In an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal Bradley A. Smith graciously provides an agenda for Elon Musk as he sits on the board of Twitter:

1. Leave more content up. Twitter has rules about posts, and the bulk of enforcement is done through artificial intelligence. The algorithms err on the side of taking down material that might violate Twitter rules. Instead, they should err on the side of leaving questionable material up until there has been human review.

2. More aggressively screen complaints. Currently, there is too much bad-faith reporting done for the purpose of getting controversial, but legitimate, content taken down. For every 10 content moderators tasked with taking down content, hire a content defender, whose job is to advocate for keeping or putting content back up. Err on the side of speech, not censorship.

3. Create an easy-to-use, rapid, transparent appeals process for takedowns of material, and especially for banned or suspended accounts.

4. Stop caving in to organized campaigns to remove particular speakers. Twitter doesn’t have to take sides in the culture wars. Say nothing, and let the controversy subside.

5. Don’t respond to overt requests from government officials to take down content. When government officials covertly request content removal, expose them, and ignore the request. When government officials tell you to “watch out” for particular misinformation, be skeptical—of both their intentions and their accuracy.

6. Eliminate the “fact-checking” program. It is biased and, because people know it is biased, has had the opposite of its intended effect. It has destroyed Twitter’s credibility.

7. Conduct an outside audit of Twitter’s policy of removing “false or misleading information” about Covid. In particular, ask: a) How much “misinformation” was removed that is now considered true?; b) What effect did removal have on the overall debate?; c) Did it prevent or delay correct information from reaching the public?; and d) Did removal actually stop the information’s spread? Use the knowledge gained to review other policies, and apologize where appropriate.

8. Review the “hateful conduct” policy to be sure that it isn’t squelching public discussion on contested issues, and change the policy where needed. For example, not every instance of or reference to “misgendering” should automatically be removed as hateful.

9. End the ban on political ads. Since 2019, Twitter has banned political ads. Not just ads from Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and other candidates, but any ad that discusses any issue, from climate change to gun rights to an ad promoting a local ballot measure. Low-cost ads on Twitter are a huge benefit to grass roots organizations. As Twitter is anything but a politics-free zone, it’s hard to see a downside to allowing political advertising on the same terms as commercial advertising.

10. Stop supporting congressional legislation that would reduce speech, such as the misnamed “Honest Ads Act.” Make the company an advocate for free speech, not censorship.

I have no idea why Elon Musk purchased 10% of Twitter, entitling him to a seat on the company’s board of directors. Maybe he did it to straighten Twitter out. Maybe he did it to make money. Maybe both. Maybe something else. It’s his money.

My point here is that, if Elon Musk bought 10% of Twitter to make Twitter “a positive force for democracy”, he’s doing it the right way. He became a stockholder, a substantial stockholder.

I suspect that’s tilting at windmills. Remember Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics.

I have a few issues with David Brooks’s latest New York Times column, a lament for the end of globalization. Here is his peroration which highlights some of my issues:

I look back over the past few decades of social thinking with understanding. I was too young to really experience the tension of the Cold War, but it must have been brutal. I understand why so many people, when the Soviet Union fell, grabbed onto a vision of the future that promised an end to existential conflict.

I look at the current situation with humility. The critiques that so many people are making about the West, and about American culture — for being too individualistic, too materialistic, too condescending — these critiques are not wrong. We have a lot of work to do if we are going to be socially strong enough to stand up to the challenges that are coming over the next several years, if we are going to persuade people in all those swing countries across Africa, Latin America and the rest of the world that they should throw their lot in with the democracies and not with the authoritarians — that our way of life is the better way of life.

And I look at the current situation with confidence. Ultimately, people want to stand out and fit in. They want to feel their lives have dignity, that they are respected for who they are. They also want to feel membership in moral communities. Right now, many people feel disrespected by the West. They are casting their lot with authoritarian leaders who speak to their resentments and their national pride. But those leaders don’t actually recognize them. For those authoritarians — from Trump to Putin — their followers are just instruments in their own search for self-aggrandizement.

Let’s consider the three italicized words. In his confidence I see the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s not merely a matter of framing as he suggests again and again, using various wordings.

But the resentments that are felt by people in various non-Western countries aren’t just a matter of framing. They are disrespected by people, at least some people, in the West.

And I don’t see a trace of the humility that he claims in his column. If anything it’s the opposite.

And, finally, understanding. I’m not even confident he understands North American elites particularly well. If he did he would recognize the disdain with which many European elites see American elites for the simple reason that they aren’t particularly elite.

And then there’s this sentence:

What we call “the West” is not an ethnic designation or an elitist country club.

Is there actually a “West”? Or are there a group of countries, many of which have an ethnic basis and most of them highly nationalistic, that cling together in pursuit of their distinct national interests?

Consider France, for example. France is unquestionably part of “the West” but it’s also highly nationalistic. For France nationalism is tied up with French culture but dig beneath the surface and, although you might be French by virtue of adopting French culture, if you are not “of French stock” you may be subject to discrimination.

Furthermore “human rights” mean different things in different countries in the West.

I suspect that Mr. Brooks is confusing “the West” with “everybody I know”.

Mitch Daniels takes to the pages of the Washington Post to urge the United States to accept “every last Ukrainian who wants to come here”:

So here we are again. Millions of Ukrainians already have fled the dictator’s tanks. And although the Horvaths of their nation are mainly still at home fighting, there is every chance that again many will have to rebuild their lives in the American refuge. It won’t be merely compassionate and humane for the United States to take in every one who seeks to come; it will be smart.

The university I serve has committed resources to support Ukrainian scholars who feel forced to flee their homeland, and we are in touch with several already. Our hope is to provide them a haven to continue their scholarship until they can return to a safe and free Ukraine. But if, as in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere, the dictator’s tanks prevent that for a long time, the United States will experience yet another windfall, of both talent and appreciation for the “blessings of liberty.”

Janos Horvath waited more than three decades. But after the breakthrough of freedom in 1989, he offered his wisdom — as he had offered it to Richard Lugar and countless American young people — to his native land. Another, highly moving photo shows a 70-something Horvath (he died in 2019 at 98) in the same chamber, being sworn in as a member of the new, post-Soviet Hungarian parliament.

We hope for a Ukrainian victory and the survival of freedom in that brutalized country. But until that survival is ensured, we should take them in, not just some arbitrary number, but every one who wants to come. It’s as much in our interest as theirs.

I’m materially in agreement with that. However, as a famous ancestor of mine once put it, “don’t set the fence too far”. Other than those who’ve fled the war, the “Ukrainian diaspora” is presently primarily in (in descending order) Russia, Kazakhstan, Canada, Brazil, and the United States with other countries having much smaller Ukrainian populations and we shouldn’t be too surprised if that pattern continues. Most of those fleeing the war have gone to Poland. I don’t know how many Ukrainian war refugees will remain there.

Since the metro areas with the largest populations of Ukrainians are (in descending order) New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, I expect we’ll get our share here. They’ll be welcome. There’s a Chicago neighborhood called Ukrainian Village although is isn’t as Ukrainian as it used to be. It’s sort of an oasis on the West Side. There are four Ukrainian churches there and I know of at least two in the town of Buffalo Grove.

Allen Blinder does a pretty good job of outlining the goals in his latest Wall Street Journal op-ed:

The Fed is trying to engineer a soft landing by the end of next year, with unemployment about where it is today (3.6%) and inflation down to 2.6%—as measured by the Fed’s favorite index, the inflation rate for personal consumption expenditures excluding food and energy, or core PCE for short.

How likely is the Fed to achieve those ambitious goals?

but it takes him quite a while to get around to the point:

The bloody conflict in Ukraine is already driving food and energy prices higher, which will boost headline inflation in the coming months. Core inflation won’t be immune because food and energy prices seep into virtually all other prices, albeit in muted form. What product doesn’t include energy in its cost, either directly (to keep the lights on) or indirectly (via delivery trucks)?

Beyond that, the longer inflation remains high, the more it gets embedded into wages and other contractual arrangements. When workers see inflation coming, they want to be compensated for it. And once higher inflationary expectations get entrenched, they affect price- and wage-setting throughout the economy, making a soft landing harder to achieve.

Fortunately, expected inflation doesn’t appear to have gotten out of hand, at least not yet. The 10-year “break-even” inflation rate implied by bond prices is only 2.8%. That’s a bit higher than the Fed would like, but only a bit. The key questions: How long will the expectations dam hold if high inflation continues? If the dam breaks, how much will the Fed have to raise interest rates to beat down inflationary psychology?

Before the war, it looked as if the Fed might glide by. Inflation appeared likely to turn down soon, and expectations of future inflation probably would have followed. Now, unfortunately, that optimism looks rather out of date.

So let’s all join Lefty Gomez in wishing Jay Powell and company good luck. They’ll need it.

Lefty Gomez was a Yanks pitcher who famously and humbly declared that he’d “rather be lucky than good”. I strongly suspect that the FOMC is not nearly as good as they think they are if only because things have changed drastically over the last 40 years. 40 years ago the Fed was able to bring runaway inflation down by using the levers at its disposal, producing a sharp recession in the process. Will today’s Fed under today’s conditions be able to curb inflation without a steep recession? Or could it produce a steep recession without curbing inflation? Right now there’s a lot of gambling being done under the assumption that the Fed is both lucky and good.

Inspired by a regular commenter I took a look again at Freedom House’s evaluations of various countries. Some might find it dry reading but I found it interesting. It’s unclear to me how one would go about comparing political and civil liberties in a small, compact highly cohesive country like, say, Switzerland with a large, diverse, and wildly noncohesive country like the United States.

In all honesty rather than being dismayed at Freedom House’s low ranking of the United States (spoiler alert: we aren’t rated 100% free) I was surprised that we were rated as high as we were. I can only speculate that those doing the research don’t reside in Illinois.

To ease worker shortages the editors of the Washington Post urge President Biden to speed up the approval process for legal immigration:

President Biden insists he is doing everything he can to lower inflation and keep the economy strong. But he has yet to take an obvious — and much-needed — step to fix the legal immigration system.

There are 9.5 million people waiting for their legal immigration paperwork to be processed by the U.S. government. These include people seeking work permits, asylum, green cards and citizenship. It’s an unprecedented backlog. Some people trying to renew temporary work permits are waiting so long that they are losing their right to work legally, meaning they lose their jobs and income. In all, people waiting for employment authorization or reauthorization make up about 1.6 million of the backlogged applications. They are ready and able to work, yet government bureaucracy is in the way. This is a major loss for the U.S. economy.

I completely agree that the process should be sped up. However, I do have some reservations about some of their claims.

For example, is a labor force participation rate of 62% worse than one of 63%? I think it depends on the reasons that underpin the decline. In addition I think that asserting that speeding up the review process for application for legal immigration will improve our employment situation is a stretch. It depends entirely on what the labor shortages are and who the prospective legal immigrants are. Just to take one example, bringing in 1 million agricultural workers or computer programmers will do little about a shortfall of welders. It will, however, tend to reduce the wages of agricultural workers or computer programmers.

I wish the editors had broken down the headline number of 9.5 million a bit. How many of those affected by the slowness of the process are people seeking work permits, asylum applicants, green card applicants, and applications for citizenship, respectively? A little factoid. Over the period of the last 30 years the rate at which asylum applications have been approved has never been above 50%. Right now just about 2/3s of such applications are denied. In other words to some degree bogus asylum claims are clogging up the system. The way to deal with that is to reduce the number of bogus applications by weeding them out much more quickly, preferably at the point at which they are made. The present, inefficient and ineffective system actually incentivizes bogus claims.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post Lawrence Summers doubles down on the baleful predictions he’s been making in a sort of Socratic dialogue format, more or less interviewing himself. Here, for example, is his observation of the Federal Reserve achieving a “soft landing” (bringing inflation within reasonable levels without the economy entering a recession):

There is a first time for everything, but over the past 75 years, every time inflation has exceeded 4 percent and unemployment has been below 5 percent, the U.S. economy has gone into recession within two years. Today, inflation is north of 6 percent and unemployment is south of 4 percent.

Second, the three examples that Powell points to all were moments when unemployment exceeded inflation, which is very different from today’s configuration.

Third, those soft-landing successes all followed actions to preempt future inflation pressures, something the Fed ruled out in its unfortunately still operative 2020 framework and operating procedures.

The condensed version of his observations is:

• The Fed’s actions to date have been inadequate.
• Delaying more serious steps is bad policy.

and here are his proposals for action:

First, as part of its new “humble and nimble” approach, the Fed should renounce its 2020 policy framework as not related to current challenges and instead emphasize setting interest rates relative to neutral rates, so as to achieve price stability and maximum employment.

Second, in the current context, this means a determination to achieve a meaningfully positive real short-term interest rate in the relatively near term, as long as no other major financial market dislocations occur.

Third, there is no advantage to delaying rate changes that are almost certain to happen. The Fed should signal openness to half-point increases, or possibly even more, at all meetings.

He also has a warning for progressives: inflation tends to impel voters to turn to conservatives.

The editors of the Chicago Sun-Times seem surprised to learn that the statistics used to measure the performance of law enforcement agencies are specifically designed to make them look good:

To counter 2021’s grim homicide statistics, Chicago Police Supt. David Brown has touted the increased number of murders considered “cleared”: 400 in 2021, the most in 19 years, Brown says. Based on the official CPD tally of 797 homicides last year, that’s a clearance rate of just over 50%.

But 199 of those cases were closed “exceptionally,” which means no one was charged. And one in seven cleared cases involved a murder committed more than 10 years ago.

In all, CPD actually made arrests in fewer murder cases than in 2020, when 209 people were charged.

CPD, it must be noted, still has too few detectives to investigate homicide cases. Recent hires have helped, but additional hiring must be a top priority.

As well, CPD uses the FBI’s formula for calculating homicide clearances, dividing the number of all cases solved, no matter when a murder took place, by the number of homicides in a given year.

Using the FBI’s formula sounds reasonable. It’s better to solve a murder years later than not at all, and detectives deserve credit when they do so. But solving more murders, more quickly, is essential, particularly when Chicago has more homicides than New York or Los Angeles, which are much larger.

A spokesperson for Foxx cites state laws that raised the bar for evidence in murder cases as the reason why prosecutors last year turned down the most cases ever in Foxx’s six-year tenure. Which begs the question: Is the same happening in other state’s attorney’s offices across Illinois?

The public deserves answers to that question and others, given widespread skepticism about Foxx’s track record on crime-fighting.

Let’s make a stab at translating that 50% clearance rate into an estimate of in how many of last year’s homicides someone was charged. My back-of-the-envelope calculation for the actual clearance rate of last year’s homicides is 18%. That sounds considerably worse than “just over 50%”, doesn’t it?

Don’t worry. I’m sure that Mayor Lightfoot’s recently announced firearm “turn-in” program will result in a dramatic reduction in gun violence in the city. Despite such programs having produced such poor results in the past.

In his Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead outlines more scenarios for how the Russian invasion of Ukraine may end:

As the two sides stumble in search of a path to victory, the Biden administration has three ugly options from which to choose.

The first option, helping Ukraine win, is the most emotionally appealing and would certainly be the most morally justifiable and politically beneficial, but the risks and costs are high. Russia won’t accept defeat before trying every tactic, however brutal, and perhaps every weapon, however murderous. To force Russia to accept failure in Ukraine, the Biden administration would likely have to shift to a wartime mentality, perhaps including the kind of nuclear brinkmanship not seen since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. With China and Iran both committed to weakening American power by any available means, a confrontation with the revisionist powers spearheaded by Russia may prove to be the most arduous challenge faced by an American administration since the height of the Cold War.

But the other two options are also bad. A Russian victory would inflict a massive blow to American prestige and the health of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, especially if the West were seen as forcing Ukraine to surrender to Russian demands. Freezing the conflict is also perilous, as this would presumably leave Russia holding even more Ukrainian territory than it did following the 2014 invasions of Crimea and the Donbas. It would be hard to spin this as anything but a partial victory for Russia—and Mr. Putin would remain free to renew hostilities at a time of his choosing.

The failure to deter Mr. Putin’s attack on Ukraine is more than a failure of the Biden administration. Donald Trump, Barack Obama and George W. Bush must share the blame. This failure may prove to be even costlier than failing to prevent the 9/11 attacks, and President Biden’s place in history hangs on his ability to manage the consequences of this increasingly unspeakable and unpredictable war.

I would add, at the very least, Bill Clinton to that list. His presidency set the U. S. on its present course with respect to its Russia policy. I honestly don’t believe that things had to be this way. I genuinely believe we could have chosen to have the Russians inside pissing out rather than outside pissing in. That die was cast decades ago.

Of those scenarios I suspect that the third is the most likely. What concerns me is the prospect of the United States being reluctant to accept an outcome that is acceptable to both the Ukrainians and the Russians.