I used to write for an environmental magazine. I quickly found out that whenever you have a controversy over safety, the ultimate question is, "Who has the burden of proof?"

If you have the burden of proof to prove that a chemical is safe, you'll never prove it. Your opponents can simply raise the standard of evidence until you don't meet it.

If you have the burden of proof to prove that a chemical is dangerous, you'll (almost) never prove it. Your opponents can simply raise the standard of evidence until you don't meet it.

So you wind up having to make a judgment call on inadequate evidence. It's not as if there's a scientific argument on one side and ignorant anti-science people on the other.

But I think the Europeans should be able to make their own judgment calls. They're not luddites.

If you find that a chemical is harmful if you mix it in a mouse's drinking water, you've found causality -- in mice. That's not definitive evidence that it's harmful in humans, but it is evidence.

Yes, but that doesn't mean they're safe either. I think it's reasonable for Europeans to say that they don't want companies to go pouring a chemical in their environment until they've convinced people it's safe.

Well, which is it? Are they significantly harmful? Or just a little harmful? Or not harmful at all?

What is the economic cost of the chemicals -- in dollars? What is the economic benefit -- in dollars? That's what you need to compare.

The truth is that you don't know. You're just making arbitrary assumptions.

Yes, that's what I say. There is some evidence that chemicals like phthalates can disrupt sexual development in human embryos. They've gone through a deliberate scientific process. They've concluded, "There's no conclusive evidence one way or the other." Then what?

It's perfectly reasonable for environmentalists to say, "We want convincing evidence of safety, the manufacturers haven't prove it, we can live without phthalates, so we don't want it in our environment."

If you think environmentalists are irrational and anti-science, you ought to see some of the industry's economists. I used to read Sam Peltzman's articles. He said that if a drug is successful on the market, it must be effective. You don't need scientific evidence. If a drug sells for $100, it must be worth $100, otherwise consumers wouldn't buy it.

Conservative economists (when they testify for the chemical industry) believe that the free market is perfectly efficient, so if they can make money doing something, it must be good.

I don't believe that unemployment is lower when the minimum wage is lower. What's the evidence for that?

Let's assume per capita GDP is a meaningful measure of the country's economy. Another measure of the country's economy is the equality or distribution of income.

I'd rather live in a country with more equality of income, even if it had a lower per capita GDP. (And some economists argue that more equality would produce a higher per capita GDP.)

Since we can't compare alternative Americas, empirical examination of the data is the best evidence we have.

I'm saying that other industrial countries have higher minimum wages, greater equality, and still have high production and a pretty good quality of life.

The difference between a per capita GDP of $55,000 a year and $45,000 a year is not that dramatic. The difference between a country in which people are left to die of treatable diseases because they can't afford health care http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1... and a country where everyone gets needed health care is dramatic.

I don't care about high unemployment, if you also have a German- or Scandinavian-style social safety net, so that unemployed people can still maintain a comfortable life. In Germany, unemployed workers are paid almost as much as they are when employed. Some of them take additional training during their down time. Some of them were go on vacation. That's fine with me. The economy doesn't collapse just because you have 10% of the workforce on the dole.

I had friends in California when Reagan was governor. They were able to go on welfare, get enough to live on, go to the California state university system free, and get a college degree. California got a lot more scientists and engineers just as Silicon Valley was developing. I think that's good.

The US does have a per capita GDP of about $10,000 more than Germany ($45,000 vs. $55,000). OK.

Suppose you had 2 countries:

Country A has a per capital GDP of $55,000, but the distribution is unequal.

If you divide the country into quintiles, people in each category are:

Bottom 1/5 $13,750 a year

Next 1/5 $27,500

Next 1/5 $55,000

Next 1/5 $110,000

Top 1/5 $220,000

(which is roughly the actual income distribution in the US.)

Country B has a GDP of $45,000. But there is more equality. The distribution is:

Bottom 1/3 $22,500

Middle 1/3 $45,000

Top 1/3 $90,000

Which would you prefer? In country A, you have 1 chance in 5 of being in third-world poverty. ($13,750 is the per capita GDP of China.)

I'd prefer country B. In country B, I'm guaranteed a comfortable life.

Of course other countries have higher GDP per capita http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... All of the modern industrial countries are clustered in about the same range.

Besides, most of that $55,000 per year per capita GDP in the US doesn't go to me. It goes to people at the top of the income distribution, and since 1980 it's been going disproportionately to the people at the very top of the income distribution.

It's like the economist's joke: Bill Gates walks into a bar. The average income in that bar goes up to $100 million a year.

When I'm writing something, I like to run it past somebody who disagrees with me, to see whether I got anything wrong.

If this is the worst that you and jmac_the_man and cold fjord can come up with, I'm confident I got it right.

I don't know of any substitute. The nice thing about the WSJ was that I could get a complete overview of everything important in one place. You could read the front page of the WSJ every day in 5 minutes, and at least be aware of everything important.

The most important thing was that I could trust them to give it to me as straight as they could. If I read a story in the WSJ that a job training program wasn't working, I'd see right there that the reporter talked to people on all sides, looked at the evidence, and the evidence was that it wasn't working. It wasn't because one of the publisher's right-wing editors decided to attack job training programs.

(The NYT had those very problems of advertisers and publisher's calling the shots. For example, their second-biggest advertiser was the automobile industry. The publisher, AO Sulzberger, actually ordered his editors to run stories about how auto safety and pollution regulations were destroying the economy. He wrote a memo that got out. And they did a lousy job of covering the Vietnam war.)

I don't want to make it sound like I let the WSJ do my critical thinking for me, but they did a lot of the preliminary work.

So now I'm back to reading news media on all sides, and evaluating each story myself on a case by case basis. If I read the NYT, and Democracy Now, etc., with some effort I can figure out something close to the truth. I know the FT has a lot of fans, but I don't read it regularly so I can't evaluate it.

I mostly follow medicine right now, and the professional journals, like Science, New England Journal of Medicine, etc. do a pretty good job. Once in the while, the editors will go too far, and get fired, which is what happened at Journal of the American Medical Association and Canadian Medical Association Journal. Maybe that's proof that the editors are willing to push it as far as they can.

But there was a time when I could tell a college student, "Read the WSJ every day and you'll have a pretty good idea of what's going on in the world." I can't say that any more.

My sense is that Murdoch wants to use the WSJ for his propaganda, but he wants to maintain the pretense that it's still an accurate and objective newspaper, so he can't overdo it. Calling inheritance taxes a "death tax" in the news pages was overdoing it.

I remember when they printed that article, and people were complaining in the comments pages that the story was propaganda. The reporter apologized.

It's dramatically worse for black men. In some cities, a third of the young black men are in jail or otherwise in the criminal justice system. That seriously affects the marriage rates among black women.

A criminal record takes away opportunities for work, education, housing, and welfare.

It's like bringing back slavery.

The criminologists say that there's an aggregation phenomenon -- when you put criminals together in one place, they encourage and teach each other to become criminals. Go to prison and you'll learn how to steal a car.

That's why those boot camps didn't work. They would take young offenders, put them together, and have some father figure yell at them like an army sergeant. But when they put young criminals together, they actually taught each other that crime was acceptable. They wound up with higher re-arrest rates than offenders who didn't go through boot camp.

A lot of times you had some kid who was busted for grass, together with kids who had been committing car theft, burglary, robbery, etc. And they would fight.

They are also economically homogeneous. That is, they have almost no poverty.

I've compared the distribution of income in US and Scandinavian countries. You can divide US families into 5 levels based on their income. In Sweden, the bottom 2 levels are missing.

Swedes have the same income as the middle and two upper income levels in the US. They're all middle class and upper class, without the poverty.

http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cm...

Overview of Basic Data

(Number Of People Serving Time For Drug Offenses In US Prisons)

Federal: "Between 2001 and 2013, more than half of prisoners serving sentences of more than a year in federal facilities were convicted of drug offenses (table 15 and table 16). On September 30, 2013 (the end of the most recent fiscal year for which federal offense data were available), 98,200 inmates (51% of the federal prison population) were imprisoned for possession, trafficking, or other drug crimes."

State: "Drug offenders comprised 16% (210,200 inmates) of the total state prison population in 2012. Twenty-five percent of female prisoners were serving time for drug offenses, compared to 15% of male prisoners. Similar proportions of white, black, and Hispanic offenders were convicted of drug and public-order crimes."

Here's somebody who developed that idea for the BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal) and made a good argument for the racism motivation.

http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2015/...
Art Cohen and Selwyn Ray: The lessons of late April in Baltimore
8 May, 15
BMJ

After years of suffering and resignation about disrespect and mistreatment at the hands of local police, young and older African-American residents of inner city west and east Baltimore, joined by others, came together these past two weeks to say: “we’ve had enough.” The spark for this was the fatal injuring, while in police custody on 12 April, of 25 year old Freddie Gray, who died a week later on 19 April. Gray was a resident of the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood and also a childhood victim of lead paint poisoning. He was arrested for making eye contact with a policeman and then trying to run away. His death acted as the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

Fortunately, the Baltimore City States Attorney took swift action on 1 May to charge all six police officers implicated in the death of Freddie Gray.

Lesson #1—The public’s health includes being free not only from the threat of gun violence, but also from the violence suffered at the hands of police officers and other government agencies.

Lesson #2—A long history in Baltimore and elsewhere of police disrespect and abuse of authority eventually can become intolerable and lead to explosions of public outrage, some of which may include violence against property or persons. The relentless, massive “war on drugs” is largely responsible for this police abuse. America’s longstanding decision to criminalize the abuse of drugs has virtually eliminated the practice of requiring “probable cause” for arrests, and has led to thousands of lives damaged and wasted by wholesale warehousing in jails and prisons.

Lesson #3—This specific public outrage about police misconduct is fueled by a broader and deeper public outrage at the severe economic, social, and health disparities which have persisted for many years within some Baltimore City neighborhoods.

https://www.themarshallproject...
04.29.2015
Q&A
David Simon on Baltimore’s Anguish
Freddie Gray, the drug war, and the decline of “real policing.”
By Bill Keller
(The war on drugs led to ignoring the Bill of Rights.)
Probable cause was destroyed by the drug war.
the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism.

I'm in the news business. This is a right-wing attack job.

In my professional judgment the WSJ used to be the best, most reliable news source in English. Then Murdoch took over, and turned it into a right-wing propaganda sheet. It was a tragedy. This crowd-sourcing of Hillary's emails is maybe the worst example of their partisan bias and seeking sensationalism.

I read the WSJ daily for 40 years (along with the New York Times, Washington Post, and professional magazines like Science and JAMA). I used to pick up their stories, and interview the same people they interviewed.

I knew reporters who wrote for the WSJ. I believed, and most journalists I knew agreed, that the WSJ was the best newspaper in the English language. The reason I liked it was that the news sections were as objective and fact-checked as humanly possible, and one of the few publications not influenced by advertisers and political pressure from the publisher. They really were fair and balanced.

The WSJ's defining moment was in the 1950s when they got leaked photos of the new model GM cars, which were a big trade secret. GM threatened to cancel their advertising if they published it. The WSJ told them to fuck off. Newspapers didn't do that. It was a long time before they accepted GM's advertising again.

An editor at McGraw-Hill once told me that if he picked up a story from the NYT, he would have to check it for accuracy, but if he picked up a story from the WSJ, he could take a chance without checking because he could depend on them to get it right.

If I read a story in the WSJ, I could depend on them getting everything right. (The quick formula is, get all sides; and especially if you attack somebody, get their side too.)

I remember one story on welfare reform in California in which the reporter quoted everybody, from the governor's assistant in charge of welfare, to the supervisors, to the caseworkers, to several welfare mothers. The story made it clear that welfare "reform" wasn't working, merely harassing welfare recipients and making it harder for them to get back on their feet.

A. Kent Macdougal was a WSJ reporter until he retired to teach journalism. He wrote an article in Monthly Review, the marxist magazine, about his experience. (Can't find it online, sorry.) He said that in his career in the WSJ, he could write whatever he wanted, as long as he followed the formula for getting all sides and supporting every statement with documented facts, even though he was a socialist who was criticizing the capitalist system in the WSJ's own pages. The WSJ was one of the few places where you could read news stories that actually criticized the American free-market system, and stood up to companies like GM. I follow health care and drugs, and the WSJ published some of the great exposes of drug companies and the medical establishment.

The ironic thing about the WSJ was that they had a very liberal news section, and a very right wing editorial page. I used to enjoy the editorial page because every day they would publish a tightly-argued, logical, well-documented right wing argument, and I would have to figure out where they made their mistake. Sometimes I had to agree that they were right, and they changed my mind. That's a good editorial page. However, there was a sharp division between the editorial section and the news section.

When Rupert Murdoch bought the WSJ, it was a tragedy for journalism and even for democracy, because the WSJ was the best thing you could read to be an informed citizen and voter.

Ironically, the best business story the WSJ ever did was their coverage of the takeover of their own newspaper by News Corporation. They gave the whole background of the ownership and control of the WSJ, and how the older generation of the Bancroft (sp?) family was committed to the mission of great journalism, but the younger generation just wanted to get higher dividends. And some of those editors and reporters, who knew they would be leaving, gave the best story ever of how unethical and contemptible Murdoch was. For example, he agreed to kill News Corporation's coverage of China's human rights abuses in order to get his satellite system into China.

When Murdoch took over, my journalistic instinct was to try to be fair to the guy and see whether he would actually destroy the WSJ as people feared. Unfortunately our worst fears were right. I could see in the paper that they were changing the way they covered stories. Instead of objective stories that quoted all sides, they started taking sides -- on the right. It was like the old cold war comic book, "What would America be like if the Communists took over?" with the right wing instead of Communists.

I remember one story, about worker's disability payments, where they went through an entire database and found the one federal disability judge who was most generous to applicants, and did an expose on him. He retired. But they didn't follow up with disabled workers who were unfairly denied claims, as the old WSJ used to. The old WSJ used to be fair and get both sides.

Here's a story from the NYT that documents pretty well how the WSJ has gone from the most respected, objective news source to a Republican propaganda organ. Now when (if) I read a WSJ story, I have to ask myself, "What did they leave out because the publisher, or some big business like GM, didn't like it?" like any other newspaper.

Every kid who snapped a picture or wrote an article for the school newspaper does have copyright ownership of that work. He can assign part of the rights to the school to use them in a yearbook.

Interestingly, copyright rights can only be assigned in writing, in my understanding. If I write for a publication, we usually have some back-and-forth emails in which we discuss the terms under which I'm writing it, and the rights that I'm transferring.

If I were the kid's lawyer, I'd ask the principal for the written contract the school and the kid signed for transfer of the rights to the photographs to the yearbook. If the principal can't present a signed contract, he doesn't have any rights.

From the article:

Hateful comments? Call somebody a Nazi, go to jail.