Groceries are quite expensive at the Providenciales supermarket compared to what you pay in Washington, DC which induced me to want to find out if the price level overall is higher here or if it’s just food. That led me to this neat map of Purchasing Power Parity all around the world:
Richer countries have higher price levels in general. But Japan is not richer than France, Germany, and the UK which makes its high cost of living evidence of a low-productivity service sector.
Tyler Cowen responds to charges of pessimism:
If the numbers for median income growth are low we ought to take that seriously, as does Scott Sumner. We are not cheerleaders per se (BC: “I’m baffled why Tyler would focus on slight declines in American growth when the world just had the best decade ever.” Is it then wrong to focus on any other problems at all? I also was one of the first people to make the “best decade ever” argument, which I still accept.) Medians also matter for the political climate, even though the median earner is not exactly the median voter. Adam Smith’s welfare economics was basically that of the median, a point which David Levy has made repeatedly.
I’m also being called a “pessimist” a lot. Yet in my view our current technological plateau won’t last forever. That’s probably more optimistic than the Hacker-Pierson approach, which requires a Progressive revolution in economic policy (unlikely), although it is not more optimistic than denying the relevance of the numbers.
I more often get this from the other direction where people mistake my agreement with the assertion that 2000-2010 was about the best decade ever for humanity with undue complacency about the problems of the world. But the fact of the matter is that it can both be true that rapid catch-up growth in large population poor countries is a huge step forward for human welfare, and also true that developed countries in general and the United States of America in particular, seem to have run aground to an extent. Indeed, even though it’s not rational for people in rich countries to feel threatened or upset about catching-up happening abroad, it’s also very natural. We would probably feel better about the slow rate of growth in the US over the past 10 years if it had nonetheless been the fastest growth in the world. But, plainly, it wasn’t.
Koch Industries, the private company of the billionaire Koch brothers, is one of the primary sources of carbon pollution in the United States. However, the actual emissions profile of the diversified giant, with its oil and gas, chemicals, cattle, forestry, and synthetics holdings, is unknown, because of the lack of mandatory carbon reporting in the United States. Furthermore, Koch is exempt from the risk disclosures that are standard for public corporations. The financial status of Koch Industries is similarly clouded in secret, with only vague statements of annual revenue around $100 billion and the Forbes estimates of the principals’ extraordinary wealth. Charles and David Koch have directed many millions of their shared $43 billion net worth into a vast propaganda machine denying the threat of global warming pollution, corrupting American politics to permit their pollution-based enterprise to continue.
Below, the Wonk Room makes some estimates of the Koch Industries carbon footprint, based on the pollution generated by its activities and from the use of the products it sells:
The Koch Industries Carbon Footprint Is About 300 Million Tons. With the assumption that Koch has a carbon intensity on the order of oil majors such as Chevron and ExxonMobil, each billion dollars of revenue corresponds to 2 to 4 million tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gases. Therefore, each year, Koch Industries is likely responsible for about 300 million tons of carbon dioxide pollution every year. Flint Hills Resources, Koch’s refining subsidiary, processes 300 million barrels of oil a year. This one company — with its refining, pipeline, chemical, fertilizer, cattle, and forestry operations — is involved in up to five percent of the entire United States 7-gigaton carbon footprint.
Koch Climate Denial Is Dirty Self Interest. The virulence of the Koch brothers’ opposition to climate policy — to anything that would make polluters instead of society pay for the cost of their pollution — is purely a matter of self-interest. The immense profitability of their carbon holdings depends on their freedom to pollute without consequence — a toxic freedom they have sold to the American public, and particularly the Tea Party faithful organized by the various Koch front groups, as inherent to the American dream. If their pollution was fairly priced in a free-market system such as the cap-and-trade markets the Koch successfully demonized in Washington (but failed in their attempt to do so in California), the Kochs would be facing costs of anywhere from $1 billion to $40 billion a year. Spending well less than $1 billion a year on their political and philanthropic activities, the Kochs have made a brilliant investment to defend their killer business model.
The Carbon Liability Of The Kochs Is Hundreds Of Billions Of Dollars. Over the lifetime of the Koch Industries, as it has grown from a $100 million enterprise built on oil refining in Stalinist Russia to one of the largest private companies in the world, its cumulative carbon footprint rivals that of most nations. Experts estimate that the social cost of carbon — the true cost to society of global warming pollution — is between $30 and $300 per ton of carbon dioxide. The potential liability the Kochs face for having knowingly destabilized the global climate system — and funded a propaganda network to prevent political action to end their pollution — represents practically the whole of their wealth.
Charles And David Koch Each Have A Carbon Footprint Of 100 Million Tons. The average American has a carbon footprint of 19 tons of carbon dioxide a year — much greater than the European average of 9 tons, the Chinese average of 5 tons, or India’s annual average of 1.4 tons of carbon dioxide per person. However, the annual carbon footprint of the Charles and David Koch is on the order of 100 million tons of carbon dioxide each. Just as their personal wealth is staggeringly greater than that of the average American, so is their damage to this planet.
Koch’s carbon pollution is inherent to its business model, putting them in direct opposition to people who care about preserving God’s creation and their children’s future.
UPDATE: See “Expert consensus grows on contribution of record high food prices to Middle East unrest” and my ongoing series on “food insecurity.” Get daily updates on climate and energy by clicking here.
Political unrest has broken out in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt and other Arab countries. Social media and governmental policies are getting most of the credit for spurring the turmoil, but there’s another factor at play.
Many of the people protesting are also angry about dramatic price hikes for basic foodstuffs, such as rice, cereals, cooking oil and sugar.
That’s from the NPR story today, “Rising Food Prices Can Topple Governments, Too.”
This summer’s extreme global weather raised fears of a “Coming Food Crisis,” as CAP’s John D. Podesta and Jake Caldwell warned in Foreign Policy: “Global food security is stretched to the breaking point, and Russia’s fires and Pakistan’s floods are making a bad situation worse.” Earlier this month I discussed how, in fact, “Extreme weather events helped drive food prices to record highs.” Back then, experts were worried about food riots. Now they are happening.
UPDATE: The anti-science, pro-pollution crowd are going flat-earth over this post because I point out that leading political experts say the Middle East rioting is driven in part by the dramatic rise in food prices, which the agricultural experts say is driven in large part by oil prices and the extreme weather we’ve seen in the last few months. Of course, the climate science experts have been saying for a while now that the extreme weather is driven in large part by human emissions — see Terrific ABC News story: “Raging Waters In Australia and Brazil Product of Global Warming” and Munich Re: “The only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change.” See also Russian President Medvedev: “What is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past.” — NYT: “Russia Bans Grain Exports After Drought Shrivels Crop” I have some more comments on this at the end, but the analysis as written here stands.
The Washington Post reported on the connection between food prices and Tunisian violence in mid-January, in a piece headlined, “Spike in global food prices contributes to Tunisian violence”:
Thousands of Egyptians continue to take to the streets in protest of President Hosani Mubarak’s 30-year-long authoritarian regime. But while the Obama Administration inches towards public support for the Egyptian people, many Republican hardliners are throwing up roadblocks to U.S. endorsement of democratic reform. Their delusion-du-jour? The threat of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Those who subscribe to Rep. Thaddeus McCotter’s (R-MI) and Amb. John Bolton’s fear-mongering warn that the inevitable result of this pro-democracy movement will be the enfranchisement of the Muslim Brotherhood and other anti-American “jihadist nutjobs.”
Today on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, former International Atomic Energy Agency director, Egyptian activist, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei blasted the delusion as a “myth” lacking “one iota of reality.” Intimately familiar with both Iranian and Egyptian politics, ElBaradei pointed out that the Muslim Brotherhood is not actually an extremist group and the idea that extremists would takeover the government is just a myth “perpetuated and sold” by the Mubarak regime:
ZAKARIA: One of the visions that haunts Americans is of the Iranian Revolution where a dictator was replaced by an even worse regime that was more anti-American and more threatening to the region. People worry about the Muslim Brotherhood. Are you confident that a post-Mubarak Egypt will not give rise to some kind of Islamic fundamentalist force that will undermine the democracy of Egypt?
ELBARADEI: I’m quite confident of that, Fareed. This is a myth that was sold by the Mabarak regime, that it’s either us — the ruthless dictators — or a Muslim al-Qaeda type. The Muslim Brotherhood has nothing to do with the Iranian movement, has nothing to do with extremism as we have seen it in Afghanistan and other places. The Muslim Brotherhood is a religiously conservative group. They are a minority in Egypt. They are not a majority of the Egyptian people, but they have a lot of credibility because of liberal parties have been a struggle for thirty years. They are in favor of a secular state. they are of –they are in favor of an institution that have bread lines, they are in favor that every Egyptian have the same rights, that the state is in no way a state based on religion. And I have been reaching out to them. We need to include them. They are as much a part of society as the markets that started here. I think this is a myth that has been perpetuated and sold by the regime and has no iota of reality. You know Fareed, I worked with Iranians, I’ve worked here. It’s 100 percent difference between the two societies.
Watch it:
While the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood had supported violence at one time, the conservative group is “Egypt’s largest opposition group” and “has disavowed violence and sought to participate in Egyptian politics” legitimately since the 1970s. Now allied with legal Egyptian political groups and tied to Egyptian professional unions, university campuses, and social welfare programs, the Brotherhood is a “peaceful” group that “could draw moderate Muslims who identify with [its] ideology to participate in electoral politics, thereby isolating violent jihadis.” Indeed, the Brotherhood denounced a recent terrorist attack in Egypt as a “cowardly act” and is not on the U.S. State Department’s terrorist list.
Though banned by Mubarak’s regime from participating in parliamentary elections, the Brotherhood has 17 supportive representatives in the Egyptian Parliament and is supporting ElBaradei’s leadership role in forming a new government without Mubarak. ElBaradei, who is now in Cairo to join the protests, called on Mubarak to resign “today” to allow for a “smooth transition to a national unity government to be followed by all the measures set in place for a free and fair election.” While avoiding support of his ouster, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton endorsed the idea of fair elections today.
Richard Ramsey writes about Fox Geezer Syndrome:
Over the past couple of years, I’ve been keeping track of a trend among friends around my age (late thirties to mid-forties). Eight of us (so far) share something in common besides our conservatism: a deep frustration over how our parents have become impossible to take on the subject of politics. Without fail, it turns out that our folks have all been sitting at home watching Fox News Channel all day – especially Glenn Beck’s program.
The years 2009 and 2010 were a period of declining popularity for Barack Obama, for the Democratic Party, and for progressive politics in the United States of America. Under the circumstances, it’s tempting to examine any particular trend in American political life that operated in parallel to this and see it as advantageous to conservative politics. Hence the skyrocketing popularity of a deliberate kind of political entertainment in which folks like Glenn Beck lie to gullible conservatives about what’s happening in America appear to many as a form of successful political tactic. In reality, however, the declining popularity of Obama, Democrats, and progressives can be easily attributable to poor economic conditions. Now that trends have leveled off and Obama is back at 50 percent and we seem to be headed for a span of so-so growth I think we’re going to find that while Beck has certainly carved out a lucrative business niche for himself, that in political terms creating a paranoid and misinformed base is not helpful.
For the first time during the uprising in Egypt, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who appeared on all the major Sunday talk shows this morning, called for Egypt to hold free and fair elections that would ensure “real democracy.” This was another sign that the Administration was distancing itself from Egypt’s President, Hosni Mubarak, since a transition to democratic government would clearly result in his removal from power. On ABC’s This Week, Clinton, after saying that Egypt had in the past been a close partner, said:
Real stability only comes from the kind of democratic participation that gives people a chance to feel that they are being heard. And by that I mean real democracy, not a democracy for six months or a year and then evolving into essentially a military dictatorship or a so-called democracy that then leads to what we saw in Iran.
Watch it:
The Administration has been accused of being too slow in calling for the removal of Mubarak, a long time US ally. But in calling for an “orderly transition,” which Clinton did on Fox News Sunday, she seemed to be suggesting, as Massimo Calabresi interpreted, “that the administration is beginning to view embattled President Hosni Mubarak’s days as numbered.” Clinton’s comments today are therefore the strongest yet and seem to clearly recognize that Mubarak’s situation has become untenable.
David Sanger and Helene Cooper explain the Obama administration’s thinking in not directly calling for Hosni Mubarak to resign:
President Obama’s decision to stop short, at least for now, of calling for Hosni Mubarak’s resignation was driven by the administration’s concern that it could lose all leverage over the Egyptian president, and because it feared creating a power vacuum inside the country, according to administration officials involved in the debate.
In recounting Saturday’s deliberations, they said Mr. Obama was acutely conscious of avoiding any perception that the United States was once again quietly engineering the ouster of a major Middle East leader.
I hesitate to say much of anything about this because, again, what the heck do I know about Egypt. But given that the country is scheduled to have a presidential election in 2012, the terms of that vote rather than the disposition of Mubarak right now seem to me to be the key issue. Obviously, Egypt’s presidential elections are shams. Appointing a new president for 18 months and then holding a new sham election doesn’t do much good. What’s really needed is concessions around the electoral process to give opposition candidates a fair chance.
Earlier this month, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) admitted during an appearance at the National Press Club that failing to raise the nation’s debt ceiling when the legal borrowing limit is reached in the coming months is “unworkable.” “Does it have to be raised? Yes, you can’t not raise the debt ceiling,” Ryan said. However, acknowledging that reality didn’t stop Ryan from taking the debt ceiling hostage to unspecified spending cuts and “fiscal controls.”
Today, on Fox News Sunday, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) pulled a similar stunt. He first said that House Republicans aren’t willing to raise the debt ceiling unless doing so is accompanied by deep spending cuts, but then admitted that failing to raise the debt ceiling would be a “disaster”:
That would be a financial disaster, not only for our country but for the worldwide economy. Remember, the American people on election day said, ‘we want to cut spending and we want to create jobs.’ And you can’t create jobs if you default on the federal debt.
Watch it :
Boehner is right that failing to raise the debt ceiling would be disastrous, rendering his and his party’s threats not to do so quite irresponsible. While Treasury could shuffle money around to avoid default if the debt ceiling is not raised, financial markets would likely be shaken, the government may have to shut down, and, as the Center for American Progress’ David Min pointed out, interest costs on the U.S. debt would spike, making the long-term budget situation worse:
If in the near term these rates moved even to 5.9 percent, the long-term rate predicted by the Congressional Budget Office, then our interest payments would increase by more than double, to nearly $600 billion a year. These rates could climb even higher, if investors began to price in a “default risk” into Treasurys—something that reckless actions by Congress could potentially spark—thus greatly exacerbating our budget problems…In short, a freeze on the debt ceiling would cause our interest payments to spike, making our budget situation even more problematic.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) also said that failing to raise the debt ceiling would result in “collapse and calamity throughout the world,” while demanding regressive cuts to Social Security in return for his vote to increase the limit.
Cross-posted on The Wonk Room.
Earlier this month, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) admitted during an appearance at the National Press Club that failing to raise the nation’s debt ceiling when the legal borrowing limit is reached in the coming months is “unworkable.” “Does it have to be raised? Yes, you can’t not raise the debt ceiling,” Ryan said. However, acknowledging that reality didn’t stop Ryan from taking the debt ceiling hostage to unspecified spending cuts and “fiscal controls.”
Today, on Fox News Sunday, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) pulled a similar stunt. He first said that House Republicans aren’t willing to raise the debt ceiling unless doing so is accompanied by deep spending cuts, but then admitted that failing to raise the debt ceiling would be a “disaster”:
That would be a financial disaster, not only for our country but for the worldwide economy. Remember, the American people on election day said, ‘we want to cut spending and we want to create jobs.’ And you can’t create jobs if you default on the federal debt.
Watch it :
Boehner is right that failing to raise the debt ceiling would be disastrous, rendering his and his party’s threats not to do so quite irresponsible. While Treasury could shuffle money around to avoid default if the debt ceiling is not raised, financial markets would likely be shaken, the government may have to shut down, and, as the Center for American Progress’ David Min pointed out, interest costs on the U.S. debt would spike, making the long-term budget situation worse:
If in the near term these rates moved even to 5.9 percent, the long-term rate predicted by the Congressional Budget Office, then our interest payments would increase by more than double, to nearly $600 billion a year. These rates could climb even higher, if investors began to price in a “default risk” into Treasurys—something that reckless actions by Congress could potentially spark—thus greatly exacerbating our budget problems…In short, a freeze on the debt ceiling would cause our interest payments to spike, making our budget situation even more problematic.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) also said that failing to raise the debt ceiling would result in “collapse and calamity throughout the world,” while demanding regressive cuts to Social Security in return for his vote to increase the limit.
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