Two Centuries of Runaway Global "Warming"

Here is a talk from the horse's mouth, Michael Mann a "global warming" climatologist, giving a talk on the "science is settled" global warming...



I find it humourous that he claims:

• We are two centuries into "runaway" global warming and the result is less an 1^oC of temperature rise. But he assures us that in the next 90 years we will get another 4^oC of temperature rise.


• He proudly claims the authorship of the "hockey stick" presentation of global temperatures. This is funny because there is good evidence


• He complains about "criminals" broke into the a university server and "stole" e-mails and "cherry-picked" these to distort the honest science into a conspiracy to "fudge" the data. Well, in fact, the scientists did fudge their data. The release of e-mails was most likely done by an insider who rebelled against the "researchers" who refused to share the data, something that is contrary to real science. (More details at Wikipedia.)


• He closes by doing science by "testimonial". He names lists of people who have signed up to support the global warming crowd as if popularity is a measure of scientific truth. In the end the real science will come out despite the popularity of current support for "warming" that has been bought and sold by big government grants. He confuses his "ethics" with science. That he is a fanatic doomsday pessimist has coloured his science and sadly he can't distinguish real fact from his desired "outcome" of his research.

In short, the above is the propaganda position of the "global warming" crowd. You can understand how it distorts fact only if you know more than what is being said by Mann. The above is a self-serving presentation of "facts". This is what passes for "science" among the global warming crowd.

Mann's presentation is as "scientific" as those infamous slideshow talks by Al Gore that won him a "Nobel Peace Prize" for his activism for "global warming". If you want to understand how politics trumps science you don't have to go any further than meditate on giving a politician a prize for world "peace" for going around scaring people about a supposed "runaway global warming".

If you want to get a sense of how desperately "hot" our world has become, take a look at this graph showing the global sea ice extent (with the anomaly in red). I don't see any "runaway" warming. According to the doomsters, global warming effects are magnified at the polar extremes, but I don't see any critical warming that has melted the polar ice.

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There has been a slight melting of arctic ice but none in antarctica. And here is a graph showing a global measure of "warming" from the UAH satellite temperature dataset:

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Nothing to panic about in these temperatures. This is just normal variability in global temperatures.

I don't disagree that greenhouse gases can warm the climate, but I don't accept the climate models as accurate (I have a background in computer modeling and know how difficult it is to model something especially if you don't have a thorough understanding of the dynamics). My disagreement with the "global warming" crowd is their politicization of the science and their doomsday cult-like drive for "solutions" that are worse than the problem. They would disrupt the economy on the basis of their bad science. I'm willing to condemn people to an impoverished life, but only if the facts are ironclad without any workaround. But the global warming crowd is like the "overpopulation" crowd of the 1960s or the "limits to growth" crowd of the 1970s. They are fanatics who are over-selling their "science" and pushing a political agenda, an agenda which would be disastrous for most people since it is anti-growth.

If you want an antidote to the global warming malarky, I can recommend this blog by Anthony Watts. It is good on the science. But I should warn you that he is a right wing nut (as are most of the people who are anti "global warming"). I don't buy the right wing politics, but I do agree on the assessment of their attacks on the phony "science" of global warming. Here is a nice bit from a post. This summarizes the failed scares promulgated by the doomsday global warming crowd:

The Antarctic sea ice extent has been at or near record extent in the past few summers and the ice is expanding, the Arctic has rebounded in recent years since the low point in 2007, polar bears are thriving, sea level is not showing acceleration and is actually dropping, Cholera and Malaria are failing to follow global warming predictions, Mount Kilimanjaro melt fears are being made a mockery by gains in snow cover, global temperatures have been holding steady for a decade or more and many scientists are predicting global cooling is ahead, deaths due to extreme weather are radically declining, global tropical cyclone activity is near historic lows, the frequency of major U.S. hurricanes has declined, the oceans are missing their predicted heat content, big tornados have dramatically declined since the 1970s, droughts are not historically unusual nor caused by mankind, there is no evidence we are currently having unusual weather, scandals continue to rock the climate fear movement, the UN IPCC has been exposed as being a hotbed of environmental activists, former Vice President Al Gore is now under siege by his fellow global warming activists for attempting to link every bad weather event to man-made global warming and scientists from around the world continue to dissent from man-made climate fears at a rapid pace.

Go read the original post to get the embedded links that substantiate each of the above.

The Ultimate IP Sleaze from Obama

The "people's" president is supposed to be on the side of the people. Everybody understands that Republican presidents cater to the 1% and those wingnuts who aspire to be the 1%. But for everybody else there is only one choice: the Democratic president.

Obama is pushing his "jobs" agenda, but with great irony, he wants creative graphic designers to labour for free to create him a poster. No job for them. Just the glory of knowing that "they did it for a good cause". Oh yeah...

Here is a bit from a post in Rolling Stone magazine:

The Obama campaign has more than $60 million cash on hand. In an economy this bad, you'd think a presidential campaign that flush would be happy to pay good money for a talented designer to create a campaign poster.

But the folks at Obama campaign have taken a page from the Arianna Huffington book of economic exploitation and called on "artists across the country" to create a poster ... for free.

And here's the kicker. It's a jobs poster.

Yes, the Obama campaign is soliciting unpaid labor to create a poster "illustrating why we support President Obama's plan to create jobs now, and why we'll re-elect him to continue fighting for jobs for the next four years."

If you win? You get: A framed copy of your own poster, signed by the president ("approximate retail value $195").

And if you don't win? Well, that's too bad. You've not only lost the contest, you've also surrendered your intellectual property. "All submissions will become the property of Obama for America," according to the fine print.

Just like the Obama presidency knows that his job #1 is to bailout banks and make sure billionaire bankers get their humungous bonuses, the Obama presidency knows that intellectual property rights (IP) goes to the sleazeball who can squeeze it out of the dumb proletariat who will sign up for work for free and give up all rights to their ideas. Wow. Isn't capitalism great, or what? Obama is a typical 1% type, you work, he gets the money, the glory, the top job, the babes, the media, the big retirement package. You get to hang on to your warm-and-fuzzy feeling that you "helped". That and $5 will help you buy a hamburger to split with your wife and 3 kids.

Obama wants to create jobs... he wants to create 4 more years for No. 1. For the 99%? This is just a slogan. He is going through the motions, crafting this as a "message with spin and a careful political game of partisanship". Whether you get a job or not? He could care less. That's your problem, not his. He is the president for the 1%.

Getting a Handle on Your Place in the Universe

You are on this very tiny dot w-a-y, w-a-y over here...



The size and numbers are truly mind boggling. From Wikipedia:

The universe is immensely large and possibly infinite in volume. The region visible from Earth (the observable universe) is a sphere with a radius of about 46 billion light years, based on where the expansion of space has taken the most distant objects observed. For comparison, the diameter of a typical galaxy is only 30,000 light-years, and the typical distance between two neighboring galaxies is only 3 million light-years. As an example, our Milky Way Galaxy is roughly 100,000 light years in diameter, and our nearest sister galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, is located roughly 2.5 million light years away. There are probably more than 100 billion (10¹¹) galaxies in the observable universe. Typical galaxies range from dwarfs with as few as ten million (10⁷) stars up to giants with one trillion (10¹²) stars, all orbiting the galaxy's center of mass. Thus, a very rough estimate from these numbers would suggest there are around one sextillion (10²¹) stars in the observable universe; though a 2010 study by astronomers resulted in a figure of 300 sextillion (3×10²³).

What I find flabbergasting is that roughly a third the people on earth think that there is a "personal" God who sent his "son" to this one planet of the one-out-of-300-sextillion suns in the universe. Oh, and that this God personally transcribed the true history of the universe and put it into one thousand page book between 2 and 3 thousand years ago and that those trusty human copyists dutifully preserved the true words without error for over two thousand years (despite the historical fact that there are literally thousands of variant texts all claiming to be the "one true" transcription of God's word, and not counting later upstarts like Muhammad, Bahá'u'lláh, Joe Smith, David Koresh, etc. who claimed "additional" revelations). And that this God has contrived to make the universe which was "created" in 7 days look like it is 13.73 billion year old and that he bothered to place fossils in the earth and create geological formations that would deceive humans into seeing the earth as 4.54 billion years old when it is only 6,015 years old according to the very careful calculations of Bishop Ussher. Funny.

An Honest Reassessment of the Singularity

Ideas inevitably backfire because our initial enthusiasm and rush to achieve them overlook the complexities, and the darker aspects of reality. The transhumanists for many years have been selling the snake oil of "the singularity" with a doctrinal purity that overlooks the grimy details of real world shortcomings and short circuits and darker motives.

Here is a nice post by Brad DeLong on his blog Grasping Reality with Both Hands that looks at the singularity and discovers that we've already had several experiences of it:

Charlie Stross does not fear (or anticipate) the Singularity:

Three arguments against the singularity: I periodically get email from folks who, having read "Accelerando", assume I am some kind of fire-breathing extropian zealot who believes in the imminence of the singularity, the uploading of the libertarians, and the rapture of the nerds. I find this mildly distressing, and so I think it's time to set the record straight and say what I really think....

First: super-intelligent AI is unlikely... you get there... by way of human-equivalent AI, and human-equivalent AI is unlikely.... [H]uman intelligence... an emergent phenomenon of human physiology... only survived the filtering effect of evolution by enhancing human survival fitness in some way. Enhancements to primate evolutionary fitness are not much use to a machine, or to people who want to extract useful payback (in the shape of work) from a machine.... We may want machines that can recognize and respond to our motivations and needs, but we're likely to leave out the annoying bits, like needing to sleep for roughly 30% of the time, being lazy or emotionally unstable, and having motivations of its own.... We want computers that recognize our language and motivations and can take hints, rather than requiring instructions enumerated in mind-numbingly tedious detail. But whether we want them to be conscious and volitional is another question entirely. I don't want my self-driving car to argue with me about where we want to go today. I don't want my robot housekeeper to spend all its time in front of the TV watching contact sports or music videos. And I certainly don't want to be sued for maintenance by an abandoned software development project....

Uploading... is not obviously impossible.... Our form of conscious intelligence emerged from our evolutionary heritage, which in turn was shaped by our biological environment. We are not evolved for existence as disembodied intelligences, as "brains in a vat", and we ignore E. O. Wilson's Biophilia Hypothesis at our peril; I strongly suspect that the hardest part of mind uploading won't be the mind part, but the body and its interactions with its surroundings.

Moving on to the Simulation Argument: I can't disprove that, either... it offers a deity-free afterlife, as long as the ethical issues... are ignored.... [I]t would make a good free-form framework for a postmodern high-tech religion. Unfortunately it seems to be unfalsifiable, at least by the inmates (us)....

This is my take on the singularity: we're not going to see a hard take-off, or a slow take-off, or any kind of AI-mediated exponential outburst. What we're going to see is increasingly solicitous machines defining our environment — machines that sense and respond to our needs "intelligently". But it will be the intelligence of the serving hand rather than the commanding brain, and we're only at risk of disaster if we harbour self-destructive impulses. We may eventually see mind uploading... but beyond giving us an opportunity to run Nozick's experience machine thought experiment for real, I'm not sure we'd be able to make effective use of it — our hard-wired biophilia will keep dragging us back to the real world, or to simulations indistinguishable from it. Finally, the simulation hypothesis... suggests that if we are already living in a cyberspatial history simulation (and not a philosopher's hedonic thought experiment) we might not be able to apprehend the underlying "true" reality.... Any way you cut these three ideas, they don't provide much in the way of referent points for building a good life... it's unwise to live on the assumption that they're coming down the pipeline within my lifetime.

I'm done with computational theology: I think I need a drink!

Me? I think about four moments:

1. Pre-linguistic homo sapiens, who: (a) knew about fifty people; (b) hunted, gathered, cooperated, fought, and raised children; and (c) learned stuff only by watching what others did and what happened to them.


2. Linguistic hunter-gatherer homo sapiens, who: (a) knew perhaps fifty people--but had heard stories about up to 500 more; (b) hunted, gathered, cooperated, fought, and raised children but also bargained, allied, and promised; and (c) learned a huge amount of what had happened outside of his or her sight and hearing by talking and listening--was an anthology intelligence with the memory and experience not of one but of a hundred.


3. Agricultural metal-working chariot-driving reading-and-writing homo sapiens--at least the upper classes, the Atreids and the Chryseids--who: (a) farmed, herded (or took stuff from the farmers and herders), wrote down stories, claimed to have special knowledge of gods, claimed to be descended from gods and have the right to rule, trained as technologically-advanced chariot-driving specialists not just in human-on-animal hunting violence but in coercive violence, kept track of accounts, built or ordered the construction of the Lion Gate at Mycenae, etc.


4. Modern post-industrial high-mass-consumption web-surfing humanity--or at least the first-world upper middle classes--whose lives we know very well.

All of these strike me as partial singularities: in each case, about three-quarters of life is more or less the same as it had been earlier--and one-quarter is transformed utterly.

I like DeLong's take on this, i.e. we've seen this movie before and it isn't the showstopper that the promoter promised. Sure it is exciting but not in a way that anybody passing through the portal of then to now would really appreciate.

The part that DeLong doesn't play with is how snake oil salesmen only talk about the revitalizing and curative powers of their potion in a bottle. They don't mention the side-effects. They never point out that to get the miracle cure your teeth will fall out, your face muscles will go slack, and you will drool.

The message is simple: the future will be a lot like now. And if there are some benefits to be had, the rich and the powerful, the criminal and the impatient, will beat you to it and open Pandora's box and discover the surprises within. If it is truly better, then they will pull a Clarence Thomas, climb up through the singularity, and pull up the ladder after them leaving us to watch as they take the mothership to a place far beyond where we in our miserable grubby lives will ever go.

I don't know how the future will unfold, but I know it will be more complex, more nuanced, more surprising, and more disappointing than any hawker of singularity has ever presented.

Portrait of Harold Camping

Harold Camping has just created his second great crime against humanity: his latest "end of days" prediction has proved to be nothing but his vanity about seeing "God's will" and using that to manipulate people around him.

Here is an interesting personal commentary on Harold Camping from a fellow married to one of his granddaughters. Here are some key bits:

He was a sullen and depressive, but volatile man who cast a long, dark shadow over the lives of his two daughters, never forgiving them for not being sons. He drove one into a lifetime of therapy and the other into a lifetime of denial.

And:

He was a lifelong teetotaler, but when these sudden moods struck him he became a sober version of a mawkish drunk, sobbing and proclaiming his deep love for strangers in the bar. The strangers in this case were his own daughters, grandchildren and family who would exchange nervous looks and do their best to comfort him as, one by one, we would each make and repeat the promise he would beg us to make him.

“Don’t worry,” we would say, “you won’t be cremated. I promise. No, no, it’s OK. We won’t let that happen to you.”

Why the fear of cremation? Because he thought you can't be resurrected if you are cremated.

He sounds like a thoroughly disagreeable, manipulative, domineering guy. It is tragic that people fall into his orbit and have their lives disrupted by this crazies theological fantasies.

It is tragic that each one of these manipulative SOBs, there has to be hundreds of decent, hard-working, sensible people putting in solid work every day to keep the glue of society together and the economy rolling. But these hard working salt-of-the-earth types get no fame or attention. They quietly do their thing while these blowhards and manipulators seize the public's imagination. Worse, guys like Camping convince people to quit their jobs, take out their life savings, and go on a "religious" binge of end-of-the-worldism that simply ends in grief and a wrecked life. Camping thinks nothing of the pain and suffering he has caused.

Dean Baker Calls Out the NY Times for Playing Along with Republican Pretenses

This is an excellent post by Dean Baker in his Beat the Press blog:

The New York Times told readers that the battle over Representative Paul Ryan's proposal, which would redistribute tens of trillions of dollars from poor and middle class people to the wealthy is a debate over:

"the size and role of government — of the balance between personal responsibility and private markets on the one hand and public responsibility and social welfare on the other."

This is not true. Paul Ryan, who is ostensibly the proponent of small government in this story, wants the government to be able to arrest people for conducting free market transactions with prescription drugs and medical devices. In Ryan's world, the government will give certain companies patent monopolies that allow them to charge prices that are many thousand percent above the cost of production.

Ryan also has shown zero interest in opening trade for doctors and other highly paid medical professionals, which would go far towards reducing costs in the United States. Ryan also wants to deny seniors in the United States the option to buy into more efficient health care systems in other countries.

According to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) projections, Ryan's plan would increase the cost of providing Medicare equivalent care to seniors by $30 trillion over Medicare's 75-year planning period, an amount that is 6 times the size of the projected Social Security shortfall. This is entirely the additional cost to the country in the form of higher payments to insurers and health care providers. This does not include the cost shift from the government to beneficiaries.

It is entirely possible that strong believers in small government would prefer having the government provide health care given the enormous savings projected by CBO. The savings are equivalent of $100,000 for every man woman and child in the country. Even libertarians generally advocate having the government take responsibility in areas where large potential efficiencies exist by dealing with an issue through a centralized body.

The one unifying theme to Representative Ryan's proposal is that it redistributes a vast amount of income upward. It does not always lead to smaller government rather than bigger government.

It is understandable that proponents of redistributing income upward would try to conceal their motives by feigning an interest in small government. The prospect of a small government probably has more appeal to most citizens than the prospect of further upward redistribution of income. The NYT should not be assisting the proponents of upward redistribution in concealing their agenda.

Go read the original article to get the embedded links.

It is criminal for the media to allow political parties to define how they are presented in the press. The reason why the US Constitution gave special status to the press was because it was supposed to play an independent role, a role as a watchdog for the people. But if the press simply take press releases from political parties, or simply act as stenographers, then there is no reason to give the press special status. The press becomes a propaganda arm of the political parties. And the poor populace has to do its own legwork to uncover facts, find discrepancies, identify lies, and understand how the political parties are trying to manipulate them.

Deadly Unserious

Paul Krugman looks at the "deadly serious" pose of the Republicans, their deep "patriotism" and rock hard concern over the fiscal future of the US...

Republicans are deeply, sincerely concerned about the budget deficit. That’s why, in unveiling their plan last week, they declared themselves willing to give ground on their traditional priorities, signaling a willingness to accept higher taxes on the wealthy and reduced defense spending as part of a deficit-reduction deal.

Oh, wait. You mean they didn’t do anything like that? You mean that even while warning about an imminent fiscal crisis, they actually tried to cut taxes on the rich to their lowest level since 1931?

Why, you might actually think that they’re not sincerely concerned about the deficit. But that can’t be true, since they keep saying that they are.

OK, you get the point. It’s truly amazing that so many commentators — people who presumably know something about the relationship or lack thereof between what politicians say and what they do — are willing to accept at face value claims of deep, sincere concern about the deficit from people whose actual priorities are demonstrated by their absolute unwillingness to sacrifice anything they want in the name of deficit reduction.

As everybody should knows, Neville Chamberlain was very serious about safeguarding England and, as everybody knows, Hitler was very serious about negotiating the fate of Czechoslovakia. What somebody says and what they do don't always line up. Republicans are as concerned about "the debt" as Hitler was concerned about the well being of Germans, in short, not at all.

As for the Republicans, Krugman finds a pattern in their behaviour:

Look, we’ve been here before. The obvious parallel in my mind is what happened after 9/11, when more or less the same people declared themselves totally focused on fighting terrorism — but unwilling to give up anything they wanted, and in fact eagerly using the terrorist threat as an excuse to grab even more goodies. I mean, within 48 hours of the attack Congressional Republicans were preparing their response: a cut in the capital gains tax; in the immediate aftermath, the Bush administration fought hard to keep airport security in private hands. Somehow, responding to terrorism only involved doing things the administration wanted to do anyway: invading Iraq, torturing people, tapping our phones, etc..

...

So it’s easy to be completely cynical about self-proclaimed deficit hawks — and the cynicism is totally justified. There’s no sincerity here.

Moving Rocks Up a Hill

Here is a video about religion in India:



The interesting bit is that there is a team involved to show the quackery of the crowd preparation and the culminating religious "healing".

Sadly this is a Sisyphean task. I can pretty well guarantee you that the next time a "holy man" shows up in the village the "lessons" of this expose of showmanship and trickery will have been forgotten and the new guy will suitably impress the villages and pluck dollars from their pockets.

One really obvious fact: if this "god man" can create dollars out of nothing, why did he need to charge the family for her "healing". None in the crowd ever asked this fundamental question. Instead, they were credulous bumpkins, rubes ready for the milking.

BBC on Global Warming

Here is a BBC program that argues for the validity of the science of "global warming". It uses the new president of the Royal Society, Paul Nurse, to sell the orthodox view. Before you get too deeply into watching these videos, see my criticisms below this set of videos.

This video is in 6 parts, Part 1:


Part 2:


Part 3:


Part 4:


Part 5:


Part 6:


But I find this video insulting. It sets it up as if rejecting global warming is on all fours with believing that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, that GM foods are "frankenfoods", and that vaccines cause autism. I reject global warming while I'm not guilty of any of the other three heresies. So it is outrageous that Paul Nurse puts up the ad hominem argument that rejecting global warming is just another anti-science view like these other three. (I accept that some deniers are politically motivated, but not myself and not those who I follow.)

I was particularly floored to watch Paul Nurse, who knows no climatology, being hoodwinked by the NASA centre that showed him the side-by-side actual weather with the modeled weather. Nurse is blown away. Proof! The model matches data so it must be good. He doesn't ask any critical question like "this model was a prediction how many days/weeks/months/decades/centuries in advance of the data you are showing me? Looking at it, it is pretty clear to me it is a "model" that is at most 48 or 72 hours in advance of the data. Look, weather forecasts are solid for 3 days, a bit flaky for 5 days, unreliable for 7 days, and hopeless for anything like 2 weeks in the future. But climatologists are claiming their models are good for decades and centuries into the future! And Paul Nurse doesn't know enough to recognize this and so in duped by the canned demo from NASA. Sad.

Paul Nurse ends his program by saying that "scientists must argue the case". But wait a second. In this video Nurse attacks global warming skeptics without any "arguing the case". He simply treats them as a lunatic fringe. But there are reputable scientist who aren't part of the consensus that "global warming is caused by CO2": Roger Pielke Sr., Roy Spencer, Richard Lindzen, Freeman Dyson. (The links let you jump to their view as stated by Wikipedia.) These are the ones I know about and follow their criticisms. These are not lunatic fringe people. These are not anti-science people. They have solid reasons for their claims.

In the normal discourse of science, skeptical views must be addressed and not simply swept under the carpet with the claim that "there is a consensus". In the late 19th century there was a "consensus" that physics was at an end and was expressed by Lord Kelvin in 1900 with:

There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.

But that ridiculous view was blown apart at the start of the 20th century with entirely new physics. Consensus isn't science. Science is theorizing, experiments to establish facts, and presenting your case to your peers to convince them. Only time will reveal what the "real science" is. It is completely preposterous to try to stop argument by saying there is a "consensus". It is completely outrageous that the new head of the Royal Society would take the view that "consensus" means real debate is over and all that is left is "scientists arguing the case" to those benighted souls who don't "get it". He sees climate science as complete and perfected with all that is left is a project to communicate "the truth" to the unwashed masses.

Update 2011jan30: There is a critical article by Christopher Booker in the UK's Telegraph newspaper. Here is a bit:

Horizon’s “Science Under Attack” turned out to be yet another laborious bid by the BBC to defend the global warming orthodoxy it has long been so relentless in promoting.

Their desperation is understandable. The past few years have seen their cherished cause crumbling on all sides. The Copenhagen climate conference, planned to land mankind with the biggest bill in history, collapsed in disarray. The Climategate emails scandal confirmed that scientists at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had distorted key data. The IPCC’s own authority was further rocked by revelations that its more alarmist claims were based not on science but on the inventions of environmental activists. Even the weather has turned against them, showing that all the computer models based on the assumption that rising CO2 means rising temperatures have got it wrong.

The formula the BBC uses in its forlorn attempts to counterattack has been familiar ever since its 2008 series Climate Wars. First, a presenter with some scientific credentials comes on, apparently to look impartially at the evidence. Supporters of the cause are allowed to put their case without challenge. Hours of film of climate-change “deniers” are cherrypicked for soundbites that can be shown, out of context, to make them look ridiculous. The presenter can then conclude that the “deniers” are a tiny handful of eccentrics standing out against an overwhelming scientific “consensus”.

Monday’s Horizon exemplified this formula to a T.

There is much more in the article with specific criticisms how how the BBC set up a straw man to knock down.

Microfinance, the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Here is a bit from a wonderful post by Maxine Udall on some wonderfully positive aspects of the microfinance world:

A couple years ago I heard Vikram Akula speak at a top graduate business school about his for-profit micro-finance firm in India, SKS. The talk was held in a large lecture hall, probably seating at least 250. The talk was held after the Lehman collapse. One of the remarkable things I remember about the talk was that it was standing room only and many, many future MBAs were standing to hear it. Another remarkable thing I remember was that Akula asserted during his talk that his managers and workers were paid something on the order of 20% less than they could make in more traditional finance firms. I remember him saying that the rationale for this was that he wanted people who were interested in doing good, not just in making money. At least, this is how I remember it.

But the most remarkable thing I remember about his talk was that when it was done, he fielded question after question from different members of the audience, all on a theme of "how do I come work for SKS?" Even at only 80 cents on the MBA starting salary dollar, a lot of the audience wanted to come work for SKS.

I suppose they might have been asking that last question because at the time and for a multitude of reasons traditional finance wasn't looking like an attractive career option. But I think not. Most of the future MBAs phrased their questions in ways that suggested that the draw was putting their skills and talents to work doing some good in the world. And they were willing to work for less to do this.

This is not news. Economist Robert Frank provided evidence some years ago that people are willing to work for less when they believe they are doing some good in the world. (As an aside, I will point out that this phenomenon is entirely consistent with utility maximization, but not with maximization of indirect indicators of utility, such as income).

But, as with much of life, there is a dark side as well:

A couple weeks ago, my friends and readers began sending me links to articles about "beneficiaries" of micro-finance in India resorting to suicide when their indebtedness became overwhelming. More recently, Muhammad Yunus, micro-finance originator and Nobel Peace Prize winner, weighed in with this condemnation of for-profit micro-finance. This was followed by a fairly predictable response from the Philanthrocapitalism blog making the usual arguments in support of for-profit micro-finance and this more nuanced and thoughtful response by Felix Salmon.

Go read Maxine Udall's original post to get all the details and the embedded links.

I'm from that cynical school of thought which says that "if it is too good to be true, then it isn't true". There is a lot to like about microfinance, but it isn't "the solution" that some proponents would like to sell you. Like anything, it can be misused. And, like anything, it works better in some situations and worse in others. In short: there are no easy answers in life. If you want to do good, you have to go in with your eyes open, because even in the world of "doing good" there are sharks, and submerged rocks, and unexpected surprises.

But I'm happy that microfinance exists. I wish there were more of it. And I hope the news is almost always happy. And I wish there were some way to make sure that bad things didn't happen in the world of microfinance. But if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Here is a bit from an article by Muhammad Yunus, the originator of microfiancne, about the current state of microfinance for the NY Times:

In the 1970s, when I began working here on what would eventually be called “microcredit,” one of my goals was to eliminate the presence of loan sharks who grow rich by preying on the poor. In 1983, I founded Grameen Bank to provide small loans that people, especially poor women, could use to bring themselves out of poverty. At that time, I never imagined that one day microcredit would give rise to its own breed of loan sharks.

But it has. And as a result, many borrowers in India have been defaulting on their microloans, which could then result in lenders being driven out of business. India’s crisis points to a clear need to get microcredit back on track.

Troubles with microcredit began around 2005, when many lenders started looking for ways to make a profit on the loans by shifting from their status as nonprofit organizations to commercial enterprises. ...

To ensure that the small loans would be profitable for their shareholders, such banks needed to raise interest rates and engage in aggressive marketing and loan collection. The kind of empathy that had once been shown toward borrowers when the lenders were nonprofits disappeared. The people whom microcredit was supposed to help were being harmed. In India, borrowers came to believe lenders were taking advantage of them, and stopped repaying their loans.

Commercialization has been a terrible wrong turn for microfinance, and it indicates a worrying “mission drift” in the motivation of those lending to the poor. Poverty should be eradicated, not seen as a money-making opportunity.

...

Grameen Bank, where I am managing director, has 2,500 branches in Bangladesh. It lends out more than $100 million a month, from loans of less than $10 for beggars in our “Struggling Members” program, to micro-enterprise loans of about $1,000. Most branches are financially self-reliant, dependent only on deposits from ordinary Bangladeshis. When borrowers join the bank, they open a savings account. All borrowers have savings accounts at the bank, many with balances larger than their loans. And every year, the bank’s profits are returned to the borrowers — 97 percent of them poor women — in the form of dividends.

More microcredit institutions should adopt this model. The community needs to reaffirm the original definition of microcredit, abandon commercialization and turn back to serving the poor.

Stricter government regulation could help.

For a different viewpoint, here is Felix Solomon's blog posting on Reuters.

Now... let me add my voice:

My cynical side says that the initial noble impulse is being watered down and diverted as times passes, as the people in charge change, as noble passions cool and greed creeps in. Otherwise, some noble enterprise from 10,000 years ago would have grown into the largest organization in existence today with its shining mission still intact. It didn't. That says that no human institution withstands the corrosion of time.

But that doesn't mean we despair. It just means we get realistic and expect every generation to re-dedicate itself and create the new institutions appropriate for the current historical setting and the current generation.

Global Food Scare

The gloom-and-doom crowd is at it again. With the floods in Australia and problems with crops around the world, they are convinced that food riots will soon break out everywhere and you best pack your gun and head for the hills.

But here is reality:


I found that image in Andrew Revkin's blog on the NY Times. He documents an exchange he initiated between Vaclav Smil, the University of Manitoba analyst of just about every global risk and trend, and Lester Brown, who heads the Earth Policy Institute and has for decades warned of economic and environmental unraveling. I side with Smil:

There are always speculative food price currents and undercurrents but no end of days as so many of your fellow citizens, being the most scientifically illiterate people who ever lived, think. Just look at #1, China: imports less than 5% of its food and CONSUMES more food per capita than Japan!!!

Nothing has changed since I wrote that closing chapter of my 2000 feeding the world book: if China can do it, anybody (but Somalia) can [*]. Nor is India “starving.” Any food shortages are 95%+ a matter of poor or no governance, not any “extreme” climate and “gunwale inching”… Queensland does not grow wheat in any quantity, just check the wheatland map of Australia, and as always you newsie guys have exaggerated the story, both south and north of the state are open for business; no end of Australia.

There is much in this exchange to please both the doomsters as well as the those like myself who use Julian Simons, author of The Ultimate Resource, as a guide.

Maureen Dowd Takes on the Anti-Science Tea Party

Here are some bits from a Maureen Down op-ed in the NY Times about the nutty anti-science positions of the Tea Party and New Jersey's Republican candidate for the US Senate, Christine O’Donnell:

Christine O’Donnell doesn’t understand why monkeys can’t turn into people right before her eyes.

Bill Maher continued his video torment of O’Donnell by releasing another old clip of her on his HBO show on Friday night, this time showing one in which she argued that “Evolution is a myth.”

Maher shot back, “Have you ever looked at a monkey?” To which O’Donnell rebutted, “Why aren’t monkeys still evolving into humans?”

...

In 2007, O’Donnell frantically warned Bill O’Reilly, “American scientific companies are crossbreeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains.”

The field of human-animal experiments is dubbed “chimera” research, named for the she-monster in Greek mythology that has a lion’s head, a goat’s body and a serpent’s tail.

Dr. Irving Weissman, director of Stanford’s Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, did the first experiments injecting human brain-forming stem cells into the brains of immune-deficient mice 10 years ago.

He assured me that the mice did not suddenly start acting human. “There were no requests for coffee from Minnie,” he said. “The total number of human brain cells in the mouse brain was less than one in a thousand. I don’t think we would get a mouse with a full human brain. And even if the mouse made it to a human mouse it would still have a mouse-brain offspring.”

Dr. Weissman is sensitive to ethical questions and has tried to ensure that “the nightmare scenario” won’t happen: putting embryonic stem cells into mice at the earliest stages, which could give rise to every tissue in the body including human sperm and eggs, which could lead to two mice mating and the early formation of human fetuses in the body of a mouse.

He is working toward breakthroughs on multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, spinal cord injuries, strokes, breast cancer and a host of other diseases, and is worried by the retrogressive attitude about science and medicine among the new crop of Tea Partiers.

...

President Obama was supposed to be a giant leap forward in modernity, the brainy, rational first black president leading us out of the scientific darkness of the W. years. But by letting nutters get a foothold, he may usher us into the past.

Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, John Boehner, Jim DeMint and some Tea Party types don’t merely yearn for the country they idealize from the 1950s. They want to go back to the 1750s.

Joe Miller, the Palin-blessed Republican nominee for Senate in Alaska, suggests that Social Security is unconstitutional because it wasn’t in the Constitution. The Constitution is a dazzling document, but do these originalists really think things haven’t changed since then? If James Madison beamed down now, he would no doubt be stunned at the idea that America had evolved so far but was hemming itself in by the strictest interpretation of his handiwork. He might even tweet about it.

Evolution is no myth, but we may be evolving backward. Christine O’Donnell had better hope they don’t bring back witch burning.

It is incredible that in the 21st century, the rabid right wing is running people with an 18th century mentality. So much for "American education". And it shows you how dangerous demagogues are during stressful times. Desperate people turn to bizarre demagogues when they are without hope.

What to Make of 9/11 Conspiracy Theories

I've seen a number of documentaries highlighting earnest people with conspiracy theories about 9/11. Most can be discounted as honest but misguided people. But I keep an open mind. I think it is very unlikely that a internal conspiracy took the buildings down. It is overwhelmingly more likely that al Qaeda managed the feat with this jet plane attack.

However, I find the following disconcerting. Here are factual claims made by a group that claim appropriate expertise in steel buildings. The group calls itself Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. If you watch their two hour documentary they raise a number of very troubling issues.

Here is the first of 13 parts:



Click here to access all 13 parts.

I can dismiss most of their arguments. But they claim to have found evidence of thermite used to do a controlled demolition of the 3 World Trade Center buildings (both fragments of unburned thermite and microspherules of melted iron indicative of a thermite explosion, more precisely a thermate-based controlled demolition). I don't have access to the material and I don't have the expertise to analyze it. But if their claims are correct, it raises very troubling questions. Sadly, in a large society, individuals get so far removed from "facts on the ground" and real expertise that you end up having to simply accept authority. These claims, if believed, clearly indicate a conspiracy. But I'm so far removed from facts and testing facts, I have to fall back on something simpler. I have two facts that I can use common sense to shape my judgement:

1. To carry out a large conspiracy and have nobody spill the beans is exceedingly unlikely.


2. Having 3 large building collapse in near perfect similarity to expensive and elaborate "controlled demolition" as a result of fires is exceedingly unlikely.

In the end, I'm guessing the perfect conspiracy of silence is more unlikely than the 3 buildings falling perfectly without a controlled demolition. So I don't buy the argument.

I do wish this group is successful in pushing for a better independent investigation of the WTC building collapses. I agree with this organization that the "official" investigations are not adequate. I do believe this group raises legitimate concerns that should be addressed.

Here's part 3 of an interview with Richard Gage where the question is posed: "How could an internal conspiracy by elements in the US government and/or military kill 3,000 Americans and none of it leaks out?" That is the crux of it. This is why I can't accept the "conspiracy" claim:



Here are parts one and two of the above video interview in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Food Fads and Fanatics

Here is a bit from a long post by Denise Minger on her blog Raw Food SOS: Troubleshooting on the Raw Food Diet. She looks at The China Study by T. Colin Campbell which makes claims such as:

The authors introduce and explain the conclusions of scientific studies, which have correlated animal-based diets with disease. The authors conclude that diets high in animal protein (including casein in cow's milk) are strongly linked to diseases such as heart disease, cancer, and Type 2 diabetes. (from Wikipedia)

Minger digs around with the underlying data to look at statistical correlations. They don't pan out. The claims of The China Study are bogus because the data don't support the claims.

Here's one example.

Campbell Claim #6

Western-type diseases, in the aggregate, are highly significantly correlated with increasing concentrations of plasma cholesterol, which are associated in turn with increasing intakes of animal-based foods.

From his book, we know Campbell defines Western-type diseases as including heart disease, diabetes, colorectal cancers, breast cancer, stomach cancer, leukemia, and liver cancer. And indeed, the variable “total cholesterol” correlates positively with many of these diseases:

Myocardial infarction and coronary heart disease: +4
Diabetes: +8
Colon cancer: +44**
Rectal cancer: +30*
Colorectal cancer: +33**
Breast cancer: +19
Stomach cancer: +17
Leukemia: +26*
Liver cancer: +37*

Perhaps surprisingly, total cholesterol has only weak associations with heart disease and diabetes—weaker, in fact, than the correlation between these conditions and plant protein intake (+25 and +12, respectively). But we’ll put that last point aside for the time being. For now, let’s focus on the diseases with statistical significance, which include all forms of colorectal cancer, leukemia, and liver cancer. (Despite classifying stomach cancer as a “Western disease,” by the way, China actually has far higher rates of this disease than any Western nation. In fact, half the people who die each year from stomach cancer live in China.)

I remember reading the Greeks in my youth. Funny how old men get very concerned about their diet. They become convinced that "if only" they ate this and not that, then their digestion would be better, their health would improve, they would get back the vigor of youth. It is an eternal illusion. Pythagoras was wierd about beans. The Classical calls for moderation made sense. But proscribing certain food struck me as odd.

I've since noticed that most people -- when they hit their 50s and 60s -- develop strange fetishes about food. They worry that something is "bad" for them and something else is presumed to have some magical "good quality" and more should be consumed. Funny. Our ancestors on the savannas of Africa didn't have this tendency to culinary quackery. They ate what was available and were grateful for it. Moderation was enforced by scarcity. Their worry wasn't the degenerative diseases of old age but the ever present threat of famine.

Here's an example of a food fanatic, Ray Kurzweil (the following is from a post by Ursula Goodenough on the NPR blog 13.7 Cosmos and Culture):

Kurzweil, in fact, hopes cryonic preservation won’t be necessary. His preferred route being to avoid dying in the first place. To this end, according to Wikipedia, he consumes 150 supplements (down from 250), 10 glasses of alkaline water (to neutralize acidic metabolic wastes) and 10 cups of green tea every day, drinks several glasses of red wine a week to "reprogram" his biochemistry, and is transfused with reprogramming chemical cocktails at a clinic each weekend.

Another approach is extreme calorie restriction. This is a nutty idea based on some fuzzy research on nematodes that suggests near starvation can make you live longer. Here's a bit from Wikipedia.

Expanding the Queen's English

Here's the new word-for-the-day, invented by Scott Adams, the Dilbert Cartoonist:

Definition of Withdumb: A quality you possess if you hold a popular and unfounded point of view.

Withdumb is different from herd instinct. A person who possesses withdumb could achieve the condition with no help from the group whatsoever. For example, if you were the only person in Mongolia who believed in astrology, you would have withdumb, but it wouldn't be because your herd influenced you.

It's easier to cling to an irrational opinion if you know that somewhere in the world there are lots of people who think the same way, especially if those other people seem smart or authoritative.

This neologism may be an insult to those with a lisp, but I like it because it can be literally translated into what it means: "I'm with the dumb folks who espouse views for which they have no factual base or reasonable justification."

Unlike most academics, Scott Adams is prepared to use his new invention, and use it without mercy on himself:

As an adult, I'm a bit more tuned to recognize withdumb, especially in myself. I see withdumb most often in the field of investing. Most investment choices are based on nothing more than the knowledge that other people do similar things. Lately I have started to wonder if the science of investing is any better than the science of astrology or the science of not eating a sandwich before swimming. I have a degree in economics and an MBA from a top university and I haven't seen any convincing evidence that investing is more than a collection of elaborate scams. Am I exaggerating? No.

I do draw a line. I won't follow Scott Adams and support this claim:

I'll even go so far as to say that the BP oil leak looks suspicious to me. I think we all agree that the most likely cause of the incident is shoddy (cheap) engineering. But the second best explanation is sabotage with a profit motive. My withdumb tells me the oil spill was just an accident. But my experience and common sense tell me I don't live in a world where the alternative can be ruled out.

I think the inventor of the term has just turned into the first person to misuse his own invented word! It isn't "withdumb" to think the Gulf oil spill was sabotage, that's conspiracy theory paranoia, and it is a minority view which is no where near "popular". So Adams has misused his own word. That must be a record in creation and corruption... all within one blog entry. Congrats!

More "Straight Talk Express"

I love the carefully crafted propaganda effort the following represents...



Yep... I figure about 8 million fully armed troops backed up with 150,000 fully armoured tanks patrolling the weak points, and maybe 10,000 fighter jets flying sorties to strafe and kill those who would dare attempt to violate American's Southern border would be the right recipe for success.

Then McCain and turn his attention to the porous and susceptible northern border. It would take only 3,500 miles of 20 foot high fence backed up with a modest force of 6 million fully armed troops covered by 130,000 fully armoured tanks patrolling the weak points. This may be tricky, the US/Mexico border is flat as a pancake compared to about 1000 miles of the US/Canada border.

Next McCain, as an ex-Navy guy, can turn his attention to setting up a 5 million man Navy with 50,000 ships to patrol the 4,000 miles of ocean that borders America.

Let's see, if we draft every male between the age of 18 and 28 that should just do the trick. And this has the added benefit of not just preventing those immigrants from taking American jobs, this 19 million man combined army & navy will employ every unemployed person as well as suck up another 9 million who would just be wasting their time at college or university. Yes, we can! We can do this just as Our Dear Leader, John McCain has shown us.

I love those words "It will work this time". Sure, that's exactly what every batter in baseball says after three strikes and he pleads for "just one more swing of the bat". Surely it will work this time!

OK... I'm being sarcastic. I get really bothered by politicians who pretend that hard problems have simple answers, politicians who believe a "let's get tough" is the answer to all of life's problems.

Reinventing History to Hide Your Mistakes

I love the Republicans. They never admit failure. They simply go from one "success" to the next "success" leaving debris, broken lives, and unhappiness in their wake. But they do it with style. They continually wave the flag and proclaim that they are truly "the good guys" despite whatever evidence of misery and deception lies in their wake.

Here's a bit from a posting by Matt Corley on the blog Think Progress:

Yesterday, the libertarian Cato Institute hosted a panel discussion on conservatism and the war in Afghanistan with Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) and Rep. John J. Duncan, Jr. (R-TN). When the conversation shifted to the war in Iraq, Rohrabacher said that “once President Bush decided to go into Iraq, I thought it was a mistake because we hadn’t finished the job in Afghanistan,” but that once Bush “decided to go in,” he “felt compelled” to “back him up.” He then added that “the decision to go in, in retrospect, almost all of us think that was a horrible mistake.”

Moderator Grover Norquist then asked Rohrabacher to provide a “guesstimate percentage of Republicans in Congress who would share that view — not that they opposed the President at the time, but today looking back.” Rohrabacher replied that “everybody I know thinks it was a mistake to go in now”:

ROHRABACHER: Well, now that we know that it cost a trillion dollars and all of these years and all of these lives and all of this blood, uh, I don’t know many…

NORQUIST: Looking for a number. Two-thirds? One-third?

ROHRABACHER: I, I can’t. All I can say is the people, everybody I know thinks it was a mistake to go in now.

NORQUIST: That’s 100 percent.

The sheer audacity to claim -- after the fact -- that all these GOP Congressmen were against the "mistake"! Poll the public. I don't think anybody is aware that these stalwarts of the GOP were struggling in the dark to push back against bad policy by Bush. All I can remember, and all that the public can remember, are claims of heroic virtue and loud cries that "any questioning of policy was tantamount to treason". Ah... but now the truth comes out. Funny... But it is a day late and a dollar short.

Who are these spineless idiots who continue to strut about as if they had a real political party with a real policy? These are opportunist who lean whichever way the wind blows! They would sell their own mother if they good get a good price.

Critique from the Right of Obama

I agree with Greg Mankiw's criticism of Obama's speech on health care to the joint session of Congress:

Yes, indeed. That is why this passage in the President's speech had me scratching my head:

I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits -- either now or in the future.(Applause.) I will not sign it if it adds one dime to the deficit, now or in the future, period. And to prove that I'm serious, there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts if the savings we promised don't materialize.

At first, it sounds like the President is threatening to veto the bills being considered in Congress because, according to CBO, they will add significantly to deficits in the out years. If true, that would be a big story. But the provision he mentions in the next sentence seems to suggest he is just passing the buck.

Translation: "I promise to fix the problem. And if I do not fix the problem now, I will fix it later, or some future president will, after I am long gone. I promise he will. Absolutely, positively, I am committed to that future president fixing the problem. You can count on it. Would I lie to you?"

My criticism is that Obama needs to confess that fixing health care will cost money. There is no "magic". All the years of promising to "cut waste" from government spending has been years of lying. Why is Obama adding to this nonsense. There are real savings to be had. That is what the public health care of other developed countries demonstrate. But it will cost money to get there.

Mankiw is a smart dude (but too right wing for my taste). His criticism is that Obama is just playing at being a politician making typical politician promises while cynically knowing that nobody will remember the promise or knowing that by the time the birds come home to roost, he will be long gone from office and therefore unaccountable.

I think both critiques are right. I don't like to agree with right wing political types, but this is one case where I agree. Obama is not being honest. He needs to demand that people understand that it will take some sacrifice to fix the problems. There can be savings but they will be ten years out. The first ten years will cost money, require new taxes. The promise of a free ride should be over. It doesn't work. People get cynical about politicians because they keep playing this game of "I'll give you what you want and it won't cost a thing". There are no free lunches.

Feldstein's Complaint

Martin Feldstein, a Harvard economist, rants in a Wall Street Journal article that health care reform would remove free choice and allow the government to "ration" health care.

The Economist magazine has an article that points out how stupid Feldstein's rant is. Here is the key bit:

The nub of the matter is this—government can afford to provide basic coverage to everyone, but it can't afford to provide every treatment everyone may want to everyone who wants it. It must therefore decide how to limit its expenses, and it can leave open the option of using a private practitioner to those who are denied care based on a cost-benefit analysis. Or government can provide coverage to no one, and those who cannot afford a treatment—effective or not—will go without. Those people will be just as fine as they'd be with treatment in some cases, they'll suffer in others, and occasionally they'll die because they couldn't afford coverage.

That's the nub of it, really. Faced with the prospect of a plan that provides effective treatments to everyone but forces people who want relatively ineffective treatments to pay for them on the private market, Mr Feldstein says he'd prefer a system where people who are unable to afford effective treatments don't get them, calling concern for those unable to pay for treatments "misplaced egalitarianism".

It's all well and good to let the market allocate televisions. Many people live happy lives without televisions, and lack of a television hasn't ever killed anyone. Attempting to provide a basic level of access to television to every American would be misplaced egalitarianism. I would have thought Mr Feldstein could understand the ways in which the market for televisions is different from that for health insurance.

The real world rations things. You can ration based on blatant power (he who has the gun, rules). You can ration based on wealth (he who has the money gets what he wants and the poor are left with nothing). Or, you can ration based on some system that tries to get the best outcome based on cost and knowledge about the state of the art (that's what most public health care system try to achieve).

None of the public health care system can prevent a rich person from buying platinum care. The rich can always buy what they want. What the public system does is makes sure that the poor are not left with nothing. But the ranting right wing in the US calls this "socialzed medicine". And they have managed to convince a fair number of fools into believing this ridiculous smear campaign.

This from an Economics Web Site?

I enjoy reading posts on the Freakonomics site, but when I ran across this item by Robin Goldstein, I decided I will have to re-think my opinion of the web site.

This is the most ridiculous thing I've read in months:

When I arrived in Portland last month, the first thing I wanted to do was buy a bike and get around the way the locals do. Since I wouldn’t be in town for too long, and it wasn’t clear that I’d be able to take the bike with me when I left, I wanted something extremely cheap.

There were bike shops on every other corner in Southeast Portland, the sort of Brooklyn-ish neighborhood where I was staying. I walked into what looked like the grungiest of them — a store that sold mostly used bikes. There was one employee, and he was heavily tattooed and seemed pretty cool. I completely leveled with him: I didn’t know anything about bikes, really; I could barely change a tire; I was only going to be in town for a little while; and I wondered if he had something cheap that I could use for puttering around town.

I know this is sort of quaint, but the last time I bought a bike, I think I spent $35 and it wasn’t hot. It was a road bike; it had 18 speeds, I think; it squeaked; and it served my needs (biking from my house to school every day) perfectly well. (The bike later died a peaceful death at Burning Man, but that was due to maltreatment, not poor quality.) I was looking for something like that.

The guy in the store asked me how much I wanted to spend.

I sort of stuttered my way and ultimately refused to answer the question because I was embarrassed to say something like “less than a hundred dollars,” for fear of coming off like Borat inspecting the Hummer before buying the ice-cream truck.

Yeah, the bike guy answered, he had something super-cheap for me, an old road bike that they’d fixed up. It wasn’t exactly my size, but it would do. It was a 1991 model, a Trek, I think. It was in good working condition, it had some newer components, and it came with a warranty. I could have it, he said, for $475.

So I went to another store. Same deal, more or less. There was one bike for $275, but it was a girl’s Raleigh from the 1960’s with a wicker basket.

I started looking around the web. At the down-to-earth-sounding Recyclery, another Portland used bike shop — and probably a great one — there are currently 59 used bikes on offer. But 34 of them cost more than $1,000, only eight are priced under $500, and there are none under $300. Even to rent a bike for one week from the Recyclery costs $175 — more than I paid for my weekly rental car the previous time I was in Portland.

...

I asked a few people in town about this and got some general sense of agreement and common frustration: cheap bikes are impossible to find around here. The word on the street was that so many people are selling their cars (or taking their cars off the road) and using bikes to commute to work that there just aren’t enough bikes to go around.

If you check the web, WalMart sells lots of adult bikes and has some for less than $100 and lots for around $120-$130, brand new bikes! A quick check shows 3 stores in Portland.

China makes most of the bikes in the world. I can't imagine with the economic slowdown that it would be difficult for WalMart to bring in say 10,000 bikes for sale. So how can this Robin Goldstein character make the claim that there is a "shortage" of bikes?

This article is complete hogwash. It makes no sense. It may be an entertaining read, but it should be clearly marked as "fiction". I question: what is it doing on a site supposedly dedicated to "economics"?