Author: VD

Checking the metric

After publishing RGD in 2009, I was asked to list some of the metrics that would indicate that I was wrong about the USA having entered the Great Depression 2.0. One of the more important ones was an increase in state and local tax revenues. So, it was interesting to read this report from the U.S. Census, which tracks annual state government tax collections.

State government tax collections totaled $704.6 billion in fiscal year 2010, down 2.0 percent from the $718.9 billion collected in fiscal year 2009. Although 2010 total state revenue figures have yet to be released, in 2009 total state tax collection accounted for 64.0 percent of the total state government revenue.

In 2010, 11 states reported a positive increase over the previous year’s total tax collections, up from five states in 2009. The reasons for each state’s year-to-year increases vary. For example, in the case of North Dakota, increased tax revenue was largely due to strength in severance tax revenues, which are taxes imposed for the extraction of natural resources. However, North Carolina’s revenue increase was largely driven by sales and gross receipts tax.

Four states experienced a decrease of 10.0 percent or greater in year-to-year tax collections. Prior to 2009, no state had year-to-year tax revenue declines of this magnitude since 2002.

That this is somewhat of a positive spin on the situation is readily apparent when one looks at the actual data. Although overall state tax revenue is only down 2 percent in 2010, it’s now down 10.21 percent from its 2008 peak and is lower than it was in 2007 or 2006. The comparison of the eleven states with positive growth in tax revenues to the four states with revenue contractions of more than 10 percent is simply bizarre; a more relevant one would be to point out that 39 states had declining revenues in 2010.

Also, five of those eleven states with tax revenue growth had growth of less than one percent. In the case of Maine, it was only 0.03%. One cannot reasonably say that the state economies were improving in 2010, only that they declined at a slower rate than in 2009.

Keep in mind that this slower rate of contraction took place despite the benefit of the enormous stimulus package, much of which, as we know from Paul Krugman’s past recommendationscurrent complaints, went to the state governments. Now that the spending orgy has, at least temporarily, come to an end, we would anticipate that state tax revenues will again decline at an increasing rate in 2011. I can’t confirm that, though, because the monthly Iowa tax report that I use as a rough proxy is inconclusive; in April it looked like 2011 tax receipts would be down, while in May they look very positive.

Regardless, by the state tax metric, the central thesis of RGD still appears to be sound.

Failing to show up for the future

This is why the 21st century will is unlikely to be an “American century”.

The latest 2010 census data show that children of immigrants make up one in four people under 18, and are now the fastest-growing segment of the nation’s youth, an indication that both legal and illegal immigrants as well as minority births are lifting the nation’s population.

Currently, the share of children in the U.S. is 24 percent, falling below the previous low of 26 percent of 1990. The share is projected to slip further, to 23 percent by 2050, even as the percentage of people 65 and older is expected to jump from 13 percent today to roughly 20 percent by 2050 due to the aging of baby boomers and beyond.

In 1900, the share of children reached as high as 40 percent, compared to a much smaller 4 percent share for seniors 65 and older. The percentage of children in subsequent decades held above 30 percent until 1980, when it fell to 28 percent amid declining birth rates, mostly among whites.

So, thanks to the late and unlamented Irish-American senator and an English Jew’s ideal of “the melting pot”, the USA is about to discover what happens when a young population of European descent is exchanged for an old population of half-European, one-sixth African, one-third Mestizo descent.

Even if you genuinely subscribe to the theory of multicultural vibrancy and strength through diversity, I would imagine you have to be at least a bit concerned about the probable outcomes here.

The “read my lips” moment

It’s rather a neat trick. A Republican candidate caves on the debt limit while simultaneously telling Republicans they can’t cave:

We just can’t cave.

After months of posturing and failed leadership from President Obama and politicians of both parties, the debate on the debt limit is finally coming to a head.

I honestly believe we have reached a moment in history when the fate of our country is at a crossroads.

Down one road is an uncertain future marked by reckless spending that deepens the debt and deficits that are killing jobs and holding American prosperity hostage. The elites and experts tell us we have no choice but to accept the path of higher taxes and new borrowing. And naturally, they prophesize disaster if we don’t continue down the only path the rest of us know America can’t afford.

But this is the same argument we’ve heard before. Trillions of dollars in spending later and trillions more in the hole, it is time to change course and chart a new direction….

Raising the debt limit without fundamental reforms will tell the world our government has become so corrupted by spending that we are beyond redemption. Our allies will grow more anxious about what a diminished America means for their future. And our enemies will grow more emboldened.

The issue isn’t raising the debt limit “without fundamental reforms”. It is raising the debt limit, period. It doesn’t matter what excuses Republicans offer for it, if they vote to raise it, (as I expect they will), they will eminently merit the political crucifixion that awaits them. This is their “read my lips” moment and I fully expect them to follow the example of George Herbert Walker Bush.

Kaus on Krugman

And by on Krugman, I mean in the sense of a prison rape:

Paul Krugman now says that some kinds of Keynesian stimulus spending just aren’t as effective as other kinds. Specifically, he suggests, aid to state and local governments (to enable them to keep government workers in their jobs) is a sort of second-class stimulus:

So what happened to the stimulus? Much of it consisted of tax cuts, not spending. Most of the rest consisted either of aid to distressed families or aid to hard-pressed state and local governments. This aid may have mitigated the slump, but it wasn’t the kind of job-creation program we could and should have had.

Hmm. That’s not what I remember him saying back in 2009. In 2009, if I remember right, job-preserving aid to state and local governments was almost the most important thing in the world. Let’s see … searching … searching … Sorry I’m a little rusty … searching … whoops, hit the Times paywall … searching … ah, yes:

Now the centrists have shaved off $86 billion in spending — much of it among the most effective and most needed parts of the plan. In particular, aid to state governments, which are in desperate straits, is both fast — because it prevents spending cuts rather than having to start up new projects — and effective, because it would in fact be spent; plus state and local governments are cutting back on essentials, so the social value of this spending would be high.

It’s always the same with Keynesian cultists. They hold to the faith that government stimulus works even though the economic logic dictates that it can’t. And when it doesn’t work, it must not have been big enough. And when it is shown that the stimulus was bigger than they recommended, then it just wasn’t the right kind. And when it is shown that it was the kind that they recommended, well… we’ll just have to wait for Krugman’s latest epicyclistic excuse.

General ignorance

Are you more knowledgeable than the average citizen? The average score for all 2,508 Americans taking the following test was 49%; college educators scored 55%.

Take the Full Civic Literacy Exam.

I scored 97%. Not bad, although I somehow managed to blow a quote that I should have known. But yes, it’s official, I am in fact more knowledgeable than those esteemed intellectuals, the college educators of the nation.

Such a surprise.

UPDATE – I had Ender take the quiz. No economics yet, hasn’t ever lived in the States, but still scored 63%. I didn’t realize how different his perspective is from mine until the WWII question, when he mused out loud “I suppose they must mean the United States”.

It’s not all nails

I am aware certain Pharyngulans and anklebiters are dubious about the legitimacy of the intellectual contempt in which I hold one PZ Myers. They appear to genuinely believe that the Fowl Atheist is not only capable of holding his own in debate with me, but that he has only been avoiding any such encounter because his argumentative skills are so much superior to mine that it would somehow pollute them to actually put them to use.*

The fact is that PZ knows perfectly well that I will destroy every last bit of his credibility if he is ever foolish enough to permit a direct engagement again. By way of evidence, I offer his latest bit of philosophical buffoonery as but one of many examples of how PZ can’t argue his way out of a paper bag.

[L]et’s cut straight to the statement Brown finds objectionable: “Science is the only philosophical construct we have to determine TRUTH with any degree of reliability.” And there, I disagree with Brown completely: it is an eminently scientific statement. It may make philosophers gack up their breakfast, but who cares?

Science is a process of empirical rationalism that produces testable answers about the nature of the universe. We learn new knowledge, knowledge that actually holds up to critical scrutiny and testing against the real world. The pipes don’t leak — not much, anyway, and we have a method that allows us to test and tighten everything up. And yes, we have evidence that it is true: I can show you a cell phone that uses the principles of quantum physics, I can show you statistics on infant mortality that are improved by vaccinations and antibiotics and hygiene. We have progressively deeper understanding of ourselves and our environment that is produced by this powerful tool.

Science works. That is the criterion for saying it is a way “to determine truth with any degree of reliability.” That is a valid statement, and yes it can be relied on as true, in the scientist’s sense of the word: provisionally and usefully. Both of Brown’s denials were simply wrong.

But there’s another part of Kroto’s statement that bugs Brown, and that he doesn’t really address. This is the missing part of his argument, and the one he fills in by telling us that we were expected to giggle at the claim… the idea that science is the only useful tool we have.

“The illogical positivism of Kroto’s talk is symptomatic of a widespread problem. Although Kroto is exceptional in his self-confidence and lack of intellectual self-awareness – few other people would state as baldly as he does that science is the only way to establish the truth – no one in the audience seems to have reacted with a healthy giggle. They may have felt there was something a bit off about the idea, but the full absurdity was veiled by layers of deference and convention. The great attraction of telling everyone else to think, to question, and to take nothing for granted is that it makes a very pleasant substitute for doing these things yourself.”

You know, if someone tells me there is only one way of doing something, and I want to show that they’re wrong, the very first thing I think of is to demonstrate an alternative. If someone were to say something truly false and giggleworthy, like for instance, “all cats are black,” what I’d do is go out and find a Siamese and a white Persian and wave them in his face. Isn’t that obvious?

I have often heard apologists wax indignant at statements by scientists that science, that is this kind of objective, constantly tested, empirical rationalism, is the only way to determine the truth of a matter. Usually it’s theologians who want to insist that they have another path. But never do they actually show me something about which we have reliable knowledge that was not determined by observing, measuring, poking, testing, evaluating, verifying…all that stuff that is part of common, mundane science.

So show me something that we reliably know without testing it against consequences in the real world, and then maybe I’ll see the joke here.

It’s at times like this that one has no choice but to shake one’s head and realize that despite one’s contempt, one has actually somehow managed to overrate the moron.

First, as Robert Winston, the former Professor of Science and Society at Imperial College London and past Director of NHS Research and Development, Hammersmith Hospitals Trust has said, “dogmatist scientists need to be reminded, now and again, that the discipline of science is not about absolute truth.” It is not, as my erstwhile biology tutor used to say, “in the truth business”. To say “science works” is not at all synonymous with saying it has the ability “to determine truth”, much less to claim that it is “the only philosophical construct we have to determine TRUTH with any degree of reliability.” Engineering works even better than science, logic works quite effectively in most situations, and there is no shortage of empirical evidence indicating that revelation and intuition work as well.

Like all these alternative paths to knowledge, science sometimes works and sometimes does not work. There is little point in resorting to a scientific version of the Atheist Dance here, as the oft-chronicled failures and financial corruption of scientists inevitably amounts to the confirmed unreliability of science as it is actually applied in the real world. One cannot reasonably compare practical logic and practical religion with ideal science, and while one could argue that ideal science would lead to perfect understanding, the same is also true of ideal revelation, ideal logic, ideal intuition, and ideal history.

But concerning the question posed, there are so many obvious answers that it is almost astonishing to have to wave them in PZ’s bearded face. Both math and logic permit things to be reliably known without testing them against the consequences, indeed, they are often utilized by scientists in lieu of science when the scientific method cannot be applied. The same is also true of all the documentary and archeological evidence that makes up recorded human history. It would be interesting to see what sort of replicable scientific experiment one would propose testing in order to prove the historical existence of Homer, as even DNA testing of current human populations matched to ancient DNA samples would not suffice to prove that one of them once wrote The Iliad. How would science go about proving or disproving the story that George Washington chopped down the cherry tree? It might be used to establish that there was no evidence to be found indicating that cherry trees grew in Mount Vernon during the reported lifetime of “George Washington”, but that is the most it could hope to accomplish.

There are entire fields of human knowledge that have absolutely nothing to do with modern science. One cannot scientifically demonstrate that Brad loves Angelina or that Marius served as the consul of Rome seven times. PZ cannot even scientifically prove that he exists, or as Nick Bostrom would have it, that the material world even exists as anything but a sophisticated electronic simulation.

To reduce TRUTH to nothing more than “that which science can discover” is to eliminate the greater part of the truths that matter. Love, Life, Consciousness, Meaning, Purpose, and Probability are all well beyond the scope of science. Even Sam Harris would not go so far as Myers has gone, his most recent book, The Moral Landscape is nothing more than a futile attempt to, (ironically enough), make a philosophical argument for what PZ blithely asserts to be the case.

This is a deeply stupid statement by a dogmatic, mid-witted scientist who, due to his affection for his hammer, has concluded that all knowledge must necessarily be comprised of nails.

* It would be very interesting to see a Pharyngulan attempt to prove that conclusion scientifically, for as we are informed, science is the only way we could reliably determine the truth of it.

WND column

The Rise of the East

Supporters of the ongoing Bush-Obama wars have often said that one of the reasons the United States needed to attack Afghanistan and Iraq (and now Libya and Yemen and Somalia) is because failing to do so would exhibit weakness and encourage our enemies. Now that the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan is into its 10th year, intrepid supporters of American empire are claiming that American troops must continue to occupy Afghanistan (and Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Somalia) because the post-withdrawal collapse of the indigenous forces presently being propped up by the U.S. military will exhibit weakness and encourage our enemies.

These childish arguments reveal that the bellicose neocons who have been pushing foreign military adventures for more than a decade are not only chickenhawks innocent of any military service, but also know nothing about military history or the military aspects of geostrategy.

Bias in book reading

Is science fiction sexist? Is adventure fantasy sexist? Without bothering to go through all fifteen issues of Black Gate, I’m going to guess that there is not a perfect statistical match between the population demographics and the contributors to Black Gate. Which, by the metric suggested by the woman horrified that Guardian readers have the sexist audacity to prefer male SF writers by a 24 to 1 margin, is ipso facto evidence that Black Gate, too, is a bastion of male privilege.

Is science fiction sexist? A bald, potentially divisive and rather emotive question, there. But increasingly, science fiction and its close cousins, fantasy and horror, are being accused of an inherent downer on the female practitioners of the genre – and the latest offender appears to be the Guardian’s recent online poll to find readers’ favourite SF novels. Earlier this month Damien G Walter asked guardian.co.uk/books users to suggest the best novels in the genre, following on from the Guardian’s special SF-slanted edition of its Saturday Review supplement.

The results went online last week, and displayed a great love for science fiction: more than 500 books, classic and contemporary, were suggested for inclusion. However, according to Seattle-based author Nicola Griffith, who did a bit of number-crunching on the stats, there’s an overwhelming bias towards male authors.

My response to this shocking non-news can be found at the Black Gate. For those who are interested, the column to which various SF/F luminaries such as the Tor editors and the present of the SFWA took such exception can be found here.

Even the bad news errs to the upside

Jammie Wearing Fool points out that last week’s terrible jobs number is even worse than advertised:

Now for the really bad news: that 18,000 gain announced by the government yesterday isn’t real. For one thing, the number of jobs increased in June only because the Labor Department simultaneously revised downward the number of jobs that existed in this country during May. It’s like moving the fences at Citi Field so the Mets players can hit more home runs. It might make Jose Reyes feel better, but it doesn’t actually make him more powerful. Without the fence-moving operation in the May employment report, the June number — yesterday’s number — would have shown a decline of 26,000 jobs.

Then there’s another problem with June’s employment report. Included in the 18,000 headline number is a guesstimate that 131,000 jobs were created by newly formed — and, therefore, invisible — companies. If you want to send your resume to one of these companies, don’t bother. They probably don’t exist, and neither do the jobs the government thinks they are creating. These figments of the imagination of the Labor Department’s computers will probably disappear when the numbers are checked early next year.

The USA is looking more and more like the old Soviet Union, where the workers pretended to work and the government pretended to pay them. The downward revision game is a pretty transparent one, but it’s been around for a while. Play it right and you can always report rising numbers despite a declining trend.

But imagine the costs of drug legalization!

Somehow, I tend to doubt 40 people will be killed every day by hash brownie overdoses:

Battles between the vicious Zetas gang and other drug cartels killed more than 40 people in a 24-hour span, a government official said Saturday. At least 20 people were killed when gunmen opened fire in a bar late Friday in the northern city of Monterrey, where the gang is fighting its former ally, the Gulf Cartel, said federal security spokesman Alejandro Poire.

Eleven bodies shot with high-powered rifles were found earlier Friday, piled near a water well on the outskirts of Mexico City, where the gang is fighting the Knights Templar, Poire said. That is an offshoot of the La Familia gang that has terrorized its home state of Michoacan. He said another 10 people were found dead early Saturday in various parts of the northern city of Torreon, where the gang is fighting the Sinaloa cartel headed by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

“The violence is a product of this criminal rivalry … surrounding the intent to control illegal activities in a community, and not the only the earnings that come with it, but also with transporting drugs to the United States,” Poire said in a news conference.

It will be interesting to see if all the anti-drug conservatives will start to change their thinking once the Zetas and other drug cartels are shooting it out in Hispanic communities across America, or if they’ll stick with the “no matter how bad it gets, it would be even worse if drugs were legal” approach.