Will we look back on 2009 as the year we headed toward 1994?

Or toward 1964?

Here’s what I think, on the REASON web site….

The Rap Video that has been “going back and forth for a century!” Check it here….

(Check for the exciting Munger cameo, when the video is premiered!)

A useful graphic, depicting population shares and tax shares.

The two endpoints:

* The top 1% of income earners pay 40% of all federal taxes
* The bottom 46+% pay zero, nada, nothing, no part of the federal budget

One of the memes I’ve heard recently in the climate debate is that there is no scientific consensus — that there is actually strong disagreement.

The main basis of this argument is that 31,486 dissenting scientists have signed a petition against the belief that Global Warming is man made at the PetitionProject.org.

I don’t want to debate climate change; rather, I want to look at that argument to see if there are any statistical flaws in it.

My problem is whenever anyone uses a single, out of context, data point. What does this number actually mean? Is 31,486 alot or a little? How many scientists are there in the US? etc.

I heard this argument the other day, and went hunting down a visual way to express it, and found this via Information is Beautiful:

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This does not resolve the debate — there are more variations (Climate Change: A Consensus Among Scientists?) — at but it demonstrates an obvious flaw in the “dissenting scientist” argument.

Here is the breakdown of skeptics, by field:

Interesting stuff . . .

In last week’s column I discussed academic studies that confirm the remarkable consistency of the market’s annual seasonal pattern, how with few exceptions markets in the majority of countries tend to make most of their gains in the winter months, and experience most of their serious corrections and bear market declines between May and November.

Nick Thomas writes: With the precipitous tail end of 2008’s crash extending into March 2009 (and the relentless rise over the rest of the year), it hasn’t even remotely resembled a “normal” year for stocks.
Rising from the depths of gloom and abject terror that started the year, the bulls have taken charge and steadily driven the index higher in an nearly unbroken straight line.

Visuwords is is a visualization tool based upon Princeton University’s WordNet.

The online graphical database — part dictionary, part thesaurus — that groups words by their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. These related linguistic ideas are visually displayed in an interactive graphic.

The most interesting visual displays come from the broadest topical words. Try words like Music, Biology, War; I’ve had more luck with nouns than verbs.

Each node can be further opened, revealing related ideas, words, etc. As an example, here is what “Economics” looks like:

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Click for interactive graphic>

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For the above, I used the Fill Browser setting — a scalable, widescreen display.

Human Behavior and the Broad Social Trends Driving the Global Financial Crisis, Globalization and the Economy in 2010 – PART II
THE TAKEOVER OF THE AMERIKAN HEALTHCARE SYSTEM PROCEEDED ON CHRISTMAS EVE AS THE GANG OF 535, ALSO KNOWN AS CAPITOL HILL, ONCE AGAIN VOTED AGAINST THE INTERESTS AND SENTIMENTS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

Washington’s Bipartisan Betrayal: The 2015 Global Financial Crisis – The time has come for new year’s resolutions. The House passed the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009 (H.R. 4173) on December 11, 2009. It gives $4 trillion in “emergency funding” to our largest banks during the next financial crisis. Instead of reform, Congress offers even bigger bailouts. Unless we change direction, we will have another crisis by 2015. Congress has made all the wrong moves to guarantee it.

Peter J. Wallison writes,

On Christmas Eve, when most Americans’ minds were on other things, the Treasury Department announced that it was removing the $400 billion cap from what the administration believes will be necessary to keep Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac solvent. This action confirms that the decade-long congressional failure to more closely regulate these two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) will rank for U.S. taxpayers as one of the worst policy disasters in our history.

Since August of 2008, I have advocated winding down Freddie and Fannie. Any other policy courts mischief.

For years, U.S. housing policy was to encourage the use of mortgage credit to the maximum extent by as many people as possible. We see the results. The new policy is to encourage as many people to stay in homes that they should not have bought in the first place for as long as possible. The result of this new policy, as I have predicted from its onset, is to perpetuate the crisis.

The significance of the unlimited backing of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae is that it represents the unwillingness of policymakers to back away either from subsidizing mortgage credit or from trying to keep the wrong people in the wrong housing units with the wrong ownership arrangement. Instead, if they were to let the market work, those who cannot afford their mortgages but who could afford the rent would become renters, and those who cannot afford the rent would move out and rent elsewhere. Again, as a taxpayer I would gladly pay moving expenses for these people rather than pay to keep them in their homes as “owners.”

Housing policy today reminds me of Japanese banking policy in the 1990’s or U.S. energy policy in the 1970’s. Once government puts a market into crisis mode, there is usually no turning back. Ronald Reagan’s decision to remove price controls in energy and return to the use of market forces is a remarkable exception. At the time, it was viewed as dangerous and absurd, even crazier than my idea of winding down Freddie Mac and and Fannie Mae and letting the housing market find its own equilibrium.