It’s time again for weekend reflections, which makes space for longer than usual comments on any topic. As always, civilised discussion and no coarse language. I’ve cut off a thread-derailing discussion of the Pinochet dictatorship on another post, but those so inclined can go at it here, bearing in mind the comments policy and the requirement for civility.
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John Quiggin 
Obama got the Nobel peace prize, I think it may hurt him politically though.
Doubtful, Rationalist.
Grsist to the mill of those who don’t like him already, but others will find ways of living with it if not justifying it. Americans like winning stuff as much as anyone else and this may prompt some to work harder to support his agenda.
John, it seems Obama’s biggest headache will now be reducing the ‘trade deficit’ for in 2009 imports will be cutting some $400 billion off GDP. But the true cost of the ‘trade deficit’ over the last decade has been the resulting $1.5 trillion shrinking of the economy. And Obama must find ways to create more demand for USA made goods and service to correct the imbalance in the trade deficit whereby imports are exceeding exports otherwise the US recession will just drag on.
See the ABC story “Obama’s win ‘diminishes Nobel Prize credibility'”.
Perhaps, the issue is that Europe (and the world) are simply thankful to see any decent President after Bush. However, Obama’s peace prize is a joke no matter what way you look at it. He has done nothing and can never do anything. Is there peace yet in Afghanistan, Iraq or Israel/Palestine?
The bottom line is that no individual can create peace and national figureheads are no different in this regard. They are as powerless as the rest of us against the mass forces of history. The very idea of the prize is based upon a series of misconceptions about the nature of history.
Ikonoclast, Republic Govenor Tim Pawlenty thinks otherwise and congratulated Obama for winning the award.
Just over 2 weeks ago, the UN Environment Program put out a media release about the latest climate science, clearly timed to contribute to the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh.
The media release announced findings from the Climate Change Science Compendium 2009, which reviews 400 major scientific works on earth systems and climate released through peer-reviewed literature or from research institutions over the last three years, since the close of research for consideration by the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, the current global scientific benchmark.
Amazingly, 16 days later, Google shows that there have been only 37 media mentions of the Compendium from the whole world – and some of them are derisory comments from sceptics. While the wire services did carry the story, it seems that the only major English-laguage papers to cover it are WaPo, Globe and Mail, and the Telegraph.
This is amazing because the Compendium shows that the observed reality of climate change is unfolding at or above the most pessimistic projections of the IPCC, and events such as glacier and ice sheet melting are exceeding predictions.
Amongst the significant points:
* Losses of tropical and temperate mountain glaciers affect perhaps 20 percent to 25 percent of the global human population in terms of drinking water, irrigation and hydro-power.
* The growth in carbon dioxide emissions from energy and industry has exceeded even the most fossil-fuel intensive scenario developed by the IPCC at the end of the 1990s. Global emissions were growing by 1.1 percent each year from 1990-1999 and this accelerated to 3.5 percent per year from 2000-2007.
* Growth of the global economy in the early 2000s and an increase in its carbon intensity (emissions per unit of growth), combined with a decrease in the capacity of ecosystems on land and the oceans to act as carbon “sinks”, have led to a rapid increase in the concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This has contributed to sooner-than-expected impacts including faster sea-level rise, ocean acidification, melting Arctic sea ice, warming of polar land masses, freshening of ocean currents and shifts in the circulation patterns of the oceans and atmosphere.
* Until the summer of 2007, most models projected an ice-free September for the Arctic Ocean towards the end of the current century. Reconsideration based on current trends has led to speculation that this could occur as soon as 2030.
It appears that all the journalists were so focussed on watching what the G20 leaders said they would do about climate change to actually notice the change that has been happening.
Has anyone considered the opening of the north west passage as a future contributor to global trade and growth?
Ikonoclast, even McCain has openly congratulated Obama for winning the Nobel Prize saying ‘as Americans, we’re proud when our president receives an award of that prestigious category’.
Ikonoclast, I forgot to mention Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper also thinks Obama is worthy of such an award saying “I think it’s a tremendous award to somebody who has obviously accomplished a great deal in his life’.
To quote some other internet commentators…
by keeping Sarah Palin out of the White House, Obama may have done more for world peace than any other living human, and…
it’s not so much Obama winning the Peace Prize, as Bush winning the “F#ck You” Prize.
of course people have, and there’s a very long (and very disturbing) New York Times article from a couple of years ago on it if you’d care to look it up. having said that, only an outright psychopath (or perhaps a wanton message-board troll) would regard worldwide crop failures, mass starvation, and the displacement of literally millions of people due to rising sea levels as somehow a worthwhile trade off for the opening of some polar sea lanes.
Canberra Boy #6, the post immediately following yours #7 illustrates the inanity we’re up against. Keep fighting the good fight but make survival plans. I don’t know what forces are preventing the Media from reporting the full extent of the peril Humanity faces but they will be held to account one day.
Canberra boy at #6, I reckon Mark at Lavartus Prodeo is on track:
@Salient Green
One possible reason that it wasn’t reported is that it wasn’t seen as news: everybody who is even slightly aware of the facts knows that climate change is unfolding faster and worse than predicted. UNEP puts out a report with evidence from hundreds of scientists? So what?
Anyone who questions the Obama Peace Prize is a terrorist, according to a top official in the Democratic Party.
Obama has been pretty peaceful. Sure he is waging a war in Afghanistan but that’s a “good war” and he didn’t start it and he is trying to thump the bad guys good and hard (may they rest in peace) so that the Afghan people can live in peace. And Obama brought peace to the minds of millions of Democrats that were going to go completely bonkers if the republicans won the presidency again. If Obama can avoid starting any new wars then next year I think he should get the peace prize again.
@Rationalist
Quite some time ago, actually
https://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2007/01/31/melting-the-arctic-ice/
Update, Update, Update yesterday former Liberal Party Director was highly critical of the way many WA Liberals are conducting themselves and the damage they are doing to the Party. But something tells this is more of a power struggle between the East v West Liberal factions rather than just Turnbull’s position on climate change.
@TerjeP (say tay-a)
That’s a pretty low hurdle, Terje. Robert Mugabe and Kim Jong Il would have no difficulty meeting that criterion. Perhaps, then, all world leaders should get one, except those actually starting wars. We could all then talk about those few who failed to win the prize.
Caught Bolt on Insiders – if you want inanity on climate science you need look no further.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/10/10/792000/-UN-Millions-Will-Starve-Rich-Nations-Slash-Food-Aid
Obama wins peace prize as the US cuts $800 million from its food aid budget over last year.
During that year the number of people in need of food aid has increased by 150 million.
The cuts to the US contribution to the world food program represents three quarters of Goldman Sach’s $1.2 billion in government-funded executive bonuses for the year!!!
Head of UN world food program warns that millions will starve:
Well now might be a good time for them to consider growing their own food, instead of hacking each other to death with machetes/having socialist revolutions/waging guerrilla warfare/carrying out 5-year plans etc etc, all carried out with the implicit blessing of the radical left.
Or maybe they could take the advice of the Keynesians, and start “demanding” more, to stimulate aggregate demand. Oh, wait a second, they can’t – because they haven’t produced anything! What a spanner in the works, you know, having to produce goods which are then exchanged for other goods – sounds like one of those radical “Austrian” ideas…
Although $1.2 billion certainly sounds like a lot, it’s not much compared to the $700 billion that the US government pissed up the wall in the name of “stimulating” the economy (not to mention Australia’s own $42 billion vote-buying scheme). Oh, those poor US citizens, with their falling aggregate demand – quick, get the economic defibrillator, stat! We can’t have these rich Westerners stop buying SUVs and TV sets, or else the world economy would collapse!
Tax payer-financed bailouts suck, but you guys are the ones asking for more government redistribution, and then you chuck a tantrum when it inevitably ends up going to the people with the greatest political clout (who neither need nor deserve it). “Oh, but if only we had the right people in charge…”
Also, the UN should shut up and get back to doing what it does best, i.e. rigging elections in Afghanistan.
A hint, Sebastian. You’re on the losing side of the debate, and snarks like the above aren’t going to help you. Try arguing in a way that might actually convince people. One thing that won’t work at all well (believe me on this) is the libertarian version of “communism didn’t fail, it was never really tried”.
John, I just know you’re going to love the latest from the BBC’s “climate correspondent”, giving the Oz a run for its money.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm
@Sebastian
Ill second JQs comments Sebastian and Ill go so far as to suggest you really dont know what you want…but Ill try to help. What you dont want is an unconstrained state run economy. What else you dont want is an unconstrained market run economy. What you do want is an economy run according to the rule of law. One thing I have noticed is that liberalists make the mistake of presupposing that deregulation delivers more power to individuals or businesses and diverts power away from governments. They have a very narrow view on that. De-regulation often makes possible greater corruption of governments by making permissable more actions than would otherwise exist (in other words delivers more power to governments) …so instead of deregulation delivering freedom to individuals it may deliver an even worse state oppression. This liberalists conveniently ignore in arguing their one cure for all diseases. There is no cure except effective rule of law and regulation Sebastian. You may harp on all you like about the left and communism but your knowledge barely touches the surface. The communist state of Russia under Stalin was no such thing. It was closer, far closer to fascism – and it was NO different to the same fascism that emerged with the McCarthy trials in the US. Are you hearing me Sebastian??. Do you think the russians wanted to live like that anymore than innocents were persecuted by McCarthyism in the United States??. The lesson here is that there were no communist enemies – that fear is a method of control and that invariably it emerges from leaders seeking control. The left right argument is sham, for all the division that has been caused in its name. Its the rule of law that is important for order in society, to be overturned by neither a fascist power hungry state nor an unconstrained oligarch controlled market.
The choice is yours Sebastian but your current enemies are all, sadly, myths.
@jquiggin
Having generally observed the 1 comment/day limit, I must say it is difficult to face my accusers with such a handicap.
As for my snarks, well, let’s just say that I don’t expect anyone on this blog is going to change their mind about anything, so can’t really see the point of arguing delicately. Although rest assured, when debating in person, face to face, I let my inner loveliness shine through, to charm and disarm my opponents.
I well and truly realise that I’m on the losing side of the debate, despite the fact we’re a lot closer to being correct. Of course, correctness has never been a prerequisite to winning a debate of this sort (case in point – the New Deal ending/mitigating the Great Depression). I guess most people are willing to suspend rationality if they get a slice of government largesse out of it.
As for the libertarian version of the communist argument, I remain a skeptic with respect to free markets, although this skepticism is heavily outweighed by my repeatedly justified skepticism about governments. With respect to the 1890s Australian depression and the post to which you linked in one of your blogs, it was at its heart based in skepticism. The question was if there were any references available from a non-Keynesian viewpoint (of which there is a utter dearth). Generally those that write on this topic are all a bunch of New Deal loving state-worshippers, which immediately rules them out as being in any way objective.
Alice, it’s one thing to feed the trolls, another to lay out a smorgasbord.
Gerard – you can lead some to a smorgasboard..but you cant always make them think.
@jquiggin
The claim is almost but not quite correct. The material and political pre-requisites [material abundance, incipient dissolution of class society on a world scale] did not (and still do not) obtain. That’s why it ‘wasn’t tried’. It couldn’t be. Claims that it was on the agenda were pure demagoguery on the part of autocrats.
What occurred instead were a series of reactive populist garrison states, always in response to the complete failure of the existing ruling classes to maintain the coherence necessary to foreclose chaos. Since in each of these jurisdictions, there was no sustained history of bourgeois democratic rule, nor any ubiquitous social foundation for such rule, nor even any institution that could establish the coherence necessary to reconcile the divisions withing the populace, the re-establishment of state power could only be through civil war and direct coercion.
Description in western political discourse of these developments as instantiations of attempts at ‘communism’ or ‘socialism’ is either ignorance or a politcal claim aimed at establishing that the persistent rule of the property-owning classes and their states represent the best of all possible worlds.
@gerard
I saw it, and it’s so ignorant it’s hard to believe the BBC could run it, let alone describe a TV weather guy as “climate correspondent”. The guy apparently hasn’t heard of El Nino.
@jquiggin
And it’s facinating in a really queasy sort of way to watch how Mojib Latif’s original comments about the possibility of atmospheric temperatures possibly staying steady for a time and the media consequences of that have been distorted by the media and the denialosphere. Check out this link http://climatesight.org/2009/10/07/a-pretty-typical-story/
climatesight is a great blog from a Canadian schoolgirl and aspiring climate scientist. Read the tone and style of what she writes. Its comforting to know there are such mature young people out there with their heads screwed on right. Something for us ‘Grown Ups’ to think about.
Sebastian, if you’re going to claim that the New Deal did not have significant beneficial effects during the Great Depression then you have to explain why, when Roosevelt started to reverse the ND in 36-37 in the name of balancing the budget, the economy promptly went into a tailspin once more.
And while correlation/causation is the topic, what is it with the high correlation between Austrianism and rudeness on the intertubes? I think it’s something to do with their embrace of “praxeology” – anyone capable of believing that pure deduction from unverifiable first principles is more capable of producing real-world-applicable results than empirical methods will have no answer to the falsification of their results other than denial and abuse.
@James
A tightening of monetary policy by the Fed in the 1936-37 period (in order to combat rising inflation from the FDR administration’s earlier credit expansion) adequately explains the 1937 recession. This authority came from the Banking Act of 1935, a New Deal program. Given that so many of the New Deal programs consisted of price-fixing policies or cartelisation, I don’t see how they contributed in any way to economic growth.
Contributing to this were various new types of pro-labour legislation that made it more costly to hire workers, and no doubt an atmosphere of business uncertainty played a part. Not to mention new taxes – and of course, one fact that Keynesian economists always gloss over when condemning “laissez faire” Herbert Hoover for trying to balance the budget at the start of the Great Depression, is that he did so not by cutting spending, but by raising taxes! That’s a recipe for disaster, even for Keynesian economists.
If you’re talking about a fall in GDP, well as I recall government spending is part of the national income identity, so cutting deficit-financed spending would necessarily involve a fall in GDP. If your goal is simply to inflate GDP figures for the sake of it, I don’t see how that’s going to actually help anyone.
I’m personally not a big fan of Austrian apriorism (nor their rejection of probability theory, nor their rejection of mathematics/empirical methods) but then again I’d also say that the reliance on econometric methods to extract mangled, spurious results is overrated too.
At any rate, a Keynesian who calls Austrian theories “unverifiable” is a hypocrite, since (as you have just demonstrated) whenever Keynesian methods don’t work, they have the Golden Escape Clause – “they didn’t spend enough”. Japan has been suffering from this misdiagnosis for years now.
Sebastian,
I would not call many of the measures “pro-labour”. It is not “pro-labour” to make it difficult and expensive to hire people. The measures were “pro-union”, and in particular “pro-large union”.
ty Canberra Boy #6 for your post – I certainly didn’t know about this until you posted
@Sebastian
The facts are not on your side.
Tightening of monetary policy in a recession is itself an anti-Keynesian policy response, so that argument supports, not undermines, a Keynesian case.
Unemployment dropped as GDP rose during the New Deal period. So did business investment and industrial production.
And please point me towards my alleged hypocrisy. Where did I say “they didn’t spend enough”? Or retract your abuse.
I find the hate has been stirred up Obama a continual revelation. The peace prize has always been a nebulous award – obviously you don’t have to single-handedly create lasting world peace to get it – and it often seems to be given more for a hopeful move in the right direction than for enduring achievements, like you might get in say Physics. However, the decision to close Guantanamo and other torture operations qualifies on it’s own for me, and the withdrawal from Iraq tops it off. I guess that for most of Obama’s enemies these same decisions are just plain crazy, as probably is the idea of peace anyway.
Jim,
The prize is meant to be for accomplishments, not for ideas of what may happen in the future. Nominations closed 11 days after he was sworn in, so the prize has been awarded for the “accomplishments” of his first 11 days? Odd, at best.
As an addition, I would hope that he qualifies as a great peace maker in 4 years from now (or even 8) but after 11 days I doubt he did.
Oops – the parser interpreted 8 ) as 8). Oh well.
Sebastian
The favourite talking point of the right that the failure of fiscal pump priming to drag Japan out of recession has been refuted by a number of researchers who have found policy was not only half hearted but in fact contractionary through part of the 1990’s.
The following paper by Kenneth Kuttner of the NY Fed and Adam Posen
“Fiscal Policy Effectiveness in Japan” might be a good place to start.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=310106
History is not really kind to the anti-interventionist point of view when dealing with severe financial crises. I think the reason there are few (if any) references to the 1890s depression by anit-interventionists is that they can’t point to government intervention as having caused or prolonged the experience. In fact the whole episode highlights the short comings of the non-interventionist case.
Well Obama has managed to peacefully remove the greatest threat to world peace. That has to count for something 😉
Barak Obama is an African-American who has won two (!) Grammies, the Presidency of the USA and now the Nobel Peace Prize. He has not yet won an Oscar, but give him a camera and some time.
He is the political personfication of Stuff White [liberal] People Like. A dream come true for Tom Wolfe and Christian Lander.
Discuss.
paul of albury@#41 October 12th, 2009 at 14:36
The prize for that achievement should go to the Twenty-second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America.
I’d like to, but I can’t quite identify your point. undeserving black man is successful because white yuppies think he’s cool, is that it?
what’s that got to do with Sarah Palin?
he may have been nominated for the “accomplishments” of his first 11 days, but the winner is chosen in October.
@Jack Strocchi
Shrub was the least popular president of the US since the inception of polls. What on earth leads you to believe he’d have been reelected if the 22nd amendment hadn’t made him ineligible, Jack?
There’s no way the Repugs would even have noiminated him Hal. They went out of their way to dissassociate themselves from his misrule even prior to September 15. After that, the fact that he was in his last days meant that he was proptected from further decline, but if he’d been dunning, it’s doubtful he’d have managed 100 in the college.
Shot duck comes to mind …
oops
I don’t think Jack’s point is that Bush would have been re-elected if he had been eligible for a third term. His point is simply that given that Bush was ineligible to run anyway, Obama achieved nothing in terms of getting rid of Bush.