I’ve blogged in the past about the Hope Street Group – a potentially damn interesting set of ’emergent liberals’ based here in Los Angeles.
They’re hosting a competition:
* Papers are due Friday, January 30, 2004.
* Papers may be submitted in any of five topic areas: (1) budget and tax policy; (2) water policy; (3) housing and/or transportation policy; (4) energy policy; and (5) education policy.
* Papers will be judged primarily on the extent to which they provide concise, well- substantiated, concrete ideas for overcoming political and financial barriers to Opportunity Economics in California. Opportunity Economics refers to the notion that economic growth is a crucial precondition for expanding equal opportunity for all, and also that such expansions of opportunity promote long-term prosperity. For more information, see ?Building the Opportunity Economy,? at http://www.hopestreetgroup.org/publications.htm.
* Five winners shall be chosen, one for each of the five topic areas. A grand prize winner shall be selected from among the five winning papers, and will receive a cash award of $2,500. A second prize winner shall also be selected from among the five winning papers, and will receive $1,000. The other three winning authors will each receive $500.
* The grand prize winner will have the opportunity to present his or her paper at a seminar sponsored by the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley.
Check it out. I’m continually impressed by the level of dialog in the comments to this blog. If you’re a reader here, go write something then submit it.
Maybe I’ll even get motivated to write something new.
Dude, where’s my end italic tag?
CBK
1. Lower taxes to attract business
2. Water needs to be priced at it’s real cost
3. a. Government needs to get out of transportation
b. Restrictive zonining raises the costs of business and housing
4. A free market in energy is better than government control
5. Privatize the K-12 system in the same way that colleges are privatized. Get the teachers unions out of their strangle hold on education.
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Can I get the prize for brevity?
Wow. I agree with M. Simon about something. Water needs to be priced at full cost. For CA, it won’t matter in a decade or so, because climate change will turn the SoCal area into a tropical rainforest. But Arkanas, West Texas, and the Oklahoma panhandle are totally fucked.
To address M. Simon:
1. Makes sense. Lots of business’ fled CA due to high taxes, to Texas for example. Taxes need to be lowered to get them back.
2.Yeah, a market economy should have as little price protection as possible.
3. Depends, government does have role to play in certain transportation fields, but mass transit should be opened up to private companies.
4.Again, makes sense. The half and half system of de-regulation was a mess, either the one or the other.
5. Bad, bad, bad. Teachers Unions are the chief problem with education today, once they have been dealt with the situation should improve dramatically.
For CA, it won’t matter in a decade or so, because climate change will turn the SoCal area into a tropical rainforest. But Arkanas, West Texas, and the Oklahoma panhandle are totally fucked.
I salute your climatic models, and idly wonder who wrote them and whether they’re successful in predicting today’s climate. I’d throw your name in the Nobel hat, if I knew what it was. Finally, the whole global warming brouhaha succinctly put to bed by a poster on Winds Of Change. Damn!
I know, I know. WAY off-topic. But…he started it, honest!
OT, sorry, but I had to respond.
Slatibartfast-
I know there are a still, like, one or two credible scientists who believe that climate change doesn’t have an anthropogenic component, but nobody with a clue suggests that the climate isn’t changing at all.
http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/Library/nationalassessment/01C.pdf
but nobody with a clue suggests that the climate isn’t changing at all
Lucky for me, then, that I didn’t say anything of the sort.
I know there are a still, like, one or two credible scientists who believe that climate change doesn’t have an anthropogenic component
I pay very little attention to what scientists believe, and a great deal of attention to what they can state authoritatively, with plenty of data to support, and under the scrutiny of their peers. Thus, although Mann, for instance, made what turned out to be an extremely rickety case for global warming, it’s pretty much a given that some warming has been observed. Exactly how much, though, has been muddied a great deal.
Sorry it too me so long to respond; I’d quite forgotten where I’d put up this particular comment. My comments, though, weren’t designed to call into question warming, but rather to poke fun at your confident predictions of climate conditions in the future.
Heh…I just followed your link, and the document is based largely on the predictions of the aforementioned Mann. Although Mann has not been shown to be wrong, it’s been shown that you can’t get to his conclusions based on the data he said he used.
Slatibartfest, I hope you’re not talking about the total BS paper in piece-of-sh*t journal Energy & Environment that didn’t even pass the laugh test…
If you’ve got some substantive criticisms to make, I’d be happy to hear them. I looked over their paper pretty closely, and it appears they’ve got a case.
Attacking the messenger, though…bad form.
Slati,
Read Mann’s smackdown:
And yes, E&E is a piece-of-sh*t journal.
If you read the article, they used precisely the data that Mann claimed to have used in his original analysis. If they omitted data, it’s because Mann failed to claim that data was used for the analysis.
So, even if it’s a piece-of-shite journal, they make valid points. And of course, you missed their response to Mann’s assertions. Too bad.
I’m not buying the professional-courtesy bit; Bjorn Lomberg was afforded no such courtesy by Scientific American.
Hmmm…Mann may have inadvertently given them the wrong data, but that could have been remedied if they had just sent him the paper first instead of going public in the lowest of “journals.”
And ah, yes, Bjorn Lomberg–not a scientist– from the school of thought that argues that because environmental policies have been working, we should undermine them. Also the school of thought that thinks that forest monocultures are the equivalent of old growth forests, and doesn’t realize that because of soil erosion, the loss of tropical rainforests is basically irreversible.
I agree that the sky-is-falling crowd often overestimates the threats; I also agree that our environmental laws ought to be designed to reduce impacts at least cost (e.g. sulfur dioxide trading). And Lomburg is right that we aren’t going “run out” of commodities like oil–rising prices will encourage substitutes.
Yes, Scientific American should have given him a chance to see their work before publishing, but they’ve given him ample chances to respond since then, and IMHO they put him to bed each time, as did Nature, Science, and American Scientist.
Hmmm…Mann may have inadvertently given them the wrong data, but that could have been remedied if they had just sent him the paper first instead of going public in the lowest of “journals.”
If you read their collective observations, you’ll note they questioned Mann on this very topic. There’s a lot more wrong with the data than a few omissions.
I’m not a big fan of the Latin-mass version of science. You don’t have to be credentialed to contribute to a body of science; you just have to adhere to the scientific method and make a convincing case in support of your theories. One of the fundamentals of the scientific method is that experiments be repeatable. M&M, it can be argued, attempted to repeat an experiment with data.
If an analysis cannot be documented to the point that it can be reproduced, it might as well be consigned to the Journal of Irreproducible Results.
Actually, Mann’s results have been duplicated about a dozen times.
Again, the criticism is that the analysis cannot be reproduced using the data cited in the study. And Mann didn’t address the data transposition and copy errors noted by M&M. It’s not as if M&M didnt’ attempt to communicate these concerns with Mann, either, as one can see from their correspondence.