Also true...

Look, can you really blame any country for not wanting to let these two in...

I mean fair's fair; they're both annoying prats.  

If it was up to me, I'd have any person who has ever been to an IPA function on a watch list of undesireables I wouldn't want in my country.

Exactly

All about money, and the state of economics

There's a very lengthy review/essay at the New York Review of Books - Against Economics - all about the parlous state of economics.  I don't know the writer, David Graeber, but he makes reference to having written on economics before, and the book he is reviewing is by a Brit, Robert Skidelsky.

But it's all rather interesting.  There is so much I want to extract.  Here is the opening:

There is a growing feeling, among those who have the responsibility of managing large economies, that the discipline of economics is no longer fit for purpose. It is beginning to look like a science designed to solve problems that no longer exist.

A good example is the obsession with inflation. Economists still teach their students that the primary economic role of government—many would insist, its only really proper economic role—is to guarantee price stability. We must be constantly vigilant over the dangers of inflation. For governments to simply print money is therefore inherently sinful. If, however, inflation is kept at bay through the coordinated action of government and central bankers, the market should find its “natural rate of unemployment,” and investors, taking advantage of clear price signals, should be able to ensure healthy growth. These assumptions came with the monetarism of the 1980s, the idea that government should restrict itself to managing the money supply, and by the 1990s had come to be accepted as such elementary common sense that pretty much all political debate had to set out from a ritual acknowledgment of the perils of government spending. This continues to be the case, despite the fact that, since the 2008 recession, central banks have been printing money frantically in an attempt to create inflation and compel the rich to do something useful with their money, and have been largely unsuccessful in both endeavors.

We now live in a different economic universe than we did before the crash. Falling unemployment no longer drives up wages. Printing money does not cause inflation. Yet the language of public debate, and the wisdom conveyed in economic textbooks, remain almost entirely unchanged.

On the question of how money is created, I have not heard of this debate before; but then again, the reviewer suggests, that's probably because it has been sort of ignored by the mainstream media:

There are plenty of magic money trees in Britain, as there are in any developed economy. They are called “banks.” Since modern money is simply credit, banks can and do create money literally out of nothing, simply by making loans. Almost all of the money circulating in Britain at the moment is bank-created in this way. Not only is the public largely unaware of this, but a recent survey by the British research group Positive Money discovered that an astounding 85 percent of members of Parliament had no idea where money really came from (most appeared to be under the impression that it was produced by the Royal Mint).

Economists, for obvious reasons, can’t be completely oblivious to the role of banks, but they have spent much of the twentieth century arguing about what actually happens when someone applies for a loan. One school insists that banks transfer existing funds from their reserves, another that they produce new money, but only on the basis of a multiplier effect (so that your car loan can still be seen as ultimately rooted in some retired grandmother’s pension fund). Only a minority—mostly heterodox economists, post-Keynesians, and modern money theorists—uphold what is called the “credit creation theory of banking”: that bankers simply wave a magic wand and make the money appear, secure in the confidence that even if they hand a client a credit for $1 million, ultimately the recipient will put it back in the bank again, so that, across the system as a whole, credits and debts will cancel out. Rather than loans being based in deposits, in this view, deposits themselves were the result of loans.

The one thing it never seemed to occur to anyone to do was to get a job at a bank, and find out what actually happens when someone asks to borrow money. In 2014 a German economist named Richard Werner did exactly that, and discovered that, in fact, loan officers do not check their existing funds, reserves, or anything else. They simply create money out of thin air, or, as he preferred to put it, “fairy dust.”

That year also appears to have been when elements in Britain’s notoriously independent civil service decided that enough was enough. The question of money creation became a critical bone of contention. The overwhelming majority of even mainstream economists in the UK had long since rejected austerity as counterproductive (which, predictably, had almost no impact on public debate). But at a certain point, demanding that the technocrats charged with running the system base all policy decisions on false assumptions about something as elementary as the nature of money becomes a little like demanding that architects proceed on the understanding that the square root of 47 is actually π. Architects are aware that buildings would start falling down. People would die.

Before long, the Bank of England (the British equivalent of the Federal Reserve, whose economists are most free to speak their minds since they are not formally part of the government) rolled out an elaborate official report called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy,” replete with videos and animations, making the same point: existing economics textbooks, and particularly the reigning monetarist orthodoxy, are wrong. The heterodox economists are right. Private banks create money. Central banks like the Bank of England create money as well, but monetarists are entirely wrong to insist that their proper function is to control the money supply. In fact, central banks do not in any sense control the money supply; their main function is to set the interest rate—to determine how much private banks can charge for the money they create. Almost all public debate on these subjects is therefore based on false premises. For example, if what the Bank of England was saying were true, government borrowing didn’t divert funds from the private sector; it created entirely new money that had not existed before.

One might have imagined that such an admission would create something of a splash, and in certain restricted circles, it did. Central banks in Norway, Switzerland, and Germany quickly put out similar papers. Back in the UK, the immediate media response was simply silence. The Bank of England report has never, to my knowledge, been so much as mentioned on the BBC or any other TV news outlet. Newspaper columnists continued to write as if monetarism was self-evidently correct. Politicians continued to be grilled about where they would find the cash for social programs. It was as if a kind of entente cordiale had been established, in which the technocrats would be allowed to live in one theoretical universe, while politicians and news commentators would continue to exist in an entirely different one.

 And then we get to a key question: what is the nature of money anyway?:

What it [Skidelsky's book] reveals is an endless war between two broad theoretical perspectives in which the same side always seems to win—for reasons that rarely have anything to do with either theoretical sophistication or greater predictive power. The crux of the argument always seems to turn on the nature of money. Is money best conceived of as a physical commodity, a precious substance used to facilitate exchange, or is it better to see money primarily as a credit, a bookkeeping method or circulating IOU—in any case, a social arrangement? This is an argument that has been going on in some form for thousands of years. What we call “money” is always a mixture of both, and, as I myself noted in Debt (2011), the center of gravity between the two tends to shift back and forth over time. In the Middle Ages everyday transactions across Eurasia were typically conducted by means of credit, and money was assumed to be an abstraction. It was the rise of global European empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the corresponding flood of gold and silver looted from the Americas, that really shifted perceptions. Historically, the feeling that bullion actually is money tends to mark periods of generalized violence, mass slavery, and predatory standing armies—which for most of the world was precisely how the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British empires were experienced. One important theoretical innovation that these new bullion-based theories of money allowed was, as Skidelsky notes, what has come to be called the quantity theory of money (usually referred to in textbooks—since economists take endless delight in abbreviations—as QTM).

The QTM argument was first put forward by a French lawyer named Jean Bodin, during a debate over the cause of the sharp, destablizing price inflation that immediately followed the Iberian conquest of the Americas. Bodin argued that the inflation was a simple matter of supply and demand: the enormous influx of gold and silver from the Spanish colonies was cheapening the value of money in Europe. The basic principle would no doubt have seemed a matter of common sense to anyone with experience of commerce at the time, but it turns out to have been based on a series of false assumptions. For one thing, most of the gold and silver extracted from Mexico and Peru did not end up in Europe at all, and certainly wasn’t coined into money. Most of it was transported directly to China and India (to buy spices, silks, calicoes, and other “oriental luxuries”), and insofar as it had inflationary effects back home, it was on the basis of speculative bonds of one sort or another. This almost always turns out to be true when QTM is applied: it seems self-evident, but only if you leave most of the critical factors out.

In the case of the sixteenth-century price inflation, for instance, once one takes account of credit, hoarding, and speculation—not to mention increased rates of economic activity, investment in new technology, and wage levels (which, in turn, have a lot to do with the relative power of workers and employers, creditors and debtors)—it becomes impossible to say for certain which is the deciding factor: whether the money supply drives prices, or prices drive the money supply. Technically, this comes down to a choice between what are called exogenous and endogenous theories of money. Should money be treated as an outside factor, like all those Spanish dubloons supposedly sweeping into Antwerp, Dublin, and Genoa in the days of Philip II, or should it be imagined primarily as a product of economic activity itself, mined, minted, and put into circulation, or more often, created as credit instruments such as loans, in order to meet a demand—which would, of course, mean that the roots of inflation lie elsewhere?

To put it bluntly: QTM is obviously wrong. Doubling the amount of gold in a country will have no effect on the price of cheese if you give all the gold to rich people and they just bury it in their yards, or use it to make gold-plated submarines (this is, incidentally, why quantitative easing, the strategy of buying long-term government bonds to put money into circulation, did not work either). What actually matters is spending.

I've probably pushed the friendship with the magazine too far - go read the rest on their site.

Yet more doctors against vaping

Some European cardiologists really don't like vaping:

Prof Münzel and his colleagues investigated the effect of e-cigarette vapour on blood flow in the brachial artery in the upper arm in 20 healthy smokers before they vaped an e-cigarette and then 15 minutes afterwards. They also measured how stiff the artery became.

They also did a mouse study.

The conclusions:

They found that just one vaping episode increased heart rates and caused the arteries to stiffen and the inner lining of the arteries, the endothelium, to stop working properly in the smokers. The endothelium is responsible for maintaining the correct dilation and constriction of blood vessels, protects tissues from toxic substances and regulates inflammation and blood clotting processes. Endothelial dysfunction is involved in the development of cardiovascular disease.

Prof Münzel said: "The results of the present studies identified several molecular mechanisms whereby e-cigarettes can cause damage to the blood vessels, lungs, heart and brain. This is a consequence of toxic chemicals that are produced by the vaping process and may also be present at lower concentrations in the liquid itself. Importantly, we identified an enzyme, NOX-2, that mediated all the effects of e-cigarettes on the brain and cardiovascular system, and we found that a toxic chemical called acrolein, which is produced when the liquid in e-cigarettes is vaporised, activated the damaging effects of NOX-2. The beneficial effects of macitentan and bepridil indicate that e-cigarettes have the capacity to trigger constriction of blood vessels and to impair our cells' antioxidant and survival systems.

"Our data may indicate that e-cigarettes are not a healthy alternative to traditional cigarettes, and their perceived 'safety' is not warranted. In addition, we still have no experience about the health side effects of e-cigarettes arising from long-term use. The e-cigarette epidemic in the US and Europe, in particular among our youth, is causing a huge generation of nicotine-addicted people who are being endangered by encouragement to switch from traditional cigarettes to e-cigarettes. Research like ours should serve as a warning about their dangers, and aggressive steps should be taken to protect our children from health risks caused by e-cigarettes."

A limitation of the study was that no healthy non-smokers were included. However, the researchers point out that a strength is that they have received no funding from the e-cigarette industry. "Recent studies indicate that e-cigarette industry funding is more likely to lead to results that indicate that e-cigarettes are harmless," write the researchers in their paper.

Colonoscopy considered

A study from England finds a really big difference in the apparent effectiveness of colonoscopy conducted by the NHS, and those done by "independent providers".   Which is not exactly an intuitive result - you might suspect that the NHS ones would be more conducted in more of a rush.  

I would guess the difference must really be down to the experience level of the doctors doing it.

It is consistent with something I heard on (I think) The Drum a few weeks ago - a doctor and some other health system expert saying that if they had cancer, they would choose to get treatment via the public system rather than private, based on the better outcomes found in the public system by virtue of their experience level.

Anyway, this from the study on colonoscopy and the subsequent rate of cancers:

a team of UK researchers set out to compare PCCRC rates between all providers in England to measure variation in colonoscopy quality.

Their findings are based on more than 120,000 individuals undergoing colonoscopy in England between 2005 and 2013 and subsequently diagnosed with colorectal cancer. The proportion of those diagnosed six months to three years after the colonoscopy were identified to calculate a PCCRC-3yr rate.

After taking account of potentially influential factors such as age, sex, and medical history, the PCCRC-3yr rate declined from 9.0% in 2005 to 6.5% in 2013.

However, rates for colonoscopies performed within the NHS Bowel Cancer Screening Programme (BCSP) were better (lower) at 3.6% than those performed by independent providers (9.3%) which are increasingly being used to meet the rising demand for colonoscopy.

Yay for socialised medicine, I suppose.

For the parents of 10 year olds

It occurred to me this morning that if you are a child wanting to build a small diorama of a wind farm for a school project, you could readily convert a used electric toothbrush head into a tiny model of one wind turbine. 

Of course, since one of these lasts a very long time, if you want a whole wind farm, you had better start saving them from preschool.

You can thank me later...

Not the sharpest officer

I don't think I have read this story before, of how Auberon Waugh got himself shot by being remarkably stupid:

On National Service in Cyprus in 1958, Auberon Waugh, having ‘miraculously’ become an officer, was sent out with his troop to cover the Nicosia-Kyrenia road between the Turkish village of Guenyeli and the Greek village of Autokoi. This was during the civil war at the time known as the Cyprus Emergency, and the aim of the mission was to prevent either village taking reprisals against the other. While his men were getting into position, Waugh noticed that something was blocking the elevation of the machine gun on the front of his armoured car. He got out to fix it, taking the opportunity to ‘seize the barrel from in front and give it a good wiggle’. As recounted in his autobiography, the incident unfolds in a laconic slow motion: ‘I realised that it had started firing. No sooner had I noticed this than I observed with dismay that it was firing into my chest. Moving aside pretty sharpish, I walked to the back of the armoured car and lay down.’ Six bullets had gone through him, inflicting injuries that compromised his health for the rest of his life and contributed to his early death at the age of 61 in 2001.

That's from the start of a review of a book about him. 

Still not normal

Just took a couple of photos, in Brisbane's western suburbs, first looking West:

And this one is looking north-east, where and if you look carefully you can just make out some of the city high rise buildings in the smoke haze:

It is quite windy.  Not good.

Bizarre and sordid crime noted

Well, that must have been a challenge for Children's Services:  The Guardian reports on a truly unusual crime in England, in which the parents of 6 children (from their incestuous relationship) murdered two of them, and tried to kill the rest.

One very strange detail, perhaps indicating that the kids might not have had the best of educations?:

“The children believed and even told officers at the scene that their father was dead, having died in the second world war.”

(The eldest children were teenagers.)

Just lies continuously

In fact, whenever Trump claims that he is responsible for something that has never happened before, it seems like a 99% chance that it is an outright lie.

Some commentary on fuel reduction burns

As noted on Radio National, a couple of people with expertise in the area talk about fuel reduction burns. 

ROSS BRADSTOCK: The notion that there is some sort of conspiracy to stop hazard reduction is a piece of fiction.

ISOBEL ROE: He says there's more pre-burning happening in New South Wales than ever, but state agencies don't have the money to do the amount of burning needed to prevent fires like those in the state this week.

ROSS BRADSTOCK: Hazard reduction will only put a dent in risk. It will not eliminate risk, because the amount of hazard reduction you would have to do to eliminate risk is beyond the financial resources of the state. 

And someone from Tasmania adds (I am sure the transcript has an error here, which I have corrected):

ISOBEL ROE: Professor David Bowman works in pyrogeography, the study of wildfire, at the University of Tasmania.

ROSS BRADSTOCK BOWMAN: What we're really talking about here is the tension between a command-and-control and regulating the use of fire in the landscape and a more organic, self-organising use of fire: 'the old school' way of doing it.

ISOBEL ROE: And he says, as the population grows in semi-rural areas, the harder it is to light safe fires.

ROSS BRADSTOCK BOWMAN: And they're becoming increasingly complicated because of the effect of shrinking safe weather windows and increased intensity of the fires.
But as you come down into the settled areas, the complexity of planned burning increases. As you get more land tenures, you have to have more sign-off, more regulation, more agreement.

ISOBEL ROE: Professor Bowman believes the budget for hazard reduction burning needs to dramatically increase, not just to increase burning but to develop better ways of doing it.

Update:  there was more on this in The Guardian.

Factcheck: Is there really a green conspiracy to stop bushfire hazard reduction?

Short answer:  "no".

Hurricane damage revised, upwards

Michael Mann is heavily promoting a new paper that applies a more sensible way to assess whether destruction from hurricanes in the US has been increasing.  His thread starts with this:

and goes on to explain the findings of a new paper, but I won't copy all of the tweets:

A summary of the paper itself is at phys.org:

Aslak Grinsted has calculated the historical figures in a new way. Instead of comparing single hurricanes and the damage they would cause today, he and his colleagues have assessed how big an area could be viewed as an "area of total destruction," meaning how large an area a storm would have to destroy completely in order to account for the financial loss. Simultaneously, this makes comparison between rural areas and more densely populated areas like cities easier, as the unit of calculation is now the same: the size of the "area of total destruction."

In previous studies, it proved difficult to isolate the climate signal. The climate signal should be understood as the effect climate change has on hurricane size, strength and destructive force. It was hidden behind variations due to the uneven concentration of wealth, and it was statistically uncertain whether there was any tendency in the destruction. But with the new method, this doubt has been cleared. The weather has, indeed, become more dangerous on the south and east coasts of the U.S. Furthermore, the result obtained by the research team is more congruent with the climate models used to predict and understand the development in extreme weather. It fits with the physics, quite simply, that global warming has the effect that there is an increase in the force released in the most extreme hurricanes.

 Roger Pielke Jnr is a famously obnoxious commentator on climate change, a trait he seemed to have picked up from his father.  (Both become nasty towards people who don't see things exactly the way they say things should be seen.)

I therefore predict that Pielke Jnr will be furious with this new analysis and will get into a flame war with those supporting it.

Appalling

As I have complained bitterly before, Malcolm Turnbull wasted his dumping by not going on a rhetorical rampage about how the Coalition must purge itself of climate change deniers in its ranks for it to have credibility on climate related policy.   You should go and listen to the clip on Twitter of this ignorant twit (from a "financial" background, not science) claiming that the BOM is inappropriately adjusting temperature records:

And where is he from?   Queensland (of course) - the state that specialises in producing the stupidest politicians. 

Get them into it young...

Spotted this in The Guardian:

The caption:

Funerals are held for American Mormons killed in an ambush in northern Mexica.

The age of the kids wielding shovels is, um, a little weird, no?

When he produces the goods on condoms that men don't mind using, then he can talk tax...

I'm being a bit mean - there's not much doubt that Bill Gates is one of the better billionaires in terms of charity work; but I didn't like his hedging on Warren vs Trump last week.

Some people think he was talking in code:  that of course "the most professional" candidate would not be Trump.   And it's true, he may have concerns about the vindictive vanity of Trump would mean a complete freeze out from Federal government co-operation with Gate's plans.   (It has already stopped work on experimental nuclear in China.)

But really - if a basically decent billionaire can't say something like "if it was a choice between Trump and some weirdo genocide supporting communist Pol Pot, sure I would vote Trump.   Otherwise, as if I would vote for that idiot", then what's the point of being a billionaire?

Gates probably does suffer from over-confidence in his own judgement (I guess it comes with the billionaire territory), and I'm not sure that he has got that many runs on the board for innovation in areas that now interest him.   The research into better condoms, for example - where has that gone?   I'm not sure that his nuclear dreams are all that well founded, either.

And I'll end by noting this Onion article, which amused me:

Not normal

Brisbane from Mt Cootha lookout today, covered in smoke haze:

Honestly, it is hard to credit how stupid the Right has become (and an anecdote about certainty)

Over the weekend, I noticed this widely mocked D'Souza tweet (and I'll just add the commentary on it too, because it is completely accurate):

Some people wondered whether he meant the "is the Earth heading to a new ice age" issue raised in the 70's;  but not, his response seemed to double down on this being a valid analogy.   It's breathtakingly stupid, yet he had plenty of support from Trumpers on twitter.

Then other people notices a tweet from 2015 from someone who now works for Trump:

As the Raw Story report explains, though, she followed it up in 2015 with this:

Lots of people were sceptical and think that this was a mere attempt at a "save" when she realised the wild stupidity of her first tweet.   A Fox News contributor being sarcastic toward the then candidate Trump policy on building a Mexican wall?  I don't think so...

And apparently Hugh Hewitt used to be considered a reasoned, moderate conservative voice:  he's now a Trump suck up like 95% of former "reasonable" commentators on the Right:

  

Update:   I also read over the weekend about how Steve Kates used to be a long haired, pot smoking, fornicating (by the sounds) hitch-hiker through Europe in his younger days. 

Sounds like he would have been very certain of his Lefty (quite hippy sounding, actually) views back in the day;  now he is very, very certain of how appalling the Left are and how "damaged women" are ruining politics, etc, etc.   Here's another recent rant, about the Trump impeachment process:

We just get used to it but these people on the left, these people in the media, these socialist nobodies, wish to overturn the democratic process. They should be put in jail. Not only are these people corrupt to the core, not only are these people ignorant, not only are they attempting to overturn our political system, they are as incompetent in their inability to make sound policy as it is possible to be. We treat much of this like a joke, but that is only because they have been unsuccessful. In fact, they have only been partly unsuccessful. They should be treated as the traitorous scum they actually are.

AND LET ME ADD THIS about the person the left is trying to overturn as president: Trump will lead the NYC parade he saved. The Democrats are soul-sick and vermin. Their leading presidential candidates are policy fools with not a single moral scruple between them. They are liars and thieves, all of which is known.

I've said it before:   it's a good rule of thumb not to trust (or at least, have reservations about) people who were once 100% certain of one political or cultural thing, who then swing around to be 100% certain of the opposite.


I would even apply this to the religious.

I remember once, as a teenager, meeting with a group a good humoured country (Catholic, 50's-ish) priest (in a casual setting), and while I can't remember how it came up, he make a joking reference to the question of whether Heaven really existed.   His quip was something like "well, I certainly hope so, or else I've wasted a lot of my life."   I remember thinking at the time that this was somewhat endearing - a man who had devoted his life to the practice of a faith, but at some level intellectually willing to contemplate the possibility that it's not based on reality.   And take that possibility in good humour, not despair.

Even someone like CS Lewis (who switched from atheism to theism to Christianity) I put in the "not as certain as he liked to make out" category:  I think it fair to say he suffered a bout of late life grief induced doubt as a result of his wife's death.  Also, as we now know, Mother Theresa was worried about her faith, too.

Who knows, maybe Kates sometimes wonders whether he is on the right track.   But at least with silent doubters like Lewis and Mother Theresa, they were (for the most part) making generous gestures and statements towards others based on a faith that they sometimes had doubts about.

Kates, on the other hand, is just nasty and dumb - using extermination linked, fascistic language towards the Left while pretending it is only the Left that uses it against the Right.   A complete sucker for the Right wing spin machine that is uninterested in truth or fairness, and just absorbed in a culture war that isn't interested in facts or science.  Terrible.

Bedroom light

I took the photo, of my son's mess of a bedroom, yesterday because I thought the orange, smoke filtered glow reminded me of the Spielbergian use of light (in ET in particular).

He was packing to go camping with a group of old high school friends; his first adult trip of that kind.  We did a trial run through of putting up the tent we have not used for a few years, so he shouldn't embarrass himself in that regard.  Even better, I think, is that I understand he probably will have no mobile phone reception (it's the beach side of Fraser Island) for nearly all of the week.  I will be interested to hear how he copes with days of limited screen time.   Maybe it will rewire his brain?   Then again, if they are attacked by a pack of dingoes, it's a beach drive to get help.   

He'll be fine...but I will wonder what he is doing quite a few times a day.

A case study of flash flooding in one American town

What a neatly presented story here at NPR on a town in Maryland that has had to face up to major changes following deadly recent flash floods.  (It looks great on my laptop, anyway - not sure how it looks on a phone.)

Confirming what I have been saying for quite a while:  the increased intensity of rainfall is the one of the clearest, earliest example of the dangers presented by climate change.