Weekend reading list

I'm out of town for the weekend so here's a few of the things I've been reading these last few days.

Surly Amy, one of the Skepchick bloggers who I normally respect and had a very enjoyable conversation with at TAM 2011, suggested her critics should not be allowed to wear clothing with messages that offends her at future conferences. I'm sad to hear her make such a contemptible statement and hope she recants.

Another secular blog wrote about why being godless does not automatically mean someone supports abortion and third-wave feminism. I can now take that off my list of long future posts to make.

I took joy in learning that one of my pet theories has not only been studied, but supported by those studies. I've long suggested that legal access to abortion must to some extent encourage additional pregnancies by providing a safety net for unprotected sex. It's a traditional moral hazard Economists Phillip B. Levine and Douglas Staiger have studied this effect both domestically and abroad and describe abortion as a potential "pregnancy insurance." Bonus points for their reminder that this effect does not indicate what the optimal number of abortions should be.

An unrelated study showed that 37.5 percent of social psychologists admitted they would discriminate against hiring a qualified candidate if they knew he or she was a conservative. No one should be shocked.

Finally, Mark J. Perry shared a quotation from Peter Glover about the similarities between Jehovah's Witnesses and Peak Oil true believers when their doomsday prediction turns out to be wrong:

"Why are peak oil-ers like Jehovah’s Witnesses? Answer: When the definitive JW prediction of the ‘Day of Wrath’ failed in 1914, they did what false prophets have done in every generation: shifted the goalposts (to 1975 in the case of JW’s—and wrong again). It’s what false prophets do to save face, enabling them to keep fleecing the inherently gullible. Peak-oilers do likewise. 

Having written their headline-grabbing, money-making blockbusters predicting the imminent collapse of an oil-driven industrial world, peak-oilers like to maintain a ‘fluid’ approach to their predictions. In the case of oil, however, that’s becoming a tougher proposition, as their ignorance of energy, economics and the sheer ingenuity of man is increasingly revealed in the looming global oil boom."

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The basics still haven't changed

Occasionally I'll be at a social event and someone will make the following claim:

"Local production will be the norm of the future. All of the cross-country shipping and large-scale productions we're used to are based on cheap gasoline, and will go away when oil prices rise."

Honestly - my social life really does include elaborate localist encounters and rhetoric.

The fallacy here is the assumption that buying local conserves fuel.

The majority of fuel is used in the production of goods, not transportation, and local production is less efficient. Even ignoring that, it's a bogus assumption that a fleet of pickup trucks going 15 miles is always more efficient than a tractor trailer going across the country, as George Mason University's Don Boudreaux recently wrote.

The activists are claiming that only transportation fuel counts, and even those numbers are against them.

The entire notion that mere petroleum prices will throw everything we know about production out the window is cringe-worthy. I'm reminded of something Paul Krugman wrote in Pop Internationalism:

"Pop Internationalism proclaims that everything is different now that the United States is an open economy. Probably the most important single insight that an introductory course can convey about international economics is that it does not change the basics: trade is just another economic activity, subject to the same principles as anything else."

Every few years some demagogue proclaims we have to throw everything we know about economics out the window. Things are different now, they say, and we need to update the textbooks.

But those same textbooks they claim to care so much about never graced their bedside tables. They are throwing out ideas that they never understood.

I anticipate rising fuel costs to be a temporary problem. It may end up lasting for a few decades, but economic history suggests that we'll just end up finding a new energy source, like we did after whale oil peaked in the 1840s.

So what will rising oil prices actually do to local production? Since local production and transportation are both fuel hogs, the price gulf between local and regular goods will continue to widen. Unless the market is interfered with (subsidies, tariffs, localist activism) than there will be less local production in the future, not more.

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