those services are available because the necessary materials and infrastructure for them has to be constantly trucked in, wired in, piped in. Please don't negate these costs, they are critical.
You have to keep it in mind, but in this case, I'm not sure it makes a difference. That is to say, the embodied carbon/energy/whatever-you-want-to-measure isn't going to be so different when comparing a supermarket inside a dense metropolis and a similar supermarket in the suburbs. Both are probably stuck in the destructive pattern of selling food that was shipped a thousand miles. Both would have their situations improved by getting most of their food from within a hundred mile radius. But with the suburban market, getting the food the last mile (or ten, or twenty) is going to have a much bigger environmental impact.
I also realize that even with the economies of scale provided by a dense population, the services you roll out will usually do more environmental damage than not having the services. But (with a few noble exceptions like yourself) it's going to be hard to talk people out of wanting the services.
that's because we let big business, headquartered in the major urban areas, hijack the entire notion of healthcare and drive up costs and create an artificial scarcity of doctors or clinicians. To ludicrous levels I might add.
Not going to disagree with you there, but my point wasn't really about medical services per se. Though if you want to find quality medical infrastructure (an MRI machine, perhaps) or a top-notch oncologist, you'll have to go to the cities, where their services find the biggest audience.
Let's back away from the medical arts for a moment. Say that, instead, the service you wanted to create was a Maker lab like the one I'm semi-involved in. Now, in a rural area, you might have the space and income to build yourself a nice backyard workshop and buy a decent set of tools for it. But after all that investment, how many people get to benefit from the service? Just you, and maybe one or two neighbors who share the maker bug. And you miss out on the companionship that comes from working with someone in the same physical space.
In the city, you have a chance to develop a thriving community based on a shared passion. With enough paying members, you can purchase a wider array of tools (which makes being a member even more beneficial), bring in guest speakers, and maybe spin off workshops for even more specific niches (like fire art, battlebots, or whatever).
If you spent enough money, you could replicate the infrastructure in your backyard shed. But even if you could care less about the community aspect, you're still stuck replicating the tools and things for every rural-dweller who wanted access to a maker lab.
I find it ridiculous that we have so skewed the economy that millions keep getting put out of work, when the money exists to "afford" more healthcare jobs, but instead it gets siphoned off so that people can maintain ludicrously expensive downtown apartments in expensive cities, and all the other resultant skewed upwards costs of living there. Your one apartment costs the same as the mortgage on three different homes with some acreage. You can get a few acres and a small home around here for 5-600 a month. That's lowball, but it exists. What's a typical manhattan apartment run today? Couple grand or more a month? That wealth for that apartment has to come from somewhere, and under analysis, it gets ripped off from the rural and suburban areas by governmental intervention in favor of the black suit at work crowd, in the high rises. The it trickles down in your urban areas, so you can have your close by services, but that is where the real wealth originates at, outside the city.
The broad-scale economics you're describing are way above my pay grade, but I t
I like the cut of your jib, but I'm not sure how my defense of urban living got translated into a defense of American imperialism and financial excess.
Look, I'm not arguing that it's not possible to live greenly out in the country, and it sounds like you're doing a great job. We'll always need people living in the countryside, doing farming and mining. But it's a different sort of living, and when people in lightly populated areas try to give themselves a lifestyle with all the benefits of city living, well, the lack of population density makes it really expensive.
Maybe we could have nine billion people all living the way you do. But it would require that they all be as environmentally conscious as you are, and you'll probably agree that it's pretty rare to find people like that.
There is a difference between "city-dwellers use fewer resources per capita" and "cities don't receive inputs from the outside world." You've convincingly disproven the latter statement, but it's not relevant to the subject at hand.
Here are a few ecological advantages the city has over more rural living:
More shared resources, and more infrastructure: The denser the city, the easier it is to roll out a mass transit system that serves a significant number of people. In a dense city, one fire brigade can protect the property of a quarter million people. A sewer system covering a square mile might serve 20x more people in an urban center than in a suburban neighborhood.
Smaller dwellings: Lighting, heating, and cooling a small apartment is generally going to be cheaper than providing the same services for a rural home. Even better, apartments stack atop each other, providing levels of insulation that you could never find in a standalone house.
More services are available within walking distance.
Many city dwellers don't even need a car. Thanks to car-sharing services (which are themselves impossible outside a dense urban center) this is an option for more and more people.
Any public services (say, a free health clinic) are going to be able to reach a larger number of people more effectively than if they tried to serve the same number of people spread out over, say, the state of Wyoming.
Because shared infrastructure is cheaper in the first place, upgrading is also cheaper. That's part of the reason that new cellular/wi-fi technologies hit the cities first. So you get the best toys first.
Then there are the non-ecological advantages: ideas travel faster, it's easier to find people who share your passions, there are more and better educational opportunities, and if you want to start any sort of service business, you're surrounded by potential customers, so you can specialize in a way that you can't in, say, a town of 1000 people like the one I grew up in.
If the island of Manhattan split off and formed its own state, it would be the greenest state in the nation, hands down, even factoring in the shipments feeding into it from around the world.* If the goal is to provide a maximum standard of living to the largest number of people on a constrained resource budget, noting beats the megatropolis.
* Source: I read something kinda like it on the Internet somewhere.
1) I shouldn't even talk about going to the hospital until someone PROVES that the pain in my chest really is a heart attack, and PROVES that it will kill me if left untreated.
2) Using the title of legislation to describe what you hope to accomplish with it is:
Whereas the energy and resources needed to maintain a suburban/rural lifestyle are brought down from the sky by singing angels?
At least among the non-city dwellers I know, most of them get most of their food from the same place: Wal-Mart.
Cities existed long before governments became powerful or ruthless enough to keep people there against their will. So they must have offered those early settlers something worth staying for, else they'd have left.
Those are good reasons to be skeptical of government's ability to spend with perfect efficiency, but they all more or less apply to the private sector as well. Businesses are constantly trying to solve problems that don't need solving, and Fortune 500 companies can be every bit as bureaucratic as the DMV. Come to think of it, the last time I was at the DMV, things went very smoothly. I even like the new driver's license picture.
Business has to respond to pressures on profits in a way that government does not. That isn't always a problem.
Advantages of government spending:
- Government can tackle issues where business is rendered helpless by externalities. Climate change is a good example. Also, educating the children of the poor.*
- Government can act on a massive scale to deal with problems that most people want solved, but which cannot be solved at a profit. Social Security does an excellent job of reducing poverty among the elderly.
- The products of government research don't have to have an immediate payoff, and do not get locked up as trade secrets. So society gets access to fundamental research, which is too expensive and risky for even a big corporation.
- Government can represent everyone. I'm the first to admit that Washington is pretty damned corrupt. But corporations aren't even theoretically capable of considering the greater good. At best, they are guided by the desires of their shareholders. At worst, they're used as a piggy bank by upper management.
- Government can deliver messages that would never be worth any corporation's time to fund. No health insurance company could fund a broad-based healthy living ad campaign. If they tried, other insurance companies would see the bulk of the rewards. It's a problem of game theory. And who is going to spring for the money to get the word out that tap water is as good as bottled water, or that breast milk is healthier than formula? Nobody makes their living by *not* selling formula, so the message is at a huge cash disadvantage.
To the extent that government can represent us all and can stay transparent and free from corruption, it is more trustworthy than the private sector. To the extent that it isn't, we as citizens need to be working to make it more so. But simply deflating government is not guaranteed to improve anything.
* Not that our system does this particularly well. But sans government action (even if that action is limited to handing out education vouchers to be redeemed at private schools) it wouldn't happen at all.
So, you can't prove it, or even marshal evidence for it on short notice, but you nevertheless hope readers won't find it objectionable?
The statement allows for no exceptions, so a reasonable person should find it suspect for that reason alone. There are situations where government efforts to save jobs in one area can lead to job losses in another. But since there are also situations where it is false, the statement overall should be considered false.
The statement is based on one assumption, which itself is founded on ideological rather than economical bedrock: government can never allocate resources as efficiently as the private sector. The moment you made the statement, I knew with 100% certainty that you were no more a trained economist than I am.
That is so good to hear. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy to know that you actually care enough about the future to not want to actively interfere with those who are trying to make sure that one happens.
But you don't want the government involved. Fine. Support cap-and-trade for CO2. That is the absolute least intrusive approach that has a chance of actually solving the problem. CO2 emissions present a huge externality, one that simply cannot be priced back into the market without government action.
Last point: I really don't understand the small-government crowd's obsession with nuclear power as the solution to our energy woes. The nuclear energy sector is by far the most heavily regulated and the one that relies the most upon government largesse. France uses the most nuclear energy, and they basically have a government-owned-and-operated energy sector. There is no way around that, and I guarantee that anyone who tries to deregulate nuclear power will be signing up for electoral defeat.
Nuclear power means a socialized energy sector. I'm fine with that. Are you?
The elimination of the human race. That is, and has always been, our secret mission all along. Why would Rush lie to you?
>> Green technologies depend on power far more than old ones. You can build a 1970s car just for the cost of computers in a Prius.
Source? Steel embodies a lot of energy too.
As green technologies go, the Prius is a baby step.
>> Windmills kill birds.
Which is why Greenpeace and PETA have come out against windmills.
Except they haven't, outside a few complaints about some antiquated buzz saws located at Altamont Pass in California.
Basically everybody agrees that wind turbines are an environmental boon. Well, not the environmentalist-bashing right wingers, but somehow I have trouble accepting their sincerity.
>> River dams kill fish.
Microhydro generally doesn't.
>> Geothermal is not available everywhere.
Given sufficiently deep holes, yes it is. Given a well-connected, high tech grid, it doesn't have to be.
>> Solar is an option only for well-lit areas (goodbye, Norway and Finland.)
Yes, we must indeed say goodbye to Norway and Finland, because there can be only one true clean energy technology. It's not like they could rely more on wind, or geothermal, or tidal/hydro, or energy imports, or maybe throw in a dash of nuclear power. No, we must choose one technology for the entire world, and abandon those areas where that technology works poorly.
Adieu, Helsinki. I weep that I never got to attend one of your moose-throwing festivals.
>> Fusion is 20 years away, as usual.
When I was growing up, it was thirty. You kids these days, don't know how good you got it.
>> Should we, perhaps, commit a collective suicide, or live like Amish do?
No, we should go along doing exactly the same things we've been doing in exactly the same ways, refusing to do any single thing to mitigate potential dangers until the evidence for global warming is so strong that even the CEO of Exxon throws in the towel. Of course, by then the opportunity to tackle the problem with low-impact, sensible risk mitigation strategies will be gone, and we'll be down to the two options you've offered.
The key is energy efficiency. Right now, probably 90% of the energy we generate does no useful work. It's lost to friction, to transmission losses, to moving dead weight, to lighting things that nobody is looking at, or any of a thousand other things that contribute not a whit to human enjoyment. You tackle those opportunities first, and suddenly the need for new generating capacity disappears.
Fine. I think that even with stimulus spending, government should try to spend its money as effectively as possible, and the Constellation program doesn't sound particularly effective. But if a GA Rep. wants to come out and say, "my district is already being crushed by unemployment, and that's why I'm fighting for this program," I can respect that.
But I'm guessing that the Rep. fighting for the program is also constantly haranguing his constituents about "out of control government spending," and voting against stimulus bills. I mean, this is Georgia we're talking about. I can't stand the hypocrisy of lawmakers who hold an outstretched hand to the government that they relentlessly attack.
Saying that "high taxes hurt small businesses" and saying "the complexity of the tax code hurts small businesses" are two different issues that should be dealt with separately.
Yes. Brilliant. Why hasn't anyone else thought of that?
Do you know how much traction an amendment like that can get, now that the corporations can flood the airwaves to kill any such attempt? It's damned hard to get a constitutional amendment passed. Look at the handful of amendments that we've managed to pass. Most of them are nitpicky stuff, or belatedly ditching anachronisms. An amendment eliminating corporate personhood would, by contrast, have to pass over the now unfettered opposition of every monied interest that there is.
You can mark yesterday in your calendar as the day that Justice John Roberts and his fellow ideologues lobotomized America's ability to make rational decisions about the governance of this country. Just stuck the knife in and wiggled it around. Now all that's left is to descend into madness.
America is in its death throes, and the Constitution has become its suicide pact.
>> And there's a reason that the thing was nicknamed the McCain-Feingold Incumbent Protection Act.
The reason being, the people who named it are morons?
The vast amount of money needed to run a political campaign is very clearly a benefit to the incumbent. The incumbent has the war chest. The incumbent has the political connections and the reliable donors, and the power to wield their votes in ways that will attract donations from various industries.
There are a few people able to overcome that sort of deficit. Meg Whitman intends to spend $100M of her own money to become governor of California. Is her right to spend her money as she likes more important than the electorate's right to have the best candidates rather than those with the deepest pockets?
While your overall advice is good, I object to the sentiment, "counseling is only for the rich." Mental illness is a very big deal. I figure that if society's goal is to allow as many people to live as happily as they can, basic mental health should be given at least as much emphasis as basic health care.
There aren't nearly enough psychologists and counselors to deal with our collective phobias and neuroses, and those that enter the field usually end up serving the few who can best afford it. But I think it's a disservice to paint it as a luxury.
My understanding is that the emotional trauma of a punishment has a lot to do with the culture in which it happens. In a culture where spanking is the norm, a kid who gets spanked has received the standard, culturally approved punishment, and is therefore still in the good graces of the culture. In a culture where it is almost unheard of, being the recipient of a spanking is a sign that you have done something exceptionally awful, and therefore that your place within the society was at risk.
At least, that was my interpretation of something Jared Diamond once tried to say. It kind of makes sense. My family didn't spank, as a rule. That's probably why I remember vividly every one of the exceptions to that rule.
The first time hate crime legislation was tested in the Supreme Court, the legislation was being used against a group of black men who beat up a white teenager. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_v._Mitchell
Something I wrote elsewhere:
Hate crimes legislation does not say "the punishment for X is greater if the victim is (black, gay, disabled, atheist, etc.)" Laws like that have been passed, but are invariably struck down as unconstitutional.
What the legislation says is that, if a person was targeted for having a certain religious viewpoint (regardless of what that viewpoint may be), or for their orientation (again, regardless of what it might be). Hate crime laws protect gay and straight, Mormon, Jew, and atheist equally. It's not a message that one group is more valuable than another, but a simple recognition that differences exist, hatreds and biases exist, and we there are certain ways that we cannot react to those feelings.
Way to miss the shades of grey. These diseases are over diagnosed, unless you really think there is an outside source causing them to go from being nearly non-existent diseases to affecting a VERY large portion of children in less than a single generation.
The alternative, of course, is that we've actually gotten better at diagnosing them, and that they were severely underdiagnosed before.
It must be the first disease ever to ONLY strike at one location, and only during a certain set of time during the day.
Psychological disorders with environmental triggers are not at all farfetched.
30% of the population is still within the "fat" part of a normal distribution, btw
Obesity is a really good counterexample to your own arguments. Like mental health issues, obesity has skyrocketed in the last generation or so, and one in four of us is obese today. But you can see the results waddling down the street. It's clearly not a problem of personal laziness or lack of willpower. Something epidemiological is going on here.
I'm sure that -- just like when you went hiking -- if obese Americans were suddenly dropped into a vastly different (and more sane) food culture, the pounds would slide off of many of them.
Perhaps you are one of the few people with actual ADD (doubtful, since adults couldn't have ADD until 2000)...
I myself prefer the 1980's DSM, so gay people can be diagnosed as mentally ill... oh wait.
Yes, diagnostic criteria change over time. Usually it's because we gain a better understanding of the phenomenon.
Whether we as a society treat Aspergers as an incapacity or just a different approach to the world is irrelevant to whether or not it is a real phenomenon. After all, when the APA dropped homosexuality as a category of mental disorder, it didn't mean gay people were just imagining things.
It never ends, kid. I'm in my mid-thirties, and mom still gets after me when she thinks I'm not dressed warmly enough.:)
There are a lot of things that we can blame it on, but parents today are just more hyperaware of potential dangers (real or imagined) that their kids face.
I once attended a lecture by Jared Diamond, where he talked about a tribe he studied. The kids there were free to make mistakes. He would often see eighteen month old babies playing with big, scary looking knives, right next to the fire. Every adult had a few burn scars to show for it, but actual deaths were astonishingly rare.
You make some fair points, but honestly I wish every kid was suffering from the overabundance of love and attention you describe. We still have rampant physical, sexual, and emotional child abuse. The schools we send kids to are a cross between a prison, a sensory deprivation chamber, and (if Paul Graham is to be believed) a corrupt and indolent royal court.
Parents have less time for them, due mostly to more hours worked, and I suspect we Americans move around a lot more than we did in the past, which is disruptive.
I think that kids are far less useful in our society than kids of previous generations, and they're smart enough to recognize it. They also have less unstructured time, less freedom to roam, and less accessible wilderness than their parents and grandparents did. And don't even get me started on the flood of cheap, trash calories we put in them.
Some kids get over-pampered, and I'm sure it causes real psychological problems. But I don't think that's the primary factor.
Last point: I would point out that the lead author of the study has spent the bulk of her career castigating the youth of today as spoiled, narcissistic whiners. Something about Jean Twinge just triggers my evil detector.
Oh really? The census reports indicate some pretty disturbing trends. Educated people are having fewer, if any children, while less and uneducated people are increasing in numbers. This isn't fantasy.
Yeah, yeah, the stupocalypse is upon us. Heard it all before, don't believe it.
For the purposes of this posting, I will define "The Stupocalypse" as the oft-predicted fall of civilization due to an intellectually diminished human race finding themselves no longer able to deal with the complexity of running said civilization. There are a lot of reasons to think that no such thing will ever happen.
First, even with an intentional eugenics program, it takes many, many generations for a trait to really take effect. Think where we'll be in ten generations. That's two hundred years, my good man! If we're not rewriting our genes daily by then -- hell, if we still *have* genes by then -- I will be flummoxed. So for any dumb genes that are trying to drive out the smart genes, the clock is ticking.
But of course, no such eugenics program exists. So the stupocalypse requires that the "smart" and "dumb" populations (if in fact such populations exist) self-segregate at least as effectively as a eugenics program, in order to beat the clock. That's not going to happen, due to a combination of odd couplings, infidelity, nontraditional reproductive strategies (sperm banking, egg harvesting, etc.), and the just plain random weirdness that governs our sexual activities.
There is another trend that the stupocalypse has to race against: less and less of the intelligent behavior of the human species is related directly to the innate capacities of the human brain. It started way back when we started talking to each other, accelerated when we started painting our thoughts on cave walls, really got revved up with the Gutenberg press, and culminated this morning, when I noticed that you can get a terabyte hard drive on NewEgg for $90.
But all that data has to be collated through a human brain before useful decisions can be made about it, right? Increasingly, no. NetFlix has terabytes of ratings data that it uses to make suggestions, but no human is involved. Same with Amazon's "you might also like" suggestions. Google indexes the web mostly automatically. Tons of stock trading is done automatically (though it's not clear what good comes from much of it). Increasingly sophisticated non-human agents react to increasingly rich data feeds on the web.
We, as a species, would have to get very dumb very fast to overcome this trend.
Finally, I'd like to focus on the specific evidence: that less educated people are outbreeding more educated people. I think the correlation between "educated" and "intelligent" is incredibly weak. I have a stat that I like to cite when people trot out the old canards about wealth and education being signs of innate superiority. Right now in the United States, the most academically successful children of the very poor are slightly less likely to graduate college than the most academically inept children of the very wealthy.
So there are two possibilities: either the children of the wealthy are so much more intellectually gifted than the children of the poor that the dumbest rich kid is smarter than the smartest poor kid, or the belief that we live in a meritocracy where everyone has an equal chance to succeed is a fairy tale.
Or to be blunt, society is stratified, but not by intelligence. So the fact that one strata may be outbreeding another says next-to-nothing about long-term intelligence trends.
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You have to keep it in mind, but in this case, I'm not sure it makes a difference. That is to say, the embodied carbon/energy/whatever-you-want-to-measure isn't going to be so different when comparing a supermarket inside a dense metropolis and a similar supermarket in the suburbs. Both are probably stuck in the destructive pattern of selling food that was shipped a thousand miles. Both would have their situations improved by getting most of their food from within a hundred mile radius. But with the suburban market, getting the food the last mile (or ten, or twenty) is going to have a much bigger environmental impact.
I also realize that even with the economies of scale provided by a dense population, the services you roll out will usually do more environmental damage than not having the services. But (with a few noble exceptions like yourself) it's going to be hard to talk people out of wanting the services.
Not going to disagree with you there, but my point wasn't really about medical services per se. Though if you want to find quality medical infrastructure (an MRI machine, perhaps) or a top-notch oncologist, you'll have to go to the cities, where their services find the biggest audience.
Let's back away from the medical arts for a moment. Say that, instead, the service you wanted to create was a Maker lab like the one I'm semi-involved in. Now, in a rural area, you might have the space and income to build yourself a nice backyard workshop and buy a decent set of tools for it. But after all that investment, how many people get to benefit from the service? Just you, and maybe one or two neighbors who share the maker bug. And you miss out on the companionship that comes from working with someone in the same physical space.
In the city, you have a chance to develop a thriving community based on a shared passion. With enough paying members, you can purchase a wider array of tools (which makes being a member even more beneficial), bring in guest speakers, and maybe spin off workshops for even more specific niches (like fire art, battlebots, or whatever).
If you spent enough money, you could replicate the infrastructure in your backyard shed. But even if you could care less about the community aspect, you're still stuck replicating the tools and things for every rural-dweller who wanted access to a maker lab.
The broad-scale economics you're describing are way above my pay grade, but I t
I like the cut of your jib, but I'm not sure how my defense of urban living got translated into a defense of American imperialism and financial excess.
Look, I'm not arguing that it's not possible to live greenly out in the country, and it sounds like you're doing a great job. We'll always need people living in the countryside, doing farming and mining. But it's a different sort of living, and when people in lightly populated areas try to give themselves a lifestyle with all the benefits of city living, well, the lack of population density makes it really expensive.
Maybe we could have nine billion people all living the way you do. But it would require that they all be as environmentally conscious as you are, and you'll probably agree that it's pretty rare to find people like that.
More later.
There is a difference between "city-dwellers use fewer resources per capita" and "cities don't receive inputs from the outside world." You've convincingly disproven the latter statement, but it's not relevant to the subject at hand.
Here are a few ecological advantages the city has over more rural living:
More shared resources, and more infrastructure: The denser the city, the easier it is to roll out a mass transit system that serves a significant number of people. In a dense city, one fire brigade can protect the property of a quarter million people. A sewer system covering a square mile might serve 20x more people in an urban center than in a suburban neighborhood.
Smaller dwellings: Lighting, heating, and cooling a small apartment is generally going to be cheaper than providing the same services for a rural home. Even better, apartments stack atop each other, providing levels of insulation that you could never find in a standalone house.
More services are available within walking distance.
Many city dwellers don't even need a car. Thanks to car-sharing services (which are themselves impossible outside a dense urban center) this is an option for more and more people.
Any public services (say, a free health clinic) are going to be able to reach a larger number of people more effectively than if they tried to serve the same number of people spread out over, say, the state of Wyoming.
Because shared infrastructure is cheaper in the first place, upgrading is also cheaper. That's part of the reason that new cellular/wi-fi technologies hit the cities first. So you get the best toys first.
Then there are the non-ecological advantages: ideas travel faster, it's easier to find people who share your passions, there are more and better educational opportunities, and if you want to start any sort of service business, you're surrounded by potential customers, so you can specialize in a way that you can't in, say, a town of 1000 people like the one I grew up in.
If the island of Manhattan split off and formed its own state, it would be the greenest state in the nation, hands down, even factoring in the shipments feeding into it from around the world.* If the goal is to provide a maximum standard of living to the largest number of people on a constrained resource budget, noting beats the megatropolis.
* Source: I read something kinda like it on the Internet somewhere.
Things I've learned from reading your post:
1) I shouldn't even talk about going to the hospital until someone PROVES that the pain in my chest really is a heart attack, and PROVES that it will kill me if left untreated.
2) Using the title of legislation to describe what you hope to accomplish with it is:
a) evil for some reason
b) when Democrats do it
I've never felt so smart!
First they came for the men with sportscars, but I did not speak out, for I was not a giant douchebag.
Whereas the energy and resources needed to maintain a suburban/rural lifestyle are brought down from the sky by singing angels?
At least among the non-city dwellers I know, most of them get most of their food from the same place: Wal-Mart.
Cities existed long before governments became powerful or ruthless enough to keep people there against their will. So they must have offered those early settlers something worth staying for, else they'd have left.
He's from South Africa, which I'll admit hardly counts.
It's no excuse for his I-know-better-than-any-mumbo-jumbo-statistics 'tude, but I don't think he's lying about his background.
Sorry. We do what now?
Those are good reasons to be skeptical of government's ability to spend with perfect efficiency, but they all more or less apply to the private sector as well. Businesses are constantly trying to solve problems that don't need solving, and Fortune 500 companies can be every bit as bureaucratic as the DMV. Come to think of it, the last time I was at the DMV, things went very smoothly. I even like the new driver's license picture.
Business has to respond to pressures on profits in a way that government does not. That isn't always a problem.
Advantages of government spending:
- Government can tackle issues where business is rendered helpless by externalities. Climate change is a good example. Also, educating the children of the poor.*
- Government can act on a massive scale to deal with problems that most people want solved, but which cannot be solved at a profit. Social Security does an excellent job of reducing poverty among the elderly.
- The products of government research don't have to have an immediate payoff, and do not get locked up as trade secrets. So society gets access to fundamental research, which is too expensive and risky for even a big corporation.
- Government can represent everyone. I'm the first to admit that Washington is pretty damned corrupt. But corporations aren't even theoretically capable of considering the greater good. At best, they are guided by the desires of their shareholders. At worst, they're used as a piggy bank by upper management.
- Government can deliver messages that would never be worth any corporation's time to fund. No health insurance company could fund a broad-based healthy living ad campaign. If they tried, other insurance companies would see the bulk of the rewards. It's a problem of game theory. And who is going to spring for the money to get the word out that tap water is as good as bottled water, or that breast milk is healthier than formula? Nobody makes their living by *not* selling formula, so the message is at a huge cash disadvantage.
To the extent that government can represent us all and can stay transparent and free from corruption, it is more trustworthy than the private sector. To the extent that it isn't, we as citizens need to be working to make it more so. But simply deflating government is not guaranteed to improve anything.
* Not that our system does this particularly well. But sans government action (even if that action is limited to handing out education vouchers to be redeemed at private schools) it wouldn't happen at all.
So, you can't prove it, or even marshal evidence for it on short notice, but you nevertheless hope readers won't find it objectionable?
The statement allows for no exceptions, so a reasonable person should find it suspect for that reason alone. There are situations where government efforts to save jobs in one area can lead to job losses in another. But since there are also situations where it is false, the statement overall should be considered false.
The statement is based on one assumption, which itself is founded on ideological rather than economical bedrock: government can never allocate resources as efficiently as the private sector. The moment you made the statement, I knew with 100% certainty that you were no more a trained economist than I am.
>> I'm OK with trying to save the planet.
That is so good to hear. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy to know that you actually care enough about the future to not want to actively interfere with those who are trying to make sure that one happens.
But you don't want the government involved. Fine. Support cap-and-trade for CO2. That is the absolute least intrusive approach that has a chance of actually solving the problem. CO2 emissions present a huge externality, one that simply cannot be priced back into the market without government action.
Last point: I really don't understand the small-government crowd's obsession with nuclear power as the solution to our energy woes. The nuclear energy sector is by far the most heavily regulated and the one that relies the most upon government largesse. France uses the most nuclear energy, and they basically have a government-owned-and-operated energy sector. There is no way around that, and I guarantee that anyone who tries to deregulate nuclear power will be signing up for electoral defeat.
Nuclear power means a socialized energy sector. I'm fine with that. Are you?
>> Then I'm confused, what do you propose?
The elimination of the human race. That is, and has always been, our secret mission all along. Why would Rush lie to you?
>> Green technologies depend on power far more than old ones. You can build a 1970s car just for the cost of computers in a Prius.
Source? Steel embodies a lot of energy too.
As green technologies go, the Prius is a baby step.
>> Windmills kill birds.
Which is why Greenpeace and PETA have come out against windmills.
Except they haven't, outside a few complaints about some antiquated buzz saws located at Altamont Pass in California.
Basically everybody agrees that wind turbines are an environmental boon. Well, not the environmentalist-bashing right wingers, but somehow I have trouble accepting their sincerity.
>> River dams kill fish.
Microhydro generally doesn't.
>> Geothermal is not available everywhere.
Given sufficiently deep holes, yes it is. Given a well-connected, high tech grid, it doesn't have to be.
>> Solar is an option only for well-lit areas (goodbye, Norway and Finland.)
Yes, we must indeed say goodbye to Norway and Finland, because there can be only one true clean energy technology. It's not like they could rely more on wind, or geothermal, or tidal/hydro, or energy imports, or maybe throw in a dash of nuclear power. No, we must choose one technology for the entire world, and abandon those areas where that technology works poorly.
Adieu, Helsinki. I weep that I never got to attend one of your moose-throwing festivals.
>> Fusion is 20 years away, as usual.
When I was growing up, it was thirty. You kids these days, don't know how good you got it.
>> Should we, perhaps, commit a collective suicide, or live like Amish do?
No, we should go along doing exactly the same things we've been doing in exactly the same ways, refusing to do any single thing to mitigate potential dangers until the evidence for global warming is so strong that even the CEO of Exxon throws in the towel. Of course, by then the opportunity to tackle the problem with low-impact, sensible risk mitigation strategies will be gone, and we'll be down to the two options you've offered.
The key is energy efficiency. Right now, probably 90% of the energy we generate does no useful work. It's lost to friction, to transmission losses, to moving dead weight, to lighting things that nobody is looking at, or any of a thousand other things that contribute not a whit to human enjoyment. You tackle those opportunities first, and suddenly the need for new generating capacity disappears.
That is a statement of economic ideology, not of fact.
Fine. I think that even with stimulus spending, government should try to spend its money as effectively as possible, and the Constellation program doesn't sound particularly effective. But if a GA Rep. wants to come out and say, "my district is already being crushed by unemployment, and that's why I'm fighting for this program," I can respect that.
But I'm guessing that the Rep. fighting for the program is also constantly haranguing his constituents about "out of control government spending," and voting against stimulus bills. I mean, this is Georgia we're talking about. I can't stand the hypocrisy of lawmakers who hold an outstretched hand to the government that they relentlessly attack.
Saying that "high taxes hurt small businesses" and saying "the complexity of the tax code hurts small businesses" are two different issues that should be dealt with separately.
Yes. Brilliant. Why hasn't anyone else thought of that?
Do you know how much traction an amendment like that can get, now that the corporations can flood the airwaves to kill any such attempt? It's damned hard to get a constitutional amendment passed. Look at the handful of amendments that we've managed to pass. Most of them are nitpicky stuff, or belatedly ditching anachronisms. An amendment eliminating corporate personhood would, by contrast, have to pass over the now unfettered opposition of every monied interest that there is.
You can mark yesterday in your calendar as the day that Justice John Roberts and his fellow ideologues lobotomized America's ability to make rational decisions about the governance of this country. Just stuck the knife in and wiggled it around. Now all that's left is to descend into madness.
America is in its death throes, and the Constitution has become its suicide pact.
>> And there's a reason that the thing was nicknamed the McCain-Feingold Incumbent Protection Act.
The reason being, the people who named it are morons?
The vast amount of money needed to run a political campaign is very clearly a benefit to the incumbent. The incumbent has the war chest. The incumbent has the political connections and the reliable donors, and the power to wield their votes in ways that will attract donations from various industries.
There are a few people able to overcome that sort of deficit. Meg Whitman intends to spend $100M of her own money to become governor of California. Is her right to spend her money as she likes more important than the electorate's right to have the best candidates rather than those with the deepest pockets?
While your overall advice is good, I object to the sentiment, "counseling is only for the rich." Mental illness is a very big deal. I figure that if society's goal is to allow as many people to live as happily as they can, basic mental health should be given at least as much emphasis as basic health care.
There aren't nearly enough psychologists and counselors to deal with our collective phobias and neuroses, and those that enter the field usually end up serving the few who can best afford it. But I think it's a disservice to paint it as a luxury.
My understanding is that the emotional trauma of a punishment has a lot to do with the culture in which it happens. In a culture where spanking is the norm, a kid who gets spanked has received the standard, culturally approved punishment, and is therefore still in the good graces of the culture. In a culture where it is almost unheard of, being the recipient of a spanking is a sign that you have done something exceptionally awful, and therefore that your place within the society was at risk.
At least, that was my interpretation of something Jared Diamond once tried to say. It kind of makes sense. My family didn't spank, as a rule. That's probably why I remember vividly every one of the exceptions to that rule.
Yes there is.
The first time hate crime legislation was tested in the Supreme Court, the legislation was being used against a group of black men who beat up a white teenager. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_v._Mitchell
Something I wrote elsewhere:
Technically, Aspergers would be merged into the high-functioning autism spectrum, because that's where it seems to fit better.
The alternative, of course, is that we've actually gotten better at diagnosing them, and that they were severely underdiagnosed before.
Psychological disorders with environmental triggers are not at all farfetched.
Obesity is a really good counterexample to your own arguments. Like mental health issues, obesity has skyrocketed in the last generation or so, and one in four of us is obese today. But you can see the results waddling down the street. It's clearly not a problem of personal laziness or lack of willpower. Something epidemiological is going on here.
I'm sure that -- just like when you went hiking -- if obese Americans were suddenly dropped into a vastly different (and more sane) food culture, the pounds would slide off of many of them.
Yes, diagnostic criteria change over time. Usually it's because we gain a better understanding of the phenomenon.
Whether we as a society treat Aspergers as an incapacity or just a different approach to the world is irrelevant to whether or not it is a real phenomenon. After all, when the APA dropped homosexuality as a category of mental disorder, it didn't mean gay people were just imagining things.
It never ends, kid. I'm in my mid-thirties, and mom still gets after me when she thinks I'm not dressed warmly enough. :)
There are a lot of things that we can blame it on, but parents today are just more hyperaware of potential dangers (real or imagined) that their kids face.
I once attended a lecture by Jared Diamond, where he talked about a tribe he studied. The kids there were free to make mistakes. He would often see eighteen month old babies playing with big, scary looking knives, right next to the fire. Every adult had a few burn scars to show for it, but actual deaths were astonishingly rare.
Read anything you can by Diamond, by the way.
You make some fair points, but honestly I wish every kid was suffering from the overabundance of love and attention you describe. We still have rampant physical, sexual, and emotional child abuse. The schools we send kids to are a cross between a prison, a sensory deprivation chamber, and (if Paul Graham is to be believed) a corrupt and indolent royal court.
Parents have less time for them, due mostly to more hours worked, and I suspect we Americans move around a lot more than we did in the past, which is disruptive.
I think that kids are far less useful in our society than kids of previous generations, and they're smart enough to recognize it. They also have less unstructured time, less freedom to roam, and less accessible wilderness than their parents and grandparents did. And don't even get me started on the flood of cheap, trash calories we put in them.
Some kids get over-pampered, and I'm sure it causes real psychological problems. But I don't think that's the primary factor.
Last point: I would point out that the lead author of the study has spent the bulk of her career castigating the youth of today as spoiled, narcissistic whiners. Something about Jean Twinge just triggers my evil detector.
Yeah, yeah, the stupocalypse is upon us. Heard it all before, don't believe it.
For the purposes of this posting, I will define "The Stupocalypse" as the oft-predicted fall of civilization due to an intellectually diminished human race finding themselves no longer able to deal with the complexity of running said civilization. There are a lot of reasons to think that no such thing will ever happen.
First, even with an intentional eugenics program, it takes many, many generations for a trait to really take effect. Think where we'll be in ten generations. That's two hundred years, my good man! If we're not rewriting our genes daily by then -- hell, if we still *have* genes by then -- I will be flummoxed. So for any dumb genes that are trying to drive out the smart genes, the clock is ticking.
But of course, no such eugenics program exists. So the stupocalypse requires that the "smart" and "dumb" populations (if in fact such populations exist) self-segregate at least as effectively as a eugenics program, in order to beat the clock. That's not going to happen, due to a combination of odd couplings, infidelity, nontraditional reproductive strategies (sperm banking, egg harvesting, etc.), and the just plain random weirdness that governs our sexual activities.
There is another trend that the stupocalypse has to race against: less and less of the intelligent behavior of the human species is related directly to the innate capacities of the human brain. It started way back when we started talking to each other, accelerated when we started painting our thoughts on cave walls, really got revved up with the Gutenberg press, and culminated this morning, when I noticed that you can get a terabyte hard drive on NewEgg for $90.
But all that data has to be collated through a human brain before useful decisions can be made about it, right? Increasingly, no. NetFlix has terabytes of ratings data that it uses to make suggestions, but no human is involved. Same with Amazon's "you might also like" suggestions. Google indexes the web mostly automatically. Tons of stock trading is done automatically (though it's not clear what good comes from much of it). Increasingly sophisticated non-human agents react to increasingly rich data feeds on the web.
We, as a species, would have to get very dumb very fast to overcome this trend.
Finally, I'd like to focus on the specific evidence: that less educated people are outbreeding more educated people. I think the correlation between "educated" and "intelligent" is incredibly weak. I have a stat that I like to cite when people trot out the old canards about wealth and education being signs of innate superiority. Right now in the United States, the most academically successful children of the very poor are slightly less likely to graduate college than the most academically inept children of the very wealthy.
So there are two possibilities: either the children of the wealthy are so much more intellectually gifted than the children of the poor that the dumbest rich kid is smarter than the smartest poor kid, or the belief that we live in a meritocracy where everyone has an equal chance to succeed is a fairy tale.
Or to be blunt, society is stratified, but not by intelligence. So the fact that one strata may be outbreeding another says next-to-nothing about long-term intelligence trends.