Category Archives: Media Criticism

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Economic Fallacies Of Disasters

61 Comments

As is always the case, the economically ignorant trot out the broken window fallacy. And you can bet that there will also be idiotic complaints about “price gouging” in the coming days. I dealt with that one years ago.

[Update a while later]

Amazingly, Matt Yglesias gets it:

…more price gouging would greatly improve inventory management. There is a large class of goods—flashlights, snow shovels, sand bags—for which demand is highly irregular. Maintaining large inventories of these items is, on most days, a costly misuse of storage space. If retailers can earn windfall profits when demand for them spikes, that creates a situation in which it makes financial sense to keep them on hand. Trying to curtail price gouging does the reverse.

None of which is to say that people should be greedy all the time. Disasters really are times when people pull together and we see large and small acts of kindness that rightly inspire us. But consider that declining to raise prices in the face of spiking demand and inelastic supply is a very odd form of charity: It doesn’t create any new resources, just allocates them arbitrarily to whoever shows up first. If you feel bad about the idea of earning windfall profits off the misfortunes of others, then donate the money to charity. If that seems too impersonal, give your employees a bonus for showing up under difficult circumstances. But storm or no storm, the best practice is to try to set prices that balance supply with demand. State governments shouldn’t be trying to stop you.

Amen.

Culinary, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Speaking Of Paleo Diets

2 Comments

Best wishes to Charlie Martin. I predict it will work.

For what it’s worth, my dad died at fifty-five, a third of a century ago, in large part due to criminal dietary advice (OK, maybe that’s a little too strong — they probably knew no better) and my mother at sixty-eight to a massive heart attack in the night, in her sleep. At least for her, it was fast. And in both cases they were overweight smokers, a product of their generation.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Mann’s Hockey Stick

15 Comments

Gone. And the Medieval Warm Period, restored:

Untruncated and unspliced data used in a new paper from Briffa and Melvin at UEA restores the Medieval Warm Period while at the same time disappears Mann’s hockey stick.

…Whoo boy, I suspect this paper will be called in the Mann -vs- Steyn trial (if it ever makes it that far; the judge may throw it out because the legal pleading makes a false claim by Mann).

No comment. The most amazing thing is that this paper is co-authored by Keith Briffa:

I have to wonder if this is some sort of attempt to “come clean” on the issue. Mann must be furious at the timing. There’s no hint of a hockey stick, and no need to splice on the instrumental surface temperature record or play “hide the decline” tricks with this data.

As he notes, expect a bunch of desperate papers soon to try to resurrect it. The “climate” “community” is eating its own.

And here’s a bonus: thoughts on the upcoming legal proceedings from Roger Pielke.

[Update a few minutes later]

A new paper from Judith Curry on the manufactured consensus:

Students of science are taught to reject ad populam or ‘bandwagon’ appeals, a sentiment is articulated by the motto of the UK Royal Society: ‘nullius in verba’, which is roughly translated as ‘take nobody’s word for it’. How then, and why, have climate scientists come to a scientific consensus about a very complex scientific problem that the consensus-supporting scientists themselves acknowledge has substantial and fundamental uncertainties?

Because, sadly, there was an agenda. And many of the supporters of the climate “science” don’t understand how science actually works.