Other peoples money

Disclaimer: I'm not socialist or conservative but I do defend both of these points of view. Obviously most systems in Europe are a strong mixture of both. But this post does deal with politics-led economics, concluding that it's all based on bad dogma.


Margaret Thatcher famously said, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” Now Thatcher was sometimes right and sometimes wrong but mostly she didn't have a clue what she was doing from one moment to the next. However that was actually an essential part of her credo. She like Reagan, believed that government can't possibly ever do anything right so we need to leave the free-market to try to solve everything by using a hands-off approach. She lived up to both parts of that credo. Let's reflect on what she achieved impartially:


Good parts;
.Reduced inflation to record lows,.
.Controlled the trade unions, who had previously been totally destructive.
.Deregulated the credit process. Eventually this led to cheap credit. The engine of economic recovery must start with cheap credit surely.
.She was right that the tax regime was barmy. By reducing the top tax she actually got more overall tax revenue.


Bad parts:
.Inflation reduction was achieved by massively increasing unemployment in a very bad recession where Britain lost virtually all of it's traditional manufacturing base; ie the thing that made Britain rich in the first place. Workers were too afraid of being out of work to strike. One might ponder which situation is better; the slow stagnation effect of the left or the rapid descent and start again effect of the right.
.Actually making things and selling them was replaced by the city of London selling reams of worthless paper. Boom and busts were made worse. The cheap credit led to a housing boom because flipping a house was more profitable than working and sometimes the only alternative in a job-free marketplace.
.Homelessness rocketed upwards.

Other stuff she did was probably a net zero. She didn't control public spending but in fact increased it largely because of all the extra unemployment benefit. Much of Britain's GDP recovered largely due to North Sea Oil revenues, most of which was squandered and which is now running out. Nuclear power was stopped but replaced by natural gas power. While she reduced the income tax, she massively increased VAT and introduced a whole slew of other taxes -  a practice which Blair/Brown copied.

Blair of course used Thatcher as his role model, with no intention of moving back to an industrial Britain. The phrase "metal-bashing" came to replace the word "engineering" in governmental circles which illustrated the utter conptempt the political classes held for it. In Blair's government, most of them had never done a real job - they were politicians straight from college. John Major was a kind of stop gap middleman between these two larger personalities. So it's fair to say that what Britain has now is due to Thatcher rather than Blair - for better or worse, depending on your dogma.

But back to the original socialist put-down phrase "other peoples money". Now you might be thinking, like me, that it's capitalism that seems to rely on other peoples money rather more than socialism. And you might even notice that "eventually running out of other peoples money" is a perfect description of the current financial crisis. But it gets even odder than that. The US and the UK, the followers of Thatchers faith, grounded as it is in the utopian Chicago economics* of regulation-free markets and rational decision-makers, are the ones in deep debt and they got most of that debt from the most socialist regime on the planet who just happen to have all the money now: China. Oh irony of ironies! Another irony appears by realizing that China got all that wealth by building and selling things - just like Britain had! Lesson learned? Not yet it seems!


*You know the crowd - they used Smith's mere metaphor of an "invisible hand" as a godlike doctrine. One presumes this is a reflection of our soundbite world where a phrase has more meaning than an entire book. Clearly none of them actually even read Smiths book.

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End qwerty domination!

A perfect example of an innocent early design mistake becoming important later:-
The qwerty keyboard was originally introduced to slow down typists because they were too fast for the first typewriter mechanisms to keep up. Yet it's still with us, even for computers used largely by two-fingered typists. This is where standardization can lead us (except for the French who, always striving to be just a little different, chose to use an azerty* keyboard instead). Yet there was a chance to change it when mobile phones were used for texting. Nobody who uses their thumbs for typing would want to use anything other than an alphabetic system. Alas now we have full keyboards on our phones though we still need to use our thumbs and --aaaargh! ---they are all qwerty. The only remaining hope now is that we get an option to change the touch screen keyboard to alphabetic. That would be really easy to do I imagine. Is there one?

*I had to change my French azerty for a Spanish qwerty. It wasn't so much the qw/az confusion (bad enough) but the numbers at the top: The French use the shift key for typing numbers while the rest of the world can type a number with just one touch. So frustrating... The Spanish keyboard bridged the Franco/Anglo divide and gives me all the funny keys I need too like ñ and Ç. So Spanish is not only easier spelt and easier pronounced but also easier typed.

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Climate model sensitivity

Glad I am to report that at least one influential non-skeptic thinks that the accepted climate sensitvity to CO2 is very overblown. Skeptical in this case largely refers to Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer, and other climatologists who think the IPCC is overly alarmist in it's projections. Oddly non-skeptical conventionally means that you accept the IPCC report. But a little known fact is that you can accept the IPCC report but prefer the lower projected increase in temperature of 1.1K per doubling of CO2. Yes that is allowed - it's called being a lukewarmer. And in that case to be skeptical is to reject the alarmism that appears only in the newspapers but not in the IPCC documents. A sensible position to take in other words.

Anyway, this next bit is lifted wholesale from another blog called MasterResource, run by Mssrs Bradley and Knappenberger and is here to remind me, or anyone else reading this, that mainstream users of climate models distrust them almost as much as the skeptics:

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"Jerry North (Texas A&M) Hints at the Problem

Eleven years ago, when I was director of public policy at Enron, I entered into a consulting agreement with Gerald North, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Sciences and Oceanography at Texas A&M’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences, to tell me what was going on. North was as close as I could find to a ‘middle of the roader’ between climate alarmism and (ultra) skepticism. He is alsohighly decorated.

And this has not changed. North’s own intuitive estimate of climate sensitivity is now 50% below the IPCC’s best guess, and he has been critical of a number of the climate mini-alarms that would make headlines and then fade away (more hurricanes, disruption of the thermohaline circulation, etc.).

But I noticed a Malthusian streak in North, that unstated assumption that nature is optimal, and the human influence on climate cannot be good but only bad–and maybe even catastrophic. Still, North in his emails to me–then and now–was rather blunt about the shortcomings of climate modeling.

Here is a sampling of quotations over the last decade:

“There is no doubt a small ‘sociological convergence’ effect, that tends to work here (individuals and their managers hate to be the outlier). The biggest problem is that doubling CO2 leads to a 1 deg C warming (I think even Lindzen agrees). If water vapor doubles it, we are at 2.0 (Lindzen differs here, but I do not know of anyone else). Are there any other feedbacks? It is hard to dismiss ice feedback, but it might be small. Clouds are positive in most models — I have always taken them to be neutral, but with no substantial reason (it’s just easier that way).”

“I do not think there is enough thinking going on. Just plugging in the numbers or running the simulations. Dick [Lindzen] is clearly right on this one.”

“I believe the ocean simulations are very primitive and quite variable from one group to another. The underlying reason is this: How much of the deep layers of the ocean are really participating in the warming?”

“There are pitifully few ways to test climate models.”

“[Models] sort of fake it (we call it ‘parameterization’). They do it in very crude ways such as if the temperature profile of the atmosphere is unstable, they make the whole column overturn, etc.”

“[The models’ treatment of feedbacks] could also be sociological: getting the socially acceptable answer.”

“I go back to my old position: we need more time, maybe a decade to get a better grip on aerosols, water vapor feedback, cloud feedback, ocean participation.”

“We have only a very loose grip on aerosols.”

“[The models] treat the ocean differently. Somehow, they are fudging the parameters that govern ocean coupling so that they get the right ocean delay to agree with the data in spite of their differing sensitivities.”

But before you call North a radical or tattletale on the ‘consensus’, consider what the IPCC said in the back of their latest assessement of the physical science of climate change:

“The set of available models may share fundamental inadequacies, the effects of which cannot be quantified.”

 - IPCC, Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis (Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 805.

Is this a trick? Satisfy the science by stating the science–but do so on page 805 rather than in the executive summary where it belongs. It is this sort of thing that Eric Berger–and other open-minded middle-of-the-roaders–are going to find out. And they just might feel a little duped."

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So OK, North leans towards 1.5K as a likely number, rather than the "official" 3K. Actually the official stance is 1.1 to 6K but everyone just takes the middle of the range as if it was a Gaussian distribution  (it isn't - all numbers higher than 1K are decreasingly scientifically plausible as North admits above - but of course the IPCC like the hoi polloi to assume it's a Gaussian). I've no problem believing that many more scientists think the same way as North but they just don't shout about it in the same way as Lindzen because it's just not politically correct to do so. Not everyones tenure is on such a sound footing as Lindzen, and Spencer actually had to resign from NASA in order to state his skeptical views.

I've noticed that Mathusian streak in a lot of the debate though - particularly on Andy Revkins blog. Overpopulation is a problem easily resolved by allowing 3rd world women some education, some independence and the right to work. All of which arrives with prosperity - which in turn is just possibly dependent on cheap, available energy. Ah...there's the rub. As they said on Spiked magazine though, Malthusians have always been wrong about the limits to growth and the real problem likely isn't too many people, it's too many Malthusians.

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The car of the future

A while back I wrote that I didn't rate the internal combustion engine much. Ever since I did a project on gas turbines I've been wondering why the gas turbine car was stillborn. The advantages are so numerous but mainly the idea of using rotary motion rather than converting reciprocating motion is the killer. It makes everything else so much simpler. The pistons in an IC engine are actually based on a cyclists legs.Why then, I've often asked myself, do we push down at top dead centre (TDC) rather than at 10 past the hour as we do on a bike. Actually the answer is probably because it was always done that way, or because of space. I did find out that the new air car by some French inventor does push down at 10 past the hour and increases the efficiency by about 40%. ie as we've seen so often, when you are limited then you are forced to find a solution. That may be the ethos of the idea behind carbon limitations too. After all, high fuel prices in Europe forced the development of small Diesel engines.

Anyway, rather than have minor improvements to fundamentally silly technologies, why not go back to the drawing board? And somebody has:

http://www.globenewswire.com/newsroom/news.html?d=179151

Sweet looking, fast series hybrid using a Diesel microturbine to charge batteries that run an electric motor. Actually it's not so new. Jay Leno has a car with similar technology in his garage from earlier this century. http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/jay_leno_garage/4215940.html 

"The Owen Magnetic. First seen at the auto show in New York City in 1915 ...has a gas engine and an electric generator. 

This drivetrain was the brainchild of George Westinghouse. The engine powers the generator, which creates a large magnetic force field be-tween the engine and drivewheels. There's no mechanical transmission. The driver moves a rheostat through four quadrants — a lot easier than shifting, and grinding, the straight-cut gears of the day — and the car moves ahead progressively, giving occupants that odd feeling you get when you try to push similar-pole magnets against each other. Both Enrico Caruso and John McCormack drove Owen Magnetics." 

And of course electric trains use this drive concept too. However, microturbines weren't available recently. I don't know why; the microturbine is almost an exact replica of the Rover turbine that I tested in 1982 and which was made in 1953. I presume it's the air/foil bearings that make the big difference.

Anyway, "0-60 mph in 3.9 seconds, 150 mph top speed, and an unheard-of* driving range of up to 500 miles on a single tank of fuel, all with ultra-low exhaust emissions that rival any hybrid on the market today"

Somewhere I read about 500 mpg but maybe that's pushing it. A nice target though! We do know that the buses/coaches that use this technology are twice as economical as diesels - and a whole lot quieter, cleaner and smoother.

*Well it might be unheard of in the USA but the new Diesel Jaguar can achieve 1000miles on a single tank - as proven on Top Gear "Basle to Blackpool on a single tank" challenge.

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Beware of fitness fashions; short term gain = long term pain

Oh no, not another skepticism confirmed. It's a bit depressing realising that skepticism about any fashionable idea is usually always justified. Another one I've just read about is high impact aerobics and step aerobics. The unfortunates who did it in the 80's all have arthritis now:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/08/27/earlyshow/contributors/emilysenay/main3207440.shtml

I'd had an inkling of this because a friend who was a radiologist in the 80's kept saying that joggers and marathon runners were causing a huge upsurge in knee problems. Funny how many people have knee problems isn't it? My own knee pain arose largely from playing football. Though I admit it was mainly people kicking me after I'd dribbled past them but I also have a suspicion I'd screwed my knees up by those ever-odd stretching exercises and the continuous impact pounding. Now that I've largely given up all exercise (apart from walking a fair amount that is) my knee has completely healed. It took a long time mind you, but finally, no longer do I get these sudden, excruciating pains when I put pressure on it.

Isn't it also odd the number of fitness freaks who succumb to heart attacks? My cyclist neighbour has just succumbed too. The conventional wisdom was that exercise was good for the heart. But the heart is a muscle and you can strain it. Good grief, the Queen mother lived to 100 without doing apparently any exercise at all.

The secret then to good health and a long life? Eating well and walking rather than running. Ask the French!

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