The Daily Duck

Why would we want to be Bretless?

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Tue, 08 May 2012 06:37:00 +0000

In my previous post I suggested that a study purporting the advisability of extortionate tax rates on the wealthy was an empty exercise in mathematical bling, concocted without any apparent reference to the real world, or any consideration of consequences therein.

Last week, the NYT carried a pre-publication review of “Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong", written by Bain venture capitalist Edward Conard. Who, since he is not just the 1%, but the 0.1%, clearly wants to make everyone except himself poor so they are free to sleep under bridges.

The idea that society benefits when investors compete successfully is pretty widely accepted. Dean Baker, a prominent progressive economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, says that most economists believe society often benefits from investments by the wealthy. Baker estimates the ratio is 5 to 1, meaning that for every dollar an investor earns, the public receives the equivalent of $5 of value. The Google founder Sergey Brin might be very rich, but the world is far richer than he is because of Google. Conard said Baker was undercounting the social benefits of investment. He looks, in particular, at agriculture, where, since the 1940s, the cost of food has steadily fallen because of a constant stream of innovations. While the businesses that profit from that innovation — like seed companies and fast-food restaurants — have made their owners rich, the average U.S. consumer has benefited far more. Conard concludes that for every dollar an investor gets, the public reaps up to $20 in value. This is crucial to his argument: he thinks it proves that we should all appreciate the vast wealth of others more, because we’re benefiting, proportionally, from it.

As it happens, Bret Wallach, one of The Great Guys is an entrepreneur: his company is engaged in designing a robot smart enough to automate pruning grape vines. In order to solve that very non-trivial problem, beyond a daunting amount of knowledge and talent, he needs two things: financial incentive to forego certain income now for more, but less certain, income later. That, and investors who see enough potential reward to make the risk worthwhile.

In other words, to make our society wealthy, we must allow people to become rich.

But never mind that. After all, equality is far better than having to suffer the success of the Brets and Conards.

Just ask the Cubans. Or the North Koreans. Or the Europeans.

Giving Guidance to the Angels means never having to say you are sorry

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 07:23:00 +0000

Yesterday, the NYT, in its news pages, presented a glowing article about a pair of French economists, Emmanual Saez and Thomas Piketty, whose seminal ground breaking research shows that income inequality is a very bad thing indeed, and that, therefore, we need a 90% marginal tax rate on top earners. Their main points:

Income inequality has become morally offensive

This inequality is correlated with a steep reduction in marginal labor tax rates for high earners

The increase in inequality is particularly pronounced in the Anglosphere

The so-called Buffet rule, which would invoke a 30% tax rate on incomes above $1 million, "... would do little to reverse the rich's gains."

Therefore, according to Mr. Saez, "Absent drastic policy changes, I doubt that income inequality will decline on its own."

Previous income inequality studies had a fairly short timeline: direct data had only been collected since 1970. Saez and Piketty extended that horizon by researching income tax archives all the way back to 1913. According to their research, inequality dropped after WWII, and remained relatively low until the 1970s, when it started to increase. "From 2000 to 2007, incomes for the bottom 90% of earners rose only about 4%, once adjusted for inflation. For the top 0.1%, incomes climbed about 94%. ... In 2010, the top 10% of earners took about half of overall income."

That has led the two economists to renew their calls for higher rates on the rich. Along with Peter Diamond, an emeritus professor at MIT and a Nobel laureate, Mr. Saez has estimated the "optimal" tax rates for the wealthy -- getting the most revenue from those most able to surrender it -- to be between 45% and 70%."

According to Mr. Diamond, "... whom [President] Obama nominated to the Federal reserve and Republicans blocked[,] 'Our finding is that the debate should be between the pre-1986 Reagan tax rate, which was 50%, and the rates that existed from Johnson to Reagan," which were higher." [Note: by "higher" the reporter, whose job description apparently excludes even superficial research, meant to say 91%.]

Since I am not a reporter, I am not at risk of betraying the profession by, well, reading the actual study. Also, as merely a glorified heavy equipment operator, and not an intellectual, I am not in the business of providing guidance to the angels, and therefore perhaps less willing to mistake my policy preferences for objective truth.

So, despite my lack of reportorial professionalism and academic credentials, I am going to take on the anointed elite to see if Saez and Piketty's argument is vulnerable to the predations of the hoi polloi.

From the introduction (citations omitted; edited slightly for wordiness; emphasis mine):

While there have been many discussions both in the academic literature and the public debate about the causes of the surge in top incomes, there is not a fully compelling explanation. Most explanations can be classified into market driven changes vs. institution driven changes. The market driven stories posit that technological progress has been skilled-biased and has favored top earners relative to average earners for CEOs as well as Winner-Take-All theories for superstars. [These] pure market explanations ... cannot account for the fact that top income shares have only increased modestly in advanced countries such as Japan or Germany or France which are also subject to the same technological forces. The institution driven stories posit that changes in institutions, defined to include labor and financial market regulations, Union policies, tax policy, and also more broadly social norms regarding pay disparity and in particular tolerance for executive pay, have played a key role in the evolution of inequality. Simply put, under that view, the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions ushered new eras in the United States and United Kingdom that favored the rich and significantly increased their bargaining power while other countries were less affected.

Whether you call it "reason", "science", or "rational inquiry", analytical thinking is abundantly effective at organizing systematic observations into an overarching schema. However, there are two significant limitations to that approach. First, and most obvious, not all phenomena are amenable systematic observation: art, for instance. That doesn't mean art doesn't exist; rather, it means that definitive statements about art are essentially impossible.

Second, and less readily apparent, all analytical thinking aims to create a model of reality. Since the model is not reality itself, analysis must make decisions about which phenomena to include, and which to exclude. We all do this whenever trying to solve any problem: if I am trying to discover the source of a noise in the front end of my car, I am not going to spend much time observing the seat belts. Consequently, the challenge of useful analytical thinking is to include all phenomena that can have a "significant" impact on the analyses.

Now, one would think that such esteemed intellectuals as Saez and Picketty would understand this and, furthermore, that they would provide some indication that they had considered, and excluded, certain phenomena that might, just might, have some impact on their findings.

In the highlighted sentence above, the market explanation is seemingly shown as inadequate because of the contrasting inequality between the US and England on one hand, and the obviously more enlightened European-socialist economies on the other. Since they are alike in all other respects, then the explanation for greater income inequality within the Anglosphere must be down to that one area: tax rates and other policies which put Progressives on the side of the angels.

Not so fast. Even before flipping to the second page, they have not considered two factors which probably go well beyond the realm of the merely salient.

There is one thing, besides a hatred of the poor that only Satan could love, that the US and England share, which the other advanced economies do not: English. So What? S&P might ask. As it happens, English happens to be the language for the vast majority of the world's various entertainment offerings. Best selling books, blockbuster movies, popular music, are all far more likely to come from the Anglosphere than the rest of the world, combined. I think the fancy economics term for this is "network effect", and it is non-trivial: think Microsoft.

And by ignoring, whether blithely or otherwise, network effect, S&P then compound the problem by confusing a group characteristic for its composition. The characteristic is wealth. Upon that characteristic, they impose a presumed composition of the group sharing that characteristic, and it is that composition upon which their analysis rests: the wealthy are CEO-ish. Their whole notion of economic responses to confiscatory taxation presumes that essentially everyone who is wealthy is someone who is paid for some sort of executive position.

But thanks to the network effect, that is nonsense. Confining ourselves to that voracious beast, the top 1%, at any given moment, a substantial number of them are athletes and entertainers (which is really two words for the same thing). There are at least as many of those as there are Fortune Top 500 CEOs. Moreover, even understanding that the composition of that top 1% is far from monolithic doesn't go far enough. Most entertainers lucky enough to hit it big don't do so for long. The subset of the category "wealthy" that is composed of entertainers is fairly constant over time, but the members of that subset do not.

Speaking of time. While I am not going to quibble over whether top executives take home a higher multiple of average wage earner pay than they once did, homogenizing the category "wealthy" into one easily demonized group ensures that S&P, as well as all other Progressives, to ignore the certainty that no small amount of that multiple is due to the far higher compensation of entertainers now than, say, the 1970s.

So, even before getting to the meat of this seminal groundbreaking study, there are two good reasons to suspect that, through ignoring what very much needs attention, S&P have produced a result that, regardless of the mathematical ornamentation, should be rejected out of hand.

Similarly missing, or, perhaps more accurately, waved away is the notion of opportunity cost. S&P insist that a uniform tax system (i.e., all income treated the same, regardless of source or nature) sufficiently ruthlessly imposed, will so reduce the gains from high salaries or elaborate fringe benefits that people will not go to the bother of bargaining for higher pay. VOILA! equality.

Glaring in its absence is what must happen instead. The wealthy, just like the rest of us, can do only two things with money: spend or save it. By engaging in ruthless taxation, the economic value of the talents of high wage earners accrues to the government, rather than the individuals themselves. That, in turn, must mean that essentially all of the spending and investing that the wealthy would have done instead becomes government spending. All of those employed as a direct consequence of the rich spending their ill-gotten gains must lose their jobs, never mind the knock-on effects.

I could go on, but this has already long gotten past the cut-to-the-comments point. In a recent Thought Mesh thread, I suggested that the sine qua non of Progressivism (the presumption of sufficient knowledge to conclude that their policy preferences are equivalent to how the world should and will work) means that Progressives must more frequently, and thoroughly, purvey ideas that are either divorced from reality, as here, or completely fraudulent (Gleick, Rather, Group of 88, et al).

But to everyone who is not a Progressive, that presumption of knowledge is the disease of self-appointed intellectuals who might have extensive and well founded knowledge within their own specialty, and from that conclude their temperamental preferences are equivalent to social imperatives.

Note the emphasis on "might." At the risk of throwing my shoulder out of whack due to unjustifiably vigorous self congratulation, I think my assessment of S&P's seminal groundbreaking paper shows that they can reach their conclusion only by ignoring every element of reality that might contradict The Narrative.

Just so here. Behind a cloak of flashy, but trite, mathematical formalism, S&P produce a seminal groundbreaking result that flatters the self-regard of Progressives without putting themselves through the bother of properly identifying global cultural trends, understanding the nature some particular group, or the opportunity costs of replacing the monetary decisions of individuals with the tender mercies of an increasingly bloated government.

But it must be OK. After all, it the NYT thought it was just fine, and so does the Obama administration.

Why?

Symptomatic

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 03:22:00 +0000

A few days ago I happened to be listening to "Marketplace"* on PBS. In particulary, the segment was on demand-driven publishing: digitizing content means that printers can nearly as efficiently print one copy of a book as a whole run. That, in turn, means a few good things: far less wastage, greatly tightening the supply chain, and the ability to satisfy demand, no matter how small.

One of the examples given was the consequences of a recent Glen Beck program, touting " ... an obscure economics text ... ": there was a sudden demand for copies, which these demand-driven printing companies were easily and quickly able to satisfy.

The name of that "obscure economics text"? Road to Serfdom.

*Any program that features Robert Reich as a commentator, or considers Road to Serfdom obscure, and calls itself "Marketplace", must be utterly immune to irony.

Ringside Seats

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 05:17:00 +0000

Early Friday morning I was en route from Oakland to Anchorage, over the Gulf of Alaska.

As luck would have it, that gave the two of us what were the best seats in the house for the aurora that followed last week's solar eruption.

Over the hour and a half or so before the descent into Anchorage we approached, then flew directly under, the most active area within probably 600 miles. It was such an alien sight that mere words, or at least any I am capable of writing, cannot possibly suffice.

From a distance, initially 500 miles, it looked like a curtain with a particularly bright fringe at the bottom. As we got closer, it became more like a a green waterfall going the wrong direction, with lots of waves and pulses. Ultimately, we flew right under it, where it seemed what being inside a flame must look like.

Without any sense of scale, distance is devilishly difficult to estimate. But, given a look angle of about 60 degrees, and the opposite side of the triangle being about 50 miles (disregarding our altitude of 6 miles), then the base of our personal aurora was roughly 20-30 miles away. The apparent motion against the background stars seemed consistent with that guesstimate.

It sure looked nearer, though. At our closest approach, we could see field line details that, frustatingly, a camera couldn't possibly capture, and two thirds of the atmosphere couldn't get in the way of. When I leaned over until my head hit the side window, I could see the streaks, torrents, and waves vaulting over the plane out into space.

And it was a show put on just for the two of us.

Once in a Lifetime

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 04:56:00 +0000

The reason for my trip to a Land Waaaaay Down Under is my mom: she has a bucket list, which includes Antarctica, and she wanted a go-along.

When this idea surfaced a couple years ago, I went right into soliloquy. "Self, if she is going to be shoveling large chunks of my inheritance into a big pile and setting fire to it, then I may as well be there to see it happen." Truth be told, there was no soliloquy. Changing pronouns appropriately, that is pretty much a direct quote of what she told me.

The trip started in Buenos Aires with a plenty long enough flight from Miami (made much less painful, though, by having an endless number of Simpsons episodes on tap) and two days hanging around there, then a day in Ushuaia, Argentina before embarking. Our tour was comprised of 100 people, 97 of whom could well have been doing contingency estate planning in case the Democrats get their way with death taxes. The tour was divided into four groups, each with a tour leader, and there were also five expedition leaders (each of which had some sort of suitable professional or academic background) who were in charge on shore.

Once on the ship, which, because it could hold only 170 people, looked like an itty-bitty cruise liner, it was two days of Victory at Sea conditions crossing the Drake Passage to the Antarctic Peninsula, five days of stopping at various spots and using Zodiac boats to get ashore, then two more days of pitching and heaving to get back.

Here are some pictures and videos.

Following are some observations, no matter how little their merit, have not benefitted in the least from more than a month's procrastination.

Buenos Aires

On meeting our group leader, starting with about the fourth word out of her mouth, we received a lengthy lecture on pickpockets and various other thieves, all of which boiled down to: anything you carry beyond the clothes on your backs and the shoes on your feet is subject to disappearance. Must have heard that same lecture about 15 times over two days. One of the people in our group was targeted, unsuccessfully.

Argentinians are an amalgam of, primarily, every ethnic background from Russia to Spain, with some Chinese and Japanese thrown in. This works extravagantly to the women's benefit, a fact of which they are perfectly aware, and about which they they are apparently obligated to ceaselessly and flamboyantly impress upon the other half of the race. I can't, off hand, recall a city where the women put their girls, never mind the rest of the festival of compound curves, on such prominent display. Viewed from my side of this power divide, it would have been possible, had I not been so distracted, to feel taunted, oppressed and in need of compensatory legislation.

Demographics

Of the 100 people on the trip, 97 were retired and Antarctica-bent on redistributing at least some of their wealth from their children and the government to Greek shipowners, Philippine crew, polyglot guides and an American tour company: the cheapest fare was $10,000.

At a very spry 78, my mom was the oldest. At 56, I had expected to be the youngest, but was more than pipped at the post by a woman in her late 20s to early 30s working in IT who was taking along her late 40s aunt, and who was to all appearances completely unconcerned by the self-admitted prospect of looking forward to five years of paying for it all. That is some seriously advanced planning, sending up in smoke an inheritance that doesn't yet exist for children that haven't been born.

En route

The voyage started with a smooth evening transit of the narrowish Beagle Channel before turning south for two day crossing of the Drake Passage to the Antarctic Peninsula.

In some respects, my job is not unlike that of a ship's Captain. Standing watch while crossing oceans is, for the properly inclined, frequently meditative, and encourages siphoning off decent fractions of income with which to stuff e-readers. That, combined with my love of the sea (or at least the part of it I surfed on growing up in Southern California) had led me to think that a boat, 40-ish feet long with sails, would be quite the thing.

Not anymore. It was two days of 45 mph winds whipping up a cross sea that put our quarter-pint cruise ship into a combination of pitching and rolling that was not helped in the least by the persistent wind induced five degree port list. Adding to the fun, every random and not particularly infrequent once in awhile, the timing of the waves would be such that the ship would be coming down from a particularly vivid skyward leap, only to be met head on by an unusually pumped up wave. Whereupon the ship would promptly loose a third of its speed with an accompanying reverberating shudder that made me ponder how much faith I put in the belief that hardly any of the people who had designed and built this thing were alcoholics or had been unable to hack it in Legos.

For nearly everyone, though, it was a great weight loss plan. Either immediately, due to gastro-revolution, or more slowly through the now wholly unwelcome prospect of tucking into a meal, no matter how skillfully prepared.

So, while being an airline pilot and a ship's Capt have some superficial similarities, they are in at least two respects wildly different.

In an airliner, the slightest joggle and people are strapped to their seats, no matter how much they might wish to use the facilities. On a ship, we were left to careen all over the place. Some people used the thoughtfully provided bedbelts. For one person, that was a wise choice. Although, on second thought, perhaps not, since ending up pinned between mattress and hull seems rather less envious than simply being rolled onto the floor and leaving the rest of the bed behind.

And then there is speed. In an airplane, nothing lasts for very long.

Pengies

The woman child's preferred term. Her charge to me was to get lots of baby pengie pics. At the risk of having NOW enforcers show up at my door bearing pastel truncheons to aid sensitivity training, it seems that doctrinaire feminism is up against rather more than male obstinacy. Based upon the reactions from my daughter's college suite mates that I overheard when I Skyped the first pengie pics her direction, young women haven't been noticeably separated from their maternal instincts.

Penguins are the starlings of the Antarctic. They are everywhere, in such conspicuous abundance as to be well outside the reach the warmenist parade of horribles.

The second thing you notice about them is their gathering into huge colonies, often, puzzlingly, much further from water than their comical gait would suggest.

The first thing is the smell. Even a nose of scarcely middling sensitivity will wrinkle at the whiff of penguin from a good 10 miles downwind. Whatever evolutionary reasons, no doubt good ones, underly their gathering in large, crowded groups, sanitation is not among them.

Actually, that is not quite fair. They excrete projectilely, with a lethal range of a good dozen feet, and are each quite assiduous about aiming away from their nest. Unfortunately, unless the nest is way out in pengie suburbia, widespread careful aiming ensures every bird is equally befouled. Sort of like carbon dating, it is fairly straightforward to judge how long a penguin has been sitting on a nest by counting the ordure streaks.

Capt Grumpy

On cruise ships, in addition to being god, the Captain has something of a PR role to play. Perhaps our Captain was preternaturally wary of pulling a Concordia (which should forever more by the term for running onto the rocks, either literally or metaphorically, while distracted by the extravagantly curved), and decided to keep a leash on it. Regardless of the reason, while he apparently gave the cruise line good value for their mariner dollar, by emitting piss-off rays he was rather letting down the side when it came to his public duties.

The crew complement was 70. The Capt was Danish, the First Mate appeared to be from northern European locale. All the rest were Philippine.

Things going bump in the night

Since our landings weren't too far apart, the ship often reached the next morning's destination by midnight, dropping the hook to hold position, since there were no docks to be had. The third night in, there happened to be quite few icebergs around.

At about 0200, there was a jarring clang. (It must be said that at that time of the morning, on a ship, putting "jarring" in front of clang verges on the repetitious.) Justifiably curious, I peered out the stateroom porthole just in time to see a berg slowly dragging by, scarcely three feet from my face.

A couple minutes later, the engines started, and the ship started to move. I'll bet Capt Grumpy was letting someone have it.

Stupid Pengies

Our last stop was Deception Island, the caldera of a volcano with just enough of a gap on one side to let ships in.

While we were being gawking tourists wandering a beach inside the crater, four penguins came walking by. Mystifyingly, they will waddle fair distances along the beach rather than resort to the water, where they are astonishingly graceful and fast. It is sort of like going to the store and deciding to take the pogo stick rather than a bicycle.

I happened upon a leopard seal, one of the penguins' primary predators, laying at the water's edge. Just a couple feet away there was a skua, a bird that is quite fond of dispatching with baby pengies, just sitting there. Neither was the least put off by a human wandering up. Nor were the strolling penguins, who stopped when they got to the seal and skua, then waddled right up to them.

Among the few creatures less mobile on land than a penguin is a leopard seal, and these birds were well beyond the max takeoff gross weight of a skua, so these pengies weren't in any peril. Clearly this was a case which, for both comic and revenge reasons, absolutely demanded these birds turn tail in unison, aim carefully, and let fly.

Especially since I had my camera ready. It would have been YouTube gold.

Stoopid pengies.

The Parade of Horribles

Since there was a great deal of killable time, particularly during the two days of getting pitched about crossing the Drake Passage, the expedition leaders would give lectures, typically three or four a day, until the bar opened at 4 pm, against which they couldn't possibly compete.

They were, in general, quite well done, and covered the relevant Antarctic topics quite well.

However, there was one exception. On the way back to the world as we know it, we were subjected to a lecture that we were assured was about catastrophic climate disruption. However, the lecture itself hadn't gotten the memo, as it was rife with references to global warming.

Regardless, it amounted to an hour long parade of the horribles, so rife with post hoc reasoning (receding glaciers), facially ridiculous evidence (extreme weather events), and heads-I-win-tails-you-lose arguments (advancing glaciers) as to make me wonder whether this particular expedition leader was, in fact, putting on a parody so convincing as to qualify as a gleicking.

On second thought, though, not. The religious among us are rarely blessed with self awareness when it comes to putting their beliefs on parade. By the end of it, my blood pressure had gone up a few points by being held captive as the parade went by. Thankfully, or perhaps providentially, though, I was in the midst of a day long attack of laryngitis, which prevented me from becoming One of Those People.

Make Work, Not Sense

The entire trip went exactly to plan; in particular, we were blessed with excellent weather by Antarctica standards. Except, perhaps, for a couple days of snow and rapidly forming sea ice. In high summer.

I would have been less puzzled if I had known that this oddity, for which global warming was perhaps not the best explanation, was actually yet another instance, since he was visiting the area about the same time we were there, of the Gore Effect.

Consequently, we got to the entrance of the Beagle channel at about 6 pm on the 10th, with four hours of sailing yet to go before reaching the dock at Ushuaia.

And then we dropped anchor. And waited.

And waited. And waited yet another 10 hours until a harbor pilot showed up to guide us the rest of the way.

Surprisingly, we mere passengers were allowed on the bridge. Being professionally interested in how ships do it, I had spent a fair amount of time up there, including our outbound passage, where I had seen, and wondered about, the pilot.

The Beagle Passage is confined, but not terribly so. And it isn't a straight shot, but it's far from convoluted. In fact, I rather got the impression that if the Captain was willing to take the bet that I could drive this thing from one end to the other, I'd take the money. For pete's sake, the thing is only going ten miles an hour, not much faster than a pogo stick.

On top of that, the ship had GPS—you might have heard about it—and a plotted course from point A to B. Pong would be a Mensa level challenge in comparison.

Why we needed a pilot for this when the Captain, grumpy though he may have been, had spent the previous week navigating much more treacherous channels was a mystery. Idling a ship for hours on end, as much time as it takes to get across the Pacific in an airplane, while waiting for said pilot to show up only added to the imponderosity.

I'm betting government is involved, somehow.

Penguins are endlessly entertaining. And the scenery, spared the erosive forces of rain and plants, is sufficiently alien to make it a little too easy to imagine having ended up, by sheer cosmic-level accident, on Titan. That feeling is only amplified by reflecting on how dead it all is: the entire continent with, penguins included, has less biological diversity than an acre of the Mojave Desert.

Having seen a pile of my inheritance go up in smoke, was it worth it?

Depends. If it was my money to spend, at my stage in life, absolutely not. However, for those who have been sufficiently [prudent | skillful | lucky] in life, at some point money becomes nothing more than numbers that will all too soon become completely worthless.

The other SWIPIAW occasionally reminds our kids that her fondest goal in life is to have the last check she writes bounce; that is the goal my mom should be pursuing.

I'm glad I got to help make it happen.

Really?

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 01:42:00 +0000

From today's NYT Magazine:

The latest austerity plan meant to satisfy Greece’s creditors and allow for new infusions of financial aid may have averted involuntary default — and a global economic downturn — but will nonetheless make life for ordinary Greeks even more difficult. The plan reduces the minimum wage by more than 20 percent ...

If reducing the minimum wage by 20% will make life for ordinary Greeks so much harder, then obviously the Greeks should quintuple it instead.

Your EPA InAction

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:47:00 +0000

Once upon a time, Anchorage had something of an air quality problem. The city is in a natural bowl, and could go days on end without any significant wind. So, despite being a smallish city (260,000) way the heck out in the middle of miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles, there was something of an air pollution problem.

In 1985 the EPA imposed a bi-annual automobile emissions testing program. There is no doubting that it imposed maintenance on cars that needed it and significantly reduced pollution. In fact, Anchorage hasn't violated clean air standards since 1997.

That is all well and good, and is an argument for government programs of the sort that address individual cost-benefit disconnects (i.e., where the cost to an individual of repairing a badly running car far exceeds the consequent incremental improvement in air quality).

Unfortunately, it is also highlights the problems that invariably attends such programs: ossification, and entrenched constituencies.

WASHINGTON - The Environmental Protection Agency on [January 9th] agreed to let Anchorage end its vehicle emissions testing program after 27 years, saying all the hassle isn't necessary for air quality.

On the face of it, in the land of cause and effect, one could place emissions testing on one side, and improved air quality on the other. Unfortunately, to stop there requires completely ignoring the closed-loop integration of digital engine controls, which started in the early 1990s, and has proceeded in earnest ever since. As older vehicles became increasingly rare in the wild, failures plummeted to a rate so low that their collective impact on air quality was inconsequential.

Which means the EPA came to its conclusion two years after the Anchorage City Council—finally yielding to reality over the imprecations of the emissions testing lobby and ecomentalists—voted to end the program a mere 13 years after the last air-quality violation.

What did this program cost?

[It required] that Anchorage drivers get their cars and trucks tested every two years and costs drivers a maximum [and minimum] of $68, depending on fees charged by the testing company. Cars up to 6 years old are exempt, as are antique cars.

Let's pull out that envelope, and turn it over. In 2003, Alaska had .4 vehicles per capita. For Anchorage, that works out to 104,000 cars and trucks. The average age of the US automobile fleet is 10.8 years. Without some sort of distribution to work with, guesstimation will have to do. Let's say that of those 104,000 cars, 1/3 are less than seven years old, and a vanishingly small number are older than 24. That yields 36,000 completely useless visits, 72,000 wasted hours*, and $2.5 million sacrificed to this local example of regulatory capture per year**. In fact, given the extremely low failure rate (less than 2%, at least some of which were due to false-positive On Board Diagnostic warnings), it is at least arguable that the additional vehicle trips of the other 98% meant the emissions testing program caused more vehicle emissions than it saved.

The EPA took two years to conclude the blindingly obvious. Adding injury to injury, back in 2010, the Assembly gave the emissions testing industry a further six months after an EPA decision with which to continue fleecing the motoring public.***

Despite being a classical liberal, I must admit there are classes of problems that market economics cannot solve. Yet this microcosmic example testifies to slothful bureaucracies, egged on by those grown used to the monetary effluence, frequently serve to only to perpetuate programs long since made useless.

Why the left is unable to take this on board is as mystifying as ...

Oh. Never mind. It is no more mystifying than reflecting upon who works for the EPA.

* You show up, and wait in line. If you are lucky, than you get right in, and the test takes about a half hour, excluding transit time. In my experience, which is why I don't play the horses, two hours is a much better bet.

** The EM places get to keep 70% of this. The municipality will have to increase other fees to make up the $800,000 per year in lost revenue. further research shows the actual numbers to be 45,000 tests and $3 million per year. But having used an envelope back, I am loath to delete its sacrifice.

*** Last week, Mayor Sullivan, put immediate cessation to a vote. He reasoned that the two years the EPA took to acknowledge the readily apparent was plenty of time. He won. That vote came a week after the emissions test expired for one of my cars. And which, due to my schedule, hasn't been on the road since. Two hours and $68 I'll never get back.

Going to the Land Waaaaay Down Under

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:41:00 +0000

Which means my posting, already not making up in quality what it lacks in frequency, will likely do a very good imitation of nil for the next several weeks.

Cause, Meet Effect II

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 16:21:00 +0000

From an editorial in today's NYT:

The gun lobby, fairly crowing, claims the spike in gun sales is because more people are feeling the need to protect themselves — even though the latest F.B.I. data show a 6 percent drop in violent crimes.

Huh?

Nervous flyers should not watch this.

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 23:17:00 +0000

Gee, I wonder why?

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:46:00 +0000

I'm going on a trip in January, about which I got a notice from the company:

[There is] a new Department of Transportation policy that goes into effect in 2012. It requires that government taxes and fees be reflected directly in air fare prices—instead of being listed separately and added to a trip price.

The correct word, by the way, is buried.

This is not a good sign

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 03:19:00 +0000

Toto, we are so not in Kansas

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 09:06:00 +0000

Reading todays Sunday Times, I came across the classifieds. The matrimonial classifieds. Perhaps I should mention at the outset it is the Times of Delhi at which I am gandering. Here a couple, out of a couple hundred, that caught my eye:

High Status South Delhi based industrialist Punjabi Arora family seeks alliance for their beautiful, fair, slim, charming, cultured Daughter. '81 born/5'5". Convent educated post graduate from most reputed Institute of Economics from London.

Looking for handsome, qualified, well settled in Business/Industrialist boy.

Caste no bar.

How nice.

On the flip side of this coin,

High Profile industrialist and multiple business Punjabi Saraswat Brahmin family invites alliance for their son, Manglik. Vegetarian, teetotaler, 5'7"/Sept 86/BBA from USA well settled in family business. Looking fro professionally qualified beautiful girl from similar status family.

Wondering: is caste a bar a bar to caste no bar?

Among the brides wanted section, the physical descriptions of the hopefuls rarely amounted to anything more than height and DOB.

Those seeking grooms are always a little more elaborate, adding at least a couple references looks, build, personality and sophistication. However, since the women are, a la Lake Wobegon, all either beautiful or very beautiful and slim and charming and sophisticated, these additional qualifiers are very little help. (Okay, I did find one that is homely and slim.)

Along that adjectival stream, roughly 70% of them plugged in either "fair" or "very fair".

None of the men seeking wives felt compelled to share in that regard.

Unsurprisingly, I suppose, not one ad noted either hair or eye color.

I'll bet there are a few lessons on human nature to be had here.

Nice Folks

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 07:16:00 +0000

ODL's contribution to political discourse.

An Eric's Progress*

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 01:17:00 +0000

The man-child just made Eagle Scout.

*h/t Brit

Crash starts with CRA

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 00:43:00 +0000

This is an extension of Stating the Obvious.

During the four years that have elapsed since Homeaggedon, you would think there would be some consensus around its causes. No, I don't mean the obvious one: all bankers are the unremitting, Snidely Whiplash personifications of total evil. Rather, whether there was some systemic element that ensured a housing bubble replaced the preceding secular trend in housing prices while virally undermining our economy.

Pace the MAL, there is a principal cause that by its very nature had to engender the worst recession in 60 years. Even worse, that cause came about only due to a breathtaking combination of stupidity, wishful thinking, untreatable ignorance and, in at least one case, destructive intent.

I am talking, of course about the Community Reinvestment Act.

The CRA was offspring of two seeming truisms. First, bankers were happy to take deposits from anywhere, but were racistly reluctant to lend in minority neighborhoods. Second, because home ownership is so strongly correlated with stable, law-abiding neighborhoods, government policies must step in where the market was so obviously failing.

Even taking those seeming truisms as given, analytical effort falling well short of mental exhaustion is sufficient to see the crater at which the CRA must arrive (as well as ascertain the MAL's, and ODLs', pervasive reality distortion field).

Since rascist bankers won't lend to the melanin gifted, they must be first urged, then increasingly forced, to do so in the face unyielding racism, as evidenced by the continuing reluctance to lend. But that means that money-grubbing bankers eager to make a profit wherever they can, must be first urged, then increasingly forced, to lend despite poor or non-existent credit ratings, limited employment history, and non-existent down payments.

Of course, bankers have always been willing to lend to people bearing those unfortunate stigma, but at a price: interest rates that reflected the associated higher default risk.

This is where, right at the beginning, the crash became inevitable. See if you can follow along; it really isn't too tough:

Homeownership is an unalloyed good.

Racist profiteering bankers willfully underserve challenged neighborhoods.

The lack of employment history and savings is unrelated to default risk.

Therefore, bankers must be encouraged to overcome their unwillingness.

When enouragment proves insufficient, coercion follows and erosion follows.

Coercion takes the form of congressional intervention in banking business decisions, based upon compliance.

Erosion takes several forms: elimination of downpayment requirements, employment and credit history.

The underlying presumption is (pick one or more) [extremely racist | a perfect example of magical thinking | fully intended to undermine the banking system].

Racist, because melanin gifted populations with otherwise identically risk enhanced financial characteristics are not nearly as likely to default as their melanin challenged counterparts. (As it turns out, the Boston Fed, through through the kind of incompetence and mendacity that is always accompanied by the modifiers "monumental" and "criminal" directly abetted that preposterous conclusion.)

Magical, because it required believing a simple, government imposed, solution could possibly solve a much more complex problem that by its very nature had to lie beyond congressional fiat.

There were some who both advocated the CRA, and hoped for its intended effect. (Note: this isn't part of the logic train, but rather an unanticipated consequence of looking into how inevitable the crash was.)

In order for the CRA to function (a goal hoped for by the drooling lackwits of both parties), the following had to happen:
- A vast expansion of GSEs and the secondary market.
- Bundling of mortgage backed securities.
- The hiding of high risk mortgages within those bundles

In short, the route from CRA to crater was so direct as to resemble the shortest, and most obvious, distance between points. It was a route that would never have been traveled without (mostly) well-intentioned idiots (Dodd, Frank, Clinton, Bush) forcing decisions that would never have occurred otherwise.

It is odd — okay, maybe it isn't — that the inchoate, incoherent, ill-educated (or wholly ineducable) flocks that comprise the ODLs never once mention the pivotal role that the CRA had in creating our crater. Just as no one seems to mention the Greek government, or the European Union, for the string of staggering stupidities that led them to their own perfectly foreseeable smoking hole.

Instead, it's all on Snidely.

It will take awhile to read these, but your time will be rewarded. Presuming, that is, you find being appalled rewarding:
Anatomy of Trainwreck: Causes of the Mortgage Meltdown
The Community Reinvestment Act, Evaluated
The Community Reinvestment Act's Harmful Legacy

Been there, seen that

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 23:31:00 +0000

I'm in San Francisco today, staying right next to Fisherman's Wharf, and a mile and a half or so from Occupy San Francisco.

In as much as it is a nice, if slightly cool day, I decided to assign the Daily Duck's crack San Francisco I'mwitless News Team (me) to some in person on the front lines reporting.

The occupation covers a small park 100 by 300 yards alongside the Embarcadero, and consists largely of large plastic tarps haphazardly providing top cover for REI castoff tents. The Occupation seems determined to deplete the world's supply of ugly signs. They run the gamut from inchoate to incoherent, with more than a dash of illiterate. Only one I saw made a lick of sense: "Don't Piss Here."

As for the oppressors, there were two police officers strolling around looking both very professional and completely bored.

Of course, this being the Wharf and Embarcadero, and a nice day, tourists abound. Not one of whom, even if pressed on the subject, could possibly give the appearance of caring even less about the Occupation than they already did.

A friend of mine who lives in the area says the Occupation leads the local news every night. It is no more apparent to him than to me as to why this should be so.

What is readily apparent though, is that anyone seeing even the slightest similarities between Occupy [anyplace with a lawn available for complete destruction] and the Tea Party, other than that both groups are bipedal, is either delusional or lying.

Rcist Bst*rds

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 07:46:00 +0000

Slate has a story noting, with some astonishment, the current popularity of Herman Cain with conservatives and Tea Party members.

The bafflegabment is easy to understand; after all, if the Tea Party is about anything, it is about racism, right?

Well, as it happens, there is some comforting news for the true believers:

But maybe the Tea Party shouldn’t be so cheery, says Christopher Parker. He’s an associate professor of political science at the University of Washington. In 2010, he was the lead investigator on an academic study of the Tea Party and race. The academics surveyed 117 “true believers” of the movement, alongside hundreds of “true skeptics,” people with mixed opinions, and people who didn’t know about the movement. Parker found that Tea Partiers held generally more negative views of blacks and Hispanics, measured in a number of ways.

One of Parker’s test statements was: “Irish, Italians, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without special favors.” Seventy percent of all white people in the study agreed; 88 percent of Tea Partiers agreed. Another statement: “If blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites.” Fifty-six percent of all white people agreed, and 73 percent of Tea Partiers. These are the kind of sentiments that Cain has voiced as he’s been asked about race. “He has an inspiring story,” says Parker. It doesn’t change the study’s conclusions.

Yep, no doubt about it, denying the bigotry of low expectations is the sure sign of fuming racism.

One-oh-Wonder

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 02:30:00 +0000

Shut Up and Color

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 06:54:00 +0000

The experts agree: AGW is big, it's bad, and it is coming soon to a biosphere near you.

According to Gary Gutting, professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, that means the rest of us have no option other than deference.

How can we, nonexperts, take account of expert opinion when it is relevant to decisions about public policy?

To answer this question, we need to reflect on the logic of appeals to the authority of experts. First of all, such appeals require a decision about who the experts on a given topic are. Until there is agreement about this, expert opinion can have no persuasive role in our discussions. Another requirement is that there be a consensus among the experts about points relevant to our discussion. Precisely because we are not experts, we are in no position to adjudicate disputes among those who are. Finally, given a consensus on a claim among recognized experts, we nonexperts have no basis for rejecting the truth of the claim.

These requirements may seem trivially obvious, but they have serious consequences. Consider, [AGW]. All creditable parties to this debate recognize a group of experts designated as “climate scientists,” whom they cite in either support or opposition to their claims about global warming.

The corporate view among climate scientists, outliers notwithstanding, is that Gaia is getting hot under the collar, and human activity is responsible for this onslaught of fever. Sure, there is some expert dispute, but since the consensus has decided upon AGW, and we non-experts are in no position to arbitrate, then it is crayons for us.

As long as [non-experts accept there is such a thing as expertise in climate science], they have no basis for supporting the minority position. Critics within the community of climate scientists may have a cogent case against A.G.W., but, given the overall consensus of that community, we non-experts have no basis for concluding that this is so. It does no good to say that we find the consensus conclusions poorly supported. Since we are not experts on the subject, our judgment has no standing.

From this it follows that non-experts, hereafter referred to as The Great Unwashed Masses (TGUMs), cannot argue against The Consensus; instead, those among the TGUMs who dispute AGW must argue that:

… climate science lacks the scientific status needed be taken seriously in our debates about public policy. There may well be areas of inquiry (e.g., various sub-disciplines of the social sciences) open to this sort of critique. But there does not seem to be a promising case against the scientific authority of climate science.

So, to summarize:

Once we have accepted the authority of a particular scientific discipline, we cannot consistently reject its conclusions. To adapt Schopenhauer’s famous remark about causality, science is not a taxi-cab that we can get in and out of whenever we like. Once we board the train of climate science, there is no alternative to taking it wherever it may go.

In other words, Shut Up and Color.

But does this conclusion follow?

On the face of it, contradiction should be hard to come by. After all, Dr. Gutting as a philosopher is a certified expert in constructing philosophical arguments. By definition, his expert argument on the expertise of experts must be immune to the inept pesterings of a TGUM.

His insistence upon accepting the consensus of experts does seem to accord reasonably well with experience. We take our cars in to mechanics — experts in the science of car repair — and rarely contradict their opinions on which framitz needs defargging. Similarly, faced with some significant malaise, people routinely get a second, or even third doctorial opinion; should those opinions coalesce into consensus, then we assume whatever position is required, and take what medically expert consensus sends our direction. The list goes on nearly without end: deference to physicists, accountants, and geologists in the realms of physics, making sense of IRS regulations and where to drill for oil goes without saying.

Therefore, failing to defer to climate scientists must be a singular case of irrationality.

Unless, of course, our expert philosopher has created an argument that assumes, conceals, neglects, or is ignorant of, rather a lot.

He assumes that since climatologists are doing sciency things, their product is science. However, in order for a hypothesis to qualify as a scientific theory, it must have deductive consequences. For example, a deductive consequence of naturalistic evolution is that inheritance must be particular, not blended. Unfortunately, climate science is so devoid of deductive consequences that it explains everything. In so doing, it is indistinguishable from religion: by explaining everything, it actually explains nothing.

Going one long step further, he also assumes (although implicitly insists is probably closer to the mark) that climate science is so arcane that its content is beyond the ken of TGUMs. This insistent assumption is striking. I have a book that convincingly explains relativity to TGUMs, thereby justifying its experts. Surely, climate science can't be more difficult to apprehend than the singular intellectual accomplishment of the modern era.

Then there is the matter of judging the experts' performance. If my mechanic tells me my framitz is fargged, when all along the wishbone was whacky, then his expertise is something less than total. Except as a contrived exercise in post hoc reasoning, climate scientists routinely fail to meaningfully predict actual climate trends. That alone is no source of comfort; after all, they could be wrong in not being right enough. However, their predictions have, at best, uniformly exceeded subsequent observations. Harold Camping assured us the apocalypse was to happen on May 21st. In the late 80s, Dr. Hansen assured us that NYC's West Side Highway would be underwater by now. Based upon the evidence, I have no more reason to suspect that Dr. Hansen's expertise in climate science is any more elevated than Harold Camping's is in apocalypse science.

TGUMs have no need to acknowledge expertise simply because a self anointed group claims it for themselves. Rather, deferring to that claim, when reality has so relentlessly contradicted it, and the costs of doing so, both in terms of economics and freedom, are so high would be irrational folly of the first order.

Dr. Gutter's insistence on our submission to the god of consensus isn't philosophy, it is theology.

Oh, by the way, stay inside the lines. Or else.

Cause, meet Effect

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 16:44:00 +0000

From today's NYT Op-Ed The Misuse of Life Without Parole:

From 1992 to 2008, the number in prison for life without parole tripled from 12,453 to 41,095, even though violent crime declined sharply all over the country during that period.

Huh?

Stating the Obvious

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 17:05:00 +0000

For those who can't determine the link between the CRA and the collapse of the housing market, look here (read it in its entirety):

The data shows that the principal buyers [of almost 25 million subprime and other nonprime mortgages—almost half of all U.S. mortgages] were insured banks, government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the FHA—all government agencies or private companies forced to comply with government mandates about mortgage lending. When Fannie and Freddie were finally taken over by the government in 2008, more than 10 million subprime and other weak loans were either on their books or were in mortgage-backed securities they had guaranteed. An additional 4.5 million were guaranteed by the FHA and sold through Ginnie Mae before 2008, and a further 2.5 million loans were made under the rubric of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which required insured banks to provide mortgage credit to home buyers who were at or below 80% of median income. Thus, almost two-thirds of all the bad mortgages in our financial system, many of which are now defaulting at unprecedented rates, were bought by government agencies or required by government regulations.

No surprise, really. The logic of the CRA ensured this outcome to anyone more sentient than Barney Frank.

TDD Readers Already Know This

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 19:31:00 +0000

Aircraft automation may be eroding pilots' skills

WASHINGTON — Pilots' "automation addiction" has eroded their flying skills to the point that they sometimes don't know how to recover from stalls and other midflight problems, say pilots and safety officials. The weakened skills have contributed to hundreds of deaths in airline crashes in the last five years.

Fifty-one "loss of control" accidents occurred in which planes stalled in flight or got into unusual positions from which pilots were unable to recover, making it the most common type of airline accident, according to the International Air Transport Association.
"We're seeing a new breed of accident with these state-of-the-art planes," said Rory Kay, an airline captain and co-chair of a Federal Aviation Administration advisory committee on pilot training. "We're forgetting how to fly."
Opportunities for airline pilots to maintain their proficiency by manually flying planes are increasingly limited, the FAA committee recently warned. Airlines and regulators discourage or even ban pilots from turning off the autopilot and flying planes themselves, the panel said.

Hmmm. I think I remember something about this a month and a half ago.

If the training environment reflected [an automation driven] culture, then training would tend to emphasize flying through the Flight Management System. The consequence could be pilots who are very good at translating required performance into FMS commands, but who have completely lost sight of the essential relationships involved in obtaining desired performance.

The article is pretty good the concepts, and does reasonably well on the details. Regulations have effectively banned hand flying the aircraft above FL270 (approximately 27,000 feet) over the last six or so years; however, that is a realm where hardly anyone hand flew previously. Airlines vary in their approach to automation, both among themselves and over time. When I was at Northwest, the operations manual actively encouraged turning off all automation when conditions were permissive. My current airline used to actively discourage shutting off the Flight Management System and the Auto Thrust System (ATS). It has now gone the opposite direction.

Some mishaps that the article lumps under eroded pilot skills are really failure to monitor performance, which is probably more a consequence of complacency. Just over two years a Turkish Airlines 737 crashed short of the runway at Amsterdam Schiphol. A malfunctioning radar altimeter feeding bad data to the ATS, causing it to command idle thrust. The flight crew failed to notice the 60 knot airspeed decay over more than a minute and a half. The Captain's response to the stall warning was quick and correct, but there was insufficient altitude remaining to effect a recovery.

If They were to ask me, which They won't, I would tell Them to include various autoflight system failures in both initial and recurrent training (my airline's recurrent training has added much more manual flying to recurrent training, but there are no AFS failure scenarios). While They are at it, They need to add a currency requirement for completely manual arrivals (AP and ATS off, FMS off on the flying pilot's side).

Steam gauge airplanes separated pilots from the pedestrians. It is time to turn up the steam.

Bear Blogging

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:42:00 +0000

Today The Volokh Conspiracy posts a couple bear photos taken at Yellowstone.

So, in that spirit, here are a couple close-ups from last week, when Rusty the Alaskan Wilderness Adventure Dog put a bear and her cubs up a tree in our backyard:

Unfortunately, she shows signs of habituating to humans.

AF447 — A Bad Attitude

noreply@blogger.com (Hey Skipper) — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 01:11:00 +0000

Previously, in Air France 447 — Summarizing the Summary, I outlined the mishap sequence, and related how a combination of unknowingly inadequate pitot probe design and testing allowed the possibility of complete loss of airspeed sensing due to icing.

All of which leaves completely untouched a fundamental question. How does the complete loss of airspeed indications cripple an aircraft?

Short answer: it doesn't.

(Note: the following was extremely difficult to write, because the conclusions I have drawn are extremely unpleasant. If my tone seems unduly harsh, particularly considering I am speaking of the dead, that is unfortunate, but unavoidable.)

Immediately after AF447's pitot probes iced over, the autopilot shut itself off, the fly-by-wire flight control system (FBW FCS) degraded to alternate law. (Alternate law is the first level of A3xx FCS degradation. The main differences between Normal and Alternate laws are the latter's lack of flight envelope protection -- which means the airplane can be flown into a stall -- flight management system (FMS), autopilot and auto throttles.) Which means that the pilots were left hand flying an airplane with fully functional engines, flight controls, attitude indicators, altimeters, and vertical speed indicators, but without any direct way of knowing that thing responsible for creating distance between dirt and plane; namely, how fast it is going through the air.

The Pilot Flying's (PF) (In the big airplane world, the two pilots have sharply delineated duties. The PF, as the term indicates, is responsible for maintaining aircraft control, directing configuration changes, and calling for checklists. The other pilot is referred to as the Pilot Monitoring (PM), and is responsible for communications, flight plan, executing checklists, FMS inputs other than during cruise, and monitoring aircraft performance. While ultimate decision authority always rests with the Captain, typically the Capt and First Officer will alternate PF and PM on each leg during a trip.) response was to increase pitch attitude to at least twice that possible for sustained flight at FL350, resulting in a climb rate far exceeding available excess power.

(In the airplane I fly, the first two steps for loss of airspeed are turn off the autoflight system then stabilize pitch and power at normal cruise values.)

In other words, the PF was trading airspeed for altitude, until the airplane no longer had any speed to give. At this point, the airplane is at the stall angle of attack (AOA), which is the angle between the wing and relative wind that produces maximum lift. Cruise AOA is roughly 2-3 degrees; stall AOA is about 22 degrees. Approaching stall AOA, drag dramatically increases.

At high altitude, there is only one way out of this: down. Because the airplane was so far into the region of reverse command (AKA being behind the power curve), the PF needed to set the pitch attitude at 5 - 10 degrees below the horizon, select max power, and sacrifice altitude in order to regain airspeed. Instead, the PF drove the elevator to the maximum nose up position and flew the airplane into an aft stick stall, characterized by very low forward speed and extremely high rate of descent.

Then did nothing about it.

All this time, the PM did not note the wildly excessive pitch attitude, unsustainable climb rate, or the gross altitude deviation. Even passing through 10,000 feet, after having lost four miles of altitude, and having mentioned that salient fact, the pilots completely failed to apply any control or power inputs to break the glaringly apparent stall.

The available evidence points in one direction: pilot error of such magnitude as to defy explanation.

There are some contributory factors.

FBW FCSs have their advantages, but one thing they do not provide is aerodynamic feedback. An Old School FCS (OS FCS) is "speed stable", which means the flight controls, all other things being equal, will get very heavy in the nose down direction with a significant loss of airspeed. By the time AF447 reached stall AOA, an OS FCS would have had something like 70 pounds of nose down control forces. In contrast, with a FBW FCS there is no feedback whatsoever of changing airspeed into the flight controls. A FBW FCS is, all things considered, better than an OS FCS when everything is working. However, should multiple system failures put the FCS into a degraded mode, a FBW FCS has no inherent self correction.

[IMHO] Adding to the debit side of the ledger is the "pilot out of the loop" problem that has come along with the "glass-cockpit" territory, regardless of FCS type. Prior to roughly the mid-1980s, aircraft cockpits had "steam gauges", round dial electromechanical indicators, and did not have flight management systems worthy of the name. Steam gauge instrument flying, done well, requires a high-rate observe / orient / decide / act (OODA) loop: observe airspeed, heading, and vertical speed / orient those observations with respect to desired parameters / decide what changes in power and attitude are required to eliminate the difference between observed and desired parameters / move the flight controls and power levers as required.

Glass cockpits come with very capable FMSs, which led many flight departments (including, until a year or so ago, the one at the company for which I work) to essentially require use of the flight director except in very abnormal circumstances. Relying on a flight director makes the OODA loop a pointless exercise. No need to decide on attitude and power, just center the pitch and bank steering bars; it is a task even a modestly gifted monkey can manage.

But wait, there's more. Transport category aircraft completely exclude the most fundamental parameter of them all: wing AOA. Yes, the ATC system is very much like a conductor and a symphony orchestra, where airspeed stands in for rhythm. Since, for a given airspeed, AOA varies based upon weight and configuration, having a bunch of airplanes flying around at their individual optimum AOAs won't work. But, for pete's sake, if the FMS is smart enough to know airspeed is unreliable, the least it can do is replace it with an alternate means of determining speed. One which, BTW, is far less prone to icing, and is mechanically far simpler, than air pressure sensing.

So. FBW airplanes are perfectly happy to run out of airspeed right when knowing airspeed is impossible. Glass cockpits can turn piloting into monkey business. Airliner design and pilot training, no matter how much ingenuity was brought to bear, could more thoroughly ignore an alternate means of determining airspeed.

Does all that suffice to explain putting an otherwise completely flyable airplane into a deep stall, then riding it in?

No.

Using Sherlockian reasoning -- having eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must contain the explanation -- the only alternative left is sheer incompetence. A flight deck with three ostensibly fully qualified pilots were incapable of maintaining basic aircraft control in a situation that, had they done nothing more than stare with gobsmacked amazement we would never have heard about.

[/IMHO]

To an even greater extent than the sea, the sky is incredibly unforgiving of any human carelessness, incapacity, or neglect.
-- unknown