Utopia, you are standing in it!

The Supreme Court handed down a stinging defeat for the Trump Administration in a unanimous decision in Maslenjak v. United States, where the Administration sought to strip an immigration of U.S. citizenship over a false statement made on an immigration form.  In a decision by Justice Elena Kagan, the justices declared that the government could not strip citizenship from Divna Maslenjak becasue her falsely stated that her husbqnd had not served in the Bosnian Serb army in the 1990s.  Notably, the Obama Administration had taken the same hard position in the case and the Trump Administration continued that position on the appeal.

In 1966-7 my Dad got a job as a young reporter for the Daily Mail’s Manchester office, just as it was made Newspaper of the Year. All staff received the memo below from editor Mike Randall.

When Dad sent it to me, he added: “Mike Randall left the paper soon afterwards. It became a tabloid and in ethical terms its downhill slide began. However, I think Randall’s statement still stands as the model of propriety to which all journalists working for all media should aspire.”

I couldn’t agree more – and it’s certainly how I’d hope people expect writers to behave. I’d add though that in the 15 years I’ve been writing, I haven’t noticed nearly as much awareness of the dangers of libel, sensationalism and indiscretion in young journos as was drilled into [my generation of] pre-internet trainees. I don’t think Twitter and the pressure of instant comment helps…

A good rule of thumb is that you will want to read any working paper Melissa Dell puts out. Her main interest is the long-run path-dependent effect of historical institutions, with rigorous quantitative investigation of the subtle conditionality of the past. For instance, in her earlier work on Peru (Econometrica, 2010), mine slavery in the colonial era led to fewer hacienda style plantations at the end of the era, which led to less political power without those large landholders in the early democratic era, which led to fewer public goods throughout the 20th century, which led to less education and income today in eras that used to have mine slavery. One way to read this is that local inequality is the past may, through political institutions, be a good thing today! History is not as simple as “inequality is the past causes bad outcomes today” or “extractive institutions in the…

About damn time! In February of last year I posted about Renee Rabinowitz’s gender discrimination lawsuit against El Al airlines for “asking” her to vacate a seat next to an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man who objected to sitting next to a woman. Rabinowitz, a retired Israeli psychologist, was upset that she had to move to accommodate religious misogyny. As the Times wrote then:

Ms. Rabinowitz was comfortably settled into her aisle seat in the business-class section on El Al Flight 028 from Newark to Tel Aviv in December when, as she put it, “this rather distinguished-looking man in Hasidic or Haredi garb, I’d guess around 50 or so, shows up.”

The man was assigned the window seat in her row. But, like many ultra-Orthodox male passengers, he did not want to sit next to a woman, seeing even inadvertent contact with the opposite sex as verboten under the strictest interpretation of…

Well cut off my legs and call me Shorty! (Is that ableist?) I was astounded to see that Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Asra Nomani, both feminist Muslim reformers, were given a whole op-ed in the New York Times to testify about women’s rights vs religion (click on screenshot to see it):

As I wrote five days ago, when Hirsi Ali and Nomani testified about terrorism (along with two men) before a mixed panel of Senators at the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee, the two women were allowed to speak, but the Democrats ignored them during questioning (see the four-hour hearing at the link at the beginning of this sentence). In fact, as Hirsi Ali and Nomani write in their op-ed, the one male and three Democratic Senators didn’t ask either of them a single question. Why? I explained that in my earlier post:

I don’t think the behavior of…