Links With Your Coffee - Saturday
Hey everyone, thanks for all the kind words about onegoodmove both in the comments and in the many emails I'm receiving. I enjoy hearing from you. I'm not doing a very good job of responding either in the comments or to all my email, but I do read them. Thanks for your support.
The Program You Are Watching Has Been Prerecorded
I don't read philosophy for answers to the meaning of life or any of the other ridiculous questions that have caused lunatics to bang their heads against the wall for as long as humans have been able to babble. What attracts me again and again to books of philosophy is the marginalia, the odd biographical details and digressions and just plain absurd minutiae that these old fools cough up on such a regular basis. The best biographies --hands down-- are of the philosophers. The unhappy little hunchbacks who waddled around the streets of their towns and endured the taunts of rock-throwing children (Kierkegaard). The closet gnomes, martyrs, and maniacs. Empedocles wrote, "Wretches! Utter wretches! Keep your hands from beans!" Three of Ludwig Wittgenstein's eight siblings committed suicide. Kant wrote a treatise on rainbows. And the great master of gloom Schopenhauer took issue with Spinoza's Ethics over what he perceived to be their disregard for the virtue and dignity of dogs.
God Outdoes Terrorists Yet Again Onion weighs in on the hurricane named Katrina and the aftermath.
A Hurricane Katrina Rap
Limbaugh calls Nagin Nayger audio
Flash from Avery AntThe Church of the Unionized Christ
Are disasters really good for the economy?
Early assessments of Katrina illustrate 'fallacy of the broken window'
Economists have been living up to their reputation as “dismal” scientists in recent days, predicting that despite the devastating human tragedy, Hurricane Katrina ultimately could have a positive impact on the economy.
The broken window fallacy
The basic flaw in the logic behind such accounting was attacked a century and a half ago by French thinker Frederic Bastiat who referred to the “fallacy of the broken window.”
This is not the first time we've disucssed this at onegoodmove here is video from a previous hurricane and a dumb shit making the same argument.
Comments
Was it just me last night (friday) or did everyone notice that they did not open the Red Cross fundraising song fest event with a white man and not a black man?!?
I have never known a group of people that are so racist in all my life. Grant it most black people are poor and could not get a ride to the song fest event from a friend or neighbor. I mean you would think that the Red Cross song fest organizer would have done something about transportation so they could at least open this crazy event with a black man or woman.
I am thinking that the organizer was saying with this statement. That black people are lazy and could not be trusted to be there on time to open the event. Either that or he was saying that the white man is dominant and only black folk come 2nd in not just hurricane's but song fest events as well.
I think that we should write the Red Cross people and remind them that we have helped support the hurricane victims and that we think their ability to not be sensitive to the needs of the poor black folk and the crazy idea of letting that white man sing 1st is no longer going to be accepted by us.
Hey, better yet, we need to do somekind of impeachment thing, all who are with me give me a YeeeeeHaaaaaw!!!
Just a thought, I don't think I have any questions this time.
Ah! The broken window fallacy again! The basic problem with the argument that the storm could be good for the economy is one of opportunity costs. Money that could have been spent on lots of other things (including reinforcing levees, by the way) now has to be spent on rebuilding New Orleans and other places damaged by the hurricane. If there were no hurricane, the city (a valuable asset) would be fine and that money could be used to help generate even more goods, services, and other stuff. You can't simply ignore the fact that a valuable asset (in economic terms) must be repaired and that the money used for the repairs is gone, taken away from the overall wealth of the country--even if New Orleans some how comes back more booming than before.
I would say Rush Limbaugh's mangling of Ray Nagin's name was an accidental slip. He's run the word "Mayor" into Nagin resulting in "Mayor Nayger". He immediately corrects himself. It certainly sounds like the sort of thing a bigot like him would say intentionally, but the audio doesn't hold up to the description.
I have heard the Broken Window fallacy applied to this hurricane, even from people who actually understand economics like the Economist. One reason it continues to have legs is that disasters actually can boost GDP. But it's like so many other things--GDP measures the price of all goods and services sold, not their true human value. Add to that the fact that after disasters the increase in money spent merely replaces capital goods which were destroyed whereas sans the disaster some of that money would have been spent on additonal capital goods--so any dollar-amount boost is more short term than long term. Hence in terms of GDP it makes little difference if there is a flu epidemic which causes people to go out and buy an additional $1 billion of health care or there is an SVU craze which causes people to buy an additional $1 billion of auto and fuel. In either case the net well-being is probably not going up at all (perhaps a little in the latter case), in fact it may be going down, but GDP is going up by a billion dollars. Of course most economists don't like get into the messy job of trying to measure well-being so they just use GDP as shorthand.
So the hurricane is causing the government and private donors to inject a massive amount of money into the Gulf Coast region. But on the other hand the people displaced are suddenly spending and earning far less. People who were helping to drive the ecomony with their getting and spending are in many cases living hand-to-mouth and homeless. Add to that the fact that the productive capacity of the country is now significantly smaller with the loss of more than a city (it's not just houses destroyed, but infrastructure and industry too). For this reason even solely in terms of GDP I doubt Katrina will have a net benefit, especially in the short term.
Of course, since all of the government money that will go into rebuilding would otherwise simply go into the war machine that turns out dead Iraqis, a product which is of no value to anyone, the broken window fallacy in this case does not apply.