With frigid weather discomforting millions and resulting in deaths worldwide, Britain’s Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband maintained in a parliamentary answer last week that the science of global warming was “settled.” Meanwhile, U.S. governments from local to federal continue to push CO2 controls, and global warming advocates stand fast by their predictions of Arctic ice disappearance and other catastrophes.
Yet this article, “The Mini Ice Age Starts Here”, has extensive reason to dispute such continued alarmism, including:

The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.

…They say that their research shows that much of the warming was caused by oceanic cycles when they were in a ‘warm mode’ as opposed to the present ‘cold mode’.

New methods have been developed for measuring ocean temperatures 3,000 ft. below the surface, where ocean warming and cooling cycles start. The research team that developed these methods predicted the new cooling trend in a paper published in 2008 and warned of it again at an IPCC conference in Geneva last September. On Sunday, the head of the team said:

“A significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles – perhaps as much as 50 per cent.

“They have now gone into reverse, so winters like this one will become much more likely. Summers will also probably be cooler, and all this may well last two decades or longer.

“The extreme retreats that we have seen in glaciers and sea ice will come to a halt. For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling.”

With Tiananmen Square covered in snow in its coldest temperatures since 1970, perhaps the Chinese government can lead the way in calling a halt to the absurd hubris of man-made global warming. But, then again, so long as the U.S. government promises $100 billion per year in guilt money payments to less developed countries—which funding and attendant regulations on CO2 and energy policy concurrently brings more of the U.S. economy and its citizens under bureaucratic control—what incentive is there?

HT: Robert Higgs

Has the recession ended? If not, do “green shoots” foretell a recovery’s advent in the near term? The answer, of course, depends on which indicators we check. Unfortunately, the mainstream economics profession and the public alike place too much emphasis on highly aggregative measures, such as estimates of quarterly GDP and the standard rate of unemployment, in their attempts to grasp what is happening. As usual, we must delve into the aggregates and inspect their components in order to gain a clear understanding of how the economy got into its present condition and to arrive at a well-founded conjecture as to where it is likely to go in the near-term future.

Mindful that both the public and the policy makers place heavy emphasis on “jobs, jobs, jobs,” I have been thrashing about in the employment data collected, organized, and distributed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At this point in the recession, everyone knows that the standard rate of unemployment, for what it is worth, has risen greatly since 2007 and lately has been stuck in the neighborhood of 10 percent. Because of this statistic’s various ambiguities (which I have discussed elsewhere), however, I am concentrating here on a more unequivocal indicator—employment.

There is no happy news on this front, of course. Total employment peaked in 2007 at 137.6 million persons on nonfarm payrolls, fell slightly in 2008, and then dropped precipitously in 2009 to 132.0 persons, for a two-year loss of 5.6 million jobs. In 2009, total employment was approximately equal to its magnitude in 2001, even though the labor force had grown substantially in the interim. The sharp recent decline in employment, which normally increases from year to year along with the labor force, has been bad enough, but when we examine the components of aggregate employment, we discover even worse news.

We find that the loss of employment has occurred entirely in the private sector: employment fell from 115.4 million persons in 2007 to 109.5 million persons in 2009, a decline that took private employment back to its level at the end of the 1990s. As private employment has collapsed since 2007, however, the government payroll has actually grown slightly from 22.2 million persons in 2007 to 22.5 million persons in 2009, which puts this class of employment roughly 1.7 million persons above its magnitude in 2000.

Monthly data for the most recent year display this difference starkly. From December 2008 to December 2009, total employment fell from 135.1 million persons to 130.9 million, while government employment remained essentially constant at 22.5 million persons. The government employees also enjoyed increased compensation during recent years. Nice work if you can get it: no risk of losing your job, plus practically iron-clad prospects of rising real compensation, notwithstanding that millions of former private-sector employees now find themselves without jobs.

Of course, much of the Obama administration’s “stimulus” spending has been directed toward ensuring that state and local government workers do not lose their jobs, and federal employees, as usual, have not had to fear joining the unemployment line, owing to the rapidly growing appropriations for practically every department and agency in the recent, skyrocketing federal budgets.

This situation bears an eerie resemblance to the employment situation during the Great Depression, when private nonfarm hours worked fell steeply from 1929 to 1932 and did not get back to the 1929 level until 1941, notwithstanding (or perhaps because of) the millions of persons added to government payrolls during the New Deal period. In both cases, the possibility that government employment crowds out private employment, rather than stimulating it, cannot be dismissed out of hand.

Unless private employment growth resumes soon, the United States risks falling into the same long-term economic “sclerosis” that has plagued the welfare states of western Europe for decades. Already it appears that the past ten years may prove to have been America’s second “lost decade” (the 1930s having been the first), an interval of little or no net economic gain, owing to destructive government policies that produced only unsustainable booms followed by inevitable busts, along with such huge, frequent, and unsettling changes in government policies that private planning, especially for long-term investment, has become too risky for private investors to bear—a situation I call regime uncertainty.

Vulgar Keynesians like to suppose that whenever the government undertakes new spending to augment the ranks of its employees a multiplier effect will result, causing private economic activity and employment to follow the same upward course. Here again, however, a closer examination of what the government does and how it goes about doing it may serve to shield us from the fallacies of overly aggregative economic analysis.

UPDATE 1: Those who read Spanish will enjoy the current article at Libertad Digital by my friend Angel Martin, who shows that recent sectoral employment changes in Spain and the United Kingdom mirror those I have described above for the United States. Even if you don’t read Spanish, the graphs will be easy to understand, and they will convey the main point.

UPDATE 2: My friend Tom DiLorenzo makes an important point about these recent employment changes in a note he sent me:

Government employment is even worse than you wrote about in your recent
article, reprinted on LRC.  The feds have employed thousands, probably
hundred of thousands or more, of additional “contract employees” in
recent years.  They’re listed by the Commerce Dept. as private sector
employees even though all their pay and benefits come from government
contracts.  The D.C. suburbs are booming like they’ve never boomed
before in terms of population growth.  This boom started with Bush and
Fatherland Security and his wars, and has been greatly expanded by
Obama from everyting I’ve read.  Unfortunately, good statistics are
really hard to come by on these contract employees.

In prepping for my appearance on Radio Free Market this afternoon I’ve done some thinking about society’s search for Great Leaders and Great Men. This made me think about a recent post on Aid Watch by William Easterly that everyone should read and a few passages in Democracy in Deficit, which I’m ashamed to say I’m only now reading. I have come to believe more and more in the explanatory power of ideas, and I think the presumption that They need Us to govern them—or more specifically, that You need Me to govern You–is especially pernicious. It also got me thinking about Lord Acton’s insight about how very Great Men are almost always very bad men. Here are some quotes from Lord Acton that are especially relevant (I’m going to assume Wikiquote is accurate here):

“The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class.”

“I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they did not wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.”

“There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”

“Advice to Persons About to Write History–Don’t.”

“Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.”

“Truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history.”

Cross-posted at the Mises Blog and Division of Labour.

Here is renowned meteorologist John Coleman, Founder of the Weather Channel, on the actual science of climate change and why the claims of global warming alarmists are junk science.

HT: Julie Sheppard

This article, prompted by Northrop Grumman’s moving its headquarters out of California to the Washington, D.C. area, says that California is on its way toward becoming a third-world economy.  Once the center of the aerospace industry, Southern California now has no major aerospace firms headquartered there.  Once a financial center, California has also lost Bank of America, Security Pacific Bank, Countrywide, and First Interstate, and is now home to no major financial institutions.  Once a major center of automobile manufacturing, California recently lost its last auto plant.  Meanwhile, there is no inflow of economic activity to offset this exodus.

The corporate exodus brings with it shrinking tax bases, reductions in philanthropy, and of course fewer economic opportunities for Californians.

Bill Watkins, the article’s author, blames this decline on Californians’ expressed preferences for quality of life and environmental preservation over economic opportunity, on high taxes despite declining public services, and on a government more focused on providing benefits to public sector employees rather than public goods for its citizens.

Watkins concludes, “Southern California is starting to look a lot like a third-world economy, service based, inequitable, serving a wealthy, mostly aging few, with little opportunity for younger workers and a large underclass.”

For decades I’ve heard that Florida is about 15 years behind California.  I’m a Floridian, and I’m hoping that’s not true.

This op-ed by Heather MacDonald in the Wall Street Journal makes a good argument that crime is not the result of a lack of economic opportunity by looking at crime rates during the downturn in 2009.  The line of reasoning that crime is caused by poverty and lack of economic opportunity implies that during the economic downturn in 2009 crime rates should have gone up, but in fact they have gone down.

This sociological view of crime places the responsibility for criminal behavior on the environment within which criminals live rather than on those who choose to engage in criminal behavior.  MacDonald is critical of theories that crime is caused by social conditions, so should be addressed by targeting welfare and educational programs toward economically-disadvantaged groups.

MacDonald also notes that during the 1960s, a decade of increased economic opportunity, crime rates rose dramatically, so it is just not the most recent crime data that call these economic and social theories of criminal behavior into question.

MacDonald says better policing causes crime rates to fall, and that has been accomplished by holding police accountable for criminal behavior within their jurisdictions.  Incentives matter, both to police and to potential criminals.  The facts seem to line up with the argument that the blame for criminal behavior belongs with the criminals, not with their victims.

Uninformed critics of Austrian economics sometimes dismiss it as “religion, not analysis.” Perhaps they should heed statistician Andrew Gelman’s advice “to retire use of the term ‘religion’ to mean ‘uncritical belief in something I disagree with.'” Right on! I mean, how often have you been chided for your “belief” in “free-market fundamentalism”? Gag. (Although I guess I’m guilty of treating Keynesians in the same manner.) Anyway, Gelman notes that in statistics, Bayesian methods are often dismissed this way. Some funny examples:

[W]hen I started doing statistics, people often referred to Bayesianism as a religion. . . . One of my Berkeley colleagues who studied probability — really, a brilliant guy — commented once that “of course” he was a Bayesian, but he was puzzled by how Bayesian inference worked in an example he’d seen. My feeling was: Bayes is a method, not a religion! Can’t we evaluate it based on how it works?

And, a few years ago, someone from the computer science department came over and gave a lecture in the stat dept at Columbia. His talk was fascinating, but he irritated me by saying how his method gave all the benefits of Bayesian inference “without having to believe in it.” I don’t believe in logistic regression either, but it sure is useful!

I’ve had similar experiences. Thank goodness for that twelve-step program!