December 17, 2004
Jon Rauch Consigns Himself to Limbo for Eternity
Jonathan Rauch writes:
Social Studies (12/17/2004): Bush's agenda differs markedly from Thatcher's (and Ronald Reagan's): Thatcher wanted to reduce both the demand for and the supply of government. Bush seems to think he can spend his way to smaller government, reducing the demand for government while, at least in terms of spending, increasing the supply. His approach, while arguably more cynical than Thatcher's, may prove more politically successful....
This paragraph is intended to send two different messages to two different sets of audiences:
To Bushies, the paragraph is supposed to say:
Democrats and deficit hawks claim that Bush's big-deficit conservatism is immoral--that it weakens the economy and impoverishes the future by reducing the rate of economic growth while shifting the costs of today's government programs onto tomorrow's taxpayers. But what do they know? Economics isn't a science. And who cares: Bush wins. He thus may well be more successful in the long run than Thatcher or Reagan.
To Democrats and to the scattered remnants of grownup Republicans, the paragraph is supposed to say:
Everyone with half a brain knows that Bush's big-deficit conservatism is deeply immoral--that it weakens the economy and impoverishes the future by reducing the rate of economic growth while shifting the costs of today's government programs onto tomorrow's taxpayers. Whatever you think of Thatcher and Reagan, Bush is a much lesser figure than either of them.
The paragraph, as written, places unbearable stresses on the words "differs markedly" and "arguably": are they supposed to trigger a positive, neutral, or negative? The paragraph is artfully written to preserve the maximum of possible ambiguity. But the time for ambiguity about George W. Bush is *long* past. If Trent Lott can call for Donald Rumsfeld to spend more time with his family, Andrew Sullivan can out-Krugman Paul Krugman as a shrill unbalanced critic of George W. Bush, and Brent Scowcroft can say that Bush's Iraq policy is a "failing venture," Jon Rauch can at least tell us which banner he is following.
As was once written by an Italian poet of the thirteenth century:
And I looked again, and saw a banner,
Which, whirling round, ran forward so rapidly,
That any thought of pausing it seemed to scorn;
And after it there came so long a train
Of people: I never would have thought
That Death had ever undone so many...
Then I understood, and I knew,
That this was the place of the cowardly wretches
Hateful to both God and to his enemies...
And every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal...
Posted by DeLong at 07:18 PM | Comments (24) | TrackBack
Jonathan Weisman Pulls His Punches
Jonathan Weisman pulls his punches as he says that Bush is engaged in a "delicate balancing act":
washingtonpost.com: Changing for the Better -- or Worse?:Throughout a two-day conference on the economy, President Bush and his allies extolled the virtues of his tax cuts and "pro-growth" policies, which they said have lifted the nation from recession and propelled it well above its international economic competitors. If Washington adheres to the path of fiscal restraint while following the president's tax prescriptions, it was suggested, policymakers could secure powerful economic growth far into the future.
Yet when the subject turned to the nation's legal or Social Security systems, the picture grew suddenly dark. Frivolous lawsuits have hobbled America's businesses and have put them at the mercy of their enlightened overseas competition, administration officials said. As for federal entitlements, a rising tide of retiring baby boomers will inevitably slow economic growth and bankrupt Social Security.
"The crisis is now," Bush warned in his closing speech.
Such contradictions emerged repeatedly, pointing up the delicate balancing act that Bush faces as he tries to sell his economic proposals....
"Lying through his teeth at least half the time" seems much more appropriate than "faces a delicate balancing act."
Posted by DeLong at 03:09 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Why Does David Ignatius Still Have a Job Edition)
Why does the Washington Post still employ David Ignatius?
Matthew Yglesias writes:
TAPPED: December 2004 Archives: DON'T SAY YOU WEREN'T WARNED. The Washington Post's David Ignatius writes "How Iran is Winning in Iraq":
If you had asked an intelligence analyst two years ago to describe the worst possible political outcome following an American invasion of Iraq, he might well have answered that it would be a regime dominated by conservative Shiite Muslim clerics with links to neighboring Iran. But just such a regime now seems likely to emerge after Iraq's Jan. 30 elections. . . . [F]uture historians will wonder how it happened that the United States came halfway around the world, suffered more than 1,200 dead and spent $200 billion to help install an Iraqi government whose key leaders were trained in Iran. Our Iraq policy may be full of good intentions, but in terms of strategy, it is a riderless horse.
I would never hold a single columnist responsible for the situation, but writings like "Possibilities of a New Iraq" by David Ignatius on October 7, 2002 surely played a role here:
Many analysts warn of the disasters that await in this postwar Iraq, but frankly I'm not convinced. . . . And the talk of Iraq's internecine strife is overblown, too. The long-repressed Shiite community forms a majority of its population, which leads some analysts to fear Shiites will create a radical Muslim regime. But the Shiites of Iraq are Arabs who stayed loyal to Hussein through nearly a decade of war against the Persians of Iran. Iraq's Shiite elite has been the country's leading modernizers, supplying more than their share of scientists and engineers.
This notwithstandig, Ignatius chooses to blame "ethicists in San Francisco" for the current situation. Somehow, I'm not buying it.
Posted by DeLong at 03:02 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
Social Security Privatization Around the Globe
Paul Krugman looks at Social Security privatization around the globe:
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Buying Into Failure: Information about other countries' experience with privatization isn't hard to find.... http://www.tcf.org.... Yet, aside from giving the Cato Institute and other organizations promoting Social Security privatization the space to present upbeat tales from Chile, the U.S. news media have provided their readers and viewers with little information about international experience. In particular, the public hasn't been let in on two open secrets: (1) Privatization dissipates a large fraction of workers' contributions on fees to investment companies. (2) It leaves many retirees in poverty....
More than 99 percent of Social Security's revenues go toward benefits, and less than 1 percent for overhead. In Chile's system, management fees are around 20 times as high. And that's a typical number for privatized systems.... If we introduce a system with British-level management fees, net returns to workers will be reduced by more than a quarter. Add in deep cuts in guaranteed benefits and a big increase in risk, and we're looking at a "reform" that hurts everyone except the investment industry....
It's true that costs will be low if investments are restricted to low-overhead index funds - that is, if government officials, not individuals, make the investment decisions. But if that's how the system works, the suggestions that workers will have control over their own money - two years ago, Cato renamed its Project on Social Security Privatization by replacing "privatization" with "choice" - are false advertising. And if there are rules restricting workers to low-expense investments, investment industry lobbyists will try to get those rules overturned....
Privatizers who laud the Chilean system never mention that... the government is still pouring in money. Why? Because... the Chilean government must "provide subsidies for workers failing to accumulate enough capital to provide a minimum pension."... [P]rivatization would have condemned many retirees to dire poverty, and the government stepped back in to save them.... [T[he Bush administration wants to scrap a retirement system that works, and can be made financially sound for generations to come with modest reforms. Instead, it wants to buy into failure...
Posted by DeLong at 11:05 AM | Comments (25) | TrackBack
When Climatologists Attack!!
The climatologists are angry, and are on the warpath against the industry-funded Tech Central Station:
RealClimate » Temperature Variations in Past Centuries and the so-called "Hockey Stick": ...coined by the former head of NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Jerry Mahlman, to describe the pattern common to numerous proxy and model-based estimates of Northern Hemisphere mean temperature changes over the past millennium... a long-term cooling trend from the so-called "Medieval Warm Period" (broadly speaking, the 10th-mid 14th centuries) through the "Little Ice Age" (broadly speaking, the mid 15th-19th centuries), followed by a rapid warming during the 20th century that culminates in anomalous late 20th century warmth.... Numerous myths.. can be found on various non-peer reviewed websites.... Estimates of Northern Hemisphere average temperature changes from climate model simulations employing estimates of long-term natural (e.g. volcanic and solar) and modern anthropogenic (greenhouse gas and sulphate aerosol) radiative forcings of climate agree well, in large part, with the empirical, proxy-based reconstructions. One notable exception is a study by Gonzalez-Rouco et al (2003) that makes use of a dramatically larger estimate of past natural (solar and volcanic) radiative forcing than is accepted in most studies, and exhibits greater variability than other models. Yet, as in all of the other simulations, even in this case unprecedented warmth is indicated for the late 20th century.
The simulations all show that it is not possible to explain the anomalous late 20th century warmth without including the contribution from anthropogenic forcing factors, and, in particular, modern greenhouse gas concentration increases. A healthy, vigorous debate can be found in the legitimate peer-reviewed climate research literature with regard to the precise details of empirically and model-based estimates of climate changes in past centuries... it nonetheless remains a widespread view among paleoclimate researchers that late 20th century hemispheric-scale warmth is anomalous in a long-term (at least millennial) context, and that anthropogenic factors likely play an important role in explaining the anomalous recent warmth.
RealClimate » Myth vs. Fact Regarding the "Hockey Stick": Numerous myths regarding the so-called "hockey stick" reconstruction of past temperatures, can be found on various non-peer reviewed websites, internet newsgroups and other non-scientific venues. The most widespread of these myths are debunked below: MYTH #1: The "Hockey Stick" Reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere mean temperatures which indicates anomalous late 20th century warmth, is based solely on two publications by climate scientist Michael Mann and colleagues (Mann et al, 1998;1999). This is patently false. Nearly a dozen model-based and proxy-based reconstructions of Northern Hemisphere mean temperature by different groups all suggest that late 20th century warmth is anomalous in a long-term (multi-century to millennial) context.... Some proxy-based reconstructions suggest greater variability than others. This greater variability may be attributable to different emphases in seasonal and spatial emphasis (see Jones and Mann, 2004; Rutherford et al, 2004; Cook et al, 2004). However, even for those reconstructions which suggest... greater variability in general in past centuries... late 20th century hemispheric warmth is still found to be anomalous in the context of the reconstruction (see Cook et al, 2004).RealClimate » False Claims by McIntyre and McKitrick regarding the Mann et al. (1998) reconstruction : Given that each of the criticisms of MBH98 raised by MM are demonstrably false, one might well be led to wonder how MM, using the MBH98 method and their putative "corrected" version of the MBH98 proxy dataset, were able to obtain a reconstruction so at odds with the MBH98 reconstruction and virtually all existing reconstructions (in particular, in its apparent indication of anomalous 15th century warmth). Rather than "correcting" the MBH98 proxy data set, we demonstrate that the reconstruction of MM resulted, instead, from their selective censoring of key indicators from the MBH98 proxy dataset. Indeed, we are able to reproduce the MM reconstruction of anomalous 15th century warmth when the entire ITRDB North American data set (and the "Queen Anne" series) are censored from the proxy network (Figure 4).
RealClimate » Rutherford et al 2004 highlights: The claims of McIntyre and McKitrick regarding the Mann et al (1998) temperature reconstruction have recently been discredited by the following peer-reviewed article... Rutherford, S., Mann, M.E., Osborn, T.J., Bradley, R.S., Briffa, K.R., Hughes, M.K., Jones, P.D., Proxy-based Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Reconstructions: Sensitivity to Methodology, Predictor Network, Target Season and Target Domain, Journal of Climate, in press (2004): "It should be noted that some falsely reported putative errors in the Mann et al.(1998) proxy data claimed by McIntyre and McKitrick (2003) are an artifact of (a) the use by these latter authors of an incorrect version of the Mann et al. (1998) proxy indicator dataset, and (b) their misunderstanding of the methodology used by Mann et al. (1998) to calculate PC series of proxy networks over progressively longer time intervals. In the Mann et al. (1998) implementation, the PCs are computed over different time steps so that the maximum amount of data can be used in the reconstruction.
"For example, if a tree-ring network comprises 50 individual chronologies that extend back to AD 1600 and only 10 of those 50 extend to AD 1400 then calculating one set of PCs from 1400 to 1980 (the end of the Mann et al. (1998) calibration period) would require the elimination of 40 of the 50 chronologies available back to AD 1600. By calculating PCs for two different intervals in this example (1400-1980 and 1600-1980) and performing the reconstruction in a stepwise fashion, PCs of all 50 series that extend back to AD 1600 can be used in the reconstruction back to AD 1600 with PCs of the remaining 10 chronologies used to reconstruct the period from 1400-1600. The latter misunderstanding led McIntyre and McKitrick (2003) to eliminate roughly 70% of the proxy data used by Mann et al. (1998) prior to AD 1600, including 77 of the 95 proxy series used by Mann et al. (1998) prior to AD 1500. This elimination of data gave rise to spurious, anomalous warmth during the 15th century in their reconstruction, sharply at odds with virtually all other empirical and model-based estimates of hemispheric temperature trends in past centuries (see e.g. Jones and Mann, 2004).
As I understand things (and I may be wrong), if there is any science in McIntyre and McKitrick at all (and I am not convinced that there is), it is an observation that North America during the "Medieval warm period" was a lot colder than North America today, while Europe during the "Medieval warm period" looks almost as warm as Europe today. Hence if you regard America as irrelevant and throw out the American data, late 20th-century warming does not look as anomalous as in studies that look at the entire northern hemisphere.
Posted by DeLong at 11:05 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Reagan the Tax-Raiser (Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?)
Kevin Drum tells the story of Reagan the tax-raiser:
The Washington Monthly: Reagan didn't grow his way out of the deficits caused by his 1981 tax cut... he raised taxes twice in 1982, and then raised them again in 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, and 1987. But even with those seven tax increases and several years of strong growth, he still didn't get rid of his deficit. It took an eighth tax hike from George Bush Sr. in 1989, a ninth in 1990, a tenth from Bill Clinton in 1993, and then another economic boom to erase the deficit. Sure, a strong economy helped, but without all those tax increases the deficit would never have disappeared.
So why don't more people understand this? I think it's because no one wants them to. Republicans don't like to talk about this because it ruins the conservative foundational myth of Reagan the tax cutter as well as the policy myth of tax cuts as the engine of economic growth. They prefer to preserve the mythology. Democrats, for their part, like to portray Reagan as an inflexible and simpleminded ideologue, and admitting that he raised taxes several times doesn't fit their myth...
I think Kevin is simply wrong, and has fallen victim to the inside-the-beltway "every story must blame both parties" disease. (How he has managed to do this telecommuting from Orange County is a mystery.)
Democrats like the idea of Reagan the rigid fool, but they like the idea of Reagan the liar even more. Every Democrat I know tells reporters early and often that Reagan raised taxes a bunch of times.
So why doesn't the message get through? Because our lousy press corps believes that it has to present the Democratic side and the Republican side of every issue, and pretend that each has equal credibility. Democrats say, "Reagan reduced personal income taxes, especially for the upper brackets, raised payroll taxes, and raised corporate taxes." Republicans say, "Reagan cut your taxes." And reporters write, "Both parties agree that Reagan reduced taxes."
Posted by DeLong at 11:04 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
December 15, 2004
Real Science
RealClimate » Climate Science: RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists. We aim to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary.
The Panda's Thumb: The Panda's Thumb is the virtual pub of the University of Ediacara. The patrons gather to discuss evolutionary theory, critique the claims of the antievolution movement, defend the integrity of both science and science education, and share good conversation.
Posted by DeLong at 09:48 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Robert Samuelson Department)
Robert Samuelson rants against entitlement spending while once again ignoring the elephant in the living room. The elephant? It's this fact: for the last 25 years, the Democratic Party has consistently worked to improve America's fiscal situation and to diminish the gap between the government's long-run financing and its long-run spending plans. The Republican Party has consistently worked to turn America into a northern-hemisphere Argentina.
Bob, people who talk about the importance of fiscal balance and yet who don't support Democrats for every federal office are frauds--they aren't taken seriously: if you preach, you have to practice too.
Who Will Say No? (washingtonpost.com): Let it be said that there is a case for a Medicare drug benefit covering truly catastrophic costs. But that benefit should have been a carrot for basic reforms, raising the eligibility age and slowly shifting more overall costs to retirees. No one attempted that bargain. Instead, President Bush, Secretary Thompson and every member of Congress who voted for the Medicare drug benefit knowingly worsened the long-term budget outlook.... What motivated this legislative atrocity? Here's Thompson's answer: "Seniors from Alaska to Florida demanded that we provide them a prescription drug benefit . . . and I'm happy to say we have delivered." Another interpretation would be that the Bush administration was trying to buy the support of retirees with hundreds of billions of dollars of new handouts. Either way, it's the politics of "yes." One narrow lesson: Be suspicious of the Bush administration's forthcoming proposals for Social Security "personal accounts." If the drug benefit is any guide, the motives are mainly political.... Thompson's self-serving boast passes as a plausible claim when it's actually an absurdity.... [T]he news media abide by this protocol of deception. Not surprisingly, news coverage of the Medicare drug debate was abysmally one-sided..... In wealthy democracies -- welfare states all -- individual benefits once conferred are considered sacrosanct, but when their total costs threaten the collective good, they must somehow be controlled. There's the paralyzing contradiction. The politics of "yes" must ultimately yield to the politics of "no" -- and the longer it's delayed, the more painful it will be.
Posted by DeLong at 11:42 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack