Monthly Archives: October 2021

“Largely Inevitable As Economies Try To Restart After Epic Disruptions”

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Now that the US is recovering from the pandemic, demand has outstripped supply in some parts of the economy, resulting in inflation. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Something else that shouldn’t be a surprise is that Republicans blame Biden, as if any of them would do better.

The economist Paul Krugman summarizes the situation in his newsletter: 

It’s been a troubled few months on the economic front. Inflation has soared to a 28-year high. Supermarket shelves are bare, and gas stations closed. Good luck if you’re having problems with your home heating system: Replacing your boiler, which normally takes 48 hours, now takes two or three months. President Biden really is messing up, isn’t he?

Oh, wait. That inflation record was set not in America but in Germany. Stories about food and gasoline shortages are coming from Britain. The boiler replacement crisis seems to be hitting France especially hard.

And one major driver of recent inflation, in America and everywhere else, has been a spike in energy prices — prices that are set in world markets, on which any one country, even the United States, has limited influence. D____ T____ has been claiming that if he were president, gas would be below $2 a gallon [in fact, America would be an earthly paradise, just like when he left office]. How exactly does he imagine he could achieve that, when oil is traded globally and America accounts for only about a fifth of the world’s oil consumption? [Answer: he doesn’t imagine how he’d achieve it, but he thinks doing it would make him look good, and that’s enough reason to say he’d do it].

In other words, the problems that have been crimping recovery from the pandemic recession seem, by and large, to be global rather than local. That’s not to say that national policies are playing no role. For example, Britain’s woes are partly the result of a shortage of truck drivers, which in turn has a lot to do with the exodus of foreign workers after Brexit. But the fact that everyone seems to be having similar problems tells us that policy is playing less of a role than many people seem to think. And it does raise the question of what, if anything, the United States should be doing differently. . . .

Many observers have been drawing parallels with the stagflation of the 1970s. But so far, at least, what we’re experiencing doesn’t look much like that. Most economies have been growing, not shrinking; unemployment has been falling, not rising. While there have been some supply disruptions — Chinese ports have suffered closures as a result of Covid outbreaks, in March a fire at a Japanese factory that supplies many of the semiconductor chips used in cars around the world hit auto production, and so on — these disruptions aren’t the main story.

Probably the best parallel is not with 1974 or 1979 but with the Korean War, when inflation spiked, hitting almost 10 percent at an annual rate, because supply couldn’t keep up with surging demand.

Is demand really all that high? Real final sales (purchases for consumption or investment) in the United States hit a record high but are roughly back to the prepandemic trend. However, the composition of demand has changed. During the worst of the pandemic, people were unable or unwilling to consume services like restaurant meals, and they compensated by buying more stuff — consumer durables like cars, household appliances and electronics. At their peak, purchases of durable goods were an astonishing 34 percent above prepandemic levels; they’ve come down some but are still very high. Something similar seems to have happened around the world.

Meanwhile, supply has been constrained not just by clogged ports and chip shortages but also by the Great Resignation, the apparent reluctance of many workers to return to their old jobs. Like inflation and shortages of goods, this is an international phenomenon. Reports from Britain, in particular, sound remarkably like those from the United States: Large numbers of workers, especially older workers, appear to have chosen to stay at home and perhaps retire early after having been forced off their jobs by Covid-19.

. . . What could or should U.S. policymakers be doing differently? As I’ve already suggested, energy prices are largely out of U.S. control.

A few months ago, there were widespread claims that enhanced unemployment benefits were discouraging workers from accepting jobs. Many states rushed to cancel these benefits even before they expired at a national level in early September. But there has been no visible positive effect on labor supply.

Should current shortages inspire caution about Democratic spending plans? No. At this point, the Build Back Better agenda, if it happens at all, will amount to only about 0.6 percent of G.D.P. over the next decade, largely paid for by tax increases. It won’t be a significant inflationary force . . .

Other things might help. I’ve argued in the past that vaccine mandates, by making Americans feel safer about going to work and buying services rather than goods, could play a role in unclogging supply chains.

What’s left? If inflation really starts to look as if it’s getting embedded in the economy, the Federal Reserve should head it off by tightening policy, eventually by raising interest rates. . .

The most important point, however, may be not to overreact to current events. The fact that shortages and inflation are happening around the world is actually an indication that national policies aren’t the main cause of the problems. They are, instead, largely inevitable as economies try to restart after the epic disruptions caused by Covid-19. It will take time to sort things out — more time than most people, myself included, expected. . . .

A Brief Note On Ending It All

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Five years ago, according to The Guardian, the Dutch health and justice ministers sent a letter to parliament saying that people who “have a well-considered opinion that their life is complete, must, under strict and careful criteria, be allowed to finish that life in a manner dignified for them”. The law they proposed would only apply to the elderly (the age of 75 was mentioned). There would be “safety mechanisms, including third-party checks, reviews and supervision”. Presumably, an old person who decided to end it all would be helped to get their affairs in order (e.g. a will would be prepared or reviewed). Further down in the article, it’s suggested that the law would only apply to the terminally ill, regardless of whether they were in pain.

The author Kenan Malik referred to this proposal on his site and called it “calamitous”, without explaining why. I’m sure the nursing home industry would hate it. But speaking as one who has reached the age of three score and ten, I think it’s a great idea. And I don’t see why you’d need to be terminally ill to take advantage of such a law.

A person who’s lived a long life should have the right to make a graceful, well-planned exit when they feel they’ve seen and done enough. You shouldn’t be forced to hang on for dear life if you don’t think life is dear enough to hang onto anymore. It’s your life. You lived it. You should be able to decide when it ends.

According to its official government site (which is in English, at least for me), the Netherlands only allows people to request euthanasia if they are “experiencing unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement”. So that wise proposal from the health and justice ministers wasn’t adopted.

To sum up the official position, therefore, you were brought into this world without any choice in the matter. You should stay here until fate or the government says you can leave.

As If What’s True Matters to Them

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Charles Pierce of Esquire covers one more case in which the truth couldn’t compete with right-wing fantasy and paranoia (as originally reported in more detail by The New York Times). Mr. Pierce’s conclusion regarding who is ultimately responsible for this nonsense is important:

. .. . Some local boosters in the central part of Montana wanted to arrange for the area to be declared a National Heritage Area. This, they believed, would boost the tourist economy in that beautiful, but lonely, place. It also would bring in some much-needed FREE MONEY! from the federal government. This sounded like a plan to many of the people living there, and especially to the local mover-and-shaker communities. But they did not reckon with the power of the Intertoobz, and one citizen’s willingness to believe anything she read there. . . .

For seven years, beginning in 2013, the proposal went along swimmingly behind the work of a retired Forest Service officer. There were town meetings, and the process was largely peaceful. And then D____ T____ ran for re-election and hell followed after him.

Rae Grulkowski [a 56-year old businesswoman who had never been involved in politics] heard a local candidate speak against the proposal, and she thereafter went so far off the diving board that said candidate disowned her and her work. Like that even matters.

At the time, [Grulkowski] was becoming engrossed in the online world of far-right media. From her home on 34 acres in Stockett, a farming community of 157 people south of Great Falls, she watched videos from outlets like His Glory TV, where hosts refer to President Biden as “the so-called president.” She subscribed to the Telegram messaging channel of Seth Keshel, a prolific disinformation spreader. And she came across a vein of conspiratorial accusations that national heritage areas were a kind of Trojan horse that could open the door to future federal land grabs.

When Ms. Grulkowski, who owns a septic cleaning company, tried using Ms. [Jeni] Dodd’s group to push the idea that Montanans’ property rights were at risk, Ms. Dodd kicked her out for promoting lies. “I’m not happy with people saying it will seize your property, because that is disingenuous,” Ms. Dodd said. “I said to her, ‘I think you need to be careful about the message. It isn’t actually the way that it works, what you’re saying.’”

But Ms. Grulkowski plowed ahead.

. . . She collected addresses from a list of voters and spent $1,300 sending a packet denouncing the proposed heritage area to 1,498 farmers and ranchers. She told them the designation would forbid landowners to build sheds, drill wells or use fertilizers and pesticides. It would alter water rights, give tourists access to private property, create a new taxation district and prohibit new septic systems and burials on private land, she said.

None of this was true.

Like that matters anymore.

Grulkowski found powerful allies to support her fantasies. The head of the Montana Farm Bureau, a muscular lobbying group, signed onboard. . . The Farm Bureau guy sounds like a real prize.

In two hours of talking at his farm, Mr. Bandel could offer no evidence to back up that claim. He said he distrusted assurances that there were no such designs. “They say, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to do it right. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. I think Adolf Hitler said that, too, didn’t he?” Mr. Bandel said. “The fear of the unknown is a huge fear.” Mr. Bandel said he trusted Ms. Grulkowski with the details.

And why wouldn’t you? I mean, it’s not like Ms. Grulkowski would believe anything that comes out of the pixelverse, right?

Outside of a poultry coop, as her chickens and ducks squawked, Ms. Grulkowski ticked through the falsehoods she had read online and accepted as truths in the past year: The Covid vaccine is more dangerous than the coronavirus. Global child-trafficking rings control the political system. Black Lives Matter was responsible for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The United Nations is plotting to control world population and seize private land. Mr. T____ was the rightful winner of last year’s election. Even in Cascade County, where Mr. T____ won 59 percent of the vote, Ms. Grulkowski argued that 3,000 illegal votes were cast.

“We didn’t believe in any of that stuff until last July,” Ms. Grulkowski said. “Then we stumbled on something on the internet, and we watched it, and it took us two days to get over that. And it had to do with the child trafficking that leads to everything. It just didn’t seem right, and that was just over the top. And then we started seeing things that are lining up with that everywhere.”

She started seeing things. I have no doubt of that.

Pretty soon, . . . thanks to the cowardice and stupidity of the Montana political establishment—right up to and including Governor Greg (Body Slam) Gianforte and U.S. Senator Steve Daines—there were power players joining the fight against this non-existent threat.

Yet it soon became accepted as truth by enough people to persuade Montana’s leading Republican figures and conservative organizations, including the farm bureau, Gov. Gianforte and Senator Daines, to oppose the proposal and enact a state law forbidding the federal government to create any heritage area in Montana.

It is a ban that the state has no authority to enforce.

Like that even matters any more.

The dispute has split communities, become a wedge issue in this fall’s political campaigns and left proponents of the heritage area flummoxed at their collective inability to refute falsehoods once they have become accepted wisdom. “We’ve run into the uneducable,” Ellen Sievert, a retired historic preservation officer for Great Falls and surrounding Cascade County, said. “I don’t know how we get through that.”

I have a Pro Tip for these folks: you can’t defeat the imaginary with either logic or reason. Delusions have their own physical laws, and you don’t know what they are.

Rae Gulkowski is not the problem. Rae Gulkowskis have been with us always. I wrote a book once that had as one of its central themes that the United States is the best country in the history of the world to be completely out of your mind. It is the powerful interests—political, social, financial; local and national—who are willing to pretend to swallow any fantastical codswallop for their own dark purposes who are the real sources of peril to the republic’s existence. It’s the people who should know better, and who clearly don’t, and worse, who don’t give a damn.

Unquote.

It doesn’t look like taking Fox News and Facebook out of the picture would have made a difference in this case, but unless we do something about the way Facebook and Fox News feed right-wing fantasy and paranoia, it’s fair to conclude that the Republican Party will become even more divorced from reality and Republican politicians will become even worse than they are now.

The Point Is They Were Trying to Change the Results of an Election, Even If That Required Violence

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Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo discusses Rolling Stone’s new article about the January 6th insurrection and the congressional investigation into it:

. . . There seems to be some significant confusion about what’s actually in the report and what it means for understanding the event itself and the investigation into it. . . . Understanding this is very important for understanding the questions of accountability and legality stemming from the whole event.

First of all, I saw many reactions to the story yesterday which treated it as a sort of smoking gun about the involvement of a number of far-right members of Congress. But at least to my understanding this part of the report was not new. Not really new at all. There are basically three parts of the story that we can distinguish for these purposes. 1) The legal/executive power attempt to overturn the election, 2) the “Stop the Steal” rally aimed at pressuring Congress and then 3) the breach of the Capitol complex which happened when then-President T____ told the rally attendees to march on the Capitol complex. But we’ve known basically from the beginning that these members of Congress were involved in 1 and 2. This has not just come out in reporting since January 6th. It was fairly open at the time. Indeed, most of these members were either present or actually spoke at the rally.

To the best of my knowledge there’s nothing in the report that explicitly ties these members of Congress to the decision to storm the Capitol complex. There are many references to additional information the cooperating sources plan to provide. So perhaps there’s additional, specific information there. But here’s why this is important and important not so much about this report but for understanding the whole situation.

If we’re looking for a specific smoking gun where [Republican congressmen] Paul Gosar or Mo Brooks says, “Hey, once you get there, storm the barricades and beat up the cops who try to stop you and take the members of Congress hostage” we’re all being way too literal about what happened here and basically making an argument in advance that lets most of the key players off the hook.

The big plot was to overturn the results of the election. The President and his congressional allies were working on that at the[Department of Justice] and in Congress. They also planned a big rally in the Capitol to menace and overawe members of Congress. They got them riled up at the rally and then literally told them to march on the Capitol. They knew there were various rightist paramilitaries in that crowd – Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, etc.

They knew they had told them that Congress was stealing the election from T____ and that they should go to Capitol Hill and make them stop. My best guess is that people like T____ and Mark Meadows didn’t want to know all the details of precisely what was going to happen once the mob got to the barricades. But that’s really always how these things work.

We already appear to have reporting that Bannon knew and was trying to foment the kind of siege that actually occurred. And we can see pretty clearly that this was the plan because the reaction to the storming of the Capitol complex from folks like Bannon and indeed T____ himself wasn’t dismay or outrage but glee. That’s what they were looking for. This remains perhaps the most important part of the whole investigation: the period of hours in which T____ gleefully watched his supporters try to hunt down the members of Congress and indeed T____’s Vice President and refused efforts to calm the situation or order federal troops to stop the assault on the Capitol.

The defenders of the Jan 6th insurrection want to argue that the rally was just like any other example of Americans exercising their right to peaceful protest. No different from the March on Washington or the Women’s March in the first days of T____’s presidency. The only problem was when individuals decided to break down the barricades and … well T____ and Paul Gosar and Mo Brooks … well, that wasn’t their fault. Who could have predicted, etc.?

To the best of my knowledge this report doesn’t change the facts on this basic issue. But we are fools if that’s what we’re looking for. Or if that is the standard we’re applying to this inquiry.

Bayes and What He Hath Wrought

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Thomas Bayes was an 18th century British statistician, philosopher and Presbyterian minister. He’s known today because he formulated Bayes’ Theorem, which has since given rise to Bayseian probability, Bayseian inference, Bayseian epistemology, Bayesian efficiency and Bayseian networks, among other things.

The reason I bring this up is that philosophers, especially the ones who concentrate on logic and the theory of knowledge, often mention something Bayseian, usually in glowing terms. It’s been a source of consternation for me. I’ve tried to understand what the big deal is, but pretty much failed. All I’ve really gotten out of these efforts is the idea that if you’re trying to figure out a probability, it helps to pay attention to new evidence. Duh.

Today, however, the (Roughly) Daily blog linked to an article by geneticist Johnjoe McFadden called “Why Simplicity Works”. In it, he offers a simple explanation of Bayes’ Theorem, which for some reason I found especially helpful. Here goes:

Just why do simpler laws work so well? The statistical approach known as Bayesian inference, after the English statistician Thomas Bayes (1702-61), can help explain simplicity’s power.

Bayesian inference allows us to update our degree of belief in an explanation, theory or model based on its ability to predict data. To grasp this, imagine you have a friend who has two dice. The first is a simple six-sided cube, and the second is more complex, with 60 sides that can throw 60 different numbers. [All things being equal, the odds that she’ll throw either one of the dice at this point are 50/50].

Suppose your friend throws one of the dice in secret and calls out a number, say 5. She asks you to guess which dice was thrown. Like astronomical data that either the geocentric or heliocentric system could account for, the number 5 could have been thrown by either dice. Are they equally likely?

Bayesian inference says no, because it weights alternative models – the six- vs the 60-sided dice – according to the likelihood that they would have generated the data. There is a one-in-six chance of a six-sided dice throwing a 5, whereas only a one-in-60 chance of the 60-sided dice throwing a 5. Comparing likelihoods, then, the six-sided dice is 10 times more likely to be the source of the data than the 60-sided dice.

Simple scientific laws are preferred, then, because, if they fit or fully explain the data, they’re more likely to be the source of it.

Hence, in this case, before your friend rolls one of the dice, there is the same probability that she’ll roll either one. With the new evidence — that she rolled a 5 — the probability changes. To Professor McFadden’s point, the simplest explanation for why she rolled a 5 is that she used the dice with only 6 sides (she didn’t roll 1, 2,3, 4 or 6), not the dice with 60 sides (she didn’t roll 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, . . . 58, 59 or 60).

Now it’s easier to understand explanations like this one from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Bayes’ Theorem is a simple mathematical formula used for calculating conditional probabilities. It figures prominently in subjectivist or Bayesian approaches to epistemology, statistics, and inductive logic. Subjectivists, who maintain that rational belief is governed by the laws of probability, lean heavily on conditional probabilities in their theories of evidence and their models of empirical learning. Bayes’ Theorem is central to these enterprises both because it simplifies the calculation of conditional probabilities and because it clarifies significant features of subjectivist positions. Indeed, the Theorem’s central insight — that a hypothesis is confirmed by any body of data that its truth renders probable — is the cornerstone of all subjectivist methodology. . . .

To illustrate, suppose J. Doe is a randomly chosen American who was alive on January 1, 2000. According to the United States Center for Disease Control, roughly 2.4 million of the 275 million Americans alive on that date died during the 2000 calendar year. Among the approximately 16.6 million senior citizens (age 75 or greater) about 1.36 million died. The unconditional probability of the hypothesis that our J. Doe died during 2000, H, is just the population-wide mortality rate P(H) = 2.4M/275M = 0.00873. To find the probability of J. Doe’s death conditional on the information, E, that he or she was a senior citizen, we divide the probability that he or she was a senior who died, P(H & E) = 1.36M/275M = 0.00495, by the probability that he or she was a senior citizen, P(E) = 16.6M/275M = 0.06036. Thus, the probability of J. Doe’s death given that he or she was a senior is PE(H) = P(H & E)/P(E) = 0.00495/0.06036 = 0.082. Notice how the size of the total population factors out of this equation, so that PE(H) is just the proportion of seniors who died. One should contrast this quantity, which gives the mortality rate among senior citizens, with the “inverse” probability of E conditional on H, PH(E) = P(H & E)/P(H) = 0.00495/0.00873 = 0.57, which is the proportion of deaths in the total population that occurred among seniors.

Exactly.