All data, including primary un-”corrected” datasets, must be available for auditing by third parties. All modeling code must be published. The assumptions made in data reduction and smoothing must be an explicitly documented part of the work product.

These requirements would kill off AGW alarmism as surely as a bullet through the head.

Transparency would kill off AGW denialism, too.

“Quits” are voluntary separations from jobs and folks do that because they’re leaving the work force (e.g. retiring) or because they found another job. Now look at quit rates over the last couple of years:

Quits have declined by about 40% compared to normal times. From here, about 50% of quits are retirements. If the retirement rate has stayed the same, then quits due to job changes went from 1.1% to about 0.5%. This suggests the number of “job seekers” among the employed has gone down by at least half.

How many job seekers are there right now? Supposing all unemployed workers are “job seekers” then the total number is about 20 million people. In normal times, that number is about… 21 or 22 million people (unemployed plus 10% of the working population). By this measure, the job market now is less congested than usual!

Making the assumptions that I made above, I constructed a “job seekers” per job opening time series:

If you assume none of the currently employed workers are “job seekers” then the graph above looks like the one put up by EPI. If you assume 20% of the currently employed are “job seekers” then even the up-tick seen in the later part of the time series goes away.

Why does this matter? Well, if there was no revolution, only evolution, to modern industrial society, you need an underlying evolutionary mechanism. Clark favors genes-based stories, but most other folks are more comfortable with culture-based stories. In either case, its hard to look at Clark’s data and pick a year before 1900 that would look like a revolution in efficiency.

If you’ve read a couple or all of these posts, leave a comment to let him know how great they are.

If not, drop whatever you’re doing and get reading.

I’m definitely a jerk if I don’t have other’s outcomes in my utility function. I’m a paternalist if I have other people’s consumption in my utility function, not their utility.

This is why a paternalist can give you healthcare instead of cash because your consumption of healthcare matters to him more than your happiness/contentedness/life satisfaction/etc.

Interestingly, most folks are jerks with respect to foreigners, they’re paternalist with respect to other anonymous citizens and they’re neither with respect to their close friends and family. I can’t find reason in this mix of preferences.

UPDATE: No injuries. No damage. No power outages. They’re not even letting the kids out of school.

Atlantic Food Channel contributor Jerry Baldwin, co-founder of Starbucks and the company’s first roaster and buyer, agrees. He now owns Peet’s Coffee and Tea, and he says the relatively low-altitude Haitian coffee doesn’t have the taste his company seeks. Still, he suggests that coffee drinkers who want to help Haiti donate to long-term agriculture projects.

I emailed Peet’s after the earthquake to ask about Haitian coffee. They said the distribution network isn’t there yet and the quality is low. I simple-mindedly suggested Peet’s throw money at the problem, perhaps funded by customer donations. Peet’s representative Ginny replied (Technoserve is an NGO Peet’s works with that has a very small team in Haiti working with farmers):

I don’t think it’s overly optimistic to think that eventually Technoserve or another similar NGO might help Haitian growers start producing really high quality beans, and that Peet’s might be a part of this, just as we have been in East Africa. But our main contribution in this kind of endeavor is expertise, not money. Jerry Baldwin, who bought Peet’s from Alfred Peet many years ago, and our buyers Jim Reynolds, Doug Welsh, and Shirin Moayyad have all lent their coffee expertise to growers all over the world (not just those served by Technoserve). And a Peet’s employee left Peet’s about a year ago to go work for Technoserve full time – his many years at Peet’s as a coffee and tea trainer helped to give him the expertise that Technoserve looks for.

So the issue is not simply money. Producing coffee of the very high quality that Peet’s looks for can take years. When I started with Peet’s 11 years ago, the only East African country producing coffee of the quality Peet’s looks for was Kenya. Now we are buying from Burundi, Rwanda, Malawi, and Tanzania. But this certainly didn’t happen overnight and it wasn’t just money that made it happen. Issues that have to be addressed include proper care of the land, the soil, and the coffee trees themselves, selective picking of the coffee cherries, proper processing techniques, etc. It’s a long process of education, training, and feedback from experts.

She suggested to me that I take a look at Technoserve (which looks to be legit). Here’s their reply to my email to them about “my” idea to work in Haiti:

While I certainly like your idea and we do work in Haiti, we do not have the capacity or funding at the moment to certify farmers to sell to Peet’s Coffee. We do hope to have the capacity to do this in the future.

Incidentally, the Haiti – Integrated Financing for Value Chains and Enterprises (HIFIVE) team that TechnoServe is a part of does some work involving coffee. We assist small and medium enterprises (SMEs) or associations that could include coffee producers or coffee traders. With only a three-person team, however, we do not have the capacity to work with farmers directly as we do in other countries and other programs. Therefore, I am afraid that our partnership with Peet’s Coffee in other countries could not apply to our work in Haiti.

In the Atlantic article, someone is quoted as saying Haitian coffee is a “cause” coffee not a “quality” coffee. If the long-run recovery of Haiti concerns you, supporting groups like TechnoServe might be the way to go.

I think it means “very good!” or “you’re so smart and good looking!”, but sometimes I think it may mean “please continue doing that because its not annoying at all!” or “you’re really good at Wii Super Mario!”.

Ok. Prof. Sumner is absolutely right that the Fed made a mistake in fall of 2008. This is illustrated by the sharp decline in inflation expectations as illustrated in this graph (stolen from here):

But Sumner often slips from this valid critique into a claim that the Fed continues to make a mistake (e.g. here: “Throughout much of 2009 I kept challenging liberals to push harder for monetary stimulus.”). This is not a valid argument. For example, the Fed made a mistake in the late 1920’s trying to prick what they thought was a stock bubble. Their actions helped precipitate the Great Depression. Flippantly: this doesn’t mean policy is still too tight today. More relevantly: its not the reason why policy was too tight in 1930, 1931, 1932 and early 1933. The mistakes they made in those years where independent of the original mistake.

The sharp up-tick in inflation expectations through 2009, as seen in the graph above, suggests the Fed is no longer making a mistake; policy is no longer too tight.

What to do about high unemployment (illustrated below)?

First, unemployment has — hopefully! — topped out. This is more evidence that policy is, if not appropriately loose, at least loosening. Second, we don’t know the mechanisms linking macro policies to employment. The Fed doesn’t (and can’t!) determine the unemployment rate in any given month even if completely ignored inflation. Its hubris to suggest that it can. Third, even if money policy’s effects on inflation expectations is immediate, in a world of very slow moving wages, there’s long lags between policy changes and employment changes. The current policy could be producing improvements in the unemployment rate maybe today, maybe in three months, maybe in nine months… we don’t know.

All this said, I support Sumner’s goal of moving the Fed towards history dependent policy (aka “level targeting”). This policy, if even implementable, would make mistakes like the one the Fed made in fall 2008 less severe. I’m just not sure why Prof. Sumner insists on arguing policy is still too tight today, nearly 16 months later, when he doesn’t need to in order to make a case for this policy change.