Some Liberals get justice

Here is a column by Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic.
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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.

After that initial round of protests, Oberlin caved to student demands to cancel all its business with the bakery. Later, an Oberlin Police Department investigation, undertaken to probe accusations of racist behavior at the bakery, found that among 40 adults arrested for shoplifting at the business in a five-year period, six were black, suggesting vigilant enforcement against people of all races.

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.
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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.

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.
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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.
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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.

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.
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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.

Government control creates conflict

Here is an insightful column by Walter Williams. Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

WW is on target.

Free markets minimize conflict.  Government regulations often create conflict.
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We are living in a time of increasing domestic tension. Some of it stems from the presidency of Donald Trump. Another part of it is various advocacy groups on both sides of the political spectrum demanding one cause or another. But nearly totally ignored is how growing government control over our lives, along with the betrayal of constitutional principles, contributes the most to domestic tension. Let's look at a few examples.

Think about primary and secondary schooling. I think that every parent has the right to decide whether his child will recite a morning prayer in school. Similarly, every parent has the right to decide that his child will not recite a morning prayer. The same can be said about the Pledge of Allegiance to our flag, sex education and other hot-button issues in education. These become contentious issues because schools are owned by the government.

In the case of prayers, there will either be prayers or no prayers in school. It's a political decision whether prayers will be permitted or not, and parent groups with strong preferences will organize to fight one another. A win for one parent means a loss for another parent. The losing parent will be forced to either concede or muster up private school tuition while continuing to pay taxes for a school for which he has no use. Such a conflict would not arise if education were not government-produced but only government-financed, say through education vouchers. Parents with different preferences could have their wishes fulfilled by enrolling their child in a private school of their choice. Instead of being enemies, parents with different preferences could be friends.

People also have strong preferences for goods and services. Some of us have strong preferences for white wine and distaste for reds while others have the opposite preference -- strong preferences for red wine. Some of us love classical music while others love rock and roll music. Some of us love Mercedes-Benz while others love Lincoln Continentals. When's the last time you heard red wine drinkers in conflict with white wine drinkers? Have you ever seen classical music lovers organizing against rock and roll lovers or Mercedes-Benz lovers in conflict with Lincoln Continental lovers?

People have strong preferences for these goods just as much as they may have strong preference for schooling. It's a rare occasion, if ever, that one sees the kind of conflict between wine, music and automobile lovers that we see about schooling issues. Why? While government allocation of resources is a zero-sum game -- one person's win is another's loss -- market allocation is not. Market allocation is a positive-sum game where everybody wins. Lovers of red wine, classical music and Mercedes-Benz get what they want while lovers of white wine, rock and roll music and Lincoln Continentals get what they want. Instead of fighting one another, they can live in peace and maybe be friends.

It would be easy to create conflict among these people. Instead of market allocation, have government, through a democratic majority-rule process, decide what wines, music and cars would be produced. If that were done, I guarantee that red wine lovers would organize against white wine lovers, classical music lovers against rock and roll lovers and Mercedes-Benz lovers against Lincoln Continental lovers.

Conflict would emerge solely because the decision was made in the political arena. Again, the prime feature of political decision-making is that it's a zero-sum game. One person's win is of necessity another person's loss. If red wine lovers win, white wine lovers would lose. As such, political allocation of resources enhances conflict while market allocation reduces conflict. The greater the number of decisions made in the political arena, the greater the potential for conflict. That's the main benefit of limited government.

Unfortunately, too many Americans want government to grow and have more power over our lives. That means conflict among us is going to rise.

Mueller's failure

Here is a column by Jonathan Turley assessing Special Counsel Robert Mueller's failure to do his job.

It is clear from how the Mueller report was written and the kind of staff that he hired that Mueller is a partisan.
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The very first and purportedly only press conference by special counsel Robert Mueller had the feeling of a Mount Sinai moment for Washington this week. Indeed, his message seemed to be the same as that of Moses, which is have faith and do not question. Mueller spoke some 1,200 words before virtually admonishing the press corps that “I hope and expect this to be the only time that I will speak to you in this manner.” After refusing to answer questions, he went back to the place from whence he came.

Last week, I wrote that it has become sacrilegious to question the motives or performance of Mueller. His press conference was the greatest test of such blind faith. Mueller announced that “the report is my testimony” and that he would not answer questions from Congress either, beyond what is already in his final report. From anyone else, such a statement would be denounced as arrogant, evasive, or both. However, many members of Congress and the media accepted it as the gospel according to Mueller.

The problem is that Mueller was uttering absolute nonsense about his inability to reach a conclusion. He likewise did not offer a principled basis for refusing to answer any questions. This includes obvious questions such as why he refused to comply with the request from his superiors to identify grand jury material, which delayed the release of his report. The disconnect in the coverage of his remarks was striking. Attorney General William Barr testified for hours on his role and has answered dozens of questions. He was promptly dismissed as evasive and even perjurious. Mueller declared he would tolerate no questions and declined to address any of the criticism of his work with very little objection from the media.

The press conference this week should be an embarrassment for the Justice Department. The agency has long maintained that the special counsel could perform the same function as an independent counsel in determining whether high ranking officials committed criminal acts. For two years, Congress and the Justice Department expressly anticipated findings of any criminal conduct. Mueller employed a massive staff and spent tens of millions of dollars. Yet, it now appears that he never intended to make any findings of possible crimes by President Trump.

Mueller insisted that, because there is a Justice Department policy not to indict a sitting president, he interpreted that to bar him from finding the basis for criminal conduct. According to Mueller, you can investigate but not reach basic conclusions on what the investigation found. One could understand why he would not be eager to answer questions about such an absurd interpretation, when his cited sources directly contradict him.

I testified on these flawed memos from the Office of Legal Counsel during the Clinton impeachment. Like many other academics, I view the policy as unsupported by either the Constitution or the convention debates, but that does not matter because the memos have simply nothing to do with a special counsel finding criminal conduct by a president. The memos focus entirely on the indictment and prosecution of a sitting president. They do conclude that being a defendant in a criminal case would thus prevent any president from performing his duties, but they do not challenge the need to investigate a sitting president. History shows presidents routinely accused of criminal conduct, including in impeachment proceedings.

Indeed, President Clinton was investigated and found to have committed crimes by an independent counsel. The Justice Department memos did not find that the investigation or such findings were improper. When the Independent Counsel Act subsequently expired, Congress was assured that the same investigatory function would be performed by any special counsels. The memos only addressed when a president can be indicted and said that prosecution must wait until he leaves office, since he could not function while in the docket of a criminal court or a federal prison.

Mueller has insisted that the policy “says that the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing.” That is not actually what it says. The Justice Department concluded that its view “remains that a sitting president is constitutionally immune from indictment and criminal prosecution.” It focuses on the prosecution of sitting presidents, not the investigation of sitting presidents. In referencing a process other than the criminal justice system, it refers to the only legal way to remove a president from office.

Nothing in the memos even remotely bars a special counsel from reaching conclusions on the basis of possible criminal charges. Indeed, the memos accept that the Justice Department needs to establish such evidence to preserve a record for possible later charges. That is why Mueller was told by his superiors that there was no policy barring him from finding criminal conduct, only the policy against indicting while the president is in office. Even if you twist the memos to suggest some prohibition to reaching conclusions on criminal conduct, that debate should have ended when his two superiors, the attorney general and deputy attorney general, told him there was no such policy and asked him to reach a conclusion.

His instructions and mandate were crystal clear. His position is even more nonsensical when you look at what he has already done. Mueller declared that “we concluded that we would not reach a determination one way or the other about whether the president committed a crime.” Yet, Mueller contradicted that statement when he declared that “if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime we would have said so.”

So which is it? Mueller actually did reach a “determination one way or the other” on crimes related to collusion. In his special counsel report, he found that he could “not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” In effect, Mueller ultimately came across as almost coquettish in his declaration that he would not make a clear finding of a possible crime but could not rule out criminal conduct by the president.

In other words, Mueller can produce hundreds of pages of evidence of possible criminal conduct and repeatedly refer to not exonerating Trump of crimes but somehow cannot reach a conclusion on the weight of the evidence. Of course,Mueller did not address such questions because he would not tolerate questions. The media simply listened obediently as he claimed that he was only being “fair” when he repeated that he could not clear Trump of the crime. That, of course, led the media to declare that Mueller really was searching for criminal conduct with a wink and a nod.

Whatever space Mueller occupied in maintaining such a position, it was neither created nor countenanced by federal law or Justice Department policy. Instead, he accepted the job of special counsel and then radically redefined it, without telling anyone outside of his staff. In that sense, he failed as special counsel. Mueller was not appointed to be a chronicler of allegations. Mueller was appointed to perform a prosecutorial function in the investigation of a president and his associates. Moreover, he does not get to dictate what Congress can investigate, or to stonewall the media.

I agree with Mueller on his hope and expectation that this will be “the only time that I will speak to you in this manner.” Next time, I hope and expect Mueller will finally address the growing questions about his investigation.

Equal pay for equal work - a sure-fire way to reduce your standard of living

Here is a column by Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

VdR is on target.

Keep in mind that bureaucrats are, for the most part, friction in the system.  Not only are they relatively unproductive (they could be on the production line making things people want) but they also make other people unproductive (more lawyers, etc.).  More unproductive people means a lower standard of living.

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One of the many problems with politicians is that it seems like they're in the outrage business. Some act as if they won't be needed unless there is some extreme wrong or insufferable unfairness to address. That's how we end up with politicians fighting mostly imaginary battles, which they propose to address through great sound bites and bad policies.

The latest case in point is presidential hopeful Kamala Harris' plan for "Holding Corporations Accountable for Pay Inequality in America."

The Democratic California senator's stated goal is to produce a world with "equal pay for equal work." There's nothing wrong with that, of course, if there's actually a problem. In her new report, she claims, like many others before her, that this is indeed an issue and that "women who work full time are paid just 80 cents, on average, for every dollar paid to men." That's the foundation of her report, and that number is actually meaningless.

The way she calculated this pay gap was by taking everyone who works 35 hours or more a week for the full year to find the median for women and the median for men. The problem is that these numbers don't compare women with men who perform the same jobs, work the same number of hours and have the same education. In addition, the work of Harvard economist Claudia Goldin, whose work is impossible to ignore on the left, has shown that when measured properly, the small pay gap that remains still isn't the product of discrimination.

Instead, Goldin finds that men and women are paid differently because women demand what she calls "temporal flexibility." As she explained a few years ago in a "Freakonomics" podcast interview, this means "anything that leads you to want to have more time." Others call it the "caregiver" or "mommy tax." Some women care for children or aging parents, which requires more flexibility in the workplace — a choice or necessity that leads to differences in job selection for women and men.

There are reasons to believe that as the workplace continues to evolve and with more telecommuting, maybe more paternal involvement in children's lives and a greater willingness of clients to substitute one worker for another (like when consumers go to the pharmacy and don't care which pharmacist they see because they are almost perfect substitutes to one another), we will see even greater convergence between men's and women's job selections.

In other words, Harris is barking up the wrong tree and using shoddy data. Then she doubles down with incredibly foolish public policy. Always the enforcer, she wants to require employers with more than 100 workers to go through the trouble of proving to a federal bureaucrat that "they're not paying women less than men for work of equal value" in exchange for an "Equal Pay Certification." If they fail to do so, they'll have to pay Uncle Sam "1% of their profits for every 1% wage gap they allow to persist."

While that may sound like a bureaucratic nightmare, it's probably even worse. Imagine the qualifying businesses having to prove that their roughly 80 million combined employees are paid according to their performance reviews and tasks. If everyone were working in factories and producing identical widgets, it wouldn't be so hard. But that's not what most businesses are like these days. Think about the work produced at think tanks, law firms or even hospitals. How do employers report their employees' divergence in creativity, entrepreneurial risk-taking or managerial talents? Every wage gap will become a liability that, in the worst-case scenario, could be remedied by employing fewer women or scaling back on flexibility so that every job looks as similar as possible.

Finally, imagine the cost in terms of additional employees that would be required on the employer side just to comply with the certification requirement. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which Harris would task with the certification, would have to add several hundred bureaucrats to its approved staff of some 2,300 employees if it wants to certify everyone in a timely fashion. Labor attorneys would probably come out ahead with new litigation resulting from the disagreements between the commission and businesses.

Yes, candidates on the campaign trail often come up with bad and outrageous ideas. Yet, in the Hall of Fame of poor policy proposals, this one may quickly rise to the top.

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One of the many problems with politicians is that it seems like they're in the outrage business. Some act as if they won't be needed unless there is some extreme wrong or insufferable unfairness to address. That's how we end up with politicians fighting mostly imaginary battles, which they propose to address through great sound bites and bad policies.

Ad Feedback

One of the many problems with politicians is that it seems like they're in the outrage business. Some act as if they won't be needed unless there is some extreme wrong or insufferable unfairness to address. That's how we end up with politicians fighting mostly imaginary battles, which they propose to address through great sound bites and bad policies.


The latest case in point is presidential hopeful Kamala Harris' plan for "Holding Corporations Accountable for Pay Inequality in America."


The Democratic California senator's stated goal is to produce a world with "equal pay for equal work." There's nothing wrong with that, of course, if there's actually a problem. In her new report, she claims, like many others before her, that this is indeed an issue and that "women who work full time are paid just 80 cents, on average, for every dollar paid to men." That's the foundation of her report, and that number is actually meaningless.
Ad Feedback

One of the many problems with politicians is that it seems like they're in the outrage business. Some act as if they won't be needed unless there is some extreme wrong or insufferable unfairness to address. That's how we end up with politicians fighting mostly imaginary battles, which they propose to address through great sound bites and bad policies.


The latest case in point is presidential hopeful Kamala Harris' plan for "Holding Corporations Accountable for Pay Inequality in America."


The Democratic California senator's stated goal is to produce a world with "equal pay for equal work." There's nothing wrong with that, of course, if there's actually a problem. In her new report, she claims, like many others before her, that this is indeed an issue and that "women who work full time are paid just 80 cents, on average, for every dollar paid to men." That's the foundation of her report, and that number is actually meaningless.

Contrary to what the Anti-Trumpers think, Mueller said nothing about Obstruction at his press conference

At his press conference, Meuller said that he was not able to prove that there was no obstruction.  This does not imply that someone else could not prove there was no obstruction.  But let's actually make Mueller's statement stronger and see where it leads.

It is not possible to prove that there was no obstruction.

Heck, why not make it still stronger.

The probability of no obstruction is less than 100%.

So, what are the implications of this statement?

• The probability of obstruction is greater than 0% and less than or equal to  100%.  For example, it could be 0.0000001% or even 99.999999% or even 100%!

• Nothing in the statement narrows the probability of obstruction down to anywhere in the interval (0%,100%].

• The statement conveys essentially no information whatever about the probability of obstruction.

• Mueller's weaker statement conveys slightly less than essentially no information whatever about the probability of obstruction.

So, the next time you hear someone claiming that Mueller's statement bears meaningfully on the likelihood of obstruction, you will know that either they don't know what they are talking about or are purposely trying to mislead you.  In either case, you may want to consider ignoring them in the future.  It may be a good idea not to vote for them, either.

Tariffs: It'snot as bad as you have been told

Listening to the Pundits, you would think that if a tariff of X percent is imposed on a product, the price to consumers will increase by X percent. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Consider an upward sloping supply curve (higher prices imply more quantity supplied) and a downward sloping demand curve (higher prices imply less is demanded). Suppose Country A puts an X percent tariff on a product from Country B. Any elementary microeconomics text shows that the consumer price paid by Country A’s citizens rises less than X percent and a lot less, given reasonable demand and supply curves.

To see why, suppose that the tariff leaves the quantity supplied unchanged. Then it must be that the suppliers’ after tariff price must be the same as before, because that is the only way to stay on the supply curve. That implies that the demanders’ (consumers’) after tariff price must be X percent higher than before. This is the picture Pundits present. But this cannot be, because such a price-quantity point is above the demand curve. A downward sloping to the right demand curve implies that at the initial price plus X percent demanders will not want to buy as much as before. If not as much is bought, then not as much is sold. Since the supply curve is upward sloping to the right it is downward sloping to the left. To stay on the supply curve, moving to the left toward lower quantity implies moving to a lower after tariff price to suppliers. The effect of the tariff on suppliers will be both a lower quantity sold and a lower after tariff price received. To the extent the suppliers receive a lower after tariff price than before demanders will pay an after tariff price less than X percent higher than before. Depending on the slopes of the demand and supply curves, the consumers may pay a lot less than X percent more, e.g., if the demand curve is not steep and the supply curve is steep.

The above discussion ignores that the likelihood that the country imposing the tariff often imposes it on only a limited number of other countries.

Suppose Country A imposes a tariff on a Country B product that is a commodity produced and consumed in many countries (Country C, for short). Country A’s consumers can evade the tariff by buying the product from Country C instead of from Country B. Country B is can then sell more of the product to Country C. In effect Country B will lose sales to Country A and make up the difference by sales to Country C. The result is that each country’s consumers will buy about the same amount of the product as before at about the same price. The tariff does not get paid.

Suppose Country A imposes an X percent tariff on zPhones produced by Country B. The Country A demand for Country B’s zPhones will decline to the extent that Country A’s after tariff consumer price of Country B’s zphones rises. But other countries (Country C) have the capability of producing the same zPhones at about the same cost as Country B. Country C can increase its production of zPhones and sell them to Country A. While that may be feasible only if Country C reduces its production of, say, TVs, Country B can use its erstwhile zPhone productive capacity to produce the same number of the same TVs that Country C fails to produce. The result is that Country A buys about the same number of zPhones as before at about the same price, but from Country C, Country C produces more zPhones and fewer TVs than before, and Country B produces fewer zPhones and more TVs than before. There need not be much change in worldwide production or consumption of either zPhones or TVs. In this case, nobody is likely to pay a significant zPhone tariff.