Amazing push bikery.

A visual elegy to abandoned caravans.

Visualising the decline of colonial empires.

Suggesting how the industrial revolution could have started in Rome.

Hezbollah wants a textbook pulled from Lebanese schools because it has extracts from the Diary of Ann Frank.

Two Chinese commentators on (in effect) the universality of human rights. A liberal-left commentator on how we have to understand China is different.

Ted Halliday looks back on communism:

Communism failed and was, given its internal weaknesses as well as the vitality of its opponents, bound to do so. However, it should not be forgotten that this attempt to escape the conventional path of capitalist development was for a time remarkably successful, not least in the ideological and military challenge it posed to the west but was in the end forced to capitulate, and to do so almost without a semblance of resistance. If nothing else, the communist collapse deserves careful study from the perspective of those who believe in elite-led or state-dictated social and economic development. This is certainly one "lesson" of communism. …
Communism was not just a utopian project: it was a dramatic response to the inequalities and conflicts generated by capitalist modernity. The continuation of many of these same inequalities and conflicts today suggests that further challenges, of an as yet indeterminate nature, will result.

About the Leninist experiment:

… There is little public awareness of the large-scale atrocities, killings and human rights violations that occurred in communist states, especially compared with awareness of the Holocaust and Nazism (which led to to far fewer deaths). The number of documentaries, feature films or television programs about communist societies is minuscule compared with those on Nazi Germany and/or the Holocaust, and few universities offer courses on the remaining or former communist states. …
The different moral responses to Nazism and communism in the West can be interpreted as a result of the perception of communist atrocities as byproducts of noble intentions that were hard to realize without resorting to harsh measures. The Nazi outrages, by contrast, are perceived as unmitigated evil lacking in any lofty justification and unsupported by an attractive ideology. There is far more physical evidence and information about the Nazi mass murders, and Nazi methods of extermination were highly premeditated and repugnant, whereas many victims of communist systems died because of lethal living conditions in their places of detention. Most of the victims of communism were not killed by advanced industrial techniques.
… They also shared an ostensible commitment to creating a morally superior human being -- the socialist or communist man.
Political violence under communism had an idealistic origin and a cleansing, purifying objective. Those persecuted and killed were defined as politically and morally corrupt and a danger to a superior social system.

Vaclav Klaus on the impact of Western politics and Reagon while living in the Communist bloc.

Pro- and anti-government demonstrators in Iran:

"Obama, Obama!" protesters chanted on a day marking the 30th anniversary of the United States Embassy takeover. "Either you're with them, or with us."
The poignant slogan came in contrast to that of nearby government supporters and schoolchildren draped in Iranian flags, who chanted, "Death to America!"

Liveblogging the protests. More:

Protesters chanted "Death to the dictator" while a pro-government group that had also gathered at the square chanted "Death to America".

The Kuwaiti Supreme Court has a view:

Last week, the same court granted married women the right to obtain a passport without their husband's approval, saying the decades-old requirement was "unconstitutional" and "compromised their humanity."

A Canadian woman who, twice forcibly married, attempts to raise awareness of the problem of forced marriage. About the extent of the problem in Canada.

A father runs over his daughter, who dies, because she was “too westernised”. Examining cultural-based crimes against women in the UK (pdf) (forced marriage, domestic violence, honour killings and genital mutilation). About the case of a 22-year old woman who deliberately chose genital mutilation. About using the tactics successfully used against footbinding in China against female genital mutilation.

A review essay on (dis)honour killings:

‘Women cannot own honour,’ the anthropologist Shala Haeri writes with reference to izzat, the Pakistani term for honour. ‘They are honour.’ Honour is basic, like bread; one of Onal’s Turkish interviewees, in prison for killing his sister, says he lives for ‘honour, dignity and for his daily bread’. But it is also elusive and constantly under threat, in the words of Brandon and Hafez, ‘an intangible asset dependent on a community’s perceptions’. The man’s honour depends on the woman, who, by his own account of her sexual nature, necessarily places it at risk. … Feminism has long pointed out that the idealisation of women’s bodies can be a thinly veiled form of hatred, always ready to trample on the one who falls or fails. In the case of honour, the rift is glaring. We are dealing with a vicious injunction and a Sisyphean task. You will enact honour in every bone of your body and every minute of your life because, as a woman, you are the one who carries the seeds of its destruction. …
No matter then that a woman is born pure, she is also judged before she breathes. Mehmet Mirza, another of Onal’s subjects, taught his daughter – whom he would one day kill – that she carried the family honour ‘in her body’, but she ‘had never understood that being a girl was a shameful thing’. How can both things be true? How can you lodge honour in a house of shame? …
Nazir Afzal, the lead lawyer on honour-based violence at the Crown Prosecution Service in Britain, said he gave up his belief that things had improved with the new generation when a young man he interviewed compared a man to a bar of gold and a woman to a piece of white silk: ‘If gold gets dirty you can just wipe it clean, but if a piece of silk gets dirty you can never get it clean again – and you might as well just throw it away.’ …
It is no less crucial to insist that honour killing cannot be equated with Islam. Both Wikan and Husseini work hard to break this equation. Wikan includes Christian examples and draws on her experience of honour cultures which do not oppress women from her fieldwork in Oman, ‘a Muslim society in which to be honourable means to honour others’. …
‘I know that killing my sister is against Islam and it angered God,’ says Sarhan, a Jordanian interviewed by Husseini. ‘But I had to do what I had to do and I will answer to God when the time comes.’ …
The cultural defence might therefore seem to be on the side of the wretched of the earth, but on closer inspection this turns out to be something of an illusion. A woman is murdered. Her killer is partly exonerated on grounds of honour. … a report she had been commissioned to write on children and youth in immigrant communities was watered down by the Norwegian authorities, unwilling to confront ‘the power of men to define the good of women and children’. Often these are men who have ascended to positions of authority way beyond that enjoyed in their countries of origin. Part of the problem in the UK is that the British government and the police rely on such intermediaries, often the most conservative men in their community, who then become tools in managing minority communities on behalf of the state. …
Seen in these terms, culture becomes another word for the unequal distribution of pain – the formulation comes from the Indian anthropologist Veena Das. Nasim Karim, a Norwegian-Pakistani woman who barely escaped a forced marriage with her life, put it even more arrestingly in an address to members of the Norwegian parliament in 1996: ‘When a man is subject to violence, it is called torture, but when a woman is subject to violence, it is called culture.’ The strong version of this argument – voiced for example by the Berlin-based feminist activist Seyran Ates – is that multiculturalism contributes to the slavery of women.

When the author writes:

… as the different parts of that world – none essentially any more modern than the rest since, after all, we are all alive at the same time – increasingly, and inseparably, become part of one another.

she is effectively denying different parts of the world as having different histories: it is deeply silly to treat Afghanistan as being as “modern” as New York (indeed, there is a line of critique of the current war-and-nation building exercise based on precisely that reality).

Offering students an extra credit in an Existentialism course if they did a short film (6 minutes or less).

A House of Commons report on the use and abuse of offical language (pdf).

About the power and limits of science.

About misreading Arendt on the banality of evil.

About collective apologies.

About Heidegger and Nazism. Judging his philosophical contribution.

Mapping countries by their values.

Nice discussion of the difference between guilt culture and shame culture.

About three different types of consistency, including Emerson’s famous quote in full:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.

Applying textual criticism to the Gospel passage “not peace but a sword”.

About lateness (and how Germans have worked out a way to be late on time):

If a (different) unique event repeatedly prevents you from arriving on time, then you need to leave earlier. You have to allow for the average length of the trip, not the trip in the world of Platonic forms.
Just record your arrival times at meetings for a couple of weeks. If you are always late, you are a Platonic traveler. In the real world, though, you are a pain in the neck.

About strong relavitism.

About the varieties of conservatism:

At the cradle of conservatism, then, lies the recognition that the religiously self-assured can be dangerous. The critique of religious enthusiasm, which was central to Hume’s conservatism, was later extended, first by Hume himself and more emphatically by Burke, into a critique of political radicalism. …
In the eyes of conservatives, the orthodox lack intellectual sophistication: Their self-assurance about the answers comes from not having thought hard enough about the questions, from not comprehending the partial or problematic sources of their views. In the eyes of the orthodox, conservatives appear as cynical, as lacking in real conviction, which they believe can only come from acknowledging the absolute source of values….

About Marxism as intellectual fashion statement:

It is a relief to turn from this pap to Slavoj Zizek's First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, a book which for all its faults makes clear that revolution necessarily involves large doses of suffering and coercion.
A Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalytical theorist and film critic, Zizek has become a gadfly of the left establishment, a prolific provocateur whose principal aim seems to be to confound his tender-minded readers. His target throughout this book is not the right but the soft, democratic, meliorist left, which imagines that the egalitarian goals of communism can be realised by non-repressive, liberal means.
Zizek is savagely scornful of this view, writing sharply that "One of the mantras of the postmodern left has been that we should finally leave behind the 'Jacobin-Leninist paradigm' of centralised dictatorial power. But perhaps the time has now come to turn this mantra around... Now, more than ever, one should insist on the 'eternal Idea of Communism' - strict egalitarian justice, disciplinary terror, political voluntarism, and trust in the people." …
But no more than Hardt and Negri can Zizek identify any social force that actually wants communism. …
Whether as Hardt and Negri's embarrassing rhetoric or Zizek's parodic Leninism, the intellectual revival of communism is best understood in terms of capitalism's ability to produce compensatory spectacles. …
The clowning cabaret of 21st-century communism does what entertainment has always been meant to do. It distracts those who watch it from thinking about their problems, which secretly they suspect may be insoluble.

About Jonathan Haidt’s moral psychology:

Psychopaths are moral strangers--apparently without conscience--because while their reasoning capacities are normal, if not superior, they lack the moral emotions necessary for a normal moral life. Psychopaths are dramatic manifestations of the failure of pure reason to sustain moral behavior. …
But while these concerns for harm and fairness would have supported the evolution of cooperation in small foraging societies based on face-to-face interactions, they would not have sustained cooperation in large groups of strangers. Cooperation within larger groups required an evolutionary process of group-selection in which, as Darwin saw, individuals cooperated within groups to compete with other groups. …
But Haidt points out that this liberal emphasis on the "individualizing foundations" of morality ignores the "binding foundations" emphasized by religious conservatives and by people in more traditional societies. In contrast to the "contractual approach" to morality taken by secular liberals and modern cultures, religious conservatives and traditional cultures take a "beehive approach." For the "beehive approach," group loyalty, respect for authority, and religious purity are moral virtues.
This distinction between the "beehive approach" and the "contractual approach" corresponds to Ferdinand Tonnies's famous distinction between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (civil society).…
Modern moral psychology and moral philosophy has been largely dominated by the psychology of Gesellschaft, Haidt observes, which creates a moral parochialism that is blind to the moral pluralism expressed in the full range of the five moral foundations.
Haidt acknowledges--although he does not stress it as much as he should--that what we really see in both cultures and individuals is not an absolute separation between Gesellschaft-psychology and Gemeinschaft-psychology, but mixtures that differ only in emphasis or ranking. …
Haidt speaks of "the socially functional (rather than truth-seeking) nature of moral thinking" (2007, 998). And he says that a Gemeinschaft "uses God as a coordination and commitment device" to reinforce group solidarity (2009, 43). But, of course, for the true believer, God is more than just "a coordination and commitment device"! …
If morality really is based more on emotional intuitions than on rational proofs, such Socratic questioning is subversive of moral order and even impious, which is why Socrates was executed. Can any morally healthy society allow freedom for Socratic philosophers to question the moral traditions of society without thereby dissolving the moral bonds of society? …
In Aristotle's Rhetoric—and to some extent, in his Nicomachean Ethics—we can see the beginnings of a rhetorical tradition of moral philosophy and moral psychology that runs through Cicero to Hume. …
The three "binding foundations" of morality can be sources of immorality! "The binding foundations can certainly motivate horrific behavior. . . . Religion brings out the best and the worst in people" (2008, 17). …
The danger of the Nazi movement came not from its lack of morality but from the emotional depth of its fanatical morality. (This is made clear in Claudia Koonz's book The Nazi Conscience.) …
As Darwin indicated, we can extend our moral emotions of sympathy to ever wider circles of humanity, but we will always feel a stronger attachment to those close to us than to those far away. …
Or we might think of how the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has disrupted the human rights movement--with critics of Israel arguing that the Israeli treatment of Palestinians violates human rights, while the defenders of Israel arguing that Israel is just exercising its right to self-defense. …
Of course, this complex combination of social multiculturalism with political individualism creates problems of its own. So, for example, how far does a liberal democratic society go in tolerating the cultural practices of Islamic fundamentalists and other communitarian groups who want to enforce patriarchal authority over their women and children? In many parts of Europe and North America, such questions have provoked troubling debates. We can moderate but not abolish such conflicts.
What we know for sure, from historical experience, if we embrace the tragic view of human imperfection, is that human beings cannot be trusted to exercise absolute power in enforcing communitarian virtues on individuals without their consent, because we know that such power will be abused in tyrannical ways. We also know, however, that if human beings are free to join communitarian groups based on a shared morality of group identity, they will find their deepest satisfaction in doing so.

The UN thinks environmental concern is a rule-making role for it:

Environmentalism should be regarded on the same level with religion "as the only compelling, value-based narrative available to humanity," according to a paper written two years ago to influence the future strategy of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), the world's would-be environmental watchdog.

With its own list of sins and taboos, promulgated by journals such as The New Scientist.

This morning, there was a mouse in the bath-tub. It had got in and could not get out again. So, I enticed my cat, Prunella, inside and placed her in the bathtub. Twice. Each time, she got straight out, even when second time I put her in facing the mouse down that end of the bathtub.

So, having let the cat out of the house to feed her, I picked the mouse up in tongs and presented the captive mouse to Prunella. Who immediately raced away.

The mouse then escaped into the backyard.

Prunella is normally happy to catch mice. She has sometimes spent long periods staring at a cupboard because she can smell a mouse. She has passed up her ordinary food to catch a mouse and race away with it.

Not today apparently.

A post about WWI and Armistice Day provokes a high quality discussion.

Why a third Lebanese War would likely be much worse than the Second. Review of a book on Hezbollah: full version here:

Unfortunately, the only equivalency that actually conforms to reality is between Hezbollah and its patron, the Islamic Republic regime in Iran. This, in turn, leads to the depressing conclusion that despite the confident analyses of Norton and many others, Hezbollah is not likely to change unless the government in Iran changes first. As long as people who, like Norton, make a living from writing on these issues miss this crucial point, they will continue to underestimate and misunderstand Hezbollah, its intentions, and the calamity it is capable of causing in the future.

A civil conflict in northern Yemen now has significant Saudi involvement.

The UK is holding an official enquiry into the Iraq War: getting all bothered because two members of the committee are Jewish or at least noteworthy.

The prosecutor in the 1993 WTC bombing case is against a civilian trial for the mastermind of the 2001 WTC attack. Responding to those claims. A Republican Senator gives the US A-G (who appears to be very poorly prepared) a really hard time over the decision.

About the complexities of the relationship between the CIA and the ISI. The Taliban insurgency has killed about 2,600 people in Pakistan in the last few years.

President Karzai is sworn in while corruption remains a major issue. Pointing out that, by the standards of recent Afghan history, Karzai looks good. Putting Afghanistan in a broader historical context. Arguing that pulling out would mean that the wrong people would win: the comments seem remarkably mindless, but it is The Guardian after all. Pointing out the fragility of the gains of Afghan women.

About the moral courage of Obama’s Afghanistan speech:

Obama is the first Democratic president in forty years to call for a significant deployment of American troops in the national security interest of his country.

A surrender to the logic of the Presidency. A speech addressed to people like Obama himself to explain why he had decided to escalate. Criticising a speech that faced two ways at once:

Never before has a speech by President Barack Obama felt as false as his Tuesday address announcing America's new strategy for Afghanistan. It seemed like a campaign speech combined with Bush rhetoric -- and left both dreamers and realists feeling distraught.

The Iraqi who threw a shoe at Dubya during a press conference has another Iraqi throw a shoe at him during a press conference.

An excellent presentation of the Climategate issue and its effects by a supporter of AGW:

Other things do matter. The e-mails reveal a systematic effort to deny legitimate freedom of information requests. They contain evidence that the rules of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were deliberately broken to include a paper that supports a particular point of view. The e-mails show an intolerance of views and facts that do not support the received wisdom of the people involved. One of the stolen documents reveals that a key result, the instrumental record of the global mean temperature since 1850, cannot be reproduced.
This is serious stuff. Reproducibility of results and open-minded discussion are cornerstones of scientific conduct.

About the destruction of trust. About the issue of trust:

Still reeling over what is in those emails ... Once scientists set out to mislead the public, they can no longer expect to be trusted. End of story.

An excellent (if hostile) presentation of the “hide the decline” reference (which is about tree-ring data and temperature proxies not the recent pause in warming). A contrary take. An example of how alarmist spin on data works. Suggesting a calmer response to it all.

A global warming thesis historical time-line. The spreading political effect of Climategate:

Now the pirating of thousands of e-mail messages from within its walls has revealed a dangerous bunker mentality among the scientists who guarded those records and a data-fudging scandal that has created a crisis of confidence in global-warming science that is threatening to destroy the political consensus around next week's carbon-policy summit in Copenhagen.
Said one scientist working at the institute: “It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that this has set the climate-change debate back 20 years.”

After revelations that the CRU has lost the original temperature data, the UK Met Office is re-examining 160 years worth of data:

The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.
The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.

An example of the sort of issue adjustment of the surface temperature data raises. The notion of private data adjustment algorithms by tax-payer funded scientists is a nonsense, but especially in such a huge public policy issue.

Examining the issues and calling for an independent inquiry. The IPCC is taking the view that there is nothing to worry about. But has changed its mind and wants an investigation. The head of the CRU is stepping down pending an investigation. Michael Mann is being investigated by his University. And is distancing himself from Phil Jones. Calling for Jones and Mann to be barred from the IPCC process. Suggesting the IPCC process has run its course:

The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production – just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive.

A case from 5 years ago of how dissenting scientists have been treated.

A high-minded response to the CRU emails. A good site to follow the issues is here. A nice flow diagram with comment. An annoyed mathematician about suppression of critique of evidence. A physicist who has published on causes of ice ages:

"The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy with arms," Shaviv continues. "We traverse one of these arms every 145 million years. If the sun's cyclical changes translate into a shift of one degree on earth, then the changes when we traverse such an arm, close to supernovae, will be on the order of 10 degrees, which is a huge amount. When you look at the geological record of the earth, you see that in the past 100 million years, there were periods with ice at the Poles and periods without ice. I demonstrated in the article that the Ice Ages correlate chronologically with our traversing the arms of the Milky Way. In other words, every 145 million years there is an Ice Age. The conclusion is that cosmic rays affect the earth's temperature on long time-scales, too."

is unsurprised by the Climategate revelations:

An editor of one of the more prominent journals wrote a colleague of mine that "any paper which doesn't support the anthropogenic GHG theory is politically motivated, and therefore has to be rejected".

The BBC carried a report about the poor quality of the computer code at CRU. A summary of what the emails reveal. Going through a history of dubious climate science. Nice moderate summary of the CRU hack and policy situation. Then there is the “most influential tree in the world”:

as McIntyre demonstrated in an explosive series of posts on his Climate Audit blog, because it showed that the CRU studies were based on cherry-picking hundreds of Siberian samples only to leave those that showed the picture that was wanted. Other studies based on similar data had clearly shown the Medieval Warm Period as hotter than today. Indeed only the evidence from one tree, YADO61, seemed to show a "hockey stick" pattern, and it was this, in light of the extraordinary reverence given to the CRU's studies, which led McIntyre to dub it "the most influential tree in the world".
But more dramatic still has been the new evidence from the CRU's leaked documents, showing just how the evidence was finally rigged. The most quoted remark in those emails has been one from Prof Jones in 1999, reporting that he had used "Mike [Mann]'s Nature trick of adding in the real temps" to "Keith's" graph, in order to "hide the decline". Invariably this has been quoted out of context. Its true significance, we can now see, is that what they intended to hide was the awkward fact that, apart from that one tree, the Yamal data showed temperatures not having risen in the late 20th century but declining. What Jones suggested, emulating Mann's procedure for the "hockey stick" (originally published in Nature), was that tree-ring data after 1960 should be eliminated, and substituted – without explanation – with a line based on the quite different data of measured global temperatures, to convey that temperatures after 1960 had shot up.

If a journalist says something you do not like, apparently you threaten him with being “cut off”.

A slightly embarrassing IPCC typo on glacier retreat.

A nice statement of the “lukewarmist” position (yes, warming; yes, some human influence probably; no, not something to get all fearful over). Richard Lindzen on the weak nature of the catastrophist case. As proving the science is not settled.

The ETS defeated in the Senate 41-33. About the McKibbin scheme as an option for Abbott. Scientist resigns from the CSIRO, claims attempt to muzzle him, calls for Senate inquiry.

Flannery and Hansen disagree over Copenhagen. China has its hand out for carbon credits. So has Russia, causing problems for any deal since it has huge potential to be a net receiver of income. In the “who will pay” issue, an issue that divides the Copenhagen summit, people are looking to the US. Lord Stern says we should just borrow to pay. Saudi Arabia is already citing Climategate. India will not sign a binding emissions agreement. African delegates are taking a hard line. Canadian government is centred on defending Canada’s interests. Agreement is expected to be difficult.

140 private planes have flown to Copenhagen for the summit. 20,000 delegates and journalists to hear impossible pledges:

President Obama, understanding the histrionics required in climate change debates, promises that US emissions in 2050 will be 83% below 2005 levels. If so, 2050 emissions will equal those in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. But there will be 420 million in 2050, so Obama’s promise means that per-capita emissions then will be about what they were in 1875. That. Will. Not. Happen.

Noel Pearson utters a few home truths:

Once-mild sceptics on the centre-right are being pushed further right, recoiling from the righteousness and the moral posturing of the zealots on the left.
The believers on the left seem oblivious to the extent the religious nature of their fervour alienates potential supporters. The price being paid for the West's progressive classes re-finding God in the environment makes many a sceptic yearn for the time people went to church for spiritual succour. Natural revelation has long provenance in Christian theology, but the Greens' religious atheism is repellent to many. …
When economically insecure people realise that climate action advocates are largely economically secure and can afford the costs that will be incurred by the policy choices they are advocating, they may revolt in the way Tony Abbott hopes they will.

Poll finds almost half of Britons do not believe in AGW.

Mannie Gross
on
How to Smell a (Scientific) Rat

The Adam Smith Club will host a meeting on Tuesday the 8th of December 2009, at the Curry Club Cafe, 396 Bridge Road, Richmond 3121

Mannie Gross is Vice President of The Australian Adam Smith Club and has a BSc(Hons) and MSc from the University of Melbourne. From a young age he has been interested in the history and philosophy of science. The issue of global warming first came to his attention in the 1990s after hearing John F Daly* address the Club and reading his book The Greenhouse Trap: Why the Greenhouse Effect Will Not End Life On Earth.

The speaker will explain how, armed with the scientific method, (which any layman can comprehend), a few rules of thumb and elementary logic the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory can be thoroughly refuted. The question then is why do so many scientists believe in AGW theory?

Attendance is open to both members and non-members. Those desiring to attend should complete the attached slip (pdf) and return it to the Club no later than Monday the 7th of December 2009. Tickets will not be sent. Those attending should arrive at 6:30pm for dinner at 7:00pm. The cost is $40.00 per head for members and $45.00 per head for non-members

* Those following Climategate might remember one of the hacked emails said John Daly's death was a form of good news.

Strong majorities of Indians and Chinese think people are better off under free markets.

Dubai as leading a middle class commercial revolution in the Middle East despite its financial crisis.

Somalia now has a pirate stock exchange.

The West Bank is having an economic boom.

that critically examines the evidence for (pdf) famous past bubbles, inclding the “tulipmania”.

Regional shares of world GDP 1969-2009.

Mexico is apparently now the second-fattest nation in the world. About the notion of American “hunger”. While the American poor are continuing to do better:

By those measures, life for the average American is better today than 35 years ago, life for poor Americans is much better than it was 35 years ago, and poor Americans today largely live better than the average American did 35 years ago.

Review of a book on the (formerly) secret AIG bailout. There seems to be a lot of “that was then, this is now” in the official story about the bailout.

Paper arguing for monetary stimulus by (pdf) the major central banks. Brad Delong (and Matt Yglesias) are impressed. Monetary stimulus as the pro-market response. About the politics of monetary stimulus. About the debate between economists on monetary stimulus and unemployment.

The US Federal Government is facing mounting debt problems:

With the national debt now topping $12 trillion, the White House estimates that the government’s tab for servicing the debt will exceed $700 billion a year in 2019, up from $202 billion this year, even if annual budget deficits shrink drastically. Other forecasters say the figure could be much higher.
In concrete terms, an additional $500 billion a year in interest expense would total more than the combined federal budgets this year for education, energy, homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On how capital gains tax exemption does not drive housing investment:

Housing is not the only asset that qualifies for negative gearing and the concessional treatment of capital gains. The choice to invest in housing must be driven by factors other than CGT concessions and negative gearing, particularly given the much higher transaction costs associated with property compared to other assets such as shares.

Hammering away at the ignoring of structural issues in US housing markets. And also.

The power of public sector unions in California:

The old deal seemed fair: public employees would earn lower salaries than Americans working in the private sector, but would receive a somewhat better retirement and more days off. Now, public employees get higher average pay, far higher benefits, and many more days off and other fringe benefits. They have also obtained greatly reduced work schedules, thus limiting public services even as pay and benefits shoot ever higher.

A post with lots of links on why minimum wages are bad. (Particularly in a country with an earned income tax credit.)

The Obama Cabinet has by far the least private sector experience of any American Cabinet ever:

When one considers that public sector employment has ranged since the 1950s at between 15 percent and 19 percent of the population, the makeup of the current cabinet—over 90 percent of its prior experience was in the public sector—is remarkable.

Talk about unrepresentative … Wondering about selection and definition in the comparison.

Why Obama’s jobs summit will not mean much:

Obama can't be fairly blamed for most job losses, which stemmed from a crisis pre-dating his election. But he has made a bad situation somewhat worse. His unwillingness to advance trade agreements (notably, with Colombia and South Korea) has hurt exports. The hostility to oil and gas drilling penalizes one source of investment. More important, the decision to press controversial proposals (health care, climate change, taxes) was bound to increase uncertainty and undermine confidence. Some firms are postponing spending projects "until there is more clarity," Zandi notes. Others are put off by anti-business rhetoric.

Using regime uncertainty to justify Congress passing health care reform quickly. “Reducing business uncertainty” seems to be a great trick: introduce a proposed reform with lots of major implications and then justify pushing it through to “reduce business uncertainty” created by the proposed reform itself.

About the performance of the Oz economy and general economic prospects (pdf):

Australia is the only developed economy where year-ended growth in GDP has remained positive during the past year. It is now 18 years since Australia has experienced a negative in year-ended GDP growth, a very prolonged economic expansion … the apparent contradiction between the shortage of dwellings and the high investment in dwellings arises because a high proportion of dwelling investment is going into improving the quality of existing dwellings and building accommodation additional to primary residences

House prices are surging around Oz. What $A1.85m buys you in Sydney.

Indiana decided to license hypnotists …:

Then, after the law was enacted, a funny thing started happening: The state began receiving license applications from people who didn’t live in Indiana. People who lived in states (i.e. most states) that didn’t require hypnotist licensing of any kind. Some were from as far away as California. It turns out they were doing it so they could advertise in the yellow pages and on bus-stop billboards as “state-licensed.” They would just neglect to mention which state.

More on the problems of occupational licensing.

As the US experiences what some might call “disaster statism”, in contradiction to Naomi Klein’s “disaster capitalism”, a review of The Shock Doctrine pulling apart its factual poverty. The longer term pattern of “disaster statism”. Another hostile review noting its own branding. Naomi Klein’s book as a dead-end for the left:

Her cheerful insouciance in the face of such inconvenient facts points to an odd, slightly endearing quality of hers: she is conscientious enough to provide readers with facts that blow her thesis to smithereens, yet at the same time she is deluded enough not to notice the rubble of her thinking on the floor. ...
With the pseudo-clarity of a conspiracy theorist, Klein dismisses out of hand the possibility of incompetence. ... Like every conspiracy theory, Klein's account of the fate of the world finally lacks internal logic. ...
Yet when it comes to the right-wingers who constitute her book's main subject, Klein's reportorial spirit is nowhere to be found.
Klein's relentless materialism is not the only thing driving her to see conservatives merely as corporate puppets. She pays shockingly (but, given her premises, unsurprisingly) little attention to right-wing ideas. She recognizes that neoconservatism sits at the heart of the Iraq war project, but she does not seem to know what neoconservatism is; and she makes no effort to find out. Her ignorance of the American right is on bright display in one breathtaking sentence: ...
All these things are true. And all these things are enormous outrages and significant problems. It's just that they are not the same outrage or the same problem. And Naomi Klein's relentless lumping together of all her ideological adversaries in the service of a monocausal theory of the world ultimately renders her analysis perfect nonsense.

A comprehensive critique of The Shock Doctrine’s (lack of) evidence and (il)logic. A Naomi Klein smackdown roundup. Naomi Klein responds to critics. A response to her response:

Since the Iraq War is Klein's strongest example of the "disaster capitalism" that Friedman is said to have influenced, it is interesting that she never mentions that Friedman was in fact opposed to the war. When asked about this before by journalists, her defence was always that she never wrote explicitly that Friedman was in favour of the war (she just tries to give that impression and so far every single reader that I have talked to got that same impression). ….
The fact that Klein thinks that this is serious research is actually much more damaging for her than any of the conscious distortions that I have examined elsewhere.
If you want unbiased data you obviously can't cherry-pick countries and years, you have to look at longer periods and more countries. But if you do, you get the opposite results — the more liberal economy, the lower the unemployment and poverty rates, is the consistent result. And this is the reason why Klein never even tries.

Paper on evidence that human rights abuses tend to reduce rather than accelerate economic liberalisation.

Developments in the Honduras standoff.

Educational attainment of mother influences birth rates.

Suggesting that it is time to end the war and drugs: and that a second-term President Obama would be the person to do it.

President Obama’s speech at Fort Hood.

China manages President Obama’s visit to the regime’s satisfaction. Europe is apparently feeling a little unloved.

Changing the midship-persons on an honour guard to make the US Navy look more diverse …

About the problems Maine has had trying to fix its health care system.

The vote in NY23rd has some permutations.

Kelo was a seminal recent eminent domain case: the result has been a wasted wasteland.

California as rent-seeker’s paradise: two lawyers write a law and then get lots of fees suing under it.

Would President Obama please stop bowing to foreign monarchs: he is a head of state.

Reporting is arguing that the health care reform would adversely affect care provided to some, including some seniors. The report (pdf). Being unimpressed with the package. Worries about the proposals:

In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health-care's dysfunctional delivery system.

The cost of a wavering Senator’s vote for the bill?: about $100m.

Arguing that the Democratic Party is not for women. This is so like the complaints of disgruntled gay activists, it’s eerie.

About the activist networks Obama put together and their recent quietude. But the Obama Adminstration has a ruling that it can pay ACORN for services performed before Congress cut funding.

A mysterious horrible odour has now been ascertained; six decomposing bodies.

With change in rules, lobbyists are resigning in record numbers, at least officially.

Pointing out that Gov. Palin’s support base is largely conservative men.

Which groups voted how much in the 2008 election.

Looking back at the bigotry around President Kennedy’s assassination.

CERC closing at the end of the year

It is with regret that I inform the recipients of the CERC Bulletin that CERC, the only Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence in Australia, will be closed at the end of 2009. There are many good experiences to reflect on and these will feature in CERC’s last Annual Newsletter, which will be sent out with the CERC Bulletin before the end of the year.
Over twenty years, CERC has provided both the physical and virtual hubs of the largest network of scholars, government officials and the public interested in Europe in Australia. We have held very successful public seminar series, international conferences and produced excellent research publications and our Working Papers Series.
We have had extensive relations with government, the EU and the media, important community outreach and excellent knowledge transfer activities government.
For many years, CERC has been an important destination in Australia for visiting scholars and officials from Europe and we have welcomed visiting scholars and postgraduate scholars.
CERC established an excellent reputation in providing research support, training and networks to a broad range of scholars across many disciplines including political science, history, education, economics, law, cultural studies and languages.
Over the last twenty years, the University, the Australian and international scholarly community and thousands of students, the public and community and specialised groups and business have benefited from CERC’s a situation of which we can be proud.
It has been a great privilege for all of us at CERC to work with so many committed people. It has been an honour to serve.
Assoc. Prof. Philomena Murray
Jean Monnet Chair ad personam
Director, Contemporary Europe Research Centre www.cerc.unimelb.edu.au
Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence
School of Social and Political Sciences
The University of Melbourne

CERC cost maybe $100,000 per year, so less than one senior University bureaucrat. It built connections between scholars across the world and across disciplines. It built connections between the University of Melbourne and the wider community of Melbourne. This decision is disgraceful.

A case of CRU denying temperature data to independent scientists. Asking good questions about the refusal to share raw data. About those emails:

However, we do now have hundreds of emails that give every appearance of testifying to concerted and coordinated efforts by leading climatologists to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to silence and discredit their critics.

That seems a more sober assessment than some of the sceptical triumphalism around the place. What they raise about the “black box” issue and the way research is funded. Retired climatologist Tim Ball on what it all means. The best comment I have seen on the hacked emails:

The emails help to shed light on some aspects of peer review that skeptics have suspected for years. It is increasingly clear that climate scientists in the monoculture have been using peer review to enforce the orthodoxy. Peer review panels are stacked with members of the club, and authors who challenge the orthodoxy are shut out of publication, while authors within the monoculture use peer review as a shield against future criticism. We see in the emails members of the monoculture actually working to force editors who have the temerity to publish work critical of the orthodoxy out of their jobs. We are now learning that when alarmist scientists claim that there is little peer-reviewed science on the skeptic’s side, this is like the Catholic Church enforcing a banned books list and then claiming that everything in print supports the Church’s position.
History teaches us that whenever we allow a monoculture – whether is be totalitarian one-party rule or enforcing a single state religion, corruption follows. Without scrutiny of their actions, actors in such monocultures have few checks and little accountability. Worse, those at the center of such monocultures can become convinced of their own righteousness, such that any action they take in support of the orthodoxy is by definition ethically justified.
This, I think, is exactly what we see at work in the Hadley emails.

Making the monoculture point rather more emphatically:

All the manipulation, distortion and suppression revealed by these emails took place because it would seem these scientists knew their belief was not only correct but unchallengeable; and so when faced with evidence that showed it was false, they tried every which way to make the data fit the prior agenda. And those who questioned that agenda themselves had to be airbrushed out of the record, because to question it was simply impossible. Only AGW zealots get to decide, apparently, what science is. Truth is what fits their ideological agenda. Anything else is to be expunged.

In other words, dissent is illegitimate in both content and motive. A more moderate version on the social validation of knowledge:

To be completely clear, I don’t think that either ideological motivation or even intimidation tactics prove that these scientists’ views are wrong. Their research should be assessed on its own merits, irrespective of their motivations for conducting it. However, these things should affect the degree to which we defer to their conclusions merely based on their authority as disinterested experts.

The emails as revealing the scientific equivalent of “machine politics”. Post with lots of links.

Sen. Inhofe, who is looking a touch prescient, wants to start an investigation. Including a warning letter to Dr Mike Mann. The CEI has lodged notice to sue for NASA’s refusal to supply documents under FOI requests.

George Monbiot apologises, calls for Jones’ resignation. Responding to Monbiot. Suggesting there is a general antipathy to open debate:

If the argument isn’t going your way, close it down. This was ever the way of liberal-left. Criticize the European Socialist Superstate and you’re a “Little Englander”; object to wind farms spoiling your view and you’re a “NIMBY”; demand curbs on immigration and you’re “a racist”; desire better education for your kids and you’re “elitist”; question the current majority scientific view on AGW and you’re a “Denier” who deserves only to be scorned, vilified and preferably silenced.

The debate is getting even more heated. Retired climate scientist Vincent Gray calls fraud:

Nothing about the revelations surprises me. I have maintained email correspondence with most of these scientists for many years, and I know several personally. I long ago realized that they were faking the whole exercise.
When you enter into a debate with any of them, they always stop cold when you ask an awkward question.

President Eisenhower’s farewell address famously warned of the military-industrial complex getting too much power. But he also warned of:

… Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

Particularly if dissent become illegitimate. If one thinks dissent is illegitimate, it also makes perfect sense to stop “evil” opinions invading “proper” journals, etc. To the extent that moral judgment is going to trump evidence.

On Climategate, the BBC is apparently in “nothing to see here" mode. Tim Flannery discusses the hacked emails on the ABC. Noting a shift in what it is apparently acceptable to say. Climategate gets lots of Google™ hits, rather less media coverage.

The prospects for an Oz ETS:

Economist and Reserve Bank of Australia board member Warwick McKibbin warns the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is "fundamentally unstable", the price of permits will be "inherently volatile" and the Copenhagen agenda is in "total disarray". "The political fallout from this is going to lead to changes," he says.
For geographical and political reasons, Australia does not have the hydro or nuclear alternatives to replace coal-fired baseload electricity. That makes it more costly for us to cut emissions compared with the US, Europe and Japan. That increases the risk of "leakage" of our carbon-intensive industries offshore to developing economies, such as China, where emissions restrictions are less stringent.

Tony Abbott on the politics of the issue.

ADDENDA The FOI angle very well set out. Replication is absolutely central to science. If uninvolved third parties cannot replicate it, it is not science. The notion that only "vetted" people with the "right" intentions can have the data is not merely not scientific, it is anti-scientific.

On Saturday, was having a lovely dinner with montjoye when she mentioned that a microbiologist friend had reported that research had been done on how long it takes viruses and bacteria to latch onto something dropped on the floor.

About 90 seconds, on average, apparently. (Presumably, that is a mean, not a mode or median.) Viruses and bacteria just do not move very quickly on their own.

So, the "5 second rule" is very low risk. Which makes sense, otherwise people would get sick a lot more often.

The growth of cognitive science has been one of the major intellectual advances of the last few decades. Largely kicked off by Noam Chomsky’s rethinking of the human aptitude for language, and attracting noted popularisers (such as Steven Pinker), it has been spreading across intellectual life. That humans have finally created something that is vaguely analogous to human cognition in its operation (computers)—something, moreover which we can “see” inside of—may have had something to do with this. (Chomsky works at MIT, after all.)

D. Jason Slone’s Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn’t presents the application of the findings of cognitive science to the study of religion. One of the strengths of the book is its presentation and synthesis of the work of a wide range of scholars.

Slone starts with two observations which are striking, given that religion is supposed to provide absolute truth: there is more than one religion in the world and religion contains all sorts of things people have to guess at (since most of us do not get to chat with the various superhuman beings religion postulates) (p.vii). But it is the difference between what people say they believe when “formally” asked and what they believe and do when making more rapid or personal decisions—the reality that received ideas from one’s culture (including theological ones) play only a partial role in what people say and do (p.4)—which is the starting place of the book’s analysis.
( religion as is v religion as ought )
The brute fact that Slone bases his analysis on, and explores in Theological Incorrectness is that religious people believe all sorts of things that, in terms of the doctrines of their religion, they should not. That is, religion as a cognitive and cultural experience is not defined by the doctrines of theologians.

But nor is it defined by “culture”. As Slone points out in his conclusion:

… cultural theories of religion are impoverished by lack of understanding of how the mind works and thus of why humans think what they and do what they do. Sociocultural theories of religion assume that the mind is a blank slate that learns what to think from culture. Not only is this mind-blind assumption inaccurate but it is illogical … Were humans merely cultural sponges we would find that each culture would be autonomous, confined and homogeneous … This paradigmatic assumption does not fit the facts.
A better explanation for why people believe what they “shouldn’t” is that people have active minds that are continuously engaged in the construction of novel thoughts and the transformation of culturally transmitted ideas (p.121).

If we look to the human mind we find that:

Three very important aspects of cognition that constrain religion are intuitive ontology (what kinds of things are in the world), intuitive causality (how do these things work), and intuitive probability (how things are likely to work). These basic cognitive capacities not only allow us to perform important functions required for survival, like analysis and prediction of environmental activity, but also produce postulations and presumptions that might be, on reflection, systematically incoherent. In this sense, theological incorrectness is a natural by-product of the cognitive tools in our mind-brains. (p.122)

And it is to evolution that we need to look to understand where those cognitive capacities come from, and why they are like they are. Not that that is a counsel of despair, moral or otherwise:

Religions preach ethics because people are prone to “ethical” behaviour, not the other way around (p.123).

Slone then makes a claim that strikes me as being too strong:

One can say, therefore, that religion is not a cause of behaviour per se. It does not determine how we think or act.

It is not the only determinant, but to suggest that belief does not have logics, and that people do not act on those logics, is just silly. Leninism, Nazism, liberalism: the doctrinal differences between these political ideologies really do matter. I take his point that cognitive habits act upon doctrines, but it is also true that people can (and do) adopt particular doctrines and act upon them. Consider this rather nice TED talk on how basic religious beliefs affect business (and other) practices.

A point Slone then immediately appeals to himself, as he concludes his book arguing strongly that religion can only be studied properly in the light of our understanding of how human cognition works: it must be scientifically grounded. Slone notes that such scientific “reductionism” no more abolishes other ways of comprehending things than knowledge of how light and sight works abolishes appreciation of the beauty of a Monet painting (p.124).

Theological Incorrectness is a fascinating excursion through religion as it ‘is’, its distance from religion as it ‘ought’ and the use of cognitive science to explicate that distance.

There are, possibly, greater terms expressing intellectual wankerdom than using ‘late capitalism’ and ‘late modernity’ other than ironically, but none that I find so transparently silly, annoying and pretentious.

We have no idea how long modernity has to run. We have no idea how long capitalism has to run.

None whatsoever.

So we have no idea how “late” in the history of either the current stage of human history is. For all we know, a thousand years down the track, people may regard our period as still being part of early modernity and early capitalism.

On the matter of capitalism, consider two things.

First, how much of the world is still not very capitalist: Africa, much of Asia, most of Latin America (hence Hernando de Soto’s witticism that “capitalism is a great idea and Latin America should try it sometime”).
( reality and pretension )
We have come along way since 1450 and 1517. [Not to mention Europeans beginning the process of creating, for the first time since humans left Africa, a common global history.] Do we have any idea how long the changes of modernity have to run? No. If we begin to move off Earth, the period when we were confined to one planet is hardly going to look like “late modernity”.

What someone is really saying when they use the term ‘late capitalist’ or ‘late modernity’ is “I know where history is going”. No, they do not. Using these terms with any seriousness is the triumph of intellectual pretension over intellectual sense.

Noting that Britain meets its emission targets because Thatcher closed coal mines (over bitter opposition from the Left) and the UK has nuclear power.

About the hockey-stick and problems with the tree-ring data:

It turns out that many of the samples were taken from dead (partially fossilized) trees and they have no particular trend. The sharp uptrend in the late 20th century came from cores of 10 living trees alive as of 1990, and five living trees alive as of 1995. Based on scientific standards, this is too small a sample on which to produce a publication-grade proxy composite. The 18th and 19th century portion of the sample, for instance, contains at least 30 trees per year. But that portion doesn’t show a warming spike. The only segment that does is the late 20th century, where the sample size collapses. Once again a dramatic hockey stick shape turns out to depend on the least reliable portion of a dataset.
But an even more disquieting discovery soon came to light. Steve searched a paleoclimate data archive to see if there were other tree ring cores from at or near the Yamal site that could have been used to increase the sample size. He quickly found a large set of 34 up-to-date core samples, taken from living trees in Yamal by none other than Schweingruber himself! Had these been added to Briffa’s small group the 20th century would simply be flat. It would appear completely unexceptional compared to the rest of the millennium.

The Hadley Climate Reporting Unit has been comprehensively hacked with documents and emails posted online. More. Police are to investigate. Andrew Bolt has a few observations. Claming it will be the end of CAGW. A certain amount of damage control is being engaged in:

"It does look incriminating on the surface, but there are lots of single sentences that taken out of context can appear incriminating," said Bob Ward, director of policy and communications at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. "You can't tell what they are talking about. Scientists say 'trick' not just to mean deception. They mean it as a clever way of doing something - a short cut can be a trick."

Post with lots of links where you can download the files:

… shows that since 1990, Phil Jones has collected staggering 13.7 million British pounds ($22.6 million) in grants.

Another post with lots of links. Initial analysis of the revealed emails:

The emails I've reviewed so far do not suggest that these scientists are perpetrating a knowing and deliberate hoax. On the contrary, they are true believers. I don't doubt that they are sincerely convinced--in fact, fanatically so--that human activity is warming the earth. But the emails are disturbing nonetheless. What they reveal, more than anything, is a bunker mentality. These pro-global warming scientists see themselves as under siege, and they view AGW skeptics as bitter enemies. They are often mean-spirited; the web site American Thinker is referred to as "American Stinker;" at one point an emailer exults in the death of a global warming skeptic; another one suggests that the Ph.D. of a prominent skeptic should be revoked because of an error he made decades ago in his dissertation; another says that he is tempted to "beat the crap out of" the same scientist. The emails show beyond any reasonable doubt that these individuals are engaged in politics, not science.
They also suggest that pro-global warming scientists fudge data to get the results they are looking for. Just over a month ago, on September 28, 2009, Tom Wigley wrote to Phil Jones of the Hadley Centre about his efforts to get the right-sized "blip" in temperatures of the 1940s:

Phil, Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly explain the 1940s warming blip. If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s blip (as I'm sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean -- but we'd still have to explain the land blip.
I've chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are 1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips -- higher sensitivity plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from. Removing ENSO does not affect this.
It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with "why the blip".

This and many other emails convey the impression that these theorists are making the "science" up as they go along, with data being manipulated until it yields the results that have been predetermined by political conviction.

Another post with lots of links and juicy quotes. Obviously the hacking is illegal, a breach of confidentiality, of privacy, etc. Sort of like the Pentagon Papers. Suggesting the leaked emails say more about academia than climate. [And also (like the point about "Jacksonian discourse").] I haven't examined them myself [apart from the ones posted in various articles and blogs], but what I have mainly got out of them is rather too much "true belief", that the highly combative and intolerant outlook one so often sees among "warmists" comes from the main CAGW scientists.

The head of the UK Environmental Protection agency wants everyone to be issued with a carbon allowance.

President Sarkozy has proposed a carbon tax:

The government has been under suspicion of seeking ways to increase its revenues in a year when fiscal income has plunged because of the recession, causing the budget deficit to balloon. …
Mr Sarkozy faces an uphill battle to convince voters to accept the plan. An opinion poll by Ifop for the magazine Paris Match, published this week, found that 65 per cent of people were hostile to the tax.

The likely first EU President wants to fund social welfare with green taxes.

Al Gore is becoming very wealthy via selling carbon control. Lots of companies are looking to government incentives on environmental issues.

Sen. Inhofe is claiming sceptical victory. Lord Lawson thinks Copenhagen ought to fail and wants a more open debate.

Nice empirical piece on increases in income equality in the US since 1980.

Looking at other aspects of financial markets, such as margins and leverage.

About dominant narratives and the difficulties in working out whether the TARP bailouts did any good. Prominent Chinese economist worries about boom and bust in the Chinese economy.

Study finds low levels of consumption multiplier for government spending. Tracing where the US stimulus money goes:

The money is not going to areas that would more directly stimulate the economy but instead to provide ongoing life support to deficit-ridden federal, state and local agencies.

But with the US federal government doing so much more, corporations are lining up to get their hands on taxpayer-provided goodies.

About regulations as repeated games of action and response. An Austrian economist (Steve Horowitz) comments on the financial crisis, financial regulation and central banking.

The UK has had its worst six months for public finances on record. Arguing against raising the top marginal rate to 50%. I thought we had played this policy experiment …

Indian heart surgeon offers cutting edge cardiac procedures at a fraction of the cost:

The approach has transformed health care in India through a simple premise that works in other industries: economies of scale. By driving huge volumes, even of procedures as sophisticated, delicate and dangerous as heart surgery, Dr. Shetty has managed to drive down the cost of health care in his nation of one billion.
"Japanese companies reinvented the process of making cars. That's what we're doing in health care," Dr. Shetty says. "What health care needs is process innovation, not product innovation."

And again. He aims to open up a large facility thereby bringing medical tourism to the Cayman Islands.

If the government pays for something, it rations it: generating controversies such as this. More. The NHS on itself:

Only the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, the Wal-Mart supermarket chain and the Indian Railways directly employ more people.

Diseconomies of scale, anyone? There was an old Cold War joke that went: the NHS and the Red Army are the two biggest employers in Europe, and the defence of Western Europe rests on the hope that the latter is as inefficient as the former.

A talk about economic gangsters. About the book. Juarez, Mexico as a city where gangs successfully (if that is the word) compete with the state. The largest narco-gang, La Familia, is religious. Religion provides a good binding agent, which particular religion matters less: British troops are finding (and fighting) Taliban fighters with British accents and tattoos, in part a drug-gang connection.

Governments driving up demand and restricting the supply of housing has led to a rise in rents in Oz. Evidence that home loan stress was a major factor in the defeat of the Howard Government.

1950 Time cover story on the builder who pioneered mass developments.

Housing prices in California continue to be inflated. With adverse effects on job prospects and employment.

Examining prospects in the UK housing market. Though suburbia is getting more positively regarded.

Another success for local government as investor:

Nearly 35 years after taxpayers spent $55.7 million building the Pontiac Silverdome and a year after a $20 million sale fell through, city officials have sold the arena once called the most desirable property in Oakland County.
The price: $583,000.

My local government is the most indebted in Melbourne, mainly because it decided it had some comparative advantage in being a property developer. Guess what, it did not.

With the total abandonment of any local currency, formerly hyperinflation-ridden Zimbabwe has been transformed:

In February 2009 Zimbabwe was the only country in the world without debt. Nobody owed anyone anything. Following the abandonment of the Zimbabwe Dollar as the local currency all local debt was wiped out and the country started with a clean slate.
It is now a country without a functioning Central Bank and without a local currency that can be produced at will at the behest of politicians. Since February 2009 there has been no lender of last resort in Zimbabwe, causing banks to be ultra cautious in their lending policies. The US Dollar is the de facto currency in use although the Euro, GB Pound and South African Rand are accepted in local transactions.
Price controls and foreign exchange regulations have been abandoned. Zimbabwe literally joined the real world at the stroke of a pen. Money now flows in and out of the country without restriction. Super market shelves, bare in January, are now bursting with products. …
There are common denominators in all hyperinflations. Generally government finances reach a point where large budget deficits cannot be financed by taxes or borrowings. The choices come down to austerity (with the government cutting back its spending) or by funding the deficit by creating local currency through the printing press, leading to the inflation tax. This is always a political decision, but the line of least resistance is the printing press. Cutting government expenditures and laying off bureaucratic staff is anathema to most politicians.
In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe has made it his mission to remain President for life. This has caused him to infiltrate his supporters into the army and police force. He also used Government finances as a way of funding patronage. His use of the printing press was liberal and nobody was prepared to stand up against him. This eventually led to inflation gathering momentum to the point where the armed forces were getting rebellious – they wanted more money. When Mugabe caved in to these demands, the Zimbabwe Dollar plunged.
Shortly after Mugabe was elected President in 1980, the Zimbabwe Dollar was worth more than the US Dollar. The ongoing abuse of the financial system eventually produced a runaway inflation. The largest bank note issued in Zimbabwe was for One Hundred Trillion Dollars ... These notes are now collector’s items and I had to part with US$2 to a street vendor to acquire the note …

Two very stupid people who clearly hugely underestimated the pattern-recognition software in human brains.

The school that has a maths pirate: love pieces like this. Via newredshoes.

Great photos of pollution in China.

About Wikipedia™ and its denizens (the comments are surprisingly good).

About the online world of cyber crime.

Cool graphic of missions to Mars. Long before there were 9/11 truthers there were moon–landing truthers: images of the Apollo 17 landing site.

The story about the disappearance of the dinosaurs is getting more complicated.

About empathy among animals.

About the slow replacement of Sumerian population in ancient Mesopotamia.

Study suggests that current estimates of minimally viable species numbers are too low.

Evidence that television has improved the status of women in India.

Tracing the neuroscience of cognitive dissonance.

Militants hide in bear’s cave: bear objects.

Fertility is continuing to fall:

Sometime between 2020 and 2050 the world’s fertility rate will fall below the global replacement rate. … Poor countries are racing through the same demographic transition as rich ones, starting at an earlier stage of development and moving more quickly. The transition from a rate of five to that of two, which took 130 years to happen in Britain—from 1800 to 1930—took just 20 years—from 1965 to 1985—in South Korea. Mothers in developing countries today can expect to have three children. Their mothers had six. In some countries the speed of decline in the fertility rate has been astonishing. In Iran, it dropped from seven in 1984 to 1.9 in 2006—and to just 1.5 in Tehran. That is about as fast as social change can happen.

Top Chinese general advocates space defences as “inevitable”.

Polish outrage over Russian military exercise simulating attack on Poland.

Negotiations with Iran close to collapse. Iran’s President is claiming victory. Russia and the US seem to heading towards a common policy to stop Iran getting nuclear weapons.

Slides from presentation given by the Fort Hood shooter in 2007: the spelling is a little erratic. Claims about what he also said during that presentation. Via jordan179. The issue of “missed signals”. US intelligence were apparently aware of his attempts to contact al-Qaeda. There seems to have been some coordination problems. The FBI’s embarrassment. Probing his links with a mosque one of whose former imans thinks the shooter is a hero. About the rush to avoid considering his actions in a jihadist context. And also on pc’s dangerous obfustications. Further. (A case, methinks, of a strong dose of reality that the “reality-based community” cannot cope with.) About making sure pc does not block needed actions. PC kills (1): colleagues had worries about the shooter’s behaviour but did not want to be seen to be discriminating against a Muslim. PC kills (2): suggesting that the Clinton era ban on carrying weapons on US army bases be rescinded.

Considering the use of hit squads to fit terrorism. Italian judges sentences 23 CIA agents in absentia for their kidnapping of a Muslim cleric.

Two men arrested because they think cartoons are worth killing over. Apparently, all non-Muslims are guilty.

Syria and Israel are to hold peace talks: why nothing will follow from this. A prediction that has already come true. Hamas reported to have rockets that can hit Tel Aviv. Israeli navy seizes ship full of weapons from Iran to Hezbollah.

Pakistani militant group with ties to Pakistani intelligence admits involvement in Mumbai attack. With Pakistani army apparently helping to run militant training camps. The fears over the long-term security of Pakistani nukes and Pakistan’s instability:

The Obama Administration has had difficulty coming to terms with how unhappy many Pakistanis are with the United States. Secretary of State Clinton, during her three-day “good-will visit” to Pakistan, late last month, seemed taken aback by the angry and, at times, provocative criticism of American policies that dominated many of her public appearances, and responded defensively. …
A $7.5-billion American aid package, approved by Congress in September, was, to the surprise of many in Washington, controversial in Pakistan, because it contained provisions seen as strengthening Zardari at the expense of the military. …
Pervez Hoodbhoy, an eminent nuclear physicist in Pakistan, said in a talk last summer at a Nation and Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy forum in New York. For more than two decades, Hoodbhoy said, “the Pakistan Army has been recruiting on the basis of faithfulness to Islam. As a consequence, there is now a different character present among Army officers and ordinary soldiers. There are half a dozen scenarios that one can imagine.” There was no proof either that the most dire scenarios would be realized or that the arsenal was safe, he said. …
During my stay in Pakistan—my first in five years—there were undeniable signs that militancy and the influence of fundamentalist Islam had grown.

Pakistan is a fractured and dysfunctional society with a riven and dysfunctional state poisoned by religious pathologies and status obsessions (particularly vis-à-vis India).

British frustration with President Obama’s lack of decision on Afghanistan. German frustration with President Obama’s silence and lack of decision on Afghanistan. President Obama is continuing to take his time reaching a decision. Leading counter-insurgency expert is less impressed. Great photos from Afghanistan.

Noting that economists tended to be against racism and slavery: hardly surprising, given the presumptions of common rationality and the benefits of consensual exchange.

Arguing (again) for monetary rather than fiscal stimulus. About the importance of framing in monetary policy (almost more a philosophy argument than an economics one).

About the ins and outs of gold:

… the IMF sale may be the last gasp of this trend. It is selling just over 400 tonnes, notionally to fund increased lending to developing countries, but in reality to bail itself out of financial problems caused by its bloated bureaucracy. The IMF wants to become more financially independent to resist external pressure for reform.

One could do a great comparative study of the IMF, ABC and Department of Defence displaying similar organisational pathologies despite quite different purposes, accountability procedures and selection beliefs.

About the future of the US dollar as a reserve currency and (pdf) China’s dependence on the US:

… assuming the United States continues to manage its monetary and fiscal affairs in a reasonable fashion and the US capital market remains open, the dollar is not likely to be seriously displaced. …
In short, having acquired large amounts of dollar securities, for practical (and self-interested) reasons, China is now stuck with them for the foreseeable future; there is no low-cost way for China to disgorge them at its own initiative.

More.

On not blaming the efficient market hypothesis for the failures of regulators and financiers. Particularly when most investors do not follow it:

The book is fun reading, but its main premise is fantasy. Most investing is done by active managers who don't believe markets are efficient. For example, despite my taunts of the last 45 years about the poor performance of active managers, about 80% of mutual fund wealth is actively managed. Hedge funds, private equity, and other alternative asset classes, which have attracted big fund inflows in recent years, are built on the proposition that markets are inefficient. The recent problems of commercial and investment banks trace mostly to their trading desks and their proprietary portfolios, and these are always built on the assumption that markets are inefficient. Indeed, if banks and investment banks took market efficiency more seriously, they might have avoided lots of their recent problems. Finally, MBA students who aspire to high paying positions in the financial industry have a tough time finding a job if they accept the EMH.

Lovely study of differential success in local government (pdf) in Nigeria as a result of different taxing and bureaucratic capacity. A nice comment on aid and accountability:

This piece speaks in a uniquely illustrative – if perhaps unintentional way – to the fundamental and ultimately invariable attribute of aid: it is, by definition, non-local unearned income. As a paradigmatic contrast, taxation is local priced income, priced in that a population demands services in return for paying the government…. Aid thus substitutes for the process of domestic resource mobilization; and when viewed from this perspective, the corrupting influence of aid in perverting basic links of accountability becomes much clearer.

When corruption is accountability:

In many African countries, voters have settled expectations about politicians; they know that once elected, politicians will not deliver on their public policy promises. So voters insist that a candidate’s promises be paid in advance. So they demand salt, sugar, soap, alcohol and cash.
Because voters hold politicians to account during campaigns, they care less about policy outcomes. Elected officials, knowing that voters don’t care what happens in public office, have little incentive to work for the public good. So they indulge in loot in order to generate the resources to buy votes at the next election. Corruption and incompetence are thus promoted by the democratic process. …
The history of Western Europe shows that accountability grew out of the revenue imperatives its rulers confronted. …
… checks and balances grew as a product of a double-sided process. First as attempts from above to give a credible signal to asset holders that their money would be used responsibly and repaid; and second, as a demand from below that if they should be taxed or if they should lend the state, it should give them voice on how their money will be used.
Therefore, democratic accountability was a product of a political settlement between a self interested state and a tax-paying or money-lending citizenry, not as an altruistic motive of rulers. The demand for honest government from below, without the self interest of the state to supply it from above cannot produce accountability.
Administratively driven anti-corruption reforms in Africa today fail because they turn this logic of accountability on the head. Instead of fighting graft, voters use it to hold government to account. What Africa needs are incentives that facilitate the state and the citizens to develop a vested interest in honest government.

Pointing out (again!) the localised nature of the US housing bubbles:

Between 2000 and the bubble's peak, inflation- adjusted housing prices in California and Florida more than doubled, and since the peak they have fallen by 20 to 30 percent. In contrast, housing prices in Georgia and Texas grew by only about 20 to 25 percent, and they haven't significantly declined.
In other words, California and Florida housing bubbled, but Georgia and Texas housing did not. This is hardly because people don't want to live in Georgia and Texas: since 2000, Atlanta, Dallas–Ft. Worth, and Houston have been the nation's fastest-growing urban areas, each growing by more than 120,000 people per year.

Lots of commentators are continuing to ignore such structural issues. And also.

Reasons to be pessimistic about the US labour market. Prof. Robert Shiller on the odd place the US economy is in, including sharp turnaround in housing prices in some markets. While the Chairman of the Fed cannot see any bubbles at the moment.

Fannie Mae has consumed billions in US taxpayer funds in a disastrous attempts to boost home ownership. Indeed, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s share of subprime losses keep climbing. Fannie Mae’s new cunning plan for failed mortgages? Turning them into renters. There can be no greater indicator of how absolutely pathological US federal policy has been in this area. (And now the same Feds are taking over US health care, with lots of new bureaucracies.)

About restrictions in the supply of houses in Oz:

… the increased first-home buyer subsidy "seems to have contributed to a boom in house prices at the lower end of the market; an unusual phenomenon in recessionary times which will have tended to offset the affordability gains from historically low interest rates".
Mr Stevens told the conference that, while alleviating skilled labour shortages, strong population growth was putting pressure on urban housing and infrastructure.
Though the credit crunch on apartment finance was temporary, he pointed to structural problems in "land supply, zoning and approval" that meant increased housing demand was not fully flowing through to increased housing construction.

And also:

House price inflation can only co-exist with over-investment in housing if constraints on new housing supply are preventing this investment from translating into additional houses being built. … Australia is producing fewer houses per person than at any time since the late 1960s. We face a shortage of housing stock due to what Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens has called supply-side impediments to the building of new houses. These constraints explain why housing investment is showing up in higher prices rather than increased supply.

With unequal social effects:

… home ownership in the 10 years from 1996 rose only 0.8 per cent despite strong economic growth and low interest rates in that period.
The Flinders Institute for Housing, Urban and Regional Research analysis found home ownership fell by 15 per cent over the two decades to 2006 for low income earners over 45 years of age and medium-high income earners under 45 years.
Other findings included large gains in national income from the resources boom were "wasted" by increasing house prices and accumulating debt to unreasonable levels. ….
Dr Joe Flood, the institute's adjunct professor, said the "the writing is on the wall for the 'Australian dream'."
"The country that promised limitless land, cheap housing and near universal home ownership to all comers now has the most expensive housing in the world amid very tight housing and land markets and little prospect of restoring the balance," Dr Flood said in a statement on Monday.

NZ is also having a housing surge:

The number of sales had risen sharply, the time it took to sell had shortened, and prices had risen 8 per cent since the start of the year and were only 4 per cent below their record high two years ago.
This reflected a shortage of new houses - caused by a strong population gain from net migration and a lack of building activity - as well as low mortgage rates.

William and Mary College elect their first transgender homecoming queen.

A WWII veteran on equal rights. And also.

Ugandan religious leaders believe life imprisonment is a more appropriate penalty for homosexuality than death. About the American evangelical connection.

Kenya wants to count its homosexual population: a bit difficult when homosexuality is a criminal offence.

School Board votes to remove display showing successful homosexuals. More.

Texan rightwingers unhappy that Senator has recommended an openly gay prosecutor for a judgeship.

Asking why, in the wake of the Fort Hood massacre, Muslims can serve but not (open) gays and lesbians. And also.

Comparing gay and straight couples:

The [same-sex] couples had an average age of 52 and household incomes of $91,558, while 31 percent were raising children. That compares with an average age of 50, household income of $95,075 and 43 percent raising children for married heterosexual couples.

About the constraining hypocrisy of Hollywood:

The dichotomy between Hollywood’s claimed social benevolence and its actual practices was seen starkly in July, when prominent gay TV director Todd Holland publicly revealed a practice of his own, which is probably common in the L.A. and New York film and TV industries: He advises gay actors who want to succeed to “stay in the closet.” …
… For example, Harris Interactive and Witeck-Combs found that 82 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 — the audience Hollywood targets — believe gays and lesbians should be legally allowed to marry or enter into domestic partnerships.
“When the public isn’t forced to make moral judgments in the polls,” says Witeck, “they are very accepting of gays and lesbians as people.”
In fact, the mounting data suggest something far more revealing about Hollywood than about the U.S.: Tinseltown has long been criticized as an isolated subculture that holds itself in excessively high regard, viewing everyday Americans as behind the times. There is every possibility that Hollywood is projecting its old biases about America, without learning how the public really feels.

About the difficulty with gay rights and faith:

Frankly, anti-gay religious beliefs are the number one obstacle to almost every measure gay rights groups tackle. The single skill that could turn the tables in their favor is the ability to effectively reach people of faith.
So why are so many gay rights groups so shockingly ineffective on matters of faith?
… If we allow any issue to be set up as a contest between people’s faith and fair treatment of LGBT people, then we’ve lost already. …
In his 1993 book A Place at the Table, gay author Bruce Bawer wrote of some gay activists, “They think that their enemy is conscious oppression and that their salvation lies in the amassing of power, when in fact their enemy is ignorance and their salvation lies in increased understanding.” Sixteen years later, the observation is just as true.
… it’s important to work within different faith traditions individually. A devout Mormon needs to hear from other devout Mormons, not from a Catholic priest. Even within the same faith, people care much more what leaders in their particular sect have to say; not all rabbis are equally influential with all Jews, for instance. This is why it’s so important to work directly with many different people of faith, because each can change minds that others can’t.

Huge drops in world poverty rates, except in Africa.

Apparently, it is easier to be happy if you have more income.

Study finds evidence that open capital markets markedly increase growth in manufacturing wage rates.

Nice set of talking points on why drugs should be legalised.

A young woman’s personal experience of the coercive power of minimum wages.

Lecture on Austrian trade cycle theory (nicely presented). The PowerPoint™ available from here. The story about over-shooting the production possibilities frontier does not sit right with me: it surely would be better put in terms of misinformed use of resources.

China is planning a rail revolution:

Over the next three years, the government will pour some $300 billion into its railways, expanding its network by 20,000 kilometers, including 13,000 kilometers of track designed for high-speed trains capable of traveling up to 350kph. Result: China, a nation long defined by the vastness of its geography, is getting, much, much smaller.

Europe and England&Wales have quite different approaches to wills and bequests.

Paper finds that, for large fiscal adjustments, tax cuts tend to generate more growth than spending increases and spending cuts quicker budget balancing than tax increases.

About laffer curves in search-and-rescue (pdf). A case in point (of moral hazard in national parks).

Arguing that the recent financial crisis strengthens the argument against (pdf) discretionary central banks.

Nice review of Superfreakonomics:

Their research into Chicago prostitution reveal that prostitutes’ wages have plummeted in real terms in the last 60 years. Why? Simple really. Sex is much easier to come by than it was then. Between 1933 and 1942, more than 20 per cent of American men had their first sexual experience with a prostitute. Now it’s around five per cent. … Learning that a prostitute in Chicago is statistically more likely to have sex with a cop than to be arrested by one doesn’t necessarily tell you much about incentives …

Interview with the Gates’ about their global health aid activities. What strikes me is how anti-poor-people many of the on-site comments are. But if you look at your own (very successful) societies primarily as a set of problems then of course prospects will be framed mainly in terms of looming failure, not possible (let alone likely) success.

Paris’s rent-a-bike program has run into problems:

Many of the specially designed bikes, which cost $3,500 each, are showing up on black markets in Eastern Europe and northern Africa. Many others are being spirited away for urban joy rides, then ditched by roadsides, their wheels bent and tires stripped.
With 80 percent of the initial 20,600 bicycles stolen or damaged, the program’s organizers have had to hire several hundred people just to fix them.

Chavez has introduced water rationing and blamed capitalism.

Post (apparently in an intended series) on the bad calls of a TV investment guru.

An unemployed Ottawa man makes money being paid to take people’s place in queues.

Comparing US per capital GDP growth and median family income growth 1950-1980 and 1980-2007.

Not a lot of bank failures in the US this time around. One would hope not, after all that bailout money was tossed around.

Estimating tax rates needed to erase the US budget deficit.

Summary of the US health care reform bill. One employer on what it will mean for his business.

US companies are hoarding cash: regime uncertainty anyone?

Texas has now overtaken New York and California for headquarters of Fortune 500 companies, as people flee and increasingly debt-ridden and dysfunctional California while Texas attracts internal migrants.