Don't Let Your Morality Get In The Way Of Doing What's Right

Bryan Appleyard steers a middle course on anthropogenic global warming, which both sides see as treason to the human race. I'm mostly an agw skeptic, although I'm willing to admit that it is possible that the globe is warming (mean global temperature is a completely meaningless concept), that it is our "fault" (although I can't imagine what difference that makes to anyone for whom the environment is not a religion) and that it is bad (although in actual human experience, warmer has always been better). The problem is that, once you've jumped through the hoops necessary to conclude that agw is happening and is bad, you're forced to conclude that it's inevitable. If our relatively small contribution to atmospheric greenhouse gases has taken us over the tilting point, there really is nothing we can do to stop the cascade now.

We can, of course, always make it worse by trying to help, which brings us to Kyoto.

There are those of us who suspect that the acceptance of agw by a certain portion of the population relies less on careful weighing of the science and more on a desire for a weapon with which to attack the west, liberal capitalism and, very specifically, the United States of America. Even if agw is true, clearly there were people predisposed to believe in it because they believe that a majority will believe that it must be fought and that fighting it requires adopting the political program urged in any event by the predisposed. Among these people are the Greens and the French [must not make joke about daily bathing] who saw Kyoto as a handy vehicle for running over the Americans.

To its credit, the Clinton Administration, and Al Gore specifically, fought back. Where Kyoto says, "Thou shalt throttle thy economy," the Administration tried to substitute relatively painless methods that might actually make a difference. These were, briefly, we should be able to buy credits from the former Communist nations, whose economies had been throttled already, we should get credit for reforesting and we should get credit for funding pollution controls in the Third World. (We've discussed these previously here.) The first two are kind of silly. Being able to buy credits from Russia was useful in bribing Russia to participate, but -- since their industries had already collapsed -- didn't subtract any CO2 from the atmosphere. Reforestation not only is happening anyway, but is a questionable means of taking CO2 from the atmosphere.

But funding air pollution control in the Third World is easy, cheap and beneficial even if agw is nonsense. We know how to do it, we've proven the technology on ourselves and our air is cleaner than its been in ages. The health benefits of clean air are clear and widespread. In the absence of these programs, China is about to overtake the US as the world's greatest source of greenhouse gases while the US has become more energy efficient (that is, it takes us less energy every year to produce each dollar of GDP).

There is only one catch: cleaning the air of particulate matter makes global warming worse.

Baltimore Sucks?

After this weekend, it's going to be time to stop paying attention to the Yankees and start worrying about whoever's number 2 in the Division.

People Care What The Voters Think?

All the cool kids are discussing voting and irrational voters and the fact that no single vote ever decides anything. (I once had a law professor who put it this way: My chances of getting hit by lightening while walking to the polling place is greater than the chance that my vote will matter, so voting is suicidal.) These discussions seem to break down into two different positions, both of which I always thought were platitudes: that the people decide things correctly and that the point of voting is to make sure that your point of view wins.

The point of voting is to create and demonstrate the consent of the governed to the legitimacy of the government.

The idea that the people, through voting, can pick out the best policy on some complicated technical issue is just nuts. I believe in the special providence, but I don't think we're supposed to rely on it to that extent. The voters are good, though by no means perfect, at choosing the better person but, more often than not, the issues we think are important in the run up to the election are not the issues that we end up obsessing over during the term. No one asked Bush or Gore what they would do after terrorists flew hijacked airplanes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Immigration was an issue in the 2004, but not much of one. And, as my law professor pointed out, the outcome is going to be the same regardless of whether I vote.

Massachusetts Runs The Experiment

As we argue past each other on immigration, it's worth noting that Massachusetts, and the northeastern states generally, have run the experiment that the anti-immigrationists use for their horror of horrors. We have close to our shore a large population of Spanish speaking people, relatively poor and relatively less educated, who have a right to move freely into the Commonwealth and a right to receive immediately any welfare benefit available to those born in the United States. The trick, of course, is that this population was born in the United States -- in Puerto Rico. Nonetheless, Massachusetts boasts a per capita income higher than the US average and Puerto Ricans in Massachusetts, though they make, on average, less than other citizens in the Commonwealth, make much more than Puerto Ricans still on the island.

So I Can Refer To It Over At The Daily Duck

The yield curve on US Treasuries as of 5/25/07.

This chart shows the 6 month, 1, 2 and 3 year rates daily from January 3, 2005 through May 30, 2007. The inversion first occurs at the end of December 2005, widens throughout 2006 and now seems to be closing.

Two Stories In The News

Scientists create remote-controlled pigeon (Via the Daily Duck)

Bush Hit By Bird Droppings At News Conference

We report. You decide.

Old Arguments

I've noticed on a couple of blogs arguments about Florida 2000. This seems odd to me, unless agents from Gore 2008 have been lurking in blog comments, but what's bothersome is that even the basic facts don't seem to be accepted.

1. Al Gore won the popular vote.

2. More Floridians woke up on election day intending to vote for Al Gore.

3. More Floridians actually voted for George Bush.

This Is Why This Blog Is Secret

I am often asked, as I fantasize about being asked questions about the blog, why "secret." What is secret about the blog? One answer is that I don't worry about whether anyone, other than fantasy interlocutors, care about what I write.

So, what do I think about the immigration bill?

As long time friends of the blog know, I'm pro-immigration. We don't have nearly enough immigrants and should take more by an order of magnitude. In fact, we do -- we just pretend that we don't want them here. The downside of this arrangement is that we don't have control of who crosses our borders. In the midst of a assymetric war in which the enemy purposely targets civilian populations, control of the border would be a nice thing to have.

But here we have completely confused two different issues. We could have much better control of the border with much more immigration, if we spent resources on the border while changing the immigration laws to welcome immigrants. That's the law I want but not the law I'm getting. I would prefer the status quo to the proposed bill, and I might get that. But even if the bill passes, I won't be too upset; it will be a failure and not much will change, but the current illegals will be legal.

Also, it's always worth remembering that the 9/11 terrorists entered the country legally. Perfect control of the Mexican border would have made no difference at all.

Not To Step On Brit's Toes ...

... but "And sniff me out like I was tanqueray" is a ludicrously good lyric.

You Know I’m No Good Lyrics

And I Thought That I Was Good At Procrastinating

When I posted below about US carbon emissions falling last year, I refrained from making fun of John Kerry. After all, what's the point? But his quote from the article has been bugging me and I finally figured out why:

"This is more proof that this President just doesn't get it when it comes to combating climate change," Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) said in a statement yesterday. "The house is on fire, and he's trying to douse the flames with a watering can. The science tells us that we need to reduce our emissions by 60-80% by 2050 in order to avoid catastrophic damage."

Now, let's say that you were a United States Senator, your party's last nominee for President and married to a billionairess. If you really believed that our only chance to avoid a "catastrophe" was to up-turn civilization in the next 40 years, wouldn't you, you know, do ... something?

Support Our Moonbats

James Taranto points us to this utterly obtuse comment on the Democrat's cave-in on caving-in by a proponent of a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq:

Some activists had privately feared that Democratic leaders were losing their resolve to stage a protracted fight with the White House over wartime funding. Pelosi had announced earlier that the House would not leave for the Memorial Day recess without a new funding bill, a signal to some of a looming defeat.

"When they put out that deadline, people realized that we were going to lose," said an aide to an anti-war lawmaker. "Everything after that seemed like posturing."

If setting a deadline in Iraq is supporting our troops by getting them out of a war they can't win, what does this mean?

Quotas Can Be Good

Having spent too much time on why quotas for women are not needed and a bad idea, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that I strongly favor affirmative action for blacks for the reasons expressed by Richard Posner here. Even so, quotas would be a bad idea. Note that this is consistent with my long-time objection to institutional feminism, which is that it is a tool of white backlash against black advancement.

If Only All Problems Were This Intractable

The government announced yesterday that US carbon dioxide emissions fell last year despite a growing economy. The reasons, according to President Bush:

"We are effectively confronting the important challenge of global climate change through regulations, public-private partnerships, incentives, and strong economic investment," Bush said in a statement. "New policies at the federal, state, and local levels -- such as my initiative to reduce by 20 percent our projected use of gasoline within 10 years -- promise even more progress." A number of factors helped reduce emissions last year, according to the government, including weather conditions that reduced heating and air-conditioning use, higher gasoline prices that caused consumers to conserve, and a greater overall reliance on natural gas. [Emphasis added]

In other words, global warming results in a more temperate climate that reduces energy consumption.

The Horror

Forget your flooding, your droughts, your famines. Forget your polar ice caps. We now see the real horror of global warming:

Britain's astounding April, the warmest on record, has produced an astounding effect in the natural world, with at least 11 species of butterfly making their earliest recorded appearances this spring in what will be seen as the most remarkable demonstration yet of the effects of climate change on Britain's wildlife.

For several years biologists have been watching warming temperatures affect living organisms, with leaves opening, birds nesting and insects emerging earlier. But what has happened in 2007 with butterflies has been quite exceptional....

Butterfly Conservation's experts are confident that only global warming can explain the changes. "Butterfly data, collected by hundreds of UK recorders, definitely points to climate change," Mr Warren said. "Species are not only emerging early, but several species are extending their geographic range northwards. The small skipper, the comma and the holly blue butterflies have all crossed the border into Scotland in the past few years, very probably as a result of the changing climate."

When will the Sheeple awake to this catastrophe?

Positioning

If abortion law settles down to on-demand in the first trimester for women who are of age, otherwise only with parental consent, and not allowed thereafter except where the pregnancy threatens physical harm to the mother or in cases of rape or incest, is that a pro-life result or a pro-choice result?

Quotas?

Over at Daily Duck, Oroborous has come out in favor of quotas for government employees. The main focus of the post, based upon recent doings in France, is quotas for women. I was going to respond in the comments, but then realized that formatting was involved.

I'm not sure that there's much of a problem here that needs fixing. According to BLS, in 2004 there were 6,365,000 civilian government employees in the US, 45.7 of whom were female. Here's a detailed breakdown:


In 2004, the non-institutionalized, civilian population was 50.7% female and the civilian workforce was 46.5% female. So, compared to the total civilian workforce, women are slightly overrepresented in the government and, compared to the population, they are slightly underrepresented. I just don't see that there's much to be accomplished by quota hiring.

This is especially true since there are at least two costs to quota hiring. First, although there are things that the government must do that the private sector is forbidden (taking land without consent, killing, armed raids into homes, etc.), there isn't a sufficient trade-off here to compensate for having the government discriminate against men. In fact, since private citizens have at least a notional right of association and the government doesn't, having the government discriminate and the private sector forbidden to discriminate is backwards.

Second, quotas in practice mean that the best person is not chosen for each job. Incompetent public servants impose costs on the rest of us. Dealing with the government is unpleasant and costs more. Those costs hit women as much as men. In fact, because women are a greater percentage of the population, they hit women more often then men. So government hiring quotas (like all quotas) will harm those they are meant to aid.

How Many Voters?

Prodded by a comment from Steve Sailer in my Immigration Footnote post, I wanted to look at the number of voters per Congressional district after the federal government was established. I wasn't able to find any pre-20th century election results on-line. The earliest results I could find were from 1920, as kept by the Clerk of the House. In 1920, the population of the US was 106 million and the House had reached its modern size of 435 Representatives. On average, each Representative had 240,000 constituents. In the 1913 reapportionment, each District was meant to have 212,000 constituents.

As one would expect, the number of voters was lowest in the South. I assume that this was due mostly to limits on the franchise, although it could also be that there was no real contest since only Democrats won in the South. In any event, the lowest number of voters came in the Third District of Louisiana, which elected WP Martin (Dem) unopposed (all of Louisiana's Representatives were elected unopposed) with 4201 votes. That is approximately 2% of his constituents.

At the other extreme, Representative Cleveland A. Newton (Rep) was elected from Missouri's Tenth District with 122,100 votes out of 199,729 cast.

Two other 1920 races are worth mentioning. In California's Tenth District, Republican Henry Z. Osborne beat Socialist Upton Sinclair 97,469 to 20,439.

Also, from 1913 through 1923, Pennsylvania had a number of at-large Congressional districts along with its 32 geographically defined districts. I believe, although I can't quite prove, that the top four at-large vote getters, Republicans who got between 1,140,836 and 1,108,538 votes, were elected to Congress from the 33rd through 36th Districts. Frankly, I did not know that a mixture of at-large and geographic districts was possible (it was apparently the result of a refusal or inability to redistrict after the 1910 census). However, this year Democrats are trying to expand the House by two seats, one to be elected from the District of Columbia and the other to be a fourth District in Utah to be elected at-large until the next redistricting in 2012. The bill has passed the House but without sufficient support to overturn a veto. The bill is still in committee in the Senate, but opponents claim that they can successfully filibuster it. The Bush Administration has suggested (but not promised) that it will veto the bill if it reaches the President's desk.

"Dickey: France's Crusading Foreign Minister"

If you ever read Slate, you might have noticed how, in the right hand margin, they have headlines from The Onion, the Washington Post and Newsweek. Have you ever noticed, though, that at first glance it can be hard to tell which headline comes from which source?

Two Good Lessons

Smarter people earn more but aren't worth more:

Pop quiz! What factors help determine how wealthy you'll become in life? ... Ohio State economics professor Jay Zagorsky suggests different factors: "Staying married, not getting divorced, thinking about savings." Wow.

Not only did he not list intelligence, he went on to note that "intelligence really isn't one of the key driving forces. In fact, people at the middle of the smarts spectrum have the fewest money problems."

When I read about his findings from a study of 7,500 middle-aged Americans, I was surprised. It seems that the smarter you are, the more you tend to earn. For each IQ point you have above someone else's IQ, you'll earn between $200 and $600 more. As an example, he noted that someone with an IQ of 130 stands to make (on average) about $12,000 more per year than someone with an IQ of 100.

That's a promising start. We who are smarter than the average bear (I'm including myself and you) would reasonably assume, then, that smarter people would end up wealthier. But that was not suggested by the study. Instead, people with higher IQs and incomes tended to spend more, maxing out credit cards and paying bills late. At the end of the day, those with lower IQs often had a greater net worth.

1. Although we tend to confuse the two (and by "we" I mean those with a hankering for social engineering), income and wealth are two different concepts and are not as related as we think.

2. By intelligence we mean a talent for a few specific pursuits. Those are not necessarily the most important pursuits and they don't necessarily lead to happiness. Just as income is not wealth, intelligence is not wisdom.

An Immigration Footnote

In all the current foofaraw over immigration and whether it favors Republicans or Democrats, there is a point that I haven't yet seen made. The argument tends to focus on which party Latino citizens will vote for. But that is only relevant in the long term. In the short term and probably in the medium term, immigration favors the Republicans and, even more so, conservatives.

The Constitution does not apportion Congressional districts or presidential electors among the state based upon the number of citizens. It apportions districts and electors based upon the total population:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

Article I, Section 2. "Free persons" includes immigrants, both legal and illegal but no State allows non-citizens to vote.

In other words, immigration increases the relative power of high-immigrant states without changing the electorate. With the exception of California, the states favored by immigrants, particularly illegal immigrants, are Republican states. Moreover, although illegal immigrants count towards apportionment now, counting people legally in the country is much easier and more accurate than counting illegals. So legalization, greater immigration and even continued illegal immigration will necessarily increase Republican power in the federal government in the short term.

The medium term point is more subtle and less certain. Even after newly legalized immigrants become citizens and they and their children start to vote, the Republicans can still benefit even if they tend to vote Democratic. (Obviously, the Republicans benefit if the new citizens vote Republican.)

In the 2004 election, a historically high 44% of Latinos voted for George Bush. (This number is somewhat controversial, but is the best number available.) The Latino split between the parties is all over the place over time, but the Latino Republican vote varies between 20% and 40%. (Interestingly, the two Republican nominees who did best among Latinos are the two most conservative modern candidates, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.) People look at these numbers and think that this means that Latino immigration is great for Democrats. But that's because they don't think it through.

For purposes of this example, I'm going to look at the Texas vote in 2004 and assume that a Republican nominee with any chance at all will receive 40% of the Texan Latino vote. The point I'm making, however, doesn't depend upon the exact percentages and the following calculations can be run for any state and any percentage without changing the point. In 2004, George Bush got approximately 60% of the Texas vote. W beat John Kerry in Texas by 1.7 million votes and, because electoral votes in most states are winner take all, W got all of Texas' 34 electoral votes. Even if there had been 1.5 million more Latino Kerry votes, W still would have won the state and all of its electors. In fact, he would have won it handily, because 1.5 million more Kerry votes implies (assuming our 60/40 split) 1 million more Bush voters and a margin of 1.2 million votes. It's not until we add 7 million more Latino voters, 4.2 million voting for Kerry and 2.8 million voting for Bush, that Kerry even comes close to catching Bush. Very conservatively, 7 million more Latino voters implies 12-15 million new Latino citizens. Now, remember that the states currently get a new Congressional district and a new elector for every 650,000 people in the state. Suddenly, George Bush is not getting 34 electors for having won 60% of the Texas vote. He's getting 50-ish electors for having won just over 50% of the Texas vote. Moreover, because the vote for Representatives is also winner-take-all within each district, it is a good bet that most of the new Congressional districts also have a Republican congressman. If the Republicans can pick up even two or three net Congressional seats in each of the border states, they will have a lock on the House for the foreseeable future.

This specific example is ludicrously favorable to the Republicans. At this point, we've more or less doubled the Texas electorate and increased the population by 50%. George Bush is a Texas native son and did better among Latinos than any other Republican is likely to do for a while. But the general point should be clear: because of the way Congressional districts are apportioned; because of winner-take-all; because the Republican party is strong in the border states, immigration will aid Republicans in the short term and probably in the medium term even if new Latino citizens vote strongly Democratic.

In the long term, of course, we're all dead.

Addenda:

1. I've run the numbers for hypothetical state "T" with a population of 23,000,000, a voter to population rate of .35 that is consistent over all population sub-groups, a current Republican/Democrat split of 55/45 and a new Latino voter Republican/Democrat split of 20/80. In T, the Republicans will still squeak out a victory with an additional 1.3 million Latino voters. That implies a population increase of 3.7 million Latino "persons" and, thus, five additional Congressional districts and electors.

2. Given the country's overall demographics and given that Congressional apportionment is a zero sum game, the new Southern/Southwestern districts will come at the expense of Northern/Northeastern districts. In other words, each new district Republicans gain from immigration will most likely come at the cost of a Democratic district. Even if Republicans don't gain every new seat and Democrats don't lose every old seat, a shift from the North/Northeast to the South/Southwest would likely be a shift from a more liberal Representative to a more conservative Representative, moving the center of Congressional power to the right.