Author: Jonah Shepp

by Jonah Shepp

Marking Open Borders Day yesterday, Ilya Somin argues for liberalizing immigration policy:

Hundreds of millions of people live in countries where their probable fate is a life of poverty and oppression. Many of them could escape that terrible fate if only First World governments would allow them to immigrate. Economist Michael Clemens estimates that the economic gains from worldwide open borders are large enough to double world GDP. Enormous numbers of people currently live in poverty not because they are unable to be productive workers, but merely because they are forcibly prevented from working for First World employers who would be willing to hire them. In addition to harming potential migrants, these restrictions also inflict losses on First world employers, landlords, and consumers who would like to hire immigrants, rent to them, or purchase goods and services they produce.

But the benefits of open borders go far beyond purely material gains, great as they are.

Many potential migrants are also trapped in societies where they are denied basic human rights, such as freedom of speech, religion, and private property. Many of the women among them reside in societies with severe gender-based oppression and discrimination. For hundreds of millions of people living in undemocratic societies, emigration is their only realistically feasible way to exercise political freedom – the right to choose what kind of government they wish to live under.

Bryan Caplan takes a critical look at the arguments against immigration:

Most arguments for immigration restriction are equally good arguments for government regulation of natives’ fertility.  But I see that almost everyone favors immigration restrictions, and almost no one favors fertility restrictions.

I see that almost everything immigrants do makes their critics angry.  The critics are angry when immigrants work, and angry when they’re on welfare.  The critics are angry if immigrants are visible, and angry if immigrants keep to themselves.  The critics are angry if immigrants increase housing prices and angry if immigrants reduce housing prices.

by Jonah Shepp & Patrick Appel

It’s semi-official: Scott Brown is running for Senate again:

In a speech that threw out red meat to conservative activists—praising the late Ronald Reagan and ripping ObamaCare, the IRS, and the 2009 stimulus package—and a call for both parties to come together for the betterment of the country, Brown announced Friday that he has formed an exploratory committee to prepare a campaign for the U.S. Senate. “A big political wave is about to break in America, and the Obamacare Democrats are on the wrong side of it,” said Brown, while noting that “There has to be a time and place where we act as Americans first, putting our country first.”

Sean Sullivan calls Brown a potential game-changer:

New Hampshire instantly becomes more competitive by virtue of Brown’s decision. Up until now, no other Republican with a prayer of defeating Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) had entered the race. Brown’s name recognition and his ability to raise big money make him a potentially formidable foe.

Something similar happened in Colorado when Gardner, a sitting member of Congress, announced last month that he would take on Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.). And while Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) is still a substantial frontrunner in Virginia, Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee chairman who announced his run in January, gives Republicans a glimmer of hope in Virginia that did not exist before he decided to run.

In short, Republicans now have more possible routes the the majority.

Molly Ball sizes up Brown’s chances:

The most recent public poll, released this week by Suffolk University, showed Brown losing to Shaheen by 13 percentage points; others have shown a closer race, though none has shown him winning. Still, New Hampshire, a state Obama won by about six points last time, is certainly friendlier territory for Brown than Massachusetts, which Obama won by 23.

A poll out today finds Brown behind by 12. Harry Enten bets against Brown:

[F]orget Shaheen’s strength; Brown is weak. His net favorability, an average -10 points in the two polls, shows that more Granite Staters dislike him than like him. In fact, Brown’s net favorable ratings are lower than every other GOP contender included in the January UNH poll. A less famous but more well-liked nominee might give Shaheen a stronger challenge.

 

Jazz Shaw chatted with a couple of New Hampshire GOP officials about the primary:

Both agreed that Brown seemed “like a very nice man” but expressed the same opinion that he isn’t really a New Hampshire guy. One went so far as to say, “Don’t get me wrong, Scott’s a good man. But he’s no Bob Smith.” (Smith, a former Senator, is also expected to get into the primary race.

The second official I spoke with brought up a different concern. After agreeing that Brown was a great guy, she leaned in a bit and said, “He’s really not right on guns, you know.” This is an issue which the media has already noted will likely dog Brown in his quest for the nomination.

Antle wonders if Brown’s Massachusetts baggage will hurt him:

The history of out-of-state political candidacies is decidedly mixed. Robert Kennedy, Jim Buckley, and Hillary Clinton all managed to parachute into New York and win Senate races. Former Tennessee Sen. Bill Brock was soundly defeated in Maryland, while Maryland transplant Alan Keyes failed even more spectacularly in Illinois.

John Fund doubts the carpetbagger attack with do much damage:

For now, Democrats are mostly tarring him as a carpetbagger, releasing a 48-second-video replete with Brown referencing his close ties to Massachusetts. But Brown is ready for the face-to-face campaigning New Hampshire demands and is quick to point out that he was born in New Hampshire, has owned property there and moved back in part to be close to his mother who lives there. His former “state of mind” isn’t likely to be a big issue, according to Andrew Cline, editorial page editor of the Union Leader, New Hampshire’s only statewide newspaper. “Over half of the state wasn’t born here,” he notes. “They root for Boston teams, watch Boston television and often work in Massachusetts, so it’s a porous border.

Bernstein entertains the idea that carpetbagging could catch on:

Politicians (and political operatives) are copycats: If Brown wins, then the odds are someone else will try something similar, and we’ll have another bit of evidence for the nationalization of U.S. politics. My guess is that although there is a chance he could win, Brown is more likely to become a punch line (like wannabe carpetbagger Harold Ford).

by Jonah Shepp

The story keeps getting weirder, but there are no answers yet:

Over the weekend, the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 became a criminal investigation as Malaysian officials said they had “conclusive” evidence that the flight had been hijacked. They also said that a final message had been received from the pilot after the plane’s signaling apparatus had been disabled, raising suspicion that the flight was intentionally diverted by crew. There have also been numerous reports this morning that plane may have flown as low as 5,000 feet, in order to avoid all radar detection, a maneuver that would require considerable skill from the pilots, while also putting the plane itself in considerable danger, as it is not designed for long travel at that altitude.

Passing along the map seen below, Derek Thompson notes that the clues about where the plane might be are still very broad:

The precise location of the flight at 8:11 AM is still a mystery. But officials provided a map (above) that shows the plane’s possible location along one of two red semi-circles, based on a “ping” from a satellite orbiting 35,800 kilometers above the Indian Ocean. As you can see, this final data point indicates two possible flight paths: one northwest stretching toward Kazakhstan and another southwest into the Indian Ocean.

The northern flight path is above land, which would raise the odds that officials find the plane or its remnants. But The New York Times points out that it’s unlikely that air-defense networks in India, Pakistan, or Afghanistan failed to pick up on a rogue 777. This makes the southern path more likely. Bloomberg‘s analysis of the last satellite “ping” tracked the plane’s last known location to about 1,000 miles west of Perth, Australia.

Patrick Smith addresses some misconceptions regarding the plane’s transponder:

The media is throwing this term around without a full understanding of how the equipment works. For position reporting and traffic sequencing purposes, transponders only work in areas of typical ATC radar coverage. Most of the world, including the oceans, does not have ATC radar coverage. Transponders are relevant to this story only when the missing plane was close to land. Once over the ocean, it didn’t matter anyway. Over oceans and non-radar areas, other means are used for position reports and tracking/communicating (satcomm, datalink, etc.), not transponders.

Many readers have asked why the capability exists to switch off a transponder, as apparently happened aboard Malaysia flight 370. In fact very few of a plane’s components are hot-wired to be, as you might say, “always on.” In the interest of safety — namely, fire and electrical system protection — it’s important to have the ability to isolate a piece of equipment, either by a standard switch or, if need be, through a circuit breaker. Also transponders will occasionally malfunction and transmit erroneous or incomplete data, at which point a crew will recycle the device — switching it off, then on — or swap to another unit. Typically at least two transponders are onboard, and you can’t run both simultaneously. Bear in mind too that switching the unit “off” might refer to only one of the various subfunctions, or “modes” — for example, mode C, mode S — responsible for different data.

Previous Dish on the missing plane here, here, and here. Update from a reader, who ramps up the wild speculation:

Check this out.  It’s the most convincing thing I’ve read in the last ten days about the flight’s disappearance. He’s an aviation hobbyist who plotted times and air routes and came up with a theory that Flight 370 shadowed a scheduled flight (appearing with it as a single signal) over all the countries that should have picked it up on radar.

by Jonah Shepp

Chris Mooney reviews John R. Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith, and John R. Alford’s Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences:

As Hibbing et al. explain, the evidence suggests that around 40 percent of the variation in political beliefs is ultimately rooted in DNA. The studies that form the basis for this conclusion use a simple but powerful paradigm: they examine the differences between pairs of monozygotic (“identical”) twins and pairs of dizygotic (“fraternal”) twins when it comes to political views. Again and again, the identical twins, who share 100 percent of their DNA, also share much more of their politics.

In other words, politics runs in families and is passed on to offspring. Hibbing and his coauthors suspect that what is ultimately being inherited is a set of core dispositions about how societies should resolve recurring problems: how to distribute resources (should we be individualistic or collectivist?); how to deal with outsiders and out-groups (are they threatening or enticing?); how to structure power relationships (should we be hierarchical or egalitarian?); and so on. These are, of course, problems that all human societies have had to grapple with; they are ancient. And inheriting a core disposition on how to resolve them would naturally predispose one to a variety of specific issue stances in a given political context.

He also looks at Avi Tuschman’s Our Political Nature, which takes the same argument further:

Tuschman doesn’t hold back. Conservatives, he suggests in one of three interrelated evolutionary accounts of the origins of politics, are a modern reflection of an evolutionary impulse that leads some of us to seek to control sexual reproduction and keep it within a relatively homogenous group. This naturally makes today’s conservatives more tribal and in-group oriented; if tribalism does anything, it makes it clear who you are and aren’t supposed to mate with.

Tuschman’s liberals, in contrast, are a modern reflection of an evolutionary impulse to take risks, and thereby pull in more genetic diversity through outbreeding. This naturally makes today’s liberals more exploratory and cosmopolitan, just as the personality tests always suggest. Ultimately, Tuschman bluntly writes, it all comes down to “different attitudes toward the transmission of DNA.” And if you want to set these two groups at absolute war with one another, all you need is something like the 1960s.

Arnold Kling thinks this type of scholarship is overhyped:

Mooney leaves readers with the impression that psychologists explain a larger share of political differences than they themselves claim to explain. In contrast, my guess is that they explain less. These are the sorts of studies that tend to suffer from publication bias (20 studies are tried, one out of 20 passes the “significance test” of having a 5 percent probability of being true by chance, and that study gets published). In these sorts of studies, attempts at replication sometimes fail completely, and even when successful the effects are smaller than in the original published study.

In fact, my guess is that we are approaching peak political psychology. I would bet that ten years from now the links between political beliefs and psychological traits will be regarded as a very minor field of inquiry.

In his own review, Kling panned Our Political Nature:

Overall, the pattern is that for Tuschman, every evil of conservatives is essential, by which I mean that it follows directly from the conservative point of view. On the other hand, every evil of the left is accidental, meaning that it occurs in spite of what leftists believe.

And yet, Tuschman declares early on that he will not take an ideological position, but instead he will speak objectively. To me, this lowers his credibility. It would have been more persuasive had he simply said at the outset, “I think that conservatives are racist, authoritarian, and warmongering, and here is some psychological research that supports my point of view.”

by Jonah Shepp

Warner Brown mapped China’s regional stereotypes according to Baidu autocomplete:

Why is the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang “so chaotic?” Why are many from the southern metropolis of Shanghai “unfit to lead”? And do people from central Henan Province really steal manhole covers? These are just some of the questions — ranging from the provocative, to the offensive, to the downright ridiculous — that Chinese people ask about themselves and each other on Baidu, the country’s top search engine, which says it processes about 5 billion queries each day.

In the West, amateur sociologists use Google’s voluminous search history to finish half-written questions about different regions. They then plot the stereotypes onto maps such as this one of the United States, which The Atlantic called “The U.S. According to Autocomplete.” China, with its long history of regional stereotyping, is ripe for similar treatment.

Christopher Beam explores what else the search engine reveals about Chinese web users:

Sex questions are popular—understandably so, given the relative dearth of sex education in China. (Plus, asking the Internet is less awkward than asking your teacher or mom.) The top “why” question among Googlers may be “why is the sky blue,” but Baidu users have a different primary concern: “Why is my semen yellow?” Runners up include “Why do I ejaculate so quickly?” and “Why don’t I have any semen?” They also pose questions they might be too shy to ask their partners, such as, “Why do girls go to the bathroom after sex?” You may have noticed these are all dude questions. It’s hard to say whether that’s because Chinese men have a disproportionately large number of sexual hang-ups, or because Baidu users are disproportionately male, or because China itself is disproportionately male. Evidence points to the latter two explanations: If you type in “I’m looking for,” “a wife” makes the list of top suggestions, but “a husband” does not.

by Jonah Shepp

Masha Gessen suggests a way for pro-gay companies to support LGBT individuals in Russia and other oppressive countries without damaging their business interests:

Immigration Equality, a legal organization that represents LGBT asylum-seekers in the United States, has recently hired a full-time Russian-speaking paralegal to help with the intake of new clients.

Russian speakers now represent the bulk of the group’s incoming clients, overtaking people from Jamaica, who had traditionally held first place. (To grasp the significance of that information, think how much more difficult it is to get to the United States from Russia than from Jamaica.) The hundreds of Russian LGBT refugees who have come over in the last few months are but the forerunners of a larger looming exodus—these are the people with enough money or self-confidence to leave now. As things get more desperate, as they inevitably will, many more will follow. These people are lucky enough to get legal help from Immigration Equality, but at this point there is no organization that can reliably help them with housing, money, job training, and job placement.

This is where the multinational companies come in. First, they should offer their Russian LGBT employees and their families the opportunity to transfer to the United States. Second, they should create programs to actively recruit, hire, and, if necessary, retrain LGBT refugees who are already in the United States. Such programs should not be limited to Russians: As the civilizational divide along LGBT-rights lines grows ever wider, increasing numbers will face more and more danger in countries all over the world, and they will need a safe haven.

Listen to Masha in a long conversation with Andrew about Russian gays, Putin’s policies, and what we should do about them here. A sample: