Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

It’s interesting how all the documents in the Wolfowitz World Bank controversy support his claim to have acted openly and honestly and contradict the unsupported assertions of his critics. Rarely do documents so clearly show important people (e.g., the former chairman of the WB ethics committee and the former chief lawyer of the WB) to be liars. Fox News has detailed stories on April 14 and April 19 with links to the original documents.

One point which has not been made clear is that although Shaha Riza received both a raise and a promotion, the raise was simply from the mid-level for her old rank to the mid-level of her new rank. The claim that a raise OR a promotion but not both were authorized looks pretty silly. Indeed, what is the promotion worth without the raise? Is it really grander to be a class H instead of a class G employee? I guess I should boast that I was once a GS-9!

Her net wages rose from $132,660 to $193,590, the April 14 story says, which must include the annual pay raise after the $180,000 salary that Wolfowitz assigned her in the key memo he wrote to the personnel office. World Bank salary table from its 2006 Annual Report— something anybody should have been able to check– shows the salary ranges.

World Bank Group Staff Salary Structure (effective July 1, 2005)
Grades	Minimum	Market reference point	Maximum	Representatitve job titles
A	22,820	29,660	38,550	Office assistant
B	27,620	35,910	50,270	Team assistant, information technician
C	33,570	43,640	61,100	Program assistant, information assistant
D	38,950	50,630	70,880	Senior program assistant, information specialist, budget assistant
E	51,010	66,310	92,830	Analyst
F	69,400	90,220	126,310	Professional
G	92,230	119,900	167,860	Senior professional
H	129,140	167,890	226,650	Manager, lead professional
I	179,040	223,800	268,560	Director, senior advisor
J	224,800	251,775	289,540	Vice president
K	249,770	283,247	311,530	Managing director, senior vice president
Note: Because World Bank Group (WBG) staff, other than U.S. citizens, usually are not required to pay income taxes on their WBG compensation, the salaries are set on a net-of-tax basis, which is generally equivalent to the after-tax take-home pay of the employees of the comparator organizations and firms from which WBG salaries are derived. Only very few staff will reach the upper third of the salary range at a grade level.

May 1: The WSJ reports today that no fewer than 1,396 World Bank employees are at Miss Riza’s current pay grade or higher. That’s out of, if I recall rightly, just 8,500 employees! The WSJ report also notes that violation of the nepotism rule seems to be common at the Bank, one notable case being that of the surprisingly-promoted wife of the former number 2, a prominent critic of Wolfowitz.

Via Christianity Today, I find that 1 in 30 late-second-trimester babies aborted in England for eugenic reasons are born alive, dying a few hours later. That’s 102 of 3,189 in this category over nine years (there are 190,000 abortions annually, in all categories). Do pro-abortion people count this as infanticide, or not? It is an interesting definitional question. It’s rare, of course, but 102 extra murders per year in Britain would, I expect, make a dent in the crime statistics.

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From a comment exchange on the Federal Vision/Sacramentalism controversy within the conservative Presbyterians, Pastor Wegener lays out the extremes:

How do our children become Christians?

A sacramentalist answers, through the church and her sacraments. So my four children became Christians at their (infant) baptism, according to this line of thinking.

The Baptist will answer through repentance toward God and faith in His Son Jesus Christ. And they arrive at this conversion at a particular point in time. So my children’s baptism didn’t help or contribute a bit.

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Mark Steyn connected the Virginia Tech killings with ones at Dartmouth and the crazy “gun-free zone” concept, so similar to the idea that if a nation unilaterally disarms, that will bring peace to the world:

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i was just reading a paper by Winston and Crandall on lawyer licensing. Here’s how I would model it.

Without regulation, a person would need to spend, say, 1 year of his time to become a lawyers. With regulation, he needs to spend 3 years, and he needs to pay the market price for tuition, P. That market price is determined by the marginal cost of the education and by the number of law schools operating. There is free entry into the law school business, but initially there are few enough law schools that P exceeds MC. We can assume constant MC and that MC=AC. Denote the pre- and post-regulation quantities y Q_0 and Q_1. What happens?

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I despise John Kerry so much that I was very pleasantly surprised to hear him stand up for an unpopular person who had supported him in the past. Good for Kerry! I think the better of him for it.

[Of Imus] “You know, the punishment has to fit the crime, so to speak,” Kerry, the Democrats’ defeated 2004 White House hopeful, told NY1.

Kerry, who had Imus’ support in that race, said he might be willing to go on a future Imus show if the radio host finds a new station – but “if he goes back to doing the same old, same old, I’d have trouble doing that.”

The Treasury, I read in Forbes recently, has proposed requiring businesses to report any purchases over $600, so the IRS can check that the seller reported the revenue. That is quite an administrative burden. What could we do instead?

How about saying that if a business reports a purchase to the IRS and it turns out that the seller didn’t report it, then the business gets a payment from the IRS for helping catch a tax cheat? We could at the same time use the stick as well as the carrot. If the IRS finds a tax cheat seller, and then finds that the purchaser did not report the purchase, then the purchaser is fined.

I’m thinking a lot about sampling these days. The idea of classical hypothesis testing is that we choose a null hypothesis and a testing scheme, and ask how often we would accidentally reject the null hypothesis if we took repeated samples and if the null were actually true. The null might be that the mean of the population is 0. The testing scheme might be that we take a sample of N=100 observations and we reject the null if the mean of that sample is less than -1 or greater than +1. The significance level of the test, the probability that we falsely reject the null, might be 14%. That means that if we took 10,000 100-observation samples, and the true mean is M=0, we would expect about 1,400 sample means to be outside of the [-1,+1] interval.

Any null hypothesis takes some set of background facts as given, as assumptions that aren’t tested. In the case above, these assumptions might include that (a) the population is distributed according to some shape f(x) around the mean M, and we know the entire shape, just not the value of M, (b) the observations are chosen independently (which also means they are chosen with replacement, I think), and (c) the shape f(x) does not change during the course of our sampling. If we wanted, we could instead take M=0 as an assumption and test statement (b) instead, or use some other combination of assumptions and null.

Well, I haven’t even gotten to asymptotics yet, but I’m out of time. I’ll have to continue this another day. Asymptotics concern the properties of a testing scheme when the sample size N is large enough that the Central Limit Theorem can be called into play and estimator errors are close to being normal even if the underlying distribution shapes are not.

A good way to reform taxes would be to eliminate the tax deduction for donations of property to charities. This is much abused, and requires difficult record-keeping if the value is to be accurately determined. Instead, however, if I have property that I wish to donate, I should be allowed to sell it and then give the money to the charity without having to report the capital gains part of it as income. Here’s how it would work.

Under current law, if I buy a painting for $10,000 and its value rises to $15,000 and I donate it to a charity, I get a deduction of $15,000 from this year’s income. If, instead, I sold the painting for $15,000 and gave the money to the charity, I would still get the $15,000 deduction, but I would also have to report a $5,000 capital gain and pay tax on that. I would pay more tax than if I donated the painting directly, and I would have to show how much I paid for the painting, the basis, which can be awkward sometimes (suppose I had inherited it instead, or received it as a gift).

Under my proposal, if I donated the painting, I would get no deduction. If I sold it and gave the $15,000, though I would get the deduction for $15,000 without any need to report the $5,000 income or to find out what the tax basis was.

Of course, my proposal isn’t perfect. The person who wanted to give his painting away to his alma mater would be discouraged from doing so under it. Maybe some special provision could be made, some costly and conservative valuation process for property gifts– say, the requirement that $2,000 be paid to cover the cost of an IRS valuation, and no possibility of doing your own valuation.

The dissent by Justices Ginsburg, Stevens, Souter, and Breyer in the Carhart partial-birth abortion case is revealing in how it separates morality from human rights and interest in human life.

      Ultimately, the Court admits that “moral concerns” are at work, concerns that could yield prohibitions on any abortion. See ante, at 28 (“Congress could … conclude that the type of abortion proscribed by the Act requires specific regulation because it implicates additional ethical and moral concerns that justify a special prohibition.”). Notably, the concerns expressed are untethered to any ground genuinely serving the Government’s interest in preserving life. By allowing such concerns to carry the day and case, overriding fundamental rights, the Court dishonors our precedent. See, e.g., Casey, 505 U. S., at 850 (“Some of us as individuals find abortion offensive to our most basic principles of morality, but that cannot control our decision. Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.”); Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U. S. 558, 571 (2003) (Though “[f]or many persons [objections to homosexual conduct] are not trivial concerns but profound and deep convictions accepted as ethical and moral principles,” the power of the State may not be used “to enforce these views on the whole society through operation of the criminal law.” (citing Casey, 505 U. S., at 850)).

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The Kennedy opinion in the Carhart partial-birth abortion case is interesting because it uses an information-failure argument at one point (rather inaptly for the Carhart law, since it implies that the law could be fixed by requiring the doctor to explain to the mother the grisly details of what he is going to do to her baby). Here is what he says.

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Here’s a shocking example of the way people think. Don Imus’s brief vulgarity is atrocious and must be punished. The music group Three 6 Mafia, which is much more vulgar, is fine, because they won an Academy Award for it. Morality is all relative, and is defined for us by Hollywood. This, of course, is the attitude that tolerated segregation and lynchings back when they, and not rap, were in fashion–or would have, if their promoters were from Southern California instead of just the South.

Beverly Calendar-Anderson, director of Bloomington’s Safe and Civil City program, offered help.

“I think Imus should have known better; he should have known where the line was,” she said Friday. “When you are on public airways … you have the responsibility not to harm people.”…

She had some insights into why Three 6 Mafia can get away with their nasty viewpoints more easily than some, Imus in particular.

“I don’t care for their music. I won’t listen to their music. I won’t buy their music,” she said. “But they have been accepted by mainstream media. They are Academy Award winners. As much as I dislike their lyrics, our country in a way has said they’re OK.”

I looked at the dissent by Justices Ginsburg, Stevens, Souter, and Breyer in the Carhart partial-birth abortion case this morning, thinking I’d find its fulminations amusing, but I found it bone-chilling instead. I hadn’t realized that so many judges— and, indeed, current Supreme Court cases, if these judge are to believed— support abortion of viables fetuses– that is, babies in the womb who could be delivered alive by Caesarean birth at the very moment that they are instead injected with poison, cut into pieces, or otherwise killed. There is a difference between this and infanticide, but it is very small: that abortion is less trouble for the woman than a Caesarean, and that the cost of tending to a premature baby is saved by killing it instead. But I should remove this last difference perhaps, since no doubt there are many people who would be willing to relieve the mother or the government of the financial burden.

Here is the relevant part of the dissent.

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I recall that when regulation started to become common (or was it the income tax?) there was legal controversy over whether requiring someone to report information to the government on a standard form was an unconstitutional requirement of self-incrimination. That would be worth thinking about again.

Consider, for example, a factory that must report its emissions of sulfur dioxide. Should it be required to do so even though having too high an emission is illegal?

If it can, then it must also be constitutional to send a form out to everyone asking them how much they have stolen in the past month, or how many illegal drugs they have used, right?

This seems worse than the usual “worst case” for self-incrimination— being required to testify under oath at your trial as to whether you committed the crime you are charged with. At least if you are on trial, there has already been enough independent evidence for an indictment. With the standard form, the government can go on a fishing expedition and get you even if it has no suspicions originally.

Here’s a comment I just left at Three Hierarchies.

1. Do I understand you correctly that there is no reason to believe that the original Septuagint included the Apocrypha, since for all we know it was added later by Christians?

2. You said that the Reformers and the Fathers differed in their errors about what the early 1st century Jews may have held canonical. But if the Fathers’ error was in equating first-century Judaism to 3-5th century, shouldn’t they have really agreed with the Reformers in excluding the Apocrypha?

3. I have found all these peripheral books– the Apocrypha, the lesser apocryphal writngs, plus the apostolic fathers, very disappointing. Even if they weren’t canonical, I thought they would be worth reading as more than history. But they seem a far step below the Bible in quality. Does anyone disagree?

4. The fact that Jude quotes Enoch strikes me less as proof of Enoch’s value than as evidence that Jude’s inclusion in the Bible was a mistake.

5. What evidence is there besides, perhaps, the New Testament’s quotations that the pre-Jamnia Jews held more books canonical than the post-Jamnia? Wasn’t Jamnia actually a fairly liberal canon, accepting Esther and the Song despite the doubts of some Jews?

Benjamin had a space party for his 5th birthday. One game that worked out well was for the kids to help make a baking soda and vinegar rocket, modifying NASA instructions that use alka-seltzer (which we did not have on hand).

My reaction to hearing that District Attorneys are rarely fired (or even not reappointed— how many in the current affair were actually fired rather than just not given a second term?) is to see the *lack* of firings as an example of government misbehavior. If you hire 100 people for an 8-year job, most of them from parts of the country your office doesn’t have personal knowledge about, how likely is it that all of them are the best for the job? I’d expect some of them to turn out to be disappointments who should be fired. I expect the only reason firings aren’t more common is pure politics: it looks bad to fire someone, because then the opposition will accuse you of hiring incompetents, whereas if you retain an incompetent, nobody minds.

Not all the current firings were for incompetence, of course, but apparently all but one were disappointments in one way or another. And even if someone is competent, isn’t it ok to replace him with someone better?

This, of course,merely establishes that it is OK in principle, and in fact, desirable, to fire US attorneys. Firing them because of the kind of cases they are filing, or the individual cases, requires different justification. That’s easy too, though. Independent U.S. attorneys would be highly undesirable. That would mean they could harass political opponents with weak indictments, refrain from prosecuting friends who assault their political opponents, and spend their entire budget on pizza parties, and the President would have to say, “Gee, I disagree strongly, but I believe in not firing a US attorney because of his choices in which cases to prosecute or in using his budget.” Thus, it is obvious that there are cases where we all would favor firing U.S. attorneys. Going from there to firing a US attorney who, for example, refuses to prosecute immigration cases, is no big stretch.

Three Hierarchies (St. Melito of Sardis) links to a novel web quiz: