Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 139

Protectionism is back on the U.S. policy agenda

(Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster)

Donald Trump has long been keen to defend U.S. workers from the “carnage” of “bad trade deals.”

To that end, he has now decided to impose tariffs and quotas on imports of steel and aluminum. He also threatened the EU with trade barriers on automobiles and could take even more measures on intellectual property rights and technology goods.

It is more plausible than not that this is the beginning of a costly tit-for-tat whereby U.S. trade protection will be countered by others.

The bad news is that a fully-fledged trade war would create serious economic damage. Recent estimations by Ralph Ossa from the University of Chicago indicate that a global trade war, resulting in a rise in trade barriers for all countries, would slash real incomes by an average 3.4%.

At the global level, this would correspond to a loss of almost one full year of growth efforts.

Case study: U.S. safeguard tariffs on steel 2002-2003

Trump’s move is surprising in that it will negatively impact the U.S. economy, although the extent of harm would be limited to the loss of jobs in the user industries of the protected sector.

This can be illustrated with the case of the U.S. steel safeguard tariffs between March 2002 and December 2003. Back in 2002, mounting competitive pressures on the steel industry led President George W. Bush to impose safeguard tariffs ranging between 8% and 30% on ten steel product groups, with a total of 272 tariff lines.

Steel imports from NAFTA countries, from other preferential trade agreement parties (Jordan and Israel) and from 100 developing countries were exempted. Moreover, around 1,000 firm-specific exemptions were granted by the U.S. Trade Representative at the time.

As a result of trade restriction, U.S. imports of steel products declined by 5% between 2002 and 2003, bringing the steel industry sector’s trade deficit down by 28%. However, immediately after the protection ended, import growth rebounded and contributed to a rapid widening of the industry’s trade deficit, above the levels from pre-protectionist era (Figure 1).

Figure 1. U.S. trade in iron and steel industry

Source: Own elaborations Flossbach von Storch Research Institute based on data from OECD STAN Bilateral Trade in Goods by Industry and End-use (BTDIxE)

The protection of the steel industry produced negative spillover effects to other parts of the U.S. economy. Steel is a key input in several industries, among others manufacture of basic metals, manufacture of fabricated metal products, manufacture of electrical equipment and manufacture of machinery and equipment not elsewhere classified.

Taken together, the steel-using industries generated in 2001 far more value added than did the steel industry itself and employed 57 workers for every employee in the steel industry.

How did it end?

Nine WTO members (Brazil, China, Chinese Taipei, the EU, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Norway and Switzerland) opposed the safeguard measures in the WTO. It was found that the safeguards violated WTO rules by failing to show a “causal link” between increased imports and “serious injury” on the U.S. side.

Also, the U.S. government did not provide comprehensive and appropriate evidence of “unforeseen developments” of steel imports explaining their increase. Due to the continuation of non-compliance of the U.S. with the WTO ruling, the EU was authorized to raise retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods.

It targeted, among others, citrus fruits and textiles, with the aim to build up internal opposition to the U.S. protectionism among various U.S. industries. Safeguard measures on steel were eventually terminated by the United States in December 2003.

Make trade or perish

There should be no doubt that unfair trading practices undermine the harmonious functioning of the global trading order. But the WTO’s dispute resolution has exactly the aim to assist discordant trading partners in a peaceful resolution of trade tensions.

As a matter of fact, the U.S. enjoys an above-average success rate in disputes that have been decided at the WTO since its foundation in 1995. At the same time, some WTO rules might be indeed outdated and could be renegotiated to better reflect the changing nature of trade today.

Finally, the lack of an investment treaty between the U.S. and China adds considerable fuel to the flames. After all, if such an investment treaty existed, it would assure fair access to reciprocal markets for multinationals.

Should Donald Trump push ahead with protectionist pledges, a tit-for-tat trade conflict or at least elements thereof would be unavoidable. Smaller muscle flexing with respect to single industries would probably not harm the overall economic picture. However, a fully-fledged trade war would be detrimental to both the United States and its trading partners.

Conclusion

More generally, the current Trump administration’s strategy reflects a false diagnosis of the underlying problem of chronic current account deficits registered by the United States.

As long as U.S. excess consumption is financed by savings from abroad, there is no economic reason for current account deficits to improve. Protectionism only reallocates the deficits among sectors.

Equally significant, under the twin deficit scenario, these trade deficit could get even worse, should the recent major tax cuts significantly worsen the outlook for the U.S. fiscal balance.

With regard to protectionism and trade wars, Donald Trump should heed the warning of his illustrious predecessor Thomas Jefferson that “the most successful war seldom pays for its losses.”

I brought my kids to a live YouTube show and it restored my faith in humanity

(Credit: Reuters//Lucy Nicholson)

Like most kids, my 11- and 13-year-olds watch a lot of YouTube. Some of what they watch is unintelligible to me. Why would anyone want to see some guy yelling at the screen while playing a dumb video game? And what about all the horrible antics some of these YouTubers get into, from painful pranks to truly offensive material? But I know it’s not all bad — sometimes I actually laugh at some of the more clever stuff, like Good Mythical Morning. So when Markiplier, one of my kids’ favorite YouTubers, announced a live show coming to our city, I decided to cough up the cash as a special treat for my kids.

Markiplier, 28, is known largely for his Let’s Play videos, which is basically his face in a corner of the screen making wisecracks while he plays video games (Five Nights at Freddy’s is one of his specialties). I find these immensely boring and so littered with profanity that I don’t love to see my kids watching them. But for all his cursing and gaming, Markiplier (whose real name is Mark Fischbach) is also funny and charming, and he raises a ton of money for charity. The question for me was: What is he going to do on a concert stage? Because if I paid good money to watch him play a video game, I was not going to be happy.

Turns out his show was actually lots of fun. In fact, it’s more about skits and improvisation than video games. He and his five friends (whom everyone in the sold-out audience knew by name) played the kind of classic improvisation games you’d see on Whose Line Is It Anyway? — from making up skits based on audience suggestions to holding a very funny dance-off. And the audience loved it. In fact, the screaming was so loud, it may have reached Beatles-level frenzy.

But here’s what made the night truly eye-opening for me: I saw approximately 2,000 kids enjoying themselves in a positive, supportive, and sincere atmosphere. This wasn’t the dark side of YouTube and its teen fans that gets so much attention, where folks laugh at people getting hurt, make nasty comments, take unwise risks, or make fun of others. The audience cheered on the quirky kids Mark pulled from the audience to show off awkward dance moves or fight imaginary wizards. At one point, something truly astonishing happened. Markiplier invited a young man up on stage to talk about himself and I thought, “Uh-oh. The audience is going to turn on him.” What was surely meant to be a brief intro to a silly sketch turned into a lengthy, uncomfortable story about this man’s struggle with bipolar disorder and how YouTube had helped him during his recovery. Markiplier listened intently. The audience was rapt. It ended with a promise from Markiplier to raise money for mental illness treatment and the audience shouting encouragement to this stranger.

And this is what YouTube is really about — at least at its best. It’s where kids can find support, spontaneity, and authenticity. The evening ended with Mark and his friends sitting on a couch answering audience questions. While some fans asked about hair dye and subscriber goals, many others asked about how to find joy or motivation. And Mark and his friends gave these kids the kind of advice you’d expect from a teacher or parent: Find your passion, be kind to others, and help make the world a better place. The kids ate it up. For all the hand-wringing that parents do over YouTube and the internet — some of it justified — this evening was a sign that maybe some of our fears about raising antisocial kids who only know how to stare at screens is misguided. It was a peek into a possible future ruled by compassionate people who care deeply about each other and the world around them. What more could you ask for?

Tips for finding the good in YouTube

Ask kids to share their favorite videos with you. Not only do you get a peek into their world, but you open up potential conversations on bigger topics.

Share your favorite videos. Whether it’s old George Michael music videos or a funny thing that passed through your Facebook feed, show it to your kids. They might not get it, but at least they’ll see you engaging with one of their favorite mediums.

Use controversies to trigger important conversations. YouTube is always getting press for something new, whether it’s kids doing dangerous challenges or a YouTuber making a bad decision. Kids — especially teens — love engaging in debates about issues they feel passionate about, from net neutrality to how much YouTubers should get paid. Help them exercise their reasoning and communication skills by asking them to explain their stance.

Don’t judge. You may think watching people play video games is stupid (yep), but don’t let that blind you to the other good stuff kids might get from their heroes. Positive messages about empathy, perseverance, and humility can be woven into just about anything.

Will holding the cheese and chocolate milk on Happy Meals make a difference?

(Credit: AP/Charles Rex Arbogast)

McDonald’s recently announced a major commitment to improve the nutrition quality of its kids’ meals. Globally, at least 50 percent of Happy Meal bundles, which include a main dish, side and drink, will meet nutrition limits on calories, saturated fat, added sugar and sodium set by McDonald’s. In the U.S., the restaurant will use strategies such as not listing cheeseburgers or chocolate milk on Happy Meal menus — but providing the items if customers ask — to meet this goal.

This commitment is a positive step, but reducing children’s consumption of nutritionally poor fast food will require much more.

I have spent 10 years studying fast-food kids’ meals marketing and nutrition. My research and that of others demonstrate an enormous challenge for parents to select healthy options when the environment inside fast-food restaurants makes the unhealthy options so much more appealing.

Fast food: Children are lovin’ it

Improving the nutrition of fast-food kids’ meals is important to public health. Childhood obesity rates have skyrocketed over the past four decades, with no improvement in recent years. In the U.S., 58 percent of children ages 6 to 8 and 41 percent of preschoolers are overweight or obese.

Sugary drinks are a big problem, but so is fast food. Despite recent introductions of healthier items, nearly all fast-food items, including on kids’ meal menus, exceed recommendations for maximum calories, sugar, saturated fat and/or sodium in a meal for children. Fewer than 3 percent of kids’ meal bundles offered by top fast-food restaurants, including McDonald’s, meet the industry’s own standards – set by the National Restaurant Association – for healthy meals for kids.

Furthermore, on any day, one-third of children consume fast food. And on days they eat fast food, children consume 126 additional calories, and more sugar, saturated fat and sodium.

Support for mandating healthier kids’ meals is growing, as local communities enact laws setting nutrition standards for kids’ meals. The Baltimore City Council just approved legislation requiring healthy drinks as the default in kids’ meals, following the lead of other cities, including Davis, California, and Lafayette, Colorado.

Over the past five years, McDonald’s has done more than most fast-food restaurants to voluntarily improve the nutritional quality of its kids’ meals. In 2013, it reduced the size of french fries in Happy Meals and added a healthier side, such as apple slices or yogurt. In 2014, the restaurant initiated a policy to remove sugary sodas from kids’ meal menus and only list healthier drinks, including milk, chocolate milk and 100 percent juice as options.

McDonald’s also has more at stake. The company spent US$33 million advertising Happy Meals in 2016. Children aged 2 to 5 viewed, on average, 2.7 TV ads for Happy Meals each week, while 6- to 11-year-olds saw three ads. Notably, children saw more ads for McDonald’s Happy Meals than for any other food brand in 2016, and the company placed more than 10 times as many ads on children’s TV networks (e.g., Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network) than any other fast-food restaurant.

This marketing works. In a survey of parents, 41 percent said their child asked to go to McDonald’s at least once a week, while 15 percent of parents of preschoolers reported that their child asked to go every day.

Persuading parents to say “yes” to their children’s requests is also part of McDonald’s marketing strategy. When advertising to parents, trips to McDonald’s and Happy Meals become a way to make children and parents happy. Public relations campaigns announcing nutritious options in Happy Meals also support this strategy. In a recent survey that has not yet been published, my research group found that 80 percent of parents said they had purchased lunch or dinner for their children under age 12 from McDonald’s in the past week. And two-thirds said they would take their child to McDonald’s more often because of the restaurant’s healthier kids’ meal policies.

Yet despite positive attitudes about healthier Happy Meals, unhealthy sides and drinks with Happy Meals persist. In our 2016 survey, we asked parents who reported purchasing a Happy Meal for their child what drink they received; 42 percent answered that they received a soda. This proportion has not changed since 2010. In addition, 64 percent reported that they received french fries, while 31 percent did not receive a healthy side. (Happy Meals come with two sides.) Furthermore, 18 percent of parents purchased an item, such as dessert, plus the Happy Meal for their child, and 25 percent did not purchase a kids’ meal at all. Notably, parents were more likely to purchase Happy Meals and healthier drinks for preschoolers than for older children.

The tantalizing smell of fries

Parents decide whether their child gets apple slices and milk or french fries and soda with Happy Meals. But research on consumer choices shows that making the healthy choice in this situation is difficult, even for adults. Consider the environment inside a fast-food restaurant: the smell of french fries, the prominent soda fountain with soda brand logos, the images of ice cream and large burgers on posters and menu boards. These cues all trigger desire for these unhealthy but highly appetizing choices.

Studies by behavioral economists also show that simply offering healthy options alongside unhealthy options is not enough to increase consumers’ selection of healthy option.

However, offering healthier drinks and sides by default – and only providing unhealthy options upon consumer request – significantly increases the likelihood that consumers will accept the healthy items. Disney theme parks use this approach with their kids’ meals. An evaluation of their policy demonstrated high acceptance of healthier options.

Publicizing healthier Happy Meal options while also offering unhealthy options raises concerns about potential “health halo” effects. Research has shown that depicting more nutritious kids’ meal items in fast-food commercials does not increase children’s selection of healthier items, but it does increase their reported liking of fast food generally. Advertising for unhealthy food, such as cookies and fruit drinks, using nutrition messages increases children’s beliefs that these products are healthy. Studies with adults have also shown increased calorie consumption and purchases of unhealthy fast-food sides resulting from health halo marketing messages.

Finally, a recent evaluation of McDonald’s healthier kids’ meal side and drink policies revealed inconsistent implementation at individual restaurants. In some cases, menu boards still showed french fries and sugary drinks as kids’ meal options, and counter personnel continued to suggest these items with kids’ meal orders.

McDonald’s new commitment to set nutrition standards for Happy Meal bundles is a positive first step. However, I believe the restaurant must do more to prove its commitment to children’s health and supporting parents. Healthy Happy Meals should be the most appealing choice for children, the most convenient choice for parents, and the only Happy Meal options available at their restaurants. McDonald’s could also, in my view, stop advertising directly to children as young as 2 years old so that parents can make the decision about if and when to introduce their children to McDonald’s.

Jennifer Harris, Professor of Allied Health Sciences, University of Connecticut

Cape Town is set to become the world’s first major city to run out of water

(Credit: AP Photo/Jim Mone)

How will humanity respond to future crises caused by climate change? Some scenarios envision us rising to the occasion, tackling adaptation head-on and weathering the literal and metaphoric storms. Those with less faith in our fellow humans predict more pessimistic outcomes.

The reality is that we won’t need to wait too long for our first glimpse: In a few months, the South African coastal city of Cape Town is set to become the world’s first major metropolis to run out of municipal water.

At present, Cape Town’s dams, which hold the city’s entire water supply, are at around 24 percent capacity. Once that level drops below 13.5 percent, the city will have to reroute its remaining water reserves to 200 emergency pickup points. According to current calculations, that day is scheduled for July 9. The event has been given an ominous name: Day Zero. When it arrives, writes South African political reporter Richard Poplak for the Atlantic, “Cape Town will become a test case for what happens when climate change, extreme inequality, and partisan political dysfunction collide.”

So what caused Cape Town to reach this perilous point? The first and most basic answer is a lack of rainfall. Piotr Wolski, a University of Cape Town climate researcher, explained to the Economist in a recent article that, “the drought in the city’s water-catchment area between 2015 and 2017 was of a once-in-300-years magnitude.”

Global warming has certainly played its part in this natural disaster, but as professor Graham Jewitt, director of the Center for Water Resources Research unit at the University of KwaZulu-Natal told Reuters, “simply blaming climate change is a cop-out.”

Cape Town’s mayor Patricia de Lille has attributed some blame to local residents. According to figures cited by the Economist, “only 41 percent of Capetonians complied” with the city’s daily water restrictions implemented last September, which limited each person to 23 gallons. As a result, the municipality has had to cut that daily limit down to 13 gallons and is giving out fines to people who don’t comply.

But apart from these restrictions, what else has local government done to prepare for this imminent threat? The short answer is, not enough.

Since 1990, members of the scientific community have issued warnings about the likelihood of a severe drought in Cape Town. In recent years as dam levels sunk, the local government under the leadership of de Lille’s Democratic Alliance became plagued by inaction. Why? “In part,” Poplak observed, “it comes down to the fact that its administration was paralyzed by a sort of bureaucratic magical thinking that combined technocratic hyper-efficiency, an obsession with austerity-driven bean-counting, and an apparent belief that miracles are certain to fall from the sky.”

On his blog More Than Just Surviving, survivalist Thomas Xavier describes this inactivity as a form of reactionary politics. He reasons that if a government is able to respond well to a drought once it has happened, it will translate into votes. However, Xavier writes, “if a local government spends a truck-ton of cash on water usage reduction technology and the local population never experiences a drought . . . they will at best think the government is overly paranoid/protective and at worst will think they are wasting money.”

It’s a classic case of — excuse the pun — damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

“Now the city is playing catch-up,” reports Time’s Aryn Baker from Cape Town. Residents are making more of an effort to save water by flushing toilets only when necessary, taking 90-second showers and using paper plates and cups to save on dishwashing. There has also been a mad scramble to stock up on bottled water and large containers and jerry cans for storage. The local government has begun erecting expensive desalinization plants to purify seawater and is attempting to tap the city’s natural underground aquifer. By the time Day Zero arrives, though, “only two of the seven water-augmentation projects are expected to be up and running,” writes Baker.

The only other major plan in the works involves the emergency water collection points. In effect, this measure will see all the city’s taps shut off, except for hospitals, schools and other “vital institutions,” according to officials. From Day Zero on, city dwellers will have to queue at communal collection points to receive a daily limit of 6.6 gallons of water. Sounds like a bit of a precarious plan, right?

Cape Town is a city of roughly 4 million residents. As Baker notes, if even a quarter of the population shows up each day to collect their families’ allotment, “each site will see some 5,000 water seekers a day.” Then there is the matter of logistics. How will transportation to and from these areas work? Armed guards will be stationed at each collection point, and how will that be managed?

“The risk grading will be done in accordance with the volume of people expected to pass through each water collection point, as well as the general crime trends in each area,” said Richard Bosman, Cape Town’s executive director for safety and security, in the Atlantic article. “Cape Town does have a number of gang hot spots and so this would be a crucial factor in determining whether a collection point is considered low or high risk.”

The longer-term consequences of Day Zero are also a major point of concern. The threat of diseases spread by diminishing basic hygiene, for instance, has been exacerbated by a recent outbreak of foodborne listeriosis in the country. As for the economic impact, analysts quoted in Time estimate that “300,000 jobs in agriculture and tens of thousands more in the service, hospitality and food sectors” are potentially at risk. That’s not to mention the fact that Cape Town remains one of the most economically unequal cities in the world.

Carol Davids, a local resident, wrote more on the issue of inequality and the water crisis for the blog Africa is a Country. Capetonians with financial means have been preparing for months, stockpiling “pricey plastic water tanks” and even “pools on stand-by, filled with chlorinated water,” writes Davids.  For those unable to afford such luxuries, the threat of Day Zero looms larger. “As always,” continues Davids, “the poor are inevitably people of color: black and colored families who remain in the shadow of apartheid’s economic and spatial legacy.”

The looming threat of the water crisis has inspired last-minute action. City dwellers have become more vigilant, and subsequently, Day Zero has been pushed back several times over the last month (maybe out of fear of Splash, a horrific water-saving mascot). If Cape Town is lucky, rain will fall as it used to in years past before July 9 and the city will be spared the less favorable outcome. The alternative is that the world will watch as the city deals with a situation many have likened to the plot of Mad Max.

According to figures from the World Resources Institute cited by Time, up to “3.5 billion people around the world could experience water scarcity by 2025 if steps are not taken to conserve water now.”

Cape Town might be the first city to experience Day Zero, but it will certainly not be the last.

The history of the Hollywood sign, from public nuisance to symbol of stardom

(Credit: AP Photo/Reed Saxon, File)

Every year at the Oscars, the cameras pan to the famed Hollywood sign and its bold white letters.

Ask someone today what the sign symbolizes, and the same words will likely crop up: Movies. Stardom. Glamour.

But as I point in my book on the Hollywood sign, the sign didn’t always represent fame and fortune. As the city changed, so did the meaning of the sign, which, at one point, was even considered a public nuisance.

Come to . . . Hollywoodland?

California has long possessed the lure of material and personal fulfillment.

What started as a destination for those hoping to strike gold became, in the late 19th century, a mecca for anyone with real or imagined ailments. The state’s temperate climate and natural springs, guidebooks claimed, possessed “restorative powers for weakened dispositions.”

The state’s gold has since been drained, and the quest for perfect health has spread to rest of the country. But the erection of the famed Hollywood sign in 1923 marked the start of another phase, one still with us today.

During that decade, a real estate development group, one of whose principal backers was Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler, built a large sign — essentially a billboard — on an unnamed mountain between the Los Angeles basin and the San Fernando Valley.

“Hollywoodland,” the sign read. Its 40,000 blinking light bulbs advertised a new housing development built to accommodate the city’s surging population, which more than doubled during the 1920s to become the fifth largest in the country, as the city drew people from all over the country for its weather, open spaces and jobs.

The city of Hollywood had been absorbed into Los Angeles only a decade earlier. At the time, it was a wealthy area that had grudgingly accepted the movie business. Many mansions dotted the hillsides below the sign, and utopian communities like Krotona, the U.S. headquarters of a mystical organization called the Theosophical Society, had sprung up in the foothills and on the flats.

Accordingly, early advertising for Hollywoodland emphasized the development’s exclusivity. It would offer an escape from the smog, dirt and unwelcome neighbors of downtown Los Angeles.

Saving the sign

Because the sign holds such a prominent place in the nation’s cultural imagination today, it may be surprising to learn that it wasn’t until fairly recently that it achieved its iconic status.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the sign makes an appearance in only a few of the movies that were about Hollywood or the movie industry. Other Hollywood institutions, like the Brown Derby restaurant, tended to represent the film world.

In the 1940s, Los Angeles — as both city and symbol — started to change. A dense smog settled over the metropolis, which would be featured as the grim, shadowy setting of noir films like “The Big Sleep” and “Double Indemnity.”

The sign — a little dingier, a little more unslightly — reflected the changing city. Since it was originally intended as an advertisement, few had considered its permanence or long-term significance.

The hillside where it had been built was dangerously steep; workers had cut the letters from thin sheet metal, which they tacked onto telephone poles. Heavy winds could easily rip the letters away, and by the late 1940s, there had been so much deterioration that the city of Los Angeles proposed to tear it down, calling it a dangerous public nuisance.

That dismissive view of the sign began to change in 1949, when the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce told the city that it would take over its ownership and maintenance. With that exchange, the “land” suffix was dropped. We could say that this is the point that the Hollywood sign we know today was actually born.

However, improvements and maintenance occurred in fits and starts. By the early 1970s, committees were being formed to “save” the sign in order to restore it beyond shoddy paint jobs and patchwork repairs.

Finally, in 1978 a committee headed by Hugh Hefner and Alice Cooper collected the funds — about US$27,000 per letter — to not simply repair, but rebuild the sign.

Today the big white letters are a permanent fixture in the Los Angeles landscape, and it’s even withstood the attempts of adventurous vandals to emulate the art student who, in 1976, tweaked the sign to read “Hollyweed.”

In their own way, these vandals are trying to carve out their own slice of the Hollywood dream — a quest not for gold or for health, but for recognition and fame, whether by talent, ambition or selfie.

Leo Braudy, Leo S. Bing Chair in English and American Literature, University of Southern California — Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Most panhandling laws are unconstitutional since there’s no freedom from speech

(Credit: AP Photo/Pat Eaton-Robb)

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Thousands of U.S. cities restrict panhandling in some way. These ordinances limit face-to-face soliciting, including interactions that occur on sidewalks and alongside roads, whether they are verbal or involve holding a sign.

According to a growing string of court decisions, however, laws that outlaw panhandling are themselves illegal. In light of rulings that found these restrictions to violate the freedom of speech, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver and dozens of other cities have repealed laws restricting panhandling in public places since 2015.

As a professor of law and urban studies, I study how local ordinances can harm the poor, particularly people experiencing homelessness. I volunteer with the American Civil Liberties Union and other nonprofits to help fight for more equitable local policies. And I have brought together nonprofits and individuals to successfully change unconstitutional anti-panhandling laws across Ohio, my home state.

Charitable solicitations

Over the past 30 years, cities have increasingly adopted laws to reduce or eliminate panhandling. Although a few jurisdictions simply ban panhandling outright, most ban the practice in certain areas, such as parks, near roads or near bus stops. Cities also regulate what they call “aggressive solicitation” – a term defined broadly to include behavior like asking for a donation twice, in pairs, or after sunset – on the basis that it can make passersby feel physically threatened or vulnerable to mugging.

The First Amendment protects everything from distributing pornography to waving hateful signs outside military funerals. So it is should not be surprising that it also protects fundraising pitches of all kinds.

In a trilogy of opinions issued in the 1980s, the Supreme Court struck down several state laws that restricted charitable solicitation, including laws that prohibited requests from nonprofits that, according to regulators, spent too much money on fundraising.

In ruling against charitable solicitation limits, the justices established two important precedents. First, charitable solicitation is constitutionally protected speech.

Second, local and state authorities can’t dictate which causes may or may not solicit donations within their borders. A regulator’s paternalistic belief that a cause is unwise or inefficient is not a valid reason to limit speech seeking support for it. The listeners can make that decision for themselves.

Panhandling is a basic form of charitable solicitation with a long history. Almsgiving dates back to the days of ancient Greece and the Bible.

Instead of asking for help on behalf of an animal shelter, food pantry or any other kind of nonprofit, the panhandlers ask for help satisfying their own personal need. In case after case, the courts have clearly ruled that the Constitution safeguards the right to make personal pitches the same way that it protects the ability of organizations to make their own asks.

‘Beggars at a Doorway,’ a Flemish painting possibly made by Abraham Willemsens in the 1650s.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

The public square

The First Amendment guarantees free speech in public spaces like sidewalks, streets and parks. This freedom is extremely broad but is not without limits.

Even constitutionally protected speech can be somewhat regulated in public areas if the government can justify the restriction. Only rarely, however, can the government restrict protected speech in public spaces based on what is being said, as the Supreme Court reminded us in a 2015 ruling on street signs.

Governments primarily try to justify their restrictions on panhandling by saying they benefit most passersby, who consider expressions of poverty and desperation a nuisance, and nearby businesses, which fear losing customers.

But there’s no freedom from speech, as the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in McCullen v. Coakley, a 2014 case about the rights of protesters to congregate near abortion clinics. The fact that someone within earshot cannot “turn the page, change the channel, or leave the Web site” to avoid hearing a message they don’t like is “a virtue, not a vice,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts.

A panhandling sign spotted in San Francisco.

BrokenSphere, CC BY-SA

Down and out but not silent

No panhandling bans have made it to the Supreme Court. But in recent years, all lower courts ruling on this issue have found that laws imposing restrictions on sidewalk and roadside solicitation are unconstitutional.

While cities have some legitimate public safety concerns, focusing on a category of speech misses the point. It is at once too broad and too narrow, covering innocent behavior that isn’t threatening and missing much behavior that is problematic.

Instead, cities remain free to regulate problematic behaviors directly, such as prosecuting suspected cases of assault and trespassing or making blocking the sidewalk illegal.

Even better, they can try harder to meet the needs of people who are seeking help rather than attempting to silence them. Portland, Maine, for example, is now hiring panhandlers to clean up public spaces after the courts threw out its restrictive ordinance.

Despite the spate of legal precedents, plenty of these laws remain on the books. Advocates like the American Civil Liberties Union are challenging anti-panhandling laws in Albuquerque, Houston and other places that still enforce this kind of law.

With these measures on their way out, cities now have a good chance to refocus their energies on helping, rather than arresting, their homeless residents.

Joseph W. Mead, Assistant Professor, Cleveland State University

The media is lying to you about how to lose weight

(Credit: Getty/ShotShare)

Like millions of my fellow obese Americans, I have a weight loss story that ended in failure.

It began in the summer of 2011, when I finally mustered up the willpower to control my diet and exercise regularly. As a result, I lost an astonishing 55 pounds in only three months, then shed another 10 pounds over the course of the remainder of the year.

Between 2012 and 2015, however, the weight gradually crept back on, despite my best efforts to keep it off. Once I returned to my old dreaded weight in 2015, I gave up entirely on dieting and exercise, returning to the sad state of affairs at which I found myself seven years ago.

I am one of those people who wishes there were an instant cure for obesity. I also realize that you very often can’t get what you wish for. And I know the media does a disservice to obese people when it comes to reporting on weight loss.

“One disconnect between how the media represents obesity research and scientific reality is that media reports tend to gloss over how much weight was lost by the participants in scientific studies,” Alexxai V. Kravitz, Ph.D., an investigator at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, told me. “Headlines often include lofty language … that sound like a game-changing solution for obesity has just been discovered. But the results of weight loss studies are usually modest, no matter what they try.”

Kravitz added, “Ten to 15 pounds is a very good effect size for a weight loss study … Many studies report smaller effects. For instance, exercise studies tend to report around three to five pounds of weight loss in their participants.”

Kravitz repeatedly pointed to a study that was reported in the New York Times last month. It argued — not unreasonably — that the quality of the food you eat often matters more when it comes to losing weight than the quantity. In other words, a person who calorie-counts while maintaining a fast food diet is less likely to be healthy than someone who eats healthy fruits, vegetables and whole foods while paying less attention to the exact amount.

This is good advice, but it isn’t the miracle cure that the headline (“The Key to Weight Loss Is Diet Quality, Not Quantity, a New Study Finds”) could lead you to believe it to be. The same can be said for a number of other studies that suggest crash diets or probiotic treatments, new exercise regimens or various foods that you should completely cut.

The underlying problem is twofold: One, that losing weight is rarely as simple as finding a magic silver bullet that will cause the pounds to simply fall off, and two, that studies find the vast majority of people who lose weight will gain it back and that successful long-term dieting is often effectively impossible.

“Unfortunately, many scientific studies don’t follow up on whether the subjects maintain the weight loss after the study, so journalists cannot report on this,” Kravitz told me. “This is largely for practical reasons — to follow up on this point, researchers would have to track subjects over years, which is very difficult.”

“The short answer here is that most people lose weight (on any diet) for about three to six months, but after this the weight creeps back on,” Kravitz continued. “So in that regard, it is incredibly important to know not just how much weight study participants lost, but how much was sustained after one year, two years, five years, etc. Not knowing whether the weight loss was sustained adds to the disconnect between what is reported in the media and what a person might expect if they follow the diet exactly as the study participants did.”

Kravitz’s point was reinforced by Kevin D. Hall, Ph.D., who is a senior investigator at the NIDDK.

“Permanent weight loss is very difficult to come by, especially substantial permanent weight loss, other than bariatric surgery which does that quite readily,” said Hall, who had earlier recalled how several major media outlets had also inflated the results of a study he had worked on. He added that “unless you have Type 2 diabetes, you don’t really need that much weight loss to confer health benefits. So, for example, 5 to 10 percent weight loss, if you’re able to do that, you can actually reduce your risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.”

One problem, Hall elaborated, is that when people focus on losing weight, they often aren’t doing so for health reasons.

“There is a conflation of the cosmetic benefits of weight loss with the health benefits of weight loss,” Hall said, meaning that a mere 5 to 10 percent weight loss simply isn’t what they want to see.

Unfortunately, a significant part of the emotional toll associated with failing to lose weight or keep it off is that people face social stigmas for not adhering to society’s cosmetic standards. As I prepared to write this article, I reached out to a number of people from my social circle who had lost a significant amount of weight only to gain it back. All of them described the pain of being judged for their size after the weight had come back on.

“I’ve overheard plenty of under-their-breath comments from strangers while running errands; I see the looks I get, judging the contents of my shopping cart at the grocery store,” Erin, who declined to give her last name for privacy reasons, told me. “I would love to get back down to a size 16, even a size 18 so I could shop at ‘regular’ clothing stores. The pounds don’t matter to me as much anymore, it’s my size that bothers me.”

Penelope, who lost a considerable amount of weight only to gain it back after becoming pregnant, had a similar story.

“I actually haven’t stepped on a scale since I gave birth … I’ve been so wrapped up in recovering from PPD that my weight has become a secondary objective,” Penelope, who wished to remain pseudonymous, told Salon. “I plan to get back to the gym when I get things sorted, but I am trying not to beat myself up too much in the meantime.”

And, not surprisingly, self-loathing was a common theme here.

“I blame myself for gaining it back. I stopped eating healthy and stopped working out,” Mary, who similarly struggled with her weight, told Salon. “People have made sly comments on my weight gain. It hurts.”

While I’m not arguing that people shouldn’t accept any personal responsibility for their health, it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that our media’s depiction of this important issue only makes the situation worse. In the most immediate sense, media outlets need to place scientific studies in their proper context instead of sensationalizing each new result as if it was a game-changer. They also need to stop viewing weight loss itself as an indicator of whether a person is healthy or not and, instead, focus on the benefits of permanent lifestyle changes — particularly those involving diet and exercise — that should be lauded when they’re followed, regardless of whether they yield measurable results on a bathroom scale.

Which brings me to the most important point: We need to stop acting like going from being obese to not being obese, permanently, is simply a matter of willpower. The science does not support that notion and it exists not because its purveyors believe in truth or helping people improve their health, but because they want to shame individuals who don’t abide by society’s prevailing cosmetic standards.

Like the number on my scale, the truth on this issue is not pleasant … but that doesn’t mean we have any right to avoid it.

Mathematics: forget simplicity, the abstract is beautiful — and important

(Credit: wang song via Shutterstock)

Why is mathematics so complicated? It’s a question many students will ask while grappling with a particularly complex calculus problem — and their teachers will probably echo while setting or marking tests.

It wasn’t always this way. Many fields of mathematics germinated from the study of real world problems, before the underlying rules and concepts were identified. These rules and concepts were then defined as abstract structures. For instance, algebra, the part of mathematics in which letters and other general symbols are used to represent numbers and quantities in formulas and equations was born from solving problems in arithmetic. Geometry emerged as people worked to solve problems dealing with distances and area in the real world.

That process of moving from the concrete to the abstract scenario is known, appropriately enough, as abstraction. Through abstraction, the underlying essence of a mathematical concept can be extracted. People no longer have to depend on real world objects, as was once the case, to solve a mathematical puzzle. They can now generalise to have wider applications or by matching it to other structures can illuminate similar phenomena. An example is the adding of integers, fractions, complex numbers, vectors and matrices. The concept is the same, but the applications are different.

This evolution was necessary for the development of mathematics, and important for other scientific disciplines too.

Why is this important? Because the growth of abstraction in maths gave disciplines like chemistry, physics, astronomy, geology, meteorology the ability to explain a wide variety of complex physical phenomena that occur in nature. If you grasp the process of abstraction in mathematics, it will equip you to better understand abstraction occurring in other tough science subjects like chemistry or physics.

From the real world to the abstract

The earliest example of abstraction was when humans counted before symbols existed. A sheep herder, for instance, needed to keep track of his flock of sheep without having any sort of symbolic system akin to numbers. So how did he do this to ensure that none of his sheep wandered away or got stolen?

One solution is to obtain a big supply of stones. He then moved the sheep one-by-one into an enclosed area. Each time a sheep passed, he placed a stone in a pile. Once all the sheep had passed, he got rid of the extra stones and was left with a pile of stones representing his flock.

Every time he needed to count the sheep, he removed the stones from his pile; one for each sheep. If he had stones left over, it means some sheep had wandered away or perhaps been stolen. This one-to-one correspondence helped the shepherd to keep track of his flock.

Today, we use the Arabic numbers (also known as the Hindu-Arabic numerals): 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 to represent any integer, that is any whole number.

This is another example of abstraction, and it’s powerful. It means we’re able to handle any amount of sheep, regardless of how many stones we have. We’ve moved from real-world objects — stones, sheep — to the abstract. There is real strength in this: we’ve created a space where the rules are minimalistic, yet the games that can be played are endless.

Another advantage of abstraction is that it reveals a deeper connection between different fields of mathematics. Results in one field can suggest concepts and ideas to be explored in a related field. Occasionally, methods and techniques developed in one field can be directly applied to another field to create similar results.

Tough concepts, better teaching

Of course, abstraction also has its disadvantages. Some of the mathematical subjects taught at university level — Calculus, Real Analysis, Linear Algebra, Topology, Category Theory, Functional Analysis and Set Theory among them — are very advanced examples of abstraction.

These concepts can be quite difficult to learn. They’re often tough to visualise and their rules rather unintuitive to manipulate or reason with. This means students need a degree of mathematical maturity to process the shift from the concrete to the abstract.

Many high school kids, particularly from developing countries, come to university with an undeveloped level of intellectual maturity to handle abstraction. This is because of the way mathematics was taught at high school. I have seen many students struggling, giving up or not even attempting to study mathematics because they weren’t given the right tools at school level and they think that they just “can’t do maths”.

Teachers and lecturers can improve this abstract thinking by being aware of abstractions in their subject and learning to demonstrate abstract concepts through concrete examples. Experiments are also helpful to familiarise and assure students of an abstract concept’s solidity.

This teaching principle is applied in some school systems, such as Montessori, to help children improve their abstract thinking. Not only does this guide them better through the maze of mathematical abstractions but it can be applied to other sciences as well.

Harry Zandberg Wiggins, Lecturer, University of Pretoria

The true cost of arming our teachers

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National Rifle Association Vice President Wayne LaPierre and his Republican sycophants are very liberal in suggesting ways to spend our money to protect us from the weapons they insist on subjecting us to. But here’s a radical idea: What if we spent a fraction of that money on our democracy, instead?

First, here’s a primer on how the gun supporters would reshape our budget. After the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., LaPierre called on Congress “to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school.” The NRA even put out a 225-page white paper describing how to prepare our schools for battle. Sample recommendations: outfit desks with ballistic protective steel plating and replace windows with bulletproof glass. The Atlantic calculated that just the cops part of the NRA’s plan would cost a minimum of $6.6 billion a year.

In response to the recent slaughter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., President Donald Trump one-upped LaPierre by proposing to arm 20 percent of teachers. A Florida House of Representatives committee has even approved a measure to arm 10 teachers per school and double the number of armed school resource officers. In its , the Florida legislature omitted the costs of buying the teachers’ guns and paying for their time to undergo three weeks of training. Including those, implementing Florida’s plan nationwide would cost $15 billion to $20 billion.

Those ideas are small bore compared to the proposal put forth by former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, the self-styled great brain of our time. Gingrich insists that the only practical answer is to put six to eight full-time armed guards in every school. The Washington Post priced his plan at $63 billion to $109 billion a year.

It’s not as if any of these ideas would truly curb the epidemic in mass shootings. After all, there was an armed guard at Stoneman Douglas High School. Even Gingrich’s gold-plated plan would fail if none of his six to eight guards happened to be in the very classroom where the shooter opened fire. And all of these plans would create an enhanced likelihood that an armed teacher might make a mistake or go crazy, as one apparently did just last week in Dalton, Ga.

Of course, these would-be solutions ignore the elephants in the room, which most people recognize to be: 1) the easy availability of particularly lethal guns; and 2) the NRA, with its outsize political power to pursue a radical agenda that is impervious to common sense.

The students and parents in Parkland figured this out instantly. Many challenged their political leaders to refuse to accept money from the NRA. Others demanded bans on assault rifles. After U.S. Sen. Mark Rubio, R-Fla., scoffed during the CNN town hall at banning assault rifles because “you would literally have to ban every semi-automatic rifle that is sold,” the crowd erupted in applause to show support for such a ban.

Rubio later tweeted the crowd’s wish for a ban was “well outside the mainstream.” But polls in the past couple of years have found that anywhere from half to two-thirds of the public supports such bans, and it’s doubtful that our ongoing epidemic of unthinkable mass shootings has done anything to reduce that support.

There is a way, albeit imperfect, to better put questions of the public’s will on guns to the test. That is to elect politicians who are free to prioritize the public’s wishes and not those of the tiny percentage who can afford to underwrite their campaigns.

Various proposals over the years have called for politicians who limit their fundraising from outside sources to be eligible to receive public campaign funding. These proposals typically require politicians to raise a significant number of small-dollar contributions to prove their viability before qualifying for public money. Some, such as one offered by U.S. Rep. John Sarbanes, D-Md., would permit citizens to direct a small amount of their taxes to candidates they support.

 A public financing system for presidential elections that was created after Watergate flourished for two decades before rising election costs rendered the system’s formulas obsolete. Such systems also have succeeded in Arizona, Maine and many cities.

We think of elections as expensive endeavors. But next to the kind of numbers being thrown around to turn our schools into police zones, the costs look fairly mundane. Federal elections spending runs about $5 billion per two-year cycle, a bit more for presidential cycles and a bit less in the other years. Even if the entire $2 billion to $3 billion annual bill were shifted entirely to the taxpayers – which it wouldn’t be under a public system – that would be peanuts next to Gingrich’s $60 billion-plus prescription.

And if our newly minted leaders decided to follow through on the public’s wish to ban or restrict ownership of semi-automatic rifles, they could easily fund a buyback plan similar to the one undertaken in Australia in the 1990s, and still bring the budget in well below the costs of the guns-in-schools plans.

Public funding systems must permit candidates to opt out, and there is nothing to prevent candidates who choose to do so from raising far more money than those who participate. But public funding formulas would give participating candidates enough money to get their message out to introduce themselves to voters. History has shown that is what matters most. Meanwhile, a slight saving grace of our campaign finance system is that outlandish spending on elections tends to yield diminishing returns.

 As long as the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision stands, outside organizations like the NRA still can accept unlimited contributions and use them to influence elections. But Congress is fully empowered to require groups that spend money on politics to disclose their donors, which the public overwhelmingly supports. Such disclosure would at least allow voters to learn who is seeking to influence them.

Candidates who run free of special interest money might accrue goodwill that offsets the effects of their big-spending opponents’ money. And if they win, they might arrive in office with a clear mind and a clean conscience. That’s the sort of radical idea upon which our nation was founded.

LaPierre and his cronies would no doubt scream bloody murder at such a proposal. That’s their First Amendment right. Just don’t let them get away with saying we can’t afford it.

Encrypted smartphones secure your identity, not just your data

Smartphones store your email, your photos and your calendar. They provide access to online social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and even your bank and credit card accounts. And they’re keys to something even more private and precious — your digital identity.

Through their role in two-factor authentication systems, the most commonly used secure digital identity protection method, smartphones have become essential to identifying people both online and off. If data and apps on smartphones are not secure, that is a threat to people’s identities, potentially allowing intruders to pose as their targets on social networks, email, workplace communications and other online accounts.

As recently as 2012, the FBI recommended the public protect their smartphones’ data by encrypting it. More recently, though, the agency has asked phone makers to provide a way to get into encrypted devices, what police call “exceptional access.” The debate so far has focused on data privacy, but that leaves out a vital aspect of smartphone encryption: its ability to secure people’s personal online identities.

As I wrote in my recent book, “Listening In: Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age,” doing what the FBI wants — making phones easier to unlock — necessarily decreases users’ security. A recent National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine study, in which I participated, also warns that making phones easier to unlock potentially weakens this key element of securing people’s online identities.

Gathering evidence or weakening security?

In recent years, police have sought access to suspects’ smartphones as part of criminal investigations, and technology companies have resisted. The most prominent of these situations arose in the wake of the 2015 San Bernardino mass shooting. Before the attackers themselves were killed in a shootout, they were able to destroy their computers and phones — except one, a locked iPhone. The FBI wanted the phone decrypted, but worried that failed attempts to crack Apple’s security mechanisms could cause the phone to delete all its data.

The agency took Apple to court, seeking to force the company to write special software to avoid the phone’s built-in protections. Apple resisted, arguing that the FBI’s effort was government overreach that, if successful, would decrease all iPhone users’ safety — and, by extension, that of all smartphone users.

The conflict was resolved when the FBI paid a cybersecurity firm to break into the phone — and found nothing of relevance to the investigation. But the bureau remained steadfast that investigators should have what they called “exceptional access,” and what others called a “back door”: built-in software allowing police to decrypt locked phones.

The importance of two-factor authentication

The situation is not as simple as the FBI suggests. Secure phones do provide barriers to police investigations, but they are also an excellent component of strong cybersecurity. And given the frequency of cyberattacks and the diversity of their targets, that’s extremely important.

In July 2015, U.S. officials announced that cyberthieves had stolen the Social Security numbers, health and financial information and other private data of 21.5 million people who had applied for federal security clearances from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. In December 2015, a cyberattack at three electricity companies in Ukraine left a quarter of a million people without power for six hours. In March 2016, countless emails were stolen from the personal Gmail account of John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

In each of these cases, and many more around the world since, a poor security practice — securing accounts solely through passwords — let bad guys do serious damage. When login credentials are easy to crack, intruders get in quickly — and can go unnoticed for months.

The technology to secure online accounts lies in people’s pockets. Using a smartphone to run a piece of software called two-factor (or second-factor) authentication makes logging into online accounts far harder for the bad guys. Software on the smartphone generates an additional piece of information that a user must supply, beyond a username and password, before being allowed to login.

At present, many smartphone owners use text messages as a second factor, but that’s not good enough. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology warns that texting is far less secure than authentication apps: Attackers can intercept texts or even convince a mobile company to forward the SMS message to another phone. (It’s happened to Russian activists, Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson, and others.)

A safer version is a specialized app, like Google Authenticator or Authy, which generates what are called time-based one-time passwords. When a user wants to login to a service, she provides a username and password, and then gets a prompt for the app’s code. Opening the app reveals a six-digit code that changes every 30 seconds. Only upon typing that in is the user actually logged in. A Michigan startup called Duo makes this even easier: After a user types in a username and password, the system pings the Duo app on her phone, allowing her to tap the screen to confirm the login.

However, these apps are only as secure as the phone itself is. If a smartphone has weak security, someone who has possession of it can gain access to a person’s digital accounts, even locking the owner out. Indeed, not long after the iPhone debuted in 2007, hackers developed techniques for hacking into lost and stolen phones. Apple responded by building better security for the data on its phones; these are the same set of protections that law enforcement is now seeking to undo.

Avoiding disaster

Using a phone as a second factor in authentication is convenient: Most people carry their phones all the time, and the apps are easy to use. And it’s secure: Users notice if their phone is missing, which they don’t if a password is lifted. Phones as second-factor authenticators offer a vast increase in security beyond just usernames and passwords.

Had the Office of Personnel Management been using second-factor authentication, those personnel records wouldn’t have been so easy to lift. Had the Ukrainian power companies been using second-factor authentication for access to the internal networks controlling power distribution, the hackers would have found it much harder to disrupt the power grid itself. And had John Podesta been using second-factor authentication, Russian hackers would not have been able to get into his Gmail account, even with his password.

The FBI contradicts itself on this important issue. The agency has suggested the public use two-factor authentication and requires it when police officers want to connect to federal criminal justice database systems from an insecure location such as a coffee shop or even a police car. But then the bureau wants to make smartphones easier to unlock, weakening its own system’s protections.

Yes, phones that are difficult to unlock impede investigations. But that misses a larger story. Online crime is sharply increasing, and attacks are growing more sophisticated. Making phones easy for investigators to unlock will undermine the best way there is for ordinary people to secure their online accounts. It’s a mistake for the FBI to be pursuing this policy.

Susan Landau, Professor of Computer Science, Law and Diplomacy and Cybersecurity, Tufts University