As far as I can tell here’s Lawrence Summers’s strategy for spurring economic growth: the beatings will continue until morale improves. After examining and dismissing two possible strategies, “emphasize what is seen as the economy’s deep supply-side fundamentals: the skills of the workforce, companies’ capacity for innovation, structural tax reform and ensuring the sustainability of entitlement programs” and “lowering relevant interest rates and capital costs as much as possible and relying on regulatory policies to ensure financial stability”, his proposal is to increase demand, both by increasing government spending and increasing private spending. Ignoring the circular nature of his proposals (the way to encourage spending is to spend more), I’m a bit concerned about his approaches.

“Public investment” as it’s been construed recently does precious little to produce sustainable economic growth. We don’t need more infrastructure spending (defined as building roads and bridges). We’re already overbuilt. Although the actual construction spending might do a bit of largely localized good, ensuring that we have 154 bridges across the Mississippi rather than 153 or that all cities with more than 50,000 population are within ten miles of an Interstate has practically no residual benefit. Neither does spending more on healthcare or education. More healthcare and education might but the pattern of the last thirty years is that greater inputs do not yield greater outputs. If anything, it’s the reverse. We spend a multiple today in real terms of what we did twenty years ago on education without material benefit except in a Red Queen sort of way.

I’m open to the the idea of public spending as a means of producing sustainable growth but I’d like to see some specific proposals. This is not the 1930s. Now we have a large component of the economy that’s mobilized to suck up every dollar the federal government is willing to throw.

Similarly with Dr. Summers’s approach to encouraging private investment:

Much could be done in the energy sector to unleash private investment toward fossil fuels and renewables. Regulation that requires more rapid replacement of coal-fired power plants would increase investment and push growth as well as help the environment.

Does this strike anyone else as a nearly perfect example of the “Parable of the Broken Window”?

Here’s an alternative: the president could approve the building of the Keystone pipeline. It appears that’s something that people already want to do rather than breaking a window so the glass can be replaced.

However, I’d like to hear other suggestions.

I just seems to me that if we continue to do what we’ve been doing, which is largely what Dr. Summers advocates, we’ll continue to get the results we’ve been getting.

Baby, it’s cold outside:

Strong winds and record cold plunged Chicago into a dangerous deep freeze Monday morning, closing highways and causing delays on the CTA and Metra. The temperature at O’Hare Airport hit minus 16 at 7:51 a.m., and wind chills dropped to minus 42 as Chicago turned into “Chi-Beria.”

City officials did not mince words in warning of the public the extreme weather.

“If you can stay indoors. Please do so,” said Gary Schenkel, executive director of the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications. “Everyday activities may not be feasible.”

Even my Samoyeds who normally relish temperatures realize that today’s temperature is just wrong. That’s consistent with our previous experience. Once the wind chill goes down to about -40°F even they generally seek shelter.

Tonight Chicago is closed on account of the cold:

As the region braces for brutal sub-zero cold, Chicago city officials have one brief bit of advice: stay inside.

“If you can stay indoors, please do so,” Gary Schenkel, executive director for the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications, told reporters Sunday. He added: “Everyday activities may not be feasible.”

Schenkel and a host of other city department heads addressed the media Sunday at the OEMC headquarters, laying out their plans for the next several days of bitter cold. Mayor Rahm Emanuel was not at the meeting and is out of town, officials said.

Chicago Public Schools reversed course on Sunday afternoon, canceling clases on Monday, hours after the Chicago Teachers Union issued a statement saying schools should be closed because of the extreme cold. Originally, CPS officials gave parents the option to send their kids to school – or keep them home.

Most schools in the Chicago area will be closed tomorrow, showing great caution about the sub-zero temperatures that are expected here then.

A word of advice to Mayor Emanuel: Chicagoans can be sensitive about mayoral responses to weather emergencies.

The other day as I was going through the checkout line at my beloved Happy Foods, I shared a chuckle with the assistant manager at the service desk, a woman almost as gray-haired as I am. “These kids”, referring to the teenage and early twenty-somethings who do most of the checking there, “have never experienced what’s coming down the pike at us. We have.” She agreed.

On Fridays during the month of January Dr. Sean Michael Carroll, physicist at the California Institute of Technology, is hosting a film series, “Introduction to Science in the Movies”, on Turner Classic Movies. Here’s the list of movies that will be screened:

• Nobel Prize Winners

• The Man in the White Suit
• A Beautiful Mind

• For All Mankind
• Countdown
• Marooned

• The Bride of Frankenstein
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941)

• The Thing (from Another World)
• Forbidden Planet
• Solaris

• The Spirit of St. Louis
• Gallant Journey

• Silkwood
• Beginning or the End
• These Are the Damned

• Edison the Man
• The Magic Box

• It Happens Every Spring
• The Man in the White Suit
• Bye Bye Birdie

• First Men in the Moon
• The Time Machine (1960)

• The Story of Louis Pasteur
• Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet
• Charly

Some of these movies are those that occurred to me immediately, e.g. The Story of Louis Pasteur, The Man in the White Suit. I don’t think that Edison the Man really qualifies because I think that Edison was an engineer rather than a scientist. A Beautiful Mind, Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, and Madame Curie are great suggestions (on catching a bit of Madame Curie my wife wisecracked a trailer slogan that somehow never made it into the film’s actual promotion—”Greer Garson is radiant as Madame Curie!”).

Some of the pictures in the list are real stretches, e.g. The Spirit of St. Louis. I’d’ve picked David Lean’s 1952 The Sound Barrier. There’s a lot more real science in it. And Bye Bye Birdie? No explanation is given for its inclusion and the only explanation I can think of for its inclusion is that Albert actually wants to be biochemist.

I’d have substituted Frankenstein for Bride of Frankenstein but that’s a quibble. And I’d’ve replaced the execrable Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde with The Invisible Ray, which IIRC actually concludes with the line “there are some things that we were not meant to know”.

Although H. G. Wells is one of the foundational science fiction writers, there’s precious little science in his works. Actually, for Wells science is the MacGuffin in stories that are actually social commentary.

What movies would you have included in a film series on science in the movies?

My site was down for a day for unknown reasons. I’m working with my web host to see if we can nail it down a little farther.

What struck me about the caption to a photo accompanying this NPR article about obesity in the developing world:

Government workers exercise at their office in Mexico City, August 2013. To counter the obesity epidemic, the city requires all government employees to do at least 20 minutes of exercise each day.

had nothing to do with obesity. It was heck, I’d be happy if Chicago required its workers to do at least 20 minutes of work each day.

The big news in Chicago as in much of the rest of the country is the weather:

Lots of freezing pipes, long underwear and cars that refuse to start.

These things are expected to arrive Monday along with a cold front that could bring the most frigid weather Chicagoans have ever experienced.

The record of minus 27 was set Jan. 20, 1985.

Monday’s high will be 6 below zero, according to the National Weather service. The low, expected to arrive in the evening, is predicted to reach minus 20, the weather service said.

“Breaking the record is not impossible,” said National Weather Service Meteorologist Gino Izzi.

“And wind chills are just going to be ungodly,” said Izzo, who noted that intermittent gusts up to 30 mph will hit the Chicago area Friday night and stick around for several days, bringing windchills of approaching minus 50.

I’m not sure how I’d make the decision on whether to open the Chicago Public Schools on Monday or not. I lean towards opening them. For a lot of the kids who attend they’ll be safer and more protected in school than if they stayed home. And better fed. For many kids the meals they get at school are the only decent meals they get.

On a side note, how I long for the days of the four Ws! Give us the news, guys. We don’t need a point-of-view.

Although The Economist does take note of Chicago’s public pension problems:

The woes of the city and the state of Illinois – which has its own, worst-in-the-nation, $100bn unfunded pension liability – have been driven primarily by the government’s failure to pay its share to keep its pension promises.

But this month, after years of inaction, Illinois passed a bill to tackle its unfunded pension liability. The state hopes the new law will save $160bn over the next 30 years – savings that will come from cuts in retirement benefits for state workers and forcing the state to make its pension contributions. The law has won plaudits as a first step towards fiscal reform. But it comes only after repeated downgrades that have left Illinois with the lowest credit rating of any US state.

Now it is up to Mr Emanuel, the hard-nosed former Obama administration official, to do the same for Chicago. Any proposal to solve the city’s pension problem is bound to look much like the state deal – cutting benefits for public workers and raising contributions.

its analysis doesn’t adequately characterize how serious Chicago’s problem is.

Chicago has two problems, an immediate problem and a long term problem. Chicago’s immediate problem is the $1 billion payment into its public pension fund required by new state regulations. There’s no obvious way for Chicago to raise that kind of revenue. The city already has the highest sales tax in the nation. There are limits to how fast the city can raise property taxes. The city does not have the power to levy a tax on income.

In recent years most of the city’s incremental revenue has come as a result of increasing fees. There’s only so much that can be realized that way—nothing like the $1 billion the city must come up with.

Paying the pensions of its retired public employees is the long term problem. The whopping pay increase given to Chicago teachers last year will aggravate that problem.

Predictably, Mayor Emanuel’s prescription for fixing the immediate problem is for the state to ease its requirements. That doesn’t actually accomplish anything other than kicking the can down the road.

The Economist’s prescription, following the lead of the state of Illinois, has a small problem. I don’t think that Illinois’s or Chicago’s attempts at weaseling out of their pension commitments will pass court muster. That depends entirely on how much water the state’s judges (who, amusingly, were exempted from the state’s recent pension reform law) are willing to carry for the state’s pols. They’d need to be willing to ignore both the language of the state’s constitution and precedent. I don’t believe they’re that willing.

As I see it there are two possible remedies for Chicago’s public pension problems. Illinois is already 50th among the states in its contribution to education (despite constitutional language about the state having the primary responsibility for education, language that has been found to be advisory only). The state could start kicking more money Chicago’s way.

Or Chicago could follow Detroit’s lead and declare bankruptcy.

The most depresing thing I’ve read so far this year is this post from Popehat:

The older I get, the more I see, the more I read, the more clear it becomes to me that the entire game is rigged. The leftists and the rightists each see half of the fraud. The lefties correctly note that a poor kid caught with cocaine goes to jail, while a Bush can write it off as a youthful mistake (they somehow overlook the fact that their man Barrack hasn’t granted clemency to any one of the people doing federal time for the same felonies he committed). The righties note that government subsidized windmills kill protected eagles with impunity while Joe Sixpack would be deep in the crap if he even picked up a dead eagle from the side of the road. The lefties note that no one was prosecuted over the financial meltdown. The righties note that the Obama administration rewrote bankruptcy law on the fly to loot value from GM stockholders and hand it to the unions. The lefties note that Republicans tweak export rules to give big corporations subsidies. Every now and then both sides join together to note that, hey! the government is spying on every one of us…or that, hey! the government stole a bunch of people’s houses and gave them to Pfizer, because a privately owned for-profit corporation is apparently what the Constitution means by “public use”.

He goes on with more analysis with which I suspect that some of my readers will agree wholeheartedly. He concludes:

The system is not fixable because it is not broken. It is working, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to give the insiders their royal prerogatives, and to shove the regulations, the laws, and the debt up the asses of everyone else.

His prescription: burn the whole thing down.

That’s the one thing that puzzles me about the post. What makes him think that doing that would result in an improvement? A better new system rising from the ashes of the old is not inevitable. I don’t believe it’s even historical. What’s much more common is more misery for the people at the bottom of the social hierarchy and us “regular peons” and a new group of amoral opportunists supplanting the old ones.

I think there’s some reason for hope. For example, here in Chicago recently. After noting that those attending the “town hall meeting” didn’t appear to be much interested in the meetings convener, Rev. Al Sharpton’s topic of gun control:

A second surprise was that many black attendees were so critical of corrupt local Democratic lawmakers, who one person called the “Chicago machine,” according to Breitbart.com.

“We don’t have a gangs, guns, drugs problem,” said one panelist. “We have a nepotism, cronyism and patronage problem.”

“The manner in which we have been voting needs to change. I’m here to say to you that we have been trained to vote in a specific manner,” said Wendy Pearson, an activist against Chicago’s recent school closings, according to Breitbart. “We need to start looking at the manner in which our elected officials have been voting…if they have not voted in a manner that is beneficial to you, yours, and your community, then you need to start voting them out.”

“I would call a serious town meeting, like the town meetings Republicans would call,” said an 82-year-old preacher. “They call it a Tea Party.”

My own prescription is small steps. Kaizen. Improvement will be slow. But it can happen.