Wow. Just when I thought I couldn't have a lower opinion of government, I find data for this:
U.S. crude oil production has been plummeting since 1970. Why? What has been done about it? Tell me our oil troubles are "Bush's Fault." How many Presidents and Congresses have we had since 1970?

Ann says: It's also remarkable that this takes place after the 1970's oil embargo by OPEC. Just when we were given a vivid demonstration of the power of OPEC to slam our country, we decided, year-after-year, to strengthen their power.

It really makes no sense whatsoever.

No, not the physics-kind of conservation of energy. The kind where we save energy by using efficient light-bulbs, driving at 55mph, and wearing a sweater like Jimmy Carter wanted us to. I think it is over-rated.

I don't want to sound like too much of a crank here; I am not in any way opposed to conservation. There really isn't much of a downside. I just don't think that conservation programs are likely to yield any lasting improvement in our energy situation.

One reason for this is that part of the savings in energy that might come from more efficiency will be offset by increased consumption. Take compact fluorescent bulbs for example. In our home we are gradually replacing our incandescent bulbs with these more efficient models. They save money and energy in the long run, but not as much as you might think. Rather than replace a 60Watt incandescent with at "60Watt equivalent" CFL, I often use a "100Watt equivalent" CFL. This allows me to get more light out of fixtures in dingy areas of the house. There is still an energy savings, since a 100Watt equivalent CFL uses fewer than 60Watts, but there is not as much savings as proponents claim. Similarly, someone who buys a car that gets better mileage may well drive more, thereby lessening the fuel savings.

Finally, and most important, energy conservation of say 20% would only buy us about 7 1/2 years before we are right back in the same boat. This is assuming a modest growth rate of 3% for the economy. My guess is that 20% is a lot, in that it would take a lot of effort and belt-tightening to gain that sort of efficiency. See the graph below which shows how many years we "buy" for percentage gains in efficiency. What's more, I don't think this sort of conservation can be thought of as a resource we can keep tapping into. With decreasing marginal returns, each additional belt-tightening measure will gain us less and less.

So the bottom line, I think, is that conservation is not a panacea. It doesn't hurt, but it would be disingenuous to suggest that we "just need to get by on less." That's not going to cut it.

Tony Snow, jazz flutist, has died.



Rest in peace Tony. Sorry to see you go.

I posted in the comments section at The Reference Frame:

I have to side with yorick over Pierre on this one. You have two faces of Obama. One is the Obama who's senate votes show him to be the most liberal of senators. The other is the new moderate Obama who is running for president in the general election. Which is the real one? I find it remarkable that people believe the latter is the better estimate.

Yorick is also right about people reading things into Obama. Again and again I hear people say "Oh, I'm sure he doesn't really believe that." Point out his membership in that nutty church. "He's just doing that for respect in the black community." Point out his anti-trade rhetoric "Oh, he's just doing that for union votes. I'm sure he is for free trade." Point out his Iraq pullout
statements. "He's just saying that to appease the hard left. I'm sure he will finish what was started there." On and on and on, issue after issue. Obama says something, people interpret it to mean whatever they want to hear.

It's bizarre, to say the least.

(*) From that old Ray Bradbury story, of the same name.

Harvard's president Drew Faust sent an email around yesterday:

"We will need to make the concern for environmental responsibility a more conscious and systematic consideration in many aspects of how we plan, build, work, and live -- while redoubling our commitment to education and research that contribute to sustainability."

The email announced the "Statement on the Report of the Harvard Greenhouse Gas Task Force." I, for one, am thrilled that we will make concern a consideration. For far too long we have only been considering making concern a consideration, and that has always concerned me.

The report itself is a nothing more than bureaucratic nonsense, just page after page after page of meaningless jargon.

How exactly does research and education contribute to "sustainability." Sustainability of what? I know Harvard is committed to sustaining it's endowment. Maybe that's what she means.

My sister makes an excellent point below. I also wonder how much of that $4000 would show up as higher tuition.

I think the whole idea of forced service is appalling. Who does this guy think he is, wanting to force labor out of young people? Check out this quote from his speech on the subject (hat tip LGF):

“We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set,” he said Wednesday. “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded.”

That's more than a little creepy, isn't it? His vision is some sort of youth brigade serving the State. Oh Fearless Leader! Guide us on the path of hope and change to a glorious future as first among equals!

There has been some talk in the blogosphere about Obama's wish to see college kids put in 100 hours of community service. (Jonah Goldberg in the LA Times and Steven Bainbridge are two.)

Most of the articles discuss the involuntary servitude aspect, but I want to talk about something else.

Go to any of the main state schools, or especially go to the minor city colleges, and you will find one thing stands out: a very large segment of the student body is returning adults who work full time, have families full time, and go to college in the evenings and on weekends, and whenever they can find time in their hectic schedules to fit in a class. These are people who may have dropped out of high school, or out of college after a couple years. After years in the workplace and leading grown-up lives they realize that to get a promotion, or to get a better job, they need to have two little letters on their resumé: B.A. These are people who take 10 years, one class a semester, to get their degree. These people don't have 100 minutes of extra time, much less 100 hours. If they did have extra time, they'd probably use it providing for their family or taking another course to get through faster.

[Back to College] (The Department of Education recently reported that 13 percent of students now enrolled in college were single parents, up from 7.6 percent in 1993.) Economic reasons are a strong factor: students want to change careers or update professional credentials. Some adult students continue to work while returning to school while others attend part-time.

[…] Millions of adult students successfully return to college to obtain a degree. However, they often have numerous responsibilities to consider when making the decision. These responsibilities can include marriage, children, work, community obligations, or care of elderly parents. The time and commitment needed to complete a degree program and balance these responsibilities can be a challenge.

[…] Recent statistics from the U.S. Department of Education show that adult students are the fastest growing educational demographic, and these numbers are steadily increasing. In 1970, 28 percent of all college students were 25 years of age or older. In 1998 the number of adult learners had increased to 41 percent. The number of students age 35 and older in degree-granting institutions has soared from about 823,000 in 1970 to an estimated 2.9 million in 2001 — doubling from 9.6% of total students to 19.2%, according to the National Center for Education Statistics

The Department of Education currently lists the percentage of college students over the age of 24 at 39% of all students.

Are these the kind of students Obama has in mind? Or is he thinking of Ivy League residential colleges which make up a tiny fraction of total college enrollment, but make up the entire fraction of his experience?

Is he thinking of the single moms who have real jobs and can't make up the 100 hours in the summer? Or is he thinking of Ivy League college kids who kick around their parent's house all summer bored and lazy, and can spend the whole summer in "community service" if they wanted to?

Adult learners can't afford to lose 100 hours of their time to make liberals feel better. Their community service is in the gainful and productive employment they perform and the child care they provide to their own kids. Their service is done keeping their own house picked up and getting dinner on the table.

To me, this shows how out of touch Obama is with the realities of many people's lives. He lives in an upper-class world where the ends always meet.

Then there's this little tidbit from his proposal:

[ Rocky Mountain News ] For college students, I have proposed an annual American Opportunity Tax Credit of $4,000. To receive this credit, we'll require 100 hours of public service. You invest in America, and America invests in you - that's how we're going to make sure that college is affordable for every single American, while preparing our nation to compete in the 21st century.

According to that same DoE page, there will be 18,839,000 college students in 2010--the first possible year that Obama's proposal could take effect.

At $4,000 a pop we're talking: $75,356,000,000! That's a brand new $75 billion dollar (or divided by 5 years of college = $15B) entitlement.

That's also $40/hour, which is higher than most people will ever make in their lives. That's also over $500 for every individual tax return filed with the IRS.

Good lord. Spare us.

T. Boone Pickens, billionaire, has a plan to address America's energy problems. He put together an interesting video:



He's using his own money to promote this; his commercials on t.v. say "paid for by T. Boone. Pickens." (Is that a great name or what? )

The plan itself seems to put a lot of emphasis on wind power and natural gas. I'm a little skeptical about the wind part, but the natural gas part sounds good for the short term. I would like to look a little closer on the practicality of wind power.

I remain a nuclear man.

I see Anthony Cordesman is mentioned today over on The Corner. I can't think of him--a fairly prominent foreign-affairs talking head, and a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Affairs--without thinking of this:

BIOLOGICAL WARFARE AND THE “BUFFY PARADIGM”

It's a 41-page fully-footnoted paper on what we can learn about national security from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". Considering it was published September 29, 2001, Cordesman either started this paper as a response to 9/11, or was actually working on it before. Here's a taste:

Any structured intellectual approach to describing this situation – and planning for it -- is so uncertain that a valid structure can only be developed as an exercise in complexity or “chaos” theory. I, however, would like you to think about the biological threat in more mundane terms. I am going to suggest that you think about biological warfare in terms of a TV show called “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” that you think about the world of biological weapons in terms of the “Buffy Paradigm,” and that you think about many of the problems in the proposed solutions as part of the “Buffy Syndrome.”

I realize that those of you who are workaholics or who are simply mature and without
children or younger relatives may never have seen this show. It is, however, about a teenage vampire slayer who lives in a world of unpredictable threats where each series of crises only becomes predictable when it is over and is followed by a new and unfamiliar one.

Yes, he actually takes the show and the concept very seriously, and it's actually a pretty good paper.

I just threw out my last 5 1/4" floppys.



They date back to a computer I got in the early 90's, which was probably one of the last machines to come with a big floppy drive. I think they were obsolete way back then, and I know the machine also had a 3 1/2" drive--I threw out those disks too.

Remember when software came on a stack of floppys and you had to sit there swapping them for an hour or so to get your software loaded? I still had those disks!

I also kept the hard drive from that computer. It had 52MB's of space on the entire drive--that's for software as well as documents. Today that's the size of a lean Microsoft program. (Sorry, did I say lean Microsoft program? I forgot that there is no such thing in existence.)

Steve Says: That's not a big floppy! Why, in my day, floppy disks were 8 inches and held 286k! And we liked it that way.

Ann says: That's less memory than my credit card.

China has decided to ramp up its nuclear power program. It wants to have 100 Westinghouse nuclear reactors in operation or under construction by 2020.

If China follows through on these and other nuclear plans they should have 200GW of nuclear power completed by 2025. This would be double what the USA has now.

While China steams ahead to a nuclear future, here in the USA the talk is all about "alternative energy." I'm afraid we are stuck on stupid. Suppose we were to try to build a 200 gigawatt photovoltaic solar power plant, by scaling up a cutting edge plant, the Serpa solar power plant. This plant, in sunny Portugal, was completed last year and is one of the largest in the world. The solar panels in this plant rotate to track the sun as it moves across the sky.

It occupies about 0.234 square miles of land, and is expected to produce about 20 gigawatt-hours per year. That works out to an average power output of about 2.28 megawatts. How much land would we have to cover with these panels to get 200 gigawatts?

200,000 / 2.28 x 0.234 = 20,526 square miles.

That's like covering all of Massachusetts 2.5 times over. Compare the footprint of the proposed drilling in ANWR

3.13 square miles

The plain truth is that solar power plants on this scale are not going to happen. It would be nice if we had some political leader out there who understood that. Instead we get fantasies about solar, biofuels and wind. I suppose this is what politicians have always done, promising the impossible to win votes. I'm reminded of Bart Simpson, running for class president:

My opponent says there are no easy answers. I say, he's not looking hard enough!

At what point does a lack of a realistic energy plan compromise national security? How long can we keep putting off taking the necessary steps to avoid a catastrophic energy shortage? The time to drill for more oil is now. The time to get our nuclear program back in gear is now.

Making the rounds in the Blogosphere:



New York Times, Dec. 21, 1924.

Jonah Goldberg:

JFK's Youth Fitness Song.

Scary? No. Creepy? A little. Weird? You betchya.

Weird?? No way! This was a real favorite in elementary school gym class. I still find myself singing it once in a while. I didn't know who Robert Preston was back then, of course. Follow the link and have a listen.

If it's the end of the first week of the start of the month...it's time for the BLS!

Every month we get the employment data, and every month I am amazed at how it is reported.

The bottom line is this: according to the household survey (basically calling people up and asking about their jobs) absolutely no jobs have been added in the last year and a half--actually 19 months.



We actually have lost an average of 1,842 jobs a month for 19 months.

The employers' survey (a poll of big employers' hiring and firing) shows a similar trend. It has a slight increase through October 07, the begins going down. From the high in October to today's report, we've lost 722,000 jobs.

I do think there are some non-economic reasons for some of the drop, and much of the rest probably comes from the highly-cyclical building industry, but it is still a big loss.

A comment I posted in response to Half Sigma's suggestion "Republicans should support socialized medicine:"

$140K [for doctor's salaries, set by the government]? You are out of your mind. Medicine will hemorrhage its best and brightest. That means no innovation. No new procedures. No progress in medical science.

That is the real, never-mentioned problem with all of these government take-over plans. Socialized medicine in the USA would be a death blow to medicine, because the USA the only major market left on earth where investing in medical research has the potential to pay off. No profit motive means no new devices, no new drugs, no new procedures, no new technology. Spare me your vision of the noble NIH-funded scientist sweating away in his lab to save humanity. His goal is to produce journal papers. Spare me your point about European drug companies doing well. Where do you think they make their money?

If we had adopted socialized medicine decades ago, where would medicine be today? Decades behind.

and another on a followup post:

Obviously, other countries have lower medical costs because their governments strictly control prices. The only major relatively free market left, the USA, ends up footing the bill for medical research by way of high prices. In effect, countries with socialized care are not paying their fair share, they are passing the costs on to us.

What if the USA adopts socialized medicine like other countries? Then all would be on equal footing. But, as I pointed out in my previous comment, it would be a disaster for the advancement of medicine.

We can debate the pluses and minuses of health care policies, but to ignore the effect of said policies on the advancement of medical science is foolish and likely dangerous.

Half Sigma is an interesting blogger, and I read him often. I sometimes wonder though if he makes incendiary statements just to get a rise out of people. He dedicates a lot of posts to the question of race and intelligence. Some will surely find it offensive. I am not much offended by it, but I don't agree with the level of importance with which he seems to rate the topic.

Below, I posted a note after my brother's comment on empty playgrounds. I believe it's mostly due to hyper-paranoia that has infected parenting. Parents buy the line that there is a predator behind every tree.

I went looking for some stats, and found this from 2002 (UCLA Bruin)

But, like last year’s “summer of the shark,” the current “summer of abduction” is more hype than fact. If parents waded through the media frenzy, they would see the number of child kidnappings by strangers has actually been decreasing in recent years. According to FBI reports, there were 115 cases in 1998, 134 in 1999, 106 in 2000, and 93 in 2001. This year, the drop has continued as 46 cases have been recorded in the first half of 2002.

As it turns out, the actual probability of a child being snatched up and murdered is about one in a million. To provide perspective lacking in the media, a child is twice as likely to fall victim to accidental shooting, 10 times more likely to drown in a backyard pool, and 100 times more likely to be seriously injured or killed on a bicycle. As Barry Glassner, a sociology professor at USC puts it, “It’s hard to imagine any serious danger to children that is less likely than kidnapping by a stranger.”

I found a national report on juvenile crime statistics which compared the two-year period from 1991-1993 to 2001-2003, and found that for kids 12-14, the rate of non-fatal victimization tanked:

Nonfatal violence –59%
Robbery –66%
Aggravated assault –69%
Simple assault –57%

And that's in a period of less than 10 years, and crime rates have been dropping for much longer than that. I'd also imaging that if you control for socio-economic level, you'd find that the victimization rate for middle class whites is almost non-existent.

Also this from the same report:

Contrary to public perceptions, NISMART–2 found that the majority of victims of stereotypical and other nonfamily abductions were teens—not younger children—and most were kidnapped by someone they knew somewhat—not by strangers or slight acquaintances. The NISMART–2 researchers point out the implications these findings have for prevention efforts, which have tended to focus on “stranger danger” and have targeted young children.

Here's one of the down-side risks (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

In 1972, 87 percent of children who lived within a mile of school walked or biked daily; today, just 13 percent of children get to school under their own power, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In a significant parallel, before 1980, only 5 percent of children were obese; today that figure has tripled, says the CDC.

The next generation of grandparents won't even need to harangue their progeny with tales of walking seven miles to school in the snow; it'll be impressive enough to say that they walked at all.

Here's the Justice Department:



It's a little hard to read, but it looks like the crime rate for young teens was about 80 in 1973, and is now down around 40--meaning that violent crimes against young teens have dropped in half since I was a kid.

There is a comments-section discussion going on at Ann Althouse's blog about the apparent lack of kids playing outside in the suburbs. I've noticed this too, for example in my parents' neighborhood, an outer suburb of Milwaukee. It's a fairly well-to-do area, with large houses on large plots of land. Many backyards and schoolyards have playground equipment in them, but it's rare to see many kids using them.

I think it's probably because these areas don't have many kids per square mile, i.e. the kid density is low. This is due to the large distance between houses and the relatively low kids-per-family that these days comes with wealth and education. I think that unless a certain critical kid density is reached, you are not likely to see groups of kids playing around the neighborhood.

Fortunately, it's a different story where we live, here in Brookline MA. The population here is fairly wealthy and educated, but the population density is very high. The two park areas nearest our house, one connected to the High School and the other a couple of blocks away, are small, but usually alive with kids and adults. It's quite nice to see kids playing on the playground equipment, or playing baseball or soccer. For little kids they have nice fountains to play in. During the summer there are kids playing in those fountains all day long. Adults play with their kids or play softball or basketball. All that activity keeps the "chronically inebriated" and other undesirables away too.

So we've got that going for us. Which is nice.

Ann adds: I think the biggest problem is hyper-paranoia on the part of parents. Our 8 year old girl isn't even allowed to walk around the block by herself. When I said something about it to our 6 year old boy, he said, "No, I might be taken!" I found that very depressing. This is what we teach our kids?

We do have a lot of homeless around here--Los Angeles has a ton, and Santa Monica once invited all the country's homeless to come. They can be creepy, and you figure that most are either mentally ill, alcoholics or addicts. So you do wonder about kids' safety around them, but the fact remains that very, very, very few kids ever have anything happen to them. And the vast majority who do are either "taken" by non-custodial parents, or are abused by family members. The danger to kids is more likely to be your friends and family--people you trust--than the bum on the street.

I think this woman has the right idea: "Why I Let My 9-year-old Ride Subway Alone". She assessed the real dangers, and realized that the threats parents usually fear are mostly paranoia-induced, and that there is the hidden threat of overly-coddled kids who are taught to be afraid of the world around them.

You know, if you are doing a show called "Marketplace", and one of your lead stories contains mention of foreign trade stats, perhaps you should have a basic understanding of the way currencies affect foreign trade?

This morning in the top of the broadcast on NPR's "Marketplace" the announcer said something along the lines of: GDP grew at over 1% in the first quarter, after the revision put out today increased the estimate over the previously released number. The better economic outlook included an unexpected increase in sales of US goods abroad.

Now, wouldn't you think that people on a show about the economy would have actually taken at least one economics class, Econ 101?

When currencies become cheap, it accelerates exports--leading to more sales abroad. Europe right now is decrying the increase in the euro, because it is making their goods too expensive as exports--while we are gaining.

No one with the slightest knowledge of economics could find that "unexpected".

Addendum: I just Googled "strong euro" + trade +exports and came up with articles like these (in order of google):

1. Strong Euro May Be Hampering European Exports

2. UPDATE: Strong Export Growth Boosts Euro-Zone April Trade. Now that seems to go the wrong way, but the first sentence of the actual article is:

The euro zone recorded a foreign trade surplus in April, reversing March's deficit and suggesting that the euro's strength and weakening global demand aren't yet weighing on exports.

3. How is the Strong Euro Affecting Euro-Area Export Margins?

With the euro trading at record highs against the US dollar, investors are becoming increasingly worried about the outlook for euro-area growth. But how are exporters responding to upward pressure on the exchange rate, and what impact is this having on their profit margins?

Ultimately, external demand for euro-area products depends on how much they cost in foreign-currency terms. This, in turn, will be affected by exchangerate developments and by relative changes in unit labour costs. But exporters also need to make a decision about margins. When the euro is rising, exporters may accept lower margins to protect market share. By contrast, when the euro is falling, they may be able to boost both their profit margins and volumes.

Translation: High euro=bad for exports.

4. Strong euro gives a boost to N.H. exporters

One of the major global developments in the last three years is the so-called realignment of currencies, which relates to an enduring change in a key currency against the dollar. Of main interest for international trade is the strengthening of the euro.

Since February 2002, the euro has increased in value by 50 percent against the dollar, implying that businesses and consumers from the euro area could now pay 50 percent less than in 2002 to buy American goods if their prices have stayed the same.

[...] A strong euro makes New Hampshire's goods cheaper in the euro area's single market and gives state exporters an extra advantage.

5. UPDATE 1-Euro zone trade surplus down as strong euro bites ...

I could go on, of course. And I could do the opposite search: "weak dollar"+trade+exports, and come up with the same sort of results.

From a report on problems teaching teachers to teach math:

... It found the programs, within colleges and universities, spend too little time on elementary math topics.
Author Julie Greenberg said education students should be taking courses that give them a deeper understanding of arithmetic and multiplication.

I wonder just how many courses on multiplication are appropriate. Perhaps multiplication should be offered as a major. I can see a potential senior thesis already: "The Impact of Multiplying by Three on the Integers Between Five and Nine: A Multicultural Approach."

Fennell, who instructs teacher candidates in math at McDaniel College in Westminster, Md., said a common area of weakness among his students is fractions — the same subject the national math panel described as a weak area for kids. "Part of the reason the kids don't know it is because the teachers aren't transmitting that," he said.
To boost teachers' understanding of math, the math departments at universities ought to place more emphasis on training educators, Fennell added.

Yes, because having math PhDs teach fractions is an excellent utilization of their time. Why are math departments busy teaching complex analysis and differential equations to engineers when there are "educators" out there who don't know what a common denominator is? First things first!

Ann adds:

How bad is math education? How about this: When our 2nd grader started to do entry-level fractions, the school sent home an explanation for parents in the class newsletter. You see, apparently, parents don't know that the numerator is the one on the top, and the denominator is the one on the bottom, and the school had to give them a heads-up so they could help their 7 year olds do their homework.

And, if you watch this video, you can see that maybe a PhD in arithmetic wouldn't be such a bad idea. These days they are making the algorithms they are using to teach kids how to multiply and divide so complicated and difficult, that you do need a higher level of education just to follow along:





Steve says: Seven months ago, I posted this comment under this youtube video:

"Ambivalent. Fundamentals are good, but I never use the standard algorithm in my head. For 26x31 I do 26x30 (780), then add in 26 to get 806. I use a calculator for 3 digits, or use two digits and multiply by 100 when an approx. is ok. Clearly, the altases are used with stats such as population, income, area, etc. With calculators around, it is often more important to know *when* to multiply. I agree group work is over-emphasized. Try that on the SAT or on the job. "

Ann says: I don't know. I've always been pathetic at keeping more than a couple numbers in my head at a time (from phone numbers to math), and usually need to reach for a pencil. In that case, getting the algorithim right makes a big difference. The methods taught on the video and in the textbooks are hunt-and-peck methods with so many extra steps that errors are bound to occur. That's part of the problem. Instead of a condensed system, there are so many steps, that the mistakes almost must happen.

He's actually Hindu. Who knew?

The idol is being presented to Obama as he is reported to be a Lord Hanuman devotee and carries with him a locket of the monkey god along with other good luck charms.

How do these stories get started?

A recent photo posted on Time`s White House Photo of the Day collection shows the first ever Black-American nominee in the race to the White House carries with him a bracelet belonging to an American soldier deployed in Iraq, a gambler's lucky chit, a tiny monkey god, tiny Madonna and child.