Tag Archives: crime

Leader turnover due to organisation performance is underestimated

Berry and Fowler (2021) “Leadership or luck? Randomization inference for leader effects in politics, business, and sports” in Science Advances propose a method they call RIFLE for testing the null hypothesis that leaders have no effect on organisation performance. The method is robust to serial correlation in outcomes and leaders, but not to endogenous leader turnover, as Berry and Fowler honestly point out. The endogeneity is that the organisation’s performance influences the probability that the leader is replaced (economic growth causes voters to keep a politician in office, losing games causes a team to replace its coach).

To test whether such endogeneity is a significant problem for their results, Berry and Fowler regress the turnover probability on various measures of organisational performance. They find small effects, but this underestimates the endogeneity problem, because Berry and Fowler use linear regression, forcing the effect of performance on turnover to be monotone and linear.

If leader turnover is increased by both success (get a better job elsewhere if the organisation performs well, so quit voluntarily) and failure (fired for the organisation’s bad performance), then the relationship between turnover and performance is U-shaped. Average leaders keep their jobs, bad and good ones transition elsewhere. This is related to the Peter Principle that an employee is promoted to her or his level of incompetence. A linear regression finds a near-zero effect of performance on turnover in this case even if the true effect is large. How close the regression coefficient is to zero depends on how symmetric the effects of good and bad performance on leader transition are, not how large these effects are.

The problem for the RIFLE method of Berry and Fowler is that the small apparent effect of organisation performance on leader turnover from OLS regression misses the endogeneity in leader transitions. Such endogeneity biases RIFLE, as Berry and Fowler admit in their paper.

The endogeneity may explain why Berry and Fowler find stronger leader effects in sports (coaches in various US sports) than in business (CEOs) and politics (mayors, governors, heads of government). A sports coach may experience more asymmetry in the transition probabilities for good and bad performance than a politician. For example, if the teams fire coaches after bad performance much more frequently than poach coaches from well-performing competing teams, then the effect of performance on turnover is close to monotone: bad performance causes firing. OLS discovers this monotone effect. On the other hand, if politicians move with equal likelihood after exceptionally good and bad performance of the administrative units they lead, then linear regression finds no effect of performance on turnover. This misses the bias in RIFLE, which without the bias might show a large leader effect in politics also.

The unreasonably large effect of governors on crime (the governor effect explains 18-20% of the variation in both property and violent crime) and the difference between the zero effect of mayors on crime and the large effect of governors that Berry and Fowler find makes me suspect something is wrong with that particular analysis in their paper. In a checks-and-balances system, the governor should not have that large of influence on the state’s crime. A mayor works more closely with the local police, so would be expected to have more influence on crime.

Volunteer parking wardens may benefit the environment

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Reducing the utility from car use and ownership motivates substitution towards other forms of transportation, which benefits both the environment and public health. One way to cut the convenience of driving is enforcing parking regulations, because drivers have to park further from their destination when the option of illegal parking becomes less attractive. Parking at a greater distance also makes people walk more – a minor health benefit.

Enforcing speed limits and other traffic rules that slow cars down increases the time cost of driving. This may reduce wear and tear on vehicles and roads, which benefits the environment.

An implication of is that people who want to reduce global warming or improve public health should become volunteer parking wardens and traffic police by reporting parking violations, speeding and dangerous driving (preferably with photo or video evidence from phones or dashboard cameras).

A possible countervailing effect of the enforcement of parking rules occurs if the illegally parked cars obstruct the movement of other cars enough to motivate some people to switch away from driving. Then stopping the parking violations may open the road up enough to encourage more use of cars, with an overall negative environmental and health effect. Similarly, if reckless drivers make the roads unsafe enough to reduce others’ car use, then making traffic civil again may attract risk-averse people back to driving. However, in most developed countries, illegal parking and the ignoring of rules of the road is not severe enough to deter driving significantly, so better enforcement is likely to reduce car use.

Slowing traffic down may increase congestion and emissions per kilometre travelled if there is little substitution away from driving. Again, in developed countries public transit and cycling are usually feasible options. Of course, some people always find excuses not to use these, and in remote rural areas public transit may indeed be economically unreasonable and distances may really be too great for bikes. Electric bikes are then an option. These increase the range of travel with less pollution and congestion than cars.

Pill testing, placebos and illegal market efficiency

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Testing illegal drugs for the active ingredient differs from testing for poisonous adulterants. Both tests have opposite effects on drug use before and after buying. After the pill has been purchased, testing reduces use, because sometimes the drug fails the test, whether correctly or not, and is discarded. Before purchase, the option to test for and avoid adulterated or inactive drugs reduces the buyer’s risk, thus increases use.

In the longer term, testing benefits the dealers of purer, more predictable and less toxic drugs, putting some suppliers of fakes out of business. Pill predictability reduces overdoses – a health effect similar to lower toxicity. If old drugs can be tested, but new ones not, then buyers experiment less and the incentive to invent new narcotics decreases.

The avoidance of poisonous adulterants is good for public health, but purer pills not necessarily so. Inactive drugs undermine consumer confidence in the illegal market, reducing use, prices and casual purchases. Trust then requires a long-running relationship with the seller, which has multiple benefits. It motivates dealers to care about the health of their loyal customers, simplifies policing and gives researchers and social workers better long-term access to the at-risk population.

One claimed benefit of party drugs is that they reduce anxiety, increase the user’s confidence and social interaction, thus improving mental health. Evidence from psychiatric medicines suggests that many such benefits are due to the placebo effect. Users are quite inaccurate in estimating the purity of ingested drugs, and factors like price and place of purchase strongly influence their perception of purity. The price per pure gram is negatively related to purity in some markets, further supporting the placebo interpretation. If inactive pills boost confidence similarly to illegal drugs, then there is a clear case for flooding the market with harmless placebos. The availability of pill tests for the active ingredient reduces this opportunity to make the illegal market inefficient. Tests for toxic adulterants, however, actually favour harmless placebos.

App for police reports

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Australia would benefit from an app or website for reporting parking and traffic violations (Singapore has such a website) and rating drivers. It would make police work easier, and the greater probability of getting caught would deter illegal parking and dangerous driving. To prevent frivolous reports from overloading the system, people should make the report under their own name, which requires proving their identity to get an account on the app. Proving identity online is easy in countries with a national ID system like Estonia, but may require more red tape in Australia.
The app should allow uploading proof of the violation, for example a photo of an illegally parked vehicle or a dashcam video of someone’s dangerous driving. There should also be an option of uploading a signed statutory declaration describing the crime. In summary, the app should make it as easy as possible to prosecute a violator, so it should follow legal procedure and standards of evidence as much as possible.
The current system of calling the police non-emergency number to report small infringements is slow and cumbersome. For example if the answerer of the call does not understand the address, or the problem does not have a clear address (e.g. a car parked in the middle of a nature park), then it takes time and frustration to explain the place at which the law is being broken. An app could easily solve the address issue by allowing automatic location tracking. The current system of reporting by phone also has no way for a caller to provide evidence that someone is breaking the law.
Privacy laws in Australia are sometimes unreasonably strict. Even emergency services cannot see the location of the mobile phone from which they receive a call (https://www.acma.gov.au/theACMA/emergency-call-service-faq-i-acma) Such draconian privacy laws may prevent the uploading of proofs of violations, e.g. photos of illegally parked vehicles. Statutory declarations testifying to someone’s lawbreaking probably do not infringe on the lawbreaker’s privacy, so do not bring legal trouble to the person reporting the violation. Uploading declarations could be used as a first step to make the app useful for prosecution.
The app could also allow positive feedback, i.e. praising polite drivers. If this feedback is verifiable, because the users of the app have proved their identity, then a person applying for a driving job (bus, taxi, lorry) could use a good rating on the app to prove being a safe driver. This would be a selling point in the job interview.
Philosophically, policing anything means that the community agrees to impose punishments for certain behaviours. This sanctioning may be delegated to specialised workers like police officers, judges, prison wardens. The app for reporting violations could be used for distributed policing instead, meaning that anyone in the community can use the app to check the past feedback on others who they interact with. Then the community members can respond in the interaction according to the feedback they see, for example avoid trusting someone with who has been repeatedly reported for lawbreaking. Such a verifiable feedback system then rewards good past behaviour and punishes the breaking of social norms.

Camouflaged encryption

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Many governments (US, Australia, all dictatorships) want to make end-to-end encryption illegal and prevent IT firms from providing it. The open-source community can create their own encryption software, but the creators and users of this could be punished as well. The reasoning of the governments for banning encryption is that criminals and terrorists use it. However, the same reasoning applies to knives, guns and cars, which are used much more directly to harm people and yet are strangely excluded from the ban. This contradiction makes me doubt the motives of these governments.
The obvious solution to a ban on some software is to camouflage it and its products. The code for the encryption software could be hidden in a seemingly nonexistent part of computer memory or blended in one log file among many, perhaps encrypted as well.
The encrypted messages passing through the internet should not look like encrypted messages, but would be embedded in innocuous-looking files. A simple way is to change the colour of some pixels in a self-made photo or video file, with the locations of the relevant pixels being known to the sender and receiver, but secret from others. The colours of the pixels can encode the data. Someone intercepting the picture or video would have to spend significant resources analysing it to find whether some pixels are of an unusual colour, especially if the starting image is riotously colourful and confusing. Publicly available images are not useful, because comparing the message-image with the original reveals the changed pixels.
A more sophisticated version of this idea has already been done by http://camouflage.unfiction.com/ A similar idea is to hide one’s browsing history in random websurfing (http://www.qqqtech.com/about.html), but this only hides the relative frequencies of websites visited, not the fact of visiting a site on a government watchlist that most people don’t visit.

Signalling by encouraging good decisionmaking

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Con artists pressure people into quick decisions. Marketing mentions that the offer is for a limited time only, so buy now, no time to read the small print. Date rapists try to get victims drunk or drugged. In all these cases, the goal is to prevent careful reasoning about what is happening and the decisions to be made. Also to prevent the victim from consulting others. Being pressured, confused or bullied while deciding is a danger sign, so one way for honest sellers to distinguish themselves is by encouraging good decisionmaking. Giving people time, referring them to neutral sources of info, asking them to think things over before deciding are all ways to make decisions more accurate.
More accurate decisions distinguish between good and bad deals better, which benefits honest sellers and harms con artists. This differential effect of information on good and bad types enables signalling by precision of information, where good types want to reveal as much as possible and bad types want to obfuscate. Information unravelling results – the best type has an incentive to reveal itself, then the second best type, then the third best etc. By not revealing, one is pooled with the average of the remaining types. In the end, the only type who does not strictly prefer to reveal itself is the worst type.