Paul Krugman is an economics columnist at the New York Times, and received the Nobel Prize in economics for work he did in the late 80’s. Those two things give him a certain cachet in the realm of economics policy. However, ever since George W. Bush was elected in 2000, he has turned nearly totally partisan, using his clout to attack conservatives and defend liberalism, at the expense of intellectual integrity. His latest column is an example of how wrapped up in partisan rhetoric he is.
Krugman is a Keynesian. Keynesians believe that in economic downturns massive government spending must take place to turn the economy around. This was the prevalent school of thought in the FDR administration, and the economic policies of the 1930’s reflect that. However, Krugman goes too far with his attempts to interpret Keynesian success from the 1940’s:
From an economic point of view World War II was, above all, a burst of deficit-financed government spending, on a scale that would never have been approved otherwise. Over the course of the war the federal government borrowed an amount equal to roughly twice the value of G.D.P. in 1940 — the equivalent of roughly $30 trillion today.
Had anyone proposed spending even a fraction that much before the war, people would have said the same things they’re saying today. They would have warned about crushing debt and runaway inflation. They would also have said, rightly, that the Depression was in large part caused by excess debt — and then have declared that it was impossible to fix this problem by issuing even more debt.
But guess what? Deficit spending created an economic boom — and the boom laid the foundation for long-run prosperity. Overall debt in the economy — public plus private — actually fell as a percentage of G.D.P., thanks to economic growth and, yes, some inflation, which reduced the real value of outstanding debts. And after the war, thanks to the improved financial position of the private sector, the economy was able to thrive without continuing deficits.
I’m no economist, nor even an economic historian, but it strikes me fairly obvious that America’s economic prosperity following WWII might have had something to do with the fact that it was the only industrialized nation that hadn’t been devastated by war. Germany, Russia, Britain, France – all had their industrial centers ravaged, their male populations decimated. BMW and Mitsubishi weren’t exactly in a position to challenge GM, Ford or Chrysler in 1946. Britain didn’t end food rationing until 1954 – nine years after the war ended.
I’m sure America’s economy would see an uptick if the rest of the world’s industrial infrastructure crumbled overnight. I don’t think we’d even need to go into public debt if it did happen to trigger the boom. I’m just not sure how Krugman is proposing for it happen.
Christopher Hitchens is a British polemicist whom I’ve admired for several years now. I’m not always his greatest fan, as he’s an strident, almost militant atheist and proud socialist. But he’s also brilliant, witty, and a ceaseless defender of Western civilization. I don’t think it’s a reach to describe him as a latter-day George Orwell. He has alternately described George H. Bush as an imbecilic monkey and imperialist, but also defended George W. Bush’s vision for Iraq and the Middle East. He was a principled but far from simple man.
He now has throat cancer. He was well known for his fondness of cigarettes and drink, and unfortunately those vices that helped to define him now appear to have caught up to him. I hope he’ll forgive me if I wish him godspeed in recovery.
I didn’t really intend to do two Global Warming posts in a row, but after talking to some friends that said they were completely ignorant of Climategate, I thought I’d post about it. A few months ago, hackers broke into and stole the e-mail records of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. This is one of the most influential Global Warming research outfits in the world. They were heavily influential on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that proclaimed the Global Warming situation dire.
It turns out that they have been engaged in some very shady things – blocking research critical of their findings, “losing” raw data so their findings couldn’t be checked, circumventing Freedom of Information Requests. Eventually, the head of the CRU had to step down. Yesterday, he was questioned by the British Parliament. The Guardian (which isn’t exactly a right-wing, global warming denier outfit) has a rather unflattering writeup. A few quick highlights:
But for the first time he did concede publicly that when he tried to repeat the 1990 study in 2008, he came up with radically different findings. Or, as he put it, “a slightly different conclusion”. Fully 40% of warming there in the past 60 years was due to urban influences. “It’s something we need to consider,” he said.
Also:
[T]he committee will be hard pressed to ignore the issue after the intervention of no less a body than the Institute of Physics. In 13 coruscating paragraphs of written evidence to MPs, it spoke of “prima facie evidence of determined and coordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law”, “manipulation of the publication and peer review system”, and “intolerance to challenge … which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process.” Ouch.
Ouch indeed.
A post over at Watts Up With That a few months ago caused quite a stir in the global warming debate. I meant to post about it then, but forgot until now.
Of particular note over the last few years was the “Hockey Stick Graph”, which showed a rapid rise in temperatures, and is featured frequently in discussions on Global Warming. The graph has come into some controversy, as a growing number of people question it’s accuracy. But the unique thing about the Watts Up With That post is that it puts aside those arguments and says, “Let’s assume it’s correct for a minute. Let’s look at it in the context of historical ice-core samples from Greenland and the Antarctic”. The result, to my mind, is pretty damning of the hysteria surrounding Global Warming.
In it, it shows that, if one frames the graph over the last 600 years or so, you end up with a picture very similar to the Hockey Stick graph. But, as one stretches out the view to include more time, the change in temperature becomes smaller and smaller, eventually becoming irrelevant when compared to the much larger variations that have occurred over the last half-million years.
I wanted to get some sort of confirmation of what I was seeing, and sure enough, I checked out the Wikipedia article on Ice Cores, and there was a plotting of Vostok Ice Core data the mirrored what was compiled by Watts Up With That.
In fact, one gets the impression that the whole of modern human civilization has occurred during a relatively brief warm period, and that the temperature variations we’ve seen over the last hundred or so years are insignificant compared to what happens naturally. Perhaps we should stop worrying about how to deal with things beyond our control and focus on things that we can. Clean, renewable sources of energy are worth-while in their own right, not because the world is going to end in the next ten years.
There is a program tonight on PBS titled “The Power of the Poor”, presented by Peruvian Economist Hernando de Soto (yes, just like the explorer). I’ve been a big fan of de Soto ever since college, when I read his book The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else.
His basic contention is that the fundamental difference between cronically destitute nations and prosperous ones is the ability of the common people to own and leverage property. He did a study, examining several very prosperous area, such as Hong Kong (pre-handover) and the US against places such as Egypt, to determine the number of bureaucratic steps needed to create a legal business. In the US and Hong Kong, it was only a handful of steps – in poor nations it would frequently take over a hundred, some not legal, in order to start a small business. De Soto’s contention is that the chief result of this inability to legally own businesses and property is that these nations have locked up a great deal of wealth that the poor would otherwise be able to leverage – it’s impossible to get a loan to expand or improve your business or property if you can’t get a loan because the bank can’t see evidence that you actually own anything.
De Soto understands how capitalism works at a very low level, and how it benefits the poor, far better than the talking heads you see on nightly news programs. I really look forward to watching the program.
Robert Novak died today. He was a political journalist. The world is lessened by his passing. RIP.
From Michael Leeden:
Long before the modern rationalizations for the “benign” nanny state, Confucius had given his own vision of the perfectly ordered pyramid with the emperor at the top, talking to God, and most of the rest of us at the bottom, lucky for the privilege to talk to their dog.
The bulk of human experience is tyranny, whereas liberty is the ultimate unprobability, a.k.a., America. Government of the people, for the people, by the people cannot survive unless the people has enough intestinal fortitude to make it work.
That reminds me of something J. Rufus Fears said about the American Revolution in his course on the History of Freedom. People rebel for many reasons – oppression, religion, power. The colonies were the least oppressed, most religiously tolerant, independent people on Earth (at least by the standards of the day). In fact, that’s one of the criticisms of the Revolution – both then and now – that the colonists were ungrateful for all the advantages they had. But the leaders of the Revolution weren’t people with nothing to lose – they were wealthy, those with everything to lose. And they were going up against Britain, which had just trounced France in the Seven Years War (French and Indian War). And if they lost, they would suffer the fate of traitors.
A people, with all the advantages in the world, going up against the most powerful nation in the world, risking everything, with the odds stacked against them. And doing it all on principle. The American Revolution was the most idealistic in history.
And it succeeded.
Happy Independence Day.
I was flipping through some TV channels today, and came across a National Geogrpahic show called “The Devil Bible”, about a medieval text called the Codex Gigas. A couple days ago, I had a casual conversation about Code Geass, and I though the similarities in the names were too close to be coincidental. Even if there’s no actual connection to the story of Code Geass (and it doesn’t appear to have any), anime does have a tradition of taking random western cultural references and using them completely out of context in their storylines (witness Evangelion), so I’m willing to bet that’s what happened here.
Still, the Codex Gigas is an interesting bit of trivia I hadn’t heard about before.
I’ve been bombarded by misconceptions about Republicans and conservative ideology recently. This is a post by Victor David Hanson over at National Review that illustrates quite well, I think, the sort of mindset that most conservatives have. Granted, it’s nominally about Obama, but I’m not posting it because it’s particularly insightful about the Democratic contender but because it shows how conservatives think:
A common trope of many pundits is that when they travel overseas now, they begin to tingle when those abroad, especially in the so-called former Third World, press them on Obama’s chances. Then the now banal theme follows: the Middle Easterner, African, South American, etc. tells the American pundit that he can’t believe an America would pick a (fill in the blank) — former Muslim, person of color, man with Hussein as a middle name, etc. — and that suddenly this liberality has restored his faith in the United States.
Then the pundit, straining to be fair, usually says he doesn’t know whether Obama could change things as much as his foreign admirers imagine, but at least this is an exciting time (finally) to once again be American. Indeed, the argument that an Obama presidency would appeal to our critics overseas and prove our liberality is becoming a powerful reason to vote for Obama for many of our elites.
Aside from the obvious point that we should not pick our presidents on the basis of whether those in mostly autocratic, non-democratic societies approve, there is something very tribal and racialist about all this chauvinism.
If a white male Christian of European ancestry were suddenly a likely successor to the Mubarak dictatorship, or were next in line to take over the Mugabe kleptocracy, or were stealing Venezuela from Hugo Chavez, or were going to be elected the next leader of South Africa, it would be of less than zero importance to me, and I would hope to other Americans of similar backgrounds. And I think most of us would shudder should an Englishman or Australian say “I just hope your next President is another white male Christian like McCain.” I was in Greece in 1988 when the socialist liberal Greeks went ga-ga over Mike Dukakis solely on the basis on his shared ethnic background and it seemed pretty absurd, especially when many promised they would change their dark view of Reagan’s America if a Greek-American were elected President.
So, one, I don’t see what is so great when a foreigner tells an American journalist that his view of America might change should we elect a person closer to his own perceived racial or religious self-image. Seems instead illiberal, tribal, and retrograde. And two, if Egyptians, Iranians, Congolese, or Bolivians want real changes in their own lives, then they should look to their own autocratic systems, not the United States that can do little to alleviate their mostly self-inflicted miseries other than to continue to shell out hundreds of billions in petrodollars and ever more humanitarian aid.
I recently came across a scholarly work investigating the history of the term “No Irish Need Apply”, and what it’s role was in history. Being that a number of elderly Irish-Americans remember signs in their youth with the term (notably, Edward Kennedy), and given the long history of Irish immigrants in America, it’s interesting to dig into the history.
To skip to the end, the basic conclusions of the article were that in isolated cases in the 19th century, such notices may have appeared, but would have almost exclusively been limited toward Irish-Catholic maids, whom mothers did not want to give undue influence over their generally protestant children. It certainly didn’t extend itself to the general workforce, for which there was no evidence to be found.
Next Page »
