February 25, 2010
Voter Capture
In the continuing struggle of technocrats against society a variety of methods to eliminate democracy and skew systems of governance toward technocratic domination have been proposed. Consider National Juries. The reason so many bad policies are good politics is that so many people vote. … Ignorant voters … are biased towards particular errors. … The best way to improve modern politics? … The number of voters should be drastically reduced so that each voter realizes that his vote will matter. Something like 12 voters per district … selected at random from the electorate. With 535 districts in Congress … there would be 6,420 voters nationally. A random selection would deliver a proportional representation of sexes, ages, races and income groups. This would improve on the current system, in which the voting population is skewed … the old vote more than the young, the rich vote more than the poor, and so on. To safeguard against the possibility of abuse,...
February 24, 2010
Agro-Tinkering
There's always trouble in agriculture, and so politicians are always meddling. In one sense they have a mandate to govern, and policies to assure adequate food supplies are a major concern. More importantly, no politician can long survive if they are opposed by farmers. In much of the world farmers are numerous and when riled up are a potent force due to sheer numbers, but even where they are a tiny minority their concerns are influential since food is an emotional issue and they get sympathy and support from city dwellers. Political tinkering in agriculture is very nearly always destructive. The more they tinker the worse things get and the more tinkering they do. In the 1970s, India dramatically increased food production, finally allowing this giant country to feed itself. But government efforts to continue that miracle by encouraging farmers to use fertilizers have backfired, forcing the country to expand its reliance on imported food. . . Behind the...
February 20, 2010
Going Mobile
Clive Crook reasons from too little evidence, and so reaches dodgy conclusions. The finding that would surprise most Americans is that the American dream is something of a fraud. Intergenerational social mobility–your chances of moving up from poverty, or down from great wealth–are lower in the US than in most of Europe. This is something I have written about before. Research suggests plenty of mobility in the middle part of US income distribution, but not much at the ends. The American dream is a kind of opportunity club, and the very poor and very rich aren’t members. Why not? The American Idea exalts equality of opportunity over equality of outcomes. A related notion is that you must look out for yourself: society does not owe you a living. In anti-poverty policy, this expresses itself as a strong preference for conditional (EITC) or in-kind (food stamps) benefits over European-style welfare payments. My instincts are strongly in favour of this approach....
February 20, 2010
Ungovernable
Both of America's bumbling political parties accuse the other of temper tantrums. It's a common theme in public discourse: My side is full of passionate idealism -- your side is just a bunch of angry fruitcakes. Both sides play the game, but some progressives manage to achieve a level of disdain that approaches the Olympic. The Tea Party movement's proletariat and its de facto leader, Sarah Palin, seem to bring out the worst among those who profess to care about the little guy. Calling her and her supporters dimbulbs and buffoons only stokes populist resentment, of course, so the mockery plays right into her note-covered hand. Could all this talk of the angry mob represent a case of projection bias? After all, the mob is largely made up of working-class folk like Joe "The Plumber" Wurzelbacher, who had the temerity to question candidate Obama's proclivities about the redistribution of wealth. Progressivism purports to protect the toiling and exploited masses...
February 09, 2010
Fixing Blame
[T]he main damage to the credibility of climate science was done not by the Climategate emails, nor by the principals’ efforts to justify themselves. The main damage was done by the many climate scientists who affected to see nothing troublesome in what was disclosed, and the far larger number who decided it was best to say nothing. That was the really shocking thing. If climate scientists had united in criticising the methods and practices revealed by Climategate, the scandal might very well have fizzled. In saying they saw nothing wrong, they impugned their own work and that of all their colleagues, and brought the whole enterprise under suspicion. Yes, but it isn't the enterprise as a whole that is important to individual scientists, except perhaps those with a contrarian temperament and the deep security of old age and independent means. It's important to grasp this if we hope to avoid more of the same. [I]t is not enough to...
February 08, 2010
If Everyone
An image that keeps recurring to me is of powerful but uninformed groups that have been hunkered down in their bunkers reassuring one another that they are the best and brightest being dragged out into daylight by crowds that pulled the doors off of the bunkers. The self-regarding bunkerites stand blinking in the sunlight, confused and angry that their reveries have been disturbed. It isn't clear to me or to the bunkerites if they have been rescued, freed from confinement, or if they are about to be tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail. It's the IPCC that is rapidly melting rather than Himalayan glaciers. It's the stupidity of the command and control fantasies of closeted academics and politicians that are being exposed and ridiculed rather than the pragmatic good sense of the rest of society. It isn't that there are no real problems and threats, it is that the supposed elites have proposed idiotic policies...
January 22, 2010
Politics Primarily
The political imperative to get elected and then retain power noted in the previous post can in some rare cases be a truer force for good governance than ideology. Obama's unblemished string of policy failures has offended ideologues on all sides - some for too little effort and some for too much. His plunging popularity and influence have prompted some to declare him a lame duck after just one year and predict great change in the 2010 elections. The loss in Massachusetts of a safe Democratic Senate seat seems to have forced a change of direction. I’ll just note this WSJ article noting that Paul Volker, who long appeared to be sidelined in these discussions, while arguing strenuously for a separation along these lines, appears to have won the conceptual day in what amounts to a policy pivot for the administration. It’s a very interesting article describing how that came about. The policy’s evolution took months, according to congressional...
January 22, 2010
Fish Bicycles
More about the depression of the deluded. Lamenting that Democratic politicians up and down Pennsylvania Avenue have lost their enthusiasm for radical health-care ‘reform,’ Paul Krugman today maintains that “politics is supposed to be about achieving something more than your own re-election.” This notion of politics is absurdly unrealistic. Public-choice economics – pioneered by my colleagues Jim Buchanan (who boasts his own Nobel Prize) and Gordon Tullock – uncovers overwhelming evidence that politics, in fact, almost exclusively is about achieving election and re-election. So to insist that politics should be about something other than what it is really about makes as much sense as insisting, say, that snow should be hot or that donkeys should be bipedal. I make a distinction between politics and governance. A well designed governance system assumes that politics is almost exclusively about achieving election and re-election, and seeks to blunt the predations of politicians and the interest groups they represent or exploit....
January 07, 2010
Stronger Tea
There is a perception that Tea Partiers are anti or at least non-intellectual. Another reaction to the Republican cratering has been the Tea Party. The Tea Party is, if nothing else, strongly resistant to the Harvard narrative. Is that where libertarians should be making our overtures? Should we be trying to be TeaPartarians? The Tea Party poses a problem for libertarians in that the Tea Party is going to stay pretty far to the right on issues like immigration and gay marriage. But the bigger problem is one of social and educational class. The Tea Party does not have a liaison office with the Ph.D crowd. Unfortunately, it seems to me as if libertarian intellectuals would rather deal with Democrats than with the Tea Party because those intellectuals are socially more comfortable with Matt Yglesias than with Glenn Beck. I think it might be good to have some TeaPartarians, meaning intellectual supporters of free markets who are comfortable working...
December 20, 2009
It's Simple
On liberty. I know about your favorite axiom, and I usually notice when something violates it. I get that you are really really convinced by it, more so than of anything ever. But listen: I’ve heard that argument and I’m not moved. I have anticipated your response and rejected it. Liberty is a fine heuristic, but efficiency is more what I want, so I’m willing to consider sometimes violating your liberty axiom. Like you I am wary of big government, but because of bad consequences that often follow, not a liberty axiom violation. My liberty axiom is something like this. All else equal, choose liberty, but when there are large advantages to liberty violation it is sometimes worth violation. It depends on how costly the liberty violation and how large the advantage of doing so, and what sort of possible damning precedent it sets. Context and implications matter. Bad consequences is a complicated idea. However, efficiency is an equally...
December 04, 2009
Amateurism
A theme has developed in the comments following Beyond Slime about the slap-dash way that supposed climate experts conduct themselves. They make all the rookie mistakes that would lead to almost immediate failure for a business, yet they do not face the bracing winds of competition that would instruct them in professional responsibility. Worse, they are supported by and co dependent on that other bastion of amateurism - government. nationalizing GM was totally discretionary. Cap and trade legislation — which would touch every corner of the economy — didn’t have to come up during a profound recession. Even fiscal stimulus was completely elective, and it certainly didn’t have to take the form of an up-for-grabs carnival of government spending. Creating completely irresponsible, economically chilling regime uncertainty would appear to be the basic modus operandi of the Obama administration. When Geithner argues that the debate over health-care reform needs to be resolved quickly in order to establish certainty about the...
December 01, 2009
Central Casting
A large number of our governance problems are due to the childish attitude to governance held by so many, especially those on the left. it's worth pointing out here how big the mismatch is between how movies think end-of-the-world global governance looks like as compared to what would happen in the real world. When the movies do it -- and here I'm thinking about Deep Impact, The Core, Children of Men, etc. -- there's usually a coterie of Really Smart People, or a Council of Elders, or some other expert-driven body that devises a risky but brilliant plan to solve the problem. In the real world... In the real world there are no Really Smart People or any other experienced or qualified groups that could devise some workable plan. This type of thinking is a vestige of early childhood when some adult or parent really was your only hope, and really did have seemingly vast power. This phase should...
November 10, 2009
Graft
Current climate related policies are not credible either as climate mitigation strategies or development strategies since they fail to engage reality. How much do crooked politicians and others steal every year? . . . the UN estimates that $1.6 trillion each year is stolen each year and moved across national borders. . . This money is significantly greater than the value of all foreign development aid. It is more than the ten year cost of the health care bill that just passed the House. It would be enough to fund a worldwide basic health system and provide basic primary education to every child on earth. Over the next fifty years it will cost the world much more than climate change. More than that, the level of criminality and incompetence demonstrated by the existence of so much theft is the most serious obstacle to economic and social development around the world. It is not just that governments administered by thieves...
November 09, 2009
All In All
I was born into an insane world, one that had a large segment of humanity barricaded behind spite walls not intended so much to keep outsiders out as to keep insiders in. Freedom was imprisoned. That was insane, but not so much as those who were outside those walls who defended them, advocated them, apologized for them and rooted for the monsters who had erected them. Part of the wall fell on this date in 1989, and was followed in time by the collapse of much of the rest. There are still prison states that hold their populations hostage, but not many, none major. But the world is still insane. Many of those who had defended them, advocated them, apologized for them and rooted for the monsters who had erected them have not recanted and long for those good old days. Today's A&L Daily has a roundup of commentary. I liked parts of this one. When the Berlin Wall...
November 01, 2009
Cooperative Fallacy
The post Poli-Sci mocked pseudo-scientists and journals that seemed to have little or no grasp of the subjects they discussed, i.e. cooperation. Consider: The unstated moral behind most media stories on our biological instincts to cooperate seems to be that we would do better to empower and emphasize these instincts. Such as, oh, taxing carbon, and shaming those who don’t tax carbon. But such stories mostly ignore the dark side of cooperation: pro-cooperation instincts rely on dangerous conformity. Yes groups can be better off if individuals can see who do things that hurt the group overall, and punish those folks, and punish those who don’t punish them, etc. But our evolved instincts about which are the individual actions that actually hurt others might be quite out of whack. Conformity is not cooperation. It isn't reasoned pro-social behavior for the good of the group, it's merely go along to get along behavior even if the group is harmed. It's mindless....
October 29, 2009
Poli-Sci
One of the things that has increasingly reduced the credibility of scientists, and science journals, is their bald political advocacy that abuses science. Progress on forging a strong, global treaty to fight climate change has been painfully slow. But before deciding who is to blame, consider what happened when Manfred Milinski asked teams of university students to save the planet from a climate catastrophe. Milinski, director of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany, wanted to see if the students could join together to tackle such a problem, which can only be solved through cooperation. And they had to do it on a shoestring budget of just 40 euros each. There is zero reason to think that a climate catastrophe could be solved by politics, which these confused pseudo-scientists mislabel as "cooperation". There are however reasons to believe that such problems can be solved if politicians are not allowed to control societies. Cooperation would be better...
October 16, 2009
Guilty Pleasures
I admit it: I read Bob Higgs. I can come out about it today since Alex likes him too. There are excellent writers and there are excellent economists and in that intersection there are none better than Bob Higgs: Until more people come to a more realistic, fact-based understanding of the government and the economy, little hope exists of tearing them away from their quasi-religious attachment to a government they view with misplaced reverence and unrealistic hopes. Lacking a true religious faith yet craving one, many Americans have turned to the state as a substitute god, endowed with the divine omnipotence required to shower the public with something for nothing in every department – free health care, free retirement security, free protection from hazardous consumer products and workplace accidents, free protection from the Islamic maniacs the U.S. government stirs up with its misadventures in the Muslim world, and so forth. If you take the government to be Santa Claus,...
September 29, 2009
Fairy Tales
Kids see the world as having begun a short while before they were born, and think that their birth was an epocal event. Over the last 50 years, American society has undergone wrenching transformations that moved us toward equality for Catholics, blacks, Jews, women, gays and lesbian, and other traditionally disfavored groups. We achieved these reforms not by emphasizing how reform would benefit straight white men, or by building complex models of how oppression depressed GDP, but by focusing on the cruelty of the status quo and appealing to America’s founding ideals. We’ve now reached the point where opponents of equality for blacks or Jews are not only in the minority, but are among the most despised people in society. A more accurate and useful account begins before the American colonies became an independent nation since it was populated by a motley assortment of traditionally disfavored groups from a variety of traditions. There's nothing novel or even particularly interesting...
September 22, 2009
Left Behind
Leftists often have buyer's remorse. What's going on here? Most of us used to be good liberals. Are we getting conservative in our old age? I'd say it's the opposite. We're what we were five or 10 years ago: skeptics and fact-mongers with a bias for personal freedom. It's the left that's turning conservative. Well, not conservative, but pushy. Weisberg put his finger on the underlying trend: "Because Democrats hold power at the moment, they face the greater peril of paternalistic overreaching." Today's morality cops are less interested in your bedroom than your refrigerator. They're more likely to berate you for outdoor smoking than for outdoor necking. It isn't God who hates fags. It's Michael Bloomberg. Again. Reagan started as a Democrat but the party moved away from the values he and many others held. The left isn't turning pushy, it has always been so. Indeed, that is their deepest, longest held reputation. They are the quintessential lunatic fringe....
September 16, 2009
Psychodrama
Politics isn't only stupid, it's boring. The Obama show ratings are dropping like a stone. A while back, I suggested that it was time for everyone to cool it a bit on linking to the craziest, least thought-through, most over-the-top writing coming from the margins of cultural conservatism. My point was that during the previous presidential administration, those figures were important to criticize because they had substantial intellectual or political access to actual policy-makers, but that after November 2008, the best thing to do was to try and shove them off into the margins where they belonged. If they continued to be the targets of regular links-for-deserved-abuse, I felt, there was the danger that those margins would continue to drive the national conversation about policy and politics. . . A lot of folks back then disagreed with my point, saying that there was no surer way to check the influence of the fringes than to expose and mock their...
July 29, 2009
TV Doctors
Or, so it is said lately, TV forensic crime labs. It's not real, or even realistic, and at some level we know this, but we suspend disbelief. That's entertainment. But through long exposure the fictional aspects, overlooked and tucked away in a distant corner of the mind, cease to ground the experience so well. So it is with politics, which is merely bad theatre. What is missing from the debate over targets and timetables is any conception of the realism of such proposals. If a proposal is not realistic, it is not really a policy proposal but an exercise in symbolism, a “magical solution.” Symbolism is of course an essential part of politics, but when it becomes detached from reality — or even worse, used to exclude consideration of realistic proposals — the inevitable outcome is that policies will likely fail to achieve the promised ends. This outcome is highly problematic for those who actually care about the substance...
July 20, 2009
Made Men
I'm amazed and amused by the convoluted illogic of arguments that try to put a happy face on the blundering Obama administration, especially its nonsensical economic policies. Federalism, often described as one of the great strengths of the American system, has become a serious impediment to reversing the downturn. It’s easy enough, of course, to mock state governments nowadays, what with California issuing I.O.U.s to pay its bills and New York’s statehouse becoming the site of palace coups and senatorial sit-ins. But the real problem isn’t the fecklessness of local politicians. It’s the ordinary way in which state governments go about their business. Think about the $787-billion federal stimulus package. It’s built on the idea that during serious economic downturns the government can use spending increases and tax cuts to counteract the effects of consumers who are cutting back on spending and businesses that are cutting back on investment. So fiscal policy at the national level is countercyclical: as...
June 12, 2009
Inefficient Dystopia
Sometimes - once he clears his throat - Timothy sings clear and true. Everywhere the liberal idea of the state is at least in malaise, if not active crisis. Its problems are old, and so is the conversation about those problems. Is the tendency of modern political classes to become more and more self-aggrandizing a cyclical one that is interrupted and corrected by strong legal and constitutional safeguards, checked and balanced? Or have political elites since 1975, even in relatively liberal and democratic states, become more and more protected from social and political restraints? I tend to think that it’s more the latter than the former despite some notable exceptions and complications. It’s hard to believe that anybody now could have the kind of credulous faith in the nation-state as an administrative or managerial institution that was sometimes expressed earlier in the 20th Century. (Even in dystopian terms: one of the brilliant touches of Gilliam’s film Brazil was that...
June 11, 2009
I See
As Tim Noah says: ‘On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details.”...
May 30, 2009
Political Crime
It's useful to be clear about the criminal nature of the climate-politics complex. The climate-change industry — the scientists, lawyers, consultants, lobbyists and, most importantly, the multinationals that work behind the scenes to cash in on the riches at stake — has emerged as the world’s largest industry. Virtually every resident in the developed world feels the bite of this industry, often unknowingly, through the hidden surcharges on their food bills, their gas and electricity rates, their gasoline purchases, their automobiles, their garbage collection, their insurance, their computers purchases, their hotels, their purchases of just about every good and service, in fact, and finally, their taxes to governments at all levels. These extractions do not happen by accident. Every penny that leaves the hands of consumers does so by design, the final step in elaborate and often brilliant orchestrations of public policy, all the more brilliant because the public, for the most part, does not know who is profiteering...
April 29, 2009
BO Beer
It looked and sounded like unthinking nostalgia going in, though I admit that I didn't listen or look closely since I have little but contempt for politicians. But, I hoped for something less crushingly dim witted since some folks that I had admired in part were enthusiastic. It was a bad idea in general to have all our eggs in one basket - one party in control of all branches - but I seriously underestimated just how bad BO was due to the above noted influences. one thing has become increasingly, even irrefutably, clear: President Barack Obama is about as visionary as the guy who invented Dippin' Dots, Ice Cream of the Future. Far from sketching out a truly forward-looking set of policies for the 21st century, as his supporters had hoped, Obama is instead serving up cryogenically tasteless and headache-inducing morsels from years gone by. On issue after issue, Obama has made it clear that instead of blasting...
April 08, 2009
Driving Blind
"Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks." That's the fourth of Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world. Worth a read, and concludes: Then we will see an economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller companies, richer ecology, no leverage. A world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks and companies are born and die every day without making the news. The second principle resonates as well: No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains. Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bail-out should be free, small and risk-bearing. We have managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal. Agreed. Perhaps we are awkward, zitty teenagers about this government business and will...
March 14, 2009
Essence
[M]ost readers and voters . . . mostly want to affiliate with a stately staccato stream of statusful statements....
March 12, 2009
Tummy Rubbing
This gem - winkled out of a pile of mixed and muddled metaphors. . . . they should reflect on why Obama, despite his undisputed excellence in gum-chewing, has so far done such an embarrassing job of walking....
February 16, 2009
Half Smart
Speaking of old mudges. First, I think Ross is right to see this as a game about the distribution of opinion elites. Second, I think he’s right to imply that a GOP with a weakened libertarian influence would become a more “right-wing populist” party. Which I think helps me make my point. Why would an intellectual libertarian want to keep company with a group of flag-waving moral reactionaries? . . . I’m glad that Ross sees that the American Right is increasingly anti-intellectual. But I don’t think that’s best combatted by sticking it out and raising the intellectual tone of an increasingly hostile group of egghead haters. As I think Ross agrees, the balance of elite opinion matters. And I think intellectual capital flight from the right really does threaten the GOPs future success. If Republicans keep bleeding young intellectual talent because increasingly socially liberal twenty-somethings simply can’t stand hanging around a bunch of superstitious fag-bashers, then the GOP...
February 02, 2009
Neither
It bothers me that advocates seldom make a reasoned argument for the thing that they advocate. Their efforts consist almost entirely of finding fault with some alternative and use that alone as the reason why their views should be seen as correct. It takes very little effort the show that their ideas are as bad or worse than the ones they critcize. It's a classic rookie logic error: if not x then do nonsense on the assumption that y. In many if not all cases it isn't y either. It's neither, an error condition. Earlier today while skimming a few sites and following some of their links an example of that caught my eye. Some fellow living his unexamined life was astonished that on some subject his opponents actually had the better arguments, yet he firmly believed that they were bereft of ideas. Of course they are, but so is the astonished fellow, and that has been true in...
January 05, 2009
Just Words
There's been some buzz about a wrinkle in the various Obama stimulus plans being floated around. Here's one of many, notable only for being the one I just read. [via IP] Obama has advanced from trying to be like Bush to trying to outdo him. WSJ, $300 billion tax-cut plan: They call it a tax cut, but is it so? The payroll tax credit is a rebate of payroll taxes for low-income workers. As faithful readers of this blog surely know, an increase in spending coupled with lower tax collections is an INCREASE in taxes. AN INCREASE in taxes. NOT A TAX CUT. If I spend more money and collect less, the government is promising to collect more taxes in the future. It is not a tax cut. Not a tax cut. Not a tax cut. And when you don't cut rates but rather give people a lump sum of $500, there are no incentive effects other than to...
December 12, 2008
Grifters
As you may be aware from reading here in the past, I have nothing but contempt for politicians. They are bad boys and girls, but usually have a sort of feral charm or cuteness if you don't look too closely or stand downwind. I'm always amazed when other people fail to grasp the nature of politics and power, and sell themselves cheaply as boot licks for one or another of them, especially when they are supposedly educated people who thus have no credible excuses for their lack of insight, or perhaps it's lack of maturity. So, I was especially amazed at Obamania given his provenance. For the more historically minded, it’s a time for nostalgia. The past comes alive as Chicago’s grand tradition of corruption is sustained for another generation. As the Chicago Tribune once wrote, “corruption has been as much a part of the landscape as corn, soybeans and skyscrapers.” According to the Chicago Sun-Times, as of 2006...
December 04, 2008
Out Of Water
I've been paying more attention to conservatives this month. I've ignored them for years since they held power and I always find the opposition to be more interesting, more dynamic as they cast about for some hook that will get them back in power. I don't mean that I listened to left wackos, they are always boring, just those who were sane enough to have some insights about their plight. Now, it is their doppelgangers on the right that are more interesting: these folks for example. Following a link from there I find this. . . . in philosophical terms at least, classical conservatism does mean something. The creed of Edmund Burke, its most eloquent proponent, might be crudely reduced to six principles: a deep suspicion of the power of the state; a preference for liberty over equality; patriotism; a belief in established institutions and hierarchies; skepticism about the idea of progress; and elitism. . . To simplify a...
December 02, 2008
Counter Cranks
In the past I've expressed concern about creeps and cranks politicizing biochar since that would polarize society and create opposition. It's the proposed policies that they oppose, but it plays out as opposition to biochar itself. Here's an interesting item from [Roger] Helmer [MEP], whose blog you can find here: Are they all mad? Next week I shall be setting off to the Conference in Poznan, Poland, which is the precursor to next year's Copenhagen Climate Conference, designed to create an international policy to succeed Kyoto (which seems to have failed, by the way). I suspect that the whole project will end in failure, but I look forward to following the debate. Meantime we are having earnest discussions in Brussels about the EU's Climate and Energy package, and later today we will be voting in Committee on the report of the Temporary Committee on Climate Change (on which I sit). There are hundreds of amendments — including several of...
November 04, 2008
Gang Day
Today, above all days, my neighbors demonstrate some of their worst traits. Robin quotes a Nature article: Humans are unique among animals in maintaining large, stable coalitions of unrelated individuals, strongly bonded by mutual trust. Humans evolved the cognitive tools to ... gauge others' reliability. ... They can emit and detect costly, hard-to-fake signals of commitment. ... When people proclaim their adherence to a particular faith, they subscribe to claims for which there is no evidence, and that would be taken as obviously wrong or ridiculous in other religions groups. This signals a willingness to embrace the group's particular norm for no other reason than that it is, precisely, the group's norm. We feel a deep pleasure from realizing that we believe something in common with our friends, and different from most people. We feel an even deeper pleasure letting everyone know of this fact. This feeling is EVIL. Learn to see it in yourself, and then learn to...
October 22, 2008
Glibness
I once said: "I think that there is information in political speech about the ability to think and speak clearly. It's not always easy to winkle out, and is often ambiguous. Punditry that has real value - if such a thing can be imagined - would be about this very subject." For example: The meme that has arisen that Sarah Palin isn't smart enough to be Vice-President (and potentially President) strikes me as quite implausible. Focusing on the big picture: she has been an extraordinarily successful governor with substantial policy accomplishments in a short time, she has an 85% approval rating, and she knocked off an incumbent and former governor to be elected. And, as I've previously discussed, based on my experience working with and in government, being governor of a state is an extremely difficult job, much more difficult than being a Senator (for instance). . . . . . how can it be that many reasonable people...
October 06, 2008
Represent
The earlier post Prime Time complained that pundits were unreliable. Their pretensions to careful thought were abandoned when it most mattered, revealing their pedestrian emotionality and muddled thinking. Gang Sign noted some research about some of the reasons this is so. There are neuro-chemical predispositions to "motivated reasoning" and few have the character to resist. Some try. It’s something of a cottage industry right now for snarky intellekchles like me to gloat over the incoherence and grammatical incompetence of Sarah Palin. . . We are, however, missing the point. We academocrats are used to a kind of hyperformalized orality that basically speaks in essays. . . We are some really strange folks. People whose audience is not captive have to think more carefully about the rhetorical fit between what they’re saying, how they’re saying it, and who they’re saying it to. So no, Sarah Palin is not explaining anything coherently. She is sermonizing. Her audience already know what they...
October 02, 2008
Gang Sign
I pick on partisans a lot, especially Democrats. It isn't that Democrat partisanship is especially galling to me, it's that the issues I am most concerned about are fubared mostly by Democrats, as noted in the recent post Bumper Crop that discussed their corrupt and ineffective association with greens. Partisanship is a mind killer. The researchers also used neuroimaging to look at the neural responses of individuals who described themselves as partisan. They showed the participants one of three groups of slides: one group about their party's candidate, one about the other party's candidate, or one about a neutral control subject. In each group, the first slide revealed a position the politician had taken, and the second depicted a contradiction — something the candidate had done or said that seemed to be contrary to what the first slide was saying. Not only were the participants unable to see the contradiction for their own candidate, but the neuroimaging showed that...
September 29, 2008
Prime Time
Not ready. Fareed Zakaria (author of a truly fine book and columnist for the Washington Post) rightly argues that Sarah Palin is unqualified to be president of the United States (and, hence, by extension, unqualified to be V-P). Mr. Zakaria is correct that Gov. Palin's recent answer to a question about the economy "is nonsense - a vapid emptying out of every catchphrase about economics that came into her head." He's correct also that she's unfit to be entrusted with the power of the modern presidency. I've read this sort of thing often of late. It always seemed to be sophomoric nonsense to me and not worth commenting about. Pundits, academics, and ordinary folks are making asses of themselves, as usual, talking politics. What's different in this case is the second graf. But Mr. Zakaria is incorrect to suppose that these traits separate Gov. Palin from other candidates for high political office. Calls by Senators McCain and Obama for...
September 28, 2008
Better Days
Old and in the way, that's what I heard them say They used to heed the words he said, but that was yesterday Gold will turn to gray and youth will fade away They'll never care about you, call you old and in the way I miss the good 'ol days of squabbling about single-payer plans and the Milton Friedman Institute....
September 26, 2008
Bilge
Man the pumps? There is no reason to rush. President Bush wants to ram this through without deliberation, because that is how he operates. The Democrats want to act without deliberation, because putting the financial sector under government control is what they want. The rest of us would be better off if the issue were carefully debated first. Well, yes, but even the Democrats would be better off. They can seize power and regiment us all some other way that is less self destructive. If they are smart. There is no evidence that they are, but one can hope, and cowardly ineptitude will serve as well in this instance. They can do that....
September 18, 2008
More Goats
Just as democracy is being blamed for the failures of majoritarianism, markets are being blamed for the failures of politics and regulatory confusion. The collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and the bailouts of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and AIG, have led to an inevitable call for more regulation. Obama promises "real" regulation. McCain will "reform Wall Street." The consensus is that Something Must Be Done to rein in financial markets. This consensus is part of a general theme among some pundits and economists that it's time to give up the naïve faith that markets can solve every problem. We are told that markets have failed. Yet much of the current chaos is the result of attempts to steer or control markets rather than let them be. Much of the chaos is the result of political failure. The problem with financial markets has some things in common with the problems of agriculture. Various regulations and subsidies have changed...
September 04, 2008
Moose Crush
The earlier post Love Sick focused on the harm being done to Democrats in particular and the fabric of society in general by Obamaniacs. Now it's the Republicans' turn. We are cock-eyed optimists at heart. And we have been forever in love with the common man (or woman) who loves his family, his God and his neighbors enough to work hard to make their lives rich and full and better than they are. I do not think I am alone in my love of these stories. And I think that's why the selection of Governor Sarah Palin as Senator McCain's running mate has struck such a powerful nerve among the electorate. She is not a part of any ruling elite. She comes from no moneyed family. Her family and its strengths and problems are familiar to us all. She's smart, courageous, honest and personable. . . I love Sarah Palin. I wish her well. She reaffirms after decades of...
August 24, 2008
Theatre
On the stage, screen and street. The only difference between Hollywood and Washington is that, while audiences understand Hollywood's leading men and women to be acting, this same ability to distinguish fantasy from fact disappears when the executive producer is Uncle Sam. This is true, but not the whole truth. For example, I know that Keira Knightley was merely acting in Pride & Prejudice, but I still ended up crushing on her. I know that is was really the character she played, Elizabeth Bennett, that appealed to me, but I still give other films a glance just because she is in them. Similarly, even when we do understand that the actors in Washington are just playing roles we can still end up with irrational affection, or even hatred, for the characters they play. People are like that. Worse perhaps, in many ways it wasn't Keira Knightley or Elizabeth Bennett who appealed to me, it was the direction of Joe...
August 21, 2008
Love Sick
Timothy has an interesting post about political madness. [Doris] Lessing writes, “To be in love with a country or a political regime is a tricky business. You get your heart broken even more surely than by being in love with a person. You may even lose your life. I knew a woman political activist in the old days–in this case, the 1950s. She spent her days and her nights working to undo the white regime in South Africa. Needing a rest, she went to visit Nigeria, to see her dream made flesh, found it was run by human beings, and committed suicide. Everyone who has been involved with idealistic, rhetorical, politics knows a thousand versions of this story, from all over the world”. . . Lessing helped me to recognize that one feeling I’m having is that I simply don’t trust people who are selling this kind of “idealistic, rhetorical, politics” and yet don’t confess to having experienced this...
August 11, 2008
More Norm
Sometimes Norm seems to be one of the very few who make sensible blog posts. It recalls Trotsky on the dialectic and, following Trotsky, Michael Walzer on war ('You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you'). The world we live in is, pervasively, political. Whether you like it or not, politics will therefore involve you - directly or indirectly. . . Involvement in something does sometimes generate an interest in it, but it doesn't have to; not everyone has a keen interest in the technology they depend upon in their daily lives or in food distribution systems. And while it is prudent to take an interest in what might come to affect you adversely, there is much about politics that can lead to a disinclination for following it too closely. Where individuals set the line between taking an interest in politics and not doing so, and how they apportion their attention to the different...
June 17, 2008
Moral Reasoning
Whenever I encounter someone who makes political arguments claiming that they are based on moral arguments I know that I've entered the twilight zone where reason has no force. The cover article in the current Scientific American claims to be a guide to the perplexed in thinking through a difficult question: how do we weigh the costs of ameliorating climate change today versus the potential benefits that this will create for future generations? Unfortunately, it is rhetoric from front to back. . . Note that the author, Oxford Professor John Broome, makes the huge assumption that the only way for us to assist these future generations is to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. He assumes away any possible efforts to recycle atmospheric carbon or execute other geo-engineering approaches, or invest in adaptive engineering solutions or simply to grow wealth fast enough to offset the negative impacts of climate change. Broome goes on to cite “the elementary moral principle that...
June 11, 2008
Fuelish Fantasies
Let's review the illogic of carbon schemes: - Prices will be raised enough to alter behavior and, hopefully, provide incentive for innovation. - Society will just have to grin and bear it. - The costs aren't costs since . . . well, that doesn't make any sense but just go with it. It doesn't seem like this has a ghost of a chance. Concerns were growing last night over a summer of coordinated European fuel protests after tens of thousands of Spanish truckers blocked roads and the French border, sparking similar action in Portugal and France, while unions across Europe prepared fresh action over the rising price of petrol and diesel. . . Jérôme Cordier of Unostra, the French union of small and medium haulage companies, said yesterday's protests marked a new phase to coordinate strikes across Europe for maximum impact, a development that could threaten widespread disruption during the holiday season. "We're taking this up a gear and...
May 25, 2008
Strange Structure
One of the things that most perplexes me about climate change politics is that folks who I find to be generally bright frequently take clueless positions on the subject. So, if we're resolved to avoid end-Permian-like CO2 levels, what can we do? If you think that human-generated CO2 makes no significant contribution to the global CO2 levels, then you don't have many options that don't involve actively extracting CO2 from the atmosphere (e.g., planting lots and lots of trees). On the other hand, if you, like the vast (vast!) majority of climate scientists, think that human-generated CO2 is the main culprit of rising CO2 concentrations (and temperatures), then we have lots of options, since we theoretically have control over how much CO2 we as humans emit [2]. There are many ways to extract CO2 from the atmosphere. Even if you restrict your view to tree planting there are still many options, not least the development of enhanced trees that...
May 18, 2008
More Rarity
The "reality based community" spends most of its time in fantasy land. There are exceptions, brief excursions away from their fantasy homes. Democrats need respectable, responsible resistance from conservatives to be good Democrats, just as tennis and poker players are no good facing potzers and fish. Another is that Obama needs to beat a contender, not a pushover, to be a good president. If you thought the last eight years were a nightmare, you should expect a completely unrestrained period of Democratic governance to be almost as awful. Nearly got it, but it would in fact be much, much worse. The Democrats aren't about anything, they are just the opposition, and without anything to oppose they fall flat on their faces. Their unreasoned excesses were supported by those they opposed, leaned against, and have no balance to keep their feet when there is nothing to lean against. It has been many, many decades since the Democrats had an idea....
May 12, 2008
Reality Repeal
Wrenching the monkey-wrenchers. Argentine farmers on Wednesday announced a return to their roadblocks just over a month after a crippling 21-day strike sparked by a rise in export tariffs, causing an immediate spike in international grain prices. News of another strike in Argentina, the world’s third-biggest exporter of soyabeans and biggest of soya oil, immediately pushed soyabean futures up 2.5 per cent in Chicago to $12.96 a bushel. . . . . . despite record world prices, Argentine farmers are already cutting back on wheat planting by up to 15 per cent this season because of the impact of tariffs and the government’s decision to periodically close exports in a bid to keep domestic prices low. The original farm protest, sparked by the government’s imposition of a sliding-scale of export tariffs in March, caused widespread food shortages, a surge in inflation and the biggest political crisis in five years. Farmers said the aim this time was to block grains...
May 08, 2008
Venal Truthiness
The real war on science. On April 30, U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken ordered the Interior Department to decide by May 15 whether polar bears should be listed under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act. Professor J. Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School says, “To list a species that is currently in good health as an endangered species requires valid forecasts that its population would decline to levels that threaten its viability. In fact, the polar bear populations have been increasing rapidly in recent decades due to hunting restrictions. Assuming these restrictions remain, the most appropriate forecast is to assume that the upward trend would continue for a few years, then level off. “These studies are meant to inform the US Fish and Wildlife Service about listing the polar bear as endangered. After careful examination, my co-authors and I were unable to find any references to works providing evidence that the forecasting methods used in the reports had...
May 03, 2008
Barmy Brits
I've commented in the past that I was worried about the Brits, that they didn't seem to be in touch with reality. It's not that I know much, this is truly rootless bloviation, but they seemed to have contracted a virulent case of Euro disease, an affliction that affects the mind and leads to increasingly tenuous connections with reality along with heightened passions: agitated delusions. Then war breaks out. Perhaps I was too pessimistic. "If someone drops litter, they should be arrested," Livingstone threatened during his campaign, thinking his resolve would impress rather than infuriate voters with its ecologically correct pettiness in a city otherwise awash in real crime. Every tax and intrusion imposed by Labour in recent years was justified as being for voters' "own good." Ending global warming, reducing carbon footprints, lowering carbon emissions and raising public funding of renewable energy — all were excuses used to hit the voters' pocketbook with more taxes. Yet none of...
March 28, 2008
Big Daddy
One of the virulent maladies that afflicts the rag-tag remnants of the post-socialist left is extreme authoritarianism. This matters since nothing is more antithetical to core leftist principles than this. Worse, it's a cult-like form of authoritarianism, almost papist or monarchist in tone and scope, that seeks to elevate some mortal to diety status as religious as well as statist leader. Barack Obama's speech on the financial crisis was a remarkable breakthrough. . . Astounding! I wish I had written the speech. It is this kind of leadership and truth-telling that is the predicate for the shift in public opinion required to produce legislative change. A radical, appropriately nuanced, and deeply public-minded description of what has occurred, the speech was Roosevelt quality: the president as teacher-in-chief. Rank rubbish. The president is not the teacher, or parent, or even leader. He heads one of three co-equal branches of government, expressly designed to blunt the predations of any aspiring diety. An...
March 17, 2008
Kill Blue
Someone sent me an email commenting on a post. Comments are open here, so I conclude that the comment was not intended to be public. OK, but I can talk about the ideas in the email without breaking confidence. I'd prefer that comments be made public. There's little to fear. The only uncivil whacko that comments here is me. If you can send email, then you can post in comments. The email quibbled with the idea that the voters of Michigan and Florida had control over the structure of their primaries, and so it could not be said that they must accept responsibility for the outcome. I replied that there were no voters anywhere at any time that had more control. Every contest has rules. Quibbling with the rules after the contest has been held is disingenuous. The time for that is before the contest. That doesn't mean that I approve of the particular rules, and even if I...
March 16, 2008
Mulligan
I suspect that one of the reasons that political parties and their candidates for office behave so irresponsibly is that they never accept responsibility for their actions. Norm points to this Jeff Weintraub post that clearly demonstrates not only that politicians don't accept responsibility, but that they are encouraged to evade it. As you all know, back in 2007 delegates from Florida and Michigan were excluded from this year's Democratic convention because those states broke the Democratic Party's rules by scheduling their primaries in January 2008. . . And at the time, no doubt, the rather draconian penalty imposed by the DNC may not have seemed like a big deal, since no one even considered the possibility that the nomination might still be contested when convention time rolled around. . . No solution at this point can be perfect, since much of the damage has already been done, and any effort to repair it after the fact is bound...
March 16, 2008
Last Word
A few weeks ago, briefly commenting on the Castro Kerfuffle, I quoted some old timers - Orwell and DeVoto - because the subject seemed so old and stale that it had all already been said. Easy for me to say, but I am aware that there are a great many people still struggling for some sort of clarity on these issues. Even the most cursory examination of Orwell and DeVoto shows that they lacked clarity too, and I freely admit that eveything I know is wrong, and have no idea what is right. I suspect that the best we can do is to gain some clarity about which things are more wrong than others. This David Mamet article, Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal', illuminates some of the same issues and fault lines as the Castro discussions, and has prompted many commentators to have a go. As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article...
March 04, 2008
Small L
Timothy continues to meditate about institutions and their discontents. Everything that works about institutional life rests on the habitus of professionals, bureaucrats, experts, on whether they are stewards or parasites, whether they recognize the fragile possibility of a better world or are just looting the till, whether they are humble in the face of wider and more distributed experience and knowledge or whether they are contemptuous of anything besides their own immediate power. We all know it: this is Arendt’s banality of evil. We do not need to fear the person at the top, but instead the mass force of institutional action. The libertarian answer, to sweep away all institutions (save those of private capital: a blind spot that I still find baffling), is no answer at all, any more than jumping off a cliff is a way to prevent being in an automobile accident. Once the world all knew that this was the danger we faced, after 1945...
January 10, 2008
Power Drinks
The illusion of action and competence is what politics is about. Offering a tangible plan that promises this tax incentive, that fact-finding commission, this reinvestment project, this funding for retraining doesn’t reach people who perceive the present as a slum left behind by a low-rent version of Benjamin’s angel of history. In fact, all it does is convince them that the candidate with the plans is one of those folks with his hands on the levers, one of them who always seems to come out on top. . . There isn’t a policy package that can straightforwardly address some of the underlying structural changes in the global political economy that affect Peoria as surely as they affect Shenzen. Your wonkish arms are too short to box with that god. I don’t think anyone is the master of these changes, even though some people and social classes and systems have way more power to direct what is happening than others....
December 23, 2007
Myopic Economics
The tunnel vision of punters like Clark (see previous post) isn't the only sight problem afflicting economists. Some are hopelessly short sighted. Checks and balances are all very well, but sometimes you have to wonder. The first session of the 110th Congress came to a close last week in a disorderly crush of half-baked legislation. It was the end of a year that gave the new Democratic leadership little to boast about. Seizing control of House and Senate in the 2006 elections, the Democrats had big ideas about holding the Bush administration to account, forcing a prompt withdrawal from Iraq and radically realigning the government’s domestic priorities. Measured against those early promises, their record has been dismal. . . The Democrats promised too much and now look foolish, but whose fault is the impasse – and who, if anyone, will pay the political price? The constitution is implicated, of course. It provides for this kind of thing, by equipping...
December 13, 2007
Poor Health
The closing thought in the earlier post Discontinuity lamented the degeneration of climate related concerns into low politics. The political epidemics that have repeatedly hammered Europe could spread to America. There are pools of infection on both coasts and some institutions are crippled. The media and academia are all but destroyed at this point. Lunatics roam the halls babbling nonsense. Things may get worse before they get better. The medicine we need now doesn't target any specific pathogen, it is a broad spectrum anti-politic. For example: The United States and the European Union remain at odds on many major points, including whether an agreement signed here should include numerical targets, a move that the United States and a few other countries, including Russia, oppose. The emerging economic powers, most notably China and India, also refuse to accept limits on their emissions, despite projections that they will soon become the dominant sources of the gases. The United States, Canada, Australia,...
December 08, 2007
Discontinuity
In the political contests seeking to use climate change as a wedge issue and power pony, the hysterics aren't the only ones stuck on stupid. The sceptics have also painted themselves into a corner. Based on the reasonable expectation that admitting a problem would lead to a huge government power grab, those conservatives with access to the biggest megaphones have used scientific uncertainty to avoid the issue. That game is just about up, and they suddenly find themselves walking unprepared into the middle of a sophisticated scientific and economic conversation about how to deal with the problem. While some conservative think tanks have considered these issues seriously for some time, the public discussion has been conducted up until now largely among various liberal factions and has turned into a technical debate about the most efficient tax scheme for reducing carbon emissions. There may have been short term political benefits for conservatives, but avoiding the issue is no more sensible...
November 06, 2007
Walkie Talky
Here's another attempt to explain IPCC politics to those who can't grasp the issues. To begin with, this appears to be the first time that the Nobel Peace Prize has gone to scientists for doing science, as opposed to engaging in advocacy or direct conflict mitigation. For example, the award also went to: Medicins Sans Frontieres in 1999; the International Campaign to Ban Landmines in 1997; the Pugwash Conferences (1995); and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War in 1985. In other words, until now the Nobel Peace Prize has been clearly recognized as a political award. The award to the IPCC thus implies that the IPCC is not a predominately scientific, but is in fact a political process: the award equates the scientific study of climate change with political advocacy. In this, it positions climate change science -- indeed, environmental science as a whole -- as a normative exercise rather than a scientific process, especially with those...
October 30, 2007
Not Wrong, Crazy
It's an epidemic, like BDS but more so. An economist once dubbed “champion of choice” by The Guardian newspaper would like your employer to organise an exercise hour for you and your colleagues. Professor Julian Le Grand was once a social policy adviser who had the ear of Tony Blair. . . An unsympathetic reading of all this is that a respected policy wonk has lost the plot. But the professor’s prescriptions – and the libertarian paternalist philosophy behind them – make more sense than you might think. He is not crazy. He is just wrong. Behind all three schemes lies the same idea: to influence behaviour without restricting choice. If you want salty food, you can add salt. If you do not want to do jumping jacks with your colleagues, just sign the excuse note. If you want to buy cigarettes, no problem – just sign up for the smoker’s permit. The £200 fee and the doctor’s signature,...
October 30, 2007
What's Left?
I know, someone already trademarked that question, but there seems to be some confusion worth discussing. Pursuing pro-market reforms does not imply facing a trade-off between efficiency and social justice. In this sense, pro-market policies are “left wing”, if that means reducing the economic privileges enjoyed by “insiders”. ...If the European left wants to be able to say honestly that it fights for the neediest members of our society, it must adopt as its battle cry the pursuit of competition, reforms and a system based on meritocracy. My only complaint is that they write as if this is new. In fact, liberalism, meaning classical liberalism, has never been conservative. It began as a movement of the left against feudalistic, conservative insiders and it remains so today. Precisely. But, things have drifted quite a lot from that good beginning as some of the good liberals became "the insiders" - big business interests that function in ways similar to the old...
October 17, 2007
Sticky Regulation
Another problem I see with regulatory approaches to problems, in addition to the ratchet effect where regulation begets more regulation in an unstoppable cascade bringing heat death to society, is that they are so very hard to rescind. [T]here are many examples of market failure. And maybe you can do things to reduce government failure. But in the end, there is the issue of dynamics. Market failure tends to be self-correcting, because entrepreneurs have incentive to fix things. For government failure to be corrected, somebody needs the insight to know how to correct it and they need to overcome the political opposition to changing the system. In practice, the change does not happen. You cannot get rid of the mohair subsidy. Regulations not only create a need for more regulation, they are resistant to treatment, like bacteria that laugh off antibiotics, even though they degrade their hosts. Resorting to regulation is intellectual failure. It reveals a lack of knowledge...
August 24, 2007
Provincialism
It seems that those who know the least about journalism are journalists. I was disappointed to see that Mr. Frey's paper on political isolation didn't address other ways that politicians remove themselves from public criticism. The Bush Administration has given us several examples of such behaviour. From President Bush's noted reluctance to read newspapers, to Vice-President Cheney's refusal to set eyes on a television tuned to a station other than Fox News, to the dissent-quieting methods of the president's advance team, to the use of hand-picked, stovepiped intelligence in crafting policy, the current administration has shown a willingness not just to discount opposing viewpoints and contradictory evidence, but to pretend such things do not exist. These actions raise interesting economic questions. Why, for instance, would an administration choose to have less information than its political opponents? Familiarising oneself with opposing ideas needn't imply a change in policy; if anything, it might improve one's strategy for achieving desired goals. The...
August 23, 2007
Political Economics
Economists, like politicians and other activists, often engage in sterile debates about picayune issues instead of engaging with real issues. It appears that the Cato authors have misstated the first statistic. Consultation of the cited source seems to show not that an increase in efficiency leads to a 20 percent jump in vehicle miles traveled, but that roughly 20 percent of total energy savings from efficiency gains are lost to increased travel. That's quite a different point, implying that efficiency gains could have a significant impact on emissions. The second statistic applies to a different argument: that because emissions per gallon of gas vary substantially by the type and age of an automobile, a gasoline tax is a very inefficient way to reduce emissions. I absolutely agree that a direct tax on emissions would be preferable to a proxy levy on gasoline, but an emissions tax is not without its costs. Increasing gasoline taxes requires only the passage of...
June 27, 2007
Summer Weave
It's odd how I sometimes look at my recent posts and find a theme woven into them. It isn't that the theme is a surprise to me, something I hadn't realized was on my mind, as that the posts hadn't been intended to pursue that theme. In Politics is Odious Joe Klein's anemic examination of the witless and intolerant left was scorned. In For Example Vaclav Klaus' responds, as a rational and freedom loving person, to the sad reality that "the dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us. Everything else is denounced". These are just a couple of posts from the front page here. There are many others. The closed minded intolerance of power politics, especially on the left, is more of a world threat than climate change. It is not only more destructive, it is pervasive, affecting every field of endeavor. And...
June 19, 2007
For Example
Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic and survivor of communism, has a penchant for deflating the pretensions of politicians, due at least in part to his past experiences with politics gone wild. In his view, Freedom, not climate, is at risk. In the past year, Al Gore’s so-called “documentary” film was shown in cinemas worldwide, Britain’s – more or less Tony Blair’s – Stern report was published, the fourth report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was put together and the Group of Eight summit announced ambitions to do something about the weather. Rational and freedom-loving people have to respond. The dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us. Everything else is denounced. The author Michael Crichton stated it clearly: “the greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda”. I feel the same...
June 07, 2007
Politics is Odious
As well as stupid. . . . the smart stuff is being drowned out by a fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere. Anyone who doesn't move in lockstep with the most extreme voices is savaged and ridiculed—especially people like me who often agree with the liberal position but sometimes disagree and are therefore considered traitorously unreliable. Some of this is understandable: the left-liberals in the blogosphere are merely aping the odious, disdainful—and politically successful—tone that right-wing radio talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh pioneered. They are also justifiably furious at a Bush White House that has specialized in big lies and smear tactics. It's interesting to see left-wingers, at long last, examining themselves a bit. But this graf is nonsense. The left didn't become witless and intolerant in response to talk radio, they have always been this way. Both sides have always been as they are, but we now have...
May 02, 2007
False Credit
I'm as mystified by Bush supporters as I am by Bush critics. The latter are often deranged, but the former are coming to seem nearly as out of touch with reality. MORE BOGUS KYOTO HISTORY FROM REUTERS: "President George W. Bush pulled the United States out of Kyoto in 2001, arguing it would cost U.S. jobs and that it wrongly excluded 2012 goals for poorer nations such as China." Er, no. The U.S. refused to ratify Kyoto under President Clinton. We've been over this before. It's all spelled out in Wikipedia, even. Really, if Reuters can't get simple things like this right, why should we trust them for actual news? . . . UPDATE: The Anchoress is unhappy, with Bush: I’m starting to get really pissed off with the Bush Administration for their inability or disinterest in fighting their own battles. We should not have to be doing this over and over, setting the record straight again and again....
April 04, 2007
Bush Whacked
Speaking of political bias . . . I confess I am stonkered at the willingness to blame the Bush administration for being insufficiently active on Doha, since without the trade team's efforts, Doha would not be on life support; it would be dead. The Bush administration did everything but a fan dance to lure all parties back to the table after the catastrophe at Cancun, and while it has not gone as far on farm subsidies as anyone would like, this is widely regarded as driven by (Democratic and Republican) farm interests in Congress, not some failure on the administration's part. It does the administration no good to negotiate a treaty that can't be signed. How, exactly, would more efforts from the Bush administration have, say, overcome the farm interests in Congress, or the much more egregious European intransigence on the matter? While the bilateral deals are worse than multilateral deals, they are better than nothing, which unfortunately is...
February 18, 2007
KOBK
Kill Or Be Killed. It is argued that this was once a pressing concern and that it has shaped us. Politics is the Mind-Killer. People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death. And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation... When, today, you get into an argument about whether "we" ought to raise the minimum wage, you're executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed. Being on the right side of the argument could let you kill your hated rival! Life, sex, status, and wealth depended on proto-human pack politics? OK, but what has changed? Not much I say. We don't kill quite so quickly and freely in some places as we once did, but for the majority of humans -...
January 22, 2007
Staying Alive
Russell Roberts does a little myth busting. Andy Grove (who has helped transform the world and who I respect greatly) makes the following observation in a piece on energy policy in today's Wall Street Journal editorial page: The first question that needs to be examined is this: If business's task is to generate revenue and profits for its owners, what is the equivalent task for a nation and its government? But government can't have tasks. . . How can a diverse group of people with diverse interests have a task? . . . Imagine writing an editorial along these lines, reprimanding these companies for being short-sighted and only caring about staying in business or trying to make profits. We all understand that making profits is what businesses try to do. So why do we expect politicians to do something other than to try and stay in office? That's what they do. Don't ask politicians to do something they aren't...
January 09, 2007
Dark Principles
Robin Hanson comments on a recent political science paper. Margit Tavits shows that in "23 advanced democracies over a period of 40 years," voters rewarded political parties for changing economic positions, but punished parties for changing other social positions. "even those parties that make [social] policy adjustments that correspond to the preference shifts of voters lose votes." On pragmatic issues, voters value "getting things done." Policy shifts in this domain signal responsiveness to the changing environment and are likely to be rewarded. Principled issues, however, concern core beliefs and values. Any policy shift in this domain is a sign of inconsistency and lack of credibility, which is likely to lead to voter withdrawal. Alas, social science is built on the idea that better info can give better social policy; if voters interpret social policy changes as a lack of principles, rather than better info, it will be very hard for better info to induce better policy. Makes me want...
January 07, 2007
Abnegation
I've most often seen this word coupled with self, as in self abnegation, but a quick dictionary check indicates that self may be superfluous. Abnegation: renunciation of your own interests in favor of the interests of others. This notion has been rattling around in my noggin for a couple of days since I last checked out Nanette's TV to make sure it still worked. (See It's Not Noise for the back story). I leave the set tuned to The Science Channel, of course, to reduce mental damage. I caught the very end of a show investigating what makes humans unusual compared to other animals. There had apparently been a number of candidate ideas explored earlier in the show but it ended with the idea of suicide as being a uniquely human behavior - especially the genetic suicide of failure to breed for ideological reasons. It wasn't a compelling thesis. A chorus of evolutionary biologists in my mind raised objections...
December 30, 2006
Political Failure
Perhaps I should go netless more often. Reading a lot of material in a short time in order to catch up, rather than in drips and drabs as it is produced, allows cross blog and media discussions to be more easily followed as a thought thread. Maybe. It isn't that this is difficult in any case, it just has greater impact when done in one swell foop. There's been a focus on bias and delusion lately. It isn't that this wasn't an important topic all along, but since the Overcoming Bias boys have assembled as a crew and launched their blog there has been increased discussion. Old material as well as new has been brought to bear on selected topics. This recent Arnold Kling post, Political Beliefs and Self-Deception, includes a couple of issues that have interested me for some time: expertise and political failure. The post is mainly a pointer to, and quote pulled from, this oldish paper...
November 03, 2006
Dueling Narratives
Timothy and I have been having an interesting (to me) discussion about the ideas presented in He Needed Killin' (thanks Tim!) - the notion that our gentrified societies have a sordid past and that this may be an unavoidable phase of social development. It's an unsettling notion, not obviously true but intriguing none the less. That it is factually so for many developed societies, they did have such phases, doesn't prove that it is necessary for all societies. And it's important to emphasize that such behaviors must always be refuted: the acts of individuals in societies in extremis can't be public policy, can't be institutionalized or pardoned, since that road leads to social pathology. Even if they are necessary crimes, they are still crimes that civil society must punish to avoid losing its soul. The relevant quote from the referenced article is that: Civil society cannot use the instruments of government to stamp out its mortal enemy—for that would...
October 26, 2006
Laws of Nature
If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation. -- Sir Arthur Eddington You can't win. You can't break even. You can't get out of the game. Deal with it. But are natural laws the only givens? Of course politicians will look for any information or argument that they can find to advance their agendas -- that is their job. While politicians may not be above playing loose with scientific truth, more often they can and will simply search out -- and find -- a legitimate expert or two who can marshal...
October 25, 2006
He Needed Killin'
The Hollywood version of the American southwest after the Indian wars and the closing of the frontier - and much earlier in Texas - is of rough, vigilante justice meted out by flawed heroes. The truly bad were tracked down and summarily dispatched with a minimum of fuss or passion. All in a day's work. There's some truth in that but it was as likely to be solid citizens as flawed heroes who did the deeds. One of the striking changes in American society after 9/11/2001 was the number of solid citizens who remembered their roots - or at least the Hollywood version - and voiced interest in some vigilantism. That's one of the reasons that Bush was applauded for his initial handling of the event. I'm putting this out there for your consideration with a fully conflicted heart. I don't feel diminished by the deaths of Mohammed Atta and the other creeps who killed thousands on September 11....
October 16, 2006
Enviro-Media Complex
Environmentalism is a hustle - entertainment at best, parasitism at worst . . . like politics. Here's a pathology of natural resource advocacy. Michael Pollan article The Vegetable-Industrial Complex in the October 15th New York Times describes an example of Holling’s pathology of natural resource management in agriculture. Wendell Berry once wrote that when we took animals off farms and put them onto feedlots, we had, in effect, taken an old solution — the one where crops feed animals and animals’ waste feeds crops — and neatly divided it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot. Rather than return to that elegant solution, however, industrial agriculture came up with a technological fix for the first problem — chemical fertilizers on the farm. As yet, there is no good fix for the second problem, unless you count irradiation and Haccp plans and overcooking your burgers and, now, staying away from...
October 04, 2006
Hysteria Tradition
Nothing is more American, more democratic, than the free expression of senseless emotions. Shrieking hyperbole uninformed by reality is the very soul of democracy. This is both its strength and its weakness. Roger Pielke Jr. links an interesting article in The Scientist on the Bush Administration. It surveys the claims and counter claims that the Bush administration has meddled in science to an unprecedented degree, quoting Dan Sarewitz as well as Pielke, who both have taken positions a bit above the fray informed more by history than partisan bias, though neither are Bush supporters. It puts many of the most shrill claims in perspective and has some good information on funding levels - the ultimate cause of high levels on the shrill-o-meter - which have varied over time. We have spent less on physics in recent decades but more on life sciences, and under Bush this has been a tiny bit less pronounced - which is perceived by life...
July 23, 2006
Crypto-religion
One of the more nonsensical memes infecting public discourse is that America is diminished by the religious beliefs of a significant portion of the population. Americans have long been ambivalent about science. Conflicting attitudes toward science are not uncommon among industrialized countries—Canadians, Europeans, and Japanese, for example, also appreciate the benefits of science but worry about potential impacts on society. What sets Americans apart is that their reservations center primarily around religion. And now, as the United States struggles to maintain its undisputed position as world leader in science and technology, religious ideology has spilled over into the public sphere to a degree unmatched in other industrialized societies. Religious groups are turning scientific matters like stem cells and evolution into political issues. Rubbish. All rubbish. The reservations of the other cited societies - Canadians, Europeans, and Japanese - also are religious. America is not different. The religions are different but in each case the reservations about science have a...
July 07, 2006
Can Humans Govern?
The Chairman at Maggie's Farm has some clarity on this question. Boston College Political Science Prof. Alan Wolfe has written a piece, Why Conservatives Can't Govern. It is an over-heated, hyperbolic, and fact-twisting anti-Bush rant (for just one example, he makes it sound as if K Street were a Repub thing - it's not. K Street just follows the influence - they don't care who it is) rather than a calm, thoughtful essay, but he does have some good points. A quote: If government is necessary, bad government, at least for conservatives, is inevitable, and conservatives have been exceptionally good at showing just how bad it can be. Hence the truth revealed by the Bush years: Bad government--indeed, bloated, inefficient, corrupt, and unfair government--is the only kind of conservative government there is. Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do...
April 25, 2006
Persuasive Pass Time
Richard Hamming: on how to do great research. [via Structure+Strangeness] Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you'll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won't get started. It requires a lovely balance. But most great scientists are well aware of why their theories are true and they are also well aware of some slight misfits which don't quite fit and they don't forget it. But, great scientists are very rare. It seems to me that great thinkers of all sorts share these mental habits, and that they are also very rare. Part of the problem may be that there are often great rewards for being "sooners", for jumping the starting gun and making premature commitment to dodgy theses. Becoming a believer and...
April 18, 2006
Type M Sleaze
In Scientific Consensus or Religious War? Arnold Kling posts again about the degraded nature of public discourse, in this case about climate change. He first argues for the wisdom of listening to dissenting views since in the past they have sometimes turned out to be right even though they were lonely voices in the wilderness only a short while before. Then he notes the increasing use of "Type M" arguments, those that evade substance and focus on the presumed motives of opponents, painted as luridly as possible. In economics in the 1960's, there was a "scientific consensus," embedded in sophisticated macro-econometric models, that inflation reflected a competition over income shares, and that government policies to interfere with wage- and price-setting were the solution. Milton Friedman's contrary views were outside the "scientific consensus." By 1985 or so, the "scientific consensus" had shifted, in part because policies based on that consensus were tried in the 1970's, leading to the worst macroeconomic...
March 15, 2006
Dark Siders
We expect exaggeration, selective use of data and out right lies from activists and politicians. They are marketing people selling everything, including their souls, in part for beliefs and in part for personal advantage. But it's different, worse, when scientists do it since their sole claim to legitimacy is truth seeking. As noted in Social Dunces there's a problem with this view since scientists are often merely marketing people too. . . . this incarnation of geoengineering is such a hot potato that scientists cannot even agree whether it should be discussed publicly. "The knowledge that we maybe could engineer our way out of climate problems inevitably lessens the political will to begin reducing carbon dioxide emissions," observes David Keith from the University of Calgary in Canada. Lessens political will! Isn't political will supposed to be informed? Does it have any value, much less legitimacy, when it is based on ignorance and lies from "authorities"? As outrageous as the...
February 06, 2006
Almost Sensible
David Roberts, dark-sider who posts at the Gristmill blog - sometimes seems to almost rise above his biases and activism to reason in good faith. Almost. Bush's SOTU statement that "America is addicted to oil" was treated as the Big News of the speech, as though he'd admitted to some deep dark secret. . . But it strikes me as an extraordinarily poor way of describing the problem. . . The subtext of America being "addicted" is that the American people are somehow fallen and weak. But America does not rely on oil by virtue of any moral failing. It is not a weakness. It's simple prudence: For quite a long time now, oil has been an incredibly cheap, incredibly concentrated source of energy. It turns out that burning it is screwing up our atmosphere, and it's going to run out soonish, and it props up politically detestable regimes, so yeah, we need to start phasing it out. Circumstances...
January 28, 2006
Rationally Ignorant
I read these Arnold Kling posts 1,2,3 about Bryan Caplan's work and forthcoming book. So here's my offer: If I use the title you suggest, I'll take you to lunch at Morton's (Tyson's Corner or Reston, your pick). I meant to develop and apply the ideas to things that have been said here - more politics is stupid ammunition - but didn't get it done. Marcelino Fuentes at Biopolitical posted about it and said some things well. To attract votes, politicians promise policies that are popular instead of optimal. So democracy delivers bad policies. The alternative is not dictatorship, which usually works much worse, but individual decision-making and responsibility. Educating voters or cleaning up the campaign finance mess will not work. In classical public choice theory voters are rationally ignorant because they lack incentives to inform themselves. Learning about policy is costly, the probability that anyone's vote will affect the outcome of elections is negligible, and the costs of...
January 07, 2006
Bunkerism
The idea of "energy security" is nonsense but it sells well in Peoria. Those who don't understand economics and global commodities have the mistaken notion that it is possible for some country, any country, to withdraw from world trade in energy by some magical combination of energy scams that promise to provide self sufficiency within a geographic area. The idea of energy isolationism is one of those strange bedfellows fantasies, like the alliance of doctrinaire libertarians and loony leftists against agricultural subsidies, that in this case brings together neo-conservative islamophobes and pseudo-environmentalists, those who use environmental issues as political wedges to advance authoritarian agendas but don't really give a fig about the environment other than an emotional need to appear pious on green religion. The earlier posts Green Accounting, Rain Dance and Off Broadway discussed these silly ideas from several perspectives. But since this snake-oil is attractive to shallow thinkers there are still opportunists fleecing the marks and it...
January 03, 2006
Not Democracy
Another politics is stupid post. In this one Jonah Goldberg is confused about democracy. [via Prometheus which is in heavily qualified agreement with Goldberg] Liberal democracy ceases to exist when partisanship vanishes. Democracy is about disagreement before it is about agreement. This doesn't justify partisanship, it speaks against it since there are so many ways to disagree about a subject. Partisanship is where gangs of thugs mob together to punch above their weight. Liberal democracy is quite different. It is what happens when those who disagree listen to one another and realize that to have a functional society it is necessary to avoid alienating large numbers through the exercise of majoritarian power. It isn't that the thugs can be potty trained, there are always those who evade socialization and behave rudely. Indeed, when you mention their bad behavior they throw a tantrum: When you hear people say, "We need to get past partisan differences," what they are really saying...
December 23, 2005
Another Pattern
Politics is stupid. It impedes good governance, effective policy making, and useful thought. It even lowers IQ. I've said all these things in the past year and as time goes on it seems ever truer. Recently in a discussion with Tim Worstall I said: I had a thought today while I was bucking 4 tons of hay into the barn. You tend to think about anything but what you are doing at times like that so that you don't simply quit and do something more rational and less painful. Politics is like a fist fight in the stands between hooligans while the game is being played on the field. The fist fight has a tenuous connection to the game, but it is not the game. It can in extreme cases affect the game, but never in a useful way. It changes the nature of the experience for observers, even sometimes comes to dominate their experience. That's a mistake, though...
November 29, 2005
Lost In Space
Sometimes I read a post and wonder what these folks are talking about since it makes no sense at all. Often I find that they simply didn't know what they were talking about, had misunderstood some event and gone off on an unrelated tangent exercising one of their bedraggled hobby horses. Once I've untangled the unrelated threads each makes some sense, though not what those who commented had in mind. Norm me-toos a Mick Hartley post that misunderstood a Stephan Pollard article which questioned a BBC news show. (How's that for a chain of references!). Working back, the beeb showed Paul McCartney viewing some PETA footage from China in which some cats and dogs were handled roughly during slaughter. McCartney called for a complete boycott of China in retaliation. Pollard thinks McCartney has his priorities confused. China imprisons and executes thousands of dissidents who dare to criticise the regime. Sixteen years after the protest in Tiananmen Square dozens of...
November 09, 2005
Paris Is Burning
And there are as many theories about why this is so as there are pundits. . . OK, more. I found this Frank Furedi article to be thoughtful. After dismissing several other explanations (economic, yada yada) he proposes his theory. The most significant thing about recent events in France is not the behaviour of the rioters, but the reaction of the political class and official authority. The Bush regime's response to the flooding of New Orleans looks positively energetic when compared with the sense of paralysis and confusion that seems to have gripped French officialdom. During the first week of the unrest, French politicians devoted their energies mainly to scoring points against one another. Nero fiddling away while Rome burned seemed to serve as a role model for the French Cabinet. For a whole week, President Jacques Chirac literally withdrew from the public domain and said nothing. . . This reluctance publicly to address the issue at stake is...
October 18, 2005
Political Disease
One of the current foci of political agitation is flu. Political activists, after having exploited hurricanes for a few weeks, have switched focus now to a possible flu epidemic as the vehicle for advancing their same old agenda. Consider this artillery barrage: Earlier this month, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan suggested patent rules might be suspended in an outbreak to allow other companies to make generic forms of Tamiflu, produced by Swiss-based Roche Holding AG. In recent days, a company in India announced plans to do that. However, [U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike] Leavitt said the United States supports intellectual property laws that bar such action. Tamiflu has a shelf life of five years. The threat of a flu epidemic is older than that yet there has been no effort by governments to do the most sensible thing and stockpile it before the threat became immanent. Their purchases all along would have been all the stimulus needed to...
September 13, 2005
Sleaze Balls
Here's another example of the sort of muddled thinking that results from thinking of politics rather than of governance. It isn't just that it silly or mean spirited nonsense, it is also that the political thinker is unable to make useful analyses of situations and actions. [via Notional Slurry] But the diehard Bush shills (no bit of right-wing sliminess is beneath them, it is said) are busy blaming the local officials. (Ask yourself: supposing there really were, say, 200 school buses available, how would that have made possible the evacuation of 100,000 people from New Orleans?) Sliminess? That seems as abundant on the left, as evidenced here, as the right. I agree, they are both slimy. The fact is that the perpetually corrupt NOLA political establishment did blunder horribly. The fact is that FEMA was not prepared to deal with a real disaster, especially one that took place in such a corrupt and poorly governed place. Politicians on both...
September 07, 2005
Monolithic Fantasy
Robust, resilient systems are never monotonous. They're not even efficient. They never come in first, or last, and can stand a lot of punishment without collapse. The earlier post After The Flood included a brief paean to systems that may not be tidy but are resilient and referred to the "small minded prig who sees the spotty failures and longs to eliminate the clutter and make everything right. His whole objective is to eliminate those failures though they are in truth among the most valuable parts of the system. In his longing for neatness and order he creates tragedy. It isn't that the small failures are desired, or that they are not lamented since real people suffer, it's that there is less suffering that way." So who are these prigs, let them speak for themselves! Faster Katrina Recriminations Blame federalism! . . . As long as we're apportioning blame in the Katrina fiasco, here's another culprit: federalism, by which...
September 07, 2005
Save British Ale
In the discussion with Timothy Burke following the post Flesh Wounds - and other places too, it was a somewhat peripatetic conversation - my view that politics is a distraction from and impediment to governance, that politicians are necessarily unethical, and that those who focus on politics fail to do useful analysis or make sensible choices puzzled Timothy. He says: I'm really just puzzled by the degree to which you think that everyone else who is interested in "politics" in some way that you are not must be operating from hidden motives, bad-faith instrumentalisms, superficialities, rather than long-established, internally consistent and principled arguments with which you happen to seriously disagree. The latter wouldn't bother me for a minute. The former, as a fairly blanketing and generic assumption, bothers me intensely and seems deeply contradictory to the specificity and depth of many other postings. This post isn't a response to Timothy's puzzlement (not that I accept his characterization), I'm still...
March 10, 2005
Left Out
In addition to the naive and self serving nonsense we've heard about why Democrats have gotten thumped so often and for so long there is a more honest and thoughtful body of work. The recent post of Timothy Burke that I've pointed to a couple of times already, Down In the Dumps, where he explains why he speaks plainly and sincerely about issues that interest him rather than avoiding subjects that might damage his liberal causes, and won't resort to lies and political strategies, is one example. I write as a liberal sack of garbage not because I think that I am writing to Gentlemen and Ladies on the other side, and thinking they accord me the same respect. I write it because the only way to win a rigged game is to play fair and hope that the onlookers will eventually notice who cheats and who does not. I write as a sack of garbage because I believe...
February 20, 2005
Mobocracy
The earlier post Extremists took issue with the naive and mean-spirited corruption of the idea of democracy advocated by reactionaries upset by consensual rule, especially in the US. Their objective is to incite mobs to use ICT to dominate society and disenfranchise as large a segment of society as possible. In Downloading Democracy Robert Conquest deals with an aspect of this issue worth highlighting. Its faults are almost as obvious as its virtues. And examples are many--for instance, the sentencing of Socrates, who lost votes because of his politically incorrect speech in his own defense. Or the Athenian assembly voting for the death of all the adult males and the enslavement of all the women and children of Mytilene, then regretting the decision and sending a second boat to intercept, just in time, the boat carrying the order. Democracy had the even more grievous result of procuring the ruin of Athens, by voting for the disastrous and pointless expedition...
November 09, 2004
God Bothering
Ken MacLeod's reaction the the US elections, like many others, starts with perplexity, then shows the flag and expresses solidarity with the losers, and ends by trying to say some sensible things. Perplexity: The Conservative and the Communist sometimes find they have more in common than either might have expected; at least that they understand each other, and agree on what is important; likewise the Freethinker and the Fundamentalist. In politics as in religion, both poles are perplexed by the Liberal; from opposite sides of the case they scratch their heads, like Victorian biologists looking at a platypus and wondering if they aren't being made a monkey of. That's how I feel sometimes. I love you guys, but I don't understand you. Add to this that I have a tin ear for US politics, and my qualifications for commenting on last week's election, and giving my liberal friends tips on how to warm their eggs and suckle their young...
November 06, 2004
False Assumptions
In a series of posts and an external essay Timothy Burke grapples with the US election results trying to understand why the Democrats lost and how they might recover from their decades long slide into increasing irrelevance and political powerlessness. I find his work useful but I think it suffers from false assumptions. In his most recent post he abstracts arguments from his essay for further emphasis. Quite a few commentators have observed that Bush is popular with some voters precisely because of his malapropisms, his anti-intellectual stance, because they see a resemblance to themselves and because that resemblance aligns them with him against educated elites. The reverse is equally true. A lot of us who voted for Kerry are astonished that the simple competence issue didn't carry the day by itself. What I have realized is that seeking competency and a respect for institutional process are cultural values that are parochially confined to educated elites. They're part of...
November 04, 2004
Bad Idea
In a comment by Timothy Burke about a Mindles H. Dreck post at AI Timothy said: If you ask people to remember and respect large pluralities of people who think differently than they do, then you have to ask that across the board. One of my objections to the Bush Administration and many of their most ardent supporters is that they show zero inclination to consider any opposing views. I feel little desire to "unite behind the President" since he has shown no interest whatsoever to take any of my views, interests, beliefs or knowledge seriously. But it would be fair to say that much of the opposition to Bush would do the same were they in power. If you find that a lamentable state of affairs, then lament it even-handedly, and work to change it. We would need a model of political process that regarded radically diverse or pluralistic convictions with respect, and tried to incorporate them into...
November 02, 2004
Newspeak
Several previous posts have talked about how those who cling to old ideas, the steam age industrial ideas of the past couple of centuries, try to tart up those old ideas with new language to pass them off as new ideas. In a comment about a previous post, Modest Praise, which softly complimented Nicole-Ann Boyer for her recognition of the work of C.S. Holling, Nicole herself asks: "I'm curious, though, what you find wrong with the Worldchanging approach?" Here is an example: We are not a partisan site -- not because we don't have a variety of strongly held political views, but because we're trying here to be part of creating a different kind of conversation about the future: a conversation more about solutions than problems, more about collaboration than conflict, more about tools than talking points, more about the tomorrow's planet than today's politics... A billion people now live in conditions of appalling poverty. What can we can...
October 28, 2004
Fallibilist Philosophy
'He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.' -- Friedrich Nietzsche A thought thread woven through previous posts deals with the conflicting world views of those who seize upon an idea and become zealous proponents of it - taking it to extremes and so losing any value the original idea may have had - and those who maintain a critical stance, even of their own ideas, and so avoid turning them into dogma or caricature. The excitable extremists ride their notions into the ground and end up walking, or crawling, while the more critical not only keep their mounts they do better at choosing routes among the various turnings and forkings of paths. It's not just a difference in temperament. There's an element of personal integrity and intellectual honesty involved as well as courage. When uncertainty or doubt...
October 23, 2004
Patooie Spirit
Michael Blowhard writes: It isn't often that I run across a political quote I can get entirely behind, but I think I may have found one today. I'm still kicking it around, but the more I do the solider the thinking in this quote feels. Benjamin Disraeli: In a progressive country change is constant; and the great question is not whether you should resist change which is inevitable but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, the traditions of the people, or in deference to abstract principles and arbitrary and general doctrines. A little before that Michael wrote: I'm thinking about politics' place in life. I'm prone to such feelings as, "Sheesh, if only we could do without." And the people I'm temperamentally prone to be most suspicious of are those who approach politics with gusto. What's the matter with them? In any case, as far as I'm concerned, politics...
October 19, 2004
Thingism
Not to be confused with chosisme. SIAW links to a previous post, Anti-Globalization, with mild interest and some reservations. In their attempt to properly label me they make this assertion: Jones makes it very clear very early on that his perspective is not one that could be called leftist. He characterises socialism, for example, as “a primitive idea formed during the early years of industrialisation, harking back to an earlier time rather than usefully anticipating probable futures”, and says that “its central tenet [is] world domination” (when we all know that our ultimate aim is domination of the entire Milky Way, eh, Cde Posadas?). Is socialism all there is to leftism? What is socialism? There are a wide variety of answers and the smaller the distinction the more virulent the dispute. At a high level it is political control of economic life, a seemingly horrible notion justified by an even more horrible history of lack of control. It hasn't...
October 16, 2004
Evolution
Here's an interesting example of old and new media; Carl Zimmer has a review of Richard Dawkins' newest book, The Ancestor's Tale, in NYT and a blog post to say things that didn't fit in the print version. It's a review of a book about evolution, in a partially evolved form, one of those missing links so prized when found in the fossil record, like a proto-cetacean with legs not fully readapted to life in the sea after a long evolutionary history on land. The form is interesting but so is the content. The blog post, The Missing Foe, ruminates about the fact that Dawkins' book didn't mention Stephen J. Gould, his long time antagonist. Here's the most important thing about The Ancestor's Tale that I couldn't fit in my review. I kept noticing how little Richard Dawkins mentioned the other celebrity evolutionary biologist of our time, Stephen Jay Gould. After all, Gould was a prominent character in many...
October 14, 2004
Uncomprehending
William Gibson is one of those hollow writers that doesn't grasp his subject while none the less having the insight to choose interesting subjects and write ripping good tales about them. This recent blog post is an example of this. ... he introduced me to several new ideas (mainly the "netwar" paradigm of warfare, which is genuinely a new paradigm in the Kuhnian sense, and which I'll return to in a later post). I came away feeling highly optimistic about, of all things, the US military..."asymmetric conflict with amorphous networks of terrorists, who repurpose civilian technologies to terrible ends" was going to be where it was at from now on... In the days after 9-11 I often took comfort in thinking of this man and the ideas he represented... I surprised friends by saying that I believed the US military's intelligentsia already understood the true nature of the conflict better than the enemy did. One actually has to be...
October 06, 2004
Bi-Polar Whingeing
A curious phenomenon of US elections is the idea that citizens of other countries, though unable to govern themselves sensibly, should have influence in US elections. They argue that since the US affects them that they should have a voice. Should the US then have a reciprocal voice in their affairs? They don't speak of that directly but of course this is their true agenda, the majoritarian nightmare discussed in the earlier post Extremists. They wish to have a single world government. The fact remains that this election will have a material impact on the rest of the world, especially people living overseas. We do feel the brunt of these foreign policies in direct and indirect ways. I can no longer travel as care-free and safely to the places I once could just five years ago. The degrees of freedom in terms of my personal business have narrowed considerably. And this lack of say, this powerlessness to exercise my...
October 05, 2004
Trick Questions
In the comments of the earlier post Compared to What? there was some discussion of why some people support Bush, even some that didn't vote for him in 2000 or vote for Republicans in general. In a new post Timothy Burke, a key participant in that earlier discussion, has more to say. I still don’t understand fully the other part of the solidly pro-Bush constituency that I encounter online and in everyday life. It’s not so much irrational as arational in my reading. I don’t understand where it’s coming from in social terms--it seems rather heterogeneous and distributed--or whether it is in fact a structurally immobile, deeply fixed political posture whose terms draw from something prior to and unaffected by conjunctural political thought or experience. It doesn't seem economically or politically self-interested to me in the way that Thomas Frank argues it is (I have been thinking a lot about Frank lately, but Michael Berube has said most of...
September 08, 2004
Compared To What?
I observe political contests for the most part with detached curiosity, finding all sides a bit repellent and their actions mainly destructive. Politics is not about governance and is usually antagonistic to good governance. While it is clear that societies must govern themselves to achieve desired outcomes, and that since there are differing views some type of decision making system must exist to resolve disputes on a pragmatic and provisional basis, the best methods yet devised fall far short of adequacy. Representative democracy with a variety of constitutional hobbles to blunt fanaticism, buffer mood swings and preserve subsidarity is a theoretically decent solution made much less effective in practice by political advocacy and conflict. Though not deeply interested in the details of political contests at either the practical and strategic levels of particular contests, such as the current US presidential elections, or the more theoretical and ideological level of historical trends, I do follow a couple of sharp pundits...
August 29, 2004
More Science Politics
Huge amounts of money are spent on scientific research, much of it by governments. Government funding is politicized, an unavoidable problem that manifests in various ways depending on the socio-political system. Opportunists of various stripes continuously maneuver for advantage, increasingly by making shrill accusations that their political opponents are doing the same. These pot and kettle contests would be humorous if the issues weren't important. The previous post Science Politics refuted the somewhat muddled advocacy of Lawrence Lessig's Wired article Stamping Out Good Science which repeats the hollow idea that philosopher kings of some sort should control science funding, regardless of public concern or minority objections, for the good of society. It's the father knows best approach, an idea that some developed societies rejected a few decades ago after taking a close look at father's previous work. There is one region where science funding has the worst of both approaches, a father-knows-best system that it completely politicized. Ask a...
March 20, 2004
The We Problem
The earlier post The President's Council discussed the partisan flap over the actions of the President’s Council on Bioethics. That post dealt with an aspect of a larger theme often discussed here, the failure of putatively progressive ideas in the past few decades, especially those relating to technology and the environment. This New Atlantis article by Wilfred M. McClay, one of several in the Winter 2004 issue that reflect on a report entitled Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness issued by the President’s Council on Bioethics in October 2003, speaks of the anti-democratic nature of "Progressivism". Although Progressivism had various aspects, one of its chief features was its optimistic faith in the power of disciplined intellect to reorder society, and free it of the inefficiencies, inequities, and pathologies that beset it. A powerful and active government was the chief means through which the disciplined intellect could act upon the world, and the burgeoning research universities were the...
March 02, 2004
The President's Council
It seems that another politicized and deceptive article about science funding appears every day. This AP article published by Wired News is an example. This one complains about a change in personnel on the President's Council on Bioethics. Two of the eighteen members changed. The two who left were outspoken advocates of stem cell research funding by the government. The AP article quotes the ever vocal Union of Concerned Scientists as critics as well as opposition presidential candidates. The UCS is an organization of politicized scientists with such prescient members as Paul Ehrlich, the buffoon who spent his life predicting doom for the world and being publicly humiliated by the failures of his predictions which are all long past their sell-by date. What makes this politicized flap so silly is that nothing is at stake but federal funds. It isn't as if stem cell research is inhibited. Non-federally funded institutions are proceeding with stem cell research and new research...
February 19, 2004
Waffling with Dignity
A good example of the politicized state of science policy which has existed for decades and is only now being challenged can be found in this brief and thoughtless NYT article which accuses the Bush administration of politicizing science. The Bush administration has deliberately and systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad, a group of about 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, said in a statement issued today. The sweeping charges were later discussed in a conference call with some of the scientists that was organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an independent organization that focuses on technical issues and has often taken stands at odds with administration policy. The organization also issued a 37-page report today that it said detailed the accusations. What the writer, James Glanz, fails to mention is that the Union of Concerned Scientists is a radical...
February 15, 2004
The Unexamined Life
Jacob Levy at Volokh provides another example of the muddled thinking about science policy now so common. ...This isn't the first administration to meddle in scientific review processes for political purposes, but the current administration's version is particuarly worrisome. It's concentrated on public health in general and reproductive health in particular, interfering with the ability of public policy to deal honestly and competently with AIDS in particular. Now, strict libertarian principle (or even strict Rawlsian-neutralist liberal principles) might tell us that state funding of research is a bad idea, but doesn't give us any guidance as to how it should be structured if it exists. My view is something like this: if state funding of research is justified, it has to be because of the value of getting good science and good research. That requires that the programs, to have merit, have to be insulated as much as possible from political interference and left free to pursue good science....
January 19, 2004
Outdated Ideas
This interesting press release amplifies the ideas from the previous post. A person's genetic predisposition to develop heart disease and history of hypertension are just as important as gender and age when it comes to determining dietary needs, according to an article in Nutrition Today. "Individualization of Nutrition Recommendations and Food Choices," written by Lori Hoolihan, PhD RD, discusses how a person's biological make-up coupled with personal lifestyle choices are among the many considerations that contribute to nutrition recommendations; a trend that may significantly alter the way health professionals prescribe diets for patients. "Health professionals have been using family history of disease to determine their patients' risks for genetic diseases for years. Now, the science is getting to be such that health professionals will be able to recommend specific foods and nutrients for optimal health based on detailed patient profiles," states Hoolihan, research specialist for the Dairy Council of California. We know a lot more about livestock nutrition and health...
January 18, 2004
Grunts and Groans
This idiotic article from the groan is another example of the entirely political agenda behind the belated concerns with science noted in earlier posts, here and here. It is worth noting that this is a loony left broadsheet published in U.K., an embarrassment to thoughtful and sincere leftists, from a nation where science is totally subsumed by politics and has been so for a very long time. Professor Kaare Norum, leader of the World Health Organisation... tells of his grave concern over American opposition to the WHO's blueprint to combat obesity. He accuses the US of making the health of millions of young Americans 'a hostage to fortune' because it has failed to take action over the fat epidemic as a result of its business interests, particularly the sugar lobby. Since 1990, successive US governments have blocked WHO calls for action, claims Norum, professor of medicine at Oslo University. 'Obesity rates have risen so that now one in three...
January 16, 2004
Please darken my door
Notes and Comment expresses concern about the OMB peer review proposal and links this WaPo article. The administration proposal, which is open for comment from federal agencies through Friday and could take effect in the next few months, would block the adoption of new federal regulations unless the science being used to justify them passes muster with a centralized peer review process that would be overseen by the White House Office of Management and Budget. Administration officials say the approach reflects President Bush's commitment to "sound science." Notes and Comment expresses these concerns... Peer review is one thing, 'centralized' peer review is another, and 'centralized' peer review overseen by the White House Office of Management and Budget is quite, quite another. Which peers would those be, exactly? Centralized by whom? And - 'overseen' in what sense, using what criteria? One can guess all too easily. ...And quotes the WaPo article. But a number of scientific organizations, citizen advocacy groups...
December 10, 2003
Texas Floods
Norm has a new home. I hope this doesn't interfere with the interesting discussion via blog he's been having with Ken MacLeod regarding MacLeod's views on our current wars. It's a discussion I've been anticipating (and attempting to instigate) for months, one that contrasts opposing views held by careful and principled thinkers, each deeply knowledgeable and long immersed in social issues. UPDATE: 12/16/2003 Ken MacLeod has replied to Norm and Norm promises further response....
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