Never Mind the Bollocks. Here's the Gyro.

Hughes on First?

Have to admit, the spectre of mailman flying a gyrocopter onto the lawn of the Capitol building appeals to the Sandwichman's weakness for eccentric idealists.

From the Tampa Bay Times, here is the letter that Doug Hughes was delivering to 535 members of both houses of Congress.

Dear ___________,

Consider the following statement by John Kerry in his farewell speech to the Senate —

"The unending chase for money I believe threatens to steal our democracy itself. They know it. They know we know it. And yet, Nothing Happens!" — John Kerry, 2-13

In a July 2012 Gallup poll, 87% tagged corruption in the federal government as extremely important or very important, placing this issue just barely behind job creation. According to Gallup, public faith in Congress is at a 41-year record low, 7%. (June 2014) Kerry is correct. The popular perception outside the DC beltway is that the federal government is corrupt and the US Congress is the major problem. As a voter, I'm a member of the only political body with authority over Congress. I'm demanding reform and declaring a voter's rebellion in a manner consistent with Jefferson's description of rights in the Declaration of Independence. As a member of Congress, you have three options.

1. You may pretend corruption does not exist.
2. You may pretend to oppose corruption while you sabotage reform.
3. You may actively participate in real reform.

If you're considering option 1, you may wonder if voters really know what the 'chase for money' is. Your dismal and declining popularity documented by Gallup suggests we know, but allow a few examples, by no means a complete list. That these practices are legal does not make them right! Obviously, it is Congress who writes the laws that make corruption legal.

1. Dozens of major and very profitable corporations pay nothing in taxes. Voters know how this is done. Corporations pay millions to lobbyists for special legislation. Many companies on the list of freeloaders are household names — GE, Boeing, Exxon Mobil, Verizon, Citigroup, Dow … 

2. Almost half of the retiring members of Congress from 1998 to 2004 got jobs as lobbyists earning on average fourteen times their Congressional salary. (50% of the Senate, 42% of the House) 

3. The new democratic freshmen to the US House in 2012 were 'advised' by the party to schedule 4 hours per day on the phones fund raising at party headquarters (because fund raising is illegal from gov't offices.) It is the donors with deep pockets who get the calls, but seldom do the priorities of the rich donor help the average citizen. 

4. The relevant (rich) donors who command the attention of Congress are only .05% of the public (5 people in a thousand) but these aristocrats of both parties are who Congress really works for. As a member of the US Congress, you should work only for The People. 

1. Not yourself.
2. Not your political party.
3. Not the richest donors to your campaign.
4. Not the lobbyist company who will hire you after your leave Congress. 

There are several credible groups working to reform Congress. Their evaluations of the problem are remarkably in agreement though the leadership (and membership) may lean conservative or liberal. They see the corrupting effect of money — how the current rules empower special interests through lobbyists and PACs — robbing the average American of any representation on any issue where the connected have a stake. This is not democracy even if the ritual of elections is maintained. 

The various mechanisms which funnel money to candidates and congress-persons are complex. It happens before they are elected, while they are in office and after they leave Congress. Fortunately, a solution to corruption is not complicated. All the proposals are built around either reform legislation or a Constitutional Amendment. Actually, we need both — a constitutional amendment and legislation. 

There will be discussion about the structure and details of reform. As I see it, campaign finance reform is the cornerstone of building an honest Congress. Erect a wall of separation between our elected officials and big money. This you must do — or your replacement will do. A corporation is not 'people' and no individual should be allowed to spend hundreds of millions to 'influence' an election. That much money is a megaphone which drowns out the voices of 'We the People.' Next, a retired member of Congress has a lifelong obligation to avoid the appearance of impropriety. That almost half the retired members of Congress work as lobbyists and make millions of dollars per year smells like bribery, however legal. It must end. Pass real campaign finance reform and prohibit even the appearance of payola after retirement and you will be part of a Congress I can respect. 

The states have the power to pass a Constitutional Amendment without Congress — and we will. You in Congress will likely embrace the change just to survive, because liberals and conservatives won't settle for less than democracy. The leadership and organization to coordinate a voters revolution exist now! New groups will add their voices because the vast majority of Americans believe in the real democracy we once had, which Congress over time has eroded to the corrupt, dysfunctional plutocracy we have.
The question is where YOU individually stand. You have three options and you must choose. 

Sincerely, 

Douglas M. Hughes

See also: WHAT IS OUR ONE DEMAND?

See also: Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens"

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

See also, Souter dissent:

"This century-long tradition of legislation and judicial precedent rests on facing undeniable facts and testifies to an equally undeniable value. Campaign finance reform has been a series of reactions to documented threats to electoral integrity obvious to any voter, posed by large sums of money from corporate or union treasuries, with no redolence of 'grassroots' about them. Neither Congress’s decisions nor our own have understood the corrupting influence of money in politics as being limited to outright bribery or discrete quid pro quo; campaign finance reform has instead consistently focused on the more pervasive distortion of electoral institutions by concentrated wealth, on the special access and guaranteed favor that sap the representative integrity of American government and defy public confidence in its institutions. From early in the 20th century through the decision in McConnell, we have acknowledged that the value of democratic integrity justifies a realistic response when corporations and labor organizations commit the concentrated moneys in their treasuries to electioneering."

#OCCUPYPIKETTYHILLARY

Hillary's campaign logo has come in for quite a bit of criticism.

The logo's designer, Michael Bierut, is a graphic design superstar. Maybe he knows what he is doing? Here's what he wrote a few years back on the Occupy Wall Street "communications arsenal":

Consider, on the other hand, the genius of that simple #occupywallstreet hashtag. Three little words, with a call to action built right in. And, also right there was the potential for an articulated brand architecture that any corporate identity expert could envy. "Occupy" sits in the master brand position. Fill in the blanks for a potentially infinite number of user-generated subbrands, from Occupy Amarillo to Occupy Zurich. Elsewhere in the OWS communications arsenal, we find other slogans ("We Are The 99%") and some visual tropes (the Guy Fawkes mask popularized by Anonymous, now an emerging public "face" for the protest). But no typeface guidelines, no color standards, no official logos.

Could it be, as Bierut writes in his final paragraph that "Sometimes, the key to political change isn't designing a logo or poster"? He makes the same point several times in his post: "I suspect that many of its supporters would insist that the last thing OWS needs is something as simple and reductive as a logo." "conventional graphic design seems like an inefficient way to make a point, never mind to create or fuel a political movement"

I suspect there may be a method to the Hillary logo's banality. It is extremely simple to repurpose. Initially, even the Sandwichman had a few yucks:

All of which only serves to commit the blasted thing to memory! But if conventional graphic design is an inefficient way to make a point, what about the conventional political candidate?

Of Bathtubs, Bombshells and Boilerplate

The bathtub in question is the analogy Linda Booth Sweeney and John Sterman use to illustrate a dynamic stock-flow system, such as the relationship between greenhouse gas emissions (a flow) and the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (a stock). Gernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman stress the importance of the bathtub analogy in their new book, Climate Shock.

What's fascinating about the bathtub analogy is how consistently people get the dynamics of accumulation wrong. Or at least how often business school graduate students with backgrounds in science, technology, math and economics get it wrong. Sterman has pioneered a cottage industry publishing articles about the inability of large numbers of students to correctly identify the effects of flow variations on stock levels. A frequent source of error is something Booth Sweeney and Sterman call "correlation heuristic": students often expect that changes in stock will have the same shape as changes in flow. 

This common error has implications for people's attitudes about the action and policy needed to mitigate climate change, Booth Sweeney and Sterman point out. According to the correlation heuristic logic, many people would assume that a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions would directly translate into less greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. It doesn't.

A bombshell dud

A few weeks ago, Scientific American called the International Energy Agency's announcement a week earlier that global GHG emissions for the generation of energy were unchanged in 2014 from 2013 a "bombshell" that "flew in the face of established economic wisdom." The article went on to point out that scientists had "mixed opinions" about the long term significance of this momentary and sector-limited decoupling of emissions from GDP growth. Some thought it was a hopeful sign that decoupling is already happening. Others warned that emissions were likely to resume their upward trend in 2015.

The article neglected to mention that even if total global emissions were to remain flat for years to come, the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere would continue to increase relentlessly. Annual emissions would need to be cut to around half their current levels just to stabilize atmospheric concentrations at current levels. That's the difference between stocks and flows.

Happy talk about decoupling GDP growth from resource consumption and waste generation to achieve "green growth" ignores this crucial distinction. Even the more sober "prosperity without growth" critique that highlights the huge disparity between relative decoupling and absolute decoupling ignores this distinction. Accumulation is the bottom line. No mitigation without disaccumulation.

From shocks to stocks and flows... to lumps

The boilerplate is not Paul Guinan's imaginary steampunk contraption -- shown at left -- but the proverbial "fixed amount of work to be done" which has performed oh-so-much work for lazy journalists and economists assuaging those unfounded fears about unemployment that emanate from the economic illiterati. Come to think of it, though, a make-believe robot makes a good mascot for an oft-told tale about a make-believe fallacy. 

Do the erring graduate students in Sterman's and Booth Sweeney's experiments assume there is a fixed amount of water in the bathtub? No, they don't. They realize that the change in flow of water into the tub affects the accumulation of stock in some way. But they systematically mis-specify the timing and magnitude of the effects.

What happens if we dial back the preposterous "fixed amount of work" assertion of the lump-of-labor fallacy claim to a more plausible "correlation heuristic"? Instead of assuming that there is only so much work to go 'round, the benighted Luddites, trade unionists and other economic populists might be suspected merely of committing the more common error of assuming that job losses in the economy as a whole are homologous to losses in a particular trade as the result of labor-saving technology. From a distance the two fallacies may appear indistinguishable. But there is a difference -- several differences, actually.

For starters, the correlation heuristic has been experimentally documented, not just asserted. Evidence trumps mere allegation. Secondly, the heuristic is not as obviously preposterous as the belief in a fixed amount of work. It seems more likely that people -- even Luddites -- would make a plausible error than an implausible one. But perhaps most importantly, the correlation heuristic error may pertain equally to those who allege the fallacy as to those who are alleged to commit it.

How so? Economists making the lump-of-labor fallacy claim insist that the price mechanism automatically adjusts the demand for labor to accommodate changes in the supply of labor. In terms of the bathtub analogy, this is the same as saying that the outflow of the drain self-adjusts to correlate with the inflow from the faucet. One can indeed imagine a device that could accomplish this feat -- a bulb, floating on the surface of the water, attached by a chain of a given length to a plug in an auxiliary drain, such that when the water rises above a certain level, the floating bulb pulls the plug out of the auxiliary drain.

It could work...

Unfortunately, as Mr. Keynes explained long ago, the propensity to consume doesn't float like a bulb on the surface of income. The economists' cherished notion of equilibrium remains a heuristic and nothing more. The pot has been calling the kettle black.

Out of the bathtub and into the frying pan

Why does the Sandwichman keep harping on this arcane specimen of journalistic and economic boilerplate? Because heuristics aside, there are statistical series that seriously, relentlessly correlate: energy consumption and hours of paid employment. Energy intensity per dollar of industrial production has declined for nearly a century. That's relative decoupling. Energy intensity per hour of paid employment does not decline. Greenhouse gas emissions per hour of paid employment does not decline. There is no relative decoupling, let alone absolute decoupling or -- sustainable pie in the sky -- disaccumulation of GHGs in the atmosphere.

To cut greenhouse gas emissions in half, we must cut hours of paid employment at least in half. What would John Sterman say to that?

With a few important exceptions (the work of Herman Daly and colleagues, e.g., Daly and Townsend 1993 ; see also Princen et al. 2002 ; Meadows et al. 2004 ; DeGraaf et al. 2005 ; Whybrow 2005 ; Victor 2008 ; Schor 2010 ), most of the research, teaching, and popular discourse on sustainability continues to focus on technological solutions—more energy, more resources, more efficient eco-friendly growth—while the actual leverage point—voluntarily limiting our consumption—remains largely undiscussable, particularly among our business and political leaders.

DeGraaf 2005, Victor 2008 and Schor 2010, by the way, all prescribe reductions of working time as key to reducing emissions. Wagner and Weitzman on Sterman's bathtub analogy: "climate scientists -- and the rest of us -- would be well advised to remind ourselves daily of its significance." Paul Krugman on Martin Weitzman's fat tail analysis: "So what I end up with is basically Martin Weitzman’s argument: it’s the non-negligible probability of utter disaster that should dominate our policy analysis. And that argues for aggressive moves to curb emissions, soon "

1. the possibility of disaster...
2. the significance of the bathtub analogy...
3. the actual leverage point... 
4. measured rather than heuristic correlations

IS-LMist Fundamentalism and the Quest for Ignorance

"So I don't care whether Hicksian IS-LM is Keynesian in the sense that Keynes himself would have approved of it, and neither should you. What you should ask is whether that approach has proved useful -- and whether the critics have something better to offer." -- Paul Krugman, "Unreal Keynesians"

The issue, of course, is not whether 'the master' would have approved of the IS-LM gadget but whether it represents an analytical advance or a regression from the insights that Keynes achieved. In a 1980 "explanation," Hicks conceded that "as time has gone on, I have myself become increasingly dissatisfied with it." In a commentary on Hicks's explanation, though, G.L.S. Shackle was less ambivalent. I have selected and re-arranged passages from Shackle's commentary to highlight his central point -- that uncertainty and equilibrium are fundamentally incompatible concepts.

The one big thing in Keynes' ultimate conception is our unknowledge of what will create itself in time-to-come. "We simply do not know." The author of A Treatise on Probability expressly rejects the notion that probability can turn this unknowledge into its opposite. When we accept this view, the possibility of involuntary unemployment becomes self-evident. 

Sir John Hicks' paper was the first presentation of IS-LM and has been for forty and more years the most famous and the most influential interpretation of Keynes. Central and essential to its argument is a notion of equilibrium. 

Sir John still does not seem to me to acknowledge the essential point: the elemental core of Keynes' conception of economic society is uncertain expectation, and uncertain expectation is wholly incompatible and in conflict with the notion of equilibrium. 

In the literature of economics the word equilibrium covers a multitude of ideas and of vacuous substitutes for thought. Its pervasive presence and the ascendancy its serious meanings have exercised show plainly that it "does something" for the economic theoretician. What does it do? It enables him to exhibit the economic world as determinate, explicable, calculable, and even predictable. Equilibrium is orderliness, harmony, the advancement of one's own interest by serving that of others. Equilibrium is interactive rationality, the recognition that society is an organism. Above all, it is the necessary condition, the basis and sanction of proof. Pride in proof is legitimate. Proof is certainty, an end to debate, and it is more, in the scale of values and sensibilities of many of us. Proof is beauty. If economic theory is to validate its claim to be a deductive system, a science, then the equilibrium idea is indispensable. But proof can exist only in a closed world. It depends upon "givens." If we are not supplied with "givens," and if we are not defended from things not given, of which we were not told, things which can blow in on us in the cold draught from time-to-come, there is no proving things.

Shackle doesn't go far enough. Well, he probably goes far enough in outlining the incompatibility of the notion of equilibrium with the conception of uncertain expectations. But I think it is possible to go a further step in comprehending the incompatibility of the notion of equilibrium with itself. That is to say, the essential incongruity of the notion of equilibrium. 

In an appendix to Significance and Basic Postulates of Economic Theory, T.W. Hutchison admonished, "It is high time to put these theories [laissez faire and equilibrium doctrines] firmly back in their place as Utopian constructions." He cited S. Bauer's 1931 article, "Origine utopique et métaphorique de la théorie du “laissez faire” et de l’équilibre naturel."

Prominent in Bauer's discussion of the origins of the notions of laissez faire and equilibrium is the role of Baltasar Gracian's Oráculo Manual -- which was translated into French by Amelot de la Houssaie in 1684 -- in popularizing both the notion and the term, laissez faire. Pierre le Pesant Boisguilbert is credited with introducing the term into political economic thought in a book published in 1707. Below is the maxim extolling the art of leaving things alone:

Where this story of equilibrium starts to get convoluted is in the Spanish Baroque's philosophical tradition of radical skepticism that Gracian exemplified. In the introduction to his English translation of Gracian's Pocket Oracle, Jeremy Robbins describes the "world of deception and illusion" central to Baroque thought:

Gracián posits a world of deception and illusion, in which appearances predominate and malice and cunning are omnipresent. Hence the distrust, pessimism and misanthropy that characterize his world-view. The key concept here is deceit (engaño): this covers, for Gracián, not simply the deception of one individual by another, but our self-deception as to the true nature and value of the world, and hence our deception by the world. It is a term at once moral and epistemological: to fail to know the world for what it is condemns us to moral error and to failure. Because of our tendency to accept appearances and to follow our desires, passions and emotions, we are mired in a world of deceit. There is consequently an urgent need for disillusionment (desengaño), the other key concept of the Spanish Baroque, For Gracián and his contemporaries, disillusionment means the realization of the true worth of things, seeing them as they really are: in essence, that this world and all within it is worthless. For many writers, this means explicitly viewing things not from a human or worldly perspective, but from the perspective of eternity, on the grounds that the here and now, being transient, amounts to mere appearance, true reality being what awaits us after death.

Robbins is the author of an introduction to seventeenth century Spanish literature titled The Challenges of Uncertainty, in which he argues that Spanish literature, "creatively responded to the unprecedented sense of uncertainty fostered by developments across Europe... it was above all this scepticism which led Spaniards to employ literature and art to question the boundaries of reality and illusion." 

Something weird is going on here. An aesthetic response to uncertainty about the bounds of reality and illusion has been adapted and transformed into a fundamental assumption about the nature of the the world. Uncertainty has been overcome by... an imaginary Utopia,

In "The Quest for Ignorance or the Reasonable Limits of Skepticism" Stephen Pepper argued that "Utter skepticism -- a skepticism void of all knowledge -- could not know itself and stands refuted in its very utterance." There are limits to what we cannot know. The Utopia of equilibrium is not simply incompatible with uncertainty -- it is an inevitable symptom of unreasonable uncertainty. Pepper asked, "How little can we know? What is the maximum of a reasonable unbelief?" His answer relied on the acknowledgement, first, of what he called "middle-sized facts":

These middle-sized facts are the matrix of all knowing. We are so immersed in them all the day long that we ordinarily miss their significance. The common man does not think about them, because he is moving among them; and the specialist does not think about them, because he has made assumptions that raise him above them. They get left out in most discussions of knowledge and fact. But they constitute the lowest limit of skepticism.