Hybrids not so good for the environment?

There is an interesting article which compares the total ecological footprint of a Prius to a Hummer. The conclusion that the article draws is that the Hummer is actually easier on the environment. How can this be? The article lists three reasons. First the actual fuel consumption is higher than claimed. Second, the manufacturing of the batteries that powers the motor invovles the toxic processing of nickel and takes a lot of energy to manufacture.

Second is the issue with the actual production of the batteries for the hybrid cars. It is only slowly being revealed that the nickel batteries that hybrids use are not environmentally friendly. The nickel for the Prius is produced in Sudbury, Ontario. According to Demorro, ” This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles.” Toyota produces 1,000 tons annually. The production of the batteries does not end in Canada, the nickel is then sent off to a refinery in Europe and then off to China and finally it ends up in finished form in Japan. This in turn uses more energy to create the batteries since it involves many factories all over the world.

Third hybrids do not last as long as conventional vehicles. Interestingly, the article concludes that the most environmentally friendly cars are conventional sub compacts.

Basically if you want to save gas and pollute less you should buy a subcompact with a PZEV rated engine. It will save you more money in the long run and the earth will thank you.

 

Farm workers killed: When are owners going to get charged with murder?

VANCOUVER — Three people are dead after a vehicle crash near Abbotsford, in B.C.’s Fraser Valley, just north of the Canada-U.S. border that shut down a major highway and choked off traffic both east and westbound during Wednesday’s rush hour.

Police say there were up to 16 people, thought to be rural farm workers, crammed into one van.

This is just obscene. It appears if you want to get away with murder all you have to do is open a business and engage in gross negligence. Here is a little stat. In 2000 there were nearly 1000 inustrial fatalities in ontario. Nearly three times the number killed as a result of drinking and driving in Ontario for that year. How many person hours are spent preventing drinking and driving compared to inspection of work sites and equipment? Where are the Mothers Against Industrial Deaths (MAID)? Wheres the equivalent moral panic?

 

Time’s Almost Man of the Year Helping to Bankrupt The Fund

Call him a caudillio, call him a dictator, call him whatever you want but Chavez has shrewdly used his oil revenue to help Latin American countries avoid the dictatorial terms on which the IMF makes its loans. The end result is that Latin and South America are able to access foreign cash without going hat in hand to the IMF. Interestingly one of the other consequences is that Chavez is helping bankrupt the IMF. In related news Poor Paul Wolfiwitz is himself going hat-in-hand looking for 18-25 billion dollars to keep The Bank solvent.

Of course a recession would be just what the doctor ordered for the Fund.  As commodity prices tanked so too would Latin and South American economies and Chavez’s capacity to make cheep condition free loans.

 

Meanwhile US Continues its Slide into Authoritarian Xenophobia

Homeland security was established to protect the US from Terrorists right? Nope it appears that they are simply unable to find any terrorists so they have turned the dogs loose on immigrant workers who ensure every white american has cheap steak to eat. That would be another check in the Left’s predictions about the US’s response to 9/11: a growing authoritarian Xenophobia matched by an overzealous and over-armed domestic security apparatus.

Union: DHS Raids Grabbed Legal Workers
By Justin Rood – December 13, 2006, 9:14 AM Union officials are outraged over a massive immigration sweep yesterday, which sent 1,000 Homeland Security Department agents — some in riot gear — to meatpacking plants in six states to round up immigrant workers suspected of using fake identification, but may have picked up legal workers in the process.

“Stormtroopers came in with machine guns, rounded [the workers] into the cafeterias, separated identified citizens from non-citizens, and then they took away all green cards and put non-citizens onto buses,” regardless of the immigrants’ legal status, Jill Cashen of the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UCFW) told me this morning.

Cashen said that reports from all six states confirmed that legal immigrants were among those taken away, and have not been returned. “We’re still trying to find out where the buses went,” she said. “Children have been left at church day cares. Nobody knows where these people are.”

Recently unsealed court documents show that DHS had identified 170 identity-fraud suspects it wished to apprehend, but that the agency wanted to round up as many as 5,000 other workers because it “further expect[ed] to apprehend persons who are engaged in large-scale identity theft[.]” Union officials say the total number of detained workers may be higher than 5,000. (Update: We’ve uploaded those court documents to our document collection here.)

 

New Issue of Post Autistic Economic Review: Doubts about the US Model and Pluralism in Economics

By Goodwin Ginger

For those of you with a passing interest in what is going on in economics and economic analysis done by progressive economists we highly recommend PAER. Generally one does not need an advanced or even intermediate training in economics to be able follow the analysis and arguments that are made in the Review. That said, one does need to put in some mental effort into reading the Review. Two articles stand out in this issue. The first is a piece by John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer “Is the U.S. a Good Model for Reducing Social Exclusion in Europe? Although not all that subtle (a bit of a brute force hack) and a little under referenced it nonetheless provides a rough and ready refutation to all those who would argue the superiority of the American model.

 

Staying with the theme of superiority, the article by Alan Freeman and Andrew Kliman “Beyond Talking the Talk: towards a critical pluralist practice” takes up the issue of what a truly scientific approach to economics as a social science would require. It is good article which essentially argues for some academic honesty through enforced pluralism whereby the waring factions model of organization and publication of research is replaced by pluralism within organizations and scholarly journals.

 

 

Canadian Observer is up for Sale or Transfer

We have decided to sell off Canadian Observer.  We are willing to take raw cash or a paragraph about why you are the individual or individual’s to take over the blog.   The blog is well established and has good potential for growth.

Interested parties can reach us in the comments section.

 

Two Percent Hold Half of World’s Assets

Chris Giles at the FT has interesting article in today’s FT on the global concentration of wealth. This article begs the question: Is it time for a global socialist movement? One of the more interesting observation is that if wealth were to be distributed equally everyone would have (US) $20,500 in assets to use. Not bad. That means a family of four would have $82, 000 in assets to make use of. This is a far cry from the regular insistence by economists that all redistribution would achieve is to make us all equal in poverty. Something to ponder when thinking about how to achieve global peace and sustainable development. It appears that the problem (Social Democrats take note) is not wealth creation, but, rather, wealth distribution. As with food as with assets.
.
Two per cent hold half of world’s assets

By Chris Giles, Economics Editor in London

Published: December 5 2006 13:13 | Last updated: December 5 2006 13:13

Personal wealth is distributed so unevenly across the world that the richest two per cent of adults own more than 50 per cent of the world’s assets while the poorest half hold only 1 per cent of wealth.

A survey released on Tuesday shows that middle-income countries with high growth rates still have a long way to go before they have a hope of catching up with the levels of prosperity of the richest.

Adults with more than $2,200 of assets were in the top half of the global wealth league table, while those with more than $61,000 were in the top 10 per cent, according to the data from the World Institutefpr Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-Wider).

To belong to the top 1 per cent of the world’s wealthiest adults you would need more than $500,000, something that 37m adults have achieved.

So much of the world’s wealth is concentrated in few hands that if all the world’s wealth was distributed evenly, each person would have $20,500 of assets to use.

Almost 90 per cent of the world’s wealth is held in North America, Europe and high-income Asian and Pacific countries, such as Japan and Australia.

While North America has 6 per cent of the world’s adult population, it accounts for 34 per cent of household wealth.

 

Why Does Stats Can Have Such Contempt for the User?

Alt title: Why does Stats Can Suck So bad?

Let my qualify. Stats Can, on the collections end, is a very robust and professional organization. However on the data delivery end it is an onerous, counter-intuitive, expensive service with a Byzantine logic to the organization of its data. Really, I had forgotten how crappy it was until I had to explain to an undergrad how to go grab some time series data on real hourly wage rates going back 76. Keep in mind the student was accessing the data through CANSIM II apparently the research friendly portal to Stats Can data. I would hate to see what they do when they are not trying to be user friendly.

Stats Can seems to have the attitude that their data should presented in the most convoluted least user friendly way. Presumably to keep the non-experts out. And what is with the shitty state of the provincial time series data and the general refusal to make consistent series that go back to at least the 1960s. Either Stats Can is cashed starved or it is run by the equivalent of old-school linux geeks that have no time for pre-compiled drivers.

There is a reason why so many researchers who work with time series data choose to work on the US. First you do not have to be a member of Academic institution or a wealthy Think Tank to get access to the data: it is on-line and its free. Second you do not have to know the exact title of the series you are looking for. Indeed on some of the official US sites the data is thematically organized in easy to interpret categories. Third many of their official sites provide internationally comparative data sets. Next time I am sending my students to the American data.

 

The Cloistered World of American Economics: A Case Study in Group Think

By Goodwin Ginger

We are all familiar with the star system in Hollywood. Less so are we familiar with the star system in the rarefied halls of the academy and even less so when it comes to profession of academic economists. Nowhere is this more true than in the United States where a rigid hierarchy of Universities combines with a heavily policed star system. Within the economics profession this produces a small and cloistered group of individuals who occupy the top tier of the profession. Inside of this tiny world, economists beaver away on those abstract models so loved by the profession and so detested by reality. And whats more, they all have a self-understanding as a community of technocratic geniuses sans any ideological bias: just the facts ma’am.

 

When outsiders accuse them of been heavily implicated in a form of ‘group think’ they are more than often met with silence and sometimes with outright scorn. Anyone suggesting that they are all of an ideological type is told that “they obviously are not familiar with the diversity of methodological approaches within the profession,” or that “they obviously have not taken a higher level of training than intro to undergrad economics and as such are not able to distinguish the difference.” There is of course little truth to the first claim and some good degree of truth to the second claim.

 

But let us stay with the first claim for now. There is only a narcissism of small differences within the top tier of US economists (increasingly so in Canada we would argue). There is not really any ideological dispute within this top tier: they are all good liberals (non-US usage).  At best there are disagreements about which models and which assumptions to invoke and sometimes which policies are best to pursue in light of their preferred models. They all agree that free markets provide the best of all possible worlds and disagreements on this question are simply about which policies might make markets better. So strong is this ideological center of gravity that even when self described New Dealers (sic) like Samuelson do construct models of free trade which demonstrate absolute and permanent job losses they are quick to argue that nonetheless governments should pursue free trade without remedial action.

 

To get a sense of just how bizarre and ideologically cloistered this top tier is we need look no further than John Williamson’s incredulity that someone might call him a “market fundamentalist.” John Williamson is the US economist which compiled the consensus of economic opinion which has become famously known as the ‘Washington Consensus’. The Washington Consensus represented, at that time, the state of the art policy recommendations flowing from Washington (the Treasury, the IMF and World Bank) to the periphery (Latin and South America). This consensus which was forced on countries via structural adjustment policies via the IMF and apparently technocratic assistance of economists at the World Bank eventually came under heavy criticism not just from radicals but from a Don within the top tier of the US economics profession itself: namely, Joseph Stiglitz one time head of the World Bank. Stiglitz charged:

“The international financial institutions have pushed a particular ideology–market fundamentalism–that is both bad economics and bad politics; it is based on premises concerning how markets work that do not hold even for developed countries, much less for developing countries. The IMF has pushed these economics policies without a broader vision of society or the role of economics within society. And it has pushed these policies in ways that have undermined emerging democracies.”

 

In Williamson’s 2000 paper for the World Bank he exclaimed his perplexion at being called a market fundamentalist by the likes of Joseph Stiglitz. Indeed Stiglitz’s critisism must have stung for every single upper tier economist clings to his (and they are almost always he) self-understanding as a non-ideological technocrat. Williamson wrote:

“My original paper (Williamson 1990) argued that the set of policy reforms that most of official Washington thought would be good for Latin American countries could be summarized in 10 propositions: (1) Fiscal discipline; (2), A redirection of public expenditure priorities toward fields offering both high economic returns and the potential to improve income distribution; (3), Tax reform–to lower marginal rates and broaden the tax base; (4), Interest rate liberalization; (5), A competitive exchange rate; (6), Trade liberalization; (7), Liberalization of inflows of foreign direct investment; (8), Privatization; (9), Deregulation–to abolish barriers to entry and exit; (10), Secure property rights.”

Following this list Williamson asks:

“How is it that a term intended to describe a technocratic policy agenda that survived the demise of Reaganomics came to be used to describe an ideology embracing the most extreme version of Reaganomics? The closest I can come to understanding this is to note that my version of the Washington Consensus did indeed focus principally on policy reforms that reduced the role of government, such as privatization and the liberalization of trade, finance, foreign direct investment, and entry and exit.”

 

A narcissism of small differences indeed. All these measures are supply side measures, save for perhaps the competitive exchange rate regime, and the tax recommendation looks quite Reaganomic to the (un)trained eye. All of this leads us to the second claim about the uninitiated: “those that do not have a enough training cannot see the ray of light seeping through the tiniest of cracks.” You see Reagan’s tax plan lowered marginal tax rates the most on high income earners. But Reagan also eventually extended the tax base. That is apparently all that separates  the original Washington Consensus from Reaganomics: an across the board decrease in marginal tax rates and a competitive exchange rate regime. Although, given there is and was a notorious problem of tax collection in Latin and South America it is probably the case that the  taxation aspects of the Consensus were in practice far more regressive than Reagan’s market fundamentalism!

 

Don’t you just wish you had received a graduate degree from Ivy league economics department so that you would understand the true degree of ideological pluralism at play in those departments? It takes a Jewler’s eye indeed. But this is as it is constructed to be; as Samuelson once remarked economists are like dogs they run in packs. But perhaps this is too harsh and hasty of a conclusion. Clearly good New Keynesians like Stiglitz can at least tell when the markets are not working while his New-Classical brethren seem struck by cognitive dissonance.

 

UTOPIA OF ENDLESS EXPLOITATION

UTOPIA OF ENDLESS EXPLOITATION
The essence of neoliberalism

What is neoliberalism? A programme for destroying collective structures which may impede the pure market logic.

By Pierre Bourdieu

As the dominant discourse would have it, the economic world is a pure and perfect order, implacably unrolling the logic of its predictable consequences, and prompt to repress all violations by the sanctions that it inflicts, either automatically or —more unusually — through the intermediary of its armed extensions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the policies they impose: reducing labour costs, reducing public expenditures and making work more flexible. Is the dominant discourse right? What if, in reality, this economic order were no more than the implementation of a utopia – the utopia of neoliberalism – thus converted into a political problem? One that, with the aid of the economic theory that it proclaims, succeeds in conceiving of itself as the scientific description of reality?

This tutelary theory is a pure mathematical fiction. From the start it has been founded on a formidable abstraction. For, in the name of a narrow and strict conception of rationality as individual rationality, it brackets the economic and social conditions of rational orientations and the economic and social structures that are the condition of their application.

….

That said, this “theory” that is desocialised and dehistoricised at its roots has, today more than ever, the means of making itself true and empirically verifiable. In effect, neoliberal discourse is not just one discourse among many. Rather, it is a “strong discourse” – the way psychiatric discourse is in an asylum, in Erving Goffman’s analysis (2). It is so strong and so hard to combat only because it has on its side all of the forces of a world of relations of forces, a world that it contributes to making what it is. It does this most notably by orienting the economic choices of those who dominate economic relationships. It thus adds its own symbolic force to these relations of forces. In the name of this scientific programme, converted into a plan of political action, an immense political project is underway, although its status as such is denied because it appears to be purely negative. This project aims to create the conditions under which the “theory” can be realised and can function: a programme of the methodical destruction of collectives.

…..

Thus we see how the neoliberal utopia tends to embody itself in the reality of a kind of infernal machine, whose necessity imposes itself even upon the rulers. Like the Marxism of an earlier time, with which, in this regard, it has much in common, this utopia evokes powerful belief – the free trade faith – not only among those who live off it, such as financiers, the owners and managers of large corporations, etc., but also among those, such as high-level government officials and politicians, who derive their justification for existing from it. For they sanctify the power of markets in the name of economic efficiency, which requires the elimination of administrative or political barriers capable of inconveniencing the owners of capital in their individual quest for the maximisation of individual profit, which has been turned into a model of rationality. They want independent central banks. And they preach the subordination of nation-states to the requirements of economic freedom for the masters of the economy, with the suppression of any regulation of any market, beginning with the labour market, the prohibition of deficits and inflation, the general privatisation of public services, and the reduction of public and social expenses.

Economists may not necessarily share the economic and social interests of the true believers and may have a variety of individual psychic states regarding the economic and social effects of the utopia which they cloak with mathematical reason. Nevertheless, they have enough specific interests in the field of economic science to contribute decisively to the production and reproduction of belief in the neoliberal utopia. Separated from the realities of the economic and social world by their existence and above all by their intellectual formation, which is most frequently purely abstract, bookish, and theoretical, they are particularly inclined to confuse the things of logic with the logic of things.

These economists trust models that they almost never have occasion to submit to the test of experimental verification and are led to look down upon the results of the other historical sciences, in which they do not recognise the purity and crystalline transparency of their mathematical games, whose true necessity and profound complexity they are often incapable of understanding. They participate and collaborate in a formidable economic and social change. Even if some of its consequences horrify them (they can join the socialist party and give learned counsel to its representatives in the power structure), it cannot displease them because, at the risk of a few failures, imputable to what they sometimes call “speculative bubbles”, it tends to give reality to the ultra-logical utopia (ultra-logical like certain forms of insanity) to which they consecrate their lives.

….

But these same forces of “conservation”, which it is too easy to treat as conservative, are also, from another point of view, forces of resistance to the establishment of the new order and can become subversive forces. If there is still cause for some hope, it is that forces still exist, both in state institutions and in the orientations of social actors (notably individuals and groups most attached to these institutions, those with a tradition of civil and public service) that, under the appearance of simply defending an order that has disappeared and its corresponding “privileges” (which is what they will immediately be accused of), will be able to resist the challenge only by working to invent and construct a new social order. One that will not have as its only law the pursuit of egoistic interests and the individual passion for profit and that will make room for collectives oriented toward the rational pursuit of ends collectively arrived at and collectively ratified.

How could we not make a special place among these collectives, associations, unions, and parties for the state: the nation-state, or better yet the supranational state – a European state on the way toward a world state – capable of effectively controlling and taxing the profits earned in the financial markets and, above of all, of counteracting the destructive impact that the latter have on the labour market. This could be done with the aid of labour unions by organising the elaboration and defence of the public interest. Like it or not, the public interest will never emerge, even at the cost of a few mathematical errors, from the vision of accountants (in an earlier period one would have said of “shopkeepers”) that the new belief system presents as the supreme form of human accomplishment.