the investments she favors may more quietly reflect conservative tenets like heavy highway spending, disregard for energy efficiency, and the denial of funds to transit and pedestrian projects in densely populated areas.

This should not be surprising, especially for streetcar proponents. But it should be alarming for them. As my former colleague Joe Miller wrote in 2014,

What streetcar advocates really have to fear is not the defunding of urban transit, but the defunding of streetcars in favor of other forms of transit. Past administrations favored transit projects that reduced congestion or improved mobility, so streetcars received few federal dollars. The Obama administration’s desire to use transit projects to create “livable communities” has made federal streetcar funding possible.

Mind you, overall Federal transit funding may not change much. But as Slate pointed out, the Obama Administration was an outlier on how the funding was spent:

Obama’s first transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, for example, was a major proponent of diverting DOT spending away from highways (many of which are boondoggles, the least of which costs many times as much as the hated streetcars) to other transportation and infrastructure projects. He supervised the creation of the TIGER grant program, which injected billions in federal money into local, multimodal projects, and was reauthorized repeatedly by Congress.

Recall that in 2013, TIGER funding provided $20 million toward the streetcar project in Kansas City. And according to the Kansas City Regional Transit Alliance (KCRTA), the proposed $227 million Main Street extension of the streetcar assumes up to $114 million in federal funding. Fourteen million of that is from designated regional funds (STP/CMAQ), which means other regional transportation projects would have to wait if streetcar expansion moves ahead. The remaining $100 million now may be pie-in-the-sky.

In July 2014, Mayor James campaigned for the first ill-fated streetcar extension line by saying, “We really have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity here.” Considering the President-Elect’s Secretary choice, he may have been right. It remains to be seen if he and other streetcar supporters believed that rhetoric.

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Kids aren’t social workers. We don’t send them to school to improve the lives of everyone else. We send them to learn. It’s time we redefine public education.

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Platters appeared in the mid-’70s and, suddenly, instead of two projectors showing individual 20-minute reels of film, projectionists were taking all the individual reels and building them into one monster reel that lay on its side on a spinning platter, and the entire film would feed through a single projector. Films would still have to be built—assembled from individual reels into platters—but with no need for reel changes and a consistent light source, projectionists were no longer needed to run the movies. The unions tried to hold back the inevitable, but chain theaters wanted to get away from expensive union contracts, and the first thing to go were licensing standards.

“Giuliani came in and started to change things to be more favorable to management, and we sensed it was going to be a problem,” Rivierzo says. “They wanted to get rid of the projectionist license completely. We fought it at city council, and eventually what they did was water down the test so anyone could pass it.”

“Before, you used to have to take a 100-question exam to become a licensed projectionist,” Ramos says. “And you had to know electricity, you had to know your currents and your storage and so forth, and you also took a practical exam. But they dumbed it down to a 40-question exam, and the department of consumer affairs took over testing rather than the bureau of gas and electricity. So managers were able to get their license and run the theater, run the box office, run everything, for ten bucks an hour.“

This is a pretty clear example of unions using licensing standards to protect jobs which are being threatened (or eliminated) by technological improvements. If it were up to the union in this story, theaters would still be required to follow the old projectionist rules despite the fact that technology has made the old job pointless in most cases. Some union jobs would have been maintained, albeit at a higher and totally unnecessary cost to filmgoers. They used political power to fight the advance of technology as much as they could. Using the term “dumbed it down” in reference to the test is absurd, because the test only eliminated the necessity of knowing information that was no longer applicable to the new technology.

This is, of course, a familiar story. We are seeing it play out right now with HVAC licensing in St. Louis County. Business down because of the recession? Expand licensing, claim you are protecting safety, and drive your small or non-union competitors out of business. “Drive out of business” may be an exaggeration in this instance, though, because the protectionism here entails more of a restriction on how non-licensed competitors can grow their businesses, by restricting what they can work on. It also prevents future competition by making it harder for people to enter the market in the first place.

Occupational licensing serves primarily to protect the interests of the people already working within an occupation. It always has, and always will.

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In the second part of his post, he links to an article on Slate that cites a study analyzing electricity consumption patterns in the wake of government policy intended to “nudge” consumers into using less energy. First and foremost, this study is not relevant to my argument. In the case of Missouri’s green rebate program, which is what I discussed in my commentary, individuals receive a cash rebate when they buy energy-efficient appliances. The study cited in the Slate article looks at a case in which the electricity company simply sent its customers a home energy report that included charts and a list of tips on how to improve energy efficiency. The program considered by this study included neither a financial incentive, nor an upgraded appliance. The only conclusion that I would feel comfortable making from the study is that pamphlets do little to influence individual behavior. The study suffers from additional shortcomings, as well. For example, I disagree that a change of 1 percent or 3 percent is significant. This variation could be attributable to multiple other variables, such as a change in the price of energy or a seasonal change in the weather. The study also did not prove that the customers it identified as “liberals” reduced their energy consumption as a result of the home energy reports. Again, this reduction could have stemmed from any variety of other factors. Furthermore, because the percentage change and the sample size are both so small, a completely different result could conceivably be selected from the raw data.

According to a report published by Peter Huber and Mark Mills at the Manhattan Institute, the claim that we can meet future energy demand through conservation and efficiency is a myth. They provide evidence that, despite dramatic gains in energy-efficiency, aggregate energy consumption has increased over history:

The American economy has experienced massive efficiency gains: for each unit of energy, we produce more than twice as much GDP today than we did in 1950. Yet during that period of time, our national total energy consumption has tripled. Paradoxically, when it comes to energy, the more we save, the more we consume. […]

“Efficiency fails to curb demand because it lets more people do more, and do it faster—and more/more/faster invariably swamps all the efficiency gains,” Peter Huber and Mark Mills state in The Bottomless Well. Or, as Huber characterized this “efficiency paradox” in a 2001 Forbes column: “More efficient jet engines … cheaper tickets … more passengers … more jets in the air.” The same holds true for cars, lightbulbs, power plants, and everything else that uses energy.

Furthermore, an economic moral hazard problem is often associated with buying green products. Energy-efficient appliances make doing dishes and laundry cheaper, which subsequently encourages individuals to use these appliances more frequently than they had before. Increases in energy efficiency mean that there is a decreased need for the existing energy supply, which leads to a reduction in the cost of energy, consequently shifting the demand curve for energy to the right. Similarly, there is evidence that owning a fuel-efficient car encourages people to drive more. A person could become less inclined to turn off light bulbs when they are more efficient, just as a person could be more inclined to run his washing machine or his dishwasher when it is not full.

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The most obvious consequence of these closings would be that people formerly employed in that segment of the adult business in Missouri would either seek new lines of work or move to other states that are more accommodating of their current professions. The supply of this good may diminish or even disappear, but the demand for it won’t go anywhere. This situation could easily lead to results that should give pause to the social conservatives who support this bill.

The increased hassle of the legislation might dissuade some people from consuming such lascivious services, but others will seek out substitutes. It would likely lead to an increase in the consumption of pornography and prostitution (and some unemployed strippers would probably enter the world of prostitution, as well). But that still may not be the worst of it.

A 2006 study by Clemson University economist Todd Kendall argued that greater access to Internet pornography helped drive down the incidence of rape during the prior two decades. In a Slate article, fellow economist Steven Landsburg summarized Kendall’s findings:

First, porn. What happens when more people view more of it? The rise of the Internet offers a gigantic natural experiment. Better yet, because Internet usage caught on at different times in different states, it offers 50 natural experiments.

The bottom line on these experiments is, “More Net access, less rape.” A 10 percent increase in Net access yields about a 7.3 percent decrease in reported rapes. States that adopted the Internet quickly saw the biggest declines. And, according to Clemson professor Todd Kendall, the effects remain even after you control for all of the obvious confounding variables, such as alcohol consumption, police presence, poverty and unemployment rates, population density, and so forth.

OK, so we can at least tentatively conclude that Net access reduces rape. But that’s a far cry from proving that porn access reduces rape. Maybe rape is down because the rapists are all indoors reading Slate or vandalizing Wikipedia. But professor Kendall points out that there is no similar effect of Internet access on homicide. It’s hard to see how Wikipedia can deter rape without deterring other violent crimes at the same time. On the other hand, it’s easy to imagine how porn might serve as a substitute for rape.

If not Wikipedia, then what? Maybe rape is down because former rapists have found their true loves on Match.com. But professor Kendall points out that the effects are strongest among 15-year-old to 19-year-old perpetrators—the group least likely to use such dating services.

Moreover, professor Kendall argues that those teenagers are precisely the group that (presumably) relies most heavily on the Internet for access to porn. When you’re living with your parents, it’s a lot easier to close your browser in a hurry than to hide a stash of magazines. So, the auxiliary evidence is all consistent with the hypothesis that Net access reduces rape because Net access makes it easy to find porn.

There are legitimate reasons to question such a strong conclusion on Kendall’s part, some of which were pointed out by Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame, but it cannot be easily dismissed. Furthermore, it would be inappropriate to draw direct parallels between Kendall’s study and the strip club situation in Missouri, because they are not perfectly analogous. Most obviously, 15-year-old to 19-year-old boys are not likely to be found in strip clubs to begin with. Still, the general idea holds up. People seeking sexual gratification may turn to much worse alternatives in the absence of easy access to common consensual options like pornography and strip clubs.

Let me be very clear: I am not predicting that this law would result in a measureable uptick in rapes in Missouri. In fact, absent a good control group, it would be hard to establish statistical correlation, let alone causation. What we do have is some very suggestive evidence that the law of unintended consequences may apply to this law in a fierce way, and it is something that the law’s supporters should think carefully about.

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Then, on Tuesday, William Saletan discussed his unease about the growing ambitions of the food police:

You can ban the Marlboros, tax the Cokes, and zone the Whoppers. But you’ll get [my] Fresca when you pry it from [my] cold, dead hands.

He argues that paternalistic tax policies concern the left and the right, except in different ways. While the right wants to regulate what you do in the bedroom, the left wants to regulate what you have long been allowed to do in public (e.g., smoking clove cigarettes).

Saletan observes that, in the context of the fat tax debate, the left and the right have swapped their usual talking points:

To justify taxes on unhealthy food, the lifestyle regulators are stretching the evidence about obesity and addiction. […] Liberals like to talk about a Republican war on science, but it turns out that they’re just as willing to bend facts. In wars of piety, science has no friends.

Both are interesting editorials, and they relate to my previous pieces about these taxes.

The post They’re Talking About Fat Taxes Assiduously at Slate appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

But the key thing is that it’s not the show itself that does this; rather, more exactly, it’s the show’s failure rate. There have been 17 seasons of either “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette,” and exactly one of them has led to a happy marriage, with one other that will likely result in a marriage at some point in the future. Think how depressing it would be if a situation where one man or woman meeting 24 members of the opposite sex and only given two months or so to get to know them had produced a dozen happy marriages. All ideas of romantic love and finding that special person who is just right for you would pretty much be replaced by the idea that you could have been plenty happy with a lot of other people — you just needed to whittle your final list down to 24 people or so, and to get rid of half of them within an hour.

So, David, what the hell does this have to do with economics or markets? Well, a lot, actually. There is a large body of knowledge about the economics of marriage and divorce, and some of it is well covered here and here in Slate. Of course, marriage is a much more rational institution than often viewed by romantics — whose mindset was beautifully destroyed by The Onion, not surprisingly. But, if it is ludicrous to believe that one bachelor would quickly find his soul mate among 24 women selected for him by TV producers (and it is), it is just as reasonable to assume that a large number of people will find their marriage partners out of the other members of their freshman class in college.

One stat you hear a lot, but that most people know is inaccurate, is that half of all marriages end in divorce. The divorce rate was quite high for a short period a few decades ago, but it’s lower now, and I really don’t care what the overall rate is as long as my own rate is zero. It just takes some very basic questions and math though, to get the odds of divorce down to around 10 percent. If you take a man and a woman (this isn’t New England, so, for better or worse, that is our only option) who love each other, and you can determine that they have similar education backgrounds, are a roughly similar age, didn’t get married out of pressure (pregnancy, etc.), didn’t get married too early in life (excluding some circumstances like military deployment), dated and were engaged for a normal period (eliminating Vegas quickie marriages), and are each getting married for the first time, then you can book them for about a 90-percent chance of a successful, permanent marriage. I don’t think you can add any variables in that will push it much past about 90 percent, because major life changes will occur for some (bankruptcy, loss of a child, etc.) that can make even the strongest marriages crumble.

On the opposite side, it doesn’t matter how much the 25-year-old cocktail waitress and the 60-year-old Ivy League financier might love each other when they say “I do” — the marriage almost certainly ain’t lasting.

Just for fun, here is the divorce calculator prepared by a “Freakonomics” contributor.

The post “The Bachelor” Reinforces My Faith in the Institution of Marriage appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Most Main Street businesses also seem uncertain about the would-be crusade against merit selection. In Greene County, the local chamber of commerce supported the switch to merit. Indeed, a 2007 Zogby poll showed that 71 percent of business executives supported merit selection. This presumably stems from a distaste for politicized courts and a preference for high-quality judges. In fact, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s own survey of in-house corporate litigators shows that of the 20 states the chamber ranked as best for business, only two elect their high courts. In Missouri, a study from the conservative Show-Me Institute called merit selection “superior” for promoting free-market goals. “I must say that I find it really odd that business groups have gone off on this kick,” the Manhattan Institute’s Walter Olson wrote this summer.

We’re always happy to receive coverage like this, but I was somewhat chagrined to find that this brief mention of our work manages to propagate two pet peeves that I’ve written about recently.

First, the Show-Me Institute is not a “conservative” think tank, a point I raised only three days ago in this blog. We’ve addressed that a few other times, as well. For some reason, people have the urge to place us toward one end of a bipolar political model, when the work we publish would fit comfortably into a wide swath of a more-useful biaxial model. (It just so happens, though, that almost everybody who wields political power — in D.C., at least — falls outside this swath.)

Labels aside, this mention of our study also fails to point out the qualifiers that the authors placed on their findings. Two weeks ago, we ran on our primary website an op-ed that I wrote about this tendency for those with a political agenda to trumpet findings they agree with while ignoring any provisos that place limits on those findings. From the piece:

The ways in which government institutions are structured have a tremendous effect on society at large. The mechanisms of the public sphere set benchmarks that radiate outward, influencing how people live, work, trade, and resolve their differences. For those of us who favor limited government and free markets, strong economic growth is one desirable side effect of public policy, but it’s not the only way to measure policy success — other metrics could tip the balance when choosing between proposals that each have evident value.

Supplementary studies might consider the extent to which a particular selection process promotes variables such as strong property rights, sensible limits on tort damages, or simple judicial accountability. People seriously considering the question of which judicial selection system would work best might place any number of factors higher than economic growth. Choosing outcome priorities for an entire legal system is an area in which people of good will can differ.

Determining the ideal structure for government institutions isn’t as simple as reading, say, the Declaration of Independence and extrapolating the principles of liberty it contains. No particular framework is implied by standard natural rights theories. If we want government to have a limited purview over the lives of the citizenry, we need to ensure that we have a robust system of checks and balances — but the exact ways in which we separate the powers of government can’t be derived from general principles. It takes hard work, observation, dialogue, and persuasion over time, and any one step in that process is not likely to provide a definitive answer.

The estimable Walter Olson, quoted in Slate right after the Show-Me Institute reference, essentially included one of those qualifications when he wrote about our study earlier this year, by including the nature of the study’s source data:

Among other conclusions, Hall and Sobel noted that the states that did best on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s 50-state rankings of state legal systems tend to be merit selection states.

This way, he highlights the study’s conclusion while also acknowledging that the data it used approaches the subject from a particular angle. It’s a useful and interesting angle, but — at the risk of repeating myself — other data could later provide a wider array of vantage points that ultimately reveal a more comprehensive glimpse at a complex subject.

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• The fast-food ban assumes that poor people can’t be trusted (and therefore have no right) to make decisions for themselves. This is paternalism at its ugliest, because it says that people’s freedom can and should be stripped from them if the majority believes their choices might prove to be unwise.
• The ban ignores the realities of these communities. As unhealthy as fast food can be, it is the most convenient, most affordable way for many people to get a meal. Even if someone in a poor community had the time to shop at a grocery store and fashion home-cooked meals, it is far more expensive to purchase fresh foods and the means to prepare them than it is to swing by a local fast-food restaurant. Especially with the escalating cost of food, families worried about day-to-day survival can’t always afford the luxury of securing the most nutritious meals.
• Fast-food restaurants provide jobs for unskilled workers. While, as Dave Chapelle’s satirical take on this issue points out, these sorts of jobs aren’t likely to end poverty, they do bring money into the community and offer a first step toward more profitable types of employment. The fewer fast-food restaurants in the community, the higher that area’s unemployment level will be.
• The ban prevents competition in the fast-food market. Los Angeles has only banned new fast food restaurants, insulating the existing businesses from competition. Not only does this alleviate some of the pressure to keep menu prices down, it also allows the existing companies to pay rock-bottom wages because workers have fewer alternative employers.

Unfortunately, as with many ill-advised government schemes, this one seems to be catching on.

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