September 2006 Archives
On Thursday, for one night only...
I'm going to be in London. On the same evening, in New York, I could go to talks by
- Esteemed Latinist Riordan Roett, on "The Emerging Radical Left in Latin America"
- Chris Anderson and Lawrence Lessig, on The Long Tail
- George Soros, on The War on Terror
Of course if I went to one I'd be upset I was missing the other two, so maybe it's not so bad I'm going to have to miss all three. But have I mentioned recently how much I love New York?
Posted by Felix at 18:59 EST | Comments (2)
Journalistic innumeracy, part 551
Verlyn Klinkenborg visits a luxury game resort in Africa, and wonders at the human cost of setting aside so much land (over 540 square miles) for game:
At $1,500 a night, Sasakwa is one of the most luxurious resorts in Africa. Which leaves only a few questions: Do you really need a pedicure after watching a cheetah with her cubs? And do you judge conservation solely by the good it does? Or do you judge it by the good it does, divided by the number of people who are able to witness and directly benefit from it?
What makes these questions more complicated is that Grumeti Reserves borders the fastest-growing human population anywhere around the Serengeti between the park and Lake Victoria...
Sasakwa Lodge looks south to the center of the Serengeti ecosystem. The line of smoke you often see on the southern horizon rises from a firebreak along the park border. But there are other fires even closer, more and more of them all the time, the cooking and brick-burning fires of an Africa that has been kept at bay to leave room for wildlife. To see the smoke from those fires, you would have to look in a different direction, and no veranda points that way. So you have another cup of tea and look south again, out at the fullness, the familiarity of nature.
It's that "divided by" which gets me: I just can't fathom what it's meant to mean. Does it mean that if you halve the number of beneficiaries you double the value of the resort? Does it mean that if you successfully manage to involve "the fastest-growing human population anywhere around the Serengeti" as part of the resort, then it becomes essentially worthless, since you're dividing the value by so many people? Or does it just mean that neither Verlyn Klinkenborg nor his editors have a single numerate bone in their collective bodies?
Posted by Felix at 18:16 EST | Comments (3)
New Yorker factoids
Oh, never mind the ins and outs of the diaeresis: here's something even more boring.
This year, as last year, the annual New Yorker Fashion Style Issue has
arrived on newsstands and in mailboxes a week after New York Fashion
Week. It's perfect-bound – chock full of ads – but it's a single,
not a double, issue.
And yet it costs $4.99, a dollar more than the usual New Yorker cover price of $3.99. What's up with that? Are people so much more likely to want to read a long article by Larissa MacFarquhar on Diane Von Furstenburg than they are to want to read a long article by David Remnick on Bill Clinton that they will happily pay an extra dollar for the ability to read the former rather than the latter? Most peculiar.
Posted by Felix at 17:44 EST | Comments (0)
The ethics of replacing things
I'm sticking to my decision not to blog the WTC site much any more, because I just find the whole thing far too depressing, and I think the catalogue of incompetence has been pretty clearly laid out at this point for anybody who's interested in what went wrong and when.
But I still read articles on it, including today's NYT story on the Customs Service, and others, moving into the Freedom Tower. Near the end comes this:
There may also be a financial incentive, since about $345 million in insurance proceeds from the destruction of the old Customs building can be used to build its space in the Freedom Tower. State officials said they did not think that the money could be transferred elsewhere.
Which raises an ethical issue which has been niggling me for some time now:
If someone pays you the cost of replacing something they broke or damaged, are you ethically obliged to use that money to replace it?
I'm sure that most of us have found ourselves in this situation at some point. In the normal course of events, one arrives at "I'm so sorry, I'll pay you back". And then you get the money for a new X – but you realise that you don't really need the thing that was broken, and you do have a big credit card bill, and you've been meaning to get a new Y for ages... and so you use the money not for buying a new X, but rather for something else.
Is that OK? One way to arrive at an answer is to see how one would feel were the roles reversed. There are two ways of looking at it from the donor's point of view:
- "I gave him $x because I broke his X, and in order to replace his X. I could have given him a new X instead, rather than the money. But instead of using the money to replace his broken X, he went and spent it on something else entirely, and although I like the guy, I'm not the kind of person who'd just give him a brand-new Y. He took my money, which was given with good intentions to make him whole, but his intentions weren't quite so good: it seems he never intended to buy a new X with the money at all! I didn't give him money for a Y, I gave him money for an X, and he should have spent it on an X."
- "I broke his X and at that point was morally obliged to replace it. I could have given him a new X, but instead I gave him both a bit more freedom and a bit more work by giving him $x instead. It turns out he was actually much happier with the $x than he would have been with a new X, since he used the $x for something else. This is a win-win situation for both of us: I don't have to go out and buy an X, while he gets to use my money for something he wants even more than an X. I'm out $x anyway, so he should put that money to its best use. That's the whole point of money: it's fungible."
The Customs Service's insurer, it would seem, is taking the first tack. They're obliged to pay the Customs Service the cost of rebuilding their offices at Ground Zero. But if the Customs Service doesn't rebuild its offices at Ground Zero, then there's no obligation.
Personally, I'm much more sympathetic to the second tack If I gave someone money to replace something and they used it for some other purpose instead, I would not feel aggrieved, since they clearly needed the money more for Y than they did for replacing X.
I wonder what neuroeconomics might have to say about this situation? Here's Jonathan Cohen, a neuroeconomist quoted in John Cassidy's New Yorker article:
“The key idea in neuroeconomics is that there are multiple systems within the brain. Most of the time, these systems coöperate in decision-making, but under some circumstances they compete with one another."
It could be that people who take the first tack are reacting on the basis of an emotional, limbic response, while people who take the second tack are being more rational. If that's the case, then one might have to make one's purchasing decision on the basis of whether the person paying you the money is more emotional or rational when it comes to such things. If they're emotional, then use the money to replace the damaged item; if they're rational, then use it for anything you want.
But that, of course, just leaves us with the even bigger problem of second-guessing the limbic state of our donor. Is there a better way, a more hard-and-fast ethical principle, which can be applied here?
Posted by Felix at 9:49 EST | Comments (2)
Economonitor
Is live. There are still glitches – let me know especially if you're having any troubles with the RSS feed. And economonitor.com won't point there for a couple of days at least. But check it out, and let me know what you think – either here or in the comments there. Thanks!
Posted by Felix at 16:15 EST | Comments (7)
Illegal aliens in Brewster
January 9 was an unseasonably warm day in Brewster, NY, a small town near the Connecticut border. As on most days, a number of day-laborers gathered in the village center, hoping for some kind of work, probably in construction. When none appeared, eight of them stopped hanging around doing nothing, and decided to take advantage of the weather to enjoy an impromptu game of football. The site they chose for their game was, unfortunately for them, a playing field belonging to Garden Street Elementary School, where another laborer had been found drunk and unconscious three months previously. Before long, all eight laborers were arrested for trespassing. Seven were released on bail, but the eighth, Juan Jimenez, couldn't raise the $3,000 bail money, partly because nearly all his earnings had gone to support his five children in Guatemala.
Jimenez stayed in jail for four months, most of that time being held at the Pike County jail in Lords Valley, Pa, a two-hour drive from his home in Brewster and a place with precious few fellow Spanish speakers. Eventually, on May 5, Jimenez opted to return to his native Guatemala, rather than face deportation proceedings which would probably have barred him from ever entering the USA again. For the crime of playing football on an elementary school's playing field, he spent four months in jail and was eventually forced to leave the country. The judge in his case, Walter Durling, expressed no sympathy for his plight: "He's kicking a soccer ball as an illegal alien," he told lawyers asking for Jimenez's release. "You gave it your best shot, but I'm not going to release this person."
So "kicking a soccer ball as an illegal alien" has now become a deportable offense, making life incredibly difficult for illegal immigrants in Brewster and for the local police. Police are effective only insofar as the law-abiding population trusts them, but if a crime is committed against an illegal immigrant, at this point it would need to be extremely severe before that person called the Brewster police. Effectively, the decision to report any illegal aliens to the federal authorities has given impunity to anybody who would defraud or otherwise harm illegal immigrants.
So far, this story sounds like the kind of woeful tale that has been doing the rounds a lot during the latest resurgence of the immigration debate. The New York Times wrote about the story a couple of times: columnist Peter Applebone asked whether "a group of blond-haired local kids or dads taking a day off from work would have been hauled off to jail for playing soccer," while reporter Anahad O'Connor found a substantial amount of support for Jimenez and his fellow soccer-players in the local community. Five Brewster teenagers even held a bake sale to help raise the $3,000 bail money for Mr Jimenez, and others wrote letters to the local paper pointing out that the playing fields were used for jogging and exercising all the time by people who never face imprisonment.
At the same time, however, there's no doubt that there's also substantial opposition to the day laborers in Brewster: O'Conner quoted Rachel McLaughlin, a mother at the elementary school, saying that "my daughter is a first grader at Garden Street, and I think it's dangerous to have large groups of people loitering in certain areas, especially if they are men."
As it happens, I spent last night in Brewster, staying with my friend Elly and her fiancé Sean, in their lovely house just outside the village. Brewster is a small, bucolic town in Putnam County, with rolling hills and clapboard houses. In the vicinity there are more than a few new McMansions, but the feel of the area is one of quiet gentility. And after talking to Sean, I'm beginning to see the other side of the story, as well as a glimmer of hope for how the day-laborer issue might be resolved.
This year's political races are being more aggressively fought than usual in the area, and Sean said that he was going to be voting for Greg Ball. Ball is the only candidate, says Sean, who is really serious about "cleaning up" Brewster.
By "cleaning up," of course, Sean didn't mean ridding the sidewalks of litter. Rather, he was talking about the Guatemalan day-laborers, who have made the village of Brewster a much less pleasant place. Those who don't find work will stay in the town, and some of them will start drinking, and when they do, they are prone to acting very unsociably towards any single women who walk past them.
Sean told me that Ball wanted to hire more police for the village of Brewster: the police at the moment were "outnumbered," he said, and felt incapable of dealing with the public-order problem. If there were more police, I asked, what would they do? Sean explained that loitering is a crime, and that if the immigrants didn't disperse from the Brewster sidewalks, the police could arrest them.
These immigrants, to hear Sean tell it, do not exactly have an enviable life. They often sleep rough, and sometimes get burned to death when they fall asleep or pass out too close to their fire. When they're not sleeping rough, they often live in incredibly crowded conditions in buildings never designed to house so many people.
The townspeople, too, are unhappy, not least Sean himself. The way he tells it, Brewster used to be a small yet bustling town, which was slowly and literally invaded by aliens. The more that the community of illegal aliens in Brewster grew, the less welcome people felt in town. One shopkeeper was quoted in the New York Times as saying that sales had plunged 70% in two years after groups of day laborers started congregating under her awning. Over the years, Brewster's shops and restaurants have closed down for lack of custom. A few new places have taken their place, catering to the Latino community, but the overall effect of the arrival of the aliens has been a visible deterioration in Brewster's vibrancy, along with an increase in public disorder and drunkeness.
The new Latino community, according to Sean, is not helping the local economy: indeed, the opposite is the case. Since most of the new aliens are illegal immigrants paid cash in hand, they pay few if any taxes. And there's certainly a feeling in town that things were much better before the aliens arrived.
There also seems to be a lack of sympathy among many people in Brewster towards the plight of the aliens themselves: if they're in Brewster illegally, seems to be the feeling, the local community has little if any responsibility for their well-being. But connected with that feeling seems to be the obvious corollary: that if the aliens were legal, and paid taxes, a lot of the animus towards them would dissipate.
Sean, despite being engaged to an alien himself, was convinced that Brewster's aliens were illegal by choice. Sean was sure that there was some way that the aliens could become permanent residents if they wanted to; their failure to do so, in his eyes, was a function of their being more unwilling than unable to navigate the relevant paperwork. I guess he reckoned that they thought that if they became legal they would pay taxes and take home less money, so they didn't want to become legal. Of course, legal unskilled immigrants make a lot more money than illegal unskilled immigrants, don't need to worry about the police, and have the opportunity to become skilled immigrants and make a lot more money still – I'm sure that any of the Guatemalans in Brewster would jump at the chance to apply for a green card were it offered to them. But I'm also sure that Sean is far from atypical: one thing that I definitely learned this weekend is that Americans are likely to vastly underestimate the difficulty of getting a green card.
I looked for Greg Ball's immigration platform: it complains that in Brewster "hundreds of laborers gather to be picked up for a day of tax-free income on most mornings". In other words, there seems to be as much anger at the "tax-free income" part as there is at the "hundreds of laborers" part. Ball continues:
The State of New York is losing close to 2 billion dollars in income taxes per year to a black market economy that forces day laborers into indefinite servitude. While hard working New Yorkers are being forced to pay an increasing burden of taxes, close to 1 million illegal immigrants are living in the land of plenty, tax-free.
Greg Ball released survey results Thursday indicating that 95% of respondents support his plan to adopt, “state legislation to tax the day laborer economy, thereby forcing illegal immigrants to pay a state income tax.”
I'm not quite sure how Greg Ball can reconcile the idea that day-laborers are being forced into indefinite servitude with the idea that they are living in the land of plenty. But in any case his platform is quite clear that illegal immigrants should pay New York state income tax.
I think that's a great idea. After all, Greg Ball loves to talk about taxpayers' rights, and so presumably the illegal immigrants would get some kind of rights when they started paying income tax. What's the least that the government should do in return for income tax revenue? I'd start with some kind of equal protection – a promise that all taxpayers have the right to be protected, rather than threatened, by the police, and that if they haven't broken any New York state laws, then New York state law-enforcement officials will not terrorise them by occasionally handing them over to the Feds. (Something which, despite being reasonably common, is actually of dubious constitutionality in the first place.)
This could be the beginnings of a solution, then. Let New York state recognise and tax its day-laborers, and give them some road to legitimacy and legal residence. If they're allowed to do things like open a bank account, then they might stop having to sleep in overcrowded flophouses. And if an employer finds them hardworking and trustworthy, as by all accounts Juan Jimenez was, then there should be some way of allowing them to take a fully-taxed job. At that point they can start chasing the American Dream along with all the other residents of Brewster. But as things stand, it's hard to chase the American Dream when the American Dream is busy chasing you.
I did learn in Brewster that there are two legitimate sides to the immigration debate. I'm vehemently pro-immigration and pro-immigrant; I live in a city (New York) which is home to the Statue of Liberty ("give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"), which has always welcomed immigrants, and which would grind to a halt overnight were it not for the work that immigrants both legal and illegal do to keep it running.
And yet America is not New York, and there are certainly places in America which have a much more problematic relationship with immigrants in general and illegal immigrants in particular. It is too simplistic and narrow-minded by far to simply dismiss the complaints of people like Sean as knee-jerk racism, and in fact I do not for a minute believe that Sean is the slightest bit xenophobic.
But the heat generated by the immigrant debate in Brewster has certainly adversely affected race relations there: Yolanda Castro-Arce, a lawyer of Puerto Rican background, told the New York Times that she was the target of racial remarks every time she walked along Main Street. The article concludes with this:
"I think you either need to make these people citizens and give them the American dream, or you need to start enforcing the laws that are already on the books," Ms. McLaughlin said. "It's not a race issue, it's a legal issue."
Yet where one resident sees legalities, another may see racism. Ms. Castro-Arce and her husband, also a lawyer, decided the incident at the ball field last month was the final straw: they put their house on the market and are now looking for a home in Westchester.
"I tell my husband all the time that coming here was a big mistake," she said. "I talk to other people about what we've encountered here all the time, and they can't believe it."
It seems to me that the only real hope for the future is to take Rachel McLaughlin's advice and "make these people citizens" somehow. So long as they're illegal they can never come close to assimilating, and the feelings arrayed against them will inevitably spill over onto American citizens like Yolanda Castro-Arce. I'm sure that my friend Sean, as well as would-be Assemblyman Greg Ball, want Brewster to be as welcoming as possible to Americans of all races. And throwing a lot of Latinos in jail is never going to achieve that goal.
Posted by Felix at 17:22 EST | Comments (4)
Felix has a job!
So I'm going to be blogging a lot more from now on, which means, weirdly enough, that I might be blogging here even less than I did over this very light-in-posting summer. We'll see. I've taken a job at RGE Monitor, where I'm going to be setting up a new economics blog which I'm rather excited about. Launching soon – all ideas and suggestions gratefully received! (Not just on economics: any tips for how to get up every morning? I haven't done it since December 2000, and I was woefully bad at it then...)
Posted by Felix at 21:34 EST | Comments (9)
Shafer on Siegel
So Jack Shafer has now weighed in, as we all knew he inevitably would, on l'affaire Lee Siegel. But despite the fact that he's late to the game, he really Doesn't Get It.
Shafer's problem is that he thinks that Siegel was suspended for sock-puppetry. That might be true in a narrow, technical sense. But I'm sure that a beloved and valued TNR contributor whose sock-puppet said nothing embarrassing would not have been suspended in this way: there are always shades of gray, as Shafer goes to great lengths to point out. And indeed it might not even be true at all: Grammar Police says that "the decision to oust Siegel was made, apparently, before it was revealed that he played sock puppet for his own blog."
Siegel's sins were much more egregious than simply using a sock puppet. For one thing, his recent blog entries had been, to put it politely, bizarre, and a lot of the blogosphere was convinced he had completely gone off the deep end. And then his comments under the name sprezzatura were often very vicious:
There's this awful suck-up named Ezra Klein--his "writing" is sweaty with panting obsequious ambition--who keeps distorting everything Siegel writes--the only way this no-talent can get him.
When it became clear that such vitriol was being written by Siegel himself, Foer had to suspend him – not for posting such material anonymously, but for posting it at all.
Shafer says that "I predict that Siegel will return to the magazine before Thanksgiving after having done his penance" – I'm more than happy to take the opposite side of that wager, at any stakes. The universally gleeful reaction to Siegel's downfall was proof, if any was needed, that Siegel was adding no value whatsoever to TNR, and indeed was destroying, at the margin, TNR's reputation. Now he's gone, there's zero reason to bring him back.
So, Jack, fancy a bet?
Posted by Felix at 22:22 EST | Comments (0)
Zipcar insurance
Gearbox has returned! It was launched as a vehicle for Mickey Kaus to blog about cars in 2001. He managed one entry that year, followed by another one at the end of 2002. 2003 was the golden year for Gearbox: Mickey managed a full nine posts! He then fell back to two in 2004, and three in 2005.
Today, Gearbox gets a new byline: that of Paul Boutin, who has decided to write about Zipcar. It's unclear whether this fills the Gearbox quota for the year, or whether more posts are forthcoming.
And in any case you'll learn much more about Zipcar from reading the Gothamist comments thread than you will by reading Boutin's article. Boutin is in full-on boosterish mode, and seems to have carefully excised all possible criticisms of Zipcar bar one: "My only beef with the service is they need to wash the cars more often."
I'm a Zipcar member myself, and have recommended them to others, and they do seem reasonably good at learning from criticism. Last year, for instance, they implemented a policy limiting people to booking Zipcars for no more than five weekends at a time, in an attempt to cut down on "zipsquatting". But it's often still very difficult to find cars at weekends; there are still no Zipcars within a one-mile radius of where I live in downtown Manhattan; and the much-vaunted XM Radios rarely seem to work.
But much more serious than all those problems is the insurance situation. I sent Zipcar an email asking them for clarification about three weeks ago, and have yet to receive a reply. The FAQ seems pretty cut and dried:
Unlike rental car companies, we don't make you pay more for basic insurance coverage. Insurance is just part of your Zipcar membership. Nice, huh?
There's a deductible of $500, but they say that even that might be covered if you book with a credit card:
Zipcar recommends that all members try to use a credit card, like an Amex or MasterCard Gold, that may provide a deductible waiver. It could save you some cash. So get out the glasses and check your credit card's fine print.
But of course Zipcar has fine print of its own, which is not very easy at all to find. My emphasis added:
10.1.1 Any person authorized to operate a vehicle under these Rules is covered by an automobile liability insurance policy to state minimum levels as well as comprehensive and collision coverage...
10.2.1 You are responsible for the full value of any damages caused to Zipcar's property or the property of all third parties which are neither covered by insurance nor by manufacturer's guarantee while you are responsible for the vehicle as described in section 6.5 of these Rules.
What does this mean in English? It means that if something happens to your Zipcar, chances are that Zipcar's insurance policy will cover it. That's what "comprehensive and collision coverage" means – it means damage to your car, not to anybody else's.
But of course if you get into any kind of accident in which another car is involved, there's likely to be some kind of damage to the other car as well, and possibly to the occupants of that car as well. And in that case, Zipcar's liability insurance only goes to state minimum levels. After that, you're liable for everything.
What are state minimum levels? I believe that in New York, they are $25,000 per person for bodily injury and $10,000 for property, while in New Jersey they're $15,000 per person for bodily injury and just $5,000 for property.
Now I often take a Zipcar to New Jersey – if I'm going on an Ikea run, for instance, my closest store is in Elizabeth. And there are lots of very expensive cars in New Jersey. So what happens if I get into an accident with a Mercedes in the Ikea parking lot, and the damage to the Mercedes comes to $15,000? The damage to the Zipcar will be picked up by Zipcar's insurance, after I've paid a $500 deductible. But Zipcar's insurance only covers $5,000 of the damage to the Mercedes: the rest, $10,000, comes out of my pocket. So I'd be liable, in total, for $10,500.
And if there was any kind of serious accident, causing bodily harm, then my liability could be much, much greater. If an occupant of the Mercedes had to go to hospital, and ended up with say $200,000 in medical bills, I would be liable for $185,000 of that.
I'm pretty sure all this is true – that most people driving Zipcars think they're covered when in fact they might end up with very large uncovered liabilities. But it's not easy to get an answer out of Zipcar: maybe they'll leave a comment on this blog. And the Zipcar website is far from useful when trying to get answers to questions such as these.
In any case, it's certainly true that Zipcar does not offer an option of extra liability insurance, probably because if they did offer it then the users would be shocked to realise that they'd been going without it all along. According to the insurance information institute, non-owner liability policies cost about $300 per year: is this something that Zipcar members should be buying? And if it is, shouldn't Zipcar be tipping them off to the fact?
Posted by Felix at 16:43 EST | Comments (49)
RSS - All blog entriesFelix Salmon: Recent posts
Felix's del.icio.us links
Archives
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License