The Political Economy of Corporate Speech

David Weigel at Slate has a very nice article on how the NRA helps stir up conspiracy theories after each massacre. You can think of them as a bit of guerrilla marketing. As he explains,

But what’s the point of debunking any of this? The theories don’t spread because they’re credible. They spread in part because of the confirmation bias of worried gun owners. And that’s actually been egged on, multiple times, by the National Rifle Assocation. The gun lobby might be the only credible group, with real clout, with the ability to bring presidential candidates to its conferences, to endorse the idea that the government would engage in a “false flag” operation. In 2011, as the Republican House of Representatives dug in on the “Fast and Furious” investigation, the NRA’s professional flak magnet Wayne LaPierre speculated that the Feds planned the debacle, to build momentum for gun control.

“Over a period of two or three years they were running thousands and thousands of guns to the most evil people on earth,” he said. “At the same time they were yelling ’90 per cent… of the guns the Mexican drug cartels are using come from the United States.’ ” It wasn’t a wild theory. “It’s the only thing that makes any sense.”

The idea that the government is one short step away from a gun ban is actually integral to the lobby’s pitch. It’s implicit when the lobby brags about ammo sales at gun shows or AR-15s disappearing from the shelves. And give the NRA this: It’s not entirely wrong about the momentum of politics. At the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference, LaPierre warned that the first-term Obama administration’s “lip service to gun owners is just part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment during his second term.”

To understand LaPierre's conspiracy speech, you need to understand the NRA. While ostensibly a grass roots organization that is supposed to look out for the interests of its members, the NRA, in practice, is the chief lobbyist for the gun industry. This change in organizational outlook is relatively recent, as Walter Hicky explains. Most of the organization's money now comes from corporate support. In turn, this means that most of the organization's activity is directed towards supporting the corporations' material interests.

The use of conspiracy theory to support private financial ends is not a new phenomenon in public speech. Look at what the tobacco industry did to hide the link between smoking and lung cancer, employing every last marketing and PR trick to sow doubt in the public mind. Even though they were aware in the 1950s that cigarettes posed huge health benefits, they kept that charade going for 40 years. This is just more evidence that a company will say whatever it wants when it comes to the bottom line.

The tobacco comparison is especially apt, since the gun industry is in a similar position. Despite the fact that gun makers got a law passed in 2005 that is supposed to protect them from class action lawsuits (love your lobbyist!), and despite the fact that the Supreme Court is working tirelessly to kill off class action lawsuits (love your lobbyist even more!), that's clearly the direction we're heading in. As Hank Cardello writes in Forbes,

To be sure, the 2005 law enacted by Congress makes it difficult for firearm companies to be sued over the misuse of their products. But successful challenges to that law have already taken place. Last October, a New York appeals court unanimously held that a gunmaker, distributor, and dealer could be held liable for selling 181 “Saturday night specials” to a gun trafficking ring, which shot a Buffalo high school basketball star. And in light of Newtown, the cries for Congress to appeal the law have begun in earnest. As Vice President Joe Biden met last week with both sides in the gun debate, President Barack Obama vowed to enact new restrictions, with or without Congress. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is pushing for a ban on assault weapons and allowing police to confiscate weapons from the mentally unstable; Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy is also calling for new restrictions.

As the anti-gun movement begins to hone its strategy, the blueprint is already in place for activists who want to pursue big legal settlements against gunmakers, using the same playbook that was successful against the tobacco industry. But unlike that industry, which staved off efforts to ban or curb smoking for decades before getting socked with a landmark $206 billion fine in 1998, U.S. gunmakers don’t have deep enough pockets to survive such challenges. Their industry profit margins are much smaller—8.5% on annual revenue of $11.7 billion, according to market researcher IBISWorld.

Both of the previous examples illustrate a classic political economy problem, and they should be framed accordingly. Government is a forum for organizations to compete over resources. These can be material (tax breaks) or not (favorable regulation), but it is the presence and relative strength of these organizations that determines what policy is passed.

Take assault weapons. I know that there's a lot to be said for the statistics of the amount of deaths that they cause, but that's for a different time. More importantly, despite the fact that a majority of Americans support a ban, the chances of seeing one pass are very slim. Why? Just follow the money, my friend. As Abram Brown explains,

Any sort of ban on modern sporting rifles will greatly affect the closely held Freedom Group and also impact Smith & Wesson and Sturm, Ruger, too. Modern sporting rifles are among the most profitable weapons that gunmakers produced, says Rommel Dionisio, a Wedbush Securities analyst, as well as one of its fastest-growing segments. Freedom Group has said that modern sporting rifles are a useful tool in driving youth interest in firearms.

These types of rifles account for 20% or so of Smith & Wesson’s sales, Dionisio estimates. It’s probably a slightly smaller amount for Ruger. Ruger’s recent explosive growth has centered on its new compact handguns, made to take advantage of expanded concealed-carry laws. The White House did not specifically mention whether high-capacity pistols would be affected. New York has already limited large pistol magazines. If that went nationwide, customers could stop buying bigger, higher-margin pistols. These more profitable guns are primarily bought for enthusiasts to enjoy the added capacity in the clips.

When the benefits are concentrated but the costs are diffused, expect the minority to usually prevail. The gun companies have a lot to lose in the increased regulation of their product, so we shouldn't be surprised by the extreme actions taken by their lobbying group to protect their industry. Among lobbying groups, the NRA remains an impressive exception. It can attract all of the negative criticism for the industry directly to itself, allowing gun makers to "make the sausage" in government with almost no direct criticism. 

Nonetheless, the underlying framework remains the same, as most politics continues to follow the Golden Rule: where there is money, there is action. We shouldn't expect the industry to remain an exception for long. Conspiracy speech is no different than any other speech; it's generation almost always follows the same financial incentives, allowing us to understand it the same as any other PR or marketing trick.

Unusual Times Call for Unusual Coalitions

There's some really amazing things happening in the House right now that defy the common sense rules about how a majority party should govern. While this trend, so far, only concerns two bills, both were major votes that might actually inspire some optimism in the future, especially since the House needs to somehow pass an unconditional increase of the debt ceiling to avoid causing an economic catastrophe.

You might of heard that Speaker Boehner had to suspend the Hastert Rule in order to get the final package of taxes in place to get out of the fiscal cliff boondoggle. In case this kind of stuff normally puts you to sleep, the Hastert Rule is an operating procedure in the House where the majority party refuses to vote on any bill that a majority of its members don't support. It's mostly a power play. If the Republican party is control of the House, for example, it has an organizational incentive only pass those bills that a majority of Republicans support. If you fracture your party by passing bills that the party itself doesn't approve of, you put yourself in the future for infighting and losing your majority. This tends to be the reason that people equate party strength with disciplined, unanimous votes.

But the most conservative wing of the Republican party is obviously not capable of actually governing. You don't have to look any further than their rhetoric about the debt ceiling to recognize that they have completely lost themselves in the throes of their ideology. Here's how Politico explains the current framework of the debate. As Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Jake Sherman write,

The idea of allowing the country to default by refusing to increase the debt limit is getting more widespread and serious traction among House Republicans than people realize, though GOP leaders think shutting down the government is the much more likely outcome of the spending fights this winter.

“I think it is possible that we would shut down the government to make sure President Obama understands that we’re serious,” House Republican Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state told us. “We always talk about whether or not we’re going to kick the can down the road. I think the mood is that we’ve come to the end of the road.”

Republican leadership officials, in a series of private meetings and conversations this past week, warned that the White House, much less the broader public, doesn’t understand how hard it will be to talk restive conservatives off the fiscal ledge. To the vast majority of House Republicans, it is far riskier long term to pile up new debt than it is to test the market and economic reaction of default or closing down the government.

While the crazies make up a majority of the Republican party, they do not make up the majority of Congress. The recent increases in taxes shows that Congress can actually pass bills without them. This is the vote breakdown of the American Taxpayer Relief Act, courtesy of GovTrack.

What's more, the full Hurricane Sandy relief package followed the same pattern. Only 21 percent of House Republicans voted in favor of this bill, and yet it still passed! Here's the GovTrack breakdown for that bill.

If this trends holds, it will be the beginning of a coalition that is almost almost unprecedented in American politics: a majority party that passes bills with the majority of its members in dissent. Take some time to wrap your head around that.

Now liberals shouldn't start jumping for joy. This isn't a Democratic Congress, despite the need for the majority of Democrats to agree with any big bill that's going to become a law. This is a style of crisis politics that will be destructive even if every false deadline is met. This kind of coalition is highly unstable too; the House members crossing the aisle to form this bloc are pretty conservative themselves. The list of Republicans supporting the Sandy Bill includes people like Peter King, Eric Cantor and a bunch of rank files from the Northeast that have an obvious interest in Sandy relief. It would be naive to expect most of them to stick with the Democrats for more than just a handful of votes.

Even if 30 of these drop out, it would still be technically possible to pass a debt ceiling bill. While this is highly unlikely, it's still a strong indication of how much Republican dissent Congress will need to endure if it is going to get anything done. Any clean pass of the debt ceiling, the kind that the President is currently saying he won't back down on, is going to have a Yea column pretty similar to the Sandy Bill. That kind of vote would be a remarkable occasion, a clear sign that the inflexible ideological stance of the Tea Party will continue to force Congress to incredible extremes just to get anything done. We shouldn't be surprised if more seemingly possible coalitions emerge over the next few months.

A Detour into Gun Law, pt. 5

Many conservative websites are circulating the story of a mom who just stopped a home invader with a gun. As the AP reports,

A Georgia mother who shot an intruder at her home has become a small part of the roaring gun control debate, with some firearms enthusiasts touting her as a textbook example of responsible gun ownership.

Melinda Herman grabbed a handgun and hid in a crawl space with her two children when a man broke in last week and approached the family at their home northeast of Atlanta, police said. Herman called her husband on the phone, and with him reminding her of the lessons she recently learned at a shooting range, Herman opened fire, seriously wounding the burglary suspect.

It's an amazing story, and I can see why so many people are attached to it. But this is still perpetuating a common-held myth that guns somehow make you safer. The data point in the opposite direction. Having a gun in your home increases the probability of a person being shot by quite a bit. Having a gun in the home carries a high risk of accident, but it also substantially contributes to the number of suicides and the number of fatal domestic disputes. Since accidents and suicides alone make up the majority of gun deaths, decreasing these kinds of risks is the biggest area of gain that we can expect from gun control. Plenty of research points out that the presence of guns significantly increases the likelihood of a suicide being successful, and you can't even have gun accidents if there aren't guns in homes.

This isn't just limited to the home. The threat of escalating violence from carrying a gun is also significant. A 2008 study pointed out in The American Journal of Public Health that people that carry a gun are 4.5 times more likely to get shot and 4.5 times more likely to get killed than those that didn't carry. While this sort of survey suffers a demographic problem (who are the people carrying guns and getting shot), there's also strong evidence that having a gun around causes you to be more paranoid and aggressive, both obvious contributing factors to gun violence.

On the other hand, the likelihood of actually deterring a home invader is very low. I think people's attachment to this story is a result of the availability heuristic, what The Economist calls the anecdotal fallacy. We like little stories, especially those with drama where we can place ourselves in the protagonists shoes. But this appreciation of the emotional content of the story often leads us to dramatically overestimate the likelihood of their occurrence. It's not all different than the flip side of this heuristic, the irrational fear of rare events. You hear much more about people fearing flying more than driving, although the latter is much more dangerous than the former.

In a review of Atlanta police reports, the number of people that were shot by intruders who seized their gun was twice as high as the number of successful deterrences. In general (citing the same report), 

(a) genuine self-defense gun use is rare, (b) there are many ways that people defend themselves without a gun, and (c) many of these other methods may be as effective as selfdefense gun use in preventing injury. Perhaps surprisingly, the evidence does not indicate that having a gun reduces the risk of being a victim of a crime or that having a gun reduces the risk of injury during the commission of a crime.

While it makes deductive sense that "you should fight back because the police won't come," the opposite seems to be true. Almost all situations where the victim tried to engage their attacker directly increased their risk. In a variety of different instances, the best thing you can do is call the police and run away. It's true across a variety of crimes, not just home invasion. Here's the US Department of Justice on rape.

Despite my predilection for regularly trashing conservatives, there are still good conservative ideas that can be used to make us safer. The Left should actively embrace the typically conservative ideas of building community ties, whether that's through churches or other local organizations. One of the strongest tools for reducing violence is community intervention, using "violence interruptors" to diffuse dangerous situations. In a more general sense, we've seen tons of success from active community policing projects. There's a lot of conservative ideas about reducing gun violence that are bunk, but this one isn't: we can solve local problems easily if we are willing to build strong community ties.

GMO's and the Naturalistic Fallacy

People that are particularly opposed to GMO's like to reference the original ideals of the organic food movement. As Stephen Barret, quoting Robert Rodale, describes it, organic originally means

Food grown without pesticides; grown without artificial fertilizers; grown in soil whose humus content is increased by the additions of organic matter, grown in soil whose mineral content is increased by the application of natural mineral fertilizers; has not been treated with preservatives, hormones, antibiotics, etc.

For the record, I think these are very worthy ideals. I just differ in how I think we can actually achieve them. Unfortunately, we can't actually feed ourselves using "purely organic" techniques activists advocate. This was already true probably 50 or so years ago. The modern organic industry admits this too. As it is defined in the US, organic amounts to little more than a label to make you pay more for a product that is essentially the same. It amounts to nothing more than a bunch of giant companies preying on your bucolic fantasies about food production. 

These fantasies can be effectively summarized as the "naturalistic fallacy." It is the insistence that anything grown in the "natural way," however that's defined, is somehow better for you. That's obviously not true. Plenty of things can be "natural" and incredibly dangerous. Thousands of plants are poisonous. E. coli is a naturally occurring thing and catching it is still a rotten experience.

Even though organic food companies love to play up the "natural" side of their products, It's a common myth that organic somehow means "chemical free." While many of the massive food companies peddling organic products prey on the fact that you think that, it's absolutely not true. Organic farming uses lots of chemicals, and many of them are incredibly dangerous to human health. The two most popular of these are copper sulfate and pyrethrum, both of which are highly dangerous neurotoxins. In a report to Parliament in 1999, the Committee on European Communities actually concluded that copper sulfate is more toxic to humans than any synthetic pesticide, and it provides no additional environmental benefits either. In fact, that toxic copper solution that organic farmers use as a pesticide is not biodegradable, staying within the soil forever.

By amount of food produced, organic farmers actually use more pesticides. This becomes especially true once you start considering the amount of pesticide reduction offered by the newest generation of GM products. The infamous Bt protein that Alex Jones rants about in corn is regularly sprayed by organic farmers. Since it's applied externally, you have to spray it a lot. In India, for example, switching to Bt cotton has cut pesticide use by something like 80 percent.

But that's just pesticides. What about fertilizer use, which is causing "eutrophication," the poisoning of our water supply by the addition of too many foreign nutrients? Organic fertilizers (i.e animal manure) are just as guilty as artificial fertilizers. We also know that these fertilizers are incredibly dangerous, since they contain things like e. coli and salmonella. The e. coli outbreak from organic bean sprouts that started in Germany is just one of many examples of the problems with organic fertilizer. So, no, in this regard we can't really consider the chemical agents used in organic fertilizer safer either.

If you go back to the Mark Lynas article, you'll see that land usage is not some trite issue. It's a fundamental part of the debate, as it is a direct measurement of the impact agriculture makes on the environment. And it's not just yields either. Organic farms use at least a third more land as conventional farms, since manuring means leaving unproductive fields to sit for long periods of time (and you need to have animals around to supply that). If we switched exclusively to organic farming, for example, pretty much all of the world's forests would have to be chopped down. How is this an improvement?

Food activists are creating a false dichotomy by insisting that organic farming is somehow superior to conventional methods. All forms of technology, including GMO's, have an important role to play if we are to address the very real environmental challenges of the next twenty years. Using genetic engineering, for example, we will be able to develop staple the crops with the ability to fix their own nitrogen in the soil. This would be a huge environmental benefit, eliminating the need for most fertilizers. We will get even better at developing crops that do not need pesticides, respond better to droughts and provide much-needed nutrients to the world's poor. But getting there requires a much healthier attitude towards science. We have to drop our gut reactions to things that might seem initially scary, while conditioning ourselves not to fall for common myths because we find the labeling (like "natural" or "organic") to be emotionally satisfying.

GMOs and Waste

Waste is another red herring in the GMO debate that often comes up. That's not to say that food waste is not a huge global problem. It is. As Rebecca Smithers writes in The Guardian,

In the face of United Nations predictions that there could be about an extra 3 billion people to feed by the end of the century and growing pressure on the resources needed to produce food, including land, water and energy, the IME is calling for urgent action to tackle this waste.

Their report, Global Food; Waste Not, Want Not, found that between 30% and 50% or 1.2-2bn tonnes of food produced around the world never makes it on to a plate.

In the UK as much as 30% of vegetable crops are not harvested due to their failure to meet retailers' exacting standards on physical appearance, it says, while up to half of the food that is bought in Europe and the US is thrown away by consumers.

And about 550bn cubic metres of water is wasted globally in growing crops that never reach the consumer. Carnivorous diets add extra pressure as it takes 20-50 times the amount of water to produce 1 kilogramme of meat than 1kg of vegetables; the demand for water in food production could reach 10–13 trillion cubic metres a year by 2050.

It would be really nice if we could solve of the problems in the global food system using only waste reduction policies. And I would love to see more food saved as it would lead to more environmentally sustainable outcomes in general.

Unfortunately, there's a couple of problems with ending food waste as a perfect panacea. Both are economic in nature. A good portion of the food wasted was purchased and then spoiled, so there is no way to stop that. The food wasted due to farming practices might not have any use since you would expect farmers to sell this at any available market if they could.

Expanding the market is an option, but understand that this is hard with perishable things like food products. (Non-perishable food items, by definition, are not easily wasted so they have to be ruled out of this issue). Without expanding the market, you need to somehow alter behavior in the West. This would also be hard, since they derive no direct benefit from this (you're doing this to feed the poor). Look, for example, how hard it is just to make Americans recycle.

There is a second economic issue. It does not benefit people in poor countries much to have Westerners flood their markets with cheap food. This reduces their GDP, for example, and it probably ensures that they continue to suffer from poverty. Instead, you would want them to adopt farming practices that increase yields, as this leads directly to economic benefits for poor farmers. This is the primary benefit of using GM products, and we have seen this happen across a range of technologies. A report from PG economics has some of the impressive conclusions,*

• Mexico - yield increases with herbicide tolerant soybean of 9 percent.
• Romania – yield increases with herbicide tolerant soybeans have averaged 31 percent.
• Philippines – average yield increase of 15 percent with herbicide tolerant corn.
• Philippines – average yield increase of 24 percent with insect resistant corn.
• Hawaii – virus resistant papaya has increased yields by an average of 40 percent.
• India – insect resistant cotton has led to yield increases on average more than 50 percent.

This isn't to say that people concerned with food waste are wrong, per se. The West would benefit enormously from saving more of its food, as it would allow us to grow enough food to feed ourselves with the minimum amount of inputs (the very definition of sustainability). Sustainability will also be important in poorer countries too, since they will want to preserve as many of their resources and natural places as possible.

But most importantly, if you care about malnutrition in poor countries, you want to help them develop. GMOs are not the exclusive cure to this issue (institutions, trade and capital expansion are also crucial too), but it is a technology that helps provide that possibility.

*Although being in the biotech industry themselves, PG Economics has incentives to overstate the benefits of its products. Buyer beware.

Empiricism and GMO's

Despite the overwhelming empirical evidence on the safety of GMO's some of my friends still refuse to leave organic foods for other alternatives. You may be surprised to hear this, given the content of my previous post, but I fully support them making that choice. My only problem is with those on the Left (and Greenpeace in particular) forcing their choices onto others and the usage of patent nonsense all along the way. And the methods they've chosen to use for this force-feeding of values are sick too. I've done enough talking about all that already.

That's the huge irony in the whole labeling debate: people that want to avoid industrial agriculture already have organic food. It's (mostly) clearly labeled. You might not like the organic standard (I think some of the exceptions are absurd), but the non-GMO food is basically labelled for everyone interested.

Your choice is there, and it's clear. Go and seize the day. No one from my side has any interest in removing your choice. Nor will that change.

But making the choice of organic and only organic, you're also committing an intellectual fallacy that needs to be addressed. All problems have to be treated with the same intellectual rigor and basic decision process. There are no exceptions. This process is pretty simple too, as you apply it every day, all the time to make the huge number of decision you need to survive.

Take the decision to talk on a cell phone, for example. Thus far, we have not proven that cell phones, if used consistently for 50+ years, will cause cancer. The technology hasn't been around long enough for that "test" to be undertaken yet. But there is a chance that when used consistently for decades straight, they might. There is also some chance that all of the current research about cell phone safety could become moot because of a particular quirk in 15G technology that allows our alien overlords to seize control of our brains. Who knows? The future is uncertain.

Similarly, I don't know with total certainty that my boss will never barge into my office, leap across my desk and bite my face off in the future. Lacking perfect foresight, I face fundamental uncertainty about this. Who knows what will happen when that chemical stash in the middle of the Aral Sea explodes?

In both situations, I use empirical observation about personal occurrences and similar accounts to make a forecast of the future. My cell phone has not caused a problem to me or anyone close to me thus far (although the aliens may want me to think that), so I go on using it. Similarly for my boss. Since there is a large number of observations about this particular incidence, I can conclude that I have a high probability of being safe.

Now, those examples may be trite, but look at what so many people are doing with GMO's. They are throwing out fundamental decision-making tools to make an argument they find emotionally satisfying. There is twenty years of data, hundreds of millions of meals consumed and the expert opinion of the world's leading scientific bodies all pointing to the conclusion that GMO's pose very little risk. My basic assumption, based on empirical analysis, following the same technique that governs all of my other decisions, has to be that they probability of risk from GMO's is very low. With each passing year, that probability also has to decrease.

Now, if something bad happens, all of these assumptions will change. As Keynes said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" If even a single person died of eating a GMO, my assumed personal risk has to increase. Similarly, if I was in a situation where there was not a whole lot of prior information to follow (like my future prospects in a cooking school) or the data was intentionally constrained (housing prices have increase for the last 5 years!!!), my assessment of risk has to be much higher. But with GMO's, we're not in that situation. We know, for the entire history of this technology, that the products delivered to market have been essentially OK. Those situations that stand out (like a type of tomato that caused allergic reactions in mice in testing), have all kept specific types of GM food off of the market because on the security measures we have in place. This should make you even more confident about their safety.

This is what I think is so great about Lynas' speech. The scientific method (and what I described above is essentially the Bayesian approach) should not be selectively applied based on our ideological preferences. At the same time, we also don't get to be intellectually lazy. A conclusion that something has a high or low probability of occurrence has to be backed by strong empirical evidence and that evidence has to be constantly refreshed. But this basic rule says GMO's are OK. Just like it says that climate change is a big problem, as are the resource constraints formed by a growing population experiencing broad economic development.

In the meantime, there are serious problems that GMOs can solve, and the people suffering from poverty and malnutrition right now don't need us to wait 10-15 years to solve them. They deserve better than that. It's ridiculous for governments to be still interfering with food products that have been in testing for 5 years within an industry that has proven, at least thus far, to be safe. It's time to end this debate. Take the technology we have and go solve our pressing problems. We have no excuse for waiting.

The Anti-Science Left

Environmentalist Mark Lynas delivered an amazing speech at the recent Oxford Farming Conference on the irrationality of the Left's opposition to GM food products. You should really take the time to listen to both the speech and Q&A, but the prepared speech gets to the heart of everything.



The key to his speech is the following paradox: when it comes to climate science, the Left is almost immediate to chastise the Right for being anti-science. But when things turn to food, the Left is now on the exact opposite side of scientific consensus. In fact, we should all be eating GM crops to reduce the impact that agriculture has on the greater environment. The damage to the earth through pesticides, carbon consumption and expanded land use are substantial, and GM crops offer the only viable way for reducing our impact in the future.

The internet is literally swamped by BS on GMOs. People are know to be especially touching about their food, since it touches a revulsion, a characteristic we developed for survival. Nonetheless, the view on among consensus bodies is pretty clear. There is nothing risky about consuming organic foods, and nearly every major health organization and scientific body confirms this.  What's more, there is no clear evidence that organic foods are any healthier.

Hundreds of millions of meals containing GM foods have been eaten over the last two decades, and there has not been a single documented case of someone getting sick because the food was GM. These products are already subject to an incredible amount of scrutiny and review. This will continue into the future, just as it continues for every product meant for human consumption. There is literally nothing to be gained by forcing further scrutiny, or banning these products.

Maybe you disagree. But understand that you disagree with every major scientific body when doing so, including the Royal Society, the National Academies of Science and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, three of the most prestigious scientific bodies in the world. The left often accuses the right of being anti-science, but by being irrationally anti-GM, you're doing the exact same, progress-inhibiting thing.

Doing so, for example, the Left has ruined the livelihood and threatened the lives of scientists in China, by stirring up GMO fears about a vitamin-A carrying form of rice that could dramatically reduce malnutrition in that country. They have convinced autocratic governments that scientists should be imprisoned for trying to develop a more sustainable food system. They attack public research foundations (literally tearing publicly-funded test crops from the ground) and encourage bureaucratic interference so great that only the biggest corporations in the world can actually conduct this kind of research. They falsify data and stir up controversy, treating science the same way tobacco companies did in the 60s and 70s.

Not only is their behavior irrational, ideological and plainly stupid, it is morally reprehensible. They force their aesthetic views onto a food system where other people would dramatically benefit from different choices, and they have no concern for the extensive damage that they cause. This is the worst kind of zealotry.

Climate change and continued population growth will put tremendous pressure on the planet to produce enough food over the next few decades. We should be doing everything we can to meet these challenges, and we should be utilizing every resource that we have. Instead, the environmental left insists on discarding our most promising technologies for reasons that have literally no scientific justification. They are on the wrong side of progress, and it's time for this to stop.

Lead and Crime

Kevin Drum over at Mother Jones has stirred up a bit of a storm with his most recent article on how exposure to lead was the leading cause of the high crime rates in the late 70's, 80's and early 90's. As he writes,

Needless to say, not every child exposed to lead is destined for a life of crime. Everyone over the age of 40 was probably exposed to too much lead during childhood, and most of us suffered nothing more than a few points of IQ loss. But there were plenty of kids already on the margin, and millions of those kids were pushed over the edge from being merely slow or disruptive to becoming part of a nationwide epidemic of violent crime. Once you understand that, it all becomes blindingly obvious. Of course massive lead exposure among children of the postwar era led to larger numbers of violent criminals in the '60s and beyond. And of course when that lead was removed in the '70s and '80s, the children of that generation lost those artificially heightened violent tendencies.

This argument is supported Karl Smith, and I am a particularly big fan of his work over at Modeled Behavior. Drum elaborates on his simple rule of thumb for understanding epidemic-like phenomena in economics. "If it spreads along lines of communication, [...] the cause is information," Drum writes. "Think Bieber Fever. If it travels along major transportation routes, the cause is microbial. Think influenza. If it spreads out like a fan, the cause is an insect. Think malaria. But if it's everywhere, all at once—as both the rise of crime in the '60s and '70s and the fall of crime in the '90s seemed to be—the cause is a molecule."

Despite my high opinion of Smith in particular, I remain skeptical about Occam's Razor-style arguments applied to social phenomena. People and societies are just too damn complex to have one factor explain something like crime rates. When looking at crime, it's clear that also sorts of factors, including policing, drug laws, the state of the economy and the availability of family planning, contribute. Some obviously play a stronger role than others, but all should be included in an explanation of an effect. Economic models are supposed to parsimonious, but under-fitting (including too few variables) is just as big as a problem as over-fitting (including too many). 

This is a criticism that Drum himself is willing to acknowledge, in part. While some of the pull-out text in the article states that as much as 90 percent of the rise and fall of violent crime over the last half century can be explained by lead, this can easily be misinterpreted. As Drum writes, "Even if the 90 percent number is correct, it doesn't imply that lead is responsible for 90 percent of all crime. It only implies that it's responsible for 90 percent of the postwar rise of crime above its natural level, which is determined by a variety of other factors. Later, the drop in lead emissions was responsible for 90 percent of the decline of crime back to its natural level."

In other words, there is a least a substantial portion of the crime rate that could not be explained by lead alone, and Drum is only trying to explain the "crime bubble" that occurred in the US at the end of the 20th century. While this is still a more reasonable suggestion, it turns out that there's a lot of questions concerning the statistical treatments of lead and crime that remain unsolved. Take crime among 14-17 year-olds, for example.

As Steve Sailer explains the preceding chart,*

When looking at the crime fall in the 1990s, this study appears to have the same flaw that dragged down Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory -- a failure to look carefully at crime rates by age cohort, combined with an intoxication with analyzing complex state-level data that leads to a failure to do simple national-level reality checks. (She was clearly influenced by Levitt, so this shortcoming is not surprising.) Wolpaw Reyes simply assumes a 22 year lag between lead poisoning around the time of birth and the violent crime rate. But, we can easily look at more detailed data for different age cohorts, which shows that the crime decline of the 1990s began among older individuals, not among the younger people supposedly benefiting from lower lead or higher abortion.

If you assume a 22 year lag to violent crime, then this graph looks great because the murder rate started to fall after about 1991.

But, that's the same mistake Levitt made way back in 1999: he forgot to look at the crime rates among narrower age cohorts. For the 17-and-under crowd, the two worst years were 1993-94. In other words, they were born when lead pollution had already fallen by almost half (just as they were born when legal abortion was close to its peak, which is a problem for Levitt's theory).

That said, I could find very little stuff out there refuting this theory, other than Sailer's criticism of the statistics. Instead, I mostly found articles supporting it. Discovery wrote about it back in 2008, and The Washington Post covered all of this back in 2007. While not quite as bullish on the crime-lead link as Drum, they nonetheless reach the same conclusion: although we do not fully understand the mechanism for this, there is obviously a strong correlation between lead exposure and crime rates.

Even if Drum is overreaching here, I'm willing to forgive him since the general message is right: lead is really bad for you. And it might take a bit of an overreaction before anything is done to clear up the many lead-contaminated sites left all over the US. As Deborah Blum points out in the Knight Journalism Blog at MIT, that's the most important point that needs to be made:

In other words, it's not that tetraethyl lead is some special form of the poison - the point is that lead exposure in any form is dangerous. And that's the real message here. The connection with crime remains somewhat complicated but there's nothing complicated about the fact that lead, in all its forms, remains one of the most troubling of all industrial exposures. And whether Drum gets it perfect here or not, he does get the main point right. We need to keep reminding ourselves - and our government - that we all benefit by, as they say, getting the lead out.

Call it a useful misconception, even if you remain a skeptic.

* Those familiar with Sailer's work would point out that his disagreement is at least partially motivated by a very specific ideological disposition. Like Charles Murray, Sailer consistently argues that different races experience different levels well-being and achievement for primarily genetic reasons. This blog does not agree with that position, and the reference to Steve Sailer's article is to illustrate the statistical issues at stake in this debate, nothing more.

The Platinum Coin Solution

Now that Washington's sturm and drang over the debt ceiling has passed, we can get ourselves ready for the next crisis - raising the debt ceiling. And unlike the poorly methaphorized and intentionally engineered fiscal cliff, this one has actually serious consequences. The United States simply cannot default on its debt, as the consequences would be disastrous, so we're stuck looking for a way out if Washington decides to rush, again, headlong into disaster.

Let's make one thing clear: the debt ceiling is an unbelievably stupid and dangerous idea. Getting rid of it is the best individual action that Congress can take to help ensure American economic security. It wouldn't be that hard to do either. From 1979 to 1995, debt ceiling increases were automatic, following a piece of legislation originally proposed by Dick Gephardt.This was undone during the fiscal brinksmanship of the Gingrich era, and now we're left with an enduring symbol of modern Congressional dysfunction: to achieve very limited partisan ends, House Republicans are willing to enact significant, permanent damage to US economy. It's pathetic.

Obviously, this cannot continue, and the President has already made it clear that it won't. James Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Institute, quoting Chris Krueger at Guggenheim Securities’s Washington Research Group, summarizes his three basic alternatives to default if Congress fails to come to an agreement over the debt ceiling: increase the debt limit with a resolution expressing Congressional disapproval (the McConnell option); invoke the 14th amendment and continue borrowing regardless of what Congress does; or let the Treasury just create enough new currency to pay the bills on as needed basis. For most, Pethokoukis included, the latter solution seems like one of those "just so crazy that it might work" ideas. As Krueger writes,

This is even more theoretical than the Constitutional Option, though some argue that it is a stronger legal option.  There are limits on how much paper money the U.S. can circulate and rules that govern coinage on gold, silver, and copper.  BUT, the Treasury has broad discretion on coins made from platinum.  The theory goes that the U.S. Mint would create a handful of trillion dollar (or more) platinum coins.  The President would then order the coins deposited at the Fed, who would then put the coin (s) in the Treasury who now can pay all their bills and a default is removed from the equation.  The effects on the currency market and inflation are unclear, to say the least.  You would also likely trigger a wave of lawsuits similar to the Constitutional Option and create two tranches of treasuries.  Both this option and the Constitutional Option are VERY low probability options

As the brilliant Steve Waldman over at Interfluidity points out, Pethokoukis/ Krueger are only partially right: creating platinum coins could eliminate all of the debt ceiling nonsense, but there aren't any economic unknowns in this scenario. In fact, as crazy as it sounds, the Treasury can work with the Fed to resolve the debt ceiling crisis independently, with an effect as if it were simply borrowing. Here's how that would work.

First things first. Just like the trillion-dollar coin idea, the treasury will simply make some new currency and use it to pay its bills after it passes its debt limit. After all, it is within its legal right to create any currency in any denomination as long as it's cast in platinum. A single, trillion-dollar coin is probably a bit risky (what if you lose it?), so the Treasury will probably mint a bunch of million-dollar coins instead.

In short, the government is literally creating the money it needs to pay its bills. Economists call this seigniorage. While the idea seems pretty sweet in the abstract (go go gadget money machine!!!), printing money to pay your bills is a terrible idea, since it usually causes inflation in the absence of external mitigating factors (more on that below). You are creating more currency without actually increasing income. Therefore, your currency, in relation to actual stuff in the economy, is now worth less. Obviously, this can all get out of control really quickly (think Zimbabwe), so it's better not to start running down this path.

A quick aside: we have annual inflation because the Fed intentionally creates more currency than the growth of GDP. Since this inflation is anticipated, it allows us to have price stability. There's also some crazy stuff with how interest rates factor into this issue, which is why, right now, you can have stuff like QE3 create money and not end up creating inflation.

In order to stop the government's money printing scheme from causing rampant inflation, Fed would begin a process of selling the treasuries to make sure that the general currency level remains essentially the same. Since you need to give the Fed some cash to pay for that treasury it's selling, the money you're using to pay is now out of circulation. Think of it like filling a pool with a drain open at one end. As the treasury increases the currency level with its new coins, the Fed will be removing currency by selling the bonds. The technical word for this is sterilization.

Oddly enough, even though this is all technically still seigniorage, the ultimate result would be essentially the same as just issuing debt. Instead of paying interest, the government is sacrificing the interest that it earns for itself by having the Fed sell some of the bonds it owns (yes, the US government pays interest to the Fed which the Fed then pays back to the government; it's weird, I know). Everything would continue as normal as long as the Fed doesn't run out of government bonds. Since it has about three trillion dollars' worth right now, this won't happen for a long time.

And just like that, the debt ceiling is solved.

A Detour into Gun Law, pt. 4

The debate following the Newtown shootings has not died down. Nor should it. There's plenty to talk about here, as America's love of gun violence strikes at the very heart of its ability to engage in meaningful and effective public governance. Unfortunately, the debate is attracting all sorts of nonsense in the process. Awr Hawkins over at Breitbart.com wants you to believe that blunt weapons are more dangerous than guns, in a spin off of the hoary reactionary argument of "this is dangerous why not ban it too?" As he writes in an article titled "FBI: More People Killed with Hammers, Clubs Each Year Than Rifles,"

According to the FBI annual crime statistics, the number of murders committed annually with hammers and clubs far outnumbers the number of murders committed with a rifle.

This is an interesting fact, particularly amid the Democrats' feverish push to ban many different rifles, ostensibly to keep us safe of course.

However, it appears the zeal of Sens. like Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) is misdirected. For in looking at the FBI numbers from 2005 to 2011, the number of murders by hammers and clubs consistently exceeds the number of murders committed with a rifle.

Hawkins' argument is a classic case where statistics don't lie, but people lie with statistics. There's two games going on here, and both rely on an assumption that Hawkins' readers are too lazy to actually check the data that he cites. Limiting it to rifles is Hawkins first obvious attempt to deceive, assuming that guns and rifles would be considered equivalent. If you actually look at the tables kept by the FBI, you'd find that most of the deaths are attributed to uncategorized firearms. For the table listed by the FBI, firearms accounted for 67.5 percent of the murders they recorded, i.e. more than all other sources combined. 

Second, total murders =/= total deaths. Suicides and accidents nearly triple the death rates for firearms; hammers don't show up all that often as a cause of death here (although, to be fair, suicide by hammer is as ballsy a death as they come). You can find this data in tables 18 and 19 of the National Vital Statistics Report.

I know that this is a politicized debate, and we all benefit from a variety of viewpoints, but stuff like this that shows that Hawkins and his editors at Breitbart.com are simply not reliable sources. They put partisanship ahead of telling the truth, and their readers are worse off because of it. Readers would be better off looking at sources like The American Conservative. At least they're honest.

Of course, there's more at stake here than just the shaming of another Breitbart columnist. The suicide stuff is especially sad, since plenty of research from the Harvard School of Public Health show that means matter. Ninety percent of people who survive a suicide attempt will not die from suicide in the future. Suicide attempts are predominantly impulsive responses to periods of extreme stress, something most people only rarely experience. One prevention is as good as a life saved.

Unfortunately, higher gun ownership rates mean higher suicide rates; this is true between different states and different countries. This is mostly due to the fact that a gun ensures that a suicide attempt is successful. Households with guns do not see higher numbers of attempted suicides.. They also don't have higher rates of mental illness, or report higher frequencies of factors that lead to suicide. The only differentiating factor is gun ownership.

The suicide rate is an important part of this debate, since it is able to control for many of the factors that lead to confusion when we look at violent crime alone. As a previous post mentioned, many different factors contribute to a nation's crime rate, and guns are not often the most prominent factor. At the same time, high amounts of gun ownership lead to higher rates of homicide than we would expect otherwise. 

This becomes obvious once we look at suicide. People all throughout the world have mental health issues, and many attempt suicides. There is little to be done to eliminate this problem, just as there is little to be done about crazy people wanting to attack children. But the extremely high firearm suicide rate rate in the US, can only be explained through high gun ownership rates. Having a firearm magnifies the socially destructive tendencies of certain people. They are, essentially, a public health risk, and they should be treated thusly.

Spend enough time with the data and you start to see the scope of the public health risk posed by guns. These statistics are often abstract and lack a suitable reference point, which is why its easy to get it mixed up. Putting it in context helps. For example, Colorado is already one of ten states where death from firearms is more common than death from car accidents. If the current trend holds, we'll be saying the same thing for the nation as a whole by 2015.

To own a car, you must be licensed and carry liability insurance. Most economists recommend the same situation for firearms. Justin Wolfers explains the issue well. As he writes,

The real problem with gun ownership is that they involve "externalities," which is economist-speak for the fact that your gun may be used to hurt others. For instance, when Nancy Lanza purchased her Bushmaster AR-15, she probably weighed the benefits of owning the gun—the joy of ownership—with the price (about $800). But it's unlikely she considered the loss, pain and grief that might follow if it were used by her son to kill 26 innocents. When people fail to consider the broader social costs of choices like buying a gun, they're more likely to do them, and society suffers.
 
The economic answer is simple: Make potential gun-owners take account of these potential social costs. One way to do this would be to charge an annual license fee for each gun you keep. Research by economists Phil Cook and Jens Ludwig suggests that the typical social cost of one more gun-owning household is somewhere between $100 and $1800 per year. While that's a wide range, if we set a gun ownership license fee this high, it would force gun owners to face the true social costs of their choices, which would lead many fewer to buy guns.

The economic solution to gun violence is surprising in that it allows us to circumvent the debate of fundamental rights and prohibition. The US can fully respect the second amendment while demanding that people display proper gun ownership skills during licensing checks and prove that they're willing to pay both the public and private costs of exercising their rights. Coupled with a voluntary buyback program, licensing and insurance could be a very effective way of actually reducing the number of guns out there; who would be capable of paying tens of thousands of dollars a year in order to maintain a personal arsenal? The already steep punishments for driving without a license show that the penalty for illegal gun ownership would be sharp as well.