The Philosophy of Government, Supposedly

Here is a nice post by Dean Baker in his Beat the Press blog that ridicules the idea that the difference between the Republicans and Democrats is "just a difference in philosophy":

The Wall Street Journal Tells Us It's All About Philosophy

The news media keeps trying to tell us not to worry about who gets the money, the issue is one of philosophy. The WSJ picks up the task today telling readers that the difference between conservative and liberal budget plans:

"The big takeaway is this: The debate over how to reduce the deficit is truly a philosophical one about the size of government."

Is that so? The Congressional Budget Office tells us that it will cost $34 trillion (5 times the size of the projected Social Security shortfall) more to provide Medicare equivalent policies through private insurers than through the traditional government Medicare program. This would be additional money paid by taxpayers and beneficiaries to insurers and providers. Is the desire to hand this money over to these groups a question of philosophy?

Go read the original post to get the embedded links.

I suppose that whether you are a billionaire or a beggar is just "philosophical". One obviously interested in "higher things" (like bigger numbers) while the other can't get his mind out of the gutter (or the cardboard box in which he resides). Yes, it is all "just philosophy".

Failed Prophecy

Here is a good article by Vaughan Bell in Slate magazine looking at how groups like last week's Harold Camping followers who expected the end of the world on Saturday May 21, 2011 deal with the failure of "prophecy". Here is a bit about the classic case:

The most famous study into doomsday mix-ups was published in a 1956 book by renowned psychologist Leon Festinger and his colleagues called When Prophecy Fails. A fringe religious group called the Seekers had made the papers by predicting that a flood was coming to destroy the West Coast. The group was led by an eccentric but earnest lady called Dorothy Martin, given the pseudonym Marian Keech in the book, who believed that superior beings from the planet Clarion were communicating to her through automatic writing. They told her they had been monitoring Earth and would arrive to rescue the Seekers in a flying saucer before the cataclysm struck.

Festinger was fascinated by how we deal with information that fails to match up to our beliefs, and suspected that we are strongly motivated to resolve the conflict—a state of mind he called "cognitive dissonance." He wanted a clear-cut case with which to test his fledgling ideas, so decided to follow Martin's group as the much vaunted date came and went. Would they give up their closely held beliefs, or would they work to justify them even in the face of the most brutal contradiction?

I truly love this "acid" test of whether a prophecy is "from the Lord":

For those who draw their inspiration from the Bible, there is some small print in Deuteronomy 18:21-22 which wonderfully illustrates why a failed prophecy may not shake the foundations of a believer's faith, or cause him any uncomfortable cognitive dissonance.

You may say to yourselves, "How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the LORD?"

If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the LORD has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously, so do not be alarmed.

Only predictions that come true are from God, you see, while failed prophecies are just down to human slip-ups—a truly divine response to anyone who would condemn either a prophet or a whole belief system on the minor matter of a failed apocalypse.

That is perfect. That's a "heads I win, tails you lose" set up!

Why Identical Twins Are Not Always Identical

I found this post by Kevin Mitchell in his blog Wiring the Brain to be fascinating. It explains why identical twins are not always identical:

... these studies also highlight the limits of genetic determinism, which is especially evident in comparisons of monozygotic (identical) twins, who share all their genetic inheritance in common. Though they are obviously much more like each other in psychological traits than people who are not related to each other, they are clearly NOT identical to each other for these traits. For example, if one twin has a diagnosis of schizophrenia, the chance that the other one will also suffer from the disorder is about 50% - massively higher than the population prevalence of the disorder (around 1%), but also clearly much less than 100%.

What is the source of this extra variance? What forces make monozygotic twins less identical? I have argued previously that random variation in the course of development is a major contributor. The developmental programme that specifies brain connectivity is less like a blueprint than a recipe (a recipe without a cook) – an incredibly complicated set of processes carried out by mindless biochemical algorithms mediated by local interactions between billions of individual components. As each of these processes is subject to some level of “noise” at the molecular level, it is not surprising that the outcome of this process varies considerably, even between monozygotic twins.

While such developmental variation can be referred to as “non-genetic”, a new study suggests that one important component of this variation may be genetic after all, just not inherited. Mutations can be passed on from parents to offspring or arise during generation of sperm or eggs and thus be inherited, but they can also arise any time DNA is replicated. So, each time a cell divides as an embryo grows and develops, there is a very small chance of new mutations being introduced. These “somatic” mutations (meaning ones that happen in the body and not in the germline) will be inherited by all the cells that are descendants of that new cell and so will be present in some fraction of the final cells of the individual. Mutations arising earlier in development will be inherited by more cells than those arising later.

Each person will therefore be a mosaic of cells with slightly different genetic make-up. The vast majority of such mutations will not have any effect of course (with the obvious exception of those that cause dysregulation of cellular differentiation and result in cancer). But sometimes a new mutation will affect a trait and cause a detectable difference. The most obvious examples are in genes affecting hair or eye colour – where a patch of hair may be a different colour, or the two eyes may be different colours.

But what if the mutations in question are linked to a psychiatric disorder? If such a mutation arises early in the development of the brain and is therefore inherited by many of the cells in the brain then this could lead to the psychiatric disorder, just as if the mutation had been inherited in a germ cell.

A new study adds to the evidence that such mutations do indeed occur at an appreciable frequency and may help explain the discordance in phenotype between pairs of twins where one has schizophrenia and the other does not. The authors analysed the DNA from blood cells of pairs of twins discordant for schizophrenia and their parents. They were looking for two different kinds of mutation: ones that changes the identity of a single base of DNA (one letter of the genetic code to another), called point mutations, and ones that delete or duplicate whole chunks of chromosomes, called copy number variants, or CNVs.

As expected, they were able to detect both inherited mutations (present in one of the parents) and de novo mutations (present in both twins but not in the blood cells of either parent). What is more remarkable though, is that they also detected de novo mutations present in the blood cells of one twin but not the other – lots of them. About 1,000 point mutations and 2-3 new CNVs not shared by the other twin. The implication is that these mutations arose during the somatic development of one twin. They identify a couple CNVs in the twins affected by schizophrenia, raising the (very speculative) possibility that those mutations may contribute to the development of the disorder. It will obviously require a lot more work to test that specific hypothesis.

All of this is fascinating, but especially interesting is that this effect is visible at the macro level. You can see it with the condition heterochromia iridum (the two eyes having different colours).

Click to Enlarge

The Wrong-Headed Tilt of US Economic Policy

Here are some interesting bits from an article by Mark Thoma in The Fiscal Times:

In the wake of the Great Recession, why has employment been so slow to recover? One answer is that an important but widely unrecognized change in fiscal policy has taken place.

Due largely to the influence of supply-side Republicans and many Democrats who embrace growth policies, policies that were originally intended to stimulate innovation in the private sector were applied to the government sector and infrastructure spending. This change in policy that puts growth at the forefront has shifted resources and attention away from traditional policies that could have reduced joblessness at a more rapid rate.

To understand the change in policy, it’s useful to divide fiscal approaches into two broad categories: supply-side policies designed to enhance the economy’s long-run growth prospects and demand-side policies designed to stabilize short-run business cycle fluctuations.

...

In past recessions, fiscal policy operated differently. The main goal was to increase aggregate demand through additional government purchases of goods and services, tax cuts, or even through government- created jobs that provided people with the income they need to go out and purchase goods and services themselves. Infrastructure spending was part of the mix, but the main goal was to stimulate demand and boost the economy; the impact on long-run economic growth was not the important consideration.

For this reason, in the past we were much more likely to consider “make-work” as a stabilization tool. Make-work is generally summarized as “paying half the unemployed to dig holes, then paying the other half fill them in again.” But that is a bit unfair since the goal is always to spend money where it does the most good, for example, to clean up a city park that has fallen into disrepair even if that doesn’t directly have an impact on long-run growth.

But as noted above, in the most recent recession, due largely to the influence of Republicans devoted to supply-side economics and to many Democrats who embrace growth policies, supply-side policies that were originally intended as a means of stimulating innovative activity in the private sector were extended to the government sector and infrastructure spending. Republicans would not have approved any other type of policy to combat the recession, particularly policies of the “make-work” variety. Growth had to be at the forefront, and Democrats accepted this approach to stabilization policy. The result was that, contrary to past policy where growth and stabilization policy were independent, present policy addressed both supply-side and demand side concerns simultaneously.

...

In the past, we did not pay enough attention to whether the policies used to fight a recession would also help with long-run economic growth. But in the present the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction – long-run growth should not be the only consideration when selecting stabilization policies.

In the future, we must do a better job of attacking the unemployment problem when recessions hit the economy even if it means implementing policies that do not directly have an impact on long-run economic growth. Those who promote supply-side policies above all else might be surprised at how much growth will be helped nonetheless by policies that avoid the long-term problems associated with high and persistent unemployment.

What I like about this article is that it recognizes that political "solutions" go in and out of favour, that the mood shifts like a pendulum, and that the last 40 years has let the pendulum swing too far toward "supply side" economics while giving "demand side" economics the short shrift.

Widespread Lawlessness in the US

From a post by Barry Ritholtz in his The Big Picture blog:

During George W. Bush’s reign of error, the Justice Department looked the other way at all manner of fraud, but most especially Securities fraud on Wall Street. During his presidency, it plummeted 87%. Other forms of fraud prosecutions also fell. My working assumption was this was specific to W and his unique brand of incompetency.

As it turns out, that was the wrong assessment. After two years in office, President Barrack Obama is no better when it comes to “corporate, securities and bank fraud” than his hapless predecessor:

“Prosecutions of three categories of crime that could be linked to the causes of the crisis — corporate, securities and bank fraud — declined last fiscal year [2010] by 39 percent from 2003, the period after the accounting scandals at Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc., Justice Department records show.”

Which raises the question: Why has the USAG dropped the ball ?

Some of it involves staffing — after 9/11, many FBI agents were reassigned to anti-terror work. But that should be under a different budget, and if this was a priority, the head of the Justice department should be clamoring for more fraud investigators and those who have forensic skills.

But 9/11 is a lame excuse for a dearth of successful fraud prosecutions a decade later.

I see three big bottlenecks for Fraud prosecutions:

1) Failure to attack the problem as a systemic issue: If it were up to me, I would be using RICO statutes to attack origination fraud and foreclosure fraud.

2) Conflict of interests: Uncle Sam still has huge stakes in banks and insurers. That reduces the incentives to find wrongdoing (thereby hurting your taxpayer funded portfolio)

3) Lobbying/Campaign donations from financials: Congress remains a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street. Despite rules prohibiting it, there has been increased pressure on DOJ to not bring actions by Congress-critters.

Thus,we have seen little motion from DOJ against the banksters.

I continue to hold the position that the best hope for obtaining any form of post-crisis Justice will come from the State AGs . . .

I understand why Bush failed to pursue the criminals. The Republicans are the party of corporate greed and corruption. But I don't understand why Obama hasn't gone after the criminals. The only reason I can see is that the biggest donors to Obama's campaign were from Wall Street. But that simply says that Obama is corrupt, the Democrats are corrupt, and that politics in the US is back to what it was in the Gilded Age when the rich bought and sold politicians like everything else they owned during turn of the century US.

Blindness Among the Political Class

Most of America's politicians are multi-millionaires. That segment of the population has recovered nicely from the Great Recession. But there are 7 million unemployed and 14 million under-employed or dropped out of the labour force because times are bad. But this is invisible to America's political class.

Here's a post by Paul Krugman on this invisible-to-the-political-elite problem:

Third Depression Watch

Last year I warned that we seemed to be heading into the “Third Depression” — by which I meant a prolonged period of economic weakness:

Neither the Long Depression of the 19th century nor the Great Depression of the 20th was an era of nonstop decline — on the contrary, both included periods when the economy grew. But these episodes of improvement were never enough to undo the damage from the initial slump, and were followed by relapses.

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.

Brad DeLong points us to Macro Advisers, which has now downgraded its estimates for second-quarter growth. As Brad says, these estimates now suggest that we have now gone through a year and a half of “recovery” that has failed to make any progress toward closing the gap between what the economy should be producing and what it’s actually producing.

And nobody in power cares!

The idea the "nobody cares" comes from the fact that the millionaires have no personal experience of anybody dumpster diving or going to "rescue" missions to get their next meal, or worse, going hungry. The on-going Great Recession is invisible to the elite who have recovered their losses and find their pay packets stuffed with bonuses and quickly escalating salaries. What recession? They don't see it.

But the job of politicians is supposed to be to represent all of the people, not just their millionaire buddies.

Disappearing Dinosaurs

Hard to believe, but a 65 million years after the dinosaurs went extinct, there are many, many dinosaurs that are "disappearing". Here is Jack Horner explaining how this can be...



I've lived long enough to see all kinds of "revolutions" in dinosaur science: hot-blooded dinosaurs, birds rediscovered as dinosaur descendants, and now the culling of duplicates. Amazing.