Electoral issue: drug use

“Human cultures vary widely in the plants they use to gratify the desire for a change of mind, but all cultures... sanction at least one such plant and, just as invariably, strenuously forbid certain others. Along with the temptation seems to come the taboo.” — Michael Pollan, Botany of Desire

The question: Are you in favor of decriminalizing drug use?

Yes.

Before proceeding, I recommend taking a few minutes to watch School of Life's video "How to Use Drugs".  While it makes a strong case for a liberal attitude toward drug use, it employs an overgeneralized notion of what a drug is and fails to overcome prejudices against certain drugs.  Most of the posts I write are numberical, but this argument will be primarily philosophical.  There is evidence to believe prohibition does more harm than good, but my answer to this question is more a case against legislating cultural hegemony.

A drug is an external physical resource that intervenes directly in the brain to create benign and positive states of mind.  People use drugs of different kinds to experience different states of mind: alcohol to experience lowered inhibitions, nicotine to experience relaxation, caffeine to experience stimulation, cannabis to experience ataraxia, heroin to experience euphoria, LSD to experience hallucinations, etc.  All of these can—when used properly—create these positive states of mind.  It is abuse of drugs that leads to detrimental, addictive behaviors.

Laws—and therefore crimes—depend on the mores of the society they belong to.  Drug prohibition in the United States eventually became law due to increasing desire to regulate pharmaceuticals.  While wester civilization has a long standing history of alcohol consumption, over 450 years of tobacco smoking, and over 350 years of coffee drinking, other drugs were used largely for medicinal applications.  Heroin—like other opiates—cocaine and marijuana have historically been used for pain management.  Recreational use of these—and other—drugs was popular in other societies, and within subcultures of our own society, but have been subject to marginalization and stigmatization.  Consider the popular image of heroin users as hopelessly dependent on the substance from their first use.  In reality, 86% of heroin users will not develop an addiction, one in five of whom have been regular users.

There are also social costs of criminalizing drug use.  Over 48,000 prisoners in the United States are in prison for drug possession, while over 208,000 are in prison for all drug-related offenses.  Of these prisoners, 67% will be rearrested within three years of their initial release: 80% for non-violent offenses, but 20% for violent offenses.  The question of decriminalizing is, essentially, about whether we respect our citizens' rights to autonomy of their own minds and bodies.  Decriminalization will be the first step in achieving such a society, but the goal should be for the eventual legalization of drugs.

Electoral issue: military spending.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.” ― Dwight D. Eisenhower 

The question: Should the government decrease military spending?

Yes.

While the United States has, arguably, the most powerful military in the world, it undoubtedly has the largest military budget in the world, larger than the next ten largest spenders on military in the world combined.  However, is this level of expenditure necessary?  To answer this question, I’ve collected data that compares the degree of militarization to the human development index and to the global terrorism index.  Of course, correlation does not imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing "look over there."  The data can be found in this spreadsheet.

In general, the data seems to indicate that the size of the both the size and relative strength of a military is only weakly correlated with higher levels of development, but this correlates moderately to greater prevalence of terrorist activity.  Consider, for example, the chart to the left.  It shows the global peace index vs. the human development index.  These two values have a correlation of −57%—noting that a smaller GPI indicates a more peaceful nation.  This seems to be expected, however, the peace index also takes into account the degree of militarization.  All this taken together, seems to suggest that there is some link between a lesser degree of militarization and a greater degree of prosperity.

This being said, what degree of demilitarization would be appropriate?  As a member of NATO, it is suggested that the United States puts 2% of its GDP towards military expenditures, which would amount to $358 billion.  Instead, the United States spends approximately $598 billion—based on 2015 figures—on its military.  If this recommendation was followed, the government would have $240 billion dollars to fund other programs, yet would still be two-and-a-half times as much as the second highest military spender—China—and more than the next four highest spenders combined.

Downsizing would neither be difficult, nor would it sacrifice the United States position as one of the strongest militaries in the world.  Simply spending at the NATO recommendation would represent approximately a 40% decrease.  A 40% decrease in the number of active military would imply a force of 890 thousand people—still the 4th largest in the world, and more congruent with our rank in population.  A similar decrease in the military equipment would imply: 6 aircraft carriers (1st) and 97 other warships, 3,580 tanks (2nd), 2,280 combat aircraft (1st), 4,200 nuclear warheads (2nd), etc.

This list almost indicates the absurdity of our level of spending, as a 40% doesn't actually affect our standing in any of these areas.  Meanwhile, there are other programs that are in great need of funding.  For example, the often cited ASCE estimate that $3.6 trillion is needed to improve our national infrastructure by 2020.  By downsizing our military, the government stands to save hundreds of billions of dollars, without negatively impacting our national security or our military strength.

Electoral issue: minimum wage

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” ― Franklin D. Roosevelt

It has been over a year since I have written for Weapons of Reason, before the presidential election had begun.  In the past, I always invited controversy.  Now, it is time to leave my door open to it.  isidewith.com has a quiz that compares your opinions on political issues with the candidates in the race.  I suggest everyone should use this resource to help to decide who to vote for in the election.  In the coming months, I will write about several of the issues that appear as questions.  I can only write about so many, though.  Every citizen should spend time investigating these issues.

I don't believe in suspense.  Assuming my position on these issues does not change radically, and you agree with these opinions, you should consider voting for either Hillary Clinton or Jill Stein.  I cannot be more specific than this, because I only have only answered the fifteen questions that I will write about.  You will have to answer the other questions based on your own judgement.

Question: Should the government raise the federal minimum wage?

Yes.

In the United States, 2.4 million workers over the age of 20 are paid at or below the federal minimum wage.  At the poverty threshold, wage earners in a typical American household earn $609 per person per month.  A typical household which consists of minimum wage earners provides only $584 per person per month.  An often cited reason for the minimum wage is the elimination of poverty among the poorest workers; however, it clearly is not succeeding in this goal.

An increase of as little as 5%—to $7.61 per hour—could eliminate the discrepancy between minimum wage and poverty, but most proponents call for much greater increases.  For example, taking the increase in prices due to inflation into account, the minimum wage in 1980—$3.10 per hour—would be worth $9.07 per hour today, and the minimum wage in 1968—$1.60 per hour—would be worth $11.07 per hour.  In 2014, a coterie of six hundred economists called for the minimum wage to be raised to $10.10 per hour by 2016.  Of course, the 15Now campaign calls for the minimum wage to be increased to $15 per hour.

Neoclassical economics—the dominant school of economics—predicts that high minimum wage negatively affects employment.  The argument is, essentially, that the price of labor (wages) will equilibrate supply of labor and demand for labor.  A business looking to hire workers will offer the free market wage and will hire a number of workers—or rather, will purchase a number of hours of labor—until the amount of revenue generated by more labor equal the cost of purchasing that labor.  If the model is correct, this will maximize the profits of the business.  The argument is that artificially increasing the cost of purchasing labor will necessarily reduce employment.

However, there are some difficulties with this approach.  First, it assumes that there is no cost associated with rejecting a job offer.  This ignores the reality of opportunity cost and negative financial consequences associated with unemployment.  It is often the case that the employer has naturally greater bargaining power.  Second, the model assumes that all labor—or that all laborers—are interchangeable.  This also creates an inequality of bargaining power.  An unskilled laborer has the choice of spending time and money seeking training, but that worker doesn't have the ability to choose between a low-paying unskilled job and a higher-paying skilled job until those resources have been invested.  Furthermore, empirical studies have revealed that the economic effects of increasing the minimum wage tend to be benign, without negatively impacting employment, but also not showing conclusively positive effects.

That being said, the issue of raising the minimum wage.  Since the '70s, the income of American workers has been mostly stagnant, but productivity has nearly doubled.  The median income in 1973 was $12,050 per household.  If inflation is taken into account, but income were also distributed as equally as then, today's median income would be on the order of $130,000 per household.  Businesses derive profit from the disparity between productivity and wages, which has grown in the past decades.

Oil and doomsday

Recently, I provided an estimate of the amount of oil that was formed in the Earth—about 18 trillion barrels.  It's always good to tackle these kinds of problems from different angles, and before using the composition of the atmosphere to do the calculation, I had planned to re-purpose the doomsday argument.  It seems much better suited to this type of problem.  After all, there is a finite amount of oil—or, rather, a finite number of barrels of oil—that we are drawing from.

However, before we are able to apply the doomsday argument, we need to know how many barrels of oil have already been consumed. Using data from Energy Trends Insider, it appears that approximately 1.4 trillion barrels have been produced in modern history.  That being said, reliable verifications of this estimate are hard to find.


Using the doomsday argument, we find that we can be 94% confident that there are at most 16.6 trillion barrels of oil remaining, given that we have already consumed 1.4 trillion barrels.

Weapons of Reason: The paradox of skill

"The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all." ― Ecclesiastes 9:11

Stephen Jay Gould is known not only for his work in biology, but also for a collection of essays on baseball.  In "Why No One Hits .400 Anymore," he explains just that, with a fairly elegant solution.  The pool of talent in baseball has grown since the early days, strategies and tactics have been improved, and players receive better training.  Another way of putting this is that the average skill among players has improved.  However, as they have improved, they are also beginning to approach the natural limits of what the human body is capable of.  When the entire community of players approach this limit, the community looses variation—there is now less room to spread out.

2009 Belmont Stakes photo finish.

This observation is sometimes called the paradox of skill—the greater the average skill level in a community, the less important skill becomes in determining the outcome of competition.  In the above photo finish, the difference between the two horses is only a few inches.  Both the horses were bread and trained to run competitively; however, the outcome was likely determined by essentially random factors that gave one horse a slight edge over the other.  This effect can be seen at work elsewhere.  At one time, higher education would have ensured employment in highly desirable, relatively low stress jobs.  Now, college education is becoming necessary for gainful employment at all.

Population density

What would the population of the United States be, if it were as densely populated as India?  I was under the impression that India's population density is only slightly greater than that of the U.S.  This assumption is wrong.

The answer to the question is 4 billion people.  When will this happen?  The quick way to answer this question is to consider historical growth rates.  During the 20th century, the U.S. averaged 1.3% population growth per year.  At this rate, population would reach 4 billion by the year 2210. A lot can happen in 200 years to affect the actual growth rate.  That being said, the U.S. may reach a population of 1 billion—the equivalent of the population density of Europe—by the year 2100 at a 1.3% growth rate.

Peak oil, part II

"It is sunlight in modified form which turns all the windmills and water wheels and the machinery which they drive. It is the energy derived from coal and petroleum (fossil sunlight) which propels our steam and gas engines, our locomotives and automobiles." ― John Harvey Kellogg

In a previous post, I wrote about peak oil—particularly that answering the question of how much oil is left is not easy.  That said, a new approach has occurred to me.  Oil and coal are the remains of ancient plants, formed 300 million years ago in the carboniferous period—C on the horizontal axis of the chart below.  The periods leading up to this saw the proliferation of plants, which removed massive amounts of carbon from the atmosphere.  At its peak, carbon dioxide made up 7000 parts per million (ppm) of the atmosphere, but today makes up only 180 ppm.  This carbon went somewhere, and for the most part it was sequestered in rocks as coal and oil.  A simple calculation puts the weight of this carbon to be 10 trillion tonnes.

How much is oil and how much is coal?  Consider the proven reserves of oil versus coal.  There are 190 billion tonnes of oil reserves, but there are 860 billion tonnes of coal reserves.  Assuming that this reflects their natural abundance, we'll assume that oil and coal are in a ratio of 5 to 1 of sequestered carbon.  This implies that there have been 3.6 trillion tonnes of oil and natural gas—18 trillion barrels—and 11 trillion tonnes of coal.

How long will this last?  As of 2015, 93 million barrels of oil are consumed per day—about 34 billion per year—which has grown by about 1% per year since the 1980s.  If this continues, there are 185 years of oil.  That being said, consumption must eventually stop growing and begin to decline—that is the notion of peak oil.  Instead, oil rations will eventually be put into effect, which could mean that oil will be here for centuries.  As for coal, 7.5 billion tonnes are consumed per year, growing by about 2% per year since the 1980s.  This implies a 170 year supply.  The same caveats apply.  Many things can change in this time, too.  It's still hard to say how long we will burn fossil fuels.