A majority of American parents want kids to have access to their phones at school, a new survey finds. In addition, most parents think cellphones have a positive effect on their kids' lives.
Debates over teens and smartphones often contain the (assumed or explicit) premise that parents want their kids to stop living what author and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls a "phone-based childhood." Popular wisdom today says parents think phones are negatively impacting their childrens' lives and want kids to have less access to phones but feel powerless to change the situation—a premise baked into Haidt's new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (read my review here).
But a survey conducted earlier this month by the National Parents Union challenges this narrative.
In The Anxious Generation, Haidt looks at the rise of various problems among young people and pinpoints two interlocking culprits: the ascendancy of a "phone-based childhood" and the decline of a "play-based childhood." Many folks see this as a simple one-way flow: phones came along and simply wiped out time or motivation for other pursuits. Haidt suggests a somewhat different sequence of events. As parents began to fear everything in the offline world (and instill this fear into their children), individual families and American society more broadly started denying children independence, autonomy, and unstructured free time. "Screen time" started to fill a void that parents, politicians, police, and our culture as a whole had already created.
The new National Parents Union survey perfectly illustrates the way fear-based parenting is driving phone-based childhoods.
In the survey—conducted in February among 1,506 parents of public school students grades K-12—66 percent of parents said their kids have a cell phone and most of these kids (79 percent) take their phones to school. Asked why parents' wanted this, the most common answers were so that kids could "use their phone if there is an emergency" (79 percent agreed) and so parents could get in touch with their children "or find out where they are when needed" (71 percent). Forty percent said it was important for communicating with kids "about their mental health or other needs during the day."
In other words, a lot of parents want their kids to have phones at school because these parents are anxious, afraid, and/or overzealously policing their progeny's whereabouts and feelings.
Hat tip to Bonnie Kristian for first identifying this paradox. "It is increasingly fashionable to talk about the risk phones pose to American kids, especially teenage girls," writes Kristian on Substack:
The dysfunction of the phone-based childhood has become impossible to ignore, thanks in no small part to Haidt's own work. We're all saying it: Make the kids put down their phones at dinner! Ban phones in school! Kick teenagers off social media or confine them to flip phones or take the phones away altogether!
But then there's the second level: When push comes to shove, whatever ideals they may spout about rejecting the phone-based childhood, average American parents want their middle and high schoolers to have phones, preferably smartphones with location tracking kept on their persons at all times.
It seems parents are as attached to their kids having phones as their kids are. In light of this, it's unsurprising that many parents frown on policies that totally deny kids access to phones at school (even though the popular/political narrative around kids and phones suggests this is what parents want).
Fifty-six percent of the people surveyed by the National Parents Union said "students should sometimes be allowed to use their cell phones" in school, while just 32 percent said "students should be banned from using their cell phones, unless they have a medical condition or disability for which they need to use a cell phone."
Even among the group who said most students should be banned from using phones, only 30 percent wanted this ban to apply broadly (i.e., outside of class). Most said phones should be banned during academic instruction but allowed at other times, such as during lunch or recess or during periods between classes.
In keeping with this, relatively few of the parents surveyed supported school policies that keep kids' entirely away from their phones during the day.
Fifteen percent said schools should "require students to place their cell phones in a central location in their classroom, such as a cubby or holder, but don't lock them up" and 14 percent said they should "require students to place their cell phones in a locked cabinet or cell phone lockers in their classroom." Another 8 percent said schools should "lock up students' cell phones in secure pouches or containers that they can carry with them but that prevent them from using their phone."
The most popular answer—shared by 59 percent of the parents surveyed—was that schools should "allow students to keep their phones in their backpack or bag (not locked
up) as long as they don't take them out and keep them on silent."
Reassuringly, very few people (5 percent) think the federal government should make decisions about school phone policies and only 10 percent say it should be a state-level government decision.
Most parents think phone policies should be made at the school district level (29 percent), the school level (28 percent), or at the classroom level (18 percent).
Some of the data in this survey fits popular narratives about kids and phones, like the ideas that they're starting young and spending a lot of time on them.
Among parents who allowed their children to have cellphones, the most popular ages to have given phones to them was between 10 and 13 years old. (The survey does not say what type of phones were given, so it's possible many kids received dumb phones to start.) Only 13 percent of parents waited until a kid was age 14 or older.
Among those whose kids had cell phones, only 18 percent estimated that their child spends less than 2 hours per day on it. Some 28 percent estimated that their kid spends between 2 and 3 hours per day on their phones, with 29 percent suggesting their kid uses it for 4 or 5 hours per day, 12 percent saying 6 or 7 hours per day, and 9 percent saying their kids are on phones for upwards of 8 hours per day.
And yet, most parents seem pretty unalarmed by this phone usage. Just 9 percent said phones had a mostly or entirely negative effect on their kids.
Nearly half—46 percent—said the phone had a mostly or entirely positive effect on their child, while 42 percent said the effect was "about equally positive and negative."
This stands out as at odds with what we commonly hear in the media and from legislators about how parents view kids' phone use. But it's in keeping with what many kids themselves say. In a 2022 survey of American 13- to 17-year-olds, conducted Pew Research Center, kids identified all sorts of plus sides to social media (which is, of course, one of the main things that kids use phones for). And a majority—59 percent—said social media is neither a negative nor a positive in their lives, while 32 percent said it's mostly positive and just 9 percent said it's mostly negative.
It's also in keeping with some earlier research on phone adoption among kids. For instance, a 2022 study from Stanford Medicine researchers followed 250 tweens and teens for five years during which most got a first cellphone, tracking study participants' well-being during this transition. The kids were 7 to 11 years old when the study started and 11 to 15 years old when it ended. The researchers "found that whether or not the children in the study had a mobile phone, and when they had their first mobile phone, did not seem to have meaningful links to their well-being and adjustment outcomes," according to lead author Xiaoran Sun.
• Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law restricting teen use of social media platforms. Under the new law, 14- and 15-year-olds can old start social media accounts with their parents' permission. "This law puts all users' privacy at risk by mandating age verification," said Competitive Enterprise Institute's director of the Center for Technology & Innovation, Jessica Melugin. It also "ignores parents' rightful role in deciding what is and is not appropriate for their child, and may sacrifice too much of the free flow of speech to be constitutional. It's political click bait, but it's not good public policy."
• California lawmakers are considering a bill that would require large online platforms to verify the identities of "influential" users. Influential here is defined to include basically any user that's been at it for a while (that is, if content they've shared "has been seen by more than 25,000 users over the lifetime of the accounts that they control or administer").
• Mother Jones has an interesting interview with Lynn Paltrow, founder of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (now called Pregnancy Justice). "For much of the past 50 years, the mainstream pro-choice groups were focused almost exclusively on the right to abortion," said Paltrow, who believes this was a mistake. "There was no campaign to explain abortion as necessary to the full equality and citizenship—the personhood—of women in this country. They were defending abortion as opposed to the people who sometimes need abortions but always need to be treated as full constitutional persons under the law, whatever the outcome of their pregnancies."
The post Parents Don't Want Schools to Confiscate Kids' Phones appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt, Penguin Press, 400 pages, $30
Jonathan Haidt opens The Anxious Generation with what is supposed to be an analogy for kids' use of smartphones and social media: Would you let your child travel to Mars, he asks, if some Silicon Valley CEO said it was safe? It's an absurd comparison: Whatever harms may or may not befall minors with iPhones, they're light-years less apparent, substantial, or universal than those facing kids shuttling through outer space to a desert planet with an atmosphere mainly made of carbon dioxide.
Happily, most of this volume is far less hysterical than that opening might lead you to believe. Yes, this book is filled with unwarranted pessimism, unjustified conclusions, and unsavory solutions. But as he lays out his case that a "phone-based childhood" is replacing a "play-based childhood," Haidt makes many points that even the most ardent opponents of tech panic and state intervention should be able to appreciate. Unfortunately, he can't keep the spirit of that opening analogy from periodically seeping back in.
***
Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, believes that young people's rising use of screens and rising rates of emotional fragility both stem from our overprotection of kids in nondigital spaces. He rails against policies that punish parents for letting children have some independence, and against the mindset that tries to shield the young from every possible emotional harm. Parts of the book were even written with Free-Range Kids author (and regular Reason contributor) Lenore Skenazy, with whom Haidt helped found Let Grow, a nonprofit that pushes back against helicopter parenting.
Haidt also stresses that many of his ideas for curbing teen tech use shouldn't be legislated, though he does favor a number of new regulations too. He recognizes the guidelines he offers parents are not one-size-fits-all—that activities OK for most minors might be problematic for some and that things that are generally bad at a certain stage of development may be OK for individual kids.
He also marshalls a lot of data as he tries to tie the recent rises in youthful depression, anxiety, suicide, and learning loss to phone-based childhoods. But here we run into trouble. Haidt seems convinced there is one right way to interpret this data: the way that implicates technology.
Pointing to Jean Twenge's research, for example, Haidt reports that "teens who spend more time using social media are more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, and other disorders, while teens who spend more time with groups of young people (such as playing team sports or participating in religious activities) have better mental health." But what does this really tell us? Not that these platforms are causing these problems. That's possible. But it's also possible that teenagers use more social media and avoid more group activities because of their depression or social anxiety—or that some third factor triggers both mental health difficulties and problematic internet use.
Haidt points to data showing rates of depression and anxiety in young people rose at the same time that smartphone and social media adoption skyrocketed among the same age group. But this was also a time period in which awareness of those conditions increased and the stigma around them decreased. And it was a period in which identity politics and a sort of victimhood cache began to permeate places where many young people gravitated online. If phones and social media play a role here, it might not be as a direct trigger—perhaps the veneration of various psychological diagnoses in certain online spaces led more kids to embrace those labels.
Haidt responds to the awareness/destigmatization theories by pointing out that we have been seeing more suicides and self harm in young people. Kids aren't just saying they're struggling, he argues; they're taking action that shows it. But the suicide picture is complicated. Yes, U.S. suicides have been rising. But the rate among older adults—the group least likely to be heavy social media users—has also increased sharply and in fact is much higher than for the youngest cohort. (In 2021, the rate for Americans ages 65 and up was 17.3 suicides for every 100,000 people. For 12- to 17-year-olds, it was 6.5 per 100,000.) In 2022, suicide rates actually went down among younger Americans while increasing among men over 34 and women over 24. (Depression, too, is up across American age groups, even preceding the pandemic.)
It's also notable that youth suicide rates in the U.S. started rising before the advent of smartphones and social media (something Haidt acknowledges) and that their rise over time has not been linear. (The same goes for the general population, with the 2022 suicide death toll about equal to what it was in 1950.) It's also much higher in some states than others, something we'd be less likely to see if a nationwide phenomenon like social media was a leading cause. The rise has not been consistent around the world, even in countries with similar phone and social media adoption patterns. In many places with widespread phone use—France and Russia, for example—teen and young adult suicide rates have fallen, sometimes precipitously.
***
Haidt argues that no single thing other than "the great rewiring of childhood" can explain the breadth of data suggesting young people are faring worse than before on an array of measures. Maybe no single thing can do this. Yet for each data point, a variety of nontech explanations could work.
For instance: Haidt cites a 2023 survey in which 68 percent of college students said they felt anxious at least half of the time. Social media could be a culprit, but so could doom coming from professional media and gloom coming from politicians. So could the anxiety emanating from adults around them. So could shifting sexual norms, fears of another pandemic, or a lifetime of what Haidt calls "modern overprotective parenting."
Or take the rise in 12- to 17-year-olds who answered national survey questions in ways suggesting they've suffered a major depressive episode. This rise started in the early 2010s and continued throughout the decade (from 8 percent in 2010 to 11.4 percent in 2014, 14.4 percent in 2018, and 19.5 percent in 2022)—a time period that corresponds with increasing smartphone adoption and the introduction of platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. But this was also a time of economic downturn, a pandemic, unrest in the streets, and extreme turbulence in U.S. politics. Surely some of this could also explain self-reports of hopelessness, sadness, etc. Maybe other health issues, such as rising obesity rates, had a role. Maybe shifts in academic expectations played a part. Or maybe the depression isn't related to events that took place during this period at all; it could stem from something in the way kids coming of age during this period were raised in the preceding decade, or even from genetic factors. Plenty of counterevidence and rival interpretations are available.
That doesn't mean we should simply throw up our hands and declare unlimited screen time to be fine at any age. Parents who look at the evidence may deem it wise to adopt some or all of Haidt's agenda—measures like limiting phone or laptop use to certain times of day, or waiting until your kids are a certain age before letting them own a phone or participate on social media. Tech companies could offer more options—including device-based options—for parents who want to prevent their kids from creating social media accounts or visiting certain sites. Individual schools or school districts could experiment with tough-on-phone policies. Of course, there's the other half of Haidt's prescription: more time for unsupervised play, more play at school, and more autonomy in general for kids.
But the data just aren't strong enough to unequivocally back up Haidt's claims about what smartphones and social media are doing to kids, which seems like a good reason to hold off on government mandates, and not just out of first-principles libertarianism.
Even if we could somehow overcome the privacy and First Amendment concerns that something like a minimum age for social media would pose for adult users (and that's a big if), we still don't know what sort of unintended consequences it might have for young people. Could a lack of online community lead to worse mental health outcomes? Would kids turn to more private methods of communication that make it harder to prevent harm or punish perpetrators? Separated from their digital distractions, would teens start drinking more and having more unintended pregnancies—both of which have decreased in recent decades?
Haidt says that if we wouldn't send our kids to Mars without having all the evidence and knowing all the risks, we shouldn't give them unfettered access to the digital world either. That goes for cutting off their connections to the digital world too.
The post Blaming Tech for Teen Troubles appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On Monday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill enacting sweeping restrictions on minors' access to social media in the state. This comes just weeks after DeSantis vetoed a different age-verification bill, citing concerns that the first bill was too broad.
But the latest bill approved by DeSantis still places draconian limits on young people's ability to make social media accounts—and requires sites to infringe upon everyone else's privacy in the process.
Under House Bill 3, most social media sites will be required to deny accounts to those under 14 years old and terminate any accounts already held by kids under 14—including accounts that the platform isn't certain are held by someone under 14 but that the company "treats or categorizes as belonging to an account holder who is likely younger than 14 years of age for purposes of targeting content or advertising." Accounts held by 14- and 15-year-olds are also targeted for deletion under the law, though these teenagers can keep their accounts with parental permission.
The bill further states that any "commercial entity" that publishes content that is "harmful to minors" on a website or social media application must use age-verification measures to ensure that users under 18 cannot access the material. This section of the law appears to be written to prevent minors from accessing pornography websites, defining material "harmful to minors" as content that "appeals to the prurient interest," "depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual content," and "when taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors."
"You can have a kid in the house safe, seemingly, and then you have predators that can get right in there into your own home," DeSantis said during a press conference. "You could be doing everything right but they know how to get and manipulate these different platforms."
Companies that violate the law could face severe penalties, including up to $50,000 in damages per violation—and a payout of $10,000 more if they are sued by an individual minor over a violation of the law.
While the bill does not specify how exactly social media sites should verify a customer's age, with such large consequences for violating the law, it's likely that companies will require customers to hand over their government ID, submit to a facial scan, or otherwise hand over sensitive information.
"HB 3 forces Floridians to hand over sensitive personal information to websites or lose their access to critical information channels. This infringes on Floridians' First Amendment rights to share and access speech online," Carl Szabo, the vice president and general counsel of NetChoice, an organization that has sued to stop similar laws, wrote in a Monday press release. "We're disappointed to see Gov. DeSantis sign onto this route. There are better ways to keep Floridians, their families and their data safe and secure online without violating their freedoms."
Should the law face a constitutional challenge, it's likely to be overturned. Similar laws in California, Arkansas, and Texas have all been struck down by federal judges who said those bills violated the First Amendment by requiring social media sites to censor content.
The post Ron DeSantis Signs Social Media Age-Verification Bill appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Whenever the subject of social media and teenagers comes up, it seems someone wants to talk about eating disorders. Conventional wisdom says Instagram and other highly visual platforms promote negative body image and push young people—mostly young women—to take dieting to extremes. Some politicians even want to hold tech companies legally liable when young users develop eating disorders.
Suggestions like these make me want to bang my head against a wall. They represent a dreadful misread of both eating disorders and technology, as well as the limits of content moderation and the functions of eating disorder communities and content.
I'm reminded of all of this because of this excellent post at Techdirt by TechFreedom legal fellow Santana Boulton. "Eating disorders are older than social media, and advocates who think platforms can moderate [eating disorder] content out of existence understand neither eating disorders nor content moderation," she writes.
The big reason we're discussing this issue right now is KOSA, the latest (and arguably most likely to succeed) effort in Congress to childproof the internet. KOSA was first introduced in 2022 and a new version is back this year. It comes from Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.), one of the original sponsors and biggest supporters of the measure that became the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA).
Under KOSA, social media companies and other covered online platforms have a "duty of care" that requires them to "act in the best interests" of minor users. To do this, they must "take reasonable measures…to prevent and mitigate…harms" including "anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use disorders, and suicidal behaviors," as well as "addiction-like behaviors" and exposure to bullying, sexual exploitation, deceptive marketing practices, and more.
KOSA would grant the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) the power to enforce this "duty of care." Even if enforced in the most neutral of ways, this could lead to a lot of crazy harassment of tech companies unless they obsessively and excessively censor online content.
Of course, giving this power to the FTC all but ensures it will be used to further the political agendas of whatever administration is in power. Under a Biden or otherwise Democratic administration we could see, for instance, the failure to delete content that doesn't uphold progressive gender orthodoxies deemed a violation (under the theory that this could promote mental health problems in transgender children). Under a Trump or otherwise GOP administration, we could see platforms censured for allowing too much LGBTQ content (grooming!), information about birth control or abortion, and so on.
KOSA is the epitome of the type of "online safety" bill that danah boyd—a tech and culture writer and researcher who has been exploring these issues since back when social media was still called "social networking"—describes as "pretend[ing] to be focused on helping young people when they're really anti-tech bills that are using children for political agendas in ways that will fundamentally hurt the most vulnerable young people out there."
"Efforts to drive design through moral panics and flawed deterministic logics can easily trigger a host of unintended consequences," writes boyd in a pre-print paper with María P. Angel. "When it comes to kids' safety, these consequences tend to be most acutely felt by those who are most vulnerable."
Which brings us back to eating disorders.
At best, laws like KOSA try to sweep eating disorders (and other mental health issues) under the rug. But they could also make things worse for teens struggling with anorexia or other forms of disordered eating.
Many people believe that anorexia and other eating disorders are about thinness, which implies that they can be triggered by exposure to beauty standards prizing thinness and solved by exposing people to less of this. From what I know about eating disorders and about media effects, everything about this is essentially wrong.
Yes, eating disorders often manifest as a desire to be thin. But this is often a symptom of deeper issues—anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, etc. Restricting calories, obsessively exercising, or binging and purging become ways to exercise control.
This isn't to say that some teens exposed to a lot of images of ultra-thin people won't wind up feeling worse about their bodies. But otherwise healthy, well-adjusted people aren't developing anorexia from looking at Instagram posts. And pretending like they are actually minimizes eating disorders' seriousness.
Could exposure to pro-anorexia ("pro-ana") content or idealized images of thinness on social media tip the scales for someone already suffering from mental health issues? It seems plausible. But in this scenario, Instagram (or Tumblr, or TikTok, or whatever) is just the most zeitgeisty manifestation of a much older phenomenon.
People said the same things about fashion magazines, Hollywood movies, Photoshopped advertisements, and all sorts of other depictions of thin beauty standards—and yet no one is suggesting we hold these legally liable when young people get anorexia.
Besides, pro-ana content isn't anything new to Instagram and its contemporaries. Back when Instagram was just a twinkle in Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger's eyes, you could find all sorts of "pro-ana" communities and eating disorder forums on LiveJournal—and I did. Which is how I know that these types of communities and content can be multifunctional, and sometimes serve as a force for good.
Yes, people in these communities posted "thinspiration" (photos of very thin people offered up for "inspiration") and offered encouragement and tips for extreme calorie restriction.
But people in many of them also offered support on the underlying issues that others struggled with. They encouraged people who wanted to recover, and warned those who didn't against going too far. They told people to seek help for suicidal ideation, and were there for each other when someone said they had no one who understood them.
Even when not being overtly pro-recovery, these communities could sometimes have a deterrent effect, since they served as windows into the misery that people with serious eating disorders lived through. If anything, they de-glamorized life with an eating disorder, perhaps driving relatively casual calorie counters (like my young adult self) away from descending into more extreme behavior.
"The empirical literature has documented both the harm and potential benefit that these forums offer participants," noted a paper published in the Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy in 2014.
Shutting down communities like this could actually do more damage than good.
And, as Boulton notes, people with eating disorders aren't one-dimensional and their social media accounts likely aren't either:
The account might also include that they're pro-recovery, post or do not post fatphobia, their favorite K-pop group, whether they go to the gym or not, what kind of eating disorder they have, and what kind of fashion they like.
Behind these accounts are individuals who are complex, imperfect, and hurting….Platforms cannot simply ban discussions about eating disorders without sweeping away plenty of honest conversations about mental health, which might also drive the conversation towards less helpful corners of the internet.
Banning accounts that hover between pro-eating disorder content and other things—be it recovery and mental health or things totally unrelated—could make the poster feel even more isolated and more likely to engage in harmful behaviors.
The idea that you can rid the web of eating disorder communities and content is silly.
Even if lawmakers manage to drive any mention of eating disorders from platforms like Instagram and TikTok, there will still be countless web forums, messaging platforms, and other venues where this sort of content and community can live. Only here, teens aren't going to have algorithms steering them away from extreme content. They're not going to be exposed to counter-messages and reality checks from people outside these communities. And it's less likely that people who know them in real life will see their activity and somehow intervene.
The idea that it's easy to separate bad eating disorder content from good eating disorder content, or other types of food/beauty/health content, is silly, too.
Inevitably, attempts to more strictly police pro-eating disorder content or content that good be viewed as triggering would ensnare posts and accounts from people in eating disorder recovery. Besides, different people view the same content in different lights.
To some, memoir-ish accounts of eating disorders are cautionary tales, to others they're crucial for feeling less alone and seeing a way out, and for others they're simply road maps.
Posts on intermittent fasting could be healthy tips for people with diabetes but bad news for people with anorexia.
"Content has a context," as Boulton writes. "A post that's so obviously eating disorder content on [a particular] account may not obviously [be] eating disorder content posted elsewhere."
The idea that tech companies could easily differentiate between content that "promotes" eating disorders and content that merely discusses them, or discusses other aspects of food and fitness, is ludicrous—even if they did have the capacity to use human moderators for this and not automated content filters. And the necessary use of such filters will only erase content even more.
Attempts to do this would almost certainly sweep up not only pro-recovery content but also a lot of harmless and/or unrelated stuff, from perfectly normal nutrition advice and fitness tips to posts from people proud of their (not-extreme) weight loss to pictures of people who just happen to be very thin.
"We could have everyone register their [Body Mass Indexes] and daily caloric intake with their username and password, to be sure that no unhealthy daily outfit pictures slip past the mods," quips Boulton, "but short of that appalling dystopia, we're out of luck."
Another important consideration here is that the content moderation this would take isn't likely to affect all communities equally. Men struggle with eating disorders and bad body image too, of course, but something tells me that male body-building content is going to be a lot less subject to mistaken takedowns than women's pictures and content about their bodies, diets, and fitness routines. In a paper published in the journal Media, Culture, & Society, Nicole Danielle Schott and Debra Langan suggest that policing eating disorder content leads to censorship of women's content more broadly.
If KOSA or something like it became law, tech companies would have a huge incentive to suppress anything that could remotely be construed as promoting eating disorders. But there's scant evidence that this would actually lead to fewer eating disorders.
As Mike Masnick noted at Techdirt earlier this year, the issue of eating disorder content is "a demand side problem from the kids, not a supply side problem from the sites."
This is, of course, true with so much of the online content that people find problematic. But because lawmakers have every incentive to Do! Something! (and face almost no recourse when it doesn't work or backfires), we see them again and again approach demand-side issues by simply asking tech companies to hide evidence that they exist.
The post Policing 'Thinspiration' Is Harder Than Lawmakers Think appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Four years ago, government officials told us, "Stay home!" We have "15 days to slow the spread."
Days turned into months and then years, while officials chipped away at our freedoms.
I have long been wary of politicians, but even I was surprised at how authoritarian many were eager to be.
Some demanded police to go after people surfing. They took down the rims of basketball hoops. Children's playgrounds were taped up like crime scenes. They told people in rural Utah and Wyoming to stay in their homes.
In the name of safety, politicians did many things that diminished our lives, without making us safer.
They complied with teachers unions' demand to keep schools closed. Kids' learning has been set back by years.
Politicians destroyed jobs by closing businesses. Some shutdown orders were ridiculous. Landscaping businesses and private campgrounds were forced to shut down.
Both former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden sharply increased government spending. Trump's $2.2 trillion "stimulus" package, followed by Biden's $1.9 trillion "American Rescue Plan," led to so much money printing that inflation doubled and then tripled.
This week, the fourth-year anniversary of "15 days to stop the spread," my new video looks back at politicians' incompetence.
First, government probably killed people with its endless red tape.
At least the Trump administration broke Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rules to speed vaccine approvals. But FDA rules kept perfectly good American COVID-19 test kits off the market because they hadn't gone through its multiyear approval process.
Michigan's Gov. Gretchen Whitmer banned "public and private gatherings of any size." Residents were told they could not see friends or relatives.
Many of her rules seemed random. She banned motorboats and jet skis, but allowed kayaks and canoes. She closed small businesses, but exempted big-box stores if they blocked off aisles offering plant nurseries and paint. Why?
Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) "six-foot rule" under Trump was arbitrary, says former FDA commissioner, Dr. Scott Gottlieb. COVID travels in aerosols that flow much farther than six feet.
When some Americans became fed up and protested, they were vilified for "threatening the public." Some were fined. A few were arrested.
It's clear now that restrictive rules were not the best way to protect people.
Sweden took a near opposite approach. They mostly left people alone.
Swedish officials encouraged the elderly and other at-risk people to stay home.
But beyond that, they let life carry on as normal. Sweden didn't impose lockdowns, school closures, or mask mandates.
They followed standard pre-COVID wisdom that the best protection is what epidemiologists call "herd" or "collective" immunity. Once a critical mass of people are infected and recover, collective immunity will reduce the total number of infections.
Arrogant American politicians and media "experts" sneered at Sweden's approach.
NBC "reported" on what it called, "Sweden's failed experiment. How their dangerous Covid gamble went wrong."
CBS confidently stated, "Sweden becomes an example of how not to handle COVID."
Time magazine headlined: "Swedish COVID-19 Response Is a Disaster."
But the media's experts were just wrong. Swedish health officials were right.
Yes, at the beginning of the pandemic, Sweden suffered high numbers of COVID deaths, but as predicted, over time, herd immunity protected people. Sweden's excess death rate was the lowest in Europe.
Sweden's economy got through the pandemic much healthier than other countries. Because Swedish schools never closed, Swedish students didn't suffer the learning losses that American kids did.
Four years later, have media blowhards who were wrong apologized? Corrected their stories? No.
Have American politicians apologized and begged forgiveness for their arrogance, for destroying jobs, restricting our freedom, and needlessly pushing us around? No.
Let's not give politicians power like that again.
COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC
The post '15 Days To Slow the Spread': On the Fourth Anniversary, a Reminder to Never Give Politicians That Power Again appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>According to one study highlighted by the Times, school districts that spent the least amount of the 2020–21 school year in remote learning (between 0 percent and 10 percent online) experienced a significantly smaller drop in student scores than districts that spent almost all of the school year online. For the least online group, declines in third- and eighth-grade math scores indicated that students were 0.35 years behind where they should be, while the most online group had fallen back more than half a school year by 2022.
While other factors contributed to district-level learning loss, like student poverty, time spent in remote learning still had an incredibly large impact. Students in the poorest districts that stayed mostly in-person actually experienced less learning loss than students in the richest school districts that taught students mostly online.
Unsurprisingly, the students who suffered the most were poor students who experienced mostly remote learning. While mostly remote students in the richest school districts were only 0.15 school years behind their mostly in-person counterparts, mostly remote students in the poorest districts lost 0.25 years more than their peer districts who were mostly in-person. In all, poor, mostly online school districts saw their students fall nearly two-thirds of a school year behind in math scores.
Some of the last school districts to reopen were large, urban school districts with many poor students. However, the leadership in many of those districts hasn't learned much in the face of mounting evidence that extended school closures hurt students without meaningfully reducing COVID infections.
"There's no such thing as learning loss" United Teachers Los Angeles leader Cecily Myart-Cruz famously quipped in 2021, adding that "it's OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival."
"I do believe it was the right decision," said Jerry T. Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, told the Times. Philadelphia schools didn't fully return to in-person learning until August 2021. "It doesn't matter what is going on in the building and how much people are learning if people are getting the virus and running the potential of dying."
While it's now been four years since schools first closed during COVID-19, the school year lost on online and hybrid learning has clearly had a lasting impact on American schoolchildren—one that is likely to echo for years to come.
The post These Students Lost More Than Half a Year of Learning During COVID appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>I was a judge and chief judge of Delaware's Family Court for over 17 years. In those roles, I held trials and oversaw plea agreements where I was required to order youths under 18 to pay fines and fees that ended up pushing them deeper into the criminal justice system when they inevitably did not pay. I have thus seen firsthand the problems that court-imposed financial obligations create for young people and their families who are often already struggling financially.
During my tenure and with my support, Delaware began to move away from imposing financial penalties in juvenile Family Court proceedings. I am proud that in 2023, Delaware joined a growing number of states and jurisdictions when we passed into law major reforms to our criminal legal system's financial obligations, including eliminating fines and fees for our young people in Family Court. Delaware Family Court judges are not only not required to impose fines or fees as a penalty for children found delinquent; they are no longer permitted to do so.
Delaware is known as the "First State," but we were not the first state to make these changes. We are one of eight states to eliminate all fines and fees in juvenile cases, joining Maryland, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington. A dozen others have made strides toward this goal, including Arizona, Louisiana, South Dakota, Texas, and others who eliminated all fees, but not all fines, for adjudications of delinquency.
In fact, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an organization of state legislators dedicated to limited government, free markets, and federalism, adopted model legislation in August 2023, urging more states to eliminate all fees, fines, or other financial obligations (other than restitution) against minors in criminal or juvenile proceedings.
As a judge, I took my role of enforcing personal accountability seriously—which is why I support these reforms. Children should not be expected to earn wages, and sometimes the children who appeared in front of me were too young to legally do so. When we punish children with financial obligations, it's their families that pay them, if they get paid at all. Children from wealthy families who appeared before me could pay off their cases quickly and would receive record-clearing expungements when the time came.
Children from poor families were not so fortunate, and with their families unable to pay off their court debts, they would often enter adulthood still trying to make monthly payments and still unable to clear their criminal record. A 2016 study co-authored by Alex Piquero, currently director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, finds evidence from a survey "of 1,167 adolescent offenders in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania" to "suggest that financial penalties in general and the sheer amount of financial penalties in particular significantly increase the likelihood of recidivism, even after controlling for relevant demographics and case characteristics."
I also believe in a small, efficient government. A 2019 study from the Brennan Center for Justice that examined 10 counties across Texas, Florida, and New Mexico found that collecting fines and fees is incredibly inefficient. It cost Texas and New Mexico counties, for example, 41 cents of every dollar of revenue they raised from fees and fines to pay for in-court hearings and jail costs alone. One county in New Mexico spent $1.17 to collect every dollar of revenue it raised through fines and fees, losing money through this system.
Before eliminating all fines and fees in 2021, Oregon charged families for the costs of having their children in custody. For fiscal year 2019, Oregon reported that they spent $866,000 to collect $864,000 in such fees. Before California eliminated juvenile fees in 2017, Santa Clara County spent $450,000 to collect just $400,000 in fees in fiscal year 2014-15, according to a March 2017 report from the University of California Berkeley Law's Public Advocacy Clinic. This is government waste at its worst. Eliminating fines and fees for children often has a low fiscal impact (or even savings!) because of how inefficient or wasteful it is for governments to try to collect this money.
Delaware is in many ways a microcosm of the rest of the country. The Mason-Dixon line runs through our state. Northern Delaware is urban and densely populated; southern Delaware is split between sparsely populated agricultural land and more densely housed retired beachcombers. If Delaware can make these reforms, any state in this country can, and I urge them to join us in doing so. Our court system is meant to require accountability and rehabilitation. Fines and fees stand in the way of that. Eliminating them levels the playing field while clearing the way for American youth to concentrate on their education and flourish.
The post Ending Fees and Fines for Juvenile Offenders is Best for Rehabilitation appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Want to make a social media account? If you live in Utah, you soon may have to hand over your ID. Or maybe not.
The Utah Social Media Regulation Act, which was originally set to go into effect in March 2024, aims to restrict minors' access to social media and the kind of content they can encounter once online.
The law would require all social media users to verify their age through privacy-invading methods such as uploading their driver's license, submitting to a facial scan, or providing the last four digits of their Social Security number. Minors must also obtain parental permission before they can create a social media account. Once online, the law would force social media companies to restrict minors' ability to find new content and other accounts and to limit when they can message others on the platforms.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment nonprofit, launched a lawsuit challenging the law.
FIRE's suit argues that the law violates the First Amendment, pointing out that it forces social media companies to restrict users' access to protected expression. Additionally, FIRE argues the law's age verification requirements amount to an unconstitutional prior restraint on free expression.
"What Utah has done, and what other states are doing, is to try to impose sort of a magic bullet solution to the whole question of youth mental health," says Robert Corn-Revere, chief counsel at FIRE. "In its rush to address what really is the latest moral panic, the state brushes aside what is a nuanced problem and chooses censorship as the presumptive solution to how it addresses these issues, ignoring the individual differences and the diverse needs of families in the state."
Following FIRE's suit and other legal challenges, Utah's Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, delayed the law's implementation until October 2024. In a legal filing from January 19, the state noted that the Utah State Legislature "is likely to repeal and replace the law." Less than three weeks later, state legislators introduced two bills that proposed minor changes to the law while keeping the considerable restrictions on accounts held by minors and required age verification in order to create an account.
Utah's law is part of a larger trend—Texas, California, Louisiana, Arkansas, Virginia, Florida, and Montana have all passed similar legislation designed to restrict minors' access to social media or sexually explicit content online. Federal courts have already blocked many of these statutes.
Utah's law is "much like the whole litany of ineffective and unconstitutional measures that courts have consigned to history, including things like protecting young people from movies or comic books, rock music, racy novels, or, most recently, video games," says Corn-Revere. "Laws like this don't solve the problems they try to address but only make them worse. And in the process, it violates everybody's constitutional rights."
The post Lawsuit Hobbles Utah's Plan To Mandate Age Verification Online appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed a bill that would have enacted sweeping restrictions on minors' ability to use social media. However, DeSantis' veto appears to be less about a commitment to keep the state out of parenting decisions—like whether to let a teenager on social media—and more about the bill's likelihood of being overturned after a legal challenge.
The original bill, House Bill 1, would have banned those younger than 16 from making an account on most social media sites and required companies to delete accounts that they believe could be—but not necessarily confirmed to be—owned by users under 16. The bill would also have required social media sites to use a third-party to verify users' age. Companies that violated the law could have been fined up to $50,000 per incident.
The bill was broadly popular and passed the Florida Senate with a 30–5 vote. But DeSantis vetoed the bill last week. In a post to X (formerly Twitter), DeSantis wrote that he vetoed the bill to make way for a superior proposal.
"I have vetoed HB 1 because the Legislature is about to produce a different, superior bill," DeSantis wrote on Friday. "Protecting children from harms associated with social media is important, as is supporting parents' rights and maintaining the ability of adults to engage in anonymous speech."
The alternate bill, H.B. 3, keeps many of the provisions as H.B. 1, though the updated bill does not include a provision requiring the deletion of possibly underage accounts. Additionally, an amendment recently approved by the state Senate would allow 14- and 15-year-olds to make social media accounts with a parent's permission but keep a blanket ban for younger children.
Even with a lowered age restriction, Florida's newest social media age verification bill will still likely face legal challenges, as several other states that have enacted similar laws have. While forcing social media companies to kick kids off their platforms has become an increasingly popular proposal across state legislatures, such restrictions almost inevitably end up violating minors' First Amendment rights to access social media content.
The post DeSantis Vetoed a Social Media Age-Verification Law, but That Doesn't Mean He Won't Sign a New One appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>America is celebrated for its economic dynamism and ample and generously paid employment opportunities. It's a nation that attracts immigrants from around the world. Yet Americans are bummed, and have been for a while. They believe that life was better 40 years ago. And maybe it was on some fronts, but not economically.
Surveys repeatedly demonstrate that Americans view today's economy in a negative light. Seventy-six percent believe the country is going in the wrong direction. Some polls even show that young people believe they'll be denied the American dream. Now, that might turn out to be true if Congress continues spending like drunken sailors. But it certainly isn't true based on a look back in time. By nearly all economic measures, we're doing much better today than we were in the 1970s and 1980s—a time most nostalgic people revere as a great era.
In a recent article, economist Jeremy Horpedahl looked at generational wealth (all assets minus all debt) and how today's young people are faring compared to previous generations. His findings are surprising. After all the talk about how Millennials are the poorest or unluckiest generation yet, Horpedahl's data show them with dramatically more wealth than Gen Xers had at the same age. And this wealth continues to grow.
What about income? A new paper by the American Enterprise Institute's Kevin Corinth and Federal Reserve Board's Jeff Larrimore looks at income levels by generation in a variety of ways. They find that each of the past four generations had higher inflation-adjusted incomes than did the previous generation. Further, they find that this trend doesn't seem to be driven by women entering the workforce.
That last part matters because if you listen to progressives and New Right conservatives, you might get a different story: that today's higher incomes are only due to the fact that both parents must now work in order for a family to afford a middle-class lifestyle. They claim that supporting a family of four on one income, like many people did back in the '70s and '80s, is now impossible. Believing this claim understandably bums people out.
But it's not true. One of its many problems, in addition to the data evidence provided by Corinth and Larrimore, is that it mistakenly implies that single-income households were the norm. In fact, as early as 1978, 50 percent of married couples were dual earners and just 25.6 percent relied only on a husband's income. I also assume that there are more dual-income earners now than there were in the '80s. While this may in fact be true for married couples (61 percent of married parents are now dual-earners), because marriage itself has declined, single-earner families have become relatively more common.
Maybe the overall morosity on the economy has to do with the perception that it's more expensive to raise a family these days than it used to be. Another report by Angela Rachidi looks at whether the decline in marriage, fertility, and the increase in out-of-wedlock childbirths are the result of economic hardship. She finds that contrary to the prevailing narrative, "household and family-level income show growth in recent decades after accounting for taxes and transfers." Not only that, but "the costs of raising a family—including housing, childcare, and higher education costs—have not grown so substantially over the past several decades that they indicate an affordability crisis."
So, what exactly is bumming people out? We may find an answer in the 1984 Ronald Reagan campaign ad commonly known as "Morning in America." It begins with serene images of an idyllic American landscape waking up to a new day. It features visuals of people going to work, flags waving in front of homes, and ordinary families in peaceful settings. The narrator speaks over these images, detailing improvements in the American condition over the past four years, including job creation, economic growth, and national pride.
I believe this feeling is what people are nostalgic about. It seems that they are nostalgic about a time when America was more united and it was clearer what being American meant. Never mind that this nostalgia is often based on an incomplete and idealized memory of an era that, like ours, was not perfect.
This is a serious challenge that we need to figure out how to address. One thing that won't help, though, is to erroneously claim that people were economically better off back then and call on government to fix an imaginary problem.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM.
The post The Economy Is Doing Way Better Than Many Believe appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This week's featured article is "Why Are Teens Depressed? It's Not Social Media" by Laura Vanderkam.
This audio was generated using AI trained on the voice of Katherine Mangu-Ward.
Music credits: "Deep in Thought" by CTRL and "Sunsettling" by Man with Roses
The post <I>The Best of Reason</I>: Why Are Teens Depressed? It's Not Social Media. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Three years ago, Paula Cole found herself needing diapers for her baby. The Waterloo, Iowa, mom of six decided to take her infant with her to Walmart—leaving behind the other kids: ages 5, 7, 9, 10, and 12. The time was 11 a.m.
This turned into an epic battle over the criminalization of her parenting that only recently ended at the state's supreme court. In a 16-page opinion, the court demonstrated an increasingly rare quality: common sense.
Here's what happened: While Cole was at the store, the other kids got into an argument, and the 9-year-old stomped off and paced the parking lot of their apartment complex. Her 10-year-old brother went out looking for her while the oldest child, a 12-year-old boy, stayed at home with the younger siblings. There is a conflict in the case record as to whether the 12-year-old was still asleep at the time. He was, at a minimum, "groggy."
The 10-year-old, who has autism, was upset when he failed to immediately find his sister, and so he begged a neighbor to call 911. By the time the police arrived, the 9-year-old had already returned to the stoop outside the apartment. Nevertheless, when Cole returned home, she was arrested and taken to jail for child endangerment.
Such stories hardly surprise me. In 2015, I was part of a legal team representing Chicago mom Natasha Felix, whose crime was letting her 11-year-old play with his siblings, ages 9 and 5, in a park next to her home. Felix was found guilty of child neglect, in part because her 11-year-old had ADHD; neurodivergent kids shouldn't supervise other kids, according to the judge. It took Felix over two years, and two levels of appeals, before the state's child welfare director cleared her of neglect, following an embarrassing expose in the The Washington Post.
Like Felix, Cole's initial contacts with the legal system did not go well. A jury found she had "knowingly acted in a manner that created a substantial risk to the children's physical, mental or emotional health."
Her first round of appeals also failed. The appellate court applied classic helicopter parenting logic: In leaving the kids at home, Cole had exposed them to a "risk of serious injury" because "anything could have happened." For instance, the court wrote, the kids "could have suffered a serious injury, or strayed from the apartment."
Cole did herself no favors by suggesting to police that all of this was the father's fault. The appellate court viewed this as blame shifting, because she hadn't actually asked the kids' father to watch them. Fortunately for Cole, the appellate court didn't get the last word. The Iowa Supreme Court reached a more reasonable conclusion: Cole had not exposed her children to any actual danger.
Drawing on the work of University of Idaho Law professor David Pimentel, who has written extensively on the criminalization of free-range parenting, the court warned against the idea that guarding against all conceivable harm is a legal necessity for parents.
"No parent can shield a child from all risks," wrote the court. "Rather, parents' best hope is simply to manage life's risks—including the very real risk that our efforts to avoid one risk will end up creating new and different risks."
Moreover, risks may be exaggerated by misinformation—for instance, by the media's highlighting the risk of stranger abductions and suggesting that it is safer to drive children everywhere than to let them walk on their own. Again quoting Pimentel, the court wrote that the risk of stranger abduction is effectively "non-existent." By contrast, wrote the court, "the American Academy of Pediatrics has published statistics suggesting that 'being driven to school in a passenger vehicle is by far the most dangerous way to get there.'"
Applying this outlook, the court cautioned that a parent should not be faulted for "creating a risk" if that risk is "part of the background risk of everyday life." Criminal endangerment requires an overt action by the parent when the parent takes a risk that is "independently unlawful" or "abusive."
The unanimous decision, filed earlier this month, overturned Cole's criminal endangerment conviction. The ruling ought to be applauded, as it assures Iowa parents that leaving kids at home when they are old enough to supervise others is perfectly responsible.
The post Iowa Court Clears Mom of Endangerment Charges After She Let Kids Babysit appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>After her 10-year-old son was sentenced to "adult" probation for public urination last year, LaTonya Eason has filed a lawsuit against the police officers who arrested her son, claiming that their actions amounted to excessive force and inflicted "physical and psychological injury" on her son.
In August 2023, LaTonya Eason attended a meeting at a Senatobia, Mississippi, law office, leaving her two children, including 10-year-old Quantavious, in her parked car. According to the complaint, Quantavious told his sister that he needed to use the bathroom, but she pointed out that a sign on the door of the law offices stated that there was no public restroom.
The third-grader then decided to urinate outside, shielding himself with one of the car's doors. According to the suit, A Senatobia police officer witnessed this and interrupted LaTonya's meeting to inform her.
"I was like 'Son, why did you do that?…You knew better.'" LaTonya told WRAL, a local news station, in August 2023, adding that the officer told her that "since you handled it like a mom, then he can just get back in the car."
LaTonya thought that was the end of the incident. However, Officer Zachary Jenkins soon arrived, accompanied by four more police officers. Jenkins insisted that Quantavious be arrested and taken to jail.
Quantavious was arrested, put in a police cruiser, and taken to a local jail, where he was kept in a cell for around an hour. He was charged in youth court with "child in need of services." In December, Quantavious was sentenced to three month's probation. The terms of his probation included that he submit to drug tests at his probation officer's discretion, a ban on the boy possessing any weapons, and a strict 8 p.m. curfew. Quantavious would also have to write a two-page report on the late basketball player Kobe Bryant.
However, Quantavious' family refused to sign the probation agreement.
"It's just a regular probation. I thought it was something informed for a juvenile. But it's the same terms an adult criminal would have," Carlos Moore, the family's attorney, told the Associated Press at the time. "We cannot in good conscience accept a probation agreement that treats a 10-year-old child as a criminal."
While Moore announced that the probation requirements had been dropped earlier this month, the family has also decided to sue the officers and the City of Senatobia, claiming that they "maliciously prosecuted a ten-year-old minor child," and "knew or should have known that these charges were filed because of personal animosity, bias, and lack of reason outside the interests of justice."
"Because of this, [Quantavious], a minor, cannot enjoy life as a normal child," the complaint states, adding that he "is treated as an adult criminal. Instead of enjoying activities a child would enjoy, his youth is tainted by malicious prosecution."
The post Mississippi Police Arrested a 10-Year-Old for Peeing Behind His Mom's Car. Now, the Family Is Suing appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>State lawmakers are getting creative in their attempts to control what young people read. Across the U.S., we're seeing legislation aimed at school materials and public libraries.
These measures often wear the mantle of "parental rights" or "protecting kids" from obscenity. But in practice they tend to take aim at any books depicting sex or sexuality.
These aren't outright book bans. But they still strike at the heart of things like student privacy and academic freedom, giving the most conservative parents, politicians, or administrators the power to determine what anyone can access of offer at public institutions.
In Utah, House Bill 29 will remove books from school libraries and curriculum statewide if a handful of schools deem them "sensitive material." The bill has passed both chambers of the state legislature and is now awaiting the governor's signature.
A statewide prohibition will be triggered if at least three school districts or two districts and five charter schools deem a book or other work to be inappropriate. This will happen automatically unless the Utah State Board of Education votes to override a statewide ban.
Opponents say the bill will allow the most conservative districts and schools to set standards for schools throughout the state. "This is the antithesis of local control," state Rep. Carol Spackman Moss (D–Holladay) said on the state House floor last month. "Parents can and should be the ones who monitor their children's reading—not the government."
HB29 also expands the definition of the "sensitive materials" not allowed in schools. Previously it just meant "pornographic or indecent" material. Now it also includes any material deemed "harmful to minors"—a category that includes "any description or representation, in whatsoever form, of nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or sadomasochistic abuse" when, taken as a whole, it "appeals to the prurient interest in sex of minors; is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community…with respect to what is suitable material for minors; and…does not have serious value for minors"—and may also include "material that includes certain fondling or other erotic touching."
Under this standard, basically any books that discuss sexual feelings or acts beyond kissing will be off limits.
Georgia lawmakers are taking a different approach to controlling what kids read. A measure that moved forward in the state's Senate last week would make school libraries notify some parents of what books their kids check out.
Senate Bill 365 says "a parent of each student enrolled in public school shall be notified in writing of the option to receive an email notification each time such student obtains material from a library operated by the public school where the student is enrolled."
The legislation passed out of the Senate Education and Youth Committee in a 5–4 vote on February 21.
The following day, a Senate committee voted to move forward with another bill related to schools and books. This one could criminalize school librarians and administrators who allow students to access content deemed "harmful to minors"—a broad category that could encompass a huge host of young adult literature.
Under existing Georgia law, it's illegal to knowingly sell or loan to a minor any "harmful" visual or written depiction of "sexually explicit nudity, sexual conduct, or sadomasochistic abuse" or any verbal description "of sexual excitement." It's also illegal to knowingly "exhibit, expose, or display in public" such materials at a newsstand, business, or public place open to minors. But there's an exception to all this for "any public library operated by the state or any of its political subdivisions [and] any library operated as a part of any school, college, or university."
Senate Bill 154 would remove "school" from that exceptions list. This means that books deemed OK for a public library or college library could be illegal to stock on the shelves of a high school library.
Like the Georgia bill, West Virginia House Bill 4654 would remove protections from prosecution for school libraries, as well as for schools more broadly, for public libraries, and for museums.
Under current West Virginia law, "any adult who knowingly and intentionally displays obscene matter to a minor could be charged with a felony, fined up to $25,000 and face up to five years in prison if convicted," notes The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. That law contains an exemption for "bona fide schools, public libraries, and museums," but the West Virginia House has now voted 85–12 to remove that exemption.
This issue seems somewhat less broad than the one in Georgia, since it applies only to obscenity generally and not the more expansive "harmful to minors" category. Then again, obscenity is notoriously hard to define, revolving around vague concepts such as "community standards" and "prurient interest."
The chief danger here is that even if mere descriptions of sex in literary works wouldn't be considered obscenity, institutions may remove them anyway to avoid the hassle of having to fight over it. Or to avoid a finding that "community standards" have changed and that now The Perks of Being a Wallflower or The Handmaid's Tale are, in fact, considered obscenity in the state.
In response to a recent resurgence in "book banning" attempts, some states are offering "right to read" statutes. "California and Illinois have already passed laws to try to limit book bans," reports Axios, and "more than a dozen other states, including Washington, are considering similar measures."
But these measures seem mostly performative, and some—like Maryland House Bill 785—could backfire spectacularly.
The Washington Post's Petula Dvorak called the Maryland bill "one of the most disquieting pieces of legislation"—not because of what's in it but because of what it's meant to protect against. It says a library shouldn't exclude material "because of the origin, background, or views of a person who created the material" or "prohibit or remove material…because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval."
Yet neither of these planks would prohibit the removal of books on the grounds that are most frequently cited in these debates (that is: sexual content deemed inappropriate for minors). Even when some of these challengers seem intent on protesting any books with gay romances or transgender characters, they don't generally say "we want this gone because of THE GAYS." They'll find a passage describing a sexual encounter, or masturbation, or some such thing, and seize on that. It's all cloaked in the language of stopping young people from being exposed to sexual themes.
Meanwhile, such a doctrine could prevent a library from excluding some books that the folks behind the Maryland bill might not like to see on the shelves. After all, wouldn't banning Nazi literature be based on the "views" of the author? And even if nothing so extreme is on the table, the doctrine would give a lot of room for authors whose books aren't stocked to claim they're being discriminated against in a way that violates this law.
It just seems likely to create more headaches than it prevents, at best.
(Meanwhile, the Maryland bill would also raise the fine for disfiguring a library book from $250 to $1,000.)
There is one facet of all this school book legislation that seems potentially useful: limits on who can challenge inclusion of books in school libraries. What we've seen recently is some people with political agendas challenge books to make a point, or a few cranks challenging tons of books, which administrators must nonetheless investigate. So bills limiting challenges in various ways—such as allowing them only from the parents of students at a school—could help prevent frivolous challenges and political stunts.
One of these has cropped up in an unlikely place: Florida.
Florida has been a hotbed of school and/or library book challenges. "No state banned more books than Florida in the most recent school year," noted Erin Davis and Jason Russell in Reason's January issue. "Over 40 percent of school book bans in the U.S. happened in Florida, though a slight majority of Florida school districts had no bans at all."
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—who can be both good and bad on educational freedom—"has spearheaded the efforts to keep inappropriate books away from kids," reports WUSF. But now even he seems to recognize that things have gone too far. DeSantis "recently Endorsed a House proposal to curb schoolbook removals and challenges," says WUSF.
The proposal: charge people $100 to challenge a book if they don't have kids in a school district and they've unsuccessfully challenged more than four books within that year.
"If you're somebody who doesn't have a kid in school and you're gonna object to 100 books, no, I don't think that that's appropriate," DeSantis said at a press conference earlier this month. "So I think the Legislature's interested in limiting the number of challenges you can do and maybe making it be contingent on whether you actually have kids in school or not."
A step like the one Florida is considering could at least prevent the worst sorts of abuses of the system. But when the system itself is geared toward severely limiting what students can read, small steps won't really make a meaningful difference.
Of course, school and public libraries are far from the only places to get books. This leads some to hand-wave away strict limitations on them—Who cares when kids can just turn to Amazon? That's fair enough when you're considering young people with enough money to purchase the books they want and/or those whose parents have more liberal sensibilities.
It still means that for some young people, reading everything from some classic literature to modern novels with gay characters could be off-limits.
And that while most teens can watch pretty graphic movie and TV depictions of sex, or find pornography on their phones, more nuanced and age-appropriate depictions of navigating sexual relationships could be out of reach.
So the idea that "This isn't an outright ban, so who cares?" doesn't sit well with me.
Laws limiting what kinds of books can be stocked on library shelves aren't censorship, but they're censorship-adjacent. In that, they resemble many attempts to control communication and information these days, from measures dictating how social media companies must moderate content to website age-verification laws to bills allowing private lawsuits against digital companies that allegedly cause amorphous "harms."
The surest way to push through such measures is to say they're for the kids. But kids have First Amendment rights too—and even if they didn't, many attempts to limit material for minors will also limit that material for adults as well.
The post States Try To Strip Sex From Literature in Libraries, Schools appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the well-intentioned rush to support American families by expanding the child tax credit (CTC), critical questions are often ignored: Aren't we already doing enough, and is this the best way to help? It's imperative to step back and examine the assumptions at the heart of this ongoing debate.
The child tax credit was first introduced in the 1997 Taxpayer Relief Act as a way to lower the tax burden for working families, with a $500 per child credit. It was increased a few times, including during the Bush years and in 2017 during the latest Republican tax reform. The justification has morphed into whatever its advocates happen to think it should be: It's an anti-poverty program—hence its refundability. It's a pro-family program—hence its growing size. It's a fertility booster program—hence both its size and refundability.
While it's not that great at meeting any of these goals, it is a true budget buster. At current levels, it costs about $1 trillion over 10 years, a price tag that will grow if it is expanded. For the 2024 tax year, the CTC will be worth $2,000 per qualifying child with $1,700 potentially refundable through the additional child credit. The House of Representatives just passed an expansion that, if passed untouched by the Senate, would extend more benefits to lower-income families. The maximum refundable amount per child would increase from $1,600 to $1,800 for 2023 taxes filed this year. It would also grow depending on inflation. And it would only require work every other year, which is a first step into turning the credit into a universal basic income for families.
Ignoring that the CTC sits on top of roughly 80 or so other welfare programs—many of which are already targeted at families—advocates of the CTC expansion argue that to make it a better anti-poverty measure we should eliminate the work requirements. Assuming no behavior changes, the expansion would certainly provide more government cash for eligible families—but it complicates things further by creating disincentives to work and rise from poverty, especially as it builds on other existing transfers.
Research by Kevin Corinth and Scott Winship at the American Enterprise Institute highlights the fact that after the proposed Wyden-Smith expansion, a single parent with three children earning $15,000 annually would get $11,244 from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), $6,750 from the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and $5,400 in CTC money. That adds up to a little more than $37,000 (ignoring many other benefits). Tragically—because of both the way higher earners are phased out and the generosity of the cumulative benefits—if that same single mom's work earnings nearly tripled to $40,000, she'd take home only some $5,000 more. Indeed, making more than $39,000 means losing all of SNAP and some EITC.
It isn't hard to see how this system, despite creating some work incentives at first, discourages people from pursuing better long-term paths for their families. This is a big deal. Increased employment among low-income parents as a result of work requirements has driven much of the long-term decline in child poverty, as we learned during the welfare reform of the 1990s. We need stronger incentives to move up the income ladder rather than incentives that perpetuate systemic poverty. And this expansion of the credit isn't going to cut it.
Unfortunately, many on the right are willing to ignore the disincentive to work because they worry about declining fertility rates. That would be a valid argument if, and only if, we had evidence that more government spending or more tax credits were effective at lifting fertility rates after they drop below replacement rates. And that isn't the case.
As noted by Adam Michel and Vanessa Brown Calder, the CTC, other financial transfers, and cash benefits are unlikely to be a cure for what ails us. A review of relevant studies "finds that financial transfers result in a short-term increase in births while leaving the long-term total unaffected."
A better way to go would be to boost economic growth so that families have more income in the first place. One way to do this is to cut and flatten tax rates, which would change incentives to save, invest, or be entrepreneurial. Also advisable is doing away with the excessive regulations driving up the cost of things families need, like housing, food, formula, and child care.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM.
The post Expanding the Child Tax Credit Would Perpetuate Systemic Poverty appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Frozen embryos are "children" under Alabama law, the state's Supreme Court says. Its decision could have major implications for the future of fertility treatments in the state.
Frozen embryos are "unborn children" and "unborn children are 'children,'" Justice Jay Mitchell wrote in the court's main opinion. Only two of nine justices dissented from the holding that an 1872 wrongful death statute applies to the destruction of frozen embryos.
The ruling seems to represent a turn toward judicial activism among members of Alabama's Supreme Court, which for a long time held that the law's text could not justify reading it to include "unborn children"—let alone frozen embryos.
It also portends a creeping Christian conservatism into court decisions, with Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker citing the Bible in his legal reasoning. In a concurring opinion, Parker justifies prohibitions on murder not by invoking classical liberal principles, like natural rights, but rather on the basis of "Man's creation in God's image" and the "you shall not murder" edict of the Sixth Commandment. "Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself," Parker writes.
The decision stems from suits brought by former patients of the Center for Reproductive Medicine in Mobile, Alabama. These patients—couples James and Emily LePage, William and Caroline Fonde, and Felicia Burdick-Aysenne and Scott Aysenne—had used in vitro fertilization (IVF) to successfully have several children and still had some embryos stored in the Center's "cryogenic nursery." In December 2020, a patient at the Mobile Infirmary Medical Center (which the Center was a part of) entered the cryogenic nursery unauthorized and proceeded to remove and then drop some of their frozen embryos, destroying them.
The couples sued the fertility clinic and the hospital, citing Alabama's Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. This 1872 law lets parents sue for monetary damages "when the death of a minor child is caused by the wrongful act, omission, or negligence of any person."
The LePages and the Fondes brought a joint lawsuit, and a separate suit was filed by the Aysennes. Both suits alleged negligence and the Aysenne suit also alleged wantonness and breach-of-contract.
A trial court granted the Center's motion to dismiss all but the breach-of-contract claim. "The cryopreserved, in vitro embryos involved in this case do not fit within the definition of a 'person'" or "'child,'" the lower court held.
The three couples appealed, and their suits were consolidated for Supreme Court purposes.
In a first-of-its-kind decision, the Alabama Supreme Court decided that frozen embryos are, indeed, children, rejecting the lower court's dismissal of the couples' wrongful death claims.
In the court's main opinion, Justice Jay Mitchell referred to frozen embryos in turn as "embryonic children" and "extrauterine children."
While the state's Wrongful Death of a Minor statute doesn't explicitly include "unborn children"—let alone "extrauterine children"—in its purview, "the ordinary meaning of 'child' includes children who have not yet been born," asserted Mitchell.
Furthermore, Alabama's Supreme Court "has long held that unborn children are 'children' for purposes of Alabama's that law," he wrote. The central question in this case, said Mitchell, is "whether the Act contains an unwritten exception to that rule for extrauterine children—that is, unborn children who are located outside of a biological uterus at the time they are killed."
The couples in this case raised some truly ridiculous arguments for why such an "exception" shouldn't exist. They argued that a finding that the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act doesn't apply to unborn children (including frozen embryos) would mean partial-birth abortions are legal, since the baby would no longer be in utero but would also not be fully born. They also suggested it would OK murdering hypothetical toddlers entirely gestated in artificial wombs, since such children—no matter how old they got—would not technically have been born.
Amazingly, the majority lent credence to these crazy arguments. They are "weighty concerns," wrote Mitchell, albeit ones that needn't be resolved at this time since "neither the text of the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act nor this Court's precedents exclude extrauterine children from the Act's coverage."
Not all of the justices agreed with the majority's logic, and some offered quite scathing rebukes of it.
For instance, Justice Brady E. Mendheim—who concurred with the result of the main opinion but disagreed with some of its reasoning—doesn't think that it's so clear cut that "child" includes frozen embryos. For one thing, the wrongful death statute in question was written a century before IVF was even a scientific possibility. Furthermore, other parts of Alabama law, including the 2019 Human Life Protection Act, explicitly define an unborn child as a human being in utero.
Justice Will Sellers also rejected the idea that this is an easy and obvious call. "Any sequence of linguistic gymnastics, cannot yield the conclusion that embryos developed through in vitro fertilization were intended by the legislature to be included in the definition of 'person,' much less the definition of 'minor child,'" he wrote. Rather, the inclusion of in utero children in certain statutes was there to allow for punishment of violence perpetrated against pregnant women. "To equate an embryo stored in a specialized freezer with a fetus inside of a mother is engaging in an exercise of result-oriented, intellectual sophistry, which I am unwilling to entertain," Sellers added.
Meanwhile, Justice Greg Cook—who dissented in full from the main opinion—rejects the idea that the 1872 law meant to include fetuses and zygotes in its definition of children, even when they are in utero.
The main opinion suggested that the "leading dictionary of that time defined the word 'child' as 'the immediate progeny of parents' and indicated that this term encompassed children in the womb," notes Cook. But if you look at the full entry in the cited dictionary, it indicates the opposite, saying "the term is applied to infants from their birth."
Furthermore, interpreting the Wrongful Death Act to include unborn children is a recent phenomenon. "There is no doubt that the common law [in 1872] did not consider an unborn infant to be a child capable of being killed for the purpose of civil liability or criminal-homicide liability," wrote Cook. "In fact, for 100 years after the passage of the Wrongful Death Act, our caselaw did not allow a claim for the death of an unborn infant, confirming that the common law in 1872 did not recognize that an unborn infant (much less a frozen embryo) was a 'minor child' who could be killed."
Thus, applying the wrongful death act to the loss of frozen embryos runs counter to the philosophy of originalism (the idea, common among libertarians and conservatives, that laws should be interpreted only as they were originally intended) and closer to the progressive idea of a malleable "living Constitution," suggests Cook. And he's not a fan. "It is not our role to expand the reach of a statute and "breathe life" into it by updating or amending it," Cook writes. If the legislature thinks the law needs expanding, it can do so.
Cook and Mendheim both object to characterizing the defense's position as seeking an "exception" for frozen embryos, because to declare it an exception to the state's protection of minor children assumes that embryos are minor children—a point that's far from a given. And they both pan the tacit acceptance of the out-there hypotheticals offered by the patients.
"The main opinion ignores the fact that it is not now—or for the foreseeable future—scientifically possible to develop a child in an artificial womb so that such a scenario could somehow unfold," writes Mendheim. Should that become possible, "the answer to this futuristic hypothetical is simple," writes Cook: "the Legislature can address future technologies and can do so far better than this Court."
Pointing out that no other state has interpreted wrongful death laws this way—and a number have specifically rejected it—Cook suggests that being "the sole outlier" should "cause us to carefully reexamine our conclusions."
He concludes the decision could end IVF in Alabama, since "no rational medical provider would continue to provide services for creating and maintaining frozen embryos knowing that they must continue to maintain such frozen embryos forever or risk the penalty of a Wrongful Death Act claim for punitive damages."
This fear was echoed by the defendants in this case, who told the court a finding that the statute includes frozen embryos could make IVF prohibitively expensive.
Barbara Collura, president and CEO of RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, called the court's decision "terrifying" for people "who need in-vitro fertilization to build their families."
Chief Justice Parker's opinion suggests that their fears are not unfounded.
His opinion is chilling in the way is showcases the theocratic underpinnings on which he sees Alabama governance resting. Pointing to a 2018 amendment declaring it "the public policy of this state to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life," he notes that the term sanctity can be defined as "holiness of life and character," godliness, and "the quality or state of being holy or sacred." He goes on to cite the King James Bible, noting that in Genesis man's creation was described as being "in the image of God." Its on these foundations that the legal treatment of frozen embryos should rest, he suggests.
According to Parker, this would not mean the end of IVF in Alabama. But it could mean changes that would seriously upend the IVF process.
In IVF, the process of preparing the body for ovulation and harvesting eggs can be extremely taxing on women's bodies, as well as time-consuming and expensive. After this, not all of the eggs collected may be successfully fertilized. And when viable embryos are created, it may take multiple tries at transferring one into a woman's body before implantation is successful. For all of these reasons, it makes sense for doctors to collect myriad eggs at one time, fertilize these eggs, and then freeze the viable embryos for later transfer, rather than harvesting eggs and creating a single new embryo for each transfer. (This also helps people who may want to create embryos when they are younger to use when they are somewhat older, or who may face illness that will impede their future fertility.) And to maximize the chances of success, doctors sometimes transfer two or more embryos at once.
Treating embryos as having the full legal rights of children could imperil all of these practices.
In Italy, "cryopreservation of embryos" is banned "except when a bona fide health risk or force majeure prevented the embryos from being transferred immediately after their creation," writes Parker. He also points approvingly to countries with other stringent regulations, such as a rule limiting the number of embryos that can be transferred at a time.
"These regulations adopted by other countries seem much more likely to comport with upholding the sanctity of life," Parker concludes, writing that "certain changes to the IVF industry's current creation and handling of embryos in Alabama will result from this decision."
Even if the ruling doesn't end IVF in Alabama, it could pave the way for changes that make fertility treatments more difficult, time-consuming, expensive, and impractical.
The post Frozen Embryos Are Now Children Under Alabama Law appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Every year, thousands of New York City families are subjected to invasive home searches as part of child abuse and neglect investigations. While less than 7 percent of these investigations lead the agency to file claims of abuse or neglect, a new lawsuit alleges that the city's Administration for Children's Services (ACS) workers often make misleading—or outright false—threats to coerce parents to allow ACS to conduct warrantless searches of their homes.
According to the lawsuit, which was filed on Tuesday, ACS employs a widespread policy of coercing families under investigation to allow case workers into their homes. ACS workers allegedly often tell families that they "must" or "have to" let them search their homes, insist that they do not need a warrant for the search, and even threaten to take noncompliant parents' children away.
Even though ACS workers are technically legally required to obtain a warrant to search homes, the agency very rarely seeks them. According to the suit, of the almost 53,000 investigations conducted by ACS in 2023, it only sought 222 court orders to search families' homes.
"Even assuming ACS completed only one home search during each investigation (it typically conducts several), ACS sought court orders for just 0.4% of home entries," the suit states. "This means over 99.5% of home searches that ACS conducts are 'presumptively unreasonable' under the Fourth Amendment."
Once inside a family's home, the suit claims that ACS workers engage in incredibly invasive tactics, looking "inside medicine cabinets, under beds, in closets and dresser drawers, in the refrigerator, and in cupboards." Even more troubling, strip searches of children are common, with workers demanding that children lift up their shirts or pull down their pants. Over the course of an investigation—the average length is 60 days—families are typically subjected to these searches more than once.
The agency itself seems self-aware about the impact of these coercive techniques. According to one 2020 report by the National Innovation Service, ACS policy "incentivizes [staff] to be invasive and not tell parents their rights." The report noted how "the experience of an investigation, even when an allegation is ultimately determined to be unfounded, too often traumatizes parents and children."
Further, agency leadership has also acknowledged that many reports of child abuse and neglect are completely unfounded, as individuals are allowed to make anonymous reports. A 2023 letter from the New York City Bar went so far as to state that a "significant percentage of" child abuse hotline callers "make false reports, for the purpose of harassment."
In all, the suit argues that ACS' policy of using coercive tactics to enter families' homes without a warrant constitutes a violation of their Fourth Amendment rights, arguing that the agency's "failure to adequately train or supervise ACS caseworkers regarding the protection of parents' Fourth Amendment rights" has directly led ACS workers to use manipulative, false tactics to persuade families to allow them to "conduct warrantless, non-exigent searches of Plaintiffs' and class members' homes."
The post NYC Child Protection Agency Uses 'Coercive Tactics' To Bully Parents Into Allowing Warrantless Searches appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Parents Are Highly Involved in Their Adult Children's Lives, and Fine With It," declared the front page of The New York Times on February 9. "New surveys show that today's intensive parenting has benefits, not just risks, and most young adults seem happy with it, too."
Is that true, though? Perhaps it depends on what you consider "intensive."
The article discussed a recent Pew Research Center survey that included a rather large swath of young adults—people between the ages of 18 and 34, everyone from high school seniors to working stiffs googling "gum pain." Separately, it surveyed parents of people that age.
One of Pew's key findings was that "parents are very involved in their young adult children's lives." It judged this in part by the fact that 73 percent of parents say they text their kids "at least a few times a week."
If that's very involved, then I'm super involved with my sister, my friends, and my political discussion WhatsApp group (even though it drives me nuts). But I wouldn't say I intensively parent any of them. Texting is so easy and fast that texting family members "at least a few times a week" seems far more normal than excessive.
Then there's the fact that young adults "turn to their parents for advice at least sometimes on their jobs, finances and even their physical health." Wouldn't it be weird if they didn't? And a little sad? And how are they supposed to find a good periodontist?
I am on record as recommending that young kids do some exploring on their own without a communication device. That way if they get lost, or their bike chain falls off, they have to figure out what to do next. They can't just call a parent. I dearly want them to develop some problem-solving skills and independence. Childhood is the time to do it.
Then, by the time they're young adults, with any luck (truly a factor), they're resourceful and capable. But that's not the same thing as having a ton of resources or being capable of everything. So they turn to us, not because we're helicopters, but because we are happy to help.
Not every problem of young adulthood requires bootstrapping.
Ah, but the survey also found that many parents help out their adult children financially. They are more involved when the kids are 18–24 and less involved as the years go by. Is that intensive? Intrusive? Well, young adults are going to college in record numbers and racking up record college debt. I'm not actually sure that college is the best path for everyone, but at the moment it's still popular. Helping young folks get their financial footing doesn't strike me as being a destructive enabler. (Maybe because I've done it myself.)
I know there are some who think that any assistance after a certain age is coddling. But I actually think it's time to flip that.
Give them independence as kids. Let them play, explore, take some small risks without adults always supervising. They'll see that you believe in them. That helps them believe in themselves. You're there for them without overprotecting. I realize there are a lot of fuzzy lines, but basically, I'm talking about trust: You trust that your kids can handle some things. They trust that you're there for them when they can't.
That's the beginning of a nice relationship. Or, as my husband put it: "At some point, it's not the whole parent-child thing. It's just family."
That makes for a boring headline. But it's true.
The post Are Parents Too Involved in Their Adult Children's Lives? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When Teresa and Jeff Williams decided to have an unassisted home birth, they had no idea they would be unable to get a birth certificate for their son nearly two years later.
Despite sending a litany of documents to the Washington, D.C., Health Department, the agency has denied the Williams' requests for a birth certificate and Social Security card for their son, JJ. Now a toddler, the boy has no legal documents at all.
The Williamses live in southwest D.C. with their two young children. Teresa Williams told The Washington Post that she and her husband became interested in home birth after having negative experiences when seeking prenatal care while pregnant with their elder child.
"It was day and night. The midwives actually asked me what I wanted my birth experience to be like versus telling me what it would be like," Teresa Williams told the Post. "I was actually being heard, and I was actually in control of how the environment was for my child to be born."
The couple decided to have their daughter, Tamar, at home, assisted by a doula and a midwife. After Tamar's birth, a home birth company filed the necessary paperwork to get the newborn legal documents.
However, the couple opted to go medically unassisted for the birth of their son, JJ, two years later. When they tried to get a birth certificate for JJ three months after his birth, they learned that they would be required to submit extensive documentation to prove he was their son.
Even though the couple say they submitted the required forms proving that JJ was born alive and in D.C. and that Teresa Williams was pregnant in the first place, the city denied their application. The Health Department told them they could bolster their application with additional medical documents, but because JJ was born at home without medical supervision, the Williamses didn't have the necessary paperwork.
Without a birth certificate and other documents for their son, the Williams say they have lost nearly $5,000 in tax credits. The family is also low-income and says they worry about losing food-stamp benefits if JJ's lack of documents is discovered. As a last resort, the couple has been forced to hire a lawyer and file a request for a judge to order JJ a birth certificate.
"It feels like I am an absentee father even though I am here," Jeff Williams told the Post. "I can't physically show that my son belongs to me because I have no document. And I might now have to go to court to prove my fathership to my child. And I have been here since day one. I haven't left."
The post They Had Their Baby At Home. 2 Years Later, They Still Can't Get a Birth Certificate. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In January, the Senate Judiciary Committee dragged the heads of Meta, TikTok, and X, formally known as Twitter, to Washington to charge them with exploiting children by allegedly addicting them to social media that sexually harms them, drives them to eating disorders, and even kills them. The Spanish Inquisition vibe of the proceedings reached a crescendo when Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) demanded that Mark Zuckerberg apologize to the families of children for the "harms" supposedly caused by Facebook and pay compensation out of his personal fortune.
But is social media really that bad for kids? And is the solution being pushed by Democrats and Republicans alike—universal age verification for all users of the internet—even technically feasible without shredding the First Amendment, destroying privacy, and creating major security issues? The answer is a resounding no, according to Shoshana Weissmann, director of digital media at R Street, a free market think tank, and author of "The Fundamental Problems with Social Media Age-Verification Legislation." Reason's Nick Gillespie interviewed Weissmann in Washington, D.C., in early February.
Today's sponsor:
The post Shoshana Weissmann: Online Age Verification Rules Are Unconstitutional and Ineffective appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>An Ohio law requiring that people under age 16 get parental permission to use social media is unconstitutional, a federal judge held this week.
On Monday, U.S. Judge Algenon Marbley told Ohio's attorney general not to enforce the law against tech industry group NetChoice or any of its members—a group that includes all sorts of major U.S. tech companies, including Meta, Pinterest, and TikTok. While this week's ruling is just a preliminary injunction, Marbley's opinion leaves little room for doubt that the tech companies will ultimately win here.
Marbley's ruling is the latest in a string of federal court orders against state laws intended to limit minors' social media or require platforms to follow special rules for users under the age of 18. Meanwhile, similar measures are still spreading like a bad viral meme throughout U.S. statehouses.
Ohio's "Parental Notification by Social Media Operators" law was passed last summer, following the passage of similar legislation in Utah and Arkansas. It requires many websites and apps to get consent from parents or guardians before allowing anyone under age 16 to sign up. Companies that fail to do this could be sued by the state's attorney general and face fines.
The Ohio law—which was slated to take effect on January 15, 2024—is part of a wave of attempts to childproof the internet through mechanisms like checking IDs for people who want to use social media or visit adult websites, raising the minimum age for opening a social media account, requiring minors to prove they have their parents' consent to use social media, and banning the use of certain social media features for users under a certain age.
Of course, applying specific rules to minors means tech companies must verify the ages and identities of all users. You or I might not need parental permission to use TikTok, but we would need to first prove we are old enough to get around that step.
For a good overview of the issues with online age-check laws, see this series from the R Street Institute's Shoshana Weissmann. She points out myriad downsides and unintended consequences, including the fact that these laws violate privacy, make people vulnerable to hackers and hostile governments, discourage data minimization (even when they sometimes purport to do the opposite), threaten our First Amendment right to anonymity, interfere with parental choice, risk criminalizing kids who try to outsmart them, and sometimes ban features—like algorithms—that actually make platforms more useful and safe.
"Like other States before it, Ohio has unconstitutionally tried to limit certain minors' access to protected and valuable speech on the Internet," argued NetChoice in a complaint filed in January. The group argues that Ohio's parental consent for social media law is unconstitutional in multiple ways.
The law interferes with minors' right to access and engage in protected speech, it "baldly discriminates among online operators based on the type of speech they publish," and its provisions are also "unconstitutionally vague," NetChoice argued. For these reasons, it violates the First Amendment rights of Ohioans under age 16 and the First and Fourteenth Amendment rights of tech companies.
The law would apply to online entities that allow users to interact socially, construct profiles, and create or post content when such an entity "targets children, or is reasonably anticipated to be accessed by children"—a rather porous category. "Websites have no way to know what this means," NetChoice argued in its complaint.
Further complicating compliance and understanding, Ohio's legislature exempted sites where "interaction between users is limited" to e-commerce reviews or to comments on content "posted by an established and widely recognized media outlet" that primarily reports news and current events.
These parameters mean review forums focused on products for sale online wouldn't have to get parental consent, but platforms dedicated to other types of reviews would. Likewise, "established" or "widely recognized" media focused on news or current events wouldn't have to get parental consent, but newer, lesser known, or mixed-purpose media platforms would. This exception discriminates against non-news content, "such as literature, art, history, or religion," argued NetChoice. "Thus, 15-year-olds must secure parental consent to join web forums devoted to United States history, but not to comment on contemporary news stories."
Ohio Attorney General David Yost argued in response that the law didn't concern speech at all but the right to contract, and that this fell within the state's authority to regulate commercial transactions.
This is a common tactic with authorities when it comes to speech restrictions involving social media or internet platforms. Rather than outright banning speech, they'll put burdensome restrictions on it and then argue that since the law focuses on contracts, or paperwork collection (as in the case of a new federal porn bill), or product design or some such thing, the First Amendment couldn't possibly apply.
Judge Marbley does not seem persuaded by Yost's argument. After issuing a temporary restraining order prohibiting enforcement against NetChoice or its member groups back in January, Marbley this week granted NetChoice's motion for a preliminary injunction, extending that temporary block on enforcement as the case plays out.
"The Act regulates speech in multiple ways: (1) it regulates operators' ability to publish and distribute speech to minors and speech by minors; and (2) it regulates minors' ability to both produce speech and receive speech," wrote Marbley, adding that there is no "contract exception" to free speech rights.
"In the State's view, the Act is a regulation striking at the commercial aspect of the relationship between social media platforms and their users, not the speech aspect of the relationship," noted Marbley. "But this Court does not think that a law prohibiting minors from contracting to access to a plethora of protected speech can be reduced to a regulation of commercial conduct." Thus, the judge agreed with NetChoice that the law restricts minors' First Amendment rights.
To come to this determination, Marbley cited a Supreme Court case concerning video games (Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association), in which the justices wrote that even if "the state has the power to enforce parental prohibitions," it didn't follow "that the state has the power to prevent children from hearing or saying anything without their parents' prior consent." Laws that do so do not "enforce parental authority over children's speech and religion; they impose governmental authority, subject only to a parental veto," the justices wrote in that case.
The judge also agreed with NetChoice that the law represents a content-based regulation, which makes it subject to a more strict level of scrutiny than regulations that are not. Interestingly, the judge reached this conclusion in part because the law targets sites with particular functions. "Functionalities allowing users to post, comment, and privately chat—in other words, to connect socially online—may very well be conveying a message about 'the type of community the platform seeks to foster,'" wrote Marbley (citing a case in which NetChoice challenged a Texas social media law). "The features that the Act singles out are inextricable from the content produced by those features" and thus "the Act's distinction on the basis of these functionalities" is content-based.
Subjecting the law to strict scrutiny means that in order for it to be OK, it must further a compelling governmental interest and be narrowly tailored to that end. But while the state says it's out to protect minors from dangerous contracts, "the Act is not narrowly tailored to protect minors against oppressive contracts," wrote Marbley. The judge also rejected the idea that the act is narrowly tailored to other areas that may or may not be considered compelling government interests, such as protecting kids' mental health.
"Foreclosing minors under sixteen from accessing all content on websites that the Act purports to cover, absent affirmative parental consent, is a breathtakingly blunt instrument for reducing social media's harm to children," wrote Marbley. "The approach is an untargeted one, as parents must only give one-time approval for the creation of an account, and parents and platforms are otherwise not required to protect against any of the specific dangers that social media might pose."
Lastly, the court found that the law's provisions are "troublingly vague" with regard to which websites are subject to it. Terms like "reasonably anticipated to be accessed by children," or established" and "widely recognized" media outlets, do not precisely describe whether or not a particular website or media outlet is subject to the law's rules, and "such capacious and subjective language practically invites arbitrary application of the law."
Marbley's recent ruling is the latest blow to the legislative trend of requiring age checks for social media, parental consent for minors to use social media, or other regulations targeting teens and social media use. Some of these decisions have been quite bold in their rebukes, too.
In August, a federal judge held that Arkansas' law to this effect likely violated the First Amendment. "Requiring adult users to produce state-approved documentation to prove their age and/or submit to biometric age-verification testing imposes significant burdens on adult access to constitutionally protected speech," wrote Judge Timothy Brooks in his decision. Furthermore, "a State possesses legitimate power to protect children from harm, but that does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed. Speech that is neither obscene as to youths nor subject to some other legitimate proscription cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them."
In September, a federal court in California halted enforcement of the state's "Age-Appropriate Design Code" (CAADCA), in another case where the state tried to argue that the rules didn't regulate speech but conduct—collecting and using data. Among other things, implementation of the code would have required that tech companies use "age estimation" techniques that would be invasive to all users' privacy or else treat all users as children.
Alas, these rulings don't seem to have dampened enthusiasm for this sort of legislation, however. So many states are now considering online age-check proposals that it's hard to keep track of them all.
Some of these—like bills under consideration in Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Tennessee, and West Virginia—would require people to verify their ages before visiting sites featuring adult content such as pornography.
Others would require social media users to verify their ages, ban children from signing up for accounts, require parental consent for people under 18 or 16 years old, or set up specific social media features that couldn't be made available to minors. In the past several months, social media restrictions bills like these have been introduced in Florida, Iowa, New York, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. Utah, which passed the first of these laws last year and is trying to get out of defending it in court, is also considering a revised version.
The Pennsylvania bill is particularly egregious. It would "require social media companies to monitor the chats of two or more minors on the platform and notify parents or legal guardians of flagged sensitive or graphic content," per a press release from the state's Democratic Caucus.
How many times will tech and civil liberties groups have to fight measures like these in court? I guess we're about to find out.
"This is the fourth ruling NetChoice has obtained, demonstrating that this law and others like it in California and Arkansas not only violate constitutional rights, but if enacted, would fail to achieve the state's goal of protecting kids online," said Chris Marchese, Director of the NetChoice Litigation Center, in an emailed statement. "We look forward to seeing these laws permanently struck down and online speech and privacy fully protected across America."
The post Kids Have First Amendment Rights Too, Federal Judge Reminds State Lawmakers appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Mali Ward's parents weren't thrilled at the thought of their eldest daughter venturing into social media. Now 17, Ward had to lobby for access to Snapchat during her freshman year of high school. "I had to convince my parents about that, with a whole slideshow and everything," she recalls.
After she made the case that she should be able to use the app to share silly pictures with her friends, her parents relented. Snapchat turned out to be a blessing. This was fall 2020. Ward had just started making friends at her new school in Brookfield, Wisconsin, when her family members—including five siblings—got COVID-19, one by one. The entire household was quarantined for weeks.
"I couldn't see anyone," she says. "It was scary, especially since I'd only been in school for a month." But "Snapchat made it a lot easier to talk to people, including people I had just met. Without that, I wouldn't have been able to talk to them at all."
Snapchat is seldom the hero in stories about teens and emotions, but I keep thinking of Ward's experience as I read headlines about social media and what people have been calling the teen mental health crisis. Rates of anxiety and depression have seemingly risen for adolescents since 2009. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, rates of adolescent depression have risen from 8.1 percent in 2009 to 15.8 percent in 2019; there is some evidence of a further rise during the pandemic. The suicide rate among Americans aged 10–24 increased from 6.8 per 100,000 in 2007 to 10.7 in 2018.
On some dimensions, of course, teens are doing much better than in the past. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the teen pregnancy rate declined by 67 percent from 2007 to 2022. (This is a further decline since the peak in the early 1990s.) Since 1991, the rate of drunk driving fatalities per 100,000 Americans has decreased 70 percent for those under age 21. Youth arrests for violent crime are down by 78 percent since 1994. High school graduation rates have gone up over the past two decades.
But those suicide, anxiety, and depression numbers are worrying, and so people look for explanations. What else has shifted over the last two decades? One obvious change: Social media use has skyrocketed since Facebook's launch in 2004. Any adult with a Facebook or Twitter account knows these platforms are often rife with insults and with highly edited versions of other people's lives. These new forms of communication seem like potential culprits.
The past few years have seen a flurry of proposed regulations. Utah, for instance, passed a law in 2023 (taking effect in 2024) requiring social media platforms to verify state residents' ages and to get parental consent before letting children open accounts; it will also ban platforms from targeting ads at kids. Related legislation has been proposed in other states, and a federal bill would enact a minimum age of 16 for using social media.
Are social media companies in fact to blame for the rising numbers? The surgeon general's report on the topic, released in May 2023, produced headlines such as NBC's "Social media is driving the teen mental health crisis, surgeon general warns." In fact, the report said, "We do not yet have enough evidence to determine if social media is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents." That's a far cry from straight-up cause and effect.
The surgeon general's report did helpfully pull together the best existing research on what turns out to be a complicated question. The literature certainly does raise concerns. One longitudinal study found that adolescents who spent more than 3 hours a day on social media faced double the risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes. Another study looked at what happened when Facebook was rolled out at different college campuses in 2004–2006. It found a 9 percent increase over baseline in depression and a 12 percent increase in anxiety once Facebook came to town.
But the research is not so clear-cut. Human beings are complicated. "Social media" platforms are a broad and changing category, but they are fundamentally forms of communication. Communication can be good (as it was during Ward's COVID crisis), can be bad, and, in most cases, can be something in between. Most of the material on platforms like Snapchat is less edifying than Leo Tolstoy. But as University of California, Irvine, psychologist Candice Odgers once put it, "You can hate social media, but it is not the case that it is driving teen suicide, depression, and anxiety."
***
If social media and mental health challenges are linked, one obvious question is what the mechanism linking them would be. What is it about going on 2005 Facebook, or 2023 TikTok, that would make some portion of people feel sad or anxious?
There are several possibilities. One common complaint, despite the apps' diverse formats, is that heavily edited photos and videos glorify unrealistic body shapes and sizes. Another is that people's tendency to post their life highlights makes normal life feel drab by comparison. Content might expose vulnerable people to ideas of self-harm that hadn't occurred to them. More broadly, social media apps allow adolescents to see what other people are saying about them in a way that was harder for bullies to pull off when teen communication was offline. If popularity is quantified via followers and likes, people with fewer followers and likes will feel less popular.
Young people themselves often have mixed feelings about these aspects of social media. Marisa Vanness, now a medical student in her mid-20s, eagerly joined Facebook as a teenager. She lived in a rural area, "probably 40 minutes away from my closest friends." Social media allowed her to connect, but looking back she realizes that she "was too malleable to what other people were thinking or saying about me. I could have gotten into hot water about that. Luckily I didn't," but "it's really hard to build confidence when everyone seems like they're beautiful and talented on those apps."
Some small studies have found that turning off social media improves people's mental states. According to the surgeon general's report, one randomized controlled trial found that limiting college kids' social media use to 30 minutes daily for three weeks "led to significant improvements in depression severity. This effect was particularly large for those with high baseline levels of depression who saw an improvement in depression scores by more than 35 percent."
On the other hand, a study from the Oxford Internet Institute, looking at data from nearly a million Facebook users in 72 countries, found that Facebook's spread from 2008 to 2019 was slightly positively correlated with well-being.
Surveys can be read in multiple ways, too. While the surgeon general's report highlights a survey finding that 46 percent of adolescents said social media made them feel worse about their bodies, that same survey noted that 40 percent said it made them feel neither better nor worse—and 14 percent said it made them feel better. (There are often more diverse depictions of beauty online than in magazines where everyone is thin and white.) A plurality felt worse, but a majority did not. Different readers will draw different conclusions from that.
In other words, the links between social media and well-being are complex. Part of the complexity is that social media are so ubiquitous. As The Art of Screen Time author Anya Kamenetz notes, "Every child uses social media and not every child has a mental health problem."
***
It isn't literally every child, but it's a lot of them. In a Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2022, 95 percent of teens said they watch YouTube, 77 percent of them daily, though this is often a matter of watching fairly professionally produced content rather than interacting with peers. About half of teens use Snapchat and Instagram daily, with a slightly higher percentage checking TikTok each day. For all of Facebook's bad press, few teens use it anymore: According to the Pew survey, Facebook use among teenagers dropped from 71 percent in 2014–15 to 32 percent in 2022, and only 19 percent of teens now say they use it daily. As I write, BeReal is buzzy, but that could change before this article is published.
Various apps also differ from each other. No one suggests LinkedIn is causing a mental health crisis, though some job-hunting young people use it.
Teens in general have a lot of discretionary time, and some teens have copious quantities of it. Electronic distractions, including social media, fill this time quite well.
Every year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics' American Time Use Survey (ATUS) asks thousands of Americans, age 15 and up, to recount how they spent "yesterday," rolling through all the days of the year. In 2022, Americans aged 15–19 averaged 5.67 hours of leisure time daily. Of this, 1.96 hours were spent watching television, and 1.64 hours on computer-based leisure, producing a total of 3.6 hours of daily screen time. This would include weekends, holidays, and the summer, but a 2019 Pew Research Center analysis of the ATUS data for 15- to 17-year-olds, looking only at the school year, found they still managed 3 hours and 4 minutes per day of screen time. I suspect this is actually an undercount, given that some portion of screen time comes in tiny chunks of time—say, 5 minutes while waiting for the car pool to show up—that wouldn't even register consciously.
I see this with my own five children. They are in all the sports and music ensembles that suburban family life requires, and they have annoying parents who confiscate their devices every night, yet they still manage to log impressive quantities of screen time. On a recent Thursday, one teenaged child had early-morning jazz band practice from 7:20–8:00 a.m., had the regular school day from 8:15 a.m. to 3:05 p.m., and then had an after-school technology competition club until 4:20 p.m., at which point I picked him up, got him dinner on the road, and delivered him to fencing practice (5:00–7:00 p.m.). He was home at 7:30 p.m. But because he had done his homework during study hall and class downtime, he was able to score 90 minutes of video games before our household 9:00 p.m. in-room-with-no-devices curfew. Plus, I saw him watching videos on his phone in the car.
Plenty of other days featured more screen time.
As with much in life, teens who have involved parents and well-functioning communities have more positive nonscreen options for their nonschool, nonsleeping hours. Multiple surveys found household income inversely correlated with child and teen screen time. Someone who is working too many jobs to drive kids to early-morning jazz band practice, and who is living in a not-so-great neighborhood, might rightly believe having a kid at home playing video games or watching YouTube videos is the least bad option. I can certainly think of much worse options. A recent New York Times article profiled a 14-year-old migrant child injured while working in a slaughterhouse. "TikTok is not that kid's biggest problem," says Devorah Heitner, author of Screenwise and Growing Up in Public. "I wish that kid was on TikTok learning dances."
***
Whatever kind of downtime kids have, social media fits this downtime well—as it does for adults. Despite shuttling children all over the planet, I too manage to log three or more hours on my phone per day, and not all of it is email, Google Maps, or wholesome NPR podcasts. Scrolling around on Instagram takes zero effort. You don't have to plan ahead, as you do with getting together in person. For many people, it fits the niche that television would have.
Sebastian Schipman, a 21-year-old graduate from Colorado State University, says he doesn't "know anyone who's necessarily been bullied or whose life took a downward spiral" as a result of social media. But, he adds, "It's kind of an easy way to sit in bed and do nothing all day."
Human beings have always liked having do-nothing time. Our do-nothing time has just gotten more interesting since we were staring at cave walls.
Some young people might encounter material online that sends them into a downward spiral. The internet has plenty of racism, sexism, and just generally antisocial behavior, like TikTok challenges that encourage vandalism. But human beings in community can do good things too. Benjamin Kaveladze, a psychologist whose doctoral research investigated online communities, notes that "some people will feel totally alone in their in-person community, but you can find a million people just like you online." For young people with disabilities, or who are the only person of their racial background at their school, or who are LGBTQ, social media connections can be a lifeline.
If you're facing a mental health challenge, you can find people like you too—and maybe some tips on how to manage. "A lot of people don't find much interest in talking to a professional mental health counselor, or aren't able to access one," Kaveladze says. If other people coping with anxiety offer resources, "there's something beautiful about that kind of online community."
In other words, social media platforms are a lot like the in-person world. "It is the meeting place," says Kamenetz. "It is the place where [young people] hang out. It's kind of like the mall. Does the mall cause depression and anxiety? Well, it depends what they are doing at the mall."
That's not to say that this digital mall needs to be a total free-for-all. Parents who are concerned about social media should monitor how much time their kids are spending there and what sorts of things they're doing. But in general, people who are fine will be fine. "Your kid who has a great life isn't going to get on Instagram and destroy that great life," says Heitner.
Mali Ward keeps herself busy enough with her swim team and studying that her screen time is naturally limited. Not all her friends have those built-in barriers. ("I have friends who are on screens for 8 hours a day.") Vanness, the medical student, argues that "anyone who has a good foundation, whose parents are teaching them healthy habits, isn't going to be as impacted as much as people who don't have as good habits, and who don't have as strong a sense of self." But this is the unfairness of life in general. A kid with a supportive family and a well-structured life is more likely to hit the gym for an hour when he's feeling bad about something he saw online (or in real life). A kid without all that might wallow. But those kids might have wallowed before social media too.
If social media's links to depression and anxiety aren't clear-cut, why are the latter's rates rising? There are no doubt many reasons, particularly in the pandemic years. One intriguing 2023 study in The Journal of Pediatrics suggested that a decline in independent activity and play over the last 50 years (with a corresponding decline in chances to develop self-regulation) has been harmful to children's mental health. The study's authors suggest that this change predates the rise of social media.
We may also be seeing more diagnoses of mental health conditions as people become more comfortable talking about them (perhaps because they see them discussed on social media). More knowledge may mean that fewer kids are willing to suffer in silence—and that more marginal cases are diagnosed (some studies have found that not everyone being treated for depression meets the clinical definition).
If there is a link between screen time in general and mental health problems, the chief culprit might not be the content of social media so much as the displacement. A day has only 24 hours, so time spent on one thing is time not spent on something else. As screen-based entertainment in all forms becomes more interesting, people may spend slightly less time on such known mood-boosters as being outside and physical activity.
"You really can't ban technology. It will find a way," says parenting expert Katherine Reynolds Lewis, the author of The Good News About Bad Behavior. "You're always playing catch-up as a government regulator, or even as a parent to be honest."
In the meantime, "adolescents need a world that's separate and mysterious to adults." Though that world probably won't be Facebook—the old people have taken that one over.
The post Why Are Teens Depressed? It's Not Social Media. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>School's out on April 8 for many kids in the U.S. and Canada. On that date, a full solar eclipse will be visible from Texas to Ontario.
This has prompted some Canadian schools to take action.
"There are risks associated with viewing a solar eclipse," announced Toronto-area school boards.
These schools are moving their May 17 kid-free professional development day to April 8 "to ensure that students will not be outdoors during the total solar eclipse."
This seems like a missed opportunity.
"I am baffled, dismayed, and hugely disappointed by this decision," says one Toronto-area school administrator, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It is misguided to keep children inside when they could be seeing this event. However, risk-aversion and groupthink are leading the process."
It does sound that way, at least in Canada. Elsewhere on the eclipse's path, schools are closing for seemingly the opposite reason: In order to make sure kids do in fact go outside to witness the gods' displeasure. (Eclipse comes from the Greek word for abandonment.)
"Buffalo Public Schools students will have the day off to view the total solar eclipse," reports KTLA.
Buffalo is also expecting an influx of tourists who will be watching the late afternoon eclipse at just about the time kids would be getting out of school, so the day off is a traffic-calming measure too.
Many Ohio schools in the eclipse's path are also closing, or letting kids out early to make sure they get a chance to see it. A better idea might have been to keep school as usual but send all the kids to the playground with pinhole projectors or solar glasses in order to enjoy the eclipse. Someone could even announce it's time and the kids could look up— because, according to the National Park Service, you actually can look at an eclipse safely with your naked eyes during the two-to-four minutes the eclipse is total. (Who knew?)
But in Canada, the rationale is simply that kids shouldn't be outside when the eclipse makes it dark and also tempting to look up. As the school boards announced: "Looking directly at the sun, without appropriate protection can lead to severe eye damage or loss of eyesight, even during an eclipse." Perhaps the gods of fun and learning are looking down upon Toronto with displeasure.
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]]>American students experienced historic losses in reading and math performance during COVID-19 school closures. Years after schools reopened, there is continuing evidence of lasting harm to student learning, with everything from ACT scores to school attendance showing continued slumps when compared to pre-pandemic years.
But a new study shows that students have regained some of the ground lost after the pandemic, sparking hope that depressed academic achievement may not be permanent.
Researchers at Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth looked at test scores of third- through eighth-graders from around 8,000 school districts in 30 states. They found that 35 percent of school districts lost more than half a year of instruction immediately after the pandemic, while just 27 percent saw either no change or improved results.
Unsurprisingly, learning losses were most extreme in low-income school districts. In many states, recovery in scores is driven primarily by improvements in higher-income school districts. However, there were some outliers—poor districts where scores made seemingly miraculous improvements and wealthy districts where scores continued to decline.
The researchers found that by 2023, students had regained about one-third of their losses in math and about one-quarter of their losses in reading. Of the 30 states studied, only one—Oregon—failed to improve upon its 2022 scores in 2023.
An analysis of the researchers' data published in The New York Times on Wednesday proposed that how schools spent federal relief dollars played a major role in which schools improved and which didn't. When the federal government poured $190 billion in a bid to help schools recover after closures, only 20 percent of the funds schools received were required to be used to address learning loss.
As a result, many school districts devoted the majority of their funds to cover expenses that have nothing to do with student learning—like building new athletic facilities, paying custodial workers, or even building a city-owned birding center. Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that schools that spent a higher portion of their funds on addressing learning loss rebounded better after the pandemic. When the Times interviewed educators at school districts with unusually high score recovery rates, school employees emphasized how their schools focused on spending federal aid money primarily on academics.
Unfortunately, the study also found that many students would likely never recover from the losses they experienced as a result of extended school closures—meaning that thousands of American schoolchildren are likely to enter adulthood with major academic gaps and could face permanently depressed earning potential.
"Few would be content to know that poor children paid a higher price for the pandemic than others—but that is exactly the path many states are on," wrote the researchers in a report of their findings. "Last year, students made up one-third of the pandemic loss in math and one-quarter of the loss in reading. Although good news, it also means that even if schools maintain the same pace this year, students, especially in lower-income districts, are unlikely to have returned to 2019 levels of achievement when the federal dollars are gone."
The post Test Scores Are Rebounding After Pandemic School Closures, but Some Students Will Never Catch Up appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On Wednesday afternoon, the closely divided House of Representatives passed a much-heralded bipartisan $78 billion tax deal by a wide 357–70 margin.
The tax bill revives and/or expands tax credits for small businesses, families with children, and affordable housing producers.
"The Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act is pro-growth, pro-jobs, pro-America," said Rep. Jason Smith (R–Mo.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.), the primary architects of the legislation, in a joint statement reported by Politico. "It's a strong commonsense bipartisan step forward in providing tax relief for working families and small businesses."
The most eye-catching part of the bill is its expansion of the Child Tax Credit. The House bill also expands the "refundable" portion of the credit that very low-income families receive, meaning they'll receive tax credits that exceed the value of their tax liability.
Republicans and Democrats have both supported child tax credits as a simple and direct means of cutting child poverty.
On the other hand, American Enterprise Institute scholars Scott Winship and Kevin Corinth have argued that the design of the tax credit will create work disincentives for low-income families, encouraging them to take part-time over full-time employment or even drop out of the labor force entirely.
"What is a refundable tax credit? It's welfare by a different name. We're going to give cash payments, checks, to people who don't even pay taxes," said Rep. Thomas Massie, (R–Ky.), per PBS. The Wall Street Journal editorial board called the child tax credit provisions a "trojan horse."
On the flip side, some Progressive Democrats voted no on the bill because it didn't expand the child tax credit enough.
The legislation allows businesses to immediately and fully deduct their development and research spending, interest costs, and capital depreciation from their tax bills. That's earned it support from free market, low-tax groups like Americans for Tax Reform.
The bill also sunsets a pandemic-era employee retention tax credit that's proven massively more expensive than expected and has been riddled with fraud.
Everyone is going to find something to like and dislike about the House bill. Perhaps the most important takeaway is that it continues America's long tradition of doing literally all policy through the tax credits.
The bill now goes to the Senate, where it's expected to have a tougher time passing.
California lawmakers are getting increasingly serious about reparations. On Wednesday, the California Legislative Black Caucus released 14 bills intended to right the wrongs of past racist policies.
The bills are wide-ranging. One would require advanced notice to be provided when grocery stores close in underserved communities. Another would restrict the use of solitary confinement. There's also a bill that would provide state funding to "specific groups," which Politico described as potentially unconstitutional.
Interestingly for property rights advocates, the bill would look to reverse past instances of "race-based" eminent domain. That bill would "restore property taken during raced-based uses of eminent domain to its original owners or provide another effective remedy where appropriate, such as restitution or compensation," said California Sen. Steven Bradford (D–Inglewood), reported Cal Matters.
Notably missing from the package is any sort of cash payments to the descendants of slaves.
The Biden administration's slow-burning war on gas stoves continues. Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Energy released a final rule creating new, tougher energy efficiency standards for home appliances that affect both gas and electric stoves.
Earlier versions of this rule could have forced many gas stoves off the market entirely, complementing local and state efforts to ban gas appliances in new development. The administration's final rule is more modest. The Washington Post reports it will affect 3 percent of gas stoves on the market.
The Energy Department's final rule "is less stringent than the initial proposal that would have forced most gas models off the market, there really shouldn't be any such federal regulatory meddling in the decisions of consumers," said Ben Lieberman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He cautioned that the Biden administration is still working on tougher regulatory standards for more home appliances like dishwashers, washing machines, ceiling fans, furnaces, and water heaters.
Scenes From D.C.
The normally tranquil mood of the Reason D.C. office was interrupted earlier this week by a shooting just down the block near Dupont Circle. Our crime photographer/managing editor Jason Russell captured the subsequent police activity.
One man, possibly in a vehicle, was shot by another man who drove off, in what sounds like a possible road rage incident. The victim was taken to the hospital with a non-fatal shoulder wound.
Like most cities, D.C. saw a big increase in violent crime during the pandemic. Unlike most cities, our violent crime rate is staying persistently high.
D.C. residents vented their frustrations at city officials yesterday at a community meeting, where the D.C. Attorney General said, failing to read the room, that the city couldn't prosecute its way out of the crime wave.
During a panel, DC residents voiced their frustrations and demanded accountability from city leaders in addressing the violent crime epidemic that's plaguing our nation's capital.
DC Attorney General Brian Schwalb's response: "We cannot prosecute and arrest our way out of it." pic.twitter.com/hEUT8GG7Al
— Carrie Severino (@JCNSeverino) January 31, 2024
D.C.'s weird status as a federal district means that city officials have little control over criminal prosecutions, which are instead largely handled by the U.S. Attorney for D.C. Matthew Graves. Graves gets a lot of blame for declining to prosecute enough crimes.
All the anger being directed towards AG Schwalb for saying this needs to be directed to US Attorney Graves, the person who can actually prosecute the majority of cases in DC and chooses not to! https://t.co/kc6JuqYroh
— Billy Easley II (@billyez2) February 1, 2024
https://t.co/XxJGKSze1l pic.twitter.com/zq5fEd9GmJ
— Warren Rhea ???? (@EverydayWarren) February 1, 2024
No criminal charges will be filed against three New Mexico police officers who went to the wrong address while responding to a domestic violence call last year and fatally shot the armed homeowner who came to the door, state officials said. https://t.co/gMvyWybmAi
— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 31, 2024
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]]>From book bans to anti-ESG legislation, when it comes to dabbling in its citizens' private lives, Florida's legislature knows no bounds. The latest intrusion of choice is now aimed at social media.
On January 24, the Florida House passed House Bill 1 (HB1) to ban kids 16 and under from using social media. If HB1 becomes law, social media platforms would be forced to implement prescriptive age verification methods for all users (including adults) and carry disclaimers that their products may be harmful.
Proponents of the bill have framed HB1 as a necessary measure intended to "protect" children from the negative impacts of these "addictive" technologies. Frequently cited are claims that adolescents are subject to cyberbullying and sexual predation on these platforms. Of particular concern is the role that excessive social media use plays on teenagers' mental health.
However, several studies have shown that these claims are unfounded and, at best, speculative. A study published in 2021 in the journal Clinical Psychological Science found that increased technology use among adolescents is not linked to a decline in mental well-being. More recently, another study published by the Oxford Internet Institute found no association between widespread Facebook adoption and psychological harm. In fact, findings from the Oxford study suggested the opposite—that Facebook membership was linked to positive mental well-being. This makes sense, as Facebook is a social media forum that connects friends and family, and therefore, nurtures relationships. Moreover, such platforms have served as a vital source of social support for teenagers deprived of human connection during the COVID-19 era.
Blaming social media for mental health issues isn't new. Any time new forms of entertainment and social technologies are introduced, society's natural response is to react with a mixture of nervous apprehension followed by gradual acceptance of the unfamiliar technology.
Consider the ubiquitous "dime novel" of the 20th century (named for its cheap price). When these sensational and wildly sought-after paperbacks first became popular, many cultural commentators believed they were thought to elicit "promiscuous behavior" and moral depravity among their audience. Social critics fretted that these adventure and romance-ridden novels were leading to so-called "reading mania" and "reading rage." These fears were so widely embedded in the collective psyche that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther was even blamed for a spate of suicides during its time.
The thought that an "epidemic of reading" could ever be considered a social ill nowadays seems absurd. However, to people back then, these were real and legitimate concerns. Sociologist Frank Furedi aptly described "penny dreadfuls," as they were called in the United Kingdom, as the media's "first moral panic."
Similarly, when video games peaked in popularity in the 1980s, they were blamed for an increase in real-world violence and acts of aggression—even mass shootings. Nowadays, most people consider this argument null. However, these myths are difficult to eradicate among the general population once they take hold.
Other forms of social entertainment that have been unfairly targeted and subject to the "violence" scapegoat narrative include the radio dramas of the 1940s, comic books and television, and music lyrics.
Unfortunately, this same phenomenon is now taking place in the Sunshine State. Well-meaning politicians "concerned" with declining mental health among teenagers blame social media and seek to censor platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Even if it is true that such platforms adversely affect mental health, the decision to prevent teenagers from engaging with these technologies is still one that ought to rest with the parents, not the government.
While there has been a rise in mental health problems across the U.S., social media is not to blame, but rather insufficient access to mental health services. According to the National Council for Mental Wellbeing, scant access to care is the primary cause of the mental health crisis. Barriers like high cost and paltry insurance coverage, as well as limited options and long waits, hinder access to proper treatment. More than 40 percent of candidates polled in a study named cost and poor insurance coverage as the top barrier for obtaining the help they need. Instead of banning platforms that connect people socially, politicians should consider reforming mental health policy.
It is true that adolescents do not have the same capacities to engage in rational decision-making as full-grown adults. But that is precisely why parents should have the ultimate say when it comes to deciding what ideas and information their children can access.
The Florida legislature is forgetting its original purpose of protecting the rights and freedoms of its citizens and unlawfully engaging in constitutional overreach with the passage of HB1. The government doesn't try to prevent teenagers from indulging in every single harmful behavior (like eating unhealthy fast food) just because of some negative consequences. That would be considered serious governmental overreach. Florida's creeping descent into paternalism should be viewed in the same light.
HB1 is poised to reach the Governor's desk in the coming month. Implementation of a similar law in Utah is going poorly, and up against significant court challenges. For the sake of the First Amendment and free speech writ large, Florida should stop trying to carry out a blanket and unconstitutional ban on Floridians' freedom.
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]]>Kids need to climb trees, jump off things, and ride their bikes—even at speed. That's what the Canadian Pediatric Society is recommending in a new white paper: Healthy Childhood Development Through Outdoor Risky Play.
It's the sort of finding that is almost considered radical these days. Mariana Brussoni, a developmental psychologist at the University of British Columbia, has been championing risky play for more than a decade, but the Pediatric Society wasn't ready to endorse her call to action.
It was only when faced with soaring rates of childhood anxiety, depression, obesity, and even myopia that Canadian health officials realized that "letting kids go out and play could be a way to deal with a lot of these challenging issues," says Brussoni.
That's because the doctors came to recognize two truths.
First, children are hard-wired to play because it aids their development. It teaches them how to take action, get along, and solve problems.
Second, replacing rollicking, kid-led play with structured, adult-led play was a mistake. It deprived children of a million opportunities to exercise their autonomy. It also increased their risk of physical danger.
When kids play without adult supervision, they hone their social and emotional coping skills, according to the report. What's more, free play can "significantly reduce children's risk for elevated anxiety."
Play does that in a rather obvious way, says Peter Gray, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College and a co-founder with me of Let Grow.
"From an evolutionary standpoint, why do children want to play in a risky way?" asks Gray. "Because this is how they develop a little courage. They deliberately put themselves into situations where they're feeling fear so that, unconsciously, they can have a sense of control over it: 'I can feel this fear and survive it.' So when they face a real emergency, they are slightly less likely to panic. They are also less fearful because they know, 'Something can happen, and I can manage it.'"
The Canadian report recommends pediatricians promote risky play as preventative medicine for mental health.
But what about the physical danger that risky play sometimes involves? How can doctors—and parents and schools—ignore that?
By looking at statistics, says Brussoni.
"From 2007 to 2022, there were two deaths from falls on the playground, and 480 deaths from motor vehicle crashes," she says.
And as the Pediatrics paper notes, "The research has established that children are less likely to be injured while engaging in unstructured activities than when playing an organized sport."
Sports are more dangerous than goof-around play? It's starting to sound like the real risk in "risky play" is that our culture has been busy outlawing it. Think of signs like the one in a suburban Washington, D.C., playground that warns would-be fun-havers: adult supervision required.
So how can we normalize free play again?
Brussoni tells parents to start with an "underwhelming" experiment.
"Let them out into the backyard while you're watching for a few minutes," she says.
The next day, sit in the kitchen and don't watch. You and your kids will get used to time apart.
Another way is to ask your kids' school to start a "Let Grow Play Club." That's when the school stays open for mixed-age free play. An adult is there but like a lifeguard. They don't organize the games or solve the spats.
The Canadian Pediatrics Society issued its full-throated endorsement of risky play partly in response to the "restrictive safety programs and measures that have become more broadly implemented—and sometimes mandated—in child care settings, schools, and playgrounds in recent years."
If even overly cautious Canada is saying safety culture has swung too far, it's time to jump off the swing.
The post Even Canada Thinks the Nanny State Has Gone Too Far on Outlawing Fun appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Rather than defend a clearly unconstitutional measure passed to "protect" kids from social media, the government of Utah intends to repeal the law.
Last year, Utah became the first state to pass a law limiting minors' social media use to those who had parental consent and requiring platforms to provide a way for parents to access their kids' accounts. It kicked off a wave of similar measures in statehouses across the country—laws that would require anyone using social media to prove their age through such methods as submitting biometric data or a government-issued ID.
Now that it faces a pair of challenges in federal court, the state has a new stance: "Psych! We didn't actually mean it!"
"They know it's unconstitutional. They know it's pure grandstanding and culture warrioring," writes Techdirt editor Mike Masnick. "And they don't want to face the music for abusing the rights of the citizens who elected them to support the Constitution, not undermine it."
Utah's parental consent for social media law (S.B. 152) was scheduled to take effect in March, along with a law (H.B. 311) to create liability for social media companies that "addict" kids. Both laws were challenged in December by the tech industry association NetChoice.
Then, earlier this month, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) sued on behalf of four Utah residents—including Hannah Zoulek, a teenager who identifies as queer—to stop S.B. 152. "Growing up already isn't easy, and the government making it harder to talk with people who have similar experiences to mine just makes it even more difficult," Zoulek told FIRE.
The FIRE lawsuit is still in its earliest stages, but the NetChoice lawsuit was already moving forward. A hearing on NetChoice's motion for preliminary injunction was set for February 12.
Then, on January 19, Utah lawmakers voted to postpone the law's effective date until October 1, 2024. And Utah officials asked the court to cancel the February hearing, given that the effective date had been postponed "and the Legislature is likely to repeal and replace the law during the current legislative session."
The state said in a January 19 motion that the law "is likely to be repealed in the next few weeks."
Last week, Judge David Barlow agreed to cancel the hearing about halting enforcement of the law, "given the delayed implementation…and given the possibility that the Act will be altered during Utah's legislative session." A meeting to make an updated schedule is slated for mid-March.
For now, that leaves social media companies in limbo.
Utah officials said in the January 19 motion that they "anticipate" the law being amended or replaced soon. But that's not a given, and for now the new rules are still scheduled to take effect this fall. Should tech companies prepare for that? For something similar? Nobody knows.
The state does "not even dispute the prospect of irreparable harm," noted NetChoice in a reply opposing the amended schedule. "Rather, Defendants argue that the irreparable harm is not 'imminent.'"
"NetChoice's members still need certainty about their compliance obligations well before the Act takes effect," the group stated:
The prospect that the Legislature might pass some legislation at some point that has some effect on this litigation is not enough to derail briefing that is well underway and set for hearing. This legislation has not even been introduced. Its terms are not public knowledge. Nor are its constitutional flaws or its overlap with the Act at issue here (if any). In any event, no one can make any guarantees about the outcome or timing of the legislative process. In the meanwhile, NetChoice's members still face an active choice between incurring unrecoverable compliance costs with an unconstitutional law or confronting potential enforcement actions when the Act takes effect in October.
If all of this represents Utah recognizing that its social media statute is an unworkable, unconstitutional, privacy-infringing mess…great! But it also highlights a fundamental issue with politics these days: lawmakers who are more interested in passing legislation that makes a statement than passing legislation that actually works.
We've seen this recently with tech bills, measures meant to curb abortion access, laws meant to defy "wokeness," and other restrictions on books, performances, and academic subjects that deal with race, sex, or gender themes. Politicians often seem more intent to signal anger or disgust—and capture the anger and disgust of constituents—than to make changes that pass constitutional muster.
Sometimes this may just be cluelessness, and other times it may be deliberately designed to test the limits of protected rights. But there are also situations—like this one in Utah, or an Ohio town's speech-restricting statute against aiding or abetting abortion—where authorities simply back down when challenged, suggesting they know this was never going to fly and basically just passed it as a P.R. move.
Hating on Big Tech is an especially good way to garner positive attention these days. And saying you're doing something to "protect kids" is a time-worn way to get props.
Besides, lawmakers are as susceptible to moral panic about new technology as anyone else, making them vulnerable to pleas to "Do something!" even if they know—or at least should know—that the Constitution frowns on it.
Ultimately, this winds up wasting time and a lot of taxpayer money. But as long as that doesn't actually translate to negative consequences for the officials whose support these laws, there's little downside for them to keep trying.
Social media age-check measures like Utah's "violate the First Amendment…rob users of anonymity, pose privacy and security risks, and could be used to block some people from being able to use social media at all," as the American Civil Liberties Union puts it.
Alas, whatever happens in Utah, it looks like we're going to be playing whack-a-mole with similar laws for a while.
Arkansas and Ohio passed social media age verification laws last year—the Social Media Safety Act and the Parental Notification by Social Media Operators Act, respectively—though courts have preliminarily blocked enforcement of both.
Louisiana also passed social media age verification measure last year (the Secure Online Child Interaction and Age Limitation Act), as did Texas (the Securing Children Online Through Parental Empowerment Act, or SCOPE). The Louisiana measure is supposed to take effect in July, and the Texas law is slated to take effect in September.
Similar proposals are now on the table in Florida, Georgia, and New Jersey.
And this isn't even counting the laws passed or under consideration to card people visiting porn websites.
There's also federal legislation—like the Social Media Child Protection Act and the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act—that would require nationwide age verification by social media platforms. And both at the federal and state level, proposals like these have been gaining bipartisan support. For many Democrats and Republicans alike, free speech is out and childproofing the internet is in this year.
The post Utah Would Rather Repeal Social Media Age Check Law Than Defend It In Court appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Back in 2016, a study found that it was increasingly difficult for subjects to distinguish between actual photographs of people and computer-generated simulations of them. The researchers suggested that development would complicate prosecution of child pornography cases. That concern has been magnified by rapid improvements in artificial intelligence, prompting a California bill that would, among other things, make it a felony to possess virtual child pornography when it qualifies as "obscene." This provision seems constitutionally problematic in light of the U.S. Supreme Court's holding that the First Amendment bars legislators from criminalizing the mere possession of obscene material.
Assembly Bill 1831, introduced by Assemblymember Marc Berman (D–Palo Alto) on January 12, aims to expand the state's definition of child pornography to include "representations of real or fictitious persons generated through use of artificially intelligent software or computer-generated means, who are, or who a reasonable person would regard as being, real persons under 18 years of age, engaging in or simulating sexual conduct." Since that new definition would pose obvious First Amendment problems as applied to constitutionally protected images, the bill specifies that such representations must meet the state's definition of obscenity: material that "to the average person, applying contemporary statewide standards, appeals to the prurient interest"; "depicts or describes sexual conduct in a patently offensive way"; and "taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."
That definition of obscenity tracks the test that the Supreme Court established in the 1973 case Miller v. California. But four years earlier in Stanley v. Georgia, the Court unanimously rejected a state law that made it a crime to possess "obscene matter." Writing for the Court, Justice Thurgood Marshall drew a distinction between that ban and other obscenity laws: "Whatever may be the justifications for other statutes regulating obscenity, we do not think they reach into the privacy of one's own home. If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds."
Berman evidently did not view the Supreme Court's reading of the First Amendment as an obstacle to his goals, and he is by no means alone in that. Way back in 1996, Congress tried to ban "any visual depiction, including any photograph, film, video, picture, or computer or computer-generated image or picture," that "is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct." The Supreme Court deemed that law unconstitutional in the 2002 case Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, noting that "the literal terms of the statute embrace a Renaissance painting depicting a scene from classical mythology" as well as "Hollywood movies, filmed without any child actors, if a jury believes an actor 'appears to be' a minor engaging in 'actual or simulated…sexual intercourse.'"
Congress tried again in 2003. The PROTECT Act covered any "digital image, computer
image, or computer-generated image" that is "indistinguishable" from "that of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct." Unlike Berman's bill, it did not require that such material qualify as obscene, making it even more constitutionally questionable. But it did include an obscenity test for another category of proscribed material: "a visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting," that "depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct." And the law applied a less demanding test to any visual depiction of "a minor engaging in graphic bestiality, sadistic or masochistic abuse, or sexual intercourse, including genital-genital, oral-genital, anal-genital, or oral-anal." The PROTECT Act made such material illegal if it "lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value," dispensing with the other two prongs of the obscenity test.
In 2008, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit considered the case of a Virginia man, Dwight Whorley, who was charged with violating the PROTECT Act by "knowingly receiving on a computer 20 obscene Japanese anime cartoons depicting minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct." Whorley argued that the law's prohibition on receiving obscene images was "facially unconstitutional" because "receiving materials is an incident of their possession, and possession of obscene materials is protected by the holding of Stanley v. Georgia."
The 4th Circuit rejected that claim. "Stanley's holding was a narrow one, focusing only on the possession of obscene materials in the privacy of one's home," the majority said. "The Court's holding did not prohibit the government from regulating the channels of commerce." The appeals court perceived the provision under which Whorley was charged as "focusing on the movement of obscene material in channels of commerce, and not on its mere possession." So even though receiving, viewing, and possessing images are all essentially the same thing in the context of the internet, the appeals court concluded that Whorley's prosecution did not run afoul of Stanley. But even that debatable reading does not seem to help Berman's bill, which explicitly applies to "every person who knowingly possesses or controls" the newly prohibited images.
Whorley also argued that the PROTECT Act was "unconstitutional under the First Amendment, as applied to cartoons, because cartoons do not depict actual minors." The 4th Circuit also rejected that argument, noting that cartoons are covered by the law only when they are "obscene" and that obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment.
That point does aid the defense of Berman's bill, but again not insofar as it applies to mere possession. In other cases involving cartoons, such as manga, Simpsons porn, and "incest comics," federal defendants have pleaded guilty to possession charges, avoiding a constitutional test.
As applied to distribution, A.B. 1831's obscenity requirement follows the approach that New York University law professor Rosalind Bell recommended in a 2012 law review article. Bell argued that the PROTECT Act provision covering digital images "indistinguishable" from the real thing, which does not require a finding of obscenity, is clearly unconstitutional.
In the 1982 case New York v. Ferber, Bell noted, "the Court established that the First Amendment does not extend to child pornography because the state has a special interest in protecting children from harm." That interest, the Court held eight years later in Osborne v. Ohio, justifies even a ban on private possession of child pornography. But those cases involved actual child pornography, and the Court's reasoning focused on the injury that its production and dissemination inflicts on the children whose abuse it documents.
"Post-Ferber child pornography regulation and court decisions interpreting this regulation have become untethered from the Supreme Court's crucial limiting interest in protecting children from physical and emotional harm," Bell wrote. "Increasingly, congressional action and court opinions reflect concerns about controlling private thoughts rather than preventing and punishing direct harm."
Bell noted that Adrian Lyne's 1997 film adaptation of "Vladimir Nabokov's famous novel Lolita" went "straight to cable" because distributors worried that law enforcement agencies might deem it child pornography. "Writers and artists have explored the theme of adolescent sexuality in countless valuable works," she wrote. "By banning non-obscene virtual depictions of child sexuality without reference to their social value, we exceed the First Amendment's crucial dictates and jeopardize these works, including acclaimed films like Romeo and Juliet, The Tin Drum, American Beauty, and Taxi Driver."
The "serious value" of such material presumably would protect it from Berman's bill, which is why the obscenity requirement is crucial. But the ban on possession still flies in the face of the Supreme Court's conclusion that "a State has no business telling a man" what he can look at while "sitting alone in his own house." Although the Court later made an exception for pornography involving actual children, that exception does not encompass images that can be produced without violating anyone's rights.
The post A Constitutionally Dubious California Bill Would Ban Possession of AI-Generated Child Pornography appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The New York Times put Charles Murray on the cover of its Sunday magazine, calling him "The Most Dangerous Conservative."
That was after he co-wrote the book The Bell Curve, which argued that different ethnic groups have, on average, different IQs. As Murray puts it in my new video this week, "Blacks on average have a lower IQ than whites. However, whites are not at the top. East Asians, on average, have a higher IQ than whites. Ashkenazi Jews have higher IQs."
Other researchers agree.
An article in ScienceDirect journal puts it this way: "East Asians and their descendants average an IQ of about 106, Europeans and their descendants about 100, and Africans and their descendants about 85."
But many people don't believe it. Many don't even want such topics discussed.
Last time Murray tried speaking to college students, a mob shouted him down.
"They're angry at you because you're perpetuating racism," I tell Murray.
"These kids," he replies, "never read a word of anything I'd ever written."
That's probably true. It's more likely that they just read slander against him from smear sites like the Southern Poverty Law Center.
They call Murray a "white nationalist" and claim he says, "White men…are intellectually, psychologically, and morally superior."
"I've never said anything remotely like that!" says Murray.
"Do you believe that blacks are intellectually inferior?" I ask.
"If you give mental tests to a representative sample of whites and a representative sample of blacks," he says, "there will be about a one standard deviation difference. To then translate that into people being inferior and superior is idiotic."
He goes on to say that there are other differences between racial groups.
"I don't think there's been a white winner of the 100-yard dash in the Olympics for a zillion years."
Actually, 20 years. A white woman won 20 years ago; a white man hasn't won for 40 years.
It's probably because some black people have more fast-twitch muscles fibers, says Murray.
I don't see why saying that is controversial. It's just obvious that there are differences between groups.
But Murray has been canceled.
It's too bad.
Everything should be talked about. People who don't agree with Charles Murray should debate him, not shun him.
He is good at revealing unpopular truths.
He once had a job working for the government, evaluating social programs. He discovered that the "war on poverty" was not lifting people out of poverty. In fact, programs like welfare perpetuated poverty.
He wrote a book about that titled Losing Ground.
It soon became a bestseller, and influenced presidents from both parties. Welfare "reformers" Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton cited Murray's work. Clinton said, "Murray has done the country a service."
Then Murray wrote In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government—a book that changed my thinking.
He describes his time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand. He watched Thai government "experts" create what they said would be a "model community." They gave the village a fishpond, a rice cooperative, a health clinic. But this aid diminished community activities.
"They weren't as happy as they used to be," says Murray. "I saw what government looks like from Bangkok and how it looks to the villager. It's the same in the United States."
The United States has spent $25 trillion (so far) on our war on poverty. But the poverty rate has stayed about the same. Instead of eliminating poverty, the war created a new "underclass"—fatherless kids who give birth to other fatherless kids—generations of families who become dependent on government handouts.
Yet the programs keep growing.
"Aren't you upset?" I ask Murray.
"I'm deeply depressed," he says. "We have watched, in our own lifetime, our hopes and dreams turned to smoldering ruins."
Then he smiles and says, "The good news is that old people are habitually too pessimistic."
Charles Murray, an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has interesting ideas. They deserve to be heard, not shouted down.
I will do a second video, covering more of his work, in a few weeks.
COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
The post Don't Shun Controversial Ideas and People. Debate Them. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Ever since schools were shuttered during the COVID-19 pandemic, chronic absenteeism among American schoolchildren has skyrocketed. Nearly 15 million schoolchildren (almost 30 percent of all K-12 students) were still missing at least 10 percent of school days during the 2021–22 school year—more than a year after most schools had returned to in-person learning. Most troubling, 6.5 million students were chronically absent before the pandemic started, indicating that absenteeism is an endemic problem in American schools.
According to the Education Department, students are chronically absent when they miss over 15 days in a school year. But according to Attendance Works, an educational nonprofit focused on absenteeism, the typical chronically absent student misses slightly more—about 18 school days per year.
Unsurprisingly, kids who frequently miss school end up with serious academic gaps—students tend not to catch up after missing valuable instructional time, especially in early grades.
"It is well documented that if a student misses more than 10 days of school in a school year, that there's a marked impact on their ability to remain caught up or to even catch up, given many of the gaps that we have in educational experiences for students," Keisha Scarlett, the superintendent of St. Louis Public Schools, told PBS NewsHour this week.
While absenteeism peaked during COVID-19 school closures, more students are still missing school than they were before the pandemic. According to Return2Learn Tracker, an absenteeism database run by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), these gaps remain even when taking economic divides into account. High-poverty districts had a whopping 36 percent absenteeism rate in 2022 (compared to 19 percent absenteeism in 2018), but even low-poverty school districts had an absenteeism rate of 21 percent in 2022 (compared to 10 percent in 2018.)
While absenteeism is a nearly universal problem in American public schools, educators are struggling with how to reverse the trend. The reasons why a student misses school can vary widely—and getting students back to school can require anything from a simple phone call to repeated home visits and connection to transportation and other resources.
"The key to keeping kids in school is noticing as soon as possible when they're starting to miss too much," Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, told Reason last year. "So someone can go out and talk to them and re-engage them, and find out what would help them to come back."
While efforts—like home visits—have shown modest effectiveness at reducing absenteeism, it seems that pandemic school closures have done major damage and likely permanently increased absenteeism among an entire cohort of students.
"[Absenteeism is] what the corona did," one 21-year-old told ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis in a story co-published with The New Yorker last week. "They're sending the kids back to school, and they don't want to no more. They want to stay home and play on their computers."
The post Millions of Kids Are Chronically Absent From School. The Problem Isn't Going Away. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Talk about a slippery slope. Toronto recently erected warning signs on 45 hills around the city that read: "Tobogganing is not allowed."
The warning further clarifies that "hazards such as trees, stumps, rocks, rivers or roads make this hill unsafe." The signs also include a URL for a website where kids can find one of 27 tobogganing-approved hills. (Not even a QR code?)
Ricki Gurwitz, a Toronto mom of two, is exasperated.
"The fear of liability is ruining modern childhood," she says. "I used to toboggan all the time with friends when I was a kid, and it was one of my favorite parts about winter."
Bill Steigerwald, a longtime newspaper writer and author of 30 Days a Black Man, agrees.
"There are too many nanny rules aimed at making the world so safe that people, and especially kids, are not allowed to do anything outdoors but sit on a bench," he says.
Toronto City Councilman Brad Bradford also opposes the ban.
"Frankly, it's embarrassing," he told The Toronto Star. "This is part of the Canadian experience, growing up in winter cities, and Toronto shouldn't be the exception to that."
Not only do kids lose out when trees become an obstacle to outdoor fun, but so does the city itself. Anti-tobogganing legislation makes Toronto "move in the direction of no-fun city," says Bradford.
Last year, the city put up bales of hay around the trees on the popular hill in Bradford's district to avoid crashes. Now, tobogganing is banned on that hill. (Of course, crashing into a solid bale of hay is perhaps not so different from crashing into a tree, in this humble correspondent's view.)
Maybe it's just that nobody wanted to bother with the bales this year, mused Philip Howard, an anti-bureaucracy crusader and author of Everyday Freedom.
"Memories of a fun place have been yanked away from families in Toronto," he says.
It's not just tobogganing. On its winter sports safety guidelines page, Toronto's team of experts advises anyone crazy enough to even think about going sledding to always check for hazards like bumps and bare spots, as well as "ice-covered areas." (Between bumps, bare spots, and ice-covered areas, that pretty much covers all the terrain, no?) The city also warns any not-yet-daunted tobogganers to never use a "plastic disc" to slide down a hill.
Don't bring the family dog, either, as animals "may get excited." (Their lives should be as boring as yours!) And of course: "All children should be supervised by an adult."
So after the adults have checked for ice, bumps, trees, plastic, rivers, streets, steps, and Fido, kids are free to enjoy the winter wonderland.
But by then, all of them are probably back inside, glued to their screens.
The post Toronto Bans Tobogganing on 45 Hills, Puts Up Warning Signs appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The political landscape is often portrayed as deeply polarized. The two sides, it is said, can't agree on anything. Even worse, if one side supports a position, that's reason enough for the other to oppose it. While this picture is largely true for cultural issues, the rise of populism on the right is making some of the two parties' economic policies remarkably similar. That's bad news for Americans.
In a new piece for The Unpopulist, Rachel Kleinfeld reminds us that until recently it was relatively straightforward to categorize economic and political systems. Economically, they ranged from left-wing to right-wing, while politically, they varied from authoritarian to democratic. Most American businesses could easily stake out their position. They generally favored right-leaning economic policies—relatively free markets—which included business-friendly regulations and management-centric approaches.
American businesses didn't have to worry much about where the country fell on the authoritarian versus democratic spectrum. While cronyism was always a problem, democratic values remained front and center. That was good for businesses since, as Kleinfeld notes, they have tended to prosper "most under classically liberal democratic systems that upheld the rule of law and inalienable rights—including property rights."
The recent emergence of right-wing populism has disrupted this traditional classification. Kleinfeld writes that today, "even supposedly right-wing populists exploit distrust, pessimism, and anger to make the case that government should wield a heavy—and often retaliatory—hand in markets." She is right. Let's examine a few examples where a shift on the right means they now share traditionally left-wing positions on these issues.
Both the populist right and left are protectionist when it comes to trade. While the right advocates for protectionism to support national security, preserve manufacturing, and maintain national sovereignty, the left supports tariffs and other trade restraints to protect workers' rights, prevent exploitation in developing countries, and reduce environmental impact. Both sides, if for different reasons, favor trade barriers and are skeptical of free-trade agreements. The best evidence is that President Joe Biden has retained most of former President Donald Trump's tariffs.
Similarly, under the misguided excuse of strengthening our economy, both sides now practice an industrial policy that dispenses massive subsidies, tax credits, and other government-granted corporate privileges. For instance, the Biden administration's $52 billion in federal tax breaks and subsidies through the CHIPS Act to prop up the semiconductor industry, including reports of $40 billion—77 percent of the funds—benefiting giant companies like Intel, GlobalFoundries, Samsung, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., was passed in a bipartisan way.
Utterly inconsistently, both sides also express serious distrust in mega-corporations. The New Right often views large corporations as part of a "global elite" disconnected from the average citizen and influencing government policies for its own benefit. Meanwhile, the left criticizes these entities for their alleged role in increasing income inequality, opposing workers' rights and degrading the environment.
As a result, despite throwing money at big businesses with one hand, both sides are bogging down corporations—especially the ones that successfully earn a lot of customers—with the other hand, stacking up regulations, or even threatening to break them up with antitrust cases.
Both the New Right and the left reject talks of fiscal discipline. No side wants to reform entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security even though these programs are becoming insolvent. Both groups support expensive, often excessive, and politically popular redistribution to families, including rich ones, in the form of paid leave programs, child care subsidies, or expanded child tax credits.
Another area where the populist right is becoming indistinguishable from the left is support for unions. Traditionally, the right has viewed unions skeptically as helping some workers only by harming others. The New Right, influenced by a focus on the working class, has recently embraced unions as a means of furthering workers' rights and raising wages.
This shift bodes poorly for the economy, as populism has a track record of producing results opposite what their proponents promise. As Kleinfeld put it, "When economists Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick, and Christoph Trebesch studied populist leaders from 1900 to 2020, they found that…after 15 years, a country led by a populist would have a GDP 10% lower than one governed by a non-populist leader" and unfortunately, "modern populists often bask in electoral support."
While many Americans and commentators are distracted by the apparent political polarization, a significant realignment of sorts is happening among populists. If it solidifies its power, it will be bad news for America's economy, as well as for our liberties.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM.
The post On Economic Issues, the Populist Right and Left Share a Lot of Common Ground appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Another year, another chance to bang your head against the wall, with good reason—and with Reason. Here are 10 incidents from 2023 that will alarm everyone who supports the free-range kids movement.
Unspecified danger in Aisle 4: The University of Michigan surveyed parents of children ages 9–11 and found that half wouldn't even let their kids go to another aisle at the store without them. Letting them out of sight for even a few moments seemed unthinkably dangerous.
Generation Unease-Z: "Gen Z perceives more dangers in life than previous generations." That was the finding of a study presented at the 2023 Society for Risk Analysis conference. (What danger lurks in the next aisle?)
Potty crashers: Students in several Oklahoma elementary and middle schools are now required to sit with their parents at all times during high school football games. In one district, the kids must also have an adult take them to the bathroom. No word on whether they're allowed to self-wipe.
D.C.'s one-child policy: One child per swing, that is. A playground sign in suburban D.C. listed 22 rules, including these: Children must swing in an "upright position," and there is to be no "loitering" on the slide. As for the jungle gym, kids must not "skip rings or rungs." Adult supervision required.
Not required? Fun.
Eek! A disproportionate reaction: Meanwhile, to the north, the town of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, shut down one of its playgrounds after a health hazard was discovered on the premises. The hazard? A mouse. No word on whether it was chasing a cat and wielding a mallet.
Sex panic: After a 5-year-old pulled down a 3-year-old's pants in Poncha Springs, Colorado, two preschool workers were criminally charged for not reporting the incident quickly enough. In court, a defense attorney told the judge: "We are here because one preschooler pulled down another preschooler's pants."
More sex panic: Sociologist Emily Horowitz's 2023 book, From Rage to Reason, chronicles what's wrong with the sex offense registry, including the case of an 18-year-old who had consensual sex with a 16-year-old. After the 18-year-old landed on the registry, it was almost impossible for him to find a job—but finally, he obtained work in an office. A judge then sentenced him to six years in prison for working too close to children. (The office was near a school.)
Blame mom: Before Connecticut mom of five and part-time Uber driver Tabitha Frank left for her shift, she called her children's father to come help her daughter, age 12, babysit. He said he would be right over, but then he fell asleep. While Frank was away, her 2-year-old accidentally fell out of a window and tragically died. The authorities decided that Frank hadn't suffered enough and charged her with manslaughter.
Cops and donuts: Two suburban Connecticut parents let their kids, ages 7 and 9, walk to Dunkin' Donuts. Police spotted the children and charged the parents with risk of injury to a minor. A few days later, they dropped the charges. But child protective services picked up the case and insisted the mom go to therapy. Who's the crazy one?
How about just a tardy slip? A Chicago mom who was late to pick up her children from school four times last year got a letter saying she was under investigation by the Department of Children and Family Services. "My daughter rushed to the car and she's like, 'Mommy DCFS came to the school, and the lady made it sound like we weren't going to come home with you today,'" said the mother. In Chicago's Cook County, 60 percent of black kids are the subject of a child protective services investigation.
But it's not all bad: There were many positive developments to celebrate this year as well. In 2023, four states passed "Reasonable Childhood Independence" laws: Virginia, Montana, Connecticut, and Illinois. These laws say that "neglect" occurs when parents put their children in serious, obvious danger—not anytime they take their eyes off them.
These states join Utah, Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado in becoming "Free-Range Parenting" states. With the help of Let Grow, the nonprofit I helm, the bills almost always have bipartisan sponsors, and they passed unanimously in four states.
In 2024, we're hoping to prevail in Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, Georgia, and the biggest kahuna of all: California. If you'd like to get involved, please visit LetGrow.org. And in the meantime, happy, criminal-charges-free holidays to all!
The post 10 Stories That Drove Free-Range Parents Crazy in 2023 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the years following extended school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, evidence has only grown that American schoolchildren have suffered tremendous learning losses from months spent in online learning. Test scores—and school attendance rates—are still far below pre-pandemic levels.
Over the past year, increasing evidence has emerged of just how badly school closures damaged American schoolchildren. Here's what we learned in 2023.
1. Online learning was linked to lower test scores.
According to a study published in June, students who spent more time in online learning were more likely to fail state standardized tests. The study, published in American Economic Review: Insights, examined the results of 11 state tests given to children in grades 3–8. The study found that between 2019 and 2021, pass rates saw substantial declines. On average, pass rates declined 6.8 percentage points for English language arts and 12.8 percentage points for math.
However, in-person learning significantly cushioned the decline. "Offering fully in-person learning, rather than fully virtual learning, reduced pass rate losses by approximately 13 percentage points in math and approximately 8 percentage points in," wrote the study's authors.
2. Half of American students are now performing below grade level.
In May, a report from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) cited a survey that found that, on average, American public schools reported that 49 percent of their students were below grade level in at least one subject area in the beginning of the 2022–23 school year. Before pandemic school closures, schools said that 36 percent of their students were behind on average. The declines hit elementary and middle school students hardest, with schools reporting 14- and 15-point increases in the percentage of students behind a grade level respectively. In contrast, high schools reported only a 9 percent increase in struggling students.
3. School closures accelerated a decline for 13-year-olds.
In June, the NCES released new test data indicating that school closures steepened an already existing educational decline among 13-year-olds. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress long-term trend (LTT) test, performance among American 13-year-olds dipped to the lowest point in decades. declines Reading scores were brought to their lowest point since 1975 and math scores to their lowest point since 1990. Student performance had already been modestly declining since 2012. The pandemic appeared to rapidly increase this negative trend.
"The 'green shoots' of academic recovery that we had hoped to see have not materialized," NCES Commissioner Peggy G. Carr said press release in June. "There are signs of risk for a generation of learners in the data we are releasing today and have released over the past year."
4. Thousands of students still haven't returned to classrooms.
Well after most pandemic-era school closures had ended, thousands of American schoolchildren were still "missing" from classrooms—meaning they weren't enrolled in local public schools but hadn't moved to another school district, enrolled in a private school, or began homeschooling. A shocking 230,000 kids were still missing from schools in fall 2021, according to a February data analysis of 21 states. In December, additional data analysis from 22 states found that 50,000 kids were still absent a year later in fall 2022.
5. Learning loss is a global trend.
Results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, released in December, show that the United States is far from the only nation whose students have suffered devastating educational declines following the COVID pandemic. In fact, among comparable countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), American students actually performed fairly well.
The test measured 15-year-olds' reading and math skills. And while U.S. math scores still dipped a dramatic 13 points on the test, the average decline among OECD countries was 17 points. And—in contrast with national data suggesting large declines in reading—American students' reading scores declined a single point, while the OECD average dropped 9 points.
The post 2023 Brought More Evidence That Pandemic School Closures Damaged Students appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this season of giving, I'll donate to the Doe Fund, a charity that helps drug abusers and ex-cons find purpose in life through work.
Doe's approach doesn't include many handouts. It's mostly about encouraging people to work.
"Work works!" they say.
It does.
Most Doe Fund workers don't go back to jail.
I'll also donate to Student Sponsor Partners (SSP), a nonprofit that gives scholarships to kids from low-income families so they can escape bad public schools. SSP sends them to Catholic schools.
I'm not Catholic, but I donate because government-run schools are often so bad that Catholic schools do better at half the cost. Thanks to SSP, thousands of kids escape poverty.
Yet some on the left say giving time and money to charity is a mistake. Their trust in government leads them to think that government programs are much better at lifting people out of poverty.
"Charity can distract from permanent solutions," claims an article in the Harvard Political Review. "Time, effort and funding that are funneled into charitable acts could be redirected to actual solutions spearheaded by the government, which has the resources to implement concrete change."
Yikes!
Yes, government has "resources," all of which are taken from taxpayers by force. "Concrete" is fitting because government's "solutions" are rigid and immovable.
But as far as promoting change that's actually useful, government has a terrible track record.
Before President Lyndon Johnson launched his "war on poverty," Americans were lifting themselves out of poverty. Every year, the poverty rate dropped.
When welfare checks began, progress continued for about seven years. But then progress stopped! Progress stopped even as America spent $27 trillion on its "war."
What happened?
Government handouts changed people's thinking. They taught millions of Americans: You are entitled to a check.
No longer was it individuals' responsibility to help families, neighbors, and ourselves; now it was clearly government's job.
The result is that people became dependent on handouts. Government rarely teaches people to be self-sufficient; handouts encourage you to be helpless.
Welfare created something never seen before in America: a near-permanent "underclass."
Welfare told parents: don't get married; you'll lose benefits. Don't work; your check will be reduced. Above all, make sure the father isn't home when a welfare worker comes. If he is, your check may be reduced or eliminated.
This changed incentives that motivated parents for generations. The result has been ruinous for millions of children.
Charities aren't perfect, but they are much more efficient and effective than clumsy government.
Charities have the freedom to be selective. They can help people who truly need aid, but also refuse charity to people who need "a kick in the butt." Government's one-size-fits-all rules prohibit that.
Charity is not guaranteed forever. People don't know how long they can expect to receive assistance. They have an incentive to become self-sufficient.
In addition, while charities actually give most of their money to the needy, government doesn't. America's constantly growing welfare workforce today is so bloated that 70 percent of welfare money now goes to the bureaucrats!
As usual, big government is the problem rather than a solution.
Americans are generous. Most of us donate to charities, many of which will provide more permanent help to the needy than government ever will.
Ideally, America would shrink government and lower taxes so more of us would have money to spend how we want. For most, that means giving to those in need.
To help people, we need more rich people.
If only there was a system that made people richer.
Oh, right! There is—capitalism!
Over the past 30 years, more than a billion people climbed out of extreme poverty, thanks to free markets.
As capitalism makes us richer, we each have more opportunity to help others in need.
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The post Here's Why Charity Is Better at Solving Problems Than Government appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As the festive season approaches, with its twinkling lights and merry carols, the item topping my Christmas wish list is fiscal responsibility from Congress and the administration. If this sounds like an economist conflating policy with goodwill, remember this: In a world where holiday wishes usually lean toward "stuff"—gadgets, games, and glittering jewels—my wish would bring long-term prosperity, stability, and cheer far beyond the fleeting joy of unwrapping presents.
Here are two small steps Congress could take to jumpstart the fiscal stability process that are uncontroversial and bipartisan (or at least they should be).
However, before I begin, I'll remind you why we shouldn't let Congress fool us into believing fiscal responsibility is impossible. In the last four years, public debt has increased by 53 percent thanks to the massive expansion during the COVID-19 emergency. Huge gains are possible simply by eliminating temporary programs that were created.
As much as people enjoy the illusion of free money handed out by Uncle Sam, it's been unmasked by inflation. Would it be terrible to go back to where we were before the pandemic, when the economy and wages were growing, and most Americans liked that direction?
The first step involves curtailing emergency spending loopholes. Emergency spending is intended for unforeseen, urgent expenditures arising from natural disasters, economic crises, or other unexpected serious situations. It's typically exempt from ordinary budgetary constraints and processes. The idea is for governments to respond quickly without the delay of standard budgetary procedures.
Unfortunately, the emergency spending label has long been abused. Regular, predictable expenditures are often labelled as "emergencies" to bypass normal budgetary controls and scrutiny. This ability to spend without much oversight is awfully convenient for politicians and, as a result, makes emergency spending a significant driver of government debt. In a new study of the issue, Romina Bocca and Dominik Lett of the Cato Institute write: "Congress has designated $12 trillion in inflation-adjusted emergency and related cap-exempt spending over the last three decades. That's 43 percent of the current public debt without including interest costs."
There's no way this much spending is based on unforeseen emergencies. Congress can give our children, who (as always) will probably foot the bill, quite the gift by deciding now to finally take on emergency spending reform. That would involve more transparency, stricter criteria about what constitutes an emergency, and better integration of emergency spending into the overall fiscal framework to ensure that such funds are used effectively and responsibly.
The second step is to tackle the staggering issue of improper payments made by the federal government, which soared to $236 billion in 2023. A new paper by Matt Dickerson at the Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC) for America notes that this number represents a 5.42 percent improper rate. This adds up to more than the combined total funding of several major government departments, even surpassing the $185 billion provided for the U.S. Army in the same year.
Since 2015, improper payments have increased by $100 billion. Over the last 20 years, the federal government reported a total of at least $2.4 trillion in improper payments. Considering less than 5 percent of improper payments were underpayments, and that the federal government barely even tries to recover overpayments, stopping this trend would make a big difference in reducing budget deficits.
I think we can all agree that improper payments that grow year after year are symptomatic of the sloppiness with which the government manages taxpayers' hard-earned money. Putting an end to this particularly unacceptable spending should be a no-brainer that transcends bipartisan politics.
Over at the Heritage Foundation, Rachel Greszler rightfully notes that legislators "must verify that government payments are valid, hold bad administrators accountable, and minimize Americans' reliance on federal programs." She is correct that reducing the reliance on programs that experience the largest amounts of improper payments, either as a share of the program (Earned Income Tax Credit) or in absolute dollars (Medicaid), is essential. But also, bureaucrats themselves should be held accountable for their mistakes.
These small changes won't fix everything. Only a reform of entitlement programs would do that. And embracing fiscal responsibility might not bring the immediate thrill of unwrapping a new toy or gadget—especially for our kids. However, its benefits would endure. Changes could signal a commitment to a more stable and prosperous future not just for ourselves, but for generations to come. This Christmas, let's hang our stockings with a hope for fiscal sanity, a gift that truly would keep on giving.
COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM.
The post All I Want for Christmas Is for Congress To Exercise Fiscal Restraint appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A Mississippi 10-year-old has been sentenced to three months' probation for urinating behind his mother's car. But the boy's mother is refusing to sign his probation agreement, citing the stringency of the agreement's terms.
"It's just a regular probation. I thought it was something informed for a juvenile. But it's the same terms an adult criminal would have," Carlos Moore, the family's attorney, told the Associated Press on Tuesday. "We cannot in good conscience accept a probation agreement that treats a 10-year-old child as a criminal."
In August, third-grader Quantavious Eason was seen urinating behind his mother's car while she went inside an attorney's office. Senatobia, Mississippi, police saw Quantavious, arrested him, and took him to a local police station. According to the boy's mother, Latonya Eason, her son was even placed inside a jail cell, despite posing no threat to the officers.
Quantavious was charged with "child in need of supervision," and a youth court judge sentenced him last week to three months of probation, as well as a two-page report on late basketball player Kobe Bryant.
According to the A.P., the terms of Quantavious' probation resembled those given to adults—including that he submit to drug tests at his probation officer's discretion and a ban on the boy possessing any weapons. The probation agreement also placed a strict 8 p.m. curfew on the boy, one that would apply despite the upcoming Christmas holiday.
According to Moore, the prosecution threatened to upgrade the charge against Quantavious to disorderly conduct if his family attempted to take the case to a formal trial. As a result, Latonya Eason initially suggested that she would sign the agreement.
"We are not going to appeal. He will not have a criminal record, this is probation. And he is a fan of Kobe Bryant, so he doesn't mind writing the two-page report," Moore told NBC last week. "But, still, the principle of it—he should not have to do anything. He should be enjoying his Christmas holiday like the other kids."
But on Tuesday, Moore announced that Latonya Eason wouldn't sign the probation agreement after reading it in full and that he had filed a motion to dismiss the charge against Quantavious.
"The terms proposed are not in the best interest of our client, and we will take all necessary steps to challenge them," Moore told the A.P.
While it is unclear whether the case against Quantavious will be dismissed, what's certain is that police never should have arrested a 10-year-old for something as minor as public urination in the first place. The fact that police—and prosecutors—responded so aggressively to a completely nonviolent child has led Moore to suggest that racial bias has played a role in the boy's case.
"He did what any reasonable person would do: He urinated next to the car behind the door—not exposing himself to anyone," Moore told NBC last week. "He would not have been arrested, prosecuted or sentenced if he was any other color, race, besides Black."
"I want to make sure this doesn't happen again," Latonya Eason added. "No matter the color or who you are, no child should have to go through that."
The post 10-Year-Old Kid Offered Probation for Peeing Behind His Mom's Car appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>According to a new analysis from the Associated Press, 50,000 children were still estimated to be "missing" from American classrooms in fall 2022—two years after the COVID-19 pandemic caused school enrollment numbers to plummet.
While the number actually indicates an improvement in school attendance—the A.P. found that an estimated 230,000 children were missing in fall 2021—it also shows that thousands of children have nonetheless experienced multiyear disruptions to their educations following COVID-era school closures.
Following the wave of school closures that began with the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020, as many as 3 million schoolchildren went "missing" from school—meaning that they weren't enrolled in their local public school but hadn't switched to another school district, enrolled in private school, or started homeschooling either.
While most of these children soon returned, a significant minority stayed absent from classrooms. In February, research from the A.P. and Stanford researchers found that during the 2021–22 school year, 230,000 children were still out of school across 21 states and the District of Columbia. When the A.P. examined data from pre-COVID years, they found virtually no children were missing.
On Tuesday, the A.P. reported that an updated analysis found 50,000 children still missing from classrooms across 22 states and D.C. as of fall 2022. While the numbers signal that the vast majority of once-missing children have returned to classrooms, graduated, or formally dropped out of school, a persistent cohort of children absent long-term continues.
According to the A.P., while exact causes are difficult to pinpoint, bureaucratic hurdles could be a major factor holding children back from returning to the classroom. Many school districts have stringent policies of unenrolling children after long absences, while others require onerous paperwork proving a child's residency within the district or complicated medical requirements.
In Atlanta, for example, parents must provide eight separate documents to enroll their children in public schools, including a "complicated certificate evaluating a child's dental health, vision, hearing and nutrition," according to the A.P.
One mother of a seventh-grader with autism told the A.P. that she tried to enroll her son in their local public school as soon as the pandemic closures ended. However, she didn't have reliable transportation and said she couldn't find a nearby appointment to get him the required immunizations, causing her son to miss five months of school.
"He wasn't in school, and no one cared," she told the A.P.
This report joins the large body of evidence showing permanent damage to many American schoolchildren following extended COVID school closures. While the children who have returned to school show devastating learning losses, those who remain absent surely have even deeper deficits.
The post Millions of Kids Left Classrooms During the Pandemic. New Data Show 50,000 Hadn't Returned 2 Years Later. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A juvenile court judge in Mississippi has sentenced 10-year-old Quantavious Eason to three months probation for urinating in public. Eason must also write an essay on Kobe Bryant. Sentobia police officers saw Eason urinating next to his mother's car while she was inside a lawyer's office with a "no public restroom" sign. The officers then arrested him and took him to jail. Shortly after the arrest, Sentobia Police Chief Richard Chandler said the arrest "violated our written policy and went against our prior training on how to deal with these situations." Chandler added that one of the officers was no longer employed at the department, though he did not say whether that officer had been fired or quit. He said the other officer would be disciplined, though he didn't specify what that would involve.
The post Brickbat: Urine Trouble appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A Tennessee youth detention center has been skirting a state law prohibiting solitary confinement for minors by classifying solitary lockups as "voluntary"—even when youth have said they spent days locked alone in a cell.
An investigation from ProPublica and Nashville Public Radio published last month found that the Richard L. Bean Juvenile Service Center, a youth lockup near Knoxville, was violating a 2021 Tennessee law that banned solitary confinement for minors.
While state law provides an exception to the ban on solitary confinement in cases where youth request to be secluded for a "voluntary time-out" that they can leave at will, several youths told ProPublica that the facility has a practice of keeping kids locked up alone even after they had asked to leave—with some staying secluded for days.
"You can't come in and out — like, the door's locked," one teenager, identified by Tyler, his middle name, told ProPublica.
However, state officials have denied any wrongdoing at the Bean Center. Following the release of ProPublica's investigation into the center, the Tennessee Department of Children's Services released a statement claiming that "since March of 2022, DCS licensing staff have observed a significant and consistent improvement in the Bean Center's quality of documentation," adding that "in October of 2022 no deficiencies regarding seclusion practices were found."
But in an update published last week, ProPublica says that there is evidence of illegal solitary confinement incorrectly classified as "voluntary" in the center in early 2023.
According to ProPublica, during the first three months of this year, the center placed children in "voluntary" seclusion over 1,000 times—a number made even more shocking considering that the facility only housed about 30 youth at a time. In a comparable period during 2022, the center had one-third of the number of voluntary lockups.
Further, Tyler told ProPublica that during the summer, the center began locking up youth in a cell block called the "brown pod" as punishment. Tyler said that children held in the Bean Center had been requesting brief voluntary seclusion to skip school or sleep. In retaliation, kids were sent to the brown pod and locked up for days.
The Bean Center "made it where they move you to brown and you're in there for like the whole day," Tyler told ProPublica. "People who would ask to go on lock up would still be locked up for like two or three days before they'd come back." A second teenager interviewed by ProPublica, Francisco, confirmed that he was held in solitary for a day after asking for brief seclusion.
Superintendent Richard L. Bean "decided that he was mad that everybody was taking voluntaries because school wasn't happening," Francisco told ProPublica. "He just was like: 'All right, then everybody's going to brown for a day. And if you don't go to school no more, you go to brown for the whole day, to the next day.'"
Shockingly, Bean himself has admitted that he is locking youth in seclusion for days at a time as a form of punishment—something that directly violates Tennessee law.
"What I started doing is put them in seclusion until the next morning, and then they want to go to school," Bean told ProPublica. "And so that's working pretty good."
Despite state officials' claims, unlawful solitary confinement for youth held in the Bean Center seems far from over. And Bean himself seems confident that his policies can stay in place.
"If I got in trouble for it," he told ProPublica in November. "I believe I could talk to whoever got me in trouble and get out of it."
The post A Tennessee Youth Detention Center Has Been Illegally Throwing Kids in Solitary Confinement appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry says it will take trillions of dollars to "solve" climate change. Then he says, "There is not enough money in any country in the world to actually solve this problem."
Kerry has little understanding of money or how it's created. He's a multimillionaire because he married a rich woman. Now he wants to take more of your money to pretend to affect climate change.
Bjorn Lomborg points out that there are better things society should spend money on.
Lomborg acknowledges that a warmer climate brings problems. "As temperatures get higher, sea water, like everything else, expands. So we're going to maybe see three feet of sea level rise. Then they say, 'So everybody who lives within three feet of sea level, they'll have to move!' Well, no. If you actually look at what people do, they built dikes and so they don't have to move."
People in Holland did that years ago. A third of the Netherlands is below sea level. In some areas, it's 22 feet below. Yet the country thrives. That's the way to deal with climate change: adjust to it.
"Fewer people are going to get flooded every year, despite the fact that you have much higher sea level rise. The total cost for Holland over the last half-century is about $10 billion," says Lomborg. "Not nothing, but very little for an advanced economy over 50 years."
For saying things like that, Lomborg is labeled "the devil."
"The problem here is unmitigated scaremongering," he replies. "A new survey shows that 60 percent of all people in rich countries now believe it's likely or very likely that unmitigated climate change will lead to the end of mankind. This is what you get when you have constant fearmongering in the media."
Some people now say they will not have children because they're convinced that climate change will destroy the world. Lomborg points out how counterproductive that would be: "We need your kids to make sure the future is better."
He acknowledges that climate warming will kill people.
"As temperatures go up, we're likely to see more people die from heat. That's absolutely true. You hear this all the time. But what is underreported is the fact that nine times as many people die from cold…. As temperatures go up, you're going to see fewer people die from cold. Over the last 20 years, because of temperature rises, we have seen about 116,000 more people die from heat. But 283,000 fewer people die from cold."
That's rarely reported in the news.
When the media doesn't fret over deaths from heat, they grab at other possible threats.
CNN claims, "Climate Change is Fueling Extremism."
The BBC says, "A Shifting Climate is Catalysing Infectious Disease."
U.S. News and World Report says, "Climate Change will Harm Children's Mental Health."
Lomborg replies, "It's very, very easy to make this argument that everything is caused by climate change if you don't have the full picture."
He points out that we rarely hear about positive effects of climate change, like global greening.
"That's good! We get more green stuff on the planet. My argument is not that climate change is great or overall positive. It's simply that, just like every other thing, it has pluses and minuses…. Only reporting on the minuses, and only emphasizing worst-case outcomes, is not a good way to inform people."
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]]>Back in 2017, the families of children in some of California's worst-performing public schools sued the state for failing to teach low-income black and Hispanic children how to read. This led to a legal settlement in which the state's 75 worst-performing elementary schools agreed to invest in evidence-based reading instruction—that is, in training teachers to use techniques, such as phonics, for which there is strong evidence that they work.
According to a new working paper from two Stanford researchers, the extra training helped. Students' reading scores improved when compared to students from other poorly performing schools. The score increases were roughly as valuable as an additional 25 percent of a school year.
Considerable research shows that children learn to read best by using phonics—essentially, by "sounding out" words they don't know. Unfortunately, many schools over the past several decades have eschewed phonics in favor of methods like "three-cueing," which encourages children to guess words they don't know using context clues, not the actual letters in a word.
Even with these gains, most of the students in these schools are still struggling. At the end of the study, two-thirds of them still failed to meet state reading standards.
"I wouldn't call the results super large," Princeton sociologist Jennifer Jennings told The Hechinger Report, an education news site. "I would call them cost-effective"
Small though these results are, they are much larger than those prompted by most other interventions. The paper notes that the change had a "larger effect size than almost 90 percent of educational interventions serving more than 2,000 students."
This change was funded by the settlement—the training costs came to about $1,000 per student—but it's not hard to imagine how similar results could be met without a big funding increase. School funding tends to have a very weak relationship with school quality. This isn't because money doesn't matter; it's that many schools waste funds on things like additional non-instructional staff and steep teacher benefits. (In 36 states, schools with higher poverty rates already receive more funding per pupil than schools with higher-income student bodies.)
Retraining teachers is likely well within the budgets of many poorly performing schools—as long as administrators choose to devote their resources to a proven method.
The post How Some of California's Worst Schools Got Better at Teaching Reading appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>President Joe Biden's administration is currently considering new regulations that will deny middle-class and upper-middle-class Americans crucial child care services, specifically hampering their ability to welcome au pairs into their families. Biden has proposed further regulating the federal au pair program, which will disproportionately burden highly skilled working mothers, maybe even to the point of driving more of them out of the workforce.
For me, this issue is personal. Like millions of families in the summer of 2020, my family faced a childcare crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The daycare our two young boys attended, aged one and three at the time, closed its doors, and our temporary nanny found another job. Fortunately, my wife and I were both healthy and able to work from home. But caring for two young children while working proved challenging.
We tried to find a solution and re-enrolled our boys in daycare, but it closed down for days at a time due to COVID cases. As a result, my wife and I had to take turns working and taking care of the children. I'd work during the morning and early afternoon, she'd work in the late afternoon and night. It was unsustainable.
Desperate, we finally considered hiring an au pair, a step we had never seriously considered before. The idea of having a stranger live with us seemed off-putting. We were not used to having help at home. We associated such arrangements with the super-rich who could afford butlers, maids, and private jets. But the pandemic left us no choice and convinced us to take the plunge.
We are so glad we did.
We contacted an au pair agency and began interviewing au pairs within days. Due to COVID-related border closures enacted by the Trump administration, new au pairs weren't coming to the United States, but those already here could switch families. After multiple interviews and in-person meetings, we decided we wanted to hire Neevoliah, who was originally from South Africa and had been with another family in San Francisco. She joined our family in early fall 2020.
I stayed home with the kids while my wife went to the airport to pick up Neevoliah. Out of nervousness, I paced back and forth before they got home. What if we didn't get along? What if she was messy? What if she was terrible with children or, God forbid, irresponsible? What if the kids hated her or my wife and I couldn't stand her? What if it was just too weird to have a stranger live in our home? I had visions of conflict: passive-aggressive fights over the washing machine, yelling about the dishes, and having to fire her.
But none of those things happened. Neevoliah was nice, pleasant, and responsible. It took about 20 minutes for us to get used to her living in our house. She joined our family, shared meals with us every day, and hung out with us on the weekends. We baked together, went to the store as a family, and shared our cultures. During the day, she watched the kids and took them all over the neighborhood to play. My wife and I could work, and the kids were safe and entertained.
My kids love her, called her "Nee," and had both a friend in her and another adult figure to set an example, discipline them, and guide them.
Having an au pair was not like having an employee living in our house, it was like having a cousin or a niece living with us. Neither my wife nor I expected to feel that bond with our au pair and our kids found somebody else who loved and cared for them.
Hiring an au pair was the second-best decision we've made regarding our children (the best was having them). But the Biden administration's proposed regulatory changes could end this program for us and thousands of other middle-class families. According to a new rule just released, the administration is proposing that wages be broadly determined by state minimum wage laws and calibrated upward based on an arbitrary tier system instead of the federal minimum wage, reducing the number of work hours, creating more complicated reporting schemes for hours worked and other requirements, and increasing the amount families must spend on education for au pairs. In short, every rule the Biden administration proposes will make it more expensive for families to hire au pairs and result in many fewer of them coming to the United States.
These changes would make it financially difficult for us and impossible for thousands of other Americans to continue hosting au pairs. In Virginia, where my family and I live, this regulation would increase the weekly wage we pay by 78.5 percent. Instead of hiring an au pair for another year, we may have to stop using the program. The fallout from a recent court ruling in Massachusetts bears this out.
In December 2019, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled that Massachusetts' high minimum wage applied to au pairs—a previously excluded category of workers. Beginning on January 1, 2020, the weekly wage for au pairs increased by 170 percent including a minor deduction for supplying free room and board. Predictably, the number of new au pairs moving to Massachusetts collapsed as middle-class families were priced out.
The number of new au pairs arriving in Massachusetts in 2022 was 68.1 percent below 2019—the year before the state's minimum wage applied to au pairs. At the same time, the number of new au pairs arriving in states unaffected by the court's ruling rose 4.4 percent. It was as if Massachusetts' minimum wage created a permanent semi-closed border around Massachusetts that locked out au pairs.
Now, the Biden administration is considering regulations that will do the same thing nationwide—denying middle-class American families, au pairs, and, particularly, my family the ability to utilize au pair services. If the U.S. sees any effect similar to what happened in Massachusetts, it could be catastrophic for working mothers—especially in blue states with higher minimum wages.
The government started the au pair program to advance public diplomacy by increasing understanding and cultural exchange between Americans and foreigners. Indeed, one of the justifications for the new regulation is to maintain "position cultural immersion experiences." But the downside of insisting on higher state and local minimum wages adjusted upward by a federal tier is that many fewer au pairs will be employed in the United States. That undermines the stated purpose of the program.
When Neevoliah was still with us, we welcomed our third child to our family—a beautiful baby girl. Neevoliah loved our daughter immediately and their bond was tight—she took the best photos of her. Neevoliah had to leave a year after she joined our family. Since, we've had a few other au pairs and even managed to replicate that first experience again. We still talk with Nee even though she's back in South Africa. Our kids FaceTime with her and, when they're not talking with her, they talk about her like a member of the family because she is one.
Regulating the au pair program out of existence would materially and financially harm families like mine. Our childcare situation would worsen, our youngest kids would have to go to daycare part of the day, and my wife (who works from home) would be burdened with even more responsibilities when I'm at the office. But the worst loss is the bond and emotional connection that we'd be prevented from forming with new au pairs—and the sadness that tens of thousands of other American families wouldn't be able to discover it for themselves.
The post Don't Kill the Au Pair Program appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In 2010, Purdue Pharma replaced the original version of OxyContin, an extended-release oxycodone pill, with a reformulated product that was much harder to crush for snorting or injection. The idea was to deter nonmedical use, and the hope was that the reformulation would reduce addiction and opioid-related deaths. That is not how things worked out.
The reformulation of OxyContin was instead associated with an increase in deaths involving illicit opioids and, ultimately, an overall increase in fatal drug overdoses. Researchers identified that pattern by looking at the relationship between pre-2010 rates of OxyContin misuse, as measured by surveys, and subsequent overdose trends. They found that death rates rose fastest in states where reformulation would have had the biggest impact. A new study by RAND Corporation senior economist David Powell extends those findings by showing that the reformulation of OxyContin also was associated with rising suicides among children and teenagers.
The root cause of such perverse effects was the substitution that occurred after the old version of OxyContin was retired. Nonmedical users turned to black-market alternatives that were more dangerous because their potency was highly variable and unpredictable—a hazard that was compounded by the emergence of illicit fentanyl as a heroin booster and substitute. The fallout from the reformulation of OxyContin is one example of a broader tendency: Interventions aimed at reducing the harm caused by substance abuse frequently have the opposite effect.
From 1988 to 2010, Powell notes in the journal Demography, the suicide rate among 10-to-17-year-olds fell by 36 percent. That drop was "followed by eight consecutive years of increases—resulting in an 83% increase in child suicide rates." Based on interstate differences in nonmedical use of OxyContin prior to 2010, Powell estimates that "the reformulation of OxyContin can explain 49% of the rise in child suicides."
Since "the evidence suggests that children's illicit opioid use did not increase," Powell says, it looks like "the illicit opioid crisis engendered higher suicide propensities by increasing suicidal risk factors for children," such as child neglect and "alter[ed] household living arrangements." He notes a prior study that found "states more
affected by reformulation experienced faster growth in rates of child physical abuse
and neglect starting in 2011." And he suggests the suicide rate may also have been boosted by "parental death and incarceration" associated with the shift from legally produced pharmaceuticals to illicit drugs.
"Areas more impacted by the transition to illicit opioids due to higher rates of previous OxyContin misuse showed sharper growth in child suicide rates," Powell said in a press release. "The results are consistent with the growth in illicit opioid use among the adult population generating worsening conditions for children by increasing rates of child neglect."
This study is one of several documenting the unintended effects of OxyContin's reformulation. In a 2021 American Journal of Health Economics article, Powell and University of Southern California economist Rosalie Liccardo Pacula noted that the intervention was immediately followed by an increase in heroin-related deaths, a trend that was especially pronounced in states with relatively high pre-2010 rates of OxyContin misuse. In subsequent years, they found, "reformulation stimulated illicit drug markets to grow and evolve," ultimately resulting in more fentanyl-related deaths.
"More exposed areas experienced disproportionate increases in fatal overdoses involving synthetic opioids (fentanyl) and nonopioid substances like cocaine, suggesting that these new epidemics are related to the same factors driving the rise in heroin deaths," Powell and Pacula wrote. "Instead of just short-term substitution from prescription opioid to heroin overdoses, the transition to illicit markets spurred by reformulation led to growth in the overall overdose rate to unprecedented levels."
The eventual impact of that transition was dramatic. "We estimate that reformulation increased the 2013 overdose rate by 1.7 overdoses per 100,000 people, a 14 percent increase relative to the counterfactual," Powell and Pacula wrote. "However, by 2017, our estimates imply that reformulation increased overdose rates by over 11.6 overdoses per 100,000 people, more than a 100 percent increase relative to our counterfactual."
What about the expectation that reformulating OxyContin would ultimately reduce opioid abuse? "The potential benefits of reformulation include reductions in the propensity of beginning to misuse opioids," Powell and Pacula noted. "However, there is little empirical evidence that such reductions are having a meaningful impact on overdose rates. The relationship between exposure to reformulation and overdose rates has strengthened over time. In addition, initial substance use treatment admissions are also increasing faster in states more exposed to reformulation, suggesting that initiation rates are still not declining in response."
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]]>A Miami hotel has agreed to pay a $5,000 fine to settle a legal battle with the state of Florida over a drag performance that state regulators claimed was "not appropriate to display to children" and a violation of Florida law.
Last December, the Miami Hyatt Regency hosted A Drag Queen Christmas, a touring drag show with former RuPaul's Drag Race contestant Nina West. Minors were allowed to attend the event, provided that they were accompanied by an adult. According to CBS News Miami, the event included instances of "simulated sexual acts and showing prosthetic female breasts on stage."
The event came under fire from state regulators in March, who claimed that the show violated a Florida provision barring "lascivious exhibition" in front of children under 16. In retaliation for these alleged violations, the state attempted to revoke the hotel's liquor license.
Following the incident, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the "Protection of Children Act" into law in May, which banned minors from attending "any show, exhibition, or other presentation in front of a live audience which, in whole or in part, depicts or simulates nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement," including "lewd exposure of prosthetic or imitation genitals or breasts." Those in violation of the law could have their business licenses revoked or removed, a far harsher punishment than the attempted removal of a liquor license.
"Florida is proud to lead the way in standing up for our children," DeSantis said in a press release at the time. "As the world goes mad, Florida represents a refuge of sanity and a citadel of normalcy."
However, enforcement of the law was halted in June, when a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against the statute.
"Florida state law, presently and independently of the instant statutory scheme, permits any minor to attend an R-rated film at a movie theater if accompanied by a parent or guardian," Judge Gregory A. Presnell of the Middle District of Florida ruled. "Such R-Rated films routinely convey content at least as objectionable as that covered by" the law.
"Moreover, existing obscenity laws provide Defendant with the necessary authority to protect children from any constitutionally unprotected obscene exhibitions or shows," Presnell wrote. "The harm to Plaintiff clearly outweighs any purported evils not covered by Florida law and a preliminary injunction would not be adverse to the public interest."
While Florida's punitive new law was stopped, the state continued its original attempt to punish the hotel for hosting the drag performance. Ultimately, a settlement was reached this week in which the hotel agreed to pay a $5,000 fine and bar minors from future events with actual or simulated sexual activity. However, records show that "the settlement did not find any violations of administrative or criminal laws," according to the Miami Herald.
The Florida state government's actions in cracking down on drag shows are part of a national trend attacking the performances. Several states, including Tennesee and Montana, have attempted to ban outright a wide range of drag performances, while others have enacted vague laws targeting performances with sexual content in an effort to curb drag shows.
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]]>Part of raising children is knowing when to step back. That comes at different times depending on kids' choices. For us, the transition was marked by our son's arrival at the University of Arizona as a freshman. Anthony would have new responsibilities, and we needed to surrender those tasks to him. If we haven't prepared our son for adulthood over 18 years, we screwed up.
"Mom, I'll do it," Anthony said when his mother started putting away toiletries in his dorm room. He snapped at her again when she looked ready to organize his desk.
"He needs to assert his independence and not be a momma's boy," I told her later. "Especially in front of roommates." One of them arrived with just a buddy to help. I assumed he was toward the tail end of a large family, and his folks were done.
I did intervene when it was clear that Anthony intended to use the floor for storage. On a run to Target to buy the towels he forgot, I grabbed a cheap flat-packed shelving unit.
"Did Mom put you up to this?"
"No, it was my idea. About a week from now, you'll realize you need shelves, and then you'll have to haul this boat anchor here on the bus."
He shrugged his shoulders, then broke out his Leatherman tool and began driving in screws.
That was it. My wife and I took our son for a goodbye breakfast and went home. After that, it was a matter of not doing things. We refrained from compulsive calling, limited texting (except for requested videos of the dog), and didn't offer unsolicited advice. We listened when he reached out to tell us about watching the precociously anti-woke 1994 movie PCU with buddies as an antidote to orientation, the interesting girl who (bummer) wandered off with another guy, and the calendar he set up to track assignments across his classes.
We did help him figure out how to pay for class materials. Overpriced apps have joined textbooks on the must-have list since my day, and the academic sales platforms rival departments of motor vehicles for user friendliness.
Not all parents are so restrained. Modern life features Facebook pages for all sorts of groups, including parents of college students. Being a glutton for punishment, or maybe just entertainment, I joined.
"Are there any dining places open after 8pm?" one parent asked. "My son said there aren't and keeps ordering Uber Eats!! They need to stay open later for kids that eat late."
As often happens, this started a war between the unrepentant helicopter crowd urging that "we all complain" in order to force the college to do something and free-rangers who expect adults to figure out how to work around posted meal hours. My wife and I are in the latter group. Having eaten in one cafeteria and compared the offerings to memories of mystery meat, I'm impressed the food was identifiable. They even offer takeout cartons for students with tricky class schedules and those who insist on eating during nightclub hours.
The parents' Facebook group proves that many empty nesters could use a hobby, a job, or even a straitjacket. OK, perhaps I stirred the pot a bit—it's good fun. But it's important to move on and not hover over kids who we, hopefully, prepared to take care of themselves.
Through homeschooling, martial arts, part-time employment, and encouraging independence, we've made the effort to raise our son for adulthood. So far, Anthony is enjoying calculus, chemistry, and engineering classes. He's fed himself easily, joined a club, hit the gym, and bought a bus ticket to visit friends in another city. He's fine and tells us that most students are thriving. Most families, it seems, take seriously the job of preparing kids for launch.
I think my wife and I prepared ourselves too. I'm taking on more writing assignments and hitting the outdoors with the dog. I'm trying woodcarving (tell me if you want a spoon made from mesquite). My wife fills the hours with a cottage bakeshop (hence my outdoor time) and the demands of her employer's new electronic medical records system, which operates at DMV-level efficiency.
We'll see our kid in person soon enough. Unlike a few less independent classmates, Anthony is content with the occasional phone call; he'll hold off on visiting home until a major holiday. I think we can call this a successful launch.
The post How To Prepare Your College-Bound Kids for a Successful Launch appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It's fashionable to claim that the free market ideas of Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman have failed the country, and that it's time for new policies. Campaigning in 2020, Joe Biden declared that "Milton Friedman isn't running the show anymore." More recently, New York Times columnist David Leonhardt noted that people like Friedman promised that the free market "would bring prosperity for all. It has not."
This is nonsense. For one thing, I wish we lived in a world fashioned more fully by Friedman's ideas. Sadly, while his insights have indeed influenced some U.S. economic policies, particularly during former President Ronald Reagan's administration, the extent of their implementation has been quite limited.
Friedman, for example, would be appalled that federal debt is now roughly the size of annual gross domestic product (GDP), having grown like a kudzu vine since registering at around 25 percent in the early 1980s. Taxes remain lower since the Reagan revolution took place, but our incomes are often taxed multiple times. Nearly every aspect of our lives is regulated by various agencies—local, state, and national. And—no surprise—cronyism is alive and well.
Still, Friedman's critics are right to treat him as a monumental figure. His ideas helped make trade freer and school choice mainstream. His clarity in contrasting markets with government opened many eyes to the benefits of capitalism. We are immeasurably better off for it. If you don't believe me, look at my native France, where Friedman has had almost no influence.
The French economy is weighed down by one of the heaviest tax levels among wealthy democratic nations, with regressive taxes and social security contributions representing a significant portion of GDP. This tax haul funds France's extensive web of social welfare programs, including health care, education, and pensions.
French regulation is also comprehensive, covering many aspects of employment, business operations, and environmental protection. The labor code is particularly onerous. Additionally, its government plays a direct role in the economy, with a significant number of partially state-owned enterprises and interventionist policies intended to safeguard employment and prioritize equality and social cohesion.
Let's see how they're doing.
U.S. GDP per capita is now $76,398; France's is $40,964. The U.S. unemployment rate is 3.9 percent. As of the second quarter of 2023, France's was 7.2 percent—a relatively low figure for a country that often faces double-digit rates even outside of recession periods. We shouldn't be surprised at any of this, considering France's stringent rules on working hours, dismissals, and employee benefits, which make it difficult for businesses to respond to market conditions. The country is slathered with reasons not to hire people.
Youth unemployment is a significant indicator of how well an economy integrates its young population into the job market. As of May 2023, France's youth unemployment rate was 17.2 percent, with historical data showing an average of 20.6 percent from 1983 until 2023. In November of 2012, it peaked at a Great Depression–like level of 28.20 percent. This is the result of well-documented structural issues distorting France's labor market. Rigid labor laws dissuade employers especially from hiring young, inexperienced workers.
In contrast, in October 2023, the U.S. youth unemployment rate was 8.9 percent. These are not just numbers; they have real implications for young individuals' economic prospects, skills development, and long-term career trajectories. As such, American youth, for all its complaints, is much better off than its French peers are.
Some claim that this is a fair price to pay for France's social cohesion and equity. I don't see it. Over the last decade, France has experienced significant social unrest rooted in economic, political, and social issues. One of the most notable periods of unrest was the yellow vest movement that began in 2018. It was sparked by the announcement of another increase in the fuel tax on top of hundreds of other taxes. It quickly morphed into a broader movement against economic inequality and the cost of living. The protests were marked by widespread demonstrations, some of which turned violent.
France is also renowned for its labor strikes, which often bring millions of protesters onto the streets. The frequency and intensity of these protests underscore the challenges that France faces in balancing economic reforms with social cohesion.
The U.S. isn't perfect. Its social cohesion could certainly be better. But given a choice between an economic system that has been somewhat influenced by Friedman and one that's barely been influenced by him at all, my choice is clear. I made it when I left France and became an American.
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