Category: Public Choice

Change in Census Question-Wording Drove Seeming Decline in “White” Population

(p. A17) The most common reaction to the release of the 2020 census was summed up in the headline “Census Data show the number of white people fell.” The data show the number of whites declining by 8.6%. This observation was often coupled with a political projection: that while gerrymandering could benefit Republicans in 2022, the political future belongs to the Democratic Party, which commands large majorities among minorities.

. . .

In the 2010 census, 53% of those who said they were of Hispanic origin checked off only “white,” a 58% increase in numbers from 2000. That rise in white Hispanics helped account for the increase in the number of whites from the prior census. But in the 2020 census, a mere 20.3% of Hispanics checked off only “white,” contributing to the 8.6% decline in the total number of people identifying only as white.

That dramatic change probably stemmed not from a shift in social consciousness or demographics, but from a subtle change in the 2020 question about race. In 2010 the census asked respondents to check off whether they were white, black or African-American, American Indian or Alaska Native, various varieties of Asian or Pacific Islander, and “some other race.” They may check off as many race boxes as are applicable.

But in 2020 the census asked respondents who checked off “white” to specify their nationality: “Print, for example, German, Irish, Italian, Lebanese, Egyptian, etc.” No Spanish-speaking nationality was listed. That likely created the impression that Hispanic was another race, notwithstanding the previous question’s disclaimer that “Hispanic origins are not races.”

For the full commentary, see:

John B. Judis. “How the Census Misleads on Race.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, August 30, 2021): A17.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date August 29, 2021, and has the same title as the print version.)

Best New Climate Models Fail at Accurately “Hind-Casting” Past Temperatures

(p. A1) BOULDER, Colo.—For almost five years, an international consortium of scientists was chasing clouds, determined to solve a problem that bedeviled climate-change forecasts for a generation: How do these wisps of water vapor affect global warming?

They reworked 2.1 million lines of supercomputer code used to explore the future of climate change, adding more-intricate equations for clouds and hundreds of other improvements. They tested the equations, debugged them and tested again.

The scientists would find that even the best tools at hand can’t model climates with the sureness the world needs as rising temperatures impact almost every region.

When they ran the updated simulation in 2018, the conclusion jolted them: Earth’s atmosphere was much more sensitive to greenhouse gases than decades of previous models had predicted, and future temperatures could be much higher than feared—perhaps even beyond hope of practical remedy.

(p. A9) “We thought this was really strange,” said Gokhan Danabasoglu, chief scientist for the climate-model project at the Mesa Laboratory in Boulder at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR.

. . .

As world leaders consider how to limit greenhouse gases, they depend heavily on what computer climate models predict. But as algorithms and the computer they run on become more powerful—able to crunch far more data and do better simulations—that very complexity has left climate scientists grappling with mismatches among competing computer models.

While vital to calculating ways to survive a warming world, climate models are hitting a wall. They are running up against the complexity of the physics involved; the limits of scientific computing; uncertainties around the nuances of climate behavior; and the challenge of keeping pace with rising levels of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases. Despite significant improvements, the new models are still too imprecise to be taken at face value, which means climate-change projections still require judgment calls.

“We have a situation where the models are behaving strangely,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences, a leading center for climate modeling. “We have a conundrum.”

. . .

In its guidance to governments last year, the U.N. climate-change panel for the first time played down the most extreme forecasts.

Before making new climate predictions for policy makers, an independent group of scientists used a technique called “hind-casting,” testing how well the models reproduced changes that occurred during the 20th century and earlier. Only models that re-created past climate behavior accurately were deemed acceptable.

In the process, the NCAR-consortium scientists checked whether the advanced models could reproduce the climate during the last Ice Age, 21,000 years ago, when carbon-dioxide levels and temperatures were much lower than today. CESM2 and other new models projected temperatures much colder than the geologic evidence indicated. University of Michigan scientists then tested the new models against the climate 50 million years ago when greenhouse-gas levels and temperatures were much higher than today. The new models projected higher temperatures than evidence suggested.

For the full story, see:

Robert Lee Hotz. “Climate Scientists Encounter Computer Models’ Limits.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, February 7, 2022): A1 & A9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date February 6, 2022, and has the title “Climate Scientists Encounter Limits of Computer Models, Bedeviling Policy.”)

“Hell No,” Greta Thunberg’s Dad Would Not Go to Global Warming COP26 Summit

(p. A1) One person is delighted not to attend the United Nations climate change conference this month.

Greta Thunberg’s dad.

For three years, Svante Thunberg chaperoned his daughter to events across the globe, including spending weeks cooped up in a sailboat crossing the Atlantic, as Greta Thunberg rose to become the leading face of youth climate activism.

Now Ms. Thunberg, who turned 18 in January, is an adult and Mr. Thunberg, 52, can finally get a bit of his life back.

“Hell no,” says Mr. Thunberg (p. A10) when asked if he will be traveling to the COP26 summit, currently underway in Glasgow. “I am certainly not going.”

. . .

Mr. Thunberg, who runs a music-production business and once aspired to owning an SUV, went along with his daughter to attend two previous COP summits. He now drives an electric car. Her parents had to set up a foundation to manage over a million dollars of prize money their child won and wants to give away. Mr. Thunberg says he quit the foundation’s board as soon as he could.

“We have other things to do,” he says. Ms. Thunberg’s mother, Ms. Ernman, is an opera singer who once represented Sweden at the Eurovision song contest. “We have jobs,” Mr. Thunberg says.

. . .

The parental odyssey started after Greta, aged about eight, watched a TV program about trash clogging the oceans. Ms. Thunberg was shocked that more wasn’t being done to address this, her father says.

She went into a depression at age 11. She largely stopped talking, virtually stopped eating for several months and had to be taken out of school. She says she was later diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Ms. Thunberg, her parents and her younger sister chronicled this in a book called “Our House Is On Fire.”

. . .

. . . climate activism appeared to energize their daughter, who was now eating better and proving very adept at delivering blunt messages in public.

Her parents were amazed that, despite not saying anything particularly new on climate change, she was cutting through. Global dignitaries lined up to invite her to lecture them on their failure to act.

For the full story, see:

Max Colchester. “Greta Thunberg’s Dad Takes a Break From Climate Talks.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, November 2, 2021): A1 & A10.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Nov. 1, 2021, and has the title “Greta Thunberg’s Dad Won’t Be With Her at the Climate Summit—and He’s Thrilled.”)

Asteroids as Another Existential Threat

Do we best prepare for uncertain existential future threats by huge centrally planned government spending, or by allowing the flourishing of general purpose technologies and nimble entrepreneurs?

(p. C4) The most immediate threat isn’t from the largest or smallest asteroids but from those in between. Over the past two decades, asteroid hunters with NASA and other international space agencies have identified and tracked the orbits of more than 20,000 asteroids—also known as near-Earth objects—that pass through our neighborhood as they orbit the sun. Of those, about 2,000 are classified as potentially hazardous—asteroids that are large enough (greater than 150 yards in diameter) to cause local destruction and that come close enough to Earth to someday pose a threat.

The good news is that scientists don’t expect any of these known asteroids to collide with Earth within at least the next century. Some will come pretty close, though: On an unlucky Friday the 13th in April 2029, the thousand-foot-wide asteroid Apophis will pass a mere 19,000 miles from Earth—closer than the satellites that bring us DISH TV.

But here’s the bad news: Hundreds of thousands of other near-Earth asteroids, both large and small, haven’t been identified. We have no idea where they are and where they are going. On Feb. 15, 2013, a relatively small, 60-foot-wide asteroid traveling at 43,000 mph exploded in the atmosphere near the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, sending out a blast wave that injured 1,500 people. No one had seen the asteroid coming.

We need to find and track these unknown invaders as soon as possible. But while NASA’s “planetary defense” budget has been steadily increasing over the past decade, the $150 million allocated in 2019 for asteroid detection, asteroid tracking and related programs amounts to less than 1% of the space agency’s $21.5 billion budget.

For the full commentary, see:

Gordon L. Dillow. “The Asteroid Peril Isn’t Science Fiction.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, July 5, 2019): C4.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 5, 2019, and has the same title as the print version.)

Dillow’s commentary is related to his book:

Dillow, Gordon L. Fire in the Sky: Cosmic Collisions, Killer Asteroids, and the Race to Defend Earth. New York: Scribner, 2019.

Biden’s Cancer “Moonshot Is 100 Percent Hype”

(p. A17) WASHINGTON — President Biden unveiled a plan on Wednesday to reduce the death rate from cancer by at least 50 percent over the next 25 years — an ambitious new goal, he said, to “supercharge” the cancer “moonshot” program he initiated and presided over five years ago as vice president.

Mr. Biden, joined by his wife, Jill Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris, also announced a campaign to urge Americans to undergo screenings that were missed during the coronavirus pandemic.

. . .

More screenings are not the answer — the only cancers for which screening has indisputably lowered the death rate are colon and cervical. Death rates for other cancers, like breast, have fallen, but a large part of the drop, if not all of it, is because of improved treatment, said Donald A. Berry, a biostatistician at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center who has spent decades studying these issues.

“Everybody loves early detection, but it comes with harms,” he said — principally, the harm of finding and treating tumors that do not need to be treated because they are innocuous. “The harms we know, but the benefits of screening are very uncertain,” he said.

If the age-adjusted cancer death rate were to plunge by 50 percent, it would have to be because cancers were being cured. Some treatments, like a drug that treats chronic myelogenous leukemia, have slashed death rates for that disease, but such marked effects in cancer are few and far between.

. . .

The White House billed the event as a fresh push by the president to “reignite” the moonshot program and “end cancer as we know it.”

. . .

Yet one Wall Street analyst who specializes in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals said that the time, money and effort might be better spent on initiatives to prevent cancer, like reducing smoking and rates of obesity. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says being obese increases a person’s risk of cancer. And reducing smoking is a proven way to cut the cancer death rate.

“This moonshot is 100 percent hype; this is the absolute wrong way to do this,” said the analyst, Stephen Brozak, the president of WBB Securities.

Presidents since Richard M. Nixon have sought to tackle cancer, of which there are more than 100 types of disease that can vary in how they grow, spread and respond to treatment. The cancer institute estimates that nearly 40 percent of men and women will be diagnosed with some type of cancer at some point during their lifetimes. The American Cancer Society estimates there will be 1.9 million new cases of cancer in the United States this year, and more than 609,000 cancer deaths.

For the full story, see:

Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Gina Kolata. “President Aims to Cut The Cancer Death Rate In Half Over 25 Years.” The New York Times (Thursday, February 3, 2022): A17.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Feb. 2, 2022, and has the title “Biden Presents Ambitious Plan to Cut Cancer Death Rate in Half.”)

Machiavelli Described the Methods of Tyrants

(p. C12) But anyone who observes politics, business or even the loftiest social institutions will know that the world is rife with backstabbers, hypocrites and ethical ne’er-do-wells all thriving at the highest levels—beyond the reach of law or hashtag.

. . .

Machiavelli’s gift, Mr. Boucheron argues, was “naming with precision that which was happening.” He explains the behavior of tyrants not to excuse them, but to show the rest of us what to look out for, in the clearest terms possible. Machiavelli’s “lucidity,” says Mr. Boucheron, was the “weapon of the despairing.”

Other political thinkers have read Machiavelli this way. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in “The Social Contract” that Machiavelli was not advising tyrants but “instructing the people on what they have to fear.” John Adams credited Machiavelli for helping him think through the likely threats to a young American republic.

For the full review, see:

Philip Delves Broughton. “A Poetics for Tyrants.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, January 25, 2020): C12.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date January 24, 2020, and has the title “‘Machiavelli’ Review: A Poetics for Tyrants.”)

The book under review is:

Boucheron, Patrick. Machiavelli: The Art of Teaching People What to Fear. Translated by Willard Wood. New York: Other Press, 2020.

Ford and Edison Tried to Build and “Gift the Nation” a “Utopian Garden City”

I have greatly benefitted from two of Hager’s previous books: The Alchemy of Air and The Demon Under the Microscope. A third one, Ten Drugs, was OK. I am looking forward to reading the new Hager book discussed in the passages quoted below from a WSJ review. I wonder if an inference from the book will be that more infrastructure could be privately provided, if the government would allow it? (By the way, I am by no means as convinced as the reviewer that the TVA was one of FDR’s greatest accomplishments.)

(p. A17) Henry Ford and Thomas Alva Edison were the twin wizards of the first decades of the 20th century in America.

. . .

The story of this pair’s vain effort to build a utopian garden city powered by a mammoth hydroelectric dam at Muscle Shoals, Ala., is all but forgotten. Now it’s been disinterred by Thomas Hager, in “Electric City: The Lost History of Ford and Edison’s American Utopia,” a well-researched, crisply written account tinged with irony.

. . .

During World War I, the government hatched a plan to dam the river and use the electricity generated to power two plants turning out nitrates for munitions. The dam was half built and the factories equipped when the war ended and the project was abandoned.

President Warren Harding didn’t want to spend the $30 million needed to finish the mile-wide 10-story dam and told underlings to lease the whole works to private interests. Ford had already been tempted to acquire the nitrate plants, which could be refitted to turn out the kind of fertilizer used by regional farmers. He envisioned the completed dam supplying cheap power for his blended new American community of garden cities strung for miles along the river. Worker-farmers would commute—in their Model T’s, of course—to small factories running on electricity from the dam. They would be given time off in planting and harvesting season to raise crops they could sell to supplement their incomes. It was a Jeffersonian vision of America updated to the age of the automobile and bounteous electricity.

Ford enlisted the prestige and smarts of his camping buddy Edison. They wanted, Mr. Hager writes, “to gift the nation they loved with a titanic, living example of how they thought America should work . . . The results would be new kinds of cities, new ways of making things, new approaches to labor and leisure, and improved lives for everyone.”

. . .

In the end, Edison faded from the picture, and Norris ended Ford’s hopes—passing legislation that made Muscle Shoals a federal undertaking, although Coolidge refused to sign it. And in the wondrous alchemy of American politics, when the Great Depression propelled Franklin D. Roosevelt into the White House, Muscle Shoals became the core of the TVA, the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the first and greatest of FDR’s accomplishments.

For the full review, see:

Edward Kosner. “BOOKSHELF; Bright Lights, Big River.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, Dec. 23, 2021): A17.

(Note: ellipses between paragraphs were added; ellipsis in the middle of a paragraph was in the original.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 22, 2021, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Electric City’ Review: Bright Lights, Big River.”)

The book under review is:

Hager, Thomas. Electric City: The Lost History of Ford and Edison’s American Utopia. New York: Harry N. Abrams Press, 2021.

Bret Baier Documents How Fauci and Collins Dishonestly Dismissed the Hypothesis That COVID-19 Originated in Wuhan Lab

Bret Baier gave a serious report on the substantial and growing evidence that Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, and other “experts” and officials lied, early and intentionally, in their dismissal of the likely Wuhan lab origin of Covid-19. (The report aired on Bret Baer’s “Special Report” nightly news program on Tues., January 25, 2022 on Fox News.)

Taking “Capital Allocation Away From People Who Have Demonstrated Great Skill in Capital Allocation”

(p. 1) The richest people on earth typically devote a share of their vast resources to charity. That is the bargain and the expectation, anyway.

Jeff Bezos, until very recently the world’s richest human, has been applying himself dutifully if a bit cautiously to the task, giving money to food banks and homeless families while pledging $10 billion of the fortune he earned through the online retailer Amazon to fight climate change.

The latest richest human, Elon Musk, has taken a rather different tack. There was the public spat with the director of the World Food Programme on Twitter, for instance, announcing, “If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.”

. . .

And, of course, there is the ongoing insistence that his moneymaking efforts, running both the electric carmaker Tesla and the rocket company SpaceX, are already better-(p. 8)ing humankind, thank you very much.

Mr. Musk is practicing “troll philanthropy.”

That’s what Benjamin Soskis, senior research associate in the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute, has called it, noting that Mr. Musk seems to be having fun with this novel approach.

“He doesn’t seem to care much about using his philanthropy to curry public favor,” Mr. Soskis said. “In fact, he seems to enjoy using his identity as a philanthropist in part to antagonize the public.”

. . .

“The particular barrier for donors from a tech background is they don’t just think their genius has made them good at what they do, they also think what they do commercially also makes society better,” said Rhodri Davies, a philanthropy commentator who wrote a piece on Mr. Musk called “The Edgelord Giveth.”

Mr. Musk, for instance, has said that getting humankind to Mars through SpaceX is an important contribution and has written and spoken acerbically about what he calls “anti-billionaire BS,” including attempts to target taxes at billionaires.

“It does not make sense to take the job of capital allocation away from people who have demonstrated great skill in capital allocation and give it to an entity that has demonstrated very poor skill in capital allocation, which is the government,” Mr. Musk said on Monday at an event hosted by The Wall Street Journal.

At the same time, Mr. Kharas said a more charitable reading of Mr. Musk’s exchange with the World Food Programme is possible. He could just genuinely want to know how the money will be spent and is putting in public, on Twitter, the due diligence work that institutional giving does behind closed doors.

“I think this idea that he was willing to engage was really good,” Mr. Kharas of the Brookings Institution said of Mr. Musk. “I think his response was extremely sensible. It was basically, ‘Show me what you can do. Demonstrate it. Provide me with some evidence. I’ll do it.’”

For the full story, see:

Nicholas Kulish. “Elon Musk, Trolling Away.” The New York Times SundayBusiness Section (Sunday, December 12, 2021): 1 & 8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 10, 2021, and has the title “Elon Musk’s Latest Innovation: Troll Philanthropy.”)

When Sri Lanka Government Banned Chemical Fertilizers, Yields Tanked and Prices “Shot Up”

(p. A4) RATNAPURA, Sri Lanka — This year’s crop worries M.D. Somadasa. For four decades, he has sold carrots, beans and tomatoes grown by local farmers using foreign-made chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which helped them reap bigger and richer crops from the verdant hills that ring his hometown.

Then came Sri Lanka’s sudden, and disastrous, turn toward organic farming. The government campaign, ostensibly driven by health concerns, lasted only seven months. But farmers and agriculture experts blame the policy for a sharp drop in crop yields and spiraling prices that are worsening the country’s growing economic woes and leading to fears of food shortages.

Prices for some foodstuffs, like rice, have risen by nearly one-third compared with a year ago, according to Sri Lanka’s central bank. The prices of vegetables like tomatoes and carrots have risen to five times their year-ago levels.

“I haven’t seen times that were as bad as these,” said Mr. Somadasa, a 63-year-old father of two who sells vegetables in the small town of Horana, just outside the island nation’s capital, Colombo. “We can’t find enough vegetables. And with the price hikes, people find it hard to buy the vegetables.”

. . .

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa cited health concerns when his government banned the importation of chemical fertilizers in April [2021], a pledge he had initially made during his 2019 election campaign.

. . .

The push for organic farming didn’t start with Mr. Rajapaksa’s current government, nor when another brother, Mahinda Rajapaksa, currently the prime minister, was president from 2005 to 2015. Some farmers and agriculture industry officials say they are warming to the idea of reducing dependence on chemicals in farming. But the shift was too sudden for farmers who didn’t know how to work organically, said Nishan de Mel, director of Verité Research, a Colombo-based analysis firm.

Verité found in a July [2021] survey that three-quarters of Sri Lanka’s farmers relied heavily on chemical fertilizers, while just about 10 percent cultivated without them. Almost all major crops grown in the country depend on the chemicals. For crops crucial to the economy like rice, rubber and tea, the dependence reaches 90 percent or more.

The April ban went into effect just before what is known as the Yala planting season, which lasts from May to August, and was felt almost immediately. The Verité survey showed that 85 percent of farmers expected a reduction in their harvest because of the fertilizer ban. Half of them feared that their crop yield could fall by as much as 40 percent.

Food prices shot up in September [2021], . . .

For the full story, see:

Aanya Wipulasena and Mujib Mashal. “A Plunge Into Organic Farming Brings Disaster to Sri Lanka.” The New York Times (Wednesday, December 8, 2021): A4.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed years, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 7, 2021, and has the title “Sri Lanka’s Plunge Into Organic Farming Brings Disaster.”)

Climate Change Infrastructure Subsidies Mainly Benefit the Rich

(p. A9) Mr. Biden has insisted that at least 40 percent of the benefits of federal climate spending will reach underserved places, which tend to be low income, rural, communities of color, or some combination of the three.

But historically, it is wealthier, white communities — with both high property values and the resources to apply to competitive programs — that receive the bulk of federal grants. And policy experts say it’s unclear whether, and how quickly, federal bureaucracy can level the playing field.

. . .

The new climate provisions in the infrastructure bill inject billions of dollars into competitive grant programs. These are pots of money that towns, cities and counties can access only by submitting applications, which federal agencies then rank, with funds going to applicants with the highest scores.

That system is designed to ensure that funding goes to the most worthwhile projects.

But it also hinges on something outside the control of the federal government: The ability of local officials to use sophisticated tools and resources to write successful applications. The result is a process that has widened the gap between rich communities and their less affluent counterparts, experts say.

The disparity begins even before the application process begins. That’s because local governments must be aware of the grant programs in the first place, which means having dedicated staff to track those programs. Then they need to design proposals that will score highly, and correctly complete the reams of required paperwork.

Even if they are awarded a grant, communities are required to pay a share of the project — often 25 percent, which is unaffordable for many struggling towns and counties.

Governments that can clear those obstacles face a final hurdle: Demonstrating that the value of the property that would be protected is greater than the cost of the project. That rule often excludes communities of color and rural areas, where property values are usually lower than in white communities.

. . .

The Biden administration has touted the program, called Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC, as a model that should be expanded. The infrastructure bill provides billions more to the program.

But most of the first round winners were wealthy, predominantly white areas in a handful of coastal states, federal data show.

More than half the money went to California, New Jersey and Washington State. The largest single recipient was a $68 million flood-control project in Menlo Park, Calif., where the median household income is more than $160,000, the typical home costs more than $2 million and only one in five residents are Black or Hispanic. The project is in line to get $50 million from FEMA.

For the full story, see:

Christopher Flavelle. $50 Billion Conundrum: Who Gets Climate Protection?” The New York Times (Saturday, December 4, 2021): A9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 3, 2021, and has the title “Billions for Climate Protection Fuel New Debate: Who Deserves It Most.”)