The Source of Europe’s Mild Climate

American Scientist Online: The Source of Europe’s Mild Climate :

If you grow up in England, as I did, a few items of unquestioned wisdom are passed down to you from the preceding generation. Along with stories of a plucky island race with a glorious past and the benefits of drinking unbelievable quantities of milky tea, you will be told that England is blessed with its pleasant climate courtesy of the Gulf Stream, that huge current of warm water that flows northeast across the Atlantic from its source in the Gulf of Mexico. That the Gulf Stream is responsible for Europe’s mild winters is widely known and accepted, but, as I will show, it is nothing more than the earth-science equivalent of an urban legend.

Sunday God[less]blogging

Interview With A Godless Conservative:

DarkSyde: You’re an atheist, what does that mean to you and why are you one?

Brent Rasmussen: It means that I am a human being in which god-belief is absent. Please notice the lack of the mention of an actual god (whatever that is). Atheists are folks in whom god-belief, of any kind, is absent. Conversely, theists are folks in which god-belief is present. Simple, really. It’s an off-on, black or white proposition. Either god-belief is there, or it’s not there.

Philosophically, I hold the same position as George H. Smith — that the word “god” is literally incomprehensible. A blank. A semantic null. I make the further claim that it has a mutable and changeable meaning that is wholly subjective and is different for each and every individual human being on the planet, each and every time they use it — thus rendering it nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, to be sure, but nonsense all the same. The reason that I am an atheist is that the only other choice in this binary spectrum is complete and utter lunacy.

Questions remain about Saudi oil

Econbrowser: Questions remain about Saudi oil:

It’s also interesting to note that these drops in Saudi production have coincided with a huge increase in Saudi drilling efforts. The graph below, taken from the Oil Drum, shows estimates of Saudi production from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (green line) and International Energy Agency (purple) along with the number of oil rigs in operation (blue). The Saudi explanation is that they are aggressively trying to develop more excess capacity, though, if that’s their intention, why not use existing capacity to prevent the price from rising to $75? One can’t help but wonder that, when Saudi production peaks, the graphs and official statements might be quite similar to what we’re seeing right here. That possibility is conceivably one of the factors driving those investment funds to keep on buying oil futures.

The Debate over Immigration

Mark Thoma, The Debate over Immigration:

From a policymaker’s perspective, what should U.S. policy address, the welfare of poor anywhere in the world which may represent the preferences of constituents, or should U.S. economic policy attempt only to maximize the welfare of U.S. citizens?

Scroll down to the extensive excerpt from Roger Lowenstein’s otherwise paywalled NY Times article.

This would be a good time to finally link to an earlier post of Thoma’s on this subject, Martin Wolf: Unskilled Immigration.

Martin Wolf has a pretty good summary of the economic and equity issues involved with the immigration of unskilled workers. A thought that strikes me is that this debate is partly about how one values costs and benefits to non U.S. citizens. Suppose you can make people better off with a particular policy, but a subset will be worse off worse off, but the subset does not contain any U.S. citizens. It is a Pareto improvement to enact the policy?

Some people will value the costs and benefits to non U.S. citizens highly – those that care deeply about the positive impact of immigration on the lives of the immigrants fall into this category. Some will place very little weight on those outside the country – policymakers such as the Fed do not recognize costs and benefits except as they relate to the U.S. economy and the welfare of its citizens. The Fed has made it clear it is not its job to worry about the unemployment rate in Mexico in the conduct of policy unless it somehow affects the U.S. In making welfare assessments, how those costs and benefits are evaluated can have a big affect on the recommended course of action. And I don’t think there’s a right answer as to what someone should consider in making such evaluations. A person isn’t more or less liberal or progrssive (or conservative) for considering their family or community first and placing domestic low skill wage earners at the forefront, or for caring deeply about immigrants.

If I thought politicians would actually follow through on the proposal, my own view is that those who benefit most from both legal and illegal immigration, those at the higher end of the income scale, would have part of those benefits taxed away to compensate those who are hurt by the policy, low-skilled wage earners in particular. In such a case, a liberal immigration policy would be my preference.

Who Owns Bolivia?

Joseph E Stiglitz:

A few months ago, Evo Morales became Bolivia’s first democratically elected indigenous head of state. Indigenous groups constitute 62% of Bolivia’s population, and those with mixed blood another 30%, but for 500 years Bolivians had been ruled by colonial powers and their descendants. Well into the twentieth century, indigenous groups were effectively deprived of a vote and a voice. Aymara and Quechua, their languages, were not even recognized for conducting public business. So Morales’ election was historic, and the excitement in Bolivia is palpable.
…
For now, the world should celebrate the fact that Bolivia has a democratically elected leader attempting to represent the interests of the poor people of his country. It is a historic moment.

Can Progressives Do Arithmetic?

Dean Baker in truthout: Can Progressives Do Arithmetic?:

The reality is that the price tag for most anti-poverty programs is quite small relative to the total federal budget. For example, Head Start accounts for approximately 0.2 percent of the federal budget, or 20 cents of every $100 of spending. Less than 60 cents of every hundred dollars of federal spending goes to TANF [Temporary Assistance to Needy Families]. The appropriations for child care subsidies, assistance for the homeless, and the nutrition programs for young children are considerably smaller.

Yet most people believe that these anti-poverty programs take up a large share of the budget. When the question is asked on opinion polls, people regularly cite welfare as one of the largest items in the federal budget.

The confusion on this point is understandable. Most people never hear that TANF costs 0.6 percent of the budget or that Head Start only takes up 0.2 percent of federal spending. They hear that TANF costs $16 billion a year and that Head Start costs $6 billion. These sums sound very large and scary. They are vastly larger than the amount of money a typical person will see or deal with in his lifetime. Since almost no one, apart from a few DC policy wonks, has any idea of how large the federal budget is, the impression that most people get from these budget numbers is that the country is spending an enormous amount of money on these programs.

If people believe that we are already spending vast sums on welfare-type programs, they are quite reasonably reluctant to spend more. After all, if we are spending a huge amount of money on anti-poverty programs already, and so many people are still in poverty, why would we think that spending even more money would make any difference? Also, if people think that a large portion of the budget is going to anti-poverty programs, then they may think that increasing the size of these programs will mean a big tax hit – or conversely, that cutting these programs would allow for large tax cuts. For these reasons, it is important that the public have some knowledge of the true size of these programs if they are to gain more popular support.

If the Politicians Say It, It Must Be True

Dean Baker illustrates the hazard of taking pronouncements about the effects of trade agreements at face value. Oppose a giveaway to ADM, and you must be against free trade and apple pie.

If the Politicians Say It, It Must Be True:

Look, the people structuring the Doha round are politicians. It should not be news that politicians are not always entirely truthful in their public comments. In other words, just because they say that the purpose of the Doha round is to help developing countries, this does not mean that the real purpose of the round is to help developing countries.

The evidence actually shows that the Doha round is likely to do very little for developing countries and will actually hurt some who are net importers of agricultural products. (The removal of rich country subsidies causes agricultural prices to rise, which means that these countries will have to pay more for their imports.) Based on projections of gains, a reasonable person might be led to believe that the main purpose of the Doha round is to assist politically connected grain traders like Archer Daniels Midland.

How grandma got legal

LA Times: How grandma got legal:

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), for example, says his grandparents — Dutch immigrants who settled in Nebraska — didn’t try to get ahead by breaking the law. Rather, they made it through “frugality … hard work, grit, honesty,” he says. “They would be very upset about people who didn’t do it the right way.”

Such comparisons between past and present miss a crucial point. There were so few restrictions on immigration in the 19th and early 20th centuries that there was no such thing as “illegal immigration.” The government excluded a mere 1% of the 25 million immigrants who landed at Ellis Island before World War I, mostly for health reasons. (Chinese were the exception, excluded on grounds of “racial unassimilability.”)

What’s more, statutes of limitations of one to five years meant that even those here unlawfully did not live forever with the specter of deportation.

In the early 1900s, immigrants from Europe provided cheap, unskilled labor that made possible the nation’s industrial and urban expansion. They shoveled pig iron, dug sewers and subway tunnels and sewed shirtwaists. Even then, people born in the U.S. complained that the newcomers stole jobs, were ignorant, criminal and showed no desire to become citizens. The rhetoric was often unabashedly prejudiced against Italians, Jews, Poles and other “degraded races of Europe.”

In the conservative climate after World War I, Congress slammed shut the golden door. For the first time, the U.S. imposed numerical limits on immigration. Congress gave the smallest quotas to Eastern and Southern European countries and excluded all Asians; it also created the U.S. Border Patrol and eliminated statutes of limitations on deportation. It exempted countries of the Western Hemisphere, however, in deference to agricultural labor needs and the State Department’s tradition of pan-Americanism.

Economists are from Mars, Europeans from Venus

John Thornhill at FT.com: Economists are from Mars, Europeans from Venus:

A Martian economist visits earth. Not only does its arrival prove — as many suspected — that some economists really do live on other planets, it also provides fresh perspectives on our world.

Earthling economists chatter excitedly to our visitor about the stunning growth rates in China. This miracle economy of the 21st century has overtaken France and the UK to become the world’s fourth biggest. Europe is the past; the US is the present; and China is the future, they proclaim. The centre of economic gravity in the world has shifted decisively towards north-east Asia.

Our Martian friend scratches its heads. “When my economics professor last visited earth in 1945 he told me that the Europeans had just experienced a terrible civil war in which 36m people had been killed, including many of their most brilliant minds. Now you tell me that 60m French people produce almost as much economic output each year as 1.3bn Chinese, who have been the dominant economic power for most of your planet’s history. What is more, the French can do this while working 35-hour weeks and producing 246 different types of cheese. How did this economic miracle come about?”

The earthling economists stare at each other and then down at their feet. “We don’t normally look at things that way. We tend to say that Europe is suffering from ‘eurosclerosis’, you know, low growth, high unemployment, bloated welfare states and a looming demographic crisis.”

“Maybe I need to talk to historians rather than economists to see how all this came about,” says our Martian friend, blinking his eyes and flitting back several months in time to hear a lecture in Washington on The Future of Decadent Europe.

(Via Mark Thoma )

Sunday Godblogging: Blogging the Bible

David Plotz, a self-described not-very-observant Jew, has lately been reading and blogging the Bible over at Slate.

Plotz’s latest installment, “Why Joseph is my hero”, treats the last few chapters of Genesis: Joseph in Egypt, Jacob’s death.

Please bear with me for a minute while I digress to tackle a strange subject: Egyptian public policy during the Josephean administration. Joseph is, of course, Pharaoh’s viceroy during the fat years and the famine. To hear the author of Genesis tell it, he’s the best viceroy the Middle Kingdom had ever seen. But to a modern reader, Joseph is appalling. Here’s what he does: During the seven fat years, he gathers grain from all over the country in warehouses. When the famine comes, he sells grain to the hungry Egyptians and to foreign buyers. This is all well and good. As the famine worsens, Egypt’s peasants return to Joseph to beg for help. So Joseph sells them more grain, collecting “all the money that was to be found in the land of Egypt … as payment for the rations.” The people were still hungry. Joseph feeds them, but seizes all their horses, sheep, cattle, and donkeys as payment. The famine continues. The Egyptian people, having given all their money and livestock to Pharaoh, come back to Joseph once more. This time, Joseph takes all their land in exchange for grain: “Thus the land passed over to Pharaoh.” Joseph explains the new deal to them: They will be sharecroppers, and will hand over one-fifth of their harvest every year to Pharaoh, keeping the balance for themselves. They reply, “We are grateful to my lord, and we shall be serfs to Pharaoh.”

Didn’t someone write a book on the biblical roots of capitalism and free enterprise? How did he handle this episode? Our hero Joseph abolishes private property, turns freeholders into serfs, and transforms a decentralized farm economy into a command-economy dictatorship. This is bad economics and worse public policy. This is China, 1949. Joseph is Chairman Mao. (And, to speculate a little bit, perhaps this centralized dictatorship established by Joseph is what ultimately led to the Israelites enslavement in Egypt. Once you create a voracious state apparatus, it must be fed. Is it a surprise that slavery became part of its diet? In a less totalitarian state, perhaps slavery wouldn’t have been as necessary or as feasible.

Dyson on Dennett

Freeman Dyson reviews Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon in the current NYRB. Wonderful stuff, as usual. Dyson concludes,

To end this review, I would like to introduce anothe recently published book, Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers, by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney. This contains extensive extracts from diaries written by seven of the young men who died in suicidal missions or as kamikaze pilots in the closing months of World War II. The diaries give us firsthand testimony of the thoughts and feelings of these young soldiers who knew that they were fated to die. Their thoughts and feelings are astonishingly lucid and free from illusions. Some of them expressed their feelings in poetry. All of them were highly educated and familiar with Western literature in several languages, having spent most of their brief lives in reading and writing. Only one of them, Hayashi Ichizo, was religious, having grown up in a Japanese Christian family. His Christian faith did not make self-sacrifice easier for him than for the others. He had read Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death and carried it with him on his final mission together with his Bible.

All of the young men, including Hayashi, had a profoundly tragic view of life, mitigated only by happy memories of childhood with family and friends. They were as far as it was possible to be from the brainwashed zombies that contemporary Americans imagined to be piloting the kamikaze planes. They were thoughtful and sensitive young men, neither religious nor nationalistic fanatics.

Here I have space to mention only one of them, Nakao Takanori, who must speak for the rest. Nakao left a poem beginning, “How lonely is the sound of the clock in the darkness of the night.” In his last letter to his parents, a week before his death, he wrote,

At the farewell party, people gave me encouragement. I did my best to encourage myself. My co-pilot is Uno Shigeru, a handsome boy, aged nineteen, a naval petty officer second class. His home is in Hyogo Prefecture. He thinks of me as his elder brother, and I think of him as my younger brother. Working as one heart, we will plunge into an enemy vessel. Although I did not do much in my life, I am content that I fulfilled my wish to live a pure life, leaving nothing ugly behind me.

We have no firsthand testimony from the young men who carried out the September 11 attacks. They were not as highly educated and as thoughtful as the kamikaze pilots, and they were more influenced by religion. But there is strong evidence that they were not brainwashed zombies. They were soldiers enlisted in a secret brotherhood that gave meaning and purpose to their lives, working together in a brilliantly executed operation against the strongest power in the world. According to Sageman, they were motivated like the kamikaze pilots, more by loyalty to their comrades than by hatred of the enemy. Once the operation had been conceived and ordered, it would have been unthinkable and shameful not to carry it out.

Even after recognizing the great differences between the circumstances of 1945 and 2001, I believe that the kamikaze diaries give us our best insight into the state of mind of the young men who caused us such grievous harm in 2001. If we wish to understand the phenomenon of terrorism in the modern world, and if we wish to take effective measures to lessen its attraction to idealistic young people, the first and most necessary step is to understand our enemies. We must give respect to our enemies, as courageous and capable soldiers enlisted in an evil cause, before we can understand them. The kamikaze diaries give us a basis on which to build both respect and understanding.

The incompetent Henry Paulson

The blogospheric response to the appointment of Henry Paulson to replace John Snow has been generally, if not uniformly, positive. Max Sawicky
begs to disagree:

All this swooning over the new Bush appointee for Treasury Secretary, not least from leading Democrats like Chuck Shumer and Robert Rubin, makes me want to puke. I suppose some of it is relief that we didn’t get someone certifiable, like my pal Steve Moore. Standards continue to fall. …

Update: Menzie Chinn suggests that, whether he’s competent or not, Paulson’s accession isn’t likely to have much impact on administration economic policy. Nice graph.

Update: Paul Krugman offers Paulson some advice, and Mark Thoma kindly leaks a bit of it through the NYT paywall (thanks!).

Right now, you’re being flattered. You have a natural urge to be a team player. But if you play the game your new bosses want you to play, your credibility with the public will evaporate in no time at all. And when you’re no longer useful to your new friends, you’ll be tossed aside.

Safari Tidy

I’ve been using Safari Tidy for a few days now, and recommend it highly. The author says:

The Safari Tidy plugin is a small plugin that lets you validate the webpages you browse for (x)html compliance. The actual validation is done by Tidy. This plugin was modeled after a similar plugin for Firefox, which can be found here.

Download Safari Tidy here

I’m finding it especially handy for WordPress, both for my own markos, and for cases where WordPress’s automatic markup conflicts with my own. I assume that the Firefox version would be just as useful.

Where did all the money go?

Kevin Drum:

The average 40-year-old guy made $44,000 in 1973, and that was as good as it ever got. Today that number is about $40,000. It’s gone down even though the American economy has nearly doubled on a per-person basis during that time.

So where did all the money go? What happened in 1973 that suddenly stopped wage growth for half the population in its tracks? And what should we do about it?

How to cheat good

Alex Halavais, via Bruce Schneier:

I would prefer that students don’t cheat. Yes, they really are mostly cheating themselves, so fine. But it also reflects poorly on the community. Rationally or not, what particularly irks me is that it is disrespectful: of me, of their fellow students, of the university, of the institution of learning, and of themselves. And—did I mention—of me? It is particularly irksome when their cheating implies (reminds?) that I am a fool.

So, to help students across the country cheat better, saving themselves both from easy detection and from incurring the wrath of insulted faculty, and leading to a much more harmonious school environment, I offer the following tips, based on recent experience:
…
8. Edit > Paste Special > Unformatted Text

This is my Number 1 piece of advice, even if it is numbered eight. When you copy things from the web into Word, ignoring #3 above, don’t just “Edit > Paste” it into your document. When I am reading a document in black, Times New Roman, 12pt, and it suddenly changes to blue, Helvetica, 10pt (yes, really), I’m going to guess that something odd may be going on. This seems to happen in about 1% of student work turned in, and periodically makes me feel like becoming a hermit.

The New York Times Discovers Sweden

Dean Baker: The New York Times Discovers Sweden:

The Times had an article this morning that reports on Sweden’s success in sustaining healthy rates of economic growth, while also ensuring a high degree of economic security for its workforce. The article is mostly fair, but is misleading on a few points.For example, the article reports that Sweden overhauled its Social Security system in the mid-nineties and added private accounts. This is true, but it would have been helpful to add that the defined benefit portion of Sweden’s system is still approximately one-third larger (relative to wages) than the current U.S. system.

Oil production and megaprojects

Stuart Staniford of The Oil Drum discusses the Petroleum Review’s rather optimistic projections of future oil production based on new megaprojects coming on line over the next few years.

The executive summary is that while I think this report

  • was a good deal of work and is a considerable service to the public
  • has some improvements from prior “bottom-up” reports

nonetheless, to no-one’s surprise perhaps,

  • I don’t think this methodology is reliable at this time.
  • I disagree with the conclusions of the report.

Staniford presents a graph of daily oil production:

Daily Oil Production 2002-2006

Average daily oil production, by month, EIA and IEA (corrected) estimate averaged. Also a nine month centered moving average of the monthly series. Click to enlarge. Believed to be all liquids. Graph is not zero-scaled. Source: IEA, and EIA.

My basic view is that we are in a bumpy plateau until we hit a big oil shock because one of the various simmering problems around the global oil supply system boils over and sharply cuts supply for a while. Or in the alternative, we are in a bumpy plateau until the housing-bubble/crazy-hedge-fund-credit-derivative/global-trade-imbalance situation blows up and cuts demand for a while (eg see Mish for a primer). My wild-ass-guess probability of one of those things happening is about 0.2-0.4 per year. Which means we won’t have to wait too many years.

All this via James Hamilton’s piece at Econobrowser on the consequences for oil prices.

Stuart Staniford … argues that the free-market economies such as the U.S., Canada, and Europe, in which consumers have not been protected from the price increases, are the places we have seen reductions in the quantity of oil consumed so far, whereas the growth in demand is strongest where the price remains subsidized.

That is a very interesting observation, and I agree that the oil producing countries with their growing incomes may make an important contribution to global petroleum demand in the years to come. But I would hesitate to dismiss the role of the incentive to conserve even in those consuming countries where the governments currently appear inclined to pretend none of this is really happening. Even if consumers don’t have an incentive to respond, the governments themselves, however unenlightened as they may be, are surely going to notice the effect of trying to maintain a subsidy on their own budgets, and eventually will find themselves without the resources to keep their fingers in the dike.

In sum, oil prices are volatile, oil production is hard to predict, and regardless of what happens, someone is going to be able to say, “I told you so.”

Feeding the Beast

Kevin Drum:

FEEDING THE BEAST….What happens if you lower the cost of something? People buy more of it. What if you raise the cost? People buy less of it.

So: what happens if the federal government reduces taxes and runs a deficit — thus lowering the “cost” of government? People will “buy” more government.

This actually makes a strange kind of sense — if there are no additional taxes to cause you pain, why shouldn’t you support big government? — and William Niskanen, the chairman of the Cato Institute, says he now has research to back this up:

Niskanen recently analyzed data from 1981 to 2005 and found….”no sign that deficits have ever acted as a constraint on spending.” To the contrary: judging by the last twenty-five years (plenty of time for a fair test), a tax cut of 1 percent of the GDP increases the rate of spending growth by about 0.15 percent of the GDP a year. A comparable tax hike reduces spending growth by the same amount.

….”I would like to be proven wrong,” says Niskanen. No wonder: for the modern conservative coalition, the implications of his findings are discomfiting, and in a sense tragic.

In other words, “starve the beast” doesn’t work. If you cut taxes, all you do is encourage additional spending.

The article quoted is in the June issue of The Atlantic Monthly, which as of yesterday was not on our local newsstands.

Missing Fact on British Health Care

Dean Baker:

The New York Times had an interesting piece on the poor state of the dental care provided by the British public health care system in its Sunday paper. The article reports that people face long waits for even emergency dental care, and that many now turn to private dentists or go to foreign countries for treatment.

Readers naturally feel sorry for the plight of Britons with bad teeth and are thankful that here in the United States we have an efficient private health care system. The key fact missing in the story is that Britain spends less than 37 percent as much person for its health care as the United States. Whatever the relative merits of the British mechanism for providing health care and the U.S. system, it would be truly astonishing if the British system could best the U.S. in every category, spending just 37 cents to our dollar. (Britain does much better on life expectancy for its 37 cents.)