Last week, Randa Jarrar, a professor at Cal State Fresno, tweeted her reaction to Barbara Bush’s death:

As you might expect, this produced a wee bit of backlash. Yesterday, however, Fresno State said it would do nothing about this:

Her comments, although disgraceful, are protected free speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Additionally, although Professor Jarrar used tenure to defend her behavior, this private action is an issue of free speech and not related to her job or tenure.

This is a key point. Every story I’ve read about this talks about the fact that Jarrar is protected by tenure, and much of the backlash has been about the evils of tenure. Jarrar herself said she would never be fired because she had tenure.

But tenure had nothing to do with it. If she had been a clerk at the DMV, the outcome would have been the same. Public employees generally can’t be fired for things they say in their private lives. Employees of private companies, by contrast, can be fired for any reason at all,¹ including pissing everyone off with meanspirited tweets. This is because the First Amendment applies to the government, not to private actors.

So keep this in mind. Regardless of what you think about Jarrar, the outcome here has nothing to do with tenure.

¹This is not a blanket rule, obviously, and it varies somewhat from state to state. Generally speaking, though, most of us are at-will employees, which means we can be fired if our boss doesn’t like the color of our shoes. The big exception is that you can’t be fired for a specific set of prohibited reasons: age, race, gender, religion, etc.

Yonhap News/Newscom via ZUMA

I sort of figured something like this must be going on:

A large part of North Korea’s underground nuclear test facility is unusable due to the collapse of a cavity inside the mountain after the latest test-detonation occurred, according to Chinese seismologists involved in a soon-to-be-published study.

….Soon after the sixth and largest blast last September, satellite images suggested that one part of the site, a 7,200 foot granite peak called Mount Mantap had diminished in height. Some U.S. and South Korean experts suggested that tunnels inside the mountain—where five of North Korea’s six nuclear tests took place—had collapsed, rendering much of the site useless. Now, the two Chinese studies give credence to that theory….The researchers warned that a nuclear test of similar yield to September’s “would produce collapses in an even larger scale creating an environmental catastrophe,” according to the abstract.

In other words, Kim Jong Un’s big announcement that North Korea was suspending nuclear tests and closing its test site were pretty much meaningless. It was something he had to do regardless, and it will probably take another year or two to build a new one.

UPDATE: Jeffrey Lewis thinks this whole thing is overblown:

No, North Korea’s nuclear test mountain did not collapse. (A note in place of the short thread I will write after I drop my children at school.)

— Jeffrey Lewis (@ArmsControlWonk) April 25, 2018

Click the link to read the entire thread. Nickel summary: one cavern collapsed, but there are others.

Democrats may have lost the congressional special election in Arizona tonight, but they sure made up a lot of ground. Here’s the scorecard since the beginning of last year:

Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

Mick Mulvaney has been running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau since November:

Since then, he has frozen all new investigations and slowed down existing inquiries by requiring employees to produce detailed justifications….But he wants Congress to go further and has urged it to wrest funding of the independent watchdog from the Federal Reserve, a move that would give lawmakers — and those with access to them — more influence on the bureau’s actions. On Tuesday, he implored the financial services industry to help support the legislative changes he has requested.

He concluded the speech, which included an appeal to diminish the bureau’s power, by describing the two types of people he was most responsive to as a congressman — constituents and lobbyists who contributed to his campaign.

Please proceed, Mr. Mulvaney:

“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” Mr. Mulvaney, a former Republican lawmaker from South Carolina, told 1,300 bankers and lending industry officials at an American Bankers Association conference in Washington. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

That seems bracingly clear. Most politicians don’t have either the arrogance or the cluelessness it would take to admit this in public, but Mulvaney does. Kudos.

What’s the best way to get people working? There have been hundreds of jobs programs studied over the past few decades, and you can draw some general conclusions from them. A couple of years ago David Card and two colleagues published a meta-analysis of 207 studies conducted between 1980-2012. Here are their main results:

Here’s their conclusion:

Another clear finding in Table 3a is the relatively poor performance of public sector programs — a result that has been found in other previous analyses…. Estimated effect sizes tend to increase as the time horizon is extended from the short run to the medium run….Comparing across program types it is clear that the pattern of rising impacts is driven almost entirely by training-based programs, which show a relatively large gain in effect sizes from the short term to the medium term and only a small decline between the medium and longer runs. The patterns for the other types of programs suggest relatively constant or declining effect sizes over the post-program time horizon….Public sector employment programs have negligible, or even negative program impacts at all time horizons.

The authors find, in general, that jobs programs have the highest impact on women and the long-term unemployed, and work best during recessions. Digging down a bit, training programs are most effective for the long-term unemployed, while threats and sanctions tend to work best for “disadvantaged” participants (i.e., those with low incomes and poor education).

For what it’s worth, the sample size for direct public employment programs is modest, and the sample size for those operated over the long term is very small. This means that the large deterioration seen in these programs over the long term might be overstated.

"Sacre bleu, what is this moron saying now? Please, not more about the crates of cash. OMG. Now it's barrels of cash. Nobody ever told me Trump was going to be part of this job."Christy Bowe/Globe Photos via ZUMA

Over lunch I was chatting with a friend and we were wondering what Donald Trump really wants to do about Syria. Does he want to get out? If so, why hire guys like John Bolton, who’d probably like to send a million troops over?

It’s a mystery. That is, it was a mystery. Today Trump cleared everything up. We’re getting out:

As far as Syria is concerned, I would love to get out. I’d love to bring our incredible warriors back home. They’ve done a great job. We’ve essentially just absolutely obliterated ISIS in Iraq and in Syria. And we’ve done a big favor to neighboring countries, frankly, but we’ve also done a favor for our country.

But wait. Maybe we need to stay after all:

With that being said, Emmanuel and myself have discussed the fact that we don’t want to give Iran open season to the Mediterranean, especially since we really control it. To a large extent, we really have controlled it and we’ve set control on it. So we’ll see what happens.

No no no. Just kidding. We’re getting out:

But we’re going to be coming home relatively soon. We finished, at least, almost our work with respect to ISIS in Syria, ISIS in Iraq, and we have done a job that nobody has been able to do. But with that being said, I do want to come home.

Although first we have to accomplish some things:

But I want to come home also with having accomplished what we have to accomplish. So we are discussing Syria as part of an overall deal. When they made the Iran deal, what they should have done is included Syria.

And now a brief interruption from our lizard brain:

When I say “should have” — before giving them, Iran, $150 billion and $1.8 billion in cash — $1.8 million in cash. You think about this. Before giving this kind of tremendous money, okay — $150 billion and $1.8 billion in cash — in barrels, I hear, it was taken out, and in boxes it was taken out — cash — they should have made a deal that covered Yemen, that covered Syria, that covered other parts of the Middle East where Iraq is — where Iran is involved. They didn’t do that.

But back to the topic at hand. We’re getting out. Honest:

So we want to come home. We’ll be coming home.

Or maybe not:

But we want to have a very, very strong — we want to leave a strong and lasting footprint, and that was a very big part of our discussion. Okay? Thank you.

So…we’re coming home but not before we leave a strong and lasting footprint. Roger that.

Every week I try to use at least one photo each of animal, vegetable, and mineral. Surprisingly, it turns out that the vegetable member of this trio is the toughest to keep up with, but we’re now in rose season so I’ve restocked my queue. Today’s photo is a Julia Child rose, which makes me wonder how you get a rose named after yourself. I suppose some rose breeder just has to affix your name to a rose that turns out to be popular. So how about it? Do I have any fans out there who are rose breeders?

The New York Times reports today on a new paper that looks at whether people voted for Trump out of a sense of economic anxiety:

A study published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences questions that explanation, the latest to suggest that Trump voters weren’t driven by anger over the past, but rather fear of what may come. White, Christian and male voters, the study suggests, turned to Mr. Trump because they felt their status was at risk.

That’s certainly plausible. Let’s go to the study itself to see what it says:

Although the panel does not include repeated measures asking directly about racial status threat—and such measures might be susceptible to social desirability bias in any case—it included a short form of the social dominance orientation (SDO) scale, tapping individual differences in support for hierarchy over equality. Psychologists most often use it as an indicator of a stable personal trait indicating animus toward outgroups, but those high in SDO also are known to oppose trade and foreign direct investment out of a desire to dominate other countries.

The study compares a panel of voters who took an identical internet survey in 2012 and 2016, and it directly includes a set of questions measuring attitudes toward social dominance. But for some reason it doesn’t take the obvious next step of simply correlating increases in SDO with increases in support for Trump. That’s odd, isn’t it? Instead it looks at three other questions. Long story short, here are the results:

I think you can see the problem: changes in SDO had only a tiny and barely significant effect on the vote for Trump, which suggests that it wasn’t all that important. So how do we save this study? It’s easy. Step 1: Examine other issues. Trump gained about 5 percentage points of support due to his views on trade. He lost about 5 percentage points due to his views on immigration. And he gained about 2 points for his China bashing.

Step 2: Make a post-hoc claim that these issues are what really matters:

Notably, all three of these issues capture potential racial and global status threat. For example, immigration captures the perceived threat of allowing those who are racially different into one’s country. Trade opposition captures Americans’fear of takeover by more dominant economic powers as well as racial opposition based on resentment of “others,” including  foreigners and businesses in countries that are racially different. Prejudicial attitudes toward domestic minorities predict trade attitudes more strongly than the vulnerability of a person’s occupation or industry of employment. Finally, China can be considered an outgroup threat both racially and with respect to threatening American global dominance.

The real takeaway from this study is that Trump’s tough talk on trade was pretty popular. But that’s not very interesting, so it gets made into something else. This is how the game is played, kids.

Serrano, Shutterstock/ ZUMA Press

This is why Scott Pruitt is able to get away with acting like he’s the Sun King:

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt is expected to propose a rule Tuesday that would establish new standards for what science could be used in writing agency regulations, according to individuals briefed on the plan. It is a sweeping change long sought by conservatives.

The rule, which Pruitt has described in interviews with select media over the past month, would only allow EPA to consider studies for which the underlying data are made available publicly. Advocates describe this approach as an advance for transparency, but critics say it would effectively block the agency from relying on long-standing, landmark studies linking air pollution and pesticide exposure to harmful health effects.

….Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Center for Science and Democracy, said in an email that Pruitt’s move would expand on his earlier decision to change the standards for who can serve on EPA’s advisory committees….“First, they came after the agency’s independent science advisers, and now, they’re going after the science itself,” Rosenberg said. “What is transparent is the unabashed takeover of EPA leadership by individuals who have demonstrated disinterest in helping communities combat pollution by using the best available science.”

As long as he keeps doing stuff like this, conservatives will let him get away with anything. I imagine Pruitt’s next step is to ban the use of science entirely because it so obviously has anti-industry bias. And after all, doesn’t EPA stand for Emitter Protection Agency?

Does higher density in big cities increase traffic congestion? Or does it actually reduce congestion by moving more people closer to where the jobs are, thus cutting down on commutes? This is not an easily answered question, but here are a few markers. First, here’s a simple chart showing that time spent in congestion increases as density increases:

However, there are other ways of looking at this and more sophisticated ways of doing the analysis. Gilles Duranton, an expert in urban design at Wharton, teamed up with Matthew Turner to perform a detailed analysis of total vehicle use based on an enormous dataset from the National Household Travel Survey. Here’s what they found:

In mid-size cities, total traffic decreases with higher density. In the biggest cities, however, the correlation breaks down and it’s hard to say what happens. Higher density probably still reduces traffic, but the size of the effect is smaller and seemingly random.

Unfortunately, even in mid-size cities the effect is quite small. The authors estimate that a doubling of urban density leads to only a 10 percent decrease in total miles traveled:

Urban density appears to have a small causal effect on driving….Our estimates of the relationship of driving to urban form allow us to assess the cost effectiveness of densification as a policy response to excessive driving. These estimates suggest that urban form is not cost effective compared to explicit pricing programs.

In particular, even concentrating the population residing in 83% of the area the continental US into an area of about 1500 square kilometers would result in only about a 5% decrease in aggregate driving, and this policy appears to describe the upper envelope of what densification policies can accomplish. On the other hand, existing estimates of the gasoline price elasticity of driving suggest that a similar decrease in driving would be accomplished with a gas tax that is no larger than gasoline price fluctuations observed over the past five to ten years. Congestion pricing programs appear to have even larger effects.

So higher density is a mixed bag: it appears to produce somewhat more congestion but slightly fewer total miles traveled. If you really want to reduce traffic, the authors suggest that a gasoline tax or, even better, a congestion charge provide far more bang for the buck. For example, here are the number of trips taken in Central London before and after they introduced a congestion charge:

As it turns out, traffic in London is about as pokey today as it was in 1996. However, the congestion charge has still been a success: although taxi and delivery trips have increased, the number of car trips into London from the suburbs has fallen by about a quarter. If that hadn’t happened, congestion would be far worse than it was in 1996.

One of the most persistent objections to denser urban development comes from residents who object to making congested streets even more congested. The evidence suggests that this is a legitimate concern, and to overcome it urban planners need to offer concrete solutions. Better mass transit is obviously one possibility, but it doesn’t necessarily reduce traffic at the location where someone is proposing to build a new apartment block. However, a congestion charge would reduce traffic everywhere, and at least stands a chance of mollifying residents who are tired of too many cars (and probably hate all the out-of-town commuters tying up their streets anyway).

So far the idea of a congestion charge hasn’t caught on in America. New York almost got one recently, but the legislature killed it a few weeks ago. But if it ever does catch on, there’s likely a bargain to be made: a congestion charge—with proceeds earmarked for mass transit—paired with statutory and zoning changes that make it easier to get approval for dense residential blocks. Why not do both?