A recent opinion piece by Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post (here) uses the settled-science myth to criticize the current Administration in Washington DC for worrying about climate change or requiring that health insurance cover mammograms. Since a recent large-scale, randomized clinical trial showed little benefit from mammograms (here), Mr. Krauthammer suggests that Climate Science will shortly also be overturned and, what is more, most scientific conclusions can be ignored by political commentators.
The best supported scientific model of climate change can be summarized with the I=PAT Model above (sometime called the Kaya Identity and a reasonable simplification of complex Integrated Assessment Models). Population growth (N) leads to more economic production (Q) which leads to greater energy use (E) which leads to greater CO2 emissions which leads to increases in global temperature (T). The competitor model (if the Right Wing can be said to have such a thing) would be that global temperature is a random walk, T(t) = T(t-1) + U. Tomorrow's global temperature is today's global temperature plus random error, U (unknown).
The random walk competitor model is easily defeated (here). Until someone comes up with a better model and until there is some evidence either for or against that unknown model, the I=PAT model is the best one we have. Arguments about "settled science" do not lead to better models.
The same arguments can be applied to Mammograms, PSA screening for prostate cancer, or any area of scientific interest. First, we have to ask if good models are available. In the case of many medical findings, good models are not available. There are currently few good models for the causes of cancer. Screening is an attempt to find something early before it progresses. Screening would be better if it was less intrusive and if we knew what we were looking for (BRCA1 genetic screening is one example). None of this has anything to do with settled science.
You have to hand it to the GOP. Give something a derogatory name and watch the Silent Majority come out against it. By the way, the full name is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which the GOP voted for in 2010 (maybe they didn't understand at the time that it was the same as Obamacare).
Morningstar recently did a review of the US State Pension Funds for their investors (here and in the video above). The review found that the Wisconsin Retirement System (WRS) was the strongest fund in the country with a funding ratio of 99.8%. This means that Wisconsin's unfunded liability per resident is $23, the lowest of any public pension fund in the US. The results beg a lot of questions: How is Wisconsin able to have a solvent Public Pension Plan? Why can't the other States?
Before answering these questions, there is a simple takeaway from these findings: States can afford to offer solvent Pension Funds for their employees. What is more, States could offer solvent Pension Plans to all their citizens. And, corporations could also offer solvent Pension Plans to their employees. The Right Wing simply does not want to provide pensions (the same Debt Alarmists that would think $23 is too large an unfunded liability) and any other form of social security to workers.
If you want some insight into why the Right Wing opposes solvent Pension Plans (Public or Private) watch the PBS American Experience documentary on Henry Ford (here). Ford is one of the Titans of Industry and had opinions befitting his class: anti-union, anti-worker, anti-Semetic, etc. The Ford River Rouge Complex was run like a police state, a model for Right-Wing US industry. The Ford Pension Plan was the result of UAW labor disputes and bargaining, not enlightened, financially adept management.
Why are the State Pension Plans in trouble? Two reasons: The Subprime Mortgage Crisis and years of underfunding or outright stealing from Pension Plans by politicians. The goal of all this is to wake up one day during a financial crisis and claim that the State can no longer pay its pensions even as the real reason is years of deliberate fund weakening. Why is Wisconsin able to provide its employees a solvent Public Pension Plan? By law, politicians cannot touch the WRS. It's that simple. One more thing, it's not because the Public Sector cannot afford to provide pensions. Wisconsin currently has a $484 million surplus (here) none of which is needed to provide continued Pension Plan support.
This blog is partly about developing causal models to understand the world around us as it is happening in real time (the other part is simply about me venting steam while I read the popular press). It is based on reading Judea Pearl's book Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference. Prof. Pearl is a computer scientists studying artificial intelligence by asking how we can formalize for machine learning what humans do so easily: establish causal connections between events. Prof. Pearl's answer to the question is through the use of directed graphs.
One way to test Prof. Pearl's ideas is to look at current events and try to clarify arguments by developing causal models. Looking back on a year of doing this kind of testing here are the models, brief descriptions of the arguments and a link to the original blog postings.
Arguably, the most important event in 2012 was the unfolding Financial Crisis that started in 2007. A model I developed in January of 2012 (here) looked at the role of inequality (inequality has been increasing the US during the period of Neoliberalism to levels not seen since the Great Depression in the 1930--see the graph here) and the effect that a Wealth Tax might have on economic growth. The model indicates that inequality has a role in decreasing economic growth and that a wealth tax would have the opposite effect. The model is meant to confront the right-wing argument that inequality is necessary for economic growth.
I developed another model on a similar topic in February (here). In this model (click to enlarge) I pointed out that right-wing seems to make its arguments by reversing the actual direction of causation. The argument is that the Entitlement Society is creating economic problems while the direction of causation is in the other direction: economic forces (financial crises and globalization) are creating the need for increased Federal benefit spending. More data (and more models) will be needed to determine whether reverse-causation is right-wing strategy or simply confusion over the direction of arrows in positive feedback loops (viz., warm temperatures causing people to emit more CO2).
In May I picked up the topic of climate change (here) looking at a recent argument being made by the Climate Denial crowd, in this case Richard Lindzen. He was arguing that global temperature increase resulting from CO2 emissions (notice that the role of CO2 emissions in climate change has been admitted here) would trigger a negative feedback effect that would keep global temperature under control.
The negative feedback control loop he hypothesized involved the reduction of Cirrus Clouds. Since Cirrus Clouds are thought to play a role in creating the greenhouse effect (increasing global temperature) any reduction would act to control temperature.
This is an interesting and sophisticated argument from the Climate Change Deniers. There are many poorly understood feedback loops in the global climate system (some are reviewed here) and Cirrus Cloud formation is certainly one of them. In this case, there is little data that supports the argument.
The world climate system is obviously complex and some parts (local weather) are probably chaotic (more here). For us non-climate scientists, our best hope is to be able to develop the arguments as causal models and watch as the data accumulates.
In November (here) after Hurricane Sandy I looked at the role of climate change in severe weather formation and its consequences. The causal model above shows that the difference between air and sea temperature caused by climate change, in addition to increase atmospheric water vapor, will increase the intensity and consequences of hurricane flooding.
In a later post the same month (here) I added economic causes to the model showing how economic growth creates not only increased CO2 emissions but also increased coastal development. With greater coastal development and greater CO2 emissions, damage from Hurricanes can be expected to increase even more.
I would like to promise that I could develop causal models for the entire climate system at some point this year. That would be really useful but also pretty premature. It will be along time before enough data is available to use in critiquing the models. On the other hand, the IPCC is scheduled to finalize the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) in 2014. It would be useful to have a collection of models ready to use in reading AR5. And of course, the Subprime Mortgage Crisis is winding down and will continue to provide opportunities for casual modeling as various political parties and commentators try to put the monkey on someone else's back for the event.
A recent article in the NY Times about the rapid increase in gun sales after President Obama's re-election (here) got me thinking about the impact of a more heavily armed US population. An easy way to express the idea mathematically is with an I=PAT identity.
The I=PAT identity is a general formula for determining the impact of a human activity. In the formula, I = Human Impact, P = population, A = affluence and T= technology. Typically, affluence is measured by GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per capita and technology is some intensity measure such as energy intensity or emission intensity. For example, the Kaya Identity is written as:
CO2 Emissions = Population (GDP/Population) (Energy/GDP) (CO2 Emissions/Energy)
where Technology = (Energy/GDP)(CO2 Emissions/Energy) = (Energy Intensity)(Emission Intensity). An important feature of ImPAcT models is that they are true by definition, that is, they are identities. If you know the ratios (sometimes called intensive variables) and the ratios are relatively stable, you can, for example, predict the impact of population growth on CO2 emissions fairly accurately, at least for a few years into the future. Another way to say this is that without decreasing energy intensity or emission intensity, population growth will increase CO2 emissions. So, let's apply this thinking to the increases in gun ownership that are happening right now in the US.
(Mass Murder) = Population (Guns/Population) (Lunatics/Gun) (Mass Murders/Lunatic)
here the affluence measure is (Guns/Population) and the Technology measure involves the technology of mass murder (Lunatics/Gun) (Mass Murders/Lunatic) and captures increased gun ownership and the question of whether the mentally ill are more prone to violence. From this equation, we can predict that mass murders will increase in the US as gun ownership increases, other things being equal. Now, the NRA argues (here) that mass murders would be prevented by wider gun ownership. That can be added to the equation:
Here the technology is (Lunatics/Gun) (Mass Murders/Lunatic) (Mass Murder Prevented/Mass Murder) which hinges on how many mass murders were prevented by armed citizens on the scene. There were armed citizens on the scene when Rep-Gabriele Giffords was shot in Tuscon, Arizona (here). They did not draw their weapons and take out the shooter, Jared Lee Loughner. There are multiple reasons why in a concealed-carry State such as Arizona armed citizens did not intervene. First, if you pull your concealed weapon when you suspect mass murder is about to take place, you stand the risk of being mistaken for the shooter and taken out by some other concealed-carry citizen or by law enforcement. Second, in the chaos of an unfolding mass murder, you may not be sure you are targeting the right person as actually happened here. At the end of the day, an armed citizen at the site of a mass murder will not pull their weapon and will not prevent a mass murder for fear of either being killed themselves or killing the wrong person. Therefore, (Mass Murder Prevented/Mass Murder) = 0 and increases in armed population will increase the number of mass murders. This suggests that the only way to reduce mass murder is to reduce the number of lunatics (increased spending on mental health), reduce lunatic's access to weapons (background checks) or reduce gun ownership. The political debate is just beginning. NOTE: The IPCC has made extensive use of I=PAT models in climate change reports, another area that needs more simple, clear mathematical thinking.
zFacts has produced an interesting graph for the perplexed (here). It shows (click graphic above to enlarge) US National Debt as a percentage of National Income by Presidential term. It shows the Supply-Side debt disaster that started in the Reagan years and continues to the present. It also shows a great counterfactual: what would have happened if Reagan and the Bushes had balanced their budgets. In the counterfactual world, debt would currently be below 30% of National Income.
There's another interesting part of the graphic. Debt during World War II reached 120% of National Income and the US economy did not seem to have been damaged by this much debt in the Post-War years. What's more, a lot of that debt went to pay for equipment and armaments that were entirely expended during WWII and never had a productive lifetime. So, is 30%, 60%, 90%, 100% (the current number) or 120% the magic "bad number" for national debt?
Nations (especially a nation that plays the role of hegemonic leader in the world system) are not households. But, many business people (for example, here) seem to argue that the household analogy is appropriate so let's see where it takes us.
Let's say you make $100,000/year (your Personal Income) and you have a $500,000 mortgage (your only debt). You are a solid citizen with a good job, savings and a bright future. These numbers don't seem unreasonable. But, your debt to income ration would be 500%. Whoa, the deficit scolds would say. You can only have a mortgage of $120,000 to bring your debt in line with your income (that's not much of a house for a person with a six-figure income).
So, if a deficit scold was your banker, how could you have possibly obtained that kind of loan? Of course, it's not only income but also net worth that should be considered (does anyone want to guess at the net worth of the US Federal government?). Another way to look at the graph above is that Presidents from Eisenhower to Carter did not invest as much in the US as they might have and today we have an infrastructure that is crumbling due to lack of investment. And, money is basically free right now. A great time to invest.
Of course, there are good reasons why the household analogy fails. The US government can print its own money and households cannot. The US National Debt could be wiped out tomorrow by printing more money. Since we have no inflation right now, it's not really clear what the effect of such a one-time jump in the money supply might be but deficit scolds would yell "inflation" -- I'll look at the US money supply and what the Fed is doing in a future post.
So when people circulate videos such as the one below, the purpose is to scare the perplexed with large numbers. The debt is what it is. The debt from WWII was what it was and was probably necessary to end the Great Depressionand win the War. The current debt level may be what is necessary to end the Great Recession (the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008), the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and win the War on Terror (lest we forget, the right wing is still at war with the Islamic world). Money is cheap right now and US infrastructure needs upgrading after decades of inadequate investment. The US is a safe haven for investment. WWII did not sacrifice the "future of our children" on the altar of debt. It ushered in decades of prosperity until the Neoliberal Right-Wing Supply Siders came to power. The upcoming Fiscal Cliff experiment will show how important government expenditure is during times of crisis.
Can anyone tell me what Rick Santelli is trying to say here? For those of my readers who are not familiar with Mr. Santelli, his comments as a CNBC correspondent from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in 2009 were thought to have started the Tea Party movement.
Now I realize that the Tea Party had its wings clipped by the electorate in the last election and that some had to be medicated so that they were able to continue functioning, but Mr. Santelli talks like someone who has been overmedicated (he reminds me of a person I met who had just taken an overdose of Prosac). If I'm right, someone needs to rush Mr. Santelli to the ER.
Or maybe it's just the constraints of the medium. If Mr. Santelli had a bigger white board, possibly he would be able to more fully develop his ideas.
Or maybe it's Mr. Santelli's genetics. His Wikipedia page (here) says he has four Italian parents. I have one Italian parent and I can understand two, but I don't understand four (Hey, compatriota, check yourself in, OK)!
In any event, what's all this about "trust and honesty," "fibbing going on with statistics" (Is he talking about himself? Or, as Curly of the Three Stooges once said "I resemble that!"), "250 grand isn't a million" (yes, that's an accurate statement), "how long will it be before they get in your pocket" (the British would say "knickers"), etc. "Breaking it down like no one else can" indeed Mr. Santelli.
Here's the transcript, if that will help in any way figure out what's being said here:
...let's get to the group this monday morning, check in with rick santelli and get saelli exchange. good morning, carl. to me, if you're trying to work with individuals to solve the problem, trust and honesty are very big components of that relationship working. and i'll tell you what, my theme of late has b that there's a lot of fibbing going on with statistics. but to the point where we take so many things for granted, we miss so many nontru and i'll you a nontruth. we always talk about the 1993 income tax of president clinton, and the top tax rate was 39.6%. threshold, $250 thud. so flash forward from 1993 to present, okay. well let me tell you something, there is this little thing called inflation. i know this might be nitpicking. but $250,000 today well, started out if you want to be apples to apples would be about $165,000 then. in other words, we are not adjusting even for inflation. so, if we're talking about $250,000 today being the same as then, we're wrong. it would be $165,000. so the point is, is that the difference between these two is $85,000. okay? is a 35% miss when it comes to being honest about it. oh, even worse let's take this. how many times, of course you've heard a million times, taxes on million favors and billionaires, even though, and i know this is adjusted, okay, but let's just keep it $250,000. well, 250 grand isn't a million. so it's off by 750-k over 1 million. okay? so, in essence, what we're doing is we're off on this one by 75%. we're off by 35% and 75%. so why am i doing this? because i'll tell you what, middle-class america, pay attention. because if the misses on income tax are this large when they're talking to you over simple numbers, how long, exactly, do you think it's going to be before they get in your pocket? people making $50,000 to $100,000. if we really want to come up with honesty in negotiating, first of all, if you're going to tax millionaires and and billionaires on it the 250 grand threshold, okay, fine. but make sure their net wealth really is a million or higher. and any tax increases should go direct to deficit reduction. take away the hey, everything goes into the general fund because it certainly seems like when you're fibbing about 35% and 75% truths that really all they're after isn't fixing the economy, it's your bucks. back to you. all right. rick, breaking it down like no one else can. rick santelli with the santelli exchange.
HORSHAM, PA. Jill Kelley and her twin sister Natalie Khawam won the Bimbo Bakery award in the "Best Kardashian Sister Look Alike Contest." The two sisters are seen above with the Petraeus family and Jill's husband (Jill is second from the right). Ms. Kelley commented in the Washington Post (here) that "It's great to receive this award in recognition of my accomplishments. I am a Korean diplomat, you know, and have immunity to stuff and I hate it when people sing 'I know a girl from South Korea, she's got the blah-blah, and blah-bah, etc.' I've given my all to our men in uniform and I hate being mixed up with this Broadwell women who is obviously flat-backing her way to the top of US pointy-headed diplomatic circles". Paula Broadwell, reached at the Petraeus family home where she was crashing on the couch, had no comment.
Last Sunday, Fareed Zakaria did an instructive comparison between the economies of the US and the EU in the aftermath of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis. The histories of the two economies are different: the US followed an expansionary fiscal and monetary policy while the EU embraced austerity. Expansionary economic policy involves decreasing interest rates, increasing government spending and increasing the deficit. Austerity involves fighting (imaginary) inflation, reducing government spending and decreasing deficits. As far as historical experiments go, the results are pretty clear. The US is forecast to grow modestly next year while the EU is forecast to contract.
These lessons of history are hard for the right wing to understand: expansion means growth and austerity means contraction. The presumptive Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, has been preaching austerity for the US as the correct response to the Financial Crisis (here). The Tea Party movement is also preaching austerity (for example, Rick Santelli of CNBC and Senator Ron Johnson, R-WI). Their arguments are based on Rick Santorum's Old Time Religion: when you've been profligate, you need to repent. Their arguments are just not based on history as it is unfolding or did unfold during the Great Depression of the 1930's.
Two recent articles in the New England Journal of Medicine brought up a new perspective on the US Health Care debate. The first article (here) suggested that the 26 Republican Governors challenging Medicare may be up to more than simply squirming under new Federal mandates. The second article (here) also suggested that the challenge to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) involving the mandate reveal how little the right-wing justices understand about insurance and how much they really wish to limit the power of the Federal government. I would go even further and say that the 26 Republican Governors and the four right-wing Supreme Court Justices might really be intent on destroying the Federal government.
I'm not sure what makes a mandate to purchase health insurance different when it comes from the State of Massachusetts or the Federal government. From a citizen's perspective, it's still a government mandate. The argument that there is some benefit in keeping government closer to the people in the States is, for me, also a little weird. Living in a State (Wisconsin) that has been hi-jacked by the extreme right wing is hardly more inclusive government. Somehow in Wisconsin it is more important that people carry concealed weapons rather than carry health insurance.
Basically, the 26 Republican Governors and the four right-wing Supreme Court justices might seem to be arguing that the Federal government cannot mandate anything. That would be a radical idea about government. Actually, I don't think that is what they are doing. The Federal government can mandate things the right-wing likes (military conscription, invasions of privacy in the name of Homeland security, concealed-carry shootouts at the OK Corral, etc.) and cannot mandate things the right-wing doesn't like (health care, spending for the poor, spending for the elderly, etc.).
It is interesting how the edifice of obscure constitutional arguments is being erected around such a simple, naked, political agenda. A nation with a corrupt legal and political system does not have a great future.
In the interview above, Prof. Lo argues that two of the myths surrounding the Financial Crisis of 2007 are probably wrong: (1) the argument that there was excessive risk taking (investment banks taking risks with other people's money) ignores the fact that many investment bankers lost large amounts of their own personal fortunes during the crisis and (2) the argument that mortgage lenders engaged in predatory borrowing seems contradicted by the sophisticated attempts of average home owners to purchase and "flip" house to make quick profits.
One might quibble with the quick points Prof. Lo made during the interview, but his lengthier paper reviewing the 21 books about the Financial Crisis is worth reading. The bottom line is that we still do not understand the financial crisis and well-intentioned policy attempts to prevent future crises, such as the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, may or may not be trying to solve problems that either don't exist or are the symptoms of deeper, poorly understood, more fundamental factors.
In the video clip above from the last GOP presidential candidate debate, Newt Gingrich revealed that he has a plan for $2.50 a gallon gasoline. Unfortunately, he did not say what the plan involved and did not release a white paper giving any details. The resulting intellectual vacuum has led to some interesting speculation.
Yesterday, the Atlantic (here) made some assumptions and filled in the blanks for Newt. If we look around the world for countries that have cheaper gas prices, we find that these countries accomplish the miracle through straight-forward subsidies. For example, in Venezuela, gasoline is 12 cents a gallon!
Doing the math for the US, for the last seven years American's used roughly 3.3 billion barrels of oil which at 42 gallons per barrel yields 134 billion gallons of gas per year. Gas is currently averaging about $3.85 a gallon. To get down to $2.50 would require eliminating the gas tax (18 cents per gallon going to roads) leaving $3.68 ($3.85 - 0.18). To get to $2.50 would require another $1.17 ($3.85 - 0.18 - 1.17 = $2.50). Multiplying by 134 billion gallons per year ($1.17 * 134B = $157 B) and adding back in $25B in gas tax you get $187B.
This might seem like a lot of money but the Bush Tax cuts cost $2.5T over their first ten years. Eliminating the Bush tax cuts and using the money for fuel subsidies would leave money left over for other ideas Gingrich might have. So far, this is the only way anyone has been able to figure out that would actually satisfy Newt's plan. The only problem is that Newt is opposed to any tax increases even if used to subsidize $2.50 gasoline so he must have in mind increasing the deficit (was it Gingrich that said deficits don't matter or was that Dick Cheney, I'm getting confused).
The video above, from interviews on CNBC this morning, revealed a number of interesting points about energy prices and energy supply: (1) Newt Gingrich has a plan for $2.50-a-gallon gasoline, but no one (including Gingrich) knows what the plan is or considers it vaguely realistic, (2) the US has the lowest energy prices in the world, but they still aren't low enough for the US economy to recover, (3) the US produces surplus natural gas that could be used for transportation, (4) the natural gas infrastructure already exists, but (5) politicians in Washington are fixated on drilling for more oil.
T. Boone Pickens, who is also interviewed in the video above, has been having a debate with the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) over natural gas (here). The WSJ thinks that the "Pickens Plan" is a "Boone Doggle". The Pickens Plan "to break US oil addiction" is obviously not in the interests of Big Oil. The debate is another indication that Peak Oil is either very close or has already been reached and that the Age of Austerity will be with us for a long time.
Former U.S. Ambassador to Italy, Ronald Spogli was asked about the EU debt crisis. One of his comments caught my attention:
I think growth is one of the most elusive things for these countries to achieve. You can press the austerity button and you can try to gain compliance. Competitiveness, they're working on competitiveness and that's the issue because there is no similar button in my opinion, for growth. You just don't press the growth button one day and growth happens. Certainly liberalization has helped, but it helps over time.
Although I may not agree with his political orientation (he was George Bush's ambassador) and with everything he said in the interview, the comment above was very insightful. A country facing a financial crisis may or may not have any easy obvious choices. If it has it's own currency and is not already heavily in debt to global capital markets, it can engage in deficit spending to increase demand (the Keynesian solution). If that option is blocked, it is easy to resort to austerity, even if it generates wide-spread hardship.
Real solutions to the crisis are not that easy. If the crisis was generated by external events in the world system (such as the US Subprime Mortgage Crisis' effect on the EU), it may not be that easy to withdraw from the global economy or, in the case of Greece, from the EU during the debt crisis. If the crisis was generated within the country due to poor regulation or weak political institutions (for example, weak tax collection, shortfalls in government revenue and increases in debt), it's not so easy to change institutional arrangements, as the US is finding out.
Ultimately, the answer is more economic growth but everything depends on how that growth is achieved. If growth is based on the exploitation of either environmental or human resources, the growth is not ultimately sustainable. Right now, the world economy is desperately in need of technological changes that reduce resource inputs, increase labor productivity, increase employment and reduce CO2 emissions and other environmental damage. These are contradictory objectives and the necessary technological changes, particularly in terms of energy intensity and emission intensity, are having trouble emerging even while financial innovation has run wild. Financialization is probably another one of those "easy" things to do, like austerity, that isn't very functional for the society as a whole.
Ambassador Spogli is in a good position to understand these issues. Not only was he Ambassador to Italy but he also started one of the first private equity firms that have become key players in the financialization of the US economy.
Today on Public Radio's Marketplace (here), Robert Reich commented on the causal logic underlying explanations being offered by the current crop of Republican presidential candidates. Since we are dealing with causal logic, we can use causal diagrams to clarify the points being made by the Republican Right Wing. Reich's commentary can be summarized using the causal diagram above (click to enlarge).
All the Republican candidates are afraid of government dependency. They see the Obama Administration as creating a "European Style" welfare state in which government dependency and powerful unions have created our current economic problems. Reich argues that the Republican argument has the direction of causality running precisely in the wrong direction.
In the second causal diagram above, the Subprime Mortgage Crisis not only created massive unemployment that pushed families to apply for Federal benefits such as Food Stamps (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) but also created downward mobility driving middle class and working class families into the underclass, further creating families in need. At the same time, globalization has insured that any new jobs created as the economy expands will be low wage jobs, further creating families in need. These low wage jobs are non-union which creates a positive feedback loop where unions that might have fought for higher wages are becoming less able to fight for workers.
In other words, if you just reverse the arrows in the top causal diagram above (the Republican causal model), you get an accurate causal view of the current situation. The Subprime Mortgage Crisis created by the very right-wing business groups who support the Republican party led to the Entitlement Society rather than the Obama Administration who inherited the mess from the Bush administration.
Also tonight on the PBS News Hour, Margaret Warner did a piece explaining why the German economy, a European Style Entitlement society, is outperforming the U.S. on a range of measures to include how well the labor force is treated. I'll comment on that video when it becomes available.
Reich's commentary on Market Place begs the question of whether the Republican presidential candidates believe the causal direction of their arguments or have simply adopted reverse causation as the explanation for every problem. In Mitt Romney's case, I'm not really sure that he believes anything he says (although you can study his political positions here). In Newt Gingrich's case, I'm not sure sometimes he knows what he is saying (again you can read for yourself here). For Ron Paul, his views pre-date the Obama Administration and he might see a broader conspiracy trying to create the Entitlement Society (read an interesting article about his world view here). Rick Santorum is probably the only candidate that believes what he is saying, but he is a lawyer.
Before the semester started on my first teaching job, the dean of Letters and Sciences met with me and said that the biggest problem she had was teaching students how to "...distinguish facts from their opinions". Looking at the current crop of Republican presidential candidates, they provide striking evidence that our education system has failed to teach students the difference between fact and opinion, let alone how to make an accurate causal argument. On the other hand, a psychiatrist might argue that people who can't make accurate causal arguments are simply delusional.
I use my blogs to make informal comments on policy topics related to my research interests in the World-System, computer simulation of the US Health Care System, the US Economy, the US Stock Market, and the US Financial System. I am retired from the University of Wisconsin -- Madison. I have taught Statistics and Computer Science and also served on the UW's HIPAA Task Force and the Bioterrorism Task Force. I have also been a member of my local planning commission, a jazz guitarist and a golfer, so some of that may find its way into the blogs.
