Some years ago, Dourado and Russell pointed out a stunning fact about airport noise complaints: A very large number come from a single individual or household.

In 2015, for example, 6,852 of the 8,760 complaints submitted to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport originated from one residence in the affluent Foxhall neighborhood of northwest Washington, DC. The residents of that particular house called Reagan National to express irritation about aircraft noise an average of almost 19 times per day during 2015.

Since then, total complaint volumes have exploded—but they are still coming from a tiny number of now apparently more “productive” individuals. In 2024, for example, one individual alone submitted 20,089 complaints, accounting for 25% of all complaints! Indeed, the total number of complainants was only 188 but they complained 79,918 times (an average of 425 per individual or more than one per day.)

What I learned recently is that it’s not just airport noise complaints. We see the same pattern in data from the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights which enforces federal civil rights laws related to education funding. In 2023, for example, 5059 sexual discrimination complaints came from a single individual–from a total of 8151 complaints. Thus, one individual accounted for 68.5% of all sexual discrimination complaints in that year.

In the annual reports for 2022-2024 the OCR identifies what type of complaint the single-individual with multiple complaints was making, a sex discrimination complaint, while in previous years they just give data on the number of complaints from single individuals compared to the total of all types of complaints. I’ve collated this data in this graph which presents totals compared to multiple complaints from a single individual without regard to the type of complaint. Do note, that there are also single individuals filing hundreds of other types of complaints such as age discrimination complaints so the data from more recent years may actually be an underestimate.

In any case, it’s clear that a single individual often accounts for 10-30% of all complaints! These complaints have to be investigated so this single individual may be costing taxpayers millions. It’s as if a single individual were pulling a fire alarm thousands of times a year, mobilizing emergency services on demand, and never facing repercussions.

Does this strategy work? Probably. When complaints are summarized for Congress or reported in the media, are totals presented as-is, or adjusted for spam?

Increasingly, public institutions seem to exist to manage the obsessions of a tiny number of neurotic—and possibly malicious—complainers.

The post The Tyranny of the Complainers appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

1. The New Aesthetics and a call for new stories.

2. Seb Krier.

3. How did TVs get so cheap?

4. How Dean Ball uses coding agents.

5. The golden age of vaccine development.

6. Why is British politics so chaotic?

7. Update on the political science paper written by Claude.

8. “EU countries have approved the Mercosur trade deal after 25 years of talks.”  And winners and losers.  There are still plenty of restrictions in the deal of course, but better than nothing.

9. Milei fully repays currency swap.

The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

I can't un-know what I learned in that courtroom. I can't unsee the videos that contradicted the photographs. I can't forget the disconnection between the evidence and the narrative.

The last 48 hours have witnessed a veritable epidemic of FDS, a collective meltdown that would be comical if it weren’t so pathetically predictable. It all stems from a recent poll by Merlin Strategy, a fresh-faced polling outfit helmed by Scarlet Maguire, a former BBC and ITV politics producer who’s built a reputation for sharp, no-nonsense analysis – most recently in a valuable piece in the New Statesman, looking at the way that young women are swinging leftwards.. Their latest survey, commissioned for The Telegraph and dated just before the new year, dropped a bombshell: on balance, Reform UK is more trusted than any other party to run the economy. Yes, you read that right. Not Labour’s hapless crew, still fumbling with their socialist spreadsheets. Not the Tories, whose economic stewardship resembles a drunkard at a casino. But Reform UK, the upstarts led by that perennial thorn in the establishment’s side, Nigel Farage. The numbers, buried in that Excel file of raw data, paint a picture of public disillusionment with the status quo, Reform edging out the competition in net trust scores on economic management.

For the FDS sufferers, this was intolerable. Their brains, already addled by years of wishing Farage into obscurity, short-circuited spectacularly.

– Gawain Towler

Keir Starmer is mulling a ban on X, formerly Twitter. This would be a shocking, draconian move, bringing the UK into line with states as authoritarian as Russia, China and North Korea. Yet the only real surprise here is that he hasn’t tried it sooner. As I argue today on spiked, the PM’s claim that this is about protecting children from X-generated AI deepfakes is incredibly weak sauce. Every man and his AI companion knows that X and its owner, Elon Musk, have been a constant thorn in the side of this loathsome Labour government. Starmer holds X responsible for reviving interest in the grooming gangs and even stoking the Southport riots. We should take his threat to ban it incredibly seriously.

– Fraser Myers

It’s been a year since Trump took back the White House -- how is it possible we know so little about these cells, and when will we see mass arrests of these paid agitators and the politicians who are determined to use whatever power they have to help them?