Category Archives: politics

#OccupyAmazon round 2: Cheap books are great, but someone’s paying the difference

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Brick-and-mortar. Photo by ImaginaryGirl.

Bouncing off the same NY Times op-ed that I did yesterday, Slate’s Farhad Manjoo says, screw indy booksellers. They’re not cheap or efficient enough. Here’s the core of his price argument:

A few times a year, my wife—an unreformed local-bookstore cultist—drags me into one of our supposedly sacrosanct neighborhood booksellers, and I’m always astonished by how much they want me to pay for books. At many local stores, most titles—even new releases—usually go for list price, which means $35 for hardcovers and $9 to $15 for paperbacks. That’s not slightly more than Amazon charges—at Amazon, you can usually save a staggering 30 to 50 percent. In other words, for the price you’d pay for one book at your indie, you could buy two.

And here’s efficiency:

Compared with online retailers, bookstores present a frustrating consumer experience. A physical store—whether it’s your favorite indie or the humongous Barnes & Noble at the mall—offers a relatively paltry selection, no customer reviews, no reliable way to find what you’re looking for, and a dubious recommendations engine. Amazon suggests books based on others you’ve read; your local store recommends what the employees like. If you don’t choose your movies based on what the guy at the box office recommends, why would you choose your books that way?

Manjoo also makes the point that indie bookstores aren’t really selling local products—their bread and butter is sales of the same nationally distributed books that fill up Amazon’s top sellers list. And since Amazon offers those books at a better price point, they’re available to more people who want them, and that’s all you need to sustain a literary culture, right?

Well, maybe. If you don’t mind that some portion of that discount comes at a cost to actual human beings. Cue Vanessa Veselka’s account of trying to unionize an Amazon “distribution center” over at The Atlantic.

He was the one who told me Bezos was going to close the Seattle warehouse. It was too expensive to run. Huge fulfillment centers were springing up around the country. In Nevada, they were getting $5.15 an hour and people had to work 12-hour shifts, five days a week. Mandated overtime pay didn’t start until after 40 hours of a workweek. So when production lulled people were sent home or told not to come in the following day to shave costs. These were the new models. This was the future.

Shaving overtime by sending people home mid-shift, or giving them “the next few days off,” was the practice in Seattle too, but in Nevada there was no velvet glove, no nod to personal identity. Workers there were herded through long security lines and body searched on their way in and out before they could clock in. The ventilation was terrible and they got fired for the slightest complaint-at least these were the reports.

That was years ago. Much more recently, Amazon management made the news for working its warehouse staff to heat exhaustion rather than open some doors to let in a breeze.

During summer heat waves, Amazon arranged to have paramedics parked in ambulances outside, ready to treat any workers who dehydrated or suffered other forms of heat stress. Those who couldn’t quickly cool off and return to work were sent home or taken out in stretchers and wheelchairs and transported to area hospitals. And new applicants were ready to begin work at any time.

An emergency room doctor in June called federal regulators to report an “unsafe environment” after he treated several Amazon warehouse workers for heat-related problems. The doctor’s report was echoed by warehouse workers who also complained to regulators, including a security guard who reported seeing pregnant employees suffering in the heat.

Cheap books are great, but someone has to pay for the difference. Manjoo’s taking the side of the robots on this one: sure, you could pay a couple extra bucks so a bookstore clerk with interesting suggestions for your next purchase can feed her family, or you could let an algorithm find you more like what you’ve already read, and let that clerk break her back in a warehouse for a barely-living wage. ◼

Advertising equality

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I’m with Queerty on this one: the Australians make a much better ad for marriage equality than us schlubs in the States.

Go ahead, take a moment to find a tissue.

If anyone asked my opinion, though—which they haven’t—I’d say that there’s an important point missing from this ad, and from most of the pro-equality campaigns I’ve seen. That point is that gays, lesbians, and transgendered folks are already living stories like the one so movingly depicted above, and making lifelong commitments to each other, without waiting for anyone’s permission to do it.

My ideal advert for equality would simply be a series of short clips of committed queer couples—maybe just sitting there looking back at the camera, maybe recounting bits of the joys of life together. Each couple has accompanying subtitles: Alice and Rose, together 14 years, or Rob and Michael, together 5 years.

The point being, gay marriages already exist, and in many cases have been existing longer than a lot of the straight couples in the audience have been together. And it’s long past time for the government to acknowledge them. ◼

Tell Congress to increase NIH funding

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Cross-posted from Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!.

For your consideration: a Change.org petition asking the U.S. Congress to increase funding to the National Institutes of Health by 3% in next year’s Federal budget. NIH is one of the biggest sources of public research funds in the U.S., and its support goes well beyond things immediately connected to human health and medicine—I did many analyses for my dissertation research on Joshua trees and yucca moths on a supercomputing cluster supported, in large part, by NIH funds.

Some would argue that the private sector should take over some of the lost funding for academic, basic research. The sad fact is that the private sector does not support the type of basic research that the NIH does; they take the results NIH-funded research and apply it to drug development. In addition, many entities in the private sector are currently slashing their Research & Development (R&D) budgets! For example, Pfizer recently cut its R & D budget by 1.5 billion.

Consider the following numbers. For 2011 budget, U.S. spending on:
Social security was $2564 per citizen (20.8% of the budget)
Defense was $2203 per citizen (18% of the budget)
Medicare was $1569 per citizen (12.8% of the budget)
Medicaid was $1172 per citizen (7.8% of the budget)
NIH was $99 per citizen (0.8% of the budget)

The original idea, as I understand it, is for this to be an “open letter” to Congress from working scientists across the nation, but supportive non-scientists should definitely sign on, too. ◼

Not that I watch Monday Night Football, either

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Slacktivist Fred Clark, as ever, draws an apt comparison:

This suggests that anyone who hopes to become an ethical person would be better off watching football on television every Monday night than attending worship at a Southern Baptist church every Sunday morning. Monday Night Football might not make you a better person, but the Southern Baptist Convention has long employed an “ethics” spokesman who seems determined to make you a worse one.

Actually, now that I think of it, much of what I like about the Slacktivist is his apparently limitless ability re-frame Christianist bigotry as a failure to behave by standards of basic human decency. Jesus said of simple courtesy, “even the pagans can do that.” Fred Clark says, “Hey, folks? The pagans are doing it better.” ◼

What does evolution have to do with the cost of police in Switzerland? Probably not much.

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Lucerne, Switzerland. Photo by Jamie McHale.

ResearchBlogging.orgSo a little while ago, I was perusing the latest from PLoS ONE while doing some low-attention-requiring lab work Monday afternoon, and a title caught my eye: “A test of evolutionary policing theory with data from human societies.” Oh, hey. That looked interesting.

The paper’s author, Rolf Kümmerli, claims to have found evidence for a particular kind of evolutionary model of cooperation in recent economic data from Switzerland. The problem Kümmerli addresses is a classic one: from the perspective of natural selection, individuals (apparently) have little evolutionary incentive to cooperate, unless they’re relatives. And yet, we see cooperation in human societies.

One solution to this quandary has been group-level selection, which is a whole ‘nother kettle of worms. Another is that policing behavior could evolve to help keep groups of less-closely-related people cooperative. Of course, modern human societies are a long way past the days when most of us lived in villages that were also basically big extended families. Kümmerli proposes that we might use some sort of rule of behavioral thumb to (unconsciously) assess how likely it is we’re interacting with close relatives—which is less likely in bigger communities, and communities with larger immigrant populations.

Er, what?

Kümmerli compiled data from the Swiss national government, comparing crime rates and police expenditures to the population size percentage of foreign nationals living in every Swiss canton, or administrative region. Rather than just use the raw population size or percentage of foreigners in each canton, he constructed an index that combines the two. And he did, indeed, find that as this index of “dissimilarity” increases, so do crime rates and expenditures on police.

Kümmerli concludes that his data support the “evolutionary policing theory.” But what has he actually shown? Crime happens for lots of reasons, not necessarily because people somehow “know” to behave more cooperatively in small towns. Most glaringly, Kümmerli’s data set includes no data on poverty, which seem like an obvious alternative explanation for the pattern—bigger communities with more immigrants also often have more poor people, and poverty is certainly related to crime rates.

Swiss police. Photo by Kecko.

Fortunately, the data Kümmerli uses, and many more variables, are all freely available online through the Swiss Statistical Encyclopedia. So I took a couple hours to play around with the raw numbers. I did all my statistical work in good old R.

For each of the 26 cantons, I compiled the number of reported crimes in 2009, the number of citizens (in thousands) in 2009, the percentage of foreign residents in 2009, the percentage of unemployed residents in 2010, annual expenditures on police in 2008, and—just for the heck of it—the percentage of commuters using public transit in 2000. As in Kümmerli’s data set, each statistic is the most recent value available. I didn’t try to replicate Kümmerli’s “dissimilarity” index because it’s not clearly explained in the paper; but I did log-transform the crime rate, the number of citizens, police expenditures, the unemployment rate, and the transit use rate to make them better conform to a normal distribution.

Here’s what the simple linear relationships among all those variables look like. Apologies for the complicated graphic, but this is a complex data set.

Linear relationships (upper triangle) and correlation coefficients (lower triangle) among variables from the Swiss Statistical Encyclopedia. Grapic by jby.

In the upper triangle of this matrix, you can see scatter plots with linear regression lines estimated from the data. Regression lines are colored according to statistical significance, corrected for multiple testing: red lines are “very” significant, orange just significant; grey lines indicate relationships no stronger than expected by chance. The bottom triangle gives the raw correlation coefficient between the variables, on a scale where 1 means a perfect relationship and 0 means no relationship.

What you should notice first is that top row of scatterplots, which show that crime rates have strong linear relationships with every other variable in the dataset, from population size to mass transit use. But that makes a certain amount of sense—all these variables are interrelated. Larger communities tend to attract more immigrants and tend to have better public transit systems that support more use. Communities with more unemployed people might have higher mass transit use, since cars are expensive. So, lots of correlation—but is there any causation in there?

There are a number of ways to tackle that question. A relatively easy one is to use multiple regression and a “model comparison” approach. This essentially builds a statistical model in which multiple variables—population, foreign residents, unemployment, mass transit use—are used to predict a single variable, crime rates. The procedure then compares the model’s AIC score, an index of the model’s ability to predict crime rates from the other variables, to models with each of the individual variables removed. If removing a variable makes a “significant” reduction in AIC—which is typically understood to be a difference of at least 2 AIC points, then that variable contributes significantly to predicting crime rates.

A Swiss public transit police car. Photo by Kecko.

It turns out that all the variables I considered make a significant difference in a multiple linear regression model trying to predict Swiss crime rates. But they aren’t equally important. Removing unemployment from consideration made a difference of 4.9 AIC points, removing the percentage of foreigners made a difference of 5.9, and removing the percentage of people using mass transit made a difference of 13.6. But removing the number of citizens made a difference of 92.9 points—an order of magnitude bigger difference than the other variables.

So it looks like the strongest pattern in Kümmerli’s data is just the effect of larger communities—they have more crime.

This is not what we scientists call a “surprise.”

Moreover, it’s not particularly informative for the purpose of the question Kümmerli sets out to answer—we don’t really know how population size actually relates to humans’ tendency to be less “cooperative,” or to need police to make them cooperative. Larger population does seem to be related to more crime, but it’s also related to more mass transit use—and mass transit use strikes me as a pretty cooperative behavior.

Admittedly, that’s a pretty off-the-cuff assessment based on a couple hours of fiddling around with simple statistical analysis of an easy-to-access public data set. But I strongly suspect that you could say exactly the same thing of Kümmerli’s paper. ◼

Reference

Kümmerli, R. (2011). A test of evolutionary policing theory with data from human societies. PLoS ONE, 6 (9) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0024350

Ten years

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Ten years ago today, I was in organic chemistry lab when the prof walked in and mentioned, somewhat casually, that an airplane had apparently hit one of the World Trade Center towers in New York. We all assumed it was some accident, and I distinctly remember picturing a small private plane of some sort.

By the time I was done synthesizing and purifying and precipitating, I returned to the dorm to find everyone gathered around CNN, watching looped footage of not one but two full-sized commercial airliners striking the towers.

Ten years later, it seems the entire United States is still gathered around 24-hour cable news, still watching the planes strike the towers. If, like me, you find it easiest to contemplate those ten years in numbers, Wired’s Danger Room has compiled an elegant series of infographics illustrating the costs and consequences of the last decade.

Graphic by Danger Room.

It’s only data. It cannot, of itself, tell us whether the last ten years were well spent. ◼

Paying up

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So one major credit rating agency has announced it has a bad feeling about the long-term value of U.S. government debt. Whatever could our government—which is to say, we, the U.S. public—have done to warrant that? How about refusing to collect revenue that could pay down existing debt:

(Via.)

Sure, government spending increases debt, and the U.S. government spends money to do lots of things I’d be happy to stop doing. But government does lots of things that any sane person agrees are necessary—paying for police and firefighters, building roads, preventing people from pissing in my drinking water—and even if we cut all those basic services to zero, we still wouldn’t have a balanced budget. (Non-defense discretionary spending for 2010 ≈ $530 billion; 2010 federal budget deficit ≈ $1,294 billion. Everyone can agree that 530 is not larger than 1,294 … right?)

When the government borrows, it borrows against tax revenue that it could, theoretically, collect to pay off the debt. Our collective decisions as U.S. citizens, expressed via elections—with admittedly varying degrees of accuracy and wisdom—have run up historically high national debt while driving the proportion of national income collected as taxes to a historical low. If you were loaning more and more money to a friend who kept working fewer and fewer hours a week, wouldn’t you start to get a bit edgy?

And if all this sounds a bit abstract, here’s a nice concrete number: the increased cost of U.S. debt associated with that credit rating agency’s bad feeling comes to about $322 per U.S. citizen. If I’m not mistaken, that’s a pretty big chunk of the refund I got back when the last round of big tax cuts took effect, ten years ago—and it’s just the start. ◼