American Conservatives are the pits

Yes, I had noticed some of this talk on conservative websites before WAPO reported it:

Hard-line Republicans and conservative commentators are mounting a whispering campaign against Jamal Khashoggi that is designed to protect President Trump from criticism of his handling of the dissident journalist’s alleged murder by operatives of Saudi Arabia — and support Trump’s continued aversion to a forceful response to the oil-rich desert kingdom. 

In recent days, a cadre of conservative House Republicans allied with Trump has been privately exchanging articles from right-wing outlets that fuel suspicion of Khashoggi, highlighting his association with the Muslim Brotherhood in his youth and raising conspiratorial questions about his work decades ago as an embedded reporter covering Osama bin Laden, according to four GOP officials involved in the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Those aspersions — which many lawmakers have been wary of stating publicly because of the political risks of doing so — have begun to flare into public view as conservative media outlets have amplified the claims, which are aimed in part at protecting Trump as he works to preserve the U.S.-Saudi relationship and avoid confronting the Saudis on human rights. 

It's hard to credit just how deeply shameful the talk and behaviour of American (and Australian) Trump supporting conservatives has become.

A potato observation

Is it just me, or do other people also find unwashed potatoes, when peeled and cooked of course, have better flavour than washed ones that have been peeled and cooked? 

Can someone give Jake Gyllenhaal a hug?

In an effort to find a relatively short Netflix movie to watch last Saturday, I settled on Enemy, starring Jake Gyllenhaal.

I mean, I've always been pretty sympathetic to him as an actor, and this movie featured a mysterious doppelgänger, and those stories are usually sort of fun, aren't they?   Well, not always, as it turned out.  Unfortunately, I had forgotten that this movie had been renowned for its weird ending.  And weird beginning.   And several weird bits on the way to the ending.

Look, I recently spent a fair few words praising A Cure for Wellness for the intriguing possible number of interpretations that could be put on it; and it seems to me that quite a few reviewers more or less praised Enemy in the same way.

But for me - nah, this one crossed the line.  Trying too hard to be a movie that people will talk about by being obscure and arch.   And ridiculous.

There is one interpretation of what's going on that pretty much makes sense, up to a point.  But let's just say:  the spider ruins it all.   Don't get it - don't care.

The movie taught me two things:   someone in Hollywood really needs to tell Jake to start making movies in which he can be a nice, happy character and face a normal story arc.    It's OK to play a normal person, Jake. 

Secondly - I didn't realise til it was finished that it was directed by Denis Villeneuve, a director whose main films I have all seen, and commented upon here.   Careful readers may recall that I always find that they have a promising set up, and visually look good, but they always have story problems which cause my interest to dwindle away until by the end I am unsatisfied.

I have given him more than a fair chance to make a movie that has impressed me from beginning to end.   He has failed every time.

I do not like him as a director.  

Hedonism, again

The Guardian has an opinion piece by a gay activist (and, I would presume, popper user) complaining that the Therapeutic Goods Administration proposal to re-categorise amyl nitrite as a serious drug (potentially able to be treated criminally in the same way as heroin) is discrimination against gay and bi men.  (!) 

It would seem that the drug, which already (so I read:  not speaking from any personal knowledge here) is only sold for fake purposes under the counter at sex shops ("video head cleaner" used to be one of them, but then the VCR died out) is primarily used by gay men who find it useful to relax a certain sphincter during certain forms of sexual activity, as well as giving them a temporary high.  (And a flushed face, possible fainting, nausea and a variety of other potential and more serious side effects.)

I don't really understand drug categorisation and whether this article is exaggerating the potential for criminal action against someone in possession.   The TGA report linked to in the article certainly indicates there are hospitalisations in Australia (perhaps 20 a year in a recent decade) arising from its use - although its easy to find many sex advice health websites that appear to make light of the potential health risks.  (Have you seen what other things they make light of in terms of safe sex?  Instead of "why in God's name anyone would actually want to do such an obviously unnatural and bizarre stretching of an orifice is beyond us.  Honestly - do yourself a favour and just get more within the range of normal, hey?")

This is one of those topics where I wish there was a widespread revival of the Golden mean, and in my application of it the common sense suggestion would be "if you need a potentially dangerous drug to enjoy the sex, you need to try a different form of sex".    And/or "if you are finding your average ordinary orgasm is not enjoyable enough without being aided by the addition of a drug - you are being too hedonistic.  Perhaps try having fewer so that you enjoy the ones you have more?"

As for the TGA proposal - I would have thought a heavier crackdown on its sale and distribution would be what is deserved.  I don't really understand why it has been so commonly available so easily for so long.

Krugman correct

I think Krugman is perfectly entitled to claim vindication for his repeated warnings about what the Republicans would do.   (Well, he is not alone in such warnings, and he was sometimes repetitious in making them, but really, it is pretty breathtaking bad faith on the part of the GOP.)  I'll be bad and extract more of his column that I probably should:

When the Trump tax cut was on the verge of being enacted, I called it “the biggest tax scam in history,” and made a prediction: deficits would soar, and when they did, Republicans would once again pretend to care about debt and demand cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Sure enough, the deficit is soaring. And this week Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, after declaring the surge in red ink “very disturbing,” called for, you guessed it, cuts in “Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.” He also suggested that Republicans might repeal the Affordable Care Act — taking away health care from tens of millions — if they do well in the midterm elections.

Any political analyst who didn’t see this coming should find a different profession. After all, “starve the beast” — cut taxes on the rich, then use the resulting deficits as an excuse to hack away at the safety net — has been G.O.P. strategy for decades.

Oh, and anyone asking why Republicans believed claims that the tax cut would pay for itself is being naïve. Whatever they may have said, they never actually believed that the tax cut would be deficit-neutral; they pushed for a tax cut because it was what wealthy donors wanted, and because their posturing as deficit hawks was always fraudulent. They didn’t really buy into economic nonsense; it would be more accurate to say that economic nonsense bought them.

.....

OK:   this part is new to me, and is important information when considering Laffer-ist claims that the total revenue did not drop after the tax cuts is some sort of semi-vindication:

What are they lying about? For starters, about the causes of a sharply higher deficit, which they claim is the result of higher spending, not lost revenue. Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director, even tried to claim that the deficit is up because of the costs of hurricane relief.

The flimsy justification for such claims is that in dollar terms, federal revenue over the past year is slightly up from the previous year, while spending is about 3 percent higher.

But that’s a junk argument, and everyone knows it. Both revenue and spending normally grow every year thanks to inflation, population growth and other factors. Revenue during Barack Obama’s second term grew more than 7 percent a year. The sources of the deficit surge are measured by how much we’ve deviated from that normal growth, and the answer is that it’s all about the tax cut.

Dishonesty about the sources of the deficit is, however, more or less a standard Republican tactic. What’s new is the double talk that pervades G.O.P. positioning on the budget and, to be fair, just about every major policy issue.

Physics and Philosophy for a Phriday

*   I quite like Philip Ball's explanation of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics in his article at Quanta.   He makes some points I do not recall having read before, such as this one (about the nature of the "splitting"):

For starters, about this business of bifurcating worlds. How does a split actually happen?

That is now seen to hinge on the issue of how a microscopic quantum event gives rise to macroscopic, classical behavior through a process called “decoherence,” in which the wavelike states of a quantum system become uncoordinated and scrambled by their interactions with their environment. Parallel quantum worlds have split once they have decohered, for by definition decohered wave functions can have no direct, causal influence on one another. For this reason, the theory of decoherence developed in the 1970s and ’80s helped to revitalize the MWI by supplying a clear rationale for what previously seemed a rather vague contingency.

In this view, splitting is not an abrupt event. It evolves through decoherence and is only complete when decoherence has removed all possibility of interference between universes. While it’s popular to regard the appearance of distinct worlds as akin to the bifurcation of futures in Jorge Luis Borges’ story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” a better analogy might therefore be something like the gradual separation of shaken salad dressing into layers of oil and vinegar. It’s then meaningless to ask how many worlds there are — as the philosopher of physics David Wallace aptly puts it, the question is rather like asking, “How many experiences did you have yesterday?” You can identify some of them, but you can’t enumerate them.

Interesting.

I must say, however, that I feel a little less convinced by the article as it goes on with his explanation of his problems with the theory.   There's a heavy concentration on it attacking the concept of self;  but in these days where Buddhist ideas of there being no core self anyway have gained quite a bit of intellectual traction, it feels a little odd to be going after a theory on that basis.   (Not that I am a fan of the Buddhist idea - I think it's a worry for quite a few reasons.)

*  Now for philosophy:  if you want a dose of the most headache inducing philosophical question - the matter of free will, its existence, and whether a belief in its absence makes a nonsense of making moral judgement about human behaviour, you could do much worse than read this back and forth between Daniel Dennett and Gregg Caruso at Aeon.   In fact, I have not read all of it carefully yet - but at first glance, Daniel Dennett is making quite a lot of sense.

Great links, hey?  

Not quite Minority Report, but still sounds potentially open to abuse

Nature has an article that is upbeat about the potential for using AI to predict armed conflict, so as to enable early intervention:

Governments and the international community often have little warning of impending crises. Likely trouble spots can be flagged a few days or sometimes weeks in advance using algorithms that forecast risks, similar to those used for predicting policing needs and extreme weather. For conflict risk prediction, these codes estimate the likelihood of violence by extrapolating from statistical data4and analysing text in news reports to detect tensions and military developments (see go.nature.com/2oczqep). Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to boost the power of these approaches.
Several examples are under way. These include Lockheed Martin’s Integrated Crisis Early Warning System, the Alan Turing Institute’s project on global urban analytics for resilient defence (run by W.G. and A.W.) and the US government’s Political Instability Task Force.

Trump and Science

Yet again, it's a case of not being sure whether to laugh or cry:  that Trumpian claim that he has "a natural instinct for science".   I think it's time to rename the Dunning-Kruger effect the "Trump syndrome".  More people would immediately recognise what it means. 

As for his natural science instinct:  how could you doubt it when one of his science-y highlights is how he has explained out loud for years about how CFC's cannot escape his sealed apartment:

Trump has made claims about hairspray and the ozone layer at least three times. Back in 2011 in Sydney, he implied the “eight-inch concrete floors” and “eight-inch concrete walls” of Trump Tower would prevent hairspray from “destroying the ozone that’s 400 miles up in the air.” In December 2015, at a campaign rally in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, Trump also said he doesn’t “think anything gets out” of his “sealed” apartment when he uses hairspray.

It's not just the child-like stupidity of imagining that gases never escape an apartment - it's the ridiculous sense of entitlement that it's a major regret that hairspray is not just like it used to be. 

Anyway, someone at Esquire does not mince words:

Trump has a predator's instinct for how people work and for identifying their weaknesses. He knows what motivates them and what plays on TV and how the media ecosystem functions. He especially knows how to keep the spotlight where it ought to be: on Donald Trump.

But in terms of intellectual capacity—the ability to reason at a high level, the volume of knowledge he's accumulated about complex phenomena, his familiarity with how humanity gathers information about the world—he is a complete and utter moron. He's a simpleton. He has absolutely no concept of how science works, which is why he feels comfortable telling the AP that he has "a natural instinct for science." Even if he did, which he doesn't, that would have exactly zero bearing on whether climate change is real. To the scientific community, the President of the United States just saying things has the same value as any other 72-year-old man yelling at them on a street corner: none.

In which he again complains about gunshots in entertainment

I just have to re-visit my complaint about how gunshot wounds are being portrayed on entertainment now.

I've been enjoying Fargo (second season) a lot, and it's not like I am going to stop watching it, but:  there was a very high body count from a sort of shootout situation in Episode 4, and the way the blood spray was special effected in on many shots made me feel more certain than ever - I reckon the special effects people are over doing it, and I strongly suspect it's certainly due to the influence of video games and their exaggerated depiction of how much blood sprays out of any gun wound.   

And look, I'm sure that some things like a close, high calibre gunshot to the head is going to be an awful mess, but it just seems that in too many shows, any shot to any part of the body is now creating big blood sprays that don't look all that real to me.  

I'm not going to ghoul around the internet trying to find close up videos of someone taking bullets, but I am curious as to whether I am right...

Dear Voters of Wentworth...

please, do not vote Liberal.   Help put this hopelessly inept government out of its misery:

And I should add:   dear Adam Bandt and Andrew Wilkie:   look, honestly, the Australian public will give you a pat on the back for curtailing a further 6 months of terrible government.  Please do it:

This man lectures at RMIT

The only way Steve Kates could climb further up Peak Cult Trump would be if he starts speculating on a transgender options, so that he can please the Master by giving his all, if you know what I mean.   Here he is, talking the Trump 60 Minutes interview:

The Interviewer thought she had his number, that she would take him apart. But she is dealing with the absolutely best, most articulate president possibly in history. A masterclass, as is every public presentation he gives.

Isn't his wife worried?   Not to mention his students.

How's that Laffer-ism going?

The "best" spin the diehard Laffer lovers can put on this is that the tax cuts have not (so far) caused a revenue drop:   but at a time when the economy is supposedly booming, should not revenues be up (and used to reduce budget deficit?)    Instead, why not ensure you will make revenue growth flat, and try increasing spending at the same time, hey Republican fiscal worriers?  Look, even the WSJ agrees with me (and pay attention to the two last lines in particular):

WASHINGTON--The federal deficit widened last year amid higher government spending—including rising interest costs on the debt and increased funding for the military—and flat revenues following last year’s tax cut.

The government ran a $779 billion deficit in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the Treasury Department said Monday. That is the largest annual deficit in six years and 17% higher than the $666 billion deficit in fiscal 2017. As a share of gross domestic product, the deficit totaled 3.9%, up from 3.5% a year earlier and the third consecutive increase.

The deficit would have been even higher if not for shifts in the timing of certain payments, Treasury said.

Government receipts held steady at $3.3 trillion, despite strong economic growth and a robust labor market. The low unemployment rate, which hit 3.7% in September, coupled with rising wages would typically drive government tax revenue higher.

But individual withheld income taxes rose just 1% in fiscal 2018, and corporate tax receipts declined 31%—both reflecting changes implemented as part of the sweeping tax overhaul enacted in December.

Trump administration officials had argued last year the new tax law would generate enough economic growth to offset the costs of a tax cut. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin went further, at times saying the changes would actually help reduce the deficit. Monday’s report showed that, so far, that is not happening.

What an insult to policy common sense.

About that civil war

There's a really interesting perspective piece in the Washington Post about the stupid civil war talk in the US at the moment, putting it in historical context of the atmosphere before the last civil war.

Basically, he argues that both sides before the C19th war took a somewhat religiously apocryphal interest in having a war to cleanse the nation.   The atmosphere in the US now is not the same -  most people can see how a war will downgrade the nation, not improve it.   (Save for the far Right, I assume - who fantasise that their authoritarian rule is just what the culture war that will kill the nation needs.)  Here are some extracts:

Apocalyptic visions captivated Americans' imaginations in the years before the Civil War. Southern Baptist Samuel Baldwin predicted in 1854 that Armageddon would ruin the Mississippi Valley, topple monarchies and Catholicism across the globe and introduce the second coming of Jesus Christ. The prophet calculated that these events would occur between 1861 and 1865 — a vision that won popular support when war broke out in 1861.

When Baldwin prophesied that Christ would return during his lifetime, he expressed a popular Protestant belief of the era, not a fringe faith. A wide array of Americans — evangelicals, reformers, utopians, boosters of manifest destiny and champions of scientific progress — believed that their actions could hasten the millennium, Christ’s thousand-year reign on Earth.

Many believers assumed that fire and blood would cleanse the world of sin and corruption before this divine presence. On April 11, 1861, the eve of the Civil War, Arthur Carpenter, an Indiana shoemaker, thought “a war of 5 or 10 years would be a great thing,” because “it would purge our nation.” Even after he volunteered and saw combat, Carpenter dreamed of biblical bloodletting. “When I die, I want it to occur in the largest battle that was ever fought, since the creation of the world,” he told his parents.

John Brown embodied Civil War Americans' faith that violence would reform America and usher Christ’s return. Brown believed that God had chosen him to end American slavery. After years of praying for the institution’s demise and guiding runaways to freedom, Brown turned to violence in Kansas and Virginia. Before his attack on Harpers Ferry, Va., Brown and his followers adopted a provisional constitution of the United States that would redesign the federal government after bloodshed washed away America’s sin. When his attack failed and he faced the gallows as a convicted traitor, Brown predicted a biblical reckoning for America, promising his jailers that “the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood."

White Southerners shared this 19th-century conviction that bold violence remade the world. Ardent secessionist and slaveholder Edmund Ruffin watched Brown die and called for disunion and war before other abolitionists followed his example. In 1860, he published “Anticipations of the Future,” a book that forecast Abraham Lincoln’s election, Southern secession and Confederate victory. Instead of waiting for an overt threat from the federal government, Ruffin urged slave owners to strike the first blow, take Fort Sumter, declare independence and convince the enemy that the price of reunion required too much Yankee blood and treasure. When the Civil War began at Fort Sumter, as he had predicted, Ruffin was there to fire the first shot.

 As to why it's different now:

The Civil War came at a moment when Americans felt control over an open, limitless future that God destined for them. Northern and Southern radicals embraced that optimism, confident that they could harness the war to achieve their ends. Enslaved millions considered America’s violent abolition an answer to their prayers. The heady optimists of the Civil War in the North and South raced toward Armageddon.

In contrast, our modern crisis is shaped by Americans feeling blindsided by unseen forces and questioning their power to direct the future according to plan. The firebrands of today who hope to stoke the passions of a divided nation encounter a society that is less confident about its future. Antebellum Americans looked forward to warfare as a catalyst for civilization, progress and salvation. After Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans doubt that warfare follows predictable, controllable paths and recognize how major conflicts create more problems than they solve.

 Good reading.

A self absorbed President has consequences

Yes, I agree with the gist of Nick Bryant's article, noting that it's hard to avoid the feeling that authoritarian leadership around the world has taken the hint that a self-absorbed, dumb, US President with a crush on "strong men" gives them lots of room to do authoritarian things and not worry that anything serious is going to be done about it:

The forced disappearance of the Interpol chief, Meng Hongwei, who it turns out is being held by the Chinese authorities.

Mounting evidence underscoring the Kremlin's involvement in the chemical poisonings in Salisbury.

The seemingly gruesome case of Jamal Khashoggi, the missing journalist who Turkish authorities suspect was killed and dismembered by a Saudi hit squad inside the kingdom's Istanbul consulate.

All point to a world of disorder: of a slide towards unruliness; of a new era of strongman authoritarianism and a waning of international law.

Traditionally the United States has viewed itself as the upholder of norms, an exemplar of moral leadership, the policeman of global bad behaviour - an idealised notion it has not always lived up to.

But this week has driven home not just how much Donald Trump has been reluctant to perform that role. It also speaks of how his doctrine of patriotism is at risk of being interpreted by other nations as a doctrine of anything goes.

In the red, white and blue of America First do other countries see a green light to act with impunity?

The thing is, even if they know that the US will huff and puff at a diplomatic level, they know that within 24 hours, Trump will say or do something so stupid and/or vain that the public both in the US and across the globe will be distracted.   (The pointless media event of Trump meeting Kanye is the latest example.  Then he'll probably be off to another mini Nuremberg within 48 hours, to make himself feel loved.)

Update:  more on Trump's shrug shoulders attitude to Saudi Arabia and internation death squads.  

Update 2:  Allahpundit at Hot Air makes the point that the US has for a very long time put up with, um, bad behaviour from the Saudis out of economic self interest.  True, but I think it still makes a difference as to whether a President says it openly, or not.   It's a dirty secret a President just shouldn't be saying out loud.

The Good Emperor

Oh, I didn't realise this (the bit about never visiting the shrine) about Japanese Emperor Akihito:

The chief priest at Japan's controversial Yasukuni Shrine is to resign after making remarks highly critical of Emperor Akihito.

In comments leaked to a magazine, Kunio Kohori said he believed Emperor Akihito was trying to destroy the shrine by not visiting it.

The shrine in Tokyo honours Japan's 2.5 million war dead but also enshrines convicted criminals of World War Two.

It remains a high source of tension with neighbours, particularly China.

Emperor Akihito, who will abdicate next year, has never visited the shrine.

He has instead sought reconciliation with Japan's wartime enemies.

He has expressed regret over Japan's military actions in both China and the Korean peninsula, and has also visited several Pacific battlefields to honour the dead, actions that have brought him into conflict with right-wing groups at home.

Video violence and empathy

It was back in March that I last had a whinge about unnecessary blood letting and violence in video games.   In that post, I complained about how a couple of studies were claimed to show no connection between games and real life violence, but when you looked at the details, it was pretty ludicrous to conclude they were particularly useful studies at all.

Now I see that I had missed another study that came out at the end of last year, claiming to show that frequent violent video game players have lower empathy response.

Well, that's more aligned with my biases!

Anyway, the study was very technical in nature, and used EEGs and tests regarding looking at faces, etc.  All very technical.  As usual, with all of this sort of testing, it is best to treat it with a high degree of caution, but the test set up does sound a little less obtuse than that in the studies I complained about.   The abstract follows: 

Research on the effects of media violence exposure has shown robust associations among violent media exposure, increased aggressive behavior, and decreased empathy. Preliminary research indicates that frequent players of violent video games may have differences in emotional and cognitive processes compared to infrequent or nonplayers, yet research examining the amount and content of game play and the relation of these factors with affective and cognitive outcomes is limited. The present study measured neural correlates of response inhibition in the context of implicit attention to emotion, and how these factors are related to empathic responding in frequent and infrequent players of video games with graphically violent content. Participants completed a self-report measure of empathy as well as an affective stop-signal task that measured implicit attention to emotion and response inhibition during electroencephalography. Frequent players had lower levels of empathy as well as a reduction in brain activity as indicated by P100 and N200/P300 event related potentials. Reduced P100 amplitude evoked by happy facial expressions was observed in frequent players compared to infrequent players, and this effect was moderated by empathy, such that low levels of empathy further reduced P100 amplitudes for happy facial expressions for frequent players compared to infrequent players. Compared to infrequent players, frequent players had reduced N200/P300 amplitude during response inhibition, indicating less neural resources were recruited to inhibit behavior. Results from the present study illustrate that chronic exposure to violent video games modulates empathy and related neural correlates associated with affect and cognition.

Godless Episode 3

I'm still finding it is well acted and looks terrific, but I have too issues with episode 3:

*  too horsey;

* this show is starting to trigger my "why does Hollywood add so many splattery bullet-to-the-head shots in entertainment now?" complaint.   In fact, they are putting a lot of blood sprays in many shooting scenes - I really suspect that this is caused by contamination from video gaming aesthetics.  I have no way of checking this, but I very much doubt that in the 19th century, there was much to be seen by way of blood spray from your average bullet wound, at least to the body.  But because people are used to seeing huge blood sprays from any bullet wound in video games, they are inserting it in all shows now.

Rare paralysis

Seems to be an unusual spike in a rare kid's paralysis in Minnesota.   A connection with a viral infection (mild of itself) seems likely, but it's interesting how long it can take to work out what causes what, medically.

More about food safety in the 19th century

My recent post about ridiculously dangerous milk was all due to reviews of Deborah Blum's book The Poison Squad, and from an NPR interview about it, I extract this:

You tell stories of kids dying from eating candy that was contaminated with lead. Given that this was causing real suffering in consumers, what kinds of arguments were people making for leaving this unregulated?

It's baffling, because you are in this period where food makers are knowingly using very bad things. I gave the example of arsenic, which was a green food dye also used to make the shellac that glosses up chocolate. But lead was used to color candies, and red lead was used in cheese. If people wanted to make a beautiful, orange cheddar cheese, they just dumped a little red lead in it. This is not people who didn't know it was bad, but there were things that made it permissible. There were no labels, and so there was no public pressure. It was just a pre-regulatory Wild West of food that permitted bad actors to do what they will, and so they did. It saved them a lot of money. You get this capitalistic feedback loop of people who were trying to make a living – and wanting to make more of a living. The consumer was both the guinea pig and the victim.

To no one's surprise, if you feed people formaldehyde, or arsenic or lead, they will get sick. And when you demonstrate that, why does it still remain so difficult to outlaw these substances in food? 

The food industry had been organizing itself to fight regulation. Wiley had been advocating and working with congressmen to get some kind of basic consumer protection. And these experiments caught national attention — they were front-page news, there were songs about them — and everyone was realizing that there is a lot of bad stuff in their food. There was an immediate pushback. Suddenly, congressmen are on the side of food business or getting offered more money. The food industry organizes to create a Food Manufacturers Association. They were phenomenally effective. They did a great job trying to damage Wiley's reputation publicly and deny what he was finding, and bullied and threatened congressmen to kill regulation every time it came up.

If Catallaxy was still a blog where you could usefully argue about libertarianism as a political philosophy, I would be commenting there about this.

But now it's just full of ratbags, and it's even hard to goad Jason to comment here...

Now that Nordhaus wins a Nobel, people are remembering Pindyck

ATTP has a post up in which he wonders out loud about an issue I've long complained about in relation to climate change impacts:

However, I do think there are reasons to be cautious about some of these economic analyses. Let me provide a caveat up front. I’m not an expert at this, so am happy to be corrected if I get something wrong, and am partly writing this in the hope that I might learn something more.

For starters, these analyses are typically linear. This essentially means that they can say nothing about the possibility of some kind of large shock. Some of these analyses actually suggest the possibility of quite small global economic impacts even for extremely large changes in climate (see links below), which would seem to suggest that there is some point at which these calculations break down.

Also, as I understand it, most of these analyses do not consider how climate change might impact economic growth itself (see this Carbon Brief Explainer about IAMs). If the global economy grows at 3% per year, then it will be about 10 times bigger in 2100 than it is today. A large economic impact in 2100, might then seem small by comparison to the global economy at that time. Equivalently, if you discount these future economic costs to today, they can also seem quite small. Is it reasonable to assume that global economic growth will be largely unaffected by climate change?

My own view, which I’m happy to be convinced is wrong, is that these kind of analyses are fine if you want to understand things like what would happen if we did something (like impose a carbon tax). They’re probably also fine if you’re interested in how the economy will response to relatively small climate and ecological perturbations, or will respond over the next few decades. Where I think we should be more cautious is when the climate/ecological perturbations are large, or when considering very long, multi-decade timescales.

 And someone in comments reminds him that Pindyck has been saying this for some years now.

I remain quietly confident that in the next decade or so, the general view will be "come on, why did we ever thing the economic modelling of climate change was realistic?"