Containing no new science, the new IPCC offering is just a rehash of its series of Fifth Assessment Reports that have been released over the past year or so

From Cato, by Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. "Chip" Knappenberger. See Last Gasp of a Dinosaur?

"Global Science Report is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly “Current Wisdom.”
 

---

The just-released “synthesis” report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) could be the last gasp of this clumsy dinosaur.

Containing no new science, the new IPCC offering is just a rehash of its series of Fifth Assessment Reports that have been released over the past year or so.

When the IPCC’s “science” portion of the Assessment was released last fall, it was immediately faulted for being based upon climate models which have greatly overpredicted the amount of climate change that has been occurring largely because they completely missed the slowdown of the rate of global warming that has taken place over the past two decades. The IPCC tried a few band-aid-type solutions to keep its cold blood, but they were too little, too late. With its dismal track record exposed, no one should possibly take the IPCC future projections seriously, including the folks down at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

More and more, people are calling for the United Nations to render the IPCC dinosaur to the strata of history, reaching a crescendo with this “new” report.

The Synthesis Report was shaped by the climate alarmists who were enraged that the IPCC even feebly admitted that its future projections were likely on the high side of things. Instead, they demanded a strong statement from the IPCC that could be used to force fossil fuel restrictions on the unwilling (which partially explains the ham-handed  release two days before pivotal U.S. elections). So despite no new science and another year—making now 16 out of the past 16 years—in which the global average temperature has fallen beneath IPCC projections, the IPCC released what has been called its “starkest” and “most important” report yet .

From The (predictable) Guardian:

“Science has spoken. There is no ambiguity in the message,” said the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, attending what he described as the “historic” report launch. “Leaders must act. Time is not on our side.” He said that quick, decisive action would build a better and sustainable future, while inaction would be costly.
Ban added a message to investors, such as pension fund managers: “Please reduce your investments in the coal- and fossil fuel-based economy and [move] to renewable energy.”

Hopefully, such talk from the U.N. will spark the rest of us to get what we deserve, that is, an end to this government-funded U.N. charade claiming to represent the “consensus of scientists.”  With luck, the extinction this dinosaur will herald the extinction of all the government-funded climate change “assessments,” ushering in the rise of Homo sapiens."

“Extreme poverty fell to 15% in 2011, from 36% in 1990. Credit goes to the spread of capitalism.”

See It’s the greatest achievement in human history, and one you probably never heard about from Mark Perry.

"

Dartmouth economics professor Douglas Irwin has an excellent op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal — “The Ultimate Global Antipoverty Program,” with the subtitle “Extreme poverty fell to 15% in 2011, from 36% in 1990. Credit goes to the spread of capitalism.” Here’s an excerpt:

The World Bank reported on Oct. 9 that the share of the world population living in extreme poverty had fallen to 15% in 2011 from 36% in 1990. Earlier this year, the International Labor Office reported that the number of workers in the world earning less than $1.25 a day has fallen to 375 million 2013 from 811 million in 1991.
Such stunning news seems to have escaped public notice, but it means something extraordinary: The past 25 years have witnessed the greatest reduction in global poverty in the history of the world.
To what should this be attributed? Official organizations noting the trend have tended to waffle, but let’s be blunt: The credit goes to the spread of capitalism. Over the past few decades, developing countries have embraced economic-policy reforms that have cleared the way for private enterprise.
The reduction in world poverty has attracted little attention because it runs against the narrative pushed by those hostile to capitalism. The Michael Moores of the world portray capitalism as a degrading system in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Yet thanks to growth in the developing world, world-wide income inequality—measured across countries and individual people—is falling, not rising, as Branco Milanovic of City University of New York and other researchers have shown.
Capitalism’s bad rap grew out of a false analogy that linked the term with “exploitation.” Marxists thought the old economic system in which landlords exploited peasants (feudalism) was being replaced by a new economic system in which capital owners exploited industrial workers (capitalism). But Adam Smith had earlier provided a more accurate description of the economy: a “commercial society.” The poorest parts of the world are precisely those that are cut off from the world of markets and commerce, often because of government policies.

MP: From a December 2013 CD post, “the chart above could perhaps qualify as the ‘chart of the century’ because it illustrates one of the most remarkable achievements in human history: the 80% reduction in world poverty in only 36 years, from 26.8% of the world’s population living on $1 or less (in 1987 dollars) in 1970 to only 5.4% in 2006. (Source: The 2009 NBER working paper “Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income,” by economists Maxim Pinkovskiy (MIT) and Xavier Sala-i-Martin (Columbia University)..

In that post, I also featured the video below, where AEI president Arthur Brooks also makes the case that free markets, free enterprise, and capitalism are responsible for the remarkable reduction in world poverty over the last 40 years:

It turns out that between 1970 and 2010 the worst poverty in the world – people who live on one dollar a day or less – that has decreased by 80 percent (see chart above). You never hear about that. It’s the greatest achievement in human history, and you never hear about it.
So what did that? What accounts for that? United Nations? US foreign aid? The International Monetary Fund? Central planning? No.
It was globalization, free trade, the boom in international entrepreneurship. In short, it was the free enterprise system, American style, which is our gift to the world.
I will state, assert and defend the statement that if you love the poor, if you are a good Samaritan, you must stand for the free enterprise system, and you must defend it, not just for ourselves but for people around the world. It is the best anti-poverty measure ever invented."

Warning for Obamacare enrollees: ‘Coverage doesn’t mean care’

From Mark Perry.

"I’ve written many times before about the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, the “free market-loving, price-displaying, state-of-the-art, AAAHC accredited, doctor owned, multispecialty surgical facility in central OK.” A few recent news reports have highlighted the Surgery Center’s fastest growing group of patients – Obamacare enrollees. 

From an August Watchdog.org story “Oklahoma doctor making a run around Obamacare“:

About a year before the birth of Obamacare, Dr. Keith Smith, director of the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, posted all the prices for his center’s surgeries online. Today, he’s in expansion mode, looking to build two more operating rooms. His fastest-growing group of patients? Obamacare enrollees.
Though armed with Obamacare health insurance plans, the patients are saddled with high deductibles. Looking for alternatives, some of them fly from around the country to the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, where the cost of care and travel together amounts to less than their deductibles under their Affordable Care Act plans.
The Surgery Center of Oklahoma is a physician-owned operation that does not take Medicare or Medicaid and only selectively works with private insurance plans. Patients pay in cash or with cashier’s checks.
“Even if someone has an Obamacare insurance card in their pocket, they are soon going to find out that it’s worthless,” Smith said, citing both higher prices and doctor shortages under Obamacare. “Coverage doesn’t mean care.”

From a FOX 25 KOKH-TV (Oklahoma City) report yesterday “Patients with ‘Obamacare’ having a hard time paying with plans, doctor says“:

There is one group of patients growing faster than any other at the Surgery Center of Oklahoma. Medical Director Keith Smith says patients with ‘Obamacare,’ plans under the Affordable Care Act, are flocking to his facility.
“They’re not the largest part of our business but they’re definitely the fastest growing part of our business as patients discover they can actually buy their health care cheaper than they can buy their coverage,” Dr. Smith said. “We started with the idea we could do it better and cheaper than the hospitals and to say it’s been a success would be a wild understatement,” Smith said.
Now, Smith says, more and more Affordable Care Act patients are becoming attracted to this different approach to healthcare. “They can actually buy a hernia procedure here for instance, or a gallbladder procedure here, cheaper paying for it themselves rather than going through the insurance benefit paying,” Smith said.
Smith said that is because many people with these insurance plans have high deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs.  The prices he offers are actually smaller than these costs.

MP: I think that we can expect to see a lot more of this type of market-based, price-displaying, innovative disruption in the health care industry. As Dr. Smith says, Obamacare enrollees are quickly finding out that “coverage is not care,” and his center is offering an affordable solution. If the Surgery Center of Oklahoma can offer surgery prices below the high deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs for Obamacare patients, this type of health care, and not government-managed health care, could represent the future of medicine."

Obama Soaks the Rich, Drowns the Middle Class

The ripple effect of the president’s tax hikes is swamping take-home pay.

By Jon Kyl And Stephen Moore, WSJ. Excerpts:

"Why aren’t wages rising? There are several reasons, including that many jobs today don’t pay as well as the ones lost during the recession. ObamaCare has made health insurance more expensive for businesses—as the nation’s biggest employer, Wal-Mart , recently reported—and that takes a bite out of take-home pay. Yet one factor is often overlooked: the tax increase on “the rich” at the beginning of 2013."

"when upper-income Americans spend their money on vacations or cars, they are taxed only once, after they earn it. But if they put their money to work by, for example, building out a family business, they got socked a second time by higher investment taxes. And this discourages the investments that grow the economy."

"The tax rate on capital gains for high-income earners shot up to 23.8%—20% plus the 3.8% ObamaCare investment surtax. Ditto for the tax on dividends. So taxes on business investment rose by nearly 60% in 2013 and are nearly 20% higher than in the Clinton years."

"For estates more than $5.3 million in value, the estate tax in 2013 rose to 40% from 35% in 2012."

"The highest income-tax rate on small business income has risen to almost 42% from 35%. That’s a 20% spike in the small business tax"

"This may help explain the paradox that even as American businesses today are generally efficient and highly profitable, they aren’t reinvesting in new plants, equipment and technology or hiring more workers at the pace they normally would."

"From 1983 to 1988, private investment averaged 12% of GDP, one-third faster than the 9% since 2009 under Obama. In the aftermath of the Kennedy, Clinton and George W. Bush capital-gains tax cuts (1998-2006), the investment rate rose sharply and immediately."

"As Paul Samuelson...once explained: “What happens to the wage rate when each person works with more capital goods? Because each worker has more capital to work with, his or her marginal product [or productivity] rises. Therefore, the competitive real wage rises as workers become worth more to capitalists...”

"History bears this out. Workers did very well in jobs and rising incomes in the 1960s, 1980s and late 1990s when capital gains and dividend taxes fell."

"The high corporate tax rate is also holding the economy back. Twenty years ago the U.S. rate was about at the international average, but now we are about 15 percentage points above the rate of most of our competitors"

"“a 1% increase in corporate tax rates is associated with nearly a 1% drop in wage rates”

Italy’s Economic Suicide Movement

Protests against Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s labor reforms illustrate Europe’s jobs problem.

From the WSJ, 10-27. Excerpts: 

"Italy’s labor-market rules have remained largely unreformed since the modern Italian state was established. Spread over some 2,700 pages, the labor code divides the labor force into two parts. Older workers benefit from the full weight of the law, including ironclad protections against being laid off, fired or disciplined, whether for performance or economic reasons."

"Then there is the Cassa Integrazione Guadagni. Under this income-assistance scheme, businesses that need to downsize can put some workers on “standby,” and the government will cover a significant share of the normal salary until the company can hire back the worker."

"Need to fire a worker for poor job performance? To do so, businesses must persuade a judge that no alternative short of termination was available—a process of administrative hearings and litigation that can take months and drain company resources."

"Italy has the largest number of small businesses in the European Union not because companies don’t want to grow, but because they fear growth will mean having to negotiate with the militant national unions like CGIL."

"The official unemployment rate stands at 12%, and half of Italy’s young people are unemployed."

Is recovery always slow after a financial crisis?

From Tyler Cowen.

"That has been the received wisdom, but it is now challenged by a new paper (pdf) by Christina and David Romer:

This paper revisits the aftermath of financial crises in advanced countries in the decades before the Great Recession. We construct a new series on financial distress in 24 OECD countries for the period 1967-2007. The series is based on narrative assessments of the health of countries’ financial systems that were made in real time; and it classifies financial distress on a relatively fine scale, rather than treating it as a 0-1 variable. We find little support for the conventional wisdom that the output declines following financial crises are uniformly large and long-lasting. Rather, the declines are highly variable, on average only moderate, and often temporary. One important driver of the variation in outcomes across crises appears to be the severity and persistence of the financial distress itself when distress is particularly extreme or continues for an extended period, the aftermath of a crisis is worse."

Better Food Labels Won't Make You Less Fat

By Megan McArdle.

"Do we need better food labels? That’s the argument of public health experts interviewed by food and health writer Jane Brody. It’s too hard, they say, to tell exactly what you’re eating all the time, which contributes to the nation’s rising tide of obesity.

Color me skeptical. I hate to be that contrarian who takes a stand against everything, even unobjectionable policies like food labels, except I guess I already did. It’s not that I’m against transparency, per se. But I’m against the notion that more transparency is always and everywhere better, and provides tangible benefits to society. Sometimes transparency can actually cause problems.

Take, well, food labeling. A while back, people got the idea that putting calorie counts on menus would help fight obesity. So we did, in some areas, and compared what happened there with what happened in places where food labeling wasn’t required. The results ranged between nothing and negative, which is to say, people ate slightly more calories after the new menus went up.

When this failed, researchers naturally suggested that the problem wasn’t labeling, per se -- it was that we hadn’t gotten the right labels. Perhaps if we offered labels that translated calories into the number of minutes you’d need to walk those calories off, people would order more sparsely. Perhaps. The study is thinly described, and I can’t even tell if they were actually ordering food, or just choosing what they would eat, if they were in a restaurant. But perhaps people would order differently if they were actually in a restaurant, rather than a university research group. Or perhaps people would compensate by eating more later. In general, the research showing substantial benefits from calorie labeling seems to be largely absent; the main argument for it is “Couldn’t hurt.”

And the proposed food labels don’t seem outrageous: They want more information on added sugars and other finely grained distinctions that are lost on the current standard label. But there are dangers. For one thing, providing too much information can mean that people don’t read any of it, as anyone who has ever gotten a mortgage can attest. Each piece of paper you have to initial or sign was added by some well-meaning person who was concerned that consumers weren’t getting enough information about their loans. But when faced with an overwhelming stack, people tend to just race through without looking at what they’re signing. If the disclosures were a page or two, it would be more likely that they’d be read.
Then there are the costs to business of revising the labels, and to small producers of having to develop them. Food labels provide good information, but the way they do so is to relentlessly standardize, selecting in favor of big companies with heavy machine processing and lots of money for regulatory compliance. Those are the companies that produce all the food that the label brigade is trying to get us to cut back on in favor of less exquisitely processed alternatives.

Of course, I love calorie labels; I check them every time. But giving me more information about added sugar is probably not going to affect the obesity epidemic one way or another."