Quote of the day

From Tyler Cowen’s post on “climategate”:

The Jacksonian mode of discourse, or mode of conduct for that matter, can do harm to your cause, especially if you are otherwise trying to claim the scientific high ground.

Too many Malthusians

At Coyote Blog we find a link to this gem of an article:

• Too many people?  No, too many Malthusians (Spiked)

You should really read the whole thing.  A sample:

The lesson of history seems to be that more and more people are a good thing; more and more minds to think and hands to create have made new cities, more resources, more things, and seem to have given rise to healthier and wealthier societies.Yet despite this evidence, the population scaremongers always draw exactly the opposite conclusion. Never has there been a political movement that has got things so spectacularly wrong time and time again yet which keeps on rearing its ugly head and saying: ‘This time it’s definitely going to happen! This time overpopulation is definitely going to cause social and political breakdown!’

The Malthusian cry of “zOMG teh populations!” is but one example of a deeper problem with these sorts of thought experiments: advancing one variable (in their case, population) while holding the others (agriculture, infrastructure, human social evolution, &c.) constant.  When Paul Ehrlich predicted mass starvation and complete social breakdown in India by 1980, he neglected to account for the possibility that India’s population boom might have produced some frighteningly skilled statisticians, whose work with another brilliant fellow named Norman Borlaug would vastly increase the productivity of Indian farmers.  India is now one of the biggest exporters of food in the world, if you believe Wikipedia.

Many of the Peak Oil eschatologists pull this shit as well.  They note (correctly) that petroleum oil is a finite resource, and advance that variable while holding others (in particular, substitute goods) constant.  Then they wail on about how drastically we’ll “have” to change our lifestyles when dinofuel becomes too expensive to use, neglecting to account for the possibility that looming unwelcome lifestyle changes might spur us to find other sources of hydrocarbons.  (This is where I rant about diesel engines, I suppose; for now I’ll confine myself to noting that Rudolf Diesel’s creation not only has damn near the highest thermal efficiency of any combustion engine, but was shown to run on peanut-oil biofuel — in 1898.  Turbines, I’m given to understand, are even less finicky about fuel sources.)

Human self-interest and human genius makes a powerful combination.  It’s foolish to bet against it.

Fixing problems with legislation

That’s what legislation’s for, isn’t it?  I mean, that’s how it works, right?

Here’s a pair of links from SayUncle:

• Texas’ gay marriage ban may have banned all marriages (McClatchy)

Can’t be.  So many opponents of marriage equality say they’re doing it to protect traditional marriage, not to ban it.  And we all know that legislation does what it was meant to do.  So how’d this happen?

The amendment, approved by the Legislature and overwhelmingly ratified by voters, declares that “marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman.” But the troublemaking phrase, as Radnofsky sees it, is Subsection B, which declares:

“This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.”

(Emphasis added.)

Oops.

kbiel notes in comments that this is a rather old issue, and has merely been raised as a political football:

If this amendment had banned all marriage, we would have already seen test cases. Certainly four years is enough time for some idiot to file a ridiculous lawsuit and get it thrown out of court or taken all the way up to the Supreme Court of Texas.

But there’s no statute of limitations on political idiocy.  How long did it take for Heller to get the DC gun ban thrown out?  It doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to suspect that Texas has fewer idiots than DC.

——

Next we come across this gem from, of course, Marko:

• No shit, Einstein (The Munchkin Wrangler)

Mohammed Atta et al. hijacked three airliners (and temporarily a fourth) with box cutters on September 11th, 2001.  Then the government prohibited us from carrying knives and nail clippers through airport security, and we were all safe.  Until Richard Reid brought a pancake of PETN onto an American Airlines 767 on December 22nd, 2001, at least… but then the TSA compelled us to take our shoes off whilst passing through security, and we were all safe.  Until London-based terrorists plotted to bring dubiously-effective liquid explosives onto ten airliners in August 2006… but then our guardian angels in government made us carry our toothpaste and our shampoo in separate plastic bags, and we were all safe again.

Er, well…

The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology figures out what some of us have known all along: you can’t get rid of everything on airplanes that can possibly be used as a weapon.

(They stabbed a few dead pigs with various everyday items, such as pens and broken glasses. Shockingly, all of them can inflict lethal wounds.)

But… but…

 

If it weren’t for the fact that I have to fly in a few weeks, I’d be laughing my ass off right now.

Back to birdshot blogging

I’ve got a rant on wealth destruction and Generalovernment Motors stewing in my mid-brain; for now, here’s some neat shit from around the big truck*.

——

Remember the uproar from late this May, when Canadian Governor-General Michaëlle Jean ate raw seal heart?  Get ready for some more pants-shitting hysteria from the grass-eaters:

• Parliamentary restaurant serves up seal meat (Globe and Mail)

Seal meat is about to join beef tenderloin and baked salmon on the haute-cuisine menu for MPs and senators in the parliamentary restaurant.  MPs say Parliament is picking up the fork from Governor-General Michäelle Jean, who triggered a global controversy last May by gobbling seal meat in a show of support for Inuit culture in the Arctic.

(Image link goes to original source)

——

Next, we have a blinding flash of the obvious from Dr. WhiteCoat as he advances an idea that might actually work:

• Have at it (WhiteCoat’s Call Room)

As I was fixing the wiring in my basement, a thought popped into my head about another way to decrease costs of medical care in this country.

Get rid of prescription requirements for most medications and procedures.

How many people would go to the doctor for a sore throat if they could buy a strep test over the counter? If the strep test is positive, they go to the pharmacy and purchase some penicillin over the counter.  If you twisted your ankle and could walk into a radiography center and get an x-ray of your ankle for $100, would you bypass the emergency department?  If you could buy your blood pressure medication over the counter, would you keep going to your doctor for those $150 checkups? Would you even purchase routine insurance? Or would you stick with just “major medical” coverage?

That makes far too much sense to be actually implemented.

The natural objection (from certain quarters — those Hayek named as “socialists of all parties”) is that people don’t know what’s good for them and must be vetted, advised, nudged, guided, prodded, compelled, verified, examined, and monitored by proper experts… for their own good, of course.  WhiteCoat notes (not unreasonably) that a fully-open system has risks:

I know that issues would have to be worked out with an open access system – such as preventing narcotic abuse and preventing antibiotic resistance due to people taking Zithromax for the flu or Levaquin for their coughs. Maybe we’d have to limit the number of CT scans or angiograms that someone may receive to keep down the radiation doses.

However, there are precedents, and it is in precedent that his introduction rises from irrelevance to shine with the blinding light of “of course… why didn’t I think of that?”

In almost any other situation, if I choose to take care of a problem myself, I can do it.

If I want to cut my own hair, I get a pair of scissors, look in the mirror, and start hacking. I don’t need a stylist’s prescription to purchase scissors.

If I want to sue someone, I can go to court, fill out the papers, pay the filing fee, and play the lotto. I don’t need a lawyer’s OK in order to gain entrance to the court house.

If I need to fix an electric outlet, I can go read about it online, buy the stuff at Home Depot, then hope I don’t get the red and the blue wires mixed up. I don’t need an electrician’s permission to purchase conduit.

When I get in over my head doing any of these things, I either take my chances or I call someone who knows more about the problem than I do.

Why should medicine be any different?

It would be interesting to explore the history of medicine’s regulation and find out how medicine became “any different”.  Sounds like another job for the Glib Dilettante to half-finish.

——

Moving from medicine to economics, we find that Eric Crampton has unearthed a pair of papers on immigration:

• Immigration (Offsetting Behaviour)

First, Giovanni Peri finds that immigration in the US doesn’t crowd out natives’ employment; rather, increases in total factor productivity from increased immigration work to raise income per worker.

You mean the myth of the great American melting-pot as a land of opportunity isn’t entirely mythological?  Comparative advantage works?  Say it ain’t so! (Emphasis in quotation added.)

So if immigration actually makes people richer — even the people who’d likely be seen as in competition with the immigrants — why do batshit xenophobes like Pat Buchanan and Lou Dobbs even exist?

Next, David Card, Christian Dustmann and Ian Preston find that folks in Europe oppose immigration less because of worries about pecuniary effects on wages and more because of what he calls “compositional amenities” – people, especially the low-educated, value the characteristics of their coworkers, schools, and neighbours, and just dislike foreigners on those margins.

Oh, of course.  It’s because “they’re different”.

Here’s the thing, though: if you go off on a shrill  hysterical rant about how different those hard-working immigrants who moved in next door are, and how they don’t share your core cultural values, you just come across as a narrow-minded asshole.  (Not that this stops anyone.)  But if you go off on a shrill  hysterical rant about how those hard-working immigrants who moved in next door are stealing your jobs!!!!11one, you can get your victim-mentality on, and claiming victim status is how people get ahead these days.

——

And speaking of shrill hysterical people who embrace known-bad political-economic views and plead persecution when they go wrong, Megan McArdle has some bad news about Venezuela’s strongman Hugo Chavez:

• Chavez’s economic problems turn nasty

President Hugo Chávez has been facing a public outcry in recent weeks over power failures that, after six nationwide blackouts in the last two years, are cutting electricity for hours each day in rural areas and in industrial cities like Valencia and Ciudad Guayana. Now, water rationing has been introduced here in the capital.The deterioration of services is perplexing to many here, especially because the country had grown used to cheap, plentiful electricity and water in recent decades. But even as the oil boom was enriching his government and Mr. Chávez asserted greater control over utilities and other industries in this decade, public services seemed only to decay, adding to residents’ frustrations.

[...]

This comes on top of the sporadic food shortages that result from price controls combined with high inflation.

So suppose you’re one of Michael Moore’s anointed anticapitalist democrats, and the Gods of the Copybook Headings are booking hotels in Caracas.  What do you do?

Well, naturally you ramp up the bellicose bloviation against one of your neighbours!

Chavez’s solution to these problem has been to go militaristic on neighboring Columbia.

[...]

No one thinks war is imminent; they think it’s just bluster to stir up patriotism and channel it through the figure of one Hugo Chavez.  But then, as the article points out, no one really thought Argentina would invade the Falklands, either.

There’s a cheery thought.

——

* Hey, Ted Stevens?  Fuck you.

New frontiers in bad ideas

CrankyProf reports on a Brilliant Idea from her university’s administration, apparently part of an effort to curb energy costs:

• Clearly, someone has a death wish (Cranky Epistles)

In a move sure to agitate all faculty and outright enrage the venerable silverbacks, the Uni has sent out an e-mail requesting that faculty members get rid of any personal beverage makers — i.e., coffee pots and electric kettles — in order to save money. In addition, the small ($25/year) Uni contribution to the faculty (note: not department — entire faculty) coffee fund is being revoked. Oh, and we should unplug departmental ‘fridges over weekends, as well.

Of course, this is part of an all-out austerity campaign to slash expenditures to the bone.  Isn’t it?

This, from the admin who routinely turns the heat on in September, and then tells everyone to “open the windows and turn on the ceiling fans” if it gets too hot.

This, from the admin who decided that the Uni President’s portrait (which hangs at the far end of an alcove in an unused ballroom on the third floor of a large marble hall that consists of mostly-unused meeting rooms) needed to be floodlit, 24/7.

…oh.

I suspect lobbying from Students’ Union-run coffee shops.

Bubble-icious

Simplifying outrageously, the 2008 credit crisis happened when a real estate bubble, driven by overexuberant lending practices and dubious incentives, burst — and the investment banking sector realized that, thanks to obfuscatory and overoptimistic reporting practices, they had no idea which mortgage-backed investments were good and which were more useful as kindling.  I see these as the key mechanical ingredients: incentives grounded more in myth than reality drove people to invest in a real estate bubble; extraordinarily loose credit allowed them to do so with relative ease (and fueled a secondary market where mortgages were packaged and sold as investments); and enervative reporting practices masked the real risk in those mortgage-backed investments.

Then, of course, the whole thing blew up in our faces (as bubbles are wont to do) and two trillion dollars worth of corporatism later unemployment’s nudging the 11% mark but nobody’s worried about a 1929-style pandemic of bank failures.  So it is that, poorer but wiser, our brilliant and well-meaning regulatory state sets off to pass legislation to make sure that this will never happen again.  That’s how it works, right?

Dubious incentives:

• Attack of the Home Buyers’ Tax Credit (Economix blog)

So, the Housing and Economic Recovery Act (HERA) — signed into law by that laissez-faire ideologue George W. Bush in 2008 — provided up to $7,500 in tax credits (according to Wikipedia; Dr. Glaeser says $8000) for first-time home buyers.  So far, so good: it’s entirely likely that a bunch of those first-time home buyers haven’t already bought a house because they can’t afford one, but this isn’t a cataclysmic fuckup like the 1997 Taxpayer Relief Act’s $500,000 home-sale exemption.  But then Congress went and fucked with it:

According to Case-Shiller data, housing prices have been rising since May, yet Congress has just extended and expanded last year’s home buyers’ tax credit. They’ve made the program more regressive by upping the income limit for families from $150,000 to $225,000.

Even more problematically, the new, but definitely not improved, tax credit now offers up to $6,500 to current homeowners who have lived in their houses for at least five of the last eight years and buy new homes.

Glaeser goes on to point out a number of problems with the fucked-with tax credit, but I’ll confine myself to noting that it provides an additional incentive for homeowners to buy new houses — when the values of their existing houses is probably significantly suppressed.  But that’s okay, right?  I mean, now that banks are being held strictly to account on their capital ratios by hawk-eyed federal oversight, they’re going to stop lending frivolously, aren’t they?

Loose credit:

• FDIC chief: Banks aren’t lending enough (Below the Beltway)

Doug Mataconis notes with disapproval the following:

FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair said the FDIC’s upcoming quarterly report would show that “not many large institutions are doing a very good job of lending.” Instead, she said, some are taking advantage of near-zero interest rates by borrowing dollars cheaply to buy higher-yielding assets like stocks or commodities — a move known as the “carry trade.”

“I don’t see much money going out (from banks). I see a lot of carry trade,” Bair told a banking conference in New York. “It used to be you take deposits and you lend out money. We’d like to see more of that.”

Oh, those awful banks!  When they aren’t screwing you over by lending you money and charging you interest, they’re screwing you over by not lending you money and not charging you interest!  It’s not fair!

So, um, dare we ask why those banks aren’t lending money?

Many banks have tightened lending standards following a wave of residential and commercial property defaults. Others say they want to lend but see little demand as consumers and businesses seek to pay off debt, not take on more.

*headdesk*

Fortunately*, the FDIC waves a big stick over the banking industry, so I’m sure we’ll see some enforced lending real soon now.  And when that happens, it might prompt a new housing bubble, but it surely won’t cause anywhere near the problems the last one did, because the credit rating agencies have all been tightened up and everybody’s being scrupulously honest about the status of their mortgages — especially the banks what hold them.  Right?

Overoptimistic reporting:

• Banks get new rules on property (Wall Street Journal)

Federal bank regulators issued guidelines allowing banks to keep loans on their books as “performing” even if the value of the underlying properties have fallen below the loan amount.

The volume of troubled commercial real-estate loans is skyrocketing. Regulators said that the rules were designed to encourage banks to restructure problem commercial mortgages with borrowers rather than foreclose on them. But the move has prompted criticism that regulators are simply prolonging the financial crisis by not forcing borrowers and lenders to confront, rather than delay, inevitable problems.

Well… fuck! And guess who’s behind it: it’s the FDIC again.  More scary news:

About $770 billion of the $1.4 trillion commercial mortgages that will mature in the next five years are currently underwater, according to Foresight Analytics. [...] The new guidelines are targeted primarily at the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of loans that are coming due that can’t be refinanced largely because the value of the properties have fallen below the loan amount.

Note that this is precisely the sort of bad debt that, according to the above article, is motivating banks to stop lending money.  And the FDIC, curiously enough, wants them to both hold onto this debt and pretend it isn’t a risk**.

So it looks like we’re getting set to have a go at another housing bubble-fueled credit crisis.  At least we’ll have a bit more practice next time.

——

* Not really

** The WSJ’s article is far more even-handed than my quotations would make it appear, but on this matter I don’t trust the FDIC one bit

Ft. Hood &c.

Well, now that I’ve formed a stable opinion I find that what I want to say has been better said by others.  So let’s go down the list in order.

First and most importantly, from Roberta X:

In other news, 3,699 to 13,999 Muslims serving in the U. S. military didn’t go on a shooting spree yesterday.

It’s not the religion. It’s not the guns. It’s the crazy. And no one group has a lock on crazy. Yeah, it’d be nice if you could single out the wicked and the dangerously loony with a simple survey. But it doesn’t work that way and no amount of pointing-with-alarm will make it so.

Just a little, huh.  Hasan wasn’t a hateful murderous asshole because he was Muslim any more than Fred Phelps is a hateful treasonous asshole because he’s Christian.  The “Muslim” part may have been his particular trigger, but those of you keeping score from home will have noted a pair of copycattish spree killings — one in Orlando, one somewhere in Washington State — shortly thereafter.  As I understand it, the problem there is that Hasan’s little orgy of petulant violence reminded those unstable cockvomits that killing a bunch of your friends will get you time on CNN, so that’s the route they took.  I doubt they stopped eating pork beforehand.

And while we’re at it, why is it that a gigantic military base in the midst of a Long War against irregular forces could be one of the most thoroughly disarmed parts of Texas?

• Safe at home (View from the Porch)

The more I think about it, the more pissed off I get at the “this is our home” comment from the completely unsat and hopefully about-to-fall-on-his-sword General Cone.

Sure, General, your troops were “safe at home”… in a war with no fronts.

They were every bit as safe at home as the crews of the USS Cole or the battleship Arizona.  Safe at home like the Marines in their barracks in Beirut.

Boat Guy, in the comments, adds:

Of course our ID cards read “Uniformed Services of the United States” now instead of “Armed Forces…” so perhaps we shoulda known …

Ouch.

Next we discover, once again, that the press has no goddamn clue what it’s talking about when matters turn even slightly technical.

• LAYERS of editorial oversight (Captain of a Crew of One)

SailorCurt quotes Fox as reporting that:

The initial investigation shows that Hasan allegedly used only one gun during the attack — a 5.7-caliber semiautomatic pistol.

The handgun in question is in fact a Fabrique Nationale Five-seveN, famous for its appearance in Counter-Strike and (until now) absolutely fuck-all else.  Its 5.7×28mm round is also fired by the FN P-90 (also famous primarily for its appearance in Counter-Strike), and as Tam notes is something like a particularly hot .22LR in lethality (and the OMG TEH SCARY armour-piercing variety is over 9000 kinds of illegal and no more capable in the “killing people” department).

But a 5.7-caliber weapon?  That’s quite something.  Just go click that link up there to SailorCurt’s article for a rather visual demonstration.

The real question, of course, is what we need to do to our security state to make sure that Nothing Like This Ever Happens Again?

• Feds dropped investigation of Hasan because he didn’t seem violent (Below the Beltway)

…

Oh.

Good thing they’re declaring libertarians to be domestic terrorists instead of investigating army officers who praise suicide bombers.  That’s totally different!

Further on, we discover that the cries of “terr’ism!” being tossed around aren’t precisely consistent with the broader narrative.  I’ll defer on this subject to both Glenn Greenwald and (of all people) Jonah Goldberg, the latter of whom notes that:

Terrorism is, by conventional definition, an attack on civilians intended to strike fear in the non-military population in order to advance a political or ideological agenda. Hasan didn’t attack civilians, he attacked uniformed members of the U.S. Army in advance of their deployment to the frontlines. It was an evil act, but was it an act of terrorism?

Something can be sick and wrong without being terrorism.  Shocking, that.

On the subject of agricultural politics

I’ve got a wee bit of a hate on for Canadian agricultural subsidies and related governmental coercion.  This latest trigger for my (purely rhetorical) homicidal tendencies is a news story by virtue of Eric Crampton:

• Further Canadian agricultural idiocy (Offsetting Behaviour)

Here’s the gist of the problem, courtesy of the Globe and FMail:

Europe insists that its dairy industries have full access to Canadian markets without any unfair competition from within Canada. Danish, Irish and French butter can be bought in supermarkets all over Europe, and officials see no reason why that can’t be the case in Canada, too.

And for the most part, Canada’s farmers share that desire: There are beef shortages in European markets, for example, and the beef-cattle industry is lobbying for more open access, along with most other farm sectors, which see Europe’s 500 million people as a highly desirable market for farm products.

But dairy farmers in central Canada, who represent a small share of agriculture, are pushing hard for protection of the government-subsidy program known as supply management. European farmers generally not receive subsidies for the production of food, and provincial supply-management programs, which mainly apply only to dairy, would be seen as an unfair competitive advantage.

MURDERDEATHKILL!

If I hadn’t grown up in Western Canada, I’d wonder why these smug self-satisfied cockvomits from Out East are so convinced that they can fuck over everyone else in the goddamn country to maintain their profit margins.  But having had a continent’s-length view of the subject, I’m well-convinced that the east-of-Winnipeg mentality is pretty damn clear in that “making other people suffer so that we can maintain our status quo” is par for the fucking course.

Ag subsidies.  Fuck.

I am disappoint.