An interesting perspective on climate change

 Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Business School, the Hoover Institution, and Stanford University has an interesting paper, "Welfare in the 21st century: Increasing development, reducing inequality, the impact of climate change, and the cost of climate policies".  It is published  in Elsevier's journal "Technological Forecasting and Social Change.

Here is the link.

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ABSTRACT

Climate change is real and its impacts are mostly negative, but common portrayals of devastation are unfounded. Scenarios set out under the UN Climate Panel (IPCC) show human welfare will likely increase to 450% of today's welfare over the 21st century. Climate damages will reduce this welfare increase to 434%.

Arguments for devastation typically claim that extreme weather (like droughts, floods, wildfires, and hurricanes) is already worsening because of climate change. This is mostly misleading and inconsistent with the IPCC literature. For instance, the IPCC finds no trend for global hurricane frequency and has low confidence in attribution of changes to human activity, while the US has not seen an increase in landfalling hurricanes since 1900. Global death risk from extreme weather has declined 99% over 100 years and global costs have declined 26% over the last 28 years.

Arguments for devastation typically ignore adaptation, which will reduce vulnerability dramatically. While climate research suggests that fewer but stronger future hurricanes will increase damages, this effect will be countered by richer and more resilient societies. Global cost of hurricanes will likely decline from 0.04% of GDP today to 0.02% in 2100.

Climate-economic research shows that the total cost from untreated climate change is negative but moderate, likely equivalent to a 3.6% reduction in total GDP.

Climate policies also have costs that often vastly outweigh their climate benefits. The Paris Agreement, if fully implemented, will cost $819–$1,890 billion per year in 2030, yet will reduce emissions by just 1% of what is needed to limit average global temperature rise to 1.5°C. Each dollar spent on Paris will likely produce climate benefits worth 11¢.

Long-term impacts of climate policy can cost even more. The IPCC's two best future scenarios are the “sustainable” SSP1 and the “fossil-fuel driven” SSP5. Current climate-focused attitudes suggest we aim for the “sustainable” world, but the higher economic growth in SSP5 actually leads to much greater welfare for humanity. After adjusting for climate damages, SSP5 will on average leave grandchildren of today's poor $48,000 better off every year. It will reduce poverty by 26 million each year until 2050, inequality will be lower, and more than 80 million premature deaths will be avoided.

Using carbon taxes, an optimal realistic climate policy can aggressively reduce emissions and reduce the global temperature increase from 4.1°C in 2100 to 3.75°C. This will cost $18 trillion, but deliver climate benefits worth twice that. The popular 2°C target, in contrast, is unrealistic and would leave the world more than $250 trillion worse off.

The most effective climate policy is increasing investment in green R&D to make future decarbonization much cheaper. This can deliver $11 of climate benefits for each dollar spent.

More effective climate policies can help the world do better. The current climate discourse leads to wasteful climate policies, diverting attention and funds from more effective ways to improve the world.

This article will outline how to establish a rational climate policy in the context of many other, competing global issues.

It takes its starting point from the standard climate models as described by the UN Climate Panel, the IPCC, in its latest, fifth assessment (IPCC 2013a) and impact models (IPCC 2014a) along with its special 1.5°C report (IPCC 2018), showing that climate change is real and man-made, and CO₂ and other greenhouse gasses lead to higher global temperatures, which on average cause a net detriment to humanity.

Global warming1 has become a top priority across the world with almost every nation committing to a target of limiting global temperature rise at or just above 1.5°C. This is partly because climate impacts have been presented repeatedly as catastrophic, leading many people to believe that unmitigated climate change is likely to lead to devastated lives, collapsing societies, and even human extinction.

These claims of devastation are almost entirely unwarranted and can lead to wasteful climate policies in which resources are allocated and decisions made driven by fear and panic. In order to identify rational climate policies, it is first necessary to address these misplaced concerns about devastating impacts from climate change.

I will do this with data from the most respected sources. Given the divisive nature of the climate debate, my first choice where available will be data from the UN Climate Panel, the IPCC, which is respected by all parties. I will use global data where available and I will mostly use US data when I refer to a specific country, partly because of the much greater availability of long-term data for the US, and partly because of its uniquely highlighted profile in the global climate conversation.

The first chapter of this article will explore the backdrop to the climate conversation. It will show that the likely future is not one of devastation. Instead, the IPCC's own scenarios show it is likely that human welfare will continue to make dramatic increases throughout the 21st century. Welfare will be described throughout the article mostly using GDP per capita because, despite criticism, this measurement correlates highly with almost all desirable variables, including higher life satisfaction, better health, longer life, less child death, higher education, less malnutrition, less poverty, more access to water, sanitation, and electricity, along with better environmental performance.

Further, inequality in the 21st century is expected to decline precipitously to levels not experienced in the 20th or even 19th century. Each person will have access to much more energy, which is crucial to deliver opportunities and lift people out of poverty, and since services will get even more effective, the experienced increase in opportunities will be even greater.

This backdrop of dramatic and inclusive welfare growth is challenged in Chapters 2 and 3 by the specter of global warming, leading to worse lives and lower welfare.

In Chapter 2, I will first detail how it is possible for most people to believe things are getting worse, whereas the data shows this mostly to be untrue. The first factor is the Expanding Bull's-Eye Effect, which points out increasing population and more wealth lead to higher damages from natural disasters. A hurricane or flood hitting a sparsely populated Florida in 1900 would have done little damage. A similar strength hurricane or flood hitting a densely populated, wealthy Florida in 2020 leads to much higher costs. The cause is not climate change, but social change.

The second factor is that it is common in the climate change literature for projected impacts from climate change to disregard adaptation. If sea levels rise some 70 cm until 2100 and no nation adapts and maintains dikes at today's heights, the world will suffer catastrophic floodings possibly costing more than a hundred trillion dollars a year. It is entirely implausible that nations will not adapt and heighten dikes and other defenses as sea levels rise and incomes more than triple. Using more realistic assumptions of adaptation, impacts typically go from catastrophic to small or even declining.

Next, I look at four areas where escalating climate impacts are popularly portrayed: droughts, floods, wildfires, and hurricanes. I explore the claims that they already impact us negatively because of global warming, and that future warming will make them even worse. These are shown to be mostly incorrect and unsubstantiated in the actual descriptions in the IPCC reports and peer-reviewed literature.

Finally, I will present two general indicators that demonstrate increased resilience: that the number and risk of climate-related deaths have dropped by more than 95%, and that the fractional cost of climate impacts is not increasing, but actually decreasing.

In Chapter 3 I will present the generalized costs of climate impacts that are estimated in so-called Integrated Assessment Models (IAM). These show that realistically, the costs of unmitigated climate impacts are in the order of 3.6% of GDP by 2100 — a problem, but not a devastation. I will then address worries that the IAM costs miss challenges including catastrophes, ocean acidification, and biodiversity loss. Many aspects are already included, and a sizable 0.73 percentage points is added for omitted costs. Taking account of the actual estimates of these potentially left-out costs shows that it is likely that they are fully included within this buffer. I finally show that even with sizable climate cost estimates, the vast, expected baseline increase in welfare will in no way be compromised. While the overall welfare increase is about 600–1,000%, the decrease is one or two orders of magnitude lower.

This background now gives us a baseline from which we can evaluate climate policies, estimating their costs and benefits. Chapter 4 evaluates the costs and benefits of the most important current climate policy, the Paris Agreement. It is found that Paris will deliver very little CO₂ or temperature reduction at a cost of $1 trillion–$2 trillion per year. While these reductions will have benefits, it is likely that the costs will vastly outweigh the benefits, with every $1 of cost achieving 11¢ of climate benefit.

Chapter 5 allows us to consider the generally optimal climate policy. This emphasizes that climate policy consists of two costs: climate costs and climate policy costs. Each impacts welfare, so we need to minimize the total cost and hence minimize the total reduction in global welfare. This is achieved using Nordhaus’ DICE model, showing that with realistic assumptions, smartly designed if less effectively implemented climate policies can save us $18 trillion, or 0.4% of all future global GDP.

However, the more important finding is that we need to avoid policies that would attempt to achieve reductions of 2°C or 1.5°C. This would be a devastating policy for the world, eradicating at least $250 trillion in welfare, or 5.4% of all future global GDP.

Chapter 6 puts the climate problem in perspective. While global warming definitely is a challenge, it is a rather small issue compared to most other human challenges, both measured in welfare and in number of dead. It shows that most people rank issues like health, education, and nutrition much higher, and that most of the world's most effective policies can do much more than what even effective climate change policies can do.

The conclusion outlines the need for policymakers to weigh approaches to make sure we tackle the negative impacts of climate change without ending up incurring more costs by engaging in excessively expensive climate policies. It affirms that we should not remain passive in the face of global warming, but we should also avoid overly ambitious and costly climate policies, and must ensure that the world remains on a growth path that will continue to deliver significant welfare gains, especially for the world's poorest.

The New York Times gets it wrong on COVID-19

David Leonhardt has a Good Morning column in the 4/13/21 New York Times. It is titled “With Covid cases rising, more experts think the U.S. should start delaying second vaccine shots. The column focuses on the possible benefit of delaying second vaccine shots in order to increase the number of people who have been vaccinated at least once. I will not point out the many flaws in DL’s argument about this. Instead, I will focus on his being unable to resist taking a shot at the US record on cases and deaths vs. Britain’s – where second shots have been delayed. Here is what DL says.

"There is real-world evidence — from Britain — showing large benefits from maximizing the number of people who get one shot."

"Britain and the U.S. have now given a roughly similar number of total shots per capita. The difference is that Britain has deliberately delayed second shots, by up to 12 weeks. The results are impressive."

"Despite being the country where the B.1.1.7 variant was first detected, Britain now has the pandemic under better control than the U.S. does. Both cases and deaths have fallen more sharply, highlighting the power of a single vaccine dose. “The levels of antibodies after the first shot are sky-high,” Dr. Robert Wachter of the University of California, San Francisco, told me."

DL then presents the following chart as justification for his conclusion that Britain has done better than the US..

Note that the red line (Britain) crosses the blue line (US) in late February. Measured from then, Britain’s COVID deaths per capita decline faster than the US’s. On the other hand, the US deaths per capita never reached the far higher peak of Britain’s. Measured from that peak, Britain’s rate of decline in deaths per capita relative to the US is truly impressive.

Let me describe what would have been an even more impressive result – according to DL’s method of analysis. Suppose Britain had done nothing about COVID and it had spread rapidly, killing 90 % of the population by, say, September of 2020. That would have guaranteed a really high peak in deaths per capita ended by herd immunity with a subsequent really rapid decline in deaths per capita subsequent to the peak. The comparison between the US and Britain in deaths per capita after that would have favored Britain even more – there would have been hardly any deaths per capital in Britain.

What this example illustrates is the incredible inadequacy of DL’s analysis. Either he knew the flaws in his analysis or he didn’t. In either case, we can conclude that DL is not credible.

What should we make of the chart? What is more important, the death rate per capita at particular times or the total number of deaths per capita? Clearly, the latter. And the chart suggests no clear superiority for Britain based on total deaths per capita. For the period shown in the chart, the difference between the total deaths per capita in Britain and those in the US is the area between the red line and the blue line. Here, the higher peak of the red curve and the higher level of the red curve in the mid October to December 2020 offsets to a large extent – and perhaps completely – the other times when the red curve is moderately below the blue curve. In other words, a more sensible analysis shows no clear advantage for Britain and a possible advantage for the US.

Putting COVID-19 in perspective

The following table shows how out of proportion the reaction to COVID-19 has been.

 

The Cultural Revolution at Universities - .the End of the Road for Freedom

 Lama Abu Odeh, a law professor at Georgetown University, at Quillette.

LAO is on target.  The United States is no longer a free country and it is the academics that have destroyed it.

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Sandra Sellers, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Law Center, was forced to resign because she was caught on video saying to her colleague and co-teacher David Batson: “I hate to say this… I ended up having this, you know, angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are blacks. Happens almost every semester. And it’s like, ‘Oh, come on!’ You know? Got some really good ones but there’s usually some that are just plain at the bottom. It drives me crazy. Of course there are the good ones… but come on…” Batson appeared in the video nodding embarrassedly.

The video was a class recording which is only accessible to students in the class and is password protected. The conversation took place after students had logged out and the professors, unaware that the recording of the class ran for 10 minutes after the end of class time, thought they were having a private conversation. A student (not enrolled in the class) posted the video on Twitter and it instantly got thousands of retweets. In response, the dean acted by first referring the culprit professors to the university’s Equity and Diversity Committee for investigation and then, after the Black Law Student Association of Georgetown (BLSA) issued a statement declaring what was said was racist and demanding that Sellers be fired, he terminated Professor Sellers’s contract. Batson was placed on administrative leave pending an investigation by the Diversity Committee, which will also investigate whether the professors’ alleged bias affected the grades they gave their students. He later resigned. The dean described the conversation between him and Sellers as “abhorrent.”

What was interesting was what ensued afterwards. The black faculty at Georgetown Law issued a statement denouncing what Sellers said, describing it as “grounded in white supremacist thought.” The statement argued that Sellers’s comments amounted to a stereotype about black students that inevitably had a negative effect on their performance and called for revisiting all the grades awarded by her. The statement insisted that her comments were not “unique” as the “legacy of white supremacy is insidious” and called on professors who “operate from unspoken white supremacist notions… to examine their own flawed thought patterns and correct them.” A black professor called for non-black faculty to issue a statement “not necessarily in support of the letter already written, but from the position of their privilege within racialized spaces like the classroom” and wondered “in what numbers would such a letter be supported and with what reservations?” Quickly and on cue, a statement by the non-black faculty was drafted in which the signatories “acknowledge[d] [their] responsibility as non-Black faculty members to engage in the constant work of examining and revising [their] own flawed premises.” They also “acknowledge[d] the many levels at which [they] must confront ongoing white supremacist notions underlying ideas of merit that may contaminate assessment and performance.” This sentiment was repeated four times in the statement, each time drafted slightly differently but making the same point. Close to every member of Georgetown Law’s non-black faculty (and others) signed the letter.

I, and a few others, withheld our signatures.

In the face of this overwhelming support by the non-black faculty, two white professors of the boomer generation with plenty of progressive credentials pushed back.

One agreed with the general framing of the incident as described in the statement by the black faculty but worried about the precedent of firing a professor for expressing her views to a colleague in what she had good reason to think was a private conversation, especially as this firing was in violation of Georgetown’s policies on secondary use of videos recording class content. Georgetown’s policy prohibits secondary use of these videos by anyone for any purpose whatsoever, with primary use being confined to students enrolled in the relevant class.

This was followed by another email in which this professor expressed exasperation at the twin statements on the grounds that they handed the political Right an easy target from a culture war perspective and suggested a more earnest effort was needed to address the question of poor performance by minorities at Georgetown Law. If they were performing badly, then surely the faculty needed to figure out ways to better serve them. He called for putting aside the narrow conception of merit which underpinned the poor evaluation of some students, linked as it is to filling vacancies at rich law firms, and suggested instead training students to acquire a range of skills for different types of employment.

The other professor who pushed back complained that the two statements relied overmuch on the notion of “unconscious bias” which presupposed the problem is linked to the shortcomings of particular individuals, when, in fact, “structural racism” is to blame. She expressed sorrow for the destruction of the career of Professor Sellers without due process and insisted that structural racism would not be cured by diversity training but required the thoughtful use of additional resources for “unprepared low performing students”. She went on to advocate that we redesign our courses so that they’re more reflective of the experiences of minority groups. While she began her email by describing the torment she went through on whether to “sign or not sign” the statement by the non-black faculty, the male professor expressed his opinion without, in his words, “sugar coating it,” and described the statement by non-black faculty as a form of “virtue signaling.”

Both of these statements were met by silence.

The silence to my mind is telling. It speaks of the lack of resources within progressive thinking that could be drawn upon to resist the trend that has bedeviled American academia over the past few years. The academy is a different place today than it was only a year ago and was different a year ago than it was five years before. Terror and dread fill academic workers, professors, and staff alike, and it is everywhere. Neither the call for distinguishing between unconscious bias and structural racism; nor for dismantling “merit” so that “minorities” succeed, seem able to do the work the authors of these emails want them to do. They fail to deliver responses of the kind, “Let’s just talk about this. Maybe the problem is overdetermined and is not reducible to ‘unconscious bias.’” What they beget instead is a combination of dread and virtuous self-congratulation. These two sentiments, dread married to virtue, constitute to my mind the affective embodiment of progressive ideology prevalent among white liberals as developed in its most privileged space: academia. They are typical. They are two faces of the same coin: flip and you see dread, flip again and you see virtue.

Both of the push-back statements by the rebel academics take it for granted that many of the assumptions made by those within the progressive camp, as represented by the two statements, are correct. One idea, which neither challenges, is that “minorities” are in a bad place in contemporary America simply in virtue of being minorities. Having agreed with this foundational premise, the two dissenters assume that debate is possible on how best to go about fixing the problem. But the problem is the ideology that frames the question in this way.

Progressive liberals are blind to the fact that there is a regime take-over apace everywhere in academic institutions. A new ruling elite is taking over academic institutions by using its “minority status” to exercise a “soft” coup and is appealing to the minoritarianism of progressive ideology to legitimize its coup—or, if you like, to “manufacture consent.” I will call the adherents of this ideology the “progressoriat.”

The reason that challenging any aspect of this dominant ideology is taboo is because it leaves you vulnerable to the charge that you are uncomfortable with the project of empowering minorities—not just the transfers of power from traditional elites to historically disadvantaged groups that has already begun to take place in the academy, but further transfers of power. The only acceptable response when confronted by any aspect of the ideology that has facilitated this coup is to enthusiastically endorse it—to celebrate it. If you’re not a minority, anything less risks being interpreted as dread at the prospect of your own imminent loss of status—or, if you are, as evidence that your soul has been “colonized” by white supremacists. As I said, virtue as the other side of dread.

The position of the progressoriat in relation to this coup is akin to that of communist activists in relation to a communist takeover. At first they see it as representing what they always fought for; then with time they find themselves having to decide whether its first atrocity is to be criticized or understood as necessary; then, when the next atrocity takes place, they feel they must tolerate it because they didn’t object to the first atrocity and, before long, a time comes when any objection can only be made at a huge cost to themselves. The unfolding history of the new coup is being written every day across the domain of academic institutions in the US as the progressoriat watch muffled, hesitant objecting in private, and then, when someone makes their reservations public, finding themselves at risk of being suspended or losing their jobs.

The new elite taking over academic institutions has at its disposal an arsenal of tools to perpetuate its rule. It not only postures as representative of others in the way communists did—the “intelligentsia” representing the worker or the peasant in the latter’s case and representing victim groups in the former’s. The new elite can also represent itself as victims, an opportunity even communists would have baulked at. Members of the new elite have no hesitation at weaponizing their feelings, silencing opponents by claiming they’ve offended them. And, of course, such claims are readily accepted by the progressoriat because of their acceptance that minorities are necessarily oppressed. In this way, the new power elite can present itself as being victims, as well as representing victims. In other words, it has the power to make itself The Cause. This is why the insistence on the ubiquity of unconscious bias is important: it allows the new elite to consolidate their status by continually self-referencing as victims. Bias being everywhere means that the new ruling class, in spite of having seized power, can continue to present themselves as being oppressed. By constantly claiming to be offended, triggering Pavlovian apologies and vows to “do better” from the progressoriat, who appear to have endless reservoirs of self-abnegation, the new elite establishes rituals that renew its rule and solicit ongoing consent to this rule.

The ranks of this new ruling class are refreshed by immigrant academics who come to understand themselves in the way progressivism understands them: as minorities who can also act victim-like if they want—a precious endowment in the cultural academic market. Intersectionality awaits to welcome them and give them a warm hug. They can be treated on principle as black-adjacent. To do that, they quickly learn that they have to concede leadership to their black colleagues as having the greatest claim to victimhood. If they don’t play the victim card, they throw away valuable currency when it comes to shinning up the academy’s greasy pole. A colleague of mine commented that I was wasting precious victimhood resources by refusing to sign the statement by non black faculty: Muslim, Palestinian, woman, dadidadida. This is the cleverness of minoritarian rule: a coalition of minorities that, collectively, form a majority but that is nevertheless always able to invoke its minoritatian status to preserve its power. Power is presented as the absence of power to preserve actual power.

The progressoriat are unable to talk about their impending demise because they have already used their own institutional power over decades to drive away conservatives. They turned their academic institution into a partisan echo chamber. Residing in an echo chamber only increases your moral certitude. Now they are being given a taste of their own brutal medicine. Meantime, the new elite is acting ruthlessly and impatiently and is only happy with declarations of complete submission. Any sign of hesitation on the part of a signatory—”Maybe we should talk about free speech too?”—is met with expressions of exasperation by the all-powerful members of the victim minority faculty. No hesitation or nuance is allowed: nothing but unequivocal loyalty oaths. The progressoriat can only repeat, “I believe in the cause. I believe. I believe. Believe me I believe.”

If this echoes a Maoist take-over, that’s because it is. It passes the sniff test.

Student activists sniffing a transfer of power are pushing it as far as they can, understanding it as part of a general generational take-over of elite institutions. Today’s students show little interest in free speech and appear more interested in moral point-scoring, especially graduate students. Polls show young academics pumped up more on moral steroids than intellectual ones. Why stop when you are winning? The situation is in flux which opens the door for moral entrepreneurs to up the ante. Some enterprising students at Georgetown Law complained to Slate magazine that the dean allowed the Federalist Society to host an event on a multi-racial working class by “three white men.” Moral entrepreneurship means that what it is to be racist is being redefined daily with someone’s demise—an ongoing post-fact articulation of the definition of “bias”—and why not declare conservatism racist while you’re at it?

The new elite in academia is part of a more general phenomenon of the rise of the technocrats who have found a home in the Democratic Party so that academic institutions, who produce these technocrats, are now the direct and unmediated suppliers of a political class whose educated credentials are its claim to rule. Academia has not only become without rival the incubating center of ruling class entitlement—and acts as a result as an extended arm of the Democratic Party—but it has also refashioned itself after the party. Like the latter, the academy acts like a council of elders managing various ethnic tribes residing under its jurisdiction. Note the rush to get out a statement when a minority group has been under assault: a group of sex workers are shot by a sex addict and the President of Harvard rushes out a statement opposing anti-Asian racism (and blaming Trump) because the killer was white and the victims Asians. So did Biden. Technocrats of virtue responding to lobbies of virtue.

The rise of the technocrat is itself reflective of the shift in US liberalism to diversity liberalism. Global capital disenfranchised the white working class by moving its investments overseas and replacing it with a diverse workforce recruited globally through lax enforcement of immigration rules. Technocratic managerialism armed with diversity liberalism is the way global capital rules. Because the white working class has lost power in the process it has to be continually depicted as having earned its demise. It has earned it by being morally compromised: in Hillary Clinton’s words, “the basket of deplorables.” Black elites coming to power as part of this shift feel comfortable exercising class dominance by deriding the white working class as racist. The continual invocation of the storming of the capitol as an expression of white supremacy is par for the course.

In Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got there (2000), David Brooks describes the displacement of the WASPs as the dominant ethnic group in the US with the introduction in the early 60s of “merit” as the primary criterion of admission to universities, especially the Ivies. The new criterion was introduced by WASPs themselves, thus paving the way to their own demise and conceding power to a new emergent group that found its own flourishing within “merit”: the high-performing Jew. This led, a generation later, according to Brooks, to the rise of the Bobos (the bourgeois bohemians) as the new cultural and economic elite. They were bourgeois because they had acquired great riches given the demand for educated labor in the new global economy they had helped create—but they were also bohemian because they imbibed the modernist progressivist values of their Ivy League professors. In other words, like their predecessors, they laid the groundwork for their own destruction by embracing the ideology that evolved into the identity politics of the 90s.

The academic Bobos are now being displaced. Like the WASPs before them, they have written the script of their own demise—in their case, through a dedicated investment in the rise of the minority academic. The progressive ideology they subscribed to left them with no tools to resist their impending fall. What should we call the new elite? The Bobus—the bourgeois bureaucrats? They are bourgeois because they’ve benefitted from the rise in demand for their representative labor in the market of diversity liberalism; and bureaucratic because they have devised the rules enshrining various speech codes and policies that buttress their power. The bohemian questioning of conventional morality, and the drive for experimentation, have been replaced by the stern bureaucrat enforcing a new morality, with its demand for penance for past sins.

When I protested to the faculty diversity trainer, a law professor from the West Coast, that the real minority at Georgetown Law are the conservative students who have been telling me about how isolated and beleaguered they feel, especially with the flood of emails from the administration when Trump was in office denouncing racism, without defining what it is or indeed giving a single account of a racist incident, she quipped, “They don’t have to be at Georgetown. They can go to Notre Dame!”

Thomas Sowell: Random Thoughts

One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.

Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest.

It is a little much when people come to this country preaching hatred against others and demanding tolerance for themselves.

Those who want to take our money and gain power over us have discovered the magic formula: Get us envious or angry at others and we will surrender, in installments, not only our money but our freedom. The most successful dictators of the 20th century-Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao-all used this formula and now class warfare politicians here are doing the same.

As a black man, I am offended when white people take the likes of Al Sharpton seriously-or pretend to.

People who are very aware that they have more knowledge than the average person are often very unaware that they do not have one-tenth of the knowledge of all of the average persons put together.

Watching CNN after watching Fox News Network is like drinking skim milk after you have gotten used to egg nog.

One of these days the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals may declare the Constitution unconstitutional.

Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.

How Bidenomics Seeks to Remake the Economic Consensus Into Fake Economics

 Greg Ip at the Wall Street Journal

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If you studied, practiced or wrote about economic policy in the past few decades you probably absorbed certain rules about how the world worked: governments should avoid deficits, liberalize trade and trust in markets. Taxes and social programs shouldn’t discourage work.

This canon came to be known globally as the “Washington consensus” and in the U.S. as neoliberalism. The latter label has always been more popular with its critics than its adherents. Nonetheless, by fusing the free-market foundations of classical liberalism with some redistribution and regulation, the term broadly described the economic policy of western leaders from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher through Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to George W. Bush, Barack Obama and David Cameron.

Neoliberalism has since fallen from grace under former President Donald Trump and now President Biden. But where Mr. Trump’s populism was never grounded in economics, Mr. Biden’s embrace of bigger government is: not the economics of the establishment but of left-wing thinkers in academia and think tanks and on Twitter.

Their views aren’t unified or entirely original. They lean heavily on ideas first advanced by Britain’s John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s, Democratic presidential advisers Walter Heller, James Tobin and Arthur Okun in the 1960s and Larry Summers in the 2010s—who, ironically, is often branded as being the embodiment of neoliberalism. All considered fiscal policy critical to achieving full employment.

So while the successor to neoliberalism lacks a label, Bidenomics will do for now. Here are some differences between the old and new thinking, though this doesn’t capture the breadth of views across both camps and in the Biden administration itself.

Growth

Old view: Scarcity is the default condition of economies: the demand for goods, services, labor and capital is limitless, their supply is limited. Over time the economy tends to operate at potential, i.e. full employment, so faster growth requires raising potential by increasing incentives to work and invest. Macroeconomic tools—monetary and fiscal policy—are only occasionally needed to deal with recessions and inflation.

New view: Slack is the default condition of economies. Growth is held back not by supply but chronic lack of demand, calling for continuously stimulative fiscal and monetary policy. J.W. Mason, an economics professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice whose writing is a sort of handbook of post-neoliberal thought, explained on Twitter: The “economy doesn’t operate at potential on average, but is normally (at least in recent decades) somewhere well below it.” That suggests, he said, that “‘depression economics’ applies basically all of the time.”
Inflation and Fiscal Policy

Old view: Fiscal policy shouldn’t push unemployment below the level that causes inflation to rise, which would force the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates.

New view: Fiscal and monetary policy should push unemployment as low as they can because low unemployment doesn’t cause inflation and if eventually it does, that’s socially much less costly than persistent unemployment.

Debts and Deficits

Old view: Because savings are scarce, government budget deficits push up interest rates and crowd out private investment and should be avoided except during recessions.

New view: Low interest rates globally show that savings are plentiful and demand is chronically weak, so deficits aren’t harmful and may be necessary. Mr. Summers has labeled this secular stagnation. “Modern monetary theory”—which few economists, even on the left, embrace—goes further, arguing deficits never crowd out private investment or raise interest rates.
Social Programs

Old view: Aid should be targeted to those who need it most because money is scarce. Aid should encourage work because that raises gross domestic product and confers dignity. Thus, unemployment insurance is better than rebate checks and support for the poor should be linked to work.

New view: Because money isn’t scarce—see above—aid can and should be universal so that no one falls between the cracks. GDP and paid work are overrated because much of what makes life worthwhile, such as caregiving, is generated outside the market. This is the rationale for universal basic income and, to some extent, Mr. Biden’s expanded child tax credit.

Markets and Incentives

Old view: High tax rates on income and profits discourage work and investment while high minimum wages reduce employment for the low skilled. Market mechanisms can achieve social goals such as lower greenhouse gas emissions more cheaply than fiat regulations.

New view: Monopoly power and barriers to market entry are pervasive, enabling the rich and corporations to accumulate far more wealth and profits—and pay workers less—than a truly competitive market would permit. Higher tax rates have little effect on incentives and higher minimum wages have no effect on employment. Market mechanisms like carbon prices perpetuate existing inequities.

Bidenomics in part reflects what economists have observed in the past 20 years: government debt rose sharply while interest rates fell and unemployment hit historic lows without unleashing inflation. New research found policies like minimum wages and tax cuts affected behavior much less than textbooks predicted.

But Bidenomics is more a political movement than a school of economic thought. The Democratic base has moved left, energized by inequality, climate change and the coronavirus pandemic, as well as by Mr. Trump and the Republican Party’s rightward shift. That base now seeks, through Mr. Biden, to reshape the economy and society for years to come.

The problem with economic policies subordinated to political imperatives is that they have no limiting principle: if $3 trillion in stimulus is OK, why not $6 trillion? If a $15 minimum wage is harmless, why not $30?

Mr. Biden can ignore limiting principles for now for one reason above all: interest rates are near zero. In fact, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is the single most important player in Bidenomics. But low rates and the Fed’s relaxed attitude toward inflation are products of today’s circumstances, not permanent new features of the economy. The longer Bidenomics proceeds as if limits don’t exist, the more likely it is to hit them.

Gun ownership and the per capita murder rate

Here is a link to a six minute video on the per capita murder rate and gun ownership.

WARNING: anti-gunners should not view this if they are at risk of a stroke or heart attack.

No Virginia, there has not been a proper investigation into the origins of COVID-19

Here is a link to an open letter concerning investigating the origins of COVID-19.

More lying by the Biden Administration

 Here is Jonathan Turley exposing the Biden Administration - and Biden - for the liars they are.

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We have been discussing the false statements made by President Joe Biden and White House Press Secretary Jan Psaki to support the boycott of Georgia over its new voting law. Yet, the White House is not the only ones seemingly doubling down on that narrative. The MLB refused to reconsider its controversial decision to move the gam from Atlanta. It is now sending the game to Denver. It is a move that will only heighten objections. Colorado also requires identification for voting — one of the key points of objection to Georgia. New polling shows that, even after this campaign, Americans continue to overwhelmingly support such mandatory identification rules with almost 75 percent in favor of such rules.

During an interview on ESPN, Biden repeated his claim that the law is “Jim Crow on steroids” and added: “Imagine passing a law saying you cannot provide water or food for someone standing in line to vote, can’t do that? C’mon! Or you’re going to close a polling place at 5 o’clock when working people just get off?”

As we previously discussed, it is hard to “imagine” because it is not true and the White House knows that it is not true. I will not repeat the clearly false claim about closing polling places early. As the Washington Post noted, “the net effect [of the Georgia law] is … to expand the opportunities to vote for most Georgians, not limit them.” The use of the provision to suggest a reduction in voting hours was a knowing misrepresentation by those seeking to justify the federalization of election laws in Congress. Despite being called out on the false statement, President Biden continues to repeat it.

Opponents of the new law have also enraged some Georgians over the move (particularly in moving the game from a city with a black majority to a city with a small black population). There have also been controversial arguments beyond the Biden claims. That includes the argument of former Clinton lawyer Marc Elias that the Georgia voters cannot not be expected to be locate their driver’s license numbers on their licenses — a claim denounced by critics as racist.

Colorado has some provisions that are more strict and some that are more lenient than Georgia. For example, Georgia allows for 17 days of in-person early voting including two optional Sundays while Colorado only allows 15.

Colorado also requires voter identification for in person voting and a copy with mail-in voting.

Colorado does automatically sends absentee ballots to all registered voters rather than require a request. However, the MLB seemed to struggle to find a venue. Indeed, Georgia legislators have suggested adopting the laws in New York and Delaware which have some more stringent provisions than Georgia.

The 10 radical new rules that are changing America

 Victor Davis Hanson gets it right yet again.  A better title of his piece would have been "The 10 radical new rules that are destroying America".

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

As to the answer to his "question" at the end of the article, My prediction is that the US is no longer a free country and will not be again. Freedom is inconsistent with intolerance of ideas, a desire to force others to behave as you think they should, allowing emotion to rule over intellect, an underappreciation of freedom, and a whole lot of other things that characterize our current social and political environment.

I have the impression that the Educational System, from K through the Ph.D. is largely to blame.  Having been a faculty member of a large university, I am impressed how many professors hold views that reflect (I'm being diplomatic here) an utter lack of contact with reality and insist on "teaching" those views to vulnerable students.

Here is his article.

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There are 10 new ideas that are changing America, maybe permanently.

1) Money is a construct. It can be created from thin air. Annual deficits and aggregate national debt no longer matter much.

Prior presidents ran up huge annual deficits, but at least there were some concessions that the money was real and had to be paid back. Not now. As we near $30 trillion in national debt and 110 percent of annual GDP, our elites either believe permanent zero interest rates make the cascading obligation irrelevant, or the larger the debt, the more likely we will be forced to address needed income redistribution.

2) Laws are not necessarily binding anymore. Joe Biden took an oath to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” But he has willfully rendered federal immigration laws null and void. Some rioters are prosecuted for violating federal laws, others not so much. Arrests, prosecutions, and trials are all fluid. Ideology governs when a law is still considered a law.

Crime rates do not necessarily matter. If someone is carjacked, assaulted or shot, it can be understood to be as much the victim’s fault as the perpetrator’s. Either the victim was too lax, uncaring and insensitive, or he provoked his attacker. How useful the crime is to the larger agendas of the Left determines whether a victim is really a victim, and the victimizer really a victimizer.

3) Racialism is now acceptable. We are defined first by our ethnicity or religion, and only secondarily — if at all — by an American commonality. The explicit exclusion of whites from college dorms, safe spaces, and federal aid programs is now noncontroversial. It is unspoken payback for perceived past sins, or a type of “good” racism. Falsely being called a racist makes one more guilty than falsely calling someone else a racist.

4) The immigrant is mostly preferable to the citizen. The newcomer, unlike the host, is not stained by the sins of America’s founding and history. Most citizens currently must follow quarantine rules and social distancing, stay out of school and obey all the laws.

Yet those entering the United States illegally need not follow such apparently superfluous COVID-19 rules. Their children should be immediately schooled without worry of quarantine. Immigrants need not worry about their illegal entry or residence in America. Our elites believe illegal entrants more closely resemble the “founders” than do legal citizens, about half of whom they consider irredeemable.

5) Most Americans should be treated as we would treat little children. They cannot be asked to provide an ID to vote. “Noble lies” by our elites about COVID-19 rules are necessary to protect “Neanderthals” from themselves.

Americans deserve relief from the stress of grades, standardized testing, and normative rules of school behavior. They still are clueless about why it is good for them to pay far more for their gasoline, heating, and air conditioning.

6) Hypocrisy is passe. Virtue-signaling is alive. Climate change activists fly on private jets. Social justice warriors live in gated communities. Multibillionaire elitists pose as victims of sexism, racism, and homophobia. The elite need these exemptions to help the helpless. It is what you say to lesser others about how to live, not how you yourself live, that matters.

7) Ignoring or perpetuating homelessness is preferable to ending it. It is more humane to let thousands of homeless people live, eat, defecate, and use drugs on public streets and sidewalks than it is to green-light affordable housing, mandate hospitalization for the mentally ill, and create sufficient public shelter areas.

8) McCarthyism is good. Destroying lives and careers for incorrect thoughts saves more lives and careers. Cancel culture and the Twitter Reign of Terror provide needed deterrence.

Now that Americans know they are one wrong word, act, or look away from losing their livelihoods, they are more careful and will behave in a more enlightened fashion. The social media guillotine is the humane, scientific tool of the woke.

9) Ignorance is preferable to knowledge. Neither statue-toppling, nor name-changing, nor the 1619 Project require any evidence or historical knowledge. Heroes of the past were simple constructs. Undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees reflect credentials, not knowledge. The brand, not what created it, is all that matters.

10) Wokeness is the new religion, growing faster and larger than Christianity. Its priesthood outnumbers the clergy and exercises far more power. Silicon Valley is the new Vatican, and Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter are the new gospels.

Americans privately fear these rules while publicly appearing to accept them. They still could be transitory and invite a reaction. Or they are already near-permanent and institutionalized.

The answer determines whether a constitutional republic continues as once envisioned, or warps into something never imagined by those who created it.