Year: 2014

Economists and Environmentalists: Divergent Values?

Brandon Christensen Books, History , , , ,

Following Simon, the author of The Bet suggests that the disagreement between environmentalists and economists may be due to a divergence in values. People in Ehrlich’s camp believe that values can exist outside human minds and claim priority over human values. Although Sabin does not go there, the practical implication is that people in Ehrlich’s camp feel justified in imposing their ideal society on those who don’t share their values, which they disguise under the mantle of science. Hence the environmentalists’ inclination to boss people around.

This is from Pierre Lemieux’s new review of The Bet, a book on an infamous bet between an economist and a biologist in 1980 (the economist won).

One could easily replace ‘economist’ with ‘libertarian’ and ‘environmentalist’ with anything and could find the same debate being played out. This observation of mine, if correct, prompts a number of questions (such as “why aren’t all economists libertarians?” or “why are libertarians so pugnacious?”), but so does the loser of the bet’s reaction to his loss (you’ll have to read the review to find out!).

The Bet is by Yale historian Paul Sabin. Here is the link to his book.

A cultura e os direitos de propriedade

claudio Liberty ,

Algumas observações sobre esta relação aqui. Como não tenho tempo para um estudo muito mais aprofundado sobre as variáveis no momento, fica aí a correlação e alguns comentários sobre a mudança cultural que, espero, ocorra no Brasil devido ao suposto maior liberalismo dos jovens.

Democrat Incompetence and Mendacity, in Nine Points

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , , , ,

President Obama, during his first campaign, declared forcefully and clearly that he would close Guantanamo Bay prison within a year. There was no qualifications, no “ifs” and “buts;” it was a simple straightforward and forceful declaration of intention. It’s been more six years and the prison is still operative. It holds un-indicted prisoners, several captured under such dubious circumstances that it’s possible that some are shepherds or traveling salesmen caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, I had leisurely talks with five people in their late twenties about the topic of Guantanamo Bay Prison. Here are my accounts of these conversations.

One had never heard of Guantanamo Bay. She had voted for Mr Obama twice.

One had heard of Guantanamo Bay prison but he did not know whether it had been closed or not. He had voted for Mr Obama the first time and abstained the second time out of disinterest.

One knew Guantanamo Bay prison and he knew that it was still open. He had voted for Mr Obama once and deliberately abstained the second time. He now sports a bumper sticker proclaiming Obama to be a “dick.”

One had never voted for Mr Obama and she knew that the Guantanamo Bay prison was still open in spite of the president’s campaign promise.

The last person, an academically and professionally successful young woman, knew well about Guantanamo Bay prison and she knew it had not been closed. She is a forceful Obama supporter who was not able to vote for technical reasons. She argued that the president was unable to close the prison because of “Republican opposition.” She said that Republicans always stop him from doing anything good.

Now, her political position is interesting because the young woman was in good faith herself but her assertions were false. Guantanamo Bay case is an excellent test of the president’s own good faith and credibility. The President of the United States is the undisputed Commander in Chief of the armed forces, “undisputed.” A single one sentence order from him would start the process of closing the prison. Any opposition from any part of the political spectrum would be impotent to stop it. The president would have to take the political fallout of his order, of course, but that’s exactly why a politician should not make irresponsible promises.

There is a Chapter Two to the analysis of this clearly failed promise of the president. Even if he absolutely wanted political cover, he could have done it during the two years when his party had an absolute majority in Congress. And, by the more way, the president would have received considerable support from all sides had he had the courage to take the step explicitly contained in his campaign promise. There are plenty of conservatives like me who hate the idea of people detained indefinitely without charge. The legal technicality employed by Pres. Bush to put detainees in Guantanamo out of reach of American constitutional guarantees on the grounds that it’s not American soil was not his finest moment.

President Obama either lied or he spoke irresponsibly. It does not hurt him much with his followers. It seems, they like a good speech expressing generous sentiments above all. My side is not responding in a politically effective way to the reality of his appeal.

The Republican Party’s own political discourse is all over the place. It sounds like a cacophony where the only word emerging are: “Obama bad.” This lacks seriousness. Republican politicians have forgotten basic rules of good communication, rules about attention span, about clarity and about the value of repetition.

If it were my call, I would do the following:

Name three things that the president clearly promised to do and that were doable and that he did not do. (Stopping global warming isn’t tone.) That the president did not do them has to be easily verifiable. Closing Guantanamo Bay prison is a good example. Keep repeating slowly the three unkept promises.

Name three things that the president did that were done badly. The deployment of the health insurance exchange is a good example. Keep repeating them. Keep repeating that they were doable, that others would have done them well.

Name three things that he should have done and that he failed to do or did badly, irrespective of promises he might have made or not. The three things have to be actions that are within the bailiwick of every American president; they have to be part of the job. Reforming the Veterans’ Administration before he had to fire his own appointee to head it would be a good example.

Here, that’s nine things, not many but as many as my young interviewees of Memorial Day are able to understand, digest or retain durably. Maybe that’s even too many.

My communication plan deliberately stays away from foreign policy where Americans disagree strongly, especially when it comes to military intervention. It refrains deliberately from the common couplets presenting Mr Obama as the Devil himself, or even as “socialist” (a word devoid of meaning.) The plan highlights the fact that President Obama has been a very bad manager of American interests, that he did not take care of business anywhere near the level of competence and attention Americans ordinarily expect. Many independents and some liberals should come to the conclusion that Obama would be fired for simple non-performance if he were not protected by his office.

The objective is to make very difficult or impossible for a future candidate to anything to ride on the Obama wave. After a few months, there should be no Obama wave left at all. If Mrs Clinton should be the Democratic candidate for the presidency, for example, she should not be tempted and not be able to borrow Barack Obama’s likability without also putting on his cloth of gross incompetence. She should thus be forced to ride on her own likability which is very low, as everyone knows.

This is a plan to establish the fact , without unnecessary acrimony, without hysteria, that Democrats produce so-called  “leaders” who don’t do the job even minimally. It’s a constructive step toward making it difficult for the Democratic Party to saddle us with yet another non-doer, Hillary Clinton, for example. (She is a woman who has also done absolutely nothing except be loyal to a husband who deserved no loyalty.)

I am quite pessimistic. I think we are already in an advanced stage of fascism with a one-party system not far int the future. The ray of hope comes from today’s Peggy Noonan column , as it often does. She argues (WSJ 05/31/14 ) that Mr Obama inaction and bad actions are giving government a bad name. I hope she is right; I hope I am dead wrong.

Hume and Humboldt

Federico Sosa Valle History, Liberty , , , , , , , , ,

Divergent dichotomies are not unusual to be found in Hayek’s writings. Besides the essay “Two Types of Mind”, we have his 1945 lecture “Individualism: True and False” on the difference between the British Enlightenment and the Continental Rationalism. Grounded in Edmund Burke’s Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, Hayek traces the origin of true individualism to Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, Josiah Tucker, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke himself. The XIX Century adds Lord Acton and Alexis de Tocqueville to the list. On the other hand, Hayek states that Jean Jacques Rousseau exemplifies the Rationalist individualism, which postulates isolated and self-contained individuals –whereas, for the former, the individual is determined by his existence in society. The “true variant” of individualism is the notion of “subject” of Hume’s philosophy: the outcome of repetitions, expectancies and habits. Finally, Hayek concludes his lecture with the censure to the German type of individualism, rooted in Wolfgang v. Goethe and Wilhelm v. Humboldt: the individualism expressed in the original development of the personality and defended in J. S. Mill’s On Liberty.

Notwithstanding in this 1945 lecture Hayek claims that this German individualism of self-development has nothing to do with what he regards as true individualism and it is “an obstacle to the smooth working of an individualistic system,” much later, in Law, Legislation, and Liberty, he will restate his opinion on Wilhelm v. Humboldt’s legacy.

This reconsideration of the value of liberty as the development of the unique and particular character of an individual will be acknowledge not only regarding legal theory but as well in his 1976 proposal of denationalization of currency. In his late writings, Hayek will endorse the development of the originality of character as an important trait for the competition to work as a discovery process.

The key to understand his shift onto this new type of individualism is closely related to Hayek’s involvement into the ideas of cultural evolution. The “true individualism” was important to state how a society can achieve certain order. The “Humboldt’s individualism” is needed to explain the dynamic of the evolution of that order. Hume’s notion of subject is related to the ideas of integration and convergence, to how an order may emerge. Humboldt’s ideal of self-development of the unique and original character of each individual implies differentiation and divergence. These two traits are the key to the adaptation to the changes in the environment that defines the notion of blind evolution. A social and political system that assures the development of differences has keen aptitudes to survive to the changes in its environment. At the level of the “true individualism”, individuals are made of institutions, repetitions and expectancies. But at the level “Humboldt´s individualism”, successful institutions are made of differences, divergent series of facts and adaptation.

(Originally published in http://www.fgmsosavalle.blogspot.com)

Scholarly Conspiracies, Scholarly Corruption and Global Warming: Part One

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Religion , , , , , , , , , ,

97 % of scientists, blah, blah…. Ridiculous, pathetic.

Thus challenged, some people I actually like throw reading assignments at me. Some are assignments in scholarly journals; some, sort of. Apparently, I have to keep my mouth shut until I reach a high degree of technical competence in climate science (or something). I don’t need to do these absurd assignments. I am not blind and I am not deaf. I see what I see; I hear what I hear; it all sounds familiar. Been there, done it!

A long time ago, I accepted a good job in France in urban planning after receiving my little BA in sociology from Stanford. I was a slightly older graduate and I had no illusions that I knew much of anything then. I had some clear concepts in my mind and I had learned the basic of the logic of scientific inquiry from old Prof. Joseph Berger and from Prof. Bernard Cohen. I had also done some reading in the “excerpts” department including the trilogy of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and Karl Marx. Only a couple of weeks after I took my job, my boss sent me to a conference of urban sociologists in Paris. Having been intellectually spoiled by several years in the US and conscious of my limited knowledge of urban planning, I asked many questions, of course.

In the weeks following the meeting, I became aware of a rumor circulating that presented me as an impostor. This guy coming out of nowhere – the USA – cannot possibly have studied sociology because he does not know anything, French sociologists thought. I had to ask how the rumor started. I was aware that I knew little but, but, I did not think it was exactly “nothing.” Besides, most of my questions at the conference had not been answered in an intelligible manner so, I was not convinced that my comparison set – French sociologists working in city planning – knew much more than I did.

Soon afterward, I wrote a “white paper.” It was about the eastern region where I had been tasked to plan for the future until 2005 (the year was 1967) as part of a multidisciplinary team. The white paper gave a list of social issues city planners had to face at this point, the starting point of the planning endeavor. As young men will do, I had allowed myself short flights of speculation in the white paper, flights I would not have indulged in a few years later. My direct supervisor, an older French woman who was supposed to be sociologist, read the whole ambitious product, or said she had, and made no comments except one. She took exception to one of my speculative flights in which I made reference to the idea that much societal culture rises up from the street. It was almost an off-hand remark. Had that part been left out, the white paper would have been pretty much the same. The supervisor insisted I had to remove that comment because, she said exactly, ”Marx asserts clearly that culture comes from the ruling class.” She told me she would not allow the white paper to be presented until I extirpated the offending statement.

In summary: The woman had nothing to say about the many parts of the report that were instrumental to the endeavor that our team was supposed to complete, about that for which she and I were explicitly being paid. She had nothing to say about the likely mistakes I exhibited in the report because of my short experience. Her self-defined role was strictly to protect what she took to be Marxist orthodoxy even if it was irrelevant. There was a double irony there. First, the government that employed us was explicitly not in sympathy with any form of Marxism. The woman was engaging in petty sedition. Second, Karl Marx himself was no lover of orthodoxies. He would have abhorred here role. (Marx is said to have declared before his death, “I am not a Marxist”!)

In any event, I was soon rid of the ideological harridan and I was able to do my job after a fashion. For those who like closure: I went back to the US to attend graduate school, at Stanford again. Two years later, my old boss called me back. He had come up in the world. He was in charge of a big Paris metropolitan area urban research institute. He begged me, begged on the phone to go back to France, and take charge of the institute’s sociology cell. He said that he understood not a word of what the “sociologists” there said to him. He added that I was the only sociologist he had ever understood. I yielded to his entreaties and I promised him a single year of my life. I interrupted my graduate studies and flew to Paris. In the event, I gave the sociologists at the institute one month warning. Then, I summoned each one of them to explain to me orally how his work contributed to Paris city and regional planning. (“What will it change to the way this is currently being done?” I asked.) They did not respond to my satisfaction and I fired all six of them. I replaced them with people who could keep their Marxism under control. My boss was grateful. I could have had a great career in France. I chose to return to my studies instead.

Three years later, having completed my doctorate, I found my self at critical juncture common to all those who go that course. You have to turn your doctoral thesis into papers published in double-blind refereed journals. (Here is what this means: “What’s Peer Review and Why It Matters“)

That’s a lot like leaving kindergarten: no more cozy relationships, no more friends assuring you that your work is just wonderful; the real world hits you in the face. The review process in good journals is often downright brutal. Anyone who does not feel a little vulnerable at that point is probably also a little silly. To make matters worse, the more respected the journal, the harder it is to get in and the better your academic career. As a rule, if you have not achieved publication in a first-rate journal in the first three or four years after completing your doctorate, you will be consigned forever to second-tier universities or worse.

Be patient, I am just setting the stage for what’s coming.

Much of my early scholarly work happened to take place within a school of research dominated by “neo-Marxists.” It was not my choice. I was interested in problems of economic development that happened to be largely in the hands of those people. My choice was between abandoning my interests or buckling up and taking my chances. I buckled up, of course. My first article to be published was innovative but a little esoteric. (Delacroix, Jacques. “The permeability of information boundaries and economic growth: a cross-national study.” Studies in Comparative International Development. 12-1:3-28. 1977.) I presented to a specialized journal and therefore not one that could be called “first tier.” It happened to contain nothing that would offend the neo-Marxists. It took less than six months to have it accepted for publication.

The second published paper out of my dissertation struck at the heart of neo-Marxists convictions. It demonstrated – using their methods – that the parlous condition of the Third World – allegedly caused by capitalist exploitation – could be remedied through one aspect of ordinary good governance. I submitted it to one of the two most respected journals (the American Sociological Review). All the reviewers who had the technical skills to review my submission were also neo-Marxists or sympathetic to their doctrine. The paper reported on a study conducted according to methods that were by now common. Having the paper accepted for publication took more than three years. It also took a rare personal intervention by the journal’s editor whom I somehow managed to convince that the reviewers he had chosen were acting unreasonably. (The paper: Delacroix, Jacques. “The export of raw materials and economic growth: a cross-national study.” American Sociological Review 42:795-808. 1977.) No need to read either paper.

Am I telling you here a story of conspiracy or a story of academic corruption? Yes, I faced a conspiracy but it was not a conspiracy against me personally and it was mostly not conscious. The only people – but me- who had the skills to pass judgment on my paper were not numerous. They were a small group that shared a common understanding of the reality of the world. It was not a cold, cerebral understanding. Those people formed a community of sentiment. They believed their work would contribute to the righting of a worldwide injustice, a “global” injustice committed against the defenseless people of underdeveloped countries. Is it possible that their ethical faith influenced their judgment? To ask the question is to answer it, I think. Did their faith induce them to close their eyes when others from their own camp cut some research corners here and there? On the contrary, were their eyes wide open when they were reviewing for a journal a submission whose conclusion impaired their representation of the world? In that situation, did they overreact to an uncrossed “t” or a dotted “i,” in a paper that undermined their beliefs? Might be. Could be. Probably was. Other things being equal, they may have just thought, it would be better if these annoying Delacroix findings were not publicized in a prime journal. Delacroix could always try elsewhere anyway.

So, yes, I faced corruption. It was not conscious, above-board corruption. It was not cynical. It was a corruption of blindness, much of it deliberate blindness. The blindness was all the more sturdy because it was seldom called into question. Those who would have cared did not understand the relevant techniques. Those who knew them shared in the blindness. This is a long way from cynical, deliberate lying. It’s just as destructive though. And it’s not only destructive for the lives of the likes of me who don’t belong to the relevant tribe. It’s destructive of what ordinary people think of as the truth. That is so because – however unlikely that sounds – the productions of elite and abstruse journals usually find their way into textbooks, even if it take twenty years.

Are the all-powerful editors of important journals part of the conspiracy? Mine were not but they tended to adhere to imperfect rules of behavior that made them objective accomplices of conspiracies. Here is the proof that the editor of the particular journal tried to be impartial. Only a month after he accepted my dissenting paper, the editor assigned me to review a submission from the same neo-Marxist school of thought that trumpeted another empirical finding proving that, blah, blah…. After one reading of the paper, my intuition smelled a rat. I spent days in the basement of the university library, literally days, taking apart the empirical foundation of the paper. I found the rat deep in its bowel. To put it briefly, if you switched a little thing from one category to another, all the conclusions were reversed. There was no imperative argument to put that one thing in one category rather than in the other. The author had chosen that which put his labor of love in line with the love of his neo-Marxist cozy-buddies. If he had not done it, his pluses would have become minuses, his professional success anathema. In the event, the editor agreed with my critique and dinged the paper for good. Nothing worse happened to the author. No one could tell whether he was a cheat. Or, no one would. No one was eager to. The editor was not in appetite for a fight. He let the whole matter go.

Myself, I came out of this experience convinced that it was likely that no one else in the whole wide world had both the skills and the motivation to dive into the depth of the paper to find that rat. It’s likely that no one else would have smelled a rat. It’s possible that if I had not still been smarting from three years of rejection of my own work, I would not have smelled the rat myself. The editor had the smarts, the intuition fed by experience, I would say, that he could put to work my unique positioning, my combination of competence and contrariness. He put it to work in defense of the truth. That fact is enough to exonerate him from complicity in the conspiracy I described. To answer my own question: Do I think that powerful scientific journal editors are often part of a conspiracy of the right thinking, of an orthodox cabala? I think not. Do they sometimes or often fall for one? Yes.

For those who like closure: My interests switched later to other topics. (See vita, linked to this blog’s “About me.”) I think the neo-Marxist school of thought to which I refer above gradually sank into irrelevance.

After that experience, and several others of the same kind, do I have something better to propose? I don’t but I think the current system of scholarship publication does not deserve anything close to religious reverence. Even if there were anything close to a “consensus” of scientists on anything, that should not mean that the book is closed. Individual rationalism also matters. It matters more, in my book.

What does this story of reminiscences this have to do with global warming, climate change, climate disruption , you might ask? Everything, I would say. More on the connection in part Two. [Update: Here is part 2, as promised! – BC]

The Skyscraper Curse

Edwin van de Haar Liberty , , ,

The Skyscraper Curse

This is Thornton at his best!

My Summer of ’63: Bureaucracy, Sex and Alternating Current

Warren Gibson Liberty , , , , ,

Brandon’s comment about just finishing The Fountainhead reminded me of the summer of 1963, a pivotal time in my life. I can’t imagine why anyone but me would care about such personal stuff, but here goes.

I had the good fortune to attend a fine private engineering school, Case Institute of Technology (now part of Case Western Reserve University). Tuition was modest by today’s standards, even if adjusted for inflation – something like $1,400 per year, but still substantial. There were no student loans and my parents were just a little too well off for scholarships. They and my grandparents provided more than half my tuition and I used my own savings and job earnings to cover the rest. I didn’t work during the school year because the engineering curriculum demanded all my time and energy.

Toward the end of my sophomore year as a civil engineering major, I began to look for a summer job. An opening advertised in the administration building seemed like it would offer good experience and good pay for the time: $295 per month. I applied and got the job, little knowing that three huge life lessons were coming my way. The value of those lessons, in the long run, overwhelmed the monetary reward.

The first benefit was to learn meticulous work. I was an assistant in the Bridge Department of the City of Cleveland. No technology of any kind, beyond dial telephones and possibly an electric typewriter (more likely manual) had penetrated the department. The engineers drew their plans in pencil on large sheets of paper mounted on drafting tables. It was my job to make archival copies of final plans.

Think about how we make copies these days. It’s pretty much a quick “save as” operation, or, in a throwback to past times, people still make photocopies. Although Xerox copiers were available by 1963 (Case had at least one), they were nowhere to be seen at City Hall. Typists made copies using carbon paper (look it up). I made copies of drawings by mounting the original on my board, placing a special sheet of linen over it, and tracing the drawing using india ink. Every line had to be duplicated at the proper width and every character of text carefully drawn by hand. Erasers? No such thing. A tiny slip could be scraped off with a knife but otherwise the only resort was to start over.

Astoundingly, a technological advance that had become universal more than seventy years previously – alternating current – was absent from City Hall. The whole building ran on direct current, a legacy of the Municipal Power authority that was launched early in the century to undercut the monopoly Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company. Fluorescent lights were out of the question as, I presume, were were any motor-driven devices like electric typewriters.

My second benefit was to learn some realities of bureaucratic life. There were six engineers on staff of whom three actually worked. Mr. Sevcik, who sat in front of me, had the same drawing on his table for the whole three months I was there. He appeared to put himself into a state of suspended animation. Somehow he could sit there motionless all day without falling off his stool. His wall calendar was blank except for every other Friday where he wrote “haircut.” Another fellow was constantly out of the office. Nobody seemed to know where he went or why.

One of the actual workers took me under his wing. He trained me in my job but also explained the facts of bureaucracy. All that could be done about the slackers was to keep them out of the way. They couldn’t be fired.

The third and most important benefit – actually two benefits – I got from Sam. Sam was a girl; I never did learn her real name. I say “girl” advisedly because in those days adult women in the workforce were typically, and without malice, called girls. She was a technician of some sort, not an engineer, and she was a worker. Her nickname may have reflected the fact that she was something of an intruder in this man’s world.

Slacks for women were gaining more acceptance by then but generally not in the workplace. I remember her wearing only skirts, and shorter skirts were coming into fashion then. So when Sam sat on her stool at her board, her skirt invariably rode up.  I mean, all the way up to there! Sometimes I would get to sit next to her to consult on some work issue. Needless to say I found it difficult to concentrate.

I made no attempt to hit on Sam. She was probably five years older than me and was clearly savvy about many things beyond her years. I was a nerd and unsavvy to say the least. It just wasn’t in the cards.

Sam was perfectly well aware of her effect on me and she charitably deflected my energy by taking it upon herself to educate me a bit in the ways of the world. After work we would usually walk together to the Terminal Tower to catch our trains. She would tell me about her boy friends – what attracted her to them and how she liked to be treated. She said nothing about her sex life and I didn’t ask. Open and frank talk about sex was still in the future.

One day Sam mentioned a novel she had just finished – The Fountainhead. “I think you’d like it,” she said. I don’t think I read it before leaving my summer job, but I soon did and I found it transformative. The character of Howard Roark was electrifying but it was many years before I understood Dominique. At that time I was trying to figure out who I was and what I stood for, and Rand got me started on my libertarian path. Later in the sixties I had read all her work and took tape-transcribed courses on objectivism from the Nathanial Branden Institute. Fortunately I never became groupie and in hindsight I see many shortcomings, as well as strengths, in Rand’s objectivism.

Not knowing Sam’s real name, I have no way to trace her. If she’s around, she’s well into her seventies. I hope her life has been good. She deserved it.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
  1. Political scientist Jason Sorens on the elections in Europe (best summary I’ve read; it’s short, sweet, and to the point)
  2. Examining Piketty’s data sources for US wealth inequality (Part 4 of 4)
  3. Greece the Establishment Clause: Clarence Thomas’s Church-State Originalism
  4. Strong Words and Large Letters
  5. The African Muslim Fist-Bump
  6. Why US Intervention in Nigeria is a Bad Idea

#LiberalismDay: Calling all classical liberals and libertarians

Brandon Christensen Current Events, History ,

The following is a message I got from Warren via email:

Hello again! You were recently gracious enough to endorse Liberalism Unrelinquished, a project I’ve been working on with Dan Klein.

I wonder if you’d be willing to help keep the ball rolling by participating in related initiative, #LiberalismDay. Liberalism Day is an internet event aimed at amplifying a simple message: the word “liberal” used to mean something different than it does today.

To participate, all you have to do is write a blog post, tweet, or anything else on or around June 16th that contains the hashtag #LiberalismDay. (The hashtag is what ties everything together in search engines.)

You can add as much or as little nuance as you’d like. You can link to a favorite article (e.g. Milton Friedman’s essay “Liberalism, Old Style”), make a meme, write a blog, or even just tweet about the event to your audience.

From my vantage outside of academic circles, I’d guess that maybe 1% of the population has ever learned that the word “liberal” ever meant something else. I believe if we can boost that fraction a bit, it could spread organically. Merely knowing that 19th century liberalism was more akin to modern libertarianism will help correct a lot of false narratives, e.g. that Lincoln Republicans were really modern Democrats, or that libertarian ideas are a modern invention.

Again, all you have to do to help is plug the event with the hashtag #LiberalismDay and make a comment or share a link on liberalism. Our friend Mike Munger has already chimed in on his blog, and Richard Epstein has offered to rep it on his twitter feed, too. 🙂

Feel free to let me know by email or by leaving a comment on LiberalismDay.com if you plan to participate and I will add a link to your blog or website!

Thanks!

Kevin

Aside from Dr Gibson, I know that Dr Delacroix, Adam, myself and Dr van de Haar are going to be participating in this project on this blog. Any other bloggers out there thinking of doing this? It sounds pretty cool, and if there was any way to wrestle the term ‘liberal’ away from the American Left I’d be more than willing to do it. This may make a small impact in doing just that.

A Renegade History of the United States: a brief response

Rick Weber Books, History , ,

A while ago I finished reading (by audiobook) A Renegade History of the United States. The overarching theme of this entertaining and interesting book often seems to be: “look at these fucking squares!”

And that’s important, because the author points out their illiberal, short sighted, and irrational views, the reactionary nature of those views. But the author turns it into yet another A vs. B situation; a linear spectrum. There’s the “renegades” and the “squares.” I’m absolutely on board with the idea that there are establishment squares to be derided. But just because The Man is stupid, doesn’t mean he’s got a monopoly on it.

The positive message is that “renegades” are exemplars of freedom, and especially the freedom to be wrong. If you aren’t free to make mistakes, you aren’t free. And the point of freedom (besides the fact that freedom is excellent) is that it allows a dispersed approach to figuring out the good life. I’m increasingly doubtful that The Hitchhikers’ Guide was anything but correct when it posited that Earth is a computer set in motion to determine the question that matches the answer to “Life, The Universe, and Everything” (the answer is 42, the question is something besides “What is 6×7?”). This history shows a number of instances that show how breaking from the status quo, actively doing what everyone else is convinced is wrong, contributes to the overall flourishing and success of later generations.

All told, I’m happy giving it 4 stars.

Slavery and the footnotes

Brandon Christensen History, Religion , , , , , , , , ,

I came across this old essay on slavery by economist Gordon Tullock (h/t Tyler Cowen) and what struck me (aside from an excellent presentation of the economics of slavery) was this footnote on the inevitable dissolution of Marxism (this paper was written in 1967):

It may be that the dissolution is not the first step toward the total elimination of this powerful religion, but merely a breaking away of the talmudic encrustation of the true scribes and pharisees of the Second and Third Internationals. Such a development is not uncommon in the history of other religions. My personal opinion is that the disintegration which we now see is more fundamental, however, and I doubt that Marxism will survive the century as a living faith.

In my own experience in the classrooms of powerful and plebeian universities alike, Marxism has indeed disintegrated into virtually nothing. Marxism has, rather, become a sort of an embarrassing older uncle that professors chuckle about in a manner that is more reminiscing than bitter. They all realize that Marxism led to very bad things, but they are unable to acknowledge that capitalism – Marxism’s Other – has brought about peace and prosperity for untold billions.

It would be wise for us, therefore, to continue to focus on this dead religion. Deep-seated beliefs are hard to let go of, even after these beliefs have been shown – theoretically and empirically – to lead to horrors of the worst kind. “Yes,” the embarrassed former adherents grudgingly admit, “communism has failed miserably, but socialism has not. It has not even been tried, and besides, it is capitalism that is responsible for the world’s ills today.”

This is not obstinance. This is deceit, plain and simple.

So how do we go about combating obvious deceit (rather than the sophisticated theories of 20th century Marxists)?

I think the answer is to just debunk their examples on a case by case basis, in as public as a forum as you can muster. Famines in east and central Africa, for example, have often been attributed to capitalism because of the policies of the World Bank and IMF. Libertarians ought to agree with most of this, and then simply point out that the World Bank and the IMF are central planning agencies designed, created, and supported by governments in the West. Once this fact -which is not quite as simple as it appears – is acknowledged, you can go from there and take a public choice route, an Austrian route, or even a populist libertarian route to explain why capitalism is not responsible for famines.

Wars, genocides, ethnic cleansing campaigns, etc., can all be explained (and eliminated) if libertarians focus on the role of the State in all of these ills rather than on the theoretical or empirical weaknesses of socialist explanations and proposals.

Eduardo Galeano Disavows ‘Open Veins of Latin America’

Brandon Christensen Books, Current Events , , , , , ,

I read this book a long time ago (it wasn’t required reading for any of my undergraduate courses) and found it to be much too hyperbolic and unsubstantiated, so I’m very pleased and surprised to see Galeano disavow it.

From the New York Times:

For more than 40 years, Eduardo Galeano’s “The Open Veins of Latin America” has been the canonical anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist and anti-American text in that region. Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s populist president, even put a copy of the book, which he had called “a monument in our Latin American history,” in President Obama’s hands the first time they met. But now Mr. Galeano, a 73-year-old Uruguayan writer, has disavowed the book, saying that he was not qualified to tackle the subject and that it was badly written.

The reactions of factions, something I have become increasingly interested in, are predictable but maybe that’s why I am so interested in them. For example:

Michael Yates, the editorial director of Monthly Review Press [a socialist publishing outlet – bc], Mr. Galeano’s American publisher, dismissed the entire discussion as “nothing but a tempest in a teapot.” “Open Veins” is Monthly Review’s best-selling book — it surged, if briefly, into Amazon’s Top 10 list within hours of Mr. Obama’s receiving a copy — and Mr. Yates said he saw no reason to make any changes: “Please! The book is an entity independent of the writer and anything he might think now.”

Consider not only the reaction of a long-time socialist to the disavowal of one of his intellectual and – dare I say – spiritual bedrocks, but also the fact that a socialist is scrambling to keep his best-selling product from losing its quite subjective value. Read the whole report.

Piketty’s numbers on inequality don’t add up

Brandon Christensen Books, Current Events, History, Politics , , , , ,

The Financial Times, a center-Left British publication, has the story here.

Piketty, an economist at France’s most prestigious business school, recently wrote an almost 600-page treatise on the growth of economic inequality in the West. The book has earned him lots of fame and has been discussed ad nauseum for about a month now.

Here is what I have found most interesting up to this point on the debate about inequality: The factions and their strategies regarding data and how it is interpreted. I think Dr Delacroix’s approach to the way data is interpreted is best, namely that the study design itself should be analyzed first and foremost.

Regarding factions, remember when that graduate student from the heavily neo-Keynesian UMass-Amherst found discrepancies in the work of Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart on austerity in the West? The Left attacked savagely. The Right came up with excuses that would have earned an ‘F’ on most undergraduate tests.

Now that the Left’s own preferred conclusions have been borne out by bad data, what do you think is going to happen? Who wants to bet that the roles of Left and Right will be reversed? When Rogoff’s and Reinhart’s mistakes went public, the graduate student was invited to speak on televised talk and radio shows around the world. His work was (justifiably) hailed in the national and international press, and also (much less justifiably) as an answer to the deplorable state of the discipline of economics. What do you think the odds will be that the researchers responsible for finding flaws in Piketty’s data will get the same reception?

My money is on the answer “not good.”

All of this discussion about austerity and inequality is great, of course. The fact that researchers are expanding their findings to include more than just the data within their own countries is perhaps the most satisfying development in regards to epistemological human progress. I will await further developments to lay down my own verdict on the matter of inequality in the West. With the mistake of Rogoff and Reinhart, I decided, after carefully reading the merits and weaknesses of both sides of the debate, that their mistake was small enough to overlook and that austerity generally leads to better economic outcomes in the near- and long-term and that public debt is a drag on economic growth.

Depending on how the Left responds to its critics, I will see if economic inequality is indeed growing in the West.

Обзор событий в России за последний месяц

Evgenii Grigorev Current Events ,

Привет, друзья! Что-то давно я ничего не писал здесь, так что постараюсь сейчас исправиться. Работа над собственным сайтом (я пишу про книги и Норвегию) отнимает все силы, да еще и запись собственного музыкального альбома в совокупности с ежедневной работой.

Сегодня я расскажу вам про события, которые имели определенный резонанс в России за последний месяц и слегка проясню ситуацию с дальнейшим форматом своих записей (I will welcome Brandon’s reaction in the comments if he’ll allow me to post link to my blog in the end of my posts, because I write political articles sometimes in my primary blog too).

Итак. Основное событие, про которое вы все наверняка знаете – это Международный Экономический Форум, который стартовал на днях. Переговоры, слегка расцвеченные сине-желтой украинской тематикой, уже принесли первые плоды, пусть и не очень хорошие. Слегка испортило впечатление то, что американские дипломатические представительства совершают давление на некоторые страны, чтобы они не присылали своих участников на форум, но в целом, по информации из газет, собралось много компаний. Параллельно с этим Санкт-Петербургу был присвоен самый низкий кредитный рейтинг…

Уже принято несколько важных решений. Например, Visa и MasterCard решили все-таки не уходить из России после принятия у нас нескольких жестких законов. Для них будут созданы специальные условия работы. При этом насколько я понял, продолжается разработка Национальной Платежной Системы России по аналогии с теми системами, которые уже есть и давно работают в Китае, Японии и, например, Белоруссии. Когда все это реализуется – пока непонятно, но тенденции к реализации есть. Это решение было принято после того, как Visa & MasterCard заблокировали карты нескольких банков, чьи владельцы попали под санкции США. Это показало, насколько политически-зависимой может оказаться работа частных компаний: в сущности они поступили так, как им приказали сверху, а пострадали сотни тысяч ни в чем не повинных граждан России, против которых санкции никто не вводил (напомню, хотя вы и так прекрасно знаете, что санкции вводятся избирательно против тех, кого считают повинными в эскалации противостояния на Украине, а также тех, кто по мнению Госдепа США повинен в присоединении Крыма к территории Российской Федерации).

Другим важным событием стало подписание “газового” договора с Китаем и перечислении аванса за газ. В последнее время отношения России и Китая вошли в новую стадию всеобъемлющего сотрудничества.

Параллельно с этим хочу рассказать про запуск нового российского интернет-поисковика “Спутник” (правда он пока что на стадии тестирования), который признан искать контент только по проверенным российским сайтам. Посмотрим, насколько удачной окажется эта идея, и как она сможет развиться в России.

Подвести итог хочу как в классических выпусках новостей, прогнозом погоды. В Санкт-Петербурге уже несколько дней стоит аномально высокая жара, которая не регистрировалась на таком высоком уровне (больше 30 градусов Цельсия) почти 130 лет. Учитывая что в начале мая у нас еще шел снег – такой резкий перепад температуры воспринимается очень тяжело. В ближайшие выходные в центре города около Петропавловской Крепости у нас начнутся Норвежские Выступления: традиционная музыка в живом исполнении, бои на мечах, исторические реконструкции, ярмарка, а также мастер-классы кузнецов, гончаров, кожевников и прочих представителей различных профессий. Будет интересно, и я собираюсь пойти!

Надеюсь у вас всё хорошо, и вы не болеете. Желаю приятных выходных!

Climate Change and Flat Earthers

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics, Religion , , , , , , , ,

“There has been no universal trend in the overall extent of drought across the Unites States since 1900.”

“Trends in severe storms, including the intensity and frequency….are uncertain and being studied intensively.”

Both quotes are from the fine lines in the 829-page quadrennial National Climate Assessment. That’s the report Pres. Obama flogged on national television recently for nearly an hour. The president insisted something had to be done right now.

I have not read the report, of course, why should I ? (See below.)

(The first quote is in the report according to a Wall Street Journal editorial on 5/9/14. The second is in the report according to my frequent reader and commenter McHenry. He is a young man who does, or used to, believe in the threat of man-made climate change. He has good scientific training.)

A few months ago, when the Great Lakes were 90% frozen, that great scientist, Secretary of State Kerry relegated me to the ranks of “Flat Earthers.” He did this because I am very skeptical (and growing) of the climate change thesis. (See definition below.)

Of course, anyone who has been observing him from his political beginnings knows that John Kerry has no scientific competences, no competences about anything at all, except windsurfing and marrying rich widows. (I don’t knock either, no sir!) It’s also possible that he knows some French. That would tend to contribute to his misinformation, I think.

I suspect, in fact, I am almost sure, that Mr Kerry’s self-assurance is based on the belief that 97% of scientists, blah, blah, blah…

The climate change thesis deconstructs as follows:

1 There is a global rise in temperature.

That’s from some undetermined date. Hasn’t been any for the last fifteen years according to federal government’s own reports.

2 It’s caused by human activity.

This includes the burning of fossil fuels, of course but yet, there is no call for an increase in nuclear energy production which is a reliable and lasting way to relieve worldwide reliance on fossil fuels. No reason is ever given for this absence. Sometimes, perfectly serious climate change partisans also include among the causes of man-made global warming belching and flatulence by the large worldwide cattle population. The latter “cause,” of course, calls for a quick conversion to vegetarianism. (That is where secret evangelists show their hand.)

3 The world, or parts of it, or us, or some of us, are in imminent danger of a variety of catastrophes that will be caused by climate change.

Note that the three propositions are logically linked: If there is no global rise in temperature, we don’t care about human activity. If human activity does nothing to the globe ( to what, exactly?) there is no emergency. If there is a global rise in temperature and it’s not man-made, there is not much we can do. If there is global warming and it is the result of human activities and it does no harm, there is nothing we should do. If it does both harm and good (longer growing seasons in the north, access to minerals near the North Pole) then, there is something important to discuss internationally.

As the evidence in support of the thesis becomes more complicated and contradictory, the alarmist cries are becoming shriller. This makes a sort of macabre sense. Simple rationality is getting lost along the way. What we are told about urgent policy requirements does not fit with the evidence that is presented by the same people who demand urgently a new policy of de-industrialization. The climate change book is like a novel whose cover would proclaim “Joe Is the Killer” while the inside pages would sow doubt on the idea that Joe has ever killed, or even harmed anyone, has ever so much as spat on the sidewalk.

Sometimes, downright fraud is also prominently involved. That’s the case for the “97% of scientists” that I think certified incompetents like Sec. Kerry rely on. Personally, I have always known and said that there was nothing to the number. There is no 97% of anything anywhere, except in some banana republics and in North Korea. Now, we have good evidence of fraud on this matter.

In past postings on the climate change or global warming, I have been at great pains to declare, even to prove my ignorance in matters of climate science. I did this because I wanted to step resolutely away from jargon-filled experts’ and pseudo-experts’ discussions that can only befuddle people who have to make a living, rear children, prepare their taxes, pay a mortgage, go to the gym.

In fact, I have fair general scientific training: I easily recognize a good study design. (They don’t grow on trees!) I can spot bad measurements from a mile away, like a jealous wife a single long hair of the wrong color on her husband’s lapel. I also possess a skill that is rare in the general literate population but common among those who have acted as referees for scholarly journals: a keen sense of studies’ formal conclusions that shout when the findings would only merit whispering.

Note that I don’t claim I have ever committed this last little sin myself when I was a scholar. It’s damned tempting though. How can you admit, “Yes, I and two colleagues worked hard on this study for three years and, frankly, what we found does not amount to a hill of beans.”

And then, there is the vertiginous, nightmarish situation where you would have to report, “The consensus is that X causes Y. Our study, carefully conceived in every way – go ahead and check everything – suggests that X does not cause Y.” This is like yelling, “Go ahead, don’t publish my study!” (I actually published two such studies in my time, one at the beginning of my career, one at the end. The last one took twenty years! See on my vita linked to this blog: Delacroix, Jacques. “The export of raw materials and economic growth: a cross-national study.” American Sociological Review. 42:795-808. 1977. Delacroix, Jacques and François Nielsen. “The beloved myth: Protestantism and the rise of industrial capitalism in 19th century Europe.” Social Forces 80-2:509-553. 2001.)

There is also a general, well known anti “negative findings” bias in all scientific disciplines. Few journals have the intestinal fortitude to publish articles that proclaim: “We did not find anything.” I doubt that the climate sciences constitute an exception. Do you?

Here is a fictitious but realistic example of such a conclusion:

“Humans have been pumping ‘greenhouse gases’ into the atmosphere with increasing intensity* for one hundred and ten years and yet, there is no rise in the frequency of droughts.”

How does this work for your career, do you think?

Here is an example of bad design, specifically.

Several years ago in one of the respected American scientific magazines there appeared an article authored by three Australian professors with impeccable scientific credentials. (I am very sorry I don’t have the reference. However, my memory forgets but it does not make up stuff.) The article purported to tackle the issue of long term global warming. It was an attempt to recoup after the disaster of the “hockey stick scandal”** which involved downright cheating.

The issue is this: If it was warmer in 1000 that it is today, it’s hard to argue that gases specific to industrial societies are an exclusive or even a primary cause of global warming. (It’s difficult but not impossible; it would involve heavy scientific lifting.)

Anyway, that article relied on one form of measurement of temperature, tree rings, I think, for the longest period, extending from about year 1000, to about year 1800. Then the authors switched to other, probably better, more sensitive measurements, based on other than tree rings, for the period extending from about 1800 to the present.

That’s impossibly bad scientific design, of course. Here are the reasons. If the first measurement somehow underestimates temperature then, it’s necessarily true that temperatures in the other period from 1800, will appear higher. If the second type of measures somehow overstates or simply detects more accurately high temperatures, the years 1800 to present will necessarily seem warmer. Both false effects would tend to be seem true irrespective of the real temperatures in both periods .

It tuns out that 1800 to present is the period of interest. If you are going to prove a sharp rise of temperature coinciding with industrialization, you have to demonstrate a big uptick for that period . The design is thus not neutral with respect to results. It favors some rather than others.

It’s such breathtakingly bad design that I had to read the article twice to believe it. (That’s what caused me to check the authors’ academic credentials. As I said, they were excellent.)

The alert reader will have noticed that the potential bias I describe above can work either way: If the measurements to 1800 overestimate temperatures while the measurements from 1800 to present happen to underestimate temperatures, you may find that you have demonstrated that there is no warming that corresponds to the industrializing period although one exists. You might even show that temperature has declined on the whole although it has actually risen.

Now, suppose that the study of reference showed precisely either no change or change in the “wrong” direction. That would be no change in global temperatures, 1000 to 2000, or a slight decline of temperatures beginning, say, in 1810.

My educated first guess is that, in the intellectual climate of the past fifteen years, the authors would not then have presented their research for publication. My second, also well informed guess, is that if they had presented it, the journal editor would have turned them down. He would have turned them down irrespective of his religion toward climate change. That’s because, journals don’t like negative results of the form: “Nothing happened.” See above.

That’s in addition to the fact that many editors are members of the same intellectual class that has lost its way on climate as it lost its way previously on communism and on Third World revolutions (another story I plan to tell soon on this blog).

In conclusion: Our current system of scholarly publication almost guarantees that there is little chance that scientific findings of high quality that contradict the belief in the thesis described above will see the light of day. It does not take a real conspiracy to arrive at such a situation, just the perpetuation of well-established bad habits.

How about the three credentialed Australian professors who committed the dramatically faulty research design? Are they scum? That’s were religion comes in. It’s helpful in pretending that the bad actions you commit are not really sinful. Did you know that the crusaders who captured Jerusalem in 1099 put all its inhabitants to the sword while shouting “God wants it”?

So, OK, I am a Flat Earther. It’s not so bad, really. One of these days, I will figure out the truth by noticing that no one ever falls off the earth, no matter how far he travels. I might even figure out why some get back home simply by moving in a straight line. Paying attention to negative evidence like this pays off. On the other hand, those who live inside a square box will never learn anything. Their blindness is dangerous for everyone.

* I don’t know the actual numbers but I would be surprised if we did not, collectively, burn one hundred times more than we did in 1800. One thousand times would not surprise me, not even 10,000 times.

**Look it up. Great story!