Category: Uncategorized

And you thought it was bad enough when you thought Obama, or at least one of his pet Keynesian economists, was running GM:

“There was a time between Nov. 4 and mid-February when I was the only full-time member of the auto task force,” Mr. Deese, a special assistant to the president for economic policy, acknowledged recently as he hurried between his desk at the White House and the Treasury building next door. “It was a little scary.”

But now, according to those who joined him in the middle of his crash course about the automakers’ downward spiral, he has emerged as one of the most influential voices in what may become President Obama’s biggest experiment yet in federal economic intervention. While far more prominent members of the administration are making the big decisions about Detroit, it is Mr. Deese who is often narrowing their options.

A month ago, when the administration was divided over whether to support Fiat’s bid to take over much of Chrysler, it was Mr. Deese who spoke out strongly against simply letting the company go into liquidation, according to several people who were present for the debate.

Now this is fabulous! We actually have a wannabe lawyer with a poli-sci degree from Middlebury and no absolutely experience in the real world handed directly responsibility for making important economic policy decisions. I’m going to go out on a real limb here and predict that this automotive experiment isn’t going to end well.

Better yet, he was the top economic staffer for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Remember, that was the campaign that didn’t know how the nomination rules worked. What are the odds he knows the first thing about malinvestment or realizes that he’s following the Japanese zombie model? One in one quintillion against or one in one megabazillion? I’d have more confidence in Paul Krugman. Actually, come to think of it, I’d have more confidence in the decomposed corpse of John Maynard Keynes.

This is just a reminder that Voxiversity III will be kicking off with the first quiz on June 13th. The paperback is now available, so if you don’t already have the hardcover, pick up a copy and start reading the introduction, “Everything You Know About Fascism is Wrong”. Even if you’ve already read the book, as many here have, you may want to consider re-reading it next week since you have to know your stuff fairly well if you’re going to score highly on the weekly quizzes.

It is not enough for the gorilla to read Nietzsche. The gorilla must grok Nietzsche.

My new publisher was kind enough to supply me with a number of books I needed for reference while working on the current project, so I now possess more Paul Krugman books in multiple editions than I would have imagined one year ago. Having read the 1999 edition of The Return of Depression Economics as well as a few of his self-serving attempts to pretend that he saw the housing and financial crises coming – sorry, Paul, but spotting the housing boom in 2005, one year before it ended, is not exactly impressive – I was curious to see how he would deal with two rather glaring statements that had appeared in that original edition in the 2008 re-release, titled The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008.

“On the whole, I have an easy conscience about the problems of the advanced countries. What I mean by that statement is that the solution for these problems do not seem to involve any especially painful tradeoffs…. the things advanced countries need to do to counter depression economics any compromise of the commitment to free markets.” (1999, p. 162)

“The world economy is not in depression; it probably will not be in depression anytime soon.” (1999, p. 154)

I haven’t found any reference to the former quote yet, in fact, the section of the title essay to which it belongs, “Protecting the Rich”, appears to have been excised entirely. Apparently Krugman isn’t eager to remind everyone how he declared that keeping interest rates low and maintaining inflation around two percent would be sufficient for the USA to avoid a Japanese-style liquidity trap. Surprisingly, however, he repeats the second quote twice in the space of two pages in the new edition.

“We’re not in a depression now, and despite everything, I don’t think we’re headed into one (although I’m not as sure of that as I’d like to be).” (2009, p. 180)

“The world economy is not in depression; it probably won’t fall into depression, despite the magnitude of the current crisis (although I wish I was completely sure about that).” (2009, p. 181)

It should be interesting to see how those statements continue to evolve in future books and/or revised editions. Unsurprisingly, his proposed solution involves increasing the size of the next fiscal stimulus equivalent to 4 percent of US GDP. But since this is only $560 billion, his published proposal is smaller than the $787 billion stimulus package that Obama has proposed as part of the 2010 budget.

In which a teacher offers copious evidence for my calculation that the average teacher’s IQ is below the societal norm:

Here are my top ten reasons why homeschooling parents are doing the wrong thing:

10. “You were totally home schooled” is an insult college kids use when mocking the geeky kid in the dorm (whether or not the offender was home schooled or not). And… say what you will… but it doesn’t feel nice to be considered an outsider, a natural outcropping of being homeschooled….

8. Homeschooling is selfish. According to this article in USA Today, students who get homeschooled are increasingly from wealthy and well-educated families. To take these (I’m assuming) high achieving students out of our schools is a disservice to our less fortunate public school kids. Poorer students with less literate parents are more reliant on peer support and motivation, and they greatly benefit from the focus and commitment of their richer and higher achieving classmates.

If you truly don’t grasp that the public school system is an idiot factory, staffed by predatory, propaganda-infusing idiots, you probably aren’t capable of reaching the logical conclusion about your own place on the intellectual totem pole. Which is fine, I see absolutely no need to spell it out for you and wish you all the joy of the summer re-runs.

I’m a day behind, unfortunately. Nevertheless, booklovers might be interested in my belated post there today, as I wrote about an online tool that I’ve found to be useful for locating hard-to-find books.

I am firmly of the opinion that a family library is one of the most important contributions one can make to one’s own education as well as the education of one’s family throughout the years. My autodidacticism was far less influenced by the books I was encouraged to read by my father as a teenager than it was by the relatively few, but high-quality sets of children’s books acquired by my mother. Those books were responsible for my acquaintance with everything from Plato and Demosthenes to Roland and Oliver, Coleridge, the Kalevala, and the Chronicle of the Cid. I particularly remember the oversized hardbacks in a series that included Robin Hood, The Virginian, and my favorite, The Tales of Paul Bunyan.

I was the beneficiary of an expensive private education from the seventh-grade through university. And yet, I can testify that the return on my parent’s investment was far, far greater on those thirty or forty books to which I was exposed in my childhood than it was on the much larger one they made in my formal, credentialed education.

Out of Ammo

Last week, Barack Obama declared that the U.S. was out of money. Today, General Motors is expected to file for bankruptcy, which is an ominous sign in a land where the financial health of the automotive giant has long been considered a proxy for the financial health of the nation. And California looks increasingly likely to go bankrupt in the near future. And yet, in a nation without money, Bloomberg has reported that the Federal Reserve has loaned out 7.8 trillion dollars without telling anyone where it has gone.

Media outlets are reporting that late-term abortion doctor George Tiller has been shot and killed at his church in Wichita, Kan.

Tiller should have been jailed and had his license revoked for the abortion-related midemeanors he blatantly committed; had justice been done then perhaps he would still be alive. Not that I care, as I wouldn’t shed any more tears for dead abortionists than I would for murdered concentration camp guards. And at his church? What sort of church that calls itself Christian allows a totally unrepentant man with the blood of many children on his hands to attend it?

It should be amusing to watch the pro-abortion camp go hysterical with fear over this, as they still hadn’t gotten over the previous round of abortionist shootings that ended over a decade ago. They know at heart that the issue will never be settled; the murder of unborn children will never, ever be acceptable to decent men and women. Abortionists have killed more Americans than every American military foe in history combined, so based on the body count alone, the post-natal termination of an abortionist is more rationally justifiable than the killing of a jihadist in Iraq or Afghanistan.

UPDATE: National Review: “It’s hard to be anything but sick over the news.”

Yeah, it’s really not. And so-called “conservatives” are sick indeed if they can shrug off the death of innocent Iraqis and Afghans as collateral damage, call for military action that spells the certain death of innocent Iranians, and then be genuinely upset over the fittingly violent end of one serial child-killer.

Paul Krugman offers a very strange complaint about two critics of the Obama spending plan:

First Eugene Fama, now John Cochrane, have made the claim that debt-financed government spending necessarily crowds out an equal amount of private spending, even if the economy is depressed — and they claim this not as an empirical result, not as the prediction of some model, but as the ineluctable implication of an accounting identity.

There has been a tendency, on the part of other economists, to try to provide cover — to claim that Fama and Cochrane said something more sophisticated than they did. But if you read the original essays, there’s no ambiguity — it’s pure Say’s Law, pure “Treasury view”, in each case. Here’s Fama:

The problem is simple: bailouts and stimulus plans are funded by issuing more government debt. (The money must come from somewhere!) The added debt absorbs savings that would otherwise go to private investment. In the end, despite the existence of idle resources, bailouts and stimulus plans do not add to current resources in use. They just move resources from one use to another.

And here’s Cochrane:

First, if money is not going to be printed, it has to come from somewhere. If the government borrows a dollar from you, that is a dollar that you do not spend, or that you do not lend to a company to spend on new investment. Every dollar of increased government spending must correspond to one less dollar of private spending. Jobs created by stimulus spending are offset by jobs lost from the decline in private spending. We can build roads instead of factories, but fiscal stimulus can’t help us to build more of both.1 This is just accounting, and does not need a complex argument about “crowding out.” Second, investment is “spending” every bit as much as consumption. Fiscal stimulus advocates want money spent on consumption, not saved. They evaluate past stimulus programs by whether people who got stimulus money spent it on consumption goods rather save it. But the economy overall does not care if you buy a car, or if you lend money to a company that buys a forklift.

There’s no ambiguity in either case: both Fama and Cochrane are asserting that desired savings are automatically converted into investment spending, and that any government borrowing must come at the expense of investment — period.

Note that Krugman doesn’t bother attempting to set the two economists straight by showing where the money is going to come from, instead he turns to a simple Econ 101 diagram of the so-called “multiplier effect” and complains about accounting. If this is a Dark Age of macroeconomics, it’s because the biggest names in the field are a bunch of third-rate Keynesians who cling to their outmoded and ineffective models as the economy melts down around them. They have no ideas except to spend more and print more, as if the problem was somehow brought about by too little government spending and too little inflation. And they completely fail to account for the actual consequences of debt and unproductive employment, or the important distinction between private consumption and government spending.

As one astute commenter pointed out: “Increase in G does decrease I – right now. It can theoretically result in increased GDP over time. This can happen though only if G creates greater velocity than I.”

Francis Asbury Tarkenton is a Viking to the end:

“I can’t put my arms around this as a Vikings fan,” he said. “I was born a Viking, I retired a Viking and I will die a Viking. … And in the spirit of sport — I don’t like to use the word hate — but [the Packers] are the enemy are they not? And I want to embrace the icon Brett Favre to come over here and play for my team? He’s a Packer and should be a Packer.

No. 10 is right. I think the Vikes will ultimately go with Sage Rosenfels, which is a definite upgrade from The Tarvaris Jackson Experiment and a perfectly reasonable option in an offense that needs a game manager more than a gunslinger. Favre looked pretty good his last year in Green Bay, but that was thanks to an excellent wide receiver corps. He didn’t have that in New York and he wouldn’t have it in Minnesota either.

And if you’re looking for a reason to cheer for the Vikings this year, Kenichi Udeze provides all the reason you need. His positive attitude and refusal to complain about the tough hand he was dealt are admirable.

According to this UK study, scientific misconduct is probably far more common than scientists are willing to admit or science fetishists are willing to believe:

The level and quality of research and training in scientific integrity has expanded in the last decades, raising awareness among scientists and the public. However, there is little evidence that researchers trained in recognizing and dealing with scientific misconduct have a lower propensity to commit it. Therefore, these trends might suggest that scientists are no less likely to commit misconduct or to report what they see their colleagues doing, but have become less likely to admit it for themselves….

A pooled weighted average of 1.97% (N = 7, 95%CI: 0.86–4.45) of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once –a serious form of misconduct by any standard– and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys asking about the behaviour of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% (N = 12, 95% CI: 9.91–19.72) for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices…. Considering that these surveys ask sensitive questions and have other limitations, it appears likely that this is a conservative estimate of the true prevalence of scientific misconduct.

I note that whenever the topic of scientific fraud or scientific credibility comes up, science defenders inevitably begin lecturing on how scientists are “trained” not to commit fraud and so forth. This is true, but they never seem to realize that the “we wuz trained” defense is no more credible for scientists than it is for journalists claiming that attending J-school somehow proves they cannot possibly be guilty of subjective bias. This paper should explode that oft-heard defense, while the sizeable gap between the 2 percent of scientists willing to admit their own serious misconduct and the 14 percent admitting they had witnessed others commit serious misconduct also tends to call the credibility of the average scientist into question.

And before any dimwitted science-fetishist brings up that old chestnut about how science critics shouldn’t use the products of scientists, let me remind everyone of two things. 1) Science is not engineering and most inventors and entrepeneurs are not scientists. 2) By this logic, no atheist critic of religion should be permitted to use the products of the religious faithful.