TheAgitator.com
Sunday Links
Sunday, March 13th, 2011- Research team claims they’ve found Atlantis.
- Read this terrific Baylen Linnekin Reason piece on New York’s “lobstah pushah” and the regulation of food trucks.
- How to respond to a public insult.
- Something isn’t right, here.
- Some stunning, heart-wrenching photos from Japan.
- Fox Business Network, meet the Broken Window Fallacy.
- Alabama man shot by police who raided his house by mistake gets a $500,000 settlement.
- More questions about James O’Keefe’s editing decisions, raised this time by the news site started by Glenn Beck.
- http://ifyouwatchitbackwards.com/
So, according to the broken window theory, the U.S. bombing of Japan during WWII is responsible for their meteoric rise as an industrial power, right?
And by that same logic, Afghanistan and Iraq didn’t grow economically because advancements in weaponry allowed us to bomb them much more surgically, eliminating much of the old style destruction.
Regarding the Atlantis story: It’s cool they found this old city. It’s neat that there are the memorial cities. But why do they always relate it to Atlantis?
Freund says the memorial cities give the site new proof and confidence. Why? How? There is nothing in the Atlantis legend (as they say, mentioned only, in passing, by Plato). They say that Plato called Atlantis an island, but the story says that this city was destroyed by a tsunami 60 miles inland. Hello? That’s not an island. It doesn’t even fit the minimalist description of Atlantis, except that it is outside the Straits of Gibraltar. Well, there are a lot of places outside the Straits of Gibraltar. This doesn’t narrow it down at all enough to call the place Atlantis.
But I guess they wouldn’t get all the funding if they called it “The Lost City of Fred” (even though it is worth researching no matter what its name was).
Something isn’t right, here.
Ugh, yeah, no kidding. Gingham, blech.
I swear no one with journalism degree has a brain. I am aware of the broken windows fallacy, maybe others aren’t. But, seriously, think of your argument before you make it.
I say the same thing when people say WWII got us out of the depression – I love it when people will tell me that building bombs and ships helped, but fdr social programs didnt. They are the same. Just added debt. Understandibly, That has no bearing on whether we had to fight WWII. That is a different argument.
Yawn. Atlantis found again.
Perhaps they’ll also find Noah’s Ark and the Ark of the covenant in there, too. No one has claimed to find those for a while.
So… SWAT storms into the wrong trailer, sprays 16 rounds in the general direction of a 50 year old guy that has had 2 heart attacks already and uses crutches to get around…
Their story? Well! He had a gun! That makes it a ‘good shoot’, huh?
Of course, the coppers claim they did it all proper and legal like… announcing their presence, etc. I’ll believe that when I see the video they shot of the raid.
More likely, of course… it was like the guy with the golf club who got shot: Armed men dressed in black charge in yelling “Woooh! We’re the frat boys!” or some other equally unintelligible shit and immediately open fire.
People are always finding Atlantis. Along with Noah’s Ark, the Garden of Eden, and a scientifically proven pill that makes your erection bigger.
Fantasies, all of them.
In a way WW II got us out of the depression.Every othre industrial country laid in ruins.The U.S.A. was untouched and was the only entity capable of producing much of what was needed to rebuild the devestated countries.Our trade surplus was huge.Never before had one country had so much of what the world needed.Those days are over,thankfully.
I’m no economist but it seems like the Broken Window Fallacy is itself a fallacy. The basic premise is if I have to spend $100 replacing my window, then that’s $100 I don’t have to spend on something else, say, wine. An economic boon to the window maker but an equal economic loss to the wine maker. No net benefit, simple enough. But here’s where that theory runs up against another fallacy: that the size of the economy is fixed. This is the logic used to claim that immigrants take jobs from natives, or that by having old people retire and get out of the way will open up jobs for young people. If instead of responding to my broken window by eliminating wine purchases, I increase my economic output so I can afford both, then the net economic effect of a broken window IS positive. Though, to be sure, my standard of living hasn’t been raised.
How about a betting pool? The next time something horrible happens we’ll place bets on the first news outlet to commit the broken window fallacy. Dibs on MSNBC.
Also, someone on at mises or LRC, I think Walter Block but I’m not certain, said that if the broken window fallacy were not a fallacy and wars were good for the economy, we should sink about a trillion dollars worth of bombs and planes in the pacific every ten years. This way we reap all the benefits of war without the heartache of casualties. I got a kick out of that.
z, the broken windows fallacy still applies. If you could that easily increase your productive effort to afford the wine and the window, then why didn’t you do that without the window being broken, then you could have bought the wine and a new chair.
There are differences between the spending we did on WWII, and the spending FDR did on support programs before the War.
Many of the support programs pretty much just moved money around. Contrarily, a whole lot of the War programs involved getting factories going. When the War ended, there was a lot of scrambling to find things for those factories to make, but they were in place and ready to be productive. Also, the spending that was done before the War wasn’t supposed to profit anybody. The War spending had some profit built into it. Make of that what you will.
Mind, I’m far from sure that any of that could be planned deliberately. The problem with Economics as a “science” is that it presumes that people will make their economic decisions rationally. There is precious little evidence for this.
The key to broken windows’ fallaciousness is that replacing the broken window is waste. By re-buying something that you otherwise would not have had to, you’re paying the opportunity cost of not buying something actually productive. It looks like a boost in productivity on the surface because the glazier’s extra production and the extra purchases he can make from the sale are visible while the losses of the boy’s victim (perhaps in the form of not expanding his business or not training for a new career) are not as readily apparent.
It’s true that there’s no effective limit on wealth in the world, but there’s certainly a limit to the wealth that an individual has at any given moment. That’s the root cause of all opportunity cost. It’s also true that in the short term immigration does mean more applicants chasing the same amount of jobs, however, the job market will normally expand with the population in the long term, which counters that effect.
That said, it seems that a massive disaster might force reconstruction in better ways that might not have been done without the disaster. It’s conceivable that the new construction will be sufficiently better that in the long term its use will offset the massive upfront cost of building them and the massive losses sustained in the disaster. Of course, it’s far from certain that this will happen in any given disaster.
O’Keefe might be deceptive at times, but I didn’t see a problem with the “problematic” edit given as an example.
Got Iodine?
http://img847.imageshack.us/img847/438/fallout.jpg
@14 Speaking of deceptive editing, what went into making that map? Is it based on what’s already happened, what’s likely to happen, worst likely case, or worst disaster movie case?
From where I sit, O’Keefe is pulling the same kind of stunts that made Dan Rather a household name. If we are going to condemn him for this (and I can respond to arguments from both sides of that one), don’t we pretty much have to dismantle the entire structure of modern ‘investigative journalism” (or Gotcha! reporting).
Again, I can respond to arguments on both sides. I don’t want the government or the corporations to be free from investigation. On the other hand, there have been – in my lifetime – any number of reporters whose careers are arguments for a return to the days when a man who felt slandered could take a horsewhip to a reporter or an editor.
What does anyone else think?
Xenocles@15
I’m told it’s the worst case assuming full loss of containment.
This is just surreal.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7451527.html
An off duty cop at a rodeo chili cook off got mad at somebody on another team (according to other news reports he claimed they had “insulted” police officers of something). So what does he do? He lobs a canister of tear gas into their tent.
Even better – the victims inside included several elderly people and a couple of amputees who had been brought there by the USO.
Turns out the guy is also a cop union bigwig with 7 prior incidents on his record. The penalty? Paid administrative leave while they conduct an “internal investigation.”
There is no Atlantis myth only a fable told by one person, Plato, who is well known for using fables to illustrate a point. Atlantis is Athens.
WWII got us out of the depression by forcing the U.S. to abandon some of its wasteful and destructive depression-era policies. That the U.S. escaped the war relatively unscathed was, of course, a major bonus.
Fundamentally, paying people not to produce something productive is a horrible economic policy which will make it harder and harder to escape an economic downturn. Much better would be to identify useful things people can do, and require that able-bodied persons who have no other employment but want to eat should do them. Instead of having a minimum wage which puts people out of work, and then taking money from the workers to support those who were put out of work, simply allow wages to equilibrate at a level where able-bodied people can find employment.
Fake image of nuclear meltdown risk going around the Internet
http://www.theweatherspace.com/news/TWS-3_12_2011_fakeimage.html
z:
Well, one counter to your example I can issue is this:
You say you can increase your economic output to not only fix your window, but keep your wine habit satiated. That’s probably true, if you can find an opportunity to earn extra revenue. Meanwhile, you have deprived someone else who might have used that opportunity for their base revenue, because your ‘extra’ economic output was going to be their bread and butter output.
Now it’s possible that with enough demand for opportunity (Available labor), a new opportunity would present itself and the other guy would snatch it up. Maybe not.
Regardless, at some later point it’s likely you’ll cease your extra activity, creating more demand for labor. On a large scale, this would tell me that a LOT of broken windows will eventually lead to a lot of businesses collapsing because they can’t find the labor they need, because the ‘extra’ output they afforded wine drinkers isn’t needed anymore, because the window is paid for.
I’m no economist, but my basic premise here is that a broken window is a temporary spike in someone’s bottom line and a temporary loss to someone else’s bottom line.
A LOT of broken windows is a temporary spike in labor demand, and then a permanent loss of that temporary spike. If opportunity was created to satisfy that demand, then the opportunity collapses.
And another refinement of my above post – the wine you demand is a better economic boon than the broken window you suffered. One is assumed to be relatively permanent, the other is temporary.
An opportunity created because a bunch of people need to eat and need a place to sleep is better than an opportunity created because a bunch of people had trees fall on their cars.
No. Because after you’ve spent all that extra effort replacing the window, all you’ve accomplished is getting back to where you were before. The idea that destroying wealth (ie: windows) somehow advances a country economically is so astoundingly idiotic as to be on the same level as believing the world is flat.
How to respond to a public insult.
So it is finally safe to be known publicly as a troll?
Something isn’t right, here.
I admit it is anecdotal, but in my experience, small dogs average much more aggressive than big dogs.
#23, exactly right. Z, ask yourself: Would you be better off if your house burned down? It would take months of time and much $$$ just to get back to how things are now. Instead, that time and money could have been used to improve things.
@26:
If the universe of consideration is just me, I have the potential to be much better off. Maybe I lived in an old house and wanted to make improvements and modernizations but couldn’t afford to do so. With the house destroyed, maybe I can incorporate these things in my rebuilding using the insurance payoff. If I can put up with the temporary dislocation caused by the fire, my long-term future is bright.
Oops, that was at #27.
The fact that destroying wealth is bad for the economy does not contradict the fact that the amount of wealth (size of the economy) is not fixed.
No, in your example, the positive economic effect comes from you increasing your economic output (which you could have done even if your window had not been broken). There is nothing to be gained from breaking the window that could not also be gained by not breaking the window. The only difference is that the economy has one less window.
Since real economic conditions in the US did not improve until after the war ended, I don’t see how you can say “WWII got us out of the depression“. Yes, unemployment fell during the war because 20% of the pre-war labor force signed-up (or were forced) to become cannon fodder. And, yes, GDP rose because US factories were busy building things — like bombs — that would be destroyed while serving their purpose of destroying wealth on other continents (wartime inflation also had a big impact on GDP). But unemployment numbers and, especially GDP can be very misleading.
GNP (spending for civilian consumer goods and capital goods) is a better number to pay attention to and, after adjusting for inflation, it was actually lower at the end of the war than it was when the war started. But you don’t even have to look at numbers, look at the living conditions in the US during the war. Price controls (because of inflation) and the diversion of resources led to the rationing of all sorts of consumer goods. Gas, oil, shoes, sugar, coffee, meats, fish, cheese, etc. were all rationed. This is what Americans had to go through to get sugar and just because you had a sugar (or any other rationed good) coupon did not guarantee there would be enough sugar (or any other rationed good) for you to get some.
Real economic conditions didn’t start to improve until after the war when the huge government budget could no longer be justified (there was no more war). Between 1945 and 1947, the budget deficit disappeared (government spending was cut by more than 60%) and, by 1947-1949, there was actually a small surplus. Of course, at the time, Paul Samuelson and other prominent Keynesians were warning everyone that the huge reduction in federal government spending would cause the postwar economy to collapse and sink back into depression.
My point is, war is never good for the economy.
About the Atlantis link… does that mean the guy that found Atlantis a couple weeks ago off the coast of Africa was wrong?
It’s been a long time since I read Plato, and maybe I should dig out my Complete Works and look it up again, but doesn’t Plato outright say that Atlantis is a myth he’s using to illustrate a point? It’s stunning that something that is clearly not supposed to be real is clung to by these New Age morons.
Nick: Since real economic conditions in the US did not improve until after the war ended, I don’t see how you can say “WWII got us out of the depression“.
Because WWII basically ended up being a huge deficit funded gamble. We built not only lots of stuff, but lots of stuff to build stuff with, all leveraged to hell and back, and then, as stated above, when the war was over… we were the only people who had anything to make anything with, and we cleaned up on the export business.
Not that we paid off the debt and not that the money flowed back necessarily to the people who held the debt, but it did raise the tide enough to bump a lot of people into the middle class.
This isn’t a refutation of the Broken Window Fallacy, in any way. It’s not a technique that could be applied again. It’s more like “Well, occasionally someone wins the lottery.” It was a complete fluke. Unfortunately, it’s given a lot of people the stupid idea that even absent all those other very special conditions, war is actually good for the economy.
As a few other commenters pointed out, I don’t quite understand the O’Keefe critiques either. From what I gather he released all of the raw footage within hours of the first expressed concerns over the editing. Kind of a slick marketing ploy if your intent is for critics to actually watch the whole thing.
Maybe one of the final exams at cop school should be city street navigation. The cop candidate gets issued whatever nav equipment he desires and is required to locate and drive to a randomly assigned address. Cop candidate fails to locate correct premises, no badge for him.
I mean how hard can it be?
That Atlantis was first described in a story written by a philosopher should be more than a little hint that it might be a fable told to illustrate a point. Now could a a real incident have inspired it? Yes, and you don’t have to search far. The Greek city of Helike was destroyed and flooded by an earthquake only about twelve or thirteen years before Plato wrote the dialogues containing Atlantis. Sounds like a more likely inspiration.
Atlantis is in your heart.
I call BS on the “deceptive editing” stuff, and so does Patterico:
http://patterico.com/2011/03/14/on-the-blazes-accusations-of-misleading-editing-by-okeefe/
Let’s see here:
- Islamophobic
- Xenophobic
- White
- Middle America
- Gun Toting
- Scary
- Racist
- Racist
As far as I can see, the only mistake he made was leaving the adjective “old” out of his description. At least that’s my experience among the Kentucky Rand Paul Tea-Partiers. Your mileage may vary elsewhere. And yeah, they’re racist enough for it to count twice. Even the Black Irish are too ethnic for these guys.
Another swipe at O’Keefe. I’m starting to think that you call yourself a libertarian because it’s the least perjorative adjective you can use to describe yourself, not because it really applies.
When I’ve compared the raw footage to the so-called “edited” material, there really hasn’t been enough difference to justify the charges, so I’m left asking what your real problem with this guy is.
That someone will accentuate the parts that buttress his/her claim is a normal, regular human behavior. Go back over the archives of ’60 Minutes’, ‘Dateline’, etc.; it’s the same sort of thing. Would you be as critical if O’Keefe worked for one of the networks?
Sorry, Radley, this was one swipe too many.
Peter,
Wait, criticizing O’Keefe makes me less of a libertarian? You’re going to have to show your work, here. One can believe that NPR shouldn’t be state funded (that’s my position, in part because I think NPR would be better off without it) and still think that O’Keefe is a clown (also my position). I’m not obliged to defend what I think are dishonest tactics just because I happen to share his position on public radio.
O’Keefe pulls dumb stunts designed to trap his targets in lose-lose situations. Sometimes they give him way more material than they should. But I’ve been in situations where someone has said something offensive and I didn’t correct or scold them for it, because it just wasn’t appropriate given the time, place, and social context. I’m sure there are times I’ve even nodded as they spoke. It’s a bullshit scenario to put someone in. O’Keefe is as much of a journalist as a writer for Punk’d. Or the guy who called Gov. Walker pretending to be one of the Kochs.
If you want to defend a guy who once tried to lure a young, female CNN reporter onto a houseboat that he filled up with dildoes, just because it would be fun to make her uncomfortable by creating a rape-y vibe, then catching the whole thing on camera, hey, be my guest. But I think he’s a twit. And the stuff he “proves” with these videos is, in the grand scheme of things, little more than the usual bullshit Red vs. Blue partisan bickering. You mean an NPR exec is biased? Heavens!
I’m by no means defending all the people he has done this to, nor am I defending everything they’ve said. But what he’s doing is political dirty tricks. It isn’t journalism.
Atlantis gets found 2-3 times a decade. This particular one seems a lot more plausible than any other I’ve heard of, though.
“But what he’s doing is political dirty tricks. It isn’t journalism.”
Then very little of the main stream media is “journalism” – they do “stings” like that from time to time, and they certainly celebrated the fake Koch story (even when it showed the opposite of what they claimed – that they guy didn’t know the Koch brothers from Adam). Are you going to say they are “journalists”?
Now, I’m not sure I would disagree with you if you did, but what O’Keefe is doing is just playing the game by the rules as currently written. “Don’t blame the player for the game.”
The best way to fix broken rules is to enforce them evenhandedly. “Shoe on the other foot”, “Sauce for the gander”, and all that.
Are you going to say they areN’T “journalists”?
Nice typo, eh?
Radley,
Deoxy has already made several of my points in response. And I agree with you that our James is quite the twit, which is ultimately irrelevant.
Like it or not, we need people who are little more evolved than swamp life to do this, because nobody else is doing so. More information rather than less.
RE: perlhaqr…
If those that promote the “war got the US out of the depression” fallacy used that explanation, I guess it would be a little easier to understand why they believed it. It’s still not much of an argument. Even though the “huge deficit funded gamble” surely contributed to the post-war boom (for reasons you stated), it did not end the depression, it actually extended it.
And you’re right that the post-war boom doesn’t refute the broken window fallacy since those that point to it to justify the “huge deficit funded gamble” are committing the fallacy themselves. After the war, Europe played the role of the broken window and the US played the role of the glazier. Some people benefited (the seen) but the economy as a whole suffered major losses (seen and unseen).