Apparently the Daniel Davies who tried in vain to save us from financial apocalypse is Daniel Davies the blogger. Anyways, here’s the Financial Times:

“The highest bonuses usually go to ‘stars’, who may feel compelled to justify their status by taking greater risks in the hope of making higher and higher profits,” Daniel Davies, a senior economist at the Bank wrote .

“Employees’ contracts almost always involve limited liability; they may share profits from favourable trading outcomes but it is difficult or impossible to make them compensate their employers for losses,” he added. That same year, Howard Davies, then the Bank’s deputy governor, threatened to set more stringent capital requirements for banks that paid big bonuses. [...]

Daniel Davies recommended that banks consider introducing deferred bonus schemes, where bonuses would be allocated for a trading period but not paid until some time later. “This gives firms the opportunity to pay negative bonuses by removing money from the deferred bonus if performance deteriorates,” the economist wrote.

The Bank wanted bonus schemes to put greater emphasis on traders’ long-term performance. But City institutions defended their pay practices and said that attempts to regulate would be counter-productive.

Sure glad we didn’t do anything counterproductive!

A comprehensive (?) list of times characters have used the word “penny” on the various Star Trek shows. Apparently such “old Earth” adages as “a penny for your thoughts” and “in for a penny, in for a pound” will persist into the distant future.

I did a post last month on some of the differences between classical liberalism and modern libertarianism but I don’t think I was making myself very clear. A practical example, however, helps.

Nowhere in the works of Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill, for example, is there anything about how if science indicates that certain form of human activity that was long thought to be harmless to others is, in fact, doing massive, hard-to-reverse damage to the long-term interests of billions of people that the correct response is to retreat into dogma and ignorance. And yet here’s Cato Institute Executive Vice President David Boaz teaming up with Washington Post columnist George Will to push the idea that there was a 1970s-era scientific consensus that we were facing dangerous “global cooling” and that, therefore, we shouldn’t take today’s warnings about global warming seriously.

The fact of the matter is that there was a bunch of media hype in the 1970s about a cooling trend. Now as probably know, the media sometimes hypes up bogus trend stories with no real basis in evidence. Neither Will nor Boaz are small children or lobotomy victims, so presumably they understand this, too. And that’s exactly what was happening in the 70s:

The supposed “global cooling” consensus among scientists in the 1970s — frequently offered by global-warming skeptics as proof that climatologists can’t make up their minds — is a myth, according to a survey of the scientific literature of the era.

The ’70s was an unusually cold decade. Newsweek, Time, The New York Times and National Geographic published articles at the time speculating on the causes of the unusual cold and about the possibility of a new ice age.

But Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends.

Yes, that’s right, even in the 60s and 70s the bulk of scientific concern was about warming. The evidence was, at that time, tenuous. But it’s grown steadily in every passing decade. This is not media hype. It’s real science. It’s possible, of course, that the vast majority of competent scientists are all part of a vast conspiracy to defraud the public into believing that human activity is causing the planet to warm. But it’s hard to see why that would happen. It is, however, easy to see why polluting industries and their hirelings in the think tank world would want to pretend that this is what’s happening.

Ross Douthat sketches out a vision of American politics in which it seems that everyone’s a non-hispanic white:

Here I’m starting from the premise that American politics has been fitfully sorting itself into a meritocracy-versus-populism dynamic, with one party (the Democrats) dominated by the mass upper class and the other party (the GOP) representing the middle and working-class voters who resent this newish elite, for good reasons and for bad.

You can see where he’s coming from. But what’s happened to the staff at the Safeway on my block? These are unionized workers, mostly black, mostly female—it’s a pretty hard-core Democrat-loving group. Nor do the good people of José Serrano’s congressional district seem to me to be members of the “mass upper class.”

Now perhaps what Ross means is that the Democratic Party is “dominated” by the mass upper class in the sense that the leaders of the Democratic Party establishment tend to come from the party’s upscale wing rather than its downscale wing. That’s true—to a first approximation the leadership is a multiracial group of lawyers from fancy schools. But by the same token it’s also true that the Republican Party is dominated by its upscale wing. Johnny Isakson may in some sense “represent” a middle-and-working class constituency but his personal fortune is valued in the $8-24 million range. Mitch McConnel who likes to play a Europe-hating rube in TV is in the $3-13 million range.

Long story short, the fact of the matter is that Republican voters are richer on average than Democratic voters.