Current Real Interest Rates

In Ireland, bacon comes from dogs and in Australia, sultanas come from Kangaroos.

From WW2 Canadian photos.

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Not Sceptics: Conspiracy Theorists

Just found this over at Dave's site about the CRU Hack:

I’ve been watching the ‘controversy’ develop over the last week or so, and I have to say, it’s pretty dispiriting. Not because a global leftist conspiracy as been unearthed, but because of the renewed enthusiasm of the sceptics to shoot first, and ask questions later. It’s saddening to see how little hey understand, and how little they want to understand.

There’s a couple of posts here that look at a couple of the accusations: http://allegationaudit.blogspot.com

There’s a couple of reasonable posts here:
- Scientific American: Climate change cover-up? You better believe it
- OpenDemocracy: The real scandal in the hacked climate change e-mails controversy

Personally, I think I’m going to stop referring to the sceptics as sceptics, but rather conspiracy theorists. There’s nothing sceptical about the sceptics (and that’s nothing new) - but the wild political conspiracies people are so quick to believe in, and anything that looks vaguely like evidence for the conspiracy instantly becomes not just a smoking gun, but ‘the mushroom cloud’.

These are clearly irony-deficient people. They claim AGW is a religion for true believes, yet they believe in crazy, global conspiracies on scant evidence. There’s still no scientific counter to AGW, there’s not even a desire to understand the issue, or examine the new ‘controversy’ in any depth.

But then again, these are the people that gave us Iraq’s WMDs, so I guess a desire for understanding is not a high priority.

(emphasis mine)
Original Link.

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OSO's Debt Watch

GDP = $14.2663 Trillion (2009 Q3 second estimate)
Public Debt = $7.61135586846705 Trillion (2009-11-24)
Debt/GDP ratio = 53.35%
Population = 308,013,326 (Resident Population + Armed Forces Overseas, 2009-10-01)
Public Debt / person = $24,711.13
Tax Receipts = $2.104614 Trillion (Year-to-date, Monthly Treasury Statement, 2009-10-01)
Debt/Receipt ratio* = 361.65%

Notes:
In October 2008, the Debt/GDP ratio was 43.43%
In October 2008, Public Debt / person was $20,264.04
In October 2008, the Debt/Receipt* ratio was 231.82%

* The Debt/Receipt ratio measures year-to-date government revenue as a percentage of current public debt. A good way to compare it would be to compare your current income to what you owe on your mortgage.

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I'm not alone on Government debt

James Hamilton, Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego, and a contributor to Econbrowser, says this about Paul Krugman's sanguine attitude towards government debt:

Normally, you'd think that putting off repaying a debt does not make it any smaller. The federal government can (with my wallet) pay the trillion today, or it can wait 10 years to pay one trillion plus 10 years' interest, or wait 20 years to pay one trillion plus 20 years' interest. The present value of the service cost on one trillion dollars in debt is exactly one trillion dollars today, no matter how long you put off paying. My comments on how much a trillion really is are perfectly appropriate for discussion of any repayment timetable.

Perhaps Paul is suggesting that there may be a potential free lunch available from postponing payment in this case, arising from the fact that the economy's growth rate has historically exceeded the government's cost of borrowing. If I put off paying another year, with interest the amount I owe grows 2% in real terms, but my income grows 3%, so things get easier the longer I put it off.

Let me go on the record as favoring the consumption of truly free lunches. If everything the government buys really is free, then by all means, let's have them buy more, and more, and more, and rather than double my taxes, let's cut taxes all the way to zero. Unfortunately, I expect that Paul would agree with me that in fact there is a limit to just how much we can count on supersizing this particular happy meal.

That last point is one of my arguments - if there is a limit to cutting taxes then logically there is a limit to how much debt the government can take upon itself.

I asked a friend the other day to compare his mortgage to his annual income, which he figured out to be 580%. For smaller economic entities like households and businesses, such a huge debt/income ratio is expected and normal. Nevertheless the bigger an economic entity is, the more risky such debt/income ratios become since its collapse would have a huge secondary impact.

The US Government's debt/income ratio is currently 362.64%. That's too large in my opinion.

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Nazism and book burning

One way to check on the various beliefs of German Nazism is to look at the books they banned and/or burned. Thanks to someone at Reddit, a link has been provided to a site which translates the original German book-banning guidelines into English. What we find is interesting:

1. "The literature of Marxism, Communism and Bolshevism." Well I guess that pretty much confirms the idea that Nazism and Communism are NOT the same thing.
2. "Pacifist literature", which means that anyone morally against war cannot be described as a Nazi.
3. "Literature with liberal, democratic tendencies and attitudes", so anyone slightly interested in, say, progressive policies cannot be described as a Nazi.
4. " Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism", which means that Nazis were not Darwinists or Evolutionists when it came to Eugenics, and which pretty much proves that Darwinists are not Nazis.
5. "All writings that ridicule, belittle or besmirch the Christian religion and its institution, faith in God, or other things that are holy to the healthy sentiments of the Volk." which means that atheism was certainly not a Nazi ideal and that atheism is not associated with Nazism (BTW, Hitler was not an atheist).
   

So what can we conclude?

• Nazis hated Marxism and Communism.
• Nazis hated Pacifism.
• Nazis hated Democracy and progressive politics.
• Nazis hated Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.
• Nazis hated Atheists.
  

Jonah Goldberg and Ben Stein need to check their sources.

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Why invest in America?

This graphic is from the recent Economist magazine and can be found at this link:


It seems rather clear that overseas sharemarkets are performing better than the DJIA and S&P500 - even when you take out the falling dollar they are better.

Update on the CRU hack

I just discovered that the hack and the emails did not originate from the Hadley Climate Research Unit but from the University of East Anglia. Obviously some emails from CRU ended up being shown (since CRU and UEA would communicate with one another) but the hack and the data should be read in this particular light. No one is going to get a complete picture of how an organisation works by looking at emails from another organisation, so any evidence needs to be incontrovertible and clear, which it apparently is not.

Realclimate says:

As many of you will be aware, a large number of emails from the University of East Anglia webmail server were hacked recently (Despite some confusion generated by Anthony Watts, this has absolutely nothing to do with the Hadley Centre which is a completely separate institution).

In regards to actual quotes being used, Realclimate says:

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

Of course, committed climate change denialists would begin reading that sentence before their eyes glazed over, and then respond to it by saying:

• You're just trying to explain it away!
• But the email says...

When in reality they are saying

• I have no idea what that explanation means, so I'll just keep saying it's wrong because it's easier than trying to understand sciencey stuff.
• How come a heavy metal band has a guy playing a keytar?