Dispatches from District 48
I am increasingly convinced all this "libertarian moment" stuff is a pile of crap. I am watching the two Presidential candidates garnering the most attention, and incredibly the least bad of the two is an out-of-the-closet Marxist.
Randal O'Toole and the Arizona Free Enterprise Club have weighed in with a comprehensive report on Phoenix's Prop 104 transit tax, and the results are ugly. A few findings:
- The oft-repeated claim that light rail has generated $7 Billion dollars in economic development is simply untrue. In fact, many of the projects included in this claim have never been built (like the Sycamore Station development) or involve projects that have nothing to do with light rail (such as the $600 million Convention Center Expansion, which was funded largely by state tax dollars).
- The main beneficiaries of the transit plan appear to be contractors and developers who have projects near rail stations. The tax revenue from the plan combined with the generous subsidies offered to select developments ensures that this plan will benefit a few contractors and developers at the expense of others.
- The plan is unbalanced and ignores vehicle street improvements. Despite the fact that only 3% of the population uses transit (less than 1% use light rail), 95% of the funding in the plan goes toward expanded bus and rail service. Only 3% goes toward vehicle street improvements.
- Transit ridership actually fell after the light rail opened. From when light rail opened in 2009 through 2014, any gains in light rail ridership were offset by the loss of more than one bus rider. Ridership is still 1.2 million less per year than it was in 2009.
- The transit plan as proposed will increase traffic congestion, energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, the transit plan will use more
The complete report is here.
Coyoteblog readers will be totally familiar with this statement from the report about light rail merely cannibalizing bus riders, echoing past articles I have had saying the same thing:
According to the city of Phoenix and Valley Metro, light rail is a great success in Phoenix, generating a 42-percent increase in transit ridership since 2001 and stimulating the construction of $7 billion in new real estate development along its route. A close look, however, reveals that both of these claims are wrong.
The increase in ridership took place between 2001 and 2009, the (fiscal) year that the light-rail line opened. Since that year, for every light-rail rider gained, the region’s transit systems lost more than one bus rider. Per capita transit ridership has declined by 8 percent since 2009 partly because the high cost of light rail forced a 34-percent increase in average bus fares by 2010 and an 18-percent decrease in bus service by 2013.
You can see this perfectly well from a chart right off of our transit authority's web site (except for my annotation in red), which I discussed in depth here.
It is just incredibly disingenuous that light rail supporters are trying to claim credit for transit ridership increases that occurred before the line was built and whose growth the line essentially halted.
Another claim the report demolishes is that light rail is somehow spurring development. Supporters claim $7 billion of light rail development planned or built along the line, but oddly enough that is the exact same figure they were touting almost 8 years ago before the line was even completed. Doesn't seem like they are getting much traction, huh? In fact, the list actually shortens with every year as projects get cancelled and no new ones are added. But beyond this, simply adding up development along the line and claiming that it is all incremental to the line's construction is simply moronic, the same facile BS analysis often used to support publicly funded football stadiums. The obvious questions are:
Finally, if you don't believe me about the relative costs of the two modes, let's take a look at the number from Phoenix's own plan. They speak for themselves:
So what does one get for the 5x higher operating costs and 134x higher capital costs of light rail over buses? Well on the negative side, one gets a system that is substantially less flexible and responsive to changes. The only positive I can come up with is that middle and upper class white people consider buses low class and want a transportation mode of their own.
"They will be subsidizing scroungers, lounging in cafes on the Mediterranean beaches.
Monetary union, in the end, will result in a gigantic blackmailing operation.
When we Germans demand monetray discipline, other countries will blame their financial woes on that same discipline, and by extension, on us. More they will perceive us as a kind of economic policeman.
We risk once again becoming the most hated people in Europe."
It is a long article, covering a lot of ground, and is full of links to literature on both sides of the debate. But its conclusions are pretty definite
I’ve spent much of the past year digging into the evidence. Here’s what I’ve learned. First, it’s true that the issue is complicated. But the deeper you dig, the more fraud you find in the case against GMOs. It’s full of errors, fallacies, misconceptions, misrepresentations, and lies. The people who tell you that Monsanto is hiding the truth are themselves hiding evidence that their own allegations about GMOs are false. They’re counting on you to feel overwhelmed by the science and to accept, as a gut presumption, their message of distrust.
Second, the central argument of the anti-GMO movement—that prudence and caution are reasons to avoid genetically engineered, or GE, food—is a sham. Activists who tell you to play it safe around GMOs take no such care in evaluating the alternatives. They denounce proteins in GE crops as toxic, even as they defend drugs, pesticides, and non-GMO crops that are loaded with the same proteins. They portray genetic engineering as chaotic and unpredictable, even when studies indicate that other crop improvement methods, including those favored by the same activists, are more disruptive to plant genomes.
Third, there are valid concerns about some aspects of GE agriculture, such as herbicides, monocultures, and patents. But none of these concerns is fundamentally about genetic engineering. Genetic engineering isn’t a thing. It’s a process that can be used in different ways to create different things. To think clearly about GMOs, you have to distinguish among the applications and focus on the substance of each case. If you’re concerned about pesticides and transparency, you need to know about the toxins to which your food has been exposed. A GMO label won’t tell you that. And it can lull you into buying a non-GMO product even when the GE alternative is safer.
This is just the management summary, the article goes into great depth on all of these.
I wanted to make an appropriate cocktail for our July 4 party, so I tried a red, white, and blue layered drink. The key to all layered drinks is to put the densest material on bottom, followed by the next lighter, and so on. The problem with this kind of flag drink is that most clear liquors tend to be the lightest and thus aren't appropriate for the middle band.
The bottom of this drink is grenadine syrup. The middle is peach schnapps. The top is blue curacao. Unfortunately, both the blue and the red on the first try were too close to the clear such that after about 5 minutes they started bleeding into the clear area. I solved this by adding some honey to the grenadine to make it heavier, and I diluted the blue curacao with water to make it lighter (even a 50:50 dilution did not seem to have much affect on its color). That did the trick.
Typically, one carefully pours each layer over an inverted spoon to keep them from mixing, but I wanted to use these tall thin glasses and a spoon would not fit. After trying several things, I used one of those large 4-6 ounce eyedroppers that are for feeding babies and pets. That worked great.
How do they taste? Uh, don't they look great! Actually, they tasted better than I had imagined for a drink concocted of ingredients chosen solely for their color and density. Tasted sort of like grape juice.
After a lot of unsatisfactory purchases of handheld vacuums, I can say this one is fabulous. The only problem is that it sites in a charging cradle that does not attach well to a wall. I am not sure why all these handheld vacuum makers have abandoned wall-mounting, but they seem to have.
A reader pointed me to this letter apparently sent to the Chicago Tribune last year in response to an editorial saying the Redskins name had to go. I can't prove it was real, but who cares at this point? It is funny:
Dear Mr. Page...
I always love your articles. and I generally agree with them. I would suggest, as in an email I received, they change the name to the "Foreskins" to better represent their community, paying tribute to the di@k heads in Congress.
Here are some other politically correctness to consider: I agree with our Native American population. I am highly insulted by the racially charged name of the Washington Redskins. One might argue that to name a professional football team after Native Americans would exalt them as fine warriors, but nay, nay. We must be careful not to offend, and in the spirit of political correctness and courtesy, we must move forward. Let's ditch the Kansas City Chiefs, the Atlanta Braves and the Cleveland Indians. If your shorts are in a wad because of the reference the name Redskins makes to skin color, then we need to get rid of the Cleveland Browns.
The Carolina Panthers obviously were named to keep the memory of militant Blacks from the 60's alive. Gone. It's offensive to us white folk.
The New York Yankees offend the Southern population. Do you see a team named for the Confederacy? No! There is no room for any reference to that tragic war that cost this country so many young men's lives.
I am also offended by the blatant references to the Catholic religion among our sports team names. Totally inappropriate to have the New Orleans Saints, the Los Angeles Angels or the San Diego Padres.
Then there are the team names that glorify criminals who raped and pillaged. We are talking about the horrible Oakland Raiders, the Minnesota Vikings, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Pittsburgh Pirates!Now, let us address those teams that clearly send the wrong message to our children. The San Diego Chargers promote irresponsible fighting or even spending habits. Wrong message to our children.
The New York Giants and the San Francisco Giants promote obesity, a growing childhood epidemic. Wrong message to our children.
The Cincinnati Reds promote downers/barbiturates . Wrong message to our children.
The Milwaukee Brewers---well that goes without saying . . . Wrong message to our children.
So, there you go. We need to support any legislation that comes out to rectify this travesty, because the government will likely become involved with this issue, as they should. Just the kind of thing the do-nothing congress loves . . .As a die hard Oregon State fan, my wife and I, with all of this in mind, it might also make some sense to change the name of the Oregon State women's athletic teams to something other than "the Beavers."
Environmentalists often claim that people systematically under-invest in energy conservation, something they call a market failure. This is why Obama and the Left put in a much heralded provision in the stimulus package that used Federal money to subsidize home energy conservation (new windows and insulation and such).
A new study in the NBER looks at the results. This is the abstract:
Conventional wisdom suggests that energy efficiency (EE) policies are beneficial because they induce investments that pay for themselves and lead to emissions reductions. However, this belief is primarily based on projections from engineering models. This paper reports on the results of an experimental evaluation of the nation’s largest residential EE program conducted on a sample of more than 30,000 households. The findings suggest that the upfront investment costs are about twice the actual energy savings. Further, the model-projected savings are roughly 2.5 times the actual savings. While this might be attributed to the “rebound” effect – when demand for energy end uses increases as a result of greater efficiency – the paper fails to find evidence of significantly higher indoor temperatures at weatherized homes. Even when accounting for the broader societal benefits of energy efficiency investments, the costs still substantially outweigh the benefits; the average rate of return is approximately -9.5% annually.
The only failure here is the government diverting capital from productive uses into money-losing ventures like this one.
I had an argument in a comment thread of one of Kevin Drum's minimum wage or some such posts (sorry, I can't even find which one now to link it). Anyway, my concluding remark was that the best thing that could ever happen to the unemployed, and particularly to low-skilled workers, would be if people were to discover ways to get rich from their labor. Of course, I was met with total scorn, as if I had suggested sacrificing virgins to improve the climate.
The reason I mention this is that this disconnect seems to be at the heart of the problem of Progressivism. I am convinced that they honestly want to help low-skilled workers and the poor do better economically, but they advocate for policies that are 180-degrees askew. Most of what they wish for -- higher minimum wages, larger mandated benefits packages, more paid leave, more ability to sue employers over trivial slights -- absolutely, with near mathematical precision, raise the cost of hiring low-skill workers, making it increasingly unlikely anyone will do so. Low-skill workers get hired for one and only one reason (which is the same reason any worker gets hired): someone thinks they can profit from that labor. It is the potential for profit that is the sole reason for hiring anyone, but it is exactly that profit potential that Progressives most fear and deride.
There are few things I enjoy more when I am on the road alone or even at home with my family gone for some reason than going to a nice restaurant, sitting at the bar, and having a few drinks and dinner. All by myself (OK, maybe with my Kindle too).
My favorite right now is the bar at Eddie V's steakhouse.
As a weird aside which I cannot explain, I am a pretty severe introvert who finds it almost impossible to make conversation with strangers at cocktail parties or at nearly any other venue. This week my wife and I were walking up Canyon Road in Santa Fe looking at art galleries and I just plain stopped going in because I didn't want to deal with the way every gallery salesperson tends to immediately overwhelm one with small talk. I worked long and hard to find a hair cutter and a dental hygenist that didn't insist on trying to have a conversation while they did their work on me. But despite all this, I can comfortably meet and interact with people while sitting at bars. Not sure why.
In a comment on this article about declining startup activity and the growing average size of businesses, a commenter wrote:
The high foreign trade deficit is also a barrier to the formation of small new companies. The annual trade deficit of the US is greater than the rate of GDP growth, which explains a lot of things. Probably more companies are being destroyed than created in the US. Legislate and reverse the foreign trade deficit and there will be a massive surge in small companies.
I wrote in return
As for wolf-dogs comment on the trade deficit, I think this is totally wrong. Most of the trade imbalance is with stuff like cars and steel which are unlikely startup businesses. The easy availability of Asian manufacturing sources for nearly anything you want to make or can dream up facilitates startups and entrepreneurship. My gut feel, just seeing what entrepreneurs around me are doing but not from any hard data, is that globalization and easy international sourcing is a net positive for small business formation.
I have never seen any data on this though. Thoughts?
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.
First, let's start with the Guardian headline:
Exxon knew of climate change in 1981, email says – but it funded deniers for 27 more years
So now let's look at the email, in full, which is the sole source for the Guardian headline. I challenge you, no matter how much you squint, to find a basis for the Guardian's statement. Basically the email says that Exxon knew of the concern about global warming in 1981, but did not necessarily agree with it. Hardly the tobacco-lawyer cover-up the Guardian is trying to make it sound like. I will reprint the email in full because I actually think it is a pretty sober view of how good corporations think about these issues, and it accurately reflects the Exxon I knew from 3 years as a mechanical / safety engineer in a refinery.
I will add that you can see the media denial that a lukewarmer position even exists (which I complained about most recently here) in full action in this Guardian article. Exxon's position as described in the Guardian's source looks pretty close to the lukewarmer position to me -- that man made global warming exists but is being exaggerated. But to the Guardian, and many others, there is only full-blown acceptance of the most absurd exaggerated climate change forecasts or you are a denier. Anyway, here is the email in full:
Corporations are interested in environmental impacts only to the extent that they affect profits, either current or future. They may take what appears to be altruistic positions to improve their public image, but the assumption underlying those actions is that they will increase future profits. ExxonMobil is an interesting case in point.
Exxon first got interested in climate change in 1981 because it was seeking to develop the Natuna gas field off Indonesia. This is an immense reserve of natural gas, but it is 70% CO2. That CO2 would have to be separated to make the natural gas usable. Natural gas often contains CO2 and the technology for removing CO2 is well known. In 1981 (and now) the usual practice was to vent the CO2 to the atmosphere. When I first learned about the project in 1989, the projections were that if Natuna were developed and its CO2 vented to the atmosphere, it would be the largest point source of CO2 in the world and account for about 1% of projected global CO2 emissions. I’m sure that it would still be the largest point source of CO2, but since CO2 emissions have grown faster than projected in 1989, it would probably account for a smaller fraction of global CO2 emissions.
The alternative to venting CO2 to the atmosphere is to inject it into ground. This technology was also well known, since the oil industry had been injecting limited quantities of CO2 to enhance oil recovery. There were many questions about whether the CO2 would remain in the ground, some of which have been answered by Statoil’s now almost 20 years of experience injecting CO2 in the North Sea. Statoil did this because the Norwegian government placed a tax on vented CO2. It was cheaper for Statoil to inject CO2 than pay the tax. Of course, Statoil has touted how much CO2 it has prevented from being emitted.
In the 1980s, Exxon needed to understand the potential for concerns about climate change to lead to regulation that would affect Natuna and other potential projects. They were well ahead of the rest of industry in this awareness. Other companies, such as Mobil, only became aware of the issue in 1988, when it first became a political issue. Natural resource companies – oil, coal, minerals – have to make investments that have lifetimes of 50-100 years. Whatever their public stance, internally they make very careful assessments of the potential for regulation, including the scientific basis for those regulations. Exxon NEVER denied the potential for humans to impact the climate system. It did question – legitimately, in my opinion – the validity of some of the science.
Political battles need to personify the enemy. This is why liberals spend so much time vilifying the Koch brothers – who are hardly the only big money supporters of conservative ideas. In climate change, the first villain was a man named Donald Pearlman, who was a lobbyist for Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. (In another life, he was instrumental in getting the U.S. Holocaust Museum funded and built.) Pearlman’s usefulness as a villain ended when he died of lung cancer – he was a heavy smoker to the end.
Then the villain was the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a trade organization of energy producers and large energy users. I was involved in GCC for a while, unsuccessfully trying to get them to recognize scientific reality. (That effort got me on to the front page of the New York Times, but that’s another story.) Environmental group pressure was successful in putting GCC out of business, but they also lost their villain. They needed one which wouldn’t die and wouldn’t go out of business. Exxon, and after its merger with Mobil ExxonMobil, fit the bill, especially under its former CEO, Lee Raymond, who was vocally opposed to climate change regulation. ExxonMobil’s current CEO, Rex Tillerson, has taken a much softer line, but ExxonMobil has not lost its position as the personification of corporate, and especially climate change, evil. It is the only company mentioned in Alyssa’s e-mail, even though, in my opinion, it is far more ethical that many other large corporations.
Having spent twenty years working for Exxon and ten working for Mobil, I know that much of that ethical behavior comes from a business calculation that it is cheaper in the long run to be ethical than unethical. Safety is the clearest example of this. ExxonMobil knows all too well the cost of poor safety practices. The Exxon Valdez is the most public, but far from the only, example of the high cost of unsafe operations. The value of good environmental practices are more subtle, but a facility that does a good job of controlling emission and waste is a well run facility, that is probably maximizing profit. All major companies will tell you that they are trying to minimize their internal CO2 emissions. Mostly, they are doing this by improving energy efficiency and reducing cost. The same is true for internal recycling, again a practice most companies follow. Its just good engineering.
I found this quote from an older Finem Respice article about Greek financial problems in the mid-20th-century to be pretty funny:
So hopeless was the state of Greek finances that, even as [the Nazis] routinely hung with piano wire prominent citizens and officials on the thinnest of provocations, and even given three years to do it, the Nazi's were somehow unable to compel what amounted to a totally subservient collaborator government to put its fiscal house in order.
The Axis administration soon realised it would be a waste of effort to get the Greek government to balance its accounts.
Later, in 1945, it was a British problem. These problems from the late 1940's should sound really familiar:
Fortunately for Germany, by the time the matter came to a head the Germans had RSVP'd to Scobie and Greece was Britain's problem. It wasn't just partisans the British would end up having to fight....
What followed could only be described as a comic progression of populist pandering, the spread to the national economy of a series of parasitic labor unions and cabals, and a confidence on the part of the Allies in their own fiscal administration abilities that was as enduring as it was inflated.
At first [British Treasury Secretary] Waley sold gold to support the drachma, conditioning the sale on a series of fiscal and monetary reforms the Greeks adopted in principle and promised to implement– at some later date when it was somewhat more convenient. It was around this time Waley quipped:
...the Greek government are in effect paying doles to a large part of the population who spend all day parading in the streets in idleness with political demonstrations as their chief occupation.9
Liberation governments, fearing popular backlash were terrified of taxing the Greeks. Instead they continued to look for sources of wealth to redistribute, and were happy to resort to even the most gamey monetary policies to buy time. After raiding "punitively" the only entities with wealth of any kind (businesses) in 1945 in order to buy popular support with cheap food and wage increases, the Greeks were, again, running out of options.
The whole thing is interesting, and depressing.
I will say that this story honestly loses me.
Just when you think we’ve reached Peak Sensitivity, the scolds of social justice sprinkle more sand into their underpants. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is currently showing a superb exhibition of the art of Hokusai. As per common practice at scholarly institutions, it is displaying related material, including an exhibition of contemporary Japanese photographers responding to the devastating earthquake that hit the northern part of the country in 2011. It also rehung La Japonaise, an 1876 canvas in its collection by Claude Monet, depicting his wife Camille in a vermillion kimono.
Among the educational programming at the MFA was “Kimono Wednesdays,” an opportunity for museumgoers to try on replica of that kimono in the presence of Monet’s canvas. It was slated for Wednesday evenings, when the museum’s entrance fee is by donation, starting June 24 and running throughout the month of July. But it didn’t make it that far.
Demonstrators showed up at the first two events bearing posters accusing the participants of grave wrongdoing. “Try on the kimono; learn what it’s like to be a racist imperialist today!” exclaimed one. “Let’s dress up Orientalism with more Orientalism,” read another. The protest had been arranged through a Facebook group named Stand Against Yellow-Face @ the MFA (the discussions have moved to a Tumblr), where the principals and their supporters expressed great umbrage. “A willingness to engage in thoughtful dialogue (or not) with museum employees and visitors on the bullshit of this white supremacist ‘costume’ event are welcome,” wrote one of the organizers.
Eventually the museum caved and even apologized. I can understand the caving -- as the author suggested, it simply was not a hill the museum needed to die on -- but these apologies for non-crimes have got to stop. Someone has to show some backbone in the face of these absurd pogroms.
When my family was visiting castles in England, they often had clothes for the kids to play dress-up in medieval garb. When my son and his friends were at Octoberfest, they bought lederhosen to wear when they attended. When I took Spanish for years in grade school, we often did projects that emulated various Spanish cultures we were studying (such as the Mexican tradition of leaving out decorated shoes for candy and gifts). Are these all wrong now?
I suppose if the museum had a "dress like a Kamikaze pilot" promotion or "pretend to be a comfort girl" exhibit, I could see the problem. But trying on a kimono? Kimono's have gone through several cycles of being fashionable in the West over the last 200 years or so (in the James Bond books, Ian Fleming often noted that Bond preferred a kimono for sleeping).
Seriously, we Americans have little in the way of home grown culture - haven't we appropriated about everything? And so what? The opposite of cultural appropriation in my mind is cultural apartheid. Which in fact seems to be what some progressives are advocating for on campus, coming full-circle and apparently asking for separate but equal facilities for women and certain ethnic groups so they won't be tainted by white maleness, or whatever.
The Heritage Foundation ranks Greece #130 on its economic freedom list, which puts it in the "mostly unfree" category. Of course, these rankings depend a lot on the categories and the weighting, but the story here is still telling. The next worst European country I can find is Slovenia at #88 and the first EU country I see is Italy at #80, not great but a good fifty spots higher.
Which begs the question, asked by Megan McArdle today, of why Europe wants Greece anyway. In terms of political-economy, it had little in common with the rest of the continent. Everyone assumes the EU is trying to prevent a domino effect, with the other PIGS nations defecting from the Euro, but I think the Greek capitulation this weekend shows how unlikely this is -- it is clear Greece will do absolutely anything to stay in the Euro, and so it is reasonable to assume Portugal, Spain, and Italy face the same incentives and are thus not ready to leave the Euro on a whim just because Greece does.
Jay P. Greene's suggestions for potential petty little dictators in government:
This is just a sample. There is more at the link
I thought this was pretty clever, and probably took some guts as this person will likely get a lot of criticism on campus. Princeton student Tal Fortgang writes "38 Ways College Students Enjoy ‘Left-Wing Privilege’ on Campus." A small taste:
1. I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my political persuasion most of the time.
2. I can spend my entire college career taking only classes with professors who think exactly as I do.
3. I can take classes and earn degrees in departments that are designed to line up exactly with my worldview.
4. I can be sure that an overwhelming majority of the material I am assigned to read for class will confirm what I already believe.
5. My professors will assume that I already think just like them, and use examples and anecdotes that testify to our philosophical uniformity.
6. I can almost always be sure that my professor will present or corroborate my side of a debate.
7. I will likely never have to make the choice between writing what I believe to be true and writing what I think will get a good grade.
In the same vein:
From the WSJ, an article on how politicians who tried to point out the unsustainability of Greek finances years ago where not only ignored, but villified and marginalized. Sort of like in places like California and Illinois.
In the past quarter century, Greece has had a handful of reformist politicians who foresaw the problems that are now threatening the nation with bankruptcy.
Their reform proposals were fought by their colleagues in parliament and savaged by the media and labor unions. They invariably found themselves sidelined....
Tassos Giannitsis is no stranger to this kind of war: His tenure as labor minister was more short lived, and the battles against him even more visceral. Mr. Giannitsis in 2001, again in the Pasok government led by Mr. Simitis, put forward a comprehensive proposal to reform the pension system.
Trade unions, opposition parties and Pasok itself unleashed menace on Mr. Giannitsis.
“Giannitsis was annihilated after his pension-reform proposals. There are few precedents for this kind of universal attack on a politician,” said Loukas Tsoukalis, a prominent economics professor here.
Mr. Giannitsis’s proposals, which would have reduced the pension levels Greeks receive and made the system overall more sustainable given the country’s demographic and labor-force trends, were never taken to parliament.
“From the fridge to the bin!” said the front page of newspaper To Vima on April 28, 2001, as the frozen pension-reform plan was scrapped for good.
“When I told my colleagues in the cabinet about the reforms I was proposing—which mind you were not the toughest available—the attitude I got was that I was spoiling the party,” Mr. Giannitsis said in an interview.
“They were, like, ‘everything is going great right now, why are you bothering us with a problem that may implode in a decade?’”
There are many other examples.
The FTC is looking into the Apple music service:
the FTC has begun looking into Cupertino's "treatment of rival streaming music apps" to make sure it's not violating any antitrust law. See, iTunes also offers those competitor apps for download, and Apple gets a 30 percent cut per subscription paid through the program. That forces the companies to choose between charging extra on top of their $9.99 per month service (making the total $12.99) and accepting the loss to match Apple Music's pricing.
In addition, the FTC's reportedly looking into the App Store's numerous restrictions, as well. These include prohibiting companies from mentioning that their apps are also available on other platforms and from pointing customers to their websites to purchase goods and services. That's the reason why Spotify recently decided to send an email blast to subscribers with instructions on how to sign up directly on its website instead of paying $3 more through iTunes.
Good lord. What is next -- does Whole Foods have to post a notice next to the tomatoes that you can buy them cheaper at Kroger? Clearly Spotify has found a workaround without any help from Big Brother at all.
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
“This is known as ‘bad luck’.”
– Robert A. Heinlein
I cannot recommend Matt Ridley's new article strongly enough. It covers a lot of ground be here are a few highlights.
Ridley argues that science generally works (in a manner entirely parallel to how well-functioning commercial markets work) because there are generally incentives to challenge hypotheses. I would add that if anything, the incentives tend to be balanced more towards challenging conventional wisdom. If someone puts a stake in the ground and says that A is true, then there is a lot more money and prestige awarded to someone who can prove A is not true than for the thirteenth person to confirm that A is indeed true.
This process breaks, however when political pressures undermine this natural market of ideas and switch the incentives for challenging hypotheses into punishment.
Lysenkoism, a pseudo-biological theory that plants (and people) could be trained to change their heritable natures, helped starve millions and yet persisted for decades in the Soviet Union, reaching its zenith under Nikita Khrushchev. The theory that dietary fat causes obesity and heart disease, based on a couple of terrible studies in the 1950s, became unchallenged orthodoxy and is only now fading slowly.
What these two ideas have in common is that they had political support, which enabled them to monopolise debate. Scientists are just as prone as anybody else to “confirmation bias”, the tendency we all have to seek evidence that supports our favoured hypothesis and dismiss evidence that contradicts it—as if we were counsel for the defence. It’s tosh that scientists always try to disprove their own theories, as they sometimes claim, and nor should they. But they do try to disprove each other’s. Science has always been decentralised, so Professor Smith challenges Professor Jones’s claims, and that’s what keeps science honest.
What went wrong with Lysenko and dietary fat was that in each case a monopoly was established. Lysenko’s opponents were imprisoned or killed. Nina Teicholz’s book The Big Fat Surprise shows in devastating detail how opponents of Ancel Keys’s dietary fat hypothesis were starved of grants and frozen out of the debate by an intolerant consensus backed by vested interests, echoed and amplified by a docile press....
This is precisely what has happened with the climate debate and it is at risk of damaging the whole reputation of science.
This is one example of the consequences
Look what happened to a butterfly ecologist named Camille Parmesan when she published a paper on “ Climate and Species Range” that blamed climate change for threatening the Edith checkerspot butterfly with extinction in California by driving its range northward. The paper was cited more than 500 times, she was invited to speak at the White House and she was asked to contribute to the IPCC’s third assessment report.
Unfortunately, a distinguished ecologist called Jim Steele found fault with her conclusion: there had been more local extinctions in the southern part of the butterfly’s range due to urban development than in the north, so only the statistical averages moved north, not the butterflies. There was no correlated local change in temperature anyway, and the butterflies have since recovered throughout their range. When Steele asked Parmesan for her data, she refused. Parmesan’s paper continues to be cited as evidence of climate change. Steele meanwhile is derided as a “denier”. No wonder a highly sceptical ecologist I know is very reluctant to break cover.
He also goes on to lament something that is very familiar to me -- there is a strong argument for the lukewarmer position, but the media will not even achnowledge it exists. Either you are a full-on believer or you are a denier.
The IPCC actually admits the possibility of lukewarming within its consensus, because it gives a range of possible future temperatures: it thinks the world will be between about 1.5 and four degrees warmer on average by the end of the century. That’s a huge range, from marginally beneficial to terrifyingly harmful, so it is hardly a consensus of danger, and if you look at the “probability density functions” of climate sensitivity, they always cluster towards the lower end.
What is more, in the small print describing the assumptions of the “representative concentration pathways”, it admits that the top of the range will only be reached if sensitivity to carbon dioxide is high (which is doubtful); if world population growth re-accelerates (which is unlikely); if carbon dioxide absorption by the oceans slows down (which is improbable); and if the world economy goes in a very odd direction, giving up gas but increasing coal use tenfold (which is implausible).
But the commentators ignore all these caveats and babble on about warming of “up to” four degrees (or even more), then castigate as a “denier” anybody who says, as I do, the lower end of the scale looks much more likely given the actual data. This is a deliberate tactic. Following what the psychologist Philip Tetlock called the “psychology of taboo”, there has been a systematic and thorough campaign to rule out the middle ground as heretical: not just wrong, but mistaken, immoral and beyond the pale. That’s what the word denier with its deliberate connotations of Holocaust denial is intended to do. For reasons I do not fully understand, journalists have been shamefully happy to go along with this fundamentally religious project.
The whole thing reads like a lukewarmer manifesto. Honestly, Ridley writes about 1000% better than I do, so rather than my trying to summarize it, go read it.
A reader sent me a link to this Vox article on streetcars. What I thought was interesting is just how weak the case for streetcars is, even when made by folks are are presumably sympathetic to them. This page is entitled "Why do cities want streeetcars." The arguments are:
Every argument I have ever been in on streetcars always boils down to something like "well, all the cool kids like them." Once, after defending the US approach to rail (vs. Europe and Japan) as (correctly) focusing on productivity vs. sexiness, having gone into a lot of detail on the economics of freight vs. passengers, I got a one sentence answer from Joel Epstein of the HuffPo: “You should get out of the country more often.” That was it -- the cool cosmopolitan kids who vacation in Gstaad but never would be caught dead driving across Nebraska were all against me.
