Coyote Blog

I know that for many folks today, history seems increasingly irrelevant.  Millenials will say that anything a bunch of old white guys were doing 500 years ago has no bearing on their lives.  Or perhaps more accurately, they don't want it to have any bearing on their life.

I love history in and of itself, but studying it has real value in understanding public policy choices. The problem in public policy is that we can seldom run good controlled studies (e.g. half of you will live under socialism and half capitalism and we will see who does better).  And even when we do inadvertently run A/B tests (e.g. blue state fiscal and regulatory model vs red state) we seldom pay attention to the results in part because we are just too close to them and too invested in them in one way or another.

But if you look back through enough time and across enough different civilizations, humans have already run millions of experiments and we can read the results.  I find it impossible, for example, to look at our government today without thinking of Rome and the Gracchi brothers in the 2nd century BC.  People today are trying to throw out institutional checks and balances, rules of decorum, traditions of collegiality, and limitations on power because they feel these are standing in the way of (mostly) well-meaning improvement programs ( in areas such as climate, income inequality, racism, etc).  But history teaches that such efforts always end the same way.  As in Rome in 133BC or Russian in 1917 or Cuba in 1957 or in many other historical cases, the inroads made by well-meaning idealists in weakening limits on individual power just open the door for real iron-fisted authoritarians to take the helm.

For a while now, I have  had a theory that the zero-sum nature of academic success (competition for a fixed and perhaps shrinking number of tenured positions) affects the larger world-view of academia. (This article that compares academia to a harmful cult demonstrates this zero-sum thinking pretty well.)

It is pretty well-established that the American academic community is disproportionately of the Left, and in fact tilts pretty strongly in many cases to the far Left / progressive side.  People debate a lot about why this should be, but I think one contributing factor (but certainly not the only one) that I have never heard anyone discuss is the zer0-sum game these academics must play in their own careers.  I think that many of them incorrectly assume that all professions, and all of the economy and capitalism, is dominated by this same dog-eat-dog zero sum game -- remember, for most, academia is the only industry they have ever experienced from the inside.  And once you assume that the whole economy is zero-sum, it is small step from there to overly-narrow focus on distribution of wealth and income.

One of the mistakes folks on the Left make about capitalism is to describe capitalism as mostly about competition.  In fact, capitalism is mostly about cooperation, its a self-organizing process where people who don't even know each other cooperate to deliver products and services, facilitated by markets and the magic of prices.  Sure, competition exists but it is not the fundamental feature, but an enabler that makes sure the cooperation occurs as efficiently as possible.  Capitalism in fact is about zillions of voluntary trades and transactions every day that each make both parties better off -- or else both sides would not have agreed to it.  Capitalism in fact is a giant positive sum game, a fact that many on the Left simply do not grasp.

Never in my business life have I thought any company I worked for was playing in a zero-sum game.  Sure, individual sales to an individual customer might be zero sum -- UPS is going to order its bearings from Rockwell or Emerson and winning and losing that one order is zero sum.  But as a whole no business I have been in has ever felt zero sum.  In my business running campgrounds, I want our campgrounds to be the best but our growth is generally not at the expense of some other campground -- it is about attracting more people for more days to camping and offering those who do camp more value-added services.

Postscript on Metrics:  As an aside, it struck me that one improvement to the dysfunctional academic experience described in the Washington Post article linked above might be to an a measurement of the professoriate that went beyond just counting published articles and their citations.  Start counting the number of advisees each professor has that lands teaching and tenured positions and you could change some behavior.

A while back I wrote:

Is it possible that inflation exists but it shows up mainly in financial assets (stocks, bonds, perhaps real estate) that don't really factor into standard inflation metrics?  Every step the Fed has taken, as well as other western central banks, appears to me to be crafted to pump money into securities markets rather than into main street.  Certainly we have seen a huge inflation in the value of financial assets and real estate over the past several years.

It was an honest question -- I am not an economist.  Business school gives one a pretty good working knowledge of micro but macro is usually outside my ken.  However, I see this is not a new idea and others make the same point.  Saw this chart on the Zero Hedge Twitter feed

I will add that progressives want to use this data to make some sort of fairness / income inequality point about wages vs. rich people's asset holdings, but this chart is not a natural result of unbridled capitalism.  It is the predictable result, even the desired result by its creators, of Fed policy in general and quantitative easing in particular.

I have been working on cord-cutting around the house and have been experimenting with different devices (e.g. Roku, Google, Amazon) and different streaming services (Youtube TV, DirecTV Now, and I may test Slingbox soon since it is the only one that seems to have the Redzone channel).

The boxes vary mostly in interface.  We have been a Roku family for a long time so we are comfortable with it, and it is pretty straight forward.  The one flaw is that there is no sharing across devices of passwords and such and so you tediously have to enter all your streaming service passwords in every device.  What is worse, the Roku tends to have these fits of forgetfulness making you re-enter many or all your passwords a second or third time.  I may have not understood the Google device but it seemed to require me to do everything with my cell phone nearby and actually streamed stuff from my phone.  This may be fine for millenials but was stupid for my home theater where I already have a Logitech remote that is programmed to handle everything.  I have not played much with the Amazon device -- if you are an Amazon family and like Alexa it may be the best solution.  I did not even consider the Apple device -- I am sure it is great if you all you use is Apple walled garden service and devices but I use many other services and in general find its interface a kluge.  Roku is really the one device with neutrality going for it.

I have tried several of the streaming services.  I like Youtube TV and its interface a lot.  DirecTV has a few more channels that I like but I like the interface less (by the way, there are several good channel coverage comparisons of the various streaming services you can google).  Both services have cloud recording functions, ability to watch content both live and in replay mode, and have good coverage of all the local networks.  I was hoping that Red Zone channel would come to DirecTV live as they have the satellite rights to it but apparently slingbox is the only service that is currently offering Red Zone, so I may have to try that.  I need to hurry as all my free trials are running out.

The one interesting exception to all this is that there is no way to get PBS live streamed on any device from any service right now.  Some local stations livestream to your browser and I think there is now a browser-based livestream of the News hour.  But you can't currently watch your local PBS station live -- you can only watch selected shows in replay mode after they have aired via a separate PBS app for devices like the Roku.  It is amazing to me that the progressive socialist haters of capitalism at PBS are the only network still committed to supporting the cable monopolies.  The PBS website helpfully tells you that you can buy an over-the-air antenna if you want to cut the cord and watch PBS.

1.  Choose a complex and chaotic system that is characterized by thousands or millions of variables changing simultaneously (e.g. climate, the US economy)
2. Pick one single output variable to summarize the workings of that system (e.g. temperature, GDP)
3. Blame (or credit) any changes to your selected output variable on one single pet variable (e.g. capitalism, a President from the other party)
4. Pick a news outlet aligned with your political tribe and send them a press release
5. Done!  You are now a famous scientist.  Congratulations.

In an article about the French railroad SNCF, Randal O'Toole makes a point I have screamed to the world for years:

Meanwhile, French trains carry less than 11 percent of freight, as more than 86 percent of freight is transported on highways. Those numbers are in sharp contrast to the U.S., where at least a third of freight goes by rail and less than 40 percent goes by truck (and I suspect a bad model has erroneously exaggerated the role of trucks).

American railroads are a model of capitalism, one of the least-subsidized forms of transportation in the world. They are profitable and do far more for the national economy than Europe’s socialized railroads, which mainly serve narrow elites.

Most of the intellectual elites and nearly all the global warming alarmists deride the US for not having the supposedly superior rail system that France and Germany have.  They are blinded by the vision of admittedly beautiful high speed trains, and have frittered away billions of dollars trying to pursue various high speed rail visions in the US.

I know that the supposedly pro-science global warming alarmists sometimes are not actually very focused on science, but this is pretty simple to think about.

First, consider the last time you were on a passenger train.  Add up the weight of all the folks in your car.  Do you think they weighed more or less than the car itself?  Unless you were packed into a subway train with Japanese sumo wrestlers, the answer is that the weight of the car dwarfs that of the passengers it is carrying.    The average Amtrak passenger car apparently weighs about 65 tons (my guess is a high speed rail car weighs more).  The capacity of a coach is 70-80 passengers, which at an average adult weight of 140 pounds yields a maximum passenger weight per car of 5.6 tons.  This means that just 8% of the fuel in a passenger train is being used to move people -- the rest goes into moving the train itself.

Now consider a freight train.  The typical car weight 25-30 tons empty and can carry between 70 and 120 tons of cargo.  This means that 70-80% of the fuel in a freight train is being used to move the cargo.

Now you have to take me on faith on one statement -- it is really hard, in fact close to impossible, to optimize a rail system for both passengers and freight.  In the extreme of high speed rail, passenger trains required separate dedicated tracks.  Most rail systems, even when they serve both sorts of traffic, generally prioritize one or the other.  So, if you wanted to save energy and had to pick, which would you choose -- focusing on freight or focusing on passengers?  Oh and by the way, if you want to make it more personal, throw in a consideration of which you would rather have next to you on crowded roads, another car or another freight truck?

This is why the supposedly-green folks' denigrating of US rail is so crazy to me.  The US rails system makes at least as much sense as the European system, even before you consider that it was mostly privately funded and runs without the subsidies that are necessary to keep European rail running.  Yes, as an American tourist travelling in Europe, the European rails system is great.  Agreed.  I use it every time I go there.  I have to assume that this elite tourist experience must be part of why folks ignore the basic science here.

My original article on all this years ago was in Forbes here.

Postscript #1:  One could argue that what matters is not the weight ratios of freight vs. passenger rail but how those compare to the road alternatives.  I would have to think this through, but it gets way more complicated because you have to start worrying about average occupancy and such since that also differs.  At full capacity say of 4 people, the typical 4000 pound car (US, rest of the world is less) would passenger weight around 12% of the total, higher than for the passenger train.   But average occupies could change the comparison and I don't have the time to work it through.  But for a full analysis we would have to take a lot of other things into account.  For example, trains are a poor fit with customer travel time preferences for longer US distances, even for higher speed options.  In the same way freight pencils out worse for rail in Europe because the last mile transport problems become a bigger percentage in a shorter haul.  I am confident though that for the US, the freight-dominant system is the right solution and it amazes me how hard it is to get anyone to recognize this.

Postscript #2:  Thinking about the SNCF, I actually did a consulting project there 20+ years ago.  I remember two things.   First they had 25% more freight car repair people than they had freight cars.  Which led me to making the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that they could give every one of these folks their own tool bag, assign them their own car to ride around on, and still cut a fifth of their staff.  I have never, ever, ever seen bloated staffing like I did at SNCF.  My other memory was lunches with executives that took place in palatial dining rooms with waiters in white gloves.  We ate for like 3 hours and drank a case of wine and all I could think about doing after lunch was going to take a nap.

Postscript #3:  This is really going to be a random aside, but if you want to bring science to the table, monorails are the dumbest things ever.  The whole advantage of rail is the friction reduction of a metal flanged wheel rolling on a metal rail.   Most monorails (and people movers) are just tires on a concrete beam (e.g this is how the Disney monorails work).  This is no more efficient than a bus and actually less because the train jacks up the vehicle to passenger weight ratio over a bus.  Because of certain geometry issues, monorails also have limited capacity.  Disney has been struggling with this for years at the Magic Kingdom in Florida and their ferry boats seem to move a lot more passengers than the adjacent monorails.  Monorails do look awesome, though, and their tracks are airier and more attractive than traditional elevated rail tracks.

I have written about this before, but critics of all things capitalism are usually particularly critical of branding, arguing that building brands has no value except to somehow beguile customers into overpaying for things or buying things they do not need.  Now, I can be sympathetic to this when I see folks who have paid a fortune for certain fashion items (*cough* Louis Vuitton bags *cough*), but in generally branding actually has real consumer value.  One important value of branding is predictability.  McDonald's was traditionally a classic example of this -- walk into any McDonald's in the world and you will be pretty sure what will be on the menu and what it will taste like.

I wrote about this before when travelling in Europe.  I know that I like some orange juice brands and don't like others.  I know for sure I like Tropicana and so I buy that because I am confident I will get something I will like.  In Europe, I had no idea what to buy -- I might pay for something I would enjoy, but I might also find myself having paid for something I really did not like.

I was reading a travel blog and thought that this quote really represented the epitome of why brands matter

I’ve been to Hyatts all around the world within every brand of the chain’s portfolio, and I don’t recall ever staying at a property which was miscategorized. There’s no mistaking a Park Hyatt for a Hyatt Regency, or a Grand Hyatt for an Unbound Collection. When I pick a property within the Hyatt portfolio, my expectations are met and the experience is standardized around the world. Hyatt Houses and Hyatt Places are almost identical properties regardless of where in the world they pop up.

I cannot say the same for the expansive Marriott portfolio. Just last month I stayed at the JW Marriott Copacabana in Rio, and nothing about that property represented the other JW’s I’ve visited. Certainly not all generic Marriott hotels are created equally, and I’ve found a very large variation in property conditions, common spaces, room sizes and other factors at Marriotts.

For example, let’s look at Courtyard properties. Within the last year I’ve stayed at the Courtyard in Durham, North Carolina, which resembled an updated Super 8. Then, not two months later, I visited the Courtyard in LaGrange, Georgia, which was more akin to a full Marriott hotel branded property. Compare those two with the Courtyard Seoul Times Square, which has an executive lounge with a rooftop patio, and I don’t know what to expect when booking a Marriott property, even within a single brand.

Despite having a lot of respect for the intellect and the insane eclecticism of its author Tyler Cowen, I have never read the Complacent Class.  The title really did not intrigue me, and frankly from that title probably had the wrong vision of what the book was about.  That is, until I read George Will's recent review, in which he said in part:

In 1800, McCloskey says, the world’s economy was where Bangladesh’s economy now is, with no expectation of change. Today, most of the jobs that existed just a century ago are gone. And we are delighted that this protracted disruption occurred. Now, however, the Great Enrichment is being superseded by the Great Flinch, a recoil against the frictions and uncertainties — the permanent revolution — of economic dynamism. If this continues, the consequences, from increased distributional conflicts to decreased social mobility, are going to be unpleasant.

Although America is said to be — and many Americans are — seething about economic grievances, Tyler Cowen thinks a bigger problem is complacency. In his latest book, “The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream,” Cowen, professor of almost everything (economics, law, literature) at George Mason University and co-author of the Marginal Revolution blog, argues that the complacent class, although a minority, is skillful at entrenching itself in ways detrimental to the majority....

For complacent Americans, a less dynamic, growth-oriented nation seems less like an alarming prospect than a soothing promise of restfulness. In a great testimonial to capitalism’s power, “The Communist Manifesto,” Karl Marx wrote: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air.” Complacent, because comfortable, Americans have had enough of that.

Hmm, I suppose I should read it.  I don't want to judge the premise of the book from a few lines of a 3rd party review, but the themes here are strikingly similar to something I wrote 13 years ago (!) on this blog in a post titled "Progressives are too Conservative to Like Capitalism".  I still agree with much, though not all, of what I wrote there so I will pare it down a bit:

Most "progressives" (meaning those on the left to far left who prefer that term) would freak if they were called conservative, but what I mean by conservative in this context is not donate-to-Jesse-Helms capital-C Conservative but fearful of change and uncomfortable with uncertainty conservative.

OK, most of you are looking at this askance - aren't progressives always trying to overthrow the government or something?  Aren't they out starting riots at G7 talks?  The answer is yes, sure, but what motivates many of them, at least where it comes to capitalism, is a deep-seated conservatism.

Before I continue to support this argument, I must say that on a number of issues, particularly related to civil liberties and social issues, I call progressives my allies.  On social issues, progressives, like I do, generally support an individual's right to make decisions for themselves, as long as those decisions don't harm others.

However, when we move to fields such as commerce, progressives stop trusting individual decision-making.  Progressives who support the right to a person making unfettered choices in sexual partners don't trust people to make their own choice on seat belt use.  Progressives who support the right of fifteen year old girls to make decisions about abortion without parental notification do not trust these same girls later in life to make their own investment choices with their Social Security funds.  ... [this would also make a good example:  Progressives oppose school choice because they don't think the poor capable of making good education decisions]

Beyond just the concept of individual decision-making, progressives are hugely uncomfortable with capitalism.  Ironically, though progressives want to posture as being "dynamic", the fact is that capitalism is in fact too dynamic for them.  Industries rise and fall, jobs are won and lost, recessions give way to booms.  Progressives want comfort and certainty.  They want to lock things down the way they are. They want to know that such and such job will be there tomorrow and next decade, and will always pay at least X amount.  That is why, in the end, progressives are all statists, because, to paraphrase Hayek, only a government with totalitarian powers can bring the order and certainty and control of individual decision-making that they crave.

Progressive elements in this country have always tried to freeze commerce, to lock this country's economy down in its then-current patterns.  Progressives in the late 19th century were terrified the American economy was shifting from agriculture to industry.  They wanted to stop this, to cement in place patterns where 80-90% of Americans worked on farms.  I, for one, am glad they failed, since for all of the soft glow we have in this country around our description of the family farmer, farming was and can still be a brutal, dawn to dusk endeavor that never really rewards the work people put into it.

This story of progressives trying to stop history has continued to repeat itself through the generations.  In the seventies and eighties, progressives tried to maintain the traditional dominance of heavy industry like steel and automotive, and to prevent the shift of these industries overseas in favor of more service-oriented industries.  Just like the passing of agriculture to industry a century ago inflamed progressives, so too does the current passing of heavy industry to services.

In fact, here is a sure fire test for a progressive.  If given a choice between two worlds:

1. A capitalist society where the overall levels of wealth and technology continue to increase, though in a pattern that is dynamic, chaotic, generally unpredictable, and whose rewards are unevenly distributed, or...
2. A "progressive" society where everyone is poorer, but income is generally more evenly distributed.  In this society, jobs and pay and industries change only very slowly, and people have good assurances that they will continue to have what they have today, with little downside but also with very little upside.

Progressives will choose #2.  Even if it means everyone is poorer.  Even if it cuts off any future improvements we might gain in technology or wealth or lifespan or whatever.  They want to take what we have today, divide it up more equally, and then live to eternity with just that.   Progressives want #2 today, and they wanted it just as much in 1900 (just think about if they had been successful -- as just one example, if you are over 44, you would have a 50/50 chance of being dead now).

Don't believe that this is what they would answer?  Well, first, this question has been asked and answered a number of times in surveys, and it always comes out this way.  Second, just look at any policy issue today.  Take prescription drugs in the US - isn't it pretty clear that the progressive position is that they would be willing to pretty much gut incentives for any future drug innovations in trade for having a system in place that guaranteed everyone minimum access to what exists today?  Or take the welfare state in Continental Europe -- isn't it clear that a generation of workers/voters chose certainty over growth and improvement?  That workers 30 years ago voted themselves jobs for life, but at the cost of tremendous unemployment amongst the succeeding generations?

I used to think some of the stuff in Atlas Shrugged was absurd satire.  This from Q&O:

The recently appointed dean of Purdue’s school, Dr. Donna Riley, has an ambitious agenda.

In her words (bold mine): “I seek to revise engineering curricula to be relevant to a fuller range of student experiences and career destinations, integrating concerns related to public policy, professional ethics, and social responsibility; de-centering Western civilization; and uncovering contributions of women and other underrepresented groups…. We examine how technology influences and is influenced by globalization, capitalism, and colonialism…. Gender is a key…[theme]…[throughout] the course…. We…[examine]… racist and colonialist projects in science….”

Decades ago, common carpentry practice (later set in stone by written regulations) specified that certain applications needed a 2 inch by 4 inch board.   The reason this board was chosen was not due to its size per se (in most cases, for cost and space issues, I am sure folks would love to have gotten away with something smaller).  This size board was chosen for a specific application by its load-carrying ability.   For example, two inch by four inch boards spaced every 16 inches apart created acceptably strong framing for a wall.

Anyway, after many years of making lumber, the timber and lumber industry found ways to make the 2 inch by 4 inch board much stronger.  Well, not always stronger, but more uniform in strength such that the weakest board in a batch was much closer to the average than before.  But for standards, this has about the same effect -- 2 inch by 4 inch boards could be considered to be much stronger since the expected value had to be set at the minimum that might be encountered.

So now, all the standard applications are over-designed.  We can get away with a smaller, cheaper board than a 2x4.  Or, for those of you less focused on capitalism and more focused on environmentalism, we can use fewer trees to build the same house.  But how do we switch an entire industry that is steeped from birth as to what a 2x4 should be used for?  How do we rewrite a myriad of regulations that all call for a 2x4?

Well, in the lumber industry, they redefined the 2x4 to actually be something like 1.5 x 3.5 actual inches, a board which under new production processes has the same predicted strength as the old 2" by 4" boards.  In effect, they decided that the essence of a 2x4 was not its dimensions, but its load-carrying ability.  Almost any engineer can understand this immediately.  This means we still frame walls with 2x4's spaced every 16 inches, but the lumber is smaller and less expensive than it was before.  Standards and training don't have to change.  Architects maybe had to adjust a bit because their wall widths changed slightly, but a 3.5 inch board width actually is a nice number because with sheets of 3/4 inch drywall on both sides it makes for a nice round number 6" thick wall.

All of this is background to this absurd story, is using this history to try to commit legal blackmail against a couple large home store chains (via Overlawyered):

Two home improvements stores are accused of deceiving the buyers of four-by-four boards, the big brother to the ubiquitous two-by-four.

The alleged deception: Menards and Home Depot (HD) market and sell the hefty lumber as four-by-fours without specifying that the boards actually measure 3½ inches by 3½ inches.

The lawsuits against the retailers would-be class actions, filed within five days of each other in federal court for the Northern District of Illinois. Attorneys from the same Chicago law firm represent the plaintiffs in both cases. Each suit seeks more than $5 million.

“Defendant has received significant profits from its false marketing and sale of its dimensional lumber products,” the action against Menards contends.

“Defendant’s representations as to the dimension of these products were false and misleading,” the suit against Home Depot alleges.

The retailers say the allegations are bogus. It is common knowledge and longstanding industry practice, they say, that names such as two-by-four or four-by-four do not describe the width and thickness of those pieces of lumber.

I loved Kling's book on the three languages of politics.  While I find this a bit depressing, I mostly agree

I think that I would have preferred that the elite stay “on top” as long as they acquired a higher regard for markets and lower regard for technocratic policies. What has been transpired is closer to the opposite. There was a seemingly successful revolt against the elite (although the elite is fighting back pretty hard), and meanwhile the elite has doubled down on its contempt for markets and its faith in technocracy.

I am disturbed about the news from college campuses. A view that capitalism is better than socialism, which I think belongs in the mainstream, seems to be on the fringe. Meanwhile, the intense, deranged focus on race and gender, which I think belongs on the fringe, seems to be mainstream.

The media environment is awful. Outrage is what sells. Moderation has fallen by the wayside.

 

This is probably not someone readers would expect me to honor, but way back when I was 19 my first college internship was working for Michael Novak at AEI.  Mr. Novak was a friend of my dad's, and I always secretly wonder if my dad saw that I was migrating away from traditional Conservatism and thought some time with Mr. Novak would head this off.

I ended up going in a different direction from Mr. Novak, but I had an enjoyable summer working with him.  I spent most of my time in the Georgetown University library researching papal encyclicals and commentary on them.  For someone who grew up around much more fundamentalist religions in the South, the more overt intellectualism of Catholic writing was fascinating.  I learned a lot, and Mr. Novak was as kind and generous as someone could possibly be.  He did a lot to defend capitalism in a world where it was increasingly questioned, and even if I have very different epistemology than he, I thank him for his work.

Yesterday at an event called One Day University, I saw a talk by William Burke-White of Penn and formerly of the Obama state department (I think he was one of many consultants, but I can never figure out seniority from people's biographies - his is here).

Mr. Burke-White was discussing the liberal world order created by the US after WWII and recent decline / threats to this world order and American power.  He discussed five trends or forces driving changes, and you probably can predicts many of them.  He discussed the rise of new world powers (e.g. China), the rise of powerful NGO's (e.g. ISIS) and the expansion of the Internet (which can destabilize traditional powers).  All fine, I have no particular comment on that stuff.  He also discussed climate change, with a picture of Manhattan underwater, and though I am tempted, I won't even respond to that.

What caught my attention was his fifth point -- about income inequality.  He showed a slide with the meme that 8 people (Warren Buffet et al) had more wealth than something like half the world's population put together.   His conclusion was that the liberal world order had failed because so much wealth had been concentrated in a few hands.

Well, if American power and influence is declining in the world and Mr. Burke-White is an example of the thinking of the Obama administration over the last 8 years, I now have a better understanding of why.   Sure there are really rich people.   There were probably 8 really rich guys in 1400 (though they would have all been Kings and Emperors rather than private business people).  The really different, world-changing event over the last 50 years has been the emergence from poverty of over a billion people, as facilitated by market capitalism.  Never before in all of the history of the planet have so many people been pulled out of poverty in such a short time.  Never before has such a large percentage of the globe moved beyond pure subsistence farming.  If the leaders of this country find it impossible to communicate this simple good news, then of course the post-WWII liberal world order is going to struggle.

Look, I understand that baby boomers (a group of which I am barely a member) have a hard time figuring out how to cope with this country's many past missteps.  Yes, we have been ham-handed (and that is generous) in exercising our power and we have often failed to live up to our stated values.  But helping to unleash a wave of market capitalism on the world is among our true successes.   And this is the US's one true source of power, this wave of prosperity we have helped to birth.  Other supposed sources of our power -- a big military and atomic bombs -- are horrifying.  Market capitalism is our one source of strength that is genuinely positive.  If we are staffing the state department with people who don't get this, then no wonder we are losing influence in the world.

This is a good video about various voting mechanisms for handling voting between more than 2 choices.

VotingParadoxes from Paul stepahin on Vimeo.  Via Alex Tabarrok

The video is about voting, but to make things simple it discusses voting among people for a single ice cream flavor they all have to share.   I don't think this video was meant to have any broader application beyond just highlighting basic paradoxes and strategies well-known in voting theory.   To me, though, this video highlights the strong advantages of capitalism over socialism in at least three ways

1. Forcing one-size-fits-all socialist and authoritarian solutions sucks vs. allowing individuals to make choices based on their personal preferences regardless of other preferences in the group.  While the video discusses a variety of voting approaches for forcing everyone into a single choice, all of these result in a lot of folks who don't get their first preference.  Obamacare is a great example, where product features have been standardized, essentially through a voting process (though indirectly) and huge numbers of people are unhappy.
2. The video fails to discuss one shortcoming of simple yes/no voting, and that is degree of preference.  In the real world, we both may prefer vanilla over chocolate, but your preference might be pretty close whereas I might be so allergic to chocolate that eating it will kill me.  Socialist and authoritarian approaches don't have a solution for this, but market capitalism does, as prices signal not only our preference but our degree of preference as well.  The real market for ice cream is a preference expression process orders of magnitude more sophisticated than voting.
3. It is almost impossible for even an autocrat who legitimately wants to maximize well-being to do so, because the mass of individual preferences are impossible to encompass in any one mind.  Towards the end of the video, it became harder and harder for a person to synthesize a best approach from the preference data, and this was just for 10 people.  Imagine 300 million preferences.

As much as Bernie would like to blame the money laundering and money-hiding in the Panama papers on capitalism, in fact the vast majority of clients in those papers appear to be from socialist and strongly interventionist, populist governments.

Socialist countries tend still have winners and losers just like capitalist countries.  However, those winners and losers are not determined by success in making products and services in the marketplace, but in success in reaching a leadership position in the government or cozying up to those in government.  Soviet government elite had special privileges and special stores not accessible by ordinary Russians.  The Castro brothers and Hugo Chavez's daughter are among the richest people in the western hemisphere.

However, these wealthy leaders now have two problems.  First, they likely spend most of their time spouting egalitarian claptrap, so that they would like to hide their wealth in order to mask the obvious consistency problem.  Perhaps more importantly, their socialist policies have likely destroyed the country's economy -- there is, for example, no place any sane person would want to invest a billion dollars in Venezuela.  They need to get their money out of the country but because everyone else in a socialist country is also trying to get their money out, the self-same leader has likely instituted capital controls.  So the leader needs to put his or her money in a different country where it can actually be invested productively, and in doing so must evade their own capital controls.

The other day John Hinderaker of Powerline wrote:

If someone proposes that next year we should import 10,000 unskilled immigrants from Pakistan, the first question we should ask is: why do we need them? But that is the one question that no one ever seems to pose.

This is a terrible question and to my eye shows just how close Conservatives come to accepting many of the assumptions of Socialism.

Socialists seldom think in terms of individuals, but instead talk about the economy as some great big machine that they get to run.  We all remember Bernie Sanders saying

“You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country”

When Hinderaker is asking if we need more immigrants, or Sanders is asking if we need more deoderant choices, they are both working from an assumption that some authoritarian gets to sit at the top and make these choices for us.

The question "do we need immigrants" is actually senseless. Who is "we"? Who gets to make decisions for "we"? Only a socialist thinks this way. In a free society, the questions that matter are "Do I want to hire this immigrant?" or, as an immigrant, "do I want to take the chance of moving to an unfamiliar country to try to better my life." If I wish to hire someone from another country and they wish to move here and take the job, what the hell does it matter if John Hinderaker thinks this person is "needed"? I have decided I need a certain immigrant for my business, and the immigrant has decided that moving here is a good tradeoff for him.  In capitalism, that should be a done deal.

Could the immigrant or I be wrong about my employment offer being a good idea? Sure.  But authoritarian government second-guessing of individual decisions is supposed to be a progressive-socialist game, and here is a prominent Conservative doing exactly the same thing.  If Bernie Sanders wanted to require me to get government permission to produce a new flavor of deodorant, Hinderaker would be outraged.  But never-the-less he similarly wants me to get government permission (actually he wants to deny me government permission) to hire the employee I want to hire.

All this "Amercan jobs for Americans" thing may sound nice, and get head nods at the local Rotary, but what it actually means is that individual business people like myself have to be limited to hiring from a government-approved list.  Doesn't sound much like the free markets and small government Conservatives claim to want.

Hinderaker quotes approvingly from David Frum

However one assesses [the Farook family] chain and its consequences, it seems clear that the large majority of legal immigrants choose to come—or, more exactly, are chosen by their relatives—for their own reasons. They are not selected by the United States to advance some national interest. Illegal immigrants are of course entirely self-selected, as are asylum seekers. …

Donald Trump’s noisy complaints that immigration is out of control are literally true. Nobody is making conscious decisions about who is wanted and who is not, about how much immigration to accept and what kind to prioritize—not even for the portion of U.S. migration conducted according to law, much less for the larger portion that is not.

Doing things for one's own reasons.  Self-Selection.  Lack of government control.  Lack of government decisions about who or what is wanted.  Lack of national priorities.  These all sound like ... capitalism and a free society.   Replace the word immigration with any other term and Conservatives would blast these two sentences and Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama would vigorously nod.  I could write a $15 minimum wage screed using almost these identical words from Frum.    Here, let me try:

However one assesses [the John Smith] $8 wage and its consequences, it seems clear that the large majority of employers set wages for their own reasons. These wages are not set by the United States to advance some national interest. The wage rates are entirely self-selected by employers and employees.

Bernie Sanders's noisy complaints that wage rates and income inequality are out of control are literally true. Nobody in government is making conscious decisions about who is hired and for how much, about how much income to accept and what kind to prioritize.

Postscript:  Yes, I know that Conservatives are all worked up because 1 in a 1,000 or so of our immigrants might be murderers.  You know what, one in a thousand Americans born every day will likely grow up to be murderers, but we don't ban sex.  We accept the consequences that we get a few bad apples along with a lot of awesome productive people.

I would also ask Conservatives this -- why don't you think the Left's desire to ban gun ownership to head off mass shootings is fair?  I would suggest one reason is that it is unfair to ban legal gun ownership for 1,000 good people because one will use their gun to commit a murder.  If you agree with this statement, explain why your argument against immigration is different from the Left's call to ban gun ownership.

Left & Right each hope to ban large group (Gun owners & Muslims, respectively) from US because 0.1% of them might be dangerous @instapundit

— Coyoteblog (@Coyoteblog) December 11, 2015

In Europe, we stayed several times in rental apartments we found through the invaluable VRBO website.  One advantage of these apartments is that we can cook breakfast, avoiding the high-priced breakfasts at many hotels.

So I found myself shopping for orange juice in Austria, with a number of choices at hand, but none recognizable to me.  Skeptics of capitalism often point to branding and brand-based advertising as particular wastes of resources.  But I would have loved to see an orange juice brand I recognized.  Brands are essentially a guarantee of  predictability -- whether I like the taste or not, I know what a Big Mac will taste like in Omaha or Beijing.  Brands are an enormous aid to shopping and making choices, and in this manner create real value for us as consumers.  I missed recognizable brands when I was in Europe.

PS-  Coca-Cola and Pepsi are obviously the exceptions to this predictability game.  Diet Coke, called Coke Light in Europe, tastes entirely different in Europe than it does in the US -- in fact it tastes more like what Diet Pepsi tastes like in the US.  Which is ironic, and fitting I guess, because Diet Pepsi in Europe tastes a lot like American Diet Coke.

Vox shares what is perhaps the greatest achievement in human history, the continuing disappearance of absolute poverty:

Readers of this blog will likely  have seen this before (though it may well be new to Vox readers).  Here is the amazing thing about the Vox article:  It never once mentions capitalism, trade, economic freedom, or any synonym.  Here is a sampling of the tone of the accompanying article:

There's still much work to be done: 14.4 percent of the world amounts to 1 billion people who still need to be lifted out of extreme poverty. And making sure everyone's making at least $1.25 a day isn't the end of the fight either. The world's median income is still only $3 to $4 a day. By comparison, the poverty line in the US for a family of four is $16.61 per person per day. Once under-$1.25-a-day poverty is eradicated, the world needs to set about eradicating under-$15-a-day poverty, which will be a substantially harder task.

Vox is treating this like it is the result of some top-down effort, using the same language one might use to describe the eradication of Yellow Fever in Panama.  As if this resulted (and as if future progress depended on) some all-hands-on-deck technocratic government program.

No one "set about" eradicating poverty.  It happened because governments, at least to some extent, got out of the way and didn't stop it.  China is a great example.  Mao "set about" trying to eliminate poverty using many of the approaches likely favored by the Vox staff, and killed a few tens of millions of people in the process.

Here is my theory of the world's accelerating wealth formation that I have written on a number of times before.  This chart largely results from:

• There was a philosophical and intellectual change where questioning established beliefs and social patterns wentfrom being heresy and unthinkable to being acceptable, and even in vogue. In other words, men, at first just the elite but soon everyone, were urged to use their mind rather than just relying on established beliefs and appeals to authority.
• There were social and political changes that greatly increased the number of people capable of entrepreneurship. Before this time, the vast vast majority of people were locked into social positions that allowed them no flexibility to act on a good idea, even if they had one. By starting to create a large and free middle class, first in the Netherlands and England and then in the US, more people had the ability to use their mind to create new wealth. Whereas before, perhaps 1% or
  less of any population really had the freedom to truly act on their ideas, after 1700 many more people began to have this freedom.

So today's wealth, and everything that goes with it (from shorter work hours to longer life spans) is the result of more people using their minds more freely.

I operate recreation areas in the US Forest Service and from time to time get criticized that my profit adds cost to the management of the facilities, and that the government would clearly be better off with a non-profit running the parks since they don't take a profit.  What they miss is that non-profits historically do a terrible job at what I do.  They begin in a burst of enthusiasm but then taper off into disorder.    Think about any non-profit you have ever been a part of.  Could they consistently run a 24/7/365 service operation to high standards?

Don Boudreaux has a great quote today that touches on this very issue

from page 114 of the 5th edition (2015) of Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics:

While capitalism has a visible cost – profit – that does not exist under socialism, socialism has an invisible cost – inefficiency – that gets weeded out by losses and bankruptcy under capitalism.  The fact that most goods are more widely affordable in a capitalist economy implies that profit is less costly than inefficiency.  Put differently, profit is a price paid for efficiency.

It is also the "price" paid for innovation.

This is a great story:

Karl Marx was wrong about many things but right about one thing: the revolutionary way capitalism attacks and destroys feudalism. As I explain in a new study,  in India, the rise of capitalism since the economic reforms of 1991 has also attacked and eroded casteism, a social hierarchy that placed four castes on top with a fifth caste—dalits—like dirt beneath the feet of others. Dalits, once called untouchables, were traditionally denied any livelihood save virtual serfdom to landowners and the filthiest, most disease-ridden tasks, such as cleaning toilets and handling dead humans and animals. Remarkably, the opening up of the Indian economy has enabled dalits to break out of their traditional low occupations and start businesses. The Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DICCI) now boasts over 3,000 millionaire members. This revolution is still in its early stages, but is now unstoppable.

Coyote, in Forbes, December 2010 (excerpts):

My contention is that what drives most progressives, at a very fundamental level, is a deep conservatism.  Of course, most “progressives” would freak if they were called conservative, but what I mean by conservative in this context is not donate-to-Jesse-Helms capital-C Conservative but fearful of change and uncomfortable with uncertainty conservative.

Because capitalism is based so completely on individual decision-making, because its operation is inherently chaotic, and because its rewards can’t possibly be divided equally and still be “rewards”, progressives are hugely uncomfortable with it.  Ironically, though progressives want to posture at being “dynamic”, it turns out that capitalism is in fact too dynamic for them.  Industries rise and fall, jobs are won and lost, recessions give way to booms.  Progressives want comfort and certainty.  They want to lock things down the way they are. They want to know that such and such job will be there tomorrow and next decade, and will always pay at least X amount.  Which is why, in the end, progressives are all statists, because only a government with totalitarian powers can bring the order and certainty and control of individual decision-making that they crave..

Progressive elements in this country have always tried to freeze commerce, to lock this country’s economy down in its then-current patterns.  Progressives in the late 19th century were terrified the American economy was shifting from agriculture to industry.  They wanted to stop this, to cement in place patterns where 80-90% of Americans worked on farms.  I, for one, am glad they failed, since for all of the soft glow we have in this country around our notion of the family farmer, farming was and can still be a brutal, dawn to dusk endeavor that never really rewards the work people put into it....

I am sure, if asked, most  progressives would profess to desire iPod’s and cures for cancer.  But they want these without the incentives that drive men to invent them, and the disruption to current markets and competitors and employees that their introduction entails.  They want to end poverty without wealth creation, they want jobs without employers, they want cars without unemployment for buggy whip makers.

Hillary Clinton in July, 2015:  via Instapundit

In her first major economic policy address of the 2016 campaign, Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton raised questions about the effect that companies like Uber and Airbnb are having on American workers. . . .

Later in the speech, Clinton vowed to “crack down on bosses who exploit employees by misclassifying them as contractors” — a possible reference to something like the recent California Labor Commission decision that threatens to undermine Uber’s business model.

To be sure, Clinton does not want to destroy the sharing economy. She acknowledged that “these trends are real” and “none is going away.” But she may believe that, with the right application of political muscle, the new economy can be forced to conform with the antiquated blue social model — that is, the midcentury vision of steady, regulated, unionized employment with generous benefits.

As we have argued again and again, this notion is unrealistic. Like it or not, this 1950s model of economic organization is breaking down, and has been for several decades, thanks to globalization, demographic changes, technological innovation, and other trends that simply cannot be reversed. Measures like the California decision are futile and counterproductive. We should treat the emergence of a more entrepreneurial, dynamic landscape as an opportunity to be engaged with productively, not a danger to be henpecked by regulations better suited to the last century.

It turns out that small government libertarians like myself and large-government progressives actually have something in common -- we both fear accumulations of unaccountable power.  We just find such power in different places.  Progressives fear the accumulation of power in large corporations and moneyed individuals.  Libertarians fear government power.

I won't try to take Caplan's ideological Turing test today, but will just speak from my own perspective.  I wonder how Progressives can ignore that government has guns and prisons while corporations just have the ability to sell you something or hire you (though perhaps not on the terms you prefer).  When pressed to explain why the Left is more comfortable with government power, their explanations (to my taste) depend too much on assumptions that competent versions of "their guy" pull the levers of power, and that power itself and the vagaries of government incentives will not corrupt this guy.

On the other hand, progressives ask me all the time, "how can you trust corporations so much" and then list off a justifiably long list of examples of them acting poorly.  This, I think, is where the real difference comes in, and where the confusion often comes int he public discourse.  I will answer that I don't trust anyone, government or corporations.  What I trust are the incentives and the accountability enforced in a market where a) consumers can take their money elsewhere if they get bad products or services; b) employees can take their labor elsewhere if they are treated poorly; and c) entrepreneurs can make a fortune identifying shortcomings in incumbent businesses and offering consumers and/or employees a better deal.

Unfortunately, when a person or organization finds itself very successful in this game, there is a natural tendency to want to protect their winning position.  But nothing in the market can stop a challenge from a better product or service, so successful entities tend to turn to the government (which has a monopoly on guns and prisons and asset seizures and the like) for protection against upstart challengers.  If successful, these restrictions tend to hobble growth and innovation -- imagine if IBM had successfully used government influence to halt the PC revolution or if AT&T had blocked the growth of cell phones.

This dynamic is at the heart of Brink Lindsey's new white paper at Cato (pdf).   As has been his wont in several past works, Lindsey is looking for proposals that bridge the gap between Left and Right.  So, rather than stake out the 98th salvo in an area where there seems to be a hopeless ideological divide (e.g. minimum wage or low-skill immigration), he focuses on four areas one could imagine building a broad coalition.  Lindsey focuses on attempts by successful incumbents to use government to cement their position and calls them "regressive regulation" because they tend to benefit the already-successful at the expense of everyone else.

In the following sections, I examine four major examples of regressive regulation: (a) excessive monopoly privileges granted under copyright and patent law; (b) protection of incumbent service providers under occupational licensing; (c) restrictions on high-skilled immigration; and (d) artificial scarcity created by land-use regulation. In all four examples, current government policy works to create explicit barriers to entry. In the first two cases, the restriction is on entry into a product market: businesses are not allowed to sell products that are deemed to infringe on a copyright or patent, and individuals are not allowed to sell their services without a license. In the other two cases, actual physical entry into a geographic area is being limited: on the one hand, immigration into the country; on the other, the development and purchase or rental of real estate.

One can immediately see how this might appeal across ideologies.  Libertarians and market Conservatives will like the reduction in regulation and government scope.  Progressives should like the elimination of government actions that primarily help the wealthy and powerful.**

I said "cross ideologies" above rather than bi-partisan because things get messy when actual politics intrude.  All of these protected constituencies wield a lot of political influence across both parties -- that is why the regressive regulation exists in the first place.  And they all have finally honed stories about how these restrictions that prevent new competition and business models are really there to protect the little people (just watch the battles between Uber and the taxi cartels and you will see what I mean).

Never-the-less, this strikes me as a pretty good list.  For whatever barriers there may be, it is a hell of a lot easier to picture a bipartisan agreement on any of these issues than on, say, low-skill immigration.  I haven't finished reading to the end -- I have to get on now with my day job -- so I have yet to see if there are any concrete proposals that look promising.

**The ideological problem here, of course, is that libertarians think that these restrictions are the primary way in which the wealthy unfairly benefit while most Progressives would (I suppose) see it as a side issue given that they believe that even the free-est of market capitalism is inherently unfair.

The previous chart on beer availability reminds me of an issue I have been thinking about for a while -- that we do no know how to measure prosperity.

GDP growth and unemployment reduction are terrible measures.  Just to give one example, these measures looked fabulous in WWII.  But the average person living in the US had access to almost nothing -- they couldn't buy anything under rationing, they couldn't travel for leisure, etc.   GDP looked great because we were building stuff and then blowing it up, the economic equivilent of digging a hole and filling it in (but worse, because people were dying).  And unemployment looked great because we had drafted everyone and sent them off to get shot.

But median income and net worth numbers fail to measure prosperity as well.  The reason was described in this post here way back in 2007.

The home on the left was owned by Mark Hopkins, railroad millionaire and one of the most powerful men of his age in California.  Hopkins had a mansion with zillions of rooms and servants to cook and clean for him, but he never saw a movie, never listened to music except when it was live, never crossed the country in less than a week.  And while he could afford numerous servants around the house, Hopkins (like his business associates) tended to work 6 and 7 day weeks of 70 hours or more, in part due to the total lack of business productivity tools (telephone, computer, air travel, etc.) we take for granted.  Hopkins likely never read after dark by any light other than a flame.

If Mark Hopkins or any of his family contracted cancer, TB, polio, heart disease, or even appendicitis, they would probably die.  All the rage today is to moan about people's access to health care, but Hopkins had less access to health care than the poorest resident of East St. Louis.  Hopkins died at 64, an old man in an era where the average life span was in the early forties.  He saw at least one of his children die young, as most others of his age did.  In fact, Stanford University owes its founding to the early death (at 15) of the son of Leland Stanford, Hopkin's business partner and neighbor.  The richest men of his age had more than a ten times greater chance of seeing at least one of their kids die young than the poorest person in the US does today.

How do we take into account that even if a person has the same income as someone in 1952, they are effectively wealthier in many ways due to access to medical procedures, travel, entertainment, electronic devices, etc?

Somehow we need to measure consumer capability -- not just how much raw money one has but what can one do with the money?  What is the horizon of possibilities?  Deirdre McCloskey tends to eschew the term capitalism in favor of "market-tested innovation."  I think that is a pretty powerful description of our system.  But if it is, we really are only measuring the impact of productivity and cost-reduction innovations.  How do we measure the wealth impact of consumer-empowerment innovations like iPhones?  Essentially, we don't.  Which, by the way, may be one reason our current crappy metrics say we have growing income inequality.  With our current metrics, Steve Jobs' increase in wealth is noted in the metrics, but the metrics don't show the rest of us getting any wealthier by the fact that we can now have iPhones (or the myriad of competitors the iPhone spawned).  The consumer surplus from iPhones undoubtedly dwarfs the money Jobs made, but it doesn't show up in any wealth calculations.

A few years ago I told a youth group that there were still many things left to discover in the mundane world -- by this I meant the everyday world we encounter and not just at the limits of the universe or at the scale of quarks.  The example I gave at the time is that there is a lot of room for better techniques to tease out causality in complex systems -- e.g. how much did the stimulus really affect the economy or how much does CO2 really affect temperatures.  I would add this question of measuring prosperity as a second item in this category.

I am off for Disney World to run in the Princess Half-Marathon this weekend.  My knees feel like I have four flat tires and have been driving on the rims for 20 miles, but I am running this last time with my daughter.

We started running this race together a number of years ago and the first time we ran was something of a breakthrough for my daughter -- the experience dedicating herself to a goal and the confidence she gained from achieving it led to many knock-on benefits, so much so that it became the core of her college essay.

That essay began with the story of she and I making our first tutu together.  At the time, I did not even know what tulle was, but we watched a YouTube video about how to make a tutu without sewing and we eventually got it done.   She ran the whole race, as she has ever since, with a tutu and a tiara on.  (By the way, I am always amazed at the niches in the Internet that I never knew existed.  This is the video we watched to make the tutu -- it has 2.4 million views!  We basically followed this process except we used a piece of underwear elastic for the waist band rather than ribbon).  My job is to cut the tulle into strips -- we make them twice as long as she wants the skirt, and then my daughter ties them to a piece of elastic in the middle, so two strands hang down.

The challenge has increasingly become to use different colors than any past tutu.   The last one looked more like a skirt.  This one she wanted to be shorter and puffier, more like a ballet tutu.  It is hard to capture it well in a picture to get the detail but this is the result:

Not to worry, your humble correspondent will be in costume too.  I have some great Darth Vader running gear I will be wearing.  I wore a rebel pilot outfit last time.  Disney really hit on something with these runs -- they have 8-10 different ones now.  The Princess half-marathon is still the most popular and sells out in about 45 minutes.  It was as hard to get a spot in it as it is to get Comicon tickets.  But given the popularity, there are whole web sites specializing in themed and costumed running gear.  I love capitalism.

PS -- I am still amazed she takes on all this extra weight and drag for fashion.  When I have to run this far, I am tempted to cut off the ends of my shoelaces to save weight.

PPS-- Here was the first one, at the finish line (a little worse for wear)

Post-modernism is many things and its exact meaning is subject to argument, but I think most would agree that it explicitly rejects things like formalism and realism in favor of socially constructed narratives.  In that sense, what I mean by "post-modern science" is not necessarily a rejection of scientific evidence, but a prioritization where support for the favored narrative is more important than the details of scientific evidence.  We have seen this for quite a while in climate science, where alarmists, when they talk among themselves, discuss how it is more important for them to support the narrative (catastrophic global warming and, tied with this, an increasing strain of anti-capitalism ala Naomi Klein) than to be true to the facts all the time.  As a result, many climate scientists would argue (and have) that accurately expressing the uncertainties in their analysis or documenting counter-veiling evidence is wrong, because it dilutes the narrative.

I think this is the context in which Naomi Oreskes' recent NY Times article should be read.  It is telling she uses the issue of secondhand tobacco smoke as an example, because that is one of the best examples I can think of when we let the narrative and our preferred social policy (e.g. banning smoking) to trump the actual scientific evidence.  The work used to justify second hand smoke bans is some of the worst science I can think of, and this is what she is holding up as the example she wants to emulate in climate.  I have had arguments on second hand smoke where I point out the weakness and in some cases the absurdity of the evidence.  When cornered, defenders of bans will say, "well, its something we should do anyway."  That is post-modern science -- narrative over rigid adherence to facts.

I have written before on post-modern science here and here.

If you want post-modern science in a nutshell, think of the term "fake but accurate".  It is one of the most post-modern phrases I can imagine.  It means that certain data, or an analysis, or experiment was somehow wrong or corrupted or failed typical standards of scientific rigor, but was none-the-less "accurate".  How can that be?  Because accuracy is not defined as logical conformance to observations.  It has been redefined as "consistent with the narrative."  She actually argues that our standard of evidence should be reduced for things we already "know".  But know do we "know" it if we have not checked the evidence?  Because for Oreskes, and probably for an unfortunately large portion of modern academia, we "know" things because they are part of the narrative constructed by these self-same academic elites.