The Myopic Chords Of Memory

We all have a tendency to believe that if something was there when we were a kid it has always been there. That creepy house down the street, the one we were scarred of when we were kids, undoubtedly scared our parents and grandparents in their day. It is an interesting trick of the mind, and an interesting trick of history.

But here’s the thing, some people know it. Some people know that if they put up a statue today, or adopt a slogan, future generations will assume that statue or slogan has always been there.

Here’s a good example. The words “In God We Trust” were first placed on American money in 1864, and adopted as the nation’s official motto in 1956. Despite this many politicians wrongfully claim that the motto dates back to the nation’s founding. For example Republican Presidential candidate Ben Carson has said that “’In God We Trust’ is in our founding documents, … its on our money,” therefore we are a Christian nation. Carson, and many other politicians, is able to get away with saying these because most people assume that since the phrase is on our money it has always been on our money. As noted it has not. In fact the first coin printed in the new nation, the “Fugio” penny had the motto “We Are One” on one side, and “Mind Your Business” on the other.

The Christian groups that pressed Lincoln to put “In God We Trust” on money know that future generations would assume that the phrase had always been there.

Many cities are currently debating the presence and placement of statues honoring confederate soldiers. For example there is a statue of the Confederate General, and notorious “Raider,” John Hunt Morgan in a prominent downtown square in Lexington. Many people suggest that Morgan was a notorious racists and advocate of slavery and the Confederacy and should not have a place of honor in the city. Others predictably argue that the statue is part of our history. This of course suggests that the statue has probably always been there. In fact it was erected in 1911.
Another common historical fallacy is that our fore-fathers were wise and even-handed. Many long for the “good old days” when our politicians were honest and honorable. Of course anyone who reads history knows that this is hokum. Politicians throughout history have been petty and self-serving. Our ancestors were no less venal than we are.

The Christian leaders that pressured Abraham Lincoln to put the phrase “In God We Trust” on money were trying to make a political point, and the same holds true for the Christian leaders who pressured Congress to make the phrase the national motto in the 1950’s. This is also true of those who placed Confederate statues across the South.

Many of the statues of Confederate generals that are in town squares across the south were placed in the early 1900’s by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Almost as soon as the guns fell silent after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse, southern writers began to spread the myth of the “Lost Cause,” and the idea that the Civil War had not been about slavery. It was a wonderful and largely successful bit of revisionist history. Novels and plays were written celebrating the daring-do of dashing young cavaliers fighting to preserve the honor and way of life of the south. (If that sounds like something out of “Gone With The Wind” it’s because that novel was one of the last, but also one of the most successful, examples of this genre.)

The United Daughters of the Confederacy was one of the leading organizations spreading this nonsense. Their chosen medium was celebratory statuary honoring local confederate heroes. In 1911 the Daughters erected the statue of John Hunt Morgan in Lexington.

Morgan was a Confederate office and most famous for his “raid” into the Union states of Indiana and Ohio. Morgan’s Raiders bravely battled the young boys and old men of the Indiana and Ohio Home Guard, and raided city and county treasuries. Morgan’s main objective was to terrorize the citizens of the north. He was briefly successful, but was eventually caught. He escaped and returned to fight but was killed in battle in Tennessee in 1864. The best part, the raid was unsanctioned by the Confederacy and in direct violation of orders from Morgan’s commander, General Braxton Bragg. For this dubious record he is honored outside of the historic Old Courthouse in Lexington.

The statue remains because it is old and we assume that it was placed their for the noblest of reasons, and not to glorify a scoundrel fighting for a rightfully lost cause.

Technology Drives Wealth Up

Throughout history technological changes have driven the distribution of wealth upward. What I mean by this is that new technologies often displace lower skilled workers and put more money in the hands of the owners of business, or what Marx called “the means of production.” Here are a couple of examples.

Once upon a time farms employed many dozens, if not hundreds, of people. Animals required care, fields had to be prepared, crops planted and tended, and then harvested. It typically took dozens of people to reap and gather a harvest on just a few acres of land. Until about 1870 a majority of Americans lived and worked on farms, and this was probably the norm across the world. But then farms began to use machinery, at first horse drawn threshers and reapers, but then mechanical tractors, and more and more things became automated. Agricultural employment decline inversely as automation increased. Today farms employ very few people. Most farmers operate huge complex combines that can till the fields and plant the crops in the spring, spread fertilizer and pesticides in the early summer, and harvest the crops in the fall. (I’m talking hear of the large agribusinesses that I grew up around in central Illinois.)

Once upon a time the farmer had to share part of the proceeds from the sale of crops with all the people who worked on the farm. But now the farmer gains all the income from farming and doesn’t have to share with “field hands.” This is not to say that farmers are getting rich, because they still have to pay for equipment, and farming is notoriously fickle and weather dependent. But my point is that money from farming is no longer shared among the farmer and many workers. It all stays in the farmer’s pocket. So the technological change has shifted the money generated from farming up.
Another more recent example – and one that I have personal experience with – involves lawyers and legal secretaries. When I began practicing law virtually every lawyer had a secretary. A lawyer would typically draft a document by hand on a legal pad and give it to the secretary to type. He would then review and revise the document and send it back for final editing. The law is very word and writing intensive, so secretaries were vital to the success of a law firm. Many large firms had more secretaries than lawyers. I worked at a large Seattle law firm where each attorney had a secretary, each section had a secretary, and there was both a day and night secretarial pool. I would estimate that there were just over twice as many secretaries as lawyers.

I began practicing law in the mid 1990’s, just as personal computers came into widespread use. All of my fellow law students used computers and did their own typing. When they got jobs they didn’t have the same need for a legal secretary as an older attorney. And so law firms began to trim secretarial staff. Now it’s common for one secretary to work for two or three attorneys, and they are now called a legal assistant since they no longer spend much time typing. According to one report I found, the legal secretary market has decline by about 10% per year since the mid-1990’s.
Now lawyers do all their own typing and don’t have legal secretaries. They have been replaced by Microsoft Word. And lawyers no longer have to share the money they get from a client with a legal secretary. Granted they have to buy a computer and software, but that’s a fraction of the cost of a legal secretary. So more of the money received from a case or a client goes to the lawyer than the staff. So the wealth accumulation shifts upward. According to studies, lawyer income has been increasing steadily since the late 1990’s.

My final example involved large scale industrial manufacturing, like making cars. There was a Jeep TV commercial from a few years back (I think it was shown during the Super Bowl) that began by showing jeeps being made during World War Two. The factory floor is covered with people, bolting and welding parts onto the vehicle on the assembly line. The ad then shows some scenes with jeeps over the years, then shows the exact same plant, outside of Toledo Ohio, where Jeeps are made today. There are a number of huge industrial robots, but not a single person in view. American automakers make roughly the same number of cars they did in 1950, but with a fraction of the workforce. There are fewer line workers, so more of the money received from each vehicle goes to people further up the line in the company. This is a trend that has played out across the manufacturing sector. Improved automation has been going on for years, but accelerated in the 1980’s with the increased use of industrial computers and robots, and the trend has only accelerated with improved computers and industrial machinery.

In the United States real wages have been stagnant since the late 1970’s, while corporate profits have grown, reaching near record highs in the last decade. One is clearly a product of the other. Fewer workers mean higher income up the corporate ladder, and more profits for shareholders.
The common counter argument is that when one industry fades another takes its place. When, for example, cars replaced horses, far more jobs were created than were lost. People lost jobs working in stables, but new jobs were created in auto plants and auto repair shops. In fact there were probably far more new jobs dealing with cars then old jobs dealing with horses. But there are two things to consider. The first is that there is a time shift. A worker who loses a job in a stable doesn’t walk down to the auto assembly line the next day and take a new job. (A few might, but most won’t.) Second, and perhaps more important, many of the new jobs are at a different skill level than the old jobs, typically a higher skill level. A car mechanic is far more skilled than a stable boy. And not every stable boy can master the skills of an auto mechanic. So everyone who loses their jobs might not find a comparable new job.

Similarly, people argue that as computer programs replaced secretaries, clerks, and bookkeepers, new jobs were created for programmers. But a computer programmer is at a much different skill level than a secretary, book-keeper or clerk. And unlike the transition from horse to cars, only a few hundred computer programmers created software that eliminated millions of secretarial jobs. So even those legal secretaries with the skills to become programmers could not find new jobs in that field.

This trend raises a number of very interesting questions, which I will raise here, and hopefully answer later.

What happens if this trend continues? Will it mean the “end of work” for millions of people? And what to do with those people who are displaced by technology and can’t find new jobs?

What does this mean for income inequality? This trend continues to drive wealth up, further exacerbating income inequality. Is there a point where there needs to be structural changes to deal with this?

I hope to answer these and other question sin the near future. Stay tuned.

The Extent of Our Control

We are all dust motes, floating through the air, buffeted by forces far far beyond our control. But as human beings we don’t want to believe it. We want to believe that we have some degree of control over our lives and the world we live in.

I thought about this as I watched the most recent Republican Presidential debate. They were talking about the economy and about how their plans would revive the economy. I’ve listened to politicians most of my adult life talk about how their policies will impact the economy, and I’ve spend as much time watching and wondering at how little impact government policy has on the economy. In the last six years or so we have heard Republican politicians confidentially claim that the health care reform law known as Obamacare was going to stifle job creation and crater the economy. It flat out didn’t happen. And it didn’t happen because government policies like that have only marginal impact on the economy. They do have some impact, but it is never as much as most politicians say.

The reality is that government policies have surprisingly little impact on our day to day lives. There are certainly some cases where government policy does have a major impact. If you are gay you were denied the right to marry until the recent Supreme Court decision. Now you can marry. That is a significant impact on the lives and happiness of a great many people. But the other reality is that if you are not gay the Supreme Court ruling has no impact on your life.

The reality is that the world is a big complex place with lots and lots of moving parts. The government can have an impact in certain areas, but a great deal of those moving parts keep moving without, or perhaps even in spite of, government action. The economy is made up of millions of consumers buying things and millions (or perhaps only hundreds of thousands) of businesses making and selling things. Government rules can have an impact, but the reality is that things keep getting made and bought because people want things.

The American consumer economy is a vast chaotic place. Products come and go, fads come and go, tastes changes. The ideas of a few tech geeks can have a greater impact on our lives that the ideas of the world’s most powerful politicians.

When I began my legal career most attorneys had their own secretary, and large firms actually had secretarial pools of secretaries. Now they don’t. Most law firms have a few secretaries/legal assistants assigned to each section. I would hazard a guess that in the last twenty years the legal market has eliminated a couple of million legal secretaries. Why? Computers and word processing software. Most attorneys now do their own writing, on their own computers. They no longer draft a letter or memorandum by hand then have a secretary type it up, then review it, etc, until the final product is produced. Attorney’s now do it all themselves. Bill Gates and Paul Allen had a greater impact on the American workplace that every politician and every law since the popularization of the personal computer and word processing software.

Most of us realize, deep in the pit of our stomach, that we have almost no control over the world we live in. We are buffeted by eddies and currents, tides and winds. Apple unveils a new phone and our world changes yet again. It is a disquieting feeling. And, in my opinion it is getting worse. We all know that the industry in which we work can change overnight. Some computer geek in Silicon Valley can create a new program that will make our job obsolete. Secretaries have been replaced by computers, factory workers have been replaced by industrial robots. Amazon is talking about shipping packages by drone, which will eliminate the jobs of thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands, of delivery drivers. Welcome to the brave new word.

It’s a new world and we don’t like it one bit. We want to feel like we have some control over our lives. And the one place where we do have some control is over our government. We elect the people that run our government. Our votes control who is President and who is in Congress. So we, to some degree, do control the government.

But, here’s the thing, the government doesn’t really have as much control over things as we would like to think. If Amazon decides to ship by drone, no government policy will save those delivery jobs. Just like no government policy can save those factory jobs replaced by industrial robots, or those secretarial jobs replaced by Microsoft Word. Or, quite frankly, those retail jobs replaced by internet retailers like Amazon. But we don’t like that, so we lash out at the one place where we do have some control, which is the government. We are mad at government for not protecting us from a changing world. But the government can’t do anything, because the government did not cause those changes. And so our anger gets deeper and deeper.

Hayek In the Rear View Mirror

Friedrich Hayek is one of the patron saints of modern libertarianism. He wrote a book in 1944, called The Road to Serfdom, that predicted that western societies were going to fall sway to totalitarianism. He said that any level of economic planning would not work and so would require greater and greater government control, until inevitably, the government would completely take over.

It is a theory that is profoundly wrong, as even the most casual observation of the events since World War Two show, but one that still drives a great deal of modern conservative politics. Both Rand Paul and Paul Ryan are fans of Hayek, and both have stated that any government involvement in the economy is doomed to fail.

I analyzed this topic from the book in some detail in a recent article in Alternet. My title was Hayek in the Rear View Mirror, but they changed it to: Big Economic Theory Underpinning Libertarian Economics Is Total Baloney. Their title is more to the point, but mine was more poetic.

Minimum Wage and Unemployment

Republicans consistently say that raising the minimum wage will hurt employment. If that is true it should show up in the overall employment data. If raising the minimum wage hurt employment then unemployment should go up after the minimum wage is raised. So the unemployment rate should be higher in the months after the wage is raised.

The following chart sets out the change in unemployment rate in the months after the minimum wage was changed.

Change in Unemployment and Minimum wage

[Here’s a link to a bigger version of the chart: http://thedisappointedoptimist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Change-in-Unemployment-and-Minimum-wage.pdf]

The national minimum wage was established in 1938. It has been changed 28 times since then. It has been raised 26 times, and lowered 2 times. Unfortunately the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not have data before 1950, so we don’t have records of the impact of the raise in the minimum wage before, but since 1950 the wage has been changed 26 times. It has been raised 24 times, and lowered twice.

If raising the minimum wage forces employers to lay off workers then the opposite should be true. Lowering it should spur hiring. But the scant statistics we have don’t really support this. The minimum wage was lowered from $1.25 per hour to $1.15 per hour in September 1964. The next month the unemployment rate was the same. It went down slightly, from 5.1% to 4.8 percent the next month, then up slightly to 5.0% the month after that. The wag was lowered from $1.60 to $1.30 in February 1969, but in the following three months the unemployment rate remained exactly the same at 3.4%. So, from the two statistically insignificant samples we have, lowering the rate doesn’t have much of an impact on hiring. But two data points are not persuasive.

Turning now to the twenty four raises in the minimum wage. Republicans make the claim that raising the minimum wage as an absolute, without nuance or equivocation. If that is true then the unemployment rate should rise every single time the wage is increased. But this has not happened. From the chart it is clear that the unemployment rate has gone down in many cases, in up in many cases. In the first month after the change, the unemployment rate went down ten times, and up eight times. So employment increased ten times after the minimum wage was increased, but it did decrease eight times after the raise. It stayed the same eight times. So the claim that raising the wage will, absolutely and without fail, lead to rises in unemployment is clearly not true.

One month is not a statistically valid sample, so I looked at unemployment over a three month period after the rate was raised. In most cases the rates jumped around a bit. In nine cases the unemployment rate went down and stayed down over a three month period. In seven cases in went up, and stayed up. In most other cases it jumped around. A few times it went up then down, and a few times it went down then up.

One important point to note: if you look at the unemployment rate charts of any year you will notice that they are constantly moving, going up and down. There are innumerably factors that impact the employment rate. These rates are “seasonally adjusted” so they take in to consideration the increased retail employment in November and December, and the increased construction employment in the summer months.

Based on this data I can say that raising the minimum wage does not cause unemployment. It is a canard. It sounds logical, but statistics do not support the contention.

Ten Books that Changed My Life

Someone posted this prompt on Facebook: what are the ten books that changed your life? Most people just listed ten books, but as I thought about it for a while, I decided that each might benefit from a brief explanation. Anyway, here’s my list:

1.   The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer.

Before I read this book in my junior year in high school I thought that history was boring and meaningless. This book first cured the boring part. It was the first history that I’d read that read like a novel. It was (after the first 100 pages or so) fast paced and full of action. It was also not meaningless, perhaps because a number of my uncles had served in the War. Before reading this book I couldn’t stand history, after reading it I couldn’t get enough of history. I even got a master’s degree in history because of it.

2.   Crime and Human Nature, by James Q. Wilson & Richard Hernstein.

Are people basically good or basically bad? That’s really the wrong question. The right question is: how do people really behave? What do statistics about crime and human behavior tell us about human nature? According to this book, about one third of all young men will commit a crime when they are young, but only about 5 to 10 percent of all males are criminals – susceptible to long term nefarious and illegal behavior – and about 1 to 2 percent of all women (and for women a large percentage of crimes are committed at the behest of men). This means that most people are good most of the time, but it does mean that a few people are really bad. This should influence how we deal with other people, and approach crime control, and has many other public policy implications. But for me this insight changed how I thought about humanity.

3.   Carnage and Culture, by Victor Davis Hanson

Why does Western Society dominate the world? According to Jarred Diamond, in his book Guns Germs and Steel, it is a bit of a fluke. But according to Hanson, who wrote this book in response to Diamond’s book, the reason is because of the Greek tradition (that dominates the Western world) of rational thought, free inquiry, and democracy. It is not because of Guns, Germs, or Steel. It is not a fluke. It was because the West had developed the ability to think honestly about problems and find the best solution. So the West was able to exploit gunpowder (which had been invented in China for entertainment purposes, i.e. fireworks), and exploit printing (which had been invented in China for decorative purposes) to transmit knowledge. The West was able to exploit Guns and Steel. This concept had a significant impact on my views about world history, culture, and political philosophy.

4.   The Autobiography of Maxim Gorki.

This book combines the pathos of Dickens with the joyous boyhood adventures of Mark Twain, but a dash of clear eyed realism from a master Russian realist. I discovered Gorki from Bukowski (see below), and loved his short stories. When you read them, or this autobiography, you will understand why the Russians rebelled, and perhaps get a glimpse of how it descended first in to utter chaos and then into extreme repression.

5.   Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame, by Charles Bukowski.

Bukowski blew my mind. I didn’t know you could say those things in print, and in funny and entertaining poetry to boot. Bukowski also introduced me to Gorki in his autobiographical novel “Ham on Rye.”

6.   American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880 – 1964, by William Manchester.

Manchester is a brilliant writer, and in this book he had a stake in the game. He felt that General MacArthur saved his life. General Douglas MacArthur was a fascinating guy and lived an amazing life during an epic time in history, so this book covers a lot of ground. I learned about the War in the Pacific (during WWII) from this book. I also learned what it means to chose your battles. MacArthur won in the Pacific by only fighting on those islands that he absolutely needed, and simply ignored the rest. Manchester was a Marine scout in the war and knew that he and probably hundreds of thousands of fellow soldiers (American and Japanese) would have died had MacArthur followed the advice of some and fought on every island.

7.   The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon.

I read a lot of fiction. I might not be obvious from this list, but I do. Somehow in the early 1980’s the more high-brow literary fiction became overly internal, maudlin, and uninteresting and difficult to read. (My sister blames Ray Carver.) This was one of the first modern works of literary fiction that read like an old time action adventure story. It reintroduced my to contemporary literary fiction and showed me what it could do. That said, I still love Graham Green and Thomas Hardy.

8.   Liberating the Gospels, by John Shelby Spong.

To truly understand Christianity you have to understand the Bible, and to understand the Bible you have to understand when, why, and how it was written. Once you understand that, its difficult to believe in ideas like literalism, infallibility, and divinity. Once you understand the development of the Bible, and the development of Christianity, you can see through the fallacies of the views of fundamentalist Christians.

9.   The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature, by Timothy Ferris.

Modern political liberalism developed contemporaneously with the scientific revolution. They actually developed hand in hand, with ideas from one feeding ideas in the other. The same ideas of reason, rationality, deduction and free inquiry that drove new ideas in science also drove new ideas in political philosophy. These changes and discoveries also drove the economy. History shows that open, rational thought (i.e. liberalism) leads to scientific advances, democratic government, and a growing economy. (There are shades of Hanson’s Carnage and Culture within,)

10.   Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.

This is my favorite novel. I felt that I had to include at least one novel simply because I liked it. And it had to be either Dickens or Hemingway, since those are my favorite writers, and for some reason (see Gorki above) I have a fondness for coming of age stories, so that left Hemingway out (his coming of age stories are all short, and collected as the Nick Adams stories). David Copperfield is a close second, and few literary characters are more memorable that Uriah Heep, but overall I like this best.

And Therein Lies the Problem

For evidence that conservatives live in a fantasy land, look no further than the current conflict over teaching American history in suburban Denver.

Recently a Republican school board member in a suburban Denver county offered a proposal for a panel to review the teaching of American History, and called for instructional material that presented “positive aspects [of American history that] promote citizenship, patriotism … respect for authority and respect for individual rights. See, Denver Post, Jefferson School Board.  But the proposal also said that the materials should not “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.” [http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_26601519/jeffco-school-board-curriculum-committee-idea-latest-divisive ]

The Jefferson County School Board member who presented that proposal is named Julie Williams, and is a member of a prominent and politically active conservative Republican family. [http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_26620327/jefferson-county-public-schools-faces-crisis-over-school]

Others have written a great deal about the dangers of white washing history, and that is certainly true. But the real problem here is the glaring internal contradiction in these particular conservative goals. Their two goals – (1) teach patriotism, which undoubtedly in their minds includes reverence for the founders, and (2) discourage teaching anything that would promote civil strife, social disorder or disregard for the law – are mutually contradictory. The reason is that this nation’s founders were revolutionaries. They emphatically disregarded the law, they actively sought social strive, and encouraged civil disorder. So a lesson in patriotism, a lesson about the founders, will be a lesson in civil, social, and political disobedience.

The inescapable conclusion is that Ms. Williams, and the conservative school board members and members of the public who support her, know absolutely nothing about American Revolutionary War history. I suspect that they know next to nothing about any other era in American history, but I don’t have the evidence to support that. But I do have ample evidence to support my claim that she, and many conservatives who think like her, know nothing of American colonial, revolutionary, and constitutional history. And yet they claim deep and abiding admiration for that history.

This is but one of the many contradictions inherent in the conservative belief system. There are many others. They claim reverence for the free market and equal abhorrence for the American media and culture, but the culture is the purest product of a free market. They revere capitalism and venerate traditional families, but it is capitalism that has destroyed the traditional family. The worship the modern economy and loath science, but the modern American economy is a product of science. The list goes on and on: that which they most revere has produces, time and time again, that which they most loath. No wonder they are angry and troubled. And therein lies the problem with American politics.

Criminalized Speech and the First Amendment

A few weeks ago a Lexington doctor named Cameron Schaeffer had an Op/Ed in the Lexington Herald Leader suggesting that the recent hubbub over Donald Sterling’s racists comments indicated that this nation may, in the near future, criminalize free speech. It was a bunch of right wing nonsense that was completely devoid of historical fact. He seemed to suggest that, once upon a time, we have absolutely free speech in this nation, but somehow that has changed. Here’s a link to his essay: Is the Sterling Ordeal a Step Towards Criminalizing Speech. [Note the Lexington Herald Leader often removes links.]

The essay was absurd, and I felt like somebody had to point out his blatant historical errors. And that somebody was me. Here’s my response: US History Full of Censorship.

I am always shocked that people who are supposedly educated can be so uninformed.

Rand Paul and Groucho Marx

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) was recently selected as on of Time Magazine’s 100 most Influential People. There was a brief blurb written about him by fellow Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell. Paul also came up on a page with various “tools” used by a few of the Time 100, which included Rand Paul’s scalpel. Before becoming a U.S. Senator, Paul was an ophthalmologist and frequently performed eye surgeries, including removing cataracts, and he noted the satisfaction in restoring a patient’s sight. But he also noted that being a doctor taught him the value of evaluating problems and symptoms objectively, and said that he tried to be as objective in his approach to politics. He even quoted Groucho Marx.

“In medicine we try to diagnose a problem and then look for a solution. There’s a Groucho Marx comment that politics is sometimes the opposite–politicians misdiagnose problems and apply the wrong solutions. But being an eye surgeon reminds me to take a more analytical approach.”

More analytical? Like blindly following disproven theories?

I laughed, but not because of the Marx quote. Rand Paul is an adherent of what is known as the Austrian School of economics. The Austrian School is an extreme form of free market fundamentalism that believes that economic markets should be nearly totally unregulated. It is called the Austrian School because the early developers were Austrian economists, including two named Fredrick Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. Many conservative politicians are enamored by the Austrian School, but curiously enough very few real economists, even deeply conservative economists, follow the Austrian School. This is probably because it has never worked in the real world, and most real economists know this. If you look at the world you can see that there are nations with highly unregulated economies. Those nations are often grouped as Third World nations. There is obviously too much regulation or government control, as every former communist country realized and as many European countries also realized before scaling back. But those countries that let the wealthy avoid taxes and let businesses avoid economic, environmental, and work place safety regulations, are not thriving. So the Austrian School of economics is pure theory.

Rand Paul’s views on foreign policy are what some have called neo-isolationist. His father (Congressman Ron Paul, R-TX) was a total isolationist, but Rand is much more nuanced. But his foreign policy views trouble most main-stream politicians, including many Republican and Conservative politicians. They rightfully note that this nation tried to disengage from international affairs after the First World War, with disastrous results. So Paul’s foreign policy views are based not on a rational analysis of the real world, and its myriad problems, but on a petty and truculent disdain for the rest of the world. It is a view based on a fantasy world, and not a rational analysis of the real world.

Paul’s views of history are also based more on a fantasy version of history than real history. Not long ago Senator Paul went to Howard University and lectured the students on why they should be Republicans. The main reason was that Lincoln (the first Republican President) freed the slaves and that many of the early advocates of the Civil Rights movement were Republicans, particularly from the northeast. He also noted that it was largely Democrats who opposed abolition, back in the middle of the 19th Century, and Southern Democrats who opposed the Civil Rights movement in the middle of the 20th Century. All of this is absolutely true, but Paul seemed to have forgotten Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” which was designed to turn southern Democrats into Republicans based on racial resentment. Paul didn’t know this but his audience at Howard, one of the jewels in the crown of historically black colleges, knew modern history very well. They knew very well that Republicans used to be for civil rights, but the modern Republican Party, since Nixon, has been home to racists, and has aggressively pushed to end programs that help minorities including blacks participate in society, including attempts to scale back the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and to restrict black voting. So Paul’s views on history are also not based on a rational analysis of fact, but on a rigid adherence to theory.

It was interesting that he quoted Groucho Marx, because his statement was comical.

The Simple Science of Climate Change

The critics of the science of global climate change act as if climatology and the science if global climate change are somehow complicated, obscure, or esoteric. They also act as if it is a new-fangled theory, dreamed up by modern day Luddites. Both are simply not true.

The science of climate change is very basic, very simple. Most people have personal experience with the underlying science behind “global warming.” Most of us have done a simple science experiment, probably in High School, where we added salt into water and noted that it changes the freezing point. The basic idea is that an impurity in a solution changes the physical properties of the solution. Adding salt to water changes the freezing point.

Air is a gaseous solution of nitrogen, oxygen, argon and some trace elements. There is also gaseous – or vaporous – water in the air. Changes in these elements, or in other impurities in the air, change the physical properties of the air, particularly its ability to retain heat.

Believe it or not, must people have first-hand experience with this phenomena. Humidity, which is the measure of water vapor in air, changes the ability of air to retain heat. Most everyone knows this. The humidity in the air is why it typically stays warm at night in the summer. If, for example, it gets up to 86 degrees on a humid summer day, it might only cool off to the low 70’s at night. But if it gets up to the same 86 degrees on an early fall day, a day with low humidity, it may cool off into the 50’s at night. Anyone who has spent time in the desert has also experienced this effect. It may get into the 90’s or 100’s during the day, but it often cools down into the 40’s and 50’s at night. Places in the tropics, where the humidity is high, may also reach the upper 90’s during the day, but only cool into the low 80’s at night. The reason is that the water vapor in the air helps the air retain heat, or in the case of the desert, the lack of moisture in the air allows the air to cool quickly once the sun is down.

This is part of what is known as the greenhouse effect. The idea was first developed by the French scientist Joseph Fourier in the 1820’s. A British scientist named John Tyndall did studies in the 1850’s that helped explain why water vapor in the atmosphere held heat. He also said that other impurities in the air, including carbon, could help the atmosphere retain heat. Finally a Swedish named Svante Arrhenius put it all together in what is now known as the “Greenhouse effect”. There are two components. One component is that the impurities in the air alter the heat retention properties of the air, and the other component is that the impurities in the air alter the ability of the atmosphere to block infrared radiation emanating from the planet. So humidity allows the air to retain heat. Arrhenius did his work in the later early 1900’s.

Arrhenius also noted that increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would cause the atmosphere to retain heat. Arrhenius actually thought that heating the atmosphere would be a good thing, and would help prevent a new ice age which might destabilize humanity. In a book called “Worlds in the Making” published in English in 1908 he said that if “the quantity of carbonic acid [CO2] in the air should sink to one-half its present percentage, the temperature would fall by about 4°; a diminution to one-quarter would reduce the temperature by 8°. On the other hand, any doubling of the percentage of carbon dioxide in the air would raise the temperature of the earth’s surface by 4°; and if the carbon dioxide were increased fourfold, the temperature would rise by 8°.” (p53) [See, e.g. the American Institute of Physics, which has an excellent history of the science behind Global Climate Change at: http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.htm]

His numbers were off for a number of reasons, including the ability of the oceans to absorb carbon dioxide, but his description of the basic science of global warming, or climate change, was dead on. Raising the amount of carbon dioxide (and other carbon based impurities) in the atmosphere alters the ability of the atmosphere to retain heat and causes the atmosphere, and the planet as a whole, to heat up.

This has been the dominant model of climatology ever since (with a brief foray into global cooling, as discussed below). So we have known for well over 100 years that adding carbon to the atmosphere would warm the planet. The terminology changed recently because it was clear that the impact was not simply warming. The additional heat in the atmosphere manifests itself in disruption of normal weather patterns, and can result, as it did the past winter, in unusually cold temperatures in some regions. So now we use the more accurate terminology of “climate change” but the scientific principles remain the same. They are simple, and well established scientific principles, and they are principles that have been around for over 100 years.