I guess yellow is the official color of the Green New Deal. I wonder who picked that?Erik Mcgregor/Pacific Press via ZUMA

I’ve made an affirmative decision not to pay too much attention to the “Green New Deal” until there’s at least a little bit of consensus about what it means, but today Matt Yglesias points me to a letter from 626 organizations—mostly small, local groups—that lays out one particular vision. For the most part, it’s pretty conventional: put an end to fossil fuels; transition to 100 percent renewable power by 2035; decarbonize transportation by 2040; and “harness the full power of the Clean Air Act.” This is followed by the inevitable shout out to “impacted communities” and indigenous rights, and it finally ends with this:

Further, we will vigorously oppose any legislation that: (1) rolls back existing environmental, health, and other protections, (2) protects fossil fuel and other dirty energy polluters from liability, or (3) promotes corporate schemes that place profits over community burdens and benefits, including market-based mechanisms and technology options such as carbon and emissions trading and offsets, carbon capture and storage, nuclear power, waste-to-energy and biomass energy. Fossil fuel companies should pay their fair share for damages caused by climate change, rather than shifting those costs to taxpayers.

I don’t get it. What’s wrong with cap-and-trade? What’s wrong with carbon capture? What’s wrong with nuclear power? What’s wrong with biomass energy? Why do they insist that fossil fuel companies be made to pay for their sins, but support the idea of helping out multinational automobile companies with federal credits for electric vehicles?

I suppose the idea here is that big companies will somehow game the system if they’re allowed to participate, but that doesn’t make sense. In any world where we have the political muscle to decarbonize everything over the next 20 years, we also have the political muscle to create a strong cap-and-trade system and to insure that money spent on carbon capture (for example) is spent wisely. If we’re unsure of our ability to do even those smallish things, what are the odds that we’ll be able to do gigantic things like ending the use of fossil fuels within two decades?

Bernd Von Jutrczenka/DPA via ZUMA

Our president does have his little hobbyhorses.

Last year, President Trump suggested a move tantamount to destroying NATO: the withdrawal of the United States….When Mr. Trump first raised the possibility of leaving the alliance, senior administration officials were unsure if he was serious. He has returned to the idea several times, officials said increasing their worries.

….Mr. Trump’s skepticism of NATO appears to be a core belief, administration officials said, akin to his desire to expropriate Iraq’s oil. While officials have explained multiple times why the United States cannot take Iraq’s oil, Mr. Trump returns to the issue every few months.

Similarly, just when officials think the issue of NATO membership has been settled, Mr. Trump again brings up his desire to leave the alliance.

The Times story suggests that Trump can pull out of NATO with the stroke of a pen, but is that really true? It sure seems like it ought to take a little more than that.

If you want to know what things are like on our southern border, one way to find out is to go down there and talk with the people who live there. Learn about their lives, and the lives of folks on the other side who want to get in. Put a human face on the whole thing.

But that’s not my style. When I want to know what’s happening, I look at the numbers. So here you go: five pairs of charts that tell the real story of the so-called crisis on our southern border.

1. The Basic Numbers

Since its peak in 2007, the population of unauthorized immigrants has been steadily dropping. And the number of deportations and other removals has been dropping every year since 2004.

2. Apprehensions

The number of unauthorized immigrants apprehended at the border has been dropping ever since 2000. Border Patrol agents apprehend about 400,000 migrants per year, one quarter the number of two decades ago. In the interior of the country, ICE agents arrest about 13,000 people per month, half the level of only six years ago.

3. Crime

Most of the evidence suggests that unauthorized immigrants commit less violent crime than US natives. As you can see, the top chart shows that states with higher levels of unauthorized immigrants also tend to have lower crime rates. (Note: If this seems unlikely to you, it’s probably because you think of places like Texas and California as high-crime states. They aren’t. California has always been below the national average, and Texas has been below it for all but a few years since 1990.)

Don’t take this chart to mean more than it does. Despite the careful work of the authors, I don’t think it proves that unauthorized immigrants commit substantially fewer crimes than natives. There’s just too much going on to say that with confidence, and anyway, the size of the immigrant population is too small to drive large differences in crime rates at a state level. However, it does provide pretty strong evidence that unauthorized immigrants don’t commit crimes at higher rates than natives. Most likely, they’re about equally crime prone compared to natives, or perhaps a bit less.

The second chart shows the percentage of deportations that are based on criminal activity. Under four different presidents, it’s been going down steadily. This suggests pretty strongly that there simply aren’t very many criminals to deport these days.

4. Drugs

Although the “crisis” language is overblown, traffic across the border in illicit drugs has clearly been rising. However, as the second chart shows, nearly all of this happens at ports of entry, where the drugs are hidden in cars or trucks. Building a wall would have almost no effect on this.

5. Asylum

If there’s plainly no crisis in terms of border crossings, apprehensions, crime, or drugs, there is a humanitarian crisis at the border. The number of asylum requests has been rising steadily for the past six years, and the denial rate has risen from 55 percent to 70 percent under President Trump. However, this barely tells a fraction of the story: there are now over 800 thousand pending cases in immigration court, a backlog that will keep growing at an astronomical rate unless we hire more judges—which we need—instead of more border agents.

They say that baboon behavior is amazingly human, but in light of recent events I think this is something of an insult to baboons. We should stop saying this before they really get pissed off at us.

Sarah Kliff has been engaged for the past year on a massive project to understand ER charges. This is admirable work, truly, but I suspect the eventual answer is going to be that ER charges are basically a witch’s brew of (a) randomness, (b) mistakes, (c) whatever they can get away with, and (d) some long-lost connection to a Medicare charge sheet with everything multiplied by e^π/2. For example, here’s something that Kliff posted today:

A rendering of a CT-scan will set you back $616. But if you add in postprocessing, the price goes down to $550. That’s pretty odd, isn’t it? Unless, of course, that postprocessing is designed to fuzz things up and you have to pay an extra $66 to get the nice, sharp, original image. Would any hospital cost accountants care to weigh in on this?

Ting Shen/Xinhua/ZUMA Wire

So let’s see. In the past 24 hours Donald Trump has:

• Suggested Elizabeth Warren should do campaign ads with her husband dressed in full Indian garb.¹
• Mocked Jeff Bezos over his divorce.
• Quoted Patrick Buchanan on border security.²
• Retweeted Geraldo Rivera saying the FBI is … I’m not sure … deranged or corrupt or something.
• Said the fake news has “truly gone MAD.”
• Claimed that gas prices are down because he deregulated energy.³
• Rejected his pal Lindsey Graham’s proposal to re-open the government.
• Warned that he would “devastate” Turkey if they attacked the Kurds.

And that’s only a single day! I understand that Trump has already passed that test where you have to distinguish an elephant from a pinball machine, but I wonder if we could use something a little more sophisticated. He sure seems to be going downhill fast.

¹Why not Warren herself? That is a mystery.

²Buchanan’s statistics about the number of arrests by ICE are not actually wrong, as near as I can tell, but he leaves out a lot. For example, here is our current “crisis”:

³For what it’s worth, gasoline prices are down because oil prices are down. And why are oil prices down? This has nothing to do with any deregulation fantasies, since none of Trump’s proposals have gone into effect yet. The real reason oil prices have dropped is because (a) in October the market got worried about a glut in oil supplies, (b) Trump then handed out lots of waivers to his sanctions on Iran, which reduced fears that Iranian oil shipments would halt, and (c) everyone is worried that Trump’s erratic economic policies make a recession this year more likely.

We’ve all heard this before, but here is the Financial Times on the performance of hedge funds last year:

Hedge funds run by GAM, Schroders and BlackRock delivered significant losses in 2018 as declines for stock markets globally and rising US interest rates led to widespread difficulties for alternative managers….Only 16 hedge funds were able to deliver positive returns before fees in 2018 from a universe of 450 monitored by HSBC’s alternative investment group.

Only 16! In fairness, 2018 was a tough year for the stock market. But it wasn’t a tough year for everything. After all, year-end GDP growth was most likely above 3 percent, the best growth number since before the Great Recession. There was certainly money to made somewhere. For example:

If you just dumped all your money into an S&P 500 index fund, you would have done poorly. But if you’d thrown some darts and picked four or five funds in a variety of areas, you would have made money and paid a management fee on the order of 0.5 percent.

Of course, hedge funds are supposed to be much smarter than this. They also have access to far more investment opportunites than just the mundane mutual funds that us financial schlubs are limited to. And they charge enormous fees: typically 20 percent of gains plus 2 percent of the total fund assets. Since nearly all of them lost money in 2018, we can ignore the 20 percent profits fee, but they’re still getting that 2 percent assets fee.

So: invest in schlub funds and earn, maybe, 2 or 3 percent with a 0.5 percent management fee. Invest in a hedge fund and lose 2 or 3 percent plus a 2 percent management fee.

If this were a one-year deal, it wouldn’t matter. But we hear this year after year after year: the average return on hedge funds is almost always lousy. And every year we schlubs scratch our chins and wonder what’s really going on. Why do super-rich people invest in these things?

And every year we don’t get an answer. So there must be something else going on. The super-rich aren’t stupid. They aren’t investing their billions year after year in funds that do worse, on average, than a workaday blended equity/debt fund from e-Trade or Vanguard.

So seriously, what’s going on? Are hedge funds really as bad as they seem to be? Or is there something that all the hedge fund critics are missing?

Who is John Galt?

Metzel Mikhail/TASS via ZUMA

I’ve spent the weekend watching a little football, catching up on some Netflix, playing frisbee golf, and not really keeping tabs on the news very much. Apparently, while I was failing to pay attention, I was transported through a warp in the space-time continuum where, it turns out:

We are no longer talking about whether Donald Trump likes Vladimir Putin a little more than you’d expect.

We are no longer talking about whether Trump’s campaign received dirt on Hillary Clinton from Russian sources.

We are no longer talking about whether Trump has obstructed justice during the Mueller probe of Russia.

Instead, we are talking—seriously, mind you—about whether the president of the United States is an asset of Russian intelligence.

Perhaps this is normal here on Earth-457-ℵ? I’m not sure. But I’d like to get back to my own earth, and I’m wondering if anyone can point me to a local nano-black-hole centrifuge or whatever it is you folks use to travel between dimensions. Any help would be much appreciated.

This is allegedly the IRB at Duke University, but they seem awfully young and good looking, don't they? I have my doubts.

Last year, a trio of hoaxsters produced a series of Onion-worthy papers in the fields of gender studies, critical race theory, masculinity studies, etc. and got many of them accepted and published in peer-reviewed journals. Now one of them, Peter Boghossian of Portland State University, is under investigation for failing to get this research pre-approved by his university’s Institutional Review Board.

If you’ve never heard of an IRB, count yourself lucky. It’s one of those bits of bureaucracy that began with the best of intentions and then turned into a monster.

Originally, IRBs were set up in response to a Wild West atmosphere at universities and medical centers in which the human subjects of research could genuinely be harmed. Medical research was one obvious area, as was psychological research of various kinds (the Milgram shock experiment, for example). But then it expanded. Were you doing econ experiments with the students in your class? Better get IRB approval. Were you doing telephone surveys? There are humans on the other end of the line. Better get IRB approval. Are you just mailing surveys to people? You’ll still need IRB approval. Over time, the roadblocks to research multiplied, and as near as I can tell, IRBs today are widely considered less to be genuine safeguards against abuse than they are mini-empires dedicated primarily to demonstrating their own power over the research community.

Still, there’s not much question that Boghossian and his colleagues failed to get IRB approval even though they should have. After all, their research was chock full of human subjects. There were the journal editors they were duping. There were the peer reviewers whose time they were wasting. And in the case of the published articles, there were the readers who were being misled. It’s an open-and-shut case.

But here’s my question: if the hoaxsters had submitted their plans to an IRB, what are the odds it would have been approved? And even more to the point: if it had been approved, what are the odds it would have stayed secret—which was, after all, critical to the whole enterprise? If there were a gender theorist on the IRB, would they have respected the value of the research, or would they have put their field first and quietly alerted a few key people to spread the word that they needed to be on the lookout for possible hoax submissions?

I have my doubts about this. And as long as we’re going there, what if you wanted to do some research that involved hoaxing an IRB? Who would you get permission from? And who could you trust to keep it under wraps?

Has anyone ever done field research comparing IRBs at different universities? That would be kind of interesting, wouldn’t it?