Will have to listen to the debate clips when I get home from work this evening to have an informed opnion or thought on the debate.

Did Richardson not join in the NPR goodness?

Nope, no Bill. Sorry I didn't mention it. I could channel him for an answer if you like. Something like...

"The thing I don't understand is why the only candidate with executive experience isn't getting more attention in this race!"

Richardson was attending the funeral of a Korean War soldier whose remains he helped bring back from North Korea earlier this year.

I'm not a fan of his but as excuses go this one is about as respectable as they get, IMHO.

I missed the first half of the debate and so I don't know what, if any, were the responses by the other candidates to why Richardson wasn't attending. But I do hope they were respectful and graceous about why he chose the funeral over political campaigning. If not then I'd like to know who wasn't so I can better understand who I don't want to be my next president.

UPO, I think you mistake the policy solution for the implementation. Single payer healthcare is an easy policy answer; getting it accomplished less so. Convincing other countries we're not half-wit cowboys to be feared isn't an easy task. Nor is addressing global warming even if, as you seem to think, the science is a sure thing (like Obama, I fear it will be worse than we expected).

Care to identify what populist demagoguery the Dems are up to? Real lefty populism embraces protectionism, the consolidation of power with the state and people, and the rejection of international markets. So far as I can tell, the only hint of leftism among this group is a reluctance to join in free trade agreements that gut labor and environmental standards and weaken labor at home. If that's what you think "demagoguery" amounts to, I hope you get it.

Petrichor, I didn't write Gravel's comment down because he's a comedy candidate. Sure, he was a senator back when I was one (leaving office when Reagan arrived), but he hasn't bothered to raise any money or hire any staff. He shouldn't even have been invited--if you want people to take you seriously, you have to take your candidacy seriously.

I don't think I can agree about Gravel being a comedy candidate. He has certainly eschewed the conventional wisdom on how a serious campaign ought to be run, and as a result doesn't appear to have the proverbial snowball's chance in hades of winning. But he has consistently given serious answers to serious questions at every opportunity.

I don't believe that Gravel is making a serious bid for the Presidency. But neither do I believe that comedy is what he's about. I think he's deadly earnest about what he's trying to do.

Foolish perhaps, but admirable IMHO.

"Sure, he was a senator back when I was one"

You were a Senator? Wow!

:)

Guess Jeff makes Obama a piker in the youthful ambition department.

Jeff, thanks for your excellently concise reply to Urban Planning Ostentator's nonsense.

Interesting that no one said immigration reform -- though I guess that was one of the three main topics?

They're bad politicians, not criminals. Bush and Cheney are best forgotten, after most of their policies are reversed or discarded. I can see why Kucinich is a favorite of the loony left.

Loony left, personal responsibility crowd, call it what you will.

Starting a war against another country which results in the deaths of tens of thousands -- if not hundreds of thousands -- of people and results in an average debt of more then $3,000 to each and every American goes a little bit beyond the range of "bad politician". That's negligence and incompetence if it was done because they were too stupid to know better and it's willful criminality if it was done on the basis of intentional deceit. In either case, they're potential war criminals under international law, just as Saddam Hussein was a war criminal for his invasion of Kuwait.

If GOP presidents could stop being such failures, maybe they could get through one administration without a bunch of their people going to jail.

"Sure, he was a senator back when I was one"

You were a Senator? Wow!

Yes, and that makes me damned old as well as obscure. (One year old, to clarify unnecessarily.)

educational system that can train (or retrain) workers to do "quantum mechanics," and other skills in demand

UPO, you know damned well that most of 'em will never get past Schoedinger's Cat.

Now if we could school them all in Chaos Theory, and debunk the concept of calling "modern economics" a discipline or a science, we could relegate it to the status of a game, which is what it really is;

We could have an honest conversation about the cost of goods production that factored in "costs of production" such as Trillion Dollar War efforts, the global pollution inherent in transporting Barbie Dolls from China to Des Moines, and so on.

Maybe in such an intellectually honest world, the boys at the shop might look more competitive versus the Starving Bangladeshis.

Orbit Planning Uberlord, I think you actually know that "efficiency" is not an absolute phenomenon, but, like relevance, to be spoken of properly must refer to "efficiency to some end." Generally speaking, efficiency to one end tends to have a trade-off in inefficiency to another. You know, like tanks vs. subcompact cars on military effectiveness vs. gas mileage.

For the sake of the argument let me posit something that I don't exactly believe, but is o.k. for a heuristic.

Let's say that lightly regulated markets tend in the long run to to be efficient at maximizing the accumulation of wealth in the system (completely unregulated ones become chaotic, producing phenomena like the murderous "taxi wars" in southern Africa in the early 1990s or the savagely harsh business cycles characterized by repeated depressions between 1830 and 1940). Now, is it therefore true that they are also efficient at producing the best distribution of that wealth? Well, that depends on what you think the purposes of economies and societies are, doesn't it? It will approximate the best distribution for a renewed cycle of efficient total accumulation. But it will not be the best distribution if say we want efficiency in health promotion, or resource conservation, or providing living wages to working people, or decent working conditions, or any number of things. If you actually are an urban planner I suppose you know that.

Now, you and I may disagree as to what efficiencies we seek, and might have a reasonable debate about that.

But if you start of with an aspersion on my motives ipso facto of my happening to disagree, we really can't have a reasonable discussion. And accusing everyone who questions the gospel of free trade in any way of being a "demagogue" is nothing but a motives attack, which indicates unwillingness to talk about actual substance. And just laying down fiat pronouncements isn't actual argument.

Here's the thing. I wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on a little country in southern Africa called Swaziland, population considerably less than metro Portland, where I lived in 1988 and 1989. In the two decades since I was there, Swaziland has acquired the unhappy distinction of having the highest HIV/AIDS prevalence of any country in the world. As you likely know, the global HIV/AIDS crisis is heavily concentrated in Africa.

And there's this huge, tremendous, vicious paradox about that. Because if you look at the overall life expectancy stats for Africa, and any number of other indicators of social well being, economic development and so on since 1945, what you see is that they went up considerably in the late colonial period (1945-early 1960s, except in the south), and then rose much more rapidly from the independence era until the early 1980s. Africans of course had all sorts of huge problems during that period, some of their own making, some due to being grass trampled by the Cold War elephants.

Toward the end of that period, the improvements started to flatten out. There were large debt problems, that had arisen for a variety of causes, many indigenous, many exogenous. A new regime came in at the IMF and World Bank as well as in the Reagan administration, and they imposed highly simplistic "free market" conditionalities on rolling over the debt. Among those conditionalities were ones that for the last 10 or 12 years the World Bank has recognized as being BAD mistakes, to wit, requirements that African countries massively cut education and health budgets.

So, in a horrific coincidence, as the HIV/AIDS epidemic was ramping up in the 1980s, western free market ideologues were forcing the dismantling public health infrastructures across Africa. And guess what? Prevention and treatment of HIV, AIDS, TB, malaria and so on require such infrastructure, and lack of it is now seen to be a major obstacle not only to repsonding to the health crises but to economic development itself, by the Bank and any number of quite orthodox economic analysts, using a human capital perspective.

So you can adopt whatever high and mighty know-it-all tone you want, it still won't change the fact that brainless pro-market ideology has played a major role in the producing Africa's protracted health crises. Acknowledging that truth doesn't make me a demagogue, but if you refuse to acknowledge that markets, and even more market ideologies used to ends often rather different, can be hugely destructive, and that the discussion has to start with aims and not with technocratic assumptions about methods, it does make you an ideologue.

The fact of the matter that knee-jerk market ideology is JUST AS STUPID as any other reflexive ideology -- and is just as much an ideology.

UPO, now that I've got that off my chest, let me also ask you something at lower volume.

You are not, unless memory misserves me, as it sometimes does, one of the climate Pangloss's of this blog, who argue that everything's for the best in this best of all possible energy regimes.

Assuming that there are some real issues there, and without plumping for some sort of autarky, isn't there a real problem about the endless expansion of trade on a global scale, that's going to run up against various kinds of ecological limits? Is it genuinely "more efficient" to have all kinds of stuff made at great distances and moved at high costs, monetary and otherwise?

Certainly it may be cost-efficient if a very narrow and short-term perspective for importer/marketer companies here. Certainly it may be profit-efficient for them in the same perspective. But a great deal of that "efficiency" is illusory. It arises because an inefficiently structured market allows the externalization of costs onto the commons, and thus misprices the goods we buy. China is an attractive place to relocate and contract out production because it permits such cost evasions and mispricings to a degree not permitted here.