Federal Court Declares Diversity Initiative at Thomas Jefferson High School to be Unconstitutional

 Jonathan Turley gets it right. Here is his blog entry.

Diversity for its own sake ignores tradeoffs that can produce a net negative effect. For example, does imposing diversity on Olympic team selection improve the team's chance of winning? Obviously, not. Similarly, does imposing diversity on schools, e.g., each class, improve a country's competitiveness in, say, science? Also, obviously not.

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We recently discussed controversies on race criteria from college admissions cases pending before the Supreme Court to the threshold criteria used by President Joe Biden for his Supreme Court nominee. Now, a federal district court in Northern Virginia has handed down a major decision in Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board, ruling that a new admissions policy at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, in Fairfax, Virginia is unconstitutional. Recently, the county decided to change the admissions system for the elite school to increase minority enrollment. Judge Claude Hilton ruled that the county unconstitutionally engineered the reduction of Asian-American students to achieve greater racial diversity.

As a parent of Fairfax public school students. TJ was always the premier high school for the most gifted students in the county. Even if your kids did not get into TJ, there has been great pride for its ranking as one of the best high schools in the country. Many parents were opposed when the county announced that it would pursue greater diversity in admissions. We have been discussing a movement to eliminate gifted and talented programs in cities ranging from Boston to New York to San Francisco.

The Court details the push to diversify the top school after the death of George Floyd.

“In June emails, Corbett Sanders promised intentional action. In an email to Brabrand, Corbett Sanders wrote that ‘the Board and FCPS need to be explicit in how we are going to address the under-representation of Black and Hispanic students.’ At a June 18 Board meeting, Keys-Gamarra said that ‘in looking at what has happened to George Floyd, we now know that our shortcomings are far too great . . . so we must recognize the unacceptable numbers of such things as the unacceptable numbers of African Americans that have been accepted to T.J.'”

As in the cases on the docket for the Supreme Court, Asian Americans alleged discrimination against them in these diversification programs. Judge Hilton wrote that “emails and text messages between Board members and high-ranking FCPS officials leave no material dispute that, at least in part, the purpose of the Board’s admissions overhaul was to change the racial makeup of TJ to the detriment of Asian-Americans….” He noted that, due to the new policy, “Asian American representation dropped from roughly 70 percent to around 50 percent of the class.”

As noted earlier, I believe that TJ should select students entirely based on scholastic achievement irrespective of their race or other criteria. While the country as a whole continues to fall behind other nations in math and science, TJ is one of the few exceptions — attracting brilliant students who are given highly advanced training. Math and science are fields given to objective testing and scoring. Students should be assured that they will be measured on their objective scores and rewarded for the hard work necessary to achieve admission.

What is interesting is how the diversification was achieved. The county limited the number of students admitted from any given middle school. That effectively limited the number of Asian-American students.

“FCPS staff then developed a proposal for a ‘Merit Lottery’ for TJ admissions, which they presented to the Board on September 15. The proposal stated that ‘TJ should reflect the diversity of FCPS, the community and Northern Virginia.’ The proposal discussed the use of ‘regional pathways’ that would cap the number of offers each region in FCPS (and the other participating jurisdictions) could receive. It included the results of Shughart’s modeling, which showed the projected racial effect of applying the lottery with regional pathways to three previous TJ classes. Each of the three classes would have admitted far fewer Asian-American students under the proposed lottery system.”

The summary judgment decision will now allow the county to appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Here is the opinion: Coalition-for-TJ-v.-Fairfax-County-School-Board-Decision

SCOTUS positions itself to regain lost First Amendment ground

 Jonathan Turley gets it right on his blog.  Here is his column.

Recent history has been a trend away from freedom, including free speech. Now, SCOTUS is in a position to reverse that trend, which is badly needed.

People who demand that their "sensitivities" be protected by limiting others' freedom do everyone a disservice. Sooner or later that attitude reduces everyone's freedom. I do not support them.

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Below is my column in the Hill on the acceptance of a major new case by the Supreme Court on the issue of free speech and anti-discrimination laws. The nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (the subject of today’s Hill column) and the Ukraine war took attention from this addition to the docket. However, this case has the makings of a major course change for the Court.

Here is the column:

“Eliminating … ideas is CADA’s very purpose.” Those words from the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals about Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act may be some of the most honest but chilling words ever uttered in a federal opinion. The court ruled that a state could not only compel an artist to speak but could prevent that artist from speaking, too.

The idea being eliminated in this instance is the view of artist Lorie Smith that marriage is “an institution between one man and one woman.” For Smith, it’s an idea grounded in faith, while for her critics, it is grounded in discrimination. Now, her case, 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, was just accepted by the Supreme Court to determine if that “very purpose” is the very thing that the First Amendment is designed to prevent.

Last year, I described the court’s current session as a “train whistle docket” of major cases that are likely to produce significant changes in areas like abortion, gun rights, and race criteria in college admissions. That whistle seems to get louder by the day. Indeed, this docket is a virtual listing of unfinished business for a court majority that may finally have coalesced around clear standards in areas long left murky by a divided court.

This latest case seems uniquely framed to reinforce free speech on religious values in conflicts with anti-discrimination laws.

Many years ago, I wrote an academic piece on how anti-discrimination laws would inevitably collide with free-speech and free-exercise rights. Those conflicts continued to mount across the country. In 2018, the court was thought to be ready to clarify the applicable standards in the case of a religious cake shop owner who refused to make cakes for same-sex couples. The court ultimately punted in that case, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, ruling for the owner yet leaving uncertainty over the constitutional limitations on cities and states under anti-discrimination law.

Smith’s case has long been a focus for some of us. I have written in favor of taking a free-speech approach to these cases rather than treating them as conflicts under the Constitution’s religion clauses. For that reason, one aspect of this grant of review was immediately notable. The court agreed to consider only one question: “Whether applying a public-accommodation law to compel an artist to speak or stay silent violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.”

Both of the questions initially raised by Smith referenced the religion clauses, but the court carefully excised the other claims to focus solely on free speech. That is precisely what some of us have advocated as the best way of resolving these disputes, and it could signal that a new, bright line will be drawn in this case.

It would be difficult to pick a case that more highlighted both the free-speech rights of artists but also the anti-free-speech elements of some of these laws. Smith is an artist and website designer who wants to use her skills to design wedding websites. She is also deeply religious and wants to promote her view of marriage as between one man and one woman. While she (like the Masterpiece Cakeshop owner) said she would work with LGBT customers, she stated that she would not create designs celebrating marriages that violate her religious values. She also wanted to post a statement explaining those values.

I fundamentally disagree with Smith’s views on same-sex marriage and have supported such marriages for decades. However, one’s personal views or values should not matter in determining whether Smith has a right to the expression of her own views as an artist.

That brings us to the most striking aspect of the 10th Circuit opinion. Many past courts have sought to reject these cases as free-speech conflicts or to minimize the degree to which speech is being curtailed or denied. The 10th Circuit was neither evasive nor ambiguous. It agreed that this case involved “pure speech” and that the state was forcing her both to say things she opposed and to not say things she supported. It further agreed that this denial required the satisfaction of the most stringent constitutional standard: the strict scrutiny test. It then said all of that was perfectly constitutional. The court ruled that the state could create a type of “pro-LGBT gerrymander” forcing religious artists to celebrate same-sex marriage while protecting the speech rights of secular artists.

The opinion has other notable elements. For example, it declares that Smith’s designs are “unique services [which] are, by definition, unavailable elsewhere.” Yet, it admits that “LGBT consumers may be able to obtain wedding-website design services from other businesses.” Thus, Smith’s status as an artist works against her. Couples want to force her to celebrate their marriage, relying on her unique artistic skills; either she creates these images for LGBT marriages, or she cannot create such images for any marriages.

After years of obfuscation and avoidance, the court finally has a free speech case without exit ramps or extraneous issues.

Free speech offers a clear path and precedent for addressing these conflicts. For example, a Jewish baker asked to make a “Mein Kampf” cake, or a Black baker asked to make a KKK cake, should be able to refuse those jobs as offensive to them. People may agree or disagree with their values; some may even boycott their stores. However, “public accommodation” should not mean “compelled public speech.” Likewise, it should not allow the government to ban an artist from expressing her views on the sanctity of marriages, even if many of us reject her views.

Colorado’s arguments in the case only heightened free-speech concerns. It stressed that a business is not required to design a website proclaiming “God is Dead” if it would decline such a design for any customer. Yet when Smith said she would not design a website celebrating same-sex marriage for any customer, the state said that was discrimination.

The appeals court resolved this conflict with a bludgeon of a rationale: Some views are simply intolerable. According to the court, an artist espousing faith-based objections to same-sex marriage is simply one of those views that must be excised “from the public dialogue” and “eliminating such ideas is CADA’s very purpose.”

In his powerful dissent, Chief Justice Timothy Tymkovich starts with a poignant quote from George Orwell: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” The Supreme Court will now decide if liberty can exist if you not only are barred from saying things that people do not want to hear but also compelled to say the things that they do.

How we have mischaracterized climate risk

 Here is Judith Curry at judithcurry.com

JC is on target. Climate alarmism is unjustified. Moreover, the climate models that have been used to create it are inadequate.  Finally, important tradeoffs necessary to address climate change intelligently have been ignored.

Here is JC's column.

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“The current thinking and approaches guiding this conceptualization and description have been shown to lack scientific rigour, the consequence being that climate change risk and uncertainties are poorly presented. The climate change field needs to strengthen its risk science basis, to improve the current situation.” – Norwegian risk scientist Terje Aven

For decision-makers, climate change is a problem in risk assessment and management. Climate change is a risk because it may affect prosperity and security in a negative way, and because its consequences are uncertain.

Global climate change policy has been dominated by a specific strategy of risk management – the Precautionary Principle as a justification for setting specific targets for the elimination of manmade emissions of carbon dioxide. In the early 1980s, the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) became bullish on the idea that fossil fuels would produce dangerous climate change. The prospect of eliminating fossil fuels was congruent with UNEP’s broader interests in environmental quality and world governance. At Villach in 1985 at the beginning of the climate treaty movement, the policy movement to eliminate fossil fuels became detached from any moorings in the science – the rhetoric of precaution argued that we should act anyway to eliminate fossil fuels, just in case. This perspective became codified by the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Treaty in 1992, the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.

Instead of framing the IPCC assessments around risk assessment, the IPCC reports narrowly framed its assessments to support the UNFCCC policies, focusing on dangerous climate change associated with fossil fuel emissions. The torquing of climate science and the manufacture of a consensus around dangerous human-caused climate change not only oversimplified the scientific and social challenges, but led to the adoption of a “predict then act” strategy to manage and control, supporting decisions about elimination of fossil fuel emissions that were begun in the 1980’s. The congruence of the IPCC assessments and UNFCCC policies enforces the belief that climate change is a simple or tame problem, with science trumping all practical questions and conflicting values and purposes.

This strategy of risk management implies that climate change is a simple, tame problem of “dose-response.” This characterization has led to the relative neglect of climate risk in formal assessment processes such as the IPCC. It is only in their most recent assessment report, AR6, that a consistent risk framing of climate change was attempted (it will be interesting to see what this looks like in the forthcoming WGII, III reports). As a result of the early adoption of a preferred risk management strategy, we are far from a complete assessment of full climate risk.

By characterizing climate change as a well-understood problem with a strong consensus, traditional risk management approaches assume that climate change can and ought to be rationally managed, or at the very least contained, and preferably eliminated. However, the diversity of climate-related impact drivers and their complex linkages, various inherent and irreducible uncertainties, ambiguities about the consequences of climate change, and the unequal distribution of exposure and effects across geography and time, confound any simple or uncontested application of traditional risk management approaches. As a result, the policy process that has evolved over the past several decades is not only inadequate to deal with the risks associated with climate change, but has fueled societal controversies around climate risk.

Risk has often been characterized as some type of statistical expected value – the product of the likelihood of occurrence and the impact. However, such a characterization is appropriate only for simple, or tame, problems. Broader definitions of risk integrate specified consequences of an event or actions, a measure of uncertainty associated with the consequences, and the strength of the knowledge base that supports the assessment.

Accepting the IPCC’s assessments as the “best available” knowledge base is not inconsistent with acknowledging significant weaknesses in the knowledge base in context of climate risk analysis. An important element of characterizing risk is evaluating the strength of the knowledge base. Concerns about strength of the knowledge base are raised by people questioning aspects of the IPCC’s assessment that are used to infer climate risk. The IPCC approach is based on judgement of the available evidence and agreement among experts. More sophisticated knowledge characterizations for risk management (Aven 2017b) include:

• the degree to which the assumptions made are reasonable/realistic – growing concern about the focus on implausible emissions scenarios RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5.

• the degree to which data/information exists and are reliable and relevant – the historical and paleo data base is inadequate for a full, global characterization of natural climate variability on multi-decadal to millennial time scales

• the degree to which there is disagreement among experts (including those from different environments) – attempts to suppress disagreement and alternative perspectives among experts

• the degree to which the phenomena involved are understood and accurate models exist – concerns about the fidelity and utility of climate models.

• the degree to which the knowledge has been thoroughly examined with respect to unknown knowns (i.e. others, but not the analysis group, have the knowledge) – neglect of the unknown knowns associated with natural climate variability.

The politics of international climate governance has produced systematic biases in the kinds of expertise and evidence that are deemed appropriate for consideration. (Lucas) The UNFCCC and IPCC have characterized climate change as an environmental and economic problem, and geoscientists and economists have dominated the assessment and policy making process.

However, the issues with the current CO2 increase and warming are social, not environmental. The Earth has undergone geological periods of higher temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations, during which life thrived. Characterization of climate change as an environmental problem has downplayed the cultural and political dimensions of the issue. Many social scientists have argued that the disciplinary constrictions imposed by the IPCC and UNFCCC have neglected many important insights arising from a wide range of expert and unaccredited sources.

A risk assessment for a problem such as climate change – with high levels of complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity – must include the following elements (King et al. 2015):

• Clarify objectives of the risk analysis – the dangers or values at risk

• Take a holistic view of all relevant factors

• Identify the biggest risks – the plausible worst-case scenarios

• Be explicit about value judgements

Values and dangers

One of the biggest problems associated with climate change risk assessments is that there is no simple way to articulate danger associated with a warmer climate. However, in attempting to build political will for the international treaties, the adverse impacts of fossil-fuel driven warming have been exaggerated – severe weather/climate events, sea level rise and many adverse ecosystem, health, economic and geopolitical impacts, with all of their complex causes, were confounded with fossil-fuel driven warming. Further, the risks from fossil fuel emissions have not been placed in the appropriate context of other global and regional risks.

A key element of risk assessment is to judge whether activities are acceptable, tolerable, or intolerable. Activities are tolerable if they are considered as worth pursuing for the associated benefits. For tolerable risks, efforts for risk reduction or coping are welcomed provided that the benefits of the activities are not lost. Burning fossil fuels has historically been considered a tolerable risk. Genuinely intolerable risks include existential threats – such as portrayed by the earth-impacting comet in the move Don’t Look Up – or “ruin” problems. For less dire threats that are considered intolerable, notwithstanding the benefits, risk management should be focused on banning or phasing out the activity creating the risk or, if that is not possible, to mitigate or fight the risk in other ways or to increase societal resilience.

How to draw the lines between “acceptable”, “tolerable” and “intolerable’’ is one of the most controversial tasks in the risk governance process for complex risks. Ambiguity results from divergent and contested perspectives on the justification, severity or wider meanings associated with a perceived threat (Stirling 2003). Climate change risks have been characterized as acceptable, tolerable and intolerable by different individuals and constituencies – clearly an ambiguous situation. “Ambiguity” means that there are different legitimate viewpoints from which to evaluate whether there are, or could be, adverse effects and whether these risks are tolerable. Ambiguity results from divergent and contested perspectives on the justification, severity or wider meanings associated with a perceived threat (Stirling 2003).

Subjective value judgments are inherent both in identifying what constitutes a risk, and in deciding how much we care about it. All formal climate change risk assessments are structured by underlying values and normative goals that are sometimes explicit but often hidden. These values include societal attitudes to the intrinsic value of nature, misperceptions of risk, and implicit judgements on the acceptability or aversion to inequality in society.

Judgments of intolerable risks from climate change relate to mistakenly conflating the slow creep of global warming with consequences associated with extreme weather and climate events, concerns about inequitable risk exposure to poorer populations, and concerns about future generations.

Climate change risk includes elements of both incremental risk (e.g. the slow creep of sea level rise) and emergency risk. Emergency risks are associated with extreme weather events; technically these are weather risks and not climate risks, even if global warming could be shown to incrementally worsen the weather hazard. Weather risk can become climate risk if global warming causes the event to exceed a vulnerability threshold that otherwise wouldn’t have been exceeded by the weather event. Attempts are also made to assess incremental costs/damages associated with extreme weather events. Such assessments are very challenging to make against the background of natural weather and climate variability.

Removing the risk from most extreme weather and climate events from the consequences of global warming diminishes the perceived urgency for reducing fossil fuel emissions. Mischaracterizing incremental risks as urgent has led to policies that are not only costly and suboptimal, but also arguably reduce resilience. The poorest populations would benefit far more from access to grid electricity and help in reducing vulnerability from extreme weather events, than from reductions to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Moralizing surrounding the issue of climate change has regarded the climate change problem as a simple, righteous values choice: Are you for the planet or against it? This moralizing neglects to understand that people engage in activities which are of value to them that happen to emit carbon as a byproduct. Further, this narrow moralizing systematically excludes important ethical values, such as improving the lives of the billion people presently living in unacceptable poverty or protecting other aspects of the environment.

The question of intergenerational equity (concerns about the grandchildren) is of special importance as there is a lag between the emissions of greenhouse gases and the occurrence of the damage. There is no simple way to decide what duty of care we owe to future generations, but the IPCC’s socioeconomic pathways for the 21st century all have the world being better off by 2100, even under the most extreme emissions scenarios.

With this context, we need a broader ethical debate about what the consequences of climate change will be for what we humans have reason to value so that we can take credible actions to protect them. This requires an equally careful consideration of beneficial as well as adverse consequences.

Holistic view of plausible worst-case scenarios

The IPCC assessments have focused on the likely range of warming, sea level rise and other impact drivers. As I have discussed in many previous blog posts, the IPCC scenarios of 21st century climate do not provide a holistic perspective on 21st century climate change – they neglect a range of plausible scenarios of solar variability, volcanic eruptions, and multi-decadal to millennial natural internal variability. Their interpretation of extreme weather and climate events is drawn from data since 1950 – ignoring longer historical data sets and paleo climate data sets.

The bottom line is that the IPCC has not provided a complete set of plausible scenarios of 21st climate change outcomes. While models can be useful for understanding complex systems, factors that fall outside the consideration of a model should not be ignored. When a system is impossible to model in a meaningful way, scenarios may be developed to imagine its possible future states.

In addition to the risks associated with increased CO2 concentrations and the risks of rapidly transitioning away from fossil fuels, there is a need to recognized that natural climate variability and change along with extreme weather and climate events have equally important societal impacts. Further, human-caused climate change also includes emissions of non-CO2 greenhouse gases and aerosol particles plus land use changes.

For the first time in the AR6, attention is given to identifying worst case outcomes, beyond its misguided focus on the implausible RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 emissions scenarios. The AR6 treatment of sea level rise is exemplary in this regard, clarifying the strength of the knowledge base associated with different extreme scenarios. The AR6 focus on regional climate change rightfully pulls away from the previous strategy of climate model generated scenarios as being adequate for this purpose, with a growing emphasis on physically-based storyline scenarios. The historical data record, especially when it extends back into the 19th century, is arguably the richest source of extreme weather and climate scenarios for the 21st century.

How to assess the plausibility of scenarios involving a high level risk is a topic that has received too little attention.

Transition risk

Social amplification of risk can occur via responses to perceived outcomes, either in anticipation or in reaction.

The UNFCCC in its urgent drive for NETZERO emissions ignores transition risk. Consequences of a rapid transition to renewable energy include the economic costs of the transition, adverse environmental impacts associated with wind and solar energy and biofuels, impacts of the intermittency of renewable energy on energy reliability and cost, more complex and extensive electricity transmission infrastructure with a larger number of failure nodes, decrease in energy security, the extensive need for rare earth minerals and the associated changes in geopolitics. These consequences of the transition are associated with a fairly solid knowledge base, leading many people to be more concerned about transition risks than they are about the more uncertain risks from climate change itself, with a far weaker knowledge base. The debate is then between tolerable but potentially unnecessary imposition of risks from the rapid transition away from fossil fuels, versus the highly uncertain impacts from climate change that are assessed as ranging from acceptable to intolerable by different individuals, countries and organizations.

The biggest risk from a rapid transition away from fossil fuels is arguably an opportunity cost – we are at risk of squandering our resources on effort that may not change the climate in a meaningful way, so that we do not have resources available for better solutions that improve human well-being in both the short and long terms. Further, we are ignoring other risks that are arguably more important to near-term human well being that could be more productively addressed with the same resources.

Conclusions

The UNFCCC is promoting a solution to an exceedingly complex, uncertain and ambiguous problem, without the context of an adequate risk assessment that references the wider ethical issues and political and practical feasibility. As a result, we have neglected to truly understand the the climate system and the broader causes of vulnerabilities of human and natural systems, and to systematically and broadly evaluate the feasible policy space.

The end result is that after 30 years of the UNFCCC/IPCC, we are fixated on the minutiae of greenhouse gas emissions levels and the abstract and impossible problem of constraining atmospheric CO2 concentration – while ignoring natural climate variability and drastically simplifying the human side. As long as the current situation prevails, the IPCC’s assessments of anthropogenic climate change and the UNFCCC recommendations for action will remain seriously inadequate.

A case of “reverse racism" at an American University

 Here is an interesting piece at quillette.com.

The kind of behavior the author describes probably is widespread. Along with Critical Race Theory and other forms of race oriented education in our schools it is probably causing more racism - not less.

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At the American university where I teach, one of my assigned tasks is to advise undergraduates—mostly freshmen and sophomores. This essay describes a conversation I had in 2017 with one of those advisees. I will call him Daniel.

Daniel was a sophomore at the time. He had been an advisee of mine for a year already, and I’d come to understand that he was a prodigy. I’d also formed a hypothesis, based on a certain bluntness and lack of social tact he exhibited, that Daniel might be on the autism/Asperger’s spectrum. He seemed weak on interpersonal skills and narrowly, even obsessively, focused on math and science. During his first year of university studies, Daniel had taken a number of upper-level math and physics courses that none of my other advisees had taken, and had earned flat As in almost all of them. His GPA probably would have been a perfect 4.0 if the university had allowed him to take only math and science courses. As it was, it was a 3.85.

At the end of his freshman year, Daniel applied for admission to a competitive honors program that our university runs, but he was rejected. He came to my office to discuss this—or, rather, to complain about it. I soon realized that he was not just disappointed; he was angry. Daniel believed he’d been treated unfairly. He believed he was the victim of reverse racism.

I told Daniel that I understood why he was upset, but I reminded him that the program he’d applied to is highly competitive. The admissions committee presumably received many strong applications. There is always some subjectivity in admissions decisions, I noted, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Subjectivity isn’t the same as unfairness.

Daniel said he wouldn’t be upset if he believed that the applicants who’d been admitted to the program were as strong as him, or stronger. But he said he had reason to believe they were not.

I asked him what he meant by that. He then pulled a laptop out of his backpack and opened up a spreadsheet.

Daniel proceeded to explain that he and a friend had both applied to the same honors program and had both been rejected. Afterwards, they wondered who had been accepted. They scrutinized the social-media accounts of fellow students and found several dozen applicants who’d posted about being accepted. A lot of them, they noticed, were either African American or Hispanic. Daniel and his friend then asked around and identified several dozen students who had been rejected, many of whom were Caucasian or Asian. This made Daniel and his friend suspicious. They decided to create a spreadsheet—the one Daniel was showing me—to organize the data they’d collected; and then they decided to gather more.

Daniel explained that he and his friend wanted to find a measure of academic achievement that they could track statistically. A student’s GPA is not public information, but the Dean’s List is; so they were able to use that as a discrete variable—Dean’s List, yes or no—as a rough proxy for achievement. Daniel explained to me that it would have been better to use a continuous variable (like GPA), but he and his friend had to work with what they had.

Daniel explained that he and his friend had performed various kinds of statistical analysis on the data, and had concluded that admission to the honors program was closely related to Dean’s List status within certain groups. However, there were large differences in acceptance rates across those groups. Overall, he told me, the factor that explained the most variance in admissions outcomes was (as he’d suspected) the race or ethnicity of the applicant. The patterns were quite stark. African Americans who weren’t on the Dean’s List had a better overall chance of being admitted to the honors program than whites or Asians who were on the Dean’s List.

At this point, I got up and closed the door to my office.

Daniel went on talking. He told me he was thinking of filing a protest with the admissions committee and challenging them with the data he’d gathered. He was also thinking about sending his data to the university newspaper as a way of exposing the unfairness of the committee’s decisions.

As I listened, I began to think about what I might tell Daniel once he stopped talking.

Should I tell him what I thought—that he might well be right about why he was not admitted to the honors program?

Should I tell him that I had heard some talk among the faculty that seemed to confirm his suspicions? A few months earlier, I’d heard a dean saying that the honors program was too “traditional” in its make-up. What the university needed to do, this dean said, was “make the program look more like America as a whole.” Having been in academia for several years, I had a pretty good idea what that might mean.

Should I try to make the case for affirmative action, explaining that the policies are well-intentioned and designed to make up for real injustices, including slavery, segregation, and racism?

Should I tell Daniel that sometimes in life one just has to accept this kind of unfortunate outcome as part of a larger process of social transformation?

Should I introduce him to the concept of “taking one for the team”?

Should I mention any of my own experiences with affirmative action?

Should I tell him about the time when I applied for an internal position at our university, only to learn that it was actually a “targeted” search? I came to understand that the faculty members doing the hiring were determined to hire a candidate from an under-represented minority. This meant that I, as a white male, had almost no chance of being selected.

Should I tell Daniel about the time when I interviewed with a small college, and the woman I was interviewing with came right out and told me that she and her colleagues were really hoping to hire an African-American candidate—but, unfortunately, there were not all that many African-American candidates in the applicant pool, so she wasn’t convinced that her school would be able to achieve this goal?

Should I tell him about what happened afterwards, when I spoke to some other graduate students about this interview? One of the graduate students said that what the interviewer had done was wrong: she shouldn’t have said what she did.

Wait a minute, I said. What is it that upsets you about this whole thing? Are you upset that the committee members are so focused on the race of the applicants? Or are you upset that this woman was honest enough to tell me the truth? (That turned out to be an awkward conversation.)

Should I tell Daniel about the colleague I’d spoken with just a few weeks earlier, who’d told me, with much frustration and a touch of anger in his voice, that he was getting out of academia because he’d concluded that it is now virtually impossible for a white male to get a tenure-track position in his field? This young man had finished his PhD and published a book. He had applied for scores of tenure-track jobs, but had finally concluded he was not likely to get one. “Picking me,” he explained, “won’t do anyone any good. It won’t help the institution show that it is combatting racism, and it won’t allow any of the members of the hiring committee to assuage their white liberal guilt.” Shortly thereafter, this colleague took a non-academic job as a computer programmer.

Should I tell Daniel that, over the years, I had grown more and more frustrated with the way in which the academics I work among approach hiring? I’d seen plenty of searches in which members of the hiring committee went out of their way to try to hire persons of color, or members of under-represented minority groups, but nobody would ever admit publicly that this is what was going on. Nor did anyone want to admit that their efforts to boost minority candidates made job-seeking more difficult for members of other, non-preferred groups. Over and over, we were encouraged to celebrate the hiring of a minority candidate, but nobody ever said anything about the persons who were passed over as a result. Everybody seemed to look at these hiring decisions with one eye open and one eye strategically closed. To me, this seemed dishonest.

In the end, I didn’t tell Daniel about any of my own experiences.

I told him that I thought he might be right about why he hadn’t been accepted into the program. It looked to me like the push for diversity might have been the cause, or at least a key factor, in regard to the decision—though it was impossible to be certain. I then briefly (and perhaps half-heartedly) outlined the usual justification for affirmative-action programs.

But what I emphasized most was that I thought it would be unwise for Daniel to launch a campaign against the admissions committee, even if his data was as strong as he seemed to think it was. I told him that a campaign of the sort he was considering would almost certainly fail. He might get some catharsis out of it in the short run, but it would probably do no good in the long run. The committee was unlikely to revisit its decisions or change its procedures going forward. Support for affirmative action is almost universal among academics. Very few are even willing to express hesitations or second thoughts on this issue, lest they be deemed racists. The people who make these decisions feel good about the people who benefit from affirmative action, and they avert their gaze, as much as possible, from the people who are harmed by it. They might be embarrassed by Daniel and his friend’s data, but they would probably not abandon their approach.

I warned Daniel that I thought his plan might end up doing him a lot of harm. If he chose to make his exposé public, the most likely outcome would be that some student or faculty member would accuse him of being a racist. Publishing his data would probably end up hurting him rather than helping him.

When Daniel heard me use the word “racist,” even in this conjectural, non-accusatory way, he responded angrily. He told me that he was not a racist. He had voted for Democrats in the 2016 election and hated Donald Trump. And as it happens, I had reason to believe this was true. The morning after that election, Daniel had come to visit me in my office, deeply troubled by what a Trump presidency might mean for scientific research and funding.

Daniel told me that he believed affirmative-action policies were justified for college admissions, but he did not think they should be used to filter out qualified applicants to honors programs and graduate programs.

He then spoke for several minutes about his own ethnic background. He reminded me that he was Jewish, and told me that both of his parents had put up with a lot of antisemitic discrimination in their universities and workplaces. Back then, they were regarded as “non-white” and were discriminated against as a result; now (ironically) he was considered “white” and was being discriminated against on that basis.

I listened with real sympathy. The situation seemed unfair to me, too. To be honest, I’ve never been quite clear on how we’re supposed to get over centuries of judging people by their skin color or ethnicity by paying more and more attention to skin color and ethnicity.

In the past few years, in fact, I’ve increasingly had the sense that affirmative action may be backfiring. Policies meant to correct historical iniquities seem to be stoking racial resentment. Like Daniel, I dislike Trump intensely. I don’t have much in common with his followers, and I certainly don’t think of myself as one of them. But I do, increasingly, understand some of the grievances that motivate them. I wish I didn’t, but I do.

In the end, as I’ve mentioned, I didn’t tell Daniel about any of my personal experiences or private thoughts. I assured myself that doing so might be counterproductive: after all, my goal was to calm Daniel down, not rile him up.

I told Daniel that he could still succeed at our university, and get accepted by a top graduate school, even if he never made it into the honors program—as long as he just kept on taking challenging math and science classes and posting good grades. That would carry the day. He would move ahead, while the unqualified would fall by the wayside, unable to do the heavy intellectual lifting that advanced courses required.

Daniel must not have been entirely convinced by my arguments, because he proceeded to tell me about a “plan” he had come up with to ensure he would be accepted by a good graduate school. He told me that two of his four grandparents were descended from Sephardic Jews who’d fled Spain in the 1500s. This, he said, made him “technically, part Hispanic”—and thus eligible for preferential admission to graduate-school programs.

I tried to discourage Daniel from putting this plan into action. I told him I thought it was deceptive and dishonest. He might be accepted by a university, but eventually the faculty members would learn that he was not the sort of Hispanic they’d intended to admit. As with his idea of publishing his data, I thought this idea would probably end up hurting him rather than helping.

Daniel eventually calmed down and left my office. He went on with his studies and did not publish his numbers.

In some ways, I think I gave Daniel good advice. Publishing the data he collected would probably not have helped him in the long run. Neither would presenting himself as Hispanic for the sake of graduate admissions. Those actions would probably have led to some unpleasant consequences.

On the other hand, maybe it would have done some good to let the world know just how far the admissions committee was willing to go to admit under-represented minorities and make that honors program “look more like America as a whole.” By the same token, maybe there is something cowardly about not challenging current practices because it’s not in one’s own self-interest to make trouble. Maybe the world would be a better place if some people did challenge these preferential policies.

So what do you think, reader? Did I give Daniel good advice? Or would you have told him something different?

More judicial system dysfunction

 Jonathan Turley gets it right on the unequal justice and sanity in our judicial system.

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The release of Quintez Brown, 21, after trying to murder a Kentucky mayoral candidate is simply baffling. Since bail decisions are based in large part on risk to the community, I cannot imagine a less compelling case for bail given a reportedly history of mental illness, an attempted murder of a political candidate, and the possible political motive behind the violence. Notably, many rioters from Jan. 6th were denied bail without a charge of attempted murder. However, Black Lives Matter was able to bail out Brown with seemingly little difficulty.

Brown came within less than an inch of succeeding in murdering Craig Greenberg. Indeed, one round cut the candidate’s sweater. He was bailed out with the help of the Louisville Community Bail Fund, which is reportedly part of Black Lives Matter Louisville.

In Kentucky, all offenses, except some capital offenses, have a right to bail. However, judges may deny bail if they believe that the individual will not appear for court proceedings or is a danger to society. Since 2013, Kentucky has used the Public Safety Assessment (PSA) that looks at the risk of failure to appear, risk of new arrest, and risk of new arrest for a violent crime. The only reason that this is not a capital case is a matter of less than an inch — literally the width of a sweater.

Brown is a known activist who appeared on MSNBC with its host Joy Reid:

Link to video

It is not clear why he wanted to murder this candidate. However, even as a criminal defense attorney, I am surprised by the bail decision. I could understand removal to a psychiatric hospital, but I cannot square the bail decision.

It is also notable that the BLM money is derived from crowdfunding despite the freezing of such funds for the Canadian truckers.

The dastardly GoFundMe

 Jonathan Turley gets it right about GoFundMe. It's a dishonest organization that deserves competition.

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GoFundMe and the Nag’s Head Light: How Crowdfunding Has Become The Latest Battleground Over Free Speech

GoFundMe’s suspension of millions to support protesting truckers in Canada shocked many, particularly when the company initially announced its intention to distribute the money to other charities. It was less of a surprise for those of us who have criticized the company for years over its use of the platform to target and block funds for conservative and libertarian causes. Indeed, the company has revised an old practice known as the “Nag’s Head light” in luring the unsuspecting into what has become a liberal lockbox on funds.

In the Carolinas, locals would sometimes tie a lantern under the head of a horse to lure ships to their doom. Thinking the light was a ship in deep water, the ships would unwittingly sail into the shore rocks where they would be stripped of their cargo. That is how the resort town Nag’s Head, North Carolina got its name.

GoFundMe is the ultimate Nag’s Head operation. It draws conservative and libertarian causes to its shore with promise of being a neutral crowdfunding site. At its creation, the founders pledged to change the world by “disrupting giving” by handing control to average people in supporting others with common values and views.

The easy-to-use technology and need for crowdfunding services quickly expanded the company into a multibillion enterprise. However, it soon became clear that the company was using its control of funds to advance its own political agenda. Worse yet, the company effectively coaxing groups into fundraising campaigns on its site, only to freeze accounts before the money could be used.

In the case of the Canadian truckers protesting Covid mandate, the company perfectly replicated the Nag’s Head Light. It allowed people to donate over $10 million, thinking that they were helping the truckers and presumably not donating to other sites. It then suspended the account and announced that it would distribute the money to other charities in consultation with the truckers. Once the ships crashed on its rocks, it was literally going to salvage the wreckage.

The announcement was breathtakingly moronic and led some to call for criminal investigations. It turns out that soliciting funds for one reason and then using them for another (“better”) cause is considered fraud in some circles. The company quickly backtracked. However, it still refused to allow the donations to go to the truckers. It will return the money. In the meantime, critical time and support has been lost for those who trusted the company.

It is a familiar pattern for the company in allowing people to send money for badly needed support only to lock the funds away at the last minute. The company’s record has moved it well beyond any plausible deniability that using access to donations to advance its own priorities.

Consider GoFundMe’s freezing of funds for legal defense funds. One would think that funding litigation costs would be unassailable since it is an effort to secure judicial review of the underlying merits of a case or a cause. After all, if a cause is based on disinformation, a court can quickly sort out the truth. Right? Wrong.

GoFundMe froze donations needed to support Kyle Rittenhouse’s legal defense because he was accused of a violent crime. However, that is the point of a trial. He was accused of a crime and he was entitled to a presumption of innocence. However, the media ran false accounts of the story while social media companies like TikTok censored pro-Rittenhouse material. One police officer was fired for simply donating to Rittenhouse anonymously on GoFundMe. Neither the company nor the media came to the defense of Norfolk Police Officer William Kelly. Rittenhouse was, of course, acquitted. Then GoFundMe released the funds after they were no longer needed to support his trial.

The company also suspended litigation funds for accused police officers as well as parents who sought to challenge vaccinate mandates in courts.

When the company blocked the distribution of donations to Rittenhouse, it declared “GoFundMe’s Terms of Service prohibit raising money for the legal defense of an alleged violent crime.” It is a ridiculous policy since defendants have a presumption of innocence and we should all parties being able to present their best cases before independent judges. That includes Canadian truckers, Black Lives Matter, Antifa and other groups facing litigation. Moreover, critics have noted that the company has supported legal funds supporting rioters in various cities as well as an appeal for the 2020 Seattle Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP.)

The hypocrisy of the company on such issues has been flagged repeatedly, including by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

It does not matter. Like the social media companies, GoFundMe controls billions in funds and has become the very scourge that it was designed to combat. Rather than empower average people, it now operates more like a corporate overlord on what causes are worthy of crowdfunding.

Notably, GoFundMe relied on accounts from the Canadian government to label the truckers as violent despite the fact that the truckers are protesting the government. The protests have been largely peaceful, particularly in comparison to the “mostly peaceful” protests in past summers (by groups allowed to crowdfund by the company). It is the same pattern used by other companies in serving as a conduit of government priorities and policies.

YouTube and Twitter have blocked critics of Putin or governments like India. Even the W.H.O. has supported such censorship to deal with what it now calls the “infodemic,” which includes criticism of itself. YouTube and Twitter have blocked critics of Putin or governments like India. In the United States, Democratic leaders (including President Joe Biden) have pushed for more corporate censorship on subjects ranging from global warming to gender issues to election integrity to vaccines.

The inclusion of GoFundMe in this increasingly united front is particularly chilling. As the Supreme Court has repeatedly held, money is a critical part of free speech. You speak through your donations and those funds then support further free speech and associations. As companies like Twitter actively silence dissenting voices, GoFundMe has served as a chokepoint for funds. The result is that many are finding it not only difficult to use social media to voice their views but to use crowdfunding to garner the support of like-minded people.

GoFundMe can clearly redefine itself as a progressive company. It has free speech rights like those who it is seeking to silence. Like many in the media, the company has largely written off half of the country. The problem of the company is when the crowd in its crowdfunding business goes somewhere else.

Climate Alarmism in perspective: A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming

 Have you heard about the recent horrendous trends in climate events such as hurricanes and tornados? Well, here is a paper that puts that in perspective.

Yes Virginia - it is alarmism.

"A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming", Alimonti, Mariani, Prodi, and Ricci in the European Physical Journal Plus.

Here is the link.

Here are some excerpts.

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Abstract This article reviews recent bibliography on time series of some extreme weather events and related response indicators in order to understand whether an increase in intensity and/or frequency is detectable. The most robust global changes in climate extremes are found in yearly values of heatwaves (number of days, maximum duration and cumulated heat), while global trends in heatwave intensity are not significant. Daily precipitation intensity and extreme precipitation frequency are stationary in the main part of the weather stations. Trend analysis of the time series of tropical cyclones show a substantial temporal invariance and the same is true for tornadoes in the USA. At the same time, the impact of warming on surface wind speed remains unclear. The analysis is then extended to some global response indicators of extreme meteorological events, namely natural disasters, floods, droughts, ecosystem productivity and yields of the four main crops (maize, rice, soybean and wheat). None of these response indicators show a clear positive trend of extreme events. In conclusion on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet. It would be nevertheless extremely important to define mitigation and adaptation strategies that take into account current trends

To date, global observations do not show any significant trends in both the number and the energy accumulated by hurricanes, as shown in Fig. 1 and as claimed in several specific papers [13] for the USA, which report the trend dating back to over 160 years ago, or for other regions of the globe [14, 15].

Particular attention should be paid to the IPCC statement which reports strong increase in the frequency and activity of tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic. To get more information on this issue, NOAA [17] analysed much longer time series (> 100 years) of Atlantic hurricane activity.

Existing records of past Atlantic tropical storms or hurricane numbers (from 1878 to present) indeed show a pronounced upward trend; however, the density of Atlantic shipping reports was relatively low during the first decades of this period: if the storms of the modern era (after 1965) had hypothetically occurred during those decades, a considerable number of storms probably would not have been observed by the naval observation network.


Therefore, after adjusting the time series to take into account the smaller observational capacities of the past, there remains only a small nominally positive upward trend of the tropical storms from 1878 to 2006. Statistical tests indicate that this trend is not significantly distinguishable from zero.

Furthermore, Landsea et al. [18] noted that the rising trend in Atlantic tropical storm counts is almost entirely due to the increase in only short-lived storms (< 2 days), which were most likely overlooked in the early parts of the record, as they would have had less opportunity for casual encounters with ship traffic.

If we look at hurricanes in the Atlantic basin, rather than all tropical storms, the result is similar: the reported number of hurricanes during the 1860s and 1880s was similar to nowadays and again there is no significant positive trend since that time. Evidence of an upward trend is even weaker for hurricanes hitting the coast of the USA, which show a slightly negative trend starting in the 1900s or late 1800s.

Although there have been increases in hurricanes hitting the coast of the USA and in hurricane counts in the Atlantic basin since the early 1970s, Fig. 2 shows that these recent increases are not representative of the observed behavior in century-long records. In short, the historic record of Atlantic hurricane frequency does not provide convincing evidence of a substantial long-term warming-induced increase.

NOAA therefore concludes that “it is premature to conclude with high confidence that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations from human activities have had a detectable impact on Atlantic basin hurricane activity” [17].





The IPPC in its AR5 [6] reports on page 44 that “conclusions regarding global drought trends increasing since the 1970s are no longer supported” and several studies indeed show no increase in the main indices regarding global drought [56, 57].

Looking at natural disasters since 1900 shown in Fig. 8, a very small number can be observed since the middle of the last century, when a sudden growth begins which stops towards the end of the twentieth century to give way to a trend marked by a slight decrease. This trend is very strange: is it possible that natural disasters essentially appeared towards the middle of the twentieth century and that they showed such dramatic growth until the end of the century? It should also be noted that this trend is at first sight “consistent” with the growth of the global temperature of the planet.

In several reports, however, CRED warned about an exclusively climatological interpretation of the increase in events observed until the end of the twentieth century: in 2004 CRED wrote [80] that their time series (Fig. 8 with data up to 2003) “might lead one to believe that disasters occur more frequently today than in the beginning of the century. However, reaching such a conclusion based only on this graph would be incorrect. In fact, what the figure is really showing is the evolution of the registration of natural disaster events over time”.

Again in 2007 [81] “Indeed, justifying the upward trend in hydro-meteorological disaster occurrence and impacts essentially through climate change would be misleading. … one major contributor to the increase in disasters occurrence over the last decades is the constantly improving diffusion and accuracy of disaster related information”.

And this indication has been maintained over the years [82] “From a disasters analysis point of view, population growth and patterns of economic development are more important than climate change or cyclical variations in weather when explaining this upward trend. Today, not only are more people in harm’s way than there were 50 years ago, but building in flood plains, earthquakes zones and other high-risk areas has increased the likelihood that a routine natural hazard will become a major catastrophe”.

In support of this interpretation, there is also the growth of earthquakes, shown in Fig. 9, which should have nothing to do with global warming and which presents a temporal trend similar to that of all other natural disasters.

In our opinion, this confirms that the main reason of the increase in the second half of the twentieth century is the growing reporting capacity of individual states and that since this capacity has stabilized on a reliable level, the number of disasters has become stationary or has even gone down. It is the same phenomenon already observed for hurricanes and tornadoes.




Conclusions

From the Second World War, our societies have progressed enormously, reaching levels of well-being (health, nutrition, healthiness of the places of life and work, etc.) that previous generations had not even remotely imagined. Today, we are called to continue on the path of progress respecting the constraints of economic, social and environmental sustainability with the severity dictated by the fact that the planet is about to reach 10 billion inhabitants in 2050, increasingly urbanized.

Since its origins, the human species has been confronted with the negative effects of the climate; historical climatology has repeatedly used the concept of climate deterioration in order to explain negative effect of extreme events (mainly drought, diluvial phases and cold periods) on civilization. Today, we are facing a warm phase and, for the first time, we have monitoring capabilities that enable us to objectively evaluate its effects.

Fearing a climate emergency without this being supported by data, means altering the framework of priorities with negative effects that could prove deleterious to our ability to face the challenges of the future, squandering natural and human resources in an economically difficult context, even more negative following the COVID emergency. This does not mean we should do nothing about climate change: we should work to minimize our impact on the planet and to minimize air and water pollution. Whether or not we manage to drastically curtail our carbon dioxide emissions in the coming decades, we need to reduce our vulnerability to extreme weather and climate events.

Leaving the baton to our children without burdening them with the anxiety of being in a climate emergency would allow them to face the various problems in place (energy, agricultural-food, health, etc.) with a more objective and constructive spirit, with the goal of arriving at a weighted assessment of the actions to be taken without wasting the limited resources at our disposal in costly and ineffective solutions. How the climate of the twenty-first century will play out is a topic of deep uncertainty. We need to increase our resiliency to whatever the future climate will present us.

We need to remind ourselves that addressing climate change is not an end in itself, and that climate change is not the only problem that the world is facing. The objective should be to improve human well-being in the twenty-first century, while protecting the environment as much as we can and it would be a nonsense not to do so: it would be like not taking care of the house where we were born and raised.

More often than not, the Government makes a mess of things

 Here is Cameron Kaplan in the Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Kaplan, an economist, is an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine.

Questions to ask yourself.

Why such inefficiency?

Is it due to inefficiency or someone taking advantage of the system for gain?

Is anything ever "free"?  If not who bears the cost and who benefits?

What role does separating decision making from consequences play?

What is likely to provide the most overall benefit most of the time - imposing the preferences of a few or allowing individual preferences to shape decisions?

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My 4-year-old daughter’s preschool requires weekly Covid testing. We were told not to worry about the cost—the tests are free. On a recent Sunday my family got tested at a pop-up tent outside a gasoline station. The sign on the tent advertised “free Covid testing.”

I didn’t pay for these tests, but they aren’t free. The cost is billed to my health insurance. A few days ago, I received a routine letter from my insurance company summarizing what it paid: $1,140 a month for my daughter’s weekly PCR test. That comes to about $285 per test, 20 times the cost of an at-home rapid test.

Policy makers at both the state and federal levels have opted to finance Covid testing through private health insurance. A California law enacted in November requires insurers to pay for Covid testing without copayments from patients. Insurers must reimburse testing providers, even out-of-network ones, and the state places no restriction on the amount reimbursed.

This gives providers unchecked power to set prices, inflating the societal cost of testing as a tool for controlling the pandemic. Insurance companies will inevitably pass the costs on to policyholders through either higher premiums or reduced benefits.

Let’s revisit the $1,140 per month for testing at my daughter’s preschool. On an annual basis, that would add up to $13,860—a sum that comes close to the $14,974 average yearly expenditure per student in California public schools.

The heart of the problem is that Covid testing isn’t simply a medical service. Regular testing is primarily for the community’s benefit. Policy makers encouraged testing by making it free for individuals, but leaving insurers to pick up the tab established an inefficient system with hidden costs that are likely to haunt us for years to come.

A far better approach would have been for the government to foot the bill for testing. Larger organizations have been able to negotiate lower prices. Last fall the Los Angeles Unified School District provided an estimated nine million Covid tests for students and staff. The price tag was high: $350 million. But that’s $39 a test, or about one-seventh of what my insurer is paying for my daughter.

Like other aspects of healthcare, the current system is also inequitable. Since private insurers are paying more for testing, those pop-up tents on the corner are likely to locate in more-affluent neighborhoods, while testing remains less accessible in lower-income areas.

Another option would be setting a maximum allowable price for Covid testing. Medicare pays up to $100, substantially lower than what some providers charge private insurers. Applying this limit more broadly might be the simplest path, given the way our system has developed. Economists typically don’t advocate price controls, but they can be a viable alternative when markets are already distorted.

Our preschool, the government, and perhaps even those administering the tests are trying to do the right thing. But forcing insurance companies to pay up to 20 times the retail rate for tests creates a sizable moral hazard problem and misallocation of resources that should not be ignored.