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Feb 16, 2024 1 min read Blog

Poor, but not guilty

When high profile people—like Donald Trump—are charged with crimes, the public suddenly pays attention to the intense pressure that prosecutors can apply against defendants. If you’re well resourced, like Trump, you have a way to fight.

The poor, though, have to give in almost immediately and often unjustly. This article summarizes the issue well.

But if you are poor and cannot pay even a small bail amount, the situation is far grimmer. You lose your job. You’re evicted from your apartment. Your children are sent to foster care. You can’t see a doctor for your chronic health condition. You may be raped in jail. So you swallow your pride, take the deal, and admit to something regardless of whether you actually did it.

Guilty if Poor by Matthew T. Martens

Feb 13, 2024 1 min read Blog

Getting Good Career Advice As a Student

A student of mine just reached out because she wants to go into medical/nutritional work in international development. She was asking for some career advice. I, of course, have very little expertise in this area.

But I know how she can get it! Here’s (an anonymized version of ) what I told her. Pass this along to anyone you think could use this advice.

I think this is a fantastic course to chart. Wherever this ends up taking you, it will be a way to do a lot of good for people.

The best advice I can give here is to reach out to people currently working in these roles and ask them for time to talk. As I mentioned before in class, you have a networking superpower right now as a student. You can reach out to professionals you’ve never met and ask if they have time to answer questions about their career. You’ll be surprised at how many people say yes.

When the opportunity comes to talk with them, have good questions about important decisions you have yet to make. What skills or credentials will you need? What mistakes should you avoid? What new careers are coming into existence that are worth considering? Experts in these fields will have a wealth of wisdom.

So here’s a plan to follow:

Using Google and LinkedIn, get a list going of professionals working in the fields and organizations that interest you. Find any available contact information.
Write a list of good questions that will help you make decisions you’re facing now or plan a better path to where you want to go.
Contact the people on your list, and follow up at least once if you don’t get a reply after a week. Beyond that, they’re too busy. If you’re emailing them, keep the email brief (1-2 short paragraphs).
When you meet with these people, be a great listener, paying special attention to any feedback about parts that are hard. We tend to ignore that kind of advice.
Ask them if there’s anyone else you should talk to. They can open doors you can’t open on your own.

I hope this is helpful! Let me know how this goes.

Jan 30, 2024 1 min read Blog

Legal Immigration Is Much Harder than You Think

The focus on illegal immigration and the border sadly absorbs all of the attention about immigration generally. In my experience, most Americans underestimate how deeply broken our immigration system is.

Next time this comes up in a conversation with someone, I’m going to show them the insane graphic in this article.

Contrary to public perception, immigrants cannot simply wait and get a green card (permanent residence) after a few years. Legal immigration is less like waiting in line and more like winning the lottery: it happens, but it is so rare that it is irrational to expect it in any individual case.

Why Legal Immigration Is Impossible for Nearly Everyone | Cato at Liberty Blog

(Via Kottke)

Jan 15, 2024 1 min read Blog

The Illusion of Moral Decline

The idea that the world is getting worse is a nearly universal human belief. But I’ve often found it strange to believe that people today are less moral than they were, say, 100 years ago. Pick the time period and people have always been a mix of good and evil.

A belief in moral decline probably happens because it’s easy to find evidence of (1) evil in our newsfeeds and (2) good in our memories, making us believe that people are worse than they used to be. This creative paper in Nature by Mastroianni and Gilbert explains the mechanism, and shows how this belief in moral decline contradicts how we see those who are close to us.

Anecdotal evidence indicates that people believe that morality is declining. In a series of studies using both archival and original data (n = 12,492,983), we show that people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining, that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute this decline both to the decreasing morality of individuals as they age and to the decreasing morality of successive generations. Next, we show that people’s reports of the morality of their contemporaries have not declined over time, suggesting that the perception of moral decline is an illusion. Finally, we show how a simple mechanism based on two well-established psychological phenomena (biased exposure to information and biased memory for information) can produce an illusion of moral decline, and we report studies that confirm two of its predictions about the circumstances under which the perception of moral decline is attenuated, eliminated or reversed (that is, when respondents are asked about the morality of people they know well or people who lived before the respondent was born). Together, our studies show that the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced. This illusion has implications for research on the misallocation of scarce resources, the underuse of social support and social influence.

The illusion of moral decline | Nature

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