Some questions about Google

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Salil Mehta writes,

On Friday afternoon East Coast Time by surprise, I was completely shut down in all my Google accounts (all of my gmail accounts, blog, all of my university pages that were on google sites, etc.) for no reason and no warning.

A couple years ago, Tyler Cowen linked to one of Mehta’s blog posts, and I linked to it also.

Mehta received a form letter from Google saying that he had violated its terms of service.

My questions:

1. If I search the terms of service for “terminate account,” I only find a reference to copyright infringement and “repeat infringers.” Otherwise, the terms of service do not appear to list any specific reasons for terminating someone’s account. What other offenses, if any, can lead Google to terminate accounts?

2. What is Google’s policy with respect to giving warnings prior to terminating accounts?

3. Google’s terms of service state that

We believe that you own your data and preserving your access to such data is important. If we discontinue a Service, where reasonably possible, we will give you reasonable advance notice and a chance to get information out of that Service.

I guess this refers to Google generically terminating a service for everyone, as they did with their blog newsreader. But what happens when an account is terminated? Does the individual have any way of recovering old blog posts, emails, and email contact lists?

[UPDATE] 4. As usual, I schedule posts in advance, and in the interim professor Mehta’s accounts have been restored. That raises the question of what prompted this decision (and the other three questions still remain unanswered).

Is trickle-down mostly local?

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Sam Wetherell writes,

the fifty largest metropolitan areas house just 7 percent of the world’s population but generate 40 percent of its growth. These “superstar” cities are becoming gated communities, their vibrancy replaced with deracinated streets full of Airbnbs and empty summer homes.

The high concentration of wealth in a few metro areas is a surprising phenomenon, given that the Internet was supposed to herald the death of distance. Possible explanations:

1. Talent tends to concentrate. So productivity is higher in the superstar cities than elsewhere.

2. Consumption externalities and network effects are powerful. So people who earn high incomes flock to cities that have what they enjoy.

Here is another possibility. Perhaps it is not the cities per se that are attracting wealth. Perhaps it is just the case that wealth is so concentrated that if you happen to have a city with a handful of the wealthiest people living in it, wealth will trickle down locally. The super-rich will put some of their wealth into the non-profit sector, and they will put significant chunks of their donations into local institutions. This raises incomes in the area.

I would put this possibility of local wealth trickle-down as one possible factor, probably a small one, as we attempt to explain the tendency for high incomes to be concentrated in a few cities.

Internet hopes, disappointed

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1. The death of distance. Supposedly, the Internet was going to reduce the importance of location. Instead, the economic importance of a few key cities seems to have increased.

2. Many of us foresaw the tebirth of highly decentralized markets, in which the small entrepreneur could compete on a level playing field with corporate giants. Instead, the Internet is dominated by key “platforms,” such as YouTube and Amazon, which rake in revenue. Those of us who try to use those platforms to earn our own living are more like Uber drivers than like entrepreneurs in charge of our own destinies.

3. A libertarian moment. The Internet would be a model of decentralized, unregulated human activity. Instead, we see corporations and governments discovering the ability to exert control. As I noted previously, the censorship that we thought was impossible 20 years ago is a reality today.

Thoughts on Internet censorship

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Tyler Cowen Alex Tabarrok writes,

When Facebook and Twitter regulate what can be said on their platforms and Google and Apple regulate who can provide a platform, we have a big problem. It’s as if the NYTimes and the Washington Post were the only major newspapers and the government regulated who could own a printing press.

1. Back in the 1990s, two cliches were “Nobody owns the Internet” and “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

These are no longer applicable. For people who rely on smart phones for access, Google and Apple own the Internet. In addition, Google owns a major domain name server.

Although I do not have a confident understanding of the technology and business environment, it would seem to me that today censorship on the Internet is feasible. I infer that when I hear of web sites being “shut down” because of the hateful thoughts that they convey.

Reversing the company’s previous stance on not censoring content, founder and CEO Matthew Prince wrote in an internal email that he “woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company.”

2. I wonder how there can be overlap between the people and organizations that champion regulations intended to impose “net neutrality” and those that want to see hateful web sites shut down. I believe that such overlap exists, but it is hard to take those as intellectually consistent positions.

3. I would like to see those who provide Internet infrastructure refrain from censorship. But having government enforce non-censorship would not be a very libertarian way of going about it. I would rather see non-censorship as a social norm that has sufficient compliance to make an uncensored Internet available to everyone who wants it.

4. For those of us who don’t like Nazis, jihadists, etc., I recommend expressing solidarity with their intended victims and support for efforts to prevent and punish acts of violence. I do not see shutting down web sites as doing much to prevent violence. I see it as more of a futile gesture, akin to confrontational counter-demonstrations.

5. My generation is aging out, and the “snowflake generation” is coming into its own. Once the anti-censorship social norm starts to break down, my guess is that it will not stop with just a few fringe Nazi sites being shut down.

A notewriter on public choice

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He or she writes,

Unlike providing pure public goods or setting generally applicable laws, the more widely accepted function of the state, the direct provision of goods and services can impact on people’s personal wealth and satisfaction in much more pressing ways. . .

. . .producers previously used to competing, albeit imperfectly, under an open market regime, will now set their eyes very carefully on the people tasked with commissioning their services: the public officials. Rather than competing for customers directly, in this new higher-stakes game, they will have to aggressively lobby officials for public contracts or employment. The result is that the same behaviour in the same sector of the economy that produces relatively efficient outcomes under market rules, produces inefficient, even predatory outcomes under democratic rules.

Pointer from Mark Thoma.

The really pure public choice view is that in the market and in politics, the same human motives are operating. They just operate under different institutional rules in each case. The less doctrinaire view would say that social norms also may differ between the market realm and the political realm. In theory, it is possible for the norms of political behavior to attenuate the tendency toward inefficient and predatory outcomes. How well this works in practice is certainly debatable.

Occupation and Gender

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Justin Fox writes,

If you are one of those who believe that men are congenitally disposed to prefer working with things and women to prefer working with people, these numbers offer some support for your position.

Some support? If you go to his post, you will find that every single one of the top male occupations involves things, and the top 9 female occupations involve people. This has to be one of the most powerful separations in all of social research.

Pointer from Mark Thoma.

David Brooks on the case for moderation

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His column concludes,

Over the next few months I’m hoping to write several columns on why modesty and moderation are superior to the spiraling purity movements we see today. It seems like a good time for assertive modesty to take a stand.

Of course, for Brooks to say this is dog-bites-man. When Paul Krugman says it, it will be news.

I remain extremely pessimistic about the political outlook.

Does America over-incarcerate?

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Joseph M. Bessette writes,

only two fifths of those convicted of felonies in state courts are actually sentenced to prison. Of the rest, about half receive no incarceration (mainly probation) and half are sentenced to a short term in a local jail. Indeed, at any one time there are more than twice as many convicted offenders on probation or parole—that is, not incarcerated—as there are in the nation’s prisons or jails.

Read the whole thing. It is a review of two books that reject the comfortable progressive/libertarian narrative that our jails are filled with harmless folks who took the wrong recreational drugs in the wrong place. The books argue that in order to reduce incarceration you have to do less imprisonment of violent offenders, and they are not afraid to advocate for that.

I have no expertise in this area whatsoever. My thoughts.

1. Prison seems quite inhumane. I can understand why people would like to see less imprisonment.

2. But releasing violent offenders may not be such a great approach. It would seem likely to me that they would wind up in high-crime neighborhoods, where they help neither themselves or the neighborhood.

3. I am curious about what the books say about alternatives to imprisonment and how well they work. The review does not touch on that topic.

4. It is easy to imagine something like a “virtual parole officer” inside a smart phone that a convict is required to have with him or her at all times. It could send alarms to police based on indications of the convict’s degree of agitation or somesuch.

Possibly related: Alex Tabarrok writes,

Using these new estimates of the effect of police and crime along with estimates of the social cost of crime they conclude (as I have argued before) that U.S. cities are substantially under-policed.

Robert Sapolsky defines culture

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Crediting Frans de Waal, Sapolsky writes in Behave.

“culture” is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means.

I guess that is close to my preferred definition, which is “socially communicated thought patterns and behavioral tendencies.”

I am about half way through the book. I have two nits to pick.

One nit is that he says that when behavior correlates with a gene in one setting but not another, that proves gene-environment interaction. An example would be that a gene correlates with violence in people who were abused as children, but not in people who were not abused as children. In my view, this might be gene-environment interaction. But it also could be gene-gene interaction. That is, the behavior might be influenced by a gene other than the one on which you are focused, and that gene correlates with whether the person was abused as a child.

Another nit is when he talks about gender and math ability. First, he points out that the very top percentile in math is dominated by males (the fact that Larry Summers was fired for pointing out). Then, he reports on a study showing that male-female math differences are less in egalitarian cultures. However, that is only relevant to the Larry Summers issue if that study refers to the very top percentile. As I read the study, by Guiso, Zingales, and others, it is about averages, not the very top percentile.

The way I see it, a lot of academics are dogmatically insistent that genes matter little and the environment matters a lot. Sapolsky is not one of those, but these examples suggest that he is somewhat biased in the direction of the prevailing dogma.

Wages and Perks

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Megan McArdle writes,

Both the supply curves and the demand curves for labor have been undergoing substantial transformations that may simply have shifted the economy to a new equilibrium. Which is an economic jargonish way of saying this may be the new normal.

The new normal is slow wage growth.

I think that one should watch what is happening to non-wage benefits. Anecdotally, I keep hearing more stories about very generous family leave policies. With things like health care benefits and (401) K matching policies, firms have a lot of ways adjusting compensation that do not involve wages. Many of these are difficult for government statisticians to track.