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Readers of this column know I’m a big baseball fan, especially of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Baltimore Orioles. So, Major League Baseball’s “woke” cancel-culture decision to move this year’s All-star game from Atlanta to Denver due to an election reform measure Georgia passed presents a real conundrum.
Especially because the first person to raise the issue was Dodger manager Dave Roberts. Georgia, which had a number of problems with its two most recent elections, took sensible actions to ensure future elections do not suffer the same problems and are completed, including vote counting, quickly and fairly. The state wanted to assure that all legitimate votes are counted and no illegitimate ones are. But progressives and other leftists falsely attacked the Georgia measures by mischaracterizing the statute’s terms and purposes. MLB and some other corporate bullies promptly caved in to the cry-baby destructive radicals. Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred first announced the All-star game, planned for Atlanta for a couple of years, would be moved, costing Georgia and Atlanta tens of millions of dollars. “In other words, Georgia is being punished financially for vote-suppressing acts it didn’t take,” wrote award-winning author Wesley J. Smith, who is also chairman of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. “In other words, … Manfred took this punitive action based on lies, not only in the media, but most blatantly by – and at the urging of – the president of the United States.” “Specifically, ‘President Unity’ sank into the caustic quicksand of demagoguery by claiming the new law is worse than Jim Crow,” which is simply ludicrous. The Washington Post’s leftist fact-checker Glenn Kessler gave Biden’s critique of the Georgia reforms “Four Pinocchios,” his lowest rating. Let’s review some opponents’ claims and the facts. First, the allegation the new law discourages voting and suppresses votes. In fact, it actually preserves or expands ballot access in several important ways, such as requiring large precincts with hour or longer wait times to add voting machines and personnel in subsequent elections. It also increases mandatory days of early weekend voting. Etc. Second, the claim it eliminates voting on Sunday to suppress African American votes. In 2020, only 16 of 159 counties offered early voting on Sundays. The reform provides the option for early voting on two Sundays for all areas. Third claim: The bill eliminates drop boxes for absentee voting. The reforms make drop boxes an official part of Georgia elections; they were unknown before 2020. So, they will be an official part of elections in all 159 counties and supervised to prevent tampering. Biden also lied by numerous times claiming the standard provision in Georgia’s law and common to all others that prevents politicking of voters standing in line would prevent voters from getting food and water. The new law specifically allows for poll workers to provide. There are more details, but the upshot is the reform law improves access for voters and fairness. Manfred and MLB leadership ignored the facts and charged ahead with their virtue signaling. Ironically, they did so right after cutting a deal with communist China to set up a baseball league there, as well as to live-stream MLB games to the country. The same China that’s committing genocide against the Uighurs in its western provinces. The one that harvests organs from living Falun Gang practitioners who are prisoners of conscience. The one that has crushed democracy in Hong Kong and may soon do worse. Not a peep from Manfred and baseball owners about these awful, continuing and growing abuses. They saw what happened when a basketball coach criticized China. What to do? First, you can be absolutely sure I won’t watch the All-star game or read about it. I’ve already cast the National Basketball League and National Football League into the outer darkness (completely ignore them and their products) for their craven fealty to wokeness and cancel culture. And I’m beginning to boycott other Big Business, Big Tech and Big Entertainment that reject and insult America, as are many individuals and groups. (Go to hell, Twitter!) I would find it hard to completely ostracize the Dodgers for Dave Roberts’ monstrous mistake. But he needs to go. The Dodgers should get someone else. Ron Knecht has served Nevadans as state controller, a higher education regent, economist, college teacher and legislator. Contact him at RonKnecht@aol.com. Ron Knecht 775-882-2935 775-220-6128 www.RonKnecht.net In recent policy debates, current income trends and disparities among Americans have been a major concern. Courtesy of economist John Mauldin and River Financial, a comprehensive set of data and charts is now available to shed new light on the subject.
The most notable point raised by people about income disparities is that, adjusted for inflation, incomes of high earners have increased rapidly over the last half-century while those of middle- and lower-income folks have increased slowly or even stagnated. Or, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. There are two problems with this account. First, it conveniently focuses on the last half-century and ignores the trend before 1971. Indeed, the income share of the top one percent of earners relative to that of the bottom 90 percent rose greatly from 1971 to the Great Recession to a level it maintains today. That is, the total incomes of the top one percent as a group today is nearly 75 percent of the total income of the bottom 90 percent group. Fifty years ago, however, the top one percent made just over 40 percent of what the bottom 90 percent did. Moreover, the high point before 1971 for the highest one percent was reached at the end of the Roaring 20s – at the same relative level as today. The very rich were very damaged by the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II (WWII). After the war, their incomes rose somewhat slower than income for “The Rest of Us” until the 1970s. So, the analyses covering only the last 50 years are not reflective of longer American history. Thus, they’re not very convincing for claims that policy or the economic system is broke. That’s not to say the current trend doesn’t indicate problems or legitimate concerns, just that it’s an incomplete and unrepresentative snapshot. The second problem with this trend account is even more notable. Namely, the income measures include only income and not the effect of taxes and government transfers (e.g., food stamps and tax credits). When the incomes series are modified to incorporate these effects of government, the overall distribution of total incomes (i.e, including taxes and transfers) are roughly the same as in 1971, or perhaps slightly more equal. Beginning in the 1980s, the inequality in the total incomes rose, as it did in the following two decades. After the Great Recession, however, incomes became more equal. In sum, the basic claim about the rich and poor is false. When we don’t adjust for taxes and transfers, the following data and trends remain. First, wages rose in line with the gross domestic product (GDP) per person after WWII to the early 1970s – a condition we think of as being normal. However, from 1972 to 2017, productivity gains far outran workers’ compensation. The phenomenon causing this trend was that capital equipment and new innovations and inventions (technology) began to claim more of firms’ earnings. And returns to capital and from inventions and innovations accrue to the wealthy and high-income folks. Also, incomes of Black people relative to White people after WWII rose rapidly until the early 1970s. From then until now, that gap has been closed at a much slower rate. From the end of WWII, median incomes of women in the workforce grew slightly slower than the economy until the Great Recession. Income of men, however, rose with economic growth until the early 1970s. After that, they flat-lined up to the present day. Overall, people’s income gains after WWII were shared widely among income classes. But since the early 1970s, the income gains have accrued much more to higher income classes than to middle and lower classes. Further, costs of some goods and services, especially housing, have risen much faster than others and the overall measures of inflation. Monetary inflation and deflation kept prices generally comparable from America’s founding until World War I, the income tax and the Federal Reserve. Since then, and especially after 1971, inflation has driven price levels ridiculously high. Finally, U.S. government debt held at reasonable levels, with upward excursions after wars, until the end of the 20th Century. It has been sky-rocketing since then, especially in recent years. Ron Knecht has served Nevadans as state controller, a higher education regent, economist, college teacher and legislator. Contact him at RonKnecht@aol.com. Ron Knecht 775-882-2935 775-220-6128 www.RonKnecht.net With the Fighting Illini launching March Madness Friday with a blow-out, I was all set to watch Saturday and Sunday as they led the Big 10 dominance through the tournament. You can take the boy out of the Midwest but you can’t take the Midwest out of the boy.
Of course, they blew the first game Saturday, leading a memorable Big 10 collapse leaving just two of its mighty nine qualifiers standing at the end of Sunday. It wasn’t much compensation that my other conference, the Pac-12, won its first five games – especially because my grad school alma mater Stanford didn’t even make the party. What’s a young man to do? The good news is Sunday afternoon the History Channel featured four parts in six hours of their great 2012 docudrama, “The Men Who Built America.” These episodes cover the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the entrepreneurs, inventors, investors and power-brokers whose truly exciting stories demonstrate the essence of America and capitalism. Cornelius Vanderbilt in railroads. Andrew Carnegie in iron and steel. Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse in direct-current electricity. John D. Rockefeller in oil and natural gas. Nikola Tesla and J.P. Morgan in alternating-current electricity. Henry Ford and the auto. Many remember them as robber barons and ruthless predatory monopolists. But they were also men of great courage and vision who were the ultimate benefactors of America and the modern world they wrought. Without them or their equivalents, we and the whole modern world would be much poorer today. They and their successors made today’s poor live better than monarchs of old and helped open to today’s well-off folks previously unimaginable vistas of knowledge, experience and human flourishing. Really, Ron? … Really. Of course, their ruthlessness and winner-take-all motif damaged more than benefitted some folks at the time, and thus engendered bitter enemies, opponents and some legitimate criticism. But it also raised much resentment-based illegitimate criticism and political opposition. Most notable, quotable and threatening of their political opponents was Democrat William Jennings Bryan. The southern-Illinois-born prairie populist orator, a leading progressive of his day, a/k/a The Great Commoner, ran for president in 1896, 1900 and 1908, coming closest in 1896. At the 1896 nominating convention, he made his most famous speech, speaking in favor of free silver and declaring of the eastern moneyed interests, “They shall not nail us to a cross of gold!!!” But he was also famous for the assertion he made while on the first whistle-stop presidential campaign tour that, “No man can honestly make $1-million dollars in a year.” A claim the documentary highlights. And the most significant point in understanding the men who built America and modern capitalism. Bryan’s claim completely misunderstands the nature of markets. He argues essentially there is a labor or similar externally-imposed standard of value that should prevail in commerce; and using that standard, no one could work enough hours in a year to earn anywhere near $1-million. But an externally imposed earnings standard is not how the world works, nor should it. To promote maximum aggregate human well-being and fairness in a society, labor and everything else should transact at some mix of the values placed on it by its buyers and sellers. And that’s what market systems do: find the market price between those two values that maximizes economic output in the society and thus aggregate human wellbeing and fairness. When an exchange of goods or services takes place, the price is below the buyer’s willingness to pay and above the seller’s willingness to accept. Otherwise, one side or the other will not make the deal. The bargaining that takes place in markets determines from the supply and demand for the item being valued what its social value is, and that’s the sale price. It provides a consumer surplus, the difference between the consumer’s willingness to pay and the price; and a producer surplus, the difference between the seller’s willingness to accept and the price. A person digging a ditch with a pick may work very hard and produce very little value. An inventor, entrepreneur, investor, etc. may, on the other hand, produce huge value for others and thereby honestly earn that $1-million a year. Ron Knecht has served Nevadans as state controller, a higher education regent, economist, college teacher and legislator. Contact him at RonKnecht@aol.com. Ron Knecht 775-882-2935 775-220-6128 www.RonKnecht.net Presidents’ Day fell on February 15 this year, and the birthday of our first and greatest chief executive, George Washington, was February 26. The birthdays of two other great presidents also occurred that month: Abe Lincoln, February 14; and Ronald Reagan, February 6.
So, it seems to me timely to discuss how the preparations of our 46th president, Joe Biden, compares with theirs. (Personal apology: I started this column two weeks ago but, recovering from knee replacement, I couldn’t finish it until now.) George Washington was born in 1732 to a Virginia family that made its fortune in land speculation on the frontier. Washington was the oldest of six children of his parents, and his father had three children by a previous marriage. His older half-brother Lawrence inherited the estate that eventually became Washington’s Mount Vernon when Lawrence left it to George. Washington did not receive the formal education of Lawrence at the Appleby Grammar School in England, but he did learn mathematics, trigonometry and land surveying. He was a talented draftsman and map-maker. He wrote with “considerable force” and “precision,” albeit “lacking in wit and humor.” In pursuit of admiration, status and power, Wikipedia reports, he tended to attribute his shortcomings and failures to someone else’s ineffectuality. Lincoln was born in 1809 to a poor Kentucky family that moved to Indiana and then to Illinois, where people revered him so much they later adopted “Land of Lincoln” as the state motto. Never having gotten a formal education, the self-taught Lincoln “read the law” and became a well-known lawyer and orator. Reagan was born in February 1911 in Illinois, to a low-income family. He graduated from Eureka College. He worked as a swimming life-guard and radio broadcaster before heading for Hollywood to be an actor, union leader, 33rd governor of California and president. Lesson here for President Biden: It’s good to be born on the frontier, but the frontier has always shifted west. At least it did so until Jay Gatsby, who falsely claimed to be from San Francisco, learned the frontier had shifted back east and moved himself to New York. So, you being born in Pennsylvania and moving to Delaware is not a problem. Broadening the notion of frontier to include the emerging commerce of the era, the other three presidents hit the nail on the head: Washington as a surveyor and map-maker when America was being opened. Ditto, Lincoln’s professions from rail-splitter to lawyer as he matured. And Reagan from actor to politician, two growth industries of the 20th Century. So, Biden’s lack of elite academic education is not a problem. He developed a saleable craft, as they all had. He also learned the essential skills of writing and speaking well. But while Washington was self-taught in this regard, Lincoln borrowed much from the Bible and law books, and Reagan had legitimate scripts, some he wrote for radio himself; Biden found his voice a less honorable way. Some of his best written and spoken pieces have definitively been found to be plagiarized. Washington, of course, had a legendary early military career from soldier to very successful planter and businessman to local politician and leader. As General of the army of the Continental Congress, he learned military diplomacy with the many generals under him and international diplomacy with our French allies. Biden, having become a U.S. Senator at age 30 with no experience except lawyering, had none of these advantages. Lincoln had only a year in the military during the Black Hawk War of 1832. Then he ran unsuccessfully for the state legislature before winning two years later. Those were the first of many political campaigns, of which he lost more than he won. However, that experience, his great success as a farmer and his long years as a revered lawyer gave him a great edge over Biden. Even Reagan’s work and experience before being elected California governor exceeded Biden’s pre-senatorial preparation. But Biden’s half-century as a senator and scandal fraught eight years as vice president have certainly prepared him for the Presidency. There are many roads to the presidency. For the sake of our country, we hope President Biden’s path serves him and us well. Knecht, MS, JD & PE(CA), has served Nevadans as state controller, a higher education regent, economist, college teacher and legislator. Contact him at RonKnecht@aol.com. Ron Knecht 775-882-2935 775-220-6128 www.RonKnecht.net “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” A glib trope a liberal-statist law school classmate used as an obvious and key claim in advanced constitutional law in 1995. My oral response objection was so loud and immediate the professor admonished me.
But official numbers at that time supported my objection. And sound theory shows that, in a true market economy, it’s the right result when it happens. We’ve all heard numerous similar tropes from Democrats, liberals, progressives, the politically correct and populists nearly every day. These claims are so glib, well known and often generally accepted that the Dems, et al. usually don’t bother to back them with research, data and analysis. And Republicans, conservatives and even many limited-government empiricists often don’t even bother to contest them. More: The rich are paying lower taxes than they used to, especially since the Trump tax cuts. And: The rich aren’t paying their fair share, so we need to increase their taxes so they do. Etc. Fortunately, the Internal Revenue Service publishes the actual numbers and facts with which we can determine the validity of these claims each year. So, let’s explore the latest annual report, released last month and covering tax year 2018. The poor get poorer? The Tax Foundation’s (TF) digest of the IRS’s data states: “Tax year 2018 was the first under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). The number of returns filed and the amount of income reported grew in 2018 yet average tax rates fell across every income group and total income taxes paid decreased $65 billion.” So, a tax cut preceded not just increased incomes for the poor and all income classes, but also income for all taxpayers as a group. Score one for the key supply-side claim our tax rates are so high they damage the overall economy. What about the really rich? Per TF: “The share of reported income earned by the top 1 percent of taxpayers fell slightly, to 20.9 percent in 2018 from 21 percent in 2017.” But remarkably, “Their share of federal income taxes rose by 1.6 percentage points to 40.1 percent.” Moreover, “Since 2001, the share of federal income taxes paid by the top 1 percent increased from 33.2 percent to a new high of 40.1 percent in 2018.” … In 2001, the top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97.1 percent of all individual income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 2.9 percent.” That is, the long-term trend shows the income tax has become greatly more progressive. And that trend continued with the Trump tax cuts. But wait, there’s more! “The top 1 percent paid a greater share of the individual income taxes (40.1 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (28.6 percent).” And, “The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 25.4 percent average individual income tax rate, which is more than seven times higher than the taxpayers in the bottom 50 percent (3.4 percent).” So much for the claim the super-rich don’t pay their share. Moreover, high-income taxpayers paid the majority of federal income taxes, “In 2018, the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers (those with [Adjusted Gross Income] below $43,614) earned 11.6 percent of total AGI. This group of taxpayers paid $45.1 billion in taxes, or roughly 3 percent of all federal individual income taxes in 2018.” “In contrast, the top 1 percent of all taxpayers (taxpayers with AGI of $540,009 and above) … earned 20.9 percent of all AGI and paid 40.1 percent of all federal income taxes.” No one knows the exact ratios that are distributionally fair, but the trends and current rates support the following: 1) high overall tax rates and public spending are greatly responsible for our slow economic growth in the 21st century (as discussed at length in my previous columns and my Controller’s Annual Reports); 2) the poor as a group are getting richer, not poorer; 3) the share of income taxes paid by the rich has increased greatly in the 21st century and continues to do so; and 4) the ratio of the rich incomes taken by federal income taxes is much higher than the puny fraction taken from the poor and middle-income folks. Ron Knecht has served Nevadans as state controller, a higher education regent, economist, college teacher and legislator. Contact him at RonKnecht@aol.com. Ron Knecht 775-882-2935 775-220-6128 www.RonKnecht.net In my last column, I discussed the problem of transgendered boys and men competing in athletic competitions established for girls and women. I explored the subject from the perspective of outstanding female athletes who have no chance of winning against previously male competitors who were nowhere near the top of the men’s standings in their events.
As one lady said, “It’s just not fair.” That seems to be the overwhelming consensus on the subject among folks I know. But while I think that’s the essence of the matter, the subject deserves a broader and deeper treatment. One appropriate context is to consider transgender issues in the context of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer issues – the LGBTQ complex so widely discussed but not addressed in necessary disaggregation and detail. The first point is: transgender issues are characteristically different from the other four. LGBQ matters involve folks’ preferences and actions regarding persons of the same or opposite gender. Transgender issues deal with how some persons identify themselves and their desires to assume a gender other than the biological identity with which they were born. Thus, LGBQ persons typically are generally happy with their own sexual or gender identity and they prefer the intimate company and practices of their own kind or of a mix of their own sex and the opposite sex. This is generally contrary to conventional sexual mores and religious or ethical teaching. Social pressure against LGBQ practices still today in many societies and historically in many others, including our own, often extended to legal prohibition or other sanction. American social practice and law, as well as that in most other western societies, has been greatly liberalized in recent decades. Now, LGBQ lifestyles are celebrated, not discouraged, as part of valuing human diversity. So, we have LGBQ holidays, parades, nightclubs, bars, literature, etc. Many more traditional people continue to resist this change, especially the supportive and celebratory aspects of it, but mainly tolerate it without objection. The issue is the distinction between, first, accepting and, second, supporting and even celebrating minority choices. Law in this area has generally focused on requiring tolerance, but not mandatory active acceptance or celebration of minority practices. And make no mistake, the LGBQ community is decidedly a minority, varying from three to ten percent of the population, depending on age and other factors. The sticking point arises when LGBQ people seek public support, celebration or accommodation, a burden on straights beyond mere passive acceptance and tolerance. The apparent logic is: There’s little burden on folks who oppose or only passively tolerate LGBQ practices when those practices are confined to the minority’s private life and do not intrude on the lives of the majority. And there’s significant benefit to the minority of allowing them to do their thing. Hence, the social cost-benefit analysis favors toleration and passive acceptance. But requiring participation, active accommodation or celebration reverses the C-B analysis so that the majority suffer more burden than the benefit then accruing to the minority. This is because there are so many more people in the majority and the feelings of many of them are as strongly held as those of many LGBQ supporters. Also, each side has strong claims it has basic rights at stake: LGBQ persons to their practices, and straights to a world that doesn’t continuously assault majority mores and cause conflict. Transgender issues confront an even bigger deficit in terms of minority numbers and sensibilities versus majority numbers. About 0.03 percent, or three in ten-thousand people have significant transgender tendencies. So, the ratio is about 9997:3. But transgender issues aren’t only characteristically different from LGBQ issues. Some transgender desires, such as sharing locker and bathroom space or competing in athletic competitions, directly burden straights, as shown in considering transgender men in female athletics. Even after full biological change to female, including surgery and hormones, persons born as men still have significant advantages in size, bone and muscle mass, strength, etc. As one girl said, “That unfairness doesn’t go away because of what someone believes about their gender identity.” LGBQ issues lend themselves to mutual accommodation. In the transgender conflict of basic rights, there’s very little room to live and let live. Ron Knecht, MS, JD & PE(CA), has served Nevadans as state controller, a higher education regent, economist, college teacher and legislator. Contract him at RonKnecht@aol.com . Ron Knecht 775-882-2935 775-220-6128 www.RonKnecht.net When Sandra Bucha entered high school in 1968, she wanted to be a competitive swimmer. But there were no girls’ teams in her state.
In 1972, with help from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), she and her father filed a federal lawsuit against the Illinois High School Association on behalf of girls who wanted to compete in school sports. They lost, in part because the judge noted that males have physical advantages over females, and thus schools had valid reasons for separate athletic competitions. That same year, Congress passed Title IX, a law prohibiting sex discrimination by schools receiving federal money, which is almost all of them. Now colleges and schools that field athletic teams have significant numbers of girls/women’s teams and athletes. Although I wish female athletics had been achieved without federal legislation and well before 1972, I’ve always thought providing equal opportunity is a great thing for everybody. And I’ve been proud of America for it. Alanna Smith, a sophomore at Danbury High School in Connecticut, is a natural athlete. She’s the daughter of Lee Smith, a Hall of Fame major league pitcher, and her mom was a high-school long-distance runner. One uncle played professional baseball, another professional football, her grandfather was a high-school basketball and football standout, and her twin brother is a three-sport athlete. “Sports is a huge part of who I am,” she says. “Training to compete and be my physical and mental best at the starting block is who I am, too. Running with my mom when I was younger taught me how to prepare, train and focus.” She won state 100-meter championships in sixth, seventh and eighth grades. She’s proud to have set records and achieved personal goals. But as a high-school freshman, she had to compete against two males who identify as female in the state meet. “No matter how many hours I trained – or how hard I worked on endurance, speed and strength – I had no chance to beat the physical strength of a biological male who previously ran in the men’s division.” “I felt defeated before stepping onto the track. … It’s not that second or third place isn’t good enough for me if I’ve done my best; it’s just not fair.” The two boys have been running girls off the track since 2017, setting 17 individual state meet records with times girls have little hope of ever breaking. Their sheer size and strength has resulted in more than 85 missed opportunities for Connecticut girls even to qualify for the next level of competition, even though neither transgender competitor was a top sprinter as a boy. “It’s simply not fair for anyone born as a boy to compete against girls,” says Alanna. “That unfairness doesn’t go away because of what someone believes about their gender identity.” So, Alanna and two other female Connecticut high-school athletes filed a federal lawsuit with the help of Alliance Defending Freedom to keep boys out of girls’ competitions. Bucha, now a lawyer, and 300 other current and former female athletes are pursuing similar action at the college level. To illustrate the unfairness, the Connecticut suit notes the fastest female sprinter in the world, America’s great Allyson Felix, has more gold medals than Usain Bolt. However, Felix’s lifetime best in the 400-meter run is 49.26 seconds. And about 300 American high-school boys beat that time each year. Says Bucha about the effect of allowing biological boys in girls’ competitions: “It isn’t merely the trophies and scholarships and opportunities at stake. It isn’t even all the benefits sports have so long provided to young women – in self-esteem and health and camaraderie with friends. It isn’t merely that girls who participate in sports tend to earn better grades, that so many Fortune 500 executives were athletes, or that sports force teen girls out of their own heads where they might stew to their own detriment. It’s the profound injustice of it.” On his first day in office, Joe Biden signed an executive order purporting to require that schools receiving federal funding must allow boys self-identifying as girls onto girls’ sports teams – reversing a Donald Trump policy. Elections have consequences. And the ACLU supports Biden’s awful policy. Ron Knecht, MS, JD & PE(CA), has served Nevadans as state controller, a higher education regent, economist, college teacher and legislator. Contact him at RonKnecht@aol.com. Ron Knecht 775-882-2935 775-220-6128 www.RonKnecht.net A key thing about measurements and forecasts of rapid human-caused (“anthropogenic”) climate change is that a sustained temperature change in any system is a result of a sustained imbalance in the energy flowing into and out of the system.
If the energy inflows to and outflows from earth’s climate are equal, the average temperature around the globe is roughly constant from one year to the next. If inflows exceed outflows, there’s warming. If outflows are greater than inflows, there’s cooling. Energy flows into earth’s climate system from the sun’s radiation at a rate estimated at 340 watts per square meter per year at the top of the atmosphere. However, only 240 watts reaches the earth’s surface. The rest is reflected back into space. Energy flows out of the earth’s climate system mainly by way of infrared (heat) radiation escaping into space, also estimated at 240 watts. The vast majority of our climate energy inflows, estimated at 99.97 percent, come from the sun. The greatest rates of insolation (the amount of solar radiation per square meter per time period) occur near the equator, while the least take place near the poles. The rates vary in the intermediate areas, depending on how perpendicular to the sun’s rays the ground is (which varies over the earth’s surface because earth is roughly spherical). Total insolation of the planet cannot be directly measured. Instead, it must be estimated from many measurements, including the total heat the sun is generating, the heat capacities of parts of the earth and atmospheres, etc. So, the 240 watts inflow figure is merely an estimate subject to measurement error. The actual figure could be 235, 245 or some intermediate value. Similarly, the energy outflow cannot be directly measured. It must be estimated from the reflective effects of cloud cover, atmosphere, land and water surfaces, etc. And the actual annual average outflow per square meter of earth’s surface may range between 235 and 245 watts. Because the in- and out-flow measurements are subject to error, so is the difference between them. Hence, it’s very difficult to know whether we’re experiencing warming or cooling as a planet. As a surrogate for direct measurement, we can use the deep ocean temperature and related data to determine whether the earth’s overall temperature is rising or falling. The idea is that deep ocean temperatures measure the overall ocean heat content much closer than surface measures do. To measure deep ocean temperatures, salinity, currents, and bio-optical properties, a system of 4000 drifting “Argo floats” have been deployed around the world since the early 2000s. Their readings are transmitted to research facilities via satellite. Using these data and many others, the average annual energy in/out flows for the earth are estimated by scientists at about one watt, another figure that is just an estimate subject to error, reflecting the uncertainty in data used to estimate it. The bottom line, according to Dr. Roy W. Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, is: our oceans have warmed very slowly the last two decades, by an average rate of 0.04 degrees centigrade per decade. The one-watt net inflows estimate is much less than the 235- to 245-watt insolation flows. Hence, the energy imbalance causing recent slight warming is much less than the uncertainty in our knowledge of natural energy flows. “As a result,” he states, “climate change could be mostly ‘natural’, and we would not know it.” Because, he points out: “Climate models must be adjusted to not produce any ‘natural’ climate change, which the modelers simply believe does not exist. Despite their belief, there is abundant evidence of past natural climate change events, the causes of which are largely unknown.” Spencer concludes, and I agree: “These facts show that the hypothesis that humans have caused most, or all recent warming involves a large measure of faith. … This is the basis of their faith: That only humans can cause climate change.” But the climate warmed and cooled naturally in the past: for example, the Medieval Warm Period (about 1000 years ago) and the Roman Warm Period (about 2000 years ago) were as warm as today, without anthropomorphic causes. I’ll discuss related points in future columns. Ron Knecht, MS, JD & PE(CA), has served Nevadans as state controller, a higher education regent, economist, college teacher and legislator. Contact him at RonKnecht@aol.com . Ron Knecht 775-882-2935 775-220-6128 www.RonKnecht.net A truly Distinguished Nevadan, great American and all-around Mensch, Sheldon Adelson, died Tuesday. This self-made fabulously wealthy entrepreneur, businessman, philanthropist, and political and communications force of nature was also a great human being who will be hugely missed.
In this hour, we send condolences and prayers to his wife, Dr. Miriam Adelson, and family and friends. Many people know some aspects of his remarkable life, but only some. Born into a one-room Boston tenement in 1933 to a Lithuanian-Ukrainian cab driver and knitting-shop owner daughter of a Welsh coal miner, Sheldon became the third-richest person in America in 2007. Following some ups and downs, he left a fortune of $33.5-billion, plus a vast legacy of gifts to many good causes. At 12, he began his career by borrowing $200 from his uncle to buy a license to sell newspapers on street corners. He went on to create nearly 50 other businesses in his life. He attended college but dropped out and attended trade school, hoping unsuccessfully to become a court reporter, before joining the army. By his thirties, via entrepreneurial ventures, he had twice built and lost million-dollar fortunes. Later, he lost $25-billion and recovered that. In the 1970s and 1980s, he also adopted and cared for the three children of his first wife. He didn’t invent trade shows, but he and partners bought the fledgling COMDEX computer industry shows in the late 1970s. Sheldon’s vision and creativity built it into one of the largest trade shows in the world in the next two decades – and remade the resort and casino industry into its modern form. Previously, the casino business overwhelmingly concentrated on the gaming floor, with cheap accommodations and food. Besides pioneering trade shows to diversify the business and upgrade the eats and accommodations to world-class levels, he also recognized the tourist business could be much more than merely gaming. Honeymooning in Venice in 1991 with his second wife Miriam, he envisioned the mega-resort hotel and casino. He added exotic shopping, entertainment and recreation to lavish rooms and food to set off the Las Vegas explosion that made him and many others very wealthy. The first such property, the magnificent Venetian, opened in 1999. Soon, he realized the model of bringing tens of millions of visitors annually to Las Vegas was insufficient, and he led the industry to the People’s Republic of China, opening the 1,000,000 square-foot Sands Macao in 2004. It multiplied his fortune by a factor of fourteen, and he built many more from there. Today, Macau’s industry dwarfs Las Vegas’s. In 2010, he opened the $5.5-billion Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, the sixth-most expensive building in the world. It has the greatest amenities of any such building and was featured extensively in the 2018 mega-film Crazy Rich Asians. But here’s what’s important about all this. In 2008, the Nevada Policy Research Institute gave him its Chairman’s Award for efforts to advance free market principles in Nevada. Before 1996, he was a Democrat, but since then has been a free markets and Republican stalwart. In 2010, as a Regent, I nominated him and Miriam for the Distinguished Nevadan award from our system of higher education. Why? In bestowing the award, I emphasized that the money he had made in business and investment only reflected the even bigger value he bestowed upon customers, his 100,000-plus employees and legions of investors, as well as Las Vegas and Nevada. When people talk abut giving back, they miss the fact that fearless entrepreneurs like Sheldon become wealthy by the great value they deliver to others via their creativity, investment, vision and guts. In 2014, he was named to CNBC’s list of 200 people who transformed business in the previous 25 years: “top leaders, icons and rebels, a definitive list of people who have had the greatest influence, sparked the biggest changes and caused the most disruption in business.” There’s so much more to tell. He has been a major force in philanthropy, newspaper publishing, diplomacy and politics in America, Israel and the world. But his humanity showed perhaps brightest when the Coronavirus pandemic hit. He’s kept the ten-of-thousands of Southern Nevadans he employs on payroll and covered by health insurance. Ron Knecht, MS. JD & PE(CA), has served Nevadans as state controller, a higher education regent, economist, college teacher and legislator. Contact him at RonKnecht@aol.com . Ron Knecht 775-882-2935 775-220-6128 www.RonKnecht.net |
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