Report from a Sample Size of One

I recently put up an essay with information that may be of use to male readers over forty.

How To Lie While Telling the Truth: Part II

My previous example was an attack on religion. This time it is a defense of AGW catastrophism.

It has long been known that increasing the concentration of CO2 increases the yield of C3 plants, including most crop species. The usual estimate is that doubling CO2 concentration, roughly what is projected for the end of this century, increases yield by 30% or more. This is an inconvenient fact for people who want to argue that AGW will reduce food supplies. Clearly what they need is a scientific article to cite, proving that CO2 is actually a bad thing for crops. 

And they have one, in Nature no less: Increasing CO2 threatens human nutrition.

 The article itself is behind a pay wall, but a good deal of its content is revealed in the abstract and various admiring news stories, including this one:

A quick google found the following table of minerals for wheat:

It includes ten minerals, zinc and iron among them. The fact that the authors of the article could find two whose concentration went down, not by very much, is interpreted as a threat to human nutrition. No information on any that went up.

It's worse than that. The figures, at least according to the news story and the abstract of the article, are for concentration. Increasing CO2 increases the yield of C3 crops. If the concentration of zinc goes down by nine percent but the total crop yield goes up by more than nine percent, total yield of zinc goes up, not down.

Further, the abstract makes it clear that the effect varies from one cultivar to another—so if there really is a problem with the concentration of zinc and iron, farmers will have an incentive to switch to cultivars for which there isn't.

If, with a doubling of CO2 (the abstract does not say what concentration was used in the experiments), crop yield goes up by 30% but the concentration of two minerals goes slightly down and the yield of protein only increases by 24%, that is a "threat to human nutrition."

A striking example of propaganda disguised as science.

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[I have sent a message to the lead author of the article inviting him to respond here]

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Another paper, not behind a pay wall, by many of the same authors. It makes it explicit that "we believe the simplest approach is to model diets that are unchanged with respect to calories and composition."

Not a Conspiracy

Someone on the FaceBook Climate Change group asked a reasonable question:

I'm trying to understand this big conspiracy everyone keeps hinting at, but never explains, now lets say AGW is a complete Hoax and Obama has somehow tricked the world to help him to trick americans to pay more taxes and put solar panels on their roof, now can someone explain how this evil conspiracy works, like who wins,who profits from this con, , what is the end game...?

I thought my response might be of interest to readers here:

"Conspiracy" is too simple. There are a variety of reasons why different people wildly exaggerate the implications of AGW. They include:

Politicians in poor countries who want to use claims of harm to their countries to get rich governments to give them money.

Politicians in rich countries who want arguments for subsidizing firms run by their supporters, passing regulations that give them power, collecting taxes, and a variety of other things.

News media that want to get readers. "Global warming is going to flood New York City" is a better story than "Global warming has raised sea levels by eight inches over the past century and might raise them by another couple of feet by the end of this century."

People who want to pretend to themselves and others that they are part of the intellectual elite, know important things that others deny.

People who like imagining catastrophe. You see the same pattern on the other side of the political spectrum with survivalists, and more generally with collapse of civilization science fiction.

The combined effect has been to convert positions on global warming from a scientific dispute to an identity marker for ideology. You can see the effect reading this group--people keep wandering away from climate questions to gun control or whether Obama is good or bad or other things linked to ideology.

Once you have that linkage, there is strong pressure on either side to take more extreme positions. Believing that global warming is a problem marks you as a loyal member of the blue tribe. So believing that it is a really big problem marks you as a very loyal member, whereas suggesting that it might be a minor problem marks you as a possible traitor to tribal loyalty. Similarly on the other side. Doubting the catastrophic story is all very well--but it's a stronger signal of red tribe loyalty to claim that warming is a fraud due to doctored figures, or that you have a scientific proof that AGW is wrong, or ... .

How Can Law Be Enforced Against the Executive?

The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office concluded that the Obama administration violated a “clear and unambiguous law.”

A recent post to the Volokh Conspiracy blog argues that a 2014 prisoner swap was blatantly illegal, in violation of a statute requiring that Congress be given thirty days advance notice of such an action. What interests me about it is not whether the claim is correct but, if it is correct, what ought to be done about it. More generally, how can either statutory or Constitutional restrictions be enforced against the executive branch?

In the case of an ongoing action, the obvious answer is that opponents can ask the courts to block it. Examples would be the various suits, past and present, over Obamacare, and Obama's policy on illegal aliens. But what about an action which is already over at the point when opponents learn of it—as was apparently true of the case that the post deals with?

The usual solution to that problem, in both tort law and criminal law, is to punish the tortfeasor or criminal. But government officials are not usually held liable for obeying the orders of their superiors, which shifts the responsibility to the President. If the violation is sufficiently serious, he can be impeached—the President of Brazil is currently threatened with impeachment for spending very large amounts of money in ways alleged to have been in violation of Brazilian law. But it's hard to argue that the particular case alleged reaches the level of “treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

One problem is that the responsibility is on the President, who is effectively immune from any sanction short of impeachment. Another is that all crimes are treated as offenses against the government, prosecution is by the executive arm of government, hence crimes that the head of the executive arm approves of are unlikely to be prosecuted. That is the same issue that arises in the very different context of offenses by police.

Solutions? Either in current law or in ways one could imagine altering it?

Why am I seeing ads on this Blog?

I have never arranged for any advertisements here. But sometimes recently, when I click on a post, I get a timed ad and have to wait some seconds. I have no idea what is going on. If any of my readers observe the same thing and can figure out where the ad is coming from, please let me know.

Trudeau and Putin: Ideology vs Interest

Warmth is, on the whole, a good thing when you are cold, a bad thing when you are hot. Generalizing to nations, the countries most likely to benefit by global warming are ones close to the poles. The habitable area of Canada, for example, is a narrow strip several thousand miles long bordered by the United States on one side, snow and ice on the other. A few degrees of warming would make it substantially wider, as well as making the currently inhabited parts a little more habitable. 

Along similar lines, the countries most likely to lose by global warming are those where it is already too hot. India, for example. Which is why I was struck by a news story about the Prime Minister of Canada's plans to lecture the Prime Minister of India on the dangers of global warming.

Meanwhile, Putin has announced that he does not believe in AGW. My guess is that what that really means is that he is in favor of it. Russia is, after all, the only country in the world with a longer arctic boundary than Canada.

(Very low lying countries are also at risk from warming, but there are not many low enough to be seriously threatened by a meter of sea level rise, which is the upper bound of the current IPCC high emissions projection for 2100.)

Is the Chicago Police Department an Accessory After the Fact?

A Chicago police officer, Jason Van Dyke, has been charged with first degree murder for shooting and killing a black teenager. The killing occurred more than a year ago. If the accounts appearing in the news are correct, the reason the indictment took so long is that other officers covered up the facts of the case.

If that is true—we will know more after the trial is complete—then other officers, probably quite a lot of other officers, were accessories after the fact to murder. Under Illinois law, an accessory after the fact to a felony is liable to the same punishment as the felon.

It will be interesting to see if any of them are ever charged

Security Theater

In all the talk about whether to admit Syrian refugees, nobody I have seen has made what seems to me the most obvious argument. The U.S. hosts about sixty million tourists a year from all over the world. Does anyone seriously believe that any terrorist organization competent enough to buy or produce passports would find it difficult to get a dozen of their people in? That's about what a terrorist attack like the recent one in Paris requires.

As best I can tell, there simply is no practical way of preventing terrorists willing to die from killing Americans while doing so. Which makes the present antics of a majority of the House security theater.

Uber adds a feature ...

that converts it into the sort of jitney transit that I described in Chapter 16 of The Machinery of Freedom.

In 1973.

Barack Obama, Supervillain

My younger son is an aspiring novelist; most of what he has been writing is set in a fictional world of superheroes and supervillains. Some of the villains are likable characters, which raises the question of in what sense they are evil. When I put the question to him in the context of the central character of his first novel, The Titanium Tyrant, who is both superintelligent and honorable, his response was that he was a villain because he did not mind killing innocent people in the process of his crimes.

It occurred to me that, by that definition, there are a lot of villains. Churchill and FDR were prepared to murder very large numbers of German civilians by mass bombing campaigns designed to kill as many, not as few, as possible. Obama has taken responsibility for drone strikes which, in the process of trying to kill terrorists, have clearly killed quite a lot of innocent civilians. In theory, we all believe that all lives matter, but in practice we divide people into our ingroup and everyone else and mostly ignore costs imposed on the latter. In the modern world, that largely means the division between our fellow citizens and foreigners.

It is not limited to national governments and warfare, although that’s the clearest example. U.S. immigration restrictions impose enormous costs on people who would like to come and are not allowed to. Most of those people are much poorer than most Americans. Yet Americans who regard themselves as favoring the poor, most obviously at the moment Bernie Sanders, feel no guilt at keeping foreigners desperately poor in order to keep American poor from getting, by world standards, a little less rich.

In the year 1000, Iceland faced a conflict between pagans and Christians. Before it was resolved by peaceful arbitration, there was a brief period when the two sides declared themselves out of law with each other. Put in modern terms, they were declaring Iceland two countries located on the same territory, each viewing the other as foreigners.

The Titanium Tyrant is out of law with the rest of us, loyal to his own people. By some standards that makes him a villain—but not obviously more of a villain than a lot of the people who many of us approve of.

Why Do I Waste Time Arguing With Unreasonable People Online?

My son just put the question to me (I was commenting on Facebook at the time), and I thought some here might be interested in my answers:

1. As an excuse not to work on my current book. The chapter drafts I have just been looking at are in worse shape than I thought, which is depressing.

2. In the hope that by putting ideas out, some of them will spread, with some (small) effect on the world. Posts here probably get more readers, but comments on Facebook reach a different audience, one less likely to be familiar with the ideas.

3. In the hope of finding someone reasonable to argue with, which might result in changing his views, or mine, or both, in a desirable direction, as well as being fun. It happens very rarely, perhaps once every few months, but I'm an optimist.

4. Because arguing with unreasonable people online, and watching unreasonable people argue with each other, gives me useful, if depressing, information about what such people are like and (I hope an exaggerated) picture of how common they are. Like most people, I live mostly in a bubble, interacting with a very nonrandom set of people, and this gets me a view outside it. The same is true of reading trade chat in WoW, also depressing.

5. For the same ignoble reason that people spend time beating up on NPC's in WoW and similar games.

Some Economic Puzzles

Visiting China last year, I was struck by an interesting puzzle. In the U.S., if you are in a big building selling clothes or groceries, a department store or a supermarket, the people selling them to you are employees of the firm that owns the building. In China, you are much more likely to be in a building whose owners rent it out in small pieces to a lot of individual sellers. Instead of a supermarket, you have a large building with half a dozen butcher stalls, eight fish stalls, ...  . Instead of a department store, you have the same pattern with different stalls selling different sorts of clothing, jewelery, electronics. 

The pattern is not perfect. There are supermarkets and department stores in China and I once saw a Chinese style food market in Baltimore. But one form of retailing is the norm in China and the exception in the U.S., the other form the norm in the U.S., the exception in China.

The puzzle is why.

On my recent visit to Brazil, I came across another such puzzle. In Brazil, at least in Sao Paulo, restaurants frequently sell food not by the dish but by the kilo. You fill up your platter with whatever combination of salad, beans, meat, desert you want, they weigh it and charge you. I do not believe I have ever seen that pattern in a restaurant in the U.S. The closest I can think of is the cafeteria in my university, which sells salad by weight, most other things by individual price.

There are obvious advantages and disadvantages to that way of selling food. The puzzle is why it is common in one country, rare or non-existent in another.

That reminds me of another puzzle that struck me a very long time ago. Some of the costs that a patron imposes in a restaurant depend on what he eats, some on how long he sits. Why are there no restaurants that price the two separately—charge a lower than usual price for the food, but add an additional charge for the time you sit?

For any reader who teaches economics, I suggest that working through the logic of these three puzzles, seeing what the costs and benefits are of one form of organization over another, would be a good problem to set your students. For any graduate student looking for a thesis topic who is more interested in doing economics than proving how much mathematics he knows, one of these puzzles might be worth considering. 

The first step, of course, would be a survey of the literature to see if someone else has already offered an adequate answer. If you find one, let me know.

Good Advice From the Fourteenth Century

Ibn Battuta was a 14th century North African world traveler—I like to describe Marco Polo as his 13th century Italian imitator. He started by going on pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, got bit by the travel bug. In the course of his travels he went down both the East and West African coasts, providing our only source for those areas in that century. Hearing that Mohammed ibn Tugluq, the fabulously wealthy sultan of Delhi, was generous to foreign scholars, Ibn Battuta set off for India and ended up spending several years as the chief Maliki Qadi of Delhi. His account of his visit to China is dubious, but he probably got at least as far as somewhere in south-east Asia. Eventually he came home and wrote an account of his travels, the Rehla, which survives.

Early on, he swore never, if he could avoid it, to return by the same route he went out on. In my travels, mostly wandering around foreign cities (at the moment Sao Paulo), I have found it good advice. Walk out by one route, back by another, and you see twice as much.