For the last few days I’ve been involved in an ongoing debate with Steve Verdon and one of his readers, Victor, on whether President Clinton is a bald-faced liar for making this statement:

On the US budget, Clinton warned that the federal deficit may be coming untenable, driven by foreign wars, the post-hurricane recovery programme and tax cuts that benefitted just the richest one percent of the US population, himself included.

“What Americans need to understand is that … every single day of the year, our government goes into the market and borrows money from other countries to finance Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, and our tax cuts,” he said.

“We have never done this before. Never in the history of our republic have we ever financed a conflict, military conflict, by borrowing money from somewhere else.”–emphasis added

Clinton added: “We depend on Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Korea primarily to basically loan us money every day of the year to cover my tax cut and these conflicts and Katrina. I don’t think it makes any sense.”

After a few rounds of back and forth it looks like we’ve adopted two differing interpretations of what “financed” means. Steve and Victor argue from the default position that there have always been significant foreign debt holders of US Securities, and their default hypothesis must be refuted entirely by accounting for 100% of the debt sourcing. To account for less than 100% automatically implies foreign contribution, and even an insignificant foreign contribution, falsifies President Clinton’s statement. I’m interpreting “financed” to mean the costs of the entire endeavor, not simply a minor part of the endeavor. This seems to be the more common usage, such as “I financed my house with a $600,000 mortgage from the bank” being a true statement even though I received a $5000 loan from my father-in-law in order to help with the downpayment.

Let’s get into the details of the argument. Steve points to WWII as the case to prove that President Clinton is lying. I pointed out that on June 30, 1941 the National Debt stood at $49 Billion and that the debt grew to $259 Billion by June 30, 1945 and during that time there were 8 War Bond Drives which raised $185.7 Billion and that more traditional financial instruments, like Treasury bonds and Certificates of Indebtedness, were also being marketed. The War Bonds by themselves accounted for 88.4% of the proceeds borrowed. Turning to another source, (see Figure 12,) we see that there was no debt issued under the Foreign Government Series until 1960. I certainly wouldn’t conclude that the WWII US war effort was financed by foreign borrowing.

Aside from sticking to the position that any amount of foreign borrowing, no matter how minor, invalidates President Clinton’s position, Steve insists that the likely points of foreign capital were Canada and Britain. I think that contention unlikely, considering they had entered into WWII two years before the US and each were on a massive war footing with their own War Bond Drives, and in the case of Britain, were already receiving aid from the US in the form of Lend-Lease:

On 11th March 1941, Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act. The legislation gave President Franklin D. Roosevelt the powers to sell, transfer, exchange, lend equipment to any country to help it defend itself against the Axis powers.

A sum of $50 billion was appropriated by Congress for Lend-Lease. The money went to 38 different countries with Britain receiving over $31 billion. Over the next few years the British government repaid $650 million of this sum.

[ . . . . ]

Britain was in pawn, at the very time that Attlee was fighting to exert some influence on the postwar European settlement. The only solution was to negotiate a huge American loan, the repayment and servicing of which placed a burden on Britain’s balance of payments right into the twenty-first century.

The rest of the Commonwealth joined with Britain in fighting against the Axis powers before the US joined the war. Their economies were also set on a war footing, which included extraordinary measures, such as found in Australia:

– the fixing of profit margins in industry;
– restrictions on the costs allowed for building or renovations;
– the pegging of prices;

I find that to posit that the private capital of the citizens was being used to finance the US deficit to be incongruent with the massive capital requirements that their countries were facing for at least 2 years before the US deficit started to rise. Isn’t it more parsimonious to assume that the capital was being soaked up by their own governments? I looked for information on foreign exchange controls but couldn’t find any information in my searches. Does any one know if such controls existed during the war period.

So, if not Canada and Britain, which countries were the major financiers of our debt? Japan, China, France, Germany, Saudia Arabia, Korea, the colonies of Africa? Anyone see a problem here? Maybe the Germans wouldn’t have minded if the neutral Swiss financed the American war effort against them? Maybe the countries that financied our WWII debt were Boliva and Panama? The coffee barons must have had a lot of surplus capital that they wanted to invest in safe instruments.

So, WWII seems to me to be a bust as a case for falsification. Victor follows in his comments with the case of the Revolutionary War being financied by the Dutch and the run-up in debt during the Vietnam War era. If we couldn’t agree on the semantics of financing a war like WWII how are we going to come to an agreement on whether a Republic exists before it wins a revolution?

On the issue of Vietnam, let’s go back to President Clinton’s text. The overall context of the remarks makes clear that he is concerned by the historical anomaly of cutting taxes and borrowing the foregone tax revenue in order to finance the tax cuts, the war effort, massively increased domestic spending and disaster reponse. There is a case to be made that some, if not all, of the additional borrowing could have been replaced with tax revenues absent the tax cuts. Underlying President Clinton’s remarks are what I take to be two moral arguments common to the Democratic critique: 1.) It is immoral to not ask the citizens to sacrifice in times of national crisis and instead expect future generations to make the required sacrifice, and; 2.) It is immoral to actually lower taxes and raise discretionary domestic spending, thus necessitating borrowing, in times of national crisis and burdening future generations with the debt obligations. The added debt, much of the which is being supplied by foreign entities, would be smaller if tax cuts weren’t implemented.

Now we got into a side argument about whether foreign sourced debt is less preferable to domestically sourced debt and my position is that any effort to broaden the market for the debt will lower the cost of servicing that debt and thus create a benefit for US taxpayers. However, President Clinton isn’t saying having foreigners buy our debt is a negative for the US. His position is that the fiscal mismanagement we’re seeing from President Bush is unprecedented
in the history of the Republic.

Let’s look at the broader financial indicators that occured during WWII (1941-1945), the Korean War (1950-1953) and the Vietnam War (1965-1973) and see how the Federal Government’s finances were being managed compared to the Iraq War period (2001-2004).

You’ll note that there was a big increase in Public Debt during World War II, but there was a steady rate of decreasing the Public Debt/GDP ratio through the Korean and Vietnam Wars. The top marginal tax rate was either raised, or reduced to the long term average rate, during those wars. The contribution of individual tax collected increased as a share of GDP during times of war. It is only during the administration of President Bush and the Iraq war that all of these indicators don’t follow historical patterns. At times of war we usually make the sacrifices needed to finance those wars, rather than pushing the cost onto the backs of our children while we add irresponsibilty onto irresponsibility by backing multiple tax cuts that have disproportionate benefit across socio-economic classes.

The financing of the Iraq War is different from that of the Vietnam War, in that while we increased our sale of debt instruments abroad during the Vietnam period, we were also growing our economy at such a rate that the added debt was actually diminishing our debt burden as a percentage of our GDP. President Bush’s mismanagement of our treasury has resulted in increased borrowing adding to our debt burden as a percentage of our GDP while at the same time decreasing the share of individual tax collections as a percentage of GDP. We’ve reduced individual tax collections by 2.9% of GDP and increased our debt by 4.1% of GDP. The added financial burden of the Iraq War has been entirely financed by debt. This report (Table #20) shows that in the period July 2002 – July 2004, China has increased its portfolio of US Long Term Debt Securities from $165 Billion to $360 Billion and Japan increased their holdings from $411 Billion to $736 Billion. These two countries alone can account for all of the debt that was issued to finance our war efforts in Iraq.

So, it sure doesn’t look to me like President Clinton was out to take a cheap shot at the fiscal policies of the Bush Administration – he had the facts behind him and this was in fact a substantive shot at the fiscal mismanagement we’re seeing from the “Party of Spending Like Drunken Sailers”, once known as the Republicans. Never before have we financed a war by increasing our Public Debt/GDP and borrowed those funds from abroad.

Lastly, when will we get serious about fiscal management if not at times like this? If we can’t show fiscal maturity during a time of war and rebuilding after a disaster, how severe will a future crisis have to be to instill the discipline we’ll need to get our fiscal house in order?

Update: Steve Sailer has a piece on the cost-benefit analysis of the Iraq War done by the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies.

Thomas Friedman speaking yesterday in the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun:

Funabashi: Among the emerging Asian countries, India seems to have an advantage in globalization because of its citizens’ high English ability. But there are reports that as many as 350 million people are now studying English in China. In a globalizing world, how does English ability impact on a country’s potential?

Friedman: Knowing English was an early advantage for India in a couple of areas. One is, obviously, call centers, where you had to know English to serve an English-speaking company. But today, the second-largest outsourcing capital in the world is Dalian, China, where thousands of Japanese-speaking Chinese are now running the backrooms and writing the software of major Japanese multinationals and American multinationals formerly based in Tokyo. And, as I’m sure people here are aware, there are Japanese language schools on every other corner in Dalian. Japanese language is now required for two years at many schools in Dalian, and I would hardly say that speaking English in Dalian today is a great advantage. In fact, speaking Japanese would be a huge advantage. That’s the first point I would make.

The second point I would make is that in terms of hard-core business processes, so much of this is about writing code and things of that nature, that I believe at the end of the day business will go to where the brains are and not where the language is. You will meet companies today in the United States who have already skipped over India and gone right to China for basically the next generation of business process engineering.

In working on my book, I interviewed Bill Gates, and he told me that Microsoft opened its third research center in the world in Beijing in 1998. It used to just have a research center in Cambridge, England, nice English-speaking place, and Redmond, Washington. He told me they opened their research center in China by giving IQ tests to 2,000 Chinese around the country, Ph.D.s and engineering students, recommended to them, and out of those 2,000 they basically chose 20 to open the research center in China.

Now, think what it is actually to be one of those 20 out of a country of 1.3 billion people. In fact, they have a saying at the Microsoft Research Center in China: In China, when you’re one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.

Now, what Bill Gates will also tell you is that today the China Research Center is the leading research center in Microsoft. You know what he’ll also tell you, though? He’ll tell you that Microsoft’s best game designers all come from Japan. I bet none of them speak English, or very few. So, I don’t think this is going to be about language. I think the language advantage is going to quickly be arbitraged out. There’ll be more Chinese speakers on the Internet very, very soon.

Related: Why India Will (Probably) Never Catch China, China vs. India: Part I

For those of you in the UK, check out BBC’s Horizon tonight for more on the Flores “microcephaly or not” question. (More here: Hobbit hhhmm….)

Professor Bob Martin, one of the team that is set to publish new evidence challenging the discovery team’s original interpretation, says the Hobbit’s brain is “worryingly” small and contradicts a fundamental law of biology.

“What this law says in simple terms is that if you halve body size, brain size is only reduced by 15%,” he told the BBC’s Horizon programme.

“So if you halve body size you don’t halve brain size, the brain is reduced far less than that.”

A while ago I posted on this subject here.

An attentive reader (Omri Tal) has pointed out an error in my analysis. The point concerns Dawkins’s ‘misunderstanding 10’: that ‘Individuals should tend to inbreed, simply because this brings extra close relatives into the world’. My analysis agreed with Dawkins that bringing close relatives into the world has no evolutionary advantage if these merely replace equal numbers of genes that would be passed on by mating with non-relatives. But I then argued that this would not always be the case:

The crucial point is therefore whether incestuous matings would simply replace outbred ones. Dawkins notes this question, but does not mention the likely asymmetry between males and females: females can usually only have a limited number of offspring, whereas males can have a practically unlimited number. A male who mates with his sister (or daughter) is therefore more likely to gain in the number of offspring than she is, and the balance between gain of inclusive fitness (measured by the increase in genes identical by descent) and loss of physiological fitness will be different for the two sexes. Suppose that a brother can mate with his sister and thereby gain 2 extra offspring for himself, while she gains none for herself (since the mating with her brother displaces an outbred one); a gene causing him to mate with his sister will therefore gain on average 2 x 3/4 copies, [2 x 1/2 copies of his own genes, plus 2 x 1/4 i.b.d. genes from her] whereas a gene causing her to mate with her brother will gain only 2 x 1/4 copies [since she would pass it on to half her offspring anyway, and it is only the possibility of extra copies from her brother that counts]. We might therefore expect males and females to evolve different attitudes towards incest, with females being much more resistant to it.

Omri Tal has pointed out that this overstates the difference between the position of males and females. I somehow overlooked the fact that if a sister mates with her brother, he ‘loses’ the nephews or nieces that his sister would otherwise produce by mating with an unrelated partner. This needs to be taken into account in calculating the effect on his inclusive fitness. The result of doing so is that his net ‘gain’ is only 2 x 1/2 copies, not 2 x 3/4. This is still greater than the ‘gain’ of his sister (2 x 1/4), but the difference is not as great as I suggested.

In more detail…

Assumptions

We assume that a variant gene (allele) predisposes its bearers to mate with their siblings (though they can still mate with non-relatives), whereas an individual who does not bear the gene mates only with non-relatives.

Each mating pair produce 2 offspring.

A male who mates with his sister also produces 2 offspring with unrelated mates, but a female who mates with her brother produces only 2 offspring in total. Her offspring with her brother therefore replace the offspring she would have had with unrelated males.

We consider two siblings who are not themselves inbred. They may each have inherited a copy of the gene from a recent ancestor, but cannot each have inherited 2 copies. (Allowing for inbreeding in the siblings themselves would just complicate matters further.)

With these assumptions, we can calculate the ‘gain’ from inbreeding compared with non-inbreeding. To give a ‘baseline’ position, suppose that for some reason (e.g. distance) the siblings cannot mate with each other, and therefore mate only with non-relatives. In this case a male who has the gene for inbreeding will on average pass on 2 x 1/2 copies to his offspring. His sister has a 1/2 chance of carrying the same gene, and therefore on average passes it on to 2 x 1/2 x 1/2 offspring. The total expected number of copies of the gene passed on is therefore 1.5. We can do the same calculations for a female who carries the gene. Since the situation is symmetrical with that of the male, the result is also 1.5.

Suppose now that a male carrying the gene mates with his sister. By assumption, he has 2 offspring with his sister and 2 offspring with a non-relative. He therefore passes on 2 x 1/2 + 2 x 3/4 = 2.5 copies of the gene to his offspring. But he no longer has the nephews or nieces he would have had if his sister had mated with an unrelated male. His net gain from inbreeding compared to not inbreeding is therefore simply 2.5 – 1.5 = 1.

The position of males and females is no longer symmetrical, so we need to calculate the position of females separately. Suppose a female carrying the gene mates with her brother. She produces 2 inbred offspring with on average 2 x 3/4 copies of the gene. She produces no outbred offspring, but by assumption her brother still produces 2 outbred offspring, with on average 2 x 1/4 copies of the gene, so in total 2 x 3/4 + 2 x 1/4 = 2 copies are passed on. The female’s ‘gain’ from inbreeding is therefore 2 – 1.5 = 0.5 copies. The ratio of male:female gain is therefore only 2:1, not 3:1 as I originally supposed.

Cattle domestication in the Near East was followed by hybridization with aurochs bulls in Europe:

Domesticated cattle were one of the cornerstones of European Neolithisation and are thought to have been introduced to Europe from areas of aurochs domestication in the Near East. This is consistent with mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) data, where a clear separation exists between modern European cattle and ancient specimens of British aurochsen. However, we show that Y chromosome haplotypes of north European cattle breeds are more similar to haplotypes from ancient specimens of European aurochsen, than to contemporary cattle breeds from southern Europe and the Near East….

Related: Humans greedy for pig? (which shows that pig mtDNA tends to exhibit diverse lineage signatures)

A genome-wide survey of structural variation between human and chimpanzee:

Structural changes (deletions, insertions, and inversions) between human and chimpanzee genomes have likely had a significant impact on lineage-specific evolution because of their potential for dramatic and irreversible mutation…The events are distributed throughout the genome on all chromosomes but are highly correlated with sites of segmental duplication in human and chimpanzee. These structural variants encompass at least 24 Mb of DNA and overlap with >245 genes. Seventeen of these genes contain exons missing in the chimpanzee genomic sequence and also show a significant reduction in gene expression in chimpanzee. Compared with the pioneering work of Yunis, Prakash, Dutrillaux, and Lejeune, this analysis expands the number of potential rearrangements between chimpanzees and humans 50-fold. Furthermore, this work prioritizes regions for further finishing in the chimpanzee genome and provides a resource for interrogating functional differences between humans and chimpanzees.

Related: Human evolution book and the chimp genome, Regional patterns of gene expression in human and chimpanzee brains.

I notice that a fair # of visitors have .edu addresses, but I never noted which ones were the most popular, but here are the top colleges sending traffic to GNXP from sitemeter:

#1 University of Washington
#2 Indiana University
#3 George Mason University
#4 Hofstra University
#5 Georgetown University

I have occasionally discussed the subject of long-term increases in average height, so I was interested to see an article in today’s London Times, here. (Link may expire after a week for non-subscribers.) The drift of it is that average adult height in Britain, as measured from skeletal remains, has not changed very much since Neolithic times. Contrary to popular assumption, people in the Middle Ages were not much shorter than today. There has been a small increase (an inch or so) in recent decades due to better nutrition, but it’s not such a big deal.

I think this may somewhat underestimate the increase since the 19th century. Most sources put this at at least a couple of inches. There in some evidence that average height fell in industrial areas during the harshest period of the Industrial Revolution, before rising again from the late 19th century onwards, so the increase since medieval times may indeed only be an inch or so.

While on the subject of press reports, I can’t resist repeating the classic headline from Sunday’s über-tabloid, The News of the World: ‘Cocaine Kate’s 3-in-Bed Lesbian Orgy’. (The ‘Kate’ is Kate Moss, in case you hadn’t guessed.) Nothing to do with GNXP, but it’s a dream come true!

A short article in the Guardian asks Are women as funny as men? (Purposefully funny, that is….)

Well, judging by Robert Provine’s (Laughter: A Scientific Investigation) research, women certainly seem to laugh more at men’s jokes than vice versa — in 1200 cases, “females laughed 126% more than their male counterparts, meaning that women tend to do the most laughing while males tend to do the most laugh-getting.”

Men seem to be the main instigators of humor across cultures, which begins in early childhood. Think back to your high school class clown — most likely he was a male….

Given the differences in male and female laugh patterns, is laughter a factor in meeting, matching and mating? I sought an answer in the human marketplace of newspaper personal ads. In 3,745 ads placed on April 28, 1996 in eight papers from the Baltimore Sun to the San Diego Union-Tribune, females were 62% more likely to mention laughter in their ads, and women were more likely to seek out a “sense of humor” while men were more likely to offer it. Clearly, women seek men who make them laugh, and men are eager to comply with this request.

Sounds like sexual selection for an indicator of intelligence to me. I mean, you have to be smart to tell clever jokes, right? (Of course, you have to be smart enough to get the jokes, too….)

The good folks at the LaughLab took a look at “joke complexity” and the brain:

We also asked people who took part in LaughLab to answer questions that involve making various estimates, such as: How many words are there on one page of a typical paperback novel?

A) Under 500
B) 500 – 600
C) 600 – 700
D) 700 – 800
E) Over 800

Research suggests that people who are good at this type of question (the correct answer is under 500) tend to have good frontal lobe activation, whilst people who make incorrect estimates do not. Interestingly, people who tended to answer this question correctly tended to prefer relatively complex jokes, such as…

A scientist and a philosopher were being chased by a hungry lion. The scientist made some quick calculations, he said “its no good trying to outrun it, its catching up”. The philosopher kept a little ahead and replied ” I am not trying to outrun the lion, I am trying to out run you”!

Whereas people who answered incorrectly, tended to like more straightforward jokes, such as…

Which day of the week do fish hate?…….
Fry-Day.

In other words, the more intelligent you are — or, at least, the more active your frontal lobe — the more complex jokes you’re likely (and able) to enjoy. And, it seems that women are looking for men who are funny (not surprising as this probably indicates intelligence) — and men are looking for women who think they (the men) are funny:

When Karl Grammar and Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt studied spontaneous conversations between mixed-sex pairs of young German adults meeting for the first time, they noted that the more a woman laughed aloud during these encounters, the greater her self-reported interest in the man she was talking to. In the same vein, men were more interested in women who laughed heartily in their presence. The personal ads and the German study complement an observation from my field studies: The laughter of the female, not the male, is the critical index of a healthy relationship.

By the way, the LaughLab folks also found differences between nations in the types of jokes that they found funny:

People from The Republic of Ireland, the UK, Australia and New Zealand expressed a strong preference for jokes involving word plays, such as:

Patient: “Doctor, I’ve got a strawberry stuck up my bum.”
Doctor: “I’ve got some cream for that.

Americans and Canadians much preferred gags where there was a sense of superiority – either because a person looked stupid, or was made to look stupid by another person, such as:

Texan: “Where are you from?”
Harvard grad: “I come from a place where we do not end our sentences with prepositions.”
Texan: “Okay – where are you from, jackass?”

Finally, many European countries, such as France, Denmark and Belgium, liked jokes that were somewhat surreal, such as:

An Alsatian went to a telegram office, took out a blank form and wrote: “Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof.”
The clerk examined the paper and politely told the dog: “There are only nine words here. You could send another ‘Woof’ for the same price.”
“But,” the dog replied, “that would make no sense at all.”

These European countries also enjoyed jokes that involved making light of topics that often make us feel anxious, such as death, illness, and marriage. For example:

A patient says: “Doctor, last night I made a Freudian slip, I was having dinner with my mother-in-law and wanted to say: “Could you please pass the butter.” But instead I said: “You silly cow, you have completely ruined my life”.

Interestingly, Germany was the exception. Germans did not express a strong preference for any type of joke – this may well explain why they came first in our league table of funniness – they do not have any strong preferences and so tend to find a wide spectrum of jokes funny.

Dr Richard Wiseman commented “These results are really interesting – it suggests that people from different parts of the world have fundamentally different senses of humour.“

Here are the top jokes in different countries according to the Laugh Lab.

And, for the record, my favorite (repeatable) joke:

A philosopher, a physicist and a mathematician were travelling through Scotland when they saw a black sheep through the window of the train.
“Aha,” says the philosopher, “I see that Scottish sheep are black.”
“Hmm,” says the physicist, “You mean that some Scottish sheep are black.”
“No,” says the mathematician, “All we know is that there is at least one sheep in Scotland, and that at least one side of that one sheep is black.”

🙂

John has an interesting post up which reviews data that certain high latitude mtDNA lineages might confer a functional advantage via reduced metabolic overhead and greater longevity. Of course, as John notes, not only does this have great relevance for the deep-time history of our species, it is going to be a serious issue for the possibility of future paperback editions of The Seven Daughters of Eve or The Real Eve (since they assume neutrality for mtDNA, ergo, it gives us an unbiased phylogenetic map).