The recent frenzy on the left about a supposed leak of internal documents from the Heartland Institute purporting to expose a devious strategy funded by nefarious individuals seemed to me to be another example of leftist chicanery. Even if the documents were valid they didn't actually say anything that hadn't already been said, they just added a bit of torque to the leftist spin. Ho hum.

It's beginning to look much worse than that.

it seems clear that one of the documents that was leaked was in fact a fake. Megan McArdle at The Atlantic does a heroic job examining the documents (something that apparently most reporters failed to do) and concludes that it is fake (I agree):

The memo doesn't add new facts, just new spin. Naturally, because the spin is more lurid, it's what a lot of the climate blogs seized on.

If the faked document happened to be produced by a climate activist or scientist (as some are already suggesting), then the leaked Heartland documents will go down in history as one of the more spectacular own goals in the history of the climate debate (with the consequences proportional to the stature of the faker). The faking is likely to overshadow whatever legitimate questions may have been raised by the release of the documents. Imagine what would have happened if the UEA hacker/leaker had made up a few emails to spice up the dossier.

More generally, the episode already illustrates much of what has become of the activist wing of the climate science community -- Apparently, reality is not good enough, so it must be sexed up. This sort of thing feeds into the worst imaginings of skeptics and blinds them to the fact that there are real issues here despite the frequent over-egging of the pudding.

Another earlier article that I read was Judith Curry's roundup of reactions pro and con to the Heartland kerfuffle, and her initial take.

I did a previous blog post on this: Blame on Heartland-Cato-Marshall-Etc. Much information about total amount and funding sources is publicly available from sourcewatch. The surprising thing is the paltry funding that the libertarian think tanks have relative to the green groups (e.g. WWF, Greenpeace, etc.) The more interesting question to me is how have these groups been so effective with so little funds, relative to the much larger expenditures by the green groups.

Re the parallels to Climategate. They are similar in the sense that they give us a behind the scenes peak at how the IPCC and Heartland works. In terms of moral equivalence, what Heartland is doing is not surprising; seems to be no different than what other advocacy groups do. The IPCC is a very different organization, and also the CRU/UEA, with explicit requirements for government accountability. So in terms of a scandal, I would have to say that Heartlandgate is nowhere near Climategate.

What interests me are the scientific issues since this is still a very immature discipline with many unknowns and evolving theories in spite of its fairly ancient origins.

Suppose it turns out that CO2 has essentially nothing to do with the earth’s climate. How will the history of this colossal mistake be written?

They will say that a mechanism called the “greenhouse effect,” was postulated long ago (~1824 by Joseph Fourier) and gained adherents in the late 20th century. They will say that the theory was seemingly invalidated by the decrease in global temperatures from 1940-1975, but that the adherents patched this up by explaining the cooling with pollution, specifically sulfur, from industry

They will say that the theory was challenged by the noted vast gap between the amount of CO2 produced by civilization and the substantially smaller increase in CO2 in the atmosphere, but that the theory was patched up by examining the increased CO2 uptake by the hydrosphere and the biosphere.

They will say the theory was seemingly invalidated by the evidence that the atmosphere was already nearly opaque in the wavelengths that are absorbed by CO2 and so the additional CO2 could have, on its own, little effect, but that the theory was patched up by positing a feedback mechanism between the small temperature increases directly due to CO2 and the production of water vapor which is the main greenhouse gas.

They will note that the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) proceeded much like any scientific theory (cf. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) in that it was modified and patched up and adjusted to fit empirical challenges until it finally collapsed altogether under the weight of incontrovertible evidence. But, the scientific historians will have a new phenomenon to consider, and that is the social and political context of this particular scientific theory. ...

Scientific revolutions are difficult and traumatic enough without the added inertia of government sponsorship. To put it more bluntly, scientists have difficulty enough admitting that they have egg on their faces. Throw in the Solyndras of the world and the United Nations and the entire anti-capitalist Global Left and the backing out of this theory will be nothing short of a fiasco.

Well, the truth of this issue should be apparent within about 15 years. . .

It is my belief that the final conclusion will be that CO2 produced by humanity will be found to be of only minor importance for global climate and that it will be heavily outweighed by exchange of heat with oceans of evolving temperature and other factors such as solar-determined cloud formation. But I am open to evidence and, alas, a lot of global warming hysterics in the scientific community (and especially in the non-scientific, political community) have their ears stopped with gobs of wax.

In conclusion, global warming is an unchallengeable “consensus” only among those who deeply yearn to save the planet. The conviction of those politicians and activists and (few) scientists that debate is destructive is itself destructive. It arises from the dungeons and dragons psychodrama going on in the minds of those deluded saints – where they embody themselves as the White Wizards and the skeptics as the Morlocks.

The appropriate role for conservatives is to oppose the bias of hysteria and the “cautionary principle;” to demand every essential cost-benefit analysis and, understanding the daydreams of the holy, to insist that progress comes by first placing our feet upon the ground.

Update: The other shoe drops

I hardly know what to say about the latest developments in the Heartland document dump. Profanity seems too weak, and incredulity too tame. ...

yesterday night, Peter Gleick went and confessed. To the phishing, but not the faking ...

His name has swiftly and silently disappeared from the webpage of the ethics task force.

This is . . . just . . . words fail me . . . I mean, seriously . . . um . . . well, what the hey?!?!

The very, very best thing that one can say about this is that this would be an absolutely astonishing lapse of judgement for someone in their mid-twenties, and is truly flabbergasting coming from a research institute head in his mid-fifties. ...

Gleick has done enormous damage to his cause and his own reputation, and it's no good to say that people shouldn't be focusing on it. If his judgement is this bad, how is his judgement on matters of science? For that matter, what about the judgement of all the others in the movement who apparently see nothing worth dwelling on in his actions?

When skeptics complain that global warming activists are apparently willing to go to any lengths--including lying--to advance their worldview, I'd say one of the movement's top priorities should be not proving them right. And if one rogue member of the community does something crazy that provides such proof, I'd say it is crucial that the other members of the community say "Oh, how horrible, this is so far beyond the pale that I cannot imagine how this ever could have happened!" and not, "Well, he's apologized and I really think it's pretty crude and opportunistic to make a fuss about something that's so unimportant in the grand scheme of things."

The weather is still changing as ever, and local climate changes following some mysterious pattern, or lack of pattern, it isn't clear which, within some set of historical bounds relating to geography. For example, the USA has been generally warm while Europe has been generally cold lately, for a net near zero. How can this be explained?

I. IPCC AGW hypothesis: 20th century climate variability/change is explained by external forcing, with natural internal variability providing high frequency ‘noise’. In the latter half of the 20th century, this external forcing has been dominated by anthropogenic gases and aerosols. The implications for temperature change in the 21st century is 0.2C per decade until 2050. Challenges: convincing explanations of the warming 1910-1940, explaining the flat trend between mid 1940's and mid 1970's, explaining the flat trend for the past 15 years.

II. Multi-decadal oscillations plus trend hypothesis: 20th century climate variability/change is explained by the large multidecadal oscillations (e.g NAO, PDO, AMO) with a superimposed trend of external forcing (AGW warming). The implications for temperature change in the 21st century is relatively constant temperatures for the next several decades, or possible cooling associated with solar. Challenges: separating forced from unforced changes in the observed time series, lack of predictability of the multidecadal oscillations.

III: Climate shifts hypothesis: 20th century climate variability/change is explained by synchronized chaos arising from nonlinear oscillations of the coupled ocean/atmosphere system plus external forcing (e.g. Tsonis, Douglass). The most recent shift occurred 2001/2002, characterized by flattening temperatures and more frequent LaNina’s. The implications for the next several decades are that the current trend will continue until the next climate shift, at some unknown point in the future. External forcing (AGW, solar) will have more or less impact on trends depending on the regime, but how external forcing materializes in terms of surface temperature in the context of spatiotemporal chaos is not known. Note: hypothesis III is consistent with Sneyers’ arguments re change-point analysis. Challenges: figuring out the timing (and characteristics) of the next climate shift.

It seems to me that we have expert disagreement with some uncertainty, and so a non-expert like me should stand down. I have no way to decide, and so should not do so. The general increase in measured global temperature, and the increase inferred from proxies (ice, trees, etc.), and the measured increase in GHG concentrations are worth attention, but it isn't clear that they matter when things like cyclical variation and climate phase change have so much larger impacts. I'm not saying that they don't, I'm saying that it isn't clear to me.

FWIW the author of the post, Judith Curry, concludes:

IMO, the standard 1D energy balance model of the Earth’s climate system will provide little in the way of further insights; rather we need to bring additional physics and theory (e.g. entropy and the 2nd law) into the simple models, and explore the complexity of coupled nonlinear climate system characterized by spatiotemporal chaos.

Hypothesis I derives from the 1D energy balance, thermodynamic view of the climate system, whereas Hypothesis III derives from a nonlinear dynamical system characterized by spatiotemporal chaos. Hypothesis II derives from climate diagnostics and data analysis.

Surowiecki made the important points that there had been a lot of fuzzy thinking about the meaning of collective intelligence, networks, and interactions. His notion of "collective" was not the same as the common use of that word. It wasn't about mobs goose-stepping to a shared vision, rather it was more of an aggregation of the thinking of a a large group of people reflecting diverse opinions offering judgments independently of one another with little communication among them. Diversity and independence are crucial to crowd wisdom. Consensus is not a goal. Agreement is not wise.

But crowd wisdom has limits and is not an appropriate tool for all problems. True group problem solving is something else again, and Surowiecki noted the work of Page in which he did computer simulations of agents competing with one another. Based on their performance Page separated the dumb from the smart agents. He then formed three groups: smart, dumb and random. As you should suspect the smart group beat the dumb group, but the random group composed of both smart and dumb agents of every rank beat them both.

Why? True group problem solving involves communication and learning. Too much communication and information cascades ruin wise crowds as well as some problem solving groups, in effect dumbing them down. The old saying is that a group of smart people can enter a conference room together and come out stupid. A key to smart group performance is heuristic diversity. If what the group members are communicating and learning from one another are diverse perspectives on the problem then they all increase the size and scope of their mental toolset and in effect become smarter.

So, to form a smart group problem solving team the selection criteria isn't just about intelligence as measured by IQ, it is also about divergent thinking. The value of a member to the team is contextual: what do they bring to the team that wasn't already there?

In those old posts I speculated about how to determine heuristic diversity in some formal way. Those with experience in forming ad-hoc, task oriented project teams have done these things intuitively for decades, so the concepts aren't really novel, but it was art rather than science. It was informal, a peculiar talent of successful project leaders. Progress is being made now to develop more formal methods.

Whatever this [IQ] test is really measuring, one thing is for sure: this is a test of convergent thinking. Your answer must converge with what the test maker came up with. Contrast this type of thinking with divergent thinking, in which you have to come up with problems to solve in the first place because there is no single correct answer. How does this -- more creative -- form of thinking relate to the type of thinking measured by IQ tests?

Researchers have attempted to get at the answer to that question -- reporting on average a small correlation between convergent thinking tests and divergent thinking tests. ...

What does this all mean? It means that IQ-type reasoning is only one slice of the creativity pie. The highest levels of creativity require both convergent thinking and divergent thinking. This idea has long been known in creativity research. According to the well known Geneplore model, creativity involves a cyclical process of generating ideas and then systematically working out which ideas are most fruitful and implementing them. The generation stage is thought to involve divergent thinking whereas the exploration stage is thought to involve convergent thinking.

There is disagreement among researchers about whether IQ tests or divergent thinking (DT) tests are better predictors of creative achievement. Resolving this dispute is complicated by the fact that some research has shown a relationship between IQ and DT test scores (e.g., Runco & Albert, 1986; Wallach, 1970). The present study conducted meta-analyses of the relationships between creative achievement and both IQ and DT test scores. The analyses included 17 studies (with 5,544 participants) that established the correlation coefficients between IQ and creative achievement and 27 studies (with 47,197 participants) that established the correlation coefficients between DT test scores and creative achievement. Marginal, but statistically significant, Fisher’s Z-transformed correlation coefficients were revealed. The analysis found a significantly higher relationship between DT test scores and creative achievement (r = .216) than between IQ test scores and creative achievement (r = .167). The differences in the correlation coefficients were explained by differences in DT tests, creative achievement types, predicted time periods, and creativity subscales. The significant independent moderator effect for different DT tests indicates that the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) predict creative achievement better than any other DT test included in this study. Among the creative achievement types, music is predicted the best by IQ and all others are predicted best by DT tests. Among the time periods evaluated, the relationship between DT test scores and creative achievement had the highest correlation at the period of 11-15 years.

That old post speculated that one way to identify heuristic diversity might be to administer IQ tests and select a team that collectively scored highest. What one member got wrong another got right and together they are better than individually. It wouldn't be a team composed of the smartest individuals, it would be composed of a complementary set of measured skills. In practice this might mean that none of the team members were exceptionally smart but that the team would be brilliant.

Adding DT and creativity tests might provide more information for team member selection. Having some divergent thinkers on the team who were also heuristically diverse could be beneficial. A team leader that was both high IQ and high DT might be important for maintaining group cohesion and progress.]]> back40 2012-02-07T10:04:27-08:00 http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/002079.html There's an interesting guest post at Climate Etc. Curry comments:

I‘m trying to remember if I've previously come across a more insightful and sensible essay on energy and climate policy, and I can't think of one.

It notes that energy security policy and climate policy are separate things in spite of claims that they ought to be lumped together.

In the United States and Canada, ensuring energy security for the next few decades at least will require that those countries continue to rely on their huge endowments of fossil fuels. For example, the World Energy Council estimates that the United States has around 30% of the world's known coal resources, which is more than any other country. They also estimate that Canada has more than 70% of the world's known bituminous oil, and the United States has more than 70% of the world's known oil shale resources. While oil imports are currently an energy security issue for the United States, absent concern about CO2 emissions the United States and Canada could together produce, at costs competitive with the current price of crude oil, all the petroleum products they need until alternative energy technologies become competitive.

More generally, fossil fuels are essential for modern economic activity, and curtailing their use will reduce economic growth by raising the cost of energy. However, burning them adds CO2 to the atmosphere, and since CO2 is a greenhouse gas, this should raise global surface temperatures and may trigger other harmful changes in climates. Although there is much uncertainty about the character, size and geographic distribution of these effects, it has been asserted that significant and immediate reductions in fossil fuel combustion are needed to avoid significantly harmful climate change.

Much of the essay is devoted to enumeration of the costs and benefits of a slightly warmer world with higher CO2 concentrations. There are good points and bad points but the good points are seldom mentioned by alarmist activists.

Predicting economic futures has been clearly shown to be beyond any current capability, and without an ability to foresee development and resource usage there is no possibility of predicting the climate consequences. We can have some broad expectations but they become less useful as the period being considered grows larger. In general, the policies that have the most immediate benefit for the least immediate cost should be done first.

IMV the contentious debate about whether or not GHG emissions and other anthropogenic changes are causing climate to warm - counteracting a natural geologic cooling trend - is irrelevant. Use of fossil fuels cannot be eliminated or even reduced for decades, so it will continue. The things that can be improved that are related to this subject should be done, but for their own sake rather than for their climate implications. For example, greater use of natural gas and reduced use of coal makes sense even in a cooling world. A greater focus on increasing soil carbon and a general increase in the net primary productivity of the sunlight that reaches earth - which increases the size of the carbon pool temporarily sequestered as organic matter - makes sense on it's own. The fact that it shifts the dynamic balance of carbon in the atmosphere and carbon tied up in organic matter is secondary, a by blow of good management. Research and development for 21st century energy systems makes sense any way you look at it, climate change or not. Steps to reduce the destructive consequences of severe weather make sense no matter what the climate is doing. And so on.

Climate alarmism isn't about improving the human condition or the environment. It's about a heart sick anti-humanism that seeks to contain and diminish humanity. Policies advocated to achieve this goal - such as harmonized international carbon taxes to increase the cost of energy - are utterly impossible as well as being ineffective for climate change mitigation, but they would advance anti-humanist goals by impoverishing humanity.

Anti-humanism is a value system, perhaps usefully likened to some sort of religious conviction, and so is not subject to reason and logic. IMV it is a value system held by a small percentage of humans. When the climate debate is examined closely to reveal the underlying values conflict there is little support for anti-humanist goals. Opposing the anti-humanists does not indicate a lack of environmental concern in general or climate issues in particular. The anti-humanist prescriptions for environmental preservation and remediation won't help the environment, they just harm humans. A better approach is to select prescriptions that have net benefits for both.]]> Energy back40 2012-02-05T13:36:40-08:00 http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/002078.html One of the other themes discussed here over the past decade has been the ignorance and arrogance of authoritarians seeking to control society, especially paleo-environmentalists but also economists with political designs.

Donella Meadows was one of the leaders of a blundering, ineffective sort of environmentalism for many years in the last part of the twentieth century. As lead author of the doomsday book Limits to Growth - commissioned by the doom think tank Club Of Rome - she epitomized a heart sick, mean spirited and anti-humanist approach to change. Meadows built her career around doom mongering and hectoring humanity to stop developing, stop growing and stop enjoying itself.

Inspired by Systems Dynamics, a.k.a. systems thinking, Meadows and a coterie of fellow travelers fully embraced command and control governance as a mechanism to contain and diminish humanity, an objective that she and others justified with model based scenarios of impending global doom due to anthropogenic causes, especially population growth and resource consumption. A generation of concerned but uninformed believers treated her pronouncements as gospel and her methods as enlightened.

People who are raised in the industrial world and who get enthused about systems thinking are likely to make a terrible mistake. They are likely to assume that here, in systems analysis, in interconnection and complication, in the power of the computer, here at last, is the key to prediction and control. This mistake is likely because the mindset of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to prediction and control.

I assumed that at first too. We all assumed it, as eager systems students at the great institution called MIT. More or less innocently, enchanted by what we could see through our new lens, we did what many discoverers do. We exaggerated our own ability to change the world. We did so not with any intent to deceive others, but in the expression of our own expectations and hopes. Systems thinking for us was more than subtle, complicated mindplay. It was going to Make Systems Work.

But self-organizing, nonlinear, feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable. They are understandable only in the most general way. The goal of foreseeing the future exactly and preparing for it perfectly is unrealizable. The idea of making a complex system do just what you want it to do can be achieved only temporarily, at best. We can never fully understand our world, not in the way our reductionistic science has led us to expect. Our science itself, from quantum theory to the mathematics of chaos, leads us into irreducible uncertainty. For any objective other than the most trivial, we can't optimize; we don't even know what to optimize. We can't keep track of everything.

Environmental concerns in general, and climate concerns in particular, are real issues, but the ignorant and arrogant activists have made a mess of everything by exaggerating their ability to foresee the future, and prescribing policies that are destructive even for the factors that they claim to care about.

Insights about complexity and chaotic systems helped illuminate the defective thinking of activists, and revealed their inimical objectives. In response they tried to tart up their old cybernetic views with the language of complex adaptive systems without actually grasping the implications. This was possible in part because complexity science stalled, failed to progress beyond early insights and provide useful new tools for thought. A new, unifying approach has emerged.

Reductionism, as a paradigm, is expired, and complexity, as a field, is tired. Data-based mathematical models of complex systems are offering a fresh perspective, rapidly developing into a new discipline: network science. ...

[D]ecades of research on complexity were driven by big, sweeping theoretical ideas, inspired by toy models and differential equations that ultimately failed to deliver. Think synergetics and its slave modes; think chaos theory, ultimately telling us more about unpredictability than how to predict nonlinear systems; think self-organized criticality, a sweeping collection of scaling ideas squeezed into a sand pile; think fractals, hailed once as the source of all answers to the problems of pattern formation. We learned a lot, but achieved little: our tools failed to keep up with the shifting challenges that complex systems pose.

Yet something has changed in the past few years. The driving force behind this change can be condensed into a single word: data. As scientists sift through these mountains of data, we are witnessing an increasing awareness that if we are to tackle complexity, the tools to do so are being born right now, in front of our eyes. The field that benefited most from this data windfall is often called network theory, and it is fundamentally reshaping our approach to complexity.

On the surface, network theory is prone to the failings of its predecessors. It has its own big ideas, from scale-free networks to the theory of network evolution3, from community formation4, 5 to dynamics on networks6. But there is a defining difference. These ideas have not been gleaned from toy models or mathematical anomalies. They are based on data and meticulous observations. The theory of evolving networks was motivated by extensive empirical evidence documenting the scale-free nature of the degree distribution, from the cell to the World Wide Web; the formalism behind degree correlations was preceded by data documenting correlations on the Internet and on cellular maps7, 8; the extensive theoretical work on spreading processes was preceded by decades of meticulous data collection on the spread of viruses and fads, gaining a proper theoretical footing in the network context6. This data-inspired methodology is an important shift compared with earlier takes on complex systems. ...

Reductionism deconstructed complex systems, bringing us a theory of individual nodes and links. Network theory is painstakingly reassembling them, helping us to see the whole again. One thing is increasingly clear: no theory of the cell, of social media or of the Internet can ignore the profound network effects that their interconnectedness cause. Therefore, if we are ever to have a theory of complexity, it will sit on the shoulders of network theory. ...

The twentieth century has witnessed the birth of such a sweeping, enabling framework: quantum mechanics. Many advances of the century, from electronics to astrophysics, from nuclear energy to quantum computation, were built on the theoretical foundations that it offered. In the twenty-first century, network theory is emerging as its worthy successor: it is building a theoretical and algorithmic framework that is energizing many research fields, and it is closely followed by many industries. As network theory develops its mathematical and intellectual core, it is becoming an indispensible platform for science, business and security, helping to discover new drug targets, delivering Facebook's latest algorithms and aiding the efforts to halt terrorism.

I do pay some attention to Twitter but I seldom tweet. Those that I follow are prolific linkers to sometimes interesting material. They are media filters. I "tune" the tweet stream by adding and dropping tweeters to shift the focus to subjects that are of current interest.

But lately I have gotten into G+. I like its asymmetrical structure. It's like Twitter in that I can circle those who interest me without their reciprocation. I find that it is possible to find a more verbal community that better suits my interests. I've speculated that this is in part due to better affordances for composition. The imbedded text editor is better than FB. It also isn't crufted up with so many annoying advertisements and other crassness. I have also been able to engage in some conversations, something that seldom happens here.

And so, I seem to have been neglecting this weblog for a month or so. It's so easy to "share" something on G+ that I do so, and then move on without composing a thoughtful weblog post. But the honeymoon is over. G+ seems to be degenerating into a more Facebook like place, innudated by griftersand hustlers with commercial objectives, cluttered with images and videos, and too slow for my primitive connectivity. Often it won't even load for me. It just gives up and leaves me with a blank screen.

I've made a couple of new posts and generally kicked the tires and tightened loose nuts here and there. I took a look at the stats to see if anyone had been reading here while I was gone. There is still substantial traffic from search engines, RSS readers, spiders and spammers trying, and failing, to leave their turds in comments, but the general drift away from weblogs to social media is apparent, and has been so for some time, even before I drifted off too.

What struck me as a bit surprising is that the old posts that have gotten the most hits are still interesting to me, and are relevant to currrent concerns. Some things haven't changed in a decade. The recent post Crystal Ball referenced an old post from 2003. The most frequently read post lately is from 2006. The difference may be that what I said years ago was heretical at that time and is now pedestrian.

The environmental, health and economic benefits of grass fed beef and managed grazing are widely noted and somewhat fashionable now rather than fringe ideas. The significance of natural climate variation is discussed due to the flat trend in climate change. Even the dingbat-in-chief Obama is gingerly supporting some new efforts to develop advanced nuclear power. Advanced genetics as well as nuclear power have been hugged by some of the perpetually tardy west coast digerati. The insanity of efforts to impose globally harmonized regulations - such as a carbon tax - though still advocated by some retarded thinkers is derided as the perpetual quest for magical unicorn sweat that can cure what ails you. The collapse of the "blue social model" is plainly evident to deniers of yore. The impact of information and communication technologies for enabling all manner of peer-to-peer behaviors is no longer speculative.

I think that we may be in a period of backing and filling now as these emergent issues have become mainstream issues. For example, the melt down of higher education has begun, to be replaced in large part by networked education. Just as home brew radio communication was replaced by home brew computing and networking, home brew genomics promises - threatens? - to change things greatly. The consequences of widely and easily available information will almost certainly be larger than we have yet imagined. ]]> TechnoSocial back40 2012-02-02T10:30:33-08:00 http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/002076.html Or is it cooperation? Coopetition? Are the boundaries between tropic levels too diffuse to make such distinctions meaningful? Perhaps it's better to see life as unitary in some respects. There is a single organism with organs. For example, it is a truism of ruminant livestock husbandry that cattle and grasses benefit one another, and over deep time can be seen as having created one another, co-evolved. Cattle hunt and eat grasses alive, which results in grasses thriving. The benefits of such relationships aren't always so direct or clear, and sometimes they aren't binary so much as circular among several species. Perhaps the cattle and grasses are better seen as organs of an organism that includes mycorrhizal fungi growing in the soil, or nitrifying bacteria?

The arrival of the first plants 470 million years ago triggered a series of ice ages, according to a research team that set out to identify the effects that the first land plants had on the climate during the Ordovician Period, which ended 444 million years ago.

During this period the climate gradually cooled, leading to a series of 'ice ages'. This global cooling was caused by a dramatic reduction in atmospheric carbon, which this research now suggests was triggered by the arrival of plants. ...

The research suggests that the first plants caused the weathering of calcium and magnesium ions from silicate rocks, such as granite, in a process that removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, forming new carbonate rocks in the ocean. This cooled global temperatures by around five degrees Celsius.

In addition, by weathering the nutrients phosphorus and iron from rocks, the first plants increased the quantities of both these nutrients going into the oceans, fuelling productivity there and causing organic carbon burial. This removed yet more carbon from the atmosphere, further cooling the climate by another two to three degrees Celsius. ...

Professor Liam Dolan of Oxford University, one of the lead researchers, said, "For me the most important take-home message is that the invasion of the land by plants – a pivotal time in the history of the planet – brought about huge climate changes. Our discovery emphasises that plants have a central regulatory role in the control of climate: they did yesterday, they do today and they certainly will in the future."

After the dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago, wiped out by an asteroid impact or other calamity, plants seized their chance. The emergence of the first grasses was the breakthrough. Grass doesn't hold much CO2 itself, but it can create mollisols, soils that are very rich in organic matter and hence carbon. "Typically they are 10 per cent organic matter down to a depth of a metre, whereas forest soils are only that rich down to about 10 centimetres," says Retallack. So a grassland ecosystem can, despite appearances, contain more carbon than a forest ecosystem.

Over the past 40 million years or so, tall grasslands spread across the globe, taking over many formerly forested zones. These ecosystems, Retallack argues, took control of the planetary thermostat, securing lower CO2 levels for their own advantage. New grazing animals evolved to live on and coexist with the grasses. "The co-evolution of grasses and grazer created a carbon-hungry ecosystem of a kind never before seen," says Retallack. "I think mollisols are saving our skins right now. Without them the world would be a lot hotter."

As the Earth cooled under the influence of grasslands, it seemed to hit an era of abrupt swings into and out of ice ages, beginning about 5 million years ago. Could this too be explained by the battle between plants and animals? ...

His research has revealed strong fluctuations in the make-up of soils in the middle of continents as the ice ages come and go. "They switch from humid grasslands to dry sagebrush and back." Soils in the wet periods are full of earthworm pellets. In dry times they contain cicada burrows. Retallack believes this shows that the carbon economy of these soils is synchronised with global CO2 levels.

How does this follow? The conventional view is that these changes merely represent the response of ecosystems to climate change. But Retallack believes it may be the other way round: the ecosystems drive the glaciations, as carbon enters soils when grasslands dominate and leaves again in sagebrush eras. ...

Retallack says he has come across a huge reluctance to publish some of his claims. "In particular, the idea of grasslands causing cooling has excited great opposition, even though I have a huge amount of evidence to support it," he says. The data will appear shortly in The Journal of Geology, after being rejected by a series of major journals. "I have data from 2000 soil samples, from Oregon and the Great Plains in the US to Kenya and Pakistan. They all show the rise of mollisols as grasslands evolved, till they covered about a fifth of the planet. That's a lot. You'd expect them to have an effect," he says.

Retallack is at pains to say he does not discount the power of geology. He is no Gaian purist. He even admits that the geology-based theories are right now "probably closer to proof" than his own. "Meteorite impacts, volcanic eruptions, hot-spring degassing and Milankovitch control are all well accepted by most scientists," he says. "But I think there is a middle way." He believes that biology has played a crucial role in the switchback of climate change over much of our planet's history. And, being a pedologist, he is convinced that the evidence lies in the soil.

The common wisdom is that the invention of the steam engine and the advent of the coal-fueled industrial age marked the beginning of human influence on global climate.

But gathering physical evidence, backed by powerful simulations on the world's most advanced computer climate models, is reshaping that view and lending strong support to the radical idea that human-induced climate change began not 200 years ago, but thousands of years ago with the onset of large-scale agriculture in Asia and extensive deforestation in Europe.

What's more, according to the same computer simulations, the cumulative effect of thousands of years of human influence on climate is preventing the world from entering a new glacial age, altering a clockwork rhythm of periodic cooling of the planet that extends back more than a million years. ...

Vavrus and colleagues John Kutzbach and Gwenaëlle Philippon provided detailed evidence in support of a controversial idea first put forward by climatologist William F. Ruddiman of the University of Virginia. That idea, debated for the past several years by climate scientists, holds that the introduction of large-scale rice agriculture in Asia, coupled with extensive deforestation in Europe began to alter world climate by pumping significant amounts of greenhouse gases — methane from terraced rice paddies and carbon dioxide from burning forests — into the atmosphere. In turn, a warmer atmosphere heated the oceans making them much less efficient storehouses of carbon dioxide and reinforcing global warming.

That one-two punch, say Kutzbach and Vavrus, was enough to set human-induced climate change in motion. ...

Using three different climate models and removing the amount of greenhouse gases humans have injected into the atmosphere during the past 5,000 to 8,000 years, Vavrus and Kutzbach observed more permanent snow and ice cover in regions of Canada, Siberia, Greenland and the Rocky Mountains, all known to be seed regions for glaciers from previous ice ages. Vavrus notes: "With every feedback we've included, it seems to support the hypothesis (of a forestalled ice age) even more. We keep getting the same answer."

The PDO changed phases in the late 1990s for the first time in nearly 30 years, corresponding exactly with the current Alaskan warming period. The next 30 years should be colder in Alaska but the PDO has many other effects. Weather all along the west coast of the Americas is affected by this oscillation. Further south along the coast of S. America waters are warmer. This not only affects weather but also sea currents and upwellings which nourish sea life. The effects of ENSO, the shorter period oscillation popularly called El Nino/La Nina, are altered. Warm periods are even warmer and cool periods are less cool.

Much of the western US is greatly affected by the PDO. The current phase of the PDO which brings cold waters to Alaska correlates with multi-decadal drought periods in the plains states, especially the Colorado plateau. Much of California, Oregon and Washington states face the same prospect. Like S. America those areas are also affected by ENSO but being farther north both the PDO and ENSO have different characteristics than in the south. Though we don't have clear understandings of the various oscillations it seems reasonable to expect significant change in the coming decades compared to the previous decades. A 30 year oscillation period is hard for a human to study or comprehend personally. People who have lived long lives close to the land and weather tell stories of how different things were in their youths (..uphill, both ways...) and are laughed at by younger people for telling tall tales. But sometimes they are just recounting observations of long cycle oscillations. I've been listening more closely to grizzled old farmers these days since the PDO flipped.

With regards to natural internal variability, we are currently in the cool phase of the PDO. Based upon the recent historical record, we would anticipate several decades in the cool phase, although these oscillations aren’t predictable. We are currently in the warm phase of the AMO, and based upon the recent historical record, we might expect another decade in the warm phase, although these oscillations aren’t predictable. ...

Previous warm AMO/cool PDO occurred 1946-1964, and cool AMO/cool PDO 1964-1976, both of which were cool periods.

It is a plausible scenario that we will continue to see relatively flat trend in temperature for the coming decade. The most recent climate shift has been argued (Tsonis et al) to have occurred 2001/2002.

Given that my ranching world seems to face an extended period of drought and cold weather the notion of warmer, wetter winters due to climate change was almost appealing. It seems that is a false hope. Climate change won't save me so I'll have to adapt to normal variation. ]]> Natural Systems back40 2012-01-31T23:50:40-08:00 http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/002074.html A few earlier posts have commented on the curious habits of mind in which we invent explanations for our own actions and decisions, though they were made without conscious thought. Kahneman speak is currently popular. There is a much older thought stream on the general subject.

David Hume referred to causality as “the cement of the universe.” He was being ironic, since he knew that this so-called cement was a hallucination, a tale we tell ourselves to make sense of events and observations. No matter how precisely we knew a given system, Hume realized, its underlying causes would always remain mysterious, shadowed by error bars and uncertainty. Although the scientific process tries to makes sense of problems by isolating every variable—imagining a blood vessel, say, if HDL alone were raised—reality doesn’t work like that. Instead, we live in a world in which everything is knotted together, an impregnable tangle of causes and effects. Even when a system is dissected into its basic parts, those parts are still influenced by a whirligig of forces we can’t understand or haven’t considered or don’t think matter. Hamlet was right: There really are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

This doesn’t mean that nothing can be known or that every causal story is equally problematic. Some explanations clearly work better than others, which is why, thanks largely to improvements in public health, the average lifespan in the developed world continues to increase. (According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, things like clean water and improved sanitation—and not necessarily advances in medical technology—accounted for at least 25 of the more than 30 years added to the lifespan of Americans during the 20th century.) Although our reliance on statistical correlations has strict constraints—which limit modern research—those correlations have still managed to identify many essential risk factors, such as smoking and bad diets.

And yet, we must never forget that our causal beliefs are defined by their limitations. For too long, we’ve pretended that the old problem of causality can be cured by our shiny new knowledge. If only we devote more resources to research or dissect the system at a more fundamental level or search for ever more subtle correlations, we can discover how it all works. But a cause is not a fact, and it never will be; the things we can see will always be bracketed by what we cannot. And this is why, even when we know everything about everything, we’ll still be telling stories about why it happened. It’s mystery all the way down.

I have had back pain at various times in my life. I've never been incapacitated, never missed a day of work due to pain, but it's a constant concern. Other fellows of a certain age that I know have lost days, repeatedly over the years, and have altered their behavior in the attempt to manage their disabilities. It's a frequent theme in movies and TV stories, there's a major industry hawking treatments, and a looming threat for us, especially for those of us who earn our daily bread with our bodies as much as our minds.

Years ago I adopted a back management method based on the notion that the problem was bad posture, and that bad posture was a result not just of sloppy stance but chiefly of uneven and unhealthful muscle tone and development. The symptoms were weak stomach muscles and tight ham strings. The cure was crunches and stretches. And so, for all of these years I have kept a hard and ripped stomach by during a lot of crunches, and very flexible legs through doing a lot of stretches. I can do a couple of hundred crunches and bend over to bang my fists on the floor while keeping my knees locked. I sit and stand straight. It seems to work.

But maybe it works because I think that it works. I feel better about myself. Things may be going to hell around me but A few crunches and stretches make me feel better about things since I at least have ripped abs and good legs, a rare thing for a fellow of my age. I can always get up, go out, and rejoin the fight.

The curious part is that these aren't new thoughts. I know that the crunches and stretches are a placebo but they still work. Sure, there are real benefits to fitness, but fit fellows have back pain too, and when things are especially troublesome I too get some twinges. I'll do some stretches and mentally revisit my calm place and the pain recedes. When life is easy the subject never comes up. If there is any credible causal relationship it appears to be more about feeling relaxed and secure than it does about any purely physical thing. It's as if I experience existential threat - however exaggerated and inappropriate - as physical pain. And I deal with existential threat by tending to that pain, though there is clearly no way that this truly affects the threats. It's the chicken soup cure, so to speak.

I'm ridiculous. Take nothing that I say seriously. I should probably focus more on telling entertaining stories since in the end, that's all I've got.

Update: Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room

Weinberger (Everything is Miscellaneous), a senior researcher at Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, engagingly examines the production, dissemination, and accessibility of knowledge in the Internet era. The fundamental and pertinent question Weinberger pursues is how the new surplus of knowledge afforded by the Internet affects our "basic strategy of knowing." This strategy evolved from "book-shaped thought," a form "in which parts depend upon the parts before it." Unlike books, however, Weinberger contends that long-form argument on the Internet engages a more dynamic dimension than a static book ever could: it is "put into a network where the discussion around it [...] will violate its pristine logic." Despite the slight incompatibility to long-form argument, ideas, and knowledge on the Internet are plentiful, hyperlinked, autonomous, open, and, perhaps most importantly, unsettled, making the Internet a forum within which knowledge is not merely accepted; it is contemplated and questioned. While occasionally tending towards the philosophical, Weinberger's book is full of relevant and thought-provoking, insights that make making it a must-read for anyone concerned with knowledge in the digital age.

Update More stories.

…as a general rule, we’re too inclined to tell the good vs. evil story. As a simple rule of thumb, just imagine every time you’re telling a good vs. evil story, you’re basically lowering your IQ by ten points or more. If you just adopt that as a kind of inner mental habit, it’s, in my view, one way to get a lot smarter pretty quickly. You don’t have to read any books. Just imagine yourself pressing a button every time you tell the good vs. evil story, and by pressing that button you’re lowering your IQ by ten points or more.

One interesting thing about cognitive biases – they’re the subject of so many books these days. There’s the Nudge book, the Sway book, the Blink book, like the one-title book, all about the ways in which we screw up. And there are so many ways, but what I find interesting is that none of these books identify what, to me, is the single, central, most important way we screw up, and that is, we tell ourselves too many stories, or we are too easily seduced by stories. And why don’t these books tell us that? It’s because the books themselves are all about stories. The more of these books you read, you’re learning about some of your biases, but you’re making some of your other biases essentially worse. So the books themselves are part of your cognitive bias. Often, people buy them as a kind of talisman, like “I bought this book. I won’t be Predictably Irrational.” It’s like people want to hear the worst, so psychologically, they can prepare for it or defend against it. It’s why there’s such a market for pessimism. But to think that buying the book gets you somewhere, that’s maybe the bigger fallacy. It’s just like the evidence that shows the most dangerous people are those that have been taught some financial literacy. They’re the ones who go out and make the worst mistakes. It’s the people that realize, “I don’t know anything at all,” that end up doing pretty well.

Why a group of longtime vegetarians and vegans converted to the idea that flesh and other food from animals can be healthful, environmentally appropriate, and ethical. ...

Though reared by omnivorous families, as young adults we each came to the conclusion that meat was to blame for health problems, environmental destruction, and cruelty to animals. Collectively, we have lived 52 years vegan or vegetarian. Yet we no longer think that vegetarianism is the answer to these ills. Now -- as a rancher, a hunter, and a butcher -- we firmly believe foods from animals can be healthful, environmentally appropriate, and ethical.

Nicolette: I gave up meat as a freshman biology major after hearing that beef was deforesting the Amazon. ... But as I studied ecologically based food production, I learned that animals were essential to sustainable farms, which don't rely on fossil fuels and chemicals. Animals can increase soil fertility, contribute to pest and weed control, and convert vegetation that's inedible to humans, and growing on marginal, uncultivated land, into food. And as I visited dozens of traditional, pasture-based farms, and came to know the farmers and ranchers, I saw impressive environmental stewardship and farm animals leading good lives. Although I've continued to follow a vegetarian diet, I support other people's choice to eat meat.

Tovar: I became a vegetarian at 20, after reflecting on the compassionate words of Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. Soon I went vegan. Almost a decade later, having moved back to a rural community from New York City, I realized that all food has its costs. From habitat destruction to combines that inadvertently mince rabbits to the shooting of deer in farm fields, crop production is far from harmless. Even in our own organic garden, my wife and I were battling ravenous insects and fence-defying woodchucks. I began to see that the question wasn't what we ate but how that food came to our plates. A few years later, my wife -- who was studying holistic health and nutrition -- suggested that we shift our diet, and my health improved when we started eating dairy and eggs. It improved still more when we started eating chicken and fish. Two years later, I took up a deer rifle.

Joshua: I was already eating vegetarian, in solidarity with my brother who was abstaining from meat due to Crohn's disease, when I read Jeremy Rifkin's Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of Cattle Culture. I was so moved that I swore off animal products altogether, and was a vegan for more than 15 years. It was only after meeting my wife and starting Fleisher's Meats that I started to introduce dairy back into my diet. Eventually I went, literally, whole hog into eating meat again; it was bacon that pushed me over the edge. Once I saw how the meat we were selling had been raised, and met the farmers who were striving to raise animals sustainably and ethically, I overcame my aversion to consuming meat. I realized I didn't have a problem with meat. I had a problem with the inhumane practices of the commercial meat industry. Once I saw how things could be done, I was happy to support the farmers who make our business possible and profitable. ...

In short, eating animal-derived foods is not a health risk. Only overconsumption is. ...

When farm animals are dispersed rather than concentrated and confined, allowed to graze rather than fed only soy and corn, and integrated into farming operations rather than segregated, they remain healthy and can provide environmental benefits. Under careful stewardship, farm animals can be efficient converters of resources and valuable members of ecological communities. ...

In considering ethics, it is important to recognize that animals live and die in all kinds of conditions. Whether raised for eggs, milk, or meat, birds and mammals can be treated horribly or humanely. And whether on a ranch, at a slaughterhouse, or in the woods, they can be killed callously, with no concern for their suffering, or killed swiftly and carefully.

As any attentive observer of nature knows, life feeds on life. Every living thing, from mammals, birds, and fish to plants, fungi, and bacteria, eats other living things. Humans are part of the food web; but for the artifices of cremation and tightly sealed caskets, all of us would eventually be recycled into other life forms. It is natural for people, like other omnivores, to participate in this web by eating animals. And it is ethically defensible -- provided we refrain from causing gratuitous suffering. ...

Concerns about health, the environment, and ethical eating do not require giving up meat. What they do require is a new ethics of eating animals: one rooted in moderation, mindfulness, and respect.

Our education system has failed miserably. When one is lost in the wilderness - which is a fair analogy of the existential state of a new human seeking to discover who they are, where they are, and how to proceed with life - the first task is to determine the initial state. Striking off in random directions driven by whim, fancy or fear is suicidal. Educators have a fiduciary responsibility - one that they have failed - to teach such simple truths and provide access to knowledge so that youths can gain some understanding of beginning position and capabilities.

The three stories above are all tales of ignorance and intellectual poverty. What a waste. Had these individuals spent their collective 5 decades attempting to improve on their initial state, rather than regressing and getting lost in the underbrush, they could have made positive contributions to society rather than being a drag on progress.]]> Natural Systems back40 2011-12-21T10:05:07-08:00 http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/002072.html The international party corps extravaganza in Durban was subdued since the world has turned away from ginned up crises to consider real ones such as economic collapse. Clarity of thought has improved a bit and we are seeing more commentary about the absurdity of past party corps predations such as Kyoto. But they haven't given up since it is still a sweet gig to fly around the world and have raves in exotic locations.

the World Bank announced plans to turn climate-smart agriculture into the next big thing for the world market in carbon offsets. ...

If an agricultural carbon offset program were in place, carbon dollars from Western companies could pay for composting, mulching, recycling crop waste, planting farm trees, and much else on the world’s poorest farms. Those improved soils, richer in organic matter, would grow more crops, help soils withstand droughts and floods, and ­ vital to earning those carbon dollars ­ capture carbon from the atmosphere. ...

The dream of enthusiasts for climate-smart agriculture is that investors will one day invest billions of dollars in the fields of Africa in order to purchase the resulting credits from capturing carbon, while at the same time improving the continent’s soils. In truth, any credible solution to climate change will probably involve finding ways to get the landscape to absorb more carbon, whether in trees or soils, probably financed from carbon markets. Can it be done in a way that helps smallholder farmers? Or will it drive them off their land?

The worst thing that could happen is for climate nutters to get their claws into agriculture in this way. Growers need to improve their land for the benefits this brings them in increased productivity and reduced costs. It's about smart agronomics not smart climate hustles.

“Soil carbon offsets will promote a spate of African land grabs and put farmers under the control of fickle carbon markets,” ...

To improve carbon draw down productivity must be increased. Productivity is increased by improving soil fertility and chemistry by amending less than desirable soils. A good example of this is the work done in Brazil on soils that had historically been considered to be useless due to poor soil chemistry. Note that these same soils are found in Africa, which was once part of the same land mass before plate tectonics separated them. Brazil added a lot of lime to increase calcium content and raise the PH of acidic soils, and also added a lot of phosphorus. The combined effect made the soil capable of growing crops with normal fertility management on a go forward basis. They created arable land from a wasteland.

But that's a first step. A portion of the carbon must be retained in the soil to have increasing returns and decreasing cost of inputs. This is a matter of agronomic methods that do not till the soil excessively, or do so at the wrong time or in the wrong way, or use soil amendments in an unbalanced way that degrades fertility over time, or simply mines the soil for the nutrients added in the renovation phase and so return it to its original barren condition.

This takes capital to do since the return on the original investment in soil is produced later and over a period of years. It's something like buying an agricultural machine that costs a lot to acquire but pays for itself over time. It is large organizations that have the means to do such projects and maintain such processes over time. Small holders are far less able to do such tasks since they lack capital and are risk averse, as they must be since failure is literally life threatening.

However, the existence of large and prosperous entities using such improved agronomic methods makes it possible for niche players to also thrive. The methods and materials are known and locally available. An end result of a mixed ecology of large, medium and small entities can develop.

Subsidies, regulations, mandates, fees and all of the other impediments that are imposed by bureaucracies for their own benefit - and this includes the predations of NGOs - make such improvements impossible by hideously distorting the effort. National and international meddling organizations could be helpful if they established local entities large enough to do the initial renovation and durable enough to maintain the processes, but private for profit entities are more likely to succeed so long as they are not subsidized and bled by parasitic bureaucrats.]]> Ag Systems back40 2011-12-18T11:12:21-08:00 http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/002071.html Coming in April, a new book by foodie and economist Tyler Cowen - An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies. The description is intriguing.

Food snobbery is killing entrepreneurship and innovation, says economist, preeminent social commentator, and maverick dining guide blogger Tyler Cowen. Americans are becoming angry that our agricultural practices have led to global warming-but while food snobs are right that local food tastes better, they're wrong that it is better for the environment, and they are wrong that cheap food is bad food. The food world needs to know that you don't have to spend more to eat healthy, green, exciting meals. At last, some good news from an economist!

Tyler Cowen discusses everything from slow food to fast food, from agriculture to gourmet culture, from modernist cuisine to how to pick the best street vendor. He shows why airplane food is bad but airport food is good; why restaurants full of happy, attractive people serve mediocre meals; and why American food has improved as Americans drink more wine. And most important of all, he shows how to get good, cheap eats just about anywhere.

Just as The Great Stagnation was Cowen's response to all the fashionable thinking about the economic crisis, An Economist Gets Lunch is his response to all the fashionable thinking about food. Provocative, incisive, and as enjoyable as a juicy, grass-fed burger, it will influence what you'll choose to eat today and how we're going to feed the world tomorrow.

The larger issue of food snobbery in which food is used for social signaling and conspicuous consumption while still, in some skewed way, claiming the virtues of mindful living in a finite world, is a small thing except when it is used by states to tighten their grip on society - to the benefit of none.

Rachel is right that a lot of the marketing hype is sheer nonsense, and Tyler is right that food snobs are absurd, that local food tastes better and is not intrinsically expensive. I've been raising grass fed beef since long before it became fashionable. Grass farming did not arise to cater to food snobs, it arose as a superior production system from an economic and environmental perspective. It was a cheaper way to produce meat and milk when done intelligently, and provided increasing returns over time due to continuous improvement of the means of production - the land. Home grown forage is the cheapest input. It is cheaper to move animals to forage than to move forage to animals since there is simply too much material to move. It doesn't work at all without a large variety of subsidies, and as we are coming to see it doesn't work in the long term even with huge subsidies.

The food is tastier and more nutritious, but those are by blows. It would make sense to do grass farming even if the food was no better than that produced by industrial methods. It makes sense even if a cattleman does not market his calves as grass fed but instead just sells them into the feedlot system, or if a dairyman just sells his milk into the commodity milk and cheese market.

What makes grass fed beef expensive is the cost of post harvest processing. The cattleman gets very little premium for the beef, but boutique aging, cutting, packaging and sales facilities are far more expensive than those used for big lot systems. Much of this extra cost is an artifact of a regulatory system captured by big ag with regulations that are entirely inappropriate for small scale production and marketing. In this sense Tyler is absolutely mistaken. It is the regulatory system, not food snobbery, that is killing entrepreneurship and innovation. If not for food snobbery there would be less entrepreneurship and innovation given the existing regulatory environemnt.]]> Food back40 2011-12-08T12:18:53-08:00 http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/002070.html One of the perennial pseudo-debates between statists and anti-statists is market failure vs. government failure. Markets do fail, but government intervention is as bad or worse. There is no solution to failure.

What! No hope! Consider what the term market failure means. It is not just an outcome that statists find to be contrary to their desires and illusions.

In the technical literature a market failure refers to any situation in which a market does not produce the “Pareto-optimal, general equilibrium” outcome. Standard neoclassical theory argues that “perfectly competitive” markets will produce outcomes in which resources are allocated to their highest valued uses and no one person can be made better off without making at least one other person worse off. In general equilibrium, prices of all goods are exactly equal to the marginal cost of producing them and all households maximize their utility. In addition, all firms are profit maximizing, but the level of real profits earned is zero, as no reallocation of resources could improve on the current one. ...

Strictly speaking, any market outcome short of this reflects a “market failure” in that markets have failed to produce the ideal outcome that theory predicts. However, in the real world the conditions necessary to produce a general-equilibrium outcome are not remotely feasible: perfect knowledge, homogeneous products, and a large number of small firms in every market with none able to influence price. Given that such a world is not possible, the charge of market failure boils down to the claim that markets don’t produce a level of “perfection” that is unattainable under any realistic circumstances.

In this sense of the term, markets “fail” constantly. It takes an Austrian perspective to understand that these sorts of imperfections (a better term than “failure”) are not only part and parcel of real markets; they also are what drive entrepreneurship and competition to find ways to improve outcomes. In other words, what markets do best is enable people to spot imperfections and attempt to improve on them, even as those attempts at improvement (whether successful or not) lead to new imperfections. Once we realize that people aren’t fully informed, that we don’t know what the ideal product should look like, and that we don’t know what the optimal firm size is, we understand that these deviations from the ideal are not failures but opportunities. The effort to improve market outcomes is the entrepreneurship that lies at the heart of the competitive market.

Thus the value of markets is not that they will achieve perfection, but that they have endogenous processes of discovery that enable people to correct the market’s imperfections. Just as it’s the very friction of the soles of our shoes on the floor that enable us to walk, it is the imperfections of the market that encourage us to find the new and better ways to do things.

Can the same be said of government failure? Government fails, use government? Is there a discovery mechanism here too? It is possible, in theory, that bad laws and regulations can be reformed, and so over time also become ever more useful and promote progress. However, this depends on a level of knowledge about the economy that is unrealistic, and the ability to analyze the fire hose of information gushing from society with the speed and accuracy required to make use of such feedback. In practice, reforms are infrequent, backward looking, and make things worse more often than making them better. And so adverse outcomes are concealed, covered up, air brushed, and rhetoric is substituted for competence.

This leads to the seeming anomaly of free market anti-capitalists. They are anti-statist and anti-capitalist. The statist anti-capitalists might learn something from them.

The market, when allowed to flourish, tears apart monopoly and generates freedom and fairness better than any other human institution. Today’s private sector, by contrast, is increasingly dominated by companies that are privileged by government through cosy contract, soft subsidy, convenient regulation and crony conversation. That is why it is producing such unfair outcomes. ...

We must distinguish two meanings of the word “market”: one is “commerce”, a forum where people exchange goods and services, for consumption, in freely competitive ways. The consequence is innovation, efficiency and general improvements in quality and price for which regulation is barely necessary, except to deter monopoly and enforce contract. The reason that your toothpaste is cheap, available when you need it and not substandard is that people are competing to supply your needs, rather than because armies of trading standards officers make it so.

The other meaning of the word “market” is a casino where you buy goods for resale (like stocks and shares) and speculate on them. Such markets are necessary to allocate capital but they are prone to booms and busts and need regulation. They also produce unequal outcomes and tend towards monopoly. The housing market should provide a service (accommodation) but it keeps being turned into a casino. Instead of deregulating finance and over-regulating commerce, we should have done the opposite.

That commentators confuse these different kinds of market is bad enough. (Until recently, I used to.) The real problem is that those who spend other people’s money — public servants — do so too. And by repeatedly supporting crony capitalism rather than commerce, they repeatedly screw up markets. No wonder our political servants (I nearly wrote masters) forget whose side they are supposed to be on.

The political divide between the champions of the public sector and the private sector misses the point; the key divide is between those who support the monopolistic tendencies of both capitalism and government, and those who support the competitive effects of markets. Big oil companies, airlines, national health services and education authorities divert their energies into political defence of their partial monopolies, while smaller start-ups invent things that customers want, such as cheap gas, cheap flights or personalised genetic medicine.

It was ever thus. In 1349, London glovemakers petitioned the mayor to cap wages and restrain freedom of movement of employees. High demand for gloves because of the approaching plague had put their workers in a strong bargaining position. The mayor naturally granted the request. Remember this when you see the BBC lobbying for its licence fee.

As Adam Smith, who championed the market but not capitalism, put it: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” The market is where these conspiracies get exposed. To win in it, you don’t lobby, you innovate.

Lobbied by big companies, politicians do bonkers things like rewarding innovations that increase the cost of fulfilling a need — such as putting up the price of electricity to subsidise wind farms and claiming it “creates jobs”. Any hairdresser, unable to make a new hire because of his electricity bill, could tell them that it does the opposite.

Wherever free markets have been even tentatively tried, from Ancient Greece to modern Hong Kong, they have produced not just rising living standards, but net moves towards peace, tolerance, freedom and equality.

If you care about prosperity, fairness, reduced inequality of outcomes, the environment, food or any of the other issues being exploited by statists to seek power then you will oppose statists and support freer markets. You don't have to be an anarchist or any other sort of wild eyed ideologue obsessed with political fervor. Simple good sense and a desire to get on with life is sufficient motivation to prefer free markets, subsidiarity and a generally smaller government footprint. It works better for the things that you value, including ethical and aesthetic values.]]> culture back40 2011-12-08T09:29:11-08:00 http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/002069.html Long ago, when I was a boy, American history was taught in public schools. As a high school junior I endured the non-optional American history course taught by one Miss Hodges, an exceptionally ugly and thoroughly mean teacher that reduced the best and brightest among us to quivering lumps. She used the Federalist Papers as an instrument of torture. No one ever got even an average grade on any of her tests. I never got a grade above a D+ on one of her tests, though I had never gotten a grade below A in any class I had ever taken to that point. Try as I might, nothing I did was even average. I was devastated, forced to reconstruct my self image. I was a failure for the first time in any academic endeavor.

But she was not a monster, or not just a monster, in that she talked to me, really talked to me. When I questioned something she really answered, really tried to engage the issue, and in that way threw me a life line of sorts. I might well be drowning but there was a small chance that I still might save myself from death if not severe harm. I'd be crippled but still alive if I had the guts to fight through the pain and defeat. The sharks might chew my legs off, but I might still pull myself up with my arms alone if I kept struggling.

She ended up giving me a final grade of A, the only one she had ever given, though I had been a comprehensive failure. All of the pain was a ruse of sorts, a way to goad me into exerting myself as never before. In the end she graded on a curve like everyone else and my work had been the best, but the point had been made that being the best of that lot was nothing to be proud of. Compared to what? I get it.

Though it was a very long time ago American history still matters to me. A few years ago, in a post that dealt with matters little different in essence than current concerns, the discussion after the post touched on some of these old conflicts. Jon said:

I am reminded of a letter that James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson on October 17, 1788.

Jefferson was in Paris, in the year before the French Revolution. Madison was in America, after the American Revolution, contemplating whether or not to support a Bill of Rights, amendments to the Constitution, he considered unnecessary in principle, but perhaps necessary in practice:

Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the government is the mere instrument of the major number of its constituents. This is a truth of great importance, but not yet sufficiently attended to: and is probably more strongly impressed on my mind by facts, and reflections suggested by them, than on yours which has contemplated abuses of power issuing from a very different quarter. Madison was politely suggesting that Jefferson was perhaps concerned about the abuses of an ancien regime, while Madison was saying, that Americans were more concerned about abuses of the, pardon my French, nouveau regime: democracy.

As is your wont, you seem to have put your fingers on a number of live wires here. (Sorry for the electric metaphor, but what happened with the lightning anyway? I have been thinking of you and Benjamin Franklin lately.)

Madison's Federalist 10, written around the same time, turned Montesquieu's conception that the only good republic was a small republic on its head, by arguing that enlarging the republic was the best way to ensure that extreme factions would cancel themselves out and make it harder to form majorities that would oppress minorities.

You seem to be exploring the implications of a wired world where the ease of scaling has complicated, if not reversed, this formulation. It is easier for larger and larger majorities to form, and at the same time, it is easier for minorities to coalesce, using the same tools of communication, the world wide web. It is like the perfect storm of factional arms races.

There were and will continue to be good reasons for larger communities and political groupings to form, as majorities and minorities.

But there are some important threads to think through here. On the one hand, despite the primeavel ability of natural forces, such as lightning for example, to zap one node or another, this distributed means of communication seems to have perhaps pulled the rug out from under the Madisonian reasoning which has served us fairly well.

On the other hand, is there any way to usefully employ this reasoning, which is an important part of our republican and democratic (small "r," small "d") intellectual legacy, to find ways to live with the inevitable formation of factions in this ever more closely connected world?

Well, I think that Madison was wrong then too. He was right that "there is the danger of oppression. . . from acts in which the government is the mere instrument of the major number of its constituents", but his prescription to enlarge the republic to neutralize competing extreme factions didn't fit the diagnosis.

The confusion, I think, is relevant to current events. The most interesting discussions of the propriety of regime change in Iraq are those that involve careful humanitarian thinkers such as Norm who cling to the older progressive interventionist view that we have a kind of moral obligation to liberate those who are oppressed. In a sense Madison was working the same beat, trying to prevent local oppression of minorities by subsuming localities into a larger republic.

It doesn't work. It can't work. So long as any majority is considered legitimate while any of its constituent minorities feel oppressed, whether those in the majority empathize or not, the system is a sham that merely exchanges one kind of oppression for another. It isn't whether or not people are oppressed, they argue, it is how they are oppressed. Bunk! That's a prescription for riots.

Consider the French problems and the general dissatisfaction with the European Social Model. Some of the same issues exist in Japan too. The chief defect is "social death". You may have a safety net, welfare payments and rationed health care but you don't have a job. You have no career, no status, no place in society, no respect, no prospects and so no life. You are a dead man walking, a rider of the purple wage, a "shitter". Worse, you are watched and regulated tightly, your freedoms are defined and limited to those that the majority considers sufficient, that satisfy their views of an "adequate" existence.

Newt Gingrich has announced that he is a Theodore Roosevelt Republican.

If you asked Theodore Roosevelt what kind of Republican he was, he would — and did — tell you that he was a proud standard bearer of the Hamiltonian tradition in American politics. Ron Paul, who would have fought TR tooth and nail as much as he is currently fighting both President Obama and ex-Speaker Newt would agree. Gingrich, Obama and TR are all Hamiltonians, and Ron Paul thinks they are all dead wrong.

As we gear up for 2012 and beyond, American attention is increasingly returning to the oldest battle in our political history: the battle between the Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians that split George Washington’s cabinet down the middle and established our first party system.

That fight was essentially over three things that divide us intensely today: the role of the federal government, the nature of the credit system, and the future of the social hierarchy. ...

The disagreement between these two men continued to reverberate down the years. John Quincy Adams, Nicholas Biddle, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln sided with Hamilton up through the Civil War. Presidents Madison and Monroe followed Jefferson, more or less; so in his own irascible way did Andrew Jackson. ...

What America needs is a debate between 21st century Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians. Obama and Paul in their way are both looking backward; Gingrich feels the need for a deep reworking of the Hamiltonian tradition and his surprising surge in the polls suggests that he has touched a nerve in the public — despite the baggage of his past and the sometimes sketchy nature of his proposals. Paul’s popularity also points to the growing public discontent with political approaches centered on the defense of the status quo.

On the whole, 2012 is not shaping up as the kind of epochal contest the country saw in 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt used his Osawotomie speech to launch the Bull Moose Party. The three way contest between Taft, Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt was the first election in which the dominant ideas of the 20th century were on display; we seem to be headed for something more modest this time.

The country needs a livelier and richer debate; over the next few days and weeks at Via Meadia we will do our part by trying to work through some of the ways in which Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian thought offer avenues for renewal and reform here in the twilight of Big Blue.