Black List Down

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Twenty-nine states have enacted statutes against blacklisting. Each and every one of them restrains employers from preventing former employees from being hired elsewhere. Each and every one of them owes its pedigree to anti-conspiracy jurisprudence. The economics are easy enough to understand: blacklists destroy the implicit wealth of targeted individuals, obliging them to accept lower wages at no substantial cost to the conspirators. If you're a regular reader, you should instantly pick up on the BATNA disparity tucked neatly away there. If you're an employer, workers are easy enough to replace (or so goes the legislative intuition), but if you're a worker, you could be completely barred from your profession. Yikes!

As you know, the Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint.

These 29 legislatures, in an uncommon fit of forward induction, have therefore been sharp enough to limit blacklisting bans to actual employers, and not to private citizens. Walter Sobchak is still at liberty to carefully write down the names of everyone who's offended him and publish it in the local paper. He might still be liable under defamation statutes, depending on what else he writes, but unless he's an employer, he won't trigger blacklist statutes.

The question I found myself asking yesterday after Popehat patiently and carefully explained all this to a #GamerGate activist is whether or not the moral intuition, if not the actual jurisprudence underpinning anti-blacklist statutes applies to privately-maintained lists. If I, a private citizen, create a public list of people who are heretical in mine eyes, and this list becomes extremely popular, perhaps even gaining a universal following among leaders of the industry I work in, isn't the effect to the people on the list exactly the same as if an employer had done it? Wouldn't I be just as complicit in ruining the career prospects of the people who've offended me?

A few possible differences:

1. Employers can maintain hidden blacklists, and there's no way to tell for sure whether or not the names on it constitute a protected class. Publicly visible blacklists kept by ordinary citizens are open to review and scrutiny.
2. Corporate blacklists can be used to sustain anti-competitive collusion. One of the solutions to a repeated PD game (at least on the margin) is to have a coordination mechanism. A blacklist can serve precisely this function. Put a name or two on there strategically to punish conspiracy defectors, and you raise the ex ante probability of sustainable cartel behavior. Private individuals have no incentive to dally in boardroom shenanigans.
3. My list is entirely opt-in. It's merely an offer. Acceptance of its elements must necessarily be voluntary. I am unable to withhold significant future commerce in the event that an employer crosses the picket line so to speak. I have precious little market power, in other words.

Perhaps you might add to this list. Perhaps not. Perhaps you'd quibble with the logic of the items in this list. I know I would. I'm not all that fond of the idea of protected classes, for example. Still, I am at no more liberty to influence the public jurisprudence than I am to influence the public taste for television programming. What I can do is attempt to parse the prevailing sentiment in an effort to predict what sort of legislative tomfoolery we might see rollin' down the pike.

On the one hand, social media does seem to be increasingly salient in employment selection/termination practices (Pax Dickinson, eg). On the other hand, it's dang hard to muster much public sympathy for the low-caste males that end up on mass Twitter block lists. What legislator would go to the mat for some douche cannon who takes preternatural glee in leveling vague (or sometimes very clear and targeted) rape and murder threats at women? My best guess? Privately-maintained block lists aren't likely to be non-euvoluntary enough to incite legislation unless and until someone starts a practically effective one (i.e. one that employers begin to honor) that actually targets people who are in an honest-to-Jim protected class.

No one would be stupid enough to do that though, right? 

Right?

h/t K.W. (Patrick maybe? Naw, Ken for sure. Like 90% sure it's Ken.) and Randi Harper.

Rational (Beauty) Expectations

Rational Expectations (RE) on a Post-It Note is a behavioral conjecture: people aren't systematically fooled. Folks can make honest mistakes given available evidence, but if you collect the random errors and average them, you arrive at the underlying Platonic Truth.

Mind you, when economists use RE as an analytical tool, they're making claims about economic variables (usually future prices), but the idea should extend well to anything with sufficient salience. If it's important enough to worry about, it's important enough to think clearly about.

The following video is evidence against everyday RE.



Photoshop (or even its predecessors, airbrushing, soft focus, lighting tricks et al) is no secret. The Internet-old "I can tell from the pixels" meme is laughably tired. Of course we all know that advertisers attempt to trick the eye, so we should be able to seamlessly ignore or discount the false evidence presented in print ads.

Right? Hello? Is this thing on?

It's "there ain't no way to hide your lyin' eyes", not "there ain't no way to digitally manipulate your lyin' eyes." Advertisers should be able to make entirely credible disclaimers that their altered photographs do not constitute fraud, since 1) everyone knows about Photoshop and 2) no explicit claims of "use our products to look like this" appear in beauty ads. It's up to the viewer to make the connection.

Is Photoshop coercive?

More interestingly, how the heck can it work? Not in the "lighten and smooth the skin, lift the breasts, tuck the tummy" sense, but how in the heck can ordinary folks fall for its obvious duplicity? Are the social tuning forks in our heads so easily warped that we set standards based on bs images in glossy magazines?

It sounds absurd to me when I think about it, but maybe that's just because my appearance occupies a relatively small sliver of my attention (as those of you who know me in person can attest). Perhaps if I identified more closely with beauty, I'd be singing a different tune.

But it's still unlikely that the refrain would include censorious intent. I'd prefer to encourage folks to be better Bayesians.

Cheerleading is not Euvoluntary?

Deadspin longform piece on NFL cheerleading. Prepare for BATNA disparity.

ATSRTWT

Evidently, NFL cheerleaders must conform to rather strict guidelines or lose the gig. And the effective hourly rates are straddling the minimum wage line (a point I find tendentious having been in the military where the effective hourly wage for round-the-clock duty days gets in kissing distance of single-digit percentages of the MW). For cheerleading, pro sports is vaguely akin to a monopsony buyer of labor, but only vaguely since you'd have a hard case that cheerleading skills are ever meant to be durable (few accredited universities have cheerleading majors). And the competition is certainly there:

For anyone fed up with constant pressure, scant pay for tons of work, and the requirement that you build your entire schedule around a seasonal part-time job, there's the omnipresent threat of being kicked off the team. "If you don't fall in line and suck it up," says the cheerleader, "there's someone else dumb enough that would replace you."

"Dumb enough". A curious accusation, this. This endeavor appears to be highly competitive, so do all these aspiring cheerleaders form a horde of ignorant bimbos? Maybe I've gotten more compassionate as I age, but I would strongly hesitate to cast aspersions like this. Before calling someone "dumb", I think I'd prefer to gather stronger evidence. Particularly since the women that tend to land gigs like these tend to use the money for university tuition. Though, to be fair, perhaps college attendance is not necessarily the indicator of intellectual quality it might be under other circumstances.

I predict that when it comes to generating a lot of public sympathy, this is a lead balloon. NFL cheerleaders are attractive young women with good career prospects. And as the last graf notes:

Mostly, they do it for Sundays. "The gameday experience—that's what keeps people coming back," says the former cheerleader, who even now gets wistful thinking about those moments on the sideline before kickoff, watching players hype themselves up, looking down the tunnel and seeing Ray Lewis doing his trademark dance. There's nothing quite like it.

In-kind compensation. The sort of in-kind compensation that is unavailable working for any other employer. Frankly, I'm sort of surprised the NFL doesn't charge cheerleaders to be on the field.

Credible Commentary

Brendan Nyhan, on Twitter: "Costly signals matter: Reporters should ask default truthers if they'll go long on US bonds in the case of a debt ceiling breach"

Is this true? For folks who believe that to be taken seriously, you need to put your money where your mouth is, then yes. Obviously. But these sorts of folks (myself included, I should point out) are also likely to be sympathetic to arguments that prostitution should be legal.

I think it's fair to say that this doesn't describe most people. I think most folks prefer to maintain a thick barrier between the marketplace for goods and the marketplace for ideas (indeed, many of these people loathe the term "marketplace of ideas"). Combining the two is offensive to people who see "bourgeois" as a four-letter word. Depending on who's listening, I'd say that having skin in the game could actually damage a person's credibility.

...Depending on who's listening. For abstruse government debt debates, I think Nyhan's spot on.