Does Liberty Still Have a Fighting Chance?

Lawrence W. Reed, president of the Foundation for Economic Education, uses FEE’s website to argue that “Liberty Still Has a Fighting Chance“:

So here we are now, decades into the very egalitarian welfare state Tocqueville warned would be the death of American exceptionalism. It threatens to make us like all the other forgettable welfare states that languish in history’s dustbins, Greece included. Should we just assume it’s inevitable and go along for the ride? Or should we muster the character that built a nation and that Tocqueville identified as quintessentially American?

If you’re pessimistic, then you’re no longer part of the solution. You’ve become part of the problem. What chance does liberty have if its supposed friends desert it in its hour of need or speak ill of its prospects?

Ask yourselves, What good purpose could a defeatist attitude possibly promote? Will it make me work harder for the causes I know are right? Is there anything about liberty that an election or events in Congress disprove? If I exude a pessimistic demeanor, will it help attract newcomers to the ideas I believe in? Is this the first time in history that believers in liberty have lost some battles? If we simply throw in the towel, will that enhance the prospects for future victories? Do we turn back just because the hill we have to climb got a little steeper?

This is not the time to abandon time-honored principles. I can’t speak for you, but someday, I want to go to my reward and be able to look back and say, “I never gave up. I never became part of the problem I tried to solve. I never gave the other side the luxury of winning anything without a rigorous, intellectual contest. I never missed an opportunity to do my best for what I believed in, and it never mattered what the odds or the obstacles were. I did my part.”

Remember that we stand on the shoulders of many people who came before us and who persevered through far darker times. The American patriots who shed their blood and suffered through unspeakable hardships as they took on the world’s most powerful nation in 1776 are certainly among them. But I am also thinking of the brave men and women behind the Iron Curtain who resisted the greatest tyranny of the modern age and won. I think of those like Hayek and Mises who kept the flame of liberty flickering in the 1940s. I think of the heroes like William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson who fought to end slavery and literally changed the conscience and character of Britain in the face of the most daunting of disadvantages. And I think of the Scots who, 456 years before the Declaration of Independence, put their lives on the line to repel English invaders with these thrilling words: “It is not for honor or glory or wealth that we fight, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life.”

As I think about what some of those great men and women faced, the obstacles before us today seem rather puny.

This is a moment when our true character, the stuff we’re really made of, will show itself. If we retreat, that would tell me we were never really worthy of the battle in the first place. But if we resolve to let these challenging times build our character and rally our dispirited friends to new levels of dedication, we will look back on this occasion someday with pride at how we handled it. Have you called a friend yet today to explain to him or her why liberty should be a top priority?

Nobody ever promised that liberty would be easy to attain or simple to keep. The world has always been full of greedy thieves and thugs, narcissistic power seekers, snake-oil charlatans, unprincipled ne’er-do-wells, and arrogant busybodies. No true friend of liberty should just roll over and play dead for any of them.

Take an inventory every day of what you’re doing for liberty. Get more involved in the fight. There are plenty of things you can do. If your state isn’t a right-to-work state, work to make it so. Support people and organizations like the Foundation for Economic Education that are teaching young people about the importance of liberty and character. Get behind the Compact for America and its plan for a balanced federal budget and an end to reckless spending and debt. Work for school choice in your state to help break the government monopoly on education. And be the very best example for liberty and character that you can possibly be in everything you do.

Whatever you do, don’t give up no matter what. Remember these words of the great US Supreme Court justice George Sutherland: “The saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time.”

Can Tocqueville’s American exceptionalism be restored? Can it last? You bet it can. The American Dream still lives, in the hearts of those who love liberty and refuse to meekly surrender it. So let’s wipe the frowns off our faces and get to work. Our future, our children’s future — liberty’s future — all depend on us.

This is nothing more than a platitudinous pep talk, delivered to a team that’s trailing by 12 touchdowns at half-time. Reed offers no actionable advice that will truly make a difference. Joining and supporting fringe groups won’t dim the promise of big government, which is to deliver seemingly free benefits to a broad, interlocking coalition of well-financed, media-backed, vote-rich interest groups. Reed is whistling in the dark.

I’m not being a defeatist. I’m being a realist. Liberty can be restored only when liberty-lovers get realistic about what it will take to restore it — and then act accordingly. What will it take? See “Independence Day 2016: The Way Ahead.”

What about the kinds of resistance counseled by Reed? Well, they might slow or even temporarily halt America’s descent into grim, impoverished, regimented statism. But they won’t prevent it. Only drastic action will do that.

Should You Vote for a Third-Party Candidate?

Inspired by Brandon Morse’s simple-minded posts at RedState.

If you live in a State where there’s little or no doubt as to which candidate will prevail, your vote doesn’t matter. Your vote for a third-party candidate may make you feel good, but it almost certainly won’t affect the outcome of the election. In fact, a lot of such votes probably won’t affect the outcome of the election. So cast that third-party vote and make your day.

But if you live in a State where the race is likely to be tight, it may matter — especially if there are enough voters who choose to withhold their votes from Trump or Clinton. It mattered in 2000, for example, when the votes cast in for Nader in Florida would have given that State to Gore, who was probably the second choice of most pro-Nader voters.

Consider a voter with a plausible set preferences who lives in a “battleground” State:

You’re a fiscal and social conservative, and you usually vote Republican but can’t stand Trump. Protest votes for a third-party candidate (probably Gary Johnson) will mean fewer votes for Trump, and therefore a boost for Clinton. So protest votes for Johnson (vice Trump) will help Clinton, who cannot possibly be more conservative than Trump on fiscal or social issues.
You’re a fiscal and social liberal, and you usually vote Democrat but can’t stand Clinton. Protest votes for a third-party candidate (probably Jill Stein) will mean fewer votes for Clinton, and therefore a boost for Trump. So protest votes for Stein (vice Clinton) will help Trump, who cannot possibly be more liberal than Clinton on fiscal or social issues.
You’re a middle-of-the-roader who usually votes for the Republican or Democrat who most appeals to you, but you can’t stand Trump or Clinton. Regardless of your distaste for Trump and Clinton, you probably consider one of them to be the lesser of two evils on issues of most importance to you. Protest votes for third-party candidates will help the greater of two evils by reducing the vote count of the lesser of two evils.

Generalizing:

Only Trump or Clinton will win the election. No one else has a chance of winning.
If you’re truly indifferent between Trump and Clinton, it doesn’t matter what you do. You can flip a coin to choose between them; you can flip a coin (or two) and choose among the third-party candidates; or you can abstain from voting for a presidential candidate.
But if you’re not truly indifferent between them, if one of them is merely the lesser of two evils, then your vote for someone else (Johnson, Stein, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy) means one less vote for the lesser of two evils. In which case, you’re voting against your own interest because you’re giving an edge to the greater of two evils.

Enough said.

Related post: Economists and Voting

Not-So-Random Thoughts (XVIII)

Links to the other posts in this occasional series may be found at “Favorite Posts,” just below the list of topics.

Charles Murray opines about “America Against Itself“:

With the publication in 2012 of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, political scientist Charles Murray – celebrated and denigrated in equal measure for his earlier works, Losing Ground (1984) and The Bell Curve (1994) – produced a searing, searching analysis of a nation cleaving along the lines of class, a nation, as he put it, ‘coming apart at the seams’. On the one side of this conflicted society, as Murray sees it, there is the intellectual or ‘cognitive’ elite, graduates of America’s leading universities, bound together through marriage and work, and clustered together in the same exclusive zipcodes, places such as Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and Boston. In these communities of the likeminded, which Murray gives the fictional title of ‘Belmont’, the inhabitants share the same values, the same moral outlook, the same distinct sense of themselves as superior. And on the other side, there is the ‘new lower class’, the white Americans who left education with no more than a high-school diploma, who increasingly divorce among themselves, endure unemployment together, and are gathered in neighbourhoods that Murray gives the title of ‘Fishtown’ – inspired by an actual white, blue-collar neighbourhood of the same name in Philadelphia.

It is in Fishtown that the trends Murray identifies as the most damaging over the past 50 years – family breakdown, loss of employment, crime and a loss of social capital – are felt and experienced. Its inhabitants have a set of values (albeit threadbare ones), an outlook and a way of life that are entirely at odds with those from Belmont. And it is between these two almost entirely distinct moral communities, that the new Culture Wars now appear to be being fought….

Collins: I was thinking about how, in Coming Apart, you explore how the elites seek to distance themselves from the working class. They eat so-called healthier foods, they have different child-rearing practices, and so on. Then, from afar, they preach their preferred ways to the working class, as if they know better. The elites may no longer preach traditional civic virtues, as you note in Coming Apart, but they are still preaching, in a way. Only now they’re preaching about health, parenting and other things.

Murray: They are preaching. They are legislating. They are creating policies. The elites (on both the right and the left) do not get excited about low-skill immigration. Let’s face it, if you are members of the elite, immigration provides you with cheap nannies, cheap lawn care, and so on. There are a variety of ways in which it is a case of ‘hey, it’s no skin off my back’ to have all of these new workers. The elites are promulgating policies for which they do not pay the price. That’s true of immigration, that’s true of education. When they support the teachers’ unions in all sorts of practices that are terrible for kids, they don’t pay that price. Either they send their kids to private schools, or they send their kids to schools in affluent suburbs in which they, the parents, really do have a lot of de facto influence over how the school is run.

So they don’t pay the price for policy after policy. Perhaps the most irritating to me – and here we are talking about preaching – is how they are constantly criticising the working class for being racist, for seeking to live in neighbourhoods in which whites are the majority. The elites live in zipcodes that are overwhelmingly white, with very few blacks and Latinos. The only significant minorities in elite zipcodes are East and South Asians. And, as the American sociologist Andrew Hacker has said, Asians are ‘honorary whites’. The integration that you have in elite neighbourhoods is only for the model minority, not for other minorities. That’s a kind of hypocrisy, to call working-class whites ‘racist’ for doing exactly the same thing that the elites do. It’s terrible.

The elites live in a bubble, which Murray explains in Coming Apart, and which I discuss in “Are You in the Bubble?” — I’m not — and “Bubbling Along.”

* * *

Meanwhile, in the climate war, there’s an interesting piece about scientists who got it right, but whose article was pulled because they used pseudonyms. In “Scientists Published Climate Research Under Fake Names. Then They Were Caught” we learn that

they had constructed a model, a mathematical argument, for calculating the average surface temperature of a rocky planet. Using just two factors — electromagnetic radiation beamed by the sun into the atmosphere and the atmospheric pressure at a planet’s surface — the scientists could predict a planet’s temperature. The physical principle, they said, was similar to the way that high-pressure air ignites fuel in a diesel engine.

If proved to be the case on Earth, the model would have dramatic implications: Our planet is warming, but the solar radiation and our atmosphere would be to blame, not us.

It seems to me that their real sin was contradicting the “settled science” of climatology.

Well, Francis Menton — author of “The ‘Science’ Underlying Climate Alarmism Turns Up Missing” — has something to say about that “settled science”:

In the list of President Obama’s favorite things to do, using government power to save the world from human-caused “climate change” has to rank at the top. From the time of his nomination acceptance speech in June 2008 (“this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal . . .”), through all of his State of the Union addresses, and right up to the present, he has never missed an opportunity to lecture us on how atmospheric warming from our sinful “greenhouse gas” emissions is the greatest crisis facing humanity….

But is there actually any scientific basis for this? Supposedly, it’s to be found in a document uttered by EPA back in December 2009, known as the “Endangerment Finding.” In said document, the geniuses at EPA purport to find that the emissions of “greenhouse gases” into the atmosphere are causing a danger to human health and welfare through the greenhouse warming mechanism. But, you ask, is there any actual proof of that? EPA’s answer (found in the Endangerment Finding) is the “Three Lines of Evidence”….

The news is that a major new work of research, from a large group of top scientists and mathematicians, asserts that EPA’s “lines of evidence,” and thus its Endangerment Finding, have been scientifically invalidated….

So the authors of this Report, operating without government or industry funding, compiled the best available atmospheric temperature time series from 13 independent sources (satellites, balloons, buoys, and surface records), and then backed out only ENSO (i.e., El Nino/La Nina) effects. And with that data and that sole adjustment they found: no evidence of the so-called Tropical Hot Spot that is the key to EPA’s claimed “basic physical understanding” of the claimed atmospheric greenhouse warming model, plus no statistically significant atmospheric warming at all to be explained.

What an amazing non-coincidence. That’s exactly what I found when I looked at the temperature record for Austin, Texas, since the late 1960s, when AGW was supposedly making life miserable for the planet. See “AGW in Austin? (II)” and the list of related readings and posts at the bottom. See also “Is Science Self Correcting?” (answer: no).

* * *

REVISED 11/18/16

Ten years ago, I posted “An Immigration Roundup,” a collection of 13 posts dated March 29 through September 22, 2006. The bottom line: to encourage and allow rampant illegal immigration borders on social and economic suicide. I remain a hardliner because of the higher crime rate among Hispanics (“Immigration and Crime“), and because of Steven Camarota’s “So What Is the Fiscal and Economic Impact of Immigration?“:

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have just released what can fairly be described as the most comprehensive look at the economic and fiscal impact of immigration on the United States. It represents an update of sorts of a similar NAS study released in 1997, in the middle of an earlier immigration debate. Overall the report is quite balanced, with a lot of interesting findings….

The most straightforward part of the study is its assemblage of estimates of the current fiscal impact of immigrants. The study shows that immigrants (legal and illegal) do not come close to paying enough in taxes to cover their consumption of public services at the present time. The NAS present eight different scenarios based on different assumptions about the current fiscal impact of immigrants and their dependent children — and every scenario is negative. No matter what assumption the NAS makes, immigrants use more in public services than they pay in taxes. The largest net drain they report is $299 billion a year. It should be pointed out that native-born American are also shown to be a net fiscal drain, mainly because of the federal budget deficit — Washington gives out a lot more than it takes in. But the fiscal drain created by immigrants is disproportionately large relative to the size of their population. Equally important, a fiscal drain caused by natives may be unavoidable. Adding more immigrants who create a fiscal drain, on the other hand, can be avoided with a different immigration policy….

With regard to economics — jobs and wages — the results in the NAS study, based on the standard economic model, show that immigration does make the U.S economy larger by adding workers and population. But a larger economy is not necessarily a benefit to natives. The report estimates that the actual benefit to the native-born could be $54.2 billion a year — referred to as the “immigrant surplus.” This is the benefit that accrues to American businesses because immigration increases the supply of workers and reduces American wages. Several points need to be made about this estimate. First, to generate this surplus, immigration has to create a very large redistribution of income from workers to owners of capital. The model works this way: Immigration reduces the wages of natives in competition with immigrant workers by $493.9 billion annually, but it increases the income of businesses by $548.1 billion, for a net gain of $54.2 billion. Unfortunately, the NAS does not report this large income redistribution, though it provides all the information necessary to calculate it. A second key point about this economic gain is that, relative to the income of natives, the benefit is very small, representing a “0.31 percent overall increase in income” for native-born Americans.

Third, the report also summarizes empirical studies that have tried to measure directly the impact of immigration on the wages of natives (the analysis above being based on economic theory rather than direct measurement). The size of the wage impact in those empirical studies is similar to that shown above. The NAS report cites over a dozen studies indicating that immigration does reduce wages primarily for the least-educated and poorest Americans. It must be pointed out, however, that there remains some debate among economists about immigration’s wage impact. The fourth and perhaps most important point about the “immigrant surplus” is that it is eaten up by the drain on the public fisc. For example, the average of all eight fiscal scenarios is a net drain (taxes minus services) of $83 billion a year at the present time, a good deal larger than the $54.2 billion immigrant surplus.

There’s much more, but that’s enough for me. Build that wall!

* * *

It’s also time to revisit the question of crime. Heather Mac Donald says “Yes, the Ferguson Effect Is Real,” and Paul Mirengoff shows that “Violent Crime Jumped in 2015.” I got to the root of the problem in “Crime Revisited,” to which I’ve added “Amen to That” and “Double Amen.”

What’s the root of the problem? A certain, violence-prone racial minority, of course, and also under-incarceration. Follow all of the links in the preceding paragraph, and read and weep.

Brandeis’s Ignorance

Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941; Supreme Court justice, 1916-1939) penned many snappy aphorisms. Here’s one that “progressives” are especially fond of: “Behind every argument is someone’s ignorance.” Here it is in larger context:

Behind every argument is someone’s ignorance. Re-discover the foundation of truth and the purpose and causes of dispute immediately disappear.

Spoken like the true technocrat that Brandeis was. The “truth” was his to know, and to enforce through government action, beginning long before his ascent to the Supreme Court.

There are fundamental and irreconcilable differences that Brandeis’s “truth” cannot bridge. Brandeis and his intellectual kin would never admit that, of course, so bent were (and are) they on imposing their “truth” on all Americans.

Is it ignorant to value liberty over the promise of economic security, especially when it’s obtained at the expense of liberty?

Is it ignorant to treat terrorism as a risk that’s categorically different than a traffic accident or lightning strike?

Is it ignorant to defend traditional values and their civilizing influence against the depradations of one’s cultural and physical enemies?

Is is ignorant to fear that America’s police and armed forces will become less able to defend peaceful citizens when those forces are weakened in the name of “sexual equality”?

Is it ignorant to oppose the subversion of the institution of marriage, which is the bedrock of civil society, in the name of “marriage equality”?

“Progressives” will answer “yes” to all the questions. Thus proving the ignorance of “progressives” and the wisdom of opposing “progressivism.”

“Feelings, nothing more than feelings”

Physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical, or as contemporary philosophers sometimes put it, that everything supervenes on the physical. The thesis is usually intended as a metaphysical thesis, parallel to the thesis attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Thales, that everything is water, or the idealism of the 18th Century philosopher Berkeley, that everything is mental. The general idea is that the nature of the actual world (i.e. the universe and everything in it) conforms to a certain condition, the condition of being physical. Of course, physicalists don’t deny that the world might contain many items that at first glance don’t seem physical — items of a biological, or psychological, or moral, or social nature. But they insist nevertheless that at the end of the day such items are either physical or supervene on the physical.

Daniel Stoljar, “Physicialism” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
first published February 13, 2001, substantively revised March 9, 2015)

Robin Hanson, an economics professor and former physicist, takes the physicalist position in “All Is Simple Parts Interacting Simply“:

There is nothing that we know of that isn’t described well by physics, and everything that physicists know of is well described as many simple parts interacting simply. Parts are localized in space, have interactions localized in time, and interactions effects don’t move in space faster than the speed of light. Simple parts have internal states that can be specified with just a few bits (or qubits), and each part only interacts directly with a few other parts close in space and time. Since each interaction is only between a few bits on a few sides, it must also be simple. Furthermore, all known interactions are mutual in the sense that the state on all sides is influenced by states of the other sides….

Not only do we know that in general everything is made of simple parts interacting simply, for pretty much everything that happens here on Earth we know those parts and interactions in great precise detail. Yes there are still some areas of physics we don’t fully understand, but we also know that those uncertainties have almost nothing to say about ordinary events here on Earth….

Now it is true that when many simple parts are combined into complex arrangements, it can be very hard to calculate the detailed outcomes they produce. This isn’t because such outcomes aren’t implied by the math, but because it can be hard to calculate what math implies.

However,

what I’ve said so far is usually accepted as uncontroversial, at least when applied to the usual parts of our world, such as rivers, cars, mountains laptops, or ants. But as soon as one claims that all this applies to human minds, suddenly it gets more controversial. People often state things like this:

I am sure that I’m not just a collection of physical parts interacting, because I’m aware that I feel. I know that physical parts interacting just aren’t the kinds of things that can feel by themselves. So even though I have a physical body made of parts, and there are close correlations between my feelings and the states of my body parts, there must be something more than that to me (and others like me). So there’s a deep mystery: what is this extra stuff, where does it arise, how does it change, and so on. We humans care mainly about feelings, not physical parts interacting; we want to know what out there feels so we can know what to care about.

But consider a key question: Does this other feeling stuff interact with the familiar parts of our world strongly and reliably enough to usually be the actual cause of humans making statements of feeling like this?

If yes, this is a remarkably strong interaction, making it quite surprising that physicists have missed it so far. So surprising in fact as to be frankly unbelievable.

But if no, if this interaction isn’t strong enough to explain human claims of feeling, then we have a remarkable coincidence to explain. Somehow this extra feeling stuff exists, and humans also have a tendency to say that it exists, but these happen for entirely independent reasons. The fact that feeling stuff exists isn’t causing people to claim it exists, nor vice versa. Instead humans have some sort of weird psychological quirk that causes them to make such statements, and they would make such claims even if feeling stuff didn’t exist. But if we have a good alternate explanation for why people tend to make such statements, what need do we have of the hypothesis that feeling stuff actually exists? Such a coincidence seems too remarkable to be believed.

Thus it seems hard to square a belief in this extra feeling stuff with standard physics in either cases, where feeling stuff does or does not have strong interactions with ordinary stuff. The obvious conclusion: extra feeling stuff just doesn’t exist.

Of course the “feeling stuff” interacts strongly and reliably with the familiar parts of the world — unless you’re a Robin Hanson, who seems to have no “feeling stuff.” Has he never been insulted, cut off by a rude lane-changer, been in love, held a baby in his arms, and so on unto infinity?

Hanson continues:

If this type of [strong] interaction were remotely as simple as all the interactions we know, then it should be quite measurable with existing equipment. Any interaction not so measurable would have be vastly more complex and context dependent than any we’ve ever seen or considered. Thus I’d bet heavily and confidently that no one will measure such an interaction.

Which is just a stupid thing to say. Physicists haven’t measured the interactions — and probably never will — because they’re not the kinds of phenomena that physicists study. Psychologists, yes; physicists, no.

Not being satisfied with obtuseness and stupidity, Hanson concedes the existence of “feelings,” but jumps to a conclusion in order to dismiss them:

But if no, if this interaction isn’t strong enough to explain human claims of feeling, then we have a remarkable coincidence to explain. Somehow this extra feeling stuff exists, and humans also have a tendency to say that it exists, but these happen for entirely independent reasons. The fact that feeling stuff exists isn’t causing people to claim it exists, nor vice versa. Instead humans have some sort of weird psychological quirk that causes them to make such statements, and they would make such claims even if feeling stuff didn’t exist….

Thus it seems hard to square a belief in this extra feeling stuff with standard physics in either cases, where feeling stuff does or does not have strong interactions with ordinary stuff. The obvious conclusion: extra feeling stuff just doesn’t exist.

How does Hanson — the erstwhile physicist — know any of this? I submit that he doesn’t know. He’s just arguing circularly, as an already-committed physicalist.

First, Hanson assumes that feelings aren’t “real” because physicists haven’t measured their effects. But that failure has been for lack of trying.

Then Hanson assumes that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Specifically, because there’s no evidence (as he defines it) for the existence of “feelings,” their existence (if real) is merely coincidental with claims of their existence.

And then Hanson the Obtuse ignores strong interactions of “feeling stuff” with “ordinary stuff.” Which suggests that he has never experienced love, desire, or hate (for starters).

It would be reasonable for Hanson to suggest that feelings are real, in a physical sense, in that they represent chemical states of the central nervous system. He could then claim that feelings don’t exist apart from such states; that is, “feeling stuff” is nothing more than a physical phenomenon. Hanson makes that claim, but in a roundabout way:

If everything around us is explained by ordinary physics, then a detailed examination of the ordinary physics of familiar systems will eventually tells us everything there is to know about the causes and consequences of our feelings. It will say how many different feelings we are capable of, what outside factors influence them, and how our words and actions depend on them.

However, he gets there by assuming an answer to the question whether “feelings” are something real and apart from physical existence. He hasn’t proven anything, one way or the other.

Hanson’s blog is called Overcoming Bias. It’s an apt title: Hanson has a lot of bias to overcome.

Is Science Self-Correcting?

A long-time colleague, in response to a provocative article about the sins of scientists, characterized it as “garbage” and asserted that science is self-correcting.

I should note here that my colleague abhors “extreme” views, and would cross the street to avoid a controversy. As a quondam scientist, he thinks of a challenge to the integrity of science as “extreme.” Which strikes me as an unscientific attitude.

Science is only self-correcting on a time scale of decades, and even centuries. Wrong-headed theories can persist for a very long time. And it has become worse in the past six decades.

What has changed in the past six decades? Sputnik spurred a (relatively) massive increase in government-funded research. This created a new and compelling incentive: produce research that comports with the party line. The party line isn’t necessarily the line of the party then in power, but the line favored by the bureaucrats in charge of doling out money.

On top of that, politically incorrect research is generally frowned upon. And when it surfaces it is attacked en masse by academicians who are eager to prove their political correctness.

Thus it is that the mere coincidence of a rise in CO2 emissions and a rise in temperatures in the latter part of the 20th century became the basis for kludgey models which “prove” AGW — preferably of the “catastrophic” kind — while essentially ignoring eons of evidence to the contrary. Skeptics (i.e., scientists doing what scientists should do) are attacked viciously when they aren’t simply ignored. The attackers are, all too often, people who call themselves scientists.

And thus it is that research into the connection between race and intelligence has been discouraged and even suppressed at universities. This despite truckloads of evidence that there is such a connection.

Those two examples don’t represent all of science, to be sure, but they’re a sad commentary on the state of science — in some fields, at least.

There are many more examples in Politicizing Science: The Alchemy of Policy-Making, edited by Michael Gough. I haven’t read the book, but I’m familiar with most of the cases documented by the contributors. The cases are about scientists behaving badly, and about non-scientists misusing science and advocating policies that lack firm scientific backing.

Scientists have been behaved badly since the dawn of science, though — as discussed above — there are now more (or different) incentives to behave badly than there were in the past. But non-scientists (especially politicians) will behave badly regardless of and contrary to scientific knowledge. So I won’t blame science or scientists for that behavior, except to the extent that scientists are actively abetting the bad behavior of non-scientists.

Which brings me to the matter of science being self-correcting. I am an avid (perhaps rabid) anti-reificationist. So I must say here that there is no such thing as “science.” There’s only what scientists “do” and claim to know.

It’s possible, though not certain, that future scientists will correct the errors of their predecessors — whether those errors arose from honest mistakes or bias. But, in the meantime, the errors persist and are used to abet policies that have costly, harmful, and even fatal consequences for multitudes of people. And most of that damage can’t be undone.

So, in this age of weaponized science, I take no solace in the idea that the errors of its practitioners and abusers might, someday, be recognized. The errors of knowledge might be corrected, but the errors of application are (mostly) beyond remedy.

Here’s an analogy: The errors of the builders, owners, captain, and crew of RMS Titanic seem to have been corrected, in that there hasn’t been a repetition of the conditions and events that led to the ship’s sinking. But that doesn’t make up for the loss of 1,514 lives, the physical and emotional suffering of the 710 survivors, the loss of a majestic ship, the loss of much valuable property, or the grief of the families and friends of those who were lost.

In sum, the claim that science is self-correcting amounts to a fatuous excuse for the irreparable damage that is often done in the name of science.

Related reading: Nathan Cofnas, “Science Is Not Always Self-Correcting“, Foundations of Science 21(3):477-492 (2016)

RealClearPolitics’ Misleading “Poll of Polls”

For my latest analysis of trends in RCP’s polls and several others, see “Election 2016.”

REVISED AND UPDATED 10/23/16

A lot of commentators cite the “poll of polls” at RealClearPolitics.com. You know the one I mean; it looks like this:

rcp-poll_1
rcp-poll_2

The graph is followed by a long list of historical polling results, on which the graph is based. It all looks authoritative. But it’s misleading.

Take the values for September 22, 2016, which show a spread of 2.1 points in favor of Clinton. However, the values for September 22 represent polling that was done between September 8 and September 21. That’s quite a lag and it badly distorts what’s really happening in the Trump-Clinton race.

So I reconstructed the “poll of polls,” as follows:

Assigned a date to each poll that coincides with the central date of the polling period it represents.

Computed, for each poll, the spread in favor of (or against) Clinton.

Arranged the polls in chronological order, according to central date.

Averaged the spreads for polls having the same central date.

Because only one or two polls are assigned to many dates, I added a trendline to emphasize the pattern that emerges from the many polls included in RCP’s “poll of polls.” Here’s a graph of the result, for polls conducted since August 1:

clintons-lead-deficit-in-rcp-polls

That’s a much more realistic depiction.

Hillary’s Health

Originally published as “Stroke?” on 09/18/16

UPDATED 09/20/16 & 09/21/16

Not long ago I listed some potentially election-changing events. Among them: Hillary Clinton might suffer a stroke. This video of Clinton’s reaction to the bombing in NYC, this discussion of the symptoms and causes of stroke, and the medical histories of Clinton’s parents lead me to suspect that she suffered one on September 11 when she collapsed after abruptly leaving a 9/11 memorial ceremony.

Either that or she’s heavily medicated because of another medical problem that’s more serious than the pneumonia that she supposedly had or has. What medical problem might that be? There’s been a lot of speculation about Parkinson’s disease, which is another credible explanation of Clinton’s behavior.

UPDATE 09/20/16

Photo taken 09/19/16. No comment necessary:

(Source: http://www.trump-conservative.com/news/hillary-clinton-helped-up-stairs-at-temple-university-rally-low-turnout/)

UPDATE 09/21/16

Thomas Lifson wonders about Hillary’s intermittent exotropia (uncoordinated eyeball movement), which is a particular form of strabismus. It could be a symptom of Graves’ disease. But, given the severe concussion Hillary incurred four years ago, trauma-related strabisumus seems most likely:

Many things and/or events can cause a strabismus. They include genetics, inappropriate development of the “fusion center” of the brain, problems with the controlled center of the brain, injuries to muscles or nerves or other problems involving the muscles or nerves. Surprisingly, most cases of strabismus are not a result of a muscle problem, but are due to the control system — the brain.

What other health problems might have caused the fall that led to the concussion, or have resulted from the concussion? Parkinson’s disease is one possibility, of course.

I don’t expect a complete and candid answer from Hillary or her camp.

Defining the Alt-Right

Maverick Philosopher (Bill Vallicella) offers a provisional definition of the alt-right:

I am not exactly sure what ‘alt-right’ refers to, and apparently those who fly this flag don’t either, … but I get the impression that the position includes some very specific theses that differentiate it from other types of conservatism. I hope to go into this in more detail later, but for now I’ll mention the following: white tribalism, anti-semitism, rejection of classically liberal notions such as the value of toleration, rejection of the formal (as opposed to empirical) equality of persons and with it key elements in the documents of the American founding as well as in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and a rejection of the normative universality of truth and value.

I hope that Vallicella will say more. Until he does, I’ll venture a provisional assessment of hsi definition, which I offer as a libertarian conservative (a.k.a. Burkean libertarian).

White tribalism. Tribalism is an ineluctable fact of human nature. Upper-middle-class tribalism, for example, connotes certain cultural preferences (e.g., standard English, non-violent music, education as a desideratum, a strong work ethic, marriage before children, a preference for standard literary forms). It is a rare black person who shares upper-middle-class cultural preferences, so upper-middle-class tribalism is white tribalism by default. The same can be said about white tribalism in general, that is, whites generally don’t share the cultural preferences of blacks and are therefore unlikely to associate with them on social occasions that aren’t work-group related. But the same can also be said of blacks and Hispanics of all classes. Tribalism, in short, is neither here nor there when it comes to defining the alt-right.

Anti-semitism. This seems to be rampant among non-Jewish leftists, and many leftists who are of Jewish lineage. Anti-semitism, like white tribalism, is neither here nor there when it comes to defining the alt-right.

Toleration. Persons of the left seem to display a stunning lack of tolerance for people who don’t share their political preferences (e.g., abortion, socialized medicine, heavy regulation). Neither here nor there.

Formal equality of persons. I take this to mean that everyone — or every citizen — should be accorded the same legal rights. But it’s not that simple. Legal rights today include the right to bear arms and the right to an abortion. I imagine that a person of the alt-right (in addition to most traditional conservatives and some libertarians) would uphold the first and wish to deny the second. Persons of the left, the left-center, the center, and even the center-right would, to varying degrees, restrict the first and uphold the second. My point is that almost no one believes in formal equality because there are deep divisions about the rights that should be held by citizens. Neither here nor there.

Normative universality of truth and value. Moral relativism abounds across the political spectrum, as do disagreements about what constitutes truth (e.g., the extent of and danger posed by anthropogenic global warming). I doubt that a person of the alt-right is any more prone to magical thinking than a large segment of the left. Neither here nor there.

Where does that leave me? Still wondering what defines the alt-right.

The Wages of Simplistic Economics

If this Wikipedia article accurately reflects what passes for microeconomics these days, the field hasn’t advanced since I took my first micro course almost 60 years ago. And my first micro course was based on Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics, first published in 1890.

What’s wrong with micro as it’s taught today, and as it has been taught for the better part of 126 years? It’s not the principles themselves, which are eminently sensible and empirically valid: Supply curves slope upward, demand curves slope downward, competition yields lower prices, etc. What’s wrong is the heavy reliance on two-dimensional graphical representations of the key variables and their interactions; for example, how utility functions (which are gross abstractions) generate demand curves, and how cost functions generate supply curves.

The cautionary words of Marshall and his many successors about the transitory nature of such variables is no match for the vivid, and static, images imprinted in the memories of the millions of students who took introductory microeconomics as undergraduates. Most of them took no additional courses in micro, and probably just an introductory course in macroeconomics — equally misleading.

Micro, as it is taught now, seems to purvey the same fallacy as it did when Marshall’s text was au courant. The fallacy, which is embedded in the easy-to-understand-and remember graphs of supply and demand under various competitive conditions, is the apparent rigidity of those conditions. Professional economists (or some of them, at least) understand that economic conditions are fluid, especially in the absence of government regulation. But the typical student will remember the graph that depicts the dire results of a monopolistic market and take it as a writ for government intervention; for example:

Power that controls the economy should be in the hands of elected representatives of the people, not in the hands of an industrial oligarchy.

William O. Douglas
(dissent in U.S. v. Columbia Steel Co.)

Quite the opposite is true, as I argue at length in this post. Douglas, unfortunately, served on the Supreme Court from 1939 to 1975. He majored in English and economics, and presumably had more than one course in economics. But he was an undergraduate in the waning days of the anti-business, pro-regulation Progressive Era. So he probably never got past the simplistic idea of “monopoly bad, trust-busting good.”

If only the Supreme Court (and government generally) had been blessed with men like Maxwell Anderson, who wrote this:

When a government takes over a people’s economic life, it becomes absolute, and when it has become absolute, it destroys the arts, the minds, the liberties, and the meaning of the people it governs. It is not an accident that Germany, the first paternalistic state of modern Europe, was seized by an uncontrollable dictator who brought on the second world war; not an accident that Russia, adopting a centrally administered economy for humanitarian reasons, has arrived at a tyranny bloodier and more absolute than that of the Czars. And if England does not turn back soon, she will go this same way. Men who are fed by their government will soon be driven down to the status of slaves or cattle.

“The Guaranteed Life” (preface to
Knickerbocker Holiday, 1938, revised 1950)

And it’s happening here, too.

Double Amen

Paul Mirengoff of Power Line reports:

Cathy Lanier is leaving her job as police chief of Washington, D.C. to become the NFL’s head of security. . . .

On her way out, Lanier had some harsh things to say about criminal justice in D.C. “The criminal justice system in this city is broken,” Lanier told the Washington Post. Indeed, “it is beyond broken.”

Often, it’s the left that calls the criminal justice system “broken.” But Lanier was not offering a leftist critique. Instead, she found the system broken primarily because it allows repeat violent offenders back on the street time after time.

Lanier cited the case of an 18 year-old man who last week was on home detention when his GPS tracking device became inoperable. The man then went on a crime rampage that started in Maryland and ended in the District. His crimes included a robbery, a shooting, and a car theft that resulted in a crash that left a bystander critically injured.

According to Lanier, this sort of thing is “happening over and over and over again.” She added:

Where the hell is the outrage? . . . People are being victimized who shouldn’t be. You can’t police the city if the rest of the justice system is not accountable.

Actually, there’s plenty of outrage. Unfortunately, much of it is directed towards the alleged over-incarceration of young black males.

In “Amen to That,” I quoted an earlier post by Mirengoff on the same subject, namely, under-incarceration:

I’ve argued that America has an under-incarceration problem. Criminals whose records clearly show they should be in jail have, instead, been released and are on the streets committing violent crimes, including some very bloody, high-profile ones.

Here’s another example. Samuel Harviley, paroled from prison less than three months ago, is being held without bond for shooting an off-duty Chicago police officer outside his home earlier this week. In withholding bond, the local judge said that Harviley “poses an extreme danger to the rest of us out in public.”

Indeed, he does. And he did three months ago when he was released early from jail. . . .

Sentencing reform is, indeed, called for. The system should be reformed so that criminals like Harviley don’t get out of prison after serving less than their half of their sentence. As Chicago Patrol Chief Eddie Johnson says, the Harviley shooting illustrates that the criminal justice system “is broken.” He added:

Until we get real criminal justice reform, the cycle will continue. We have the laws here. We just need to make sure that these criminals are held accountable for their actions.

What a quaint notion.

None of this is news to me. See, for example, “Crime Explained” (fifth item) at this post. The bottom line:

Incarceration has a strong, statistically significant, negative effect on the violent-property crime rate. In other words, more prisoners = less crime against persons and their property.

Double amen.

[See also Paul Mirengoff’s “Our Under-Incarceration Problem, Charlotte Edition.”)

Hot Post

Thanks to Free Republic, a five-year-old post of mine attracted an inordinate number of visitors over the weekend. The post is “September 20, 2001: Hillary Clinton Signals the End of ‘Unity’.” Go and see it for yourself.

The “Shy Trump Supporter” Hypothesis

Scott Adams — the creator of Dilbert — has some thoughts about the “shy Trump supporter” hypothesis:

For starters, we can say with certainty that they exist…. People feel comfortable telling me privately, and also anonymously online, that they hide their Trump support from their spouse and coworkers. So we know they exist. We just don’t know how many.

We know that sometimes robocall surveys and online surveys show more Trump support than human-to-human polling. So that might be an indicator, but we don’t know what other variables are in play.

…I’m guessing some Shy Trump Supporters “park” their votes with Gary Johnson (polling at 9.3%) or Jill Stein (polling at 3.3%).

But I wonder if the Shy Trump supporters are mostly parked with Johnson because of gender (consciously or unconsciously), whereas Stein is more of a real protest vote against Clinton. Anecdotally, Shy Trump Supporters tell me they do park their pre-vote preferences with Johnson….

Then you also have the question of turnout. Trump is clearly generating the most enthusiasm in public appearances. I would think that translates into more new voters….

I predict that 3% of voters are Shy Trump Supporters. As polls continue to tighten, especially in battleground states, that will be enough for an electoral landslide for Trump.

Here’s my take. It’s unlikely that much of Gary Johnson’s support comes from disaffected Democrats. He’s a fiscal-conservative-small-government-is-best candidate. If there are disaffected Democrats who aren’t yet ready to push the button for Clinton — or who never will be ready — they’re in the Jill Stein camp.

Johnson’s support, which is running around 9 percent, is improbably high for a Libertarian candidate. Johnson got 1 percent of the popular vote in 2012. The only Libertarian candidate to do better was Ed Clark in 1980, with 1.1 percent.

What about “respectable” (non-segregationist) third-party upstarts like John Anderson and Ross Perot, who garnered 7 to 19 percent of the popular vote in the elections of 1980, 1992, and 1996? Well, the Libertarian Party isn’t an upstart. It’s been around since the election of 1976, and has never gained traction. Johnson just isn’t making the waves that Anderson and Perot did.

So I believe that Scott Adams is right. A lot of “shy Trump supporters” are claiming that they’ll vote for Johnson, but most of them will vote — if they do vote — for Trump. My evidence? Trump’s standing in Rasmussen’s poll is strongly (r-squared = 0.6) and negatively correlated with Johnson’s standing. As voters decide that they aren’t going to waste votes on Johnson, they’ll turn (mainly) to Trump.

Does that mean a win for Trump on election day? Not necessarily. I’ve run some numbers on the polling relationships to date. Here’s what they imply:

If Johnson’s popular-vote share slips from its current 9 percent to 3 percent on election day — which is 3 times better than his showing in 2012 — Trump would pick up 3 percentage points. On the other hand, if Stein’s support slips from its current 2 percent to 1 percent on election day — 3 times better than her showing in 2012 — Clinton would pick up 0.7 percentage point. So far, so good, for Trump.

But as the “other-undecided” vote shrinks from its present level of 7 percent to 1 percent (a bit higher than in recent elections), Clinton will pick up 5.5 percentage points while Trump picks up only 1.3 percentage point.

Adding it up, there’s a likely gain for Trump of 4+ percentage points and a likely gain for Clinton of 6+ percentage points. Adding those numbers to Rasmussen’s latest results for Trump (39 percent) and Clinton (43 percent) yields something like 43 or 44 percent for Trump and 49 or 50 percent for Clinton.

That’s consistent with the results of another method. Based on trends to date, if Trump and Clinton take 95 percent of the total popular vote (leaving 3 percent for Johnson, 1 percent for Stein, and 1 percent for “other”), Clinton will get 50 percent of the total, as against 45 percent for Trump. Clinton’s margin of 5 percent exceeds the 3-percent margin of error in Rasmussen’s polling. With 52 or 53 percent of the two-party popular vote (50 percent divided by 95 percent), Clinton would win at least 60 percent of the electoral vote. (In 2012, Obama won 62 percent of the electoral vote with 52 percent of the two-party popular vote.) So it’s looking good for Clinton.

All of this is predicated on trends over the past several months. Those trends might continue, allowing Clinton to “run out the clock.” But a major event could change everything. For example, Clinton might have a stroke, Assange might reveal truly damning e-mails, Trump might demolish Clinton in the debates, etc. Those are the “known unknowns.” It’s impossible to list the “unknown unknowns” — but they’re out there.

As I’ve said before, the only thing worse than a Trump victory would be a Clinton victory. There’s a chance that Trump would nominate constitutionalists to the Supreme Court; there’s no chance that Clinton would do so.

Social Justice vs. Liberty

The original position is a central feature of John Rawls’s social contract account of justice, “justice as fairness,” set forth in A Theory of Justice (TJ). It is designed to be a fair and impartial point of view that is to be adopted in our reasoning about fundamental principles of justice. In taking up this point of view, we are to imagine ourselves in the position of free and equal persons who jointly agree upon and commit themselves to principles of social and political justice. The main distinguishing feature of the original position is “the veil of ignorance”: to insure impartiality of judgment, the parties are deprived of all knowledge of their personal characteristics and social and historical circumstances. They do know of certain fundamental interests they all have, plus general facts about psychology, economics, biology, and other social and natural sciences. The parties in the original position are presented with a list of the main conceptions of justice drawn from the tradition of social and political philosophy, and are assigned the task of choosing from among these alternatives the conception of justice that best advances their interests in establishing conditions that enable them to effectively pursue their final ends and fundamental interests. Rawls contends that the most rational choice for the parties in the original position are two principles of justice: The first guarantees the equal basic rights and liberties needed to secure the fundamental interests of free and equal citizens and to pursue a wide range of conceptions of the good. The second principle provides fair equality of educational and employment opportunities enabling all to fairly compete for powers and positions of office; and it secures for all a guaranteed minimum of all-purpose means (including income and wealth) individuals need to pursue their interests and to maintain their self-respect as free and equal persons.

Samuel Freeman, “Original Position,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
February 27, 1999, with a substantive revision on September 9, 2014

Rawls, like many moral philosophers, presumes to judge all and sundry with his God-like mind. He uses it to fabricate abstract, ideal principles of distributive justice. Thus the real and possible world is found wanting because it fails to conform the the kind of world that’s implicit in Rawls’s principles. And thus the real and possible world must be brought into line with Rawls’s false ideal. The alignment must be performed by the state, whether or not Rawls admits it, because his principles are inconsistent with human nature and the facts of human existence.

There can’t be an original position. Human beings are already in myriad “positions,” of which they have extensive knowledge. And a large fraction of human beings wouldn’t willingly act as if they were “deprived of all knowledge of their personal characteristics and social and historical circumstances.” Why? because they wouldn’t deem it in their interest. The original position and the veil of ignorance are therefore nothing but contrivances aimed at justifying Rawls’s preferred social, political, and economic arrangements.

Further, there isn’t — and never will be — agreement as to “general facts about psychology, economics, biology, and other social and natural sciences.” For example, many of the related entries in this blog are representative of deep divisions between respectable schools of thought about such subjects as psychology, economics, evolution (as it applies to race and “natural rights”), criminology, etc. Rawls writes blithely of “general facts” because he assumes that they point to the kind of world that he envisions.

Similarly, there’s Rawls’s “list of the main conceptions of justice drawn from the tradition of social and political philosophy.” I doubt that Rawls is thinking of the conception that there is, or ought to be, an absolute rejection of any kind of social-welfare function wherein A’s gain is “acceptable” if it (somehow and by some impracticable measure) offsets B’s loss. But that position is implicit in the idea that there ought to be “a guaranteed minimum of all-purpose means (including income and wealth) individuals need to pursue their interests and to maintain their self-respect as free and equal persons.” This is nothing but cover for redistribution. Who decides how much of it is enough? Rawls? The social engineers who buy into Rawls’s conception of justice? Well, of course. But what justifies their stance? Their only real recourse is to impose their views by force, which reveals Rawls’s philosophical rationalization for what is, necessarily, a state-enforced redistributive scheme.

And who says that a person who accepts state-enforced handouts (the fruit of theft) will thereby maintain his self-respect and is a free and equal person. In fact, many recipients of state-imposed handouts are lacking in self-respect; they are not free because as wards of the state they subject themselves to its dictates; and they are equal only in an irrelevant, rhetorical sense, not in the sense that they are the equal of other persons in ability, effort, or moral character.

Rawlsian equality is an empty concept, as is the veil of ignorance. The latter is a variant of Kant’s categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” The categorical imperative is a vacuous bit of philosophical rhetoric that doesn’t get around reality: Human beings often act as if there were a “law” for everyone else, but not for themselves.

The “veil of ignorance,” according to Wikipedia (as of July 2010) requires you to

imagine that societal roles were completely re-fashioned and redistributed, and that from behind your veil of ignorance you do not know what role you will be reassigned. Only then can you truly consider the morality of an issue.

This is just another way of pretending to omniscience. Try as you might to imagine your “self” away, you can’t do it. Your position about a moral issue is your position, not that of someone else. Rawls’s position is Rawls’s position, and that of persons who like the redistributive implications of his position. But who are Rawls and his ilk to set themselves up as neutral, omniscient judges of humanity’s moral, social, and economic arrangements? Who died and made them Gods?

In the end, justice comes down to the norms by which a people abide: They can be voluntarily evolved and enforced socially, or in part by the state (e.g., imprisonment and execution). They can devised by clever theorists (e.g., Rawls) and others with an agenda (e.g., redistribution of income and wealth, abolition of alcohol, defense of slavery), and then imposed by the state.

There is a neglected alternative, which Michael Oakeshott describes in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays:

Government…as the conservative…understands it, does not begin with a vision of another, different and better world, but with the observation of the self-government practised even by men of passion in the conduct of their enterprises; it begins in the informal adjustments of interests to one another which are designed to release those who are apt to collide from the mutual frustration of a collision. Sometimes these adjustments are no more than agreements between two parties to keep out of each other’s way; sometimes they are of wider application and more durable character, such as the International Rules for for the prevention of collisions at sea. In short, the intimations of government are to be found in ritual, not in religion or philosophy; in the enjoyment of orderly and peaceable behaviour, not in the search for truth or perfection….

To govern, then, as the conservative understands it, is to provide a vinculum juris for those manners of conduct which, in the circumstances, are least likely to result in a frustrating collision of interests; to provide redress and means of compensation for those who suffer from others behaving in a contrary manners; sometimes to provide punishment for those who pursue their own interests regardless of the rules; and, of course, to provide a sufficient force to maintain the authority of an arbiter of this kind. Thus, governing is recognized as a specific and limited activity; not the management of an enterprise, but the rule of those engaged in a great diversity of self-chosen enterprises. It is not concerned with concrete persons, but with activities; and with activities only in respect of their propensity to collide with one another. It is not concerned with moral right and wrong, it is not designed to make men good or even better; it is not indispensable on account of ‘the natural depravity of mankind’ but merely because of their current disposition to be extravagant; its business is to keep its subjects at peace with one another in the activities in which they have chosen to seek their happiness. And if there is any general idea entailed in this view, it is, perhaps, that a government which does not sustain the loyalty of its subjects is worthless; and that while one which (in the old puritan phrase) ‘commands the truth’ is incapable of doing so (because some of its subjects will believe its ‘truth’ to be in error), one which is indifferent to ‘truth’ and ‘error’ alike, and merely pursues peace, presents no obstacle to the necessary loyalty.

…[A]s the conservative understands it, modification of the rules should always reflect, and never impose, a change in the activities and beliefs of those who are subject to them, and should never on any occasion be so great as to destroy the ensemble. Consequently, the conservative will have nothing to do with innovations designed to meet merely hypothetical situations; he will prefer to enforce a rule he has got rather than invent a new one; he will think it appropriate to delay a modification of the rules until it is clear that the change of circumstances it is designed to reflect has come to stay for a while; he will be suspicious of proposals for change in excess of what the situation calls for, of rulers who demand extra-ordinary powers in order to make great changes and whose utterances re tied to generalities like ‘the public good’ or social justice’, and of Saviours of Society who buckle on armour and seek dragons to slay; he will think it proper to consider the occasion of the innovation with care; in short, he will be disposed to regard politics as an activity in which a valuable set of tools is renovated from time to time and kept in trim rather than as an opportunity for perpetual re-equipment.

Such was the wisdom of the much-violated and mutilated Constitution of the United States. Its promise of liberty in the real world has been dashed by the Saviours of Society — idealists like Rawls, opportunists like FDR and LBJ, and criminals like the Clintons.

* * *

AGW in Austin? (II)

I said this in “AGW in Austin?“:

There’s a rise in temperatures [in Austin] between the 1850s and the early 1890s, consistent with the gradual warming that followed the Little Ice Age. The gap between the early 1890s and mid-19naughts seems to have been marked by lower temperatures. It’s possible to find several mini-trends between the mid-19naughts and 1977, but the most obvious “trend” is a flat line for the entire period….

Following the sudden jump between 1977 and 1980, the “trend” remains almost flat through 1997, albeit at a slightly higher level….

The sharpest upward trend really began after the very strong (and naturally warming) El Niño of 1997-1998….

Oh, wait! It turns out that Austin’s sort-of hot-spell from 1998 to the present coincides with the “pause” in global warming….

The rapid increase in Austin’s population since 2000 probably has caused an acceleration of the urban heat-island (UHI) effect. This is known to inflate city temperatures above those in the surrounding countryside by several degrees.

What about drought? In Austin, the drought of recent years is far less severe than the drought of the 1950s, but temperatures have risen more in recent years than they did in the 1950s….

Why? Because Austin’s population is now six times greater than it was in the 1950s. The UHI effect has magnified the drought effect.

Conclusion: Austin’s recent hot weather has nothing to do with AGW.

Now, I’ll quantify the relationship between temperature, precipitation, and population. Here are a few notes about the analysis:

I have annual population estimates for Austin from 1960 to the present. However, to tilt the scale in favor of AGW, I used values for 1968-2015, because the average temperature in 1968 was the lowest recorded since 1924.

I reduced the official population figures for 1998-2015 to reflect a major annexation in 1998 that significantly increased Austin’s population. The statistical effect of that adjustment is to reduce the apparent effect of population on temperature — thus further tilting the scale in favor of AGW.

The official National Weather Service station moved from Mueller Airport (near I-35) to Camp Mabry (near Texas Loop 1) in 1999. I ran the regression for 1968-2015 with a dummy variable for location, but that variable is statistically insignificant.

Here’s the regression equation for 1968-2015:

T = -0.049R + 5.57E-06P + 67.8

Where,

T = average annual temperature (degrees Fahrenheit)

R = annual precipitation (inches)

P = mid-year population (adjusted, as discussed above)

The r-squared of the equation is 0.538, which is considerably better than the r-squared for a simple time trend (see the first graph below). Also, the standard error is 1.01 degrees; F = 2.96E-08; and the p-values on the variables and intercept are highly significant at 0.00313, 2.19E-08, and 7.34E-55, respectively.

Here’s a graph of actual vs. predicted temperatures:

Actual vs predicted average annual temperatures in Austin

The residuals are randomly distributed with respect to time and the estimated values of T, so there’s no question (in my mind) about having omitted a significant variable:

Average annual temperatures_residuals vs. year

Average annual temperaturs_residuals vs. estimates of T

Austin’s average annual temperature rose by 3.6 degrees F between 1968 and 2015, that is, from 66.2 degrees to 69.8 degrees. According to the regression equation, the rise in Austin’s population from 234,000 in 1968 to 853,000 (adjusted) in 2015 accounts for essentially all of the increase — 3.5 degrees of it, to be precise. That’s well within the range of urban heat-island effects for big cities, and it’s obvious that Austin became a big city between 1968 and 2015. It also agrees with the estimated effect of Austin’s population increase, as derived from the equation for North American cities in T.R. Oke’s “City Size and the Urban Heat Island.” The equation (simplified for ease of reproduction) is

T’ = 2.96 log P – 6.41

Where,

T’ = change in temperature, degrees C

P = population, holding area constant

The author reports r-squared = 0.92 and SE = 0.7 degrees C (1.26 degrees F).

The estimated UHI effect of Austin’s population growth from 1968 to 2015 is 2.99 degrees F. Given the standard error of the estimate, the estimate of 2.99 degrees isn’t significantly different from my estimate of 3.5 degrees or from the actual increase of 3.6 degrees.

I therefore dismiss the possibility that population is a proxy for the effects of CO2 emissions, which — if they significantly affect temperature (a big “if”) — do so because of their prevalence in the atmosphere, not because of their concentration in particular areas. And Austin’s hottest years occurred during the “pause” in global warming after 1998. There was no “pause” in Austin because its population continued to grow rapidly; thus:

12-month average temperatures in Austin_1903-2016

Bottom line: Austin’s temperature can be accounted for by precipitation and population. AGW will have to find another place in which to work its evil magic.

* * *

Related reading:
U.S. climate page at WUWT
Articles about UHI at WUWT
David Evans, “There Is No Evidence,” Science Speak, June 16, 2009
Roy W. Spencer, “Global Urban Heat Island Effect Study – An Update,” WUWT, March 10, 2010
David M.W. Evans, “The Skeptic’s Case,” Science Speak, August 16, 2012
Anthony Watts, “UHI – Worse Than We Thought?,” WUWT, August 20, 2014
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, “The Great Pause Lengthens Again,” WUWT, January 3, 2015
Anthony Watts, “Two New Papers Suggest Solar Activity Is a ‘Climate Pacemaker‘,” WUWT, January 9, 2015
John Hinderaker, “Was 2014 Really the Warmest Year Ever?,” PowerLine, January 16, 2015
Roy W. Spencer, John R. Christy, and William D. Braswell, “Version 6.0 of the UAH Temperature Dataset Released: New LT Trend = +0.11 C/decade,” DrRoySpencer.com, April 28, 2015
Bob Tisdale, “New UAH Lower Troposphere Temperature Data Show No Global Warming for More Than 18 Years,” WUWT, April 29, 2015
Patrick J. Michaels and Charles C. Knappenberger, “You Ought to Have a Look: Science Round Up—Less Warming, Little Ice Melt, Lack of Imagination,” Cato at Liberty, May 1, 2015
Mike Brakey, “151 Degrees Of Fudging…Energy Physicist Unveils NOAA’s “Massive Rewrite” Of Maine Climate History,” NoTricksZone, May 2, 2015 (see also David Archibald, “A Prediction Coming True?,” WUWT, May 4, 2015)
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, “El Ni ñ o Has Not Yet Paused the Pause,” WUWT, May 4, 2015
Anthony J. Sadar and JoAnn Truchan, “Saul Alinsky, Climate Scientist,” American Thinker, May 4, 2015
Clyde Spencer, “Anthropogenic Global Warming and Its Causes,” WUWT, May 5, 2015
Roy W. Spencer, “Nearly 3,500 Days since Major Hurricane Strike … Despite Record CO2,” DrRoySpencer.com, May 8, 2015

Related posts:
AGW: The Death Knell (with many links to related readings and earlier posts)
Not-So-Random Thoughts (XIV) (second item)
AGW in Austin?
Understanding Probability: Pascal’s Wager and Catastrophic Global Warming
The Precautionary Principle and Pascal’s Wager

Not-So-Random Thoughts (XVII)

Links to the other posts in this occasional series may be found at “Favorite Posts,” just below the list of topics.

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Victor Davis Hanson offers “The More Things Change, the More They Actually Don’t.” It echoes what I say in “The Fallacy of Human Progress.” Hanson opens with this:

In today’s technically sophisticated and globally connected world, we assume life has been completely reinvented. In truth, it has not changed all that much.

And he proceeds to illustrate his point (and mine).

* * *

Dr. James Thompson, and English psychologist, often blogs about intelligence. Here are some links from last year that I’ve been hoarding:

“Intelligence: All That Matters” (a review of a book by Stuart Ritchie)

“GCSE Genes” (commentary about research showing the strong relationship between genes and academic achievement)

“GWAS Hits and Country IQ” (commentary about preliminary research into the alleles related to intelligence)

Also, from the International Journal of Epidemiology, comes “The Association between Intelligence and Lifespan Is Mostly Genetic.”

All of this is by way of reminding you of my many posts about intelligence, which are sprinkled throughout this list and this one.

* * *

How bad is it? This bad:

Thomas Lifson, “Mark Levin’s Plunder and Deceit“

Arthur Milikh, “Alexis de Tocqueville Predicted the Tyranny of the Majority in Our Modern World“

Steve McCann, “Obama and Neo-fascist America“

Related reading: “Fascism, Pots, and Kettles,” by me, of course.

Adam Freedman’s book, A Less than Perfect Union: The Case for States’ Rights. States’ rights can be perfected by secession, and I make the legal case for it in “A Resolution of Secession.”

* * *

In a different vein, there’s Francis Menton’s series about anthropogenic global warming. The latest installment is “The Greatest Scientific Fraud of All Time — Part VIII.” For my take on the subject, start with “AGW in Austin?” and check out the readings and posts listed at the bottom.

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