Productivity and unemployment issues start to go mainstream ...

O'Reilly Network: Can computers help reverse falling employment? [Sep. 29, 2003]

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Interesting not because the suggestions are useful or the analysis deep, but because the issues of structural unemployment in our "new world order" are starting to go mainstream. At least the dialog is beginning.

Saddam only THOUGHT he had WMDs?

TIME.com: Chasing a Mirage -- Oct. 06, 2003

Over the past three months, TIME has interviewed Iraqi weapons scientists, middlemen and former government officials. Saddam's henchmen all make essentially the same claim: that Iraq's once massive unconventional-weapons program was destroyed or dismantled in the 1990s and never rebuilt; that officials destroyed or never kept the documents that would prove it; that the shell games Saddam played with U.N. inspectors were designed to conceal his progress on conventional weapons systems—missiles, air defenses, radar—not biological or chemical programs; and that even Saddam, a sucker for a new gadget or invention or toxin, may not have known what he actually had or, more to the point, didn't have. It would be an irony almost too much to bear to consider that he doomed his country to war because he was intent on protecting weapons systems that didn't exist in the first place...

...The Iraqi dictator was crazy for weapons, fascinated by every new invention—and as a result was easily conned by salesmen and officials offering the latest device. Saddam apparently had high hopes for a bogus product called red mercury, touted as an ingredient for a handheld nuclear device. Large quantities of the gelatinous red liquid were looted from Iraqi stores after the war and are now being offered on the black market.

Saddam's underlings appear to have invented weapons programs and fabricated experiments to keep the funding coming. The Mukhabarat captain says the scamming went all the way to the top of the mic to its director, Huweish, who would appease Saddam with every report, never telling him the truth about failures or production levels and meanwhile siphoning money from projects. "He would tell the President he had invented a new missile for Stealth bombers but hadn't. So Saddam would say, 'Make 20 missiles.' He would make one and put the rest in his pocket," says the captain. Colonel Hussan al-Duri, who spent several years in the 1990s as an air-defense inspector, saw similar cons. "Some projects were just stealing money," he says. A scientist or officer would say he needed $10 million to build a special weapon. "They would produce great reports, but there was never anything behind them."

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There's an aphorism somewhere along the lines of "Never assume conspiracy when incompetence will suffice". The newest theory on the disconnect between international intelligence and (apparent) Iraqi reality is that Saddam was delusional, and that his advisors were unwilling to contradict his delusions and were massively corrupt besides. He really did think he had something to hide.

Definitely a desperate and crazed sounding explanation, but we left the tracks of reason a while back ...

Bush officials guilty of a federal crime? (Can you say ... impeach ...?)

Bush Administration Is Focus of Inquiry (washingtonpost.com)

At CIA Director George J. Tenet's request, the Justice Department is looking into an allegation that administration officials leaked the name of an undercover CIA officer to a journalist, government sources said yesterday.

The operative's identity was published in July after her husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, publicly challenged President Bush's claim that Iraq had tried to buy 'yellowcake' uranium ore from Africa for possible use in nuclear weapons. Bush later backed away from the claim.

The intentional disclosure of a covert operative's identity is a violation of federal law.

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A few interesting things about this:

1. This is not cheating on one's spouse. This is a federal crime of a high degree. More than one senior administration official is thought to be involved, with Karl Rove on the hot seat.

2. The media has been curiously slow to investigate. Don't look for much from Fox News or the WSJ.

3. Several journalists declined to use the leaked information, they thought it was a security risk and irrelevant to the story. Robert Novak was the administration shill. His credibility as a journalist may be shot.

4. If Bush was involved, this is an impeachable offense -- no doubt.

With the Washington Post weighing in, the blood is in the water. Now, loose the sharks of print!

No Iraqi WMDs.

The Failure to Find Iraqi Weapons

A draft of an interim report by David Kay, the American leading the hunt for banned arms in Iraq, says the team has not found any such weapons after nearly four months of intensively searching and interviewing top Iraqi scientists....

... Yesterday, Secretary of State Colin Powell met with Times editors. Asked whether Americans would have supported this war if weapons of mass destruction had not been at issue, Mr. Powell said the question was too hypothetical to answer. Asked if he, personally, would have supported it, he smiled, thrust his hand out and said, 'It was good to meet you.'.

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What the heck was Sadaam thinking? I'd love to know what his strategy was. Even France and Hans Blix thought Iraq was hiding WMDs, the arguments were all about how to respond to Iraqi WMDs, what the real threat was, etc.

If I were running the US, I'd have every intelligence chief in the nation in front of me for 3 days of grueling interrogation.

Poverty in America

Number of People Living in Poverty in U.S. Increases Again

Poverty rose and income levels declined in 2002 for the second straight year as the nation's economy continued struggling after the first recession in a decade, the Census Bureau reported Friday.

The poverty rate was 12.1 percent last year, up from 11.7 percent in 2001. Nearly 34.6 million people lived in poverty, about 1.7 million more than the previous year....

... The poverty threshold differs by the size and makeup of a household. For instance, a person under 65 living alone in 2002 was considered in poverty if income was $9,359 or less; for a household of three including one child, it was $14,480.

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So 12% of Americans are very, very poor. Another very large chunk lives pretty close to the edge. That's a lot of very poor people. The article didn't provide many references, but I suspect the poverty rate is still lower than in the early to mid 1990s. The problem is next year, and the fundamental causes of poverty in the United States.

First -- next year. Other administrations have targeted recessional fiscal stimuli to help low income families directly. The Bush administration fiscal stimuli is considered by most economists to be extremely inefficient in terms of near term support for low income Americans. I think we should all be worried about what next year's numbers will look like. Will we give up all the progress of the 90s?

Then there are the fundamentals. The world in which we live is increasingly demanding in a classically Darwinian fashion. Rewards go to the elite -- those gifted by genetics, environment, experience, and inheritance. The non-elite lose out. They become poor, and their children become poor. At the bottom of the heap are the 8-10% of all humans who have serious psychiatric disorders (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder), low IQs (in theory half the population has an IQ < 100, but in practice I think it's about 30% are less than 100), or bad luck (such as parents with the above, or just plain bad luck).

In a real sense, a lot of humanity that was "able" in the 19th century would be, practically speaking, "disabled" today. Someone with a good temperament and an IQ of 90 could be a well regarded laborer or farm worker in 1942; in 2003 I think they'd be out of luck. That's a lot of people.

Of course the Bush administration, and many Republicans and religious conservatives, seem to consider prosperity as a sign of God's favor. So non-elite status is a mark of God's disfavor. Who's to argue with God? If that's what you believe, then you may believe that the poor are best left to fester in quiet. (Except eventually they join Al-Qaeda II, but that's another story.)

If, on the other hand, one has a wee bit more compassion and understanding (and a desire for self-preservation?), then it's time to rethink approaches to hard core poverty -- and all those folks who live on the edge of the precipice. Maybe the high disability rates in Nordic countries need to be examined with a slighly different perspective. If the market solution to 21st century disability is unpalatable, then maybe we need to consider other solutions.

The consequences of angering Microsoft ....

Company disowns author of critical MS report

Security vendor @stake Inc. has dissociated itself from a report critical of Microsoft Corp.'s OS dominance, and says that the report's instigator, former @stake Chief Technical Officer Dan Geer has left the company abruptly.

Geer and several other researchers wrote a report which argued that Microsoft's dominance of the desktop and server OS markets posed an inherent danger to security. The report was sponsored by the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA).

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I hope Geer expected to be canned and had a good severance clause in his contract -- otherwise he was being rather naive.

The Bush Administration lies about their Bible studies?

Is There Anything the Bush Administration Doesn't Lie About?: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

Next we'll learn that Bush is actually a neo-Pagan. What a weird bunch.

Brad DeLong: Krugman's essay on income inequality

My Favorite Paul Krugman Essay: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

A coincidental f/u to one of today's postings, a 1998 essay on wealth concentration in America.

Marines in Liberia: 25% got malaria!

Malaria, the Terrorist's Friend

When the United States Marine Corps went ashore in Liberia in August, it discovered an enemy that had no ties to the various factions in the civil war there. More than 50 of the 225 service members, roughly a quarter, who landed in Liberia last month were hospitalized because of a longtime scourge of mankind: malaria.

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That's an amazing attack rate. Some of those marines may suffer from malaria for the rest of their lives. Liberia has been far more dangerous, on a percentage basis, than Iraq.

Friedman: Bush war on terrorism is a hobby.

Connect the Dots

And one thing we know about this Bush war on terrorism: sacrifice is only for Army reservists and full-time soldiers. For the rest of us, it's guns and butter. When it comes to the police and military sides of the war on terrorism, the Bushies behave like Viking warriors. But when it comes to the political and economic sacrifices and strategies that are also required to fight this war successfully, they are cowardly wimps. That is why our war on terrorism is so one-dimensional and Pentagon-centric. It's more like a hobby -- something we do only until it runs into the Bush re-election agenda.

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Friedman has tried hard to be kind to Bush. Looks like he's run out of patience. In this case it's the stupidity of US position on world trade that set him off.

How to eliminate a species

A Bug's Death

Specicide -- the deliberate extinction of an entire species -- could be engineered by exploiting the biology of selfish genetic elements. These are segments of genetic material found in the genomes of all organisms; they contribute nothing to the well-being of their hosts, but simply proliferate themselves. And proliferation is something they excel at. A feature of all selfish genetic elements is that they cheat at Mendel's rules of inheritance and so have better odds for getting into eggs and sperm than regular genes do. As a result, a selfish genetic element can spread through a population extremely fast -- far faster than a regular gene -- even if it is harmful to its host.

... (The risk to us from this technology is negligible. Even supposing an extinction gene appeared in humans — by accident or by malice — it would take thousands of years for extinction to be effected. During this time, it is inconceivable the gene's spread would go unnoticed; once noticed, it could easily be stopped.)

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I really think the paragraph in parentheses should have appeared higher in the article! So this particular technique won't be used to wipe out humans. Phew.

Argentina North: The New America

U.S. Income Gap Widening, Study Says

...In 2000, the top 1 percent of American taxpayers had $862,700 each after taxes, on average, more than triple the $286,300 they had, adjusted for inflation, in 1979.

The bottom 40 percent in 2000 had $21,118 each, up 13 percent from their $18,695 average in 1979.

Mr. Shapiro also analyzed the budget office data in tandem with a recently updated study on income by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization in Cambridge, Mass. The bureau study found that in 2000, the top 1 percent income group had the largest share of before-tax income for any year since 1929...

... The center's analysis said the highest income Americans had grown richer from 1979 to 2000 both from gains in income because of economic prosperity and from tax cuts. Huge gains in executive pay were a significant factor, Mr. Shapiro said.

Federal tax burdens for most Americans had declined over the previous two decades, and not risen as some conservative policy experts have asserted, the center said. Congress enacted tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 that were heavily weighted to the top 1 percent, which supporters said would encourage them to invest more to the benefit of all Americans.

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The Economist covered this as well. The US is heading towards a South American wealth distribution. Over 20 years the wealthiest Americans tripled their income, the poorest increased by 13%. Cuts in capital gains and estate taxes will accelerate this effect.

Eventually, people will start to notice.

War in Iraq is hell on headlines .. another story about reporting in Iraq

War in Iraq is hell on headlines and perspective: Reporters contrast what they see with what viewers see at home

An interesting read. It's very hard for even journalists on the spot to get a sense of what's happening in Iraq.

Iraq: not going as badly as the media reports?

Iraq: not going as badly as the media reports?

Journalists are giving a slanted and unduly negative account of events in Iraq, a bipartisan congressional group that has just returned from a three-day House Armed Services Committee visit to assess stabilization efforts and the condition of U.S. troops said.

Lawmakers charged that reporters rarely stray from Baghdad and have a “police-blotter” mindset that results in terror attacks, deaths and injuries displacing accounts of progress in other areas." ....

...Marshall also claimed that there now are only 27 reporters in Iraq, down from 779 at the height of the war. “The reporters that are there are all huddled in a hotel. They are not getting out and reporting,” he told The Hill.

Economist survey of Islam... And the salvation is women and children

“THE next war, they say.” That was the headline printed at the top of this page the last time The Economist published a survey of Islam, in August 1994. We concluded that conflict between Islam and the West was by no means impossible. But the writer of our survey was not convinced that it was inevitable. Another possibility was that the anger and disillusionment that seemed to be sweeping through the world of Islam in the 1990s might turn in a more benign direction. Was it not similar to the disillusionment that began to sweep through Christendom in the 16th century, which led via the Reformation to the development of modern democracy?

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This is an Economist review of Islam, two years post 911. It's excellent even by the very high standards of their usual reviews, and I think it's available to non-subscribers.

There are no great surprises in this review. The key question is whether the potentially civilization ending "clash of civilizations" between Islam and "the west" (meaning some odd mix of Christian doctrine and technocentric secular humanism) is inevitable. The writers conclude that it is not inevitable, but quite possible. The invasion of Iraq has raised the stakes, and at this time seems to make a catastrophic clash more, not less, likely. The Economist is a bit too craven to lay accusations of incompetence at the foot of the Bush administration, but they are slowly growing a spine.

In my opinion, which no-one has requested, the primary focus of the West should be to align the prospects of Islamic children with the prosperity and health of the West. I say this based on a personal hypothesis, which goes like this:

1. Women always have great power and influence, even in cultural settings (Fundamentalist Mormonism, Fundamentalist Islam, Fundamentalist Christianity) where they seem powerless.

2. Men have allegiance to power and to cultural conditions that give them access to more mates and more personal power. Women have primary allegiance to their offspring and to cultural conditions that support them and their families. Women will sacrifice cultural doctrine to further the success of their children.

3. Women will support actions that improve the lifespan of their children.

Lastly, I point out that envy and hatred by both men and women comes about as much from relative distinctions (opportunity, health) as absolute distinctions.

The implications are obvious. If we want our western culture to survive, and if we secular humanists want to survive in that western shell, we need to make an unspoken "deal" with the women of the Islamic world. The deal goes like this:

1. You bias your culture, within the boundaries of the Koran (which are reasonably flexible), towards tolerance, forgiveness, and compassion.

2. We will give your children opportunities to grow up, to learn, and to have families of their own. We will give you prosperity.

The same discussion, by the way, applies within the United States. But that's an exercise for my non-existent readership! :-)