conservative politics

In the aftermath of the Nevada republican primary yesterday, the activities of Mr. Adelson have come to the fore. He is a wealthy Jewish casino owner, who has supported Gingrich and now promises to support Romney as well, with the single-minded objective of "defending Israel". This whole thing falls well within the historical support for Israel that has long been a part of Republican party platforms, although both parties have been equally helpful to Israel in practical ways. In this case, and given current evens in the middle east, I feel compelled to comment. Adelson does not "speak for" american jews. It appears to me that his concept of what is "good for" Israel is extremely short-sighted. That country could probably no longer survive a concentrated all-out conventional war of the 1948 and 1967 types. Only its nuclear threat keeps the situation stable. However its neighbors, both arabic and persian, have every right to be concerned about such a one-sided situation, and I think a nuclear middle east is ultimately inevitable. In my personal opinion, only close economic and cultural ties among all the countries of the region can hope to maintain peace in the event of the extremely difficult to avoid coming nuclear standoff. This requires very long-term thinking and society-building, not bluster and aggressive threats. I speak as the descendant of Holocaust survivors.

energy

I've recently become aware of a couple of facts, or more specifically connections among facts. Supposedly income inequality in the US started to rise significantly during the 1970s. US internal oil production peaked in the early 1970s. World oil production reached a plateau in 2005 - it is unclear whether we are actually at 'peak oil' as defined by available reserves, but from a practical perspective it doesn't matter since if reserves are too costly in money and energy to recover, they don't really do any good. A couple of economic sites suggest that rising oil prices from 2005 were at least partly responsible for the timing of the 2008 recession - it was a doomed bubble in any case, but as energy costs rise, then all material costs rise as well, and at some point that simply has to effect the general economy.

So, if these are not just coincidences, they suggest that world economies will never fully 'recover' in some sense. Unemployment may go down, per capita growth measured in dollars may go up. Oil or other fossil fuels will never truly be used up. But the entire united states population, much less the rest of the world, will hardly be able to return to the profligate post-WWII era when one could buy anything on credit, and drive or fly anywhere with little regard to the effects on household budgets. And having won the 'war' on marxism, and added over a billion chinese and russian workers accepting very low salaries (compared to american workers) to the world's competitive free-market doesn't help.

On the plus side, assuming that at some point total world production of everything will contract, measured at least in terms of fossil fuels burned up, then at some point we will in fact stop exacerbating global climate change. The only issue is how bad things will be at that point. The prudent thing to do would be to plan ahead for such a world, and start conserving oil and water now, and finding an alternative economic model to material production-based growth measurements. The typical human thing would be to put head in sand, ignore facts, and starve to death or engage in endless border wars with neighbors over oil or water 50 years from now. I won't say which future I personally think is more likely, that would be too depressing (hint!)

on capitalism

I just finished reading a book called The Future of Capitalism by Lester Thurow. He's a hard-core economist, previously Dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management. So presumably he knows what he's talking about, although also presumably he has as little clue of the future as any other "expert" in that field. But at least, there are a number of statements that he suggests are historically validated, and that I fully agree with, regarding the behavior of "pure" versus "mixed" economic systems. Since it's a library book that I am returning, this seems a great place to document those particular quotes:

1. "In capitalism there is no analysis of the distant future. There is no concept that anyone must invest in the plant and equipment, skills, infrastructure, research and development, or environmental protecion that are necessary for national growth and rising individual standards of living. There simply is no social "must" in capitalism...If capitalism is to work in the long run, it must make investments that are not in any particular individual's immediate self interest but are in the human community's long-run self-interest. How does a doctrine of radical short-run individualism emphasize long-run communal interests? Simply put, who represents the interests of the future to the present? ....If one asked what must governments do in capitalistic societies to make conditions better, the socialist answer was to own and run business firms. That answer proved to be incorrect. The right answer is to force a high level of private and public investment.

2. No one knows exactly what will happen in our society if inequality continues to rise and a large majority of our families experience falling real wages...Similarly, if the democratic political process cannot remedy whatever is causing this reality to occur within capitalism, democracy will eventually be similarly discredited...In a world where national leaders cannot deliver real-wage increases..sooner or later they, or some other newly elected leader, will start pointing the finger of blame at someone else in the hopes that their supporters will see these groups as the cause of the problems...in Congress, the poor are the enemy and must have their entitlement programs cut to save the entitlement programs for those far wealthier than they. None of these actions solves the basic problems. All are diversionary attempts to direct public anger at some powerless minority who can be blamed.

3. History teaches us that the survival-of-the-fittest versions of capitalism do not work. The free market economies that existed in the 1920s imploded during the Great Depression and had to be reconstructed by government....It is well to remember that the social welfare state was not implemented by wild-eyed leftists. Its midwives were almost always enlightened aristocratic conservatives (Bismarck, Churchill, Roosevelt) who adopted social welfare policies to save, not destroy capitalism by protecting the working class."

This book was written in 1994, but it might have been written yesterday. In the aftermath of the 2008 recession, we see many of the same reactions arising even more severely than in recessions of the 1980s and 1990s. Governments jumped in to prevent apparently complete fiscal meltdown, which was driven by inevitable investment bubbles driven by financial companies seeking purely short-term profits with an effective absence of any social policy, social obligation, or government regulation. In other words, these huge recessions are simply unavoidable in pure capitalism, they are getting worse with global money transfer capabilities, and each time government's ability to lead recovery is getting weaker. Result: blame poor people, blame muslims, blame the president, in essence everyone is blaming someone else.

The one area where this book does not seem to be right is in the inevitability of worse in the future: Why? Because it does not address the coming end to cheap oil. When transportation of goods and resources becomes too expensive, then the global economy will clearly have to break down somewhat. At some point even in the US it will be cheaper to run factories locally than to ship raw materials overseas and finished products back again. I guess this will happen within the next 50 years. But what happens when globalism in manufacturing is reduced, but not globalism in information and money transfer? That may have no precedent in human history so it's hard to say. I hope things will get better, maybe more people will go back to farming and the excess unemployment caused by too-efficient factory processes will be rendered irrelevant. It's easy to say that more education and skills training is the key, but humans fall on a normal curve for all capabilities, so there will always be some people that are not "trainable" for some activities (like me for professional music or basketball for example!)

economics nuttiness

We are certainly seeing a serious schism in american political life. One might argue that it's time for the country to split into two. Not north versus south, but ultra conservative versus moderate (never mind about ultra liberal, they are a weak force in politics by now). Clearly there is a major fraction of the US population that does not really accept a real role for government - they don't accept the fundamental concept of civitas. They may think that police, fire, education and the arts should all be privately managed, i.e. only available to the well-to-do.

Let's review what actually happened during the past 10 years. After 9-11, the US became hugely militarized, and the the Patriot Act one could say pretty fascistic (when it needed to be, and not against most of the population, but against targeted groups certainly). As usual in time of (effectively) war, the country rallied around its government and its elected political majority party. Unfortunately, the actual military actions were rapidly hijacked by a totally irrelevant agenda, i.e. the conquest of Iraq rather than a focused campaign against Al-Qaeda and its associated groups. Clearly the entire Iraq campaign was unnecessary from a home security perspective (regardless of its possible value to Iraqis under their dictatorship, although it's arguable whether we've actually done the poor Iraqis any good at all). Moreover, it was hugely expensive. The failure to focus sufficiently on Al-Qaeda probably made the subsequent military expansion into Afghanistan necessary.

At the same time that these two wars were prosecuted, marginal tax rates were lowered and financial speculation was wildly over-encouraged, leading to the 2008 fiscal meltdown. The huge deficit incurred by now in the U.S. is a clear outcome of those mostly Republican policies (although plenty of Democrats played the banking deregulation game as well, to their shame). Now hard line Republicans want to finally pay for those wars and financial shenanigans by ultimately eliminating Social Security and Medicare (though most of them won't say as much in as many words). So the true vision of these hardliners is clear: a dog-eat-dog world where nice guys finish last, robber barons run the country, and the justification is that after all maybe I could be one of those robber barons if the rule of law is practically abolished. Sorry guys, but I don't agree with your basic premise. I think it is possible for the country to have sustainable "entitlements", in fact that is not even the right word for them. Social Security and Medicare are basically national savings plans, they are paid by everyone's taxes because everyone will need them some day. The way to prevent them from bankrupting the country is to manage them, which is hard, not to abolish them which seems easy but is in fact vicious and mean.

OK, my two cents today, inveighing against mean spirited fascists.

Rare genetic disorders

this is cribbed from my FB page, but liked it enough that I wanted somewhere more permanent for it. The topic is the genetic analysis of rare single-gene disorders, what are some of the rationales justifying that work.

Our genome has something like 20,000 genes and we need to know what the consequences are of mutations in all of them. In some cases they will be of very general significance, such as mutations causing breast cancer or diabetes or osteoporosis; in such cases even if the genetic disease is rare the genetic pathways identified may provide new drug targets for a much larger number of people who have the same disease due to non-genetic defects in that pathway.

Moreover, even though each of these single gene disorders is individually rare, in aggregate there are thousands of them and together they comprise a significant fraction of pediatric hospital patients. Since each disorder is different, the only way to diagnose and determine optimal patient management is to understand the molecular bases of all of them - so far the human genetics community has characterized about 2500 rare genetic disorders (I personally have been involved in discovering 15 of these). That is still fewer than 20% of all potential single-gene conditions. These include very well known things like Huntington disease, cystic fibrosis, and some forms of breast and colorectal cancers, but also tons of relatively unknown (to the public) things like Marfan syndrome (maybe Lincoln had it), neurofibromatosis (elephant man), achondroplasia (many forms of dwarfism), and metabolic disorders including one that all children born in the modern world are tested for (by enzyme activity, not by DNA test) phenylketonuria. In addition, by studying the genomes of patients with rare disorders, we are learning a lot simply about genetic variation, which is essential for when we move on to trying to understand the genetic component of more complex diseases which have multiple genetic and environmental factors. At the moment we are not really smart enough to tackle that problem (although many scientists are trying), we have to take baby steps. On a purely logistic note, these kinds of discoveries (for rare genetic disorders) cost on the order of thousands of dollars each, sounds like a lot but compared to hundreds of millions that are spent on diabetes, obesity, cancer it's a superb return on investment to the taxpayer

thoughts on health care in america

In the immediate aftermath of yesterday's controversial court decision, saying that the health care plan requires unconstitutional control over private citizens' pocketbooks, there seems a very widespread sense that the single payer plan would have circumvented this legal problem. However that alternative falls afoul of the reactionary impulse toward smaller government at all costs. It seems to me that this is less a case of the white house and congress kowtowing to industry, but another in a series of poor but necessary compromises with a strong right wing. This is part of the larger breakdown in american political life between what I would call modernists and antiquarians. It is simply not feasible or realistic to have a 'small' federal government in a huge highly industrialized country. Our system of checks and balances is still the best way to control the excesses of power, even when it works poorly or slowly. The alternatives, too much central power or too little, lead separately to police states or to gross economic inequity. I suspect that hundreds of years from now when historians consider the 21st century, that is the major conflict that they will see.

GM foods

A friend of mine asked me what I thought of a particular author's argument against genetically engineered foods, in particular GM corn expressing high levels of bacillus thuringiensis toxin to target particular pests. Here's my response (some points may not make sense without reading the original, but you'll get the picture):

Unfortunately, my motto these days is trust nobody. I don't automatically trust any company. There are plenty of people in companies (including most of their scientists) who are honorable and do their best to make a useful safe product. There are also obviously completely amoral people in companies who don't care about anything whatsoever except money. I also don't trust anti-corporate luddites because they typically indulge in shoddy thinking (as indeed you note multiple instances in this guy's rant against BT). On the other hand, I don't like the idea of eating corn containing large amounts of any bacterial protein as a result of overexpression in the corn cells themselves. I also don't like the idea of eating corn sprayed with neurotoxins, or corn covered in fungus containing neurotoxin because it was not sprayed or engineered. As long as we grow food on huge farms, some kind of technology will be used to keep pests off, and it's all at least somewhat dangerous. The alternative is to watch a big chunk of the world starve to death. As long as human beings are trapped in their genetically evolved "Have to make exponentially more copies of myself" mindset, these things are inevitable.