25 Jun 2010

My Take on the Water Shortage in Nashville

Shameless Self-Promotion 5 Comments

Ironically, the recent flooding in Nashville led to a water shortage. Naturally it was a Nature/Government one-two punch. I explain in the Tennessean. The danger with writing for the local paper is that some Obamaphile might jump me in the grocery store. Of course, that presupposes there is an Obamaphile in Tennessee.

25 Jun 2010

Why the Rothbardians Will Win

All Posts 15 Comments

[UPDATE below.]

Wow I have been out of academia too long. I was just trying to buy Steve Horwitz’s book on free banking, and Tyler Cowen’s book on business cycles. They are each at least $170 used on Amazon. (Tyler’s book is 184 pages, while Horwitz’s is 228 pages. And though they are hardcover, I don’t think they’re hard because they’re made of ivory plating.)

In contrast, you can read just about everything Murray Rothbard ever wrote on banking (e.g.) for free from the Mises Institute, and heck if you want them to send you an actual book they’ll do it for a few bucks.

With an advantage like that, the Rothbardians will win. It doesn’t mean their arguments are better, but this isn’t even a fair fight.

UPDATE: OK Steve informs me that I was looking at his dissertation, which is out of print. (To which I say BAM.) But here is a paperback version of his later book, which is far more reasonably priced. However, I still don’t think I can get Tyler’s book for under $50. Do you concur?

24 Jun 2010

Jim Manzi vs. Mark Levin

Climate Change 9 Comments

Wow, I don’t know what to make of this. Jim Manzi let fly a pretty scathing critique of Mark Levin’s treatment of global warming in his massive bestseller, Liberty and Tyranny (which people tell me cites one of my PRI op eds, so it must not be all bad). I’m not sure if this had been just a random blog post that caught the NR guys by surprise, or if Manzi had cleared it with them first. In any event, I was amazed to see this type of paragraph on the NR blog:

I’m not expert on many topics the book addresses, so I flipped to its treatment of a subject that I’ve spent some time studying — global warming — in order to see how it treated a controversy in which I’m at least familiar with the various viewpoints and some of the technical detail.

It was awful. It was so bad that it was like the proverbial clock that chimes 13 times — not only is it obviously wrong, but it is so wrong that it leads you to question every other piece of information it has ever provided.

Yikes! In case you don’t know who he is, Jim Manzi is hands-down my favorite Internet Warrior when it comes to global warming issues. He can quote the IPCC chapter and verse to blow up the alarmist policy prescriptions. (For example, here he is blowing up Krugman on the argument that “fat tails” in the catastrophe probability distribution justify massive interventions.) So Manzi isn’t bluffing when he claims to be knowledgeable on this issue.

Anyway, where I am going in this post, is to share with you a jaw-dropping component of Levin’s response. But to appreciate it, I need to set the context.

One of the issues is that in his book (which remember, Manzi is giving a scathing review in his blog post at NR), Levin cited a petition denying the connection between human activities and global warming, apparently signed by 31,000 scientists. Manzi was underwhelmed by this and wrote:

There are a few problems with this survey that Levin doesn’t mention. More than 20,000 of these “scientists” lack PhDs in any field. There was very little quality control: At least one person signed it as Spice Girl Geri Halliwell. Scientific American did the hard work of actually contacting a sample of individual signatories, and estimated that there are about 200 climate scientists who agree with the statement in the petition among the signatories. And most important by far, the text of the petition is not close to Levin’s claim of rejecting the notion of man-made global warming. In the key sentence it says that signatories do not believe that there is compelling scientific evidence that human release of greenhouse gases will cause catastrophic heating and disruption of the earth’s climate. Depending on the definition of “catastrophic,” I could agree to that. Yet I don’t reject the notion of man-made global warming.

OK so now are you ready to hear Levin’s comeback on this particular point? Here it is:

I would also encourage you to look at the petition Manzi disparages, having, I’m sure, carefully reviewed the qualifications of each and every expert listed, as he dismisses the entire lot of them. He mentions that 20,000 of the signatories don’t have doctorates. But more than 9,000 do.

Even so, that alone is not the standard. Reading his post, one would think they’re all a bunch of kooks and frauds. He knows this because Scientific American did the hard work of taking a small sample of the group and contacting them. Now, how scientific is that? Global-warming bloggers have unfairly attacked this petition relentlessly. Manzi simply repeats the mantra. He even refers to the phony names on the list, which he hopes will degrade the effort, without realizing that global-warming zealots are responsible for inserting them. How embarrassing.

If you didn’t have to take a step back, and a deep breath, after reading that, then you didn’t get what just happened. It’s no fun to explain a joke, except in this case Levin wasn’t joking–he doesn’t understand how hilarious what he just wrote was. So permit me to explain.

In the pseudo-science wars, both sides will try to marshal authorities to show the public that their intuitive arguments have solid backing. One of the standard moves from those advancing unorthodox positions (whether from the Intelligent Design people, the “skeptics” of global warming, the fans of holistic medicine, or even economists who deny that government “stimulus” creates jobs) is to come up with an online petition that they urge qualified experts to sign. (Incidentally, I am NOT mocking these unorthodox groups. I actually am very sympathetic to a lot of their points.)

Now here’s the problem: Just because someone signs a petition as, “John Perrywinkle, nuclear physicist, NASA,” that alone doesn’t mean there really is a NASA physicist out there who agrees with the petition. We obviously have to worry about whether the people organizing the petition are actually verifying the identities of the “signatories.”

In order to show how insecure some of these petitions are, their enemies will log on and sign them with fake names. The dull enemies will put “Mickey Mouse” or “Donald Duck,” but that’s stupid because the people running the petition can quickly weed them out. So what wiseguy liberals will do, is put down an obviously fake name that stuffy conservatives likely won’t recognize from a simple inspection of the list–which is why Geri Halliwell is perfect. Her name isn’t as recognizable as, say, Madonna or Britney Spears, but on the other hand it’s almost certainly not referring to an atmospheric scientist with a PhD from Harvard who spells her name just like that.

Sooo, just to make sure we all see what’s going on here: The fact that the people maintaining this list of “31,000 scientists” didn’t purge “Geri Halliwell” (until presumably the cynics busted them) shows that we have little confidence that the remaining names are authentic. We would have to go and investigate each one; the existence of this list per se is rather pointless.

Now that I’ve belabored the point, let’s return to Levin’s riposte: “[Manzi] even refers to the phony names on the list, which he hopes will degrade the effort, without realizing that global-warming zealots are responsible for inserting them. How embarrassing.”

You’re right, Mr. Levin, I do feel embarrassed for someone right about now.

I realize I’m beating a dead horse, but I must persist: What exactly does Levin think that Manzi thought had happened? That the people organizing the petition said:

“Hmmm, right now we only have 30,999 credentialed scientists who signed this thing. It would really be nice to get one more to put us over the psychological threshold of 31,000. Who should we put down? Al Gore? Nah, we’d get busted. How about Carl Sagan? The wacko leftists love him. What’s that Tom, you say Sagan’s dead? OK, damn. Wait, I’ve got it! We all know the liberals love rock stars and pretty faces, rather than cold hard logic. Somebody go look up the real name of one of the Spice Girls, and better make it one of the hot ones. This will be great. I’d love to see Leonardo DiCaprio’s hypocritical face when he sees this.”

I mean really, did Levin not understand what just happened? Did he consider Manzi such a moron that he (Levin) didn’t even bother to try to contemplate what the argument was, before firing off his response? I am truly in awe.

24 Jun 2010

Glenn Greenwald Lets Obama Rest Up, Hits National Review

Foreign Policy 5 Comments

To his credit, Glenn Greenwald switched from bashing right-wingers to bashing Obama once the latter had gained power. But Greenwald couldn’t resist hitting National Review’s Jay Nordlinger who, when commenting on the fact that Hamas wasn’t letting the Red Cross visit an Israeli soldier (Gilad Shalit) in their custody, wrote: “…there’d be mass demonstrations in [Shalit’s] behalf all over Europe, and on American streets, too” if “Shalit were other than Israeli.”

The obvious implication is that only those dastardly Hamas terrorists hold people hostage without access to Red Cross inspections. Greenwald says: “I’m asking this literally: is Nordlinger ignorant of the fact that the United States of America denied ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] access to non-Israeli prisoners for years during the prior administration?”

He goes on to quote from a BBC story from 2005:

The US has admitted for the first time that it has not given the Red Cross access to all detainees in its custody.

The state department’s top legal adviser, John Bellinger, made the admission but gave no details about where such prisoners were held. . . . He stated that the group International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had access to “absolutely everybody” at the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which holds suspects detained during the US war on terror. When asked by journalists if the organisation had access to everybody held in similar circumstances elsewhere, he said: “No”.

Then I like this paragraph from Glenn (emphasis mine):

This raises an important and under-appreciated point. Many Americans defend the U.S.’s conduct not because they support it, but because they’re completely unaware of what those actions actually are. Many of the people who support what they call the “enhanced interrogation” program really believe they’re defending three instances of waterboarding rather than scores of detainee deaths, because they literally don’t know it happened. And here you have Nordlinger — a Senior Editor of National Review — claiming that denial of access to the ICRC is the hallmark of brutal tyrannies (it is), and arguing that a country could only get away with it if they do it to an Israeli, making clear that he is completely ignorant of the fact that his own Government did this for years (without, needless to say, prompting a peep of protest from his magazine), and reportedly continues to do it. That the U.S. did this systematically just doesn’t exist in his brain; he really believes it’s something only China, Cuba and Hamas do. They really do live in their own universe and just block out whatever facts they dislike while inventing the ones that make them feel good.

My only objection is that Glenn seems to have succumbed to the materialist fallacy. Yes, it’s technically true that the fact of U.S. atrocities doesn’t exist in Nordlinger’s brain, but then again it doesn’t exist in your brain, either Glenn. It exists in your mind.

23 Jun 2010

Glenn Greenwald, Become a Libertarian!

All Posts 7 Comments

Wow I feel Glenn Greenwald’s pain. Lately he has been in an argument with “moderate” liberals over Obama’s capitulation on important progressive goals. (The thing you need to remember, is that Barack Obama is a “liberal” the same way George W. Bush was a “conservative.”)

The moderates have been pooh-poohing the “fanatics” on the Left for thinking that Obama should have pushed for a public option, really cracked down on the Fed and big banks, pulled the troops out of the Middle East, closed Guantanamo, etc. According to the moderates, the president of the United States is actually quite weak, except possibly on military issues. But for sure on health care and financial reform legislation, they claim, Obama’s hands were tied.

So GG has been going nuts, pointing out all the different reasons that this argument is crazy.

Now the funny part. In this post, Glenn links to one of his numerous critics, Robert Farley, who wrote:

I haven’t really seen anyone claim that the US Presidency is “weak, helpless, and impotent”; Glenn certainly intimates that his interlocutors have this view, but he fails to demonstrate such, and my own cursory reading of the discussion has thus far failed to uncover anyone who holds such a view of the US executive.

At this point Glenn turns into George Costanza, he is so frustrated. (“Jerry, I’m losin it!”) Glenn fires back:

Gee, I wonder where I got that idea from. And you know what the title of Bernstein’s post was? This: “The Presidency Is Weak. Really.” Farley says that he’s never encountered anyone who argued that the presidency is weak, helpless and impotent even though Bernstein’s post — which Farley himself cites when disputing (and thus presumably read) — says exactly that (“Is the idea of an ‘Impotent, Helpless President’ a joke? No, it’s basic American politics”).

I realize with the block quotes and he-said, she-said, I may have lost you, so let me give you the chronology:

(1) A defender of Obama writes an article with THE TITLE of, “The Presidency Is Weak. Really.” In the body of the article, the Obama apologist literally writes, “Is the idea of an ‘impotent, helpless president’ a joke? No, it’s basic American politics.”

(2) Greenwald goes nuts, saying that the modern president has a ton of powers. Obama clearly could have pushed for progressive goals, if they were actually important to him.

(3) Greenwald’s critic says, “I haven’t seen anyone actually claim that the president is weak and impotent; Greenwald is attacking a straw man.”

Glenn, you need to become a libertarian. Sure, we have petty infights all the time. But we know how to read article titles.

23 Jun 2010

You Can Use the Government’s Own Figures

Financial Economics 10 Comments

People often wonder why I use the government’s official numbers (on CPI, the costs and benefits of cap-and-trade legislation, the size of the Fed’s balance sheet, etc.) to make my arguments. The answer is twofold:

(A) They are the “official” numbers and so cynics can’t say that I’m making stuff up (if my punchline is that the government is ripping us off).

(B) I generally can make my point using the government’s own numbers, so I can stipulate them for the sake of argument.

To that end, just look at the Treasury’s own statement about the current (in)solvency of all social insurance funds, which includes Social Security, Medicare, etc. I don’t want to spoil it. Open this (small) pdf (HT2 WND), and go to the last page. You can see in the first column, bottom row, the Treasury’s total for 2009.

And keep in mind, the number listed is in billions.

Oh another important thing: The parentheses around the number means it’s negative.

22 Jun 2010

Bruce Bartlett Apparently Just Graduated From the Joe Romm School of Blogging

All Posts 6 Comments

So Jeff Hummel has long argued that it would be a good thing if the US Treasury defaulted on its bonds. Bruce Bartlett wrote a response in which he strongly implied that anyone who thinks such a thing is a nutjob, though he worded it very carefully so he could plausibly deny it (as David R. Henderson caught too).

So Hummel links to the post and says, “For someone who used to be a libertarian, he [Bartlett] is awfully contemptuous of those opposed to increasing the federal debt limit.”

Deciding that irony and good humor are for suckers, Bartlett lets fire with this:

Historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel accuses me of being “awfully contemptuous of those opposed to increasing the federal debt limit.” He is right. I am contemptuous of those who know so little about the federal budget that they actually believe the debt limit is an effective tool for controlling growth of the federal debt.

Opposing a debt limit increase is simply an example of political posturing at its worst—Dan Shaviro calls it “almost criminally negligent.” It allows members of Congress who voted for massive tax cuts and new spending programs that they knew would increase the deficit to pretend that they are fiscally responsible by voting against a debt limit increase once every year or so. And the offenders belong equally to both parties. Among them was then Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, who voted against a debt limit increase back in 2006. Don Marron calls the vote to raise the debt limit a tax on the majority party.

And it allows bloggers who imagine themselves to be Horatio at the Bridge, fighting against the evils of government debt, to sound as if they are proposing something meaningful to reduce deficits without naming specific spending cuts or tax increases that would reduce the deficit or finding the political support to get them enacted. Such people are too pure and too principled to bother with the political process. They prefer to lob ideological grenades on obscure web sites and pat themselves on the back for their courage while ripping those that care enough about the deficit to suggest that raising revenues might just possibly be part of the solution.

You might also want to follow the links to see how Bartlett called Murray Rothbard a “conservative.”

I am sure there is a template for libertarian punditry that I can’t even fully grasp because I’m within it. Fair enough.

There is also a template for “thoughtful” social democratic analysis. Krugman, DeLong, and above all Joe Romm are masters of it. Anyone who disagrees with you is evil and stupid, and you get to define what is politically feasible and use that criterion to blow up anybody you disagree with as being unrealistic and in the fringe.

People keep lamenting poor Bruce Bartlett for getting canned because he dared to criticize the president. Really? A guy lobbing bombs like the above, and you think it was really just a matter of intellectual disagreement?

22 Jun 2010

Money vs. Wealth

All Posts, Financial Economics, Shameless Self-Promotion 9 Comments

I heard the host and a guest on NPR’s “Marketplace” talking about people taking their money out of stocks and putting it into checking accounts, so I thought I’d set them straight. But the “user contributed tag” at the end of the article says:

“this is dumb as hell you seriously dont understand basic economics lol robert murphy is a retard”

(Note that this guy had to contribute several tags, to wit, ‘this is dumb as hell’ and then ‘you seriously dont understand basic economics lol’ etc. Some may have put ‘lol’ as a separate tag, but this guy doesn’t play by the rules. He keeps you guessing.)