"Democracy," according to "The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World," "refers to a form of government in which, in contradistinction to monarchies and aristocracies, the people rule."
That is not the case in Iraq and is not likely to be the case soon. In much of Iraq the people exist in a kind of hell on earth, at the mercy of American forces on the one hand and a variety of enraged insurgents on the other. Despite the pretty words coming out of the Bush administration, the goals of the U.S. and the goals of most ordinary Iraqis are not, by a long stretch, the same.
The desire of the U.S., as embodied by the Bush administration, is to exercise as much control as possible over the Middle East and its crucial oil reserves. There is very little concern here about the plight of ordinary Iraqis, which is why the horrendous casualties being suffered by Iraqi civilians, including women and children, get so little attention.
What most ordinary Iraqis have been expressing, not surprisingly, is a desire for a reasonably decent quality of life. They are a long way from that.
In large swaths of the country, death at the hands of insurgents seems always just moments away. It's also extremely easy for innocent Iraqis to get blown away by Americans. That can occur if drivers get too close - or try to pass - an American military convoy. Or if confusion arising from language barriers, or ignorance of the rules, or just plain nervousness results in an unfortunate move by a vehicle at a checkpoint. Or if someone objects too vociferously to degrading treatment by U.S. forces. Or if someone is simply suspected, wrongly, of being an insurgent.
Crime in many areas is completely out of control. Kidnapping for ransom, including the kidnapping of children, is ubiquitous. Carjackings are commonplace. Rape and murder are widespread.
In a country with the second-largest oil reserves in the world, drivers have to wait in line for hours at a time for gasoline. Electric power is available just a handful of hours a day. Unemployment rates are sky high. With many women destitute, prostitution is a growth industry.
Iraqis may have voted yesterday. But they live in occupied territory, and the occupiers have other things on their minds than the basic wishes of the Iraqi people. That's not democracy. That's a recipe for more war.
UPDATE: Also see this from LGF. I guess that's the heroic message resonating with some.
But I wonder why we didn't see similar scenes in Iraq yesterday? Surely the MSM would have covered them.
"Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest"
A very good friend just sent me yet another link about glaciers melting -- asking with dripping irony whether I'd chalk this up to some "liberal plot."
Well: by coincidence reader Harold Brashears sends in the following comment on this recent post:
I was amused to see the quote from Stephen Schneider. He was a prominent global cooling enthusiast, not long ago.
His paper on global cooling: Schneider S. & Rasool S., "Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols - Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate", Science, vol.173, 9 July 1971, p.138-141.
A more recent Schneider quote:
"To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest."
(In interview for "Discover" magagzine, Oct 1989).
So to respond to my friend's question: is this a "liberal" plot? Maybe not, but the Schneider quote sure sounds like a private arrangement between those with personal/professional interests in capturing and keeping "the public imagination."
I've been watching HDNet's no-commentary nonstop all-night Cinema Verite coverage of the Iraq election. Seeing smiling people on the streets and the kids playing with US troops would cheer up anyone. Or so one would think. (Wait for Meet the Press I guess...)
If the insurgents wanted to stop people from voting, they failed. If they wanted to cause chaos, they failed. The voters were completely defiant, and although there was never the sense that the insurgency was over, there was a feeling that the people of Baghdad, showing a new, positive attitude, had turned a corner.
UPDATE II: 9am central, just tuned into Chris Matthews' Sunday show. A wrinkled, sad-angry little dwarf who says he's Dick Cavett (funny -- I thought I loved his show in the 60's!) agrees it is laughingly obvious -- inevitable, in fact -- all the losers in the Iraqi election will shortly pull out and start a civil war. Total irony, this Cavett guy.
Here are some answers to Crichton. Persuasive? You decide:
Crichton's heroine notes that from 1940 to 1970 carbon dioxide emissions increased as world temperatures decreased (pgs. 86-7). "So if rising carbon dioxide is the cause of rising temperatures, why didn't it cause temperatures to rise from 1940 to 1970?" she asks.
New York University physics professor Martin Hoffert answers: "Simple. Climate change is caused by several factors: changes in solar radiation, aerosols that scatter sunlight and the buildup of human-emitted greenhouse gases. By the early 1970s, the growing CO2 in the atmosphere (and other human greenhouse gases) overwhelmed the other effects and will continue to do so in this century."
Crichton's heroine says much of the warming can be attributed to increased heat in growing cities because of reflection by buildings and asphalt. She cites examples of cities warming and towns not (pgs. 368-385). "At least one study suggests that half of the observed temperature change comes from land use alone. If that's true, then global warming in the past century is less than three-tenths of a degree. Not exactly a crisis."
Actually, oceans and rural areas are also warming, said Jeff Severinghaus, a geosciences professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. "The ocean data says it all. Ground temperatures confirm this."
Crichton's heroine cites satellite data showing that the atmosphere five miles above the ground isn't warming, although global warming says it should be (pgs. 99-100). "Trust me," says the heroine. "The satellite data have been re-analyzed dozens of time. They're probably the most intensely scrutinized data in the world. But the data from the weather balloons agree with the satellites. They show much less warming than expected by the theory."
At least three groups of scientists have looked at the satellite data Crichton refers to and concluded that it understated temperatures. Longer-term weather balloon data also confirm warming trends, climate researchers say. According to Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, "Evidence is mounting that the (original satellite record) is not correct. The (newer) Remote Sensing Systems record is best in my view (but still not perfect) and is in full accord with models."
Crichton cites numerous locales where warming is not occurring (pgs. 190-4, 368-385). His protagonist says: "As you can see, many places in the United States do not seem to have become warmer since 1930."
Scientists say the global picture over a longer time period is important. What Crichton does, says Stanford University climatologist Stephen Schneider, "would be like trying to figure out the lifetime batting average of Barry Bonds by seeing what he did for three weeks in the year 2000."
So what do we learn from these responses?
(1) The "trigger effect" switches in whenever true believers say it does. Human CO2 started causing a greenhouse effect in 1970, in other words, because (obviously!) that's when temperatures started to change.
(2) Severinghaus and colleagues expect to persuade, simply, by saying data contradicting global warming are wrong -- but data supporting it are correct. This leaves us to wonder exactly how they can tell the difference between wrong and right data? (Trenberth says RSS system record is "best" but "still not perfect" -- apparently "perfection" equates to confirming global warming in this scientist's (or should we perhaps write it "scientist's"?) mind.)
(3) "At least three groups of scientists have looked at the satellite data Crichton refers to and concluded that it understated temperatures." In other words, Crichton was correct in saying the data do not suggest global warming. He just misinterpreted the numbers, because he foolishly thought the data said what they said.
Despite the Iraqi Sunni boycott, al-Zarqawi's imprecations against the general election, and the unprecedented level of bloodletting, an certain number of the 40,000 polling stations across the country will almost certainly open on time Sunday, January 30.
That was one of the starting points on which Gregory Hooker, chief analyst of CENTCOM, the American command running the war in Iraq, presupposed his detailed forecast of election results...
The second premise was that orderly vote-counting would likewise take place notwithstanding threats of sabotage.
The Hooker forecast is essentially a simulation exercise based on US and Iraqi intelligence data gathered in the last six months, together with estimates of opinion openly canvassed in towns up and down the country.
The level of participation and the results of this pivotal election will bear strongly on the Bush administration's second term Iraq policy, the tasks facing US armed forces, the chances of the elected national assembly taking up its responsibilities, including the drafting of a new national constitution, and the prospects of an elected government exercising authority...
For elections held now, Hooker projects the following figures:
The Shiite Unified Iraqi Alliance list -- 43.8% = 120 national assembly seats.
The Kurdish list -- a surprising 36.4% (more than twice their 16-18% proportion of the general population) = 100 seats.
The Iraqi National Accord -- 8.1% = 22 seats. (A formula is being actively sought to retain him as premier even if his showing is low.)
The Iraqi Communist party (the best organized) -- 1.6% = 5 seats.
All the Assyrian, Turkomen and Yazdi minorities together -- 4 seats.
All the rest -- 5 seats.
The first conclusion reached by our analysts is that, while the leading Shiite UIA bloc can expect to be the big winner of the election, the real victor will be the Shiite cleric who assembled and founded the alliance, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and his inner circle. The slate he drew up of candidates to the legislature reflects his political aspirations and cunning: of the 120 registered, the first 60 are independents with no parties behind them and will therefore be totally dependent on Sistani himself for support.
The US, MCU, and MC models have been updated and new forecasts are available. Here's the US model forecast memo. I'll post more as an update as soon as I've had time to read it.
UPDATE: Okay, quoting from the memo we have the following:
Real Growth and the Unemployment Rate: The predicted growth rates for the next four quarters are 4.1, 3.2, 2.9, and 2.8 percent, respectively. These growth rates are enough to keep the unemployment rate roughly unchanged. The jobs variable, JF, is predicted to increase in the four quarters by 1.9, 1.9, 1.8, and 1.7 percent, respectively.
Inflation: Inflation as measured by the growth of the GDP deflator (GDPD) is predicted to be 3.5 percent in 2005 and 3.4 percent in 2006. These predicted values are higher than the consensus view as of this writing, and so the model is more pessimistic about inflation than is the current consensus view.
Monetary Policy: The estimated interest rate rule (equation 30) is predicting that the three month bill rate (RS) will rise to 2.8 percent by the end of 2005. It then rises to 3.3 percent by the end of 2006.
Other Variables: The federal government budget deficit is predicted to be around $420 billion in the next four quarters (on a NIPA basis). (See the predicted values for SGP.) This is smaller than many others expect. This is where experimenting may be useful. In particular, it may be that the above assumptions have underestimated future federal government spending. It could also mean, however, that people are too pessimistic about the deficit.
The U.S. current account deficit (variable -SR in the model) is forecast to be extremely large throughout the period. It is predicted to rise to over $800 billion in 2006.
He's wrong, too, when he claims that a simple fact -- that cities are warmer than countryside, leading to a "heat island effect" -- has been ignored in climate temperature data taken near cities. He misleads his readers when he has his characters say that temperatures measured by Earth satellites are inconsistent with global warming derived from thermometers on land. To "document" his claims, Crichton shows many plots downloaded from the NASA/GISS Web site -- but he misrepresents the data.
Isn't this interesting. Notice the careful distinctions being drawn here between being "wrong" (sure, there must be some mention of the urban heat island effect somewhere in the literature) and only "misleading" the readers or "misrepresenting" the data.
One man's misleading/misrepresentation is another man's "Hey guy -- I read these same numbers and they just don't say to me what they say to you."
So it turns out we're not a bunch of smelly animals after all...
Via the new (and somewhat heterodox?) methods of experimental economics, researchers at the Atlanta Fed have confirmed my side of an argument I've been holding with colleagues for years -- that redistribution and social justice are themselves elements in everyone's utility set.
Which means (1) people value the redistributive impact of progressive taxation up to and only up to a point, and (2) in the short run households overvalue redistribution and social justice because they are unaware of the costs:
There is much more to be said about material in this little essay. (Without wishing to be too explicit, for example, it seems to say my Democratic friends are correct when they charge the Republican Party is the representative of those who hold extreme right-wing views on race and immigration!)
But for now I think the major point is one EconoPundit has been stressing over and over again, like the mad prophet just returned from the desert with an important message -- immigration reform is the issue of issues waiting for some charismatic leader to grab hold of:
When we look at [polling data, the] popular spectrum of political opinion has the Democrats and liberal elites on the Left, the Republicans in the middle, and the voters out to their Right.
Immigration as an issue illustrates the popular spectrum to an almost embarrassingly exaggerated extent. About 70 percent of Americans (and only about one-fifth of American elites) think that mass immigration is a serious threat to the U.S. and needs to be curtailed. There are votes in cutting immigration levels -- but you would never guess this from elite media coverage. And responding to this, both parties favor increasing immigration levels and reducing restrictions on entry.
What makes the Democrats' task of recovery so difficult is that the issues that most concern voters -- namely, national security and moral issues -- fit into the popular spectrum better (i.e., the Democrats and the voters are at opposite ends of the spectrum on such issues -- with the GOP in the middle). But because the Democrats take their cue from elite institutions such as Hollywood and the media, they never realize their vulnerability. And every election defeat astonishes them.
If a Democrat were to outflank the GOP on an issue with a high salience on the popular spectrum, they might get back in the game. Senator Hillary Clinton has hinted she might do precisely that over illegal immigration -- where President Bush is extremely vulnerable. But the Democrats' first forays into reconsidering such sensitive policies have plainly run into the sands of timidity, dogmatism, and elite complacency.
As long as that is the case, the Democrats will continue to lose -- and continue to be surprised. (Emphasis added)
Our work a few weeks ago was problematic, because we mistakenly read a data table as "net" when it was, indeed, gross. Here's a picture of the difference:
Gross undocumented immigration must be adjusted before we worry about its economic impact: people who legalize their status move from "undocumented" to documented; people who die, or move back voluntarily or otherwise, can't become part of the labor force and therefore shouldn't be counted as part of undocumented immigration.
Using the new net data in a regression similar to our earlier exercise gives us the following results:
and the following estmate/simulation of net undocumented immigration:
A plot of the results can make the results more or less dramatic depending on how one arranges the vertical axis:
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want -- which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear -- which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor-- anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
To that new order we oppose the greater conception -- the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.
Since the beginning of our American history, we have been engaged in change -- in a perpetual peaceful revolution -- a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly adjusting itself to changing conditions -- without the concentration camp or the quick-lime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.
This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.
To that high concept there can be no end save victory.
"The ownership society sounds good and grand, but I don't see it has much substance," said Robert Higgs, a fellow at the Independent Institute and author of "Against Leviathan," a libertarian critique of Social Security and other programs. "The idea that the government will be your savior and protector is so ingrained in the populace that it's impossible to stamp out."
John Powers wades through the evidence. He manfully struggles through a deep, sticky, foul swamp while claiming everything smells fine, the fields are neat and clean, the flowers trimmed.
There's a quarter century's worth of evidence that those elaborate social theories he learned in college were, plainly and simply, false. He struggles through all the indications.
Every American will cheer the president's repeated references to the U.S. obligation to hold high the torch of freedom. "America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies," the president declared, and that is right. "We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery." That is right, too.
The admirably underplayed depiction of a high school football season in a small Texas town that lives and breathes high school football, Friday Night Lights, has been released as a Widescreen title by Universal (25476, $30). Billy Bob Thornton shows a wonderful restraint portraying the level-headed coach, and the rest of the movie is equally reserved, exploring the psychological pressures on several of the primary team members, and even delving into their love lives, but never using movie tricks to make them appear more heroic than they are for just coping with life. In terms of intimacy and consistency, it goes beyond a documentary, but it has a very documentary-like feel to it (it is based on a real team and their experiences one season), and it would make an excellent double bill with the real high school football documentary, The Last Game (Jan 04). Viewers naturally get caught up in the progress of the season, the successes and failures of the characters, and the excitement of the championship game. At the same time, the film is looking at the overbearing intensity that the entire community directs towards the team, but it never forces its messages, and so it consistently slips past your defenses.
The letterboxing has an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. The film has a deliberate, documentary-like look, but the image is sharp and solid, and fleshtones are accurate. The 5.1-channel Dolby Digital sound has a decent dimensionality and is reasonably strong. The 118-minute program has alternate French and Spanish audio tracks in standard stereo, optional English, French and Spanish subtitles, a cast & crew profile section, a 6-minute piece on singer Tim McGraw, who portrays the alcoholic father of one of the players, 4 minutes of home movie footage taken by one of the actors on the set, a minute-long interoduction by director Peter Berg to one scene in the film that was added on after previews, 22 minutes of very good deleted and alternate scenes that reveal more character and story points, and a 23-minute production documentary that includes some good interviews with the real individuals interpreted in the film.
Berg and his cousin, Buzz Bissinger, who wrote the book upon which the movie is based, supply a commentary track.
There was this idealistic union song Pete Seeger used to sing. The words went something like this: "Which side are you on, brother -- which side are you on?"
Paul: while we're on the subject of mythical free lunch, answer me this little puzzler: Where (other than via a monopoly on the right to tax) does government "generate" interest on the IOU's it writes to pay Social Security recipients all the money it continually borrows from them?
Something similar [to proposed Social Security Reform] can...be said of Mr. Bush's immigration proposal. Again, the case can be made that there is no crisis--if the presence of 10 million undocumented workers, largely accounting for a $1 trillion black market, isn't quite a crisis. But at some point, one Administration or another is going to have to come to terms with the integration of the North American labor market, and neither ignoring the problem nor building a 2,000-mile Berlin Wall along our southern border achieves that. Mr. Bush's guest-worker program may only be a first step toward a more comprehensive solution. But at least the President is facing up to reality.
Think about the issue this way: the economy produces and allocates resources, goods/services, and then government/torts/etc re-distributes everything that was produced and initially allocated.
There's an initial production/allocation process, and then a secondary one.
The question is now simple. How does the cost of the secondary process (joint activities of government and the legal structure) compare with the cost of the primary process?
To get a grip on the issue go through the following simple thought experiment. Imagine how a single bicycle is manufactured in China, then imagine how it would be manufactured in the US. The materials are identical. The actual physical process of putting the thing together is vitually identical in both countries. The actual physical cost of getting a bicycle made is virtually the same in the US and China. What differs is the hourly cost of labor and the general cost of society itself.
But how much actual labor time goes into a bicycle? Let's say directly and indirectly four hours. The US labor cost is about $80 and the Chinese labor cost is about $12 -- but the actual selling price differential usually amounts to hundreds of dollars doesn't it?
When you look at it that way you see actual labor costs are trivial compared with "everything else." That "everything else" -- the cost of society iteslf, not the bicycle -- may be largely determined by the costs of all the "secondary" processes of redistribution we refer to above.
UPDATE: For background reading start here and then spend time here.
But there's another parallel, which I haven't seen pointed out: the politicization of the agencies and the intimidation of the analysts. Bush loyalists begin frothing at the mouth when anyone points out that the White House pressured intelligence analysts to overstate the threat from Iraq, while neocons in the Pentagon pressured the military to understate the costs and risks of war. But that is what happened, and it's happening again.
Go to the Social Security Online and browse. The agency is already highly politicized. It has its own unique self-justifying, politicized view of history. The glass is always half empty. There's no imagination left for those who might see it as half full, as with the 45% number we pointed out, for example.
Dan Rather really believes he is neutral, and Paul Krugman really believes Social Security Online is neutral. Their biases, I guess, are the very last things they will discover.
Okay, the most advanced, purest line of thought is postmodernism, right? And the least-polluted of all postmodernisms is its earliest European incarnation, the ironic, self-referential set of artistic ideas addressing only iteself and other art rather than the economic or political worlds.
And I have found the purest incarnation of this idea. The perfect postmodern phenomenon. And as it turns out, it is pure fun.
I refer of course to IRON CHEF AMERICA. We were absolutely spellbound by the first show last night.
Tonight's show, safely recorded and waiting for us on our TIVO disc, has Iron Chef competing with Chicago's own Rick Bayliss from the Frontera Grill. Colorful, tasty, absolute HEAVEN!
What's so fun about all this?
(1) In case you are from Mars and don't know already, this is a cooking show laid out as sports competition -- complete with instant replays, color commentary, and blow-by-blow analysis as top chefs pull together four separate dishes based on a (supposedly unknown by them) "secret" ingredient like spiny lobster, sea urchin, or (as in the case of the Saturday Night Live parody) eel farts.
(2) This is an American version of a Japanese show, which in itself provides enough self-referential, ironic jokes for this and many seasons to come (no pun intended).
So what do we have? An Americanized version of a Japanese show which presents cooking as a sporting event. How could this possibly not be fun?
As of 1934, the proportion of US elderly with sufficient retirement income to support themselves was approximately
(a) 45%
(b) 25%
(c) between 5% and 12%
(d) less than 1%
Check here for the answer. (Scroll down to "State Old Age Pensions" if you don't want to read the whole thing.
(While the above is interesting in itself, our concern here is not simply historical. It relates to whether the Social Security Administration is being "politicized" by the Bush administration. If you surf thru this site I think you'll find lots of self-justification -- some might even say politics.)
When the government projects the costs of subsidy programs such as the Medicare prescription drug benefit, does it account for the fact that the prices of prescription drugs will rise more than they would in the absence of the subsidy? In other words, by subsidizing demand for drugs, government is driving up prices by some amount relative to the size of the subsidy (if I understand supply and demand correctly). If the government does not account for this in its cost projections, it seems that all figures will be lowball. And, if the subsidy is a general one (i.e. for everybody rather than a small slice of the population), would the subsidy be self-defeating in that it would drive up prices by an amount equal to the subsidy?
EconoPundit responds:
Basic supply and demand isn't the best model for drug prices.
Drug prices are more administered than strictly market-determined. Exactly how research and development costs are recouped -- and how much rent can be collected on successful research and development -- is an arbitrary process, just as much political as it is economic.
Face it, some kind of federally-administered pricing of drugs is inevitable. If the puny little Canadian market can have its drugs bought for it in bulk by the Canadian federal goverment, think what can happen here in the US when Washington decides to do our purchasing for us.
I know the party line is that this will kill research and development of new pharmaceuticals. Perhaps the party line is correct if the whole thing is to be administered by Michael Moore, but I suspect even Teddy Kennedy could figure out how to set prices carefully enough to control damage to the industry. Remember, lower prices in the US can be partly subsidized by controling the "bargains" enjoyed by Canadians and others.
I am revising Thursday's work, to take into account necessary adjustments to the INS numbers. (It turns out their numbers are gross, not net -- they need to be adjusted for number of undocumented entrants who went back, were captured/processed/sent back, died, legitimized their residency, and so on.)
While I do the work consider this graphic from Daniel Drezner, now being linked to by Instapundit:
Here's a very-roughly comparable plot showing the newly-adjusted net immigration numbers as a fraction of US noninstitutional male population age 24-55:
My graph stops at 2008, but the once cited by Drezner moves all the way out to 2025. For the next few hours I leave it to you to check out Drezner's comments, and to decide what our graph might look like if the 2004-2008 trend were extrapolated all the way out another twenty or so years. Think and decide whether Glenn Reynolds ought to be as concerned as he seems to be.
INS work done in late 2003 allows us to move a bit beyond this early approximation. The work was important for two reasons. First, it corrected previous widely reported inaccuracies in Census-based estimates. Second, and more important for our purposes, it allowed year-by-year analysis of the relationship between undocumented immigration and broad economic aggregates in the US and Mexico.
Here is are the basic INS Mexico data points in graphic form:
Yes, to be sure, there are only ten observations here. But they are an extremely useful ten observations, showing significant up-down variation that correlates nicely with growth rates in the US (see what's happening between 1990-1992) and Mexico (1995-1997 are particularly interesting).
There are times when statistical elegance must give way to necessity. Allowing that this is one of those rare times when data mining is appropriate I regressed the ten INS data points on six (yes you read that correctly) variables, getting a virtually perfect fit:
and a tight forecast of undocumented immigration for 2000-2008 (after 2004 MCU estimates for growth and exchange rates were used):
So, based on US/Mexican rates of economic growth, the Peso/Dollar exchange rate, and a quadratic population trend, we have actual-value simulations for 2000-2004 undocumented immigration, and MCU-value simulations for 2005-2008 immigration as well.
TECHNICAL NOTE
(skip this unless you want to fiddle with the regression analysis):
C=CONSTANT OF REGRESSION
T=TREND VARIABLE
T^2=QUADRATIC TREND VARIABLE
PMEY(-1)=ONE PERIOD LAGGED PERCENT CHANGE IN MEXICAN REAL GDP
PUS=UNLAGGED PERCENT CHANGE IN US REAL GDP
PUS(-1)=ONE PERIOD LAGGED PERCENT CHANGE IN US REAL GDP
MEE(-1)=ONE PERIOD LAGGED MEXICAN EXCHANGE RATE
(End of TECHNICAL NOTE)
IMPLICATIONS OF THE ESTIMATE
So far what we have is a credible estimate of current and upcoming undocumented immigration. We can get a rough idea of the numbers' significance by comparing immigration levels with some basic population aggregates.
For starters, let's engage in a simplifying assumption that all undocumented immigration consists of working-age males. (This is probably unrealistic, but relaxing the assumption at some future time will enable us to see what "difference" gender makes when considering policy alternatives.)
Here we've graphed total US noninstitutional males age 25-54 as the data come to us, and as the data would look if (given our simplifying assumption) undocumented immigration from Mexico were zero:
As it stands the graph highlights the upcoming slowdown in growth of this population component -- and how undocumented immigration (if our simplifying assumption is true) accounts for virtually all population growth in this particular component.
But please, if you happen to be a member of the anti-immigration camp don't allow yourself to hyperventilate too much over this graph. My software's defaults constructed its vertical axis minimum for clarity, but in violation of all those basic rules we learn in How to Lie with Statistics. Here's the same graph with the vertical axis "forced" to start at zero:
Not quite so dramatic, eh?
Okay, pay attention now. We've identified a component of the population that changes more-or-less significantly with undocumented immigration. Under a perfect, counterfactual program of immigration reform for the years 1990-2008 the US population component of 25-54 males would be represented by the blue line rather than the red. Similarly, in Mexico total population would increase by the same amount.
We can assess the impact of immigration reform, then, by re-allocating population from the US to Mexico. Specifically, we can run the MCU model under an assumption of appropriately reduced US population, appropriately increased Mexican population, in order to see how the basics -- income, unemployment, jobs, wage rates, and economic growth -- would have been affected by the population change.
Everything Peggy Noonan says here is correct, but she's missing the important substructure of the issue. (Unlike EconoPundit, after all, she doesn't run a business which has purchased display advertising every month since 1937 from two major newspapers.)
What do newspapers do? How do they make their money? They print news and opinion to be read by purchasers and subscribers. Purchase price and subscription fees are supplemented by advertising revenue.
And there you have it. Circulation has been in decline since the late 80's. Advertising fees have been going up, even as the effectiveness of this same advertising continually goes down, because increasingly fewer people read the ads. And for readers of news and opinion, the ratio of words to advertisements has been in continual decline over the entire period.
So: every service offered by print news is in decline while all fees charged by same have been in continual increase. How could anyone possibly be surprised the print news branch of MSM is in decline? How could it possibly be otherwise?
I have been in a deep brood about all this for some time. Arthur Schlesinger's history of the New Deal still sits on my bookshelf like the Bible, but critics and personal experience have eroded much of my early faith.
In particular: Did the New Deal (like the earlier Progressive Movement) effectively address growing power of "family" fortunes only in ways which, now as these means have been handed down to us, foolishly, dogmatically, and blindly limit the creation of even modest family wealth?
This time I'll be posting the whole thing on EconoPundit as I write a first draft, so check in early tomorrow morning for the first data and discussion.
UPDATE: Jurispundit says this is a basic struggle between conservative and libertarian thought.
Maybe. I'm just a dumb economist, not too sure about these distinctions.
UPDATE: William Safire's very well-informed contribution can be found here. (Interesting closing contrast between Hebrew and Christian canons, by the way; former books doctrinally required happy, upbeat endings owing to unavailability of those promises of Heavenly reward.)
To Jerry Bowyer, this says the Bush supply side experiment has worked:
Well yes. And well, no. While it's always fun to try, you just can't answer these things this way.
The recession happened independently of any tax policies which followed, and the observed growth rates the chart illustrates have more to do with the recession -- face it -- than anything else.
Yes, this is opportunism. But as DDT's costs/benefits are weighed against the ongoing problems it can solve, will "scientific truth" win out -- or will we discover we're finally so postmodern scientific truth no longer exists for us?
UPDATE: Here's another angle on why everything is now different. The ability to aid 150,000 disaster victims has to do not with your per capita wealth, but with your degree of modernity. Indeed your willingness to do so may also depend on your degree of modernity:
The view that wanton behavior provoked the quake was the subject of Friday sermons in Saudi Arabia and of other religious commentaries.
"Asia's earthquake, which hit the beaches of prostitution, tourism, immorality and nudity," one commentator said on an Islamist Web site, "is a sign that God is warning mankind from persisting in injustice and immorality before he destroys the ground beneath them."
Walid Tabtabai, a member of the Kuwaiti Parliament, said the earthquake was a message.
"We believe that what occurs in terms of disasters and afflictions is a test for believers and punishment for the unjust," he wrote in a column in the newspaper Al Watan.
UPDATE II: And of all the opportunism surfacing in the past few days, perhaps this is the silliest of all. Yes, during a natural disaster many poorer people suffer more than the richer ones -- but this is just as in everyday life, no? To link a 150,000-person-killing-Tsunami to one's own personal battle against global poverty seems like fatal submission to the disease of moral vanity.
The internationalization of the battle: The enemies of Islam have mastered the following instrument to fight it: (1) the United Nations; (2) the loyal rulers of the Islamic peoples; (3) the multinational corporations; (4) the international communications networks; (5) the international news agencies and media networks; and (6) the international relief agencies which are used for "spying, proselytizing, planning coups and transferring weapons."
Against this alliance, stands the Islamist alliance comprising of the Islamist movements in the entire Islamic world. These movements are growing outside the new world order, under the banner of Jihad for the sake of Allah, freed from Western imperialist domination and from the apostate countries of America, Russia and Israel. (Emphasis added)
The failed Dot.coms believed that all the nuts and bolts of value creation could be seamlessly outsourced to other entities through the magic of system integration. The Dot.com would be the Integrator, getting the fees and margin with little capital expended, while sub-contractors did the dirty work.
Just like the Dot.coms, the U.N. is trying to skim the political capital in the relief operation while the member states do the heavy lifting, and it’s not clear what value it is bringing to the party.
We think we are in the early stages of what will turn out to be a relatively long and robust U.S. expansion...The small-business character of the U.S. economy is a key part of our confidence in the durability of the U.S. expansion.
--Big companies slowed the expansion some in 2003 and 2004. They held down inventories, hired sparingly, and spent less than their cash flow. We leave open the possibility of some very high quarterly growth rates in coming quarters, depending on whether big businesses lift their animal spirits (the willingness to spend their cash hoard).
Small businesses have been able to take advantage of the hesitancy of big businesses. They enjoy the best credit conditions ever, the availability of experienced workers (trained by big companies in the late 1990s), and fast-growing final demand.
--The Russell 2000 equity index hit an all-time record 654 on December 28.
--The small business optimism index reached 107.7 in November. This level has been seen only once before, in the third quarter of 1983. Real GDP growth topped 7% for five consecutive quarters beginning with the second quarter of 1983.
--Proprietors' income (a proxy for income of smaller, unincorporated businesses) rose to a record $902 billion in November 2004...
