My favorite example of causation vs correlation

A friend and I were talking about Dr Wakefield, of anti-vaccination fame, and it reminded me of this, from an open letter top the Kansas School Board

 

So, one morning, about a month ago, I finished building this…

All the bits went in like this.

It all fits into the desk cart like so.  The 2 monitor stand and bracket worked out really well…

…so I mostly use it like this.

The same morning I built the computer, I started on this:

I was able to use the Golden Proportion in 7 different places.  Mr Fibonacci would be pleased.

I was aiming for this. Pretty close, yeah?  This unit is is slightly narrower, so

The Geek v. Nerd Debate: solved

Bamboo and Organic Cotton Clothing – Not perfect, but very, very good.

When it comes to bamboo and organic cotton clothing, it’s important to not let the perfect become the enemy of the good. For example, there are excellent choices out there right now for organic tee shirts for women, men and kids. The poster child for bad farming techniques is cotton. Non-organic cotton is possibly the most insecticide sprayed and chemically treated crop in the world. It is then transported great distances to be manufactured into clothing in brutal sweatshops. Even some non-linen hemp and bamboo clothing is manufactured in an outdated, chemically harsh rayon process. Eco-conscious consumers and retailers need to be aware that there is more than one step in making clothing and fabric worthy of an “Organic” label.

At every step in the process, there is a lot of room for improvement over the status quo. Fair Trade policies focus attention on the human side of this by requiring fair wages and safe conditions for workers and fair prices for crops. The Fair Trade certification is very strict and requires sign off on every step of manufacture and production from raw materials to finish product. “Organic” is used on labels more loosely, but is still a valuable term to consumers and retailers alike. For example, certified organic cotton is a vast improvement that means less persistent toxic insecticides, healthy soil management and no synthetic fertilizers.

Things are a little more complicated for bamboo and hemp rayon. Both are especially eco-friendly crops, quick to grow with a very low need for either fertilizer or pesticides. Bamboo in particular grows very quickly with minimal, if any, negative environmental impact. The quality of the fabric rivals silk in comfort and is very effective lightweight, breathable fabric for blocking harmful UV radiation. Organic bamboo is readily available in China, giving it the added advantage of being a locally grown crop exactly where most clothes in the world are made. That said, it’s critical that environmentally safe practices are in place where the plant is converted to fabric. Consumers and retailers looking to support organic products have to ask questions and keep pressure on manufacturers to use safe methods. In the meantime, while none of these products are perfect, organic clothing for women are a vast and welcome improvement over any non-organic alternative.

The Conversation We Almost Never Hear, But should

I think this little chart gets it about right.  Strip away all the baggage,  all the cultural issues and wedge issues and distractions, and this is the real disagreement.  It’s rare that the conversation ever happens in these terms, which is a shame.  Here is a great example of what that conversation sounds like:

http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:video:thedailyshow.com:407480

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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how a super sized military always gets us to the same place

Yesterday, i saw this post  from Eric Martin about the pattern we always follow toward military intervention:

• Step 1: How can the President not at least condemn [Regime X] publicly for its abhorrent actions? A public condemnation is the very least the President can do. It wouldn’t cost much, but it would be an important show of our resolve and support for freedom!
• Step 2 (with Regime X still in place): So what, the President condemned the regime publicly with some harsh words and called it “illegitimate.” Words are cheap and inconsequential. We need sanctions and coordinated efforts to isolate the regime. That will do the trick!
• Step 3 (with Regime X still in place): Sanctions? Regime isolation? Is that all the President is going to do in the face of Regime X’s perfidy? Those timid jabs will never work, and the President’s dithering will make us look weak and lacking in resolve. Our enemies will be emboldened. The President must use our military to deal a swift blow. No one is advocating a prolonged occupation, just a decapitation maneuver, and then a rapid hand off to the indigenous forces for democratic change.
• Step 4 (with Regime X toppled by our military): Now that we’ve committed our military, and brought about regime change, we have a moral obligation to see the mission through to the end. Besides, if we withdraw, chaos will erupt and our enemies will fill the vacuum. We owe it to the locals, we can’t afford to lose face, we can’t show weakness and our credibility depends on staying until a relatively stable, friendly nation emerges from the rubble.
• Step 5 (repeat as needed): We’ve turned the corner, shifted the momentum and victory is within reach. The next six months should prove decisive.

This misses the hardest point of all,  #6)  “If we stop now, it means those who fought and died before have died in vain.”  Welcome to foreverwar.  Matt Yglesias  adds the observation that the US has a lot of problems putting the brakes on between steps 2 and 3.

This eflects the perils of keeping a lot of military “excess capacity” on hand. If someone asks the president of Chile about some egregious human rights abuses happening somewhere and he condemns them, that statement clearly is what it is—a condemnation. If he says “Dictator X should go,” he’s making an ethical observation about the impropriety of so-and-so’s regime. Nobody expects Chile to follow up its words with actions. Sometimes, though, you’ve just got to take a stand in much the way that an editorialist might. But precisely because the United States has a lot of military assets at our disposal that clearly aren’t needed to repel a Canadian invasion, it’s difficult to find a middle ground between turning a blind eye to atrocities and calls for military intervention.

This works like a a self winding clock.  Because we have this enormous military capacity, we tend to see everything through a military lens and prioritize those resources to them.  Today, Fareed Zakaria, on how even modest defense cuts could start to correct that:

Defense budget cuts would force a healthy rebalancing of American foreign policy. Since the Cold War, Congress has tended to fatten the Pentagon while starving foreign policy agencies. As former defense secretary Robert Gates pointed out, there are more members of military marching bands than make up the entire U.S. foreign service. Anyone who has ever watched American foreign policy on the ground has seen this imbalance play out. Top State Department officials seeking to negotiate vital matters arrive without aides and bedraggled after a 14-hour flight in coach. Their military counterparts whisk in on a fleet of planes, with dozens of aides and pots of money to dispense. The late Richard Holbrooke would laugh when media accounts described him as the “civilian counterpart” to Gen. David Petraeus, then head of U.S. Central Command. “He has many more planes than I have cellphones,” Holbrooke would say (and he had many cellphones). The result is a warped American foreign policy, ready to conceive of problems in military terms and present a ready military solution.

 

want more jobs? how about the medium chill plus universal health care.

What would happen if all the people who are stuck in 40 hour a week drone jobs that they can’t leave because they are chained to a health care plan…what if they suddenly were free to start a business of their own or cut back their hours to do the things they really like and not lose their own or their families health insurance?    How many new jobs would that create?  I think a lot more than lowering some marginal tax rate by 3 percent.

I complained a lot during the health care bill debate last year that Democrats and Obama were missing the whole point of having universal health care.  Sure, poor people would get health insurance, which is sweet and decent of us but nobody gets far in American politics appealing to our collective guilt.  For whatever reason that is just the way it is.   Instead, Americans are aspirational when it comes to supporting new laws and programs.  We don’t aspire to be poor and sick and needing a handout.  But we will take a pell grant, a mortgage deduction or a small business loan, right?  If you want to change something in the US, make it in line with this thought:  “Government is here to help those who help themselves.”

I said in 2009 that the administration should’ve called the ACA the “Health Care Freedom Act” and pitched it as the most awesomest way for aspiring entrepreneurs to unchain themselves from dead end jobs and start their own businesses.  Just because you are a responsible parent who wouldn’t take the chance of losing your kids insurance shouldn’t prevent you from starting your own business in the best market economy in the world, right?   Shouldn’t people with diabetes or some other pre-existing condition be able to start their own business, too?   So how about that Unlock the Freedom Enterprise Healthy Family Act of 2010!  fuck yeah! You just go ahead and salute when you call that Obamacare.

The thing is, I forgot all about the people who hate their soul grinding jobs and all the near retirees out there that are too young to get Medicare.  If all those folks cut back, moved on to something that they liked to work at but doesn’t come with health benefits right now or simply retired earlier because 60 year old folks could actually get insurance on their own…that is a boatload of new jobs opening up.  One man’s crushing toil is another’s golden opportunity, after all

So, what is the “medium chill.”  This is the choice for people who work enough to afford the life they want and no more.  I saw it from Julian Sanchez here  first as a response to why tax policy is just not the big economic lever it is supposed to be.  Economics cannot easily account for the fact that not everyone cares about money the same way.

Will Wilkinson has a great piece on medium chill and how  autonomy is profoundly important

Reihan Salam, on medium chill,  entrepreneurs and “killers”:

My own view is that a fairly large number of people are believers in “medium chill” and that a relatively small group of people — I call them “killers” — constitute a neurotic, ultraproductive minority that drives our economy forward, and sometimes backward. Roberts might see these people as deeply mistaken about the sources of the good life. I think of them as differently wired, like the sleepless elite, and their tireless efforts account for many of the things the rest of us enjoy. … I tend to think that our policy environment is not sufficiently pro-killer, but of course others will disagree.

So, what would happen to unemployment if the killers and chillers did their thing.  How many jobs would that open up and create?

Grist follows up today:

I suspect there are many, many medium chillers who would be happy working 30-hour weeks and trading the extra income for leisure time. Or perhaps they’d like to share a job. Or maybe they’d like to work more when they need money and less when they don’t — just “work and get paid for it” when they need to. Those options aren’t workable for most people today because of the specter of health insurance. To deviate from the 40-hour employee model is to take on risk beyond what all but a few brave souls are willing to bear.

Similarly, there are all sorts of people who might like to be “killers” and start their own business or invent something new but are inhibited from taking the leap by the fear of losing or not being able to afford health insurance. Plenty of people take that chance, of course, but how many more would there be if that risk were taken out of the equation?

In short, America’s stupid health-care system prevents people from shifting their work-life balance to less-work-and-more-life, but it also prevents people from doing the inverse! It locks people into a rigid system that serves almost no one (except insurance companies) very well.

To me this looks like an argument for universal, single-payer healthcare. Not only would it achieve better health outcomes for less money than the employer-based system, but it would free people to pursue much more diverse working arrangements. It’s a step toward “de-formalising and de-bureaucratising labour,” as Wilkinson seeks. Work-sharing along the lines of what Germany does would be another nice step.

I bet my math on this is better than the tax cut math. All day.

the debt, summary and chart love

Some useful information on the debt ceiling.  First, this is why it is a really, really bad idea to lose the triple A rating on the world’s reserve currency:

America’s AAA-rating on our sovereign debt is useful to the American people. But it also plays a crucial role in the global economy as a whole. People and firms want access to safe sovereign debt for a variety of purposes. If we lose that rating, can people just start using German debt instead?

Basically, no. There’s not nearly enough German or French or British AAA-rated debt out there to play the kind of global role that U.S. Treasuries currently play. The world’s second largest economy, China, doesn’t have liquid capital markets, and the third largest economy, Japan, has already lost its AAA-rating.

[UPDATE] Incidentally, the “other” AAA-rated countries are the Netherlands, Australia, Austria, Norway, Singapore, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, and Hong Kong. So the issue, as you can see, isn’t so much a shortage of non-U.S. AAA-rated sovereigns, it’s that these are all small countries who are highly rated in part because they don’t have very much debt outstanding.

By Matthew Yglesias

Here is where the deficit is coming from:

The most important thing to understand about what we are going to cut is that there is no way that discretionary spending cuts,  with no change to the tax code, military or entitlements, are not ever going to fix our deficit.  In fact, you could cut the entire discretionary budget to zero  (minus defense) and it still wouldn’t eliminate the deficit.  Here is a good breakdown of what we’d need to cut if we leave all tax expenditures, interest on the debt, Social Security, military pay, and Medicare untouched:

• You just cut the IRS and all the accountants at Treasury, which means that the actual revenue you have to spend is $0.
• The nation’s nuclear arsenal is no longer being watched or maintained
• The doors of federal prisons have been thrown open, because none of the guards will work without being paid, and the vendors will not deliver food, medical supplies, electricity,etc.
• The border control stations are entirely unmanned, so anyone who can buy a plane ticket, or stroll across the Mexican border, is entering the country.  All the illegal immigrants currently in detention are released, since we don’t have the money to put them on a plane, and we cannot actually simply leave them in a cell without electricity, sanitation, or food to see what happens.
• All of our troops stationed abroad quickly run out of electricity or fuel.  Many of them are sitting in a desert with billions worth of equipment, and no way to get themselves or their equipment back to the US.
• Our embassies are no longer operating, which will make things difficult for foreign travellers
• No federal emergency assistance, or help fighting things like wildfires or floods. Sorry, tornado people!  Sorry, wildfire victims!  Try to live in the northeast next time!
• Housing projects shut down, and Section 8 vouchers are not paid. Families hit the streets.
• The money your local school district was expecting at the October 1 commencement of the 2012 fiscal year does not materialize, making it unclear who’s going to be teaching your kids without a special property tax assessment.
• The market for guaranteed student loans plunges into chaos. Hope your kid wasn’t going to college this year!
• The mortgage market evaporates. Hope you didn’t need to buy or sell a house!
• The FDIC and the PBGC suddenly don’t have a government backstop for their funds, which has all sorts of interesting implications for your bank account.
• The TSA shuts down. Yay! But don’t worry about terrorist attacks, you TSA-lovers, because air traffic control shut down too.  Hope you don’t have a vacation planned in August, much less any work travel.
• Unemployment money is no longer going to the states, which means that pretty soon, it won’t be going to the unemployed people.

WHERE THE US SPENDS IT’S TAX DOLLARS:

The US government spends money on programs in 2 ways.  The first is direct payments from taxes collected.  The government sends out about 80 million checks per month to citizens, contractors and other businesses.  The second method is subsidies in the tax code.  Here, rather than collect a tax and send a check, the government rebates the amount of taxes owed.   Here is a chart showing where our direct payment tax money goes

That amounts to about 2.4 trillion dollars/year.   There is another 1.2 trillion/year in tax subsides that go to businesses and individuals.  For thes government programs, rather than send out a check, the amount of the government subsidy is rebated through a tax deduction.  In effect,  some  pay a lower tax rate while  others pay more to make up the difference.  These so-called “Tax Expenditures” are government subsidies designed to encourage certain types of investment( like R&D or home ownership) or behavior (like retirement saving or having children).  Some of these programs are nearly as large and every bit as popular as Social Security.  For example,  a self employed renter with no kids, no 401k and no employer provided health insurance pays lots of extra income tax so that people who do have kids and mortgages and tax free health insurance from their employer can pay less. A worker pays more in income tax so that an investor can pay less in capital gains tax. And a small business pays a corporate tax rate 10x higher the GE or Exxon Mobile because of all the breaks and subsidies they have acquired over the years.   Its important to remember that a cost is a cost no matter how it shows up on the books or if there was a middle man or not to write a check.  Here is some info on the size of these  tax expenditures:

• Treasury Tax Expenditures by Sector (History and Projections, $ Billions)

  Source: Subsidyscope analysis of data 

A list and explanation of the top 10 most expensive tax expenditure programs is available  from Forbes here.  And here is a look at how big those programs are compared to some other government programs:

concerning shadows on the wall and other deep thoughts

Robin Hanson has a post up about the futility of  opinion survey’s.  Most people have no consistency at all in their answers; we seem to make up an opinion just because the question was asked, not because we had ever thought about it before.  He quotes the paper:

Perhaps the most devastating problem with subjective [survey] questions, however, is the possibility that attitudes may not “exist” in a coherent form. A first indication of such problems is that measured attitudes are quite unstable over time. For example, in two surveys spaced a few months apart, the same subjects were asked about their views on government spending. Amazingly, 55% of the subjects reported different answers. Such low correlations at high frequencies are quite representative.

Part of the problem comes from respondents’ reluctance to admit lack of an attitude. Simply because the surveyor is asking the question, respondents believe that they should have an opinion about it. For example, researchers have shown that large minorities would respond to questions about obscure or even fictitious issues, such as providing opinions on countries that don’t exist.

This is one of those observations that really does seem painfully true and made me think of this quote from Emerson’s Sef Reliance:

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.

It is just our nature to bullshit.

the utility of violence

From a brilliant post at Esquire, published the day before the violence in Oslo:

“… At the beginning of this year, not long after they’d found the bomb on the bench in Spokane, a journalist named David Neiwert put together a list of nearly thirty acts of right-wing political violence that had taken place, or had been foiled, in the United States since the summer of 2008 — or roughly since Barack Obama’s presidency began to be seen as a genuine possibility. The list began with Jim David Adkisson, who killed two people in a Unitarian church in Tennessee because he was angry at how “liberals” were “destroying America.” It included two episodes in April 2009, one in Pittsburgh and one in Florida, in which men who were sure that Barack Obama’s government was coming for their guns opened fire on law-enforcement officers who had come to investigate them on other matters.

Some of the crimes on the list were briefly sensational — Scott Roeder’s murder of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, or Joseph Andrew Stack’s flying his small plane into a building in Austin in protest of the Internal Revenue Service, or the incoherent array of violent crimes committed by the “Sovereign Citizens Movement.” But most of them barely made the national radar at all. In December 2008, a woman in Belfast, Maine, named Amber Cummings shot to death her sleeping husband, James, who’d been savagely abusing her. Upon arriving at the Cummings home, investigators found Nazi paraphernalia and a stash of chemicals indicating that James Cummings was preparing to make a “dirty bomb” that he planned to detonate at Obama’s inauguration. Except in the local media, that aspect of the case disappeared completely. James Cummings and his bomb had nothing to do with Scott Roeder’s handgun or Joe Stack’s airplane.

It is a fertile time for such things. The country elected a black president with an exotic name. The economy, wrecked by a rigged game at the highest levels, continued to grind through a jobless recovery. The national dialogue grows coarser and wilder, and does so at a pace accelerated by technology. People sense the fragmentation — things are falling apart — even while they take refuge in those fragments of life that seem safest and most familiar…

The bomb in the bag on the bench in Spokane was a shrapnel bomb, a direct descendant of Henry Shrapnel’s original brainchild. It was specifically designed and carefully placed to create an expanding killing zone, a sideways rain of lethal fragments. A child could have been killed by the blast itself, or by a piece of the bench, or by a chunk of the child’s own father. After all, shrapnel is nothing more than undifferentiated fragments with sufficient force applied.

That the bomb did not do what it was designed to do was a combination of luck and human agency. (It was a triumph for public employees, to put it in the context of our current political argument.) That the events of January 17 largely have faded from the news has nothing to do with luck at all. That is all human agency — how a fragmented country gathers the pieces of an event like this and tries to construct from them, not necessarily the truth of what happened, but a story that the country can live with, one more fragment among dozens of others that the country has remembered to forget.

Don’t talk, then, about the wildness in our rhetoric today, and its undeniable roots in that deep strain of political violence that runs through our national DNA, on a gene that is not always recessive. Don’t relate Centennial Park in Atlanta in 1996 to Oklahoma City to murdered doctors to Columbine, and then to Tucson and to the bag on the bench in Spokane. Ignore the patterns, deep and wide, that connect each event to the other like a slow-burning fuse to a charge. That there are among us rage-hardened, powerless people who resort to the gun and the bomb. That there are powerful people who deplore the gun and the bomb, but who do not hesitate to profit from their use. And when the gun goes off or the bomb explodes, the powerful will deplore the actions of the powerless, and they will reassure the rest of us that We are not like Them, who are violent and crazy and whose acts have no reason beyond unfathomable madness. But above all, they will say, Ignore the fact that there is still a horrible utility in political violence, the way there was during Reconstruction, or during the labor wars of the early twentieth century. If there were not, it wouldn’t be so hard to get an abortion in Kansas, and assault weapons would not have been accessories of choice at recent rallies purportedly held to discuss changes in the way the country organizes its health-care system.”