Here is an article in Columbia University's State of the Planet publication, by Kevin Krajick.
The article illustrates that climate modeling is not as well developed or as accurate as the media, climate alarmists, and politicians think. Those who shout "Climate Denier" are the deniers.
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State-of-the-art climate models predict that as a result of human-induced climate change, the surface of the Pacific Ocean should be warming — some parts more, some less, but all warming nonetheless. Indeed, most regions are acting as expected, with one key exception: what scientists call the equatorial cold tongue. This is a strip of relatively cool water stretching along the equator from Peru into the western Pacific, across quarter of the earth’s circumference. It is produced by equatorial trade winds that blow from east to west, piling up warm surface water in the west Pacific, and also pushing surface water away from the equator itself. This makes way for colder waters to well up from the depths, creating the cold tongue.
Climate models of global warming — computerized simulations of what various parts of the earth are expected to do in reaction to rising greenhouse gases — say that the equatorial cold tongue, along with other regions, should have started warming decades ago, and should still be warming now. But the cold tongue has remained stubbornly cold.
This troubles many scientists, because the cold tongue plays a key role in global climate. For example, it affects the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, a natural cyclic strengthening and weakening of the trade winds that causes cooling and warming of the eastern Pacific surface every two to seven years. ENSO is the world’s master weather maker; depending on which part of the cycle it is in, its echoes in the atmosphere may bring heavy rains or drought across much of the Americas, east Asia and east Africa. Whether the cold tongue warms will likely affect weather across huge regions. Resulting shifts could affect world food supplies and outbreaks of dangerous weather. But our predictions of those shifts rest on climate models.
Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, has long suspected that climate models get the cold tongue wrong. In 1997, he and colleagues published a paper suggesting that it had not warmed at all during the 20th century. At the time, most scientists assumed that any discrepancy between real-world temperatures and those predicted by climate models were due to natural variability. We should just wait; eventually the signal of cold tongue warming would emerge. Now, two decades later, with more modern satellite data in hand, real-world observations are veering ever more obviously from the models. It is time to reconsider, says Seager.
In a new paper in the journal Nature Climate Change, he and colleagues use simplified models that isolate the fundamental dynamics of the tropical Pacific atmosphere-ocean system. These, they say, comport with the cold tongue’s actual behavior — and show that it is consistent with rising greenhouse gases.
We recently spoke with Seager about climate models, the intricate workings of the Pacific climate system, and the wider implications for the world.
In general, how well do climate models match real-world observations?
The mismatch between observed changes in cold tongue temperature over past decades and the models is quite striking. There are scores of simulations with multiple models from research groups across the world. While these models are all forced by the same histories of greenhouse gases, volcanoes, solar radiation and other forces, they generate their own internal variability. Hence they create a range of estimates of climate history. For changes in cold-tongue temperature, the observed changes are at the far cold end or outside the model range. The average or median model says the cold tongue should have warmed by 0.8 degrees C or more over the past six decades, but the real value is only 0.4 degrees or less.
Why are the state-of-the-art climate models out of line with what we are seeing?
Well, they’ve been out of line for decades. This is not a new problem. In this paper, we think we’ve finally found out the reason why. Through multiple model generations, climate models have simulated cold tongues that are too cold and which extend too far west. There is also spuriously warm water immediately to the south of the model cold tongues, instead of cool waters that extend all the way to the cold coastal upwelling regions west of Peru and Chile. These over-developed cold tongues in the models lead to equatorial environments that have too high relative humidity and too low wind speeds. These make the sea surface temperature very sensitive to rising greenhouse gases. Hence the model cold tongues warm a lot over the past decades. In the real world, the sensitivity is lower and, in fact, some of heat added by rising greenhouse gases is offset by the upwelling of cool water from below. Thus the real-world cold tongue warms less than the waters over the tropical west Pacific or off the equator to the north and south. This pattern of sea-surface temperature change then causes the trade winds to strengthen, which lifts the cold subsurface water upward, further cooling the cold tongue.
What do your models do that the more widely used ones don’t?
Our models actually date back to the early 1980s, when people were first trying to use models to explain phenomena like the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. It was common then to make the problem simpler by assuming within the model the climatological mean state and simply simulating perturbations from that. We used that approach. By doing so, we were able to show within our one simple model that, if we assume the real-world climatological state, the response to rising greenhouse gases is warming everywhere, but not in the cold tongue. In contrast, if we assume the biased climatological state in the complex state-of-the-art models, the response to rising greenhouse gases has enhanced warming in the cold tongue. Hence this trip down modeling memory lane allows us to diagnose what is wrong with the complex models currently being used for climate projections and impact assessments.
If your ideas are correct, how might projections of ENSO’s future behavior change?
Short answer, we don’t know. One thing at a time! However, we do know that ENSO behavior depends on the mean state around which it is perturbing things. If we are right that the tropical Pacific is moving to a state where the waters are warming everywhere but not in the cold tongue, and cold subsurface waters are being lifted closer to the surface, then ENSO will almost certainly change in amplitude, frequency and other ways. We need to find out.
What are the implications for people?
They are many. The sea-surface temperature of the equatorial Pacific influences climate and its variability worldwide. Generally, warming of the atmosphere increases the amount of moisture the air can hold, and intensifies moisture transport. This tends to make subtropical dry zones drier and tropical and mid-latitude wet zones wetter. But on top of those changes there will be regional changes. If the cold tongue warms as the complex models say it should, analogous to an El Niño event, it will create a wet tendency in some regions, to offset subtropical drying in southwest North America and South America. It will also create a wetting tendency in east Africa, but a drying tendency in equatorial South America and the Sahel. If, instead, we are right and the cold tongue will not warm as much, then drying in southwest North America, subtropical South America and east Africa could be more severe than the complex models project. At the same time, equatorial South America and the Sahel might see wetter conditions. In developing climate impact assessments, scenarios should not be limited to the complex models. They should also consider the case in which the cold tongue continues to not warm. The implication for modelers is that they must find out why their models have biases, and fix them.
Sunday, June 30, 2019
Climate change models over estimate climate change
Here is a link to a paper at www.nature.com.
Climate models are most impressive to those who do not understand their limitations, e.g., the media, climate alarmists, politicians, and even some climate scientists.
The paper "Earth system models underestimate carbon fixation by plants in the high latitudes" is an example of one of their limitations.
Here are some excepts. My comments are in italics.
----------------------------------------
ABSTRACT
Most Earth system models agree that land will continue to store carbon due to the physiological effects of rising CO2 concentration and climatic changes favoring plant growth in temperature-limited regions. But they largely disagree on the amount of carbon uptake. The historical CO2 increase has resulted in enhanced photosynthetic carbon fixation (Gross Primary Production, GPP), as can be evidenced from atmospheric CO2 concentration and satellite leaf area index measurements. Here, we use leaf area sensitivity to ambient CO2 from the past 36 years of satellite measurements to obtain an Emergent Constraint (EC) estimate of GPP enhancement in the northern high latitudes at two-times the pre-industrial CO2 concentration (3.4 ± 0.2 Pg C yr−1). We derive three independent comparable estimates from CO2 measurements and atmospheric inversions. Our EC estimate is 60% larger than the conventionally used multi-model average (44% higher at the global scale). This suggests that most models largely underestimate photosynthetic carbon fixation and therefore likely overestimate future atmospheric CO2 abundance and ensuing climate change, though not proportionately.
Dimension reduction using principal component analysis
The drivers GDD0 and atmospheric CO2 concentration vary co-linearly due to the radiative effect of increasing CO2 concentration in the NHL. Thus, it is problematic to conduct an accurate factor separation in terms of their respective contribution to increase in LAImax. However, the co-linearity suggests that a large amount of the signal is shared. Therefore, we conduct a PCA to apply dimension reduction.
Climate models are most impressive to those who do not understand their limitations, e.g., the media, climate alarmists, politicians, and even some climate scientists.
The paper "Earth system models underestimate carbon fixation by plants in the high latitudes" is an example of one of their limitations.
Here are some excepts. My comments are in italics.
----------------------------------------
ABSTRACT
Most Earth system models agree that land will continue to store carbon due to the physiological effects of rising CO2 concentration and climatic changes favoring plant growth in temperature-limited regions. But they largely disagree on the amount of carbon uptake. The historical CO2 increase has resulted in enhanced photosynthetic carbon fixation (Gross Primary Production, GPP), as can be evidenced from atmospheric CO2 concentration and satellite leaf area index measurements. Here, we use leaf area sensitivity to ambient CO2 from the past 36 years of satellite measurements to obtain an Emergent Constraint (EC) estimate of GPP enhancement in the northern high latitudes at two-times the pre-industrial CO2 concentration (3.4 ± 0.2 Pg C yr−1). We derive three independent comparable estimates from CO2 measurements and atmospheric inversions. Our EC estimate is 60% larger than the conventionally used multi-model average (44% higher at the global scale). This suggests that most models largely underestimate photosynthetic carbon fixation and therefore likely overestimate future atmospheric CO2 abundance and ensuing climate change, though not proportionately.
FROM THE METHODS SECTION
Dimension reduction using principal component analysis
The drivers GDD0 and atmospheric CO2 concentration vary co-linearly due to the radiative effect of increasing CO2 concentration in the NHL. Thus, it is problematic to conduct an accurate factor separation in terms of their respective contribution to increase in LAImax. However, the co-linearity suggests that a large amount of the signal is shared. Therefore, we conduct a PCA to apply dimension reduction.
Principal Components Analysis is a purely statistical procedure with little relation to the physics of climate change. It is widely used in Finance. One Nobel Prize winner once referred to the "factors" it provides as follows. "factors" are things you pull out of your A__." Statistical models can be powerful and extremely useful, but they are not a substitute for physics. Climate models often are based on or rely on statistical models - be forewarned.
Saturday, June 29, 2019
Democrats' plans for housing will prove catastrophic
Here is John Cochrane on the Democrat presidential candidates' plans for housing.
JC is right concerning his characterization of how bad are the Democrats' plans. The interesting question is why they are the plans. Are the Democrats that uninformed about economics, so they really do not understand the damage their plans will do? Are they exploiting the voters lack of understanding of the consequences? The Venezuelas of the world go down the drain precisely because of a combination of the two. The Democrat Presidential candidates are not the kind of people you want as a President.
-----------------------------------------------
NPR covered the Democratic candidates' plans to address housing issues:
[Julian] Castro would provide housing vouchers to all families who need help. Right now, only 1 in 4 families eligible for housing assistance gets it. He would also increase government spending on new affordable housing by tens of billions of dollars a year and provide a refundable tax credit to the millions of low- and moderate-income renters who have to spend more than 30% of their incomes on housing.
I'm actually surprised it's as much as a fourth. Most government programs outside medicare and social security attract tiny fractions of the eligible people. Watch out budget if people catch on.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren calls for a $500 billion federal investment over the next 10 years in new affordable housing....
[New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker] would also provide a renters' tax credit, legal assistance for tenants facing eviction and protect against housing discrimination...
Sen. Kamala Harris has also introduced a plan for a renters' tax credit of up to $6,000 for families making $100,000 or less.
New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has signed on to both the Harris and Warren plans, which have been introduced as legislation.
In sum, they're piling on to pay your rent or mortgage.
The economic foolishness of all this is painful. Housing is not a single good. It's location, location, location, and also size and condition. This isn't about homelessness. Everyone lives somewhere, so the point is to subsidize larger, better, or more conveniently placed housing. Or, to free up money for people to spend on other things.
Economics is about incentives. If the government pays for all your rent past 30% of your income, that's a big incentive to rent a huge apartment and not to earn any extra income. =
"Affordable housing," doesn't mean affordable housing, in the same way affordable hamburgers mean affordable hamburgers. It's a catchword for "below-market rate" housing, usually mandated by zoning boards, but now I guess to be paid for by the government. But when you give away something for, by definition, less than the market rate, that means people line up for it. Like scarce rent-controlled apartments, is one more impediment to people moving for better opportunities.
Econ 101: What happens if you subsidize demand, but do not unleash supply?
Prices go up. Period. It ends up entirely in the pockets of current property owners. There is a good case this happened already. To earn a gazillion dollars in tech, you need to move to the Bay Area. There are only so many houses, so the great gains in productivity end up in the pockets of existing landowners.
Aha, you will answer, but they have a fix for that: rent control, now sweeping the nation. We know where that leads.
They also answer, as above, the Federal government will start building houses and apartments.
I guess millenials are too young, and nobody reads any history any more, but, we and especially Europe have tried this one over and over, to catastrophic failure. Go visit the sites of housing projects, now thankfully torn down, in Chicago. They look like Chernobyl. Go visit the cruddy outskirts of European cities, with government built cement apartment blocks. This is our vision for the "middle class?"
In sum, the candidates promise to repeat for housing the immense success of subsidies and supply management and provision that the the government has just accomplished for health care, insurance, and education.
It's usually a good idea to figure out what's broken before we start fixing things. That idea never seems to occur to anyone in politics when talking about economic policies. Where is the market failure in home and apartment building? Why is the private sector not building more housing? The answer is pretty obvious -- zoning, building codes, insane permitting processes and so forth.
So, the government restricts supply, and prices go up. Then it subsidizes demand, and prices go up some more. Then it puts in price controls. So the plan seems to be to bring the government's huge success with health care and health insurance to the housing market.
One tiny ray of light:
New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker would provide financial incentives to encourage local governments to get rid of zoning laws that limit the construction of affordable housing.
Warren would also give grants to first-time homebuyers who live in areas where black families were once excluded from getting home loans. "Everybody who lives or lived in a formerly red-lined district can get some housing assistance now to be able to buy a home," Warren told attendees at the She the People Presidential Forum in Houston this spring.
Calfornia's SB50 proposal to force local zoning to allow development near transit had a similar feature. Yes, we allow development everywhere -- except in poorer neighborhoods most in need of development, which are protected from the evils of new Starbucks and Whole Foods popping up.
These are tough times to be an economist. As a matter of technocratic policy, this is not hard stuff. Physicists don't have to write blog posts because the candidates want to enshrine the phlogistic theory of heat. Doctors don't have to rail about HHS policy on four humor management. Somehow we are left railing against fallacies understood since the 1700s.
It is, of course, no better on the right. The benefits of free trade and migration have also been known since the 1700s. It is just, sadly, that there is no debate on the right at the moment.
This is a real weakness of the American political equilibrium, that in a reelection year all the new ideas and analysis come out of the party in opposition. It would be a great time for the Republican Party to try to come to terms with what Trumpism means, how it relates to traditional conservatism, and to hash out ideas like this. Alas, that will not happen.
One is tempted to dismiss all this as rhetoric that will settle down in the general election. But I don't think one should take too much comfort. Trump ended up doing a lot of exactly what he said he would do. Politicians often do.
On this, I found fascinating a tidbit from Dan Henninger in WSJ, covering a poll of Democrats conducted by Fox News.
Fox asked these Democratic voters whether they wanted “steady, reliable leadership” or a “bold, new agenda.” Steady and reliable crushed bold and new by 72% to 25%.
Anyone consuming the media every day the past year would have concluded that the Democratic left’s “bold, new agenda” had taken over the Democratic Party lock, stock and barrel. Most of their presidential candidates obviously thought so.
How else to explain why Sens. Warren, Harris and Cory Booker instantly saluted Bernie Sanders’s socialized medicine or, even more incredibly, the antic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s multitrillion-dollar Green New Deal? Recall how Nancy Pelosi, whose 70-something sense of political smell is still more acute than her juniors’, called it “the green dream, or whatever.”
In fact, when Fox asked these Democrats what they most wanted from their candidate, 74% chose “unite Americans” against just 23% who want to “fight against extreme right-wing beliefs.” Looks like there’s a silent majority inside the Democratic Party, unmoved by the propaganda of social media.
These are the parts of the Fox poll, surfacing a nostalgia for steadiness and unity, that should upset the Trump campaign, not Mr. Biden’s 10-point lead 16 months before the election.
JC is right concerning his characterization of how bad are the Democrats' plans. The interesting question is why they are the plans. Are the Democrats that uninformed about economics, so they really do not understand the damage their plans will do? Are they exploiting the voters lack of understanding of the consequences? The Venezuelas of the world go down the drain precisely because of a combination of the two. The Democrat Presidential candidates are not the kind of people you want as a President.
-----------------------------------------------
NPR covered the Democratic candidates' plans to address housing issues:
[Julian] Castro would provide housing vouchers to all families who need help. Right now, only 1 in 4 families eligible for housing assistance gets it. He would also increase government spending on new affordable housing by tens of billions of dollars a year and provide a refundable tax credit to the millions of low- and moderate-income renters who have to spend more than 30% of their incomes on housing.
I'm actually surprised it's as much as a fourth. Most government programs outside medicare and social security attract tiny fractions of the eligible people. Watch out budget if people catch on.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren calls for a $500 billion federal investment over the next 10 years in new affordable housing....
[New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker] would also provide a renters' tax credit, legal assistance for tenants facing eviction and protect against housing discrimination...
Sen. Kamala Harris has also introduced a plan for a renters' tax credit of up to $6,000 for families making $100,000 or less.
New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has signed on to both the Harris and Warren plans, which have been introduced as legislation.
In sum, they're piling on to pay your rent or mortgage.
The economic foolishness of all this is painful. Housing is not a single good. It's location, location, location, and also size and condition. This isn't about homelessness. Everyone lives somewhere, so the point is to subsidize larger, better, or more conveniently placed housing. Or, to free up money for people to spend on other things.
Economics is about incentives. If the government pays for all your rent past 30% of your income, that's a big incentive to rent a huge apartment and not to earn any extra income. =
"Affordable housing," doesn't mean affordable housing, in the same way affordable hamburgers mean affordable hamburgers. It's a catchword for "below-market rate" housing, usually mandated by zoning boards, but now I guess to be paid for by the government. But when you give away something for, by definition, less than the market rate, that means people line up for it. Like scarce rent-controlled apartments, is one more impediment to people moving for better opportunities.
Econ 101: What happens if you subsidize demand, but do not unleash supply?
Aha, you will answer, but they have a fix for that: rent control, now sweeping the nation. We know where that leads.
They also answer, as above, the Federal government will start building houses and apartments.
I guess millenials are too young, and nobody reads any history any more, but, we and especially Europe have tried this one over and over, to catastrophic failure. Go visit the sites of housing projects, now thankfully torn down, in Chicago. They look like Chernobyl. Go visit the cruddy outskirts of European cities, with government built cement apartment blocks. This is our vision for the "middle class?"
In sum, the candidates promise to repeat for housing the immense success of subsidies and supply management and provision that the the government has just accomplished for health care, insurance, and education.
It's usually a good idea to figure out what's broken before we start fixing things. That idea never seems to occur to anyone in politics when talking about economic policies. Where is the market failure in home and apartment building? Why is the private sector not building more housing? The answer is pretty obvious -- zoning, building codes, insane permitting processes and so forth.
So, the government restricts supply, and prices go up. Then it subsidizes demand, and prices go up some more. Then it puts in price controls. So the plan seems to be to bring the government's huge success with health care and health insurance to the housing market.
One tiny ray of light:
New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker would provide financial incentives to encourage local governments to get rid of zoning laws that limit the construction of affordable housing.
Zoning laws largely keep poor people away from rich people and enforce a lot of racial segregation.
But again, "affordable housing" means "housing allocated by politics," and "housing you'd better not leave once you get it, and better not earn too much either." I wish the article just said "limit the construction of housing, which makes it unaffordable!"
The usual coexistence of subsidy and restriction plays out almost comically in the "gentrification" issue, politicians wanting to be all things to all people:
"It is not acceptable that, in communities throughout the country, wealthy developers are gentrifying neighborhoods and forcing working families out of the homes and apartments where they have lived their entire lives," [said] Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders,..
But again, "affordable housing" means "housing allocated by politics," and "housing you'd better not leave once you get it, and better not earn too much either." I wish the article just said "limit the construction of housing, which makes it unaffordable!"
The usual coexistence of subsidy and restriction plays out almost comically in the "gentrification" issue, politicians wanting to be all things to all people:
"It is not acceptable that, in communities throughout the country, wealthy developers are gentrifying neighborhoods and forcing working families out of the homes and apartments where they have lived their entire lives," [said] Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders,..
Warren would also give grants to first-time homebuyers who live in areas where black families were once excluded from getting home loans. "Everybody who lives or lived in a formerly red-lined district can get some housing assistance now to be able to buy a home," Warren told attendees at the She the People Presidential Forum in Houston this spring.
Technically, "Everybody" includes white millennials. I wonder how she will stop that.
Calfornia's SB50 proposal to force local zoning to allow development near transit had a similar feature. Yes, we allow development everywhere -- except in poorer neighborhoods most in need of development, which are protected from the evils of new Starbucks and Whole Foods popping up.
These are tough times to be an economist. As a matter of technocratic policy, this is not hard stuff. Physicists don't have to write blog posts because the candidates want to enshrine the phlogistic theory of heat. Doctors don't have to rail about HHS policy on four humor management. Somehow we are left railing against fallacies understood since the 1700s.
It is, of course, no better on the right. The benefits of free trade and migration have also been known since the 1700s. It is just, sadly, that there is no debate on the right at the moment.
This is a real weakness of the American political equilibrium, that in a reelection year all the new ideas and analysis come out of the party in opposition. It would be a great time for the Republican Party to try to come to terms with what Trumpism means, how it relates to traditional conservatism, and to hash out ideas like this. Alas, that will not happen.
One is tempted to dismiss all this as rhetoric that will settle down in the general election. But I don't think one should take too much comfort. Trump ended up doing a lot of exactly what he said he would do. Politicians often do.
On this, I found fascinating a tidbit from Dan Henninger in WSJ, covering a poll of Democrats conducted by Fox News.
Fox asked these Democratic voters whether they wanted “steady, reliable leadership” or a “bold, new agenda.” Steady and reliable crushed bold and new by 72% to 25%.
Anyone consuming the media every day the past year would have concluded that the Democratic left’s “bold, new agenda” had taken over the Democratic Party lock, stock and barrel. Most of their presidential candidates obviously thought so.
How else to explain why Sens. Warren, Harris and Cory Booker instantly saluted Bernie Sanders’s socialized medicine or, even more incredibly, the antic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s multitrillion-dollar Green New Deal? Recall how Nancy Pelosi, whose 70-something sense of political smell is still more acute than her juniors’, called it “the green dream, or whatever.”
In fact, when Fox asked these Democrats what they most wanted from their candidate, 74% chose “unite Americans” against just 23% who want to “fight against extreme right-wing beliefs.” Looks like there’s a silent majority inside the Democratic Party, unmoved by the propaganda of social media.
These are the parts of the Fox poll, surfacing a nostalgia for steadiness and unity, that should upset the Trump campaign, not Mr. Biden’s 10-point lead 16 months before the election.
Mr. Henninger did not add that Mr. Biden is the one who should be listening hardest. He is currently drifting fast to the left. The poll tells us that this time, my friends, the answer is not blowin' in the wind. I hope more people listen.
Friday, June 28, 2019
We do not live in a free society anymore
Here is a column by Tucker Carlson and NeilPatel.
They are on target.
When voters insist on telling others how to live, i.e., intolerance rules, then politicians oblige to gain and remain in power.
Bad Government is created initially by intolerant, uninformed voters. It is then a short path to Politicians taking control and creating tyranny.
----------------------------------------------------
How do you know if you're living in a free society? Here's a quick test: Are you allowed to say obviously true things in public? Or are you forced to lie? As George Orwell put it in "1984": "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows." But what if that freedom isn't granted? What if you're required to repeat things that you know aren't true? What if everyone who hears you knows perfectly well that you're lying, but they can't say so out loud? What if everyone is required to nod along in mock sincerity as if it's all completely real? That's what a pep rally in a police state looks like: "Thanks to the dear leader for a bountiful potato harvest!" they chant, even as they starve to death. You get the same feeling as you watch the current race for the Democratic nomination.
Pete Buttigieg is in that race. A few years ago, back when he was best known for being mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Buttigieg made the point that "all lives matter." He said it because it's true. All lives do matter, no matter what they look like. Every life has value -- period. That's the message of Christianity and the civilization that it spawned in the West. But in the modern Democratic Party, it can no longer be acknowledged. So Buttigieg recently apologized for his wrongthink.
Beto O'Rourke was asked recently about a harmless joke he once told about his wife staying home to raise their kids. O'Rourke fell apart completely. He groveled and whimpered and abased himself. He even expanded the self-criticism and apologized for how he was born.
This is what Maoist tribunals looked liked during the Cultural Revolution. By summer, you can imagine O'Rourke wearing a paper dunce cap with "white privilege" scrawled across it as a warning to other would-be counterrevolutionaries. Pretty much everyone running for president as a Democrat this year has had to face inquisitions like this. They write their confessions of guilt, bowing before their accusers on Twitter and begging for forgiveness. Kirsten Gillibrand read her confession on live television. Years ago, when she was running for a different office, Gillibrand once expressed sympathy for the idea of a closed border. Looking back, she is deeply ashamed. She can hardly believe she ever thought something so immoral.
There's nothing liberal about this, obviously. It's purely authoritarian: "woke" fascism. Power over ideas. In place of thinking, obedience. In return for dissent, punishment. Lying as official policy -- and not just conventional lying, the ordinary truth-shading of everyday life, but terrifying full-inversion lies. The exact opposite of the truth. The kind of lies that regimes that seek total control must tell in order to maintain their power.
The latest of these lies is that low-grade mafia figure Al Sharpton is, in fact, a legitimate civil rights leader. The Democratic candidates claim to believe that now. They recently trooped over to his tax-exempt organization to pretend he's the new MLK.
Where were these people in the mid-1990s when Al Sharpton was denouncing a Jewish landlord in Harlem as a "white interloper" shortly before his store was firebombed and eight people were killed? O'Rourke was still a manny then. Gillibrand was a lawyer working for the cigarette companies. None of them were woke yet. They are now. They went to Sharpton to clamor for an idea that not even 20% of the population supports: race-based reparations. Sharpton asked each candidate if they would pledge to support Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee's bill to form a commission to study how to do reparations. Every single candidate at the event expressed complete support.
The question isn't whether we get reparations. The question is whether you want to live in a country where such people have political power, where humor and dissent are criminal acts, where lying is the currency of public life, where authorities whose names you don't know can destroy you for thinking the wrong things. You've seen that world before. It's called Twitter. Imagine if it had control of the U.S. military.
They are on target.
When voters insist on telling others how to live, i.e., intolerance rules, then politicians oblige to gain and remain in power.
Bad Government is created initially by intolerant, uninformed voters. It is then a short path to Politicians taking control and creating tyranny.
----------------------------------------------------
How do you know if you're living in a free society? Here's a quick test: Are you allowed to say obviously true things in public? Or are you forced to lie? As George Orwell put it in "1984": "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows." But what if that freedom isn't granted? What if you're required to repeat things that you know aren't true? What if everyone who hears you knows perfectly well that you're lying, but they can't say so out loud? What if everyone is required to nod along in mock sincerity as if it's all completely real? That's what a pep rally in a police state looks like: "Thanks to the dear leader for a bountiful potato harvest!" they chant, even as they starve to death. You get the same feeling as you watch the current race for the Democratic nomination.
Pete Buttigieg is in that race. A few years ago, back when he was best known for being mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Buttigieg made the point that "all lives matter." He said it because it's true. All lives do matter, no matter what they look like. Every life has value -- period. That's the message of Christianity and the civilization that it spawned in the West. But in the modern Democratic Party, it can no longer be acknowledged. So Buttigieg recently apologized for his wrongthink.
Beto O'Rourke was asked recently about a harmless joke he once told about his wife staying home to raise their kids. O'Rourke fell apart completely. He groveled and whimpered and abased himself. He even expanded the self-criticism and apologized for how he was born.
This is what Maoist tribunals looked liked during the Cultural Revolution. By summer, you can imagine O'Rourke wearing a paper dunce cap with "white privilege" scrawled across it as a warning to other would-be counterrevolutionaries. Pretty much everyone running for president as a Democrat this year has had to face inquisitions like this. They write their confessions of guilt, bowing before their accusers on Twitter and begging for forgiveness. Kirsten Gillibrand read her confession on live television. Years ago, when she was running for a different office, Gillibrand once expressed sympathy for the idea of a closed border. Looking back, she is deeply ashamed. She can hardly believe she ever thought something so immoral.
There's nothing liberal about this, obviously. It's purely authoritarian: "woke" fascism. Power over ideas. In place of thinking, obedience. In return for dissent, punishment. Lying as official policy -- and not just conventional lying, the ordinary truth-shading of everyday life, but terrifying full-inversion lies. The exact opposite of the truth. The kind of lies that regimes that seek total control must tell in order to maintain their power.
The latest of these lies is that low-grade mafia figure Al Sharpton is, in fact, a legitimate civil rights leader. The Democratic candidates claim to believe that now. They recently trooped over to his tax-exempt organization to pretend he's the new MLK.
Where were these people in the mid-1990s when Al Sharpton was denouncing a Jewish landlord in Harlem as a "white interloper" shortly before his store was firebombed and eight people were killed? O'Rourke was still a manny then. Gillibrand was a lawyer working for the cigarette companies. None of them were woke yet. They are now. They went to Sharpton to clamor for an idea that not even 20% of the population supports: race-based reparations. Sharpton asked each candidate if they would pledge to support Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee's bill to form a commission to study how to do reparations. Every single candidate at the event expressed complete support.
The question isn't whether we get reparations. The question is whether you want to live in a country where such people have political power, where humor and dissent are criminal acts, where lying is the currency of public life, where authorities whose names you don't know can destroy you for thinking the wrong things. You've seen that world before. It's called Twitter. Imagine if it had control of the U.S. military.
Thursday, June 27, 2019
Along the road to tyranny
Tyranny is all about forcing people to live the way you want them to. The reduction of choice is one of the tools used to achieve it.
Bill DeBlasio doesn’t allow New York City citizens to buy large size bottles of soda. That’s tyranny because it eliminates choices that people want to make.
Elizabeth Warren wants to establish Medicare For All. That might not be tyranny if people could choose whether to use it or not. But she also wants to disallow other forms of health care choice, e.g., private health care insurance. That’s tyranny because it eliminates choices that people want to make.
The “Medicare For All and No Private Health Insurance” crowd wants tyranny. You can easily spot a lot of other people who advocate similar examples of tyranny. None of them are the kind of people you want in Government.
Bill DeBlasio doesn’t allow New York City citizens to buy large size bottles of soda. That’s tyranny because it eliminates choices that people want to make.
Elizabeth Warren wants to establish Medicare For All. That might not be tyranny if people could choose whether to use it or not. But she also wants to disallow other forms of health care choice, e.g., private health care insurance. That’s tyranny because it eliminates choices that people want to make.
The “Medicare For All and No Private Health Insurance” crowd wants tyranny. You can easily spot a lot of other people who advocate similar examples of tyranny. None of them are the kind of people you want in Government.
Thursday, June 20, 2019
US Holds All the Cards in Showdown With Iran
Victor Davis Hanson at Townhall.
VDH makes some good points.
---------------------------------------------
In May 2018, the Donald Trump administration withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran, popularly known as the Iran nuclear deal.
The United States then ramped up sanctions on the Iranian theocracy to try to ensure that it stopped nuclear enrichment. The Trump administration also hoped a strapped Iran would become less capable of funding terrorist operations in the Middle East and beyond, proxy wars in the Persian Gulf, and the opportune harassment of ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz.
The sanctions are clearly destroying an already weak Iranian economy. Iran is now suffering from negative economic growth, massive unemployment, and record inflation.
A desperate Iranian government is using surrogates to send missiles into Saudi Arabia while its forces attack ships in the Gulf of Oman.
The Iranian theocrats despise the Trump administration. They yearn for the good old days of the Obama administration when the United States agreed to a nuclear deal that all but guaranteed future Iranian nuclear proliferation, ignored Iranian terrorism, and sent hundreds of millions of dollars in shakedown payments to the Iranian regime.
Iran believed that the Obama administration saw it as a valuable Shiite counterweight to Israel and the traditionally American-allied Sunni monarchies in the Gulf region. Teheran assumes that an even more left-wing American administration would also endorse Iran-friendly policies, and so it is fishing for ways to see that happen in 2020 with a Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or Joe Biden presidency.
Desperate Iranian officials have already met secretly with former Secretary of State John Kerry and openly with Sen. Diane Feinstein, likely to commiserate over Trump's cancellation of the nuclear deal and to find ways to revive the Obama-era agreement after Trump leaves office.
To that end, the Iranians wish to disrupt world oil traffic while persuading China, Russia, and the European Union to pressure the United States to back off sanctions.
Iran hopes to provoke and embarrass its nemesis into overreacting — or not reacting at all. If Trump does nothing, he looks weak to this Jacksonian base of supporters. But do too much, and he appears a neoconservative, globalist nation-builder. Either way, the Iranians think Trump loses.
After all, Iran knows that Trump got elected by flipping the blue-wall states of the Midwest — in part by promising an end to optional interventions in the Middle East. Accordingly, Iran hopes to embarrass or bog down the U.S. before the 2020 elections. In Teheran's view, the challenge is to provoke Trump into a shooting war that it can survive and that will prove unpopular in the United States, thus losing him the election.
Iran, of course, is not always a rational actor. A haughty Tehran always magnifies its own importance and discounts the real dangers that it is courting. It harkens back to its role in the 2003-2011 Iraq War, a conflict which proved that U.S. efforts could be subverted, hundreds of American soldiers could be killed, public support for war could be eroded, and a more malleable American government could be transitioned in.
But what worked then may not work now. The United States is not only the world's largest producer of oil and natural gas, but also the soon-to-be largest exporter of energy — and without getting near the Iranian coast. Likewise, American allies in the Middle East such as Israel are energy independent. America's Arab friends enjoy seeing competing Iranian oil all but off the market.
Time, then, is on the Americans' side. But it is certainly not on the side of a bankrupt and impoverished Iran that either must escalate or face ruin.
VDH makes some good points.
---------------------------------------------
In May 2018, the Donald Trump administration withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran, popularly known as the Iran nuclear deal.
The United States then ramped up sanctions on the Iranian theocracy to try to ensure that it stopped nuclear enrichment. The Trump administration also hoped a strapped Iran would become less capable of funding terrorist operations in the Middle East and beyond, proxy wars in the Persian Gulf, and the opportune harassment of ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz.
The sanctions are clearly destroying an already weak Iranian economy. Iran is now suffering from negative economic growth, massive unemployment, and record inflation.
A desperate Iranian government is using surrogates to send missiles into Saudi Arabia while its forces attack ships in the Gulf of Oman.
The Iranian theocrats despise the Trump administration. They yearn for the good old days of the Obama administration when the United States agreed to a nuclear deal that all but guaranteed future Iranian nuclear proliferation, ignored Iranian terrorism, and sent hundreds of millions of dollars in shakedown payments to the Iranian regime.
Iran believed that the Obama administration saw it as a valuable Shiite counterweight to Israel and the traditionally American-allied Sunni monarchies in the Gulf region. Teheran assumes that an even more left-wing American administration would also endorse Iran-friendly policies, and so it is fishing for ways to see that happen in 2020 with a Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or Joe Biden presidency.
Desperate Iranian officials have already met secretly with former Secretary of State John Kerry and openly with Sen. Diane Feinstein, likely to commiserate over Trump's cancellation of the nuclear deal and to find ways to revive the Obama-era agreement after Trump leaves office.
To that end, the Iranians wish to disrupt world oil traffic while persuading China, Russia, and the European Union to pressure the United States to back off sanctions.
Iran hopes to provoke and embarrass its nemesis into overreacting — or not reacting at all. If Trump does nothing, he looks weak to this Jacksonian base of supporters. But do too much, and he appears a neoconservative, globalist nation-builder. Either way, the Iranians think Trump loses.
After all, Iran knows that Trump got elected by flipping the blue-wall states of the Midwest — in part by promising an end to optional interventions in the Middle East. Accordingly, Iran hopes to embarrass or bog down the U.S. before the 2020 elections. In Teheran's view, the challenge is to provoke Trump into a shooting war that it can survive and that will prove unpopular in the United States, thus losing him the election.
Iran, of course, is not always a rational actor. A haughty Tehran always magnifies its own importance and discounts the real dangers that it is courting. It harkens back to its role in the 2003-2011 Iraq War, a conflict which proved that U.S. efforts could be subverted, hundreds of American soldiers could be killed, public support for war could be eroded, and a more malleable American government could be transitioned in.
But what worked then may not work now. The United States is not only the world's largest producer of oil and natural gas, but also the soon-to-be largest exporter of energy — and without getting near the Iranian coast. Likewise, American allies in the Middle East such as Israel are energy independent. America's Arab friends enjoy seeing competing Iranian oil all but off the market.
Time, then, is on the Americans' side. But it is certainly not on the side of a bankrupt and impoverished Iran that either must escalate or face ruin.
Wednesday, June 19, 2019
Black Education Decline
Here is a column by Walter Williams, "Black Education Decline".
WW is on target.
Culture matters.
Do-Gooders often advocate "solutions" that make things worse.
-----------------------------------------
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio says that the city’s specialized high schools have a diversity problem. He’s joined by New York City Schools Chancellor Richard A. Carranza, educators, students and community leaders who want to fix the diversity problem. I bet you can easily guess what they will do to “improve” the racial mix of students (aka diversity). If you guessed they would propose eliminating the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test as the sole criterion for admissions, go to the head of the class. The Specialized High Schools Admissions Test is an examination that is administered to New York City’s eighth- and ninth-grade students. By state law, it is used to determine admission to all but one of the city’s nine specialized high schools.
It’s taken as axiomatic that the relatively few blacks admitted to these high-powered schools is somehow tied to racial discrimination. In a June 2, 2018 “Chalkbeat” article (https://tinyurl.com/y64delc3), de Blasio writes: “The problem is clear. Eight of our most renowned high schools — including Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School — rely on a single, high-stakes exam. The Specialized High School Admissions Test isn’t just flawed — it’s a roadblock to justice, progress and academic excellence.”
Let’s look at a bit of history to raise some questions about the mayor’s diversity hypothesis. Dr. Thomas Sowell provides some interesting statistics about Stuyvesant High School in his book “Wealth, Poverty and Politics.” He reports that, “In 1938, the proportion of blacks attending Stuyvesant High School, a specialized school, was almost as high as the proportion of blacks in the population of New York City.” Since then, it has spiraled downward. In 1979, blacks were 12.9% of students at Stuyvesant, falling to 4.8% in 1995. By 2012, The New York Times reported that blacks were 1.2% of the student body.
What explains the decline? None of the usual explanations for racial disparities make sense. In other words, would one want to argue that there was less racial discrimination in 1938? Or, argue that in 1938 the “legacy of slavery” had not taken effect whereby now it is in full bloom? Genetic or environmental arguments cannot explain why blacks of an earlier generation were able to meet the demanding mental test standards to get into an elite high school. Socioeconomic conditions for blacks have improved dramatically since 1938. The only other plausible reason for the decline in academic achievement is that there has been a change in black culture. It doesn’t take much to reach this conclusion. Simply look at school behavior today versus yesteryear.
An Education Week article reported that in the 2015-16 school year, “5.8% of the nation’s 3.8 million teachers were physically attacked by a student.” The Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics show that in the 2011-12 academic year, there were a record 209,800 primary- and secondary-school teachers who reported being physically attacked by a student. Nationally, an average of 1,175 teachers and staff were physically attacked, including being knocked out, each day of that school year.
In the city of Baltimore, each school day in 2010, an average of four teachers and staff were assaulted. A National Center for Education Statistics study found that 18% of the nation’s schools accounted for 75% of the reported incidents of violence, and 6.6% accounted for half of all reported incidents. These are schools with predominantly black student populations. It’s not only assaults on teachers but cursing and disorderly conduct that are the standard fare in so many predominantly black schools.
Here are questions that might be asked of de Blasio and others who want to “fix the diversity problem” at New York’s specialized schools: What has the triumph of egalitarian and diversity principles done for the rest of New York’s school system? Are their academic achievement scores better than students at New York’s specialized schools? The most important question for black parents: What has been allowed to happen to cripple black academic excellence?
WW is on target.
Culture matters.
Do-Gooders often advocate "solutions" that make things worse.
-----------------------------------------
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio says that the city’s specialized high schools have a diversity problem. He’s joined by New York City Schools Chancellor Richard A. Carranza, educators, students and community leaders who want to fix the diversity problem. I bet you can easily guess what they will do to “improve” the racial mix of students (aka diversity). If you guessed they would propose eliminating the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test as the sole criterion for admissions, go to the head of the class. The Specialized High Schools Admissions Test is an examination that is administered to New York City’s eighth- and ninth-grade students. By state law, it is used to determine admission to all but one of the city’s nine specialized high schools.
It’s taken as axiomatic that the relatively few blacks admitted to these high-powered schools is somehow tied to racial discrimination. In a June 2, 2018 “Chalkbeat” article (https://tinyurl.com/y64delc3), de Blasio writes: “The problem is clear. Eight of our most renowned high schools — including Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School — rely on a single, high-stakes exam. The Specialized High School Admissions Test isn’t just flawed — it’s a roadblock to justice, progress and academic excellence.”
Let’s look at a bit of history to raise some questions about the mayor’s diversity hypothesis. Dr. Thomas Sowell provides some interesting statistics about Stuyvesant High School in his book “Wealth, Poverty and Politics.” He reports that, “In 1938, the proportion of blacks attending Stuyvesant High School, a specialized school, was almost as high as the proportion of blacks in the population of New York City.” Since then, it has spiraled downward. In 1979, blacks were 12.9% of students at Stuyvesant, falling to 4.8% in 1995. By 2012, The New York Times reported that blacks were 1.2% of the student body.
What explains the decline? None of the usual explanations for racial disparities make sense. In other words, would one want to argue that there was less racial discrimination in 1938? Or, argue that in 1938 the “legacy of slavery” had not taken effect whereby now it is in full bloom? Genetic or environmental arguments cannot explain why blacks of an earlier generation were able to meet the demanding mental test standards to get into an elite high school. Socioeconomic conditions for blacks have improved dramatically since 1938. The only other plausible reason for the decline in academic achievement is that there has been a change in black culture. It doesn’t take much to reach this conclusion. Simply look at school behavior today versus yesteryear.
An Education Week article reported that in the 2015-16 school year, “5.8% of the nation’s 3.8 million teachers were physically attacked by a student.” The Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics show that in the 2011-12 academic year, there were a record 209,800 primary- and secondary-school teachers who reported being physically attacked by a student. Nationally, an average of 1,175 teachers and staff were physically attacked, including being knocked out, each day of that school year.
In the city of Baltimore, each school day in 2010, an average of four teachers and staff were assaulted. A National Center for Education Statistics study found that 18% of the nation’s schools accounted for 75% of the reported incidents of violence, and 6.6% accounted for half of all reported incidents. These are schools with predominantly black student populations. It’s not only assaults on teachers but cursing and disorderly conduct that are the standard fare in so many predominantly black schools.
Here are questions that might be asked of de Blasio and others who want to “fix the diversity problem” at New York’s specialized schools: What has the triumph of egalitarian and diversity principles done for the rest of New York’s school system? Are their academic achievement scores better than students at New York’s specialized schools? The most important question for black parents: What has been allowed to happen to cripple black academic excellence?
Tuesday, June 18, 2019
Socialism vs. Capitalism: Capitalism wins
Here is a link to an insightful article by Andrei Shleifer of the National Bureau of Economic Research titled "State Versus Private Ownership".
The Introduction follows.
---------------------------------------------------
What kinds of goods and services should be provided by government employees as opposed to private firms? Should government workers make steel and cars in government-owned factories? Should teachers and doctors be publicly employed or should they work for private schools and practices? Should garbage be picked up by civil servants or employees of private garbage haulers? Should the whole economy be "socialized"? Although these are age-old questions in economics, the answers economists give to them, as well as the reasons for arriving at these answers, have been changing. In this paper, I describe some recent ways of thinking about government ownership.
Half a century ago, economists were quick to favor government ownership of firms as soon as any market inequities or imperfections, such as monopoly power or externalities, were even suspected. Thus Arthur Lewis (1949, p. 101), concerned with monopoly power, advocated the nationalization of land, mineral deposits, telephone service, insurance, and the motor car industry. For similar reasons, James Meade (1948, p. 67) favored "socialization" of the iron and steel, as well as the chemical, industries. Maurice Allais (1947, p. 66), always a step ahead of his English-speaking peers, argued for nationalization of a few firms in each (!) industry to facilitate the comparison of public and private ownership. At that time, privatization of such services as incarceration and education was evidently not even discussed by serious scholars.
These comments by the future Nobel laureates were part of a broader debate over capitalism, socialism and the role of planning in a market economy, which raged in the 1930s and 1940s. The views of serious economists ranged from advocacy of socialism (Lange, 1936; Lerner, 1944), to fierce opposition to socialism (Hayek, 1944; Jewkes, 1948), to a reluctant concession that socialism is bad but inevitable because capitalism was running out of steam (Schumpeter, 1942). A remarkable aspect of this debate is that even many of the laissez-faire economists focused overwhelmingly on the goal of achieving competitive prices, even at the cost of accepting government ownership in non-competitive industries. Thus Henry Simons (1934, p. 51), in "A Positive Program for Laissez Faire," writes "The state should face the necessity of actually taking over, owning, and managing directly, both the railroads and the utilities, and all other industries in which it is impossible to maintain effectively competitive conditions." Simons's advice is partly a response to the failures of regulation during the Depression, but the acquiescence of this libertarian economist to public ownership is symptomatic of the professional sentiment of the times. Pigou (1938), Schumpeter (1942) and Robbins (1947) were not too opposed to state ownership either, although Pigou recognized most clearly the dangers of bureaucratic control. In the first edition of his Economics text, Samuleson (1948) was more skeptical of socialism, writing (p. 604): "It is only too easy to gloss over the tremendous dynamic vitality of our mixed free enterprise system, which, with all its faults, has given the world a century of progress such as an actual socialized order might find it impossible to equal." Even Samuelson, however, focuses exclusively on the allocative role of prices, and does not say anything about ownership.
The Introduction follows.
---------------------------------------------------
What kinds of goods and services should be provided by government employees as opposed to private firms? Should government workers make steel and cars in government-owned factories? Should teachers and doctors be publicly employed or should they work for private schools and practices? Should garbage be picked up by civil servants or employees of private garbage haulers? Should the whole economy be "socialized"? Although these are age-old questions in economics, the answers economists give to them, as well as the reasons for arriving at these answers, have been changing. In this paper, I describe some recent ways of thinking about government ownership.
Half a century ago, economists were quick to favor government ownership of firms as soon as any market inequities or imperfections, such as monopoly power or externalities, were even suspected. Thus Arthur Lewis (1949, p. 101), concerned with monopoly power, advocated the nationalization of land, mineral deposits, telephone service, insurance, and the motor car industry. For similar reasons, James Meade (1948, p. 67) favored "socialization" of the iron and steel, as well as the chemical, industries. Maurice Allais (1947, p. 66), always a step ahead of his English-speaking peers, argued for nationalization of a few firms in each (!) industry to facilitate the comparison of public and private ownership. At that time, privatization of such services as incarceration and education was evidently not even discussed by serious scholars.
These comments by the future Nobel laureates were part of a broader debate over capitalism, socialism and the role of planning in a market economy, which raged in the 1930s and 1940s. The views of serious economists ranged from advocacy of socialism (Lange, 1936; Lerner, 1944), to fierce opposition to socialism (Hayek, 1944; Jewkes, 1948), to a reluctant concession that socialism is bad but inevitable because capitalism was running out of steam (Schumpeter, 1942). A remarkable aspect of this debate is that even many of the laissez-faire economists focused overwhelmingly on the goal of achieving competitive prices, even at the cost of accepting government ownership in non-competitive industries. Thus Henry Simons (1934, p. 51), in "A Positive Program for Laissez Faire," writes "The state should face the necessity of actually taking over, owning, and managing directly, both the railroads and the utilities, and all other industries in which it is impossible to maintain effectively competitive conditions." Simons's advice is partly a response to the failures of regulation during the Depression, but the acquiescence of this libertarian economist to public ownership is symptomatic of the professional sentiment of the times. Pigou (1938), Schumpeter (1942) and Robbins (1947) were not too opposed to state ownership either, although Pigou recognized most clearly the dangers of bureaucratic control. In the first edition of his Economics text, Samuleson (1948) was more skeptical of socialism, writing (p. 604): "It is only too easy to gloss over the tremendous dynamic vitality of our mixed free enterprise system, which, with all its faults, has given the world a century of progress such as an actual socialized order might find it impossible to equal." Even Samuelson, however, focuses exclusively on the allocative role of prices, and does not say anything about ownership.
Consistent with the evident lack of aversion to state ownership, the postwar state assumed an enormous role in production throughout the world, owning everything from land and mines to industrial factories and communications to banks and insurance companies to hospitals and schools -- even in market economies! In some of these economies, such as Japan, the United States, and Germany, government ownership was restrained, while in others, such as Italy, In the prewar and predepression years, economists were a good deal more skeptical about state ownership. A truly brilliant statement of this skepticism, to which I return below, is by Alfred Marshall (1907).
France, and Austria, the state assumed control of significant parts of production. Most developing countries opted for state ownership of the so-called "strategic" sectors. In socialist economies, the state came to own not just the strategic sectors, but everything else as well.
How the world has changed! In the last 20 years, governments in market economies throughout the world have privatized the very state firms in steel, energy, telecommunications and financial services that the Nobel laureates approvingly saw nationalized a few decades earlier. Communism has collapsed almost everywhere in the world, and reform governments throughout the formerly socialist world have embarked on massive privatization programs. The economic policies of developing countries turned squarely to private ownership. In market economies, government provision of such basic services as garbage collection and education has come into question, and has increasingly been replaced with private provision, though still largely paid for from tax revenues.
Although some early voices, most notably that of Milton Friedman (1962), did rise to oppose state ownership, it is fair to say that post-war economists generally failed to anticipate its grotesque failure2. In recent years, however, the evidence on the failures of state ownership in economies around the world has begun to accumulate (World Bank, 1995), and advances in the theories of ownership and contracting have reopened the question of state versus private provision. The contracting perspective distinguishes sharply between the government paying for a particular service, such as education, and providing it inhouse. This perspective also permits to identify the opportunities for achieving social goals through private supply by a firm that may operate under a government contract or regulation. In a sense, the issues here are closely related to the vertical integration literature (Coase, 1937), except the question is that of the “make or buy” decision by the government rather than by a private firm.
When the opportunities for government contracting are exploited, the benefits of outright state ownership become elusive, even when social goals are taken into account. Moreover, it becomes clear that private ownership is the crucial source of incentives to innovate and become efficient, which accounts for what Samuelson (1948) called the "tremendous vitality" of the free enterprise system. The contractual perspective can serve as the basis of a theory of optimal provision when the government maximizes social welfare. It also allows us to think about an imperfect government, which maximizes political goals such as patronage or simply the income of politicians through bribes. Generally speaking, the case against state ownership becomes stronger when political considerations enter the calculation.
This paper begins by evaluating the case for in-house provision of goods and services by employees of a benevolent government. It argues that the conditions under which government ownership is superior in a country with good contract enforcement are very limited, and involve particular cases where soft incentives are extremely valuable and competition is very limited. I then turn to the more realistic case of a non-benevolent government, which helps to explain why the gains from privatization in many instances have been so enormous. Elementary and secondary education offer a particularly vivid example where I believe the case for near-monopoly government provision in an advanced democracy is indefensible.
The bottom line of this paper is simple. The 1940s case that government production is broadly desirable is no longer convincing. This case was motivated in part by such empirical observations as some successes of government control during the war, the failures of competition and regulation during the Great Depression, and the apparent success of Soviet industrialization, but also by a misunderstanding of the consequences of political control of firms, and by a substantial disregard of the importance of innovation in market economies. Today, the war and the Depression are no longer as vivid, and the communist economies have collapsed. As importantly, the quality of contracting and regulation have improved, competition has become more effective, the dangers of politicization of production have become self-evident, and the appreciation of the innovative potential of entrepreneurial firms is at a new high. For all these reasons, the benefits of reducing the role of government as a producer are becoming apparent and beginning to be exploited.
France, and Austria, the state assumed control of significant parts of production. Most developing countries opted for state ownership of the so-called "strategic" sectors. In socialist economies, the state came to own not just the strategic sectors, but everything else as well.
How the world has changed! In the last 20 years, governments in market economies throughout the world have privatized the very state firms in steel, energy, telecommunications and financial services that the Nobel laureates approvingly saw nationalized a few decades earlier. Communism has collapsed almost everywhere in the world, and reform governments throughout the formerly socialist world have embarked on massive privatization programs. The economic policies of developing countries turned squarely to private ownership. In market economies, government provision of such basic services as garbage collection and education has come into question, and has increasingly been replaced with private provision, though still largely paid for from tax revenues.
Although some early voices, most notably that of Milton Friedman (1962), did rise to oppose state ownership, it is fair to say that post-war economists generally failed to anticipate its grotesque failure2. In recent years, however, the evidence on the failures of state ownership in economies around the world has begun to accumulate (World Bank, 1995), and advances in the theories of ownership and contracting have reopened the question of state versus private provision. The contracting perspective distinguishes sharply between the government paying for a particular service, such as education, and providing it inhouse. This perspective also permits to identify the opportunities for achieving social goals through private supply by a firm that may operate under a government contract or regulation. In a sense, the issues here are closely related to the vertical integration literature (Coase, 1937), except the question is that of the “make or buy” decision by the government rather than by a private firm.
When the opportunities for government contracting are exploited, the benefits of outright state ownership become elusive, even when social goals are taken into account. Moreover, it becomes clear that private ownership is the crucial source of incentives to innovate and become efficient, which accounts for what Samuelson (1948) called the "tremendous vitality" of the free enterprise system. The contractual perspective can serve as the basis of a theory of optimal provision when the government maximizes social welfare. It also allows us to think about an imperfect government, which maximizes political goals such as patronage or simply the income of politicians through bribes. Generally speaking, the case against state ownership becomes stronger when political considerations enter the calculation.
This paper begins by evaluating the case for in-house provision of goods and services by employees of a benevolent government. It argues that the conditions under which government ownership is superior in a country with good contract enforcement are very limited, and involve particular cases where soft incentives are extremely valuable and competition is very limited. I then turn to the more realistic case of a non-benevolent government, which helps to explain why the gains from privatization in many instances have been so enormous. Elementary and secondary education offer a particularly vivid example where I believe the case for near-monopoly government provision in an advanced democracy is indefensible.
The bottom line of this paper is simple. The 1940s case that government production is broadly desirable is no longer convincing. This case was motivated in part by such empirical observations as some successes of government control during the war, the failures of competition and regulation during the Great Depression, and the apparent success of Soviet industrialization, but also by a misunderstanding of the consequences of political control of firms, and by a substantial disregard of the importance of innovation in market economies. Today, the war and the Depression are no longer as vivid, and the communist economies have collapsed. As importantly, the quality of contracting and regulation have improved, competition has become more effective, the dangers of politicization of production have become self-evident, and the appreciation of the innovative potential of entrepreneurial firms is at a new high. For all these reasons, the benefits of reducing the role of government as a producer are becoming apparent and beginning to be exploited.
Monday, June 17, 2019
Some Liberals get justice
Here is a column by Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic.
--------------------------------------------
On November 9, 2016, three black students at Oberlin College made a late-afternoon trip to Gibson’s Bakery, a small, family-owned business near campus that has been serving the community at its present location since 1905. Like countless undergraduates of all races, classes, genders, and generations, they hoped to leave with alcohol but weren’t yet of age to purchase it legally.
A fake ID was produced and rejected.
In the moments that followed, Allyn Gibson, the owner’s son, would try to keep the fake ID, pursue the male student who had used it as he fled to the back of the store, chase him into the street yelling “Shoplifter!,” and detain him, even as the other students, who were women, attempted to intervene on behalf of their friend. Soon, Oberlin police arrived and arrested the three undergraduates. A police report accused them of trying to shoplift two bottles of wine. Many classmates jumped to the conclusion that they’d been mistreated and launched protests almost immediately.
“Chants of ‘No justice, no peace’ reverberated across campus from early morning into late last night as hundreds of protesters lined West College Street, calling for a boycott of Gibson’s Bakery,” the student newspaper reported. “According to a flyer distributed by protesters, this incident was far from Gibson’s first instance of alleged racial bias.”
The same article quoted a black employee of the store who dismissed racism as a motive. “If you’re caught shoplifting, you’re going to end up getting arrested,” he said. “When you steal from the store, it doesn’t matter what color you are. You can be purple, blue, green; if you steal, you get caught, you get arrested.”
It is easy to understand why some college students would reflexively side with their peers, especially early on, as conflicting eyewitness accounts spread by hearsay across the small campus. The student government passed a resolution calling for the university to “cease all support, financial and otherwise,” of the bakery, which had a long-standing contract with Oberlin’s food-services vendor.
Later, when the male student was charged with felony robbery rather than shoplifting, even as his fake ID suggested at the very least that his initial intent had been to make a purchase, many at Oberlin perceived a miscarriage of justice and wondered whether race had played a role in the charging decision. That, too, is easy to understand.
If this was merely a matter of hasty student protests going too far before all the facts emerged, the eight-figure lawsuit would not have been warranted.
But the jury heard a story in which adults at Oberlin chose to fuel the mob’s excesses while pandering to its false narrative.
Daniel McGraw, who covered the trial for Legal Insurrection, reported on an email that Emily Crawford, who worked in the school’s communications department, sent to her bosses, who forwarded it to other administrators. “I have talked to 15 townie friends who are poc (persons of color) and they are disgusted and embarrassed by the protest,” she warned. “In their view, the kid was breaking the law, period … To them this is not a race issue at all and they do not believe the Gibsons are racist. They believe the students have picked the wrong target … I find this misdirected rage very disturbing, and it’s only going to widen the gap (between) town and gown.”
He also reported on the response from Tita Reed, the special assistant to the president for community and government relations, who reacted to the news of local sentiment, “Doesn’t change a damn thing for me.”
The Gibson family’s lawsuit, set forth in a 33-page complaint, would give locals a lot more reason for anger at Oberlin and Meredith Raimondo, the special assistant to the president for equity, diversity, and inclusion. Among its allegations were the following:
The lawsuit goes on to allege that when David Gibson sat down with administrators to tell them about the devastating effect that defamation, boycotts, demonstrations, and refusal to do business with Gibson’s were having on his family’s store, Oberlin administrators sought to negotiate special treatment for shoplifting students in exchange for resuming relations with the bakery.
The complaint described the meeting as follows:
Gibson requested that Oberlin College immediately retract the defamatory statements and reinstate its contracts … Defendants represented that they would consider reinstating business … but only if Gibson’s Bakery would agree that “Gibson’s would not push criminal charges against first-time shoplifters” … Gibson’s Bakery already loses thousands of dollars a year due to stolen merchandise, and such losses would certainly multiply if students learned they could steal without repercussion.
Time would only further undermine the proposition that the Oberlin students were innocents victimized by a racist local business. While pleading guilty to misdemeanor theft charges in August 2017, each of the students would declare in an official statement, “I believe the employees of Gibson’s actions were not racially motivated. They were merely trying to prevent an underage sale.”
And yet, the Gibsons’ lawsuit alleged, Oberlin students giving campus tours on behalf of the college advised prospective and future students and their families not to shop at Gibson’s Bakery because it was “racist” and “assaults students.” Various hits to the business ultimately caused it to lay off multiple employees, adding to the social injustice done by the misguided student activists and the Oberlin faculty and administrators who abetted their harmful efforts.
That is not to say that everyone at Oberlin was of like mind.
Almost a year after the incident, Roger Copeland, a professor emeritus of theater and dance, wrote a letter to the student newspaper lamenting, “It is now abundantly clear that the College’s boycott of Gibson’s was disingenuous and utterly unwarranted.” He criticized then–Oberlin President Marvin Krislov and Raimondo for a “rush to judgment” and actions that amounted “to a staggering, potentially bankrupting loss” to a small family business, and concluded with this biting critique:
The facts of this case are no longer in question. And yet, a counter-narrative has taken hold, one that refuses to allow mere “facts” to get in the way. It’s embarrassing when one has to ask Oberlin students the same question one asks climate-change deniers: At what point do you accept the empirical evidence, even if that means having to embrace an “inconvenient” truth? Alas, even those who concede that the defendants violated the law, continue—stubbornly—to insist that there is “plenty of blame to go around” and that “both sides” are at fault. Really? Isn’t that what Donald Trump said about Charlottesville?
The time has come for the Dean of Students, on behalf of the College, to apologize to the Gibson family for damaging not only their livelihood but something more precious and difficult to restore—their reputation and good standing in the community.
At trial, Raimondo was revealed to have sent a text reacting to Copeland’s letter that said, “Fuck him. I’d say unleash the students if I wasn’t convinced this needs to be put behind us.” To me, the metaphor suggests administrators who calculatingly wield some control over whether students activists are aggressive or restrained.
Another striking moment at trial came when Eddie Holoway, a black man who put himself through technical college decades ago while working at Gibson’s Bakery, spoke about what he regarded as a false narrative spread about his former employer. “He was accused of being something that I know he’s not, and that’s a racist,” Holoway testified. “In my life, I have been a marginalized person, so I know what it feels like to be called something that you know you’re not. I could feel his pain. I knew where he was coming from.”
Ultimately, jurors awarded the family $11 million in compensatory damages, and—on Thursday—an additional $33 million in punitive damages. It is likely the judge will reduce that latter figure to $22 million due to an Ohio cap on such awards.
After the eight-figure victory, David Gibson told a Legal Insurrection reporter, “I just want to let people know across the country that this can happen to anyone else, but we stayed and worked together as a family and fought against this. In many ways, what we wanted from Oberlin College the jury gave to us. They said we were not racists and that the college should have said so when all this started.”
An official statement released by the college expressed sharp disagreement with the outcome, asserting that neither Oberlin nor its administrators had defamed the bakery or its owners. “Rather, the College and Dr. Raimondo worked to ensure that students’ freedom of speech was protected and that the student demonstrations were safe and lawful, and they attempted to help the plaintiffs repair any harm caused by the student protests,” the statement reads. “Colleges cannot be held liable for the independent actions of their students. Institutions of higher education are obligated to protect freedom of speech on their campuses and respect their students’ decision to peacefully exercise their First Amendment rights.”
If colleges were held responsible for the independent speech and actions of student protesters, that would indeed have a chilling effect on free speech. This lawsuit may even inspire future litigation against colleges that chills protected speech, as plaintiffs seeking a similar payday attempt to target administrators for what students do on their own. But jurors in this case did not find Oberlin liable for the independent actions of students. And I think administrators displayed the most egregious behavior in this case, given that they ought to possess more wisdom than the most zealous undergraduates.
--------------------------------------------
On November 9, 2016, three black students at Oberlin College made a late-afternoon trip to Gibson’s Bakery, a small, family-owned business near campus that has been serving the community at its present location since 1905. Like countless undergraduates of all races, classes, genders, and generations, they hoped to leave with alcohol but weren’t yet of age to purchase it legally.
A fake ID was produced and rejected.
In the moments that followed, Allyn Gibson, the owner’s son, would try to keep the fake ID, pursue the male student who had used it as he fled to the back of the store, chase him into the street yelling “Shoplifter!,” and detain him, even as the other students, who were women, attempted to intervene on behalf of their friend. Soon, Oberlin police arrived and arrested the three undergraduates. A police report accused them of trying to shoplift two bottles of wine. Many classmates jumped to the conclusion that they’d been mistreated and launched protests almost immediately.
“Chants of ‘No justice, no peace’ reverberated across campus from early morning into late last night as hundreds of protesters lined West College Street, calling for a boycott of Gibson’s Bakery,” the student newspaper reported. “According to a flyer distributed by protesters, this incident was far from Gibson’s first instance of alleged racial bias.”
The same article quoted a black employee of the store who dismissed racism as a motive. “If you’re caught shoplifting, you’re going to end up getting arrested,” he said. “When you steal from the store, it doesn’t matter what color you are. You can be purple, blue, green; if you steal, you get caught, you get arrested.”
It is easy to understand why some college students would reflexively side with their peers, especially early on, as conflicting eyewitness accounts spread by hearsay across the small campus. The student government passed a resolution calling for the university to “cease all support, financial and otherwise,” of the bakery, which had a long-standing contract with Oberlin’s food-services vendor.
Later, when the male student was charged with felony robbery rather than shoplifting, even as his fake ID suggested at the very least that his initial intent had been to make a purchase, many at Oberlin perceived a miscarriage of justice and wondered whether race had played a role in the charging decision. That, too, is easy to understand.
If this was merely a matter of hasty student protests going too far before all the facts emerged, the eight-figure lawsuit would not have been warranted.
But the jury heard a story in which adults at Oberlin chose to fuel the mob’s excesses while pandering to its false narrative.
That the narrative was suspect should have been obvious almost immediately. Administrators were present at early legal hearings where the male student offered to plead guilty to misdemeanor theft, a plea deal that David Gibson, the bakery’s owner, explicitly approved. (A judge rejected the deal, citing student protests at Oberlin and the bad precedent that could result from the perception of reducing the charges under pressure. One of the student defendants would later remark that he appreciated the support of his classmates even though it probably hurt his case.)
Daniel McGraw, who covered the trial for Legal Insurrection, reported on an email that Emily Crawford, who worked in the school’s communications department, sent to her bosses, who forwarded it to other administrators. “I have talked to 15 townie friends who are poc (persons of color) and they are disgusted and embarrassed by the protest,” she warned. “In their view, the kid was breaking the law, period … To them this is not a race issue at all and they do not believe the Gibsons are racist. They believe the students have picked the wrong target … I find this misdirected rage very disturbing, and it’s only going to widen the gap (between) town and gown.”
He also reported on the response from Tita Reed, the special assistant to the president for community and government relations, who reacted to the news of local sentiment, “Doesn’t change a damn thing for me.”
The Gibson family’s lawsuit, set forth in a 33-page complaint, would give locals a lot more reason for anger at Oberlin and Meredith Raimondo, the special assistant to the president for equity, diversity, and inclusion. Among its allegations were the following:
- Oberlin employees were among those who distributed a boycott flyer, and they allowed it to be copied for free on school machines. It declared without evidence that the bakery was a “racist establishment with a long account of racial profiling and discrimination” and called its behavior toward the three students who broke the law there “heinous.”
- Reed, Raimondo, and some Oberlin professors “raised their fists in support of the demonstration,” with some of them “shouting the defamatory statements on a bullhorn, thereby assuring that a large audience would hear their defamatory statements.”
- Credit was given to students who attended the protest in lieu of classes, and administrators bought them food to support them.
The lawsuit goes on to allege that when David Gibson sat down with administrators to tell them about the devastating effect that defamation, boycotts, demonstrations, and refusal to do business with Gibson’s were having on his family’s store, Oberlin administrators sought to negotiate special treatment for shoplifting students in exchange for resuming relations with the bakery.
The complaint described the meeting as follows:
Gibson requested that Oberlin College immediately retract the defamatory statements and reinstate its contracts … Defendants represented that they would consider reinstating business … but only if Gibson’s Bakery would agree that “Gibson’s would not push criminal charges against first-time shoplifters” … Gibson’s Bakery already loses thousands of dollars a year due to stolen merchandise, and such losses would certainly multiply if students learned they could steal without repercussion.
Time would only further undermine the proposition that the Oberlin students were innocents victimized by a racist local business. While pleading guilty to misdemeanor theft charges in August 2017, each of the students would declare in an official statement, “I believe the employees of Gibson’s actions were not racially motivated. They were merely trying to prevent an underage sale.”
And yet, the Gibsons’ lawsuit alleged, Oberlin students giving campus tours on behalf of the college advised prospective and future students and their families not to shop at Gibson’s Bakery because it was “racist” and “assaults students.” Various hits to the business ultimately caused it to lay off multiple employees, adding to the social injustice done by the misguided student activists and the Oberlin faculty and administrators who abetted their harmful efforts.
That is not to say that everyone at Oberlin was of like mind.
Almost a year after the incident, Roger Copeland, a professor emeritus of theater and dance, wrote a letter to the student newspaper lamenting, “It is now abundantly clear that the College’s boycott of Gibson’s was disingenuous and utterly unwarranted.” He criticized then–Oberlin President Marvin Krislov and Raimondo for a “rush to judgment” and actions that amounted “to a staggering, potentially bankrupting loss” to a small family business, and concluded with this biting critique:
The facts of this case are no longer in question. And yet, a counter-narrative has taken hold, one that refuses to allow mere “facts” to get in the way. It’s embarrassing when one has to ask Oberlin students the same question one asks climate-change deniers: At what point do you accept the empirical evidence, even if that means having to embrace an “inconvenient” truth? Alas, even those who concede that the defendants violated the law, continue—stubbornly—to insist that there is “plenty of blame to go around” and that “both sides” are at fault. Really? Isn’t that what Donald Trump said about Charlottesville?
The time has come for the Dean of Students, on behalf of the College, to apologize to the Gibson family for damaging not only their livelihood but something more precious and difficult to restore—their reputation and good standing in the community.
At trial, Raimondo was revealed to have sent a text reacting to Copeland’s letter that said, “Fuck him. I’d say unleash the students if I wasn’t convinced this needs to be put behind us.” To me, the metaphor suggests administrators who calculatingly wield some control over whether students activists are aggressive or restrained.
Another striking moment at trial came when Eddie Holoway, a black man who put himself through technical college decades ago while working at Gibson’s Bakery, spoke about what he regarded as a false narrative spread about his former employer. “He was accused of being something that I know he’s not, and that’s a racist,” Holoway testified. “In my life, I have been a marginalized person, so I know what it feels like to be called something that you know you’re not. I could feel his pain. I knew where he was coming from.”
Ultimately, jurors awarded the family $11 million in compensatory damages, and—on Thursday—an additional $33 million in punitive damages. It is likely the judge will reduce that latter figure to $22 million due to an Ohio cap on such awards.
After the eight-figure victory, David Gibson told a Legal Insurrection reporter, “I just want to let people know across the country that this can happen to anyone else, but we stayed and worked together as a family and fought against this. In many ways, what we wanted from Oberlin College the jury gave to us. They said we were not racists and that the college should have said so when all this started.”
An official statement released by the college expressed sharp disagreement with the outcome, asserting that neither Oberlin nor its administrators had defamed the bakery or its owners. “Rather, the College and Dr. Raimondo worked to ensure that students’ freedom of speech was protected and that the student demonstrations were safe and lawful, and they attempted to help the plaintiffs repair any harm caused by the student protests,” the statement reads. “Colleges cannot be held liable for the independent actions of their students. Institutions of higher education are obligated to protect freedom of speech on their campuses and respect their students’ decision to peacefully exercise their First Amendment rights.”
If colleges were held responsible for the independent speech and actions of student protesters, that would indeed have a chilling effect on free speech. This lawsuit may even inspire future litigation against colleges that chills protected speech, as plaintiffs seeking a similar payday attempt to target administrators for what students do on their own. But jurors in this case did not find Oberlin liable for the independent actions of students. And I think administrators displayed the most egregious behavior in this case, given that they ought to possess more wisdom than the most zealous undergraduates.
Unintended Consequences
Here is a column by Rob Norton.
The problem with Alarmists and Do-Gooders is that they seldom address the tradeoffs implicit in their recommendations. And for sure, they tend to be oblivious to unintended consequences. Both failures tend to result in their actions making things worse off, not better off.
-------------------------------------------
The law of unintended consequences, often cited but rarely defined, is that actions of people—and especially of government—always have effects that are unanticipated or unintended. Economists and other social scientists have heeded its power for centuries; for just as long, politicians and popular opinion have largely ignored it.
The concept of unintended consequences is one of the building blocks of economics. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” the most famous metaphor in social science, is an example of a positive unintended consequence. Smith maintained that each individual, seeking only his own gain, “is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention,” that end being the public interest. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, or the baker, that we expect our dinner,” Smith wrote, “but from regard to their own self interest.”
Most often, however, the law of unintended consequences illuminates the perverse unanticipated effects of legislation and regulation. In 1692 the English philosopher John Locke, a forerunner of modern economists, urged the defeat of a parliamentary bill designed to cut the maximum permissible rate of interest from 6 percent to 4 percent. Locke argued that instead of benefiting borrowers, as intended, it would hurt them. People would find ways to circumvent the law, with the costs of circumvention borne by borrowers. To the extent the law was obeyed, Locke concluded, the chief results would be less available credit and a redistribution of income away from “widows, orphans and all those who have their estates in money.”
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the famous French economic journalist Frédéric Bastiat often distinguished in his writing between the “seen” and the “unseen.” The seen were the obvious visible consequences of an action or policy. The unseen were the less obvious, and often unintended, consequences. In his famous essay “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen,”
Bastiat wrote:
There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.1
Bastiat applied his analysis to a wide range of issues, including trade barriers, taxes, and government spending.
The first and most complete analysis of the concept of unintended consequences was done in 1936 by the American sociologist Robert K. Merton. In an influential article titled “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action,” Merton identified five sources of unanticipated consequences. The first two—and the most pervasive—were “ignorance” and “error.”
Merton labeled the third source the “imperious immediacy of interest.” By that he was referring to instances in which someone wants the intended consequence of an action so much that he purposefully chooses to ignore any unintended effects. (That type of willful ignorance is very different from true ignorance.) The Food and Drug Administration, for example, creates enormously destructive unintended consequences with its regulation of pharmaceutical drugs. By requiring that drugs be not only safe but efficacious for a particular use, as it has done since 1962, the FDA has slowed down by years the introduction of each drug. An unintended consequence is that many people die or suffer who would have been able to live or thrive. This consequence, however, has been so well documented that the regulators and legislators now foresee it but accept it.
“Basic values” was Merton’s fourth source of unintended consequences. The Protestant ethic of hard work and asceticism, he wrote, “paradoxically leads to its own decline through the accumulation of wealth and possessions.” His final case was the “self-defeating prediction.” Here he was referring to the instances when the public prediction of a social development proves false precisely because the prediction changes the course of history.
For example, the warnings earlier in this century that population growth would lead to mass starvation helped spur scientific breakthroughs in agricultural productivity that have since made it unlikely that the gloomy prophecy will come true. Merton later developed the flip side of this idea, coining the phrase “the self-fulfilling prophecy.” In a footnote to the 1936 article, he vowed to write a book devoted to the history and analysis of unanticipated consequences. Although Merton worked on the book over the next sixty years, it remained uncompleted when he died in 2003 at age ninety-two.
The law of unintended consequences provides the basis for many criticisms of government programs. As the critics see it, unintended consequences can add so much to the costs of some programs that they make the programs unwise even if they achieve their stated goals. For instance, the U.S. government has imposed quotas on imports of steel in order to protect steel companies and steelworkers from lower-priced competition. The quotas do help steel companies. But they also make less of the cheap steel available to U.S. automakers. As a result, the automakers have to pay more for steel than their foreign competitors do. So a policy that protects one industry from foreign competition makes it harder for another industry to compete with imports.
Similarly, Social Security has helped alleviate poverty among senior citizens. Many economists argue, however, that it has carried a cost that goes beyond the payroll taxes levied on workers and employers. Martin Feldstein and others maintain that today’s workers save less for their old age because they know they will receive Social Security checks when they retire. If Feldstein and the others are correct, it means that less savings are available, less investment takes place, and the economy and wages grow more slowly than they would without Social Security.
The law of unintended consequences is at work always and everywhere. People outraged about high prices of plywood in areas devastated by hurricanes, for example, may advocate price controls to keep the prices closer to usual levels. An unintended consequence is that suppliers of plywood from outside the region, who would have been willing to supply plywood quickly at the higher market price, are less willing to do so at the government-controlled price. Thus results a shortage of a good where it is badly needed. Government licensing of electricians, to take another example, keeps the supply of electricians below what it would otherwise be, and thus keeps the price of electricians’ services higher than otherwise. One unintended consequence is that people sometimes do their own electrical work, and, occasionally, one of these amateurs is electrocuted.
One final sobering example is the case of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. Afterward, many coastal states enacted laws placing unlimited liability on tanker operators. As a result, the Royal Dutch/Shell group, one of the world’s biggest oil companies, began hiring independent ships to deliver oil to the United States instead of using its own forty-six-tanker fleet.
Oil specialists fretted that other reputable shippers would flee as well rather than face such unquantifiable risk, leaving the field to fly-by-night tanker operators with leaky ships and iffy insurance. Thus, the probability of spills probably increased and the likelihood of collecting damages probably decreased as a consequence of the new laws.
The problem with Alarmists and Do-Gooders is that they seldom address the tradeoffs implicit in their recommendations. And for sure, they tend to be oblivious to unintended consequences. Both failures tend to result in their actions making things worse off, not better off.
-------------------------------------------
The law of unintended consequences, often cited but rarely defined, is that actions of people—and especially of government—always have effects that are unanticipated or unintended. Economists and other social scientists have heeded its power for centuries; for just as long, politicians and popular opinion have largely ignored it.
The concept of unintended consequences is one of the building blocks of economics. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” the most famous metaphor in social science, is an example of a positive unintended consequence. Smith maintained that each individual, seeking only his own gain, “is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention,” that end being the public interest. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, or the baker, that we expect our dinner,” Smith wrote, “but from regard to their own self interest.”
Most often, however, the law of unintended consequences illuminates the perverse unanticipated effects of legislation and regulation. In 1692 the English philosopher John Locke, a forerunner of modern economists, urged the defeat of a parliamentary bill designed to cut the maximum permissible rate of interest from 6 percent to 4 percent. Locke argued that instead of benefiting borrowers, as intended, it would hurt them. People would find ways to circumvent the law, with the costs of circumvention borne by borrowers. To the extent the law was obeyed, Locke concluded, the chief results would be less available credit and a redistribution of income away from “widows, orphans and all those who have their estates in money.”
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the famous French economic journalist Frédéric Bastiat often distinguished in his writing between the “seen” and the “unseen.” The seen were the obvious visible consequences of an action or policy. The unseen were the less obvious, and often unintended, consequences. In his famous essay “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen,”
Bastiat wrote:
There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.1
Bastiat applied his analysis to a wide range of issues, including trade barriers, taxes, and government spending.
The first and most complete analysis of the concept of unintended consequences was done in 1936 by the American sociologist Robert K. Merton. In an influential article titled “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action,” Merton identified five sources of unanticipated consequences. The first two—and the most pervasive—were “ignorance” and “error.”
Merton labeled the third source the “imperious immediacy of interest.” By that he was referring to instances in which someone wants the intended consequence of an action so much that he purposefully chooses to ignore any unintended effects. (That type of willful ignorance is very different from true ignorance.) The Food and Drug Administration, for example, creates enormously destructive unintended consequences with its regulation of pharmaceutical drugs. By requiring that drugs be not only safe but efficacious for a particular use, as it has done since 1962, the FDA has slowed down by years the introduction of each drug. An unintended consequence is that many people die or suffer who would have been able to live or thrive. This consequence, however, has been so well documented that the regulators and legislators now foresee it but accept it.
“Basic values” was Merton’s fourth source of unintended consequences. The Protestant ethic of hard work and asceticism, he wrote, “paradoxically leads to its own decline through the accumulation of wealth and possessions.” His final case was the “self-defeating prediction.” Here he was referring to the instances when the public prediction of a social development proves false precisely because the prediction changes the course of history.
For example, the warnings earlier in this century that population growth would lead to mass starvation helped spur scientific breakthroughs in agricultural productivity that have since made it unlikely that the gloomy prophecy will come true. Merton later developed the flip side of this idea, coining the phrase “the self-fulfilling prophecy.” In a footnote to the 1936 article, he vowed to write a book devoted to the history and analysis of unanticipated consequences. Although Merton worked on the book over the next sixty years, it remained uncompleted when he died in 2003 at age ninety-two.
The law of unintended consequences provides the basis for many criticisms of government programs. As the critics see it, unintended consequences can add so much to the costs of some programs that they make the programs unwise even if they achieve their stated goals. For instance, the U.S. government has imposed quotas on imports of steel in order to protect steel companies and steelworkers from lower-priced competition. The quotas do help steel companies. But they also make less of the cheap steel available to U.S. automakers. As a result, the automakers have to pay more for steel than their foreign competitors do. So a policy that protects one industry from foreign competition makes it harder for another industry to compete with imports.
Similarly, Social Security has helped alleviate poverty among senior citizens. Many economists argue, however, that it has carried a cost that goes beyond the payroll taxes levied on workers and employers. Martin Feldstein and others maintain that today’s workers save less for their old age because they know they will receive Social Security checks when they retire. If Feldstein and the others are correct, it means that less savings are available, less investment takes place, and the economy and wages grow more slowly than they would without Social Security.
The law of unintended consequences is at work always and everywhere. People outraged about high prices of plywood in areas devastated by hurricanes, for example, may advocate price controls to keep the prices closer to usual levels. An unintended consequence is that suppliers of plywood from outside the region, who would have been willing to supply plywood quickly at the higher market price, are less willing to do so at the government-controlled price. Thus results a shortage of a good where it is badly needed. Government licensing of electricians, to take another example, keeps the supply of electricians below what it would otherwise be, and thus keeps the price of electricians’ services higher than otherwise. One unintended consequence is that people sometimes do their own electrical work, and, occasionally, one of these amateurs is electrocuted.
One final sobering example is the case of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. Afterward, many coastal states enacted laws placing unlimited liability on tanker operators. As a result, the Royal Dutch/Shell group, one of the world’s biggest oil companies, began hiring independent ships to deliver oil to the United States instead of using its own forty-six-tanker fleet.
Oil specialists fretted that other reputable shippers would flee as well rather than face such unquantifiable risk, leaving the field to fly-by-night tanker operators with leaky ships and iffy insurance. Thus, the probability of spills probably increased and the likelihood of collecting damages probably decreased as a consequence of the new laws.
Friday, June 14, 2019
Climate change perspective from an expert
Here is Judith Curry's blog entry on Politics vs. Science in the Global Warming debate.
JC is on target.
Those who shout "climate denier" cannot be trusted.
----------------------------------------------------
Politics versus science in attributing extreme weather events to manmade global warming.
If you follow me on twitter, you may have noticed that I was scheduled to testify before the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Jun 12 [link]. The subject of the Hearing is Contending with Natural Disasters in the Wake of Climate Change.
Late on Jun 10, I received an email telling me that the Hearing is postponed (as yet unscheduled). Apparently the Committee finds it more urgent to have a Hearing related to holding the Attorney General and Secretary of Commerce in contempt of Congress [link]. Interesting to ponder that Congressional procedural issues are deemed to be more important than Climate Change.
So I spent all last week working on my testimony (which is why there have been no new blog posts). I hope the Hearing will eventually happen (Michael Mann is also scheduled to testify).
Hurricanes and climate change constitute a major portion of my testimony. You may recall my recent series on Hurricanes & climate change [link]. Specifically with regards to detection and attribution, my bottom line conclusion was:
“In summary, the trend signal in hurricane activity has not yet had time to rise above the background variability of natural processes. Manmade climate change may have caused changes in hurricane activity that are not yet detectable due to the small magnitude of these changes compared to estimated natural variability, or due to observational limitations. But at this point, there is no convincing evidence that manmade global warming has caused a change in hurricane activity.”
I’m sure many would dismiss this conclusion as ‘denial’, in spite of the extensive documentation and logic of my arguments. Lets dig into:
the latest from the hurricane researchers
‘storylines’ from non-hurricane researchers
why blaming extreme events on AGW is important in ‘winning’ the public debate
what happens when scientists get in the way of AGW activist ‘scare stories’ about extreme events
‘scaring the children’ strategies
New review paper – Knutson et al.
Earlier this week I spotted an in press review article entitled Tropical Cyclones and Climate Change Assessment: Part I. Detection and Attribution [link].
There are 10 coauthors on the paper:
“The authors of this report include some former members of the expert team for the WMO 2010 assessment (Knutson et al. 2010) along with current membership of a WMO Task Team on Tropical Cyclones and Climate Change. The Task Team members were invited to become members by the WMO World Weather Research Program’s Working Group on Tropical Meteorology Research.”
Excerpts from the Summary:
<begin quote>
“In this assessment, we have focused on the question: Can an anthropogenic influence on TC activity be detected in past data? We explore this question from two perspectives: avoiding/reducing either Type I or Type II errors, since we presume that different audiences will have different preferences on which type of error should be avoided to a greater extent.
Using the conventional perspective of avoiding Type I error, the strongest case for a detectable change in TC activity is the observed poleward migration of the latitude of maximum intensity in the northwest Pacific basin, with eight of 11 authors rating the observed change as low-to-medium confidence for detection (with one other author having medium and two other authors having medium-to-high confidence). A slight majority of authors (six of 11) had only low confidence that anthropogenic forcing had contributed to the poleward shift. The majority of the author team also had only low confidence that any other observed TC changes represented either detectable changes or attributable anthropogenic changes.
Regarding storm surge, our expectation is that a widespread worsening of total inundation levels during storms is occurring due to the global mean sea level rise associated with anthropogenic warming, assuming all other factors equal, although we note that no TC climate change signal has been convincingly detected in sea level extremes data. To date, there is not convincing evidence of a detectable anthropogenic influence on hurricane precipitation rates, in contrast to the case for extreme precipitation in general, where some anthropogenic influence has been detected.
The relatively low confidence in TC change detection results from several factors, including: observational limitations, the smallness of the expected human-caused change (signal) relative to the expected natural variability (noise), or the lack of confident estimates of the expected signal and noise levels.”
<end quote>
JC comments: This paper illustrates an approach that is very unusual in the annals of climate change assessments. The sea level rise community is also using expert elicitation (e.g. Bamber et al.). Expert elicitation and and expert structured judgment is much preferred over ‘consensus seeking’. The Knutson et al. paper is distinguished by clearly explaining the evidence and and arguments that the individual scientists are considering, and in the Supplementary Information also showing individual responses.
Experts disagree on most aspects of climate change. Why do they disagree? I have covered this extensively before, the main reasons are summarized as:
Insufficient & inadequate observational evidence
Disagreement about the value of different classes of evidence (e.g. paleoclimate reconstructions, models)
Disagreement about the appropriate logical framework for linking and assessing the evidence
Assessments of areas of ambiguity & ignorance
Belief polarization as a result of politicization of the science
The specific reasons for disagreement on a given issue need to be clarified, which the Knutson paper does. Distinguishing between Type I and II errors is also useful, which clearly identifies the speculative issues as scientifically informed speculation.
ATTP
ATTP has a joint blog post with philosopher Eric Winsberg entitled Extreme weather event attribution.
<begin quote>
Eric has just published, together with Naomi Oreskes and Elisabeth Lloyd, a paper called Severe Weather Event Attribution: Why values won’t go away. The paper discusses the issue of how one might assess the anthropogenic influence on an extreme weather event. This post describes what was presented in the paper and tries to justify why there may be value in approaching this issue from more than one perspective.
A complementary approach is to consider a storyline. For example, given that an event has occured, how might climate change have influenced this event? If the air was warmer, then we may expect enhanced precipitation. If sea surface temperatures are high, then we may expect a tropical cyclone to be more intense. The focus here tends to be on the thermodynamics (i.e., the energy) and to take the dynamics as given (i.e., the event happened).
It turns out, though, that the story-line approach has been rather controversial, with many who favour more formal detection and attribution being highly critical. They argue that it could lead to more false positives and that taking the dynamics as given ignores that dynamical factors could actually work to make some events less likely. Essentially, they argue that the storyline approach may over-estimate anthropogenic influences, potentially mistaking natural variability as being anthropogenic.
The problem, though, is that although the two approaches are complementary, they’re not actually quite addressing the same issue. The detection and attribution approach is essentially trying to determine how anthropogenic-driven climate change influences the probability of a specific class of event. The storyline approach, on the other hand, is more looking at how anthropogenically-driven climate change might have influenced an event that has actually occurred. There is no real reason why we should prefer one approach over the other; they can both play an important role in aiding our understanding of how anthropogenic influences impact extreme weather events.
<end quote>
JC comment: The epistemic status of formal detection and attribution approaches, versus the storyline approach, should be obvious to all CE readers.
The ‘storyline’ approach is useful for posing hypotheses for for further investigation (and avoiding possible Type II errors). However, these ‘storylines’ are generally posed by climate researchers rather than by meteorological experts on that particular type of extreme weather.
In any event, using such storylines, and claiming (even implicitly) that they are part of the AGW ‘consensus’ is scientifically dishonest.
Roger Pielke Jr’s story
As scientists are interviewed following each hurricane, speculative storylines about hurricanes and global warming abound in the public discourse on climate change. Some of these manage to get published. However, nearly all get knocked back by serious assessments.
As an example, recall the ‘storyline’ whereby Hurricane Sandy (wind speeds equivalent to a Cat 1 hurricane at landfall) was influenced by some magical steering effect associated with AGW that steered to the storm to New York City. Well, the recent U.S. National Climate Assessment Report tackled this one head on (Appendix C, Box C.2) and concluded:
“[T]here is low confidence in determining the net impact to date of anthropogenic climate change on the risk of Sandy-like events, though anthropogenic sea level rise, all other things equal, has increased the surge risk.”
For a more complete discussion, see my previous blog post on hurricanes and attribution to climate change.
Roger Pielke Jr. has been tireless in calling out scientists and others who make statements attributing hurricane impacts to climate change, citing the IPCC and other national/international assessments.
For this, Roger Pielke Jr has been massively attacked and ostracized. See this recent article by Ross McKitrick that appeared in the Financial Post “This scientist proved climate change isn’t causing extreme weather — so politicians attacked“:
“Roger Pielke Jr. is a scientist at University of Colorado in Boulder who, up until a few years ago, did world-leading research on climate change and extreme weather. He found convincing evidence that climate change was not leading to higher rates of weather-related damages worldwide, once you correct for increasing population and wealth. He also helped convene major academic panels to survey the evidence and communicate the near-unanimous scientific consensus on this topic to policymakers. For his efforts, Pielke was subjected to a vicious, well-funded smear campaign backed by, among others, the Obama White House and leading Democratic congressmen, culminating in his decision in 2015 to quit the field.”
If you are unfamiliar with the details of all this, they are quite chilling. RPJr has prepared a twitter thread on his talk ‘Extreme Weather and Extreme Politics” which is a must read. Incidents include:
the coordinated effort of the Center for American Progress to get RPJr fired from his position on 538
shenanigans (corruption, really) in the IPCC AR4 Section 1.3.8.5 that passed off an unpublished graph as being published and miscited it, so that they could claim an influence of warming on disaster losses
Grijalval inquisition
Dr John Holdren (President Obama’s Director of Office of Science, Technology and Policy) posted a screed on the White House web page against RPJr and his findings on disasters and climate change, which were highly inappropriate (not to mention scientifically incorrect).
Why extreme events matter in the climate debate
Why is attributing extreme events (or not) to AGW such a big deal? Well, the reason for this became apparent to me following Hurricane Katrina (2005), in the heyday of the hurricanes and global warming argument.
Lets face it, in 2005 the public found it very hard to care about 1 degree or even 4 degrees of warming — heck, the temperatures varied by that much on a day-to-day basis. If they wanted a slightly warmer or cooler climate, they could always move a few hundred miles to the north or south.
However, arguments that a relatively small amount of global warming (order 1 C) could result in more intense hurricanes, well that got their attention, particularly as the U.S. was reeling from Katrina catastrophe.
The AGW activists now had new weapon in their arsenal — attributing extreme weather events to manmade climate change. The ‘will to act’ seemed tied to alarmism about extreme weather events. Which provides a key political role for unsupported ‘storylines’ about extreme weather events.
Scaring the children
A corollary to this activist strategy is to scare school children, and enlist their help in politicizing the issue of climate change and extreme events and also convincing their parents.
The poster child for this is Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg. Several relevant articles on scaring the children over climate change:
Stop scaring children witless about climate change
Self-harm versus the greater good
The real problem with Greta Thunberg is not her age.
The obvious issue is that teachers should educate children about climate science and not scare them witless about the apocalypse. The less obvious issue is the harm done by scaring children.
The other glaring example of this is the Juliana v. United States lawsuit, filed by school children (with the help of Jim Hansen and some activist organizations.) Extreme events figure prominently in what the children are worried about.
I sympathize with Greta Thunberg and the other scared children. I have my own ‘scaring children’ story to relate.
Back circa 1960, the ‘scary story’ was Russians taking over the U.S. through nuclear war or via infiltrating the U.S. This scary story was conveyed to me on a weekly basis by a nun in my Saturday Catechism class (Catholic Church). I was well and duly scared by all this. In fact I worried alot about this. When one of my parents was late to come home from shopping or an outing, I was worried that they got captured by the Russians.
In fact I worried about all this so much that I was diagnosed with a stomach ulcer at the ripe old age of 8 years old. In discussing this with my doctor (who had been apprised by my parents that I was a ‘worrier’), he told me I had nothing to worry about, and in any event there was nothing I could do about all this as a kid. And that I should enjoy my childhood. I said ‘ok’, and that was pretty much the end of my worrying about the Russians.
(Note: all this worrying was brought back into my memory by watching the TV show ‘The Americans’ which is absolutely fascinating.
Unlike Greta et al., I was told by responsible adults to stop worrying. In the case of Greta et al., they are cheered on by adults who find these children to be very useful in their propaganda efforts.
Conclusions
So where does all this leave us in the climate debate? There is very little in the way of extreme weather events that can convincingly be attributed to manmade global warming, even if you are assuming that all of the recent warming is manmade.
Global warming activists will continue use extreme events as an argument against fossil fuels, even though there is little to no evidence to support this. Without this argument, there is very little left to worry about in the near term regarding AGW, apart from the slow creep of sea level rise.
The shenanigans of activists and politicians in this regard are not surprising. What is horrifying is the way that schoolchildren are being used (and arguably harmed) in the interests of supporting the activists’ propaganda.
And finally, the silence of scientists who should know better, especially among those who have a vocal public presence (e.g. media interviews, twitter) is very disturbing. Although who among them would want to suffer the hassles and osctracism suffered by RPJr, myself and others.
The ‘establishment’ community of climate scientist activists has much to answer for. But insatiable media market for ‘fake news’ regarding extreme weather events assures them of a path of continued professional success for spouting alarmism regarding extreme weather events.
JC is on target.
Those who shout "climate denier" cannot be trusted.
----------------------------------------------------
Politics versus science in attributing extreme weather events to manmade global warming.
If you follow me on twitter, you may have noticed that I was scheduled to testify before the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Jun 12 [link]. The subject of the Hearing is Contending with Natural Disasters in the Wake of Climate Change.
Late on Jun 10, I received an email telling me that the Hearing is postponed (as yet unscheduled). Apparently the Committee finds it more urgent to have a Hearing related to holding the Attorney General and Secretary of Commerce in contempt of Congress [link]. Interesting to ponder that Congressional procedural issues are deemed to be more important than Climate Change.
So I spent all last week working on my testimony (which is why there have been no new blog posts). I hope the Hearing will eventually happen (Michael Mann is also scheduled to testify).
Hurricanes and climate change constitute a major portion of my testimony. You may recall my recent series on Hurricanes & climate change [link]. Specifically with regards to detection and attribution, my bottom line conclusion was:
“In summary, the trend signal in hurricane activity has not yet had time to rise above the background variability of natural processes. Manmade climate change may have caused changes in hurricane activity that are not yet detectable due to the small magnitude of these changes compared to estimated natural variability, or due to observational limitations. But at this point, there is no convincing evidence that manmade global warming has caused a change in hurricane activity.”
I’m sure many would dismiss this conclusion as ‘denial’, in spite of the extensive documentation and logic of my arguments. Lets dig into:
the latest from the hurricane researchers
‘storylines’ from non-hurricane researchers
why blaming extreme events on AGW is important in ‘winning’ the public debate
what happens when scientists get in the way of AGW activist ‘scare stories’ about extreme events
‘scaring the children’ strategies
New review paper – Knutson et al.
Earlier this week I spotted an in press review article entitled Tropical Cyclones and Climate Change Assessment: Part I. Detection and Attribution [link].
There are 10 coauthors on the paper:
“The authors of this report include some former members of the expert team for the WMO 2010 assessment (Knutson et al. 2010) along with current membership of a WMO Task Team on Tropical Cyclones and Climate Change. The Task Team members were invited to become members by the WMO World Weather Research Program’s Working Group on Tropical Meteorology Research.”
Excerpts from the Summary:
<begin quote>
“In this assessment, we have focused on the question: Can an anthropogenic influence on TC activity be detected in past data? We explore this question from two perspectives: avoiding/reducing either Type I or Type II errors, since we presume that different audiences will have different preferences on which type of error should be avoided to a greater extent.
Using the conventional perspective of avoiding Type I error, the strongest case for a detectable change in TC activity is the observed poleward migration of the latitude of maximum intensity in the northwest Pacific basin, with eight of 11 authors rating the observed change as low-to-medium confidence for detection (with one other author having medium and two other authors having medium-to-high confidence). A slight majority of authors (six of 11) had only low confidence that anthropogenic forcing had contributed to the poleward shift. The majority of the author team also had only low confidence that any other observed TC changes represented either detectable changes or attributable anthropogenic changes.
Regarding storm surge, our expectation is that a widespread worsening of total inundation levels during storms is occurring due to the global mean sea level rise associated with anthropogenic warming, assuming all other factors equal, although we note that no TC climate change signal has been convincingly detected in sea level extremes data. To date, there is not convincing evidence of a detectable anthropogenic influence on hurricane precipitation rates, in contrast to the case for extreme precipitation in general, where some anthropogenic influence has been detected.
The relatively low confidence in TC change detection results from several factors, including: observational limitations, the smallness of the expected human-caused change (signal) relative to the expected natural variability (noise), or the lack of confident estimates of the expected signal and noise levels.”
<end quote>
JC comments: This paper illustrates an approach that is very unusual in the annals of climate change assessments. The sea level rise community is also using expert elicitation (e.g. Bamber et al.). Expert elicitation and and expert structured judgment is much preferred over ‘consensus seeking’. The Knutson et al. paper is distinguished by clearly explaining the evidence and and arguments that the individual scientists are considering, and in the Supplementary Information also showing individual responses.
Experts disagree on most aspects of climate change. Why do they disagree? I have covered this extensively before, the main reasons are summarized as:
Insufficient & inadequate observational evidence
Disagreement about the value of different classes of evidence (e.g. paleoclimate reconstructions, models)
Disagreement about the appropriate logical framework for linking and assessing the evidence
Assessments of areas of ambiguity & ignorance
Belief polarization as a result of politicization of the science
The specific reasons for disagreement on a given issue need to be clarified, which the Knutson paper does. Distinguishing between Type I and II errors is also useful, which clearly identifies the speculative issues as scientifically informed speculation.
ATTP
ATTP has a joint blog post with philosopher Eric Winsberg entitled Extreme weather event attribution.
<begin quote>
Eric has just published, together with Naomi Oreskes and Elisabeth Lloyd, a paper called Severe Weather Event Attribution: Why values won’t go away. The paper discusses the issue of how one might assess the anthropogenic influence on an extreme weather event. This post describes what was presented in the paper and tries to justify why there may be value in approaching this issue from more than one perspective.
A complementary approach is to consider a storyline. For example, given that an event has occured, how might climate change have influenced this event? If the air was warmer, then we may expect enhanced precipitation. If sea surface temperatures are high, then we may expect a tropical cyclone to be more intense. The focus here tends to be on the thermodynamics (i.e., the energy) and to take the dynamics as given (i.e., the event happened).
It turns out, though, that the story-line approach has been rather controversial, with many who favour more formal detection and attribution being highly critical. They argue that it could lead to more false positives and that taking the dynamics as given ignores that dynamical factors could actually work to make some events less likely. Essentially, they argue that the storyline approach may over-estimate anthropogenic influences, potentially mistaking natural variability as being anthropogenic.
The problem, though, is that although the two approaches are complementary, they’re not actually quite addressing the same issue. The detection and attribution approach is essentially trying to determine how anthropogenic-driven climate change influences the probability of a specific class of event. The storyline approach, on the other hand, is more looking at how anthropogenically-driven climate change might have influenced an event that has actually occurred. There is no real reason why we should prefer one approach over the other; they can both play an important role in aiding our understanding of how anthropogenic influences impact extreme weather events.
<end quote>
JC comment: The epistemic status of formal detection and attribution approaches, versus the storyline approach, should be obvious to all CE readers.
The ‘storyline’ approach is useful for posing hypotheses for for further investigation (and avoiding possible Type II errors). However, these ‘storylines’ are generally posed by climate researchers rather than by meteorological experts on that particular type of extreme weather.
In any event, using such storylines, and claiming (even implicitly) that they are part of the AGW ‘consensus’ is scientifically dishonest.
Roger Pielke Jr’s story
As scientists are interviewed following each hurricane, speculative storylines about hurricanes and global warming abound in the public discourse on climate change. Some of these manage to get published. However, nearly all get knocked back by serious assessments.
As an example, recall the ‘storyline’ whereby Hurricane Sandy (wind speeds equivalent to a Cat 1 hurricane at landfall) was influenced by some magical steering effect associated with AGW that steered to the storm to New York City. Well, the recent U.S. National Climate Assessment Report tackled this one head on (Appendix C, Box C.2) and concluded:
“[T]here is low confidence in determining the net impact to date of anthropogenic climate change on the risk of Sandy-like events, though anthropogenic sea level rise, all other things equal, has increased the surge risk.”
For a more complete discussion, see my previous blog post on hurricanes and attribution to climate change.
Roger Pielke Jr. has been tireless in calling out scientists and others who make statements attributing hurricane impacts to climate change, citing the IPCC and other national/international assessments.
For this, Roger Pielke Jr has been massively attacked and ostracized. See this recent article by Ross McKitrick that appeared in the Financial Post “This scientist proved climate change isn’t causing extreme weather — so politicians attacked“:
“Roger Pielke Jr. is a scientist at University of Colorado in Boulder who, up until a few years ago, did world-leading research on climate change and extreme weather. He found convincing evidence that climate change was not leading to higher rates of weather-related damages worldwide, once you correct for increasing population and wealth. He also helped convene major academic panels to survey the evidence and communicate the near-unanimous scientific consensus on this topic to policymakers. For his efforts, Pielke was subjected to a vicious, well-funded smear campaign backed by, among others, the Obama White House and leading Democratic congressmen, culminating in his decision in 2015 to quit the field.”
If you are unfamiliar with the details of all this, they are quite chilling. RPJr has prepared a twitter thread on his talk ‘Extreme Weather and Extreme Politics” which is a must read. Incidents include:
the coordinated effort of the Center for American Progress to get RPJr fired from his position on 538
shenanigans (corruption, really) in the IPCC AR4 Section 1.3.8.5 that passed off an unpublished graph as being published and miscited it, so that they could claim an influence of warming on disaster losses
Grijalval inquisition
Dr John Holdren (President Obama’s Director of Office of Science, Technology and Policy) posted a screed on the White House web page against RPJr and his findings on disasters and climate change, which were highly inappropriate (not to mention scientifically incorrect).
Why extreme events matter in the climate debate
Why is attributing extreme events (or not) to AGW such a big deal? Well, the reason for this became apparent to me following Hurricane Katrina (2005), in the heyday of the hurricanes and global warming argument.
Lets face it, in 2005 the public found it very hard to care about 1 degree or even 4 degrees of warming — heck, the temperatures varied by that much on a day-to-day basis. If they wanted a slightly warmer or cooler climate, they could always move a few hundred miles to the north or south.
However, arguments that a relatively small amount of global warming (order 1 C) could result in more intense hurricanes, well that got their attention, particularly as the U.S. was reeling from Katrina catastrophe.
The AGW activists now had new weapon in their arsenal — attributing extreme weather events to manmade climate change. The ‘will to act’ seemed tied to alarmism about extreme weather events. Which provides a key political role for unsupported ‘storylines’ about extreme weather events.
Scaring the children
A corollary to this activist strategy is to scare school children, and enlist their help in politicizing the issue of climate change and extreme events and also convincing their parents.
The poster child for this is Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg. Several relevant articles on scaring the children over climate change:
Stop scaring children witless about climate change
Self-harm versus the greater good
The real problem with Greta Thunberg is not her age.
The obvious issue is that teachers should educate children about climate science and not scare them witless about the apocalypse. The less obvious issue is the harm done by scaring children.
The other glaring example of this is the Juliana v. United States lawsuit, filed by school children (with the help of Jim Hansen and some activist organizations.) Extreme events figure prominently in what the children are worried about.
I sympathize with Greta Thunberg and the other scared children. I have my own ‘scaring children’ story to relate.
Back circa 1960, the ‘scary story’ was Russians taking over the U.S. through nuclear war or via infiltrating the U.S. This scary story was conveyed to me on a weekly basis by a nun in my Saturday Catechism class (Catholic Church). I was well and duly scared by all this. In fact I worried alot about this. When one of my parents was late to come home from shopping or an outing, I was worried that they got captured by the Russians.
In fact I worried about all this so much that I was diagnosed with a stomach ulcer at the ripe old age of 8 years old. In discussing this with my doctor (who had been apprised by my parents that I was a ‘worrier’), he told me I had nothing to worry about, and in any event there was nothing I could do about all this as a kid. And that I should enjoy my childhood. I said ‘ok’, and that was pretty much the end of my worrying about the Russians.
(Note: all this worrying was brought back into my memory by watching the TV show ‘The Americans’ which is absolutely fascinating.
Unlike Greta et al., I was told by responsible adults to stop worrying. In the case of Greta et al., they are cheered on by adults who find these children to be very useful in their propaganda efforts.
Conclusions
So where does all this leave us in the climate debate? There is very little in the way of extreme weather events that can convincingly be attributed to manmade global warming, even if you are assuming that all of the recent warming is manmade.
Global warming activists will continue use extreme events as an argument against fossil fuels, even though there is little to no evidence to support this. Without this argument, there is very little left to worry about in the near term regarding AGW, apart from the slow creep of sea level rise.
The shenanigans of activists and politicians in this regard are not surprising. What is horrifying is the way that schoolchildren are being used (and arguably harmed) in the interests of supporting the activists’ propaganda.
And finally, the silence of scientists who should know better, especially among those who have a vocal public presence (e.g. media interviews, twitter) is very disturbing. Although who among them would want to suffer the hassles and osctracism suffered by RPJr, myself and others.
The ‘establishment’ community of climate scientist activists has much to answer for. But insatiable media market for ‘fake news’ regarding extreme weather events assures them of a path of continued professional success for spouting alarmism regarding extreme weather events.
Climate hypocrisy
Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel get it right at Townhall.
-------------------------------------------
You often hear climate change described as a global conflict with existential consequences. As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once put it, "This is our World War II." It would be interesting to know what survivors of, say, Guadalcanal or the Bataan Death March think of that comparison. But never mind. Let's take the hyperbole seriously. If global warming is a war, who is our enemy? Who are we fighting? First on the list would have to be double agents. These are the people who pretend to be on the side of righteousness but in fact are doing the work of dark forces. During the last world war, people like this were called quislings, after the Norwegian collaborationist leader. They were dealt with harshly. Who are our quislings today?
If you were compiling a list, you'd start with former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, both one of the world's richest men and one of the most visible climate activists. In a recent C-SPAN interview, Bloomberg was asked if he lives a "climate change lifestyle." Bloomberg dodged the question, which is tantamount to answering it. This is a man who travels by private jet and helicopter, between the at least 10 luxury properties he owns all over the world. It's hard to imagine a life of more profound carbon emissions. Bloomberg has personally caused more global warming than entire African states. Yet from listening to him talk, you'd think the real problem was poor people in West Virginia and Kentucky. Bloomberg routinely attacks the coal industry as a driver of climate change. He'd like to close every mine in America, further impoverishing the country's most beleaguered communities. The fight against global warming demands no less, Bloomberg claims. What he doesn't mention is his own lifestyle, which is baffling.
If Bloomberg really thought the future of mankind hung in the balance, wouldn't he be working to reduce his own emissions? Each one of Bloomberg's private flights emits about twice as much carbon as the average American household does in an entire year. We aren't really asking for extreme sacrifice here. How about fly first-class?
Bloomberg's not the only one. Leonardo DiCaprio, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore and many other top climate activists exhibit the same behavior. Fortune 500 companies are equally to blame. They have fleets of private planes that ferry around not just the CEOs but all the top managers. The Daily Caller News Foundation reached out to 31 of the top corporate, celebrity and nonprofit backers of urgent action on climate change to ask if they would forgo private air travel. Crickets.
If Bloomberg and the other billionaires ranting about global warming were really worried about climate change destroying our planet, it would seem reasonable that they would be willing to put up with at least some minor inconveniences to their high-flying lifestyles, even if only to drive home their seriousness.
Climate activists who are funded and supported by these billionaires, celebrities and corporations are conspicuously quiet about their benefactors' truly massive carbon emissions. If they really cared about these issues wouldn't they speak up? If the earth really hangs in the balance it seems reasonable to expect that they would.
The policies advocated by these leading climate change luminaries read like a left-wing wish list: more regulation, higher taxes, more government and less fossil fuel production. All those things come with costs to regular people. It's hard to convince people to sacrifice, but it's impossible when those asking are totally unwilling to join in. The result: BS detectors going off big time.
In 12, 20 or 50 years, if the oceans really do rise to wipe out entire islands, if the glaciers melt away, if severe storms ravage the planet regularly and entire communities are upended and mankind as we know it is put in danger, the biggest villains won't be Donald Trump and Dick Cheney. They will be remembered as the thickheaded dopes who couldn't get their heads around the seriousness of the problem. The true villains will be those who knew better but were totally unwilling to make even the tiniest sacrifice to lead others by example. Just behind them will be the entire climate activist community that stood by silently while their biggest supporters sent the world a message that climate change is important enough to talk about incessantly but not important enough to require even the tiniest sacrifice.
-------------------------------------------
You often hear climate change described as a global conflict with existential consequences. As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once put it, "This is our World War II." It would be interesting to know what survivors of, say, Guadalcanal or the Bataan Death March think of that comparison. But never mind. Let's take the hyperbole seriously. If global warming is a war, who is our enemy? Who are we fighting? First on the list would have to be double agents. These are the people who pretend to be on the side of righteousness but in fact are doing the work of dark forces. During the last world war, people like this were called quislings, after the Norwegian collaborationist leader. They were dealt with harshly. Who are our quislings today?
If you were compiling a list, you'd start with former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, both one of the world's richest men and one of the most visible climate activists. In a recent C-SPAN interview, Bloomberg was asked if he lives a "climate change lifestyle." Bloomberg dodged the question, which is tantamount to answering it. This is a man who travels by private jet and helicopter, between the at least 10 luxury properties he owns all over the world. It's hard to imagine a life of more profound carbon emissions. Bloomberg has personally caused more global warming than entire African states. Yet from listening to him talk, you'd think the real problem was poor people in West Virginia and Kentucky. Bloomberg routinely attacks the coal industry as a driver of climate change. He'd like to close every mine in America, further impoverishing the country's most beleaguered communities. The fight against global warming demands no less, Bloomberg claims. What he doesn't mention is his own lifestyle, which is baffling.
If Bloomberg really thought the future of mankind hung in the balance, wouldn't he be working to reduce his own emissions? Each one of Bloomberg's private flights emits about twice as much carbon as the average American household does in an entire year. We aren't really asking for extreme sacrifice here. How about fly first-class?
Bloomberg's not the only one. Leonardo DiCaprio, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore and many other top climate activists exhibit the same behavior. Fortune 500 companies are equally to blame. They have fleets of private planes that ferry around not just the CEOs but all the top managers. The Daily Caller News Foundation reached out to 31 of the top corporate, celebrity and nonprofit backers of urgent action on climate change to ask if they would forgo private air travel. Crickets.
If Bloomberg and the other billionaires ranting about global warming were really worried about climate change destroying our planet, it would seem reasonable that they would be willing to put up with at least some minor inconveniences to their high-flying lifestyles, even if only to drive home their seriousness.
Climate activists who are funded and supported by these billionaires, celebrities and corporations are conspicuously quiet about their benefactors' truly massive carbon emissions. If they really cared about these issues wouldn't they speak up? If the earth really hangs in the balance it seems reasonable to expect that they would.
The policies advocated by these leading climate change luminaries read like a left-wing wish list: more regulation, higher taxes, more government and less fossil fuel production. All those things come with costs to regular people. It's hard to convince people to sacrifice, but it's impossible when those asking are totally unwilling to join in. The result: BS detectors going off big time.
In 12, 20 or 50 years, if the oceans really do rise to wipe out entire islands, if the glaciers melt away, if severe storms ravage the planet regularly and entire communities are upended and mankind as we know it is put in danger, the biggest villains won't be Donald Trump and Dick Cheney. They will be remembered as the thickheaded dopes who couldn't get their heads around the seriousness of the problem. The true villains will be those who knew better but were totally unwilling to make even the tiniest sacrifice to lead others by example. Just behind them will be the entire climate activist community that stood by silently while their biggest supporters sent the world a message that climate change is important enough to talk about incessantly but not important enough to require even the tiniest sacrifice.
Thursday, June 13, 2019
Gun locks costs lives
Here is a Townhall column by John Lott.
JL is on target.
We all want to reduce violent crime. What is sad is that what the Anti-Gun Crowd advocates too often increases violent crime. I think that the reason is that the AGC operates on emotion and misinformation, not fact and logic.
---------------------------------------------
Last year, right after a student fatally shot eight classmates and two teachers at Santa Fe High School, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick urged Texans to lock up their firearms. The killer had stolen his father’s guns.
On the last night of the legislative session, the Republican-dominated state legislature approved a $1 million public safety campaign for gun storage. The Associated Press and other national media are playing this as a major test of NRA power in “gun loving Texas,” and they are waiting to see if Governor Greg Abbott will veto the spending. If the NRA can be defeated in Texas, that will animate Democrats’ hopes that it can be defeated anywhere.
We all want to do something, but more lives will be lost than saved if everyone locks up their guns.
Gun storage is primarily designed to prevent accidental gun deaths of children. According to the Centers for Disease Control, Texas averaged 8 accidental juvenile gun deaths a year from 2013 to 2017. That’s about 8 percent of the number of such deaths nationwide. This is smaller than Texas’ more than 10 percent share of the under-18 population.
It must be a puzzle for gun control advocates since a significantly larger percent of Texas households have guns and the state doesn’t have the gun “safety” laws that other states have.
But now, legislators have gotten the idea that gun locks will help prevent mass public shootings. Very few shootings have involved guns stolen from parents. In 2012, 20-year-old Adam Lanza stole his mother’s gun, though she already kept it in a safe. So, a new law would have made no difference.
Since 2000, including Sante Fe, there have been three US mass public shootings by a juvenile killer. But the Red Lake, Minnesota attack was committed by a 17-year-old who killed his grandfather, an Indian Reservation police officer, and then took his service gun off his dead body. So, again, gun locks wouldn’t have stopped that attack either.
Unfortunately, mandating gun locks can have unintended consequences.
According to my research, which has been published in the Journal of Law and Economics and elsewhere, such laws have made it more difficult for people to successfully defend themselves and their families. Criminals became more emboldened to invade people’s homes. There were 300 more total murders and 4,000 more rapes occurring each year in the states with these laws. Burglaries also rose dramatically.
That is not particularly surprising given that crime rises when we infringe on people’s right to self-defense. Indeed, every place in the world that has banned guns has seen an increase in murder.
If locking up guns could have prevented all three of the mass shootings that were committed by juveniles since 2000, there would have been 21 fewer deaths and 19 fewer people who were wounded. In reality, these killers could have obtained weapons in other ways. But for the sake of argument, let's accept this number. One could even add in the annual number of accidental gun deaths and assume that these would also have been prevented.
The final number would still be only a fraction of those who die in a single year because states with mandatory locks kept people from getting to their guns in time.
In truth, gun lock laws didn’t even reduce accidental gun deaths among children or teenagers. Few accidental gunshots take place in law-abiding, normal homes. In fact, most accidental gunshots that result in the deaths of minors are fired by adult males who have criminal histories and are in their mid-to-late 20s. Many are drug addicts or alcoholics.
Unless you send your child to play at a violent criminal's home, your child is exceedingly unlikely to get shot at a gun owner's home. It makes much more sense to check for a criminal history than for whether they are gun owners.
We see news stories about the horrible deaths and injuries that occur from school shootings. And rightly so. But we don't hear about the deaths that occur because people can’t readily access a gun to protect themselves and their families. These latter deaths are no less horrific.
The media just can’t help itself playing this public safety campaign spending as a defeat of those who support gun ownership. But the media completely ignores another bill that really will project school children, a bill that expands Texas’ program to let teachers carry guns at school.
Ads of children accidentally shooting each other will scare many people into keeping their guns locked. But this is really scaring people into compromising their safety.
We need to pass whichever laws save the most lives. There has never been a shooting in any school that allows teacher and staff to carry concealed handguns. What we don't need are any more laws that leave people defenseless.
JL is on target.
We all want to reduce violent crime. What is sad is that what the Anti-Gun Crowd advocates too often increases violent crime. I think that the reason is that the AGC operates on emotion and misinformation, not fact and logic.
---------------------------------------------
Last year, right after a student fatally shot eight classmates and two teachers at Santa Fe High School, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick urged Texans to lock up their firearms. The killer had stolen his father’s guns.
On the last night of the legislative session, the Republican-dominated state legislature approved a $1 million public safety campaign for gun storage. The Associated Press and other national media are playing this as a major test of NRA power in “gun loving Texas,” and they are waiting to see if Governor Greg Abbott will veto the spending. If the NRA can be defeated in Texas, that will animate Democrats’ hopes that it can be defeated anywhere.
We all want to do something, but more lives will be lost than saved if everyone locks up their guns.
Gun storage is primarily designed to prevent accidental gun deaths of children. According to the Centers for Disease Control, Texas averaged 8 accidental juvenile gun deaths a year from 2013 to 2017. That’s about 8 percent of the number of such deaths nationwide. This is smaller than Texas’ more than 10 percent share of the under-18 population.
It must be a puzzle for gun control advocates since a significantly larger percent of Texas households have guns and the state doesn’t have the gun “safety” laws that other states have.
But now, legislators have gotten the idea that gun locks will help prevent mass public shootings. Very few shootings have involved guns stolen from parents. In 2012, 20-year-old Adam Lanza stole his mother’s gun, though she already kept it in a safe. So, a new law would have made no difference.
Since 2000, including Sante Fe, there have been three US mass public shootings by a juvenile killer. But the Red Lake, Minnesota attack was committed by a 17-year-old who killed his grandfather, an Indian Reservation police officer, and then took his service gun off his dead body. So, again, gun locks wouldn’t have stopped that attack either.
Unfortunately, mandating gun locks can have unintended consequences.
According to my research, which has been published in the Journal of Law and Economics and elsewhere, such laws have made it more difficult for people to successfully defend themselves and their families. Criminals became more emboldened to invade people’s homes. There were 300 more total murders and 4,000 more rapes occurring each year in the states with these laws. Burglaries also rose dramatically.
That is not particularly surprising given that crime rises when we infringe on people’s right to self-defense. Indeed, every place in the world that has banned guns has seen an increase in murder.
If locking up guns could have prevented all three of the mass shootings that were committed by juveniles since 2000, there would have been 21 fewer deaths and 19 fewer people who were wounded. In reality, these killers could have obtained weapons in other ways. But for the sake of argument, let's accept this number. One could even add in the annual number of accidental gun deaths and assume that these would also have been prevented.
The final number would still be only a fraction of those who die in a single year because states with mandatory locks kept people from getting to their guns in time.
In truth, gun lock laws didn’t even reduce accidental gun deaths among children or teenagers. Few accidental gunshots take place in law-abiding, normal homes. In fact, most accidental gunshots that result in the deaths of minors are fired by adult males who have criminal histories and are in their mid-to-late 20s. Many are drug addicts or alcoholics.
Unless you send your child to play at a violent criminal's home, your child is exceedingly unlikely to get shot at a gun owner's home. It makes much more sense to check for a criminal history than for whether they are gun owners.
We see news stories about the horrible deaths and injuries that occur from school shootings. And rightly so. But we don't hear about the deaths that occur because people can’t readily access a gun to protect themselves and their families. These latter deaths are no less horrific.
The media just can’t help itself playing this public safety campaign spending as a defeat of those who support gun ownership. But the media completely ignores another bill that really will project school children, a bill that expands Texas’ program to let teachers carry guns at school.
Ads of children accidentally shooting each other will scare many people into keeping their guns locked. But this is really scaring people into compromising their safety.
We need to pass whichever laws save the most lives. There has never been a shooting in any school that allows teacher and staff to carry concealed handguns. What we don't need are any more laws that leave people defenseless.
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