A little more reflection on the Hitchens/Turek debate of my last post. The very end of the debate the moderator asked both men this question, "What would it take to convince you you are wrong?" Turek answered that the science would have to be different. The universe would have to show evidence that it did not come from nothing or that the anthropic constant was common place in universes. An answer which at least had the illusion of reasonbleness. Hitchens on the other hand demured and said he could not think of something that would convince him. But I found that answer inadequate, for the Atheist's answer to this is quite simple, God could appear. God could arrive speaking simultaneously to all humans on the planet and working a couple of miracles. Maybe he could give cats the power of speech, maybe he could eliminate AIDS, TB and Malaria, maybe he could cause a new plant to spring up that provided a new and bountiful form of food. These are simple suggestions, Of course God, being omniscient, would obviously have a more effective list.

But clearly an appearance even once a generation would certainly eliminate all doubt about God's existence. And one can certainly imagine historical moments when God's arrival would have been really appropriate. Perhaps during the Holocaust, he could have struck down Hitler and turned the concentration camps to dust or gingerbread. During the Rwandan genocide he could have turned the machetes to jello, during the black plauge he could have told people "Its the rats, not the Jews or the cats." You get the point, God's appearance and strategic action at various particular times would certainly have put Atheism in the same category as the worship of Molech.

Ah, but you protest, what about faith? Is faith not central to Religion? Isn't God nothing without faith? And what about free will? To take faith first, it is true that faith is an important factor, but faith is certainly not eliminated by God's regular appearance. If we take the stories of the Bible seriously certainly the people of Israel even as God led them by the hand through the desert of Sinai still needed faith and regularly had none. And Mark tells us that even in the midst of watching Jesus still storms, calm seas and feed 5000 with a few fish and loaves the disciple still needed faith and often failed. Additionally, just generally speaking we tend to give greater status to those who were there at the beginning that actually saw than people today who believe without seeing, regardless of what Jesus says to Thomas in John. We consider those disciples Saints, yet they actually saw miracles and divine action according to the text. No, its clear that a generational appearance by God would not stop faith.

But what about free will? We could easily descend into a philosophical discussion of freewill that would take us astray. Let me simply stipulate that even if God appeared and occasionally did global miracles, the moment after those miracles there would still be free will. The only difference would be that the world would be made better, at least temporarily. Additionally, God might do some well needed updating of the law. For instance he might well say, "ok, shellfish and wearing polyknit blends, that's fine now (who knows what I was thinking there), but now thou shalt give up thy seat on the subway to old people, thou shalt use thy turn signal when making a left that thy days on the earth shall be long. Thou shalt not smoke in public areas nor shalt thou drive after consuming multiple alcoholic beverages that impairs thy judgment." A little face lift might actually help us out, and certainly one could decide whether one followed the commandment or not, but it might be nice to know what was really important to God today rather than during the Bronze age.

Contrary to Hitchen's perpective, the end of atheism is simple. Yet no one expects that God will actually lift a finger to do this instead leaving it to people like Turek to make the case. Which causes one to wonder, if we live in a universe that functions perfectly as though there were no God (as Julia Sweeney put it) what does that say about the existence of God? Certainly we can easily envision the end of Atheism, or can we?

One of the issues I have been looking at lately is the New Atheism as we have seen in Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and Dennet. Recently I watched a debate between Frank Turek of Crossexamined.org a christian apologetics group and Christopher Hitchens who has recently written the book "God is Not Great." You can watch the video yourself here on youtube. This was not terribly far from NC but it was still 6 hours on a school night, so I didn't get a chance to go see it. But watching the debate after the fact was interesting.

I'm on Turek's mailing list so after the debate he talked about it. He complained that he felt Hitchens had not responded to his points. That at no point had Hitchens made a rebuttal to his argument. This is of course the case as anyone who watches the video can see. Yet interestingly Hitchens acts as though he had in fact answered each one of Turek's points. And it got me thinking, why do they seem to talk past each other so much of the time?

I guess I'd want to try to unpack this by categorizing their arguments like this: For Turek, the argument about religion is ultimately a philosophical argument. Religion (specifically here Christianity) presents a series of proposition which are deemed more or less reasonable based on a combination of logic and data marshaled in argument. In this way the question is unrelated to history or society. Is the proposition "there is a God" a defensible proposition? Turek has his series of arguments for the existence of God. They are mostly the classic arguments for the existence of a deity shined up with some scientific data. He revives the ontological argument with reference to the Big Bang; there was a big bang and God caused it. He then goes with the cosmological argument, often known as the watchmaker argument, here buttressed by the scientific notion of the anthropic constant, the universe supports life and if any number of changes had been made it would not therefore it shows evidence of design. Finally, he argues that morality requires a deity. This I think is his weakest argument but one he seems to love dearly. I'll not argue with any of Turek's points though I think they are all vulnerable to critique, rather my point here is that they are staunchly idealist arguments. They rise and fall not based on historical contingencies but their reason.

Hitchens on the other hand is only interested in an historical argument. The very fact that religion has been a force for evil in history precisely belies its divine origin. The problem with Turek's philosophical arguments is that the science has really been an after thought. The arguments were all in place long before the discovery of atoms, or germs or DNA. Science becomes this repository of data that can spruce up the arguments of theism, but the arguments themselves stripped of this new veneer are just as empty as ever. Hitchens, I suspect, believes his audience familiar with the various rebuttals of the arguments for God that he only need point out that this is Johnny-come-lately sprucing up of age old arguments and one will conclude that you can put lipstick on a pig... What you are left with then for Hitchens is history, and viewed from the standpoint of history theism has problems. Grounded in a particular historical and cultural milieu the development of monotheism is a relic from our bronze-age past which has then been used by the powerful, the sociopathic and the psychotic to wreck the evils of history from the crusades to 9/11. History for Hitchens is everything, no other argument has weight.

Turek tries to blunt Hitchen's argument some by conceding the atrocities of religion but blaming religious people not religion per se, and falling into an ethnocentrism which concedes that Hitchens is right about 99.9% of religions; they are all bad and false. With one exception: Christianity. He just got one wrong, but other than that he is completely right. Hitchens does not fall prey to this false flattery, Hitchens has already argued earlier the converse of the argument. Every monotheists is an atheist with regards to every other god worshiped in history from Baal to the Great Spirit. Every monotheist contends he is right on all these other religions with one exception. Hitchens, argues he just goes that extra .1% and really all the arguments about how the other religions are wrong that monotheists so ably employ when looking at other religions need only be refocused on their own to show the poverty of their own position. The problem is not the people for Hitchens, it is the religion itself and he painstakingly goes through the holy texts of all the monotheisms showing their ethical depravity. You can not, argues Hitchens, agree that the other religions calls to genocide are horrific human acts of self-deception and your texts call to genocide is just the valid command of a God whose demands cannot be questioned.

But at root, the argument between Hitchens and Turek are two men yelling from separate places. Turek is on top of the mountain demanding that Hitchens come up to the philosophical peak, and Hitchens is at the bottom demanding that Turek deal with the historical grounding of the mountain itself. It is thus understandable that at times one felt as though one were watching two debates instead of one. Yet it would be interesting to see somebody move to the ground of the other person and watch a fair fight.

A brief reflection about the principle of relativity. This weekend I was in Boston at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. There I delivered a paper on ideology. The night before I went to dinner with another scholar who I was desperate to have like me. His work is exceptionally important for my own work and I'd hope that he might even consider writing a blurb for my book. The dinner went fine, but I came away feeling pretty much like an ass for a number of statements that didn't come off the way I'd would have liked. I then did a final proof of my paper and there I saw all the problems with it. Paragraphs that were disconnected from the main argument, transitions poorly formed, awkward sentences that fell flat. I went to bed having fixed as much cosmetically as I could and hoped there would be a low turnout since the session was early, my flat inelegant prose ringing in my ears.

The next morning, much to my chagrin, the session was fairly well attended. Not only that, to my deep unease, one of the founders of the movement I was engaging was actually there. My turn came and I delivered my paper. I received only a couple of questions which were entirely positive in nature including one from aforementioned senior scholar who came up afterwards and told me what a marvelous paper it was and how truly right I was. Several other people came up to me as well and the rest of the day people stopped me in the halls to tell me they appreciated what I had said.

That night I went to bed with the words of my paper once again ringing in my ears, only this time they had the sound of pure poetry, with argumentation that was incisive and witty. The paper had not changed, but my perception of it had. I'm not sure if there is a moral lesson to take away from this, but I thought of the principle of relativity: how an object changes with a difference in the position of the observer. It isn't just about black holes in space.

I have been hearing a lot about the comeback potential of McCain. McCain's own comments "we're down six points in the polls...My friends, we've got them right where we want them!" is all about McCain's ability to comeback. Joe Scarborough the other day said he wouldn't write off McCain because, "McCain always finishes strong." So I wondered about this comeback potential and thought I'd look back at the record (don't you just love the internet). Here's what I found.

Indeed roughly 6 months before the New Hampshire Primary (McCain didn't bother with Iowa -- a fact he may be regretting now) McCain was down and broke. It is worth noting however that a mere 4 months before that he was virtually tied at the top spot with Guiliani and McCain both getting about 30% of the vote. Things though went to hell in the summer and by September 14, McCain hit his nadir at 12% but still running 3rd behind Guiliani and Romney. By January 9 McCain had raised his poll number up to a little beyond their March level and won with 37% of the vote. An astonishing comeback to be sure. But is it predictive of whats happening now. Let's look a little more carefully at the numbers

McCain made up those points in 4 months. And when the election happened, he was actually sliding in the polls, about 4 points off of his high (though polls did not reflect the final outcome perfectly, they were within the margin of error). So the myth of McCain finishing strong as Scarborough has said, does not seem born out by the facts. Additionally, the real question is what happened in the last 9 days of the campaign. The RCP average has him currently down by 7.8 points and 538 has him down by 7.1. It is perhaps most instructive to look at the poll that came closest to the actual voting results. Reuters/CSpan/Zogby was closest polling McCain at 36% on election day (1% off actual total). So how much did McCain make up in that final week? The 1/1-1/3 poll had him at 34%. McCain then at his very strongest, with a field of 6 was able to make up a total 3 points. With 8 percent undecided in the early poll, none of the candidates finished much lower than that initial prediction and most picked up 1-2 points. So McCain picked up at the end roughly 3% of Republican undecideds. Currently undecideds are about 5-7% of the electorate. For McCain to show movement enough to win, he would have to pick up all the undecideds. This he did not do in New Hampshire (though to be fair he did pick up the majority of them).

Thus the bottom line of this analysis is that the notion that McCain can somehow come back from the significant deficit he has strikes me as far fetched. I'm not saying its not possible. Its is possible, but the famous McCain comeback in New Hampshire was not an overnight success. In fact for the two weeks before New Hampshire, McCain led in most polls or was within the margin of error. Those last two weeks saw some modest momentum for McCain, but anyone who watched the polls was not surprised that he won as he had been leading. The true reversal happened about a month back when Romney began to slide off his double digit lead to two weeks before when McCain pulled even. Thus while I do expect the race to narrow, I would be surprised to see a reversal in this short a time period.

Of course all this is academic at some level, because the national numbers are in the end less relevant. It is the state by state numbers which are important. Currently, these numbers heavily favor Obama. Many of them reflect double digits leads for the democrat. Pennsylvania, which McCain has identified as his best hope for a win, has Obama up anywhere from 7-13 points. Things don't look good. Currently most electoral maps have Obama leading with between 259-268 electoral votes. Again with a max of 11 EV down, Obama seems in good shape.

In watching the presidential race lately, I have been reminded of a joke. A man comes home early from work and find his wife in bed with his best friend. His friend leaps up and says, "pal, there is nothing going on here." The man replies, "you are naked and in bed with my wife!" The friend replies, "Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?" (my thanks to the guys over a Political Machine for reminding me of this)

The current tactics of the McCain camp are like this. Obama is a terrorist, "Obama pals around with terrorist, Obama doesn't see America like you or I, We don't really know who Obama is", "Obama is a radical", "Obama is a mystery" all fail to connect because they just don't match what people see, particularly in the debates. Obama did not look scary and radical or so different than you or I, he looked calm, cool and actually kind of ordinary. His debate performances were better than McCains's as the polls seem to indicate, but not so much that he looked like he was so different. Thus the problem for the McCain camp is that their desired narrative just doesn't square with the facts.

Unfortunately for McCain the same is true for his narrative about himself. When McCain argued at the debate "we have to have a steady hand on the tiller." He seemed to be campaigning for Obama who in the economic crisis has looked very steady as opposed to McCain who has seemed to jump from one dramatic idea/stunt to another. When McCain claimed that we need someone who can "look Putin in the eye." and yet seemed unable to look Obama in the eye he once again undercut his own message. When McCain says repeatedly "I know how to fix/find/do..." and the then he goes to washington and the bailout falls apart, he once again subverts his own narrative. And you gotta wonder, if he really did know how to find Bin Laden like he says, shouldn't he tell the Bush administration so they could get him?

McCain likes to say, "the american people know me well." But this is actually a confusion part between name recognition and actually have a sense of the person. People don't seem to feel they know McCain well and even conservatives are wondering aloud who he is. On the other hand, the extended (seemingly endless) primary between Hillary and Barack has served as a base for Obama to solidify his brand. And once again Obama never has seemed scary. Idealistic and aloof perhaps, but not scary.

So the McCain camp is placed in the position of asking the question in the joke, "Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes." unfortunately for the McCain camp, this time the electorate is inclined to believe their eyes.

I'm avoiding some paper work I have to do so I've been playing with two sites that I think are pretty great. The first fivethirtyeight.com is a really good poll tracking site. I've used pollster.com as well but fivethirtyeight actually ranks the reliability of the polls based on track records so I find them a little more sophisticated. And then also I've been playing with the site 270towin.com it has a cool simulation mode which will show a variety of ways the race could go. I think the simulator is interesting, but it occasionally shows Obama winning Louisiana or West Virginia, which neither really is conceivable. But if you want to play with states to see what you need to get to 270, it has a nice interactive map. Though I'd like it better if you could drill down and see the actual poll numbers. Anyway...

So what do we see. Well it appears that Kerry states are coming home. Those upper states of MN, WI and MI all look pretty solidly like they are going back democratic. While the polls don't show huge leads, they show consistent leads. The addition here is the pick up of Iowa which was a Bush state in 2004, but Obama has lead their consistenly in all the polls. In the west, the west coast looks solidly Obama as well as New Mexico (which was not a Kerry state). I would also put New Hampshire in Obama column, its a Kerry state and its polls have been trending Obama generally though there was an outlier that had everyone up in arms. Obama's lead has been small there, but consistent so my guess is that it will go Obama. Polls in Pennsylvainia also look pretty good for Obama, its a Kerry state and Obama has generally led there, often outside the margin of error. In the south the big surprise is Virginia which seems pretty solidly Obama.

So given all that what does it mean? If Obama just wins these states, then Obama wins. Those states together give him 277 electoral votes and he needs 270 to become president. Of course we're still more than a month away from election day and something could happen in that time that could elevate McCain or destroy Obama, but it does not look like the debates are going to be that game changer. The pundit class basically felt McCain and Obama battle each other to a draw and the insta-polls all gave it to Obama. So unless there some real game changer that occurs things look pretty good for Obama.

But I think we'll know a lot early on election night. If Obama wins more than what I've predicted here, let's say he also picks up North Carolina and/or Florida then he's got it in the bag, pop the champaign to celebrate or drown your sorrows because its going to be President Obama. But if he suddenly loses some of those states. If he doesn't cleanly sweep the North East, if Pennsylvannia goes red or Virigina is for McCain lovers then its going to be another sad night for democrats. If he just does what I've outlined here, then I think Obama will win, but it may be a little more of a knuckle-biter. 277 is not a huge landslide and if the rust-belt gets antsy or the west coast goes really wonky then it could be something else. However, if we come out of the midwest as expected or better than expected it will be another election where they won't call it until the Polls close on the West Coast just to be polite.

I think Obama people continue to have a lot to be optimistic about. The two elections I remember best, Dukakis and Kerry offer a lesson. In both of those, the general tracking polls showed huge leads in summer which evaporated after the conventions and never came back. Often the two candidates were still within the margin of error, but the democrat was never on top. That is not the case this time and with early voting taking place already in a lot of states, the state of the race today may actually effect how votes are cast.

John McCain's national deficit with Obama has shrunk to 3 points and has changed to a lead in some polls. Is it possible the democrats have made a mistake, have the nominated the wrong person? Should we at the last minute turn to Hillary Clinton as the Messiah to lead us out of the wilderness? Democrats are panicking. Could it possibly be that democrats will once again snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?

Deep breath. The one place you don't see panic is in the Obama campaign. The Obama campaign is doing what they have been doing. Why? Because the Obama people understand that national polls don't matter. They didn't win the nomination by trying to convince the whole democratic party, they understood the rules and played to win by the rules. They are doing the same here. The president is not elected by the aggregate popular vote (just ask Al Gore) he/she is elected by electoral vote. The question is how does the state by state look?

Now bear in mind, we are really outside the window where polls are really reliable, but lets ask the question, where are we now? To answer this question we should turn to the ultimate resource on the question which is pollster.com. Pollster.com aggregates field polls from all sorts of reputable organizations. It excludes push polls or polls with clear statistical problems and then neatly puts them together to give us as accurate a picture of the current state by state as is possible. Right now, Obama is solid in states totaling 214 electoral votes and leading outside the margin of error in states with 46 electoral votes. That puts him at 260 electoral votes assuming he gets them all on election day. A reminder: it takes 271 electoral votes to become president. That means Obama needs to pick up 11 electoral votes to win. John McCain on the other hand is solid in states totaling 112 votes and with states leaning towards him totaling 64. That gives him a total of 176. That means that for John McCain to win he needs to pick up nearly 100 electoral votes. In the toss-up states that are left total there are 102 electoral votes. McCain then needs to get all those states where he's strong and leads AND a vast majority of the toss-up, a landslide in the toss-up states if you will.

Obama, on the other hand, only really needs to pick off one of the bigger toss-up states. There's a reason the convention is being held in Denver, Colorado is 9 electoral votes. If he swings that state to his column he's within three. I'd look for him to spend a lot of time in OH, NV, VA, and FL as well. And if he can pick-up my state, NC he would be home free (right now John McCain leads, but within the margin of error). But really he only needs one of those to win. So certainly if I were Barack Obama I would much rather be in my shoes than John McCain. Of course anything could happen, the John McCain is out of touch meme is just getting started. The conventions and the debates are still to come. But I think a cold look at the numbers would argue against panic and towards a guarded optimism.

Ok, dissing Obama's patriotism, or liberal voting record, or celebrity status that's all grist for the mill. The mutual head bashing goes on as it will. I have largely been silent on these issues because they will all get sorted out in the campaign process. But when John McCain's staff decides that they can pick on an embattled minority who has recently lost a giant in their midst then a LINE HAS BEEN CROSSED! I speak, of course, of the vile attack on D&D'ers. Observe this statement from The John McCain Website

"It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd to disparage a fellow countryman's memory of war from the comfort of mom's basement, but most Americans have the humility and gratitude to respect and learn from the memories of men who suffered on behalf of others."

This goes to far indeed! What's next a frontal attack on LARP'ers? Denigrating Furries? WE ARE ALL AMERICANS! Do you have no shame, Sir? D&D'ers are patriots and I will hear nothing less. Did the McCain people not see Taps? John McCain should apologize immediately for his staff bloggers. A D20 die should be rolled and whatever hit points acquired should be taken from his poll numbers.

After spending two weeks in central Mexico, I have some reflections on the current oil crisis. First, while I am increasingly convinced that the current run-up is a bubble and will at some point pop (indeed the most recent preciptious decline may have already shown that) I am also convinced that the price of oil will continue to rise. Those who have argued against the bubble hypothesis are not wrong in that demand is and will continue to increase as China and India (in particular) continue their climb into the 21st century. Which means that while $5 a gallon gas may not happen this year, it will happen. Significant global economic decline may push it off for some time, but not indefinitely. And as T. Boone Pickens has stated so clearly, our ability to drill our way out of this crisis is diminishing. He claims there is no easy oil left and as a billionaire oil man he may infact be an expert on this. Not to mention the national security aspect of importing 70% of our oil from foreign governments many of which are either unstable, hostile or potentially hostile to us. George W.Bush was not wrong (finally!) when he said we are addicted to oil and it is an addiction we must break.

The issue of course is the transportation sector. Most of the other areas in our lives, perhaps all of them, run not on gas but electricity and electricity is not moored to a single source. We can create electricity from a variety of sources: Coal, Natural Gas, hydro, geothermal, solar, wind, the list goes on. It is only in the transportation sector that we are dependent on gasoline and thereby oil. Here then is where I disagree with Pickens plan. He proposes we move from oil to Natural Gas for the transportation sector. But that is switching heroin for cocaine, we still are dependent on a single source for energy. The more options we have for energy creation the less any one source can become the kind of political football that oil has become.

Now let me be somewhat contradictory and say I'm not sure this is the case for Mexico. Mexico has vast Natural Gas resources and it may in fact be more cost effective for them to switch to Natural Gas nationally than electricity. They have terrible pollution problems. Mexico city is blanketed in a white haze the likes of which are reminiscent of the days in L.A. when out door activity was banned because of pollution when I was growing up. One walks along the streets of many cities, even smaller ones and has the constant feeling of breathing exhaust and gas fumes. A switch to Natural Gas might be the sort of change that could effectively aid this terrible problem in Mexico.

But for us the answer has to be electricity, we just don't have the kind of natural gas resources to do the other. And here is where I have gotten very excited about the G.M. forthcoming vehicle Chevy Volt. The volt has been described as a hybrid, but this is misleading. Unlike the Prius which uses the electric motor to glean greater mileage out of the gas engine, the volt is an electric car which contains a small gas engine to maintain the power of the battery. Essentially you are never driving on the gas engine. You only drive on the battery, but the gas engine acts as a "range extender" so that you can go long distances without needing to recharge. The battery alone has a 40 mile range. If you commute less than 40 miles round trip (as I do) you would never need to use gas AT ALL except for long distance drives.

The car is a miracle of ingenuity and could radically change the entire energy dependence equation coming to a show room next year (2010 model year).Not only would a car like this massively effect our dependence on oil, but likewise it would also significantly reduce our greenhouse gas emission contributing to a significant easing of the problem of global warming.Its a two-fer (three-fer if you count the concomitant fall in oil prices that will come with decreased demand)

There are two issues, of course. First is an issue of power generation, with a hundred million volt-like cars we will need more ways to generate electricity and thus we need significant investment in our electrical infrastructure. But unlike hydrogen fuel cells or natural gas, it won't require the creation of a brand new infrastructure, we already have everything we need, we just need to improve it.

But the second issue is how do we get the old cars out and the new cars in. Importantly, how do we make sure that those people who are often driving the least efficient and oldest vehicles, our poorest citizens, are not left out of the loop, because as cool as this car is it won't be cheap. GM estimates a street price of 40k for the volt. Here is where government intervention is needed. At $40,000 this car will be a luxury item reserved for the well off. We need the governement through a combination of loans, tax credits to the automakers, rebate programs and tax credits for consumers to make this car (and any car like it, GM is licensing its technology) available to people at any income level. Obama's program is a start but it is too timid, it won't reach enough people. If we are actually to solve the problems that fossil fuels have gotten us into then there must be boldness and vision.

If you are like me and the whole sub prime mortgage thing makes no sense to you then I have a link for you. Public Radio's This American Life has done an incredible show called The Giant Pool Of Money. The housing crisis all begins with the giant pool of money, money in pensions, insurance company money, federal bank reserves (US and foreign banks), any money that some coroporation or organization has that's just sitting around waiting for a rainy day (like a disaster, retirement, run on the banks, whatever). That pool is huge, 70 trillion dollars. And the people who manage it, and there's a lot of them, are constantly looking for new ways to make the pool larger. That's where everything begins, but it ends with the feared collapse of the entire global banking system because some folks in Van Nuys can't make their mortgage. If that doesn't make sense to you then is program will show you how we got there and what a bubble looks like on the inside. Dot Com vetrans should hear some things very familiar. The show is free to listen to on line, but you have to pay if you want down load it. Still its an hour of your time that will educate you like nothing else. And I urge you to listen to their program or podcast weekly. No one tells stories like This American Life.

Brad Setser has a couple of interesting posts I'd like to point out. The first is from last week called Unpleasant Oil Math. He notes that for every $10 increase in the price of oil there is an significant increase in the domestic budget of the oil producing countries. No surprise there, but a reminder here of who is benefiting.

Each $10 increase in the price of oil produces:

"An additional $57b for the GCC states (Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and the other emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman).

An additional $25-26b for Russia.

An additional $10b for the Iranian government.

An additional $8b or so for Venezuela."

These governments in particular are important because they are one or more of the following: 1) funding or supporting terrorism abroad 2) are undemocratic themselves and less likely to change when the money comes pouring in 3) boogey-men of the conservative right 4) Don't like us.

Until we start to see our dependence on oil as an issue of national security, we will continue encouraging international behavior we don't want.

The other post What can't go on still hasn't slowed let alone stopped talks about the amount of dollars that the Chinese are current holding in reserve. That number is astonishing. Currently it is 1.7 trillion. That's a lot of money. And it's not stopping. The Chinese picked up another 82 billion last month. And, as Setzer points out, that is a month when oil was at record prices and China imports most of its oil. At this rate China will add another billion to its reserves before the end of the year. That means China will hold almost 3 Trillion dollars in reserves. Setzer points out that they are not making money on this. Holding that kind of cash in dollars is a losing proposition particularly with the dollar continuing to be so weak.

Which raises the question, "why are they doing it?" Setzer does not ask this question, but certainly its one which we should keep in mind. I'm not sure I have an answer. Optimistically I'd suggest they think the United States will turn the corner at some point and the dollar will come roaring back. Pessimistically, I wonder if they see this as their ticket to political dominance. What do you think?

If you haven't seen this, and you love bollywood, then you really should. Honestly, can you picture either John McCain or Hillary Clinton doing Bollywood? I think not! The election is over! Screw West Virginia, if you've got the Bollywood vote your on your way to White House!

Nirvak Singh has a blog post about a paper he heard from Davesh Kapur in which he reflects on the real difference between China and India. Certainly there is no discounting the role of centralization that China's authoritarian governnment played in the economic moves China has made, and contrastingly, the much less streamlined approached democracy has entailed for India. Many economists praise the Chinese totalitarian government as "quick and versitile" while India's democratic institutions are "slow and lumbering." Still Singh puts these aside and approaches the issue ideologically sideways which presents food for thought

"My reading of the role of ideas (not necessarily completely in line with Kapur’s) is that China saw a much sharper shift in the conception of what forces drive material progress. China’s experience with central control of all facets of society and economy, the sharp discontinuities it had already undergone, and the ability of the Communist Party to reach down to the local level, meant that the country’s ideational shift was comprehensive and far-reaching. In India, on the other hand, economic reform has not been accompanied by a similar sea change in perceptions. Liberalisation has been seen by many in the bureaucracy or political leadership as a necessary evil, to be implemented grudgingly on an as-needed basis, rather than as a fundamentally new approach to organising the economy. It is important to realise that this is not a difference between elite and masses—it is large segments of the elite that have failed to change their attitudes, despite the failures of the old Indian model of supposedly state-led development. The result is a false equation of concern for distributive justice with a preservation of the ancien régime, or with restoration of some non-existent golden age of governance."

Here the issue of ideology is not simply about an economic system, it is about a new way of thinking, a change in core values and the political will to follow through. Here again we veer perilously close (as G.W. Bush did once) to praising dictatorship as "easier to get things done." But what is more important I think is that India's reticence represents a failure in the marketplace of ideas of the free marketeers to make their case to the entire populace. All boats must be lifted and a transition from one economic system to another requires not the sink or swim callousness of Milton (or Thomas) Friedman, but clear sense of how people are going to be taken care of.

In our own country, if we are going to prepare for the global revolution that looks to be knocking at our door we cannot expect that a causal "jobs will be created, jobs will be lost, that's life in the global economy" approach is going to be successful. We must strengthen our governmental safety net. It is only when people have the confidence that their economic and physical well being will not be put in jeopardy that they will be willing to take the risks necessary to be competitive in the global economy. Otherwise we will continue to lose out to China and India.

If you have watched the news today you probably have seen a massive earthquake has struck China. Reading of a magnitude of 7.8 (truly frightening for someone who is from California and knows what the numbers mean). The death toll of 7600 is probably only a beginning. My colleague and friend Shawn is in China right now with a group of students. He has texted and reported that he and the students are alright. I'm thankful for that.

Also on China I will draw attention to to Jim Hoagland's Op Ed in the Washington Post on a new alliance between Japan and China. An interesting article in general, but I would draw attention to this statement,

"Japan's modest growth over the past five years has been fueled almost entirely by its exports to China. While markets elsewhere have reached saturation levels, China's appetite for Japanese finished goods and manufacturing parts is unabated. Choosing his words with care, Fukuda hinted that Japan's economic future may lie in Asia rather than in its traditional markets in Europe and the Americas."

Currently we see the results of competing with China over oil and food. A shift in Japanese trade towards China may mean we are soon competing with China over televisions, cars and computers.

Observe this quote announcing the simple fact of anthropocentric Global Warming:

"Some of the most compelling evidence of global warming comes to us from NASA. No longer do we need to rely on guesswork and computer modeling, because satellite images reveal a dramatic disappearance of glaciers, Antarctic ice shelves and polar ice sheets. And I've seen some of this evidence up close. A few years ago I traveled to the area of Svalbard, Norway, a group of islands in the Arctic Ocean. I was shown the southernmost point where a glacier had reached twenty years earlier. From there, we had to venture northward up the fjord to see where that same glacier ends today – because all the rest has melted. On a trip to Alaska, I heard about a national park visitor's center that was built to offer a picture-perfect view of a large glacier. Problem is, the glacier is gone. A work of nature that took ages to form had melted away in a matter of decades.

To lead in this effort, however, our government must strike at the source of the problem – with reforms that only Congress can enact and the president can sign. We know that greenhouse gasses are heavily implicated as a cause of climate change. And we know that among all greenhouse gasses, the worst by far is the carbon-dioxide that results from fossil-fuel combustion. Yet for all the good work of entrepreneurs and inventors in finding cleaner and better technologies, the fundamental incentives of the market are still on the side of carbon-based energy. This has to change before we can make the decisive shift away from fossil fuels."

The name of this radical, business busting, eco-terrorist? John McCain. Today in Oregon. Some may still argue whether there is a "consensus" among scientist, but clearly there is among the candidates for president.

I'm interrupting my current series on globalization to note the beginning of a new blog on apocalypticism. This is an area in which I am currently doing research and I've started a new blog to isolate my notes on that issues and not burden this blog with more technical material on those issues. I invite you to read my blog if you wish, its called Explaing The End at explainingtheend.blogspot.com. Hope to see you over there.

I post this image from James Fallows Blog who is currently living in China. This is the crowd that greeted the arrival of the Olympic torch. "Frackin' huge" I think is the way one might describe it.

Yes, those are people. But an economist might suggest they are also wallets. And this is just one town in essentially the boonies of China. As Fallows says, "Shenzhen, remember, is a city that is geographically and culturally about as far distant from Beijing as you can find in China, the far-southern outpost of pure manufacturing-based market-mindedness." Makes you think.

As part of my community service requirements I was forced to watch FOX News the other day (just kidding, it was on at the Gym), and I saw the "pundits" take pot shots respectively at enviromentalists, global warming, and ethanol requirements. To FOX's credit, there was a woman who rejected these explanations and instead looked to a new global demand for food from India and China as a greater part of the problem. Business Week (not exactly Enviromentalist Weekly) has an article Is Ethanol Getting a Bad Rap where they essentially debunk the idea that ethanol is at fault for rising food prices. Certainly it is a minor factor, but only a minor one. Let me be clear here, I have been troubled by the environmental concerns that corn based ethanol studies have raised recently. I agree with Obama's statements that we need to move to cellulose ethanol rather than food based.

But that said we must look to globalization for a large part of the problem. As incomes increase in India and China their demand for better nutrition and more food will increase accordingly. Likewise I have heard anecdotal stories that indicate that the sheer size of the burgeoning Indian and Chinese middle classes (still small proportionally, but huge in real numbers) are wrecking havoc in boutique industries. Squid becomes a fad among Chinese bourgeoisie and suddenly the fisheries of the entire Indian Ocean and Japanese Sea are wiped out. The same is true for oil and other raw resources as we see escalating energy prices (which also leads to higher transport costs and therefore higher food costs) and now food itself. As India and China continue to claw their way to the top of the economic food chain (no pun intended) the U.S. needs to recognize both opportunity and danger. Clearly rising food prices are good for American farmers and the Business Week articles notes that the U.S. Government has saved billions in subsidies not disbursed because of rising farming profits. At the same time simple free market economics may actually mitigate against the U.S. in the long term as increasing global demand will increase prices not only to the benefit of farmers but to the detriment of American consumers.

There have been some arguments that say the rising cost of food will benefit local farmers and increase "buy local" movements. Indeed Robyn Meredith argues that such an approach could actually be far more effective than tariffs or price controls. On the other hand others have warned that the beneficiaries may be fast food chains which can more easily absorb the cost increases and thus poorer urbanites (for whom local farmers markets are not readily available) might see increased purchasing of "Happy Meals" as more competitive than buying from Safeway. This would then certainly have a negative health impact on the U.S. populace which is having greater incidents of obesity and diabetes at younger ages than ever before. The health care costs associated with this are another piece of the puzzle which should not be ignored.

I don't have a solution to any of this, my only point here is to begin some analysis of the situation and to seek answers. So far answers seem in short supply.

I have, of late, taken an interest in the issue of Globalization. I know I'm way out of field, but I first had my interest peaked by a lecture at UNF by Fareed Zacharia. Many of you probably know Zacharia's writing in Newsweek and he's a frequent contributor on news shows like "This Week." Generally his thoughts are about foreign policy and for the most part rational and realist. But the lecture that I attended was not on foreign policy per se but rather about the phenomena of Globalization in general. His point was encapsulated in what he called "Zacharia's law" which was 2.5 billion times anything is a big number. And 2.5 billion is the combined population of China and India. Other statistics that he mentioned were the dramatic increase in Chinese average wages which have gone from $400 a year to $2000 a year, a five-fold increase. This is in a scant 10 year time frame. At the same time middle class incomes in the United States have at best remained stagnant or fallen in the past 20 years after being adjusted for inflation. Not to mention the large number of working-class manufacturing jobs that have moved to China.

Earlier this year I was struck by the data presented in the video "Shift Happens" I'll post it here again as a reference point. If you haven't seen it you should. Not all of this data is about globalization but certainly it sets the stage.



I have thus done some reading on this issue. Recently I finished Robyn Meredith's "The Elephant and the Dragon." This is a deeply flawed book written by a reporter for Forbes Magazine. It has an anachronistically cold war mentality and a sloppy use of figures and is replete with anecdotes instead of analysis (though I hear Thomas Friedman's work is even worse). This is when it just isn't schizophrenic and self-contradictory. But getting past its rah-rah free tradism, and is inability to really deal with historical and cultural issues that aren't just caricatures, it does make some important points.

Historically speaking the rise of the United States is the result of the withdrawal of China and India from the world scene. Self-focused for most of the twentieth century they interacted little with the world economy. The United States on the other hand with its massive manufacturing base and technical innovation led the world and became the dominant economic power. Little competition was had for global resources like oil and food and the U.S. built itself as though it was the only player in the game. Its per capita use of resources dwarfing anyone else.

But this all changed in the late 80's and early 90's. China opened its doors to foreign investment, and quickly became a magnet for companies looking to build things at rock bottom labor prices. Investing heavily in infrastructure like roads, bridges and ports, China has now become the factory to the world. India on the other hand, invested in technological infrastructure like cabling and wiring, so when I called my Cable company to indicate my payment was on the way, I talked to "Monica" in Bangalore. The white collar jobs of call centers, customer support and back office accounting and form processing are being shipped over seas to India and soon, Meredith predicts, any company that can get on board will get on board with either China or India.

This happens as those advocates of free trade are singing the praises of higher corporate profits and the lower wages of India and China. But what they are celebrating is actually short term phenoma. Because there is no limit on China and India. They will continue to grow as fast as they can and their expansion cannot be checked by the United States.

What this means is that we are in the midst of a global redistribution of wealth. While salaries are falling in real terms in the U.S. they are rising in India and China. Sure American companies are making a lot of money right now, but the cultural revolution closed the universities. We are only now seeing the first generation of college graduates. The next generation will not be happy with $2000 a year salaries but will expect a 5 fold increase as well. And soon Chinese universities will be graduating not just B.A's but MBA's who will be interested not in just doing the bidding of whatever U.S. company happens to roll in to town, but will start and build their own businesses taking advantage of that same huge labor force that the U.S. has found so attractive. But with a consumer base of 2.5 billion they will soon dwarf our paltry corporations. It seems well within the realm of possibility that by the middle period of this century, a larger proportion of Americans will be working for Chinese Companies than Chinese working for American companies.

I'll stop here for now, but this seems to me to be one of the most important phenomena that we will address in this century and it requires serious consideration.

On a lighter note, as a fan of both the actress below and BSG I post the following video below. My understand that if you just watch it you will vote for her to become a regular on Mahalo Daily. Now I love Veronica Belmont as much as the next geek, but really Melody would be sooooo much better. Give it a watch.