Another approach to reducing gun violence?

The gun control debate seems to perennially go nowhere, in part because the two sides talk past each other.  Gun control advocates focus entirely on keeping guns out of the hands of bad guys, which is something the the gun rights advocates are incredibly skeptical can be done without overly impeding the legitimate exercise of 2nd amendment rights.  And gun rights advocates talk about their rights as if they are absolute and in a vacuum, failing to address the legitimate safety concerns of gun control advocates.  No surprise, little gets done and compromise is hard to find.

But it seems to me that there are a few things we can all agree on:

• Criminals and irresponsible people shouldn't have guns
• Law-abiding/responsible gun owners (by definition) aren't a problem.
• There's too much violence committed with guns (which is, of course, precisely why many gun owners carry heat), much of which is preventable.  Yes, violence is committed with knives and other weapons, but guns make it much easier to be much more fatal with less personal risk to the shooter than any other weapon, hence the focus on guns.

Since both sides would agree that a responsible gun owner is not a problem, let's focus on that.  I'd start with defining what "responsible" actually means, since it has to mean something.

"Responsible", I think we can all agree, means never allowing a child to have access to a loaded weapon without appropriate supervision (and for very young children, obviously, it means never letting them have access, period.)  This is not a 99% of the time thing - we wouldn't tolerate an airline pilot who avoids a crash 99% of the time, after all.  It means 100% of the time you don't let kids near guns unsupervised.  Take your kid hunting, show them how to safely handle it, go target shooting.  But if your child gets access to your gun to take to school, or finds it and shoots a playmate, then you have to be responsible for that.  If your 4 year old shoots your 6 year old, you are guilty of child endangerment, assault, and possibly murder.  After all, kids can't be responsible, so you need to be.  (Is this even controversial?)  And if you suspect someone of suicidal thoughts, you should ensure they can't get your guns.

It may not be possible to prevent criminals that are determined enough and sophisticated enough from getting guns, but being responsible means not helping them to do so.  This means when you sell a weapon to someone, you are comfortable that they are also responsible.  You want to give a gun to your uncle Joe?  Sure, why not.  Sell a gun at a gun show?  OK.  But here's the thing: you need to be responsible for making sure that the recipient isn't likely to do something stupid.  After all, if it's your responsibility to not help bad guys get weapons, then you need to exercise at least some care in making sure they don't.

I'd propose that if you give/sell a weapon to somebody, and they commit a crime with it, then you should be held responsible as an accessory to the crime.  But I'd pair that with a "get out of jail free" card: if you perform a background check (or have one done on your behalf), then you are presumed to have done your diligence and have no responsibility whatsoever.  You know your Uncle Joe, so you can decide not to do a background check on him, but selling a gun to Wayne who you just met at the gun show is probably a bit more of a risk.  And it seems this should be transitive.  If Alice sells to Bob who gives to Claire who sells to David, who commits armed robbery with it, and Alice was the only one who did a background check, then Bob and Claire should be accountable for allowing David to get the weapon.  In other words, background checks would not be mandatory, but failure to do so has its risks, and you need to weigh them. Doing the background check is generally cheap insurance.

Many criminals also steal weapons, and others are lost.  Arresting a bad guy and sending him to jail for possessing a stolen weapon is heck of a lot better than waiting until he hurts someone before arresting him.  So part of taking responsibility for making it harder for bad guys to get weapons is reporting them as soon as you are aware of a loss or theft (ideally including serial numbers).  Again, rather than making this mandatory, it's your choice.  But if someone does something bad with your weapon, and you knew it was missing/stolen but hadn't reported it, you're effectively an accomplice and should be treated as such.  Reporting it missing would, as with performing a background check, would absolve you of any such liability.  Again, cheap insurance to do so.

Speaking of insurance, responsible people recognize when they have the potential for greater loss than they can afford.  They can't afford if their house burns down, if their car crashes, or if they get cancer, so they carry insurance for all of these risks.  Lawyers carry insurance in case of bad advice, doctors carry insurance in case of bad treatment.  None of these are controversial, they're all common sense responsible things to do.  Weapons - guns in particular - are quite capable of causing losses far beyond what an owner can afford; a responsible gun owner carries insurance.  And like all policies, that insurance should be expensive for risky behavior and cheap for responsible behavior (think gun safes, training certification, etc.).

Finally, the words "law-abiding" in the phrase "law-abiding gun owner" needs to mean something.  Obviously, speeding, cheating on your taxes, and mass murder are not violations of equal magnitude.  But if you commit any crime of violence (or threat thereof), even without a weapon, or break any weapons rules or crimes involving a gun (including poaching or armed robbery), it seems to me that you've demonstrated that you are not a law-abiding gun owner and should forfeit your right to have one.

I don't offer any of the above suggestions as a cure-all for our violent society.  It won't solve most suicides (a large fraction of gun deaths), and it won't prevent terrorists or mass shooters, who generally are sophisticated and plan meticulously.  But it could help reduce the far too common daily killings.

3 reasons why my Jewish background causes Trump's nomination to give me absolute chills.

The "Nazi" comparison gets so overused in today's politics that it has (unfortunately) lost its meaning.  As awful as I think Trump is, I do not think he is a Nazi.  But there are 3 specific parallels to that period in Germany that I think are unavoidable.

The first is his "strongman" tendencies, inciting violence at his rallies.  Any "leader" deserving of that title would be a calming force.  Instead, he tells people how he'd "like to punch him", how people should be "roughed up", and that he'll pay their legal fees.  No surprise, his supporters commit violence against protesters.  This is the behavior of someone who wants to be dictator, not president.  I think it's very telling that the only foreign leader who has expressed support for Trump (and who Trump has openly admired) is Putin.

Trump's call for a ban on Muslims, besides being likely unconstitutional, is exactly the sort of bigoted scapegoating of an entire group of people.  But think about the logic here: if foreign Muslims are a threat, then so are domestic Muslims (look at San Bernadino, for example).  And if they're a threat, why shouldn't we make them identifiable (hmm, perhaps via identity card or symbol sewn onto their clothing?) or rounding them up in internment camps so that they can't harm us?  OK, these are "slippery slope" arguments to be sure, but nevertheless they are directionally consistent with Trump's rhetoric.  And the way he is demonizing entire groups based on religious or national affiliation is indistinguishable in nature from any other anti-semitic or racist regime.

Perhaps most frightening has been the fact that Trump has called for acts that range from being banned by the Geneva conventions (like torture), to other acts that have explicitly called for the commission of war crimes ("taking out" the families of terrorists).  These are war crimes for a reason, and anybody familiar with 20th century history would understand why Jews in particular (though by no means exclusively) think that the "war crime" designation is quite justified.

Trump is known for bluster, our democracy is (I hope) strong enough to provide adequate checks on such tendencies.  But these are attributes that should send warning flags - red flags and sirens - about the potential perils of a Trump administration.  This would be a leader with more in common with Putin than any previous US president.

An open letter to both sides of the gun debate

After the tragic shootings in Newtown CT last month, and with Biden's proposals to be announced this week, there has been a ton of discussion about gun-violence and "gun control" (which I put in quotes because I think it is poorly defined and, as a result, people project their own meanings into the phrase).

I think both sides in the debate miss some key points, so I offer an open letter here to each.

To the folks who favor "gun control":

The 2nd amendment is not only a constitutional right, but the supreme court has determined that it is in fact an individual right.  You may not like this fact, but you can't change it in the short term; people have been trying for 30 years to overturn Roe v Wade without success; if your strategy involves getting around the 2nd amendment or getting a different supreme court decision around it, you have a long, long road ahead of you and you're not likely to succeed.

So forget about stopping law abiding people from having the guns they choose to have.  I don't personally agree with the NRA on much, but they're absolutely right when they say that law-abiding/responsible gun-owners are not the problem.  If your solution involves trampling their rights, then you need another solution.

There are many issues that lead to violent crime and gun-violence in particular.  We should try to address all of them, of course, but when it comes to gun-violence, I think the issue is not guns per-se.  The NRA is right on another count: guns don't kill people, bad people with guns kill people.  Not everyone who drinks alcohol is an alcoholic or a drunk driver; not everyone with a gun is a problem.

So the key thing to focus on in the gun-violence arena is stopping "baddies" from getting guns.  (I'll define a "baddie" here as anyone who should not have a gun: criminals, mentally unstable people, and unsupervised minors.)  And, to the degree that baddies are getting guns from leakage somewhere in the pipeline from gun-manufacturer-to-gun-owner, I'd suggest addressing the key leakage points, and focusing on ensuring that the NRA's lauded "law-abiding and responsible" owners are in fact both, and that the incentives and penalties around both are strong.

To the folks who are gun-rights advocates:

Nobody is coming to take your guns.  There are some people who advocate doing so, but they can't.  You have a constitutional protection, which is about as strong as it gets, and despite the crazy political rhetoric to the contrary, we are a nation of laws.  You just sound ridiculous when you go off about how the first thing that Stalin, Hitler, etc. did was to take the citizens' guns.  We're not anywhere close to that situation: we have a constitutional protection to the right to bear arms that was not present in any of those situations, and we don't live in a dictatorship. Our laws and our constitution actually do get enforced, and our politicians are not above the law.  I don't blame you for being vigilant about potential erosion of your rights, but you're not going to lose your guns.  Nobody takes you seriously (nor should they) when you react to everything as if it were the final step before confiscation.  Join the debate in a sincere manner already, please, and quit with the "they're coming to take our guns" whining.  They're not because they can't.

That said, the 2nd amendment is like every other constitutional right: it is not absolute.  In the same way that there are limits on the 1st amendment, there are legitimate limits on the 2nd amendment as well.  No rational argument has ever been made to the contrary.  One obvious example is that you don't have the right to bear nuclear weapons or surface-to-air missiles; another is that we all agree that felons and mentally unstable people should not have guns.

Wayne LaPierre said a few weeks ago that "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."  He may have been right about that, but he leaped over an important piece: how did the bad guy get the gun?  As I said to the "gun control" folks above, we have a problem of too many bad guys getting guns far too easily.  If we all agree that baddies shouldn't get guns, then we should agree that we can do more to make it harder for them to do so.  Nothing is foolproof, nothing will stop all baddies from getting guns all of the time, but I also don't buy for a minute the argument that nothing can be done that is effective, or that any non-zero imposition on "good guys with guns" is too much.  If you choose to exercise your right to bear arms, then you must choose the responsibility that goes with having guns to help keep them out of the hands of bad guys.  That will mean some level of imposition.  Perhaps more than you like, but if it actually works (the key question), and it lets you have your guns, then it's consistent with the 2nd amendment and worth doing.

Oh, and stop with the argument about bats and other weapons.  Baddies with guns are a distinct problem from baddies with bats, for two reasons: (a) when you have a gun, you can kill people much more quickly than with other weapons, and (b) with a gun, you can kill someone without having to get up close to your victim (thus putting yourself at risk), which lowers the threshold to shooting.  I think these two assertions are well borne out by the statistics about the rates of murder with guns vs. other weapons.

So to both sides of the debate, I'll offer this request: we all agree that bad guys with guns are a serious problem, don't we?  So why can't we find effective means for solving that problem?

My rules for this election season

Republicans had their convention last week, Democrats this week, and we have another 8 weeks of this nonsense.

It's incredibly frustrating to me listening to both sides.  Not because of the issues per se (although I obviously have opinions on those), but from the whole way the political "debate" is performed.

So forthwith, here are my "rules" for the political process.  I'm not so naive as to think any of these will be respected by any politician, but I think if more people followed them then our system as a whole would work better.  Anybody who violates a rule should have to put a sock in it until at least after the election.  And these apply to people of ANY political persuasion.

• Don't define the parties by their crazies and extremists; it's easy to find examples of them in any party, and since they're the noisy ones they get lots of attention.  Watch where the decision makers and consensus of the party are.
• The other being wrong does not make them bad people, nor does it mean they have ill motives.
• Political truths that were once valid may no longer be true.
• Political truths applied in one situation may not apply to another.
• The other side being wrong doesn't make you right.
• ALL policies have unintended consequences and tradeoffs.  It is the weight of these - not their existence - that argues against a policy
• Even if the other side is wrong, their points about the downsides of your position are likely valid
• 99% of conspiracies aren't.
• Challenge yourself . If you're liberal, watch Fox news. If conservative, watch MSNBC.  If you respond to an issue and know your position immediately without thinking, stop and think about it.  Could you actually argue the other side's case convincingly in a mock debate?  If not, you probably don't really understand it.
• If you need to make up, distort, or omit facts, your case is weak. 
• People can look at the same facts and have different opinions about their implications.  (This is, IMO, the source of most political disputes)
• Don't forward email or post on Facebook without first checking whether something is true.
• Be skeptical of any data coming from a partisan source; it is selective at best, untrue or misleading at worst.
• Keynes was exactly right 100% of the time, except when he wasn't.  Corollary: Hayek was exactly right 100% of the time, except when he wasn't.

How big is appropriate for government?

The health care ruling a few weeks ago brought up the ages-old debate about what is the right size of government, and where the right balance is between individual liberty/freedom and government regulations/requirements are.  Many of the people arguing for the conservative/libertarian view of minimalist government also adhere to a fairly strict constitutional interpretation and think a lot about what the founders meant.

I don't wish to wade into the merits of the health care decision (much less the law) here, nor do I want to argue whether a constructionist approach is appropriate (especially since the latter is really a subjective call; a matter of one's perspective and political philosophy). 

Rather, I simply wanted to make an observation as to the nature of why government has grown in our daily lives so much more compared to in the days that the constitution was created.

In particular, I think that our society has changed in two key ways that must require at least some more government "intrusion" in our lives than in the colonial days.  (Whether these justify the level of increased intrusion is a question I will leave readers to determine for themselves).

The first key change is that 200+ years ago, the vast bulk of trade was local.  If you had a home, you probably built it yourself.  If you had furniture, you likely built that too.  You probably grew your own food.  Trade certainly existed - people were certainly not entirely self-sufficient - but they were significantly more so than they are today.  And most of what they did in trade they did locally and face to face. 

Libertarians often decry government consumer "protections" as being unnecessary because the market will adjust for charlatans and cheats.  200 years ago, that was likely true: if the general store owner was dishonest in his dealings with people, he'd quickly be out of business because he was very likely to personally know each of his customers. 

It's still true today that the market can self regulate to a degree, but much less so.  If you feel AT&T screwed you on your phone bill, that's generally just tough luck for you.  The sheer degree to which we each rely on trade and the impersonal nature of much of that trade makes establishing a trust relationship with each trading entity prohibitively inefficient.  As a result, having some degree of 3rd-party trust validation provides a grossly disproportionate amount of lubricant to the economy; without it, the economy would grind to a halt.  In today's environment, the government does some of this (FDA ensuring food standards, for example), the private sector/trade groups does other aspects of it (Better Business Bureau, or, as an example of doing this badly, the ratings agencies that failed so badly during the financial crisis). 

I believe that one can legitimately argue whether the balance of government/private 3rd-party trust providers should be tilted more towards government, is about right, or should be tilted towards more private sector.  And I suspect that the reasons much of it that is government done today are primarily financial (there may not be a good private sector model to fund it) and trust (self-policing can sometimes fail due to conflicts of interest).  But the notion of reducing this function to its colonial-era levels is a quaint reminiscing for a simpler time that ultimately leads to economic suicide.

The second key change from the days of the constitutional convention is simple scale.  When we were a few million people scattered across the colonies, the impact one could have on one another and upon the broader environment (economic as well as ecological) was limited.  Our resources, and space simply dwarfed our numbers and our ability to have negative impacts.  With over 300 million people and a vastly higher per-capita income, those days are long gone.  The tragedy of the commons is a very real problem, even if there is controversy about what are the best solutions to it. 

But again, as with having 3rd party trust agencies above, governments tend to step in where markets fail.  Thus it is perfectly reasonable to expect to see a larger role for government in a larger, more crowded, and more resource constrained society.

None of this is intended as an argument in favor of excessive government intrusion in our lives or limits on our freedoms; quite the contrary - I, for one, don't want government involved any more than necessary.   My point here is simply that as society grows in scale and in technological sophistication, the definition of "excessive" will move over time; we shouldn't pretend otherwise.

China and climate change

I was in China recently to learn more about the country's progress in the clean-tech arena.  "Clean-tech" is a vague term, but encompasses almost anything that reduces pollution and/or consumption of non-renewable resources.  China has enormous challenges in this space: energy insecurity from the facts that they (like us) import most of their oil, their air and water pollution are bad enough to be properly labeled "hellish", and extreme water scarcity, just to name a few.  And on top of this, they are now the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, which of course contributes to climate change.

The authoritarian government there is terrified of instability (and being thrown out of power, in particular), and their primary strategy to avoid this has been economic growth.  There has been an implicit (albeit coerced) bargain between the government and the people, in which the Chinese government will help the people to build better lives for themselves economically, and in exchange the people stay out of politics.  I think there is lots one could say about this relationship, and perhaps I'll comment on it another day, but for now I'll leave it at "I don't live there (thankfully), so it's not my decision."  The key thing for my point right now is that China views economic development as priorities number 1, 2, and 3.

Well, actually, number 1 and 2.  In its current 5-year plan, China has elevated sustainability to be one of its top 3 priorities.  There's a lot I can say about that (and will in another column), but I think it highlights a key distinction between how they approach problems like climate change and how we approach it.

In China, there is no debate about whether climate change is real or man-made.  But not because it's a suppressed/censored debate.  It's because people in the government are, by and large, well educated technocrats and they would look at you strangely for suggesting that it's some plot by left-wing scientists who are fudging their data in order to get government grants.  They look at the data, and draw what seems to be the obvious conclusion: it's real, and it's likely to be a huge problem.  There simply hasn't been any credible scientific alternative theories or model (of course, one could show up, but it hasn't) to the idea of man-made climate change.  (Certainly none that actually demonstrate that the models cannot be true).

Yet China is, at the moment, the world's biggest contributor to the problem.  One might ask how this can be if they actually believe that climate change is both real and bad.  The main reason is the bargain I referenced above: economic growth wins, and economic growth right now means carbon emissions.  Here in the US, we struggle with the same tension, of course, between emissions and the economic growth that causes them, yet somehow some of us allow the debate about policy to cloud our ideas about the underlying science.  But denial is a lousy strategy.  If the science is wrong and climate change is not real, then hooray - that's great news.  Unfortunately, there's more and more evidence that the science is wrong and climate change is actually going to be worse than modeled.  I hope that too is wrong, but alas hope is also not a strategy.

The Chinese seem to be able to accept the most likely scenario (climate change is real and bad) and address it within the limitations of their other constraints requiring economic growth.  But they are not ignoring it.  They have some aggressive goals about energy intensity per unit of GDP to build on some pretty impressive reductions in energy intensity over the previous 5-year plan, for example.  I personally don't think that's enough - after all, the climate doesn't care about energy intensity, it cares about absolute emissions level - but it is a necessary first step.  What's really required - and I think China understands this, they just aren't in a position technologically yet to make it happen - is a fundamental shift of the economy to low-carbon energy sources.  I believe that the classic tradeoff between "economic growth" and "clean energy" is ultimately a false choice, a failure to see opportunity in a challenge.  And I think China agrees with me.  They are investing heavily in alternative fuels, efficiency, and figuring out a low-carbon economy, and when they get the costs right, the transition will happen for economic reasons rather than environmental ones.  And China will do very nicely economically as a result.

We in the US, on the other hand, still compare people who think that maybe this climate change thing is real to terrorists and mass murders.  I wouldn't trade our political system for theirs, but I would very much like for us to adopt their dispassionate approaches to these sorts of issues.

Scientific "controversy" and a misunderstanding of science

Tennessee has just passed a law that allows science teachers to teach both sides of scientific theories that are subject to "dispute" or "debate."  While it's obvious to me that this is aimed squarely at evolution and global warming, and thus that it's really motivated by politics rather than improving science education (after all, teachers have never gotten into trouble for teaching students legitimate scientific inquiry and skepticism), I think someone needs to step in and remind people (a) how science works, and (b) what actually constitutes scientific "dispute" or "debate."  I'll be that someone.

Let's start with how science works: anyone who suggests that science can prove anything is full of beans.  Scientific methods and science cannot prove anything.  Now that might sound like a controversial and ridiculous statement, but let me clarify it: science can only disprove things.  This is why they are called scientific theories and not scientific facts.  A theory is good as long as it is not disproved.


This sounds counter intuitive, but it actually makes sense.  We view data about the world around us and form a hypothesis for what is going on.  A hypothesis must be testable (you can design an experiment to see if it works); otherwise, it is faith.  Nothing wrong with faith, but faith is not useful for describing the "how" of the world around you.  A hypothesis must also be able to make predictions, or else it is not terribly useful.  When we design an experiment to test a hypothesis, we are actually looking not to see if we can prove the hypothesis, but rather if we can disprove it.  If the experiment is inconsistent with the hypothesis, then it cannot be true - it is disproved and thus should be discarded, since it obviously and demonstrably doesn't work.  If it is consistent with the hypothesis, though, that doesn't mean the hypothesis is right, it just means that it could be right.

The simple example here is the hypothesis "all swans are white." (Apologies to Taleb)  You can design an experiment to test this: gather all the swans you can find, look at their color, and see if they are all white.  If you gather a million swans and they are all white, then your hypothesis is certainly looking pretty good, but - and this is key - it is not proven.  All it takes is one black swan and you have to throw it out.

This distinction between "proven" and "not proven wrong" is a subtle one, and when an idea is repeatedly tested and not disproved, we become casual about the distinction.  Newton's laws of motion (for example, distance = speed x time) have worked so well for centuries that we can on an everyday basis treat them as fact, although a pesky upstart scientist named Einstein showed that around the edges (namely approaching the speed of light) Newton's models are demonstrably wrong.

But that's how science works: when a model is shown not to work (or shown not to work in a particular domain), it must be thrown out and replaced with another model that does work.  It is only "proven" until it is disproved.

So, in a sense, all science is subject to "dispute" and "debate".  But some dispute/debate is more legitimate than others.  Particularly in the politically sensitive areas of climate change and evolution, people tend to make four critical errors:

• Confusing "not yet disproved" with "insufficiently proven."  In American criminal trials, we have the idea of proof "beyond a reasonable doubt," and we sometimes apply this threshold to scientific theories, especially ones (like climate change) where it is difficult or impossible to do controlled experiments.  But this is the wrong threshold - as described above, Newton's laws, on which our ability to fly airplanes and drive cars relies - could not meet this threshold.  It is not reasonable to expect any theory to meet this bar; the correct bar is "not contradicted by observable data."
• Treating flaws or open questions in a theory as proof for an alternate theory.  In the case of "intelligent design" as an alternative theory to evolution (which it isn't because it is neither disprovable nor predictive), perceived holes in evolution are used as proof that a higher being must have been involved.  This is a basic flaw in logic.  If there is a hole in evolution, that doesn't make an alternative theory any better.  Only if the alternative theory fits the facts better - and is predictive and testable (disprovable) - should the alternative gain any traction.
• Confusing debate over the details of how a theory works with the overall idea of the theory.  Both evolution and climate change have lots of unanswered questions about the mechanics of how they work.  Climate change cannot be tested with controlled experiments, so it relies on models and fitting to observed data, and the overall system is so complex and chaotic that there are always huge margins of error in any model.  Debate over these issues is healthy; models should be refined and reworked as more data comes in, and we need to always remember that a model is just that - a model.  But whether someone is correctly accounting for heat-island effect or cloud reflectivity (or whatever) has no bearing on whether the basic idea of pumping CO2 into the atmosphere traps heat.  Almost all of the debate in the scientific community about climate change is about the accuracy of the models, not over the basic principle of greenhouse gases trapping heat.
• Confusing "some people disagree with this" with "there is debate about the validity of the theory."  There are still people who believe the world is flat.  That does not mean that there is any debate about the shape of the earth.  Just because someone who calls himself a scientist openly questions something does not mean that the questions are worthy of discussion.  It is worth noting that most significant scientific advances were radical ideas from people who could be considered "crackpots" in their day : Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein.  (I've written on this very topic.) But it is also worth noting that for every "crackpot" who turns out to be a genius, there are 99 crackpots who are simply...crackpots.  I'm not asserting that people who question climate change are crackpots (although some certainly are); rather, I'm pointing out that to date they have pretty much all either focused on the details (as above), or their "smoking gun" evidence disproving the bulk of climate change theory has either not matched facts, or has not actually been a "smoking gun" at all.

Questioning scientific theories - including evolution and climate change - is healthy and necessary.  It is how our understanding of the world, umm, evolves.  I suspect (though I cannot prove!) that both of these theories will undoubtedly be ultimately disproved, but I also suspect that - like Newton's laws - the subsequent theories will not be wholesale replacements but rather incremental refinements (as Einstein's models were refinements on Newton's).  These theories, after all, have held up for so long precisely because they fit the observable data so well.

Unfortunately, Tennessee's new law is not aimed at this sort of productive questioning.  It is aimed at legitimizing pseudo-science under the guise of scientific discussion.  There is no meaningful scientific debate about whether evolution is real (although there are lots of questions to answer about how it works).  And there is no meaningful debate about whether the basic theory of climate change is valid - not because there is some liberal conspiracy to which most experts in the field somehow subscribe, but because the basics of the theory have failed so consistently and for so long to be disproved.  There is indeed plenty of debate about the accuracy of various models, whether it is man-made or natural, or whether we can (or should) do anything about it; some of that is scientific, some of that is policy, and all of it is healthy.  But when the number of Americans who doubt the basic ideas of evolution and climate change is large and growing, treating these debates as a debate over the larger idea is misleading and does not teach our students critical thinking on scientific issues.

Can tax cuts pay for themselves?

I think it's interesting the notion that people have that tax cuts either pay for themselves (via increased economic growth), or that they simply drive the country deeper into deficit.

It seems to me that neither is always the case; it all depends on the tax being cut, from what level, and to what level.  I'm not an economist, so forgive my naivete on this, but a simple thought experiment and math suggests that some tax cuts sometimes can more than pay for themselves, while others would not.  In particular, is there any reason that tax cuts wouldn't work like any other price-elasticity supply-demand curve?

As a thought experiment, let's think about how pricing would affect sales of, say, a Ford F150 truck.  Let's suppose that Ford prices the truck at $1M.  It's pretty safe to assume that this is such a high price that it will choke off all demand for the vehicle.  Now, suppose Ford lowers the price by 10% to $900K.  You're still so far out on the curve that this will not nudge demand - there will still be no sales.  Suppose, instead, that they lower the price to, say, $40,000.  I don't know if that's a good price or a bad price for an F150, but you can imagine that the demand will be a large multiple more than the demand was at near a million.  If that multiple is more than 25x, then Ford will make more revenue selling F150s at $40,000 than they made at $1,000,000. 

Now lets lower the price (we're ignoring cost and profit here!) from $40,000 to $30,000, then $20,000, then $10,000, and finally to just $1,000.  The first few price reductions will likely increase sales further as the truck becomes more affordable to more and more people.  But at some point, everyone who wants an F150 can afford one and the later price reductions have negligible (if any effect) on demand.  A price cut from $1,000 to $500 is unlikely to result in double the demand because $1,000 for a new truck was hardly any barrier at all.

What does this have to do with taxes?  Everything, really.  From 1944-1963, the highest marginal personal income tax rate was in the 91% range.  That is a hugely burdensome tax rate, and puts a huge damper on the resources people have to invest in economic activity.  That rate fell to about 70% in the 1960s.  Taxes on this income bracket dropped by about 23% (91% to 70%), so if economic activity caused taxable income in this bracket to increase by 30% (= 1 / 0.77), the tax cut would have paid for itself.  The economy did noticeably pick up in this time period, though proving a causal relationship to the tax cuts is obviously difficult to do.  But it certainly passes the sniff test that a 23% cut from 90% could yield 30% more growth.


Fast forward to now with a 35% top marginal tax rate.  Imagine the same amount of rate reduction - 21percentage points.  (This represents the same portion of income that the government in the 1960's stopped laying claim to.)  The top rate would go from 35% to a mere 14%.  The same 21 points that represented 23% of the 90+% tax rate now represents a 60% reduction, and that means that taxable income in that bracket would need to grow 250% (= 1 / 0.40) to pay for itself.  35% may be a "high" tax rate, but it isn't so high one can reasonably imagine that it is restraining a more than doubling of economic activity.  Even if one proposed a proportional tax cut - 23% off of 35% (to 27%), that 8-percentage-point reduction is unlikely to yield the required 30% growth to be self-funding.

Now, nobody is proposing cuts like this on our current tax rates.  My point here is that, in the same way that each dollar of price reduction on the truck affected demand for the truck differently depending on what the overall price of the truck was, each percentage point of tax reduction also has a different impact on both the tax burden and the threshold to be "self-funding" depending on what the overall tax burden is.  A 21-point reduction from 91% behaves very differently than a similar reduction from 35%.

My analysis above is greatly simplified, and I'm not responding to any particular proposal.  My only point is to say that "self funding tax cuts" bear the burden of proof: one must not assume that a proposed tax change is or is not self-funding.

Income Disparity and the Occupy Wall St. Crowd.

I've posted before about the income gap in this country.  Alas, I have to acknowledge I made a prediction that ultimately turned out to be wrong that the economic downturn would shrink the gap.  Well, as they say, predicting is hard, especially about the future, but even if I can't predict the future well, I stand by my overall points of what we should make of the income gap itself.

Anyhow, income inequality is back in the news with the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters making a big deal of it.  It's certainly a real issue (albeit, as I've said before, a symptom of underlying problems rather than a direct problem itself).  But I think the OWS folks both make the mistake of viewing it as the problem, but also making assumptions about the causes that imply fixes that would not be appropriate.

At a macro level, there are 3 ways that income inequality can arise.  For the sake of illustration (and easy math), let's assume we start with a nation of 100 people, each of whom makes $100/year.  The entire annual economy is thus $10,000, and there is (initially) no income inequality.

How can inequality arise?  I think there are three basic scenarios, and I think it's important to point out that they are not mutually exclusive.  Quite the contrary: I think they all happen, in varying degrees, over time, simultaneously with the others.

Scenario 1: "Malthus Model".  In this scenario, one or two people ("the 1%") enrich themselves at the expense of the rest, but the overall economic pie remains fixed (hence the name "Malthus Model", after the man who predicted starvation due to growth in population that outstripped production).

Bernie Madoff would certainly be an example here, as were the CDOs that sliced and diced mortgages and got rated AAA despite having lots of sub-prime crappy mortgages in it.  I think CEO pay (another OWS complaint) could also arguably be placed here, to the degree that any "excess" pay they get above and beyond the value the create for the company comes at the expense of shareholders and employees.  Whether any CEOs pay is excessive, of course, is a subjective call, but there is good evidence that it has gotten disconnected from CEO value, especially when more than half of company boards target their CEO pay to be above the 50th percentile.  That is, of course, mathematically impossible to achieve, but it results in CEO pay that increases much faster than the underlying fundamentals.

Lotteries, by the way, are also in this model: 100 people spend $1 on a lottery ticket, one person wins $100, so that person gets $99 richer at the expense of the others.

In any case, it seems to me that Malthus-model driven economic disparity is often (though not always, as the lottery example demonstrates) indicative of a problem.

Scenario 2: "Steve Jobs/MicroEconomic Success": suppose that one of the 100 people is Steve Jobs, and he invents Apple Inc.  This creates a huge amount of value, and since the company is Steve's he will keep a significant amount of that value.  Everybody else still makes $100 (or perhaps a they take home little less that year because they buy an iPhone), but Steve makes a lot more money.  So now there is huge inequality between the 1% (Steve) and everybody else.  Two things to note here: (a) the other 99% did not suffer due to Steve (to the degree that they spent money on iPhones, they did so because they felt the iPhone was more valuable to them than the money it cost), and, more importantly, (b) the overall pie grew significantly due to Steve's creation.

I would argue that income disparity from Scenario 2 is not a problem, and is in fact a "good thing."

Scenario 3: "MacroEconomic Changes".  This is arguably a variant on scenario 2, but in this case it isn't that the folks that get rich create disproportionate value and wealth for themselves, but rather that the entire economy grows by some percentage (sometimes negative).  So our economy may grow from $10,000 to $10,400 one year, and then drop to $10,200 the next year.  The inequalities arise here from the fact that the growth (positive or negative) is not spread evenly across the population.

There are many factors why this growth is uneven.  For example, not surprisingly, people with more education and/or more marketable skills tend to weather the downturns better and ride the economic growth more than their less educated or less market-ably skilled fellow citizens.  People who get hurt or sick have trouble even in good times, and may not be able to change jobs due to health insurance concerns.  Our aforementioned lottery winners do well regardless of the economy.  Workers with skills that match open jobs may not be able to take those jobs because it requires them to move and they can't sell their homes because their mortgages are under water (this is proving to be a huge stubborn issue in the current recession given its housing bubble origins).  Macroeconomic trends can change the value assigned to skilled labor, moving jobs to where it can be done more cheaply.  (I can address why I believe fighting this trend rather than adapting to it is generally a bad idea in another post).

There are many moving parts here, many reasons why economic ups and downs affect different populations or economic sectors in different ways.

For that reason, I think that income disparity from Scenario 3, unlike scenarios 1 and 2, does not easily lend itself to a "problem" or "good thing" label.

Furthermore, I think that this scenario is by far the dominant driver of inequality, followed by scenario 2.  I think the Malthus scenario covers too few cases to be a major cause.

And therein lies my issue with the OWS crowd's take on income disparity.  To hear the chanting and slogans and placards, one would think that our income disparity is almost exclusively due to Scenario 1.  If that were the case, then it would be a simple matter of shifting "ill gotten" wealth back to its rightful owners and all would be well again.  But alas, in a Scenario 2 world that sort of explicit wealth transfer truly would be punishing success (hold that thought) and in a Scenario 3 world that probably wouldn't solve anything anyhow.  So I think the OWS crowd is dangerously naive here.

Now before you think I'm totally dissing OWS and everything they believe in, let me put in a defense of the 99%: It is important that we have a strong and vibrant 99%.  If you are a member of the 1%, you need to realize three things.  First, if you think you got to be a 1-percenter in a vacuum, you are delusional.  You did it in a society with good transportation infrastructure, rule of law, low corruption, security, and so forth - all of which are government functions.  Secondly, stability is critical to your success, and places with high concentrations of wealth tend to be less stable than places where there is broad economic participation.  And finally, having a healthy 99% is critical to your continued membership in the 1% club.  Steve Jobs would not have made very much money, after all, if nobody could afford to buy Apple products.

I do not advocate any solution that has a direct aim to reduce wealth concentration.  Robin Hood is decidedly not the answer.  But there are reasonable steps to help ensure that the broad middle has a fighting chance to be economically significant participants in the economy.

Fortunately, America has long done well with this.  For example, we already have a progressive tax system.  Indeed this is (by definition) a higher burden on the wealthy than on the poor, but as long as it isn't punitive, it is a very reasonable way to ensure that healthy 99%.  A 35% top marginal tax bracket simply is not punitive, but then neither was 39.6% (which we had throughout the boom of the 90s) or even a little higher.  (I think when you start hitting 45% or more things start to get punitive).  There are good arguments that the overall size of government needs to shrink - and if so, the rates obviously could come down.  But unless and until that shrinking happens, the tax rates need to reflect actual costs.  "Starving the beast" has yet to actually work to tame government spending.

Another place where America has long shined is in making the Steve Jobs scenario above an attainable dream for anybody willing to put in the sweat and innovation necessary to achieve success.  There's a reason that Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. are American companies.

But the fact is that there remains much more to "solving" income inequality than having a progressive tax system and a good environment for startups, but I think they revolve around addressing the Scenario 3 issues.  Our housing crisis is exacerbating things.  Health costs are devastating for many people.  Our educational system is a mess, and a huge percentage of people studying STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math subject) are foreigners who twenty years ago would have stayed here with their skills but who are now going back to their newly-stable and newly-prosperous home countries, while more and more American students are studying far less marketable subjects like journalism.

These are not easy problems to solve, and simply transferring wealth does nothing to address them.  If the OWS crowd is serious about addressing inequality, they would do well to focus their energies on real solutions to the big macro-economic challenges that we face, not just getting angry about some perceived "unfairness" that (gasp) some people have more wealth than others do.  That's simply not productive.

The problem with global warming (or climate change)

I am pessimistic about our ability as a species to deal with the threat of climate change, and I think it's because this is an instance of a larger class of problems that we simply don't handle well.

Let me start by saying that I am not intending this to be a discussion of the science behind global warming. I have no particular scientific background in this area, and discussions/debates about this should really be limited to people who have that background. (I.e., being a politician makes you competent to discuss policy around global warming, but not to make pronouncements about whether or not it is real or man-made).

In any case, my point here does not depend on whether you believe climate change is real or not.

The usual tradeoff matrix for something like climate change is usually expressed something like this (AGW = "Anthropogenic Global Warming"):

	AGW is real and bad	AGW is bunk (or not as bad as feared)
We do nothing	We're hosed	Hooray - we didn't hurt the economy
We do something meaningful	It cost a lot, but we're saved	We killed the economy for nothing

As a broad generalization, conservatives tend to look at the downside of the lower right quadrant, the upside of the upper right quadrant, and the uncertainty of the lower left and conclude that there is no point in taking aggressive action to fight climate change, while liberals tend to look at the downside of the upper left and the upside of the lower right and demand action.

This is a classic tradeoff matrix, of course. But the challenge with climate change that makes this sort of analysis vexing is that if we choose to address it, we end up "making the wrong bet".

(If you believe AGW is bunk, please suspend your disbelief for a moment and assume it is real for the sake of the argument below; I'm not trying to get you to change your mind, you can resume your AGW skepticism afterwards.)

First of all, given all the uncertainties around climate models, there is no way to know for sure if we were to over-invest. So we could end up putting a greater economic drag on ourselves than is necessary (either because we could solve the problem with less cost, or, more pessimistically, because it's all futile anyhow). Actually "could" is the wrong word - there is no way to accurately predict precisely how much would be the right amount of cost to successfully fight climate change, so we would necessarily miss the mark.

But there is a broader challenge: suppose that somehow that we were to nail it: we make whatever changes manage to stop climate change in its tracks. Then it turns out that there is no way to distinguish success in the lower left quadrant above (we defeated global warming) from the lower right quadrant (we wasted a lot of money on something that isn't real). The economic cost of fighting climate change will be relatively easy to measure, but the underlying climate change that didn't happen cannot be measured - suggesting (though not proving!) that AGW was bunk in the first place, or at least that the economic cost incurred to fight it was overkill. And since we can't do a controlled experiment (two earths, one with lots of CO2 and one without), we can't determine if we spent the right amount or if the threat was less than advertised.

As a result, I suspect that the debate about policy will inevitably creep over the line into an (inappropriate for politicians) debate about the underlying science. And the only way that this ultimately gets settled is if we find ourselves in the upper-left quadrant. In other words, we only react well to hard provable evidence; we don't have the tools to deal well with theoretical issues. That doesn't seem like the right way to resolve an issue like this.

In Praise of Crackpots

There are a lot of crackpots out there. Not just political ones (though there's more of them than any other flavor), but conspiracy theorists who believe the moon landings were faked, people who believe that they can subdue tornadoes with electrical fields, people who believe that they have a cure for cancer but are being oppressed, and, yes, the most strident climate-change deniers. (In the latter category, I'm not including the folks who have legitimate scientific questions about the quality of data or the interpretation of that data or with the theories that arise from it; I'm talking about the folks who disregard any data that supports man-made climate change and embrace any and all data that could be seen as refuting it).

It's very easy to write off crackpots as a bunch of nutjobs. But it wouldn't be wise to do so. Every so often - very rarely indeed, but not never - the crackpot is right.

I think that the thing that makes a crackpot a crackpot is that they grasp on to the non-disprovable. The state of science is such that not everything that is false can necessarily be disproved. In the cases like the moon landing conspiracy, I think the conspiracy theory has been thoroughly disproved and we can ignore these crackpots.

But the are the folks who claim to have a cure for cancer, or who think that there is no anthropogenic climate change are generally in a different place: it's harder to definitively prove them "nutty," and sometimes they aren't.

If 90+% of scientists agree on something (again, take climate change), it is certainly wrong to say that it must be true. It's just super likely to be true. If a huge majority of scientists believe something, then the burden to show them wrong is very high indeed. Science is, after all, based on peer review and you advance if you discover replicable advancements in human knowledge; if it isn't replicable, you don't go very far.

But, ironically, the great leaps in science come from the crackpots. Newton, Galileo, Einstein (just to pick a few of my favorites) were "crackpots", espousing theories that were distinctly in the minority. I think it's fair to say, for example, that much better than 90% of scientists thought time was inelastic prior to Einstein's theory of relativity.

So the great paradox of crackpots is that we should dismiss almost all crackpots almost all of the time, because almost all of them are almost always, well, nuts. But we need to be careful because every now and then one of those "nutjobs" will turn out to be right.

I wonder who the next significant crackpot to be found right will be?

Self-un-fulfilling prophecies

Thomas Malthus is famous for predicting that population growth, which grows geometrically, will eventually outstrip the arithmetic growth in our ability to grow food (or provide any important resource such as energy). Poor guy, he's always been proven wrong (at least so far).

Of course, Malthus ultimately has to be right. For a ridiculous example that proves the point, I think it's pretty clear that the Earth alone cannot support more than, say, 10 to the 25 (1 followed by 25 zeros) people because the people alone would then weigh more than the whole weight of the earth.

But this is indeed a ridiculous limit; the more salient point in the criticism of Malthus has generally been the accurate observation that he neglected to account for the effects of innovation, and indeed innovation has always intervened before Malthusian limits could apply.

A great example of this is the very food production which spurred his theories, where the capacity of 19th century agriculture extrapolated across all potentially arable land would be sufficient to feed perhaps a billion or 2 people. But alas here we are today pushing 7 billion people, with lots of wasted food and an obesity problem in many nations. This is due to innovations in fertilizers and pesticides, which have dramatically increased yields faster than the population has grown.

Yet there is a perverse self-unfulfilling prophecy at work here: human innovation is motivated, at least in part, by the fear that failure to innovate will prove Malthus right. As described in the book "The Alchemy of Air," it was precisely the fear of starving populations that drove the discoveries of new fertilizers.

So I think there is an interesting irony that it is precisely the fear of Malthus being right which has led to his consistently being proven wrong.

Great article about facts and opinions

A friend pointed me to this great article in The Week that, in my opinion, explains so much about partisanship. Note that I'm not talking right-wing vs. left-wing, this is a human artifact. We simply don't like to be wrong.

The rapture is due to happen in 2hrs 10 minutes from now. I'm sure that tomorrow morning, when the rapture didn't happen, the folks who believe in it will have some perfectly "rational" reason for why.

Why the TSA needs to be dramatically overhauled

I know that I've complained about the TSA before. I need to do so again. The TSA is structurally broken.

Allow me an analogy.

I think we can all agree that the acceptable number of murders in, say, Chicago, is zero, that even one murder is one too many.

In that vein, imagine if we proposed that in order to reduce the number of Chicago murders to zero, we are going to impose the following new policies:

• No weapons of any kind, or things that could be weaponized (steak knives, for example) are allowed within city limits.
• Because arson could lead to murder, we ban all flammable liquids within Chicago. For good measure, though, since we can't easily distinguish flammable from non-flammable, we disallow any other liquids over 3oz from being taken into the city.
• Every person, without exception, is subject to a full search of everything in their possession in order to enter the city. They can refuse, but will be denied entry if they do.
• For good measure, a bunch of people who we think might be associated with gangs, or otherwise just don't seem right to us, will simply be prohibited from entering Chicago. The list of these people will be secret, and there is no recourse if you find yourself denied entry into Chicago.
  

This might achieve the goal of reducing the number of murders to zero (then again, it might not). But I think we can all agree that these restrictions would be ridiculous overkill (pardon the pun) to the murder problem, and an unreasonable restriction on people's rights.

Yet substitute "airline system" for "Chicago", and "terrorism" for "murder" (not that there's any meaningful outcome difference on the latter substitution) and it's exactly what we have with the TSA. Why do we treat these two situations differently?

It should not be surprising that the TSA is a one-way ratchet to increasingly intrusive and unreasonable "security" procedures. After all, we've given the TSA a single goal: zero tolerance for any sort of security threat. If they think of anything that could be exploited and don't do something to address it, they will be blamed, yet there is little or no incentive to put limits on how intrusive these procedures are, nor any reason to evaluate their efficacy. (And of course, the TSA is famous for thinking up new threats only after somebody has tried it, not before). As a result, first we take our shoes off, then we can't take liquids on board, now we have a choice between giving up our right to travel or giving up our right to be free from unreasonable searches.

So now we have full-body scanners and/or intrusive pat downs. Is there any evidence that these actually enhance security? Have they found any bad guys with the new procedures and technology that they would have missed with the old metal detectors?

Perhaps, although I certainly haven't heard of it in the news. So at the moment, the hypothesis that "The TSA is effective at providing security" seems to me to be without data to support it. One might argue that we haven't had a terrorist attempt to do anything with an airplane originating in the US (the TSA's jurisdiction) since 9/11, and therefore the TSA is doing its job. But I'd counter that with the observation that we hadn't had a hijacking or similar incident with a US-originated flight in the 20+ years prior to 9/11 either (pre-TSA), which is more than double the current lifetime of the TSA, so I don't think a 10-year absence of airline terror in the presence of the TSA proves that they're doing their job.

In fact, I have an alternative hypothesis: it is not the TSA that has kept the skies safe. Rather, it is old-fashioned intelligence gathering and alert passengers. In fact, I can think of 3 attempts to commit an act of terrorism on an airplane in the past several years. One was the plot to blow up airplanes over the ocean using liquid explosives, while the other two were the shoe-bomber and the underwear-bomber. The first, of course, was thwarted by intelligence, long before the TSA would have gotten involved, while the latter two were missed by TSA-equivalents in other countries (the flights didn't originate in the US) and were thwarted by alert passengers.

I recognize that my examples here are anecdotal and don't actually prove anything, but they also don't support the idea that the TSA is actually effectively thwarting terrorism, and they certainly are suggestive that my alternative hypothesis could very well be the accurate one.

I'd love to hear any sort of counter argument supporting the argument that the TSA is providing any meaningful value.

Pakistan: get over it

Pakistan's president yesterday loudly condemned any notion of incompetence or "complicity" with Al Queda and expressed indignation at the violation of his country's sovereignty, particularly over the fact that Pakistan was not consulted prior to the raid.

I understand that of course he has to say that to pacify his domestic audience. It is, after all, them who he serves.

But that doesn't make it total nonsense.

I should start with a few bits of defense for Pakistan. First of all, I believe that the government is in fact our ally. Not a good ally or a reliable ally, and one with decidedly different priorities and interests from us. But Pakistan has also lost many of its citizens to Islamic extremists, and the rational ones in the government realize that the monster they helped to create is dangerous to them. (Hmmm...that wasn't much of a defense, was it?)

Secondly, nobody has yet produced any evidence that the Pakistani military or ISI knew about or protected Bin Laden. Again, I suppose that wasn't a strong defense, but it needs to be said.

But enough of defending Pakistan. The president of Pakistan deserves all of the suspicion and ridicule he is experiencing.

First of all, most of the criticism is that Pakistan should have known that Bin Laden was in their midst. It is perfectly reasonable to ask why the US, halfway around the world, was able to figure out Bin Laden's presence, when the elite of the Pakistani military trained only half a mile away in ignorance. It begs the question of whether the Pakistanis were merely incompetent or actually in cahoots. Not a comfortable question for sure, but I'm afraid it's a perfectly reasonable one to ask. It is, I suppose, possible, that Bin Laden was just that good and his network of support was just that secure (i.e., a third option in the loaded question above), but as we learn more, that possibility seems less and less likely.

Scondly, there is good reason that we didn't coordinate with Pakistan in the Bin Laden raid. Whether or not your military or intelligence organizations knew about Bin Laden's presence, somebody did. Al Queda and the Taliban have a strong presence in the country, and the lack of concrete evidence tying that support to the military or ISI is no reason to assume that there is in fact no such support. As such, any warning or coordination would have had a very real - and very reasonable - risk of tipping Bin Laden off. Pakistan can be indignant about not being told, but the cold fact is that they did not deserve that level of trust. Yes, I suppose we did violate their sovereignty. And if Bin Laden had been in, say, England, with whom we do share common interests and where there isn't a strong base of support for Bin Laden, and where corruption is not endemic, we wouldn't have done it without coordination or permission. But alas, Pakistan is no England, this is a war, and this was not a police action. If a country does not want its sovereignty violated, perhaps it is better to first ensure that the world's most wanted terrorist does not take up residence within its borders.

My message to Pakistan: you'd have done the same if the tables were turned. Your protests are hollow and unjustified. Get over it. If you really want to help defeat Al Queda, after screwing up Bin Laden so badly, you should double down and work with us on the follow up: interrogation of Bin Laden's widows and helping track other cells and other operatives.



Pakistan's government may actually be an ally. And The fact of the matter is that Pakistan

A spending problem? What is the right level of spending?

I saw a Facebook post the other day that mentioned that "the problem with our deficit is that congress has a spending problem." It's a sentiment that I've heard many times, and while it's not surprising that this generally comes from conservatives (it is, after all, not exactly a common liberal complaint), what I find fascinating about the statement is that it's ironic coming from folks who are very market-oriented.

Let me quickly say that I have no problem with the sentiment being expressed here. I am extremely worried about our deficits and debt, and spending is obviously one of the two ways you can address these huge problems (the other, obviously, is revenue). While I personally think we need to address both spending and revenue, my point in this post is not to make an argument about that particular issue, if only because I don't think I have anything particularly enlightening to add to that discussion.

Rather, I want to focus on two somewhat more esoteric points:

1. The amount of spending is "correct".
2. Politicians are not addicted to spending

Huh? Am I making some liberal argument that we aren't spending too much? No, no, don't worry - I do agree we are spending too much. But the amount of spending is nevertheless the "correct" level, in that it is the best level as determined by the relevant marketplace (in this situation, Congress).

Allow me an analogy. What is the correct price of a share of, say, Microsoft? That is fundamentally an unknowable question. There are lots of ways to compute it, but they don't all agree. We generally view markets as the best way to determine such prices, and when we say that a share of Microsoft is worth, say, $25.50, that doesn't mean that everybody agrees that it should be $25.50. Some people believe it should be higher (and they're generally buying), some believe it should be lower, but this is the price where such forces balance out. At a broader level, the level of the Nasdaq index is a similar process, just one level higher. after all, nobody really buys or sells "the Nasdaq index", instead they just do the aforementioned process with each of the constituent stocks of the index and the index rises or falls as a side effect of these thousands of individual price movements. So if you ask "what's the correct level for the Nasdaq," you're really asking a nonsensical question. The correct level for the Nasdaq is not a particular value, but rather a process, and as long as it is computed correctly from its member stock values, then it is at "the correct" level. It may be a bubble, it may be oversold, but it is nonetheless "correct" and it is meaningless really to suggest that the value should be higher or lower. (Predicting where it will go is another matter altogether, but that is not the same thing as saying it is "wrong".)

Congressional spending is really the same way. The total spend is not something anybody formally agrees on really. Rather, it is a whole bunch of individual spending decisions: defense, social security, etc. Like the stock market, each of these individual spending items has people who think spending should be higher and those who think it should be lower, and the ultimate value in the budget is not correctly viewed as a "consensus" level so much as a "market clearing" level. And to continue the analogy, the total budget is analogous to the Nasdaq index: it's just the result of thousands of smaller market-clearing decisions.

The analogy carries one step further as well, actually. The stock market, for all of its efficiencies, is still a rather imperfect pricing mechanism, which is why prices swing, bubbles form and deflate, and so forth. But we use it because it's better than any alternative yet devised. I do not need to point out the flaws in our government's budget process (often compared to sausage making), but democracy, like the market, is also the worst possible way to do this, with the exception of all the others that have ever been tried. (Apologies to Churchill, who I believe is the source of that).

But the larger point here is that if you don't like the level of spending on an individual item (whether you think it's too low or too high), it is generally the result of something akin to a market process. If you don't like the result of it, you really have two options: (a) get involved and start buying or selling in that "marketplace", or (b) get the process changed. Note: the former is generally easier than the latter.

Which brings me to the second point. We don't have a spending problem per se. Politicians do indeed spend money, but they're not spending it on themselves (other than corruption, which thankfully is a minor problem in the US), so it's hard to see them doing it to serve some personal need that they have. I think a far better explanation is that politicians are addicted to their jobs (or to power), and spending is a powerful tool for satisfying that need.

More to the point: politicians don't spend money just to spend it. They do it for constituents. They build roads in their districts, steer contracts to their districts, spend money on things that their voters believe to be important such as national defense or social security and so forth. Which means that in the end, it's the voters who receive the benefits of the spending.

There's an important corollary to this: we all complain about the overall level of the budget and say that spending is too high (and we're right), but the problem is that pretty much all of that spending is going to things that somebody wants. Everybody has ideas about where spending should be cut, but there's very little consensus among those ideas for this reason. So it all gets worked out in the aforementioned budget "marketplace", as a huge aggregation of individual spending decisions.

We have met the enemy and it is us, not the politicians. If we really want to reduce overall spending (and I reiterate that I am in that camp), the only effective and non-reckless way to do it is to slog it out item by item in the budgeting marketplace. Focus on the individual spending decisions and the "budget index" will fall.

Environmentalists hate progress, right?

I keep seeing posts by folks (usually, but not always, on the far right) portraying all environmentalists as extremists who want us to effectively go back to living in caves in the name of reducing carbon footprint, and who are otherwise opposed to freedom and economic growth. In fact, some of the rhetoric here comes right out and says that it's about "control," such as Penn & Teller's episode of "Bullshit" where they "debunk" recycling, in which they declare - without any evidence - that control is in fact the real motive behind getting people to recycle. I'll leave my problems with this particular P&T episode for another day, but I think I need to stand up for environmentalists.

I recall a number of years ago hearing a conservative friend of mine talk about how when environmentalists see a suburb he sees wealth, better lives for people, freedom, etc., but environmentalists just see negatives: sprawl, degraded habitat, etc.

Who is right? Well, of course the answer is "both." Nothing is free; upsides like greater wealth and economic growth come with costs. You can focus on whichever you like, you can decide the where you believe the balance between the two lies, but it is naive to pretend that either upside or downside doesn't exist.

Environmentalists indeed tend to focus on the downsides of growth, and focusing on the downsides of course never makes anybody popular.

But let's use an economic analogy. At most businesses, there are two ways to increase profits: increase sales or lower the cost for each sale (thus increasing the margin for each sale). These are, of course, not mutually exclusive - in fact, they are often self-reinforcing. WalMart, for example, has a laser focus on lowering costs, which allows them to offer lower prices, which helps them to increase sales. And at a successful company like WalMart, I should point out, nobody who points out a way to lower costs gets accused of being opposed to increased sales.

Of course, businesses focus on those costs for which there is an economic signal to which they can respond - i.e., it is usually something that can be represented on the balance sheet or income statement.

Environmentalists are the cost-watchers for the stuff that doesn't have those direct impact on the financial statements. This doesn't mean they aren't costs, just that reducing the impact of these costs doesn't improve the bottom line, so the economic signal to reduce those costs is not nearly as strong, and thus it often requires other forms of pressure, such as that provided by environmental organizations.

I don't mean to imply that companies like WalMart don't respond to environmental costs - in fact, large companies such as WalMart, Coca-Cola, etc., have been leaders over the past decade in recognizing the need to make their practices sustainable, to lessen the impact of their operations on the planet. And they should be commended for this.

And I also don't mean to imply that there aren't extremist or naively idealistic environmentalists who truly want to reduce freedoms and/or economic growth in the name of saving the planet (or "control", if you are prone to conspiracy theories). Earth Liberation Front comes to mind here. Thankfully, these represent a tiny fraction of environmentalists and are viewed by the greater environmental movement the way the majority of Caucasians view the white supremacy movement - i.e., with great disdain.

But it is irresponsible to paint all environmentalists with a broad "extremist" brush when they fill an important role as the cost-watchers for our ecosystem.

Climate vs. Weather

OK, folks, I feel compelled to weigh in on this. I'm tired of people looking at individual weather phenomenon (Katrina, the recent tornadoes in the south, cold winters, heat waves) and declaring a connection to (or a refutation of) global warming.

It's apples and oranges. Weather and climate are different things.

Allow me the analogy to a roulette wheel in a casino. Imagine that when the wheel is spun, you knew the exact velocity and position of the wheel. You then use that to predict which number will be pointed to at any given moment, using the basic laws of physics. You predict what number will be at the top in 2 seconds, 4 seconds, 6 seconds, and so forth. Your prediction for 2 seconds will likely be pretty good. But due to imprecision in your measurements, your prediction for 4 seconds will not be OK but not as good as the 2-second prediction, for 6 seconds will be not as good as the 4-second prediction, you will not be terribly accurate at all at predicting the final resting number of the wheel. (If you want the details for why the predictive ability falls off, it is due to chaos theory.)

This is analogous to predicting the weather. A roulette wheel is of course far simpler than the weather (and doesn't have nearly the chaos-inducing non-linear variables), so in practice you'd do a lot better than a weather forecaster, but the principle is the same (and this is, after all, an analogy). In particular, you can see that predicting the roulette wheel (weather) gets significantly more difficult as time passes.

If the casino made its money "predicting" the roulette wheel, they'd lose money like crazy and go out of business quickly. But of course, we know empirically that as a rule casinos have a bit of a habit of making, not losing, money.

Why? Simple: they're not predicting the weather, they're looking at the climate. If predicting the weather is analogous to predicting the outcome of given roulette wheel spin, looking at the climate is analogous to predicting the AVERAGE outcome of MANY roulette wheel spins. In other words, it's looking at the statistics of the system rather than any individual outcome.

In the case of the roulette wheel, we know that over the long time, a fair roulette wheel will end on red a little less than half of the time, on black a little less than half of the time, and occasionally on 0 or 00. And that "little less than half" is where they make all of their money at the roulette table.

In the same way, climate is not about individual weather events, it's what the statistical averages and trends are in temperature, precipitation, etc. Having a "warming" climate doesn't mean that winter snowfall stops, or that we have nothing but heat waves and no cold snaps. But it does mean that over a long-ish period of time, when these things are averaged out, there are measurable trends in the statistics.

One heat wave, one hurricane, one deep freeze - it is impossible and thus meaningless to say that any of these would or would not have happened without climate change, or that any such event proves or disproves climate change theories.

This is like saying that 4 spins of the roulette wheel which, in a row, yield 4 reds somehow "proves" that the odds of the roulette wheel favor red. Assuming the wheel is not rigged or flawed, this proves nothing of the sort. People who make similar claims relating weather to climate are doing everyone a disservice by saying so. Climate science has its flaws, but its model and accuracy will be refined and improved in the aggregate, not by the individual weather event.