Whig Zhou

There’s a new paper out that extends the record of host manipulation by toxoplasma. We already knew that toxoplasma infections cause mice to lose fear of cat urine – turns out that toxoplasma infections also cause chimpanzees to develop a morbid attraction to leopard urine, a marker of their main predator. Uninfected chimps avoid it. Interestingly, infected chips don’t seem attracted to lion or tiger urine, which suggests a specific strain of toxo.

The background is that toxoplasmosis infects many warmblooded creatures as the intermediate host, but can only sexually reproduce in cats, their definitive host. These protozoans (apicomplexans, like malaria) need to have their intermediate host eaten by a cat, and they’ve apparently evolved methods of manipulating host behavior to help bring that about, probably through their colonization of the brain.

There is some evidence that toxoplasma in the brain has effects on human behavior, such as slowed reaction times, reduced long-term concentration, and, of course, liking the smell of cat urine.

The changes in mice sure look like host manipulation, and I have wondered if it might be happening in humans – in particular, cat ladies, but maybe this played a role in the whole human domestication-of-cats thing. Then again, perhaps it was toxoplasma domesticating humans. But if this manipulation happens in chimpanzees, you just know it has to work in humans. This suggests that if you eliminate the toxoplasma in the brains of cat ladies, say with Atovaquone and Clindamycin, you could perhaps cure their morbid attraction, just as antibiotics can cure parthenogenesis in parasitic wasps infected by Wolbachia. Cured, they might put all their flea-bitten parasites in a sack and throw them into the river. And get a dog.

About half the human race has toxo on the brain, as if we didn’t already have enough trouble.

The big question (other than helping explain human craziness) is whether this is an important part of how cats make a living. It may be that toxo is an essential ingredient in cat predation strategies: if so, it is probably very old, and may even go back before cats, perhaps switching from some creodont.

If toxo naturally can make people like cat piss, it’s already preadapted to become (with suitable genetic engineering) the model system for many kinds of infectious behavior modifiers.

By the time we get to vote on leaving the EU, you’ll be sick and tired of figures. Unless you’re very unusual, you’ll be subject to the human tendency to confirmation bias. When you see claims that sustain your pre-existing assumptions, you’ll vaguely believe them; when you see claims that challenge your prejudices, you’ll barely register them.

The Remain campaign is plainly going keep questioning my statistics, and quite right, too. You should consider their critique before deciding who is right. And, of course, the same applies to their statistics.

The ten quotations below are taken from the Britain Stronger in Europe (BSE) leaflet sent by post to ten million households. If my experience in debates with EU supporters is anything to go by, we’ll be hearing them again and again before polling day. But repetition doesn’t make them true. Let’s ponder them in turn.

1. “The benefits are worth £3,000 per year to the average household”

Channel 4’s FactCheck has called this figure “fiction”, and with good reason. It comes from a paper by the Brussels-funded CBI. The CBI didn’t base its claim on any research; instead, it arbitrarily picked five estimates, evidently chosen because they gave pro-EU findings, and then plucked a figure from the top end of the range. As FactCheck says, the CBI number is “way more optimistic than most other estimates, and we can’t don’t really know how CBI researchers have arrived at this figure”.

For most UK households, the three largest budget items are food, fuel and tax. All three ought to fall outside the EU. Groceries will be cheaper because we will no longer have to subsidise Continental farmers. Fuel bills will fall without EU rules requiring us to buy more expensive alternative energy. And the £350 million we send to Brussels every week would be enough to give the entire country a 71 per cent council tax rebate.

2. “If we left the EU, the cost of imports [from the EU] would increase by £11 billion”

This claim rests on the idiotic assumption that, outside the EU, Britain would impose tariffs on the other member states. But no one is suggesting such a thing. Even Lord Rose, who heads the pro-EU campaign, accepts that free trade would continue. As Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, our former Ambassador to Brussels, admits: “There is no doubt that the UK could secure a free trade agreement with the EU.”

A pan-European free trade area stretches from non-EU Iceland to non-EU Turkey, covering EU and non-EU states alike. Indeed, since the EU’s association agreements in Moldova and Ukraine came into effect, the only geographically European countries that have chosen to stand aside are Russia and Belarus.

3. “Over 3 million UK jobs are linked to our trade with the EU”

The dishonesty of this claim is staggering. It is based on the same false idea that Britain would stop trading with the EU if it were not a member. Why? No one argues that we have to form a political union with, say, Brazil or Russia in order to do business with those countries.

The economist from whose work the figure was taken, Dr Martin Weale, has called the claim “pure Goebbels”, adding: “In many years of academic research, I cannot recall such a wilful distortion of the facts.”

4. “Countries that want free access to Europe’s market of 500 million have to accept free movement”

Nonsense. To pick a random example, the EU just signed a free trade agreement with Colombia. No one suggested that free movement had to be part of the deal.

Outside the EU, Britain might want to keep a measure of labour mobility with other EU states. But we would recover the ability to decide whom to admit and in what numbers.

5. “Leaving would also mean our border controls move from Calais to Dover”

The reciprocal stationing of UK and French customs officials on both sides of the Channel has nothing to do with the EU. It rests on two bilateral deals between London and Paris: the 1993 Sangatte Protocol and the 2003 Le Touquet Treaty. I explained on CapX last week quite how mendacious this claim is.

6. “Being in the EU means lower prices in our shops”

Au contraire, as we say in Brussels. Being in the EU means being inside the EU’s Common External Tariff, and having to charge duties on imports from non-EU countries – especially on agricultural products, textiles and commodities, precisely the things that Britain sources from outside Europe.

Outside the EU, we would continue to have tariff-free access for EU goods, but we could extend the same deal to non-EU producers, not least the growing economies of the Commonwealth. As well as helping those countries, it would mean that the price of food, clothes and other goods would fall in Britain.

7. “We are an independent nation within the EU”

Of all BSE’s claims, this is perhaps the most shameless. The essence of the EU, the thing that distinguishes it from every other international association, is that its laws take precedence over the laws of its member nations. As Lord Hoffman, the senior judge, put it, “The EU Treaty the supreme law of this country, taking precedence over Acts of Parliament.”

BSE brazenly says that the idea that Eurocrats “set our laws” is a “myth”. In fact, on everything from what taxes we pay to what we can fish from the sea, from employment law to immigration, we must do as Brussels says.

8. “The UK gets £66 million of investment every day from EU countries”

It’s hard to see how BSE came up with this figure. According to the ONS, investment from other EU states in 2014 was £5.3 billion, or £14.4 million per day – only 19 per cent of total inward investment in Britain, the vast bulk of which now comes from outside the EU.

Europhiles used to claim that investment would dry up if we kept the pound. They were wrong. Then they claimed that it would fall because calling a referendum had created uncertainty. In the event, we have had more inward investment since the referendum as announced than any country in the EU. According to Ernst and Young, 66 per cent of Asian investors and 72 per cent of American investors want Britain to have a looser relationship with the EU.

9. “Being in the EU costs each household less than a pound a day”

The ONS says our gross contribution to the EU is over £50 million a day. That’s enough to build and equip a brand new NHS hospital every week. Enough to wipe out all the austerity savings in the last parliament twice over. BSE is deducting the money spent in this country from the total; but that assumes it is spent on things we would have chosen for ourselves. It’s rather like arguing that basic rate income tax is not 20p in the pound but zero, because the whole sum is “given back” in roads, schools and defence.

10. “We are safer thanks to the European Arrest Warrant”

Tell that to Andrew Symeou, a teenage Briton who was whisked away to Greece in what was very obviously a case of mistaken identity, and spent two years in that country, 11 months of them in prison, waiting for his trial. Or to the parents of my five-year-old constituent Ashya King, detained in Spain under the European Arrest Warrant because they had taken their child out of Southampton Hospital to seek treatment elsewhere.

EU supporters like to claim that the EU is about security, but Brussels rules make it harder for Britain to deport criminals. As the former head of Interpol, Ronald Noble, said recently, the dismantling of European borders has created “effectively an international passport-free zone for terrorists to execute attacks on the Continent and make their escape.”

The post Ten Euro-myths debunked appeared first on CapX.

The WWF may have a friendly panda for a logo, but amongst the poorest of the poor it's known for something else: violent thugs called ecoguards.

Reader Kenneth has compiled and submitted a comprehensive list of some 250 peer-reviewed scientific papers from 2015 on climate, all supporting the premise that the Earth’s climate is driven in large part by natural factors. It now has been posted.

Science institutes can no longer ignore massive body of scientific evidence that contradicts the man-made global warming theory. Image: logo of the National Academy of Sciences

How could the IPCC, scientific academies, institutions, lawmakers possibly ignore them? They are out there for all to see – and now in a single list.

What follows is just a tiny random sampling of the findings this massive body of evidence delivers:

A small sampling of findings

“Mounting evidence from proxy records suggests that variations in solar activity have played a significant role in triggering past climate changes.” http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/43/3/203

“Solar minimum conditions reinforce the high pressure above Greenland together with a weakening of the other two North Atlantic pressure centres.” http://www.ann-geophys.net/33/207/2015/angeo-33-207-2015.pdf

“There have been many studies noting correlations between solar cycles and changes in the Earth temperature.”
http://www.rxiv.org/pdf/1504.0124v1.pdf

“Ocean heat content anomaly (OHCa) time series in some areas of the Pacific are significantly correlated with the total solar irradiance (TSI). ” http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682615300778

“Here, we demonstrate that the CR [cosmic ray] effect on ΔGT [global temperature] is robust to reasonable measures of global temperature,…” http://www.pnas.org/content/112/34/E4640.extract

“Solar forcing as an important trigger for West Greenland sea-ice variability over the last millennium.”
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379115301682

“We show how clouds provide the necessary degrees of freedom to modulate the Earth’s albedo setting the hemispheric symmetry. We also show that current climate models lack this same degree of hemispheric symmetry and regulation by clouds.”
http://webster.eas.gatech.edu/Papers/albedo2015.pdf

“While there is scientific consensus that global and local mean sea level (GMSL and LMSL) has risen since the late nineteenth century, the relative contribution of natural and anthropogenic forcing remains unclear.”
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150729/ncomms8849/full/ncomms8849.html

“Most present-generation climate models simulate an increase in global-mean surface temperature (GMST) since 1998, whereas observations suggest a warming hiatus.”
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v517/n7536/full/nature14117.html

“Positive (negative) phases of the AMO coincide with warmer (colder) North Atlantic sea surface temperatures. The AMO is linked with decadal climate fluctuations, such as Indian and Sahel rainfall, European summer precipitation, Atlantic hurricanes and variations in global temperatures. It is widely believed that ocean circulation drives the phase changes of the AMO by controlling ocean heat content. “
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v521/n7553/full/nature14491.html

“Predicted slow-down in the rate of Atlantic sea ice loss. Recent forecasts indicate that a spin-down of the thermohaline circulation that began near the turn of the century will continue, and this will result in near neutral decadal trends in Atlantic winter sea ice extent in coming years, with decadal growth in select regions.”
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GL065364/abstract

The list of the 2015 papers with such findings is some 250 long! To claim that they do not matter and do not count is willful ignorance. And keeping them from the public is flat out deception and a disservice to the field of science. Little wonder government and institutions have seen the public trust fade.

This list is the perfect thing to educate them. only needs to be sent this list. Send it to your Senators, Congressmen, newspaper editors, journalists, teachers, professors or blind following alarmists who are currently on the verge of a nervous breakdowns over the fictitious global warming catastrophe.

 

Remember all the old Canadian nationalists? The ones who said that the (Canada-US) Free Trade Agreement would destroy Canadian culture? The ones we economists defeated back in the 1988 election? I'm beginning to wish we hadn't defeated them quite so thoroughly.

They were wrong. But they sorta, kinda, did have a point. Social/economic institutions are endogenous. They are not part of the unchanging geological landscape. Social/economic institutions are part of what people do; they are part of how people interact with each other, and expect others to interact with them. And, at least in principle, there is no reason why those social/economic institutions should be exogenous with respect to our imports and exports. And there is, or there used to be, a whole school of Canadian economics that pushed exactly that idea. So if you could make a reasonable case that the FTA and importing or exporting more apples would cause Canadian social/economic institutions to become, well, like North Korea, then OK. All that guff about comparative advantage and economies of scale and the gains from trade wouldn't be very convincing.

Here's Jonathan Portes:

"The essence of the economic case for migration is very simple: it is the same as the case for markets in general. If people take decisions on the basis of their own economic self-interest, this will maximise overall welfare. This applies to where people live and work just as much, if not more, than it applies to buying and selling goods and services. Of course markets fail here, as elsewhere, and "more market" is not always better. But the view that, as a general proposition, markets are good at allocating resources - including human resources - is widely shared among economists.

And this analogy holds in a narrower, more technical sense as well. The classic argument for free trade, as advanced by Adam Smith, is not just analogous to, but formally identical to, the argument for free movement. It is easy to see this. In economic terms, allowing somebody to come to your country and trade with you (or work for you, or employ you) is identical to removing trade barriers with their country." [bold added]

Sometimes I am proud of what some people unkindly call economists' "autism". At other times I despair. This is one of those other times.

Importing people is not like importing apples.

It's not just "labour services" and "consumer demand" that crosses the border; it's people. And there's a lot more to people than just bundles of labour services and consumer demands, where tariffs and transport costs make the only difference to whether they are inside or outside the borders.

"Total Factor Productivity" is not some geological feature like the Canadian shield. There has to be a reason why some countries are rich and other countries are basket cases, and unless you are lucky enough to find yourselves sitting on great reservoirs of oil that someone else will pay you to pump out of the ground, that reason seems to have something to do with social/economic institutions, and social/economic institutions seem to have something to do with people.

If you have a model which treats Total Factor Productivity as exogenous, then yes, if "resources" flow from places with low TFP to places with high TFP, as they will if the invisible hand is allowed to operate, that would be a Good Thing. But you need to stop and ask: "Hang on. I wonder why TFP is higher in some places than in others?" Which should lead you to the next question: "I wonder if TFP really would be exogenous to the sort of policy experiment I'm using my model for?". Which should lead you to the next question: "I wonder if social/economic institutions really would be exogenous to the sort of policy experiment I'm using my model for?"

How exactly will social/economic institutions change when we import people? God only knows. They might change for the better; they might change for the worse. It depends on them; it depends on us. But they almost certainly will change. And if you can't even see that question, and wonder about it, then you really are missing something that even the great unwashed uneducated rabble can see. And the great unwashed uneducated rabble are going to put even less credence on what you intellectual elites are telling them they ought to think.

Mrs Thatcher was not wrong, but misunderstood. There is such a thing as society, but society is not something that exists apart from the rules of action and belief of the people who create that society on an ongoing basis. We don't just do it once and leave it cast in concrete; we re-create it every day. And as Hobbes said, Total Factor Productivity wasn't so great in the State of Nature.

“Though the mills of God grind slowly; Yet they grind exceeding fine”

It is the most serious of allegations: that a senior judge would attempt to sway the judgement of two Constitutional Court judges. Yet it has been allowed to fester for the last eight years.

The allegation was made by the two justices, Chris Jafta and Bess Nkabinde. It was – to put it simply – that they should find in favour of Jacob Zuma (then facing allegations of corruption in relation to the notorious arms deal.)

Justice Hlophe is alleged to have told them that he would be next Chief Justice and that they should consider their future – and rule in favour of Zuma.

Justice Hlophe, who had faced previous allegations of misconduct, described these allegations as “utter rubbish …” and as “… another ploy …” to damage his reputation”.

But the matter has dragged on…and on…and never been resolved. Hlophe (who is the Judge President of the Western Cape) has used every judicial ploy to ensure that it never comes before a full court.

Today, finally, it has moved one step forward, with a hearing in the Supreme Court.

Don’t hold your breath…

Martin

Source: Eyewitness News

JOHANNESBURG – The Supreme Court of Appeal has reserved judgment in the case involving misconduct charges against Western Cape Judge President John Hlophe.

The court heard arguments today on the legality of the tribunal investigating him.

Constitutional Court Justices Bess Nkabinde and Chris Jafta have accused Hlophe of trying to influence them during an arms deal case involving President Jacob Zuma in 2008.

Nkabinde and Jafta have challenged the legitimacy of a tribunal set up by the Judicial Service Commission in 2013 into Hlophe.

They both refused to testify, accusing Hlophe of trying to influence them during cases involving Zuma and arms manufacturer, Thint.

They want the tribunal to be properly and legally constituted.

The Supreme Court of Appeal has raised concerns about how long this matter has gone on for.

The tribunal remains suspended until the matter is finalised.

 

 

 

 

 

 

一家酒馆的老板在公共场合两次被委员会执行官员要求脱下他的珍藏版Union Jack英国国旗夹克——穿着可能有冒犯他人的风险。

Technology could eventually lead to the creation of replacement body parts

Another day, another study purporting to find that Tech Is Sexist. Since it’s showing up here, you probably already guessed how this is going to end. Most of this analysis is not original to me – Hacker News had figured a lot of it out before I even woke up this morning – but I think it’ll at least be helpful to collect all the information in one easily linkable place.

The study is Gender Bias In Open Source: Pull Request Acceptance Of Women Vs. Men. It’s a pretty neat idea: “pull requests” are discrete units of contribution to an open source project which are either accepted or rejected by the community, so just check which ones are submitted by men vs. women and whether one gender gets a higher acceptance rate than the other. This is a little harder than it sounds – people on GitHub use nicks that don’t always give gender cues – but the researchers wrote a program to automatically link contributor emails to Google Plus pages so they could figure out users’ genders.

This alone can’t rule out that one gender is genuinely doing something differently than another, so they had another neat trick: they wrote another program that automatically scored accounts on obvious gender cues: for example, somebody whose nickname was JaneSmith01, or somebody who had a photo of themselves on their profile. By comparing obviously gendered participants with non-obviously gendered participants whom the researchers had nevertheless been able to find the gender of, they should be able to tell whether there’s gender bias in request acceptances.

Because GitHub is big and their study is automated, they manage to get a really nice sample size – about 2.5 million pull requests by men and 150,000 by women.

They find that women get more (!) requests accepted than men for all of the top ten programming languages. They check some possible confounders – whether women make smaller changes (easier to get accepted) or whether their changes are more likely to serve an immediate project need (again, easier to get accepted) and in fact find the opposite – women’s changes are larger and less likely to serve project needs. That makes their better performance extra impressive.

So the big question is whether this changes based on obviousness of gender. The paper doesn’t give a lot of the analyses I want to see, and doesn’t make its data public, so we’ll have to go with the limited information they provide. They do not provide an analysis of the population as a whole (!) but they do give us a subgroup analysis by “insider status”, ie whether the person has contributed to that project before.

Among insiders, women do the same as men when gender is hidden, but better than men when gender is revealed. In other words, if you know somebody’s a woman, you’re more likely to approve her request than you would be on the merits alone. We can’t quantify exactly how much this is, because the paper doesn’t provide numbers, just graphs. Eyeballing the graph, it looks like being a woman gives you about a 1% advantage. I don’t see any discussion of this result, even though it’s half the study, and as far as I can tell the more statistically significant half.

Among outsiders, women do the same as/better than men when gender is hidden, and the same as/worse than men when gender is revealed. I can’t be more specific than this because the study doesn’t give numbers and I’m trying to eyeball confidence intervals on graphs. The study itself say that women do worse than men when gender is revealed, so since the researchers presumably have access to their real numbers data, that might mean the confidence intervals don’t overlap. From eyeballing the graph, it looks like the difference is 1% – ie, men get their requests approved 64% of the time, and women 63% of the time. Once again, it’s hard to tell by graph-eyeballing whether these two numbers are within each other’s confidence intervals.

The paper concludes that “for insiders…we see little evidence of bias…for outsiders, we see evidence of gender bias: women’s acceptance rates are 71.8% when they use gender neutral profiles, but drop to 62.5% when their gender is identifiable. There is a similar drop for men, but the effect is not as strong.”

In other words, they conclude there is gender bias among outsiders because obvious-women do worse than gender-anonymized-women. They admit that obvious-men also do worse than gender-anonymized men, but they ignore this effect because it’s smaller. They do not report doing a test of statistical significance on whether it is really smaller or not.

So:

1. Among insiders, women get more requests accepted than men.

2. Among insiders, people are biased towards women, that is, revealing genders gives women an advantage over men above and beyond the case where genders are hidden.

3. Among outsiders, women still get more requests accepted than men.

4. Among outsiders, revealing genders appears to show a bias against women. It’s not clear if this is statistically significant.

5. When all genders are revealed among outsiders, men appear to have their requests accepted at a rate of 64%, and women of 63%. The study does not provide enough information to determine whether this is statistically significant. Eyeballing it it looks like it might be, just barely.

6. The study describes its main finding as being that women have fewer requests approved when their gender is known. It hides on page 16 that men also have fewer requests approved when their gender is known. It describes the effect for women as larger, but does not report the size of the male effects, nor whether the difference is statistically significant. Eyeballing it, it looks about 2/3 the size of the female effect, and maybe?

7. The study has no hypothesis for why both sexes have fewer requests approved when their gender is known, without which it seems kind of hard to speculate about the significance of the phenomenon for one gender in particular. For example, suppose that the reason revealing gender decreases acceptance rates is because corporate contributors tend to use their (gendered) real names and non-corporate contributors tend to use handles like 133T_HAXX0R. And suppose that the best people of all genders go to work at corporations, but a bigger percent of men go there than women. Then being non-gendered would be a higher sign of quality in a man than in a woman. This is obviously a silly just-so story, but my point is that without knowing why all genders show a decline after unblinding, it’s premature to speculate about why their declines are of different magnitudes – and it doesn’t take much to get so small a difference.

8. There’s no study-wide analysis, and no description of how many different subgroup analyses the study tried before settling on Insiders vs. Outsiders (nor how many different definitions of Insider vs. Outsider they tried). Remember, for every subgroup you try, you need to do a Bonferroni correction. This study does not do any Bonferroni corrections; given its already ambiguous confidence intervals, a proper correction would almost certainly destroy the finding.

9. We still have that result from before that women’s changes are larger and less likely to serve immediate needs, both of which make them less likely to be accepted. No attempt was made to control for this.

“Science” “journalism”, care to give a completely proportionate and reasonable response to this study?

Here’s Business Insider: Sexism Is Rampant Among Programmers On GitHub, Research Finds. “A new research report shows just how ridiculously tough it can be to be a woman programmer, especially in the very male-dominated world of open-source software….it also shows that women face a giant hurdle of “gender bias” when others assess their work. This research also helps explain the bigger problem: why so many women who do enter tech don’t stick around in it, and often move on to other industries within 10 years. Why bang your head against the wall for longer than a decade?” [EDIT: the title has since been changed]

Here’s Tech Times: Women Code Better Than Men But Only If They Hide Their Gender: “Interestingly enough, among users who were not well known in the coding community, coding suggestions from those whose profiles clearly stated that the users were women had a far lower acceptance rate than suggestions from those who did not make their gender known. What this means is that there is a bias against women in the coding world.” (Note the proportionate and reasonable use of the term “far lower acceptance rate” to refer to a female vs. male acceptance rate of, in the worst case, 63% vs. 64%.)

Here’s Vice.com: Women Are Better At Coding Than Men: “If feminism has taught us anything, it’s that almost all men are sexist. As this GitHub data shows, whether or not bros think that they view women as equals, women’s work is not being judged impartially. On the web, a vile male hive mind is running an assault mission against women in tech.”

This is normally the part at which I would question how a study got through peer review, but luckily this time there is a very simple answer: it didn’t. If you read the study, you may notice the giant red “NOT PEER-REVIEWED” sign on the top of every page. The paper was uploaded to a pre-peer-review site asking for comments. The authors appear to be undergraduate students.

I don’t blame the authors for doing a neat study and uploading it to a website. I do blame the entire world media up to and including the BBC for swallowing it uncritically. Note that two of the three news sources above failed to report that it is not peer-reviewed.

Oh, one more thing. A commenter on the paper’s pre-print asked for a breakdown by approver gender, and the authors mentioned that “Our analysis (not in this paper — we’ve cut a lot out to keep it crisp) shows that women are harder on other women than they are on men. Men are harder on other men than they are on women.”

Depending on what this means – since it was cut out of the paper to “keep it crisp”, we can’t be sure – it sounds like the effect is mainly from women rejecting other women’s contributions, and men being pretty accepting of them. Given the way the media predictably spun this paper, it is hard for me to conceive of a level of crispness which justifies not providing this information.

So, let’s review. A non-peer-reviewed paper shows that women get more requests accepted than men. In one subgroup, unblinding gender gives women a bigger advantage; in another subgroup, unblinding gender gives men a bigger advantage. When gender is unblinded, both men and women do worse; it’s unclear if there are statistically significant differences in this regard. Only one of the study’s subgroups showed lower acceptance for women than men, and the size of the difference was 63% vs. 64%, which may or may not be statistically significant. This may or may not be related to the fact, demonstrated in the study, that women propose bigger and less-immediately-useful changes on average; no attempt was made to control for this. This tiny amount of discrimination against women seems to be mostly from other women, not from men.

The media uses this to conclude that “a vile male hive mind is running an assault mission against women in tech.”

Every time I say I’m nervous about the institutionalized social justice movement, people tell me that I’m crazy, that I’m just sexist and privileged, and that feminism is merely the belief that women are people so any discomfort with it is totally beyond the pale. I would nevertheless like to re-emphasize my concerns at this point.

[EDIT: I don’t have much of a quarrel with the authors, who seem to have done an interesting study and are doing the correct thing by submitting it for peer review. I have a big quarrel with “science” “journalists” for the way they reported it. If any of the authors read this and want my peer review suggestions, I would recommend:

1. Report gender-unblinding results for the entire population before you get into the insiders-vs.-outsiders dichotomy.
2. Give all numbers represented on graphs as actual numbers too.
3. Declare how many different subgroup groupings you tried, and do appropriate Bonferroni corrections.
4. Report the magnitude of the male drop vs. the female drop after gender-unblinding, test if they’re different, and report the test results.
5. Add the part about men being harder on men and vice versa, give numbers, and do significance tests.
6. Try to find an explanation for why both groups’ rates dropped with gender-unblinding. If you can’t, at least say so in the Discussion and propose some possibilities.
7. Fix the way you present “Women’s acceptance rates are 71.8% when they use gender neutral profiles, but drop to 62.5% when their gender is identifiable”, at the very least by adding the comparable numbers about the similar drop for men in the same sentence. Otherwise this will be the heading for every single news article about the study and nobody will acknowledge that the drop for men exists at all. This will happen anyway no matter what you do, but at least it won’t be your fault.
8. If possible, control for your finding that women’s changes are larger and less-needed and see how that affects results. If this sounds complicated, I bet you could find people here who are willing to help you.
9. Please release an anonymized version of the data; it should be okay if you delete all identifiable information.]

IN 2014 Ukrainian GDP fell by 7%; in 2015 it shrunk by an astonishing 12%. The whole economy is indeed in trouble; the hryvnia, the currency, has lost about 70% against the dollar in the past two years. Inflation is very high (though it is now subsiding). However, what's often lost in analysis is that different parts of the country are doing very differently. 

The war has been concentrated in the east of the country (Donetsk and Luhansk). To show the economic damage this has caused, we've looked at how much construction is going on in different provinces (this is a decent proxy for GDP growth). Data from a warzone are hardly reliable, but there is a regional pattern to Ukraine's economic woes. In January-November 2015 Donetsk's construction shrank by an astonishing 60% on the previous year. 

But western Ukraine is clearly...Continue reading

1. Chart of the Day I (above). New EIA data show that America’s net petroleum imports fell to a 44-year low last year of 24.4% of products supplied, the lowest level since 1971. In an amazing turnaround that was unexpected and unplanned by government bureaucrats or any official US energy policy, America’s shale revolution — a “free market triumph” according to petropreneur Harold Hamm — was solely responsible for bringing net US oil imports down from an all-time high of 60.4% in 2005 down to below 25% in only ten years. Carpe oleum.

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2. Chart of the Day II (above). Thanks in large part to falling gas prices and a gradually improving economy and job market, Americans traveled more by car (and by truck, bus, etc.) on the country’s roads and highways over the most recent 12-month period (through November 2015) than in any 12-month period in US history, according to a recent monthly report from the Federal Highway Administration.

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3. Chart of the Day III (above). In another very important energy milestone, natural gas has now surpassed coal as an energy source for US electricity generation, and we can thank the shale gas revolution for its role in that historic development. For the majority of Americans who are concerned about CO2 emissions, they should be celebrating the fact that CO2 emissions from the US electric power sector were brought to a 20-year low last year thanks to the abundance of environmentally friendly shale gas.

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4. Chart of the Day IV (above). Restaurant employment is booming in Washington state outside of the Seattle MSA area, and increased last year between January and December by 7,400 new jobs (and by 8.5%). In contrast, restaurant hiring stalled out starting last January, and food jobs declined by 300 between January and December of last year. Could higher labor costs in the city of Seattle explain the dramatic difference? In the city of Seattle, the minimum wage is now between $10.50 and $13 an hour compared to the state minimum wage of $9.47 an hour. Of course, the higher labor costs from Seattle’s eventual $15 an hour minimum wage only apply to restaurants in the city and not the Seattle suburbs, so it’s hard to isolate the effect of Seattle’s minimum wage on restaurant employment. But isn’t at least a possibility that it’s the pending $15 an hour minimum wage in the city that is contributing to food job losses in the Seattle MSA between January and December last year?

5. The Great Recession vs. The Great 40% Minimum Wage Hike. From my op-ed (with Michael Saltsman) in the Washington Post (“The District’s wrong turn on minimum wage“):

D.C. restaurants were able to withstand the Great Recession without any major effects on food industry jobs: During a period from 2008 to 2010 when restaurants in the suburbs lost nearly 6,000 jobs, the District’s restaurants actually added more than 1,500 jobs. Today, they’re having a much harder time grappling with the $2.25-per-hour increase in labor costs that occurred in steps on July 2014 and July 2015: D.C. restaurants gained only 100 jobs last year, while suburban restaurants added 3,600 new jobs.

6. Markets in Everything: a) It’s basically “Uber for gas” — App-based Booster Fuels will fill up your car with gas while you’re working and b) Sweden-based Rebtel introduces free, unlimited international app-to-app calling.

7. Quotation of the Day. From the always brilliant Thomas Sowell, writing about the controversy over the lack of black nominees for this year’s Academy Awards:

The assumption seems to be that different groups would be proportionally represented if somebody were not doing somebody else wrong. That assumption carries great weight in far more important things than Academy Awards and in places more important than Hollywood, including the Supreme Court of the United States. Having spent decades researching racial and ethnic groups around the world, I have never yet found a country in which all groups — or even most groups — are even roughly equally represented in most endeavors.

My own favorite example of unrepresentativeness, however, is right at home. Having watched National Football League games for more than 50 years, I have seen hundreds of black players score touchdowns, but I have never seen one black player kick the extra point. What are we to conclude from this? Racist discrimination? Are racists so inconsistent that they are somehow able to stifle their racism when it comes to letting black players score touchdowns, but absolutely draw the line when it comes to letting blacks kick the extra point?

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8. Good Question: Where Have All the Oil Speculators Gone? From Brad Schaeffer’s op-ed in yesterday’s WSJ:

One interesting aspect of this major correction is that the politicians and media commentators who a few years ago were outraged over rising gas prices, denouncing “gouging” and “speculators,” are now curiously quiet (see graphic above). Don’t expect a follow-up for the May 2011 Senate Finance Committee hearing when oil-company executives were called in and excoriated for the sin of returning a profit to shareholders. A few months later, Sen. Bernie Sanders said: “When working families need an end to excessive oil speculation and real relief at the gas pump, the government has failed to act.”

But the usual free-market bashers aren’t the only ones with egg on their faces. Fox News host Bill O’Reilly pounces on “speculators” whenever the price of gas strikes him as unreasonable—as in 2008, when he said: “Speculators gamble on credit, driving the paper price of oil up and down. And we get hosed.” He promoted a bill that would have required market participants classified as speculators to take full physical delivery of the oil on whose price they were betting.

Bernie Sanders was back at it in June 2014, proposing a bill that would give federal regulators emergency powers to stop “Wall Street speculators.” With almost comedic timing, oil prices began their long decline the same month. The price drop occurred without any new regulations because market forces were left to work unfettered, and supply overwhelmed demand.

9. The Snowflake Generation: a) a Rogers, MN youth girls basketball team got kicked out of its league for being too good and b) in the video below (“Dumbing Down University: Closing the Minds of Tomorrow Today”), Pat Condell discusses the campus cry-bullies and the campus censorship epidemic in the UK that have developed in parallel with the same phenomena in the US.

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10. Video of the Day (below). A small 2009 Chevy Malibu demolishes a 1959 Chevy Bel Air in a crash test, demonstrating just how far passenger protection has advanced in the last fifty years.

In the campaign ad above for Hillary Clinton, the narrator tells us that “On average, it takes three hundred Americans working for a solid year to make as much money as one top CEO. It’s called the wage gap.” In a Tweet last month, Bernie Sanders lamented that “CEOs make 300 times what their workers make. That is simply immoral and must be dealt with.”

How accurate are those claims that CEOs in the US make 300 times more than an average full-time American worker? Even if true, so what, is that a problem to be “dealt with”? I’ve blogged about this before on CD, see posts here, here, here and here. Here are a few additional thoughts and observations:

1. If we want an accurate “apples-to-apples” comparison, then shouldn’t we really compare the average CEO in the US to the average American worker? In 2014, there were 21,550 Chief Executives working full-time “managing a company or enterprise” and those CEOs earned an average annual salary of $216,100 according to the BLS. That’s about the same annual salary of $201,030 for the average orthodontist.

The average private full-time American worker earned $48,920 in 2014 (based on an average hourly wage of $24.46). That would give us an “Average CEO-to-Average-Worker Pay“ ratio of only 4.4-to-1 in 2014. That ratio has been been stable over the last 8 years at an average of 4.4-to-1 between 2007 and 2014 (see chart above).

To re-state Hillary Clinton’s claim above: “On average, it takes only 4.4 average Americans working for a solid year to make as much money as one average CEO. It’s called the wage gap.”

2. But Hillary and Sanders, along with the AFL-CIO, like to compare the total compensation of a very small sample of only about 350-475 of the highest-paid CEOs in the US to the average annual pay for about 100 million hourly workers employed at private companies (small, medium and large companies), and some of those workers are part-time. Note that Hillary qualifies her claim of a 300-to-1 CEO-to-worker pay ratio by referring to “top CEOs.” It’s hard to know the exact number for sure, but many of those 100 million hourly workers don’t even work for one of the 350-475 companies headed by a “top CEO.” For example, think of an American working at a small hardware store in Kansas, a family-run restaurant in Montana or a small family-owned grocery store in Kentucky. What sense does it make to compare Apple CEO Tim Cook’s $10m salary to the annual pay of workers who work for those small companies?

Of course, when the average person hears from Hillary or Sanders that there’s a 300-to-1 “wage gap,” and thinks about 300 Americans working all year to equal the salary of one top CEO, many of them are understandably upset. So upset that they can easily be persuaded that something must be done, by Hillary and Bernie of course, to address the “problem” of “excessive CEO pay,” using the heavy hand of government force if they’re elected president.

But when you have a total workforce of 150 million Americans, and you look at 300-400 of the highest paid executives in the US at the head of large, multi-national corporations, and compare their average compensation to the annual income of the “average hourly worker,” including many at small and medium sized firms, why wouldn’t we expect a large “wage gap”? Just like you’d expect to find a pretty big “wage gap” if you compared the average annual income of America’s 100-200 highest paid athletes, or the average salary of the country’s 100-200 highest paid entertainers, musicians or celebrities to the $48,920 annual income of the average hourly worker. And yet we rarely hear complaints about “excessive athlete, musician, or celebrity pay.”

3. Then there’s the inevitable lamenting about how the “CEO-to-worker pay ratio” has increased so much over time. It was about 20-to-1 in 1965, and has grown over time to the current 300-to-1 ratio that Hillary and Bernie complain about. But why wouldn’t we expect the ratio to increase over time? The size of the US workforce has doubled since the 1960s from about 75 million to 150 million workers, so the top 350-500 CEOs have become a smaller and smaller minority of all workers as total payrolls keep increasing. And adjusted for inflation, the S&P500 Index has increased three-fold since the 1960s, meaning that the CEOs of today’s S&P 500 companies are managing firms that are many times larger than S&P500 firms in the past and therefore deserve greater compensation relative to the average worker. For example, the value provided by an average hourly worker at Target or McDonald’s hasn’t changed much in the last 25 years. But the CEOs of Target and McDonald’s today are managing retail and fast food giants that are many times larger than Target and McDonald’s in the early 1990s.

4. To put the size of the largest of today’s S&P500 companies into perspective, I posted last week on CD about how the market value of Apple’s stock at $521 billion is greater than the entire stock market of Brazil ($490 billion). Further, the combined market cap of Apple, Google, Microsoft, ExxonMobil and GE exceeds $2 trillion, and those five companies as a separate country would be the world’s 6th largest stock market. It’s not surprising that the CEOs of S&P 500 companies whose value is comparable to the market caps of the entire stock markets of other countries are highly compensated.

Bottom Line: It might be a little disingenuous and hypocritical for Hillary Clinton to complain about excessive CEO pay when her minimum speaking fee, reportedly $225,000 for a one-hour talk, is more than the $216,000 average annual CEO salary in 2014. We could say how unfair it is that the average CEO in America has to work a full year, 50 weeks full-time, to earn the same income that Mrs. Clinton earns in about 50 minutes giving a speech! How unfair! How immoral! Something must be done!

And if Bernie Sanders compares the pay for an average CEO to the average worker — i.e. compares “apples to apples” — and understands that the Average CEO-to-Average-Worker Pay ratio was only 4.4-to-1 in 2014, I’m not sure how he can call that an “immoral” outcome that must be “dealt with.” If Sanders wants to deal with some excessive pay that’s “immoral” maybe he should start with Mrs. Clinton’s excessive speaking fees before dealing with CEO pay. Or he might deal with the “immorality” that there are currently more than 60 NBA players who will earn $12 million or more this season, which is more than the average CEO of an S&P500 company earns!

The claim of a 300-to-1 ratio for CEO-to-worker pay made by Hillary, Bernie and the AFL-CIO gets my “Biggest Blindly Accepted Statistical Legerdemain Award.” Well no it’s actually a tie with the gender wage gap myth mentioned in the Hillary ad above and the perpetual and incessantly repeated “77 cents on the dollar” statistical falsehood.

This is not an Onion story. And no, you did not travel back in time. It is 2016.

The Guardian reports:

An Italian woman faces six years in jail after her husband accused her of not doing enough cooking and cleaning at home.

Her husband made a formal complaint to the paramilitary Carabinieri police, saying that his wife was slovenly, failed to put meals on the table and left their home in a dreadful mess.

….. The crime, article 572 in the Italian penal code, “punishes whoever mistreats a person in their family or a person entrusted to them for reasons of education, care or custody.”

Her husband, 47, accused her of “bad management of domestic affairs”, in a case that reinforces the image of the harassed Italian wife stirring a steaming pot of pasta sauce while small children run round her feet and the man of the house puts his feet up with a newspaper.

 

Filed under: africa Tagged: Italy, misogyny, Rome, sexism, sexual harassment

Why the need for this series?

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and the Critical Threats Project (CTP) at the American Enterprise Institute conducted an intensive multi-week exercise to frame, design, and evaluate potential courses of action that the United States could pursue to defeat the threat from the Islamic State in Iraq and al Sham (ISIS) and al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria. ISW and CTP will publish the findings of this exercise in multiple reports. The first report examined America’s global grand strategic objectives as they relate to the threat from ISIS and al Qaeda. The second report defined American strategic objectives in Iraq and Syria, identified the minimum necessary conditions for ending the conflicts there, and compared U.S. objectives with those of Iran, Russia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia in order to understand actual convergences and divergences. This third report assesses the strengths and vulnerabilities of ISIS and al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra to serve as the basis for developing a robust and comprehensive strategy to destroy them. Subsequent reports will provide a detailed assessment of the situation on the ground in Syria and present the planning group’s evaluation of several courses of action.

Learn more about this series.

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DOWNLOAD THE REPORT

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The key findings of this second report are:

• ISIS and al Qaeda are Salafi-jihadi military organizations with distinct sources of strength. The groups interact differently with the populations among which they operate. These differences create distinct requirements for destroying each organization.

• U.S. strategy must operate against both ISIS and Jabhat al Nusra simultaneously. Attacking the source of ISIS’s strength—its territorial caliphate—is relatively straightforward to describe. Expelling ISIS’s hybrid forces from terrain and setting conditions to prevent their return is a much more complicated task with which American and Western militaries are nevertheless familiar. Jabhat al Nusra, however, is primed to benefit from ISIS’s defeat by moving into territories from which ISIS has been cleared. Current efforts that focus on ISIS first and plan to address Jabhat al Nusra second (if at all) have a high probability of facilitating Jabhat al Nusra’s expansion.

• Current U.S. policy appears to assume that depriving ISIS of its control of Mosul or ar Raqqa will lead to the organization’s collapse. That assumption was likely valid in 2014 and early 2015, but it is no longer true. ISIS has established itself in multiple major urban centers, including Fallujah, Palmyra, and Deir ez Zour. Any of these cities in Iraq or Syria could serve as a de-facto capital for its caliphate were it deprived of Mosul and ar Raqqa. ISIS must be driven from all urban and major rural population centers in Iraq and Syria if it is to be destroyed.

• Jabhat al Nusra draws strength from its intertwinement with Syrian Sunni opposition groups. The slow pace of U.S. strategy and its exclusive prioritization of ISIS are facilitating Jabhat al Nusra’s deeper entrenchment within the opposition. It is not possible to attack this intertwinement directly, and even most indirect efforts will likely be counter-productive. Identifying means of separating Jabhat al Nusra from the opposition in order to destroy it is the most difficult intellectual task in developing a strategy for Syria, and the one on which the planning group is continuing to focus.

• All operations against Jabhat al Nusra and ISIS must be integrated into a single coherent strategic concept that takes account of the divergence of interests between the U.S. and its European partners, on the one hand, and Russia, Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia on the other. As the recent Russian-Iranian-regime envelopment of Aleppo shows, Moscow and Tehran are pursuing objectives antithetical to American interests and their operations will further radicalize the conflict in ways that entrench ISIS and al Qaeda.

• The U.S. and its Western partners will have to conduct multiple simultaneous and successive operations whose exact course cannot be described fully in advance. The initial operations must focus on altering the conditions on the ground in order to expose Jabhat al Nusra’s sources of strength to attack. They must alter the popular narrative that the West has abandoned the Syrian Sunni Arabs in favor of Iran, Assad, and Russia. This task will be impossible as long as the West offers the Sunni no meaningful support in the face of the Assad regime’s imminent threat to their survival as individuals and communities.

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Editor’s note: The following is a brief excerpt from the third report in the US Grand Strategy Series. Download the complete report at the link above or read the report on your desktop computer at the bottom of this page.

Introduction

The United States and Europe face mounting threats of terrorist attacks in their homelands directed or inspired by al Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and al Sham (ISIS). The conflicts in the Middle East have destabilized the region and are feeding sectarianism globally, creating conditions ripe for al Qaeda and ISIS recruitment and expansion. Current counter-terrorism operations have not contained these threats and will not prevent additional attacks in the West. Al Qaeda and ISIS seek to bring their wars to the West and will succeed in doing so as long as they hold their regional bases in Iraq and Syria.

Al Qaeda and ISIS operate across the Muslim-majority world and are gaining strength. Their local campaigns generate insecurity, drive sectarian conflict, and co-opt local militant Islamist groups into the global Salafi-jihadi movement. Their global insurgency seeks to overthrow the secular international state system, and terrorism is but one tactic among many al Qaeda and ISIS use to advance their objectives. Seemingly local conflicts—such as those in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen—serve to build a global insurgent base. Salafi-jihadi militant organizations that pursue only local objectives for now constitute the core of this base and provide al Qaeda and ISIS with the necessary capabilities the groups need to reconstitute and generate threats against the West.

The Iraq and Syria theater is the primary source of the al Qaeda and ISIS threat. ISIS reconstituted from the remnants of the Islamic State in Iraq (or al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers) in 2011-2013 and began setting the stage for its rapid conquest of Iraqi territory, including the June 2014 capture of Mosul. The ISIS Caliphate is contiguous across the Syrian-Iraqi border, and the group fields an adaptive terrorist army. Its message of victory is resonant: foreign fighters pour into Iraq and Syria to live under and fight for the Caliphate. ISIS media campaigns are nuanced and far-reaching, exploiting publicity from social media and tailoring recruiting messages to specific demographics. Its attraction to would-be recruits is evident in the steady pledges of support and dedications of attacks around the world to ISIS.

Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al Nusra, has established itself within the Syrian opposition over the course of the civil war. ISIS drove it out of its original base in eastern Syria, and it is now thoroughly intertwined in many of the opposition military and governance structures in Western Syria. The safe haven Jabhat al Nusra maintains in Syria is and will remain critical terrain for al Qaeda globally. Jabhat al Nusra leadership signals Syria-focused objectives for the moment, but it has not disavowed future attacks against the West. Already, al Qaeda devotes significant resources to its Syrian base, including having sent a team of veteran operatives to advise, train, and share strategic and tactical expertise.

The public schism between ISIS and al Qaeda over the former’s attempt to subsume Jabhat al Nusra in April 2013 divides the global Salafi-jihadi movement into two rival camps, but it has not weakened either group. The competition is instead driving cohesion within the movement and raising the bar for success. The Salafi-jihadi movement is now more capable, more potent, and more resilient as a whole. Destroying either al Qaeda or ISIS alone while leaving the other in place will not secure vital American national security requirements. The U.S. and its partners must also destroy the non-al Qaeda, non-ISIS Salafi-jihadi base on which both groups draw. Any strategy that does not achieve these three aims will ultimately fail, whatever temporary success it might appear to have.

The Obama administration is pursuing a strategy that is not designed to operate against Jabhat al Nusra or other Salafi-jihadi groups in Syria. It initially dismissed the emergence of both ISIS and Jabhat al Nusra as threats to the U.S., describing the groups’ objectives as local and highlighting the undesirability of engaging in complex foreign conflicts. The administration framed the initial American intervention in Iraq as one grounded in humanitarian concerns over ISIS’s mass atrocities against Iraqi ethnic minorities. It defined America’s immediate objectives as degrading ISIS leadership and disrupting its advances to allow the re-formed Iraqi Security Forces to conduct a ground campaign against the group to defeat it. American officials continue to cite leadership attrition and percentage-control of terrain in Iraq as metrics of success against ISIS even as the group strengthens globally. Current discussions surrounding a counter-ISIS intervention in Libya revolve around the same metrics. The U.S. had also been conducting targeted airstrikes against an al Qaeda cell embedded with Jabhat al Nusra in Syria that is or was involved in imminent, direct plots against the U.S. homeland or U.S. interests prior to Russian military intervention.

Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter has framed U.S. objectives against the Islamic State differently since January 2016: “The three key objectives of the counter ISIL military campaign are first, to destroy the ISIL cancer’s parent tumor in Iraq and Syria by collapsing its two power centers in ar Raqqa and Mosul. Second, to combat the metastasis of the ISIL tumor worldwide. And third, to protect our people at home.” This conceptualization is more accurate, but still insufficient to achieve U.S. vital national interests. The identification of ar Raqqa and Mosul as ISIS’s two power centers, or in military technical terms, centers of gravity, in Iraq and Syria might have been accurate in 2014 but is no longer, as this paper will argue.

The U.S. furthermore is not otherwise acting against Jabhat al Nusra or any other non-ISIS Salafi-jihadi group. American strategy in Iraq and Syria both rest on facilitating diplomatic and political resolutions to the conflict without weakening Jabhat al Nusra or its Salafi-jihadi allies and then relying on local partnered forces to conduct ground campaigns against ISIS. Such a strategy is likely to ensure al Qaeda control over a significant portion of Syria, even if ISIS is defeated.

The current U.S. course of action in Iraq and Syria thus cannot secure U.S. grand strategic interests. ISIS is not contained in Iraq and Syria: it is established in the Sinai and Libya and expanding its influence in Afghanistan. ISIS cells exist in Europe, and there will probably be another organized attack on the continent mirroring the tactics used in Paris in November 2015. ISIS reaches into the U.S., too, with reports of recruiting across all 50 states and the potential for another inspired attack like the December 2015 San Bernardino attack. Jabhat al Nusra is meanwhile strong and growing, and is working to convince other Syrian armed opposition groups to adopt its ideology and objectives. Jabhat al Nusra is a core component of the al Qaeda network and probably poses the most dangerous threat to the U.S. from al Qaeda in the coming years. It cannot be carved away from al Qaeda’s global ambitions. Its resources, capabilities, and sanctuary strengthen al Qaeda globally.

The current U.S. approach to Iraq and Syria will thus preserve at minimum a robust al Qaeda safe haven in Syria, and most likely an ISIS safe haven in Syria and continued presence in Iraq. Such an endstate is not acceptable. The planning group assessed in the first two reports of this series, Al Qaeda and ISIS: Existential Threats to the U.S. and Europe and Competing Visions for Syria and Iraq: The Myth of an Anti-ISIS Grand Coalition, that the U.S. must pursue a strategy that destroys ISIS, al Qaeda, and the Salafi-jihadi militant base in Iraq and Syria.

Destroying ISIS, al Qaeda, and the Salafi-jihadi militant base in Iraq and Syria is one of the critical requirements for securing American interests. There is no simple solution, and publicly palatable courses of action, such as airstrikes, are inadequate. ISIS and Jabhat al Nusra derive their strengths from different sources in Iraq and Syria, and the planning group assessed that the U.S. will have to define distinct and nuanced approaches to defeat them in different parts of the theater. This paper explores the nature of both groups to identify their centers of gravity, critical capabilities, critical requirements and critical vulnerabilities to serve as the basis for the development of such approaches. The task will not be easy, but neither is it impossible. It is, in any event, essential for securing the American people and way of life.

ISIS center of gravity analysis 

Introduction

ISIS and al Qaeda enjoy durable and resource-rich safe havens. These sanctuaries provide each organization with all the necessary capabilities to continue to generate threat nodes in Europe and the U.S. for the foreseeable future. The U.S. must develop theater-specific strategies to defeat ISIS and al Qaeda groups, prioritizing among the most dangerous and durable safe havens. These include Iraq, the Egyptian Sinai, and Libya for ISIS as well as Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria for both ISIS and al Qaeda. The first two reports in this series examined the relationship between regional safe havens, the capability of these organizations to conduct spectacular attacks in the West, and the overall conditions required to destroy both ISIS and al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria, the two most critical safe havens.

The purpose of studying the ISIS and Jabhat al Nusra visions, objectives, and way of war in the earlier papers is not only to identify the enemy correctly, but also to allow the framing of a counter-strategy. Jessica Lewis McFate characterized military doctrinal methodology for doing so in 2014.

A counter-strategy requires knowledge of the enemy’s sources of power that allow him to act and factor continuously into his strategic calculus. The critical elements of strategic power possessed by ISIS are identifiable through analysis of its military strategy. The elements of strategic power are doctrinally expressed through a study of an enemy’s center of gravity. Center of gravity is a strategic construct introduced by Carl von Clausewitz to describe the primary source of an enemy’s strength. The identification of enemy Centers of Gravity emerged into the military craft through the following passage of his master work, On War:

“Out of these characteristics a certain center of gravity develops, the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends. That is the point against which all our energies should be directed.”

Center of gravity studies have been expanded in the context of U.S. military planning doctrine to include Critical Capabilities, Critical Requirements, and Critical Vulnerabilities as additional expressions of Strategic Power with which to evaluate a military enemy.

Critical Capabilities are essentially the enemy’s means; Critical Requirements are his constraints; and Critical Vulnerabilities are his deficiencies. These concrete planning factors translate directly into an enemy’s strategy, and they can be targeted directly to achieve linear battlefield effects. A center of gravity, on the other hand, requires a broader understanding of the behavior of the enemy system, and thus it requires a comprehensive assessment of the other elements of the enemy’s strategic power. Targeting a center of gravity achieves nonlinear destructive effects against an enemy. This study will therefore identify the Critical Capabilities, Critical Requirements, and Critical Vulnerabilities of ISIS and Jabhat al Nusra before providing an assessment of their Centers of Gravity, which may be targeted in order to achieve exponential effects upon the enemy.

Center of gravity:

Control of terrain to serve as a physical caliphate is now the principal center of gravity of ISIS because it provides religious legitimacy, military capacity, the ability to impose governance, and a globally resonant message.

The Islamic State in Iraq and al Sham’s declaration of its caliphate in June 2014 fundamentally altered the basis of its own legitimacy. It also changed the global discourse within the Salafi community about how to advance the movement. The declaration of the Caliphate has created an ideological split within the global Salafist movement, in fact, with al Qaeda leaders and loyalists rejecting the validity of the Caliphate and, thus, of ISIS. ISIS previously alternated between being an insurgent group that did not control territory and a quasi-conventional force that did. The declaration of the Caliphate requires ISIS to continue to control and govern terrain, however. ISIS without territory and people to rule is no longer ISIS. Control of terrain to serve as a physical caliphate is now the principal center of gravity of ISIS because it provides religious legitimacy, military capacity, the ability to impose governance, and a globally resonant message.

The control and governance of terrain is also a center of gravity from the standpoint of the threat ISIS poses to the West. Possession of uncontested safe-havens; populations from which to extract resources and recruits; and terrain in which to conduct advanced training, weapons development, planning, intelligence, and media functions all constitute the core capabilities that allow ISIS to generate attack groups to operate within the West at will, as discussed in the first report of this series. Depriving ISIS of territory it can govern will severely degrade the organization’s ability to support frequent and sophisticated attacks against Europe and the United States.

ISIS is a resilient organization, however, and depriving it of terrain is not tantamount to defeating, let alone destroying it. The planning group assesses that the loss of all of its territory will drive ISIS back into a terrorist-insurgent mode, possibly with a significant number of ISIS members rejoining local al Qaeda affiliates, thereby strengthening them. The elimination of ISIS control and governance of territory is thus a necessary but not sufficient condition for defeating ISIS itself and must be part of a larger effort to defeat al Qaeda affiliates and the Salafi-jihadi groups with which they are allied in order to achieve lasting success.

ISIS grand strategic objectives and concept of operation

ISIS aims to expand its caliphate to include all historically Muslim lands and to provoke and win an apocalyptic war with the West. ISIS pursues these objectives through mutually supporting campaigns in Iraq and Syria; in the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia; and in the wider world. ISIS maintains affiliates in nine countries and supporters in many more. This global presence allows ISIS to project a narrative of constant victory. Operations outside of Iraq and Syria give ISIS strategic resiliency. Control of territory outside of Iraq and Syria will allow ISIS to survive even if it loses control of governed spaces in Iraq and Syria, as we shall see.

ISIS strategic objectives

• Maintain the physical caliphate
• Expand the caliphate to include all of “Dar al-Islam,” or historically Muslim lands
• Assert unchallenged authority as a caliphate
• Win an apocalyptic war with the West

Continue reading this report in the PDF viewer below. Or download the report here.

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© 2016 by the Institute for the Study of War. All rights reserved.

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North Korea is as unpredictable a regime as a political scientist might imagine. Its decision-making is secret. Its leader is a posterchild for the madman theory: the idea that simulating insanity may be a useful tool of intimidation. Yet, a new paper by economists Andy Kim, Hyoung Goo Kang, and Jong Kyu Lee suggests that North Korea’s aggressive military and diplomatic actions do follow some predictable, though surprising, patterns. The authors analyze 287 of the country’s military and diplomatic interactions between 1999 and 2012. They assign different levels of hostility to these actions, with missile tests as the most aggressive category. They then examine whether a range of different variables can predict the more aggressive acts. Two findings stand out. Read British newspapers The first standout finding comes from their coding of print journalism. The authors collected more than 70,000 newspaper reports about North Korea. For each article they used automated text analysis to code how negative the tone of the article was. They then examined whether highly negative reports were correlated with an aggressive North Korean action one or two days later. It turns out that the tone of newspaper reporting did help the model predict North Korean aggression, improving its predictive value by as much as 47 percent. But here's what's really surprising: South Korean and U.S. coverage didn’t correlate with North Korean action. Only British news stories did. This doesn’t imply that the articles’ attitudes prompted those actions — only that we can systematically observe those negative British articles coming before the aggressive actions. The authors suggest that this is so because British journalists may have more information about what's happening in North Korea. The United Kingdom has an embassy in North Korea, unlike either South Korea or the United States. That’s consistent with another finding by Andy Kim and Hosung Jung that British hedge funds show the most significant abnormal short-selling of the South Korean stock market (KOSPI) index two to three trading days before North Korean military actions. Another possibility (not suggested by the authors) is that British news stories reveal stronger attitudes, period – whether positive or negative -- than do either South Korean or U.S. reporting, and are therefore easier to code using automated techniques. Take note of Dear Leader birthdays The second key finding is that North Korea is more likely to undertake aggressive acts within five days of a past or present “Dear Leader’s” birthday. That wasn’t true for organizational anniversaries, such as the establishment of the North Korea government (Sept. 9), the Army (April 25), or the Labour Party (Oct. 10). A note of warning: Kim Jong Il’s birthday was Feb. 16, so we’re in the danger zone. That’s a reminder — in case we had forgotten — that North Korea is a personal dictatorship, with an agenda focused much more on entertaining the “Dear Leader” than upholding the country’s institutions. So how does this matter? North Korea’s recent satellite launch, which apparently flew over the Superbowl site last Sunday, illustrated once again that the country will continue to take actions that are threatening to South Korea and the international community. We don’t know if the South Korean and U.S. governments have predictive models based on classified information that perform better than this one. Whether or not they do, the rest of us -- citizens, businesses, and other non-governmental actors -- also have an interest in knowing when to expect aggression. This analysis shows that even these highly secretive and seemingly random actions follow somewhat predictable and publicly observable patterns.

Israel is on the cusp of moving forward on its next stage of the development of its natural gas resources deep beneath the seabed in the eastern Mediterranean.  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, is due to testify before the Israeli Supreme Court on why he is pushing through a so-called “gas framework” against political and legal opposition.

The arguments are complicated. Houston-based Noble Energy, which leads the consortia that have discovered all the gas in Israel’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), wants to know that its operations are not going to continue to be a political football in Israel before it starts work on developing the huge Leviathan field.

Noble Energy has already invested $2.5 billion in Israel, supplying gas from the now-depleted Mari-B field off Ashkelon and now from the much larger Tamar field, which came on stream in 2013.  Gas from the Tamar field currently produces more than half of Israel’s electricity.  The proportion will rise when the field is further developed.  That development, along with bringing Leviathan on stream will cost an estimated $6 billion.  Small wonder that Noble wants to be confident of the regulatory environment before going ahead.

Opposition within Israel ranges from the claims that the price being charged is too high – even though it compares favorably with prices in Europe and Asia – and concern about the impact on the environment.  Public opinion is also against Noble’s local partners, principally the Delek group of companies, which will profit from the deal.  Such is the challenge facing Mr. Netanyahu, a one-time management consultant who no doubt understands the economic logic of moving forward quickly to take full advantage of Israel’s energy good fortune.

With the planned extra production, Israel will have enough natural gas for export. (There may also be oil to be discovered, if geological evidence proves accurate.) Already later this year a small amount of gas is due to start flowing to two Jordanian industrial plants near the Dead Sea.  Plans are also being discussed for Israeli gas to supply Jordan’s main electricity power network, as well as a pipeline to Egypt, either for local domestic use or for conversion into liquefied natural gas (LNG), which can then be exported anywhere in the world on specially-built tankers.

Other options include gas exports to Cyprus, in whose water Noble has found another gas field, or even undersea gas pipelines to Turkey and/or Greece.  There is also a possibility that spare Israeli electricity could be sent via seabed cable to Greece.

All these technical possibilities are pushing against political constraints.  Last month the leaders of Israel, Cyprus and Greece met to sign cooperation accords.  Israel promptly signaled to Turkey that its cooperation with Greece was not a barrier to also sending gas via pipeline to Turkey.  On the Palestinian front, there is also the option to develop a field offshore Gaza, which makes no commercial sense unless its molecules are mixed with those of Israel gas.

Apart from the political good sense of regional cooperation, Israel’s natural gas also boosts its energy security, a clichéd term of various meanings, the best of which is probably the sense of giving Israel options.  Instead of relying on dirty heavy fuel oil or diesel for its power plants, Israel can use cheaper, and cleaner, natural gas.  At least one major power plant will still use coal, with special filters on its chimneys to minimize the environmental impact. Commercially, by using its own gas, Israel saves on foreign exchange and also boosts its revenues by taxing Noble and its Israel partners.

Politics can make matters more complicated, especially in Israel.  The uncertainty of the Middle East, especially the future of Syria, whose own waters may also contain viable gas deposits, may prove at least a partial insurmountable barrier.  But even with the low price of oil and natural gas, technically and in business terms, the exploitation of Israel’s reserves makes sound sense.

The post Netanyahu fights for Israel’s energy future appeared first on CapX.

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A gargantuan funnel of gray pouring from the top of Mount Hood—did Oregon’s iconic peak just blow its top?

Nooope. (Although one day it could, being a volcano that erupted periodically through the 1800s.) What people saw Wednesday was instead a huge, inverted shadow, cast upon a fiery sky by the rising sun.

Locals describe the scene as “stunning” and “Monet-like” on the Facebook page of Portland’s National Weather Service, which shared the above photo taken by Lisa Nelson. Meteorologist Scott Sistek has more great images at KOMO-TV, showing the shadow stretching like a blue stalactite over cold waters or pointing beam-like to the side as if it were a reverse-spotlight.

This is at least the second time in 2016 the mountain has made a floating penumbra over Oregon. Here are similar views from February 3:

Mount Hood cast a long shadow this morning. (photos) #pdxtst https://t.co/PyC7XXA4mO pic.twitter.com/30n7cH3UF5

— The Oregonian (@Oregonian) February 3, 2016

We received lots of great photos of this am's sunrise and shadow of Mt. Hood!
SLIDESHOW:https://t.co/9Y5tDB9NWT pic.twitter.com/lVcxniL6HV

— FOX 12 Oregon KPTV (@fox12oregon) February 3, 2016

Who else caught Mt. Hood's shadow in the clouds before class started this morning? pic.twitter.com/L4yUgFWvHs

— Chad (@_ChadRichards_) February 4, 2016

Siderea writes an essay on class in America. You should read it. In case you don’t, here’s the summary:

1. People tend to confuse social class with economic class, eg how much money you make. But social class is a more complicated idea involving how respectable you seem, how educated you are, and what kind of family you come from. An assembly line supervisor might make the same amount of money as a schoolteacher, but the schoolteacher would probably seem more refined and be able to access better social circles.

2. Classes are cultures. People in a certain class have their own way of dressing, speaking, decorating, and behaving. They have distinctive ideas and values. This is why a lower-class person cannot simply claim to be upper-class and so gain all the benefits of upper-class-hood; it would be as hard as trying to pass for Japanese. Lower-class people can learn their way around upper-class culture, but it’s a difficult and lifelong project done most easily if you already have upper-class resources.

3. Talking about class is taboo because we like to believe we’re a classless society. We talk about income instead and pretend it’s class. Class breaks through in a couple of phrases like “rednecks” or “white trash” or “white collar” or “coastal elites”, but people use the phrases without usually having a broader idea that it’s class they’re talking about.

4. Class prejudice is complicated. It combines the practical superiority of being upper-class to being lower-class (because you have more money and opportunity) with the very dubious value judgment that upper-class culture is superior to lower-class culture, or that lower-class culture is just people trying to do upper-class culture but failing. But lower-class people like lower-class culture and generally do not want to adopt upper-class culture, except insofar as it’s necessary to advance. Analogies to race and assimilation are obvious.

5. People mostly understand their own class, and the class one step above or below them, but have only vague stereotypes of classes further than that. This limits social mobility; you can’t join what you can’t understand.

6. College is a finishing school for the upper classes. They send their children there to learn the proper upper class values and behaviors. Even if community college does a great job teaching whatever trades it teaches, it will not teach you how to be a part of the upper class, and this will seriously limit your opportunities.

7. Politically, the left pretends class doesn’t exist; the right talks about it, but only to yell at the underclass and say that their culture is wrong. Race is really complicated and will be left out of this analysis.

I notice Siderea is a psychotherapist, which doesn’t surprise me. We in mental health get a pretty good cross-sectional exposure of everybody and get to hear about their lives, and with enough data points the structure comes into sharper relief.

Just to give an example: suppose a lady comes in with really over-permed dyed curly hair wearing several rings, bracelets, and necklaces. Her name is Sherri and she calls you “darling”; she’s also carrying her lunch, which is KFC plus a Big Gulp. Without knowing anything else about her, you can peg her as working class. Maybe she won the lottery ten years ago and is now the richest person in your state. It doesn’t matter. She’s still working class.

Or suppose a thin 25-year-old man comes in wearing glasses, a small close-cropped beard, and a Led Zeppelin t-shirt. His name is Alex and he apologizes for being three minutes late. This guy is probably middle-to-upper-middle-class and college educated, maybe not a great college but still college-educated. And maybe he’s fallen on hard times and doesn’t have a dollar to his name. It still doesn’t matter. He’s still middle-to-upper-middle class.

And you start to learn you can predict things about these people, the concerns they’re going to have, the kind of things that happen to them. Who their friends are. How they relate to their friends: Sherri will expound upon the flaws of every single one of her ungrateful coworkers; Alex will reluctantly say he went through a tough breakup a year or two ago. What kind of drugs they abuse, if they abuse drugs (maybe Sherri has smoking and drinking problems; Alex has probably tried marijuana and LSD but is embarrassed to say so).

But this kind of innate stereotyping is different than a formal taxonomy. Siderea links to Michael Church’s attempt to explain what the classes actually are. This is another piece you should read, but again in case you don’t:

1. 10% of people are in an underclass consisting of “generationally poor” people who may never have held jobs and who come from similarly poor families.

2. 65% of people are in the labor class. They work jobs where labor is seen as a commodity, ie there’s not as much sense of career capital or reputation. They base virtue and success around Hard Work. Its lower levels are minimum wage McJobs, its middle levels are assembly line work, and its higher levels are things like pilots, plumbers, and small business owners. The stratospheric semi-divine level is “celebrities” like reality TV stars who become fabulously rich and famous while sticking to their labor class roots.

3. 23.5% of people are in the gentry class. They fetishize education and career capital. They engage in all sorts of signaling games around “fair trade” and “organic” and what museums they go to. At the lower level they’re schoolteachers and starving artists, at the mid level they’re “professions” like engineering and law, and at the highest level they’re professors and scientists and entrepreneurs. The stratospheric semi-divine level is “cultural influencers” like Jon Stewart or Steven Pinker who become famous and (maybe) rich while sticking to their gentry class roots.

4. 1.5% of people are in the elite class. Although you can be borderline-elite by getting a job in finance and making a few million, the real elite are born into money and don’t work unless they want to. Occasionally they’ll sit on a board or found a philanthropic association or something. They don’t believe in “professional achievement” because working is lower-class; they might compete in complicated status games around who throws the best parties or has the best horses or whatever.

5. The highest class (E1) are insane psychopaths who burn the global commons for shits and giggles. They tend to be drug lords, arms dealers, and morally insane billionaires. Most famous politicians and businesspeople are not of this class and most people in this class are not famous.

6. The three main classes (labor, gentry, and elite) are three different ‘infrastructures’. To be in labor you need skills, to be in gentry you need education, and to be in elite you need connections. There’s no strict hierarchy (eg not all gentry are above all labor), but you can picture them as offset ladders, with the lower gentry being at the same rung as the higher labor and so on.

7. The Elite control everything; the constant threat is that Gentry and Labor will unite against them, which might very well work. The Elite neutralize this threat by making Labor hate Gentry as “effeminate” or “pretentious”; they also convince Labor that the Gentry are probably secretly in cahoots with the underclass against Labor. Elites also convince Labor that Elites don’t exist and it’s Gentry all the way up, which means that “anti-1%” sentiment, which should properly get Labor and Gentry to cooperate against the Elites, instead makes Gentry hate the Elites but Labor hate Gentry. Politics boils down to Gentry being good people trying to improve things, and Elite conning Labor into hating Gentry to prevent things from being improved.

8. While all classes can have good and bad people (except E1, which is wholly bad), Elites have a generally negative influence on society, and Gentry are generally positive. After the World Wars, everybody got angry at the Elites for all the war and killing and stuff, which convinced them to lie low for a few decades and forced the Gentry to take over. This was why the country did so well during the 50s and 60s. Whether the country goes in a good or bad direction now depends on whether the Elites manage to take it back or not. One reason Silicon Valley works (used to work?) so unusually well was that it was mostly a native project of the Gentry that hadn’t yet been infiltrated by the Elites.

Reaction to Church on the subreddit was pretty negative, but I find it at least a good nucleus for further discussion. The Gentry/Labor distinction is glaringly obvious. The Labor/Underclass distinction also seems glaringly obvious to me, if only because Labor hates the underclass. The Gentry/Elite distinction doesn’t seem glaringly obvious to me, but maybe that’s just because I haven’t met enough elites. In particular, Church’s “E1” seems caricatured and out-of-place in his otherwise sober analysis. Then again, if those people existed I probably wouldn’t know anyway. Then again, the rest of Church’s blog suggests some paranoid tendencies, so maybe the E1 entry is just those coming out.

Siderea notes that Church’s analysis independently reached about the same conclusion as Paul Fussell’s famous guide. I’m not entirely sure how you’d judge this (everybody’s going to include lower, middle, and upper classes), but eyeballing Fussell it does look a lot like Church, so let’s grant this.

It also doesn’t sound too different from Marx. Elites sound like capitalists, Gentry like bourgeoisie, Labor like the proletariat, and the Underclass like the lumpenproletariat. Or maybe I’m making up patterns where they don’t exist; why should the class system of 21st century America be the same as that of 19th century industrial Europe?

There’s one more discussion of class I remember being influenced by, and that’s Unqualified Reservations’ Castes of the United States. Another one that you should read but that I’ll summarize in case you don’t:

1. Dalits are the underclass, made up of homeless people, chronically unemployed people, drug addicts, etc. They tend to have a lot of trouble with the law, go in and out of jail, never really hold down stable employment. Status is “street cred” that you get from being powerful, wealthy, and sexually successful, eg gang leaders.

2. Vaisyas are standard middle-class people who engage in productive employment. They tend to form nuclear families and try to go to church. Status is having a stable job, a stable family, and being well-liked in your church or social club.

3. Brahmins are very educated people who participate in the world of ideas. They range from doctors and lawyers to artists and professors. Access is conferred by top-tier university education. Status is from conspicuous engagement in progressive politics, eg being an activist, working for an NGO, “campaigning for justice”. They are “the ruling class”.

4. Optimates are very rich WASPs concerned with breeding and old money. Status comes from breeding and an antiquated idea of “nobility”. Optimates used to be “the ruling class”, but now they’re either extinct or endangered, having been pretty much absorbed into the Brahmins.

5. Mentioned elsewhere in the UR corpus: politics boils down to Vaisyas being basically decent people trying to lead normal productive lives, and Brahmins trying to create a vast tentacled monstrosity of useless bureaucrats and petty enforcers of ideological conformity to employ Brahmins in the “knowledge work” they feel entitled to and to protect their interests. Silicon Valley is (used to be?) unusually functional because it maintained some Vaisya values separate from the corrupting influence of the Brahmins.

Michael Church’s system (henceforth MC) and the Unqualified Reservation system (henceforth UR) are similar in some ways. MC’s Underclass matches Dalits, MC’s Labor matches Vaisyas, MC’s Gentry matches Brahmins, and MC’s Elite matches Optimates. This is a promising start. It’s a fourth independent pair of eyes that’s found the same thing as all the others. (commenters bring up Joel Kotkin and Archdruid Report as similar convergent perspectives).

But there are also some profound differences. UR says that the Elites are mostly gone, that everything’s ruled by the Gentry nowadays, and that the Gentry are allying with the criminal Underclass against Labor. MC mentions this same picture, but only as the false facade that the Elites are trying to get everyone else to believe in order to keep them divided.

You could reconcile some of the differences by supposing the two models have different cutoffs. Suppose we rank people from 0 (lowest underclass) to 100 (highest elite). Maybe MC draws the Labor/Gentry and Gentry/Elite borders at 40 and 70 respectively, and UR draws the Vaisya/Brahmin and Brahmin/Optimate borders at 60 and 90. If the world’s being run by 80s, MC could be right to say it’s run by Elites and not Gentry, and UR could be right in saying it’s run by Brahmins and not Optimates. If Silicon Valley is run by 55s but being ruined by 75s, MC could say it’s run by Gentry but ruined by elites, and UR could say it’s run by Vaisyas but ruined by Brahmins. But if there’s this much variability in class boundaries, what’s the point in even drawing them in the first place?

But I think the differences are real and political: MC comes from a liberal perspective, UR from a conservative one. MC wants to locate the source of the cancer in the (mostly plutocrat) Elites, cast the (mostly liberal) Gentry as wonderful people who can do no wrong, cast the (mostly conservative) Labor as deluded and paranoid, and cast the (liberal-aligned) Underclass in a sympathetic light. UR wants to locate the source of the cancer in the (mostly liberal) Brahmins, cast the (mostly conservative) Labor as decent salt-of-the-Earth types under threat from the elite, and cast the (liberal-aligned) Underclass in an unsympathetic light.

And the political angle evokes one more system worth adding here: my own discussion of the Blue Tribe vs. the Red Tribe in I Can Tolerate Anything But The Outgroup. I point out that the group sometimes referred to as “coastal liberals” or “SWPL” and so on are marked not only by Democratic Party beliefs, but by a host of cultural similarities including food, dress, music, hobbies, religion, values, art, etc. Likewise, the group sometimes referred to as “rednecks” or “fundies” and so on are marked not only by Republican Party beliefs, but by a similar set of cultural similarities. I call these the “Blue Tribe” and the “Red Tribe” as an attempt to distinguish them as cultures and not just as sets of political beliefs.

These tribes seem closely related to classes. “Blue Tribe” is similar to Gentry; “Red Tribe” is similar to Labor. I won’t say there’s a perfect 1:1 equivalence; for example, I know some union leaders who are very clearly in the Labor class but who wouldn’t be caught dead in the Red Tribe. But the resemblance is too close to miss.

Some final scattered thoughts:

1. All those studies that analyze whether some variable or other affects income? They’d all be much more interesting if they analyzed the effect on class instead. For example, there’s a surprisingly low correlation between your parents’ income and your own income, which sounds like it means there’s high social mobility. But I grew up in a Gentry class family; I became a doctor, my brother became a musician, and my cousin got a law degree but eventually decided to work very irregularly and mostly stay home raising her children. I make more money than my brother, and we both make more money than my cousin, but this is not a victory for social mobility and family non-determinism; it’s no coincidence none of us ended up as farmers or factory workers. We all ended up Gentry class, but I chose something closer to the maximize-income part of the Gentry class tradeoff space, my brother chose something closer to the maximize-creativity part, and my cousin chose to raise the next generation. Any studies that interpret our income difference as an outcome difference and tries to analyze what factors gave me a leg up over my relatives (better schools? more breastfeeding as a child?) are stupid and will come up with random noise. We all got approximately the same level of success/opportunity, and those things just happen to be very poorly measured by money. If we could somehow collapse the entirety of tradeoffspace into a single variable, I bet it would have a far greater parent-child correlation than income does. This is part of why I don’t follow the people who take the modest effect of IQ on income as a sign that IQ doesn’t change your opportunities much; maybe everyone in my family has similar IQs but wildly different income levels, and there’s your merely modest IQ/income relationship right there. I think some studies (especially in Britain) have tried analyzing class and gotten some gains over analyzing income, but I don’t know much about this.

2. I think Siderea is right that the Right thinks in social class terms more naturally than the Left. To oversimplify, both sides use class warfare, but the Left’s class warfare is economic (“the plutocrat billionaires are ruining everything!”) and the Right’s class warfare is social (“the media and academic elites are ruining everything!”).

3. Closely related: Donald Trump appeals to a lot of people because despite his immense wealth he practically glows with signs of being Labor class. This isn’t surprising; his grandfather was a barber and his father clawed his way up to the top by getting his hands dirty. He himself went to a medium-tier college and is probably closer in spirit to the small-business owners of the upper Labor class than to the Stanford MBA-holding executives of the Elite. Trump loves and participates in professional wrestling and reality television; those definitely aren’t Gentry or Elites pastimes! When liberals shake their heads wondering why Joe Sixpack feels like Trump is a kindred soul even though Trump’s been a billionaire his whole life, they’re falling into the liberal habit of sorting people by wealth instead of by class. To Joe Sixpack, Trump is “local boy made good”.

4. The thesis of “I Can Tolerate Anything But The Outgroup” simplifies to “It is a Gentry-class tradition to sweep aside all prejudices except class prejudice, which must be held with the intensity of all the old prejudices combined.”

5. But “I Can Tolerate Anything But The Outgroup”‘s Grey Tribe sits uneasy within this system. It doesn’t seem to be a class. But it also seems distinctly different from ordinary Gentry norms. And what about minorities? What about the differences between farmers vs. factory workers? If different classes are equivalent to different cultures, well, there are a lot of different cultures that don’t fit easily into the hierarchy. Maybe class is one factor among many that can create a different culture, but other factors can be stronger than class in some groups?

6. Siderea doesn’t want to get into how race interacts with class, and that seems wise. But a related digression: lots of people complain about social justice being classist, in that it’s hard for anybody who hasn’t either gone to college or at least spent a lot of time hanging around social justice people to keep track of which words, opinions, and causes are okay versus will render you radioactive. On the one hand, this is probably true. On the other, it’s probably true of everything, with social justice as an unexceptional example. Yes, the way you refer to trans people shows what class you’re from, but so does the way you order ice cream.

7. Siderea admits she is classist and not ashamed of this. I have a hard time understanding what she means, but I can try to explain my own classism: I think classes probably sort on important qualities and reinforce those qualities. For example, the Underclass and Labor class people I know are much more likely to have high-conflict styles of interaction: if they feel offended, they’ll yell at you and maybe even fight you. Gentry class people would be horrified at the thought; they might respond to the same offense by filing a complaint with Human Resources. I think there are two equally correct ways to interpret this. Number one, people with the maladaptive behavior of starting physical fights don’t make it very far in life and so end out in lower classes, and insofar as these behaviors are either genetic or learned within the family, their families stay in lower classes throughout the generations. Number two, the lower classes have a culture where you defend your honor by fighting people who offend you, and the upper classes have a culture where you defend your honor by submitting complaints, and although in a cosmic sense both of those styles are equally valid, and although indeed a thousand years ago the fighting might have been more adaptive, in today’s society the complaint-submitting is more adaptive and the lower classes are screwed unless they unlearn that behavior – which they probably won’t, because unlearning class is hard. But this means that classism is at least kind of justified – if you want to hire for example a schoolteacher, you might want to look for people who show all the signs of Gentry rather than Labor class to make sure they’re not going to get into physical fights in the classroom.

8. Cellular automaton theory of fashion likely relevant.

9. Siderea’s idea of college as finishing school for the upper classes is interesting, and her own experience is a window into something I never thought about before. But I’m not sure how typical she is; I think most colleges admit students who are already members of the classes their graduates end up in. I felt like I didn’t learn any class culture during my own college experience at all – which isn’t surprising since I was born the son of a doctor and ended up as a doctor myself. I think my story’s probably more typical than Siderea’s, though other people can prove me wrong if they’ve seen differently.

The average condo price in Manhattan has hit an astronomical $1,948,221 in the fourth quarter of 2015. In fact, Manhattan has experienced a 20-year stretch of nearly uninterrupted price increases. Will real estate prices continue to rise, or is it about time for a downward price correction? Manhattan is not unique in its meteoric rate of price increases. Potential buyers in other so-called “star” cities, such as San Francisco, Boston, or Los Angeles, must be pondering the very same question.

Luckily, for Manhattan, it has kept a near complete record of real estate transactions going back to 1890. From these records, one can construct a real estate price index for the entire island.

What can we learn from the history of Manhattan real estate prices? Most importantly, that real estate prices are very volatile. Tom Nicholas from Harvard and I (Anna Scherbina) documented Manhattan’s experience with a run-up in real estate prices during the Roaring 20s. We found that prices peaked in 1929 and then declined by more than half during the Great Depression. I (Jason Barr) and my co-authors collected more recent data on land sales in Manhattan. Our index of Manhattan land prices from 1950 to 2014 is based on land sales transaction prices. We found that Manhattan real estate prices experienced several ups and downs during that period. The land values index, plotted in inflation-adjusted dollars, is below. The index shows inflation-adjusted values of $100 invested in a standard plot of land in January 1950 over the subsequent years.

Had you bought land in Manhattan in 1950, you would have earned a nearly zero real return (nominal return with inflation subtracted out) from holding this land for the next 34 years. Since then, land prices have increased and declined again. Between 1950 and 1993, investing in land would have produced a meager real return of 0.45% per year. However, starting in 1993 land values really take off and reach a peak in 2007. Manhattan land prices also fell when the nation-wide real estate bubble burst in 2007, but by 2014, they had rebounded to an even higher level. Had an investor purchased a plot of land in Manhattan in 1993, the investment would have risen by a factor of 28 in inflation-adjusted dollars, and the buyer would have realized a real annual return of 16.3% per year!

What was the impetus for the rise in real estate prices that started in 1993? The initial rise in prices is probably due to a combination of factors: A change in policing reduced street crime in Manhattan; baby boomers who saw their children go off to college started moving from the suburbs back to the city; Hong Kong residents poured huge sums of money into foreign real estate (read American cities) on the eve of the 1997 handover to China. The initial price increases attracted more subsequent buyers. As Manhattan’s population became gentrified, crime rates fell even further and the city became an even more attractive investment to wealthy and educated newcomers from all over the world.

By 2014, land prices had reached record heights. The most desirable areas of Manhattan carried a substantial premium over the average land price for the island. These high land prices made sense only if builders could construct super-luxury condominium buildings, priced for billionaire hedge fund managers and ultra-wealthy foreign buyers. In addition, many wealthy buyers were attracted by Manhattan real estate because they did not have to reveal their identities. According to The New York Times, over half of Manhattan properties priced over $5 million were sold to limited liability corporations, thus offering anonymity to the individuals actually buying the properties.

Most individual real estate owners in Manhattan own a condo rather than an empty plot of land. So how do condo prices compare to land values? As land prices rise, developers must build taller and taller buildings to recoup their land investment, thereby maximizing the number of condos they can build on a given lot size. While the amount of developable land in Manhattan remains fixed, the number of condominiums keeps increasing. So not surprisingly, an investment in a typical condo did not appreciate as much as an investment in land.

StreetEasy uses public condo sales records to construct a Manhattan condo price index, starting in 1994. Over the 1994-2014 period, condo investors did very well, earning a real annual return of 4.38% a year. However, investors who put this money in land, earned by comparison a staggering 14.94% real annual return. One should remember though that, unlike empty land, condos provide housing, thereby allowing the investor to save on rent.

What is next for Manhattan land values? The law of supply and demand tells us that the uptrend in land prices will slow down or even reverse if either the supply of housing increases or the demand slows down.

As has been the case for many U.S. cities, the supply of new housing in Manhattan is kept artificially low by various local zoning restrictions that control the height of new buildings and the population density in the area. The obvious beneficiaries of these restrictions are the current property owners. Low housing supply and high demand ensures that real estate investments continue to appreciate. (The unfortunate side effect is that rents rise with real estate prices, and renters increasingly find themselves priced out of Manhattan.) However, there is little chance that Manhattan zoning laws will be overturned any time soon.

What is the future for housing demand in Manhattan? Housing demand is determined not only by objective factors (such as the economic prospects of a location and the attractiveness of that location as a place to live) but also by the less easily forecastable investor sentiment (i.e., investors’ shared attitude toward a particular investment).

Manhattan has much to offer for the wealthy and the highly educated: career opportunities, entertainment options, mingling with people who are at the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy. The close proximity of educated career-driven individuals increases the prospects for continuing economic growth and the attractiveness of Manhattan as a place to be.

On the downside, Mayor de Blasio and the U.S. Treasury Department dealt a blow to the real estate market for the super-wealthy by implementing new rules to end real estate buyer anonymity. High-end condos have started to take longer to sell, and may indicate that supply may be beginning to exceed demand – at least in this segment of the market.

The reaction of Manhattan real estate investors is most difficult to predict. Based on historical precedent, highly visible news events could trigger the worst fears and put an end to investor excitement about entire categories of investments (be it the dot-com stocks or stocks and bonds issued in various emerging markets). Any possible future event, be it environmental or political in nature, could negatively influence the current sentiment that Manhattan is a safe and exciting place to live. It would deal a blow to buyer demand and to the trajectory of land prices.

2014年，中国政府指责麦当劳和百胜的供应商美国福喜集团在华子公司故意出售过期肉制品，警方拘捕了其子公司的多名涉案人员。上海嘉定区法院本周公布了裁决：对福喜集团旗下两个子公司──上海福喜和河北福喜──处以人民币240万元罚款，判处10人有期徒刑，其中包括福喜集团驻华总经理、澳大利亚籍人士杨立群。杨立群被判处有期徒刑三年，驱逐出境。另外九名被告面临二年八个月至一年七个月不等的有期徒刑。福喜集团对此表示不服，称将提起上诉。福喜表示，中国相关部门不公平地扣押了福喜雇员17个月，还禁止福喜高管和记者参加庭审。该公司计划对东方卫视采取法律行动；这家国有电视台在2014年播出了福喜的相关报道。福喜称，东方卫视作出了无视事实和中国相关法律的虚假且不完整的指控。福喜集团的内部调查发现，一位心怀不满的前福喜集团员工和两名记者策划了东方卫视的上述报道。

It’s a strange and uncomfortable exercise: Imagine you’re about to be executed, and you’re given the opportunity to make a final statement. What would your last words be? To psychologists who study how humans cope with fear and death, condemned inmates’ final statements are — setting aside the ick factor — a...More »

In Launching the Innovation Renaissance I argued that students were not graduating with the degrees that pay (see also my piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education).

In 2009 the U.S. graduated 37,994 students with bachelor’s degrees in computer and information science. This is not bad, but we graduated more students with computer science degrees 25 years ago! The story is the same in other technology fields such as chemical engineering and math and statistics.

If students aren’t studying science, technology, engineering and math, what are they studying?

In 2009 the U.S. graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual and performing arts graduates in 1985.

So what has happened since 2009? The good news is that enrollment in STEM fields has increased dramatically. The number of graduates with computer science degrees, for example, has increased by 34%, chemical engineering degrees are up by a whopping 49.5% and math and statistics degrees have increased by 32%.

The bad news is that we are still graduating more students in the visual and performing arts than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined. As I said in Launching nothing wrong with the visual and performing arts but those are degrees which are unlikely to generate spillovers to society.

We are also graduating more students in communications and journalism than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined and more students in psychology than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined. Here’s what I said about psychology:

In 2009 we graduated 94,271 students with psychology degrees at a time when there were just 98,330 jobs in clinical, counseling and school psychology in the entire nation. The latter figure isn’t new jobs — it’s total jobs!

Despite these problems, the number of psychology degrees conferred annually has increased since 2008-2009 by an astounding 21.4%! Visual and performing arts degrees have increased by 9.7% and communication and journalism degrees are up 8.1%. Do you think that jobs in these fields have gone up by equal percentages?

Stated differently, in 2012-2013 we graduated 20,418 more students in computer science, chemical engineering and math and statistics than we did in 2008-2009 but we also graduated 20,179 more students in psychology alone! We have a long way to go.

Here is the data:

The post The New College Degrees: The Good News and the Bad News appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Imagine that one person, or a small group, wants to do something, like watch pornography, do uncertified medical procedures, have gay sex, worship Satan, shoot guns, drink raw milk, etc. Imagine further that many other people outside that small group don’t want them to do this. They instead want the government to make a law prohibiting similar groups from doing similar things.

In this prototypical situation, libertarians tend to say “let them do it” while others say “have the government make them stop.” If we take a cost-benefit perspective here, then the key question here is whether this small group gains more from their activity (or an added increment of it) than others lose (including losing via their “altruistic” concern for the small group). Since this small group would choose to do it if allowed, we can presume they expect to gain something. And if others complain and try to make them stop (or cut back), we can presume they expect to lose. So we are trying to estimate the relative magnitude of these two effects.

I see three considerations that, all else equal, lean this choice in the libertarian direction.

•  Law & Government Are Costly – It will take real resources to create and enforce a law to ban this activity. We’ll have to negotiate the wording of this law, and then tell people about it. People will complain about violations, and then we’ll have to adjudicate those complaints, and punish violators. We’ll make mistakes in which laws to create, who to punish, and how to manage the whole process. More rules will discourage innovation, and invite more lobbying. All of which is costly.
• Local Coordination Might Work – If people do something that hurts those around them more, often those nearby others can coordinate to discourage them via contract and freedom of association. If playing your music loud bothers folks in the apartment next door, your common landlord can set rules to limit your music volume. And kick you out if you don’t follow his rules. The more ways that smaller organizations could plausibly solve a problem, the less likely we need central government to get involved.
• Lawsuits Might Work – Legal systems have well-established processes whereby some people can sue others, claiming that the actions of those others have hurt them. Suit losers must pay, discouraging the activity. Yes, people harmed can need to coordinate to sue together, and yes legal systems tend to demand relatively concrete evidence of real harm, and that the accused caused that harm. It might be hard to figure out who to accuse, the accused might not have enough money to pay, and the legal process might be too expensive to make it worth bothering. But again, the more situations where the law could plausibly solve the problem, the less likely that we need extra government involvement.

Again, each of these considerations leans the conclusion in a libertarian direction, all else equal. Yes, they can collectively be overcome by strong enough other considerations that lean the other way. For example, I’ll grant that for the case of air pollution, we plausibly have strong enough evidence of large harms on outsiders, harms insufficiently discouraged by local coordination and lawsuits. So yes in this case central government might be an attractive solution, if it can act cheaply and efficiently enough.

But the main point here is that the three considerations above justify a libertarian default that must be overcome by specific arguments to the contrary. If outsiders complain about an activity, but aren’t willing to buy less of it via contract, or to sue for less of it in court, maybe they aren’t really being hurt that much. There is an asymmetry here: if we don’t ban an activity and might get too much, contract & law could reduce it a lot, but if we ban an activity and might get too little, contract & law can’t increase it much.

Yes, other persuasive contrary considerations might be found, including considerations not based on the net harm of the disputed actions. But the less you think you know about these other considerations, the more your choice will be influenced by these three basic considerations, all of which seem to me pretty solid.

While I have said before that I am not a libertarian according to common strict definitions, I still usually tend to lean libertarian, because in fact arguments based on further considerations often seem to me pretty weak. While one can often make clever arguments, it is often hard to have much confidence in them; the world seems just too complex. And so I often have to fall back on simple defaults. Which, as I’ve argued above, are libertarian.

潜水员在魔鬼洞蓄水层收集魔鬼洞鳉的数据。图片来源：Brett Seymour人们似乎不可能在美国内华达沙漠腹地找到一条鱼。但是，炙热死亡谷的一条地下裂缝却是魔鬼洞鳉的唯一天然栖息地。这种濒临灭绝的沙...

Still, it doesn't make sense to most people as to why an increasing number of corporations would advocate and advance leftist political issues when in the end it just means higher corporate taxes. But if you stop thinking logically and instead look at this phenomenon through a different set of eyes it's actually quite apparent what corporations are doing. And what you'll find is that it's a combination of today's Gen X'ers taking over corporate leadership roles combined with a lack of any new ideas or talent.

Welcome to the new marketing strategy of corporate America.

How the weakness (or absence) of scientific support behind climate alarmism became its political strength.