The Show Me Institute helps me stay informed about local politics in my state of Missouri, and from the articles I’ve read they generally take a pretty pure libertarian perspective on things. Yesterday they posted an article about another potential attempt to raise the state’s cigarette tax of 17 cents per pack. Similar attempts have failed twice in the last few years, but the attempts keep coming back because there’s something attractive about trying to raise a cigarette tax rate that’s the lowest in the nation by almost 50%.

Continue reading Should Missouri Raise Its Cigarette Tax?

I’ve been learning a bit about one of the candidates running for the Republican nomination. Gary Johnson polls about 2% and doesn’t get as much attention as Romney or Perry, but there are some interesting things about him so I thought I’d talk about him a bit here. Gary Johnson is almost like the reasonable version of Ron Paul for libertarian-minded people who are too cool to like Ron Paul because of the way he seems obsessed with the Federal Reserve and conspiracy theories.

Continue reading Who Is Gary Johnson?

Last weekend I wrote about UNICEF’s report that child mortality had declined by large amounts across the globe from 1990 to 2010 (UNICEF defines child mortality rates by the number of children per 1000 live births who do not make it to age 5). Of course, the report did not speculate about how much economic growth may have contributed to this decline, but the capitalist in me wanted to know. Wouldn’t it be good to know if it was better to save children’s lives by encouraging the growth of government programs or by encouraging the growth of the marketplace? So I spent some free time in the last few days gathering data from Wikipedia to see how well GDP numbers correlated with child mortality numbers.

The quick summary is, yes, countries that had stronger GDP growth tended to see greater reductions in child mortality, although the correlation wasn’t as strong as a pure capitalist might like to see. There is perhaps nothing surprising or remarkable about this, but I’m trying to stimulate more discussion of the great news about world reduction in child mortality, which I don’t feel has gotten nearly as much attention as other recent reports like the one on US poverty. A few disclaimers before I present the data:

1. I am assuming that the child mortality numbers from UNICEF are reliable. Gathering comparable data from every single country in the world is quite difficult, and there was much surveying and modeling.
2. I am assuming that Wikipedia’s GDP numbers are reliable. (The third Wikipedia link has three different sources for 2010 GDP; I went with the CIA World Factbook source because it listed the most countries.)
3. I am assuming that I copied and pasted all of those numbers inerrantly.
4. I decided to compare a percentage of child mortality reduction with a percentage of GDP growth per capita, as opposed to with a percentage of GDP growth, or comparing absolute numbers for any of them. I also did not account for inflation or changes in the value of the dollar. By using the same basic reported numbers for every country I thought this was the simplest and best way to analyze the average rise in living standards per person, but you may disagree.
5. Because I decided to use percentages, I did not analyze every country in the entire UNICEF report. I arbitrarily excluded countries that had a reported 1990 child mortality rate below 30 deaths per 1,000 live births because I don’t think that a 60% reduction from 10 to 4 says as much about the living standards of a country as does a 60% reduction from 100 to 40. In other words, once your country gets to a relatively decent child mortality number, the marginal cost of reducing that number by a given percent is much higher than reducing that number by the same percent for a country with a much more horrid child mortality number. I’m just looking at the “bad” countries and seeing how much their economy grew on their way to getting better, but you may argue that I should have chosen a different number than 30 as my cut-off. Additionally, you may argue that I should have chosen high or low cutoffs for GDP per capita to exclude outliers from that dimension.
6. I also excluded a few ad hoc countries for which I could not find GDP data for both 1990 and 2010, but this should not greatly affect the overall averages and trends based on the 134 countries that I did analyze.

So this is not a report on “How Child Mortality Reduction Correlates With GDP Growth By Country.” It’s a report on “How Child Mortality Reduction Correlates With GDP Growth From High Child Mortality Countries For Which I Could Find Decent Data Under A Variety Of Hopefully Reasonable Assumptions.” Here we go…

Continue reading How Good Is GDP Growth At Reducing Child Mortality?

The Muslim tension in France has reached a new level. Praying in the streets has been banned in Paris, and it may be extended to the rest of the country. After reading several news articles, I learned that thousands of Muslims have been blocking the streets with their prayer mats on Fridays – apparently because there are not enough mosques – and the secular French have had enough of the weekly obstruction to their public roads. “The street is for driving in, not praying,” the French interior minister Claude Guéant said. This is only five months after France became the first European nation to ban the burqa, partly because the full covering undermined the French ideals of openness and equality.

It is well-known that the Muslim population is growing rapidly in Europe, due partially to the declining birth rate among Europeans and the very large birth rate among the growing Muslim immigrants. France is said to have the largest Muslim population, numbered at five or six million, and it’s fascinating to watch the unfolding tension between them and the sophisticated, secular French state.

Continue reading Religion in France: Paris Bans Praying In Street

The U.S. Census Bureau released an updated poverty report yesterday, and the headlines were plastered across the news media. “U.S. Poverty Rose to 17-Year High,” said the Washington Post. “U.S. poverty totals hit 50-year high,” said the L.A. Times. Like all statistics, it depends on how you count it and adjust for history, but the broad point was that the number of people living in poverty in the United States rose last year to some of the worst levels we’ve seen in a very long time, and it was headline news everywhere. The anti-Obama peanut gallery in the USAToday article pretended it was evidence of Obama’s personal failure, while those on the left tend to view it as evidence that government needs to do more to help the poor.

I read several articles and commentaries yesterday, but I wasn’t ready to offer my own opinion. They do say that the income level that defines the poverty line is adjusted for inflation, but I wasn’t sure if that properly counted technological progress. I knew that The Heritage Foundation report on poverty from July claimed that 99.6% of the “poor” have refrigerators, and 97.7% have a television. In addition, those televisions are probably of higher quality than the televisions of a decade or two ago, and the higher quality of technology is almost certainly enjoyed by the almost 40% that have personal computers or 55% with cell phones. If 30% of the poor own video game consoles, how poor can that 30% really be? My gut reaction was that this reported increase in poverty was not taking into account some very important things, but I know that gut reactions can be wrong, so I waited.

Continue reading Is Poverty In the United States Getting Worse?

Thursday night my Twitter feed lit up with posts about a sudden blackout in San Diego. Apparently an error regarding a repair job by an electrical worker in Arizona led to a series of shutdowns that affected somewhere around four or six million people across California and Arizona. Many people were wondering how a single error in one place could lead to power problems of such a magnitude. Most intriguing to me were statements in news articles such as, “the safeguards that typically prevent an outage from spreading didn’t work.”

This eerily reminded me of coverage of last year’s BP oil spill with its “sequence of failures,” and this spring’s Fukushima nuclear disaster and its “failure of multiple back-up electrical systems.” The good news in this case is that, unlike the other incidents, the situation is not deteriorating and it looks like power is being restored. But all three incidents involved the failures of multiple systems that led to large negative outcomes which were supposed to be impossible. All three incidents also had to do with energy sources – from the private sector – and the failures spanned private energy companies in Britain, Japan, and the United States.

It’s a disturbing trend, to be sure. I’m sure progressive technocrats would say these energy companies need to be more heavily regulated (indeed, “Federal regulators” are going to “investigate” this latest incident), and I’m sure small-government types would respond that government is already heavily involved in the energy sector and that more involvement would only drive up energy costs without preventing any more disasters than they are preventing now. This may be true, but it’s also clear that any built-in incentives on the part of companies to prevent such disasters are failing as well.

Continue reading The California Blackout And The Failure of Fail-Safe Energy