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We have been working with the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) to identify the features of ethical and trustworthy Smart Data schemes. Smart Data refers to the "secure sharing of customer data with authorised third party providers …

Revoking Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) with China will weaken the US economy, fail to change Beijing's legitimately concerning practices, won't do much to prevent Chinese products from entering the US market, make the customs process more opaque, and will not enhance US national security.

New York City restaurants could face fines of $50 to $250 if they include utensils, soy sauce, ketchup, and other plastic items in takeout orders if the customer did not ask for them. The new "Skip the Stuff" law is aimed at reducing plastic waste. Restaurants will only receive warnings for violating the law until…

Australian authorities fined 77-year-old New Zealand resident June Armstrong $3,300 (U.S. $2,034) for bringing a chicken sandwich into the country. Armstrong bought the sandwich, which was sealed, at the Christchurch airport and put it into her backpack intending to eat it on her flight. But she forgot about it until a customs official in Australia…

Opposition to immigration has emerged as a key issue in Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign. Masha Krupenkin writes that Trump's negative rhetoric about immigrants can have real consequences for their daily lives. Americans who are exposed to negative rhetoric about immigrants are more likely to report suspected undocumented immigrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, are … Continued

Changing brand names is risky. Brand clarity, employee morale and customer trust are all at stake. In the case of Twitter, Eli Sopow compares Elon Musk’s moves to those of a cowboy. When Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he turned it into X in a haste, "[riding] it like a wild bull through a delicate and … Continued

"The market process allows low-skill people to specialize in what they do best while freeing up high-skill people who can concentrate their efforts on things they do best. Everybody wins, and in some small way, you have a part in every achievement by every bleary-eyed customer for whom you dutifully pour coffee on their morning commute." ~ Art Carden

Suppliers increasingly face customer pressure to decarbonise. However, there's no empirical evidence that firms can lead their suppliers to reduce emissions. The adoption of targets doesn't change much because emissions and energy inputs are inherent to production technology and substantial changes may take time. Swarnodeep Homroy and Asad Rauf write that suppliers make symbolic commitments to sustainability in the … Continued

Why leave a tip? You have already received whatever food or service you are going to receive. Maybe if you are a very regular customer, tipping could lead to better service in the future. But most people who leave tips do so even if they are stopping off at, say, a restaurant in a city … Continue reading Some Economics of Tipping
The post Some Economics of Tipping first appeared on Conversable Economist.

Ofcom, the UK government agency that regulates the Royal Mail, has conceded that the national carrier can reduce its letter deliveries from six to possibly as few as three per week. The company was split from the Post Office and privatised a decade ago. I still have my shares in it. But in what is known as the Universal Service Obligation, it is legally obliged to deliver to anywhere in the UK for a fixed price — which, in the case of letters, is an eye-watering £1.25 for first class and 75p for second).Of course, fewer people send letters these days, preferring email for important and personal communications. So letter volumes have fallen, and the Royal Mail is hurting as a result. Ofcom says the company could save £100m-£200m by cutting deliveries to five per week, and £400-£650 by cutting them to just three per week.The British government has insisted that a six-day service should remain and that Saturday deliveries, in particular are (for some unspecified reason) "sacrosanct". And the Communication Workers Union (CWU), which represents Royal Mail staff, says the three-day delivery idea is unacceptable, would destroy Royal Mail and cost thousands of jobs.How can you privatise a company that is effectively a national monopoly of letter delivery (and, at the time, a near-monopoly in parcels delivery) only for it to get itself into debt and have to cut back its service? With a national monopoly and a national infrastructure system, you would expect it to be rolling in cash.The answer is that it hasn't really been privatised at all. Royal Mail was privatised, but it still isn't allowed to operate as a private company. Politicians insist it must charge the same to carry a postcard from Land's End to John O'Groats as it does to carry one from No.8 Acacia Avenue to No.13 Acacia Avenue. A government agency decides how much it can charge and what days and times of day it must deliver on. And the same powerful union that made the Royal Mail notoriously unreliable is still doing the same.The point of privatisation is not who owns a company. It is about setting a state-owned organization free to explore innovative ways of providing its service better, quicker, faster, and of developing new services that give consumers even greater value. When you privatise something as a monopoly, though, it has very little reason to bother itself with that.For a little while, Royal Mail relied on its lucrative parcel delivery service, Parcelforce, another near-monopoly, to keep the whole tub afloat. And yes, it is still the UK's biggest parcel carrier. But Parcelforce has had the stuffing knocked out of it by other, more nimble and innovative carriers like Hermes, DPD, Yodel, DHL and Amazon. And many customers prefer those others as being quicker and more reliable (some even nickname the Royal Mail's effort as 'Parcel-farce').There are lessons to this for the future of other state industries too. Many years ago, when we had a pro-market government, I asked the head of a US-owned international hospital provider — whose clinics and hospitals were very impressive indeed — why they didn't offer to take over and run an NHS hospital to show how it could transform the treatment and care of NHS patients. His answer was blunt: he would prefer to build a new hospital that might actually work efficiently, and hire management and staff that were steeped in the culture of customer service, rather than the gloomy culture of the NHS. And indeed, when one private company did take over an NHS hospital, though the improvements were tangible, the legacy culture eventually overwhelmed it.Since then, looking at many other state organizations has convinced me that privatising an unreformed, monopoly service is a mistake. You really have to create the conditions by which you can grow something new — something innovative, competitive and customer-focused. That was the idea of the internal market in health and education: the government still pays, so everyone can access the service, but it is provided by various independent companies or non-profits, so that customers also have the benefits of choice and competition. Of course, it wasn't long before the civil service stifled that sort of innovation by swamping the new providers with regulation. And that's a problem we have seen often, from buses to schools. But it's a problem we can solve.

With the accession of both legislative chamber
leaders for the 2024-28 term of the Louisiana Legislature now
settled, a question of whether to retain the practice of granting minority
party members committee chairmanships is up for debate – and change.

This practice almost no other state follows. A few
here and there will place a minority party member at the head of a temporary
committee, or perhaps give one a vice chairman's slot. Some allow for minority
reports to be issued about legislation. But in today's era, the only states
that appear to do this (absent special situations where party representation in
a chamber is even between the two major parties, or Nebraska's
unicameral/nonpartisan organ) are Louisiana and Texas.

Texas
legislators appear to be making a conscious effort to back away from the
process. This year, its Senate Republican leadership shed the last minority
member who had been a chairman, while its House Republican leadership reduced
its number to eight of 34 standing committees, and a deliberate emphasis to
shunt Democrats as chairman to low-profile panels. Texas has small GOP
majorities in each chamber at present.

In contrast, Republicans in Louisiana have
supermajorities in both chambers, projected to grow slightly as a result of
elections to conclude this weekend. Yet as of now, of the 16 House committees
two retain Democrats as chairman and four others as vice chairmen. In the
Senate, of 17 committees Democrats head up five and serve in the second slot on
two of those and four more (with more committees and fewer senators, there are
fewer choices).

By no means is this ingrained practice. Democrats had
every legislative seat and of course the governorship from 1920-60, and only in
1964 did Republicans start creeping into the House and into the Senate in 1976,
but none in 1980 when the first GOP governor in modern times Dave Treen took
office. The custom of gubernatorial choosing of legislative leaders by then was
decades old, but purely among Democrats' factions.

Treen had no choice in the Senate and just ten of
his party in the House, so nothing changed in that all leadership was
Democrats. The tradition started when Democrat Gov. Buddy Roemer assumed the
office, who ideologically on fiscal issues was closer to the 17 House and 5
Senate Republicans. He managed to have his preferred floor leaders installed
(who about halfway through his term would be dumped by Democrat Gov. Edwin
Edwards allies who restored his team from his previous term) who then appointed
a few Republicans as chairmen.

When Edwards came back for his fourth term, after
a contentious election where he relied upon Republican voters to return him
(even as the GOP dropped their House total by one), he continued the practice
as a larger, if indifferently applied, pledge to govern in a more bipartisan
fashion. Then when Republican Mike Foster succeeded him, with 30 GOP House
members and nine in the Senate, the momentum was unstoppable and a GOP governor
had plenty to choose from.

The tables began turning, naturally, when during
Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal's terms the GOP took control in both chambers, so
then it became a matter of accommodating Democrats. Again, keep in mind that the
practice didn't grow out of any desire to include the minority, but because of
the custom of gubernatorial leadership selection and the particular combinations
and circumstances of different eras.

Thus, there's no real reason to continue it, particularly
as during Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards'
terms, precisely because center-right majorities ruled the chambers in contrast
to an avowedly (secretively at first, but much more openly after reelection) leftist
governor, the Legislature began selecting leadership more independently. Now,
there's a return to a period – likely to be extensive – where the governor will
align ideologically with a large majority of legislators.

Regardless of whether they consult with incoming GOP
Gov. Jeff Landry, Republicans state
Rep. Philip Devillier
and state Sen. Cameron Henry
should ensure every committee chairman or chairwoman comes from their party.
The people have spoken loudly in favor of their conservative agenda, and if
Democrats want to have any more than peripheral input into the policy-making process
when it differs from Republicans, then they need to win elections. 

Nicholas Anthony


Senators Cynthia Lummis (R‑WY) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D‑NY) introduced an updated version of their Responsible Financial Innovation Act. The bulk of the bill addresses issues around market structure and cryptocurrency exchanges—issues my colleagues Jack Solowey and Jennifer Schulp have discussed at length. Yet, within the bill also lies an interesting section on combatting illicit finance within the cryptocurrency market.
What makes this section so interesting is that Senators Lummis and Gillibrand appear to have largely adopted this section from a separate bill introduced by Senators Elizabeth Warren (D‑MA) and Roger Marshall (R‑KS). In fact, all four senators just joined hands to introduce this section as a standalone amendment to this year's National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). As many might remember, the Warren‐​Marshall bill received a nearly instant wave of criticism from Cato, Coin Center, Bitcoin Policy Institute, Bitcoin Magazine, Filecoin Foundation, and many others when it was first introduced.
Coin Center's Peter Van Valkenburgh wrote, "The bipartisan Digital Asset Anti‐​Money Laundering Act, introduced today by Sens. Warren and Marshall, is the most direct attack on the personal freedom and privacy of cryptocurrency users and developers we've yet seen." Filecoin's Marta Belcher wrote, "The bill would also effectively ban privacy‐​enhancing technologies in blockchain networks. The bill is a disaster for digital privacy and civil liberties."
A cursory look at the bill makes it easy to see why everyone was so concerned. The Warren‐​Marshall bill proposed expanding anti‐​money laundering (AML) and know‐​your‐​customer (KYC) surveillance to self‐​hosted wallets and cryptocurrency ATMs as well as effectively setting a prohibition on the use of cryptocurrency mixers. The bill also proposed having the Treasury, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) levy new examination and review processes on the companies they oversee. Finally, the bill proposed a requirement for Americans to report to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) if they transact more than $10,000 in cryptocurrency if at least one party in the transaction is outside the United States. As Valkenburgh and Belcher said at the time, it was a direct attack on digital privacy and civil liberties.
How the Two Bills Stack Up
The good news is that the new Lummis‐​Gillibrand bill did not copy the Warren‐​Marshall bill entirely. The Lummis‐​Gillibrand bill would not necessarily expand surveillance to self‐​hosted wallets, prohibit the use of cryptocurrency mixers, or force Americans to report cross‐​border transactions over $10,000. The bad news is that the Lummis‐​Gillibrand bill did pick up other pieces of the Warren‐​Marshall bill (see Figure 1).












Like the Warren‐​Marshall bill, the Lummis‐​Gillibrand bill would require cryptocurrency ATMs to "verify the identity of each customer using a valid form of government‐​issued identification or other documentary method, as determined by the Secretary of the Treasury." The bill would also require owners of cryptocurrency ATMs to report the physical location of ATMs to FinCEN every four months. Targeting ATMs may not be as severe as surveilling self‐​hosted wallets and effectively prohibiting mixers, but it's important to recognize that requiring cryptocurrency users to have their identities verified is still taking a stance against financial privacy.
The Lummis‐​Gillibrand bill also adopted the Warren‐​Marshall proposal to have the Treasury, SEC, and CFTC create new "risk‐​focused examination and review" processes for the companies they oversee. These examinations would be intended to monitor how companies are complying with anti‐​money laundering requirements. Considering compliance is already estimated to cost financial institutions $46 billion a year in the United States to stop an unknown amount of crime, it's unclear what exactly this added burden will contribute, especially since the specifics are left for the agencies to determine.
Where the Warren‐​Marshall bill would have prohibited the use of cryptocurrency mixers, the Lummis‐​Gillibrand bill takes a more nuanced approach by instead requiring FinCEN to issue a report to Congress that explains how mixers are used in markets currently and to make recommendations on possible future legislation. This approach is better than the prohibition proposed by the Warren‐​Marshall bill. However, this approach will require watchful eyes on the part of the public. On the one hand, the report could easily give FinCEN another tool to argue for further expanding its authority over financial transactions. On the other hand, the report could result in essentially kicking a prohibition to a later date.
Beyond Warren and Marshall
The Lummis‐​Gillibrand bill also makes a few unique additions of its own outside of what was adopted from the Warren‐​Marshall bill.
Notably, the section on combatting illicit finance opens with an amendment on penalties for cryptocurrency related crimes. By amending 12 U.S.C. Section 1957, the Lummis‐​Gillibrand bill would make it so violations of financial recordkeeping laws (12 U.S.C. Chapter 21) where cryptocurrency is involved can lead to additional punishments with up to $10,000 in fines and up to five years in prison. It's possible this provision is partly a response to the fall of FTX given it raises the stakes for keeping proper accounting standards.
The Lummis‐​Gillibrand bill would also see to the creation of a working group dedicated to crafting proposals to combat illicit finance. The group would include officials from both law enforcement and regulatory agencies as well as businesses working on cryptocurrency technology, financial institutions, and research organizations. Within this theme, the bill would also require the President to issue a separate, public report. Although exchanging ideas in an open manner is commendable, it's unfortunate that legislation is required to make that happen. (Though, perhaps that's more so a commentary on politics at large.)
Continuing the theme of opening new dialogues, the Lummis‐​Gillibrand bill would create an "Innovation Laboratory" within FinCEN. The laboratory would be dedicated to promoting "regulatory dialogue, data sharing between the FinCEN and financial companies, and an assessment of potential changes in law, rules, or policies to facilitate the appropriate supervision." This idea might sound nice to some, but FinCEN's history of repeatedly refusing to provide data to prove the effectiveness of anti‐​money laundering surveillance in general makes it hard to have faith in the agency's ability to live up to what the senators have in mind. One may be comforted because it's a statutory requirement, but events earlier this year have shown that statutory requirements have still not been enough to get real answers about the effectiveness of anti‐​money laundering requirements.
Finally, although it was not in the section on combatting illicit finance, it's worth mentioning that the Lummis‐​Gillibrand bill does address self‐​hosted wallets elsewhere in the bill. When discussing risk management, the bill says that the CFTC and the SEC must create standards regarding money laundering, customer identification, and sanctions compliance for exchanges dealing with self‐​hosted wallets. This move is not the same assault levied by the Warren‐​Marshall bill. Yet, at the same time, it is concerning that these rules are being left open for regulators to decide and will require watchful eyes if it comes to fruition.
Conclusion
Taken together, the Lummis‐​Gillibrand approach may not be as concerning as the Warren‐​Marshall bill, but that is not to say it is not concerning at all. Although Senators Warren and Marshall sought to take a leap forward for expanding financial surveillance, Senators Lummis and Gillibrand are still creeping forward by pushing forth these proposals. It's for that reason that the Lummis‐​Gillibrand and Warren‐​Marshall alliance should be concerning for advocates of privacy and freedom.
It was only a few months ago that Senator Warren was described as "building an anti‐​crypto army." The fact that her proposals spreading, even in limited form, should give people pause to ask if that army isn't growing. The new bill is not the full assault from last year, but it also isn't a retreat.
As debates move forward on both this bill and the recent NDAA amendment, it will be important for the public to keep a watchful eye.

David J. Bier


President Biden has received significant criticism from people who want to see more immigration enforcement for supposedly "gutting" Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). While most measures of ICE enforcement remained below pre‐​pandemic levels, they also have almost uniformly increased since President Biden took office in January 2021, recovering from significant declines under the Trump administration in 2020.
More Immigrants Deported
Figure 1 shows the monthly number of "removals" (occurring under Title 8 immigration code) and expulsions (occurring under the Title 42 health code before it was rescinded in May 2023). Altogether, the number of removals and expulsions increased from about 9,000 to about 16,000 in September 2022 (the latest month made available). Most reports about ICE removals have not acknowledged the ICE's Title 42 expulsions, which have replaced many formal "removals" under Title 8 authority, creating a false impression that ICE has been forcing out fewer immigrants overall. Expulsions accounted for a majority of ICE‐​forced departures in 2022.











Tom Cartwright of the advocacy group Witness at the Border collects important data on the number of ICE flights by destination, and ICE is conducting more flights than ever. Figure 2 shows the number of ICE flights by type: international removal or expulsion flights with a destination outside the United States, a "lateral" flight along the U.S.-Mexico border to expel someone under Title 42, and other purely domestic flights. These other flights include the first legs of a removal fight as well as transfers to open detention space.











One explanation for why the number of people removed or expelled has not fully recovered to pre‐​pandemic levels might be that people expelled following a "lateral flight"—which fly along the U.S.-Mexico border to expel the person to a different Mexican state (at Mexico's request)—are probably not included in the number of ICE Title 42 expulsions. If these "lateral" flights were included in the removal figures for ICE, there would be no overall decline in removals.
Another explanation could be that ICE is flying to a more diverse set of countries than they were pre‐​pandemic. It is easier to fill planes to traditional destinations, and it appears that there were fewer people onboard each ICE flight at least from late‐​2020 to the middle of 2021. Title 42 expulsion policies at the border have also meant fewer transfers of Mexicans to ICE custody because they can just be quickly expelled to Mexico. But despite fewer ICE removals, they are still being sent back to Mexico by Customs and Border Protection, which contributes to the slower recovery in ICE removals.
More Immigrants Detained
ICE has also increased the number of people that it is incarcerating in ICE detention facilities since January 2021. From January 2021 to June 2023, the number of people in ICE detention doubled from 15,097 to 30,005. Figure 3 makes clear that Biden reversed the downward trend in ICE detention that started before the pandemic. While it is true that ICE has used detention more judiciously than before the pandemic, when detention was a goal in and of itself, Biden's ICE has certainly not "gutted" detention either. In reality, it has increased detention use since Biden came into office.











Another measure of enforcement activity is the number of ICE administrative arrests (i.e. people ICE charges as removable from the United States). Monthly ICE arrests have fully recovered in 2022 to their pre‐​pandemic monthly rate during the first half of 2020. Border Patrol aided this recovery by releasing people at the border without charging them and telling them to check in with ICE to finish the charging process—most of whom did so.











More Interior Enforcement
The Border Patrol release policy shifted some workload off Border Patrol and onto ICE, but this initiative has now ended, so it is possible that administrative arrests have fallen since the end of the 2022 fiscal year in September. However, ICE also releases monthly statistics on the number of people arrested and booked into ICE detention facilities, which would exclude Border Patrol releases and other arrests not ending in ICE detention. These statistics also show a rise from January 2021.











ICE removals of people who were arrested in the interior of the United States also show a similar pattern. The number of removals declined from about 7,500 in October 2019 to about 2,400 in January 2021 before doubling to about 4,800 by September 2022. If the Biden administration had maintained interior removals at the same level as in January 2021, it would have removed about 14,000 fewer immigrants than it has in reality.











Official ICE enforcement guidelines have undergone several iterations under President Biden. Court rulings have repeatedly forced it to alter its stated policies on prioritizing enforcement of criminals and recent border crossers. Nonetheless, ICE has ended workplace raids, and ICE prosecutors have dismissed tens of thousands of cases against low‐​priority immigrants. But despite the claims of critics that immigration enforcement is too low, ICE activity is increasing steadily and in many cases outperforming its capacities at the end of the Trump era.

More people producing things leads to lower prices for consumers - all else being equal of course. Morrisons has begun matching its prices to Aldi and Lidl as new chief executive Rami Baitiéh mounts a fightback against the German discounters.The supermarket has pledged to match the price offered by Aldi or Lidl on more than 200 products, offering customers whichever price is lowest. The offer will cover everything from corn flakes and mince to canned tomatoes and baby wipes. Prices will be updated twice a week.One of the advantages of advancing age is that we've seen things happen before. Back a quarter century the big worry about British supermarkets was the uncompetitive nature of the industry. Net margins were up at 6% and the like of turnover - vastly high by international standards. Reports were written identifying triangular areas that one or t'other of the chains dominated and so on. Not much happened. Then Aldi and Lidl arrived. A different method of retailing, a smaller number of stock lines, different positioning, lower prices. At which point that competition started to eat the market - net margins for the industry are now in the 2 to 3% range. For everyone has had to do, these recent decades, what Morrisons is now doing. Cut prices to consumers to combat said competition.Those German and Austrian billionaire families which own those two insurgent chains have not done this for our interest. They've done it to amass those billionaire fortunes. But the effect has been to lower food prices for all of us. The capitalists competing for our custom is what produces that benefit to us.Sure, there are alternative ways of attempting to gain this result of an increase in consumer living standards. Venezuela famously decided that the President knew what things should cost and therefore everything should cost what the President said. The result was not an increase in living standards, rather the vanishing of everything from the marketplace.The standard example in the economic literature of this effect is indeed about the butcher and the baker, it's not their benevolence that feeds us, it's their regard for their own self-interest. The particular issue here being that free part of free markets. Which means that people are free to enter the market if they wish - which they have done and to our collective benefit.Free market competition for the win then.

That this runs in The Guardian makes us think that they might not have realised the import here: The 59-year-old Wilfred Poggenpoel is a fisher from Lambert's Bay, a picturesque town 170 miles north of Cape Town that's popular with surfers and home to 17,000 breeding pairs of Cape gannets. Five years ago, he made the decision to join a virtual marketplace called Abalobi, which enables fishers such as him to sell their catch directly to restaurants, retailers and consumers using a custom-built app."I get a better price and I can sell more species now," he says. "I've bought a 60-horsepower motor that I'd never have been able to afford before. I've bought a second boat." He joined, he says, because he didn't want to spend all day walking around town in the sun trying to sell fish. "My quality of life has improved. I've even been able to help some old people in the community."Abalobi (which means fisher in isiXhosa, one of the official languages of South Africa) is a tech nonprofit that works to help the small-scale fishers who make up the bulk of the South African fishing industry but are traditionally excluded from it financially.Those previously in a Polanyiesque marketplace of direct contact and mutual obligations have now moved over to a technologically intermediated impersonal and larger scale market. They are - humoungously - better off as a result. Which is glorious, poorer people are now better off. Precisely, exactly and wholly because of a deeper and wider market - a more efficient market. Or, as we might put it, market efficiency matters. It's what makes people better off. Therefore we must - as we are not - be very careful in evaluating anything that makes markets less efficient for whatever synapse-spasm seems a good idea at the time to those proposing it.But then we've known about this for a long time. That study of sardine fishermen and their mobile phones off Kerala was in one of the very top economic journals back in 2007. The creation of those more efficient markets increased fishermen welfare - profits went up and labour requirements declined. Increased consumer welfare - the price of fish went down. Everyone benefitted - even CO2 emissions declined - none lost, from that mere market efficiency.Of course, early papers often get revised - the conclusion of doing that seems to be that the original paper under-estimated the benefits, the general increase in human welfare from that more efficient market.Market efficiency, it's a good thing and don't you, ever, forget it.