Challenging Opinions >>

Otaviano Canuto was a vice president of the World Bank Group. He previously served as Executive Director at the Board of the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, and he’s held other roles at the World Bank and, as well as the position of State Secretary for International Affairs at the Ministry of Finance of Brazil. … Continue reading "CO147 Otaviano Canuto on the Post-Covid Economy"

Dr. Rashawn Ray is Associate Professor of Sociology and Executive Director of the Lab for Applied Social Science Research (LASSR) at the University of Maryland, College Park. He’s a coauthor of the book How Families Matter: Simply Complicated Intersections of Race, Gender, and Work. ***** I’ve talked about Venezuela before, it’s a country that has … Continue reading "CO146 Rashawn Ray on the Numbers of Policing"

Steven Koltai is an entrepreneur, long time business executive, and foreign policy expert with a focus on entrepreneurship. He’ s also the author of ‘Peace through Entrepreneurship: Investing in a Startup Culture for Security and Development‘ published by Brookings Institution Press in 2016. ***** Sometimes it’s hard to tell if the idiots are getting more … Continue reading "CO145 Steven Koltai on the Business of Peace"

Tom Rosenstiel founded and for 16 years directed the Project for Excellence in Journalism. He was also a reporter and editor, and he recently published his third novel, Oppo. ***** If you are looking for reading suggestions to fill up the lock down hours, I’d suggest anything by Dave Eggars. He’s a great and inventive … Continue reading "CO144 Tom Rosenstiel on Political Fact and Fiction"

William Burke-White is Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. He’s got a long string of other academic distinctions, and he has written extensively on international criminal law, international economic law, and human rights. He’s also the author of forthcoming book How International Law got Lost, due to be published next year. ***** It’s not so long since wind and solar power were seen as the Cinderella of the of the energy world. The didn’t have the heft of their two big, ugly polluting sisters, coal and oil. That might not be the case for so much longer. The first article I saw on this was about UK electricity production. Remember that Britain was the first country in the world to have an industrial revolution, which was fired by its coal production, the world’s first real electricity generation plant was built in London in 1882, and of course coal fuelled the British Navy for much of the time it was conquering half the world. That’s why it’s startling to read that coal, along with all other fossil fuels combined have been overtaken by renewables – mostly wind power – as the main source of electricity in the UK. In the first quarter of 2020, In that period, 45 per cent of all the electricity was generated by renewables, while only 33 per cent was generated by burning fossil fuels. That’s a gigantic modal shift in quite a short time. Most of the balance came from nuclear power, by the way. But the really striking thing is not the speed with which renewables are taking off, it’s the speed at which their price is dropping. Renewable energy in all the main world markets, including  the U.S., Europe, China and Russia, renewables are now cheaper than coal. It’s not so surprising that we would have got to that point, given that whether you are building a windfarm or a coal power plant, you have to pay for building the infrastructure, but with the windfarm, once you’ve built it, the fuel is free. With coal, even if it’s dirty and dirt-cheap, it can never be as cheap as free. But, the argument went, we already have hundreds of coal-fired power plants around the world, and there’s nothing to stop them from burning cheap, dirty coal until they fall apart. If they’re already built, that sunken cost can’t be retrieved, so the owners are likely to keep running them. Maybe not. A report recently from Energy Innovation think tank said that, since 42 per cent of the world’s coal plants are unprofitable, it’s there’s an increasing economic incentive to close them down, and that’s just what is happening. The Colorado utility Xcel will ‘retire’, that means shut down, 660 megawatts of coal capacity before their planned end-of-life dates and switch to renewable sources and battery storage, because it’s simply cheaper to do so. That’s because electricity from new windfarms is cheaper than existing coal capacity. Get that. If you own a coal-fired power plant – if you have it already built and paid for – the cheapest way to generate electricity is to close it down and pay to build a new windfarm. This isn’t so surprising. Most of the development of a technology occurs in its early years. The Dutch might disagree with the windmills on their polders, but serious wind power is a pretty new technology, so it’s natural that it’s getting more cost-effective and efficient right now. As I said, coal has been used for electricity generation for nearly 140 years by now, so any improvements to the technology, or efficiencies that make it cheaper have probably already been thought of. And money talks, so you can get used to seeing a lot more windmills on the horizon.

William Burke-White is Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. He’s got a long string of other academic distinctions, and he has written extensively on international criminal law, international economic law, and human rights. He’s also the author of forthcoming book How International Law got Lost, due to be published next year. ***** It’s not so long since wind and solar power were seen as the Cinderella of the of the energy world. The didn’t have the heft of their two big, ugly polluting sisters, coal and oil. That might not be the case for so much longer. The first article I saw on this was about UK electricity production. Remember that Britain was the first country in the world to have an industrial revolution, which was fired by its coal production, the world’s first real electricity generation plant was built in London in 1882, and of course coal fuelled the British Navy for much of the time it was conquering half the world. That’s why it’s startling to read that coal, along with all other fossil fuels combined have been overtaken by renewables – mostly wind power – as the main source of electricity in the UK. In the first quarter of 2020, In that period, 45 per cent of all the electricity was generated by renewables, while only 33 per cent was generated by burning fossil fuels. That’s a gigantic modal shift in quite a short time. Most of the balance came from nuclear power, by the way. But the really striking thing is not the speed with which renewables are taking off, it’s the speed at which their price is dropping. Renewable energy in all the main world markets, including  the U.S., Europe, China and Russia, renewables are now cheaper than coal. It’s not so surprising that we would have got to that point, given that whether you are building a windfarm or a coal power plant, you have to pay for building the infrastructure, but with the windfarm, once you’ve built it, the fuel is free. With coal, even if it’s dirty and dirt-cheap, it can never be as cheap as free. But, the argument went, we already have hundreds of coal-fired power plants around the world, and there’s nothing to stop them from burning cheap, dirty coal until they fall apart. If they’re already built, that sunken cost can’t be retrieved, so the owners are likely to keep running them. Maybe not. A report recently from Energy Innovation think tank said that, since 42 per cent of the world’s coal plants are unprofitable, it’s there’s an increasing economic incentive to close them down, and that’s just what is happening. The Colorado utility Xcel will ‘retire’, that means shut down, 660 megawatts of coal capacity before their planned end-of-life dates and switch to renewable sources and battery storage, because it’s simply cheaper to do so. That’s because electricity from new windfarms is cheaper than existing coal capacity. Get that. If you own a coal-fired power plant – if you have it already built and paid for – the cheapest way to generate electricity is to close it down and pay to build a new windfarm. This isn’t so surprising. Most of the development of a technology occurs in its early years. The Dutch might disagree with the windmills on their polders, but serious wind power is a pretty new technology, so it’s natural that it’s getting more cost-effective and efficient right now. As I said, coal has been used for electricity generation for nearly 140 years by now, so any improvements to the technology, or efficiencies that make it cheaper have probably already been thought of. And money talks, so you can get used to seeing a lot more windmills on the horizon.

Bill St. Clair is a blogger, programmer and libertarian. ***** You might not have heard of Benford’s law. It’s not so much a law, it’s really just an observation that when you get a large enough set of natural numbers, let’s say a list of all the countries in the world by population, in sets of numbers like that, the first digit is 1 much more often than you would expect. And where the numbers don’t begin with 1, the next most likely starting digit is 2, and it goes on down like that, and the least likely starting digit is 9. So, if you look at the list of countries by population, there’s China and India in the one-point-something billion range, and there’s loads in there’s Russia, Mexico, Japan, Philippines, Bangladesh and Egypt in the one-hundred-and-something million range, but there’s only four countries in the two-hundred-and-something million range, one with three-hundred-and-something million, the United States, and that’s it. Go lower down in the scale, and at every order of magnitude, countries whose population figure starts with a 1 are far more common, countries whose population figure starts with a 9 are much rarer. There are mathematical reasons why this is the case but they don’t matter to the point that I’m making. Benford’s law is just one of a series of mathematical tools often used by people like forensic accountants who are trying to examine sets of figures to determine if they are true or not, because it’s surprisingly difficult for people fake a set of naturally-occurring. This is something to bear in mind when looking at the figures from countries around the world regarding the corona virus outbreak, particularly because there could be a lot of people in the chain between figures being collected and published who are motivated to push them up or down. A lot of other people have commented on this, particularly observing the huge variation of death rates around the world. Some badly hit countries like Italy, Spain and the UK have high fatality rates at or above 10 per cent, while other countries are down at one or two per cent. The standard explanation of this is that it’s all down to testing. The logic of this goes that, in some countries, we’re missing a lot of infections from the figures, but not deaths, if someone dies, that gets noticed. I’m not so sure. For a start, we know that in the UK, the government was only reporting deaths that actually happened in a hospital. People who died before they got to hospital were not counted, and also left out were people who were discharged to die at home. The Economist magazine has compared death rates in badly-hit areas of Spain and Italy, to how many people died in normal times. In the past weeks, the total death rates have rocketed, and only a fraction of that is accounted for by the announced death rates from Covid-19. As well as the normally expected deaths, there are the Covid deaths, and on top of that there are thousands more unexpected deaths. That could be partly legitimate. Remember that the healthcare systems are overwhelmed. Right now is not a good time to have a heart attack, or get in a car wreck. It’s probably not so astonishing that people with totally unrelated medical emergencies would have a higher death rate when hospitals are clogged and doctors are working flat-out in a massive emergency. But the jump in the death rates in some places are so gigantic that it’s difficult to believe that this explanation holds. These unexplained deaths, that are not reported as Covid deaths, are in some cases two or three times more than the Covid-19 deaths. It’s very hard to escape the conclusion that, in these countries with already very high reported death rates, the true death rates could be, in fact, even higher. Other concerning countries include Russia. Russia is far along in the process, it reported its first infection the day after Italy did, but as of this podcast, has only reported about five per cent of the number of cases as Italy, and about three per cent of the number of deaths. Putin has declared a national holiday – that’s a creative way of doing a lockdown – everyone is on a national holiday since March 28, and that’s due to last until April 30. That’s fine for government employees, and employees of big firms who get paid to stay at home, but for the self-employed, and the informal economy, which accounts for most Russian employment, if they don’t work, they don’t get paid, and that’s not an option in such a poor country as Russia. From personal contacts I know that there is no real lockdown in operation, and in January Moscow health officials reported a huge surge in what they called pneumonia, before changing their minds and saying that hadn’t happened at all. And they are not the only ones. Here’s another: Indonesia, population 264 million is reporting a tiny but steady rate of reported Covid infections and deaths. It’s a poor country that has little capacity to either conduct tests or cope with a major epidemic. But Reuters are reporting that in Jakarta, the capital, the number of funerals in March was at least 40 per cent above normal rates. But let’s look at China. We all know the disaster in Hubei province, but it’s all under control now, right? Maybe. But there have been reports of 21m cellphone contracts being deactivated in February and March. That’s worrying because Chinese people are basically required by law to have a cellphone contract, and can only cancel it when they die. It contains their government ID, and controls access to healthcare, education and so on. There was some comment that these missing phone contracts might indicate a huge untold death toll, but it’s not clear what portion of that 21m were the compulsory cell phones, or were secondary phones that were held by, say, migrant workers who got a second contract to avoid roaming charges while they worked outside their home network. They might have cancelled those contracts when they lost their jobs and went home because of the crisis. But we don’t know. What we do know is the official figures from Hunan province. Hunan borders on Hubei, where everything started. Hunan province has a population of 67m. They are reporting a thousand cases, of which four people died. Compare that to Iceland, they are reporting 1,500 cases and also exactly four deaths. But here’s the thing. Iceland has a population of about a third of a million people. And it’s far away. It’s in the North Atlantic, on the other side of the world from China. And Iceland is reporting infection and death figures that are 200 or 300 times higher. Get that, a Chinese province right next door to the epicenter of the outbreak, but it’s reporting an infection rate three hundred times lower than an isolated rock thousands of miles away. I think that guy Benford, he should be applying his law and having a close look at a lot of the figures that we are hearing from around the world.

Fletcher Armstrong is the south east director of the Center for Bioethical Reform. ***** Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died. And none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship. Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without divine offices … great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead. And they died by the hundreds both day and night … And as soon as those ditches were filled more were dug … And I, Agnolo di Tura … buried my five children with my own hands. And there were also those who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city. There was no one who wept for any death, for all awaited death. And so many died that all believed it was the end of the world. That’s a quote from the Italian chronicler Agnolo di Tura about the effects of the Black Death, which did a deadly circuit of Europe in the 1340s and 1350s, killing perhaps a third of the population or more. It returned at various intervals for centuries, causing more localized but sometimes just as deadly epidemics. But don’t let that get you too paranoid, this disease can be now easily cured with antibiotics, which weren’t available in the fourteenth century. Nevertheless, the Black Death is something that still haunts the culture of Europe and beyond. The danse macabre, with its awkward dancing skeletons, is still a common image, as is that of the plague doctor, with the black gown and long beak-like plague mask. The southern German village of Oberammergau still follows a vow that they would faithfully perform a Passion Play, reenacting biblical stories, every decade if they were spared the plague that was ravaging the area in the 1630s. But even more influential, for an event that happened nearly 700 years ago, are the social and economic effects of the Black Death. The poor died more than the rich in the Black Death, there’s a surprise, they died more because they lived in much closer quarters, allowing much more contagion, and didn’t have the luxury of isolating themselves in castles or country houses. But in the years after the plague subsided, the tables turned. Feudal Europe’s power structures were reversed when laborers realized that there was an abundance of farmland, all owned by the rich, and the food that it produced, but a shortage of workers. That shift of power dynamics in the market meant that peasants could negotiate a much better deal for themselves with the landholders they were previously tied to. This greatly destabilized feudalism, and can be seen as the starting point for many of the changes that came in Europe in the following centuries. Some scholars have even attributed Italian Renaissance to the effects on society of the Black Death. That’s a bit above my pay grade, but it’s not unusual for economists to attribute big advances in society and the economy to apparently destructive upheavals. The comparative success of the German economy, compared to Britain in the aftermath of World War II is seen as ironic, given that the British won the war and the Germans lost, but it’s not that surprising. The total destruction of Germany meant that old power structures were thrown out. To a significant extent, people who got rich in that period in Germany started out with nothing, and got rich because of their talents and efforts. In Britain, whose class system was not disrupted by defeat, you got rich if your parents were rich. That meant that enterprise was rewarded in Germany, stagnation was rewarded in Britain. Not so surprising that Germany did better. It looks like we’re going into another upheaval now, hopefully not nearly as dramatic. But even if the pandemic fades quickly, there are likely to be lasting effects. An obvious one is the demand for healthcare reform in the United States. The full effects of the virus are by no means clear in the US, or anywhere else for that matter, but the hugely inflated cost of healthcare, and its inaccessibility to millions of people is coming under pressure like never before. In the UK, the outgoing Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn claimed that the virus response had proven that he had won the argument, in the election that he lost so spectacularly, he had won the argument for big government and big spending programs. That’s more than a little self-regarding, but has a point that government programs that so many conservative and centre-right European countries were very recently saying were completely impossible, they are doing them now. Requisitioning hospitals, housing people who were sleeping on the streets, giving significant cash handouts to people who have lost their jobs, banning evictions and rent increases. I’m reading some dire predictions of the possible death toll in the United States. I’m hoping they aren’t true, but if those deaths are to be avoided, it will mean saving people’s lives with hugely expensive treatment to people who are un- or under-insured, and the only way to do that is with the federal government action. And once that’s done, it’s going to be difficult to argue that it’s impossible to do.

Amanda Starbuck is a senior food researcher and policy analyst at Food & Water Watch. ***** I’ve talked about the other thing a couple of times already, but I’m sure you’ve heard enough about it by now, and there’s nothing extra that I can say that hasn’t already been said, so let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about the state of the world and its people. Bear in mind that life expectancy in the US in the year 1900 was about 48. Thinking of all the countries in the world, taking into account the huge populations of the poor countries in Africa and Asia, what would you guess is the average life expectancy of people today? 50 years? 60 Years? No, the average across the whole world is now 70. And again, across the whole world, what percent of the population do you think has access to electricity? The answer is 80 per cent. And if you had to guess what percent of children had at least some of their vaccinations? Again, across the planet, the answer is 80 per cent. Finally, if you had to guess, over the last hundred years, taking into account the massive population explosion we’ve had, what has happened to the number of people – the absolute number, not the proportion – the number of people who die each year in natural disasters; has it more than doubled? Stayed the same? In fact, that number has more than halved. All these figures come from a book by the Swedish academic Hans Rosling, and he formulated them to show us that sometimes, things are much better than we think they are, and in particular, for all our cynicism, things can and do get better. Lots better. By those metrics that he chooses, the average person in the world today is vastly better off than the average person was in the United States a hundred years ago. More children – much, much more children – are getting educated, much more people are getting basic healthcare, much more people have access to the basics of comfort that the whole of humanity went without for almost all of our existence. Sometimes we can be terribly stupid, but on the whole, humans are clever and creative. We can solve problems. We can make our lives better. That makes it all the more tragic when we don’t, but on the whole, we’re doing better, lots better than we were, and often way better than we actually think we are doing. Sometimes we create terrible problems, but we can solve problems too, and we do solve them, and maybe with that whole loss aversion thing in our mentality, we remember our failures better our successes. That music you can hear in the background is the Italian resistance anthem, Bella Ciao. It’s being played by the National Theatre Orchestra of Serbia. But this is a recital with a difference. They’re playing together, but they’re not together. The recital was recorded over a live video call with a conductor, and dozens of musicians each playing from their own home. This technology would have been unimaginable just a decade ago, now we take it for granted that it’s in billions of people’s pockets. Wash your hands.

Demetrius Minor is a member of the national advisory council of the Project 21 Black Leadership Network. He is also the associate producer of the nationally-syndicated “Stacy on the Right” talk radio show. In addition to writing that has been featured in The Washington Times, Townhall.com and  by FreedomWorks, Demetrius is the author of the book Preservation and Purpose: The Making of a Young Millennial and a Manifesto for Faith, Family and Politics. ***** I talked about the Corona virus a few weeks back, and I mentioned that it could turn out to be nothing significant, or a real problem, or a global pandemic. Clearly one of those three options is no longer on the table. I’m not a medic, and I’m certainly not an expert on infectious diseases, so I don’t want to comment on something I don’t know much about, you can get that from any barstool bore. But I do know a bit about statistics, and I think that I’ve spotted something that isn’t being reported, or at least not reported very widely. After China, two of the worst-hit countries are South Korea, and Italy. That’s handy because these countries are quite alike in economic and population terms, and that allows us to make comparisons, but they are very different in social terms. I know that Iran is reporting a similar number of cases, but Iran is a closed country with a very different economy, and it’s hard to get reliable information so I’m not including it here. South Korea and Italy have a lot of similarities, they have roughly the same population, 50 million and 60 million, they are both wealthy developed countries, both in the OECD, with advanced economies. And they’re both reporting high levels of Corona virus – about 15 per hundred thousand in South Korea, about 30 per hundred thousand in Italy. But there is one statistic where they diverge sharply. The death rate. In Italy, the death rate currently stands well over seven per cent. In South Korea it’s 0.9 per cent. Get that, Italy is reporting a death rate from the disease, the same disease, that is eight times higher than in South Korea. To understand what’s going on, I want to go to a book called Risk by Professor John Adams. Checking it on Google here, I see that Adams has put the entire book online for free, which is nice of him, I’ll link to that on the website. The book is about risk, and he tries to do things like understand the risks of driving, for which he needed an accurate measurement of road crashes. Where do you get that? Police reports? Adams analyzed road crash data in the UK – he’s British – and he found interesting anomalies. For example, the death rate for reported road crashes is much higher in rural Scotland than it is in the centre of London. In fact he could demonstrate a dose-response effect where the further you were from built-up areas, the more likely a crash was to be fatal. Why? Well, could be that when you are far from the rescue services, you are more likely to die of your injuries? Or that people drive differently in isolated rural areas, causing more fatalities? That’s possible, but that didn’t explain a different phenomenon. On days that there was a terrorist attack in London, the total number of road crashes reported in the city dropped sharply. What could cause that? People being extra careful? People staying at home on days that a terrorist attack was in the news? Maybe, but probably not, because although the rate of crashes apparently dropped, the rate of fatal road crashes didn’t change at all. Adams goes through the figures in much more detail, and his conclusion is that the number of crashes doesn’t change at all, what changes is the reporting rate. On days that police are called away from their stations in great numbers, and the ones that remain are incredibly busy, people don’t bother them by reporting minor road crashes. But the more serious the crash, the more likely it is to get reported anyway, and of course if someone dies, then it is almost certain to be reported. Similarly, if you live in a remote area of rural Scotland, you could be hours away from the nearest police station, and therefore you are less likely to report minor fender-benders, but the more serious the crash, the more likely you will be to make the effort. So the apparent effect of crashes being more likely to be fatal in Scotland isn’t true at all, it’s an artifact of a totally different statistical effect. I think we could be seeing the same effect in Italy now. Remember, South Korea and Italy, similar countries, similar reported rates of Corona virus, but Italy has eight times the death rate. Italy is a country that has a serious problem with the efficacy of public institutions. I know, I’ve lived there. There are the things that are clichéd about Italy, but those clichés have a strong basis in reality. Seat-belt laws and motorcycle helmet laws are regularly flouted. There’s a constant battle between the tax authorities and the public over tax compliance. Even a passing experience with Italian bureaucracy will convince you how the entire system can be set up for the convenience of the people who work there – or, let’s say, are employed there – rather than the service users. And the culture in Italy is very different to South Korea. In brief, conforming with the rules is highly prized in Korean culture; not conforming with the rules is prized in Italian culture. For that reason, I’m not in the least convinced that the corona virus death rate in Italy is eight times higher than in South Korea. I think that it’s much more likely that the corona virus rate in Italy is eight times higher than is being reported. That has very serious implications for the containment of this dangerous disease. But the whole of Italy is on lockdown now; they are at last taking it seriously, now that far more than a thousand people are dead. But how can this information help elsewhere? There is one terrifying statistic about this disease. The USA at the moment has an incredibly low rate of reported infections, as I write on Saturday 14 March; it’s only 0.6 infections per hundred thousand. That’s hardly one-fiftieth the rate in Italy. But hold on, that’s not the terrifying statistic. Remember South Korea? They are testing 10,000 people for the virus every day. 10,000 a day. That’s roughly the number that the United States has tested in total. And that’s not the terrifying statistic either. If you look at Washington State, the epicenter of the outbreak in the US, they are reporting a death rate of 6.5 per cent, almost the same as Italy. That’s Italy, where I think there is good reason to suspect that the reporting of infections is drastically underestimated. That could mean that there are thousands of infected people in Washington State – and other states – a large portion of them who are un- or underinsured and afraid of the cost of going to the doctor, who are showing little or no symptoms, and afraid to miss a shift at a job they need to put food on the table. That 6.5 per cent death rate, that’s a canary in the coalmine. One last point – Iceland is a tiny country, a third of a million people, but it is very rich, it is a highly cohesive society, people have a very strong allegiance to authority, and in turn the authorities are highly professional. Iceland has a free, high-quality healthcare system that covers all residents, and Iceland has the highest infection rate in the world. Or, the highest reported infection rate in the world, more almost 40 per hundred thousand, or more than 60 times higher the reported rate in the US. Iceland hasn’t had any deaths; it is too small for that to be statistically significant. Its people are rich, and travel quite a bit, but it’s an island in the middle of the Atlantic, it isn’t anything like as connected as Europe where people regularly get in their car and drive across borders to do their weekly shopping. I think that when the history of this is written, there’ll be a big fat chapter on the quality of the statistical reporting.

Randy Sutton is a retired police lieutenant Las Vegas Police Department and founder of the Wounded Blue national assistance and support organisation for injured and disabled law enforcement officers. He’s also the author of a number of books including The Power of Legacy, Personal Heroes of America’s Most Inspiring People. I mentioned the previous episode of the podcast where I talked to Heather McDonald where I talked about her book the War on Cops. ***** You might remember that I interviewed Aaron Naparstek of the War on Cars podcast last year; he’s a big advocate of non-car based transport. I don’t know what he would make of a story from Luxembourg I saw this week, I suspect he’d be an enthusiast. I’m not. The story is that Luxembourg has decided to make all public transport free to use, in an effort to cut pollution and traffic jams. The country has an extensive network of tram, train and buses, and from now on, you can just hop on and go anywhere. I say extensive, but of course the country is tiny, it has a population of just over half-a-million and it’s smaller than Rhode Island, you could throw a stone across it if you had a good go at it. And it’s rich, so they can afford to make the transit system free; they have a big financial services industry, which is a polite way of saying that they launder drug and prostitution money, and the funds looted from national treasuries by third world dictators. But that’s a different story some people are saying that this is the way to go for transit systems. If they’re free, then people will leave their cars behind, and use these systems that don’t cause traffic jams and don’t cause as much pollution. Luxembourg isn’t the only country going down this line, Scotland is planning to make public transport free for under-18s, and some political parties in Ireland are advocating going the whole way and making the whole system free like in Luxembourg. I think that they’re wrong. There are two big mistakes here. The first mistake is the effect that this won’t have, and the second mistake is the effect that it will. Let’s look at the effect that this won’t have first. The thinking is that people who drive will be tempted out of their cars by free public transit. The problem here is that in almost any city in the world, public transit is already much, much cheaper than driving. If saving that much doesn’t motivate drivers to get the bus or the train or whatever, why would anyone think that saving just a little bit more will? This whole scheme totally misunderstands why people drive. Look at the cars on any street. There is a huge variety. You can drive anything from a clanger for under a thousand bucks to spending several hundred thousand dollars of a top-end luxury vehicle. But one thing that they all of them, expect the very cheapest rustbucket, almost all of them have in common is that the driver could have saved a few bucks by getting a cheaper car. From the highest-end luxury performance vehicle to the most ordinary vehicle, the driver could have traded down to the next cheapest model. Every single driver, except perhaps the bottom one per cent could have saved a few bucks if they wanted to. But they didn’t. They chose to spend more money than they really needed to, because they wanted the comfort and the prestige. Nothing wrong with that really. I have to say that I do much the same myself with other products. I have a phone that’s really much more expensive than what I need. Probably the same for the audio equipment that I use to make this podcast. But if you understand why people do what they do, you have a better chance of understanding how to motivate them to change their behavior. And it’s clear that overwhelmingly, finance isn’t the main thing that motivates drivers. If making mass transit cheaper could tempt them away from their cars, then it would have already done so – because in most big cities, mass transit is already vastly cheaper than driving the cars that most drivers drive. But in a lot of cities, there are a lot of people that walk or cycle to their destination. Even if drivers aren’t motivated to a modal shift, it’s pretty obvious that free public transit will encourage cyclists and walkers to hop on the public transit. That doesn’t provide any benefit in terms of reducing traffic or pollution, but I’m sure that the walkers and cyclists appreciate it. But the people already riding the bus might not be so happy. Mass transit systems in many cities are already running at capacity. They just switching having walkers and cyclists getting on a few stops before a long-time user might mean that they can’t fit on, or at the very least that their ride would be a whole lot less comfortable. It might even be so much more uncomfortable as to push those people to drive their journey. And that’s the point. All the evidence would indicate that drivers who have a choice to use mass transit and don’t choose it, do so because they like the comfort and prestige of driving. So if you have a big wad of money to spend on your city’s mass transit system, spending it on making that system free is unlikely to improve anything, unless that system is running with loads of spare capacity, which is almost never the place. But if you are thinking of spending that wad to use mass transit to improve pollution and traffic congestion, here’s the way to do that. Spend it on making the mass transit cleaner, safer, more regular, more reliable, more extensive and operating for longer hours. That last point is important, by the way. No point in taking mass transit out for the evening if you can’t get home. Supermarkets and radio stations that operate 24 hours don’t always do it because they make a profit in the small hours of the morning, they do it because they know that if they don’t their competitor will, and the customer who uses it then once, will get used to going to their competitor all the time. And, to be blunt, money should be spend on making mass transit more prestigious. Tram and train systems are less prone than busses to getting stuck in traffic, but they are more favored by the sort of people who could switch to a car, partly because saying ‘I got the train’ sounds better than ‘I got the bus’. People advocating free mass transit sometimes argue ‘why can’t we do both?’ Here’s why: what you’re doing is spending money. Money is limited, or at least it represents limited resources. Every cent you spend on making mass transit free is a cent you didn’t spend on making it better. And making it better will always give a better return than making it free.

Roy Speckhardt is the executive director of the American Humanist Association, and the author of Creating Change Through Humanism published by Humanist Press . ***** As of this podcast, something over 2,000 people have died from Corona virus infections, all but six of them in China. About 75 thousand people have been confirmed as infected, again, all but a handful in China. Of the 29 countries that have reported at least one infection, the majority have reported less than 10 infections, and as I say, the 28 countries other than China with reported cases have reported a combined total of six fatalities. This is clearly serious. 2,000 people dead is serious by any measure. We have the whole airline industry in chaos about an apparently faulty aircraft that led to the deaths of a fraction of that number. And the number of infections, along with the much smaller number of people dead – the death rate would seem to be something around two or three per cent – those numbers aren’t the whole story. Throughout what we know of human history, there have been pandemics with terrible consequences. The Spanish flu of 1918 killed at least 40 million people, it could have been 100 million, we don’t really know. To put that in context, World War 1, which had just ended, which resonates through our culture, which is still taught in detail in history classes, memorialized in thousands of locations across Europe and beyond, World War 1 has inspired hundreds of novels, poems, TV shows, and films not least the recent Oscar-winner 1917; World War 1 killed less than 20 million people over four years. The Spanish flu, in just one year killed an absolute minimum of double that. So it’s worth paying attention to the Corona virus not just because of the people already dead or infected, but because of the numbers of people who could potentially be infected in the future, if the disease was left unchecked. But it’s not being left unchecked. There are quarantines and other extreme measures being put in place to prevent its spread. You might have seen the stop motion video – that hardly required stop motion – of Huoshenshan hospital being build from scratch in 10 days. Dozens of airlines including British Airways and Lufthansa have cancelled all flights to China. Many countries have banned Chinese people from even applying for visas to enter. Ships have been quarantined, millions have been donated, and China has closed down whole sectors of its economy, not to mention curtailing internal travel and even switching off elevator systems in large apartment blocks to discourage people from going out. Some of those measures maybe the reason why the spread of the virus has been contained. In the past few days, the number of new daily infections in China has been falling every day, and no other country has enough cases to make a meaningful measurement. That might not continue, but that’s the situation as of now. Or they may not be the reason. For every Spanish flu, there are thousands of infections that kill a few people, or a few dozen, or nobody at all, and then just disappear naturally. This sort of thing has a serious risk of a mild negative outcome, and a mild risk of a serious negative outcome We don’t know where on the scale from Spanish flu to mild Chinese headcold this, or any other virus will fall. What I find interesting is the speed with which governments acted, closing borders, stopping air routes, quarantining ships, not to mention China closing down a huge chunk of its economy. It’s interesting to compare that to the reaction to the threat of climate change, which by all accounts has a seriously high risk of a very serious outcome.

Rosanna Weaver is programme manager for executive compensation As You Sow. ***** Her face looks at the camera in a way that is totally different to how teenagers take selfies now. There’s no elaborate expression, but there is, for some reason, a hint of a smile. Maybe the instinct to smile when a camera is pointed overcomes her in the moment. But this is not a sharable moment. Her name is Czes?awa Kwoka, and her photograph has been colorized, but even in the black and white original the uniform of Auschwitz-Birkenau is unmistakable. The colorization is by Brazilian artist Marina Amaral, and it brings to life a young person who died many years ago. Her face stares out at us across the decades. In one photograph, she wears her camp-issued headscarf and looks up and to the side. She is pretty, but she is thin. Her hair is roughly cut short. Her lip is cut. The photographer who takes her pictures later testifies that she has just been beaten by a guard. Later, when he is ordered to destroy them, The photographer risks his life to save some of the pictures, including those of Czes?awa. She is deported to Auschwitz, along with her mother in 1942. It’s not clear why, her family is Catholic, not Jewish, but her uniform has a red triangle alongside her prisoner number, that means political enemy, so it’s possible that someone in her family is in some organization that the Nazis dislike. She’d be 92 now if she had survived. She might still be alive, lots of people live to be 92 or older. But she does not survive. All that remain of her are those three photographs, now colorized, staring out from our new technology, and our wondering of what she might make of this new world. She arrives in Auschwitz in December 1942. Some weeks later, in February 1943, someone decides that her life isn’t worth her reaching 92, or reaching one more day. They inject phenol, a poisonous acid, into her heart. She is 14 years old.

Chris Bostic is Deputy Director for Policy of ASH, Action on Smoking and Health. Which, since 1967 has been campaigning against Big Tobacco to reduce the death toll from smoking. ***** So this is a famous clip of Ellen Degeneres on her TV show talking about some ridiculous products aimed at women. Ellen is a pretty funny character, but she really doesn’t need to do much work to get a laugh at the idea of pens specially for women. But this clip refers to one trope that was going around a while back, called the Pink Tax. The idea was that products aimed at women were having their prices jacked up by the evil patriarchy so that women had to pay more for the same things than men. The whole idea was really just a clickbait thing, and it was confused as to whether it referred to products that were marketed at women’s preferences, or products that women needed to be different to men’s products because of their physiology. Ellen’s example is a pretty clear case of a product that you can literally pay any price you like for. You can go to a discount store and buy packs of dozens of pens for a dollar or so, or you can spend hundreds of dollars for a single premium pen. I found one pen for sale online that costs more than $5,000 – but hey, it’s got free shipping. And all those pens do pretty much the same job; what you write won’t be any better because you wrote it with a pen that costs thousands of times more than the cheapest pen out there. But why does this extreme price difference exist? Surely the laws of the market should flatten out the prices. Well, clearly they don’t. Because here’s a secret of capitalism. If you’re selling pork bellies or  currency futures, supply and demand set the prices, it’s a true marketplace. But if you’re buying a pen because you want to sign a card that you’re sending to someone – do you really shop around? Of course not. What sets the price is what the market will bear. What people will pay without complaining too much. If the pen costs a dollar, will you go to the next store to see if they’re selling it cheaper? No. and even if you know that the next store sells it for only 50 cents, will you go there if you’re already in the place that sells it for a dollar? Very unlikely. And the manufacturers and retailers know this. They even do market testing to see what price they can get away with charging, and build their whole product around that information. That’s why women’s shampoo costs more than men’s, because women are willing to pay more for it. That’s also why men’s cars and home stereo systems cost more than women’s – because men are willing to pay more for them. And before you ask, yes there are such things, marketers don’t write that on the label, but those markets are strongly gendered. That brings me to a campaign that did have a bit more sense to it, but was still misguided. Value Added Tax, called VAT is a sales tax in all EU countries, and it’s pretty high, in some countries up to 25 per cent, but typically around 20 per cent. And in most EU countries, that sales tax was charged on tampons and other women’s hygiene products. There are active campaigns to have it removed from these products because they are regarded, reasonably enough, as necessities. From the start of this year, 2020, that campaign was successful in Germany. The tax there was 19 per cent, and it’s just been cut to just seven per cent. So a win for women, right? Not quite. As soon as the VAT was cut on these products, the manufacturers, it is reported, moved to increase the prices to compensate, and bring the retail price back to what it was before the tax cut. So instead of this being a tax cut for women, it was a tax cut for the producers. Because the price of consumer products isn’t really set by the cost of production, it’s set by what the consumers are willing to pay. This isn’t even a secret, IKEA the massive Swedish furniture say that the first thing they design on their products is the price tag, and everything else follows from that. The point is that, particularly when it comes to market forces, it’s hard – it’s nearly impossible – to do anything that doesn’t have unintended consequences.

Steve Garner is a researcher at the department of Social Science at Cardiff University. The BBC Analysis programme that he appeared in is available here. ***** Back in August I talked here about the pro-democracy protests, anti-Putin protests in Moscow, and I noted that, compared to the similarly-motivated protests in Hong Kong, there were small. People might grumble, but there is no arguing that Putin has very widespread support in Russia, and the protesting was done by a particular well-educated cohort. But it’s important to remember that as well as being small, these protests in Moscow are supported by a particular slice of society. There is a group of well-educated Russians, mostly in Moscow and other large cities who yearn for democracy and western-style freedoms. You could call them a young middle class. They travel abroad on holidays, they speak English and other foreign languages, they get their news online from largely independent sources… That last point is important; television, regular broadcast television, is hugely popular in Russia; it is hugely influential, and it is totally under the thumb of the Kremlin. Just last week, Alisa Yarovskaya, a prominent journalist on a Russian regional TV station in north west Siberia asked Putin at a press conference why Moscow wasn’t supporting a project to build a bridge to link two local towns, a project that the regional governor had proposed. Pretty innocuous you might think. Not in Russia. By the next day, she was unemployed, saying that she had quit rather than be fired. That gives you an idea of the level of dissent tolerated, or rather not tolerated, in Russian TV news. But as I said in August, the young, urban, often well-educated people who are most likely to support democracy often just bypass Kremlin propaganda and get their news online; often they speak English or some other foreign language and keep well-informed via foreign news sites. But there might be a road block coming on that bypass. This week the Russian government announced that it had successfully tested what is called Runet. This is the internet – sort of. The ‘sort of’ there is important. If you work in a large office, your computer is connected to the internet so you can send email and check websites, right? Not quite. A typical computer in a large office is connected to the company network, and that is connected to the internet, so you can look up stuff online. So rather than you following a link to the Challenging Opinions website, and your computer getting the content of that website, an office computer asks the company server for the Challenging Opinions website, the server gets that content and passes it on to the user’s computer. Or maybe not, if your office blocks the Challenging Opinions website. A lot of employers block porn, or social media, or job search websites or all sorts of other content. They’re allowed because it’s their network. But you go home, and unless you put on your own filter, you can access whatever content you want. But not if you live in China, or Iran, or Thailand or Turkey or a growing number of countries that block content at the national level. But Russia is going one step further here. As well as setting up what is essentially a gigantic version of a company intranet, where you get selected access to the outside internet, they are forcing telecom companies to comply with the Runet system, which would allow them to not block the internet, but then create a parallel internet system that works only in Russia, and that allows Russians online, but only to view content that originates in Russia. So people would only be able to send and receive emails or other content within Russia. And if you’re thinking VPN, they’ve thought of that too. VPN is a way to encrypt your internet traffic and disguise where it is coming from and going to. Almost all VPN traffic would be totally blocked by Runet. Russia has also introduced a law that requires government-controlled apps to be pre-installed on all smartphone sold in the country. Essentially what they are doing is not seeking to put their citizens offline, they are seeking the ability to disconnect Russia’s online from the rest of the world’s online. This has been called the ‘splinternet’. Where the internet is still there, but autocracies set up a system whereby websites, messaging systems and so on continue to work, but only the ones that they approve, and only the ones that they can spy on when they want to. The Kremlin has said that this power will only be used in ‘an emergency’ but as with most Russian laws, there is no definition of what might constitute an emergency, and no oversight of anyone making that decision. But the real significance of this is the determination, in a country where he controls the vast majority of the media, to eliminate the last vestiges of access to free information.

Ivan Eland is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute. He has a PhD in Public Policy from George Washington University and has been director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, and he spent 15 years working for Congress on national security issues. Earlier this year he published War and the Rogue Presidency Restoring the Republic after Congressional Failure. ***** So here’s a thing. A common talking point on gun control, for people discussing banning assault rifles, military-grade weapons, or any particularly category of guns, or all guns for that matter, is the difficulty of actually removing any guns that were banned from the people who currently own them. The people who have guns are probably the sort of people who aren’t all that minded to give them up, and on top of that, they are the sort of people who, you know, have guns, so that’s an issue. My cold dead hands and all that. Gun control advocates say that wouldn’t be such a problem as it’s made out to be, and their opponents say that it’s not really on because it’s the sort of problem where you don’t know how big the problem is until you have that problem, and that’s not a good position to be in. But now we have a test case. On the March 15 an Australian immigrant murdered 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, apparently motivated by alt-right white nationalist ideology. He was arrested and will be tried next year, but in the immediate aftermath the prime minister announced that there would major new restrictions to firearm ownership. Before the attack, there was relatively little control on the ownership of guns in New Zealand, it was probably the only developed country other than the United States not to require the registration of firearms, although they did require the registration of the type of automatic rifles that were to be banned. New Zealand is a relatively small and thinly populated country, about the same size and population as Colorado, and with a similar layout, a couple of bigger cities, some smaller towns and lots of wilderness. There are a lot of guns in New Zealand, perhaps one gun for every four people, which is a huge number by the standards of most developed countries, but only a fraction of the level of gun ownership in the US. Anyway, military grade automatic rifles have been banned in New Zealand, and this week the buy-back scheme ended. This scheme offered 95 per cent of the purchase price of now-banned guns to owners who turned them in. So how did it go? 56,000 weapons were handed in, but it’s difficult to say exactly how successful that was. What percentage of the banned guns were handed in. To work that out, you need to have an idea how many of those guns were out there in the first place, and estimates of that vary, to say the least. The Council of Licensed Firearms Owners is New Zealand pro-gun organization, and they claim that there were 170,000 such guns in the country before the buy-back, and their spokesperson Nicole McKee said that that “50,000 is not a number to boast about”. That’s a reasonable point, it would seem that exactly one third of those 170,000 guns were turned in, but before the buyback began, New Zealand police said that there were about 15,000 registered guns in that category to be collected. Since they collected nearly four times that number, it’s clear that the 15,000 was a big underestimate, but there’s no real evidence for the 170,000 either. The person giving it is, as I say, from the biggest pro-gun organization in New Zealand, and it’s a bit ironic that it’s called the Council of Licensed Firearms Owners, since if what they are saying is true, then way more than 90 percent of their members were breaking the law by not licensing their firearms as required by law. But one thing that didn’t happen was any resistance. Many guns were handed in, undoubtedly many weren’t, though it’s impossible to really say how many, but there were no shoot-outs, no armed resistance. All countries are different of course, but New Zealand is about as close to a guinea pig mini-United States as you can get. It’s got a similar settler frontier spirit, it’s got wide open spaces where people live far from any real government authority. So how is a ban on already-widely distributed firearms going? Middling. No resistance, no violence. Lots of guns collected, probably lots not collected, but it’s unclear how many. And will it reduce violence? We’ll see.

Joan Esposito is the afternoon host for WCPT AM 820, Chicago’s progressive talk radio. We talked about, among other things, Barack Obama’s call for progressive unity and condemnation of excessive expectations of purity. ***** You’re used to me spouting on here based on not much more than my own prejudice, but here’s a topic that I am actually qualified to talk about. I studied linguistics, and I have quite a bit of experience in language learning. And anyone who has learnt a second language will know that the words and phrases in one language often don’t map exactly to the ones in another. A language is a complete speech convention, it’s not like Morse code where you transfer words directly. Things work differently from one language to another. Some languages have several non-interchangeable words where another language has just one or maybe none, and this can make problems for a language learner who hasn’t grown up with the experience of knowing when to use which word. And this means that people familiar with language learners will quickly learn to spot what is the native language of the learner by the mistakes that they make in their target language, the language they’re learning. There’s even a name for it, it’s called native language interference. Believe it or not, this is useful when it comes to understanding the comments in the hugely popular online version of the British newspaper, the Daily Mail. The comment was from someone with the username DMreader and gave their location as Lovely England, it was on an article about a request from a Russian-backed separatist in Ukraine to Nigel Farage to support his cause. Articles, in case you’re not a linguist, are words like a and the. So, if you want to say ‘I ate the apple’ you’re talking about a specific apple known to the listener; but if you say ‘I ate an apple’ then you’re not specifying to the listener which apple, because it’s not important. **** Now, here’s the thing about Russian. The Russian language doesn’t have articles at all. If you want to say ‘I ate an apple’ you say ‘? ???? ??????’; if you want to say ‘I ate the apple’ it’s the same, ‘? ???? ??????’, in both cases literally ‘I ate apple’. It’s easy to leave out a word that you don’t have a translation for, but if you’re an language learner, it’s much trickier to work out when to use words in your target language that have no equivalent in your native language. For this reason, Russian learners of English have a particular problem with knowing when to use articles, knowing when not to use them and knowing which one to use. This might be surprising until you think just how complicated some conventions of English actually are. This rule about using the word the for specific things and a or an for non-specific ones doesn’t always hold. It’s often way more complex than that. If someone says ‘I went to the bank’ or ‘I went to the beach’ it’s likely that they are not referring to a specific bank or beach known to the listener, and sometimes we leave articles out altogether, and say ‘I went to school’ or ‘I went to work’. Sometimes this grammatical rule gets totally reversed. You might walk into a store and ask ‘Do you have the Daily Mail?’, you use the when you don’t mean a specific one, you mean any of thousands that were printed. Then go into the café next door to meet a friend, they ask you do you have a newspaper, and you answer ‘Well, I have a Daily Mail’ when in this case you are referring to the specific copy that you just bought, for some reason. It gets more complicated when you use negatives, sometimes the negatives can replace the article – ‘I have a computer’, ‘I have no computer’; and sometimes they can’t – ‘I have the book’, ‘I don’t have the book’. This makes things even harder for Russian speakers, because where English has several negating words, no, not, don’t Russian has only one, ???. This is where the comment by DMreader in Lovely England on a Daily Mail online article about Nigel Farage and Ukraine from a while back comes in, I’ll read it verbatim. There’s a number of things there. Let’s leave aside the content, why someone in ‘Lovely England’ would be so concerned that the Nigel Farage take a stance on the conflict in Ukraine; let’s just look at the language. “…stay away from business that’s not concern of ours…” That’s weird phrasing. You could say ‘not a concern of ours’, you could say ‘no concern of ours’, but ‘not concern of ours’ isn’t something typical of an English speaker. Then there’s the mention of ‘one pro-Russian activist with a common sense’. With ‘a common sense’? Who says that? Not native speakers. And ‘sees the situation in a logical order’? that’s a strange way to put it, but it seems to me to be a direct translation of Russian phraseology. Not to mention that we are expected to believe that DM reader in Lovely England seems well-up not just on the conflict in Ukraine but also Farage’s position on it. But I don’t. Looking at the language, and I have significant expertise in this area, I haven’t a shadow of doubt that this text was written by a Russian-speaker. But here’s the thing. This text wasn’t written recently; it wasn’t ever written at the time of the UK Brexit referendum. It was written in April 2014, years before either that referendum or that presidential election. The Daily Mail online is the biggest UK online news source, and an obvious target for campaigns of influence. They might have started sloppy, with writers who have middling English doing heavy-handed messaging, but it would be foolish to think they’ve given up on it, or not gotten better at it. Make no mistake, this is information warfare. But it’s better than bombing Malaysian airlines, I suppose. Or Afghan wedding parties for that matter.

Ira Mehlman is the media director of Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). In our discussion we talked about the prominent stories on FAIR’s home page which suggest that undocumented immigrants in the US are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime, or are a disproportionate burden on the economy. In fact, the weight of evidence indicates that undocumented immigrants commit proportionally fewer crimes than the rest of the population. There are a range of studies on the net cost/benefit of undocumented immigrants to the economy. Some studies indicate that the immigrants make a net contribution right across society, while others indicate that, while most US-born citizens benefit, very low skilled workers (highschool dropouts) suffer a wage drop, although this is offset by access to lower prices, and the effect diminishes with career progression. FAIR’s contention that all levels of society suffer a significant net financial disadvantage caused by undocumented immigration is an outlier that is not replicated in other studies. ***** About 40 men were taken to a barn and shot. Following that, at least 300 men, women, and children, including infants were rounded up and locked in the barn, which was doused with gasoline and set on fire. Anyone who tried to escape was shot. All of them died. This is what happened in a small village called Jedwabne on July 10 1941, in nazi-occupied Poland. Before the massacre, Jedwabne had a population of about 1,500 Jews and 700 Catholics. Some of the details are lost to history because of the fog of war, but one thing is notable about this outrage. There were nazi forces present in the village earlier that day, and some may have taken part on the periphery, but the massacre was not carried out by Germans. In Jedwabne, the Jews were murdered by their neighbors. They were killed by Catholic Poles who they had lived beside for generations. Clearly there were ethnic tensions before the nazi invasion, and these were exacerbated by the perceived, and sometimes real support for the Soviet Union in the Jewish community – the area had been under Soviet occupation until a few months previously. In post-war communist Poland, there were trials of people accused of participating in the pogrom; several local catholic men were convicted. Their trials fell drastically short of anything that could be considered fair or impartial. Despite this, there is no serious historical source that disputes the central fact that local Catholic poles murdered hundreds of their Jewish neighbors. No serious historical source. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t disputed. Memorial to the murdered Jews of Jedwabne In 2018, Poland’s conservative ruling party, called the Law and Justice party, passed a law making it a criminal offence to publicly state that the Polish nation was in any complicit in the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich. The truth is that many Poles gave their lives fighting bravely against the nazis. But some Poles were collaborators, sometimes under duress, and some, as happened in Jedwabne were enthusiastic in their treason. The 2018 Polish law effectively extended a practice in Poland’s schools to the whole of society, making it impossible to tell that truth. There was an international outcry, and the law was changed to remove the prison sentence, but the law remains. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance has compiled the most widely-accepted definition of anti-Semitism; it contains several examples, including one which reads “Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II”. Poland’s legally-compelled anti-Semitic lies are an example of what happens when people can’t win an argument on the facts, so they make up their own facts. This is poison for public debate, but it’s not the only example of this. A couple of weeks ago, the Republican-controlled House in Ohio passed a bill instructing teachers in public schools on how to grade pupils taking exams. Under the law, students can’t be penalized if their work is scientifically wrong as long as the reasoning is because of their religious beliefs. So, if a geography teacher sets a pop quiz with a question which is closest to the age of the earth, five billion, five million, 5,000 or 500 years, and a student get it wrong, and ticks 5,000 instead of five billion, the teacher isn’t legally allowed to mark them wrong. And, presumably if a student says that the sun orbits the earth, or the earth is supported by elephants on the back of a giant turtle, or any number of religious-inspired answers, the teacher is legally obliged to mark them right. And even if the student gets some basic math wrong, says that two plus two equals five, what’s to stop them from saying that’s based on their religious belief, so top marks please? Once the answer is based on what’s in the student’s mind, not what’s true in reality, there is nothing to hold on to. These two examples are on different scales, but they both show a disconnection from the real world. If the facts aren’t the way you want them to be, you just pass a law to change them, or at least to force people to agree with you. Any belief system that must be shielded from reality by the force of law doesn’t have much going for it.

Randall Holcombe is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, and DeVoe Moore Professor of Economics at Florida State University. In the past He has also served as President of the Public Choice Society, President of the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics and as a member of the Florida Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors as well as a number of academic roles. He’s written many books, the most recent of which is Liberty in Peril: Democracy and Power in American History, which was published last September. ***** I saw a little story from Chicago during the week. Not something that’s going to make headline news, but it’s interesting. It comes from a City Council budget hearing submission by Library Commissioner Andrea Telli. I told you, this isn’t headline news. But it is interesting. What the Chicago public libraries did was abolish fines for the late return of books. You know the sort of thing, you get two weeks to read the book, but if you don’t bring it back in time, you have to pay a dime or whatever for every extra day. The theory is that people will be more likely to bring back their books on time if they have to pay a fine for them being late.  Well, Chicago said, forget it, bring us back the books when you can, no worries. What happened? The return rate soared by 240 per cent. That goes against what you might expect, why would so many more people bring back their books when the penalty is removed? There’s a couple of reasons. First, these fines are comparatively tiny, and they were only ever likely to be enforced when someone came into the library, probably to return the books, so to a degree they were more of a deterrent than an encouragement to bring the books back. But secondly, human motivations aren’t as simple as that. People often do things for people, not because they have a financial motivation, but because they want to be good people. And, sometimes financial motivation just doesn’t work. I’m reminded of a study where a kindergarten set up a system of fines for parents who picked up their kids late. Kindergarten teachers are basically held hostage by parents who show up late, because the kids are too young to kick out onto the street. So they said you pay so much money for every minute past closing time that we have to mind your kid. Did that make the parents show up on time? No, not by a mile. Actually, it made them show up even later, and significantly later. As the authors of the study wrote, the parents regarded the payment not as a fine, but as a fee, and many thought it was a fee well worth paying. And, the fact that they were paying for the service meant that they lost non-financial motives to be on time, such as the sense of moral duty not to force the teachers to stay late at work. But what was really interesting was when the kindergarten abandoned the fine system. Did the parents go back to normal, and pick their kids up not-quite-on-time, but not as late when they were paying for the extra time? No. It seems that the experience of paying the fine, or the fee, permanently changed the parents’ outlook. Once they saw picking up their kids on time was not a moral duty, but a transaction, it seems that they couldn’t go back. Even after the fine system was withdrawn, they still saw it as a transaction, just maybe a better value one. So the introduction of money damaged the social contract. The point here is that not every motivation is money, even in today’s world, people still can be motivated by a sense of duty to people even when they have no real connection with them. Whether it is fighting to defend people you’ve never met, caring for them as teachers or medics, keeping an orderly line in a busy café or braking to let someone merge into traffic, that sense of duty is, literally, priceless.

Michael Tauberg is a senior Columnist with ProgressiveBrief.com. We discussed his article Trump Administration Corruption Doesn’t Excuse the Bidens. ***** Air pollution in India is off the scale. That sounds like a rhetorical flourish, but it isn’t. It’s literally the truth. Most cities around the world, including in India, have sensors which monitor the levels of various pollutants, but one of the most important to monitor is called PM10s and PM2.5s. I won’t get into the technicalities but that’s basically a particle so small that our nasal hairs, the mucus on our airways and the other ways that our bodies have evolved to deal with impurities in the air, are unable to stop. We have no natural defenses against them. And they’re bad. Breathing elevated levels of these particles is associated with a whole range health problems including bronchial asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, interstitial pneumonia and birth defects, and they are listed as a grade 1 carcinogen, the worst type. They can come from a variety of sources including diesel engines, power plants, agricultural burning and domestic fires for heating and cooking. They are estimated to cause up to 50,000 deaths per year in the United States, and more than a third of a million deaths per year in Europe, which is more densely populated. There is a scale that basically measures how polluted the air is, it counts how many particles are in each cubic meter of air, anything under 50 is good, under 100 is satisfactory, between 200 and 300 is poor and there’s a warning with that it “may cause breathing discomfort to people on prolonged exposure, and discomfort to people with heart disease”. Not nice, but it’s not the worst. Between 300 and 400, very poor air quality “may cause respiratory illness to the people on prolonged exposure. Effect may be more pronounced in people with lung and heart diseases”. And the top of the scale, between 400 and 500 “may cause respiratory impact even on healthy people, and serious health impacts on people with lung/heart disease”. The scale doesn’t go higher, but the pollution can still get worse. Although there are no official classifications for the readings, the equipment can register higher readings in extremely polluted areas, but even they have their readings. In the past few weeks, in some Indian cities, many sensors are all giving the same reading: 999. That would be a horrifying reading, if it were true. It would mean that the pollution level was double the top of the range of the worst category of pollution. But it’s not true. The air pollution isn’t that bad. It’s worse. The reading is 999 because that’s the highest reading the sensors can give. When they were designed, nobody imagined that they would need to measure air that badly polluted, so the design limitation is that readings of 1000 or above can’t be registered, they all appear as 999, so we don’t have real data, but even though we don’t have the true reading, we know that it is truly awful. It’s the equivalent of smoking 50 cigarettes a day. It has devastating results. Apart from the obvious, lung cancers in non-smokers, half of Delhi’s 4.4 million schoolchildren have stunted lung development from which they will never recover. There are a variety of reasons why it is so bad now, some of them seasonal, but that’s not the point I want to make here. The live map of world air quality shows that air pollution is worst in poor Asian countries, by a long way. There are some environmental campaigners who advocate a return to a low-tech village life and who idealize some third-world ways of life; what they don’t realize is that what they are describing is poverty; grinding poverty. And people in grinding poverty like that will do almost anything to improve their lives right now. That may be cutting down a tree to get firewood to cook their next meal, burning smoky coal to keep warm or driving a dirty diesel truck to earn a few bucks. You can try to explain to them that they are endangering their long-term future, but when your short term future is in jeopardy, that’s not so persuasive. It’s like telling someone going before a firing squad that they shouldn’t have that last cigarette, it’s bad for them. It’s true that the world faces gigantic environmental challenges. The way to solve them is to move forwards, not backwards. We have developed technologies that were unimaginable a few decades ago. The choice isn’t between taking people out of poverty and meeting those challenges. In fact, it’s probably not possible to do one without the other.