Quotulatiousness

February 20, 2023

“There is no way Justin Trudeau won any of the last three elections”

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Elizabeth Nickson on recent rather alarming confirmation of many things told by various “conspiracy theorists” and purveyors of “misinformation”:

Cracks are beginning to appear in the massive election fraud strategy prosecuted against western democracies. Berlin last week reversed its city election because it had been stolen by the left, and Berliner-Zeitung revealed that a team of reporters from The Marker, Haaretz and Radio France had gone undercover for six months as clients of a company that did nothing but election theft. That company, Jorge, had “intervened in 33 national election campaigns and votes. In 27 cases, it is said to have influenced the elections in favor of its clients. In order to control the opinion on the Internet, the secret company controls over 30,000 credible fake accounts on social media platforms”.

And in Canuckistan this morning, in the organ of the bien-pensant liberal establishment, there was this nugget.

There is no way Justin Trudeau won any of the last three elections. And, honey, this little story from Canada’s most prestigious newspaper is just the beginning.

But first, a story of my own …

When I turned right I had been hired to write an op-ed column for the above Globe and Mail, and what unfurled from my fingers was pure conservatism. I’d hold up my fingers and think, What the hell? Where did that come from? But I continued, and as I did, family and friends sheered away until, except for my mother, I was left virtually friendless.

I had moved back to Canada, you see, and we are 100% captured by the left. There are a handful of conservative writers in the country, but they are soft and weak and they prevaricate because otherwise they would not eat. Luckily I had spent most of my adult life out of the country, had a broader pool to draw from, and given my new thinking, mirable dictu for every friend I lost, I made five new ones. And they were smarter, more responsible, more interesting people. I missed the clothes, restaurants and parties for a while, then I gave up on those too. Essentially, sickening. Finally corrupting.

But it continues, since we live in a hard-left community. We are isolated. Even Jamie, because he lives with me, has lost friends and family. We have his sons, his ex-wife, one of my brothers. The rest are just cold, pitiless. Cruel.

This has happened to hundreds of thousands of people. It’s called “bad-jacketing” and is part of the Fifth Generation Warfare launched against malcontents large and small (like me) up and down the social ladder. Millions. Tens of millions. The competent are targeted, isolated and bad jacketed. It is meant to drive the competent out of the culture. Why is everything breaking? Why is the economy failing? Everyone left in the system is incompetent and vicious with it. It’s why Soviet Russia failed, why the Eastern Bloc collapsed, it is why China went for a capitalist hybrid. Everywhere socialism is tried it destroys the competent and then destroys everything else.

The left is implacable and they punish. They hurt you until you give up. They will break anything you have. Thinking about helping a young neighbor last month, which would require a week or more of brutal work, I finally thought: I have not helped or befriended one single socialist — and she was an avowed socialist — who hasn’t eventually stabbed me in the back. Not one.

When I was driven out of the profession, I spent ten years studying. Was I right? Was I wrong? I should have signed up for a remote doctoral program, because I worked. I study, therefore I am. I studied therefore I was, should be written on my cremation plaque in the family plot. Not that they’ll let me in.

We are all intimidated by that level of hate and exclusion. All of us, politicians, editors, bureaucrats, charities, all of us are terrified of being taken down in our personal lives. Bad-jacketed, rejected by those you love deeply. I know how that feels and I bet you do too.

December 17, 2022

Capital punishment

Filed under: Government, Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tam at View From The Porch expresses some of her concerns about the death penalty and government’s fitness to carry out such punishments fairly:

“Tombstone Courthouse State Historic Park” by August Rode is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I’ve written numerous times that I’m pretty ambivalent about capital punishment. There are some crimes so heinous that you can’t just walk back from them and say “Hey, I’m sorry I ate grandma’s face with some fava beans and a nice chianti, but I was off my meds. I’m feeling better now and ready to be a productive member of society!” I’m comfortable with the concept of having society’s lifeguard blow the whistle and order that dude out of the pool.

Thing is, it turns out that a lot of people wind up on death row for Felony Being Black In A Lineup with a further count of Aggravated Having A Bad Lawyer. It’s bad enough having to try to make things right with a dude you’ve locked in a cell for years by mistake, but it’s impossible to do with a dude you’ve put in a coffin.

Conservatives don’t trust the government to do most anything right, from writing & enforcing gun laws to delivering the mail, but when it comes to making sure they strap the right guy in Ol’ Sparky, suddenly y’all act like the government couldn’t possibly screw up.

So while in theory I’m pretty okay with the idea of capital punishment, in some frictionless setting where all cows are spherical and have equal mass and libertarianism works, here in the real world I just don’t trust people to implement it right.

If we as a society screw up and off the wrong dude, who gets the sentence for that? Or do we all get ¹⁄₃₃₃,₀₀₀,₀₀₀ of a sentence?

October 21, 2022

The brief career of Liz Truss as British Prime Minister

Filed under: Britain, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As I was typing the heading for yesterday’s post on former British Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, it occurred to me that I might need the same phrasing for the Prime Minister … but I expected her to stumble on a few more weeks or months rather than following Kwarteng out the door this quickly:

Edmund Burke – one of the great theorists of the state – argued that for a government to rule successfully, it must have consent. Liz Truss lacked that consent; she moved like Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, ruling with an iron fist towards her economic vision without the consent, explicit or implicit, to rule in that manner and pursue that agenda.

Her economic programme was wholly unsuitable for the climate and deeply damaging. The result was that her reign, like Hobbes’ state of nature where nobody had the political legitimacy to rule, was nasty, brutish and short. It has left the mantle impossibly difficult for her successor.

Liz Truss has become the first prime minister since Neville Chamberlain to never face a general election whilst in office, and her successor will be under immediate pressure to call one. The economic situation is far more dire than it was before her disastrous mini-budget, and trust is shattered. This is before expected interest rate increases could tip millions into unaffordable mortgages, and the expiry of the energy support scheme (except for targeted support). Whoever takes over will face crises on multiple fronts that may prove impossible to arrest.

There’s rarely been a political downfall that didn’t merit at least a nod to the famous bunker scene:

If you haven’t seen Downfall, you’ve almost certainly seen its most famous scene. As shells fall on Berlin and the Red Army advances, Hitler sits in his bunker and listens as his generals lay out exactly how bad the situation is. One by one, his options are whittled away until eventually it sinks in that all that awaits is total defeat, humiliation, and annihilation.

On an entirely unrelated note, as Liz Truss returns to her bunker underneath the big table in the Cabinet Office Briefing Room, difficult conversations are happening in Downing Street. It’s 11am on a Thursday morning …

Penny Mordaunt attempts a cheerful smile. She does not succeed. “Prime Minister – the Labour party has made a breakthrough across a wide front. In the South they are taking Bedfordshire and Norfolk. In the North, the Red Wall is broken. In the East and West, losses are limited because fish don’t vote. But indications are that even the haddock are pretty gloomy about your prospects.”

Truss waves this away. “Don’t worry. Kwasi’s resignation will bring it under control.”

The Cabinet exchanges uneasy glances. Mordaunt steps forward from the crowd. “Prime minister … Kwasi …”

Jacob Rees-Mogg finishes the thought. “Kwasi is briefing against you in the Times. He says you have weeks remaining in office.”

An awkward silence develops, extends. In this room, time now has no meaning. Glaciers run like rivers. The sun and moon flicker across the sky. Empires rise and fall, newly sapient species emerge, flourish, and die off. Eventually the universe undergoes total heat death, frozen into stasis until a spark suddenly appears; a second big bang. Energy. Light. The reinvention of particle physics, and eventually an earth, evolution, Britain, and

“Prime Minister?”

“Yes. I see.”

A second pause, blessedly shorter. Mordaunt and Rees-Mogg glance nervously at each other. Eventually, Truss settles on a response: “Would everyone who has briefed against me in the last week please leave the room.”

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill makes the argument that Britain is now a political wasteland:

So Liz Truss is out. After just 44 days her premiership is no more. “I’m a fighter, not a quitter”, she said in parliament yesterday, and now she’s quit. Her premiership deserves to live in ignominy. Not necessarily because her blunders were so spectacular – though many of them were – but because of what this strangled-at-birth stint in Downing Street tells us about British politics more broadly. Which is that it’s a wasteland. An ideological void. A dustbowl of ideas. The lack of even the faintest glimmer of leadership material anywhere in the Westminster circus is horrifying to me. Trussism is but a symptom of a wider malady afflicting our political class.

[…]

Let’s go beyond Truss and Hunt and ask what this all tells us about the Conservative Party. This is the oldest political party in Europe, arguably the world. It’s the party that gave us Peel, Churchill, Thatcher, properly historic figures. Which birthed so much of the legal and political order we live under. Which The Economist aptly called “the world’s most successful party”. And which once reached, through Conservative Associations, the Church and other formal and informal networks, into communities across the land.

Now it’s a hollow machine, bereft of strategy, in dire want of ideas, out of touch with the public, disorientated, and infamous for having a PM who couldn’t last a naff, paltry 50 days in Downing St. The factional Tories cheering Truss’s demise are fools. Your entire party is indicted by this shitshow. And by the fact that your big replacement for lame Liz – Hunt – is a man so disconnected from British people, British history and British politics that he prefers EU oversight to national sovereignty, technocracy to belief, and “competence” to passion. Congrats!

To see the true state of the Tory Party, look no further than a comment piece penned by one of its former leaders, William Hague, this week. “Ideology is dead: it’s competence we need now”, the headline said. In short, you’ve had your fun with Brexit and Boris and the mad populist experiment – now it’s time for the adults to come back into the room and take control. Not only is this undemocratic (14million people voted for Boris to be PM, no one voted for Hunt to be de facto PM). Not only is it anti-political. Not only is it bureaucratic, stiff and unabashedly concerned more with making the trains run on time than with inspiring the people with proposals for a genuinely better life. It is also an admission that they have no ideas left. That the once great Conservative Party is completely out of steam. That Westminster itself is knackered. “Competence” is the last refuge of the visionless. They’re finished. Kaput. Clueless. Not just Liz, all of them. The need for a political overhaul has never been so pressing and so great.

Despite the “bad optics”, as Tristin Hopper points out here, this is what’s supposed to happen when the PM gets it totally wrong, and Canadians have no grounds to criticize Britain here:

October 15, 2022

Freeland does a good job of “talking the talk”, but the government is doing anything but “walking the walk”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney reluctantly agrees that at least some of what Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland covered in her recent speech to the Brookings Institute in Washington, DC was logical, sensible and well-crafted. What he finds mind-croggling is the chasm between what Freeland talks about and what the government she’s deputy leader of is actually doing:


Screencap from the CPAC video of Chrystia Freeland’s speech this week.

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland went to Washington this week, to give a speech at the Brookings Institution. It is a very interesting speech. Truly — it’s interesting. You should read it.

Is it a good speech, though?

In some ways, yes. You could even go so far as to say it’s a very good speech. Freeland lays out a stark but convincing critique of more than 30 years of Western foreign policy and economic assumptions, and offers some worthwhile Canadian initiatives that seek to address what we got wrong. We were wrong to believe that history had ended, Freeland said, and must now accept that we’re going to have to fight for the world we want to live in, and to win hearts and minds. We can’t just sit around and wait for the arc of history to bend things our way — we must work consciously and deliberately with our allies to make the Western alliance stronger, richer and safer, better able to withstand the hostility of our enemies and win over the undecideds of the world.

That’s the good stuff. There is, however, some bad news.

[…]

Freeland’s speech is full of little examples like this, where the value of her ideas collides bodily with the reality of her government’s competency problems. She is saying the right things. She is also saying the things that her government could already have been doing, but either hasn’t wanted to or isn’t capable of actually pulling off.

So we’re going to spend some domestic political capital to help draw the democratic allies together, eh? That sounds great. But what if they want to sell us some cheese or fancy butter? Are we going to spend some domestic political capital on that, or nah? Freeland says we must “deepen and expand” NATO and our other alliances, which also sounds super, but we’re already seeing signs that our allies are increasingly cutting us out of the loop and forming new Canada-free forums because we simply aren’t interested in deepening or expanding anything, and don’t add anything but an extra meal tab when we show up for the family photo. Freeland says that adapting to our changing world order is “one of our most urgent tasks”. Okay! Again, that sounds fantastic, but are we going to do a defence policy review? A foreign policy review? Are we going to spearhead any new initiatives? Are we going to build out our military, expand our diplomatic corps, and invoke that famous convening power in a way that tangibly helps? Or is this one of those things where the urgency is in the saying aloud before a well-heeled crowd, but not so much in the doing?

Indeed, this goes well beyond what I’d call this government’s meta-failure: a strong preference for saying the right things in place of doing the right things, but still expecting full credit for said things, as if they’d actually pulled it off. That problem is bad enough, but on top of that is layered the very real concerns I and many others have about our state capacity. Even if we chose to spend political capital to get things done, and then tried really hard to succeed, could we? I know it’s a bit of a deep cut now, but I wonder if everything Freeland wants to do will be charitably deemed “underway with challenges” by the time the war in Europe enters its second year, or fifth, or tenth.

There’s a line in Freeland’s speech that really jumped out at me. Early on, she’s talking about the assumptions many of us in the West had about the “end of history” — the proclaimed permanent triumph of democracy and capitalism after the end of the Cold War. “It is easy to mock the hubris and the naiveté which animated that era”, she said.

She’s right! Here’s the thing, though: it’s equally easy to mock the hubris and naiveté of a Canadian deputy PM who flies to Washington to lay out a vision of allied solidarity and hard work that her own government has yet to demonstrate the slightest interest in putting into action. Her government’s own record undercuts her (truly) very fine words. Canada could be leading by example here. Instead, Freeland is giving a speech about the things we ought to be doing, and could already be doing, but aren’t. The D.C. audience may not know enough of her government’s record to mock the hubris and naiveté; we Canadians have no such luxury of ignorance.

I’ll say this for Freeland: I believe she is sincere. I believe she means what she says, I believe she has thought about these issues long and hard, and despite my previously acknowledged quibbles, it is a damn good speech. The problem, in this case, isn’t the message, or even the messenger. The problem is who the messenger works for.

September 30, 2022

QotD: Many media people are folks “who Don’t Read Shit” about the stories they “report” on

Filed under: Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Without wading back into the exceptionally complicated details of that long controversy, I learned two things from the experience that have never left me.

First, as I traveled to Boston to go to court, and as I wracked up PACER charges downloading legal briefs and judicial orders, I would have email exchanges with newspaper reporters who wanted me to tell them what had happened. I would shoot back an email message that said, “Judge’s ruling attached,” and they would reply, “Yeah, saw the attachment, what does it say?”

Over two years, through events in a trial court and in an appellate court, with multiple parties pursuing complicated and divergent courses, reporters would not read. They wouldn’t read the 40-page legal briefs filed by the lawyers for all the competing sides, but they also wouldn’t read a three-page order from a judge. They would not read, period. They wanted the tl;dr, in a sentence or two. “Yeah, what’s it say?”

In our own moment, I remain extremely confident that the flood of bullshit like this […] is being slopped out by people who DRS — who Don’t Read Shit — about the topic they cover. Somebody in a government agency shot this dude an email message that said COVID VACCINES ARE MIRACLE DRUGS EVERYONE SHOULD GET THEM, and he said to himself, “Miracle drugs, got it!” We’re plagued by an army of people who pour “information” into the world based on two Twitter posts and a text message, after a full three to five seconds of deep thought …

Chris Bray, “Chris Bray is Stupid and Evil”, Tell Me How This Ends, 2022-04-07.

August 8, 2022

Boring British politicians

Filed under: Books, Britain, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Katherine Bayford compares the last set of cabinet ministers appointed by lame duck PM Boris Johnson with some of the Parliamentarians of the 20th century … and it’s difficult not to feel nostalgic for a past Golden Age at Westminster:

Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his first Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, 25 July 2019.
Official photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

One of Boris Johnson’s final, whimpering acts of power in his premiership was to appoint a new cabinet. Fatally wounded by a team of ministers made up of those with little charm, intelligence or experience, who was actually left for Boris to replace them with?

A veritable who’s-that of the worst unknowns that can be found down the side of parliamentary benches was swiftly conscripted in. I tell a lie — Johnny Mercer MP achieved mild public recognition for defending elderly soldiers accused of war crimes and getting very angry at certain risqué insinuations made in the comments section of the Plymouth Herald.

[…]

There is nothing unusual about this class of minister, however. They are representative figures: dim, without verbal sparkle, frequently light on narrow policy insights and wider understandings of social and economic history. The median British politician has been like this for decades now. Tony Blair would bemoan the shoddy material he had to work with at every reshuffle, and David Cameron likewise found himself struggling for a front bench neither too hateful nor too stupid. The difference in political acumen and sophistication from the most forgotten of ministerial interviews from fifty years ago reveal a steep decline in both the eloquence and elegance of our politicians.

Perhaps the 20th century spoiled the voting public. Pick any decade and you will discover frontline politicians with vast hinterlands. Harold Macmillan recited Aeschylus — in the original Greek — whilst lying shot in the trenches. Enoch Powell rose from private to brigadier during the Second World War, after becoming the youngest professor in the empire. When Winston Churchill was attempting to stay solvent in the face of decades worth of excess, he maintained financial buoyancy by being the highest-paid journalist in the world. Publishers adored him. He could be trusted to write a million-word definitive biography of his relative, the first Duke of Marlborough. Roy Jenkins would in turn distinguish himself as a biographer of Churchill — as well as Gladstone, and the Chancellors of the Exchequer at large. Second-hand embarrassment is the only proper response when comparing such authorial endeavours to Boris Johnson’s biography of Churchill.

It’s not a matter of our politicians not being able to write anymore. Compared to the recent past they can barely speak. Political debates have succumbed to an entropic, deadening mediocrity. Recent discourse between a patronising, bland Sunak and a po-faced, blank Truss was not a nadir: it was standard fare.

Look upon this 1970 debate between Jenkins and Powell. Both men hold articulate and intelligent positions, arguing intricately and considerately, with a commitment to truth rather than point-scoring. They agree where relevant and have an ability to articulate clearly and fluently. Half a century on, political debate of such quality seems unrealisable. When watching vintage ministerial debates, the viewer is struck by the level of knowledge and attention that the speakers assumed their audience would possess, whether on the finer points of tackling inflation or whether IRA bombers deserved to the death penalty.

The slightest glance at cabinets fifty years ago demonstrates a far higher set of standards and abilities than those found today. Harold Wilson — always keen to consolidate as much power as possible — nevertheless packed his cabinet with the best and brightest, even if he kept them in positions in which they wouldn’t be able to outshine him. Wilson himself was a subtle and clever debater, not above using cheap PR tricks (such as his much-perfected pipe smoking) but always as a tool to realise his political vision.

Mediocrity requires mediocrity in order to survive. When judged against excellence — or even simple competence — the insufficiencies of today’s politician become intolerable. It is this which leads the public to distrust politicians more than their policy choices.

July 29, 2022

“Shrinkflation” isn’t the only way companies try to sell you less for the same price

Filed under: Business, Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

And, as Virginia Postrel points out, “shrinkflation” does get noticed for economic statistics, unlike some of the other changes many companies are making:

Original image from www.marpat.co.uk

My latest Bloomberg Opinion column is explained well in an excellent subhead (contrary to popular assumptions, writers don’t craft the headlines or subheads that appear on their work): “Packaging less stuff for the same price doesn’t fool consumers or economists. But diminishing quality imposes equally maddening extra costs that are almost impossible to measure.” Excerpt:

    If a 16-ounce box contracts to 14 ounces and the price stays the same, I asked Bureau of Labor Statistics economist Jonathan Church, how is that recorded? “Price increase”, he said quickly. You just divide the price by 14 instead of 16 and get the price per ounce. Correcting for shrinkflation is straightforward.

    New service charges for things that used to be included in the price, from rice at a Thai restaurant to delivery of topsoil, also rarely sneak past the inflation tallies any more than they fool consumers.

    But a stealthier shrinkflation is plaguing today’s economy: declines in quality rather than quantity. Often intangible, the lost value is difficult to capture in price indexes.

    Faced with labor shortages, for example, many hotels have eliminated daily housekeeping. For the same room price, guests get less service. It’s not conceptually different from shrinking a bag of potato chips. But would the consumer price index pick up the change?

    Probably not, Church said.

This phenomenon, which Doug Johnson aptly dubbed “disqualiflation” in a Facebook comment, is widespread. One example is the four-hour airport security line I chronicled in an earlier Substack post. Another is the barely trained newbie who screws up your sandwich order — a far more common experience today than four years ago. It’s the flip side of a phenomenon I wrote about in The Substance of Style and in economics columns in the early 2000s (see here and here).

    During the 2000s and 2010s, inflation was probably overstated because of unmeasured quality increases. Now there’s the opposite phenomenon. Quality reductions have become so pervasive that even today’s scary inflation numbers are almost certainly understated.

If you can read the column at Bloomberg, please do. But if you run into the paywall, which allows a few articles a month, you can use this link to the WaPo version, which doesn’t have links.

July 26, 2022

What’s worse than having a nepotistic elite running the country? Having an incompetent nepotistic elite running the country

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kurt Schlichter isn’t a fan of the kakistocratic “elite” running most of the western world at the moment:

The things we took for granted decades ago are uncertain, and there’s always an excuse — inevitably one that blames us. Like the new take on air conditioners, which is that they are an extravagance we should learn to live without. What the hell? Why?

And don’t get me started on the bizarre insistence of the resetters that we all need to give up beef and start eating bugs. I have a better idea. How about we eat ribeyes and burgers like Americans instead of crickets and locust like Third World famine victims?

A proper ruling class would see the problems and move to solve them, because the proper relationship between the ruling class and the rest of us is that the ruling class provides prosperity and security and the rest of us let them skim some cream off the top. If they were doing a decent job, their riches and luxuries would not bother us much; but when they have failed yet still expect full pay and benefits anyway, that grates. It is unsustainable.

So why doesn’t the ruling class try to get America moving again instead of telling us that we should settle for less and less? For one thing, because our ruling class is not competent. Joe Biden is, in a way, the perfect president for the resetters — stupid and getting seniler, corrupt, yet absolutely sure of his own genius despite literally no basis for that self-regard. Look, the solutions are there. Want to fix crime? Do what Giuliani did in New York City in the nineties. Want energy independence? Do what Trump did in 2016. Want the economy roaring? Do what Reagan and Trump did. These tactics are not secrets, yet they seem to be too hard for our elite to pull off. Our reset revolt will be to embrace someone who can.

Of course, the incompetence issue assumes that our elite wants to succeed in doing what elites should do. Does it really? Does it really want us prosperous, secure and free? Oh, the elite wants to succeed for itself, and it sure has. The elite is richer than ever. And it intends to stay that way even after you are reset to “Peasant” mode. The elite won’t be taking public transportation among the hobos like you. They will be safe behind armed guards while you are disarmed and victimized — defend yourself at your peril! And they will keep eating steak tartar while you slurp up beetle paste. Yum yum, proles!

The ruling caste has no intention of you living like a civilized citizen. No, you are their sacrifice, to Gaia, the angry weather goddess or whatever other pagan idol that empty void inside them worships. Your pain is the point. Remember, bullies love the raw exercise of power. Making you miserable is a manifestation of their urge to dominate and crush. That’s the genesis of those seemingly insane moves around the world like Sri Lanka giving up fertilizer or agricultural powerhouse Holland evicting farmers. But these moves — including the destruction of our own energy industry — only seem insane if you refuse to accept their ultimate goal. They want to hurt you. Your pain is a feature, not a bug — which will be your next meal if they get their way.

July 4, 2022

(Very expensive) roads, bridges, and railways to nowhere

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Government, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Palladium, Brian Balkus wonders why American can’t build anything any more:

Construction of the Fresno River Viaduct in January 2016. The bridge is the first permanent structure being constructed as part of California High-Speed Rail. The BNSF Railway bridge is visible in the background.
Photo by the California High-Speed Rail Authority via Wikimedia Commons.

Sepulveda’s cost and schedule overrun aren’t even the worst of it. Just as unattainable as a shortened commute is the Californian dream of building a bullet train that could take you from Los Angeles to San Francisco in under three hours. In 2008, a year before the Sepulveda project began, the state tried to turn this dream into a reality after voters approved a 512-mile high-speed rail (HSR) project. Amid failing overseas wars and financial crises, at the time it could’ve become a symbol of renewal not just for California but the entire country. Instead, it came to exemplify a dysfunctional government that lacks the capacity to build.

At the time California began accelerating the development of its HSR system it only had 10 employees dedicated to overseeing what was the most expensive infrastructure project in U.S. history. It ended up 14 years (and counting) behind schedule and $44 billion over budget. Incredibly, the state has not laid a single mile of track and it still lacks 10 percent of the land parcels it needs to do so. Half of the project still hasn’t achieved the environmental clearance needed to begin construction. The dream of a Japanese-style bullet train crisscrossing the state is now all but dead due to political opposition, litigation, and a lack of funding.

Despite its failure, the HSR project inaugurated the U.S.’s megaproject era. Once a rare type of project, by 2018 megaprojects comprised 33 percent of the value of all U.S. construction project starts. An alarming number of these have spiraled out of control for many of the same reasons that killed the California bullet train. The decade that followed the financial crisis was a kind of inflection point in the industry; this was when construction projects became noticeably worse and when the long-term implications could no longer be ignored. One of the most cited studies of the U.S.’s declining ability to build reviewed 180 transit megaprojects across the country, revealing that today, U.S. projects take longer to complete and cost nearly 50 percent more on average than those in Europe and Canada.

Having joined Kiewit in 2010, I witnessed these changes first-hand. I have since moved on, but have remained in the broader industry, including working on what are called “strategic pursuits” — the process by which companies compete for megaprojects. This experience has provided insight into the mechanics of how these projects are awarded and why they so frequently fail.

Even if the construction had proceded close to schedule, the economic justification for California’s high speed rail line was never strong … and it’s unlikely the service would have come close to breaking even. It almost certainly would have added significant ongoing costs to Californian taxpayers, and due to the nature of high speed rail services, been effectively a subsidy from working-class Californians to the laptop elites of Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area.

All of that, however, are merely additional reasons to believe the project was doomed from inception. Broadly speaking, all major infrastructure projects in the United States are struggling with paperwork and compliance requirements mostly driven by state and federal environmental regulations passed with the best possible intentions (as the saying goes):

Sepulveda’s numerous lawsuits and stakeholder conflicts are an example of a phenomenon that can be traced back to the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in 1969. NEPA mandates developers to provide environmental impact statements before they can obtain the permits necessary for construction on huge swathes of infrastructure.

Shortly following the passage of NEPA, California’s then-governor Ronald Reagan signed the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) into law, which required additional environmental impact analysis. Unlike NEPA, it requires adopting all feasible measures to mitigate these impacts. Interest groups wield CEQA and NEPA like weapons. One study found that 85 percent of CEQA lawsuits were filed by groups with no history of environmental advocacy. The NIMBY attitude of these groups has crippled the ability of California to build anything. As California Governor Gavin Newsom succinctly put it, “NIMBYism is destroying the state”.

It is also destroying the U.S.’s ability to build nationally. The economist Eli Dourado reported in The New York Times that “per-mile spending on the Interstate System of Highways tripled between the 1960’s and 1980’s.” This directly correlates with the passage of NEPA. If anything, the problem has gotten worse over time. Projects receiving funding through the $837 billion stimulus plan passed by Congress in the aftermath of the financial crises were subject to over 192,000 NEPA reviews.

The NEPA/CEQA process incentivizes the public agencies to seek what is often termed a “bulletproof” environmental compliance document to head off future legal challenges. This takes time, with the average EIS taking 4.5 years to complete. Some have taken longer than a decade. A cottage industry of consultants is devoted to completing these documents, earning themselves millions in fees.

July 1, 2022

Trust “the experts”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray on the appalling track record of so many of our modern-day “experts”:

So the public health experts are baffled by the consistent failure of their predictive models, and the economic experts are baffled by the consistent failure of their predictive models. It’s like a chef who keeps trying to grill a steak, only to find that he’s burnt another lemon pie. “I SWEAR TO GOD I THOUGHT THIS ONE WAS A BEEF THING.”

These people aren’t stupid, but they’re stupid in practice because they show up to the game with the weight of what they know people in their position are supposed to say and think. Fashionable experts, in-group leaders in their status-compliant position in a field, aren’t reviewing the evidence — ever — but are instead reviewing a performative checklist dotted with social status land mines.

They’re on a team, so they say the team slogans.

[…]

If that’s how expertise works, we no longer have have any. We have actors who play the brow-furrowing expert role, but have no real job beyond intoning the message of the day. It says on this card that we recommend even more Covid vaccines for everyone. Let’s break for lunch!

But, mercifully, that’s not invariably how expertise works. And this is why politicians and trend-policing media figures are so completely baffled by experts like Robert Malone or Ryan Cole, or Geert Vanden Bossche or Clare Craig or Peter McCullough, experts who follow the evidence wherever it goes. Tone and social reception tells you a lot: Does an expert say things that aren’t comforting, that sound a little … not on the team? That person clears the first barrier, and you can start assessing the specifics of what they say. Look for journalists who are offended and triggered, and try to find the person who hurt their feelings. That person may turn out to be wrong, but he won’t turn out to be Paul Krugman wrong.

QotD: The CBC doesn’t want to do economic journalism

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[The] CBC’s attitude towards economics journalism is the same as a teenager’s attitude towards household chores: If they do it badly enough, they won’t be asked to do it again.

Stephen F. Gordon, Twitter, 2019-05-06.

June 29, 2022

COVID Exposed the Truth About the CDC

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Media, Politics, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published 28 Jun 2022

The agency will never be controlled by fact-driven experts shielded from politics.
——————-
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was once widely viewed as the gold standard in public health, considered an apolitical, science-driven bulwark against all pathogen threats, foreign and domestic.

Today, trust in the agency has plummeted because COVID-19 exposed the truth: The CDC is thoroughly corruptible, and federal regulators will never be impartial experts. They respond to political incentives just like everyone else, and a fact-driven, purely technocratic state is an impossible dream.

The Trump administration pressured the CDC to narrow the scope of testing so case counts would drop, blocked officials from doing interviews, and edited its flagship scientific reports. The CDC provided a scientifically dubious public health rationale for rejecting migrants at the southern border. President Joe Biden continued that policy, and under his purview, CDC guidance on school closures was surreptitiously written by leaders of the country’s second-largest teachers union.

Tom Frieden, a former CDC director, co-authored a 2021 op-ed with three other former agency heads expressing hope that Biden’s incoming CDC Director Rochelle Walensky would “restore the public’s confidence in the CDC’s scientific objectivity,” with its reputation “a shadow of what it once was.” Yet, Frieden endorsed large-scale protests against racial injustice two months after writing in The Washington Post that “the faucet of everyday activities needs to be turned on slowly. We cannot open the floodgates.” Meanwhile, public health officials were keeping people from attending the funerals of their loved ones.

And could it be pure coincidence that the CDC chose the Friday before President Biden’s State of the Union address to drop its indoor mask recommendation for the majority of Americans, even though the supporting data were months old?

In other words, it doesn’t matter who occupies the White House — political incentives mean that, no matter how dedicated or competent the career scientists who work at the CDC are, the agency will never be controlled by fact-driven experts shielded from the “hurry and strife of politics,” as Woodrow Wilson wrote. After decades of mission creep, the CDC’s role should be strictly narrowed, limited to surveillance and coordination, leaving the heavy lifting to local officials and private and academic researchers who are more reactive to direct feedback from their communities.

Written and produced by Justin Monticello. Edited by Isaac Reese. Graphics by Reese, Tomasz Kaye, and Nodehaus. Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Music: “Robotic Butterflies” by Evgeny Bardyuzha; “We Fall” by Stanley Gurvich; “Free Radicals” by Stanley Gurvich.

Photos: BSIP/Newscom; BSIP/Newscom; Sarah Silbiger/UPI/Newscom; Shawn Thew – Pool via CNP/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Alex Edelman/ZUMA Press/Newscom; SMG/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Simon Shin/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Michael Brochstein/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Adam Schultz/White House/Newscom; Brazil Photo Press / SplashNews/Newscom; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; Polaris/Newscom; Jonathan Alpeyrie/Polaris/Newscom; Aimee Melo/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Julian Stratenschulte/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Sven Hoppe/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; CNP/AdMedia/Newscom

June 28, 2022

If your gas can sucks – and it probably does – thank the EPA

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Environment, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The editors at FEE dug out an old classic article from Jeffrey A. Tucker that still holds up ten years later:

The gas gauge broke. There was no smartphone app to tell me how much was left, so I ran out. I had to call the local gas station to give me enough to get on my way. The gruff but lovable attendant arrived in his truck and started to pour gas in my car’s tank. And pour. And pour.

“Hmmm, I just hate how slow these gas cans are these days,” he grumbled. “There’s no vent on them.”

That sound of frustration in this guy’s voice was strangely familiar, the grumble that comes when something that used to work but doesn’t work anymore, for some odd reason we can’t identify.

I’m pretty alert to such problems these days. Soap doesn’t work. Toilets don’t flush. Clothes washers don’t clean. Light bulbs don’t illuminate. Refrigerators break too soon. Paint discolors. Lawnmowers have to be hacked. It’s all caused by idiotic government regulations that are wrecking our lives one consumer product at a time, all in ways we hardly notice.

It’s like the barbarian invasions that wrecked Rome, taking away the gains we’ve made in bettering our lives. It’s the bureaucrats’ way of reminding market producers and consumers who is in charge.

Surely, the gas can is protected. It’s just a can, for goodness sake. Yet he was right. This one doesn’t have a vent. Who would make a can without a vent unless it was done under duress? After all, everyone knows to vent anything that pours. Otherwise, it doesn’t pour right and is likely to spill.

It took one quick search. The whole trend began in (wait for it) California. Regulations began in 2000, with the idea of preventing spillage. The notion spread and was picked up by the EPA, which is always looking for new and innovative ways to spread as much human misery as possible.

An ominous regulatory announcement from the EPA came in 2007: “Starting with containers manufactured in 2009 … it is expected that the new cans will be built with a simple and inexpensive permeation barrier and new spouts that close automatically.”

The government never said “no vents”. It abolished them de facto with new standards that every state had to adopt by 2009. So for the last three years, you have not been able to buy gas cans that work properly. They are not permitted to have a separate vent. The top has to close automatically. There are other silly things now, too, but the biggest problem is that they do not do well what cans are supposed to do.

And don’t tell me about spillage. It is far more likely to spill when the gas is gurgling out in various uneven ways, when one spout has to both pour and suck in air. That’s when the lawn mower tank becomes suddenly full without warning, when you are shifting the can this way and that just to get the stuff out.

June 20, 2022

The blight of the 21st century – the dictatorship of the experts

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Oliver Traldi considers the role of experts in the modern world:

Click to see full-size image at The New Yorker.

A few weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration as President, the New Yorker published a cartoon depicting a mustached, mostly bald man, hand raised high, mouth open in a sort of improbable rhombus, tongue flapping wildly within, saying: “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?” The tableau surely elicited many a self-satisfied chuckle from readers disgusted by the populist energy and establishment distrust that they perceived in Trump’s supporters.

But what exactly is the joke here? Citizens in a democracy are not akin to airline passengers, buckled quietly into their seats and powerless to affect change, their destinations and very lives placed in the hands of professionals guarded by a reinforced door up front. Even brief reflection reveals the cartoonist’s analogy to be comparing like to unlike.

That none of us thinks we know better than a plane’s captain, yet we often think we know better than experts in matters of politics, suggests differences between those domains. And it highlights a vexing problem for modern political discourse and deliberation: We need and value expertise, yet we have no foolproof means for qualifying it. To the contrary, our public square tends to amplify precisely those least worthy of our trust. How should we decide who counts an expert, what topics their expertise properly addresses, and which claims deserve deference?

* * *

We all rely upon experts. When something hurts, we consult a doctor, unless it’s a toothache, in which case we go to a dentist. We trust plumbers, electricians, and roofers to build and repair our homes, and we prefer that our lawyers and accountants be properly accredited. Some people attain expertise through training, others through experience or talent. I defer to someone who’s lived in a city to tell me what to do when I visit, and to a colleague who’s studied a particular topic at length even though we have the same mastery of our field overall. A friend with good fashion sense is an invaluable aid in times of sartorial crisis.

In all these cases, our reliance on expertise means suspending our own judgment and placing our trust in another — that is, giving deference. But we defer in different ways and for different reasons. The pilot we choose not to vote out of the cockpit has skill, what philosophers sometimes call “knowledge how”. We need the pilot to do something for us, but if all goes well we need not alter our own beliefs or behaviors on his say so. At the other extreme, a history teacher might do nothing but express claims, the philosopher’s “knowledge that”, which students are meant to adopt as their own beliefs. Within the medical profession, performing surgery is knowledge-how while diagnosing a headache and recommending two aspirin as the treatment is closer to knowledge-that.

But how are those without expertise to determine who has it? Generally, we leave that determination to each individual. A free society and the free market allow for widely differing judgments about who to trust about what, with credentialing mechanisms in place to facilitate signaling and legal consequences for outright fraud. Speculative bubbles notwithstanding, the market also helps to aggregate countless individual judgments in ways that yield socially valuable outcomes. Two New York City diners may have signs promising the “World’s Best Cup of Coffee”, but the one that actually has good coffee is more likely to be bustling on any given day and to thrive in the long run.

H/T to Ed West’s weekly round-up post for the link.

May 20, 2022

High and low “state capacity” illustrated

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Law & Liberty, Helen Dale recounts a miserable experience getting out of a major US airport and says this is an example of America’s low state capacity:

“TSA Checkpoint” by phidauex is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

At the other end, I found a stretch limo waiting for me. Getting ferried about in a limo after The Trip from Hell is something I’ve experienced before, in Damascus, before the Syrian civil war. Classic third world. Like Syrians, American hosts send limousines to the airport to pick you up because they know you flew in from JFK and will need to be appeased.

My experience is illustrative of something not confined to airports, however. Indeed, if it were only confined to airports, then the phrase I’m about to use (about the US) would be unfair (to the US). America’s dysfunctional airports are instances of widespread low state capacity. And this is bigger than airports. Low state capacity can only be used to describe a country when it is true of multiple big-ticket items, not just one.

State capacity is a term drawn from economic history and development economics. It refers to a government’s ability to achieve policy goals in reference to specific aims, collect taxes, uphold law and order, and provide public goods. Its absence at the extremes is terrifying, and often used to illustrate things like “fragile states” or “failed states”. However, denoting calamitous governance in the developing world is not its only value. State capacity allows one to draw distinctions at varying levels of granularity between developed countries, and is especially salient when it comes to healthcare, policing, and immigration. It has a knock-on effect in the private sector, too, as business responds to government in administrative kind.

Think, for example, of Covid-19. The most reliable metric — if you wish to compare different countries’ responses to the pandemic — is excess deaths per 100,000 people over the relevant period. That is, count how many extra people died beyond the pre-pandemic mortality rate on a country-by-country basis. For the sake of argument, drop the five countries leading this grim pack. Four of them are developing countries, and the fifth is Russia, which while developed, is both an autocracy and suffers from chronic low state capacity.

At the other end of the scale, ignore China, too. It may be lying about its success or, more plausibly, may have achieved it by dint of being an authoritarian state with high state capacity (notably, the latest round of draconian lockdowns in Shanghai commenced after the WHO collated that data).

The US has the worst excess death rate in the developed world (140 per 100,000). Australia has the best: –28 per 100,000. Yes, you read that right. Australia increased its life expectancy and general population health during the pandemic. So did Japan, albeit less dramatically. The rest of the developed world falls in between those two extremes: Italy and Germany are on 133 and 116 per 100,000 respectively, with the UK (109 per 100,000) doing a bit better. France and Sweden knocked it out of the park (63 and 56 per 100,000 excess deaths).

Recall, too, that not only did different countries adopt different approaches to pandemic management; sometimes there were large differences within countries. Like the US, Australia is a federal system, and as in the US, different states did things differently. Melbourne, capital of the state of Victoria, had the longest lockdown of any major city in the developed world. Other Australian states, meanwhile, locked down sparingly or not at all. In a European context, Sweden rejected most over-the-top Covid responses, the UK was somewhere in the middle, and Italy was thoroughly draconian, even barring unvaccinated people from supermarkets and groceries.

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