Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium
Should lunch counters have been allowed to stay segregated? No—but the question is how to disallow it. Bigoted businesses shouldn’t face threats of legal force for their racism. They should face a force much fiercer and more meaningful—the full force of voluntary social organization and a culture of equality. What’s to stop resegregation in a libertarian society? We are. Using the same social power that was dismantling Jim Crow years before legal desegregation.
The idea that it is essential for a nation to have a single legal system applying to everyone within its borders is, so far as I can tell, a modern one–there are non-Muslim examples as well of polylegal systems.
So, um, according to David Brooks, the United States has successfully returned Iraq to a condition more or less on par with the average regional disfunction and has managed to get the power to stay on a hair over half the time. This proves that "nation building works."
If you finish high school and keep a job without having children before marriage, you will almost certainly not be poor. Period. I have repeatedly felt the air go out of the room upon putting this to black audiences. No one of any political stripe can deny it. It is human truth on view. In 2004, the poverty rate among blacks who followed that formula was less than 6 percent, as opposed to the overall rate of 24.7 percentIQ is not the problem. Patience/ability to defer gratification/culture is.
SOLID-STATE lighting, the latest idea to brighten up the world while saving the planet, promises illumination for a fraction of the energy used by incandescent or fluorescent bulbs. A win all round, then: lower electricity bills and...less climate-changing carbon dioxide belching from power stations.
Well, no. Not if history is any guide. Solid-state lamps, which use souped-up versions of the light-emitting diodes that shine from the faces of digital clocks and flash irritatingly on the front panels of audio and video equipment, will indeed make lighting better. But precedent suggests that this will serve merely to increase the demand for light. The consequence may not be just more light for the same amount of energy, but an actual increase in energy consumption.
I suspect that a big reason that mathematics took over economics is that it gives you a sense of mastery. Indeed, it may give you a false sense of mastery. As you learn mathematical economics, you realize that you are getting really good at doing something that only a small group of people is able to master. And you get the sense that because you completed a mathematical proof that you accomplished something. It is very seductive.However, this is as true of String Theory, Climate Science, and a number of other fields.
Still, it is useful to put down some markers about the recently adopted Dodd-Frank Act (DFA), which looks to be the most troubling--maybe even destructive--single piece of financial legislation ever adopted.Aretae's line: Oh, look! They just screwed up the financial feedback system.
This explanation makes a prediction: If you greatly increase your animal-fat intake, your heart scan score should improve. A commenter said what he’d read on paleo-diet forums supported this prediction: “If you hang out in the paleo/low carb forums, you see this kind of thing a lot.”
Isn't a more 'European style' economy what Obama wanted? Alas, when we create an American Europe, we don't get to choose what parts transfer.
Will Wilkinson has dubbed a related phenomenon the “UN Fallacy” — the error of assuming that two areas can be usefully compared simply because they are nation-states. So, for instance, you hear nonsense related to how “China has overtaken Japan.” Of course, on a per capita basis China remains poorer than El Salvador. Yet because the Chinese have aggregated themselves into a relatively large political unit, we think of the Chinese as “getting rich” and the Salvadorians as “poor.” We think of India as surging ahead, though it has more poor people than Africa.
The embargo was a flop.The terrible seventies, then, were not the result of anti-American oil sheiks shrewdly manipulating the U.S. economy for political or religious purposes. The injuries were self-inflicted – or U.S. government-inflicted, to be precise.
The lessons from that decade, then, are these:
- Don’t interfere with the price system, and
- Don’t worry about embargoes.
Neither the failure of the environmental apocalypse to arrive nor the steady improvement in environmental conditions over the last 40 years has dampened the ardor of those eager to make hair shirts for others to wear.
Government programs to promote homeownership are American as flag-flavored eagle pie. The first clue is that there are so many goddamn subsidies for homeownership in democratic America. The second clue is that these subsidies are so goddamn popular with Americans, probably because American culture really does relentlessly assault Americans with the American idea that owning an American house is an essential American part of the best and most authentic American way of American living.RTWT.
Marijuana was perfectly legal throughout the United States until the city of El Paso first outlawed it in 1914, a move that was followed in the same year by national criminalization with the Harrison Act.
Ford raised workers’ wages for two reasons, neither of which had anything to do with raising consumer demand for his automobiles. The first reason was to reduce worker turnover. [...] Second, because the $5 wage was conditioned upon Ford’s workers learning English, as well as their steering clear of alcohol and gambling [...] the higher wage was an incentive for workers to be more reliable and productive while on the job.
A reporter tried to track down the Russian spies who infiltrated Cambridge in a country run by leaders who believe in secrecy and state control over everything.
the experience of being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and being worthy of happinessIn other words, self-esteem consists of 2 parts:
Many more quotable sentiments in there too:It’s no wonder “free enterprise” and “free markets” have fallen into such ill repute among broad sections of the American public. You can thank their most vocal defenders. If “free markets” meant what the folks at FreedomWorks and AEI meant by them, I’d hate them too.
Fortunately, though, they don’t. Free markets — genuine free markets, without subsidies or protections for big business — are the enemies of corporate power. But you’ll never see anyone saying that on CNBC or the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
The people who talk most about “free enterprise” and “free markets” in American political discourse, far from actually favoring those things, have appropriated the label “free enterprise” for their system of corporate welfare, corporate protectionism, and crony capitalism.Libertarians mostly don't count, not being really IN the American political discourse.
This is probably because they interact socially with a far less age-segregated set of people (our public school system is really quite unique, and profoundly unnatural that way, it is as if someone read Lord of the Flies and decided it was prescriptive rather than descriptive).
Government exists to provide benefits to politicians and the politically connected – no other reason.
Now it is certainly true that of the trio “Prosperity, Liberty, Democracy,” Hayek puts prosperity first and liberty second–or, rather, that freedom of contract needs to be more closely safeguarded than freedom of speech, for if there is freedom of contract then freedom of speech will quickly reappear, but if there is no freedom of contract than freedom of speech will not long survive. But the passage above makes me wonder whether democracy has any place in Hayek’s hierarchy of good things at all.
Reasoned public deliberation, passionate rhetorical jousting, and bullshit heritage mongering are all among the selection pressures that shape the course of cultural evolution. Foster’s worry about my sort of libertarianism isn’t really that it’s a “rationalist” ivory tower abstraction remote from the lived experience of the allegedly natively libertarianish American tradition. It’s that the application of any rational scrutiny (libertarian or not) to the efforts of conservative elites to construct bullshit American-heritage narratives tends to get in the way of elite conservative political aspirations.Translation: The conservative "good old days" is mostly a fiction.
When you try to micromanage a complex system, the most important virtue is humility.
Markets achieve a spontaneous order. The opposite of order is disorder. Price controls in the oil market created disorder, to the point where fights broke out in lines at gas stations.Government interference in housing markets, which helped produce the disorder known as the financial crisis, is still producing disorder
Wherever there are strong property rights, there is wealth and happiness.Wherever there are no or weak property rights, there is overuse, destruction, and misery.
when I researched the Great Depression, I was shocked at how the conservative Wall Street establishment hated dollar devaluation, despite the fact that the stock market obviously loved it. I noted (to myself) that “at least the modern WSJ is much better; they often use the market reaction to policy announcements as a way of establishing their likely effects.” I guess the WSJ has reverted back to the primitive pattern of the 1930s. “Yes, the markets are screaming for easier money, probably because it will boost the economy. But we can’t have that because it might make Obamanomics look successful. Plus ca change . . .
This isn’t rocket science. When the AD curve shifts to the left then NGDP falls (relative to trend, as in the excellent Cowen/Taborrok textbook.) That’s an adverse demand shock. We have seven members of the Fed who don’t even seem to understand the basics of AS/AD theory. Who have concocted all sorts of bizarre structural theories to explain away their failure to boost NGDP enough for a robust recovery. This is EXACTLY what happened at the Fed in the Great Depression.
Sure the recent crisis has created setbacks, such as the government takeover of GM. But the long run trend around the world has been strongly liberaltarian, and will almost certainly remain so for the foreseeable future. Just the other day Denmark decided to cut unemployment benefit eligibility from 4 years to 2 years. Think about what that means. Two French researchers (Algan and Cahuc) found that Danes had the most liberal/civic-minded attitudes on Earth. They argued that Denmark was the country most suited to have social insurance programs, because the non-deserving would be less likely to abuse the programs in Denmark than in any other country. Yet even in ultra-honest Denmark it was found that a large number of workers mysteriously found jobs immediately after their unemployment benefits ran out. So they are cutting back. Denmark already has the freest markets in the world, and now they are shrinking their welfare state. No wonder the Danes are so happy, despite dreary weather.
The bad news is that you have been the victims of a terrible swindle, denied an inheritance you deserve by contract and by your merits. And you aren’t the only ones; victims of this ripoff include the students who were on your left and on your right in high school but didn’t get into Cal, a whole generation stiffed by mine. This letter is an apology, and more usefully, perhaps a signal to start demanding what’s been taken from you so you can pass it on with interest.But then he starts into the details. And it's ...deserving of a fisking really. But I'm not sufficiently angry to do a proper fisking. Rather than blaming government parasites, public unions, and schools which are now VERY well paid, but delivering crappy results...he blames folks who want to keep the money they earn. If California's public spending hadn't increased by something like 4x the inflation*population growth increase that it has, there MIGHT have been a case. As it is, the ONLY possible explanation is that government SUCKS money and wastes it.
Based on Wilson’s string of posts, he fits squarely into what Arnold Kling describes as the MIT mantra: markets fail, let’s use government.
..
However, a lot of his posts seem blissfully unaware of public choice problems, almost as if there could never be government failure or democratic fundamentalism. I begin to wonder–is Wilson willing to apply his model of human behavior to regulating government failures? Hard to ascertain, which is too bad, because his thinking here seems better adapted to what Kling calls the GMU view of economics: sure, markets fail, but let’s use markets.I'm getting suspicious of whether anyone who argues for government action but isn't familiar with the public choice topic shouldn't just be laughed out of the room.
I buy “organic” food because it tastes better and I can, but I feel guilty about reinforcing all the kinds of delusion and superstition and viciousness that are tied up in that label. We simply cannot feed a world population of 6.6 billion without pesticides and factory farming and GMOs and preservatives in most bread; now, and probably forever, “organic” food will remain a luxury good.
Try telling its political partisans that, though. Hyped on their belief in their own virtue, and blissfully ignorant about scale problems, they have already engineered policies that have cost thousands of lives during spot famines. The potential death toll from (especially) anti-GMO policies is three orders of magnitude higher.
A few years ago, Peter Gray blogged a provocative set of claims:Foragers don’t distinguish work and play.
Foragers kids learn without being taught:
This same “free school” approach works today:
Modern childhood and schools arose for other reasons:
Gray is mostly right: forager kids learn all they need when free to play all day, forager adults work all they need without toiling, and kids can learn modern skills this way today. But there is no movement toward free schools, and I expect a wholesale move would be a disaster. Yes, it works for some students, including those who stay until graduation, but parents probably soon pull kids for whom it doesn’t work. School isn’t about learning “material”, school is about learning to accept workplace domination and ranking, and tolerating long hours of doing boring stuff exactly when and how you are told. Others seem to agree with me:
There used to be thousands of “free” schools back in the 1960s and 1970s, … The number has waned since, although … many of their ideas are used in public alternative schools and by some homeschooling families. … There are about 200 “democratic” schools around the world, including the Sudbury schools. … Many say the Sudbury model is not — and shouldn’t be — for everyone. “It’s a great model for some students — but I would say that for every kind of education.” (more)
I'm not well versed in methodological individualism, but I suspect this is the critical point, often overlooked for its uncomfortable implications....Long story short: Individual abilities and motivations matter a lot.
Supposedly, the proper use of statistics makes relying on scientific results a safe bet. But in practice, widespread misuse of statistical methods makes science more like a crapshoot.Of course most people have a successful strategy there as well. Ignore all the evidence and any statistics that doesn't conform to your preconceptions, and then claim that the other side's science is suspicious.
Left unsaid, but becoming increasingly clear even to those who generally take little interest in matters political, is the fact that every operation of government is, by definition, an exercise in “class warfare” — a raid by a political class whose very survival depends on its continued ability to loot your wallet, your wealth, your work.
Like everyone else, the political class has to eat.
Unlike everyone else, the political class proposes to eat us.
the optimal system--given our current knowledge and the importance of teacher effects--is to hire a lot of teachers on probation and then fire 80% after two years, yes 80%.My God! It's as if a feedback system is the only decent solution.
The path to making [government] smaller is to make it more devolved (most policy decided at the metro-region level), responsible (restricted suffrage), accountable (ending civil service laws), and coherent/hierarchical (an "independent" agency is an unaccountable agency).The Aretaevian position is suspiciously close to the Friedman III/Romer position, but probably differs in some respects.
Imagine what would happen if education policy were decentralized. In order to have influence, a self-styled education expert would have to convince families that the expert has helpful ideas about how their children ought to be educated. And in order for unprofitable education programs to receive funding, a self-styled charitable giving expert would have to convince donors to support those programs. Instead, what we have is a political process. To get your preferred education policy adopted, you ignore individual families and donors and instead go straight to Congress. If the results are clumsy and wasteful, so be it. "We" must have these policies, just as "we" must have government-guaranteed mortgages. Any other point of view is beyond the pale.
Anyone supporting high-status positions, in or out of science (Climate Science, Relativity, any consensus) needs their credibility downgraded. Monkeybrains wish to be high status, and wishes alter observations, not just conclusions.Now along comes a post ridiculing Keynesian economics in the context of the stimulus:
The entire ethical structure of the free market was destroyed so that Sheila Bair could be spared the inconvenience of euthanizing crippled, syphilitic ghouls like Citigroup and Bank of America....and I realized...Keynesian economics is a perfect storm of consensus opinion that serves both the status and the monetary interests of the folks in charge and the liberal academy (which is >50% funded by the government, even in the "private" colleges and universities). It basically says that government should give money to their cronies in big business and big labor (actual effect, not pretend effect).
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