Good Reasons for "Believing" in God - Dan Dennett, AAI 2007

Dan Dennett's talk at the AAI 2007 Conference in Washington, D.C. He is presented with the 2007 Richard Dawkins award at the introduction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvJZQwy9dvE

Study Sheds New Light on Extinction of Dinosaurs

Jul 28, 2014 by Sci-News.com

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According to a study published in the journal Biological Reviews, non-avian dinosaurs might have survived the impact of a large bolide about 66 million years ago if it had happened a few million years earlier or later.

This image shows two individuals of Qianzhousaurus sinensis and a small feathered dinosaur called Nankangia. Image credit: Chuang Zhao.

“There has long been intense scientific debate about the cause of the dinosaur extinction,” said Dr Richard Butler from the University of Birmingham, who is a co-author on the study.
“Although our research suggests that dinosaur communities were particularly vulnerable at the time the asteroid hit, there is nothing to suggest that dinosaurs were doomed to extinction. Without that asteroid, the dinosaurs would probably still be here, and we very probably would not.”
“The dinosaurs were victims of colossal bad luck,” added Dr Steve Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh, the lead author on the study.
“Not only did a giant asteroid strike, but it happened at the worst possible time, when their ecosystems were vulnerable. Our new findings help clarify one of the enduring mysteries of science.”
Dr Brusatte and his colleagues studied an updated catalogue of dinosaur fossils, mostly from North America, to create a picture of how dinosaurs changed over the few million years before the asteroid hit.
The team found that in the few million years before a large bolide (comet or asteroid) struck what is now Mexico, Earth was experiencing environmental upheaval. This included extensive volcanic activity, changing sea levels and varying temperatures.
At this time, the dinosaurs’ food chain was weakened by a lack of diversity among the large herbivorous dinosaurs on which others preyed. This was probably because of changes in the environment and climate.
This created a perfect storm of events in which non-avian dinosaurs were vulnerable and unlikely to survive the aftermath of the asteroid strike.
As food chains collapsed, this would have wiped out the dinosaur kingdom one species after another.
The only dinosaurs to survive were those who could fly, which evolved to become the birds of today.
The scientists said if the asteroid had struck a few million years earlier, when the range of dinosaur species was more diverse and food chains were more robust, or later, when new species had time to evolve, then they very likely would have survived.
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Stephen L. Brusatte et al. The extinction of the dinosaurs. Biological Reviews, published online July 28, 2014; doi: 10.1111/brv.12128

Reading Climate Change in the Leaves

An ecologist records nature's color signals to understand the feedback between plants and a changing climate.

By Josie Garthwaite|Tuesday, May 27, 2014

 

Andrew Richardson installs instruments 115 feet up in the Harvard Forest. 

Courtesy Donald Aubrecht

A silver station wagon loaded with climbing gear, computers, electrical wiring and a few scientists from Harvard University stops near a stand of pine and oak trees in the Harvard Forest, about 70 miles west of campus. Physiological ecologist Andrew Richardson, leader of this expedition, slips from the driver’s seat and grabs gear to ascend a metal tower among the trees. Its peak affords
Richardson a clear view of his living laboratory: the forest canopy.

Above the treetops, he checks a cluster of instruments that analyze the lush canopy as a collection of numbers: the amount of carbon being inhaled from the atmosphere, the concentration of water vapor in the air and the precise mix of hues the leaves exhibit.

Different pigments serve different functions: Green chlorophyll, which dominates during the growing season, absorbs light energy for photosynthesis, the conversion of carbon and water to sugar. In the shortening days of autumn, red anthocyanins and yellow carotenoids take over to help protect leaves against light damage.

To document this subtle seasonal color change, a webcam atop the tower snaps high-resolution images of the canopy every 30 minutes from dawn to dusk and uploads them to an online database.
During the past decade, Richardson has spearheaded an effort to install more than 80 such cameras at sites across North America, from the arctic tundra near northern Alaska’s Toolik Lake to the tropical grasslands surrounding Hawaii’s towering Mauna Kea. 

This PhenoCam Network amasses thousands of photos per day. Over time, Richardson hopes the resulting trove of color data will help scientists understand — and better predict — how ecosystems like the Harvard Forest respond to changes in the climate. 

Fall colors in the Harvard Forest on any given day (Oct. 9 in this case) vary from year to year, depending on temperature and rainfall.

Courtesy of Andrew Richardson/PhenoCam Network (3)

A Pulsating Palette

Over the course of millennia, white snow cover, vibrant autumn foliage and bright bursts of green have punctuated the rhythmic cycles of winter frosts, spring showers and long, warm summer days. Animals have evolved to be in sync with seasonal change: They bring young into the world just as nutritious green sprouts emerge in spring, and molt to blend in with winter whites and summer green-browns. It’s an intricate dance scientists refer to as phenology.

Richardson’s efforts to decipher this color code began in the 1990s, shortly after his return from an eight-month trek in Canada’s Yukon Territory. “It was the vegetation, the transition from forest to tundra and how the colors changed through the seasons that really captivated me,” he recalls.
Richardson had recently abandoned pursuit of a Ph.D. in economics at MIT and found himself in awe of nature’s colorful clockwork — so much so that he redirected his studies. 

Richardson enrolled in Yale University’s forestry program in 1996 and a few years later threw himself into a project lopping off balsam fir and red spruce branches in the White Mountains. He measured how much light the needles reflected in different wavelengths. This is an indicator of stress and “a very precise way of measuring color,” he explains.

Richardson showed that needles in the harsh, resource-poor high altitudes invested in stress-protection pigments to cope with wind, cold and blazing sun. 

Reading the Leaves

“Phenology is really sensitive to weather,” Richardson explains. “If it’s a cold spring, leaves will come out later. If it’s a warm spring, that will happen earlier.” 

Forests in the United States absorb and store more than 750 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, or more than 10 percent of national carbon emissions. Warmer temperatures triggering earlier green sprouts could produce a longer growing season in some places and more photosynthesis — and thus more carbon uptake. But early growth followed by frost or drought could damage fragile sprouts and reduce the amount of carbon that certain plants are able to absorb. Some species also respond to warming by fast-forwarding through their life cycles, narrowing the window for photosynthesis and carbon uptake.

Nature’s color palette already shows effects of climate change. Along the East Coast, where the “green wave” of spring leaves sprouting from maples, oaks and poplars historically has rolled from Miami to Maine in 75 days, atmospheric scientists with Princeton University predict the wave could take just 59 days by the end of the century. In parts of New England, fall colors arrive a few days later than they did 20 years ago, and the reds are more muted as autumn temperatures in the region warm.

But scientists don’t know what new rhythms will arise across different regions  — whether bursts of green will be brighter but shorter-lasting, for example, or more muted but longer-lasting. Nor do they know what such changes mean for the food web; for life-cycle events like migration, breeding and nesting; for the amount of moisture that trees will suck from the soil; or for the amount of carbon dioxide stored by plants.

That’s what Richardson hopes to tease out. “As we build up a big archive — warm years, cold years, wet years and dry years — we can use the data to develop models of how weather and phenology are related,” he says. These models can then be mapped against climate forecasts to predict how phenology could shift in the future, painting a picture of landscapes in a world of warmer temperatures, altered precipitation and humidity, and changes in cloud cover. “We want to use phenology as a biological indicator of the impacts of climate change on ecosystems,” Richardson says.

Richardson climbs a tower in New Hampshire’s White Mountains to repair a wireless network.

Courtesy Mariah Carbone

Cameras Rolling

Webcams offer a cheap way to monitor foliage at a local scale across a broad geographic range. “These pictures give you this permanent record,” Richardson says. “I can see what it was like on any day. I can go back to other years and compare, and tell you how things are different between those two years.” 

Scientists have used satellite-mounted sensors to indirectly measure vegetative growth around the globe for decades. But cloud cover and other atmospheric clutter often muddle the data. A study published in Nature in February suggests that previous models based on satellite data have overestimated greenness during dry seasons in the Amazon rainforest. Shadows, which shorten over the course of the tropical dry season, produce an optical illusion: Leaves reflect more light in the infrared spectrum, even as their actual greenness declines. 

Researchers need ground-level measurements like those of the PhenoCam Network to validate
remotely gathered information and refine the algorithms used to evaluate it. Richardson’s work complements field observations by researchers like Harvard ecologist John O’Keefe, who visited the same trees in the Harvard Forest every few days for more than 20 years, starting in the 1990s, to track the opening of buds in springtime and autumn leaf coloration. Last year Richardson’s team analyzed O’Keefe’s historic data set and found that most local tree species will likely display fall colors for longer durations and at higher intensity in coming years.

A decade and a half after Richardson’s shift to ecology, he has come to see leaf color the way an economist might view a financial statement. “It tells you a lot about the physiology of the leaf,” he says. 

Eighty-two feet up the tower, Richardson emerges above the dark understory of the Harvard Forest to feel a flush of sunlight and a flick of breeze on his face. “The views from the top are fantastic,” he says, “and this motivates a lot of what I do.” His methodical quest to decode the phenological rainbow has a way of propelling itself forward. As Aldo Leopold, who doggedly recorded seasonal signposts in Wisconsin in the 1930s and ’40s, once wrote: “Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search, and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events.”

[This article originally appeared in print as "Cracking the Climate Color Code."]

Early Cretaceous Bloodsucking Bugs Found in China

July 26, 2014 | by Janet Fang

Photo credit: Flexicorpus acutirostratus / Y. Yao et al., Current Biology 2014

       

Fossilized blood-feeding bugs have been discovered in early Cretaceous sediments in China. That means at least one lineage of bloodsuckers was around 30 million years earlier than we thought. They may have even fed from dinosaurs. According to the study published in Current Biology this week, the fossils represent two new species, and they’re the earliest evidence of blood-feeding “true bugs.”

True bugs (order Hemiptera) have a mouthpart designed for sucking fluids, called the proboscis. But unlike proboscis-wielding butterflies or honeybees, true bugs can’t roll up their mouthparts. Modern true bugs include nasty bed bugs. As annoying and ubiquitous as they seem, blood-feeders (also called hematophages) are relatively uncommon among modern insects. They’re mostly found in just four orders: lice, fleas, true flies (including mosquitoes), and true bugs. The latter three have been documented prior to the Cenozoic.

It’s been hard to tell hematophages apart from their non-blood-feeding relatives in the patchy insect fossil record. Until now, only one hematophagous true bug, Quasicimex eilapinastes, has been described, from mid-Cretaceous amber in Myanmar, about 100 million years ago.
Working in the early Cretaceous Yixian Formation of Northeastern China, a team led by Yunzhi Yao and Dong Ren of Capital Normal University in Beijing studied nearly 400 insects. In seven true bug specimens, they looked specifically for geochemical signals of iron, which indicates blood meals. By combining those findings with results with morphological and taphonomic (fossilization) data, the team placed three of the bloodsuckers into two new genera within a new family, Torirostratidae.

The other fossilized true bugs belonged to phytophagous (plant eating) families or predaceous families, which include assassin bugs who would liquefy the insides of their prey, before drinking them. Their iron concentrations were much lower.

They named one of the new true bugs Flexicorpus acutirostratus. That’s Latin “flexi” for “soft” and “corpus” for “body.” The species name is taken from Latin “acuti” for “sharp” and “rostratus” for “beaked.” It's less than 10 millimeters long, and here are some cool pictures:

They’re naming the other one, which is over 12 millimeters long, Torirostratus pilosus. That’s Latin “torosus” for “bulges” and “rostratus” for “beaked” (again). The species name is comes from Latin “pilosus,” which refers to its dense setae (stiff bristles).

One of the bugs appears to have died immediately following a blood meal, which may have been taken from a mammal, bird, or dinosaur, though the researchers can’t be sure. (Insert Jurassic Park joke here, bonus points for True Blood.)

Images: Y. Yao et al., Current Biology 2014

Read more at http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/early-cretaceous-bloodsucking-bugs-found-china#mzQvUAVVY8ffihKI.99

Refreshing Our Hearts -- With Thich Nhat Hanh

Published on Mar 26, 2014

Enjoy this video stream from our friend Thich Nhat Hanh which we originally broadcast live in October of 2013, from the Paramount Theater in Oakland, CA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC8FBdWwejk

Cleaning Up Polluting Mines With Plants--Plants That Then Turn Into Precious Metals

One enterprising scientist thinks we're close to creating a whole new, much greener mining industry.  

Nothing grows here at Walker Ridge. Oaks, pines, and wildflowers stop abruptly at the edges of a huge swath of bare earth. The dead zone--tinged an uneasy shade of green--stretches almost as far as the eye can see in one direction, down a slope that feeds directly into a watershed. Piles of dirt, scraps of rust-eaten metal, and a few crumbling bricks seem the only signs left of what was once a Gold Rush-era mercury mine. They’re not.

Downriver, fish have 20 times more mercury in their flesh than the EPA says is safe for consumption.
Two hours south, mercury concentrations spike in San Francisco Bay during big floods. Geologists and hydrologists estimate that this abandoned mine--and at least 5,200 others like it in the state--will continue to leak poison for the next 10,000 years. With the costs of “remediating” a single polluting mine falling somewhere between $.5 and $7 million, the solution often seems to be to just deal with the mercury and leave the mines as they are.

But what if there were a way to monetize that cleanup, to turn Superfund sites, abandoned mines, and other metal-contaminated dead zones into desirable (and healthier) real estate?

In Dylan Burge’s vision of the Walker Ridge site, mining operations are booming again. Thousands of rows of deeply green, compact plants are thriving in the toxic soil, reaching for sunlight that filters through fabric tarps stretched overhead. Downhill (just below glinting banks of solar panels), metal-contaminated effluent from the old mine is being captured and piped back up to the plants, watering some rows while filling hydroponics for others. The mercury problem is under control, trucks are rolling off the site, and no one’s spending $7 million. In fact, people are making money. That's because, as Burge sees the future possibilities, the world’s first loads of truly “green,” sustainable metals--mostly nickel from this site, plus a little gold--are headed for market.

Burge, 34, is a botany curator at the California Academy of Sciences and an expert in hyperaccumulators--plants that attract and suck up huge quantities of metals by releasing ion-attracting compounds from their roots. Found generally in metal-rich serpentine soils (like the kind most hard rock mines, like Walker Ridge, sit on), each species has protein pathways that seem “tuned” for a particular type of metal. Gold, nickel, copper, zinc, cobalt, aluminum, manganese, even some rare earth elements, they’re are all on the menu.

The idea of “phytomining”--using these plants in commercial mining operations-- isn’t new; mining companies actually funded much of the early research, a wave that gained momentum in the mid-1970s before petering out about 20 years ago. “Things got pretty quiet after that,” says Burge, “but not because phytomining didn’t work. It was because the yields weren’t profitable enough to be interesting. The technology wasn’t there, and the science wasn’t there.” He’s got a two-part plan to fix that.

Burge works with Streptanthus polygaloides, a small, flowering herb native to California that’s also the third most powerful nickel hyperaccumulator in the world, capable of sucking up as much as 2% of its dry bodyweight. In the Walker Ridge hypothetical, these plants are harvested up to six times a year and mixed into a live slurry. Microbes break the slurry down--creating sellable carbon-neutral ethanol as a byproduct--and metal production begins with the material that’s left. During the process, massive amounts of hydrolysis occur, allowing hydrogen to be captured, stored, and converted into electricity that helps power the plant. “And all this could be done right now,” says Burge. “No waiting. All you need is a botanist, an abandoned mine, and a tech startup that’s good at scalable solutions.”

Dylan refers to these mines as “point-source problems” (small sites with huge environmental impact), but monetizing their cleanup by creating a consumer market for sustainable metals could have benefits far beyond safer, healthier local ecosystems. Metals worldwide are cheap not because they’re unlimited or easy to get at, but because we pass on the vast environmental and social costs of mining them to other countries. If American consumers were to start asking where the metal in their devices, cars, and wedding rings come from--and paying for the kind that doesn’t leave destruction in its wake--it could pave the way for a new kind of mining.

Burge is already at work on one key to that future: unraveling the genetic secrets of hyperaccumulators. Last month, he became the first person known to have sequenced the full genome of a hyperaccumulator--of 24 of them, actually--and somewhere in the resulting terabytes of data, he expects to find the gene (or suite of genes) that gives Streptanthus its metal-mining abilities. With that discovery should come the Holy Grail of phytomining: the potential to create larger, more efficient hyperaccumulators.

“If you make it your goal as a scientist to affect the world in your lifetime,” says Burge, “you’re almost guaranteed to fail. But every once in a while,” he adds, “it’s possible to get lucky.”
Profits from a Streptanthus metal harvest will never be big enough to get the commercial mining industry excited about becoming farmers. But splice the gene for hyperaccumulation into something with significant biomass--something like corn, for example--and one of the dirtiest, most dangerous, most destructive industries in the world might start paying attention again.

A guaranteed income for every American would eliminate poverty — and it wouldn't destroy the economy

Updated by Dylan Matthews on July 23, 2014, 12:20 p.m. ET @dylanmatt dylan@vox.com

 

 

Not how an ideal basic income would be distributed. (Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images)   

Eliminating poverty seems like an impossibly utopian goal, but it's actually pretty easy: we can just give people enough money that they're above the poverty line. That idea, known as a basic income, has been around forever, but it's made a comeback in recent years.

And it's a sign of how far it's come that opponents of the idea are beginning to feel the need to make arguments against it. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, in The Week, is the latest to present a case against, and grounds it almost entirely in the findings of a series of experiments on a variant of the basic income known as a "negative income tax" conducted in the 1970s, which he says show the idea is doomed to failure.

Not so fast — the experiments raise valid worries, but they hardly herald doom, and still suggest that a negative income tax could eliminate poverty at a manageable cost.

The 1970s experiments

President Nixon and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who designed his negative income tax plan. (Nixon Foundation) A negative income tax isn't precisely the same thing as a basic income, but it's related: after giving everyone a cash grant, an NIT rapidly taxes it away, such that the vast majority of taxpayers get no money back at all. For example, Richard Nixon, during his first year as president, proposed a negative income tax that would pay around $10,000 in 2014 dollars to a family of four, and then tax it away at a 50 percent rate until families earning above $20,000 or so stopped getting anything at all.

The four experiments Gobry cites — conducted in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Iowa, North Carolina, Seattle, Denver, and Gary, Indiana, with samples totaling about 7,500 people — are, along with a similar experiment done around the same time in Manitoba, the most comprehensive tests to date of negative income taxes. They tried various cash grant sizes (from 50 percent of the poverty line to 148 percent) and phaseout rates (from 30 percent to 75 percent), enabling a more detailed look at how the plan's components interacted with each other.

The studies found that the policy was beneficial to those getting the money, but tended to modestly reduce the number of hours they worked, and the amount they earned. The latter is a potential cost worth weighing against the policy's benefits. But to Gobry, it's definitive proof the plan is defective.
"Millions of people who could work won't, just listing away in socially destructive idleness (with the consequences of this lost productivity reverberating throughout the society in lower growth and, probably, lower employment, in a UBI-enabled vicious cycle)," Gobry concludes.

The problems with concluding too much

The Old Miller School in Gary, Indiana, one of the sites of the negative income tax experiment. (Chris Light/Wikimedia)

Gobry is right that the negative income tax experiments are the best test we have of this policy to date. But "best" does not equal perfect. My concern is that Gobry reads the experiments to be saying more than they are in fact saying, given both flaws and limitations in their methodologies and other conclusions they came to that Gobry failed to mention. Here are a few concerns worth raising.

1. "Worked less" sometimes means "the results were underreported."

This is the big one. Brookings' Gary Burtless, writing up the results, noted that the Gary and Seattle/Denver experiments relied on self-reported earnings information, rather than using official government records. When the findings were cross-referenced with actual earnings data, the labor force effects in Gary disappeared entirely, and the Seattle/Denver ones were diminished considerably.

As Princeton's Orley Ashenfelter noted in a response to Burtless, this throws the entire conclusion that negative income taxes reduce labor supply into jeopardy. "Who is to say whether there would be any labor supply response, further income underreporting, or neither, if an experiment with conventional administrative procedures were implemented?" he asks. "Only an experiment fully informed at the design stage about the possibility for income underreporting, and that tested for its effect, would shed any light on this critical issue. Sadly, the design of none of these experiments was so informed."

2. "Worked less" does not necessarily mean "dropped out of the labor force forever"

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that underreporting doesn't invalidate all these results. That still doesn't mean the experiments are the slam-dunk case against basic income Gobry takes them to be.

For one thing, it's worth differentiating different ways that labor supply can fall. The most obvious way is that people will drop out of the labor force entirely. But as Georgetown philosopher Karl Widerquist, a vocal advocate for a basic income, noted in his write-up of the experiments, researchers didn't find any evidence that happened. "Would a large number of people respond to an NIT by withdrawing entirely from the labor force?" he asked. "The experiments found no evidence of such behavior. Some of the experimenters said that they were unable to find even a single instance of labor-market withdrawal."

So what happened, then? Burtless reported that the apparent decline in labor supply didn't come primarily from a reduction in hours worked either. It's not that people who had previously been working 60 hour weeks waiting tables cut back to 40 hours.

The remaining explanation, once we've ruled out reduced hours and permanent labor force drop-outs as major factors, is longer spells of unemployment. That has obvious costs; unemployment is generally bad for one's well-being. But the key here is that the negative income tax resulted in people choosing to remain unemployed for a longer stint; presumably, this is more pleasant than involuntarily elongated unemployment.

Further, the most obvious interpretation is that people are waiting longer to find a good job match, or are quitting bad jobs in favor of searching for better ones. Those responses have efficiency advantages and, in the long-run, connecting people with more pleasurable and rewarding work should increase well-being, something worth weighing against the well-being cost of increased unemployment.

3. "Worked less" sometimes means "got more education"

Another factor is people withdrawing from the labor force to pursue more education. Stanford's Eric Hanushek, evaluating the non-labor force effects of the experiments, found that "for youth the reduction in labor supply brought about by the negative income tax is almost perfectly offset by increased school attendance."

That's not the only positive education finding. One study looking at the New Jersey experiment found that a negative income tax of mid-range generosity increased odds of completing high school by 25 to 30 percent; a similar analysis of the Seattle-Denver experiments put the number at 11 percent. While the evidence on academic performance was more limited, there was some evidence that children in NIT households did better at standardized tests in lower grades.

4. "Worked less" is sometimes a good thing

Apart from the special case of education, it's worth asking, in general, whether maximizing labor force participation is actually a good thing, or whether there's more to human flourishing than just that. This is not to say that work is unimportant. Gobry notes research suggesting that unemployment comes at a significant well-being cost, and while some of that is probably due to financial stress more than a lack of psychic fulfillment from work, the latter factor is part of the picture.

But especially in cases where people are choosing not to work, it's worth asking whether they're being irrational, and setting themselves up for unhappiness, or whether they've actually identified something besides work that create even more value in their lives. The whole point of Social Security, for instance, is that at some point in one's life having a leisurely retirement is better for well-being than continuing to work. Social Security and private retirement savings almost certainly have a much more negative effect on labor force participation than a negative income tax would, and yet we all, correctly, have decided that's besides the point.

So it's worth considering whether some of the decrease in labor force participation hypothetically caused by a negative income tax would be desirable. What if a household uses the money to quit a part-time job in favor of caring for a chronically ill child? What if they use it to retire a few years early? What if they use it to finance a long vacation between jobs? I don't actually think any of those phenomena are big problems policymakers should be eager to avoid.

5. You can only know so much from short experiments

The final caveat is that extrapolating from short-term, small-scale experiments like these to determine the effect of a national or state-wide policy would have is fraught with peril. The experiments didn't apply to everyone in the municipalities in question; they were targeted at small, low-income subsets of the population. Would the same results hold if everyone were getting the check? You could imagine a permanent plan either having a more positive impact, by triggering macro effects like employers bidding up wages to convince people to stay in the labor market, or a more negative one, by assuring people that staying out of work longer is going to be viable long-term. We don't know which of those would actually occur.

Scaling an idea like this up from pilot to actual program introduces a wide array of confounding factors. When you find big effects, then it's plausible those confounding factors won't be enough to make them go away. But with results as small as the experiments' findings on labor supply (or the findings on education, to be fair), it's likely they'll be overwhelmed by these new complications, and the impact of a national program will look significantly different from what was found at the hyper-local level. As Gobry says, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) like these experiments are among the best tools policymakers have. But what they give us in scientific validity, they lose in scope.

What we should be debating

Lyndon Johnson on his "poverty tour" of Appalachia, pegged to the start of the War on Poverty. (LBJ Presidential Library)

When researchers come to small and somewhat sensitive-to-error conclusions about a policy's effects, the findings become a bit of a Rorschach test, with interpretations reflecting the policy preferences of those doing the interpreting (myself very much included) more than they do the underlying facts.

"The prevalence of small effects opens the way to alternative interpretations of the research findings," Nobel economist Robert Solow, commenting on the results, wrote. "The interpretation adopted will depend a lot on the interpreter's ideological and doctrinal preconceptions and only a little on the detailed experimental results themselves.
But one finding we can rely on, with some degree of confidence, is the conclusion of Burtless and others who have evaluated the negative income tax experiments that a national NIT big enough to eliminate poverty isn't budgetarily unviable.

Widerquist notes that studies estimating the cost of compensating for lost earnings could increase the cost of the program  5 percent (at the low end) or nearly triple it (at the high end). Burtless, who produced the high-end estimate, concluded that a generous plan set to 100 percent of the poverty line would all the same only cost about 1.5 percent of GNP (which is basically the same as GDP where the US is concerned) a year on top of existing welfare programs. That's a rough estimate, especially give how much welfare programs have changed since Burtless was writing — Demos's Matt Bruenig has more current numbers here — but going from the federal government being 21.1 percent of GDP to 22.6 percent or thereabouts is hardly a sea change. And yet that's, roughly, all it would take to eliminate poverty in America.

So here's my takeaway: a negative income tax or basic income of sufficient size would, by definition, eliminate poverty. We still don't know if there'd be much of a cost in terms of people working and earning less. If there is, the effect is almost certainly small enough that a negative income tax can offset the lost earnings and remain affordable. The worst case scenario is that we eliminate poverty but see a modest decline in employment. The best case scenario is we eliminate poverty at even lower cost and don't see much of an effect on employment. That's a gamble I'm willing to take.