Systemic causation

In the world of science and technology, the difference between acceptable and not acceptable can sometimes be measured in parts per billion or a few thousandths of an inch.  As a result, trained scientists tend to be very careful with their proclamations.  This caution tends to create uncertainty when there is little reason for it.  This is especially damaging when the world of politics intersects with science.  A scientist may be 99.9999% certain of his findings—a degree of confidence no politician can or has ever had about anything—yet because the scientist wants to be absolutely accurate, he comes across as having serious doubts in a political argument.

Here Lakoff steps into the fray to explain why a better understanding of the word "causation" may dramatically assist the public's understanding of the climate change phenomena.  This is good stuff and obviously necessary.

Hurricane Sandy—counting the costs

One of the many scandals of this fall's Presidential election is that the two major candidates had three debates lasting 270 minutes and the subject of climate change was not mentioned once.  Not even superficially.  Candy Crowley, one of the debate moderators, was asked how such a thing could happen and she claimed that she wanted to focus on the economy.  Candy baby, in 2012 we burned up 8.8 million acres from wildfires that destroyed hundreds of homes while the corn belt was scorched by an unprecedented drought.  And now New York is being slapped around by the second "storm of the century" in two years.  Kind of hard to imagine anything more relevant to the economy than climate change.

Well, at least they were forced to close the New York stock exchange so even the fools who think economics is only about markets are being forced to admit the new crazy climate reality.  But as you can see from these articles, the thinking is not exactly deep.  I mean, Bill McKibben is one of my favorite writers and he focuses on the damage that has been caused to the subway system.  But when he compares New York to an old growth forest, it becomes pretty clear that he doesn't really understand the function of design and maintenance of infrastructure.  And when insurance companies can only focus on the losses that will accrue to underwriters, it's really clear that no one of "importance" can even imagine the damage that has been done.

But hey, they will put a number on it.  Perhaps it will even be large enough to attract the attention of a dullard like Crowley.

Who is eating the higher food prices?

Sunday I went grocery shopping and paid less than $2 for a gallon of milk.  Most other prices were similarly reasonable and close to what I have paid for the last few years.  My point is that the high grain prices caused by last summer's drought are NOT showing up at the retail level.  At least not yet.  It's not for lack of trying.  If anyone raises their prices, all you have to do is wait a couple of weeks and they will have gone back down.  Yes, there is some successful stealth price rises such as reduced package sizes with the old prices, but the overwhelming reality is that nobody in the food industry has pricing power these days.

I don't see higher prices showing up at the local eateries either.  So the lesson seems to be that while someone is eating the higher food prices, it is the food processors, wholesalers, retailers and eateries who are suffering the major margin reductions.  Dairy farmers are obviously losing money.  And I have NO idea how most small restaurants are surviving these days.

Naming hurricanes

Gotta love this idea.  The very least we can do with the deniers of reality is shame them.  Attaching their names to catastrophes would be a fine start.

Austerity is so last month

Now that the damage has been done, we find some of the banking community waking up to the reality that austerity is very, VERY destructive to the ability of an individual or nation to service a debt.  And since performing loans are the only real assets moneylenders have, this is not a good thing.  Once upon a time, bankers actually believed the saying, "NEVER kill your customers!"  Ah! the good old days before the business was consumed by sociopathic greed.

Wasting youth

This is so precious.  A generation of people has had their hopes dashed and their lives consigned to irrelevance.  But you know, the tragedy isn't real until someone attaches a number to it—it doesn't matter how superficial they might be.  Even so, 153 Billion Euros is a very large number, no matter how much has been left out.

Climate change (again)

If the effects of climate change are most noticeable the further you are from the ocean, the equator, and sea level, Bolivia which is a landlocked country whose capital LaPaz is over 4000 meters (13,300 feet) above sea level should be an ideal example.  It is.

Bolivia has taken it upon herself to warn the rest of us about the impending calamity.  Unfortunately, those who wish to deny climate change are pretty much impervious to evidence.

Tony's Political Economy Round-up, October 27, 2012

In Neoliberalism Kills, Part One, letsgetitdone (Joe Firestone, who is Managing Director and CEO of the Knowledge Management Consortium International (KMCI), crunches the numbers to compare the Affordable Care Act (ACA or Obamacare), with Romney's plan, the Conyers-Kucinich Medicare for All bill (HR 676), and true universal coverage, to see how many lives of poor Americans our elites are willing to throw away.

The ACA saves hundreds of thousands of lives compared with the benchmark and Romney scenarios; but it still projects an additional 286,000 fatalities through 2022 under the ACA scenario, and a total of 427,000 fatalities from 2010 through 2022. This compares to nearly 800,000 under the Romney scenario and just over 700,000 for the no change benchmark. Certainly, the ACA is much better than the Benchmark or Romney alternatives, but it’s hard to avoid noting that the most striking comparison is between any of these three alternatives, and the Medicare for All alternative. Had that alternative been legislated in 2009 and implemented by January of 2010, we’d be looking at virtually no fatalities due to lack of insurance rather than 400,000 or 700,000, or 800,000.

Then he asks the important question: What Was the Justification for Accepting the Cost of Those Lives? 

Saturday toons 27 OCT 12

The Nordics don't want to bail out anyone

The money boys are doing something very dangerous—they are screwing with their legitimacy.  Now it's one thing for guys like me to question the legitimacy of the high priests of finance who turn paper and electronic information into symbols for wealth that virtually everyone agrees with, it's quite another thing entirely when these conversations migrate out into the general public.  And while it is tempting to describe bankers as these dim mediocrities who not only cannot design or manufacture light bulbs—they are hard-pressed to change one, their claims to Masters of the Universe status are justified simply because they get the rest of us to believe their magic / bullshit.  I consider this perhaps the most interesting sociological fact, ever.

But when you ask someone in Finland or Denmark to cosign for bad loans made by German and French banks made to Spain and Greece, you are seriously taxing the bullshit's ability to describe reality.  After all, why should some monetary information contained on computer chips be used to destroy living standards in Rovaniemi Finland?  And when folks are asked to accept something so fundamentally unjust, they begin to question the mechanisms that allow it to happen.  Now bankster bullshit is very powerful, but it will not stand up to much close inspection.  Because while the bullshit is powerful, it's still bullshit.  As the French nobility discovered in the 18th century, it's a very short ride from Master of the Universe to the guillotine.

We are about to discover if the banksters are smart enough to act in their own interests.  Because if they are, they will act to save their legitimacy—their single most important asset.  They will reverse their austerity agenda, they will clean up the raging corruption in their trading houses / casinos, they will radically restructure debt, and they will dramatically tone down their public presence.  If the banksters wish to survive, they will quietly restore the global economy to health.  And with abundant examples of how this can be done, there is absolute NO excuse for them not to do it.

Food shortage update

We got a crop here in southeast Minnesota, but September was the driest ever recorded.  
Here a combine stirs up enough dust harvesting soybeans to create a fair imitation of 
ground fog.  Well, at least farmers spent almost nothing for crop drying.

Will USA really elect Gordon Gekko?

Gordon Gekko.  Fictional takeover bandit played by Michel Douglas in Oliver Stone's 1985 movie Wall Street.  In the movie's happy ending, Gekko goes to jail.  Of course, back in the 1980s, folks still went to jail for white collar crimes.  Now they complain if folks merely notice that their activities are extremely destructive.

Building a company that pays its workers a decent wage, that pays its taxes, and delivers a product that customers are happy to pay for—is usually the outcome of genius and the hard work of many, many actors.  It is actually a very rare event.  To destroy such a company so a few thieves can make some quick "profits" ranks as the most odious of economic crimes imaginable.  That those thieves can get away with such crimes is astonishing.  That someone who made his fortune engaging in such theft is now running for President claiming his criminal acts qualify him to run a nation is crazy.

Meet Mitt Gekko—an uber vandal who promises to do to the country what he did to the companies that once provided honest employment to thousands of workers.

The Predators are evil AND crazy

In some ways, it is slightly (and I mean slightly) comforting to know the we in USA do not hold a monopoly on people who genuinely hate science.  Of course, this is hardly new.  The Predators think nothing of stealing everything the Producers do, so why should we be so surprised when they demonstrate their demented ignorance by adding cruelty to their palette.  Legend has it that Ivan the Terrible blinded the architects of St. Basil's so they could never build anything more beautiful.  And then there was the Catholic Church that threatened Galileo with torture for the "sin" of observing the moons of Jupiter.

But this is truly insane.  Because of the absurd number of variables, predicting an earthquake to within the accuracy of a century would be an amazing accomplishment.  But the Predators cannot understand that reality and actually think that accuracy can be raised and refined by inflicting punishment.  This is Dark-Ages level of stupidity and was inflicted on working scientists by the Italian legal system—one of the "educated" subsets of the Predator Classes.

Canceling sovereign debt

Last summer I got into a depressing exchange.  The guy wanted to know what I would propose to deal with the massive national debt as he was certain this was the biggest problem facing the country.  He suggested cutting social security.

I explained that yes, we are certainly deep in debt.  We are in debt to the poisoned atmosphere, we are in debt to the depleted oil fields, we are debt to the soils that grow food, etc.  We have MANY real debts!  Then there are the "debts" we owe the electronic storage systems of banks.  Those are the debts the bankers and politicians talk about almost exclusively when they want to sound "responsible."  Yet these are the debts we could eliminate by pressing a few buttons.  Unfortunately, the debts caused by climate change or the end to the age of petroleum cannot be cancelled nearly so easily. But since those debts to storage systems are the only ones anyone can bring themselves to address, they get in the way of even addressing the real debts.  So the FIRST thing we need to do is push those damn buttons.

Because I have been thinking along these lines since at least the 1980s, I am not overly optimistic that we will see a global debt cancellation anytime soon.  But last week, we saw an "important" paper from the IMF (yes!) proposing just that.  The Greenback Party, the Non-Partisan League, The People's Party, etc. have been validated by an organization that has spent decades ruining the lives of billions of people with their austere structural adjustment dictates.

Iceland—the best response to 2008

Iceland took a quite different path in response to the financial meltdown of 2008.  For one thing, they actually threw some of their crooked bankers in jail.  But this was far from enough.  They realized that the financial catastrophe was partly the result of a systemic problem and set about to reform their society to prevent it from happening again.  So they decided to write a new constitution.  Even better, they used the tools of the Internet to enable real direct democracy.

Now Iceland has some advantages going into such an effort.  Not only does she have a nearly total literate population, but surprising numbers of her citizens are astonishing well-read.  She also has a 1000+ year democratic tradition.

Here's the story as written just before the vote on Saturday.

Status emulation in a good cause

Thorstein Veblen wrote that status emulation was a very powerful human motivation—second only to the survival instinct and sometimes not even in second place.  I remember when I read his description of folks being "well-dressed but ill clad" and thinking of some of the more extreme examples I had encountered while driving taxis during college.  On bitterly cold nights I would pick up women at places like Orchestra Hall who had on skimpy cocktail dresses and very expensive high-heeled shoes that were not exactly a good match for icy sidewalks.  Cast out in the elements, they probably had a life expectancy of less than five minutes but damn, they looked good.

It was observations like this that made me a lifelong fan of Veblen's.  Not only did he have deep insights into how humans made many of their economic choices, these insight were often extremely prescient.  I have often wondered what Veblen would say if could see what television advertising has done to status emulation.  But if status emulation can sell off-road trucklets to suburban housewives who will never even venture down strange alleys, I would imagine it can be used to sell PV panels.  And now we see that there are studies that show such outcomes can already be demonstrated.

Transaction tax

A lot of the damage done by finance to the real economy is simply a function of speed.  Bad things happen when you can move money around faster than factories and labor.  When I first became aware of this problem, I would make cracks like, "The problem with Wall Street is that they think long-term planning is deciding where to have tomorrow's lunch."  Since the real economy operates at times on a schedule that can stretch into decades, it is obvious that short-term thinking can severely damage long-term projects.

But now we have reduced the trading lag in the financial world to nano-seconds. Even Mark Cuban believes this is madness.  And virtually ALL this useless trading for trading's sake would disappear with a transaction tax.  If it only slows down trading, a transaction tax is worth putting into place.  Unfortunately, a handful of people are making big bucks from useless high-speed trading so a common-sense idea that would benefit virtually all of us becomes this huge political struggle with plenty of money to buy a large pile of corruption.

Glass Steagall in Europe?

Glass-Steagall worked so well for so many years, folks who believe it a good idea tend to think of it in terms of one of those lightning-bolt moments when genius drifted down.  As an Institutionalist, I must disagree—we believe that good ideas spread between intellectual disciplines.  In this case, the intellectual godfather was ship design.  The idea is if somehow you get a hole in your hull, you have bulkheads and water-tight doors to seal off the damage so you can limp home.  Glass Steagall was simply a plan to keep disasters in one part of the economy from spreading to the whole thing.

I was especially pleased that Charles Ferguson brought up the ships-with-bulkheads example in "Inside Job."  Because since no one is coming up with a better plan for protecting the necessary parts of finance, Carter Glass's great idea will not go away.

The Predator Classes have a Mecca

I have a minor quibble with Petras' use of the term "parasite" and I am not completely convinced that London is all that much worse than New York, but calling what is happening in London a Crime Wave is completely accurate.

Carbon dioxide to fuels?

(h/t to kfathi, thanks)
Normally, I don't pay much attention to stories like this one.  The reason is that over a lifetime of being asked for technological recommendations, I have gotten VERY conservative because if something doesn't work, I am the one who gets blamed.  Hence my "Home Depot rule"—if you can't buy your parts at a regular retail outlet, it's probably too experimental to use on your home.

So here we have a perfect example of an experimental process.  Supposedly some Brits have figured out a way to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and convert it to a liquid fuel.  If the laws governing the conservation of energy mean anything, it will require at least as much energy to run this process as was released by burning the fuel in the first place.  And since atmospheric CO2 is very diffused, it will probably require MUCH more.  Of course, once you have manufactured this precious fuel, there is a mighty incentive to use it—at which point that CO2 goes back into the atmosphere.  So this process conserves no energy nor lowers atmospheric CO2.  So the question becomes, "What's the point?"

Not that we should worry about this much—the inventors claim that they will need 15 years to scale up this process to a refinery-sized operation.  Of course, these "tiny" intrusions of reality don't stop the headline writers at The Independent from claiming this is a "massive boost" in the fight against the energy crises.

Flash-mobbing Beethoven

Watching the bankster / Predators destroying the great civilizations of Europe with no more motivation than greed and sadism, sometimes it easy to forget just how amazing those civilizations really are. This "flash mob" performing Beethoven on the the streets of Vienna was an excellent reminder for me.