Is the Deficit too Small?

No. Really. I'm not joking (well, maybe a little). From an article in the Washington Times:

The conventional wisdom is our federal government deficit is too large. However, the empirical evidence suggests the deficit might be too small. [...]

The total federal government debt held by the public (which is the relevant number to be concerned about) dropped from 42 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 1962 to a low of 25 percent in 1975, then rose to a high of 50 percent in 1993, and then dropped back to 33 percent in 2001. Currently, debt as a percent of GDP stands at about 35 percent.

Since 1963, we have had 14 years when debt has been below 33 percent of GDP and 26 years when it has been higher. Conventional wisdom is that economic performance should have been better in the years when we had less relative debt, but the facts are the opposite. Real economic growth averaged 3.47 percent in the high debt years, which was almost 1 percent higher than the 2.59 percent average growth of the low debt years.

Unemployment was also lower in the high debt years averaging 5.65 percent as opposed to 6.43 percent in the low debt years. Inflation averaged a whopping 7.6 percent in the low debt years, almost 3 times as high as the average 2.95 percent of the high debt years.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates federal debt could grow to as much as 40 percent of GDP by 2005 and then begin declining again. From 1986 to 1999, it was above 40 percent, and we did quite well during most of those years. Recent data showing both much higher economic growth and higher inflation (meaning much higher nominal GDP) than the CBO forecasted means the debt GDP ratio in fact is likely to remain almost constant. [...]

Finally, the analysis of the historical data clearly indicates that if we had properly structured tax cuts (like the first Reagan and the most recent Bush tax cuts) in 1969, 1973, 1979, 1989 and 2000 we may have avoided the recessions, with all their human misery and unemployment, that occurred the year following each of the above dates. Unfortunately, policymakers in all of those years were more preoccupied with reducing the deficits rather than keeping the economy growing.

The lesson is clear, economic prosperity can continue, even if the federal government never balances its budget, provided it keeps government spending from growing as a percentage of GDP, and has an ongoing program of removing tax and regulatory impediments to growth.

Obviously, the debt itself isn't what causes superior economic performance. It's probably reduced inflows to the government (i.e., reduced taxation) which then causes both the increased economic performance and also the debt. Nonetheless, DOD (debt obsession disorder) is at this point,more of a problem than the debt itself (in my opinion).

This article also reminds us that as more and more worldwide economic data becomes available, it is critically important to learn from, and rely on that data, as opposed to relying on economic theory or "common sense". There will continue to be situations where there is no comparable historical data, but these situations are becoming fewer and farther between. In every case where taxes above 20% of GDP are cut, growth accelerates (with a slight lag). In every case growth eventually benefits the poor (though never as much as the rich). Therefore, if you want to help the poor, cut taxes.

National Direct Democracy: One Approach

I've been thinking about direct democracy at the national level and its potential benefits and problems. One of the first questions that comes to mind is "how would the government need to be restructured in order to support direct democracy?" Unfortunately, it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Without identifying the potential benefits and impacts of direct democracy, it's difficult to design an optimum system. However, with out knowing what the system might be, it's difficult to identify the potential problems and determine how beneficial a directly democratic system might be. But we have to start somewhere, and I think starting with a rough outline of one way direct democracy could work is as good a place as any.

The simplest version of Direct Democracy that I can think of, and the one that requires the least change to the structure of the government and leaves most of the checks and balances which seem to work so well in place, is to leave the Executive and Judicial branches and the Senate as they are now, and to make two minor changes to the House of Representatives. The first change is that the populace can introduce legislation to the House of Representatives. The second change is that the vote of the House of Representatives is advisory only and requires a subsequent national vote to pass the legislation.

There are many ways that a system could be designed for the voters to introduce legislation to the House of Representatives. Most methods have some person or entity write proposed legislation and collect some number of millions of signatures, and if enough signatures are collected, the legislation is added to the House or Representative's agenda (in time order). We'll need to assume that those signatures can be collected electronically and that the electronic collection is verifiable and incorruptible. This may be an enormous or even insurmountable assumption and the required technology will be the topic of future essays, but for now, let's assume it can be done inexpensively and effectively. I'm also going to ignore numerous other interesting details for now.

With this approach, the House of Representatives would have an agenda of pending legislation, part of which was added to the agenda by the Representatives themselves just as it's done now, and part of which was added to the agenda by the above procedure. The Representatives debate and vote on the legislation just like they do now. However, the vote doesn't have any direct effect on whether or not the legislation passes. For each piece of legislation there is a national vote and the whether or not the legislation passes is solely dependent on the national vote.

I would suggest that the national votes be based on something similar to a typical proxy based corporate vote. At voter registration, each voter would specify their default proxy directive as having his or her vote be the same as the advisory vote of the House of Representatives, the same as the advisory vote of a given party or subparty within the House, the same as the advisory vote of one of the representatives, or an abstention. Just like a corporate proxy, the voters can rescind their proxies for a particular piece of legislation and vote directly on that legislation. Legislation that passes would continue on to the Senate just as it does now.

Clearly, if the voters never bothered to introduce legislation and everybody set their proxy default to follow the advisory vote of the entire House of Representatives, the legislative process would proceed exactly as it does now. If voters want to be more specific about their allegiance, they can pick a particular group or subgroup within the House to be their "voting advisors". And if they care about a particular issue, they can cause legislation to be produced and vote directly on that legislation.

I'm proposing this approach because it gives the voters tremendous flexibility with minimal burden and requires little change to the existing government structure. There are numerous other approaches, but I think this one is good enough to begin discussing the benefits and impacts of a national direct democracy.

Don't Forget...

...it's National Buy Ammo Day! I just knew you didn't want to miss knowing that.

And He Had a Good Shot at My Vote

Howard Dean just lost any chance at getting my vote in 2004.

After years of government deregulation of energy markets, telecommunications, the airlines and other major industries, Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean is proposing a significant reversal: a comprehensive "re-regulation" of U.S. businesses.

The former Vermont governor said he would reverse the trend toward deregulation pursued by recent presidents -- including, in some respects, Bill Clinton -- to help restore faith in scandal-plagued U.S. corporations and better protect U.S. workers.

In an interview around midnight Monday on his campaign plane with a small group of reporters, Dean listed likely targets for what he dubbed as his "re-regulation" campaign: utilities, large media companies and any business that offers stock options. Dean did not rule out "re-regulating" the telecommunications industry, too.

This excerpt from a Washington Post article. My company, like most high tech companies, offers stock options. Does he want to kill the entire high-tech sector? Is his goal to bring back the stagnation of the 1970s? What is he thinking?

Hitler and Germany Versus Bush and America

This is a first draft, I'll probably hack it up and republish it over time...

A common theme across much of the world is that Bush and America has many similarities to Hitler and Hitler's Germany. I think most of the evidence being presented to backup of this theme is extremely weak. A somewhat typical example is an essay at the Common Dreams website. It's an amusing and clever radical reweighting of historical factors and finds a couple of events from before WWII that seem similar to the present time. Anti-war folk point to essays like this to "prove" that Bush is a fascist in the making. Pro-war folk roll their eyes and wonder how anybody could be so ignorant of history to believe that there is any similarity between Nazi Germany and America. I just chuckle to myself.

In my opinion, the similarities of the details between Hitler and Bush and their respective nations are few and far between. However, from the perspective of the projection of ideas, I think Hitler's Germany was quite similar to Bush's America. And both of those have a great deal of similarity to the Romans, the imperial British, and other major powers.

Allow me to explain myself.

Memetics is the study of cultural evolution. A Meme is "a unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another." Genes are to DNA like memes are to culture. Both genes and memes mutate and combine to form novel combinations.

A Meme Complex (MC) is a group of memes that form an organized belief system, such as a religion or ideology (sort of like a chromosome). A culture is then a set of MCs. MCs exist across individuals. In aggregate, the individuals host the MCs. While a MC can exist in only one individual, it's not particularly interesting. It becomes interesting when MCs exists across a population. In this view, MCs utilize their human hosts to cause behaviors and actions across that population. In other words, the MCs are the primary actor, not the individual human thinkers.

Like genes, memes only survive if they are able to propagate to new hosts at a rate faster than existing hosts die or stop hosting them. Like a set of chromosomes in a biological entity, only memes that are part of MCs that are good at propagating survive. MCs that might be potentially good for humanity are immaterial if they are not also good at propagating. Like genes, memes have no consciousness of their own and don't care how much suffering they cause. They only "care" about propagating.

When Homo Sapiens first appeared, MC propagation was closely linked with the population growth of those hosting the MC. If the MC helped a tribe do well in reproduction and survival, the number of people hosting that particular MC increased. While there was some communication between tribes, the effect on MC propagation was probably dwarfed by the effect of population growth and migration of successful tribes.

The invention of trade about 40,000 years ago was the first major change to MC propagation. Not only were goods traded. Ideas were traded as well. The invention of trade is itself a MC which was self propagating. Inventions and cultural adaptations were able to propagate much faster because they were facilitated by inter-tribal interactions whose primary purpose was trade. Inventions like agriculture spread to much of the globe in only a few thousand years. Prior to the invention and adoption of trade, it would have taken much, much longer.

With the inventions and propagation of trade and agriculture, a much higher population and density of that population could be attained. Probably as a result, MCs involving aggressive conquest and empire building became very successful. Examples include Alexander the Great, the Greeks, the Roman Empire, and 1,500 years of European religious and secular wars and empires. Not only did the conquering MC acquire resources to support more rapid reproduction, but the conquered often adopted some or all of the conqueror's MCs. This adoption is easily seen by tracking the propagation of language and dialects throughout the world, since language itself is a significant MC.

The printing press coupled with increasing literacy enabled far more complicated MCs to be supported. The more complicated MCs supported far more complex societies, far high population densities, far more potent cultures, far more effective economies, rapid technological advance, and far more lethal weaponry and military strategies and tactics. At the end of the 20th century, a given MC could have hosts numbering in the billions, with potentially tens of millions being directed to fight and possibly die to support the propagation of the MCs. The individuals would die, but the MCs would live on and even increase their total number of hosts. In some cases, MCs lead to negative population growth (in most of the 1st world), but the total number of hosts increases since the MCs infect new hosts from the 3rd world.

Truth has never been an inherent part of MCs. If lies help a MC to propagate, then there is strong selective pressure for a MC to evolve to incorporate those lies. The printing press and big media prior to the last decade were expensive and therefore centrally controlled by only a relatively few elite people. These elites were able to set and control the debate and thus had huge influence on the propagation of memes. Because of this concentration of power controlling a primary channel of meme propagation, truth increasingly became a victim in order to further the power of the elite's control of their society's MCs.

In the last ten years, with the rapid growth of the Internet and cheap telecommunications, and increasing access to those technological developments, big media is losing its monopoly on controlling MC propagation. At the same time, a rich economy (rich because of effective MCs and luck) is able to use these technologies to project their MCs across the globe.

The American MCs are tremendously aggressive in global propagation. They are in your face, seductive, and subversive. Because they help those who adopt them produce wealth and power, they leave those who don't adopt them relatively worse off. As a result the American MCs are obliterating the rest of the MCs in the world. America has a powerful military and isn't afraid to use it, but the military's influence is inconsequential compared to the rest of America's projection of its MCs. Thus, the American MCs are currently heading rapidly toward global domination.

The WWII German MCs also evolved to attempt global domination. Because communication and media technology were less advanced, the primary channel for MC propagation was military conquest.

In this sense Hitler's Germany and Bush's America are identical. Both have evolved extremely aggressive cultural MCs that tried or are trying to propagate themselves globally, to be hosted by every person on the planet. The German MCs failed and were destroyed (parts still exist, but not the whole mix).

Islamism (as opposed to Islam, the religion) is another group of MCs that has correctly identified the American MCs as an explicit threat. For the Islamism's MCs to survive, those MCs will have to evolve so that they are able to resist the seductive nature of the American MCs. If it's not possible to resist, the Islamism's MCs will have to evolve so that they attempt to destroy the American MCs (perhaps they already have). Unfortunately, it may be that the only realistic way for Islamism's MCs to survive is to destroy the American MCs. That may require the slaughter of tens of millions of Americans and destruction of the West on a vast scale.

The West, in standing up to Hitler 60 years ago, understood that it would require devastating Germany to survive. Islamism's MCs may understand that it requires devastating America to survive. Hitler lost. We may too.

Mom Finds Out About Blog

A hysterically funny article from the Onion.

Here's "what to do when your mom discovers your blog" by Blogger Support.

More on Iraq - al Qaeda Linkage

I wrote below that I didn't "have any clue one way or the other" regarding Bush and his administration alleged "lies" regarding links between Iraq and al Qaeda. There are two reasons for that. First, as I've pointed out several times, I seriously distrust all media. That's why I find the pair of NY Times quotes via Sullivan both amusing (to me) and tragic (for that once venerable old paper).

The second reason is that there is plenty of public information that corroborates those quotes in Jim's entry. For example, here are some excerpts from a recent article from The Weekly Standard:

OSAMA BIN LADEN and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda--perhaps even for Mohamed Atta--according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

The memo, dated October 27, 2003, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It was written in response to a request from the committee as part of its investigation into prewar intelligence claims made by the administration. Intelligence reporting included in the 16-page memo comes from a variety of domestic and foreign agencies, including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. Much of the evidence is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources. Some of it is new information obtained in custodial interviews with high-level al Qaeda terrorists and Iraqi officials, and some of it is more than a decade old. The picture that emerges is one of a history of collaboration between two of America's most determined and dangerous enemies.

According to the memo--which lays out the intelligence in 50 numbered points--Iraq-al Qaeda contacts began in 1990 and continued through mid-March 2003, days before the Iraq War began. Most of the numbered passages contain straight, fact-based intelligence reporting, which in
some cases includes an evaluation of the credibility of the source. This reporting is often followed by commentary and analysis.

The relationship began shortly before the first Gulf War. According to reporting in the memo, bin Laden sent "emissaries to Jordan in 1990 to meet with Iraqi government officials." At some unspecified point in 1991, according to a CIA analysis, "Iraq sought Sudan's assistance to establish links to al Qaeda." The outreach went in both directions. According to 1993 CIA reporting cited in the memo, "bin Laden wanted to expand his organization's capabilities through ties with Iraq..."

The Weekly Standard is a right wing publication and supportive of Bush. I don't trust them either. They could easily made up the leaked "top secret" memo. I'm always particularly suspicious when only one journalist (or at least journal) gets to see some inside information and nobody else has access to it. Who leaked it? Why can't we see the memo itself? What evidence is there that it's real?

But the same goes for those providing "evidence" that Bush lied. It always seems to be some unnamed intelligence official providing that information. Again, who is said intelligence official? Why should we consider what they say authoritative? How do we know they had access to all pertinent information (intelligence is usually distributed on a "needs-to-know" basis so few people have access to all information)? How do we know they just weren't anti-Bush and made it up?

That's why, in my mind, the case is not yet closed whether or not Bush lied about links between Iraq and al Qaeda. The same is true regarding weapons of mass destruction, including the African enriched uranium story. If someone believes the media, the evidence is conflicting. If someone doesn't believe the media, there's virtually no evidence. If someone only believes the portion of the media that conveniently aligns with that person's views, then that person is biased.

Where's the Data?

Jim, regarding three quotes from Bush and senior administration officials, you write that "it's pretty clear these are outright lies or at least great leaps beyond the facts." Unless you have access to all classified intelligence data worldwide, or at least what Bush and his Administration have access to, I'm baffled as to how you could possibly know that with such confidence. Especially to the confidence level that Bush should be "put in jail" for those statements. I'm not saying I'm sure he didn't lie (or even that I have any clue one way or the other). I'm just saying the evidence that he did lie is totally lacking, primarily because it's extremely difficult to prove a negative (i.e., prove that Bush and his Administration did not see intelligence that supports his statement).

You also asked, "would you want one of your kids to serve in Iraq?" I would be honored if one or both of my daughters served in the United States Armed Forces one day in a situation such as Iraq if they so choose (they're a little young at the moment).

You state "Hitler overran other nations. Saddam not only didn't overrun another nation, he didn't even have the means to do so." Ummm, doesn't Kuwait count as a nation? He tried to overrun Iran. Does that not count because he didn't succeed?

The situation in Iraq in 2002 was much more similar to the situation in Germany in 1938. Who, from that era, if they knew what the future had in store, wouldn't have supported pre-emptively attacking Hitler before he got his war machine in full swing? Yet there was less evidence at that time to support taking action against Hitler than there was supporting taking action against Saddam. At that point Hitler hadn't actually invaded any countries. Saddam had.

As Howie will vouch from our conversations one to two years ago, I wasn't particularly keen on invading Iraq at that time. But then I had a long political conversation with my Dad, who clearly remembered the late thirties. He described to me the peace protests, Neville Chamberlain's "Peace in our Time" speech, the antiwar media, the French wringing their hands and imploring and threatening Hitler not to continue violating the Treaty of Versailles (but doing nothing). He was stunned by the similarity of that time with 2002. He asked me, "when is the world going to learn that you shouldn't ever appease power hungry dictators?" I couldn't come up with a good answer to his question and since then I've supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Are there other power hungry dictators? Of course. Should we remove them from power? If they have the resources to actually achieve the power they crave, I think we should. Saddam, with his hunger for power and oil fields, was, in my opinion, the most obvious target at the time. The other power hungry dictators simply don't have the resources to wreak as much havoc as someone like Saddam.

I need clarification on one thing. Do you think that Ends can never justify Means (that are not just in and of themselves), or that in the case of the Iraq war in particular the Ends didn't justify the Means, if the Means were that Bush lied?

Where Have All the Editors Gone?

Did the NY Times lay off all of it's Editors?

"President Bush sketched an expansive vision last night [at his American Enterprise Institute speech] of what he expects to accomplish by a war in Iraq. Instead of focusing on eliminating weapons of mass destruction, or reducing the threat of terror to the United States, Mr. Bush talked about establishing a 'free and peaceful Iraq' that would serve as a 'dramatic and inspiring example' to the entire Arab and Muslim world, provide a stabilizing influence in the Middle East and even help end the Arab-Israeli conflict. The idea of turning Iraq into a model democracy in the Arab world is one some members of the administration have been discussing for a long time." -- New York Times editorial, February 27, 2003.

"The White House recently began shifting its case for the Iraq war from the embarrassing unconventional weapons issue to the lofty vision of creating an exemplary democracy in Iraq." -- New York Times editorial, November 13, 2003.

Is it incompetence or bias? (Hat tip Andrew Sullivan)

Ham 'n Cheese Please

That's as in ham 'n cheese for an omelet because an egg won't be enough. In this post Jim presents an article from The Economist to express his concerns about the economy and the contention that people are living beyond their means. Below in bold type is the admission of egg on the face.

EVER since America's stockmarket bubble burst in 2000, The Economist has argued that America faced several years of sluggish growth, if not a deep recession, as the economy worked off the excesses that built up in the late 1990s. Yet the economy has come roaring back, with GDP rising by 7.2% at an annual rate in the third quarter—its fastest sprint for 19 years. Do we look a bit silly? Indeed. But there are still big risks ahead.

The risks that concern me are geopolitical (i.e. a revolution in Saudi Arabia with damage to the oil fields) or a domestic policy shift towards austerity and away from growth (i.e. tax hikes, trade wars...). Absent those types of events, I see some key factors pointing to a broad and strong expansion taking hold. The modest improvement in credit spreads last fall followed by the big improvement last spring along with the huge positive divergence between the household and establishment employment surveys are very positive signs. Low inflation and a 15% tax rate on capital gains and dividends means that the taxation on capital formation is the lowest in over 40 years. This will be a huge positive undergirding the expansion. You will not learn the significance of this from Al Franken and the supply-side Jesus parody in his latest book.

Business investment is picking up, but ample spare capacity will continue to discourage new spending. In September, manufacturing output was running at only 73% of capacity, well below the average of 81% over the past half century. In any case, business investment is too small a share of the economy to keep it aloft in the absence of robust consumer spending.

Business spending is already picking up for the first time in 3 years. Capacity utilization has only upticked slightly from the lows. Capital expenditures usually accelerate early in a cap.ute. ramp, well before average or high levels are reached. It has happened this way before. It would surprise you to know how cap.ute. rates are produced and why the behavior I'm referring to occurs.

Debt levels are high but not unmanageable. As growth takes hold, this concern will fade.

Early last century, economists such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek argued that, if interest rates were held below their “natural rate� (at which the supply of saving from households equals the demand for investment funds by firms), credit and investment will rise too rapidly and consumers will not save enough.

Yes, in theory this is true. In reality, the natural rate of interest is unknowable. I wouldn't be surprised if some economist somewhere is sure that they know how to calculate it. If you want a better understanding of the monetary distortions that rippled through the economy over the last few years, have a look at this Jude Wanniski article titled The Deflation Monster. I might have sent this to Bret and HoneyBee several years ago. The Fed could still snatch defeat from the jaws of victory if they don't start paying more attention to price based indicators and modify their ad hoc approach to monetary policy.

ps all of the essays at the bottom of the page at wanniski.com are worthwhile.

Pode Lives! (and How to Use the Comments Section)

Jim mentioned that he isn't "seeing the Comments capability." That's too bad because Pode's first access is in the comments to Jim's Post!

Jim, at the bottom of your post I see:

# posted by Jim @ 9:43 PM Comment (1)

If I click on the word "Comment", it brings up a new window which shows all the comments and allows me to enter a new one. I think you have to have Javascript enabled for it to work though.

Anyway, Pode proposes March. That works for me. I'll go out on a limb here and propose a specific date. How about Friday March 5th through Monday March 8th, 2003?

How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love The Deficit (with apologies to Stanley Kubrick)

Obviously running large deficits indefinitely can cause problems, but some people can't get beyond DOD, deficit obsession disorder. This Holman Jenkins article has a good treatment of the political issue. Here are some excerpts:

Politically, voters care about budget deficits only when they feel insecure about their own jobs. The deficit then becomes an emblem of economic mismanagement (never mind the Keynesian wisdom that a growing deficit is desirable when the economy is slack, providing countercyclical demand).

What Republicans have understood, instead, is that the only effective long-term form of fiscal discipline is tax cuts.

Republicans have become the Party of Tax Cuts: that is, the party that lets you keep your own money, the party that protects the private sector from being smothered by big government. In a more sophisticated audience's eyes, it means a second thing: the party that restrains the growth of government by keeping it on the only fiscal leash that works--a k a the deficit, which maintains a constant tension between forgoing new spending or borrowing to pay for it.

Admittedly, this involves Republicans in a certain amount of self-duplicity (We don't mean this in a bad way; every party has to keep its big tent together.) Not only do Republicans take as given that Congress will spend every dime it can tax and then every dime it can borrow, until it runs up against its effective credit limit. Republicans also accept that they will behave exactly like Democrats in this matter.

Gary Becker, the Nobel economist, has made the same argument much more elegantly, showing that the strongest correlate to fiscal restraint is a rising share of the federal budget devoted to interest payments on the national debt. The picture here is not pretty if you imagine your federal government being run by farseeing grownups who plan the future meticulously and have compendious knowledge of all things.

The picture is quite pretty if you have limited confidence in managerial competence but appreciate the exquisite wisdom of the Founding Fathers, who devised a government responsive to the public mood yet constrained by checks and balances.

Humor

This from a Todd Buchholz book, New Ideas From Dead Economists

In a joke from the Soviet Union, a man asks, "Was communism invented by biologists or politicians?" "Politicians, of course. Biologists would have tried it out on rats first."

Great Guys IV

Yes, we should start thinking about Great Guys IV. While using my house as a base isn't a possibility (the wife won't tolerate it), San Diego is a good place to have the party for several reasons: reasonably good winter weather, lots of stuff to do, and, since I live here, I can optimize the experience.

Here is a possible itinerary:

Friday Afternoon and Evening: Great Guys begin arriving
Saturday: hiking and partying in the anza-borrego desert. I'm intimately familiar with this particular desert and know many really interesting and fun places.
Sunday morning: mission bay beach and boardwalk activities - rollerblading, surfing (rent boards and wetsuits)
Sunday afternoon: Black's beach (one of the most beautiful nude beaches in the U.S.) - swimming, hackey-sack, frisbee
Sunday night and Monday: Great Guys begin leaving

Other possibilities: Mexico, Hang-gliding (for beginners on Dunes down in Mexico),.

What do you think? When are you available? Use the comments section to let me know...

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

Where do they come from? The jobs fairy, of course! Actually they are created and destroyed all of the time in a healthy economy. The relative rate of creation and destruction changes depending on many factors. This article from today's New York Times is so good, I'm posting the whole thing.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

November 7, 2003
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Great Job Machine
By W. MICHAEL COX and RICHARD ALM

ALLAS

Apparently unconvinced by last week's eye-popping growth figures, economic pessimists remain fixated on the labor market. Today's release of the Labor Department's latest employment figures, we are told, will give a true picture of the pace of economic recovery.

But the monthly statistics, while relevant within the larger context of all economic indicators, don't tell the whole story of what is happening with Americans' jobs. Focusing on net employment gains or losses misses the real show, the long-running drama that drives the economy forward.

While it may seem that little progress is being made on the jobs front, beneath the surface the economy is doing what it's done for decades: orchestrating a relentless and enormous recycling of jobs and workers.

Large-scale upheaval in jobs is part of the economy; the impetus for it comes from technology, changing trading patterns and shifting consumer demand. History tells us that the result will be even more jobs, greater productivity and higher incomes for American workers in general.

New Bureau of Labor Statistics data covering the past decade show that job losses seem as common as sport utility vehicles on the highways. Annual job loss ranged from a low of 27 million in 1993 to a high of 35.4 million in 2001. Even in 2000, when the unemployment rate hit its lowest point of the 1990's expansion, 33 million jobs were eliminated.

The flip side is that, according to the labor bureau's figures, annual job gains ranged from 29.6 million in 1993 to 35.6 million in 1999. Day in and day out, workers quit their jobs or get fired, then move on to new positions. Companies start up, fail, downsize, upsize and fill the vacancies of those who left. It is workers' migration to new and existing jobs that keeps the country from sinking into some Depression-like swamp.

Yes, this disruption can be very hard on some workers who lose their employment and have trouble adapting. But in the larger sense, the turmoil in the labor market is vital to economic progress. A good part of the turnover takes place in a handful of industries, like restaurants and retailing, but to greater or lesser extent the churning grinds on across the board, in bad times and good. Tallies of net jobs lost or gained capture only a fraction of the flux in the job market. As this plays out, most workers end up better off.

Societies grow richer when new products emerge that better meet consumers' needs, and when producers adopt new technologies that reduce costs by making workers more productive. In a dynamic, innovative economy, these forces unleash waves upon waves of change. Some industries and companies prosper while others wither. Some companies find themselves with too many workers while others struggle with too few. A free-enterprise system responds by moving resources — in this case workers — to where they're more valuable.

For example, e-mail, word processors, answering machines and other modern office technologies are cutting jobs for secretaries but increasing the ranks of programmers. The Internet opened jobs for hundreds of thousands of Webmasters, an occupation that didn't exist as recently as 1990. Digital cameras translate to fewer photo clerks.

A century ago, 40 of every 100 Americans worked on farms to feed a nation of 90 million. Today, after one of history's most brutal downsizings, it takes just two agricultural workers out of 100 workers to supply an abundance of food to a nation more than three times as large. Suppose we'd kept 40 percent of our labor on the farm. Absurd, yes, but if we had, we wouldn't have had enough workers to produce the new homes, computers, movies, medicines and the myriad other goods and services of our modern economy.

Likewise, the telecommunications industry employed 421,000 switchboard operators in 1970, when Americans made 9.8 billion long-distance calls. Thanks to advances in switching technology, telecommunications companies have reduced the number of operators to 78,000, but consumers ring up 98 billion calls. Let's face it: Americans are better off with more efficient long-distance service. To handle today's volume of calls with 1970's technology, telephone companies would need 4.2 million operators, or 3 percent of the labor force. Without the productivity gains, a long-distance call would probably cost 40 times what it now does.

Microeconomic failure is not macroeconomic failure. Quite the opposite, "failure" is the way the macro economy transfers resources to where they belong. It is the paradox of progress: a society can't reap the rewards of economic progress without accepting the constant change in work that comes with it. Efforts to soften the blows, by devising policies or laws to preserve jobs or protect industries, will lead to stagnation and decline, the biggest threat to American workers.

Job losses for farm hands and telephone operators came so long ago that they don't sting anymore. Today we see the benefits clearly and forget the costs. That's harder to do in the short term — it rightly distresses us to see newspaper photographs of laid-off industrial workers. But these are the economic forces that raise living standards.

Since 1980, Americans have filed 106 million initial claims for unemployment benefits, each representing a lost job. Facing unemployment and rebuilding a life can be hard on families, but the United States today is better off for allowing it to happen. Even with the net decline in jobs over the past three years, during the past decade total United States employment has risen to 130 million from 91 million since 1980, a net gain of nearly 40 million jobs. Productivity, measured by output per worker, increased a staggering 56.2 percent.

Some people tend to forget this. The almost daily drumbeat of reports and "expert commentary" about a so-called jobless recovery prompts the question, "What's gone wrong with the labor market?"

The surprising answer: nothing.

Job growth will come, as it always has in the past. The economy, meanwhile, is as busy as ever in shifting labor from one use to another to make the country richer and more productive.


W. Michael Cox, chief economist of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and Richard Alm are co-authors of "Myths of Rich and Poor."



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Direct and Universal Democracy?

From the Straits Times (Asia):

The one-man-one-vote system could be modified in Germany to give parents an additional vote for their children if some leading German MPs have their way.

The proposal to give parents a proxy vote for their children to counter the rising power of the elderly lobby is similar to an idea mooted by Singapore's Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew in the early 1990s, but which was never taken up.

Concerned that politicians would be increasingly beholden to the demands of the rapidly swelling ranks of the retired, some Germans have taken the idea of universal suffrage to its logical conclusion.

They want children to have the right to vote to counter-balance the fast ageing electorate that is resisting cuts to generous benefits.

Forty-seven MPs are supporting a cross-party motion that calls for the right to vote from birth.

The motion asks the government to amend the Constitution so that parents get a proxy vote for each child under 18.

Clearly my thinking is nowhere near radical enough on the subject of direct democracy. I wasn't thinking that children should vote too.

American Are Losing the Victory in Europe (Part II)

Apparently, the Life Magazine articles from 1946 were for real. In addition, I've discovered a couple of others.

From the Saturday Evening Post, January 26, 1946, "How We Botched the German Occupation". The article states "No wonder so many Americans are asking, 'What are we doing in Germany?'"

The 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, "Alternatives for Germany" states "The defeat of Nazism has removed one of the obstacles to the democratization of Germany; but it has not created a democratic Germany. Nor is there much basis for the belief that democracy will develop in Germany under present conditions of defeat, hunger, idleness and despair."

It's striking how familiar these articles seem. It's almost as if today's journalists just looked up these articles and rewrote them for the Iraq occupation. Perhaps things really are going badly in Iraq, but, as with Germany, I don't think we'll really know for quite a few years or even decades.

New Science Discovery

A major research institution has recently announced the discovery of the heaviest chemical element yet known to science. The new element has been tentatively named "Governmentium". Governmentium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 11 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A minute amount of Governmentium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete when it would normally take less than a second. Governmentium has a normal half-life of three years; it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to speculate that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as "Critical Morass". You will know it when you see it.

(from Andrew Sullivan).

Protecting the Commons

One thing that keeps me from even claiming to be a libertarian is that I'm very skeptical that certain types of commons can be protected without government regulation. One example of such a common resource is air. Therefore, at least for the time being, I accept government regulation of the air, and I accept the loss of freedom, the growth of bureaucracy (the EPA), and the cost in taxes and lost productivity associated with it. It's unfortunate that we have to endure so many costs to have clean air, but having clean air is still worth it to me.

However, I think commons should be privatized wherever feasible, and regulation of the remaining commons should be pushed down to as localized level as possible.

Slavery Versus Freedom

During the period immediately preceding the civil war, southern slaves were better off than their northern free counterparts by every physical measure. For example, the slaves were taller, heavier, had more daily calories to eat, had a longer life-expectancy, and had higher birth rates. This makes sense in a perverse sort of way, since slaves where "property" and their owners invested in their property to maximize utility. The northern, free blacks had nobody investing in them.

Of course, even though the southern slaves were physically better off and more comfortable, none of the northern blacks sold themselves into southern slavery to achieve that comfort. Freedom was worth far more to them than comfort. In fact, according to this:

"What slaves hated most about slavery was not the hard work to which they were subjected (most people in the rural United States expected to engage in hard physical labor), but the lack of control over their lives - their lack of freedom."

While you might think that statement is blisteringly obvious, it's amazing to me how quickly people nowadays are willing to trade their freedom for a little security, whether it be support for the Patriot Act or the FDA, ignoring the evisceration of the Rule of Law, tolerance for bureaucratic meddling and high taxes, or support for soon to be bankrupt programs like Social Security or Medicare.

Apparently, freedom doesn't seem like it's all that important until you don't have it anymore.