Paul Samuelson, eminent economist and producer of elementary textbooks, including the one used for my introductory class, has passed away at age 94. Among his beloved predictions was this from a popular university introductory textbook on economics made in the 1989 edition, published just before the Soviet Union dissolved, from, among other reasons, an inability to make toilet paper, computers, cars, and a variety of other consumer goods. Samuelson said, “The Soviet economy is proof that … a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.” It never thrived, and then, didn’t function. Sales of the textbook continued unabated after this massive predictive failure. Now this was a predictive failure, a failure in the easiest of all the scientific steps, not even a failure in doing something useful. Woops.
Another thing that Samuelson’s textbook said was the notion of the “multiplier” or “seeing-eye dollar” from government spending. According to this, government spending produces a multiplier of, it is said, X3. Empirical evidence has show that the government multiplier is actually rarely positive. Well, he wrote a lot of books.
Global Warming is so awful that Alberta Standardbred racing has been shut down for the past week because of the cold. That takes some doin’.
On a more scientific basis, consider the sunspot data.
“Since the sun, and not carbon dioxide, is the principle driver of climate change, a dearth of sunspot activity would herald a repeat of the Maunder Minimum, the name given to the period roughly from 1645 to 1715, when sunspots became exceedingly rare and contributed to the onset of the Little Ice Age during which Europe and North America were hit by bitterly cold winters and the Thames river in London completely froze.”
The Copenhagen Hysteria conference better hurry up and pass its pointless and Draconian laws before Global Cooling removes their always-shaky basis.
Today, we consider criminal rehabilitation and effective methods which are neglected.
from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:
An Abbreviated History of Corrections
Incarcerating criminals is relatively recent. In the past, criminals were beheaded, tortured, transported, banished, hanged, disfigured or made to pay fines for acts which are currently followed by lockup. Early confinement required prisoners to maintain total silence, kept them in isolation, worked them on treadmills and treadwheels, and frequently subjected them to a bread and water diet. These conditions were designed to reduce recidivism, or reoffending, but studies were not done. Incarceration rates and crime rates vary among countries with a high rate of one not necessarily associated with a high rate of the other. Correctional rehabilitation efforts, early or current, make exactly the same mistakes as other applications of social science, with failure to evaluate, believing an intention is a result, confusing current correctional philosophy with outcome, and using popular theories about the nature of society and\or Human Nature to determine rehabilitation techniques.
The guiding assumption of correctional rehabilitation shifted from evil to illness, so that well into the twentieth century criminals, and others who deviated the wrong way from average behavior, were deemed to be “sick” and in need of a “cure”. This assumption, which still has much reach, came from the success medicine had with the many diseases which yielded to the application of new findings in microbiology and pharmaceuticals. The belief that medical analogies and metaphors are useful in human action appears frequently in the study of behavior, but has little to offer in producing useful treatment. One of the implications of this point of view has been indeterminate sentencing for those deemed to have acted criminally because of “a mental illness or defect” where the criminal behavior is evidence of the mental illness which caused the behavior.
Measure of Success In Criminal Rehabilitation
Recidivism is a measure of criminal activity which occurs in a given period after release from incarceration or after treatment is terminated. The measure of recidivism can be as simple as a yes/no indicating whether the person was charged with a crime during a period, the number of offenses in a period, the length of the sentence(s) given or a combination of many measures of criminal activity. A rehabilitation program for criminals is deemed successful if the recidivism rate of its graduates is significantly lower than the rate of a similar group which has not enjoyed the program.
Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
