Showing posts with label UC Davis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label UC Davis. Show all posts

Thursday, April 27, 2017

Policing and Walking a Beat

Policing in the old days involved a cop walking a beat.  Why walking?  So he could get to know his community and operate as part of a village raising children to be law-abiding adults.  On his own, the cop was useless and vulnerable; as part of the community, he was one of its respected pillars.

As cities became larger and cars more popular, police adapted and got behind the wheel, too, obviously losing the personal touch.  Without the comfort of knowing who is familiar and unfamiliar, cities with exploding populations--especially L.A.--not only experienced "white flight" but also more aggressive policing methods. (See the documentary, O.J.: Made in America (2016), for details.)  One may argue the 2nd Amendment necessitates harsher methods, but if that was the case, why wasn't the "cop on the beat" decades ago as harsh as the cops in body armor today? 

Crime has always been with us, and policing methods have adapted to changing demographics. If you don't know your own neighborhood, you may decide to treat everyone initially as a potential threat or a potential ally.  Police in America today have decided to go with the former to ensure their own safety.  Such an approach is sure to fail, because treating others with prejudiced suspicion always breeds contempt. Once contempt is created, dialogue becomes more difficult, and eventually things fall apart.  

When schools teach Jim Crow and segregation, they always mention fire hoses and police dogs, but not demographics and policing methods.  What are police--who must generally follow orders--supposed to do when mayors or city councils order them to disperse a crowd, even a peaceful one?  If the mayor is getting his or her ear chewed off by small and large business owners losing sales because streets are blocked off or consumers are hesitant to come inside and shop, what is the mayor supposed to do? These days, American protests don't accomplish much because they're too staged and shut down no real activity.  The pop stars giving speeches never go to jail, so there's no sense of danger.  It's like a sporting event--everyone blows off some steam, then goes home.  

Meanwhile, the real action is done horse-trading political favors behind the scenes, with each government agency trying to get as much money as possible while placating voters. The politician today stands for nothing save the following question: "How much can I give this agency for their collective votes, and how much can I raise taxes or borrow to pay for it before my voters get so frustrated, they vote me out?" 

Students who study Jim Crow and other policing methods in the South should also study the liberal, open, and lovely college town of UC Davis. In 2011, a police officer used pepper spray on undeniably peaceful student protestors.  In the aftermath of worldwide outrage, UC Davis--a public university--used taxpayer dollars to pay consultants at least $175,000 to help its image online.  

As for the cop using the pepper spray?  He applied for worker's compensation and won more than $38,055 for suffering he experienced after the incident. Did anything really change after 2011 in California with respect to police power and its use against residents and voters?  Not at all.  Did police officers become more open to accepting the consequences of following clearly unjust orders? Nope.  If anything, police--and other government entities, such as teachers--became more powerful and cloistered as their unions continued to lobby for greater legal protections.

The modern American political system is rigged in favor of large, coordinated groups against the individual--regardless of merit or principle.  That's how democratic institutions typically work, except it's much harder to root out corruption when it's economic and when debt and paper stock market gains do better cover-up jobs than any "special investigations unit." 

In Brian De Palma's 1987 thriller, The Untouchables, Sean Connery plays a beat cop, Jim Malone, and asks Kevin Costner’s character, Eliot Ness, what he’s prepared to do to nab a notorious mobster. The insinuation is that it's going to take more than aboveboard policing methods to take down Al Capone, who will do anything to ensure he's the most feared and powerful man in Chicago.  What do Americans do now, when the most feared and powerful entities are not the criminals, but the police and other government employees, who are backed by judges they helped elect or appoint? What happened to government employees as pillars of their communities rather than the least accountable persons in them? 

Sunday, January 29, 2017

Blue Devils

A few days after criticizing Duke basketball, I visited my alma mater, UC Davis and a local museum.  Unbeknownst to me, the local high school's mascot are the Blue Devils.



One of the docents was kind enough to print me a history of the mascot's origin, which relates to a WWI French Allied military unit.


The most interesting memorabilia were WWI items, such as Liberty Bond advertisements.  From the Federal Reserve website: "World War I began in Europe in 1914, the same year the Federal Reserve System was established."   Yet, the Federal Reserve at that time disfavored money printing to fund wars.  The Secretary of the Treasury "opposed printing money because it would hide the costs of war rather than keeping the public engaged and committed. 'Any great war must necessarily be a popular movement.'"


I love UC Davis and going back made me wonder if I should have found some way to stay after graduation.  Unfortunately, the law school put me on its wait list, and I never heard from them after that.  If you have a chance to attend UC Davis, go for it.  It was a wonderful school when I attended, and it is still a wonderful place.

Bonus: more from Duke University HERE on the Blue Devils.

Monday, January 5, 2009

Bankruptcy Filings Show Consumer Overspending

UC Davis Magazine (Winter 2009) published an interesting study on bankruptcy filings:

Simple overspending has driven most personal bankruptcies in recent years, a change from previous decades when illness and unemployment were major factors, concludes a new study from the University of California, Davis, Graduate School of Management.

"The reasons people file for personal bankruptcy indeed have shifted during the past couple of decades," says Ning Zhu, the study's author and an associate professor of management at UC Davis. "Although our research supports the notion that adverse life events, like losing one's health or job, contribute to personal bankruptcy filings, excessive consumption contributes more to the recent increase in personal bankruptcy filing."

According to the American Bankruptcy Institute, 2,039,214 personal bankruptcies were filed in 2005, up nearly five-fold from the 412,510 bankruptcies filed in 1985. Indeed, personal bankruptcies jumped from 0.3 percent to 1.8 percent of all U.S. households during the same period.

The UC Davis study looked at all personal bankruptcy filings in Delaware in 2003, because the state was among the first to make its bankruptcy filings available through the Public Access to Court Electronic Record system and its demographics closely resemble those nationwide. The year 2003 was chosen because it allowed the study to follow cases to their conclusion, and permitted observation of filing patterns before 2005. (Filings may have been accelerated in the months leading up to October 2005, when the federal Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act took effect, by households wanting to avoid the new act's stricter requirements.)

So that he could compare bankrupt households with solvent ones, Zhu also collected information from the Federal Reserve Board's national Survey of Consumer Finance about households that had never declared bankruptcy.

Overall, Zhu concluded that debt accounted for more than 50 percent of recent bankruptcies, while medical problems caused just 5 percent and unemployment led to only 13 percent.

Zhu found that bankrupt households have bigger mortgages, car loans and credit card balances than solvent ones, but make less than half as much money.

Among bankrupt homeowners, mortgages were 3.21 times higher than annual household income, versus 1.73 times for solvent households. Auto loans were double the annual income for bankrupt households, versus 0.4 times for solvent households. And bankrupt households carried credit card balances that almost equaled their annual household income, while the average credit card balance for solvent households was 6 percent of annual income.

In addition, bankrupt households had a median annual income of $25,738, versus $43,341 for solvent ones. (The median is the midpoint in a set of values; a median income of $25,738 for bankrupt households means that half of the bankrupt households in the study made higher salaries and half made less).

Interestingly, more than 5 percent of bankrupt households owned at least one luxury automobile (average age of the car was 7 years), compared with 8 percent of solvent households (average age was 8 years).

The study also suggests that some Americans deliberately spend beyond their means with the intention of using the bankruptcy system to erase some or all of their debt, and recommends reforms to discourage such abuse.

"Our results emphasize that bankruptcy law reform should aim to address the issue," Zhu writes. "Current means test focusing on income, rather than consumption patterns or adverse events, may not set the best criteria for sorting out the households who truly need bankruptcy protection from those that consume beyond their means to take advantage of the system."

The research has been presented at Boston College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, UCLA and Yale, and will be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Legal Studies, a publication of the University of Chicago Law School. The working paper is online at [PDF file]:

http://www.gsm.ucdavis.edu/Faculty/Zhu/PersonalBankruptcy [PDF file]

Zhu earned his doctorate in finance from Yale in 2003. He specializes in individual behavior in financial markets, bankruptcy and distress, and investments.

Media contacts:

* Ning Zhu, Graduate School of Management, (852) 9848-2096, nzhu@ucdavis.edu (Ning is on sabbatical in Hong Kong; note time difference when calling his cell phone.)

* Tim Akin, Graduate School of Management , (530) 752-7362, tmakin@ucdavis.edu


* Claudia Morain, UC Davis News Service, (530) 752-9841, cmmorain@ucdavis.edu

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Educational Attainment and Economic Advantage

David Brooks recently wrote a great article about education's impact on the economy:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/opinion/29brooks.html?ex=1375070400&en=7286e3c1957017ac&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Starting intensive education earlier (Scotland starts its first grade at 4 years old, at least when I was there) and investing in all-day (9AM to 6PM) elementary schools may be a wise choice. When I tutored at UC Davis, I was stunned at how poorly some UC students wrote, especially after the supposedly higher educational requirements for admission. God only knows what teachers and tutors have to deal with in the California State University (CSU) system.

One personal anecdote: the ESL students, usually foreign residents earning math, science, or engineering degrees, worked the hardest on their writing. Some students even hired me for private work. I remember being ecstatic about making 15 dollars an hour when a South Korean student hired me as a private tutor. Back then, 15 dollars was major bling-bling and meant dinner at the local Thai restaurant (Sophie's Kitchen, apparently under different ownership now, so I can't personally vouch for it) rather than the 99 cent chicken sandwich at Jack-in-the-Box. I discovered sushi for the first time in Davis also. Yup, those were the days.