April 20, 2011
April 20, 2011
Let’s just go our separate ways.
April 7, 2011
With a messy form of federalist direct democracy, four official languages, two dominant religions, and a topography dissected by lofty mountain ranges, the continued existence of Switzerland is quite doubtful. In a long run of trials, Switzerland-type-nations are highly unstable. Of those that there ever were, the overwhelming majority have ceased to exist, and an even greater number of these states never came into existence at all. To a real scientist, the Switzerland on our maps is merely anecdotal.
April 4, 2011
Read the whole thing
The core claim of Academic Choice is that valid economic theories are an underprovided public good, due to a combination of academic entrepreneurship and rational public ignorance. Is this merely a prediction of the mathematical models, or is there real world evidence of this claim?
Originally I did arrive at this result as a logical consequence of the theoretical model; however, the prediction has since been corroborated through empirical investigations.
Consider the following seven propositions. All of them have been effectively promoted and publicized by academic economists:
P1. (e.g. Greenspan) It is unnecessary to worry about deception in financial markets since market discipline will make sure that dishonest agents are permanently ostracized.
P2. (Clarke) A person whose income is 100 times as large as that of another person has contributed exactly 100 times as much to the general welfare.
P3. (First Welfare Theorem) Corporations, if left to themselves, will always provide employment to everyone and produce an economy featuring constant recession-free growth.
P4. (Arrow-Debreu) A necessary condition for this ideal economy is the availability of arbitrarily complicated securities that reference cash flows in all times, in all places, and in all ways imaginable.
P5. (Borrowing at the Risk-Free Rate) Economic institutions should be designed under the assumption that whenever a firm or bank tries to obtain a low interest loan, it succeeds.
P6. (1997/2008) If a Third World country has a banking crisis, bedrock principles of economics dictate that its largest banks should be allowed to fail and be acquired by U.S. and European banks. However, if the U.S. has a banking crisis, bedrock principles of economics dictate that its largest banks should be saved through massive subsidies from the public.
P7. (EMH, etc.) It is impossible for investment funds to beat the market. However, the current capital market system centered around funds trying to beat the market is this most perfect system conceivable by human beings.As a bright high school student like yourself can clearly see, the list consists entirely of statements that are obviously wrong, and several of them are internally inconsistent. If economists were simply confused, we would expect to find no pattern in these statements. Instead, as predicted by Academic Choice, statements P1-P7 all directly enable rent-seeking by certain influential minorities (financial sector employees and corporate executives). Moreover, P1-P7 have also helped to generate market discontinuities with significant public costs, among which the recent global financial crisis.
March 23, 2011
“One is almost forced to the conclusion that to be economically sound, a man has to be an idiot.”
Senator Henrik Shipstead, 1933
“Economics is not only a science, it is a genuine science…”
“The heterodox ideas found here and elsewhere have had no impact on economics as a whole….”
What economics needs to lose is a lot of metaphysical baggage, plus a lot of needy f-type personalities.
The tragedy of this is that there is, within the bloated corpus of economics, a perfectly nice slimmed-down little science struggling to get out.
This confusion disappears if you make sure to remember that the “ist” at the end of the word “economist” should be taken not as analogous to “scientist”, but rather to “Trotskyist”.
(The opinions on this page are my own and have not been endorsed by D^2, Edward Lazear, Steven Durlauf, or Henrik Shipstead).
Introduction
For about five years now I’ve been asking whether economics is a science at all, rather than just a weakly systematized area of policy studies and advocacy which dazzles laymen with complex math. People seemed to be getting tired of my ranting and trollery and I retired from the field for awhile. But gradually the question became a hot issue in the field (Google, DeLong 1, DeLong 2, Thoma), mostly because economic true believers had succeeded in throwing us into the worst recession since 1937. So I’ve collected the more amusing and presentable of my rants below.
My summary answer is that the question “Is Economics a Science?” is not as important as people think. Foucault’s answer to that question would be “Sure, economics is a science, but it’s a moderately crappy one — though not as crappy as, for example, Criminology or Education Administration.”
Pragmatism judges sciences by their success and power, and economics does not have the power that physics has. The philosophy of science developed by Russell, Popper and the logical positivists was utopian — they all assumed that science would save us, if it was real science. (Read the last 50 pages or so of Russell’s History of Western Philosophy). The joke was that that they thought that science would save us by making itself non-normative and objective, but that’s crap. It makes no sense at all. You can’t start off by bracketing out the questions you need to answer.
Meeting the minimum standards for being a science doesn’t mean as much as people think it does. Even scientific power is not enough, if the questions science answers aren’t the ones we need answers to. Science isn’t going to save us. Maybe economics is a science, maybe it isn’t, but we still have to ask how good its answers are in terms of what we need to know. And, as it turns out, they haven’t been good enough.
In economics since World War Two there’s been a zemblanitous consilience of excessive formalization, fraudulent claims to scientific power, ideological claims surreptitiously sneaked in, and mercenary dirty work done for the market, and all of it has been symbiotic with pop psych, high-powered public relations campaigns, the dominant political trends, and TV game shows. Once detached from the execrescent growths that seem to have taken over, much of the empirical partmight be OK.
What’s really at stake here is the surplus authority economics claimed based on its scientific status. That is fraud and mystification. Economics is not nothing — there are a lot of things there that you need to know. Think of it as a useful craft or art, or as a form of knowledgeable advocacy like law. There are times when you need the best economists you can afford, because otherwise you’ll be at the mercy of the bad guys’ economists.
Is the power of economics like the power of physics, or is it primarily a dazzling, pseodo-empirical persuasive power, like the power of alchemy, astrology, or phrenology? My belief is that to an unfortunate extent it’s the latter, and that the immediate future of economics is a salvage job.
Is Economics a Science?
(Nov. 29, 2010)
If economics were a science rather than just a wad of assorted hypotheses, could this most recent collapse have happened? Shouldn’t there have been some mechanism within the profession to prevent this? Instead Fama was on the short list for the Nobel Prize. Those of us who are not economists do not find this reassuring.
Alternatively, next time a school of economics asks for a chance to test their hypotheses on the global economy, shouldn’t we tell them no? Certainly something will end up being learned from this big experiment (though probably not until the experimenters are dead or emeritus), but will it have been worth it?
I’ve devised three mental-experiment tests for whether something is a science or not. First, the veil of ignorance test. Suppose that you were knowledgeable about economics and all you knew about someone was that they were a new summa cum laude PhD from an unnamed top-twenty school. How much confidence would you have in the guy? Are there some schools whose graduates you would be doubtful about?
Second, is it possible to write a test which would accurately select competent economists, with few false positives or false negatives? You don’t have schools of physics or chemistry; these scientists disagree on the frontiers of their sciences and often are fairly ignorant of subfields distant from their own, but you don’t have never-ending controversies about the most fundamental issues.
Third, the professionalism test. Is it possible for an economist to be disbarred or defrocked? Is there some level of error, incompetence, misconduct, or public dishonesty which would require that an economist be drummed out of the profession? Is there any internal discipline within the profession? Are there even any possible ways of knowing that an economist is wrong? Or is the PhD a license to say whatever you want to say about economics, no matter how ridiculous, and still be called an expert?
My guess is that economics passes none of these tests, though it is probably closer to doing so than counseling psychology. I would guess that physics and chemistry pass the first two tests without being much concerned for the third. As for the third, medicine and law have rather low standards of ethics, but economics seems to have none at all. (Like law and medicine, but unlike physics, on the whole, economics is an applied science, which is why the ethics question is necessary).
My claim is that economics, like most social sciences, is too ill-formed, inconsistent, incomplete, and unempirical to be a real science in the sense that economists themselves use the word, and that it is for this reason that you have warring schools of economics, and it is for this reason that economist political hacks are able to get away with saying pretty much anything. (Brad DeLong claimed that Mankiw’s professional reputation was destroyed during his tenure with George W. Bush. Is there any evidence that this actually happened?)
Due to the complexity and indeterminacy of the material studied, it strikes me as impossible that social sciences will ever attain the level of scientificity, success and predictivity that they hope for (and, whenever they think they can get away with it, brag about.) This isn’t really a failure; it’s just the way things are. I would actually be willing to renorm the definition of science enough to allow economics in, but that would defeat the economists’ purpose, since their goal is to become a magical science like physics, a science which can solve all the world’s problems, a science that will make them heroes, the only real social science and not just one of several. And the renormed definition (“a science that has a lot of interesting things to say and provides valuable rules of thumb”) isn’t what they want.
Probably, soon enough, the profession will dig up someone who got The Great Moderation right, thus proving once again that economics is too (in Lazear’s words) “a real science”. The problem is that , while economics may have all the right answers there on the shelf somewhere, they’re still mixed in indistinguishably with all the wrong answers. They say that Popper’s falsificationism has been refuted, but it’s my understanding that physics, for example, (unlike economics) has two different shelves, and has definite procedures and practices making it possible to move things from the right-answer shelf to the wrong-answer shelf, procedures that do not entail ruining everything for everyone.
(The reader might ask: much of what has been written above is valid? My response is: “Probably some of it is and some of it isn’t, but who cares? At least I didn’t destroy the global economy.”)
Most recent
So now an other school of economics lies in the rubble, if anyone cares. Another voodoo economist will show up sooner or later. All they will have to do is prove that you can cut taxes, maintain military spending, and balance the budget all at the same time.
How did economists get it so wrong?
Economics is too ill-formed, inconsistent, and incomplete to be the rigorous formal science it pretends to be. What it is instead is a bag of tricks, many of which work most of the time.
Economics is a tool of history
It’s generally true that physicists, chemists, and biologists have been unimpressed by the accomplishments of the social sciences, and my belief is that they are right, except that many of them have the idea that if they had been the ones doing social science, they would have done it right. What I think is that the social sciences will never get the kinds of results that the “hard” sciences get, and it’s not because they’re doing it wrong but because the goal is inappropriate.
General principles
Trained incapacity, occupational psychosis,
and the limitless sovereignty of the master’s voiceBurke, Veblen, and others talk about the built-in stupidities of methodological paradigms.
Economics and Philosophy of Science
Review of Deborah Redman. Economics’ self-serving misuse of philosophy of science, starting with Friedman’s preface to Positive Economics.
Professionalization creates self-policing lackeys who can only work within professionally assigned limits. All real decisions are made non-professionally by powerholders who may or may not be professionals.
Many of the supposed virtues of academic disciplines make them mostly useless for anyone trying to understand the actual world.
Why Analytical Philosophy Should Rankle Your Ass
The problem with academic philosophy is the crowding-out. The academic space it takes up could be more beneficially filled. (This is not about economics but several points it makes are relevant.)
The Psychology of Economics
Animal Spirits, Veblen, and Melville’s The Confidence Man
Today’s mess of futurology, prosperity gospel, self-help, investment couseling, Chicago school economics, New Age spirituality, management buzz words, personal affirmation, and sociopathy was diagnosed long ago by Veblen and Melville. (More on Melville).
“At his peak in 1990, [Madame Nui's] toad controlled more than $10 billion in financial investments, making its owner the world’s largest individual stock investor.”
Peasant Wisdom about the Collapse of Western Civilization
The point is this: once you try to figure out what’s going on you risk getting sucked into the game. You’ll think you’ve got the game figured out, and the guy sitting across the table from you will let you win a few hands, but in the end BOOM! you’ve lost everything. Unfortunately I haven’t figured out a way of staying out of the game.
In the good old days the 2011 economy was booming and we are all rich now.
The land of sagas, glaciers, geysers, fish, ponies, hakarl, and Bjork is going through a rough patch these days. It used to be the libertarian paradise.
Finance tweakers have destroyed civilization
Wall Street should have been pee-tested — a level of euphoria that high is hard to reach by natural methods. Probably it was just legally prescribed anti-depressants and amphetamines. It couldn’t have been cocaine. (I suspect Palin and Bachmann too — Jesus can’t do it all by himself.)
Rationality
Tyler Cowen on Economics Rationality
Tyler Cowen defines five or six different kinds of rationality, which you just swap in and out according to your needs at any given place in the argument. I’ve always thought that for economists sociopathic rationality is a goal to be aspired to and was never meant to be descriptive. Economics’ pidgin psychology of ”the rational man” certainly wasn’t very useful for those trying to figure out what was going on, though most economists weren’t trying to figure anything out but were just cheering things on and pigging out.
Nobelist Amartya Sen Tries to Reduce his Profession’s Wilful Ignorance
At first I really liked Sen’s book — it was nice to read an economist trying to reduce the sociopathy of his field. That’s when I realized that I had been spending too much time around economists. Sen was just trying to undo seventy years worth of criminal stupidity and bringing economics back to zero.
Gintis et al: Moral Sentiments and Material Interests
Economics takes another small step in the direction of sanity. Ev Psych tells us that people are not naturally “economically rational”.
Gary Becker’s Economics of the Family
Becker began his career in the 50s by proving that racial discrimination is economically impossible. His economics of the family is equally persuasive. He’s the best example of the Chicago School’s “irreverence”, which is a smarter version of Rush Limbaugh’s liberal-baiting. Families are factories producing children, who produce child services and have some sort of relationship to the something called a child market, though it’s impossible really to say what that market is.
January 15, 2011
November 29, 2010
All economics is undead, and mere anarchy is unloosed upon the world
Posted by John Emerson under Uncategorized[12] Comments
John Quiggin, Zombie Economics, Princeton, 2010
The collapse of the world economy brought a lot of economics down with it, and while we should not expect economics departments to care much about this, some individual economists are participating in discussions going on outside the university. John Quiggin’s contribution to this discussion is as good as any, and you should buy and read it. (Disclosure: back in the days when I had some hope for the world I trolled the Crooked Timber website where Quiggin resides, and he has even thrown an acknowledgment my way. But I bought my copy with my own money).
“Zombie economics” lives on even after it’s been disproven. Quiggin specifically talks about “The Great Moderation”, “dynamic stochastic general equilibrium”, the efficient markets hypothesis, trickle-down economics, and privatization. These were all key components of the center-right-to-far-right political consensus that dominated politics and government in the U.S. (and globally) during the last thirty years (and probably still does). But of the five of them, only dynamic stochastic general equilibrium ever really claimed to be an actual economic theory. The other four were merely wishful hypotheses or rough policy guides which conformed to the prejudices of the movers and shakers.
I have no quarrel with the specifics of what Quiggin says, but I think that his professional bias makes him exaggerate the role of economic theory in the events of that era. Economists were just mercenary auxiliaries in the service of the political actors who transformed America starting in 1980. The economy itself cannot be reduced to politics, but given its inconsistency, incompleteness, uncertain empirical grounding, and corruption, economic science can be. Starting around 1968 an effective majority of Americans, at least, moved from being grudgingly willing to make small sacrifices in order to improve the lives of others, to a more enthusiastic willingness to make small sacrifices in order to make sure that others get hurt.
Quiggin seems to assume that most people and most economists think that inequality, poverty, and suffering are bad things, but many do not. To a pure economist of the dominant school, inequality is a good thing, and poverty, etc., are bad only if they drag down the economy as a whole — one of them recently calculated that poverty is a bad thing only if the security cost of repressing the underclass rises too high.
Conservatives in general, whether economists or not, believe that suffering is inevitable and godly and that it is sinful to try to reduce it much. They’ve grudgingly come to accept modern medicine (except in the case of AIDS), but they despise political attempts to wipe out poverty or reduce inequality. Whether as punishment for sin, or as the unavoidable outcome of inevitable misbehavior, or as a way of weeding out the gene pool, or as a way of incentivizing the lazy, or as a way of intimidating and disempowering potential evildoers, or as a way of marking the limits of acceptable behavior so everyone knows what they are, or merely as the stakes in the great game of life (the agony of defeat needed to enhance the thrill of victory), to conservatives misery, suffering, crime, and punishment are necessary and useful parts of God’s great plan. And not everyone needs even that much justification: there are many conservatives who oppose social spending for the same reasons that they used to set cats on fire. (Selfishness has something to do with it, of course, but in recent decades a lot of noses have been cut off in order to spite faces too.)
And to that must be added the drug-fueled euphoria that gave us Dow 36,000, etc. The optimistic mix of Wall Street numerology, pop psychology, prosperity Christianity (mixed with Armageddonism), visionary futurology, quantum fractal pop science, self-help, pyramid scams, get rich cults, Ponzi schemes, self-affirmation prayers, Tom Friedman metaphors, etc. that made up the mind of the Nineties was too powerful for any but incurably grumpy to resist, and it infected a lot of people who should have known better (including, be it said, the liberal globalists). A flood of infectious delusion persuaded the chump majority that they were actually insiders in the con game of America.
In public politicians have to say that you strongly want equality and opportunity for all and that their policy proposals are designed toward that end, but they don’t have to believe it. The virtually continuous success of the Democratic Party between 1932 and 1968, together with Eisenhower and Nixon’s acceptance of the New Deal, concealed the fact that all during that time there was a large, often wealthy minority that never accepted any of it and basically wanted to turn the clock back to the McKinley era. (To a serious Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, like his cousin, was a traitor). These men (mostly) never gave up, and when liberalism finally faltered in 1968, they were ready to strike.
Certainly, economics provided them with some of the propaganda weapons they used to attack Carter and the Democrats and to justify their own plans, but the economic weapons were only one part of a large arsenal, and the right wing never cared much whether it was good economics or just propaganda trash like the Laffer hypothesis. Punitive resentment and magical thinking were certainly more important factors.
The politics was there first, and the science was built under it. The Laffer Hypothesis was almost instantly refuted and abandoned, but who cared? The Great Moderation was just a hypothesis, too: a certain regularity was observed and pumped up into a law which happened to be highly convenient to one political tendency, but there never was any law there — it was like a lucky gambler ‘s system for winning the numbers game. The Efficient Markets hypothesis was much the same. Its weak spots were known from the beginning, but there was no way to force its backers to admit anything, and it was only finally tested when it it was written into policy and the world economy collapsed. The experiment that falsified the Efficient Markets and Great Moderation hypotheses is the world we live in – a world which may never recover from what is already the longest and deepest recession since 1929. But the political agenda is rolling on, because, really, who cares? The next thing we need to do is reduce Social Security benefits.
Economists can only test their theories by taking political power; otherwise these theories are purely scholastic and hypothetical. By 1980 the Democrats and Keynesian Republicans had been in power for 48 years, and a number of things had recently gone wrong, including the economy (along with the Vietnam War and a rise in crime). The Keynesian remedies did not work, and a new economic team, allied to a new political team, was ready and waiting. When these new eco0nomists took over, they brought along their own political principles and the political principles of their political sponsors. As part of this new and successful political alliance, their economic ideas became the default for several decades. But how much does this have to do with economic theory, and how much of it is just a political and cultural power shift? One set of pseudo-scientific economic rules of thumb posing as science was replaced by a different set. The science was never really there, either way. (As Quiggin says on p. 81, “Money supply targeting [the panacea of Reagan's Chicago School economic team] did not work particularly well and was later replaced by policies managing interest rates, but the resurgence of the Chicago School was not reversed”.)
This is not to say that there was never anything there at all. The Keynesian set of policy guidelines and rules of thumb was a perfectly nice one, but not robust enough to survive LBJ and Nixon. (Think about that: Nixon was the last Keynesian. How could anything possibly have gone wrong?) The incoming Chicago school policy guidelines were probably perfectly nice too, at least for anyone who believed that the lower orders needed to be slapped around a bit. But the Chicago rules were tested by George W. Bush (who seemed to be dabbling in Keynesianism at the same time), and the disastrous outcome was hardly a surprise. Nixon and Bush were like kids who take the word “unbreakable” as a challenge and an insult.
LBJ and Nixon tested Keynesianism by fighting a credit-card war, and the economy ended up with problems which Carter couldn’t solve with Keynesian or any other method. Was this really a refutation of Keynesianism, this one single experiment? Suppose that LBJ and Nixon had been more prudent Keynesians, and that the problems hadn’t arisen – would Keynesianism then still be true? Even after the political transition Reagan still governed as a pseudo-Keynesian anyway, and thirty years later George Bush did the same thing with another credit-card war. Once in power, Reagan and the Bushes pushed through their political agendas, but what they were doing had little to do with economic theory.
So now an other school of economics lies in the rubble, if anyone cares. Another voodoo economist will show up sooner or later. All they will have to do is prove that you can cut taxes, maintain military spending, and balance the budget all at the same time.
What’s happening now is politics, and what we really need is a political movement of the radical or populist type, not an additional and supposedly better economic theory. But the Democrats have spent the last 75 years or so expelling everyone capable of leading such a movement, and they have degraded the Democratic brand so badly that they haven’t even been able to keep the Koch brothers — two of the ten richest men in America – from proclaiming themselves to be the leaders of a populist revolt.
Life is sweet these days for economics nihilists.
September 13, 2010
This is my response to “Models tell us more than hindsight“, in which Tim Harford defends economics and modeling against a critique of a historian-turned-journalist (linked here.) I’ve been saying something like this for a long time and Harford’s piece just gave me another chance to say it.
My argument is that social reality is historical (the way physics and the realities it studies are NOT historical, and the way that evolution is historical*) and that the social sciences are really parts of history and tools of history. So if a model works, use it!
The big problem is that even though economists always put in little caveats about the limits of their models, at crunch time they aren’t nearly as careful as they should be. I have a particular grudge with regard to the present recession (the longest and deepest since 1929). The dominant theory of economics (Chicago School) was working with a model (efficient markets) that essentially said that this recession could not happen. The term “The Great Moderation” was floating around, which was a claim that a recent actual historical moderation and stabilization of the economy (consistent with the efficient markets theory and other components of the dominant paradigm) actually meant that the theory was right and that there could be no bubble or slump again. But the Great Moderation ended in 2006 or so. ( I have suggested that this big recession just be named The Great Moderation Recession, but no one has bit on that.)
Furthermore, the economists who were putting out these ideas are unrepentant. They’re institutionally entrenched and are able to claim that they were never interested in the practical applications of their theories and have not been implicated in the mistakes that were made (something which was not really true), and also that their theories are unscathed, since with the insertion of a few jimmies and shims and kludges they still work pretty well.
I should add that an additional flaw in economics is that there was, within economics, no way for the rest of the profession to show that the efficient marketers were wrong, except by giving them control of the economy in order to see what would happen. Plenty of economists were suspicious, but there was no way for their suspicions to be brought effectively to bear against the orthodoxy. Economics is just too inconsistent, incomplete, and ill-formed for that to be possible.
As science has progressed from mechanics to thermodynamics, sub-atomic physics, evolutionary biology, and social science, at each stage there has had to be a redefinition of science and the renunciation of certain goals of the earlier sciences (eg. , predictivity). Economists have underestimated the degree to which this had to be done. (The whole complex of ideas around entropy, chaos, complexity, non-linearity, non-ergodicity, etc. add up to a powerful indictment of the formalisms used by mainstream economics, and people have been saying something like this since formalization became dominant in the 50s and 60s.)
It’s generally true that physicists, chemists, and biologists have been unimpressed by the accomplishments of the social sciences, and my belief is that they are right, ecxcept that many of them have the idea that if they had been the ones doing social science, they would have done it right. What I think is that the social sciences will never get the kinds of results that the “hard” sciences get, and it’s not because they’re doing it wrong but because that goal is inappropriate.
I’m also convinced that a lot of social-science scientism amounts to pulling rank and even fraud. Economists have been extremely arrogant in their claims because they’re “The smartest people in the room”, but this is bogus because they never really got the science right. (Alchemy is difficult too.) There are a lot of money and power at stake, and economists have not resisted the temptations that come with that.
In a way I’m just saying that history should be guiding theory of social science the way evolution is the guiding theory of biology.
May 27, 2010
Oil is measured in gallons, barrels, and tons. This creates confusion when you remember the number but not the unit. One ton = 7.3 barrels = 306 gallons. One barrel = 42 gallons. These numbers are a bit approximate (oil varies in density) but close enough.
The largest spill ever was during the Gulf War and was done on purpose: 11 million barrels. The #14 spill was at Urquiola Spain: 733,000 barrels. Exxon Valdez was only 250,000 barrels and is low in the top 100.
It’s impossible to confidently estimate the size of the present Deepwater Horizon spill, partly because of genuine uncertainty, and partly because information is being withheld while misinformation is being broadcast, but if the upper estimate of 100,000 barrels a day is right, we’re now at 3,000,000 barrels, which would quantitatively be #3 of all time. And this isn’t a “spill”. Spills have an upper limit depending on the capacity of the tanker. We have no idea what the top end of this one is.
The seriousness of a spill isn’t merely quantitative. Biological, economic, and human effects depend on the location (The effects of some earlier spills were also probably underestimated because they were in third world locations, but this is a somewhat different question. ) Land spills spread less far and are probably less damaging than ocean spills.
This particular spill is near a heavily populated area with a huge fishing industry and a lot of tourism, which makes it very serious. I also suspect that a spill in the open sea is less destructive than one in a partially enclosed gulf like this, though I can’t be sure about that. The Gulf of Mexico was already in trouble when this happen, and now it may be ruined for good.
The real lesson here is that the American political system, the American legal system, both political parties, the media, and much of the American public are the slaves of big business and big finance, and big business and finance are legally obligated to be ruthless and conscienceless. We’re going to keep on drilling, the cleanup will be ineffectual, only symbolic and cosmetic changes will be made to drilling practice, and only a few low-level scapegoats will be punished. The people of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas will defend BP and blame immigrants and Arabs, because what can they do? They need jobs, and employers are watching them closely. BP will change its name, spin off a subsidiary to take the fall and go bankrupt, and walk away unharmed. And that will be the end of it.
Enjoy!
Wiki: largest oil spills (Note that the top 14 spills all happened before 1993. We had been making progress.)
Wiki: Deepwater Horizon oil spill
April 24, 2010
At Haquelebac I do culture only. Sometimes my politics peeks through, but nothing there is intended to have a political effect.
Older pieces are archived at Idiocentrism and Open Left.
Self-published books: Lulu.
emersonj at g m a i l d o t c o m
