Contradiction Du Jour

Mitt Romney:

This week, President Obama will release a budget that won’t take any meaningful steps toward solving our entitlement crisis. The president has failed to offer a single serious idea to save Social Security and is the only president in modern history to cut Medicare benefits for seniors.

Does this:

A) show how dumb Romney is
- OR -
B) show how dumb Romney thinks voters are

Foreign Oil

Saw this on WonkBlog the other day and was surprised. According to the EIA, over the past few years we've been producing more of our own oil and importing less:



..doesn't really square up with the criticisms you hear from the GOP about Obama blocking our domestic oil production.

It's also interesting to see where we do get our imported oil from. He's the top countries, listed by thousands of barrels imported per day in 2011 (again from the EIA):

CANADA	2,157
SAUDI ARABIA	1,180
MEXICO	1,113
VENEZUELA	893
NIGERIA	826
COLOMBIA	364
IRAQ	473
ECUADOR	203
ANGOLA	323
RUSSIA	246

The way you see this talked about on TV, it's easy to imagine that every dollar we spend on oil goes to Iran. I'm not at all saying our foreign oil dependence (or just plain oil dependence) isn't a problem, it's just not quite the problem we can sometimes think.

Manufacturing

One of the things Obama emphasized in the SOTU today was increasing manufacturing jobs in America. You frequently hear all types of politicians and pundits talk about the importance of the manufacturing sector. It has been in decline, and many view that as the reason for widening income inequality. But is there anything special about manufacturing?

Matthew Yglesias has written a few articles about this I thought were really good, explaining how arbitrary the difference between manufacturing and services is:

if I make pasta then dry it and stick it in boxes, I'm manufacturing. If I make fresh pasta and serve it to you on a plate with my pea pesto that's services. The difference between manufacturing and services is not an ontological void between making things and not making things. It's really a gap between putting things in boxes and not putting them in boxes. Like if you build a bookshelf and ship to a store and I buy it, that's manufacturing. If I hire you to come to my house and install custom built-in shelves, that's services.

Plus, whereas people often act like our loss of manufacturing jobs is a recent phenomenon, you can see in this chart that it's been in basically the exact same steady decline since WW2 ended.

While there has been a correlation between manufacturing decline and income inequality, it seems to me that there's nothing intrinsic about manufacturing that should lead us to think that correlation is causation in this case. We need jobs and less income inequality, but I don't think that's any reason to have policies specifically favoring manufacturing.

This could turn into another topic, but I also generally don't like the idea our goal is to bring back jobs that have been outsourced. If a job is better done somewhere else; keep it there. I think that once we restore aggregate demand in our economy, the market will adjust to provide new jobs for people without policies designed to bring back the old ones.

The Founding Fathers and National Banks

This has been bothering me from a debate last week, and I never saw any talk about it. Members of the audience got to ask questions, and one guy asked Gingrich something like "The founding fathers were opposed to a national bank, thus no Federal Reserve. Who has a better grasp of what's best for our country: you or the founding fathers?" Gingrich made some comment about how he's a historian, and he knows the founding fathers know best, which is why he wants to reduce the Federal Reserve.

But.. one of the major points of disagreement amongst the founders was this very topic. The main supporters of a national bank were Washington, Adams, and Hamilton, and Washington created one. Jefferson and Madison were the main ones opposing it, but after getting elected President they ended up supporting it. So they were conflicted on the topic of a national bank, but if anything it'd be more accurate to say they mostly favored it in the end. Did Gingrich not know that? I assume he did; but why would he pretend the guy was right?

This is just one example of the weird misconceptions that are so common about the founding fathers.. acting like they were infallible mouth-pieces of God who agreed on everything and were divinely inspired to write the inerrant Constitution. In reality, they were not one thing; they were individuals who disagreed on interpreting the Constitution and on what should even be in there in the first place. It's usually meaningless to say "the founding fathers wanted ...". And if you're going to treat their beliefs like religious dogma, at least know what they really believed.

But even if they did all oppose a national bank, that guy's question is still extremely frustrating because of its implication that it'd be so unacceptable to disagree with the founding fathers who must know what's best. I'd like to know his opinion on slavery.

Ending Minimum Wage

The EITC and the minimum wage have the same goal: reduce poverty through higher income for people with low-paying jobs. Which makes me wonder.. why don't we figure out which one is more effective, and then get rid of the other while proportionally expanding the better one?

I'd need to be way less ignorant to say this with any certainty, but it seems like the EITC is preferable over minimum wage. The benefits can be more directly targeted to where it's needed. And its costs can be more spread out instead of specifically making it more expensive for employers to hire more people.

Of course, reality is complicated, and there may be good reasons to keep a mix instead of one over the other. But it seems strange that I never see this topic brought up in political news.

Important graphs for understanding our unemployment

Why hasn't our unemployment rate improved? You hear different answers to that question, but here's the number of jobs over Obama's presidency in the private and public sectors:





The private sector bottomed out almost 2 years ago and has been steadily recovering. Government jobs have been steadily declining (minus the spike for the census).

Republicans always explain that unemployment is high because Obama has led an unprecedented expansion of "big government" that is preventing businesses from creating jobs, and what we need is "smaller government". But if that were true, the graphs above should be reversed. Businesses are creating jobs, but those are being offset by lost government jobs due to... smaller government.

Many people assume that all disagreements between Democrats and Republicans just boil down to opinions that can't be proven one way or the other. But sometimes you can be just plain wrong.

Book plug: Willpower

I just finished reading, and highly recommend, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Baumeister and Tierney. It's about scientific studies into our willpower/self-control: how to measure it, how it works, how we can improve it. Some of it is really surprising, but convincing, and part of what makes all of it interesting to me is that the whole concept of a "will" is one of the most mysterious things about existence - the fact that our impulses and instincts can pull us in one direction, but we have the ability to choose to do something else.

I'm not going to go through all the studies demonstrating this, but the basic idea in the book is that our willpower is a lot like a muscle. It gets tired when we overuse it. We can also build its strength over the long-term, or let it weaken. The most interesting thing to me was that our brain consumes glucose to use self-control. This is why dieting can be especially hard; you need glucose to resist temptations, but dieting reduces your supply of glucose.

The book also spends some time explaining how our culture has made a big mistake in prioritizing self-esteem over self-control for children. A lot of the studies about the problems with an over-emphasis on self-esteem were funny. In one, they tested a bunch of kids on a new subject, then spent some time with only half the kids telling them how great they were at it. After more teaching and a test on the same subject, the kids who received the self-esteem boosts were more confident in their work than the others but actually performed worse.

It does give advice on proven ways to help improve your willpower, but the authors seem to admit that this is an area where we still have a lot to learn. They explained some studies showing that religion can be a large source of willpower but didn't go much into trying to dissect that. In my opinion, monasteries would be a good source of ideas to test. Monks of many religions have spent thousands of years trying to figure out how to control each and every thought, and it'd be interesting to test their various techniques from a scientific standpoint.

Anyway, a quote from the book:

We think that research into willpower and self-control is psychology's best hope for contributing to human welfare. Willpower lets us change ourselves and our society in small and large ways. As Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, "The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts."