The Reconstruction

29/05: Gasoline Inventories and Price Volatility

In response to Tim Haab's question as to whether gas prices are becoming more volatile... I argue that it's lower inventories at work.

27/05: News Flash: Demand Curves Slope Downwards

CNN, on this breathtaking development:

As gas goes up, driving goes down

(CNN) -- At a time when gas prices are at an all-time high, Americans have curtailed their driving at a historic rate.

The Department of Transportation said figures from March show the steepest decrease in driving ever recorded.

Tomorrow, a special report: "Fire is hot."

10/03: Dark Suckers

If anyone remembers the old internet joke theory known as the "Dark Sucker Theory", the one in which light bulbs do not emit light but instead suck dark, they might be surprised to learn that this piece of silly internet humor is pretty well-aged. In a New York Times article on Daylight Savings Time, a reference to a letter written by Ben Franklin notes an 18th-century jokester's "insistence that opening the shutters to greet the dawn lets out the darkness rather than bringing in the light." The article itself reports more evidence that the provision in the generally-awful Energy Policy Act of 2005 that changed the dates for Daylight Savings Time has probably increased overall electricity usage. No surprises there.

18/04: What Is and Is Not Genocide

The word "genocide" carries with it powerful emotional and political implications. As such, there are always those who will attempt to deny or belittle an actual genocide, or claim as a genocide something that is not.

In the former category, there are those like Ann Coulter, herself a joke, who here makes a poor attempt at one:

Saddam's barbaric rape rooms, chemical attacks and torture — those, liberals could live with. But now they want us to send troops to Darfur, a country from which no one anticipates terrorism anytime in the next millennium. If you're looking for a good definition of "no imminent threat," Darfur is it. The climate change "emergency," set to start taking effect sometime during the next century, is a more imminent threat to the United States than Darfur.

These people can't even wrap up genocide. We've been hearing about this slaughter in Darfur forever — and they still haven't finished. The aggressors are moving like termites across that country. It's like genocide by committee. Who's running this holocaust in Darfur, FEMA?

We would, if it weren't so ignorant, ignore the fact that Darfur is not a country-- it's a part of Sudan, which, under the rule of the National Islamic Front (which is still in power) harbored Osama bin Laden for five years. Having noted the sheer ignorance of this statement, however, we should point out that though it may not be proceeding as quickly as Coulter would like, the conflict in Darfur has claimed up to 450,000 lives. Is it a genocide?

According to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:

[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

• (a) Killing members of the group;
• (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
• (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
• (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

By the definition of the term-- absolutely, yes, what is happening in Darfur is genocide.

In the latter category, that of those who wish to make genocide out of other situations that, while tragic, do not qualify, we have examples like the following, from a Washington Post article about violence in Rio:

"For young people, this is a genocide," said Raquel Willadino, a director of violence-related issues and human rights for the Observatory of Favelas. "And I don't mean that as a metaphor. It really is a genocide."

The violence in Rio is certainly devastating-- extrapolating the numbers in the article, 9 people are dying every day from violence-- over 3,200 a year. It is not, however, the number dead that makes a genocide what it is. It is that the acts are "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such". This doesn't appear to be the case in Rio, and so claiming it as genocide doesn't do anything more than cheapen the word.

17/11: Bush on the Lessons of the Vietnam War

From CNN.com:

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) -- U.S. President George W. Bush said Friday the United States' unsuccessful war in Vietnam three decades ago offered lessons for the American-led struggle in Iraq.

"We'll succeed unless we quit," Bush said shortly after arriving in this one-time war capital.

It's a little worrisome that the lesson from Vietnam that our President thinks applies best to Iraq is that "We'll succeed unless we quit." Honestly, though, it's far more worrisome that he extracted that lesson from the Vietnam war at all. I wasn't alive at the time, so I'm not qualified to judge, but I always thought that even to someone who only made a cameo appearance on a National Guard base in Alabama, the war couldn't have looked like something that we were guaranteed to win (unless we quit).

To me, a more interesting set of lessons from Vietnam to compare to our policies and experience in Iraq would be those offered by Robert McNamara, Nixon's Secretary of Defense:

1. We misjudged then — and we have since — the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries … and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.
2. We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience … We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.
3. We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
4. Our judgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.
5. We failed then — and have since — to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces and doctrine…
6. We failed as well to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
7. We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement … before we initiated the action.
8. After the action got under way and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course … we did not fully explain what was happening and why we were doing what we did.
9. We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people's or country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
10. We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action … should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.
11. We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions … At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide which of these lessons apply to Iraq.

I grabbed the list from the Wikipedia entry on Errol Morris's superlative documentary, "The Fog of War"; it's the list that inspired the movie, but it is not the one that forms the structure of the film, nor is it the one provided as an addendum by McNamara himself.

16/11: Post-Election Violence in the Congo

Violence again in the Democratic Republic of the Congo:

"IT STARTED with burning tyres and rocks thrown by protesters. Then gun battles erupted between rival soldiers using heavy machine guns, mortars and rockets. The fighting at the weekend in Kinshasa shows that peace in Congo is not yet assured. The battle brought the centre of the capital, a city usually bursting with people, to a standstill." (from The Economist)

The BBC's coverage is particularly interesting, however, as it dovetails with the observations of a friend of mine. The BBC mentions that an "analyst who wished to remain anonymous told the BBC that there were serious questions about the validity of some ballot papers, especially a large number of votes cast by voters outside their home areas." Compare this with a blog entry from my friend Sophie, who was working as an election monitor in the DRC:

"Election day security and proceedings were generally good, with the exception of one potentially unstable situation that we were confronted with involving initially about fifty people unable to vote due to being away from their polling centers. We went into the polling station outside which the very loud and obviously angry crowd was gathered and talked to the chief of the centre de vote. He emphasized that he was following the election code and reported that the crowd was threatening to stone them if they continued to be unable to vote, the police being insufficient to control them...

"On the whole the election was peaceful and pretty orderly, but what we saw represents the psychological aftereffects of a war like the Congo's - a disrespect for the rule of law and a lingering presumption that when push comes to shove, violence can solve problems. So rather than saying "hey, I'm not able to get back to where I'm registered to vote; I'm really mad about that, but it's the law and I'll just have to be prepared to vote next time," the response is "I'm Congolese, I have my voter's ID card, but I'm not going to be able to get to the place where I can vote, so I'm going to make them allow me to vote." It's going to take a long time for enough trust in the justice of the law and the strength of the state to be established to prevent incidents like that. I just hope the Congolese have enough faith and the new Congolese government can produce enough results for them to stick with it."

31/08: Gladwell Misses the Mark

The other day, a friend of mine sent me a link to Malcom Gladwell's most recent article, entitled "The Risk Pool". I thought it fell short of Gladwell's usual quality, and sent to my friend the e-mail that I've included below the fold. I'm not the first to get around to criticizing this article, though, so if you want to see the back-and-forth:

1. "Worst Malcom Gladwell article ever?"
2. Malcom Gladwell's first response
3. Gladwell's second response
4. Jane Galt's critique
5. Gladwell's first response to Jane Galt
6. Gladwell's final comments

Having read through the back-and-forth, I'm a little disappointed in Gladwell. The basic premise of his article-- drawing a parallel between the macro-level phenomenon of dependency ratios and the micro-level failures of a few firms-- doesn't hold up, and he seems either to not understand why or not want to admit having written something so bad. To me, the other disputes are a side issue. That, in combination with the contempt he seems to hold for anyone who happens to critique his work through a weblog, takes my opinion of him down a notch. Of course, that's only going from "huge fan" to "big fan, with a couple reservations".

If anything, the existence of such a fundamental error in an article written by a talented and intelligent journalist underscores for me the difficulty of writing about economics. Most economists can't write well, and most journalists, even the smart ones, don't have enough economic training to be able to write accurately about it. The subject is a minefield, and there are a lot of people who would like to lead a journalist astray-- astray in a minefield is a bad place to be. For that matter, a minefield is also a bad place to be drawing inaccurate parallels...

My own thoughts on the piece follow.

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29/05: The Wall Street Journal vs. Itself on Climate Change

In May 12th's Wall Street Journal, the Science Journal feature considered how "Scientists Explain How They Attribute Climate-Change Data". Subscribers can read the article online. It's short, but fascinating for two reasons: it's a succinct rebuttal to a few of the popular arguments used to try to convince people that the science of climate change is unsettled, and it's directly in conflict with the WSJ's editorials, which seek to dimiss the scientific consensus on global climate change.

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13/05: Time for a Fiscal Stabilization Board? Perhaps Not.

Brad DeLong asks, over his morning Diet Pepsi, if it is time to create a fiscal stabilization board to control government spending in the way that the Federal Reserve controls monetary policy.

His argument is simple and practical. He argues that politicians, for the most part, have proven themselves incapable of addressing the problem. He also lays out his argument that a balanced budget amendment is not the solution-- there are legitimate reasons to run deficits, i.e. for fiscal stimulus and during wartime, but to provide the flexibility to do so without the amendment losing its force is nearly impossible. Thus, the need for independent oversight. I'll let you watch for yourself.

I'll admit, I find the idea attractive. At the same time, though, I don't see how it could ever be enacted, nor am I certain that a fiscal stabilization board could remain independent of the political process to the degree necessary. It's an attractive idea because, at least in theory, an FSB could, as an independent body, impose fiscal discipline that is lacking in Congress.When we consider why this is, though, the problems with creating an FSB become clear.

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28/04: Rush's Alternate Reality

Rush Limbaugh issued a press release today over PRNewswire stating, "Reports Stating Rush Limbaugh Was Arrested Are Inaccurate; Limbaugh's Attorney Holds Press Conference at 8:00 pm Tonight".

The release is clearly designed to lead the reader to believe that Rush was not arrested. He was. A quick check with the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office confirms this. The only shame is that the prosecutor who cut a deal with him was obviously not a Rush fan-- otherwise, he might have taken Rush at his word: "Too many whites are getting away with drug use...Too many whites are getting away with drug sales...The answer is to go out and find the ones who are getting away with it, convict them and send them up the river, too."

The full press release is below the fold.

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