Events like these have huge ramifications for those inside that country, including potentially more separatism, but not so much elsewhere. In short, direct effects matter a lot [update: see statement by Scottish National Party leader], but indirect lesson learning does not. Why? For the former, the exit will directly affect the interests (incomes!) and power of those inside the UK, leading to stronger interests on the part of the Scots to leave (although it may not be as instant as some might have thought). For the latter, the problem is that there are multiple lessons to learn. For those who want to leave the EU or separate from their current country, they can look at Brexit and say: they did it, we can do it too, taking away the positive lessons. For those who don’t want to leave the EU or secede from wherever, they can observe the economic shocks and other painful consequences and learn that this would be awful for them. Let confirmation bias be your guide, I always say. Again, multiple lessons to learn, so which lessons will people take away?
What does Brexit mean for the 2016 election? →
So Britain (well, really, England and Wales), voted to leave the European Union Thursday. As the English would put it, this decision has created a small spot of bother in global financial markets and political capitals. Off the top of my head, the knock-on effects will include:
A downward revision of British and global economic growth;
Scotland holding a second referendum on independence;
Other E.U. countries holding referendums on exiting the E.U. as well;
The U.S. trade deficit worsening as the dollar’s strength increases even further;
A lot of commentators freaking out even more about the possibility of a President Trump.
3 things you should know about the new Colombia peace agreement with its rebels →
Some much-needed good news:
Colombia has been fighting the longest-running civil war in the world, and it may finally come to an end very soon...
1. The Colombian government has reached a bilateral cease-fire agreement with the country’s largest insurgent group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
The agreement effectively marks the end of hostilities between two parties at war since 1964. The government and the Marxist guerrillas of FARC have been in talks since 2012 and have reached agreements on each of the five negotiation pillars.
Will the Trans-Pacific Partnership Turn Silicon Valley Into Detroit? →
Ignoring the leading headline...
The connection between Silicon Valley and Detroit (sorry Detroiters) comes in Article 18.78, which requires countries to have laws allowing companies to protect trade secrets and imposing criminal penalties for violators. The language in this section is broad, but it can certainly be interpreted as implying that governments allow for the enforcement of “non-compete” agreements. Non-compete agreements prohibit employees from quitting their job and working for another company in the same industry for a substantial period of time.
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The restrictions on trade secrets are not the only anti-growth provisions in the TPP. The deal also requires stronger and longer copyright, patent, and related protections. These protections raise the price of the protected items in the same way that tariffs on imports raise prices. The big difference is that copyright and patent protection is typically equivalent to tariffs of several thousand percent, not the single digit tariffs on other items that are being reduced or eliminated in the TPP.
While most proponents of the TPP have opted not to look at the cost of these forms of protectionism it is likely to be substantial. The New Zealand governmentestimated that increasing the duration of copyright protection from 50 years to 70 years, as required by the TPP, would cost it 0.024 percent of its GDP annually, the equivalent of $4.3 billion annually in the United States.
This is the cost of just one small provision in a country that already has strong copyright protection. The costs would undoubtedly be much larger in countries like Malaysia and Vietnam, which don’t currently have strong copyright protections.
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And of course, there are the provisions for the pharmaceutical industry that make patent and related protections stronger and longer. In the United States we spend more than $420 billion a year (@ 2.2 percent of GDP) for drugs that would likely sell for around $40 billion a year in a free market. The goal of the TPP is to make the other countries pay as much as we do, and to lock in place indefinitely high drug prices in the United States. In addition to slowing growth, these protections will also jeopardize public health.
Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City →
Amazing essay on the continued difficulty of ending segregation in schools. Number one problem: affluent (mostly white) parents trying to ensure "the best opportunity" for their children. The history of money chasing just the "right" amount of diversity is depressing:
In a city where white children are only 15 percent of the more than one million public-school students, half of them are clustered in just 11 percent of the schools, which not coincidentally include many of the city’s top performers. Part of what makes those schools desirable to white parents, aside from the academics, is that they have some students of color, but not too many...
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...New York, like many deeply segregated cities, has a terrible track record of maintaining racial balance in formerly underenrolled segregated schools once white families come in. Schools like P.S. 321 in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood and the Academy of Arts and Letters in Fort Greene tend to go through a brief period of transitional integration, in which significant numbers of white students enroll, and then the numbers of Latino and black students dwindle. In fact, that’s exactly what happened at P.S. 8.
A decade ago, P.S. 8 was P.S. 307’s mirror image. Predominantly filled with low-income black and Latino students from surrounding neighborhoods, P.S. 8, with its low test scores and low enrollment, languished amid a community of affluence because white parents in the neighborhood refused to send their children there. A group of parents worked hard with school administrators to turn the school around, writing grants to start programs for art and other enrichment activities. Then more white and Asian parents started to enroll their children...
Racism is still deeply embedded in America, though it may not be as heinous a problem as it was fifty years ago. And it hurts everyone's children, as the essay points out:
...By 1988, a year after Faraji and I entered middle school, school integration in the United States had reached its peak and the achievement gap between black and white students was at its lowest point since the government began collecting data. The difference in black and white reading scores fell to half what it was in 1971, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. (As schools have since resegregated, the test-score gap has only grown.) The improvements for black children did not come at the cost of white children. As black test scores rose, so did white ones.
Will Bernie Sanders Win the Platform? →
The left wing of the party has never been given more power to shape the platform. Sanders appointed five of the 15 members of the platform drafting committee, with six allotted to Hillary Clinton and the other four to the DNC. That’s a big variation from past practice: Clinton lost by a smaller margin to Barack Obama in 2008, and got zero slots on the platform committee.
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This gives a serious presence to avowed liberal activists on the platform committee, compared to the mostly elected officials and policy advisors of 2008. (Warren Gunnels, Bernie Sanders’ policy director, also is a non-voting committee member.) On controversial issues like fracking or Israel/Palestine negotiations, Sanders’s choices bring career-defining positions into the debate.
Clinton’s allies, if they’re intent on seeking the typical broad coalition heading into the general election, could simply outvote the Sanders faction and brush aside their viewpoints. But on several issues, that would put Clinton at odds not just with Sanders supporters, but with the mainstream of the party.
The Split [in the Democratic party] →
Some great, wide-ranging thoughts on the causes and consequences of this moment in the Democratic party.
To help make sense of what’s causing the split, and where it’s headed, we turned to 23 leading historians, political scientists, pollsters, artists, and activists...
The Fallibility of DNA Evidence →
DNA identification, like all science these days, relies on probability and statistics. If the public is being kept from knowing how any company's DNA ID process works, justice is very literally blind:
It's the same problem as any biometric: we need to know the rates of both false positives and false negatives. And if these algorithms are being used to determine guilt, we have a right to examine them.