china's hunger for education

parents who have travelled with their children to enroll for university in Wuhan, in China’s central Hubei province, bedding down for the night in a campus gymn made available to those who cannot afford hotel accommodation

source: West is trounced by Chinese aspiration

intellectual journey

The intellectual journey we decide to go on in the end is not a product of the extent of our intelligence or our curiosity about the world. The decisive factors are social class outlook, the time we choose to spend on slow, deep thinking (reading and thinking about book length analysis) and an intangible which could be called "conquering spirit"

A friend sent me this article (Busted: Stories of the Financial Crisis) by Joshua Clover in The Nation.

He starts with Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan then proceeds to Hayek, then Zizek, then reviews an entertaining book about the current economic crisis written by a novelist, John Lanchester:

credit default swap: "It's as if people had used the invention of seat belts as an opportunity to take up drunk driving."

and so on.

But Joshua Clover does not stop there because the analysis is not complete. He goes onto discuss Marx's Capital and modern interpretations by David Harvey, Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho because the current mainstream analysis is inadequate.

"Not surprisingly, economists cannot borrow, even at low levels of interest, the insights most needed: the basic understanding that capitalism's flaws are internal to its own logic and can't be whisked away by another round of financial regulation or everybody promising to be less of a creep. It is indeed a compulsion, and it ends poorly"

I wonder how many others are taking a similar intellectual journey. It is unusual to see this sort of honest self reflection in the mainstream media.

current assessment of climate science and policies (Pielke snr)

For a current assessment of the state of climate science and policy conclusions that flow from that see Pielke snr's recent Summary Of Climate Science Issues and follow his links for more detail. Here is an abbreviated summary:

the science:

• humans do effect the climate in various ways, not only global warming
• CO2 is important but IPCC focus is misleading, they focus too much on CO2 and computer modelling
• computer modelling of futures is too inexact to be useful at this stage
• global average surface temperature is an inadequate measure, ocean heat, measured in joules, would be a superior measure

policies:

• funding of computer modelling in the hope of achieving accurate predictions decades into the future is a waste of money
• focus on brute force CO2 reduction to achieve a more stable climate will achieve little
• climate policy should be mainly separate from energy policy
• vulnerability analysis, risk and disaster prevention are underutilised policy options

Bernanke's admission and Keen's critique

Bernanke has admitted that the "recovery" has stalled:

In sum, the pace of recovery in output and employment has slowed somewhat in recent months, in part because of slower-than-expected growth in consumer spending, as well as continued weakness in residential and nonresidential construction
- The Economic Outlook and Monetary Policy, August 27

Steve Keen's analysis (What Bernanke doesn’t understand about deflation) is that although Bernanke has read Irving Fisher (who was burned by the Great Depression but then underwent an intellectual transformation) he didn't understand him fully:

You would think Bernanke, as the alleged expert on the Great Depression—after all, that’s one of the main reasons he got the job as Chairman of the Federal Reserve—had read Fisher’s papers. And you’d be right. But the problem is that he didn’t understand them—and here we come back to the belief problem. The Great Depression forced Fisher—who was also a Neoclassical economist—to realize that the belief that the economy was always in equilibrium was false. When Bernanke read Fisher, he completely failed to grasp this point.

You can read Irving Fisher's analysis of the Great Depression here (pdf, 21pp):
The Debt Deflation Theory of Great Depressions (1933) by Irving Fisher

climate change essential reading

I asked Roger Pielke jnr which papers he would recommend to explain why he recommends a low carbon tax to fund R&D into energy alternative and not taxation from general revenue for this purpose. On the carbon tax issue he recommends:

An Analysis of a Technology-led Climate Policy as a Response to Climate Change by Isabel Galiana and Christopher Green (pdf, 68 pp)

For a general outline of the approach taken by Pielke jnr and his associates he recommends:
The Hartwell Paper, pdf 42 pp

He also has a book in the pipeline, The Climate Fix. The first 50 pages, with only a couple of pages missing, are available at the amazon look inside feature and provide a pretty clear picture of where his argument is heading.

If the policies advocated here had been taken up by Rudd or Turnbull then perhaps they would not have ended up in the political meat grinder. They also differ significantly from the current policies of The Greens (anti development), the Coalition (our current technology is sufficient to do the job) and Gillard's ridiculous citizens assembly (we lack conviction so pass the buck).

If only some of our politicians would grow a brain, the solution is there waiting to be found.

peak oil discussion

Peak Oil Discussion

I'll keep my eye on this discussion thread over the next few days. Discussions at Brave New Climate often reflect a wide range of opinions some of them well informed. The lead article is well researched. There is a cautionary editorial at the beginning from Barry Brook, the owner of BNC.

My current not very well informed opinion is that peak oil will only become a severe problem if we fail to develop nuclear power. We are failing to do this in australia since the Labour Party and The Greens especially won't go near it and public opinion is against and not being challenged much. For now in Australia the anti nuclear fear mongers have won. But other countries such as China, Russia, France etc. are going ahead and will develop nuclear further. Over time it will become cheaper than alternatives, but the time line is not possible to predict

Renewables can't supply the energy we need. In the long term our energy future is nuclear.

In the meantime the evidence for the likelihood of severe economic crisis independent of energy concerns is growing stronger so I continue to focus my study in that direction

michael perelman's analysis of the economic crisis

I watched the above video, which is part of a series he is making on the economic crisis. The video presentation is of poor quality but I quite like his calm or laconic style of delivery. Here is a summary of the main points:

The overall or inherent tendency of the economy is towards falling marginal costs and high fixed costs, in other words for the economy to enter a deflationary spiral. (aka the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, although Perelman does not use that phrase) Perelman outlines 6 reasons for this and also discusses the contradictions involved in some of the factors. Another central point he stresses is the importance of competition between companies in the trend towards lower prices. When faced with this reality companies or governments have these options:

1) Launch price wars without reinvestment, keep that going for as long as possible.

2) Global labour arbitrage, cutting wages and benefits, by off shoring

3) Compete by investing in new technology. This increases output (overproduction, although he does not use that word) and causes prices to fall. One of the problems here is that in a competitive environment business throws away technologies before they have paid for themselves, to replace them with even newer technologies.

4) Governments may intervene to blunt the effects of competition by fiscal and monetary policy. One negative of this is that when the economy is going well then companies will tend to not invest in new technology and the economy then stagnates on the supply side. Another tendency is for governments to indulge in military spending for mainly economic reasons, aka military Keynesianism

5) The strengthening of intellectual property law, creating cartels, is another response to increased competition. One effect of this is to severely limit the development of science and technology. There is a disencentive for others to follow in the footsteps of the original creators. The violation of intellectual property rights leads to high legal costs for those who try to break through this barrier and creates uncertainty.

6) Growth of the financial sector. Once again this is contradictory. It is true that many companies need credit to get off the floor. However, valuable resources are siphoned off into the financial system. For example, during the dot com era a good number of physicists and mathematicians went into the financial system, rather than doing anything directly productive. Finance itself becomes a disciplinary force on business. Business ends up following finance more than it follows markets. A business may cut back on R&D because that creates a cost with an uncertain payoff. If your profits are low then financial players may come and take over your company.

The Invisible Handcuffs is the name of Michael Perelman's forthcoming book. For his intellectual biography and descriptions of his other books see his intellectual biography page. On that page, summarising one of his books, he again stresses the problem associated with competition:

On a deeper level, this book calls the conception of competition into question. I show that intense competition is equivalent to a depression, yet most economists believe that competition is good and depressions are bad.

mick jagger elections

If you vote for Abbott there is a huge risk you'll get Gillard. If you vote for Gillard there is a huge risk that you'll get Abbott. If you vote for the Greens there is a huge risk you'll get Gillard (preference deals).

Since there wasn't much difference between Labour and the Coalition to start with and since Labour then backtracked on most of the small differences that did exist, then this election is even more strongly tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee than usual.

Democracy means something in countries where religious fundamentalism is a real issue (if the Taliban becomes government again if Afghanistan then religious fundamentalism runs that government) but has become a bore in countries where modernity is clearly established . Democracy is something people are literally dying for in undemocratic or recently democratic countries (Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Burma (Myanmar), North Korea, China, Zimbabwe, South Africa) but is something people are bored to near death with, at least in Australia, since we are given no real choice on election day. Britain recently was no different and in the USA Obama has turned out to be just another Democrat politician. All the major parties are Mick Jagger parties: "I can't get no satisfaction"

Some brief thoughts on some of the "issues" of the campaign:

• The economy - both parties pretend that the crisis is over and have promised a quick return to a surplus; this won't happen
• Boat people - it's disappointing that it is an issue at all but it would not be such an issue if we felt secure economically
• Mining tax - nothing wrong with taxing the wealthy more but the fear factor exists again because of  economic insecurity
• Climate change - a realistic political solution has been worked out by Pielke jnr but hasn't filtered through yet to the mainstream parties; the reactionary Greens on the other hand want to turn the productivity clock back
• Broadband - one of the few issues where Labour's policy is superior but, on the other hand, Conroy also wants to censor the internet, so he needs to be censored himself

At some point the political boredom will turn into something else. When the economic crisis really hits then the promise of both parties to restore the surplus will look particularly hollow. Which in the end brings home that capitalist democracy is limited by the system which it serves.

money, liberty, credit, crisis

John Weeks has three great quotes on his home page which sums up the spirit of our times:

"When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall…dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession…will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease ..." [J M Keynes, ‘The Future’, Essays in Persuasion 1931]

"Unhappy events…have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group" [Franklin D Roosevelt, message to the US Congress 1938]

"In a system of production, where the entire continuity of the reproduction process rests upon credit, a crisis must obviously occur — a tremendous rush for means of payment — when credit suddenly ceases and only cash payments have validity" [Karl Marx, Capital III, p 490]

Hitchens - Charlie Rose interview

Follow the link for an excellent video (I can't embed it) interview by Charlie Rose of Christopher Hitchens:
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11168

From this interview you obtain a real sense of why Hitchens is so highly regarded as a significant public intellectual - intelligent, deep knowledge of history as well as current affairs, masterly orator, sense of humour, ability to think on his feet and recall detailed argumentation, principled, sometimes contrarian, loyal to his friends and awareness of his own strengths and weaknesses.

We need more public intellectuals like Hitchens.

materialist dialectics

Alfredo Saad-Filho provides a good explanation of materialist dialectics in chapter one of his book, which is available on line The Value of Marx(pdf). I've only read chapter one of Saad-Filho so far but this might also be a good modern guide to reading Capital. Chapter one of Capital is the most difficult and for most mere mortals a guide is necessary.

I thought I had understood dialectics through reading Mao's philosophical essays many years ago but now realise that I hadn't understood the initial non obvious phase of concept formation, particularly the importance of history and abstraction in that process. eg. how in Capital Marx identifies the concept of value.

I suspect the disagreements from non marxists and misunderstandings from "marxists" that have followed are partly to do with not understanding the method used. There is a section on method in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy but it is not particularly thorough. Marx applied a method to analyse the internal workings of capitalism but only left hints as to what his method was, rather than a full explanation, for whatever reason. This footnote from EP Thompson towards the end of chapter one of Saad-Filho provides the explanation:

‘We have often been told that Marx had a "method" ...and that this constitutes the essence of Marxism. It is therefore strange that ...Marx never wrote this essence down. Marx left many notebooks. Marx was nothing if not a self-conscious and responsible intellectual worker. If he had found the clue to the universe,he would have set a day or two aside to put it down. We may conclude from this that it was not written because it could not be written, any more than Shakespeare or Stendhal could have reduced their art to a clue. For it was not a method but a practice, and a practice learned through practising. So that, in this sense, dialectics can never be set down, nor learned by rote.’

US economy is worse than Greece

U.S. Is Bankrupt and We Don't Even Know It: Laurence Kotlikoff

Laurence J. Kotlikoff is a professor of economics at Boston University

IMF annual review of US economic policy:

"The U.S. fiscal gap associated with today’s federal fiscal policy is huge for plausible discount rates ... closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 percent of U.S. GDP"

To correct this fiscal gap would require doubling of US taxes, which is politically not yet possible

How can the fiscal gap be so enormous?

Simple. We have 78 million baby boomers who, when fully retired, will collect benefits from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid that, on average, exceed per-capita GDP. The annual costs of these entitlements will total about $4 trillion in today’s dollars. Yes, our economy will be bigger in 20 years, but not big enough to handle this size load year after year.

This is what happens when you run a massive Ponzi scheme for six decades straight, taking ever larger resources from the young and giving them to the old while promising the young their eventual turn at passing the generational buck.

Herb Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under U.S. President Richard Nixon, coined an oft-repeated phrase: “Something that can’t go on, will stop.” True enough. Uncle Sam’s Ponzi scheme will stop. But it will stop too late.

And it will stop in a very nasty manner. The first possibility is massive benefit cuts visited on the baby boomers in retirement. The second is astronomical tax increases that leave the young with little incentive to work and save. And the third is the government simply printing vast quantities of money to cover its bills...

And bond traders will kick us miles down our road once they wake up and realize the U.S. is in worse fiscal shape than Greece.

Pakistan's infrastructure

The deluge, which was many times the usual monsoon and fell farther north and west than usual, has exposed the lack of investment in water infrastructure, including big dams, much of which was built in the 1960s. The removal of forest cover may also have allowed rainwater to drain faster into the rivers.
- Swamped, Bruised and Resentful

Global warming may have contributed to the disaster in Pakistan. But then again it may not have. Spending money on essential infrastructure now is going to save more lives than pronouncing certainty about things that are not certain. For a more informed perspective than mine see Pielke snr:
Follow Up On Weather Channel Interview Of Kevin Trenberth and Roger Pielke Sr
A Way Forward In Climate Science Based On A Bottom-Up Resourse-Based Perspective
Extract:

The IPCC, unfortunately, ignored this bottom-up, resource-based focus, and instead completed an inappropriately narrow top-down CO2-centric viewpoint based on multi-decadal global climate model predictions; e.g. see the movement from WG1 to the WG2 reports, which culminated in the WG3 report

and Pielke jnr:
Catastrophe Catnip

Journalists are drawn to the notion that greenhouse gas emissions increase the human toll from extreme events like Ulysses was drawn to the sirens. The connection between the two is made despite a robust scientific consensus -- and lack of evidence to the contrary -- that no signal beyond increasing societal vulnerability has been detected in increasing disaster losses, much less attributed to the effects of accumulating greenhouse gases

creativity doesn't count

Some thoughts on reading The hot young teacher they hired instead and Tom Hoffman's response

There is a difference b/w monopoly skills (a worker being indispensable) and general adaptability skills (being flexible enough to "go with the flow" on the job). The former is allowed but never fully recognised, the latter is essential to the ongoing continuity or reproducibility of the system.

Monopoly skills, indispensability, is anathema to capitalism. Sooner or later all workers have to be replaced.

Some creative workers may develop monopoly, indispensable skills. For example, a brilliant English teacher may develop outstanding skills in developing, delivering and assessing a course in Holocaust literature (well worth reading). But when it comes to the ongoing continuity of the system this does not count. The cheaper replacement teacher does not have to have these indispensable skills. In the final analysis creativity does not count, the system does not like it.

This is implicit in teacher training courses, which have a requirement of general skill level and adaptability but not brilliance or excellence in any particular area. Exceptional creativity just does scale in a system or sausage factory of mass production. And when this transfers to on the job skills then hard work - to the point of modern day slavery, not having a real life outside the job, see Martha Infante's ridiculous comment which triggered Tom's rage - and adaptability, being able to do a wide range of different tasks to a good enough standard, are more valued than deep creative brilliance.

The ongoing historical trend of the dynamics of capitalist production is in the direction of deskilling, simplifying and where possible human labour being converted into machine labour.

David Harvey has a great section in his book Limits to Capital, Ch 4.2 The Labour Process, where he explains Marx's words about the social process that goes on behind the backs of producers which reduces skilled to simple labour.

It is true that brilliant, creative individuals such as Mark Shuttleworth, Paul Graham, Nicholas Negroponte or Brewster Kahle can make personal fortunes by creating and selling their inventions to capitalists and then using their wealth for the public good, more or less. The system cannot eliminate creativity completely. Other brilliant individuals make fortunes as entertainers in sport or music. The system also needs to keep us entertained and distracted. A deeper analysis would require a further elaboration of these categories. But I believe the general trend is clear, as illustrated by Beth Aviv's tale. These issues are also raised by Tom Friedman's book The World is Flat, where he talks about plain vanilla jobs being exported to the developing world through globalization and that to retain your job in the industrialised world you need to develop some special, indispensible skills. However, David Harvey takes this analysis further than Friedman.

hitchen's

Christopher Hitchen's is making the best of it but the prognosis is not good.



He has also written about his cancer and treatment regime: Topic of Cancer

Huh?

So Labour sacked the unpopular and unelectable Rudd and appointed the popular Gillard as Prime Minister so they could win the upcoming election. But now the "popular" Gillard has made Abbott the Coalition more popular than she is, so the "unpopular" Rudd has stepped forward to campaign more broadly in order to convert the now unelectable Labour into electable Labour.

political economy as theatre

Some writers (Roughtheory) argue that Marx's Capital is really theatre, that illustrates the absurdity of the human condition, at least in our current social and economic system. Marx does talk about the capitalist as capital personified and much more along those lines. Like everything else with Marx this idea has been both much discussed and much distorted. But to be a capitalist you do have to devote a significant portion of your life to reproducing and nourishing capital, a "mere thing". In one sense that "mere thing" takes over the life or significant parts of the life of a human.

Capital is difficult reading. I wonder if it could reach a wider audience if aspects of it were presented as a play.

Although not as conceptually ambitious this has been done to an extent by Lucy Prebble with her play about Enron:


Here is an extract from an article based on an interview with the playwright Lucy Prebble:

...the whole financial basis on which Enron rose and fell was "that most theatrical of entities, just a game, an illusion, a system of belief". ... Jeffrey Skilling, the disgraced former CEO of Enron ... begins full of the airy belief that he has reinvented the world on his own terms, and ends beset by his own demons as that world crashes around his ears ... what is extraordinary is that we had all watched this happen with Enron nearly a decade before and yet still we wanted to believe in the illusion of financial miracles

Skilling: I have to check the stock price.
Daughter: Why?
Skilling: Because that's how daddy knows how much he's worth.
Daughter: Why?
Skilling: Because the market tells me.
Daughter: Why?

It's nearly time for Australia's Great Financial Crisis

Neither Labour nor the Coalition will be announcing a policy about this in the current election campaign.

Steve Keen warns that Australia is heading for a collapse in housing prices which will devastate our economy.

The relative percentages of home loans making up the assets of banks in the UK, USA and Australia are:
UK 17%
USA 15%
Australian Commonwealth Bank 49%

See the slides 21 and 22 of the presentation linked to from this Keen article in May: Excellent presentation on Scribd on Australian housing

In a more recent article (Thanks for the Manna) Keen writes:

There is however one important way in which house prices do differ from shares: the first sign of trouble is not a sudden drop in prices, but a fall in the number of sales and an increase in the length of time it takes for properties to sell. That sign was evident in the data from the last year or so, which is why I argued that a fall in house prices was imminent in a previous article on Business Spectator. Now that the data are unequivocal, the following processes are likely.

Firstly, with an increased stock of unsold houses on the market, buyers are likely to take yet more time to make a decision—which will add further to the backlog. If prices are falling, why hurry? The urgency will leave the buy side.

Secondly, so-called investors—whom I prefer to call speculators, since 90% of them have bought existing properties rather than built new ones—will start to consider whether they should swap from the buy side to the sell side. After all, no-one in their right mind buys an investment property in Australia for the rental returns: it’s capital gains or nothing DownUnder. Do you capitalize on gains to date, or hang on hoping that the upward trend will re-assert itself once more?

Given the skewing of our market away from owner-occupiers and towards speculators in the last two decades, this second effect could cause a sudden increase in the number of properties on the market—at just the same time that buyers have become more relaxed about closing a sale. It’s this sort of process in an asset market that is why asset prices don’t “taper”—or “plateau”, to use a word from an earlier time.

I expect these two processes to lead to an accelerating rate of decline in house prices now, as they did in the USA when “Flip That House” ceased being a winning trade.

what rote and relevance both lack

Educational approaches tend to flip flop between rote learning and relevance or surface motivational learning. Although both of these have their place what they both lack is a deep understanding of the actual subject knowledge being taught. The reason little progress is made in educational reform is that it is really hard work to deepen subject knowledge. It doesn't scale. It would require us as a society to take education far more seriously.

Teaching in higher education requires that we continually develop our understanding of our subject. As a young lecturer, I remember feeling constant frustration about my inability to get my students to grasp the meaning of simple concepts such as “society” and “the social”.

I still feel a twinge of embarrassment when I recall my early futile attempts to go beyond very formal expositions about the difference between nature and nurture. It was only after a series of disappointing episodes of miscommunication that I decided to spend some time reading about this subject to see if I could teach it more effectively.

It was while reading the introduction to Karl Marx’s Grundrisse one evening that the proverbial light bulb was switched on. The passage that did it was about the socially mediated meaning of eating: “Hunger is hunger, but the hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth.”

A week later I tried it out in one of my seminars. “Even an apparently biological act like eating is socially mediated,” I explained, before elaborating on Marx’s example. Did it work? Almost immediately one of my Nigerian students pointed out that “you Europeans worry about overeating while we in Africa are concerned about not having enough food in our belly”.

A few minutes later another student raised the question of eating disorders. “It is unlikely that people in the Stone Age knew very much about anorexia,” she posited. By the end of the seminar, the students had begun to internalise the concept of “social” and I learnt how to teach this subject more effectively.

It was not the magic of the Grundrisse that achieved this revelation. I could have gained inspiration from numerous other texts. For me, what was significant about this episode was that I finally learnt to treat a problem of teaching as an issue that was inseparable from matters to do with my scholarship
- Feeding a fine hunger by Frank Furedi

This also helped me understand why I am taking time off work to study political economy. I simply was not satisfied with my depth of understanding of society and how it works. The way in which apparently simple concepts like "eating" change their meaning as a result of changes in the productive forces and relationships in society relates closely to how we understand concepts such as value, labour and capital as well.

update: Frank Furedi on authority in schools Radio interview, There's a crisis in adult authority in our schools (15 minutes)

Is Women's Weekly against Labour?

Chris Uhlmann:

There is something disturbing about the cover of the Women's Weekly, adorned by a beaming Prime Minister.

It's beautiful, glossy, near perfect. It's also utterly contrived.

It's disturbing because the makeover is a metaphor for the Labor campaign.
- Labor policy make-up melting in political spotlight

I agree with Chris Uhlmann's analysis of the Labour campaign. It just seems to me that Labour has been like this - phony - for a long time but now it has become more obvious.

Is even Women's Weekly now working against Labour?

the honest broker, discussion

Roger at Face Value
Pielke versus Schneider

update, 2nd August: also The Honestly Broken and And in the End ( the comments are part of the essential reading)
update, 5th August: The Honest Broker (this one is at Pielke jnrs blog, Michael Tobis joins in at comment 63 and there is some to and fro with Pielke jnr after that)

Great discussion here, in the comments, between Michael Tobis, Roger Pielke jnr and others including Richard Tol about Roger's book The Honest Broker.

What is the nature of science, the nature of politics and how do they interrelate?

Extract from an informative review of The Honest Broker:
Roger A. Pielke, Jr., The honest broker: making sense of science in policy and politics:

(Pielke) develops four idealized roles for scientists in the policy process. The pure scientist attempts to remain detached from politics and policy, focusing only on research without consideration for its use. The science arbiter answers scientific questions for decision makers but avoids considering normative questions. The issue advocate uses scientific information to advance a specific political agenda or policy alternative. Finally, the honest broker of policy alternatives expands, or at least clarifies, the scope of choice for the decision maker through the integration of knowledge and a broad consideration of possible alternatives.

and

Pielke argues that the decision contexts in which scientists operate range from “Tornado Politics” to “Abortion Politics.” By Tornado Politics, Pielke means a context characterized by limited choices, agreement about values, and high certainty about the relationship between available alternatives and valued outcomes. Thus, a group of people deciding whether to seek shelter from an approaching tornado is engaged in Tornado Politics. In contrast, by Abortion Politics, Pielke means a context characterized by a large number of possible alternatives, competing goals and values, and uncertainty about how alternatives relate to valued outcomes. Pielke (p. 43) posits that scientific information can help “assess decision alternatives” in situations involving Tornado Politics, but it can only “justify decision commitments” in situations involving Abortion Politics. This is because, Pielke argues, scientific information only compels action in instances without substantial value conflict—science cannot reconcile conflicting values.

From the discussion at Michael Tobis's blog, Pielke jnr said "If you think that you are in a debate that can be resolved in some manner through appeals to science, you are wrong."

I have just ordered my own copy of The Honest Broker

The Michael Tobis blog discussion is about whether climate change is a Tornado type discussion (mainly empirical) or an Abortion type discussion (mainly about values). Since it does fit the latter category, Roger is correct IMO. We would end up achieving more useful results (for example, more research into energy alternatives such as the Boron car, serious development of pilot nuclear programs like the Integral Fast Reactor) if believers became less zealous about the necessity of achieving CO2 reduction targets in definite timelines.

The public believes in AGW but is not prepared to alter their lifestyle to achieve reductions. The demise of Rudd and Turnbull illustrate the non productive nature of a radical "must do" stance on this issue.

Also scientists should not pretend to be certain about projecting trends 50 years ahead, the should acknowledge the uncertainty involved in such projections (and the state of the science in general) more openly. For evaluation of the science itself I recommend the Pielke snr blog.

Marx: ego is not a dirty word

What did marx say about human nature?

This issue came up in a recent discussion here but it also comes up all the time whenever you mention communism or socialism. Someone I spoke to recently said:

Even if the whole world was socialist or communist then it would eventually revert back to capitalism because that is human nature

And in a comment on this blog Mark Miller said:

The problem I see with Marxism is it assumes that human nature can be molded and changed. Where Marxism has been tried it runs into what I'd call "the wall of human nature". It doesn't achieve its stated goals, because imperfect people are involved in the enterprise. Inevitably the same qualities that Marxism tries to overthrow: greed, the hunger for power over others, end up controlling the enterprise. I think Lord Acton's maxim holds true no matter what structure is tried: "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Such efforts to create a society where everything is parceled out equally and no one has more power than anyone else is continually frustrated, because human nature keeps getting in the way.

I recognise these opinions as "popular wisdom" but wasn't actually sure what Marx did say about human nature, so I looked it up and here is part of what I found, part of a polemic against Max Stirner:

"Communism is simply incomprehensible to our saint because the communists do not put egoism against self-sacrifice or self-sacrifice against egoism nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or in its high-flown ideological form; on the contrary, they demonstrate the material basis engendering it, with which it disappears of itself. The communists do not preach morality at all, such as Stirner preaches so extensively. They do not put to the people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are well aware that egoism, just as much as self-sacrifice, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals. Hence, the communists by no means want,... to do away with the "private individual" for the sake of the "general," self-sacrificing man....

Communist theoreticians, the only ones who have time to devote to the study of history, are distinguished precisely because they alone have discovered that throughout history the "general interest" is created by individuals who are defined as "private persons." They know that this contradiction is only a seeming one because one side of it, the so-called "general," is constantly being produced by the other side, private interest, and by no means opposes the latter as an independent force with an independent history - so that this contradiction is in practice always being destroyed and reproduced. Hence it is not a question of the Hegelian "negative unity" of two sides of a contradiction, but of the materially determined destruction of the preceding materially determined mode of life of individuals, with the disappearance of which this contradiction, together with its unity, also disappear."
- Personal, versus General Interest, from Selections from the remaining parts of The German Ideology by Marx and Engels

Labour: no guts no glory

Q&A: Monday 26th July (video 55 min, expires in 13 days)

Includes Malcom Turnbull (who lost his Deputy Leader position through supporting Rudd's emissions trading scheme), Christine Milne (Deputy Leader of the Greens), Penny Wong (Climate Change Minister)

This is well worth watching to see how Julia Gillard's reworking of the climate change policy is playing out. Penny Wong was very much on the defensive in attempting to justify Labour's backsliding on an issue where the public does want some action. Contrast this with Penny Wong's personal gutsy stand on the gay and asian issue in the same program, which received strong support.

After watching this I felt it possible that Labour might lose this election owing to their perceived inability to take a tough stand on any issue. This might trump the calculations of the Labour Union back deal manipulators who gambled on the women's vote. Time will tell.

Some very brief observations:

• The Greens falsely claim that renewables can do the job
• Malcom Turnbull is incorrect to suggest that China is going green (at the end)
• None of the parties support nuclear energy, which is the best direction to head in as an alternative
• There is general ignorance about the real state of the science, which I believe is best depicted by Pielke snr

Roger Pielke jnr keeps a close eye on Australian climate policy (and everywhere else for that matter). For his analysis of the Gillard policy, see: julia gillard lays out her approach, particularly his comment that:

When will politicians learn that climate policies are a political loser if they require that people "transform the way we live and the way we work"?

I left a comment on his blog, #11.

growing wealth disparity

I regard growing wealth disparity as uncontroversial and an indictment of the system which produces such disparity. I'll just quote an extract from David Harvey's Limits to Capital which provides substantial evidence for growing wealth disparity:

"According to the UN by the mid 1990s the net worth of the 358 richest people in the world was then found to be equal to the combined income of the poorest 45 per cent of the worlds population - 2.3 billion people. The world's 200 richest people more than doubled their net worth in the 4 years to 1998, to more than $1 trillion, so that the assets of the world's top three billionaires were more than the combined GNP of all least developed countries and their 600 million people.... The share of the national income taken by the top 1 percent of income earners in the US more than doubled between 1980 and 2000 while that of the top 0.1 percent more than tripled. The income of the 99th percentile rose 87 percent between 1972 and 2001 while that of the 99.9th percentile rose 497 percent. In 1985 the combined wealth of the Forbes 400 richest people in the US was $238 billion with an average net worth of $600 million, adjusted for inflation. By 2005, their average net worth was $2.8 billion and their collective assets amounted to $1.13 trillion - more than the GDP of Canada. Much of this shift has been due to rapidly rising rates of executive compensation. In 1980, the average chief executive made about $1.6 million a year in today's dollars but by 2004 this had risen to $7.6 million." (p. xi, Intro to the 2006 Verso Edition)

I quoted an extract of Harvey's figure on a reddit thread and received this reply from mrhymer:

"Wealth is not a finite pool that all humans pull from. There is no evidence that if the millionaire in Dubai releases his wealth back into the wild that it will ever find the hand of the poor man in Bangladesh. So studies highlighting the gaps and distributions are foolish post hoc, ergo proctor hoc arguments."

For a more detailed outline of Harvey's views where he does connect the increasing of wealth disparity with the evolution of the capitalist economy into neo liberalism try this interview. I don't agree with all of Harvey but his analysis of the effects of neo liberalism seems sound to me.

blogger comment length restriction

It seems that blogger now has a comment length restriction of 4096 characters.

"There is a flaw in Blogger comment code, that makes the deletion process abort, with large comments. Spammers were exploiting this flaw, to create undeletable comments. Blogger is protecting us from undeletable spam comments, by preventing long comments"
- nitecruzr

It would be better if blogger fixed the flaw in their comment code. Some bloggers like to discuss issues at length.

Christopher Hitchens has oesophageal cancer

You can read his brief announcement, interesting comments from those who love him and bad taste comments from those who hate him, here: An Update from Christopher Hitchens. I admire him for his outspoken support for the Iraq war and wish him well in his battle against cancer.

Related:
the irony of September 11th
waterboarding: DIY

capitalism: for and against

I responded to LinuxLiberty on a reddit thread (source), which began with a misleading quote from John Maynard Keynes.

LinuxLiberty:
It is kind of amazing that capitalism even needs to be defended given the enormous amount of prosperity it has brought to the world. While I won't say the U.S. is an example of free market, in particular like the rest of the world it has a Marxist banking system that repeatedly fails, but it has brought enormous amount of prosperity to even poor people. Look even most poor people live in a house an apartment that has indoor plumbing, electricity, AC, a color television, a DVD player, a phone, a computer with Internet, and many poor people own cars. If you own all of those things that puts you in the top 10% of the rest of the world. The average person in China can't even afford a color television much less a car.

The biggest problem with capitalism is it turns people into spoiled brats who can't even comprehend what a rough life or poverty is.

billkerr:
It's true that capitalism has been the most productive system to date. However, there are also some problems with it, which I would summarise as follows:

• it can't avoid major economic crisis, eg. the last Great Depression and the next one, soon
• it has deformed or crippled the nature of work, especially the way factories operate
• the wealth disparity b/w rich and poor continues to increase
• it promotes the unsustainable dream that you can create more money from money

pielke snrs hypotheses regarding climate change

From Roger Pielke snr, who favours hypothesis 2a, that whilst CO2 is significant it should not be elevated above other climate forcings:

Hypothesis 1: Human influence on climate variability and change is of minimal importance, and natural causes dominate climate variations and changes on all time scales. In coming decades, the human influence will continue to be minimal.

Hypothesis 2a: Although the natural causes of climate variations and changes are undoubtedly important, the human influences are significant and involve a diverse range of first order climate forcings, including, but not limited to, the human input of carbon dioxide (CO2). Most, if not all, of these human influences on regional and global climate will continue to be of concern during the coming decades.

Hypothesis 2b: Although the natural causes of climate variations and changes are undoubtedly important, the human influences are significant and are dominated by the emissions into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases, the most important of which is CO2. The adverse impact of these gases on regional and global climate constitutes the primary climate issue for the coming decades.
- Invitation On Assessing Three Climate Hypotheses

Roger Pielke snr invited feedback on these hypotheses following criticism of them at Real Climate: What do Climate Scientists Think? (See Comments 36, 43, 49)

Pielke snr has now published the feedback he has received about the different hypotheses: Feedback On My Invitation On The Three Hypotheses Regarding Climate Forcings

I did post comments (and received responses) to John Cook’s blog: A Scientific Guide to the 'Skeptics Handbook' , which does seem to make an honest attempt to evaluate evidence about climate change, about Pielke snrs invitation to improve his hypotheses.

32. billkerr at 11:11 AM on 2 July, 2010
hi John,
Have you considered the choice b/w Pielke snrs invitation and hypotheses 2a and 2b? (Invitation On Assessing Three Climate Hypotheses) You seem to support 2b judging by your handbook's CO2 emphasis but 2a may be a better fit for the evidence

Hypothesis 2a: Although the natural causes of climate variations and changes are undoubtedly important, the human influences are significant and involve a diverse range of first order climate forcings, including, but not limited to, the human input of carbon dioxide (CO2). Most, if not all, of these human influences on regional and global climate will continue to be of concern during the coming decades.

Hypothesis 2b: Although the natural causes of climate variations and changes are undoubtedly important, the human influences are significant and are dominated by the emissions into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases, the most important of which is CO2. The adverse impact of these gases on regional and global climate constitutes the primary climate issue for the coming decades.

Response: I hadn't seen Pielke's hypotheses. It seems to me 2a and 2b aren't mutually exclusive - any climate scientist would agree that CO2 is not the only driver of climate and that we need to take into account all forcings. The reason for the emphasis on CO2 is because it is the most dominant and fastest rising forcing. The emphasis on CO2 in the Scientific Guide is also necessary as the 'Skeptics Handbook' fails to recognise the many lines of evidence that more CO2 forces up temperature - this is a somewhat more extreme stance than the more nuanced views of Roger Pielke Snr.

50. billkerr at 10:03 AM on 3 July, 2010
#32 and #33

John,
When you say "The reason for the emphasis on CO2 is because it is the most dominant and fastest rising forcing" you are supporting Pielke snrs hypothesis 2b and rejecting 2a. They are mutually exclusive by my reading.

Doug and John,
The Real Climate discussion that Doug links to predates Pielke snrs invitation for people to improve the wording of the hypotheses if they feel the wording is inadequate, as claimed by Eric in the Real Climate discussion. This Pielke snr post, which also predates the invitation, condenses the different viewpoints

.

study political economy

Given that we are facing the greatest economic crisis in 80 years it is a good idea to begin some serious study of the fundamentals of political economy.

great depression looms

Mainstream economists Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (Telegraph) and Paul Krugman (New York Times) are now saying we are heading for a version of another Great Depression.

Investors are starting to chew over the awful possibility that America's recovery will stall just as Asia hits the buffers. China's manufacturing index has been falling since January, with a downward lurch in June to 50.4, just above the break-even line of 50. Momentum seems to be flagging everywhere, whether in Australian building permits, Turkish exports, or Japanese industrial output.
- Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

There is a difference of ruling class opinion about how to deal with the ongoing economic crisis, either to introduce austerity measures (as in Greece and some other Eurozone countries) or to print more money. Both of the above authors advocate more stimulus and are dismayed at the growing trend to austerity measures.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, With the US trapped in depression, this really is starting to feel like 1932, 04 Jul 2010

Paul Krugman, The Third Depression, June 27, 2010

Update (12th July 2010): Greenspan Says Economy May Be Undergoing a `Pause'

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said the U.S. economy may be undergoing what he called a “pause,” and that he can’t rule out the possibility of a so- called double-dip recession ... Inventory accumulation “has stopped” and production “has flattened out,” the 84-year-old former central banker said.