Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.
John Quiggin 
External Diseconomies of Scale and all other social costs must be factored into any new project cost-benefit analysis if it requires government approval. The narrow focus of developers and project managers cannot be relied upon to minimise social costs. With the global environment in a state of permanent danger, all new projects need to be tested for environmental damage outcomes. There can no longer be any leeway granted just to create jobs. It will not matter how many jobs are created in the short run if a long run outcome is even more environmental damage. Politicians who only see to the end of the week, are not the best people to make this vital decision. There needs to be a permanent environmental police force that enforces all environmental law. Like all other police actions, there should be no political interference into this enforcement process. If all this sounds too heavy handed just remember that we are just one environmental catastrophe away from environmental collapse. No leeway can be given to developments and projects that harm the environment.
Gregory J. McKenzie says: “No leeway can be given to developments and projects that harm the environment.”
*
“I’ve come to the conclusion that nuclear power advocates, like climate delusionists (virtually all climate delusionists are nuclear fans, though not vice versa) are essentially immune to empirical evidence.”
JANUARY 18, 2014
JOHN QUIGGIN
Worse luck, me too JQ. So I applaud your continued efforts to provide intelligent commentary.
Yet !● The risks stay the same.●!
“This is what I call the criminal stupidity of statistical science.”
Says NN Taleb…
“In 2003 the Japanese Nuclear Commission said that a fatality due to radiation exposure from an accident at one of its facilities should happen less than once per million years.
…
“This is what I call the criminal stupidity of statistical science. These models can tell you something about normal events, but they cannot deal with unexpected, high-impact events. Some guy probably measured the risk according to a formula and said, “Well, it meets the one-in-a-million standard.” But we are incapable scientifically of measuring the risk of rare events. We tend to underestimate both the probabilities and the damage.”
…
From “What’s next for nuclear power: Nassim Nicholas Taleb”
https://fortune.com/2011/03/24/whats-next-for-nuclear-power-nassim-nicholas-taleb/
But! Economics! The market!
Economics and the market are tools. Not the tree, planet or inhabitants.
So it is about minds first, then the people and processes. Not the AFR or the LibNat Coalition or the GoP.
The tail of money, power and profit is wagging the dog of earth and humanity.
“You cannot have a trillion dollar company with a work force that cannot be easily manipulated. That is what this is all about.”
https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/were-all-mice-trying-to-chew-through?
Nuclear = 60% capital.
Electricity is just a bonus to capital.
Got my fifth COVID-19 vaccination this morning. Been delaying it as long as possible but it no longer felt safe to delay any more, even in our private, self-imposed, endless lock-down. We are traveling later this year in our COVID-19-free capsule, aka a 4WD. And we will be going to places mostly far from the madding crowd and using N95 masks and all other possible NPI measures when we can’t totally avoid potentially infectious people, which is all people of course.
My local doctor’s clinic has become a completely unsafe place. I was the only masked person anywhere in sight there and at the local small-shop shopping area in general. No doctors were masked, no nurse(s) masked, no patients masked, no passers-by or other shoppers masked. I will have to find a safe doctor and dentist for the future, if any exist.
The continuing sheer idiocy of this nation’s near non-response (other than leaky vaccines) to the COVID-19 pandemic remains beyond belief. NPIs are easy to implement and cost far less than the enormous economic and human costs of the endless COVID-19 pandemic. We are even in a seasonal flu pandemic as well (and possibly an RSV pandemic) but still nobody will wear a mask or take other simple precautions.
We have no trouble (our governments and our society) with mandating seat belts, bike helmets, no mobile phone use while driving and driving licenses. Yet, we can’t mandate (and model) mask wearing behaviors during an airborne pandemic or three. At a bare minimum, N95 masks or better should be required for all health staff and support staff at all medical and pharmaceutical delivery points. Mask should also be mandated for all indoor public spaces where there are not hepa filters and other clean air provisions. Masks should also be mandated for all public and mass transport (staff and passengers).
How long should we keep masking and using NPIs? For the foreseeable future. We are in the Pandemicene just as we are in the Climatocene: two major aspects of the Anthropocene. Living in denial of these brute facts is the way to die quicker and/or suffer longer than you otherwise would. There is no percentage in that. Wearing a mask and taking sensible precautions to avoid serious respiratory diseases is as easy as pie.
More climate war economics
Last week I proposed a war economy model for (test case) Australia, for net zero by 2030. Is there any path at all, even a low-probability one, to this sort of thing happening?
There are radical voices out there far more qualified than mine. Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at UCL, in the Guardian:
“To have any chance of adapting effectively to what’s coming, the country [the UK] needs to be on a war footing […] The environment secretary, Thérèse Coffey, has called the [government’s] programme a step-change in the government’s approach to managing the risks of the climate crisis. And indeed it is, a largely sideways step from nothing to next to nothing, when what we need is a great leap forward. And we need it now.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/20/government-plan-britain-extreme-heat-society-economy
Many other climate experts like James Hansen have been making similarly dire statements. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/19/climate-crisis-james-hansen-scientist-warningv But do they have a coherent programme? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t see it.
There are radical protest movements out there. In the UK Extinction Rebellion demand “net zero by 2025”. This looks technically impossible in most countries. How do you import food without currently oil-fueled ships? https://extinctionrebellion.uk/the-truth/demands/ . Just Stop Oil, another British civil disobedience movement, has a surprisingly limited demand, that “the UK government halt all new licences and consents for oil, gas and coal projects” https://juststopoil.org/news-press/ No proposals for a more significant accelerated closure of gas power stations and mass deployment of heat pumps to replace domestic gas boilers, for instance.
The most radical professional scenario I can find is the IEA’s “Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario (NZE)”. https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-and-climate-model/net-zero-emissions-by-2050-scenario-nze. The IEA! Recall that it was founded as a response by oil importers to the chaos created by the first OPEC extortions of 1973. Conversion to the green transition cause is very recent, and as an IGO it still represents mainstream, not radical, thinking. We need professional models for a more radical transition urgently. “Radical” means “any climate policy with emission targets lower or earlier than the IEA’s NZE”.
Part of the problem lies within the economics profession. The key historical references are the war economies of WW2, and Soviet central planning over a longer period, but professional research into these is a tiny niche. Outside the USSR and perhaps the Pentagon supply departments, the non-Soviet profession completely internalised the political and social consensus that these emergency systems should be dismantled and best forgotten. Women factory workers returned to the kitchen, and commodity planning boards and the like disappeared. A few eccentric historians like Alan Milward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Milward and Peter Wiles worked on the problem, but left no schools of followers – but plenty of books mouldering in economics libraries awaiting readers. Would the British Civil Service of today be capable of reproducing the comprehensive consumer rationing it set up in a few months in 1939-40?
The news is not all bad. Modern war planners would have access to far better analytical tools than those of 1940. For starters, they have the work of two great Russians to build on: Wassily Leontief’s input-output analysis, and Leonid Kantorowich’a linear programming. And for whatever type of model they pick, they can now run an enormous number of simulations on supercomputers. I dare say they could also build black-box neural networks that will issue handily unchallengeable Delphic advice.
One thing we can be pretty sure of is that there are no would-be Great Men waiting in the wings for their chance at glory. When Fabius, Scipio, Napoleon and Churchill were catapulted into power, their ideas on the main strategic problems they faced were clear and well-developed. There are no ambitious politicians out there today with plans for climate war mobilisation. Most politicians today have no idea of the scale and scope of the 1940-45 efforts, let alone of the vital details of how they were achieved. The best we can hope for is committees of ordinary mortals solving one crisis after another by trial and error.
In fact the situation will be much closer to 1914 than 1940. All the belligerents had assumed that whoever won, the war would not last long. Instead it quickly settled into a bloody stalemate with no end in sight, but an enormous appetite for war supplies. The politicians had little historical experience of long wars to go by beyond the distant American Civil War and the Napoleonic wars, but they improvised solutions anyway. I have little idea what these were. Perhaps there is a handy shelf of the works of “some long-dead economist”.
Another Great Man anecdote though. Jean Monnet was 26 in 1914, like Scipio in 210 BCE, working in the family cognac business. The French government briefly decamped to Bordeaux, where Monnet presented his ideas on the French war economy to the otherwise preoccupied PM, Viviani. Nothing came of this, but Monnet got his chance in 1917, when he and a like-minded British civil servant, Arthur Salter, talked the French, British and American governments into handing the pair of them day-to-day operational control of transatlantic shipping, threatened by U-boats, port limitations, and other problems. This worked much better, in spite of a pyramid of committees. Salter later wrote the book. Once you really start looking for them, you can usually find tough, energetic and capable commissars like this pair.
Although I see that politically we here in the US at least are very far away from where we need to be – yet I don’t think it’s impossible. The weather events are just getting too severe and too numerous. I am very much hoping that there will arise some leadership on the right. I know those people exist. We just need them to speak up.
I admit, I am also sort of hoping for some geoengineering types, just since democracy might take too long (is taking too long). I only wish for this very carefully.
Actually, I was going to say that I am not super-fond of war vocabulary, but for the people we need to get on board, that could be a feature.
Ikonoclast says:
“Got my fifth COVID-19 vaccination this morning.”
At least we know where it hides.
A Covid snug – your brain.
“The Brain and Long Covid – by Eric Topol – Ground Truths
“The brain’s immune system (the skull bone marrow-meninges axis niche reservoir) and “enormous amounts” of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein localized to the skull bone marrow, meninges and brain tissue in people who had Covid but died of other reasons, fully discussed here”
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-brain-and-long-covid
Via:
“Spatial biology is lighting it up
“A rapid fire chain of discoveries are illuminating health and disease
ERIC TOPOL
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/spatial-biology-is-lighting-it-up
Any stories from readers associated with;
“Robert Solow on growing up in Brooklyn, fighting Nazis, and everything that came after
Episode 7-March 03, 2023
Listen:
SOUNDCLOUD
SPOTIFY
AMAZON MUSIC
APPLE PODCASTS
Read Links:
Robert Solow – full transcript
Click to access 007-TWGO-Robert%20Solow%20transcript.pdf
https://irs100.princeton.edu/podcasts/robert-solow-2023
*
“Ninety-Eight Years of Economic Wisdom
“Robert Solow is 98 years old and a giant among economists. He tells Steve about cracking German codes in World War II, why it’s so hard to reduce inequality, and how his field lost its way.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/ninety-eight-years-of-economic-wisdom/
h/t marginalrevolution
Rentier returns and trumps capital, so a return to,
some say,
– Imperialism – Prabhat Patnaik –
“When Can There Be a Fall in the Rate of Profit?”
some say;
– Feudalism – Yanis Varoufakis
“Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism”
It will be interesting to see what you say JQ in “After Neoliberalism”.
Any release date yet?
*
Prabhat Patnaik: “Even after decolonisation in a political sense, domination indirectly exercised over the “outlying regions” (for instance through the imposition on them of neo-liberal policies) can play the same role as played earlier by political domination.” Link below. ^2.
*
Pluralistic.
“But capitalism has finally run out of gas. In his forthcoming book, Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis proposes that capitalism has died – but it wasn’t replaced by socialism. Rather, capitalism has given way to feudalism:
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781847927279
…
“Today, we live in a rentier’s paradise. People don’t aspire to create value – they aspire to capture it. In Survival of the Richest, Doug Rushkoff calls this “going meta”: don’t provide a service, just figure out a way to interpose yourself between the provider and the customer:
…
*
^2.
“When Can There Be a Fall in the Rate of Profit?
Prabhat Patnaik
…
“…. And if profit-margins are deliberately raised, that is, if the distribution between wages and profits is altered in favour of profits, then that, instead of removing the tendency towards a falling rate of profit, only accentuates it further.
“Any tendency towards a falling rate of profit, it must be noted, is only a tendency that does not actually manifest itself (economists call it an ex ante tendency); it forces the system to adopt countervailing measures to keep the tendency at bay. The falling tendency of the rate of profit therefore is not a prediction of what would happen over time in a capitalist economy, but an analytical tool for investigating its dynamics.
“In fact from the falling tendency of the rate of profit, no matter what theory we invoke to explain it, one can discover an economic motive for imperialism.”…
…
“Even after decolonisation in a political sense, domination indirectly exercised over the “outlying regions” (for instance through the imposition on them of neo-liberal policies) can play the same role as played earlier by political domination.”
https://peoplesdemocracy.in/2023/0723_pd/when-can-there-be-fall-rate-profit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prabhat_Patnaik
Wow. There is some very damaging mental gymnastics in the No camp.
“… Yes campaign, likening one board member to a Nazi.” complements of Warren Mundine.
Lucky Warren Mundine can afford mental health care – (see below.)
Justifying and excusing Gary Johns would drive me crazy.
Or like Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price saying “… that she was “grateful” for some aspects of British settlement.
“For instance, I wouldn’t exist and many of us of Aboriginal descent wouldn’t exist either. I’m grateful we weren’t colonised by the Dutch or Belgians.
Warren Mundine:
“No campaigner Mr Mundine said he did not take lectures from anyone affiliated with the Yes campaign, likening one board member to a Nazi.
“They’ve got a communist sitting on their thing [board] and a communist is just as bad as a Nazi,” he said.
“He added that comments from Yes campaigners had prompted him to receive treatment after his mental health had deteriorated.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-25/voice-no-camp-responds-gary-johns-blood-test-welfare/102639842
Truth is ALWAYS stranger than fuction.
The Northern Hemisphere is now +0.4 °C warmer than ever observed!
The Earth System will likely breach the +1.5 °C threshold (relative to the 1850-1900 baseline) as a MONTHLY average in Jul 2023, which is NOT THE SAME as breaching the longer-term multi-year average.
Marine heatwaves could be catastrophic for marine life.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230720-theres-a-heatwave-in-the-sea-and-scientists-are-worried
Prof. Eliot Jacobson on being a doomer. He sums it up pretty well. Although I don’t call myself a doomer, I do call myself a realist.
https://climatecasino.net/2023/06/on-being-a-doomer/
In an X-Twitter post from Sep 2022 the Prof. says:
“My simple thought on Truss as PM: I am now convinced that the UK is going to be the first “first world” country to completely implode and collapse, and that its going to happen very soon, maybe by next summer. I have no idea what this will trigger worldwide, but it won’t be good.”
Truss has been and gone. The UK is still on the road to collapse. Clearly if the UK is to collapse, places like Africa, the Middle East, the sub-continent, SE Asia and others have no hope. If Australia doesn’t radically change its policies it has no hope either.
A couple of recent stories on the ABC website have highlighted how bad cyber crime, hacking and identity theft are now.
“ATO reveals more than $557 million claimed by fraudsters exploiting security loophole”
“Byron Bay (Medibank and Paypal) breach victim told to pay Adidas, National Basketball Association $US1.2m by US courts”
Of course, there was the big Medibank hack and other hacks.
Governments, corporations and businesses expect and keep a lot of our data. And they are absolutely hopeless at securing it. This is a major problem now for Australia and ALL of its citizens. What will done? Next to nothing, I predict. Just as corporations and governments (hand in puppet) do nothing to protect us from climate change and pandemics, they will do nothing effective about this either. As a nation, we are spiraling down the plughole now. All we ever see is total, systemic, organizational government and business incompetence in the face of modern challenges. This is the end stage of neoliberalism: incompetence, denial and collapse.
Note to self: Things you should not do to keep your sanity: Complain about the existence of social democrats that imagines refugees get a higher welfare rate than locals in the presence of native welfare recipients, since at least 50% will tell you the AFD conspiracy theory spewing Social Democrat is of course right…….
I think what is really meant by “i agree they get a higher welfare rate” is that younger high educated white Ukrainian women might get assigned a higher social status than them. They also get treated somewhat similar to local welfare receipts, not obviously worse. To make things worse, they might not have been all that poor before the war started and have rather good odds to move into decent paying jobs within the foreseeable future.
No one left to look down onto with some realistic sense that the lower ascribed social status is shared by most of society when refugees stop being dark skinned muslim men. Not that those would be acceptable refugees. One can perfectly be jealous of Ukrainians one thinks (probably in unrealistic inflated ways) as on track for high status jobs and bad uneducated brown male muslim criminals (that might not be so low educated or have been so poor in their country of origin either).
Somehow, there is always a way to be jealous about those slightly better off in similar circumstances and ignore the obvious unfair true privileged.
Yes, the duopoly Australian supermarkets are profiteering:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jul/27/australian-supermarket-profits-rise-woolworths-coles
On Tue, 25 Jul 2023, the North Atlantic SST daily mean was at 24.87 °C, only 0.02 °C below the record of 24.89 °C set on 2-4 Sep 2022.
There may perhaps be another full 1 °C of warming ahead before this year’s peak is reached. Where will the peak reach? 25.5 °C? 25.7 °C?
It seems 26 Jul 2023 is perhaps the day to break another temperature record.
The whole Northern Hemisphere is +1.23 °C warmer than average (1979-2000 baseline) and +0.44 °C warmer than ever observed.
There’s another very informative data dive by Prof Jason Box published on 23 Jul 2023 in a YouTube video titled record setting July 2023 Greenland heatwave alert, duration 0:14:53.
James, as a revolutionary follow on to, as you said:
“There are radical voices out there far more qualified than mine.”
“Risk and Revolution”
By Wen Stephenson https://thebaffler.com/latest/risk-and-revolution-stephenson
And for me, a good history lesson.
Of note, the P Boys will actually physically fight. Something most armchairs warriors will not do.
The latest news on Australia footballers of various codes, except perhaps soccer, again illustrates the need to outright ban collision sports or to at least price them out of most operation by insurance, litigation and damages costs. The numbers of known collision sport CTE victims is spiraling, not to mention all the other skeletal, muscle, ligament, tendon, cartilage capsule damage and so on. The unknown number of CTEs alone is likely to be huge and will further come to light as the years roll on. The corporate pursuit of ever more violent spectacle for profit is driving all this human damage.
Major collision sports in Australia include boxing, AFL, RL and RU. As I say, they should be banned or priced out of viability.
The American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement was revised in 2008 to include the following definition:
“In collision sports (e.g. boxing, ice hockey, American football, lacrosse, and rodeo), athletes purposely hit or collide with each other or with inanimate objects (including the ground) with great force. In contact sports (e.g. basketball), athletes routinely make contact with each other or with inanimate objects but usually with less force than in collision sports. In limited-contact sports (e.g. softball and squash, contact with other athletes or with inanimate objects is infrequent or inadvertent.”
Then there are non-contact sports (non-contact except for rare bumps and accidents, some of which admittedly can still be serious) like athletics, swimming and even tennis and cricket.
Ridding our society of collision sports or reducing them to those competitors, administrators and fans who would be prepared to pay the huge costs of insuring and indemnifying all current and future damage would be a huge health and economic boon to the nation. There would be plenty of good, worthwhile, healthful and watchable sports left. Nobody would suffer deprivation of exercise, enjoyment or excitement.
The Victorian Government announced on Friday (Jul 28) that gas connections in new homes will be banned from next year.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-29/victoria-government-gas-ban-new-builds-explainer/102661808
The NSW Premier today told Ben Fordham on-air at Radio 2GB this morning that he is “not pursuing” a ban on gas.
https://www.2gb.com/exclusive-premier-chris-minns-rules-out-gas-ban-in-nsw/
A quick look at the AEMO’s Gas Statement of Opportunities – March 2023 shows in Figure 26 Reserves and resources reported in the 2022 GSOO and 2023 GSOO (on page 51):
* 2P developed reserves: _ _ 16,659 PJ _ _ R/P: 8.5 years
* 2P undeveloped reserves: _17,000 PJ _ _ R/P: 8.7 years
* 2C resources: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 41,938 PJ
as at 31 Dec 2022
* 2022 actual consumption: 1,950 PJ
The 2P reserves estimate reflects statistically that there should be at least a 50% probability that the quantities actually recovered will equal or exceed the sum of estimated proved plus probable reserves.
So where does NSW Premier Chris Minns think NSW’s adequate gas supply is coming from beyond this decade?
How does Premier Minns think burning more gas helps with the worsening climate crisis?
This month (Jul 2023) will very likely be the hottest month on the instrumental record, likely breaching (or getting very close to) the +1.5 °C MONTHLY global mean (relative to 1880-1920 global mean baseline).
This year (2023) has a high probability of being the hottest year on the instrumental record, likely breaching the +1.3 °C YEARLY global mean (relative to 1880-1920 global mean baseline).
Next year is expected to be even hotter coupled with an emerging strong El Niño, with the possibility of breaching the +1.5 °C YEARLY global mean (relative to 1880-1920 global mean baseline).
Warming is only going to accelerate while the Earth Energy Imbalance (EEI) keeps getting larger. Burning more gas makes the EEI higher/worse.
IMO, NSW Premier Minns is failing to serve the longer-term best interests of NSW residents.
All soccer (football) players should at least wear appropriate crash helmets, and mouthguards if the helmets are not full face. They bang heads, and hard, more often than is usually assumed. The Matildas lost to Nigeria last Thursday perhaps because two great players were absent due to 6 day concussion protocols covering knocks suffered in training the previous Tuesday.
https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/38071071/fowler-luik-join-kerr-matildas-injury-list
If we showed parents and kids the inside of a human skull – scary – , and then a movie of dynamics of congealed blob of fat floating in a liquid, they’d get the understanding of concussion in and of themselves, asap.
What age to show such a graphic?
Today, Wally Lewis is being thanked for publically discussing his cognitive decline due to being diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/jul/31/wally-lewis-cte-concussions-nrl-rugby-league
Svante,
Good point about soccer. I deliberately erred on the side of giving all non-collision sports (by the definition I quoted) a pass mark. I was trying to avoid overreaching. I think sports like soccer and basketball, to give two examples, could redeem or cover themselves with significant rule changes and thus avoid a large proportion of CTE and other contact injury dangers. With soccer, it might upset the purists, but banning heading altogether could work. After all, it is football not headball.
And yes KT2, poor Wally Lewis’s brain scan is terrifying. I thought it was exaggerated for illustration purposes but I can see no statement saying that. The macro damage is so large scale and obvious that any layperson can see it. Terrifying, as I said. Let’s not forget that there is also extensive micro damage with very serious, indeed horrible consequences, in CTE-affected brains, which damage can only be revealed after death by autopsy using microtomes, microscopes and perhaps other instruments.
An earlier post to this thread failed.
Multiple posts to another blog have failed. Just wondering what’s going on?
Geoff,
Too many links or links that are too long? I limit my links to one per post on this blog. If I mess up and accidentally do a post with a link that is too long (like lines and lines too long) that post simply disappears. That’s on this blog. I hardly post anywhere else. Posting elsewhere now? Well, I wonder at the point of it. Almost nobody is listening if one makes any sensible, logical or scientific points. Any point of view outside the neoliberal or the soft, left liberal neoliberal lite Overton Window is completely ignored.
I do appreciate your factual posts and links, Geoff, so please keep them up. If you can find any useful Covid-19 data, research and reports please post them too. The government and media blackout on valid C-19 data, studies and reporting is near total now. The suppression of data and the pretense that the crisis is over is all-pervading. They are curating our reality and denying the citizenry any real data.
Ikonoclast: – “Too many links or links that are too long?”
I’ve found up to 3 ‘clean’ links per post avoids automatic moderation.
My earlier post, about hot water heat pumps, efficiencies, CoPs, power input for various ambient air temperatures, etc. just vanished after clicking the “POST COMMENT” button.
At the other blog, for multiple attempts, it was either it vanished or ‘you are commenting too quickly’, or no facility to comment (that was a new observation last night). I get the feeling I’ve been blocked there.
It takes time to compose, and the earlier post here just vanished as if it didn’t exist – frustrating! Perhaps ‘the system’ didn’t like one of the links?
Some other time – got to run.
Kahneman and Deaton ‘conflict resolved”. The income curve as…
“Killingsworth, (2021) reported a linear-log pattern in which average happiness rose consistently with log(income).”
I’d appreciate a comment on this. Taken to the extreme, Elon et al must be so happy insanity is close.
Andrew Gelman headed his op on this study “”Studying average associations between income and survey responses on happiness: Be careful about deterministic and causal interpretations that are not supported by these data.” below.
So some missgivings.
Yet I do agree that “flattening pattern only for the least happy people. Happiness increases steadily with log(income) among happier people, and even accelerates in the happiest group.”.
From:
“Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved”
Matthew A Killingsworth et al.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2023
Abstract
Do larger incomes make people happier? Two authors of the present paper have published contradictory answers. Using dichotomous questions about the preceding day, [Kahneman and Deaton, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 107, 16489-16493 (2010)] reported a flattening pattern: happiness increased steadily with log(income) up to a threshold and then plateaued. Using experience sampling with a continuous scale, [Killingsworth, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 118, e2016976118 (2021)] reported a linear-log pattern in which average happiness rose consistently with log(income). We engaged in an adversarial collaboration to search for a coherent interpretation of both studies. A reanalysis of Killingsworth’s experienced sampling data confirmed the flattening pattern only for the least happy people. Happiness increases steadily with log(income) among happier people, and even accelerates in the happiest group. Complementary nonlinearities contribute to the overall linear-log relationship. We then explain why Kahneman and Deaton overstated the flattening pattern and why Killingsworth failed to find it. We suggest that Kahneman and Deaton might have reached the correct conclusion if they had described their results in terms of unhappiness rather than happiness; their measures could not discriminate among degrees of happiness because of a ceiling effect. The authors of both studies failed to anticipate that increased income is associated with systematic changes in the shape of the happiness distribution. The mislabeling of the dependent variable and the incorrect assumption of homogeneity were consequences of practices that are standard in social science but should be questioned more often. We flag the benefits of adversarial collaboration.
Keywords: Well-being; experience sampling; happiness; income; income satiation.
Via:
“Studying average associations between income and survey responses on happiness: Be careful about deterministic and causal interpretations that are not supported by these data.”
Posted on August 1, 2023 9:32 AM by Andrew [Gelman]
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/08/01/studying-average-associations-between-income-and-survey-responses-on-happiness-be-careful-about-deterministic-and-causal-interpretations-that-are-not-supported-by-these-data/
Geoff,
The back arrow might bring back the composed text when you lose a comment. I used to copy my whole post and save it to a document before attempting posting . That was when I used to write very long posts, which probably nobody read. Sometimes, I even composed first in word processing, saved there and then did the copy, paste and post.
Rational dissenting voices are being silenced all over the internet and in many ways. That doesn’t apply to this site obviously. It will be technical issues or bad luck. Check your PC for viruses etc I guess. Sadly, the Duck Duck Go add-on started playing up on my PC for unknown reasons and I had to ditch it.
Ikonoclast: – “The back arrow might bring back the composed text when you lose a comment.”
I did that but no joy. Usually it works, but not in this recent instance. I think one of the links included is the culprit upsetting the system.
Ikonoclast: – “Sometimes, I even composed first in word processing, saved there and then did the copy, paste and post.”
I’ve done that too when I’m less certain of the post being accepted. Usually haven’t had a problem here.
On a different topic, Art Berman tweeted Aug 2:
Perhaps a reason to put critical power transmission underground?
“It’s a bit like the pandemic: everybody said it was a risk before it happened, but no one did anything about it.” – Art Berman.
We have a system now (late stage neoliberal capitalism) which not only does nothing about most risks, it absolutely refuses to do anything about any risks other than those which might affect the earnings of the rich in the next quarter. The entire system is programmed to work in this way and no other. For as long as the system continues to run / be run in this manner, we have next to zero chance of saving anything. Sadly, it’s as simple and as brutal as that.
Social housing can be done and it works.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-04/vienna-s-social-housing-and-low-rent-strategy/102639674
I grew up in a form of social housing; a Qld. Housing Commission suburb. Today, Australia is richer than ever (supposedly) and yet it has a major housing crisis. Why? Because it refuses to tax the wealthy properly and it refuses to implement social housing and other social policies. This nation is governed by and for the rich and the rest of the population are being callously neglected. If we continue in this fashion we collapse into social anarchy, crime, privation, disease, barbarism and ignorance. It’s as simple as that. What sort of nation do we want to be?
Immediate action is needed to reduce hospital-acquired COVID-19 infections. Since my immunosuppressed daughter has to go into “day hospital” today for relapse or “flare up” diagnosis and treatment, this a subject close to my heart. She is “gowned up” and ready as I type this. She should be fine but our nation’s needless toleration of an endless, dangerous pandemic places her and many others at unnecessary risk.
Ozsage have called for action to reduce hospital-acquired COVID-19 infections.
https://ozsage.org/media_releases/immediate-action-is-needed-to-reduce-hospital-acquired-covid-19-infections-and-deaths/
It is astonishing in this supposedly wealthy, scientific and enlightened age that this is even an issue. It becomes less astonishing when one realizes it is neoliberal ideology (the functioning of the economy for the very rich only) which has issued the continuous infections / inadequate protection diktats which mandate the endless circulation of a dangerous disease: doing so to protect the profits of the rich and in contravention of the human and medical rights of the vulnerable and disadvantaged.
Our government healthcare rights website claims:
“Access: You have a right to healthcare services and treatment that meet your needs.
Safety: You have a right to receive safe and high-quality healthcare that meets national standards, and to be cared for in an environment that is safe and makes you feel safe.”
These are token and meaningless words while COVID-19 remains uncontrolled in our society and hospitals.
“Mid-winter temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius in South America leaves climatologists in disbelief”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-04/south-america-extreme-heat-mid-winter-climate-change-scientists/102678662
I had been of the belief that our two coming Australian summers would be, respectively, tolerable this year in 2023-2024 and extremely dangerous in 2024-2025. I’ve now modified this expectation. I am very concerned about this coming summer. I have already done all I can, clearing further area around my house and removing all brush and dead wood but there are still large trees on my block and neighboring blocks. I wish now I had built an “underground” house (nearly 30 years ago) but I doubt I could have afforded it.
By underground house, I mean a house built into our south facing hill such that the roof was turfed and the house doors, glass doors and windows only faced south. They would then have needed fire shutters. Other design elements would have been required too. Instead I might have to go another way. A summer frightening enough, without actually burning the house down, would I think motivate us to install water tanks and an emergency sprinkler system over the house. A back-up diesel generator with its own safe housing would be necessary for the pump. Power will go out of course. Yes, I am committed to staying where I am. It’s a great “semi bug-out” for avoiding the pandemicence deliberately unleashed on all of us.
Broadcast on ABC Radio National Drive yesterday (Aug 3) was an audio segment MPs warned of “devastating” climate-fuelled disruption across Asia-Pacific, duration 0:08:47, discussing a stark briefing by climate think-tank Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, with the Briefing Note author David Spratt. It comes as the findings of a similar threat assessment by Australia’s Office of National Intelligence (ONI) have been kept classified by the government.
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/drive/devastating-climate-fuelled-disruption-across-asia-pacific-/102685024
The Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration has this week published a Briefing Note titled What does Australia’s first climate and security risk assessment say?, by David Spratt.
https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/briefings
See also today’s post at Climate Code Red headlined The Australian Government refuses to say what it knows about climate-security threats, so we gave policymakers a helping hand. It began with:
http://www.climatecodered.org/2023/08/the-australian-government-refuses-to.html
It seems all but a very few Australians are being denied information about the biggest threat to their future well-being.
The main function of governments these days is to pretend bad stuff is not happening so they don’t have to do anything about it. Then all the spare money can go to billionaires.
Okay, that is a bit of an off the cuff remark in response to Geoff Miell’s post above. However, I think it is pretty right, pretty justified. It is what I see modern governments doing the world over, whether they are dictatorships like Russia or China or representative democracies like the US, UK, Japan, etc.
Everything is about image control, spin and curating reality in terms of what the general public gets to learn about what is happening. We are in this position where we have all this amazing science and technology. We could investigate, test and data collect on reality, on what’s really happening and do so to an astonishing and powerful degree. But we don’t do that in a lot of cases.
Governments refuse to test. They refuse to check on what it is really happening, very often. Or when they do, they refuse to communicate the results to people, to educate the people. Into this space steps the whole misinformation, disinformation industry and the government too is doing this, especially in relation to COVID-19 (refusing to test and analyse what is happening and being more interested in data suppression, data avoidance, spreading myths of “mild” and “over” about COVID-19 and that seasonal flu is something to be far more worried about). Government now is about avoidance of bad news not about avoidance of harm.
The fact is bad news is actually good news. If you don’t get bad news, a signal that something is wrong, then you don’t know anything is wrong, you don’t know harm is happening. You can’t act to avoid harm, to ameliorate harm, to prevent harm. If you discover weevils in your pantry that is good news. Following the theory of objective realism which is pretty well irrefutable, the weevils were there before you know about them and doing harm. Only when you learned of their presence could you act to eradicate them from your pantry. When you get the bad news of a basal cell carcinoma, especially before it metastasizes, that is good news. Your life can be saved.
The opposite is happening to our society. We won’t test for bad stuff in many cases. Our woeful and near total lack of knowledge of how much COVID-19 is really in the community and what it is really doing to people, especially long term, and our suppression of climate change security issues are two major examples. Most people are still in a data-free, information-free, reality-free consumer bubble. Barbie movies while the climate roasts! People living in and dying of a fug of respiratory diseases. This is a juvenile world civilization. Totally infantilised, detached from reality, unable to face any reality at all. But the reality is there and it will keep coming until it is savagely and gruesomely undeniable.
Ikonoclast: – “Everything is about image control, spin and curating reality in terms of what the general public gets to learn about what is happening.”
I’d suggest it’s getting ever more difficult to “curate reality” when increasingly more people are losing their homes and livelihoods to worsening storms, wildfires, floods, droughts, SLR, etc. And for those that haven’t yet been directly affected by climate-related damage, I’d suggest they may perhaps have begun to notice rising insurance premiums (or inability to get some types of insurance).
ICYMI/FYI, for the first time in recorded history, the North Atlantic mean sea surface temperature is above 25 °C (77 °F).
With a month of warming ahead, the Aug 3 average temperature of 25.01 °C was 0.70 °C higher than the previous record for the date (24.31 °C in 2020).
Here’s another excellent explainer from glaciologist Professor Jason Box in his latest YouTube video published 4 Aug 2023 titled 5 factors behind the Global Heatwave 2023, and it’s not just El Niño, duration 0:11:54.
Zombie Economics?
New book suggestion:
Zombie Politicians.
“Welcome to the Zombie Election
“The Trump vs. Biden rematch really does seem to be happening.
BY CHRISTINA CAUTERUCCI
AUG 03, 2023
…
“One major difference has revealed itself in recent polls: Trump is in a better position relative to Biden than he ever was in the 2020 cycle. The zombie election looms.”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/08/2024-presidential-election-trump-biden-zombies-undead.html
Many may challenge “Trump is in a better position relative to Biden than he ever was in the 2020 cycle.”.
Reuters reported on 5 Aug 2023 in an article headlined Oil rises for 6th straight week as global supplies tighten, including:
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/oil-prices-set-sixth-weekly-gain-producers-pledge-output-cuts-2023-08-04/
Brent likely to be in $85-$90/bbl range over coming months -UBS
The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) continues to be drawn down, to 346,759,000 barrels (as at 28 Jul 2023).
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=WCSSTUS1&f=W
https://www.ogj.com/general-interest/article/14297250/eia-us-crude-inventories-down-17-million-bbl
It’s a rainy day. Time for contemplation. Who controls the finances in your household? My wife said to me today that many little things in this world are still sexist. She pointed out that as the primary card holder for a travel-oriented credit card she received the letter with the black background design and I as the secondary card holder received the letter with the pink background design. I hadn’t seen or taken any notice of these letters or even the application(s) for that matter. We had a laugh. Clearly, given these indications, anyone can guess that my wife controls the finances in our household.
How has this come about? Well;
(a) She is diligent and much better at it by dint of application and perseverance. She keeps track of everything very carefully.
(b) I am lazy; too lazy to apply myself to household bookkeeping, to paying the bills and all that sort of stuff.
My wife clearly values the utility of control and being primary financial decision maker and purchaser over the dis-utility of the work involved. I clearly weigh the utility of being free from all that stuff over the disutility of being the boss of finance and purchases. How does it work? Once I mastered the art of asking myself “do you have to win arguments and have control” and being able to answer myself in the negative, I had no trouble at all.
Is this fair and equitable? Yes, I think it is. Over our married life I reckon my wife earned / brought in 60% of our total accumulated income and hence, pretty much, our accumulated wealth. We both had and have faults. I used to fritter and she still splurges and yet we both saved and still save enough. My personal assessment is that frittering and splurging are the worst of both possible worlds as a combination in a couple. There is some rationale, I think, to letting one or the other take overall control of finances. Then frittering or splurging, one at least, will be mostly eliminated.
Of course, this only works under a benign financial semi-dictatorship. When I needed $10,000 for eye operations it was made available. When I needed $3,000 for dental work it was made available. I didn’t have to stomp off to the bank and make a performance of using my own joint card(s).
As to investment capabilities we are both relatively incompetent by true investor standards. But we dealt with / deal with this by conservatism and risk-aversion. We were never going to become seriously rich except by a lottery ticket purchase, which we very rarely make. We were never going to be bankrupted except by force majeure.
Given the way the climate and the pandemic are going and given the way our government is stage by stage abandoning all the people except the rich and the powerful, I guess bankruptcy by force majeure and lack of ultimate social insurance is a real possibility even for the middle class. So much to look forward to, eh? And we in Australia are still in a far more fortunate position than most around the world. It will come down to luck and probabilities. Social insurance both rests on and creates social cohesion. I fear for our nation’s cohesion. It is already beginning to fall apart. I foresee much worse ahead unless we entirely change direction from neoliberal capitalism to democratic socialism. We will never ameliorate / survive climate change and the pandemicene under neoliberal capitalism. Not a hope in hell on earth. I always circle back to these global dangers as they are the fundamental existential risks civilization faces, along with war of course.
How was the Antarctic sea ice doing on 5 Aug 2023?
How did the Greenland ice sheet do in Jul 2023?
Greenland surface melt extent:
https://nsidc.org/greenland-today/greenland-surface-melt-extent-interactive-chart/