Economic strategy, research, and the Republican mind-set about Debt, with some added links
We have many times referred to the apparent Republican distaste for science. Worst of all these attitudes is that towards global warming. This attitude has arguably the most deleterious effects for man and her environment and is based on the least supportable evidence. The second most deleterious Republican attitude towards science is that towards economic research, because it has the most negative effects on the economy, upon which people depend for their livelihoods as well as for their enjoyments.
In May 2010, an “academic paper” entitled “Growth in a Time of Debt“, was published by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff. This paper concluded that “high levels of government debt…90 percent or more of GDP” was “associated” with lower growth. Specifically, the countries with that high of a debt were said to have an average growth rate of -0.1 percent.
Four years later, the authors released a paper , apparently in response to another paper that was sharply critical of its findings, that identified a “spreadsheet coding error” that led to miscalculation of the growth rates of highly indebted countries after WW II. The new figure for growth in high debt nations was +2.3 percent. The figure for growth in low debt nations was still +3.5 percent. Other statistical errors in the paper made even that apparent weak relationship questionable: see this paper that responded to the response and laid out some devastating arguments that Reinhart and Rogoff were using reverse causation: it could be that lower growth causes high debt to GDP ratios, not the reverse. What was worse, Reinhart and Rogoff knew about the reverse causation problem and were spreading their initial hypothesis around the TV talk shows and right-wing talk circuit.
Since its release in 2010, the findings of the original paper were cited as evidence by a large wing of the Republican Party that demanded immediate steps be taken to limit federal debt burdens. The Republicans, in control of the House of Representatives, were able to force through a bill that caused across the board spending cuts of 10% for the rest of this fiscal year, and more afterwards. Despite its presentation as a stimulus to force reasonable cuts, the Republicans were able to manoeuvre Congress into falling back on the sequester, an eventuality that was not supposed to happen.
Now the conclusions of the only academic paper that supports the view that high government debt is unsustainable have been watered down, if not rendered completely implausible. What is more, as Paul Krugman in his Guardian post (here) points out, another study by Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna (1998) called “Tales of Fiscal Adjustment” (which is available through the DASH library, thankyewverymuch) that supported “expansionary austerity” had its findings reversed within a year (see, for example, most recently and with many references, “Expansionary Austerity and Reverse Causality“). There is little other research that supports the notion that austerity does anything good for an economy; science as well as common sense both support the theory that governments should step in to support people with jobs and aid when recession hits, and collect plenty of taxes when times are good.
This theory, known as Keynesianism to economists in the know and “Communism” to Republicans, is supported by conclusive research and many real world examples.
It is a crying shame that once again, Republicans are sitting on the side of anti-science. Here the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes have been supported by reams of research, yet they are anathema to conservatives. Why? Possibly because Keynesian policies include large amounts of support for individuals and families who say that they don’t have enough money to live on. Support given in small amounts to large numbers of individuals is said by Keynes to have an immediate stimulative effect on the economy because the money will go into immediate circulation– none of it will be saved.
“Conservatives tend to be hesitant to give people money. Whether this is a true moral precept or a character flaw (even a sign of mental illness) I will leave as an exercise for the reader.” (Krugman)
“nice strategy” of San Francisco, California says: “The reality is that debt is a concept, and credit has always been about power — about making claims over the work, the time, the life of other people.”
There’s an article in the online New York Times that ties together austerity policies and increases in the death rate from a variety of causes. By the way, if you don’t want to pay for a subscription to the Times, I think you can get twenty articles a month free…it’s good to know which twenty articles in advance…
The article in question is called “How Austerity Kills” by David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, published May 12, 2013. The authors used data sets on economic policy and public health from countries all over the world and found, as they expected, that cutting spending on public health raises death rates. Every country studied showed the same pattern. Countries that instituted policies targeting newly unemployed people for rehabilitation showed dramatic drops in suicide rates. Money spent on “humane” policies rebounded two or threefold in economic gains in every country studied. By contrast, cutbacks or elimination of such policies caused increases in death rates and failure of economic recovery.
The International Monetary Fund, which was responsible for forcing many austerity programs on countries in economic crises, has actually changed their minds about this policy. In 2012, they formally apologized to the countries affected in the 1997 Asian financial crisis that had followed their policies in return for loans to bail out their ruined economies. They admitted that their policies had caused an excess of deaths and illness, and stated that they would change.
There is no doubt that money spent on policies that target poor, drug-addicted, homeless, recently imprisoned, or chronically ill people is rewarded by improvements in health and economic welfare for the entire society. After all, these are the people with the highest death rates and the most misery. An attitude that such people do not deserve aid because of their crimes, their lifestyle, or even just their national origin is not only misanthropic, but self-defeating. In contrast, policies that reward those who are already well off have no measurable benefit for society as a whole.
The treatment of syphilis is a good example. Arguably, syphilis is a disease of sin: you pretty much have to sin, or have marital relations with someone who has sinned. However, allowing syphilis into the marital bed because of a single mistake by one of the partners prior to marriage is an invitation to disaster and congenital syphilis with its consequent deforming of innocent offspring. The institution of required syphilis serology for a marriage license is one approach: another is to treat syphilis where-ever and and whenever it is found, and to actively search it out by providing free sexually transmitted disease clinics in the poorest neighborhoods and giving outreach to sex workers (prostitutes.) I will leave it to your imagination which approach is more likely to eradicate syphilis from society as a whole and result in uncountable benefits for generations to come.
The article may be found here.
How to Survive a Stampede
In the spirit of my past posts on how to get off the subway tracks, I present this item on how to avoid being crushed in a stampede: prior to leaving a large event, make a mental map of all the exits and then head for the less-used ones.
An experiment by Caesar Saloma, a physics professor at the University of the Phillipines, with mice who are dumped into a pool of water and given exits to escape showed that on the initial trial, the mice jammed up into a few exits. On subsequent trials, the mice learned to avoid crowded exits and use all available escape points to prevent jamming. Experienced mice learn to queue up at an exit instead of all trying to leave at once, and this speeds up their escape as well. The lesson from this experiment is that, since you don’t get multiple trials, you should memorize the exits ahead of time and use them when needed.
This assumes, of course, that you are not a mouse and unaccustomed to being dumped into a pool of water.
A side note: most deaths from crowds occur by asphyxiation from the pressure of one’s neighbors while standing up, rather than on being trampled. A closely packed crowd can exert as much as a thousand pounds of force on a person trapped in the middle. So avoid being crushed, and anticipate the possibilities when you enter into a crowd of people.
The New York Times article referenced can be found here.
World War Two began in China and Spain, with the Spanish civil war and the Chinese civil war and Japanese invasion of China in 1931. Some people argue that the first two world wars were really the same war with a prolonged truce in the middle.
The current world war has begun with the American invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. It is now heating up with the creation of ISIS after the Syrian civil war quickly degenerated from a series of lawful public demonstrations by citizens of Syria that were fired upon by Syrian troops to a full-fledged multi-sided civil war with indiscriminate bombing of rebel-held areas and the use of nerve gas. ISIS apparently began after the leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was held as a low-level civilian prisoner from February to December 2004, and released because he didn’t appear impressively radical. Most of the leaders of ISIS were also imprisoned at the same time, in Iraq after the US invasion.
al-Baghdadi didn’t become leader of ISIS until the deaths of several predecessors, in 2010. By then, the US had announced a withdrawal from Iraq but that wasn’t enough for ISIS. After the US withdrawal left a power vacuum in Iraq, exacerbated by the ineffective civilian administration which should have been prepared by the US for the pull-out, ISIS began to really expand, particularly in the Sunni areas that had always been difficult for the US to control. This summer, ISIS has asserted itself publicly with its gruesome videos, accompanied by territorial claims in both western Iraq and eastern Syria, limited to waterways and roadways through the brutal deserts of the area.
The US and some allies have responded with air attacks in support of the endangered Iraqi government forces and the Kurdish in their newly independent area financed by oil, who have proved better fighters than the Iraqi troops. There have been air attacks on ISIS in Syria as well. A captured Arab pilot was burned to death in his cage in one of the more gruesome videos published by ISIS.
Now ISIS has claimed responsibility for a complex attack in Paris with at least six locations and eight suicide shooters, with at least 128 dead so far. This is as much a declaration of a state of war as anything, if the Charlie Hebdo attacks were nothing. There is no question that the attackers were supplied with military weapons such as hand grenades and plastic explosives, so outside help from ISIS for homegrown terrorists is the best explanation for these attacks. The governments of Europe and the US should view this as much a declaration of war as Pearl Harbor was.
It’s true. Check out the Wikipedia entry. Fred Koch had developed a new, more efficient, small scale method of cracking crude oil to get gasoline, and he was sued 44 times in the United States by larger oil companies. Unable to work in the US for several years because of the lawsuits, he was forced to take his new process to the Soviets, who did not recognize intellectual property rights, thus welcomed his new small scale method. In 1928, he set to work in Russia with a number of committed Bolsheviks who cooperated with him for several years in building fifteen new complexes that used Koch’s new process to refine oil into usable gasoline and diesel, even in tiny backwoods installations.
After several years of working with his Soviet partners, “several” of the Soviet men were caught up in Stalin’s purges and shot or imprisoned. This was especially rankling to Koch because these were the men he had worked with and knew, and they were all Bolsheviks to a man, loyal to the Party. Stalin didn’t care. His paranoid mind engendered an entire secret police agency that condemned innocent and guilty alike.
Koch, however, reacted negatively to the entire purge, as might be expected. His ire fell upon the entire concept of communism, and socialism as well. He became a founding member of the John Birch society in 1958 after publishing a pamphlet that described his experiences in Russia and the threat of internal subversion by Communists who would pretend to be loyal officials of the government until they could take over and declare Soviet rule. In fact, he saw potential Communist subversion everywhere. He was part of the successful effort to declare Kansas a “right to work” state, also in 1958.
For those who are unaware of the meaning of “right to work”, it is a clause that makes it impossible for a union to run a “closed shop” in which all workers are required to belong to the union. The “right to work” laws prohibit the “closed shop” and make belonging to any union voluntary, not required.
The sudden death of Mr. Koch while pheasant hunting (supposedly immediately after shooting down a pheasant) left the Koch brothers with a wealth of indoctrination regarding the Communist threat to the United States and the need to limit government spending and avoid anything smacking of socialism. There is no need to wonder at how the Koch brothers have developed their attitudes towards government and how easy it is for them to endorse hypocritical views as to government financial assistance. They have what we would describe as a distorted worldview, remembering that in their minds it is us who have the distorted worldviews. Their clinical paranoia is directly consistent with their father’s worldview.
It is not surprising that Stalin’s behavior would have affected Fred Koch to such a paranoid extent that, for the rest of his life, he was seeing Communists under his bed. Unfortunately, his efforts created the sons who are spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year in an attempt to indoctrinate the public with the principles of the Tea Party– near-anarchy except where it comes to women’s rights. There is a consistent tone to their attacks on President Obama, his health-care plan, and anything associated with the Democratic Party. Their money and the indoctrination that it has paid for are responsible for the Republican majorities in the House and Senate and the attempts of Tea Party House members to hold the entire economy hostage to their demands. I don’t think the Kochs believe that their lifestyle would be affected by a government shutdown but I do think they will be surprised at the severity of its effects.
For details on the numerous programs and institutions created by the Kochs to disseminate anti-Democratic propaganda, see the New Yorker article of 2010 describing Koch’s “Kochtopus”.
An important study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine recently: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1511939 This study concluded that reducing the blood pressure to a goal of 120 systolic reduced mortality by a third over using the goal of 140 systolic.
Here is the conclusion of the study, which enrolled nearly ten thousand patients 50 and older with at least one cardiovascular risk factor (but not diabetes) for a year of treatment if their blood pressure was 130 or greater:
Among patients at high risk for cardiovascular events but without diabetes, targeting a systolic blood pressure of less than 120 mm Hg, as compared with less than 140 mm Hg, resulted in lower rates of fatal and nonfatal major cardiovascular events and death from any cause, although significantly higher rates of some adverse events were observed in the intensive-treatment group.
Surprisingly, hypotensive episodes were increased, but falls with injury were not significantly increased.
The relative risk (RR) of mortality for intensive treatment was 0.75, meaning a treated patient had 75% of the risk of dying of an undertreated patient. This means that the already impressive gains in mortality realized by treatment of high blood pressure will be further improved by more intensive treatment. This study answers the question of “how much treatment is enough?” which has troubled doctors for years.
The progressive New York Times editorial columnist Paul Krugman published his interpretation of the rise in mortality reported among American white middle-aged lower educated men and women. This rise was particularly marked in suicides and drug-related deaths, even in cirrhosis of the liver. What is even more shocking is the fact that the foreign mortality statistics among the same population group have improved or at least stayed stable, among almost all European countries except Russia.
Krugman’s explanation is that the problem is related to a phenomenon he says has been described already, as “hysteresis”: the long term negative effects of short term austerity policies among national governments. He says that economists in 1986 described the problem as the effect of misguided short-term austerity policies on long-term growth abilities– that is, a negative effect. Debts are actually greater long term when austerity policies are used than when expansionary policies are in effect, because the expansionary policy results in so much more long-term growth that it overwhelms any short-term debts.
Of course, advocating expansionary, or Keynesian economic policies is unlikely to get anywhere with the coming six to eight years of Republican domination of Congress. Those who should learn from experience, long, repeated experience, that austerity policies cause long-term damage, simply ignore the facts and continue to repeat that they are the Very Serious People who should determine policy.
There may be some hidden advantage that those who advocate contraction-causing economic policies derive from the general pain that austerity causes. Perhaps they are able to maintain their control over the levers of power in the government when it contracts, and expansionary events cause a risk that they will lose their control. Perhaps they hold large amounts of gold or precious metals and wish to see the price increase, as it has over the last fifteen years.
The price of gold plateaued in the last years of the Clinton administration, then started increasing in the early years of Bush and even more in the first few years of Obama. There was a crash in 2013, but prices improved the following year and are again at historical highs. It is important to note that gold prices were increasing even in the early years of the Bush administration, before the Great Recession began. There was something about government policy that benefited holders of gold, even without contraction of the economy; perhaps it was the losses that middle class workers were experiencing even as the economy appeared to expand and military spending was increased in the early years of the Bush administration.
The furor has died down, so it is appropriate to revisit the case of Raul Ernesto Morales-Ramos, who died at the age of 44 on April 6, 2015, of “intestinal cancer.” I’m sorry that I couldn’t quickly locate anything more specific, although “intestinal” could refer to colon or small intestine, which is a critical difference to a medical person. He died after several weeks of diarrhea and inability to hold his urine; a medical evaluation was performed too late to save him or even operate on him. An autopsy was performed but I couldn’t locate a reference to any report.
His extradition request (in Spanish) is here: http://sv.vlex.com/vid/-397524694
What happened is a black comedy of errors and greed. First, four members of his family (his mother and three siblings) were killed in 2003 in an auto accident that was said to have occurred after the driver lost control of his vehicle on a highway. His family was awarded over ten million dollars in compensation in 2006 by the government (state of California) supposedly because the retaining wall on the highway was inadequate or missing and that contributed to their deaths.
Second, Raul discovered that certain other members of his extended family were to share in the enormous award. He resolved to avoid this by assassinating those family members (in El Salvador) and he hired three gang members to do the job. This was extremely cost effective because you can have someone killed in El Salvador for $6000, assuming they don’t have any body guards.
Those murders were carried out, at least some of them; the murderers were caught and sentenced to 90 years in prison each. The government of El Salvador then requested of the United States that Raul be extradited from the United States, and enlisted the support of Interpol. Raul was arrested in 2011 and confined in the US until he died. At the time of his death, the extradition request was under appeal in the Ninth Circuit of the federal courts.
Raul was confined in a privately-run detention center; for the last year of his life, this was in Adelanto, California. The company is called Geo and is based in Florida. It runs numerous detention facilities and there are stories (which the Immigration service refuses to confirm) that hundreds of detainees in Adelanto have started a hunger strike. The facility has 400 beds but has been authorized to increase to 650.
Why did Raul spend four years in the US instead of El Salvador in detention? His lawyers fought the extradition to the point of filing appeals. Possibly the same lawyers who got the ten million compensation for the deaths of four people in a single-vehicle car crash.
Why is he dead instead of alive? Partly because of privatized prisons and partly because he hired three gang members to kill members of his family so he wouldn’t have to share that huge award. Who is really at fault? The ones left holding the bag.
If he hadn’t been able to contest the extradition, he probably would have died in prison in El Salvador; whether he would have lived any longer is open to question. Poor driving, Raul’s greed, and the systemic greed of the private prison industry, made his “intestinal cancer” fatal. If he had simply shared the award, he would have had enough money to consult a doctor immediately when he started having symptoms, which might have extended his life.
Destruction of the American Middle Class Appears in a Rise in Death Rates in Middle Aged Whites
Here is an abstract from a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; unfortunately the full paper is “behind a paywall”, that is, costs money to view. The abstract is pointed enough, and tells of an epidemic of pain and social dysfunction that has struck middle-aged Americans, especially those with only a high school education. This epidemic is making itself felt in the increasing mortality rates seen in this age group. The cause of this epidemic of pain and disability may have something to do with the destruction of the middle class over the last few years. The paper can be found here.
This paper documents a marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013. This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround. The midlife mortality reversal was confined to white non-Hispanics; black non-Hispanics and Hispanics at midlife, and those aged 65 and above in every racial and ethnic group, continued to see mortality rates fall. This increase for whites was largely accounted for by increasing death rates from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis. Although all education groups saw increases in mortality from suicide and poisonings, and an overall increase in external cause mortality, those with less education saw the most marked increases. Rising midlife mortality rates of white non-Hispanics were paralleled by increases in midlife morbidity. Self-reported declines in health, mental health, and ability to conduct activities of daily living, and increases in chronic pain and inability to work, as well as clinically measured deteriorations in liver function, all point to growing distress in this population. We comment on potential economic causes and consequences of this deterioration.
Here, from an editorial by Charles Blow about “gotcha” questions from the moderators at the GOP Presidential candidate debates:
soxared040713
Roxbury, Massachusetts 11/1/2015 7AM EST
The demonization of the media as the acid in political discourse can be traced to 1969. Richard Nixon, newly installed as president, sent his vice president, Spiro Agnew, to Des Moines for a major policy speech. Agnew, who would be exposed as a liar and a thief a few years later and forced to resign his office as Watergate engulfed the second Nixon administration, went ballistic with his famous “nattering nabobs of negativism.” The vice president was simply following his boss’s orders. Nixon hated the news business, in particular television news, because of his poor performance in his debates with John F. Kennedy at WBBM-TV in Chicago in 1960. Nixon never forgave television for either his five o’clock shadow or his wandering responses to moderator Howard K. Smith of ABC News. So Dr. Ben Carson’s reaching into the sewer for slime when backed into a corner has very handsome Republican precedent. It’s called a “non-denial denial,” a dodge designed to confuse voters into blaming Democrats and “liberals,” turning a quite legitimate question about a candidate’s history or views back upon the interrogator as unfair, inappropriate, offensive, or mean-spirited, all designed to elicit sympathy for the “victim.” The phrase was part of the verbal sandbank employed by the defensive Nixon White House as the truth about the Watergate break-in and cover-up ate away at his last defenses. Blame the messenger, then kill him. It’s a ploy perfected by the Right for generations. And it works.
[240 Recommended]
In the debate, Ben Carson was asked about his relationship to a nutritional products company, Mannatech; he denied having any doings with that company. In reality, he endorsed the products and gave paid speeches, and even appeared in promotional videos. Politifact rated his answer as “False” but should have said “Pants on Fire” as this man did everything but accept a paid position in the company. This liar wants to be President. What’s worse, he is currently leading the Republican candidates with 26 percent to Trump’s 22 percent.
After the debate, Carson claimed that the questions had degenerated into “gotcha” provocations, as if his lies when confronted with a compensated relationship to a “nutritional product” (placebo) company were somehow justified because the question was unfair. I don’t think it’s unfair to point out a medical man’s relationship to a company that exploits the ignorance of American consumers by selling useless pills. It seems odd that a neurosurgeon (who would normally make half a million dollars a year in his work) would stoop to paid endorsing work, especially for a company that peddles fraudulent health remedies. Not illegal, but certainly not the kind of behavior you would expect from a future President.
That was not, by any means, the least disturbing of the things Ben Carson has said. Many of these things have boosted his popularity with the Republicans who seem to favor him and Donald Trump, people who have an attitude which is appalling to normal Americans. The most enlightening aspect of these exchanges, both with Carson and Trump, is the popularity that these statements seem to have gained from what they have said. There appears to be a large group of self-identified Republicans whose attitudes are repellent to normal people: they agree that tighter gun control is worse than mass shootings, that health care insurance for all is worse than slavery, and that “a lot of people go into prison straight, but when they come out, they’re gay.” And, “We now live in a society where people are afraid to say what they actually believe.” There’s so much more. “56 percent of the US-Mexico border is not under our control.” “Margaret Sanger (the birth-control pioneer) believed that people like me [blacks] should be eliminated.” “There are a multitude of vaccines that do not prevent deadly and crippling diseases” (there are no vaccines for trivial diseases.) “Pediatricians have cut down on the number and proximity of vaccines because they recognize there have been too many in too short a period of time.” (the vast majority of pediatricians support the current vaccine schedule.) “We spend twice a much on health care per person as the next closest nation.” (Actually, we spend a lot more on health care but only twice as much as the European average, not the next closest nation. We spend $8,508 and Norway spends $5,669… Mexico spends $962.) Those last three statements are from a supposedly qualified medical man, which makes them even more outrageous.
I’m leaving out Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Jeb Bush, among others, but they just don’t have the impressive mendacity of Ben Carson and Donald Trump. The entire field of Republican Presidential hopefuls are liars, cheats, and misanthropists. The fact that they have any chance of becoming President is simply horrifying. The thought of a Republican Senate, House, Supreme Court, and Presidency sends chills down my spine. The epic mismanagement of this country that we have witnessed in the last thirty five years could become even worse. In a way, I’m glad that I’m old and drawing Social Security; these horrors will fall mostly on the young, the poor, and people of color.
Even a Democratic President will only slightly mitigate the awfulness of our government. That is the most likely outcome, but it is not really cause for optimism. Only a complete change in the minds of our elected representatives will save this country from otherwise inevitable decline and degradation.
[The “facts” referenced above were sourced from Wikipedia and Politifact.]
