Lacking All Conviction: exploring the future from the center

If Trump wins, I will know who to blame. Not the people who vote for him, the downtrodden victims of his charismatic authoritarian personality, but economists and politicians who enable each other to shape our lives with disregard for human dignity. Those who have been treating human beings as mere variables, who, like any other variable, exist only within equations where productivity is the goal. In economic practice, these variables do not become human again until increased productivity is mathematically guaranteed. This is a mistake. Observe this Capuchin monkey reacting angrily to inequitable treatment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg Now imagine millions of much smarter and stronger primates slowly coming to terms with the scale of economic inequality in America today. This should be a primary, not secondary, concern of economists and especially politicians.  The belief that human beings are capable of withstanding unlimited indignities and hardships, of adap...

How the hell should I know? A perpetual dilemma of economics is the lack of certainty about what is signal and what is noise, in terms of policy and effect, and we are in a sense blinded by this lack of predictive power of economic models. Thus there will continue to be great risks entailed by every possible policy path that we could take. A suitable metaphor is that we are jogging on a cliffside path, and we need to find our way without falling, but our senses won't tell us that we've found the edge for sure until we start to fall. The only way I can think to survive such a scenario is to have some mechanism to catch ourselves once we begin to fall  and this, I believe, is why the most economically successful countries have central banks that are willing to step in and lift their industries out of free-fall. This safety feature, I believe, is a very powerful tool that an economy can use in order to experiment with different policies in a situation where models lack predictive ...

The following was written as a response to the blogger who writes at www.adividedworld.com. Please see the comment section of the following page for the background to this post. http://www.adividedworld.com/scientific-issues/clouds-and-global-warming/ Hello again Charles. I have been thinking about the things we disagree on over the past few months, and trying to figure out a way to respond to one of them without putting the rest of my life on hold. You've altered the way I think about climate change on an emotional or intuitive level, if not a logical one. I have long been aware of the lack of predictive validity of climate simulations, an ambiguity that naturally accompanies any simulation of sufficient complexity. Call it chaos theory or simply bad science, the result is that the margins of error in the field are unfortunately huge. I had previously been unmoved on an emotional level by any non-AGW theory due to their seeming to me to be reactions against pro-AGW theor...

Background:              TLDR: The official poverty measure is confusing as hell Upon Googling "Bernie Sanders", an interesting combination of words appeared: "Forbes.com" "Policies for Bernie Sanders" The article  was a rather facile examination of the relative merits of conditional vs. non-conditional cash transfers, as in food stamps vs. cash benefits. There are better articles about this subject such as this one in the Economist and this one on a Norwegian website. But what immediately caught my eye, and what takes up the bulk of the article, is a claim that the author, Tim Worstall, makes about the childhood poverty rate, namely that it is only 2-3%. Of all the metrics that you could use to argue that poverty in America isn't as bad as some people say it is, the childhood poverty rate is probably the least likely to convince someone who has access to the official statistics. I confronted Tim about his lack of citations in the c...