In email this morning from the American Physical Society, a call for a financial bailout:
Congress has not passed any FY 2009 appropriations bills and is now
finalizing a Continuing Resolution (CR) that will keep the government
operating when the new fiscal year begins on October 1, 2008. The
House is expected to consider the bill on Thursday or Friday of this
week. The CR, according to the latest information, will remain in
effect until March 6, 2009 and would keep all federal programs
operating at FY 2008 levels, except those granted waivers. At this
time, science is not on the waiver list, and the proposed bill would
not include any of the science increases contained in the
Supplemental Appropriations bill Congress passed earlier this year.
Unless science receives a waiver, the impact will be extraordinarily
damaging.Specifically,
.Department of Energy user facilities would be forced to cut back
operations substantially;
.A new round of layoffs at the national laboratories could occur;
.The number of university grants would be cut, with new, young
investigators especially harmed; and
.The U.S. would be forced to cut to near zero its planned contributions
to the global fusion energy project, ITER, damaging the nation’s
ability to participate in future international scientific collaborations.
They’re asking that APS members contact Congress to ask them to include the science funding increases authorized in the Supplemental Appropriations bill last year, and they provide a handy web page to make it easy to do so. If you’re interested in seeing adequate funding for science in the US, please consider dropping a line to Congress and telling them so.
If it’s worth $700 billion to bail out the financial wizards who brought us the subprime mortgage mess, surely it’s worth a percent or so of that amount to support people who do some actual good for society.
Hi Chad,
I like the spirit, but consider that those ‘financial wizards’ you refer to above will be taken to mean ‘PhDs’ and many of them are physicists by training. I am sure there could be some very stupid physicists who don’t believe in correlation effects or who believe their models are perfect…but I haven’t met them. In fact, in my experience the physicists in finance are usually the good guys pouring cold water on dangerous ideas.
I would point to Adil Abdulali (MIT mathematician) who co-authored a paper with me warning of the need to move to a quantum theory of pricing for mortgage backed securities …. in 2002 (linked below). In our minds the price of a mortgage backed security is a quantum wave function which collapses under an observation (where the act of observation is called ‘price discovery’ in the trade), but the markets insist on treating these objects classically…to some impressive extent as can now be seen. I should point out that Adil followed up this work with a gadget called the ‘bias ratio’ which sought to detect when managers were fudging returns and attempted to popularize that notion as well, also with limited impact.
In short I think you are missing the opportunity here: we in the financial *need* independent minded mathematicians and physicists to keep the ‘masters of the universe’ honest and sane. This is a failure of the numerate class to restrain the short term profiteers. Our government should be running to physicists and mathematicians as well as CEOs to structure a plan, but it hasn’t even occured to them.
If you want to use your megaphone that is the message to trumpet across the blogosphere.
Can I get a witness?
Keep up the great blogging,
Eric
http://www.eric-weinstein.net/Papers/Weinstein_Abdulali_RISK_Vol_15_No._6_June.2002.pdf
[Note: there is no quantum language in the paper as we were trying to reach decision makers of various backgrounds.]
Not a single penny (1.43×10^(-14) relative) of the $700 billion (of $6 trillion total illiquidity) is targetted at NINJA mortgage holders. 90% will loudly indemnify criminal derivative investments, 10% will quietly disappear as commissions. Science is receiving more than its full share. We call for science to give back what it is debauchedly withholding from more deserving pockets.
1965 (President Johnson’s “Great Society”) to 2008, Welfare has cost $13.6 trillion. Do we owe any less to our financial community and its cheerleaders? Compassion is an evolutionarily stupid act committed at others’ expense.
Al,
I’d like to do some research, what’s the source (or sources) of your $13.6 trillion dollar figure? If a person has ever dipped into welfare, but has ever paid taxes, then shouldn’t the total amount of revenue generated by their taxes be subtracted from that $13.6 trillion? Does the number you provided adjust 1968 dollars to 2008 dollars, 1967 dollars to 2008 dollars, and so on? I suppose it must since otherwise your figure implies that we’ve been putting an average of 316 billion a year into welfare… which is awfully close to the 324 billion that (I believe) we put into the program this year… and I’d be surprised if we’d been putting (roughly) the same amount into the program for every year since its inception (in terms of absolute dollars). Also… shouldn’t we factor in other costs to to government that are altered by a person being on welfare, if for example, a person who takes money from welfare has a different chance of getting sick (for example a decreased chance of illness because of better nutrition, or an increased chance of illness because of worse nutrition– I don’t know how receiving welfare changes a recipients eating habits)… anyway, if their health is altered as a result of being on welfare, then don’t we have to include that in our calculation of the total cost of welfare since, presumably, this will alter the amount of money being drawn from the government (either directly through low-income health programs, or indirectly through changes in insurance rates resulting from an increase or decrease in uninsured patients)… also, I suppose, we should factor in the tax’s generated by the income of welfare recipient’s children… If a child whose parents are on welfare is more likely to become a good wage earner then this should lower your figure, but if they are less likely then the figure should stay as is… because their cost to the system has already been calculated (if we were projecting FUTURE cost, then we’d have to include this figure in our calculations as an increase)… These are just a few of the factors that spring to mind… and now you have me interested…
I disagree with your assessment on science getting more than its share… I think the total cost to the US’s economy is negative when it comes to science spending (but one has to factor in profits that have arisen as a result of government supported science research)… I liken it to the government paying for roads– extremely expensive in and of itself, but it pays for itself in the long-term by providing an infrastructure that encourages economic growth, which in turn generates more revenue for the system. (no numbers or sources on this… just a gut feeling).
I also think you are mistaken about compassion. I think it’s evolutionarily advantageous… but that could turn into a very long discussion which would distract from the more interesting question of figuring out the true ‘toal cost’ of welfare.
PS.
Please forgive the mispellings and apostrophe manglings that I just now noticed… Thanks.
http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ED062995b.cfm
and run the curve forward in time.
Government disbursement that is not dedicated to exacerbating the problem it Officially seeks to cure is wasted. $Millions/year were spent on anti-tobacco public service announcements and simultaneously $hundreds of millions/year on tobacco grower subsidies. On that basis government is extraordinarly efficient: Departments of Education, Defense, Homland Severity, Environment, HHS…
Thanks for the link,
I’d hoped it would be a good place to start, but it’s light on the hard data for which I’m looking and doesn’t provide me with any solid references from which it got its data (although I’m certain the data is accurate)… It has a few failings that reinforce my desire to go to the original data: such as comparing relative welfare expenditure to other programs– this only meaningful if *relative expenditures* mean something important to you… and for the question of interest to me, they don’t. Also, its predictions about total (state and federal) welfare spending in years after 1995 are off (at least according to this site: http://www.libraryindex.com/pages/872/How-Much-Does-Nation-Spend-on-Welfare-PUBLIC-AID.html)… take 2000, for instance, so I can’t really use it to project ahead to the present, since it was demonstrably wrong a mere five years past its creation (I don’t blame the author… he does say that he’s citing another report’s projections… and states “if current projections are to be believed…”). oh well… I was just being lazy. It looks as if I’ll have to slog through the search engine morass myself if I want this done right. Thanks for taking the time to send the link though, it is appreciated…
PS. Interesting definition of efficiency… In the interests of efficiency, would you advise the forming of a Department of Sensible Spending? But how are we to rate disbursements not Officially dedicated to solving a Problem?