I found these two pieces provided an interesting counterpoint. In the Wall Street Journal James Freeman reads the description of one of the posts incoming Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson just created via executive order:

The Deputy Mayor for Labor Relations is responsible for working with all City agencies and departments to foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of Chicago; improve working conditions; advance opportunities for profitable employment; and assure work-related benefits and rights, including working with relevant authorities to help enforce workers’ statutory rights.

and, quoting from the Trib:

That’s a gift-wrapped present for the [Chicago Teachers Union], which probably had a big hand in its composition. It says nothing whatsoever about any obligation to protect taxpayers, homeowners, businesses or, frankly, even the democratic process. It basically says: Do what unionized workers want, find more ways to give them more of what they want, and your annual review will be just dandy. Any private sector manager, or even a private sector union leader, closely reading that language, would be shaking their head in amazement.

In fact, if you take that job description at face value, any deputy mayor pushing back on any union demand whatsoever would, in fact, be contravening what their boss says is the requirement of the job. If a union asks for something that it says “advances opportunities for profitable employment,” then the deputy mayor’s job is to immediately give it to them and think up more stuff, too. If the deputy mayor were to say, for example, we can handle a 5% raise but not 25%, such a statement would contravene their very job description.

declaims:

This gift to the Chicago Teachers Union is appalling but perhaps not surprising to Journal readers.

The other piece is a post by Bryce Hill at RealClearPolicy:

The new poll from Echelon Insights in partnership with the Illinois Policy Institute shows Illinoisans prefer pension reform 3-to-1 over tax hikes and service cuts.

Here’s the exact wording of the question: “When it comes to public-sector pensions for government workers, which of these statements do you agree with more, even if neither is exactly right? Illinois should …”

• Amend the State Constitution to preserve retirement benefits already earned by public employees and retirees, but also allow a reduction in the benefits earned in the future by employees and allow for slower growth in retirees’ future benefits.
• Raise taxes or reduce state spending on higher education, public safety, and social services to fully fund the state’s pension obligations to government workers.

Fifty-six percent of respondents supported the pension reform position, compared with just 18% of respondents who supported tax hikes and service cuts.

With respect to Mr. Freeman’s point I believe that any thinking person knew that before Mayor Johnson was elected. It was obvious. No executive order was needed to make the determination.

With respect to the second although I think the poll’s question is a little cooked (for one thing they should have separated raising taxes from cutting services), I completely agree that public pension reform in Illinois is a dire necessity made all the more urgent by higher inflation than has been seen in decades—cost of living increments are baked into public pensions and have the force of law. It certainly isn’t surprising: Illinois voters already rejected a graduated state income tax. And we already pay among the highest taxes in the country. The reforms that should be implemented are legion including:

• We should transition from a guaranteed benefits plan to a guaranteed contribution plan. We should have done that a decade ago.
• School districts should be required for pay a larger proportion of retired teachers’ pensions. Ideally, all of it.
• The practice of “goosing” teacher pay for the last couple of years before retirement should be forbidden by law
• Either Chicago teachers should be rolled into the same plan as other Illinois school districts’ retirees or Chicago citizens should be exempted from the part of state taxes used to pay the retirements of non-Chicago retired teachers or the city should be reimbursed by the amount that Chicago overpays. The present situation is unjust.

I also think that the wages of public employees must be kept in line with the incomes of the communities they serve but that’s a slightly different subject.

But my main point is that I don’t see any straightforward way of reconciling Mayor Johnson’s goals. We’ll have an interesting test case soon. Although the Chicago Teachers Union just negotiated its contract the Chicago Federation of Police has not. The FOP didn’t support Johnson’s mayoral campaign and, as I have reported here, public safety is a key concern of Chicagoans. Although I’m not naive enough to believe there’s a straight line connection between the FOP and public safety, they’re not completely unrelated either. I think there’s a straight line relationship between the uptick in crime and decreasing number of arrests.

There’s a conflict among public safety, defunding the police, and the limits how much revenue can be extracted. I’m reminded of the faux Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times.

While I’m on the subject this piece by Loren Thompson at Forbes caught my attention:

The dual stresses of conflict in Ukraine and potential conflict in Taiwan have forced a wholesale reevaluation of how the U.S. government purchases munitions and other materiel, with an eye to accelerating every facet of the process.

The urgency of military needs has merged with the Biden administration’s efforts to craft a national industrial policy, and the bureaucratic result is akin to when frozen regions begin to thaw with the coming of spring.

At this point the U. S. isn’t able to supply arms to Ukraine at the pace at which the country needs them. Will we able to supply both Taiwan and Ukraine at the same time?

As should be obvious Russia’s war with Ukraine is a European war but other than the United Kingdom, Netherlands, and countries that share borders with Russia you would hardly know it. Consider:

Find more statistics at Statista
When considered in absolute terms the situation is even more stark: the U. S. is supplying more aid to Ukraine than all other countries combined.

Here’s a question the significance of which shouldn’t be lost on any of the interested parties: given a choice between Ukraine and Taiwan, which is our higher priority? I think it’s Taiwan.

Here’s an interesting quote from scholar Stefan Auer in an interview at Chatham House:

I am seriously concerned by the growing gap between the EU’s capabilities and expectations. We are being told Ukrainians are fighting and dying for Europe, for the EU, so Ukraine must become a member of the EU. But the more I research, the more sceptical I become about the viability of that proposal.

Even before the war started, Ukraine did not measure up to expectations on the quality of governance needed for EU membership. So if the EU pursues its normal procedures in terms of enlargement there is no way Ukraine will become a full EU member within the next 10-20 years. But geopolitically Ukraine must become a member, so the EU must change to make that possible.

Another problem is that, from the perspectives of Germany and France, the EU needs to integrate further before enlargement can proceed, but there is no support for that. Poland does not support it and I do not think there would be much support for it in Ukraine either. When you examine Ukrainian debates about national sovereignty or the nature of their fight, yes they fight for Europe but they fight for Ukrainian independence. So, to imagine the Ukrainian preference would be for a ‘United States of Europe’ is utterly misguided.

Does NATO membership for Ukraine face similar obstacles?

At Project Syndicate Joschka Fischer, probably more responsible for Europe’s sorry state than any other living individual, declaims that Europe will be the biggest loser from many of the situations unfolding today and it has no choice but to reassert itself as a “real power”:

But the broader danger for the international system stems not from the war in Ukraine (Russia is too weak to pose a truly global threat), but from the deterioration of US-China relations. True, notwithstanding China’s bellicose rhetoric over Taiwan and its aggressive naval exercises in the waters around the island, the confrontation so far is less military than economic, technological, and political. But that is cold comfort, because it is an intensifying zero-sum conflict.

Some of the biggest losers in this confrontation are likely to be Japan and Europe. Chinese firms have built massive production capacities in the automobile industry – especially in electric vehicles (EVs) – and are now poised to outcompete the European and Japanese automakers that have long been globally dominant.

Making matters worse, America’s own response to Chinese competition is to pursue an industrial policy that will come at European and Japanese manufacturers’ expense. Recent legislation such as the Inflation Reduction Act, for example, provides large subsidies for cars produced in the US. From the US perspective, such policies kill two birds with one stone: protecting large domestic manufacturers and providing them with incentives to pursue EV development.

The eventual outcome will be a thorough reorganization of the global auto industry, with Japan and Europe (primarily Germany) losing competitiveness and market share. And lest we forget, this major economic development represents merely the beginning of a much larger global confrontation and strategic reordering.

Not only must Europe take great pains to preserve its economic model during this reorganization of the global economy. It also must manage high energy costs, the growing digital technology gap vis-à-vis the two superpowers, and the urgent need for increased defense spending to counter the new threat from Russia. All these priorities will grow even more urgent as the next US presidential election approaches, given the distinct possibility that Donald Trump could return to the White House.

Europe thus finds itself especially disadvantaged. It resides in an increasingly dangerous region, yet it remains a confederation of sovereign nation-states that have never mustered the will to achieve true integration – even after two world wars and the decades-long Cold War. In a world dominated by large states with growing military budgets, Europe still is not a real power.

When Germany was profiting by its “factory in a box” trade with China, there was no threat. Now that Germany is running a trade deficit with China, it’s a threat. Furthermore, he’s a pacifist who encourages intervention.

As in the United States European military power and global influence are downstream from economic power. I don’t see how Europe preserves its economic model, reduces its reliance on fossil fuels, eschews nuclear power, and reindustrializes all at the same time.

Mit Verlaub, Herr Fischer, Sie sind ein Arschloch.

I’m finding the discussions in the blogosphere and the opinion pieces in the media pretty discouraging. They’re almost entirely partisan bickering. Individuals on different sides look at the same events and see drastically different things. It’s true of practically every story.

What I think that both Democrats and Republicans are missing is that practically all elected officials are corrupt and the longer they have been in office and the higher the office the worse they are. They have compromised their principles so thoroughly they don’t have any.

Some see that and assert that if only their guys got in things would be different. That’s wishful thinking. They won’t be any different.

Some say that’s proof positive of how useless government is. Sadly, there are some things that desperately need doing that markets and individual initiative won’t accomplish. As bad as it is, we need the government.

So we’re down to bickering.

This article in Science by Jeffrey Brainard is a week old but I thought it was worth mentioning. It may not be surprising but it’s scandalous nonetheless. Nearly a third of papers published in neuroscience journals are fraudulent or plagiarized:

When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was “shocked” by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%. Both numbers, which he and colleagues report in a medRxiv preprint posted on 8 May, are well above levels they calculated for 2010—and far larger than the 2% baseline estimated in a 2022 publishers’ group report.

“It is just too hard to believe” at first, says Sabel of Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and editor-in-chief of Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience. It’s as if “somebody tells you 30% of what you eat is toxic.”

His findings underscore what was widely suspected: Journals are awash in a rising tide of scientific manuscripts from paper mills—secretive businesses that allow researchers to pad their publication records by paying for fake papers or undeserved authorship. “Paper mills have made a fortune by basically attacking a system that has had no idea how to cope with this stuff,” says Dorothy Bishop, a University of Oxford psychologist who studies fraudulent publishing practices. A 2 May announcement from the publisher Hindawi underlined the threat: It shut down four of its journals it found were “heavily compromised” by articles from paper mills.

This seems to be emerging as a common theme today. When publishing such frauds is rewarded and there are practically no punishments when the fraud is detected:

The microbiologist Elisabeth Bik has an extraordinary ability to spot duplicated or faked images in scientific journals: She has spotted hundreds over the years. But she told Nature that even five years after she’d reported the fakes to the journals, most of them had not been dealt with.

The Oxford psychologist Dorothy Bishop says this matches her own experience: “If one points out academic malpractice to publishers or institutions, there is often no reply.”

There are plenty of other issues with scientific research and publishing. Journals take scientists’ work for free or even charge to publish it, then charge them again for access.

Editors at one journal walked out recently over “unethical” publishing fees. And the demand for “positive” results incentivizes scientists to hack the data up until they find something. Those are deep systemic problems within science.

But outright fraud, you’d think, should be easy to fix if detected. And yet the scientific community often ignores it, undermining the entirety of science: If a large percentage of studies are fake, how can we trust the progress science does make?

Greater transparency, including full publication of data and code as standard for all papers, would be a start, but ultimately the incentive structure of science has to change.

I agree with that conclusion: the incentives need to change.

Note, too, that the results reported are from before the great explosion in the use of large language model tools. Some will claim that such tools will aid in detecting frauds. Contrariwise, I suspect that the use of the tools in perpetrating frauds will outstrip their use in detecting them by far.

Yahoo News has posted a Chicago Tribune editorial giving unsolicited advice to incoming Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. Here’s the meat of it:

We expect Johnson, who strikes us as an honest man, to continue his predecessor’s campaign against corruption and conflicts of interest of all kinds, including his own at negotiating tables. We similarly anticipate a vast improvement in a commitment to transparency, not one of the previous administration’s strongest suits.

We remind him that most Chicagoans are political moderates, that nobody elected the Chicago Teachers Union to run the city, and that warmed-over Marxist or racially divisive rhetoric, for which Johnson has shown a certain affinity, will alienate far more Chicagoans than it inspires.

Most Chicagoans look to their mayor to improve their everyday lives — to clear the snow, keep the CTA safe and reliable, keep the roads free from potholes and bring them together across racial and other divides when times are hard.

Johnson is an inspiring speaker and we trust he will put that to good use when it comes to the inevitable funerals, and also the good-news moments when he can help Chicagoans rediscover their sense of unity and civic pride.

We urge him to take an international view and use his gifts to promote the city’s attributes far and wide. We remind him of the importance of arts and culture, the things that make the city unique. We point out that the suburbs are neither hostile territory nor irrelevant to his quest for success. Pride in Chicago does not stop at the city limits and nor does investment in the city’s future. He should talk to Highland Park, Waukegan and Naperville. And he should not tax them for coming downtown for work or play.

Chicago’s downtown and its storied neighborhoods all will vie for Johnson’s attention, and we point out again that their economic fates are intertwined. This is not a zero-sum game. The city’s struggling areas need entrepreneurs more than they need handouts. They need new, dynamic residents and their existing local businesses need support. And kids need functioning schools that teach the necessary skills for success. The task is one of continuous improvement, not changing the measurements to protect an entrenched bureaucracy.

We also remind him that most Chicagoans are all Chicagoans by choice. They have the ability to get up and go if they feel like their new mayor has his hand unduly in their wallets or is failing to provide a safe environment for them to raise their children or walk their dog.

They go on to provide advice I suspect will go unheeded: not to allow his administration to become an echo chamber.

I think it’s all pretty good advice as far as it goes. We will probably know soon if it falls on deaf ears.

Today is Brandon Johnson’s first full day as mayor of Chicago. His term of offices promises to be a grand experiment in progressive governance. We’re not entirely sure what that portends for the city. We can make some inferences, however, based on the four executive orders he signed immediately after his inauguration. From the report by Jessica D’Onofrio at ABC 7 Chicago:

The first, EO 2023-15, is aimed at boosting youth employment by ordering the Office of Budget and Management to analyze the resources in the city’s 2023 budget in order to find funding for youth employment and enrichment programs. It also instructs the Deputy Mayor of Education and Health and Human Services to lead all city departments and agencies in identifying entry-level jobs that would be suitable for young people.

The second order, EO 2023-16, establishes a Deputy Mayor for Immigrant, Migrant and Refugee Rights, who will coordinate and communicate between city departments and officials to support newly arrived migrants, refugees and immigrants. This includes immediate needs and long-standing policy and goals.

The third order, EO 2023-17, establishes a Deputy Mayor for Community Safety, whose office will focus on “eradicating the root causes of crime and violence” and “advance a comprehensive, healing-centered approach to community safety.”

The final order, EO 2023-18, establishes a Deputy Mayor for Labor Relations, with the goal of allowing “coordination to foster, promote and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers and retirees of Chicago.” This role will also work to improve working conditions, protect workers’ rights and advance new job opportunities in the city, Johnson said

I think the statistics are inescapable. The “root causes” of crime and violence in Chicago are black street gangs and the conclusion by a relative handful of people that the laws will not be enforced and violent crime is a viable way of making more money a heckuva lot more easily than they might by working at the jobs for which they might be hired with the credentials they have or are willing to attain. The street gangs in turn are a consequence of dysfunction in inner city black society. The dysfunction in turn is a consequence of evils that were remediated long ago. Once put in place social structures are difficult to erase.

The viability of violent crime for achieving prosperity is a consequence of the previous experiment in progressive governance that has been promoted by States Attorney Kim Foxx and over which long-time prosecutors are resigning. Anti-prosecution and anti-incarceration are measures that have been tried and failed not measures that have never been tried. If prosecutors won’t prosecute and judges won’t convict, why should the police arrest? That’s where we are now.

I could go on be relating low wages to the seemingly unending supply of new workers taking entry level and low wage jobs. That’s why the black youth unemployment rate is 20%.

Welcome to the Petri dish, Chicago.

Today Brandon Johnson will be inaugurated as the 57th mayor of Chicago. Over the weekend 12 people were killed and 23 wounded. As Cate Cauguiran reports at ABC 7 Chicago in a single half hour period yesterday there were 10 armed robberies:

CHICAGO (WLS) — Chicago police are searching for four armed men responsible for 10 robberies that happened within 30 minutes on the Northwest Side.

Police said the robberies happened between 7:20 a.m. and 7:50 a.m. on Sunday in the Logan Square and Hermosa neighborhoods. In each of the attacks, police said the suspects got out of their grey Hyundai Elantra with guns drawn at their victims as they were on the sidewalk or parking their vehicles.

Surveillance video of one incident shows that it took thieves about 45 seconds to rob one victim before driving off.

The Logan Square neighborhood is where outgoing Mayor Lori Lightfoot lives. During her four year tenure as mayor nearly 3,000 people were killed and another 12,000 wounded.