Random Readings

First Item:

Not believing in the greenhouse effect, I mean global warming, I mean "climate change" is not a kook-fringe position. Even some of the authors of the UN's climate reports don't believe it.

See this story.

By the way, have you noticed how the problem has morphed over the years?

I remember reading all about "The Greenhouse Effect" in elementary school and junior high. A specific, verifiable problem with a specific, verifiable mechanism driving it, which turned out to specifically not be happening.

Next, we heard about global warming. A specific, verifiable problem with a vague mechanism driving it, that turns out to have happened for about 30 years, but now . . . not so much.

Enter "climate change." This may be a winner. This is the real "change we can believe in" Both the problem and the mechanism are vague enough that no one can disprove them. Earth gets warmer = climate change! Earth gets colder = climate change! Every honest person, when asked "is the climate changing?" must answer "yes." Then the yelling about the horrors of capitalism, the evils of SUVs and the poor polar bears starts, and no one listens to the rest of the answer (from the article):

what do I believe about climate change? Firstly climate change is real, and has occurred on Earth for at least 4 billion years as long as an atmosphere and oceans have existed. Climate change occurs in cycles at various time scales, with the shorter time scales known as weather (by convention the distinction is 35 years). Trying to stop or control climate change is akin to stopping ocean tides. Secondly, I believe human activities affect climate, otherwise why would I bother with a mortgage. The climate inside my house is different to the climate that would exist if my house were gone.

Second Item:

Maryland has done us a service by demonstrating the effects of a huge tax increase on "the wealthy." The Wall street Journal has the story here.

Basically they raised the tax rate on those making over $1 million dollars a year. Here's what happened:

The Baltimore Sun predicted the rich would "grin and bear it." One year later, nobody's grinning. One-third of the millionaires have disappeared from Maryland tax rolls. In 2008 roughly 3,000 million-dollar income tax returns were filed by the end of April. This year there were 2,000, which the state comptroller's office concedes is a "substantial decline." On those missing returns, the government collects 6.25% of nothing. Instead of the state coffers gaining the extra $106 million the politicians predicted, millionaires paid $100 million less in taxes than they did last year -- even at higher rates.

Huh, who'd have thought? As the article explains "this is one reason that depending on the rich to finance government is so ill-advised: Progressive tax rates create mountains of cash during good times that vanish during recessions."

Breakthrough in Medical Research

An enduring mystery of the human body has been solved. Where does belly button lint comes from? A Fox News article sums up the research:

'Abdominal hair is mainly responsible for the accumulation of navel lint,' proclaims Steinhauser in the abstract to his paper, presented in the online version of the journal Medical Hypotheses. 'Therefore, this is a typically male phenomenon. The abdominal hair collects fibers from cotton shirts and directs them into the navel where they are compacted to a felt-like matter.'

"Typically male?" What are you trying to say about men?

That's in keeping with a medium-scale Australian study cited by London's Daily Telegraph, which found that the average bearer of navel lint was "a slightly overweight middle-aged male with a hairy abdomen." . . . The hair's scales act like a kind of barbed hooks. . . . Abdominal hair often seems to grow in concentric circles around the navel.

That passage makes my belly button sound a little like the "all-powerful Sarlacc" from Return of the Jedi. As a slightly overweight, middle-aged man with a hairy abdomen, I can confirm that I do, indeed, collect belly button lint . . . let me rephrase that. Lint collects in my belly button. Don't worry, Becky, I'm not saving up to knit a sweater, or make flannel board characters, or anything weird like that.

Maybe if I comb some of those "concentric circles" another direction . . . hmmm . . . something to think about.

(Someone should nominate this for an IgNobel prize, if it hasn't been nominated already)

Amen

A great article in the UK Daily Mail today on the true motivations of a segment of the environmental movement.

Jonathon Porritt, the [UK] Government's 'green' adviser, has said that couples who have more than two children are being 'irresponsible' by creating an unbearable burden on the environment.

Curbing population growth through contraception and abortion must therefore be at the heart of policies to fight man-made global warming.

Apparently this is all because people have to accept responsibility 'for their total environmental footprint'.

That's what having children amounts to, apparently, in his mind.

The blessings of a large family and the contribution this makes to prosperity and progress don't figure at all. Instead, children are to be measured solely by their burdensome impact on the planet.

What kind of sinister and dehumanised mindset is this? It is no coincidence that the country which comes nearest to Jonathon's ideal society is Communist China, which imposed a murderously cruel policy of restricting families to one child apiece. For the desire to reduce the number of children that parents produce is innately totalitarian.

I can't say it any better.

Read the rest of it here.

One More Thing to Worry About . . .

And just when I thought I had enough to worry about:

Forward-facing strollers may harm babies emotionally

Oh dear, I'll be sure to put that on my list of important things to worry about . . . let's see . . . that'll be about number 154,567. I'll get right on that.

I can't wait for the activists to ban non-conforming strollers.

Apparently I Don't Understand Economics

We all know inflation is bad. Rising prices devalue our money and make it harder to buy things. Apparently the opposite is also bad. Deflation - falling prices - is also bad for the economy, at least according to economists quoted by MSNBC.

“A benign decline in prices amidst a sluggish but recovering economy would be unwelcome but tolerable,” Merrill Lynch economist David Rosenberg wrote in a note to clients this week.

Unwelcome to whom, Mr. Rosenberg? I know plenty of people who like to pay less for goods of all types. I've heard of weirdos who like to pay more, but they're much more rare.

“But the price slashing now under way as the consumer beats a hasty retreat could allow that corrosive deflationary spiral to take hold — something the Fed wants to avoid at all costs.”

The Fed wants to avoid falling prices "at all costs?" boy, with friends like that, who needs enemies?

As I said, I'm not an economist, but perhaps someone who is could answer this question for me:

If inflation is bad and deflation is bad, then what, precisely, do you expect prices to do?

Should a pound of cheese always have the same price? If so, then the USSR had this economics thing all figured out. They just printed the price right on the label. Year after year a jar of tomato sauce was 40 kopeks. Your parents paid 40 kopeks and, by darn, your children would pay 40 kopeks. Is that the answer?

The problem I have with this idea is that (as I have learned both in life, and in school), in a market, there needs to be a mechanism to balance supply and demand. That mechanism is price. If I want 40 dollars for a widget, and you don't think it is worth 40 dollars, guess what? No sale. Deflation has to occur to meet your demand.

At this point any "real economist" is probably either rolling on the floor laughing, pulling out his hair in frustration, or muttering incoherently about Econ 110 having no relationship to "real economics."

Well, maybe not - but the economists in the MSNBC story seem to have nothing but contempt for consumers. They give the distinct impression that they believe the average of consumers' judgments about the worth of goods (otherwise known as the 'market price') is wrong, and that they, the "elite" know what things are worth.

Pardon my skepticism, but are these the same "elite" who have guided our economy to it's current prosperous state? The ones who never saw the housing bubble coming? Who watched house prices rise 10% per year as wages rose 2% and saw nothing to worry about? Who thought sub-prime mortgages were a terrific idea? Or, a little farther back, thought stratospheric stock prices for unprofitable .com businesses were just the "new economy?" Or thought that Pres. Bush's tax cuts would unacceptably reduce govt. revenue? or that Reagan's tax cuts would do nothing the stimulate the economy? Or thought that Sweden was a model of a well-run economy?

Now who should be laughing?

I'll say it again. Economics is not a science. It is a pseudoscience. Any claims to truth or predictive ability that it makes are a fraud.

Economics is a descriptive art - like psychology. Also like psychology, it has no power to predict future behavior because every person in the system is an agent unto herself, and not an automaton. This is why no one saw this crisis coming. Economists admit that this is unprecedented and was almost completely unforeseen - and they are right - they just don't see it as a failure of their 'science.'

Economics is (at best) a social science, a descriptive study of human behavior. It is individual psychology mis-applied to huge groups of people, and it goes through fads just like any other field of study. It also has its quacks like any other field. Keep this in mind next time an economist claims to know something.