February 2007

Despite selloff, recession unlikely, according to economists (Wednesday, 2/28/07)
Given the cryptic way Alan Greenspan often spoke while he was Chairman of the Federal Reserve, he seemed very much aware that he could not make even the slightest descriptive statement about the economy without influencing it. That still seems to be true more than a year after he left his post at the Fed. His remarks about the possibility of America's slipping into recession this year apparently helped to aggravate the big stock dive yesterday.

Today, many economists are rushing to emphasize that they don't agree that the U. S. economy is headed for recession. The irony is that a close look at their remarks, as well as those of former Chairman Greenspan, suggests that they are saying essentially the same thing. Here's more from Jeannine Aversa.

At any rate, Asian markets continued to lose ground as of this morning, but, later in the day, Tim Paradis reported from New York that stability seemed to be settling in. The current American Federal Reserve Chairman also has emphasized that the markets are working as they should, and that he expects the American economy to continue growing during the months ahead.

While yesterday's big selloff can be attributed to multiple factors, including former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's remarks and a possible machine malfunction, it did seem to provide evidence of China's growing international influence, as David Barboza reports from Shanghai for Melbourne's The Age.

Western governors agree to plan for cutting greenhouse gases (Tuesday, 2/27/07)
The governors or California, Arizona, Oregon, New Mexico, and Washington have agreed to reduce their states' emissions in order to slow climate change, while scientists from 63 countries prepare to take Earth's temperature at its poles.

In addition to all of the other reasons for worry about atmospheric and oceanic warming, there is concern that global warming could set off a catastrophic change in the other direction. After centuries of relative warmth during the High Middle Ages, the "little ice age" began in the early 14th century and lasted into modern times. Earth was plunged into a long period of cold that many experts attribute to less solar and more volcanic activity. During these centuries, water in the canals of Amsterdam as well as Venice froze solid, and millions died from the Black Death during the mid-14th century as well as from starvation over many subsequent generations.

This time, it may be more a consequence of the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, including tremendous population increases. It all has to do with "thermohaline circulation" and the "conveyor belt" that circulates through the world's oceans, bringing warmth to the northern latitudes. If the polar ice caps melt, dumping large amounts of fresh water into the oceans, the "conveyor belt" could be disrupted or destroyed, and this could result in another very cold period that could last for centuries. However, this time, it would result in far more deaths than before, because global population is many times greater now than it ever was during the previous "little ice age."

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Abrupt Climate Change (Tuesday, 2/27/07)
It appears that the onset of the "little ice age" in the early 14th century may have occurred within only about a decade, so climate change isn't necessarily a gradual process extending over a long period of time. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's Ocean and Climate Change Institute examines the phenomenon of Abrupt Climate Change.

Almost a hundred corporations join the Global Roundtable on Climate Change (Friday, 2/23/07)
Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University says that many industry leaders agree that solving the problem of gas-caused climate change will require considerable lead time, so it's high time that we all get started.

Michael Crichton was on Charlie Rose's television program the other night. He has generated considerable controversy with one of his recent books, State of Fear, in which he explains why he's not a "catastrophist" on the question of climate change. While he agrees that the world is getting warmer, that human activity is largely responsible, and that the world should take action to limit CO2 emissions, he doesn't believe that existing data support the notion that the world faces imminent catastrophe requiring drastic action that would threaten the U.S. economy or way of life.

Dr. Crichton apparently met with President Bush, whose administration has been cool to popular interpretations of climate change and calls for drastic action. While he and the President might be in agreement on some issues having to do with the climate change issue, it may be for entirely different reasons.

The Bush administration appears to include many persons who really don't believe in science and have far too much confidence in their own subjective judgments. In fact, it's one of the things that the President and some of his most outspoken opponents seem to have in common.

Crichton, on the other hand, like most scientists, seems to believe that it's highly unlikely that we will be right about anything if we don't base our conclusions on systematically controlled observations and careful analysis. We agree that it's not good enough simply to make up something, to rely on the unaided sense, to confine ourselves to the limited perspective of daily life, or to be guided by consensus.

Crichton doesn't believe that anybody can predict what the climate will be like in the future. Even weather can't be forecast with acceptable accuracy more than a few days ahead, he says. Moreover, it appears that this is because of the nature of complex, dynamic, nonlinear systems themselves, not because we lack sufficient information. "Chaos theory," despite its unfortunate name, is an important part of modern physics and arose in meteorology.

On the Charlie Rose program, Crichton said that the U. S. culture may be changing so that an increasing number of people and their leaders may believe that it's not necessary to verify data. He also said that many people seem to have a strong appetite for catastrophic scenarios, whether or not they are supported by facts.

Noted science fiction novelist, screenwriter, producer, and director Michael Crichton is a "big man" in Hollywood in more ways than one--he's nearly seven feet tall. He also taught anthropology at Cambridge before earning a Harvard M. D. We believe that he keeps his medical license current, but we're not sure about that.

Finally, another triumph for Billie Jean King: Wimbledon changes its policies (Thursday, 2/22/07)
It has been a third of a century since Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs on the tennis court in the widely watched "battle of the sexes," even though this interpretation distorted Billy Jean's long-term efforts to achieve financial parity for women players. She said at the time, and has emphasized many times since, that her point isn't that the best women players can beat the best men players, but that women's tennis has the same entertainment value, and that's the bottom line.

However, Billie Jean is as happy as anybody that the authorities at Wimbledon have decided that women players will be paid the same as men. Misinterpretation or not, how long would it have taken if Riggs had defeated King all those years ago?

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Online Mathematics Textbooks (Thursday, 2/22/07)
Many people who work for colleges and universities throughout the United States have a vested economic interest in having large numbers of people value their approval and be willing to go deeply into debt in order to help support them and their careers. However, if you're really interested in learning, rather than simply pleasing people with institutional authority so that they will be willing to give you a certificate to display or brag about, educational resources are more freely available to you now than ever before. For instance, Georgia Institute of Technology's Professor George Cain offers you ready access to sixty-five mathematics textbooks online.

The American economy looks both west and east (Wednesday, 2/21/07)
People who work in America's private sector may feel they have more in common with Asian workers when it comes to security, while people in the U. S. public sector may feel more like Europe's workers. Dennis Cauchon of USA Today tells about the big private vs. public sector pension gap.

Are some economists "in denial?" (Tuesday, 2/20/07)
Most research psychologists marvel that, at the same time that most of Sigmund Freud's hypotheses have been discredited by psychological research, some versions of several of his concepts seem to have gained prominence in the language of popular culture. If you've heard about people being "anal" or "in denial" in recent years, you'll know what we mean.

For whatever reason, Paul Craig Roberts writes in Manufacturing News about how some economists appear to be "blind to offshoring's adverse impact."

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: European Academy of the Urban Environment (Monday, 2/19/07)
Most Europeans live in urban areas, which helps explain the mission of the European Academy of the Urban Environment.

Incidentally, why are Europe and Asia still widely regarded as separate continents? Because, for centuries until fairly recent history, Europeans had no idea that cities such as Paris and Beijing are located on the same land mass. In fact, in the long history of humanity's experience on this planet, it was only about "a week ago Thursday" that Europeans realized that Europe and Asia are separated to Europe's west by what are now referred to as "the Americas," that there is a vast Pacific Ocean, and that the world is as large as it is. We're still living with small pieces of that legacy.

About the time of the American Revolution, it was still widely believed that there was a huge undiscovered southern continent, and President Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark out, in part, to discover the so-called "Northwest Passage," which never existed.

Americans increasingly question free trade (Sunday, 2/18/07)
Do "globalization" and free trade stimulate global economic growth? Probably.

If you would like to see what happens when a nation isolates itself from other world economies, just take a look at North Korea, which would be the clear winner in the world's economic basket-case sweepstakes, if there were not so much competition.

On the other hand, has "globalization," as it has occurred so far, aggravated the have vs. have-not gap in the world? Probably.

Markets do seem to do the best job at distributing resources efficiently and fairly for those who are "inside the system." However, they don't serve some human needs well at all, which is why nations collectively build infrastructures for public use, and they don't do a very good job of serving people who lack the resources to participate.

Here's more from the Christian Science Monitor's Mark Trumbull on what many regard as the "dark side" of free trade.

Yang to contribute tens of millions of dollars to Stanford (Sunday, 2/18/07)
Jerry Yang, cofounder of Yahoo!, will donate $75 million to Stanford University, according to the International Herald Tribune. Yang was a student at Stanford when he and fellow student David Filo founded Yahoo! in 1994.

Incidentally, for at least a brief period during the late 1990s before the dot-com bubble burst, Yang was said to have been worth $10 billion. When asked how that felt, he replied that he had learned that having $10 billion was the same as having $1 billion. Moreover, he said that the new money was most important to him when he first realized that he wouldn't have to scramble to find a way to meet his car payment.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Ending Oil Dependence (Sunday, 2/18/07)
The world's dependence on oil is a fairly recent phenomenon. In fact, until sometime in the 1950s, coal was still the principal source of energy in the United States. There are people still living who have talked to persons who could easily remember when oil was used mostly as a lubricant in many regions of the world.

However, as the world more heavily industrialized, as global population exploded, and as standards of living increased in many regions, the planet's appetite for energy increased exponentially, and, before long, the world was running mostly on oil.

What now? David Sandalow of the Brookings Institution offers a number of ambitious proposals for ending America's dependence on oil during a time that increased international competition for the remains of this finite resource is coupled with growing environmental concerns.

More on the U. S. quarrel with China over intellectual property rights (Saturday, 2/17/07)
Traditionally, much of Asia hasn't paid too much attention to international copyright laws. What Westerners regard as "piracy" has been a continuing problem. Moreover, many observers, including many government officials in Beijing, believe that one of China's principal needs now is to develop a modern legal system that will support its economic future. Christopher Rugaber in Washington writes that the United States continues its conflict with China over video and music piracy and is prepared to take its complaint to the World Trade Organization.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: When to Replace Common Household Items (Saturday, 2/17/07)
Many old computers still operate as they always have, but nobody wants to use them, because they have become obsolete. Kelli Grant says they should be replaced after about four years. That's probably about the time you'll feel that you've been left behind and want to drop-kick your PC across the street. But, if you're still satisfied with it, keep using it. On the other hand, Ms. Grant has been talking to experts about the "shelf life" or "use life" of a variety of items, from cosmetics to mattresses. Here's When to Replace Common Household Items.

No place to hide (Thursday, 2/15/07)
Martin Fackler tells how foreign workers, including those in the United States, are having trouble adjusting to "The Toyota Way."

The Japanese economy has spent more than a decade struggling--largely because of a real estate bubble and the way that Japanese business is financed--following a long postwar period during which it was best-known for its "Japanese economic miracle." In fact, twenty years ago or so, American executives were being sent to Japan in attempts to learn "how they do it."

During recent years, the Japanese economy has looked less "miraculous" and possibly in danger of losing its second largest position among world economies to China or India. Nonetheless, Toyota seems poised to become the world's largest automotive manufacturer, as General Motors seems ready to be demoted to "Colonel" or something.

What best characterizes the nation's second most populous country--its wealth or its poverty? (Monday, 2/5/07)
India contains more people than any other country except China, which it is expected to surpass in total population sometime later this century. India has soooo many people and is soooo diverse in nearly every respect, that it contains multitudes of nearly everything one can imagine. For instance, we've been hearing a lot recently about its breathtaking economic growth and the growth in an affluent consumer class that is accompanying it. However, India still contains many of the world's poorest people as well. Here's more from The Guardian.

What? The Chinese government doesn't want its citizens to read about Marxism? (Monday, 2/5/07)
Noam Cohen writes in the New York Times that the people who run the Marxist Internet Archive suspect that the Chinese government is hacking their site and trying to prevent them from presenting Marxist materials in the Chinese language. If true, it seems to provide additional evidence that China is no longer a communist country in any sense that would be recognized by communism's founders or even by Mao himself.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Current Controversies (Sunday, 2/4/07)
History certainly isn't dead. We respond to things in terms of how they look to us, and context and perspective influence how they look. Historical context and perspective are particularly important.

For instance, it's important to view current issues in historical perspective. Current Controversies: History Behind the Headlines contains several articles, including ones with titles such as "Terrorism in Perspective" and "The Politics of Oil."

It's real, and we're responsible, they say (Saturday, 2/3/07)
Scientists from 113 countries have issued a report indicating that the preponderance of the evidence is that the world's atmosphere and oceans really are heating up in unprecedented ways, and that human activity since the onset of the Industrial Revolution is responsible. Moreover, the degradation of the natural environment will continue, according to the experts.

Several people in the American Bush administration are said to have close ties to the oil industry, and, until his recent State of the Union speech, the President hadn't indicated much concern about climate change, despite the growing evidence, both systematic and anecdotal. John Heilprin reports from Washington that the Administration continues its opposition to mandatory C02 limits.

Meanwhile, the American Enterprise Institute is offering economists and scientists from around the world $10,000 if they will publish articles which dispute the recent U. N. environmental report. According to The Guardian, the AEI receives funding from ExxonMobil, which has reported record profits, according to Joe Carroll and Michael Erman of The Courier Mail.

According to public opinion polls, particularly in the United States, it's still widely believed that scientists are in disagreement over climate change issues, but that hasn't seemed to be the case for a long time. According to some, public perceptions have been greatly influenced by the oil industry, which has spent millions of dollars to "manufacture uncertainty" among members of the public.

A fundamental part of the problem is that most Americans and most of their political leaders still aren't aware of WHAT IT TAKES to be sure of anything or to generate trustworthy answers to empirical questions of all kinds. It all comes down to what philosophers for centuries have referred to as "epistemology." Basically, if one really is interested in what is true about nature, including human nature, at the very least, it's necessary to go through the following steps:

1) What QUESTION are we interested in answering? It's important to formulate our questions in terms that make it possible to answer them, preferably quantitatively; e.g., How many? How much? To what extent? In what ratio or proportion?, etc. By framing questions in quantitative terms, it provides the precision necessary to enable us to answer them by gathering facts.

The key thing, though, is that, if we're really interested in determining what is true, we must start with a genuine question, not a conclusion. That is, we must start as though we really don't know what the answer is, and, unless or until we DO WHAT IT TAKES TO KNOW, we really DON'T know. If we start with conclusions rather than questions, we'll simply expend all of our energies defending our conclusions. But where do our conclusions or beliefs come from in the first place if we haven't really done WHAT IT TAKES to know?

2) What INFORMATION must we have in order to answer our question? What information is needed in order to make an informed judgment? If we are unable to specify the information we need, how can we claim that our judgments or beliefs are informed, and how can we be so certain that we're right?

3) What METHODS do we need to use in order to obtain the information we need?

Those three steps constitute the minimum that one must do in order to develop trustworthy answers to empirical questions of any kind. A fundamental problem with the current American Administration is that it seems to contain few people who recognize these realities; but, then, ours is a representative democracy, and the knowledge and tech revolutions have left most individuals and most institutions far behind.

However, it's even worse than most of the Bush administration's most outspoken critics seem to believe, because most of them don't recognize what it takes to be right about climate, or anything else, either.

Attitudes, including their belief components, are easy--everybody has them. Moreover, it isn't hard to find people who believe they're right about something. However, these things aren't enough.

A small proportion of the human race has been working hard to keep up to date. Why do researchers work so hard and spend so much time on their projects? Because THAT'S WHAT IT TAKES.

Some very bright, hard-working members of the species have learned a lot about two things during recent history: 1) WHAT IT TAKES to reach trustworthy conclusions about nature, including human nature, both present and past, and 2) the processes by which most people USUALLY formulate and maintain their interpretations of themselves and the world around them. In relation to this latter issue, it's necessary to examine research from the past 70 years or so in fields such as cultural anthropology, social psychology, and neuroscience.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Chem1 Virtual Textbook (Saturday, 2/3/07)
Now that one can toss a brick in nearly any direction in the United States and hit somebody with multiple graduate degrees, we've thought it might be more convenient simply to award everybody these degrees shortly after birth, along with their Social Security numbers. In the meantime, if you would like one or more certificates to hang on your wall or brag about, there certainly is no shortage of organizations, traditional and otherwise, willing to take your money in exchange for awarding you one or more "degrees."

At a time when genuine learning and knowledge are more important than ever before, many Americans seem increasingly preoccupied with symbols or certificates, and these may or may or may not reflect genuine knowledge or competence. For many people in the United States, including many employers, the shadows seem more important than the substance.

However, if you really would like to participate in the vast knowledge explosion that's going on in order to enhance your real education for living, citizenship, or work, unprecedented resources are freely available now. Just as the Protestant Reformation promoted the notion that individuals can relate directly to God, and do not need to go through a complex hierarchical system of arbiters, it is not necessary for you to accumulate crushing student debt while jumping through academic political hoops and acquiring the blessing of existing institutions, for-profit or otherwise.

As we've said so many times, in the long-run, the only questions the world asks are "Do I really know anything?" and "Can I really do anything?" If the answer to these questions is "yes," there aren't any other important questions. If the answer is "no," there aren't any other important questions either.

However, if somebody tells you that it isn't necessary to go to college, this does NOT mean that it isn't necessary to learn, only that there are a growing number of alternatives for doing so. Aristotle is supposed to have told his pupil, Alexander, that "there is no royal road to mathematics." This is true for the non-royal among us too. In fact, there's no special path to mathematics or any other form of knowledge for the rich or powerful either.

If you think that it's not necessary to know anything in order to succeed or even to live well in the modern world, don't believe it. In fact, you will need to know much more than your ancestors from now on simply in order to survive on any level that is familiar or satisfactory to you, particularly if you regard "successful living" as something more than simply accumulating wealth or possessions.

Some people run no risk whatever of learning anything unless they are pulled, kicking and screaming, through a university curriculum with professors employing tacit threats all along the way. Frequently, though, these efforts result in no real success, despite accumulated degrees and huge debts. However, with sufficient will and commitment, it has been possible for decades to acquire an excellent education for nothing at the public library. Libraries can still be wonderful places, but you also have the Internet and other resources freely available to you now as well.

Some persons really cannot NOT learn, if simply exposed to resource-rich environments. Some simply cannot NOT be creative or productive. The modern resource-rich world is perfect for these people.

Ten-thousand years from now, it's likely that current institutions and their symbols will be unknown to everybody other than a few archeologists, or whatever they will be called then. On the other hand, it's likely that the ideas behind the famous E = MC2 formula will be as important then as they are now. To which would you rather devote your precious life's time and energy?

Among available resources now are a growing number of online textbooks, including Chem1 Virtual Textbook, which has been put together by Stephen Lower of Simon Fraser University.