I have some thoughts on cost overruns on federal transportation projects, including space transportation, over at Open Market.
Category Archives: Economics
The Twilight Zone
The Keynesian one:
America Needs A Control Group
Frank J. has some thoughts on people who are anti-science:
despite the obvious importance of science, one group of people does everything in pure defiance of scientific methods: politicians.
What do politicians do when they think they have a great idea? They just go and implement it. It’s like someone thinking he’s got a cure for cancer and immediately injecting it into everyone he can. That’s a madman, not a scientist. You always have to at least try out your idea on monkeys to make sure it doesn’t kill them.
Were farm subsidies first tried on monkeys? Social Security? Bank bailouts? No, the unscientific politicians went straight to trying all their ideas on humans, and now we have a bunch of bankrupt people instead of harmless bankrupt monkeys.
But the problem with testing political ideas on monkeys is that forcing them to go billions into debt would violate animal-cruelty laws. The only ones we’re allowed to do that to are people.
There was an old joke in the Soviet Union. The teacher is lecturing the class on Karl Marx, and one of the kids raises his hand and says, “Teacher, is it true that Marx was a great scientist?” The teacher answered that, yes, indeed, he was the greatest scientist who had ever lived. The kid thinks for a while, and then says, “If he was such a great scientist, why didn’t he try this crap on rats first?”
Solyndra
This is Obama’s Enron, except a) it’s much worse and b) the press will continue to cover for him. By all rights, it should put a stake through the heart of the “green jobs” nonsense, but it won’t.
“An Umitigated Litany Of Failure”
Obama’s scorecard.
As many commentators have noted, there is an aroma of fear hovering about the White House these days: the stale, acrid scent of panic. Some of us have known all along that Obama, the community organizer miraculously elevated to the U.S. Senate for a few months before he erected some Greek columns and talked his way into the U.S. Presidency, some of us, I say, have known all along that he hadn’t a clue. Now it seems that even he is getting uncomfortable inklings. In the beginning Obama emitted an aura of that some identified as an aura of confidence; really, it was an aura of entitlement — along with what the President himself a while back identified as “bluff.” Are you the sort of person who likes empirical reminders?
I don’t think he is.
And why is the press uninterested in Obama’s Lincoln gaffe? Because it’s Obama, and not Mike Huckabee. Or Sarah Palin.
What If?
Thoughts on Obama’s latest deficit-increasing blather from Jim Geraghty:
We’re a $14 trillion economy that makes everything from timber to jumbo jets to firearms to smart-phone apps to Hollywood movies to every food product under the sun. The notion that some grab bag of tax credits and federal grants is going to kick-start a hiring binge to put 14 million Americans back to work or that the economy is one tax credit for hiring veterans away from recovery is laughable.
The recession we’ve endured for the past three years is far from normal, and yet we keep getting the normal Keynesian responses. I realize I’m about to offer blasphemies and shockers on par with Rick Perry’s Ponzi-scheme comparison, but what if Obama was wrong last night, and a big issue is that some of the people of this country do not, in fact, work hard to meet their responsibilities? What if decades of a lousy education system have left us with a workforce that has too many members with no really useful skills for a globalized economy? What if way too many college students majored in liberal arts and are entering the workforce looking for jobs that will never exist? What if the massive housing bubble got Americans to condition themselves to work in an economy that’s never coming back? (How many realtors are unemployed right now?) What if we have good workers who can’t move to take new jobs because they’re underwater on their mortgages and can’t sell their house?
That’s just crazy talk. (No link because it’s from his morning email.)
And on a related note, is it the end, after decades, of the New Deal Order? I hope so, but it went on so long that the transition to sanity is going to be very painful, and perhaps very ugly, as we saw with the union thuggery in Washington state that is so far not only going completely unpunished, but its author sat in a box with the First Lady at the president’s speech.
Space Interview Tonight
Alan Boyle of MSNBC will be interviewing me in Second Life tonight on Virtually Speaking Science at 6 PM SL time (PDT). Here’s the SLURL for SLers: http://slurl.com/secondlife/StellaNova/228/226/38
This is the promo:
Alan Boyle talks with Rand Simberg
As MSNBC.com’s science editor, Alan runs a virtual curiosity shop of the physical sciences and space exploration, paleontology, archaeology and other ologies that strike his fancy. Alan is the author of “The Case for Pluto,” a contributor to “A Field Guide for Science Writers,” and the blogger behind Cosmic Log, the 2008 recipient of the National Academies
Communication Award.Rand Simberg describes himself as ‘just a recovering aerospace engineer.’ The Competitive Enterprise Institute describes him as ‘an expert on space technology and policy, particularly with regard to NASA and commercial human spaceflight.’ He writes widely about the politics and economics of space exploration. Read him in Popular Mechanics and Transterrestrial Musings – Biting Commentary about Infinity and Beyond! Watch him on YouTube. | Listen live and later on BTR
And yes, it will probably conflict with the Republican debate.
NASA’s Costly Risk Aversion
I have some further thoughts on the ISS situation today over at Open Market.
Mike Griffin’s Credibility
Will McLean wonders why he has any.
Obama Will Get A Recovery
…when demand curves slope upwards:
Card and Krueger proudly announced the repeal of the most fundamental law of economics: “Our empirical findings challenge the prediction that a rise in the minimum reduces employment. Relative to stores in Pennsylvania, fast food restaurants increased employment by 13 percent.” Except they didn’t. Their data, gathered by telephone survey, turned out to be “so bad that no credible conclusions can be drawn,” another study concluded. Other economists used actual payroll data instead of a phone survey and found just the opposite: the state-mandated pay hike reduced employment.
“Let’s hope that labor economist Alan Krueger, as he assumes his new position as Chief Economist to the President, remembers that demand curves really do slope downward,” Perry concludes.
Once again, it appears that Obama has hired the best incompetence that money can buy.
When it comes to economics, it’s the Democrats that are anti-science. Especially on the dismal one.