Bonjour! Here’s your PolicySphere morning briefing! If you were forwarded this, here’s more about who we are and what we’re doing and, of course, don’t forget to sign up and tell your friends.
NEW: In response to yet another egregious doxxing case, we published the following article making the case for a Federal anti-doxxing statute.
#FakeScience – The fact that much of “science” is tainted, unreliable, or even downright fraudulent, is becoming harder and harder to hide. WSJ has a good exclusive report: “Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which Tuesday will announce that it is closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud.”
#TheEconomy – “The percentage of economic output that workers receive as compensation has been shrinking for decades, not just in the US but worldwide, and no one knows why,” writes Tyler Cowen.
#Reg – A good case study of professional licensing insanity: DC’s new requirement that day care workers have college degrees. Reason has a good report on the insanity. It is darkly hilarious. Just a taste: “Ami Bawa, lead teacher and assistant director at a nursery school in northwest D.C., exemplifies the unintended consequences of the regulation. Although she has been working in the field for over 20 years, Bawa may now be forced out of her job [because she doesn’t have the right degree].”
#FamilyPolicy – The blogger Maxwell Tabarrok looks at a new paper by Danish economists which seems to show that the “female income child penalty”–the finding that women who have kids have lower income across the run of their life–might not be true at all. “We can’t just compare women with children to those without them because having children is a choice that’s correlated with all of the outcomes we care about. So sorting out two groups of women based on observed fertility will also sort them based on income and education and marital status etc,” Tabarrok explains. The Danish economists get around this epistemic problem by looking at women who pursue IVF treatments. “Successfully implanting embryos on the first try in IVF is probably not very correlated with these outcomes,” and therefore this provides that economist catnip: a so-called natural experiment. Well, it seems according to this new data set, the female income child penalty simply does not exist.
#Immigration – Nice scoop from Adam Shaw and Bill Melugin over at Fox News. We already knew this, but it’s nice to have official numbers to confirm it: “The number of illegal immigrants evading Border Patrol agents has skyrocketed under the Biden administration.” More: “The numbers of Border Patrol nationwide gotaways — illegal immigrants who avoided agents but were detected by other forms of surveillance such as cameras and sensors — were obtained by a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Fox in October. […] In FY 2020, there were 136,808 gotaways at the border. That number then rose to 387,398 in FY 2021, which coincided with the last months of the Trump administration and the first months of the Biden administration. As the migrant numbers at the southern border rose to crisis levels, so did the number of gotaways — with numbers then skyrocketing to 606,131 in FY 2022 and 670,674 in FY 23.”
#DrugPolicy – The FDA is scrutinizing pharma companies’ listings in the so-called “Orange Book,” the Approved Drug Products with Therapeutic Equivalence Evaluations. It is threatening legal actions against pharma companies if they are trying to get frivolous patents to prevent the emergence of new generics. According to Fred Ashton, Director of Competition Policy at American Action Forum, “The FTC sent notice letters […] to drug manufacturers challenging more than 400 patents and filed patent listing dispute notifications with the FDA. The FTC asserted that improper or inaccurate listings block or delay competition from generic alternatives and that such activity could be considered an unfair method of competition in violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act.”
#TaxPolicy – The Tax Foundation has a fun interactive website where you can look at which places pay the most property tax, county by county. The results are pretty much what you’d expect, but it is still a fun toy you may enjoy playing around with.
Chart of the Day
From Fox News’ Bill Melugin, USBP Nationwide “Gotaways” numbers, FY2010 – FY2023
Meme of the Day
