Quotulatiousness

September 21, 2013

Why wind and solar power can’t meet our needs

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:32

Robert Bryce explains why — no matter how much we might want it to be so — alternate forms of energy like wind and solar power cannot cover our demands:

That 32 percent increase in global carbon dioxide emissions reflects the central tension in any discussion about cutting the use of coal, oil and natural gas: Developing countries — in particular, fast-growing economies such as Vietnam, China and India — simply cannot continue to grow if they limit the use of hydrocarbons. Those countries’ refusal to enact carbon taxes or other restrictions illustrates what Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, calls the “iron law of climate policy”: Whenever policies “focused on economic growth confront policies focused on emissions reduction, it is economic growth that will win out every time.”

Over the past 10 years, despite great public concern, carbon dioxide emissions have soared because some 2.6 billion people still live in dire energy poverty. More than 1.3 billion have no access to electricity at all.

Now to the second number: 1. That’s the power density of wind in watts per square meter. Power density is a measure of the energy flow that can be harnessed from a given area, volume or mass. Six different analyses of wind (one of them is my own) have all arrived at that same measurement.

Wind energy’s paltry power density means that enormous tracts of land must be set aside to make it viable. And that has spawned a backlash from rural and suburban landowners who don’t want 500-foot wind turbines near their homes. To cite just one recent example, in late July, some 2,000 protesters marched against the installation of more than 1,000 wind turbines in Ireland’s Midlands Region.

Consider how much land it would take for wind energy to replace the power the U.S. now gets from coal. In 2011, the U.S. had more than 300 billion watts of coal-fired capacity. Replacing that with wind would require placing turbines over about 116,000 square miles, an area about the size of Italy. And because of the noise wind turbines make — a problem that has been experienced from Australia to Ontario — no one could live there.

[…]

In 2012, the contribution from all of those sources amounted to about 4.8 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, or roughly one-half of a Saudi Arabia. Put another way, we get about 50 times as much energy from all other sources — coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear and hydropower — as we do from wind, solar, geothermal and biomass.

September 17, 2013

The flaw in “nudging”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Health, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:18

Coyote Blog looks at the flourishing “nudge” sector of government activity and points out one of the biggest flaws:

The theory behind the idea that government should nudge (or coerce, as the case may be) us into “better” behavior is based on the idea that many people are bad at delay discounting. In other words, we tend to apply huge discount rates to pain in the future, such that we will sometimes make decisions to avoid small costs today even if that causes us to incur huge costs in the future (e.g. we refuse to walk away from the McDonalds french fries today which may cause us to die of obesity later).

There are many problems with this theory, not the least of which is that many decisions that may appear to be based on bad delay discounting are actually based on logical and rational premises that outsiders are unaware of.

But the most obvious problem is that people in government, who will supposedly save us from this poor decision-making, are human beings as well and should therefore have the exact same cognitive weaknesses. No one has ever managed to suggest a plausible theory as to how our methods of choosing politicians or staffing government jobs somehow selects for people who have better decision-making abilities.

A brief history of fifty years of American economic thought

Filed under: Economics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:07

Tyler Cowen wraps up the rise and fall of “right” and “left” economics in the US since the 1960s:

Throughout the 1970s and most of the 1980s, the so-called “right wing” was right about virtually everything on the economic front. Most of all communism, but also inflation, taxes, (most of) deregulation, labor unions, and much more, noting that a big chunk of the right wing blew it on race and some other social issues. The Friedmanite wing of the right nailed it on floating exchange rates.

Arguably the “rightness of the right” peaks around 1989, with the collapse of communism. After that, the right wing starts to lose its way.

Up through that time, market-oriented economists have more interesting research, more innovative journals, and much else to their credit, culminating in the persona and career of Milton Friedman.

I’ve never heard tales of Paul Samuelson’s MIT colleagues mocking him for his pronouncements on Soviet economic growth. I suspect they didn’t.

Starting in the early 1990s, the left wing is better equipped, more scholarly, and also more fun to read. (What exactly turned them around?) In the 1990s, the Quarterly Journal of Economics is suddenly more interesting and ultimately more influential than the Journal of Political Economy, even though the latter retained a higher academic ranking. The right loses track of what its issues ought to be. There is no real heir to the legacy of Milton Friedman.

September 11, 2013

What do libraries have to do with rent seeking?

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Economics, Education — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:46

As Logan Albright explains, quite a lot:

Libraries are wonderful places. There is nothing like a vast repository of knowledge, filled with undiscovered treasures for anyone who cares to look. They provide free access to information, both in book form and over the internet, to people would otherwise not be able to afford it. All in all, it’s a lovely service. But as much as I enjoy them, libraries also provide a useful example of the inefficiencies of the public sector and the numerous problems with government funded programs.

You may not realize it, but most librarian jobs these days require a specialized education – a master’s degree in the field of Library Science. The curriculum of such a degree varies from school to school, but the main focus is on using a variety of complex databases, as well as interacting with the public. Why is such a specialized form of education required to work in a library? It’s not like a degree in aeronautics or medicine where actual lives could depend on your competence. A quick search for the job duties of a reference librarian turns up the following: “A reference librarian provides assistance to users of a library who need help locating resources and information.” The average salary for a reference librarian? $39,659 – $55,008. Other library science related jobs can make as much as $100,000 a year.

Of course, it’s not as simple as all that. Locating information in a library database is not like searching Google. It requires specialized skills. You can’t simply type in what you want and expect to get it. The obvious question here is: why not?

The simple answer is that the public funding structure of libraries provides no incentive to improve things. In fact, it encourages just the opposite. Since the library’s budget does not depend on how many customers it pleases, there is no compelling reason to make things easier. Since a library’s revenues come from the public coffers and not from the pockets of voluntary patrons, there is no competitive pressure to keep costs low.

September 7, 2013

TPP negotiators actively concealing their tracks

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

The EFF on the now even-more-secret negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty:

This week, trade delegates met in San Francisco to discuss the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement’s e-commerce chapter. It’s likely that this secret chapter carries provisions that whittle away at user data protections. But we weren’t able to say so at this meeting. Not only have they neglected to notify digital rights groups — including EFF, which is based in San Francisco — about the meeting, we could not even discover where it was taking place.

Delegates from TPP countries are right now holding these secretive “inter-sessional” meetings here and in other undisclosed cities around the world. Trade reps for specific issue areas are hammering out “unresolved” issues that are holding up the conclusion of the agreement, and doing so by becoming even more secretive and evasive than ever.

We only heard about a TPP meeting on intellectual property in Mexico City in September through the diplomatic rumor-mill, since the US Trade Rep is no longer bothering to announce the dates or locations of these closed-door side meetings. During this round in Mexico, countries that have been resistant to U.S. demands to sign onto highly restrictive copyright enforcement standards may ultimately be strong-armed into doing so.

It’s probably safe to assume that the reason they’ve become so secretive is that they don’t want any of us to know what they’re doing until it’s a fait accompli and we can’t do anything about it. That’s how much they trust us.

September 2, 2013

Macroeconomics and math

Filed under: Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:06

Noah Smith on the uneasy foundations of modern macroeconomics:

In macro, most of the equations that went into the model seemed to just be assumed. In physics, each equation could be — and presumably had been — tested and verified as holding more-or-less true in the real world. In macro, no one knew if real-world budget constraints really were the things we wrote down. Or the production function. No one knew if this “utility” we assumed people maximized corresponded to what people really maximize in real life. We just assumed a bunch of equations and wrote them down. Then we threw them all together, got some kind of answer or result, and compared the result to some subset of real-world stuff that we had decided we were going to “explain”. Often, that comparison was desultory or token, as in the case of “moment matching”.

In other words, the math was no longer real. It was all made up. You could no longer trust the textbook. When the textbook told you that “Households maximize the expected value of their discounted lifetime utility of consumption”, that was not a Newton’s Law that had been proven approximately true with centuries of physics experiments. It was not even a game theory solution concept that had been proven approximately sometimes true with decades of economics experiments. Instead, it was just some random thing that someone made up and wrote down because A) it was tractable to work with, and B) it sounded plausible enough so that most other economists who looked at it tended not to make too much of a fuss.

We were told not to worry about this. We were told that although macro needed microfoundations — absolutely required them — it was not necessary for the reality of any of these microfoundations to be independently confirmed by evidence. All that was necessary is that the model “worked” after all the microfoundations were thrown together. We were told this not because of any individual failing on the part of any of our teachers, but because this belief is part of the dominant scientific culture of the macro field. It’s the paradigm.

Slate on the gender wage gap

Filed under: Business, Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

Hanna Rosin debunks the meme that “women only get paid 77 cents for every dollar earned by men doing the same job”:

The official Bureau of Labor Department statistics show that the median earnings of full-time female workers is 77 percent of the median earnings of full-time male workers. But that is very different than “77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.” The latter gives the impression that a man and a woman standing next to each other doing the same job for the same number of hours get paid different salaries. That’s not at all the case. “Full time” officially means 35 hours, but men work more hours than women. That’s the first problem: We could be comparing men working 40 hours to women working 35.

How to get a more accurate measure? First, instead of comparing annual wages, start by comparing average weekly wages. This is considered a slightly more accurate measure because it eliminates variables like time off during the year or annual bonuses (and yes, men get higher bonuses, but let’s shelve that for a moment in our quest for a pure wage gap number). By this measure, women earn 81 percent of what men earn, although it varies widely by race. African-American women, for example, earn 94 percent of what African-American men earn in a typical week. Then, when you restrict the comparison to men and women working 40 hours a week, the gap narrows to 87 percent.

[…]

Goldin and Lawrence Katz have done about as close to an apples-to-apples comparison of men’s and women’s wages as exists. (They talk about it here in a Freakonomics discussion.) They tracked male and female MBAs graduating from the University of Chicago from 1990 to 2006. First they controlled for previous job experience, GPA, chosen profession, business-school course and job title. Right out of school, they found only a tiny differential in salary between men and women, which might be because of a little bit of lingering discrimination or because women are worse at negotiating starting salaries. But 10 to 15 years later, the gap widens to 40 percent, almost all of which is due to career interruptions and fewer hours. The gap is even wider for women business school graduates who marry very high earners. (Note: Never marry a rich man).

I’ve posted similar articles on this topic before: August, 2012, June 2012, and July 2010.

August 30, 2013

Economic Darwinism – you’re soaking in it

Filed under: Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:19

Charles Hugh Smith on the next big financial crisis and the way we’ve carefully put the worst people in place to cope with it:

Brenton Smith (no relation) recently identified a key driver of the next financial crisis: Economic Darwinism. Just as natural selection selects for traits that improve the odds of success/survival in the natural world, Economic Darwinism advances people and policies that boost profits and power within the dominant environment.

As Brenton explains in his essay The One Phrase That Explains the Great Recession, “The Federal Reserve’s 20-year policy of easy money created an environment virtually assured to select bankers, bureaucrats, educators, and elected officials who least understood the consequences of a credit crisis.”

In other words, a hyper-financialized environment of near-zero interest and abundant credit rewarded those people and policies that succeed in that environment. Once the environment changes from “risk-on” to “risk-off,” the people and policies in charge are the worst possible choices for leadership, as the traits that enable successful management of credit crises have been selected out of the leadership pool.

This has political as well as financial consequences. As Brenton noted in an email exchange, Economic Darwinism creates an “incestuous relationship between Wall Street and Washington D.C., where success on Wall Street leads to a career in D.C.” This is a self-reinforcing process, as all those who are unwilling to keep dancing during the risk-on speculative orgy are weeded out of both the financial and political sectors, while those who dance the hardest gain political power, which they use to keep the music playing regardless of the increasing risks or consequences to the nation.

Trade negotiations are so secret that MPs are denied access to the information

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:55

Techdirt‘s Mike Masnick says that even congressmen have (limited) access to ongoing Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiation documents, but that even the NDP’s trade critic can’t get that level of information here:

Don Davies is a Canadian Member of Parliament who notes that he’s been denied access to information about the ongoing TPP negotiations, of which Canada is supposedly a member:

    “The TPP is a sweeping agreement covering issues that affect many areas of Canada’s economy and society — including several areas of policy that have never been subject to trade agreements before,” said Davies. “By keeping Parliament completely in the dark on negotiations the Conservatives also leave Canadians in the dark and, for an agreement of this magnitude that is abnormal and unacceptable.

    “If the US can allow its legislators to see the TPP text, there is no reason that Canada can’t,” Davies said.

In this case, it’s doubly ridiculous. Davies is a member of the NDP party, which is not in power, but his role is as the Official Opposition Critic for International Trade. In other words, he’s basically the trade policy expert for the NDP, and as such, you’d think he should at the very least be included in the details of ongoing negotiations. Yet again, though, it seems that the main negotiating parties involved in the TPP have realized that the best way to get across an agreement they like is to keep it as secretive and non-transparent as possible, especially from critics. This is the exact opposite of how democratic governments are supposed to work.

Of course, the addition of Canada to the TPP has always been done in a way to keep our neighbor up north as a silent partner to the US’s position. You may recall that the US didn’t let Canada join until well into the negotiating process, and as part of the invite, Canada was told that it had to accept all negotiated text without question, even though it wasn’t allowed to see it yet. And, related to that, they had to agree to future texts during some meetings where they weren’t allowed to attend.

August 29, 2013

Meet the Undercover Economist, Tim Harford

Filed under: Books, Economics, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:36

A profile of economist and popular author Tim Harford in The Independent:

Tim Harford can’t help himself. We are navigating our way to lunch in an unfamiliar city and I am momentarily disorientated by the mass of visual paraphernalia at a busy crossing. My hesitation is his cue for a story about the Dutch traffic engineer who found that getting rid of excess street furniture forced car drivers to take more responsibility, dramatically slashing the number of accidents.

Welcome to the world as seen by Harford, a man who made his name explaining the economic rationale behind everything that we do. His tale about the late Hans Monderman is illustrative. Later, over a tableful of dim sum, he adds: “The world is a constant source of ideas for someone who thinks like an economist.”

His bestselling “Undercover Economist” books have made him a founding member of the new tribe popularising the dismal science; not before time given the circumstances, you might add. His latest volume, The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, subtitled How to Run — or Ruin — an Economy, is out this week. It tackles the recent “titanic” mess and is his first foray into macroeconomics, also known as the “bigger picture”.

“It’s my job to figure out an interesting way to talk about these things, and a different angle that’s fun and memorable and tells people something about how the economy works…. I’ve always been much more of a micro guy — individual behaviour and the psychological elements of game theory were always my thing, so when I started, it felt like a sense of duty. But halfway through, the subject had won me over.”

[…]

As it happens, Harford, who turns 40 next month, didn’t intentionally study economics. His undergraduate PPE degree (philosophy, politics and economics) was the “classic Oxford degree for people who don’t know what to do”, and he spent his first year intending to drop economics at the end of it. Pressed by his tutor, after doing “really well”, he changed his mind and thus his life, not least because he met his wife while working at Shell, in the scenario planning team for a certain Vince Cable.

Despite starting out in a job that required forecasting, Harford is defensive of his profession, which is much maligned for not predicting the global crash. “Economists have allowed themselves to walk into a trap where we say we can forecast, but no serious economist thinks we can,” he says, pointing again to a Keynes quote, this time aligning economists and dentists. “You don’t expect dentists to be able to forecast how many teeth you’ll have when you’re 80. You expect them to give good advice and fix problems. We’ve allowed ourselves to become really bad weather forecasters, which is a shame.”

August 28, 2013

Megan McArdle on why Wal-Mart can’t pay like Costco

Filed under: Business, Economics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:14

TL;DR – it’s not because they’re Dickensian monsters.

I wrote about this last spring in regard to Wal-Mart and Costco. Upper-middle-class people who live in urban areas — which is to say, the sort of people who tend to write about the wage differential between the two stores — tend to think of them as close substitutes, because they’re both giant stores where you occasionally go to buy something more cheaply than you can in a neighborhood grocery or hardware store. However, for most of Wal-Mart’s customer base, that’s where the resemblance ends. Costco really is a store where affluent, high-socioeconomic status households occasionally buy huge quantities of goods on the cheap: That’s Costco’s business strategy (which is why its stores are pretty much found in affluent near-in suburbs). Wal-Mart, however, is mostly a store where low-income people do their everyday shopping.

[…]

In other words, Trader Joe’s and Costco are the specialty grocer and warehouse club for an affluent, educated college demographic. They woo this crowd with a stripped-down array of high quality stock-keeping units, and high-quality customer service. The high wages produce the high levels of customer service, and the small number of products are what allow them to pay the high wages. Fewer products to handle (and restock) lowers the labor intensity of your operation. In the case of Trader Joe’s, it also dramatically decreases the amount of space you need for your supermarket … which in turn is why their revenue per square foot is so high. (Costco solves this problem by leaving the stuff on pallets, so that you can be your own stockboy).

Both these strategies work in part because very few people expect to do all their shopping at Trader Joe’s, and no one expects to do all their shopping at Costco. They don’t need to be comprehensive. Supermarkets, and Wal-Mart, have to devote a lot of shelf space, and labor, to products that don’t turn over that often.

[…]

That’s not the only reason that the Trader Joe’s/Costco model wouldn’t work for Wal-Mart. For one thing, it’s no accident that the high-wage favorites cited by activists tend to serve the affluent; lower income households can’t afford to pay extra for top-notch service. If it really matters to you whether you pay 50 cents a loaf less for generic bread, you’re not going to go to the specialty store where the organic produce is super-cheap and the clerk gave a cookie to your kid. Every time I write about Wal-Mart (or McDonald’s, or [insert store here]), several people will e-mail, or tweet, or come into the comments to say they’d be happy to pay 25 percent more for their Big Mac or their Wal-Mart goods if it means that the workers are well paid. I have taken to asking them how often they go to Wal-Mart or McDonald’s. So far, no one has reported going as often as once a week; the modal answer is a sudden disappearance from the conversation. If I had to guess, I’d estimate that most of the people making such statements go to Wal-Mart or McDonald’s only on road trips.

August 14, 2013

Ignore the inconsistencies in official Chinese statistics at your peril

Filed under: China, Economics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:40

It’s been a while since I reminded everyone that the official Chinese government statistics can’t be trusted. Here’s Zero Hedge on the same topic:

How Badly Flawed Is Chinese Economic Data? The Opening Bid is $1 Trillion

Baseline Chinese economic data is unreliable. Taking published National Bureau of Statistics China data on the components of consumer price inflation, I attempt to reconcile the official data to third party data. Three problems are apparent in official NBSC data on inflation.

    First, the base data on housing price inflation is manipulated. According to the NBSC, urban private housing occupants enjoyed a total price increase of only 6% between 2000 and 2011.

    Second, while renters faced cumulative price increases in excess of 50% during the same period, the NBSC classifies most Chinese households has private housing occupants making them subject to the significantly lower inflation rate.

    Third, despite beginning in the year 2000 with nearly two-thirds of Chinese households in rural areas, the NSBC applies a straight 80/20 urban/rural private housing weighting throughout our time sample. This further skews the accuracy of the final data.

To correct for these manipulative practices, I use third party and related NBSC data to better estimate the change in consumer prices in China between 2000 and 2011.

I find that using conservative assumptions about price increases the annual CPI in China by approximately 1%.

This reduces real Chinese GDP by 8-12% or more than $1 trillion in PPP terms.

Regular visitors to the blog know that I’ve been rather skeptical about the official statistics reported by Chinese government and media sources.

If there’s a conspiracy, it’s a pretty ineffectual, incompetent one

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:20

Jeff Thomas asks whether the gold market is being manipulated by shadowy conspiracies of governments, big banks, and international bodies:

… we are reminded that, no matter how evil we think a given government may be, no matter how greedy we think a given banker may be, both the world’s governments and the worlds banks have proven time and time again to be guilty of overreach; that is, they assume that their position of power will assure that, if they attempt to control a market, they will succeed.

However, history shows that both governments and banks have a patchwork quilt as a record for effectiveness in this regard. Both exhibit a history of misinterpretation of market drivers, inadequate planning and inadequate execution, to say nothing of a penchant for betraying one another. (The admission by Barclays Bank that they manipulated LIBOR is a good example.)

As such, the concept of a finely-tuned conspiracy of bankers and governments in which all the players (including the egotistical heads of countries) all agree on every facet of a “Grand Plan” is unlikely in the extreme. On the other hand, it is highly likely that an endless series of deals between any two or more parties will crop up along the way. They will succeed or fail to varying degrees. (And we should not overlook the likelihood that, whatever one group should attempt, another group may, inadvertently or not, spoil that attempt through their own plan, which may well be a different one.)

By arguing whether or not gold manipulation exists, we may find that we are wasting our brain cells on the question. A better question, and one that we might choose to monitor on a regular basis, might be, “To what degree is successful manipulation taking place?” We might then use the on-going answer as a guide, to inform our reasoning going forward, as to what impact any perceived manipulation is likely to have with regard to our precious metals investment.

August 13, 2013

It’s accurate to describe the Greek plight as a depression

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Greece — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:44

Allister Heath says the catastrophic state of the Greek economy fully merits the descriptor “depression”:

Sorry, but the fact that Greece collapsed at an annual rate of 4.6 per cent in the second quarter, rather than a little bit faster, isn’t good news. It’s terrible, awful, horrible news. Greek output is down by 23 per cent since 2008 and unemployment is at around 28 per cent; no wonder, given the shrinking economy, that gross tax revenues are continuing to undershoot targets.

Hyperbolic economists sometime claim that the UK has undergone a depression, which is nonsense — but Greece’s woes cannot be described in any other way. Its depression has been catastrophic, one of the worst ever recorded for any country in the modern, industrialised era (apart from during or immediately after a war). Its dramatic collapse reminds us that stupid economic policies can destroy a nation; depressions have not been banished from modern civilisation.

It may be, of course, that the collapse is beginning to abate and that the economy may finally stabilise next year. I’ll believe it when I see it; unless Greece’s money supply starts growing again, and demand begins to increase, a recovery is impossible. But Greece is just a tiny part of the Eurozone, so achieving such an outcome is even harder than in a country like the UK, especially given that the Greek financial crisis hasn’t really gone away. There is no way that Athens will meet its bailout targets and its debt burden is utterly unsustainable.

August 8, 2013

The dismal economics of professional hockey in Arizona

Filed under: Economics, Sports, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:15

I don’t follow hockey at all, so I had to be reminded that there already was an NHL team in Phoenix. The fact that the team is bleeding money all over is not a surprise — that they’re determined to stay in Arizona and continue losing lots of money? That’s just dumb:

As you probably know by now, the Phoenix Coyotes are staying in Glendale, but they’ll be changing their name to the Arizona Coyotes to reflect the fact they aren’t in Phoenix.

Now anyone with a modicum of common sense knows that this is a venture that is almost certain to fail, given how much money the team has lost over the years, the bankruptcy process, attendance, etc. This is all made worse by the fact there are several viable markets itching to get a team (Quebec City and Southern Ontario spring to mind).

If you’re a Coyotes fan, you might be thinking, “what does this clown know? He’s just some idiot with a blog. Hey, he was probably a diehard Jets supporter and watched, ashen-faced, as his team played its last game on his 15th birthday before leaving for the desert bwahahahahaha.” To which I would respond, “hey, are you a stalker or something?”

Okay, so I’m not a fancy economist or anything and perhaps I’ll never let the departure of the original Jets go.

The guy who wrote the following IS an fancy economist though, and his opinion, which was submitted as part of legal wrangling between the league and former Coyotes owner Jerry Moyes over ex-RIM CEO Jim Balsillie’s brazen attempt to acquire the team without the NHL’s consent, is pretty clear. Leaving the Coyotes to founder Glendale is a terrible move on many levels.

H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.

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