most issues! I read your series of questions as boiling down to "What's going on" (one of your explicit questions, btw), so I answer that to my mind if there is anything wrong with her staffers - which you very storngly imply, in my humble reading - then imho we should ask why she hired them. That's more interesting, to me, then all the rest. We can agree to disagree on that. I may have also misunderstood you. In either case I don't see any justification for devolving the discussioon into (misfired) personal attacks.
hiring normie dems would be a big improvement because it seemed a lot like tiktok addicts were pushing* her into dumb positions like the healthcare thing and she'd have to do damage control.
*she may have just been that bad at campaigning, idk
Lots of kids are not going to school for less than benign reasons. Parents need the money they can earn, they’re trafficked, and so on. Look at history before compulsory schooling. Compare the US and its schooling to places like Mexico without it (and I love Mexico, but the comparison is true) and the progress of an enlightened populace. Sad to say, schools aren’t always great, but letting parents let/keep kids out of attending school is not a good idea.
The excerpts from the book are fairly banal ideas and highlight the point that execution of these policies is really what matters. These are carefully worded policy positions on tactics that hardly ever get implemented effectively. Strikes me as typical focus-group tested pablum.
Given her public policy incoherence, and her statements on issues that barely exceed the level of "See Spot run. Run, run, run", claiming she actually has the capacity for anything other than clever campaigns is a stretch IMO. She certainly isn't one of the Edith Wilsons that are the authors of the Biden administration.
Being a talented politician is clearly a rarer skill than being able to give guidance to a ghost writer.
Typos in the quotes from Harris's book:
"is unacceptable’ traditional approaches" -> "unacceptable; traditional"
"That means a tough on comprehensive approach" -> "tough and comprehensive"
Violent crime isn’t quite a bit higher now than 2009 from any state I’ve seen.
I don't have a super strong opinion about Harris, but I've noticed that her supporters are disproportionately in the "DEI manager in the Yemeni wedding liquidation division at Lockheed Martin" quadrant of the coalition. The guys who want to decolonize the claim denial department at the health insurance company they work for. As in, more concerned about the most basic optics (and talking about them constantly) than, you know, what's really going on out there.
Kamala needs to be on the cover of The Peter Principle
Today ended up being a fun Throwback Thursday: after Matt took us on this trip down memory lane, I reread Elizabeth Nolan Brown's critical piece on Harris [https://reason.com/2019/06/03/kamala-harris-is-a-cop-who-wants-to-be-president/], to which I remember Matt tweeting in reply at the time something like "Kamala is a cop but cops are popular.".
One weird trick for Democrats to start getting Dave Coffin's vote:
Stop nominating fucking prosecutors.
Huh? I’m struggling to think of other prominent Dems who are former prosecutors.
https://reason.com/2023/08/09/why-kamala-harris-wont-be-asked-about-the-suicide-of-a-newspaper-man-she-persecuted/
Heh, I see I wasn't the only one peeking around Reason this morning, and I'm not surprised that you were one of them.
Just some meta-commentary... I'm kinda surprised that there isn't more KH hate going on here. Don't get me wrong, I'm totally a detractor of hers, but I'm not actually a hater. I just figured most SBers *were* haters.
There’s a good amount of hate being expressed. But Matt usually encourages that with negative commentary about her. This time he was more positive about her.
Harris' problem is she is not an effective politician. It's difficult to get riled up over something like that.
I don't have anywhere near enough time in my day to litigate on here all the ways in which Kamala is fucking horrible.
Could you find some time? I'd really like to know. Honest question.
I think she's a standard VP. Above Quayle, below Gore (but probably less than one might think).
KH's views on the appropriate use of incarceration would be more attractive if our jails and prisons were more constructive and less dangerous places. Here in NYC, sending someone to Rikers could literally be a death sentence, and certainly not rehabilitative.
What's the timeline on replacing Rikers with five borough-separate prisons? Have you seen a good explainer why they haven't been built yet?
No good explanation, nope. And...things are definitely getting worse, because of inadequate staffing. We read this in the NYT, but also my son's Zen Buddhist group, which used to provide Buddhist chaplains to Rikers (and elsewhere) on a volunteer basis, has finally been invited back in after Covid, but is seriously worrying about whether conditions are too dangerous, based on what they have been told by the official chaplain, about staffing inadequacy. "We'd really love to have you back, but we can't promise to keep you safe."
Basic point that Matt leaves completely unaddressed: Cops should also be arrested and prosecuted for non-murder crimes, such as making false statements on official documents (like arrest reports). Any attempt to improve the quality of our law enforcement has to take this seriously.
it would be great to get back to that old reliable of "people who commit crimes should be punished"
but i think the obvious nature of this is also an indicator of how weird the world is now
will the brief vogue of decarceration just disappear like a puff of smoke?
it seems like getting all those judges out will be hard
I mean, the issue is there's a distinct disagreement on what crimes should be prioritized and gone after for the overall good of society, as opposed to the more obvious crimes in front of you.
Most of my more left-leaning friends for example, think the executives who have been in charge of oil and gas companies for the past 50 years who spend tens of millions to basically create the climate change denial industry are on the hook for far more death and criminal actions than any group of normal criminals. Like, if the CEO of Exxon whose funding of various think tanks led to untold number of deaths, cancer diagnoses, and a lower quality of life walks free with more money than God, why care that some guy is getting free bail who held up a 7-11?
You're never going to convince somebody believes that it's far more important to go after the guy who stole something from Walgreen's. Like, much of the generation that saw bank execs get off scot-free from the Great Recession is just going to laugh at your first sentence.
Now, those people aren't going to be the majority of voters, but they might, especially in the next decade or so, be the majority of primary voters in many prominent American cities, so "popularists" are going to have to figure out an argument to win them over.
I think it would be hard to draw a rock-solid causal line that would hold up in court, between the actions of fossil fuel executives decades ago and deaths/cancer rates now. Climate science can be complex and contentious on attribution-related issues. And how much of a rise in global temperature did each of those think tank dollars lead to?
Plus they would try all sorts of arguments to rebut it, that might even have some truth to them, like climate change reduced extreme cold deaths which are much greater in quantity than extreme heat deaths, or fossil fuels saved more lives than climate change took, etc.
Plus it's really hard to prove that, that fossil fuel or or bank execs knew what the outcome of their actions would be to the same degree a street criminal would. Our justice system weights intent very heavily, and rarely comes down hard when there is poor evidence for it.
"the world" is weird on this only if the word "the world" means the same thing it means in "the world series"...
I am curious about the fact that many countries have much lower crime rates than ours even though we have comparatively huge incarceration rates. I know it is complicated, and there is probably a Slow Boring about it somewhere, but this is the sticking point I come back to when thinking about this issue.
I think that at a core level, we as a society tolerate violence and more importantly believe in an efficacy of violence much more than do our peer societies.
The reasons for this are myriad, but it leaves us with more people, who are more prone to violence, and then we the state believe in and respond with a higher level of violence in the both police force and longer incarceration.
I don't think our incarceration rates will ever level down to our peers. that's not to say we shouldn't be trying to get them lower than they are.
I just browsed a study on recidivism from the US Sentencing Commission, the group that writes the federal sentencing guidelines. The basic takeaway is that increasing sentences from 38 to 79 months reduced recidivism by 18%. That doesn’t mean you subtract 0.18, it means you multiply by 0.82.
They used matching to control for age at release and offense type, very plausible methodology, and they have enough data for robust conclusions.
Anyway, that seems like a good estimate of the effect of incarceration. Double sentences, reduce recidivism by 18%. This is a good investment if you are deterring serious, violent crimes and a bad investment if you are deterring almost anything else.
Seems like there’s a slip from reduction of recidivism to deterrence at the end. It seems to me that those are very different things. And the importance of an 18% drop in recidivism might be more meaningful if it is a drop from 44% chance to 36% chance than if it’s a drop from 11% chance to 9% chance.
I remembering reading once that age is a significant factor the probability that some one commits a crime, and I wonder to what extent longer sentences reduce recidivism because people are older when they get out of prison.
All sentences being life sentences means no recidivism, but it’s a bad solution
the u.s. sentencing commission adjusted for that through matching, but yes, age is a huge predictor of criminality and violent crimes by men over 50 are pretty rare
I think that might be more true of violent crime, but much less than you would expect for crime in general. Recidivism among older people is still remarkably high.
One thing I would like to know is who exactly are these key Harris staffers? What are their names? And why do they appear from afar to be so much worse than the average Democratic staffer? Are they a bunch of a Tiktok-addicted zoomers? What's going on? I see from five seconds of googling that her chief of staff is someone named Lorraine Voles, but she was only hired in 2022 and has a long resume working for lots of normal Democratic politicians, so I assume she isn't the worst of them.
Her staffers are her choice so ultimately it reflects on her (esp. if they are worse than average,, it makes HER worse than average as a politician).
Thanks for not answering any of my questions, and for so effectively countering an argument that I plainly didn't make. I get that you really dislike Harris and everyone else to your left - I'm not a huge fan of hers either - but at least try to stay on topic instead of preaching at people.
I'm late getting to this post and catching up on all the comments. One thing I get (other than how focused people are on pulling kids from school) is that people dislike Harris because they, well, dislike Harris. Mumble mumble failed 2020 campaign mumble mumble. Something about unnamed staff personnel? Her fans being progressives? (I didn't know she had any fans.) All very vague and confusing.
VPs are never popular. VPs are never never more popular than POTUS (current approval rating 40% compared to 39% for Harris). They always look weak and ineffectual. It's in the job description.
The dislike of Harris seems to be so much about "vibes" and not much else that part of me is starting to think maybe it has something to do with her gender? I don't know. "Just asking questions."
What on earth? I don't particularly dislike Harris, nor is she on my left on most issues! I read your series of questions as boiling down to "What's going on" (one of your explicit questions, btw), so I answer that to my mind if there is anything wrong with her staffers - which you very storngly imply, in my humble reading - then imho we should ask why she hired them. That's more interesting, to me, then all the rest. We can agree to disagree on that. I may have also misunderstood you. In either case I don't see any justification for devolving the discussioon into (misfired) personal attacks.
hiring normie dems would be a big improvement because it seemed a lot like tiktok addicts were pushing* her into dumb positions like the healthcare thing and she'd have to do damage control.
*she may have just been that bad at campaigning, idk
I have no knowledge but have heard that Maya Harris played an important role in how Kamala defined her stances in the 2020 campaign.