The size effect is well-known and often referred to as "the network effect". There is only one possible pairing between two people; three pairings between three people; six between four people; ten between five; and so on in a steep growth curve. In a society with a million people, adding one more person adds a million new pairings. The complexity really takes off when you get big.
But the complexity can also grow intrinsically. In an economy with just a handful of people, barter is the easiest form of economic transaction. A larger economy creates a demand for a standardized unit of exchange -- money -- to facilitate transactions. An even larger economy requires indirect forms of money -- bills of exchange, or checks -- to handle more complicated transactions. From there, as the economy grows more complex, we add all sorts of financial instruments: credit cards, stocks, bonds, T-bills, CDs, and so on. Size demands complexity.
Thus, as a society grows, so too must its government. The government must grow not only in absolute terms, but in relative terms. In other words, the government must, by necessity, consume an ever-greater share of the GDP in order to fulfill its function of regulating an ever more complex society.
This does not mean that a government must eventually reach the size where it crushes the economy under its weight. If government increases the productivity of the citizens, then some portion of that excess productivity can be diverted to the government, and the citizens will still grow wealthier.
At this point, I must refute a common misunderstanding about government: that it produces nothing, and only consumes wealth. This is not correct; government increases the productivity of the citizens. It does so by increasing social capital, the lubricant that enables the engine of the economy to run smoothly.
A simple example of government's role in increasing productivity is the security it provides its citizens. If there were no criminal law and no police forces, each citizen would be responsible for their own safety. We'd have to carry guns, double-padlock our doors, armor our cars, and put bars on our windows. The costs of all this personal security would surely be greater than the costs of the criminal justice system; government saves money for more productive uses.
At the other extreme, I am able to invest in stocks because I am confident that I will not be swindled. Without the SEC, no sane person would invest in stock, and our whole system of capital formation would not exist, and new companies would not be created. Our economy would be much smaller than it is. Again, the miniscule cost of the government regulation provides us with gigantic increases in economic productivity.
So we conclude that government must grow as society grows. But how is that growth to be managed? I shall have to defer that discussion to another topic.
21 comments:
"I am able to invest in stocks because I am confident that I will not be swindled."
I'm sure your tongue must have been partly in your cheek when you wrote that. While Madoff has gotten the headlines, there are literally dozens of mini-Madoffs and wannabe Madoffs out there, and swindles are happening every second. Just today, in the NY Times, another example: "2 Money Managers Held In New Wall St. Fraud Case." And the money that's allocated to the SEC to attempt to head off these frauds? A pittance, way short of what in fact might do the job. (The same goes for funds to the IRS to police tax evasion: next to nothing compared to the need.)
"Confident" the American people aren't. They've learned, the hard way, that you can't trust *anybody*. It'll be a long time before that trust comes back.
P.S.: Thanks for the book tip, i.e., Systems of Survival. I'll be getting hold of it.
Chris: The book you mentioned is a 1992 book by Jane Jacobs. The title, as you said, is Systems of Survival.
Chris, you're giving me another chance to be disagreeable. I think this will be a long one, since there are a number of points to address.
"Let us begin by thinking of government as a regulatory system for society."
Why think that? Why not simply look at history, and observe the way in which governments came into existence — by conquest, and expropriation, enslavement or extermination of the conquered. This might lead us to a more realistic assessment of government's role in society.
"However, as soon as you add a second person to that society, you have need for some system to regulate the interaction between the two people, lest they destroy each other in conflict."
What beef did the average American have with the average German in World War I? What beef does the policeman have with the peaceful citizen who smokes marijuana to ease the nausea caused by chemotherapy? And so on. Governments — again, historically — have been the principle instigators and facilitators of the conflicts in which one person destroys another. Only governments could have accomplished the tens of millions of deaths of the twentieth century.
"In an economy with just a handful of people, barter is the easiest form of economic transaction. A larger economy creates a demand for a standardized unit of exchange -- money -- to facilitate transactions."
And money came into existence without any central plan or edict, organically, as a means of better facilitating exchanges in the process of barter. Even the suitability of gold to the purpose of money was discovered in different times and places by way of the market process.
All of this points to a spontaneous order, by which people pursuing their own happiness, in cooperation with others, are able to solve problems. In other words, human beings are not inert matter, waiting for orders from on high. As the society grows more complex, the superiority of this spontaneous order — over the lumbering, reactionary, top-down institution of government — at adjusting to change, becomes increasingly evident.
Not only did governments not invent money, they have never even improved upon it. Instead, always and everywhere, they have debased it, thereby making it less useful as a unit of account and a store of value. Knowing this, they have passed legal tender laws to force people into using their inferior product.
Kings used to "call in the coin of the realm," then clip a little gold off the edges before returning it to the owners. Of course, this is just robbery and fraud. Today's central bank inflation is less crude, but essentially the same.
If there were no criminal law and no police forces, each citizen would be responsible for their own safety. We'd have to carry guns, double-padlock our doors, armor our cars, and put bars on our windows.
Many people still do all or some of those things. The police can not be everywhere at once, and they certainly will not be in your house to protect you when an intruder breaks in.
What's more, a lot of the crime in the inner city is the result of government prohibition of drugs, which brought into existence a black market and all the attendant consequences.
As for the costs of government "protection," here are some other considerations:
1. How many peaceful men and women have been taken out of productive society and placed in government cages because they violated some arbitrary prohibition?
2. How much money has been spent on building prisons, and paying prison guards premium salaries and pensions, to keep the aforementioned victims of government aggression locked up? (I recall the guards unions and prison building industry paying for ads during the last election to oppose state referendums on more lenient sentencing for drug users.)
4. How much money is spent on the military? How much of this has nothing to do with protection and is just featherbedding for the military-industrial complex?
5. What are the costs of our foreign policy of entangling alliances and military intervention around the world? How many lives lost and how much wealth destroyed?
6. Relatedly, how much is spent domestically, under the rubric of "homeland security," on surveillance, militarized police presence and the like? What is the cost to our liberties?
It is true that conflicts will arise between people, and that this problem must be addressed so as to avoid either party taking recourse to violence. On that point we are in agreement. And the state almost certainly does prevent some bad things from happening. If we end our analysis there, everything is fine.
But the state is nothing if not violent, and unjustly so, on a grand scale. So the costs of whatever good is accomplished by government must outweigh the benefits. Rather than trying to "fix" the state, i.e. train a snake to pull carriages, it would be better to put our minds to work finding other solutions to the problems of society.
Gerald, it's true that there are scams on Wall Street -- which is why Wall Street wants regulation. They know perfectly well that one Madoff does far more damage to the market than the value of his takings.
And thanks for correcting me. I always get Susan Jacoby mixed up with Jane Jacobs.
Dither, you propose to replace my non-judgemental characterization of government with a highly judgemental characterization. If you start with the assumption that government is evil, then don't be surprised if you come to the conclusion that government is evil. And what is wrong with my characterization? Is it incorrect? I agree that the concept of government is complicated, and you can probably come up with some interesting oddities that would mess up my characterization, but I see now reason why my characterization is intrinsically wrong. Please explain why you think it is intrinsically wrong.
You counter my two-person society with an example from a multi-million person society. Your point about war is lost on me. Yes, governments fight wars. Yes, that's bad. But some governments do not fight wars. Your reasoning, if applied to individuals instead of governments, would imply that we should exterminate humanity because some people are bad.
And money came into existence without any central plan or edict, organically, as a means of better facilitating exchanges in the process of barter.
Yes and no. The earliest forms of money were metals, to be sure. But when we started making greater use of precious metals, people started figuring out how to cheat others by trickery, such as alloying gold with baser metals and passing it off as gold. Or misrepresenting the amount of metal being offered. The solution to this problem was provided by governments in the creation of standardized currency that was guaranteed by the government to be honest. That's why coins bore the faces of the issuing monarch: he was the guy guaranteeing the honesty of the money. Had governments not provided reliable coinage, economies would have been crippled.
And so what you call spontaneous order was in fact neither spontaneous nor orderly. Cheats were constantly chipping away at the order created by governments, and only the continuing efforts of governments to keep the cheats at bay kept economies moving smoothly.
Not only did governments not invent money, they have never even improved upon it. Instead, always and everywhere, they have debased it, thereby making it less useful as a unit of account and a store of value.
Throughout most of history, coinage by different governments was used interchangeably, and governments that debased their coinage enjoyed only temporary benefits. Gresham's Law may not have kept them perpetually honest, but it made them think twice before debasing the currency. And reliable coinage, such as the Venetian ducat, enjoyed a huge advantage over unreliable coinage, such as most of the French coinage. This in turn gave the Venetians a significant commercial advantage over the French.
Oh boy, I get to be really pedantic! "Coin of the realm" was originally derived from the Greek term "koine", which referred to a slangy Greek that was universally used in Greek areas. Nowadays, however, it has taken the meaning you use.
The fact that some people need more protection than the police can provide does not mean that the police do not provide a valuable service. There are degrees of security. The police get us to, say, 99% security. If you want 99.5% security, then you spend additional money. But the police dramatically reduce the cost to everybody.
You next offer a series of criticisms of government policies. Let's be careful, however, to differentiate "governments in general" from "the US government". For example, if you were to apply your questions to the governments of Denmark or the Netherlands, I think you would come up with very different answers.
Dither,
You seem to be pointing out a lot of examples where government has made things worse, but let's cut to the abstract argument here. I will not be very original here:
(1) Without any compacts with other people, we have no reason to respect the safety of others. We are in what Hobbes calls "the state of war."
(2) We make compacts, but it is in vain if there is nothing to enforce these deals. If I give you some lump some of money so you won't assault me, what would stop you from breaking the deal once you have your cash?
(3) An arbitrator must be given absolute power. Not necessarily a single person, or an oligarchy in the traditional sense, but something that is united enough to keep us from breaking the rules. Otherwise, we are at war with one another.
(4) The other problems of government are not pleasant, but the fundamental problem of safety and the need for such safety in order to pursue the specialization of labor come first.
I admit that I just ripped this straight from the Leviathan and changed it only insofar that I believe there is no need for a monarchy. This being said, I do not see how *any* progress can be made without an aparatus to pass absolute judgements in some way, shape, or form.
Without a higher power that can't be challenged without serious unrest, what alternative exists for preventing violence?
Instead of a point-by-point rebuttal to the replies made by Chris and Alex, I want to get at what I think is the root of the issue.
We all agree that murder, robbery, fraud and other such unpleasantness is best avoided.
That said, to me, it doesn't make sense to entrust a murderer with preventing murders, or a robber with preventing robbery.
Chris pointed out that people cheated by debasing coins, and argued that government was necessary to ensure honest money. But what has government done except debase our money on a grand scale? And this is happening worldwide, with every government today on a fiat currency, inflating away.
If you argue that government is necessary to prevent people from killing each other, then it is absolutely relevant to point out that governments fight wars, and always have. Death tolls in the tens of millions cannot be brushed aside as a minor setback. Something is very wrong with this "regulatory system" if it is supposed to be preventing us from destroying each other in conflict, and is actually doing the opposite.
I do believe in regulation. But to me, regulation does not imply government regulation. For instance, I believe children should be protected from pornography on the internet, but this is best accomplished by parental regulation. Sure, some parents will fail at this. No human institution will ever give us perfection, but we can minimize the harm caused by mistakes, negligence or malice by not concentrating too much power in any one place.
In a decentralized system, the failure of a few does not drag down everyone else. Problems become opportunities to profit for those with the ingenuity to come up with solutions.
By all means, let's come up with some solutions. Government isn't providing them, and simply re-stating the problems it is supposed to be solving doesn't change that fact.
Dither, the concept of regulation, of which you approve, implies an authority with the power to enforce that regulation. You cite parental regulation. That works because parents have the power to enforce their will. But without an entity capable of enforcing regulation, there is no regulation. Who might that entity be other than government?
I don't think that your arguments get to the root of the problem. Moreover, several of them are wrong. For example, you note that governments fight wars. This is true, but we have a good comparative example here in the behavior of pre-state societies. To keep it clean and simple, I'll cite only the case of the Yanomami Indians of the Amazon basin. They have never been under the strict control of the Brazilian government; for the most part, they are left to their own devices except when they mess with other people. The average Yanomami male has only a 50% chance of dying a natural death. That's an indication of how much violence governments prevent.
"The average Yanomami male has only a 50% chance of dying a natural death. That's an indication of how much violence governments prevent."
I really don't think a primitive tribal society provides a good basis for comparison. The progress of humanity is largely the progress of good ideas and the falling away of bad ideas. Do the Yanomami share our society's ideas about the value of the individual, the rights of man, and so forth?
Put another way, if our government disbanded, would you kill your neighbor and steal his wife? Would you kill your grocer and take all his food? I believe there is more holding our society together than fear of the police.
"You cite parental regulation. That works because parents have the power to enforce their will."
True. But it also works because parents (generally speaking) love their children and have more incentive than anyone else to protect them. This is also why parents do not kill their children as punishment for disobedience.
The type of regulation I am referring to is that which results from the nature of things. For example, bad behavior carries its own punishment. Drink too much and you will have a hangover. Treat people badly and you will want for friends. In the marketplace, as I've mentioned before, the greed for profit is kept in check by the risk of loss.
There is an inconsistency between means and ends that tells me the state is itself just a problem yet to be solved.
Sure, if the state disappeared today all at once, not much would change, because people would still think as they did yesterday. There might be some fighting, but eventually a new gang would take over, declare itself the government, and life would go on as it did before.
But people can change their minds. They can substitue good ideas for bad ideas. In the past, they have learned that slavery is wrong, and that peaceful cooperation and exchange is superior to plunder. Someday, I hope, they will change their minds about the state, and a new arrangement will come into existence.
Dither, there's some circularity in your argument rejecting the example of the Yanomami because they are primitive. Is there really enough difference between "primitive" and "lacking government" to justify your rejection of that example?
Put another way, if our government disbanded, would you kill your neighbor and steal his wife? Would you kill your grocer and take all his food? I believe there is more holding our society together than fear of the police.
*I* wouldn't -- but there are plenty of people who would. That's the problem.
Let me also point out an ugly historical truth. In all of human history, with all of the many variations and wild oddities of human behavior, there has never been a society without government that was peaceful. All the non-governmental societies are always characterized by extremely high levels of personal violence, high mortality rates, and low life expectancies.
The function people expect out of government is management of negative externalities. When two parties trade it's always beneficial to those parties (otherwise they wouldn't trade). However, a trade my impose a cost on others.
Recently a neighbor planned to chop down a 150-year-old tree and extend his home. Another neighbor circulated a petition to stop this, claiming to love and honor the tree for its great size and age. Although I prefer being near a large tree and a medium house to being near a large house I did not sign the petition because I believe in property rights. Many signed.
People love the status quo. The beg for restrictive zoning to stop their neighbors from changing the character of their neighborhoods. They beg for blue laws to keep their children from getting the wrong lifestyle ideas. If the city won't create enough zoning restrictions they set up homeowners associations!
Government doesn't grow based on the size of the society (nor the log of the size, nor the square). It grows based on the size of the status quo. Before the invention of house paint we didn't desire laws about what color a house could be.
I don't even know what the libertarian analog of homeowners associations is. For carbon emissions we are going to start up a cap and trade system. I can't imagine having shares in house colors and having to buy them from my neighbors before painting my house in an ugly color but perhaps technology will make that possible.
Yes, that issue with homeowner's associations is really messy. On the one hand, I think it reasonable for people to be able to enforce some minimum standards of appearance in their neighborhood. On the other hand, I prefer to leave people alone. I would, very reluctantly, refused to sign that petition, even though I love trees and detest people cutting them down. I would have instead approached the guy and pointed out the big effect that tree has on the value of his property.
In the two cases where I actually had the opportunity to protest a neighbor's plans, I passed over the opportunity. I would object if somebody wanted to put an open pit mine or a motocross course next to my land.
Dither: what do you think about global warming? It's the general belief that only through global coordination can global warming be stopped. How about other "tragedy of the commons" issues?
Eurohippie,
I'm not a scientist, and I know that actual scientists are not all in agreement about the causes and consequences of global warming. (It's worth noting that all of the past doomsdsay predictions of environmentalists -- about overpopulation, mass starvation, a new ice age, depletion of natural resources, and so on -- have been dead wrong. That doesn't mean they are wrong now, but the record is worth considering.)
Regardless, I don't see any reason to believe that central economic planning for the purpose of regulating the earth's climate is going to be any more successful than other attempts at central economic planning.
It will be successful at enriching state-favored industries, and increasing state control over all human activity. Since carbon is a by-product of life itself, and the scientific claims are unfalsifiable, global warming provides a catch-all, no-loopholes excuse for totalitarianism. So I'm worried about that.
In the end, costs and moral concerns must be weighed against benefits. If the government plan stifles economic growth, it will actually hamper people's ability to adapt to a changing climate. And if it leads to violent political repression, as state planning always does when carried too far, then warmer temperatures will be the least of our worries.
Dither, the science of global warming is much clearer than the public has been led to think. All significant scientific organizations the world over have issued statements declaring AGW to be real and potentially dangerous to humanity. The claim that scientists are divided on the basic issue is bogus. There are lots of disagreements about the magnitude of the problem, but those disagreements are whether AGW will be merely costly or whether it will be catastrophic.
Our response to it is a purely political issue that must be decided in the political sphere. However, the science is a matter for scientists -- not political advocates -- to determine.
Chris,
Much of the science is funded by governments. It is plain realism to consider the incentives at work under such conditions. The last thing governments want is to be viewed as irrelevant. Thus, scientific conclusions that support a major government role in society will always be favored over those that don't when the grants are awarded.
The same is true in the field of economics. Keynesian approaches are adopted by governments not because they work, but because they provide a rationale for governments to do what they want to do anyway: tax, spend, run up deficits, print money and control the economy. (Is it any wonder there are so many Keynesians working in government, and no Austrians?)
As I mentioned in another post, it was once the consensus of the economics profession -- buttressed by its newfangled "scientific" methods (actually pseudoscientific) -- that socialism would outperform capitalism in the production of goods.
I'll close by quoting a relevant commentary by Michael Crichton on the subject of consensus:
"Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
"There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.
"In addition, let me remind you that the track record of the consensus is nothing to be proud of. Let's review a few cases.
"In past centuries, the greatest killer of women was fever following childbirth . One woman in six died of this fever. In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them. The consensus said no. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compelling evidence. The consensus said no. In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management. The consensus said he was a Jew, ignored him, and dismissed him from his post. There was in fact no agreement on puerperal fever until the start of the twentieth century. Thus the consensus took one hundred and twenty five years to arrive at the right conclusion despite the efforts of the prominent "skeptics" around the world, skeptics who were demeaned and ignored. And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women.
"There is no shortage of other examples. In the 1920s in America, tens of thousands of people, mostly poor, were dying of a disease called pellagra. The consensus of scientists said it was infectious, and what was necessary was to find the "pellagra germ." The US government asked a brilliant young investigator, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, to find the cause. Goldberger concluded that diet was the crucial factor. The consensus remained wedded to the germ theory. Goldberger demonstrated that he could induce the disease through diet. He demonstrated that the disease was not infectious by injecting the blood of a pellagra patient into himself, and his assistant. They and other volunteers swabbed their noses with swabs from pellagra patients, and swallowed capsules containing scabs from pellagra rashes in what were called "Goldberger's filth parties." Nobody contracted pellagra. The consensus continued to disagree with him. There was, in addition, a social factor-southern States disliked the idea of poor diet as the cause, because it meant that social reform was required. They continued to deny it until the 1920s. Result-despite a twentieth century epidemic, the consensus took years to see the light.
"Probably every schoolchild notices that South America and Africa seem to fit together rather snugly, and Alfred Wegener proposed, in 1912, that the continents had in fact drifted apart. The consensus sneered at continental drift for fifty years. The theory was most vigorously denied by the great names of geology-until 1961, when it began to seem as if the sea floors were spreading. The result: it took the consensus fifty years to acknowledge what any schoolchild sees.
"And shall we go on? The examples can be multiplied endlessly. Jenner and smallpox, Pasteur and germ theory. Saccharine, margarine, repressed memory, fiber and colon cancer, hormone replacement therapy…the list of consensus errors goes on and on.
"Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way."
I'm going to jump all over that Michael Crichton quote because it is utter bullshit. Crichton is not a scientist and so has no claim to authority here. (Indeed, I have better credentials than Mr. Crichton on this topic.)
First, note that each of the three examples he quotes is "ancient history" science. Before World War II, there weren't many scientists and science was a small community. It was easier for mistakes to go unchecked. But when you've got tens of thousands of scientists working on a problem, it's a lot harder for mistakes to go unnoticed.
Second, I want to address your comment on incentives. You insinuate that scientists have no integrity and simply parrot whatever the reigning political regime desires. I cannot believe that people still repeat this idiotic argument. If it were true, then during the eight years of the Bush Administration, we would have seen American scientists loudly denouncing AGW. But that didn't happen. So let's drop this idiotic argument.
Let me tell you about the real incentives in science. Research scientists don't give a hoot about personal income -- if they did, they'd work for industry and earn three times as much as they earn in academia. Scientists are all driven by the desire to obtain the respect of their peers. Each and every scientist wants to be thought of as "eminent" in their field. They want to win a scientific prize and to be inducted into a prestigious scientific organization. There's only one way that happens: publish papers that everybody else respects. And what makes a paper worth of respect? Its information content. The journals are full of me-too papers filling in some tiny blank in the library of science. But the papers that get noticed are the ones that challenge the existing way of thinking. Every single one of the most revered and respected science in the 20th century earned that respect by publishing papers that challenged the orthodoxy. In physics, it was giants like Einstein, Fermi, Feynman, and Hawking who dominated the century, and each one of them rocked the boat. Rocking the boat is the path to success. I guarantee you, if a scientist were to come out today with a paper undermining the entire AGW theory, they'd get a Nobel Prize for sure.
Third, every anti-AGW argument I see includes some degree of conspiracy theory. Recognizing that every reputable scientific organization recognizes AGW as a serious problem. the anti-AGW nuts simply reject scientists as part of some grand conspiracy to take over the world.
Fourth, Mr. Crichton cites three cases in which the scientific consensus was incorrect. He could probably add a few dozen more, if he dug around. But EVERYTHING ELSE that science has done in the last hundred years -- all the millions of scientific papers, all the theories, all the advances, the work of hundreds of thousands of scientists -- ALL OF THIS -- has come out fairly well. I challenge you to go through any scientific journal from the 1950s, randomly select a paper, and compare it with current knowledge. The odds that the paper will contain a statement confuted by current knowledge are miniscule. Mr. Crichton is arguing that, since some people are Siamese twins, we can safely assume that everybody else is a Siamese twin who lost their partner and now lies about it.
The process by which science proceeds is complicated and has itself been the object of study of many great minds. There are hundreds of "history of science" courses all over this country; a search on the phrase "history of science" at Amazon.com yields 43,000 titles. Yet Mr. Crichton could not possibly have written what he did had he read any of those books or taken one of those courses.
Chris, I think Crichton's main point is this:
"Science ... requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world."
Is this bullshit? Right now, the popular AGW thesis cannot be verified by some reproducible experiment. That's the truth.
I never said that scientists have no integrity. But nor are scientists, as a group, any more immune to the corrupting influence of dependence on government money, and a self-reinforcing herd mentality, than any other group of people.
Somewhat off-topic: I wanted to share this article with you. It's a very clear, concise and easy-to-understand refutation of the logic behind the government's economic recovery plan.
It's written by Peter Schiff, who predicted the current recession back in 2006, even while he was laughed at by the establishment pundits. (Video from the second link is a real eye-opener.)
No, that sentence is not bullshit, although it is incomplete. It's the conclusion he insinuates that it really doesn't matter how many scientists believe something. All those other scientists did not come to their conclusions by throwing darts onto a poster. They came to their conclusions after a lot of analysis of research. Yes, a single scientist can turn everything upside down -- and that's what every scientists strives to do. But the ultimate question is, "Who's right?" If you've got one scientist arguing X and everybody else arguing ~X, you don't just throw your hands in the air and declare the matter undecided. You put your money on the best estimates of the best scientists.
Right now, the popular AGW thesis cannot be verified by some reproducible experiment. That's the truth.
That statement is true in the sense that it is so vague as to be impossible to either support or reject. Your statement seems to boil down to the belief that science can never predict the future because we cannot experiment with things in the future. That's definitely not true. When NASA launches a satellite to Mars, they make predictions about when it will arrive at Mars. Those predictions cannot be tested in advance, and so your reasoning would deny NASA funding for a Mars shot because there's no reason to believe that it will work. But in fact it DID work, and indeed, the orbital predictions that the NASA people have made have been fabulously accurate, without setting up laboratories around Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and so forth.
Science can make predictions that are useful. There are issues of accuracy and precision with the predictions, and some predictions can be very inaccurate. But to take a black and white view and declare that such predictions are necessarily meaningless is just plain wrong.
But nor are scientists, as a group, any more immune to the corrupting influence of dependence on government money, and a self-reinforcing herd mentality, than any other group of people.
Did you read what I wrote about incentives for scientists? Go back and re-read that. I made it clear that the incentive system that scientists work under motivates them to rock the boat. And the biggest boat-rockers get the Nobel Prize.
I read the article you linked to and I was appalled by it. First, it had too much bombast to be taken seriously. But its fundamental mistake is its assumption that the micro-society in its example has zero resources outside of what it discusses. This is absurd. Every society always has lots of extra resources that can be brought into the picture. In his scenario, if the candlestick maker falls ill and cannot make candlesticks for a few weeks, he starves to death, and that's the end of his productivity. In a real society, somebody (bank, family, friend, government) would lend him the wherewithal to survive his illness, and he would repay it later.
It also failed to take into account the role of foreign capital. His example needed a Chinese guy standing on the edge of the group, offering to loan steaks, bread, or candlesticks to anybody who wanted it. The Chinese guy provided the surplus.
Next, he stumbles badly with his emphasis on manufacturing rather than services. C'mon, that's 1950s thinking! Economics is about goods and services, and there's nothing that makes one superior to the other. Indeed, the two are, at a deep level, indistinguishable. When you buy a hamburger, are you purchasing a good (two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce tomato and a sesame seed bun) or a service (a bunch of people preparing a meal for you)?
Lastly, I am offended by his suggestion that people who use credit are doing so in order to spend all day relaxing in a tub. Much of our credit goes to finance increased productivity. That's the whole point of saving, isn't it?
Lastly, predicting the recession isn't much of a mental coup. As soon as Mr. Bush started his huge spending program, and launched the war in Iraq, I knew that the dollar would go down the toilet. I moved most of my money overseas. I've been hurt by this downturn, but I expect to regain the value sooner than most people.
Well, Chris, I guess we aren't going to change one another's minds today! (Or possibly ever...)
Dither, because I value our differences, I'm going to sleep on this and respond tomorrow.
Oops, previous comment was meant for the other topic. I'll repeat it there.
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