Brad DeLong

Menzie Chinn Is a Prince Among Men

He does the heavy lifting on the atrocity that is Economix:

Econbrowser: One Interpretation of Recession Causes... with Really Long and Really Variable Lags...

Thanks.

Somewhere in the World There Must Be Someone Who Understands the Unemployment Insurance Seasonal Adjustment Factor

But it sure ain't me:

Greg Robb:

U.S. jobless claims up after two straight declines: First-time claims for state unemployment benefits rose in the latest week after back-to-back declines, the Labor Department reported Thursday. The number of initial claims in the week ending Oct. 17 rose 11,000 to 531,000. That's the highest level since the week ended Sept. 26. Claims had fallen 34,000 in the prior two weeks. Most economists had expected the uptick in claims. Claims in the previous week were revised to a decrease of 11,000 to 520,000, compared with the initial estimate of a decrease of 10,000 to 514,000

links for 2009-10-22

• Scott Horton: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? Is WaPo Opinion Section the Worst in America?
  It’s a new Georgetown cocktail-party game: name the single stupidest piece to run in Fred Hiatt’s opinion pages this week. So many to choose from. After a week of colossal idiocies—for instance, running an editorial arguing that the Nobel Peace Prize should have gone to a martyr of the Green Revolution in Iran, when the terms of the prize require the recipient to be alive—Gawker asks the obvious question: "Under editor Fred Hiatt, the Post op-ed page has gone completely off the rails...." And David Broder doesn’t even get a mention! But maybe the question should be put differently. What did the reporters of the Post, who are plainly at the top of the profession, do to deserve such an embarrassing editorial page?
• Mark Thoma sends us to Glenn Rudebusch on the Economic Outlook
• Atrios: Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? Make me care.
  Atrios writes: "Journalists want me to care about quality journalism, and I do, if not necessarily the existing institutions and elite practitioners of it, but their failure to differentiate quality journalism from the partisan hacktitude of Fox News is one of the problems with their profession. I don't have any problem with ideological media, obviously, though ideological is different than partisan, but people in elite media should have a modest understanding of the role of the various players in their ecosystem. Maybe it's fine that Fox News is basically just an extension of the Republican party, what's not fine is all the people pretending that isn't the case." Ruth Marcus to the white courtesy telephone please...
• Barry Ritholtz: Securitized Loans Are 5X More Likely to Be Delinquent
  Here is an interesting data point you may have missed: A study found that securitized mortgages were five times as likely to be delinquent as mortgages that were not resold to securitizers. Kinda makes you think that the banks that planned on keeping their mortgages had different lending standards than those that knew the paper would be off their hands soon. (Approximately one in eight homeowners have had their mortgages securitized). I do not recall the data source, but sub-prime mortgages are also much more likely to be securitized than prime mortgages are.
• Joe Nocera: Benjamin Roth’s View From Inside the Great Depression
• Andrew Ross Sorkin: Holding Off Disaster: The Race to Save Lehman
• Calculated Risk: Macroblog: "The growing case for a jobless recovery"
• Jim Hamilton: Unemployment and Inflation
• Atrios: Huckaboom
  I think one of the most interesting moments of the presidential primary season came when the online Right and plenty of elite conservative commentators had a collective freakout about the possibility of Huckabee as their candidate. How exactly that squares with the Palin worship I don't quite understand, but keep that in mind as we watch the unfolding conservative movement crackup..
• Eric Boehlert: Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? Jake Tapper can't figure out how Fox News is different from ABC News
  Oh my, Tapper has no idea how Fox News is different than ABC News, and he works there. Tapper can't tell what Fox News does differently that his own network. And Tapper was clearly irked that the White House had offered up an opinion that one of the Village's "sister organizations" wasn't professional. "Why is that appropriate for the White House to say?" Tapper demanded to know. (Hint: As a Beltway rule, Democratic White Houses are forbidden from calling out the press by name.)
• Tom Olson: When Books Collide: Sloppy ‘Superfreakonomics’ Meets its Match in Lucid ‘Climate for Change’
• Nathan Myhrvold jumps the shark — and jumps ship on Levitt and Dubner (on their blog!) asserting: “Geoengineering is proposed only as a last resort to try to reduce or cope with the even greater harms of global warming! … The point of the chapter in S...

Liveblogging World War II: The Economist: September 3, 1939

The editors:

For the Right: The answer is, of course, that a war does no good; but it has become the only way of preventing infinitely greater harm.

And why has it become the only way? That is a question that only history can finally answer. But one moral can be drawn now which history will not upset. We have had many chances of strangling in their infancy the forces of aggression and brutality which have now engulfed the world in war. As each issue has arisen, we have refused to meet the risks attached to the suppression of brute force. And, as issue has followed issue, we have seen the price of security rise, in a steady Sibylline progress, until now it has reached the most awful height that a nation ever had to face. Before we plunge into war, this lesson must be drawn from twenty-one years of uneasy peace: security cannot be attained by avoiding risks; a policy of limited commitments leads inevitably to the unlimited commitment of war; safety cannot be found without courage. Let us never again make the mistake of being involved in the maintenance of peace without being committed to its enforcement.

These considerations provide two of the pillars of the eventual peace settlement: it must bring the end of armed dictatorship; and it must provide for a world-wide system of enforcing peace. A third pillar must, of course, be the restoration of their independence to those people who have lost it, primarily the Czechs. But these three aims achieved, the fourth must be an avoidance of any merely vengeful or repressive provisions against Germany, which would provide genuine grievances for a new Hitler. If she is democratic, if she cooperates in the new international order, if she restores her unjust conquests, it will be to our interests at the end of this war (as we can now see that it was to our interest in 1918) to help her to unity, equality, wealth and self-respect. The only alternative policy would be one of permanent partition and garrisoning of a defeated Germany, for which the democracies have neither the strength nor the moral mandate.

These, then, are the four principles of peace: Democracy, an International Order, Restitution and Generosity. Their translation into precise details is a matter which cannot now be undertaken. But there are certain points to which it is essential that we should all now commit ourselves as publicly as we can, while our visions are still unclouded. There must be no annexations of German territory and no indemnities. There must be disarmament, but no expectation that Germany will remain disarmed while other nations are armed. There must be a genuine sharing of colonial benefits and responsibilities through the widest extension of the mandatory principle. There must be a new League of Nations, with the hesitations and half-commitments of the old removed. There must be an end of the more senseless forms of economic nationalism.

In the madness and the agony that is to come, we must cling fast to these principles. Only so can we be quite sure that, in defending democracy, we shall not betray it, and that the freedom for which we fight is that freedom for all men on which alone permanent peace can be built.

I Just May Have to Readmit Andrew Sullivan into Polite Society

For this, which covers a great multitude of sins--perhaps even the sin against the Holy Ghost:

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan: One does not quite know what to say about Pat Buchanan's latest. Is it too predictable to note? Or too ugly to record? Or too stupid to ignore? Upon reflection, I'll go with stupid. Take one simple point. Notice that for Buchanan in this column, it is axiomatic that America was once defined by its whiteness. This is what he means by "tradition." America - once uniformly white - is now, for him and those he speaks for, bewilderingly multicultural and multi-confessional. Hence the anxiety. Hence the panic. Hence, in some ways, the confluence of fear and paranoia among the 20 percent of Americans who seem to feel this way and see the federal government in some way as the enabler of this destruction.

But this axiom, while useful as a myth, has a problem. It is untrue. And this "country" that white Americans are allegedly losing is not, in fact, a country. It is merely a self-serving and solipsistic illusion of a country that some white Americans feel they are losing.

From its very beginning, after all, America was a profoundly black country as well.

This took a while for an Englishman to grasp upon arriving here, because it's so easy to carry with you all the subconscious cultural baggage you grew up with. England, after all, is deeply Anglo-Saxon. It makes some sense to refer to England's roots and ethnic identity as white, its language as English, its inheritance as a deep mixture of Northern European peoples - the Angles and the Saxons and the Normans and the Celts. And superficially, English-speaking white Americans might seem in the same cultural boat as white English people, dealing with a relatively new multiculturalism in an increasingly diverse and multi-racial society. And at first blush, you almost sink into that lazy and stupid assumption, especially if you arrive in Boston, as I did, and carried all the usual European prejudices, as I did.

The English, lulled by their marination in American pop culture from infancy, and beguiled by the same language, can live out their days in this country never actually noting that it is an alien land - stranger than you might have ever imagined, crueler than you realized, but somehow also more inspiring than you ever thought possible. This is the America I am trying to make my home, after 25 years. It is not the America of Pat Buchanan's or John Derbyshire's fantasies.

It struck me almost at once, if only in the music I heard all around me - and then in so many other linguistic, cultural, rhetorical, spiritual ways: white Americans do not realize how black they are. Even their whiteness is partly scavenged from the fear of - and attraction to - its opposite. Even something as stereotypically white as American Catholicism, I discovered to my amazement, was also black from the very start. (Yes, those Maryland slaves. If you've never been to a Gospel Mass in an ancient black Catholic parish, try it some time.)

From the beginning, in its very marrow, this country was forged out of that racial and cultural interaction. It fought a brutalizing, bloody, defining civil war over that interaction. Any European student of Tocqueville swiftly opens his eyes at the three races that defined America in the classic text. Has Buchanan read Tocqueville? And that's why it seems so odd to me that the election of the son of a white mother and a black father is seen as somehow a threat to American identity for some, when, in fact, Obama is the final iteration of the American identity - the oldest one and the deepest one. This newness is, in fact, ancient - or as ancient as America can be. The very names - Ann Dunham and Barack Obama. Is not their union in some ways a faint echo of the union that actually made this country what it is?

That some cannot see Buchanan's cartoon as a travesty of history remains America's tragedy of self-forgetting. It reminds me of the way in which Britain always defined itself as a Protestant country, even while, of course, it was deeply, deeply Catholic before it was ever Protestant - and for a much longer period of time. As a Catholic growing up in England, and having genealogical roots in both Catholic Ireland and in Domesday Book England, it took a while for me to appreciate the pied beauty of this identity. Tribalism is a powerful thing, especially for the Irish. I remember one day, as I was herded into the local Anglican church for my high school assembly, thinking: "This ancient building was once mine, ours." But that was before I realized that Anglicanism itself could not be understood without the profound inheritance of English Catholicism - and that Anglicanism was actually a hybrid of Protestant and Catholic Englishness. And that this was England - all of it. And to be truly English was to own it all.

Buchanan, of all people, should know better than these tedious recurring explosions of racial panic. And, of course, he does know better. He has read more history than most pundits. He is personally a civil and decent man. But he feels these things in such a profound and tribal way that what he knows is submerged by tribal fear and expressed as hateful hackery. But this much is true and deserves restating:

Black Americans have shed blood in every American war since the Revolution. This country, even the very Capitol building in which today's legislators now demand to see the birth certificate of the first black president, was built on the sweat and sinew of slaves. Before we were people in the eyes of the law, before we had the right to vote, before we had a black president, we were here, helping make this country as it is today. We are as American as it gets. And frankly, the time of people who think otherwise is passing. If that's the country Buchanan wants to hold onto, well, he's right, he is losing it.

And about time too.

---

But I am sure that Daniel Davies will have something to say about the claim that "England, after all, is deeply Anglo-Saxon..."

Two Nations

For the rich:

• Expected real GDP growth at 3.5% per year or so for the year of so we can foresee...

For the poor:

• An unemployment rate stuck near 10% for the next year...

From Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil:

Disraeli: "It is a community of purpose that constitutes society," continued the younger stranger; "without that, men may be drawn into contiguity, but they still continue virtually isolated."

"And is that their condition in cities?"

"It is their condition everywhere; but in cities that condition is aggravated. A density of population implies a severer struggle for existence, and a consequent repulsion of elements brought into too close contact. In great cities men are brought together by the desire of gain. They are not in a state of co-operation, but of isolation, as to the making of fortunes; and for all the rest they are careless of neighbours. Christianity teaches us to love our neighbour as yurself; modern society acknowledges no neighbour."

"Well, we live in strange times," said Egremont, struck by the observation of his companion, and relieving a perplexed spirit by an ordinary exclamation, which often denotes that the mind is more stirring than it cares to acknowledge, or at the moment is capable to express.

"When the infant begins to walk, it also thinks that it lives in strange times," said his companion.

"Your inference?" asked Egremont.

"That society, still in its infancy, is beginning to feel its way."

"This is a new reign," said Egremont, "perhaps it is a new era."

"I think so," said the younger stranger.

"I hope so," said the elder one.

"Well, society may be in its infancy," said Egremont slightly smiling; "but, say what you like, our Queen reigns over the greatest nation that ever existed."

"Which nation?" asked the younger stranger, "for she reigns over two."

The stranger paused; Egremont was silent, but looked inquiringly.

"Yes," resumed the younger stranger after a moment's interval. "Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws."

"You speak of--" said Egremont, hesitatingly.

"THE RICH AND THE POOR."

W00T!! Wifi-Equipped 757s! W00T!!

The future may not be evenly distributed, but there is definitely a lot of it around here! W00T!! W00T!! W00T!!!!

Can We Please Shut Down the New York Times's Economix Now?

This is the final straw:

The Panic of ‘08: Recession Cause or Effect?: Recent research questions the claim that the financial panics themselves contributed to their contemporaneous and severe employment downturns...

That most people writing for Economix are good is no excuse. You read it and you trust it, and you know less afterwards than you knew when you started.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Scott Sumner Simply Loses His Mind

Ryan Avent:

The Bellows: He begins a post by quoting this from Paul Krugman:

The chapter opens with the “global cooling” story — the claim that 30 years ago there was a scientific consensus that the planet was cooling, comparable to the current consensus that it’s warming.

And he says:

Why does Krugman keep doing this?  Why does he continually misrepresent what others say?  My theory is that he assumes those he disagrees with are either fools or knaves.  Instead of doing a sympathetic reading, trying to discern what others are really trying to say, he looks for the “gotcha.”  I just read the chapter, and it bears little resemblance to his description.  And I have read a lot of scientific papers on geoengineering, on both sides of the issue, so I know a bit about the field.

The chapter indisputably opens with the global cooling story. There’s just no getting around it. Go here (PDF) and see for yourself. I don’t know what else there is to say about that...

Oh, Please, Yes! A Different Opposition Party than the Republicans, Yes!!

Let the Curse of Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater finally wreak its vengeance to the end!!!!

Aimai:

No More Mister Nice Blog: Let the Witch Hunts Begin!

via digby:

To me, now more than ever, the conservative movement must purge itself of those in its “leadership” who are not worthy of the cause they claim to champion. Over the past year I have begun to suspect that David Keene, the head of the American Conservative Union and the Chairman of CPAC (the largest annual gathering of conservatives) may fit into this category.

This is starting to look like a repeat of the early chapters of Thomas Franks' What's the Matter With Kansas. That's the part where the rank and file Conservatives--the secretaries and the holy rollers--stopped taking marching orders from the upper class, corporatist, Republicans and took over the party from underneath. That was good for the Republican Party for a while since it gave them an energized base. But since party identification has fallen to its lowest level ever, and they are splitting off between social conservatives and small government conservatives its not clear that this will still be a winning strategy nationally. In fact, its not going to be until the social conservatives free themselves of the corporatists and reach out sucessfully to hispanics and blacks, or the corporatists free themselves of the social conservatives and reach out sucessfully to eve

De Laudibus Economic History

Paul Kedrosky comments:

Newsflash: Economic History Matters: Gosh, here is a surprise: Economist history matters. From an interview in The Atlantic with Paul Samuelson

And sends us to:

Q: Very last thing. What would you say to someone starting graduate study in economics? Where do you think the big developments in modern macro are going to be, or in the micro foundations of modern macro? Where does it go from here and how does the current crisis change it?

A: Well, I’d say, and this is probably a change from what I would have said when I was younger: Have a very healthy respect for the study of economic history, because that’s the raw material out of which any of your conjectures or testings will come. And I think the recent period has illustrated that.

Very nice to see...

I Will Remember This as the Day I Learned There Would Be No Downside to Replacing PBGC Executives with Capuchin Monkeys...

That is all.

Monkey Markets

Keith Chen, Laurie Santos, and Venkat Lakshminarayanan, "How Basic Are Behavioral Biases?: Evidence from Capuchin Monkey Trading Behavior"

• Gambles...

• Prospect theory in Capuchin monkeys...

• Universal, innate, cognition...

• Reference dependence...

• Loss aversion (2 to 2.5 to 1)
• Diminishing sensitivity...
• Endowment effect...

Transportation Is a Close Second; Meat Agriculture--Because of Methane--Should Be Third

Posted via web from delong's posterous

links for 2009-10-21

• Brad Johnson: Answers For Delong About The SuperFreaks, Part Two: ‘Global Cooling’ And ‘Economic Suicide’
• Brad Johnson: Answers For DeLong About The SuperFreaks, Part One
• Steve Horwitz: Hayek on Deflation and the Great Depression
• Mike Konczal: A little more on Geoengineering
• Eric Boehlert: Despite God-awful polling results, WashPost's Cillizza claims Republicans have had a "good year"
  The amazing part is that pundit Chris Cillizza makes that claim today after detailing how the GOP just got slaughtered in the latest WashPost survey: [emphasis added]:  "And, perhaps most troubling for GOP hopes is the fact that just 20 percent of the Post sample identified themselves as Republicans, the lowest that number has been in Post polling since 1983. (No, that is not a typo.)" I noted earlier today how the dismal GOP poll results do not fit in with the preferred Beltway narrative. And sure enough, Cillizza seemed to do his best to assure Republicans that the news wasn't that bad: "That's not to say that 2009 hasn't been a good year for Republicans. By and large, it has been." Imagine what the those poll results would have looked like if the GOP had had a bad year?
• Matthew Yglesias: Carbon Pricing is the Best Path to Realistic Technological Solutions for Climate Change
  What I think is remarkable is the extent to which people on the right, in their zeal to avoid a market mechanism that the business establishment happens to hate, have a tendency to talk up what instead amounts to a kind of Five Year Plan approach. Instead of regulating carbon, let’s just direct scientists of invent miracle trees! Let’s turn the sky red! The greenhouse gas problem is one of the largest political crises the liberal/democratic/capitalist order has ever faced, but unlike something like Hitler the basic shape of the problem is something we’ve seen and dealt with before. The whole “sometimes there are negative externalities and you need to charge people for them” thing is in basic textbooks. Maybe the result of such a scheme will be a technological miracle, or maybe not but the shape of the policy environment that will let us find out isn’t mysterious.
• Sam Jones: Due diligence made investors wary of Galleon
• Eric Pooley: Freakonomics Guys Flunk Science of Climate Change
• Expertise, and "expertise" | Free exchange | Economist.com
• FT.com | The Undercover Economist | Steven Levitt in controversial claim shock…
• The Washington Monthly
• The Washington Monthly
• The Washington Monthly
• Econbrowser: Dollar Demise and Double Dip: Latest Forecasts

Supertrees!!

Will Wilkinson called for SUPERTREES!!:

For More Responsible Climate Politics: This is all very hand wavey. Take a technology like artificial carbon sequestering "trees." What that would do is simply remove carbon from the atmosphere, like real trees, but at a much greater rate. They would be relatively easy to calibrate and fine tune. This is the sort of thing I had in mind. It wouldn't "throw a wrench" into the climate. It would pretty straightforwardly change "too much" carbon in the atmosphere to "not too much" carbon in the atmosphere. That is to say, it would fix the problem. That would be fantastic, right?

It would be. And carbon tqxes (or, second best, cap-and-trade) would be a wonderful way to get John Galt's mammoth brain set to work inventing them, wouldn't it? But somehow Will doesn't see it that way...

Hoisted from Comments: Nicholas Weaver on Solar vs. Nuclear, Myhrvold, Dubner, and Levitt

Hoisted from Comments: Nicholas Weaver, who knows what he is talking about, writes:

The Very Last Superfreakonomics Post of All Time...: Rather than just going "the black quote was a mistake", the Freakonomics crew has given Myhrvold a forum to defend the quote!?! http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/are-solar-panels-really-black-and-what-does-that-have-to-do-with-the-climate-debate/

Now there are many MANY problems with solar replacing coal, from the energy storage issue to potential use of rare-metal components. Solar is not a panacea, and the real conclusion that one reaches is nuclear power, and lots of it. I can easily construct a solid argument that solar is not viable for most of our electricity needs:

1. It doesn't work at night/cloudy conditions without additional energy storage.

2. It is vastly more $/W to manufacturer than a coal plant, when you include the cost of energy storage.

3. Many solar technologies (eg, Nanosolar's thin films) involve very rare metals (eg, indium). It is unclear what a real ramp-up of solar production would do to that market.

and that QED: we need nuclear power. (It is fun to taunt greenpeace with this, BTW).

But instead Myhrvold defends his position badly...

He repeats the black canard, without mentioning that 1kWh of coal-energy also releases 1kWh of thermal energy, so unless you are placing the solar panel on a surface with albedo less than .3, even just the thermal heating argument is false. Or if you use an alternate approach ("White roof is 1T C02 per 10 m^2 annual savings equivelent" Akbari's estimate), you are still talking the CO2 load of just 500 kWh/yr of a coal plant. If your 10 m^2 roof generates 1.5 kW for 6 hours/day, that is $5/W to <$2/W. Since so much of the cost of the cells for the study is the refining of silicon, there is probably a similar drop in kWh of construction per watt of power. He misses one of the huge reasons why the efficiency crowd want buildings to have a high albeido: simply to lower the AC bill for free, and thus why you should put solar cells on the roof of your garage rather than the house itself...

He compares the cost of running a coal plant with the cost of building a solar plant, neglecting that we need to construct vastly more power plants to both meet growing demand and to deal with end-of-life on old, inefficient plants. Even then, the breakeven point is less than 3 years, by his inflate-the-cost of solar figure!

What I don't get is why they are taking this approach.

It would be easy enough to go "Whoops, the 'because they are black' quote was taken a bit out of context as a joke, thats really minor all things considered. The real reasons solar is not a panacea relate to energy storage, etc..., its being corrected in the second printing." The conclusion thus stands, but the argument becomes sound. So why defend it stupid? Is it simply trolling for attention?

Instead, what is happening is I have to conclude that anything Myhrvold says has to be assumed to be false until proven otherwise, and by unquestioningly accepting his assumptions, anything Drubner and Levitt say may need to be taken the same way.

DeLong Smackdown Watch: Tim Harford

I guess I really do need to apologize to Tim Harford for calling him a defender of Levitt and Dubner's Superfreakonomics climate chapter...

Tim writes:

FT.com | The Undercover Economist: Perhaps I was naive in my reading of Superfreakonomics, but it didn’t occur to me that the chapter on geoengineering would stir up such a storm. I liked the book, but worried about the chapter. I wrote:

As for the final chapter on global warming, it is a striking discussion of geo-engineering, surveying various schemes for cooling down the planet rather than trying to prevent climate change by cutting carbon emissions. This is a strong story, but it is also one-sided, portraying the geo-engineers as brilliant iconoclasts, dismissing the objections to geo-engineering as the knee-jerk reaction of the unreflective, and failing to convey the views of a single credible geo-engineering sceptic. A well-deserved swipe at Al Gore does not really count.

According to this chapter, the only reason everyone is making so much fuss about carbon dioxide is that they’ve never heard of geo-engineering, or are the kind of stubborn Luddites who think technology never solved anything. I have some sympathy with that view but the section nevertheless needed more balance....

Brad DeLong even thinks the above paragraphs constitute a defence of the global warming chapter; well, you be the judge of that.... I read all the criticism and the back and forth, went back to the original review, which I penned three weeks ago, and... I don’t think I’d change a word. It is a strong story. And it is one-sided.

The Very Last Superfreakonomics Post of All Time...

---

How did I get here? Steve Dubner is an excellent, excellent reporter and writer. There is nobody sharper than Steve Levitt when he is on. I like the idea of geoengineering. I am both a science fiction geek and an economist--thus I am the key demographic for geoengineering. I would love to watch the 18,000 mile in diameter parasol being nudged into its metastable orbit at L1. And I definitely think that a lot of research into geoengineering possibilities should be one of the strings to our bow--alongside conservation, efficiency, and the move to closed-carbon-cycle and non-carbon energy technologies--in dealing with global warming.

But I don't think that research into geoengineering possibilities is properly conducted by people--like Nathan Myhrvold--who appear to be so bad at figuring orders of magnitude that they genuinely think that solar panels on net warm the earth, nor that what they say should be relied on.

And I definitely don't think people should misinform their readers by saying that the global cooling warnings of the 1970s were like the global wqrming warnings of today, or that the "climate agnostics" have a point because human activity contributes only 2% of the flow of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, or that particulates worldwide have been going down over the past several decades, or that trees are a net source of global warming, or that the world has been cooling over the past several years, that Nathan Myhrvold has thought more about ecological disaster scenarios in greater scientific detail than any climate doomsayer, or that coal is so cheap that it is "economic suicide" to move away from it as an energy source.

The only story that makes sense is that Dubner and Levitt went to Intellectual Ventures, were wowed by their presentations--that is, after all, reputed to be the key competitive advantage of Intellectual Ventures, that and patent trolling--and then somehow... failed to sharpen their wits and do their due diligence.

And as best as I can see they are still failing. Someone who wishes me ill sends me a transcript from NPR, a piece of which reads:

LEVITT: Now, in the long run, perhaps you'll want to deal with the [high] carbon[-dioxide] issue [even with geoengineering] because we're going to have acidification of the oceans and the coral reefs will die if we don't do something about the carbon. But if you just buy the time to keep the Earth cool for a while longer, I am certain that if we invest we will come up with technology that will allow us much more effectively in the future to pull carbon out of the air than we currently have....

Let's think about what such a technology might be...

We need to pull the CO₂ out of the air--which means we need to chemically change it in some way, because it is quite a stable molecule and a very gaseous one as it is. We are going to have to break some of the carbon-oxygen bonds. When we do, oxygen will be free and looking hard for two electrons--but we can get it to bond to itself and then it will float off into the atmosphere, causing no immediate problems: there is a lot of oxygen in the atmosphere already, and a little more won't change concentrations appreciably enough to cause any problems. We then can bond the carbon to itself and to hydrogen atoms, making long nice organic molecule chains out of which we can make textiles or plastics or cellulose or any of a bunch of other materials.

Sounds really cool!

The problem is that breaking these carbon-oxygen bonds takes energy. So let's fire up some more coal-fired power plants to generate the energy. Since our technology is really efficient, it won't take that much energy, right?

Wrong.

Coal-fired power plants make energy by making carbon-oxygen bonds. A bond is a bond. To break a carbon-oxygen bond and make a carbon-carbon one in order to pull a carbon atom out of the atmosphere takes as much energy as you get when you break a carbon-carbon bond and make a carbon-oxygen one in a coal-fired powr plant. So in order to pull one atom of carbon out of atmosphere via our magic efficient technology we have to--if we are powering it by coal--push one atom of carbon into the atmosphere.

So now we have (a) our normal power plants to power our civilization, plus (b) our atmosphere carbon-scrubbing industry, which is (c) powered by even more carbon power plants to generate the power to break the carbon-oxygen bonds that our first set of power plants made. But plants (c) put more carbon into the atmosphere than plants (a) did.

I know, says Steve Levitt, we can power our carbon-scrubbing industry (b) by power plants (c) that use nuclear or solar or... But then why not power our original civilization-sustaining power plants (a) by nuclear or solar or whatever?

I know, says Steve Levitt: we can build self-reproducing nano-machines to pick up ambient sunlight and use it to break carbon-oxygen bonds and fix carbon. That way we don't have to build either our carbon-scrubbing industry (b) or our power plants (c). And since they reproduce autonomously, they are costless in the long run. We can assemble them into aggregate structures and--at this point Matthew Yglesias breaks in: we could call them "trees"...

I can't conclude anything other than that Levitt and Dubner have failed to sit down and think any of this through to its conclusion. Which is too bad. Because we know they can think and communicate--and think and communicate accurately and very well...

links for 2009-10-20

• Joe Romm: The NYT’s false “guilty of inaccuracies and overstatements” charge began with a false charge by Pielke
• Brooks Moses: Making Light: Chili-Dog Casserole
  Brooks Moses: October 17, 2009, 01:49 PM: So, what's a "Vlassic pickled nacho ring"? Google, in its high-speed exuberance, pretty much only returns this very page for a search on that. I'm guessing from context that these are pickled slices of jalapeno or something of that nature?
• Consumer Expenditure Survey Results on the 2008 Economic Stimulus Payments (Tax Rebates)
  Nearly half (49 percent) of recipients reported using the rebate mostly to pay off debt. Most other recipients reported either mostly spending the rebate (30 percent), or mostly saving the rebate (18 percent). The small remainder of those asked (3 percent) did not report this information
• John Berry: Playing politics with Social Security
  The White House’s knee-jerk reaction to the news that inflation was so low that Social Security beneficiaries won’t get a cost-of-living increase next year was a seriously bad omen for long-term control of federal spending. The problem wasn’t the $13 billion cost of another one-time $250 payment to each retiree proposed by President Barack Obama. No, it was the utter disregard of the discipline inherent in indexing payments to changes in consumer prices. Benefits were indexed in the 1970s precisely to stop politicians eager to curry political favor by providing large benefit increases on an ad hoc basis. Shoveling out more checks to an important group of voters when the economy is as depressed as it is now would be a popular thing to do. Plenty of Democrats — as well as many of the Republicans who have been clamoring about soaring budget deficits — quickly endorsed the $250 payment even though prices weren’t just flat, they fell by 2 percent.
• Steve M.: Worst New York Times Article Ever
• Paul Krugman: Bush Derangement Derangement Syndrome
  Nice catch by Jonathan Chait, who finds “George W. Bush’s former minister of propaganda, Peter Wehner” lashing out — still — at the victims of Bush Derangement Syndrome, a group that he says includes the likes of "Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, Jonathan Alter, Jonathan Chait, Bill Maher, Michael Moore, and many others." He describes as a “homogeneous crew”, which is almost funnier than the fact that he’s still using the term.
• What Digby Said
  There's a reason why so many people are uninsured and it isn't only because they have pre-existing conditions. It's also because insurance is unaffordable. Unless this reform fixes that problem they haven't fixed it at all. [The Democratic legislators] need to create a public plan that these subsidies can actually make affordable or these folks are all going to have to become criminals and defy the mandate. And if that happens reform fails. I think you will see a terrible backlash if they don't get a grip on the political realities here. I hope that Hickey is correct and that they are, or this could be a monumental debacle.
• Democracy in America; Contrarianism's end?
  Contrarianism generally lines up with the "perversity" column in Albert Hirschman's typology "The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy". Here's the thing: as history progresses, things change. And societies try to adapt to those changes. Experts come up with solutions to the problems the societies face. Those solutions often entail discomfiting established interest groups. And the solutions the experts come up with almost always entail some degree of perverse counterreaction.... It can be very interesting to focus on those counterreactions; it can generate fascinating, eye-grabbing journalism. But in the overwhelming majority of cases, the counterreactions aren't as big as the first-order effects of the solutions..... There was a time when I encountered contrarian arguments like those made by Mr Levitt and Mr Dubner and thought, hm, that's really cool. In recent years, when I encounter such arguments, my tendency has been to think, yeah, that's probably a lot of hooey.
• Jamison Foser: WaPo's Brauchli takes reader questions today -- but will he answer them?
• E.J. Graff: Roman Polanski’s Rape
• Charles Taylor: The Immanent Frame

A Crisis... No, a Panic... No, a Depression... No, a Recession... No, a Rollng Readjustment...

Michael Perelman writes:

A half-century ago, John Kenneth Galbraith had a marvelous description of the shaping of language regarding crises. Galbraith, John Kenneth. 1958. The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 38:

Marx's reference to the "capitalist crisis" gave the word an ominous sound. The word panic, which was a partial synonym a half century ago, was no more reassuring. As a result, the word depression was gradually brought into use. This had a softer tone; it implied a yielding of the fabric of business activity and not a crashing fall. During the great depression, the word depression acquired from the event described an even more unsatisfactory connotation. Therefore, the word recession was substituted to connote an unfearsome fall in business activity. But this term eventually acquired a foreboding quality and a recession in 1953-1954 was widely characterized as a rolling readjustment. By the time of the Nixon administration, the innovative phrase "growth recession" was brought into use...

Somehow though, neither "rolling readjustment" nor "growth recession" displaced "recession"...

More on the Rating Agencies

Robert Waldmann writes:

Moody's Blue: This McClatchy article by Kevin G Hall seems important to me. It does rely a lot on accusations by disgruntled ex employees, but I guess that is unavoidable.

The lede:

WASHINGTON -- As the housing market collapsed in late 2007, Moody's Investors Service, whose investment ratings were widely trusted, responded by purging analysts and executives who warned of trouble and promoting those who helped Wall Street plunge the country into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression...

Yep. Another Washington Post Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Watch...

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

The New York Times:

Corrections - Correction - NYTimes.com: An article on July 3 reported on aborted plans for the publisher of The Washington Post to hold corporate-sponsored dinner parties including Post journalists. One issue in the controversy was that the dinners were being promoted as “off the record.” The article quoted The Post’s executive editor, Marcus W. Brauchli, as saying that the newsroom would “reserve the right to allow any ideas that emerge in an event to shape or inform our coverage.” By The Post’s definition of the term, that means the events would not be “off the record.”

On Sept. 12, an article in The Times reported that Charles Pelton, the marketing executive at the center of the plans, had resigned from The Post. That article, referring again to Mr. Brauchli’s comments at the time, reported that he said he had not understood that the dinners would be off the record. However, in a subsequent letter to Mr. Pelton — which was sent to The Times by Mr. Pelton’s lawyer — Mr. Brauchli now says that he did indeed know that the dinners were being promoted as “off the record,” and that he and Mr. Pelton had discussed that issue.

Howard Kurtz:

Post's Canceled Series of 'Salon' Dinners Again Called Into Question - washingtonpost.com: Charles Pelton, who had been The Post's general manager for special events and approved the flier that had not been seen by Brauchli, prompted the Times's postscript. Pelton resigned last month after several weeks of negotiations with the company.

Pelton's lawyer gave the Times a Sept. 25 letter in which Brauchli told Pelton: "I knew that the salon dinners were being promoted as off the record. That fact was never hidden from me by you or anybody else. . . . The New York Times reporter apparently misunderstood me."...

Brauchli said Saturday: "I have consistently said that my intention was that Post journalists only participate in events if the content could be used to inform our journalism. . . . I was aware, as I have said since July 2, that some materials described the proposed salon dinner as an off-the-record event. As I have also said before, I should have insisted that the language be changed before it surfaced in any marketing material."

New York Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty:

the paper's correction "is clear and speaks for itself."

Actually, the correction is not clear and does not speak for itself.

Is the New York Times saying that (a) Brauchli knew that the dinners were being promoted to lobbyists as off-the-record, (b) but in fact had no intention of letting them be so--fully intended to use what the lobbyists said to shape and inform coverage?

Or is the New York Times saying that (a) Brauchli knew that the dinners were being promoted to lobbyists as off-the-record, (b) but was happy to have the New York Times reporter believe that he did not know, and (c) took no steps to correct the false impression the New York Times reporter conveyed to the readers?

Inquiring minds want to know...

Yet More Superfreakonomics Blogging. Yes. I Know. I Know...

A breakfast companion points out that there seem to be three big differences between Levitt and Dubner on the one hand and we economists who tend to worry about global warming on the other. He further points out that these are all due to the fact that Levitt and Dubner today appear to no longer be thinking like economists. Economists believe that there are always substitutes--alternatives; economists believe that there are always complements--always ways of doing things that reinforce each other, especially in situations of uncertainty in which diversification is especially valuable; economists believe that orders of magnitude are very important and that the right simple numbers are good guides to orders of magnitude;

The first is that we economists see geoengineering as a complement to other measures--as something you research now in addition to clean energy technologies; as important to do because uncertainty is rife and so diversification to reduce risk is much more than usually important; and as something that you do in the future as your other conservation, efficiency, and shift-away-from-open-carbon energy policies take hold--and that (if they work) allow you to do less of other policies. (Though perhaps not all that much less, in all probability: a world with significantly more CO2 and significantly less sunlight and significantly more acid rain would be very different from our current world in a number of ways we do not know understand, some of which might be quite costly.) Dubner and Levitt, by contrast, appear to see them as substitutes--as what we do not in addition but instead of conservation. For Levitt and Dubner, we do geoengineering, and then we don't have to do anything else--that conservation on the one hand and geoengineering on the other are alternative "way[s] to cool the planet, albeit with methods whose cost-effectiveness are a universe apart.

The second is Levitt and Dubner's buying of Nathan Myhrvold's claims that "coal is so cheap that trying to generate electricity without it would be economic suicide" and that "energy consumed by building thousands of new solar plans necessary to replace coal-burning and other power plants would create a huge long-term 'warming debt'." Your standard economist's response to "there are no cost-effective substitutes" is always "you must be joking." Your standard economist's response to the claim that it is very costly to shift the productive structure of an economy from one configuration to another is always "show me the money." Yet that doesn't happen in this case:

Mr. LEVITT: Right. But I just don't--if you look at the history of modern mankind, I think you will be hard pressed to find any particular problem that was serious that was solved by a behavioral change, as opposed to by a technological solution...

That's just not economics: economics is that incentives change, and as incentives change people's behavior changes.

The third is that Levitt and Dubner no longer think like normal economists in looking not just for a number but for the right number relevant to a back-of-the-envelope calculation. For example, they write:

When Al Gore urges the citizenry to sacrifice... the agnostics grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, with the remainder generated by natural processes like plant decay...

Yoram Bauman questions this:

More Superfreakonomics: I have just seen a PDF of the Superfreakonomics chapter on climate change, and it makes basic mistakes when it says things like “When Al Gore urges the citizenry to sacrifice… the agnostics grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, with the remainder generated by natural processes like plant decay.”... [Y]es, human generation of CO2 is dwarfed by natural processes like plant decay. But it also shows that natural processes balance each other out: plant decay generates massive amounts of CO2, and plant growth takes in massive amounts of CO2 via photosynthesis. What you’re left with is a completely plausible story in which human activity slowly increases atmospheric concentrations of CO2 from pre-industrial concentrations of about 285ppm (parts per million) to current concentrations of about 385ppm that are going up by about 2ppm per year.

This sort of misleading skepticism exists throughout the chapter, and it does a disservice to climate science, to economists like me who work on climate change, to academic work in general, and to the general public that will have to live with the impacts of climate policy down the road....

Steve Levitt responds:

I don’t understand your comment below. Why does it matter if natural processes are in balance or not? CO2 is CO2! The source doesn’t matter. If we could cut CO2 emissions a little bit overall, whether through natural sources or others, the effect would be the same. It is not saying that cutting human emissions isn’t the right way to do it, but it is a surprising fact and one worth mentioning...

Yoram Bauman tries again:

[Y]ou are ignoring the overall thrust of the chapter, which is terribly misleading. It’s not factually incorrect to write that “agnostics… grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions”, or to give big play to media stories from the 1970s about “global cooling”, or to write that Lowell Wood says that global sea level will rise 1.5 feet by 2100... but all of these statements collectively give a terribly misleading perspective:

• Yes there are agnostics who “grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions”, but this is not a reason to doubt the theory of anthropogenic climate change. The book makes it sound like YOU are among the agnostics, and this is bad....

So that’s my two cents: Your chapter pains me not because it’s factually incorrect but because it clearly gives a misleading impression of the scientific consensus on climate change. I am reminded of your quorum on global warming that your blog colleagues were kind enough to invite me to participate in. There’s nothing factually wrong in there, but it is terribly misleading that the two scientists you quote are BOTH skeptics. What are the odds of that? Probably a billion to one, so my unavoidable conclusion is that you are deliberately trying to cast doubt on the scientific consensus. I don’t mind if you do this in a straightforward way by getting involved in climate research, but to do it via insinuations is in my opinion a disservice to to climate science, to economists like me who work on climate change, to academic work in general, and to the general public that will have to live with the impacts of climate policy down the road...

Steve Bloom chimes in:

The business about the CO2 stocks and flows boils down to an argument from personal incredulity: How could puny man affect a systerm so large? Levitt isn’t that stupid. The only “agnostics” who point to it are those who themselves lack an understanding of the climate system or are actively encouraging misunderstanding by others. It would be one thing if he mentioned it by way of explaining and debunking, but it doesn’t sound as if he does.... I now see that the CO2 point was intentionally framed to mislead and confuse.

And my brain has just exploded:

Excuse me while I pick up stray neuronal clumps from the many different corners of the room...

I mean, Levitt and Dubner’s passage really ought to read:

When Al Gore urges the citizenry to sacrifice... the agnostics grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, with the remainder generated by natural processes like plant decay. Of course the agnostics are misleadiing you: even though human activity creates just 2% of the flow of emissions, already there is 50% more CO2 in the atmosphere than there would be without human activity...

or:

When Al Gore urges the citizenry to sacrifice... the agnostics grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, with the remainder generated by natural processes like plant decay. Of course the agnostics are misleadiing you: even though human activity creates just 2% of the flow of emissions, once human-created CO2 is in the atmosphere it takes longer for nature to absorb the nature-created CO2. As a result, already there is 50% more CO2 in the atmosphere than there would be without human activity…

or:

When Al Gore urges the citizenry to sacrifice... the agnostics grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, with the remainder generated by natural processes like plant decay. Of course the agnostics are misleadiing you: the right way to think about it is that already 1/3 of the CO2 molecules in the atmosphere are the products of human actiivity, and the fraction and amount are growing very rapidly indeed…

Levitt and Dubner structure their passage to say (a) only 2% of emissions are of human origin, and (b) the fact that only 2% of emissions are of human origin is relevant to and supports an “agnostic” position on global warming.

But that is a lie: itt does not support an agnostic position. It is grossly, grossly misleading for Dubner and Levitt to talk about how the relative flows are "a surprising fact and one worth mentioning." They know damned, damned well that what is relevant to the "agnostic" positon are not the flows but rather the stocks. And they know damned, damned well even though only 2% of the new CO2 molecules created are of human origin, a full 30% of the stock of CO2 molecules existing is of human origin--with that percentage climbing every day.

Oh! There’s my right parietal lobe over there under the couch!

Let me give Steve Levitt the last word:

Steven Levitt:

...I do think also that there is something to be said for raising some skepticism about the current climate models and predictions... they are stated and restated as if they are fact, when in practice I suspect, and good scientists agree, that there is enormous uncertainty and things we cannot or at least could not know...

No, let me give maureendowdsemailfriend@gmail.com the last word:

While eco-cultists like Al Gore keep referring to a 6 degree C rise in global temperature as some sort of doomsday scenario, the agnostics grumble that the temperature of the earth is already 287 Kelvin, so we're talking about a mere 2% increase.

I can haz best-seller?

links for 2009-10-19

• Eric Idle Responds to Your Fatuous Comments
• Yoram Bauman: More Superfreakonomics: emails from Steven Levitt
  Steve Levitt: Tthere is something to be said for raising some skepticism about the current climate models and predictions…they are stated and restated as if they are fact, when in practice I suspect, and good scientists agree, that there is enormous uncertainty and things we cannot or at least could not know.
• Henry Farrell on the Decline and Fall of Clive Crook
  TMr. Crook is peculiarly unsuited to lecture anyone about silencing, shouting down, and questioning not only the judgment but the legitimacy of people whom he disagrees with. Perhaps he truly believes that there is some difference between “questioning the legitimacy” of one’s intellectual opponents, and coming out with vicious slurs like: "The Democratic party’s civil libertarians seem to believe that several medium-sized US cities would be a reasonable price to pay for insisting on ordinary criminal trials for terrorist suspects."... Here’s the more speculative bit, which you can take or leave as you like. Crook’s more loathsome rhetoric over the last year or so has been consistently reserved for those who want to see torturers and enablers of torture prosecuted. In a backhanded class of a way, I think this may possibly reflect well on him. I suspect that at some level he is genuinely conflicted between the standard DC bipartisan line on torture (that it is best to brush it all under
• Steve Benen on the Idiocy that Is America's Press Corps
  The lead overnight story on Mark Halperin's "The Page" features a photo of President Obama alongside U.S. currency. The text reads, "Red Ink Nation: Obama presides over $1.4 trillion deficit." The front page of the Washington Post tells readers, "Record-High Deficit May Dash Big Plans; $1.4 Trillion in Red Ink Means Less to Spend On Obama's Ambitious Jobs, Stimulus Policies." The New York Times' front page says, "$1.4 Trillion Deficit Complicates Stimulus Plans." Let's set the record straight here.... Halperin's report makes it seem as if the Obama administration deserves blame for the huge budget shortfall. That's demonstrable nonsense.... And finally, let's also not forget that it only makes sense to run large deficits given the circumstances. We're dealing with an economic collapse and two wars, following eight years in which we were led by "the most fiscally irresponsible president in the history of the republic."
• Roger Farmer| Don’t give up on quantitative easing: We can have our cake and eat it too
• Andrés Erosa, Tatyana Koreshkova and Diego Restuccia: How important is human capital? A quantitative theory assessment of world income inequality
  ur main finding is that human capital accumulation strongly amplifies TFP differences across countries: To explain a 20-fold difference in the output per worker the model requires a 5-fold difference in the TFP of the tradable sector, versus an 18-fold difference if human capital is fixed across countries. Moreover, we find that sectorial productivity differences play a prominent role in quantitative implications of the theory.
• Arguments from Global Warming Skeptics and what the science really says
  chunkyreesewitherspoonlookalike@gmail.com notes that Dubner and Levit make nine of the top twenty-seven false and misleading global warming skeptic arguments.
• Yoram Bauman: Climate change in Superfreakonomics
• Oliver Morton: Superfreakonomics, etc
• Ryan Avent: If the Grass Looks Greener, It’s Important to Understand the Nature of the Fence
• Peter Yuan Cai: Earthquake at Caijing: a litmus test for China’s media freedom
• Faiz Shakir: Specter rips GOP: ‘A Party of obstructionism.’
  Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA), who until late April of this year was a lifelong Republican, castigated his former party this morning on Fox News. Specter ripped the GOP for refusing to be a good-faith negotiator in the health care debate: "On the Republican side, it’s no, no, no. A party of obstructionism. … You have responsible Republicans who had been in the Senate — like Howard Baker, Bob Dole, or Bill Frist — who say Republicans ought to cooperate. Well, they’re not cooperating."... Specter also indicated he would fight hard for the public option. “I’m not prepared to recede at all. I think the public option is gaining momentum,” he said. “I am not going to step back a bit. I am going to fight for the best public option.”
• Duncan Law
• Jonathan Bernstein: Oh, You're No Fun Any More
• Andrew Gelman: Freakonomics Update
  Dubner defends himself here. No word on the drunk driving advice, but he has some backstory on the interviews that he and Levitt did regarding global warming. It seems pretty clear that their approach to writing Freakonomics 2 was much different than the original book: the first Freakonomics was all about Levitt's work, whereas the most prominent part of the sequel is a discussion of the ideas of others. As I noted yesterday, this creates a huge selection issue--how did they decide whom to interview?--which is much less present in the first book. I'm also still confused that Dubner describes global warming as "a very difficult problem to solve," given that on his blog the other day he seemed to be endorsing the view that future trends are "virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling."
• Tim Lambert: Pat Michaels: "fraud, pure and simple"
  [Pielke] claims that [Hansen's] scenario B was off by a factor of 2 on CO2. This sounds like a lot until you discover that means that emissions grew by 0.5% per year instead of 1% a year. And that works out to scenario B having the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere within 1% of what has actually happened. Pielke is being much more than a little unfair by calling a prediction that got within 1% of the correct answer as not being "particularly accurate or realistic".
• Felix Salmon: Levitt and Dubner on the northern spotted owl

All Right. One More. I Gotta Correct the Record...

Steven Dubner writes:

Global Warming in SuperFreakonomics: The Anatomy of a Smear - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com: Much of the outcry was made by people who had read Romm but not our book — which isn’t surprising, since the book isn’t out until October 20. As the noise grew, Romm added on the charge that “the publisher has stopped Amazon from allowing people to search the book” – that is, to read the actual text online. Smells like a conspiracy theory, no?

But nobody stopped anything. The text was never searchable on Amazon for the simple reason that the book wasn’t yet published, which is standard procedure. I don’t know where Romm got this fact – or if perhaps it was just too good a rumor to not be true...

(1) Dubner's "nobody stopped anything" is simply wrong. Romm posted a .pdf of Freakonomics chapter 5. Somebody--Dubner and Levitt's publisher--then did require Romm to take it down. That takedown is in sharp contrast to the behavior of some other publishers these days, who are eager to offer sample chapters online.

(2) Moreover, Romm says that as of last week he was able to use Amazon's "search inside the book" function on Superfreakonomics, and that somebody turned it off. I believe him:

Alan Blinder Approves of President Obama on Economics

Alan writes:

A Report Card on President Obama’s Progress: The president’s critics complain that his only real accomplishment is the $787 billion stimulus bill--which they deride, somewhat contradictorily, as either budget-busting, ineffective or both. But is that all there is? I think not.

STOPPING THE SLIDE Let’s remember that the new president was dealt a dreadful hand on Inauguration Day--including a shattered financial system and a national economy teetering on the brink of disaster. The administration’s chief accomplishment to date surely is devising and executing--with huge assists from the Federal Reserve — a comprehensive program to pull us back from the abyss. The stimulus was just one component.... Job No. 1 — stopping the train wreck — appears to have been done rather well.

ENACTING THE STIMULUS PACKAGE The much-maligned fiscal stimulus has been criticized from both the left (as too small) and from the right (as too big, especially the spending parts). My own judgment is that both its magnitude and composition were reasonable, though not perfect. But bills that navigate the multiple hazards of the Congressional sausage grinder must be graded on the curve.... Give it a B or B+.

RESCUING THE BANKS.... When the Treasury secretary finally did release his plan, in stages, he wisely resisted the siren songs coming from both the left (“nationalize the banks”) and the right (“let ’em fail”), opting instead for the high-risk “stress tests” of 19 big financial institutions. Today, all 19 are alive and breathing. None have been nationalized.... So give the bank rescue plan an A–. The minus comes from being too soft on many banks and bankers, who failed us and then benefited from public largess.

REDUCING FORECLOSURES.... C.

TRYING FOR REGULATORY REFORM While it is still only a set of proposals, not laws, the Treasury worked at breakneck speed.... At this point, we can’t even guess what may pass. So give this policy an “incomplete,” noting, however, that the first draft shows promise....

[O]n the crucial macroeconomic and banking issues, we must conclude that “Saturday Night Live” got it quite wrong: Mr. Obama’s accomplishments in just nine months are palpable and were very much needed...

From my perspective, two big parts are missing:

• No strategy to get unemployment down to no more than 8% by the end of next year.

• No reform of financial industry compensation to make it incentive compatible.

This second may turn out to be a fatal mistake. Wall Street is now paying out huge cash bonuses when it should be giving its high flyers long-term stakes in the firms that they work for. This creates incentives for traders that may produce another big crisis five years down the road. And this makes it impossible for the federal government to commit more money to supporting the financial sector in the short run. That is a bad thing: there is about one chance in ten that things will turn down sharply, and that we will really want to provide more support to the financial sector. And now--because we did not reform financial compensation over the past year--we will not be able to do so if we need to.

Dean Baker on Why the Washington Post Should Have Been Shut Long Ago

Dean on George Will as an information-destroying activity:

Beat the Press Archive: George Will claims that the stimulus packages passed in 2008 and in February of this year did not work. How does he know this? Well, because the unemployment rate is still very high. That is an interesting logical leap. Suppose a person has been diagnosed with cancer and is treated with chemotherapy. Three years later the person is still alive and reasonably healthy, but the tumor has not gone away. By Dr. Will's logic, the chemotherapy did not work....

Economists can test for the effect of the stimulus by using models that project what would happen in the absence of stimulus and compare this scenario with what actually happened. These models generally show that both the 2008 and 2009 stimulus strengthened the economy. Will is either profoundly ignorant of economics, or being disingenuous, when he implies that the Obama administration is somehow making things up when it claims that is has "saved" [italics in original] jobs....

Will also fails badly in describing the spendout rate on the stimulus. He concludes his column by telling readers that:

But one-quarter of Stimulus II will be spent this year. Another quarter will be spent in 2011. Half will be spent in 2010, an election year. Which suggests that Stimulus II is, and Stimulus III would be, primarily designed to save a few dozen jobs -- those of Democratic members of the House and Senate."

That's a cute story, but the problem is that Will's number refers to fiscal years. The 2009 fiscal year ended September 30th. The spending for calendar year 2009 will be roughly 36 percent of the stimulus, with another 50 percent to come in calendar 2010. Rather than being timed for the 2010 election year, the stimulus was designed to get money out the door as quickly as possible...

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Paul Krugman Goes Meta

And offers us three things to read:

(1) Joshua Gans identifies in Dubner and Levitt an odd inconsistency that I’ve identified more broadly: those who go on and on about how people respond to incentives when they’re making a pro-free-market argument suddenly seem to lose all faith in the power of incentives when the goal is to induce more environmentally friendly behavior:

But come on. Isn’t the whole point of the Freakonomics project that prices work and behaviour changes in response to incentives? Everywhere else, a few pennies will cause massive consumption changes while when it comes to a carbon price, it is all too hard.

(2) Ryan Avent makes a general point about people who dismiss cap-and-trade as too hard, then promote something else that only seems easier because you haven’t thought it through. I agree with him about the carbon tax issue; and while I hadn’t thought about applying the same principle to geoengineering, he’s completely right. Having somebody--who? The United States? The United Nations? The Coalition of the Willing?--pump sulfur into the atmosphere through an 18-mile tube, or cut off sunlight with a giant orbital mirror, would either (a) require many years of hard negotiations or (b) quite possibly set off World War III. If it’s (a), why is that so much easier than a global agreement on emissions? (Which, as Brad points out, really would only have to involve four big players.)

(3) Andrew Gelman poses a question:

The interesting question to me is why is it that “pissing off liberals” is delightfully transgressive and oh-so-fun, whereas “pissing off conservatives” is boring and earnest?

I have a theory here, although it may not be the whole story: it’s about careerism. Annoying conservatives is dangerous: they take names, hold grudges, and all too often find ways to take people who annoy them down. As a result, the Kewl Kids, as Digby calls them, tread very carefully when people on the right are concerned — and they snub anyone who breaks the unwritten rule and mocks those who must not be offended. Annoying liberals, on the other hand, feels transgressive but has historically been safe. The rules may be changing... but it’s been that way for a long time.

*Sigh* Last Post on Superfreakonomics, I Promise

Sigh.

So I finally got a copy of chapter 5 of Superfreakonomics.

In the abstract I really like the idea of cheap geoengineering solutions to global warming. My personal favorite is a giant parasol 18,000 miles in diameter at L1 to absorb and then reradiate a chunk of sunlight in other bands. But I have never been able to find anyone here at Berkeley who (a) knows what they are talking about, and (b) agrees with Levitt and Dubner that we know that Al Gore efficiency-and-conservation solutions are much less cost-effective than Mt. Pinatubo geoengineering solutions in dealing with global warming. That NASA and Energy and OSTP should be working on and funding research into the possibilities of geoengineering is something everybody I talk to agrees with. But nobody I talk to agrees with Levitt and Dubner that efficiency-and-conservation efforts are futile, and that we should shut them down to bet all our chips on geoengineering.

It really does look to me like Levitt and Dubner:

• went to Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures.
• got wowed.
• excitedly wrote up what they heard.
• and then failed to do their intellectual due diligence about what they were told there.

Thus I have a little unsolicited advice for Levitt and Dubner. If I were them, I would abjectly apologize. And I would then start editing the chapter thus:

1. pp. 165-6: Change to no longer put "global cooling" in the 1970s and "global warming" today in parallel: The scientists in the 1970s who were worried about global cooling had neither the quantative evidence, the climate models, the understanding of forcing processes, or the peer-reviewed consensus that analysis of global warming has today. Placing the two in parallel is simply wrong.

2. pp. 165-6: Change to remove false claim that the quotes from Newsweek were the words of "scientists."

3. pp. 165-6: Change to remove false claim that Newsweek was accurately citing the 1975 NAS Study--which says not that the globe is likely to cool but instead that we don't know enough about climate to forecast trends, and tht we need to do more research.

4. p. 167: Change to make explicit the claim that switching to an all-vegetarian diet reduces your carbon footprint by about the same order of magnitude as does switching to a hybrid car. But do not say that cars and trucks do not "contribute an ungodly share of greenhouse gases." They do--it's just that human meat-intensive agriculture contributes and ungodly share as well.

5. p. 168: Change to make the point that the fact that our estimates of climate effects are imprecise is not an argument for doing less or waiting to offset global warming--it is an argument for doing more and doing more now. Uncertainty is not our friend at all

6. p. 169: Change. Currently massively confused about Marty Weitzman's work. Marty focuses on the chance and valuation of catastrophe. He concludes that a version of the precautionary principle is appropriate: when distributions have fatter tails than log normal--which Marty thinks they do--the right policies are those that minimize the possibiliity of catastrophe. Which means starting to act now.

7. p. 170: Change to no longer imply that James Lovelock has some special role or authority in climate analysis or climate policy.

8. p. 170: Change to debunk rather than approve of British conservative Boris Johnson's claim. Johnson's statement is simply wrong. It is not the case that "the fear of climate change is like a religion in this vital sense, that it is veiled in mystery, and you can never tell whether your acts of propitiation or atonement have been in any way successful." We can measure greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, solar radiative forcings, and temperatures. We can tell whether acts of propitiation and atonement are working.

9. p. 171: Change the highly misleading: "When Al Gore urges the citizenry to sacrifice... the agnostics grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, with the remainder generated by natural processes like plant decay..." that 98% of carbon emissions are part of an ongoing biological cycle is not an argument supporting an "agnostic" position. And Levitt and Dubner should not hve claimed that it is.

10. p. 171: Change highly misleading paragraph to stress that what is relevant is not the stock but the flow: not that human activity accounts for 2% of the flow but rather that but for industrial emissions one-third (and growing) of the stock of greenhouse gases would simply not be there today.

11. p. 173: Change to no longer dismiss out-of-hand global agreement on climate policy. Dubner and Levitt currently write: "when it comes to actually solving climate change externalities through taxes, all we can say is good luck.... [G]reenhouse gases do not adhere to national boundaries.... Nor does one nation have the right to tell another what to do." But if the big four--U.S., EU, China, and India--of 2050 do agree, they then have the cultural, economic, and diplomatic power to coerce the rest of the world. Reaching global agreement is a very reasonable prospect.

12. pp. 177-181: Change to tone down the puff piece on Myhrvold and Intellectual Ventures--the subsequent pages contain a lot of clues that Myhrvold and company really don't know very much about what they are talking about.

13. p. 182: Change to debunk rather than approve of quote from Wood: "Everybody turns their knobs... so they aren't the outlier, because the outlying model is going to have difficulty getting funded..." Alternatively, back this claim up with some real evidence that it is so. (The climate modelers who I talk to say that it is not.)

14. p. 182: Change to debunk rather than approve of quote from Wood: "current climate models 'do not know how to handle water vapor and various types of clouds'..." Current climate models may not handle water vapor and clouds especially well, but they do handle them.

15. p. 182: Also, change to reinforce point that uncertainty in climate models is not an argument for doing less now but rather an argument to do more.

16. p. 183: Change to debunk rather than approve of quote from Myhrvold: "most of the global warming over the past few decades... might actually be due to good environmental stewardship." It's not.

17. p. 183: Change to remove false claim that worldwide particulate pollution is shrinking rather than growing. It is still growing rather than shrinking and so still cooling the earth more with each passing year--it's only in the clean North Atlantic that heavy particulates been shrinking.

18. p. 183: Change to rephrase: "Nor does atmospheric carbon dioxide necessarily warm the earth"--other things equal, it certainly does.

19, p. 184: Change to remove false claim: "Yet [Ken Caldeira's] research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight."

1. p. 186: Change to debunk rather than approve of false quote from Wood: "most authoritative literature on the subject suggests a [sea level] rise of about one and a half feet by 2100."

2. p. 186: Remove false claim: "a most surprising environmental scourge: trees." Distinguish between (a) tropical trees, (b) temperate trees, and (c) boreal trees in regions where there is a great deal of snow cover.

3. p. 186: Remove false claim that the earth has been cooling "over the past several years."

4. p. 187: Claim that "coal is so cheap that trying to generate electricity without it would be economic suicide" needs much, much more backing-up: I can't see how it could possibly be true.

5. p. 187: Remove false claim: "A lot of things that people say would be a good thing probably aren't.... As an example he points to solar cells..."

6. p. 187: Claim that "The energy consumed by building the thousands of new solar plants necessary to replace coal-buring and other power plants would create a huge long-term 'warming debt'"--I cannot see how this could possibly be true. The overwhelming majority of power plants that are going to be in operation have not been built yet, and buildind closed-carbon-cycle or non-carbon plants is not much more expensive than building open-carbon-cycle ones.

7. p. 188: Remove false claim that "Myhrvold... has probably thought about such [ecological disaster] scenarios in greater scientific detail than any climate doomsayer."

That is as far as I have gotten...

James Hamilton Is Mostly Optimistic

"No L"--Merry Christmas--he says:

Econbrowser: No L: I first called attention on April 9 to the regularity that a peak in new claims for unemployment insurance usually means that a recovery from the recession will begin within two months.... [T]he last few weeks have confirmed the pattern of a significant drop in unemployment claims typical of economic recovery. Unfortunately, the level remains high enough that net job growth is likely still quite negative.... On Friday we received two quite favorable indicators from the Federal Reserve. The first is that the nation's capacity utilization rate has been steadily climbing since June. Calculated Risk regards that as another reliable indicator that the recession is over.... Even more encouraging was the Fed's report that its index of industrial production rose by 0.7% in the month of September and at a 5.2% annual rate during the third quarter. Paul Krugman thinks that could mean a third-quarter GDP annual growth rate above 4%.

That kind of growth is inconsistent with a jobless recovery. After the 2001 recession, we didn't see a GDP growth rate of that size until 2003:Q3. There are two separate feedback mechanisms operating. The first is that rapidly rising output will eventually bring hiring up with it. The second is that the high unemployment rates will bring more foreclosures and cause spending and output to sputter.

Which is it going to be? Nonfarm payroll employment is the key indicator to watch from here.

links for 2009-10-18

• Brad Johnson: Ken Caldeira Contradicts SuperFreaks Steve Levitt and Steve Dubner: ‘Carbon Dioxide Is The Right Villain’
  The “SuperFreaks” claimed that Ken Caldeira’s “research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight."... Caldeira has responded on his professional website: “Carbon dioxide is the right villain, insofar as inanimate objects can be villains”:
• P O'Neill on Superfreakonomics: Patriotic Prostitutes
• Code Monkey
• Rick James: Super Freak
• Michael Froomkin: Readers Follow Dan Froomkin to HuffPo
  Huffington Post Passes WashingtonPost.com In Unique Visitors In September: Nielsen. More data at Editor & Publisher I had no idea Dan was that popular….
• Glenn Greenwald: British High Court rejects U.S./British cover-up of torture evidence
• My review of Freakonomics 2 - Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
  The interesting question to me is why is it that "pissing off liberals" is delightfully transgressive and oh-so-fun, whereas "pissing off conservatives" is boring and earnest? Based on their writings in Freakonomics 1 and their blog, Levitt and Dubner strike me as open-minded political pragmatists, so it's not that I think they have a big political agenda. It's possible to write things that piss off conservatives while still retaining an edgy, transgressive feeling--take a look at Nate Silver (or, to take a less analytical example, Michael Moore)--but I think it's a little harder to do. Flouting liberal conventional wisdom is funner somehow. As I said, I think there's something more general going on here but I don't feel I have a full picture of this phenomenon. Freakonomics 1 was based on Levitt's previous research, which was all over the map, whereas in Freakonomics 2 the authors got to choose ahead of time what to be counterintuitive about. When it comes to writing, too much freedom
• Adrian Hon: Notes on Iain Banks’ Transition
• Climate Experts Warn that Short-Term Snapshots of Temperature Data Can Be Misleading: Focus Instead on the Bigger Picture « Berkeley Lab News Center
• Ellis Weiner: Subject: Our Marketing Plan
• Renaissance Oaf
• Lizardbreath: iPhone Woes
  I hadn't realized I was buying myself a handheld gaming thing - I found Civilization in the App Store, and have been playing the stupid thing until my eyes cross. I've always had a bad (in the addictive sense) relationship with computer games, and having an appealing one in my pocket is not great for my chances of paying attention to anything else when I have a free moment. Newt's already chastised me for playing games instead of watching his soccer team get massacred. Also, when I crank up the difficulty, I find that it produces absurd situations like allowing the computer to defeat my tanks with its mounted knights. (A) This is poor design -- no matter how hard the game's supposed to be, that's just silly, and (B) it causes me to behave in a childish and unseemly fashion in public. I shoulda just bought myself a phone.
• Ken Caldeira: Carnegie Department of Global Ecology
• Krugman on Superfreakonomics
• Peter Wadhams: Arctic to be ice-free in summer in 20 years
• FAIL: Superfreakonomics « Left as an Exercise
• And The Estate Of Rick James Is Suing, Too « Around The Sphere

William Connolley on SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling

He writes:

SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling (and some other stuff)?: liked Freakonomics, so I'm a bit sad to see the (inevitable) sequel being so hopelessly wrong. Probably this is a case of the old rule: whenever you see people write about stuff you know, they get it wrong. Joe Romm has a fairly characteristic attack; and just for a change I'll agree with him; though he chooses odd bits to assault. It looks like the "global cooling" junk is just one chapter, but of course it is the only one I'll pay any attention to.

Diagnosis, in brief: (1) they write about stuff they clearly don't understand (2) they pick a catchy reverse-common-wisdom nugget as a headliner without the having the slightest interest in whether it is true or not (mind you, plenty of more respectable folk do the same) (3) they pick an expert to talk to, but since they don't have a clue about the subject they don't know how to pick a good expert, or even understand what the expert says (4) there is a grain of sense in there, but so badly wrapped in trash it is nearly unfindable.

The entire piece is riddled with errors. Reading it all would be tedious. So, before reading it in detail I decided to set myself a target of 10 major errors and then stop....

Does "Superfreakonomics" Need A Do-Over?

Brad Plumer:

Does "Superfreakonomics" Need A Do-Over?: I enjoyed the original Freakonomics quite a bit.... [I]t was clear Levitt was a clever economist who could gin up fascinating "natural experiments" to crack open everyday mysteries. So now Levitt and his co-author Stephen Dubner have a sequel.... Levitt and Dubner just parachute into the field of climate science and offer some lazy punditry on the subject dressed up as "contrarianism." There's no original research. There's nothing bold or explosive. It's just garden-variety ignorance. As William Connelly, a former climate modeler at the British Antarctic Survey says in his review of the book's climate chapter (which he has posted):

Diagnosis, in brief: (1) they write about stuff they clearly don't understand (2) they pick a catchy reverse-common-wisdom nugget as a headliner without the having the slightest interest in whether it is true or not (3) they pick an expert to talk to, but since they don't have a clue about the subject they don't know how to pick a good expert, or even understand what the expert says (4) there is a grain of sense in there, but so badly wrapped in trash it is nearly unfindable.

In just a few dozen pages, Dubner and Levitt manage to repeat the myth that the scientific consensus in the 1970s predicted global cooling (quite untrue), imply that climatologists are unaware of the existence of water vapor (no, they're quite aware), and traffic in the elementary misconception that CO2 hasn't historically driven temperature increases (RealClimate has a good article to help with their confusion). The sad thing is that Dubner and Levitt aren't even engaging in sophisticated climate-skepticism here--there's just a basic unwillingness to gain even a passing acquaintance with the topic. You hardly need to be an award-winning economist to do that.

What's more, as Joe Romm reports, the main scientist that Levitt and Dubner actually interviewed, Ken Caldeira, says they've completely twisted and mischaracterized his views—a glaring bit of journalistic malfeasance. And, as Matt Yglesias points out, one of Dubner and Levitt's arguments rests on the (demonstrably wrong) premise that solar panels are always black. Now, as a journalist, I'm all in favor of having people write about things they're not an expert in--and mistakes do happen--but this is a little absurd.

Meanwhile, over at The New York Times website, Dubner is complaining that critics are all engaged in "shrillness" (without linking to any of the criticisms of his book) and appears to be quietly removing comments when readers attempt to point to Connolley or Romm's critiques. Guess they don't make hard-charging contrarians like they used to.

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UPDATE: And chunkyreesewitherspoonlookalike@gmail.com emails:

I'm a little offended by the book's laziness. Had they wanted, they could've recruited some clever deniers to feed them material for the climate chapter. People like Chris Horner and Anthony Watts and Roger Pielke are dishonest and wrong, but they're not stupid or ignorant people—they engage in some high-level sophistry and deceit. But Dubner and Levitt didn't even know enough about the subject to seek out the A-list bullshit artists.

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FURTHER UPDATE: Roger Pielke is unhappy with chunky (which I understand) and with my posting of chunky (which I understand), but then appears to go completely off the rails in email:

Roger Pielke, Jr. rpielkejr@gmail.com Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 5:48 AM: I see that you have refused to post my comment on your blog. If you make strong accusations about a professional colleague it would seem appropriate to back that up. I await your reply which I'll prominatly feature on my blog. All best from Boulder, Roger Pielke, Jr.

Brad DeLong brad.delong@gmail.com Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 11:22 AM: I have no idea what you are talking about. I haven't done anything to any comments from rpielkejr@gmail.com...

Roger Pielke, Jr. rpielkejr@gmail.com Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 11:24 AM: How about the comments that you posted on your blog about me? Specifically: http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/10/economist-brad-delong-calls-me-stupid.html

Brad DeLong brad.delong@gmail.com Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 11:29 AM: Are you sane? I have not refused to post your comment on my weblog. My default is that everyone's comments are automatically published. (I do prune them later, if I think they are actively misleading. But I don't refuse to publish.)

Roger Pielke, Jr. rpielkejr@gmail.com Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 11:35 AM: Indeed I am sane. I believe you are ignoring the point of my email to you, you posted a comment on your site with some very strong (and misleading statements about me, here: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/10/does-superfreakonomics-need-a-do-over.html. Why did you do this? And will you correct the post or otehrwise explain this unprovoked attack? See: http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/10/economist-brad-delong-calls-me-stupid.html

Brad DeLong brad.delong@gmail.com Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 12:11 PM: I repeat: I have not refused to post your comment on my weblog.

At this point I am thoroughly bemused...

Four Defenders of Dubner and Levitt, Superfreakonomics's Cllimate Chapter...

Bryan Caplan:

The High Points of Superfreakonomics: I just read my advance copy of Superfreakonomics.  Overall, it's better than the original.  It's still cutesy, but stronger in the "who cares?" factor. The highlight: "What Do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo Have in Common?," a surprisingly skeptical look at global warming, and a shockingly positive defense of geoengineering.  Levitt and Dubner don't seem ready for the Pigou Club:

But when it comes to actually solving climate-change externalities through taxes, all we can say is good luck.  Besides the obvious obstacles - like determining the right size of the tax and getting someone to collect it - there's the fact that greenhouse gases do not adhere to national boundaries... Thus, global warming.

In any case, why bother with taxes when we can fix warming for peanuts?

Budyko's Blanket could effectively reverse global warming at a total cost of $250 million. Compared with the $1.2 trillion that Nicholas Stern proposes spending each year to attack the problem, IV's idea is, well, practically free...

Tim Harford:

Superfreakonomics reviewed: As for the final chapter on global warming, it is a striking discussion of geo-engineering, surveying various schemes for cooling down the planet rather than trying to prevent climate change by cutting carbon emissions. This is a strong story, but it is also one-sided, portraying the geo-engineers as brilliant iconoclasts, dismissing the objections to geo-engineering as the knee-jerk reaction of the unreflective, and failing to convey the views of a single credible geo-engineering sceptic. A well-deserved swipe at Al Gore does not really count.

According to this chapter, the only reason everyone is making so much fuss about carbon dioxide is that they’ve never heard of geo-engineering, or are the kind of stubborn Luddites who think technology never solved anything. I have some sympathy with that view but the section nevertheless needed more balance.

In the end, a book such as SuperFreakonomics stands or falls on its entertainment value. And on that count, there’s no doubt: it’s a page-turner...

Joshua Gans:

The Climate of Superfreakonomics: there is nothing too wrong with it. Not enough for name calling. What the authors are doing is identifying the ‘economist’s angst’ in this whole discussion. They start off with the 1970s discussion of global cooling although it isn’t clear that is a strong prediction either. We are all frustrated that climate models aren’t perfect even if sufficient scientists think there is enough and so I read that discussion as providing an example of that. But then there is a pretty clear discussion of the intertemporal problem we face in dealing with this. Again, all fairly non-controversial if leaning to a sceptical side. Nothing to get upset about....

The chapter then moves on to consider what to do about climate change. It too quickly moves through current plans for carbon prices saying they are uncertain and costly. Both true but there is surely more to it than that. After all, there is a ton of pollution going on and surely economists should be nervous about that being unchecked. Levitt and Dubner recognise externalities but then propose to mitigate externalities by eliminating the harm rather than changing behaviour. This is to be done through geoengineering which is discussed at length....

The underlying argument as to why we should pursue this rather than behavioural change is not environmental religion but whether it is possible to put prices on this and get behavioural change. Levitt and Dubner don’t think it is possible. They argue that if you can’t get doctors to wash their hands to stop the spread of infection, how can you expect people to clean up the planet?

But come on. Isn’t the whole point of the Freakonomics project that prices work and behaviour changes in response to incentives? Everywhere else, a few pennies will cause massive consumption changes while when it comes to a carbon price, it is all too hard. My own view is that a carbon price plus some information might have some drastic effects on the behavioural side. This chapter should have been about what it takes to change behaviour and what we do and do not know about that. Instead, it passes through that entire issue in a completely unsatisfactory way. Where is the call for field experiments and randomised trials? Instead, we should stick hoses into the atmosphere and seemingly give up on trying to get people to turn off lights when they exit a room....

This is all a shame because the point of having a popular face for someone like Steve Levitt is to be able to push agendas they are convinced about. The geoengineering one is a candidate for that but the incompleteness of the economic job has undermined the exercise and may well damage the platform he has built. It would have only taken a few pages. Yes, it would be a little less punchy and counterintuitivey (is that a word?) but the influence factor would surely have been stronger.

When it comes down to it, pollution is occurring. As Ken Arrow pointed out long ago, if there are irreversibilities then there is an option value in curtailing the polluting activity so that we can work out what the right future path is. It is that risk that means we should not let externalities go unpriced. And even if geoengineering works out, there will still be externalities. The safe course is to deal with them now...

Robert Waldmann:

Tubes!: Not the intertubes, 18 mile long tubes held up by helium baloons releasing S02 into the stratosphere.

Daniel Davies writes

if you find yourself writing, in all seriousness, as a practical proposal, the phrase "pumping large quantities of sulphur dioxide into the Earth’s stratosphere through an 18-mile-long hose, held up by helium balloons", it is probably time to take a step back and ask yourself if something has gone a little bit wrong with your life.

Ok, so I asked myself, and I still think that pumping large quantities of sulphur dioxide into the Earth’s stratosphere through an 18-mile-long hose, held up by helium balloons, would be excellent.

Davies is one of many many people who criticize the chapter on global warming of "Superfreakonomics" by Steves Levitt and Dunbar. The most quoted takedowns were written by Joe Romm and by Tim Lambert. As far as I can tell, they really don't have very much to say against the acid rain tubes idea. Rather they mainly object to the Steves proposal that we use the tubes as an alternative to cap and trade. The argument against doing both seems fairly weak to me.

There is the Leninist argument that the worse it is the better it is so any way to ameliorate global warming other than reducing emissions is bad, because it wil reduce pressure for reduced emissions. No one feels obliged to paint their roof black to increase pressure for emissions reductions and I don't see the difference.

Now there are clearly problems with the acid in the stratosphere approach. The SO2 won't stay there forever. It seems to me that the best way to defend the tubes proposal is to lye -- that is dump something alkaline in the oceans (this is both to deal with sulfuric acid from the tubes and carbonic acid from C02). Now if one aimed to do that in a way which wouldn't create extremely alkaline areas and kill marine life, it would cost a lot. I think that cost should be added to the tubes' cost.

Also, it might not work. A case for not relying on the tubes but not, as far as I can see, a case for not trying them.

Liveblogging World War II, by Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill

70 years ago:

An account... by a German report... may be recorded:

At 01:30 on October 14, 1939, H.M.A. Royal Oak lying at anchor in Scapa Flow was torpedoed by U-47 (Lieutenant Prien). The operation had been carefully planned by Admiral Doenitz himself, the Flag Officer (Submarines). Prien left Kiel on October 8, a clear, bright autumn day, and passed through Kiel Canal--course N.N.W., Scapa Flow. On October 13, at 4 AM, the boat was lying off the Orkneys. At 7 PM--surface; a fresh breeze blowing, nothing in sight; looming in the half-darkness the line of the distant coast; long streamers of northern lights flashing blue wisps across the sky. Course west. The boat crept steadily closer to Holm Sound, the eastern approach to Scapa Flow. Unfortunate it was taht these channels had not been completely blocked. A narrow passage lay open between two sunken ships. With grteat skill Prien steered through the swirling waters. The shore was close. A man on a bicycle could be seen going home along the coast road. Then suddenly tehwhole bay opened out. Kirk Sound was passed. They were in. There under the land to the north could be seen the great shadow of a battleship lying on the water, with the great mast rising above it like a piece of filligree on a black cloth. Near, nearer--all tubes clear--no alarm, no sound but the lay of the water, the low hiss of air pressure and the sharp click of a tube lever. Fire!--five seconds--ten seconds--twenty seconds. Then came a shattering explosion, and a great pillar of water rose in the darkness. Prien waited some minutes to fire another salvo. Tubes ready. Fire! The torpedoes hit amidshipsi, and there followed a series of crashing explosions. H.M.S. Royal Oak sank, with the loss of 786 officers and men, including Rear Admiral H.E.C. Blagrove (Second Battle Squadron). U-47 crept quietly away back through the gap. A blockship arrived twenty-four hours later.

This episode, which must be regarded as a feat of arms on teh part of the German U-boat commander, gave a shock to public opinion...

From The Gathering Storm...

Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Purchase Life Insurance

Finally...

Download Superfreakonomics chapter 5

Global Warming

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.txt

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State of the Climate | Global Analysis | September 2009:

Global Highlights

• The combined global land and ocean surface temperature for September 2009 was 0.62°C (1.12°F) above the 20th Century average of 15.0°C (59.0°F). This was the second warmest September on record, behind 2005, and the 33rd consecutive September with a global temperature above the 20th Century average. The last below-average September occurred in 1976.

• The global land surface temperature for September 2009 was 0.97°C (1.75°F) above the 20th Century average of 12.0°C (53.6°F), and ranked as the second warmest September on record, also behind 2005. The worldwide ocean temperature tied with 2004 as the fifth warmest September on record, 0.50°C (0.90°F) above the 20th Century average of 16.2°C (61.1°F). Warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures were widespread, particularly in lower latitudes. The near-Antarctic southern ocean and the Gulf of Alaska featured notable cooler-than-average temperatures.

• For the year to date, the global combined land and ocean surface temperature of 14.7°C (58.5°F) was the sixth-warmest January-through-September period on record. This value is 0.55°C (0.99°F) above the 20th Century average.

• A weak El Niño persisted across the equatorial Pacific Ocean during September. Sea surface temperature observations in the equatorial Pacific Ocean during the month remained above average. According to NOAA's Climate Prediction Center, El Niño is expected to strengthen and last through the Northern Hemisphere winter of 2009-2010.

Paul Krugman on Superfreakonomics on Climate

Paul Krugman writes:

Superfreakonomics on climate, part 1: OK, I’m working my way through the climate chapter.... The chapter opens with the “global cooling” story — the claim that 30 years ago there was a scientific consensus that the planet was cooling, comparable to the current consensus that it’s warming. Um, no.... To the extent that there was a consensus, it was that there wasn’t much evidence for anything.... What you have today is a massive research program involving thousands of scientists and many peer-reviewed publications, with all major international bodies agreeing that man-made global warming is real. You can, if you insist, dismiss it all as a gigantic hoax or whatever--but it’s nothing like the isolated 70s speculations about cooling.

And then we come to a bit of economics.... Yikes. I read [Marty] Weitzman’s paper... it’s making exactly the opposite of the point they’re implying it makes. Weitzman’s argument is that uncertainty about the extent of global warming makes the case for drastic action stronger, not weaker. And here’s what he says about the timing of action:

The conventional economic advice of spending modestly on abatement now but gradually ramping up expenditures over time is an extreme lower bound on what is reasonable rather than a best estimate of what is reasonable.

Again, we’re not even getting into substance — just the basic issue of representing correctly what other people said.

Six Questions for Levitt and Dubner (More Superfreakonomics Blogging)

Aha. A friend has sent me a scan of what he calls the "particularly egregious" pages 186-7 of Steve Levitt's and Steve Dubner's Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance:

Indeed, I find that I have six questions for them about these two pages:

1: "Wood notes that the most authoritative literature on the subject suggests a rise of about one nd a half feet by 2100..." I had thought that the most authoritative estimates suggest a 1 to 7 feet rise in sea levels by 2100--not 1.5 feet. Am I wrong?

2: "Ken Caldiera... mentions a most surprising enviromental scourge: trees..." I grant that covering the reflective greenland ice sheet with green leaves might not be a good idea. But surely Ken Caldeira of Stanford did not say that your average tree is doing less to cool the earth by sucking up carbon dioxide than if the tree were cut down and decomposed and some other more-reflective typical use were made of its spot, is he?

3: "Then there's this little-discussed fact about global warming: while the drumbeat of doom has grown louder over the past several years, the average global temperature during that time has in fact decreased..." As best as I can see from http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.txt, this year is:

• 1/5 of a degree F warmer than last year
• the same temperature as 2007 and 2006
• 1/7 of a degree F cooler than 2005
• 1/10 of a degree F warmer than 2004
• the same temperature as 2003 and 2002
• 1/7 of a degree F warmer than 2001
• 2/5 of a degree warmer than 1999 and 2000
• the same temperature as 1998
• and warmer than every single other year since the start of the Industrial Revolution--a full degree F warmer than 1960, for example.

How do you get from that temperature record to the statement that "over the past several years... average global temperature... has in fact decreased"?

4: "coal is so cheap that trying to generate electricity without it would be economic suicide..." That coal is cheap does not mean that moving away from it would be "economic suicide." That depends on (a) how large a share of total costs are energy costs, and (b) how expensive the long-run alternatives to coal turn out to be. And that is what we are trying to figure out. What definition of "economic suicide" are you using?

5: "The problem with solar cells is that they are black... designed to absorb light from the sun.... But only about 12 percent gets turned into electricity, and the rest... contributes to global warming." Surely the heat energy reradiated from a solar panel is a small fraction of the heat trapped by all the carbon dioxide that would be produced by the coal-fired plants that would otherwise generate the electricity, isn't it?

6: "The energy consumed by building the thousands of new solar plants necessary to replace coal-burning and other power plants would create a huge long-term 'warming debt'." I had thought that practically none of the power plants that we will use in 2050 are now in operation, and that building them--whether for open-carbon cycle, closed-carbon cycle, or non-carbon--will cost about the same amount of energy, and thus that there is no significant extra power-plant construction debt from going green in our new power-plant construction over the nezt forty years as long as it is done gradually. Am I wrong?

Steve Levitt on His Unpublished Book, Freakonomics, and Climate Change

Steve Levitt writes, about his unpublished book:

The Rumors of Our Global-Warming Denial Are Greatly Exaggerated: [W]e believe that rising global temperatures are a man-made phenomenon and that global warming is an important issue to solve. Where we differ from the critics is in our view of the most effective solutions to this problem. Meaningfully reducing global carbon emissions has proven to be difficult, if not impossible. This isn’t likely to change, for the reasons we discuss in the book. Consequently, other approaches represent a more promising path to lowering the Earth’s temperature. The critics are implying that we dismiss any threats from global warming; but the entire point of our chapter is to discuss global-warming solutions, so obviously that’s not the case.

The statements being circulated create the false impression that our analysis of the global-warming crisis is ideological and unscientific. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Ummm...

Perhaps then they should halt distribution, and get a new and very different dust jacket for the book? After all, "global cooling" are the first two words of their subtitle:

Correspondence on Global Warming and Superfreakonomics

Steve Dubner writes:

Brad,

It is amazing to see how quickly and thoroughly Romm's extremely misleading attack has spread, to the point where even independent thinkers like you accept it on face value. His attack is full of deception and outright lies. He makes it sound as if we somehow twisted and abused Caldeira's research; nothing could be further from the truth. We will have to clear this up publicly, although as you suggest it will be hard to put out this fire no matter how wrongfully set. This is politics that's being played now, nothing else. Also: yes, Romm posted a PDF of the chapter on his website, which the publisher, in its routine effort to pull pirated copies of its copyrighted material off the web, asked him to take down. As far as I know, it was never on Amazon; there's been no censoring; we are talking about a book that hasn't yet been published (when it is, I assume Amazon will post the searchable pages, as is typical), but Romm has done a great job of getting people to believe that a book they haven't read is full of errors.

I reply:

Brad DeLong to Stephen

Re: "It is amazing to see how quickly and thoroughly Romm's extremely misleading attack has spread, to the point where even independent thinkers like you accept it on face value..."

As I said, I can't read your chapter--by your publisher's choice.

That's very bad for you: Romm's posting your chapter and a link to it is a way for him to establish credibility--"see for yourself"; your publisher's pulling it down is a way to diminish yours.

Over this weekend, people's views are gelling--Paul Krugman's, for example--while your voice isn't being heard, and once people's views are gelled, it takes a huge amount of evidence and the right kinds of psychological pressure to ungell them.

Thus, for example, I would love to believe in Myrhvold and in cheap geoengineering solutions. But I come from Berkeley, where Richard Muller is the dominant public-intellectual voice on geoengineering, and he is very knowledgeable and very skeptical. My second cousin Tom Kalil does solar panels and so forth for a living at OSTP. The reaction of the climate people I know to Myrhvold on solar panels, whom Romm says you quote:

"A lot of the things that people say would be good things probably aren’t,” Myrhvold says. As an example he points to solar power. “The problem with solar cells is that they’re black, because they are designed to absorb light from the sun. But only about 12% gets turned into electricity, and the rest is reradiated as heat — which contributed to global warming..."

is simply unprintable--that it's like claiming that curve balls curve because of photon pressure from the stadium lights.

So given what is flowing past my computer screen at the moment, it looks very much to me as though you were simply hornswoggled by Myrhvold and company, who have formed their own tight self-reinforcing intellectual community reinforcing each other's beliefs up there in Seattle. There is nothing I can see contradicting that interpretation, and a bunch of things from Romm and others confirming it.

The place where I would concentrate, if I were you, would be Stanford's Ken Caldeira. Romm claims:

"[Caldeira] writes me: 'If you talk all day, and somebody picks a half dozen quotes without providing context because they want to make a provocative and controversial chapter, there is not much you can do.' One sentence about Caldeira in particular is the exact opposite of what he believes (page 184): 'Yet his research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight.' Levitt and Dubner didn’t run this quote by Caldeira, and when he saw a version from Myrhvold, he objected to it. But Levitt and Dubner apparently wanted to keep it very badly — it even makes the SuperFreakonomics Table of Contents in the Chapter Five summary “Is carbon dioxide the wrong villain?...”

If your principal experts truly do repudiate the interpretation you place on their work, that's very bad for you...

links for 2009-10-17

• Daniel Davies: Superfreakonomics Review
  This is going to be a lot shorter than the Freakonomics one, and it is basically going to consist of this link, via the Paul Krugman blog, and the observation that if you find yourself writing, in all seriousness, as a practical proposal, the phrase "pumping large quantities of sulphur dioxide into the Earth’s stratosphere through an 18-mile-long hose, held up by helium balloons", it is probably time to take a step back and ask yourself if something has gone a little bit wrong with your life.
• Tim Lambert: Why Everything in Superfreakonomics About Global Warming Is Wrong
• Corbin Hiar: The Freaky Science of SuperFreakonomics
  Dubner, who also writes a popular New York Times blog with Levitt, dismissed Romm's post in an email to me yesterday as "hard to take seriously"...
• Matthew Yglesias: Right-Wing Anti-Anti-Racism
  If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times, but it’s continually striking how thoroughly defined modern American conservatism is by opposition to opposition to racism. Isaac Chotiner observes a National Review article chuckling over the fact that John Derbyshire’s bigotry discomfits liberals while Adam Server brings us folks who wouldn’t necessary make the kind of racist statements Rush Limbaugh makes nonetheless circling the wagons to defend him from his critics. Next time Republican strategists are wondering why Michael Steele’s embrace of hip slang hasn’t brought black people flocking to their doors, conservatives might want to consider some of this behavior. I suspect it’s not helping the right with its endless quest to woo Jews, either.
• Andrew Gelman on Steve Levitt, the "all else equal" fallacy, one more time (this time using econ jargon), and also a discussion of the perils of "crossover" arguments
• Gawker: The Washington Post Has the Worst Opinion Section in America
• Andrew Gelman: The two incompatible options of empirical microeconomics
• Bruce Bartlett: Supply-Side Economics, R.I.P.
• David Roberts: How CBO budget scoring devalues efficiency ... WITH PUPPIES!
• Kristina Peterson: AIG Bonuses Were a Treasury 'Failure,' Barofsky Says
• Paul Krugman: A Hatchet Job So Bad It’s Good
• Justin Wolfers: Nickeled and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
• Joe Romm: Error-riddled ‘Superfreakonomics’: New book pushes global cooling myths, sheer illogic, and “patent nonsense”
• Joe Romm: Error-riddled ‘Superfreakonomics’, Part 2: Who else have Nathan Myhrvold and the Groupthinkers at Intellectual Ventures duped and confused? Would you believe Bill Gates and Warren Buffett? « Climate Progress
• Union of Concerned Scientists: New Book "SuperFreakonomics" Mischaracterizes Climate Science
• Why the Lehrer Newshour Should Stop Broadcasting Now...
  Richard Rahn, recently had a segment on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer canceled. In this case, however, it wasn't because he had the wrong point of view, but because the show found a better guest to say the same thing. Again, this is part of the game. Policy wonks all know that if a producer can bag a congressman or senator to make his point he is going to get bumped. No problem. What is funny about Richard's experience is that he wasn't bumped for a bigger name, but for another economist prepared to make his points in the form of rap.... "We just learned that Russ Roberts, a professor of economics at George Mason University, who was our second choice for the anti-Keynes position, is shooting a rap video about Keynes and Hayek next week in New York. He has written the lyrics (they are quite good), hired rappers and musicians, and tapped professional music video producers -- there will be bling, babes, limos, the works"...
• Brad Johnson: SuperFreakonomics Gets Climate Change Super Freaking Wrong
• EtherPad: Realtime Collaborative Text Editing
• Superfreakonomics Chapter 5: What Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo Have in Common :EnviroKnow
• Defoe: A Journal of the Plague Year
• Defoe: Memoirs of a Cavalier
• Edmund Wilson: To the Finland Station
• Council of Economic Advisers Staff

Ezra Klein's Levitt and Dubner Smackdown

Ezra has a copy of the book, and is a really unhappy camper:

Ezra Klein: The Shoddy Statistics of Super Freakonomics: Super Freakonomics is getting a lot of flak for its flip contrarianism on climate change, most of which seems based on incorrectly believing solar panels are black (they're blue, and this has surprisingly large energy implications) and misquoting important climate scientists. But before people begin believing that the problem with Super Freakonomics is that it annoys environmentalists, let's be clear: The problem with Super Freakonomics is it prefers an interesting story to an accurate one... from the very first story on the very first page of the book....

Take, for example, a night of drinking at a friend's house. At the end of the night, you decide against driving home. This decision, the book says, seems "really, really easy." As you might have guessed, we're about to learn that it's not so easy. At least if you mangle your statistics. The next few pages purport to prove that drunk walking is eight times more dangerous than drunk driving....

It's terrifically shoddy statistical work. You'd get dinged for this in a college class. But it's in a book written by a celebrated economist and a leading journalist. Moreover, the topic isn't whether people prefer chocolate or vanilla, but whether people should drive drunk. It is shoddy statistical work, in other words, that allows people to conclude that respected authorities believe it is safer for them to drive home drunk than walk home drunk. It's shoddy statistical work that could literally kill somebody. That makes it more than bad statistics. It makes it irresponsible.

But hey, it makes for a fun and unexpected opener.

Recipes for Recovery

Sam Brittan says something smart:

Sam Brittan’s Recipe for Recovery: Commercial banks certainly worsened the recession by greedily seeking higher returns than those provided by market interest rates; and they can put grit in the recovery by refusing to lend. I can only suggest making Paul Krugman, the radical Keynesian economist, Comptroller of the US Currency with over-reaching powers to take over old banks and initiate new ones, with similar appointments in other countries...

Paul Krugman says "ahem!":

I would... quarrel with designating me a “radical Keynesian.”... A perfectly standard New Keynesian model, with intertemporal optimization and all that — the kind of model that is standard in freshwater courses — says that under current conditions fiscal stimulus should be very strong, much stronger than what we’re actually doing. Ryan Lizza’s piece on the Obama economics team makes it clear that Christina Romer — whom nobody would call radical — reached more or less the same conclusions in her economic analysis that I did. The point is that what passes for “sound” economics these days (and maybe most days) isn’t actually sound economics — it’s economic analysis trimmed and softened to fit political realities/prejudices. Questioning that notion of soundness isn’t being radical; it’s just being intellectually honest.

To put it another way, Milton Friedman and Jacob Viner would fit Brittan's definition of "radical Keynesian" these days.

You gotta get demand up. You can do it by deficit spending. You can do it by convincing banks to lend and businesses to borrow. But you gotta do it somehow, by some means.

Solar Panels: John O'Donnell on Nathan Myhrvold, Steve Levitt, and Steve Dubner

John O'Donnell:

Error-riddled ‘Superfreakonomics’: New book pushes global cooling myths, sheer illogic, and “patent nonsense” — and the primary climatologist it relies on, Ken Caldeira, says “it is an inaccurate portrayal of me” and “misleading” in “many” places: Yes Nathan is howlingly off base.  Not because solar panels are (whatever cover with whatever relative emissivity), but because solar panels, like wind turbines and solar thermal power plants, eliminate the emission of CO2 which would otherwise occur from electricity production.

As Ken Caldeira so grippingly points out (and I tried to make graphically clear in my Stanford talk last year) , each molecule of CO2 released thermal energy when it was formed — that’s why we formed it.  In the case of electricity generation, about 1/3 of its thermal energy went out a wire as electric power, the rest was released promptly as waste heat.  But each molecule of CO2, during its subsequent lifetime in the atmosphere, traps 100,000 times more heat than was released during its formation.

A hundred thousand is a big number.  It means that running a handheld electric hairdryer on US grid electricity delivers a planet-warming punch comparable to [the heat directly emitted by] two Boeing 747s operating at full takeoff power for the same time period.  The warming is delivered over time, not promptly, but that don’t matter; the planetary heating is accrued, the accountants would say, the moment you hit the switch.

The thermal energy balance for a solar panel runs vastly in the other direction.  If our solar panel is pure black, and 14% efficient, then for each kWh of electric power that comes out, there are 7 kWh of heat that were absorbed and radiated.  But each kWh it generates it eliminates the release of 1.4 pounds of CO2, which during its lifetime in the atmosphere will absorb 210,000 kWh of heat.  So the energy balance for the solar panel (when it’s connected to the US grid) is about NEGATIVE 209,993 kWh(heat) per kWh(electric) — since some fossil power plant somewhere is being turned down based on its generation. And hey, if it’s blue instead of black, that might increase to negative 209,995 kWh.

Levitt and Dubner Disarm Themselves in Their Battle of Wits with Joe Romm...

Joe Romm writes:

Error-riddled ‘Superfreakonomics’: New book pushes global cooling myths, sheer illogic, and “patent nonsense” — and the primary climatologist it relies on, Ken Caldeira, says “it is an inaccurate portrayal of me” and “misleading” in “many” places. « Climate Progress: The reason I’m calling Levitt and Dubner Superfreaks for short is that Chapter Five of SuperFreakonomics, the “Global Cooling” chapter — aka “What do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo have in common?” — has precious little economics, and what it does have is simply wrong.  So the book could easily have been titled Superfreaks.  [Note:  Most of the book is searchable online.  At the request of the publisher, I have taken down the PDF of the chapter]...

I want to read the Superfreakonomics chapter on climate change this morning. Steve Levitt and Steve Dubner's publisher is now keeping me from doing so.

That is a bad thing to do--and something that is, I think, very bad for Levitt and Dubner (if possibly good for their publisher's bank account). I can read Romm on Levitt and Dubner. I can't read Levitt and Dubner. And that is very bad for Levitt and Dubner: if I can't read them, Romm's argument that they (a) were sold a bill of goods by Nathan Myhrvold and company who do not understand orders of magnitude and (b) misrepresented the views of Stanford's Ken Caldeira win by default.

UPDATE: And Paul Krugman weighs in:

Paul Krugman:

A counterintuitive train wreck - Paul Krugman Blog: Uh oh. I trust Joe Romm on climate — and his verdict on Superfreakonomics is pretty damning. I’ll get to work on the book myself, but it doesn’t look good.

At first glance, though, what it looks like is that Levitt and Dubner have fallen into the trap of counterintuitiveness. For a long time, there’s been an accepted way for commentators on politics and to some extent economics to distinguish themselves: by shocking the bourgeoisie, in ways that of course aren’t really dangerous. Ann Coulter is making sense! Bush is good for the environment! You get the idea.

Clever snark like this can get you a long way in career terms — but the trick is knowing when to stop. It’s one thing to do this on relatively inconsequential media or cultural issues. But if you’re going to get into issues that are both important and the subject of serious study, like the fate of the planet, you’d better be very careful not to stray over the line between being counterintuitive and being just plain, unforgivably wrong.

It looks as if Superfreakonomics has gone way over that line.

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SECOND UPDATE: Joe Romm:

Climate Progress: [S]ince my original post and various other debunkings around the web, the publisher has stopped Amazon from allowing people to search the book.... I don’t know of a single instance where searching was allowed and then stopped.  It seems to me the publisher must be concerned that bloggers and others could actually see and quote the myriad errors and sheer illogic and patent nonsense for themselves...

This is very bad for Levitt and Dubner. They need to get on the horn to their publisher immediately, and get access restored.

To respond by shutting off internet access to the book may or may not be good for short-term sales, but it means that Romm's story becomes the default story for all time...

links for 2009-10-16

• Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill: Their Finest Hour
• Montesquieu offers a master class in snark
• Ferdinand Lasalle: The Working Man's Programme
• Richard Kahlenberg: Kristof’s Misplaced War on Teacher Unions
• Michael Tomasky: You really won't believe this one; I mean you really, really won't believe it
• Via TNH: Clementine Literature: Early Christian Fanfic
• Econ 115 Lecture Notes: October 15, 2009: World War II Powerpoints
  Download now or preview on posterous 20091015 115 slides 2.doc (4618 KB) ...
• The Globe, for the Map Quiz
  Eastern and Western Hemispheres... See and download the full gallery on posterous ...

Econ 115 Lecture Notes: October 13, 2009: Tyrannies

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20091015 slouch 18.pdf

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Lecture Audio: Econ 115-13--Tyrannies (10.13.2009 12-51-22 PM)

More Lies from William Saletan...

William Saletan starts his column today with more lies:

Human Nature : Polanski: Three Questions: Some of you are mischaracterizing what I wrote on Tuesday...

What Saletan wrote on Tuesday:

Human Nature : The Polanski Affair: The Times reports that the authorities treated Polanski "not so much as a sexual assailant but as ... a normally responsible person who had shown terrible judgment by having sex with a very young, but sophisticated, girl." The probation officers' report "quoted a pair of psychiatrists as saying that Mr. Polanski was not ‘a pedophile,' "and it concluded that his offense "appears to have been spontaneous and an exercise of poor judgment by the defendant." That's an entirely reasonable assessment of the incident. There's a difference between pedophilia and taking advantage of somebody who's old enough to be interested in sex but too young to judge the physical and emotional risks of messing around. If the legal officers and moral critics of the 1970s saw that distinction more clearly than we do, the shame is ours.

What Saletan says today:

Human Nature : Polanski: Three Questions: One [question] is whether Polanski raped Samantha Geimer outright... by coercion.... I can't pretend to resolve the facts.... But I should be clear: If the case is ever fully presented and Polanski is proved guilty of rape, he should be put away for a long time, and that's that...

And then at the end of his column he comes clean:

In my first post on this subject, I mentioned that the probation report said Polanski's offense "appears to have been spontaneous and an exercise of poor judgment by the defendant." I then wrote: "That's an entirely reasonable assessment of the incident." I shouldn't have written that sentence, because it characterized the whole case and thereby took a position on the first question, which wasn't my point and on which I had no expertise.

But it was your point, William--a huge honking point at that.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?