Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

After the storm

I'm covering the hurricane story, and it's breaking my heart. The human toll is terrible, and seems likely to get worse when they start chopping out the bodies of those who drowned in their attics.

And long after the rebuilding begins, the economic effects will be felt. The gulf area produces about 10% of our crude oil, and an even bigger percentage of our refined petroleum products. Right now, both are shut down. Expect $3 gas over labor day (urp . . . I just moved my holiday camping trip two extra hours away from the city) and if facilities are seriously damaged, a sizeable impact on consumer spending in the months ahead.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The perils of premature snark

Pointed commentary from Juan Cole bites back.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Snake oil salesman go national

Just last night I was watching some guy on television claim that the drug companies are withholding the cure for diabetes in order to make a profit. He was, of course, hawking his book on how to cure diabetes, which sounded like a bunch of herbal crap. There's a cure for Type II diabetes, all right--excercise and eat right--but it only works early in the process, and drug companies don't yet have a wonder drug that will make Americans get out of the barcalounger and throw out that bag of pork rinds.

"How," I wondered, "can this man make these claims on television without some regulatory agency slapping him upside the head with a cease and desist order?"

Derek Lowe has a more pungent reaction.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Not what one's looking for in a martyr

Having spent the last week complaining vociferously that conservatives were just making it all up about high-profile liberals who are rooting for the insurgents, the left half of the blogosphere cannot be happy to discover that Cindy Sheehan thinks that the folks infiltrating into Iraq to blow up cars in large crowds are "freedom fighters".

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Hitting the ceiling

The Wall Street Journal reports that Hawaii is preparing a nice little controlled experiment that we might call "Do price ceilings really cause shortages?" In response to higher oil prices, Hawaii has decided to cap the price of gasoline. Weirdly, it is imposing that price not at the pump, where it would at least lower prices to consumers, but at the wholesale level.

In traditional economic theory, when prices are capped, consumer demand keeps going strong but suppliers curtail supply, leading to the shortages that those who were sentient in the seventies will remember--long lines for gas, alternate day gas purchases, and so forth. More recently, this is basically what happened in the California blackouts, although there were added wrinkles there due to defects in the regulatory setup of the electricity market. I'm not sure what happens if you cap wholesale prices. There are two plausible scenarios. Wholesalers will undoubtedly curb supply in response to the price caps. The resulting mismatch between supply and demand could simply result in higher prices as consumers get into a bidding war for the available gasoline; in that case, the market will clear, and a handsome windfall profit will be transferred to gasoline station owners from the pockets of consumers and wholesalers. Or, the gasoline station owners may be afraid to raise prices for fear of attracting regulatory attention, in which case the result will be shortages and rationing. I'd bet on the former, and would also bet that there is a powerful gasoline station owner's lobby which has been agitating fiercely for wholesale price caps.

The politicians imposing the ban, on the other hand, argue that they are simply curbing the market power of the island's two wholesalers. We'll soon see whether they are right.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Predicting the peak

Kevin Drum is looking to bet John Tierney that oil prices will stay high.

Personally, I think Kevin's being foolish. Oil company internal forecasting generally assumes an inflation adjusted oil price of about $30-$40, or so I'm told. Kevin's posts on oil are very well informed, but permit me to suggest that the good folks at BP and ExxonMobil are also pretty well informed about the state of the world's oil supply, and have a much larger financial incentive to be right than does Mr Drum.

It's not that I disagree with Mr Drum's basic thesis--that current reserves are being exhausted. They are; that's a law of nature. But I am reliably informed that oil companies think they can get oil out of Canada's tar sands at a profit with prices well under where they are now. The tar sands alone contain more oil than all Saudi Arabia. Moreover, higher prices will spawn conservation, exploration, and so forth.

But even if you think that peak oil is correct in the long term (as it undoubtedly is if you make the term long enough), in the short term it is very, very foolish to bet on--in just the same way that it was foolish to short the stock market in the late 1990's. I know someone who did just that for four years. He made a killing year four--but almost had to declare bankruptcy in year three. Betting on short term prices based on long term trends is bad financial mojo.

While the long term trend may well be upwards, in the short term, there's going to be a lot of volatility. To bet that oil will be above $85 a barrel in five years, you have to bet that China won't go into recession, Americans won't change their driving/insulating habits, Iraq won't be able to boost its oil production past the tepid prewar levels driven down by years of mismanagement, Saudi Arabia will default on its promises to raise production by 2.5 million bpd--indeed, no OPEC producers will respond to higher prices by increasing their pumping capacity, and that about a zillion other things that could drive down the price of oil, won't. Economically speaking, the predictable result of rapid spikes in the cost of a commodity, such as the ones that we have seen in the last eighteen months, is that suppliers ramp up their capacity, causing a glut. Even if the long term trend is upwards, the short term trend is more likely to be down then up.

(So will I back John Tierney? Not I! How would little ol' me know when the bull will end its run and the bear will start?)

It is an odd fact of human psychology that if tight supply (or excess capacity) persists for long enough, people will start acting as if the trend line is permanent. It is odd because "long enough" isn't very long. Five years ago, people were talking about $5 a barrel oil, not realising what is perfectly obvious in hindsight, which is that low oil prices were not a result of being overtaken by a bold new future, but of the widespread recession in Asia that followed upon the 1997/8 financial crisis. Now they're talking about $100 a barrel oil. Both times, theorists emerged with books absolutely proving that this was the result of some new natural law they had discovered. I find it surprising that Matthew Simmons et. al. are gathering so many followers when the memory of abnormally low prices (and the fleeting life of same) is so fresh.

Anyway, you won't catch me putting any $5,000 on the proposition that I have found a foolproof way to tell the future.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Vioxx viable?

Great post on the statistical signifigance of the Vioxx results from Econbrowser. Frankly, given how low the relative increase in risk is, I don't understand why patients aren't being given the option of taking Vioxx after being rigorously informed of the potential side effects.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Informed?

Ouch.

Update Speaking of oil economics in the Middle East, This entry from Mr Cole is a wee bit addled:

By the way, Saud al-Faisal correctly points out that a key element in the current high price of petroleum is lack of refining capacity. Since the oil majors are not willing to build a new refinery, why not resolve the problem ourselves. Can't California do one of those fancy referendum items instructing the state to build a refinery? They could insist that its products meet California pollution standards. A refinery would cost $5 billion, but it might or might not be profitable in the medium term (petroleum prices could dip once it was completed), which is why the corporations are not building one. It is highly irresponsible, and hurting the world economy.

It is the people of California, in the form of their legislators, who are keeping the refineries from being built because they don't like the pollution. (And the people of New York, and New Jersey, and Massachussetts . . . ) Why would they vote on their community boards to keep nasty refineries and power plants out of their communities, then turn right around and vote in a referendum to build one? As far as I know, no one has come up with a way to control the two major pollution problems with refineries: they're ugly, and they smell. Until firms find a way to make refineries cute, like, say, an Amish barn, there will be no new ones built any time soon.

It misses the mark in another way: the major problem isn't lack of refinery capacity, per se, but that America's patchwork of air-quality regulations means that refiners have to custom-blend smaller batches of gasoline and other petroleum products, rather than making bigger runs for larger areas (Chicago, for example, has its very own gasoline blend). This makes refineries less efficient than they should be.

Lack of refining capacity is a problem for the Saudis, because their heavy, sulphurous crude requires more refining to meet American air quality standards. This means that their crude currently trades at a considerable discount to the lighter, "sweeter" grades that American and European refineries like to buy (which is, some say, why they aren't putting more of it on the market). If the refining industry had overcapacity, the price of Saudi oil would go up relative to lighter grades like West Texas Intermediate, while the price of WTI would go down somewhat. But it's not clear how much this would help consumers.

Update II More errors on oil:

Back in the real world, all of Iraq's petroleum production was knocked out on Monday.

Yikes! Thought I. That's a big story! How could I have missed it? My boss is gonna kill me!!!

But if you actually click through the link, you'll see that production is fine; power outages at the export terminals temporarily halted shipments. Maybe this is nitpicking, but us business types think there's a pretty big distinction between production and distribution--like the difference between Ford Motor Company, and your local Ford dealer. Shutting down all of Iraq's oil production would require a major conflagration; temporarily halting shipping (with no actual loss of product) requires very little, as the dockworkers strike a couple of years ago showed America.

Hey, this is blogging, not journalism or scholarly work. But Mr Cole can be pretty blistering when others make errors on his turf.

Update III Double ouch.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Economic ignorance passing as political savvy

I've been enjoying Michael Lind's guest-blogging over at TPM Cafe. But this is just wrong:

We're in the Middle East To Threaten Asian Oil--Not Protect Ours

Americans who think that Bush, Cheney and the neocons have been turning the Middle East and Central Asia into a U.S. military sphere of influence, centered on the bases we are building in Iraq, to protect American oil are naive. Most Persian Gulf oil goes to Asia; only about 15 percent comes to the U.S. As China grows, its share of Middle Eastern oil will increase dramatically.

Why, then, are the neocons so keen on creating an exclusive American military sphere of influence over the oil-producing countries of the Middle East and Central Asia, when the oil is destined chiefly for Asia? Since the early 1990s the neocons have sought to contain China. Putting the American sword to the Chinese oil jugular is part of their strategy, along with creating a US-Japanese-Indian alliance against China and putting U.S. bases in Central Asia near the Chinese border to threaten China from the rear.

If the US became self-sufficient in energy tomorrow, the Sinophobic neocons would still want the US to control the Middle East and the Indian Ocean/South China sealanes, in order that the U.S. could plausibly threaten to cut off Chinese oil in a show-down.

This is not the first time I've heard this theory, a slightly more sophisticated turn on the standard conspiracy theories running around the left. The last time I heard it, however, the proponent had the exuse of being a slightly daffy 25-year-old graduate student in Middle Eastern Studies who had never taken an economics class and was, somewhat understandably, emotinally vulnerable to conspiracy theories about the Bush administration.

The oil market is a commodity market. It's very nice that most Middle Eastern oil goes to Asia, but that's a matter of proximity and refining capacity (we're closer to Alaska and Canada, and our refiners prefer, for regulatory reasons, lighter and sweeter crude than that which is prevalent under the sands of the Arabian peninsula). It is not a natural law. And for slightly more in transportation and refining costs, Middle Eastern oil could easily come here. Conversely, Canadian, Alaskan and Mexican oil could easily flow to Asia.

There is thus no way to "control" the flow of oil to China. Refuse to ship oil from Iraq to Beijing, and Norway or Venezuela will sell to them instead, and Venezuela's customers will buy your Middle Eastern oil. There won't even be a noticeable uptick in the price.

How can I be so sure? How do you know this isn't theoretical airy-fairy economist fundamentalist libertarian crap?

Well, because Arab oil producers tried to do exactly this to the US. The oil embargo was a miserable failure; the Arabs eventually gave it up not because they got happy about our foriegn policy (cough), but because it wasn't making much difference in the US oil price, and it was causing them a lot of hassles to maintain.

The only way the US could "control" the flow of oil to China would be to turn off the taps. Turning off the taps in Iraq would be bad-ish--Iraq is currently exporting about 1.5 million barrels a day, out of total world consumption a shade above 83 million bpd. But it would be just as bad for the US as it would for China. If Iraqi oil went off the market, China wouldn't just say, "Oh, well, that's a pity" and shrug. "China" the entity wouldn't act; millions of Chinese producers and consumers would. They would go buy oil elsewhere. That would mean less oil for the people who used to buy oil from those producers. The subsequent bidding would push up the price of oil.

Removing that much oil from the world market would cause prices to spike pretty high; a relatively small mismatch between supply and demand is responsible for the current price environment. The rule of thumb is that every $10 per barrel increase in the price of a barrel of oil shaves half a percentage point off of GDP growth. The economically illiterate like to talk about the "oil weapon", but as a weapon, oil is pretty much a doomsday device--it takes those who wield out along with their enemies. That's what OPEC found when it tried to use its "weapon"--the 1980s collapse in the price of oil was arguably more devastating to OPEC nations than the preceding spike had been to Western importers.

We're in the Middle East because stable oil prices are, economically speaking, very, very important. One need only look at the history of Europe to see that despotic regimes operating where control of land is the primary means of securing wealth and power tend to go to war a lot. This is not conducive to stable oil prices, as a quick look at the recent history of the oil market will tell you. This is why the US will not, for the foreseeable future, stop throwing its military might around in the Middle East, whatever the romantic ideations of the pacifist left and the isolationist right.

The Middle East has enough conspiracy theories. Let's please put this one to rest.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Who decides--and how?

I find the Merck verdict pretty disturbing. Regardless of what you think of the modern torts system, the jury doesn't seem to have done a very good job assessing the evidence:

Merck argued that Vioxx couldn't have caused Mr. Ernst's death because, according to his death certificate, he died of an arrhythmia or irregular heartbeat, not a heart attack. While scientific evidence suggests Vioxx can promote blood clots leading to a heart attack, no data have linked the drug with arrhythmias.

Jurors who voted against Merck said much of the science sailed right over their heads. "Whenever Merck was up there, it was like wah, wah, wah," said juror John Ostrom, imitating the sounds Charlie Brown's teacher makes in the television cartoon. "We didn't know what the heck they were talking about."

According to the Wall Street Journal, jurors were swayed by things that simply shouldn't have been a factor--an irrational belief that the CEO should attend the case (Merck is sued hundreds of times a year; should the CEO stop running the company so the jurors can feel special?), and even more disturbingly, a desire to get on Oprah. You only get on Oprah if you find for the plaintiff.

Every successful big lawsuit against a pharmaceutical company reduces the capital available to the industry, and the willingness of the industry to spend capital on developing new drugs, rather than novel ways to package things already on the market that they haven't been sued for. As Richard Epstein says, it's no good saying you only want to target the bad companies; investors have no way of telling, in advance, which companies jurors will decide are "bad". This case was widely viewed as a slam dunk for Merck, given that the plaintiff's deceased husband had neither the use profile, nor the cause of death, associated with Vioxx's problems. In the case of companies that are misbehaving, that is a cost we have to bear. But there seems to have been little evidence that Merck was misbehaving, and no scientific evidence that the drug caused the death the plaintiff was suing over.

This points up a larger problem, which is that even under the Daubert standard of scientific evidence, lay jurors are disastrously ill-equipped to cope with complex technical arguments. An acquaintance who is a securities litigator told me shortly before 9/11 that they try their damndest to keep cases out of court, because the issues are so complex that even the lawyers have a hard time getting a handle on them, and "if you explain it to the jury, it takes six weeks, and they hate you more with every minute--and at the end, they still don't understand it."

How do the jurors decide the cases, then? I asked. She shrugged. "Beats me."

I'm an MBA and I write about business and economics for a living. I'm not sure I'm qualified to sit on a securities case--and if I'm not, your average HR assistant sure as hell isn't. There is a limit to the amount of technical information the human brain can absorb, even when that information isn't as mind-numbingly boring as securities law or double-blind study design.

The jury system was designed in an era of generalists, before even the invention of forensic evidence. Juries were generally being asked to rule on things they understood well--theft, infidelity, property rights, murder. Now they're being asked to rule on things far outside of their experience (and in some cases, outside of their cognitive ability). Base motives are nothing new to the jury system; it was Samuel Johnson, I believe, who noted that "Wretches have hanged that jurors might dine". But the harder it is for jurors to comprehend the evidence before them, the more likely they are to fall back on unsalutary urges in rendering their verdict.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Why can't the US be more like Finland?

Zimran Ahmed makes a good case:

People respond to incentives. In a tiny, homogeneous country, group norms can take the place of monetary rewards. If you identify strongly with your neighbours then you care if they shun you. But the US is 50 times larger than Finland and very heterogeneous -- people here don't care much about what their neighbours think because 1) their neighbours are not neccessarily much like them and 2) they keep changing. In this kind of soceity group norms simply will not work. If my neighbours in Boston stopped talking to me, I honestly would not notice.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Yes, Virginia, it's a bubble

Alex Tabarrok on Robert Shiller's housing index:

Robert Shiller has put together the first, long, true index of home prices. By true I mean that as much as possible it looks at repeated sales of the same or very similar houses over time. Conventional indices confuse changes in size and quality with changes in the price of housing per se.

What the index shows is that real house prices have remained stable over the past 100 years. The contrary impression is driven by inflation and as noted above, changes in what is being measured. Stability, however, is what we should expect. The United States remains a relatively unpopulated country. When house prices in current population centers increase, suburbs and smaller cities expand. People move to less populated areas and in so doing alleviate the press on house prices. In the long run, the supply of housing is very elastic.

The glaring exception to stability is the last 6 or 7 years when house prices have skyrocketed far beyond where they have ever been before. Can you hear the pop coming?

I hate to say I told you so. But I told you so.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Money money money money

Bryan Caplan asks why left-wing professors grade on merit, rather than need or opportunities:

To me, this reveals a basic inconsistency in egalitarian philosophy. If you assign grades based on merit, and merit depends on performance unadjusted for opportunity, then why shouldn't the same principle hold for income and wealth? Just because you feel sorry for someone, why does that entitle them to a share of the riches of the more successful? And if you do not adjust for unequal opportunities when you grade, why should you adjust for unequal opportunities when you contemplate redistribution?

You could say that money affects people's lives more than grades, but I beg to differ. The empirical evidence cuts the other way. Job satisfaction - which probably depends heavily on having the education and grades to open up the doors you want to walk through - matters a lot more for happiness than dollars of income. So if you really wanted to even out the ultimate inequality of life, you'd redistribute grades before money.

I find it odd, too, that so many academics profess to be egalitarians, yet academia as a whole has produced one of the most radically inegalitarian societies to be seen since Louis XVI fled Versailles. Many academics of my acquaintance profess to be aghast at the "status seeking" in which their neighbours engage--and yet I have never met anyone as obsessed with collecting professional merit badges as an academic. Nor have I experienced any other organisational culture, even in hyper-competitive consulting or investment banking, in which professional success is so readily confused with personal worth.

Since all the happiness research currently captivating left-wing intellectuals purports to illustrate that it is one's place on the relative rank-order, rather than the absolute amount of income one earns, that makes people happy, why hasn't academia moved to obscure the status-markers which make the life of a low-ranked academic so much less happy than it could be?

In other words, as I have always longed to ask John Kenneth Galbraith, "if you think that we should equalise the distribution of income, why do you not think that we should equalise the distribution of PhDs?"

From the desk of Jane Galt:

So we're not going to cure cancer by 2010 after all. Who knew?

Apparently, not Senator Arlen Specter.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Building Iraq

How do you build a sound economy when insurgents keep blowing everything you build up? And how do you sap the energy of the insurgency when the parlous state of the economy keeps everyone desperately poor? Iraq's economic ministers are try to answer those questions.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Gay adoption

Julian Sanchez has an article about gay adoption up at Reason.

Something bothered me about it that I couldn't quite put my finger on, and then I realised that it seemed to be relying on an argument that is often used in favour of gay adoption: that we should allow gay adoption because there are over 100,000 kids awaiting adoption right now, and gay couples could pick up some of the slack. As the article puts it: "For children in Florida�s foster care system, the alternative to gay parents may be no parents at all".

The problem with this is that, as I understand it, most of the kids who are awaiting adoption are doing so because they are either sick, mentally or physically disabled, or older than toddler-age--or a combination of these things. That makes these children undesireable to parents, who are looking for a healthy baby, not a lifetime committment to somebody else's problems.

Articles about gay adoption generally point to a few gay couples who have taken in children with HIV, or developmental disabilities, arguing by implication that gay couples can take over the system's most difficult cases. I suspect that this is done to encourage support for gay adoption among Americans who might not think that gay couples make equally good parents as heterosexual couples, but believe that a gay couple is certainly better than an unstable foster home.

But there are a few heroic heterosexual couples who do these things too. Most heterosexual couples, however, want children who are healthy, and too young to remember another parent (or damaging foster homes). They linger on waitlists for years, or go abroad, while the sick children, the slow ones, and the older kids live out their formative years in dreadful foster homes.

I see no reason that gay couples will be, in this respect, much different from heterosexual couples; most of them will want a pretty new baby with no obvious problems. To the extent that gay couples have been concentrated in higher-need cases (and I don't know whether or not this is the case), I would guess that this is only because they are barred from the most desireable adoptions. Putting gay couples on equal footing with straight ones would, it seems to me, mostly just increase the competition for the small supply of adoptable babies.

This is not in any way to say that gay adoption is a bad idea; the gay couples I know who have adopted are all ideal parents. It's only to say that I don't think gay adoption can be relied on to clean up the foster care system's hard cases. And promising that it will may well backfire when straight parents suddenly notice that gay parents are going after the babies they want--and wonder if the gay rights movement isn't misleading them about other things, too.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Department of awful headlines

Experimental Hybrid Cars Get Up to 250 Mpg.

250 MPG!!! Wow!! How do they do that?!

Ummmm . . . by charging the car's batteries off the electric grid.

On this headline's logic, I am inviting investment my new idea for a car that uses NO GASOLINE AT ALL!!! I am planning to call it a "diesel".

The point being, of course, that shifting the form of fossil fuel consumption does not necessarily improve either cost-efficiency, or greenhouse-gas emissions, the two generally stated reasons for wanting more efficient cars. On the one hand, big power-plant turbines are much more efficient than little internal-combustion engines. On the other hand, coal is more carbon-polluting (and other polluting) than petroleum. Electricity generated from natural gas is cleaner and less carbon-emitting, but natural gas is in even shorter supply than oil.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

To tell or not to tell?

More women these days are using donor eggs to conceive, and apparently, most of them have decided not to tell their children about it. Elle has a long article about it, outlining the hidden and not-so-hidden costs:

�If they're not going to tell, they have to not tell a single soul. Ever. Because there is a real chance that if anyone knows, the child will find out, and if that happens the child will feel terribly lied to and violated�that we know from research. So they have to burn all the papers: the donor profile from the clinic, a picture they may have of her. They have to never talk about it, not even to each other. They have to lie to the obstetrician, the pediatrician, go to enormous lengths to make sure it isn't in any records. Let's say the mother's family has a history of breast cancer�she can't tell the daughter not to worry herself sick about it. It's an enormous secret to keep, lies on top of lies, and the fear of having the truth uncovered is with you every day.� (For most people, it's already too late to vow never to utter a word. According to Klock's data, about 80 percent of recipients have told others; these same people told Klock they regret having blabbed.)

Mendell also boldly speaks the three words parents in this position dread most: home DNA testing. With paternity and maternity kits available on the Web for about $200, it's not hard to imagine a scenario in which a kid, already sensing there's something unsaid at home, puts two and two together and sneaks a hair from Mom's brush.

Marital strife, unrelated to egg donation, could also �out� a child who hasn't been told, Rosenberg says. �Imagine what's going to happen during divorces when men try to take the kids and can prove to the court that they're the only genetic parent.�

Not to mention the negative externality: all those forty-something celebrities parading their babies gives younger women the false impression that they can safely put off conceiving for another decade or so.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

It's all about money

Guest-blogging for Daniel Drezner, Joseph Britt argues that NARAL's over-the-top ad was aimed, not at convincing voters, but at firing up its donor base:

The playing to the activist base that Tierney and other commentators criticize as a political tactic is not primarily that. It is instead a fundraising tactic; NARAL used, and continues to use, violent rhetoric to its most committed (or most gullible) supporters, seeking not votes against John Roberts but money for itself.

There are dozens of institutions in Washington doing the same thing. If an issue that can be used as a hook for fundraising doesn't exist, one can be invented. It isn't enough for institutional advocates to be effective; they also have to look busy.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Never seen in the same room at the same time

UPDATE: Don't miss the comments. They're Beam-worthy.

I submit that the author of this blog also pens this one.

It has to be. Compare the clever use of irony and redundant 'framing'-

***begin block quotation***
1 - they are whiny
2 - they think anyone who disagrees with them are traitors or unpatriotic
3 - the conservatives who write them are incredibly illogical and are quite clearly not the most rigorous thinkers
4 - they seem most interested in creating high drama and personal attacks and they almost never address real issues or focus on resolving real problems, instead focusing on pure politics and personal attacks...

...snip...

...7 - They post to their blogs almost everyday on the most meaningless issues because they obviously are more interested in web hits and publicity than worthwhile writing and meaningful political issues...

...Previous Posts:
* Richard Posner's Stupidity - Part III
* See Slate Piece on Dumb Posner Article
* Posner: Wrong on the Blogosphere - As Biased and Dumb as Ever
* Liar - Part III
* Liar - Part II
* Liar
* Rove Watch: Fire Rove; No Ethical Basis to Argue He Should Not Be Fired
* Baseball Crank Wrong on Rove
* Rove Scandal: Bush and Cheney Implicated?
* Rove Watch: Fitzgerald has strong basis to prosecute Karl Rove

***end block quotation***

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

One hand claps

A new sort of troll (at least to me) is making an appearance on this post at Q and O. (straight to comment thread). Is this constructive international dialogue, Or just a shadow of the obligatory soviet spokesmen in news shows during the '70's and '80's?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Public Service Announcement

I'm guest-blogging at Instapundit this week. Mindles may post, and I may put up some longer pieces here, but most of your hot Jane Galt action will be over at Insty's.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Question of the day

How long does it take after your average nuclear explosion for the kill zone to become liveable again?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Taking recommendations

. . . for campsites within reasonable travelling distance of New York City, with hiking suitable for a not particularly athletic journalist type, good for at least two days of activity. Ideally, one where I can have a fire in the privacy of my own damn campsite, instead of having to crowd into one of those horrible "fireplace" areas so that I can enjoy my romantic firelight dinner in the company of every dyspeptic toddler in the tri-state region. But this may be an amenity reserved for large groups, or outlaws, the two types of camping expeditions I have previously enjoyed.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Intelligent Design Redux

Steve Verdon has some suggestions for other creation stories that we might want to include in our science curriculums. Excellent idea, but I feel his scope is too narrow. Why should we limit ourselves to already-existing creation stories? Why not encourage the citizenry to submit their own? For example, I have a theory that our cosmos is a third-grade science project for a multidimensional being beyond our ken who is named, for some reason, "Grimmet". Readers are encouraged to think of their own creation stories for inclusion in American textbooks.

On a serious note, yes, I know that President Bush was not urging that creationism be taught in our schools, or even that ID be given equal time. I certainly don't have a problem devoting a couple of classes to the holes in evolutionary theory--one of the things that irks me is that most of the people I know who believe in evolution believe in it on the same basis that most creationists I know (yes, I do know some) believe that the world was created in six days: because their friends and family, and a couple of authority figures they respect, believe it is so. The contempt those self-identified illuminati display for those with a more traditional brand of religious belief is cruel self-parody.

The problem is that the people pushing to "teach the holes" are largely also hoping to plug those holes with God. I do not like this in our nation's public schools--nay, nay, sir, I do not like it at all. President Bush's suggestion was fairly moderate, and even reasonable. But the ends to which it aspires are neither moderate, nor reasonable, and it gives me a squirmy feeling to contemplate them.

On the other hand, the Republic struggled along pretty well for 200 years with creationism (and bible verses!) being taught right there in the classroom. I do not think that our nation will fall if ID wends its way into classes; given how appallingly little our nation's students seem to glean from their classwork, I doubt we'll even notice very much.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Eeek!

This makes me cringe just thinking about it. Please consider donating.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

GGS blogging

Brad de Long and a few others have been doing a lot of Guns, Germs and Steel blogging. The topic: is Jared Diamond a racist? Since one of my main complaints with the book is that he spends a huge amount of time trying to conclusively disprove something that rather few people in his readership demographic believe--that the low technology level achieved by peoples outside of Eurasia by 1500 was the result of their inherent genetic inferiority--I don't think this is a debate I'll step into.

The more interesting critiques, like Timothy Burke's, fault Jared Diamond for being too much of a geographical determinist; what about culture, asks Mr Burke? I agree that he's overdeterministic, but no one has made a cause for my favourite candidate for explaining the technological difference: luck.

Having convinced me that Eurasia simply had better crop candidates than anywhere else, Mr Diamond undercut his argument when it came to a discussion of corn. Wild corn, it turns out, is a remarkably bad candidate for domestication. In it's native state, corn ears are about the size of a human fingernail. It took milennia to breed the succulent sweet corn that I enjoyed last night.

So what other food candidates are there that people didn't try to domesticate, or didn't have the patience to stick with? Or that didn't produce as good mutations at the right time? Or where there was no agricultural genius to invent, say, the rice paddy? I found other arguments, such as the point that it is easier for domesticated food crops and animals east-west than north-south, still very compelling, but the argument that Eurasia just lucked out on domestication candidates suddenly lost a lot of its lustre.

It turns out I wasn't the only one. The inimitable Brian Caplan had the same thought:

According to Diamond, the horse is just easier to domesticate and gives a bigger bang for your buck than a llama or a zebra. What made Diamond's argument especially convincing to me was his claim that since the integration of the world economy, scientists and entrepreneurs have tried mightily to domesticate non-Eurasian animals, with little success. Zebras...

were tried out as draft animals in 19th-century South Africa, and the eccentric Lord Walter Rothschild drove through the streets of London in a carriage pulled by zebras. Alas, zebras become impossibly dangerous as they grow older...Zebras have the unpleasant habit of biting a person and not letting go. (Guns, Germs, and Steel, pp.171-2)

More generally:

In the 19th and 20th centuries at least six large mammals - the eland, elk, moose, musk ox, zebra, and American bison - have been the subjects of especially well-organized projects aimed at domestication, carried out by modern scientific animal breeders and geneticists... Yet these modern efforts have achieved only very limited successes. (Guns, Germs, and Steel, pp.167-8)

But doubt about this argument started to well up in me when I reflected on Diamond's history of corn:

Archaeologists are still vigorously debating how many centuries or millenia of crop development in the Americas were required for ancient corn cobs to progress from a tiny size up to the size of human thumb, but it seems clear that several thousand more years were required for them to reach modern sizes.(Guns, Germs, and Steel, pp.171-2)

Or to take a more familiar example, look at what we've done with wolves! We've turned them into everything from the noble Lassie to the irritating poodle. It really makes me start thinking, "Sure, the zebra is hard to domesticate now; but if we worked on them for a few hundred years, I bet the change would be amazing."

On reflection, it's not surprising that modern science has failed to domesticate animals like zebras. It would probably take generations, so the investment wouldn't pay a reasonable rate of return. And we've already got something better, anyway.

But if breeding useful animals takes centuries, I don't see this as a great explanation for why Eurasia did so much better than Native Americans and Africans. You'd just wind up asking, "Why were Eurasians more successful breeders?," which seems like a special case of "Why were Eurasians more economically successful overall?"

Admittedly, there is more to Diamond's argument, and it's worth reading in its entirety. He also says that the wild ancestors of the Eurasian flora and fauna were initially closer to being useful to man than the non-Eurasian flora and fauna.

Maybe he's right, but I'm worried that Diamond's suffering from hindsight bias: If the Eurasians domesticated the horse, it must have been inevitable, right? But if the Incas had shown up in Europe in 1492 with deadly llama cavalry, and mowed down backward European infantry, I suspect modern Incan historians would have declared the horse a hopeless candidate for domestication too.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Words fail me

Bush has endorsed the teaching of intelligent design. My liberal friends and commenters are entitled to one "I told you so".