Their Own Private Europe - NYTimes.com

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January 27, 2011
Their Own Private Europe
By PAUL KRUGMAN

President Obama’s State of the Union address was a ho-hum affair. But the official Republican response, from Representative Paul Ryan, was really interesting. And I don’t mean that in a good way.

Mr. Ryan made highly dubious assertions about employment, health care and more. But what caught my eye, when I read the transcript, was what he said about other countries: “Just take a look at what’s happening to Greece, Ireland, the United Kingdom and other nations in Europe. They didn’t act soon enough; and now their governments have been forced to impose painful austerity measures: large benefit cuts to seniors and huge tax increases on everybody.”

It’s a good story: Europeans dithered on deficits, and that led to crisis. Unfortunately, while that’s more or less true for Greece, it isn’t at all what happened either in Ireland or in Britain, whose experience actually refutes the current Republican narrative.

But then, American conservatives have long had their own private Europe of the imagination — a place of economic stagnation and terrible health care, a collapsing society groaning under the weight of Big Government. The fact that Europe isn’t actually like that — did you know that adults in their prime working years are more likely to be employed in Europe than they are in the United States? — hasn’t deterred them. So we shouldn’t be surprised by similar tall tales about European debt problems.

Let’s talk about what really happened in Ireland and Britain.

On the eve of the financial crisis, conservatives had nothing but praise for Ireland, a low-tax, low-spending country by European standards. The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom ranked it above every other Western nation. In 2006, George Osborne, now Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer, declared Ireland “a shining example of the art of the possible in long-term economic policy making.” And the truth was that in 2006-2007 Ireland was running a budget surplus, and had one of the lowest debt levels in the advanced world.

So what went wrong? The answer is: out-of-control banks; Irish banks ran wild during the good years, creating a huge property bubble. When the bubble burst, revenue collapsed, causing the deficit to surge, while public debt exploded because the government ended up taking over bank debts. And harsh spending cuts, while they have led to huge job losses, have failed to restore confidence.

The lesson of the Irish debacle, then, is very nearly the opposite of what Mr. Ryan would have us believe. It doesn’t say “cut spending now, or bad things will happen”; it says that balanced budgets won’t protect you from crisis if you don’t effectively regulate your banks — a point made in the newly released report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which concludes that “30 years of deregulation and reliance on self-regulation” helped create our own catastrophe. Have I mentioned that Republicans are doing everything they can to undermine financial reform?

What about Britain? Well, contrary to what Mr. Ryan seemed to imply, Britain has not, in fact, suffered a debt crisis. True, David Cameron, who became prime minister last May, has made a sharp turn toward fiscal austerity. But that was a choice, not a response to market pressure.

And underlying that choice was the new British government’s adherence to the same theory offered by Republicans to justify their demand for immediate spending cuts here — the claim that slashing government spending in the face of a depressed economy will actually help growth rather than hurt it.

So how’s that theory looking? Not good. The British economy, which seemed to be recovering earlier in 2010, turned down again in the fourth quarter. Yes, weather was a factor, and, no, you shouldn’t read too much into one quarter’s numbers. But there’s certainly no sign of the surging private-sector confidence that was supposed to offset the direct effects of eliminating half-a-million government jobs. And, as a result, there’s no comfort in the British experience for Republican claims that the United States needs spending cuts in the face of mass unemployment.

Which brings me back to Paul Ryan and his response to President Obama. Again, American conservatives have long used the myth of a failing Europe to argue against progressive policies in America. More recently, they have tried to appropriate Europe’s debt problems on behalf of their own agenda, never mind the fact that events in Europe actually point the other way.

But Mr. Ryan is widely portrayed as an intellectual leader within the G.O.P., with special expertise on matters of debt and deficits. So the revelation that he literally doesn’t know the first thing about the debt crises currently in progress is, as I said, interesting — and not in a good way.

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The War on Logic - NYTimes.com

January 16, 2011
The War on Logic
By PAUL KRUGMAN

My wife and I were thinking of going out for an inexpensive dinner tonight. But John Boehner, the speaker of the House, says that no matter how cheap the meal may seem, it will cost thousands of dollars once you take our monthly mortgage payments into account.

Wait a minute, you may say. How can our mortgage payments be a cost of going out to eat, when we’ll have to make the same payments even if we stay home? But Mr. Boehner is adamant: our mortgage is part of the cost of our meal, and to say otherwise is just a budget gimmick.

O.K., the speaker hasn’t actually weighed in on our plans for the evening. But he and his G.O.P. colleagues have lately been making exactly the nonsensical argument I’ve just described — not about tonight’s dinner, but about health care reform. And the nonsense wasn’t a slip of the tongue; it’s the official party position, laid out in charts and figures.

We are, I believe, witnessing something new in American politics. Last year, looking at claims that we can cut taxes, avoid cuts to any popular program and still balance the budget, I observed that Republicans seemed to have lost interest in the war on terror and shifted focus to the war on arithmetic. But now the G.O.P. has moved on to an even bigger project: the war on logic.

So, about that nonsense: this week the House is expected to pass H.R. 2, the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act — its actual name. But Republicans have a small problem: they claim to care about budget deficits, yet the Congressional Budget Office says that repealing last year’s health reform would increase the deficit. So what, other than dismissing the nonpartisan budget office’s verdict as “their opinion” — as Mr. Boehner has — can the G.O.P. do?

The answer is contained in an analysis — or maybe that should be “analysis” — released by the speaker’s office, which purports to show that health care reform actually increases the deficit. Why? That’s where the war on logic comes in.

First of all, says the analysis, the true cost of reform includes the cost of the “doc fix.” What’s that?

Well, in 1997 Congress enacted a formula to determine Medicare payments to physicians. The formula was, however, flawed; it would lead to payments so low that doctors would stop accepting Medicare patients. Instead of changing the formula, however, Congress has consistently enacted one-year fixes. And Republicans claim that the estimated cost of future fixes, $208 billion over the next 10 years, should be considered a cost of health care reform.

But the same spending would still be necessary if we were to undo reform. So the G.O.P. argument here is exactly like claiming that my mortgage payments, which I’ll have to make no matter what we do tonight, are a cost of going out for dinner.

There’s more like that: the G.O.P. also claims that $115 billion of other health care spending should be charged to health reform, even though the budget office has tried to explain that most of this spending would have taken place even without reform.

To be sure, the Republican analysis doesn’t rely entirely on spurious attributions of cost — it also relies on using three-card monte tricks to make money disappear. Health reform, says the budget office, will increase Social Security revenues and reduce Medicare costs. But the G.O.P. analysis says that these sums don’t count, because some people have said that these savings would also extend the life of these programs’ trust funds, so counting these savings as deficit reduction would be “double-counting,” because — well, actually it doesn’t make any sense, but it sounds impressive.

So, is the Republican leadership unable to see through childish logical fallacies? No.

The key to understanding the G.O.P. analysis of health reform is that the party’s leaders are not, in fact, opposed to reform because they believe it will increase the deficit. Nor are they opposed because they seriously believe that it will be “job-killing” (which it won’t be). They’re against reform because it would cover the uninsured — and that’s something they just don’t want to do.

And it’s not about the money. As I tried to explain in my last column, the modern G.O.P. has been taken over by an ideology in which the suffering of the unfortunate isn’t a proper concern of government, and alleviating that suffering at taxpayer expense is immoral, never mind how little it costs.

Given that their minds were made up from the beginning, top Republicans weren’t interested in and didn’t need any real policy analysis — in fact, they’re basically contemptuous of such analysis, something that shines through in their health care report. All they ever needed or wanted were some numbers and charts to wave at the press, fooling some people into believing that we’re having some kind of rational discussion. We aren’t.

A Tale of Two Moralities - NYTimes.com

January 13, 2011
A Tale of Two Moralities
By PAUL KRUGMAN

On Wednesday, President Obama called on Americans to “expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.” Those were beautiful words; they spoke to our desire for reconciliation.

But the truth is that we are a deeply divided nation and are likely to remain one for a long time. By all means, let’s listen to each other more carefully; but what we’ll discover, I fear, is how far apart we are. For the great divide in our politics isn’t really about pragmatic issues, about which policies work best; it’s about differences in those very moral imaginations Mr. Obama urges us to expand, about divergent beliefs over what constitutes justice.

And the real challenge we face is not how to resolve our differences — something that won’t happen any time soon — but how to keep the expression of those differences within bounds.

What are the differences I’m talking about?

One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state — a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.

The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.

There’s no middle ground between these views. One side saw health reform, with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care. The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose.

This deep divide in American political morality — for that’s what it amounts to — is a relatively recent development. Commentators who pine for the days of civility and bipartisanship are, whether they realize it or not, pining for the days when the Republican Party accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state, and was even willing to contemplate expanding it. As many analysts have noted, the Obama health reform — whose passage was met with vandalism and death threats against members of Congress — was modeled on Republican plans from the 1990s.

But that was then. Today’s G.O.P. sees much of what the modern federal government does as illegitimate; today’s Democratic Party does not. When people talk about partisan differences, they often seem to be implying that these differences are petty, matters that could be resolved with a bit of good will. But what we’re talking about here is a fundamental disagreement about the proper role of government.

Regular readers know which side of that divide I’m on. In future columns I will no doubt spend a lot of time pointing out the hypocrisy and logical fallacies of the “I earned it and I have the right to keep it” crowd. And I’ll also have a lot to say about how far we really are from being a society of equal opportunity, in which success depends solely on one’s own efforts.

But the question for now is what we can agree on given this deep national divide.

In a way, politics as a whole now resembles the longstanding politics of abortion — a subject that puts fundamental values at odds, in which each side believes that the other side is morally in the wrong. Almost 38 years have passed since Roe v. Wade, and this dispute is no closer to resolution.

Yet we have, for the most part, managed to agree on certain ground rules in the abortion controversy: it’s acceptable to express your opinion and to criticize the other side, but it’s not acceptable either to engage in violence or to encourage others to do so.

What we need now is an extension of those ground rules to the wider national debate.

Right now, each side in that debate passionately believes that the other side is wrong. And it’s all right for them to say that. What’s not acceptable is the kind of violence and eliminationist rhetoric encouraging violence that has become all too common these past two years.

It’s not enough to appeal to the better angels of our nature. We need to have leaders of both parties — or Mr. Obama alone if necessary — declare that both violence and any language hinting at the acceptability of violence are out of bounds. We all want reconciliation, but the road to that goal begins with an agreement that our differences will be settled by the rule of law.

Why Not Regulate Guns as Seriously as Toys? - NYTimes.com

Why Not Regulate Guns as Seriously as Toys? - NYTimes.com

Climate of Hate - NYTimes.com

January 9, 2011
Climate of Hate
By PAUL KRUGMAN

When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen?

Put me in the latter category. I’ve had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach ever since the final stages of the 2008 campaign. I remembered the upsurge in political hatred after Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 — an upsurge that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. And you could see, just by watching the crowds at McCain-Palin rallies, that it was ready to happen again. The Department of Homeland Security reached the same conclusion: in April 2009 an internal report warned that right-wing extremism was on the rise, with a growing potential for violence.

Conservatives denounced that report. But there has, in fact, been a rising tide of threats and vandalism aimed at elected officials, including both Judge John Roll, who was killed Saturday, and Representative Gabrielle Giffords. One of these days, someone was bound to take it to the next level. And now someone has.

It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate.

Last spring Politico.com reported on a surge in threats against members of Congress, which were already up by 300 percent. A number of the people making those threats had a history of mental illness — but something about the current state of America has been causing far more disturbed people than before to act out their illness by threatening, or actually engaging in, political violence.

And there’s not much question what has changed. As Clarence Dupnik, the sheriff responsible for dealing with the Arizona shootings, put it, it’s “the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business.” The vast majority of those who listen to that toxic rhetoric stop short of actual violence, but some, inevitably, cross that line.

It’s important to be clear here about the nature of our sickness. It’s not a general lack of “civility,” the favorite term of pundits who want to wish away fundamental policy disagreements. Politeness may be a virtue, but there’s a big difference between bad manners and calls, explicit or implicit, for violence; insults aren’t the same as incitement.

The point is that there’s room in a democracy for people who ridicule and denounce those who disagree with them; there isn’t any place for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary.

And it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence.

Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P.

And there’s a huge contrast in the media. Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you’ll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won’t hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at The Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly, and you will.

Of course, the likes of Mr. Beck and Mr. O’Reilly are responding to popular demand. Citizens of other democracies may marvel at the American psyche, at the way efforts by mildly liberal presidents to expand health coverage are met with cries of tyranny and talk of armed resistance. Still, that’s what happens whenever a Democrat occupies the White House, and there’s a market for anyone willing to stoke that anger.

But even if hate is what many want to hear, that doesn’t excuse those who pander to that desire. They should be shunned by all decent people.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t been happening: the purveyors of hate have been treated with respect, even deference, by the G.O.P. establishment. As David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter, has put it, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox.”

So will the Arizona massacre make our discourse less toxic? It’s really up to G.O.P. leaders. Will they accept the reality of what’s happening to America, and take a stand against eliminationist rhetoric? Or will they try to dismiss the massacre as the mere act of a deranged individual, and go on as before?

If Arizona promotes some real soul-searching, it could prove a turning point. If it doesn’t, Saturday’s atrocity will be just the beginning.

The Texas Omen - NYTimes.com

anuary 6, 2011
The Texas Omen
By PAUL KRUGMAN

These are tough times for state governments. Huge deficits loom almost everywhere, from California to New York, from New Jersey to Texas.

Wait — Texas? Wasn’t Texas supposed to be thriving even as the rest of America suffered? Didn’t its governor declare, during his re-election campaign, that “we have billions in surplus”? Yes, it was, and yes, he did. But reality has now intruded, in the form of a deficit expected to run as high as $25 billion over the next two years.

And that reality has implications for the nation as a whole. For Texas is where the modern conservative theory of budgeting — the belief that you should never raise taxes under any circumstances, that you can always balance the budget by cutting wasteful spending — has been implemented most completely. If the theory can’t make it there, it can’t make it anywhere.

How bad is the Texas deficit? Comparing budget crises among states is tricky, for technical reasons. Still, data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities suggest that the Texas budget gap is worse than New York’s, about as bad as California’s, but not quite up to New Jersey levels.

The point, however, is that just the other day Texas was being touted as a role model (and still is by commentators who haven’t been keeping up with the news). It was the state the recession supposedly passed by, thanks to its low taxes and business-friendly policies. Its governor boasted that its budget was in good shape thanks to his “tough conservative decisions.”

Oh, and at a time when there’s a full-court press on to demonize public-sector unions as the source of all our woes, Texas is nearly demon-free: less than 20 percent of public-sector workers there are covered by union contracts, compared with almost 75 percent in New York.

So what happened to the “Texas miracle” many people were talking about even a few months ago?

Part of the answer is that reports of a recession-proof state were greatly exaggerated. It’s true that Texas job losses haven’t been as severe as those in the nation as a whole since the recession began in 2007. But Texas has a rapidly growing population — largely, suggests Harvard’s Edward Glaeser, because its liberal land-use and zoning policies have kept housing cheap. There’s nothing wrong with that; but given that rising population, Texas needs to create jobs more rapidly than the rest of the country just to keep up with a growing work force.

And when you look at unemployment, Texas doesn’t seem particularly special: its unemployment rate is below the national average, thanks in part to high oil prices, but it’s about the same as the unemployment rate in New York or Massachusetts.

What about the budget? The truth is that the Texas state government has relied for years on smoke and mirrors to create the illusion of sound finances in the face of a serious “structural” budget deficit — that is, a deficit that persists even when the economy is doing well. When the recession struck, hitting revenue in Texas just as it did everywhere else, that illusion was bound to collapse.

The only thing that let Gov. Rick Perry get away, temporarily, with claims of a surplus was the fact that Texas enacts budgets only once every two years, and the last budget was put in place before the depth of the economic downturn was clear. Now the next budget must be passed — and Texas may have a $25 billion hole to fill. Now what?

Given the complete dominance of conservative ideology in Texas politics, tax increases are out of the question. So it has to be spending cuts.

Yet Mr. Perry wasn’t lying about those “tough conservative decisions”: Texas has indeed taken a hard, you might say brutal, line toward its most vulnerable citizens. Among the states, Texas ranks near the bottom in education spending per pupil, while leading the nation in the percentage of residents without health insurance. It’s hard to imagine what will happen if the state tries to eliminate its huge deficit purely through further cuts.

I don’t know how the mess in Texas will end up being resolved. But the signs don’t look good, either for the state or for the nation.

Right now, triumphant conservatives in Washington are declaring that they can cut taxes and still balance the budget by slashing spending. Yet they haven’t been able to do that even in Texas, which is willing both to impose great pain (by its stinginess on health care) and to shortchange the future (by neglecting education). How are they supposed to pull it off nationally, especially when the incoming Republicans have declared Medicare, Social Security and defense off limits?

People used to say that the future happens first in California, but these days what happens in Texas is probably a better omen. And what we’re seeing right now is a future that doesn’t work.

Skeptic » eSkeptic » Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

Good Calories, Good Science
or Bad Calories, Bad Science?

by Barry Rein

There is little doubt that the United States, along with much of the rest of the world, is in the midst of an epidemic of obesity. As we get fatter, the diseases associated with obesity — diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, cancer — continue to rise. Despite the fact that we are constantly exhorted to eat less and exercise more, we continue to get fatter. A neutral observer might conclude that there is something wrong with the science here. Gary Taubes claims to be one such observer, and he’s convinced that there is definitely something wrong with the science of nutrition as it is being practiced today.

The central thesis of Taubes’ new book, Why We Get Fat is that carbohydrates in our diet is the cause of this epidemic. While his thesis is unquestionably controversial, Taubes builds a strong scientific case that this is indeed what is happening. If he is right — and his work has the ring of scientific truth about it — it means that much of the dietary advice we have been following is flat-out wrong.

This book reviews much of the same ground that his previous work, Good Calories, Bad Calories covered. That work was nearly five hundred pages of densely-written, heavily annotated scientific prose. Unsurprisingly, many readers found it to be hard going as it was aimed at a scientifically-oriented audience. One of Taubes’ aims in Why We Get Fat is to cover the same ground but, as he says in the introduction, in a form that husbands, wives, parents, or friends and siblings can read without difficulty.

Gary Taubes is no neophyte in writing about scientific controversies. Before he turned his attention to dietary science, Taubes wrote about physics, such as the highly acclaimed Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion, about Pons, Fleischman, and the problems that ensue from announcing a major scientific discovery by press conference before anyone has a chance to replicate your findings; and also Nobel Dreams, a critical look at Carlo Rubbia and the harm to science in general and to a scientific career in particular that can result from the pursuit of the Nobel Prize. For such work Taubes won the Science in Society Award of the National Association of Science Writers three times. He is currently a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator in Health Policy Research at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health. So Taubes’ bona fides as a researcher and writer are impeccable. But is his science?

Why We Get Fat is divided into two major sections. The first, Biology, not Physics, is generally a debunking section that endeavors to break down much of what we think we know about getting fat. Among other themes, it explains why the calories-in/calories-out hypothesis is false. The second section, Adiposity 101, clarifies the science behind fat accumulation, and comes up with some startling, but well-supported conclusions as to why we’re really getting fat.

Book I covers a theme that should be familiar to skeptics: that should draw our conclusions from the evidence, wherever the evidence might lead — in this case, why we get fat. If the evidence contradicts our beliefs, do we ignore the evidence, or do we change our beliefs? Taubes wants us to change our beliefs.

The conventional wisdom describing the obesity epidemic is that we eat too much and don’t exercise enough. We live in a “toxic environment” where food is too readily available and where we don’t move around enough to burn off what we eat. Too much food too easily available, sedentary lifestyles — that’s what’s making us fat.

Not quite, says Taubes, beginning with the fact that obesity correlates more closely with poverty than prosperity. He gives examples of several obese populations that had no access to any of the factors that we assume are making us fat today. For example, the Native American tribe known as the Pimas were remarked upon by mid-19th century explorers as being lean and in fine health. By 1900, however, the Pima had been consigned to reservations, living on government rations that consisted largely of white flour and sugar. And, according to the anthropologists who documented their fate, they were fat.

The Pima are just one example of several populations that Taubes references who became fat despite (or because of?) poverty, and despite the absence of the several factors we assume are making us fat today.

Next, Taubes goes into the “Elusive Benefits of Undereating,” and “The Elusive Benefits of Exercise.” Eating less may work in theory, but as Taubes shows, many medical studies show that it doesn’t work in practice. Calorie starved patients didn’t lose much weight, and those who did regained it shortly thereafter. Is this due to the moral weakness of the patients, or is there a biological reason?

Likewise exercise: Taubes acknowledges that exercising may well be good for us, but that it is, generally speaking, not an effective method for losing weight or keeping it off. In an amusing example, he asks: if you knew you were going to a huge feast in the evening, what would you do to ensure you had a good appetite? You’d follow the exact advice we are given to lose weight: eat less and exercise more. So, the method you would use to make yourself as hungry as possible for the evening is the same as the advice for losing weight!

For some, exercise is something we do in a gym, or on a track, or at a sporting venue. While many of us work in sedentary occupations, domestics, gardeners, construction workers and other physical laborers get plenty of exercise as a normal part of their jobs. Taubes points out that, 1) many of the jobs involving physical activity are done by the poor and disadvantaged and, 2) many of these people are still fat. So, if physical activity is the key to staying lean, why do the poor tend to be more obese? This is another argument against the calories-in/calories-out hypothesis.

One other example: A 2006 study of 13,000 habitual runners, all subscribers to Runner’s World magazine, found that, indeed, those who ran the most tended to weigh the least, but that all the runners tended to get fatter with each passing year. The implication is that in order to keep weight constant it is necessary to increase running mileage year after year, as the runner gets progressively older. As Taubes notes, maybe it’s time to question these underlying beliefs.

There is a fairly widespread belief that the calories-in/calories-out hypothesis is supported by the first law of thermodynamics. The first law, also known as the law of energy conservation, roughly states that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but only changed from one form to another. In a section entitled Thermodynamics for Dummies, Taubes neatly explains why this law does not explain weight gain and loss any more than Newton’s laws of motion or Einstein’s laws of relativity would. While it is true that in order to gain weight we must eat more calories than we expend, the first law explains nothing about causality: it does not explain why we overeat. This is the real question that must be answered in order to deal with the obesity epidemic, and it is dealt with in Book II.

Finishing up Book I, Taubes attempts to take some of the blame away from the obese themselves. This may not be a popular viewpoint, but if the cause of obesity is biological (genes and physiology) and not moral (gluttony and sloth), then we have been barking up the wrong tree when looking for causes and cures. Why, he asks, would someone voluntarily subject themselves to the opprobrium, and the debilitating effects, of obesity?

Having dispensed with many weighty misconceptions, in Book II Taubes goes into what he argues is the real science of fat. He discusses the role of insulin and insulin resistance in fat regulation, why some people get fat and not others, and individual variations in the way fat is regulated. Little of the science Taubes discusses here is controversial: The operation of insulin, for example, has been established for decades. What Taubes does, however, is to gather and synthesize the known science into a coherent whole. This does not mean his conclusions are not controversial, just that the science itself isn’t.

For example, in a chapter entitled A Primer on the Regulation of Fat, Taubes reviews the details of the science behind fat metabolism, explaining the processes by which fat is regulated, stored, and released. Basically, when insulin increases fat is stored; when insulin decreases, fat is released. If we keep our insulin levels low, fat will be burned. There is more to it than this, which Taubes explains clearly, but that is the basic idea. There might be a lot less confusion about weight loss and gain, Taubes insists, if facts like these were more widely understood.

Taubes discusses what we can do about the dietary fix we’ve eaten ourselves into. If you haven’t guessed yet, he considers the culprits to be carbohydrates in all their forms: “In a world without carbohydrate-rich diets, obesity would be a rare condition.”

We all know people who can eat as much as they like yet remain slender. Subsequent chapters explain why some of us get fat and others stay lean eating approximately the same amount of food. There is seemingly no justice here! Also covered is why many of us get heavier as we age. Hint: Taubes reckons it has to do with insulin resistance.

Taubes considers fructose to be a serious contributor to being overweight. He quotes biochemists who called it the most “lipogenic” of carbohydrates, the one converted most easily to fat. Many of us are aware of, and try to avoid, the high-fructose corn syrup in sodas and other products. But what about the fructose in fruits? The fruits we eat have undergone hundreds of years of selective breeding to increase their size and sweetness. Many contain substantial amounts of fructose, so Taubes suggests that maybe we should track the amount of sugar we get when we consume fruit, as well as our sodas.

There is a lot more controversy in the remainder of the book. Without reviewing all the details here, Taubes shows how many human cultures in the past obtained most of their calories from animal foods without suffering from heart disease or any of the other diseases that plague Western civilization.

Some other subjects covered that are likely to induce cognitive dissonance in readers accustomed to the party line on obesity:

* Saturated fat is either harmless or beneficial, and is not responsible for heart disease.
* Eating fat is not the cause of getting fat.
* Why there is little genuine scientific support for the benefits of a low-fat diet.
* A low carbohydrate diet is the best diet for humans.

To be sure, much of what Taubes says is going to be a hard sell. It is diametrically opposed to the dietary advice outlined by such organizations as the American Heart Association. Nevertheless, throughout the book Taubes clearly supports his positions in a way that leaves little room for argument (which is not to say there won’t be any).

Diet and nutrition is not a field that has received much scrutiny by the skeptical community, but Why We Get Fat fits squarely within the canon of skeptical analysis. We skeptics like to believe that we reach our conclusions based on reason and evidence, and we are supposed to be willing to change our opinions in the face of new evidence. Well, here it is: a book that turns upside-down almost everything we think we know about human nutrition.

If Taubes is wrong, well, his error is a doozy! Following his advice will lead to increases in obesity, cancer, heart disease, diabetes and all the other conditions Western civilization is heir to. Ironically, this is exactly what we are already experiencing. If bad science leads to bad results, then maybe it’s time for a paradigm shift. That is certainly what Taubes believes.

When Zombies Win - NYTimes.com

December 19, 2010
When Zombies Win
By PAUL KRUGMAN

When historians look back at 2008-10, what will puzzle them most, I believe, is the strange triumph of failed ideas. Free-market fundamentalists have been wrong about everything — yet they now dominate the political scene more thoroughly than ever.

How did that happen? How, after runaway banks brought the economy to its knees, did we end up with Ron Paul, who says “I don’t think we need regulators,” about to take over a key House panel overseeing the Fed? How, after the experiences of the Clinton and Bush administrations — the first raised taxes and presided over spectacular job growth; the second cut taxes and presided over anemic growth even before the crisis — did we end up with bipartisan agreement on even more tax cuts?

The answer from the right is that the economic failures of the Obama administration show that big-government policies don’t work. But the response should be, what big-government policies?

For the fact is that the Obama stimulus — which itself was almost 40 percent tax cuts — was far too cautious to turn the economy around. And that’s not 20-20 hindsight: many economists, myself included, warned from the beginning that the plan was grossly inadequate. Put it this way: A policy under which government employment actually fell, under which government spending on goods and services grew more slowly than during the Bush years, hardly constitutes a test of Keynesian economics.

Now, maybe it wasn’t possible for President Obama to get more in the face of Congressional skepticism about government. But even if that’s true, it only demonstrates the continuing hold of a failed doctrine over our politics.

It’s also worth pointing out that everything the right said about why Obamanomics would fail was wrong. For two years we’ve been warned that government borrowing would send interest rates sky-high; in fact, rates have fluctuated with optimism or pessimism about recovery, but stayed consistently low by historical standards. For two years we’ve been warned that inflation, even hyperinflation, was just around the corner; instead, disinflation has continued, with core inflation — which excludes volatile food and energy prices — now at a half-century low.

The free-market fundamentalists have been as wrong about events abroad as they have about events in America — and suffered equally few consequences. “Ireland,” declared George Osborne in 2006, “stands as a shining example of the art of the possible in long-term economic policymaking.” Whoops. But Mr. Osborne is now Britain’s top economic official.

And in his new position, he’s setting out to emulate the austerity policies Ireland implemented after its bubble burst. After all, conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic spent much of the past year hailing Irish austerity as a resounding success. “The Irish approach worked in 1987-89 — and it’s working now,” declared Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute last June. Whoops, again.

But such failures don’t seem to matter. To borrow the title of a recent book by the Australian economist John Quiggin on doctrines that the crisis should have killed but didn’t, we’re still — perhaps more than ever — ruled by “zombie economics.” Why?

Part of the answer, surely, is that people who should have been trying to slay zombie ideas have tried to compromise with them instead. And this is especially, though not only, true of the president.

People tend to forget that Ronald Reagan often gave ground on policy substance — most notably, he ended up enacting multiple tax increases. But he never wavered on ideas, never backed down from the position that his ideology was right and his opponents were wrong.

President Obama, by contrast, has consistently tried to reach across the aisle by lending cover to right-wing myths. He has praised Reagan for restoring American dynamism (when was the last time you heard a Republican praising F.D.R.?), adopted G.O.P. rhetoric about the need for the government to tighten its belt even in the face of recession, offered symbolic freezes on spending and federal wages.

None of this stopped the right from denouncing him as a socialist. But it helped empower bad ideas, in ways that can do quite immediate harm. Right now Mr. Obama is hailing the tax-cut deal as a boost to the economy — but Republicans are already talking about spending cuts that would offset any positive effects from the deal. And how effectively can he oppose these demands, when he himself has embraced the rhetoric of belt-tightening?

Yes, politics is the art of the possible. We all understand the need to deal with one’s political enemies. But it’s one thing to make deals to advance your goals; it’s another to open the door to zombie ideas. When you do that, the zombies end up eating your brain — and quite possibly your economy too.

Good Calories, Good Science

or Bad Calories, Bad Science?

by Barry Rein

There is little doubt that the United States,
along with much of the rest of the world, is in the midst of an epidemic of
obesity. As we get fatter, the diseases associated with obesity — diabetes,
cardiovascular diseases, cancer — continue to rise. Despite the fact that we
are constantly exhorted to eat less and exercise more, we continue to get
fatter. A neutral observer might conclude that there is something wrong with
the science here. Gary Taubes claims to be one such observer, and he’s
convinced that there is definitely something wrong with the science of
nutrition as it is being practiced today.

The
central thesis of Taubes’ new book, Why
We Get Fat is that carbohydrates in our diet is the cause of this
epidemic. While his thesis is unquestionably controversial, Taubes builds a
strong scientific case that this is indeed what is happening. If he is right —
and his work has the ring of scientific truth about it — it means that much of
the dietary advice we have been following is flat-out wrong.

This book
reviews much of the same ground that his previous work, Good Calories, Bad Calories covered. That
work was nearly five hundred pages of densely-written, heavily annotated
scientific prose. Unsurprisingly, many readers found it to be hard going as it
was aimed at a scientifically-oriented audience. One of Taubes’ aims in Why We Get Fat is to cover
the same ground but, as he says in the introduction, in a form that husbands,
wives, parents, or friends and siblings can read without difficulty.

Gary
Taubes is no neophyte in writing about scientific controversies. Before he
turned his attention to dietary science, Taubes wrote about physics, such as
the highly acclaimed Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion,
about Pons, Fleischman, and the problems that ensue from announcing a major
scientific discovery by press conference before anyone has a chance to
replicate your findings; and also Nobel Dreams, a critical look at Carlo
Rubbia and the harm to science in general and to a scientific career in
particular that can result from the pursuit of the Nobel Prize. For such work
Taubes won the Science in Society Award of the National Association of Science
Writers three times. He is currently a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Investigator in Health Policy Research at the University of California,
Berkeley School of Public Health. So Taubes’ bona fides as a researcher and
writer are impeccable. But is his science?

Why
We Get Fat
is divided into two major sections. The first, Biology, not Physics, is generally a debunking
section that endeavors to break down much of what we think we know about
getting fat. Among other themes, it explains why the calories-in/calories-out
hypothesis is false. The second section, Adiposity
101, clarifies the science behind fat accumulation, and comes up
with some startling, but well-supported conclusions as to why we’re really
getting fat.

Book I
covers a theme that should be familiar to skeptics: that should draw our
conclusions from the evidence, wherever the evidence might lead — in this case,
why we get fat. If the evidence contradicts our beliefs, do we ignore the
evidence, or do we change our beliefs? Taubes wants us to change our beliefs.

The
conventional wisdom describing the obesity epidemic is that we eat too much and
don’t exercise enough. We live in a “toxic environment” where food is too
readily available and where we don’t move around enough to burn off what we
eat. Too much food too easily available, sedentary lifestyles — that’s what’s
making us fat.

Not
quite, says Taubes, beginning with the fact that obesity correlates more
closely with poverty than prosperity. He gives examples of several obese populations
that had no access to any of the factors that we assume are making us fat
today. For example, the Native American tribe known as the Pimas were remarked
upon by mid-19th century explorers as being lean and in fine health. By 1900,
however, the Pima had been consigned to reservations, living on government
rations that consisted largely of white flour and sugar. And, according to the
anthropologists who documented their fate, they were fat.

The Pima
are just one example of several populations that Taubes references who became
fat despite (or because of?) poverty, and despite the absence of the several
factors we assume are making us fat today.

Next,
Taubes goes into the “Elusive Benefits of Undereating,” and “The Elusive
Benefits of Exercise.” Eating less may work in theory, but as Taubes shows,
many medical studies show that it doesn’t work in practice. Calorie starved
patients didn’t lose much weight, and those who did regained it shortly
thereafter. Is this due to the moral weakness of the patients, or is there a
biological reason?

Likewise
exercise: Taubes acknowledges that exercising may well be good for us, but that
it is, generally speaking, not an effective method for losing weight or keeping
it off. In an amusing example, he asks: if you knew you were going to a huge
feast in the evening, what would you do to ensure you had a good appetite?
You’d follow the exact advice we are given to lose weight: eat less and
exercise more. So, the method you would use to make yourself as hungry as
possible for the evening is the same as the advice for losing weight!

For some,
exercise is something we do in a gym, or on a track, or at a sporting venue.
While many of us work in sedentary occupations, domestics, gardeners,
construction workers and other physical laborers get plenty of exercise as a
normal part of their jobs. Taubes points out that, 1) many of the jobs
involving physical activity are done by the poor and disadvantaged and, 2) many
of these people are still fat. So, if physical activity is the key to staying
lean, why do the poor tend to be more obese? This is another argument against
the calories-in/calories-out hypothesis.

One other
example: A 2006 study of 13,000 habitual runners, all subscribers to Runner’s World magazine, found that,
indeed, those who ran the most tended to weigh the least, but that all the
runners tended to get fatter with each passing year. The implication is that in
order to keep weight constant it is necessary to increase running mileage year
after year, as the runner gets progressively older. As Taubes notes, maybe it’s
time to question these underlying beliefs.

There is
a fairly widespread belief that the calories-in/calories-out hypothesis is
supported by the first law of thermodynamics. The first law, also known as the
law of energy conservation, roughly states that energy cannot be created nor
destroyed, but only changed from one form to another. In a section entitled Thermodynamics for Dummies,
Taubes neatly explains why this law does not explain weight gain and loss any
more than Newton’s laws of motion or Einstein’s laws of relativity would. While
it is true that in order to gain weight we must eat more calories than we
expend, the first law explains nothing about causality: it does not explain why we overeat. This is the
real question that must be answered in order to deal with the obesity epidemic,
and it is dealt with in Book II.

Finishing
up Book I, Taubes attempts to take some of the blame away from the obese
themselves. This may not be a popular viewpoint, but if the cause of obesity is
biological (genes and physiology) and not moral (gluttony and sloth), then we have
been barking up the wrong tree when looking for causes and cures. Why, he asks,
would someone voluntarily subject themselves to the opprobrium, and the
debilitating effects, of obesity?

Having
dispensed with many weighty misconceptions, in Book II Taubes goes into what he
argues is the real science of fat. He discusses the role of insulin and insulin
resistance in fat regulation, why some people get fat and not others, and
individual variations in the way fat is regulated. Little of the science Taubes
discusses here is controversial: The operation of insulin, for example, has
been established for decades. What Taubes does, however, is to gather and
synthesize the known science into a coherent whole. This does not mean his
conclusions are not controversial, just that the science itself isn’t.

For
example, in a chapter entitled A
Primer on the Regulation of Fat, Taubes reviews the details of the
science behind fat metabolism, explaining the processes by which fat is
regulated, stored, and released. Basically, when insulin increases fat is
stored; when insulin decreases, fat is released. If we keep our insulin levels
low, fat will be burned. There is more to it than this, which Taubes explains
clearly, but that is the basic idea. There might be a lot less confusion about
weight loss and gain, Taubes insists, if facts like these were more widely
understood.

Taubes
discusses what we can do about the dietary fix we’ve eaten ourselves into. If
you haven’t guessed yet, he considers the culprits to be carbohydrates in all
their forms: “In a world without carbohydrate-rich diets, obesity would be a
rare condition.”

We all
know people who can eat as much as they like yet remain slender. Subsequent
chapters explain why some of us get fat and others stay lean eating
approximately the same amount of food. There is seemingly no justice here! Also
covered is why many of us get heavier as we age. Hint: Taubes reckons it has to
do with insulin resistance.

Taubes
considers fructose to be a serious contributor to being overweight. He quotes
biochemists who called it the most “lipogenic” of carbohydrates, the one
converted most easily to fat. Many of us are aware of, and try to avoid, the
high-fructose corn syrup in sodas and other products. But what about the
fructose in fruits? The fruits we eat have undergone hundreds of years of
selective breeding to increase their size and sweetness. Many contain
substantial amounts of fructose, so Taubes suggests that maybe we should track
the amount of sugar we get when we consume fruit, as well as our sodas.

There is
a lot more controversy in the remainder of the book. Without reviewing all the
details here, Taubes shows how many human cultures in the past obtained most of
their calories from animal foods without suffering from heart disease or any of
the other diseases that plague Western civilization.

Some
other subjects covered that are likely to induce cognitive dissonance in
readers accustomed to the party line on obesity:

• Saturated fat is either
  harmless or beneficial, and is not responsible for heart disease.
• Eating fat is not the cause of
  getting fat.
• Why there is little genuine
  scientific support for the benefits of a low-fat diet.
• A low carbohydrate diet is the
  best diet for humans.

To be
sure, much of what Taubes says is going to be a hard sell. It is diametrically
opposed to the dietary advice outlined by such organizations as the American
Heart Association. Nevertheless, throughout the book Taubes clearly supports
his positions in a way that leaves little room for argument (which is not to
say there won’t be any).

Diet and
nutrition is not a field that has received much scrutiny by the skeptical
community, but Why We Get Fat
fits squarely within the canon of skeptical analysis. We skeptics like to
believe that we reach our conclusions based on reason and evidence, and we are
supposed to be willing to change our opinions in the face of new evidence.
Well, here it is: a book that turns upside-down almost everything we think we
know about human nutrition.

If Taubes
is wrong, well, his error is a doozy! Following his advice will lead to
increases in obesity, cancer, heart disease, diabetes and all the other
conditions Western civilization is heir to. Ironically, this is exactly what we
are already experiencing. If bad science leads to bad results, then maybe it’s
time for a paradigm shift. That is certainly what Taubes believes.