I’m seeing tons of unsolicited advice to both candidates on what they need to do or not to do in tonight’s debate. I have found nothing I thought was particularly worthwhile.

Against my reflexes I will probably watch the debate tonight. At least the debate itself. I’ll try to avoid the network commentary to the degree possible.

Anybody have any thoughts?

I think as long as neither candidate falls on his or her face the debate won’t make a great deal of difference and I expect full court presses from various directions claiming that one candidate or another did, in fact, fall on their face.

Like many I was appalled at the school shooting in Georgia last week. I am heartened that the father of the shooter was arrested and indicted as well as the kid. I have a question.

For the last 36 years, since the school shooting perpetrated by Laurie Dann in suburban Chicago, we’ve been aware of a tragic pattern. Parents who hide and coddle their seriously mentally ill children with violent urges. This time we hear that “he was on the FBI’s radar”. Here’s my question. Why isn’t there something in between looking on silently while violent mentally ill kids are enabled by their (probably also mentally ill) parents to go shoot up schools and locking kids up on suspicion? It would seem to me that such kids should, at least, have some sort of mandatory counseling.

If you have a NetFlix subscription you might want to check out Monsieur Spade. Have you ever wondered what happened to Sam Spade after the events of The Maltese Falcon? This limited series answers that question. Apparently, he went to France.

It’s an American-Anglo-French production, intelligently written and produced by Tom Fontana, the writer for St. Elsewhere and Homicide: Life on the Street. Beautifully written (particularly by Clive Owens), acted, and directed, lots of French location shooting.

The graphic at the top of the page is from this report by Aaron Zitner and Adrienne Tong at the Wall Street Journal on which economic proposals from the the campaigns both Democrats and Republicans agree.

As you can see there is agreement on the topmost five proposals. I would like to see some analysis on the budget and fund impact of most of them. I’m skeptical that any of them is prudent. All I can say is if you think food and drug “deserts” are common now, wait until these proposals become law. With respect to taxing tips, why tax income at all? A prebated tax on consumption instead of an income tax would be economically more efficient.

Lance Morrow’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal is not particularly uplifting but, at least to me, it has the ring of truth:

The essence of the case against Donald Trump: A democracy can’t be entrusted to an autocrat, especially one as unprincipled and unstable as he. He believes in the democratic process only when it affirms him and his sovereign ego. The Jan. 6 Capitol riot proved that. He is uniquely uncouth—barbarian, vulgarian, choose your word—and addicted to telling lies. He heads the vast MAGA cult of personality, and in that he resembles, say, Hong Xiuquan, who led the Taiping rebellion that devastated Qing Dynasty China in the 19th century. Hong believed himself to be the son of God, younger brother of Jesus Christ. Mr. Trump seems to be laboring under a similar delusion. So his enemies say.

The argument against Kamala Harris: Until the day before yesterday, almost everyone agreed she was a mediocre vice president. She was Joe Biden’s insurance policy. No one, the argument went, would want him to quit the presidency and leave it in the hands of such an empty suit.

Now, incredibly, she is Wonder Woman, high priestess of the Politics of Joy, a daughter of Jamaica and India come to rescue reactionary white America from itself. The Democrats in a few short weeks have mustered their own cult of personality around Ms. Harris, transfiguring the erstwhile hack into a world-historical heroine. Never has the power of spontaneous 21st-century image-spinning been so gloriously demonstrated.

The negative version goes deeper. If Mr. Trump is an autocrat, the entire Democratic program, as reposed in Ms. Harris, is also sinister and dictatorial. It has profoundly autocratic tendencies. Despite the Norman Rockwell pageantry of the Democrats’ convention in Chicago, the party, especially with the old San Francisco lefty Ms. Harris in the Oval Office, could be expected to impose the intolerant, ideological coercions and absolutism of what might be called the horribly virtuous. It would be cancel culture times 10. Her recent interview on CNN made clear that a President Harris would continue all Biden policies: on taxes, the border, Israel, Iran. Same policies, probably further to the left. So say Ms. Harris’s enemies.

He continues with a sunnier view of Trump:

He is a genuine though obnoxious patriot, whose policies on immigration, the economy, Russia, China and the Middle East would be stronger, more decisive and more credible than the weak, ambivalent performance of the Biden-Harris team. Mr. Trump, however much one might wonder at his bizarreness and bad manners, would be better for the country because his views are arguably more in sync with those of the American people. Simple as that.

and then of Harris:

She may, in truth, be an American miracle. The country has always been the story of a sequence of self-transcendences—of breakthroughs and evolutions. Think of the Jacksonian populism that empowered the people beyond the mountains, introducing a newer and wider vision of America. Think of the Civil War, which at great cost transformed the country. Or of the stupendous flood of immigration in the second half of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th. Or of the New Deal. Or of the 1960s, which introduced such seismic changes.

Perhaps it is true that Ms. Harris represents a breakthrough, a new evolution, a new future. Maybe she has been sent by America’s special providence to rescue the country from a spent generation of leaders, to tell the world: This is no country for old men.

I think the optimistic view of Vice President Harris is vanishingly unlikely. What I think is closer to the truth is that the Democratic Party leadership is oligarchic (with themselves as the oligarchs) and they find her acceptable because they’re convinced that she’ll do as she’s told. If she doesn’t they’ll jettison her as quickly as they jettisoned President Biden when they realized he threatened their continued rule.

I do not believe there has been a presidential election in my lifetime with two such lousy candidates. Voting for the lesser evil is still evil.

At Illinois Policy Patrick Andriesen and Jon Josko report that violent crime has risen in Chicago over the last year:

Chicagoans experienced 7.2% more violent crime from August 2023 through July 2024 than during the previous 12 months, with cases of aggravated assault, aggravated battery and robbery reaching five-year highs.

Residents reported 30,375 violent crimes through July. Cases of violent crime increased but the arrest rate for these felonies dropped to just 12.8%, the second-lowest level in the past five years.

Overall, robberies were the most common violent crime, accounting for 36% of incidents. Batteries and assaults were an additional 57% of cases.

That’s probably understated. As I have documented before a significant number of 911 calls requiring a police response go without such a response. That means that they are not even included in the police statistics. If that happens enough people stop reporting crimes.

So-called “smash and grab” robberies are a multiple times nightly occurrence, sometimes a dozen times a night or more. Recently, these have taken the form of using a truck or SUV, frequently stolen, and chains to tear the doors off a store or restaurant. Frequently, the robbers get very little from such robberies and the damage is much more costly than the robbery itself.

Whether homicides have risen or declined depends the period over which you are looking. They are down relative to a year or two ago, up relative to five years ago, down relative to seven years ago, and considerably up relative to a decade ago.

When people feel insecure they vote not necessarily at the ballot box but with their feet. Chicago’s population is the lowest it has been in a century. Much of the flight has been from the South and West sides.

I’ve already given my prescription: law enforcement, City Hall, the states attorney’s office, and the judiciary all need to be pulling in the same direction. What good does it do for a police officer to arrest a suspect if City Hall bloviates about root causes, the states attorney won’t prosecute and, if prosecuted, judges won’t convict.

Rather than leading off this post with the commentary that caught my eye this morning let’s begin with a local news story. From ABC 7 Chicago:

FOREST PARK, Ill. (WLS) — A 30-year-old Chicagoan has been charged after four people were shot and killed while asleep on a CTA Blue Line train early Monday, police said Tuesday.

Rhanni S. Davis faces four counts of first-degree murder, Forest Park police said.

Forest Park Mayor Rory Hoskins said the victims were sleeping when they were shot.

“Every loss of life is tragic, regardless of what their circumstances were. You know that they were special to somebody,” Hoskins said. “This was an incredibly unfortunate act, a criminal act, the loss of life that we all grieve for.”

The four adult victims are three men and one woman, police said. Three of the victims were found shot in one train car and one was found in another. Police said the victims were not robbed.

In another words a young man approached several people who were sleeping on an L train and murdered them. It has been suggested that one or more of the victims was homeless. The murders were not done for gain. The perpetrator apparently did it because he could.

I can think of several possible motives. Maybe the shooter was high on something. Maybe it was part of some gang initiation. Maybe he hates people sleeping on trains.

Now on to this post at the American Institute for Economic Research by David C. Rose on our fraying cultural framework:

The rise of civilization is the story of people living in ever-larger groups. In places like America, culture evolved even further, producing the moral belief that we should never do moral don’ts and use government, if necessary, to enforce them. Meanwhile, obeying the moral dos is to be treated as a purely private matter. In other words, we should mind our own business. This is so deeply ingrained in the American ethic that for us it’s like water to fish.

Being confident that, in most contexts, no harm would come to us led to a habit of extending trust to strangers unless there was a good reason not to. That is the essence of a high trust society. Since trust is a powerful catalyst to voluntary cooperation, this unleashed the power of freely directed cooperation as never before in human history.

Tocqueville’s own thesis for American success notes that many of our mediating institutions are highly trust dependent. These institutions were voluntary associations which is why they were epiphenomenal with a culture of freedom. It is difficult to imagine that such voluntary associations would last long if everyone in them was highly suspicious of everyone else.

Gallup has found declining levels of trust in most institutions and professions.

He continues:

Here from Statista is a snapshot of the decline in CTA ridership:

It’s clear what impelled the decline—COVID-19. That, too, is a form of decline in trust. People don’t trust that the person sitting next to them won’t give them a potentially fatal disease.

Will feral young men murdering people on trains increase trust in the trains, decrease trust in the trains, or have no effect?

I think that Charles Murray has hold of the wrong end of the stick in his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “The Roots of STEM Excellence”. Much of the op-ed is devoted to identifying young people capable of learning science, technology, and mathematics early by standardized testing and admitting them to top tier institutions of higher learning based on that. Here’s a snippet:

In the 1970s, Johns Hopkins psychologist Julian Stanley established the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth by administering the SAT to 12- and 13-year-olds. Some 2,000 of the participants have been followed throughout their careers.

Measures of productivity varied substantially within the top percentile, equivalent to an IQ of 135 or higher. Those in the top quartile of the top 1%, equivalent to IQs of 142 and higher, were more than twice as likely to earn a doctorate or be awarded a patent as those in the bottom quartile and more than four times as likely to publish an article on a STEM topic in a refereed journal. There was no plateau. Greater measured cognitive ability was correlated with greater adult accomplishment throughout the range.

These results suggest that we should be thinking in terms of at least the top half of the top percentile of ability when defining the set of people who have the potential to make major contributions in a STEM field. The U.S. has around 130 million people of prime working age: 25 to 54. For any given talent, therefore, about 650,000 are in the top half of the top percentile of ability. That’s a lot of people.

The task is to identify those with STEM talent when they are young. The good news is that standardized tests expressly designed to measure cognitive ability are an efficient way to do so. They are accurate, inexpensive, resistant to coaching and demonstrably unbiased against minorities, women or the poor. Those conclusions about the best cognitive tests are among the most exhaustively examined and replicated findings in all social science.

The bad news is that admissions offices of elite universities ignore this evidence.

I’ll present my reactions in the form of a number of bullet points followed by an anecdote or two.

• IQ testing does measure something real
• There is a correlation between the cognitive ability represented by IQ and the ability to learn science and mathematics
• There used to be a good correlation between SAT scores and IQ. That correlation no longer appears quite as strong.
• There are abilities other than IQ which are more closely correlated with success (however measured) in life than IQ
• There is a weak correlation between income and IQ
• Compensation, like most other prices, is determined based on supply and demand
• The rate at which jobs for physicists is increasing is less than the rate at which the population is, even the population of people with the cognitive abilities to be good physicists, and that has been true for 50 years
• Lawyers and physicians tend to have IQs above normal but by less than three standard deviations
• There aren’t a lot of jobs in mathematics and the sciences that pay enough to lead a middle class lifestyle

The smartest guy I know (he has an IQ four standard deviations above normal) is a brilliant mathematician. He has a doctorate in mathematics and an IQ four standard deviations above normal. After trying for years he finally gave up getting a tenure track position teaching in a university and became a computer programmer. One of the smartest guys I know is a successful creative writer. Before that he held minimum wage jobs. I don’t think these anecdotes are out of the ordinary. Extremely smart people tend not to be lawyers, physicians, or in finance. They find those positions too boring or require interpersonal skills other than those they have.

There are several things we could do to encourage “excellence in STEM” but we aren’t doing them. One of the most important is ensuring that the people capable of excelling at STEM earn enough to make it worth their while.

I rarely quote posts at Cato but I found this one by Jeffrey Miron, which largely consists of a lengthy quote from a previous Cato post, worth noting. It’s about the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017:

In brief, the corporate income tax changes generated substantial benefits, but several claims about these benefits (only a minimal reduction in revenue, with a large increase in wages) were significant exaggerations.

This passage is particularly interesting:

Second, taxes matter for corporate investment. Firms facing larger corporate tax cuts invested more than firms facing smaller cuts. Three empirical approaches indicate that the tax cuts increased total tangible corporate investment by 8–14 percent. This response was far too small to offset the forgone tax revenue.

which is almost exactly what I’ve been saying for the last six years. To remind you I supported cutting the corporate tax cuts on efficiency and competitive grounds. The economically most efficient corporate tax rate is zero. Claims about “corporations paying their fair share” is political posturing rather than sound economic policy. However, I have thought that the revenue losses from the cuts in the corporate tax rate needed to be made up by increases in not just personal income tax rates but revenue from personal income taxes. That was irresponsible.

I also think that we need considerably more business investment than at present but for that to happen much more narrowly targeted policies would be required. I doubt that the wealth taxes being proposed by some would accomplish that.