The Great Global Warming Conspiracy?

Via Grist and Brooke Jarvis on Twitter, here’s a graphical evaluation of the competing conspiracy theories.

Great Global Warming Conspiracies

How Free-Market Fundamentalists are Hopelessly Wrong, III: money, debt and blindness

Part I presented the evidence that economies in the free-market era delivered only mediocre performance before crashing in the disastrous Global Financial Crisis.  Part II showed how the standard theory of free markets bears no useful resemblance to real economies, and its application amounts to pseudo-science.

Returning to the GFC now, there is a particular reason free-market economists claim the GFC was unforeseeable:  debt and money play no role in their standard equilibrium economic models.  They claim one person’s debt is another person’s asset, and so aggregate “demand” is not affected by debt.  This would be true in a barter economy, or if the banking system was based entirely on savings, for only in those cases would the extra purchasing power of the borrower be balanced by the reduced purchasing power of the depositor.

How Free-Market Fundamentalists are Hopelessly Wrong, II: the theory

In Part I we saw that readily available evidence shows clearly that economic performance in the free-market era that began around 1980 was already poor, even before the disaster of the Global Financial Crisis.  Here we look at the theory that underlies the free-market rhetoric, the so-called neoclassical theory.

How Free-Market Fundamentalists are Hopelessly Wrong, I: the evidence

Australia’s commentariat is thickly populated with right-wing guardians of the doctrine of free markets.  Many of them have been groomed by right-wing think tanks in a long-term campaign to drag our perceptions to the right.  Chris Berg and Sinclair Davidson, of the Institute of Public Affairs, are regulars on the ABC’s The Drum Opinion.  The campaign has been highly successful, as the free market mantra has taken over both sides of politics and dominates economic discussion.

However it is very easy to demonstrate the doctrine is hopelessly wrong.  The evidence is clear that free markets have retarded growth.  The theory underlying the doctrine is plainly and absurdly unrealistic.  The Global Financial Crisis was caused by financial markets building up mountains of debt, yet debt and money are absent from mainstream economic models and, apparently, from economists’ thinking.  Hence their blindness to the GFC’s approach, its cause and its remedy.

These problems will be covered in a three-part series.  First, the evidence.

Cherry Picking 2 – Faking Global Cooling

 My previous post showed how you can get a series of downward trends in global temperature data, even though the overall trend is clearly upwards (courtesy of Skeptical Science.

The most frequent false claim about the data is that there has been no warming since 1998.  For a long time I’ve wanted to demonstrate explicitly the cherry-picking behind this claim.  Now here it is (taking advantage of some free plotting software I recently downloaded, and generating an animated gif at a free online site).

HadCruT temperature analyses

Down the up escalator: cherry picking for the global temperature trend you want

Here is a graph I’ve wanted for a long time.  It shows how you can get the answer you want out of the global temperature data series.  Just pick the right start and finish point and, presto, the temperature is rising, or falling, or flat.

It’s why denialists keep insisting that global warming stopped in 1998.

Courtesy Skeptical Science: http://www.skepticalscience.com

Media Ownership: by Us, The People, Directly

[Published 7 Feb on ABC's The Drum Opinion.]

Gina Rinehart’s evident intention to own large chunks of our media is focussing many minds on the question of media ownership.  However most of the discussion does not properly recognise the special role of the media in our society, and canvasses only variations on concentrated ownership by very rich people, usually with an implication that ownership by government is the only alternative.

The media are the means of social conversation in large societies.  They deserve to be accorded special status, like the courts.  Ownership could be widely distributed among those served by each outlet.

The Real Howling Mob

[A condensed and modified version published at Eureka Street, 7 Feb.]

The Australia Day “riot” at the Lobby restaurant in Canberra was the subject of hysterical misreporting – I know, I watched it.  We would be wise not to dismiss this episode as just another example of media sensationalism.  Rather, it is symptomatic of a growing nexus in Australia of fear, hysteria, racism and ignorant ranting.

These phenomena are rapidly degrading our capacity for decency, our democracy, and even our perception of reality.  We are moving rapidly away from the decent, laconic Aussies of our stereotyping, and into being a fearful, intolerant, nasty and brittle society.