Category: Rants

Posts where I spout off on one topic or another

Taking political positions in public

U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia is not a man who I often find myself in agreement with. That said, I do think a recent comment of his was both true and important. Opponents of gay marriage in the United States are seeking to have their identities kept secret, because they fear that they will suffer for their views. In response, Scalia said that: “The fact is, running a democracy takes a certain amount of civic courage.” He also said that: “you can’t run a democracy this way, with everybody being afraid of having his political positions known.”

Certainly, it is grossly inappropriate for people to be threatening the personal security of those who oppose gay marriage. That being said, having an active and effective public debate over issues of policy and law does require people to openly and honestly express their views. Furthermore, in a free and democratic society, we retain the right to reach judgments about people on the basis of their views. It is perfectly legitimate for me to think that someone is bad at evaluating complex information, because they are a climate change denier. Similarly, it seems legitimate to say that those who do not support equal rights for gay couples don’t really take human rights or the concept of equal treatment under the law seriously.

Whether you agree or disagree with that specific perspective, I think Scalia’s argument that society benefits when people declare their positions honestly and publicly is a strong one. Serious politics, based around competing ideas, relies on that sort of open discussion and debate. The alternative is a shadowy political world in which people try to advance their preferences obliquely, using whatever underhanded techniques might be effective.

Meteorologists on climate

Writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, Charles Homans has a piece on why so many television meteorologists are climate change deniers. He cites the particular case of John Coleman, whose opposition to mainstream climate science was motivated more by personal animosity than by any doubts about their empirical methods:

Coleman wasn’t arguing against the integrity of a particular conclusion based on careful original research — something that would have constituted useful scientific skepticism. Instead, he went after the motives of the scientists themselves. Climate researchers, he wrote, “look askance at the rest of us, certain of their superiority. They respect government and disrespect business, particularly big business. They are environmentalists above all else.”

Coleman’s 2007 essay was picked up by right-wing news sites, with his experience as a weatherman used as a justification for taking his position seriously.

The issue of meteorologists making decrees on climate goes back to the basic question of what constitutes expertise and whose views – if anyone’s – we should pay special attention to when making up our minds. Apparently, the majority of professional meteorologists in the United States reject the mainstream science of climate change:

Twenty-nine percent of the 121 meteorologists who replied agreed with Coleman—not that global warming was unproven, or unlikely, but that it was a scam. Just 24 percent of them believed that humans were responsible for most of the change in climate over the past half century—half were sure this wasn’t true, and another quarter were “neutral” on the issue.

Despite how climate science and meteorology are very different fields, the Yale Project on Climate Change found that 66% of Americans listed television meteorologists as a credible source of information on climate change. It’s not surprising – though it is certainly regrettable – that this helps keep the general public confused about the issue.

The Economist mentions runaway climate change

For the first time, I found a reference to the possibility of runaway climate change in an article in The Economist. Oddly enough, it is not in an article on climate change, but rather in a survey on water from last month:

Few people have dwelt on the worst possibility, even if it is highly unlikely to come about: that the extra water vapour held by a warmer atmosphere might set in train a runaway greenhouse effect in which temperatures rose ever faster and tipping-points for, say, the melting of ice sheets were reached. This possibility has received little consideration outside academia, perhaps because less improbable consequences of climate change provide enough to be gloomy about. The wise conclusion to be drawn may be that all planning should allow for greater uncertainty, and probably also greater variability, so every plan will need to have a greater degree of resilience built into it than in the past.

This account doesn’t even mention the most shocking possible form of runaway climate change, where the oceans boil away and the Earth becomes permanently uninhabitable for life as we know it.

I wonder how long it will be before the main opinion pieces in The Economist take this risk into consideration. So far, they seem to remain convinced that climate change is a rather secondary problem – certainly less important than maintaining global GDP growth – and that it will eventually be efficiently dealt with through carbon pricing schemes.

As I have said countless times before, the major risk with climate change is that the lags between emissions and effects will conceal just how gigantic a problem climate change could be until it has become too late to prevent the worst effects.

Liberal-NDP cooperation

Michael Ignatieff’s ever-wavering stance on cooperation with the NDP is increasingly annoying for me. Sometimes, he seems to think some sort of coalition (with or without support from the Bloc) could be a possibility, at other times he denouces the idea as ‘ridiculous.’ Regardless of which Canadian political parties a person supports, this sort of vacillation seems both muddled and opportunistic (since the coalition looks best when it seems most plausibly in reach). Regardless of political affiliation, it also seems increasingly clear that Ignatieff doesn’t really understand the fix his party is in, or how to get out of it.

I think it should be obvious enough to Canadians that the idea of a merger or coalition between the Liberals and NDP is not ridiculous, from the perspective of those who want there to be a serious opposition challenge to the current government. The effort to ‘unite the right’ by merging the Conservative and Alliance parties has been successful. Now, even though they have a minority of support, the Conservatives are consistently able to scrape together a plurality and govern as a minority.

Admittedly, there is a big difference between a merger and a coalition (and a lesser difference between a Liberal-NDP coalition and a Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition). Some of the apparent vacillation mentioned above comes down to Liberals feeling more comfortable with a series of temporary Parliamentary alliances than with the actual melting down and recombination of major parties. That said, it may be a basic strategic reality that a united right in a first-past-the-post Parliamentary democracy produces the necessity for a united left, if there is to an opposition that can credibly and effectively hold the government to account. It is worth mentioning that Canadian democracy is also dysfunctional in circumstances where the centre-left has such an unchallenged hold on power as to not face any serious risk of being replaced in government.

With Parliament split between the Liberals, NDP, Bloc, and Conservatives, a fall election would probably just produce yet another Conservative minority, followed by a Liberal leadership race. I doubt anyone would be too sad to see Ignatieff go (at least Dion had some original ideas), but this outcome would just be a perpetuation of the status quo.

The two ways out of gridlock seem to be a Liberal-NDP merger/coalition, or electoral reform that introduces some significant measure of proportional representation.

Canada’s climate plans a flop

As discussed in a post of the Pembina Institute’s blog Canada’s record of failure in dealing with climate change continues to worsen. While the government once promised that Canadian emissions would peak forever sometime between 2010 and 2012, they now expect them to rise all across that span.

Policies the government expected to reduce emissions by 52 million tonnes (megatonnes) of CO2 in 2010 are now expected to produce reductions of just 5 megatonnes. Furthermore, the $1.5 billion Clean Air and Climate Change Trust Fund, distributed to provinces in 2007, did not produce the expected 16 megatonne reduction. Now, the government claims it cut emissions by just 0.34 megatonnes, with 3 more to follow by 2015.

These lackluster results, coupled with ever-rising emissions (especially from the oil and gas sector) demonstrate convincingly that Canada just isn’t doing its part on climate change mitigation. Future generations are likely to see this quite correctly as evidence of short-sightedness and irresponsibility.

Facebook and data mining

I have written before about privacy and Facebook, expressing the view that people should treat whatever they put on Facebook in the same way as they treat something they put on a completely public website at this one. It may be wise to give people more granular control over who can see what, but it isn’t intelligent as a Facebook user to assume that their privacy controls will always be adequate and that your information will stay safe.

In the wake of the latest Facebook privacy debacle, I have realized that there is an element to the situation that I hadn’t considered before. Especially now that Facebook is working to put everybody’s ‘Interests’ into a standardized format, there is a real difference between how information on Facebook can be used, compared to the wider web.

A person with some time and interest could scan through my blog, figure out about how old I am, learn what sort of books I read, discover my political views, and so on. It would be rather tricky to write an automated computer program that would achieve the same result. Blogs are non-standardized, and comprised of human generated text. By contrast, information on Facebook is increasingly organized in a manner that is easily machine readable. If I want to reach 25-27 year olds who enjoy reading Carl Sagan books and live in Ottawa, it is easy to do via the information on Facebook, but hard to do with information from the general web. That seems to comprise a different sort of privacy violation and/or data mining.

In response, I have stripped my Facebook account of everything that might be of interest to advertisers, at least where it is easily machine-readable: hometown, current location, music and films appreciated, etc. A determined human user could still learn a lot about me from Facebook, for instance by looking at status updates and communication with others, but this will at least make it a bit trickier for machines.

The credit crunch, bailouts, and moral hazard

Why did governments bail out failing financial institutions?

They said it was because banks and insurance companies were so interconnected with the rest of the economy that, if they failed, they would cause a cascade of other failures. If the banks went broke, firms that actually have sound businesses would fall as well. That supposedly risked turning the credit crunch into a general depression.

Assuming this argument is correct, the natural question is what we should do to eliminate that vulnerability, termed ‘systemic risk’ by economists. It is as though we are mountain climbers attached by a tether to the banks. When they start to slip, we need to save them, in order to keep from being pulled over ourselves. Once we have done that, however, we need to start thinking about how to get rid of tether.

According to the argument that politicians are making, we got dragged to the edge of the cliff this time. To experience that and not think seriously about how to get ourselves untethered is stupid and irresponsible.

1) Make banks smaller

No single bank should be large enough that its collapse could threaten the economy as a whole. Banks should be small enough to fail.

2) Make finance more boring

Get rid of complex new products like collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. Treat new financial products like new pharmaceuticals, with the onus on those developing them to show that they are safe, and with tough oversight and regulation.

These things seem to spread risk around in the financial system in ways that make it possible for relatively minor players (even non-banks) to really screw things up.

3) Separate the safe and risky sides of banking

There should be two sorts of banks.

The first sort will take deposits and make very safe loans, like well-secured mortgages or loans to businesses with a strong plan for paying them back. These banks should be insured, so that if they fail the depositors don’t lose their money.

These banks should be allowed to call themselves ‘safe banks’ or ‘guaranteed banks’ or something similar, so it is clear to everybody that they are in a special category that excludes the second type.

The second sort can basically do whatever they like. They can invest in all sorts of unusual financial instruments, and try to make profits. When they fail, their depositors get nothing. The only things they cannot do are get too big (see point 1) or sell products that threaten the system (see point 2).

The government loves to boast about how well Canada weathered the financial crisis. The basic reason for that seems to be how boring our banks were forced to remain, as the result of heavy regulation. The places with laissez faire regulatory approaches – like the United States, Ireland, and Iceland – are the ones that have had the most to fear from the credit crunch.

4) Accept the drawbacks

This plan has a number of drawbacks.

First, it might make the financial system less efficient at allocating capital. That’s what banks claim is their value added to society: they match up people who have wealth but no ideas for using it productively with people with ideas and talents, but not enough money.

Making the financial industry safer would reduce returns for savers, and reduce the financing opportunities for firms and entrepreneurs. We might be turning a Ferrari into a Volkswagen, but there are good reasons to do so. For one, it is better to ride in a Volkswagen at 90 km/h than in a Ferrari that goes 120 km/h but sometimes explodes and kills everyone inside. For another, banks and bankers will always have the financial means to manipulate politicians. They are well placed to get a good deal for themselves, whereas the general public is in a weaker position. Since there is a built-in bias in politics towards making things easier for the rich, having some special protection for the general welfare of the population seems justified and appropriate.

Second, making the system safer will make it harder for poor people to get credit. The safe banks won’t offer mortgages to people who are likely to default on them, and the risky banks are likely to change an arm and a leg for them. That said, it was probably always a fantasy for people of modest means to buy big houses in cities with overpriced property markets. Also, by reducing the speculative froth in real estate markets, the approach outlined here could end up helping such people in the long run.

That being said, I think a plan basically resembling this one is worthwhile. Most importantly, it would largely eliminate the systemic risk which we are creating right now by bailing out the institutions that have been the least responsible, because of the threat they pose to everyone else. What that approach will ultimately produce is another, larger crisis.

Of course, this is all a pipe dream. Politicians don’t have the bravery or far-sightedness to do any of this, and bankers are clever enough and rich enough to convince them and bribe them into leaving them basically alone. Besides, that next crisis will probably happen when another lots of politicians are in charge, and those who organized today’s bailouts are occupying well-paid seats on the boards of the banks they rescued.

The cost of prison

Apparently, imprisoning someone in Canada costs over $100,000 a year. Right off the bat, that is clearly a substantial investment of resources. It gets even worse when you consider a few further aspects.

Firstly, it seems highly dubious that prisons play a rehabilitative role. Those who are incarcerated will probably deal with a lengthy stigma afterward, perhaps for the rest of their lives. This will worsen their employment prospects and reduce the welfare of their family members. It is also plausible that having a record of incarceration increases the relative appeal of crime as a means of financial subsistence. Before you have such a record, you have a lot to lose from a criminal conviction; afterward, you have fewer legitimate job opportunities and less to lose from a longer record.

Secondly, it seems clear that the government could spend that sum of many in a great many more productive ways. You could probably finance someone’s entire undergraduate degree for that amount, or provide an apprenticeship program for a trade. You could do a lot of preventative medicine, or invest a fair bit in deploying improvements in energy efficiency or renewable energy generation.

It seems particularly absurd to imprison people with a non-violent involvement in the drug trade. It is a normal characteristic of human beings to want to experience altered states of consciousness. It is one that we positively encourage in some cases, such as the thrill from athletic exertion or Hollywood movies, and tolerate and regulate in others, such as with alcohol and tobacco. It seems utterly foolish to imprison those who seek to alter their mental state in unauthorized ways, or assist other people in doing so, when that choice is costly to everyone in terms of lost opportunities, and especially costly to the person being punished, in terms of future prospects.

No alternative to oil?

A recent article in The Economist took on a rather insufferable tone when talking about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and offshore drilling more generally:

The accident seems likely to strengthen the hands of environmentalists keen to turn America away from oil and towards some unconvincingly specified alternative mixture of noble abstinence, natural gas, electricity and ethanol.

Oh, those crazy environmentalists with their half baked plans! Why can’t they just recognize that oil is the way to go? It’s not like continued dependence on it ties our prosperity to a fundamentally non-renewable resource, from which many of the profits flow into the coffers of vile regimes. And it’s not like the climatic dangers of the continued heedless burning of fossil fuels threaten to undermine everything good humanity is trying to build for the future…

Renewables may be four or five times more costly than fossil fuels, per unit of output. That being said, energy costs are a small part of our economy. We can afford to pay more for safe and reliable alternatives that will carry on working indefinitely At the same time, fossil fuels are only ‘cheap’ when you ignore most of the costs associated with them. You would think that a newspaper ostensibly committed to: “tak[ing] part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress” might have figured some of this out by now.

As for ‘convincingly specified alternatives,’ David MacKay’s book is one of several that provide a suite of such options for public consideration.

Government and opposition, as theatrical roles

The other day, I watched a Parliamentary committee.

It was depressingly predictable. The opposition MPs accused the civil servants appearing before the committee of being wasteful, or being slow and inefficient, and of being hijacked by the government’s political agenda. The government MPs defended their own choices as good for Canadians, and certainly more impressive than anything opposition MPs did while in power.

If there was an election and the position of the parties was inverted, these people would just need to cross the floor and trade speaking notes. There is no real dialogue here, just the performance of previously defined and superficial roles.

I suppose that is all in keeping with my theory of democracy as constraint – a theory based primarily around very low expectations for politicians. Perhaps we cannot really hope to control what politicians do once they are in power, by listening to what they say before elections and selecting one lot rather than another. Perhaps all we can do is force that floor-crossing, note-trading exercise to take place before one particular group becomes hopelessly compromised and corrupt.