Annals of the Anthropocene: when the ocean becomes the farm

When I started posting weekly "Warming Wednesdays," I rapidly discovered that even an elementary acquaintance with climate change issues would force me to learn much about the scale and impact of our human effect on the planet about that I'd barely considered. Shortly after that, I became prepared to believe, against all my "natural" instincts, that we now live in the Anthropocene, an age in which human activity, ingenuity, and intelligence will determine what sort of environment exists on Earth. No, I don't really have my mind around that notion, but I'm trying.

In the interests of trying, I'll be posting here occasionally under the heading. Annals of the Anthropocene a supplement to the ongoing Warming Wednesdays series. None of this is my area of expertise, but that is true for most of us; for all of us, learning to think about human impacts and our consequent responsibility is simply part of being the lead species that we are in this time.

Paul Greenberg's Four Fish: the future of the last wild food is one of the most thought provoking volumes I've encountered in the last few years. It's an exploration of the insight that, just as on land, farming -- cultivation and management for human needs -- is coming to our relationship with the oceans. He explains:

... the interplay of domestication and wildness is one of the most important issues going on with fish today. Choosing which fish will be our domesticated "seafood" will have huge ramifications for our species and for the planet. In fact, we are right now zeroing in on our cattle, pigs, sheep and goats of the sea. Across menus and markets, we are starting to come to a consensus on what we're looking for in fish: something pink and succulent like a salmon; something white and meaty, the category that's usually filled by a number of near shore fish that are often called "bass" or "snapper"; something white and flakey that you can deep fry, i.e. codfish; and something that's steak-like and dense for grilling and sushi, like tuna. So we have roughly those four "fish-flesh" types on our menus. The most important ecological question facing the oceans today is how we can sustainably meet this demand using different methods of capturing and farming fish.

Greenberg traveled all over the world seeking to understand aquaculture. He interviewed its scientific inventors and environmentally conscious fish farmers -- and also the inevitable industrial fish producers who leave endangered and depleted fisheries in their destructive wake.

He tries to imagine how farmed but relatively healthy oceans can co-exist with billions of hungry humans.

Fishermen need to start seeing themselves more as herders than hunters. The open-ended nature of fishing has to change. Highly damaging fishing methods like the most destructive forms of bottom trawling, purse seining (encircling entire schools of fish with a large net), and certain kinds of long-lining need to be taken off the table. To paraphrase the UK-based writer and conservationist, Charles Clover, you wouldn't just drag a net along the Serengeti knocking down all the trees and killing all the birds, zebras, lions and elephants, just so you could extract the wildebeest. That, in effect, is what some of the worst industrial fishing practices do. That sort of behavior shouldn't be allowed.

On the fish farming front, well, we need to look at what the organic land-farming movement has found — that monocultures and feedlots are not the answer. Polycultures are the way to go. I'm reminded of the "three sisters" culture that native Americans used. Corn, squash and beans were often grown together. Corn provides the pole structure for bean plants, beans fix nitrogen for the corn and squash provide ground cover and weed suppression for all three. In Canada they are just starting to polyculture salmon together with mussels, commercial brown algae and sea cucumbers. Tilapia, likewise, can work well with hydroponic crops like tomatoes. With fish farming we have an opportunity to make polyculture our starting point rather than our desperate attempt later on to fix a taxed and broken system.

This book is fascinating and important as we stumble into the Anthropocene. Greenberg likes fish and fishermen; that makes for easy reading.

In observance of National Coming Out Day

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force has a nice little campaign to encourage the government to count all of us. If LGBT people aren't visible in official statistics, we're not really there when it comes to government protections and services. Yet the Census still fails to ask.

[NGLT is] campaigning to change the Census in future years to make sure it includes questions that identify LGBT people. And it's more than just the Census -- we need all the yearly surveys the government conducts to do this as well. We need to be counted. When we go to bat for things like LGBT health services or hate crime prevention, we can use this data to prove our point. We'll be able to say, "Look, there are people who need this in your district."

Seems a good idea to me.

Good news for California libraries and their patrons

California Governor Jerry Brown signed a lot of bills lately, many of them measures that will improve the quality of life for state residents. The highest profile law was an upgrade to the state Dream Act allowing undocumented state resident public college students to apply for state scholarships. ¡Que vivan los estudiantes and way to go Jerry!

Less noticed is that Brown has signed a bill to make it far more difficult for cash strapped counties and cities to hand their libraries over to for-profit companies. Along with public schools, libraries are one of our leveling institutions, a place everyone can go to seek information or entertainment, to use a computer, or even, if you are well behaved, to get out of the rain.

AB 438, by Assemblyman Das Williams, D-Santa Barbara, requires private companies to prove they will save taxpayers money before they are allowed to take over operating a public library.

Contra Costa Times

You might not suspect there would be profit-seeking companies that think they can squeeze money out of formerly public libraries, but there are. How? Easy, get rid of the librarians. Oh yes -- and continue to recruit unpaid citizen volunteers.

There's an unexamined idea out there that private enterprise must be more efficient and cheaper than government management. But too often, this is simply false. Brad Plummer reported a study of costs and savings from privatization at the federal level from the Project on Government Oversight (POGO).

For its study, POGO decided to do something different than the usual method of comparing public- and private-sector salaries. Instead, the group scrutinized the actual contracts that were awarded to companies for specific tasks and compared them with what it cost the government to do the same job in-house. They looked at 550 contracts — all deemed “fair and reasonable”— for 35 different jobs across government agencies, from auditors and engineers to food inspectors and groundskeepers.

As it turned out, the private contractors cost more in 33 of those 35 jobs. On average, the service contracts paid private employees 83 percent more than the government would pay a federal employee doing the same job (and that’s even taking into account health care benefits, pensions, and so on). There’s a long debate about whether workers in the private sector actually make less than their federal counterparts, but it turns out this is all beside the point. The POGO analysis found that private contractors working with the government make, on average, twice as much as a comparable private-sector worker.

Besides, do we really want some unaccountable business looking over our shoulders when we read or research or view? Phillip Pullman, the author of The Golden Compass, envisions the library privatizers as greedy ghosts.

The greedy ghost understands profit all right. But that's all he understands. What he doesn't understand is enterprises that don't make a profit, because they're not set up to do that but to do something different. He doesn't understand libraries at all, for instance. That branch - how much money did it make last year? Why aren't you charging higher fines? Why don't you charge for library cards? Why don't you charge for every catalogue search? Reserving books - you should charge a lot more for that. Those bookshelves over there - what's on them? Philosophy? And how many people looked at them last week? Three? Empty those shelves and fill them up with celebrity memoirs.

That's all the greedy ghost thinks libraries are for...

And the secrecy of it! The blessed privacy! No-one else can get in the way, no-one else can invade it, no-one else even knows what's going on in that wonderful space that opens up between the reader and the book. That open democratic space full of thrills, full of excitement and fear, full of astonishment, where your own emotions and ideas are given back to you clarified, magnified, purified, valued. You're a citizen of that great democratic space that opens up between you and the book. And the body that gave it to you is the public library. Can I possibly convey the magnitude of that gift?

Leave the libraries alone! Never, never give them to businesses accountable only to the bottom line. There are other values.

Scene from Fleet Week in the military's new day

It's the annual Fleet Week in San Francisco. That means for the last few days the Navy air show team, the Blue Angels, have been flying over the city. They are enjoyed by hundreds of thousands for their daring and cursed by the minority who hate being loudly, dangerously, and expensively buzzed by this advertisement for military power.

Fleet Week also means the sailors are in town.

Every Sunday in the fall I watch football on TV with a rowdy bunch of gay guys who as very young men were draftees in Vietnam. It's an understatement to say they didn't like being involuntary soldiers in a war they hated and were simply glad to survive. They have dutifully marched against their country's subsequent wars.

But yesterday one of them, I'll call him "Bob," wanted to report a scene that made his heart glad. He'd dropped by a gay bar the day before and there they were: three serving Marines in full uniform, having a high old time. These men didn't have to hide their sexual orientation any longer. He was stunned, a little confused in his feelings, but happy: "They were so cute! ..."

Others couldn't let this go by. Bob was yelled at: "Stop it .. they are murderers!"

These folks have been friends through life and death for almost 50 years, so they quickly dropped the subject and went back to appreciating the 49ers pounding on the Tampa Bay Bucs.

I don't really have anymore to say about this little scene except that, for the people who find themselves sent to fight, their wars are never entirely over.

Don't let those dirty hippies get started ...

Last we heard from Rep. Peter King he was leading a Republican Congressional witch hunt seeking imaginary terrorists in Muslim-American mosques.

The 99 percent don't intend to quit til we get our country back from the thugs on Wall Street -- and from Washington pols who dance their tune.

H/t Inch at a Time.

Occupy at the beach: tax the rich!

Brad is at it again, embodying protest as art.



Sign up to send a message at the website. He needs to know how many of us will be there in order to plan.

What a government captured by plutocrats has inspired

Most people take to protest only when they believe it is their best hope for getting what they want. It doesn’t have to be extremely promising, just more likely to work than anything else.

David S. Meyer

There's a corollary. When the people who are protesting show they are willing to suffer for what they are seeking, for just a moment the rest of society will listen up. That's how genuinely nonviolent movements break through the media filter.

For an instant, most involuntarily, Occupy Wall Street got that because cops acted badly, with mace and mass arrests. Our opponents won't always be so stupid -- probably. But succesful movements gain intelligence on the fly too.

Find a national list of Occupy events here.

Saturday scenes and scenery: Domestic bliss in a household with a knitter

Turn around one day and this might be the look of the living room floor. She was thinking about color.


Look out the window and there's this.


I'm not going to pretend I don't enjoy wearing the product.

Peace vigil endures

After ten years of war in Afghanistan, they are still showing up to stand silently for one hour on Thursdays beside the tall, cold, glass and steel old Federal Building.


Quakers have been there from the beginning.


The Episcopal Peace Fellowship has also been faithful. Bishop Marc Andrus joined the little band yesterday.


Supervisor and mayoral candidate John Avalos turned out to deliver a commendation from the entire Board. The city recognizes this faithful witness is emblematic of our city's values (on our better days.)


Although founder Markley Morris has "retired" from the vigil, he is still a smiling presence, plying passersby with flyers.

No gay marriage initiative in California in 2012

Yesterday the LGBT advocacy organization Equality California made it official that they would not lead the community back to the ballot next year to try to overturn Prop. 8, the state's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

Right after the 2008 vote, there were heated calls from many gay sectors to bring up the issue again as soon as possible. Approaching the 2010 election, I was certain that a quick counter-initiative was a losing proposition and delighted that we didn't try it. This time around, I was agnostic, but I think I'm pleased to hear that our leaders have backed away from another campaign.

They estimate that it would cost $40 million to fight this kind of initiative. The fundraising would be tough. With New York, a huge state won via the legislative horse-trading and donor pressure, now anchoring the marriage movement, winning a tough vote in California at that kind of cost isn't likely to attract out of state funding. National funding for gay rights is more likely to go to smaller states where there's more chance of victory with less bucks.

Though nationally polls show rising approval for gay marriage, there's been less change in California, possibly because the emotionally charged Prop. 8 campaign left many previously indifferent voters feeling locked into one position or the other.

The 2012 election is not likely to pull out the kind of infrequent and new voters we'll need to win this thing. California won't be a battleground state unless the economy falls off a further cliff -- and if that happens we'll be too poor and too demoralized to make the fight. There will be lots of worthy initiatives for progressives to work on, including one to replace capital punishment with sentences of life without parole.

Eventually, unless an on-going federal legal challenge succeeds in invalidating Prop. 8 (still a real possibility), gay marriage will have to win at the ballot box in this state. But we aren't ready for that route just yet.

Afghanistan war, 10 years on

The U.S. exercise in futility in Afghanistan will be 10 years old tomorrow. Nobody knows why U.S. soldiers, Afghan soldiers and Afghan civilians are dying, but this imperial folly grinds on.

And just about everyone understands, in one way or another, that this is madness.

• Terry Gross of NPR recently interviewed Mark Mazzetti, a New York Times journalist who shared a Pulitzer in 2009 for reporting from the war. Neither of them seems to be a strong critic of U.S. power projection. That only makes this exchange more poignant.

  GROSS: Is there anybody among your sources in the Pentagon or sources in the State Department or the White House who truly believe that if we stayed longer in Afghanistan that we could turn around the state and really make it, you know, a safer, more democratic place that would really function as a state?
  
  MAZZETTI: No one I talked to believes some of the things that people believed 10 years ago when they were wondering what was possible, a very Democratic state, as you said, a state modeled after a Western democracy. No one thinks that's really possible. ... I think there's also resignation to some degree over exactly how Pakistan operates. You know, you would hear a couple of years ago that, you know, the United States was very eager to get Pakistan to cut its ties to militants, to, quote, "change its behavior," that, you know, maybe, you know, Pakistan could be turned around in America's minds. You don't hear that anymore. ...

• Harvard Professor Steve Walt, an exponent of international relations realism, is more direct. He is willing to say that the war is a stupid, costly defeat for the United States.

  The truth is that the United States and its allies lost the war in Iraq and are going to lose the war in Afghanistan. There: I said it. By "lose," I mean we will eventually withdraw our military forces without having achieved our core political objectives, and with our overall strategic position weakened.

• We the people have had enough of the Afghanistan war.

  A majority (58 percent) in a recent CBS News Poll said the United States should not be involved in a war in Afghanistan now, while only 35 percent said the country was doing the right thing by fighting the war. Almost 70 percent said the war has lasted longer than expected and almost as many (62 percent) said the number of troops in Afghanistan should be decreased. ... In a national poll by Pew Research Center, 41 percent said that “considering the costs versus the benefits to the U.S.,” the war in Afghanistan has been worth fighting, but 52 percent disagreed.

When everyone knows that a war is nothing but waste of lives and treasure, simply futile, when does the killing stop?

Warming Wednesdays: thoughts from a dentist's waiting room

One of the few collateral benefits of extensive tooth repairs is leafing through National Geographic magazines in waiting rooms.

The June issue, pictured here, leads with a fascinating article about an archeological site at Göbekli Tepe in modern Turkey. Apparently a temple or temples, the carefully carved pillars here were built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the pyramids in Egypt. Lacking a water source or evidence of human settlement, this was apparently a place of pilgrimage where crowds gathered periodically but did not live permanently; the lead investigator speculates that, in addition to whatever spiritual awe the edifice inspired, it is also appropriate to think of it as "the Neolithic version of Disneyland."

All this suggests a new story about how we humans stopped wandering and took up agriculture. Students of human history used to believe that an episode of climate change, a Little Ice Age, pushed our ancestors to learn how to cultivate and harvest plant foods, enabling large settlements and the development of complex cultures.

Newly excavated sites suggest our evolution proceeded in a different sequence; planting, cultivating and harvesting may have followed on the needs of people at human gathering places -- spiritual and social -- rather than in response to external necessities. Less Ice Age push, more social and spiritual pull ...

"Twenty years ago everyone believed civilization was driven by ecological forces," [archeologist Klaus] Schmidt says. "I think what we are learning is that civilization is a product of the human mind."

***What's this got to do with contemporary climate change? A great deal, I think.

Scientists today are trying to get across to us that we're living in the Anthropocene era, that humans are remaking the planet in accordance with the byproducts of our imagination, our intelligence, our civilization. Moreover, our impacts have become so great that we can no longer get away with doing this unconsciously. We're at a turning point, as were those ancient humans whose creativity carried the species into the Neolithic Age.

The idea that their process was driven by social and spiritual needs as well as (or indistinguishable from) material necessity should tell us something about how the species might interact with and respond to contemporary climate change. Respond we will; for a glimpse, chekc out Bradford Plummer for a measured description of geoengineering schemes.

I find the emerging picture of how our ancestors became us suggests something about how we'll weather what we've wrought on the planet, for good and ill.

From #OccupySF

I dropped in on the protest at 101 Market Street in San Francisco's Financial District today.


Signs facing the street leaned against several tents at the encampment of about 50 people. I was glad to see tents as it was beginning to rain for the first time this fall. A surprising number of drivers passing by honked their approval.


There were the trappings of life ...


animated conversations ...


and people creating art.


Some ask, what do these "occupy" people want? That's not so hard; they want to be treated as inherently deserving human beings. And they feel contemporary U.S. society isn't giving them that.


The lack of an articulated list of demands reflects that people are not acting from a shared agreement on what is keeping them -- what is keeping most all of us -- from our due. There's a kind of consensus to blame the banks and "corporations" but not a program. Rather, this is an effort to create a culture of resistance to dehumanization.


I'm surprised by the prominent place that U.S. flags hold in this emerging culture. In my generation, the generation of the Vietnam war, we burned those things. But after 9/11, I guess we can try to reclaim them.


OccupySF reminded me of other hopeful encampments I've known. In 1969, there were the early days of People's Park in Berkeley when activists expropriated university land to build community. In 1985, people with AIDS chained themselves to a San Francisco federal building seeking government attention to the plague and long running tent vigil formed around them.

Both these cheerful gatherings eventually attracted more than their share of society's damaged sufferers, rendering them problematic spaces for others. Neither of them led to utopias, but they left their mark -- there's more government preservation of community spaces these days and eventually the health establishment turned its sights on AIDS.

The current "occupiers" are clearly an experiment that has struck a chord; something will come of this energy though we won't know for awhile just what. Go visit for yourself. You might be able to find local emanations here.

Deja vu all over again: Iran

This drivel just keeps coming back. It wouldn't matter except that its purveyors are considered Very Serious People, especially by Republican presidents, though Democrats are not immune.

International relations professor Stephen Walt points to a piece of current imperial folly that a couple of neo-cons are peddling about how the U.S. should deal with Iran. These are the same dangerous clowns who were sure that invading Iraq would bring hearts and flowers to the greater Middle East. Now they have more snake to sell. No worries here -- if we just push those dumb wogs a little harder, they'll give up their stupid assertion of national pride and do what the United States bids. From Walt:

Pollack and Takeyh also fail to see the irony -- or it is hypocrisy? -- in their own prescriptions. They say at the beginning of their piece that the US must "compel Iran to relinquish its nuclear ambitions, adhere to prevailing norms on terrorism and human rights, and respect the sovereignty of its neighbors" (my [Walt's] emphasis) Yet with a straight face they then proceed to outline a menu of options designed to violate Iran's sovereignty for as long as it takes to produce the government there that we want. And yet we wonder why Iran's leaders don't see us as especially principled or worthy of trust.

In 2003 New York Times writer Steven Kinzer tried to educate the U.S. public about the 1953 coup carried out by the C.I.A. that removed Iran's Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. This event that remains the searing fount of Iranian preceptions of the United States: when Iranians sought to control their own energy resources, Washington overthrew the man Iranians had elected and imposed a dictatorial monarch. No wonder that all Iranians, very much including their own democratically oriented "Green" activists, want no part of a Western order for them not to develop nuclear technology that they believe they are entitled to.

Kinzer's account of the coup is a little over done for me. I don't admire C.I.A. man Kermit Roosevelt's imagination and daring, so I don't really care about the play by play. But I do appreciate Kinzer's exposition of the historical (racist?) ignorance with which the Brits, whose oil fields had been taken over by Iran's people, and most United States officials viewed that ancient country. Westerners have some dim idea that China and perhaps India are modern expressions of complex ancient civilizations. But when it comes to Persia/Iran (and even more the core Middle Eastern lands), we dismiss proud histories as if they had never been.

Mossadegh was a vexing irritant to the West because he belied their stereotypes that they were dealing with a primitive people. When Britain tried to condemn Iranian nationalization of the oil fields at the United Nations, the sophisticated Iranian Prime Minister (he was a lawyer) knew what to do.

Mossadegh loved [the U.N. complaint] so much so that he resolved to come to New York and present his case in person. This was a master stroke. The most eloquent figure Iran had produced in many centuries would now take to the world stage, and he would present not just the case of one small nation against one big company, but that of the wretched of the earth against the rich and powerful. Mossadegh was about to become the preeminent spokesman for the nationalist passion that was surging through the colonial world. ...

"The government of the United Kingdom has made abundantly clear that it has no interest in negotiating, and has instead used every illegitimate means of economic, psychological and military pressure that it could lay its hands on to break our will." Mossadegh declared. "Having first concentrated its warships along our coasts and paratroopers at nearby bases, it makes a great parade of its love for peace."

[He went on:] Our actions are described as "insensate" and our people as "deluded." We have been "precipitate," "arbitrary," and have made life "intolerable." Our legislative process is described as one of "hustling." We are damned as "intransigent" and accused of presenting ultimatums. Our grievances are dismissed as "wild accusations." We are "ridiculous" and exhibit "base ingratitude." We are "intemperate." "exploiters" of our own people, and save our own necks by inflaming our people against foreigners. Our aims are "illusory" and our means of achieving them "suicidal." Our case is presented as one of the lame leading the blind in pursuit of a phantom.

In sum, Mossadegh was guilty of self-respect and assertion of national sovereignty. He blunted the attack on Iran at the United Nations; he had to go.

And so the C.I.A. got rid of him. Here are some of Kinzer's observations on the consequences of that decision. Kermit Roosevelt was brought home to report on his feat.

Roosevelt concluded his White House briefing by warning that the CIA should not take his success in Iran to mean that it could now overthrow governments at will. The Dulles brothers, however, took it to mean exactly that. They were already plotting to strike against the left-leaning regime in Guatemala and asked Roosevelt to lead their coup. He declined. ...

Not that Roosevelt ever thought his operation was wrong ... but apparently its very success raised his alarm in some way.

Within Iran and the developing world:

Its most direct result was to give Mohammad Reza Shah the chance to become dictator. He received enormous amounts of aid from the United States--more than $1 billion in the decade following the coup--but his oppressive rule turned Iranians against him. In 1979 their anger exploded in a shattering revolution led by Islamic fundamentalists.

...Operation Ajax taught tyrants and aspiring tyrants there that the world's most powerful governments were willing to tolerate limitless oppression as long as oppressive regimes were friendly to the West and to Western oil companies.

The United States is still thrashing around amidst the wreckage of empire, vacillating between trying to maintain control of peoples seeking their own ways and outright imposition of rulers we think are "friends." We ask "why to do they hate us?" Kinzer's account of the Iran coup answers that for one proud people and suggests explanations for many more.

Have I mentioned I'm coping with my painful teeth?

Richard Florida looks at Gallup's data on who goes to the dentists.

Income is key, as the Gallup-Healthways study surmised. People see a dentist more frequently in higher-income states. The correlation between the two is considerable (.66). But income is not the only factor to play a role. ...

Dental visits closely track socioeconomic class. They are much higher in states where a higher percentage of the workforce is employed in knowledge, professional, and creative work. The creative class is significantly associated with dentist visits (.31). The same is true of the share of college graduates, a measure of the knowledge base and human capital in a state. The correlation between dental visits and college grads is even higher (.65). On the flip side, visits to the dentist are negatively associated with the working class share of a state’s workforce (-.28).

There's more:

We find close associations between oral health and two key health factors: smoking and obesity. Visits to the dentist are negatively associated with both smoking (-.55) and obesity (-.6). Not surprisingly, more frequent dental visits are associated with higher levels of overall happiness and subjective well-being (with a correlation of .57).

Oral health also reflects the underlying divide between Red and Blue America. Oral health is positively associated with states that voted for Obama in 2008 (.38) and negatively associated with McCain states (-.42).

This article doesn't mention what seems obvious to me about access to dental care. Because dental medicine's evolution became disassociated from and lower status than other health care activities, it is not routinely thought to be something covered by insurance. Even when people have dental insurance, it routinely covers little more than a yearly check up. Of course people aren't going to the dentist -- they can't afford to!

We go to dentists when we can ... and when we decide we have to.

Have I mentioned we are in the middle of ktichen remodeling?

Who knew modern drawers were self-closing?

Obviously we'll be happier when such cabinets and the new stove, refrigerator. and dishwasher -- all currently crowded into the living room -- are installed. But there is progress.

Saturday scenes and scenery: Two San Francisco police officers

She was on break, waiting to meet a friend for dinner.


He was cheerfully herding cars and people at the climate change march last Saturday.

Items I could write posts about

... if I had a different body and mind. (I'm coping with a tough concurrence of dental pain and kitchen remodeling this week. Either would be distracting; both make deeper thought nearly impossible.)

The map above is quite a picture of where racial anxiety of the classic U.S. variety -- white antagonism to people of African descent -- still holds sway. Even if every individual imprisoned for life is really a bad, bad guy, where's something fishy here. None of these are majority Black states. They aren't all former slave states either.***

Okay, so we know that religious beliefs, if we go in for that sort of thing, are supposed to underlie our actions in the world. But I find myself more and more haunted by the insight I took from the sociological study, American Grace, that people in this country are likely to use our religious freedom of choice to migrate to a church grouping that accords with our politics, rather than having our politics shaped by religious precepts. Think about that for a minute ... if true, it says a lot about what we think religious beliefs are for.

Ah well -- at least the findings suggest that in one arena liberals are the people with more intensity ... this too agrees with American Grace.

The graphic comes from a study from Faith Communities Today that suggested that ALL religious bodies are losing the young.

Friday cat blogging

Tina sends these from Beirut.

Mismeasurement and the economists

This stuns me though it may seem obscure. Felix Salmon, a Reuters finance blogger, highlights that the United States Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the part of the Department of Commerce that collects data and issues statistical descriptions of how the economy is doing, was simply wrong by a huge amount when it first calculated what had happened to the domestic economy in the last quarter of 2008. The incoming Obama administration was told that GDP had declined by 3.8 percent. Subsequent "revisions" -- a normal feature of BEA practice as they assemble more data -- have concluded the fall was actually 8.9 percent.

This is Hurricane Katrina-level failure among the green eye shade crowd. If government leaders had known the actual picture more accurately, they might have made a more vigorous effort in the winter of 2009 to get us going again. Maybe. I also suspect that the truly smart ones probably knew they weren't getting good data, but the false picture robbed those who thought we needed a more drastic response of the intellectual ammunition they required to push harder.

Salmon explores structural reasons the BEA has become an unreliable source of information:

... the quality of statistics has been declining, and ... that the status of economists collating such statistics has been declining as well. Once upon a time, extremely well-regarded statisticians put lots of effort into building a system which could measure the economy in real time. Today, I can tell you exactly how many hot young economists dream of working for the BEA on tweaks to the GDP-measurement apparatus: zero.

I’m pessimistic that this is going to change. Putting together macroeconomic statistics is not a prestigious part of the economics profession any more, and government payscales are pretty meager compared to what good economists earn elsewhere.

Increasingly the economists in the government who craft the policy responses to macroeconomic developments are working on a GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) basis. ...

Statistical economists have fallen to the status of first grade teachers: essential to the general welfare but underpaid and scorned.***Paul Krugman has been lamenting the intellectual failings of his discipline on his blog.

I’ve never liked the notion of talking about economic “science” — it’s much too raw and imperfect a discipline to be paired casually with things like chemistry or biology, and in general when someone talks about economics as a science I immediately suspect that I’m hearing someone who doesn’t know that models are only models. Still, when I was younger I firmly believed that economics was a field that progressed over time, that every generation knew more than the generation before.

The question now is whether that’s still true. In 1971 it was clear that economists knew a lot that they hadn’t known in 1931. Is that clear when we compare 2011 with 1971? I think you can actually make the case that in important ways the profession knew more in 1971 than it does now.

Every time I read something like this, I am reminded of my own tiny brush with academic economics as an undergraduate in the 1960s. I wanted to understand how the world worked, so I enrolled in Econ 1, looking for a new way to think. But instead, I was asked to master manipulating (very simple) models that described nothing I'd ever observed around me. The only human activity that I'd seen that seemed to function at all as these models suggested was the amateur marijuana sales market. Perhaps that was the epitome of this "free market"? So I went back to studying history, absorbed what I know of economic thought through The Worldly Philosophers, a bit of Marx, a dose of Samir Amin, and other economic historians, and wondered just what these econ guys thought they were doing.

It's scary to read a winner of the Nobel prize in economics having similar thoughts from within the profession.