EclectEcon

Mystery, the Killer Cat

Mystery turned three years old this past week.

She looks so calm and peaceful.





Nice fangs, Mystery!





Impressive tongue, too!

(Short on manners, long on tongue?)









Thanks for posing.

The UN Human "Rights" Council-- a Bad Joke

I had first seen reports of this from Melanie Phillips and then Stephen Pollard. A representative from UNWatch.org made a presentation to the UN Human Rights Council in which he pointed out all the council's blatant biases and anti-Semitism.

The ... UN Watch speech, lifting a mirror to the shortcomings of the UN Human Rights Council, was rejected by council president Luis Alfonso de Alba as "inadmissible." ... He banned the statement from being delivered again, and the speech was stricken without notice from the official extranet record of the Human Rights Council Secretariat

For a comparison of the types of statements welcomed by the Council on the one hand, in contrast with the remarks from UN Watch, see this.



Here is the speech that caused the commotion:

Where's the Beef?

One of the all-time famous Wendy's commercials:

What Is the Optimal Number of Messages in Your Inbox?

Last week, Jack sent me this piece arguing that having a messy desk and office is actually more efficient than having a pristine, clean desk and office.

"...A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder," by Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman, [is] a new book that argues neatness is overrated, costs money, wastes time and quashes creativity.



"We think that being more organized and ordered and neat is a good thing and it turns out, that's not always the case," said Freedman.



"Most of us are messy, and most of us are messy at a level that works very, very well for us," he said in an interview. "In most cases, if we got a lot neater and more organized, we would be less effective."



Freedman argues that it is neatness that is expensive.



"People who are really, really neat, between what it takes to be really neat at the office and at home, typically will spend anywhere from an hour to four hours a day just organizing and neatening," he said.

This got me to thinking about my e-mail inbox and sent box. I could probably empty them once an hour/day/week/whatever, but I don't. There are things there that I want to see now and then to remind of something; there are other things that just don't neatly fit into any of the standard categories of my life. In other words, the incremental costs of clearing my inbox are quite high in terms of time (and filed items I would probably never see again), and the incremental benefits are low.



I asked Jack how many messages he keeps in his inbox, and said that since his server permits nearly unlimited storage of e-mail, he has about 100 messages in his inbox. I used to keep that many in the inbox, but I found it was too many for me to remember or manage. I never saw the ones at or near the top of the list and might as well have deleted them. So I did.



I now keep about 20 - 40 messages in my inbox, depending on my e-mail inflow for the day and depending on the opportunity costs of my time to think about and deal with them. When the number gets over 30, I try to make a concerted effort to do something (including deleting) to/with some of them. That happens at least once a day.



My inbox, I guess, is like the cluttered desk of Abrahamson and Freedman. It is organized clutter, and it is probably the efficient amount of clutter for me.



.

Economics? Cosmology? Dark Predictions...

Economists are often trashed for our imprecision and inability to forecast. But what about the cosmology branch of astrophysics? From the NYTimes,

Take [the recent] observations of supernovae, apply one cornerstone of 20th-century physics, general relativity, and you have a universe that does indeed consist of .26 matter, dark or otherwise, and .74 something that accelerates the expansion. Yet in another way, dark energy doesn’t add up. Take the observations of supernovae, apply the other cornerstone of 20th-century physics, quantum theory, and you get gibberish — you get an answer 120 orders of magnitude larger than .74.

As if we can measure the amount of dark matter and dark energy to test either prediction...



Economics is so much more precise.

Health Care Economics

BenS sent me this:

Two patients limp into two different medical clinics

with the same complaint:



Both have trouble walking

and appear to require a hip replacement.



The first patient is examined within the hour, is

x-rayed the same day and has a time booked for

surgery the following week.



The second sees his family doctor after waiting a

week for an appointment, then waits eight weeks to see a

specialist, then gets an x-ray, which isn't reviewed

for another week, and finally has his surgery

scheduled for six weeks from then.



Why the different treatment for the two patients?



The first is a golden retriever.

The second is a senior citizen.

Of course if this had happened in Canada, the senior citizen would still be waiting...



Update: Former student, Mike Moffat has some issues with this, but I disagreed with him in the comments to his posting. He extrapolates from one scenario to claim that the price elasticity of demand is low, and he implicitly assumes a low price elasticity of supply.

An Inside Look at Poverty in the U.S.

Hispanic Pundit has written a very informative, very moving auto-biographical sketch of life in the Compton/LA ghettos. That he escaped from those pressures must have been a miracle. His theme: poverty in the U.S. is not due to a lack of food or clothing or shelter, but results from broken homes.



It is well worth reading.

Bicycle Helmets: Expected Marginal Costs and Benefits

I began wearing a helmet when I bicycled back in the 1970s. I did an intuitive, ad hoc, estimate and figured the expected benefits of wearing the helmet would exceed the expected costs.



But my bicycling was, for the most part, in-town commuting to and from work or for social events. I did not do the calculation for bicycling on a narrow path along the edge of a cliff.

Why bother with a helmet in this situation? One possible explanation is that during the rest of the ride a helmet would be a good idea, and it would be too costly to take the helmet off for this stretch of the ride and then put it back on afterward.



[h/t to Jack]

Cash and Drugs

What would happen if the US halted its war on drugs? One effect would be the opposite of "currency drain" from the monetary system. There would be many fewer reasons for drug-dealers to hold and carry out their transactions using currency, and much of the outstanding currency would be deposited in financial institutions, setting off a multiple expansion of the money supply. Presumably the Fed would offset this effect. From this site (courtesy of Jack):

Tom Palmer on the Rationale for Private Protection and Self-Defence

Tom Palmer, who is with the Cato Institute, is a strong supporter of individual freedoms. He recently was quoted by the Washington Post as saying,

Let’s be honest: Although there are many fine officers in the police department, there’s a simple test. Call Domino’s Pizza or the police and time which one gets there first...

Unfortunately, he is right, and that makes the case for personal defence and prevention measures all that much stronger. If the publicly provided protection is not likely to be as good as we might like, we have more incentive to invest in locks, alarm systems, private weapons, and private security systems. We also have an incentive to buy detection systems, such as video cameras, to deter potential criminals.



At our house, we have reset our alarm system to ring at Godfather's Pizza, which is just down the street from us and can be here in no time flat.

Seagulls on the Ice

Last Friday morning, Ms. Eclectic and I went walking by the lake. The ice is breaking up, aided by an ice-breaker to bring in this ship to load up salt from the salt mines.

Along the way, we saw these two seagulls:

UN to Iran: "We REALLY Mean It This Time."

The UN Security Council has voted more sanctions against Iran in an attempt to force Iran to halt its uranium enrichment programme. From the NYTimes,

All 15 members of the Security Council adopted the sanctions, Resolution 1747, which focus on constraining Iranian arms exports, the state-owned Bank Sepah — already under Treasury Department sanctions — and the Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite military organization separate from the nation’s conventional armed forces.



No surprises were in the resolution, which modestly strengthens largely financial sanctions adopted in December in a first, limited resolution.

Meanwhile, of course, French and Russian financial institutions and arms dealers are licking their chops in anticipation of big profits to be made; so is Kofi Annan's son.



Addendum: These cartoons from a previous posting capture the situation pretty well.

Here Is a Coin I Like

Not that I am all that keen on subsidizing the Vancouvre 2010 Winter Olympics, but I enjoy curling enough that I bought an entire roll of these quarters last week (10 bucks! big spender, eh?)

Who Am I?

Read my VisualDNA™ Get your own VisualDNA™

Actually, my favourite drink is either Coke Zero or Scotch, but neither choice was available.

I first saw this at Stitch in Haste. Even though we got quite different "analyses", like Kip, many of my selections turned out to be at the right end (less frequently chosen) of the spectrum. But I was so ambivalent about so many of the choices that I did the thing again, making sure I chose my second choice for each category whenever I had been in doubt the first time through. Here is the alternative me:

Read my VisualDNA™ Get your own VisualDNA™

It seems like a pretty robust test if it yields the same conclusions despite these changes. Either way, I'm a dreamer/conqueror romantic who is pretty much out of touch with reality, I guess. And look at those choices: pizza, cheeseburgers, chocolate, Coke --- it's a wonder I'm still alive with tastes like those!

Update: Rondi has posted her results, and Rebekah promises to post hers, too.

Thomas Schelling on TVO 4pm this afternoon

On Saturday, BIG IDEAS features Thomas Schelling, the 2005 Nobel Prize winner in Economics. He shared in the award for his application of “game theory” to everything from labour negotiations to military strategies. His talk offers a series of arguments defending ‘rational choice ‘ theory, a view of human behaviour which claims that individuals choose what they believe best suits their interests.

On Sunday, we welcome back Simon Winchester, a journalist, writer and a spectacular lecturer. This is encore presentations of his talk based on his book The Meaning of Everything. At the time when Wikipedia serves as a contemporary model of how knowledge is “constructed” , it’s worth knowing about how similar principles were put to use in the making of the Oxford English Dictionary.

BIG IDEAS airs on TVOntario every Saturday and Sunday at 4:00 pm

Our lectures are also available to you as podcasts. To download please go to our website at www.tvo.org/bigideas. Or you can also listen to BIG IDEAS via iTunes. [emphasis added]

Retail Therapy

A week or so ago, I listened to Russ Roberts' interview with Tyler Cowen. At one point during the interview, Tyler talked about "retail therapy":

Go to Amazon.com, look for some CDs, click, buy the CD....

It's genuinely fun. It's fun to do the shopping; it's fun to get the CD.

Lots of people do this. What is nice about his approach is that he is quite open about it: no guilt, no regrets.



And "retail therapy" provides utility not just if you are feeling down. Even when you are up, and not in need of a boost, shopping for something, buying it, getting it home, and trying it out — they are all fun activities. For someone to unabashedly admit it and support it is refreshing.



I am certain that retail therapy has at times acted as a form of marital therapy for Ms. Eclectic and me. We always seemed to be able to patch over or work out our differences when we went shopping for something together.



One drawback to retail therapy: what to do with the accumulation of "stuff". Tyler Cowan talks about being ruthless in his discards; I'm not sure I have the will power to do that.



Moving to a smaller home, as we did nearly four years ago, means that we must continually think of ways to get rid of things, though, as we buy more stuff. That was one of the major reasons we made the move. We saw the congestion that had appeared in our parents' homes as they accumulated stuff, and we realized we had to seek out some sort of pre-commitment strategy (i.e. buy a smaller house) to keep from accumulationg too much stuff.* Fortunately, our children and grandchildren have been happy to receive many of our discards, and so have many charities in the area.



*When I apologized to my older son for having accumulated some memorabilia in the attic that he would have to go through when we die, he said, "Well, Dad, here's hoping you go in house fire."

Feminism vs. Fundamentalist Islam

Phylis Chester wrote this for the TimesOnLine. It is (or should be) devastating if you think freedom is important:

Once I was held captive in Kabul. I was the bride of a charming, seductive and Westernised Afghan Muslim whom I met at an American college. The purdah I experienced was relatively posh but the sequestered all-female life was not my cup of chai — nor was the male hostility to veiled, partly veiled and unveiled women in public.



When we landed in Kabul, an airport official smoothly confiscated my US passport. “Don’t worry, it’s just a formality,” my husband assured me. I never saw that passport again. I later learnt that this was routinely done to foreign wives — perhaps to make it impossible for them to leave. Overnight, my husband became a stranger. The man with whom I had discussed Camus, Dostoevsky, Tennessee Williams and the Italian cinema became a stranger. He treated me the same way his father and elder brother treated their wives: distantly, with a hint of disdain and embarrassment.



In our two years together, my future husband had never once mentioned that his father had three wives and 21 children. Nor did he tell me that I would be expected to live as if I had been reared as an Afghan woman. I was supposed to lead a largely indoor life among women, to go out only with a male escort and to spend my days waiting for my husband to return or visiting female relatives, or having new (and very fashionable) clothes made.



In America, my husband was proud that I was a natural-born rebel and free thinker. In Afghanistan, my criticism of the treatment of women and of the poor rendered him suspect, vulnerable. He mocked my horrified reactions. But I knew what my eyes and ears told me. I saw how poor women in chadaris were forced to sit at the back of the bus and had to keep yielding their place on line in the bazaar to any man.



I saw how polygamous, arranged marriages and child brides led to chronic female suffering and to rivalry between co-wives and half-brothers; how the subordination and sequestration of women led to a profound estrangement between the sexes — one that led to wife-beating, marital rape and to a rampant but hotly denied male “prison”-like homosexuality and pederasty; how frustrated, neglected and uneducated women tormented their daughter-in-laws and female servants; how women were not allowed to pray in mosques or visit male doctors (their husbands described the symptoms in their absence). [emphasis added]

There is much more in the original article.



Also, see this, which I posted over a year and a half ago. Just because apologists for Islamic fundamentalists ignore this problem, that does not mean the problem will go away quickly or easily.



And speaking of feminism and Islam, do not forget the amazing story of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, summarized here by Mona Charen, and here in one of my earlier postings, which includes several links to her autobiography, The Caged Virgin, and other items about her.

Exam Excuse: "I was in the World Championships."

I would have let this person write a make-up exam. From Curling, a blog I maintain along with Alan Adamson,

Last year, Denmark's Jensen had to leave the competition early due to health concerns. Her team battled valiantly without her, losing the final round-robin game to finish 6-5 and one win away from tiebreakers.



This year, another Dane will be departing early. Second Camilla Jensen, Angelina's sister, leaves Friday to write a critical university exam back home. She is now out of the starting lineup with two round-robin matches left to play.



"It's my whole education, so sadly I must go," said Jensen. "So let's go Denmark, let's get those Olympic points."

I realize this was a huge exam at the end of her educational career, unlike the examinations we give our students in North America, even at the end of a year-long course in Canada. But I still would have let her write a make-up exam somehow. Hell, we let people write make-up exams for competitions in every other sport; why not the Women's World Championships in Curling? As it was, Denmark lost to Canada in the first game the team played without her, and then proceeded to lose to last place Italy in the next game Denmark played.



All that having been said, it certainly is nice to learn about a student with so much dedication to her education.

France Court Clears Cartoon Publishers"...didn't amount to ethnic slurs and were protected by freedom of expression."

From Bloomberg (h/t to Jack):

March 22 (Bloomberg) — A Paris court today cleared French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo of charges it insulted Muslims in a case that dragged in presidential candidates and strained relations between official Muslim organizations and the state.



The decision was expected after the prosecutor at the hearing last month, Anne de Fontette, recommended that the charges be dropped because the satires didn't amount to ethnic slurs and were protected by freedom of expression.



`We are happy because now we can do our job,'' said Philippe Val, editor of Charlie Hebdo. One of the Muslim groups that brought the suit said it would appeal, while the other said it most likely won't.



Jean-Claude Magendie, the presiding judge, ruled that two of the three cartoons in questions didn't target all Muslims, just violent ones. The third, showing the prophet Muhammad with a bomb in place of a turban, could offend all Muslims, he said, though it was covered by freedom of speech laws because riots in some countries about the cartoons made its publication newsworthy.

That's the crux of the situation. More details and quotations are available at Bloomberg.

Humour in the New Zealand Parliament

Rodney Hide is the leader of the ACT party in New Zealand, a party which consistently advocates shrinking the size of gubmnt and cutting taxes. While his party has had a substantial impact in the past, in the most recent election ACT was reduced in size (to only Rodney's seat, I think).



During the past year, too, Rodney Hide has lost weight and embarked on ambitious conditioning programmes (see this and this, for example).



With that background, enjoy the following Q&A:

Rodney Hide: Has the Minister seen any reports of a political party that has always advocated extensive tax cuts, whatever the macroeconomic conditions, its own electoral fortunes, and the fads and fashions of politics--and, indeed, irrespective of floods and volcanoes?

Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN: Yes, I have. I have noted that both the size of the caucus and the size of its leader are shrinking at approximately the same rate.

To which Rodney added,

But we never deviate on our policy!!

After seeing this week's Liberal Conservative Party's budget, I sure wish we had some Rodney Hides as members of parliament in Canada.

More Coins for the USA?

Once again, the US is bringing out a one-dollar coin. And once again, the effort will likely be a failure in the sense that the coin will not become generally accepted and displace the paper dollar bill. The reason: rent-seeking by vested interests, including the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the Mississippi cotton producers who produce the cotton used in the dollar bills, and the papermill with the contract to convert that cotton into paper for the dollar bills. From Slate,

Around the time the Sacagawea [a one-dollar U.S. coin] was proposed, they [the vested interests] formed a lobbying group called Save the Greenback, which, according to press accounts, had the ear of Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi and, back when he was in Congress, Rep. Joe Kennedy of Massachusetts. Save the Greenback's annual lobbying expenses average a couple of hundred thousand dollars, presumably paid in crisp new singles. The group managed to get a piece of legislation called the Save the Greenback Act of 1997 introduced in the House; it died in committee, but the $1 Coin Act, which authorized the Sacagawea that same year, required that the bill be retained. The group's archenemy is a pro-dollar-coin lobby called the Coin Coalition, backed by vending-machine and car-wash interests.



You know the Feds are acting like the Keystone Koin Kops when they're outgunned by a New York state agency, but the Treasury really ought to look to the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which runs the New York subways. The MTA introduced an electronic fare card in 1997 but kept the token around for several years, making silly noises about the MetroCard's poor "public acceptance." New Yorkers were slow to adopt the card, even when a volume discount made it worth their while to do so. But the moment tokens went away in 2003, "public acceptance" was inevitable, and four years later, no one (except a few railfan cranks) is whining about the good old days. The public is slow to accept new currencies, but that same public has a mercifully short memory. Get rid of those dirty handkerchiefs tomorrow, and you'll have forgotten about them by the time the first Martin Van Buren dollar lands in your palm.

In light of these lobbying efforts, it is amazing that Canada was able to get rid of its one-dollar and two-dollar bills, replacing them with coins. It was a shock at first, and merchants complained about needing extra slots in their cash drawers. But I have a solution for them: stop using pennies and you'll gain an extra slot.



[h/t to JH, who claims he wants to start a campaign to save the penny. I doubt it.]

The U.S. Economy Has Gained, Not Lost, Jobs in the past 6 years

Protectionists are quick to point to the 3 million or so lost jobs in manufacturing in the U.S. during the past 6 years. What they rarely point to, however, is the gain of 8 million jobs in the rest of the economy, for a net gain of 5 million jobs.



To be blunt, I think job counting is misleading. If we think the economy tends toward the natural unemployment rate, job creation and job destruction seem pretty meaningless.



That having been said, Steve Polos has a good treatment of the job creation and destruction issues:

What kinds of jobs have been created? Mostly jobs in the services sector – some 7 million of them. For example, there were 1.8 million new jobs in health care, 1.3 million in government, 700,000 in finance, 500,000 in education and 84,000 in transportation. The hospitality sector contributed 1.4 million jobs. Besides this, over 800,000 jobs were created in construction, and 100,000 in mining.



Some have responded to this analysis by claiming that the new jobs being created were of lower quality, with lower wages, than those being lost, often citing job growth in hospitality. However, the average service sector wage was only 4% below the average manufacturing wage back in 2001; and today, that gap is only 1%. This is because since 2001 service sector wages are up 21%, whereas manufacturing wages are up 17%. And construction sector wages – a common destination for displaced manufacturing workers – are about 20% higher than the average manufacturing wage. This is why total U.S. income and spending have been strong, despite the woes of manufacturers.



It must also be recognized that this restructuring of the U.S. economy did not begin in 2001. There has been a gradual but steady shift away from manufacturing and into other sectors for the past 50 years. Back in 1955, 31% of all U.S. jobs (15.5 million workers) were in manufacturing. Today, that figure is only 10.3%, or about 14 million workers. Meanwhile, the number of construction workers has risen by a factor of 2.7, and service sector workers by a factor of 3.6, in the past 50 years.



International trade is playing a key role in this story. The productivity and wages of American manufacturing workers have increased enormously over the past 50 years. Much of this has come by using international trade to make companies more efficient, offshoring low-productivity tasks and raising the capital intensity of production in the U.S. Two-way trade is more than four times as important to the U.S. economy today as it was in 1955. Lower-cost manufactured imports boost spending power in the U.S., which leads to the creation of jobs in other sectors of the economy.

The International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom

People with whom I correspond have undoubtedly noticed that I am a member of the International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom. This group was organized over the past two years to help head off the attempts by two different British unions to boycott Israeli academics. Regardless of your views about Israel, it just makes no sense to me to single out a single group of academics to boycott. It makes no sense because there are so many groups with which one might reasonably take issue; and, even more so, it makes no sense because academic freedom is so important for promoting, not squelching, the exchange of ideas.



Even though the battles have been fought (and won) twice in the past two years to head off these ill-advised boycotts, there will be more scheming to re-introduce them. From Ofir Frankel, the IAB director,

It is likely that a sweeping boycott of Israeli academia will be proposed at the University and College Union (UCU) conference at their annual meeting at the end of May 2007 ...

I will be working/teaching in England then. You can bet I will be involved, working against the proposed boycott.

Optimal Search and the Natural Unemployment Rate

With any search process, intermediation can push the amount of information the searcher receives forward so much that a little search gets a lot of information at little cost, and it isn't worthwhile to do much searching beyond that. It appears that this effect has also occurred in labour markets; with the growth of job search via the internet, people remain unemployed shorter periods on average, and fewer people are unemployed as they change jobs. Here is the abstract from Betsey Stevenson's working paper:

The Internet has increased the ease and availability of employment information, but a question remains as to how, and if, this increased information has changed employment outcomes. This research examines the impact of the Internet on worker flows and job matching. While previous research found a negative impact of the Internet on unemployment duration, this research demonstrates the importance of including flows between employment to employment in an analysis of the impact of Internet. Over 80 percent of online job seekers are employed at the time of their job seeking and Internet users, conditional on observables, are more likely to change jobs and are less likely to transition to unemployment. Furthermore, those who use the Internet have greater wage growth when changing jobs. I use several approaches to attempt to isolate an exogenous source of Internet use in order to isolate the causal relationship between the Internet, job change, and wage growth. The first is to examine state-level aggregate data. As states’ Internet penetration rates rose differentially through the 1990’s so did employer-to-employer worker flows with a 10 percentage point rise in state-level internet penetration leading to a 5% increase in employer-to-employer flows. While it can be difficult to disentangle whether changes in state labor markets reflect Internet usage or drive Internet adoption, I find a useful instrument that isolates the causal mechanism: the Internet has diffused in much the same way as past innovations, and hence average state ownership rates of household appliances in 1960 describe Internet adoption patterns over the past decade.

I was prompted to look into this issue by Gabriel's comments earlier on my posting about natural unemployment rates, where he challenged my position that people's expectations might be out of line with reality, forcing the unemployment rate to differ from the natural rate. His position is that the monumental growth of the internet performs such effective intermediation that people's expectations should only rarely be out of line with reality by very much.



The results of Stevenson's work (which I accept for now, despite my general skepticism of "instrumental variables") suggests that with the intermediation of the internet, the optimal length of search has diminished considerably over the past two decades, and, as a result, so has the natural unemployment rate.



And these results are also consistent with Gabriel's view that with internet intermediation, divergences between the unemployment rate and the natural unemployment rate have probably diminished over time. If so, then perhaps Canada's natural unemployment rate is less than 6.5%. And to the extent that unemployment is search (what else can it be?), the internet should lead to reductions in both search and unemployment rates.

Maybe the Earth is NOT Warming

Chris Essex, Ross McKitrick, and Bjarne Andresen recently published a paper [Jl. of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics, Vol 32, 1 - 27, 2007] in which they demonstrate that using different metrics leads to different conclusions about whether the earth is really warming. Here is the abstract:

Physical, mathematical, and observational grounds are employed to show that there is no physically meaningful global temperature for the Earth in the context of the issue of global warming. While it is always possible to construct statistics for any given set of local temperature data, an infinite range of such statistics is mathematically permissible if physical principles provide no explicit basis for choosing among them. Distinct and equally valid statistical rules can and do show opposite trends when applied to the results of computations from physical models and real data in the atmosphere. A given temperature field can be interpreted as both ‘‘warming’’ and ‘‘cooling’’ simultaneously, making the concept of warming in the context of the issue of global warming physically ill-posed.

Their conclusion is strong [emphasis added]:

There is no global temperature. The reasons lie in the properties of the equation of state governing local thermodynamic equilibrium, and the implications cannot be avoided by substituting statistics for physics.



... Since temperature is an intensive variable, the total temperature is meaningless in terms of the system being measured, and hence any one simple average has no necessary meaning. Neither does temperature have a constant proportional relationship with energy or other extensive thermodynamic properties.



Averages of the Earth’s temperature field are thus devoid of a physical context that would indicate how they are to be interpreted, or what meaning can be attached to changes in their levels, up or down. Statistics cannot stand in as a replacement for the missing physics because data alone are context-free.



Assuming a context only leads to paradoxes such as simultaneous warming

and cooling in the same system based on arbitrary choice in some free parameter. Considering even a restrictive class of admissible coordinate transformations yields families of averaging rules that likewise generate opposite trends in the same data, and by implication indicating contradictory rankings of years in terms of warmth.



The physics provides no guidance as to which interpretation of the data is

warranted. Since arbitrary indexes are being used to measure a physically

non-existent quantity, it is not surprising that different formulae yield different results with no apparent way to select among them. The purpose of this paper was to explain the fundamental meaninglessness of so-called global temperature data. The problem can be (and has been) happily ignored in the name of the empirical study of climate. But nature is not obliged to respect our statistical conventions and conceptual shortcuts. Debates over the levels and trends in so-called global temperatures will continue interminably, as will disputes over the significance of these things for the human experience of climate, until some physical basis is established for the meaningful measurement of climate variables, if indeed that is even possible.



It may happen that one particular average will one day prove to stand out

with some special physical significance. However, that is not so today. The

burden rests with those who calculate these statistics to prove their logic and value in terms of the governing dynamical equations, let alone the wider, less technical, contexts in which they are commonly encountered.

Addendum: Chris Essex tells me that Drudge cited this paper as well.

The Coase Theorem Invades China

According to the Coase Theorem (named for the economist who developed it, Professor Theorem),

• If property rights are well-defined and well-enforced, and
• If transaction costs are low (less than the expected gains from the transaction), then
• resources will move to their most highly valued use.

The passing of legislation to establish, enhance, and enforce private property rights in China suggests that as Chinese residents come to trust and expect that their property transactions will be protected by law, there will be more resource movement toward more highly valued uses in China. From the Washington Post,

Jiang Ping, former president of the China University of Political Science and Law and a scholar who advised officials drawing up the law, told the official New China News Agency that it is significant because it helps codify a property law system that has been evolving through regulation in recent years as the country moves away from socialism.



"Only when people's lawful property is well protected will they have the enthusiasm to create more wealth and will China maintain its economic development," Jiang said.

What is disappointing is that the story also quotes this idiot (who clearly qualifies to be leader of Canada's NDP):

"In the property law, state assets and private assets are put on the same level, which I think is totally wrong and even irrational," said Gong Hantian, a Beijing University law professor who has advised the government on legal matters.



"The reason China has such a fast-growing economy is that we have a very strong public sector. . . . Privatization for a socialist country like China is not a gospel, but a disaster," he said.

His facts are wrong. The reason China has such a fast-growing economy is that private entrepreneurship with the ability to earn and retain profits has gained increasing legitimacy over the past two decades. Before the mid-1980s, economic growth was slow because there was little incentive to take financial risks: if you succeeded, you didn't get to keep the rewards, and if you failed, you lost your state-determined job.

Price Controls Lead People to Eat Less Health Food

The United Arab Emirates, concerned about the health, weight, and obesity of its nationals, is considering slapping price controls on health foods to induce consumers to buy more health foods. Unfortunately, the UAE Health Ministry is only half right: Yes, lowering the price would lead to an increase in the quantity demanded, but they are ignoring the supply side. John Chilton points out that price controls will actually lead to less consumption of healthy fruits and vegetables, contrary to the intentions of the price fixers:

Introducing a price ceiling to lower the price of healthy foods would give consumers the incentive to seek to consume more healthy food, but it will also give suppliers less incentive to provide healthy foods. Consumers will find the amount or quality of healthy food decline. Consumers will end up consuming less, not more healthy food - exactly the opposite of the good intentions of the Health Ministry.



If the ministry wants to spur consumption of healthy food it needs to either convince consumers to buy more at given prices, or subsidize healthy food in the marketplace.

Follow the link to read his take on the distinction between "nationals" and "residents" and on the expansion of Krispy Kreme donuts into the UAE.

Right Thinker -- a global on-line magazine

Matt Marks (son-in-law of Preston Manning) has started up an on-line magazine called "Right Thinker" with the sub-title, "Think global from the right perspective." Registration is no-charge, quick and easy. The link is www.rightthinker.com.



Look for Rondi Adamson's piece on Turkey.

Friends

Ms. Eclectic sent me this the other day. I hadn't seen it before.

Friends are like butt cheeks

Crap might separate them,

but they always come back together.

Curling - the Women's World Championships: Who is Telecasting the Round Robin?

It is disappointing that no one is telecasting the Women's World Championship curling games to Canada. I'm especially puzzled that TSN didn't send a crew there to do at least one game per day. Fortunately for us addicts, CBC will televise the semi-finals on Saturday morning (March 24th) at 7am and the finals on Sunday morning at 1am. But what about the rest of the games which started today???



If you know of any site from Japan, Europe, or China that might be telecasting the round robin via broadband please let us know!



Surely it must be worthwhile for someone to do a minimalist web-cam type telecast at the very least.