Thank God somebody said it

Mittens is above all this poor-people talk.

While Mitt Romney is probably one of the more unlikable public figures to ever be unliked, it's important to note that he hasn't gotten a fair shake on taxes.

The reason centers around the fact that most of his income (along with Warren Buffet, who has been patently misleading the public on the topic) is derived from capital gains and dividends, which are taxed at the corporate level before being passed through to the individual. In essence, it is a type of double taxation which occurs pretty directly - your money doesn't just get taxed when you get it, but it gets taxed while the check is still in the mail as well. This makes his actual tax rate much higher.

The more orthodox case of double taxation also applies to Mitt, and it's even more important. Imagine you are a doctor who has an extra $10k to spend after a year of budgeting. You have narrowed down your purchase decision to two options: a pair of new jet-skis, or an investment in a local restaurant. From the jet-skis you get a return of glorious fun with perhaps a special someone, and from the restaurant investment you get a return of equity and the capital gains that come from dividend payouts.

Obviously, the returns from the jet-ski option are not taxed by the government besides sales tax and licensing (you can't tax fun!), but the returns from investing in the restaurant - the option that provides a real return to the community - well, those are subject to an unhealthy dose of both corporate and personal taxes. This means that our tax code is biased against productive spending, and for that reason we try to keep the percentage rate as low as we can (hence lower tax rates on dividends and capital gains).

Mitt Romney has made piles of money, so I understand some of the punches thrown over his tax rate. Spraying venom at a policy that keeps money employed in useful ventures instead of extravagant luxuries, however, is not a reasonable attack. Let's hope people remember that after the political dust has settled.

Pay or You Hate France!

What a complete asshole.

I love seeing French attitudes towards wealth. Bernard Arnault, a rich guy French guy, is leaving the country after President Hollande announced he planned to tax his type at 75% percent:

A day after French President Hollande made his case for new taxes, the public responded angrily to a report that its richest man, Bernard Arnault, was trying to avoid taxes by heading to Belgium.

Story here. Interestingly enough, there seems to have been a lack of outrage from French citizens when the Rolling Stones moved there as tax exiles from England.

I'm fascinated by the tax situation in France right now. I've seen a few stories pop up about how wealthy people were going to be fleeing the country, but it seemed pretty fluffy and was being pushed by conservative bloggers. I wasn't sure if individuals would really take the plunge. Turns out at least one did.

The Real Crisis in Europe (in pictures)

This is getting weird.

Spiegel is running an interesting story about the incredible challenges faced by a certain profession during the Euro debt crisis. Politicians? Bankers? Accountants? Of course not. This drawn out downspiral has most drastically affected photographers:

Stratenschulte is a photographer with the German news agency DPA. He has been photographing euro coins from various angles for the past three years. He tries to convey the complex crisis in images. The problem is that the crisis won't end, which means Stratenschulte has to keep coming up with fresh ideas. 

His colleagues have resorted to using children's toys, arranging a plastic shark to look like it's eating a Lego man holding a Greek flag. They have photographed coins in a free fall. Rumor has it that one photographer poured gasoline on coins to try to make them glow with heat.

The problem is capturing in photographs something which cannot be photographed - purely abstract economic occurrences. I personally prefer the pictures of Merkel and other important people looking angry or friendly while sitting in rooms full of fine wood furniture. It captures the actual events that are happening, but it does of course leave out the immense ramifications of those events. A burning Euro coin does help bring home (at least for Europeans) how critical the shifts are, but to foreign viewers it is a picture of a piece of metal on fire. I never found it very moving.

Be sure to flip through the slideshow and read the humorous captions.

Competing with Apple in More Ways...

Samsung is apparently going to crack down on its manufacturing partners for possible labor violations. This surprises me, as I wouldn't imagine there being much money in being nice to poor people. Perhaps, though, Samsung will be offering the trendy youth something Apple has not: guilt-free conscience.

From the Reuters article:

"If supplier companies are found to be in violation of our policies and corrective actions not taken, Samsung will terminate its contract with those supplier companies," Samsung said.

It needs more Bernanke!

You are boring the Ben Bernank.

For the millionth and a half time, the NYT reports:

The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, delivered a detailed and forceful argument on Friday for new steps to stimulate the economy, reinforcing earlier indications that the Fed is on the verge of action.

I'm uncertain if viewing this situation with proper perspective is particularly flattering to the Federal Reserve at this point. I at least hope we can start draining some excess reserves instead of just throwing more money at the system mindlessly.

Also, an interesting note I didn't know about:

Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, has said such action would be counterproductive, and has pledged to replace Mr. Bernanke at the earliest opportunity.

Way to make friends, Mitt!

Aw China, you so crazy!

I don't know what this means, but it's evil.

I'm contrarian by nature, so I've always been pretty bearish about China's next ten years. Maybe it's a knee-jerk reaction to communists (I'm still living in 1952 and I wasn't yet alive then), but I prefer to trace my doubts to the fact that it's a completely corrupt state with out-of-control shadow industries and an economy so in danger of overheating that occasionally a factory spontaneously bursts into flames.

That's why I find this story in the NYT to be so deliciously enjoyable. It's pure madness that a country can grow at 10% a year and not run off of a cliff occasionally, but there is always a sea of lemmings faithfully trusting in the Chinese leadership's all-wise aversion to ledges. Long-term, the state is going to need reforms - long-standing institutions which relied on that (very little remaining) nationalist Communist pride will be ripped to shreds by capitalism in the next thirty years. Short term the country is going to be massively unstable as rapid industrialization, regime uncertainty, a corrupt business environment oftentimes outside of regulation, and a government obsessed with maintaining the facade of  ultra growth multiply business cycles to painful extremes.

China is given a pass by a media that is more interested in whipping up fear over the country's ascent then by pointing out its probable failures. It's going to be interesting to watch this play out.

I wrote limericks!

I somehow stumbled upon the limericks page of Dr. Mesterton-Gibbons, a mathematics professor at my school. He has been doing a limerick of the month for years, and his online collection reaches back to 1996. While looking at this I realized I should be working on behavioral economics, so I naturally decided to write limericks about it instead.

One should note that there is (apparently) a strict rhyming scheme to limericks which I have completely ignored. That disclaimer being given, here are my efforts:

On shifting reference points:

A lottery player who had won

Said “finally, I’m in for some fun”

But while his wealth lifted

His reference point shifted

So his u­₂ over u equaled one.

On mental heuristics:

So many shortcuts in our thought

With errors our results are wrought

Heuristics are okay

In your day-to-day

As long as the President you are not.

On loss aversion:

Jen suffered such aversion to losses

When choosing her boys and her bosses

That at 34 she found

After looking around

That this was half of her trouble’s causes.

On prospect theory:

The model of utility expected

Was aged and quite well respected

On it we had built

A sandcastle of silt

‘til Kahneman conjectured we prospected.

On altruism:

Economists modeled humans a la carte

Thinking souls wouldn’t fit on the chart

But dictators show

What little we know

About the depth of the human heart.

On a Loewenstein paper:

Economists yearned for a pure thinker

As feelers force modelers to tinker

But as Loewenstein alludes

More predictable moods

May belong to the visceral rum drinker.

My poor, oft-deserted ideas

My poor, poor ideas.

I like the idea of deliberately being inconsistent in one's ideas. People adopt an idea and make it part of their identity, siding with a team or trying to carve out a unique vision of who they are. But you don't own ideas; they exist whether you live or not.

This might be what makes ideas so powerful and so destructive. I've seen people go through the weirdest logical jumps and make the lamest assumptions to make sure their idea makes it through scrutiny unscathed. There is nothing worse than someone defending an idea and completely wrecking their integrity in the process. Theories are not, for most people, a way of making sense of the facts, or trying to find a true pattern within them. They're convenient devices which shield us from the hard job of thinking.

So this is why I constantly disagree with what I said three days ago. And why it doesn't really bother me. I'd rather be totally detached from ideas and willing to disown them at any moment when I decide they have some fatal flaw than to be obsessively holding onto them for fear of admitting I am wrong.

If I'm inconsistent in my ideas, does it make my ideas somehow weaker? If my ideas survived the scrutiny of others merely on the basis that I seem like a legitimate source for ideas, then clearly this person is not actually evaluating my ideas and is instead applying a very crude heuristic to select the ideas that sound most reasonable. If that's what people do, fine. I don't want to be right in someone else's perception, I want to be right in actuality. If I turn out conflicting ideas on a daily basis, then yay for me! I'm thinking inconsistently and producing a wide range of ideas and am much more free of an ideological influence.

Also, there is an awesome story about Africa on the intertubes today and I really think it is worth a read.

Chinese lending slumps, world watches with baited breath

PROTIP: You want the graph to have less of those big changes and more of the little ones.

From Christopher Balding:

From 2008 to 2009 new local currency loans rose from 3.48 trillion rmb to 10.32 trillion according to the PBOC for an annualized increase of nearly 300%.  If economic history tells us anything about rapid increases in credit, it implies that those loans should start going bad in the very near future. 

This is a really impressive graphic that shows the massive spike in government lending in the crisis, a result of the government ordering banks to lend more to help prop up the economy. This was taken by Western writers to be a great strength of the Chinese system, that central financial regulators had such immense power. Great quote from a Forbes editorial from 2009:

Chinese officials essentially forced the banks to lend to support the stimulus program. So state enterprises were forced to borrow. China Aviation Industry Corp., for instance, had to borrow $49.2 billion from 12 Chinese banks this spring. Its general manager, Lin Zuoming, complained in April that he did not know what to do with all the cash. 

We see now that an increase of almost 300% in one year may have had a backlash following it. Are we going to see rolling defaults coming soon as debt cannot be rolled over or extended in these tighter credit conditions? I'm excited to watch.

Dollar Shave Club - kicking in the rotten door of the dumbest oligopoly

The double-edge safety razor seemed like a humorous devolution to me. Purchasing the first pack of replacement razors for your Gillette or Schick shaving product is a coming-of-age event for any young man, when he realizes life is going to be expensive. I actually took part in this system of obvious rent-seeking for a few years before I applied my interest in economics and realized that if there was competition in shaving, prices would fall. Competition in the cartridge razor market is stymied by proprietary cartridge connections, but for my luck the safety blade market is humming at something dramatically closer to a competitive equilibrium. So I returned to the shaving technology of fifty years ago and felt, in net, quite advanced for the change.

It never once occurred to me, though, that there is a massive pile of money to be made in taking down the oligopoly that exists in shaving.

Your handsome-ass grandfather had one blade. And polio.

It seems obvious now. For how much I do like my safety razor, it's not exactly user-friendly. As my dad discovered when I got him one for Father's Day, you can cut pretty sizable gashes in your face with these things. There's sort of a trick to using one effectively. Also, you have to replace the actual razor itself - which involves taking an unbelievably sharp sliver of steel out of a little paper wrapper and dropping it into place. I haven't cut myself yet doing it, but I imagine when I do it's going to be the World Series of cursing.

However, there is absolutely nothing special about cartridge razors that would stop a competitor from jumping in. The biggest cost to switching is the original razor handle, and if a startup were to, say, sell a subscription service to help subsidize that, they could easily break in. So what is needed is a competitor to bring Schumpeter-esque destruction upon the big razor companies. They'll need to sell an effectively designed cartridge razor, be low in cost, effectively market to young men, and preferably operate outside of the normal channels of distribution.

I bring you Dollar Shave Club. I'm not sure if I'll sign up - I'm torn, as I do sort of miss cartridge shaving, but I still have a ton (tonnnn) of safety razors left. But I do like what these guys are doing. So go watch their video, it's pretty funny.

Control of the purse

A recent Times article hits on the idea of campaign finance since Citizens United becoming more diversified, ripping away control from party bosses.

The idea of quietly showing a candidate the door is an idea that harkens back to the days when the political parties were run by a handful of power brokers — before “super PACs,” the Tea Party and politics by Twitter diminished the influence of the parties.

“It was a time when the party bosses controlled the access to money and to the media,” said Doris Kearns Goodwin, a political historian. “They really could tell people to do something or other. I don’t know who those people would be today.”

The Super-PAC's have crushed the party fundraising establishment and the Internet has crushed the media establishment. Perhaps, in an ironic twist, a more democratic process has emerged from Citizens United?

For the love of math

Over the past several days (and perhaps it was building up weeks beforehand) I've really taken a liking to mathematics. 

You vill take ze mathematics and you vill like eet.

This is weird, as I failed freshman algebra in high school. I hated math. Nobody took the time to explain to me that if you want to do anything serious (read: sciency) you need to have a rigorous understanding of upper-level mathematics. It all seemed like a pointless exercise that I would willingly subject myself to in grade school when it was easy, but once it required any thought from me I rebelled against it. But then came college, and the kindling of my passion for economics.

So I set myself out to learn to love math. Nobody liked their first sip of coffee nor their first cigarette nor their first alcoholic beverage, but people are addicted to these things for a reason: they're great. I postulated that perhaps my relationship with mathematics would be the same way, that perhaps mathematics (and maybe everything) was an acquired taste. All I needed to do was immerse myself in it, force myself to face it and take a cheerful attitude about it. I needed to want to love it as well as expose myself to it.

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers is a book about Paul Erdős, a 20th century Hungarian mathematician who was extremely prolific in his publishing and extremely eccentric in his habits. The aggressive, intellectual rat-race view of mathematicians you get from movies such as A Beautiful Mind and Good Will Hunting wasn't something I could fall in love with, but this Erdős fellow was poor, weird, and happy. He really loved math, and it allowed him to live in his own little world where he didn't need the things that other people need. He is now extremely famous among mathematicians, but fame never seemed to be his goal as much as the joy of solving problems. I feel moved by a witness so fervent in his faith. 

This book not only gives the story of Erdős, but also some of the story about mathematics. From Pythagoras to Euclid to Newton to Riemann to Gödel, the evolution of mathematics and mathematical proofing takes the weirdest and most intriguing turns. So many who like mathematics use the word certainty to describe the field, but it seems to me that, again and again, so much of what we thought we knew in this perfect undertaking turns out to be an oversimplification of the case. The words "non-Euclidean geometry" are exceptional for carrying the properties of being both bizarre and cliche. And the idea that so many of the problems are the most difficult yet the most accessible - Fermat's Last Theorem, for instance, a simple conjecture which stood for 350 years before being proved - makes an interest in mathematics one which is immediately accessible.

If I'm to go to graduate school in economics, an intensive education in mathematics is going to be required. If I am to be good at my craft, which I aim to be, I must have a passion for all types of math. It will take immense sums of time and effort, and will require changes fundamental to my personality and lifestyle.

But I think it can be done. 

I never took Director's Law seriously before...

Why must you doubt me?

Aaron Director, University of Chicago Law professor, brother-in-law to Milton Friedman and all around solid guy, had a theory about public choice and economics. He postulated that most public programs will end up supporting the middle class, at the expense of the lower and upper classes. He saw the middle class as the biggest interest group in society, one which could control the vote and get money to come its way. This little idea is called Director's Law, and I know Milton Friedman helped spread the concept.

It always seemed to me like he was doing it as a family favor. The idea that the middle class are a homogeneous group which votes together was kind of unrealistic to me. The law also seemed like a humorous stereotypical economist's opinion - the middle class is strictly self interested and will steal from the poor to feed their fat faces. Why was Milton Friedman into this idea? Was there a lost bet, or maybe a social mistake at a Thanksgiving dinner which Friedman was attempting to make up for?

Well, today on the NYT there is an interesting article which seems to support the idea behind Director's Law. Maybe the reasons behind it aren't perfect, but the concept of the middle class democratic money hole is supported here. Parts of the article itself feels like a snarky hit piece on the "supposedly independent" Tea-party types, and in that aspect I think it might fail to consider the fact that maybe people who don't support the government stealing from them are still willing to take back the money the government stole from them. The actual content, though - the middle class is getting more and more subsidized - is fascinating from a theory standpoint.

Is Apple Driving Workers to Suicide?

The muckraking media has been buzzing with serious tones about what clearly seems to be horrible working conditions and loads of suicides in the plants in which Apple products are produced. Apple contracts out this work to Foxconn, a Taiwan-based firm who has over 900,000 employees. Most of these employees are in China.

I bet if we inject a bunch of senseless emotion into
this we can obscure the fact that this is a made-up crisis.

Apparently, Foxconn employees are being driven to suicide by their working conditions. The company has put up suicide-prevention nets at its main factory in Shenzhen, giving the place a creepy sort of air. That particular location is gigantic, covering 1.15 square miles and being made up of 15 factories. How many people are employed there isn't clear, but it's probably well over 400,000. That's roughly the number of people who live in Miami proper.

Media reports cite monotonous work, dangerous working conditions, long hours, poor pay and a management team that just generally is not overtly friendly. Of course people are hurling themselves over buildings; look at how terrible things are compared to your job!

This is silly, and you don't need to take my word for it.

Your job is in the United States, where your expectations ("reference point") for a job are much higher. People voluntarily work at Foxconn. They would not do this if it was horrible. The tragic comedy of comfortably fat people in America enforcing their labor philosophy on skinny people in Asia just to watch that factory close and everybody go back to starving to death has been played out before. Luckily, Apple loves profits too much to behave like Kathy Lee Gifford did when it turned out her clothing line was made by the fingers of innocent children. Those kids weren't fortunate enough to have truly evil capitalists running the show.

The best part of it is that we are talking about 17 suicides among 1 million workers. Suicide rates are calculated per 100,000, meaning that Foxconn factories have suicide rates of 1.7 per 100,000. China's suicide rate is 22.23; the United States comes in at 11.8, Canada at 11.3, and France at 16.3.

Working at a Foxconn facility actually drastically cuts your risk for suicide, regardless of what you compare it to. That's because Foxconn represents a huge increase in living standards for its employees and as a result they are happy to be working there.

Barry Schwartz - full of shit?

Barry Schwartz seems like a pretty likable guy. Sort of eccentric, minimal concept of himself, funny. However, this video here is probably the best dumb thing I've ever seen on TED.

Barry Schwartz is essentially conjecturing that all the noise that comes with having a thousand options for things is a problem. We're unhappy because we feel that, no matter how much we think we like the product we decided on, we could have had a better product. If we only lived in a Soviet-style communist state, perhaps. Just throwing it out there.

I'm not sure if this image is an argument for or
against jean choice.

The real take home I get from his TED talk is that he's basically a crotchety old man who has trouble adjusting to changes around him. The idea that anybody else leaves after purchasing jeans actually distraught over the idea that perhaps there was a better pair of jeans in that pile of thousands makes no intuitive sense for me. I doubt it does for anybody else.

I would posit that jean purchasing is largely simplified by a simple set of heuristics we apply, ala the editing stage of Kahneman's prospect theory. When I shop for jeans I have some rules: first off, they need to be reasonably close fitting to my body; second off, they need to not make me look like my dad when he wears jeans; third, they cannot be distressed or faded because that's just stupid. And, of course, they need to be in my size.

I have quickly narrowed the store to about six options. I think two look dumb and one is too pricey, so I try on two pairs and choose the one I like best. I have now found a satisfactorily reasonable approximation for the best pair of jeans in the store, and I leave whistling and looking for a hot pretzel stand.

Search theory also has a few things to say about jean purchasing. There is cost to searching - the time it takes to do so. For some, this is actually a bonus (women like to shop and other stereotypes); for me personally, it's an immense burden that makes my legs feel weak and compels me to resolve this crisis immediately. Under these conditions, Schwartz's precious scarcity of decisions is reintroduced, and is reasonably estimated by the search theory function. If it costs me to look I won't look long, and my options have narrowed.

Interesting thing to think about, but it doesn't seem realistic.

ARPANET: Really the Internet Heroes We Make Them Out to Be?

I found this video of Ward Christensen, who co-created the first BBS system, talking about his time with ARPANET, and how he lent them the ideas he found on his own when they weren't getting anything done.
ARPANET was a Department of Defense project which is credited with the creation of the underpinnings of our modern internet. Libertarians often have to take a hit on this, as it is true that the internet is important and it seems like the government did create it. And to a large part, they did. This serves, in my opinion, as a weak spot in libertarian dogma.
Christensen's interview for the BBS documentary reflects, however, that maybe private innovations helped spur a lumbering, slow-moving project along.

Is Behavioral Economics Going to Teach Itself Out of a Job?

Somewhat related: I always imagine
Richard Thaler as having a sort of
comical, high-pitched voice. Irrational?

Clearly, very few homo economicus live among us. And if one did, he'd probably be murdered for being such an incredibly selfish sociopath.

So the basic tenets of behavioral economics - that we need to adjust our axioms when modeling human behavior - make sense. They even have some really great adjustments to make to microeconomic models, with the weird kinks in indifference curves and the inevitable incorporation of reference points. However, one of the favorite topics of behavioral economists is irrationality, and on that front I think they will make a massive contribution to humanity and a withering, temporary one to economics.

Basically, if you explain to a bunch of people that they are stupid and why they are stupid and how they are stupid and examples of how it is hurting them, they are going to stop being stupid.

It's sort of (I guess?) a Campbell's Law problem, and it separates the wheat from the chaff in economic theory, in my opinion. The wheat is concepts like Nash Equilibrium, which are self-prophetic - once you know about Nash Equilibrium, you obey Nash Equilibrium, because you have a huge incentive to do so. Then the chaff is behavioral concepts such as confirmation bias or misapplied probability heuristics - once humans become aware of their tendency to do these stupid things, they stop doing them.

This means that behavioral economics could make a really big, positive impact on our planet. And there are definitely issues that come out of these experiments that may need to be built into our models (and really, if you've taken a decent micro course, already have been).

However, the knowledge of some of this stuff is going to make it untrue going forward.

Stupid forever?

Sans-furniture is actually kind of foolish. Also, click on the image.

Does youthful stupidity and aggression and non-conformity have any value? Do we all have to stop being foolish eventually and accept that the old ways of doing things are the ways we've always done them for a very good reason? Does what happened before even have any bearing on the value of your stupid idea?

Probably, actually. Values are relative, after all.

Overrating Steve Jobs' impact on society is one of my favorite hobbies, and I'm totally glad we're calling him the Edison of our time. Woz did all the hard work and Bill did all the useful application, so it's bizarre that Jobs wins our historical perspective just because he died first.

I think I will gain the ability to be foolish the older I get. The only thing that holds me back now is not wanting to be a stupid kid.

The Continuing Intrade Mistake

If you're not familiar, Intrade is an online predictions market. The market makers create a market in derivative contracts for, say, Rick Perry winning the Republican presidential nomination, and idiots like me buy and sell them. The contracts are worth $10, and payout comes when the real life event happens.

It's shameless gambling.

I have a problem?

I made the incredible mistake of going short on Romney winning Florida. In my defense, one can observe a decent amount of volatility in these markets, and Florida is just so far off from when I made the bet that it seemed like 86.9% chance of winning was too high at that point. Certainly I could cash out when some new attack ads run or it turns out he's been wearing a rug.

Romney is bulletproof, though, and now his odds are up to 96% (contract valued by the market at $9.60). My 15 share short has reaped me a loss of $13.50, and when you're only starting out with $40 that means something. 

The shame is I've done this before in the stock market. I was able to convince myself that the overbearing regulatory environment somehow diluted the effects of my "get attached to a random company and then make it the world series of confirmation bias" strategy, but it's becoming more clear to me now that I simply should not do this kind of stuff.

Also, there's lots of cold and not a lot of hot today.

Could Austrians Be Biased?

It's a day in my maturity: the Mises Institute is no longer on my bookmarks toolbar.

Those voracious Austrians have long been making the case for free markets and small government to wandering undergraduates such as myself, interrupting those lessons only to make lessons on why no government would probably be even better. They will certainly go on with the show, serving as the naive capitalist's confirmation bias for decades to come.

I'll be okay only hearing about it second hand.

The straw that fatally injured the camel was global warming. Now, I wouldn't claim to be an expert on geophysics or meteorology. I have never taken a class in climate science, and frankly I don't really care about the topic at all. There are a ton of guys with white lab coats and some of them even wear glasses, and they have apparently made a case that humans are causing global warming and it's going to be a bad, bad thing. I've never heard one of them comment on the median voter model or diminishing utility, and I'm willing to keep up the contract and be blissfully ignorant about, um... greenhouse gasses and stuff. I like studying how people interact more than how water molecules interact, so I find climate change discussion kind of boring.

The good people at Mises, however, have uniformly fallen into line as global warming deniers. The lock-step consensus astounds me, as you would think nothing about believing in a certain methodology for researching economic phenomena would give you a certain tendency to oppose mainstream scientific research. After all, none of these guys have Ph.D.'s in anything remotely useful - it's all just social sciences and a few law degrees. What about this group would give them a unique scientific perspective?

Of course, it's the ramifications of the existence of man-made global warming that Mises followers do not like. Any individual can reasonably have a differing opinion from mainstream scientists, but when nearly every individual in a certain group has that opinion, it's clear they have found a conclusion which does not fit their worldview and therefor have rejected that conclusion.

Anything you hear from a libertarian as scientific arguments against anthropological global warming probably doesn't come from a deep-seated passion for climate science which led that individual to a unique conclusion. It comes from an undying need to be right, paired with a drunken disinterest in actually finding the truth.

I'm focusing more on micro now. Macro is a religion, and those kinds of wars are played out.