Astral Codex Ten

Dutch

37 min read

Dutch

Article

Dutch is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between November 25, 2021 and October 28, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Some sources note that they manage to beat the Dutch despite the latter country’s much higher human development index”; “superficially-similar Swiss, German, and Dutch models”; “the Dutch also have gay marriage and keep really good records”. It most often appears alongside California, Chicago, China.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: November 25, 2021
  • Last seen: October 28, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Links For November
November 25, 2021 · Original source
Boris Johnson (left) is 5’9, so the guy in the middle must be gigantic. Who is he? Looks like it’s Milo Djukanovic, President of Montenegro, who’s 6’6 (198 cm). Is he the tallest world leader? It seems like he’s tied with his colleague across the border, Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic. Why are Balkan leaders so tall? As usual, the answer is “genetics”. This article says: It has been noted that men from Herzegovina are taller on average than men in other places—the average male height is just over six feet...Putting all the data together, researchers concluded that the most likely cause of larger-than-average height of Herzegovinian men is lifestyle during the Paleolithic—men hunted large animals such as mammoth for survival—such a diet, heavy in protein, combined with small population densities, would have provided ideal conditions for height selection, resulting in increasingly taller men who passed the trait down through their I-M170 chromosome to future generations. Some sources note that they manage to beat the Dutch despite the latter country’s much higher human development index. The Dutch are probably tall through a combination of nature and nurture; Balkan people are tall through nature alone. 7: Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn’t need more ego boosts, but an idea he had a couple of years ago - using strings of bright lights to provide a better and brighter experience for Seasonal Affective Disorder sufferers than regular light boxes - spread from him to the rationalist community to the wider world, and has finally gotten tested in a formal study (see Acknowledgments section). Results seem vaguely positive: "SAD symptoms of both groups improved similarly and considerably...exploratory analyses indicate that a higher illuminance is associated with a larger symptom improvement in the BROAD light therapy group" 8: Percent of people who choose woke options on polls very tentatively and preliminarily seems to be going down post-Trump (h/t Richard Hanania). 9: Twitter conspiracy theories 10: Did you know: all those reconstructions of “how classical art would have looked with the original paint” are probably inaccurate. There is no reason to think the Greeks and Romans used garish technicolor hues on their statues; what evidence we have suggest they were good at shading, and the statues were probably colored very tastefully. 11: Complaints about how Karl Friston uses the term “Markov blanket” 12: Trevor Klee on the claim that cyclosporine patients don’t get dementia. Apparently there was a big study where basically nobody on the immunosuppressant cyclosporine ever got dementia, and there are some theoretical reasons why cyclosporine might prevent neurodegeneration. But another study found people on cyclosporine got dementia at the usual rate. I think in a situation like this you should have a really high prior on “the people who got the crazy result bungled their study somehow”, but I’m interested in hearing what other people think. 13: Also from Trevor: a history of fluvoxamine treatment for COVID. 14: To tide you over until the next book review contest, here is awanderingmind’s review of The Conquest Of Bread. 15: Claims: cnbc.com/2021/11/05/sam…\nft.com/content/dcb75a… (better article, but paywalled)","username":"moskov","name":"Dustin Moskovitz","profile_image_url":"","date":"Fri Nov 05 15:49:46 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":184,"like_count":1188,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{"url":"https://www.ft.com/content/dcb75a56-ca23-439c-96db-56483979bf34","image":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/80a58c96-c72f-4301-b571-aa9384f132bd_2400x1350.jpeg","title":"Subscribe to read | Financial Times","description":"News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication","domain":"ft.com"},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> 16: Big trial on Vitamin D for depression finds null result. Peter Attia tries to tear it apart here, but I am unconvinced, especially in the context of Vitamin D never working for any of the things people say it does besides the most boring aspects of bone health. 17: “California is actively considering the adoption of flawed and inequitable guidance on math curricula based on misleading data and inaccurate success metrics reported by San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD)...Based on our review of the data, we found misleading, unsupported, and cherry-picked assertions of success for the new math program. We noted that overall test scores are down and enrollments in UC-approved advanced math classes have dropped as well.” It looks like San Francisco is trying the good old “lower standards, then when more kids meet the standards, claim your school reform plan worked” trick again. 18: A new study claims that self-reported “Long COVID” symptoms are more associated with believing you’ve had COVID than with actually having it (as measured by serologic testing), which sounds like pretty strong evidence that it’s psychsomatic. Expert reactions are mixed-to-negative, although the only one of these that doesn’t sound like excuse-making is Dr. Rossman’s about the unreliability of the tests. I haven’t confirmed test reliability stats but Philippe Lemoine also thinks this is a plausible confounder. 19: Noahpinion: What If Xi Jinping Just Isn’t That Competent? I appreciated this for making me think, and for underlining the extent of the difference between the Deng/Jiang/Hu era and what Xi’s doing. I especially appreciated this line, which I’d never thought about before: Xi presided over the end of China’s hypergrowth. To some extent this is not his fault. No country can grow at 10% forever, and there were many structural forces pushing downward on China’s numbers — the end of the demographic dividend, the exhaustion of rural surplus labor (the Lewis Turning Point), the saturation of export markets, and so on. But China is also slowing down earlier than South Korea, Taiwan, or Japan did in their day. China’s per capita GDP (at PPP) is still only about 1/3 that of a developed country, so if they stop catching up at about half of developed-country levels, that will not be a great showing. A big lesson of the past twenty years has been “actually liberal democracy isn’t necessary to reach developed-country status”, so it would be quite the twist if it turned out you needed liberal democracy to reach developed-country status. This gets pretty close to the great mystery of why some less-developed countries “catch up” and others don’t; whatever happens in China is going to be a really useful data point. 20: Variations on the fable of The Frog And The Scorpion. 21: You’ve probably heard about the University of Austin, the new project by a bunch of wokeness-critical academics to start a new university that won’t cancel people or force conformity (New York Post article, Politico article - these were the two least “you need to be super-outraged about this right now” articles I could find). Tyler Cowen and Larry Summers are involved; Steven Pinker was supposed to be but left for unclear reasons. My thoughts, in no particular order: Even forgetting the political aspect, attempts to start new universities are always welcome.
Inline links: Milo Djukanovic, Aleksandar Vucic, This article, in a formal study, Richard Hanania, Twitter conspiracy theories, There is no reason to think, Complaints about, cyclosporine patients don’t get dementia, a history of fluvoxamine treatment for COVID, The Conquest Of Bread, Vitamin D for depression, here, is trying, A new study, Expert reactions, Philippe Lemoine also thinks, What If Xi Jinping Just Isn’t That Competent?, Lewis Turning Point, slowing down earlier, per capita GDP (at PPP), the great mystery, Variations on the fable of The Frog And The Scorpion, New York Post article, Politico article
Book Review: Which Country Has The World's Best Health Care?
January 19, 2022 · Original source
Emanuel hates having to give a clear answer to that question, but when confronted with the fact that he’s writing a book with that title and can’t really weasel out, he grudgingly admits that “the top tier would include Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Taiwan”.
4: Single Payer Channeled Through Private Insurance is typical of Germany and the Netherlands. I think this is kind of like how charter schools work in the US: the government pays 100% of your costs, but you get to choose which insurance company (out of various heavily-regulated and basically identical plans) to go with. Then the insurance company pays private doctors and hospitals as usual.
Single-payer implemented through private insurance - Germany and the Netherlands - comes out looking pretty good: these are 2 of the 4 countries Emanuel puts in his top tier. I’m confused here. The US has at least three major problems that Germany/Netherlands lack: nonuniversal coverage, high costs, and poor patient choice (ie you have to worry about “out of network” providers). I can see why single-payer eliminates the first: if the government buys coverage for everyone, of course it will be universal. But why does it eliminate the second two? Germany and the Netherlands have dozens of different insurance providers - why doesn’t that decrease bargaining power and raise costs? Why doesn’t it mean that sometimes they fail to reach an agreement with a hospital, and their patients can’t go there without facing “out-of-network” costs? I thought I understood the reasons why US health care doesn’t work, but Germany and the Netherlands seem to replicate its apparent disadvantages without running into the same problems. Why? Maybe I just don’t fully understand what “single-payer” means?
How Are The Gay Younger Brothers Doing?
October 04, 2023 · Original source
…suggesting that even the nonsignificant effect they found might have just been from small studies and a file drawer effect. So they’re claiming FBOE doesn’t exist, right? Actually, their paper is so long and dense I can’t figure out exactly what they’re claiming. It sort of looks like they think that, but when someone says so, they protest that: Blanchard & Skorska (2022) completely misconstrued our work by claiming that we wrote there is no evidence for the FBOE in men or women. This is not what we claim, neither in the present study, nor in the preprint. So what are they claiming? I’m not sure, but notice that their specification of the effect only demonstrates that older brothers do not cause homosexuality too much more than older sisters. If both types of older sibling caused homosexuality, that would match their findings, even if brothers caused it slightly more. And in fact, hot on their heels, a new study found exactly that! Ablaza, Kabatek, Perales, And 9,000,000 Dutch People To The Rescue Remember how Frisch and Hviid managed to look at two million Danes? Well, the Dutch also have gay marriage and keep really good records. Ablaza, Kabatek, and Perales were able to obtain and analyze the data from nine million of them. They do more advanced statistics than any of their predecessors and are able to report basically every parameter of interest with high confidence4. They find: On average, individuals who did not enter a same-sex union have 2.36 siblings. This number is split evenly between younger (μ=1.19) and older (μ=1.17) siblings. The average sibling sex ratio—that is, the number of brothers over the number of sisters—is 1.04 for both younger and older siblings. In contrast, individuals who entered a same-sex union have fewer siblings (μ=2.14) and a greater number of older (μ=1.23) than younger (μ=0.91) siblings. Further, the sex ratio of their older siblings is skewed towards brothers (μ=1.18). All of these differences are statistically significant . . . these patterns manifest among both men and women. These effects are potentially large: For example, 0.73% of men who are the youngest of five siblings entered a same sex union, compared to just 0.35% of men who are the eldest of five siblings . . . the share of men with four older brothers entering a same-sex union is 0.96%, more than twice the share among men with four older sisters (0.46%) Because of their advanced regression model, they’re able to tease apart family size effects from birth order and gender effects: Adding one younger sister to an existing sibship is associated with a 13.8% decrease in the probability of entering a same-sex union (OR = 0.87, p < 0.001)5; moving one place down the birth order while keeping the number of younger and older brothers fixed is associated with an 7.9% increase in the probability of entering a same-sex union (OR = 1.08, p < 0.001); and replacing one older sister by one older brother is associated with a 12.5% increase in the probability of entering a same-sex union (OR = 1.13, p < 0.001). Replacing one younger sister by one younger brother is associated with a 1.2% increase in the probability of entering a same-sex union (OR = 1.01), but this estimate is not statistically significant (p > 0.1). Also: To illustrate the combined effects of birth order and sibling sex, we use the model to predict and plot the probabilities of entering a same-sex union for individuals in all relevant permutations of two-person sibships (Figure 3). In this example, we focus on two-person sibships because they are the most common sibship type (35% of individuals) and because the corresponding number of permutations is fairly contained (n=8). Among men, the lowest predicted probability (PP) of entering a same-sex union is for those whose only sibling is a younger sister (PP = 0.55%), followed by those with a younger brother (PP = 0.56%), those with an older sister (PP = 0.61%) and, finally, those with an older brother (PP = 0.68%). The ordering is the same among women: those with a younger sister (PP = 0.757%), followed by those with a younger brother (PP = 0.764%), those with an older sister (PP = 0.81%), and those with an older brother (PP = 0.92%). The difference between the lowest and highest predicted probabilities is 0.12 percentage points (23.5%) for men, and 0.16 percentage points (21.2%) for women. How does this correspond to the findings of Frisch & Hviid, Blanchard & Bogaert, and and Vilsmeier et al? I can’t really square it with Frisch & Hviid. Even though the methodologies are similar (one investigating everyone in Denmark, the other everyone in the Netherlands), the first finds approximately no result, and the second a very clear result. But Ablaza et al have both a larger sample and better statistics, and they better match previous studies on the topic, so I’ll be siding with them. On the other hand, this beautifully synthesizes the seemingly-opposed results of Blanchard & Bogaert vs. Vilsmeier et al. The FBOE, rightly understood, is primarily an effect of older siblings in general, not just older brothers. However, older brothers exert a slightly stronger effect than older sisters, for both men and women. Blanchard and Bogaert were right to think something was going on with older siblings and homosexuality, and even right to highlight brothers in particular. But Vilsmeier et al were right to say they were wrong to discount older sisters, and that the “advantage” of older brothers over older sisters was so small they shouldn’t be sure it existed (although this much larger study can say more confidently that it does). What does this mean for the maternal immune system / H-Y antigen / NLGN4Y theory of the effect6? It’s definitely awkward: the classic version of the theory doesn’t predict that older sisters should have any effect, or that siblings should have an effect at all on turning later-born females lesbian. Proponents of the theory are trying to adjust, claiming that maybe women have some kind of related antigen. Blanchard and Lippa have already proposed (though not conducted) the experimental next step: see if women with daughters have higher NLGN4Y levels than women who have never had children at all. I would also feel more comfortable if somebody replicates Bogaert’s 2006 study finding this was definitely biological and it’s not just some boring social effect like guys with more brothers having more positive male role models and so being more likely to get attracted to men. Cremeiux Is Still Skeptical I’d like to end on a note of “so now finally everyone agrees that birth order effects on homosexuality are real”, but Statistics Twitter personality Cremieux Recueil (Twitter, Substack) doesn’t agree. He admits that the Dutch study is the best evidence we have so far, but worries that it’s not good enough: I don’t find these objections too convincing. Yes, gay marriage as an outcome omits most gays, but it’s still a bigger sample size than anyone else, and it seems less likely that married gays systematically differ from unmarried gays in their number of siblings for some reason (which doesn’t apply to married heterosexuals) than that they’re finding the same effect everyone else has found before them. Conclusion The fraternal birth order effect hypothesis has had a tough decade, but things are starting to look up. It’s been forced to abandon some of its key tenets (like an effect on male gays but not on female lesbians) and relax others (like older brothers having more of an effect than older sisters). In the process, its beautiful immunological mechanism has been cast into some doubt. But the core of the idea - that more older siblings = more gay - seems to stand. My predictions (to be evaluated whenever stronger evidence comes in): Sibling birth order effect on homosexuality is real: 85%
Inline links: Blanchard & Skorska (2022), obtain and analyze the data from nine million of them, 4, 5, 6, Blanchard and Lippa, Twitter, Substack, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!oh7O!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2f346572-af93-421f-a1ca-ba4f2a5fe3f2_586x701.png
Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
November 27, 2024 · Original source
Vollaard et al in the Netherlands find that a ten-strikes law decreased crime 25%; the average person affected had 31 past convictions and plausibly committed >250 crimes per year.
Inline links: Vollaard et al
So we expected Three Strikes to decrease crime by 80%, but in fact it decreased it by 0-7%. Why? Because California’s Three Strikes law was weaker than it sounds: it only applied to a small fraction of criminals with three convictions. Only a few of the most severe crimes (eg armed robberies) were considered “strikes”, and even then, there was a lot of leeway for lenient judges and prosecutors to downgrade charges. Even though ~80% of criminals had been arrested three times or more, only 1-4% of criminals arrested in California were punished under the Three Strikes law. Why can’t we have a real Three Strikes Law? For the same reason we saw in Sweden earlier. I can’t find any graphs of the US population broken down by number of past offenses, but we know that about 8% of Americans have at least one felony. Let’s say that about half of those have at least three felonies. That means a real Three Strikes law would require increasing the incarceration rate from its current 0.75% up to 4%, ie quintupling it. We’d need to build 6,000 new prisons and 10,000 new jails, locking up an additional 5-10 million people, and spending somewhere between $400 billion and $1 trillion per year (ie around the same as the entire military budget) on prison-related costs. This is light-years outside the Overton Window and I’ve never heard anyone seriously propose it. Still, it would decrease crime by 80%. Again, the lesson is that - despite power laws - small increases in incarceration cause small decreases in crime, and only very large increases in incarceration are capable of causing very large decreases in crime. Why Did A Ten Strikes Law In The Netherlands Massively Decrease Crime? Given the ambiguous results of three strikes in California, I was surprised to learn that a ten-strikes law in the Netherlands did reduce property crime by 25% (Volaard et al). In 2001, the Dutch government passed a law allowing longer sentences for criminals with at least ten previous offense who were not good targets for rehabilitation (eg rejected or had already failed drug treatment). The law allowed judges to increase the typical sentence for petty theft (2 months) to a longer sentence (2 years). A quasi-experimental study found that property crime, though not violent crime, decreased by 25%. It’s not surprising that violent crime didn’t go down since the law was almost entirely deployed against thieves. Vollaard found that the population affected was extremely criminal; they had an average of 31 past offenses, and on surveys they admitted to committing an average of 256 crimes per year (mostly shoplifting). Before the law was passed, they spent an average of four months per year in jail (probably 2 x 2 month sentences); afterwards, they spent two years in jail per crime. It’s hardly surprising that imprisoning these people decreased crime. So why didn’t the California law do the same? I think there are two reasons. First, Europe imprisons far fewer people than any US state. The incarceration rate in the Netherlands is only an eighth that of California. The pre-ten-strikes-law Dutch penalty for shoplifting was two months; the equivalent California penalty alternates between six and thirty-six months depending on which set of propositions won the last election. Vollaard found that the ten strikes law had diminishing returns: On average, we find the benefits of the policy to exceed the costs by a large margin. We find the benefits to go down rapidly with a more intensive use of the law, however. The marginal crime-reducing effect of convicting another prolific offender to an enhanced prison sentence declines by some 25% when going from the 25th to the 75th percentile in the rate of application of the law during 2001–7. The benefits of the policy remained higher than the costs, however, even for the cities which used the law most intensively. So I think it’s plausible that California was already much more punitive than the Netherlands even before the California Three Strikes Law was passed, and there were diminishing returns from becoming even more punitive than that. Second, the California law only applied to certain serious crimes (eg armed robbery). People don’t commit these as often as shoplifting. The average person affected by the Dutch law shoplifted 256 times per year. Even the most energetic criminal would struggle to commit 256 armed robberies per year, and they would probably get killed (or murder a victim) long before reaching that point. So petty theft is longer-tailed than serious felonies, and it’s easier to decrease the petty theft rate by imprisoning the few worst shoplifters compared to decreasing the armed robbery rate by imprisoning the few worst armed robbers. Why Can’t We Just Incarcerate Those 327 Shoplifters In New York City? This time we just suck. Remember, each of these shoplifters was arrested 20 times per year. So they can’t be going to prison in any substantial way. Even if they got a one-month sentence for each arrest, they’d run out of months to shoplift in after twelve! So the question here isn’t “why are prison sentences for shoplifting so short”, but rather “why can’t New York City incarcerate repeat shoplifters at all?” I’ll come back to this question later. What About El Salvador? They famously solved crime by more imprisonment - how? By doing a lot of it. I said above that we might be able to decrease US crime rates by 80% if we quintupled our incarceration rate. Between 2014 and today, El Salvador quadrupled their incarceration rate: (source) They now have by far the highest incarceration rate in the world, 2-3x that of America (which is itself the fifth highest, after various dictatorships). How did they afford this? Through a combination of lots of funding, not being too picky about human rights and prison conditions, and not being too picky about whether the people they imprison were guilty of any specific crime or just kind of gang-adjacent. As incarceration rate quadrupled, homicide went down by a factor of twenty: We previously predicted a similar increase in incarceration would lead to an 80% decrease in crime in the US, but El Salvador got a 95% decrease in crime. Why did they do so much better than our prediction? I think because they started with half our incarceration rate and ten times our murder rate. When you’re starting from someplace terrible, without any of the low-hanging fruit picked, it’s easy to make progress! I can’t find good statistics on other crimes like theft, but the crappy statistics I find say it hasn’t budged (1, 2). Why not? Either my statistics are bad, or the gangs that the government cracked down on weren’t in the theft business.4 Incapacitation Fine, so despite power laws there’s no way to easily solve crime just by imprisoning a small number of people. How much bang for the buck do we get by incapacitating criminals? You would think this would be easy to figure out: just determine how many crimes the marginal prisoner commits per year. Then that’s how many crimes incapacitation prevents per year. But although it’s easy to see how many times the marginal prisoner has been arrested, most crimes don’t result in arrest. How do you know how many crimes they really committed? Some bold scientists have tried asking them - giving prisoners surveys about their criminal histories - but obviously these should be greeted with heavy skepticism. The method criminologists have settled on is to wait for big shocks to incarceration - big enough to affect the general crime rate - then see how much the crime rate goes up or down. The best study here is probably Levitt 1996 (you may know Steven Levitt from Freakonomics). In the 1970s, US prisons were overcrowded. The ACLU argued the overcrowding was a rights violation - a form of “cruel and unusual punishment” - and sued a dozen states. They won all their lawsuits, and judges in all states said the government had to free prisoners until prison crowding returned to a non-cruel, usual level. So at a slightly different time in each state, many prisoners got released all at once. By examining the effects of this sudden release on the crime rate, we can determine how much crime the incarceration of those prisoners was preventing. Levitt does a lot of fancy statistics, and Roodman reanalyzes with even more fancy statistics, but the good news is they both agree and get numbers somewhat contrary to Roodman’s biases, which make me trust them more. Each year of imprisoning the type of prisoner who got released under the ACLU lawsuits prevented 6 property crimes and 1 violent crime. This suggests the average criminal commits ~7 crimes per year, which I think matches well with the data above showing that the median prisoner has 10 past arrests and some have 30+. Other studies on incapacitation, mostly taken from Roodman, that I trust less than Levitt: Owens (2009) investigated a Maryland law that caused some criminals to get released early. They found a crime increase corresponding to about 3 crimes per prisoner per year. This is lower than Levitt’s estimate of 7, but crime rates went down in general between Levitt’s study period (the 70s) and Owens’ (the 2000s), so they might both be right.
Inline links: 1, 4, 8% of Americans have at least one felony, Volaard et al, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9L-h!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F29a25928-8620-45d1-b677-34447be88ad6_778x528.png, source, fifth highest, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ww3Y!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F028e701c-5f95-436d-b1ff-15742274e221_2000x2000.png, 1, 2, 4, Levitt 1996
The cost of imprisonment to families and communities - for example, now the prisoner’s children are without a father, the prisoner’s family is without a son/brother/etc, the prisoner’s corner store is without a customer, etc. Although we can’t quantify these, pro-longer-sentencing people note that when you survey the poor minority communities most affected both by crime and by mass incarceration, they tend to say they want the government to be tougher on crime. This suggests that at least some of the unquantifiable benefits outweigh the unquantifiable costs. Even if we’re not going to swallow the result whole, I think these kinds of analyses help us understand what we’re really getting per extra incarceration-year. For about $30,000 - $120,000 in imprisonment costs, we’re getting four fewer shopliftings, two fewer car thefts, and a small decrease in violent crime. Long Prison Sentences Are Probably One Of The Least Cost-Effective Ways To Reduce Crime This paper estimates that an extra police officer prevents about 20 crimes per year. This is true prevention, not incapacitation (ie the officer’s presence deters criminals from acting, rather than catching them afterwards). We previously said an extra year of incarceration averts 7 crimes. But the 20 crimes from police and 7 crimes from incarceration aren’t directly comparable, because the 20 is reported crimes and the 7 is total crimes. Only about 40% of crimes are reported, so we expect that the police officer really prevents about 50 total crimes. A year in prison costs $60,000 (ignoring costs to the prisoner themselves). An extra police officer costs $150,000. So prison prevents one crime per $8,500 spent, and police prevent one crime per $3,000 spent. This looks even better once we adjust for the moral cost of prison: the cop is three times as cost-effective without locking someone in a cage for a year! So What Do We Do About Shoplifting In California? This post was somewhat motivated by an earlier guest post on California’s Proposition 36, which argued that lengthening prison sentences for shoplifters wasn’t the right tool to fight shoplifting. The comment section was pretty hostile to this thesis and refused to believe it. Now that we know more, let’s look at this question again. …and it’s not clear that anything we’ve learned bears on this question at all. We said before that 327 shoplifters in New York City were responsible for a third of the city’s petty theft, and that each of them gets arrested twenty times per year. A similar group of Dutch offenders shoplifted 256 times per year. Proposition 36 increased sentences for shoplifting from six months to three years. But it doesn’t seem like these shoplifters are getting six months or three years. It doesn’t seem like they’re even being arrested. If they are, they’re either being let off without penalty, or - at most - in jail for a few days. So for me, the interesting question isn’t “should jail sentences be short or long?”, but rather why we can’t punish repeat shoplifters at all, with short sentences or long sentences. I asked the comments section this question, and got some good responses from people with criminal justice experience: Graham (ex-cop) says: Police have limited time and resources, they they focus - individually and at the department level - on the priorities that the voters and elected officials set for them. When elected officials say “the punishment for crime X is a stern talking to” the police get the message: crime X is not important. That’s why we don’t use undercover sting operations to apprehend jaywalkers. That is what has happened with theft in California. Police are not - and should not - waste time hunting down and arresting thieves who will be immediately released, which is the current regimes. For some reason the author thinks police should commit time and resources to arresting people who will not even be booked into jail and/or will be immediately released. So apparently the police aren’t arresting these people because the attorneys aren’t punishing them. What do the attorneys have to say for themselves? Andrew Esposito (ex public defender) says: [Graham] doesn't actually know what he is talking about. Evidence on this topic shows pretty clearly that arresting someone for misdemeanor larceny and then letting them go actually does a good job of preventing them from shoplifting in the future. If the police are saying "what's the point of arresting because they'll just let them go" then they are severly mistaken. In addition, almost every state regime has escalating punishments based on records. This could look like a three strikes law (your third misdemeanor larceny conviction becomes a felony) or alternatively handled at sentencing, where a judge, when deciding what punishment is appropriate, chooses to give harsher sentences to those who have comitted the crime before. In either case, you still want to be arresting even first time offenders who will receive a slap on the wrist, because when you arrest them the second or third times they will no longer be wrist slapped, but locked up for increasingly long stints. In my own jurisidiction, first offense petit larcenies were handled with community service, second offense was a weekend in jail, third offense was 10 days in jail, and then after that you'd be looking at serious time on the order of months, and eventually years. It should be (possibly weak) evidence of the system working that the vast majority of the theft cases that came through our office were first time offenders, not career thieves. Once someone gets caught, arrested and has to go through a trial, it suddenly doesn't seem worth it to steal shirts from target, or a steak from Kroger. My personal take is you want a system where the chances of being caught are very high, but then the punishments are relatively modest (but high enough to make it not monetarily worth it to steal). And CJW says: I was a municipal prosecutor for 10 years, a county one for 17, and a public defender for 4 […] In municipal court what would happen is they get a ticket, some cop has to write up a VERY brief probable cause affidavit but I would guess it still took an hour for the paperwork, I spend 5 minutes reviewing it and sign off on it. If the defendant doesn't show, they get a bench warrant, with a bond equal to the fine, say $200 first offense (plus cost of lost goods if not recovered). They get stopped for a ticket someday, and end up paying the bench warrant bond off to avoid jail, or they don't have that money in which case they sit in jail about a day before the municipal judge releases them because county jails don't have space to hold shoplifters for days and it costs like $40/day per inmate for the city to have them housed there. I would say only 1/100 cases would the defendant show up, demand a trial, and require me to get the loss prevention manager of Wal Mart to show up for night court. If it was a repeat offender, it might get referred to county, where the typical disposition might be 90 days jail suspended (it would be imposed only if they broke probation), with 2 yrs of unsupervised probation. Because I was both the municipal prosecutor and county prosecutor, I could actually control this a little and would cherry pick the cases out of municipal that I thought needed to go higher. (And sometimes in the other direction to cut somebody a break.) But if that had not been the case, there wouldn't be any coordination there and no rhyme or reason as to why some cases had a $200 fine and some had 2 yr bench probation period and real chance of jail. Over $750 it was a felony, which was a different matter. If a stealing victim was a private citizen these nearly always remained felonies. On a shoplifting, there was some chance it would get reduced to a misdemeanor. If property was unrecovered the person could make restitution in advance they had a better show of this. The reason mandatory jail doesn't work (and this applies to more than shoplifting) is that if you tell people they're going to jail, you have to give them a public defender. They are also less likely to want to plead guilty, and more likely to want a trial, or at least drag it out towards trial. In a regime where there is prosecutorial discretion, as I had, what will inevitably happen is that the state will face down an organized push from the local public defenders' office to set a bunch of shoplifting cases for jury trial. They know the state won't want to have those trials, and probably doesn't have the courtroom dates available to do so. And if you go ahead and call the bluff and try them, the odds are that the sentence the defendant gets won't be bad enough to deter this maneuver -- judges aren't supposed to increase sentences just because a guy chose to have a trial, so it's still unlikely he'd get more than whatever the mandatory minimum was set at. So the prosecutors will do the only remaining thing they can, which is amend the charge down to something that doesn't carry the mandatory minimum, thus allowing them to unclog the system. Theodidactus writes: Hello. Criminal defense attorney here. As I said on a previous post of yours, I don't think the tough on crime crowd realizes how many resources the US system is *obligated* to spend in the case of a criminal prosecution (and you can't have jail or prison without a criminal prosecution). If you charge someone with shoplifting and insist on 30 days in jail, the defendant can obligate the system to provide - a lawyer - a jury of 6 (in minnesota) or 12 (if you're going to impose prison time) - a judge - a court reporter - a prosecutor - a cop witness ...several of these for multiple hearings (you'll appear before a judge using your lawyer several times in the course of a criminal case) additionally, that same defendant can obligate the *victim* to provide - footage of the incident - a store witness all for a $5 pack of hamburger patty (yes, I have seen a shoplifting trial on a $5 pack of hamburger patty) ...and at the end of all this, even if the conviction sticks, you still have to sell a judge on sending some poor guy to jail for *thirty days*. Not that it can't happen, but it's such an immense expense of time and effort for everyone involved that it's usually much easier to cut a deal. I’m still not sure I understand what’s going on here, but it seems like there might be two problems: City attorneys believe that the scare of getting arrested, plus or minus a warning or small penalty, is enough to deter many people8. They have research which seems to back this up. Based on the research, they don’t impose stricter penalties for first-time offenders. But cops don’t believe this research, and feel frustrated that their work is coming to nothing, so they stop arresting people at all.
Inline links: This paper estimates, an earlier guest post on California’s Proposition 36, says, says, actually does a good job of preventing them from shoplifting in the future, says, writes, 8
25
October 28, 2025 · Original source
Period where locals in the area to be annexed may protest (there aren’t really any locals except some landowners who have already sold their land to the project, so legally relevant protests are unlikely) The paperwork itself contains some exciting details. Phase 1 of the city will have 175,000 people, with the ability to expand up to 400,000 later. CEO Jan Sramek summarized the urban design as “American street grid, Spanish/Japanese superblocks, and Dutch woonerfs”. The American street grid is the logical right-angled design typical of cities like Manhattan or Chicago. The Spanish superblocks are the big blocks with courtyards in the center, typical of cities like Barcelona: ...and woonerfs are small Dutch side streets which are designed to just-barely-allow drivers but prioritize pedestrians. creating a road layer in between big car-centered thoroughfares and pedestrian-only sidewalks: The proposal also moots two additional megaprojects: the Solano Shipyard, where the new city touches the upper tributaries of the San Francisco Bay. American shipbuilding has long been something of an embarrassment, the Trump administration is working on it, and the new city would be strategically placed to benefit if the federal government could remove some of the barriers that make US naval manufacturing unprofitable. And the Solano Foundry would be the “the largest [advanced manufacturing] park in the US”. Many of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs’ manufacturing startups set up shop in Southern California - for example, Elon Musk’s original base for SpaceX and the Boring Company was in Hawthorne, near LA - just because the Bay has so few good industrial locations. The Foundry aims to change that, and aims for 40,000 new manufacturing jobs. Finally, something nobody else will care about but which is close to my heart - Jan is pursuing a partnership with Monumental Labs, a group working on “AI-enabled robotic stone carving factories”. The question of why modern architecture is so dull and unornamented compared to its classical counterpart is complicated, but three commonly-proposed reasons are: Ornament costs too much
Inline links: summarized, Spanish superblocks, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!85zv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F12dd47a8-20ab-4699-a4e8-77c2eed30705_1024x683.jpeg, woonerfs are, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5-gC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6f23ae71-8eca-4cea-8ee3-8b26633be1f1_1000x562.png, Solano Shipyard, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cZKL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdaff879b-2364-49e3-9568-2779f28cd231_639x426.jpeg, Solano Foundry, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!APFe!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2086d0cc-0654-4c0a-80c3-3aaacbe5744e_1199x675.jpeg, Monumental Labs, is complicated
...and woonerfs are small Dutch side streets which are designed to just-barely-allow drivers but prioritize pedestrians. creating a road layer in between big car-centered thoroughfares and pedestrian-only sidewalks: The proposal also moots two additional megaprojects: the Solano Shipyard, where the new city touches the upper tributaries of the San Francisco Bay. American shipbuilding has long been something of an embarrassment, the Trump administration is working on it, and the new city would be strategically placed to benefit if the federal government could remove some of the barriers that make US naval manufacturing unprofitable. And the Solano Foundry would be the “the largest [advanced manufacturing] park in the US”. Many of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs’ manufacturing startups set up shop in Southern California - for example, Elon Musk’s original base for SpaceX and the Boring Company was in Hawthorne, near LA - just because the Bay has so few good industrial locations. The Foundry aims to change that, and aims for 40,000 new manufacturing jobs. Finally, something nobody else will care about but which is close to my heart - Jan is pursuing a partnership with Monumental Labs, a group working on “AI-enabled robotic stone carving factories”. The question of why modern architecture is so dull and unornamented compared to its classical counterpart is complicated, but three commonly-proposed reasons are: Ornament costs too much
Inline links: woonerfs are, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5-gC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6f23ae71-8eca-4cea-8ee3-8b26633be1f1_1000x562.png, Solano Shipyard, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cZKL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdaff879b-2364-49e3-9568-2779f28cd231_639x426.jpeg, Solano Foundry, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!APFe!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2086d0cc-0654-4c0a-80c3-3aaacbe5744e_1199x675.jpeg, Monumental Labs, is complicated