The end of football?

It could happen, according to economists Tyer Cowen and Kevin Grier:

By now we’re all familiar with the growing phenomenon of head injuries and cognitive problems among football players, even at the high school level. In 2009, Malcolm Gladwell asked whether football might someday come to an end, a concern seconded recently by Jonah Lehrer.

Before you say that football is far too big to ever disappear, consider the history: If you look at the stocks in the Fortune 500 from 1983, for example, 40 percent of those companies no longer exist. The original version of Napster no longer exists, largely because of lawsuits. No matter how well a business matches economic conditions at one point in time, it’s not a lock to be a leader in the future, and that is true for the NFL too. Sports are not immune to these pressures. In the first half of the 20th century, the three big sports were baseball, boxing, and horse racing, and today only one of those is still a marquee attraction.

The most plausible route to the death of football starts with liability suits.¹ Precollegiate football is already sustaining 90,000 or more concussions each year. If ex-players start winning judgments, insurance companies might cease to insure colleges and high schools against football-related lawsuits. Coaches, team physicians, and referees would become increasingly nervous about their financial exposure in our litigious society. If you are coaching a high school football team, or refereeing a game as a volunteer, it is sobering to think that you could be hit with a $2 million lawsuit at any point in time. A lot of people will see it as easier to just stay away. More and more modern parents will keep their kids out of playing football, and there tends to be a “contagion effect” with such decisions; once some parents have second thoughts, many others follow suit. We have seen such domino effects with the risks of smoking or driving without seatbelts, two unsafe practices that were common in the 1960s but are much rarer today. The end result is that the NFL’s feeder system would dry up and advertisers and networks would shy away from associating with the league, owing to adverse publicity and some chance of being named as co-defendants in future lawsuits.

It may not matter that the losses from these lawsuits are much smaller than the total revenue from the sport as a whole. As our broader health care sector indicates (try buying private insurance when you have a history of cancer treatment), insurers don’t like to go where they know they will take a beating. That means just about everyone could be exposed to fear of legal action.

Via Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy, who responds that the NFL and other football leagues could successfully push for tort-reform laws protecting the sport from legal action.  Maybe, but that wouldn’t solve the insurance problem – not to mention a gradual decline in the number of young people being allowed to play the game.  (Football is my favorite sport, but the more we learn about head trauma, the more nervous I become about my own sons possibly taking part.)

If history is any guide, the NFL will go out of business just as the Cleveland Browns are about to win the Super Bowl.

The man who adopted his girlfriend

Florida multimillionaire John Goodman (no, not that John Goodman) faced the prospect of bankruptcy when he was sued by the parents of a young man he killed in a drunk-driving accident.  He did have a massive trust fund set up for his children, but there was no way he could get access to that money.

Until now…

Enter the shrewd estate planning attorney who recommended that the 48-year-old Goodman adopt his 42-year-old girlfriend, Heather Laruso Hutchins, thus making her a beneficiary of the trust that Wilson’s parents cannot mention or touch. (In this arrangement, Hutchins is the beneficiary to roughly $70 million, which she would presumably share with Goodman, her doting dad-slash-boyfriend.) Elegant. Brilliant. And actually not that uncommon, it turns out.

Believe it or not, there is a growing trend in this country of adopting one’s adult lover or spouse for various reasons: to better guarantee the adoptee’s right to inherit directly from the adoptor; to keep other relatives from having any standing to contest an estate plan; or, as in Goodman’s case, to add a spouse or lover to a class of trust beneficiaries, allowing the “child” to inherit from the “parent.” Courts around the country are struggling to figure out whether these adoptions should be upheld or not.

Clever.  Sleazy and sick, but undeniably clever.

Slate asks the obvious question: wouldn’t the relationship between Goodman and Hutchins be considered incest, now that she is legally his daughter?  It would in some states, but not Florida:

But before you go out and adopt your lover, there is one pretty serious repercussion you should consider: Are you committing incest? An incest conviction can result in serious jail time. And think about it: The adopter is having sexual relations with his or her legal child. Is that not incest?

For as long as anyone can remember, almost all cultures have outlawed at least some form of sexual relations and/or marriage between family members. Written prohibitions can be traced as far back as the Levitical Codes. Incest is a statutory crime that has been around in America since colonial times.

My research indicates that today at least 25 states and territories, representing over 140.8 million people (approximately 46 percent of the total population) in the United States, are subject to laws that include the adopted parent/adult child relationship within the definition of incest. That means a good many adult adoptions solve one legal problem but create an arguably worse one. Fortunately for both Goodman and his daughter/girlfriend, Florida is not one of these states. Otherwise, they might find themselves facing criminal prosecution, as have adopters and adoptees elsewhere.

Insert your own Woody Allen reference here.

(via The Volokh Conspiracy)

Affinity fraud

Warning: that charming fellow who made a presentation at your church or [ethnic group] community centre, promising to make you all millionaires overnight, does not have your best interests in mind:

Mr Madoff, whose victims lost perhaps $20 billion, perpetrated the largest “affinity fraud” ever. The term refers to scams in which the perpetrator uses personal contacts to swindle a specific group, such as a church congregation, a rotary club, a professional circle or an ethnic community. Once the scammer gains their trust, his scam spreads like smallpox. Most affinity frauds are Ponzi schemes, in which money from new investors is used to repay old ones, or is siphoned off by the promoters.

The Madoff fraud fed on multiple affinity circles: wealthy Jews in Florida and Israel, country-club types and European old money, lured with help from marketers running “feeder” funds. The next-largest alleged investment fraud of recent years, the $7 billion collapse of Allen Stanford’s empire, also concerned specific groups, including the Latin American and Libyan diasporas and Southern Baptists. Mr Stanford’s trial began on January 23rd. He denies wrongdoing.

Beneath the mega-scams swirls a mass of smaller cons, spanning the world. Any close-knit community can be a target. Last August a South Korean pastor was indicted for misappropriating 2.4 billion Korean won ($2.3m) that the faithful had handed over to set up a Christian bank. In Britain, Kevin Foster’s KF Concept targeted the former coal-mining towns of South Wales, bilking more than 8,000 victims with the help of glitzy roadshows.

The problem is a global one but best-documented in America. Besides the Madoff saga, Marquet International, a consultancy, has identified more than 300 sizeable Ponzi schemes from the past ten years, with combined losses for investors of $23 billion. It estimates that up to half of those were affinity-based. No one has a reliable number for smaller frauds over the same period, but guesses range from $5 billion to $20 billion. In all, affinity-fraud losses in America could be as much as $50 billion.

The FBI is probing some 1,000 cases of investment fraud, more than double the number outstanding in 2008. Six state securities commissioners contacted by The Economist all say the problem is growing.

[...]

Why do such people let their guard down? “Everyone is looking for a shorthand way to judge character, and affinity settings offer that, at least in theory,” says Jeff Robinson, head of the Utah County Attorney’s investigations bureau. Tribal ties foster trust, which is usually a good thing (see article). But it can be abused.

Another factor is the rise of “prosperity theology”, or the belief that God wants Christians to be rich as well as good. This idea has taken root fastest in black and Hispanic churches. The problem is that it puts pressure on congregations to invest successfully, which makes them more vulnerable, says Ole Anthony of the Trinity Foundation, which investigates church fraud.

Social media make affinity fraud quicker. Bonds that used to take years to establish can be forged in days on Facebook or Twitter. Fraudsters read potential victims’ online profiles, and use the information they glean to refine their pitches. In a recent case, the SEC won a restraining order against a scam targeting users of chat sites popular with the deaf.

If it seems too good to be true…

Prepare to have your mind blown

This is an actual newscast from a TV station in Cleveland, covering a trial where cameras weren’t allowed in the courtroom:

Via Warming Glow.

Where the nanny state leads

When you keep infringing on people’s freedom “for the children,” a little at a time, eventually you get something like this:

Anurup and Sagarika Bhattacharya – an Indian couple from Kolkata are living a nightmare in Norway. Their children – a three-year-old son and one-year-old daughter – were taken away from them by Norway’s child protective services and placed in foster care eight months ago.

The drastic measure was taken because, according to the child protective services, the couple were not bringing the children up properly. What did they do wrong? They fed the children with their hands and the infants slept in the same bed as the parents.

“My son was sleeping with my husband. They said he should sleep separately from your son,” said Mrs Bhattacharya.

“Feeding a child with the hand is normal in Indian tradition and when the mother is feeding with a spoon there could be phases when she was overfeeding the child. They said it was force feeding. These are basically cultural differences,” said Mr Bhattacharya.

Recently, the Indian Embassy in Oslo stepped in and an officer even met the children, though the parents were not allowed to.

Reason‘s Shikha Dalmia says the parents have not been allowed to even see the children for the past eight months.  For this.  But remember, the government always knows best.

What’s going on with the internet today?

Many prominent websites, most notably Wikipedia, are going dark today to protest two ham-handed anti-piracy bills making their way through the United States Congress:

What exactly is blacked out?
The English-language version of Wikipedia is offline and has been replaced with a message related to the anti-piracy legislation going through Congress, SOPA, in the United States. Other language editions of Wikipedia will be unaffected.

Additionally, popular community website Reddit has also gone offline, as well as Boing-Boing and several smaller websites.

WordPress is suggesting users black out their own websites, but is not forcing any blackouts.

Whoa, SOPA? What the heck is that?
SOPA, which stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act, is a piece of legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives. The act is designed to target copyright infringers online through a series of harsh penalties.

In the U.S. Senate, a separate companion bill is called the Protect Intellectual Property Act or PIPA.

[...]

…Why do the SOPA opponents say it would turn the Internet into a police state?
Several of the provisions in SOPA force American Internet service providers or ISPs hosting websites to remove a site from the Internet if there’s a claim it’s infringing against copyright, even if it has not been fully proved in court. The argument is that this would make it easy for someone to make false or weak claims to take a website offline while the case makes its way through the courts.

Additionally, it would force ISPs to block non-U.S. websites accused of having infringing material, meaning sites from other countries might not be available in the United States. Opponents say this might destabilize the Internet and allow loopholes for hackers to exploit.

Which sites that I use would this affect?
Most obviously, Wikipedia. There are millions of users who constantly update the site, and sometimes things are posted that might have questionable copyright provenance. If Wikipedia were shut down or blocked every time it was challenged over copyright, the site would likely cease to function.

YouTube would be another site that would be harshly affected by the measures. Since millions of people upload videos to YouTube, sometimes copyrighted material slips through. Currently, this is dealt with by individual videos being taken down after a complaint. Google has stated YouTube probably wouldn’t exist if a SOPA-like law had been in effect in 2004 when the site launched.

Some interpretations of the bill say that sites that even link to other sites accused of infringing might be at risk.

Basically, any site that has a large user-generated component is worried about SOPA.This is the document Wikipedia references when explaining why they are against the bill.

Google has posted an online petition against SOPA and PIPA, which I encourage everyone to sign.  More from the Cato Institute and The Globe and Mail.

Eric, Lola, and division of property

This week, the Supreme Court of Canada will revisit the issue of whether common-law spouses are presumptively entitled to an equal division of family property:

They’re known as “de facto spouses.” Partners in a paperless marriage. Or, in this case, plain old Eric and Lola.

But there’s almost nothing ordinary about the tale of a 51-year-old Quebec billionaire businessman and a former Brazilian model, whose messy legal battle could change life for millions of Canadian couples.

Their case, which reaches the Supreme Court of Canada [this] Thursday, is expected to decide whether common-law spouses have the same rights as married couples to support and sharing of property after a break-up.

While the case is likely to have its greatest impact in Quebec, legal experts predict that if Lola succeeds in her landmark challenge, eight other provinces and territories that deny property rights to unmarried spouses, including Ontario [and Nova Scotia - DJP], will be forced to rethink their legislation.

As a starting point, common-law spouses should have the right to both alimony and an equal share in property, argue lawyers for the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), an intervenor in the case.

[...]

Looming over the case is a 2002 decision by the Supreme Court involving Susan Walsh, a Nova Scotia woman who sought a share of her late common-law husband’s assets. In that case, the court’s 8-1 majority upheld a section of Nova Scotia’s Matrimonial Property Act, which gives only married people a share in a partner’s property.

The court said excluding common-law couples was a way of respecting their decision to avoid marriage because of the legal obligations that go along with it.

LEAF argues it is time to revisit the Walsh decision, saying the court in 2002 did not have the benefit of social science research that shows when people move in together, they aren’t motivated by legal considerations.

In fact, North American research over the past decade has shown that most couples who live together are under the mistaken impression they already have the same rights as married couples.

Via @John_Magyar.