Climate Scientists' Biggest Challenge Isn't Scientific - Bloomberg View

Opinion is not scientific evidence or proof. A scientist who is an "expert" can still deliver only an opinion. 
The scientific method does not include popularity contests. Consensus is to scientific proof what lemon is to a skin rash. 
This seems so simple to me, but confusion about this matter riddles debate after debate, and the willingness to use govt force in support of "expert" and "scientific" opinion is killing people (low fat diets).

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-03-21/climate-scientists-biggest-challenge-isn-t-scientific

Chicago Tribune - Stop digging. Start over. Fatal conceit

This article is on target but the authors miss the point - the problem isn't poor implementation or any other engineering issue.  The problem is men are not made to do the work of gods, they are not capable of using coercive force to help their peers have better lives, it is the work of gods not of men to arrange the transactions of men.  Obamacare is just plain hubris.  It is the fatal conceit.
But we won't learn that lesson, the elites will keep arguing about how it was a great idea, and how he should have just implemented it better.
http://my.chicagotribune.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-78189619/

The Weekend Interview with Stanley Druckenmiller: How Washington Really Redistributes Income - WSJ.com

But he adds that "I did not think it would be nutty to tie entitlements to the debt ceiling because there's a massive long-term problem. And this president, despite what he says, has shown time and time again that he needs a gun at his head to negotiate in good faith. All this talk about, 'I won't negotiate with a gun at my head.' OK, you've been president for five years."

His voice rising now, Mr. Druckenmiller pounds his fist on the conference table. "Show me, President Obama, when the period was when you initiated budget discussions without a gun at your head."

Which brings him back to his thieving generation. For three decades until 2010, Mr. Druckenmiller ran the hedge fund he founded, Duquesne Capital. Now retired from managing other people's money, he looks after his own assets, which Forbes magazine recently estimated at $2.9 billion. And he wonders why in five years the massively indebted U.S. government will begin sending him a Social Security check for $3,500 each month. Because he earned it?

"I didn't earn it," he responds, while pointing to a bar chart that is part of his college presentation. Drawing on research by Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff, it shows the generational wealth transfer that benefits oldsters at the expense of the young.

While many seniors believe they are simply drawing out the "savings" they were forced to deposit into Social Security and Medicare, they are actually drawing out much more, especially relative to later generations. That's because politicians have voted to award the seniors ever more generous benefits. As a result, while today's 65-year-olds will receive on average net lifetime benefits of $327,400, children born now will suffer net lifetime losses of $420,600 as they struggle to pay the bills of aging Americans.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303680404579141790296396688
Did you see that headline about how social security robs the young and poor to give to the old and rich?  No?  Wonder why that is ...

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

― Friedrich von Hayek

Von Mises: "Kids, Don't Try This At Home"

Mises explained how the banking system was endowed with the singular ability to expand credit and with it the money supply, and how this was magnified by government intervention. Left alone, interest rates would adjust such that only the amount of credit would be used as is voluntarily supplied and demanded. But when credit is force-fed beyond that (call it a credit gavage), grotesque things start to happen.
Government-imposed expansion of bank credit distorts our "time preferences," or our desire for saving versus consumption. Government-imposed interest rates artificially below rates demanded by savers leads to increased borrowing and capital investment beyond what savers will provide. This causes temporarily higher employment, wages and consumption.
Ordinarily, any random spikes in credit would be quickly absorbed by the system—the pricing errors corrected, the half-baked investments liquidated, like a supple tree yielding to the wind and then returning. But when the government holds rates artificially low in order to feed ever higher capital investment in otherwise unsound, unsustainable businesses, it creates the conditions for a crash. Everyone looks smart for a while, but eventually the whole monstrosity collapses under its own weight through a credit contraction or, worse, a banking collapse.
The system is dramatically susceptible to errors, both on the policy side and on the entrepreneurial side. Government expansion of credit takes a system otherwise capable of adjustment and resilience and transforms it into one with tremendous cyclical volatility.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574443600711779692.html

In other words, "you don't know enough to mess around with this stuff."

Or, "You can pay me now you you can pay me later."

Or, "It is not for man to meddle in the affairs of the gods (or the god)."

Keynesianism = Hubris = The Fatal Conceit

Real business nonresidential fixed investment (RBNRFI) was lower in 1Q2012 than it was in 4Q2011, falling at a 2.1% annual rate, quarter to quarter. This continued a decelerating trend. After growing at 15.7% during 3Q2011, RBNRFI slowed to a 5.2% growth rate in 4Q2011 and then fell at a 2.1% rate last quarter.


Why does this matter? It matters because RBNRFI is what actually drives the economy. Both real GDP (RGDP) and employment growth are a direct function of RBNRFI. The notion that “spending” drives the economy is the Keynesian Superstition.

Plans based upon superstition tend not to work very well. Obama’s $831 billion “stimulus” program of early 2009 failed utterly, as did Bush 43’s $152 billion stimulus program a year earlier. The economists in the grip of the Keynesian Superstition (e.g., Paul Krugman) were left sputtering that the stimulus “just wasn’t big enough”.

Because stimulus works in exactly the same way as trying to raise the level of a swimming pool by drawing a bucket of water out of the deep end and pouring it into the shallow end, no stimulus can ever be big enough. In retrospect, it’s unfortunate that Obama didn’t push through a $2 trillion stimulus. It would have been worth wasting another $1.2 trillion to finally bury this deadly superstition.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiswoodhill/2012/05/02/president-obamas-2012-re-election-prospects-suffer-an-ominous-gdp-report/
I think of the Keynesians as some peacock like bird, strutting around with an undue sense of self significance imagining all the great things they can do with power.  They are defined by pretense.  The pretense that men can act as gods, pulling strings, manipulating the world economy as if it was their backyard creation.  Only man's fatal conceit would allow him/her to believe they possessed the depth of understanding and knowledge necessary to try and manipulate such complexity.  Hubris is not something humans are running short on.

Solution? Or Trade Off?

The only solution. So why aren’t politicians competing to see who can lower oil consumption more? Republicans are going after programs they once supported to seed the advanced battery and auto industries. They’re fighting to protect oil subsidies and slash transit funding. They’re scolding the military for trying to use less oil. They love oil, love oil companies, and love sprawl.
Dems, meanwhile, have managed to hang tough on fuel-efficiency standards and fight off serial attacks on EPA, for the most part anyway. But that’s about it. When gas prices go up, they panic, and it’s the usual cacophony about speculators and strategic oil reserves and Big Oil profiteering.
http://grist.org/energy-policy/the-only-solution-to-high-gas-prices-with-charts/

The lack of ability to stay out of linear thinking is a curse on all of our houses. 

First off, there's no "solution" that will lower oil consumption and therefore prices.  As the price of oil decreases, the relative utility increases, and the number of ways oil may be productively, profitably employed increases.  In short, there's little reason to think that decreasing demand, and therefore short term price reductions, won't result in increasing demand.

Nevermind that all this green energy nonsense ignores a fundamental reality - when you build a car, you expend as much oil as the car will burn in its lifetime on the manufacturing process for the car.  IOW, if you want to reduce consumption, you will have to reduce manufacturing - of cars and most other stuff too.  Pretending you can influence these matters by looking only at something like "efficiency" in the product is half baked thinking.

What one would have to do to begin to know whether there's more benefit than cost - in other words, to evaluate trade offs instead of pretending that there's a "solution" - is a comprehensive analsis of multiple variates. 

But the truth is, no one knows what will happen when these ideas become legislation.  Coercive manipulations of human choices ALWAYS have unintended negative consequences, and ususally they are borne by the least capable, least adaptable of us.  In this way, while the elites dole out goodies with their right hand to the "disenfranchised" to make themselves feel better, they smack them in the back of their heads with the left hand.  This is the hubris of men who think they can play god.

Characterized By Their Incompetence

Mallon uses his literary sensibility and mordant wit to give humanity to characters who in their confusions and delusions staggered across the national stage, utterly unqualified for the prominence they enjoyed until it devoured them.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-ghosts-of-watergate/2012/02/23/gIQAr4VfYR_story.html
But having listened to hundreds of hours of Nixon’s tapes, Mallon considers them “totally inculpating”: He is sure that Nixon — a “misanthrope in a flesh-presser’s profession” — did not know in advance about the burglary. Mallon hears Nixon on tape constantly “trying to give the impression that he knows more than he did, not less.” Mallon’s “Watergate” is a tale of floundering, frightened people unsure of what had happened or what others were telling investigators.

These two sections have a complete ring of truth.  Qualified to perform in the roles now allocated to the President?  No one.  Perhaps that's why they all end up looking foolish to some degree or another.

Hubris - Attempts to Act As A Deity

http://blog.independent.org/2012/02/22/this-man-was-almost-elected-president-of-the-united-states/
Al Gore, who came within a few hundred votes of being elected president in 2000, has designed a blueprint to overhaul capitalism to create a sustainable capitalism that will support lasting economic growth. He says that the way capitalism is now practiced does not “...incorporate sufficient regard for its impact on people, society and the planet.”

Perhaps I'm just mis-judging him because he's so well intentioned in his hubris.  Few things would frighten me more than the idea of Algore pulling all the strings.

He's right, however, in his assessment of how well capitalism is working.  With all of the mal-incentives provided to capitalists by government, there's no question that vast quantities of human capital are being wasted.  It could be much, much better.