Mon 10 Dec 2012

Shouldn’t We Also Cancel The British Monarchy?

Posted by Brian Moore under bad things
No Comments

So, apparently they canceled an Australian talk show after the hosts prank called the hospital where a certain British citizen was staying.  This is very confusing to me.

Let’s start off with an assertion with which I think most people can agree: if someone prank calls your place of work, and you unwittingly pass the call on to someone else, that is absolutely, by itself, not a reason to commit suicide.    Nurses do far worse things all the time (including similar mistakes, like accidentally revealing HIPAA-protected information) and don’t commit suicide.  If, after such an event occurs, someone does kill themselves, it is almost certain that there were other issues that probably played a far greater role — since prank calls and nurse “mistakes” (if this even was one) happen almost constantly without any results of this type.

I think it’s very hard for us to blame the talk show hosts, either legally or even just in the court of public opinion.  Perhaps what they did was rude or mean, but this single sentence constitutes the full spectrum of their actions: they called one person once and said something that made them unhappy.  If this is a standard of guilt, every person who has ever yelled at customer support on the phone is guilty as well.

Since we are unaware of what other circumstances could have led to this tragedy, there are only 2 factors that matter:

  • A nurse was called by radio hosts who said some things in order to gain access to a 3rd party
  • That 3rd party was a member of the British Monarchy, an organization that has no real meaning outside that which society attaches to it

As I said above, I think we can all agree that item #1 is not sufficient, by itself, for anyone to even get particularly upset, much less commit suicide.  So, what role does item #2 play?  Certainly more than the former.   I emphatically do not believe that the celebrity we grant to totally random individuals makes us (or the celebrity) guilty when someone does something tragic as a result of that fame, but since we seem incapable of not trying to blame someone when this happens, why, of the two outside parties, did we pick the radio hosts?  Why not the institution that makes these completely random people something more important than random other hospital patients no one feels terrible about when they make a totally innocuous mistake in the course of their care?

If two radio hosts can be suspended because they said some rude things that caused someone to feel that they had impugned the majesty of  a randomly selected group of people, why on earth wouldn’t we levy the same penalty on the people and institutions who decided that group of people were worthy of that respect?  People who, despite obviously not being directly responsible for what occurred, are at least somewhat more responsible than the radio hosts.  It’s also important to note that to the extent that they contributed to this tragedy, they continue to maintain the circumstances that could make it possible for similar issues to occur — unlike the radio hosts, who will undoubtedly never prank call that hospital again.  It’s impossible to prevent people saying rude or offensive things that might drive others to suicide.  It is not impossible for us to decide that certain random people are unworthy of the level of respect that causes people to feel terrible because they forwarded a call about those people.  Unfortunately, while not impossible, it’s extremely unlikely — because the exact organizations that keep treating random selections of British genetics like newsworthy items (CNN, etc…) are precisely the people for whom this is not a tragedy, but a ratings boost.

 

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Sun 10 Jul 2011

On Not Using Government Social Programs

Posted by Brian Moore under budget, liberal-tarian, libertarian
[2] Comments

Cory Doctorow, at BoingBoing, reproduces this great chart, showing the number of people who, after receiving the benefits of a government social program, still believe they are not using government social programs:

He editorializes:

It’s the “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” phenomena writ large: a society of people who subsist on mutual aid and redistributive policies who’ve been conned (and conned themselves) into thinking that they are rugged individualists and that everyone else is a parasite.

While I am second to none in slamming those in the  ”Keep your government hands off my Medicare” crowd, this graph doesn’t exactly say that.  Doctorow says “subsist on” but that’s not really what the chart says.  It just points out that one is receiving a government benefit of any value, not that one subsists on it, or even enjoyed net benefits from it.   To take a specific example, as far as I can tell (I don’t recognize all the items listed), the only one that I have received is the mortgage interest deduction.  Yet, as a crazy libertarian, I would indeed say “I am not on a government social program.”

You can say that’s me being hypocritical, but when you compare the amount of money I gain from that tax credit, compared to the money I pay in taxes to support all those other things that I do not benefit (you can argue that I may one day benefit, or that they provide a protective net) from, it’s hardly fair to say that I benefit from (much less subsist on!) government programs as a whole, as the net benefit to me of them is negative.  In fact, for at least some relatively large section of the population, the net benefit must be negative, in order to balance the other section (those for whom the social program is surely designed) for whom the benefit is positive.  I would gladly forgo that tax credit if I could get out of even one or two of those other programs — social security being top of the list.  The endpoint of this logic is that we would claim that a person who pays 1o dollars in taxes to support “government social programs” and only receives 2 dollars in benefit from them is a hypocritical jerk for not thinking they were beneficiaries of these programs. (more…)

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Thu 7 Jul 2011

Tim @Forbes.com

Posted by Brian Moore under Uncategorized
No Comments

Tim is now writing at Forbes.com.  You should go read it!

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Tue 5 Jul 2011

Spending = Raising Taxes

Posted by Brian Moore under budget
No Comments

The entire problem with the budget is this: both Republicans (hardcore anti-nominal-tax ones and the regular brand) and Democrats don’t understand that spending is equivalent to raising taxes.  What we usually call “raising taxes” is just balancing the checkbook later on.  Once the government declares that it has spent a dollar, it has raised taxes, because that dollar (and any attendant interest that is accumulated in the span of time between spending and acquisition) must be physically acquired by one of the following “national checkbook balancing” methods:

  1. What we usually call “raising taxes” — i.e. signing a bill in congress that actually empowers the IRS to deduct one dollar from some taxpayer’ account.
  2. Printing it — which causes inflation, and therefore, all else held equal, makes everyone else slightly less wealthy. (you can argue that it has other good effects, or is better than option 1, that’s fine — it is still inflation)
  3. By refusing to physically acquire it, or defaulting, which increases the actual cost of every other dollar the government spends, which then must be acquired via option 1 or 2.

This has three implications for those congressmen who took Grover Norquist’s “no new taxes” pledge: (though it’s obvious neither he nor they interpret it this way, though that’s merely their ignorance)

  1. If they ever voted for increasing spending, they violated their pledge.  (i.e., almost all of them)
  2. If their actions lead to a default, they have violated their pledge, because it will increase the cost of “national checkbook balancing” options 1 and 2 by even more.
  3. If they do not vote for combined bills that reduce spending by a higher amount than they allocate to ”national checkbook balancing” option 1 (i.e. what we traditionally view as “raising taxes”) then they are violating their pledge as well. (there are some complicating issues here — you might not want to maintaining long term surpluses, though I think we’re currently at little risk of that, or you might not be convinced that the bill will actually cut spending, but the general principle remains)

As the current budget qualifies (at least as far as it has been explained to me) for category 3, it should be passed — and it would indeed reduce the true level of taxation, consistent with their pledge.

The final implication is that the only people more guilty than those who are hesitating to physically acquire the dollars to balance our spending in the past are those who voted to increase our spending so much in the first place, thereby making these “tax increases” (by either definition) necessary.

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Thu 2 Jun 2011

Libertarian Calories

Posted by Brian Moore under healthcare, history, libertarian, science
No Comments

It’s always good to have a story, especially one that upholds your political beliefs.  So, imagine my reaction upon reading Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes.  I don’t know if Taubes himself has any leanings in the direction, but his book is the most compelling libertarian story of the past 50 years.

There are some basic principles of the libertarian critique of governmental policies designed to solve Pressing Problems.  These are, that those government policies often:

  • mis-diagnose the problem
  • makes decisions based on political realities instead of scientific ones
  • crowds out competing (and potentially more accurate theories or solutions) either directly, by criticizing them, or indirectly, by denying them funding
  • end up making the problem worse, or exacerbating a different problem via unexpected side effects
  • cause a legion of special interest groups of corporations to arise to take advantage of (as well as reinforce, through their own interest) the government’s potentially wrong decision

If you’re not particularly disposed to these ideas already, this all sounds like wishful thinking about government incompetence.  Yet this is exactly the story presented by Taubes as the history of the fat vs. carb nutrition debate in the US over the past 50 years.

To sum up, without all the science (read the book, it has all the data you need), the story goes like this: about 50 years ago, a few prominent scientists, particularly Ancel Keys, decided, based on incomplete evidence, that fat was the cause of heart disease, and that carbohydrates were a good replacement for it in our diets.  Unfortunately, not only was the decision premature, it also was wrong, and here’s the most important part: it was wrong even based upon the evidence they had at the time — they simply ignored or dismissed it.  This isn’t a case of science improving and rendering an old government policy wrong, this is government policy making the wrong choice despite the evidence.

The anti-fat movement (led by Keys) then convinced the government and the media of the correctness of their case, which was then enshrined as policy by a government panel: fat bad, carbs good.  This is partly why the food pyramid’s base, the largest section, was all carbohydrate-rich breads and pasta.  The low-carbohydrate movement (the opposition of the anti-fat movement), despite having an increasing body of evidence that stated that fat was not bad, and carbs were not good (each subsequent study failed to prove the anti-fat hypothesis), were pushed aside, labeled as cranks or corporate stooges of the companies that produced high-fat food.  Billions of dollars of NIH funding flowed into anti-fat research, food manufacturers touted the heart-friendly effects of their products, and groups like the CSPI arose to plug anti-fat agendas.  Government policy and millions in advertising now set, Americans duly changed their diets to become more “healthy” — ushering in a wave of all the “diseases of civilization” that low-carb advocates predicted: diabetes, obesity and various forms of cancer.

Then, once the obesity epidemic (if not directly caused by the high-carb policy, certainly exacerbated by it) became the new threat, established policy and scientists blamed it on fat as well.

You probably could not invent a story that fit the libertarian critique so well.  Confirmation bias alarm bells went off the entire time I was reading; but the Taubes book is exhaustively researched and annotated — not just with the data (often based on studies that examined the results of low-tech societies, which ate mainly meat and other high fat diets, transitioning to the higher-carb diet of Western societies, and their subsequent explosion of diabetes and obesity — and cancer) but with the specific charges leveled at each by the anti-fat movement in an effort to erroneously discredit them.  Some people will write a book based on the results of a single paper, and present its conclusion as definitive proof.  This book presents the results of hundreds of papers and studies, all of which disprove the anti-fat hypothesis or support the low-carb one — every one dismissed and ignored.  It is also a devastating critique of academia, which, once a theory was established as the conventional wisdom, had no interest in examining data that might undermine it.

To recap: the government picked some bad science and enacted incorrect policies based on it, which damaged the health of millions of Americans, costing us billions of dollars in healthcare bills, millions of lives (here I merely repeat the government’s claims about the damage of the “obesity epidemic”) and did little to actually prevent the problem for which it was designed.  They suppressed, ignored and slandered those who disagreed, who had the data on their side both at the time, and today.  Then, when the damage reports came rolling in from their actions, promptly demanded that they were the only people capable of fixing this problem, and confidently prescribed the exact same medicine which had caused the problem in the first place: the low fat, high carb diet*.

How is this not the centerpiece of the libertarian argument for a less-activist government?

* – to be fair, they also advocated good things, such as an increase in exercise, and a decrease in the consumption of sugars and soda.  The latter again points out the crazy logic of advocating high carb diets: those carbs roughly translate into the same end result in your body as the sugar.

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Wed 4 May 2011

Terrorist Vikings

Posted by Brian Moore under history
[2] Comments

Apparently there are some people who are angry at a black guy being cast in the Thor movie as a Norse god.  I haven’t seen it, but in addition to liking Idris Elba quite a bit, I don’t see the problem here.  The most hilarious accusations are that this somehow is an insult to “white culture” — which, I suppose the implication is that the Scandinavian people who believed in this mythological pantheon, are for some reason exemplars of that culture.

The problem here is that whatever “white culture” is, I sort of guess that it probably involves, at minimum, some list of nice things that white people did in the past.  And the sort of person who would be very concerned about white culture might consider, say, the civilizations of Europe, the preservation of pre-Dark Ages knowledge or the spread of Christianity as three of those nice things.

Here’s where the problem with considering the Vikings part of this comes in — they were, to put it mildly — historically opposed to these developments.  I don’t mean they lodged complaints at the white people’s local 182, I mean they sailed up on ships and brutally murdered lots of the white people who were doing these nice things.  It seems like, whatever white culture is, when a group of people run around killing, raping and plundering those who represent it, no one should get really irritated when the ancient gods of said plunderers are victims of some perceived insult.

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Mon 2 May 2011

Questions

Posted by Brian Moore under foreign policy, war
No Comments

I imagine there are some very pointed questions being asked in Pakistan right now.

But hey, it managed to wipe the royal wedding entirely off CNN’s site — that’s success in my book.

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Sat 23 Apr 2011

Dear CNN (part 192)

Posted by Brian Moore under bad things
[2] Comments

Please, for god’s sake, stop covering the royal wedding.  It is not news.  At this very moment, the CNN World edition (as if the world just loved hearing the wedding affairs of the descendant of, on average, their historic oppressors)  has 3 of the 9 “highlights” being wedding related, and the primary headline (vastly more prominent than “Syrian Government Shoots Uninterestingly Non-Royal Protesters“) is “WHO’S GOING TO THE ROYAL WEDDING.”  I would like to say that this insanity was limited to CNN, but the other networks basically have the same thing.

So here’s the rule from now on: no news organization who has dedicated this much time to the wedding of the descendant of (historically documented) serial killers is ever again allowed to run an article or editorial about the sad state of our political discourse.  If you really felt that way, every dollar you spent covering the powerless, useless, politically embarrassing (you still have royalty in this day and age, Britain?  Really?  Bet the other more mature countries don’t invite you to their parties!) spawn of a long line of up-until-recently murderous butchers could have been used to help fix that — ’cause it’s not like there aren’t actually important things happening right now in the world.

You’re even aware of them, Mr. Strangely Anthropomorphised (see I can be British too) Embodiment of CNN, because I see that you are covering them in tiny boxes next to the article about “How To Dress Like a Princess.”  It’s really sad when the ad copy for Barbie Princess Dress-Up Dolls and your headlines converge.  I’d try to compare by listing how many times G.I. Joe action figures have the same marketing line as Fox headlines, but that might be a bit scary.

It’s bad enough how much the news focuses on the personal lives of actual leaders (to the detriment of coverage of their policies) — but when they”re covering the wedding of British welfare queens (a more accurate usage of the term has never been committed to paper) who don’t even wield a shred of political power (thank god), we’ve gone too far.  Is there anything that puts the miracle that we actually have a representative government in starker relief than the amount of time, money and energy that people spend on this ridiculous, sycophantic theatre — including, most amazingly, the citizens of a country that actually owes its existence to the fact that it shot quite a few servants of said royals?

The British royalty — and even more explicitly, this wedding — is not a news item.  They are more like a sadly prominent pimple on the fact of an otherwise respectable person, that — if we must — should be discussed only in the context of how most effectively we can cure her of this condition, so we can put the entire embarrassing situation behind us and move onto issues that matter.

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Fri 22 Apr 2011

Economics is Not Physics

Posted by Brian Moore under philosophy, science, taxes
No Comments

This kind of debate is absolutely and endlessly fascinating to me.  Go ahead, read ‘em all.  I’ll admit that the original Landsburg example was very counter-intuitive to me, even though I generally agree with him.  But that’s not the interesting part — it’s that there is such an amazing divide.  And not a polite one either, Krugman actually implies that Landsburg doesn’t really deserve his Ph.D.

That there can be such a debate over (what seems to me) to be a very basic principle of the field is totally astonishing.  Physicists might argue over whether string theory is valid or not, but that’s pretty advanced stuff — they all basically agree on how simple stuff like inclined planes work.  Now, I understand that there are no political implications in the area of inclined planes — if there were, (is friction conservative or progressive?) there might be more debate.  But even in fields with heavily charged issues — take climatology or evolutionary biology — the tendency seems to be for the field to develop a consensus and then mock the outsiders who disagree.  But this seems to be a pretty bedrock disagreement amongst a number of well-respected (though politically opposed) industry insiders.

This seems to have pretty scary implications for the science.  And even if the debate is not over the actual theory and definitions, but rather over the potentially implied policies of that theory, that brings up an equally uncomfortable conclusion: that at least one side of this debate thinks that the theory must be presented in a way that supports their policy goals.

I really wanted to title this post: “Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Tax Forms.”

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Fri 22 Apr 2011

Mission Creep Part 2

Posted by Brian Moore under war
No Comments

It’s funny that Will Wilkinson wrote this story about mission creep in Libya — and only a day later John McCain goes there.  But I guess it’s okay, since McCain (like those CIA advisors) doesn’t wear boots, right?  Some days journalists write things that get proven wrong by events on the next day — and some days they get validated.

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Thu 21 Apr 2011

Study Question

Posted by Brian Moore under libertarian
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Since Gary Johnson is now running for president, this occurred to me: how has no one done a study on the effect of medical marijuana dispensaries (which are now quite common in some states) on the illegal pot trade?  Does it hurt their business?  Does it cause them to alter their prices, or quality?  Do they compete with the dispensaries, or do they just open one themselves?  Do they try to occupy a different market segment?  This seems like economics study gold.

Alternatively, if someone has done this study, let me know!

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Thu 11 Nov 2010

Zero-Sum GDP Rankings

Posted by Brian Moore under bad things, culture, foreign policy
[2] Comments

God, I really hate articles like this:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Changes in the global pecking order are coming.

As western nations face stunted economic growth and years of painful budget-slashing ahead, developing nations like China, Brazil, India and Russia are slowly moving up on the world stage.

Look, people, “pecking order” implies that the person with the #1 world GDP “wins” and gets some special benefit because of that ranking.  That’s simply not how this works.  Do we really need more pointless status contests between nations?  The only thing that matters is the absolute numbers, not the relative ones.  If China is going up, that is good for everyone.  If the US is going down (it isn’t) that is bad for everyone.

The United States is struggling to hit 2.7% growth for the year, while emerging economies, which also include smaller countries mostly in Asia and Latin America, are collectively on track for 7.1% growth for the year.

Jesus, how can you state these numbers without the real figures?  Smaller percentages of bigger numbers can be larger in real terms for the citizens of those countries.  And, more importantly, you simply can’t make these kind of comparisons and say “well that means the US is screwing up.”  Or things like this:

So where did these countries get it right while western superpowers got it so wrong?

God damn.  The reason developing economies grow faster than developed economies is because they’re catching up.  You can’t compare the two.  If you compare two nations with similar conditions, and one’s growth rate is higher, then we can talk.  Comparing China and the US on percentage GDP growth is pointless.

And while we’re on the topic of pointless comparisons, there’s no point to comparing GDP without talking per capita, which apparently at least someone the article author interviewed was willing to say:

Even if China does become the world’s largest economy, its population is roughly 4.5 times bigger than that of the U.S., making it difficult for China to catch up to the American standard of living, said Jay Bryson, global economist with Wells Fargo.

This undermines the whole “pecking order” comment — and the entire tone of the article.  There is no meaningful information to be gained from knowing who has the highest GDP.  It’s pointless, and just talking about it puts it in the frame that somehow China would be “beating us” if they had a higher GDP, as if that would be bad for us.

Higher per capita growth, in any country, is good for every other country.  If somehow, every other country got to be higher than us (without US growth being negative), and we were dead last on the rankings — it would still be good for us.  In fact, it would be incredibly good — because it would mean that billions of people around the world had exited poverty and would now have immense resources to develop new technologies that we would benefit from, or buy our stuff, or sell us their stuff.  To slightly rework a great quote:

There is a single light of [economic progress], and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.

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Fri 29 Oct 2010

Relocating Terrorism To the Other Side of the Detector

Posted by Brian Moore under bad things
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Jeff Goldberg (the rest is ok, but a few too many euphemisms for me):

I had a choice of two TSA screening checkpoints. I picked mine based on the number of people waiting in line, not because I am impatient, but because the coiled, closely packed lines at TSA screening sites are the most dangerous places in airports, completely unprotected from a terrorist attack — a terrorist attack that would serve the same purpose (shutting down air travel) as an attack on board an aircraft.

The obligatory Schneier reference:

I don’t object to stringent security (as you will soon see), but I do object to meaningless security theater (Bruce Schneier’s phrase)

Roll the image of the airport security lines around in your head for awhile.  Think about it.  The idea is that we will prevent terrorists from smuggling bombs or weapons onto planes, where they will be able to use the enclosed space to kill the densely packed civilians there.  How do we do this?  By packing all those civilians into nice, tightly packed rows, in order to check them.  Relish the insanity.

Now, imagine what would happen if these devices actually detected a real bomb on a passenger.  What would he do?  Would he say “oh, well, I guess you caught me — I was really dead set on blowing up hundreds of people on a plane, but you know, it’s just not the same if they’re all standing here on the ground.”  Or would he just pull the trigger and accomplish the exact same goal as he had intended?

Yet that’s exactly what we’re doing — attempting to prevent high density civilian kills… by detaining large number of civilians in small spaces where it would be trivial to blow them up.  This is all old news.  I would have told you this on September 12th, 2001.  But there’s a certain pain in realizing that we’re still doing it 9 years later.  If blatantly obvious facts have no impact on our security methods, how much safety do we think these methods are buying us, for our billions?

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Thu 28 Oct 2010

Google Solar System

Posted by Brian Moore under science
[2] Comments

Okay, so NASA released it, not google, but it’s basically the same thing: Eyes on the Solar System.  If you ever find yourself, as I often do, needing to know where the asteroid 25143 Itokawa is right NOW, then this is the tool for you.  I await the addition of turn by turn directions.

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Fri 22 Oct 2010

The Alien-EMH

Posted by Brian Moore under Uncategorized
No Comments

The efficient markets hypothesis applied to conspiracy theories:

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Wed 13 Oct 2010

Special Bulletin: Don’t Resize The Y Axis

Posted by Brian Moore under budget
[2] Comments

Via Steven Landsburg, I see that Paul Krugman has essentially resorted to third-grade level statistics.  Take it away, Paul:

I’ve been getting some mail over yesterday’s column, with angry correspondents posting charts like this, showing government spending as a percentage of GDP, to claim that government spending has too surged:

He says this is dishonest, since:

What’s going on? Yes, that’s right: it’s what happens when you divide by GDP in a time of terrible economic performance. Spending hasn’t surged; in fact, it grew more slowly in the two years after Lehman collapsed than in the two previous years, despite a sharp rise [what's the difference between "a surge" and a "sharp rise" -- apparently Krugman knows] in spending on safety-net programs. Instead, GDP growth has plunged.

This is a totally fair critique — you could show a surge in spending even with a decline in real dollars spent, if GDP had dropped enough — and of course is has dropped over the last 2 years.  But here’s where the mindboggling, balls-out dishonesty comes in.  Here’s the graph that Krugman posts to refute it:

But if you look at the raw numbers on government spending, here’s what you see:

I’ll take a moment to pause, because everyone who has ever taken a stats course or submitted a research paper has just violently thrown up on their computer screen.  What Krugman’s done here is completely unacceptable — he just compared two graphs, after resizing the Y axis.  This is 100%, totally, fundamentally dishonest.

Yes, I know that what he said he did was get a graph that showed real spending increases vs. spending-as-a-percentage-of-GDP and he did indeed do that — but the problem is that if that was all he did, the graphs wouldn’t look the way he wanted them to — the 2nd would actually show a larger change (see below), with similarly scaled Y axes.  But when he resized the Y, he’s stepping into cheating land.  To get a good grasp of how dishonest this is, you have to look at the actual numbers.

The top graph which, according to Krugman, dishonestly shows “a surge,” has a total increase (going purely on my visual estimations, instead of referencing the actual numbers, since Krugman is asking his readers to rely solely on the graph) of ~30.8 to 36.1 — the latter number is about 117% of the former.  In the lower graph, the left most number is ~4,100 and the final number about ~5,300, which is about 129% of the former.  I’ll let that sink in.  Krugman has “refuted” his opponent’s claim of there being a “surge” in government spending by reproducing a different graph with a method of calculating spending that actually shows a higher percentage increase — which, no matter the subjective definition of “surge” or “sharp rise,” I think we can all agree that 129% of something represents a larger “surge” than 117% of something.

The entire reason the second graph looks like a less drastic increase is the resizing of the Y axis, which is completely dishonest.  I feel like a broken record, but this is simply unacceptable.  You can’t do that and expect to be taken seriously.  To get a good feel for how crazy Krugman’s claim  that “real spending vs % of GDP shows there was no spending surge” is, you have to understand that it’s usually the “cut spending” (i.e. Krugman’s enemies) crowd that revises the graphs like this — there’s a reason Nick Gillespie, in his “we are out of money” rants at Reason.com, always encourages using the real dollar amounts, because it makes the spending increase look larger!

This is flat out dishonesty.

(more…)

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Tue 12 Oct 2010

Education Consumer Protection Agency

Posted by Brian Moore under education
No Comments

Why do we need a government agency to protect adults from taking on loans for homes that they will find difficult to pay back, but no agency to protect 17 year old children from taking on loans for educations that they will find difficult to pay back, especially when we have such good data on the correlation of under-graduate education and future income?

I’m rarely in favor of new regulation, but one I’d support would be this: every university, upon acceptance of a student, must chart the average income for their selected major against the loans they’ve taken out and give data on how much they’ll expect to pay per year after graduation, and expected pay-back durations.

If anyone says “but there are so many non-financial benefits for getting an education!” I’d counter with two points.  1) there are lots of non-financial benefits from having a house, but we still think that taking a loan you can’t pay back is a bad idea and 2) maybe it’s a bad idea to take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans to pay for things that have non-financial benefits.

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Thu 23 Sep 2010

My Door Slamming Thoughts Exactly

Posted by Brian Moore under culture
No Comments

This is almost precisely the same conversation I had with a Democratic campaign volunteer in my (very Democratic) area of Ohio:

Steve Nicholson barely opens the storm door for the Democratic campaign volunteer trying to talk to him about the Ohio governor’s race. “I don’t care for either one,” he says, “I just want jobs.” The volunteer says that’s exactly why he should vote for the incumbent, Democrat Ted S trickland. “Not voting is a vote for Kasich,” she says, referring to Republican challenger John Kasich. “Strickland will be better for jobs,” agrees Nicholson, 30. So will he vote? No. Does he at least want a little campaign literature to learn about the race? No. The storm door closes.

I didn’t say anything about jobs, I said that I didn’t like Strickland’s opposition to charter schools.  And I didn’t say anything about Kasich, because at the time I didn’t even know the name of the Strickland’s opponent — I think I just called him “the other guy.”  And I think I’m relatively interested in politics!

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Mon 20 Sep 2010

Liberaltarian Deregulation

Posted by Brian Moore under liberal-tarian, libertarian
[3] Comments

Everything Tim writes here is great, as are Mr. Yglesias’ deregulation posts, by extension.  I babble a lot in Tim’s comments, but if you want to read my rambling, badly punctuated inanity here as well, well, you’re in luck:

These types of de-regulation are both libertarian and liberal, and both factions should support them. And I definitely, 100% agree that people who support them should express themselves on liberal principles, because like you said, there are genuinely liberal principles involved.

But I’ve been reading the “is Cato topping off your paycheck??” comments at Yglesias’ site, and there are literally people there who wrote many paragraph treatises on why it would be a terrible blow to humanity if DC tour guides were unlicensed. (or barbers). I think there must be something more at play than just “well, evil right wing people like de-regulation, so it must be bad in all cases” because the “we must make rules to make things better” phenomena is so widespread, even amongst those evil right wingers. As far as I can tell, only a small number of “right wing” people even think about deregulation at all — only the especially crazy policy people.

The average person, right left or otherwise, accepts the idea that laws work as designed; that if a law is on the books to Improve The Quality of DC Tour Guides by X, Y and Z methods, that it does so, and has such a status quo bias towards it that unless there is some personal harm that comes as a result of it, will not support overturning it. I think if you copied the same Yglesias’ post on the average right wing site, saying that “Nasty Liberals Support Unsafe and Unclean Barbers!” most people would agree.

Even say with prohibition, the king of all dumb regulation – that most people are actually against, I absolutely guarantee you that the vast majority does not oppose it because it was a stupid law that caused a great deal of unintended harm, but because it is opposed to the status quo of legal alcohol today. And therefore adopts the opposite stance on pot prohibition.

For almost every single person, every part of their daily life is “regulated.” If you don’t like X at home, you tell your kid its a rule they can’t do it. If your bosses doesn’t want you doing Y, they make a rule about it. Every interaction with a software company or telephone provider or bank comes with multi page contracts outlining the regulatory environment and hoops you must jump through. And the absolutely only time people object is if the rule personally affects them, and even then, they don’t say “there are better ways to achieve the goals of this rule” but rather “change that specific rule so it stops bothering me.”

Is there any surprise that people that people would apply the exact same methods and principles that guide their daily lives to the political sphere?

Seriously, go read the comments at Yglesias’ site.  People who don’t live in DC, haven’t ever taken a tour there, and don’t know anything about the situation are confidently explaining their regulatory schemes for that market.  I don’t know anything about it either, but I’m not advocating rules for it, either.

Edit: goddamn it, I capitalized the Central Atlantic Treaty Organization in Tim’s comments again.  -10 libertarian points.

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Sun 19 Sep 2010

The Value of Having Your Name Printed On The Ballot

Posted by Brian Moore under Uncategorized
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This article analyzes the chances of Lisa Murkowski’s write-in candidacy in Alaska.  Though I don’t really care about that election, other than harboring a vast well of distrust for hereditary power-holders from noble families, the interesting part is the analysis of how valuable actually being listed on the ballot really is:

Suppose you accept the argument that, were Ms. Murkowski running as a conventional independent candidate, with her name listed on the ballot, she would stand a decent chance of winning a three-way race. How much of a penalty might she suffer from the fact that she is not in fact named on the ballot, and that she must instead count on voters to write her name in?

This is particularly interesting, since he indicates (well, not that we all didn’t know this anyway) that not being listed on the ballot is a major penalty beyond that of not being associated with a major party.  If this is the case, and it obviously is, why do we have printed ballots at all?  If it was a serious enough issue to convince 4 of 9 Supreme Court justices that  having too much money in an election could unfairly damage our democracy even in the face of what seemed to be an insurmountable obstacle in the first amendment, why do we let this easily solved problem persist?  It seems like it would save some money too, since every ballot would always look the same: one line to put your candidate’s name.

If just having your name printed on a ballot provides such a massive advantage, why don’t we ban the practice?  Have everyone be a write in.  If our voting preferences are swayed by money, it seems they are also swayed by which names we see before us, denying voters from expressing their true preferences, unbiased by printed paper.  Plus, people are always complaining that the electorate isn’t educated enough — now we would have surefire way of reducing the influence of those ignorant chumps who couldn’t even be bothered to learn the names of the candidates, because as Mr. Silver points out, write-ins that can’t be deciphered get dismissed:

And regardless of the tenor of her campaign, any win by Ms. Murkowski is liable to be ugly in a procedural sense. If the result between Ms. Murkowski and her two opponents is at all close, litigation is likely to result. Although minor misspellings will count for Ms. Murkowski, how about a ballot cast for “Liza Murklusky”? Or one where the voter spells her name properly, but does not fill out the oval to indicate they have made a write-in choice?

Banned pre-printed candidate names seems like a win-win — well, except for people with hard-to-spell last names.  While we’re at it, why not ban listing party affiliation as well?  If you can’t even identify your party’s candidate is, then how can we trust you to know if they would be good at doing the job you’re electing them for?

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