A COMBINATION OF IMMIGRATION RESTRICTIONS, and insufficient interest by Americans, are threatening American science. according to this report.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

My God.you mean market forces work? What a shock.

I mean, this looks like a great recruiting strategy:

Offer a bunch of intelligent people a career path that requires 10 years of hard work to get the right to land a $30,000/year job with no job security. Oh.and you have to move every two years for an indeterminate time period.

Let them get a good look at a bunch of demoralized 30-somethings who are trying to compete for limited jobs and funds against an entire world’s worth of scientific talent (over 50% of the hiring pool in the US is made up of non-citizens). Make sure that the non-citizens are seriously motivated to work insanely hard, because if they’re not employed in a visa-permitted category, they have to go home.*

(*And why are they here? Usually because there aren’t even any post-doc positions in their home countries.)

Demolish the tenure system to the point that the ability to get multiple grants with an average acceptance rate of 10%) is a requisite for keeping your job, once you do actually manage to find one.

Yeah, sign me up.

Now sure, the truly brilliant people are OK in this system-but there’s no room for what a friend (a Ph.D in chemistry who “defected” into the computer industry) calls the “utility infielders”. And established scientists are amazed that students don’t like those odds?

Unfortunately, research is a hell of a lot of fun, which is why I keep banging my head against a brick wall. But if I knew at 18 what I know now, I wouldn’t be doing this for a living.

Sign me, anonymously please, as

A cynical but still fighting American-born post-doc

Perhaps reports like this one will encourage some rethinking of these incentive structures.

SUMMARY EXECUTIONS ON THE WEST BANK: Where’s the outcry from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or Mary Robinson over events like this?

Hours later, three bound Palestinians, apparently suspected informers for Israel, were found dead at the same spot where the car was hit.

Palestinian gunmen shot the suspected collaborators in the head, raising concerns of lawlessness in Palestinian controlled areas as Israeli forces withdraw from the West Bank.

Perhaps Arafat should be held accountable.

Or, if executions by death squads don’t arouse the ire of Mary Robinson, perhaps Israel should form some of its own? After all, it’s been savagely criticized for simply arresting Palestinians suspected of terror, while these acts of undeniable savagery go almost completely uncriticized simply because they don’t (quite) bear the open imprimatur of government sponsorship.

You have to live with the incentive structures you create.

STILL NOT READY FOR PRIMETIME: Ford dealership details ‘struggle’ with EV truck as ‘concerns’ mount.

Maoli claimed the sales for the electric version of Ford’s iconic F-150 truck have been dismal at her New Jersey dealership. Her comments come just days after the U.S. automaker announced it would dial back production of the electric truck as demand wanes.

The company said it will reduce the number of shifts at the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center, where it builds the EV pickups, to one, beginning April 1.

The move will affect some 1,400 workers, including 700 who will move to the company’s Michigan Assembly Plant. Some employees will be placed in roles at the Rouge complex or other Ford facilities in southeast Michigan, and others can “take advantage of the Special Retirement Incentive Program agreed to in the 2023 Ford-UAW contract,” Ford said.

“I think that we all know, and we all talk about how… the infrastructure is not there yet for EVs,” Maoli added. “And I think that they’re trying to move a little bit too fast.”

Get ahead of the market — or try to create one out of thin air through taxes, incentives, and mandates — and the market will bite back.

MALINVESTMENT: IRA Subsidies Are Driving Investment Decisions In A Dangerous Direction.

One result of having perhaps the worst possible class of people – politicians – making all these multi-billion-dollar decisions for the rest of us comes clear in the perverse incentives and unintended consequences the policies are now creating.

One of the best illustrations of this is the IRA/EPA policy effort to force 2/3rds of the U.S. transportation fleet to convert to EVs by 2032. The IRA contained the carrot of heavy incentives and subsidies for EV makers and consumers, and the EPA is implementing the stick of new tailpipe emissions and mileage standards designed to crowd most current internal combustion models out of the market.

This carrot-and-stick policy approach comes at the same time the U.S. power generation sector faces an already-severe and growing shortage of the transformers that are integral to any power generation or transmission project. It is now taking up to 4 years to source high voltage transformers, most of which are made overseas and moved via supply chains largely controlled by China.

The obvious problem here is that recharging millions of additional EVs will place an enormous new load on the nation’s power grids, a fact that Tesla CEO Elon Musk says will require at least a doubling of generation capacity in the coming years, and that even the Biden administration admits will require the build-out of 47,000 miles of new high-capacity transmission lines.

But get this: Neither the IRA nor the 2021 infrastructure law included subsidies or incentives targeting transmission or transformers.

Oh.

Just a reminder that all this DC-directed spending won’t deliver the promised results, will deliver a lot of misery or at least inconvenience, and come at the cost of productive investments required for healthy economic growth.

GOOD: Strong Revenue and Fiscal Federalism Are Driving a State-Based Tax Revolution.

State lawmakers have been driving down income-tax rates across the map for two consecutive fiscal years, and they show no sign of relenting in 2023. The extraordinary wave of state income-tax cuts that began in 2021 is set to continue as states such as West Virginia, North Dakota, and Kentucky are moving quickly to cut rates this year.

Strong state revenue made the recent wave of tax cuts possible. Changes in federal tax law enacted in 2017, and the rise of remote work following the pandemic — that allows workers to move to better-managed, lower-tax states — gave lawmakers the further incentive to act, resulting in unprecedented interstate tax competition.

In just the last week, West Virginia lawmakers sent Governor Jim Justice a bill to cut the top income-tax rate from 6.5 percent to 5.12 percent. North Dakota’s house passed a series of bills that would scrap the state’s progressive tax structure, with its 2.9 percent top rate, and replace it with a flat income tax of 1.5 percent.

Kentucky already enacted an income-tax-rate cut from 4.5 percent to 4.0 percent in February, effective next year. Still more states such as Ohio, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Kansas are teeing up major income-tax overhauls, each targeting a low, flat (or near-flat) income-tax structure.

Strong state revenue combined with extraordinary federal pandemic aid created the opportunity for a wave of state tax reforms. The National Association of State Budget Officers estimates that state general revenue grew by 16.6 percent in fiscal 2021 and 14.5 percent in fiscal 2022, which explains why so many states have been able to cut rates in concert.

In addition, two structural changes have enhanced state tax competition. First, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act capped the federal deduction for state and local taxes paid at $10,000, thus increasing the “felt cost” of state taxation, particularly for higher earners. A high-paid Silicon Valley engineer who could previously deduct $70,000 in California income taxes on his federal tax return can now only deduct $10,000. In short, the burden of his state-government tax policy went up, incentivizing him to find a better-managed state.

Second, the pandemic untethered a multitude of high-paid workers from a geographic location, creating the opportunity for taxpayers to move, and giving states an incentive to compete for their relocations. A 2022 McKinsey report found that 35 percent of workers were eligible for full-time remote work, including 46 percent of workers earning over $150,000. The Silicon Valley engineer who lost federal deductibility for his California income taxes in 2018 became eligible for remote work in 2021. His move to Austin, Texas, eliminated his entire state income-tax liability.

But will he be smart enough to support the policies that attracted him?

THE DESIRE NAMED STREETCAR: Amtrak’s Oakland to Los Angeles train is slower than the 1930s, but just as beautiful.

But why does California’s premier train connection take twice as long as driving?

Steve Roberts, president of RailPAC, a train advocacy organization, said the train’s slow speeds are tied to the nation’s 20th-century love affair with cars. In the heyday of 1900s train travel, before automobiles and highways supplanted mass transit, private railway companies operated a vast network of luxurious passenger trains. That was when rail travel came with elaborate art-deco drinking taverns and wood-paneled coffee carts.

Last century on the Daylight, dubbed “The Most Beautiful Train in the World,” the tracks and technology were upgraded so trains could zoom around corners at higher speeds. “The train at some places along the coast could go 90 miles an hour,” said Roberts.

But once passengers started skipping rail for their steering wheels, the private railway companies downgraded their faster infrastructure because it was too expensive to maintain, Roberts said. In 2022, Coast Starlight’s top speed is 79 miles per hour, but that velocity is rarely reached.

“Basically, society’s decision was to build the interstates,” said Roberts. “And the railroads stayed static.”

While lackluster infrastructure means slower trains, Amtrak’s biggest affliction is rampant delays caused by the nation’s economic workhorse: freight trains.

For the Coast Starlight, only 54% of passengers arrived within 15 minutes of their scheduled time in 2021. The dismal performance stems from a long-standing and bitter competition between Amtrak and freight train operators, both of whom are forced to cohabitate on the nation’s rail network. While Amtrak is supposed to be entitled to priority on railways, riders are often forced to wait hours for passing freight trains. Last week, in one of the latest dustups, Amtrak announced mass cancellations of its long-distance trains, including the Coast Starlight, due to freight workers threatening a strike.

I know California leftists hate the car and highways hate the car and highways, but why doesn’t the article mention the other development that made passenger railroading much less desirable? The jet passenger aircraft:

By the time Congress created Amtrak, intercity rail passenger service in the United States had been in a 20-year decline. Until the 1950s, railroads were the only way to travel long distances. But during that decade, the federal government began financing the interstate highway system, a $41 billion, 16-year project, and, as jet airplanes were introduced, significantly increased its support for the construction and improvement of airports.

Airplanes, personal automobiles, and buses began competing with the country’s railroads for long-distance travel. The railroads responded to the competition with new equipment on their prestige long-distance routes, replacing steam locomotives with diesel engines, and introducing lightweight stainless steel passenger cars with air-conditioning and double glazed windows. But as the number of passengers continued to drop, the rail companies had little incentive to make major capital investments to upgrade their tracks, signaling, stations, and maintenance facilities. Why, they thought, should their profitable freight business subsidize a means of intercity transportation that was competing with systems receiving federal and state tax dollars? By 1958, rail service accounted for just 4 percent of intercity travel.

The decline in rail passenger service and the deterioration of passenger facilities continued during the 1960s. By the end of the decade, the number of passenger trains had dropped to 500, down from more than 20,000 some 40 years earlier, and only 12,000 passenger cars remained in service. Losses from passenger service operations in 1970 came to more than $1.8 billion dollars in 1997 dollars. Most of the loss was on long-distance, intercity travel. Commuter and suburban lines obviously were less affected by airlines and, at least during the 1960s, lost little ridership to buses and private cars. Many of the railroad companies filed applications to get out of the intercity service on most or all of their routes. Among the most critical was the proposal by Penn Central (the merged Pennsylvania Railroad and New York Central Railroad) to eliminate all its passenger service in the Northeast and Midwest.

Federal Action

The Railroad Passenger Service Act allowed the railroad companies to transfer their money-losing passenger operations to Amtrak in exchange for either a tax write-off or Amtrak stock. Only three lines, the Denver & Rio Grande Western, the Rock Island, and the Southern, did not join Amtrak, opting to continue their own passenger service.

The San Jose Mercury story at the top of the article notes that “the Bay Area portion – connecting Oakland and San Jose to Los Angeles – takes over 12 hours. In 1938, the now-defunct Daylight train cruised down to Los Angeles in less than 10.”

A flight from Oakland’s airport to LAX takes one hour and 25 minutes — and costs about the same for a ticket.

(Classical reference in headline.)

KATHERINE MANGU-WARD: Why Can’t We Build Anything?

The issue has never been a lack of funds for infrastructure; it’s that the money flows unpredictably from multiple sources and then frequently ends up getting spent on something else via a heavily politicized decision-making process.

There’s also the question of why building anything, but especially infrastructure, in the United States costs so much and takes so long. The U.S. is the sixth-most expensive country in the world to build rapid-rail transit infrastructure like the New York City subway or the Washington, D.C., metro system.

Part of the reason is just plain waste and corruption. The federal infrastructure bill has created massive incentives for rent-seeking while ballooning the municipal lobbying sector. Like contestants on a game show, states and localities are scrambling for dollars, correctly understanding that this might be the only major windfall in this area for a decade or more—again, largely due to Congress’ inability to do its job in a predictable way in concert with a chief executive who can set clear achievable policy priorities.

We’re governed by grifters and dullards.

DISPATCHES FROM GOVERNMENT MOTORS: Top Biden Aide’s Lobbyist Brother Wins Presidential Visit for Client. General Motors, set to welcome Biden to Michigan factory, has paid Jeff Ricchetti nearly $200K to lobby White House and Congress.

After paying the lobbyist brother of a top White House aide nearly $200,000 this year, auto giant General Motors has won an official visit from the president to showcase its new electric vehicle factory.

Jeff Ricchetti, the brother of Biden’s longtime political consigliere Steve Ricchetti, has disclosed $160,000 in payments from General Motors since President Joe Biden took office to lobby the White House and Congress on electric vehicle tax incentives, according to his firm’s lobbying disclosure forms. The investment appears to have paid off—on Wednesday, Biden will attend the grand opening of the company’s new electric vehicle factory as part of his push for Congress to “approve big tax incentives for zero-emission vehicles,” precisely what Ricchetti was paid to push for.

Steve Ricchetti has been one of Biden’s closest advisers for nearly a decade and played a leading role in framing the administration’s infrastructure negotiations. Neither the White House, Jeff Ricchetti, nor General Motors responded to requests for comment on Jeff Ricchetti’s role in arranging the visit.

Ricchetti has cashed in on his family ties to the administration. Ricchetti has already brought in $2.4 million in lobbying fees this year, double his 2020 haul of $1.2 million, according to numbers compiled by OpenSecrets. Ethics experts have criticized the Biden administration for allowing Steve Ricchetti to work on issues his brother is being paid to lobby the administration on.

GM, in bed with an Obama administration retread? Unexpectedly!

GREEN AUTHOR MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Why I Am Not A Progressive.

But progressives are talking out of both sides of their mouth. Yesterday I debated a British climate scientist named Richard Betts on television. After I pointed out that he and his colleagues had contributed to one out of four British children having nightmares about climate change he insisted that he was all for optimism and that he agreed with me about nuclear power. But just hours earlier he had told the Guardian that we were “hopelessly unprepared” for extreme weather events, even though deaths from natural disasters are at an all time low and that, objectively speaking, humankind has never been more prepared than we are today.

And on the drug deaths crisis, the consensus view among Democrats in Sacramento is that “the problem is fundamentally unsolvable,” according to one of the Capitol’s leading lobbyists. Facing a recall that is growing in popularity, Governor Gavin Newsom yesterday tried to demonstrate that he believes he can solve the problem. He came to Berkeley California and cleaned up garbage created by an open air drug scene (“homeless encampment”) underneath a freeway underpass. A reporter for Politico posted a picture of Newsom who he said was “looking tired, sweaty and dirty.” But a commenter noted that the video was shot at 12:12 pm and by 12:25 pm Newsom was holding a press conference. The governor hadn’t even bothered changing out of his Hush Puppies into work boots. People close to the governor say that it is Newsom himself who believes homelessness is a problem that cannot be solved.

The reason progressives believe that “No one is safe,” when it comes to climate change, and that the drug death “homelessness” crisis is unsolvable, is because they are in the grip of a victim ideology characterized by safetyism, learned helplessness, and disempowerment. This isn’t really that new. Since the 1960s, the New Left has argued that we can’t solve any of our major problems until we overthrow our racist, sexist, and capitalistic system. But for most of my life, up through the election of Obama, there was still a New Deal, “Yes we can!,” and “We can do it!” optimism that sat side-by-side with the New Left’s fundamentally disempowering critique of the system.

That’s all gone. On climate change, drug deaths, and cultural issues like racism, the message from progressives is that we are doomed unless we dismantle the institutions responsible for our oppressive, racist system. Those of us in Generation X who were raised to believe that racism was something we could overcome have been told in no uncertain terms that we were wrong. Racism is baked into our cultural DNA. Even apparently positive progressive proposals are aimed at fundamentally dismantling institutions. The Democrats’ $1 trillion infrastructure bill, supported by many Republicans, and their $3.5 trillion budget proposal, contain measures that would finance the continuing degradation of our electrical grids by increasing reliance on unreliable, weather-dependent renewables, and establish racial incentives for industries including trucking, where there is already a shortage of drivers in large measure because not enough of them can pass drug tests. And does anyone really believe that, if those bills pass, progressives will abandon their dark vision of the future and return to Rosie the Riveter?

Meanwhile, at the state and local level, progressive governments faced with worsening racial disparities in education and crime, are attempting to “solve” the problem by eliminating academic standards altogether, and advocating selective enforcement of laws based on who is committing them. Such measures are profoundly cynical. Progressives are effectively giving up on addressing racial disparities by ignoring them. But such is the logical outcome of victim ideology, which holds that we can divide the world into victims and oppressors, that victims are morally superior and even spiritual, and no change is possible until the system that produces victims and oppressors is overthrown.

To some extent none of this is new.

Nope: Welcome Back My Friends, to the Malaise that Never Ends.

DRIVING TOWARDS UTOPIA, SKIDDING ON ICE:

Unfortunately, if you want to get a policy changed, it’s not enough to persuade governments that it will have a net negative impact on the country. You also have to convince that them there is a policy that will also meet their aims—here it’s reducing carbon emissions—to compensate them for having to abandon their destructive approach.

In this case there is an alternative policy. It  is to improve the efficiency of the internal combustion engine so that it releases fewer carbon emissions into the atmosphere. It’s a very simple and practical approach to solving a difficult problem. It does not require the building of any infrastructure, let alone a massive one, in order to work effectively. For that and other reasons, it doesn’t constitute a heavy increase in expenditures by governments and consumers.  It’s already being accomplished by the research departments of automobile companies which have transformed conventional cars to an astounding extent since the 1960s.

How effective might this approach be in reducing carbon emissions? Professor Kalghatgi estimates that a 5 percent reduction in fuel consumption by ICE vehicles would obtain a larger reduction in carbon emissions than the massive switch to electric cars with all its attendant infrastructure costs. That alone would be a massive prize. But he also believes that a reduction much larger than 5 percent in fuel consumption by ICEVs could be obtained through such methods as “better combustion, control and after-treatment systems along with partial electrification and reductions in weight.”

The snag is that though these innovations are being pursued now, how long is that likely to continue if the U.K. government instructs car manufacturers that they must stop selling their product in ten years? What incentive is there for companies to maintain large R&D expenditures when they are officially told that these innovations, even if successful, will reduce  carbon emissions and make other improvements in their automobiles for only a short period before production is halted altogether?

As Iowahawk likes to say, in America, we need the equivalent of the Second Amendment to protect us against the coming war on driving.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

● Shot:

All around the world, young people are having less sex than previous generations. At the forefront of the so-called global “sex recession” is Japan, which has one of the lowest fertility rates on Earth, and it could serve as a cautionary tale for the U.S. and other industrialized countries.

Shota Suzuki works as a building custodian in Tokyo. After work, he likes to hang out in an area known for anime and manga with his friends. But at 28, Suzuki has never had a romantic relationship, and he’s pessimistic that he ever will.

“Yes, I’m a virgin,” he told CBS News. “I would like to get married, but I can’t find a partner.”

Suzuki is far from a rare case. It’s not difficult to find other young adults, like 27-year-old Kakeru Nakamura, who are surprisingly candid about their sexual inexperience.

“My parents want me to hurry up and get married,” he said. “I tell them I’m too busy.”

A review of Japan’s National Fertility Survey reveals virginity is on the rise; one out of every 10 Japanese men in their 30s is still a virgin. That puts Japan’s virginity rate well ahead of that of other industrialized nations.

—“The cautionary tale of Japan’s ‘sex recession,’” CBS News, September 27th.

● Chaser:

In the decade leading up to the publication of The Population Bomb and the creation of ZPG in 1968, a range of non-fiction films and television broadcasts engaged with population. Millions had viewed CBS Reports’ Emmy-award winning “The Population Explosion,” a television documentary about India, in 1959. Canada’s National Film Board produced People by the Billions (1960) and Population Explosion (1967), while the Ford Foundation’s National Educational Television (NET, later replaced by PBS) broadcast a six-part series on The Population Problem in 1965. The Squeeze (1964), a short experimental film about overpopulation by time-lapse pioneer Hilary Harris, won a Golden Gate Award for best fiction at the San Francisco Film Festival. And most famously, the Population Council commissioned Walt Disney’s Family Planning (1967). Translated into over twenty languages, the ten-minute cartoon starring Donald Duck cost $300,000 to produce and was accompanied by supplementary filmstrips, slides, leaflets, comics, posters, and other materials.

In roughly the same period, fictionalized narratives about overpopulation and population control also flourished. A thriving subgenre of science fiction, subsequently dubbed demographic-dystopian, or “demodystopian,” was not only published in paperback, but also broadcast on radio and television. Following Malthusian episodes of radio’s Exploring Tomorrow (1958) and television’s ABC Stage 67 (1966) and Star Trek (1969), ABC Movie of the Week aired “The Last Child” on October 5, 1971, just three months before Z.P.G. opened nationwide. Set in New York “sometime in the not too distant future”, the made-for-TV movie follows a young couple’s attempt to save their unborn child from state-administered abortion by fleeing the overpopulated police state America has become to Canada, where population control laws are more lenient. The narrative structure of defiantly reproductive heroes on the run from draconian authorities as well as the conservative (pro-family, anti-abortion) subtext of “The Last Child” was soon echoed in Z.P.G., the first demodystopian film to be seen not on television, in the privacy of homes, but in cinemas across the nation. The name of the film, identical to that of Ehrlich’s organization, brought ZPG into direct conflict with Z.P.G. 

—“Malthus at the Movies: Science, Cinema, and Activism around Z.P.G. and Soylent Green,” US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health, October 18, 2018.

Similarly, as lefty historian Douglas Brinkley noted in his 2012 biography of CBS’s longtime anchorman Walter Cronkite, Cronkite became obsessed with radical environmentalism right after the first manned moon landing in 1969 — which, curiously enough, was precisely when the Democratic Party became obsessed with radical environmentalism. As Brinkley wrote:

[N]ow that Neil Armstrong had walked on the Moon, Cronkite sensed that ecology would soon replace space exploration as the national obsession. CBS News producer Ron Bonn recalled precisely when Cronkite put the network on the front line of the fight. “It was New Year’s Day, 1970, and Walter walked into the Broadcast Center and said, ‘God damn it, we’ve got to get on this environmental story,’ ” Bonn recalled. “When Walter said ‘God damn it,’ things happened.” Cronkite pulled Bonn from nearly all other CBS duties for eight weeks so he could investigate environmental degradation. He wanted a whole new regular series on the CBS Evening News— inspired by Silent Spring, the philosophy of René Dubos, and those amazing photos of Earth taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts. The CBS Evening News segments were to be called “Can the World Be Saved?” “We wanted to grapple first with air pollution, the unbreathable air,” Bonn recalled. “But then we wanted to deal with the primary underlying problem, which was overpopulation.”

Finally, as Jazz Shaw writes at Hot Air on “the Sex Recession,” “There may well be other factors, too. We have teenagers running around the world convinced that the Earth is melting down and they’ll all be dead in 12 years. What are we doing in response to this mass paranoid hysteria? We’re handing out awards for best performance, that’s what. That’s not exactly an incentive to invest in the future, is it?”

AOC WANTS A RAISE? ISSUES & INSIGHTS HAS A BETTER IDEA: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) thinks her current salary of $174,000 a year isn’t enough to keep her colleagues from using all those evil “dark-money loopholes.” House Democrats are considering allowing a $2,500 Cost-Of-Living Adjustment (COLA), but AOC says that’s not enough.

Now along comes the Issues & Insights crew with an absolutely brilliant proposal: AOC’s current salary is three times the Median Household Income (MHI) for her congressional district of $58,331, which clearly makes it a prime illustration of America’s yawning income gap.

So how about AOC and every other member of the House be paid whatever the MHI is for their district? Just think of the incentives that pay structure would instantly create for every representative to get serious about the growing the U.S. economy, creating new jobs and opening the doors of opportunity for everybody in their district. Why, it might even make Supply Sider Reaganauts out of them!!

WHAT THE PRESS MISSED ABOUT VANGUARD FOUNDER’S FORTUNE:

John Bogle, the founder of The Vanguard Group who died earlier this month at age 89, got rich by giving his mutual fund customers a better deal.

The obituaries seem to have missed that point, dwelling instead on the theory that if only Bogle had chosen to rip off his customers, he could have been even richer. That claim is highly speculative, and based on a fundamental misperception: a view of capitalism as a racket rather than as a system in which the incentives of entrepreneurs and customers sometimes align with results that are spectacularly rewarding for both.

The tone was set with a New York Times obituary. “Vanguard managed its indexed mutual funds at cost, charging investors fees that were far lower than those of virtually all of its rivals,” the Times wrote. “Vanguard’s consistent growth produced riches for Mr. Bogle, but not to the extent that another ownership structure might have done. For example, Edward C. Johnson III, the chairman of Fidelity Investments, has a net worth of $7.4 billion, according to Forbes. Mr. Bogle’s net worth was generally estimated at $80 million last year.”

In case anyone missed the point, the lead headline in Friday’s Times business section read “Jack Bogle was no billionaire.” That ran over an article crediting Bogle with “giving up his chance at great wealth by eschewing ownership of the company,” and describing Bogle’s $80 million as “small change by the standards of money management.”

“Instead of making billions, helping millions,” was the Times inside headline. An accompanying Times article described Bogle as someone “who didn’t care about his own bottom line.”

Concurrently though, media darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s policy adviser Dan Riffle “believes billionaires are immoral even if they’re good people,” tweeting, “Important point here. Bill Gates’ money hoarding makes him greedy, but maybe he goes 6/6 on the other deadly sins and, on balance, is a good person. Still, he’s a policy failure. The acquisition of that much wealth has bad consequences. A moral society needs guardrails against it.”

With Oceania now being at war with Eastasia, I eagerly await the Gray Lady’s denunciation of Times savior Carlos Slim.

WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING, BESIDES EVERYONE WITH A BRAIN? It Sure Looks Like This Obamacare Program Has Led to More People Dying: Under the health law, Medicare started penalizing hospitals for too many readmissions. Now mortality rates are up.

To determine whether a government program is successful, it’s often necessary to look not only at how well it does what it’s supposed to do, but what it’s doing that it isn’t supposed to. For example, killing people.

Take the hospital readmissions program built into Obamacare. The program derived from a simple observation that hospitals were treating lots of people who would then return for more treatment within the month. Unnecessary readmissions cost Medicare an estimated $17.5 billion a year. If hospitals were treating people effectively, the thinking went, those people shouldn’t need to return so soon.

So the health law instituted a Medicare payment penalty for hospitals with too many readmissions for pneumonia, heart failure, and heart attack. Since 2012, Medicare has assessed about $2 billion in penalties on hospitals with too-high readmissions rates.

Hospital groups have argued that these payments are punitive and unfair, particularly to so-called safety net hospitals that serve the poorest, sickest patients. These patients tend to have higher readmissions rates, and the hospitals that treat them were more likely to be hit with payment reductions. (Earlier this year, the Trump administration changed the penalty structure for safety net hospitals.)

But the program has often been labeled a success because it accomplished its primary goal. Readmissions dropped between 2.3 and 3.6 percentage points for the conditions targeted. Readmissions associated with other maladies dropped by 1.4 percent. The authors of one 2016 study suggested that the lower readmission rates “point to how Medicare can improve the care that patients receive through innovative payment models.” It offered proof, and hope, that with the right incentives, Medicare could save money and provide better care.

A new study appears to dash that hope, at least as far as readmissions are concerned.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and conducted by by researchers associated with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical and Harvard Medical School, looked at hospitalizations between 2005 and 2015. It found that “30-day post-discharge mortality”—the number of people who died within a month of leaving the hospital—increased for heart failure patients after the readmissions penalty program was implemented.

But remember, if you opposed ObamaCare, it was because you wanted people to die. All the best thought leaders said so.

DOES REGULATON BREED FINANCIAL ILLITERACY? “The lulling effect of regulation can take a number of forms. One involves removing the downside from certain financial decisions. Mandatory insurance of bank accounts guarantees a depositor’s balance up to a certain amount — $250,000 in the U.S., £85,000 in the UK — taking away any incentive to evaluate the creditworthiness of individual banks. Government guarantees of student loans and mortgages shift credit risk from debtors to taxpayers, rewarding carelessness on the part of both borrowers and lenders.”

The Peltzman Effect is everywhere.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Debt Alone Won’t Crush Puerto Rico. Depopulation Is the Curse.

“They owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street,” Donald Trump told Geraldo Rivera. “We’re going to have to wipe that out. That’s going to have to be — you know, you can say goodbye to that. I don’t know if it’s Goldman Sachs but whoever it is, you can wave goodbye to that.”

Bond markets didn’t appreciate the verbal wave. The territory’s bonds, already weak from the pounding of Hurricane Maria, fell another 31 percent. White House budget director Mick Mulvaney hastened to say the president didn’t mean what he said. “I wouldn’t take it word for word with that,” he said demurely. Nor should you; as debt expert Cate Long told CNN Money, “Trump does not have the ability to wave a magic wand and wipe out the debt.”

Yet the fact remains that Puerto Rico is not going to be able to pay all of its debts. Prior to the hurricane, the territory had $73 billion in outstanding debt, and a population of 3.4 million people. That’s approximately $21,500 for every man, woman and child on the island – just about enough to buy each of them a brand new Mini Cooper, provided that they don’t insist on the sport package or the heated seats. . . .

And why was the government borrowing so much? For one thing, because the government doesn’t work very well. The operations of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, for example, defy belief: It essentially gave unlimited free power to municipalities and government-owned entities, which used it to do things like operate skating rinks in the tropics. Everywhere you look, you see signs of a government struggling to perform basic tasks: collect taxes, maintain the infrastructure, improve the health system. In the jargon of development economists, the island lacks “state capacity”: It is simply unable to exert the amount of power over its operations that we on the mainland mostly take for granted.

But you can’t entirely blame the Puerto Rican government for the state of the underlying economy, which is what had plunged the island into a bankruptcy crisis even before the hurricane. For that you have to look to the federal government, which eliminated a tax break that had given companies incentives to locate in Puerto Rico, and then oversaw a financial crisis that sent them into an even deeper spiral. We also made sure that a relatively poor island was forced to adopt the federal minimum wage, which was too high for the local labor market. That has contributed to the 11.5 percent unemployment rate. And Puerto Rico uses the U.S. dollar, leaving it unable to adjust monetary policy to overcome economic stagnation.

None of those things will change just because we wipe out the bondholders. And the bondholders are not Puerto Rico’s only creditors; it has an unfunded pension liability of roughly $50 billion. Covering the current liability will consume more 20 percent of the budget.

That figure will only grow, because the biggest problem of all is Puerto Rico’s rapid demographic decline. There has long been a steady migration from Puerto Rico to the mainland. By 2008, there were more Puerto Ricans in the rest of the U.S. than there were in Puerto Rico. But the economic crisis has accelerated that flow to staggering levels.

So I’m guessing that if Steve Bannon were still around, he’d be encouraging Trump to do things that would make Puerto Rico so attractive that not only would people want to stay there, but expat Puerto Ricans would want to return, since most of them vote Democrat, and Puerto Rico doesn’t have any electoral votes. Which would be good for Puerto Rico, and also for Trump. In Bannon’s absence, I’m not sure there’s anyone in the White House who thinks that way.

MORE OF THIS, PLEASE: Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and Congressman Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) have an oped in NRO, “A Stronger Congress, a Healthier Republic.”

The federal government is broken. And while there is plenty of blame to go around, only Congress can fix it.

We don’t mean this as an indictment of any one leader or party, because the dysfunction in Washington today has accreted over decades, under Houses, Senates, and presidents of every partisan combination, as well as the many different justices of the Supreme Court. . . .

The stability and moral legitimacy of America’s governing institutions depend on a representative, transparent, and accountable Congress to make its laws. For years, however, Congress has delegated too much of its legislative authority to the executive branch, skirting the thankless work and ruthless accountability that Article 1 demands and taking up a new position as backseat drivers of the republic.

So today, Americans’ laws are increasingly written by people other than their representatives in the House and Senate, and via processes specifically designed to exclude public scrutiny and input. This arrangement benefits well-connected insiders who thrive in less-accountable modes of policymaking, but it does so at the expense of the American people — for whose freedom our system of separated powers was devised in the first place.

In short, we have moved from a nation governed by the rule of law to one governed by the rule of rulers and unelected, unaccountable regulators. Congress’s abdication, unsurprisingly, has led to a proliferation of bad policy and to the erosion of public trust in the institutions of government. Distrust, also unsurprisingly, is now the defining theme of American politics. . . .

That is why we have joined with eight colleagues in the House and Senate to develop and promote a new agenda of structural reforms that will strengthen Congress and reassert its vital role in our society. We call it the Article 1 Project (A1P). . . .

First, Congress must reclaim its power of the federal purse. Our formal budget process, which dates to 1974, has fallen apart, and we must restructure it for a post-earmark world. We need to bring entitlement programs back onto the actual budget and bring self-funding federal agencies back under annual appropriation.

Second, we need to reform legislative “cliffs” that loom behind expiring legislation — at the end of the fiscal year and when the federal debt nears its statutory limit — to realign the incentives of the American people and their government.

Third, Congress must take back control of actual federal lawmaking. Today, the vast majority of federal laws are unilaterally imposed by executive-branch agencies. The bureaucrats in these agencies then serve as police, prosecutors, and courts in the ensuing cases. All major regulations should be affirmatively prioritized and approved by a vote of Congress.

Finally, we must clarify the law governing executive discretion, which right now allows presidents and federal bureaucrats to ignore or rewrite federal statutes, so long as they have a clever enough reason.

Yes, yes, yes, and yes to these four commonsense proposals. But they are only a small start in the right direction. Congress’s voluntary abdication of its legislative power since the early twentieth century is perhaps the single most significant flaw in our constitutional architecture– and one that the founding generation never foresaw. As James Madison expressed it in Federalist No. 48:

[I]n a a representative republic where the executive magistracy is carefully limited, both in the extent and the duration of its power; and where the legislative power is exercised by an assembly, which is inspired by a supposed influence over the people with an intrepid confidence in its own strength . . .  it is against the enterprising ambition of this department [the legislature] that the people ought to indulge all their jealousy and exhaust all their precautions.

Like Dorothy and her ruby slippers, Congress has always held the power to “go home” and restore the Constitution’s separation of powers. It can simply click its collective heels and, well, legislate, particularly in areas such as the power of the purse and passing statutes that carefully circumscribe (and limit judicial deference to) the unconstitutional “fourth branch” of the administrative state.

Of course the success of the Article I Project (or any similar effort) will require either: (1) a President who does not veto any such laws (i.e., a Republican President); or (2) a veto-proof supermajority of two-thirds of both chambers of Congress (i.e., a House and Senate comprised of at least two-thirds GOP members). Sadly, the Democrats have shown zero willingness in restoring Congress’s constitutional power, and have indeed cheered President Obama’s incessant executive power grab.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: What We’re Buying With $1 Trillion+ in Student Loans:

You know what they say about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. This is certifiable. College is too expensive, so have the government make it easier to finance — then keep shifting more and more of the cost burden to the government, without doing anything about the underlying cost inflation that is making it necessary for government to get into the finance business.

Obviously, this can’t go on indefinitely. The income-based-repayment programs are relatively new, so the government hasn’t yet been handed the bill for the loan forgiveness that will be necessary as we give people payment rates that are often less than the interest on the loan. But when the government gets that bill, people are going to notice that this is a costly business.

Over decades, the government has restructured the educational system to make it look more like the health-care system, with the costs paid by third parties while the service is consumed by individuals who have no incentive to think about price. The effects are predictable for both. . . .

Does college actually make people much more economically productive? Yes, yes, I know: People who go to college earn substantially more than people who don’t, and that earnings premium has been increasing in recent decades. But what, exactly, do they learn in college that makes them so much more productive? In certain technical professions, the answer is obvious; engineers and nurses do need to master the rudiments of their trade before they are unleashed on an unsuspecting public.

But that doesn’t describe the whole higher educational system. It doesn’t even seem to describe the majority of college degrees. Administrators defending the value of degrees in “business” or liberal arts rely on nebulous claims that they are teaching students “how to think.” However, they provide little objective evidence that these programs impart thinking skills worth tens of thousands of dollars.

There’s at least some evidence that a lot of the benefit of a college degree comes not from what you learn in college, but from signaling to employers that you are the kind of conscientious, hardworking student who can get into college and stick with it long enough to get a degree. In other words, much of what we do in school is not learn anything in particular, but obtain a credential that certifies us as good potential employees.

Do tell. If you understand the federal student aid system as a means for transferring money from taxpayers to an industry that’s basically a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party, it makes more sense.

A SYSTEM WHERE WHAT’S RATIONAL FOR THE INDIVIDUAL IS BAD FOR SOCIETY IS A DYSFUNCTIONAL SYSTEM:

The other day, after one of my talks, a 10th-grade girl came up and shyly asked if I had a minute. I always have a minute to talk to shy high school sophomores, having been one myself.

And this is what she asked me:

“I understand what you’re saying about trying new things, and hard things, but I’m in an International Baccalaureate program and only about five percent of us will get 4.0, so how can I try a subject where I might not get an A?”

I was floored. All I could think as I talked to this poor girl is “America, you’re doing it wrong.”

I was 15 in 10th grade. If you can’t try something new in 10th grade, when can you? If you can’t afford to risk anything less than perfection at the age of 15, then for heaven’s sake, when is going to be the right time? When you’re ready to splash out on an edgy assisted-living facility?

Now is when this kid should be learning to dream big dreams and dare greatly. Now is when she should be making mistakes and figuring out how to recover from them. Instead, we’re telling one of our best and brightest to focus all her talent on coloring within the lines. This is not the first time I’ve heard this from kids and teachers and parents. But I’ve never heard it phrased quite so starkly.

Our educational system, like our political system, is structured to reward behavior that is bad for society at large. You get more of what you reward. Incentives, even perverse incentives, matter.

NICK DENTON, INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY: “Gawker is organized like an international money-laundering operation. Much of its international revenues are directed through Hungary, where Denton’s mother hails from, and where some of the firm’s techies are located. But that is only part of it. Recently, Salmon reports, the various Gawker operations—Gawker Media LLC, Gawker Entertainment LLC, Gawker Technology LLC, Gawker Sales LLC—have been restructured to bring them under control of a shell company based in the Cayman Islands, Gawker Media Group Inc.” Nobody tell Liz Warren.

Or Joe Biden — because then you’d have to explain what a shell company is, and that the Cayman Islands aren’t part of Oiho.

Meanwhile, Kevin Williamson comments:

So we have evil offshoring — exploting those poor marginalized Hungarian nerds — baroque tax-minimizing schemes, assets that will not be repatriated because of U.S. taxes, and that favorite sin of the Left: hypocrisy. In my mind, hypocrisy is a lesser sin than stupidity, and it is sort of stupid to write up a breathless account about Romney’s doing the precise same thing your company does. Incidentally, there is nothing in the Gawker report or the accompanying documents suggesting that Romney or Bain did anything improper. And neither did Gawker, for that matter: U.S. tax practices create very powerful incentives to pursue avoidance strategies. Gawker’s owners apparently know that, even if its writers lack the guts or the intellectual capability to acknowledge as much.

We eagerly await the next Gawker editorial on the need for corporate-tax reform.

Heh. Hoist, petard, etc.

UPDATE: The Gawker story kind of undermines this leak of Mitt Romney tax information, which, as a reader emails, “has David Axelrod’s fingerprints all over it.”

You know, one reason to abolish the income tax is that it puts private information into the hands of politicians and government officials who are able to abuse it for political reasons.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Why We Stopped Spanking.

I wonder, however, if “better” is quite the right word. It seems to me that what parents have discovered is a much, much more intensive form of parenting than their grandparents employed. The elaborate charts and systems of incentives are enabled by the fact that modern children are effectively monitored by adults every waking hour until they become quite old.

As Valerie Ramey points out in a recent essay, one of the enduring mysteries of the 20th century is that in America, at least, labor saving appliances don’t seem to have saved much labor. Adults spend less time on certain “home production” tasks–like cooking–but more on others, particularly childcare. . . . Today’s kids seem to be not only supervised but regimented; most of their time is supposed to be spent in some sort of structured activity. This makes it very easy to create elaborate reward systems, because there is all this elaborate surveillance that makes it very easy to monitor compliance.

I had some related thoughts here. “We keep hearing about declining birthrates, but raising a kid is far more expensive — financially, emotionally, and in terms of time — today than it was a few decades ago. As she occasionally notes, things that were considered adequate, or even exemplary, parenting then are now considered abuse or neglect. In fact, when you look at how the burden of childrearing has increased, it seems amazing that we see as many people having children as we do.” By way of comparison, I invoked James Lileks.

But here’s another thought. Why are kids today so fat? Because — since you can’t (or at least, many parents don’t) induce good behavior by spanking, people try to keep kids happy with food. (That’s the most common “reward.”) Stick a kid in a carseat — unknown in the past — and you pacify them with a juicebox or some goldfish. They’re immobile (burning fewer calories than old-fashioned front-to-back clambering kids) and fed to distract them from the unhappiness of being strapped in like a mummy.

Likewise, schools and daycare centers shove snacks at them for the same reason. It may only add up to a few hundred calories a day in the form of extra snacks and reduced mobility, but that’s all it takes to produce weight gain over time.

The Bryan Caplan “good enough” approach is healthier, and easier on parents. Related item here. Beware the wimpy parents.

And maybe spanking isn’t so bad.

UPDATE: Here’s a column I wrote a while back on related matters. Excerpt:

Meanwhile, in the United States, commentator John Gibson is calling for “procreation, not recreation.” But I think that attitude is part of the problem. (Procreation not recreation? As an old-timer once reportedly said in response to the Make Love, Not War, slogan: “Hell, in my time we did both.”)

But Gibson’s slogan unwittingly captures an important aspect of the problem, in the United States and other industrial societies, at least: We’ve taken a lot of the fun out of parenting. Or to echo Longman, the “social costs” of parenting continue to rise, and, more significantly, perhaps, the “social returns” continue to decline.

Parenting was always hard work, of course. But aside from the economic payoffs, parents used to get a lot of social benefits, too. But in recent decades, a collection of parenting “experts” and safety-fascist types have extinguished some of the benefits while raising the costs, to the point where what’s amazing isn’t that people are having fewer kids, but that people are having kids at all. . . . There’s also the decline in parental prestige over generations. My mother reports that when she was a newlywed (she was married in 1959) you weren’t seen as fully a member of the adult world until you had kids. Nowadays to have kids means something closer to an expulsion from the adult world. People in the suburbs buy SUVs instead of minivans not because they need the four-wheel-drive capabilities, but because the SUVs lack the minivan’s close association with low-prestige activities like parenting, and instead provide the aura of high-prestige activities like whitewater kayaking. Why should kayaking be more prestigious than parenting? Because parenting isn’t prestigious in our society. If it were, childless people would drive minivans just to partake of the aura.

In these sorts of ways, parenting has become more expensive in non-financial as well as financial terms. It takes up more time and emotional energy than it used to, and there’s less reward in terms of social approbation. This is like a big social tax on parenting and, as we all know, when things are taxed we get less of them. Yes, people still have children, and some people even have big families. But at the margin, which is where change occurs, people are less likely to do things as they grow more expensive and less rewarded.

So as we head into what looks like a major demographic debate, I think we need to look beyond subsidies and finances to culture. If people want to see Americans have more children, they should probably ignore Putin’s advice, and they should definitely ignore Gibson’s advice. They should look at ways of making parenting more rewarding, and less burdensome, in social as well as economic terms.

Read the whole thing, if I do say so myself. Plus, here’s a law-review article on how the legal system encourages “over-parenting.”

RICHARD EPSTEIN: Why Progressive Policies Always Fail.

We have rigged our tax policies so that, depending on the year, close to 40 percent of the income tax revenue comes from the 1 percent of the population that controls 20 percent of the wealth.

Close to half the population pays no federal income tax at all. This is a political disaster in the making.

The American economy is currently stagnating for two main reasons. At the top of the system, a relentless program of redistributive taxation undermines incentives for long-term investment and growth.

Yet from this vain pursuit of economic equality, we get declining standards of living for all. Simultaneously on the ground, excessive regulation of labor and real estate markets chokes off growth — employer by employer and house by house.

Our lopsided structure cannot last. Stock market losses cut the total income of so-called “one percenters” by around 30 percent between 2007 and 2009, with the greatest losses in the top 0.1 percent.

Higher tax rates will drive that overall level of wealth lower still, given that so little government revenue comes from the bottom half of the income distribution. Low tax revenues plus shiny new entitlements create an unsustainable situation where 40 percent of current expenditures are funded by long term debt, on which principal and interest payments will soon come due.

Something that can’t go on forever, won’t.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Why Fire Teachers? This is why. “I doubt that the lowest possible turnover rate is compatible with the best possible education. Turnover has costs, but it also has benefits: fresh blood, lower burnout rates, and an incentive for teachers to keep performing. The whole idea of hiring someone in their early twenties and employing them forever seems like an unhealthy organizational structure to me–in the military and old-school law firms as well as teaching, though the military and law firms do more to weed out the number along the way. It breeds an organization that is insular–resistant to new ideas, suspicious of outsiders, resentful of its nominal clients. We should be looking for ways to make teaching more open to part-timers and people in second, third, or eighth career cycles, and to make it easier for teachers to move around between schools and districts, and between teaching and other industries. . . . I think that the educational benefits outweigh the drawbacks. In part this is simple contrarianism: right now, it is very hard to fire teachers, and many schools are very bad. It’s worth trying whatever we’re not doing.”

WHY DOES COLLEGE COST SO MUCH?

The price of higher education is rising — rapidly — and yet a) individual universities do not have strong incentives to take in larger classes, and b) it is hard to start a new, good college or university. The key question is how much a) and b) are remediable in the longer run and if so then there is some chance that the current structure of higher education is a bubble of sorts.

I never see the authors utter the sentence: “There are plenty wanna-bee professors discarded on the compost heap of academic history.” Yet the best discard should not be much worse, and may even be better, than the marginally accepted professor. Such a large pool of surplus labor would play a significant role in an economic analysis of virtually any other sector.

When it comes to solving the access problem, the word which pops up is “financial aid,” not “increased competition.” Why might that be?

There is, apparently, no problem that cannot be solved through increased government subsidy.

This week, my crime column for Reason looks at 117 audio recordings of roll call meetings in a Brooklyn NYPD precinct that were recently obtained by the Village Voice.

Some background: Last March, a study from Molloy college suggested that NYPD higher-ups were pressuring police officers to under-report or reclassify serious crimes to juke the city’s crime stats. At about the same time, an NYPD officer released a few recordings in which his commanding officers can be heard telling rank-and-file cops that they’re required to meet a minimum number of arrests and citations each month. Both stories were played down by NYPD and its supporters.

The new recordings obtained by the Village Voice reinforce both sets of allegations made last March. The implications are pretty startling: As a matter of policy, NYPD seems to be encouraging its officers to harass innocent people, even to the point of arresting and detaining them for non-crimes (the city had a record 570,000 stop-and-frisk searches last year). At the same time, the department may be pressuring some officers and citizens to downgrade actual crimes–even serious ones–or to not report them at all.

We obviously want to hold government employees accountable. But it’s important that the metrics we use in doing so both reflect political realities and create a proper alignment of incentives. Much of what’s wrong with the criminal justice system today isn’t the product of evil or malevolent law enforcement personnel, but of poorly structured incentives put in place by bad policy. And bad policy usually comes from clueless politicians (the issue of crime seems particularly prone to unnuanced, slogan-based policy making).

I’ll look at other incentive problems within the criminal justice sysem in future posts this week.