A new paper in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy by Bisschop, Kastoryano, and van der Klaauw looks at the opening and closing of prostitution zones (tippelzones) in 25 Dutch cities.

Our empirical results show that opening a tippelzone reduces sexual abuse and rape. These results are mainly driven by a 30–40 percent reduction in the first two years after opening the tippelzone. For tippelzones with a licensing system, we additionally find long-term decreases in sexual assaults and a 25 percent decrease in drug-related crime, which persists in the medium to long run.

Cunningham and Shah studied decriminalization of indoor prostitution in Rhode Island and found very similar results.

We exploit the fact that a Rhode Island District Court judge unexpectedly decriminalized indoor prostitution in 2003 to provide the first causal estimates of the impact of decriminalization on the composition of the sex market, rape offenses, and sexually transmitted infection outcomes. Not surprisingly, we find that decriminalization increased the size of the indoor market. However, we also find that decriminalization caused both forcible rape offenses and gonorrhea incidence to decline for the overall population. Our synthetic control model finds 824 fewer reported rape offenses (31 percent decrease) and 1,035 fewer cases of female gonorrhea (39 percent decrease) from 2004 to 2009.

A succinct account of the entangled mess...

https://www.wsj.com/article_email/the-fbis-political-meddling-1508883468-lMyQjAxMTE3MzI1NjgyNTY4Wj/

:...no one could have imagined the invention of texting would increase the risk of a car crash 23-fold..."

Richard Fernandez

https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/the-crisis-of-myth/

Yep. To Kill a Mockingbird is off the shelves. I knew Trump would bring back the bad old days.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/leave-my-safe-space-alone-15530.html

We seem always to get it wrong. Here Spengler (David Goldman) explains.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2017/09/25/washingtons-despicable-hypocrisy-towards-kurds/

In arguing for the continuity in Eugene Genovese's thought, Stuart Schrader paraphrases his thinking this way:

In contrast to historians who preceded Genovese, however, he saw the social world of the enslaved and the masters as a unity, even if fundamentally cleaved. The chief difference between this non-capitalist system and capitalism is that slaveholders could not shrink their labor force without losing their investment in those enslaved bodies. In contrast, under capitalist competition shedding workers is key to maintaining or increasing profitability. Under capitalism, productivity increases are enabled by introduction of labor-saving machines, whereas to increase productivity under slavery, according to Genovese, slaveholders had to add bodies or more closely surveil and abuse the enslaved. Because the South thus lacked the economic dynamism associated with capitalism, it fell behind the North and could expand only extensively into new territories, rather than intensively, as the North did, through technological innovation.

Jacques Barzun's cultural history, From Dawn to Decadence, describes the rise of journalism. We hear many complaints nowadays of bias in the media, and it is hard to deny the justice of the claims. But apparently, it was ever so:

The journalist developed into a social type, exemplified in the London of the years of our concern [ca. 1715] by Defoe, Addison, Steele, Swift, and a large group of lesser lights. Their common characteristic is allegiance to a political party....What journalists of every type see as their proper task is to form public opinion.

Before they decide to ban Stephen Foster (word and thought crime) sit back and enjoy these masters.