Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, has a major article in today's Wall Streeet Journal, which can be seen here.
Lomborg argues that it would be much more cost-effective to let global warming happen and then combat its bad effects than it would be to reduce warming by forcing drastic reductions in hydrocarbon energy sources. If his numbers are anywhere near correct, it is an argument that needs to be considered.
The recent leak of e-mails purporting to show that prominent climate scientists have cooked the books, concealed data which might undermine their arguments, and tried to prevent scientists who do not agree with them from publishing their arguments in peer-reviewed journals are a major concern, of course. But even if a totally benign interpretation is placed on these emails, there may be a more major problem with today's climate science "concensus."
As Thomas Kuhn demonstrated in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, "normal science" operates within a prevailing paradigm, or way of understanding and interpreting observations and placing them within a meaningful frame of reference. In smaller words, scientists tend to follow the beaten intellectual path, and those who come to radically different conclusions about thingsd are shunned, ridiculed, and labeled "unscientific."
The fact that so much research today is paid for by grants from the government may act to intensify this herd effect. When the scientific estabhlishment decides that global warming is caused in large part by human activities, the scientists to whom grant proposals are sent for peer review are very unlikely to commend proposals from people regarded as skeptics.
I don't know what can be done about this, except to always take claims of scientific concensus with many grains of salt. After all, Ptolemaic, earth-centered, astronomy was the establishment position of astronomers for a thousand years.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Outstanding discussion of a key obstacle to medical reform
Ezra Klein, who writes for the Washington Post, has done a very fine analysis of a key obstacle to medical reforms (as I pointed out on this blog some time ago): namely, many people do not understand how much health insurance is already costing them. And he proposes a remedy that makes sense. Read his column here.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Medical reform: the continuing saga
Although I would not have expected this, it seems to me that the reform bill now discussed in the Senate is being greatly improved as it goes through the mill. I still have doubts whether passing it would be a good idea, but two of the recent changes are undermining these doubts:
First, the proposal to allow people to buy into Medicare starting at age 55.
Second, allowing people to buy insurance the same way as government employees (including members of Congress), with the same government agency negotiating some standard contracts that would be available from insurance companies throughout the country.
The beauty of these changes lies first of all in their radical reduction in complexity from the previous provisions for a "public" option, an option which never did make much sense to me. Second, they do not require creation of a new government administration system. Third, these steps might indeed be only the first in a series which would ultimately end up with universal coverage in a system that approximates the single-payer provisions in numerous foreign countries.
Supporters of the legislation before these two changes thought that, bad as the bill was, it would be a camel's nose in the tent that would make further reforms easier. I was afraid that the bill might have the opposite effect, helping to freeze the current dysfunctional system in concrete. With these two changes, the camel may be beginning to enter the tent.
First, the proposal to allow people to buy into Medicare starting at age 55.
Second, allowing people to buy insurance the same way as government employees (including members of Congress), with the same government agency negotiating some standard contracts that would be available from insurance companies throughout the country.
The beauty of these changes lies first of all in their radical reduction in complexity from the previous provisions for a "public" option, an option which never did make much sense to me. Second, they do not require creation of a new government administration system. Third, these steps might indeed be only the first in a series which would ultimately end up with universal coverage in a system that approximates the single-payer provisions in numerous foreign countries.
Supporters of the legislation before these two changes thought that, bad as the bill was, it would be a camel's nose in the tent that would make further reforms easier. I was afraid that the bill might have the opposite effect, helping to freeze the current dysfunctional system in concrete. With these two changes, the camel may be beginning to enter the tent.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Criminalizing a drink of water
The pursuit of “illegal aliens” has become a high government priority. Congress has made it illegal to hire an “undocumented” alien who has managed to get into the U.S. Although discrimination in other contexts is illegal, for the undocumented it is mandatory.
Impeccable logic underlies this requirement. A major reason people want to move here is our employment opportunities and higher wages. If you cannot be hired, sneaking in is much less attractive.
Mandatory employment discrimination cannot do the whole job, especially since enforcement has been sporadic and half-hearted. So auxiliary measures are needed, and a recent court decision in Arizona illustrates what some of these measures might look like.
In June, a federal jury convicted Walt Staton of littering. His “littering” consisted of leaving jugs of fresh drinkable water in an area near the Mexican border for entering aliens who might otherwise have died from dehydration (as a great many indeed have).
The 27 year old graduate student was sentenced to 300 hours of community service, a year’s probation, and banned from the National Wildlife Refuge in which he had done his evil deeds. Now he has refused to do the community service and the judge is threatening to send him to prison.
The logic behind making it a criminal act to give someone a drink of water is also impeccable. If more “illegals” die from thirst, this will make crossing into the U.S. less attractive and reduce the burden of policing the border.
It is clear what the next step needs to be: we must make it a criminal act to give or sell food to anybody who cannot document that they are a citizen or here with official government approval.
After that, I am not certain. Allowing or requiring everybody to shoot down undocumented people on the spot might, by more soft-hearted Americans, be regarded as going a little too far. But this too would be a logical response to a problem that so many people are concerned about.
I guess the real question is: once we assume that such a category of people as “illegal aliens” is a legal and moral possibility, where do we draw the line in doing something about it?
An alternative which would not require us to draw any such line would be to abandon the whole concept of an illegal alien and regard every human being on the planet as a member of the human race and a citizen of the world. Inside the United States no matter what state we were born in, we automatically acquire state citizenship merely by moving there. Thus I was a citizen of Michigan for 36 years despite having been born in Oregon, and my wife is a citizen of Oregon despite her birth in Connecticut. There is no reason why this system could not work at the world level, and I am sure that at some future time we will have such a system.
In the meantime we have to live with a different system, but we need to recognize just how crazy this system is and the impossible choices with which it confronts us.
Christians, for example, including fundamentalists (perhaps especially fundamentalists!), need to think about the implications of their faith here:
“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me a drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me ….” (Matthew 25:35)
Does anybody really want to live in a world where it is illegal to give a fellow human being a drink of water?
Impeccable logic underlies this requirement. A major reason people want to move here is our employment opportunities and higher wages. If you cannot be hired, sneaking in is much less attractive.
Mandatory employment discrimination cannot do the whole job, especially since enforcement has been sporadic and half-hearted. So auxiliary measures are needed, and a recent court decision in Arizona illustrates what some of these measures might look like.
In June, a federal jury convicted Walt Staton of littering. His “littering” consisted of leaving jugs of fresh drinkable water in an area near the Mexican border for entering aliens who might otherwise have died from dehydration (as a great many indeed have).
The 27 year old graduate student was sentenced to 300 hours of community service, a year’s probation, and banned from the National Wildlife Refuge in which he had done his evil deeds. Now he has refused to do the community service and the judge is threatening to send him to prison.
The logic behind making it a criminal act to give someone a drink of water is also impeccable. If more “illegals” die from thirst, this will make crossing into the U.S. less attractive and reduce the burden of policing the border.
It is clear what the next step needs to be: we must make it a criminal act to give or sell food to anybody who cannot document that they are a citizen or here with official government approval.
After that, I am not certain. Allowing or requiring everybody to shoot down undocumented people on the spot might, by more soft-hearted Americans, be regarded as going a little too far. But this too would be a logical response to a problem that so many people are concerned about.
I guess the real question is: once we assume that such a category of people as “illegal aliens” is a legal and moral possibility, where do we draw the line in doing something about it?
An alternative which would not require us to draw any such line would be to abandon the whole concept of an illegal alien and regard every human being on the planet as a member of the human race and a citizen of the world. Inside the United States no matter what state we were born in, we automatically acquire state citizenship merely by moving there. Thus I was a citizen of Michigan for 36 years despite having been born in Oregon, and my wife is a citizen of Oregon despite her birth in Connecticut. There is no reason why this system could not work at the world level, and I am sure that at some future time we will have such a system.
In the meantime we have to live with a different system, but we need to recognize just how crazy this system is and the impossible choices with which it confronts us.
Christians, for example, including fundamentalists (perhaps especially fundamentalists!), need to think about the implications of their faith here:
“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me a drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me ….” (Matthew 25:35)
Does anybody really want to live in a world where it is illegal to give a fellow human being a drink of water?
***************
This piece has run in the Adrian (Michigan) Daily Telegram and in the Corvallis, Oregon Gazette-Times. On January 7, 2010 it ran on CommonDreams, a major on-line magazine.
Friday, December 4, 2009
An interesting quote from Howard Dean
Howard Dean, former chairman of the Democratic Committee and former candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, is himself a physician. At a town hall meeting in Virginia last summer (according to the Associated Press quoted in the December 4, 2009 Oregonian) he said the following:
"Here's why tort reform is not in the bill [being considered by Congress to reform the medical system]. When you go to pass a really enormous bill like that, the more stuff you put in it the more enemies you make, " Dean said. "The reason tort reform is not in the bill is because the people who wrote it did not want to take on the trial lawyers in addition to everyone else they were taking on, and that is the plain and simple truth."
"Here's why tort reform is not in the bill [being considered by Congress to reform the medical system]. When you go to pass a really enormous bill like that, the more stuff you put in it the more enemies you make, " Dean said. "The reason tort reform is not in the bill is because the people who wrote it did not want to take on the trial lawyers in addition to everyone else they were taking on, and that is the plain and simple truth."
Some thoughts on Ayn Rand
The Wall Streeet Journal has just published an interesting discussion of Ayn Rand, "Does Ayn Rand Hurt the Market?" Read it here.
For a number of years I taught a one hour class at Adrian College in which we read and discussed Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged. The students who took the class were always an intelligent and highly diverse group, and not just those who were predisposed to agree with her. One notable student, one of my favorites despite his political orientation at the time which was pretty much left wing, told me he took the class because his advisor told him "it would test his values." And I think it did.
Although I found Atlas Shrugged to be an excellent book to provoke student thought and discussions, my own feelings about Rand's outlook were and are very mixed. I first heard of her and read Atlas Shrugged when I was a first year graduate student in political science at The Johns Hopkins University. She was coming in to give a talk there and I always like to read something before going to hear the author talk.
The book profoundly depressed me at the time, which didn't take much doing as my first year at Hopkins was not a very happy one. Uprooted from all my friends from undergraduate days at Willamette University in Oregon and from my parents, who were living in Honolulu, I was lonely and felt socially uncomfortable at Hopkins. I was living in a rented room in a not very hospitable private home near the University. With no cooking facilities available to me, when all the University dining halls shut down for Christmas vacation I ended up eating Christmas dinner all by myself in a Chinese restaurant----the only place I could find open! (And I still like Chinese food today, in spite of this!)
This was not an ideal posture in which to plunge into Rand's book, but of course I had no idea what I was getting into. I think now that my very negative reaction to the book was due to its combination of a very sour and indeed horrible philosophy of life with a very useful and sharp distinction between voluntary associations and involuntary associations. Government is, of course, fundamentally an involuntary association, as I have discussed in my four books available on-line for free reading, linking, and even reprinting. (Click here to access them.)
Rand's big mistake, I think, was in her failure to see how important government is in setting the context within which voluntary associations on any scale are possible by protecting property rights, enforcing contracts (which are one way of creating voluntary associations), and enforcing basic rules of the road to prevent voluntary associations from interacting with one another in ways which are destructive to the general welfare (such as the recent economic meltdown in the U.S. and elsewhere).
Nonetheless I am very grateful to her for helping me grope my way, during the next ten years, to the general classification of human associations which is summarized in the "periodic table of associations" in my first two books mentioned above.
I remain of two minds about Rand. On the one hand, I still find her general philosophy quite perverse, and Atlas Shrugged can hardly be considered great literature. On the other hand it contained great insights into the nature of human associations, and on top of that, Rand made money from her books. Lots of money! As an author myself, this is one quality of hers that I would dearly have loved to emulate.
For a number of years I taught a one hour class at Adrian College in which we read and discussed Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged. The students who took the class were always an intelligent and highly diverse group, and not just those who were predisposed to agree with her. One notable student, one of my favorites despite his political orientation at the time which was pretty much left wing, told me he took the class because his advisor told him "it would test his values." And I think it did.
Although I found Atlas Shrugged to be an excellent book to provoke student thought and discussions, my own feelings about Rand's outlook were and are very mixed. I first heard of her and read Atlas Shrugged when I was a first year graduate student in political science at The Johns Hopkins University. She was coming in to give a talk there and I always like to read something before going to hear the author talk.
The book profoundly depressed me at the time, which didn't take much doing as my first year at Hopkins was not a very happy one. Uprooted from all my friends from undergraduate days at Willamette University in Oregon and from my parents, who were living in Honolulu, I was lonely and felt socially uncomfortable at Hopkins. I was living in a rented room in a not very hospitable private home near the University. With no cooking facilities available to me, when all the University dining halls shut down for Christmas vacation I ended up eating Christmas dinner all by myself in a Chinese restaurant----the only place I could find open! (And I still like Chinese food today, in spite of this!)
This was not an ideal posture in which to plunge into Rand's book, but of course I had no idea what I was getting into. I think now that my very negative reaction to the book was due to its combination of a very sour and indeed horrible philosophy of life with a very useful and sharp distinction between voluntary associations and involuntary associations. Government is, of course, fundamentally an involuntary association, as I have discussed in my four books available on-line for free reading, linking, and even reprinting. (Click here to access them.)
Rand's big mistake, I think, was in her failure to see how important government is in setting the context within which voluntary associations on any scale are possible by protecting property rights, enforcing contracts (which are one way of creating voluntary associations), and enforcing basic rules of the road to prevent voluntary associations from interacting with one another in ways which are destructive to the general welfare (such as the recent economic meltdown in the U.S. and elsewhere).
Nonetheless I am very grateful to her for helping me grope my way, during the next ten years, to the general classification of human associations which is summarized in the "periodic table of associations" in my first two books mentioned above.
I remain of two minds about Rand. On the one hand, I still find her general philosophy quite perverse, and Atlas Shrugged can hardly be considered great literature. On the other hand it contained great insights into the nature of human associations, and on top of that, Rand made money from her books. Lots of money! As an author myself, this is one quality of hers that I would dearly have loved to emulate.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
More free music
I am continuing to post free music for viewing or downloading on my new website. From now on I will not be announcing new posts on this blog, so if you are interested just check the website once in a while.
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