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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2021-033
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
> Correction: An earlier version of this story, published Thursday, incorrectly reported that One America News was warned by the FBI that it was the target of a Russian influence operation. That version also said the FBI had provided a similar warning to Rudolph W. Giuliani, which he has since disputed. This version has been corrected to remove assertions that OAN and Giuliani received the warnings. <
> The research also shows that poverty is highest among the least educated: people with a high school education, at most, had a poverty rate of 22.2% in March. During the same month, Black Americans saw a poverty rate of 21.2% and child poverty reached a pandemic high of 17.4%. <
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Other issues:
Civil War:
Syria:
Afghanistan:
Must see:
Use as open thread …
The increase in murders is likely due to the
lead paint cleanup during the 90s. There are nominal regulations (“Lead SAFE”), but their implementation leaves (left? Has the situation since improved?) the paper on which they are written as used toilet paper.
There were even occasional newspaper articles about the dust clouds around residential lead paint cleanup sites (guys using grinders, as late as 2011… though these have since disappeared), and demolitions are exempt from such regulations.
Also, populations of predominantly subsaharan African ancestry take up more lead than e.g. European or Asian ancestry. Note the 3-6 times higher black murder rate than white murder rate. While the academic literature claims that US blacks are more exposed to lead, these are ex cathedra claims, not supported by relevant evidence.
The evidence that gets cited is higher blood lead levels, which could arise both from greater exposure, and from greater uptake. A survey that was conducted on prevalence of lead painted housing (
supplemental to the December 1994 Current Population Survey) was strangely not analysed (link to microdata; when I looked at it, there was no indication of the greater black exposure that the literature implies).
Another scam in the lead literature is “geometric mean of blood lead level.” The scam character becomes more obvious when “confirmed BLL” (a second measurement, used when the first is above a level of “concern.”
To see that the geometric mean is a scam, one can take three approaches. Intuitively, if a zero reading occurs, the population geometric mean is zero, so they scam (per the governmental laboratory manuals) the zero readings into (depending on the year) 0.5 or 0.6 micrograms per deciliter (half of the minimum that the equipment can detect).
Another way to see that geometric mean blood lead level is a scam, is to see if the conditions needed for it not to be a scam are met. The purpose of averaging is to get a quantity that is representative of the dose effect. Thus a representative dose (in LaTeX notation) is
\[\bar{x}=f^{-1}(\bar{f(x)})\]
where the bar indicates averaging over possibilities (distribution) or instances of x (in this case, the measured blood lead level), and f(x) the dose response (must be monotonically increasing).
To make geometric the relevant averaging, f(x) must be logarithmic. Most studies find a low “dose” linear effect (e.g. IQ loss vs blood lead level; dose in quotes, as a single measure of blood lead is a poor proxy of dose) that becomes less steep at higher doses. The studies that do find a logarithmic dependence are at birth, during a Pb petrol/gasoline era. However, at birth, the blood lead in such is subject to exponential decay with time (biological half-life ~35 days), due to maternal leave and confinement causing a missing dose that becomes present if no maternal leave occurs. The missing (linear) dose contains a term that has the product of the prior dose rate (expressible in linear terms of blood lead before maternal leave), and the logarithm of the at-birth blood lead level.
Thus the logarithmic dependence in the “logarithmic dose response” studies appears to be an artefact of maternal leave, in the presence of a (low dose) linear dose response. In those studies, the geometric mean of the at-birth blood lead level is expected to be linearly related to the linear dose. Outside those studies, geometric mean blood lead is a scam.
The third way to appreciate the scam is to look at the population surveillance distributions of BLL, e.g. state surveillance and NHANES III and later. The high tails in these distributions can be fit (small numbers and unequal width bins, so interpretation e.g. with Poisson statistics needed) to a truncated hyperbola (1/x) better than Gaussian. This is expected if there is sporadic (interdose time substantially larger than biological half-life) dosing (i.e. Poisson process, aka exponential distribution of interdosing times), with a much smaller frequent dosing process.
The scam becomes apparent when one runs a Monte Carlo simulation of the sporadic dosing process and resulting blood lead level over time (dBLL/dt=R(t)-BLL/\tau; R(t) is dosing, thus sum of Dirac delta functions, one for each dose), comparing the arithmetic mean blood lead level with the geometric mean “confirmed” blood lead level; the arithmetic mean can easily be eight times larger than the “confirmed geometric mean.” More fun: reduce the “level of concern” (supposedly because of concerns of harm at low levels), and observe the effect on the “confirmed geometric mean” relative to arithmetic…
There is one more fun scam in the literature that I have found. In the lead vs IQ studies, the main independent variables are dose proxy and parental IQ. Parental IQ is motivated by IQ twin studies, that suggest that IQ is largely determined by the direct action of genes, which while unpalatable to many (myself included), is at least intellectually consistent, and can also be motivated on other grounds. The problem is that the parents were also exposed in their infancy, thus the parental proxy contains a lead term which is being misassigned. One can do an a priori calculation of the effect of this on the dose response:
\[\beta_{measured}=\beta\{actual}(1-R_{P,C}\frac{\sigma_P}{\sigma_C})+\beta_{env,genes}\]
where the final term is “environment correlated with genes” (about which I remain resolutely agnostic). Note that one can even obtain a sign reversal in the apparent dose response, with sufficient exposure. Both the dose and the dose response are expected to be underestimated.
If in fact lead uptake varies with genes, then perhaps monozygotic twins will have a higher correlation of lead uptake than dizygotic twins.
Posted by: Johan Meyer (2) | May 2 2021 16:42 utc | 7
@19 Cont’d–
Hudson’s newest, “The Honest Sector”, is essentially an abridged autobiography of his work as an economist, which many have seen him recite before. But here we have him calling out those responsible for the Neoliberal Trap:
“They created money as part of an accounting-system, a means of payment. They set one unit of grain (a bushel of grain was equal to one shekel of silver), so that you could keep foreign trade and domestic agriculture all in one set of unified accounts. Money thus was a by-product of accounting.
“You had 100 years of misinformation about money, essentially written by pro-bankers, Austrians and academics that said: Money must have developed when people wanted to barter. But that’s not how money was created! It had nothing to do with barter….
“Money wasn’t used at all for barter! You can understand why: the major domestic money was grain….
“So, the whole Austrian idea was wrong. The reason was not only dishonesty, but a vicious hatred of democracy by the Austrian school and by academic economics. Their hatred of democracy was the fear that a democracy might take control of a government and apply pro-labor policies that interfered with the profits of banks and the profits of the rich people. The Austrian school developed a whole theory of economics. Today it is the Chicago school junk economics, the monetarism.
“How do we create an economic theory where government doesn’t exist? If we can say that the whole economy works without government existing, except to interfere, then we can we can block democracy, we can prevent any government from actually doing anything. That’s the ideal of the Republican party and the Democratic party of the United States today, it’s the neoliberal idea today.
“It is essentially to circumscribe governments so that instead of the governments creating money, or instead of the governments regulating debt, the bankers, the financial sector will be in control, which is [sold to us as] the honest sector. [My Emphasis]
And thus today’s Biggest of Big Lies taught as scripture at universities most everywhere:
“Every economic student today has said: there’s a business cycle and the business cycle is self-regulating. If unemployment goes down or there’s a crash, it’ll all automatically go back to normal without the government doing anything. That’s not what they believed in the Bronze Age. They knew that the government had to intervene and restore order.”
And more are revealed as we read on:
“The Cretans and Egyptians, used a decimal system, so their rate of interest was one tenth. But Rome used the duo-decimal system, twelfths. It divided, just as you have the Troy Pound divided into twelve Troy Ounces, you had twelfths. In Greece, Rome, Babylonia, in every country, the rate of interest was the local fractional system. We realized, what was born was the whole argument that Aristotle later developed: how can interest be charged in monies of baron metal?
“You have again the Austrian school, the anti-socialist far right-wing extremists say: The creditors must have always been the good guys, because if you say the creditors are the bad guys, then you have an argument against today’s bankers, so the creditors must have lent out cattle and they must have lent out grain and took part of their return in the form of grain and cattle.
“No anthropologist has found any society, anywhere in the world, at any time, where people lend out cattle. Creditors foreclose on cattle, but they won’t lend them out. They take them, not lend them.
I realized that what was born, was not cattle, it wasn’t crops growing, it was time. If you have 1/12 interest, that means you pay 8,3 % a month. You had every rate of interest based on the time, and the debts in Greece were always owed on the new moon. When you have the moon, a new period, the debts are due. You had the whole timing of paying debt.” [My Emphasis]
Hudson then points out what ought to be the obvious, the actual historic lessons taught by Greek and Roman history:
“In Rome, you had an oligarchy ruling from the very beginning. The kings were overthrown and the oligarchies were pretty much in control from the 5th century, end of the 6th century and onward. What you had was five centuries of repeated revolts, walkouts, secessions of the plans and civil wars. The common demand of all of the rebels was: cancel the debts, redistribute the land.
“They were all killed, the Romans believed in the kind of free market that the University of Chicago believed in. ‘We can’t have a free market, if you don’t assassinate everybody who wants to challenge our power.’
“The oligarch’s ‘free market’ is, ‘Liberty for us is the liberty to enslave our debtors. Liberty for us is the ability to do what we want to other people.’ That was a free market as the Romans defined, and of course that’s Milton Friedman’s free market, and what libertarian economics is all about: Freedom for the wealthy.
“What they call the free market is a market dominated by the creditors, dominated by the monopolists and by the rentiers. Rome was a rentier society, so they killed one popular leader after another, ending with the stabbing of Julius Caesar, when they were worried that he was going to cancel the debts to resolve the debt crisis that had already occurred a generation before in the Catiline conspiracy, when Catiline tried to fight to cancel the debts, as his predecessors had tried to.” [My Emphasis]
And the disclosure moves rapidly forward to today where the same basic dynamic is happening:
“We [Rentiers] can recover what was overthrown in the 19th century. We can restore what happened in the medieval times. We can have a neo feudal society. We can be money-large, and we’ll have the power that the landlords had over Europe for hundreds of years before democratic reform. All we have to do is stop democracy, and of course that’s where American diplomacy comes in.” [My Emphasis]
And what do we see Republican politicos doing at the state and federal levels when it comes to enabling voting, the fundamental democratic act? And here’s where the interviewer formulates the crucial question:
“Jussi: wow, this is a strong picture you’re painting. My question is this: can it be a coincidence that we have all the economic theories that we have? That we have beliefs that say: the state needs to have a surplus all the time, we have to borrow from private banks all the time.
“I don’t see that many who talk about the problem with private debt. It’s you and Steve Keens actually, and a few more, but not that many. I don’t see any big-name economists, I don’t see that in any papers, is there any reason for it, what do you think?” [My Emphasis]
Hudson’s answer is very long and calls for the the cessation of economics as now taught. A viewer question allows Hudson to tell about the EU, his full answer going well beyond what I cite:
“Well you’re going to have to withdraw from the European Union, to begin with. Right now, Europe’s government is part of NATO. Europe is governed by a small office in the bottom of the Pentagon.
“We’re following the problem we had when I was analyzing the Vietnam war: How does America pay for all of the military bases all over the world? It pays just by writing treasury debt. Europe funds America’s military. For America: the vantage point of American diplomacy.
“I’m answering your question because I’m framing it. Europe has to conduct this money with US dollars. The Americans designed the Euro at the University of Chicago, again the root of all evil. No European country is any longer what political textbooks define as a state. A state has the ability to issue money, to do its own taxes and to declare war. No European country has any of these rights. Part of the rules of the Eurozone is: you cannot run a budget deficit of more than three percent.
“The intention of the US who designed this is: If the eurozone cannot run into debt, then there is not going to be Eurobonds for other countries, to hold their international reserves in. The only thing that they can hold their reserves in will be US dollars, which are the monetization of America’s military bases and military activities all over the world. A dollar is the embodiment of America’s military spending.” [My Emphasis]
Perhaps the most interesting Q&A is about China and is last:
“China says: we’re not in it for the money, we’re not developing this transport and belt and road infrastructure in order to make a profit. We’re developing it in order to create a region-wide prosperity, in which we can all share.
“The whole concept of government banking: making loans on the basis of industrial engineering. In America, industrial companies are run by financial engineers. In China, loan making financial companies, are designed by industrial engineering principal saying: What kind of industry and what infrastructure do we need in China? What do we need for a train transport, for highway transport, for public power transport etc.
“So, the conflict between the United States and with Europe is the tail in China. It isn’t a conflict about who’s going to make better iPhones. It’s a conflict to the death of economic systems. The United States and Europe cannot permit any country to survive that is not polarizing the economy.
“It’s a conflict between an economic system that impoverishes the economy, which is the political aim of the European governments and the American governments, or an economy that is structured so as to help economies grow, which is Chinese pragmatic industrial economy.
“We’re really talking about a conflict not among nations, but between what was industrial capitalism, which is evolving into socialism, or finance capitalism. The United States represents finance capitalism, and it imposed this on Europe as its satellite. As long as Europe lets itself become a satellite for finance capitalism, it’s going to end up being de-industrialized as the United States.” [My Emphasis]
And for those that missed it, here’s the transcript of Xi’s 21 April speech at the Boao Forum. So, what’s happening is a competition based on geoeconomics that China’s winning because it actually invests in the promotion of industrial development unlike the Neoliberal Outlaw US Empire. As I told many during my trip across the USA, Trump had the right idea–MAGA–but was a total contradiction to accomplishing that since his wealth and mindset is all based on Neoliberal principals–the very forces destroying the USA.
Posted by: karlof1 | May 2 2021 23:45 utc | 25
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