J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 335

The 1870 Inflection Point in Transport and Trade: An In-Take from "Slouching Towards Utopia": An Economic History of the Long 20th Century

The metallurgy to cheaply make the rails and the engines of the railroad had made transport over land wherever the rails ran as cheap as travel up navigable watercourses or across the oceans had every been, and made it faster.

The mid-nineteenth century Massachusetts transcendentalist author and activist Henry David Thoreau���s response to the railroad was: ���get off my lawn!���:

To make a railroad round the world.... Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere in next to no time and for nothing, but though a crowd rushes to the depot and the conductor shouts ���All aboard!��� when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over���-and it will be called, and will be, ���a melancholy accident���...

My ancestors had a very different view. The old rule-of-thumb before the railroad was that you simply could not transport agricultural goods more than 100 miles by land: by that time what the horses or oxen would have eaten was as much as they could pull. Either you find a navigable watercourse���and it had better be much closer than 100 miles���or you were stuck in bare self-sufficiency, unable to buy anything made outside your local township that could not be purchased with the (low-value) spinning and weaving labor of your womenfolk. For Thoreau the fact that it took him a day to walk or ride into Boston was a benefit���part of living deliberately. But that one would seek to live deliberately above all else is the point of view of a rich guy, or at least of a guy without a family to care for.

The railroad made a big difference for all those who did not live near navigable waterways. But the true revolution in transportation���the one that mattered for nearly everyone���came not in the 1830s with the railroad, but rather later, with the iron-hulled ocean-going coal-fired steamship.

1870 saw the Harland and Wolff shipyard of Belfast in northern Ireland launch the iron-hulled (rather than wooden-hulled) steam-powered (rather than wind-powered, but it did still have masts and sails) screw-propellered (rather than paddle-wheeled) passenger steamship R.M.S. Oceanic. 9 days from Liverpool to New York���a journey that in 1800 would have taken more like a month. The Oceanic���s crew of 150 supported 1,000 third-class passengers at a cost of ��3���15 dollars���for a third-class passenger���the same share of average earnings as ��2,100 or 3,300 dollars today, almost a business-class transatlantic airfare, the rough equivalent of a month and a half���s wages for an unskilled worker���and 150 first class passengers at ��15 a head: the same share of average income then that 17,000 dollars would be today. Third class on the Oceanic cost half as much as passage a generation earlier during the Irish Potato Famine, and roughly a fourth as much as in 1800. After 1870 sending a member of a family across the ocean to work became a possibility open to all save the very poorest of European households.

The falling cost of transporting people marched alongside a falling cost of transporting goods: flour that cost 1.5 cents per pound more in London than in New York in 1840 cost only 0.5 cents per pound more after 1870 ���a fall in the price of carrying the raw materials for a loaf of bread across the Atlantic from 30 minutes��� worth of unskilled labor time to ten minutes��� worth. After 1870 every commodity that was neither exceptionally fragile nor spoilable could be carried from port to port across oceans for less than it cost to move it within any country.

All this mattered for two reasons. First, it meant that everyplace in the world was, as long as there were docks and railroads, cheek-by-jowl to every other place. Everyone���s opportunities and constraints, not, as before, just the consumption patterns of the elite, depended on what was going on in every other piece of the world economy. This process has propelled itself forward from 1870 to our day, with an interruption between 1914-1945, to give us a world economy today where a lowly t-shirt and its materials will typically cross the Pacific Ocean twice and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans during its lifetime. That meant that the logic of comparative advantage could be deployed to its limit: wherever there was a difference across two countries in the value of textiles relative to ironmongery���or any other two non-spoilable goods���there was profit to be made and societal well-being to be enhanced by exporting the good that was relatively cheap in your country and importing the good that was relatively dear.

For this logic of comparative advantage, it did not matter where the difference in relative prices came from. A country hopeless in growing food but even more hopeless in making machine tools could make itself better off by exporting food and importing machine tools. A country that was best-in-class at making automobiles but even better, in relative terms, at making airplanes could make itself better off by exporting airplanes and importing cars. Whether one���s comparative advantage came from entrepreneurs who could innovate rapidly, a deeper community of engineering practice, a well-educated workforce, abundant natural resources, or just poverty that made your labor cheap, business could profit and society grow richer by expanding world trade. And once a comparative advantage was established it tended to stick for a long time. There was nothing about British-invented automated textile machinery that made it work better in Britain than elsewhere. Yet Britain��� cotton textile exports rose decade after decade from 1800 to 1910, peaking at 1.1 billion pounds a year in the years before World War I.

Second, if you could move goods you could also move and supply armies. Thus conquest, or at least invasion and devastation, became things that any European great power could undertake in nearly any corner of the world. And the European powers did. Before 1870 European imperialism was���with the very notable exception of the British Raj in India���largely a matter of ports and their hinterlands, plus settler expansion into the low-population (after the plagues and genocides, that is) Americas and Australasia. By 1914 only Morocco, Ethiopia, Iran, Afghanistan, Nepal, Thailand, Tibet, China, and Japan had escaped European (or, in the case of Taiwan and Korea, Japanese) conquest or ���protectorate������and Ethiopia fell to Mussolini���s Italy with its airplanes and poison gas shells in 1936.

Maria Bustillos: The Anthony Bourdain Interview: Weekend Reading

Maria Bustillos: The Anthony Bourdain Interview: "Anthony Bourdain had started smoking again, was the first thing I noticed as he sat down with me last February. He was a bit hung over from a recent working trip to south Louisiana for Cajun Mardi Gras; 'Harder partying than I���m used to, I gotta say', he said, laughing. Despite his great height his leonine head seemed just huge, and a little fleshier than I���d imagined; there was this slight dissipation to him...

...But no���who could be troubled about the wellbeing of Anthony Bourdain? Just look at him, so debonair, so completely at ease. A veritable prince of savoir vivre. Sixty-one, and still very elegant in his looks; the word sexy came to mind. Almost an old-fashioned word now. The sort of person who seems to think with his hips, his hands. He was in love, he would later admit; he and his new girlfriend, Asia Argento, had started smoking again together. He was a little rueful about the smoking, had the air of someone who meant to quit soon.

As he started to talk, everything about him became familiar at once; he slipped so effortlessly into the sleek carapace of his fame. The very air of vulnerability he projected, along with the rough candor, was part of this persona. But in fact he was a very private person, as his assistant, Laurie Woolever, reminded me after his death. Something I���d already known, from reading his books; he���d liked the piece I���d written about him and sent me an unbelievably kind note about it, which was what had emboldened me to ask for an interview. That, and he was famously generous to writers in general.

He loves the world, and that���s what this new publication is about, I���d written to Woolever. I���d be so thrilled if he could talk with me a little bit about this, even over the phone.��The reply came right back.

Tony has agreed to do an interview, though he is in town only briefly next week. Could you meet at 3 pm on Friday Feb 16? He has suggested either Bouchon Bakery, on the third floor of Time Warner Center, or Coliseum, a no-frills bar and grill on West 58th between 8th & 9th.

When someone���s that famous, things have to be arranged within an inch of their lives, but there was no time limit set for the interview. I thought he���d spend maybe fifteen minutes with me, and to make them count I���d need to be laser-focused. I decided to ask him about the matter of luxury. Because through his television work������Parts Unknown��� especially���Bourdain showed Americans a different way of thinking not only about food, but about travel and tourism. About looking at ourselves as one part of a larger human story, in stark contrast to the conventional notion of travel: Americans casting themselves as ���exceptionalist��� democratic superstars in a drama, with the rest of planet Earth as their Tour Guide co-stars, and plenty of violins in the soundtrack.

Had Bourdain succeeded in bringing a more inclusive and egalitarian dimension to American culture? What is tourism now? Isn���t it doomed, all this determined globetrotting for two weeks a year, with the obligatory ���authentic��� ���hole in the wall but AMAZING��� dining���wasn���t it all just breathing on the Lascaux murals, and trundling dutifully past the Vermeers? Is it immoral even to get on an airplane? What was the goal of his work, ultimately? How did he see it?

So��� one topic, and try to persuade him to say different things from those he���d already said in interviews. I braced myself for fifteen minutes of attempted psyche vacuuming.

Instead he spent two and a half hours with me in the comfy Irish bar, blabbing about everything under the sun. The transcript of this conversation is in excess of 20,000 words. And nobody bothered us in all that time, it was like there was a force field around him.

���Not one person has come up to you. Does this happen like���anywhere on earth?���

���No.���

He talked about #MeToo and the powerful forces of evil arrayed against decent people, about Rose McGowan, about raising daughters, about the sexual mores of the 1970s. He told me how he imagined the death of Harvey Weinstein, a hilarious, weirdly specific fantasy that I���ll share with you in a moment. We talked about luxury, too.

He drank Stellas and I drank Malbec. We went outside and I had my first cigarette in some years. We went back in and had another couple of drinks and went back outside and had another cigarette (Marlboro Reds). He invited me up to see his apartment right across the street. It was way up high in a luxurious new building, the place itself spotless, almost characterless; like a very beautiful hotel room, but with a ton of books, and better pictures on the walls. He spent five days there a month. He showed me his trepanning tools and his portrait of Iggy Pop in the living room. I was so gobsmacked (and tipsy, by now) that I managed only to take a few blurry cell phone photos, half-thinking I might ask for a followup later, and if that happened I���d bring a photographer. Just the conversation was going to take a long time to digest. How long? The answer is: forever.

 

On Travel: I like the idea of inspiring or encouraging people to get a passport and go have their own adventures. I���m a little worried when I bump into people, and it happens a lot������We went to Vietnam, and we went to all the places you went.��� Okay that���s great, because I like those people and I like that noodle lady, and I���m glad they���re getting the business, and it pleases me to think that they���re getting all these American visitors now.

But on the other hand, you know, I much prefer people who just showed up in Paris and found their own way without any particular itinerary, who left themselves open to things happening. To mistakes. To mistakes, because that���s the most important part of travel. The shit you didn���t plan for, and being able to adapt and receive that information in a useful way instead of saying, like, ���Oh, goddamnit, they ran out of tickets at the Vatican!��� or whatever, ���That line at the Eiffel Tower is you know, six hours!��� and then sulk for the rest of the day.

 

On the Cajun Mardi Gras: Well, they make their own costumes, you know, they���re made from generally found, leftover stuff. And, you know, it���s a tradition that goes back to when they were all desperately poor, and one day a year they got to put on masks and make fun of the clergy, the landowners, the aristocracy���anybody in authority���but also because they had masks, without shame, they could beg for food.

So they���d go from house to house in a big drunken mob, ridiculing everything in authority freely, and then beg for you know,�� a chicken, some rice, and then make a big pot of gumbo at the end.

It was a wild debauch��� terrifying at times.

Did you dress up?

I did! I had a woman who���s been doing them for forty years make me an elaborate uhhh��� yeah.

 

On Taking drugs, these days: I can smoke weed at home when I don���t need my brain anymore but like as far as socially interacting with people, or being any situation where I might be called upon to answer the phone or make a decision? I���m not gonna do it!

No way man��� back in the day you���d buy a lid, which was like a sofa cushion, you���d smoke a joint and nothing would happen to you.

Now the stuff is devastating, you can���t leave bed.

This is one of the things I find so weird about England! Every time I���m there, I���ll be out drinking with perfectly reasonable, nice people. And then somebody��� it happens every time! Let���s get some charlie��� some coke! And suddenly everybody���s high on coke, and it���s like what is this, 1986?! I mean who does cocaine anymore? What the fuck?!

Young people! Young people that don���t need to sleep.

[altar boy]

No one I know��� I���m so out of it I haven���t seen it in ages except in England, where it really jumps out at you because people my age are still doing it.

Where do they even get it?? It���s probably full of weird detergent or contaminants from like��� oligarch crime rings.

Oh it���s rampant over there. It���s the major market over there in Europe. I think they���re doing more per capita than we do.

 

On Journalism and Interviewing: The worst thing about North American journalism is its insularity: the feeling that the United States is the world. And this is true even of the New York Times; nothing comes from the perspective of other places���

Or anyone outside of Timesland.

Yeah! Exactly��� and that kind of feeds into the materialism that brought us to this point politically. So��� I���ve always seen you as somebody who made the world bigger for people, and who is kind of immune to questions of status ��� you will find the coolest person in the room no matter where you go, and it���s not about wealth or titles or status; that person might be a grandma, or a plumber. So if we could democratize how people look at the world now, given that the U.S. finds itself in this��� position, how are we gonna do that?

One of the things I���ve started noticing on my shows and through my experience was��� [say] you go to a place like Beirut, and you find yourself talking to a Muslim woman. If you���re a journalist tasked with an agenda, you know, you���re there to report a story, and you come right out with it. You���re going right into some very difficult areas. Whereas I have the luxury, I���m there to eat! Presumably. I���m there to eat, and I���m asking very simple questions.

What makes you happy? What do you like to eat, where do you like to go to get a few drinks; you know? What do you miss about the place when you go away? And I find, again and again, just by spending the time, by asking very simple questions, people have said the most astonishing things to me. Often things that would be very uncomfortable for them outside of that casual context; things that we���ve had to edit out of the show, that might come back to bite them.

I���m going to suggest something to you about that. As you know I read all your books, lol.

I was really impressed by that, by the way...

#weekendreading

Well, Our Three Bridge View from the Graduate Student Lounge Is Not at Its Best This Morning, Is It?

Well, our three bridge view from the Peixotto Graduate Student Lounge is not at its best this morning, is it?

That is a pity because the new first-year graduate students are arriving this morning...

This is what it is supposed to look like:

We here at Berkeley Economics are vastly underresourced relative to those institutions that we claim are our peer institutions. The interesting thing is that not only do we think we punch well above our weight, but so does the world as a whole:

Noah Smith (2015): Econ 101: Chicago? M.I.T.? Nope, Berkeley's on Top: "Which is the greatest university economics department of them all?...

...When I think of the economics department that has had the most influence on the profession in the past four decades, another candidate springs to mind: the University of California-Berkeley.... Researchers at Berkeley during the past four decades haven't just been prestigious and incisive, they have been different. Their research has taken economics in new directions, in terms of both methods and subject matter. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the Chicago School has been replaced in prominence and influence by what I like to call the Berkeley Reformation....

Berkeley boasts Dan McFadden, who almost singlehandedly invented random utility discrete choice models.... David Card, who revolutionized the field of empirical economics with his use of natural experiments.... Some of Berkeley's heavy hitters have since moved on, but their legacy remains. The chief example is George Akerlof, whose pioneering insights into the economics of asymmetric information revolutionized the discipline in the 1970s, alerting economists to a huge class of ways that markets could fail and break down.��Another star who did most of his work at Berkeley (he recently moved to Harvard) is Matt Rabin, one of the leading lights of behavioral economics....

Berkeley has done something similar to what the old Chicago School did -- it has changed the entire game.... The Chicago School was Panglossian in its belief that markets work well; the Berkeley Reformation showed deep, fundamental reasons that they break down. The Chicago School described the world in terms of perfectly rational agents; the Berkeley Reformation added the complexity of flawed decision-making.��In the 1980s and 1990s, it could rightly be said that Chicago had conquered the economics world. But in the 2010s, the profession has pointed in Berkeley's direction.

 

The smart Joachim Voth thinks that it is (mostly) a university-wide phenomenon���that it is true not just of econ, but of most (or many) departments on campus.

I will say that 13-story Evans Hall needs nine elevators, was designed for six, five were built, and it is a good day when four are running:

Joachim Voth: Teachings from Berkeley: "'It���s amazing' those were the words of a renowned Swedish economics professor as he toured UC Berkeley...

...On clear days, the sun-soaked campus offers spectacular views over San Francisco Bay all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge. The visitor was then led through Evans Hall, which houses the Department of Economics. It is an ugly, 60���s-era concrete bunker-like structure with linoleum floors, windows that do not shut properly, and elevators that have not worked right in years���on a good day, two out of four are running. Again, he utters the same comment: ���It���s amazing.��� His host is becoming suspicious.... Evans Hall is anything but amazing.... When asked to clarify just what he found so amazing, his response came quickly: ���It���s amazing how much you���ve done here with so little.���

Berkeley... 40,000 registered students.... In physics, chemistry, math, IT and economics, it regularly ranks among the top five; nearly every other department is in the top ten worldwide. No less than 92 Nobel Prize winners have studied or worked here. The Times Higher Education Ranking puts Berkeley in the eighth spot among universities worldwide ��� above Yale and just below Princeton....

Berkeley spends about 4.1 billion dollars per year, or about 105,000 dollars per student... far more than the school receives in tuition and fees (about 13,000 per student from California, 40,000 from out-of-state and foreign students).... However... Stanford... spends over 250,000 per student.... Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and other major private universities in the US all boast more funds per student.... State-run Berkeley is particularly efficient in converting financial means into academic excellence....

What can Europe learn from this? The first lesson is clear: money is not everything. Those who shrug their shoulders at the massive endowments of Harvard and Stanford, saying it is not worth even trying to compete, are giving up too easily. Efficient spending can help tax funds go a lot farther than one might expect, giving public universities the chance to keep up without becoming symbols of inefficiency.... The second lesson is: there are clear limits to efficiency. Berkeley spends only 40% of Stanford���s per-student budget, but that still amounts to 105,000 per year. At the University of Zurich, well equipped by European standards, per-student spending totals around CHF 32,000, while the University of Bonn lays out just ���17,000...

Comment of the Day: Robert Waldmann: Will Wilkinson Tries...

Comment of the Day: Robert Waldmann: Will Wilkinson Tries to Rescue the Word "Libertarianism": "My first reaction is that it is generally unwise to debate the meanings of words. Rather than argue about what true libertarianism is, Wilkinson could discuss policies, their consequences and whether, in this case, consequentialism involves ignoring some human right that really exists...

...But I realise that I am silly. People do, in fact, first chooes a team and second debate what that team's goal is (unless they are playing a sport and the goal is a net or a line and it's clear).

You go to a meeting of the minds with the humans you have, not the rational beings you want. We are tribal and we will argue about the true nature of our tribes.

Given that, there are some tribes which are better left and many well intentioned -ists who should be renegades, and Wilkinson is one of them. He might continue to try to promote "liberaltarianism" (the slogan, hence the quotation marks which, aren't "scare quotes") but "libertarianism" is a distraction which prevents most people from considering his interesting ideas.

I end up thinking that we are naturally tribal, and mortal, but don't have to accept current levels of ideology and malaria. I think we can try to free ourselves from our tribe and our love of slogans and ideologies. We can try to see others as people not either one of us or them, ideas as ideas not parts of an ideology, policy proposals as proposals not points for or against our team.

To me this is the essence of true liberalism.

Robert: do you mean "scare quotes" or "'scare quotes'"?

#commentoftheday

No, the Trump administration is not very competent at ach...

No, the Trump administration is not very competent at achieving its stated goals. But that does not mean that the Trump administration is not doing enormous harm under the radar by simply being its chaos-monkey essence. The smart David Leonhart tries to advise people how to deal with this: David Leonhardt: Trump Tries to Destroy the West: "[Trump's] behavior requires a response that���s as serious as the threat...

...For America���s longtime allies, the response means shedding the hopeful optimism that characterized the early approach taken by Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron, France���s president. Merkel is the right role model. She has been tougher, without needlessly escalating matters, because she has understood the threat all along.

For Trump���s fellow Republicans, it means putting country over party. A few Republicans, like John McCain, offered appropriately alarmed words in the last two days. Now members of Congress need to do more than send anguished tweets. They should offer legislation that would restrain Trump and hold hearings meant to uncover his motives.

For American voters, it means understanding the real stakes of this year���s midterm elections. They are not merely a referendum on a tax cut, a health care plan or a president���s unorthodox style. They are a referendum on American ideals that are older than any of us...

#shouldread

The sharp and well-intentioned Will Wilkinson still think...

The sharp and well-intentioned Will Wilkinson still thinks that the name "libertarianism" is worth fighting for, or perhaps that "liberaltarianism" is worth fighting for. I, however, for one, think that "libertarianism" is poisoned in the same way that "fascism", "communism", "socialism", and "neoliberalism" are poisoned. Too many bad people have waved their banners in bad faith. In libertarians' case, the bad people waving in bad faith have been those who think that the only rights that matter are the rights to discriminate, to exchange, and to hold what you have no matter how you acquired it. Maybe "positive libertarians" has a chance, maybe not: Will Wilkinson: Liberaltarianism: Back the Future: "Misean economics,... filtered through Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard's peculiar views of rights and coercion...

...delivers a powerfully moralized brief for capitalism that calls into question even taxation for the purpose of financing genuine public goods. That Rothbardians and Randians have wasted so much time fighting with each other on the question of the minimal state versus anarcho-capitalism obscures their unity on a rights-based bulwark against the slide from the welfare state to socialism. Sadly, ���libertarianism��� has become identified rather strongly with this ideology���an ideology some of the thinkers most strongly identified with libertarianism, like Hayek and Friedman, never shared...

#shouldread

Peter Jensen, Markus Lampe, Paul Sharp, and Christian Sko...

Peter Jensen, Markus Lampe, Paul Sharp, and Christian Skovsgaard: The role of elites for development in Denmark: "How did��Denmark get to Denmark?... Hundreds of butter factories could spring up in a few years in the 1880s... dominance in agricultural exports could be so rapidly consolidated... why this happened in Denmark and not elsewhere...

...Cooperatives were the unintended result of something which happened more than 100 years earlier, when elites moved into Denmark... from the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein.... They brought a relatively sophisticated agricultural system they knew from home, known as the 'Holstein system', which introduced the idea of centralising dairy production. They also emphasised an early enlightened approach to agriculture, including modern standards of bookkeeping and accounting. Finally, they established knowledge institutions and experimented both on their estates and at specialist research institutions. For example, the first centrifuge in Denmark was trialled on one of these estates.... It was a trickle down of ideas from the elites in the 1700s that later allowed the cooperatives to emerge so successfully.... Denmark got to Denmark not simply by having hard-working peasants and a democratic countryside, but on the shoulders of landed elites. Moreover, this process took more than 100 years to complete...

#shouldread

Paul Krugman: Brexit Meets Gravity: "These days I���m wri...

Paul Krugman: Brexit Meets Gravity: "These days I���m writing a lot about trade policy. I know there are more crucial topics, like Alan Dershowitz. Maybe a few other things? But getting and spending go on; and to be honest, in a way I���m doing trade issues as a form of therapy and/or escapism, focusing on stuff I know as a break from the grim political news...

...Anyway, as Britain���s self-inflicted Brexit crisis (self-inflicted with some help from Putin, it seems) comes to a head, it seems to me worth trying to explain some aspects of the economics involved that should be obvious���surely are obvious to many British economists���but aren���t, apparently, as obvious either to Brexiteers or to the general public. These aspects explain why Theresa May is trying to do a soft Brexit or even, as some say, BINO���Brexit In Name Only; and why the favored alternative of Brexiteers, trade agreements with the United States and perhaps others to replace the EU, won���t fly.

Now, many of the arguments for Brexit were lies pure and simple. But their claims about trade, both before and after the vote, may arguably be seen as misunderstandings rather than sheer dishonesty. In the world according to Brexiteers, Britain needn���t lose much by leaving the EU, because it can still negotiate a free trade agreement with the rest of Europe, or, at worst, face the low tariffs the EU imposes on other non-EU economies. Meanwhile, Britain can negotiate better trade deals elsewhere, especially the US, that will make up for any losses on the EU side. What���s wrong with this story? The first thing to understand is that the EU is not a free trade agreement like NAFTA; it���s a customs union, which is substantially stronger and more favorable to trade.... The EU sets common external tariffs, which means that once you���re in, you���re in: once goods are unloaded at Rotterdam they can be shipped on to France or Germany without further customs checks. So there���s much less friction. And frictions, not tariffs, are what businesses are complaining about as Brexit draws near. For example, the British auto industry relies on ���just-in-time��� production....

TOne of the best-established relationships in economics is the so-called gravity equation for trade between any two countries, which says that the amount of trade depends positively on the size of the two countries��� economies but negatively on the distance between them.... While America offers a market comparable in size to that of the EU, it���s much further away, so that even if the UK could make an incredible deal with us, it wouldn���t be worth nearly as much as the customs union they have. All of this explains why May is trying to negotiate a deal that keeps the customs union intact. But that, of course, ain���t much of an exit: Brussels will still set UK trade policy, except that Britain will no longer have a vote. So what was the point of Brexit in the first place?

Good question. Too bad more people didn���t ask it before the referendum.

#shouldread

Real Climate: 30 years after Hansen���s testimony: "The f...

Real Climate: 30 years after Hansen���s testimony: "The first transient climate projections using GCMs are 30 years old this year, and they have stood up remarkably well...

Misrepresentations and lies: Over the years, many people have misrepresented what was predicted and what could have been expected. Most (in)famously, Pat Michaels testified in Congress about climate changes and claimed that the predictions were wrong by 300% (!)���but his conclusion was drawn from a doctored graph (Cato Institute version) of the predictions where he erased the lower two scenarios. Undoubtedly there will be claims this week that Scenario A was the most accurate projection of the forcings [Narrator: It was not]. Or they will show only the CO2 projection (and ignore the other factors). Similarly, someone will claim that the projections have been ���falsified��� because the temperature trends in Scenario B are statistically distinguishable from those in the real world...

And, yes, from the Cato Institute and the Wall Street Journal, we have what can only be called misrepresentations and lies.

#shouldread

In the internet economy, traditional antitrust doctrines ...

In the internet economy, traditional antitrust doctrines and nostrums are much less helpful than we would wish. We need new thinkin' and new legislatin' here. Not that I know what we need, exactly, but we do need it: Ben Thompson: AT&T, Time Warner, and a Framework for Neutrality: "Unfortunate[ly]... a bad case by the government has led to... a merger... never examined for its truly anti-competitive elements...

...at worst, bad law that will open the door for similar tie-ups. To be sure, it is not at all clear that the government would have won had they focused on zero rating: there is an obvious consumer benefit to the concept���that is why T-Mobile leveraged it to such great effect!���and the burden would have been on the government to show that the harm was greater. The bigger issue, though, is the degree to which laws surrounding such issues are woefully out-of-date. Last fall I argued that Title II was the wrong framework to enforce net neutrality, even though net neutrality is a concept I absolutely support; I came to that position in part because zero rating was not even covered by the FCC���s action. What is clearly needed is new legislation, not an attempt to misapply ancient regulation in a way that is trivially reversible. Moreover, AT&T has a point that online services like Google and Facebook are legitimate competitors, particularly for ad dollars; said regulation should address the entire sector...

#shouldread