The Liberal Order

A Johnston County teen brings a gun to school . . . so what's next?

Here are a few reasons why someone may have a gun on campus:

1. They intentionally want to murder innocent students, teachers, and staff
2. They want to protect themself from an immediate threat, which then threatens innocent bystanders
3. They forgot to keep it at home after a weekend of hunting

The problem is that ex-ante we cannot know the intent or the reason why the person bringing the gun to school did so, therefore make possessing a gun on school property a per se violation punishable by expulsion or at least a long suspension. If we cannot know the intent of the gun toter before any shots are fired, then punish a gun toter for the simple act of brining a gun to school.

Now, in the case of David Cole Withrow of Johnston County, North Carolina, he realized that he had accidently brought the gun to school with him after a weekend of hunting and immediately went to school officials to inform them of his mistake and to ask their permission to take it home.

Mr. Withrow appears to be a clean-cut kid, and Johnston County is certainly known for hunting, with all those Jim-Bobs and Skeeters living in the woods over yonder, so having a hunting rifle in your vehicle is not out of the oridinary. Maybe reason should have prevailed and the school official grant him permission to take the gun home, with a warning that the next time will be treated as a violation of the gun policy. But no, school officials immediately called the police, Withrow was suspended, and he is currently being told that he will not graduate with his classmates.

If you want kids who accidentally bring guns to school to never reveal their error, and in fact to possibly compound the problem by hiding the gun on their person or in an unsecured place where someone with evil intent can get to it, proceed to harshly punish Mr. Withrow and make sure that reason will never prevail when a bright and otherwise cooperative student attempts to rectify a mistake.

Oh, whatever happened to the good ol' days.

Sometimes lottery games result in statistical anomalies.

The winning combination in the state’s twice-a-day Pick 4 lottery turned out to be 1-1-1-1 on Saturday night, and it also turned out that 1,995 tickets beat the 1-in-10,000 odds of matching all four digits in order, state officials said Sunday.

Story here.

This reminds me of the time 19 people picked 5 out of 6 winning numbers of the Powerball Jackpot (no one picked the powerball), each one using the numbers they found in their fortune cookies. 

 

A Puzzle For Bryan Caplan

Bryan Caplan has argued that higher education is largely signaling rather than improving students' human capital. He uses as proof the argument that when a professor cancels a class, students largely rejoice rather than lament the loss of a learning opportunity.

I have a solution/test/challenge for Bryan. If higher education is all about signaling, try this. Next semester go to your first class and tell your students the following. 

I want to be here three hours per week for the next fifteen weeks no more than you do.* So I propose the following:

After today I won't hold any more classes for the remainder of the semester. I will simply assign every student a final letter grade based on random drawing. Ten percent of you will receive an A; fifteen percent a B; sixty-five percent a C; and ten percent a D. There will be no Fs.  You will not have to waste your time listenting to me lecture and I get more time to engage in actual productive activity.

Let's see how many students take him up on his offer. If it's all about signaling, then students should jump at the opportunity for a 90% chance of earning a C or above without having to even attend more than one class. Even if you were to offer equal chances of being assigned either an A, B, or C (i.e., 33.33% each), my guess is that you would meet a lot of resistance from students, especially those with higher GPAs. If you argue that well certainly A students won't take a chance of earning a C, you are implicitly agreeing that grades reflect human capital achievement. 

* If it's indeed all about signaling and not about improving human capital, then it must be totally tedious to teach such under-performers. 

A very touching story . . .

. . . about the plight of a homeless teen who will be attending Harvard in the fall.

During that sophomore year, the family’s personal belongings were auctioned off. That cost Loggins many of her childhood belongings, she says. But the junior year was one of achievement, capped by an appointment to Governor’s School last summer in Raleigh.

Putnam drove Loggins to the camp and brought her back home when it was finished. Loggins says she tried calling her parents near the end of camp, but their phone service had been cut off.

“When she returned,” Putnam says, “the parents were gone.”

Shane moved in with friends in Hickory and will graduate this week from high school there, having received a college scholarship himself.

Dawn Loggins says she later learned her parents had moved to Tennessee. Initially, she stayed at friends’ houses, sleeping on their couches. But with the help of Putnam and others, Loggins found a temporary home with a friend’s mother, Sheryl Kolton, custodian at Burns Middle School.

“Sheryl gave me stability,” Loggins says. “Because of her, I could stay at Burns. There wasn’t the drama of another school change.”

Cornerstone Dental Office in Shelby supplied Loggins with a lot of personal belongings, and others in the community stepped in.

So it was with college. Loggins was accepted at UNC Chapel Hill. But Carol Rose, a volunteer who had helped Loggins fill out college applications, asked her, “Why not aim high?”

Rose told her to try for Harvard. The acceptance letter arrived about two months ago. Accompanied by her boss, Burns High custodian Junie Barrett, she visited the Ivy League campus recently.

Let's expose more of these personality defects!

A Brief History of Credit Card Users

A 1968 survey found that only 17 percent of Americans had credit cards, as opposed to the 62 percent who had gas cards. A 1971 study in the Journal of Marketing found that men who used credit cards were disproportionately affluent, urban and more likely to agree with statements like “I like to think I am a bit of a swinger.”

Those who didn’t use credit cards led more restrained lifestyles. Men without cards disproportionately believed that “hippies should be drafted,” that “liquor is a curse on American life” and that “a woman’s place is in the home.”

Story here.

 

Should It Be A Crime to Use A Washing Machine to Give Your Baby A Bath?

There are two reasons for charging and prosecuting someone for criminal behavior or negligence: one is about retribution and the other deterrence. 

The first says that you punish a wrongdoer as retribution for his or her misdeed(s) - you harmed somebody so we're going to harm you back. The other says that we punish a wrongdoer now to deter others from acting similarly in the future.

Watch the video below of a man (presumably the father) putting a child in a washer at a laundromat and then closing the door. It could have ended tragically, but it didn't. Luckily, an attendant at the laundromat was able to disconnect power to the machine and then open the door.

 

Now, do you not charge the father for child endangerment given that a) the child was not physically harmed, and b) it was probably just a stupid prank gone amiss, not an actual intent to hurt the child?

The principle of retribution says to let it go; he learned his lesson the hard way. The principle of deterrence says to charge him and penalize him so that any person who thinks about doing something like this in the future will think twice knowing they'll likely face criminal charges for their act.   

This actually happens more than you would think. But I'm also not certain that charging the father will deter that many people from doing something like this again. (Though you can never know the successes of such a deterrent.) Few people will ever know about his criminal charge and maybe a video like this going viral has far more of a deterrent effect than convicting him of negligence and child endangerment. And if someone can attach his name to it, a little shame might deter others as well.

UPDATE: New Jersey's prosecutor decides to not press charges against the man.

"By looking at the video it is clear there was no attempt to harm the child," he said.

Here is the New Jersey statute regarding child endangerment.

Cruelty to a child shall consist in any of the following acts: (a) inflicting unnecessarily severe corporal punishment upon a child; (b) inflicting upon a child unnecessary suffering or pain, either mental or physical; (c) habitually tormenting, vexing or afflicting a child; (d) any willful act of omission or commission whereby unnecessary pain and suffering, whether mental or physical, is caused or permitted to be inflicted on a child; (e) or exposing a child to unnecessary hardship, fatigue or mental or physical strains that may tend to injure the health or physical or moral well-being of such child.

Emphasis mine. I'm not certain the prosecutor doesn't have a case, but again, there appears to be no willful intent to harm the child. The prosecutor is accepting the retribution argument rather than the deterrent argument. 

Education and Intelligence Are Not the Same Thing

Nor is IQ the primary predictor of success.

Research carried out by the Carnegie Institute of Technology shows that 85 percent of your financial success is due to skills in “human engineering,” your personality and ability to communicate, negotiate, and lead. Shockingly, only 15 percent is due to technical knowledge. Additionally, Nobel Prize winning Israeli-American psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, found that people would rather do business with a person they like and trust rather than someone they don’t, even if the likeable person is offering a lower quality product or service at a higher price.

As Woody Allen noted, "Eighty percent of success is just showing up." And as Harry Banks once said, "For success, attitude is as important as ability."

For this and last year's graduates, it is very important that you convey not only your abilities and how you'll create value for the firms to which you are applying, but also signal your personal worth and how you'll be a good emotional fit within the company. 

Do as I say, not as I do.

In a story about something that actually occurs more often than you would think, a woman responds to the question of whether she would stop to steal (yes, it is stealing) money on the highway dropped from an armored car.

"Of course I would," she said. "If the armored car had been in an accident of something, I'd make sure the drivers were OK and I'd call 911. But I'd put as much money in my pockets (as I could) and run."

Obviously the woman has questionable morals. "Questionable" because maybe she's not familar with Kant's categorial imperative, but she does seem to have it at least partially in mind when she makes the following statement:

But what if her kids were there? "I absolutely would not take any money," she answered again without hesitation. "I wouldn't want them to get the message that grabbing money that is not yours is the right thing to do." 

Another guy later in the article notes:

[H]e would get out to pick up the cash, with a few conditions. If he had kids and they were in the car, he wouldn't do it. He also wouldn't risk his safety.

Parents, kids learn by your actions, not by your words. They are fully aware of hypocrisy when they see it, especially when they can pin it on their parents. 

Your pop caught you smokin' and he said, "No way!"

That hypocrite smokes two packs a day.

Lastly, this comment from a different clown:

Another kind of karma occurred to Dennis Lowe, 30, of Providence, R.I. He said it's simple human nature, especially if the money is from an armored truck. He said plenty of Americans are fed up with banks, insurance companies and other corporations that move cash in armored trucks.

"The money is insured," he said while waiting downtown for a bus. "They've been taking money from me, so it's just karma."

First, that money stolen is paid for by the rest of us in the form of reduced stock returns in our retirement portfolios, lower wages, or increased prices.

Second, in a world of specialization and voluntary exchange, how have banks, insurance companies and corporations taken money from Mr. Lowe without his willing consent? Oh I know of one all-too-common way, a way that maybe, just maybe, legitimizes stealing from the government. (I disagree with this too, but can see how people legitimize it.) But don't blame companies for getting rich by enriching you. 

BTW - Speaking of armored car mishaps, watch this humorous documentary of a Loomis Fargo theft in Charlotte, NC in 1997. 

Markets In Everything; There Is No Great Stagnation . . .

. . . whatever, this is one of those.

The Bodymetrics Pod, which launched in the United States during the Denim Days celebration at a Bloomingdale's in Los Angeles, uses Kinect for Windows to digitally ogle your curves and body-map your butt. This is all in the name of hooking you up with a pair of jeans that will flatter you rather than make it look like you crashed into a denim factory at 55 mph.