JayB

Thinking carefully is the operative phrase. what Jim spewed out is just another knee-jerk liberal mantra. The euros do it, we must do it too, just like them! If oil reserves are drying up, then we need to set goals that get us off of oil period - before we are forced to. that might involve higher CAFE standards, but those could be more or less than what the Euros do. And as you pointed out, the metrics may be apples-and-oranges as it is due to their higher use of diesel, which uses more crude to produce in the first place. I never ceased to be amazed by the typical liberal response of a feel-good gesture which may more may not actually achieve a goal. These are the people who supposedly are "pro-science", and yet never do the real science and number crunching to determine if something actually needs to be done, and to what extent. The important thing is "feeling good" and doing "something". Exhibit A: Any discussion of nuclear power. IMO higher fuel prices brought on by a genuine scarcity relative to demand would be the the most significant driver of reduced CO2 emissions per-unit output (conservation), adoption of alternative energy-sources, etc - and would dwarf the effects of any regulatory regime any legislature would dare impose.

Reducing CO2 emissions and limiting the extent to which we enrich unsavory regimes of various stripes by buying their oil are both worthy goals, but there are better and worse ways of doing so. One of the worst ideas - the entire corn-ethanol econo-enviro megacluster seems to have gained the most traction so far, so the importance of thinking carefully about the means used to achieve these ends seems worthwhile.

Euros tend to run way more diesel due to the higher energy content and the fact that diesel fuel enjoys tax breaks in Euroland that gasoline does not. The UCS makes a good point when comparing the total emissions from oil-well to tailpipe. "DIESEL PERFORMANCE — EXTRA POWER, HIGHER EFFICIENCY, BUT ... If you or your parents owned a diesel car 20 years ago, you may have some bad memories of the experience. American drivers have steered clear of diesel since the early 1980s because many of the cars were unreliable, noisy, and polluting. Though today's diesel cars have overcome most of their past performance problems, they account for only a few percent of new automobile and truck sales in the US. In Europe, on the other hand, about 40% of new cars sold are diesel, amounting to more than five million vehicles each year. The demand for diesel in Europe is fueled by the high cost of gasoline. (Unequal taxation of the two fuels results in diesel costing about one dollar less per gallon in most European countries.) Over the past few years, diesel's popularity as an automotive fuel has grown significantly. Thanks to its higher energy content and its efficient combustion process, diesel performance enables cars to travel at least 30% farther on a gallon of fuel than comparable gasoline models. The improved efficiency of diesel engines can also help reduce oil consumption. It should be noted, however, that it takes about 25% more oil to make a gallon of diesel fuel than a gallon of gasoline, so we should really look at how a vehicle does on fuel efficiency in terms of "oil equivalents." Thus, we need to adjust the mileage claims for diesel vehicles downward by about 20% when comparing them to gasoline-powered vehicles."

On the whole, it seems to me that skilled tradesmen tend to do pretty well. I don't have the stats handy, but I'd guess that their annual take-home is comparable to that of most engineers in non-management roles, if a bit more variable from one year to the next. Once you subtract the value of at least four years of lost wages plus the cost of student-loans plus interest, I'd imagine that things get even closer to parity. Add more flexibility, the ability to work pretty much anywhere, and the fact that it's essentially outsource proof and a career in one of the trades looks even better. Probably not everyone's cup of tea, but not a bad gig, and has to have one of the better R.O.I.'s of any modern profession.

Man that suuuuuucks. I've fallen while reaching for the top at the end of a problem just to the right of Coach's Crack that we called "Four Rock Classic." I was lucky enough to walk away no worse for wear, but it did seem as though that the gravel on that side was just a bit shallower than elsewhere. I can vaguely recall pushing a bit more gravel into my anticipated landing zones on that aspect of the rock after that. Anyhow - very sorry to hear about the accident, and hope that you get great care and recover fully, as quickly as possible.

Not agreeing presumes understanding the subject matter. Ergo the average poster in this forum has a fair amount of work to do if they wish to increase their cognitive status to "imbecile" when discussing these issues.

Another Krugman essay that people who post frequently on economic matters should read, and attempt to understand, but won't. "rICARDO'S DIFFICULT IDEA SYNOPSIS: The trendy idea of rejecting Comparative Advantage is rejecting a tried and true idea that has lifted millions out of poverty. The title of this paper is a play on that of an admirable recent book by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1995). Dennett's book is an examination of the reasons why so many intellectuals remain hostile to the idea of evolution through natural selection -- an idea that seems simple and compelling to those who understand it, but about which intelligent people somehow manage to get confused time and time again. The idea of comparative advantage -- with its implication that trade between two nations normally raises the real incomes of both -- is, like evolution via natural selection, a concept that seems simple and compelling to those who understand it. Yet anyone who becomes involved in discussions of international trade beyond the narrow circle of academic economists quickly realizes that it must be, in some sense, a very difficult concept indeed. I am not talking here about the problem of communicating the case for free trade to crudely anti-intellectual opponents, people who simply dislike the idea of ideas. The persistence of that sort of opposition, like the persistence of creationism, is a different sort of question, and requires a different sort of discussion. What I am concerned with here are the views of intellectuals, people who do value ideas, but somehow find this particular idea impossible to grasp. My objective in this essay is to try to explain why intellectuals who are interested in economic issues so consistently balk at the concept of comparative advantage. Why do journalists who have a reputation as deep thinkers about world affairs begin squirming in their seats if you try to explain how trade can lead to mutually beneficial specialization? Why is it virtually impossible to get a discussion of comparative advantage, not only onto newspaper op-ed pages, but even into magazines that cheerfully publish long discussions of the work of Jacques Derrida? Why do policy wonks who will happily watch hundreds of hours of talking heads droning on about the global economy refuse to sit still for the ten minutes or so it takes to explain Ricardo? In this essay, I will try to offer answers to these questions. The first thing I need to do is to make clear how few people really do understand Ricardo's difficult idea -- since the response of many intellectuals, challenged on this point, is to insist that of course they understand the concept, but they regard it as oversimplified or invalid in the modern world. Once this point has been established, I will try to defend the following hypothesis: (i) At the shallowest level, some intellectuals reject comparative advantage simply out of a desire to be intellectually fashionable. Free trade, they are aware, has some sort of iconic status among economists; so, in a culture that always prizes the avant-garde, attacking that icon is seen as a way to seem daring and unconventional. (ii) At a deeper level, comparative advantage is a harder concept than it seems, because like any scientific concept it is actually part of a dense web of linked ideas. A trained economist looks at the simple Ricardian model and sees a story that can be told in a few minutes; but in fact to tell that story so quickly one must presume that one's audience understands a number of other stories involving how competitive markets work, what determines wages, how the balance of payments adds up, and so on. (iii) At the deepest level, opposition to comparative advantage -- like opposition to the theory of evolution -- reflects the aversion of many intellectuals to an essentially mathematical way of understanding the world. Both comparative advantage and natural selection are ideas grounded, at base, in mathematical models -- simple models that can be stated without actually writing down any equations, but mathematical models all the same. The hostility that both evolutionary theorists and economists encounter from humanists arises from the fact that both fields lie on the front line of the war between C.P. Snow's two cultures: territory that humanists feel is rightfully theirs, but which has been invaded by aliens armed with equations and computers...." The rest of the essay is here: http://www.pkarchive.org/trade/ricardo.html

We all created Walmart. China is able to deliver lower cost goods because it doesn't have the same costs we do. It doesn't spend as much to protect the environment and to ensure worker safety. It doesn't spend money on consumer protection. I'm all for free trade, but let's insist that our trading partners uphold decent standards. At least the goods they export should meet standards, if not they way they treat their workers. Perhaps there should be tariffs that reflect the amount of money they save by not protecting their workers and their environment. We could create a charity with the tariff money for Chinese workers. Maybe that would shame the Chinese into doing better. From that noted NeoCon, Paul Krugman: "In Praise of Cheap Labor Bad jobs at bad wages are better than no jobs at all. By Paul Krugman For many years a huge Manila garbage dump known as Smokey Mountain was a favorite media symbol of Third World poverty. Several thousand men, women, and children lived on that dump--enduring the stench, the flies, and the toxic waste in order to make a living combing the garbage for scrap metal and other recyclables. And they lived there voluntarily, because the $10 or so a squatter family could clear in a day was better than the alternatives. The squatters are gone now, forcibly removed by Philippine police last year as a cosmetic move in advance of a Pacific Rim summit. But I found myself thinking about Smokey Mountain recently, after reading my latest batch of hate mail. The occasion was an op-ed piece I had written for the New York Times, in which I had pointed out that while wages and working conditions in the new export industries of the Third World are appalling, they are a big improvement over the "previous, less visible rural poverty." I guess I should have expected that this comment would generate letters along the lines of, "Well, if you lose your comfortable position as an American professor you can always find another job--as long as you are 12 years old and willing to work for 40 cents an hour." Such moral outrage is common among the opponents of globalization--of the transfer of technology and capital from high-wage to low-wage countries and the resulting growth of labor-intensive Third World exports. These critics take it as a given that anyone with a good word for this process is naive or corrupt and, in either case, a de facto agent of global capital in its oppression of workers here and abroad. But matters are not that simple, and the moral lines are not that clear. In fact, let me make a counter-accusation: The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through. While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers. After all, global poverty is not something recently invented for the benefit of multinational corporations. Let's turn the clock back to the Third World as it was only two decades ago (and still is, in many countries). In those days, although the rapid economic growth of a handful of small Asian nations had started to attract attention, developing countries like Indonesia or Bangladesh were still mainly what they had always been: exporters of raw materials, importers of manufactures. Inefficient manufacturing sectors served their domestic markets, sheltered behind import quotas, but generated few jobs. Meanwhile, population pressure pushed desperate peasants into cultivating ever more marginal land or seeking a livelihood in any way possible--such as homesteading on a mountain of garbage. Given this lack of other opportunities, you could hire workers in Jakarta or Manila for a pittance. But in the mid-'70s, cheap labor was not enough to allow a developing country to compete in world markets for manufactured goods. The entrenched advantages of advanced nations--their infrastructure and technical know-how, the vastly larger size of their markets and their proximity to suppliers of key components, their political stability and the subtle-but-crucial social adaptations that are necessary to operate an efficient economy--seemed to outweigh even a tenfold or twentyfold disparity in wage rates. And then something changed. Some combination of factors that we still don't fully understand--lower tariff barriers, improved telecommunications, cheaper air transport--reduced the disadvantages of producing in developing countries. (Other things being the same, it is still better to produce in the First World--stories of companies that moved production to Mexico or East Asia, then moved back after experiencing the disadvantages of the Third World environment, are common.) In a substantial number of industries, low wages allowed developing countries to break into world markets. And so countries that had previously made a living selling jute or coffee started producing shirts and sneakers instead. Workers in those shirt and sneaker factories are, inevitably, paid very little and expected to endure terrible working conditions. I say "inevitably" because their employers are not in business for their (or their workers') health; they pay as little as possible, and that minimum is determined by the other opportunities available to workers. And these are still extremely poor countries, where living on a garbage heap is attractive compared with the alternatives. And yet, wherever the new export industries have grown, there has been measurable improvement in the lives of ordinary people. Partly this is because a growing industry must offer a somewhat higher wage than workers could get elsewhere in order to get them to move. More importantly, however, the growth of manufacturing--and of the penumbra of other jobs that the new export sector creates--has a ripple effect throughout the economy. The pressure on the land becomes less intense, so rural wages rise; the pool of unemployed urban dwellers always anxious for work shrinks, so factories start to compete with each other for workers, and urban wages also begin to rise. Where the process has gone on long enough--say, in South Korea or Taiwan--average wages start to approach what an American teen-ager can earn at McDonald's. And eventually people are no longer eager to live on garbage dumps. (Smokey Mountain persisted because the Philippines, until recently, did not share in the export-led growth of its neighbors. Jobs that pay better than scavenging are still few and far between.) The benefits of export-led economic growth to the mass of people in the newly industrializing economies are not a matter of conjecture. A country like Indonesia is still so poor that progress can be measured in terms of how much the average person gets to eat; since 1970, per capita intake has risen from less than 2,100 to more than 2,800 calories a day. A shocking one-third of young children are still malnourished--but in 1975, the fraction was more than half. Similar improvements can be seen throughout the Pacific Rim, and even in places like Bangladesh. These improvements have not taken place because well-meaning people in the West have done anything to help--foreign aid, never large, has lately shrunk to virtually nothing. Nor is it the result of the benign policies of national governments, which are as callous and corrupt as ever. It is the indirect and unintended result of the actions of soulless multinationals and rapacious local entrepreneurs, whose only concern was to take advantage of the profit opportunities offered by cheap labor. It is not an edifying spectacle; but no matter how base the motives of those involved, the result has been to move hundreds of millions of people from abject poverty to something still awful but nonetheless significantly better. Why, then, the outrage of my correspondents? Why does the image of an Indonesian sewing sneakers for 60 cents an hour evoke so much more feeling than the image of another Indonesian earning the equivalent of 30 cents an hour trying to feed his family on a tiny plot of land--or of a Filipino scavenging on a garbage heap? The main answer, I think, is a sort of fastidiousness. Unlike the starving subsistence farmer, the women and children in the sneaker factory are working at slave wages for our benefit--and this makes us feel unclean. And so there are self-righteous demands for international labor standards: We should not, the opponents of globalization insist, be willing to buy those sneakers and shirts unless the people who make them receive decent wages and work under decent conditions. This sounds only fair--but is it? Let's think through the consequences. First of all, even if we could assure the workers in Third World export industries of higher wages and better working conditions, this would do nothing for the peasants, day laborers, scavengers, and so on who make up the bulk of these countries' populations. At best, forcing developing countries to adhere to our labor standards would create a privileged labor aristocracy, leaving the poor majority no better off. And it might not even do that. The advantages of established First World industries are still formidable. The only reason developing countries have been able to compete with those industries is their ability to offer employers cheap labor. Deny them that ability, and you might well deny them the prospect of continuing industrial growth, even reverse the growth that has been achieved. And since export-oriented growth, for all its injustice, has been a huge boon for the workers in those nations, anything that curtails that growth is very much against their interests. A policy of good jobs in principle, but no jobs in practice, might assuage our consciences, but it is no favor to its alleged beneficiaries. You may say that the wretched of the earth should not be forced to serve as hewers of wood, drawers of water, and sewers of sneakers for the affluent. But what is the alternative? Should they be helped with foreign aid? Maybe--although the historical record of regions like southern Italy suggests that such aid has a tendency to promote perpetual dependence. Anyway, there isn't the slightest prospect of significant aid materializing. Should their own governments provide more social justice? Of course--but they won't, or at least not because we tell them to. And as long as you have no realistic alternative to industrialization based on low wages, to oppose it means that you are willing to deny desperately poor people the best chance they have of progress for the sake of what amounts to an aesthetic standard--that is, the fact that you don't like the idea of workers being paid a pittance to supply rich Westerners with fashion items. In short, my correspondents are not entitled to their self-righteousness. They have not thought the matter through. And when the hopes of hundreds of millions are at stake, thinking things through is not just good intellectual practice. It is a moral duty. "

Some excerpts: "People of America: the world is following your news in regards to your invasion of Iraq, for people have recently come to know that, after several years of the tragedies of this war, the vast majority of you want it stopped. Thus, you elected the Democratic Party for this purpose, but the Democrats haven't made a move worth mentioning. On the contrary, they agree to spending of tens of billions to continue the killing and the war there, which has led to the vast majority of you being afflicted with disappointment... In the Vietnam War, the leaders of the White House claimed at the time that it was necessary and crucial war, and during it, Rumsfeld and his aides murdered two million villagers. And when Kennedy took over the presidency and deviated from the general line of policy drawn up for the White House and wanted to stop the unjust war, that angered the owners of the major corporations who were benefiting from its continuation. And so Kennedy was killed, and al Qaeda wasn't present at that time, but rather, those corporations were the primary beneficiary from his killing... This war was entirely unnecessary, as testified by your own reports. And among the most capable of those from your own side who speaks to you on this topic and on the manufacturing of public opinion is Noam Chomsky, who spoke sober words of advice prior to the war, but the leader of Texas doesn't like those who give advice.... The entire world came out in unprecedented demonstrations to warn against waging the war and describe its true nature in eloquent terms like "no spilling red blood for black oil," yet he paid them no heed.... So in answer to the question about the causes of the Democrats' failure to stop the war, I say: they are the same reasons which led to the failure of former president Kennedy to stop the Vietnam war. Those with real power and influence are those with the most capital. And since the democratic system permits major corporations to back candidates, be they presidential or congressional, there shouldn't be any cause for astonishment -- and there isn't any -- in the Democrats' failure to stop the war. And you're the ones who have the saying which goes, "money talks." And I tell you: after the failure of your representatives in the Democratic Party to implement your desire to stop the war, you can still carry anti-war placards and spread out in the streets of major cities, then go back to your homes, but that will be on no use and will lead to the prolonging of the war.... In fact, the life of all mankind is in danger because of the global warming resulting to a large degree from the emissions of the factories and of the major corporations, yet despite that the representative of these corporations in the White House insists on not observing the Kyoto accord, with the knowledge that the statics speaks of the death and displacement of the millions of human beings because of that, especially in Africa. This greatest of plagues and most dangerous of threats to the lives of humans is taking place in an accelerating fashion as the world is being dominated by the democratic system, which confirms its massive failure to protect humans and their interests from the greed and avarice of the major corporations and their representatives.... The capitalist system seeks to turn the entire world into a fiefdom of the major corporations under the label of "globallization" in order to protect democracy.... And if you would like to get to know some of the reasons for your losing of your war against us, then read the book of Michael Scheuer in this regard...."

One of the best parts about shopping at Walmart, while in New Hampshire, is simultaneously pissing off economically illiterate retards on the left, putting another nail in the coffin of unions that expect the public to pay higher prices to fill the gap between what their skillsets are actually worth and what they'd like to be paid, and depriving the state of Massachusetts and it's bloated, corrupt, and massively inefficient public sector of as much revenue as possible. It's like Christmas every time I walk through the door.

I agree with the decision on the grounds that the motive for restricting climbing at the site was "pursuant to a secular purpose - the preservation of a historic cultural area." When it comes to public lands, there are various places and resources that have a cultural, historical, or ethnographic significance that provides a secular basis for their preservation. Any time any group attempts to exclude others or restrict their activities on the basis of legal arguments that have their basis in the assertion of their "religious rights" is one that courts should dismiss out of hand. If Mormons asserted their "religious rights," and attempted to exclude the public from, or restrict the public's activities on public lands on this basis, then they'd also enjoy your enthusiastic support, would they?

When anyone with whom the central message of this image resonates argues on behalf of granting the government control over healthcare, the irony thus generated has a kind of sublime majesty and magnitude about it that humbles most mountain ranges. Amazing.

Atually, I'd be inclined to think it your own commuter vehicle of choice. I'm flattered, but actually I've commuted by bike or walked to school or work for all but three years in the interval from 1992 to the present.

This from memory, but I remember reading that the average welfare payment is less than $500 a month. This does not include subsidized housing or food stamps. Last year, during the picker shortage, pickers in E. Wa could make $150 a day...more in a week than you could make in a month on welfare. Plus, their dinero is worth even more south of the border. Part of the labor shortage stems from a lack of population 'willing' to work those jobs in rural areas. This creates a demand for a migratory labor force that the area could not support year round. Just thinking out loud on that one - but just to continue the exercise further, you'd probably have to find the pay-threshold at which working extremely hard in hot fields becomes more desirable than earning less pay for doing nothing. If X is the pay for doing nothing, and it's enough to live on, then I imagine that they pay for working hard in a field would have to be some multiple of X in order to persuade people to accept the trade-off. I can only imagine the response if someone suggested cutting off welfare payments - at least during harvest season - to able-bodied males and childless women who weren't in some kind of a training program, and who refused offers of employment from farmers at whatever wage rate was in effect at the time. Believe it or not, there are many people in the world who actually do have a work ethic and would be ashamed to accept money when they are able-bodied. Earning one's own way is not only an economic drive, it is also something instilled into us. I agree, but it seems like by definition these values are typically not quite as robust in the average multi-year or multi-generational welfare recipient that might otherwise make a good candidate for farm labor.

Your ideal equation may provide some insight on paper, but it still doesn't address this logistical problem: the majority of welfare recipients live in cities; too far from farms to provide a labor force. Rural areas with sparse populations can't support the large, migrant populations of workers they need during certain critical times of year. Like it or not, farming communities need a migrant labor force. I'm sure the farmers would spring for the tab for the Greyhounds they'd need to get the labor force to the farms. I think I recall something like this happening in places that were experiencing shortages of farm labor, and I vaguely recall that it wasn't terribly successful because the workers they got were so inferior - from the farmer's perspective - to the migrant laborers that they were accustomed to. I think the actual outcome of a "work on the farm or go hungry" policy would be an increase in crimes committed by people who conclude that boosting stereos provides a better effort-to-reward ratio than working on a farm.

Is that how he commutes to the office at the hedge-fund in the Caymans?

wLwv39GiKIs

This from memory, but I remember reading that the average welfare payment is less than $500 a month. This does not include subsidized housing or food stamps. Last year, during the picker shortage, pickers in E. Wa could make $150 a day...more in a week than you could make in a month on welfare. Plus, their dinero is worth even more south of the border. Part of the labor shortage stems from a lack of population 'willing' to work those jobs in rural areas. This creates a demand for a migratory labor force that the area could not support year round. Just thinking out loud on that one - but just to continue the exercise further, you'd probably have to find the pay-threshold at which working extremely hard in hot fields becomes more desirable than earning less pay for doing nothing. If X is the pay for doing nothing, and it's enough to live on, then I imagine that they pay for working hard in a field would have to be some multiple of X in order to persuade people to accept the trade-off. I can only imagine the response if someone suggested cutting off welfare payments - at least during harvest season - to able-bodied males and childless women who weren't in some kind of a training program, and who refused offers of employment from farmers at whatever wage rate was in effect at the time.

Mexbots. There'd be quite the cosmic econo ying/yang thing happening if this hypothetical class of harvesters were produced on Mexican assembly lines...

Yup - but if the only people who are willing to work for those rates under those conditions are illegal aliens who lack other options, then the odds are good that the rate that they are paying isn't the market rate. It would be kind of interesting to compare the total value of welfare payments (per recipient) to the total compensation of agricultural workers (per worker) in order to see if we have artificially contstrained the labor market for farm workers by creating a class of people who can earn a higher "wage" by doing nothing, rather than working in fields. If that's the case, then the farmers would be justified in claiming that labor market distortions created by the government are part of the reason why they can't attract labor at true market rates.

The small problem for that is climate.... Farmers already have moved abroad in order to supply fresh fruits and vegetables when those would normally be out of season. Their are strawberry fields in the middle of Baja that are being picked in January. The pickers and the season move north as the year progresses. One need only look where a majority of the subsidies end up - in the pockets of large corporate farmers - to see that subsidies should end and end soon. Then that's a problem for Mexico, and the corrupt and ineffectual administrative class that's kept the population mired in poverty for the past century will have to figure something out or contend with the angry, jobless young men that they've been exporting to El Norte on their home turf. I also think that reducing the de-facto labor subsidy will put quite a premium on developing machine-harvestable variants of crops that currently have to be picked by hand, and new machines to do the harvesting.

Yup. The greatest of all of the polite fictions that we nod and smile at when around people with children that they've never taught to behave properly. I'd wager that about 5% of hyperactive kids actually behave the way they do for purely biological reasons, and the rest comes down to parenting. Just not worth alienating the folks with the kids that they don't know how to raise, though. I take some comfort in the fact that they will ultimately suffer the most as a consequence of their child-rearing styles, though.

Not a snide comment - but did you discuss the economic reforms that the Irish have made over the past ~20 years with any Irish people, since it sounds like you have some connections there?

What will eventually happen if the borders are ever brought under control, and we decline to follow the Euro-model of creating a class of unassimilated guest workers - is that crops that can be harvested mechanically will continue to be grown in the US, while labor intensive crops will be grown where the labor is cheap. Growing labor intensive crops in Mexico instead of using the current de-facto labor subsidy for farmers would bring about important social and economic benefits for both the US and Mexico. Somehow factories found a way to get by without using child labor, and farmers will have to find a way to grow crops without paying below-market rates for their labor, or go out of business. Farmers are businessmen, and why they should be exempt from the rules that every other class of enterprise has to abide by is beyond me.

Beavers?