The data on misconduct and corruption among border patrol agents is especially murky, but we have some evidence available to us. Alex Nowrasteh is author of "Border Patrol Termination Rates," a new policy analysis from the Cato Institute.
Join me as I talk with Dr. Laura Carlson about theology and politics in the Carolingian Empire in her article "Adoption, Adaptation, and Authority: The Use of Isidore of Seville in the Opus Caroli." Join the conversation on the Claytemple Forum.
Birgitta Jónsdóttir has an unusual background for a politician: she’s a poet and a free speech activist. Since 2013, she’s been a member of the Icelandic parliament representing the anti-establishment Pirate Party. Jónsdóttir talks to Mike about what it’s like to work within a fledgling political party and why she’s disappointed with what Wikileaks has become.
In the Spiel, how not to respond to a terrorist attack.
On October 11, 2017, the Supreme Court heard argument in Jesner v. Arab Bank, PLC, a case regarding the validity of suits against corporate entities under the Alien Tort Statute. Between 2004 and 2010, survivors of several terrorist attacks in the Middle East (or family members or estate representatives of the victims) filed lawsuits in federal district court in New York against Arab Bank, PLC, an international bank headquartered in Jordan. Plaintiffs alleged that Arab Bank had financed and facilitated the attacks in question, and they sought redress under, among other laws, the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). The district court ultimately dismissed those ATS claims based on the 2010 decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., (“Kiobel I”), which concluded that ATS claims could not be brought against corporations, because the law of nations did not recognize corporate liability. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the Second Circuit’s judgment in Kiobel (“Kiobel II”) but for a different reason: the failure to rebut a presumption against extraterritorial application of the ATS to actions that took place in the territory of a sovereign other than the United States. The district court in Jesner acknowledged this, but concluded that nothing in the Supreme Court’s decision actually contravened the Second Circuit’s original rationale regarding corporate liability, which therefore remained the law applicable to district courts within the Second Circuit. On appeal, the Second Circuit affirmed the district court, agreeing that Kiobel II did not overrule Kiobel I on the issue of corporate liability under the ATS. Other federal circuit courts of appeals, however, have read Kiobel II differently with respect to the possibility of corporate liability, creating a split with the Second Circuit--and the Supreme Court has now granted certiorari to address whether the Alien Tort Statute categorically forecloses corporate liability. To discuss the case, we have Eugene Kontorovich, Professor of Law at Northwestern School of Law.
Is it just a low wage that conjures up the term when we talk about “crushing poverty”? Or is it really a host of other issues that likely accompany that lack of money? Economist Sabina Alkire has spent her career crafting the measures that demonstrate that latter proposition, work that with fellow economist James Foster resulted in what is known as the Alkire-Foster Method for determining level of poverty.
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Alkire – director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative -- explains to interviewer Dave Edmonds the need to have a consistent and reputable means of measuring poverty over time. This usually entails “a monetary measurement, either income or consumption,” she details, “and a person is deemed to be poor if they don’t have enough by some poverty line.”
But as noted above, this is only half the battle – or perhaps not even half.
“I’m not at all against income poverty level measures or consumption poverty measures, but it doesn’t tell the whole story,” Alkire explains (and notes that Foster is himself architect of some of those types of indices). “A person is also poor if they’re malnourished, and if their house is decaying and they don’t have a job and they’re not educated or their children are not attending school or if they’re victims of violence.”
What’s needed is “a more three-dimensional account,” even if that new method doesn’t perfectly correlate with traditional material measures. And so she and Foster, building on work by Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen, created method to derive the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index. That index does not include income but does look at living standards across 10 dimensions. If someone is considered ‘deprived’ in more than a third of those 10 dimensions, they are officially identified as poor.
Looking just at the globe’s 103 developing countries, Alkire says 1.45 billion people are “multidimensionally poor.” The mixed news, she adds, is that while levels of poverty are declining, the number of poor is increasing.
Knowing where people stand is important in a policy context, Alkire says, which makes having an “official permanent statistic” that will survive changes in government, and which is drawn from demographic and health surveys in public domain, important. So far, national-level multidimensional poverty indices have proven their worth in poverty alleviation efforts, with state level governors in Mexico, for example, vying to out-lower each other. (Alkire notes that national indices do vary from the global index due to regional variation: Bhutan uses a measure of a household’s distance from a road.)
In the long history of the ebb and flow of liberty, some examples stand out. Jim Otteson of Wake Forest University offered a few of those examples at Cato Club 200.
In less than thirty years, California’s Indian population fell from 150,000 to 30,000. In An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (Yale University Press, 2016), Benjamin Madley, Associate Professor of History at UCLA, argues that war or disease can’t explain this population drop. The state and federal government carried out genocide against California Indians between 1846 and 1873. Madley uncovers, in excruciating detail, how government officials created a killing machine that cost at least $1,700,000.
An American Genocide has won many awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History, the Raphael Lemkin Book Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide, the Charles Redd Phi Alpha Theta Award for the Best Book on the American West, the California Book Award’s Gold Medal for California, and the Heyday Books History Award. The book was also named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, an Indian Country Today Hot List book, and a Choice magazine Outstanding Academic Title. True West Magazine also named Madley the Best New Western Author of 2016.
