Why Can’t Economists Be More Like Nutritionists?

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Last week we got the news, hot out of Cambridge, that nutritionists could no longer say that giving up or cutting down on well reared, fatty red meat, and dairy fats would do us any good.  Over the years they have extolled the benefits and alternately the dangers of red wine. Eggs were rehabilitated after several decades on the naughty step. I distinctly remember in the seventies that we were told that kippers and smoked fish, coffee (particularly black) and toast were carcinogenic. Carbs good, fats bad, oils bad, cooking anything, bad.

And each time there is a volte face on what is or isn't good for us, depending on how far the advice catches on, it has wide ranging ramifications for public health. Years may even be cut from millions of lives if we've been doing the wrong thing for a long time on scientific advice available at the time, liberties unnecessarily curbed by politicians. But you know, that's how a science works. It tries one thing, sees how it works, tries another, retraces its steps as something new is discovered and so on. Not scared of contradicting its previous theories where necessary. We learn about many of the most important in the most basic school science classes. We celebrate the names of those by whom breakthroughs were made. We do children's Christmas Lectures about them. They appear in pub quizes.

Even in social sciences, specifically as I have been studying them, poolitics and international relations, we are taught from the start about various schools of thought, their history and relevance, we have the opportunity directly to study the works of significant figures in historical political thought, and almost all our work involves trying to understand and explain different political subject areas from several of these perspectives.  When one type of system goes wrong, we debate better, replacement, systems from amongst alternative vision.  Again, many of these figures are in the public consciousness, though probably less so than natural scientists.  But still often in pub quizes.

But in economics? No such luck, especially in taught economics at anything, it would seem, up to and including undergraduate level. It hardly seems a comprehensive enough basis for practicing economics, understanding the shades of opinion in policy debates, not knowing the history of those policy debates. And let's not forget, just as with nutritional advice, economic policy has far reaching human welfare implications. People starve when their countries' economic plans go awry, the imbalanced distribution of wealth and properity around the world must tell us that something hasn't worked. And that something is the standard neo-classical models we are all taught without exception or much debate about alternative views.

Maybe it's unusual for an undergraduate student to have read much economics before university, and I know little about the GCSE and A level curricula. But the number of well known economists who have even had a name-check during my course, including simply having some kind of economic model named after them where we have learned about the model is miniscule, and they're generally all of one broad school of thought. So we know, say, about the Mundell-Fleming model or the Phillips curve, but know very little, if anything, about Bob, Marcus or Bill themselves.

I was shocked last year, in a third/final year module, for example, to hear that nobody else (willing to speak up in seminar at least) had heard of David Ricardo or even Comparative Advantage.  Adam Smith got a mention, once, in an early compulsory Micro module or something. But Say, Marx, Ricardo, Walras, Marshall, Bates have had no mention at all to say nothing about less orthodox economists like Boehm-Bawerk or Menger, Sraffa, Minsky. Even Hayek, I think, got only one mention in all of my modules.  Schumpeter got several mentions, but again, just for the words "creative destruction" not about studying the man and his ideas in any more detail than that.

Now, sure, one problem for ecnomics and economists is that there really isn't a laboratory setting in which different ideas can be tried under controlled conditions and then applied to the real world. All experimentation is done on real economies with real human reactions to the policy changes that themselves might change the parameters of the experiment by reacting other than expected.  There is a distinct lack of "discursive" economics of the form that Sraffa, Minsky or J K Glabraith preferred (even Keynes didn't think a concentration on mathematical modelling and predicting was useful). But really, with the seemingly intractable economic issues the world is beset with most of the time (and particularly after 2007/8's crash) you would have thought we would be taught how to debate the different possible ideological responses to those issues - the closest we have got is an essay specifically on monetary and fiscal policy as enacted after the crash in the UK, the only thing I would say has been a rigorous "academic essay" in the whole of the economics side of the course, probably.

There are, of course, signs of change. Student groups and lecturers have begun to get fed up of the monopoly neo-classicalism has on the curriculum, but the suggestions I have seen do not particularly, it seems, move away from an obsession with models over dialectic. In fact, I get the impression that some proposed curricular reforms want to see a more mathematically rigorous discipline which only partly addresses the problems with the current set up.

The current curriculum must be incredibly frustrating to teach as well. From what I can gather, most of my lecturers would probably self-identify as heterodox in some way, but are, effectively, prevented from teachig their ideas. The orthodoxy stifles real debate, making policy questions one-sided and leaving current undergraduates unprepared for a world of more open debate, schooled in models but not educated in economics.

Don’t Bully Teens, Joel Burns — Leave Vapers Alone

blindfold

The Fort Worth City Council, led by Councilman Joel Burns, is considering an ordinance to ban minors from purchasing e-cigarettes, portable battery-powered devices used for vaping nicotine liquids. The approach is short-sighted and likely to increase the propensity of teens to use conventional tobacco cigarettes.

The city government cited a study by the Center for Tobacco Research and Education that found e-cig users are more likely to use tobacco products. While that may be, the problem is that were it not for access to e-cigs, young adults would have more likely begun illegally acquiring cigarettes or readily available illicit substances like marijuana or MDMA at earlier ages. Removing access to a safer, reliable, and less expensive product puts children at unnecessary risk, forcing them to deal with perhaps less reputable personalities who may not have the same concern for a client’s well-being. The prohibition has ramifications on smokers of all ages led to believe the ban is an indication that e-cigs are no safer than the traditional cigarettes minors are already prohibited from purchasing. Teens and people first experimenting with smoking might then turn to the more traditional cigarettes instead.

The council didn’t address how many minors could be expected to turn to theft to afford the increased costs that would follow prohibition. I doubt he’s even considered it. Getting arrested not only has long-term ramifications for teens getting hobbled with a criminal record, but it gives the wrong life lessons and omits teens from have the responsibility and experience of making positive life choices. It’s through the practice of making the right decision that we can get the confidence and experience to building character. So we’ll need young people to strengthen their decision-making skills, just as they would for any academic assessment. It would be as if students were provided answers to a test that didn’t influence their semester grade. They wouldn’t much care for the outcome of the test or how they arrived at the answers they provided.

Just the same, if we’re pushed into making a choice, even a better choice, we aren’t exercise our good judgement — just mindless obedience — and we don’t get the feedback necessary to know what we’re doing right and where we have opportunities to grow. No one reasonably believes the government should make every decision for us. That means young people need to be free to use their own judgement as they take initiative. The unavoidable fact that people make mistakes isn’t a reason to hold them back. Politicians like Joel Burns may sincerely think they’re shielding us from our lesser selves, but what they’re doing is sacrificing the ability to make the most of our lives in constructing a better world for everyone, even those who stumbled on their way.

Image credit: Keirsten Marie, with a Creative Commons license
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A Crimean Diversion

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In a brief respite between coursework and dissertation deadlines, I feel the need to reflect a little on the Ukraine situation. Actually it's not such a big diversion as it directly relates to two of my modules this semester as well, on democracy, civil society and governance and on human rights. I feel about as close as it is possible to be to have considered the issue, read and heard people on both "sides", and actually not be able to hold an opinion either way. That's not to dismiss it as insignificant: in the back of my mind I always recall General Sir John Hackett's Third World War beginning in the recently independent Ukraine! I am genuinely conflicted. I have no idea what the "right" answer is.

Firstly, and I think a fair few strident "western" commentators need to appreciate this too for a bit of humility when pontificating what people half a world away should do, I and most of the people I know have no experience of being a geopolitical pawn (welll we do, we just don't usually recognise it as such!).  That means people in the UK and the USA primarily: we simply have not in living memory been invaded, annexed, carved up and redistributed, our people force-marched 3,000 miles as collective punishment, been starved in one of the biggest instances of democide in history.  

I mean, let's face it, sixty years ago or whatever it was, moving the Crimea to Ukraine would have been something akin to moving Grimsby back to Lincolnshire instead of Humberside, an administrative thing, done for who knows what reasons of course, but nonetheless. Maybe they thought the Ukrainians were always too independent minded so the territory called Ukraine should have more Russians in it. Mere gerrymandering on a grand scale? Who knows. You can be sure they then didn't envisage these Soviet Republics ever being anything other than part of the Soviet Union, so these were administrative internal issues. On the other hand, you would think that experience of the Holodomor and then of internal exile would make the Tatars totally against siding with Russia, so whose country is Crimea anyway? Should the (minroity) returning Tatars have some prior say, or should it be the ethnic Russians who were presumably also more or less forcibly moved into the Crimea in the fifties, as "current occupiers"?

It's bad enough having one "master" in the form of a state, but having several fight over you, swap you for something else, demand that one day you are loyal to one regime and the next to another, perhaps accompanied by enforced changes in language, legal system, religious freedoms and so on must be truly awful. I of course don't understand why they cannot simply go it alone - with a population of around 2 million Crimea is not dissimilar in size to sovereign Slovenia and Latvia, somewhat bigger than eight other independent European nation states.

Anyway, all of that is by way of saying I really cannot imagine, living in a country that has not ostensibly "changed hands" for the best part of a millennium, what all that historical baggage, much within living memory remember, does to communities.  But what of the political dimension, what is it that one side, Europe and the US are getting all moral high ground about?

Okay, so I paid only a passing interest in the street battles in Kiev, celebrated a little when the Yanukovych government fell (all governments falling are a cause for celebration, for there is the briefest opportunity that people might reject government entirely!). I mean, from the outside, it looks like Ukraine has had a series of pretty gangster governments. Yushchenko and the bizarre poisoning incident, Timoshenko the oligarch turned politician (rarely a good combination IMO). For better or worse the current legally, however dubiously, elected gangster-in-charge happens to be Yanukovych. And he has been forced from office by a mob. Amazingly a mob demanding closer ties to the European Union: Brussels can't see that strength of feeling in their favour very often!

The new government is, naturally, dominated by western-oriented Ukrainians so even the flimsy nationwide democratic consent to the Yanukovych government can no longer be counted upon. I'm not clear when we started supporting coups d'etat, but it seems to me that people pointing out that's exactly what we're doing have a good case.

On the other hand there is the unseemly haste with which all this is happening. One would expect a neighbouring country, especially one with crucial assets in the territory concerned, to have a position on the legitimacy or otherwise of a change in government next door, but is there anything to suggest that even if Ukraine were about to be more politically divided on ethnic lines anyone was in such imminent danger as to demand (let alone justify) immediate deployment and de facto annexation of the Crimea by Russia? You know, Scotland's been planning a vote on independence for what, three centuries, Crimea's could surely have waited a few months and allowing time for legal challenges and so on? I don't trust Putin at the best of times, and the swiftness of his intervention stinks of planning and takeover not protection.

I hear people comparing it to Kosovo. But I'm not sure the comparison works, or at least I hope it doesn't. In Kosovo, a rebel government had been going for some time, it had already turned bloody, and the remarkable aspect of the NATO intervention was bombing Serbia to make them give up their grip on Kosovo. So if Putin is not suggesting that large scale bloodshed on ethnic lines was imminent, from which the Crimean people needed immediate protection, is he really saying that he's prepared to bomb Kiev in order to defend the rights of self-determination of Crimea? An independent Crimea, by the way, that would be slightly larger in population than the current "independent" Kosovo.

And oh, as I was writing this last night, news comes in of some alleged phone conversation with Timoschenko apparently quite casually talking about nuking ethnic Russians.  Maybe Putin has a cause for swift intervention after all.  Either way, I cannot bring myself to think well of either side in this, and it seems to me that from the western point of view, rarely has there been as good a reason to keep one's own counsel as when the greenhouse windows are in full view of the incoming stones.

Why Wendy Davis Is No Supporter of Women

Wendy Davis

After nearly a year of charting her race to be the next Texas governor, Wendy Davis is finally taking the offensive against the GOP nominee, Attorney General Greg Abbott.

For weeks, Abbott had been plagued with questions of whether he would have signed a bill like one Davis sponsored in the last regular session that would allow women more time to sue an employer for paying male counterparts more for the same work and would allow women to seek redress in a state court. The bill was eventually vetoed by Gov. Rick Perry on the grounds that it was “redundant,” as a more curtailed federal version of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was already law. Abbott finally responded to the question, saying he likewise would have vetoed the bill. That sent the Davis team hurling press releases about the indifference her opponent has for women’s equality, which is arguably true.

In that same session, Davis rose to national prominence for her 11-hour filibuster of a bill, which eventually became law over her objections, meant to cripple women’s health clinics that provided abortions. In spite of that, she disclosed to the Dallas Morning News that she didn’t actually oppose the 20-week ban on abortions; she just wanted the restrictions on doctors and clinics to be more lax.

For these stances, she’s supposed to be a champion of women’s equality. Hardly. She’s an impostor offering superficial remedies.

If Davis were concerned that women weren’t receiving their fair pay, she would confront the biggest burdens on women’s achievement: namely, capricious occupational license requirements, restrictions on reproductive health care, immigration barriers to legal status, constraints on operating home-based businesses and access to credit, prohibitions on effective labor organizing tactics, asset forfeiture, means-tested welfare programs that lock single moms in poverty, a drug war that fractures families and accounts for a greater percentage of women prisoners than it does men, and welfare for the rich that takes the form of artificial scarcities and barriers to competition. Demanding anything less would be selling women short.

Meddling politicians claiming to be the champion of your interests are just promoting their own. They can be expected to side with power and influence, not their ordinary constituents, who are just left worn and scorned.

Image credit: Alan Kotok, with a Creative Commons license
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I Would Gladly Baby Tuesday For a Hamburger Today

Here are the powerpoint slides for my presentation at the AERC this past weekend, “Surrogacy Contracts and Inalienable Rights: A Rothbardian Analysis.”

On Government, Insurance Companies, and ALS or #NoWhiteFlags

Steve Gleason has done a lot to bring attention to Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS, Lou Gehrig’s Disease). Please read this letter that he wrote to his congressional delegation. Living with such a debilitating condition is not easy. Government and insurance companies have the ability to make it just a little bit easier. Unfortunately they usually do the exact opposite.

An Open Letter to Louisiana Senators and Congressmen:

Dear Senators Landrieu, Vitter and all Louisiana Members of Congress,

Recently, legislation was introduced to ensure patient access to quality, complex rehabilitation technology. An example of that technology is my power chair. I cannot imagine living with ALS (or any other physically restrictive disease) without a power chair. It is not only a necessity, it is a means of independence for me and my caregivers. The bi-partisan legislation introduced is S. 948 and HR 942. While every organization that supports the care of people with physical limitations supports this, not one legislator from Louisiana has signed it as of today.

Adding to this, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMMS) have new rules which become effective April 1st. Exactly the opposite of the legislation above, these superfluous rules will inhibit people from having consistent access to essential communication devices. The term essential is not hyperbole. I use my eyes to type on one of these devices. Essential communication; from requests for food or water, to telling my family I love them, advocating at the United Nations, or open letters to policy makers.

While I am very fortunate to have the ability to own and customize my equipment, most people who are dealing with ALS, and conditions like ALS, do not. Living with a physically debilitating disease is not only a tremendous emotional burden, but a financial one as well. By taking away access to these devices, the CMMS is harming the very people the institution was created to help.

Imagine if your cell phone, tablet and laptop were taken away when you had a hospital visit. While it is logical to rent “simple” machines like a car or a pressure washer for periods at a time, renting complex and customizable technology like a cell phone, tablet or laptop is far less viable, especially when that technology is your only means of connecting to the world.

I was recently in a Microsoft commercial. The commercial shows how transformative technology has been to individuals and the world. Microsoft calls these technologies “empowering”. These new rules from the CMMS will quash the power that technology gives people like me… people who intend to be productive and purposeful.

Please sign S 948 and HR 942. And, please introduce immediately an exclusion for Speech Generating Devices (SGDs). Thank you for your attention to this important issue and for your voice in Washington, DC. Through your support, you will also safeguard the voices of thousands of others.

Steve Gleason


Don’t be a dick

I wrote about the concept of "microaggression" for VICE, where I now have an archive and where I never read the comments.

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What Not to Say After a Self-Defense Shooting

Anything. Don’t say anything. Based on a concealed carry training class he attended, a user on reddit gave some wise advice for anyone who’s been involved in a self-defense shooting.

soupwell:

Our legal instructor went to great lengths to hammer it into our heads not to say anything besides:

Call 911 – ‘There has been a self defense use of force, I believe the assailant is in need of medical attention. Please send police and paramedics to [address or location].’ HANG UP.

Note that you do not even specify that you in particular were the person using self defense, or that you shot anyone.

When the police arrive – ‘Officer, I mean no disrespect, but I understand my rights. I have the right to have an attorney present during questioning. I have a right to refuse to consent to any search of my body and personal effects. I wish to exercise all my rights. If I am under arrest, I wish to invoke and exercise my Miranda rights and be allowed to obtain the advice of my attorney. If I am to be taken into custody, I request a reasonable opportunity to make arrangements to secure my own property. If I am not under arrest, I want to leave. If I am free to leave, please tell me immediately so I may go about my business.’

In the meantime while the police are arriving, contact a lawyer. Most people will have the urge to spill their guts to plead their case. Don’t! There are lots of political and other circumstances at play. It may mean the difference between being detained for a few hours and spending years in prison.

Image credit: soupwell
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Parkland Hospital CEO’s $1.1 Million Salary

The new CEO of Parkland Memorial Hospital could receive over $1.1 million per year in compensation, reported the Dallas Morning News, as part of a new three-year contract. Dr. Fred Cerise was introduced on Monday in a news conference to oversee the publicly funded hospital, which has a new $1.27 billion facility expected to open within a year.

These kind of executive contracts makes sense as part of an institutionalized culture that embraces high administrative and capital outlays at the expense of patient care. As Kevin Carson explained in his paper “The Healthcare Crisis” (summarized here), hospital administrators as the de facto decision makers view this type of spending, rather than waste, as necessarily adding value to the customer experience.

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Happy Tyrannicide Day (observed)

Happy Tyrannicide Day (observed)! To-day, March 15th, commemorates the assassination of two notorious tyrants. On the Ides of March in 2014 CE, we mark the 2,057 anniversary — give or take the relevant calendar adjustments — of the death of Gaius Julius Caesar, ruthless usurper, war-monger, slaver and military dictator, who rose to power in the midst of Rome’s most violent civil wars, who boasted of butchering and enslaving two million Gauls, who set fire to Alexandria, who battered and broke through every remaining restraint that Roman politics and civil society had against unilateral military and executive power. Driving his enemies before him in triumphs, having himself proclaimed Father of His Country, dictator perpetuo, censor, supreme pontiff, imperator, the King of Rome in all but name, taking unilateral command of all political power in Rome and having his images placed among the statues of the kings of old and even the gods themselves, he met his fate at the hands of a group of republican conspirators. Led by Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus, calling themselves the Liberators, on March 15, 44 BCE they surrounded Caesar and ended his reign of terror by stabbing him to death on the floor of the Senate.

Here's a painting of

Die Ermordung Cäsars, Karl von Piloty (1865)

By a coincidence of fate, March 13th, only two days before, also marks the anniversary (the 133rd this year) of the assassination of Alexander II Nikolaevitch Romanov, the self-styled Imperator, Caesar and Autocrat of All the Russias. A group of Narodnik conspirators, acting in self-defense against ongoing repression and violence that they faced at the hands of the autocratic state, put an end to the Czar’s reign by throwing grenades underneath his carriage on March 13th, 1881 CE, in an act of propaganda by the deed.

Here's a color drawing of

Das Attentat auf Zar Alexander II. am 13. März 1881 in St. Petersburg. Anonymous.

In honor of the coinciding events, the Ministry of Culture in this secessionist republic of one, together with fellow republics and federations of the free world, is happy to proclaim the 15th of March Tyrannicide Day (observed), a commemoration of the death of two tyrants at the hands of their enraged equals, people rising up to defend themselves even against the violence and oppression exercised by men wrapped in the bloody cloak of the State, with the sword of the Law and in the name of their fraudulent claims to higher authority. It’s a two-for-one historical holiday, kind of like President’s Day, except cooler: instead of another dull theo-nationalist hymn on the miraculous birth of two of the canonized saints of the United States federal government, we have instead one day on which we can honor the memory, and note the cultural celebrations, of men and women who defied tyrants’ arbitrary claims to an unchecked power that they had neither the wisdom, the virtue, nor the right to wield against their fellow creatures.

Here's a photo of a silver coin with the caption EID MAR. Above the caption are two daggers, flanking a Liberty Cap to the left and the right.

My favorite collectible coin. This silver denarius was actually minted and circulated in Macedonia by M. Junius Brutus after he and his fellow conspirators stabbed Caesar to death. The obverse features Brutus’s head in profile. The thing in the middle, above EID MAR (Ides of March) and flanked by the two daggers, is a Liberty Cap, traditionally given to emancipated slaves on the day of their freedom.

It is worth remembering in these days that the State has always tried to pass off attacks against its own commanding and military forces (Czars, Kings, soldiers in the field, etc.) as acts of terrorism. That is, in fact, what almost every so-called act of terrorism attributed to 19th century anarchists happened to be: direct attacks on the commanders of the State’s repressive forces. The linguistic bait-and-switch is a way of trying to get moral sympathy on the cheap, in which the combat deaths of trained fighters and commanders are fraudulently passed off, by a professionalized armed faction sanctimoniously playing the victim, as if they were just so many innocent bystanders killed out of the blue. Tyrannicide Day is a day to expose this for the cynical lie that it is.

There are in fact lots of good reasons to set aside tyrannicide as a political tactic — after all, these two famous cases each ended a tyrant but not the tyrannical regime; Alexander II was replaced by the even more brutal Alexander III, and Julius Caesar was replaced by his former running-dogs, one of whom would emerge from the carnage that followed as Imperator Gaius Julius Son-of-God Caesar Octavianus Augustus, beginning the long Imperial nightmare in earnest. But it’s important to recognize that these are strategic failures, not moral ones; what should be celebrated on the Ides of March is not the tyrannicide as a strategy, but rather tyrannicide as a moral fact. Putting a diadem on your head and wrapping yourself in the blood-dyed robes of the State confers neither the virtue, the knowledge, nor the right to rule over anyone, anywhere, for even one second, any more than you had naked and alone. Tyranny is nothing more and nothing less than organized crime executed with a pompous sense of entitlement and a specious justification; the right to self-defense applies every bit as much against the person of some self-proclaimed sovereign as it does against any other two-bit punk who might attack you on the street.

Every victory for human liberation in history — whether against the crowned heads of Europe, the cannibal-empires of modern Fascism and Bolshevism, or the age-old self-perpetuating oligarchies of race and sex — has had these moral insights at its core: the moral right to deal with the princes and potentates of the world as nothing more and nothing less than fellow human beings, to address them as such, to challenge them as such, and — if necessary — to resist them as such.

How did you celebrate Tyrannicide Day? (Personally, I toasted the event at home, watched the Season 1 finale of Rome, posted some special-occasion cultural artifacts to Facebook, and re-read Plutarch’s Life of Brutus from a nice little Loeb edition that I picked up from Jackson Street Books in Athens, Georgia.) And you? Done anything online or off for this festive season? Give a shout-out in the comments.

Toasting the Ides at home…

Thus always to tyrants. And many happy returns!

Beware the State. Celebrate the Ides of March!