Senate passes torture ban despite Republican opposition →

More than 20 Republican senators rejected a ban on the use of cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners on Tuesday, voting against an ultimately successful measure to permanently prevent a repeat of the CIA’s once secret and now widely-discredited torture program.
The bipartisan amendment reaffirms President Barack Obama’s prohibition of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding and sleep deprivation, which were developed by the CIA under the administration of his predecessor, George W Bush.
The measure passed in the Senate, 78-21.

Research on The Trade-off Between Free Services and Personal Data →

Our findings, instead, support a new explanation: a majority of Americans are resigned to giving up their data­ -- and that is why many appear to be engaging in tradeoffs. Resignation occurs when a person believes an undesirable outcome is inevitable and feels powerless to stop it. Rather than feeling able to make choices, Americans believe it is futile to manage what companies can learn about them. Our study reveals that more than half do not want to lose control over their information but also believe this loss of control has already happened.
By misrepresenting the American people and championing the tradeoff argument, marketers give policymakers false justifications for allowing the collection and use of all kinds of consumer data often in ways that the public find objectionable. Moreover, the futility we found, combined with a broad public fear about what companies can do with the data, portends serious difficulties not just for individuals but also -- over time -- for the institution of consumer commerce.

The Shift from Public to Private Markets in Tech Funding →

Very interesting notes in relation to the "tech bubble" talk:

Yesterday, the folks at Andreessen-Horowitz released a slide deck on their reasoning why “this time it is different” on tech funding and bubbles. It is worth a little of your time but here are the take aways:
  • The amount of money going into tech start-ups is still much less than it was in the dot.com bubbleof 2000. Indeed, as a share of GDP funding has been flat since that time. It is also flat as a function of people online.

However:

  • The tech funding is heavily geographically concentrated. We know that this is the case with entrepreneurial activity (see here) and I think it is becoming more so.
  • That means that while an economy-wide view of funding shows flatness in the aggregates, I wonder if we did just a Silicon Valley analysis, it would look like this. My guess is that funding from Silicon Valley to Silicon Valley has increased.
  • Given this, I think the heart of the move to earlier stage funding is doing hand in hand with the increase in wealth concentration...

Conservatives, Universal Registration, and “Informed Voters” →

If I can expand Foster’s thought a bit, he’s making a simple argument: Democracy requires informed citizens, but the larger the pool of voters, the less likely the average citizen is especially informed. Far from enhancing democracy, universal voter registration might make it worse.
(It’s a classic “perversity thesis” for those of you who read your Hirschman.)
I’m sympathetic to this view, especially since it seems inevitable that more voters—even if they’re just potential voters—equals a less intelligent electorate. But consider this: The story of our democracy is of progressive expansion: Landed white males to all white males, all white males to all males, all males to men and women. Each expansion brought in “uninformed” people, and yet, the electorate isn’t less informed than it was when voting was the privilege of a few. What gives?
...
I said there were two things, and here’s the second. Conservatives have a genuinely different view of voting than liberals. For liberals, voting is good in its own right, and universal registration affirms that everyone is a valuable member of society. That they count, and their voice should too. Conservatives, by contrast, tend to see voting as a means to an end: Good governance and wise leadership. And if that’s true, then there’s every reason to limit the franchise; to put obstacles to voting and to ensure that only the most motivated people come to the polls.
But they should know that this argument doesn’t just apply to universal registration: It applies to every voting expansion, from the 15th Amendment to women’s suffrage. In other words, it proves too much.
Which is to say this: Maybe our history shows that, far worsening our politics, making it easier to vote is how we give all Americans a chance to be great—and informed—citizens.

Protecting public safety while reducing the prison headcount →

Three things to like about Ross Douthat’s Sunday column on incarceration:
1.  He starts in the right place: the sheer scale and horror of mass incarceration, especially as practiced in this country. (Douthat is right: by any reasonable definition, SuperMax is torture.)
2. He acknowledges the key fact: there aren’t enough harmless prisoners that releasing them would solve the problem. If we want to get to civilized levels of incarceration we need to let out some seriously guilty and possibly dangerous people.  Just to get back to the U.S. historical level – already about 50% above European rates – we would have to let out four out of five current inmates. That means freeing large numbers of armed robbers, rapists, and murderers.
3. And he asks the right question: how to do that without ending our twenty-year winning streak in crime reduction...

In China, Don’t Mistake the Trees for the Forest →

The chart reminds us that China is a large and heterogeneous country—and, as it happens, social unrest isn’t a national referendum. You don’t need a majority vote from a whole country to get popular protest that can threaten to reorder national politics; you just need to reach a critical point, and that point can often be reached with a very small fraction of the total population. So, instead of looking at national tendencies to infer national risk, we should look at the tails of the relevant distributions to see if they’re getting thicker or longer. The people and places at the wrong ends of those distributions represent pockets of potential unrest; other things being equal, the more of them there are, the greater the cumulative probability of relevant action.

For American pundits, China isn’t a country. It’s a fantasyland. →

And because China is so vast, its successes can be attributed to whatever your pet cause is. Do you oppose free markets and privatization, like John Ross, former economic policy adviser for the city of London? Then China’s success is because of the role of the state. Do you favor free markets, like the libertarian Cato Institute? Then China’s success is because of its opening up. Are you an environmentalist? China is working on huge green-energy projects. Are you an energy lobbyist? China’s building gigantic pipeline projects. Are you an enthusiast for the Protestant work ethic, like historian Niall Ferguson, who describes it as one of his “killer apps” for civilizations? Then credit China’s manufacturing boom to its 40 million Protestants — even though they’re less than 5 percent of its 1.3 billion people.
With a massively changing country, correlation and causation are easily confused. China’s boom years in the 2000s, for instance, correspond nicely with an explosion in the number of pet dogs; perhaps some canine enthusiast is even now explaining how this is evidence that Bo, not Barack, should be making policy.