Better Angels

These Things I Believe (which is why I have no party and I must scream)

While I more or less identify as a libertarian (and they'll only have me because there's nothing they can really do about it), the reality is that I don't fully belong to any party or ideology.

This isn't one of those meaningless "I reject political labels" statements that can only be made by politicians who are in fact perfectly described by the label they are busy rejecting, this is more of a slightly disappointing acceptance of reality.

I read blogs and listen to podcasts from a variety of political viewpoints (well, except for Leftist stuff, as I absorbed all that I can ever possibly need in my first 30-some years) and I get much out of them, but I always find myself in significant disagreement with some central tenet of the party or ideology I'm listening to.

Probably this is for the best, uncomfortable as it is. It means I am forever on my toes, always probing to find the areas where I disagree with someone, always knowing I can't take everything said at face value. Exhausting yet liberating.

Why do I find myself in this situation? Well, see if you can spot the items that put me at odds with each ideology/party out there:

• I believe absolutely in freedom of speech and thought.

• I believe absolutely in the freedom and basic rights of women and all people, even those who live in countries other than the one I happen to be in.

• I believe slavery and oppression are bad regardless of religion or country.

• I do not believe in God.

• I do not believe in talking other people out of believing in God.

• I am very uncomfortable with guns and unable to muster enthusiasm when it comes to restrictions on them.

• I believe in killing people who intend harm to my country.

• I believe in overthrowing oppressive regimes when doing so aligns with my country's interests, and in not interfering otherwise even if there are moral reasons to do so.

• I believe all immigration is good -- legal, illegal, whatever -- and welcome every well-meaning immigrant who comes to my country to create a better life.

• I believe economic liberty and a free market system are central to wealth and health and overall liberty.

• I believe that a government and government intervention are critical to the existence of a civil society.

• I believe that government intervention in any sphere of life should be thought of like chemo-therapy: Unfortunately necessary, to be applied as much as required but not one whit more, and of no benefit if it kills the patient before the cancer does.

• I believe that the ills of too much of a free market are infinitely preferable to the ills of too much government.

• I believe in freedom of choice when it comes to abortion.

• I believe that if you believe abortion is murder, then the only morally-acceptable view is that abortion should be illegal in all cases except where the life of the mother is at stake.

• I believe that most popular tenets of environmentalism -- organic food, locally-produced goods, zero landfill -- are magical thinking designed to make the thinker feel good, and almost always result in the worst possible decisions for helping the planet or the people on it.

• I believe adults should be allowed to do as they wish if they are not harming others.

• I do not believe that adults doing whatever they wish means they always do what they should, but I believe liberty trumps morality and practicality.

• I believe humans bring meaning to nature, and that nature has no inherent benefit or usefulness without humans to make use of it.

• I believe that I must be wrong about a great many things, and therefore should always proceed with humility and do my best to test my beliefs against the arguments of others.

If none of these statements pissed you off -- well, first I don't believe you, and second perhaps we should start a new movement together!

Are We Killing Ourselves To Death? A Brief History of Historical and Modern Violence as discussed by Steven Pinker

"I can't really remember when I last had any hope. And I certainly can't remember when anyone else did, either."

-- Theo Faron, protagonist of Children of Men (P.D. James)

It is a time of war and rumors of war. The 20th century was the deadliest in human history, as we converted our supposedly wonderful technology into machines of murder and slaughtered each other on a scale never before known in history. It is an era of shame. The masses of humanity call out for us to return to a simpler time where perhaps we didn't have television and computers, but at least we lived with simple peace and common humanity and brotherhood.

We are killing ourselves to death.

So it seems. So goes the zeitgeist many of us grew up with. A gnawing sense of just how evil modern society is, and how corrupted we are for being a part of it. We've become a ruthless world, barely worth living in, as perhaps best expressed in the brilliant book-turned-movie Children of Men:

This is the way we feel. This is the way we want to feel, and perhaps the way we are programmed to feel. There is a visceral pleasure in saying, "I won't bring a child into this awful world."

This may be the reality we create in our minds and our media and our fiction, but it is largely a reality of our own construction, not reflective of what is actually happening out there, especially in relation to any time in the past. In reality, so many things in the world are better than ever before for more people than ever before. It's an encouraging and, really, irrefutable message, but one that, oddly, we tend not to want to hear, and to outright reject. Yet we need to understand what is actually getting better if we are to improve those things still wrong with the world.

I've covered some of this in talking about the question of how to handle global warming. Over time I'll delve into other factors that fall into this. Today, watching a video of a talk by Steven Pinker from a few years ago, I was struck by a chart he showed which I'll get to in a bit. First, here is his overall shocking, and perhaps unacceptable, thesis:

"Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth."

-- Steven Pinker, "A History of Violence"

An insane and irresponsible statement, clearly, particularly in a time of the Iraq war and genocides like Rwanda and Darfur, and a few decades after the holocaust and the horrors of starvation in Stalin's Soviet Union. Or is it? Here is Pinker discussing the subject in a 2007 talk at TED:

To give context for the idea that violence has decreased significantly and for his assertion that primitive societies do not hold some moral high ground when it comes to man's treatment of man, Pinker created this chart based on data gathered by Lawrence Keeley, author of War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage:

The chart shows the percentage of males killed by violence in various societies around the world. This is just a partial picture and can't be trusted on its own to represent the state of the world; yet what I found striking is that the statistic for the U.S. and Europe combined includes the first and second world wars.

Consider the implications of that. As Pinker says, if men in the U.S. and Europe were killing each other at the rate seen in non-state societies, instead of 100 million people killed in recent history, we'd have something approaching two billion.

So much for the noble savage, and the peaceful harmony of a simpler time.

Perhaps technological and other forms of human progress having something going for them after all.

In his article for the New Republic, Pinker provides further detail:

Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution--all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.

At one time, these facts were widely appreciated. They were the source of notions like progress, civilization, and man's rise from savagery and barbarism. Recently, however, those ideas have come to sound corny, even dangerous. They seem to demonize people in other times and places, license colonial conquest and other foreign adventures, and conceal the crimes of our own societies. The doctrine of the noble savage--the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions--pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like José Ortega y Gasset ("War is not an instinct but an invention"), Stephen Jay Gould ("Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species"), and Ashley Montagu ("Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood"). But, now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.

...The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century.

...Several historians have suggested that there has been an increase in the number of recorded wars across the centuries to the present, but, as political scientist James Payne has noted, this may show only that "the Associated Press is a more comprehensive source of information about battles around the world than were sixteenth-century monks."

...The criminologist Manuel Eisner has assembled hundreds of homicide estimates from Western European localities that kept records at some point between 1200 and the mid-1990s. In every country he analyzed, murder rates declined steeply--for example, from 24 homicides per 100,000 Englishmen in the fourteenth century to 0.6 per 100,000 by the early 1960s.

On the scale of decades, comprehensive data again paint a shockingly happy picture: Global violence has fallen steadily since the middle of the twentieth century. According to the Human Security Brief 2006, the number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this decade. In Western Europe and the Americas, the second half of the century saw a steep decline in the number of wars, military coups, and deadly ethnic riots.

Zooming in by a further power of ten exposes yet another reduction. After the cold war, every part of the world saw a steep drop-off in state-based conflicts, and those that do occur are more likely to end in negotiated settlements rather than being fought to the bitter end. Meanwhile, according to political scientist Barbara Harff, between 1989 and 2005 the number of campaigns of mass killing of civilians decreased by 90 percent.

These are shocking, heartening statements and statistics. They do not deny flaws in the world or in humans, but they show that not only are we capable of making things better, we have done a remarkable job of making things better. I recommend reading the entire article for more interesting insights and a discussion of why people find these statements hard to believe.

And many do want to reject any story of good news and the improving state of mankind both because they don't believe it and because believing it might lead to complacency and a passive acceptance of man's cruelty to man.

But we cannot progress by ignoring reality. We cannot choose smartly where to apply our resources by ignoring the data.

The world has gotten better, and we can make it better still. But only if we open our eyes to reality, even the reality of good news.

Seasteading: Welcome to Rapture!

You may have played the mostly excellent BioShock in the last year or so, and must have found the premise to be a bit...far-fetched. A rich genius, Andrew Ryan, builds a secret underwater paradise based on Objectivist principles and fills it with the world's smartest and most creative people.

This way the cream of the human crop will live unfettered and uncontrolled by government, in a pure market economy where no man is held back from reaching and exercising his full abilities, thanks to not being dragged down by the weak and welfare-addicted masses.

Kind of attractive, actually, if you ask me, especially since I live in the most-opposite-place-on-Earth, San Francisco. But, alas, a pipe dream.

OR IS IT???

I was quite surprised to listen to a recent episode of the EconTalk podcast and discover that not only is a similar concept in the works, but the purveyors hope to get it up and running in the immediate future.

The concept is Seasteading, or setting up highly mobile living spaces on the sea to accomplish, as the Seasteading Institute's website says:

Because the world needs a new frontier, a place where those who are dissatisfied with our current civilization can go to build a different (and hopefully better) one.

Currently, it is very difficult to experiment with alternative social systems on a small scale. Countries are so enormous that it is hard for an individual to make much difference. Seasteaders believe that government shouldn't be like the cellphone or operating system industries, with few choices and high customer-lock-in. Instead, they envision something more like web 2.0, where many small governments serve many niche markets, a dynamic system where small groups experiment, and everyone copies what works, discards what doesn't, and remixes the remainder to try again.

Think about all the hot air and argumentation about a whole host of different political issues - freedom vs. security, absolute wealth vs. inequality, strong family vs. tolerance, open vs. closed borders, whatever the topic du jour is. Instead of deciding them through rhetoric, or voting on a few representatives to decide them for tens or hundreds of millions of people at once, imagine if we could try them each on a small scale and see what happens. If people could create societies with different priorities - the environment, civil liberties, economic freedom, religious values - we'd be able to see how well these ideas actually work in practice. In some cases, certain approaches will work so well (or terribly) that everyone (or no one) will use them too. In others, it will turn out to be a matter of preference, in which case we'll be giving people the choice to choose to live in whatever small society is closest to their ideal.

In short, we seasteaders are people who, whatever our ideals, want to stop arguing about them, stop proselytizing them, and start living them. And it looks like homesteading the oceans is our best opportunity.

One of the main proponents of Seasteading is Patri Friedman, grandson of Milton Friedman and son of David Friedman, so he's no stranger to economics and concepts of freedom. In fact, one of the things that made me pay more attention to the seemingly-wacky discussion than I might have otherwise is the fact that Patri, while clearly a Utopianist of sorts, would regularly make an intelligent economic statement, like realizing that producing all your own goods and "buying local" without external trade is another way of saying "very poor".

An image I found amusing from the discussion: Because individuals would be highly mobile in a sea-based community, if you don't like the tax policy of the local "city", you can just float away to another city.

Take that, San Francisco supervisors!

Check out the episode page where you can listen to the podcast in your browser, or download it directly.

Fortunately for the Seasteading folks, thanks to Andrew Ryan of Bioshock, a promotional video has already been done:

Stop the economy so I can get off: Good sources on what happened and what we shouldn't do next

Probably the three people I listen to most in the world when it comes to economics are Russ Roberts, Megan McArdle, and Arnold Kling. And here I get a chance to combine their wisdom in one post.

First up, Megan McArdle (channeling Tyler Cowen a bit) gives an excellent concise summary in her post, "How did it all happen". For the interesting and accessible details, read the whole thing. Here is her conclusion:

Over the past few weeks, much has been made of the various regulatory actions that enabled this mess. Though some are wrong, two are not: the Democrats protected OFHEO's shockingly loose regulation of Fannie and Freddie against the White House's attempt to toughen it; and the Republican-appointed SEC loosened the capital requirements for the five largest banks.

But why did they do this? Democrats seem to believe that the Republicans and the SEC simply did this out of wanton greed and a blind faith in markets; Republicans seem to believe that OFHEO, the Democrats, and Fannie/Freddie did this because of political corruption and a blind belief in homeownership for poor people. But neither side was simply accepting the risk that the whole thing might come crashing down leaving the economy in tatters and the taxpayers on the hook...

What we need, fundamentally, is not simply stricter regulation or less greedy bankers. What we need is better economic theory of how these things play out, so that the regulators have better tools to assess and prevent systemic risk. But that's not how we're thinking right now. What we're looking for is not better tools, but someone to blame.

To understand one of the key pieces in this puzzle, you need to know how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac work and their history related to all this. As it happens, Arnold Kling used to work there, and he gives a very easy to understand description of these matters in an interview with Russ Roberts. You can listen to the interview on that page and read the highlights or download the podcast.

Finally, there is Russ Roberts himself, who gave an excellent interview to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Definitely read this one too. Some excerpts:

The question I've gotten recently is, "Does this remind you of 1929?" -- which is a reference to the stock market crash. But what this reminds me of is 1932. In 1932 we had the feeling that we had to do something. The myth of 1932 is that Herbert Hoover did nothing but fortunately FDR realized that something had to be done because otherwise we'd wallow in crisis forever. That's a myth.

Herbert Hoover actually was quite an activist in trying to turn the economy around. He failed, which is why he wasn't re-elected. He ran large deficits. Then he tried a tax increase to get rid of the tax deficits. He signed a large tariff. And his Federal Reserve chair under him was aggressively contracting the money supply, which most people feel is the opposite of what he should have been doing....

You could debate for a hundred years as to what would have happened had they done nothing and we'll never know. What we do know is that FDR came in and tried lots and lots of things. Most of them didn't work. There was some improvement in the economy and then it started to fall off the table again. Unemployment began rising dramatically until 1938 and then started to go back down again, but it wasn't like the New Deal was a magic charm. It did not work. But he did something...

I find it remarkably bizarre that we have given an immense amount of arbitrary power to the Treasury, the secretary (Henry Paulson) and his department on the grounds that otherwise we will have a disaster. We continue to have a disaster. There is no evidence as to the scope of the disaster that made this intervention necessary, just merely the claim that we're about to have a disaster -- sort of as if the experts don't have the time or patience to explain to us mere mortals what the state of affairs is.

I find that extremely frightening, to be honest, not just depressing and disturbing and damaging to economic activity in the future, but frightening. $700 billion? Even for the United States, that's real money...

I mean, nationalizing the banks? It didn't work if the goal was to stop the stock market decline. You have to be careful: the stock market and the economy are not the same thing. The fact that the stock market's gone down is not proof that it's not working. But again, I don't have any data. You got any data? Does anybody have any data? How we're doing? Is it working? It's a war mentality. You have the president and his cabinet members stand up and say things like, "We're working on this. We're fixing this. We have to take dramatic steps, don't worry the economy will be stabilized." We've got to have some data...

There are a lot of people who say this is proof once and for all that markets don't work. Of course, those of us who like the free market can always argue that it's not a free market, and of course it's not. The other side can always say, "Well, these are the kind of excesses you get when you don't regulate and especially when you don't regulate well." It's a very, very difficult situation for the average person to make an independent assessment of what really happened. My worry is that this is going to be a watershed event like the Great Depression was in condemning markets -- fairly or unfairly, and I think unfairly. But it's certainly going to be the people who are opposed to markets who will want top-down centralized control of things in the hands of experts as opposed to decentralized, emergent decision-making...

In terms of true silver linings, the only real silver lining will be if we learn the appropriate lesson, which is the risk of trying to manage the housing market from the top down. I would love if the people would realize that Fannie and Freddie were intellectually bankrupt as entities and that it was impossible to create a schizophrenic entity that pursued profit and was backed by the government and that we could manage it in a way that would make sure it turned out all right. I hope we've learned the lesson that that is a bad idea.

Related to the discussion of Hoover, FDR, and all that -- over the past year or so I've heard various rumblings about economists researching the Depression era and coming up with surprising facts that counter some myths we all hold pretty strongly. So I'm very much looking forward to listening to the audiobook of Amity Shlaes's revisionist history of economic policy during those times (and hopefully not our times!), The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. I will probably have more to say after I listen to it, and I'll gather comments from others in a post. If you can't wait, check out the book reviews on that Amazon page...

How to save the world through environmentalism, with a note about those light bulbs

Requirements to reduce emissions are running into a sudden roadblock: The economy:

German plea to halt costly laws

Representatives of German business have called for a moratorium on any European Union legislation that would impose higher costs on companies at a time when they are grappling with the fallout from the financial crisis.

Two of Germany's largest trade bodies said Brussels should think carefully about putting additional burdens on business given the potential of the financial crisis to weaken the "real economy".

"We've got to ask whether certain measures, including environmental legislation, are responsible given the economic outlook," Hanns-Eberhard Schleyer, general secretary of German Confederation of Skilled Crafts, told the Financial Times.

Efforts on global warming chilled by economic woes

The economic free fall gripping the nation may bring down one of the main environmental objectives: capping the greenhouse gases that are blamed for global warming.

Democratic leaders in the House and the Senate, and both presidential candidates, continue to rank tackling global warming as a chief goal next year. But the focus on stabilizing the economy probably will make it more difficult to pass a law to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. At the very least, it will push back when the reductions would have to start.

As one Republican senator put it, the green bubble has burst.

"Clearly it is somewhere down the totem pole given the economic realities we are facing," said Tom Williams, a spokesman for Duke Energy Corp., an electricity producer that has supported federal mandates on greenhouse gases. Duke is a member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, an association of businesses and nonprofit groups that has lobbied Congress to act.

Fiscal woes could delay climate change efforts

The financial crisis and a deepening economic downturn are threatening to delay efforts to deal with another pressing global crisis: climate change

Hopes for action had been running high since both Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama had pledged to make cutting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions a top priority. But environmentalists now fear that the next president may be more focused on reviving a flatlining economy, and Congress could be wary of supporting any measures that might slow growth or raise energy prices for consumers.

"The truth is there is a very large question mark hanging over the idea that Congress would take economywide action on global warming with the economy in such anemic shape," said Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch.

As long as environmental actions require significant additional cost, for often minimal impact, this is going to be a huge problem for those who want environmental change. Not unlike the argument against invading a country to counter starvation or genocide: We may want to do it, it may be a really good idea to fix the problem...but if we don't have sufficient self-interest, we'll bail when the going gets tough and possibly make things worse than if we hadn't gotten involved.

Long-term expensive environmental programs are likely to fail if there isn't sufficient self-interest to weather the bad times, like economic downturns.

The best way to make progress is to find ways to proceed that improve the economy, which means the solutions should be cheaper and provide more benefit than not enacting them. In that case, two factors come into play:

1. Because the environmental solution is cheaper, it won't go on the chopping block when the economy goes south...in fact, we'll want more of it.

2. There will be much less, possibly no need, to create special environmental departments and groups to enact these things, because market economics will drive us toward them anyway.

Case in point: We recently installed the new low-energy light bulbs throughout our house. We did so because they save us money, and for the same reason they save us money, they also use less energy.

Though, if one breaks, there are a few things to be aware of...:

How should I clean up a broken fluorescent bulb?
Because CFLs contain a small amount of mercury, EPA recommends the following clean-up and disposal guidelines:

1. Before Clean-up: Air Out the Room
   
   • Have people and pets leave the room, and don't let anyone walk through the breakage area on their way out.
   • Open a window and leave the room for 15 minutes or more.
   • Shut off the central forced-air heating/air conditioning system, if you have one.
2. Clean-Up Steps for Hard Surfaces
   
   • Carefully scoop up glass fragments and powder using stiff paper or cardboard and place them in a glass jar with metal lid (such as a canning jar) or in a sealed plastic bag.
   • Use sticky tape, such as duct tape, to pick up any remaining small glass pieces and powder.
   • Wipe the area clean with damp paper towels or disposable wet wipes. Place towels in the glass jar or plastic bag.
   • Do not use a vacuum or broom to clean up the broken bulb on hard surfaces.
3. Clean-up Steps for Carpeting or Rug:
   
   • Carefully pick up glass fragments and place them in a glass jar with metal lid (such as a canning jar) or in a sealed plastic bag.
   • Use sticky tape, such as duct tape, to pick up any remaining small glass fragments and powder.
   • If vacuuming is needed after all visible materials are removed, vacuum the area where the bulb was broken.
   • Remove the vacuum bag (or empty and wipe the canister), and put the bag or vacuum debris in a sealed plastic bag.
4. Clean-up Steps for Clothing, Bedding, etc.:
   
   • If clothing or bedding materials come in direct contact with broken glass or mercury-containing powder from inside the bulb that may stick to the fabric, the clothing or bedding should be thrown away. Do not wash such clothing or bedding because mercury fragments in the clothing may contaminate the machine and/or pollute sewage.
   • You can, however, wash clothing or other materials that have been exposed to the mercury vapor from a broken CFL, such as the clothing you are wearing when you cleaned up the broken CFL, as long as that clothing has not come into direct contact with the materials from the broken bulb.
   • If shoes come into direct contact with broken glass or mercury-containing powder from the bulb, wipe them off with damp paper towels or disposable wet wipes. Place the towels or wipes in a glass jar or plastic bag for disposal.
5. Disposal of Clean-up Materials
   
   • Immediately place all clean-up materials outdoors in a trash container or protected area for the next normal trash pickup.
   • Wash your hands after disposing of the jars or plastic bags containing clean-up materials.
   • Check with your local or state government about disposal requirements in your specific area. Some states do not allow such trash disposal. Instead, they require that broken and unbroken mercury-containing bulbs be taken to a local recycling center.
6. Future Cleaning of Carpeting or Rug: Air Out the Room During and After Vacuuming
   
   • The next several times you vacuum, shut off the central forced-air heating/air conditioning system and open a window before vacuuming.
   • Keep the central heating/air conditioning system shut off and the window open for at least 15 minutes after vacuuming is completed.

So with the inevitable cost of some cleanup, or getting some kid or dog sick, maybe this wasn't such a cost-or-energy effective idea for us! Well, for purposes of this discussion, let's assume we're saving money and energy anyway.

One reason it saves us money is that the local government (not sure if city or state) insisted on footing a big chunk of the bill for our light bulbs, making them even cheaper for us, at other people's expense.

But, to my knowledge, that wasn't necessary. The light bulbs would have saved us money anyway, and since the light bulbs would have saved us money without the subsidy, we would have bought them anyway.

Or, if without the subsidy the light bulbs wouldn't have saved us money, then it's a pretty good bet that they wouldn't save energy either. Cost is usually a pretty good indicator of efficiency, except when there are externalities where there's some cost to society not reflected in the price. In the case of lightbulbs I doubt it...and if there are, they are probably swamped by the cost to us of the cleanup reflected above.

In either case a government subsidy isn't necessary...worse, by "picking the winner" and subsidizing this kind of bulb, if a more efficient bulb using a different technology comes along, the government subsidy may encourage us to keep buying the less efficient bulb, thereby increasing rather than decreasing energy usage.

In any case, let's take it as a given that the bulbs reduce energy consumption and save money for the consumer. Then it seems the best, most realistic way to improve the environment is to continue to seek items like the light bulbs, which we know won't be thrown out if money gets tight.

I'm not an environmental genius, and I don't know what all cost-saving environmentally-sound products we should be focusing on to replicate the light bulb situation. But there must be numerous things we can do along those lines that will save consumers money, so they are guaranteed to be adopted and kept through the tough times.

Whatever those things are, they aren't Kyoto, which even if it were actually fully implemented, would do very little:

...all current models show that the Kyoto Protocol will have surprisingly little impact on the climate: temperature levels projected for 2100 will be postponed for all of six years.

Yet the cost of meeting the Kyoto Protocol will be $150 billion to $350 billion annually (compared to $50 billion in global annual development aid).

So let's save the world: Let's find solutions that people and governments will be eager to implement because they save money and increase convenience, not the other way around.

HT: Instapundit

Explaining complicated financial history in 90 seconds

I have to say, I'm impressed at the skills people are developing in these YouTube videos and current political ads to communicate a very complicated situation in a very short period of time. Message and politics aside, there's some interesting art going on here.

I think this RNCC ad is very well done, using material from the Congressional video I posted yesterday, some unexpected cello music, and basic text to tell the story:

For an eleven minute take on the financial crisis that also demonstrates these techniques, go here (I couldn't figure out how to embed it...)

Now, I don't know that these tell the whole story, and I think the second video is a bit over the top -- I listen to Megan McArdle when she says that there is no one source to the current problems, and that loaning to the poor doesn't track as causing things.

But politically, it's clear that the Democrats are lying through their teeth right now, trying to escape their complete culpability in whatever role Fannie and Freddie did play in all this. Whatever your politics, when it comes to figuring out what should come next and who should do it, you should be aware of who was in fact for and against responsible oversight of these government-assisted entities, and that in fact irresponsible government interference played a big part in Fannie and Freddie acting as they did.

Caught on video: Eye-opening 2004 House hearing on Fannie & Freddie

Given who is blaming whom for lack of oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac today, it's quite surprising to see who was saying what back in 2004, when it maybe could have been fixed:

Logic alert: I saw Barney Frank on television defending this, saying that in 2003 (I assume he meant 2004), he didn't see anything wrong with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He then said, "The Republicans had eight years to put regulation in place, and they did nothing!" But...but...if Frank was adamant that nothing should be done (he's practically pounding the table in that video), and was part of putting together a Democratic voting block to keep something from being done...how can he in the next breath accuse the Republicans of doing nothing? He wanted it that way! He pushed for doing nothing! Based on his statements at the time, he would have done nothing even if he had a button to push to make responsible regulation magically happen.

He also said the Democrats did pass some kind of regulation thing after they got in power -- I'm not aware of what this was, and would be happy for any pointers.

HT to Hot Air...

Strategic Petroleum Reserve

If you've ever been curious about exactly how the Strategic Petroleum Reserve works (or doesn't), how it's been used historically, and what impact it could have in the future, I highly recommend checking out one or both of these Cato Institute podcasts with Jerry Taylor and Steve H. Hanke. I found their coverage very interesting and enlightening.

Short discussion (11 minutes):

Or download it here.

Full presentation: Download here.

The Cato page for the event is here.

Economic myths from the land of my people: Sweden

I have a Swedish background, and my name once betrayed this much more clearly (but what happened to my name is another story).

After reading Johan Goldberg's perceptive debunking of Naomi Klein, I got interested in finding out more about him, and as a result have realized there's all sorts of interesting video content available at the libertarian site reason.tv. I'll no doubt be pointing to various items as I make my way through.

Today's topic is a discussion of the claim that Sweden is the most successful society the world has ever known, especially in an economic sense (the "Scandinavian model"). Unfortunately reason.tv doesn't provide transcripts, and I'm too lazy to transcribe it myself, so I can't provide easily-consumable quotes along with the video, as is my wont.

The discussion is quite interesting, even if you are likely to disagree with Johan's economic philosophy.

So just click on the damn video -- it won't hurt!

Naomi Klein: Agree or disagree with her politics, you have to admit she's a lying liar

Full disclosure up front: I can't stand the politics of Naomi Klein or her ilk...I honestly believe that if their approach to economics and politics were followed faithfully, we would undergo the greatest amount of death, destruction, and suffering in the history of the planet.

Perhaps you have a different, or at least more moderated, view of her politics, and I can understand that. If this were just a matter of opposing ideas, I would welcome Klein's voice in the debate.

But it's not about ideas...Klein has chosen to join that non-partisan group of distorters and liars who exist in all areas of the political spectrum and who use inflammatory statements and outright smears to further their point of view. Whether it's Ann Coulter, Michael Moore, Bill O'Reilly, or Keith Olbermann, these are people who are all about effect and nothing about truth. I object strongly to these people, regardless of their political affiliation or whether they agree or disagree with me. I only want my arguments furthered on the strength of objective and testable facts, and where philosophy can't be tested, then at least on honest debate.

Regardless of what you think of Klein's worldview, I hope you agree with me that character assassination of a deceased person by outright lying about what they believed is not the proper way to advance the worldview.

That is what Klein does in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, her latest screed, by completely mis-representing the views of Milton Friedman in order to make her case for a mythical doctrine/conspiracy theory among those she disagrees with.

Johan Norberg does an excellent job of documenting this in his article, "Defaming Milton Friedman: Naomi Klein's disastrous yet popular polemic against the great free market economist". The article is short, and I encourage you to read it all. Or check out this excellent short video interview with Johan, which not only discusses the points in the article, but covers additional lies used by Klein to make her case:

Here in brief are a few of the points that destroy Klein's thesis and show her to be a knowing liar:

Exhibit A against Friedman is a quote from what Klein calls "one of his most influential essays": "Only a crisis-actual or perceived-produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable." This, says Klein, is "the shock doctrine." In a not-very-subtle short film based on the book, the quote appears over images of prisoners being tortured.

The quote is not, in fact, from one of Friedman's most influential essays; it's from a very brief introduction to a reprint of his book Capitalism and Freedom. And it is not a rationale for welcoming disasters; it's about the uncontroversial fact that people change their minds when the old ways seem to fail. Friedman provides a telling example, which Klein neglects to quote: Young Americans joined him in opposing the military draft after the Vietnam War forced them to risk their lives on another continent.

She also distorts other Friedman quotes to support her case. She pretends that Friedman's concept of "the tyranny of the status quo" refers the tyranny of voters, and that he believed crises were needed to bypass the democratic process. But for Friedman, the tyranny was something entirely different: an iron triangle of politicians, bureaucrats, and special interest groups (businesses, for example) that deceive voters.

Discussing Friedman's proposal to reduce inflation through sweeping market reforms, Klein writes, "Friedman predicted that the speed, suddenness and scope of the economic shifts would provoke psychological reactions in the public that ‘facilitate the adjustment.' " This gives the impression that Friedman wanted to disorient people through pain in order to push through his reforms. But the quote in its entirety shows that Friedman had something very different in mind. If a government chooses to attack inflation in this way, he wrote, "it should be announced publicly in great detail....The more fully the public is informed, the more will its reactions facilitate the adjustment." In other words, if voters are not ignorant and not disoriented, but fully informed of the reform steps, they will facilitate the adjustment by changing their saving, consuming, and bargaining behavior. Friedman's view was the opposite of what Klein claims.

The irony here is that in some key areas, Friedman would agree with Klein, yet she chooses to distort his true views and smear him for her own purposes. For example, she blames the Iraq war on him, saying it was an economic plot of his making, when in fact Friedman opposed the war, something she neglects to mention in her book. There are many similar cases of this, some of which are discussed in the video above.

I leave it for you to determine why she might take this approach. For me, it's a shame that an important thinker like Milton Friedman will, for the time being at least, be known and defined today by the words from a member of that worst of species, the Lying Liar.