Regular readers of The Thinker will of course know by now that I am an unabashed proponent of free markets.

But every economic system has its disadvantages. Even though capitalism is better than any other system ever tried, it is not perfect. It does result in an unequal distribution of wealth. (Although some would argue that’s a feature, not a bug.) Worse still, it has given birth to that diabolical monstrosity known as marketing, including its evil modern-day incarnations: telemarketing, popup ads, and spam emails.

But worst of all, it has given us mass-produced (a.k.a. “macrobrewed”) beer.

Before prohibition, beer was brewed locally in relatively small batches. But by the end of prohibition, advancements in refrigeration and motor vehicles made it more economical to mass-produce and transport beer than to brew it locally. The large brewers which quickly came to dominance focused their efforts on the beer style that would best maximize profits: a light lager, made with cheap components, bland and inoffensive enough that it could be imbibed in large quantities (thereby increasing sales).

Normally I would be fine with maximizing profits. In a free market, maximum profits means that consumers are being optimally satisfied by some linear combination of price and quality, producers are maximizing their efficiency, and owners and investors are being commensurately rewarded. It’s a win-win for everyone. But in the case of beer, it’s caused the dumbing-down of American beer to the lowest common denominator. Local breweries producing good beer, the way beer was meant to be brewed, were squeezed out of the market.

Enter Jimmy Carter.

In 1978 Carter did the one single thing he got right during his entire presidency: he signed into law H.R. 1337, making home brewing legal. Home brewers began cloning many of the centuries-old beer styles in Europe, where macrobreweries had not killed off the craft as they did in the U.S. Eventually home brewing led to the growth of small breweries and brewpubs, and the whole microbrewery and craft beer phenomenon was born.

So it pains me to say it, but Jimmy Carter saved beer from capitalism. Thank you, Jimmy Carter.

Hey, wait a minute. I just realized, it’s not really capitalism’s fault that macrobreweries crowded real beer out of the market. The market can’t help it if Americans are tasteless and stupid. The market just reacts accordingly. Which leads me to hypothesize that there is a positive correlation between poor critical thinking skills and a propensity to drink shitty beer.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me.

This Overcoming Bias post talks about this NY Times article which discusses this research into the question of why college professors are so overwhelmingly liberal.

(In related news, I’ll soon be posting my research findings on the question of why the blogosphere is so overwhelmingly derivative and incestuous.)

The researchers’ conclusion is that because professors are typecast as being liberal, liberals are drawn to academia.

Nursing is what sociologists call “gender typed.” Mr. Gross [one of the researchers] said that “professors and a number of other fields are politically typed.” Journalism, art, fashion, social work and therapy are dominated by liberals; while law enforcement, farming, dentistry, medicine and the military attract more conservatives.

“These types of occupational reputations affect people’s career aspirations,” he added in a telephone interview from his office at the University of British Columbia. Mr. Fosse, his co-author, is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard.

The academic profession “has acquired such a strong reputation for liberalism and secularism that over the last 35 years few politically or religiously conservative students, but many liberal and secular ones, have formed the aspiration to become professors,” they write in the paper, “Why Are Professors Liberal?” That is especially true of their own field, sociology, which has become associated with “the study of race, class and gender inequality — a set of concerns especially important to liberals.”

This seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy phenomenon. Call a group “liberal” loudly and for long enough, and liberals will want to be part of that group — thereby making that group increasingly liberal over time.

Maybe we just need to start calling academia conservative (or better yet, libertarian) to reverse the trend!

David Boaz at Cato At Liberty brings us a list of the ideas for new taxes being considered by Obama and his aids and allies. The list includes raising top tax rates, limiting itemized deductions for people at high tax rates, increasing capital gains and dividend taxes, a VAT tax on all goods and services (I assume this would be a national sales tax), lifting the cap on required social security contributions, a variety of business taxes, higher taxes on beer, wine, soda, and cigarettes, etc., etc., etc.

I love the Jefferson quote at the end of the article:

…perhaps Thomas Jefferson’s words are even more immortal and equally applicable: “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”

This FactCheck.org article sounds off on the “spread the lie” strategy, one of the dirtiest tricks in sociopolitical discourse today:

A Sept. 4 article in the Post discussed several recent studies that all seemed to point to the same conclusion:  Debunking myths can backfire because people tend to remember the myth but forget what the debunker said about it. As Hebrew University psychologist Ruth Mayo explained to the Post, “If you think 9/11 and Iraq, this is your association, this is what comes in your mind. Even if you say it is not true, you will eventually have this connection with Saddam Hussein and 9/11.” That leaves myth busters like us with a quandary: Could we, by exposing political malarkey, just be cementing it in voters’ minds? Are we contributing to the problem we hope to solve?

…

The Post story wasn’t all that surprising to those who follow the findings of cognitive science research, which tells us much of our thinking happens just below the level of consciousness. The more times we hear two particular bits of information associated, for example, the more likely it is that we’ll recall those bits of information. This is how we learn multiplication tables – and why we still know the Big Mac jingle.

Our brains also take some surprising shortcuts. In a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Virginia Tech psychologist Kimberlee Weaver shows that the more easily we recall something the more likely we are to think of it as being true. It’s a useful shortcut since, typically, easily recalled information really is true. But combine this rule with the brain’s tendency to better remember bits of information that are repeated frequently, and we can run into trouble: We’re likely to believe anything we hear repeated frequently enough. At FactCheck.org we’ve noted how political spin-masters exploit this tendency ruthlessly, repeating dubious or false claims endlessly until, in the minds of many voters, they become true.

The London Times is reporting that

[IPCC chief] Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it.

In other words (assuming the London Times story is true), he knowingly and intentionally sat on the news of the IPCC report’s errors until after the Copenhagen summit.

Dr Pachauri, who played a leading role at the summit, corrected the error last week after coming under media pressure. He told The Times on January 22 that he had only known about the error for a few days. He said: “I became aware of this when it was reported in the media about ten days ago. Before that, it was really not made known. Nobody brought it to my attention. There were statements, but we never looked at this 2035 number.”

Asked whether he had deliberately kept silent about the error to avoid embarrassment at Copenhagen, he said: “That’s ridiculous. It never came to my attention before the Copenhagen summit. It wasn’t in the public sphere.”

And this may be a bald-faced lie:

However, a prominent science journalist said that he had asked Dr Pachauri about the 2035 error last November. Pallava Bagla, who writes for Science journal, said he had asked Dr Pachauri about the error. He said that Dr Pachauri had replied: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”

…

Mr Bagla said he had informed Dr Pachauri that Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University and a leading glaciologist, had dismissed the 2035 date as being wrong by at least 300 years. Professor Cogley believed the IPCC had misread the date in a 1996 report which said the glaciers could melt significantly by 2350.

Mr Pallava interviewed Dr Pachauri again this week for Science and asked him why he had decided to overlook the error before the Copenhagen summit. In the taped interview, Mr Pallava asked: “I pointed it out [the error] to you in several e-mails, several discussions, yet you decided to overlook it. Was that so that you did not want to destabilise what was happening in Copenhagen?”

Dr Pachauri replied: “Not at all, not at all. As it happens, we were all terribly preoccupied with a lot of events. We were working round the clock with several things that had to be done in Copenhagen. It was only when the story broke, I think in December, we decided to, well, early this month — as a matter of fact, I can give you the exact dates — early in January that we decided to go into it and we moved very fast.”

…

Dr Pacharui has also been accused of using the error to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Well, I imagine Dr. P was probably very busy in the weeks leading up to Copenhagen, and I also imagine he gets a fair volume of email. So it could be he was being honest when he claimed he was unaware of the IPCC report’s errors until after Copenhagen. But, then again, he equivocates in his response to Pallava’s interview questioning, rather than denying that he knew it.

So, as the situation now stands:

• We already know that several IPCC report chapters have cited non-peer-reviewed, non-scientific opinion pieces to support their points.
• We know that one author (and maybe others) knowingly made unsubstantiated claims, for political purposes.
• We know that the IPCC’s internal review process didn’t catch these errors.
• Now we also know that the IPCC chief didn’t respond to the Himalayan glacier errors until the story broke publicly, even though it appears he may have known two months earlier.

This whole story is continuing to emerge, so I think I will hold my opinion of Dr. P at arm’s length for just a while longer. But I think it’s safe to say at this point that the IPCC’s report should be viewed as suspect, and its findings should no longer be taken seriously.

As of the time I’m typing this, 49.1% disapprove of Obama; 47.8% approve.

From Pollster.com:

It will be interesting to see what Obama’s poll numbers do in the wake of the SOTU address. Will Americans fall for the political triangulation and demagoguery?

Today as we commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz, keep in mind ALL of the 100 million or more innocents who died in the last century (and this) at the hand of their own governments in the name of “progress” and “the greater good.” And beware of those whose hubris ignores, in Hayek’s words, how little we know about what we imagine we can design.

– Steve Horwitz

Swiped blatantly from my friend and fellow Rush fan Steve Horwitz’s facebook status.

I wondered here whether the IPCC’s blunder in publishing bogus claims about Himalayan glacier retreat means there are other politically motivated lies in the IPCC report as well.

It turns out there may very well be. Here’s a list of papers by the World Wildlife Fund  that the IPCC’s latest report cites to support its findings. The WWF is an environmental group that produces biased opinion papers, not peer reviewed science.

There is also an emerging story regarding the latest problem in the IPCC’s report: unfounded claims regarding the rate of Amazon rain forest depletion. It’s too early to tell if and to what extent this story is legitimate, so I won’t comment on it further for now; Google for details.

It’s hard to tell just yet how much of the IPCC report reflects unsubstantiated and politically motivated opinions rather than a science-based consensus position. But I have to wonder what it will mean if, in the final analysis, say 25% of the report is found to be tainted. Since the IPCC report is supposed to be reflective of the climate science community’s opinion, would this mean that 25% of climate scientists are intellectually dishonest and politically motivated? And since many of the IPCC report participants were aware of the errors but chose to remain silent, can we assume the same about the climate science community as a whole?

The terms “Progressive” and “Conservative” — labels for the two predominant political ideologies in the U.S. today — refer to the pace of change preferred by each. We are told that Progressives push for progress and are bold reformers and improvers, while Conservatives prefer traditional tried and true methods and institutions. Often it is said that Progressives are forward-looking, while Conservatives are backward-looking. Progressives want progress, conservatives want to conserve.

I view these labels as both incomplete and inaccurate.

1. The labels are incomplete

First, there are far more differences between Progressives and Conservatives than merely the pace of change they prefer. The biggest difference, in my opinion, is their value sets. Progressives value social and economic equality over liberty; Conservatives value liberty over social and economic equality. Progressives believe in positive rights, i.e., rights to things, like education, health care, affordable housing, etc.; Conservatives believe in negative rights only, i.e., rights to not have things done to you, such as crime, confiscation of property and wealth, impediment of free speech, etc. Progressives stress interdependence and community; Conservatives advocate independence and individuality, and dislike collectivism. These differing value sets also lead to divergent views over the proper size and role of government. Progressives want a large government that offers a variety of services and has the power to correct social ills, while Conservatives prefer a limited and unobtrusive government that allows maximum personal freedom.

Thus, the “Progressive” and “Conservative” labels, which refer only to the preferred pace of change, are woefully inadequate. This can lead to confusion.

Suppose, for example, that a person proposed the immediate abolishment of all laws, taxes, and institutions that were not explicitly allowed by a strict original intent-based interpretation of the Constitution. (Maybe Ron Paul fits this description.) Would this person be called a Progressive, because of the rapid pace of change he wants? Or would he be called a Conservative, because of the value sets and size/role of government he wants to change to?

What about a person who wants a large egalitarian welfare state, but believes we should achieve it slowly and incrementally, to avoid any abrupt economic dislocations resulting from too rapid a pace of change? Would this person be a Conservative or a Progressive?

2. The labels are inaccurate

Second, the differences between Progressives and Conservatives really have nothing at all to do with their preferred paces of change in the first place. In fact, I think they don’t really prefer different paces of change at all. It’s just an illusion, arising from the fact that we are much farther from the big government utopia favored by Progressives than we are from the free nation preferred by Conservatives. Since Progressives wish for a much larger change from the current state than do Conservatives, it should be no surprise that Progressives favor a more rapid pace of change. If the situation was reversed — if we currently had a large socialist welfare state — then it would be Conservatives clamoring for reform and rapid change, and Progressives wanting to preserve “tried and true” institutions. Heck, our founding fathers were pretty Conservative (by today’s definition) and they had a revolution. Pretty rapid pace of change there, if you ask me.

This may just be the most brilliant blog post I’ve ever read.

Make sure to read the comments too.

HT to Popehat.