An Autonomous Car Might Decide You Should Die →

We're moving into a science fiction future, where artificial intelligence (however defined) will be programmed by us for us, but, like all other policy, we're not really thinking through to the end, logically:

On some level, I believe many of us realize we are fast becoming inefficient parties in the face of artificial intelligence. Science fiction movies where the robots have “deemed us expendable” give many people cause for concern, fleeting as the thought might be. However, we may find out all too soon that autonomous cars will have been the first salvo fired off by robots in such a future. We program them to understand our values. They make decisions that reflect our values. The decisions frighten us. What does that mean?

So how do we program these things, when, right now, we can't solve fundamental moral problems? I really like the examples and logic puzzles. Well worth the read.

The real "middle class" is even worse off →

Recent research from the St. Louis Fed's Center for Household Financial Stability attempts to overcome these problems by adopting a demographic definition of the middle class. And it makes a difference. As the authors, William Emmons and Bryan Noeth noted, changing the definition reveals that "the middle class may be under more financial pressure than has been otherwise reported."
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Comparing income in 2013 with income in 1989 for each of these three groups, the researchers found little change in the median income of Thrivers and Stragglers. For Thrivers, median income rose 2 percent over this time period, while for Stragglers it rose 8 percent. However, for the Middle Class, median income fell by 16 percent between 1989 and 2013.

The Myth of Police Reform →

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Thus it was not surprising, last week, to see that the mayor of North Charleston ordered the use of body cameras for all officers. Body cameras are the least divisive and least invasive step toward reforming the practices of the men and women we permit to kill in our names. Body cameras are helpful in police work, but they are also helpful in avoiding a deeper conversation over what it means to keep whole swaths of America under the power of the justice system, as opposed to the authority of other branches of civil society.
Police officers fight crime. Police officers are neither case-workers, nor teachers, nor mental-health professionals, nor drug counselors. One of the great hallmarks of the past forty years of American domestic policy is a broad disinterest in that difference. The problem of restoring police authority is not really a problem of police authority, but a problem of democratic authority. It is what happens when you decide to solve all your problems with a hammer. To ask, at this late date, why the police seem to have lost their minds is to ask why our hammers are so bad at installing air-conditioners. More it is to ignore the state of the house all around us. A reform that begins with the officer on the beat is not reform at all. It's avoidance. It's a continuance of the American preference for considering the actions of bad individuals, as opposed to the function and intention of systems.

Use of E-Cigarettes Rises Sharply Among Teenagers, Report Says →

I've been amazed at how quickly smoking [cigarettes] went of fashion in the U.S. That may be reversing:

E-cigarettes have arrived in the life of the American teenager.

Use of the devices among middle- and high school students tripled from 2013 to 2014, according to federal data released on Thursday, bringing the share of high school students who use them to 13 percent — more than smoke traditional cigarettes.

About a quarter of all high school students and 8 percent of middle school students — 4.6 million young people altogether — used tobacco in some form last year. The sharp rise of e-cigarettes, together with a substantial increase in the use of hookah pipes, led to 400,000 additional young people using a tobacco product in 2014, the first increase in years, though researchers pointed out the percentage of the rise fell within the report’s margin of error.

Americans Love Paying Taxes →

For my doctoral research on Americans’ experience of taxpaying, I conducted interviews with 49 people in 21 states about their sentiments on taxes. The single most surprising thing I learned is that Americans feel a deep pride about being taxpayers. “It feels good to be able to contribute,” said a 28-year-old from Utah, “and to know that you’re part of the reason why there’s an infrastructure in place.” A woman from Florida agreed. “I feel like it’s a contribution to society and for the future,” she said. “When I’m gone, maybe my little bit of money that I’m putting in is paying somebody else’s Social Security or Medicare or whatever.” (Because the interviews also covered tax evasion, all respondents were promised anonymity in exchange for their participation in the study.)

These respondents are not exceptional. In national surveys, over 95 percent of Americans agree with the statement, “It is every American’s civic duty to pay their fair share of taxes,” and more than half see taxpaying as “very patriotic.” One man from Ohio called it a responsibility to “the Founding Fathers.” A former Marine said taxpaying is “the cost of being an American,” while a man from California said tax avoidance is the equivalent of “shorting the country.”

The feeling is bipartisan. Surveys show that Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats to agree that taxpaying is a moral responsibility...

Why the FDA doesn't really know what's in your food →

Lupin is considered a "major food allergen" in Europe and must be labeled accordingly on packaged foods. In the United States, where lupin is less commonly used, there is no such requirement, leaving Fattell and others who suffer from peanut allergies vulnerable.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has known about lupin’s effects since at least 2008, but has made no move to require companies to identify it as an allergen on products sold in the United States.

Lupin is just one of thousands of ingredients companies have added to foods with little to no oversight from the FDA. They’ve taken advantage of a loophole in a decades-old law that allows them to deem an additive to be “generally recognized as safe” — or GRAS — without the agency’s blessing, or even its knowledge.

Why C.E.O. Pay Reform Failed →

Say-on-pay is the latest in a series of reforms that, in the past couple of decades, have tried to change the mores of the executive suite. For most of the twentieth century, directors were paid largely in cash. Now, so that their interests will be aligned with those of shareholders, much of their pay is in stock. Boards of directors were once populated by corporate insiders, family members, and cronies of the C.E.O. Today, boards have many more independent directors, and C.E.O.s typically have less influence over how boards run. And S.E.C. reforms since the early nineteen-nineties have forced companies to be transparent about executive compensation.
These reforms were all well-intentioned. But their effect on the general level of C.E.O. salaries has been approximately zero. Executive compensation dipped during the financial crisis, but it has risen briskly since, and is now higher than it’s ever been. Median C.E.O. pay among companies in the S. & P. 500 was $10.5 million in 2013; total compensation is up more than seven hundred per cent since the late seventies. There’s little doubt that the data for 2014, once compiled, will show that C.E.O. compensation has risen yet again. And shareholders, it turns out, rather than balking at big pay packages, approve most of them by margins that would satisfy your average tinpot dictator. Last year, all but two per cent of compensation packages got majority approval, and seventy-four per cent of them received more than ninety per cent approval.
Why have the reforms been so ineffective? ...