December 08, 2011
Market Failure
One of the perennial pseudo-debates between statists and anti-statists is market failure vs. government failure. Markets do fail, but government intervention is as bad or worse. There is no solution to failure. What! No hope! Consider what the term market failure means. It is not just an outcome that statists find to be contrary to their desires and illusions. In the technical literature a market failure refers to any situation in which a market does not produce the “Pareto-optimal, general equilibrium” outcome. Standard neoclassical theory argues that “perfectly competitive” markets will produce outcomes in which resources are allocated to their highest valued uses and no one person can be made better off without making at least one other person worse off. In general equilibrium, prices of all goods are exactly equal to the marginal cost of producing them and all households maximize their utility. In addition, all firms are profit maximizing, but the level of real profits earned is...
October 29, 2011
Woopocalypse
One of the subjects that I've given some attention is the behavior of humans in threatening situations. When faced with danger the fashionable poses fall away and character is revealed, but also decisions can be irrational. One theory about such irrational behavior is that it enhances survival: when there are no good choices then trying what seems to be a bad choice sometimes works. It's better to jump off the cliff and hope to survive than to hold your ground facing certain death. There's an example in pop culture of such a situation. With that same petty and narcissistic fixation that we can control everything in our own personal destiny—and for no other ends than our own betterment—Jobs, we read, first attempted to treat his cancer with mumbo-jumbo fruit juice diets and psychic spiritualism, then by ultrascientifically trying to become his own medical authority, spending $100,000 to have his DNA sequenced, acting altogether as if no one had ever...
October 28, 2011
Crime Culture
Consider this example of the notion from the previous post that we have a corrupt culture. Gaming the public pension system for inflated retirement funds is bad enough; scamming the public pension system by pretending to have permanent disabilities is much more disgusting. As the NYT reports: The United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, said, ‘Employees [of the Long Island Railroad], in many cases, after claiming to be too disabled to stand, sit, walk or climb steps, retired to lives of regular golf, tennis, biking and aerobics’… A sampling of hundreds of cases approved by two doctors showed that $121 million had been paid to workers whose disabilities were either fabricated or exaggerated, according to court papers, though the total was quite likely more. It was unclear if officials would try to stop the payouts, or could even legally do so, before the disbursements hit $1 billion. This kind of thing doesn't happen unless all of the principals...
October 26, 2011
Pretending
Though likened to the tea people by hopefuls, the occupiers are far less substantial. They get more press, and more fawning support from the clerisy, but there's no there there as yet. It's merely a performance of an old, dimly remembered or poorly understood ritual from decades ago, but without the energy or intellect. The best analogy I've heard is to civil war reenactment troupes, except that the civil war reenactors are more self aware. There are also reports of paid performers and part time occupiers who pitch a tent but don't sleep in them, preferring more comfortable quarters at night. It's fake, but that's good enough for the press and the clerisy. So far so boring and meaningless, but that's a good thing. What is a bit more interesting are the various ideological camps who want to claim them by voicing a narrative of some sort that does not even remotely describe what is happening but could perhaps...
October 04, 2011
Intellect Again
Intellectuals are always whining that they get no respect. There's truth in that, and it's worth thinking about. The most depressing spectacle on the political landscape right now (besides a potential second term for Barack Obama) is the party of Lincoln entertaining the presidential ambitions of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann—women with better hairdos than heads. One needn’t be a GOP-hater like Paul Krugman or Maureen Dowd to be dismayed by the growing anti-intellectualism of the party. Even David Brooks, a conservative commentator, has observed that Republican disdain for liberal intellectuals has morphed into a disdain for all intellectuals. But modern intellectuals, having abandoned honest inquiry for unabashed activism, must themselves bear some blame for the backlash. ... every time really smart people run the country, things go spectacularly wrong. The team of the “best and brightest” that Lyndon Johnson inherited from John F. Kennedy embroiled America in an ignominy like Vietnam—not to mention Medicare, a fiscal quagmire that,...
October 01, 2011
Uncollege
In the earlier post Crowdcast I said: I was in that group of people who - in the day - were advised by our trusted professors that if we were after education then the university was not the place to be. Several other posts have linked to commentary on the industrial education system and the inferior products that they produce as well as the ever increasing costs. There seems to be a growing backlash....
September 30, 2011
Moral Goofiness
I repost a Herbert Gintis book review here: This review is from: Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (Revised Edition) (Paperback) The background for this book is the recent resurgence of American conservatism, and more specifically, the mood of the country that led to widespread support for President Bush's invasion of Iraq. The general feeling among American liberals in the latter part of the first decade of this century was that liberalism was in retreat, and liberal thinkers were racing around trying to find some anchor point for a resurgence. Most moved towards increasing stress on bottom line distributional issues, in particular advocating a redistribution of wealth from the upper to the middle classes. Others, like myself, who had little but contempt for such short-sighted money-grubbing, were left alienated from liberal politics, advocating some alternative moral vision. My alternative vision was to recognize the stunning success of liberalism in the post-world war II period, which saw Medicare, Medicaid,...
September 25, 2011
Dog Packs
While skimming press releases about recent research findings I briefly noted, and skipped past, a study with the headline claim that sex segregated schooling does not improve outcomes but that it does increase gender stereotyping. It wasn't interesting to me since that's pretty much been the litany for some years though it was contrary to my observations. My experience is such a small slice of society that it is entirely possible that it is not general or representative of the whole. It came back to mind when I read this PR: Men and women cooperate equally for the common good Stereotypes suggest women are more cooperative than men, but an analysis of 50 years of research shows that men are equally cooperative, particularly in situations involving a dilemma that pits the interests of an individual against the interests of a group. Additionally, men cooperate better with other men than women cooperate with each other, according to the research, published...
August 22, 2011
Intellectual Poverty
One of the talking points circulating among the aging, disillusioned and depressed culture warriors is that there are no more big ideas. Ideas just aren’t what they used to be. Once upon a time, they could ignite fires of debate, stimulate other thoughts, incite revolutions and fundamentally change the ways we look at and think about the world. They could penetrate the general culture and make celebrities out of thinkers — notably Albert Einstein, but also Reinhold Niebuhr, Daniel Bell, Betty Friedan, Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, to name a few. The ideas themselves could even be made famous: for instance, for “the end of ideology,” “the medium is the message,” “the feminine mystique,” “the Big Bang theory,” “the end of history.” A big idea could capture the cover of Time — “Is God Dead?” — and intellectuals like Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal would even occasionally be invited to the couches of late-night...
August 19, 2011
Social Signals
From observation and experience it has long been my view that conformists could not be trusted. They seemed to want to be seen as being socialized, though they are not. I'd much rather have a non-conformist contrarian at my back since they are reliably cooperative, not just for appearances sake. It may not be just my view. The study, published in the August issue of the journal Personality and Individual Differences, shows that people who do not conform are most likely to work together for the greater good, while conforming to social norms can actually make people less likely to co-operate – a finding which surprised the researchers and could have implications in the workplace for team design and operations management. Psychologist Dr Piers Fleming and economist Prof Daniel Zizzo, of the Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science at UEA, conducted an experiment in which they first measured participants' conformity levels and then let them play a game...
August 09, 2011
Pencil Necks
The weakling theory of Libertarianism. Many libertarians seem to feel they have discharged most of their info moral obligations if there is a reasonable interpretation of their words which has them telling no clear lies. As someone who spend most of my early economist years specializing in the economics of info, this seems spectacularly inadequate. I wonder if, as kids, libertarians tended to be witty weaklings – losing most fair physical fights, but easily winning most fair verbal sparring. Perhaps such kids prefer everyone to embrace the slogan “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me,” because then the people they hurt via words can’t complain, because they can’t even admit they were hurt. Now as a matter of practice, libertarians and I tend to agree in many policy disputes. Their support of property and contract often promotes economically efficient outcomes. And for that, I salute them. I even say sometimes that I “lean...
August 02, 2011
Pennies and Pounds
I find the "in for a penny, in for a pound" argument to be weak at best, and often simply false. The saying came about at a time when the penalty for owing or stealing a penny was the same as that for a pound, but that is seldom the case. When the penalties vary with the magnitude of the infraction it makes sense to limit the infraction. This is not well understood it seems. I do not see why my aside about capitalism and state power should be the least bit controversial. Since my libertarian friends seem more comfortable with deduction from first principles than empirical observation, let's try it this way. Capitalism needs private property. Since there will be disputes about property, there must be an institution for settling those disputes effectively. That institution is the state. ... Capitalism thus presumes a state which decides who owns what, and is (almost) unquestioningly obeyed. Again: capitalism needs contracts,...
July 30, 2011
The Tweedles
Dee and Dum. I've been pointing out the absurdity and incompetence of the left lately, but that doesn't mean that the right is golden. Last winter I put it this way: I don't think that liberals are liberals because they desire sensible socio-economic systems so much as that they just don't like or trust humans and feel that society must be stifled and controlled, even if just through nudge thugery and confiscatory taxation. And I don't think that conservatives are much different except in the details of the nudges and the way the taxes would be spent. The real division isn't between liberals and conservatives, it is between libertarians and the rest. It will be a long hard sell to convince either the liberals or the conservatives to like or trust humans. In the meantime the struggle will be between aristocratic factions, each convinced that it is most fit to rule the masses, though the evidence clearly shows them...
July 29, 2011
Tin Foil Hats
One of the indicators of the anti-intellectualism of the intelligentsia is their refusal to think about socio-political events. They don't engage with the world in any sort of collective cognition that evaluates different ideas or information. They don't listen to the words of others or read for comprehension, instead they behave like lawyers arguing a case and react to each bit of testimony or evidence with the objective of refuting it, even if true or insightful, because they only wish to win their case. While you are speaking to them they are thinking of counter arguments, not the possible significance of what you are saying. It takes very little mental effort to find some way for them to continue to slide along in well worn mental ruts, and are only comfortable when slotted into their path in such a fashion, on mental rails that go to the same old destinations. In a nutshell, what’s going on is something that...
July 29, 2011
Scholarly Propaganda
Continuing the thread about the intellectual and ethical poverty of the liberal intelligentsia. I was reading a thread in a private forum a few weeks ago in which a sociologist was using the collective cognition of the group to help develop a proposed book about online propaganda. A few people pointed out that propaganda is a hard thing to define, that it comes from all ideological sides, and that there is in effect so little that is not propaganda that it is easier and likely better to define it as the rule rather than the exception. I can count the non-propaganda online sources without taking both boots off. However, the objective of the book was to excoriate conservatives rather than do a truly scholarly inquiry into online propaganda, and so that's what was discussed and written about with only a brief and anemic nod to the ubiquity of such behavior on all sides. Here's another example of the poverty...
July 11, 2011
Liberal Corporatism
What, you may wonder, is corporatism? a system of economic, political, or social organization that involves division of the people of society into corporate groups, such as agricultural, business, ethnic, labor, military, patronage, or scientific affiliations, on the basis of common interests.[1] ... The term corporatism is based on the Latin root "corp" meaning "body".[4] One of the main types of corporatism is economic tripartism involving negotiations between business, labour, and state interest groups to establish economic policy.[5] ... Corporatist types of community and social interaction are common to many ideologies, including: absolutism, capitalism, conservatism, fascism, liberalism, progressivism, reactionism, socialism, and syndicalism.[10] ... Liberal corporatism was an influential component of the Progressivism in the United States that has been referred to as "interest group liberalism".[29] The support by U.S. labor representatives of liberal corporatism of the U.S. progressives is believed to have been influenced by the syndicalism and particularly the anarcho-syndicalism at the time in Europe.[29] In the United...
April 02, 2011
Furniture Dusting
They're just dusting the furniture while complaining about the house fire. Why ask for William Cronon’s email? Certainly it’s to intimidate him, and indirectly, his colleagues. I think that’s only the beginning. In the end, it’s a declaration by the organizations filing the requests in Wisconsin, Michigan and wherever else they will ask next that they don’t want any public universities of any kind. This is genuinely a pretty serious abandonment of a consensus position. It used to be that Republicans and Democrats alike agreed that higher education was an important investment in human capital and an important precondition of the flourishing of the American dream. Sure, on the right you might grouse more about the left-wing eggheads, but you still believed in the basic idea of public education. A Republican governor was as proud of having a flagship campus and a public university system as a Democratic governor was. No longer. You may say, “Aren’t you exaggerating”? Honestly,...
March 28, 2011
Entitlement
Or, the wages of educational sin. How could it be that graduate students delivered such appallingly poor papers and presentations? They'd gotten undergraduate degrees; why couldn't they write in sentences? Why were they devoid of originality, analytical ability, intellectual curiosity? Why were they accosting me with hostile e-mails when I pointed out unsubstantiated generalizations, hyperbolic assumptions, ungrounded polemics, sourcing omissions, and possible plagiarism? The sad thing is, I'm not alone. Every college teacher I know is bemoaning the same kind of thing. Whether it's rude behavior, lack of intellectual rigor, or both, we are all struggling with the same frightening decline in student performance and academic standards at institutions of higher learning. A sense of entitlement now pervades the academy, excellence be damned. Increasingly, students seem not to realize what a college degree, especially a graduate degree, tells the world about one's abilities and competence. They have no clue what is expected of them at the higher levels of...
March 26, 2011
Happy Time
A couple of years ago Chuck and Nancy visited for the Apple Festival. Chuck is pushing 90 and has had the misfortune to outlive his daughter. Her husband David, reinventing himself after her death, was passing through the general area on his way to India, so he met them here. David is a classical guitarist, a teacher, and was going to India on a fellowship, a cultural exchange of musical styles and methods was clearly implied. While I was out in the pasture tending my animals David sat on the deck playing for Chuck and Nancy, especially a piece that he had composed for his wife's funeral service and that Chuck had heard only once before. Other pieces that he played that day had a Spanish flavor as is common with classical guitar music. A trick of acoustics in these hills allowed me to hear it all from some distance away, as if David was on a stage in...
March 01, 2011
Weakened Faith
As they age academics are in danger of losing their religion. Today, academia is treated by many as a standard source for official explanations and justifications. ... The general approach has been to smooth out local wrinkles, relative to distant reference points. In each topic area, one assumes the validity of some distant standard assumptions or beliefs, and then seeks local conclusions that more simply and reliably cohere both with local evidence and those more distant assumptions. For example, one might assume that medicine helps health, and that people prefer to insure against risks, and calculate co-insurance levels to recommend. This sort of local-smoothing isn’t obviously likely to move much further away from the truth. But I worry that it better hides our ignorance when initial assumptions are pretty far from the truth. ... To me, humans seem quite mistaken about the main functions driving a great many important areas of human behavior. Yet because so many have worked...
February 23, 2011
War Lizards
How much blood and treasure can be spilled to promote democracy? “It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see….” “You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?” “No,” said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.” “Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.” “I did,” said Ford. “It is.” “So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?” “It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.” “You mean they actually vote...
February 22, 2011
Over Egged
I tend to see the various disputants in most political and cultural conflicts as all being unhinged. I'm neither nor but sufficiently self aware to know that they likely have as much antipathy for me as I do for them, and that this is normal human behavior. I don't take them, or myself, very seriously. This is disappointing to me since there was a time when I had assumed that my betters understood the ways and had the means, and that in principle a day could come when I too would understand. This is no longer a credible view. What [Gov. Scott] Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin--and eventually, America--less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy. And that's why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators' side. Note that the "big money" is a state government....
February 21, 2011
Old Habits
Actually, this is a review of a book about the "vaccines cause autism" scandal, but go with it for a bit. The core problem with the rational actor model is that, while it deals with risk rather well, it has absolutely no handle on genuine "uncertainty," as the famous Ellsberg Paradox so well illustrates. When a situation has a probabilistic outcome but the probabilities are clearly known, as for instance in flipping a fair coin, people behave different than in a situation in which they are not sure of the probabilities. The standard axiomatic of rational choice cannot deal with such a situation. ... The first reaction to fundamental uncertainty is to delay making a choice. ... The second reaction is to lay out a search plan: try out several alternatives, and let your experience clarify the risks and the payoffs of each. ... The third reaction is to see what other people have done in your situation, with...
February 21, 2011
Jacksonian
For me, that term conjures images of hard scrabble independents who disdained the religious radicals who came in an early wave of immigration to N. America, as well as the aristocratic refugees who came in a later wave and established a plantation system. The Jacksonians are the ones who headed for the hills in disgust at both of those cultures. They seem to still be with us in spirit. The Tea Party movement taps deep roots in U.S. history. It is best understood as a contemporary revolt of Jacksonian common sense — the idea that moral, scientific, political and religious truths can be ascertained by the average person — against elites perceived as both misguided and corrupt. And although the movement itself may splinter and even disappear, the populist energy that powers it will not go away any time soon. Jacksonianism is always an important force in American politics; at times of social and economic stress and change, like...
February 18, 2011
Blue Disease
I've unavoidably seen some of the stuff about the Wisconsin Democrats' flight from Democracy as the state tries to balance its budget at the expense of civil service union members. I'm in two minds about this. On one hand governments have made intemperate promises that they can't keep and the bill has come due. Union members and officials have made the problems worse by their actions and attitudes. OTOH I know some of these folks, not in Wisconsin but around here, and they really had no grasp of the issues and so feel caught up by forces that they had never considered to be relevant to themselves. They just played the hands that they were dealt. Like many other middle income workers they are faced with an evaporating life dream of modest but comfortable expectations. I am not exactly glad this is happening; the teachers, firefighters and ordinary state and local government workers who are going to be paying...
January 23, 2011
Liberty
The current state of the national zeitgeist has been called "the libertarian moment" by some, due to the failures of socialism, state capitalism, and crony capitalism; and the inability of macro economists to explain what has happened much less propose policies to manage our affairs better. Or, perhaps more accurately, there are many explanations and prescriptions, each with some small support and criticism. Small L libertarianism is one of those views with some support, but it seems to be taken more seriously by a greater number of people than in the past. It's grown in stature while others have shriveled. But, it's just a moment, implying that it will soon recede into the background again. One of the sillier ideas has been called "liberaltarianism", a nebulous scheme to convince liberals (in the peculiarly illiberal US sense) to adopt more sensible economic views, and so allow libertarians to more easily align with those liberals, and so make a less strange...
January 15, 2011
HEAP
I recently reread Cryptonomicon during a prolonged rain storm. One of its leitmotifs is the Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod (HEAP), a set of resources intended to enable avoidance and self defense from a repeat of the Holocaust, but with consideration of other holocausts that have occurred in history. This isn't one of my usual themes but with Cryptonomicon fresh in mind some recent net articles are more interesting. Since about 1985 I have held a "blame the victim" attitude towards minority oppression. By this I have never meant in any way that the victims deserve their plight. Far from it: victims are victims and will remain victims until they end their victimization. Rather, I have been arguing that only by banning together in collective struggle can the victimization be defeated, and only the victims have a real interest in ending their own oppression. Jews, Gypsies and gays were not responsible for being gassed, shot, hanged, and simply kicked...
December 18, 2010
Moral Purity
It's been darkly overcast and rainy here lately, and it looks to continue for another week. It's mild compared to the mini ice age that grips many parts of the world, so I can't complain too much, but it's a bit depressing. In that frame of mind it's natural to reflect on the general mess that this nation and much of the world finds itself mired in at present. Of course, there were other reasons for intervention in Iraq apart from the defense of human rights, and the unhappy Afghan drift from an initially legitimate, limited and successful operation to destroy terrorist bases to the present inchoate mission is partly explained by geopolitical factors. But the fact remains that regime change in both countries was supported in Western states in part because it was believed intervention could promote human rights. If failure was predictable in each case, what accounts for Western elites supporting the use of force to achieve...
December 13, 2010
U. S. Blues
I've said most of this before, though not all at once and not as well. America has everything it needs for success in the twenty-first century with one exception: a critical mass of thinkers, analysts and policy entrepreneurs who can help unleash the creative potential of the American people and build the new government and policy structures that will facilitate a new wave of private-sector led growth. Figuring out why so many of our intellectuals and experts are so poorly equipped to play a constructive role — and figuring out how to develop the leadership we currently lack — may be the most important single thing Americans need to work on right now. ... But when I look at the problems we face, I worry. It’s not just that some of our cultural strengths are eroding as both the financial and intellectual elites rush to shed many of the values that made the country great. And it’s not the...
December 07, 2010
Schoolyard Visions
Innovation is an increasingly popular subject. it seems to me that the post-cold war neoliberal dominated political consensus (which is a consensus of the Right, insofar as the flagship of the Left hit an iceberg and started to sink in 1917, finally hitting the sea floor in 1989) is intrinsically inimical to the consideration of utopian ideals. Burkean conservativism tends to be skeptical of change, always asking first, "will it make things worse?" This isn't a bad question to ask in and of itself, but we're immured a period of change unprecedented in human history (it kicked off around the 1650s; its end is not yet in sight) and basing your policies on what you can see in your rear-view mirror leaves you open to driving over unforseen pot-holes. To a conservative, the first priority is not to lose track of what's good about the past, lest the future be worse. But this viewpoint brings with it a cognitive...
December 05, 2010
Fighting Words
See Humanomists for an earlier post discussing Deirdre McCloskey's ideas of Bourgeois Dignity, and see Needed: An Economics for Grownups for more: NRO: What should Americans do to preserve bourgeois society, or is our rhetoric so naturally pro-bourgeois that we don’t need to worry? McCloskey: We need to worry a little less than the average northern European does. Arguments about bourgeois virtue that strike most Americans as pretty obvious (“The middle class, not the clerisy or the state, is the source of good innovation”; “Making money is all right”; “We can solve environmental problems by invention”) are fighting words in the Netherlands or Sweden. Old Europe distrusts innovation. In the United States the task is to embarrass the anti-capitalist Left with facts, without arousing moralistic, anti-innovation fervor on the Right. NRO: You spend a lot of time demolishing cherished lefty myths about capitalism. What do you think the Right has gotten wrong on capitalism? McCloskey: A certain disdain for...
November 23, 2010
World Affairs
We, unfortunately, live in interesting times. Our local troubles, however pressing, are not unique or even, for the time being, as dire as those elsewhere. Ireland, for example, seems to be in deep trouble, and the EU faces some daunting prospects ... or so it is reported. I've little confidence that the "experts" have a useful grasp of the issues and so I am little enlightened by reading their reports. Even Germany is in turmoil. Thilo Sarrazin, a minor German politician on the technocratic wing of the country’s Social Democratic party, has just written what is probably the bestselling political book in postwar Europe (1m copies in hardback and counting). Everyone in Germany knows at least a simplified version of what Germany Abolishes Itself says ... The message of the book, in headline form, is that Germany is becoming smaller (thanks to the familiar story of a falling birthrate among native Germans) and stupider (thanks to the fact that...
November 13, 2010
Doofus U
When they want your opinion they will tell it to you. the idea that sustainability is an essential, even an important, goal strikes me as indefensible. To see why, imagine what it would have meant c. 1900. The university existed, it had a lot of students and faculty. None of them had automobiles. Many, presumably, had horses. Sustainability would have included assuring a sufficient supply of pasture land for all those horses into the indefinite future. It might have included assuring a sufficient supply of firewood. It would, in other words, have meant making preparations for a future that was not going to happen. ... The issue was recently brought to my attention when a colleague at a faculty meeting gave a glowing description of all the good things that were being done or planned in support of sustainability, up to and including a future teach in. I asked him one question—whether any part of the plans included presentations...
October 30, 2010
Pathetic
There's been a lot of commentary about the perversely named "rally to restore sanity", though it's for very small and extremely narrow values of sanity. It seems to be yet another flaccid and reactionary attempt to assert the authoritarian control of the early Obama administration, before society twigged to the hideous blunder that they had made by giving so much power to such inept people. It didn't seem worth mentioning but there's an angle that perhaps makes it interesting. ... probably most of us who’d liked to have been there wouldn’t come because we have lives. For us, that was morning soccer, a Halloween parade and then a Halloween party for kids that my daughter co-organized. All of those things I take to contain the same message that Stewart’s rally does: we’re all in this together. On the sidelines of the parade, it seems ridiculous to think that there are people running to represent the people of this county,...
October 26, 2010
Book Smart
That's an insult in some places, and it isn't only an envious dismissal of the superficial knowledge of educated fools by those who lack the means to have similar accomplishments. It's not just a dumb fellow's snark about smart fellows, it it also a similarly smart, or more so, criticism of someone who is not even aware of their defects. It is not an argument against eugenics per se, but against the view that letting in stupid people into a smart society is bad: on the contrary, due to the law of comparative advantage it makes everybody better off since now the Einsteins can focus on what they are good at rather than taking out the trash. Note that this is not based on assuming that the Einstens dislike doing menial jobs: they can do both brain work and janitorial work, it is just that they are better at brain work than less brilliant people. Hence productivity will grow...
October 05, 2010
Buzz Words
Two of the nastier lexemes in the current lexicon are diversity and sustainability. I have argued for and against both of them depending on which definitions are used. They can both be used to mean just about anything. Diversity and sustainability are the two most characteristic ideas of the modern academy. Diversity asks us to focus on group identity and personal affiliation, and it puts race at the center of the discussion. Sustainability asks us to focus on humanity's use of natural resources, and it puts climate at the center of discussion. Note that diversity does not necessarily mean identity politics and that sustainability is not about human use of natural resources. Those obsessions are labeled diversity and sustainability respectively to give them a respectability that they do not otherwise deserve. It's Newspeak. Both are about repairing the world; both invite exuberant commitment; both are moralistic; and most of all, both are encompassing ideas that crowd out other encompassing...
September 30, 2010
Mixed Morals
Moral arguments tend to be instrumental. They do not, as discussed in Mixed Nuts, make sincere attempts to wrestle with the truth that all moral values are ungrounded and wildly diverse, they advocate for one or another set of prejudices and lack any reasoned foundation. What should happen to the Rutgers students who livestreamed a roommate having sex, spurring him to suicide? . . . Jail, expulsion from Rutgers, financial liability. At least two out of those three is likely to come to pass, and probably all three should. I wish there was some way to ensure, either with the authority of the state or the civic pressure of our society, that something else followed, possibly instead of any of those consequences. . . What I’d like is that the two Rutgers students spend the rest of their lives talking in public about what they did, and how what they did touches on all of our lives, and maybe...
September 22, 2010
WEIRD Kids
A few weeks ago WEIRD People speculated about some unique aspects of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies. The WEIRDer you are, the more you perceive a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships, and the more you use an analytical thinking style, focusing on categories and laws, rather than a holistic style, focusing on patterns and contexts. . . That post veered off into a discussion of WEIRD morality but there are other interesting implications. An excellent article back in June reviewed the many ways psychologists mostly get data from a very unrepresentative sample of humanity, what they call the WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. In the process, they review ways the US is exceptional: Americans are, on average, the most individualistic people in the world. … American parents, for example, were the only ones in a survey of 100 societies who created a separate room for their baby to sleep. … In contrast...
September 16, 2010
Tea Crazy
I've been thinking about some semi-hysterical reactions by some libertarians to the Tea Party. Is Christine O'Donnell a Nut? Reading news stories, including a recent story by Michael Moynihan in Reason, the answer seems to be yes. Following up the detailed claims in those stories, it isn't so clear. . . Almost anybody can be made to look nutty by a suitable selection of past comments—consider that the current Vice President is a man who apparently believes that FDR was President at the time of the stock market crash and went on national TV to reassure people. Given a press sufficiently hostile to one candidate and friendly to another, it isn't that hard to create the illusion that the outsiders are all nut cases, their opponents all reasonable folk. Read the linked post for a researched debunking of Moynihan and Reason, though Friedman notes that: "O'Donnell may really be a nut, of course. Sarah Palin was badly misrepresented by...
August 21, 2010
Framed
Would you like that to hurt now or later? "The major division in this country is no longer between parties but between political elites and the people," Mr. Rasmussen says. His recent polls show huge gaps between the two groups. While 67% of the political class believes the U.S. is moving in the right direction, a full 84% of mainstream voters believe the nation is moving in the wrong one. The political class overwhelmingly supported the bailouts of the financial and auto industries, the health-care bill, and the Justice Department's decision to sue Arizona over its new immigration law. Those in the mainstream public just as intensely opposed those moves. The division of Americans into these groups has real significance for the way polls are conducted and how their results are interpreted, according to Mr. Rasmussen. One reason some polls offer misleading results, he says, is that the premise behind questions asked isn't always shared by those queried. "Many...
August 19, 2010
Blind Faith
Conservatives and liberals (in the extremely illiberal and peculiarly American sense of the word) are monsters locked in combat with one another and oblivious to the world as a whole. The conservative students at Eastern elite were under no illusions that they were anything but an extreme minority -- and the institution's reputation is such that some were discouraged by friends back home from even enrolling. But almost uniformly, they were happy. They identified their professors as being liberal, but admired them nonetheless. In fact, as Wood noted here, "they viewed the experience of being in the minority as a positive one" in teaching them to examine and defend their beliefs, and "almost every single one said that they received a better education" by being in the extreme minority, a finding "in contrast to the conservative critique." Liberal dogma and conservative criticism of that dogma aren't the only - or even most coherent - analyses. The problem isn't just...
August 07, 2010
Secular Clerisy
Let's paddle out to the deep end. According to Pascal Bruckner, we in the west suffer from neurotic guilt, a condition imposed upon us by the high priests of the left. This secular clerisy are heirs to the Christian tradition of original sin, which universalised guilt by claiming that humans are fallen and must redeem themselves. Nietzsche denounced Christian guilt as a psychic evil which forces man’s will to power in on himself. Pascal Bruckner is a latter-day Nietzschean who gives no quarter when it comes to excoriating our new moral elite. Bruckner represents a distinct species of French intellectual. Born in 1948 and coming of age in the upheavals of 1968, he initially indulged the revolutionary fervour sweeping Paris but soon became affiliated with the nouveaux philosophes, a group of anti-Marxist intellectuals. Consisting of figures like Andre Glucksmann, Alain Finkielkraut, Bernard-Henri Levy and Jean-Marie Benoist, this cenacle may be considered France’s second generation of anti-communist thinkers. . ....
August 06, 2010
Idiocracy
More about the lack of intellect among intellectuals. For those familiar with the invaluable academic work of Paul Hollander, the cast of characters will be familiar and the zeal with which so many American intellectuals embraced totalitarianism will be unsurprising. But the mention of the Webbs and their book Soviet Communism: A New Civilization sent me to the academic database JSTOR to gauge the general reaction to the book, an almost comic hagiography of Stalin, amongst the intelligentsia. One explanation for the abysmal performance of the intelligentsia over the twentieth century is glibness. Some thoughtful people simply have a tendency to confuse intelligence with the ability to be glib, or more precisely, to bs. . . It is not uncommon to confuse glibness with intelligence. Certainly law professors do it all the time in assessing faculty candidates or students. I suspect that we are not alone in doing this. Quite obviously the establishment mainstream media falls for the same...
August 04, 2010
Plastic People
A few decades ago it was a damning put down to be called "plastic". Though not a clearly defined epithet it had something to do with inauthenticity, unreliability, and a greasy sort of smoothness. There was an implication of a stamped out, injection molded, mass produced conformism, a lack of substance much less originality. Now we call them princes. Princes, who can be male or female, are senior executives at major corporations. They are almost always charming, smart and impressive. They’ve read interesting books. They’ve got well-rehearsed takes on the global situation. . . Grinds, on the other hand, tend to have started their own company or their own hedge fund. They’re often too awkward to work in a large organization and too intense to work for anybody but themselves. Over lunch, they can be socially inert. You try to draw them out by probing for one or two subjects of interest to them. But as often as not,...
August 02, 2010
Government Failure
Previous posts have noted the failure of the modernist state, the propensity to deny that failure by self-interested functionaries, and the reflexive support for policy initiatives even by those who no longer deny that failure. An ancient theme here has been the absurdity of government health policies, especially their deadly dietary guidelines. increasing scientific evidence suggests that some current federal recommendations have simply been wrong. Will a public-health establishment that has been slow to admit its mistakes over the years acknowledge the new research and shift direction? Or will it stubbornly stick to its obsolete guidelines? . . . Researchers have started asking hard questions about fat consumption and heart disease, and the answers are startling. In an analysis of the daily food intake of some 350,000 people published in the March issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute found no link between the amount of saturated fat that a...
July 30, 2010
Fever Dreams
Sometimes you read something that makes no sense at all and wonder if the writer was hallucinating. When it works, tenure doesn’t just protect faculty whistleblowers, but also motivates faculty to be good custodians of their institutional future. We could use that in every workplace. Both British Petroleum and the United States as a whole would be better off if the workers at Deepwater Horizon had been able to voice their concerns not just to the top of their corporate hierarchy but to all stakeholders and concerned parties, including the public. Bradley Manning is a fucking hero, whatever his motivations: the citizens of the United States, Afghanistan and the world deserved to know all along what Wikileaks has now revealed. Sunlight really is the best disinfectant, and we need strong legal and institutional guarantees that sunlight will shine hard and long into every nook and cranny of our lives. So in this sense, let’s think less of tenure as...
July 26, 2010
Fixers
I've been thinking about the institutional muddle discussed in Post Macro, which quoted a Gintis book review. The Walrasian model is purely an equilibrium model with no known analytically-based dynamics. Because macroeconomics deals centrally with disequilibrium and dynamical phenomena, it is perfectly useless for macroeconomic dynamics, and this has been well-known for fifty years. The Keynesian and New Classical models are "toy" models with "representative agents" and single markets in investment and consumption. The Keynesian model makes assumptions concerning individual irrationality that it claims underly the volatility of the market economy, and the New Classical model makes even more bizarre assumptions concerning rationality and market clearing. These models are, to my mind, so incredibly stupid that it is unbelievable that reasonable economists would hold any credence in them. In fact, most economists don't really buy the standard models, but they are more or less in agreement with the policy implications of these models. This is lamentable, because it is...
July 20, 2010
Post Macro
This is like one of those mumbled pop songs where the lyrics are hard to decode and don't make perfect sense but the music is catchy. It is easy to critique the three main traditional branches of macroeconomics, Walrasian, Keynesian, and New Classical. The Walrasian model is purely an equilibrium model with no known analytically-based dynamics. Because macroeconomics deals centrally with disequilibrium and dynamical phenomena, it is perfectly useless for macroeconomic dynamics, and this has been well-known for fifty years. The Keynesian and New Classical models are "toy" models with "representative agents" and single markets in investment and consumption. The Keynesian model makes assumptions concerning individual irrationality that it claims underly the volatility of the market economy, and the New Classical model makes even more bizarre assumptions concerning rationality and market clearing. These models are, to my mind, so incredibly stupid that it is unbelievable that reasonable economists would hold any credence in them. In fact, most economists don't...
July 19, 2010
Bourgeois Virtues
Actually, we are in Kansas. We are in times not seen since the Depression, when at its depth in 1934 my parents lost their Kansas farm to the bank. Such memories and the intensity of the current crisis led me and my colleague, Steven Gjerstad, to examine the last 14 recessions including the Depression. We have been surprised and dismayed to learn that in 11 of these 14 recessions the percentage decline in new house expenditure preceded and exceeded percentage declines in every other major component of GDP. Hence the sources of the current debacle are hardly new! Moreover, past recoveries in the housing market have been closely associated with recovery from recession. The latest data continue to tell us that the turnaround in housing, consumer durables, and business investment are all anemic. Our past housing and government spending mistakes leave us with no good choices. But please no more government spending! The deficit must now be faced. Avoid...
July 19, 2010
Rednecks and Oiks
One of the themes here has been that "intellectuals" lacked intellect: it's merely a social pose. Similarly, experts lack expertise: it too is merely a pose, a set of class signifiers. Such posers are easily identifiable due to their cultural cringe, their shame at being Americans. Liberal politics is now – over there as much as here – a form of social snobbery. To express concern about mass immigration, or reservations about the Obama healthcare plan, is unacceptable in bien-pensant circles because this is simply not the way educated people are supposed to think. It follows that those who do think (and talk) this way are small-minded bigots, rednecks, oiks, or whatever your local code word is for "not the right sort". The petit bourgeois virtues of thrift, ambition and self-reliance – which are essential for anyone attempting to escape from poverty under his own steam – have long been derided in Britain as tokens of a downmarket upbringing....
July 11, 2010
Rebel Dogs
One of my father's most dismissive criticisms of someone was to say that "he thinks that the world owes him a living". His life truths were shaped in part by having been a depression era child and a world war teenager, and I was shaped in part by that too. I don't recall where I first heard it but another aphorism that is still apposite is that "if it happens to you then it is your fault". It may not literally be true but it is the most useful attitude. In 1966, American psychologist Julian Rotter published a paper that introduced the concept known as locus of control. Human beings, according to Rotter, could be divided into two basic groups: those who believed their locus of control was within themselves, and those who see themselves as under the control of forces located outside themselves, such as luck, or fate, or other people whose will cannot be resisted. The first...
June 29, 2010
More Bullshit
Yet more tedious rehashing of the ideological quagmire currently sucking cherished illusions out of us. [Daniel] Ben-Ami’s robust defence of growth might lead some to assume that he is a free-market conservative, but he’s not. As he points out, historically the left were supportive of growth and mass prosperity, but today ‘most self-proclaimed radicals emphasise the need to impose limits on consumption and economic growth’. In the preface, Ben-Ami aligns himself with the radical Suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, who wrote: ‘We do not preach a gospel of want and scarcity, but of abundance… We call for a great production that will supply all, and more than all the people can consume.’ As the book’s cheeky title, Ferraris for All, suggests, he wants to raise mass living standards, at a time when many respond to inequality by calling for a levelling downwards. Ben-Ami’s discussion of how ‘progressives’ abandoned progress highlights the fact that ‘left’ and ‘right’ can be misleading categories today....
June 27, 2010
Last Gasp
As briefly discussed in the comments following Dunning-Kruger, the recent dust up about the PNAS climate black list "seems too stupid to be real, to be true, like something from The Onion, but there it is." Said another way: Re the PNAS paper, it is rather louche. What is the point of this paper? Are the arguments so old and stale that it has to rely on past statements to substantiate a point of view? Death rattle come to mind. Perhaps we are seeing the death throes of the old guard. Perhaps out of these ashes will emerge a more solid scientific view on climate and global change, free of orthodoxy and invigorated by debate. Finally, in case the PNAS paper comes out in a second edition. I should state my position on attribution. Very Likely? Likely? Well maybe! Actually, I would like to form a new subgroup, “very likely disgusted.” I suspect its membership may be rather large....
June 27, 2010
Pond Scum
Revealed. The life and death of a 3-year-old members-only online liberal bulletin board is a story that normally would offer all the searing drama of a public television pledge drive. But the sudden collapse of JournoList Friday afternoon -- after the private e-mails of Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel were maliciously leaked -- offers a cautionary tale about the dangers of candor in an age when everybody (and not just Big Brother) is watching. . . I do not know Weigel (and actually do not remember most of his postings on JournoList), but I am outraged over what happened to him. It is one thing to castigate a reporter for the accuracy of his journalism or to deride a blogger for the rigor of his arguments. But it is morally repugnant to heist someone's e-mail comments -- and to leak them in a way designed to embarrass him with the people whom he is covering. The obvious and odious...
May 28, 2010
Bigotry
The frustration I spoke of in Pax Mongolica - "opposition to rationalist constructivism is usually treated as opposition to liberal principles rather than to the defects of rationalist constructivism as a means of achieving liberal principles" - Is part of a larger charge of intolerance and bigotry that is the foundation of progressivism. “Tolerance” is a feel-good buzzword in our society, but I fear people have forgotten what it means. Many folks are proud of their “tolerance” for gays, working women, Tibetan monks in cute orange outfits, or blacks sitting at the front of the bus. But what they really mean is that they consider such things to be completely appropriate parts of their society, and are not bothered by them in the slightest. That, however, isn’t “tolerance.” “Tolerance” is where you tolerate things that actually bother you. Things that make you go “ick”, or that conflict with strong intuitions on proper behavior. Once upon a time, the idea...
May 24, 2010
Pax Mongolica
I've long been engaged with such thoughts. It may be worth speaking more about Tyler's old point: Friedrich A. Hayek, in his famous essay “Individualism: True and False” (Hayek, 1948), draws a distinction between two differing strands in Western thought: skeptical individualism and rationalist constructivism. As Hayek points out, at one time in history or another, each strand has claimed to be spokesman for liberal principles. Discussions of these issues can be frustrating since opposition to rationalist constructivism is usually treated as opposition to liberal principles rather than to the defects of rationalist constructivism as a means of achieving liberal principles. Recognizing those defects depends on a dynamic view over time: "rationalist constructivism will almost invariably lead to centralized planning and state domination". And, state domination is the enemy of liberal principles . . . but not at first. From The Rational Optimist, p. 182: Empires, indeed governments generally, tend to be good things at first and bad things...
May 23, 2010
Black Planner
As the rickety statist contraptions in Europe and elsewhere continue to breakdown and stall believers pledge to continue patching them up. I view this as the number one policy question facing the global economy today. Do you favor patches to keep the current system up and running, or do you think we need an as-smooth-as-possible combination of defaults and devaluations? I fall into the latter camp and I believe that no such feasible patches exist. I believe that Hayek -- not of The Road to Serfdom but rather the critic of rationalist constructivism -- is being vindicated more and more every day. A long time ago Tyler explained: Friedrich A. Hayek, in his famous essay “Individualism: True and False” (Hayek, 1948), draws a distinction between two differing strands in Western thought: skeptical individualism and rationalist constructivism. As Hayek points out, at one time in history or another, each strand has claimed to be spokesman for liberal principles. Hayek argues...
May 22, 2010
Parasite Class
Rent seeking authoritarians publish "reports" in which they mingle factoids with their ransom demands. In every corner of the globe the evidence of the global biodiversity crisis is now impossible to ignore. . . as the impact of these species losses around the world have mounted – riots over food shortages, costly floods and landslides, expensive bills for cleaning polluted water, and many more disasters – attention has finally started to turn to the impact of human beings literally consuming the planet's natural resources. So it was in 2007, just months after the British government made global waves with the biggest ever report on the economics of climate change by Lord Stern, that world governments met in Potsdam, in Germany, and asked the leading economist and senior banker Pavan Sukhdev to do the same for the natural world. . . Echoing Lord Stern's famous description of climate change as "the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever", Sukhdev – who...
May 21, 2010
Cynic Hunt
Wanted: Cynic Textbooks Formal education relentlessly pushes idealistic views on kids, and censorship “protects” them from hearing cynical views. Whatever cynicism kids learn “on the street”, they know teachers will not want to hear it in class. Cynical views may be expressed in hushed tones to co-workers, but modern workers know to avoid such views in official memos, or even in private emails, for fear of hurting their firm if exposed in a lawsuit. Alas, this seems nothing remotely like a fair rhetorical fight. To give kids a fair chance to believe whatever the evidence best supports, they should have access to textbook-like presentations of cynical views that are as clear and accessible as for idealistic views. But few such texts exist, and we’d probably censor any that were created. I’m interested in helping to create such texts, but the ideologues most willing to fund the creation of contrarain texts prefer to frame them in idealistic terms; cynical framing...
May 17, 2010
Pig Stories
Lately I've become attuned to aphorisms that involve pigs. I've told the one about argumentative farmers: they argue for the same reason that they wrestle pigs - they just like to wrestle and are disappointed when the pig quits. I heard another one the other day, not for the first time: when you wrestle with pigs you both get muddy but the pig enjoys it. That's a more urban take on the whole pig wrestling thing I guess since farmers don't get too upset about mud. Another one came up today: “Teaching Latin to someone like me,” he says, “was like trying to teach a pig to dance. It’s a waste of the teacher’s time and it irritates the pig.” I've heard a number of variations of that one, the key part being the "waste of time" and "irritating the pig". I once told my pig wrestling aphorism to a semi-post-Marxist-semi-post-Jew and the only part he heard was the...
May 17, 2010
Mama Bears
In First Dude I expressed embarrassment about finding myself "in any agreement with an unreconstructed euro-jerk communist" in that I do see the politics of Tea Women as being a sort of authentic feminism rather than the common misogynist style that has been dominant in academia and the media, and which defines the Democratic political party. I'm out of my comfort zone on such subjects, but the broad ideas are being voiced in a number of places these days, so my views may not be so naive. Is the Tea Party a women's movement? More women than men belong—55 percent, according to the latest Quinnipiac poll. . . If the Tea Party has any legitimate national leadership, it is dominated by women. Of the eight board members of the Tea Party Patriots who serve as national coordinators for the movement, six are women. Fifteen of the 25 state coordinators are women. One of the three main sponsors of the...
May 15, 2010
First Dude
This is embarrassing. I was struck by this passage, from Žižek's new Living in the End Times. Maybe it's what you would get if Andrew Sullivan were a Lacanian and a Hegelian: Earlier generations of women politicians (Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, up to a point even Hillary Clinton) were what is usually referred to as "phallic" women: they acted as "iron ladies" who imitated and tried to outdo male authority, to be "more men than men themselves." ...Jacques-Alain Miller pointed out how Sarah Palin, on the contrary, proudly displays her femininity and motherhood. She has a "castrating" effect on her male opponents not by way of being more manly than them, but by using the ultimate feminine weapon, the sarcastic put-down of male authority -- she knows that male "phallic" authority is a posture, a semblance to be exploited and mocked. Recall how she mocked Obama as a "community organizer," exploiting the fact that there was something...
May 13, 2010
Social Junk
Now it's a party. If a small child were to expose their or another’s genitals, the social norm is to quickly get them to stop, perhaps make a quick smirk or joke, and then change the subject. It is not so much that we don’t know we all know that genitals exist, can be aroused, or can induce arousal, as that we know pursing the subject looks bad. This seems to me a helpful metaphor for understanding how people react to factoids that expose our hypocrisies. Consider common reactions to hearing that: medicine has little correlation with health few show much interest in medicine quality police internal affairs report to police chiefs college graduates rarely use what they learn moral philosophers are not more moral managed funds on average lose money few give much to foreign or future poor voters dislike politicians committed to promises Most folks either grab at flimsy excuses to deny or excuse such things, or...
May 11, 2010
Reaction
Actually, the revolution was televised . . . both times. Back in '98, Mark Lilla's influential article "A Tale of Two Reactions" suggested that "the cultural and Reagan revolutions are fundamentally harmonious." It might not fit the standard Culture War scripts, Lilla argued, but Americans "see no contradiction in holding down day jobs in the unfettered global marketplace -- the Reaganite dream, the left nightmare -- and spending weekends immersed in a moral and cultural universe shaped by the Sixties." . . . Reason readers may remember Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch's "The Libertarian Moment," published at the end of 2008, with its argument that, despite everything coming out of Washington in the age of Gitmo and TARP, we're entering a "new century of the individual, which makes the Me Decade look positively communitarian in comparison": Already we have witnessed gale-force effects on nearly every “legacy” industry that had grown accustomed to dictating prices and product and intelligence to...
May 09, 2010
Lunatic Fringe
It becomes increasingly clear that the lunatic fringe is the establishment. Elites are under siege in every corner of the world. . . the shift of public debate from the mainstream press to the Internet has helped to break down the authority of traditional elites: newspaper editors, political columnists, academics, politicians. In cyberspace, anyone can have his or her say. This is more democratic, no doubt, but it has made it harder for people to sift nonsense from truth, or demagoguery from rational political debate. . . The real problem of traditional elites may not be too much power, but too little. The lack of trust in political elites is linked to a suspicion, which is not entirely irrational, that elected governments have little authority. The real power, people suspect, is lodged elsewhere – on Wall Street, in the unelected EU bureaucracy, in the Royal Thai Army and the Royal Palace. What people crave in uncertain times is strong...
May 07, 2010
Credulous Skeptics
Authoritarians who rant about libertarian mobs are frightened and confused. Americans are and have always been credulous skeptics. They question the authority of priests, then talk to the dead1; they second-guess their cardiologists, then seek out quacks in the jungle. Like people in every society, they do this in moments of crisis when things seem hopeless. They also, unlike people in other societies, do it on the general principle that expertise and authority are inherently suspect. It isn't expertise that is suspect, it is the experts who claim expertise but show themselves to be incompetent bumblers that are suspect. It is the lack of expertise that is the issue. Authority is indeed suspect since it is entirely devoid of expertise. This, I think, is the deepest reason why public reaction to the crash of 2008 and the election of Barack Obama took a populist turn and the Tea Party movement caught on. The crash not only devastated people’s finances...
May 01, 2010
Bad Guess
One must not be too critical. it is not Europe’s economic, institutional and military weakness that is really the key to its troubles, and to the problem Europe’s weakness poses for the United States. At the core, the problem is conceptual. The Euro-elite thought it saw the shape of the future. It believed it was aligning itself with key global trends and would be in a position to advance those trends. The introduction of a common currency was such an epochal event, the elites believed, because, as the Lisbon conference of 2000 put it, a “quantum shift” would enable Europe “to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world.” In other words, military strength was outmoded. Power would now be measured in globalist economic terms. It was against this background that a new literature and a new ideology appeared: The 21st century was to be the century of Europe. Its values Europe would become the values...
April 17, 2010
Infinite Turtles
The multi-blog dust-up from which I abstracted one tangential notion to talk about in the post Ducklings isn't very interesting to me except that there are a number of such tangential notions that can be extracted from the inky clouds of obfuscation emitted by the intellectuals engaged in that conflict. Here's another. J.S. Mill had some things to say on the subject. From On Liberty: Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant – society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it – its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in...
April 09, 2010
Muddled Rhetoric
More made up stuff. It’s just plain wrongheaded to cast the libertarian project as the project of restoring lost liberties. Most people never had the liberties backward-looking libertarians would like to restore. I know the rhetoric of restoration can be very seductive, especially in a country unusually full (for a wealthy liberal democracy) of patriotic traditionalists. But restoration is a conservative project and liberty is a fundamentally progressive cause. Nonsense. Restoring the liberties lost by some is useful, as is extending those lost liberties to a larger franchise. Both are worthy objectives and that has been a key part of our national conversation since the very beginning. The founders achieved part of that but not all. There's nothing conservative or traditionalist about this. That's a muddle minded confusion that understands conservatism as being respect for any historical practice, and progressivism as disrespect or even disdain for them. That is a common mind set of "progressives", but it isn't usefully...
April 07, 2010
Whole Cloth
Some folks just make stuff up. Liberaltarian Drift since libertarian personalities are close to liberal personalities, and since young folks with a libertarian cast of mind have little or no memory of the threat of socialism at home and communism abroad, there is little in the right-wing politics of traditional American identity that resonates with to them. The party of liberal-minded Americans, the Democratic Party, just feels more like home, despite its often pointedly un-libertarian economic policy. Nonsense. Conservatives feel more at home with what are called liberals in the US since they are all authoritarians. The bottom line for both "liberals" and "conservatives" is brute force control of society through state coercion. Conservatives are slow liberals in the sense that their preferences lag the current mid-point of social preferences, and liberals are hasty conservatives, rush freaks who enjoy the giddy sense of danger in thoughtless change for the sake of change. Libertarians may have either slow or hasty...
April 07, 2010
Hooray For . . .
Bollywood. If you are a producer of films in the future you will: 1) Price your copies near the cost of pirated copies. Maybe 99 cents, like iTunes. Even decent pirated copies are not free; there is some cost to maintain integrity, authenticity, or accessibility to the work. 2) Milk the uncopyable experience of a theater for all that it is worth, using the ubiquitous cheap copies as advertising. In the west, where air-conditioning is not enough to bring people to the theater, Hollywood will turn to convincing 3D projection, state-of-the-art sound, and other immersive sensations as the reward for paying. Theaters become hi-tech showcases always trying to stay one step ahead of ambitious homeowners in offering ultimate viewing experiences, and in turn manufacturing films to be primarily viewed this way. 3) Films, even fine-art films, will migrate to channels were these films are viewed with advertisements and commercials. Like the infinite channels promised for cable TV, the internet...
March 19, 2010
Green Eggs
The population dud. population growth is slowing. For more than three decades now, the average number of babies being born to women in most of the world has been in decline. Globally, women today have half as many babies as their mothers did, mostly out of choice. They are doing it for their own good, the good of their families, and, if it helps the planet too, then so much the better. Here are the numbers. Forty years ago, the average woman had between five and six kids. Now she has 2.6. This is getting close to the replacement level which, allowing for girls who don’t make it to adulthood, is around 2.3. . . So why is this happening? Demographers used to say that women only started having fewer children when they got educated and the economy got rich, as in Europe. But tell that to the women of Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest nations, where girls...
March 16, 2010
Indulgences
The specific points made in the post Purity are apparently part of a more general syndrome. Being virtuous is wonderful thing, but feeling virtuous is a shortcut to vice. That seems to be the moral of a fascinating piece of research by two Canadian psychologists, which suggests that the greener people are, the more likely they are to lie and cheat. Doing the right thing by the planet earns us credit in our ethical investment accounts that we can then spend by dumping on our fellow human beings. The "halo of green consumerism", it is claimed, is just a license to behave less well in other areas of life. . . This finding doesn't surprise me. It echoes a report that came out in 2008, which showed that people who were most concerned about the environment were more likely to take long-haul flights. Some of those questioned explicitly said that recycling every last scrap of paper earned them the...
March 15, 2010
Purity
The previous post mugged me after having read a few things in recent days and then encountering Chicks with chicks. a recent article on The Femivore’s Dilemma, about the prevalence of women in the new old food movement. . . the more profound ideas behind the article and the commentaries are fascinating. Personally, I’m not sure that there really is a gender divide, and it would be salutary to see this in a global context. Indeed. I'd add history as well since farming and food are often women's work: in the present in some cultures and in the past in others at similar stages of development. What had been on my mind was Liberal Purity. At Yourmorals.org we have always found that scores on the Purity/sanctity foundation are higher on the political right than on the left. Conservatives, particularly religious conservatives, live in a more sacralized world. Liberals, particularly secular scientifically-minded liberals, live in a more materialist, un-magical world....
March 15, 2010
Egg Money
At one point in history people knew what that meant: the money that a woman earned selling eggs from hens that she raised herself, for herself, for as close to no cost as possible. The chickens were fed what she scrimped and saved from table scraps, a little corn, often filched, and whatever the hens could catch on their own. The money was her money, perhaps her only discretionary money, and so had disproportional importance. What's old is new. the original “problem that had no name” was as much spiritual as economic: a malaise that overtook middle-class housewives trapped in a life of schlepping and shopping. A generation and many lawsuits later, some women found meaning and power through paid employment. Others merely found a new source of alienation. What to do? The wages of housewifery had not changed — an increased risk of depression, a niggling purposelessness, economic dependence on your husband — only now, bearing them was...
February 26, 2010
Smarty Pants
Robin ruminates about a study of beliefs. The study notes that: Adult intelligence predicts adult espousal of liberalism, atheism, and sexual exclusivity for men (but not for women), while intelligence is not associated with the adult espousal of evolutionarily familiar values on children, marriage, family, and friends. ... Childhood intelligence at age 10 significantly increases the probability that individuals become vegetarian as adults. Robin wonders: The results are interesting and worth pondering, but it is still far from clear to me why the modern world should push smart folks in these directions. Is it that smart folks are more open minded and willing to adopt new beliefs? If so, why do they differ only on some topics but not on others? Is it that some beliefs are newly rewarded in the modern world, and smart folks are faster on the uptake? This makes some sense of monogamy values, since the farming revolution has preferred that institution (longer term investments,...
January 20, 2010
Disgust
At one point in my cultural education I became interested in Bluegrass music. I came at it from an odd and arguably derivative direction in that the interest stemmed from hearing jazz/classical/Bluegrass fusion music sometimes called Spacegrass or Jazzgrass. I didn't understand many of the references or allusions until I studied the history and origins of such music. For example, the Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs tune "Don't Get Above Your Raisin'" baffled me. Above a rasin? What could that possibly mean? Then I noticed the apostrophe and the accent/language implications. Duh! "Don't get above your raising", be true to your class. I'd never really thought about that before, but it is clearly a powerful influence in society. It's foundational to tribal loyalty, solidarity, class warfare, social and economic status, belonging and home. Those who reject their milk language and society are largely denied the pleasures of the hearth since they will never be fully accepted anywhere again. The...
December 18, 2009
Teeth Biting
I've speculated in the past about why anthropologists have done such a poor job understanding cultures. It seemed to me to have something to do with them staring intently through a window on some other culture trying to assemble a coherent image in their minds, and failing since much of what they saw was their own reflection in the glass through which they were peering. Said another way: At this point, most of the folks who would have cited Mead as a straightforward authority about Pacific societies a generation ago have learned to bracket her off and see her more in the context of an intellectual moment, as a cultural philosopher of sexuality and gender, who found the Samoans she studied “good to think” . . . Mead didn’t invent the Samoa she described out of whole cloth, in accordance with her vision of what human beings ought to be, but neither was the narration of what she observed...
December 15, 2009
P-Zombies
Or maybe meat-puppets. The Big Brothers of the 1940s saw children as tools of moral blackmail and social control. Today, in the twenty-first century, scaremongers see children in much the same way, exploiting their natural concern with the wonders of life to promote a message of shrill climate alarmism. . . The growing significance of environmental issues in the school curriculum is directly proportionate to society’s broader moral illiteracy and loss of purpose. Today, even religious studies often appears as a sub-branch of the dogma of environmental alarmism. . . By transmitting their values to children, the scaremongers hope to channel children’s indignation into hostility towards older generations that are apparently destroying the planet. . . The flipside of the devaluation of adult authority is the sacralisation of the status of the child. Increasingly, children are assigned the role of educators, charged with enlightening their misguided, greedy, stupid elders. This has led to a process of socialisation-in-reverse. The project...
December 12, 2009
Deadbeats
Why is socialism so distasteful to those who seek improved societies? In the contemporary United States, at a time of growing unemployment, a jobless man or woman is not a full member of the community. In order to receive even the exiguous welfare payments available, they must first have sought and, where applicable, accepted employment at whatever wage is on offer, however low the pay and distasteful the work. Only then are they entitled to the consideration and assistance of their fellow citizens. Why do so few of us condemn such "reforms"—enacted under a Democratic president? Why are we so unmoved by the stigma attaching to their victims? Far from questioning this reversion to the practices of early industrial capitalism, we have adapted all too well and in consensual silence—in revealing contrast to an earlier generation. But then, as Tolstoy reminds us, there are "no conditions of life to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees...
November 19, 2009
Palinoia
In the continuing effort to coin new labels for those who go over the top in their dysrational biases about political figures - remember BDS? - a new one has evolved. Y'all well know that I really don't like Sarah Palin. In fact, more than one of you has yelled at me about this. And I find the whole schtick about how the media is just a bunch of elitist hooligans who are out to get her really grating. That's why I really wish the media wouldn't act like, well, a bunch of elitist hooligans who are out to get her. I've coined a new phrase to cover the situation: Palinoia. It's when you think people are out to get you, and then they do their best to justify your erroneous belief. . . There seems to be an unhealthy obsession with tearing her down. And really, guys, if you'll just back off a little, she'll do the job...
October 08, 2009
Plain Song
Another of the characters in my virtuality. While writing my Ph.D. dissertation in Mathematics at Harvard, I became a anti-Vietnam war/pro-civil rights activist, which led me to embrace Marxism (I didn't know what Marxism was, but I knew the people I hated hated it, so I figured it must be good), and thus to transfer to the Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard, because I was told that "economics determines everything." . . . Lately, I have been very dissatisfied with the main currents in the political economy of social policy. I read the liberal journals, such as Dissent and The American Prospect, but found I could not stomach their platitudes. I read Commentary and the Cato Institute publications, but their knee-jerk love affair with free markets and their lack of concern for the poor and the environment exasperated me. So, I thought I would go back to the classics, rereading Milton Friedman and the other Chicago school policy types,...
September 16, 2009
Elitist Monsters
Or, Elitist Nonsense part II. Thinking about the passing of Norman Borlaug. Norman Borlaug arguably the greatest American of the 20th century died late Saturday after 95 richly accomplished years. The very personification of human goodness, Borlaug saved more lives than anyone who has ever lived. He was America's Albert Schweitzer: a brilliant man who forsook privilege and riches in order to help the dispossessed of distant lands. That this great man and benefactor to humanity died little-known in his own country speaks volumes about the superficiality of modern American culture. . . In the mid-1960s, India and Pakistan were exceptions to the trend toward more efficient food production; subsistence cultivation of rice remained the rule, and famine struck. In 1965, Borlaug arranged for a convoy of 35 trucks to carry high-yield seeds from CIMMYT to a Los Angeles dock for shipment to India and Pakistan. He and a coterie of Mexican assistants accompanied the seeds. They arrived to...
September 14, 2009
Elitist Nonsense
Arnold whiffs. Do they fit the stereotype of being white, small-town, uneducated racists? Not much racism, but otherwise I would say they fit the stereotype enough to make me skeptical that this is an important political movement. This country is becoming more urban, less white, and more educated. . . I think the long-term significance of what is going on, both at the progressive end and at the Tea Party end of the political spectrum, is an open rupture. In the 1960's, a Hubert Humphrey or Robert Kennedy could connect with uneducated white voters. The idea of blowing them off was unthinkable, if only because they were such a large majority of the voting population at the time. Now, the elitism of President Obama and his supporters has reached in-your-face levels. They have utter contempt for the Tea Party-ers, and the Tea-Party-ers know it. I wouldn't want the Tea Party-ers at the faculty picnic, either. But my sense of...
September 08, 2009
Personal Life-meaning
I've been seeking out and reading Herb Gintis' stuff for a few years since I encountered his work on evolutionary game theory a decade ago. See example. Currently I get my Gintis fix reading his Amazon reviews of books. It's so convenient to have an RSS feed on them. Today he reviews The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen. In much the same way as German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, Sen's commitment to freedom and democracy is based not on distributional issues, but rather on a deep understanding of the importance of communicative discourse and public debate in making the good society. This commitment fits well with Sen's major contribution to welfare economics, which is providing an alternative to the selfish and materialistic Homo Economicus of standard neoclassical economics. For traditional economics, well-being is a function of the goods and services and individual enjoys. For Sen, well-being is a function of how fully and vigorously an individual exercises his human...
September 03, 2009
Pop-Sci Dorks
Consider this nonsense "thought experiment". Sen describes a problem of divergent views on justice in which you have one flute and three children who want it. One child wants the flute because she knows how to play it, the second one wants it because he is poor and doesn't have toys, and the third one says she made the flute, so she should get it. Who do you give it to? One take is that this is a silly question. this is not really such a puzzling question, is it? The correct answer is: It all depends on how “you” ended up with the flute! Is the flute yours because you provided the materials (which were yours) and paid the kid who made it? If so, you can give it to anyone you want, or you can keep it. It’s yours! Did you steal it from the kid who made it? Then you should give it to the kid...
August 24, 2009
Theme Parks
I've never found them to be charming. The cute seems tawdry, the wow doesn't wow me, the dead eyed patrons are only slightly less interesting than the bored staff. There are some exceptions: sometimes kids are chuffed and their excitement is warming. Part of what makes parks unappealing is that I've known employees and have some inside perspective. It's not a nice story. And so, the Old Country seems much the same, but larger. Americans rate European life so highly (in part) because the buildings from previous eras are so striking and attractive. If all of the U.S. looked like U.S. postwar construction, the country would still impress more or less as it does. If all of Europe looked like its postwar construction, Americans would be less likely to admire European policies and political institutions. Yes I know about Lille, and contemporary Spanish architecture, but in reality most Americans would think of Europe as some kind of dump. This...
August 03, 2009
Elmer Bashing
Fashionably lame. . . . the fad for organic foods has never been about vitamins and minerals, and eating more healthily. Rather, consuming organic is about adopting a mystical and reverent attitude towards nature, and a dim view of hoi polloi. It's the same in the US as in the UK. The urban bi-coastal romance with alt.food was never about health, it was about signaling, status and the joy of rubbishing rubes. . . . the simplistic claim that organic is always more nutritious than conventional food was always likely to be misleading. Food is a natural product and the nutritional content of different foods, and even of different varieties of the same food, will vary for a number of reasons, including: freshness, the way the food is cooked, the soil conditions it is grown in, the amount of sunlight and water crops have received, and so on. The differences created by these things are likely to be greater...
July 25, 2009
Borewood
Last week I watched a 5 episode BBC mini-series, Torchwood. It was a crushing bore but it had little competition in this period of summer reruns and low budget off season fare. There were multiple showings per day and repeats of earlier days as well so it didn't take much effort to see all of the episodes, making the mild interest in seeing what happens next sufficient. The intent of the series - it's message - seemed to be faint praise for the British bureaucracy as being marginally better than British politicians, though none were very admirable. The plot was dreary, the dialog idiotic, and the characters were unlikeable. It would have been less tedious had it been a normal made-for-TV movie. Puffing it up to run for 3 times as long and splitting it into 5 segments made no cinema sense, but it may be explained as a production by bureaucrats, for bureaucrats, making tediousness a virtue. Gray...
July 05, 2009
Social Fog
The drum beat of big think political commentary that comes with the 4th of July - worse it seems in this year of street protest and general dissatisfaction with bumbling government - has gotten to me a bit. In general it's tedious stuff which interests me very little since none of the various factions seem to have a useful grasp of the material, and in any event do not reason in good faith. It's like listening to a dysfunctional couple bicker - you end up loathing them both. Genuine support for Communism -- meaning the Marxist-Leninist governing ideology of the Soviet Union and its allies, as distinct from various flavors of socialism or social democracy -- was minimal in the Western world, despite the United States government's best efforts to uncover it. But you didn't have to endorse Communism to be fascinated by it. Simply the existence of that alternate model, with its claim of scientific inevitability and its...
May 27, 2009
Burst Booble
I've been mocking greens for years for their idiotic beliefs that were so ludicrous and ineffective that they were bad for the environment. The more genuine your concern for the environment the more that you should oppose greens, but even if you don't much care about the environment greens are ridiculous. It may be that these fashion victims are now being more broadly criticized as the public twigs to them. When the creator of “Beavis and Butt-head” comes out with a cartoon comedy series mocking environmentalists (”The Goode Family,” which premieres tonight on ABC), you could be forgiven for wondering if the culture has reached an inflection point green-wise. The environmentalist-contrarians Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger already think it has. Writing in the New Republic (and provoking a lot of debate there), they declare that the “green bubble” has burst in terms of public support. . . . . . the left’s alienation in the Bush years helped inflate...
May 27, 2009
Texie Morals
There's a disjoint, peripatetic cross-blog conversation going on that grapples with what appears to me to be the intellectual sewer of happiness research. There's some subjective data and a great deal of waffling about its meaning. In some ways the data is a Rorschach blot that is interpreted based on priors, each pundit seeing what is desired or at least expected. However, some of the pundits are aware of their biases and seek to overcome them. Below is Table 6.1, from a 2008 paper on the “net affect” of 45 ways we spent our time. (Net affect combines six emotions felt during the activity: happy, tired, stress, sad, interested, and pain.) A simple policy of taxing low affect activities and subsidizing the others would have us subsidize not just parties, doing and spectating sports, exercise, playing with kids, walking dogs, and music, but also subsidize religion, eating out, and shopping. We would tax not just work, commuting, home maintenance,...
May 06, 2009
Lame Journalism
Making farmers cool again Farming has become an occupation and cultural force of the past. Michael Pollan’s talk promoted the premise — and hope — that farming can become an occupation and force of the future. In the past century American farmers were given the assignment to produce lots of calories cheaply, and they did. They became the most productive humans on earth. A single farmer in Iowa could feed 150 of his neighbors. That is a true modern miracle. “American farmers are incredibly inventive, innovative, and accomplished. They can do whatever we ask them, we just need to give them a new set of requirements.” This is complete nonsense. Any real engagement with data reveals that farming is an occupation and cultural force of the present in spades. Just consider the political head lock that farming states have on airy-fairy urban fantasies such as climate control legislation - where Democrat congressmen from farming states vow to block any...
April 06, 2009
Red Foot
I'm not sure that anything will come of it, but there seems to be some push back against the various efforts by power elites to clamp down on humanity. There are the Tea Parties - which you may have heard about unless you are deep in the bowels of some echo chamber . . . or only know what the MSM reports - and there is Freedom Summer: We think that the regulation of everyday life is one of the key political questions of our time. The state’s erosion of informal relationships and spaces – in the street, the playground, or the football field – is one of the most worrying developments of our age. We want to make these questions political, to develop a political critique and challenge to the regulation of everyday life. . . Another challenge is to develop more the feel and sensibility of freedom, the spaces of informal collaboration where we can organise together...
March 06, 2009
Fashion
Or, Scary Monsters and Super Creeps. There's a brand new talk, but its not very clear Oh bop That people from good homes are talking this year Oh bop, fashion Its loud and tasteless and I've heard it before Oh bop You shout it while you're dancing on the ole dance Floor Oh bop, fashion Some things don't change. Part of my unease has to do with the argument of some experts that what’s needed is a short-term return to the consumer spending habits of 2003-2004 in order to boost the economy, then a managed, gradual “slow landing” to a much heavier emphasis on savings over spending to give the economy time to shed excess capacity in a sensible, graduated manner. That’s roughly the equivalent of expecting occupied Iraqis to universally throw flowers and parades to welcome the American military. Desire isn’t so easily managed, nor for that matter is fear. This vision of the way forward is made...
February 20, 2009
Effete Fakirs
In the interest of disambiguation note that a general definition of a fakir is simply an educated man. But what kind of education? Among the purposes of liberal education is the inculcation of self-questioning and self-doubt, qualities that many academics have lately — and rightly — found lacking in our political and managerial elite. But can we honestly say that we have held ourselves to the same standard? After decades of jargon-ridden theorizing in the academic humanities, how sure can we be that President Eisenhower (as quoted by Hofstadter) was entirely wrong when he defined an intellectual as "a man who takes more words than are necessary to tell more than he knows"? It's dead common to hear complaints about anti-intellectualism. It exists, and always has existed in America. It's related to a general disdain for aristocracies of all sorts, part of the long effort of humanity to throw off the yoke of kings and priests. It has never...
January 24, 2009
Strange Land
One of my projects for the new year and new regime is to pay more attention to conservatives, a task I had largely ignored for years since they held power - sort of - and I find those outside the gate to be more interesting, even when they are reprehensible, as was indeed the case while the conservatives governed. The Democrats were insane, but that can be interesting if not edifying. I previously mentioned a group blog - Secular Right: Reality & Reason - as one source I would monitor. Little of value has come of that, which seems to be dawning on them too. . . . we tend to attempt to clear a space where it is acceptable to air both secular and conservative thoughts without accusation of contradiction, but many of our critics suggest that there is no issue at all and no real conservatives make arguments on religious grounds alone. That is debatable, but I...
December 25, 2008
Death Cult
Those who have been expecting relentless nastiness and intellectual bankruptcy from Obama have been mostly disappointed until recently, just as his most rabid supporters who longed for such excesses have been disappointed . . . until now. Holdren references the threat that "continuing population growth" poses to human flourishing: This was the key insight in Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (Ballantine, New York, 1968), as well as one of those in Harrison Brown's prescient earlier book, The Challenge of Man's Future (Viking, New York, 1954). The elementary but discomfiting truth of it may account for the vast amount of ink, paper, and angry energy that has been expended trying in vain to refute it. It is, I suppose, possible to find a "key insight" about population growth in Ehrlich's book that's anodyne enough to qualify as "elementary" and irrefutable. But there's a pretty good reason that the book is remembered primarily for its mix of hysteria and moral idiocy:...
October 14, 2008
Quackdoodle
I read a story once, a Dillard IIRC, in which a British anthropologist insisted on calling the Kuakiutl Indians on the west coast of North America Quackdoodle, as they had been called by the British for 100 years. In the story this was intended to discredit the priggish anthropologist, showing her lack of true insight about the native people. That sort of thing still happens. Conservatives are in a tizzy over the way Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) pronounced “Pakistan” during last night’s debate: – “When Obama says Pock-i-stahn I have an uncontrollable urge to read the New Yorker and find some Chardonnay. Fortunately I have an old copy of NR and a Coors Light to snap me back to reality. Seriously though — no one in flyover country says Pock-i-stahn. It’s annoying.” [E-mail posted by Kathryn Jean Lopez] Every country in the world does this. The classic example is the British insistence on pronouncing French words adopted into English...
September 18, 2008
Scapegoats
It's an old custom. The scapegoat was a goat that was driven off into the wilderness as part of the ceremonies of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in Judaism during the times of the Temple in Jerusalem. The rite is described in Leviticus 16. The word is more widely used as a metaphor, referring to someone who is blamed for misfortunes, generally as a way of distracting attention from the real causes. . . Since this goat, carrying the sins of the people placed on it, is sent away to perish [5], the word "scapegoat" has come to mean a person, often innocent, who is blamed and punished for the sins, crimes, or sufferings of others. In some developing countries democracy is the scapegoat. Traditional theories of democratization, such as those of Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, predict a story of middle class heroics: As a country develops a true middle class, these urban, educated citizens insist on more...
July 16, 2008
Tortured Views
In a few earlier posts, most recently in Venture Socialism, I've noted that the use of torture was by no means rare in the world, and that those who hyperventilated about it lately had an unrealistic and uniformed view of things. Perhaps this is correct? As repugnant as torture is, the fact is most countries -- even those with democratic governments -- do it. . . An average of 78 percent of the governments in the world used torture against at least one person under their control in any given year during the last 25 years of the 20th century, according to Moore and Ryals. Those who used it in a given year faced a 93 percent chance of continuing the practice the next year. "Politicians and pundits speak in highly moralistic language that suggests that because torture is abhorrent, it is abnormal and unusual," the researchers wrote. "While it is abhorrent, it is neither abnormal nor unusual. Human...
May 20, 2008
Fairy Dust
The longing for sacrifice - hair shirt self-abnegation - that underpins the appalling views of green fashion victims about agriculture discussed in the previous post are pervasive - a large part of their views about energy too. The lack of research funding that Revkin discussed is a symptom of a deeper conflict. The denial of the growing evidence of - yes - "peak oil" by commentators on the Right resembles their vociferous denial of global warming (more sophisticated responses now reveal that, all along, it wasn't the reality of global warming that bothered them; it was the implications. And they are daunting). The same is true of the reaction on the Right about Peak Oil (in fairness, there's a good deal of techno-optimism on the Left as well; while the Right thinks there's plenty of oil - enough in ANWR to run our civilization for another century, it is implied - the Left thinks we're going to replace oil...
May 16, 2008
More Indignities
The earlier post Bio-Squick, which linked Pinker's critique of using dignity, whatever that means, as an argument for some set of values that advocates wish to make the law of the land, blithely skipped past the main discussion of Leon Kass and a report from the President's Council on Bioethics: Human Dignity and Bioethics. Regime change is near, this stuff is history. But conservatives are outraged. Steven Pinker's assault on the President's Council on Bioethics and its recently-released of batch of essays is just as shoddy and bizarre as Yuval Levin says it is. Pinker wants scientists, like himself, to be the social arbiters of morals. How’s he doing so far? Pinker’s essay is a striking exhibit of a set of attitudes toward religion and the West’s moral tradition that has become surprisingly common among America’s intellectual elite. It is a mix of fear, suspicion, and disgust that has a lot to do, for instance, with the Left’s intense...
May 14, 2008
Bio-Squick
Or, the rise of the ice-cream police. Many people are vaguely disquieted by developments (real or imagined) that could alter minds and bodies in novel ways. Romantics and Greens tend to idealize the natural and demonize technology. Traditionalists and conservatives by temperament distrust radical change. Egalitarians worry about an arms race in enhancement techniques. And anyone is likely to have a "yuck" response when contemplating unprecedented manipulations of our biology. The President's Council has become a forum for the airing of this disquiet, and the concept of "dignity" a rubric for expounding on it. . . Whatever that is. The problem is that "dignity" is a squishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it. The bioethicist Ruth Macklin, who had been fed up with loose talk about dignity intended to squelch research and therapy, threw down the gauntlet in a 2003 editorial, "Dignity Is a Useless Concept." Macklin argued that bioethics has done just...
March 09, 2008
More Bogusity
Continuing the thoughts in the earlier post, Bogusity, (or should that be bogosity?) about research findings and their interpretations. Well designed experiments and observations yield data that has intrinsic value, but the interpretation of that data seems to be a sand box where superstitions and biases often play. Consider this: Experimental evidence for reciprocity comes from behavioral game theory, which uses economic games in which subjects make choices under varied social conditions. For instance, Herrmann et al. employ a public goods game in which each of four anonymous subjects is initially given 20 tokens, and each is told he can place any number of these tokens in a public account. The tokens in the account are multiplied by 1.6 and the result divided evenly among the four. At the end of the experiment, the tokens are exchanged for real money. In this game, each individual helps the group most by placing his 20 tokens in the public account, and...
October 31, 2007
Ho Ho Ho
No, wait, that's a different holiday. Whatever. You will recall that in March, some Serbian vampire hunters attempted to properly stake the mortal remains of Slobodan Milosevic, so as to prevent him from troubling the world in un-death as he had in life. (Via Warren Ellis.) By all accounts, half a year later Milosevic is still, thankfully, dead: once again, I ask, could this be coincidence? There's more. It's a bag-o-treats. Dig in. Gingerly, there might be sharp and/or pointed objects embedded....
October 15, 2007
Legless Facts
An earlier post, Disease Control, cited some US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention research that lamented the fact that attempts to debunk health myths failed to a large extent because they repeated the myth, and that's what subjects remembered, with the kicker that it was from an authoritative source! When ... social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that ... three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual. ... Most troubling was that people ... now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC. I responded that "just any old smear won't do. It has to have legs. It isn't that "whoever makes the first assertion about something has a large advantage over everyone who denies it later", it is that a good smear is difficult to refute". Perhaps I am mistaken, Facts Prove No Match for Gossip, It Seems. “If you know you...
October 15, 2007
Bon Mot
Think nice today. The principle of comparative advantage is one of those ideas that can completely transform the way you see the world, once you really internalise it. That everyone, even those who are best at nothing, can benefit themselves and others through co-operation is a beautiful idea that points to the possibility of a benevolent world....
October 09, 2007
Beauty Light
I am too busy to think, so I do it to excess. Weird that. I can't relax since the task list is impossibly long. Even while working 12 hour days I feel like I'm shirking if I talk to you. But the anxiety of time pressure ignites my mind, heightens my perceptions and makes me vulnerable to reality when it shyly or boldly exposes itself to me at unexpected moments. All day today I have been intoxicated by the light. When the sun is lower in the southern sky, on a clear day, it's like those brief moments in the morning and evening when everything sparkles, the colors are incandescent and contrasts are heightened. It's what photographers, some of them anyway, call beauty light. There's a crew of ad men that come around here sometimes to shoot stills and videos advertising dirt bikes, quads and such. They pay good for access to private land with interesting features where they...
October 06, 2007
Flawed Heroes
Last year at about this time there was some discussion of vigilantism prompted by thoughts about 9/11. This seems to be a yearly event now. He Needed Killin' explored some of the ideas. One of the striking changes in American society after 9/11/2001 was the number of solid citizens who remembered their roots - or at least the Hollywood version - and voiced interest in some vigilantism. The conflict is that the acts of vigilantes are criminal - outside the law - but are viewed by some as necessary, at least in the early days of a society. The mythology of the American west abounds with examples, though this isn't formal argument or proof of the proposition. The example that was used in the comments following that post comes from the film The Searchers. Ward Bond has to arrest John Wayne and take him to trial even though the creep needed killin'. The president who tortures to save the...
September 08, 2007
Agonistic Liberalism
The other day Timothy's interest was piqued by a review of John Gray's Black Mass. Timothy notes that: Rauchway describes Gray as arguing that Thatcherite neoliberals assumed that reducing the size of the state and empowering markets would reinvigorate a mannered, respectable and traditionally moral middle-class culture within Britain. Instead, one of the fruits of neoliberalism on the domestic front was a less judgemental, more tolerant society that was even more socially and culturally decentralized than the post-1968 society the Thatcherites looked on with distaste. This, to Gray, explains the rise of neoconservative enthusiasm for state interventions into social, cultural and moral concerns. With adaptations, this argument seems useful in the United States as well. For me, one of the key convergences of the last two decades in American political life has been in arguments used by a culturalist right and a culturalist left. Both factions assume that the only way to explain why many Americans do not “naturally”...
April 15, 2007
Cause and Effect
One of the faults I find in much social research is that ideologically motivated researchers assume what they wish to prove, and then confirm thier biases. This seems to be a good example. Participants in laboratory games are often willing to alter others’ incomes at a cost to themselves, and this behaviour has the effect of promoting cooperation1–3. What motivates this action is unclear: punishment and reward aimed at promoting cooperation cannot be distinguished from attempts to produce equality4. To understand costly taking and costly giving, we create an experimental game that isolates egalitarian motives. The results show that subjects reduce and augment others’ incomes, at a personal cost, even when there is no cooperative behaviour to be reinforced. Furthermore, the size and frequency of income alterations are strongly influenced by inequality. Emotions towards top earners become increasingly negative as inequality increases, and those who express these emotions spend more to reduce above-average earners’ incomes and to increase below-average...
April 15, 2007
Tool Time
There's new meaning to the old saying "shooting yourself in the foot". According to new statistics that would make Bob Vila cringe, the number of injuries from nail guns has almost doubled since 2001. . . n fact, the number of weekend carpenters treated each year for nail gun injuries in emergency rooms in U.S. hospitals more than tripled between 1991 and 2005, increasing to about 14,800 per year. . . "The increases in injuries are likely related to availability of these tools on the consumer market and the steady decline in the costs of tools and air compressors," Lipscomb said. "The frequency of such injuries that are treated in emergency departments in professional workers have remained relatively flat; however, the tools are now readily accessible to consumers, extending what has been largely an occupational hazard to the general public." It seems that there might also be a decrease in whacked thumbs and other hammer related injuries, but they...
March 27, 2007
Green Noir
The landscape is littered with pundits and advocates who have perfect records of failure. They are always wrong, in obvious ways, and when finally forced to admit error just reinvent themselves with a new set of predictions and causes to advocate. There was an example of this in a recent post that quoted Bruno Latour lamenting that his deceitful practices had been hijacked by his opponents and used against him. I myself have spent sometimes in the past trying to show the "lack of scientific certainty" inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a "primary issue." But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument–or did I? After all, I have been accused of just that sin. Still, I'd like to believe that, on the contrary, I intended to emancipate the public from a prematurely naturalized objectified fact. Was I foolishly mistaken? Bullshit. The arguments were instrumental...
March 20, 2007
Beer Bribery
It works. Politicians have known this for centuries and now even physicists and mathematicians have caught on. Thus the reasoning behind eigenfactor.org, the latest brainstorm from Carl Bergstrom's lab — most of the actual code and elbow-grease being provided by Jevin West and Ben Althouse. It covers all the journals that impact factor would, but also gives an estimate of the impact of citations to non-journals (which lets us see that some software is more influential than some journals). Plus you get to see all kinds of useful things about how much the journals cost (something Carl's been interested in for some time), and how that breaks down by paper or by citation. All in all, it's a very fun and potentially very useful tool for anyone interested in the academic publishing system, and/or applications of Markov chains. Disclaimer/Incestuous Amplification: Rumors that Carl arranged for me to publicize everything his lab does in this weblog in exchange for beers...
March 18, 2007
Business Envy
While we are looking at Randall's posts let's do this one too. Scientists and engineers have knowledge that equip them in a variety of ways to hazard predictions about the future. Yet, being humans, they have assorted desires and needs that can bias their predictions away from the most likely future courses of events. This is Randall's concluding graf following a discussion of a Benny Peiser interview of Freeman Dyson about academic - especially British academic - doom mongering. Benny Peiser: Britain's leading cosmologists seem to be particularly gloomy about the future of civilisation and humankind. . . How do you explain this apocalyptic mood among leading cosmologists in Britain and the almost desperate tone of their pronouncements? Freeman Dyson: My view of the prevalence of doom-and-gloom in Cambridge is that it is a result of the English class system. In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class....
March 07, 2007
No Sale
To reason usefully one must consider all aspects of an issue. Burch's Law is a special case of a more general rule: Just because your ethics require an action doesn't mean the universe will exempt you from the consequences. If the universe were fair, like a sympathetic human, the universe would understand that you had overriding ethical reasons for your action, and would exempt you from the usual penalties. The judge would rule "justifiable homicide" instead of "murder" and exempt you from the usual prison term. Well, the universe isn't fair and it won't exempt you from the consequences. We know the equations of physics in enough detail to know that the equations don't contain any quantities reflective of ethical considerations. We don't send automobile manufacturers to jail, even though manufactured cars kill an estimated 1.2 million people per year worldwide. (One Holocaust per decade, or around 2% of the annual planetary death rate.) Not everyone who dies in...
March 02, 2007
Prohibition
See this telling exposure of the absurdity of the prohibitionist agenda: To Fly or Not to Fly (to California): That is the Question. [C]arbon offsets only really work if you assume that people in the developed world can pollute proportionally more than people in the developing world. If you give everyone on earth an equal share of a sustainable carbon footprint, then a single transatlantic round-trip flight is about 2 years worth of your allowable carbon output. . . I'm worse than most, flying a ridiculous amount so I can live in Manhattan and work for IFTF in Palo Alto (I fly out here about every six weeks, spewing approximately 4 tons of CO2 into the stratosphere per trip). Plus all the trips to client sites. So seeing that buying a TerraPass isn't going to be enough, I've been toying with the idea of taking the train out to California from New York for this year's Ten Year Forecast...
January 24, 2007
Winks, Squidgers?
It isn't merely child's play. The first thing the newly revived MIT Tiddlywinks Association wants people to know about the game of flicking small plastic discs into a cup is that it is not just a game of flicking small plastic discs into a cup. . . Tiddlywinks started in the late 1800s in England. In 1955, it resurfaced at Cambridge University, where a group of undergraduates were looking for a game to represent their school. Tim Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web and recent recipient of the Draper Prize, played tiddlywinks. The game is played with sets of small, thin discs, known as winks, which are lined up on a mat. Using the larger disc, called the squidger, players pop the smaller discs into flight by snapping one side of the smaller disc with the edge of the larger one. . . There are two different versions. The first is the informal child's game in which the...
December 29, 2006
Cultural Perversity
During my catch-up reading blitz yesterday I skimmed a post that lamented the use of the term "protectionist" to describe those who wish to erect or maintain trade barriers. [Perhaps I will recall where I read that and add a link later.] The argument was that "protectionist" is too kind a term since it masks a destructive behavior less about protection of anything than preservation and enhancement of monopolies. I suppose it is protecting monopolies - and so is accurate, strictly speaking - but it conceals more than it reveals. One of the darker aspects of the impulse to restrict trade can be seen in the attempts of various autocratic regimes to censor cultural products and the ideas they encapsulate. Last year there was concern about attempts to censor the net, especially by China, yet the chief villain in this drama is the UN. UNESCO sought an international agreement allowing trade protectionism for cultural goods . . . which...
October 25, 2006
He Needed Killin'
The Hollywood version of the American southwest after the Indian wars and the closing of the frontier - and much earlier in Texas - is of rough, vigilante justice meted out by flawed heroes. The truly bad were tracked down and summarily dispatched with a minimum of fuss or passion. All in a day's work. There's some truth in that but it was as likely to be solid citizens as flawed heroes who did the deeds. One of the striking changes in American society after 9/11/2001 was the number of solid citizens who remembered their roots - or at least the Hollywood version - and voiced interest in some vigilantism. That's one of the reasons that Bush was applauded for his initial handling of the event. I'm putting this out there for your consideration with a fully conflicted heart. I don't feel diminished by the deaths of Mohammed Atta and the other creeps who killed thousands on September 11....
October 04, 2006
Grim U.
I've quoted this Roger Scruton piece a couple of times before. . . . intellectuals value their oppositional and transgressive stance far more than they value truth, and have a vested interested in undermining the practices — such as rational argument, genuine scholarship and open-minded discussion — which have truth as their goal. They will seize on the relativist arguments — even if they are as shoddy as Foucault’s or as empty as Rorty’s — as they will seize on any kind of mumbo-jumbo that silences the critic and furthers their subversive aims. And when they take hold of institutions they form a “confederacy of dunces” whose first aim is to exclude anyone who thinks out of line. That is why university departments in the humanities and social sciences are now such grim, bigoted places . . . There's another explanation for this sort of counter-productive behavior. Faculty positions and grant money are scarce commodities, and universities and funding...
September 17, 2006
Fluxology
Blues, Jazz, Bluegrass and inventive instruments. The colonists were surely musical. The Dopyera brothers were born in what is now Slovakia, and came to the U.S. with the wave of Eastern European immigrants around the beginning of the 20th century. (In fact, the word “Dobro” is both a contraction of “DOpyera BROthers” and the word for “good” in their native tongue.) Engineers, tinkerers, businessmen, and accomplished musicians (their family had a history of violin making going back centuries, and Rudy was by many accounts an exceptionally talented and soulful Gypsy-style violinist), the two Dopyera brothers combined their Old World skills and traditions with the booming technology and futuristic tastes in art of pre-WWII America. Who else thought that spun aluminum might be a good material for sound projection? Who else engraved beautiful Art Deco designs on the bodies of their guitars? Only the Dopyeras....
July 29, 2006
Vegetable Minds
Reasoning in good faith from evidence to conclusions is out of fashion, or more properly, still out of fashion. That's one aspect of the nonsensical views criticized in Crypto-religion. Those views, "that Americans have long been ambivalent about science", uniquely so in the author's view, were rebutted by pointing out the religious nature of scientific ambivalence in other parts of the world. Such ambivalence is more common than in the US but isn't attributed to religious views, though even a casual look shows that it is. Consider food fetishes. Many religions have them, and one of the clearest indicators of unreasoning faith in modern crypto-religion is food obsession and non-scientific, or even anti-scientific, justifications for them. Organic religion, vegetable religion and a bewildering variety of other health and diet fads are staples of life in many parts of the supposedly developed world, though the behaviors are more appropriate for the developing world where education is not as available. This...
June 24, 2006
I'm Late, I'm Late
It's not that there are no interesting things to talk about, it's that RL intrudes. I'm reduced to flying pointers. Catch this. This repudiation of the national idea is the result of a peculiar frame of mind that has arisen throughout the Western world since the Second World War, and which is particularly prevalent among the intellectual and political elites. No adequate word exists for this attitude, though its symptoms are instantly recognized: namely, the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’. I call the attitude oikophobia – the aversion to home – by way of emphasizing its deep relation to xenophobia, of which it is the mirror image. Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which intellectuals tend to become arrested. As George Orwell pointed out, intellectuals on the Left...
June 14, 2006
Sweet Nothings
One of the agronomic, dietary and political fads of the moment is to demonize maize. It's subsidized, exhausts soil, sucks up water and makes you fat. It's the foundation of industrial agriculture in the US and some other nations, a fact that has economic and political implications as well as agronomic and environmental consequences. I've been saying much of this for years, online and offline. An incident that in some ways characterizes this long effort is a series of rants at the old Electric Minds virtual community in 1997 when I tried to convince Howard Rheingold and Bob Watson of these things. I was speaking heresy at the time but it has almost become conventional wisdom now. Unfortunately as the ideas have become more popular they have become less sensible, less accurate. Since there is less resistance it is now possible to make claims that don't stand up under scrutiny. They aren't so thoroughly scrutinized. One of those claims...
June 07, 2006
Grimmer Than Thou
The earlier post Narratives delved into some of the reasons for the failures of media to report accurately or do useful analyses of events. The dominant leftward tilt of the media was one explanation but that was further decomposed into a propensity for gloom in western thought, especially on the left, and the odd effects of group dynamics in which views tend to slide toward the grim. It may also be a competition of sorts. [via A&L Daily] Until recently, no one knew who is right, because no one was keeping score. But the results of a 20-year research project now suggest that the skeptics are closer to the truth. I describe the project in detail in my book Expert Political Judgment: How good is it? How can we know? The basic idea was to solicit thousands of predictions from hundreds of experts about the fates of dozens of countries, and then score the predictions for accuracy. We find...
June 04, 2006
Seattle Borg
A couple of weeks ago (how time flies!) I linked and quoted a bit from Brad Allenby's May column. It bears repeating. Under conditions of systems and ontological complexity which push people beyond their adaptive capacity, retreat to fundamentalism -- religious, environmental, scientific, philosophical, ideological -- is a common response. Unfortunately, such responses are profoundly dysfunctional . . . It is not that fundamentalism or ideologies are necessarily “bad,” although they have certainly spilled their share of blood in the past century. But it is very clear that they are especially maladaptive in periods of rapid and fundamental change. If, then, the major adaptive mechanism to dauntingly rapid change, fundamentalism of various kinds, is dysfunctional, what is one to rely on? . . . For the individual, a difficult authenticity must be demanded; for the systems response, we must first accept the complexity of the world we have created, and our fairly pervasive ignorance of it, and learn to...
June 01, 2006
Factoids
One of the updates to Ugly Attention noted the fondness of activists for factoids, preferably alarmist factoids but any old factoid will do if it helps make a spurious point. Other posts have poked fun at food and agriculture poseur Michael Pollan, and the enviro-exploitation zine Grist. A recent interview of Pollan provides a useful example of factoid abuse. Most of the produce on the East Coast comes from the Central Valley of California. We're taking organic lettuce, grown with great care, terrific cultural practices, and we put it on a truck and we keep it cold from the moment we pick it, 36-degree cold chain all the way across the country for three to five days, and that takes 56 calories of fossil-fuel energy to get one calorie of organic lettuce. . . So if you're motivated by environmental considerations, you may find -- and I'm not telling anybody what to do, I'm just trying to give them...
May 31, 2006
Life is Messy
And so is intellectually honest scholarship and pedagogy. For me, the best possibilities of academic life are realized in an appreciation of nuance, complexity, subtlety, depth. What has disappointed me most about academia, a disappointment I have written about in my weblogs for three years now, are all the various ways in which a rich appreciation for the messiness and ambiguity of human life get boxed out or bracketed off in scholarly discussions and pedagogical work. If “politicized” courses, and “politicized” scholarship concern me–and they do–it’s largely because they’re part and parcel of the way that the necessary reductions of the unmanageable and incomprehensible variety of human experience turn into instrumental manglings and amputations, into grinding out scholarship and enrollments like sausage in a factory. This is one graf of very many written by Tim Burke about the recent ACTA report critical of academia in general for its left biases. As one might expect its a complicated and contentious...
April 25, 2006
Two Kinds
There are two kinds of people: those who think there are two kinds of people and those who don't. Lynne Kiesling points to a Forbes article by Rich Karlgaard that identifies two kinds of people: "opportunity seekers" love charging into the unknown future; "problem solvers" resist forward motion until all present-day problems are gone. This is in response to Virginia Postrel's dichotomy of people: dynamists and stasists. Both dichotomies ring false to me. There's something there that they are nibbling at but they haven't nailed it. An earlier attempt at the problem, Jane Jacobs' Systems of Survival, seems to have more depth. Her dichotomies are summarized by Stewart Brand here: THE COMMERCIAL MORAL SYNDROME Shun force. Come to voluntary agreements. Be honest. Collaborate easily with strangers and aliens. Compete. Respect contracts. Use initiative and enterprise. Be open to inventiveness and novelty. Be efficient. Promote comfort and convenience. Dissent for the sake of the task. Invest for productive purposes. Be...
January 07, 2006
The New Doom
The blogosphere is all a twitter about this Mark Steyn article, It's the Demography, Stupid. This Lileks Screed is a good example: I defy anyone to find anything in a modern newspaper as bracing or blunt – or as long, for that matter – as this much-discussed Mark Steyn piece on the decline of the West. . . The telling line in Steyn's piece quotes that fine Gaul Jean-Francois Revel: "Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself." I’ve read a lot of Revel; a great man and a profound, clear thinker. Lucky for him, he is old, and will not see his fears made manifest. Guilt is a problem, but it’s not the entire enchilada. It’s guilt married to a peculiar belief that Western Civilization is unique only in its sins. The only thing Western Civ really gave the world was slavery, imperialism, war, and...
December 25, 2005
Whiffed
Sometimes we see what we want to see, and so miss some interesting things. I hope I'm wrong (I really do), but I fear that too many people who read the following about Frank Perdue will regard such efforts as contemptible, low, mean, almost comical, unworthy of being ranked as great. In fact, such efforts are precisely the sort that makes our prosperity so vast and deep. . . But what was its [a Perdue chicken's] unique selling proposition? To hear Perdue himself tell it, his chickens were just plain better than anybody else's. . . he spent six months on the road, talking to butchers about what qualities they liked to see in their chickens. . . he mated a meaty-breasted Cornish male with a White Plymouth Rock female to create the Perdue pedigree. They didn't want bruised meat, so Perdue set strict protocols for handling live chickens. Ain't it great that someone -- someone who is a...
December 12, 2005
Doom Seeky
Nothing is more exciting to a doom monger than a disaster movie. Even a real disaster isn't as good since it can't be safely anticipated, savored and enjoyed repeatedly. Real disasters are so grubby, and they don't lend themselves to ridiculous moralizing and political activism. You might think they would since they are real, but when it's for real the critics out you for your perversions. They point and laugh. A movie sort of keeps it in the closet, gives you plausible deniablility. The fact that you love horror films doesn't mean that you want to become a slasher or a slasher victim or something, and loving disaster films doesn't mean you long for disaster. Or so you can claim. The pervs at worldwhingeing are dreaming of methane hydrate apocalypse. RealClimate explores in some detail today just how the frozen methane could melt, and what the result could be if it does so. The situation, as RealClimate sees it,...
November 17, 2005
Rebel, Rebel
This isn't really the all-Burke-all-the-time-network, it just seems that way. At any rate, Timothy points out in a comment to Paris Is Burning that Frank Furedi, the author of the article used to launch my diversity rap, has a "complicated ideological history". Too true. (Perhaps you will recall if I remind you Timothy that we discussed this in a BS thread many years ago when they were Living Marxism?) Just for phun I Googled Furedi to see what was being said about him and chose this Catallaxy post as a useful survey of opinion about Furedi and Spiked!. This entry at Source Watch, pointed to by the Catallaxy post, briefly states just how complicated that ideological history is. Frank Furedi is professor of sociology at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. He was, while using pseudonym Frank Richards, the founder and chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) of Great Britain. The RCP has traversed one of the...
October 24, 2005
UNwise
Increasingly I wonder why anyone supports the UN? It has long been held in low regard by some but was defended by others who actively shielded it from exposure for its gaffes and corruption since it helped them further their domestic agendas. But its blunders in the Balkans and Africa were reconsidered in the media when it proved to be so inept in tsunami relief efforts. And then there's the cluster of Iraq blunders and corruption. Now they have punked themselves again. [via Norm] THE United Nations withheld some of the most damaging allegations against Syria in its report on the murder of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister, it emerged yesterday. The names of the brother of Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria, and other members of his inner circle, were dropped from the report that was sent to the Security Council. The confidential changes were revealed by an extraordinary computer gaffe because an electronic version distributed by...
September 30, 2005
Ship of Fools
Polemical Commentary plucked a quote from Andrew Rich's Think Tanks, Public Policy and the Politics of Expertise:, repeated here: p. 220, "The biggest worry for liberals, conservatives, and scholars alike should be the trend for think tanks - and increasingly experts of all kinds - to produce research that is little more than polemical commentary. This work diminishes the potential for its producers to have substantive influence with policy makers. Even more, this work, especially in its most ideological and most aggressively marketed forms, damages the reputation of experts generally among policy makers. The distinction between experts and advocates is tenuous. As we head into the future, the weakness of that distinction presents a fundamental challenge for think tanks, experts, and those who rely on them. The weakness threatens the quality of policy produced; for if trusted research and analysis is not available, what becomes the foundation for informed policy decisions?" It's a good question but it assumes that...
June 05, 2005
The Nose Knows
The sense of smell is often noted for its emotional significance, its ability to trigger emotional states and memory cascades. It's a secret passage into the mind, a direct path to the primitive lizard brain nestled beneath the civilized finery of the well clothed sophisticated mind. But it is also a weak sensory path for humans, orders of magnitude less acute than for most other animals, and often dismissed as having little importance. There is some difference by gender, the feminine being more attuned to odors if not truly more talented in detecting and distinguishing them. There is art as well as talent involved. Those who lose another input path, such as vision, often discover that there is much useful information in odor. It is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It isn't an absolute value about which all can agree though there is usually great overlap in judgements. Ugliness seems nearly if not equally...
June 03, 2005
Butt Found
Many people are described as lacking the ability to find their own butts even using both hands. Or, if found, distinguish them from random holes in the earth. This may be related since they may have found their butts but not realized that they had done so. Terry Teachout has apparently made such a discovery. There was a time not so very long ago, Teachout recalled, when students at Stanford, led by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, stood in the streets crying out: "Hey hey! Ho ho! Western culture's got to go...!" Today, the idea of a cultural majority seems almost quaint. Whatever mainstream culture in the United States might have been at one time, today it has transformed into a series of fragmented communities, identities and demographics. These "lifestyle clusters" are providing an illustration of something that the recent elections have made all too clear: people of differing views are becoming more and more isolated from each other. We...
May 11, 2005
Cyber Clones
Any collection of information is useful only to the extent that you can access the information readily. Though hardly the first to grapple with the truth American librarian Melvil Dewey was inspired to create the Dewey Decimal System of Classification to bring some order to vast collections of books. But there is a fundamental defect to the idea of ordering information, indexing it by some type of abstraction; it conceals more than it reveals. Anything less than complete information loses information. The problem isn't that information needs order, it is that it needs search tools that can provide views of the whole collection of data filtered by selected criteria. But there's a problem here too in that a full search can take a long time and find so many matches that there is still too much for a human to digest. Finding something takes skill and talent even with good tools. Scholars and researchers require full information and are...
March 17, 2005
Ethereal Science
Norm points to a quasi-religious pseudo-science article in the Groan, one that supports his biases against meat eating. Of course, it's possible to mock here. But one can mock anything. Indeed sometimes it's an apt thing to do. But in itself mocking supplies no reasons. And reasons are also good - and needed. The reasons have been documented many, many, many times before so there is something disingenuous about asserting that reasons are needed, as if there were none. This is a common rhetorical tactic used to support weak ideas. Simply ignore the body of knowledge available and challenge others to refute an otherwise unsupported idea. A more intellectually honest approach would be to cite the reasons already given and, if possible, find fault with them. As bad as Norm's take is the Groan is worse, as we should expect. ...new research suggests that animals have far more complex cognitive and social skills than we gave them credit for......
February 27, 2005
Contrasts
The comments of Harvard president Larry Summers about women in science are interesting but the reactions to them are even more interesting. Timothy Burke says: Most of what I have to say about Larry Summers has been said already by others. He is not a martyr to political correctness. Many of his critics were exaggerated or extreme in their reaction, but the speech he gave was really quite weak. It’s perfectly ok to get up and say something like, “We have to remain open to a variety of explanations for the relative lack of women in the sciences, including genetic or innate differences between men and women”. But Summers didn’t say that: he went on to speculate that this was the correct hypothesis. The current state of knowledge on this subject suggests fairly strongly that this is not a good hypothesis. If you’re the president of Harvard, you ought to know that if you’re going to shoot your mouth...
February 24, 2005
Miserly Values
There's something repellent about most paleo-environmentalists, something deeply wrong in their value systems that oozes into their words and deeds producing mean-spirited acts. But it isn't just their values that are repellent, their reasoning is defective as well, perhaps a feedback phenomenon from their values. They are misers, convinced that there is only so much loot around and determined to get their propers, what they feel is owed them in some way. This is simple greed masquerading as fairness. Consider this miserly rant: Less than a quarter of the Earth's surface actually sports much in the way of life. The rest – the dark deep ocean, the high mountain peaks, the deserts and ice caps – isn't totally lifeless... But it's hard to make a living in a place where nature's bounty consists of a few bacteria going pokily about their business deep beneath the frozen ice. No, for our purposes, we've got a quarter of a planet. No,...
February 20, 2005
Undermining Society
An idea expressed in several earlier posts is that clumsy government policies that undermine and displace the efforts of citizens degrade society. The post Mama's Rules showed how this type of behavior has destroyed forests as well as forest management culture. The post Creating Chaos discussed how development aid destroys local initiative and culture. The central defect of such efforts is to respond to social need by replacing existing institutions with government institutions, rather than aiding those existing institutions. The result is degraded societies less able to advance themselves. They are less willing to engage in productive activities where there is risk of failure or government takeover, so society stagnates. Consider this example. if a significant percentage of the population lacks access to information services that could provide a significant foundation for other forms of innovation, who is going to bridge the gap, and how? If the delivery of information services is strictly the business of private companies, incumbent...
February 03, 2005
Healthy Dog
Robert Conquest's The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History sounds interesting so I've ordered it. Like his earlier work The Great Terror, 1968 and subsequent works such as The Harvest of Sorrow it is being met with initial rejection by many in academia. If, like those earlier works, it proves in time to be equally sensible it will be a good read now. Product Description: From the author of The Harvest of Sorrow and one of the world's most respected humanists comes this long-awaited work of history and philosophy. The Dragons of Expectation—in the tradition of Isaiah Berlin's The Crooked Timber of Humanity and George Orwell's Essays—brilliantly traces how seductive ideas have come to corrupt modern minds, to often-disastrous effects. From the onset of the Enlightenment to the excesses of democracy, Stalinism, and liberalism, Robert Conquest masterfully examines how false nostrums have infected academia, politicians, and the public, showing how their reliance on "isms"...
January 10, 2005
Family Affair
In Modest Praise Nicole-Anne Boyer was, err, modestly praised. It may seem as if I harbor a special enmity for Nicole-Anne Boyer since I have repeatedly dunked her pigtails in the ink well 1, 2, but as usual it's a special affection expressed through close attention and criticism. She's the best of the lot at WorldChanging, by a wide margin, and has her own blog at Fuzzy Signals, a venue worth visiting regularly and so resident in my blog roll. I'm sure this isn't how she sees herself but my take is that she's a sensible and well meaning person who has fallen in with a bad crowd. She indulges in the normal behavior of the bad crowd, flashing gang sign and parroting party line, but when she expresses herself about subjects that make her think virtue is revealed, a swan among ducks, but not aware of the vast distinction for lack of a mirror. In Book Review: In...
January 09, 2005
Tin Foil Time
Ken MacLeod alternates insightful posts with drooling paranoiac nonsense but is always entertaining. Today he quotes an article from conspiracy central. Do you find modern art baffling and depressing? Have you ever wondered if it's all a ridiculous hoax? Don't worry. It's meant to be baffling and depressing, and it is a ridiculous hoax. According to American leftist James Petras's review of Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders [at Marxism-Leninism Today]... The Nazi attack on 'Degenerate Art' and some similarities between Nazi and Stalinist art have obscured some simple and obvious facts. The 'Degenerate Art' attacked by the Nazis was not the art foisted on us today. (What have the savage cartoons of Grosz in common with the pretentious trivia of BritArt?) One country's heroic statuary is much like another's heroic statuary. Vivid depictions of tanks and tractors, workers and soldiers look rather similar no matter who puts up the...
December 15, 2004
Invisible Pachyderm
Norm makes brief mention of Terry Eagleton's review of Frank Furedi's Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? Furedi's book has several other reviews 1 ,2 ,3 , 4 as well and seems to have touched some nerves in both academia and government. Noel Malcolm's review states the gist of the argument: What Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, mostly tries to do in this book is to analyse the growth of "philistinism" in our contemporary culture - the dumbing down of politics, the arts and education. It is true, of course, that in a dumbed-down society there will be less esteem for intellectuals; it is also true that, if the intellectuals themselves have participated in the dumbing down, they may no longer have anything smart to say... Universities, libraries, museums and art galleries are all under pressure to be "inclusive", to promote the "self-esteem" of the people who enter them, and so on. In short,...
December 13, 2004
Nice Idea...
but wrong species. SIAW mistakes gross external characteristics for the whole of reality. How about this for a radical new approach: why not leave religion to the religious (and the kind of blinkered liberals who get more upset about symbol than substance), and focus once again on the sources and forms of social division that can’t be chosen, from “race”, gender and sexual orientation to what used to be the chief concern of the left: class? hmmmm, class can't be chosen but religion can? I doubt that anyone raised in a religion would agree. They can choose not to practice and choose not to believe but they can't undo their past or force their families etc. to share their new beliefs. In many ways, in most places, religion is a far more determining issue than class. (Not to be confused with caste). Considering how quickly the babushkas were back in church after it became possible in the deformed republics...
December 03, 2004
Public Intellectuals
For the past few years there has been much ado about the decline of the public intellectual as a force in society. Populist heroes or at least demagogues have taken their place claiming a mandate from society as their authority rather than wisdom or scholarship. Closer examination shows that the history of intellectuals in general and public intellectuals in particular isn't very inspiring. Frances Stonor Suanders writes: Last week came an announcement from the University of London's Birkbeck College that it intends to establish a centre for public intellectuals. Its international director is to be Professor Slavoj Zizek... 'Political issues are too serious to be left only to politicians,' says Zizek. 'We need intellectuals - not to make decisions, but to make clear what the issues are about.' Trust for politicians being at an all-time low, it is tempting to believe him. But what exactly is a public intellectual? Unfortunately, Birkbeck doesn't tell us. There's some woolly stuff about...
December 03, 2004
Groupie Roundup
In the run up to the past US elections and during the immediate aftermath there was a lot of discussion about the narrow minded group-think of academics. Here are some recent additions to the growing body of commentary on the problem. Timothy Burke: Academics are not motivated to groupthink out of a loyalty to liberal causes, left-wing politics or registration in the Democratic Party, though in many disciplines at the moment, they may end up predominantly having those affiliations in a smug, uninterrogated manner. They’re motivated to groupthink by the institutional organization of academic life. The same forces that help academics to produce knowledge and scholarship are the forces which produce unwholesome close-mindedness and inbred self-satisfied attitudes. These forces would act on conservatives as well were we to magically remove the current professoriate and replace them with registered Republicans. They do act already on academics who operate in disciplines where certain kinds of political conservatism are more orthodox, or...
November 23, 2004
Science Opera
It's been called science wars but that doesn't seem quite apposite. It isn't that words are the only weapons, wars can be fought with words, but that it isn't a respectable, serious conflict so much as a theatrical adventure drama. In this scene John Holbo sings an aria accusing John Derbyshire of hypocrisy for pointing out that scientific progress is retarded and scientists are inhibited by fear of career damage when they have the temerity to study certain subjects that undermine liberal orthodoxy. Furthermore, if A and B both come from a population that has been breeding mostly among themselves for a few hundred years, while C comes from a different, remote population, it is very highly probable that you could discover this situation just by examining the three genomes. And now you know why the datanaut keeps his identity secret. He, or more precisely his website, has already been denounced as "bigoted" by one of those people who...
November 22, 2004
Hare Brained
The earlier post Blue Anti-Intellectualism could have been more properly titled academic anti-intellectualism since the focus was on how liberal orthodoxy in academic institutions had permeated them and become academic manners, the social reality of closed societies. The consequences of this for thought - false consensus, tendencies to extremism, etc. - and the consequences for society of having its youth sieved through such a warped filter were noted. This news article about a study of self reported voting by academics is illuminating. One of the studies, a national survey of more than 1,000 academics, shows that Democratic professors outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. That ratio is more than twice as lopsided as it was three decades ago, and it seems quite likely to keep increasing, because the younger faculty members are more consistently Democratic than the ones nearing retirement, said Daniel Klein, an associate professor of economics at Santa Clara...
November 06, 2004
Anti-Intellectualism
The heart of Timothy's argument in the previous post, that "Bush is popular with some voters precisely because of his malapropisms, his anti-intellectual stance, because they see a resemblance to themselves and because that resemblance aligns them with him against educated elites" is echoed in this opinion piece by Frank Furedi in of all places The Scientist. The lack of cultural affirmation for the promotion of science has little to do with science as such. Among young people, the reaction against science and experimentation has not led to the establishment of alternative outlets for the development of intellectual curiosity. Previously, when young people became estranged from science, they turned to the humanities and liberal arts. Today's generation of students has adopted a distinctly pragmatic approach and is turned off by history, social theory, and philosophy as it is by science. The status of science is not merely at stake but also that of intellectual life in general. Ideas such...
October 22, 2004
The Bad Seed
Timothy Burke has another useful post, further evidence that he is among the very few that I am aware of that are making valuable contributions to society at this time. He employs his considerable rhetorical skills to breathe life into insights that deflate the irrational exuberance of stridently politicized positions, and leave the reader better balanced rather than chuffed up to die fighting infidels. (What fun is that?) But by alternately fluffing both sides of the argument he keeps it interesting and perhaps more effective, softening hard heads so that insights can penetrate and creating a little space for them to lodge and perhaps grow. He's a teacher as well as a thinker. His subject is the class war, or perhaps culture war, currently raging in the US. His take home point is that both sides have sinned and that we are diminished by the polarity. This may seem to be an obvious insight that many have voiced before...
October 17, 2004
Anti-Globalization
The primary refuge of the rag-tag post-socialist left is among various sects of monkey-wrenchers collectively self described as the anti-globalization movement. They aren't actually opposed to globalization, they are opposed to capitalism and liberty, but they try to conceal their true agenda since trying to sell an authoritarian program that denies self rule and local decision making didn't work well in the past and has no chance now that the world has had ample opportunity to observe those societies that suffered socialist revolution and subsequent collapse after decades of misery. One of the reasons that those closed societies collapsed was that information from the free world leaked in despite state censorship and attempts at information control. Weakened by bad governance their oppressed populations longed for release. A pair of blue jeans or training shoes weren't just clothing, they were information bombs that communicated the stark differences between controlled and free societies. The same is true of popular music and...
September 28, 2004
Doofus Alert
Some stuff seems just too stupid to comment on, but a number of bizarre public behaviors in recent months highlight the fact that really stupid stuff has an audience, in spite or perhaps because of the stupidity, and that it may sometimes be worthwhile to belabor the obvious. So, consider these archaic ideas that are still being touted as prescriptions for current policy: We need to communicate to everyone in the world a new story of our planet's destiny, showing them a better way to live than our bankrupt and ruinous 'civilization' way. We need to achieve a huge consensus that overpopulation and overconsumption are the two root causes underlying all the problems we face today, and agree on deadlines and targets for correcting them. We need to organize six billion people to use their collective wisdom to tell us how to meet these deadlines and targets, and then free them to work in their communities to make it...
July 30, 2004
Ungrateful Living
Many previous posts have refuted the analysis, conclusions, prescriptions and methods of doom mongers. The main defect in methodology is to seek to control systems so as to force them to conform with an ideal, the cybernetic blunder first discussed here in Mental Tools. The main defect in prescription is that systems should be changed to match an ideology, overlooking the value of the existing system. The main defect in conclusions is that systems are dysfunctional. But even if the conclusions, prescriptions and methods of doom mongers were improved they would still be unhappy because they analyze by finding fault. Everything is faulty by some metric so there is an inexhaustible supply of them that can never be corrected. In a sense their goal is to justify their unhappiness and cause unhappiness for others who foolishly fail to grasp the coming doom. There's an almost humorous exercise in gloomiphilia (don't laugh, it's unseemly) in a recent book The Paradox...
April 22, 2004
TFT
One of the common failures of proselytizing believers in simplistic political systems is failure to understand human behavior, which is partly a result of poor observation skills and partly a result of poor reasoning skills. History is filled with such blunders. The ones in Europe, beginning with the French revolution, still bleed. A rudimentary understanding of human behavior would have allowed those French revolutionaries to see that the result of their bloody tantrum would be Napoleon and nearly two centuries of continental war. Cooler intellects anticipated the ensuing chaos and warned the world, but few listened. The problem persists. This Wired article about video games lauds what they mistakenly characterize as teaching tools for cooperation. September 12th isn't like other games. Because when a missile shot at Arab terrorists kills an innocent bystander in the game's fictional Afghani village -- and it's nearly impossible not to -- other villagers run over, cry at their loss and then, in a...
March 18, 2004
Unanimous Fallacies
Conservation News links to this Jared Diamond article which asserts that "The parallels between Easter Island and the modern world are chillingly obvious". Diamond has been flogging this idea about for a few years and it hasn't improved with time. The collapse of society on Easter Island when their Polynesian culture proved unsuitable to the small and isolated island on which this band of immigrants landed has provoked speculation ever since it was discovered by Europeans in 1722, approximately 800 years after discovery by Polynesians. Diamond cites ideas by Heyerdahl and von Däniken that supported their respective grand theories of human development. Diamond has one too but it isn't convincing, not even for Diamond. Thanks to globalization, international trade, jet planes, and the Internet, all countries on Earth today share resources and affect each other, just as did Easter's eleven clans. Polynesian Easter Island was as isolated in the Pacific Ocean as the Earth is today in space. When...
February 13, 2004
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