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That’s the headline for my latest piece in The Guardian. Final para Events like the Menindee fish kill bring home the cost of treating the environment as a cultural battleground. The culture warriors’ policy amounts to listening to what scientists say we need to do, then doing the opposite. This is a guaranteed route to global disaster. Like this:Like Loading...

from Dean Baker Let’s see, cattle ranchers are against vegetarianism, coal companies are against restricting CO2 emissions, and the Davos crew is trying to combat populism, according to The Washington Post. It is kind of amazing that the rich people at Davos would not understand how absurd this is. Yeah, we get that rich people don’t like the idea of movements that would leave them much less rich, but is it helpful to their cause to tell us that they are devoting their rich people’s...

McDonalds Anyone, Trump Buys for Lunch? Dems Refuse over Bad Offer on the Table. Giving this guy some coverage is questionable; but he is an idiot along the lines of his boss who also says the dumbest things. KEVIN HASSETT, Trump economic adviser: “You know as soon as it’s resolved, then people get their paychecks, and the government will go back to acting normal, and the economy will go back to the 3 percent growth that President Trump’s policies have...

from Lars Syll “Getting philosophical” is not about articulating rarified concepts divorced from statistical practice. It is to provide tools to avoid obfuscating the terms and issues being bandied about … Do I hear a protest? “There is nothing philosophical about our criticism of statistical significance tests (someone might say). The problem is that a small P-value is invariably, and erroneously, interpreted as giving a small probability to the null hypothesis.” Really? P-values are not...

Source: Dreams Deferred, Institute for Policy Studies

from Lars Syll The treaty includes no provisions for the economic rehabilitation of Europe — nothing to make the defeated Central Empires into good neighbours, nothing to stabilize the new states of Europe … The Council of Four paid no attention to these issues … Reparation was their main excursion into the economic field, and they settled it as a problem of theology, of politics, of electoral chicane, from every point of view except that of the economic future of the states whose destiny...

from Dean Baker One of the Trump administration’s talking points about global warming is that we’re reducing greenhouse gas emissions, while the countries that remain in the Paris accord are not. Well, the first part of this story is clearly not true, as data for 2018 show a large rise in emissions for the United States. The second part is also not very accurate, as most other countries are taking large steps to reduce emissions. At the top of the list is China. The country has undertaken...

Prediction is a mugs game, but, watching the Brexit trainwreck, I can’t resist. Over the fold, my predictions from mid-December. So far, everything has gone as I predicted, but I didn’t anticipate how badly May would be defeated, or how strongly Parliament would reassert itself. I now think that the “No Deal” option will be off the table sooner rather than later. Either May will capitulate to Corbyn’s demand or Parliament will force the issue somehow. That makes...