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Cameron Todd Willingham, Texas, and the death penalty

Cameron Todd Willingham, Texas, and the death penalty
Willingham was charged with murder. Because there were multiple victims, he was eligible for the death penalty, under Texas law. Unlike many other prosecutors in the state, Jackson, who had ambitions of becoming a judge, was personally opposed to capital punishment. “I don’t think it’s effective in deterring criminals,” he told me. “I just don’t think it works.” He also considered it wasteful: because of the expense of litigation and the appeals process, it costs, on average, $2.3 million to execute a prisoner in Texas—about three times the cost of incarcerating someone for forty years. Willingham couldn’t afford to hire lawyers, and was assigned two by the state: David Martin, a former state trooper, and Robert Dunn, a local defense attorney who represented everyone from alleged murderers to spouses in divorce cases—a “Jack-of-all-trades,” as he calls himself. Willingham’s lawyers were equally pleased. His parents went to see their son in jail. Willingham was implacable.

Bill Clinton On Why The World Is Getting Better All The Time Our world is more interdependent than ever. Borders have become more like nets than walls, and while this means that wealth, ideas, information and talent can move freely around the globe, so can the negative forces shaping our shared fates. The financial crisis that started in the U.S. and swept the globe was further proof that--for better and for worse--we can't escape one another. There are three big challenges with our interdependent world: inequality, instability and unsustainability. But I firmly believe that progress changes consciousness, and when you change people's consciousness, then their awareness of what is possible changes as well--a virtuous circle. Forget what you may have heard about a digital divide or worries that the world is splintering into "info haves" and "info have-nots." In Haiti, one of the poorest places on the planet, phones have revolutionized the average person's access to financial opportunity. As a consequence, only 10% of Haitians have a bank account.

The Myth of American Meritocracy Just before the Labor Day weekend, a front page New York Times story broke the news of the largest cheating scandal in Harvard University history, in which nearly half the students taking a Government course on the role of Congress had plagiarized or otherwise illegally collaborated on their final exam.1 Each year, Harvard admits just 1600 freshmen while almost 125 Harvard students now face possible suspension over this single incident. A Harvard dean described the situation as “unprecedented.” But should we really be so surprised at this behavior among the students at America’s most prestigious academic institution? In the last generation or two, the funnel of opportunity in American society has drastically narrowed, with a greater and greater proportion of our financial, media, business, and political elites being drawn from a relatively small number of our leading universities, together with their professional schools. The Battle for Elite College Admissions Estimating Asian Merit

J. M. Coetzee - Nobel Lecture: He and His Man He and His Man Boston, on the coast of Lincolnshire, is a handsome town, writes his man. The tallest church steeple in all of England is to be found there; sea-pilots use it to navigate by. The fens are home to many other kinds of birds too, writes his man, duck and mallard, teal and widgeon, to capture which the men of the fens, the fen-men, raise tame ducks, which they call decoy ducks or duckoys. Fens are tracts of wetland. These Lincolnshire duckoys, writes his man, are bred up in decoy ponds, and kept tame by being fed by hand. By these representations, he writes, which are made all in duck language, they, the decoy ducks or duckoys, draw together vast numbers of fowl and, so to say, kidnap them. And while they are so occupied the decoy-men, the masters of the decoy-ducks, creep into covers or coverts they have built of reeds upon the fens, and all unseen toss handfuls of corn upon the water; and the decoy ducks or duckoys follow them, bringing their foreign guests behind.

Why Legalizing Marijuana on Election Day Might Not Be a Good Idea Voters in two states will decide on Election Day whether ending the prohibition on pot is a good idea. But before they do, they should know what might go wrong. No government has ever created a commercial pot market. But next week voters in Colorado and Washington State are poised to do just that, passing ballot initiatives that legalize, tax, and regulate marijuana much like alcohol. Both efforts are polling above 50 percent, but regardless of whether they pass, the country is bending toward historic reforms and the remaining prohibitionists are on the run. Only about one in three Americans think pot should remain illegal, and that shrinking block of opposition is poorly organized and underfunded, producing no formidable spokesperson, not even a sad-sack orator to argue futilely, that legalization is the devil’s work. But such a profound policy shift deserves a two-sided debate. The case against legalization begins with a defense of its opposite: the benefits of prohibition.

McAllen, Texas and the high cost of health care It is spring in McAllen, Texas. The morning sun is warm. The streets are lined with palm trees and pickup trucks. McAllen is in Hidalgo County, which has the lowest household income in the country, but it’s a border town, and a thriving foreign-trade zone has kept the unemployment rate below ten per cent. McAllen has another distinction, too: it is one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country. The explosive trend in American medical costs seems to have occurred here in an especially intense form. The question we’re now frantically grappling with is how this came to be, and what can be done about it. From the moment I arrived, I asked almost everyone I encountered about McAllen’s health costs—a businessman I met at the five-gate McAllen-Miller International Airport, the desk clerks at the Embassy Suites Hotel, a police-academy cadet at McDonald’s. Was the explanation, then, that McAllen was providing unusually good health care? I was impressed. Others were skeptical.

What do Americans know about inequality? It depends on how you ask them Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 7, no. 6, November 2012, pp. 741-745 A recent survey of inequality (Norton and Ariely, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 9–12) asked respondents to indicate what percent of the nation’s total wealth is—and should be—controlled by richer and poorer quintiles of the U.S. population. We show that such measures lead to powerful anchoring effects that account for the otherwise remarkable findings that respondents reported perceiving, and desiring, extremely low inequality in wealth. We show that the same anchoring effects occur in other domains, namely web page popularity and school teacher salaries. Keywords: inequality, response bias, anchoring-and-adjustment, replication study. 1 Introduction National differences in wealth and income inequality are large and important (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2010). Logically, the Percent and Average measures of inequality are intimately connected. Of course, inequality exists, at varying levels, in many domains.

A Brief History of American Prosperity by Guy Sorman, City Journal Autumn 2012 An entrepreneurial culture and the rule of law have nourished the nation’s economic dynamism. Until recently, the Federal Reserve had maintained a predictable currency, encouraging investment. Worry over America’s recent economic stagnation, however justified, shouldn’t obscure the fact that the American economy remains Number One in the world. The United States holds 4.5 percent of the world’s population but produces a staggering 22 percent of the world’s output—a fraction that has remained fairly stable for two decades, despite growing competition from emerging countries. Not only is the American economy the biggest in absolute terms, with a GDP twice the size of China’s; it’s also near the top in per-capita income, currently a bit over $48,000 per year. Only a few small countries blessed with abundant natural resources or a concentration of financial services, such as Norway and Luxembourg, can claim higher averages. Democracy, too, encouraged ever-cheaper products.

The Insourcing Boom - Charles Fishman After years of offshore production, General Electric is moving much of its far-flung appliance-manufacturing operations back home. It is not alone. An exploration of the startling, sustainable, just-getting-started return of industry to the United States. Thomas Porostocky For much of the past decade, General Electric’s storied Appliance Park, in Louisville, Kentucky, appeared less like a monument to American manufacturing prowess than a memorial to it. The very scale of the place seemed to underscore its irrelevance. In 1951, when General Electric designed the industrial park, the company’s ambition was as big as the place itself; GE didn’t build an appliance factory so much as an appliance city. By 1955, Appliance Park employed 16,000 workers. The arc that followed is familiar. Yet this year, something curious and hopeful has begun to happen, something that cannot be explained merely by the ebbing of the Great Recession, and with it the cyclical return of recently laid-off workers.

Margaret Paxson – On peace Let’s just say that suddenly you are a social scientist and you want to study peace. That is, you want to understand what makes for a peaceful society. Let’s say that, for years in your work in various parts of the world, you’ve been surrounded by evidence of violence and war. From individual people, you’ve heard about beatings and arrests and murders and rapes; you’ve heard about deportations and black-masked men demanding your food or your life. There were men on horseback calling the boys to war and long black cars arriving to steal people away in the dead of night; there were girls who’d wandered the landscape, insane after sexual violations; there was the survival of the fittest in concentration camps; there were pregnant women beaten until their children were lost and bodies piled up in times of famine; there was arrest and exile for the theft of a turnip; there were those who were battered for being a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim or a Bahá’í. Or it has been for me.

We're having the wrong debate about rising health care costs By Geoff Colvin, senior editor-at-large FORTUNE -- The central mystery in America's health care crisis is a simple question: Why don't people take better care of themselves? Like many simple questions, it leads into deep waters. That debate will rage when the Supreme Court issues its ruling on Obamacare in June. Our thinking on health care policy is premised largely on a reality that prevailed for nearly all of human history: that ill health is a curse that can be visited upon any of us at any time. What's important from a policy perspective is not just that these diseases cause the most deaths, but also that they cause the most spending. More: 5 ways to healthier employees If Americans behaved just a little differently, our health care costs could settle down to a sustainable growth rate that matches the economy's growth, or could even fall further. The answer isn't so simple. Social acceptability plays a role. What's the best policy response to those facts?

The Strangely Underreported Decline in the Incarceration Rate I hereby submit my nomination for the most underreported public policy story of the past year: The continuing decline in the number of Americans who are behind bars or on probation/parole. Both the change itself and low level of attention it has garnered are worthy of reflection. At the time of President Obama’s inauguration, the incarceration rate in the United States had been rising every single year since the mid 1970s. If a public policy trend with that much momentum had even slowed significantly, it would have been merited attention, but something far more remarkable occurred: The incarceration rate and the number of people under correctional supervision (i.e., including people on probation/parole) declined for three years in a row. You’d think this would be big news, but it’s gone largely unnoticed. Why hasn’t the shrinkage of the correctional population received more attention already? (3) “If it bleeds it leads” remains a journalistic norm.

Can You Fight Poverty With a Five-Star Hotel? Accra is a city of choking red dust where almost no rain falls for three months at a time and clothes hung out on a line dry in 15 minutes. So the new five-star Mövenpick hotel affords a haven of sorts in Ghana’s crowded capital, with manicured lawns, amply watered vegetation, and uniformed waiters gliding poolside on roller skates to offer icy drinks to guests. A high concrete wall rings the grounds, keeping out the city’s overflowing poor who hawk goods in the street by day and the homeless who lie on the sidewalks by night. The Mövenpick, which opened in 2011, fits the model of a modern international luxury hotel, with 260 rooms, seven floors, and 13,500 square feet of retail space displaying $2,000 Italian handbags and other wares. The investment company, Kingdom Holding Company, has a market value of $12 billion, and Forbes ranks its principal owner, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, as the world’s 29th-richest person [3], estimating his net worth at $18 billion. U.S. Editor's Note

World Bank’s IFC Arm Responds to Our Critique of Its Poverty Fighting Below is a letter from an official of the World Bank's International Finance Corp., taking issue with our article [1] posted Jan. 2 and co-published with Foreign Policy magazine. It is followed by our brief response. We are deeply disappointed by your article, "Can You Fight Poverty With a Five-Star Hotel? What is our record? Every dollar of profit we make is reinvested to support private sector development, increasingly in the poorest countries. Since IFC began in 1956, we have invested more than $125 billion in developing countries, improving the lives of millions. The World Bank Group's recent World Development Report focused on the importance of creating jobs. Our investments are not nearly enough—not at a time when 1 billion people go hungry every day and 600 million jobs need to be created within this decade. In addition to failing to examine this record, the writer, Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, also made several factual errors. Finally, Ms. Sincerely,

Why cops lie Police officer perjury in court to justify illegal dope searches is commonplace. One of the dirty little not-so-secret secrets of the criminal justice system is undercover narcotics officers intentionally lying under oath. It is a perversion of the American justice system that strikes directly at the rule of law. Yet it is the routine way of doing business in courtrooms everywhere in America. Count this as one more casualty of the "war on drugs." It is simply additional collateral damage from using the American criminal justice system as the battlefield of that war. Why do police, whom we trust as role models of legal conduct, show contempt for the law by systematically perjuring themselves? The first reason is because they get away with it. Another reason is the nature of most drug cases and the likely type of person involved. But the main reason is that the job of these cops is chasing drugs. Maybe the video tape scandal from the Henry Hotel will help change this culture.

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