OPINION
SONIA ARRISON: “Don’t Be Afraid to Live Longer, Justin Timberlake”
“While the film [In Time] is fun, it falls into a dystopian trap, assuming that greater longevity would create a terrifying society. But it gets almost everything about human life extension wrong. Scientists are on the verge of discovering ways to radically extend human life—though they probably won’t figure out how to maintain the pristine looks of 25-year-olds any time soon. In Time seems to argue that we should be concerned about this looming longevity. But there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
MATTHEW INGRAM: “Looks Like Congress Has Declared War on the Internet”
“Many internet users in the United States have watched with horror as countries like France and Britain have proposed or instituted so-called “three strikes” laws, which cut off internet access to those accused of repeated acts of copyright infringement. Now the U.S. has its own version of this kind of law, and it is arguably much worse: the Stop Online Piracy Act, introduced in the House this week, would give governments and private corporations unprecedented powers to remove websites from the internet on the flimsiest of grounds, and would force internet service providers to play the role of copyright police.”
HASAN. M. ALAHI: “You Want to Track Me? Here You Go, FBI”
“In an era in which everything is archived and tracked, the best way to maintain privacy may be to give it up. Information agencies operate in an industry that values data. Restricted access to information is what makes it valuable. If I cut out the middleman and flood the market with my information, the intelligence the F.B.I. has on me will be of no value. Making my private information public devalues the currency of the information the intelligence gatherers have collected. ”
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Sometime today, the UN estimates that world population will hit 7 billion people. Some people are worried about how those 7 billion mouths will be fed. Here’s Paul Ehrlich in 1968′s The Population Bomb, when world population was not yet 4 billion:
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash program embarked upon now.
Not so much, thankfully. Ehrlich and other people who live in bed-wetting fear of their fellow man forget that people are more than stomachs; they are also brains. And brains have an increasing return to scale. The more of them there are, and the more they can interact and exchange with one another, the faster they can outpace the rumbling stomachs.
That’s why real world per capita GDP is 16 times higher than it was before the Industrial Revolution — even without correcting for the increased quality of goods. Including that omission would bring the increase to something like 100-fold, according to the economist Deirdre McCloskey. And this is per capita; remember, world population has increased about 7-fold since 1800.
The data are simply astonishing. Seven times as many of us are each at least 16 times and as much as 100 times better off than our great-great-great-great grandparents. This is the single most important event in human since the Agricultural Revolution. It is so important that McCloskey calls it the Great Fact.
And the data show no signs of the Great Fact reversing itself, or even slowing down. if anything, China and India’s recent partial embrace of liberalism has quickened the brain’s still-incomplete conquest over the stomach.
Former CEI Warren Brookes Fellow Ron Bailey has more at Reason. Elsewhere, Steven Landsburg thinks that current human population might be too small.
Over at RealClearMarkets, my colleague Wayne Crews and I argue that the law of demand holds. Hard to believe that’s actually controversial, but that’s Washington for you. Here’s our conclusion:
Eberly was put in an uncomfortable position when she came to Washington. Just as a lawyer’s job is to vigorously defend clients even if she knows they are guilty, Eberly’s job is to vigorously defend policies that are obviously harmful to the economy. Try as she might, she cannot argue against the law of demand.
Regulations make hiring costlier and thus make jobs scarcer. And regulatory uncertainty makes companies reluctant to hire employees they might not be able to afford down the road. Case closed.
Read the whole thing.
South Korea got a higher percentage of its young people to go to college than the U.S. But it backfired. Although “great numbers of eager students graduate from college every year,” “the predictable problem is that many of them can’t find work commensurate with their education. The government now wants to lower the number of students going to college.” The Obama administration wants to increase the percentage of youngsters going to college in the U.S., based on the theory that this will somehow result in more skilled jobs, but Korea’s experience shows that “the idea that supply creates its own demand with regard to education is mistaken. Joanne Jacobs says that in Korea, 40 percent of new college graduates can’t find jobs (even though Korea has had healthy economic growth recently, although less so than in the past when it had fewer college grads. Korea’s economy grows faster because its government is smaller than ours).
Economist Peter Schiff, “who was among the first people to publicly predict the collapse of the housing bubble,” criticizes Obama’s new, costly student-loan repayment scheme here, saying it will result in increased college tuitions and “moral hazard.” George Leef of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy writes that “Obama’s student loan gambit,” just “like his politically motivated interventions in the housing market,”
is just going to prolong and deepen the problem — too many people going to college largely at the expense of others, then struggling to find jobs that pay enough to cover the debts. Many will never find such employment since the labor market doesn’t automatically create high-paying jobs just because more people have a “higher attainment” in formal education. Then the costs are passed along to taxpayers. Obama’s move might reap him some political benefit, but it will lead to more wasted resources.
At Minding the Campus, Andrew Gillen calls the Obama administration’s new student loan repayment scheme unjust social engineering that will harm some borrowers. As Joanne Jacobs notes, “Obama’s Pay As You Earn plan limiting loan repayment encourages students to borrow more and colleges to charge more, writes a business analyst. Taxpayers will get the bill.”
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Yet another batch of regulatory bloopers:
- Motorists entering Tacoma, Washington, with criminal intent are required to telephone the chief of police.
- It is illegal to catch fish with your bare hands in Kansas.
- It is illegal for a man to curse in front of a woman in Nebraska. Women can cuss away, though.
- Turtle racing is illegal in Key West, Florida.
- You can’t play checkers in public in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
- In Hartford, Connecticut, you may not cross a street while walking on your hands. Feet only, please.
- The U.S. Code requires the federal government to employ a Construction Metrication Ombudsman. His job is to encourage federal contractors to use the metric system.
- Don’t ride your bicycle faster than 65 mph in Danbury, Connecticut. You could be arrested.
According to an estimate by the United Nations’ population division, Earth’s seven billionth human will be born on or about Halloween 2011, most likely in South Asia.
To put that number in perspective, consider this: It took 250,000 years, from the birth of our species until the beginning of the 19th century, for the human population to reach 1 billion (I guess it’s true what they say; the first billion’s the hardest). After that it took just a little over a century to hit the 2 billion mark in 1927. By 1999 the world’s six billionth person was born (identified as Adnan Nevic from Sarajevo, Bosnia). And now here we are, only 12 years later, and number 7 billion is upon us.
It’s quite a milestone. And on the face of it, would seem to indicate homo sapiens is a stunningly successful species with a deep and healthy breeding population, portending perpetuation of our kind for a long time to come. That’s good news, right?
Well, not if you are a self-loathing homo sapien, a curious creature whose natural habitat is restricted to the jungles of academia, Hollywood, and The View. For these lefties, we are the problem — the more we, the bigger the problem. As Paul Wilson put it for NewsBusters:
For many people, this milestone is a cause for celebration and a human triumph. But for environmentalists on the radical left, the ever-growing legion of consuming humans is a harbinger of impending doom.
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CEI Weekly is a compilation of articles and blog posts from CEI’s fellows and associates sent out via e-mail every Friday. Also included in the weekly newsletter is a brief description of CEI’s weekly podcast and a feature on a major CEI breakthrough made during the week. To sign up for CEI Weekly, go to http://cei.org/newsletters.
CEI Weekly
October 28, 2011
>>Featured Story
In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal Europe this week, CEI President Fred Smith and Vice President for Strategy Iain Murray urge the European Union not to standardize tax and fiscal policy across nations. Read the full piece here.
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OPINION
TIMOTHY B. LEE: “FreeBieber Campaign is Not Afraid of Justin Bieber or His Lawyers”
“In 2007, a 12-year-old Justin Bieber began recording videos of himself singing covers of popular songs and uploading them to YouTube. A copyright reform organization called Fight for the Future created a website called FreeBieber.org to highlight the danger that a pending anti-streaming bill could make the creation of such videos a felony. The 17-year-old Justin Bieber, now an international superstar, apparently doesn’t appreciate the unauthorized campaign. So he (apparently) had his lawyers send out a cease-and-desist order.”
JOHN PODHORETZ: “A College Loan Scam”
“According to the invaluable Web site finaid.org, the average graduate of a four-year college in the United States now leaves school saddled with $27,000 in debt. The reforms the president announced to the national student-loan system in front of an audience of screaming college kids in Denver on Wednesday won’t actually do very much to help them — and will do nothing to help people out of college now and coping with their indebtedness.”
LARRY KUDLOW: “No Armageddon Yet, But No Victory Yet Either”
“The world economy has once again dodged Armageddon. The European Union finally forged a Greek bond deal, and a rescue fund big enough to ring-fence banks and sovereign debt, in order to avoid a catastrophic, Lehman-like contagion event. At the same time, the U.S. economy moved away from the threat of recession with a third-quarter real GDP report of 2.5 percent.”
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Twenty-nine years ago tomorrow, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Eli Lilly’s and Genentech’s Humulin, making it the first ever fully approved product of recombinant DNA, or what we now call modern molecular biotechnology. Humulin was the first biosynthetic human insulin, produced by splicing the human gene that codes for insulin production into a harmless microbe. Previously, diabetics who needed supplemental insulin used bovine or porcine insulin that was purified from the pancreases of cows and pigs. They worked reasonably well, but were not perfect analogues of human insulin. With the introduction of Humulin they could now take actual human insulin, which improved the treatment’s safety and efficacy.
According to The New York Times, my friend and colleague “Dr. Henry Miller, the medical officer in charge of Humulin at the F.D.A., said the development was a major step forward in the ”scientific and commercial viability of’” recombinant DNA techniques. ”We have now come of age,” Dr. Miller said.”
Since 1982, biotechnology has revolutionized the practice of medicine and the pharmaceutical industry. Over the past 29 years, some 200 or so biotech medicines have been approved in the United States, with roughly 900 more now being developed to treat more than 100 diseases ranging from cancers and infectious diseases to autoimmune disorders and cardiovascular diseases.
Unfortunately, while food biotechnology has the same potential, it has not fared nearly as well. A broad scientific consensus has concluded that rDNA technology (known variously as gene splicing, genetic engineering, and genetic modification) is merely an extension, or refinement, of less-precise breeding techniques that scientists have long used for similar purposes, but it’s use has been hobbled by vast over-regulation in the U.S. and around the world — a phenomenon I have written about at length elsewhere. So, let’s celebrate the tremendous success of the medical biotechnology industry, but let us not forget how government has nearly strangled food biotechnology in its crib.
OPINION
NICHOLAS KRISTOF: “Crony Capitalism Comes Home”
“Whenever I write about Occupy Wall Street, some readers ask me if the protesters really are half-naked Communists aiming to bring down the American economic system when they’re not doing drugs or having sex in public. The answer is no. [...] [W]hile alarmists seem to think that the movement is a ‘mob’ trying to overthrow capitalism, one can make a case that, on the contrary, it highlights the need to restore basic capitalist principles like accountability. To put it another way, this is a chance to save capitalism from crony capitalists.”
JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: “Seven Reasons Why Obama is Wrong on Income Inequality”
“As if ordered up directly by the Obama White House and Occupy Wall Street, the Congressional Budget Office has produced a timely report looking at income inequality. The CBO found that between between 1979 and 2007, average real after-tax household income grew by 275 percent for the top 1 percent of households, 65 percent for the next 19 percent, just under 40 percent for the next 60 percent, and 18 percent for the bottom 20 percent.”
RUSS ROBERTS: “My Response to Paul Krugman”
“When I say that Paul Krugman and I are ideologues, what I am really saying is that we are stuck in our ways. Not completely stuck of course. It is imaginable that Krugman might eventually after some natural experiment concede that his view of government’s effect on the economy might change. But it is highly unlikely. That is the nature of human nature in a field where there really isn’t a natural experiment that can be decisive. So the post-WW II test of Keynesianism that Keynesianism totally failed–a 60% drop in government spending when the war ended that was followed not by the worst depression in American history but by good times, did not cause Keynesians to give up their faith.”
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