No, Economics Is Good for Lots of Things

Survey Research at Work

Perhaps the greatest intellectual casualty of the 2008 financial crisis was the credibility of economics as a science. "Why didn't economists foresee the crisis?" people asked, and this lingering suspicion came to a head in a recent NYT editorial blasting economics as a scientific discipline. On first pass, I thought it was just one of those silly articles that crops up on occasion, but the more that I thought about the editorial, and compared it with some of the economic insights I have absorbed as a student, the more I was angered. And thus, I felt compelled to rant.

What should be kept in mind is that, like engineering, economics is a broad discipline that covers many different fields. Just as some engineers study computers and others study nuclear reactors, some economists study taxes, other study financial markets, and still others study how psychological biases should change the design of policy. So to use the chaos in financial markets as a reason to discredit all of economics is analogous to discrediting all of engineering on the count of a Fukushima disaster. While portions of macroeconomics may be made up of smoke, mirrors, and misleading standard errors, even a brief introspection can reveal why that is not representative of economics as a whole.

In economic models, people do whatever maximizes their self interest. However, this leaves no room for intellectual growth -- any new insight or strategy would have already been discovered by the omniscient agents! But people are of finite intelligence. As a result, their self-interest can be up for reinterpretation.

In this area, economists play the important role of introducing new *ideas* about policy. Precisely because people are not as omniscient as the agents in economic models, it's important that governments have a solid foundation on ideas to conceptualize and defend policies from critics. By introducing a new framework or a new empirical fact, economists can cast policy into a different light and redirect the conversation and agenda.

Let us first consider the canonical example of auction theory. Game theorists have been remarkably effective at designing auction mechanisms. The late Ronald Coase famously argued that the U.S. should auction off spectrum rights. Yet in his Congressional testimony, he was met with disbelief, with a congressman asking "is this a joke"? Later on, when the FCC changed its mind, it fell to economists (game theorists, no less!) to design the details of the auction. Designing such an auction is not a trivial task. Since it's advantageous to have radio frequencies in geographically contiguous areas, what a company is willing to bid on one spectrum in an area is dependent on whether it can win in other areas. Moreover, there are a host of protections you need to design. How do you stop firms from colluding? How do you make sure firms can't manipulate the bids to pay extremely low prices? When these issues were ignored in the Australian and New Zealand auctions, many hundreds of millions of dollars were lost.

Economists have also managed to change the way we talk about poverty policies in the United States. A common misconception is that impoverished people are just lazy, and that nothing can be done for them. And as a result, welfare just represents an unproductive transfer from the makers to the takers. However, survey data from the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan has shown that poverty is most often a transitory phenomenon, and that no, welfare is not about Cadillac queens or subsidizing sloth, but rather about providing insurance for a wide range of people who live on the threshold of poverty. The fact that the national conversation sometimes forgets this point is a reminder that economists do have an important role to play in shaping the welfare policy debate, and that neglecting this can have serious human impact.

And when we take a look at the the role of economists in analyzing aid and development, the impact is even larger. The foundations of international finance and the study of capital flows explains what kinds of aid are better than others, and why it's important not only to provide money but also personnel and expertise. On a micro level, pioneering experimental work, as popularized by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banjeree in their book titled "Poor Economics", has added an additional subtlety to the design of development policy. By integrating insights from psychology and political science, development economists like them have gone on to revise how to better provide fertilizers to farmers or how to limit the extent of patronage politics. These are all critical issues in the task of economic development, and it has fallen to economists to address them.

So far, I have focused on micro topics. But there are actually a surprisingly robust set of results about how emerging markets should handle capital flows. Stephen Salant (who is teaching me applied micro modeling this fall!) laid the foundation for speculative attacks on stockpiles of resources, such as oil or food. His model later led to Krugman's pioneering work on how currency crises happen, and the lessons from the literature on currency crises showed why external debt could be so harmful for developing economies. Anton Korinek has also made great contributions outlining the welfare arguments for avoiding external debt and currency crises. Indeed, those economies who had large stocks of external debt relative to foreign reserves were precisely the ones who suffered the most during the financial crisis. While it may not be a direct result, it is now clear to all emerging markets that a combination of external debt and exchange rate pegs can be extremely dangerous. And the absence of those two fault lines has put the emerging markets on much more stable footing during the current sell-off.

Even in the controversial field of monetary policy we're doing better. Back in the 1920's, it was thought that monetary policy should ease during the boom and tighten during the bust. This was called the Real Bills Doctrine, and ended up amplifying the business cycle. Doubt about the effect of Quantitative Easing is not equivalent to ignorance about money's effect on the macroeconomy. We might not be clear on magnitudes, but we at least know which way goes up and which goes down.

From a methodological standpoint, economists are valuable because we are trained to think about social issues through a quantitative and empirical framework. While other social sciences such as sociology and psychology are also known for their increasingly quantitative measures, economists are special because the variables we are interested in -- income, prices, population -- are easily measured and interpreted quantitative measures.

(As a digression, I was surprised that this notion of economics as socially applied statistics was completely missing from the conversation about economath. Without the work in mathematical statistics, economists would have been unable to do the measurements that we do, and the empirical studies that I describe above would not have been possible. I remember Miles Kimball joking with me that empirical macro is all about interpreting measurement error, yet without the work of generations of econometricians, we would not know of how to do that kind of analysis.)

From a personal standpoint, I will also be contributing towards this kind of research this year. Since University of Michigan is a state school, we are of course very concerned about how all of our students -- across socioeconomic classes -- are doing. And therefore I will be heading a project to design a survey instrument and analysis methodology to measure how students are doing in the off campus housing markets and to identify the potential severity of this kind of socioeconomic segmentation. (See picture). While it may be true that my project will have various flaws, I still think of it as representative of the power of empirical economics. Identify problems. Collect data. Make lives better. Wash, rinse, repeat. And at least from personal experience, this mode of analysis -- of looking at bivariate relationships, of thinking about longitudinal effects -- is not as common among my fellow social scientists from psychology or political science.

This explicitly empirical tack built into modern economics is important because the alternative to a world with economists is not some non-partisan paradise. Rather, it will be filled by the Keith Olbermanns and Sean Hannities of the world, who rely instead on cheap rhetorical tricks instead of well grounded theory and empirics.

Yet in spite of my strong conviction that economists do create value for society, I do recognize that economics, on the most part, is not an experimental science. But that should not necessarily be seen as a flaw. Economists are tasked with evaluating policies that can play such a large role in the welfare of the masses. And once you know that a certain policy is harmful, it would be a profound breach of ethics to repeatedly apply such failed policy so that you could "replicate" and make the results "scientific".

I want to wrap up this post with a joke.

A physicist, a chemist and an economist are stranded on an island, with nothing to eat. A can of soup washes ashore. The physicist says, "Lets smash the can open with a rock." The chemist says, "Let’s build a fire and heat the can first." The economist says, "Lets assume that we have a can-opener..."

The punchline suggests that instead of solving problems, economists just assume them away. But the real work of economics actually comes after the initial assumption. A real economist goes "..then if we had a can opener, we would be set. So let's go make a can opener." The joke misrepresents the work of economists by focusing on "opening a can" -- a task that has neither ambiguity nor great subtlety. On these issues, of course the hard sciences will be superior. But what if we asked a different question such as "how should we reduce carbon dioxide emissions"? In this case, there is no clear answer. But the economist would go "let's assume there were a price to carbon. Then the first welfare theorem means there's no inefficiency. So let's go price carbon!"

The big social problems of our day -- long term poverty, global warming, the middle income trap -- have few direct solutions, and any solution will affect portions of society in largely differing ways. And without economists to help work out the theory and empirics, how do you plan on tackling such dilemmas?

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Update: Indeed, long term unemployment is a more severe problem than just an intellectual scruffle. But it really does seem that after the Great Recessions, economists are (perhaps rightly) viewed with more skepticism.

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Why is Liu Xiaobo China's first Nobel prize winner?

Last week, Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on Charter 08, a document that calls for democratic reforms and greater political freedoms in the People's Republic of China. He is currently in jail for writing that document. When the prize was announced, China's state-controlled media and security apparatus began an all-out campaign to censor the story, blocking Web access to information about the award, arresting people who gathered to celebrate, and promptly imprisoning Liu's wife.

I should mention at this point that Liu Xiaobo is the first resident of China to win any Nobel Prize. Ever.

I cannot help but think that this is no coincidence.

Name a well-known piece of technology invented in China since the year 1400. Or name an important scientific discovery made in China since that year. If you can, you're a better Google hound than I, because I find absolutely nada. Nothing. In 600 years. China's technological and scientific underachievement is not a figment of Swedish/Norwegian bias.

What could cause a country with 20% of the world's population - twice as many as all of Europe! - to be the world's most spectacular scientific and technological dunce for six centuries?

Racist and Eurocentric theories that East Asians are less creative than Caucasians are patently false, as both historical and modern facts demonstrate. Japan, for example, has plenty of Nobel prizes and great scientific discoveries to its name, and is the birthplace of inventions such as (deep breath) the digital camera, the hand calculator, the floppy disk, flash memory, pluripotent stem cells, B-vitamins, the camcorder/VCR/VHS, and the compact disc (not to mention MSG, high-fructose corn syrup, methamphetamine, and karaoke). People of Chinese descent have made huge numbers of landmark contributions to science and technology...outside China. And, as everyone knows, pre-1400 China was the birthplace of paper, gunpowder, the compass, movable type, the horse collar, the astrolabe, compartmentalized ship hulls, and a long list of other awesome things that rivaled (and, during the Middle Ages, far exceeded) anything in Europe. It is clear that China's underachievement has been due to collective deficiencies, not individual ones.

Similarly, China's turbulent history in the 19th and 20th centuries, though undoubtedly a contributing factor, is hardly an excuse. Russia, which lost a far larger percentage of its population to wars and famines than did China during the same time period, and suffered under an equally blinkered communist regime, managed to put the first man in space and clean up plenty of Nobels. And the upheavals of the modern age cannot explain the so-called "Great Divergence" of 1400-1870, in which Europe took over from China as the locus of global innovation long before British warships showed up pushing opium.

Nor is this simply a case of China's inevitable catch-up. The U.S. was the birthplace of inventions like the steamboat and the airplane long before it caught up to European levels of per capita GDP. Even if China now starts to produce some innovations, it will still have 600 years of stasis to explain.

So what is China's problem? As I said before, I believe that the fact that China's first Nobel winner is an imprisoned dissident is telling. Liu Xiaobo is not the first Chinese citizen to be imprisoned by the state for calling for intellectual freedom; he joins a long and hallowed line of such persecuted thought-criminals, stretching back at least to Li Zhi of the Ming Dynasty.

Glib theories cannot easily explain the broad sweep of history, but my guess as to the cause of China's technological underachievement goes something like this: the act of trying to keep together a nation as large and diverse as China has come at the cost of intellectual, scientific, and technological progress. After 1400, as Mongol domination of China ended, the rulers of the Ming Dynasty soon found themselves in charge of an empire vastly more populous (thanks to new rice-farming techniques) than the earlier Han and T'ang dominions. Controlling and stabilizing this mega-nation required more government intervention in daily economic life than in most countries. China stayed together where European and Indian empires of comparable population crumbled, but the cost was constant suppression of potentially disruptive technologies.

The Ming began this unfortunate tradition by banning private shipping (just as European explorers were gearing up for world conquest), by purging science from the civil service examinations, and by sending a bunch of (basically) lawyers called the "Confucian Scholar-Gentry" into the countryside to regulate economic activity. Mechanical inventions comparable to, and centuries ahead of, the textile machinery that kicked off Europe's Industrial Revolution languished in obscurity and were forgotten.

European countries, of course, would have loved to do the same thing, but they couldn't. Although European nations were arguably more despotic than China during the Early Modern period, they were forced to fight each other in a series of endless wars; this not only spurred them to allow their scientists and inventors to do their thing (in order to gain a military edge over the neighbors), but it allowed visionaries like Columbus to shop around for patrons among the cornucopia of European rulers. China, with one Emperor - even a benign one - could afford to sacrifice progress in favor of stability. This is basically Jared Diamond's theory of "optimal fragmentation."

Even in the modern day, the absolute priority that China places on internal stability ("harmony," in their favored terminology) has contributed to the aforementioned bloody and chaotic history that delayed China's industrial revolution until 1979. The Chinese Civil War (really, wars), the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square - all of these were overkill on the part of Chinese rulers desperate to keep the far-flung empire as a single, unified, homogeneous nation-state. Excessive government control of academia has led to a culture of fraud and fear that continues to hamstring Chinese science. Meanwhile, Chinese splinter nations Hong Kong and Taiwan, and smaller East Asian neighbors like Japan, Korea, and Singapore, sped ahead while massive, monolithic Mainland China languished.

Far from being the champion of the Chinese race, as it has always claimed, the Chinese Empire - and its successor, the People's Republic of China - has been the greatest force preventing 80% of East Asians from finding new and better ways to live.

If my theory is right, it is no surprise that China's first Nobel laureate is not a scientist, but a would-be reformer. China's high-speed economic growth primarily relies on foreign technology and on brute accumulation of physical capital; the people who are doing the most new and revolutionary things in that country are those who are trying to reform a society hobbled by 600 years of excessive government enforcement of "harmony."

I think there is great hope for China to change. Modern communications and transportation technology has made it more possible than ever to hold together a large, diverse nation without sacrificing intellectual dynamism - the U.S. and India are cases in point. But cultural change is no sure thing. It seems to me that until and unless China Liu Xiaobo's succeed in their attempts at societal innovation, China's scientists will continue to lag behind those of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the West.

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Rise of the machine-owners

In recent years, more and more credence has been given to the scary notion of "skill-biased technological change" - the idea that technology is no longer usable by everyone, and so is causing an increase in inequality. Basically, the theory says that thinking machines have begun to replace some of us, but not yet all of us; those who own the thinking machines (capitalists) and those who are smart enough to operate them (tech workers) will get more and more of what our automated society produces. I'm not convinced this theory describes our current world, but it certainly seems like it could happen sometime, as computers get smarter but human capabilities don't improve. What do we do if 70% or 80% of humanity becomes no more employable than dogs?

Matt Yglesias suggests that the rich people make the poor people their pets:

One way to think about the skill-biased technological change issue that I think is useful is to construct for yourself an exaggerated hypothetical in which SBTC is definitely driving a big increase in inequality...what would be the correct policy response? I say—higher taxes to finance more and better public services, the exact same thing that’s the correct policy response to the actual world.

Note that he's not exactly saying that rich people should give their wealth to the poor. He's saying that rich people should give their wealth to an organization that provides services for the poor. In Yglesias' ideal world, not only will the poor depend on the (willing or forced) largesse of the rich for their daily bread, but they won't get to decide how to spend that bread; instead, they will live in a playground that is crafted and shaped for them by others, receiving their livelihood indirectly in the form of "public services."

In other words, they will be pets.

Why do humans keep pets? Because the pets are cute, lovable, companionable, etc., which is just another way of saying because we like them. We pay pets to live in a world that we prepare and create for them, simply because it makes us feel good to do so. Yglesias' solution to skill-biased technological change is to do the same for obsolete human beings.

This sounds nightmarish. But in fact there is no easy solution to the problem of SBTC, as the most obvious alternative - simply ban the technology that makes humans obsolete - is utterly unworkable in practice. What are we to do, then? Will the rise of thinking-machines inevitably force us to choose between "pet-owner socialism" and "ditch-digger socialism"?

It is my opinion that the only acceptable, workable long-term solution to the SBTC problem is to use society's resources to focus on inventing technologies that augment human capabilities - things like intelligence enhancement and cyborg modification for human-machine interface. Furthermore, we should use the government to redistribute not wealth, but inborn capability (much as we try to do now with public education), making sure that things like heightened intelligence and human-machine interface are available equally to even the poorest citizens. In other words, we must battle skill-biased technology by creating and disseminating skill-boosting technology.

I know that sounds really weird, but isn't that better than having a society that's divided between those who own and operate thinking-machines, and those who live as pets for the former? Someday, this will be the choice we face.

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Why our country is going down the tubes, and what you can do about it

America is caught in a spiral of decline and stagnation.

Why? The most immediate cause is that we refuse to spend money on public goods:

The lights are going out all over America — literally. Colorado Springs has made headlines with its desperate attempt to save money by turning off a third of its streetlights, but similar things are either happening or being contemplated across the nation...

Meanwhile, a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.

And a nation that once prized education — that was among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children — is now cutting back. Teachers are being laid off; programs are being canceled; in Hawaii, the school year itself is being drastically shortened. And all signs point to even more cuts ahead...

In effect, a large part of our political class is showing its priorities: given the choice between asking the richest 2 percent or so of Americans to go back to paying the tax rates they paid during the Clinton-era boom, or allowing the nation’s foundations to crumble — literally in the case of roads, figuratively in the case of education — they’re choosing the latter.

It’s a disastrous choice in both the short run and the long run...

[E]verything we know about economic growth says that a well-educated population and high-quality infrastructure are crucial. Emerging nations are making huge efforts to upgrade their roads, their ports and their schools. Yet in America we’re going backward.

How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right...

Krugman knows, of course - and has said in other columns - that antigovernment rhetoric never really convinced many Americans to give up public goods and public services. What really happened was that the conservative movement told white people that all the cost of public goods would be borne by them, while all the benefits would go to blacks and Hispanics. This is the argument that was successful. This is the argument that destroyed our government's ability to provide the economic foundations of a successful nation-state.

Surely, now that our economy is going down the tubes, white conservative Americans are going to wake up and realize that they need public goods too...right?

Except that people's minds don't quite work that way. Instead of convincing people of the need for public goods, economic downturns often lead people to switch to an "every tribe for itself" crisis mode. This is what Matt Yglesias is talking about when he says that economic insecurity breeds mass scapegoating, prejudice, racial tribalism, and paranoia:

Last year we had town halls gone wild, fueled by the threat of death panels pulling the plug on Grandma. This year, us-vs.-them controversies are proliferating, linked by a surge in xenophobia. This is our summer of fear.

So far, the summer of fear has featured a charge, led by Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and former New York congressman Rick Lazio, to block the construction of the Cordoba House Islamic cultural center (which is to include a mosque) a few blocks from the site of the World Trade Center. Meanwhile, with frightening speed, we've gone from discussing the prospects for comprehensive immigration reform to watching congressional Republicans call for hearings to reconsider the 14th Amendment's guarantee of citizenship to anyone born in the United States...

Fear, in essence, begets fear. The loss of a job, or the worry that one might be lost, raises anxiety. This often plays out as increased suspicion of people who look different or come from different places. While times of robust growth and shared prosperity inspire feelings of interconnectedness and mutual gain, in times of worry, the picture quickly reverses. Views of the world turn zero-sum: If he wins, what do I lose? Any kind of change looks like decline -- the end of a "way of life."...

Benjamin Friedman, an economist at Harvard whose 2005 book "The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth" argued that growth tends to foster liberal sentiments and open societies, whereas slowdowns undermine them, says this summer's events "are predictable consequences of this kind of sustained economic downturn."

"Manifestations like these have appeared in the U.S. at such times before," he told me, "most obviously in the 1880s and early 1890s," when a sustained period of economic stagnation coincided with the abandonment of the Reconstruction-era commitment to civil rights, the widespread adoption of anti-Chinese legislation and a nationwide wave of lynchings directed not only at blacks, but also Catholics and immigrants...

The lesson is simple: The current controversies are ultimately byproducts of our economic morass. To really dispel the atmosphere of suspicion, what's needed are ideas about how to boost the economy to bring unemployment down and earnings up. Finding policies that do all this will not be easy, but it is the only way to turn the national mood around.

This is a very common idea, and it is supported by a number of lab experiments.

So, America is trapped in a vicious circle: Underinvestment in public goods causes economic decline, which causes prejudice and tribalism, which causes underinvestment in public goods.

How can this cycle be broken? I believe that the only people who can break it are conservatives. If Republican voters realize that government is not the enemy, and that investment in public goods is crucial to their own children's futures, we can arrest the cycle of decline, and set ourselves back on the upward path of economic growth and greater social integration. If you vote Republican, the power to save the country is in your hands.

But for us liberals, there is just not much that we can do, other than to try persuade our conservative friends that roads and bridges and public education are not just a scheme to steal their money and give it to the brown people. If we fail to make that case, America has a hard, dark road ahead.

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Democrats have many good ideas. Republicans have no ideas whatsoever.

This is a partisan post. Which is not to say I'm writing this because I like Democrats better in general. I just like Democrats better right now, because they have ideas to fight our country's problems. Republicans do not.

Note that this was not always the case. In the Reagan era, Republicans had a lot of ideas, and Democrats largely promised more of the same. Voters seemed to realize this when they made their choice. but Republicans dropped the mantle of the "party of ideas" about a decade ago, and show no signs of picking it back up.

What are the main problems facing our country today? Well, there's the ongoing depression. Republicans' best idea has been to cut unemployment benefits, which reduces structural unemployment slightly but raises cyclical unemployment a lot. We are not in a recession because people have suddenly decided that they don't want to work; people are looking for jobs, and simply not finding ones that match their skills.

Then there's that long-term deficit. A simple breakdown shows that most of that deficit comes as a result of the Bush tax cuts; reversing these cuts would help stabilize our public finances (though in the long run, big cuts in Medicare are needed as well). But Republicans absolutely refuse to rescind those unsustainable tax cuts. Instead, if they are in power, they will probably just threaten to shut down the government unless Obama comes up with ideas for big spending cuts; then, if Obama capitulates (and he is kind of a capitulating sort of dude), the GOP will slam him for the very same spending cuts they forced him to make.

And then there's health care. Republicans have essentially no ideas for how to cut healthcare costs, unless they decided to support Medicare cuts, which they are afraid to do. When pressed, Republicans suggest tort reform and "allowing people to buy health insurance across state lines"; the former is a good idea but a drop in the bucket, and the latter is basically a meaningless red herring.

Financial reform? Republicans recognize the moral hazard problem - the idea that implicit government promises of bailouts encourage banks to take crazy risks - but they have no solution to this other than to have the government say, very sternly, "We won't bail you out the next time!" Which is a laugh, because yes you will, and you know it.

And finally, there's energy. Republicans have nothing on this. "Drill here drill now"? Not a solution, since that oil can and will be sold anywhere. What else? Deafening silence.

Compare this to the Democrats.

On the depression: Democrats are split on additional stimulus spending, but they definitely favor rebuilding our infrastructure, which is important in the short-term (because it adds to demand) and the long-term (because it improves our competitiveness). They favor having the Fed do more quantitative easing (printing money and buying stuff), although legislators cannot tell the Fed what to do. These ideas are good, although the other thing I think we need to do - pressure China to immediately revalue its currency - is unlikely to happen.

On the deficit: Democrats favor rescinding the Bush tax cuts. This is the right thing to do, since those tax cuts were unsustainable. In the short and medium terms that will make a huge difference, but in the long term we'll need to contain health care costs and cut health care spending a lot. This, sadly, is something Democrats are not yet talking about much.

On health care, Democrats finally switched us to a universal coverage nation. That was an important first step - it removed the division of the country into health-care "haves" and "have-nots," which should make future cost-cutting measures more politically possible. It implemented various small cost-control measures, any of which could be ramped up hugely in a few years if it is found to work. This is almost certainly the best health care fix that we could expect in the short term; it remains to be seen if the Dems will come through with serious cost-control ideas in the future.

On financial reform, the Democrats have had a bunch of good ideas, many of which - a resolution authority to reduce the moral hazard problem, a consumer protection agency to reduce lending scams, rules on derivative trading to cut unnecessary complexity from the system - are in the process of being put into law, thanks to Dems and no thanks to the GOP. And on energy, Democrats are correctly investing in alternative energy technology.

Now, I am not saying that I agree with all of the Democrats' ideas. A cap-and-trade system, for example, seems pretty pointless to me (especially since U.S. emissions are falling anyway). And on some issues (China trade, health cost control) they need to go much farther. Nor is having a lot of ideas automatically good; Chairman Mao had a whole little red book full of bad ideas.

But the point is that the Democrats' ideas are mostly good ones. They are a clear improvement over the status quo - ballooning deficits, a collapsing health care system, a bloated unproductive financial sector, vulnerability to peak oil. The Republicans offer no such improvement. They have no ideas whatsoever.

For this reason, stumping for the Democrats in the fall elections is not partisan, and it is not ideological. It is simply patriotic. A vote for a Republican is, at this juncture, a vote for sclerosis and decline.

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