View 811 Friday, February 21, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

There is a major essay in Commentary by Arthur C. Brooks, President of the American Enterprise Institute: “Be Open-handed Toward Your Brothers: A Conservative Social-Justice Agenda.” \

‘Be Open-Handed Toward Your Brothers’

 Arthur C. Brooks

There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be open-handed toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land.

—Deuteronomy 15:11

The 2008 election marked the return of progressive politics in America. For the first time in 16 years, Democrats won both houses of Congress and the White House. They wasted no time in articulating a progressive agenda they claimed would offset the Great Recession and turn America toward greater fairness and compassion. Lifting up the poor, decreasing inequality, and curbing runaway income gains among the wealthiest Americans ranked high among their stated priorities.

It has been five years. How has their project turned out?

Since January 2009, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has more than doubled. Last year brought the largest annual increase in the S&P 500 since the late 1990s. And the vast bulk of this sustained market surge has accrued to the extremely wealthy. According to New York University economist Edward Wolff, the top 10 percent of earners own 81 percent of stocks and mutual funds, 95 percent of financial securities, 92 percent of business equity, and 80 percent of non-home real estate. So it comes as little surprise that nearly all the real income growth that President Obama’s “recovery” has generated would flow to the wealthiest Americans. According to University of California, Berkeley, economist Emmanuel Saez, 95 percent of all recovery gains have accrued to the much-vilified “top 1 percent.”

At the same time, the poor have become even more desperate. The number of Americans receiving aid through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (known as food stamps) has increased by almost 50 percent since January 2009, from 32.2 million to 47.7 million. One in six citizens in the richest country in the world now rely on food aid from their government.

Brooks quotes this in his essay, and asks readers to guess who said it:

“There is no reason why, in a society that has reached the general level of wealth that ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom; that is: some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for these common hazards of life against which few cab make adequate provision.”

“Was it Franklin Roosevelt, John Rawls, Ralph Nader? Not by a longshot. It was Freidrich Hayek. That passage is featured in his seminal free-market text The Road to Serfdom. (1943)

Granted that Commentary, Brooks, and the AEI are more from the neo-conservative movement rather than the Russell Kirk inspired Conservatives who look back to Edmund Burke, we can note that Burke himself said that “For a man to love his country, his country ought to be lovely,” and he made it clear that streets clogged with beggars was not lovely.

I received the following last December, but things got complicated. Ron Unz is a smart guy who has questioned a number of conservative assumptions. He is also the author of a number of conservative initiatives and the rescuer of a number of flagging conservative enterprises. He has lately taken up a new cause:

Announcing Our New Website <http://www.higherwages.org/>

I’m very pleased to announce the release of our www.HigherWages.org <http://www.higherwages.org/> website, associated with our campaign to raise the minimum wage to $12 per hour both in California and across the rest of the United States.

Although we will be adding additional functionality to the website in the future, its primary role will be to provide convenient access to the media coverage and research support for our efforts, as well as those parallel drives by other groups and individuals.

Over the last week, we have been particularly heartened that Norman Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, a highly influential Washington policy expert, published a major piece in The Atlantic declaring his strong support for a substantial hike in the minimum wage, demonstrating that the issue has begun to gain traction not merely in liberal circles, but also in some more conservative ones as well. On Tuesday, I appeared on CNBC’s Closing Bell business news show, and the response to my proposal was quite respectful, as has been the reaction when I had previously appeared on several major conservative talk radio stations.

Until the last year or so, many prominent liberals, including such notable figures as economist Paul Krugman, had been skeptical of the benefits of a large minimum wage hike, usually focusing their support on other anti-poverty programs, such as government stimulus packages or larger EITC payments, and other younger liberals were often even more dismissive. For example, when Reihan Salam, National Review‘s chief domestic policy analyst, cautiously raised the possible benefits of a minimum wage hike on an MSNBC discussion show a couple of years ago, he was immediately ridiculed by Ezra Klein and the other liberal pundits for demonstrating such total ignorance of basic economics <http://www.higherwages.org/opinion/immigration-liberal-dc-pundit-denounces-minimum-wage-on-msnbc/> . So it is hardly impossible that conservatives may also begin seeing the issue in a new light, nor could liberals reasonably criticize them for any such change in their position.

Assuming that the resulting job-loss would be as small as many experts believe, I think the conservative case for improving the financial position of working-poor Americans by means of raising their wages rather than increasing their governmental social welfare benefits is a compelling one. And if tens of millions of American families are no longer so poor, the dollars spent on state and federal anti-poverty programs would automatically decline, thereby saving vast sums for the taxpayers. Principled conservatives and free market advocates should support the notion of requiring businesses to pay their own workers rather than allowing them to transfer their expenses to the government and the general American taxpayer.

Here are links to a few of the hundred-plus articles and columns provided on our new website:

The Moral and Economic Imperative to Raise the Minimum Wage <http://www.higherwages.org/opinion/the-moral-and-economic-imperative-to-raise-the-minimum-wage/>

Norman Ornstein, The Atlantic, December 4, 2013

GOP Tech Millionaire Advocates $12/hr Minimum Wage <http://www.higherwages.org/event/gop-tech-millionaire-advocates-12hr-minimum-wage/>

Closing Bell/CNBC, December 9, 2013

Raise the Minimum Wage to $12 an Hour <http://www.higherwages.org/opinion/raise-the-minimum-wage-to-12-an-hour/>

Ron Unz, The New York Times, December 4, 2013

The Push To Raise the Minimum Wage for All Americans <http://www.higherwages.org/event/the-push-to-raise-the-minimum-wage-for-all-americans/>

The Diane Rehm Show/NPR, December 9, 2013

Why the Right Should Boost Minimum Wage, Too <http://www.higherwages.org/opinion/why-the-right-should-boost-minimum-wage-too/>

Clarence Page, The Chicago Tribune, December 11, 2013

$12 per Hour Minimum Wage? <http://www.higherwages.org/opinion/12-per-hour-minimum-wage/>

Steve Sailer, iSteve.com, December 10, 2013

Immigration: Liberal DC Pundit Denounces Minimum Wage on MSNBC <http://www.higherwages.org/opinion/immigration-liberal-dc-pundit-denounces-minimum-wage-on-msnbc/>

Ron Unz, The American Conservative, September 26, 2011

My own view has long been that raising a minimum wage either has no effect (people are already getting that much because they are worth it) or brings about low end unemployment, which eats into the ability for the young and unskilled to enter the labor force. It also adds to the cost of starting a new enterprise, particularly a small one, and that can be devastating to an economy. Capitalism has a tendency to concentrate wealth, and as Adam Smith warned, every time two capitalists get together they plot supporting a scheme in which government prevents anyone else from entering their business. Steve Jobs began in a garage; today’s regulatory environment probably would have prevented him and Wozniak from ever getting started. Interestingly Hewlett Packard started small, grew quickly, and went through a full business cycle; one wonders if it could be started now?

There is also the flat statement by von Mises and other Austrian school economists that the long term effect of minimum wages is unemployment.

Until this week I had never given the matter much more thought.

It is clear that raising the minimum wage while leaving a flood of undocumented – illegal – immigrants available to undercut the minimum wage (and income taxes as well) is likely a formula for disaster; and I have still seen no solution to the deleterious effect of minimum wages on starting new businesses.

I also recall that for many years, the IRS differentiated between single owner businesses and partnerships and limited liability corporations, which is why in my earlier years my writing business was a single proprietor business. The tax laws in those days allowed single proprietorships to employ the minor children of the owner at any wage they thought proper, to deduct those wages as expenses, and, unless they amounted to more than some minimum, there need not be withholding and reporting and all those complications. This was I am sure originally designed to let mom and pop stores employ the children without a lot of paper work. In my case it allowed me to pay my kids for cleaning up the office, running the Xerox, and other such matters – and then to pay their own tuition at school. Of course that was all long ago and has not been done for decades, but it is an idea of how the tax laws could help small enterprises.

All of which is background to an upcoming discussion of these matters. Raising the minimum wage, both generally and for hotel workers specifically, is seriously proposed in California, and I understand there is a movement to raise the minimum wage at the Federal level.

Of the papers Ron Unz cites in his essay, I found the notes by my friend Steve Sailer $12 per Hour Minimum Wage? <http://www.higherwages.org/opinion/12-per-hour-minimum-wage/> interesting. I had not seen it before today.

There is of course a fundamental question of rights; and also of who pays.  The Affordable Health Care Act said that some should have higher insurance premiums so that others could have health care insurance at lower premiums or no premiums at all. In theory there are also subsidies paid for by general revenues, not extracted from those who buy their own health care insurance, and it is rumored that the goal shall be that all health care insurance would be paid for by taxes. I don’t find authorization of any of that in the Constitution, but then I could never see why window washers at an office building in Ann Arbor were engaged in interstate commerce and thus subject to minimum wage laws; the US Supreme Court held they were, as were bakers who sold their bread only in their own stores.

On safety nets, I have always thought those best left to the states, but that is apparently an increasingly old fashioned view. Brooks shows, or purports to show, that all this can no longer be left to charity. Whether it is more efficiently done by government is not obvious to me. We have left our children’s education to government, and taken control of that away from the states, and the result is a system indistinguishable from punishment for losing a war – which In a sense we have, since the teachers have the right to teach our children however they like and we have no right to interfere – or if we do, we do so at our own expense.  And our schools more and more fail to teach a good half – perhaps two thirds – of our children to be able to do anything that anyone would pay them a living wage to do.  Until school graduates are well enough taught that they can go out and work for a living, the schools are an expensive child care operation; if states had that money they could build safety nets as well as operate child care facilities that would be more fun for the kids at a far lower cost.  But perhaps I am whimsical.

This discussion will continue during next week, and I may consolidate it into something coherent when it has been discussed. And it is late and I have shopping to do. Sable is getting less and less active, as the cancer sets in, and I don’t think we have a lot longer; but she enjoys our walks, and in the evenings she acts like a happy dog although she no longer has much energy. Alas we will soon have decisions to make.

Hoo haw!  Dr. Bowman is about to meet Frances. For those who find this nonsense, you’re missing a great experience. Go to http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff100/fv00001.htm to get started. Alas, ii is a continuing story and makes no sense if you don’t start at the beginning. I assure you that if you start at the beginning and go on to the present time – it will take you a couple of weeks at a reasonable pace – you will not regret it.  This is one of the best examinations of the social consequences of artificial intelligence – if in fact what happens here is artificial, and that’s part of the story – you will ever see.  Recommended.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 811 Wednesday, February 19, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

Today I go back out to Kaiser to get the stitches taken out of my face. My Harry Potter scar – or if you’re from an older generation, my Heidelberg Studentcorps Schmitte – is developing nicely.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a very thought provoking article

Closing the Productivity and Pay Gap

Companies should either share productivity gains or contribute to public programs instead.

By William A. Galston

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303945704579391070814416410?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303945704579391070814416410.html

I don’t recall knowing of Galston prior to this, and the WSJ didn’t run a bio clip with the article so I looked him up. He’s a Brookings Fellow in public policy, which sets him pretty thoroughly in the mainstream Democrat intellectual community, and thus it’s no surprise that he has been a policy wonk for Clinton and Al Gore. Which doesn’t mean that he hasn’t written a thought provoking essay.

His thesis is simple. Productivity of the American productivity in almost all sectors has increased enormously, but “The Great Decoupling of wages and benefits from productivity, the biggest economic story of the past 40 years, shows no signs of ending. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report on Feb. 6, nonfarm business productivity rose 1.7% between the fourth quarter of 2012 and the fourth quarter of 2013. During the same period, hourly compensation (corrected for inflation) fell 0.9%. Since the end of 2010, real compensation has hardly budged.”

Henry Ford is famous for paying his workers a lot more than the then prevailing wage. The idea was that they could then afford to buy his cars.

In 1914, Henry Ford started an industrial revolution by more than doubling wages to $5 a day—a move that helped build the U.S. middle class and the modern economy.

In 1913, to help meet the growing demand for the Model T, Henry Ford turned his attention to improving the manufacturing processes. The business model Ford developed—production on a grand scale, performed by well-paid workers—spread throughout the world and became the manufacturing standard for everything from vacuum sweepers to cars, and more.

. . .

Henry Ford had reasoned that since it was now possible to build inexpensive cars in volume, more of them could be sold if employees could afford to buy them. The $5 day helped better the lot of all American workers and contributed to the emergence of the American middle class. In the process, Henry Ford had changed manufacturing forever.

http://corporate.ford.com/news-center/press-releases-detail/677-5-dollar-a-day

Note that Henry Ford wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about allowing the workers to dictate their own pay. After Ford bought William Knudsen’s Buffalo N.Y., factory, he commissioned Knudsen to set up a Model-T factory in Buffalo. Knudsen had developed the assembly line to far greater efficiency than Ford’s original concept had been. Knudsen taught the mechanics to assemble the cars in separate stages, and his new techniques – different from Ford’s – in which parts always moved in the same direction, and other techniques. Model T’s roiled out.

“Then one morning Knudsen was stunned to come in and find all the machines idle.

“The workers told him they were on strike. They had decided they didn’t like the piecework rates they were being paid on some of the outside contracts. Knudsen couldn’t believe they were so shortsighted as to break off building the country’s fastest selling automobile [this was 1908] over a minor contract dispute. But the men wouldn’t budge. He decided this was a crisis requiring the advice of the owner himself. At great trouble and expense, Bill Knudsen managed to reach Ford on the primitive telephone in the [Buffalo] office.

Ford listened and said, “That suits me. If the men don’t want to work, get some flatcars and move the machinery to Highland Park [Michigan].

Three days later it was done. Then Ford ordered Knudsen and other managers out to Michigan.”

Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Built the Arsenal of Democracy That Won World War II

by Arthur Herman http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13152691-freedom-s-forge

Incidentally, this is one reason why Detroit, and not Buffalo, N.Y., became the industrial center of the US after 1910. In those days, there was a definite coupling between productivity and wages. Of course after World War II that coupling was lost, and the unionization of the automobile industry brought about exponential rises in wages and benefits in the US, resulting in the widespread import of foreign made – particularly Japanese – cars, and the beginning of Detroit’s spiral from industrial capital to wasteland; which is very much a part of this story.

So what can be done?

Galston suggests

To explain the compensation/productivity gap, mainstream economists focus on globalization and technological change. The emergence of world markets for labor and capital has put downward pressure on wages for routine and middle-skill jobs. Technological innovation has reduced the number of manufacturing jobs and is poised to do the same in many service sectors.

If Oxford’s Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne are correct, automation could eliminate jobs in nearly half of all standard occupational categories. Unless other sectors—including many that do not yet exist—pick up the pace of job creation, we could be in for an extended period of slack labor markets.

And

For the sake of economic growth, social mobility and political stability, we must think more boldly about reforging the connection between compensation and productivity. That connection must be accepted as a goal—and norm—across the economy. And to make it real, we should link the tax rates individual firms pay to the compensation strategies they adopt. The point is simple: Firms can either share productivity gains with their workers—or contribute to the public programs made necessary by their failure to do so.

It’s time to get dressed and get ready to go out to Kaiser. I’ll have more on this later today and for the rest of the week. The point is that productivity and pay do have to be coupled, but as more and more can be produced by fewer and fewer people, where should we go? One direction is higher minimum wages. The LA City Council wants to raise the minimum wage for hotel workers to $15.38 an hour because a maid can’t make enough money to buy new tires for her husband’s car, and the family can’t afford a house. IF that makes little sense, perhaps you had to be there for the Councilman’s pitch, which is that everyone who works all day deserves a decent middle class wage, no matter what work they do. Come to that, didn’t I hear the President say something similar recently?

But that, I think, does not couple productivity with pay.

More later. I have to get my face fixed.

Face fixed, got spare set of glasses so not trying to get about with computer glasses (28” focal length bifocals rather than my normal trifocals, alas not photo-grey or whatever they call the automatic sunglasses feature nowadays).  Turned out to be a bit more strenuous than I had expected, so I’ll defer my comments on minimum wage.  I had the eBook version of Forge of Democracy on my Kindle Fire and started rereading it while I was out at Kaiser, and of course part two of the book is about Henry J. Kaiser. It’s still a good book on just how we turned the American civilian economy based much on Detroit from peacetime to wartime.  Doubt we could do that again; but maybe.  We certainly managed to train a large work force – Rosie the Riveter and her kin – from untrained to skilled blue collar workers.  As well as trained a number of new white collar workers.  And the war, for America, lasted only 1942 to 1945 total. Our progress in Iran and Afghanistan are measures of what we can do now.  And during the Great Depression we built Hoover Dam and a number of other dam, and started the Federal highway system, and —

It does make me sad.  I lived through those years.  Few went to college, but none graduated with huge debts for doing so.  And after the war there was a huge economic revival. We have so much more going for us now, and yet we are losing more jobs than creating new ones.  Unemployment goes down because people stop looking for work, but the number of those with a job grows ever so slowly – so the remedy is to raise the minimum wage?  That will put more money among the people and stimulate demand and make everyone rich.

If you believe that, look up the Townsend Plan and read all the favorable comments on the theory, than read what happened to the states that adopted it. 

And they never catch wise, the general said….

‘What happens to a nation whose elites laugh at its citizens? . . . What happens to its elites?’

<http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/2014/02/18/our-decadent-elites/>

——

Roland Dobbins

Albert J. Nock once said that it would be amusing to write an essay on how to recognize that we were entering a dark age. We have known since 1983 that out public school system is indistinguishable from an act of war by a enemy of the United States.

And of course we have the theory that we can get out of this depression by raising the Federal Minimum Wage; this will get more people employed. As evidence for this theory we have the historical case of –  I guess my absentmindedness has taken hold. I don’t remember when and where it worked. But surely it has since so many of our elites purport to believe it; surely they are not saying it for the campaign donations from unions?

Case Study: Rolling Back a Bureaucracy

When WW II began we had bad torpedoes. I’ve kept an eye peeled but have seen no evidence that the designers and producers of these crummy weapons ever suffered in any way, or even an admission of who they were. Perhaps the whole situation was covered up at the time in a blanket of wartime security.

Now comes a tale of current weapons procurement with a happier outcome, and there are lessons to be learned. We are shown a way to successfully work around a bureaucracy with strong congressional support.

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htmurph/articles/20140219.aspx

Robert

So perhaps there is hope yet?  That would be wonderful.

It is late and time for bed.  Good night.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 811 Monday, February 17, 2014

President’s Day

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

Still recovering. Ice packs then hot compress for the abrasions. Cleaning things up. I still won’t go out in public, but it mostly doesn’t hurt any more. Hard to sleep but I manage.

One thing, I’ve had time to read. Actually it’s re-reading, two books absolutely unconnected, or I would have thought so, but they aren’t. There are a number of reasons to read both more or less together.

The first is L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall, a novel based on the 1939 novella in the December 1939 Unknown Magazine. The book is a masterpiece about a Twentieth Century archeologist standing in the courtyard of the Roman Pantheon suddenly taken back in time to exactly the same place in 6^th Century Rome. He knows both Latin and Italian as well as English, which gives him some ability to communicate, and he has read a number of classical histories that include the age of Justinian. On the other hand he has nothing on him but the contents of his pockets, and he must not only make his way but transform history so that the Rome of his future is a better place to live than the Rome of our past.

I read this book in high school, about the time I was studying Latin, and it I loved it then, and I’ve reread it a few times since. By chance it turned up just now when I need some light reading distraction. I have the Ballantine paperback that sold for $2.50 new. There are others available including electronic editions.

The other book I’ve been reading again is one I read more recently. In fact I’d just finished it and was putting together not so much a review of the book as an essay on its subject matter. It’s called The Idealist: Jeffery Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, by Nina Munk. There are both hard cover and Kindle editions. Mine is the hard cover because my habit is to make notes in a book like this and I’m used to doing that in colors. This is the story of The Millennium Project, an attempt to end human poverty in Africa, and the determination of Jeffrey Sachs to do that. The story ends before poverty is overcome, of course, and since its publication what has happened to the villages chosen for transformation has changed again and again, and there is some ambiguity about just what was accomplished. Several hundred million dollars can do a lot, but how much of that endures?

As you can see, the two books do have something in common, although it is not apparent at first look. I’ll have more to say on this when I’m doing a bit better. Meanwhile if you are looking for a good story and you don’t know Lest Darkness Fall you’re in for a treat; and if you are at all curious about the hard facts of foreign aid and what it can and perhaps cannot accomplish, Munk’s book is a good case study by an objective reporter who began as an enthusiast. She hasn’t lost her enthusiasm, but she has lost some naiveté.

Global Warming Causes People

Excellent.

Bottom line – with global warming humans can continue to eat.

An ice age will cause widespread devastation and human privation. Society can continue on a tropical Terra (thus global warming is not the great evil); it may not survive on an ice ball.

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

Global Warming Causes People

By Randy Bissell

The “why” and the disclaimer.

Please read that title again, “Global Warming Causes People.” It is a little different than the rhetoric we’ve been hearing the last decade or so. In the following sentences, I will attempt to add insight to the association between human activity and the global temperature shift by flipping the relationship over and examining the correlation anew.

It is not my intention to deny or diminish the actuality of global climate change or the contribution to accelerating global warming by man’s use of fossil fuels and industrial production of “greenhouse gases.” However, I would suggest that many doomsayers might over-represent the certainty of their most pessimistic predictions. Likewise, it is unwise for the naysayers to ignore the impact that humans have on the climate without sober reflection on the costs and benefits of our technological, environmental, and population trajectories.

Here goes.

Instead of assuming that climate change is fundamentally caused by humans, I would assert that human technological advancements, cultural progress, and population increases have been caused by, or perhaps better said “facilitated by,” increases in global temperature over the last 12,000 years. Furthermore, I might assert that any recent human contribution to that temperature rise has a possibility of improving worldwide climatic conditions necessary for sustainable population growth and spurring technological progress.

Likewise, if one accepts that a recently warming globe in geologic terms has contributed to the habitability of the planet by homo sapiens (us), then we might also consider that any significant decrease in average global temperature or a reversal of sea level due to polar ice cap expansion would result in a human catastrophe of much greater proportion than the projected increases in temperature and rising sea level.

Finding a level sea?

The geologic strata on our planet record innumerable oscillations in sea level through time. The magnitude and scale of these events are reflected in continental geomorphology. This is not simply a scientist’s perspective. Biblical creationists must also account for the “gatherings of water and ground” and Noah’s flood from Genesis. Evolutionists and creationists may disagree on everything else scientific, and likewise, everything sacred. But everyone can agree there is little precedent in science or Holy Scripture for a belief wherein sea level remains constant beyond the span of a few hundreds or thousands of years.

So, our circumstance is sea level rising or sea level falling. It is a ridiculous position that we expect sea level to remain constant. No matter the cause, sea level never stays at any level very long. “Sea level” as a permanent datum is actually a silly notion.

Getting a bigger tank.

Now, let’s consider the guppies multiplying in my fish tank for a moment. I have always heard that a fish tank can support 1 inch of fishes for every gallon of tank. Using that reasoning, my 20 gallon tank should support 20 inches of guppies, nose-to-tail. That’d be about 40 adult fish. To sustain a population above that, I’d need a bigger tank.

When I was recently in New York City, I showed my family the glacially striated outcrops in Central Park. I pointed out to my elderly aunt that there was, but just a few thousand years ago, hundreds of feet of glacial ice covering New York – a polar ice cap extensive across the North American continent and terminating in the northern tier of the United States. Today 1.6 million people live on Manhattan Island. Could that number of people have been living there 12,000 years ago on top of that ice? Could there be a New York City? Toronto? Chicago? That would seem impossible with all that ice at those locations!

A Summer Day in North America 12,000 Years Ago

Where is New York? Chicago? Washington? Toronto?

(figure source: http://www.nature.com/news/evidence-found-for-planet-cooling-asteroid-1.13661 ) 

Global warming causes people.

Yes, the idea is that simple. Global warming has given us a bigger tank or, in our case, more land mass to work with. With the reduction of the area of the northern polar ice cap we end up with more land mass in climatic bands that are advantageous to the proliferation of homo sapiens. Growing wheat in the northern plain states and Canada would have been impossible when the ground was frozen-solid year around or under a mile of ice. The migration of the temperate climate bands northward over centuries have opened up arable lands for important

food crops and livestock. In step, man has perfected agriculture and livestock production. The inverted wedge-shape and the distribution of the largest landmasses in the Northern Hemisphere have increased the potential areas for cultivation and habitation. Bottom line: more land, better climate to sustain more people.

Let’s cool things down.

I am old enough to remember how everyone reacted when we experienced the North American cold snap in the 1970’s. To save us from cooling climate change, scientists have proposed spreading coal dust on the polar ice caps to help melt the ice and warm the Earth. Are we smart enough to meddle with the key factors that hold Earth within the narrow envelope of habitability? Tampering with the earth’s climatic controls is like my guppies trying to manipulate the temperature of their tank. They have contributed to conditions, yes, but they have little control and even less understanding of their “climate.”

But what if we woke up tomorrow and the sea reversed its rise? I think we’ve already established that there is no precedent for a stable sea level. It’s either going up or going down. So, what are the implications of a falling sea level, a cooling climate, and growing ice caps? What happens when fresh water gets pulled from the atmosphere to build glaciers and polar ice caps – remembering too that cool air carries less rain-making moisture? What happens to ocean ports and coastlines and reefs? How could a cooling trend be stopped?

When things cool down, what happens to the northern plains as the breadbasket of the world? What’s going to happen with less bread? Or with less land to cultivate or inhabit? What if I took 20% of the water from my fish tank? Or fed my fish with 20% less food? I’ll tell you what would happen — fewer guppies.

Who benefits?

I am reminded of an account in Martin Dugard’s great book, The Last Voyage of Columbus, of how shipwrecked Christopher Columbus manipulated the natives of Jamaica into giving his crew food by telling them that he, Columbus, would have his god blot out the moon as their punishment for neglecting their guests. You see, Columbus was an experienced astronomer and he was quite familiar with the upcoming predicted eclipse of the moon. Having demonstrated the consequences of their sins at the height of the eclipse, the chiefs swore their continued allegiance to Columbus and began delivering food that night. To show his god’s power and grace, the moon was restored.

When I speak with regular folks, many students and friends, about heady and interesting things such as sea level variations and the history of the earth, it comes as a surprise to the non-scientific that the sea is more characteristically rising or falling rather than remaining constant. With a little patient explanation, it is easy to convince them that sea level variation is the norm and the rise we’re experiencing has been occurring for millennia. Sea level today is nowhere near its historical maximum. Sadly, the study of earth science is often neglected in

our high schools. It would thus seem that an absence of basic scientific knowledge amongst our general population serves its nefarious purposes.

Could it be that commonplace ignorance of relevant earth history serves those who might manipulate others into paying tributes based in fear? Just like Columbus, could I profit or become powerful by convincing the natives that they have caused a natural calamity that is, in fact, simply a natural phenomenon? Are there people doing that today?

Conclusions.

1) Before any meaningful discussions and suggestions of remedies for our present state of accelerated warming, we must consider the longer view of history. The crucible of human existence, planet Earth, is delicately balanced in orbit, chemistry, and energy (and geologic history) which results in a complex system called “climate.” Tampering with any key element of our condition may jeopardize the narrow envelope of our existence. Some might argue that human release of CO2 in the last 150 years is tampering with the system. Others might say that we should recognize the brevity of our perspective, as we are the guppies in the tank or as the comedian George Carlin said, “fleas” on the “dog.”

2) Our misguided “solutions” might have unintended and woeful consequences. Some solutions may even be proposed simply to exploit the situation to enrich and empower the few. Every suggested fix has some climatic, social, economic, and environmental impact. Remember that exploitation of power and control is a pretty big part of our human nature.

3) Without global warming, fewer of us would have been born (my friends, my wife, and my children). If the climate had not warmed over these last 12,000 years or if this warming cycle had ended early, we wouldn’t be here. I didn’t get to pick when I was born. But I am glad I was born and lived in an age when the climate is warming. You and I are products of this age – of this longstanding process. I feel fortunate and blessed to be alive in this time – to see, to learn, to love, to think, to drive my car.

4) Global warming causes people. Without global warming these many centuries, I believe the few humans might all still be huddled in their cave, gnawing mammoth bones, wondering why they have to walk everywhere, and grunting about why Uncle Ned has such a prominent brow.

*Randy Bissell is an amateur philosopher and professional geologist experiencing the rising sea level and warming climate in Corpus Christi, Texas. Feedback, comments, and criticisms regarding this essay can be directed to bissellr@swbell.net  – Please subject emails: Global Warming Causes People

Other Sources and Inspirations:

Christian, David, 2011, The History of our World in 18 Minutes, www.ted.com/talks/david_christian_big_history.html 

Carlin, George, 2009, George Carlin on the Environment, www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmtSkl53h4  

Dugard, Martin, 2005, The Last Voyage of Columbus: Being the Epic Tale of the Great Captain’s Fourth Expedition, Including Accounts of Swordfight, Mutiny, Shipwreck, Gold, War, Hurricane, and Discovery, Little Brown and Company. 320 p.

I certainly agree that I would rather live in a warmer land with higher seas than in a renewed Ice Age. I would also like some choices about how warm it may get.

I am still searching for precise definitions of the means for getting local temperatures and the weights given to each of those measures in computing the global hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and annual average temperatures. That is: clearly the ocean temperatures are important; but what is the temperature of the ocean? How much weight is given to ocean temperature as opposed to land temperature? We know the ratio of ocean surface area to the total surface area of the planet: is that what is used? But the oceans hold a large volume, and the temperature varies by depth, sometimes by quite a lot. If we are using surface temperatures is that a reasonable thing to do when estimating the temperature of 80% of the planet surface? Do we take the water temperature or the air temperature at the surface? Justify your answer.

And of course we can ask many of the same questions about the land areas: are we interested in the temperature of the land itself, which stores a lot of heat one way or another, or of the air temperature at the surface? Looking at the way the measures seem to be taken, apparently it is the air temperature in the shade at about 2 meters above the surface: that is, that seems to be what I see when I look at a temperature measurement station. Of course the temperature in the sun may be considerably higher than that in the box in which the thermometer is kept – and at night exposure to the night sky will lower the temperature measured. Which do we use, and why? I confess that the more I think about it, the more questions I have about even the average temperature of Los Angeles, much less the entire earth.

Subject: Letter from Karen R. Hammond-Nash

I applaud you for your nice response to her letter.

A parent is responsible for their child’s education, not a public school or a private school. If neither of those two institutions are getting it done, then you have to step in to either supplement it or replace it with your own learning environment.

My daughter entered Kindergarten this year. I am monitoring the level of instruction to see how she is doing. When I was in Kindergarten (1980), we had 1/2 a day of instruction and at the end of the year the main goals were identifying primary/secondary colors, letters and sounds, the calendar, seasons, and being able to follow instructions.

My daughter is subjected to a full day of instruction. It includes all of what I had as a child, plus reading, adding, and subtracting. They really stress reading. So much so, that I wonder if they are turning off kids who are not ready for reading. Thankfully, they don’t use whole word reading. The teacher spends a lot of time each day corralling the boys. If I was a boy that age, I’d have a hard time sitting still for the whole day.

We’ll see how it plays out. I survived public education, but I was bored a lot. My daughter is bored as well and has mastered the goals for the year already. Hopefully she will find positive avenues for her boredom, as I did when I attended school.

As always, thanks for the interesting dialog you have on your site.

Best Regards,

Andy Gross

I will post part of this because I want to make an important point: There is no such thing as reading readiness after 4 years of age. Every kid of normal or dull normal intelligence, and most of the rest, can be taught to read at 5 or 6, and most at 4. For centuries in England children were taught to read in nursery by nannies, in the upper and middle classes that could afford nannies, and those kids were no better protoplasm than contemporary children. But before kids can be taught to read you have to believe they can learn, and the official education policy of the US Dept. of Education is that the reason kids don’t learn to read in first grade is because they are not ready.

Once kids can read they can read anything including nonsense words like deaming and walaplooty and monochromhydride. Some will be tough because that’s a lot of syllables to put together, but it can also be a game.

If your daughter can read — meaning that she can read words she has never seen before — then just give her lots of interesting stuff to read. Let her choose what she wants to read. And you will want to look into things like a child’s history of the world, and a lot of nursery rhymes (which are fun) and stuff like that. As to what to read, anything she likes within reason.

Jerry Pournelle

Chaos Manor

I do agree with your point regarding the reading readiness. My only point of reference is my own education, and that is what I use to gauge my daughter’s progress. Things have changed considerably since 1980.

My daughter showed interest in reading for herself at the age of four. She has made considerable progress over the past 6 months. As I listen to her read, I am reminded of the oddity of the English language.

I appreciate your suggestions on reading materials. She would probably like the history books. She brought home a book on all of the first ladies last week and we’ve been working through that. We spent a good bit of time on Mary Todd Lincoln…. Endless questions. Inquisitive children are refreshing…..

Best regards,

Andy

I am pleased to announce that in the next week or so we will release the California Sixth Grade Reader, a collection of stories and poems that everyone in the California school system read in sixth grade from about 1910 until the 1930’s (with some adjustments and changes of course, but not very many). They are good stories, interesting, well written, with a useful vocabulary. We’ll be announcing its availability in the near future.

‘The Navy plans to deploy its first laser on a ship later this year, and it intends to test an electromagnetic rail gun prototype aboard a vessel within two years.’

<http://news.yahoo.com/us-navy-ready-deploy-laser-183035272.html>

——–

Roland Dobbins

A nuclear carrier has an enormous power source, a lot of room for projectiles, and considerable space to mount rail guns…

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 810 Saturday, February 15, 2014

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

Cheer. The pledge drive ends, and I won’t bug you about money for a while. I time my financial appeals to coincide with the KUSC pledge drive. KUSC is the Los Angeles Classical Music station, and this place operates on the Public Radio model: it is free to everyone, but it will only stay open if it brings in enough money to make that feasible. So far it has done that. I want to thank all those who have recently subscribed, and also some of you who subscribed long ago and have recently returned. If you haven’t subscribed, or did so but haven’t renewed in a while, this would be a very good time to do so. https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/

I continue to recover from last night’s trip to the Kaiser Emergency Room. I am pleased to say that Sable, who was the indirect cause of my whamming myself on the concrete deck by leaving the remains of a stolen box of chocolate there – see last night’s View for details – was a bit droopy this morning, but has recovered from the effects of eating chocolate. She has always been a hardy dog. She does wonder why we are not going for a walk, and she also looks at me curiously, which is no surprise because my face is a bloody wreck, and is likely to be that way for a week or two. There’s no permanent damage, but I have a fine Harry Potter lightning scar in the middle of my forehead – I suppose for accuracy I should say I have a wound of that shape now, with stitches, which will inevitably become a Harry Potter scar. I also have abrasions and bruises and such all over the place. Not something to expose my neighbors to. I am wondering if I should wear a ski mask to church tomorrow. And brunch at the local restaurant we go to is likely to be a bit embarrassing. Ah well.

Continuing last night’s thoughts on where science is going:

The State of Modern Science Message

Jerry,

I, and I believe I can speak for most scientists, am with you on the desire to see simpler models. Most of us think that when we REALLY understand what is going on we will develop simpler models. But, that understanding may be a long way off as we are trying to find ways to conceptualize behaviors our brains have NEVER experienced — traveling at the speed of light, sitting in a black hole, or whizzing around as a sub-atomic particle. The every day universe we evolved to model intuitively in our brains is vastly different from these realms.

The other issue is that our models are vast simplifications of reality. The only way to model the universe in all of its detail is to run the whole universe, not very practical. This means our models will always have inaccuracies in them, conditions that they cannot model fully. I know that there has been a lot of noise about closing in on the Theory of Everything, that one elegant equation that predicts all things in the universe, including itself. I have always thought that such a theory is not possible because it runs hard up against Godel’s incompleteness theorem and Turing’s halting problem. (Which are two shades of the same thing.)

I, too, am dismayed by the rise of shoddy science, misconduct in science, and outright fraud in science. There are some good articles on this problem in Scientific American. One point that the articles make is that there is very little replication work being done for any of the major claims being published these days. Perhaps major journals should require at least one independent replication of a major result before they agree to publish? I don’t know; this may be too cumbersome and time consuming, but peer review seems to be failing miserably these days.

Kevin Keegan

I will also add this link:

Science has lost its way, at a big cost to humanity

Researchers are rewarded for splashy findings, not for double-checking accuracy. So many scientists looking for cures to diseases have been building on ideas that aren’t even true.

October 27, 2013| Michael Hiltzik

In today’s world, brimful as it is with opinion and falsehoods masquerading as facts, you’d think the one place you can depend on for verifiable facts is science.

You’d be wrong. Many billions of dollars’ worth of wrong.

A few years ago, scientists at the Thousand Oaks biotech firm Amgen set out to double-check the results of 53 landmark papers in their fields of cancer research and blood biology.

The idea was to make sure that research on which Amgen was spending millions of development dollars still held up. They figured that a few of the studies would fail the test — that the original results couldn’t be reproduced because the findings were especially novel or described fresh therapeutic approaches.

But what they found was startling: Of the 53 landmark papers, only six could be proved valid.

"Even knowing the limitations of preclinical research," observed C. Glenn Begley, then Amgen’s head of global cancer research, "this was a shocking result."

Unfortunately, it wasn’t unique. A group at Bayer HealthCare in Germany similarly found that only 25% of published papers on which it was basing R&D projects could be validated, suggesting that projects in which the firm had sunk huge resources should be abandoned. Whole fields of research, including some in which patients were already participating in clinical trials, are based on science that hasn’t been, and possibly can’t be, validated.

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/27/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20131027

There is considerably more, all worth your time since you’re the ones paying for it. Note that this was not a scare piece in some anti-science publication. Even the popular press is becoming concerned.

It’s dinner time and I don’t know my schedule today, I slept late. I may get some more done later tonight.

And here endeth the Winter Pledge Drive. If you haven’t subscribed recently this would be a great time to do it. And thanks to all those who responded.

Paying for this place: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.