by Dave Schuler on January 27, 2012
Riffing on my last post, I can’t help but wonder if there’s something that we lose track of too easily. We really have no idea of the state of technology in the very distant past. We’ve deduced what life was like 3,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 years ago based on the presence or absence of implements made of bone, stone, pottery, and metal, the vestiges of things that have lasted over the millennia. However, there may well have been things made of leather, wood, basketry, and cloth of enormous complexity and sophistication. Those things have vanished.
There are some reasons to believe that’s true based, for example, on the design of pottery which makes little sense as pottery but makes a good deal of sense if the shards we’ve found were made in imitation of the design of baskets. But we’ll never really know.
by Dave Schuler on January 27, 2012
My first reaction to this article, titled “Complex Fish Traps Over 7,500 Years Old Found in Russia”:
An international team of archeologists, led by Ignacio Clemente, a researcher with the Spanish National Research Council, has discovered and documented an assemblage of fish seines and traps in the Dubna Basin near Moscow that are dated to be more than 7,500 years old. They say that the equipment, among the oldest found in Europe, displays a surprisingly advanced technical complexity. The finds illuminate the role of fishing among European settlements of the early Holocene (about 10,000 years ago), particularly where people did not practice agriculture until just before the advent of the Iron Age.
was “I wonder if they caught anything?”
My second reaction was to wonder if they’d found containers that might have once held beer in the vicinity of the traps.
I have old and fond memories of helping my Uncle George (he wasn’t my blood uncle but rather the husband of my maternal grandmother’s best friend and the closest thing I had to a grandfather) tend his trout lines. For several years running when I was a kid I spent a week with them in their house on stilts “down on the riverr”, on the banks of the Meramec River. I don’t ever recall his catching anything but I do recall his consuming a certain amount of beer in the process.
You know what they say: give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he’ll sit in a boat and drink beer all day.
by Dave Schuler on January 27, 2012
In the Wall Street Journal this morning there’s a very interesting open letter, signed by sixteen prominent scientists that
- Urges calm in “de-carbonizing”
- Condemns the Lysenkoism-like enforcement of orthodoxy in an area in which there is no consensus
Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society, from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to remove the word “incontrovertible” from its description of a scientific issue? There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question “cui bono?” Or the modern update, “Follow the money.”
Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them.
My own views are that
- I think that the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is legitimate cause for concern and deserving of substantial study.
- The proposals for dealing with whatever problems carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may cause are draconian, don’t do a great deal about the problem, but would create a ruling oligarchy.
- The lack of increase in global warming over the last ten years has, shall we say, cast a cloud over the models that predicted global warming.
- A considerable proportion of the increase in extremes of weather in recent years can be explained by the Asian Brown Cloud, which now extends into central China.
I’ve been in favor of a Pigouvian tax on gasoline for the last 35 years, mostly but not exclusively for geopolitical reasons. The only significant presidential candidate to propose such a thing was resoundingly defeated at the polls. Technology and exhaustion of the Middle East oil fields among other reasons may render that view obsolete. We’ll see.
I think it’s ironic that the rush to do something about carbon dioxide emissions embodied in the defunct Kyoto Protocol may have actually induced some of the problems it was intended to solve. More of European reduction in carbon emissions has been accomplished by off-shoring manufacturing to China (where the problem becomes intractible) than by their cap and trade system which, fortunately, we have elected not to emulate.
I’m also concerned that political correctness has caused us to ignore the tremendous concentration of population in enormous cities in India, China, and the rest of the developing world creating substantial heat islands which themselves would seem likely to influence weather at least locally and, possibly, intercontinentally. But that’s a subject for another post./li
by Dave Schuler on January 26, 2012
I think that Walter Russell Mead is onto something. It’s genuinely astounding how nostalgic all of the presidential aspirants are. As both Megan McArdle and Dr. Mead have pointed out, it certainly appears that the president is nostalgic for the 50s and 60s, while the Republican aspirants seem to be nostalgic for the 1920s, 1890s, or even the 1870s. It’s not as though we haven’t tried weak central governments, laissez-faire capitalism, and trade-only isolationism.
Is America’s future one of managing our decline? As I see it that’s where the nostalgic strategies take us.
Will social media increasingly drive the agenda? Will we become increasingly tweeted and facebooked? If online virtual communities supplant geographically-based face-to-face communities, I find it hard to see how that doesn’t make our foreign, trade, immigration, education, and social policies look increasingly ridiculous. If your work is on the web and your friends, colleagues, and neighbors are in Taiwan and Sweden, why pay to educate the kids who live next door? Arnold Kling has written on this subject at length and suggested virtual governments rather than geographically-based ones, something I find unlikely.
I’m not so sure. The actual statistics on this are terribly hard to come by but traffic on social media sites seems to have peaked in the United States and most new traffic is coming from places that haven’t achieved saturation. I’m not saying that social media will vanish. I’m saying that they probably are what they are.
Will there by a Liberalism 5.0? What will it look like?
by Dave Schuler on January 26, 2012
I’ve scoffed at the president’s proposal for improving on-time high school graduation rates and I’m not the only one. I think it’s only fair that I present at least one proposal that I think has a better chance of improving graduation rates in the most troubled areas. I won’t deny that I’m skeptical that paying teachers more will improve on-time high school graduation rates. Teachers’ pay rates have increased enormously over the last thirty years and we’ve got precious little to show for it (although we might have something as this study, recently brought to my attention, points out). Here’s my proposal: pay high school kids to go to school and to make progress.
The program would need to be carefully constructed. Only the most troubled schools. You’d need to have the kids clock in and out and get paid only at the end of the day. Cut class and they’re ineligible. Over 18 and they’re ineligible. Not making progress towards graduation and they’re ineligible.
Not a perfect system and I can see any number of flaws but at least it’s an incentive approach rather than a punitive one.
by Dave Schuler on January 26, 2012
Walter Russell Mead has an extended article in a vein similar to what I posted a bit earlier today:
Fordism was once a term of abuse hurled at the factory system by Marxist critics who, rightly, deplored the alienation and anomie that mass production for mass consumption entailed. Has the Fordist factory system and the big box consumerism that goes with it now become our ideal, the highest form of social life our minds can conceive? Social critics also denounced our school system, justifiably, as a mediocre, conformity inducing, alienating, time wasting system that trained kids to sit still, follow directions and move with the herd. The blue model built big-box schools where the children of factory workers could get the standardized social and intellectual training necessary to enable most of them to graduate into the big-box Ford plant and shop in the big-box store. Maybe that was a huge social advance at one time, but is that something to aspire to or be proud of today? Don’t we want to teach our children to do something smarter than move in large groups by the clock and the bell, follow directions and always color between the lines?
What’s the “post-blue model”? We don’t know but we’re hurtling towards it.
The success of our institutions and ideas has so changed the world that they don’t work any more. We cannot turn back the clock, nor should we try. America’s job is to boldly go where none have gone before, not to consume our energies in vain attempts to recreate the glories of an unattainable past. We need to do for our times and circumstances what other Americans have done before us: Recast classic Anglo-American liberal thought, still the cultural and moral foundation of American life and the source of the commonsense reasoning that guides most Americans as they evaluate policy ideas and party programs, in ways that address the challenges before us.
Read the whole thing.
by Dave Schuler on January 26, 2012
Megan McArdle has a pretty fair take on President Obama’s economic proposals in the State of the Union message. After quoting from the interview in which the president said if didn’t turn the economy around in three years he would be a one-term proposition, she remarks:
If Obama didn’t want to be judged on the basis of the economy’s performance, he shouldn’t have let his mouth write checks that he couldn’t cash. If it turned out to maybe be a little harder to steer the economy where you want it than he thought it was, then maybe he should lay off claiming that the Republicans drove the thing into a ditch.
But he hasn’t. Instead he’s complaining that the GOP won’t let him steer–pretty rich considering that he started out with a 60-seat majority in Congress, and chose to ignore the economy in favor of passing a health care bill that has gotten even less popular since we passed it to find out what was in it.
That’s the harsh version. The slightly kinder version is that Obama, stymied by an economy that’s still pretty weak, and an opposition that has no more interest in cooperating with him than Republicans did with Hoover, has turned to a laundry list of weak proposals that sound pleasing to interest groups, but wouldn’t achieve much. Of those, the best was allowing students who study here to stay here; the stupidest was probably adding yet another investigation of bank fraud (what have you been doing for the last three years, Mr. President?) And the worst was the bizarre proposal for states to force students to stay in school until graduation or the age of 18.
She then identifies the connecting thread in the speech as nostalgia for the 1950s or early 1960s. That’s a complaint I’ve made around here from time to time. Whether through ignorance of modern U. S. business or preference for the Fordist model of Big Business and Big Business, collaborating under the guidance of the velvet-gloved fist of Big Government, far too often Democrats tailor their policies towards that temporary, long-vanished Fordist world.
That world is failing everywhere, not just here. It could only exist in the isolated bubble of the 1950s when the U. S. was the world’s only functioning industrial economy, the others rebuilding after the war. Had Big Labor been successful in boosting the wages of its members faster and higher in the 1970s and 1980s, that would only have resulted in the jobs of its members that delivered high wages and only required modest skills being driven overseas faster.
It’s easier for Big Government to deal with Big Business but Big Business has shed jobs at an alarming rate. At it’s peak employment General Motors employed 600,000 people, mostly in the United States. Now it’s a third that. However successful GM is it will never be the engine of job creation it was once upon a time.
Like it or not rather than relying on Big Business to revive the American economy, we need many, many more small, growing start-ups. The president’s proposal for that, easier credit for small businesses, is laughable. Today’s new businesses tend not to be as capital intensive as the new businesses of the 1950s. They’re frequently financed using credit cards. And anybody who’s tried to obtain an SBA loan knows that the ability to obtain one is essentially a signal that you don’t need one.
The most important thing that government could do to aid in the formation of new, young, growing businesses that will provide the jobs of the future is to get the heck out of the way. What do we get instead? The Stop Online Privacy Act which if enacted will beat down new and growing business to the benefit of a handful of established intellectual property barons.
by Dave Schuler on January 25, 2012
Last night’s State of the Union message was, as I suspect most of us expected in an election year State of the Union message, a stump speech and, like most SOTUs, loaded with scads of proposals we’ll never hear from again. Here’s what the editors of the Washington Post heard:
A STATE OF THE UNION address from a president seeking reelection is always an odd event. Especially in the face of a divided Congress, the president’s proclaimed program stands little chance of enactment. The ambitious agenda of years past gives way to the knowledge, born of painful experience, of how difficult that will be to achieve. Meanwhile, the president’s proposals are made in the context of the race about to be joined, stacked up against the pie-in-the-sky promises of his opponents. The subtext is, inevitably, less a blueprint of the year to come than an explanation of why the president deserves reelection and a sneak preview of a second-term agenda.
Neither I nor they found the speech particularly divisive. I found the speech notably empty of meaningful content. Here’s a quick test to help you see what I mean. Place “the reason that” as the opening of a sentence, whatever the apparent purpose of a particular policy proposal is next, and then the president’s proposal and see how it sounds. Let’s try some examples.
The reason that the high school graduation rate isn’t higher is that those who fail to graduate on time aren’t forced to stay in school until they turn 18.
The reason that income inequality has increased in the United States is that the top .1% of income earners aren’t taxed at a marginal rate of 30%.
The reason that more companies aren’t returning their manufacturing facilities to the U. S. is that the tax incentives they receive for doing so aren’t high enough.
IMO all of these assertions are risible. Here’s my point: even if every proposal in the SOTU were enacted into law I believe they would only effect minor changes in the problems that face us. 18 year old non-graduates would age out of the system rather than graduate. The highest income earners would adjust their compensation to avoid taxation (not to mention that the reason for increasing income inequality in the U. S. is that the incomes of the poorest haven’t increased fast enough not that the incomes of billionaires have increased too fast). China’s low labor costs and superior production engineering as well as the improved access to the Chinese market that local manufacturing provides would keep manufacturing there.
In a speech in which we don’t expect everything that’s proposed to be enacted into law and, arguably, nothing that’s proposed will be enacted into law why not aim for the sky? Why not dream big?
The full text of the speech is here.
Update
Let me put it another way. One way of looking at the last couple of years has been that the president has been blocked at every turn by obstructionist Republicans. I strongly suspect that will be the theme of the president’s re-election campaign. But there’s another way of looking at things as the editors of the Wall Street Journal explain in their remarks on the speech:
The New Yorker magazine this week has posted on its website a 57-page memo that economic adviser Larry Summers wrote to Mr. Obama in December 2008. It lays out nearly his entire agenda for the “stimulus,” reviving housing, the auto bailout and saving the financial industry. If anything, the memo overstates what would be needed to stabilize the financial panic, but nearly all of the stimulus spending priorities that the memo deemed “feasible” made it into law. They simply didn’t work as promised.
The Pelosi Congress also passed ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, cash for clunkers, the housing tax credit, and much more. The only Obama priority it didn’t pass was cap-and-trade, which was killed by Senate Democrats.
Mr. Obama’s regulators also currently have some 149 major rules underway, which are those that cost more than $100 million. The 112th Congress hasn’t been able to kill a single major rule. The most it has been able to do is extend the Bush tax rates—which helped the economy by avoiding a tax shock—and slow the rate of increase in federal spending. This President has been “obstructed” less than anyone since LBJ.
When you get what you ask for blaming the results on obstruction is a pretty neat trick if you can pull it off.
