Case in point: file Newsweek A survey on misinformation. In the survey — conducted of 1,500 eligible US voters in early July by Redfield & Wilton Strategies — people were asked if “referring to someone with the wrong gender pronoun (he/she, she/it) should be Criminal offense”.
A shocking percentage of younger respondents said it should.
Younger millennials were the most likely to support criminal penalties for misinformation, with 44 percent of respondents ages 25-34 supporting it and only 31 percent saying misinformation shouldn’t be a crime.
But support for criminalizing mutilation was also strong among older Millennials and Generation Z, although the younger group was less enthusiastic about it:
- About 38 percent of respondents aged 35 to 44 said it should be a crime, while 35 percent disagreed.
- About 33 percent of respondents aged 18 to 24 said it should be a crime, while 48 percent opposed it.
Of the survey respondents in general, 19 percent said counterfeiting should be criminalised. Nearly two-thirds – 65 percent – said it should not be criminalized, while 12 percent said they neither agreed nor disagreed, and 4 percent said they did not know.
Calling people by their preferred pronouns is definitely the nice thing to do, just as calling people by their preferred or honorific names is. Conversely intentionally Misleading someone is a foolish move.
but The purpose of criminal law is not to punish people for being foolsa perverted society that believes that everything offensive or bad should be criminalised.
In this particular case, the criminalization of counterfeiting would also clash with First Amendment concerns. Forcing someone to use certain pronouns under threat of criminal penalty would be compulsory government speech, which our Constitution frowns upon.
the Newsweek The survey results are disturbing, but we may be able to attribute some of them to social desirability bias. People want to answer survey questions in a way that makes them look good. When asked the question of crime of conscience in the isolated and abstract, some respondents may have responded in the affirmative as a means of indicating disapproval of people being misled and in support of transgender acceptance. Faced with a specific real-world proposal to criminalize disinformation, maybe (hopefully!) there won’t be too many people on board.
Free minds
Iowa court stops abortion ban by 6 weeks. Just a few days after Republican Kim Reynolds, the governor of Iowa, signed a strict abortion ban into law, a Polk County court has stopped the law. The pending measure would make most abortions illegal after six weeks of pregnancy. from New York times:
Polk County District Court Judge Joseph Seidlin said the new ban will be suspended while the larger legal case against him moves forward. In his ruling, he said plaintiffs who have sued against the ban, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers, will likely be successful on the facts of their case.
This means that abortion in Iowa is legal again until about 22 weeks into the pregnancy, at least for now.
In his ruling, Seidlin wrote that “there are good, honorable and intelligent people—morally, politically, and legally—on both sides of this troubling societal and constitutional dilemma.”
Free markets
Income inequality is shrinking. After the Great Recession, “expectations of economic decline dominated,” notes Yascha Monk V Atlantic Ocean. “America, a country long known for its inherent optimism, has grown dreadful of the future – as it now seems most people will have less and less.”
American rhetoric was peppered with concerns about a recession and increasing income inequality. However, Mounk notes that “the reasons for economic pessimism are beginning to sound less convincing than they did before”:
(David) Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes that the American economy is bifurcated. Even as the demand for highly skilled workers increased, the demand for “middle-wage, mid-skill, and blue-collar jobs” was shrinking. The American economy, which once provided plenty of middle-class jobs, is splitting into a highly affluent professional class and a large, busier rest. The overall result was, according to Autor, “a decline in real income for out-of-college workers” and “a sharp rise in wage inequality.”
Autor’s previous work on declining wages for a large portion of the American workforce makes it all the more remarkable that he now seems more optimistic. As companies were desperately looking for workers at the end of the pandemic, Autor argues in a working paper published earlier this year, lower-wage workers found themselves in a much better bargaining position. There has been a remarkable reversal in economic fortunes.
“Disproportionate wage growth at the bottom of the distribution has reduced college wage premiums and reversed the rise in total wage inequality since 1980 by nearly a quarter,” Autor writes. The big winners in recent economic trends are precisely those groups that were excluded in previous decades: “The rise in wages has been particularly strong among workers under the age of 40 without a university degree.”
Even after accounting for inflation, Autor explains, the bottom quartile of American workers saw a significant increase in income for the first time in years. A scholar who previously wrote about the “polarization” of the American workforce now concludes that the US economy is experiencing an “unexpected squeeze.” In other words, the wealth gap is narrowing incredibly fast.
And Autor is not the only economist who has noticed this.
While many Americans cling to beliefs that income inequality is on the rise, “the intellectual foundation of the thesis is beginning to waver,” Monk notes. More here.
Quick hits
Statement by U.S. Attorney General Damian Williams Concerning Intent to File Contempt and Seeking a Court-appointed Receiver to Address Conditions at Rikers Island
– SDNY American Attorney (SDNYnews) July 17, 2023
• “The Georgia Supreme Court on Monday denied Donald Trump’s attempt to stop the Fulton County District Attorney’s investigation into whether the former president and his allies interfered in the state’s 2020 presidential election,” reports NBC News.
• “Based on his own statements to colleagues, we know former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson did not believe allegations by Trump attorney Sidney Powell about systemic fraud in the 2020 presidential election,” he notes. a reasonJacob Salloum. However, Carlson was “singing a different tune (Sunday) at the Turning Point Action convention in West Palm Beach, Florida.”
• Pop star John Legend, an Ohio native, is trying to rally people against an August ballot that would make it difficult to amend the state constitution. The Republican-backed measure is in response to efforts to put a pro-choice amendment on the ballot this fall.
• Legal scholar James Grimmelman talks about how various content modification proposals might hold up “under US federal communications privacy regulations, including the Wiretap Act, the Stored Communications Act, and the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA).”