If you’re a fan of electric cars, you won’t like this:
A 2012 comprehensive life-cycle analysis in Journal of Industrial Ecology shows that almost half the lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions from an electric car come from the energy used to produce the car, especially the battery. . . When an electric car rolls off the production line, it has already been responsible for 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide emission. The amount for making a conventional car: 14,000 pounds.
While electric-car owners may cruise around feeling virtuous, they still recharge using electricity overwhelmingly produced with fossil fuels. Thus, the life-cycle analysis shows that for every mile driven, the average electric car indirectly emits about six ounces of carbon-dioxide. This is still a lot better than a similar-size conventional car, which emits about 12 ounces per mile. But remember, the production of the electric car has already resulted in sizeable emissions—the equivalent of 80,000 miles of travel in the vehicle.
So unless the electric car is driven a lot, it will never get ahead environmentally. And that turns out to be a challenge. Consider the Nissan Leaf. It has only a 73-mile range per charge. Drivers attempting long road trips, as in one BBC test drive, have reported that recharging takes so long that the average speed is close to six miles per hour—a bit faster than your average jogger.
It gets worse:
To make matters worse, the batteries in electric cars fade with time, just as they do in a cellphone. Nissan estimates that after five years, the less effective batteries in a typical Leaf bring the range down to 55 miles. As the MIT Technology Review cautioned last year: “Don’t Drive Your Nissan Leaf Too Much.”
And if you replace the batteries, you get to start your carbon footprint all over. Bottom line:
If a typical electric car is driven 50,000 miles over its lifetime, the huge initial emissions from its manufacture means the car will actually have put more carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere than a similar-size gasoline-powered car driven the same number of miles. . . Even if the electric car is driven for 90,000 miles and the owner stays away from coal-powered electricity, the car will cause just 24% less carbon-dioxide emission than its gas-powered cousin.
(Emphasis mine.)
But, electric cars put a lot of money into the pockets of Obama’s cronies, so they have that going at least.
Yes, the 2008 financial meltdown was substantially caused by the Community Reinvestment Act, which:
Required banks to lend more to low-income communities.
Directed Fannie and Freddie to buy up mortgages and turn them into securities.
Directed Fannie and Freddie to buy up high-risk mortgages, thereby encouraging banks to make more high-risk loans.
The left is desperate to deny this, since the financial meltdown was their entire pretext, not just for staying in power despite an appalling economic record, but also for ruinous regulation of the financial sector. So far, with the help of their media allies, they have been largely successful at keeping the connection out of the public consciousness.
But that hasn’t kept economists from studying the subject, and a new paper shows a strong connection:
Did the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) Lead to Risky Lending?
Yes, it did. We use exogenous variation in banks’ incentives to conform to the standards of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) around regulatory exam dates to trace out the effect of the CRA on lending activity. . . We find that adherence to the act led to riskier lending by banks. . . These patterns are accentuated in CRA-eligible census tracts and are concentrated among large banks. The effects are strongest during the time period when the market for private securitization was booming.
POSTSCRIPT: Because we ought to be reminded of it every few years, after the jump are some excerpts from the anti-prophetic 1999 LA Times article that covered nearly every aspect of the CRA that caused the financial crisis without seeing any problem with any of them:
It’s literally on the first day of a typical introductory economics course that students are typically taught that price caps lead to shortages. Shortage lead to non-price rationing schemes for what supply is available, such as long lines.
Unfortunately, our politicians seem to have less than one day of economics training. Laws against “price gouging” — that is laws that forbid the market to adopt the market-clearing price dictated by supply and demand — are nothing more than price caps, and lead directly to shortages. We see this playing out once again in the wake of Hurricane Sandy:
Without “price gouging” laws, the price would rise, thereby encouraging distributors to ship more gas to the area, and also discouraging people from buying gas they don’t need. Also, it would put a stop to people waiting hours for gas.
It’s always fascinating to observe through practice the hierarchy of liberal causes. For example: when it’s convenient to them, liberals would have you believe that safety is the top priority for society (“think of the children!”). But while liberals favor safety over nearly any individual liberty, it’s at nearly the bottom when measured against other liberal priorities.
For instance, in a story headlined “Bacteria May Grow In Reusable Grocery Bags, But Don’t Fret”, NPR argued that:
Dr. Susan Fernyak, director of San Francisco’s Communicable Disease and Control Prevention division, tells Shots, “Your average healthy person is not going to get sick from the bacteria that were listed.” . . .
San Francisco banned disposable plastic shopping bags three years ago. San Francisco’s bag ban hasn’t affected the rates of E. coli infection in town, Fernyak says.
That was a strange position to take, from people who usually think that the slightest possibility of danger justifies a ban. Moreover, according to the latest research it simply isn’t true. A study at the University of Pennsylvania found that food-borne illness did spike after San Francisco enacted its ban, and that people died as a result.
Gary Taubes has an op-ed piece in the New York Times blasting the war on salt. As I’ve noted before, the anti-salt campaign is far out in front of the actual scientific evidence, and has been for decades. One key quote:
When I spent the better part of a year researching the state of the salt science back in 1998 — already a quarter century into the eat-less-salt recommendations — journal editors and public health administrators were still remarkably candid in their assessment of how flimsy the evidence was implicating salt as the cause of hypertension.
“You can say without any shadow of a doubt,” as I was told then by Drummond Rennie, an editor for The Journal of the American Medical Association, that the authorities pushing the eat-less-salt message had “made a commitment to salt education that goes way beyond the scientific facts.”
And another:
An N.I.H. administrator told me back in 1998 that to publicly question the science on salt was to play into the hands of the [food] industry. “As long as there are things in the media that say the salt controversy continues,” he said, “they win.”
I should add that the war on salt has been personally detrimental to me and my family. Some people (like me) need more salt than most, and the anti-salt warriors have sometimes made it difficult to obtain.
POSTSCRIPT: The anti-salt campaigners were happy to tell us that the science was settled, when it wasn’t remotely settled. That’s something to keep in mind when other campaigners tell us the same.
The New York Times has an opinion piece decrying the efforts of social scientists to employ the scientific method:
Many social scientists contend that science has a method, and if you want to be scientific, you should adopt it. The method requires you to devise a theoretical model, deduce a testable hypothesis from the model and then test the hypothesis against the world. If the hypothesis is confirmed, the theoretical model holds; if the hypothesis is not confirmed, the theoretical model does not hold. If your discipline does not operate by this method — known as hypothetico-deductivism — then in the minds of many, it’s not scientific.
Such reasoning dominates the social sciences today. . . But we believe that this way of thinking is badly mistaken and detrimental to social research. For the sake of everyone who stands to gain from a better knowledge of politics, economics and society, the social sciences need to overcome their inferiority complex, reject hypothetico-deductivism and embrace the fact that they are mature disciplines with no need to emulate other sciences.
There’s no question that the social sciences are handicapped by the difficulty in doing controlled experiments. But does that mean they shouldn’t even try? They offer no real argument in support of their position.
In fact, the argument that they try to make exposes a complete misunderstanding of the scientific method. They argue that the scientific method is unnecessary because of various examples in which the sciences made do with mathematical proofs in place of experiments.
Okay, great! But understand that mathematical proof is better than experimental evidence, not worse. Proof offers us certainty, but it’s only available to certain domains. Unlike mathematics, logic, and much of computer science, the physical sciences have to settle for experimental evidence, because they cannot get the certainty that comes from mathematical proof.
I’ll happily allow that social scientists, or any scientists, can set aside experimental testing of their hypotheses in favor of something better. But the authors aren’t arguing for that. Instead they make the unjustifiable leap to the notion that because experimental testing is not always necessary, we can settle for something worse. That’s nonsense.
ALTHOUGH the myth that mobile phones cause cancer has been laid to rest, an implacable minority remains convinced of the connection. Their fears have been aggravated of late by bureaucratic bickering at the World Health Organisation (WHO). Let it be said, once and for all, that no matter how powerful a radio transmitter—whether an over-the-horizon radar station or a microwave tower—radio waves simply cannot produce ionising radiation. The only possible effect they can have on human tissue is to raise its temperature slightly.
In the real world, the only sources of ionising radiation are gamma rays, X-rays and extreme ultra-violet waves, at the far (ie, high-frequency) end of the electromagnetic spectrum—along with fission fragments and other particles from within an atom, plus cosmic rays from outer space. These are the sole sources energetic enough to knock electrons out of atoms—breaking chemical bonds and producing dangerous free radicals in the process. It is highly reactive free radicals that can damage a person’s DNA and cause mutation, radiation sickness, cancer and even death.
By contrast, at their much lower frequencies, radio waves do not pack anywhere near enough energy to produce free radicals. The “quanta” of energy (ie, photons) carried by radio waves in, say, the UHF band used by television, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cordless phones, mobile phones, microwave ovens, garage remotes and many other household devices have energy levels of a few millionths of an electron-volt. That is less than a millionth of the energy needed to cause ionisation.
Unfortunately:
All of which leaves doctors more than a little puzzled as to why the WHO should recently have reversed itself on the question of mobile phones. In May the organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) voted to classify radio-frequency electromagnetic fields (ie, radio waves) as “a possible carcinogenic to humans” based on a perceived risk of glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer. . .
The Group 2B classification the IARC has now adopted for mobile phones designates them as “possible”, rather than “probable” (Group 2A) or “proven” (Group 1) carcinogens. This rates the health hazard posed by mobile phones as similar to the chance of getting cancer from coffee, petrol fumes and false teeth.
The WHO’s unfortunate waffling gives alarmists somewhere to hang their hat. As a result, we get misleading stories such as one in the January 2012 Consumer Reports which conveyed the impression of a risk by failing to observe that the “possible” designation was the lowest risk level, the same as coffee, and by allocating much more space to equivocal studies that failed to disprove a risk than to definitive studies that did disprove a risk.
As I’ve written before, the main problem with global warming alarmism isn’t the reconstructions of the Earth’s past climate (which I haven’t the scientific expertise to debate), but the predictions for the future. The basis of the scientific method is to generate testable hypotheses, and then test them. The models that climate scientists use to predict long-term changes to climate simply cannot be tested over the short-term. In regards to long-term changes, they are simply unscientific.
Worse, when those same models are used to make short-term predictions, which can be tested, they tend not to come true. Two cases in point:
First, a new report from the British Met Office and the (infamous) Hadley CRU shows that the Earth has not warmed since 1997. Now, any particular year is mostly noise, but this is 15 years without any trend:
Second, a new study from the University of Alabama shows that snowfall in the Sierra Nevada hasn’t changed for 130 years:
The analysis of snowfall data in the Sierra going back to 1878 found no more or less snow overall – a result that, on the surface, appears to contradict aspects of recent climate change models.
Researchers have found that electric cars can be worse for the environment than conventional cars. Specifically, the study found that, in China, the pollution resulting from generating electricity for electric cars is worse than the pollution generated by gasoline-powered cars.
The trade-off is likely to be different in America, where we have cleaner electric generation, but it’s a reminder that environmental trade-offs can be much more subtle than the green industry would have us believe.
Researchers have made the biggest success yet in stem cell therapy. And, like all actual progress in stem cell therapies (as opposed to political hype), it uses adult stem cells.
A study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research looks at how various countries tried to deal with budget deficits. It finds that those countries that focused on spending cuts were successful, while those that attempted a “balanced” approach of tax hikes and spending cuts were not.
This is very timely, since Democrats are pushing the latter strategy. (Of course, even that would be an improvement over the usual Democratic strategy, which is to promise a “balanced” approach, but never deliver the spending cuts.)
Anthony Watts says that the greenhouse-effect lab experiment in Al Gore’s “Climate Reality Project” was faked. He charges that the video was bogus, and that the experiment could not be done the way the narrator (Bill Nye) claimed that it was. I find his evidence very compelling, especially for the former charge.
There’s no question that the greenhouse effect exists; Gore is on completely solid scientific footing for that at least. So why fake the experiment? I think the answer is pure showmanship. He wanted a very simple experiment to illustrate to the viewer how elementary the greenhouse effect is. Unfortunately, a legitimate demonstration of the greenhouse effect would be too complicated to serve the purpose. Rather than settle for reality, Gore preferred to fake the experiment.
POSTSCRIPT: Just to emphasize: Although this is a telling indication of Al Gore’s lack of honesty, it has no bearing on the global-warming debate. There’s no doubt that the greenhouse effect exists. We can calculate the direct effect of rising CO2 levels on the temperature of the Earth. That direct effect is modest. The real question is what happens next: Do the secondary effects amplify or counter the direct effects, and to what degree? It’s impossible to run an experiment, so no one knows.
The Economist had an article (subscription required) earlier this month about Pakistan’s disastrous electricity shortage. In the middle of the article was a little hint as to why the shortage exists:
Insufficient capacity is not even the biggest problem. That is a $6 billion chain of debt, ultimately owed by the state, that is debilitating the entire energy sector. Power plants are owed money by the national grid and the grid in turn cannot get consumers (including the Pakistani government) to pay for the electricity they use. This week, the financial crunch meant that oil supply to the two biggest private power plants was halted, because the state-owned oil company had no cash to procure fuel.
(Emphasis mine.)
Suppliers aren’t being paid and a shortage results? Imagine that!
Stories like this remind us to maintain a healthy skepticism about anything we hear from the IPCC:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up by the UN in 1988 to advise governments on the science behind global warming, issued a report [in May] suggesting renewable sources could provide 77 per cent of the world’s energy supply by 2050. But in supporting documents released this week, it emerged that the claim was based on a real-terms decline in worldwide energy consumption over the next 40 years – and that the lead author of the section concerned was an employee of Greenpeace. Not only that, but the modelling scenario used was the most optimistic of the 164 investigated by the IPCC.
POSTSCRIPT: Since I haven’t had occasion to mention it for awhile, my position continues to be that the science on historical climate change seems to be reasonably solid (with a few majorexceptions), but the science that purports to predict the future is little better than guesswork.
A startling find at one of the world’s foremost laboratories that a subatomic particle seemed to move faster than the speed of light has scientists around the world rethinking Albert Einstein and one of the foundations of physics.
Now they are planning to put the finding to further high-speed tests to see if a revolutionary shift in explaining the workings of the universe is needed – or if the European scientists made a mistake. . .
CERN reported that a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant.
President Obama’s new appointment for chairman of the Council of Economic advisors is Alan Krueger, known for an infamous study that argued that minimum wage increases increase employment in fast-food restaurants. The paper contradicted the one of the two basic tenets of economics, the Law of Demand, which says that as the price of a commodity (labor in this case) increases, people buy less.
Liberals loved the study, but given its astonishing and absurd finding, they should not have been surprised when it turned out to be junk. Its data were essentially random. The study that debunked it (which is quite accessible to the layman), concluded:
The data base used in the New Jersey fast food study is so bad that no credible conclusions can be drawn from the report.
and:
These serious mistakes and omissions have resulted in a study doomed to become a textbook example of how not to collect data.
The Law of Demand and the Law of Supply are the two basic tenets of economic theory. They are literally taught on the first day in any introductory economics course. Appointing a demand-curve denier as the president’s chief economist is comparable to appointing a flat-earther to head the US Geological Survey.
Economist Robert Barro has written yet another take-down of Keynesian economics for the Wall Stret Journal. In his latest, he observes that the theories being employed by the Obama administration are unencumbered by empirical validation.
A new psychology study finds (subscription required) that viewing the American flag pushes people to greater affinity for the Republican party:
The conclusion, which Dr Ferguson reports in a paper in Psychological Science, was that participants’ voting intentions were, indeed, affected by seeing the flag. The possible average scores on presidential voting intentions ranged from -10 (definitely voting for Mr Obama, definitely not voting for Mr McCain) to +10 (definitely voting for Mr McCain, definitely not voting for Mr Obama). The actual scores of those subsequently assigned to the two groups did not differ significantly the first time round. The second time, though, those who had been shown the flag were more weakly pro-Obama and more strongly pro-McCain, with a score of -3.0, than those who had not been shown the flag, who averaged -4.8.
For the political-party-warmth ratings, the potential score range was between -500 (extreme warmth towards Democrats, extreme cold towards Republicans) and +500 (extreme warmth towards Republicans, extreme cold towards Democrats). The team found that flag-viewers were cooler towards Democrats and warmer towards Republicans, with average scores of -90, while those who never saw a flag had scores that averaged -173.
The Economist also reports that earlier research on the Israeli flag suggested that seeing the flag might push people to more moderate positions, so one theory is that Republicans are subconsciously seen as more moderate than Democrats. As appealing as I might find that theory, I don’t think it’s right. Tim Groseclose’s work found that Barack Obama is only slightly more liberal (37.3 left of center) than John McCain is conservative (34.6 right of center), so voting for McCain is not a dramatically more centrist position than Obama.
A new paper (well, new a month ago) finds the more scientifically literate a person is, the less likely he is to believe that global warming poses a catastrophic threat.
Now, as much as global warming skeptics would like to draw the conclusion that the scientific evidence opposes global warming, that’s not what the study finds. It finds that in regard to the issue of global warming, scientific literacy tends to reinforce a person’s pre-existing biases: those predisposed to skepticism become more skeptical, and vice versa. The effect is stronger for the skeptics, which accounts for the overall finding.
What is interesting is that the effect does not appear to apply in general. In regard to nuclear power, the more scientifically literate a person is, the less likely he is to believe that nuclear power poses a safety risk, regardless of the person’s predispositions.
The paper notes that, in regard to nuclear power, the effect once again is stronger for those predisposed to think nuclear power is safe. Consequently, greater scientific literacy leads to greater polarization, just as with global warming. This leads the authors to the conclusion of their paper, which I won’t go into.
But curiously — unless I missed it when I skimmed the paper — they didn’t discuss, or even conjecture, why the effect was different for global warming and for nuclear power.
My guess is there are two effects being mixed together. One effect is the degree to which the scientific evidence points in one clear direction and people find that evidence convincing, and the second effect is the polarization effect that the paper emphasizes. The paper shows clearly that the first effect is not the whole story. But it seems likely to me that in nuclear power, the scientific evidence is so compelling that it dominates the polarization effect. Hence both populations move in the same direction. For global warming the polarization effect dominates, so both populations move in opposite directions.
This makes sense to me, because my reading of the climate science is that it does not support strong conclusions about the future either way. Global warming could be dangerous, or not; we just don’t know.
This is all conjecture. Hopefully someday someone will tease those effects apart. But the one thing this study says clearly is that skepticism of global warming is not the result of scientific illiteracy.
A new study contradicts was nutritionists have been telling us for years:
For years, doctors have been telling us that too much salt is bad for us. Until now. A study claims that cutting down on salt can actually increase the risk of dying from a heart attack or a stroke. The research has left nutritionists scratching their heads.
Its findings indicate that those who eat the least sodium – about one teaspoon a day – don’t show any health advantage over those who eat the most.
Personally, I welcome this news, whether it holds up or not. The truth is that different people need different amounts of salt, regardless of the averages say. I’ve known for many years that I happen to be one of the people who needs more salt than most. Unfortunately, the anti-salt campaign has occasionally made it difficult to get it. Anything that hinders the anti-salt campaign is good for me.
POSTSCRIPT: There’s an amusing addendum to attach to this story. The New York Times, in its reporting on this story, shows that media bias is not limited to politics:
Low-Salt Diet Ineffective, Study Finds. Disagreement Abounds.
A new study found that low-salt diets increase the risk of death from heart attacks and strokes and do not prevent high blood pressure, but the research’s limitations mean the debate over the effects of salt in the diet is far from over.
The article continued with four paragraphs telling why no one should believe the study before it deigned to report what the study actually found.
UPDATE: According to Scientific American, the anti-salt campaign has always been on shaky scientific footing. For example:
For every study that suggests that salt is unhealthy, another does not. Part of the problem is that individuals vary in how they respond to salt. “It’s tough to nail these associations,” admits Lawrence Appel, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University and the chair of the salt committee for the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. One oft-cited 1987 study published in the Journal of Chronic Diseases reported that the number of people who experience drops in blood pressure after eating high-salt diets almost equals the number who experience blood pressure spikes; many stay exactly the same.
Indeed. People are trying to cut my salt intake, even though I need more than average. Of course, this is always the problem with one-size-fits-all policy.
UPDATE: In light of this article, I’m going to strengthen this post’s title.
UPDATE: I said that the New York Times’s hit piece on the salt study proves that media bias isn’t limited to politics, but on further reflection, I think it’s entirely political. The New York Times is, after all, located in New York, where the mayor has waged a high-profile war on salt (and just about anything else that people enjoy, it would seem). If New Yorkers learn that Bloomberg’s entire war on salt was based on false information, they might wonder what other infringements of their personal liberty are unnecessary and/or counterproductive.
President Obama says the problem with our economy is that we have too many machines replacing people. He specifically mentioned ATMs.
This is a classic economic fallacy. Capital, such as machines, make labor more productive. One person can produce more using a machine than he can without it. That makes labor more valuable, not less. Any introductory economics class covers this. It’s sad that the president of the United States does not understand it.
Yes, technology can produce temporary disruptions as its ramifications work their way through the economy, but it has always been thus. It’s not a special problem now. (Besides, ATMs have been around for ages.)
Moreover, any disruption in today’s economy caused by technology is dwarfed by the disruption caused by Obama’s multiplication of the regulatory state. And that brings up the one sense in which the accumulation of capital could be seen as a negative sign: If the relative costs of labor and capital shift, so that labor becomes relatively expensive, businesses do have an incentive to substitute capital for labor. That is, capital does not cause labor to become less valuable (Obama notwithstanding, it’s quite the contrary), but capital can become more attractive if labor becomes less so.
This might actually be happening. As Tom Blumer put it, ATMs are exempt from Obamacare.
UPDATE: Another good rebuttal, along the same lines.
Another reason not to trust the government (any government): The Economist (subscription required) reports on a new study that finds that even well-meaning justice systems can be quite arbitrary:
The government might deliver even-handed justice, but you certainly can’t count on it.
Okun’s Law says that recoveries should come with a drop in unemployment, but our last three recoveries have been jobless ones. The weakness of the current recovery explains some of it, but it can’t be a complete explanation. Is Okun’s Law dead? What did we do to it?
A little bit of googling found me an article from the New York Fed, written during the much-more-mild jobless recovery of 2001-2003. They found:
We advance the hypothesis that structural changes—permanent shifts in the distribution of workers throughout the economy—have contributed significantly to the sluggishness in the job market.
We find evidence of structural change in two features of the 2001 recession: the predominance of permanent job losses over temporary layoffs and the relocation of jobs from one industry to another. The data suggest that most of the jobs added during the recovery have been new positions in different firms and industries, not rehires. In our view, this shift to new jobs largely explains why the payroll numbers have been so slow to rise: Creating jobs takes longer than recalling workers to their old positions and is riskier in the current uncertain environment.
From a policy perspective, this suggests two things to me. First, there are a lot of reasons why the economy might be shifting from one industry to another, and there’s no way to stop that sort of trend (if we even wanted to). We should get it over with. What I mean by that is we should not be trying to prop up shrinking industries. We can’t do it in the long run, and our attempts serve only to push the adjustment process into recessions (reality sets in when times are tough).
Second, we should make it easier and less risky to create new jobs in new industries. That means encouraging investment and cutting regulation.
Unfortunately, our current administration is doing exactly the opposite of all the above.
Research conducted by Auto Trader suggests that money, not the environment, is the main driving force behind motorists’ interest in eco-friendly vehicles, at least in Great Britain. The majority of UK motorists (73 percent) would consider “going green” to save money on fuel, compared to just 41 percent of drivers admitting that environmental concerns would motivate them to purchase a greener vehicle.
This is good (if unsurprising) news for an efficient economy. In a competitive market, the best measure of the resources expended to make a product is price. When people base decisions on price, they are optimizing resource allocation.
The thing about price is it values all resources even-handedly, according to their scarcity. When environmentalists push us to spend more for a green product, they are encouraging sub-optimal resource allocation. Specifically, they want us to use increase our use of more-expensive (and therefore more scarce) resources in certain categories (such as labor or precious metals), in order to conserve less-expensive (and therefore less scarce) resources in other categories (such as oil). Green advocates feel that the latter categories are more important despite being less scarce.
Since Glenn Reynolds commented on DARPA’s CRASH and PROCEED programs:
Well, my only thought is that if you have cyber-security that’s modeled on the human immune system, the result will be a generation of hackers expert in overcoming the human immune system. I can see longer-term problems with that . . . .
CRASH’s immune system motivation is really just a metaphor. It really has nothing to do with the human immune system so you don’t need to worry about that. The most important thing about CRASH is they are pushing for “clean-slate” operating systems work, which means starting over rather than trying to make incremental improvements to existing faulty operating systems.
PROCEED would be a bigger deal, if someone can figure out how to make fully homomorphic encryption practical. So far, no one has any idea how to do that. (There’s a somewhat layman-friendly explanation of what fully homomorphic encryption is about here.)
GORDON PETERSON, HOST: It’s been a terrible winter. If global warming is the problem, why are we having such a tough winter? Well Al Gore told Gail Collins of the New York Times there’s about a four percent more water vapor in the air now in the atmosphere than there was in the ’70s because of warmer oceans and warmer air, and it returns to earth as heavy rain and heavy snow. That’s what Al Gore says.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Look, if Godzilla appeared on the Mall this afternoon, Al Gore would say it’s global warming…
[Laughter]
…because the spores in the South Atlantic Ocean, you know, were. Look, everything is, it’s a religion. In a religion, everything is explicable. In science, you can actually deny or falsify a proposition with evidence. You find me a single piece of evidence that Al Gore would ever admit would contradict global warming and I’ll be surprised.
The study of historical temperature is science, even if the peer review processes that are supposed to ensure that sound science prevails have been seriously corrupted. It operates by proposing hypotheses and testing them against data.
The projections of future temperature are not science. They rely on models that cannot be tested in the short term because temperature is too noisy. It will take decades to gather enough data to substantiate or reject them. Neither can you test the models on historical data (even assuming accurate historical data) primarily because of the problem of over-fitting the data, and secondarily because the historical data lies in a different part of the curve than the projections are interested in.
When Al Gore says the science of climate change is settled, it’s not true. It would be more accurate to say the science of climate change has yet to begin.
The phenomenon wherein incompetent people don’t know enough to realize they are incompetent is easy to see, but I didn’t realize that it has a name (the Dunning-Kruger effect) and has been studied scientifically.
A now-retracted British study that linked autism to childhood vaccines was an “elaborate fraud” that has done long-lasting damage to public health, a leading medical publication reported Wednesday.
An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study’s author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study — and that there was “no doubt” Wakefield was responsible.
Australian scientists have found that increased carbon-dioxide levels can dramatically increase crop yields. It may also reduce crops’ need for water. Interesting.
Are the TSA’s much-reviled body scanners safe? Some scientists aren’t sure. They say that existing analyses, which were designed for X-ray machines, aren’t appropriate to body scanners. X-ray machines distribute their radiation throughout the body, but body scanners apply it all to the skin, resulting in a much higher exposure than an X-ray-based analysis would suggest.
In response, the government was able to muster only this:
The FDA asserts that its method is correct. “This is how we measure the output of X-ray machines and how we’ve done it for the past 50 years,” says [FDA spokeswoman Kelly] Classic.
“We’ve always done it this way” is not a scientific rebuttal.
POSTSCRIPT: Some of the dubious scientists think the machines probably are safe (“You would have to be a heavy traveler to accumulate a large dose.”) but others aren’t sure (“At this point, until I knew more information, I’d tell people to take the pat-down.”)
Scientists are learning how to trace the origin of a nuclear weapon by examining the aftermath of its blast. This is very important, since it seems all-but-certain that Iran will soon be a nuclear power. For us to have any hope of deterring Iran from turning nuclear weapons over to terrorists, we need the capacity of tracking those weapons back to them.
The Federal Reserve is considering bringing back inflation, on purpose:
The Federal Reserve spent the past three decades getting inflation low and keeping it there. But as the U.S. economy struggles and flirts with the prospect of deflation, some central bank officials are publicly broaching a controversial idea: lifting inflation above the Fed’s informal target.
The rationale is that getting inflation up even temporarily would push “real” interest rates—nominal rates minus inflation—down, encouraging consumers and businesses to save less and to spend or invest more.
Idiots. We have established that this trick does not work. More precisely, it works only to the extent that you can trick people into thinking inflation will be low, otherwise people will simply compensate for the higher price level. More pithily, inflation does not stimulate the economy; only surprise inflation stimulates the economy.
The problem is that people quickly learn to expect inflation and the trick stops working. (And the fact that the Fed is being open about its plans doesn’t help!) Furthermore, once people start expecting inflation, they won’t believe you when you say you’re stopping. It’s very hard to put that genie back in the bottle again.
A team of scientists has invented a technique to convert adult cells to stem cells without using retroviruses. Previous iPS techniques used retroviruses, which make them dangerous for medical use, and scientists have been looking for alternatives. The new technique uses messenger RNA instead and seems to have no down side. And if that weren’t enough, it’s twice as fast and up to 100 times as efficient.
iPS cells are superior to embryonic stem cells because they don’t require the destruction of embryos, and because they can be acquired from the patient, thereby eliminating the risk of rejection.
A new study has found that playing video games trains people to make correct decisions faster, and that skill applies to everyday activities as well. Interestingly, the effect applies to “action video games” but not “slow-moving strategy games”.
Remember the old canard about how the Bush administration put politics ahead of science? Now we have an administration that actually does that, and not just in regard to economics and oil spills either. Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services tried to keep the lid on the results of an HHS study on sex and abstinence, even going so far as to deny a Freedom of Information Act request.
HHS was ultimately forced to release the study when faced with a deluge of FOIA requests. The study found that the vast majority of parents (no surprise) and adolescents (a bit more surprising) believe that sex should wait until marriage.
POSTSCRIPT: Incidentally, this is a different study than the Penn study published earlier this year that showed that abstinence education works.
In this paper, published in Economic Policy Journal, economists Yann Algan, Pierre Cahuc, and Andre Zylberberg looked at the impact of public employment on overall labor-market performance. The authors use data for a sample of OECD countries from 1960 to 2000, and they find that, on average, the creation of 100 public jobs eliminated about 150 private-sector jobs, decreased overall labor-market participation slightly, and increased by about 33 the number of unemployed workers.
Harvard economist Robert Barro has a piece in the Wall Street Journal estimating the results of the 2009 stimulus bill. He estimates the multiplier (that’s the amount by which the economy grows for a given amount of fiscal stimulus) at 0.4 for the first year and 0.6 for the second. Let’s call it 0.5 overall.
That means that $300 billion in government spending comes at the cost of $150 billion in reduced private-sector activity. So, if at least half the stimulus spending is worthwhile, society as a whole is better off, having obtained more than it gave up. On the other hand, if at least half of the stimulus is wasted, then society is worse off. You can judge for yourself which is more likely.
But that’s just one side of the ledger. Increased government spending comes at the price of higher taxes, either now or at some future date. Barro estimates the tax multiplier at -1.1. (He notes Christina Romer, the president’s chief economic advisor, has found the tax multiplier to be even worse.) That means that the taxes to pay for $300 billion in spending result in $330 billion in reduced economic activity.
Put these together and you get a combined multiplier of -0.6. That means that every $300 billion in fiscal stimulus makes society worse off by $180 billion. And that’s assuming that not one cent of the stimulus is wasted. If half of the stimulus is wasted (which strikes me as a bare minimum), we’re $330 billion worse off.
In short, the 2009 stimulus bill was a complete disaster. And we just passed another one.
POSTSCRIPT: Interestingly, the Obama administration assumed a spending stimulus of about 1.5. It’s completely unsupported (they basically concede this). but it’s an interesting number. It means that after the -1.1 tax multiplier, we would still be 0.4 ahead, so the stimulus would better society if at least 60% of its spending were worthwhile. It strikes me that 40% is just about the lowest number that could possibly be argued for stimulus waste, so it seems as though the administration’s multiplier guess is the lowest number that could justify its plan. In other words, it seems that the Obama administration determined the number by working backwards from the plan’s desired outcome.
A new study finds that cohabitation before marriage hurts the likelihood of a successful marriage. Some people find this counterintuitive, but it makes sense to me. By living together without a commitment to stay together, you’re not practicing for marriage, you’re practicing for separation.
Here’s the latest in the annals of unsurprising science. Scientists have have devised a psychology experiment that supports the hypothesis that power corrupts.
What was a bit more surprising was a second finding: Power corrupts people who believe they deserve their power. Those who didn’t exhibited a strange phenomenon the scientists dubbed hypercrisy (i.e., the opposite of hypocrisy), in which they were harder on themselves than others.
I’m not sure how significant the second finding is in practical terms. Should we choose our leaders by lottery? There’s a certain appeal to that, but I doubt it would really work out well. Also, I think that people pretty quickly come to believe that they deserve their good fortune.
A widespread belief among liberal social engineers is that abstinence education doesn’t work and “safe sex” is better. But no one had ever looked carefully at the subject, until now. A new study shows that the conventional wisdom has it completely backwards:
Sex education classes that focus on encouraging children to remain abstinent can persuade a significant proportion to delay sexual activity, researchers reported Monday in a landmark study that could have major implications for U.S. efforts to protect young people against unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.
Only about a third of sixth- and seventh-graders who completed an abstinence-focused program started having sex within the next two years, researchers found. Nearly half of the students who attended other classes, including ones that combined information about abstinence and contraception, became sexually active. . .
The study is the first to evaluate an abstinence program using a carefully designed approach comparing it with several alternative strategies and following subjects for an extended period of time, considered the kind of study that produces the highest level of scientific evidence.
The study shows not only that abstinence education works, but “safe sex” education is harmful. Students who were taught both abstinence and safe sex did slightly better than the control group but much worse than the abstinence-only group. Students who were taught safe sex only (not abstinence) did slightly worse than the control group:
Over the next two years, about 33 percent of the students who went through the abstinence program started having sex, compared with about 52 percent who were taught only safe sex. About 42 percent of the students who went through the comprehensive program started having sex, and about 47 percent of those who learned about other ways to be healthy did.
According to a new paper, vaccines are being allocated the wrong way. Rather than using scarce vaccines on the population that is most at risk from a disease, the authors argue that they should be used on the population that is most likely to spread the disease. This would create herd immunity and save more lives overall.
A group of scholars at George Mason University have done an econometric analysis of spending under the stimulus bill. They wanted to see what factors influenced the allocation of stimulus funds. For example, they wanted to see whether variables such as unemployment or mean income had a significant impact, which might indicate that the bill was tailored to stimulate the economy.
Their analysis found no correlation between stimulus spending and any economic variable. In fact, there was only one variable with a significant impact, and that was which party represented the district: Democratic districts obtained significantly more stimulus funding than Republican ones. Party was significant at the 99.9% confidence level (p < 0.001).
The other variable with some impact was whether the district was politically “marginal”, meaning that the district’s representative won by less than 5% of the vote. Politically marginal districts received less funding than non-marginal ones. Marginality was significant at the 90% level but not the 95% level.
Put these two together and you get a clear picture of how to get stimulus funding: be strongly Democratic. Weakly Democratic districts get less, and Republican districts get much less.
So the purpose of the stimulus travesty is empirically revealed. The biggest peacetime spending scheme in history is a massive transfer payment from Republicans and independents to Democrats.
RealClimate.org this past week linked an older Real Climate post titled “Peer Review: A Necessary But Not Sufficient Condition“. The post makes the point that peer review is a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition for credibility, observing that bad papers sometimes make it through peer review. (The bad papers they want us to ignore are all skeptical of a human impact on climate change.)
In fact, I would say peer review is neither necessary nor sufficient for credibility. Bad and even horrible papers are sometimes accepted. Good papers are sometimes rejected. Some good papers, for one reason or another, are never submitted to peer review. So peer review is not a magic wand; it is simply a process that adds value by subjecting scientific work to skeptical scrutiny.
Anyway, one of the post’s main examples of the failure of peer review is a paper by Ross McKitrick and Patrick Michaels (a prominent global warming skeptic) that purported to find economic signals in the temperature records. (It doesn’t really matter what this means. The point is that the non-skeptics didn’t like it.)
It turns out that the work was flawed, because McKitrick and Michaels’s data was in degrees but their trigonometric library measured angles in radians. They acknowledge the error. (ASIDE: They also found that the correction does not affect the overall result. On the other hand, Real Climate alleges that there are other problems with the paper as well.)
But here’s the point: The error was discovered because McKitrick and Michaels made their code available! If they had withheld their code, no one ever could have found the error.
Alas, withholding the code seems to be a common practice in the climate science community. The Hadley CRU would not release its code, and it took a leak to expose the fact that its code was broken. (And unlike the previous case, CRU’s code does not admit an easy fix, or perhaps even any fix at all.)
In climate science, the facts may be on the majority’s side (although I’m not as confident as I once was), but they can learn from the skeptics something about the process of science.
Posted by K. Crary 
