People have been getting all upset with Obama for not getting on board with marijuana decriminalization. Fair enough, I suppose. I think that drug use for the most part should be an individual choice and that the government shouldn't be wasting money on the war on drugs but instead regulating and taxing it. Okay, fine.

But, I wish people would get their facts straight when making this argument. I've read a number of things in the blogosphere attacking Obama because, after all, "pot is harmless." This line of argument troubles me because, well, it's just untrue and paves over a large number of issues of which people should be aware before engaging. For starters, and the one that's most concerned me, marijuana use is strongly linked with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. (One can read "Cannabis use and risk of psychotic or affective mental health outcomes: a systematic review". It surveys a large number of studies from over the years.)

As noted, I don't think the government should make every dangerous thing illegal, I'm no fan of the nanny state, so my support for legalization has nothing to do with my views on the safety of using it. But I wish people would do a bit of research before blithely proclaiming marijuana use harmless or safe or, my favourite, "no worse than cigarettes". Yeah, right.

There's an article in the Wednesday New York Post reporting that Citigroup and Bank of America are using the federal TARP money, the money that was supposed to be used to free up lending, to speculate on toxic mortgage assets. And, of course, they anticipate that the value of these assets will go up because of the government's willingness to buy up these assets. The looting continues, if we were going to spend all this money on the banks, we probably should have just nationalized them.

Global Warming and Conservatism

This morning I was reading Chris Mooney's response to George Will's recent cynical anti-global warming diatribe and it got me to wondering. Why is there so much criticism about global warming, a matter about which scientific consensus is quite strong, on the right and why is most, although not all, of the criticism coming from the right? My rough impression is that the various gw sceptics, usually conservatives, are practicing something other than healthy scepticism but bring in a predetermined conclusion looking for a justification. Maybe I'm wrong about that, maybe conservatives really are better scientists than all those arguing about the dangers of global warming, but even if I am wrong, I think it still may be a phenomenon requiring explanation. In other words, if it just happens that the Conservatives are right about global warming, why is it that the oppositiion and scepticism is so heavily concentrated on the right? (So, I'm less interested here in who's correct than I am in understanding why the divergence of positions is breaking down the way that it is.)

a) D'uh, what do you expect, we're Conservatives? This is the simple explanation. Global warming entails the necessity of a fairly radical change in lifestyle. Conservatives are disinclined to embrace huge lifestyle changes, that's often part of the reason they're conservatives. Nothing fancy here, we just don't want to change.

b) Global Warming, if correct, represents an important failing of free market ideology: Global warming is not a problem easily solved by the markets. The problem of pollution already presents a problem for free market ideology insofar as firms receive the benefit of creating marketable goods in a way that pollutes but they don't bear the cost of the increased pollution. Free market adherents have some response to this in the case where the effect of the pollutants is rather immediate and the responsibility for polluting is tracable to a small number of parties. But I would think that it becomes harder and harder to give a coherent free-market response when the effect of the polluting is temporally distant, affects a much broader class of properties, and the extent of the responsibility for the damage is harder to assess. So, to the extent that the truth of global warming represents a reductio of free market ideology, we can expect that proponents of that ideology would oppose it. We're never inclined to give up fundamental theories easily.
We all tend to naturally embrace scientific conclusions that reinforce our prior beliefs and way of doing things and oppose those that do the opposite. (In this regard, we're all conservatives.) Liberals wrt economics tend to be sceptical of science indicating the efficacy of free markets, for example. None of us are floating along as unbiased judges, we're all trying to save the theories that take a place of centrality in our web of beliefs, the more central the theory the less inclined we are to disentangle it.

c) The cost of these fixes is very high, let's make sure we have it right before embarking on them: An argument that I've heard explicity is a simple prudence based one, i.e., let's not spend our resources and lifestyle on this until we're really sure. This is merely an advocacy of doing some decision theory and who could argue with that? But I think that the inherent problem is that conservatives will have a different calculus when doing the cost - benefit analysis. To their minds government controls on business, for example, exact a very high cost, a society in which government has much stronger controls on business. There is also a realization that this isn't a very high cost for many liberals assessing the situation, it's a situation they're perfectly happy or mostly happy to live with. Therefore, in order to get the decision theoretic calculus operating in a manner more balanced to their weightings, it's in the interests of conservatives to take steps to start the calculations with a much lower probability on the correctness of various global warming predictions.

Mitch McConnell makes this observation about Obama's budget proposal, "Unfortunately, at this juncture, while the American people are tightening their belts, Washington seems to be taking its belt off." Mitch, I know we're not all Keynesians, but, you know, this is actually precisely the point of this massive spending, i.e., because Americans are tightening their belts, and reasonably so, the government is trying to pick up the slack to prevent the economy from completely tanking. This seems a bit like someone watching a baseball game and saying, "unfortunately, just as the Orioles went up to hit the ball their opponents started doing their level best to prevent hits".

Meet the New Boss, Same as the old boss

Many had hoped that the new Obama administration would change the abominable civil and human rights policies that had been put in place during the Bush administration. His inaugural address explicitly asserted that those hopes were not ill-founded. Unfortunately, those hopes were at least partially dashed yesterday. Five men are attempting to sue a subsidiary of Boeing for "aiding the CIA in flying them to other countries and secret CIA camps where they were tortured" (ABC story). The government is using "state secrets" and "national security" to prevent these men from having their day in court.

See Glenn Greenwald's blog and Andrew Sullivan's, erstwhile Obama cheerleader, for more comments.

Job Number Optimism?

The G & M has a relatively optimistic story about spinning yesterday's horrendous unemployment numbers out of the U.S. They note that it's a little inaccurate to compare these to the 1974 numbers, the last time we've posted numbers this big, because the total number of jobs is so much higher now. Also, as they note, the unemployment rate is far rosier than it was in the Great Depression and even rosier than the early 80s' serious recession.

They also acknowledge that it's a lagging indicator, though, and there are a reasons, IMO, to worry that we're on a very troubling downward spiral. The reason is that in the early 80s and and in 1974 we weren't facing nearly as fragile a situation with housing and with car companies. As demand for cars continues to decrease we're likely to reach a point at which failure of two of the big three becomes inevitable. Similarly, the foreclosure situation is horrific and while we're losing jobs at a pace of 500 000/month, it's likely to get worse. Remember the precarious situations banks were in, well we could see even more of their assets becoming toxic. The banks and the auto industry don't need too many more hard shoves, but I worry that this accelerating job loss situation is exactly what is going to be delivered. And if Chrysler and GM go, then we'll really start seeing unemployment numbers.

With apologies to Harper's Index

Percent of national income the richest 1% of the population took home in 1976: 9
Percent of national income the richest 1% of the population took home in 2006: >20
Last year in which the richest 1% of the population took home more than 20% of national income: 1928

(This from Robert Reich, link. Today's blog is also worth a read for those interested in the cuts vs. spending debate.) Tell me again, about how I should feel indignant about Obama wanting to increase taxes on the rich.