07 Jun 2014

Potpourri

Potpourri 10 Comments

==> The Detroit authorities are threatening to seize a billionaire hedge fund manager’s goats, which are grazing on land that the authorities claim is public. Bundy Ranch 2.0? (Just kidding. And it’s Mark Spitznagel.)

==> Richard Ebeling discusses the wisdom of Adam Smith.

==> An awesome photo of Milton Friedman and very young David R. Henderson, Jerry O’Driscoll, Jack High, and Richard Ebeling.

==> An interesting chart from Vox on global carbon dioxide emissions. Look at China and the US.

==> Tom Woods and Ron Paul talk about homeschooling.

==> I don’t agree with his overall stance, but Scott Sumner is pretty funny talking about the alleged “zero lower bound” in Europe.

==> Josie Wales on oppression (she’s against it).

==> This spiked article has some good observations about the reaction to the FT critique (HT2 AK). My favorite part:

When the Great Man himself responded to the FT, his annoyance at having to deal with someone raising questions about his awesome work was clear. ‘Ridiculous’
and ‘dishonest’ was how he initially described the FT’s findings. In his full reply, he says the 
FT’s points were ‘criticism for the sake of criticism’ – in other words, this wasn’t a genuine search for the truth. In response to a number of the FT’s specific charges, Piketty says that he often had to adjust the data because of their inadequacies, and he applied his best judgment. He admits that in a few cases he could have been more explicit in describing his adjustments.

Such a response may lead to more questions, but not from his loyal supporters, who were busy celebrating Piketty’s ‘victory’ over the FT‘Piketty’s devastating point-by-point rebuttal’, says Robert Kuttner, shows that Giles ‘made a fool of himself’. Economist and New York Times contributor Justin Wolfers tweeted,‘Debate’s over folks’ – providing further evidence for Joel Kotkin’s theory of the spread of a ‘debate is over’ syndrome among the modern left, which seeks to impose a stifling conformity on a variety of issues (from climate change to the causes of poverty and the definition of marriage, among others). Krugman concluded that the FT-Piketty debate showed the persistence of inequality ‘deniers’– the same term of abuse thrown at today’s heretics who dare to question climate-change orthodoxy.

10 Responses to “Potpourri”

  1. Bob Roddis says:

    witchywoman • 6 hours ago
    That city is a joke! Murders, rapes, car jackings, home invasions, they do nothing. You bring a goat in the city and it’s Katy bar the door, Oh no we can’t have that! Suddenly they are West Bloomfield!

    http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/ordinance-stops-goats-from-eliminating-weeds-in-detroit/26371384#comment-1423883143

    • Bob Roddis says:

      We suburban Detroiters can talk like that. If someone else does, it’s racist.

    • 't th says:

      Detroit, isn’t that where they measure emergency response times in hours? At least they can get animal control to remove domesticated animals on demand. He could have at least pretended that the fines were in someway designed to help the city in its financial crisis.

      • khodge says:

        One of these days I’ll figure out how these computers work.

  2. Joseph Fetz says:

    Gotta love David’s pants.

  3. Darien says:

    Ah, so Piketty just “adjsted the data.” Is that all? And here everybody’s been making it sound like he was making stuff up.

    Listen. His best judgement told him to adjust the dates of income tax rate changes in the US. What’s so wrong about that? The truth was inadequate, deniers. This debate is now over. Q.E.D.

  4. Bogart says:

    The markets don’t seem to mind the negative interest rates? Maybe that real rates have been negative for several years has something to do with it? Maybe that the 0.1% negative rate is so close to zero that it does not matter?

    Maybe now it does not seem to matter, but in 5 years it may matter a whole lot?

  5. Tel says:

    Open up the Vox chart on one screen and the following chart on another:

    http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo.png

    What you see in the Mauna Loa data is that the averaged (black) line is almost dead straight from 2000 until now (check with the edge of a business card up against the screen). However the Vox chart shows a big acceleration in CO2 output from 2000 until 2005, then a sudden dip as many countries went into recession, and now it’s picking up again.

    There’s also a dip in World Carbon Emissions from 1980 to 1983 followed by a surge up to 1990, this period is also a straight line on the Mauna Loa chart. Why?

    There is a limited correlation with the fall of the Soviet Union around 1990 causing a dip in consumption, which is reflected in the CO2 concentration, but strangely the CO2 catches back up first in 1998 while actual consumption picks up later after 2000. They don’t seem to correlate very well at all.

  6. Tel says:

    http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2014/06/04/censoring-truth-in-the-eu-rajoy-revealed-as-prime-mover-for-eu-courts-article-29/

    Might be worth getting into the habit of keeping screen shots of any interesting articles you read. Looks like the EU now officially sanctions things getting “disappeared” when inconvenient.

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