[This is a guest post by Clara Collier. Clara is the editor of Asterisk Magazine.]

Proposition 36 is a California ballot measure that increases mandatory sentences for certain drug and theft crimes.

It’s also a referendum on over a decade of sentencing reform efforts stemming from California’s historical prison overcrowding crisis. Like many states, California passed increasingly tough sentencing laws through the 90s and early 2000s. This led to the state’s prisons operating massively over capacity: at its peak, a system built for 85,000 inhabitants housed 165,000. This was, among other things, a massive humanitarian crisis. The system was too overstretched to provide adequate healthcare to prisoners. Violence and suicide shot up.

In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that California prisons were so overcrowded that their conditions violated the 8th Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. That year, the state assembly passed a package of reforms called "realignment," which shifted supervision of low-level offenders from the state to the counties. Then, in 2014, Californians voted for Proposition 47, which reduced some felony crimes to misdemeanors – theft of goods valued at under $950 and simple drug possession – and made people in prison for those crimes eligible for resentencing. Together, realignment and Prop 47 brought down California’s prison and jail population by 55,000.

The campaign for Prop 36 is based on the premise that Prop 47 failed, leading to increased drug use and retail theft (but don’t trust me – it says so in the text of the measure). 36 would repeal some parts of 47, add some additional sentencing increases, and leave some elements in place (the LA Times has a good breakdown of the changes here).

It’s easy to round this off to a simple tradeoff: are we willing to put tens of thousands of people in jail if it would decrease the crime rate? But this would be the wrong way to think about the measure: there is no tradeoff. Prop 36 will certainly imprison many people, but it won’t help fight crime.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-case-against-proposition-36

Tyler Cowen is an economics professor and blogger at Marginal Revolution. Patrick Collison is the billionaire founder of the online payments company Stripe. In 2019, they wrote an article calling for a discipline of Progress Studies, which would figure out what progress was and how to increase it. Later that year, tech entrepreneur Jason Crawford stepped up to spearhead the effort.

The immediate reaction was mostly negative. There were the usual gripes that “progress” was problematic because it could imply that some cultures/times/places/ideas were better than others. But there were also more specific objections: weren’t historians already studying progress? Wasn’t business academia already studying innovation? Are you really allowed to just invent a new field every time you think of something it would be cool to study?

It seems like you are. Five years later, Progress Studies has grown enough to hold its first conference. I got to attend, and it was great.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/notes-from-the-progress-studies-conference

The Median Voter Theorem says that, given some reasonable assumptions, the candidate closest to the beliefs of the median voter will win. So if candidates are rational, they’ll all end up at the same place on a one-dimensional political spectrum: the exact center.

Here’s a simple argument for why this should be true: suppose the Democrats wisely choose a centrist platform, but the Republicans foolishly veer far-right:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-median-voter-theorem