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All posts by Mike
Wednesday Linkorama
Weekend Linkorama
Cash for Spelunkers
One of the things that drove me to my pro-free market values? Stuff like this, in which the Secretary of Transportation declare cash for clunkers a success. His reasoning is that it gave money to the auto industry (which is still underwater to the tune of tens of billions) and benefited the environment (which is dubious: the intrinsic environmental cost of a new car may not be offset by gains in fuel efficiency). So it’s a win-win, at least according to the Secretary.
Lahood’s claim, however, is a classic illustration of the broken window fallacy. 700,000 cars — a couple of billion dollars in assets — were taken out and destroyed. That is a loss of economic value which can now be seen in the sharp rise in prices on the used car market. That rise is going to take money out of the pockets of people on the margin who can not afford new cars. And the program isn’t old enough to see if we’re going to have a wavelet of car loan defaults from people who Cash for Clunkered themselves beyond their means.
But it’s frustrating. Because the rhetoric is all on the side of LaHood and our media are too ignorant or too slavish to ask the right question. As I said, it’s the broken window fallacy: the difference between what is seen and what is unseen. What is seen are the new cars flying off of lots. What is unseen are the cars being destroyed, the people being priced out of the used car market and loan defaults in a year or two.
Update: Another illustration of the point. The Climate Crock of the Week guy has his own crock this week about wind power. While I’m positive about wind power, you simply can not do a video about it and ignore the massive subsidies wind power involves and the net economic loss it has produced for countries heavily invested in it (link). Seen: a big wind industry. Unseen: massive subsidies and job losses. Green jobs have become the ultimate Broken Window. I predict they will be next bubble that will produce an economic crash.
Again, to be clear — I’m positive on alternative energy and, as I’ve made clear, realistic about global warming. Peter Sinclair is great at knocking down BS anti-AGW arguments. But this video illustrates that everyone has their blind spot. For someone who delights in breaking myths to make a video that is nothing more than a commercial for the politically powerful and heavily subsidized wind industry is appalling.
And utterly human.
The UVA Panic
It never fails. A terrible murder takes place on a college campus. Next follow the “we’re all in danger” articles. College campi have been and remain some of the safest places in the nation. Can we please not exploit every tragedy to tighten the grip that Administrators have over students?
Wednesday Linkorama
Unsung Heroes
I love stories like this from Cracked about unsung heroes who saved the world.
It’s interesting, of course, to see the usual anti-Green-Revolution trolls slamming Norman Borlaug. Apparently, we’d be better off with a billion or two dead people and a lot more wars. It’s amazing how much green bullshit has infiltrated certain minds. The Green Revolution produces more food with less resources that traditional farming. And as a side effect, a more certain food supply has produced declining birth rates.
I’m also glad to see more attention going to Henrietta lacks. Her story is both inspiring and disgraceful. Inspiring in that this woman accidently saved so many lives. Disgraceful in that no credit was ever given to her until recently.
Update: It’s worth linking up two recent articles on farming. Foreign policy points out that Africa is realizing a fraction of their food potential thanks to their reticence to use modern farming and Reason points out a recent study claiming that biotech crops improve the environment.
Monday Meme
Megan McArdle has the idea of going to your Amazon history and seeing what the first thing you ordered was.
Apparently, I did not mess around. I ordered:
Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame? : Baseball, Cooperstown, and the Politics of Glory by Bill James. This is still the gold standard for HOF discussions and I re-read bits of it frequently.
The Law by Frederic Bastiat. This is one of the books that has guided my political philosophy.
The Tenth Insight : Holding the Vision : Further Adventures of the Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield. This was a gift for my sister, who is into new-age crap.
The Death of Common Sense : How Law Is Suffocating America by Philip K. Howard. Howard is someone conservatives should pay more attention to. He’s a progressive who believes in government and is incredibly frustrated with the way it is hamstrung by too many rules, too little authority and no accountability. It isn’t often I site a progressive as a big influence, but Howard is.
The Crying of Lot 49 : A Novel (Perennial Fiction Library) by Thomas Pynchon. Read on the advice of my English major girlfriend of the time. Not a bad read.
Lost Rights : The Destruction of American Liberty by James Bovard. Bovard is a radical libertarian even by my standard. But he has credibility on the subject since he has gone after both Democrats and Republicans. A compilation of constitutional abuses that is enraging. This is a big part of the reason I am against the War on Drugs and was instantly suspicious of the excesses in the War on Terror.
Slow Learner : Early Stories by Thomas Pynchon. A gift for said English major girlfriend.
Fear and Loathing : On the Campaign Trail 72 by Hunter S. Thompson. Kind of long but an interesting insight into the ’72 election from a radical liberal.
Looking over that list, I must say that I hit the jackpot on my first Amazon order. Of the five books I ordered for myself, all were good and at least three have been critical to my thinking.
Weekend Linkorama
Weekend Linkorama
DC Cab
DC statehood is up again.
My views on this are clear and comport quite well with those expressed here. The district already gets enormous amounts of money from the federal government and that will only get worse if they have three votes in Congress. Indeed, this was precisely the reason that it was not granted statehood in the first place. It also make no sense for DC to have senators since they are supposed to be representatives of the states, not the people.
There’s also the thorny issue of the 22nd amendment, which grants three electoral votes to DC. If we grant them statehood, does that not mean three more?
To be honest, I think people are thinking with their parties. The senators and representative from DC would certainly be Democrats. That potential shift in the balance of power is the primary informer of people’s opinions on the subject — pro or con.
I am, however, uncomfortable with the idea of people not having representation. What I would prefer is a compromise. Have the people of DC declare residency in either Virginia or Maryland. Allow them to vote accordingly. Or split the city geographically. That way they get representation, but not outsized representation.
Of course, that would still mean changing the 22nd amendment. What are the chance of that happening?
Birthers Reloaded
I’ve discovered a new argument the “birthers” are using to argue that Obama is an illegitimate President. I mean, besides denying the reality of the certified birth certificate that has been released. They’re arguing that Obama is not a “natural born citizen” because his father was not a US citizen.
Problem: Charles Evans Hughes was allowed to run for President, even though his father was a British subject (as Obama’s father was and, in reality, as all our early Presidents were).
Further problem. By this logic my Texas-born daughter can no run because her mother is Australian.
Just a reminder of what these people really believe.
Manzi on Climate
Jim Manzi is one of the best conservative critics of global warming solutions. This is typical of his work. He argues that carbon capping is such a massive all-encompassing and expensive “solution” that it would leave us helpless if a more pressing crisis erupted like an asteroid strike or an epidemic.
Yesterday, he wrote a nice post on the epistemic closure on the Right — what I call the Right Wing Echosphere. It’s the tendency of conservatives to only listen to each other. In particular, he talks about the chapter on global warming from Mark Levin’s book in which he: cites global cooling; cites the bogus “30,000 scientist” petition and cites three people who do not work in climatology as a springboard to saying it’s a all Left Wing Plot.
On one side of the scale of Levin’s argument from authority, then, we have three scientists speaking outside their areas of central expertise, plus a dodgy petition. What’s on the other side of the scale that Levin doesn’t mention to his readers?
Among the organizations that don’t reject the notion of man-made global warming are: the U.S. National Academy of Sciences; The Royal Society; the national science academies of Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, India, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand. Russia, South Africa, and Sweden; the U.S. National Research Council; the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the American Chemical Society; the American Physical Society; the American Geophysical Union; and the World Meteorological Organization. That is, Levin’s argument from authority is empty.
Of course, this roll call could be arbitrarily long and illustrious, and that does not make them right. Groupthink or corruption is always possible, and maybe the entire global scientific establishment is wrong. Does he think that these various scientists are somehow unaware that Newsweek had an article on global cooling in the 1970s? Or are they aware of the evidence in his book, but are too trapped by their assumptions to be able to incorporate this data rationally? Or does he believe that the whole thing is a con in which thousands of scientists have colluded across decades and continents to fool such gullible naifs as the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, numerous White House science advisors, Margaret Thatcher, and so on? Are the Queen of England and the Trilateral Commission in on it too?
Levin doesn’t answer this question. Manzi, however, could. He would point out that all of these societies are accepting the results of an IPCC report that is, at the very least, poorly sourced. He would point out that there are only four direct temperature lines, at least one of which is suspect. He would point out that the models predicting doom and gloom are sketchy to say the least.
But that would be Good Skepticism. Levin is peddling Bad Skepticism. And his fellow conservatives have predictably circled the wagons.
Update: I would be remiss if I failed to note that the Left has a lot of epistemic closure, particularly on the issue of the climate.
Criticism of climate policy, including legitimate criticism, is frequently blasted as denial. Good Skeptics like Bjorn Lomborg and Ron Bailey are unfairly blasted as “tools of industry”. Algore has been saying “the debate is over” for twenty years, including on issues like overpopulation that turned out to be overblown. And the response to Climategate on the Left has been to dismiss it as though, at the very least, failure to comply with FOI requests and poorly written and documented climate code are acceptable scientific practices. And we are told that doomsday AGW scenarios are the most likely and should be the basis of policy.
It doesn’t help the epistemic closure on the Right when the response of the Left to any criticism is to circle their own wagons.
Update: Levin responds by calling Manzi a liberal and a “global warming zealout”, which is both ridiculous and totally expected.