Some Good News About The Bankruptcy Option For Student Loan Debt

George Leef at the John Williams Pope Center for Higher Education Policy writes perhaps the most encouraging thing I've read in ages on the subject of student loan debt in a great long while. As it turns out, and contrary to my prior writing on the subject, student debt can be discharged through bankruptcy, but it requires going through special hoops to do it:

Writing on Huffington Post, Steve Rhode (who calls himself the “get out of debt guy”) states, “The general perception is that federal student loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy. Obviously that assumption is not true because an allowance exists for discharge in the case of undue hardship. But many incorrectly assume that threshold is impossible or nearly impossible to accomplish.”

Rhode finds the support for his conclusion in his analysis of 35 adversary proceedings in 2012 where the debtor sought discharge of student loans through bankruptcy. In those cases, the debtor won full discharge in 47 percent and received some reduction or more favorably repayment terms in another 33 percent.

Those 2012 numbers are in the same vicinity as the numbers calculated by Professor Jason Iuliano from cases filed in 2007, which formed the basis for his 2011 paper published in American Bankruptcy Journal, An Empirical Assessment of Student Loan Discharges and the Undue Hardship Standard. Iuliano found that 25 percent of the cases resulted in full discharge and 26 percent resulted in partial reduction or easier payments.

It turns out further than representing oneself in bankruptcy court is entirely plausible, as Acosta Conniff v. Educational Credit Management Corporation showed in Alabama. Further, "the Department of Education recently released a “guidance letter” pertaining to undue hardship discharge cases" that "tilts the scales more in favor of students who are petitioning for bankruptcy discharge." Leef even advocates reverting student loan debt to normal status, i.e. where bankruptcy law was prior to 1977, which would allow easier discharge of unpayable debt and force universities and banks to rationalize degree programs. It's probably too much to hope for legislative change at this point, but that's what we need.

The Censor, Anita Sarkeesian

I recently had cause to discuss whether Anita Sarkeesian's "Feminist Frequency" videos amounted to censorship or not. By a strict definition, no they are not, because she had not at that point demanded state action, i.e. prior restraint on video game publishers. Criticism, of course, is not the same thing as censorship, but with Sarkeesian, there have been a number of "tells" that she has a strong itch in that direction, the principle one being that she demands the right to direct the course of video game production — of which she is not, by her own admission, much of a customer. It would be one thing to play video games and want something better. (For a parallel example in the related world of comics, see my brief remarks about Barbara Randall Kesel.) It's quite another to see content she is only peripherally interested in (or worse, demands others pay for) and then expects producers thereof will hew to her cloistered thinking. She has also been unwilling to take the stage with any opponent (most notably the firebrand journalist Milo Yiannopoulos) to debate her ideas; she appears to want a megaphone, not exchange, which again suggests she has a totalitarian's indifference to anyone else's opinion.

But charitably, the question remained at least until recently an open one, when she somehow got a report published through the United Nations on "cyber violence". (The full report can be found here (PDF), because the link from the title page appears to be broken.) This includes

Cyber VAWG includes hate speech (publishing a blasphemous libel), hacking (intercepting private communications), identity theft, online stalking (criminal harassment) and uttering threats.

 Sarkeesian expanded on those goals considerably:

According to feminist culture critic Anita Sarkeesian, who spoke at the event, online “harassment” doesn’t simply consist of what is “legal and illegal,” but “also the day-to-day grind of ‘you’re a liar’ and ‘you suck,’ including all of these hate videos that attack us on a regular basis.”

Unable to prove that they are the victims of a wave of “misogynistic hate” – no bomb threat against a feminist critic of video games has ever been deemed credible and there are serious doubts about threats supposedly levelled at transsexual activist Brianna Wu – feminists are trying to redefine violence and harassment to include disobliging tweets and criticisms of their work.

In other words: someone said “you suck” to Anita Sarkeesian and now we have to censor the internet. Who could have predicted such a thing? It’s worth noting, by the way, that if Sarkeesian’s definition is correct, Donald Trump is the world’s greatest victim of “cyber-violence.” Someone should let him know.

As a bonus points follow-on, Yiannopoulos found a Redditor willing to slog through all 120 of the report's footnotes, concluding that 30% are broken, blank, duplicated, or nonexistent in some other way, with another 15% self-referentially linking back to UN documents. (Also, yikes, for Popehat phoning it in, though at least he recognized it at the time.) The benefit of the doubt no longer applies; schoolyard taunts provide sufficient cause for Sarkeesian to demand governments silence others, and that the mechanisms for doing this be built into the technical infrastructure of the Internet. Sarkeesian is nothing more than a schoolmarm with an overgrown ego.

Is There Anything Good About Men?

I've been meaning to write about a phenomenal essay I encountered a few days ago, Roy F. Baumeister's "Is There Anything Good About Men?" Originally a lecture delivered at a 2007 conference of the American Psychological Association, he subsequently expanded on it to publish a book of the same name. He opens by taking on the feminist notion of patriarchy, the feminism that looks up and envies:

The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top. If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners? The population on Death Row has never approached 51% female. Who’s homeless? Again, mostly men. Whom does society use for bad or dangerous jobs? US Department of Labor statistics report that 93% of the people killed on the job are men. Likewise, who gets killed in battle? Even in today’s American army, which has made much of integrating the sexes and putting women into combat, the risks aren’t equal. This year we passed the milestone of 3,000 deaths in Iraq, and of those, 2,938 were men, 62 were women.

... Culture has plenty of tradeoffs, in which it needs people to do dangerous or risky things, and so it offers big rewards to motivate people to take those risks. Most cultures have tended to use men for these high-risk, high-payoff slots much more than women. I shall propose there are important pragmatic reasons for this. The result is that some men reap big rewards while others have their lives ruined or even cut short. Most cultures shield their women from the risk and therefore also don’t give them the big rewards. I’m not saying this is what cultures ought to do, morally, but cultures aren’t moral beings. They do what they do for pragmatic reasons driven by competition against other systems and other groups.

He's got a lot of other questions:

• Why is it that 19th century women didn't forge new musical paths despite increasing access to musical instruments (the piano specifically), yet African-American men, who were demonstrably poorer and "mostly just emerging from slavery", laid down the foundation for jazz?
• What percent of our ancestors were women? ("It’s not a trick question, and it’s not 50%. ... Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men.") What does this mean for human social behavior? ("[M]en outnumbered women both among the losers and among the biggest winners", a fact that informs male risk-taking and creativity.)
• How do men and women differ in their social behavior? Men, he posits, have large, shallow social networks, where women tend to few and intimate networks. 

 He also makes two observations about earned manhood:

1. Respect is earned by producing more than you consume.
2. Putdowns are endemic as a way to remind everyone that respect is in limited supply. ("This, incidentally, has probably been a major source of friction as women have moved into the workplace, and organizations have had to shift toward policies that everyone is entitled to respect. The men hadn’t originally built them to respect everybody.")

Baumeister probably won't convince anyone who thinks patriarchy is real, i.e. a grand conspiracy, but he's got a good framework for understanding why women have it so hard in the modern workplace. A lot of evolutionary psychology amounts to just-so stories, but falsification in this field, as with all evolution, is notoriously difficult to do. I really look forward to reading his book.
 

Update 2021-07-09: Fixed the link to the original essay.

The Dog Fancy Steals A Page From The "Rape Crisis" Hoaxers

I've previously written about the various bogus surveys of rape and its much broader sister charge, sexual assault, and how political motivation has expanded that to include clumsy attempts at hand-holding. With its engineered results that turn virtually any unwanted advance or gaffe into sexual assault, it's little wonder those trying to prove there's a huge sexual assault problem on college campuses come up with numbers vastly higher than actual rape statistics, which latter have been in decline for decades — unlike the static "1-in-5" factoid. File under "figures don't lie, but liars can figure".

The dog fancy has taken a similar approach to dealing with their flawed product. Two years ago, UC Davis published a study finding some genetic diseases common to all dogs apparently occur at the same rates in mutts and purebreds. AKC apologists rapidly seized on this finding, even though it didn't actually say what they thought it did. In fact, for 10 of the 27 diseases surveyed, purebred dogs had notably higher incidence rates than mutts. Yesterday, I encountered a similar study (original at PLOS One) with even brighter news for the KC (or so they would have you believe). Originating from a survey of English veterinary records and paid for by the RSPCA, the press release version claims "purebreds are no more likely than crossbreeds to suffer the most common disorders", i.e. the diseases they studied had equal incidence in both purebreds and mutts, based on reviews of veterinary practice data throughout that country. In fact,

• For three of the most common 20 diseases (otitis externa [ear infections], obesity, and skin masses), the incidence in purebreds was materially higher (p<0.05) than in "crossbred" dogs (in fact, dogs of unknown provenance).
• Four of the 20 "mid-level" diseases (musculoskeletal issues, aural, opthamological, and again obesity, though not sure why that latter is counted in this group again) again have materially higher incidences in purebreds than mutts; none were higher in mutts than the general population.
• For specific breeds, some problems were more frequent and some were less than the general population. This is to be expected.

So rather than a rigged study, the Telegraph article simply fails to note the cases where there were in fact more problems among purebreds; but ignoring those cases does not make them go away. Likewise, the survey doesn't attempt to address breed-specific genetic or genetically-linked diseases (hip dysplasia, cancer, collie eye anomaly, Leonberger polyneuropathy, high uric acid in Dalmatians, inability to whelp vaginally, etc.) that are much more likely in certain breeds and contribute to overall health problems. I eagerly await more detailed studies that include such conditions.

Martin Shkreli, Poster Boy For Regulatory Capture And Patent Abuse

The New York Times has an article about a hedge fund operator named Martin Shkreli, whose firm, Turing Pharmaceuticals, has the apparent sole purpose of running up the cost of certain drugs. Since buying out the manufacturer of the drug Daraprim (a 62-year-old drug developed by Gertrude Elion to combat malaria, but now the only drug licensed to treat toxoplasmosis), the price of the drug has gone up from $13.50 a tablet to $750.

Martin Shkreli, the founder and chief executive of Turing, said that the drug is so rarely used that the impact on the health system would be minuscule and that Turing would use the money it earns to develop better treatments for toxoplasmosis, with fewer side effects.

“This isn’t the greedy drug company trying to gouge patients, it is us trying to stay in business,” Mr. Shkreli said. He said that many patients use the drug for far less than a year and that the price was now more in line with those of other drugs for rare diseases.

“This is still one of the smallest pharmaceutical products in the world,” he said. “It really doesn’t make sense to get any criticism for this.”

And yet. And yet. As always, the invaluable Techdirt has much, much more background on this than the NYT piece, which includes a look at the long-expired patents, and what Shkreli's actual plans are:

Turing, of course, defends the increased price by claiming the exorbitant profit margin will result in increased R&D. But let's take a closer look at what its spokesman is actually saying.

Rothenberg defended Daraprim's price, saying that the company will use the money it makes from sales to further research treatments for toxoplasmosis.

Translation: this money will be dumped into finding another variation to patent, thus locking out potential competitors and allowing Turing to continue charging whatever it wants for the medication.

They also plan to invest in marketing and education tools to make people more aware of the disease.

Translation: we will market the hell out of this new drug.

This sort of thing isn't exclusive to Turing. It's standard MO for all pharmaceutical companies. Rather than engage in meaningful competition, these companies are awarded lengthy monopolies on drugs and treatments by the US government. Turing is no different than Amedra -- part of the holding company acquired by Turing along with the Daraprim rights. But when Amedra acquired the rights from GlaxoSmithKline, it somehow managed to keep its price hike to a couple of dollars, rather than several hundred.

The FDA has built a regulatory moat around pharmaceutical companies which con artists like Shkreli use to their advantage, and to the detriment of everyone else. Patents are surely part of the story (they figure large in Turing's future plans for keeping the price of Daraprim high). The argument favoring patents is that without them, inventors wouldn't invent, but it's unclear that's ever true. The reverse, an endless stream of arbitrary restrictions and high prices for very old drugs, seems to be playing out almost every month now. Similar problems exist for regulating drug makers; why was there only one manufacturer of an elderly but still useful drug?

Update 2015-09-23: Techdirt once more has a useful followup; apparently Shkreli will do something good in the future about the price, but we don't know how much it will go down or when. Sounds great to me!

The Dumb Rejoinder To Ahmed Mohamed's Arrest: Common Sense Clocks Out

So in case you've been living in a cave the last couple of weeks, an Irving, Texas boy, Ahmed Muhamed, claimed to bring a clock of his own manufacture to school. In his English class, he plugged it in to a wall socket, whereupon it made some noise that the teacher decided was suspicious. Someone at the school declared the device a "hoax bomb", i.e. not a real bomb, whereupon police arrested and handcuffed Ahmed while they waited for his parents to take custody of him. As one Facebook poster observed, it is entirely clear neither the school officials nor the police believed he had a bomb; the observation of the "bomb", and his arrest and detention all took place within the school; the bomb squad was never called, and the "bomb" was never isolated.

More recently, poster Jeremy at Artvoice wrote a long-form piece about the incident that makes a compelling case against at least Muhamed's title claim, i.e. that he made the clock, a sentiment also endorsed by Richard Dawkins (who cited that piece). I won't go into that, because his photographs provide sufficient evidence that it's highly likely Muhamed merely stripped the cover off an old Radio Shack digital clock and threw it in a pencil case to make it look homebrew. But Jeremy then drifts into speculation and sophistry when he endorses subsequent police and administration behavior:

If we stop and think – was it really such a ridiculous reaction from the teacher and the police in the first place? How many school shootings and incidents of violence have we had, where we hear afterwards “this could have been prevented, if only we paid more attention to the signs!” Teachers are taught to be suspicious and vigilant. Ahmed wasn’t accused of making a bomb – he was accused of making a look-alike, a hoax. And be honest with yourself, a big red digital display with a bunch of loose wires in a brief-case looking box is awful like a Hollywood-style representation of a bomb. Everyone jumped to play the race and religion cards and try and paint the teachers and police as idiots and bigots, but in my mind, they were probably acting responsibly and erring on the side of caution to protect the rest of their students, just in case. “This wouldn’t have happened if Ahmed were white,” they say. We’re supposed to be sensitive to school violence, but apparently religious and racial sensitivity trumps that. At least we have another clue about how the sensitivity and moral outrage pecking order lies.

Because, is it possible, that maybe, just maybe, this was actually a hoax bomb? A silly prank that was taken the wrong way? That the media then ran with, and everyone else got carried away? Maybe there wasn’t even any racial or religious bias on the parts of the teachers and police.

Well, yes, it was a ridiculous overreaction. Arresting a kid for having a clock? For what crime? Handcuffing him? If the charge is that the kid lied about its manufacture, in what universe is that a colorable crime? And if the point was it might have been a hoax bomb (when the kid consistently declared otherwise, per the Dallas Morning News report), who made that determination? Subsequent investigation prompted Irving police chief Larry Boyd to say "there’s no evidence to support the perception he intended to create alarm". In other words, the only people stirring up trouble were the paranoid panicky teachers, administrators, and police at the high school. (Wait, police at a suburban high school?) I get his point that "none of us were there", but if we take media reports seriously (i.e. based on evidence presented), this is a zero-tolerance nightmare. To dismiss criticism of the actions of the officials on the scene as specious ("we jump to conclusions and assume we’re experts") is equally misguided. The Muhumad case joins a long list of official freakouts over very little, and if anything, should open a dialogue about the wisdom of using police to perfect society.

Susan Brownmiller's Refreshing Views On Rape Prevention

Susan Brownmiller long ago wrote Against Our Will, a largely fact-free jeremiad that has since informed modern feminism's belief in rape as a political tool. That this is true only in distant lands populated principally by itinerant goat herders has not much changed the canon; if anything, it's gotten shriller and even more untethered from reality. Yet, despite her book's foundational status, Brownmiller seems to have views on rape that diverge wildly from modern feminist orthodoxy. Uncovered in a recent interview in New York magazine, they come as an utter shock to anyone aware of her earlier work. She recoils from developments in the theory she originated (emboldening in Brownmiller's responses are due to me):

I was wondering if you have been following the discussions of rape activism on college campuses.
Yes, very closely. In the 1970s we had an extraordinary movement against sexual assault in this country and changed the laws. They [the campus activists] don't seem to know that. They think they are the first people to discover rape, and the problem of consent, and they are not.

They have been tremendously influenced by the idea that "You can drink as much as you want because you are the equal of a guy," and it is not true. They don't accept the fact there are predators out there, and that all women have to take special precautions. They think they can drink as much as men, which is crazy because they can't drink as much as men. I find the position "Don't blame us, we're survivors" to be appalling.

Also, they [college women] are not the chief targets of rapists. Young women and all women in housing projects and ghettos are still in far greater danger than college girls.

Holy smoke, did you hear that? Men and women are different! Yikes! And the last, at least,  comports with empirical Bureau of Justice Statistics data showing young women off campus are much more likely to be raped than college students. And then, this:

And my feeling about young women trapped in sex situations that they don’t want is: "Didn’t you see the warning signs? Who do you expect to do your fighting for you?" It is a little late, after you are both undressed, to say "I don’t want this."

Interviewer Katie Van Syckle makes a weak attempt at a late save:

I guess the hope is that young men would respect [a naked woman in bed telling them "no"].
That would be nice. There is not much attention on them is there?

Predictably, Amanda Marcotte tars her with the epithet "former feminist hero". Break out the popcorn:

There's a real irony here, because our cultural allergy to focusing on men who actually rape also prevents us from having a productive conversation: one that should be had with both men and women—ideally starting when they are boys and girls—about why rapists rape. We would talk about how our culture valorizes male domination. How some men learn to feel big by putting women down. How both men and women often stand aside and let some men express toxic views about women without being challenged.

 This is, of course, the purest bullshit, because she's been one of the principle drivers pushing for an expansion of rape away from coercive sex. That is to say, while she presumably cares about men who actually rape, she's also eager to inflate the charge to include regetted and even imaginary sexual encounters, despite her own denials. Whether it's the Rolling Stone hoax set at the University of Virginia or Emma Sulkowicz's sordid lies ("rape apologists", LOL), she's only ever prepared to believe the "victim", even if the accuser has but a fleeting grasp of reality. To force everyone else to adopt the correct, guilt-stricken pose, she plans on "having a productive conversation", which we assume starts young and is indistinguishable from harangue.

She goes on to discuss the Steubenville rape case, which is rather atypical for her because it has actual perpetrators, clear evidence (along with video confessions), and a real victim.

If you want to see the cause, you have to look at the culture around the assault: the guys who made a video laughing about it, the spreading of the images, the unwillingness of anyone to interfere, the congratulations for domineering, abusive behavior. That is why assault happens, not because some girls drink too much. We need to help young people, both men and women, spot predatory behavior for what it is, and to push against it instead of laughing it off.

But having that conversation requires talking with and about men. As the Brownmiller interview shows, even for feminists, policing women and talking about their choices is just a lot easier to do. It's comfortable, like an old nightgown (one that hopefully doesn't show off too much thigh!). We've tried the woman-policing route for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years now. It's time to switch it up and start focusing on male choices instead.

 A number points worth mentioning here:

1. The sort of "culture" she describes derives from a number of poor choices by men. This is an ancient problem, and one that appears to have no ready solution, despite it being of obvious import. No OECD country has a per-capita rape rate of zero, though they vary quite a bit. This suggests the "just teach men not to rape" silver bullet beloved of modern feminists has been tried everywhere and found wanting. While she doesn't come out and say it, that's the only solution she appears to know.
2. I suppose we should be grateful she wants to talk to men at all.
3. The large majority of men do not, in fact rape. So her "don't rape" message there will do no good. In fact, it is liable to result in the opposite: contempt. This will likely have negative consequences in the jury box.
4. For the minority that does commit rape due to some combination of hormones, alcohol, drugs, poor impulse control, and misplaced or nonexistent empathy, this message will fall on deaf ears.

Because she does not understand male behavior and its underlying driving factors, she cannot reasonably prescribe preventative courses of action. (Indeed, it's unclear that there is much that can be done, outside of women taking defensive measures.) It has nothing to do with idiotic "men are taught to" nonsense, and everything to do with male nature. This is, of course, no excuse for rape, but modern feminists seem utterly incapable of distinguishing advice to minimize exposure to potential rapists from victim-blaming. That Marcotte savages the iconic Brownmiller for suggesting otherwise signals just how unhinged from reality she and her fellow third-wave sisters have become.