Letters from Vienna #159
Letter to Emanuel Pastreich II
Something is rotten in the state of Academia II
Dear Emanuel,
There were times when academics actually risked their careers and their very lives to speak the truth (a “heroic golden age” if you will). I remember, for example, in April 1981, when 365 British economists asked the government to end the monetarist experiment and warned that the budget of that year would worsen the recession. Of course, they were right. The government, which was hell-bent on destroying the economy (much like today), ignored their sensible advice, and imposed insane deflationary policies at a time of international deflation, with disastrous consequences.
Perhaps, at this juncture it would be wise and prudent to say (or rather quote) a few words about Milton Friedman’s “monetarism”: “Ostensibly, monetarism was a theory about money. Friedman’s research in economic history convinced him that inflation was “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon”—if the supply of money rises faster than real economic activity, prices will rise. Further, he was convinced that every economy
had a natural rate of employment, defined by its technology and the skills of its workforce. Attempts at fiscal stimulation to increase employment beyond that rate were invariably inflationary.”
“Monetarists taught that the supply of money was the product of the stock of money—just the sum of spendable coins, bills, checking accounts, etc.—times its turnover rate, or its velocity. Friedman’s historical research showed that velocity was roughly constant, so government policy need concern itself only with the money stock. If the Federal Reserve expanded the money stock at approximately the rate of economic growth, prices would also stay roughly constant. Most important, by establishing rigid rules for monetary management, it would constrain officials’ meddlesome impulses.”
“Monetarism, in fact, proved extremely difficult to implement technically, but practical results have little to do with the persuasiveness of ideologies. While Keynesians prayed to the idol of the quasi-omniscient technocrat, the Friedmanite religion enshrined the untrammeled workings of free-market capitalism. (Friedman opposed almost all forms of government regulation, including safety regulation for pharmaceuticals.)”
“Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 signaled that Keynesian liberalism was dead. Vaguely, inchoately, but unquestionably, voters had signaled their readiness for a change of ideological horses. The theorists of the free market would get to run their race.”
…
“The truth is that monetarism didn’t break inflation, Volcker did. Somehow, free-market monetarists hadn’t guessed that if the Fed cracked down on conventional money stock, profit- seeking banks would create new financial techniques to avoid the restrictions. Which they promptly did—spinning out high-yielding money market mutual funds, interest-bearing checking accounts, electronic sweeps to marshal corporate cash, and much more. The transcripts of FOMC meetings through most of 1980 betray an air of semi-comic desperation as the members try to discern which numbers they should count as the money supply.”[1]
I shall never forget reading many years later in the FT Friedman’s admission that he’d got it wrong, about which the Guardian wrote:
“Lunch With the FT’s’ world scoop is that Friedman has changed his mind: he admits he was wrong. Having had all that baleful influence on economic policy everywhere from the United Kingdom to Chile, Friedman has recanted.”
“The economic quote of the month – and probably the decade – is that Milton Friedman now admits: “The use of quantity of money as a target has not been a success.” He added: “I’m not sure I would as of today push it as hard as I once did.” (FT, 7 June 2003).”[2]
Similarly, in 1997, 31,487 American scientists (including 9,029 with PhDs) signed a petition, arguing that: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”[3]
In Britain the academic, author and TV presenter David Bellamy voiced his disquiet: “…it’s just nonsense. For the last 16 years, temperatures have been going down and the carbon dioxide has been going up and the crops have got greener and grow quicker. We’ve done plenty to smash up the planet, but there’s been no global warming caused by man.”
His point of view was hardly welcomed by the establishment: “in 1996 he let rip against wind farms (‘because they don’t work’) during one of his regular appearances on Blue Peter: ‘That was the beginning really. From that moment, I was not welcome at the BBC.’”
“The killer blow came when he was dropped by The Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts, of which he was president. “I worked with the Wildlife Trusts for 52 years. And when they dropped me, they didn’t even tell me. They didn’t have the guts. I read about it in the newspapers. Can you believe it? Now they don’t want to be anywhere near me. But what are they doing? The WWF might have saved a few pandas, but what about the forests? What have Greenpeace done?”[4]
Given the power of the establishment it shouldn’t surprise that the lies have been so egregious or that so few have been brave enough to resist. As Gregory Wrightstone recently wrote:
“You have likely heard that 97% of scientists agree on human-driven climate change. You may also have heard that those who don’t buy into the climate-apocalypse mantra are “science deniers.” The truth is that a whole lot more than 3% of scientists are sceptical of the party line on climate. A whole lot more.”
“The many scientists, engineers and energy experts that comprise the CO2 Coalition are often asked something along the lines of: “So you believe in climate change, then?” Our answer? “Yes, of course we do: it has been happening for hundreds of millions of years.” It is important to ask the right questions. The question is not, “Is climate change happening?” The real question of serious importance is, “Is climate change now driven primarily by human actions? That question should be followed up by “is our changing climate beneficial or harmful to ecosystems and humanity?””
“There are some scientific truths that are quantifiable and easily proven, and with which, I am confident, at least 97% of scientists agree. Here are two:
Carbon dioxide concentration has been increasing in recent years.
Temperatures, as measured by thermometers and satellites, have been generally increasing in fits and starts for more than 150 years.
What is impossible to quantify is the actual percentage of warming that is attributable to increased anthropogenic (human-caused) CO2. There is no scientific evidence or method that can determine how much of the warming we’ve had since 1900 that was directly caused by us.”
“We know that temperature has varied greatly over the millennia. We also know that for virtually all of that time, global warming and cooling were driven entirely by natural forces, which did not cease to operate at the beginning of the 20th century.”
“The claim that most modern warming is attributable to human activities is scientifically insupportable. The truth is that we do not know. We need to be able to separate what we do know from that which is only conjecture.”
“If, indeed, 97% of all scientists truly believed that human activities were causing the moderate warming that we have seen in the last 150 years, it would be reasonable for one to consider this when determining what to believe. One would be wrong, however.
Science, unlike religion, is not a belief system. Scientists, just like anyone else, will say that they believe things – whether they believe them or not – for social convenience, political expediency or financial profit. For this and other good reasons, science is not founded upon the beliefs of scientists. It is a disciplined method of inquiry, by which scientists apply pre-existing theory to observation and measurement, so as to develop or to reject a theory, so that they can unravel as clearly and as certainly as possible the distinction between what the Greek philosopher Anaximander called “that which is and that which is not.””
“Abu Ali ibn al-Haytham, the natural philosopher of 11th-century Iraq who founded the scientific method in the East, once wrote:
The seeker after truth [his beautiful description of the scientist] does not place his faith in any mere consensus, however venerable or widespread. Instead, he subjects what he has learned of it to inquiry, inspection and investigation. The road to the truth is long and hard, but that is the road we must follow.
The long and hard road to scientific truth cannot be followed by the trivial expedient of a mere head-count among those who make their livings from government funding. Therefore, the mere fact that climate activists find themselves so often appealing to an imagined and (as we shall see) imaginary “consensus” is a red flag. They are far less sure of the supposed scientific truths to which they cling than they would like us to believe. “Consensus,” here, is a crutch for lame science.”
“The earliest attempt to document a “consensus” on climate change was a 2004 paper cited by Al Gore in his allegedly non-fiction book, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’– Gore attended natural science class at Harvard but got a D grade for it. The author of the cited paper, Naomi Oreskes, asserted that 75% of nearly 1,000 papers she had reviewed on the question of climate change agreed with the “consensus” proposition favoured by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”): “Most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.” None, she maintained, dissented from this line of reasoning.”
“The Oreskes paper came to the attention of Klaus-Martin Schulte, an eminent London surgeon, who had become concerned with the adverse health effects of his patients from their belief in apocalyptic global warming.”
“Professor Schulte decided to update Oreskes’ work. However, he found that only 45% of several hundred papers endorsed the “consensus” position. He concluded: “There appears to be little basis in the peer-reviewed scientific literature for the degree of alarm on the issue of climate change which is being expressed in the media and by politicians, now carried over into the medical world and experienced by patients.”[5]
But I fear I am growing long-winded, boring and tedious and will have to continue at a later date once more…
Best,
Michael
[1] pp.18-25 The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown, Charles R. Morris
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2003/jun/22/comment.economicpolicy
http://www.petitionproject.org/
[4] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2266188/David-Bellamy-The-BBC-froze-I-dont-believe-global-warming.html
[5] https://expose-news.com/2023/04/21/less-than-1-scientists-agree-humanity-causing-climate-change/?fbclid=IwAR08mwdab1WbUZLZFGfBL0DTySFI05_xOvAi-K3DVjK-4pAfkkg7urVdnsg