A Clean Slate For Property Rights, Entities, Federalism, And Related Matters

There are some economic and legal reforms which are hard to make now, but starting with a clean slate would have been better to have made differently, or which are just structural reforms.

Mineral Rights And Water Rights

* All mineral rights should be owned by the government and merely leased by firms exploiting them.

* The rights of surface owners of land over mineral rights leased by the government should follow the Colorado rule (which requires underground mining that preserves the rights to support of the surface owners) and not the Wyoming rule (which permits strip mining).

* All water rights should be owned by the government and leased annually to water users. All water users in the same watershed would pay the same lease rate based upon an auction. Market failures and transaction costs cause inefficient overallocation of water at very cheap prices to agricultural users to the detriment of fishing, recreational use, and municipal water use.

* Grazing land would be primarily publicly owned with the right to graze cattle on open ranges leased.

Wildlife Management

* To the extent possible, management of wildlife populations with natural predators, like bears, wolves, and mountain lions, would be preferred to hunting.

Real Property Rights

* Legal life estates and other present and future interests in real property should not be permitted. Someone wishing to create the equivalent to a life estate could establish a trust in which some beneficiaries had equitable life estates and others had equitable remainder interests. Existing legal life estates could be deemed to be trusts in which the present interest holder is the trustee for the benefit of themselves and all future interest holders.

* The race-notice statute should be modified so that a person with an interest in real property created by a written instrument could only benefit from the notice provisions for up to four months from the date of the instrument to gain priority over a recorded instrument creating rights in land. Written instruments creating an interest in real property that are more than four years old would be subordinate to the rights of the owners and encumbrances of record.

* Judgment liens would be possible to record against all real property in the state owned by a debtor in a single state filing.

* Ancillary probate of real estate would be replaced with a requirement to give full faith and credit to an executor, personal representative, or administrator appointed in the place of domicile, subject only to state homestead exemptions.

Property Taxes

* Education would be funded through state income, sales, and gifts and estate taxes, not through local property taxes.

* Non-profits, including churches and state government property, would not be exempt from property taxes, but state government property would be assessed at the state level rather than at the local level.

* Property tax assessors, and state and county treasurers, would be civil service appointments, not elected.

Limited Liability Entities and Judgment Liens

* Ownership interests in entities would have to be recorded with a state registrar, although this information would only be available to interested parties. 

* Trusts would be registered with the state registrar rather than with courts of probate jurisdiction.

* Trusts and estates would be treated as entities for state law purposes.

* Judgment liens should be possible to record against all interests in entities in a state with a single state filing.

* All limited liability entities would be required to be bonded against the claims of trade creditors and insured to standards established by regulation, with the bonding agent and insurers made a matter of public record. The directors, officers, managers, and partners of the entity would have joint and several personal liability for any failure to do so, guaranteed by the owners if they, collectively, were unable to satisfy any debts of the company that should have been bonded or insured.

Local v. State Authority

* Occupational licensing in the construction trades, and building codes, should be regulated at the state level, rather than the local level.

* Local governments should not be permitted to have their own courts and instead would enforce their rights, including ordinance violations, in the appropriate state courts.

* Local governments should not be permitted to enact ordinances for which incarceration is a penalty, other than contempt of court punishments for violations of injunctions previously imposed against a particular defendant in a state court proceeding brought by the local government against that particular defendant.

* Zoning and use regulation by local governments would be limited at the state level.

Copyrights and Intellectual Property

* Copyrights should have a much shorter term, such as the pre-1976 rule of 26 years from publication and an additional 26 years if a copyright registration is renewed, which a separate regime protecting the exclusive right of the authors to publish and register unpublished works. Works not published within 26 years of the death of the author would be in the public domain. This might be accomplished with a one time buyout of existing copyrights more than 52 years old at fair market value or a nominal amount for unmarketed and unappraised copyrights.

* There would be mandatory licensing of copyrighted works, handled by one or more non-profits for performances of all musical works, all orphan works, translations of works for which had not been translated into a particular language pursuant to a license within some designated period of time after the publication of the work in its original language, and almost all other derivative works.

* The scope of the derivative work right for copyrights would be greatly narrowed.

* Statutory damages for copyright violations would be abolished. Economic damages for copyright violations would be limited to unjust enrichment relative to licensing the work, or lost profits relative to licensing the work, whichever was greater.

* Common law trademark rights in trademarks not registered in the principal register under the Lanham Act (including rights under state trademark filings) would be exclusively a matter of federal law.

* Rights of publicity would be exclusively a matter of federal law.

* Royalty income from intellectual property would be taxable where the sale giving rise to the transfer takes place, not where the owner of the intellectual property is domiciled.

Federal Court Jurisdiction

* Federal court diversity jurisdiction not involving international diversity would be abolished.

* Federal question jurisdiction in cases between private parties not involving other specific grants of federal court jurisdiction (e.g. in the cases of intellectual property, civil rights, certain class actions, and election law cases) would be abolished.

* Federal crimes for matters that can be prosecuted under state law, like bank robbery, intrastate controlled substances violations, and most murders, would be repealed.

* Felonies committed in Indian Country would be governed by new Indian Country District Courts and a U.S. Court of Appeals for Indian Country, and a related Indian Country law enforcement agency, rather than by the relevant U.S. attorney's office and the FBI.

* The lowest level immigration offense of illegal entry would be made a civil offense governed primarily by the immigration courts, and decriminalized (this makes up a significant share of the total criminal docket in many U.S. District Courts).

* The immigration courts would be reformed and made Article III courts. A right to an attorney at public expense would be established in the immigration courts.

Red County And Blue County Realities

The realities of life in conservative leaning (red) parts of the United States are different than in liberal leaning (blue) parts of the United States. Roughly speaking, these distinctions play out not so much at the state level as at the county level. This post explores some of the differences in lived realities for people in blue counties compared to red counties that helps to explain their stark political differences in the U.S. as part of a more cohesive narrative that can help build understanding about their true causes. Of course, even this rather lengthy list is far from comprehensive.

Economic Productivity and Population Density

Per capita GDP in blue countries is roughly twice what it is in red counties. This is huge!

The population density in the inhabited parts of blue counties is much higher than the population density of red counties and "purple counties" which are evenly balanced between liberal and conservative leanings, tend to have intermediate population densities which are often suburban.

Ski resort towns and other counties with tourism based economies (e.g. greater Las Vegas) often have low population densities when crudely comparing permanent residents to the land area of the county, but have large swaths of land where no one lives with small dense resort style housing areas which house many seasonal residents in addition to permanent residents.

The link between economic productivity per capita and population density isn't accidental. One of the most consistent empirical laws of economics is that higher population density leads to greater productivity which makes it possible to pay higher wages and necessary to do so in a competitive employment marketplace. It holds true across cultures, across geographical regions, and across thousands of years. It has been true all of the way back to Jericho and Sumer and the Nile River Valley and the Indus River Valley to the present. It was true in the pre-Columbian Americas in North America, in Mesoamerica, and in South America.

Transit and Electric Vehicles

Public transportation is more cost effective and provides better service in higher population density blue counties than in lower population density red counties.

Red counties also have longer average motor vehicle trips than blue counties, because people are spread out further from each other, and longer average trip lengths (and longer peak monthly and annual trip lengths) disfavor all but the very latest electric vehicles relative to gasoline and diesel vehicles.

Housing, the Cost of Living, and Wages

The cost of living is much lower in red counties than in blue counties. This is mostly driven by lower housing costs in red counties (both renting and owning) than in blue counties relative to median wages, and by lower business real estate costs in red counties relative to blue countries that indirectly impact retail prices.

Lower housing prices in red counties mean that homelessness is much less of a crisis in red counties than in blue counties.

The pressure to increase the minimum wage is greater in blue counties where the cost of living is higher than it is in red counties where the cost of living is lower. A "living wage" in a blue county is higher than the "living wage" needed to maintain the same standard of living in a red county. 

Slower home price appreciation in red counties than in blue counties also means slower property tax increases over time.

Lower home prices in red counties also mean that red county homeowners who have owned their homes for many years have much less wealth in the form of home equity than blue county homeowners who have owned their homes for comparable periods of time.

A lower cost of living also places less pressure on red county residents to set aside savings that build wealth, than blue state residents who know that they need to save money to be able to afford a security deposit or down payment for a home, to afford education for their children which is critical for a blue county child's future income, and to afford other major purchases. Of course, lower incomes also make it harder to save money.

But with little home equity if they sell their homes, and less savings, and a higher cost of living in blue counties relative to incomes for less educated and less skilled worker wage premiums in blue counties, many residents of red counties are basically trapped there. They can't afford to move to a blue county even if they'd like to do so. The jaws of the trap are even tighter for red county residents with no blue county residents who are no longer working and are on fixed incomes.

Blue counties have higher housing costs because their populations tend to grow faster than the housing supply as people move their for their larger number of jobs that pay better than in red counties. 

About half of red counties, if not more, are losing population while their housing stock remains more or less the same, and even those red counties that have growing populations are growing slower than blue counties, so it is easier for the construction industry to increase the supply of housing enough to keep up with the slowly growing population. Moreover, in many red counties, populations have been declining, stagnant, or at least below the national average, relentlessly, for decade after decade pretty much starting in 1960s and almost every decade since in the last sixty years. Indeed, the percentage of the population engaged in farming has declined for almost every single decade from the 1790s until into the 2000s. These long slow declines undermine even hope for an eventual recovery or stabilization.

Since housing prices in red counties seem likely to fall, or at least only keep up with inflation, this also makes investing in maintaining and improving homes in red counties a bad investment. In contrast, in blue counties with every soaring real estate prices, keeping a home well-maintained and up to date with renovations and improvements can yield disproportionate returns, causing the existing housing stock in blue counties to be in better shape and more up to date.

More educated and skilled workers make much more income in blue counties than in red counties, which more than makes up for the higher cost of living there. Less educated and skilled workers also make more income in blue counties than in red counties, but not enough to make up for the higher cost of living there.

Tighter economic circumstances and economic stagnation in a community, also fosters zero sum game thinking, and eats away at empathy as taking care of your own becomes your priority. All potential forms of competition, from international trade, immigration, female workers competing with male workers, and non-white workers competing with white workers, all starts to look like a threat in this mindset, whether or not this is true. And, older white men without college educations, in particular, who are the core of the MAGA movement have seen their demographic's economic prosperity decline in relative terms to lots of other groups (even if it has not actually meaningfully declined even after adjusting for inflation and their own costs of living are low), through events taking place mostly in their own lifetimes.

Fertility

It is more expensive to raise children in a blue county with its higher cost of living, than in a red county. So, families in blue counties are smaller, with fewer children in response to those realities. Blue county children are also more likely to need and benefit from expensive higher education (which red county voters don't want to support funding for since higher education confers a much smaller benefit to them than it does to the children of their blue county peers).

The expansion of economic opportunities for women also greatly increase the opportunity costs for all women, in blue counties and red counties alike, of having more children. This opportunity cost has caused the number of children per woman per lifetime to fall particularly fast for less educated women who previously weren't qualified to be teachers or nurses, and had few options other than being house wives, but can now work in a variety of less skilled jobs previously held predominantly by men.

This has made the "trad wife" ideal unattainable for most families, but especially those consisting of non-college educated couples with lower incomes who need two incomes just to support themselves and one or two kids. But when women are less economically dependent upon their husbands and often have steadier and better paying work than their husbands, then families are less tight economic glue holding them together, and a provider man's position as "head of the household" is undermined.

Nostalgia

In a red county that has been stagnant or in decline for half a century or more, nostalgia for the "good old days" can be intense. High school educated people used to have incomes proportionately much closer to those of college educated workers and managers, even if the absolute buying power of those workers hasn't actually fallen, and this has gotten steadily worse since the early 1970s. In contrast, blue county college educated men have seen uninterrupted prosperity (and a lot more men have college educations now than in the 1970s). Women have seen their access to higher education and to more remunerative employment in non-traditional professions soar. Minority members are much less shut out of the top levels of the career ladder than they were in the 1960s even if they haven't reached parity, improving in relative terms. High school educated men have stagnated, in part, because of the structure of the economy (it is important to recognize that the two and a half decades after World War II were a remarkable one time only exception that can't be reproduced for the most part, and not the norm), and in part, because the average was being pulled up by smart, socially functional men who had no access to college educations then and now have gained college educations leaving their less bright and more difficult peers behind in a new economy. 

Civil rights aren't a zero sum game, but it is easy for a high school educated man prone to feeling aggrieved for economic reasons to see it that way, and women and minorities have secured a lot of civil rights that they once lacked. 

Smaller and less stable families for all but billionaires or near billionaires, it seems, has also undermined and narrowed the role of men as fathers of many children, something was was commonplace for middle class men in the Baby Boom era (although people forget that this time period was also one with much higher poverty rates than those of today until the "War on Poverty" rebalanced the status quo a bit).

The patriarchy has weakened, and they are the heirs of the patriarchy. So, of course, they yearn for the good old days, even though that was facilitated by key factors that can't be recreated with new policies.

Unions

The union narrative of the left is that unions brought us the weekend, the 40 hour work week, overtime, workplace safety, employer provided health care, and more. And, this isn't wrong. But it is incomplete.

Unions facilitate turning the economic power of workers into concrete economic gains for them in an efficient manner. But this facilitation and negotiation and political action related role only works at times when the demand for the labor of the unionized workers is great and the supply is smaller.

When there is a glut of less skilled, less educated workers, because the economy has been transformed to be less labor intensive, through automation, for example, and because other countries long ago restored the manufacturing capacity that was destroyed in World War II and no longer need to import manufactured goods to the same extent, unions don't provide workers with much in the way of concrete benefits because they don't have much to negotiate with. 

Likewise, part of the shortage of workers during the Baby Boom was because women left the work force en masse to have kids (a desire deferred during the Great Depression and World War II which were times of great scarcity), reducing the supply of workers and leaving the men who  re-entered the work force after World War II in greater demand with more economic power. This also won't recur. The many men who died or were seriously injured in World War II also shrunk the supply of able bodied adult male workers in the U.S., which is certainly not something we would like to repeat.

This, in a nutshell, is why private sector labor unions have declined steadily until just a few years ago (when worker economic power and demand was near a prolonged record high also accompanied by prolonged record low unemployment). For decades they couldn't deliver. And, since the labor market is weaker in the less productive red county economies, unions are even less effective in red counties than they are in blue counties.

Employers never like unions, but in red states, there isn't an intense worker desire to protect unions because they provide minimal benefits there, so the legal balance has tipped against unions in red states with things like "right to work laws", while in blue states, where the strong economy gives workers more power and unions more to bargain with, the balance between unions and management legally and politically has been more stable, because unions in blue states can deliver more to workers who therefore have a more intense desire to support them politically against employer attacks.

Religion

Being religious provides few economic and educational benefits to college educated upper middle class people, and can be a hinderance. And, it provides only modest economic and educational benefits to working class girls. But it provides great economic and educational benefits to working class boys (both black and white).

Religiosity is also strongly associated with uncertainty in life, especially economic uncertainty. Less educated people, on average, are at much higher risk of unemployment and prolonged unemployment during their working years. Farmers and fishermen are also subject to great uncertainty in their economic prospects due to factors like weather and the availability of fish from year to year than even "middle skilled" workers in blue counties and "urban farmers" (who work in truck gardens or indoor marijuana grows).  So, people in red counties are more likely to see religion as more important in their lives even controlling for whether they are religiously affiliated or not.

Red counties (especially in the South, in Utah, and in other Mormon dominated counties) have a far greater percentage of Christians with far less denominational variation than blue counties. Red counties are far fewer religious non-Christians (e.g., Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists) than blue counties do. So, religious diversity is not part of the everyday experience of residents of red counties.

Family Stability

The same economic instability and uncertainty, and lack of economic prosperity that makes red county residents more religious also dramatically influences their family stability.

The biggest predictor of whether a cohabiting couple will not marry, or whether a married couple will divorce, in basically every culture, is whether the woman in the couple earns more in the cash economy than the man. And, men without college educations, who make up a disproportionate share of men in red counties, are much more likely to have sustained periods of unemployment and to have mediocre earnings that have been stagnant, adjusting for inflation, for decades, than men with college educations (or even "mid-skilled jobs" and some college) in blue counties.

Also, high school educated women who leave the work force to have kids for a while receive few, if any, economic penalties to their earning capacity when they return to the work force, while college educated women who do that see their earning capacity when they return to the work force plummet. And women in red counties are much more likely to obtain some level of post-high school education than men. Indeed, programs to help women improve their education and skills often succeed in improving the economic well being of women, while programs to help men do the same rarely attract interest from men or have much of an impact.

As a result, couples with high school educations are failing to marry (the average high school educated couple has a child two years before getting married while the average college educated couple has a child two years after getting married and does so at an older age), and getting divorced when they do marry, at unprecedented high rates (in white couples echoing trends that started to appear with black couples without college educations in the late 1960s, as discussed for example, in the Moyihan report at the time).

In these breakups and divorces, where the inability of the man in the couple to be the stronger economic provider in the relationship is a key cause of the breakup, the man also has little if any ability to pay child support and alimony, or to provide a significant property division settlement (i.e. the legal rights a woman gains from being married).

The economic struggle that high school or less educated couples have to stay employed and earn a decent income after decades of wage stagnation for high school educated workers, also makes these families much more vulnerable to situations where they neglect or abuse their children, often resulting in a termination of parental rights or just child protective service intervention.

Both unstable couples, and neglect/abuse situations, means that many red county children often grow up without their father as part of the household for prolonged periods of time (echoing the experience of African-American children half a century earlier).

These trends are also exacerbated by the trend towards assortative marriage. There are fewer marriages in which one member of a couple is college educated and higher earning and the other is not college educated and has lower earning capacity. In part, this is because people have long tended to marry people of similar IQ, but now higher IQ women obtain college educations, while historically, this was much less common.

So, red county families are vastly more fragile than blue county families. This has led to a perennial state of moral panic in red counties about masculine identity and "family values" which when viewed as a moral problem prompts an attack on perceived sources of immorality and lost of masculine identity, which has led red county men to try to express their insecurity about their masculinity by trying to display that in ways other than being an economic providers, and by scapegoating LGBT people.

In contrast, college educated couples, who are much more common in blue counties, are much more likely to marry before having children, and have divorce rates that are falling to levels not seen since the 1960s.

Higher Education

In blue counties, higher education programs at all levels from certificates to associate's degrees to four year college degrees greatly increase your earning potential and pay for themselves in as little as a year or two, and usually in less eight years for all but the least qualified students in the least technical programs.

In red counties, higher education programs other than four year college degrees are a net money loser even at low community college tuitions when living at home, and even a four year degree can take as much as twenty-four years to pay for itself with higher earnings.

This is fundamentally because urban areas with healthy economies have productive ways to utilize the skilled and abilities developed in college, while rural and small town economies don't have jobs that productively utilize what someone learns from a college education.

See here and here.

Immigration

Blue counties have greatly disproportionate shares of immigrants and, in particular, disproportionate shares of immigrants who are settled residents of their communities rather than migrant workers living semi-nomadic lives. Due to their familiarity with immigrants in their daily lives, residents of blue counties are much less afraid of immigrants, who they know from experience to be good community members (at least to the same extent or more than native born members of the community) and who they know from experience are not disproportionately likely to commit crimes.

Red countries have a disproportionately smaller share of immigrants, who are often limited primarily to medical professionals and migrant farm workers. Due to their lack of familiarity with immigrants and the lack of a healthy economy, red county residents are much more likely to fear immigrants. Attitudes towards immigrants and globalization is also influenced by the reduced likelihood of red county residents to have had any higher education (as discussed above), or to have travelled abroad or to have lived in very different places within the United States (as discussed below).

Travel and Migration

Residents of red counties are much less likely to have a passport or to have traveled abroad than residents of blue counties. They are also less likely to have spent significant amounts of time living in places in the United States other than the vicinity of the place that they grew up, and even when they have lived elsewhere are likely to have lived somewhere else quite similar to the place that they grew up.

Studies of cousin marriage have shown that people in cousin marriages are less economically successful on average, primarily as a consequence of being less likely to leave the community where they grew up to move to larger cities.

Race

Some counties are overwhelmingly white, and those counties tend to be red counties that are rural or small town settings, especially in Appalachia, the rural Midwest, and much of the mountain states. The main exceptions are in New England (e.g. rural and small town areas in Vermont and Maine and Western Massachusetts) and counties defined by college towns.

Counties that are majority non-white tend to be blue counties even if they are similar to red counties in other respects, these include most of New Mexico and parts of Southern Colorado, counties with Indian Reservations (from Oklahoma to Arizona to North Dakota), and much of rural Hawaii and Alaska.

Quite a few red counties, however, are biracial. They have a white majority, and a non-white minority, usually black in the South and the Rust Belt, usually Hispanic in the Southwest, and sometimes Native American in countries near Indian Reservations and in Alaska (in the case of Alaska Natives) that don't actually have Indian Reservations or Alaskan Native communities. Few red countries, in contrast, and many blue counties, are genuinely multiracial, with significant numbers of people from more than two races or ethnicities.

Age, Health Care, Disabilities, and Credit

Residents of red counties tend to be older than residents of blue counties (except that Mormon dominated red counties tend to have younger residents).

Blue counties have more specialized and higher quality medical care available, and more medical professionals per capita than red countries which have a greater need for medical care due to their older populations. Blue states also tend to have fewer people who are uninsured since unlike some red states, they don't intentionally turn away free federal funds for Medicaid expansion and mostly don't provide state funding for health care beyond the federal minimum contribution. 

Red county residents have less interaction with medical professionals, especially medical doctors, than blue county residents, and a greater proportion of medical doctors in red counties are foreign born than in blue counties, which can impair the quality of doctor-patient interactions and communication.

Red county residents are less likely to have good health care outcomes following trauma incidents and strokes than blue county residents since they are less likely to reach a trauma center or top quality hospital during the "golden hour." More generally, red county residents have less first hand experience with what top quality modern health care can accomplish, on average, than blue county residents.

Red county men in the work force are much more likely to be employed in jobs with highly elevated rates of occupational injuries (like farming, fishing, timber work, mining, and construction) than blue county men in the work force.

A greater proportion of workers in red counties have physically demanding jobs that make it far more common for these workers to become disabled or forced to retire at younger ages than in blue counties.

Higher percentages of the population that are uninsured, and general lower levels of economic security among high school educated people who are more common in red counties also mean that average credit ratings are much lower in red counties than in blue counties, and that a very substantial proportion of the population in red counties have money judgments outstanding that can cause their wages and bank accounts to be garnished and their property seized, which can build animosity towards the legal system, and distrust of law enforcement officers who enforce judgments and of financial institutions in red counties. In blue counties where economic prosperity is more often uninterrupted and adequate health insurance is more common, in contrast, credit ratings are higher, money judgments are much more rare, and trust in the civil courts and financial institutions is much greater. Lack of health insurance also breeds justifiable fear of interactions with the medical establishment which can lead to financial ruin for many red county residents, while it rarely has that effect for blue county residents.

Self-Respect and Fragile Self-Esteem

The non-college educated white men at the core of the MAGA movement have taken immense blows to their self-esteem in many cases, and if they haven't have seen friends and neighbors who have.

The fact that they didn't go to college or went and didn't graduate brands them as a failure. They have failed to be reliable and prosperous economic providers. They have often failed to hold together intimate relationships and marriages. They have often failed to fulfill the expectations of society for fathers. They are often reliant on government payments, perhaps disability payments or SSI or Social Security, even if they earned them, rather than earning money from meaningful work.

In the MAGA heartland of West Virginia, 20% of the state's entire GDP consists of federal spending in the state less federal taxes paid from the state, and this is true of basically every county. Even if some of this is subtle, like Medicare and Medicaid provided health coverage, or a Social Security disability pension that was someone's only option to survive, a disabled man of working age who worked in physical labor all of his life, still sees receiving this support as a blow to his sense of self-respect which leaves his self-esteem as something fragile to prop up by means other than being an economic provider. Receiving government aid can feel bad even when you need it and it makes you better off because it is a constant reminder of your own failures.

Cursing the federal government and claiming you can be independent of it, reality be damned, can help compensate for the blow to one's self-esteem and self-respect that flows from being dependent upon it, even though it is counterproductive (at least in the short term) to do so.

Veterans, Hunters, Dangerous Animals, Law Enforcement Response Times, Firearms, And Crime News

Men in red countries are much more likely to be military veterans, than men in blue counties.

Men in red counties are much more likely to have engaged in recreational hunting than men in blue counties.

The higher proportion of men in red counties who are military veterans and/or have engaged in recreational hunting, means that men in red countries are much more likely to be gun owners than men in blue counties, and in particular, are much more likely to own firearms other than handguns.

Due to lower population densities in rural America, where the vast majority of counties are red counties, the average red county resident is a much greater distance from the average law enforcement responder than the average blue county resident, and as a result law enforcement response times to 9-1-1 calls are longer in red counties than in blue counties. Encounters with dangerous wildlife are also much more common in red counties than in blue counties. These circumstances creates a greater perceived need to own firearms for self-defense and the defense of others in red counties than in blue counties.

Also, while blue county news reporting typically covers a whole metropolitan area, resulting in a constant stream of news about violent crime, red county news reporting is typically hyperlocal, covering only a portion of the county around a small town, resulting in fewer reports of violent crimes near the people reading it, even though their crime rates per capita are actually higher. So, red counties tend to be perceived as less crime ridden than they are, while blue counties tend to be perceived as more crime ridden than they actually are. This interferes with the ability of people in red counties to see the connection between their high rates of firearm ownership and lax gun control enforcement and the rates of suicide and homicide and police use of firearms that they experience. In contrast, the connection seems stronger than it is in blue counties, because there is so much crime to cover in a populous metro area that only the most serious violent crimes which often involve firearms, receive news coverage, creating the perception that this is the most typical kind of crime in blue counties even though this isn't the case.

Economic Prosperity Is Not An Intrinsic Function Of Geography

Taiwan is the dominant producer of advanced computer chips in the entire world. One could ask "why?" One could also reframe the question and ask, "why aren't advanced computer chips manufactured in California or Michigan or Ohio or Massachusetts? 

There is a lot of concern that rare earth metals are predominantly sourced from China. If there was ever a war with China, that could be a problem, because a lot of advanced military equipment relies upon them. There has been a fair amount written about this issue. Despite the name, unlike diamonds and platinum group metals which have deposits only a few places on Earth, for example, rare earth metals aren't actually particularly rare. There are many places on Earth with abundant rare earth metal deposits and there was a time when they were mined in the U.S. and many other places. 

China is dominant in rare earth metal production because it is the low cost producer of a resource that there wasn't all that much demand for until recently. And, while it is the low cost producer, it isn't all that dramatically cheaper. The difference between the production costs for oil in low cost production areas like Saudi Arabia and high cost production areas like off shore drilling in the Arctic and fracking in the U.S. is greater than the differences in the cost of exploiting rare earth metals in China compared to doing so in the U.S. before the industry more or less withered away here.

There is no intrinsic reason that the dominant diamond cutting center in the world is a single city in India, or that it movie industry is concentrated in "Bollywood". 

There is no intrinsic reason that the financial industry in the U.S. is highly centralized around centers in New York and San Francisco, that the commodities trading industry in the U.S. continues to be highly centralized in Chicago, that a huge share of American actuaries work in Connecticut, that Delaware is the dominant player in the corporate law of big businesses, that the book publishing industry is centered in New York City, the U.S. movie production is concentrated in Los Angeles, that U.S. TV and music production is split between Los Angeles and New York City (except for country music which is centered in Nashville and Memphis in Tennessee), and that new musicals and stage plays in the U.S. are highly concentrated in New York City, that the U.S. robotics industry is centered in Boston, ands the the U.S. tech industry has its headquarters in San Jose. Vancouver, Toronto, and Prague have no intrinsic advantage that make them secondary centers for filming movies and mini-series.

Indeed, intrinsic availability of natural resources or intrinsic geographic advantages is something of a curse to economic development. West Virginia's abundant coal resources (like other centers of coal mining in Europe) did not make it rich. The unique in the world supplies of diamonds and platinum group metals in a small area of South Africa weren't all that important in its relative prosperity on the African continent. Yemen's optimal farming conditions haven't made it prosperous. Western Pennsylvania's oil reserves didn't bring that region lasting prosperity. The unique in the world supplies of ultra-pure quartz in Western North Carolina didn't make that region particularly affluent.  Bolivia isn't particularly prosperous despite having some of the richest supplies of lithium in the world. Panama's unique location and its canal have not made the country an economic standout with respect to its Latin American neighbors. Venezuela's rich supplies of oil haven't prevented it from being an economic basket case. Afghanistan's abundant poppy fields didn't stop it from being the poorest country in Eurasia. In India, the standard of living of a place is basically inversely related to its geographically determined agricultural productivity.

Economic prosperity does show sharp breaks at national and subnational borders. But it is even more tightly tied to particular, reasonably compact, urban centers, and sometimes even to particular neighborhoods within major urban centers. The boroughs of Queens and Staten island aren't the source of New York City's dominance in finance, entertainment, or publishing. When professionals and craftsmen with similar sets of skill are located close to each other there are synergies that benefit these entire economic communities and allow them to achieve excellence. Knowledge based economies have returns to scale.

Our Diets Are Not Getting More Toxic

More children died of starvation in the United States 90 years ago, in 1934, than in any other year in the last century plus.

So, don't believe the utter bullshit implication of the following meme which is has a bogus and misleading implication, and is basically a bald faced lie fueled by ignorance and hysteria.

 

The idea that "new" food is making us sick couldn't be further from the truth. Little things like iodized salt and enriched flour have made us vastly healthier today. 

Not "eating local" has prevented myriad deaths from famine and has greatly reduced malnutrition too. 

Our very civilization's existence hinges on the fact that almost none of us grow our own food as our primary source of sustenance.

The fact that we understand what ails us, and can give it a name, rather than merely chalking most deaths up to "natural causes" is not a bad thing. You can't cure a disease you don't know that you have.

Most Construction Work Should Relocate To Factories

Manufacturing large modules for a building off-site and then assembling them in a couple of days on site has all sorts of benefits over on site stick built construction. And, this is one area where China is far ahead of the United States in technology and economic organization.

U.S. construction firms, to a great extent, operates like pre-industrial craft shops in the manufacturing industry, that never updated themselves to the modern, maximally automized and optimized factory production model.

Manufacturing large modules for a building off-site in construction projects is significantly cheaper than getting the same work done on site.

The number of workers required is significantly lower without the hurry up and wait of traditional construction projects. You can spread the work over the entire years rather than being limited by weather to the building season, which provides more stable employment with a steady paycheck and regular hours. Workers at a factory can live close to a factory whose location never changes that can be transit accessible, and workers who drive to work can use designated factory employee parker that doesn't disrupt the neighborhood where they are working. Factory workers can use real bathrooms with running water and sinks, instead of porta-potties and sometimes hand sanitizer, and can enjoy pleasant break rooms with refrigerators and microwaves and nice coffee machines and TVs, or go to familiar neighborhood restaurants to have lunch. 

In contrast, in the status quo, most construction work is seasonal, workers work unpredictable long hours when conditions are good and have unpredictable unpaid interruptions due to weather and other onsite project delays associated with sequencing tasks in the complex PERT chart that face all sorts of random interuptions, and workers have to drive to different construction sites on a daily or weekly basis all over the region where their construction firm operates. 

On site workers swamp the neighborhood's publicly available parking on and off for weeks, have to use grotty temporary toilets, often can't wash up with running water, constantly contend with dust, mud, dew, frost, wind, chills, heat, pre-existing electrical and gas lines, darkness, glare, and construction debris at sites whose configurations constantly change even during the course of a single construction project.

For example, many of my Colorado relatives on my father's side, are dry land farmers on the Eastern Plains which occupies them during planting and harvesting season, and then migrate to Front Range cities and mountain towns for construction work much of the rest of the year to make ends meet. not that I'll ever really get why they sink so much multifaceted skill and expensive land, water rights, and equipment into something so uncertain due to fires, droughts, hail, etc. and so unprofitable in all but the best of years.

When you construct a building on site, you need to negotiate new combinations of subcontractors on a project by project basis and have only limited control over how those subcontractors do their jobs, which adds a great deal of administrative and management expense, while impairing quality control, uniform safety rules, and efficiency. In a factory, in contrast, you don't have to renegotiate the organizational structure of the factory for each new project.

Since everyone in a factory is an employee you can impose stricter quality control and safety rules and use workers more efficiently. It is easier to get workers in a factory who smoke to do so in designated areas that spare fellow workers secondary smoke and prevents fire risks,  than it is to enforce that at an on site construction project.

In onsite construction, construction workers are notorious for showing up late or not at all. This isn't simply a matter of construction workers being worse people than other employees. 

An office or factory worker can follow a routine and let habits take over, and when they arrive, what they need to start working will generally naturally and almost automatically be in place be virtue of the structure of the workplace which doesn't change much. And, office and factory workers aren't exposed to the same risks of occupational injuries and illnesses (and the away from work time necessary to treat them), that on site construction workers are on a daily basis.

In contrast, construction workers have to have the bandwidth every day to keep up with a constant barrage of changing schedules at different places with unfamiliar transportation times to get there due to traffic and construction and have to keep track of all the tools, equipment, safety gear and supplies that they need for each particular job. Often, at least somebody has been hurt or get sick from events at some previous job (often different jobs for different workers). And, those construction workers aren't conditioned to the expectation that everything will be on time, because often it isn't and they don't feel the obligation to hold themselves to higher standards. The delays that foster disrespect for exact work times flow, in part, from the fact that project managers need to make sure that everything the workers need before they can do their job from permits, to prior steps in the construction process, to construction waste dumpsters, to portable toilets, to heavy equipment, to parking spaces for worker vehicles, to partial road closures is in place before those workers show up in a process that has to be repeated from scratch with every new job and has numerous potential chokepoints that can stop everything, even before considering weather conditions and supply chain issues that add additional layers of unpredictability to the process.

When you hire general contractors and subcontractors to do on site construction, the workers generally have to pay force and finance their own equipment and tools, sometimes financing it with their own subpar credit or cutting corners on what they buy because they can't afford the best equipment and tools for the job. And, the financing costs of those equipment and those tools, and a profit margin on those purchases, gets passed along to the general contractor and the owner of the land buying the building. But, in a factory, the factory owners can buy the optimal equipment and tools with a much lower financing cost, and any profit margin is collected only once at the factory level rather than at the general contractor level and at each layer of subcontractors right on down to individual employees of subcontractors who supply their own tools and equipment and safety gear.

The predictability of the in-factory part of the construction process also makes it easier to manage the cost and timing involved in procuring the necessary construction materials. Less uncertainty about when you will need construction materials, which is subject to constant rushes and delays in on site construction, means you don't need as much warehouse and construction yard space. But you also have fewer surprises about what you will need when, which allows you to shop for deals better and allows you to avoid paying premium prices when supplies are in the highest demand at particular points in the construction season that the weather allows.

Workplace injuries are an order of magnitude lower and tend to be less serious. The work environment can be better controlled, can be monitored and improved upon over time as the same space is used for one project after another. The work is done in a temperature controlled setting that is dry and has good lighting, where everything is in a familiar place that you don't have to relearn with each new project. The factory is free of the dust, mud, frost, dew, bugs, wind, excessive heat, cold, construction debris, and pre-existing natural gas and electrical lines that are ubiquitous in on site construction. Random strangers and neighbors are much less likely to wander into a factory than a construction site. Only absolutely necessary final assembly work takes place at great heights, or in windy or wet or dark or high glare conditions.

The amount of building material waste is an order of magnitude lower and you can be smarter and more efficient about what you do about the waste that you do generate. For example, it is much easier to pre-sort construction waste into five different kinds of materials each with different recycling options that don't have to be landfilled at a factory than it is to do that on site. And, the temptation to throw out, useable bits of leftover lumber or screws or paint from one job rather than trying to save it and reuse it on another project is much smaller in a factory setting. You can also power your tools and equipment with electricity from a greener, cheaper, and more efficient power grid at a factory, while you frequently have to resort to on site diesel generators in traditional on site construction projects.

The precision and quality control in the final building is greatly increased, which also makes the finished building better at withstanding storms and minor earthquakes which aggravate weaknesses caused by minor imperfections. Concrete components that can be made in the factory can be made in optimal temperature and moisture conditions that aren't dependent upon the whims of the weather which can impair their quality. The materials in the building also aren't exposed to weather that can cause them to be damaged or deteriorate for long periods of time from heat and cold cycles, warping from sun exposure, and moisture during the construction process. 

You can use heavier machinery that is better for getting certain parts of the job done efficiently and well, rather than being limited to what a construction worker can carry. You can also build with heavier building components (e.g. large cast metal or wooden single beams with no subparts that provide weak points) rather than multiple smaller components fitted together on site like smaller girders or pieces of wood that are screwed or nailed together, even if larger building components are better from an engineering and architectural perspective, but aren't used because workers at a construction site can't easily carry them to the places where they need to go (e.g., in the interior of higher stories of multistory buildings).

You don't need to tie up expensive and scarce tall building cranes at the job site for long periods of time. 

The disruption to people in the neighborhood where the building is going up is vastly less because there is so much less on site construction time. You still need to prepare the foundation and water main, sewer, and utility main hookups in advance which can't be done in just the flashy three stories a day of onsite construction of the building itself that is shown in the video. So it isn't quite as instant as it seems. But you are still talking a few weeks instead of a few months or couple of years of disruption to the neighborhood. And, when a stick built mid-rise building looks complete on the outside it is really only about 50% done, while a modular build like this is is more like a week or two away from being ready for occupants to move in since the interior finishes and electrical and mechanical work is mostly already in place.

The inspection and permitting process for the factory made components can be done on a predictable and routine basis in the factory, rather than making every inspection a scheduling chore and bottleneck in the process that has to be coordinated on a job by job basis that requires the inspector to climb all over half-finished buildings often many stories tall, on a construction site at critical points in the course of the project whose timing is hard to predict.

Some of the cost benefits just boil down to economies of scale. It is more efficient to add plumbing and electrical fixtures to a hundred bathrooms on an assembly line at a factory, to have twenty subcontractors add these fixtures to an average of five bathrooms each in two or three buildings each, in a work load often interspersed with a decent share of repair work in existing buildings. But the construction industry in most major metropolitan areas, where about 80% of the U.S. population and where an even larger share of new building construction takes place, is large enough to support building component factories large enough to benefit from these economies of scale.

Also, in the current site built construction paradigm, to get any kind of meaningful construction economies of scale at all, you have to build a lot of nearly identical buildings next to each other in Levittown style residential subdivisions or giant multi-building apartment complexes, or office parks, or industrial parks. But, in a factory build module system, most of the economies of scale happen at the factory, so you can get most the same construction efficiencies of scale by building thirty similar office buildings that are spread out over infill sites spread all over a metropolitan area, as you can from building all thirty office buildings right next to each other in a massive, single use office park. As it happens, that isn't how it is actually done in China, which builds massive apartment complex and office parks and rapidly builds whole new towns and cities from scratch on green fields several times a year. But it could be done that way in the U.S. where the pace of development, even in the fastest growing metropolitan areas, isn't nearly as frenetic, because the U.S. economy is more mature and has already done a lot of the economic development that it needs to do over many decades. The U.S. economy hasn't had the pace of rising demand for new construction that China is experience since the 1950s and 1960s.

The construction industry has been stubbornly unable to materially improve its productivity, cost structure, and quality for decades. It has one of the highest rates of workplace injury and death in the entire economy (neck and neck with farming, fishing, and mining). And construction defeats in the site built construction paradigm are routine, can be expensive to fix, and can lead to long, complicated, and expensive construction defeat litigation.

Greatly increasing the share of construction work that is done in factories could revolutionize the industry in a way that is cheaper, faster, safer, and far less prone to construction defects and the litigation and insurance costs that go with it. It would create a better situation for construction workers, would be more environmentally sound, and would dramatically reduce the impact that construction projects have on the neighborhoods where they a located.

Doing more construction work in factories wouldn't solve the affordable housing problem by itself. In places with soaring housing costs, rising land values are more of a problem than construction costs which are often only a minority of the total cost of housing and have been quite stable over time and between markets compared to land values. But, even if the construction module factories had a higher profit margin, they would still materially reduce the cost of building new housing which would help address the affordable housing problem.

Sunday Musings

 * The United States is deeply politically and culturally divided, and it has had a few political dynasties. But, ultimately, the U.S. has at least largely resisted the hereditary principle and clan politics. We have oligarchies of big corporations, but those big successful corporations, while not entirely free of it, are not hotbeds of nepotism either. Father to son CEO succession happens, but it is rare, and tends to happen second tier businesses not in big national S&P 500 companies.

* We are approaching a point where it may make sense to declare war on both Iran and its proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and Iranian militias in Syria and Iraq. The Houthis have directed piracy and missiles at commercial ships in the Red Sea and their insurgency has led to one of the worst famines in the world in Southern Yemen which has historically been the bread belt of Arabia. (It is worth nothing that both sides of the civil war in Yemen are united in their hate for the United States.) Hamas carried out the October 7 attack and has continued a suicidal response by Gazans to Israeli retaliation. Hezbollah in Lebanon has been lobbing artillery and missiles as Israel for decades. Iranian missiles recently killed a detachment of U.S. troops in Jordan. Iran has fired several hundred missiles at Israel in the last few days, has been in multiple skirmishes with U.S. Navy forces in the Persian Gulf, and has terrorized commercial traffic in the Persian Gulf.

* The U.S., admittedly, plays an important part in Iran's ascendancy. U.S. support for the Shah in Iran played an important rule in the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran that put the current regime in place. Sanctions the U.S. pushed for caused Iran to develop its own domestic military production (something similar happened as a result of sanctions in Israel, in South Africa, and in Turkey), and also pushed Iran into Russia and North Korea's circle of allies. U.S. military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan defanged Iran's neighbors who were among its greatest military adversaries. Dislodging the neo-Communist dictatorship in Iraq opened the door to Iranian backed Shiite party political gains there. Encouraging Arab Spring revolutions in Syria contributed to the Syrian Civil War that still isn't over and has created a vacuum for Iranian backed militias there.

* Golf courses are a waste of water in the arid west:

About 1% of total Colorado water consumption goes toward golf courses (this is about 5% of non-agricultural water use):

In its 2021 economic and environmental impact report, the Colorado Golf Coalition, a collection of state organizations, reported that the industry’s water consumption represents less than 1% of the state’s 2018 total — 41,213 acre-feet, compared with 4.7 million acre-feet for agriculture, the largest consumer.

It also touts the positive environmental impact of its more than 33,000 acres of greenspace statewide, of which a little more than 16,000 acres constitute irrigated turfgrass, species like bluegrass that can endure high traffic and low mowing heights ideal for golf. That’s more than 17% less irrigated acreage than in 2002.

By region, the courses in the Denver metropolitan area account for more than 43% of the irrigated acreage. Since the 2002 measurements, Colorado courses have increased use of reclaimed water and significantly reduced use of municipal sources.

Still, golf courses have joined lawns as targets for restrictions in places like Aurora, where Mayor Mike Coffman invoked the “new reality” of water scarcity in Colorado in support of a proposed ban on new courses — unless they employ the buffalo and blue grama long a staple on the Eastern Plains — as the city looks at limiting grass yards, medians and decorative office park areas.

In fairness, golf courses in the arid west have made very significant efforts to reduce their water consumption; far more significant efforts than agricultural users have.

* Agriculture and evaporation consume all but 18% of water in the Colorado River basin (and that 18% includes a significant portion for lawns and golf courses). About 70% of agricultural water is used for cattle feed, mostly alfalfa and to a lesser extent hay, according to a Denver Post analysis:

* Despite its immense water use, agriculture is almost economically irrelevant in Colorado.

* According to Denver Water, household water used breaks down as follows:

54% landscaping

13% toilets

11% laundry

10% showers and baths

6% faucets

5% leaks

1% dishwashers

* The Southwest is, however, a naturally ideal place for solar energy (and it doesn't hurt that a lot of the electricity demand there is for air conditioning which coincides with solar energy availability):

* This week I learned that there are both role playing games and video games in which the protagonist that you play is a bird.

* It turns out that a certain part of Poland is the heartland of ketchup production (a widely used product there):

The Polish Ketchup Belt is a narrow lane between the 51.5N and 52.5N parallels where almost all ketchup production in Poland is concentrated. (Source)

* Ukraine has made strikes deep into Russian territory:

It is 755 kilometers from Ukraine to Moscow and there are numerous Russian refineries and oil storage sites to attack along the way. Ukraine has been attacking those oil facilities and . . . the damage to oil facilities and other targets has been so great that Russia has had to ration how much fuel civilian and military users can get. It is estimated that the Ukrainian attacks destroyed twelve percent of Russia’s oil refining capability.

* Bible reading has recently fallen dramatically in the U.S.:

 * Coal use is up globally, despite falling in the U.S., the U.K., and a number of European countries, due predominantly to new coal fired power plants in Asia:

Greece's failure to tap into its abundant wind power capacity and its near ideal geography for electric cars, baffles me. The same can be said for Hawaii.

* Turkish people drink a lot of tea.

* According to data cited the Economist magazine, South Korea has an intense "glass-ceiling" for women in the workplace, which surprises me. I had thought that the situation for South Korean women who didn't marry or had kids was pretty good.

* Early 19th century grave robbing was driven by incentives you wouldn't expect:

At the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte’s final battle, more than 10,000 men and as many horses were killed in a single day. Yet today, archaeologists often struggle to find physical evidence of the dead from that bloody time period. Plowing and construction are usually the culprits behind missing historical remains, but they can’t explain the loss here. How did so many bones up and vanish?

In a new book, an international team of historians and archaeologists argues the bones were depleted by industrial-scale grave robbing. The introduction of phosphates for fertilizer and bone char as an ingredient in beet sugar processing at the beginning of the 19th century transformed bones into a hot commodity. Skyrocketing prices prompted raids on mass graves across Europe—and beyond.

* In the Netherlands, the interest rate on a particular mortgage fall over time to reflect the reduced risk of loss to lenders as the debt to equity ratio falls as principal is paid off and real estate appreciates in value. But, this also disincentivizes selling one home to move to another, or refinancing.

* Average hourly wages vary greatly across Europe:

* In Ray Bradbury's short story "All Summer In A Day": "The children let Margot out of the locked closet at the end of "All Summer in a Day." They had locked her inside while the teacher was elsewhere, making Margot miss the sun, which only comes out every seven years." It was a story the affected me greatly as a child and still does.

* Skunks are an American thing. The skunk family (Mephitidae) consists of 13 species, and almost all are restricted to the Western Hemisphere, reaching from Southern Canada to the Strait of Magellan in South America. The exception is the Stink Badger which can be found in Indonesia.

* Gasoline prices, adjusted for inflation, are similar or lower now than they were in 2006. U.S. mortgage interest rates are middling by historical standards and historically low rate until recently may have helped drive up real estate prices:

* High rise office buildings are plummeting in value.

* There were once more than 9,000 Blockbuster video stores. There is now one, in Bend, Oregon.

* What's better with Jalapeños?

1. Pizza.
2. Beer.
3. Lemonaide.

* Humans are basically fish in flesh suits and our blood is a decent approximation of sea water. An image gets across the concept:

*  There ought to be a law disqualifying judges from deciding cases involving the person who appointed them as a party (in the appointing person's personal, as opposed to their official, capacity).

* Trump does not have legitimate defenses in the classified documents criminal case against him, despite the fact that a judge he appointed seemed to be "confused" about this point.