The National Park Service returns 10 dollars for every dollar of taxpayer investment, not only collecting admission and camping fees, but filling surrounding hotels and restaurants while emptying the shelves of local grocery stores and sporting goods outfitters.
The profitability of the NPS was most ironically demonstrated last October during the 16 days of the federal shutdown, when 7.88 million visitors stayed home because the parks were closed. Even that short period cost $414 million in lost revenue: All the entrance passes visitors would have bought, all the hotel rooms and bed and breakfast nooks where they would have stayed, all the meals they would have purchased in communities surrounding the parks, and all the walking sticks and picnic baskets and hiking boots they would have bought for their adventures.
It’s Hardly Hard Out There For A Pimp
A report (pdf) from the Urban Institute looks at the sex work economy in eight major US cities. Emily Badger recaps the findings:
Urban’s researchers estimate that, in 2007, the entire illegal sex economy in Atlanta – including brothels, escort services and dubious massage parlors –was valued at $290 million. In Miami, it was $205 million (that’s more than twice the size of the market there for illegal drugs). In Washington, it was $103 million. On the low end, in Denver it was about $40 million.
Between 2003 and 2007, Washington’s market shrunk. Seattle’s boomed. Meanwhile, the mean weekly income for a pimp in Denver, post-2005, was $31,200.
The report is the first of its kind to affix hard numbers like this to the shadowy market for sex work. The findings are based in part on 260 interviews with convicted pimps and sex workers, prosecutors, law enforcement officials and other experts in San Diego, Seattle, Dallas, Denver, Washington, Kansas City, Atlanta, and Miami (cities selected, among other things, for being part of “known ‘pimp circuits’ in the United States”).
Derek Thompson, who passes along the above chart, pulls some highlights from the report, which also covered illegal drug and gun markets:
1. Atlanta has the biggest sex economy among the studied cities, by far. Dallas has the largest market for drugs or guns. …
2. As a share of each city’s cash economy (i.e.: doesn’t include the vast majority of commercial activity with credit) Atlanta has both the biggest sex and guns trade. San Diego has the biggest underground drug economy. If you add all the underground economies together, you’ll see the largest combined black markets (by city) are: Atlanta, Miami, San Diego, and Dallas. Across the studied cities, the largest underground market is sex, followed by drugs, then guns.
Kyle Chayka focuses on how pimps and sex workers employ social media marketing, including on the mostly defunct MySpace:
[P]imps set up profiles for their workers with codewords like “girlfriend experience” and wait for the customers to inquire. “Friend them, once you make a connection, you let them know what the deal is. It’s [sex] for sale,” one former sex worker interviewed in the study explained. “Myspace, all that, it’s just a disguise.”
The report shows even Twitter being used to advertise job openings. “Believe it or not, people still use [social networks], and the ones that are using them are usually younger, and pimps are on there like crazy,” a Dallas police official said.
And Amanda Hess takes note of how the pimps interviewed for the report represented themselves:
Many of the convicted pimps didn’t identify as pimps because they claimed not to engage in some of the behavior typically associated with the profession, like confiscating money, beating sex workers, or trafficking women. The madam insisted that she took smaller cuts of her workers’ fees than many assumed. And a male manager said: “The old school cats would talk about how the girls would hide money, not give it all up, and in the old days they would beat the girls if they didn’t get it all. Now, I know the girls come to me and will stash some around the corner before they come in, but I’m just as happy if they give me any of it, as long as they bring me something, because they’re the ones doing all the work.”
Update from a skeptical reader:
The Urban Institute numbers seem a tad bit farfetched; the entire Denver area illicit sex market is valued at $40 million USD, even though the average pimp is making somewhere in the neighborhood of $31,000 * 52 = ~$1.6 million USD a year? Are there only twenty pimps in charge of “brothels, escort services and dubious massage parlors” in Denver?
Another is even more skeptical:
I would take that Urban Institute study of prostitution with several massive helpings of salt. It represents everything that is wrong with how sex work is studied in this country. The researchers interviewed a grand total of 36 actual sex workers. In three cities, they interviewed none. And all the interviews were of sex workers in prison, which is a known massive bias in studies of sex work (80-90% of sex workers are not street walkers, but most jailed sex workers are). They interviewed twice as many pimps and almost five times as many law enforcement personnel. In effect, this “study” amounts to taking the boasts of convicted pimps and the speculations of law enforcement and putting a very thin scientific veneer on it. Massive parts of the study consist of lurid anecdotes from law enforcement personnel speculating on what sex work is really like.
I’ll also point you to Maggie McNeill’s discussion of pimps, where she argues that they are actually rare in sex work. So this study is looking at a tiny sliver of the sex industry. It’s not representative at all.
The War Over The Core
Seth Masket considers the latest debate roiling the education world:
By now, you’ve probably heard of the Common Core State Standards. They are a set of skills expectations for students that have been adopted by 45 states plus the District of Columbia. They require that students be broadly competent in mathematics and literacy and know how to do things like critically read a text, argue and defend a point of view, interpret data, etc. – all things that we’d consider pretty useful for students entering college or the work world. The Common Core itself contains no specific prescriptions for content or curriculum, just the requirement that students learn these vital skills.
But that’s not at all what you’ll hear about it in the conservative media. For them, not only is the Common Core a massive federal intrusion into state and local education policy (a debatable point, but one roughly grounded in reality), but it’s a primary tool of President Obama and the Left (and possibly the United Nations) to fundamentally transform education, to undermine the authority of religion and parents, to track the location and behavior of children who’ve committed thought crimes (perhaps using iris scans), and to essentially impose collectivism upon America. As Glenn Beck sums up, “This is like some really spooky, sci-fi, Gattaca kind of thing.”
Peter Wood’s criticisms are more reality-based. He argues that Common Core “set a ceiling on the academic preparation of most students”:
None of this might matter if the Common Core were just a baseline and students and schools could easily move above it if they wished to. The trouble is that the Common Core has been designed to be a sticky baseline. It is hard for schools to rise above it.
There are two reasons for that. First, it uses up most of the time in a K-12 curriculum, leaving little room for anything else. Second, the states that were leveraged into it via Obama’s “Race to the Top” agreed that students who graduate from high school with a Common Core education and are admitted to public colleges and universities will automatically be entered into “credit-bearing courses.” This is tricky. Essentially what it means is that public colleges will have to adjust their curricula down to the level of knowledge and skill that the Common Core mandates. And that in turn means that most schools will have little reason to offer anything beyond the Common Core, even if they can. In this way, the Common Core floor becomes very much a ceiling, too.
Neal McCluskey isn’t thrilled about Common Core’s relationship with the SAT:
What’s the connection between the Core and the SAT? A big one: David Coleman, who is both a chief architect of the Core and president of the SAT-owning College Board. Coleman announced when he took over the Board that he would align the SAT with the Core, and it was clear in the Board’s SAT press release that that is what’s happening. Employing Common Core code, the Board announced that the new SAT will focus on “college and career readiness.” Why is this potentially bad news for Core supporters? Because the SAT changes are widely being criticized as dumbing-down the test – good-bye words like “prevaricator,” hello toughies like “synthesis” – and that may drive attention to people who are questioning the quality of the Core.
And longtime standards proponent Diane Ravitch recently leveled her own criticisms:
The Common Core standards have been adopted in 46 states and the District of Columbia without any field test. They are being imposed on the children of this nation despite the fact that no one has any idea how they will affect students, teachers, or schools. We are a nation of guinea pigs, almost all trying an unknown new program at the same time.
Maybe the standards will be great. Maybe they will be a disaster. Maybe they will improve achievement. Maybe they will widen the achievement gaps between haves and have-nots. Maybe they will cause the children who now struggle to give up altogether. Would the Federal Drug Administration approve the use of a drug with no trials, no concern for possible harm or unintended consequences
She made similar points in new interview:
[Common Core standards] haven’t been tried anywhere, they’ve been tested — and we know that where they’re tested, they cause massive failure. So I would say we need to have more time before we can reach any judgment that they have some miracle cure embedded in them.
I know, and a lot of teachers know, they’re totally inappropriate for children in kindergarten, first grade, second grade and third grade, because when they were written there was no one on various writing committees who was an expert in early childhood education… They’re also totally inappropriate for children who have disabilities — they can’t keep up. There’s an assumption in the Common Core that if you teach everybody the same thing, everybody will progress at the same speed. And that’s not human nature. It doesn’t work that way.
Reveling In Repetition
When it comes to music:
[O]ver the past century, a number of composers expressly began to avoid repetitiveness in their work. In a recent study at the Music Cognition lab, we played people samples of this sort of music, written by such renowned 20th-century composers as Luciano Berio and Elliott Carter. Unbeknownst to the participants, some of these samples had been digitally altered. Segments of these excerpts, chosen only for convenience and not for aesthetic effect, had been extracted and reinserted. These altered excerpts differed from the original excerpts only in that they featured repetition.
The altered excerpts should have been fairly cringeworthy; after all, the originals were written by some of the most celebrated composers of recent times, and the altered versions were spliced together without regard to aesthetic effect. But listeners in the study consistently rated the altered excerpts as more enjoyable, more interesting, and – most tellingly – more likely to have been composed by a human artist rather than randomly generated by a computer.
Alexis Madrigal’s takeaway:
[Elizabeth Hellmuth] Margulis’ essay takes a fascinating turn to explain what it is about repetition that makes it so key to music. The secret, the evidence suggests, is that listening to music is an active process: We’re making the music in our heads as the sounds play our brains.
Bike Safety In Numbers
Lesley Evans Ogden visited seven cities where cycling is a common mode of transportation and concluded:
Safety improves in a city as the total number of cyclists increases. This effect has been seen in studies in Denmark, the Netherlands, 14 other European countries, Australia, and 68 cities in California. “It is likely that causation runs in both directions: safer cycling encourages more cycling, and more cycling encourages greater safety,” writes John Pucher, professor of Urban Planning at Rutgers University, in his 2012 book City Cycling, written with Ralph Buehler. Motorist behavior probably contributes to this phenomenon. In places like Copenhagen—where four out of five individuals have access to a bicycle—most drivers are also cyclists, and so are accustomed to sharing public space with bicycles.
Industrial Art
Jennifer Norman turns the camera on photography, capturing pictures of the environmental costs of the artform:
While pursuing a Ph.D. in photography at the University of Sydney, Norman spent four years photographing some of the heavy industries that directly and indirectly make photography possible, including oil refineries, pulp and paper mills, and chemical plants. “It was a way of making myself a personal experiment and trying to not ignore all the factors of production that I rely on every day to have the luxuries I have,” she said.
Photographers, it turns out, rely on more industries than Norman had time to shoot, including asphalt for roads to get to their subjects, chemicals for photo development, and power to operate their computers and other equipment. After researching various facilities, Norman traveled as much as 17 hours by car to make her photographs. She resolved to photograph alone and at night in order to recreate the fear that we push aside in our everyday lives in order to enjoy the fruits of environmental destruction.
Norman’s work is currently at the Pith Gallery as part of the Exposure Festival.
Why So Few Green Conservatives?
Sean McElwee blames messaging:
According to Dr. Robert Bartlett, chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Vermont, the problem has been framing. “Environmentalists tend to frame the issue in terms of harm and justice, while conservatives respond to in-group loyalty, sanctity, respect and stewardship.” Aaron Sparks, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Santa Barbara who is studying the issue with Phillip Ehret, finds that about 20 to 30 percent of strong conservatives hold pro-environment attitudes (meaning they are willing to sacrifice economic growth to protect the environment). But Democrats must be “smart about how they frame their appeal,” Sparks says. “Conservatives can be persuaded to accept the environmental argument if is pitched in a way that is consistent with their morality, which tends to emphasize the sacredness of nature and a focus on local, community-building issues.”
But a 2012 study finds that climate campaigns overwhelming continue to frame the issue as harm and care, fairness and oppression of marginalized groups.
The Best Of The Dish Today
First up: a must-read from the invaluable Marcy Wheeler on how the Obama administration has tried to protect the presidency from full accountability for the torture program. Could it be because the presidential authorization of torture also authorized drone strikes which the current president has embraced? Read the whole thing. As I said today, I now consider the White House to be part of the problem here, rather than part of the solution. And if the report on torture gets stifled permanently, it will be an unforgivable betrayal.
Four other posts worth revisiting: the cooptation of yoga; the grinding persistence of Obama’s agenda; a genius cartoon about where we are now in the gay rights debate; and Colin Powell’s awesome ur-selfie.
The most popular post of the day was The Way We Live Now followed by The Boring, Relentless Advance Of Obama’s Agenda.
See you in the morning – Pacific Time, that is, as I’ll be on Bill Maher’s show tomorrow night.
The Hounding Of A Young Gay Writer
So I’m perusing the web on the airplane to Los Angeles and saw a blast of incandescent gay fury all over the place. It turns out that Ezra Klein had the gall to offer a writing fellowship at Vox to one Brandon Ambrosino, a 23 year-old professional dancer who is a graduate of Liberty College, Jerry Falwell’s joint. Judging from the reaction, you might have thought Ezra had hired Rick Santorum. Oh! the screeds and harrumphs, the sighs and the gasps! Here’s the gay politburo official at Slate, Mark Joseph Stern, in a dreary tract against what he calls Klein’s “unbelievably bad hire”:
Ambrosino’s ideas are not brash, unconventional, exciting, or avant-garde. They are reckless, retrograde, and vapid—and hiring Ambrosino reflects startlingly bad, potentially catastrophic judgment by Vox.
“Potentially catastrophic!” A 23-year old who doesn’t parrot what the left likes could bring the entire Ezra Klein venture down! Not to be outdone, we get this from my friend John Aravosis:
While I think Brandon Ambrosino is sloppy, unimaginative, a bad writer, and a not-very-complicated thinker, my biggest concern is that he comes across, to me, as having an agenda that borders on animus … Brandon Ambrosino is the Allen West of homosexuality. He’s your go-to guy, if your goal has nothing to do with finding a legitimate minority voice on the issues of the day.
Notice the disturbing notion of a “legitimate minority voice.” And who decides what’s legitimate? Why John of course! As for the imputation of anti-gay animus: it’s as lame as neocons calling critics of Israel anti-Semites or self-hating Jews. Equality Matters calls him baldly an anti-gay apologist and then proceeds to tell us solemnly that
The announcement was met with widespread condemnation from LGBT activists and writers who called his hiring an “embarrassment” and a “major mistake.”
So, as you would, I went and read some of Ambrosino’s work. We posted about one recently but I hadn’t read much else. The most impressive by far is a funny, sometimes moving, self-deprecating and brutally honest memoir of his time as a gay kid at Falwell’s school. Maybe The Atlantic‘s editors made it better (as they do) – but as a piece of writing, it’s livelier and funnier than anything I’ve read from, say, Mark Joseph Stern. As for his other pieces, they do suffer from some occasional cluelessness and attention-seeking pyrotechnics. But is a young writer not allowed some attention-seeking pieces any more? And his critique of gay-left intolerance gains a little poignancy as the rhetorical lynch mob now prowls the interwebs in order to get him fired.
Here’s what I also found: He wants the gay rights movement to adopt more of the forgiveness and compassion that marked the spirit (if not always the letter) of Martin Luther King Jr. He gets a little grossed out by hyper-sexual antics at gay rights parades – which is a bit of a bore, at this point, but within his rights (and certainly something some gay people say sotto voce). He conflates too many issues when discussing gay identity – but, in his emphasis on choosing sexual identity, he echoes the new left rather than the gay right. Sure he trades on being the gay writer willing to criticize the gay world, but he seems perfectly sincere to me, if a little jejune. And why is he not allowed to criticize what he sees? Is he supposed to take some gay test before he’s allowed a voice?
He is unusual, in as much as his journey into gay life from religious fundamentalism inevitably makes his take on being gay a very particular – and fascinating – one. But guess what? Millions of gay people are born and brought up in fundamentalist Christian environments and families. Understanding their lives and finding a place for them in the world is something we should be striving to achieve rather than attempting to snuff out. And gays from fundamentalist backgrounds can help us engage in dialogue with some of our most dedicated opponents. What I found truly disgusting about some of the commentary is that they tried to portray the man as somehow a Jerry Falwell clone. That’s a deliberate lie and a smear. And it springs from anti-Christian animus.
Gabriel Arana flatters me thus:
Sullivan’s and Rauch’s positions are thoughtfully staked out and stem from nuanced views about the role of government, Ambrosino’s iconoclasm amounts to heedless self-promotion.
Yes, but no one’s making him the editor of The New Republic, are they? He’s just got a gig as a writing fellow at Vox, for Pete’s sake. Give him time and some mentoring and editing (which is presumably what such a fellowship is for), and his 23-year-old talent might indeed go on to become more thoughtful and nuanced. And why would these harrumphing lefties want to stop that?
Could it be because they don’t actually want to continue the dialogue with people of faith, but rather seek to leverage the growing majority in favor of gay equality to rhetorically bludgeon the “bigots” into submission, to create a world in which they call the shots the way homophobes used to? Could it be that they enjoy policing the discourse now that they seem in the majority? This latest surge of gay intolerance needs to be beaten back as forcefully as the anti-gay right’s cornered animus. It’s particularly brutal when that intolerance is directed at a young gay writer whose work and life are being trashed as somehow illegitimate. If anything is anti-gay in this kerfuffle, that is.
Suspected Of Being An Adult
Jamelle Bouie looks at a recent study (pdf) about our perceptions of black children:
Researchers used implicit association tests to gauge racial attitudes and observe how people perceived misdemeanor or felony acts. The results were startling. When comparing felony acts by whites, blacks, and Latinos, respondents overestimated black boys’ ages by 4.53 years. Police officers, who were also included in the pool of participants, overestimated their ages by 4.59 years. To put this in more concrete terms, when participants saw a 14 year-old African American boy, they perceived him as an 18 to 19-year-old adult. And the effect of this was to deny the presumption of innocence—after all, adults are seen as fully responsible for their actions.
Philip Bump puts the study in context:
In 2012, data from the Department of Education revealed that black students were far more likely than white students to face harsh discipline following infractions at school than student of other races. That sort of uneven system of discipline prompted the Obama administration to call for zero-tolerance policies to be dropped. If this study is any guide — and it’s only one study, of course — the tendency to give white kids the presumption of innocence and youth that isn’t afforded to black students might be one of the reasons for that discrepancy.
(Figure: “Officers’ average age estimation accuracy for child suspects of different races.”)
The Dish 