Category: Economics: Principles and Issues

Education as Conspicuous Consumption

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution asks “Is education good for growth?” He answers himself by quoting from an analysis by Phil Mullan at Spiked:

Challenging the conventional view, there is actually a striking global correspondence between the world economic slowdown since 1973 and ever-increasing levels of educational spending. Comparisons between countries also confound the idea that more education translates into more growth. For example, South Korea is often given as an example of a country that made education a priority since the 1960s and saw significant economic growth. But as Professor Alison Wolf from King’s College London points out, Egypt has also prioritised investing in education, but its growth record has been poor (4). Between 1970 and 1998 Egypt’s primary enrolment rates grew to more than 90 per cent, secondary schooling levels went from 32 per cent to 75 per cent, and university education doubled – yet over the same period Egypt moved from being the world’s forty-seventh poorest country to being the forty-eighth.

A retort might be that education isn’t the sole determinant of growth – other factors may offset its positive economic role – but it remains a necessary one. But this argument doesn’t stand up either. The rapid growth of Hong Kong, another of the East Asian tigers, wasn’t accompanied by substantial investment in education. Its expansion of secondary and university education came later, as more prosperous Hong Kong parents used some of their newfound wealth to give their children a better education than they had had.

A study for the World Bank came to similar conclusions….

As Cowen says, “The consumption component of education is commonly underrated. Rich countries spend more on education for the same reason that they consume more leisure.”

There you have it. If you work in the “white collar” world, think about how many of your colleagues have pursued advanced degrees because those degrees carry prestige and make them more promotable — not because they have acquired more skills but simply because they have acquired a piece of paper from a university. Now think about how much more productive those colleagues have become because they acquired their advanced degrees. Oh, you’re still waiting to see the results? Fancy that!

The Rationality Fallacy

MSNBC runs a piece by Jerry Adler of Newsweek International headlined “Mind Reading”. Adler is quick to repeat a common misunderstanding about economics:

For all its intellectual power and its empirical success as a creator of wealth, free-market economics rests on a fallacy, which economists have politely agreed among themselves to overlook. This is the belief that people apply rational calculations to economic decisions, ruling their lives by economic models.

Balderdash and hogwash! Economics says that individuals try to maximize their satisfaction, as they understand it. Maximizing satisfaction isn’t always the same thing as maximizing wealth, which is apparently the measure of rationality being used in the article; viz.:

Economists have many ways of demonstrating the irrationality of their favorite experimental animal, Homo sapiens. One is the “ultimatum game,” which involves two subjects….Subject A gets 10 dollar bills. He can choose to give any number of them to subject B, who can accept or reject the offer. If [B] accepts, they split the money as A proposed; if [B] rejects A’s offer, both get nothing. As predicted by the theories of mathematician John Nash (subject of the movie “A Beautiful Mind”), A makes the most money by offering one dollar to B, keeping nine for himself, and B should accept it, because one dollar is better than none.

But if you ignore the equations and focus on how people actually behave, you see something different….People playing B who receive only one or two dollars overwhelmingly reject the offer. Economists have no better explanation than simple spite over feeling shortchanged. This becomes clear when people play the same game against a computer. They tend to accept whatever they’re offered, because why feel insulted by a machine? By the same token, most normal people playing A offer something close to an even split, averaging about $4. The only category of people who consistently play as game theory dictates, offering the minimum possible amount, are those who don’t take into account the feelings of the other player. They are autistics.

Such experiments may prove something about wealth maximization, but they prove nothing about rationality because they fail to take into account the dynamics of human interaction. Being offered only one of 10 dollars is an insult, and accepting an insult isn’t worth a dollar, to most people. When someone who is holding 10 dollars offers you only one dollar, that person is sending you a signal about your worth in his or her eyes. It’s like approaching a panhandler with a fan of five-dollar bills in your hand and plucking out one of those bills for the panhandler — who might take it, refuse it, spit in your face, or grab all the bills. If your purpose is to give the panhandler five dollars, without insulting the panhandler, you approach the panhandler with a single five-dollar bill in your hand and give that bill to the panhandler — who will accept it with thanks. (By the way, why do some people give money to panhandlers? After all, it’s not a way to maximize one’s wealth. That’s right, it’s a way to maximize one’s satisfaction. Those who give money to panhandlers feel better about themselves.)

There is simply a lot more to maximizing satisfaction than maximizing wealth. That’s why some people choose to have a lot of children, when doing so obviously reduces the amount they can save. That’s why some choose to retire early rather than stay in stressful jobs. Rationality and wealth maximization are two very different things, but a lot of laypersons and too many economists are guilty of equating them.

Regulation, Competition, Wages, and Employment

Just a quick note to remind non-economists about the effects of regulation on wages and employment. It’s been shown many times, by many economists, that economic regulation raises the costs of doing business, thereby discouraging business formation and reducing competition. The results: (1) Prices are higher because (a) costs are higher and (b) there is less competition. (2) Wages are lower because there is less demand for labor. (3) Employment is also lower because there is less demand for labor.

I Just Have to Say Something about This

Many other bloggers have commented on this, but I can’t resist adding my dime’s worth. Media left, right, and center are parroting the party line about the effects of the Bush tax cuts. As the Washington Times (of all papers) says:

Bush tax cuts seen hurting middle class

ASSOCIATED PRESS

President Bush’s tax cuts since 2001 have shifted more of the tax burden from the nation’s rich to middle-class families, according to a study released yesterday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

The tax rate declined across all income levels — but more so in the top brackets, the report said….

The tax cuts didn’t hurt the middle class (whatever that is). As the story says, the tax rate declined across all income levels. How does a lower tax rate for the middle class hurt the middle class? Oh, the middle class didn’t get as big a tax break as the so-called rich, who continue to pay the lion’s share of income taxes. It’s just not fair — to the “rich”.

Refuting Rousseau and His Progeny

I’ve been pinging on Rousseauvian philosophy in recent posts (here, here, here, and here). Rousseau is the spiritual father of socialism and communism. His modern adherents, who might disclaim socialism and communism by name, nevertheless spout the party line when they claim that we don’t deserve what we have. Their ideas hark back to Rousseau’s The Social Contract, about which Wikipedia says, in part:

According to Rousseau, by joining together through the social contract and abandoning their claims of natural right, individuals can both preserve themselves and remain free. This is because submission to the authority of the general will of the people as a whole guarantees individuals against being subordinated to the wills of others and also ensures that they obey themselves because they are, collectively, the authors of the law.

In other words, individuals will be free only if they surrender their freedom to the “collective will” — which, of course, will be determined and enforced by a smaller group of citizens, whose authority cannot be questioned by the majority.

Latter-day Rousseauvians dress it up a bit by making assertions like this:

[T]here’s no good reason to believe that a system of free-market and private property is anything close to a merit-based system. Some people work hard on worthy projects for their whole lives or take exceptional risks on society’s behalf and nevertheless remain comparatively poor; others, through being lucky or rich, get to be as rich as Croesus. Is Warren Buffet more morally deserving than the firefighters on 9/11? Of course not. He doesn’t think so, they don’t think so, we don’t think so….

Warren Buffet can speak for himself. Those who remain comparatively poor can speak for themselves. And the “we” at Crooked Timber can speak for themselves. But they cannot speak for me or the millions like me who disagree with them. They are promoting a view of the world as they would like to see it — nothing more, nothing less.

And therein lies the refutation of their worldview. There is no Rousseauvian social contract. There cannot be when millions of us reject the concept. Rousseau’s self-appointed priests and acolytes may judge us to their heart’s content, but their judgments are meaningless because we, the millions, do not accept those judgments.

The Social(ist) Contract

In two earlier posts (here and here) I tore into a blogger for his presumption that we don’t deserve what we earn. The blogger is, apparently, a proponent of Rousseau, who penned The Social Contract. Here are some tidbits about The Social Contract from Wikipedia:

Perhaps Rousseau’s most important work is The Social Contract, which outlines the basis for a legitimate political order. Published in 1762 and condemned by the Parlement of Paris when it appeared, it became one of the most influential works of abstract political thought in the Western tradition. Building on his earlier work, such as the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau claimed that the state of nature eventually degenerates into a brutish condition without law or morality, at which point the human race must adopt institutions of law or perish. In the degenerate phase of the state of nature, man is prone to be in frequent competition with his fellow men whilst at the same time becoming increasingly dependent on them. This double pressure threatens both his survival and his freedom. According to Rousseau, by joining together through the social contract and abandoning their claims of natural right, individuals can both preserve themselves and remain free. This is because submission to the authority of the general will of the people as a whole guarantees individuals against being subordinated to the wills of others and also ensures that they obey themselves because they are, collectively, the authors of the law. Whilst Rousseau argues that sovereignty should thus be in the hands of the people, he also makes a sharp distinction between sovereign and government. The government is charged with implementing and enforcing the general will and is composed of a smaller group of citizens, known as magistrates…Much of the subsequent controversy about Rousseau’s work has hinged on disagreements concerning his claims that citizens constrained to obey the general will are thereby rendered free….

Rousseau was one of the first modern writers to seriously attack the institution of private property, and therefore is often considered a forebearer of modern socialism and communism (see Karl Marx, though Marx rarely mentions Rousseau in his writings). Rousseau also questioned the assumption that the will of the majority is always correct. He argued that the goal of government should be to secure freedom, equality, and justice for all within the state, regardless of the will of the majority….[emphasis added]

In other words, the magistrates decide what’s best for the people. As I said before, “there’s a philosophy that’s fit for (dare I say it?) Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russian, and Mao’s China.” I rest my case.

Aha!

In the previous post I suggested that a certain Chris Bertram was either omniscient or arrogant, and I pointed out that his line of thinking empowers the beast of the state.

Well, it turns out that Bertram is a member of the Rousseau Association. There’s a link on the Association’s site to a biography of Rousseau. It seems that Bertram, who presumes to judge whether we deserve what we have, emulates Rousseau in his arrogance, pretensions to omniscience, and willingness to entrust all to the state:

Rousseau reacted against the artificiality and corruption of the social customs and institutions of the time. He was a keen thinker, and was equipped with the weapons of the philosophical century and with an inspiring eloquence. To these qualities were added a pronounced egotism, self-seeking, and an arrogance that led to bitter antagonism against his revolutionary views and sensitive personality, the reaction against which resulted in a growing misanthropy. Error and prejudice in the name of philosophy, according to him, had stifled reason and nature, and culture, as he found it, had corrupted morals. In Emile he presents the ideal citizen and the means of training the child for the State in accordance with nature, even to a sense of God. This “nature gospel” of education, as Goethe called it, was the inspiration, beginning with Pestalozzi, of world-wide pedagogical methods. The most admirable part in this is the creed of the vicar of Savoy, in which, in happy phrase, Rousseau shows a true, natural susceptibility to religion and to God, whose omnipotence and greatness are published anew every day. The Social Contract, on the text that all men are born free and equal, regards the State as a contract in which individuals surrender none of their natural rights, but rather agree for the protection of them. Most remarkable in this projected republic was the provision to banish aliens to the state religion and to punish dissenters with death. The Social Contract became the text-book of the French Revolution, and Rousseau’s theories as protests bore fruit in the frenzied bloody orgies of the Commune as well as in the rejuvenation of France and the history of the entire Western world.

Ah, yes, “training the child for the State in accordance with nature,” and “banish[ing] aliens to the state religion and…punish[ing] dissenters with death.” Now, there’s a philosophy that’s fit for (dare I say it?) Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russian, and Mao’s China — speaking of “frenzied bloody orgies.”

Who Decides Who’s Deserving?

I explained why we deserve what we have after being inspired to do so by Will Wilkinson’s Tech Central Station essay “Meritocracy: The Appalling Ideal?”. Now, Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber takes Wilkinson to task over a technical issue, which is whether the idea that we don’t deserve what we have can be attributed to John Rawls. Who cares? Stick to the point.

Bertram actually concedes the point that we deserve what we have when he says:

There does seem to be a psychological need for those who have profited from the system to be comforted by the idea that they deserve what they have. (Maybe some of them even do deserve what they have!)

Bertram gives away the game in the parenthetical comment. If “some of them” deserve what they have, which ones do and which ones don’t? If Bertram pretends to know the answer he is either delusional (thinks he’s God) or arrogant (thinks he knows who’s deserving and who isn’t). Or perhaps he has a formula for deciding who’s deserving and who isn’t: If you make more than, say, $200,000 a year you’re not deserving, but if you make a penny less, you’re deserving.

Mmm…as long as we’re being arbitrary, which Bertram is apparently willing to be, let’s try this definition of “deserving”: If you believe that all people aren’t deserving of what they have, then obviously you aren’t deserving of what you have. Your income will therefore be taxed at 100 percent, for redistribution to the deserving masses. Well, that’s how much sense he makes.

To quote my earlier post, here’s my take on the matter:

There are many, many, many people whose IQs are lower than mine but who have earned far more than me and who live far more lavishly than me. Do I begrudge them their earnings and lavish living? Not a bit. Not even dumb-as-doorknob Hollywood liberals whose idea of an intellectual conversation is to tell each other that Bush is a Nazi.

Unlike Chris Bertram, I don’t presume to judge whether people are deserving of what they have. That’s the difference between socialists like Bertram (well, he talks like one) and libertarians like me. And it’s an important difference, because once you let the state (who else?) decide who’s deserving and who’s not deserving, you have ceded omnipotence (if not omniscience) to the state. That’s okay as long as the state is doing things the way you’d like them to be done, but what happens when the state turns on you? Won’t you be sorry that you vested great power in the state?

Lefties like Bertram rail about things like the war on drugs, the Patriot Act, and corporate welfare, to name a few. How do they think such things came about? They didn’t happen overnight. They’re the result of a long accretion of power by the state, which began in earnest in the 1930s, thanks to the Chris Bertrams of that era.

It cuts both ways, laddie. When you loose the beast of the state, you are at its mercy, like the rest of us.

Krugman and DeLong, a Prevaricating Pair

A few days ago I called Brad DeLong for dishonestly focusing on the transition costs of privatizing Social Security. Now, DeLong’s intellectual peer, Paul Krugman, has done the same thing:

Social Security is, basically, a system in which each generation pays for the previous generation’s retirement. If the payroll taxes of younger workers are diverted into private accounts, there will be a gaping financial hole: who will pay benefits to older Americans, who have spent their working lives paying into the current system? Unless you have a way to fill that multitrillion-dollar hole, privatization is an empty slogan, not a real proposal.

Krugman conveniently ignores the same fact that DeLong ignores. I must, therefore, repeat what I said about DeLong:

[T]he cost of not privatizing Social Security will far exceed the transition costs. If Social Security isn’t privatized, benefits will be cut and/or payroll taxes will rise — and it will be forever, not just during a transition period….

Does Krugman not know that the transition costs argument is phony — a diversionary tactic to scare people away from privatization — or does he know this all too well?

In other words, is Krugman an idiot or a liar? Well, Krugman is a Ph.D. economist, so he’s probably not an idiot (though I’ve known some Ph.D. economists who came close). I must conclude that he’s a liar.

Interesting but Not Surprising

Kevin Hassett, writing at Tech Central Station, reports on Kerry’s budget proposals. The bottom line:

Even with [a] generous accounting, the Kerry spending promises add up to an extraordinary amount of money. Our best estimate is that Kerry’s proposals will add up to between $2 trillion and $2.1 trillion over the next ten years. Since the revenue from his tax proposals relative to the current baseline is actually negative, this implies that the Kerry proposal would increase the deficit by perhaps as much as $2.5 trillion over the next ten years.

It’s not the greater deficit that matters as much as the greater spending. The real cost of government is measured by the resources it commandeers through spending.

Why We Deserve What We Earn

I’m lucky because I have a high IQ. I didn’t earn it, it just happened to me. So what? I had to do something with it, right? I did do something with it, but not as much as I could have because I couldn’t take the stress that’s required to be truly rich and/or politically powerful. So I kicked back a bit, made a good living, and retired to a comfortable but far from lavish existence.

There are many, many, many people whose IQs are lower than mine but who have earned far more than me and who live far more lavishly than me. Do I begrudge them their earnings and lavish living? Not a bit. Not even dumb-as-doorknob Hollywood liberals whose idea of an intellectual conversation is to tell each other that Bush is a Nazi.

By the same token, there are a lot of people whose IQs are higher than mine, and I’m willing to bet that some of them didn’t do as well financially as I did. So what? Should they have done better than me just because they have higher IQs? I don’t know where that rule is written. I’ll bet that there’s not a Democrat to be found who would subscribe to it.

Everyone deserves what they earn as long as they earn it without resorting to fraud, theft, or coercion. Members of Congress, by the way, resort to coercion when it comes to paying themselves. Yes, there’s the constitutional provision that congressional raises can’t take effect until the next session of Congress, but incumbents are almost certain of re-election, and most incumbents run for re-election. So the constitutional provision is mere window-dressing.

Back to the topic at hand. Tell me again why I am where I am because of luck. I had to do something with my genetic inheritance. I did what I wanted to do, which wasn’t as much as I might have done. Others, less “lucky” than me did more with their genetic inheritance. And others, more “lucky” than me did less with their genetic inheritance.

Well, I could go on in the same vein about looks, athletic skills, skin color, parents’ wealth, family connections, and all the rest. But I think you get the picture. “Luck” is a starting point. Where we end up depends on what we do with our “luck”.

Not so fast, you say. What about family connections? Suppose Smedley Smythe’s father, who owns General Junk Food Incorporated, makes Smedley the CEO of GJFI and pays him $1 million a year. If Smythe senior is the sole owner of the company, that’s his prerogative. The million is coming out of his hide or, if consumers are willing to pay higher prices to defray the million, out of consumers’ pockets. But no one is forcing consumers to buy things from GJFI; if its prices are too high, consumers will turn elsewhere and Smythe senior will rue his nepotism. Suppose GJFI is a publicly owned company? In the end, it amounts to the same thing; if the nepotism hurts the bottom line, its shareholders should rebel. If it doesn’t, well…

Now what about those who are born poor, who aren’t especially bright, good looking, or athletic, and who are, say, black rather than white. Do they deserve what they earn? The hard, cold answer is “yes” — if what they earn is earned without benefit of fraud, theft, or coercion. Why should I want to pay you more because of the circumstances of your birth, your IQ, your looks, your athleticism, or your skin color. What matters is what you can do for me and how much I am willing to pay for it.

But what about people who are poor because they have been unable to “rise above” their genetic inheritance and family circumstances. What about those people who are poor because they have incurred serious illnesses or have been severely injured? What about those people who didn’t save enough to support themselves in their old age? And on and on.

Those are hard questions. Such people may be helped, privately, out of compassion or duty or guilt. Such people may be helped through coercive government programs that draw on compassion, duty, guilt, and large measures of political opportunism and economic illiteracy. But the fact that they are helped in no way negates the truth that — except for criminals and Congress — we deserve what we earn.

(Inspired by Will Wilkinson’s Tech Central Station article, “Meritocracy: The Appalling Ideal?”.)

More Economic Illiteracy from a Usual Suspect

Today’s NYTimes.com has a story by Edmund L. Andrews, It’s Not Just the Jobs Lost, but the Pay in the New Ones, from which one gleans these tidbits:

The stunningly slow pace of job creation, which sank to growth of just 32,000 in July, has provided new ammunition in an intense political debate over job quality.

For months, Democrats have said that the long-delayed employment recovery was concentrated in low-wage jobs that paid far less than those that were lost. White House officials replied that the available data failed to settle the matter one way or the other….

It may or may not be true. But, so what? The market’s the market. What should we do, appoint a labor-market czar to dictate how many new jobs should be created, what they should be, and what they should pay? That would be a big help.

The Eye of the Needle

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:24)

Bush Listens to Sermon on Material Wealth. So saith AP via Yahoo! News:

By SCOTT LINDLAW, Associated Press Writer

KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine – A clergyman implored his affluent congregation, including President Bush’s family, to jettison their material possessions….

The Very Rev. Martin Luther Agnew preached Sunday to a packed Episcopal church just down the road from the Bush family’s seaside estate. Its oceanfront parking lot was filled with luxury cars….

“Gated communities,” Agnew said, “tend to keep out God’s people.” But, he said, “Our material gifts do not have to be a wall.”

“They can very well be a door. Jesus says, `Sell your possessions and give alms,'” Agnew said. “I’m convinced that what we keep owns us, and what we give away sets us free.”…

But aren’t the people who live inside gated communities also God’s people, Rev? And what happens to the poor when they get all those alms? Won’t they have trouble getting into heaven? What about putting away childish things, such as tennis and golf, eh Rev?

What Ash-heap of History?

Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution says:

I have yet to see a good argument for creating a new director of intelligence. It’s true that the intelligence agencies failed to share information. But an epi-central director of intelligence doesn’t solve that problem and may make it worse. The implicit model of the 9/11 Commission is command and control — move all the information from the roots of the tree to the top of tree and then one all-encompassing-mind will evaluate it and make the right decision. Does that model sound familiar? Sure it does, that’s the model of economic planning that is currently lying on the ash-heap of history.

Tabarrok is right in principle about centralization, but I think he’s partly wrong in saying that the centralized “model of economic planning…is currently lying on the ash-heap of history.”

Let’s take the United States, just to make it personal. It’s true that there’s no central office for economic planning and control. But there are several cabinet departments, several more so-called independent agencies, thousands of State and local agencies, and hundreds of congressional, State, and local legislative committees that together regulate a large chunk of economic activity in the United States. It’s no worse than the “all-encompassing-mind” of centralized economic planning, but neither is it any better.

Sometimes Economists Are Too Clever

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution asks “Are people becoming happier over time?” His answer seems to be “yes” — but he can’t stop there:

Happiness research can be used to account for behavioral failures to maximize utility. Most alcoholics are not happy by traditional standards yet they drink of their own volition. So we might use happiness research to suggest a higher tax on alcohol than on vaccines for children.

We don’t need happiness research to know that alcoholics have an addiction that leads them to engage in self-destructive behavior. Anyway, is Cowen suggesting that we “exploit” alcoholics by raising taxes on alcohol, just as we “exploit” smokers by raising taxes on cigarettes? Why be coy about it? Why don’t we simply round up all alcoholics and smokers and throw them in sanitariums? If you’re going to be a social engineer, just be one and don’t try to conceal it with economic gobbledygook.

Material Persons

Daniel Akst sees through those who express guilt about material progress:

Heck, Thoreau could never have spent all that time at Walden if his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson hadn’t bought the land. It’s fitting that getting and spending -— by somebody —- gave us our most famous anti-materialist work of literature. Getting and spending by everyone else continues to make the intellectual life possible, which is why universities are named for the likes of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Stanford, and Duke. Every church has a collection plate, after all, even if the priests like to bite the hands that feed them.

Fear of the Corporation

Recently I had an exchange of views with someone who seemed to fear large, multi-national corporations more than government. John Kenneth Galbraith seems to suffer the same fear, according to this review of his latest book, The Economics of Innocent Fraud. The reviewer, Daniel Ben-Ami, recaps Galbraith’s fear:

For Galbraith, the all-powerful role of companies defines contemporary society. As he argues in his latest work: “Central to my argument here is the dominant role in the modern economic society of the corporation and of the passage of power in that entity from owners, the stockholders, now more graciously called investors, to the management. Such is the dynamic of corporate life. Management must prevail.” (2) He rejects the view that consumers are sovereign. Instead he says it is producers, in the guise of corporate management, who truly control the economy.

Galbraith goes on to argue that corporations dominate the state; that government institutions are forced to obey the narrow interests of companies. From here it is a small step to his argument that the recent Iraq war was fought for the military establishment and weapons industries. Younger authors are more likely to point to energy firms such as Halliburton, but the view is the same.

Ben-Ami’s response to that line of reasoning echoes my own:

But Galbraith misjudges the power of the state relative to the corporation. During his seven decades as an economist, the state has come to play an increasingly central role in economic life. State spending accounts for a high proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) in all the developed economies. The state is also highly active, through a wide variety of institutions such as central banks and financial regulators, in maintaining economic activity. In fact, today’s corporations could almost be seen as an arm of an ever-growing state.

Moreover, the extent to which large corporations have a lot of influence on laws and regulations is an argument for restricting laws and regulations to those that protect us from force and fraud. Show me a heavily regulated industry and I’ll show you an industry that’s sheltered from competition.

And FDR Didn’t Do a Thing About It

FuturePundit informs us that Long Droughts Were Common in American Great Plains Holocene Era:

A team of Duke University researchers led by Jim Clark looking at core drillings found repeated dust bowl periods during “the mid-Holocene period of 5,000 to 8,000 years ago in parts of the Dakotas, Montana and western Minnesota.”

PORTLAND, ORE. – Events like the great Dust Bowl of the 1930s, immortalized in “The Grapes of Wrath” and remembered as a transforming event for millions of Americans, were regular parts of much-earlier cycles of droughts followed by recoveries in the region, according to new studies by a multi-institutional research team led by Duke University.

Some of those prehistoric droughts in the northern Great Plains of what is now the United States also lasted longer than modern-day dry spells such as the 1930s Dust Bowl decade, according to sediment core studies by the team.

The group’s evidence implies these ancient droughts persisted for up to several decades each….

Too many people believe that whatever weather one has seen in one’s own lifetime is “normal”. When weather suddenly veers from the pattern one has become accustomed to there is a human tendency to look for some exceptional cause such as human intervention. While human intervention may well be changing the climate, the climate is not stable to begin with. We should expect large climate changes as natural.

Even the 1930s drought was not unique in modern times with the 1890s having gone through a drought period as well….

The regularity of these ancient droughts make much more recent Great Plains droughts in the 1890s and 1930s appear “unremarkable” by comparison….

…Whether or not humans reduce their emissions of green house gases, sooner or later the Earth is going to go through some large regional and eventually even global climate shifts….

However, not all the natural changes lying in our future will come to pass. At some point humans are going to start intervening to prevent some changes while perhaps in other cases humans will engineer other desired changes….

But it will happen because the parties with a stake in the outcome (e.g., agribusiness and food processing) make the necessary investments in research and technology, not because FDR’s spiritual successors impose yet another government program on taxpayers.

The Wisdom of Limited Government, Confirmed Again

Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, professors of political science at The Johns Hopkins University, have written Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public. This review by Robert Heineman tells me all I need to know. Here are some excerpts from the review:

…Somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, the authors assert, policy elites became disengaged from the political public because a mass base was no longer needed for influencing and manipulating public policy….

[T]he proliferation of special interests in the nation’s capital has provided bureaucrats with a ready substitute for public approval and support. In the authors’ words, “The era of the modern citizen, which began with a bang, is quietly slipping away”….

Group conflict within the beltway now dominates American politics, and by the mid–twentieth century political scientists viewed group activity as “the essence of American politics”…. With the rise of what Theodore J. Lowi has critically described as interest-group liberalism, government became little more than a broker for competing interests. Moreover, in terms of information and access, the increase in regulatory institutions at the national level has given group leaders located within the beltway a tremendous advantage over their colleagues in other parts of the nation. Perhaps of most concern, these “insider” groups themselves now discourage their members’ active political involvement….

The proliferation of groups that function without public support has been encouraged by major changes in the litigation process. By providing successful plaintiffs with a right to legal fees in many cases, Congress has encouraged attorneys to push advocacy and tort litigation, which in turn has been facilitated by judicial loosening of the requirements for standing and class action. Thus, special interests now can obtain from the courts policy decisions that previously would have required political pressure on elected officials….

Despite the acuity of the authors’ insights into the dire direction of the U.S. policy process, they seem oblivious to the possibility that big government itself is the cause of the problem….

Indeed.

In summary: The pigs keep demanding a bigger public trough at which to feed, and their “public servants” in Congress continue to comply.

This Isn’t Free-Market Capitalism in Action

From today’s NYT online (free registration required):

Bill Would Raise Franchise Value of Sports Teams

By DUFF WILSON

Owners of professional sports teams stand to gain tens of millions of dollars in the values of their franchises because of a single sentence buried deep in a sprawling piece of export-tax legislation now before Congress.

The benefit to sports franchises is contained in a small part of an enormous bill introduced originally to settle a trade dispute with the European Union. But the legislation has since become laden with add-ons for interests ranging from tobacco farmers to Oldsmobile dealers….

Another good argument for replacing the income tax with a national sales tax.