Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

The Real Inflation Crisis: Flattery Inflation

Posted on July 21, 2021 by Michael Froomkin

Like Digby, I found a lot to like in Paul Krugman’s recent column on how the Trump wing of the GOP (can you call it a ‘wing’ if it’s more than 3/4 of the whole?) has for several years increasingly resembled a cult of personality as exhibited in dictatorial regimes.

Signaling is a concept originally drawn from economics; it says that people sometimes engage in costly, seemingly pointless behavior as a way to prove that they have attributes others value. For example, new hires at investment banks may work insanely long hours, not because the extra hours are actually productive, but to demonstrate their commitment to feeding the money machine.

In the context of dictatorial regimes, signaling typically involves making absurd claims on behalf of the Leader and his agenda, often including “nauseating displays of loyalty.” If the claims are obvious nonsense and destructive in their effects, if making those claims humiliates the person who makes them, these are features, not bugs. I mean, how does the Leader know if you’re truly loyal unless you’re willing to demonstrate your loyalty by inflicting harm both on others and on your own reputation?

And once this kind of signaling becomes the norm, those trying to prove their loyalty have to go to ever greater extremes to differentiate themselves from the pack. Hence “flattery inflation”

Krugman points to Xavier Márquez’s paper, The Mechanisms of Cult Production as the go-to reading here, but anyone who remembers Trump’s creepy cabinet meetings 1 will find the current reality distortion field in Mar-a-Lago to be just more of the same.

  1. For an example, see In Cabinet meeting, Pence praises Trump once every 12 seconds for three minutes straight.[↩]
Posted in Politics: US | Comments Off on The Real Inflation Crisis: Flattery Inflation

The Rent is Too Damn High

Posted on July 20, 2021 by Michael Froomkin

Lots of news outlets picked up on this report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition stating that there is no place in the USA where a person with a 40-hour minimum wage job can afford a two-bedroom rental.

I’m very much for greater equity, and I think it’s likely true as a general matter that this is a particularly bad time for new renters due to the house-buying mania plus the moratorium on evictions (both of which restrict supply of available rentals), but at a first glance this report seems to have some issues.

For starters, they stacked the deck by pricing 2 BR rentals with one worker with one job and no overtime. Why does a single person need a 2 BR to live? Or even a couple without kids? I agree that in a wealthy country like ours, decent housing ought to be a basic right, but does decent housing mean a 2BR for everyone?

What this report suggests to me is how tough things can be for a single parent, but even then in most states a single parent on 40hrs minimum wage ought to get various kinds of aid, e.g. food stamps, sometimes section 8 housing vouchers [which admittedly can be hard to use] or maybe the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), plus Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), plus now child subsidy. There’s no sign the report took account of any transfer payments at all nor that it took any account of family circumstances.

Also is it weird to think that maybe many single minimum wage job holders might live in shared housing? Have half of a 2BR? Or a share of a house? When I was a single law clerk I lived in an efficiency, not even a 1BR.

Yes, a two-parent household with kids often has to have at least 2 jobs, maybe more, to hope to make ends meet, and that is a real problem, but that isn’t what this study says, and that isn’t what got into the headlines (e.g. CNN, “Minimum wage workers can’t afford rent anywhere in America“).

And, oh yes, the numbers they used probably are too general to support the scare headline. To identify the cost of rent they use a HUD number, the FMR, which is based on an entire metro area. As the report itself notes, “The FMR is usually set at the 40th percentile of rents for typical homes occupied by recent movers in an area. FMRs are often applied uniformly within each FMR area, which is either a metropolitan area or nonmetropolitan county. Therefore, the Housing Wage does not reflect rent variations within a metropolitan area or nonmetropolitan county”.

In other words, in a large metro area, there could be less expensive parts of town with substantial amounts of more affordable if less desirable housing, but the FMR for the city/county could be pulled up by having lots of more expensive housing too.

This is not my subject, so I’m very open to correction, and I don’t want to suggest there is not an unequal income crisis, which in turn feeds a housing crisis, but I think this particular report is more advocacy than serious research. And thus, I suspect, it’s not actually the case that there are no places in the US where adequate housing can be afforded by a single person on a minimum wage and by couples on two minimum wages. Maybe it won’t be a great neighborhood, it likely will not be a 2BR, maybe even shared housing, it may be older, but I have a strong suspicion that it often exists. Not, perhaps, in San Francisco and a few other outliers, but likely much more often than this scare headline suggests?

Posted in Econ & Money | Comments Off on The Rent is Too Damn High

SSRN has The New Authoritarianism in Public Choice

Posted on July 13, 2021 by Michael Froomkin

For a good time, see David Froomkin and Ian Shapiro, The New Authoritarianism in Public Choice (July 10, 2021).

Abstract
Much early public choice theory focused on alleged pathologies of democratic legislatures, portraying them as irrational, manipulable, or subject to capture. Recent years have seen the emergence of a new strand of argument, reaffirming the old skepticism of legislatures but suggesting that transferring power from legislatures to chief executives offers a solution. Just as the earlier prescriptions ignored the pathologies of the agencies empowered to check and constrain legislatures, so the new scholarship overlooks the pathologies of executive power. The primary sources of congressional dysfunction call for reforms that would strengthen Congress instead of hobbling it in new ways that exacerbate the drift toward authoritarian presidentialism in the American system. Executive aggrandizement is a consequence of decades of institutional malfunction, worsened by right-wing attacks on legislative capacity. This has been the enduring impact of the public choice movement since the 1950s, but its twenty-first century offshoot is especially malign.

Note: I am not related to Ian Shapiro.

Posted in Readings | Comments Off on SSRN has The New Authoritarianism in Public Choice

Some People Can’t Stand This

Posted on July 9, 2021 by Michael Froomkin

If you are not subscribed to the weekly Short Circuit summary of interesting (primarily) appellate cases, then you ma be missing a lot of summaries about important cases involving civil liberties, especially (these days) strange affirmances by courts of appeal of qualified immunity decisions in police violence cases. Sample:

Coleman County, Tex. jailer watches a suicidal man wrap a phone cord around his neck and pass out. Instead of calling 911, the jailer calls his boss, who arrives ten minutes later. Only then does the jailer enter the cell, unwrap the cord, and call paramedics—but neither try to resuscitate the man, who dies. Fifth Circuit: Qualified immunity. Dissent: “Qualified immunity is not the judicial equivalent of the Armor of Achilles, an impenetrable shield that governmental actors can wield to insulate themselves from liability no matter how flagrant their conduct.”

You are certainly missing out on consistently dark, or at least grey, humor such as this:

Gov’t contractor affixes ankle monitor to one-legged man waiting to stand trial on gun charge. Guess which leg. While the man’s prosthesis and monitor stay at home, he commits a murder. Can the victim’s family sue the gov’t under the Federal Tort Claims Act for negligently hiring the contractor—a company knee-deep in litigation for a history of falling down on the job? D.C. District Court: No.

And yes, both the court and Short Circuit had the good grace not to suggest that plaintiffs did not have a leg to stand on.

I’m not 100% on board with the sponsoring organization, the Institute for Justice, but it’s often out there where libertarianism meets liberalism, so there’s considerable common ground. And the newsletter is consistently good.

Posted in Law | Comments Off on Some People Can’t Stand This

Well That Didn’t Take Long

Posted on July 1, 2021 by Michael Froomkin

Remember that nutty DeSantis-inspired law that would make it illegal for some, but not all, large social media companies to ban politicians from their platforms?

On Wednesday US District Judge Robert Hinkle issued a 31-page preliminary injunction blocking it.

Or, as Ars Technica summarized it, “Judge tears Florida’s social media law to shreds for violating First Amendment: Judge blocks Florida law, calls it example of “burning the house to roast a pig.”

It wasn’t a gentle ruling; the Ars Technia piece linked above hits the (many) high points.

Gavel image licensed under Creative Commons  CC BY-SA 3.0 by Alpha Stock Images.

Posted in Florida, Law: Constitutional Law, Law: Free Speech | Comments Off on Well That Didn’t Take Long

We Robot Will Be Held in Person this September!

Posted on July 1, 2021 by Michael Froomkin

[x-post from werobot2021.com]

We’re delighted to announce that We Robot 2021 — our 10th anniversary edition — will be held live and in person at the University of Miami’s Newman Alumni Center. Workshops take place on September 23, and the main conference will be on Sept. 24-25. For the latest information about our terrific schedule see the We Robot 2021 Program page on this blog.

Admission to We Robot requires registration, and while there may be tickets at the door if space is available, we strongly advise advance registration as space will be limited due to the University of Miami’s requirement that seating respect its social distancing rules.

We are still accepting proposals for our Poster Session until July 15, 2021.

Starting with its first edition here in Miami, We Robot has sought — we think successfully — to create and encourage interdisciplinary conversations about robotics (and AI) law and policy. We now have a decade’s worth of success at evolving a common vocabulary and a body of work which includes bedrock scholarship for the rapidly expanding fields represented at the conference. We have fostered, and continue to foster connections between a diverse, international, and interdisciplinary group of scholars, ranging from graduate students to senior professors to persons in government and industry. And — not least — we’ve had a lot of fun doing it.

Given the circumstances, we anticipate having a lot of (careful) fun in September. Please join us!

We strongly advise that attendees be vaccinated against COVID-19, and we may require proof of a recent negative COVID test from persons who cannot demonstrate they have been vaccinated. Masks may be required in the conference venue. Please monitor our website and the University of Miami’s COVID response page for the latest COVID-related information.

Posted in Robots, Talks & Conferences | 1 Comment