Putting A Value On New York City Public Housing

The disaster that is New York City public housing has been covered many times at this site, for example here and here.  But can we quantify the disaster?  How much value -- value that could be used to elevate the poor out of poverty -- is intentionally suppressed by keeping tens of thousands of apartments in socialist-model ownership where they can never be bought or sold or subleased or mortgaged or otherwise turned into usable income of any kind?

Historically, the instinctive answer to the question would be "not much."  When the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) projects were built (mostly in the 1940s through 70s), they were placed in areas that had little to no value in the real estate markets of the time.  That's how they could acquire the land cheaply!  At the time of construction of the projects, almost all of them went into areas in one of three categories: (1) slums, (2) industrial areas in the process of being abandoned with the decline of manufacturing, and (3) waterfront and near-waterfront areas, also in the process of being abandoned with the decline of shipping other than at massive new container ports, which are mostly in New Jersey.

Well, that was then.  Today, there is almost no such thing any more as a classic "slum" in New York City.  (The closest things today to that concept are certain neighborhoods with massive infestations of -- you guessed it -- public housing.  Exhibit A:  Ocean Hill-Brownsville in Brooklyn; Exhibit B:  parts of the South Bronx.)  The large majority of the formerly industrial areas have been transformed into trendy hipster districts where young people move in and turn one-time factories into "lofts."  (Examples: much of Willamsburg, Greenpoint and Red Hook in Brooklyn, Long Island City in Queens, and -- believe it or not -- increasing stretches of the South Bronx.)  And the waterfront?  Those parts of it that were not taken over by public housing when it was in vogue have now been completely transformed by private investment into highest-end housing.  See, for example, the entire Lower West Side of Manhattan from 23rd Street down, the entire Brooklyn waterfront from the Newtown Creek (northern border of Brooklyn) to Cobble Hill, and much of Long Island City and Astoria in Queens.  There are even plans afoot to build new high-end private housing on the waterfront at the southern tip of the South Bronx!

So, do the areas with the public housing remain valueless?  Obviously not.  But until recently it's been tricky to put a precise figure on their value.  The nearest new or upscale private housing would be at least several blocks away, and for anything closer, the proximity to the public housing tended to suppress the value.  

But guess what?  In the past couple of years development pressures have driven new construction closer and closer to the NYCHA projects.  Today there are new condominium developments going up right in the midst of some of the areas of highest concentration of public housing.  And, in the past few months, a couple of those developments have hit the market and started to sell apartments.  The prices give a rather precise estimate of the suppressed potential value of the public housing that is not just across the street, but literally surrounding the new development.

Consider 1399 Park Avenue.  It's at the corner of East 104th Street in Manhattan.  In case the name "Park Avenue" conjures up for you an impression of luxury, you should know that the area of Park Avenue lined with high-end condos and co-ops until recently ended rather abruptly at 96th Street.  That's where the railroad viaduct emerges from its tunnel and becomes elevated.  (All trains that go into Grand Central Terminal -- hundreds per day -- go down this viaduct.  Who wants to live next to an elevated railroad?)  The NYCHA projects start just 3 blocks up at 99th Street, and continue from there.  The first project, known as the Carver Houses, goes from 99th Street to 106th on the West side of Park Avenue, and from 104th Street to 106th on the East side. Here is a link to a map, and below is a picture, looking North from about 100th Street, where you can see some of the project in all its beauty, with the railroad viaduct on the right.

1399 Park Avenue is going right into the middle of this.  It has the Carver houses across the street both to the West and North, not to mention the railroad viaduct.  With that context, you might appreciate the sales blurb from the building's website:

At the crossroads between modern and classic is 1399 Park Avenue. Rising 23 stories, this 72-unit glass and architectural-grade concrete tower takes the best of this prestigious avenue and merges it with a thoroughly modern lifestyle.

Here is a rendering of what the building will look like when finished:

Notice that this view (like every other image of the building I can find) looks Southeast, the only direction you can look without seeing any of the Carver Houses.  Although the building is a long way from finished, sales have begun.  Prices are at the link, averaging around $1,250 per square foot, which would mean about $1.25 million for a standard 1000 sq. ft. 2 bedroom apartment.  Granted, that is cheap by Manhattan standards.  Still, if you put the same per square foot price on the Carver Houses, you get some amazing numbers:  assuming an average of 150,000 sq. ft. for each building of the 14-building complex, the value comes to about $2.6 billion.

But, believe it or not, there is an even more extreme example taking shape on the Lower East Side.  Down there, from just North of the Manhattan Bridge all the way up to East 14th Street, there is an almost-unbroken stretch of about three miles of one NYCHA project after another, around 100 buildings in total.  I say "almost unbroken," because somehow there managed to survive in there a couple of privately-owned plots, one of which contained a one-story supermarket.  Next thing you know, mega-developer Extell had bought that site and proposed putting up a very large (80-story) condominium building literally in the midst of all the projects.  After a few years of community opposition (why?  who knows?) they got construction under way, and now the concrete structure is nearing the top, although completion of the entire building is probably more than a year out.  Nonetheless they have started sales of the building, calling it One Manhattan Square.  This picture from last November gives a good idea of the extent to which this building is completely surrounded by projects (but note that the structure is much taller today):

Prices?  In this case they average around $2500 per square foot.  Hey, it's on the water (or at least close)!  And there's no railroad viaduct next door (just the FDR Drive viaduct between you and the water and also the Manhattan Bridge -- which carries four subway lines plus about a gajillion cars a day -- so close you can almost touch it)!  

What does that mean for the value of the 100 or so NYCHA buildings?  At about 150,000 sq. ft. per building and $2500 per square foot, I get something in the range of $35 - 40 billion.  None of which, in current socialist-model ownership, can be realized upon in any way, shape or form to pay property taxes, or to provide public safety, or to maintain or upgrade the buildings, let alone to elevate their residents from poverty.  It's just tens of billions of dollars down the rathole as far as I can tell.  Frankly, it's criminal.

Let me also remark on a couple of relevant newspaper articles.  In today's New York Post, Kathryn Wylde, President and CEO of the Partnership for New York City (the great and the good!) has an op-ed reporting on a meeting last week of some 50 New York business leaders with President Trump.  The idea behind the meeting was to convince (lobby) Trump to maintain funding for New York City priorities in his budget.  What priorities?  Well, "priorities like public housing . . ."  That's as far as I got.  Is it any wonder that the rest of the country thinks that New Yorkers are idiots?

Or there's the article from yesterday's Wall Street Journal reporting on the failing program in South Africa to build public housing for the legions of extremely poor people in that country (sorry, it's behind a paywall).  The subject of the article is one Patricia Makhetha, whose publicly-owned house remains half-built and unusable after more than five years of supposed construction.

The party of Nelson Mandela has sought to radically transform the South African economy through affirmative action and extensive social policies, including a housing program whose annual budget has climbed above 30 billion rand ($2.15 billion).  But the ANC’s ambitions have been undermined by allegations of corruption and patronage and controversies have consumed the presidency of ANC leader Jacob Zuma . . . .  

That's right, they chose to copy our very stupidest public policy, socialist-model public housing.  And it has failed disastrously.  Surprise!  The poor will remain poor.  Can somebody tell them that all they need to do is provide for private ownership of the property and the homes will magically appear without any need for government involvement, and meanwhile the poor people will start to build equity and move into the middle class?   Or do we now need to send everyone to a "safe space" before we can utter such words?

It's Time For EPA To Reconsider And Rescind The Endangerment Finding

Hopefully, most readers here have heard of EPA's Endangerment Finding.  If you haven't, here's the background.  During the Bush 43 administration, a group of "blue" states, led by Massachusetts, petitioned the EPA to regulate CO2 under the Clean Air Act.  When EPA did not do that, those states sued to compel the agency to regulate, and in 2007 the case reached the Supreme Court.  In Massachusetts v. EPA, the Supremes held that EPA should make a determination as to whether atmospheric CO2 poses a "danger" to human health and welfare, and, if it does, should regulate it.  When the Obama administration arrived in 2009, it got right to work on the project.  In December 2009 Obama's EPA issued the Endangerment Finding, determining, to no one's surprise, that CO2 in the atmosphere does indeed pose a "danger" to human health and welfare.  The Endangerment Finding is the legal foundation on which all subsequent Obama-era regulation of CO2 and other "greenhouse gases" rests.  These regulations include, as a leading example, the so-called "Clean Power Plan," that seeks to shutter all coal electricity generation in the U.S.

Since issuance of the Endangerment Finding (and, indeed, even before, during the public comment period) many criticized EPA's Finding as lacking in scientific basis.  (Bizarrely, EPA asserted in its supporting documentation that the evidentiary basis for the "finding" consists mostly of models of how it thinks the atmospheric heat transfer system works.  In other words, EPA claimed to use its hypothesis as the principal proof of the hypothesis.  Yes, these are people who purport to lecture others on "science.")  Seven and a half ensuing years of temperatures failing to rise as predicted have left the Endangerment Finding sitting on increasingly weak ground.  In September 2016, a distinguished group of scientists published a major Research Report asserting that all of the "lines of evidence" claimed by EPA to support the Endangerment Finding had been scientifically invalidated by the empirical data.  That Research Report was covered here on September 19, 2016, in a post titled "The 'Science' Underlying Climate Alarmism Turns Up Missing."  That post is one of the most-read posts ever published on this blog.

Obviously, no matter how ridiculous this might become, the Obama administration was not going to change direction.  But now we have a new President, committed to undoing counterproductive and job-destroying environmental regulations.  On January 20 a group called the Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council petitioned EPA to undo the Endangerment Finding.  Full disclosure:  I am one of the lawyers for the Council.  Here is a copy of the Petition.  The Petition is substantially based on the conclusions of the Research Report as to the scientific invalidation of the Endangerment Finding.  The Research Report was also a big part of the basis for John Christy's testimony before the House Committee on Science, Space & Technology on March 29, reported on by me here.  (Dr. Christy is one of the co-authors of the Research Report.)

You will see in our Petition and Research Report that this is the essence of the scientific enterprise.  Does the best empirical evidence from the real world support or refute the hypothesis?  We assert that EPA's hypothesis of "endangerment" has been refuted; but any scientist (or for that matter, any non-scientist) can seek to replicate and/or refute the results of the Research Report.  The authors of the Report, and of the Petition (who include yours truly) do not engage in any name-calling or ad hominem attacks on those who might disagree.  Rather, we challenge them to refute our results or, if they can't, to concede that there exists no basis for the Endangerment Finding, nor for the restrictions on fossil fuels that the Obama administration was seeking to impose.

When President Trump issued his Executive Order on March 28, ordering reconsideration of the Obama-era climate regulations, it included no specific reference to the Endangerment Finding, nor specific direction that the Finding be reconsidered.  Yesterday, our group issued a press release, seeking to get some more distribution for our Petition, and to raise awareness of the importance of the Endangerment Finding and of its reconsideration.

There has been some favorable coverage of our Petition at the Daily Caller  (Michael Bastasch), and at Breitbart (James Delingpole).  From Bastasch:

Two groups — Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and the Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council (CHECC) — claim EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding” should be updated with new evidence invalidating the agency’s previous claim greenhouse gasses threatened public health. . . .   CHECC sent its petition to EPA Jan. 20, during Trump’s inauguration. CHECC is only now publicizing this, along with CEI, to urge the Trump administration to re-examine the endangerment finding now that the president issued an executive order to rolling back Obama-era global warming policies.  CHECC’s petition relies on a 2016 study that “failed to find that the steadily rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations have had a statistically significant impact on any of the 13 critically important temperature time series data analyzed.”

More bizarre has been the reaction from the mainstream press and environmental activists.  Most have ignored us, of course.  But those who have not choose, as always, to avoid any attempt to deal with the scientific results on the merits, or on their own terms.  Instead, it's non-stop name calling and ad hominem attacks.  For example, a series of tweets from a guy named John Walke of the NRDC included these gems:

Telling insight into panic, rage & pathos of climate change deniers realizing they're outliers even in Trump admin.

Hard right-wingers mount furious & futile assault on climate science & legal obligation to reduce carbon pollution.  

"Panic, rage & pathos"?  Really?  Have you read the Petition?  (He's hoping you won't either.  Please do read it.). And meanwhile, John, can you explain why the hypothesis (of dangerous man-made global warming) has not been refuted by the evidence?

At the Washington Post, the article by Seth Borenstein of AP on March 29 (following John Christy's testimony that presented the results of the Research Report) is headlined "U.S. hearing on climate science focuses on name calling."   Again, Borenstein does not so much as reference the Research Report, nor attempt to deal with the scientific merits of its conclusions.  Funny, but I've read John Christy's testimony, and I can't find any name calling.  It's an extremely dispassionate statement of the scientific evidence and how the evidence does not conform to the hypothesis represented by the mainstream climate models.  Name calling is something different.  It is what Mr. Walke does, quoted above.

For the eight years of the Obama administration, the orthodox side of the climate controversy has been able, through control of government funding and processes, to suppress essentially all scientific debate on this subject,  and to silence adversaries.  Now it's time for name-calling to end and the science to be engaged.  EPA is in a position to force real engagement on the science by reopening the Endangerment Finding for reconsideration.  It is high time for that effort to begin.   

A Few Places Where Justice Gorsuch Can Make A Difference

You may be surprised to learn that, even in these highly contentious times, the U.S. Supreme Court decides about half or more of its cases unanimously.  For example, from the New York Times, July 3, 2014:

The court is indeed often united, and it will end this term with unanimous decisions in more than half of its cases. Over the past four terms, even the members of the court least likely to agree voted together 66 percent of the time.

But those unanimous decisions tend to be the ones that few people care about and that don't make the front pages of the newspapers.  Then there are the cases that go to the essence of our Constitution and the nature of our government.  To pose the key question:  Is the United States a country that is run by the government, or is it a country that is run by the people?  If you were to read the Constitution or the Federalist Papers you would very likely come away with a strong impression that the whole idea is that the country is to be run by the people rather than by the government.  Yet, in recent years (up to the death of Justice Scalia) when a case posed an issue related to that fundamental question, the result was very often decided by a vote of 5 to 4.  And when it was 5 to 4, almost always the four liberals and four conservatives would both vote as blocs, leaving Anthony Kennedy as the mostly-but-not-reliably-conservative swing vote.  

The overriding philosophy of the "liberal" bloc has been discussed many times on this blog, and there is nothing complicated about it.  The basic concept is that the government consists of neutral, apolitical experts whose job it is to move us all towards greater and then perfect justice and fairness through the magic of more and more laws, rules and regulations.  The neutral experts must be given full authority and discretion to rule over the people in order to complete this project.  Obviously the government must run the country, because otherwise there would be chaos!  Or, even worse, unfairness! 

In case you don't keep track of these things, you might find interesting a little mini-roundup of a few of the big issues that split clearly along the ideological divide.

First Amendment/Citizens United.  One of the provisions of the so-called Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (often referred to as "McCain-Feingold") made it illegal for corporations and unions to use their general treasury funds to make independent expenditures for speech that expressly advocated for the election or defeat of a candidate in an election.  The idea was to move toward the perfect justice and fairness by "getting money out of politics."  A federal bureaucracy (the Federal Election Commission) would do away with the chaotic free-for-all of free speech and replace it with government say-so as to who could say what and when.  The Supreme Court struck that down as unconstitutional under the First Amendment in the 2010 case called Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.   It was a 5 to 4 decision, with all of the "liberals" of the time (Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor) in dissent.

Ever since the decision came out, overturning it has been a priority for the Left -- and for the "liberal" bloc of the Court.  Hillary Clinton promised in her campaign to introduce a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United during her first ten days in office.  It was never clear that a constitutional amendment would actually be necessary, since all she really needed was one Supreme Court appointment to deep six the case for good.  In a widely-publicized interview that appeared in the New York Times on July 10, 2016, Justice Ginsburg was quoted as saying "I'd love to see Citizens United overturned."

Perhaps, given the huge fund-raising advantage that Hillary had over Donald Trump in the recent election, you are wondering why it is a priority for the Left to eliminate corporate financial involvement in elections.  It appears that the game is to silence all opposition -- or at least all well-funded opposition -- while assuming that the complete control of the press and of academia will enable the progressive message to get out in all circumstances.  But do they understand that all of the newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post) and broadcast media (ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC) are organized as corporations?  This could have become a huge issue if, for example, Merrick Garland had made it onto the Court.  Now, it will likely just go away.

Second Amendment/Heller.  Under a constitutional amendment that reads (in part) "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed," can a state or local government make it illegal in some or all circumstances for citizens to own firearms?  It is not surprising that views as to the answer to that question break down along ideological lines.  What is somewhat more surprising is that "liberal" legal academics and judges can convince themselves, in the face of the language of the Second Amendment, that severe restrictions that essentially eliminate legal private firearms possession are no problem.  The belief that the all-knowing bureaucrats can perfect the world if only given enough power is so strong that seemingly intelligent people are able to find ways to avoid remarkably clear and definitive language written into the Constitution itself.

The Heller case of 2008 was the one in which the Supreme Court decided that the right to "keep and bear arms" was a personal one that belonged to the people.  The vote was 5 to 4.  All of the "liberals" of the time (Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer) voted as a bloc.  Merrick Garland, or any Hillary Clinton appointee, would immediately have overturned this one.  Now the precedent is safe for a while.

Commerce Clause/Lopez.  Perhaps the most famous quote from the Federalist Papers is that from Madison's #45: 

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.  The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.  

I won't delve here into the steps by which the federal government slipped the ties of its "enumerated powers," most notably Wickard v. Filburn of 1942.  But are there today any limits at all on federal powers?  The most relevant Supreme Court case is United States v. Lopez of 1995.  Again, it was a 5 to 4 decision, with all of the "liberals" of the time (Breyer, Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg) dissenting.

At issue in the case was the constitutionality of the federal "Gun Free Schools" act, by which Congress had purported to make possession of a firearm near a school into a federal crime.  Could there be any subject farther removed from the "few and defined" powers granted to Congress by the Constitution?  Lopez challenged whether Congress had authority to legislate in this area.  The majority of 5 held that it did not.  But Justice Breyer, in dissent, articulated a rationale under which the constitutional limits on Congressional powers become completely meaningless:

Could Congress rationally have found that "violent crime in school zones," through its effect on the "quality of education," significantly (or substantially) affects "interstate" or "foreign commerce"? 18 U. S. C. §§ 922(q)(1)(F), (G). As long as one views the commerce connection, not as a "technical legal conception," but as "a practical one," Swift & Co. v. United States, 196 U. S. 375, 398 (1905) (Holmes, J.), the answer to this question must be yes.

While they won't quite say so directly, it is absolutely clear that all Supreme Court justices of the liberal bloc will find a way, in any given case, to support the power of Congress to legislate under the Constitution, no matter how remote the subject at hand may be from the enumerated powers of Article I, Section 8.

So, if you were hoping for the achievement of new heights in perfect justice and fairness through more laws, rules and regulations, you are probably very disappointed that it was Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton who got to make this Supreme Court appointment.  If you like the Constitution as written, you probably like Gorsuch. 

Reasonable Inferences About The Weird Obsession With Russia

Just over a month ago (March 2), I first posed the question "What Is With This Weird Obsession With Russia?"   I followed up three weeks later with "The Weird Obsession With Russia Just Won't Go Away."  Now we're up to April 7.  The weird obsession is still out there.  It's time to draw some obvious inferences.

I start from this very simple proposition:  The sad truth is that all humans are imperfect.  Corollary:  Very few human beings, and maybe none, given political power and control of the apparatus of government, can resist the temptation to misuse the powers of the state to advance themselves and disadvantage their opponents politically.  When the government's powers can be used in secret, the temptation becomes close to irresistible.  

The question of the day is, did members of the Obama administration, during the time of the recent election campaign and transition, misuse the surveillance powers of the NSA and FBI to gather information on Donald Trump and his associates for political purposes?  We know that various conversations of Trump and associates with representatives of foreign powers have been recorded, "unmasked" (in the euphemism of the day), and the substance provided to at least the National Security Advisor during the recent campaign and transition.  Is it a reasonable inference that these disclosures were completely innocent and without political purpose or use?  

I'll start be reprising a post that I wrote way back in June 2013, titled "Yes, Universal Government Snooping Is A Problem."  The occasion for the post was an article in the Wall Street Journal on June 8 of that year reporting on revelations of the essentially universal data collection on everyone all the time which had then recently been undertaken by the NSA.  The same article also reported on President Obama's defense of same.  According to the article, Obama on June 7, 2013 had asserted that the data collection involved only "modest encroachments" on privacy, and moreover had been "vetted" by Congress and the courts.  What could go wrong?  My take at the time:

[T]here are very serious problems with the government monitoring all the activities of everyone all the time.  The main one is, they are just not capable of resisting the temptation to misuse the information for political advantage.  And make no mistake, the information is highly valuable for political purposes. . . .  

Are there examples of top political actors using the powers of their position to spy on their adversaries?  Well, just in what is well known, there was the massive and systematic use by President Lyndon Johnson of the FBI and CIA to spy on the Goldwater campaign:

It was a political scandal of unprecedented proportions: the deliberate, systematic, and illegal misuse of the FBI and the CIA by the White House in a presidential campaign. The massive black-bag operations, bordering on the unconstitutional and therefore calling for impeachment, were personally approved by the president. They included planting a CIA spy in his opponent's campaign committee, wiretaps on his opponent's top political aides, illegal FBI checks, and the bugging of his opponent's campaign airplane.  The president? Lyndon B. Johnson. The target? Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the 1964 Republican presidential candidate.

Or how about President Nixon's attempted use of the IRS to gather potentially damaging information on his opponents (unfortunately for Nixon, the IRS was not disposed to go along):

During Richard Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign, the president's White House counsel, John Dean, met withthe head of the Internal Revenue Service, Johnnie Mac Walters, and presented him with an envelope. Inside was a list of approximately 200 names -- the names of Nixon's political enemies and with it came the understanding that the IRS begin investigating the "enemies list" and perhaps start sending some people to jail.

Obviously, this is not a partisan issue.  But, you say, the saintly and haloed Obama would never stoop to such wrongdoing?  Actually, we know very well that that is not true -- the Obama IRS scandal being only the most prominent of several examples.  (And, unlike the case of Nixon, the IRS, consisting almost entirely of partisan Democrats, was only too happy to help Obama try to hobble his opponents.)

Also going to the question of reasonable inferences to be drawn is the timing of emergence of the "Russia collusion" stories.  Do you remember when these stories about Trump's alleged collusion with Russia started to come out?  Looking around today, here's what I learn:  the earliest story I can find on the subject is this one from Franklin Foer of Slate on October 31, 2016.  That's just about one week before the election.  The story contains lots of speculation, and exactly zero hard information.  All of its sources are explicitly anonymous.  ("I communicated extensively with Tea Leaves and two of his closest collaborators, who also spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, since they work for firms trusted by corporations and law enforcement to analyze sensitive data.")  

The obvious inference is that surveillance of Trump and his associates went on throughout the campaign as part of a completely political operation to help defeat the adversary.  It's just in the nature of the very most powerful human instincts and incentives that that is what has occurred.  And the Russia thing?  I mean, in the off chance that Trump might win, the existence of the surveillance would inevitably come out.  A cover story was needed, and it had to surface before the election because it wouldn't be believable if it only emerged after the surveillance had been discovered and publicized.

It's a pretty good cover story, too.  I'll bet it polled well!  And here's something I have learned from a life in the litigation business:  it's impossible to prove that someone is lying when he is talking about his own motive.  If the question is "Did you shoot the deceased?" and you answer "No," that can be rather definitively disproved by a video showing you pulling the trigger and the deceased dropping to the ground.  But there can be twenty true answers to the question of "why" you did something.  "Why did you go to New York?"  "Because I like New York."  "Because my sister lives there."  "To look for a job."  "To see Central Park."  "To visit the Manhattan Contrarian."  "To kill the deceased."  They could all be true at the same time!  Or some could be true and some not.  Suppose you answered "Going to see Central Park was no part of the reason I went to New York," but actually it was the main reason that you went.  "Sure I happened to be in Central Park, but I was only there on my way to visit the Manhattan Contrarian."  How is anybody going to definitively prove you wrong?

So Susan Rice has been quoted as saying:  “The allegation is that somehow Obama administration officials utilized intelligence for political purposes. That’s absolutely false."  Do you believe her?  For reasons given, there is no way to disprove the statement definitively.  How you view her statement likely turns on how plausible you find the "Russia collusion" narrative, versus what you think of the ability of the Obamanauts to resist the temptation to misuse their governmental powers.  A few months into the "Russia collusion" thing with no evidence of any kind to support it -- and lots of reasons to think it's preposterous -- I'm not giving it much weight.  You may disagree.  But I point out that it would be completely normal for a presidential campaign and/or transition team, during the course of the campaign or transition or both, to:

• reach out to and speak to representatives of significant foreign countries to hear their perspective on significant issues affecting the two countries; or
• float ideas for changes in policy with respect to a given country with its representatives and get an indication of how the country might react to those changes.

Indeed, it would be incompetent for a campaign and/or transition team not to do these things with respect to the major countries on the international stage.  Do we think, for example, that some members of the Trump transition teams may have discussed with representatives of the UK the implications of the Brexit vote for the two countries' relations, and how our trade agreements might need to be restructured to deal with that situation?  How could they not have?

In other words, the fact that representatives of a campaign or of a transition are having discussions with representatives of foreign powers is completely normal and provides absolutely no basis for the NSA or FBI of the incumbent administration to make transcripts of the conversations involving an adversary's campaign and bring the substance of those discussions and the names of the participants to the attention of the President and the National Security Advisor.

The very, very, very strongest temptation pulling on a President is the temptation to use the secret powers of state surveillance to disadvantage his political adversaries.  This temptation is so powerful that it might well even have enabled the Obama team to convince themselves that they weren't doing anything wrong in surveilling the other side's campaign.

One final thing:  the story that "we had to surveil our political opponent because he might have been colluding with the Russians" will be equally available for every other politician in power going forward.  Hey, it worked for Obama!  For future presidents who want to try to use this line, I do recommend that you also follow Obama's example and first get a few well-placed articles like that Slate thing out there before the evidence of the surveillance itself starts coming out.

There Is No Alternative To Embracing Automation

Salena Zito, whose work I often admire, has a long piece in the New York Post from Sunday headlined "This is the next Democratic stronghold to crack like the Rust Belt."   It seems that Ms. Zito has done the same thing that I have done many times, namely taken the Acela train between Washington and New York.  If you do that, it's hard not to notice the very large stretches of devastated, abandoned and burned-out America -- some in Newark, some in Trenton, a huge part of North Philadelphia, some of Wilmington, the majority of Baltimore.  Zito:

Outside, a different Acela corridor rolls by — one roiled by isolation, decay and societal changes, a world ghosted by technology, corrupt politicians and bad city planning.  Shuttered machine shops, refineries, steel mills and manufacturing plants near Trenton and Philadelphia slide past the window like a kaleidoscope of sorrow; scores of once-charming century-old houses are now covered in graffiti and dot areas in and around Baltimore, Newark and Wilmington, Del.

There are also some upscale places along the route, although somehow the train's view doesn't offer much of a flavor of the nice suburbs of New York and Washington.  But as to the large and highly visible decayed areas in these cities:  could they now be ready to try another political approach, rather than whatever it is that has brought them so low?

Ms. Zito then moves on from description to diagnosis and prescription.  Unfortunately, I think that she then gets it all (or nearly all) wrong.  Her diagnosis of the problem, in a word, is "automation":

[M]ostly, it has been unrelenting automation that has eliminated middle-class jobs and lives. . . .    [One study] determined [that] every additional robot used in automation reduced employment in a given commuting area by three to six workers, and lowered wages by 0.25 to 0.5 percent. There are 1.5 million robots out there working in what is left of industrial America, and that number is projected to double in less than 10 years.

And how about a prescription of what to do?

The hard truth is that no one has any idea what to do with the under-employed, high school-educated people who once were able to carve out good, middle-class lives with their own hands, as long as they were willing to work.  But somebody had better figure it out soon. . . .

Sorry, but no.  First:  sure robots destroy jobs.  They are just the latest gizmos to fill that role.  Earlier versions of such gizmos were industrial looms and mechanized tractors and reapers for farms.  Those things, between and among them, "destroyed" what were then the jobs of some 90+% of Americans.  Here's a chart from the Department of Agriculture that I used in a post back in August 2014.  

Notice that the process of elimination of the agricultural jobs was still going on in the post-World War II period.  A good 10 million or so of those jobs were "automated" out of existence during my lifetime, during the 1950s and 60s -- an era now looked back on as some kind of golden age by many of the uninformed, who can see only the expansion of factory jobs during that time and not the devastation of agricultural employment.  And by the way, the jobs in agriculture were backbreaking, miserable jobs that paid just barely enough to subsist when the harvest was good.  When the harvest was bad, you starved, or lost your farm to foreclosure, or more likely both.  Is there anyone who seriously would want those jobs back today?

Those jobs were replaced by many things, manufacturing not a small part of the total.  But manufacturing is no more immune than agriculture to the processes of creative destruction.  Literally every factory, sooner or later, is going to be driven out of business.  It may happen because of a better process involving robots, or it may be by (temporarily) cheaper labor in a China or a Mexico, or it may be by a guy across the street with a better design for the product, or it may be that the owner dies and doesn't have a good successor, or it may be something else.  The fact remains that every job will some day go away.

So what to do about that?  When Ms. Zito says that "no one has any idea what to do with the under-employed, high school-educated people," she is just wrong.  What to do about it is obvious.  It's the "creative" part of "creative destruction."  Entrepreneurs and investors, given a good business climate and the rule of law, will create and grow new businesses and soak up the excess labor -- no matter at what level of skill.  That is, unless government hinders, obstructs, or prevents that process from proceeding.

The essential problem of Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore is not the automation and the closure of what were once hundreds of viable factories.  That happens everywhere.  What distinguishes these places is that nothing has yet come in to replace the failed businesses.  The problem is that the people who are creating new businesses today are not creating them in these places.  Why?  The right place to look is at predatory government.  In these cities -- but not in others -- taxes are way too high, crime is not under control, labor regulations (minimum wage, wage and hour restrictions, favors for unions), and other regulations (including things like nitpicking "safety" and "environmental" rules) greatly increase the burden and expense of starting and operating a business.  Potential entrepreneurs either go elsewhere or just don't bother to go to the effort of starting a business.

To ask an obvious question:  If you had an idea for a new business that could be located anywhere in the country and could employ, if it caught on, a few hundred modestly-educated people at decent wages, is there any chance that you would choose Baltimore as your location?  You would have to be out of your mind.  Baltimore's murder rate is around 50 per 100,000 (New York's rate is 4 per 100,000).  They had riots in Baltimore in 2015 where the citizens looted and burned local businesses for weeks on end, and the police stood aside.  Is any sane investor really going to sign up to be treated that way?

The funny thing is, if you had come to my own neighborhood of Greenwich Village in the 1970s (or at least to substantial parts of it), you would also have had the impression that it was "roiled by isolation, decay and societal changes" and "ghosted by technology" -- just like the big swaths of Philadelphia and Baltimore today.  The former shipping piers had been completely abandoned for around two or more decades, and the first couple of inland blocks were nothing but abandoned factories and warehouses that had formerly served the port.  Here is a picture of what some of the piers looked like at that time:

Today the same waterfront is lined with gleaming new condos that fetch top dollar, averaging something around an amazing $4000 per square foot (that would be about $4 million for a standard-size 2 bedroom apartment).  Here's a relatively recent picture:

What happened?  A few things:

• Between the late 1970s and mid-1990s, the top New York State income tax rate was cut in a series of steps by more than half, from 15% to under 7%.  (There has since been some regression, but only a little.). Still, there was no development.
• Then crime began its dramatic fall.  Using the murder rate as a proxy, it was about 25 per 100,000 in the early 1990s.  By 2000 it had fallen to about 8 per 100,000.  That's when redevelopment in this area started to get going.  Today the murder rate is around 4 per 100,000 and redevelopment has soared.

Come to the Greenwich Village waterfront today, and you would have no idea that a couple of short decades ago it looked much like North Philadelphia and Baltimore today.

There is no reason that those places cannot see the same kind of renaissance that we have had.  They just need to make themselves an attractive place for new investment.  That means getting taxes down and crime under control.  And they don't have the Broadway theater, the opera and the museums like we have.  That means that they can't assume that our level of taxes will work for them.

Meanwhile, "automation" is going to proceed, like it or not.  Rail against it all you want.  Unfortunately, if we want the overall level of incomes to increase, that means that productivity must increase.  And that means embracing automation.  There is no real alternative.  But embracing automation does not mean that anyplace has to be abandoned and forgotten.  That is a function of the attraction of new businesses, and has little to nothing to do with the destruction of the old, which is inevitable.

Climate News This Week: What Was Important?

To begin with, there was President Trump's Executive Order on Tuesday directing EPA and other government bureaucracies to begin the process of unwinding the dozens of Obama-era fossil fuel restrictions that were supposedly going to "stop climate change," or something like that.  But you already knew about that one.  

The next day, Wednesday, there was a hearing before the House Committee on Science, Space & Technology that inquired into the scientific basis for all those Obama-era regulations.  Witnesses included John Christy, Judith Curry, Roger Pielke, Jr., and Michael Mann.  The links go to the written testimony of each of those witnesses.  The first three witnesses were called by the Republican majority of the committee, while Mann was the pick of the Democratic minority.  (Really, was this guy the best they could do?  Needless to say, his testimony was all about how the "overwhelming majority" of scientists agree with his position, with no effort to engage on the merits whatsoever.)

Not to minimize the other two witnesses, but I'll focus on Christy's testimony.  The gist of that testimony was that the climate models that are the basis for all greenhouse gas regulation have failed in empirical testing against real world data.  In other words, the basis for IPCC and EPA claims that human greenhouse gas emission have a measurable impact on climate has been disproved.  From Christy's summary:

When the “scientific method” is applied to the output from climate models of the IPCC AR5, specifically the bulk atmospheric temperature trends since 1979 (a key variable with a strong and obvious theoretical response to increasing GHGs in this period), I demonstrate that the consensus of the models fails the test to match the real-world observations by a significant margin. As such, the average of the models is considered to be untruthful in representing the recent decades of climate variation and change, and thus would be inappropriate for use in predicting future changes in the climate or for related policy decisions. 

Well, that's rather a bombshell.  I wonder, how did the New York Times report this news?  And the answer is, in the three editions of that paper since Dr. Christy testified on Wednesday, there has not been one word about what Christy said at this hearing, or for that matter, mentioning the hearing at all.  

Christy goes into considerable detail as to the sources of evidence used to track real world temperature trends, and his methodology.  I'll leave it up to you to read that information at the link.  But a couple of more things of interest.  Christy presented a chart that was buried deep in the "supplementary material" of the most recent IPCC Report, "AR-5."  His comment:

What is immediately evident is that the model trends in which extra [i.e., human-added] GHGs are included lie completely outside of the range of the observational trends, indicating again that the models, as hypotheses, failed a simple “scientific-method” test applied to this fundamental, climate-change variable. That this information was not clearly and openly presented in the IPCC is evidence of a political process that was not representative of the dispassionate examination of evidence as required by the scientific method. 

Christy also discussed the results of the Wallace, et al., Research Report of September 21, 2016 (of which he was a co-author).  That Research Report was discussed here when it first came out back in September ("The 'Science' Underlying Climate Alarmism Turns Up Missing").   The summary conclusion from Christy's testimony:

The basic result of this report is that the temperature trend of several datasets since 1979 can be explained by variations in the components that naturally affect the climate . . . .      

So that is what the New York Times found to be completely unimportant in climate news this week.  And what did they find to be important?  Well, there was that big article on the front page Thursday, and continuing onto most of a full page in the interior, headlined "China Poised to Take Lead on Climate After Trump's Move to Undo Policies."  From the Times:

“They’ve set the direction they intend to go in the next five years,” Barbara Finamore, a senior lawyer and Asia director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, based in New York, said of China. “It’s clear they intend to double down on bringing down their reliance on coal and increasing their use of renewable energy.”  “China wants to take over the role of the U.S. as a climate leader, and they’ve baked it into their five-year plans,” she added, referring to the economic development blueprints drawn up by the Chinese government.

So, New York Times, what does that mean quantitatively?  I mean, how much coal generation capacity does China now have compared to the United States, and are the numbers for the two countries increasing or decreasing?  Of course, this being Pravda, don't expect to find any of that easily-available information in their article.  So I'll give it to you.  For China statistics, here is London-based Carbon Tracker, November 2016:

As of July 2016, China has 895 GW of existing coal capacity being used less than half of the time – and perversely has 205 GW under construction and another 405 GW of capacity planned. . . .  

In January 2017, China canceled some 103 GW of that planned-and-under-construction capacity, meaning that it now has "only" 507 GW of coal generation capacity planned and/or under construction, to add to its 895 GW of existing coal generation capacity.  And the numbers for the U.S.?  We have only about 325 GW of coal generation capacity according to this report from 2015 -- and that figure has likely declined somewhat since then.  In other words, our total of existing coal generation capacity is about a third of China's, and not much more than half of what China is planning to add in the next few years.  By that time, our coal generation capacity will be less than one-quarter of theirs, and maybe even less.  Good "climate leadership" China!

Now that you know those numbers, you can consider some of the more ridiculous things in this Times article.  For example, we have this from Chinese energy "researcher and policy advisor" Chai Qimin:

Chai Qimin, a climate change researcher and policy adviser, said that policies adopted at a recent Communist Party meeting showed that China “has attached ever greater importance to ecological civilization and green development.”  “Everyone is taking this more and more seriously,” he added.

Or consider this, quoted by the Times from an editorial in the Chinese state-run Global Times newspaper:

“Washington is obliged to set an example for mankind’s efforts against global warming, and now the Trump administration has become the first government of a major power to take opposite actions on the Paris Agreement,” the newspaper said. “It is undermining the great cause of mankind trying to protect the earth, and the move is indeed irresponsible and very disappointing.”

Does the Times realize that these people are laughing at them?  Honestly, I don't think they do.

Now, as between Dr. Christy's testimony on the empirical invalidation of the IPCC climate models, and the seizure of "climate leadership" by China, which do you think is the more important?