Fauxconomist Paul Krugman is at it again, exhorting Americans to "avoid hot water" by acting on "economic and climate policies."  With regards to the economy, Krugman says we're headed for a jobless recovery - as if there could be any such thing - as the economy picks up but the unemployment rate stays high.  Anyone with an ounce of common sense will realize that this simply isn't possible, but it has become the liberals' catch-all excuse for why their economic policies always fail, starting with FDR's failed policies during the Great Depression.  However, Krugman assures us that "this isn't what the economic Cassandras are saying; it's the forecasting consensus."

The forecasting consensus?  Well, isn't that nice?  Let's remember that a year ago, the forecasting consensus was that there might be a minor recession starting in late 2008, lasting a few months.  Well, come to think of it, without massive government panic spending, the recession probably would have been minor, which the forecasters probably couldn't have known.  But that's the point, isn't it?  Forecasters are constrained by what they know about past behavior, trying to find correlations between economic variables that can indicate what consumers and investors will be doing next year, or in two years, or whatever.  But behavior frequently changes, and the variables that control behavior aren't well-understood, to put it mildly, so why should we put too much stock in forecasting vs. sound general economic principles such as balancing the federal budget?

Furthermore, as any good social scientist knows, correlation isn't the same, nor does it imply, causation.  Let me repeat this, because it's important:  correlation isn't the same, nor does it imply, causation.  Two events can be highly correlated, even marching in lockstep, without one event causing the other or vice versa.  One tongue-in-cheek example I heard recently says that as the number of pirates decreased in the 20th century, global warming increased; therefore, pirates must have been preventing global warming.  The fallacy of this statement is obvious.  Although there's a correlation - at least until recent events in the seas off the Horn of Africa - between a reduction in pirates and global warming, they clearly didn't cause the climate to be cool.

And speaking of the climate, forecasting in that discipline works the same way.  Forecasters are constrained to try and find correlations between climatological variables that might indicate what will happen tomorrow or next week, in the case of weather forecasting, or in the next few decades, in the case of climatology.  However, the fact that weather forecasters frequently can't give an accurate reading of what the weather will do tomorrow, let alone next week, tells us they don't understand what these correlations mean, nor do they even probably know what all the relevant variable affecting the climate are or how to measure them.  So why should we put much stock in what climatologists forecast for the end of the century?

To say the climate is changing is to say the sky is blue; the climate is always changing, with average temperatures either increasing or declining, and it has done so since the earth was a ball of hot mud.  Human factors have always had little or nothing to do with it, and there's no evidence that they do now, either.  The only "evidence" is the correlation-driven math models that have found a relationship between the rise in carbon dioxide levels over the last hundred years and a suspected slight rise in the earth's average temperature, but these are only two of a host of possible factors in the suspected warming trend.  The major driver in the Earth's climate is actually solar activity, which isn't well-understood at all, and it's therefore impossible to predict or factor into a climatological model.  Also remember that these same climatologists, 30 or so years ago, thought they detected a slight <em>decline</em> in the Earth's average temperature, which led them to predict "nuclear winter."

In both cases - "nuclear winter" and "global warming" - the prescription was the same:  allow government to have a veto over how the private sector produces its goods and services, a role many liberals see growing ever larger owing to the superior intellects of those "expert" planners - climatologists and economists - whose expertise will help save the average American, and ultimately the average "world" citizen, from himself.  The fact that the prescription is the same -increased government control - in both cases reveals the true agenda of the left:  implement socialism, or at least socialist-style control, over the American economy.  By halting the "excesses" of "rapacious" capitalism, the intellectual elites in government and academia will ultimately be saving the benighted average person from his own greed and self-interest, both ecologically and economically.

You have to wonder if these "elites," including, of course, our own Dr. Krugman, were paying one bit of attention to what happened in Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R. in the post-World War II era.  Nevertheless, put Krugman solidly in the camp of the economic tweakers and planners, those academics who sincerely (apparently) believe that they can use they superior intellects to make the economy - and the climate - behave as they want.  We'll have concrete evidence as early as next year that, at least where the economy is concerned, they're wrong, and that should enable us to accomplish two things.  First, kick the fools who perpetrated this stimulus disaster out of office and replace them with common-sense fiscal conservatives, and second, stop the mad rush to hamstring the economy with laws such as the "cap-and-trade" bill while our competitors such as China and India do no such thing, thereby gaining considerable competitive advantage over us in the world marketplace.  That should finally make Krugman and his fellow left-wingers give it a rest, but I'm not holding my breath for that.