Climate change "progress"

As if the US and European fiscal crises, with the concurrent political dysfunction, weren't enough to worry about, climate change proceeds apace, despite denial by many people. The graph below makes the point:

Atmospheric CO2 levels are rising at about 3 ppm per year, and most models suggest that somewhere around 400-450 ppm will be the tipping point for major disruptive climate change worldwide. We are rapidly approaching that point.

Recommended: The End of the Euro: A Survivor's Guide

The Huffington Post has an interesting and sobering article, The End of the Euro: A Survivor's Guide.The authors argue that the end of the Euro union is inevitable, but will probably come slowly over several years of repeated crises. It always seemed to me a pipe dream that nations as diverse as those in the Euro zone could have a monetary union without a political one.  Too many wildly different cultures, too many wildly different attitudes toward government and finance and taxes.

The jobs "entitlement" myth

David Brooks wrote an interesting piece a few days ago entitled The Age of Innocence, in which he discusses the changing public attitudes about democracy and democratic processes. The piece is well worth reading, but this post is really about the comments that followed it.

I was struck by how few people among the comment writers really understand the capitalist system.  There is a prevalent view that the job of companies in a capitalist system is to create jobs for people. Much of the current Obama criticism of Mitt Romney’s days at Bain Capital is that his company didn’t create jobs.  WRONG WRONG WRONG !!!! In a capitalist system, the purpose of companies is to deliver returns to sharholders – that is their only purpose.  They need to produce products or services that people are willing to pay for at a price somewhat higher than their cost of production, so that they can deliver the difference in new product development (to stay competitive in the market) and/or in dividends to the people who put up the money to start the company – the shareholders.

Nowhere do companies have an “obligation” to produce more jobs. They only have the obligation to survive and prosper, if they can.  If automation and/or outsourcing increases their competitiveness and their returns, they would be remiss in their obligation to their shareholders not to implement those steps.  If they can do the job with less people, and hence at a lower cost of production, more power to them.

Related to this is the current misconception that people are somehow “owed” a job by companies or by the government.  Again, WRONG WRONG WRONG !!!!  People can either (a) become entrepreneurs and create their own jobs (and perhaps jobs for others as well), or (b) develop useful skills that other people and companies are willing to hire .  The obligation is on the individual to make themselves employable, NOT on companies to employ them.

This passive entitlement mindset is pernicious – America was built by people who hustled, cleared forests, created farms out of wildernesses, set up their own mills and stores, etc. etc.  How did we get from there to this current “entitlement” mindset?

Of course, natural selection will eventually correct the situation. When the hard times come, as they always do eventually, the realists, who understand the need to hustle and  make their own way in the world, will survive and the “entitlement” folks will find themselves in a world of hurt.

Strange - rationality is now exteme.

Senator Reid has announced that the coming tax fight in due to Tea Party extremism. I'm not necessarily a Tea Party supporter, but it does seem to me that arguing that we should cut the ballooning deficit is a rational position, not an extreme one.  The extreme position, I should think, is to argue in the face of the ballooning federal deficit that we ought to increase the deficit yet more, and faster -- that is essentially the Democratic position, based on the budgets they have proposed.

This whole debate feels like the Mad Hatter's tea party in Alice in Wonderland - Europe has at least faced the fact that they have a fiscal crisis, even if they are bumbling in their responses. The party in power in Washington has just as serious a looming fiscal crisis but has yet to even admit it exists, let alone propose any reasonable remedy.  Only people who propose (necessarily painful) remedies get labeled "extreme".

Recommended: Drift - The Unmooring of American Military Power

I highly recommend Rachel Maddow's book "Drift - The Unmooring of American Military Power".  Maddow points out that the framers of the US Constitution were well aware of the historical tendency for rulers to go to war, so they deliberately made it difficult for the President to go to war by lodging the war-making power in Congress, where open debate and cooler heads might prevail. She argues that in recent times Presidents have arrogated war-making powers to themselves, and Congress has let them, with disastrous results. (think of Obama's Libyan bombing, for which he argued he needed no Congressional approval).   This is not a Republican or a Democratic thing - presidents of both parties have played this game in recent years, including Clinton and both Bushes as well as Obama.

This book will not be a comfortable read. You will no doubt be appalled at how we have moved war - real destructive killing war - underground with contractors so that the American people hardly know (or care) that we are at war. We now kill people in foreign lands from drones without trial, without a declaration of war by Congress, and without any serious oversight by any elected official. If you are uncomfortable with this, you ought to be. I certainly am.

Recommended: Essence of Science in 63 seconds

The NPR site has a wonderful short (63 second) video of Richard Feynman explaining the essence of science to a 1964 Cornell class. And his explanation is correct: guess a theory, test it against the real world, and abandon it if it doesn't agree with real life. Oh to have expensive political programs subject to such real-world tests......

Recommended: The Stuctural Revolution

David Brooks has another good piece in the New York Times: The Structural Revolution.  He too argues, as I did a few days ago, that the US needs fundamental structural changes to get out of its current problems, not simply more debt-financed "pump priming".

Posts may be scarce for a bit.....

We will be traveling for the next five weeks, with only intermittent internet connections, so posts may be few and far between until we get back.

Recommended: France's Strategy

STRATFOR has issued another of it's insightful analyses, this one entitled France's Strategy. It reviews Frances recent history (since 1815) and discusses how that has shaped France's foreign policy strategy, especially under President de Gaulle. The author argues that even though France's new president Francois Hollande is a socialist, and hence nominally against the de Gaulle view of affairs, he will nevertheless be forced, eventually and perhaps reluctantly, to follow the same policies his predecessors have been following.

It boggles the mind.....

Watching the European debt crisis, California's imploding economy, and our feckless Congress and administration (I include both parties equally here), it boggles the mind that all these political elites continue to live in a never-never land where common sense doesn't seem to matter.  Anyone with an IQ higher than 90 ought to be able to see that if a government (local, state or federal) continually spends more than it takes in, something bad will eventually happen. The only solutions --- and these are the ONLY solutions -- are to (a) increase revenue (higher taxes) and/or (b) cut spending (reduce government payouts).  There simply are no other alternatives, no other magic tricks or "funny money" solutions, unless one wants to allow rampant inflation to reduce the real value of the debt (and our wages, pensions and savings), which in fact is just a back-door way of raising taxes.

In Europe, politicians who advocate either of these common-sense steps seem to get regularly thrown out of office (but the politicians who replace them still face the same realities).  In the US, Democrats refuse to cut spending and Republicans refuse to raise taxes (or cut total spending either, apparently).  It doesn't take a Harvard degree to see that this is not sustainable.

President Obama's class warfare against the rich may be good populist politics, but it does almost nothing to address the real problems. One can't tell what Romney would do as president; he only talks in generalities.

There is a lot of talk among "experts" about the importance of promoting growth, which is a good idea in the abstract, but the only way politicians seem to find to "promote growth" is to spend more government money, which just makes the whole problem worse (and anyway seems to produce little real growth).  And in fact neither in Europe nor in the US is there any realistic prospect of "growing" our way out of our current debt and federal deficit.

Both Europe and the US need serious and substantial structural adjustments to get out of this mess. In the US, we need to clean up and simplify the tax code, reduce (not eliminate, but sharply reduce) federal regulation in many fields, massively overhaul our educational system so that we produce a young work force adapted to today's competitive world economy, massively reduce the size and scope of our federal government (including the military), and sharply prune back the current entitlement programs.  Of course these are painful steps, and inevitably will result in people losing benefits and jobs.  That raises the predictable howls from everyone whose favorite entitlement or benefit would be reduced or eliminated.  But if we don't deal with these problems, we will eventually all be in far worse shape

Can anyone sell this to the American people, or have we become like the Greeks -- unwilling to face reality and prepared to throw out any politician or political party who is brave enough to try to solve the real problems?

Quotation of the week

"Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels; two-thirds, more or less, idiots; and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons."

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)

Recommended: Same-sex marriage: Conservative and liberal views

The BBC online has an interesting article this morning: Same-sex marriage: Conservative and liberal views.  The author argues that despite the defeats of same-sex marriage laws at the ballot box (most recently in North Carolina this week), opponents of same-sex marriage are going to lose in the long run, because the younger generation is far more tolerant on this issue than their elders.  The author also posits that it is the pressure of the liberal media that is shaping the long term debate, just as it did in the 60's with civil rights.  And, just as America experienced a profound U-turn in attitudes toward racial segregation in just a generation (a remarkably short time for such a strongly held cultural view), it is undergoing a similar 1-generation U-turn on the issue of gay rights and gay marriage.

 

Defense of marriage??

Those who oppose allowing gay marriage often couch their arguments in terms of "defending marriage". In fact, one of the key pieces of legislation on this issue is entitled the Defense of Marriage Act (enacted in 1996 and signed into law by President Clinton.)

Excuse me?? How does allowing a gay couple to marry, and have all the civil benefits of a marriage, in any way damage traditional marriage? I am in a happy traditional marriage, and I see no threat at all to my own marriage when gay couples marry. A gay couple marrying somewhere doesn't change my own relationship to my own spouse, nor do we lose any civil or legal rights. No, gay marriage is no threat whatsoever to traditional marriages.

The only threat is to some people's own religious ideology. I believe in religious freedom (so long as it doesn't include honor killings, oppression, or human sacrifice), so I respect their right to hold and follow their own beliefs in their own lives, but I recognize no right for them to impose their beliefs on the rest of us and insist that we live our own lives according to their own peculiar religious ideologies.

Evidence and belief

The previous two posts have got me thinking about how much we think we know for which, in fact, we really have little or no solid, reliable supporting evidence.

Good scientists are always aware of how much they don’t know, and are always aware that even what they are pretty certain about is probably at best just an approximation to the real world, which is probably far too complex for a human mind to understand fully. But good scientists are and always have been pretty thin on the ground; there are a lot of people in white coats with PhDs who don’t really understand the scientific method very well.

Religions, of course, are a classic example of believing without evidence. People believe all sorts of things, even patently absurd things, just because some religious “authority” told them so (probably when they were young and impressionable). Indeed, religions make a virtue of “faith” – believing without evidence.

Much of history is a fabrication, as any good historian knows. It is always biased, selective, shaped by winners, embellished in the telling, viewed through the cultural assumptions of (a) the writers and (b) the reader. There are a number of good books on the common historical fallacies still taught today in most classrooms, and one can be sure these are just the tip of the iceberg.  Of course it is often hard to find solid evidence about events that happened long ago, but it is amazing how many fallacies are still believed even when there is solid evidence to contradict them.

Political ideologies, both left and right, tend to be based on assumptions with little or no supporting evidence. Which is why so many political programs end up being ineffective, if not downright counter-productive. And it always amazes me that when evidence does accumulate that a policy isn’t working, it makes no difference at all to those who believe in the policy (throwing more and more money at America public education is a case in point).

Big business seems to be particularly susceptible to evidence-free “fads” marketed by slick salespeople. Zero defects, six sigma, ISO9000, etc, etc, etc ad nausium.  Oh, there is always anecdotal evidence given to support the claims of these processes, but precious little hard evidence.  These are almost as prevalent as the evidence-free diet fads that continually sweep the nation.

I suppose it is not surprising that so few people understand either the importance of hard evidence in shaping their beliefs, or the sort of critical skepticism that is needed to assess the strength and validity of evidence when it is offered. It is not a natural human trait, and takes serious training and study to achieve.  Still, I often wonder at the amazing credulity we humans so often display.

Another PhD Comics recommendation

Along the same lines as the last post, see the dark matter video here. The main point is quite true.  We can make accurate predictions about gravitational fields, and about electromagnetic fields, but in fact we have no idea at all how/why they work. Oh, physicists can write equations about them, and speculate about fields being mediated by various theoretical particles with cool names like the Higgs boson, or the graviton, or the gluon, but fundamentally we still really don't understand how the world around us works.  There is still plenty of scope for the next Einstein or Galileo or Copernicus.

Kids ought to be taught this, and their imaginations fired by it.

Recommended: PhD comics explains the Higgs boson

For a chuckle, plus some real physics education in a painless manner, see PhD comics explains the Higgs boson