Thursday, June 22, 2006
An EUxample
The Wall Street Journal has an enlightening editorial today [paid subscription is probably required]. It's written by the Eurpean Union commissioner for agriculture and rural development and it talks about all the reform they're going to do. If you know the EU, you'll know not to expect any real reform and to expect a lot of denial.
The editorial talks about the problems with the European wine industry. The Wall Street Journal had a news article on 6/16/06 called "Wine Into Windex" about the wine industry where they described the pathetic European industry. This year, the EU will pay 131 million euros to turn French and Italian wines (Spain and Greece are still waiting for their requests to be processed... good luck) into fuel and industrial alcohol in order to prop up the European wine market which has been getting clobbered by the US and elsewhere. This is supposed to be an emergency measure, but since 2000, the EU has done this with 10% of its total wine output. Of course, politics being what it is, the quality wines get to have some of their stock destroyed as well as the cheap table wines to make everyone happy.
In the last decade, while European wine exports have gone up slightly, US exports have increased by a factor of four! Chile and Australia by a factor of 19!
Anyone familiar with economics will know how to cure the problem: basic open competition. Unfortunately, unbridled competition is destructive and European suppliers don't like it. So you know what that means: reforms that are essentially shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Here's what the EU commissioner has to say about it:
The first sentence promises a "root-and-branch reform of the EU's wine sector". Right off the bat, this is wrong. It shouldn't be the role of a government to decide the vast details of how business operates. It's like having the referee of a sporting event decide what strategies the teams will be using.
The commissioner says the European wines are the best in the world. No qualifiers, just the best. In a recent blind taste test, the US won over Europe. And this test is a repeat of a test done 30 years ago with the same results (see here for details). The guy running the test in 1976 believed he had it sufficiently rigged for Europe to win, but they lost to the US.
So for the European commissioner to make this statement seems a bit much. Of course he add that Eurowines are renowned for their quality, and some other things like centuries of tradition and beautiful landscapes which produce them. Yeah.
At least the guy admits that the "New World" [the scare quotes are actually in the editorial like he's talking about the "Zionist Entity" or some other thing so unmentionable that a EUphemism is needed] is taking a disproportionate share of the world market outside of Europe. And he admits that before too long, Europe could become a net wine importer rather than exporter.
So how do you fix this problem? In a free market, each wine producer is competing against all other wine producers in their customer market. And those markets themselves are subject to intense competition to change or redefine them, or create new markets (such as wine coolers or whatever people really want). At one time, I'm sure the European wine market was a free market, which would explain how they got as good as they did. But today, when the customers send them a strong message by giving them decreasing amounts of market share, the EU is there to intercept that message and destroy it. In a free market, some wine producers would fail or be taken over by better ones. And all wine producers would be held more accountable to their customers: improving their quality by whatever means possible, improving the ease of product selection.
But while the commissioner admits that destroying wine "is an unsustainable -- some might say crazy -- way to spend a half-billion euros of taxpayer money each year" the very next sentence says "I'm not advocating cutting the annual wine budget of about €1.2 billion." What the hell? So you slowly end up having to spend huge amounts of money to prop up an uncompetitive industry and once that money starts getting spent, it is allocated to that industry forever! Typical bureaucratica.
The editorial talks about the problems with the European wine industry. The Wall Street Journal had a news article on 6/16/06 called "Wine Into Windex" about the wine industry where they described the pathetic European industry. This year, the EU will pay 131 million euros to turn French and Italian wines (Spain and Greece are still waiting for their requests to be processed... good luck) into fuel and industrial alcohol in order to prop up the European wine market which has been getting clobbered by the US and elsewhere. This is supposed to be an emergency measure, but since 2000, the EU has done this with 10% of its total wine output. Of course, politics being what it is, the quality wines get to have some of their stock destroyed as well as the cheap table wines to make everyone happy.
In the last decade, while European wine exports have gone up slightly, US exports have increased by a factor of four! Chile and Australia by a factor of 19!
Anyone familiar with economics will know how to cure the problem: basic open competition. Unfortunately, unbridled competition is destructive and European suppliers don't like it. So you know what that means: reforms that are essentially shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Here's what the EU commissioner has to say about it:
The first sentence promises a "root-and-branch reform of the EU's wine sector". Right off the bat, this is wrong. It shouldn't be the role of a government to decide the vast details of how business operates. It's like having the referee of a sporting event decide what strategies the teams will be using.
The commissioner says the European wines are the best in the world. No qualifiers, just the best. In a recent blind taste test, the US won over Europe. And this test is a repeat of a test done 30 years ago with the same results (see here for details). The guy running the test in 1976 believed he had it sufficiently rigged for Europe to win, but they lost to the US.
First to be tasted were white wines. The comparison was with Chardonnay - matching the very best French Chardonnays (Burgundy) against California Chardonnays. The winner was a California Chardonnay from Chateau Montelena, by winemaker Mike Grgich. Third and fourth place also went to California Chardonnays. All nine judges awarded their top scores to either Chalone Winery or Chateau Montelena, both of California.European judges had found California wines to be better than European wines. And a repeat of the test this year also had California winning. Then there were the red wines:
The red wines were then tasted choosing a Cabernert Sauvignon from California's Stag's Leap Wine Cellars produced by winemaker Warren Winiarski for the top wine. "The wine that one judge said bespoke 'the magnificence of France' turned out to be a Napa Cabernet." Similarly, "'That is definitely a California. It has no nose,' said another judge - after downing a Batard-Montrachet '73." The comments and results of the tasting indicated that the judges could not distinguish California from French wines.One of the judges tried to get her ballot back after the event. Europeans called the results a fluke.
So for the European commissioner to make this statement seems a bit much. Of course he add that Eurowines are renowned for their quality, and some other things like centuries of tradition and beautiful landscapes which produce them. Yeah.
At least the guy admits that the "New World" [the scare quotes are actually in the editorial like he's talking about the "Zionist Entity" or some other thing so unmentionable that a EUphemism is needed] is taking a disproportionate share of the world market outside of Europe. And he admits that before too long, Europe could become a net wine importer rather than exporter.
So how do you fix this problem? In a free market, each wine producer is competing against all other wine producers in their customer market. And those markets themselves are subject to intense competition to change or redefine them, or create new markets (such as wine coolers or whatever people really want). At one time, I'm sure the European wine market was a free market, which would explain how they got as good as they did. But today, when the customers send them a strong message by giving them decreasing amounts of market share, the EU is there to intercept that message and destroy it. In a free market, some wine producers would fail or be taken over by better ones. And all wine producers would be held more accountable to their customers: improving their quality by whatever means possible, improving the ease of product selection.
But while the commissioner admits that destroying wine "is an unsustainable -- some might say crazy -- way to spend a half-billion euros of taxpayer money each year" the very next sentence says "I'm not advocating cutting the annual wine budget of about €1.2 billion." What the hell? So you slowly end up having to spend huge amounts of money to prop up an uncompetitive industry and once that money starts getting spent, it is allocated to that industry forever! Typical bureaucratica.
Friday, June 16, 2006
Why do boys do poorly in schools today
Nelson D. Horseman says:
Hat tip to Ann Althouse via Instapundit
To see the problem clearly, imagine being a girl in a school that is the mirror image of today's schools....I've been waiting for the pendulum to start swinging in the other direction for decades.
Imagine that students get rewarded for being overtly aggressive in school and that there is a zero tolerance policy for being passive.
Imagine getting extra credit for resisting authority, and having points deducted for being compliant with arbitrary rules and meaningless deadlines.
Hat tip to Ann Althouse via Instapundit
Monday, June 12, 2006
The Madness of Europe
A trial in Italy accusing a writer of defaming Islam. Appropriately enough, the book is called "The Force of Reason".
As one Muslim leader told the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Izmir, Turkey, Giuseppe Bernardini: “Thanks to your democratic laws, we will invade you. Thanks to our religious laws, we will dominate you.”
Sunday, June 11, 2006
Random writing about stuff
I've been considering the impact of the Internet on the universities and how that compares to the impact of the printing press on the knowledge establishments of that time period. The Wikipedia entry I linked above has some interesting information in it.
We all know that books were hand written by scribes and that in Europe, it was closely tied to the Catholic Church. We know that very few books were produced, they were very expensive, and that they were closely guarded by a privileged few.
Interestingly enough, when the printing press began to catch on, the papal court considered requiring a license from the Catholic Church in order to run a printing press. If they had any foresight, they would have made this a top priority because the printing press would result in an unpredictable, uncontrollable chaos which would be the Renaissance, the Reformation, the establishment of a scientific community and the organizational technique which would eventually dominate the entire world: the scientific method. The Wikipedia entry says that before the printing press, scientists has been mostly isolated and didn't work in a large community with lots of communication.
It seems pretty clear that the printing press in Europe enabled large groups of people to organize outside of the traditional hierarchy of Western society: the Catholic Church. And at that time, the church was arguably growing increasingly corrupt and ineffective. Perhaps that was because the best and brightest now had other choices.
We are in the early stages of the Internet revolution (I'm talking from a human communications perspective and not from a data communications perspective which is also quite amazing). I've been involved in it since 1992 and I've watched it transform amazingly rapidly and on profoundly structural levels. In 1992, Usenet newsgroups created discussion forums of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them very well educated and knowledgable about every sort of detail. At that time, it seemed like the future of the Internet was more of the same, with a greater number of forums discussing ever more narrowly defined subjects. But then the world wide web appeared and suddenly it became clear that anyone could become a publisher. In 1992, some Usenet news groups had operated like chat rooms, but then chat rooms appeared on their own. Online games broke out of the local area networks of high tech businesses and onto the Internet. Instant messaging appeared. Blogs appeared. Podcasting. Myspace. And I believe the constant innovation will continue, perhaps even accelerate. In my opinion, we are in the early stages of our own Renaissance.
The early activities of the Internet were mostly in academia and very specific companies such as BBN. So in this case, the printing press was invented by the church and used by the church. Soon, most high tech businesses joined in (this was before they were in vogue and before being called "tech" companies), which was when I stumbled into the Internet in 1992. Since we were not far removed from academia, those high tech business people blended in reasonably well. But very soon after, I could see that AOL and bulletin board systems were truly crashing into the Internet culture. It created a lot of chaos. You'd have bulletin board people posting advertisements for a babysitter on the Internet, you'd have totally uneducated idiots arguing about physics with groups of physics professors, you'd have the worst sort of abusive behavior that a word had to be invented/stolen to describe it: spam. The church had been invaded by the masses thanks to the printing press.
But during the past 15 years or so in which the Internet has enabled communications among people who otherwise would have been isolated from each other, it seems to me that academia has been rotting away, becoming increasingly corrupt and ineffective. I think a lot of that appearance of decline is because the Internet has "raised the bar".* Huge amounts of knowledge are transferred much more rapidly, effectively, and efficiently today over the Internet than in pre-Internet days. We aren't aware of it because we're immersed in it and the change has happened slowly over time, relative to the speed of our lives. For instance, imagine going to the store and buying a newspaper in order to find a stock quote (which can only be obtained for the previous day). Or imagine having to wait hours for, and then watch, an entire news show on TV just to find out who won a particular baseball game. But obviously it goes far beyond baseball scores and stock quotes.
It seems to me that the role of the university as the repository and education center of knowledge is now gone. If you think about it, all of the knowledge students learn in college could easily be distributed over the web as wiki-books, blogs of notes and FAQs, podcasts of lectures, and so forth. You might argue that you need professors to grade papers, but it's really grad students who grade most of the papers and they aren't very good at it. Besides, we're talking about knowledge and not certification (i.e. a degree). But this would only be for portions of an education which are useful such as physics, calculus and differential equations, probability and statistics, engineering courses, science courses, and other objective valuable classes. The benefits of English composition could be done easily via blogging. Medicine obviously needs its own educational system. I'd argue that engineering probably does as well, although most of it could be offloaded to individual work.
But really. Take a step back for a minute and compare the way knowledge is gained via standard education vs how it's gained over the web. Most people have taken at least one small area of knowledge and done extensive web learning on it. Think about how fast and effective and inexpensive that was compared to taking a college course on the subject. College is now mostly a medallion, a token, a certification. It's an expensive and largely useless exercise in getting a diploma.
Imagine if you could de-couple the requirements of all jobs (except medical doctors and veterinarians) from the diplomas they currently require. Think about how much useless activity is demanded from people. There's a reason why home-schooled kids are so knowledgable.
* Despite what news publishers and academics say, putting the punctuation inside the quotes is not a given. Arguably, with the increasing precision required from language due to changes in technology and communications, the punctuation should go inside the quotation marks iff** it's part of what is being quoted.
** "iff" stands for "if and only if".* ***
*** Warning: I created an infinite loop!
We all know that books were hand written by scribes and that in Europe, it was closely tied to the Catholic Church. We know that very few books were produced, they were very expensive, and that they were closely guarded by a privileged few.
Interestingly enough, when the printing press began to catch on, the papal court considered requiring a license from the Catholic Church in order to run a printing press. If they had any foresight, they would have made this a top priority because the printing press would result in an unpredictable, uncontrollable chaos which would be the Renaissance, the Reformation, the establishment of a scientific community and the organizational technique which would eventually dominate the entire world: the scientific method. The Wikipedia entry says that before the printing press, scientists has been mostly isolated and didn't work in a large community with lots of communication.
It seems pretty clear that the printing press in Europe enabled large groups of people to organize outside of the traditional hierarchy of Western society: the Catholic Church. And at that time, the church was arguably growing increasingly corrupt and ineffective. Perhaps that was because the best and brightest now had other choices.
We are in the early stages of the Internet revolution (I'm talking from a human communications perspective and not from a data communications perspective which is also quite amazing). I've been involved in it since 1992 and I've watched it transform amazingly rapidly and on profoundly structural levels. In 1992, Usenet newsgroups created discussion forums of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them very well educated and knowledgable about every sort of detail. At that time, it seemed like the future of the Internet was more of the same, with a greater number of forums discussing ever more narrowly defined subjects. But then the world wide web appeared and suddenly it became clear that anyone could become a publisher. In 1992, some Usenet news groups had operated like chat rooms, but then chat rooms appeared on their own. Online games broke out of the local area networks of high tech businesses and onto the Internet. Instant messaging appeared. Blogs appeared. Podcasting. Myspace. And I believe the constant innovation will continue, perhaps even accelerate. In my opinion, we are in the early stages of our own Renaissance.
The early activities of the Internet were mostly in academia and very specific companies such as BBN. So in this case, the printing press was invented by the church and used by the church. Soon, most high tech businesses joined in (this was before they were in vogue and before being called "tech" companies), which was when I stumbled into the Internet in 1992. Since we were not far removed from academia, those high tech business people blended in reasonably well. But very soon after, I could see that AOL and bulletin board systems were truly crashing into the Internet culture. It created a lot of chaos. You'd have bulletin board people posting advertisements for a babysitter on the Internet, you'd have totally uneducated idiots arguing about physics with groups of physics professors, you'd have the worst sort of abusive behavior that a word had to be invented/stolen to describe it: spam. The church had been invaded by the masses thanks to the printing press.
But during the past 15 years or so in which the Internet has enabled communications among people who otherwise would have been isolated from each other, it seems to me that academia has been rotting away, becoming increasingly corrupt and ineffective. I think a lot of that appearance of decline is because the Internet has "raised the bar".* Huge amounts of knowledge are transferred much more rapidly, effectively, and efficiently today over the Internet than in pre-Internet days. We aren't aware of it because we're immersed in it and the change has happened slowly over time, relative to the speed of our lives. For instance, imagine going to the store and buying a newspaper in order to find a stock quote (which can only be obtained for the previous day). Or imagine having to wait hours for, and then watch, an entire news show on TV just to find out who won a particular baseball game. But obviously it goes far beyond baseball scores and stock quotes.
It seems to me that the role of the university as the repository and education center of knowledge is now gone. If you think about it, all of the knowledge students learn in college could easily be distributed over the web as wiki-books, blogs of notes and FAQs, podcasts of lectures, and so forth. You might argue that you need professors to grade papers, but it's really grad students who grade most of the papers and they aren't very good at it. Besides, we're talking about knowledge and not certification (i.e. a degree). But this would only be for portions of an education which are useful such as physics, calculus and differential equations, probability and statistics, engineering courses, science courses, and other objective valuable classes. The benefits of English composition could be done easily via blogging. Medicine obviously needs its own educational system. I'd argue that engineering probably does as well, although most of it could be offloaded to individual work.
But really. Take a step back for a minute and compare the way knowledge is gained via standard education vs how it's gained over the web. Most people have taken at least one small area of knowledge and done extensive web learning on it. Think about how fast and effective and inexpensive that was compared to taking a college course on the subject. College is now mostly a medallion, a token, a certification. It's an expensive and largely useless exercise in getting a diploma.
Imagine if you could de-couple the requirements of all jobs (except medical doctors and veterinarians) from the diplomas they currently require. Think about how much useless activity is demanded from people. There's a reason why home-schooled kids are so knowledgable.
* Despite what news publishers and academics say, putting the punctuation inside the quotes is not a given. Arguably, with the increasing precision required from language due to changes in technology and communications, the punctuation should go inside the quotation marks iff** it's part of what is being quoted.
** "iff" stands for "if and only if".* ***
*** Warning: I created an infinite loop!
Friday, June 09, 2006
an LGF comment I made
The real dilemma that leftists face today is that they intensely disagree with the direction of our government yet that government was elected by the US citizens. They are faced with three facts which can't all be true:
1) The people of the US are not evil.
2) The government represents the people of the US.
3) The government is doing evil.
For them, #3 is a given and they cling to it fiercely. This means they must choose between denying #1 or #2. After the 2004 elections and after no meaningful Vietnam-like breakdown of the willingness of people to remain in Iraq, #2 is getting more and more difficult to deny, so people are shifting towards denying #1. And this is the path of a left-wing jihad that will leave a core group of extremists to be more and more strongly allied with the Islamists, despite their enormous differences.
The behavior of the leftists in the US are typical of anyone who loses influence. For them, it's like driving a car and finding the brakes don't work, the steering wheel doesn't steer. So they frantically apply more and more force to the things which had worked in the past. The average person doesn't expect to control society. They provide their opinions, make their arguments, and then listen to the other opinions and arguments. But those who were in power still expect their steering wheel to control the country.
Aside from his foreign policy, Clinton had already adopted much of the conservative ways of viewing things. He understood basic economics. He was very good at straddling positions. I recall how impressed I was with his response to an arrogant question about abortion: Clinton basically said that reasonable, educated people disagree on basic assumptions regarding when life begins. Blammo, he grabbed the center.
At the time, leftists didn't know it, but their steering wheel and brakes were already largely non-functional. They were simply lulled into believing that they still had power and influence. George W. Bush didn't have that facade and it frightened leftists once again as Reagan did. They viewed the Reagan years as a temporary detour when it was a permanent turn that Clinton accepted, but was able to hide very well.
But let me be clear that I've never considered GW Bush to be a great president. He has serious flaws in communicating with the people. His father had the same problem. Today is a time when that is a very important skill for our president to have.
I believe the leftists of today will never change. They'll continue believing that they belong in charge, that their ideas are correct while the world leaves them behind. They'll be like some aging, ousted dictator still trying to live in the past. And they will only get crazier and crazier.
